Humans! Make! Games!

Two quick disclaimers.
One: When I say assholes, I do not mean racist/sexist/otherwise dead-end beliefs and the people that espouse them. I mean people with opinions that deviate from the "Bacon is a vegetable" folks of nerdom.
Two: The article I'm responding to here is a couple months old now.

My favorite games aren't my games. "My games" are the products of the vision of a specific studio. I play Blizzard games. I play Supergiant games. I play Runic games and so on ad infinitum. But I can't claim them as mine, except in the sense that I own a license.

Ben Kuchera's article, over at the Penny-Arcade Report (these days invaluable) largely avoids this point, when talking about assholes making your games, using Fish and Teasdale as examples. Fish, for saying hyperbolically what serious games commentators have being saying for years (Japan's games for this console cycle by and large have been disappointing or worse) and Teasdale for the mortal sin of being sick of space marines and off-brand Tolkien as settings for videogames.

The article uses a weak defense of personhood to throw a veil over Phil Fish or Mr. Teasdale. "Hey, guys, Phil Fish might piss you off on Twitter, but, hey, isn't Fez great" is the takeaway. That's weak and Kuchera ought to know better. A more vigorous defense might be: This person has an opinion contrary to your own. He is entitled to it. And, given that he's a game developer and a gamer himself, perhaps their criticisms are warranted.

And even that's weaker than the point that reminds us these people are individuals: They're allowed to be wrong and speak before his thoughts are fully formed.

Teasdale is an asshole for speaking his mind about sci-fi/fantasy games, apparently. He's probably just letting off steam. But more than that? He's right. Sci-fi and fantasy are well-trod settings for videogames, some incredible, most passable.

It's not a debatable premise that a setting involving American men with assault weapons in shiny space armor is tired. That's a fact of life in 2013. Same for the post-apocalyptic genre or off-brand Tolkein. Teasdale saying that he's not interested in those settings or trappings personally shows that he's a creative, discriminating human who has made those games for 15 years of his life already. And Kuchera ought to know better than to call that unreasonable.

For an example outside gaming: Go to any big comic convention and count how many male "zombification" artists or scantily clad women in zombie makeup you can see before you start taking sanity damage or lose interest in zombies as a storytelling device.

And yes, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" is a thing Picasso said, but in the canon of videogames there's terribly few artists, or, I suppose, studios with a chosen aesthetic and the a) vision and b) talent to properly exploit it.

But beyond these comments speak to something else in life: Many people who consume art/entertainment/whatever are dismayed to learn that discrete persons with opinions create "their" media. Take any well-known creative on Twitter and they will tell you they get people telling them "why do you keep posting politics on my twitter or I unfollowed you because you had an opinion I dislike."

(We pass over the cardinal sin on Twitter, being a woman with an opinion. Whatever you do, don't do that.)

Saying: "Well, you followed me and if you don't like what I say or think the unfollow button is right there" gets you branded as an asshole. Put a different way: Asserting your right to discrete personhood in the space which you designate as yours for mental overflow is being an asshole.

You can see how that's worrisome.

And so the problem isn't with "asshole" devs, or people with opinions, but gamers ourselves. Though, I could also substitute people.

Gamers are by and large, scared of people's different, opposing opinions. I suspect it's a matter of how young the market for console shooters skews is, but it feeds into a larger human feeling that we don't know we want something new until an artist has already put in the time to envision, create and distribute it, we'd largely prefer a more precise, better variation on an idea that's come before.

Case in point: Grand Theft Auto 3.

To sum up: I hope we get more assholes making games, the same way I hope gamers can feel less defensive about a person trying to manifest their creative vision. We've got a long way to go.

It's a blog about ideas, so have a song called I've Got An Idea... by End Of A Year/Self Defense Family. Enjoy.

Sacrosanct Space

I haven't played Sim City. I haven't played Dead Space 3. I haven't played Aliens: Colonial Marines. I haven't played any videogames except Penny-Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, Torchlight 2 and Bejeweled 3 in about a year. Wait. Maybe I've played Jamestown. I've played Diablo 3.

(Pretend I didn't list Jamestown. Shhhhhhhh.)

But I've seen a lot of people talk about DLC or "always-on" experiences and what comes to mind as a player is the idea that my experience of playing a videogame is being interrupted. In the case of always on, it means that I am at the whim of of a developer to make sure their own infrastructure is sound enough to play the experience I have already paid money for.

And that's not a thing that I should have to care about as a player. I've already put down my money. I've already showed, in some cases, sixty examples of good faith, plus tax. When I purchase a book, I don't have to worry about firmware updates to the paper getting between me and the experience.

One could make the same argument for videogame consoles before the current generation. I don't have to worry that my Playstation 2 will decide tomorrow that it needs to connect to the internet before I play a little Dragon Quest 8 before bed. I can play Dragon Quest 8, or maybe you'd prefer Burnout 3, or Persona 4 or whatever game I choose, because the architecture of the system is designed in a way to require the game and the tray and nothing else.

