When I was a child I wanted to Do Great Things at all costs. By the time I was twenty years old, I was living in the heart of Manhattan studying acting, hard-driven, dying quietly inside.

Eventually I surrendered my early twenties to an unimpeachable sadness, an illness of the heart that literally ate me away.>During a year when sleep eluded me and standing was difficult, I started my first spindly-fingered, cautious attempts at writing in the vague hope it might lead to something sustaining. And when night came, some kind of terrifying pall I fought like a too-heavy blanket, I kept calm and took a little nourishment by playing Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town.

I don’t want to talk too much about what was wrong with me; it was ignoble, desperate, gutting. It’s good that I got better, that I negotiated a truce with life, and now we’re cool. There are already a million essays from people who say that video games dug them out of tragedy. I don’t need to add one.

But I do want to talk about life simulations, so.

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One of my favorite gaming institutions has long been Michael Abbott’s fun, thoughtful Brainy Gamer podcast. My colleague Brendan Keogh and I were recently invited on as part of Michael’s ongoing series on the “State of Games,” and here we are talking about all kinds of things. It’s such an interesting, complicated time.

 As usual I find it terrifyingly hard to keep up on blogging, as much as so many of you ask me to. I’m going to try to do better, as usual. For now, I have a public Facebook page that acts as a repository of all my links, if you want to look for anything that catches your fancy that you may have missed.

I’m still using Twine at a very, very basic level, I guess just trying to gain some confidence with it and experiment with interactive writing. I did make a game lately about what I imagine SXSW to be like based on never having been there, which you can check out in your browser if you like! More soon. Thanks for hanging with me.

With Bayonetta 2 coming to Wii U, a lot of people have been asking about the Bayonetta article I wrote a couple years ago for now-defunct GamePro, and whether it still exists. You can find it on the Wayback Machine, and I’ll also reprint it here for posterity (if that’s not legal, sue me, I guess).

Some things have changed in the two years since I did that article. The me who wrote it described herself as not particularly interested in gender issues, or at least not more than in any other issue. Yet reading that old SVGL post there’s a clear conflict going on: I say I don’t mean to be a feminist, just to talk about things that interest me — but I’m clearly interested in approaching the role of women in media. In the same breath as I talk about subjectivity and not wanting to speak for all women, I talk about my job like a duty I didn’t quite choose, and what people expect of me.

To an extent I still only talk about things I’m interested in. Woman is only one of many factors that informs my perspective on those things. And I am still only one perspective that doesn’t represent a group.

But I feel entitled to shape my own role in a way I didn’t then. Social pressure and audience misconceptions don’t determine what I need to write about. I do. That’s what empowerment feels like, and I’ve found it since I began aiming to grow up into an educated and passionate feminist.

I think I’d be able to articulate my feelings about Bayonetta — how “positive” doesn’t mean “sexless” and how legislating a woman’s appearance or use of her sexuality isn’t feminism – better, less apologetically, less-defensively, less excuse-makingly if I were asked to do so today. Like, the pat “I get to see women do things men can’t” conclusion isn’t quite what I was trying to get across and makes me cringe, and I think I don’t really well explain why “stylization” is a relevant creative choice.

But I still think Bayonetta is empowering. She is provocative, but she owns it. Her camp sexuality is a conversation-starter, a threat. She evades your judgment in a flurry of cloying flower petals. We’re uncomfortable with her because she is in control of that weaponized body. She is supposed to make you uncomfortable. Good for her.

Anyway, after the jump you’ll find the full text of that old GamePro Bayonetta piece, previously headlined “Empowering or Exploitative?”, here to sit in perpetuity so that you won’t have to email or Tweet me about it anymore. I’m not super fond of it but take it for what it is.
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I’m spending a month working from London; since I’ve arrived it’s snowed uncommonly, my host caught a cold and I’m already inciting trouble.

Quintin Smith and I are continuing to do letter series together; following our Dyad Letters at Gamasutra, we migrate to Polygon to discuss Far Cry 3 – in particular with a lens toward the conversation on violence and game narratives.

Earlier this week I published another editorial on a similar subject: At Gamasutra, here’s five situations when violence in games feels meaningful or serves the experience. Discomfort with game violence doesn’t automatically mean a delicate disposition or a blanket aversion: Many, if not most of us who want to examine violent games simply want to be able to have good answers for what it’s for, if for no other reason than to make better, smarter games.

