Friday afternoon tidbits

Watchmen comes out this weekend. Like Alan Moore himself, I have my doubts about how the book could possibly be filmed in a way that does it justice, but some of the early reviews are encouraging. Then again, some aren't. I look forward to finding out for myself.

-Lots of tearful goodbyes to N'Gai Croal this week. It may be useful to remind ourselves that he is, in fact, still alive. Still, there were some some elegant tributes to the man.

From Dubious Quality:

N'Gai is one of the very few people who writes about gaming who is a writer first, not a gamer. He could have written about anything and it would have been interesting (and I hope he does).

From The Cut Scene:

N'Gai Croal... forged a path in many ways for those of us writing for mainstream publications about video games as a business and an art form.

From Joystick Division:

Among a relatively small pool of games journalists who not only push the profession farther but are also, you know, read, Croal was a standout, and it's not hyperbole or blowing smoke up his ass to say the profession - not to mention the gaming community en masse - is a little worse off without his voice.

From Sexy Videogameland:

...one of the things I credit most to him is helping delineate and cement the concept that there can exist game criticism as a discipline separate from traditional reviews, from pointed editorial and from news journalism -- writing that in part asks questions and shares experiences.

From GameDaily:

Perhaps the most surprising fact to come to light this week was that Croal has only been covering games for three years. It feels like he's been with us for much longer. In the short time N'Gai Croal has written about games he's opined on controversies and encouraged us to think about our pastime in new ways.

And, of course, at MTV Multiplayer, the final Vs. Mode: part 1 and part 2.

-I've said it before and I'll say it again now: Duncan Fyfe is one of the best pure writers talking about videogames. He's just wrapped up a nine-part series called "The Domestic City," which presents a fictional world in which videogames have the cultural cachet we keep pretending they do. It's just amazing.

-I'll link to anybody who's still talking about Far Cry 2. This week it's Michael Abbott, who says he couldn't take the bleakness of the game's moral vacuum. It's a perfectly reasonable position to take, and yet that was what excited me so much about the game. I felt like it was operating on a different philosophical level entirely from other shooters. Also, make sure to read the comments on the post. As usual at the Brainy Gamer, they're great.

-L.B. Jeffries wrote a critical analysis of Half-Life 2, the likes of which would be impossible to do under the usual review structure. You need this kind of time and separation in order to really be able to deconstruct a game. He makes a number of insightful observations about setting and theme, the kinds of things I only ever noticed on a subconscious level while playing.

Looks like I've got Killzone 2 on tap for the weekend. It'll be nice to finally see what all the fuss is about.

Level cap reached

No more Level Up.

I doubt he'd agree, but I owe N'Gai Croal a great deal. He was the first blogging heavyweight to link to Insult Swordfighting, to what I thought was a throwaway post about the similarities between the biggest game blogs. He kept linking, and those traffic spikes were followed by links from sites like GameSetWatch, Gonintendo, and even Kotaku itself,* all of whom, I have to assume, got to me through Level Up.

N'Gai's embrace of the New Taxonomy of Gamers is a debt I will never be able to repay. He first spotlighted the series in a comprehensive response last April, referenced it in a 1up.com podcast, and was still mentioning it in Slate's Gaming Club in December (and then, between the time I wrote this post and the time I scheduled it to publish, he linked it in the last-ever Vs. Mode at MTV Multiplayer). While it would be genteel of me to say that satisfaction with my own work is reward enough, it would also be a bald-faced lie. The response from readers has been gratifying and validating. Every month or so, it seems, somebody else discovers the series, links to it, and discusses it. That's at least as much N'Gai's doing as it is mine.

For a few years now, Level Up has served as the hub of a certain type of videogame writer. Although there were always plenty of people doing interesting, thoughtful work about games, for too long they were isolated. N'Gai was like a switchboard operator, making the necessary connections to get the information through. I always talk, in general terms, about the need for a more thoughtful and substantive cultural conversation about games. N'Gai actually made it happen.

