I made a new game called THE SEX CHAMBER, inspired by ongoing conversations on the alienating quality of traditional games vocabulary, and by my complicated and muddled memories of trying to understand ‘adult’ games as a child.

This game intentionally employs a structure that frustrates the player in logical, intuitive behaviors or in knowing more about the subtext and purpose of the world. If you aren’t sure whether you were supposed to have been able to achieve something or not, that was my intention. I wanted to make a game that had more ways to say no to you than yes,hoping to illustrate the sense I had when young that there must be some complex, sophisticated and mature (potentially shocking! Salacious!) universe lurking beneath the games I couldn’t figure out how to play.

A lot of times it was because these games were early-1990s indie freeware or shareware, and either required paid unlocks or were broken. Most of them came on disks with tens of other games and it was impossible to trace the author or to find out whether I’d one day learn to solve the puzzles or whether the game was bugged and therefore unsolvable.

The feeling that there were complicated ‘adult’ mysteries outside the realm of my understanding very much defined my relationship with games during plenty of my formative years.

The obscurity of authorship, wondering who made these strange artifacts, was also poignant. That’s why I got some generous friends to each contribute some MSPaint art to enhance the game’s creative disharmony. If you reach the game’s end you can see the credits.

Leisure Suit Larry was a funny little old sketch, a joke that stops being funny when you take it too seriously as a game. It certainly stops being funny when you remake it for the sake of being corny and gross, and without a reason besides to feed blind obeisance to nostalgia. I suppose the backers got what they paid for.

I reflected on my childhood memories of LSL (yeah, I played it as a child, weirdly) to illuminate why I think the remake defeats the game. Cue commenters about how I don’t have the right to say what should and shouldn’t exist unless I am going to make a game myself. Oh, gamers, you funny, tail-eating little beasties. I love my work.

1. At regular intervals, slap your own face (gently!) while muttering, “produce, produce”
2. See how quickly you can consume a sugarless red bull (or appropriate equivalent)
3. Stare.
4. Drink a large glass of wine. NOTE: This only works if it is not nighttime
5. Roll ‘log-style’ across a carpet or similar surface, moaning dramatically
6. Scroll through Twitter too rapidly to read anything, whispering “fucker” or similar
8.
9. Imagine yourself at the lip of a yawning void. Visualize dark ripples spreading indeterminately outward from you to an undefined but bleak outcome. OPTIONAL: Imagine your own personal entrails bobbing gently before you on the surface of the void
10. Take a walk. At the first corner you see, turn around, performing concentric circles.
11. Open a word document.
12. Google “are mermaids real”
13. Think about your Klout score, mentally rewrite Camus’ The Stranger as if it concerned your Klout score

I’m often kind of hard on nerds: Creative escapism and interactive entertainment are leading channels of communication this century, not a private treehouse you get to keep. The idea of “gamer” has become, to me, an open-mouthed marketing pawn desperately devouring and regurgitating memes, merchandise, sullen and slavish.

I resent it. Nerd culture is a place where dancing to My Little Pony songs becomes a sacred cultural expression, but, like, mocking and disregarding actual human identities is some kind of entitlement the disruption of which is treated as an unforgivable nuisance.

Gross. I’m embarrassed of it. Almost any time I tell a normal person what I do for work, I have to couple it with a gentle unpacking of their prejudices against video games, explain it’s not all hateful garbage and wank fantasies. But it’s complicated.

Continue reading →

I remember throwing a fit in the kitchen as a child. Not a proper little-kid tantrum, more of an adolescent sulk. I was not turning out to be very cool in school, and I thought part of what was holding me back was that I did not have the right brand of clothes.

Why do we have to get everything at the fucking outlet store instead of the mall, it’s not like the prices are that different, and on like that.

That night my dad made me a game, basically.
Continue reading →

God, I’m sorry, but I just hate trailers so much. A trailer appears, game news websites are obligated to post and parse it, and then we are supposed to have good feedback regarding the video of an interactive entertainment product which technically doesn’t exist yet.

“What do you think of the trailer?”

“It looks really cool. Yeah, they said it’s going to have some things they said in the video.”

“What about these things that weren’t covered in the trailer?”

“Yeah, we’ll probably find out more about that later. Cool.”

A trailer is an outline of a shape of a thing. Having people seriously expect that I or anyone might have a “reaction” “thoughts” “insight” on a trailer frequently frustrates me. To respond demands the exact kind of low, lazy language I always used to hate about games writing: “Looks cool, but time will tell!” “For now, here’s what we know”, and “it will have [vehicle], [feature], [character(s)].”