I think Far Cry 3 wants to be a smart game. Much of my published conversation with Quinns focuses on whether we think it succeeds.

I’ve long been a fan of the letter format, ever since Kirk Hamilton and I did an extensive collaboration on FFVII and one on the original Deus Ex. But I like it even more now, especially alongside the trend that favors increasingly “I-centric,” incredibly personal writing.

It wasn’t long ago I tried my hand at arguing on behalf of this trend at Thought Catalog in a piece called “Welcome to the Age of Feelings.” Don’t know if I would write that piece today. While I love hearing interesting stories, especially from people who wouldn’t have been outspoken in another generation of game conversation, I do occasionally feel uncomfortable with it. I like the community and social support it fosters — but I’m also skeptical, if not of the motivation necessarily, at least of the contribution it makes to the critical landscape and our understanding of games.

Nonetheless, I’ve ended up thinking a lot about how personal perspectives are relevant to the context in which we discuss and interpret games. The reason I do letter series with other critics I like and trust is because nobody plays in a vacuum; doing letters allows me to write about games in a way that resembles the way I like to share, talk and argue about them — it’s personal and intimate, yes, but it’s also the conversation that shapes and informs my opinions, and I hope others enjoy participating.

If you care about games, you already know that some of the game industry’s biggest players headed to Washington today to meet with Vice President Joe Biden in a summit about gun violence. The industry was invited to talk about what it plans to do to reduce mass shootings in America — alongside the NRA, which is doubtless waiting expectantly for other people to assume responsibility for its business and culture.

You should not feel particularly good about this, even if you’re of the school of thought that thinks we have an obligation to “join the conversation.” Ian Bogost’s Atlantic article today is absolutely essential reading on the sad state of games’ relationship with policy-making; it considers Kris Graft’s fiery Gamasutra editorial yesterday alongside Casey Lynch’s widely-circulated counterpoint at IGN, and the IGDA’s arguably narrow-sighted letter to the vice president.

It’s a complicated state of affairs for sure, made moreso by our emotional relationship to our work and the strain of being repeatedly trotted out to answer for it every time a horror erupts. On one hand our commercial industry — to your average person our most visible and economically-powerful arm, still —  makes a good deal of its money participating in the systemic problem of the fetishization of guns and violence. If games are to be respected as a part of culture whatsoever, we don’t get to bury our heads in the sand.

On the other, entertaining the misguided dialogue whenever the possibility of a causal link between games and mass shootings is dragged out for the evening news is a depressing rejection of the breadth and nature of the work we do.

Today I published an interview with Games for Change co-president Asi Burak, who shared insights on how the landscape for games as tools of education, communication and social change has evolved since he released PeaceMaker, regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine, five years ago. I don’t expect the interview to crush traffic and comment records.

Burak tells me that despite increasing interest from nonprofits, government organizations and corporations in using games to communicate, educate and inspire, the interest and passion from the skilled game development community is harder to capture.

This is partially because there’s no money in it, and partially because devs seem more interested in more pure applications for their work — “pure” is Burak’s choice of descriptor, and mine is “either an ascetic devotion to design as discipline or a slavish devotion to ‘making cool entertainment’.”

PeaceMaker was groundbreaking because it offered people interested in an incredibly complicated conflict tools that they couldn’t get from the news or from any other medium — the opportunity to go hands-on with a variety of factors, and most importantly, to experience the issues from perspectives other than their own. It catalyzed education and conversation — Burak, a native Israeli, told me he spoke and collaborated with more Palestinians in his work on that game than he did over all his years in his homeland.

And in response to a request to take responsibility in a shattering tragedy, our industry executives are sitting at a table with the NRA and with an administration that sees them as little better than profit-obsessed nonsense-mongerers, a perspective it hasn’t adjusted no matter how many copies of Portal or Journey or we’ve tried showing them.

What do game makers really need to do here and now? The way to engage people who don’t understand what games can do is to show them. Really show them.

Here we have a complicated issue regarding arguably the 21st century’s most wide-reaching and relevant communication medium, and instead of using this medium they’ve mastered, game developers are writing angry blog posts and defensive comments.

