The Game Critique

A few weeks back, Kris Ligman came to New Jersey to give a presentation at a conference about her research. Before she was to fly back to California she dropped by my home town to say hi and chat. During her brief stop before I took her to the airport she mentioned that the Moving Pixel crew would like to have me on for a podcast at some point. I said I’d love to join. A while later I was contacted and was asked if I’d still like to come on. Well of course I would but I would need to know what I’d be speaking about. It tends to work better that way. It was Critical Distance and its place in the critical blogosphere. Ever since the year end round up I’ve been asking permission with anything Critical Distance related. I mentioned this and G. Christopher Williams stated he felt dumb for nothing thinking of Ben in the first place. So we all got together a few weeks ago to have a chat about Critical Distance. It came out today and I didn’t come off as bad as I feared I  might of. At the end I said that I was in the works for editing CDC episode 8 and hoped it would be out before this podcast went live, well it was. By three days.

CDC podcast episode 8: A Very GDC Podcast” is up for download and your listening pleasure, both at the site and on iTunes. This one took a lot longer to do in every stage of working on it. I batted around a few ideas for what to do and with Ben we eventually settled on the idea of getting a bunch of people who went together and group them together based on their favorite panels they went to. I asked 16 people that I could get a hold of and had it all set up one weekend only for it to collapse at the last minute when I found I had gotten work hours during much of the podcast time. So I tried to set it up for next weekend only for a lot of scheduling conflicts to get in the way. But I got 8 people to sit down on two different days for two different discussions about the panels they went. Given how long it took for me to edit these two sessions and get them produced it’s probably to everyone’s benefit that I didn’t do more.

GDC was back in March and I didn’t get everyone together until April and it only got released in May. I defend this timeline with the fact the second word in the title is Distance. So even with GDC being some time ago it’s still nice to remember everything that went on and hear it straight from a person’s own mouth. You can’t type down Courtney’s excitement about the SWERY talk like you can hear it on the podcast.

Oh and yes I do put outtakes at the end of each podcast. I cut out 20 minutes worth of umms, errs, you knows, likes, pauses, stutters and pauses from the audio. I go above and beyond for quality. Hope you all enjoy.

It seems to be a theme for this year. I’ve done more on other people’s sites than I’ve done on my own. This continues to be true. Over a week ago I was invited to do the Chronoludic podcast with Chris Green, Mike Dunbar and Seb Wupper. The topic at hand was the question ‘what is a game worth?’ The focus of this particular question was the issue of economics and us as game purchasers. WE didn’t reach any ground breaking conclusions or earth shattering revelations. In fact it seems more of a review of the facts, but if anything it does show that these issues are not simple and that they are in fact many inter connected issues. From the personal, like present size of your wallet, what you want to buy, to the pile of shame on your table or on Steam to the corporate like how to make back your enormous production budget, fighting the used game beast, setting price in a competitive market and determining what market to go after.

Personally I think we’ve reached a point where companies don’t have to make every single game the big AAA blockbuster that has to sell multiple millions of copies to succeed. We see a few tentative steps being taken and thankfully being rewarded. There is a thriving indie scene with some mega successes like Braid and Minecraft. Double Fine and THQ are started what seems to be the indie department of a major studio like Miramax or Searchlight in the downloadable game market. We do see real changes being made, very very slowly and I think it’s that slowness of movement rather than stagnation that causes these conversations to come up. It’s frustration, hell I’m frustrated with what in my point of view seems like a very obvious way to come at the market that will reward the boldness and forthrightness of he approach. But then I’m a broke critic working at a third rate blog, not in charge of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs across multiple countries, so I really don’t have a right to dictate terms.

