Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Saturday, March 02, 2002
Posting from home for a change, where I am riding out the snow with a fresh load of groceries, copies of The Longest Journey and Jak and Daxter, and the 20 boxes of my comics I finally retreived after five years of storage at a friend's warehouse. No, I don't expect to get much work done this weekend.
But I'm still doing a bit of surfing over my 56K, and I've found a few things of interest:
* An essay on how Scientology manages to place itself so highly in Google searches when anti-Scientology sites like Operation Clambake are much more popular and updated more often.
* You might remember Edge.org; I linked to their terrific World Question Center a couple months ago. Well check out who showed up for their latest dinner party.
* And to make Matt Hughley happy,
Critical IP sucks.
Friday, March 01, 2002
Blood in the streets in Gujarat, India, as the death toll in Muslim-Hindu rioting has reached nearly 300. Major American media outlets are covering the story nicely, but I've found it interesting to read the coverage on the English language version of the SIFY News website.
A San Francisco woman has taken on the unenviable task of remodeling a murder house--and the murder isn't even the weirdest thing that's happened there...
Warren Marshall of Epic Games made a good point on the Planet Crap thread regarding Robert Abbott's essay that seems to be sending a lot of folks to this page:
I grow so weary of this crap. Here's something to chew on : remember the graphics you saw back in the "good old days"? Those weren't intentionally bad. Those were the BEST the developers could do! They pushed the graphical limits of the machines back then too. Graphics were no less of a focus than they are today.
The difference today is that there are many more options available.
A look at another headline from today's news, and in this case I think the reporters were reaching pretty far to achieve some sort of "irony"...
Wanna bomb your house?
Just so you don't think bombs are all fun and games, here's some light reading: the report of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. Fascinating stuff.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Earlier today, JP sent me a link to an article called "Video Games Are Incredibly Stupid" that he found amusing. Later tonight, I saw that Bezzy posted his response to the article, but was nice enough not to go at it point by point.
Leaving it to me.
One of my credos is "I'll be debated, but I won't be dismissed." Much like Bezzy, at its core I don't necessarily disagree with what Abbott is saying. (Maybe we'll get to that before we're done.) But he sounds like such an egotistical, authoritative ass saying it that it's time to pull out the red pencils and critique his work.
First, go read the article. I don't want to waste space and risk legal action reprinting the whole thing.
Ready? OK. Here we go, folks, deep into the mind of a man on the brink:
*His summary of the game market as third-person shooting games, skateboard games, and racing games*
His first overly broad statement takes two paragraphs to make. Which is strange, because in two paragraphs he could have squeezed in a lot more genres of games currently on the shelves than just the three he insists are the only ones in existance. Lemme see what I can do in a single paragraph. Deep breath, and--
Shooters, driving games, sports games, rhythm games, adventure games, flight simulators, strategy games, puzzle games, role-playing games, fighting games, casino games, kid games, pinball games, board games--
--gotta...take..breath--
--And that doesn't even count games that cross the lines between genres (like Deus Ex, a hybrid of FPS and RPG), or subcategories of any of the above (FPS, MMORPG, TBS, RTS, etc.) Of course, I'm sure those were what he meant when he said:
"There are a few games, mostly available on personal computers, that follow other formats. One or two of these games show some promise, but I won’t address them in this diatribe."
How nice of him to concentrate his vitriol. How nice of him to cautiously avoid writing a piece that would be constructive rather than just pissing and moaning. And how nice of him to ignore the games of nearly every genre mentioned above that have come out for not just PCs but consoles--yes, consoles--before the time he wrote his piece and since.
When was that, by the way? He says that he finally gave up seeking publication and posted the essay online in August 2001, but when was it written? I have to assume that it was 1990 or later, since everything before then was awesome! Right, Robert?
"I hope there are those of you who remember the games of the 1970s and 1980s—games like Berserk, Q-Bert, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Tetris, and the brilliant Chip’s Challenge."
Pac what? Who Kong? Wait--Chip's Challenge? Wasn't that the game on that Atari thing?
"Chip’s Challenge is now played as a computer game, but it started life on the hand-held Atari Lynx."
Yeah! I knew I knew that one from some-- Actually, I didn't. What the hell?
See, he's "proving his credibility" here, kids. First he names only the classics of the entire field, then an obscure game. This top of the crop--in the first five cases proven by the test of time, in the last by his own subjective standards--he pits against everything on the shelves today. Well, except for the games that show promise. Only the crappy ones. Because that's a fair comparison, right? ("Mah granmah's prize-winnin' apple pie recipe tastes a lot better than the average piece of horseshit, don't it?")