Whatever he does next, I'm sure he'll do well at it. But we will miss him.

*None of whom has linked to me for ages. Come back, Maggie!

Friday afternoon tidbits

It's Super Bowl weekend. (Now that I've said "Super Bowl," and not something generic like "the big game," I expect to be sued by the NFL.) Madden predicts a Steelers victory, while I predict that I don't care. Definitely rooting for the commercials this year.

-Earlier this week, we wondered just how many third-party games were available on the Wii. While there are obviously plenty, some readers took issue with my contention that they were dribbling out compared with third-party titles on other systems. So that's only tangentially related to N'Gai's article about third-party Wii games, but I need a lead-in somehow. He argues that more third-parties should lead development on the Wii, and then upscale them to the PS3 and Xbox. It's an interesting idea, and it would be nice to see Wii versions of games that aren't just shitty versions of other games with awful motion controls grafted on. It's especially hard to argue with N'Gai's claim that "the most powerful hardware is not what’s required for a game or a platform to succeed. "

-Tom Cross's "Diamond in the Rough" column at Gamasutra this week was about the challenge of storytelling in games. Much of the piece is about Valve generally and Left 4 Dead specifically. Left 4 Dead doesn't just work for the reasons Tom specifies. I've still been unable to say this in a way that feels satisfactory to me, but what is so impressive about Left 4 Dead is the way that its framework allows the players' own personalities to create a new and unique narrative each time through. It's true that Valve gave each character his own traits, but it's the players' actions that provide subtext. Maybe Louis really is just a good-hearted optimist -- but, depending on who's playing, maybe his sunny exterior is actually masking a craven, selfish heart. (I'm reminded again of Daniel Purvis's excellent recap of one such playthrough.)

-Ed Borden argues, a little counterintuitively, that the Xbox is just dragging everyone down: "Now, I can't play Halo or Fable, and Blizzard can't sell WOW to 22 million X-Box gamers. Now, X-Box gamers get crappy networking and "matchmaking" for multiplayer (console gamers don't even know what they're missing), and I get the joke that is Games for Windows Live. Now, X-Box gamers can't even use a browser or access the huge libraries of classic games from GOG.com or Steam, and I can't play XBLA games." It's a well thought-out piece with some provocative points. My last experience with PC matchmaking was Gamespy circa 1998, though, so I am pretty happy with Xbox Live.

-I won't get my hopes up for Arkham Asylum. I won't get my hopes up for Arkham Asylum.

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.

Insult Swordfighting levels up

Yesterday, this blog was featured on N'Gai Croal's Level Up, in a post titled "The Big Idea." It was the second in a presumably ongoing series about how we self-identify as gamers (or don't, as the case may be). N'Gai linked to the "Taxonomy of Gamers" series, and had some kind words to say about it. He's sort of the spiritual leader of a certain class of games blogger, so to get his seal of approval is flattering.

It's been interesting to see the discussion develop around the community in recent months. It seems that many people agree that the terms we have now aren't getting the job done, but their solutions vary wildly. That's a good thing. It's a conversation we need to have. As I've said, it's not so much coming up with the perfect nomenclature as it is identifying the elemental reasons we play. We just need to know what those are. The danger is that if we don't define our own identities, others will do it for us. We may not like what they come up with.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Just a few leftovers before I embark upon a weekend full of exciting activities, like drinking beer and falling asleep on the couch:

-I'll take full credit for this: The Boston Phoenix cleaned up at the New England Press Association awards. The paper won the association's top prize, the George A. Speers Newspaper of the Year Award. In addition to almost two dozen individual awards, the Phoenix also nabbed first place nods for General Excellence in the Alternative Weekly category, and for Arts and Entertainment Section, alternative class, for the September 29, 2006 issue. I think it was my Yakuza review that put us over the top.

-In the Brainy Gamer podcast, we touched upon the commercial prospects of No More Heroes domestically. Kotaku has the numbers, and the verdict is: it's doing okay. I don't know what the benchmarks are to call something a success or a failure, sales-wise, but 200,000 units shipped and over 100,000 sold in the first month sounds pretty good to me. Much better than under 40,000 shipped in Japan, even accounting for the population difference. Crazy.