And then on the other hand we see the same corporations seem to make some head way and then pull their hand back sharply with only  the CEO yelling “psych” missing to complete the picture. Note, if you weren’t going to do it if you got a poor initial reaction from people that mostly don’t matter or something that had little to no purpose than you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. If you are going to try something new then you have to go in whole hog as the saying goes. An audience can always tell when the person on stage is only going so far that they can pull back if they have to, just in case. Those are the worst performers. It’s the one who jump in with both feet thinking they’re right and hoping the audience agrees that succeed. But EA, Ubisoft, Activision and the rest only seem willing to do it with the safe bets, safe bets that lose them money more often than not I’ve noticed. I’m rambling and we touch on most of this in the podcast and are at least somewhat entertaining.

You can find it here at Chronoludic’s website.

The other thing I did was last week’s TWIVGB. Ben is off at GDC again this year and asked for me to step into the writer/gather shoes. I took over when he went to GDC last year so that means I’ve been working on and off at Critical-Distance in a more or less official capacity for a year now. (Though in checking the dates, apparently GDC is a week earlier this year, so it will be next TWIVGB that will be the one year anniversary.) So, go me.  I’ve gotten better at it, but I think I’ve said than many times before and the only difference this week is that this last week is when I finally think I’ve reached my limit. My RSS feed has grown and with it how many posts I read. Well I think it’s finally at the size where it is unmanageable. I can only get it down to around 20-25 unread posts before I wake up the next day to find it’s jumped to around 50 or some number. There was a time where I could empty the whole damn thing and still have time to do something else. And that wasn’t too long ago. Hell I was able to do that back in October. Now I’m struggling to keep up. There is just so much being written and of course this is only my RSS feed. I still read links I get sent sent or are linked on twitter from around the web that aren’t in my feed and I read them too. I haven’t gamed, read the book that’s been staring at me since last summer to finish it, and I finally managed to watch a movie last weekend for the first time in weeks and came back to find my RSS feed had grown by another 15 or so.

Am I saying anything? No. I’m venting. Could I do as Ben suggest and just click set all as read? Yes I could, but then I’d be missing something, something good. I don’t rely on TWIVGB, because I’m often creating it. It’s the sysiphysian task of chosen and it’s just recently I can no longer get to the top before the bolder rolls back down. (Yes I know the myth and where that analogy goes off it.)

Anyway read last weekend’s TWIVGB here. And when I do this week’s I post the link to that one here. I’m not going to write another post just to say I did that one as well.

While I haven’t been updating my own blog much lately it’s partly because I’ve been busying myself with other things. I’ve worked at finding a new job. I lost or rather finished my other part time, contract work last month. I’ve also been hurriedly trying to get my RSS feed back under control. The week I spent away from it (I’ll tell you why later on) even though it was the week between Christmas and New Years it didn’t slow anybody down when it came to posting. That and I was introduced to over half a dozen new blogs and had to get caught up on them. I got back into playing real games, not just reading about them and still have got a whole batch of essays lined up to be written. I don’t seem to have any small posts left in me, so these are going to take a while. But other than all that, the main thing that kept me busy was the projects I was working over at Critical-Distance.

At the end of last year through to the beginning of this year I was working on a new project. I knew the last week of the year was going to be a blank week when it came to TWIVGB. It was vacation time for everybody and Saturday, the usual release time (or it is on the East Coast at least) was New Years Eve and at around midnight everyone was going to be parting or recovering from the celebrations, again, depending on your timezone. Since Ben wasn’t going to do anything and the CDC podcast had put me in the mindset of reviewing the previous year I thought a TYIVGB might be in order.

So that’s what I did. I spent the week going back through every single TWIVGB from the year and reading all the links again. Many I remembered, others I needed a refresher. It was too big a project to do by myself so I asked Ian to help me. Together we got through the 995 links from the previous year and started a preliminary list of links. Sufficed to say there were way too many of them. So we went through them again, being even more discerning and got the list down to over 100. It was still too much. At the time I was aiming for something a little bigger than the normal TWIVGB, around 30 links. That idea was dashed on the rocks about this point. I had forgotten how much quality writing had come out, but I still had to cut it down. I was off for the week, no work, no responsibilities, except for what I set for myself. This is what I set for myself. Eventually I hacked away at this list until it was around 60. Did I include everything worth including. HELL NO. I had to cut some pieces I personally liked, because there frankly wasn’t room.

