Friday afternoon tidbits

This weekend, I'll be nominating 25 games for a master ballot of the best games of the decade. It's harder than I would have expected. For one thing, there's a lot I haven't played. Looking through some lists on the interweb, I see possible contenders like Silent Hill 2, Eternal Darkness, and Beyond Good and Evil, and feel like I dropped the ball. (To be fair: I was dead broke during those years.) What's even crazier is how long a decade is. They were still releasing N64 games in the year 2000! That's also the year Deus Ex came out. Seems wrong, doesn't it?

-As a farewell to Hit Self-Destruct, Ben Abraham rounded up some tributes to Duncan Fyfe and posted them on Critical Distance. Part 1 has entries from L.B. Jeffries, Matthew Gallant, and me; part 2 features Nels Anderson, Eric Swain, and Ben Abraham; part 3 has Michel McBride-Charpentier, Michael Abbott, and Alexander Peterhans. Some wonderful observations here about Duncan's work. It's too bad that he died. (Oh, he only quit blogging?)

-Simon Parkin has written the definitive piece on Tim Langdell, the litigious head of alleged software publisher The Edge, a company that hasn't released a new game in almost 20 years but has made a healthy business in suing other people who use the word "edge" in their products.

Ironically, Langdell has a seat on the board of the International Game Developers Association. Corvus Elrod has been leading a charge to have him removed. The extent of my knowledge of the entire situation is limited to what you're reading right here, but it certainly seems like a hell of a drama. I'll be interested to see how it unfolds.

-Elysium at Gamers with Jobs makes a point I sometimes try and fail to: good graphics are an important part of a game. The issue isn't technology, it's imagination. Creative and inventive art direction is an asset for any game. As Elysium says, "Dazzle me, game developers and art designers. Show me something I’ve never seen before, whether set in the scale of the galactic or mundane. Stop wasting time seeing if you can pack a few dozen more polygons into the architecture of a bus stop and instead paint the unexpected." Games can show us new worlds in a way that books and movies never could. Why don't they?

-There's a bonus track for fans of the Big Red Potion podcast I was on earlier this week, in which we muse about the rigorous standards of secrecy regarding upcoming video games. It is pretty surprising -- video game companies guard their secrets better than the government does.

-Given the news of a gunman targeting women at a Pennsylvania gym, Brinstar's post about misogyny in gamer culture was especially timely. For reasons I don't understand, a large number of people in this country believe that there's no such thing as bigotry in any form, but if there is, the only victims are white men. (Many of these people are United States senators.) The level of hostility toward women and minorities in this country is shockingly high, all the more so because the perpetrators act so aggrieved. They actually get mad at the real victims of discrimination.

You know what else is bullshit? I go to the Huffington Post, where they've been following the Pennsylvania shooting pretty closely: "PA gunman targeted women," "PA gunman left behind online diary detailing hatred of women," etc. They helpfully linked his diary, too, in which he discussed in detail his desire to bed 20-somethings, and his frustration that he couldn't, which logically meant that he had to kill them. (And then ended up killing a few 40-somethings instead.)

To the right on the HuffPo homepage, in the "most popular" box, was a headline trumpting "Vanessa Hudgens NUDE pictures!" Vanessa Hudgens is the 20-year-old star of Disney's High School Musical films. No, we're not sending mixed messages or anything.

Do I have a solution? No. This world is completely fucked. If I ever have a daughter, I'm going to feel so goddamn guilty for what she'll have to go through. [/soapbox]

Big Red Potion

I mentioned it in passing yesterday, and now I'm happy to post the link to Big Red Potion Episode 20, "Out of Our Hands."

I joined hosts Sinan Kubba and Joe DeLia, along with guest and friend of Insult Swordfighting, Michael Abbott, to discuss game controls. As N'Gai Croal has said, we see games with our hands. The controller is the nexus of intention and action. Yet most discussions of games skip right over this topic, or approach it with no more insight than "the control was good or bad." Or maybe we make a snarky comment about waggle.

With that in mind, we tried to take a broad view of play control. We talked about notable successes and failures in the history of peripherals (somehow without mentioning either the U-Force or the Sega Activator in the latter category), what effect the Wiimote has had on game design, and what the future holds for Project Natal and Sony Motion. And we wondered whether standard control inputs are limiting gameplay possibilities, or whether new controller types will lead to a bunch of shallow gimmickry.

It's always hard to judge one's own performance on these things (plus, the sound of my own voice gives me hives), but I can say with confidence that Sinan, Joe, and Michael all said fascinating things about this most important of videogame topics. Have a listen!