Says Bogost in his article today: “If the White House is really interested in games, they could start using them as sophisticated communication tools to help break out of politics as usual, instead of using games as convenient rhetorical levers when the need arises.”

Who’s making that? Unfortunately, I wonder sometimes if people who make games are really interested in games.

If you are interested in hobbyist development and how tools companies are adapting to the democratization of gaming, or if you are curious about the emergence of programming-free utilities by which you can experiment with popular genres, here is a sincere and ideally-informative article for you.

If the idea of hobbyist dev and fringe culture is interesting to you, you might also like one of my recent Creators Project columns on its rise.

Also, I am excited to announce I’m returning to Kotaku as a monthly columnist, and this bit of weird satire is my dubiously-considered re-debut; if you are sincerely interested in social gaming business, entrepreneurship, “web 2.0″ or ideas about gamification and social currency, hopefully it makes you feel terrible. Kidding! Kind of. Anyway, please enjoy HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR GAME DEVELOPMENT CAREER IN 2013.

I’ve still got the privilege of being one of Edge’s monthly columnists, too, and my stuff seems to go online about a month or so or thereabouts after subscribers get it in print. My latest column is about the rise of ‘cult of personality’ in development, and in it I explain why I find the work of complicated, difficult personalities so interesting — I even prefer it over games you’d call mass-appealing or ‘highly-polished’. Appropriately, I learned it was online when I saw Anna snarking it on Twitter.

There is finally an iPad in my life, so I’m spending a lot of time playing Pandemic Plague Inc. and naming plagues after my pets and also my enemies (ha ha, you caused projectile vomiting worldwide, you ass) . Talk soon.

Not too long ago, I wrote up the six biggest lessons we’ve seen emerging from the game boom on Kickstarter so far. Ultimately, though, you could tease out one main idea: letting your fans be your publisher isn’t necessarily the golden proposition we all thought it was, it seems.

Development never goes as smoothly as we think it will. Bigger, more expensive projects are notoriously unpredictable, sprouting multiple heads that often start eating each other. I always kind of wished we as consumers and as media were closer to that capricious process, better able to expose or to understand it.

See this article — It sounds absurd that a game can simultaneously be “100 percent finished”, “on time and on budget”  – while also requesting, or requiring, an additional $200,000. I wonder if fans and crowdfunders are going to be as patient and generous about offering the budget deviations, flotation devices and extra time that publishers historically have done sometimes, whether we have transparency on that process or not (we usually don’t).

I mean, in the Kotaku piece I linked above, American McGee seems to think the downside of working with publishers — games pushed out half-done to meet timelines, developers starving to death over a game less successful than anticipated — is worse than the downside of being funded by demanding fans who have more exposure and who want more accountability on the process side than ever before. I’m not so sure.

I’ve been playing The Walking Dead, and am sort of surprised that I’m enjoying it, since I hate zombie games. Did some writing at Gamasutra in re why even people who hate ‘zombie games’ are likely to enjoy it — maybe because the glut of zombie stuff out there has kind of been missing the point, shambling clumsily past the kernel of why we find undead apocalypses enduringly fascinating.

My friend Katie Williams said on Twitter that she is “kinda really sick of video games using children as plot devices to elicit ‘emotional’ responses in players.” So am I. There’s a bit of that in Walking Dead; the protagonist (if you ever wondered how to pronounce my name, it’s same as his) is humanized somewhat by the task of protecting Clementine. The resource allocation is more complicated when there are children around, raising the question– albeit bluntly, clumsily — of whether compassion for the helpless is an essential survival skill.

I actually like the Kid Thing as a device for Walking Dead. The unkillable kids milling around a warzone to remind you you’re a jerk or whatever, not so much. The “oh my god y’all, there’s kids!” thing is a little bit of a lazy narrative device in most contexts, just like “oh my god y’all, there’s guns” is basically a lazy design device, if you ask me (you didn’t ask, but I’ll stand by that one.)

Expect more kids, though. The reasoning’s transparent: Lots of professional game developers are men who’ve been making games that they and their friends would like since their late teens, early twenties. I’m not convinced that an intense focus on games as a primary hobby or career isn’t in part a way to avoid adulthood for a lot of people. At least, I think it can be.