Did I miss some great pieces, most definitely. I used the TWIVGBs as my source of links. If we missed it there, we missed it for the final wrap up. Is it definitive? No, plenty of great work was left out, because it was too damn big. It wasn’t a here is everything from the year worth reading, it was an overview, something to remind people of all the great writing there was throughout the year. It was fun to look back on.

Spotlight: This Year in Video Game Blogging

Because I spent so much time reading the old stuff, multiple times I might add, I had a lot of catching up to do on my normal reading. Something I only caught up with this week. But meanwhile, between bouts with the forces of nature and multiple tons of white shit the sky dumped on us, I was setting up the next CDC podcast. It wont be a weekly feature, there’s no way it can be. We have no regular group of people like other podcasts. The casts will from now on be set up to match the topics. It was difficult to get this cast together, because many people I asked turned me down. It’s no longer the holiday season, people have busy lives. But eventually I managed to cobble together a great and very argumentative panel to discuss comments in the gaming blogsphere.

I knew it was going to be the topic since before we did the last podcast. That’s when the arguments started. It was supposed to be out a week ago, but like with all new endeavors there were technical problems. While the last podcast the challenge was the sheer length and size of the original recording, plus having to compile it into three different files, the challenge here was fixing an error in the recording. My voice ended up warping, doubling and interweaving itself to where I couldn’t tell what I saying anymore. I had to piece that back together fractured word by fractured word until I knew what I was saying and smooth it out. It took 3 programs to accomplish this. I don’t think I did too badly and am just lucky I didn’t talk more during the podcast. If you listen to the very end you can hear an unedited clip from the raw audio and it’s pretty much what it sounded like every time I talked. It’s a great discussion, fun to listen to, you can find it at the link below, but before that, here are a few choice quotes:

“I am interested in what they have to say; I don’t want them to comment.” – Ben Abraham

“I have a different attitude to my blog. I want it to be a beautiful place.” -Ben Abraham

“They’re like the people in the peanut galleries back in the 19800s when they had theaters.” – Ian Miles Cheong

“Hang on a minute. Why are you privileging the commenters over the author?” – Ben Abraham

“I’m really glad you have this opinion, but I don’t have it. I don’t share it.” – Ben Abraham

“Because I don’t think the fact that you have an opinion give your opinion value.” – Adrian Forest

“I think you’re misjudging you experience.” – Adrian Forest

“I’ve got a basis in experience and I’d like to think reality.” – Ben Abraham

If that doesn’t make you want to listen to it, I don’t know what will. I didn’t get any good lines in this one. Maybe next time.

Critical Distance Confab: Episode 7 – A Post-Comment World

A little over a week and a half ago I asked TWIVGB compatriots Ben Abraham and Ian Miles Cheong if they wanted to join me in restarting the CDC podcast series. I’ve wanted to do another ever since I last appeared on episode 3. I love talking to intelligent people, intelligently about… well anything really, but the subject here is video games. Given the time of year I figured it was only fitting that we discuss the year in a retrospective of events, stories and games. I knew the three of  us wouldn’t be enough. It took a lot of work and this was a very busy year. Ian suggested both Kirk Hamilton and Denis Farr. Both said yes, which was both surprising and headache inducing.

Kirk lives in Pacific timezone, myself in Eastern, Denis in Berlin timezone, Ian in Malaysian and Ben off of the Sydney clock. Sufficed to say setting up a time where everyone could be awake and available was a challenge. The day before I was getting ready. I was prepping. I was reading every single TWIVGB from this year and taking notes. I had honestly forgotten when some of these events had taken place and thought they were from a different year.

