My second post looking into Interactive Fiction is up on PopMatters. This time I look at two works that move away from the text adventure lineage and start pushing what can be done with text and a parser.

This paragraph got cut from the posted version – probably rightly so – but it shows my intent behind the post just the same:

I don’t have really anything sort of introduction beyond that. I’m not going to compare or contrast them. Or even look how these two game approach interactive fiction differently than the games from last time. I’m simply using this as an excuse to shove two essays into one post.

Yeah, I didn’t have anyway to combine my thoughts on Photopia and Galatea and both deserved an essay individually, so I didn’t even try. In both essays, though, I discussed what each game was about. Photopia was fairly easy to see it was about fate given its structure and ending. Galatea, on the other hand, I have a lot of difficulty nailing down what it was about. For the longest time I figured it was essentially a formalism tech demo to see what could be done. But then the lightening bolt of inspiration hit.

Please read both, it’s a genre of game that doesn’t get talked about much and these are two of the best examples of it I’ve ever seen. Both Photopia and Galatea are available to play through your browser.

Finally I’m back to talking about games. For the first week of May I decided to critique two modern text adventures and look at the interesting things they do.

Instead of jumping in to the next big thing or tackling my backlog of AAA titles, and boy I have a lot to get through on that front, I wanted to go off the beaten path. I wanted to look into the weird, the experimental, the lambasted and the old. I wanted to look at the stuff that doesn’t get critiqued. You have no idea how many times I’ve played some brilliant game only to search and find nothing written about it. This has happened with titles that are decades old. There are games, because of the sphere they occupy don’t get anything substantial or really any criticism at all.

I ended cutting this paragraph from the my post because it didn’t fit the tone and spoiled the flow of the intro, but it encapsulates my feeling on the subject:

Thinking on it I’m shocked Dear Esther, Thirty Flights of Loving and the rest of the First Person Walkers managed to garner so much attention. Though the first was a finalist in the IGF and a grant winner from the Indie Fund, while Thirty Flights of Loving rode on the coat tails of the Idle Thumbs Podcast kickstarter to notoriety. Without these built in meta narratives, would the games have achieved their success or attention?

I don’t mean to knock either game. I think very highly of them. Instead I want to point out how lopsided the critical circles are that we don’t give our attention or our effort into certain brands of gaming. I don’t expect the mainstream publications to dive in, they have a certain market and needs. But what is the amateur critic and blogger’s excuse.

I decided to focus a theme month on the areas often left untouched and games not given their fair due of critical appraisal. At first I was going to do some list post with a paragraph or two of thoughts on each item with a different area focused on each week. But that idea ended up being thrown out, because A. if I was going to give some attention to games that don’t get attention then I shouldn’t half ass it and B. I ended up having quite a bit to say anyway with just two of the games and my intro that I pushed the other two interactive fiction games to next week. Then on thinking on it some more, I think this is going to be Interactive Fiction Month and leave the other areas of gaming for another time.

So take a look at what is now part one of my miniature critical odyssey down the interactive fiction road.

And so I finally finish my three part series on PAX East. Part the First, Part the Second and Part the Last. It’s not so much about this PAX East, but using this PAX East as an attempt to explain all PAX Easts, maybe all PAXs, but I haven’t been to the west coast. Don’t know how good a job I did.

In reality this idea of what “PAX East” is doesn’t really exist. Even just walking around in the empty time between things to do you can just tell that there is just so much going on and so many different experiences to be had, with each person telling their own story of the show. Some might be similar, but I doubt any two are the same. Yet, PAX East has this tainted image, not wholly undeserved, due to its founders. But on the other hand the convention has grown so far beyond the purview of Gabe and Tycho that it isn’t about them anymore. I can be pretty confidant in saying that there is probably a good sized percentage of people attending who don’t know what Penny Arcade is. Does that erase whatever stigma the rather indefensible behavior of its creators from it? I don’t know, but it makes it really easy to ignore.

In all honesty, the huge scope of the convention already puts it beyond any need to consider it. The show is yours. Over the three days, many people with have many different experiences and may never cross the other’s path. There is enough at the show that you can find something to do and tailor the event to your desires.

The first year I went I was playing tourist at the whole event. I was a shutterbug and I put together a pretty decent first person narrative of my time there. (Didn’t bother with the second year. The photos didn’t come out all too well.) That’s fine for my personal site, but I didn’t want to do that for PopMatters. Not only that, but it isn’t that interesting to hear about someone else’s time. It would be just a series of anecdotes and I do have quite a few of them. But they are personal stories that wont mean anything to anyone else. They’re the kind of thing you tell when the other person get the chance to tell one back to you.

In addition, my experience as I said in my pieces is going to be fundamentally different from that of a fan’s. Having the badge and using it means I have different priorities and thus a different view for many things. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a single focus in my time at PAX East. I’m all over the place dipping my toes into a bunch of different things, but never fully diving in. If my posts feel a bit scattershot, that is why. There is no narrative thread underlying my experience. I have no grand thesis on the show. It’s a bunch of half formed vague thoughts on various elements with the only connection being that it was my time there.

