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our sordid histories, they play the drama of redemption

Editor’s note: I have this strange tendency when listening to a “voice” i like to start adopting it to something i want to write or say. I’ve been listening to Wil Wheaton’s PAX East keynote (equal part inspiring and slightly NSFW), and in his honor (both to Get Excited and Make Things, and to shamelessly borrow his “voice), It sounds like this:

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on a night like tonight, I can’t help but remember the past, and the future.

The weather outside is warm, but with a chill on the breeze,

like all those nights of driving home after a late friday with friends, windows down, playing my sad songs on the road home.

all the same, i’m living in the future,

getting inspired by a hero i’ve never met while chatting with lifelong friends from across the country.

the world may not be in the best shape: politicians are still deplorable, people are still starving.

things may seem downright scary or depressing on a micro level (or at least in the abstract),

and there’s not much to do to make it right.

but pulled back, what do I have?

i’m living in the Future,

and the same Me who survived the heartache and turmoil of those long drive nights is the me filled with passion,

and life,

and goals and plans today.

and every bit of what it took before led me here.

Yes, even the childish laziness and abject fear of my thesis writing.

Yes, even the uncertainty (past and present) of a career path or a five-year plan.

It all matters. It all counts. And I trust that the Lord has built a universe in which these threads tie together more than they ever split apart.

I hope Future Me has exponentially more to be thankful for, in looking back at how it all fits together with even sharper eyes, with even a clearer view.

At the moment, though, I can’t imagine feeling much more warm and full than I do now.

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“We look out way down past the road we came from. We’re looking at redemption--it was hidden in the landscape of loss and love and fire and rain. Never would have come this way looking for redemption.” - Dan Haseltine

Peace and love,

sean

Facing the music - (the myth of) realism in gaming

In a post on Game Design Advance, Frank Lantz writes...

Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs? … And isn’t it therefore our job and our responsibility to guide players along that rocky path, no matter how uncomfortable it might seem… ?….

[I]f we have used computers to build intentional flaws into the numerical heart of our deepest and most cerebral games instead of using them to elevate our understanding of the computational heart of the universe, then we’re doing something wrong.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life was the way that Poker forced me to re-program my own kludgy understanding of probability. It took me a few years of dedicated play and study, years that included as much suffering as they did joy, and moreover in which the joys were somehow uniquely bound up in the suffering. But eventually I got to a place where sometimes I get a little glimpse of the world-as-probability, of the Bayseian logic that boils beneath the solid cause-and-effect surfaces of my everyday, results-oriented consciousness.

The problem with "truth" in video games is that games like STALKER (a realistic shooter from an Eastern European developer) are considered "clunky" and "broken" while games like Modern Warfare are celebrated for their “realism” and bombast.

There are a few problems with the poker example... poker is a *social* interaction, and the rewards come from that (and joining that "club") in a far more realistic way than joining the "hardcore" gaming crowd... I understand his point about simulations, but in many ways gaming has evolved (in the positive sense) *away* from these kinds of truths b/c the only way they can be expressed is the "do it again stupid" (DIAS) style of gameplay.

In point of fact, games were designed to *exploit* the DIAS mindset, and the cultural legitimacy of the medium has come to be (equated with? compared to?) the drop in this sort of DIAS gameplay. In a lot of ways the lasting cultural impact of games lies in the ability of early games to get more coins out of arcade players, and so proficiency in gaming came from being the most proficient at unforgiving gaming systems.

With gaming in the public eye defined as a hardcore, niche activity, the only way for gaming's onus to spread was outward and away from unforgiving systems, even alongside a concomitant push for "realism".  Within this framing device, the *only* way for games to get "easier" was naturally for designers to soften or bend the rules of "reality", and any push for more "realism" must almost by definition include a ramping up of DIAS, "hardcore" gameplay.