The remarkable thing about all of this, it was a stealth podcast. In that no one outside of the five of us knew what we were doing until after it was done.

The recording session was enjoyable in itself, all 4 and half hours. It ran on so long that we talked about breaking it up into two parts. It ended up too long that I had to break it up further into three. The year was big indeed, but even longer was how much we had to say on nearly every single thing I had written down. Afterwords Ian and myself talked for another 6 hours just for the hell of it. Over the next few days would cause me no ends of headaches as I would first get a recording program for next time that wouldn’t crap out after 5 minutes, finding and learning an audio editing program that would do what I needed it to do. I couldn’t find one, it takes two different programs to put things together. As I said for nearly 3 days straight on twitter: we all need diction lessons. The amount of pauses, umms, uhhhs, you knows, likes and all around stuttering was maddening. Especially after each one I had to pause the playback, highlight the offending section, make sure it was only that and not part of another word and delete it. If it sounds a little choppy at points, that is why.

As for music, thankfully Ian suggested some great fair use music, which I forgot to credit in the show notes.

Opening Theme: Close – The Alpha Conspiracy

Closing Theme: Wishing Never – The Alpha Conspiracy

The podcasts were finished Sunday morning, the day after Christmas. Then I had to teach myself a new skill and understanding: how to upload the things to the server so people can download them. That was a mind-numbing experience. (Google you are worthless at explaining FTPs among other things. (iTunes will be up whenever they say so.))

Throughout the creation process of this podcast was inexperience. I was a lackadaisical host in I let the conversation drag on in points, though in retrospect of what we got out of it, that might have been for the best. I had to wait for other people to send me the audio files, the server data or some of tidbit explaining what I had to do. I don’t foresee having these problems the second time around, even with different guests,  because I know what I’m doing now. Yay me.

There are a lot of fun details and behind the scenes shenanigans it took to get it together, but really it all comes down to the final product. You can download it here:

Critical Distance Confab Episode 6 – 2010 Retrospective

Once again thank you Ben, thank you Ian, thank you Kirk and thank you Denis for participating, putting up with me and the overly long podcast, especially keeping Denis up and Ben away from Red Dead Redemption.

(Indie Game Spotlight is an irregular feature, trying to be a regular feature that I haven’t done for almost a year and finally got back to. I highlight and talk about an indie game as opposed to the AAA titles that usually dominate the critical conversation.)

One Chance is a flash game over at Newgrounds that you must play, but a note before you do. The title is more than that; it is a warning of what you are about to play. You have only one chance to play this game. There are no restarts or replays. Refreshing your browser does nothing. Keep that in mind when you make your choices.

It is a game of note, also because it is notoriously difficult to write about. I could soliloquize its themes and how it conveys them, but there is no challenge in that, nor would it enlighten anyone. It is an emotionally powerful game, I say powerful in the same way a sledgehammer is powerful: you can help but feel the impact.

Play it now.

Before you read on.

I find it difficult to talk about the game without entering into a state of gonzo criticism. I doubt I can even do that well. I gave the above warning, because I didn’t have it when I played the game and it was slightly unfortunate. The game hit me hard in my emotional gut and I didn’t want to start over because I felt I failed or because of curiosity in what other options presented. (Something that may have run counter to the point of the game.) I wanted to play the game again and again so I could ferret out the thematic commentary of the designer. There is something in here to say about time and how we spend it. Unfortunately it was only after I finished my play through that I found out that is all I got.

A secondary note, while it is admirable that the designer chose this method to make sure his player had one shot, I feel this is the strong-arm method. There is no subtly to the design. I wasn’t guided into not wanting to play again, I was flat out told I could not.  I said above that I didn’t feel like I failed, or at least not completely. I’m not sure if my path was optimal or not. The point is, were I not a critic, nor someone trained to nitpick and read closely I don’t think I would have wanted to play again. I would have the experience and I would be satisfied with it.