I still maintain that PAX East primarily is a place to meet people. For me it’s a chance to see those I only get to see once a year. It was great to see everyone once more and in the case of some for the first time. I hesitate to name you all in fear of forgetting someone. And a double thanks to the people who kindly donated to get me a chance to get up there and have some Poptarts and breakfast bars to snack on. I will be get to those little writing snippets I promised very soon.

At last I can stop trying to channel Hunter S. Thompson or David Foster Wallace and get back to my normal writing style. Emerson I guess. I don’t know.

Episode 12 of the CDC podcast went live. I know it was promised back in March, but it was delayed due to the hell that misbegotten excuse for an audio file put me through. I had to edit the thing three times.

Originally I had planned to release it last year in conjunction with Deirdra Kiai’s Indigogo for her newest game. That fell through due to editing problems which caused me to start all over again. So I’m editing it for release in the second week of March. I finish, saved it and then put it through a third editing program with particular capabilities to clean up sections of the audio. This wasn’t my usual nitpicking, these sections were unintelligable. The program was nice enough to add an additional sound clip every 5 seconds telling me the name of the program I used. I had to start all over again. And the second half of the audio was borked. My sound channel was doubling and then inter-splicing everything I said. This is the second time Skype screwed me over like this.

I have fixed the solution, but I recorded this interview with Deirdra back in 2011 which was before the problem became apparent and I fixed the settings. Unsplicing audio is the most maddening task I think I’ve ever set myself to do and having to edit this damn thing three times…

Sufficed to say I hope you enjoy the interview. And please play Life Flashes By. It’s free.

I had a post here. 1200 words of what I thought at least were some interesting ideas and for once decently written. WordPress said screw you and erased them from existence when I saved them. All that’s left is the title above, the tags at the bottom and my anger within. Sufficed to say I’m too pissed to get anything done and I doubt I could hope to rewrite it. It wasn’t even suppose to be long it just ended up that way. So here are the links to my reviews that spawned the whole thing.

Cognition episode 1

Cognition episode 2

A New Beginning – Final Cut

I had these pretty images. I’m not wasting them.

And so comes to an end of a month looking at walking games with jaunt over to the Third-Person Walkers of last year Journey and Bientôt l’été.

The whole idea of the first person walking genre was from Kris Ligman or at least I thought it did until I tried to track down where she said it. It isn’t often that a year provides so many examples of a new genre. Especially one as diverse as this one. The walking genre is about stripping things down to their bare essentials removing nearly all interactivity until it is just the looking and the moving, two of the most essential elements of video games and those not given a lot of credence to in the wider world.

But neither Journey nor Bientôt l’été goes that far. they have additional elements that almost seem required given the difference between first person and third person games. Thanks to these minimalist games, we can see the difference much clearer. I didn’t see the conclusion until I had written it. I always like surprising myself when I connect the dots in my essays.

So, take a look at the ostentatiously titled post over at PopMatters. (Thank you G. Christopher Williams for that one.) Now I have to come up with a new monthly topic to last 5 weeks.

I’ve finally finished up my series on the First Person Walkers of 2012. Ending on the last of the three that I played and the one I honestly had the hardest time writing about: Proteus.

I don’t know if it’s the fact I don’t play that many open world games and thus don’t have the proper critical vocabulary to discuss them or what. I like Proteus. It’s restful. I end up closing my eyes and just lightly rest in my chair. Not really napping, just resting. I don’t know how the piece came out. Maybe I should have just done a basic close reading of the game instead.

One part that I really like that I wish I could expand upon properly is the idea of the First Person Walker as a reductionist genre. Where you take standard AAA game genres and boil them down until you’re entire interaction is based in walking and looking. It gets to the heart of storytelling methods of them and brings those elements front and center.

Anyway, read my thoughts on Proteus and tell me what you think.

I appeared on another episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast to discuss the indie game Little Inferno. I don’t know what to really think of the game and spend most of my time trying to parse it out in real time with my fellow podcasters. It’s another game I’m very happy that it exists and I enjoyed my time with it, but I don’t know what to ultimately say about it in any final word sort of way. It feels like a lot of half finished ideas and sentiments put together centering on the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace.

Does it have an environmentalist message? Is it anti-corporate? Is it critical of the tech culture where people sit around and stare at a entertainment machine all day? Not really to all three. It weaves in moments of light hearted complexity regarding all those issues and never really stakes a claim on any of them. That’s not really a problem, but it muddies the waters on what I can say about it. Maybe sometimes it’s just fun to watch the world burn and it turns out not to be so bad after all.

What I love about this particular episode of the podcast is how much we use that mutli-themed ambiguity of the game a reason to go on numerous tangents related to everything and anything we can think of. It’s probably one of the more fascinating discussions I’ve had about a single video game title for being so free form.

This is a week late and a good example of why you should have your posts written out ahead of time.