But what is it that he liked about those games? I won't quote (much), but let me pull out his checklist and respond one by one:
* "Top down view" allowing full view of gameboard
Well, technically, Tetris and Donkey Kong had side views, Q*Bert used an orthogonal view, and Pac-Man and Beserk...well, it's hard to tell if they used a side view or an orthogonal view crushed down into 2D ('cause you get full side views of all the characters, see?). None of them were "top down". Spy Hunter was top down. Half of Tron was top down (for Slow Joe in the Back Row, that would be the tank battle and the light cycles.) Qix may have been top down; who can tell?
* Minimal graphics
This tenet makes Pong the ideal sports game and Fire Truck the two-player best driving game ever. Actually, he may be right in the latter case, but not for the reasons he thinks.
* Player character is stick figure or a small round cartoon face.
 Donkey Kong  Mario64 |
He's right. I don't know how I managed to continue playing Mario after I saw that he had a big "M" on the front of his hat, or was rendered in more than 3 colors. You win this round, Mr. Abbott.
*"Most of these games relied on fast response, but the players could actually apply reasoning."*
I remember the weeping of the dedicated strategists in my hometown who had to turn back to chess and Go when the Centipede machine at the pizza place broke down. Thankfully, an emergency airlift of Tempest, Asteroids, and Battlezone was brought in before we turned to those evil new games relying on reflex like baseball or soccer. Saved from exercise!
"Compared to today’s games, the 70s and 80s seem like a golden age of video games."
From his lofty perch, the philosopher king peers into history forgotten by most mortals and eats peeled grapes of wrath washed down with the sweet melancholy wine of what could have been...
Maybe it wasn't fair to say that he's just bitching. Because he at least identifies the root causes of the problem, right?
"Cause 1: Today’s players are incredibly stupid"
Played a game lately? He means you, right? No, no--of course he doesn't, you discriminating reader of his online wisdom. Because he spends the four sentences following his pronouncement backing off from it until he identifies the true culprits:
"teen-age boys who are engrossed in the “twitch” games"
Not even the boys who are engrossed with twitch games; just those who are engrossed in twitch games. That's right, it's a blame pool in temporal flux. Between the ages of 13 and 19? Logged onto a Quake or UT server on your other computer? Your ears should be burning, man.
(Before we go on, I love his opening statement, another look back at the good ol' days:
"In the 70s and 80s, people of all ages played video games."
It's only that he managed to avoid saying "all people of all ages" that prevents me from whipping out my scathing joke about how my Grandpa was a big Burgertime freak. Dammitall.)
Well, actually, you share the blame, boys. Here's another group to welcome to the penalty box:
"Cause 2: Video game critics are incredibly stupid"
At the end of his article, Abbott says he couldn't get game magazines to publish his article. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to deduce why.
But what exactly are his beefs with the magazines? First, the publication of codes that allow you to move from level to level in a game. To be fair, I'm going to assume that he probably hates "god mode" and "ghost" cheats too. I love how he assumes that game developers embed these commands in a game simply so that the game will get coverage in magazines. Hang on while I go grab a random half dozen game mags--
Okay, I'm back. I'm going to assume that if these cheats are so important, they'll be advertised in the cover copy of the magazine somewhere. Let's take a look:
Computer Games, March 2002: Nothing, though it does admit to the existence of "strategy", "role-playing", and "wargame" games; clearly the CG staff isn't looking at the shelves of their local store, where only third-person action games, driving games, and skateboard games are for sale. Oh, wait, that's bullshit.
Computer Games, May 2001: Nope.
NextGen, October 2001: Nada.
PCGamer, March 2002: Nope. But apparently PCGamer is taking on the Taliban somehow. (Looks inside) Actually, they just played a few games of Jane's USAF. Roll on, America! PCGamer is right there behind you! Well, behind you and behind their monitors, I guess.
Game Informer #92: Nothing to get you ahead in a game, but they do offer advice on how "to trick your parents into buying the perfect gift". I assume they mean for yourself, the gamer, and not some weird Parent Trap thing.
XBox Magazine, February 2002: Holy shit! There it is, right on the cover! "SAVE 61 HOURS! Skip Straight to the Good Stuff Without All the Work!" Four sidebars of cheat codes, for eight different XBox games. That's a grand total of one page of content. You gotta wonder how they managed to fill the other 95 pages...