One Chance was satisfying unto itself and its delivery was comparable to a short story. (This is where I have further troubles talking about the game in an intelligible manner. I cannot play it again, so I cannot remember many of the details.) You play a man, a scientist, who has just discovered the cure for cancer. He goes into work and there is a celebration going on. You are offered by one of your female coworkers to go off somewhere. You are blocked off from the roof and the lab is open to continue your work. That is the first day. Subsequent days have the word turning darker and bleaker. We find that the cure has some very nasty side effects in that yes it kills cancer cells, but all other cells along with it. As the days tick down to total oblivion you make your choices to spend time with your daughter, taking her to the park, you see the fate of your co-workers as they kill themselves by jumping off the roof or in a more grizzly fashion and you can go to your lab to try and find a cure.

If I sound vague it’s because I have little choice. I have no reference material to see how these choices matter, or what specifically were choices, or effects. Things happen, but do they happen because of me, or were they going to happen anyway because of the situation. All I can be certain of is the end. That was the direct result of my actions. Every day I would go to work and enter the lab. Every day a large red X would appear on a computer terminal. The world was becoming a lonelier and emptier place, one night I came home to find my wife had slashed her wrists and left our daughter all alone. The next day she was so frightened she clung to me. I took her to work with me, over the corpses of my former coworkers, the message “Sorry” painted on the wall in someone’s blood. She plays in the corner of the lab as I see another red X. Finally the last day comes. Why I went home and not stay the lab seems a bit odd to me. I take my daughter with me again. Our skin is gray and the man moves slower than before. She is so tired I set her down in the lobby to close her eyes for a bit. I head into the lab and am greeted with a green check mark. I inject myself and then head into the hallway. I make it to my daughter, my own skin bright pink again and inject her. The final screen shows us both with pink skin sitting on a park bench. That is it. I have found the cure and saved both my daughter and myself to live in a lonely world.

That was my one chance and beyond the visceral emotional impact it had on me I have little else to say about it. Because the game only gives you one chance to play it makes it difficult to evaluate as a work or cultural artifact. I know how it makes me feel as a story would, but then this is merely the result of my actions. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book that would burn itself if you hit an end. A lot of the possible and authored content is lost. Any message therein doesn’t exist to the player and themes are muddled if not outright denied to us because we can’t play the game again.

It has been nearly a week since I’ve played One Chance and I’ve lived with the effect of that game. I’m sure it’s had an effect on at least one dream this week. But now it’s faded. I have a few mental screenshots, but like life memories they aren’t strong or concrete. It’s like I am missing some piece of the whole. As a piece of art I cannot double back to look or dig any deeper. It is a paradoxical work in that it presents itself as deep, possible is deep, but denies you from exploring it on any level but the surface.

Repeatedly at the beginning of each day I am told I have one chance to save the world and on the last day it changes the message to I had one chance. Of course that was the day I found the cure and saved my daughter and I. Was there some path I could not see? A single event that could avert catastrophe, or a series of choices from the first day onward in the game that I may or may not have had access to as the game went on? I ask these questions and wonder, as the designer wants us to. He wants us to think about what may have been or could have been in the face of total annihilation. We are supposed to be thinking these questions as we play, but I did not know the main rule of One Chance, the one hard coded into the game: you get only one chance, one play through. So I did not roleplay; or did I? I wont know now, can’t ever know now.

As an experience it is a sledgehammer, one that is still affecting me as I am still thinking about it. But without the ability to go back and relive the experience it will fade and be a one-time thing. No further inspection is available. Of course, by the time it really does fade from memory, maybe, just maybe my cache will have cycled this flash game from memory and I can live it again. This time knowing in this game my choices matter and this log can be left behind so that I may take the road not traveled.

This is not an essay by me. I’m sorry if you got that impression and clicked your way here. There are a few posts I’ve read recently that articulate the debate very well. As with most posts like this it’s really for me to have them at my fingertips should I ever need the link.

