Friday afternoon tidbits

A small milestone to mark: Sometime today, if it hasn't happened already, this blog will serve up its 200,000th page view. That's not a large number by most blogs' standards, but it seems like a big one to me. Thanks for reading.

-It's the best thing I've seen this week -- Matthew Gallant's mash-up of "I'm on a Boat" with Wind Waker:



-News of Stephen Totilo's move to Kotaku seems strange to me, for reasons I haven't quite been able to put my finger on. Kotaku is good, but MTV Multiplayer is often great. While Totilo will unquestionably be reaching a larger audience, which he deserves, I am hoping that he brings Multiplayer's sensibility to Kotaku, and not the other way around. Kyle Orland interviewed Totilo for Crispy Gamer, and he says all the right things. I just hope that Totilo's reporting doesn't get lost in the hourly press-release snarking.

-Critical Distance is a new group blog dedicated to highfalutin' discussion of games. So far it's a mix of original thinkpieces, well considered links, and a brand-new podcast. They've gathered a good collection of writers. Can't wait to see how the site develops over the coming months.

-Finally, I've deleted a couple of comments this week, so I wanted to take a second to discuss this blog's commenting policy. Simply put: I will only delete comments that are pure spam, or that link to something that seems illegal. That's it.

I won't delete comments for disagreeing with me, even if it's vulgar or just plain stupid. I trust that the tone set by me and by the regular commenters here is enough to dissuade people whose only interest is starting a flame war. Comments provide much of a blog's value, especially when the commenters are as passionate and as intelligent as you guys are. I'd rather err on the side of more reader participation, not less.

When is a game finished?

Today's brain food comes from Stephen Totilo at MTV Multiplayer, who wrote a post called "A New Theory: Maybe Game Reviewers Don't Need to Finish Games." Frankly, I didn't realize they did need to. Even Gamespot's own review policy says they don't necessarily finish everything they play.

I wrote a fairly long comment on the Multiplayer post, if you click through, but I want to focus on another point that I addressed only obliquely: Just when is a player "finished" with a game, anyway? Sometimes, the answer is pretty obvious. Take BioShock, for example. Although that game gave you several ways to make it to the finish line, everybody who played had to follow the same basic path through the story. There were no other gameplay modes besides the single-player campaign. I think most people would agree that playing through the story to the end credits would count as finishing BioShock.

What about Grand Theft Auto IV? You can play the main missions and still miss a hefty chunk of what the game has to offer. I would argue that ignoring the missions altogether is no way to play, but lots of people do just that. They set up explosive interactions in the game world like kids with a chemistry set. They don't care about structure or narrative, and they wouldn't have it any other way. Some people will never be finished with this game in a definite sense. That's part of the design.

Finally, take it all the way to the extreme: When is World of Warcraft finished? When is Tetris finished? When is The Sims finished? These are games that don't actually end. Or, more accurately, they end when the player decides they do. The ending isn't built into the game; it comes from the player.

This brings up, again, one of the inherent pitfalls in reviewing games. We don't all approach games with the same set of expectations. One of the things that actually sucks about reviewing something like Grand Theft Auto is the temptation to charge through the story in order to finish the game. That's missing the forest for the trees. It wouldn't feel fair, either, to ignore the game's numerous scripted events and missions, and just see how many different ways you can murder bystanders. But there's always going to be a huge group of players whose interests don't align with the reviewer's, because of all the different reasons we play.

A key task for any reviewer is to identify what a game is trying to do, and judge it accordingly. Sometimes a story is perfunctory. Sometimes a multiplayer mode is tacked on. That doesn't necessarily mean that the game's core strengths are lessened. The best games do find a way to succeed on several levels, but it's simply not a requirement for your garden-variety good game to excel in several different areas. Doing well in one is usually enough.

I would argue that storytelling is but one of a few crucial elements, without which GTA would be a different game. So while it's important to get a good sense of the story (and it is very involving), completing the storyline at the expense of exploring the city, building relationships with the characters, and trying some multiplayer would certainly not be the same as finishing the game. Frankly, I'm not sure what would.

What do you think? With so many games designed to be played and replayed endlessly, when can we say we're finished with it?

Totilo scoops Krpata

Well, no reason to link my Phoenix piece now that Stephen Totilo has written essentially the same thing. Curse the lead time it takes to publish on dead trees! You'd almost think that this "internet" thing is leading to the demise of newspapers as we know them.

Still, it's good reading, and of course I endorse Totilo's sentiments. I would expound more on the subject, but I'll be flinging 2400 words of my own at you within the next couple of days. Suffice it to say that you kids are in for a talking-to!

N'Gai speak

You listen.


Look: This Resident Evil 5 controversy isn't going away. The sizable segment of the gaming community that wants it to be simply a non-issue will not find their wishes granted. In fact, N'Gai is more charitable than I am to those who took the post-racial approach to the issue:

There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it. Like literally couldn’t see it. So how could you have a conversation with people who don’t understand what you’re talking about and think that you’re sort of seeing race where nothing exists?

I considered it a willful blindness -- but even if it isn't, it's still a blindness. I think it's important for people to make an honest effort to understand better the complaints that Resident Evil 5 is going to get. It's possible to defend both the content of the game and the rights of others to be offended. "Shut up" is not an appropriate or helpful response to somebody who finds this imagery troublesome.

My thoughts haven't changed much since I opined about the trailer last summer, and N'Gai echoes some of them in the Multiplayer piece. I don't think it's necessary to rehash them here. So without going into the specifics of RE5 once more, I just want to make this general point:

Art has always been controversial. Art that challenges the status quo comes under fire from one side, and art that tries to maintain it gets criticized from the other. The conversations we have as a result of this will help to determine what we want the status quo to be, and in turn move the culture forward. Overtly racist portrayals of non-white characters used to be commonplace in American films and TV shows, until people got fed up and said enough is enough. We've made progress.

But there's this strange temptation to assume that we've arrived at a point in history where we've made it past all this stuff, despite the abundance of counter-examples. Forget about RE5 for a second: consider the Cole Train, or the "bizarre b-boy timewarp" of Unreal Tournament III. Why were those character choices made? What was the thinking (or lack thereof) behind them? What does it say about us when we don't notice racial stereotyping, either explicit or implicit? That it doesn't exist, or that we're trying to wish it away?

Art may only be a mirror to the culture that produces it, but it's important for us to look honestly at our reflection from time to time. Either you think video games belong in this conversation, or you don't. I do.

Today's must-read

MTV Multiplayer's Jason Cipriano has a good scoop: an interview with the owner of the world's only copy of an Atari 2600 game called Gamma Attack. The collector, identified only as "Phantom," posted the item on eBay for $500,000, and in the interview claims that he did so only to raise publicity for the item. He's holding onto it for now.

It's a fascinating read for several reasons. Not just because, if legitimate, Gamma Attack is a curio like few others in the retro scene. But I'm also interested in the look at the inner workings of the collectibles scene -- one I'm not familiar with. Like you'd find in any niche, it sounds like collectors are narcissistic and hyper-competitive. Someone could probably make a King of Kong-style documentary about these guys.