I can't imagine these associations disappearing any time soon, and until they do, we're stuck with the false dichotomy forced on us by our own history - where accessibility and realism are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

I have some more thoughts on the weight of video games' history on its present, and also on the way that so many aspects of culture, not just gaming, caters to the distortions about reality that we comfort ourselves with, and I hope to revisit those themes again soon.

A better story: knowing how to ask the right questions

In an interview with Jim Rossingol at Rock Paper Shotgun,  Brad Wardell (of Stardock) reveals that he has been working on a collaborative project with Random House to fill out the backstory for his upcoming game, Elemental: War of Magic, in hopes of producing both a series of novels and a more comprehensive game world.

I'm terribly excited about this development, and I hope this is a huge success for both Wardell and Random House.

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Let me show you what I see:

We've seen plenty of games die on the table for lack of good writing - and this *even when* writers (or in Fable 2's case, stagers and cinematographers) are in the process from the very beginning.

What games have had (for the most part) are designers who come up w/ questions, and they bring in famous writers to answer those questions. The problem is, these writers never really have the ability to ask whether those questions are even the *right* ones to answer, or whether a reworking and reframing the question (or throwing out altogether) would be the better option.

I'm not saying that editors are the best people for creativity (they interact with writers to make good product), but the fact that the Random House guys said, "no, *never* just do generic fantasy" is a *huge* deal.

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Motivation, logic, reason, a realized world and history - these are key to *any* story, and if games want to mature into a strong medium alongside novels and film, then *this* is essential. The happy accidents of Doom and the auteurism of early RPGs are no longer acceptable.

(NOTE: I'd be interested to see if the big boys like Bioware already employ an editing and review process like this... they're smart enough to have lead writers and series bibles, but I wonder, if ME had an editor, if it would feel less nostalgic and more innovative than it does right now).

A quick update

I'm sure everyone cares, but my thesis work is coming along swimmingly, by which i mean, it's actually *coming along*. So, following Seth Godin's advice, I won't apologize... just wanted to keep everyone updated. Hopefully in a month or so I can pick this back up more regularly... until then, I have more important things to work on :)

North, to the future!

Sean

PS I'm also digging back in to the audiobook version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ... I am simultaneously struck by the resonance her ideas have with current conservative values and philosophies (and offering interesting hypotheticals for the end results of liberal programs in a way that its adherents could utilize)... and the striking absence of these examples in conservative rhetoric. I didn't realize it was a a big jump from the "free market is in everyone's social interest" and "self-interest *is* the public good." More on that later, I guess.

Quotable Quotes: The Sanity to Move

Extremists move the middle.

Compromise is everywhere. Most of us can't possibly be pure extremists or true fundamentalists, so we draw the line somewhere in the middle.

And so it's left to the zealots.

The people at either end have little hope of moving the masses all the way to their end of the argument. Instead, what they do is make it feel safer to change the boundaries, safer to recalibrate the compromise.

Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so.

- Seth Godin, from the blog post Moving the Line (the power of a zealot)

Quotable Quotes: Creation and Innovation

"...An art game, by itself, is neither inherently original nor unoriginal. Likewise, innovation, by itself, is neither good nor bad.... In the same way that a knife can be put to good or evil purposes depending on who is holding it, a game can be great or terrible depending on who makes it....

A bad game is a bad game, and I think it's intellectually dishonest to act like big budget games are incapable of being unique while art games are original and wonderful by no merit other than the type of game they are. Let's judge these things on their own merits."

- Jim Sterling, "Art games aren't innovative and innovation isn't good", published on Destructoid

PS My dearest thanks and gratitude to Leigh Alexander, whose style of making quotes interesting I mimic here.

Still alive...

... I've just been editing, reading and writing in a different universe.

... yes, kids, I've built a summer home in Windows.

It's been a really weird feeling, operating most of the time in a control-click world, and the more I add, whether it's iTunes, or Thunderbird (with all my mail addresses!), or whatever, the weirder it gets.

Oh well, it's keeping me gainfully employed I guess... seems like this might be good blog post fodder for the future.

Until then, take care friends, and I'll be in touch soon!

A quote to tide you over...