However, with the Supreme Court case coming up soon deciding whether or not video games are protected speech under the first amendment they are good articles to pass around. If you haven’t read them before, I thoroughly endorse them, if that means anything. If you have, well they are all good for a reread.

Why Your Loved Ones Hate Video Games by Micheal Drucker

Column: The Blue Key: The Aggressive Instinct Pt. 1, Violence in Video Games by Connor Cleary

Column: The Blue Key: The Aggressive Instinct Pt. 2, Addressing the Counterpoint by Connor Cleary

Well Ben Abraham was away from the internet last week, something to do with spelunking I think, and asked me to step in as writer of the This Week In Video Game Blogging feature again. I don’t know what it is, but every time I take up the task the internet decides that this is the week to get super prolific. So we I ended up writing what I believe to be the second longest TWIVGB…so far. It didn’t help that my list of links doubled about an hour before I should have written the damn thing.

You can read it here.

While I wading through the mass of writing and trying to figure out what was worth spreading around I noticed thematic trends floating around this week’s work. That and I while reading one post I began applying the thoughts of other posts to it, even if they weren’t on the same thing. The most pronounced of these were the posts examining Inception and the connection they seemed to have with examination of the self that many writers were doing via examining RPGs. So instead of simply grouping all of the related material together and calling it a day, I tried to do something new. I tried to connect them thematically in the post the same way they were connecting thematically in my own mind.

It was an experiment and so far I’ve gotten really positive feedback.  I would still like to hear how well the connection style worked, was it sloppy, did I not do enough, did I do too much. Like all writers I’m insecure about my own work and my ego has to be stroked/validated or crushed/criticized. Doesn’t matter which, either will do as long as I know why.

Well I did my two weeks at Critical Distance writing the This Week in Video Game Blogging feature. I can honestly say that I have even more respect for Mr. Ben Abraham. How he can keep that up week after week is beyond me. Maybe it had something to do with the fact I was new and hadn’t gotten used to it. Maybe it had to do with the first time I did it was the most prolific week ever in quality video game criticism. I don’t know, but hats off to you man. And if you ever need a fill-in (hint hint) you know where to go. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. Now to get back to my own site.

Here are the two weeks I did if you haven’t read them yet:

TWIVGB: March 7th

TWIVGB: March 13th

and for good measure, a great summation of what it takes.

As some of you may know, or care, Ben Abraham will be gallivanting off to GDC thanks to the generous contributions from around the blogosphere, proving once more that some people have way too much free time on their hands. All kidding aside, I’m sure Ben will do a bang up job covering the event. For those of you who don’t know him and will be going, he’ll be the one introduced as the Permadeath guy. He will also have an Australian accent and probably be the only one with a tan.

“What does this have to do with me?” the man at the back of the room says. I’m glad you, not a plant, asked me that. Ben Abraham, among his many ventures, posts the TWIVGB (This Week in Video Game Blogging) feature over at the Critical Distance blog. Due to the fact he will be out of the country, his country not mine, he has decided to take leave of his senses and ask me to fill in for the next two weeks.

So if you follow Critical Distance and notice a slight drop in quality of your quick perusal of video game criticism, you know who to blame. If however you don’t want that to happen, please @ reply any links you might find over the course of the next two weeks to the critical distance twitter feed: critdistance.

Critical Distance is a community effort to up the thought surrounding our medium. Please do your part in making my job that much easier.

Last Thursday I played Bioshock during the simultaneous VGHVI playthrough, while talking on Skype with Denis Farr, Roger Travis, Micheal Abbot and several others. Roger took that conversation and made a podcast out of it. He was doing the recording and unfortunately Skype kept kicking him out so he didn’t get everything, probably for the best. He does a wonderful job editing out a lot of the blank spaces and stumbles.

Note for next time: if VGHVI decides to do another single player playthrough, choose a game less audio intensive. Hope we do another; it was a lot of fun.

VGHVI Podcast 6