Again, Mr. Abbott is correct.
(This, of course, ignores the possibility that many "cheat codes" are simply commands used by dev teams while producing a game, and that it's the players and their desire to cheat--or, so not to leave the developers in the clear--get around bugs in the 'finished product' that cause them to ferret out these codes and put them online, where they are discovered by magazine editors and used as filler in a minor section of a magazine whose majority content is columns, articles, and reviews. Not that there aren't quality problems with those, but--)
He also says,
"Their reviews usually contain this sentence: “The action is so smooth, the graphics are so compelling, the music is so over-powering, that you feel you are really there shooting at the monsters.” "
In context, he's talking about magazine reviewers appearing on TechTV, but you gotta figure that they would say the same thing in their print reviews, right? And many of those reviews are reprinted online, right? Right. So let's take advantage of the Internet and do a Google search to test the thesis. Two results, one of which is Abbot's essay, and the other an old 3D sound page that uses many of the same words separated by many others.
Okay, time to take a break. Go get a glass of water, stretch, go to the bathroom. I'll wait.
Or go read The Brunching Shuttlecocks and come back tomorrow. This will all be over by then.
We're past the halfway point, folks.
Before anyone else catches the blame, we get Abbott's real beef with modern games:
"realism"
I quote the word once, but it appears in the article nine times. (I counted by pasting the article into Microsoft Word and replacing the word "realism" with "goat". Go ahead and do it yourself. The screed doesn't lose any of its power.) And to be honest, here's where I agree with him the most--there is a relentless pursuit of graphical quality going on that often seems to happen at the cost of gameplay innovation. At the very least, consumers of the last decade have responded more readily to better graphics over better gameplay, causing publishers to push developers to produce prettier pictures over new gameplay paradigms. This hints at the real thing bothering Abbott, whether he knows it or not. But we'll get to that later.
Now it's time to sling more blame:
"Cause 3: Video game designers are incredibly stupid"
Both because it's short and because I take it most personally, I am going to quote every word of this section, piece by piece:
"Not only are they incredibly stupid, they aren’t even game designers."
First the semantics game again: Can "Video game designers are incredibly stupid" be logically followed by "not only are they incredibly stupid, they aren't even game designers?" Let me get this straight:
- There are such things as game designers.
- Game designers are incredibly stupid.
- These people, who are incredibly stupid, aren't even game designers.
Here, let me do the (by this logic) logical substitution for you :
- These people, who are (game designers), aren't even game designers.
That, my friends, is faulty logic.
But if they aren't game designers, what are they?
"They are computer programmers and graphic artists."
No, no, no. Designers are designers, and programmers are programmers. If his problem is that many companies don't hire people specifically for the purpose of designing their games and leave that as a secondary task to people primarily hired for other skills, I wish he had said so. But this, of course, overlooks the possibility that, though their attentions may be divided with those other tasks, programmers and artists may still have skill--or at least skill accrued through experience--in that area. Heck, many of the top designers are also programmers or artists. That's just good budgeting
And that plays into the root of the thing. I was going to wait to get at what I think Abbott is really missing, but I can't hold it back any more. Here's the key, friends, in bold for the slow:
Video games are a business.
That's the truth you have to understand, friend. Profit, money, budgets, all these things have to be taken into consideration on every game you find in an arcade or on the shelves at the computer store, and that concern for making a profit pollutes the pure artistic instincts that many pros in the industry do have. They're compromises of necessity--if a game developer makes innovative games that nobody buys, it won't be long before their office is a back-alley cardboard box.
In that last sentence, I lay not the blame but at least complicity on the shoulders of the consumers. It's a vicious cycle; developers only make games that consumers buy, consumers can only buy the games developers make. But if you don't like the status quo, for god's sake get out there and support the fringe. Find an experimental game like Uplink or Bezzy's own K and support the holy hell out of it. Give the developers support--ideally, seed money or buy copies of their finished games, but words of support at the very least--and tell other people about the games, force them into their hands.
Otherwise, shut the hell up before you become like Abbott. Before I lose my head of steam, let's get back to him and his discussion of game developers:
"Video game companies can’t even comprehend the concept of a game inventor. To them, a game or a puzzle is of no consequence."
He's right. I'm certain that game design isn't even discussed at industry conferences. I'm certain that the largest of publishers hates puzzle games and would never publish one. And when a name appears above the title of a game, it's usually an artist or a programmer.
"These designers have no creativity. All they can do is take an old game or puzzle, one in public domain, or sometimes they steal a new game or puzzle."