Most of all, the obligation to react to a trailer still suggests an unexamined obedience to the schedule that marketing sets. Marketing proffers you what it has decided makes it look good, and then dutifully we jump to offer our “impressions,” assistance to the propagation of a message we didn’t even author.

A weird thing about participating in the culture of games: It requires our investment in an unknown future, always. The next gen. The games we wait years for. Hovering around forums and reviews sites awaiting a verdict just prior to launch.

Even I write about games not because of what they are, but because of what I think they could be someday. I’m just as bad.

There is a lot of buy-in, a lot of breath-holding, vigorous optimism and patience required. Then you load a trailer or a Let’s Play on YouTube and hear not-remarkable dudes, the kind you went to high school with — probably, they are in high school — tossing halting witticisms and slightly-awkward jokes over some character jogging this way and that. It’s hard to feel like all the buy-in is worthwhile.

On buy-in, I’ve written a feature about what crowdfunding has taught us about game dev budgets — how hard it is to explain to gamers that an investment is not a pre-order, and why overfunding is more of a headache than a blessing.

My colleague Mike Rose also writes about buying in — here’s his thought-provoking feature on the potential dark side of free-to-play games’ reliance on monetizing “whales”. Are successful f2p games geared to capitalize on vulnerable spenders?

Here’s my critique, if you missed it. There are some interesting links supporting my piece, too, most notably Keith Stuart’s piece on the rise of male-centric dystopian games, and two different opinions on whether or not The Last of Us is excessively male-centric.

I’m spending Fourth of July abroad in England. Planning to finish my long-delayed season wrap-up of Game of Thrones (thanks for waiting!) and get trashed and write about Animal Crossing or something. I hope all my American readers eat a lot of barbecue for me.

What’s new, friends? I’ve been playing The Last of Us and Animal Crossing (more soon) and watching the utterly singular Top of the Lake on Netflix, which you should definitely check out if you can. It borrows a bit of the Twin Peaks convention, where an incident concerning a young, ostensibly innocent girl gently blooms outward into a narrative about a town and its population.

It’s grounded in bleakly gorgeous rural New Zealand, and also like Twin Peaks it manages to deftly balance stark humor and a heap of dark, scary shit. The thing that fascinates me about it is that basically all the dark shit comes from exploring the unfavorable power balance between women and men, and it’s fundamentally a woman-centric story. Basically every character on it looks like a real person and not a Gorgeous Actor (Elisabeth Moss is a Gorgeous Actor, okay, but she is given a real-world look).

I’m sure I’ll end up writing about it someplace when I’m finished watching it. But anyway, WHAT ABOUT VIDEOGAMES I CAME HERE FOR VIDEO GAMES WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING GET TO THE VIDEO GAMES okay, okay

Continue reading →

Sorry for the gap in updates, but it’s been an absolutely busy time. Let’s catch up on earnestness, pizza, things like this.

Continue reading →

I’ve been fascinated by love, sex and relationships in games since forever. In our latest Polygon letter series, “Love and Darkness,” Quinns and I do some fencing on the topic, from my spotty roots in hentai games to roleplaying in online worlds. Yes, he went to Furcadia.

And on the subject of roleplaying, I’ll be helping Quinns review indie pen and paper RPGs at Shut Up & Sit Down, that extraordinary destination for all things tabletop. If you don’t know what these things are — and even I didn’t really, until a little bit ago — you should come along on the journey of discovery!

I’m so excited to’ve found a new way to play games that really speaks to me. These games are about relationships, social tension and romance. Do check out our writings, and comment on Shut Up & Sit Down with recommendations for what we should check out!

We start with an introductory conversation — Quinns does a good job explaining the format of these games. I talk about my younger days some, explaining why I feel roleplaying has the ability to slot into part of my life I lost touch with growing up.

And here’s our first review! It’s a game called Shooting the Moon, where you and a friend compete for the attentions of a fictional Beloved you collaborate in imagining. We accidentally made an amazing story that’s still living with me.

It always feels like a breath of fresh air when I find social ways to play that are intelligent and rich, but nonetheless feel like something anyone could approach and get something out of.

That vision of games — a joyous sea of play possibilities where there’s something for everyone — is core to the GameCity festival, whose opening night I happily attended in Nottingham last week. If you don’t know what GameCity is, do read what I wrote about it! It just may be my favorite gaming event.

Sometimes when you fall in love you get married, and then there is a wedding, and then the wedding has a band and the band starts to play The Rains of Castamere and — oh, hell. My Game of Thrones recap of that episode is up, and as usual I’m proud to have the best commenters and the best GoT discussion on the web going on alongside it.