But now we’ve got an economically-mature commercial industry and these devs are now in their 30s and 40s. I think when game creators start having kids of their own, they naturally start wondering about how their  work fits into that. I think we see a lot of children shoehorned onto the battlefield because it’s a literal translation of what’s happening in these guys’ lives. They feel the conflict of developing a certain type of game  with the role of adult parent.

The saucer-eyed little girl asking you why you had to shoot the bad guy is probably a reflection of the saucer-eyed kids waiting at home for Dad and Mom who’ve been crunching in the studio. We probably feel the collective anxiety of not being sure what to say to ‘em, I guess.

Anyway, I picked Duck, for one thing. I feed Clem first, usually. Sigh. I’m so easy.

We like video games because they’re logical systems. Each action we perform has a result we can see, feel and understand. That’s appealing to us as humans — the fundamental fear in the heart of all of us is that there might be no pattern to anything, no particular reason for anything. Games give us the fantasy of perfect control.

We don’t deal well when terrible things happen and we can’t understand why. We try to find causes, patterns. We try to divine a primary cause, a cocktail of blame. What happened in Newtown is the sort of tragedy made unbearable by the fact that it makes no sense. I am loathe to talk about video games in the wake of something like that. But people will talk about video games; I heard people talking about them today. The day of the tragedy was the gun control minefield discussion. The day after, the appalling state of mental healthcare in America. Today it’s us (and if you are running Jack Thompson quotes today and I ever meet you in person, I am going to pull your card).

After every successive tragedy of this particular kind since Columbine, everyone has wanted to know if the shooter played video games, and it’s outraged us — the impossible idea that they train people to kill. The ludicrous idea that millions of people can play something for entertainment and when just one of those people goes wrong, it’s the video game’s fault.

I dislike the rush to attribute “fault” to any one force in the wake of this tragedy, but that’s what humans do. We want to understand how this happened, what tempest of factors combined precisely to birth this nightmare. In the chaos we target symptoms, we mount our defenses.

Obviously there is no causal relationship between Newtown and video games. But I have played the damn things since I was a very small child and only in the last few years have I, as an adult woman, begun to feel profoundly uncomfortable with their unapologetic celebration of gun violence. I kill things in games every day, and sometimes I even shoot people in the face, but even I have begun to’ve had enough. It feels dark.

Something is wrong with my country.

Any games writing that questions that right to bear virtual arms with joyful impunity is often accused of having some irrelevant political agenda, of ruining the fun, of refusing to accept the all-important fact it’s just a game. Like disassociating ourselves from any intellectual consideration of the content we consume or any emotional response to it is a basic requirement for participation in this community.

I can’t accept that.

The top-grossing games of all time are about marching in a straight line and shooting people. I’ve felt confused and sad about that for a few years now and I feel moreso this week. Our recent Hollywood gold-encrusted televised awards ceremony cheered the boyish joy in “shooting people in the face.” Nobody would say that if the VGAs aired tonight. Because they’d have the good sense to have a fucking think about what that means.

It’s as useless to “blame” video games for any violent act as it is to “blame” any other single factor in a massive socioeconomic ecosystem. Games do not “cause” things; we know that. But the entertainment we create and consume is no more and no less than a reflection of who we are.

I want us to shut our righteous mouths for one second and think about that. It’s the least we can do.

I visited a toy store, and came away concerned for the state of traditional gaming hardware and software retail.

I went to Times Square’s gigantic three-story Toys R’ Us today, obviously because I was Christmas shopping for the young people in my life and not because I’m an adult child obsessed with toys. Like, don’t assume that I went to go in and look at the toys just because I like toys because that wasn’t it at all, like, I know a lot of children and OKAY FINE I WENT TO LOOK AT TOYS.

I was expecting to pick up and hug the roly-poly stuffed penguins while no-one was looking. I didn’t expect to get such a vivid look at the breadth of game IP, transmedia and the gamification of toys — all of which I think makes surprisingly ominous news for the traditional game retail landscape as we once knew it.

I also saw this adorable, sad-looking Mario standing at the crossroads of the world. Coincidence?! Read on, and see my extensive picture gallery from the weird world of entertainment retail!

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