Could somebody please email me with directions to the secret repository of new games and puzzles so that I can gather my developer friends and arrange a complex heist to steal a couple? Thanks.
"They then add jazzy graphics, music, sound effects, and program it as a video game."
Yeah, I remember Grand Theft Auto 3 before they put in the jazzy graphics, music, and sound effects. It was called an idea. And though I clapped my hands and believed in pixies as hard as I could, it was very hard to play.
"And they think they have done a brilliant job because they are the ones who added realism to the game."
Or could those jazzy graphics, music, and sound effects have been a user interface and player feedback for a game idea, with realism as a design or artistic goal for implementing them? No, he's probably right. Hoo-haw! Clap yourselves on the backs, industry folks! You're realism injectors, n' proud uv it!
"They are, of course, fervent believers in the mistaken notion that realism is the only criterion for judging a game."
Yeah, those crazy realistic games winning Independent Game Festival awards. Those nutty photorealistic games I hear being discussed in glowing terms here at work. If only there were alternatives...
Okay.
Abbot has one last cause of our woes. Let's do it:
"Cause 4: Computer technology has greatly improved since 1990"
In by-now typical fashion his 'cause' is an overstatement that he has to clarify; the real problem, he claims, is that the only use of that improved technology has been to add realism to games. Never mind that soundtracks like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault can be Michael Giacchino's incredible full orchestral score (of the type I never hear walking around in my everyday life, I note) rather than the cruder (and I'm speaking only in technical possibility here; I make no subjective judgments as to what someone may or may not like) soundtracks of games from the 80s.
(Another aside. I know, I know. But I can't let this bit get by:
"Unfortunately, the comedies they made as talkies were never as funny as the silent comedies. In fact, to this day no one has made a movie as funny as the silent comedies."
I'm just glad to discover he's out to piss off more than just game fans, reporters, and developers. Modern comedy fans, contact us to arrange a schedule for picketting outside his house for a while.)
Abbott goes on for a few more paragraphs to complain about first person-views, the lack of overall gamestate information in that view (ignoring that not knowing everything about the gameworld is as valid a design choice as being all-seeing), and design inertia (how hard it might be to convince consumers to go back to an old paradigm once they've whole-heartedly bought into a new one.)
In that last item, he might have a point. But again, it's a point caused and reinforced by the influence of the economics of the situation.
Then he seems to run out of things to say, which is good--I'm going to drop my end of the pissing contest at this point. I'm tired, and I have work to do tomorrow.
Look, I don't claim to be a be-all, end-all authority; I leave didactic pretension to Abbott. I'm just a guy with a different set of opinions. But in closing, I want to repeat the two most important opinions--bordering on facts--that I hope didn't get buried in the mass of text above:
1) Games are an industry, and the money involved has an influence on every aspect of the process between and including the initial concept in somebody's brain and a consumer playing the final product.
2) If you don't like games tainted by money, go find some that aren't; they're out there, and while Sturgeon's Law applies to many of them, a handful are very good.
To the examples noted above relating to this second bit, I also once again provide a link to Orisinal. I don't know what mad compulsion forces Ferry Halim to keep making great, simple, beautiful little games and letting people play them for free, but if they ever develop a medication to make it go away they'll have to kill me before they can force it down his throat.
You've read the whole thing. In the game of Screed/Counterscreed: The Reading, you have now earned one more point.
I sleep now.
Not much time to post today; when I'm not busy with work-related work I'm doing a few small writing projects, including making a little progress on my essay about story in games. Later tonight, it's off to game.
A quick reccomendation, though: if you enjoy superhero comics you should definitely be reading the Batman titles. The "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" storyline was great, and today's Batman #600, the start of the "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive" storyline, was just as good.
Later, skaters.
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Cool! Apparently a TV series based on the vastly underrated movie Zero Effect is in the works. It's a shame that Bill Pullman won't be involved, but I'll still check it out.
A sidebar: I'm stunned to learn that there was a movie version of one of my favorite childhood books.
I was just hit by an awesome Google search for which I am apparently the only result. And I don't even answer their question. Sorry, whoever you are.