-N'Gai Croal is in the midst of an epic multi-part series called "Is the Cultural Trajectory of Videogames Doomed to Parallel That of Comic Books?" As usual, it seems silly to even attempt to piggyback upon the man's wisdom, so I'd only suggest that you waste no time in reading it.

Okay, maybe I'll toss in one observation. N'Gai quotes Steve Gaynor as saying that the barrier to mass acceptance is much higher for games than for other media: "To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.)" Which is true, but that's a relatively new development. You only need to go back a few hundred years to find a time when the only literate people were the ruling classes, either in government or clergy. Even our hyperliterate society is largely a post-war phenomenon. Maybe we need to look ahead by decades, or even centuries, to find a time when gaming will be as ubiquitous as reading or watching movies, but it seems to be catching on much faster than its predecessors did.

-Along a similar track, Alastair Harper of the Guardian makes the bold claim that games already are art. He argues that the vast majority of all forms of art and entertainment is trashy -- just look at the bestseller list, the box office charts, the Billboard charts. Yet we don't disqualify the works of genius in those media because of their association with lower-brow fare. Nor do we use their weak sales numbers as an argument against their worth. It's generally accepted that commercial fiction subsidizes literary fiction, blockbusters subsidize art films, and so on. We're not there with games. Instead, games with something on their minds have to sneak in that part of themselves, under cover of blaring pronouncements about next-gen graphics.

-Following up on recent Blu-ray news, Wal-Mart has announced that they, too, will be discontinuing HD-DVD in order to focus exclusively on Blu-ray. The writing's on the wall -- even Toshiba may be ready to pull the plug.

-Enjoy your weekend!

Recommended reading

Several smarty-pants writers have convened over at Slate to have a highbrow discussion about the year in games. N'Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, Chris Suellentrop, and Seth Schiesel are participating in the inaugural year-end "Gaming Club," and if you've been looking for some deeper criticism than where a game plots along the graphics-sound-control axes, it's the place to be. It also provides Totilo another venue in which to advocate for Desktop Tower Defense.

On the Totilo front, I have only recently begun to read the MTV Multiplayer blog, and I like it a lot. It's a group blog that follows the Kotaku/Joystiq/Destructoid formula, but -- how to put this -- is interesting to read. They're currently running a series about women in games that I highly recommend.

One of the dark secrets of the game playing community is the way the prototypical male player really does seem to jealously guard his hobby. It's not exactly a "no girls allowed" club, but any woman in the industry, from Jade Raymond back to Killcreek, is always judged as much by her looks as what she produces. Most men don't have to deal with this. When Jack Tretton says something idiotic about the PS3, the reaction may be rude and crude, but the criticism is aimed squarely at the content of his comments -- not his hair, fashion choices, or inherent frailty. (Cliff Bleszinski is the exception that hilariously proves the rule.)

As always, the solution isn't to preach or moralize, but to provide a dialogue just as MTV Multiplayer is doing. Good stuff.

In good company

Here's a silly end-of-the-week post. Game|Life ran a bunch of gaming blogs through a readibility tool and posted the results. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most scored at the "junior high level," meaning you need at least a junior high education to understand them. Both Ars Technica and N'Gai Croal's Level Up scored "genius," which must make them feel good.

Insult Swordfighting scored at the "college" level, equal to powerhouse blog Joystiq. I guess I'll take it, even if I haven't blogrolled them yet.

N'Gai speak

You listen.

Since the Gerstmann thing broke, I've been waiting for Mr. Croal to weigh in, as he is so often the most measured and reasonable voice on these matters. Alas, he had seemed to turn his attention to more empirical matters like the Activision-Vivendi merger, which is part of what makes him a real journalist. It is why I respect and fear him in equal measure. But now he does have something to say about the relationship between publicists and media, and as usual it's a doozy.