I like Thirty Flights of Loving as a mental experiment more than I like it as a game. As a game there just isn’t enough for me to grab on to in the manner we often attach ourselves to the experience of play. But I find it fascinating to pick apart and autopsy the various elements and what they do in relation to one another. It’s like having a huge story telling game experience distilled to the point where it’s pure. And boy has this metaphor gone off the rails.

Even Dear Esther doesn’t have the distilled essence that’s useful for the type of mental exercises Thirty Flights of Loving is capable of, let alone a AAA 20 hour blockbuster. It’s a thought experiment, a craft experiment and narrative experiment in the guise of a published game. Tons of things are hinted at and on my first playthrough so many months ago I felt like I’d completely missed the point. Each subsequent playthrough revealed something else and a clearer picture of what happened formed in my mind.

I don’t love this game, but it like Hotline Miami, Dys4ia, Frog Fractions, Papo & Yo among others endlessly fascinate me and get my synapses firing. Here I explore the cinematic aspect of the game and compare it to the notion of cinematic as an adjective in gaming as a whole.

So the PS4 announcement was a thing and amid the hype, the backlash to the hype and the reasoned deconstruction of what was revealed I keep seeing the same things focused on. The PS4 is showing more of the same, the PS4 has a share button that could do things, the PS4 has or hasn’t set itself up as a new generation system. I’m not going to argue or dispute any of that. Though I will give a general shame on you to those spreading their bile. Not to those being snarky, a time honored tradition from the peanut gallery, but to those actively spitting on the people watching the press conference either with sincere joy for what they were seeing or the spectacle of the presentation. I don’t know when it became “cool” for spitting on people who are enjoying themselves, but its utterly sickening.

Anyway. One thing about the PS4 that seems to get a drive by mention before being relegated to the uninteresting camp is that fact it’s using x86 PC architecture. I know it’s not flashy or super marketable as a bullet point, but I can’t help but see it as possibly the most important feature of the console. The console market as we know it is very much in danger of going belly up commercially. For the most part it has already done so artistically. With games like Dead Space 3 and Assassin’s Creed III needing to sell multiple millions of copies to break even, there is a problem with the budgets of AAA games. I believe the numbers were 4 and 5 million respectively. Ubisoft’s franchise dodged a bullet by being in the top 10 selling games last year with 7 million copies.

I wrote those few sentences on the sales numbers so the modern reality of AAA game development would be understood. A game had to be one of the top 10 sellers of the year to come just ahead of breaking even. For all the amount of money that some titles make, the records they break and the headlines proclaiming their success the audience for them isn’t that big. The combined total for the consoles it was available on is north of 145 million. That’s not including PCs. It sold 7 million.

38 Studios went bankrupt and took their subsidiary developer Big Huge Games with them because Kingdoms of Amalur: Awakening was a failure having only broken a million copies. 1,000,000 copies wasn’t enough to break even. It was a third of what was needed. Most games never hit a million copies. The problem isn’t the market which has grown massively over the last decade. It’s the budgets.  We all know this. Every time we read one of those ridiculous headlines of how much this or that game cost to make or how many copies it needs to sell or how the companies are getting around it by monetizing other aspects of the game. Games that don’t perform have their franchise’s killed and their studios shut down throwing many people out of work. All because of the astronomical, unsustainable budgets.

The other consequence of this is that it creates a make it or break it type of environment where games have to be made. Games cannot just be a success anymore, they have to be a record breaking blockbuster. It has to chase the Call of Duty dragon.

Now what little programing experience I do have has taught me that I should not be doing programing under any circumstances. What I do know is what is done with the various platforms. An easy to develop for architecture is inherently cheaper to work with than one that isn’t. What I also know is that with the same processor architecture as a PC means that developers wont have to specialize for a single system and can work with comparable versions of the same game for multiple systems. (It also has the added benefit of no more second rate PC version.) This much is obvious, but glossed over. It’s taking the thinking to the next step where I see real possibilities.

Developers on Kickstarter are creating or should I say recreating the mid range titles for a fraction of the budget of their console AAA counterparts. Nearly all of these high profile kickstarted games are on PC and good many of them are using the Unity engine for development. Now Unity may not be Unreal 4 or whatever other new for sale engine someone has in the pipeline, but with some of the screenshots and demo videos I think we can reasonably say “who cares?” I can reasonably see a lot of studios using Unity or the like working off of the x86 chips in the PS4 to create high quality mid tear games at price the market can return on. Of course it requires dev teams and publishers to actually move in this direction, but even they have to be looking for a ways to cut down costs.

We can have our blockbusters, but every game cannot be a blockbuster. Every game cannot be the one to shatter sales records or be a top 10 seller just to break even. The reality is, and this is true for every medium, the blockbuster’s purpose is mostly to offset the losses made throughout the year with the company’s profits mostly coming from the cumulative of mid tier projects making a little more than they cost to create.

Now all they need is to announce an easy way for indie developers to publish on the console and we’re set.