Order a copy of Sketch!. We're only 4,000 copies away from royalties... |
A trip down memory lane for Brian (the other Brian, the one who rarely posts on the page that link points to), who is probably reading, and a little bit of history for the rest of you. Sketch! was most likely conceived while gaming at the Schomburg house; I distinctly remember the phrase "I wish there were a game where the better your character was drawn, the tougher they were," and it's likely that came from the mouth of a Schomburg, fantastic artists that they are. But it wasn't until the spring of 1994, when I went out to visit Brian while he worked at West End Games, that the game was actually born. Actually, the birth came like a bad sitcom plot somewhere on the interstate between Honesdale, PA and Atlantic City, where Brian and I had decided to visit. The Atlantic City trip was a bust (literally, if you're talking about the pencil holders we saw in the Boardwalk Gamblers' Gift Shop), but the journey produced four pages of handwritten notes that formed the nucleus of a new game where characters were created by drawing them. It would be another five years before Jon was crazy enough to suggest that Corsair acutally publish the game, but that night after returning from Atlantic City the first game of Sketch! (then called C.H.A.O.S.--"Captain Hero's Adventures On Sketchworld"--if I remember correctly) was played. And that's what picqued this bit of reminiscing, for last night I uncovered the first two characters drawn by Brian and myself. You'll note that my character won the Popularity Points for that fight; even then the game showed that though the better artist would have a better character, anyone could win. (In the final version of the rules, there are some basic rules that build that into the system, but that night I can only take credit for lucky rolls on the dice...) |
Okay, time to reveal one of my fringe opinions. But first, one shared by many: I hate urban sprawl. Mile after square mile of land covered with cookie cutter houses just so everyone can have their little piece of belonging and 200 square feet of lawn. It's the worst parts of the American pursuits of the rural ideal, the frontier, and conspicuous consumption all at once.
Okay, now we head for the fringe. For years, whenever I complain about sprawl, my answer has always been that everyone move into apartments. Wait, don't leave--I don't mean microflats or any traditional form of apartment. What I actually mean is that everyone move into enormous buildings that would simulate everything people get out of their sprawlhomes, but use space more wisely, more densely. Give them a four bedroom ranch house--it's just stacked atop forty others. And don't give them narrow, flouresecent-lit hallways--give them broad, high-ceilinged, street-like halls lit by sunlight piped in via fiber optics, running off of floor hubs lined by small businesses. A few small parks inside, but outside the building--okay, let's just call it what it is, an arcology--enormous tracts of forest and greenspace available to all inhabitants.
Of course, I'm not the first or the best to come up with this idea. This Village Voice article outlines things nicely, though they make brash statements that I wouldn't neccesarily be prepared to defend (like, say, to green farmers in Vermont), and I'm sad to see that Jane Jacobs disagrees--I really enjoyed her book The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But if Eugene Tsui's Ultima Tower ever gets built, I would definitely be one of the first to move in.
"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."
Things get the most frightening when real life begins to resemble a story from The Onion.
"If Target sold bourbon, I would just put the family in a Winnebago and live in the parking lot."
Hopefully today's Bleat by James Lileks will convince Shala that he's not an entirely bad (read: Target-hating) guy.
Monday, February 25, 2002
Tasty, tasty crescent rolls.
And an update from the floor: Parappa 2 up three to 58.75 following soldiers carrying banjos with bayonets and a crazy afro-carving octopus barber.
I don't mind radio stations importing programming from out-of-town; I listen to Harry Shearer's LA-based Le Show and the Boston game show Says You! on WPR all the time. What annoys me about the way Clear Channel is doing business (and if you only click one link in this post, that's the one, folks) is that it's based on deception, with DJs in Tampa trying to pretend that they're sitting in a booth in Boise. Add in a fake DJ recruited to attend local events, 'live' on-air events that aren't, and an overall watering down of available avenues for creativity, and it's just one more thing that pisses me off as the entertainment and media industries continue to optimize themselves for maximum profitability. We'll never see the likes of KBHR again...
Well, CrossGen Comics has made all of their comics available to read on the web free of charge--until next month, when they go to a subscriber service. The art isn't big enough, the interface is awkward, the text can be hard to read, and I don't even want to think about the poor people on dialup. But it's there for you to check out.
And now, the Weekend Video Game Roundup, with a closer look at the PS2 market: State of Emergency down 6 points to a new low of 12 dollars, with analysts continually noting that it's fun aspects are hidden deep under a layer of mediocrity; PaRappa the Rapper 2 up three and a half at 52.50, thanks to the return of Chop Chop Master Onion and its non-sequiter of a plot involving planet-sized ants and the Noodle Syndicate; Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 reaching a 52-week high of 72.50, as fund managers finally learn the manual and begin to nail combo tricks.
We'll have more after the closing bell.
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