"All the stuff was good simply because He saw it that way… simply because He had made it.  Creation was (and is) of value to God because it is His,.. not because of it’s usefulness.  So that the innate value of all things would rest in its relationship to the Creator. Not it’s usefulness to other parts of Creation nor it’s nearly arbitrary value in the Marketplace…

All Creation has value,

All Creation is good, because He is… and it is His."

- Justin McRoberts, on Genesis and marketability.

PS From time to time, I hope to post some quotes that I think are interesting or meaningful, from across the spectrum... I've seen other blogs do it in visually interesting ways, and I hope to (eventually) do the same. Enjoy!

From the Archives: For the Kids

Dear people of the Internet: I don't want to disappoint you by not publishing content on a regular basis, so from time to time I'll pull a post out of the archives from blogs and message boards past to keep you entertained while I work on new content. This particular piece was the second of two posts on my first game culture blog, Leene's Bell. I really like this idea of gaming's accessibilty... on a lot of levels, gaming doesn't need Citizen Kane as much as Toy Story. Enjoy!

Note: This entry was originally posted to Leene’s Bell in November 15, 2008. Michael's original post is still online as well at the Brainy Gamer blog.

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Michael Abbott, of The Brainy Gamer, wrote a great post recently on the state of E-rated games, and the implications of that state for the industry. His post, and the comments which followed, really resonated with me, so I thought I would post my response on my blog. You can read the original post and the comments here...

Well, Michael, you almost make me want to go out and start a “critical review of kid’s games” site – all I need is a good business model. I think David S. hit on something really important that I don’t think many people think about – when kids look back at the games they remember nostalgically, it will be :gasp: licensed games and “me too” movie games. Horrifying, no? But then I think of the games I remember from my own childhood, and a good half of them were just as horrible (and just as licensed)… see most Disney-based SNES games, alongside any non-Disney licensed platformer (Rocko’s Modern Life anyone?) I still remember and love the good games that I played (and the SNES still has the lion’s share of amazing games), but that doesn’t negate all the mediocre-to-bad games I played and maybe, just maybe, enjoyed.

This observation elicits two responses from me. First, I think, “we should push for good games, so our kids will remember the good stuff”, and have classics to look back on that weren’t ten years outside of their play range on release (given the recent trends towards all the “classic” games earning M ratings). On the other hand, I honestly wonder if this is (sadly) the way that the industry (and nostalgia) work.

I have a good friend, who is critical of games’ flaws, but he enjoys playing licensed movie games of Marvel characters. He realizes that they aren’t that great, but he puts up with it because it is the only way for him to enjoy something based on his favorite (non-game) franchises. And I know that David’s 22 year old friend would roll his eyes at that as well, but like Leigh pointed out several weeks ago, we “gamers” are maybe one percent of all gamers.

Sometimes I think we serve as an echo chamber, trying to enact change or self-consciously define our favorite games as “important”, but going about it in such a way that alienates mainstream gamers (and most non-gamers) and only reinforces our own sense of superiority or “class”.

I guess, if I could summarize this extraordinarly long comment, I would say that gaming, as many have suggested, needs a Pixar (and I wonder if Warren Spector’s “this will piss so many people off” upcoming game might be the start): games that are fun across age groups, without pandering to either category. Maybe it won’t sell to the Gears crowd, but then again, as the Wii has shown, there is so much more to gaming than the Gears crowd, and I don’t think any one group should hold the monopoly on games’ “importance”. Here’s to hoping we can find a balance (and maybe echo chamber in that sort of useful direction).

A quick PSA

So until I figure out how to link to other blogs on some sort of sidebar, I wanted to return a friend's favor:

My buddy Bradley Phillips is running his own blog. Right now it's mostly on health training, but he's written some good posts on workflow and efficiency in the past, and I can't imagine his posts going anywhere but up from here on out.

So if you have a minute, check it out.

Work and life have been crazy and rewarding the past two weeks... expect more (somewhat) regular programming the coming few days.