Anything always on changes that. Instead of needing two things, a player/customer now needs three. They need the disc to work. They need the system to work and they need the developers and publishers to be on the ball every day of each year going forward. That's a material change in the relationship between the buyer and the seller. I'm being asked going forward to take on faith that another party will have their ducks in a row.

That isn't a feature.

 

I would like whatever it is I bought to work when I have or carve out the time in my day to play it. I suspect that's why I read so many books as opposed to movies or videogames these days: I can pick up the book and it works immediately. I don't have to sit through five minutes of commercials for other products or anti-piracy warnings, I can just read the book. Books are also portable and easy to use, I say just a little bit facetiously. I can throw one in my bag and it's ready when I am.

I'm surprised I have to say this, but I'm enjoying the very retro feeling of having no popups appear on screen, whether it's an alert that a friend is playing the same game or the game announcing that "you got an achievement!"

What brings my interest in PS2 games and the aforementioned Steam games together is that at least once I'm playing, my playing experience isn't interrupted for an ad to buy more stuff. They take my time seriously.

I felt like I was in high school when I played Penny-Arcade's On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness 3. It demanded me until 3 or 4 a.m.. It accomplished this by telling me a story I wanted to know more about, by interacting with me in a way that felt familiar, but had a couple really excellent twists on the concept and least of all, not interrupting itself to sell additional content.

To a lesser extent, I had this experience with Torchlight II and Bejewled 3. These are games that respect the players. You bought the game, and now, you ought to enjoy it. I don't want to say that it's an "old-school" kind of experience, because Journey exists. But: The idea that the best ad for the next game is the one you're playing right now is a powerful one.

The cardinal sin of Dead Space 3 is not that microtransactions exist inside it, but how those are implemented into the experience of playing the game. The team has spent two odd years and thousands of hours to create an environment that scares the player and all that work is destroyed when the offer is made to you that if waiting 10 minutes to get supplies is too long, you can cut the time in half in exchange for more of your local money.

That's an offer that takes me out of the game, first. Second: Had I paid $60, I'd be furious. I just paid sixty dollars for an entertainment experience and there was something built in for the specific purpose of detracting from the meticulously crafted thing I paid sixty dollars for? Get out of town.

I don't mind DLC. Shit, I like DLC. But don't interrupt my play experience, the thing that got you in the door, to hawk me more shit. Maybe this is my recognition that I am no longer the target market for these experiences and on some level that bums me out. I don't think it is, though. I don't mind being offered DLC. But I do mind how the offer is made.

I want to support developers and publishers that view the time I spend playing their game as sacrosanct. That indicates a respect for my time and my attention, which I am happy and excited to repay with cash dollars, which I suspect is all those developers and publishers wanted in the first place.

Penny-Arcade Dickwolves. (NSFW, TRIGGER, ETC.)

First things first: TRIGGER WARNING. Hello. TRIGGER WARNING. Consider this the bright, flashing red light telling you these things might set something off. This post will talk about the Penny-Arcade Dickwolves stuff, which you might imagine to be NSFW, but also if you are triggered by discussions of, a monster with penises for limbs who'se purpose is let's say, sinister, skip this one.

The background to the issue what appears to be full is available here and will only take five minutes of your time, so don't bother reading any further until you get through that page.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

...

Back? Great.

Let's get my positions out into the open first:

1. Penny-Arcade (for now, Jerry and Mike) was wrong to make the shirts and compounded that bad decision by letting those sleeping dogs lie.

2. Then, when they did talk about it, it was done haphazardly by Mike, who is no one's idea of a subtle instrument.

3. Which stoked the fire even more.

4. By the time Jerry weighed in (the member of the two who'se words carry rhetorical weight) and said “Maybe I'm wrong,” it was too late.

Rape is a pretty big blindspot for gamers. Why will take me off-track and I'll discuss it further down. And here goes my Ill Doctrine hat-tip: I'm less concerned if Penny-Arcade are rape-apologists in their hearts, I'm far more concerned that they responded this badly to an idea that's pretty clearly out of their depth. What Penny-Arcade did was make t-shirts out of a fictional monstrosity whose only purpose is rape. That was a bad idea. What Penny-Arcade is, though, is different. Rape, pretty obviously now, is their blindspot. Humans have them. You do. Shit, I do. When you add to that their poor handling of the issue, which I can understand quite easily, it compounded the problem, which was never really something they understood to begin with.

But calling them names and yelling insults at anybody within earshot doesn't fucking help the case. I think people get further keeping the focus on what they did, not what they are.

The hope is that Penny-Arcade learns from this experience, because, and let's be clear: They're not going anywhere. They're also the best of the webcomics and their work for the gaming community has paid incredible dividends. They're pretty obviously sincere in their desire to do good.

So far, they haven't acknowledged what I believe to be the core issue, and appear to believe the comic was the issue. The issue, as I see it and explained elsewhere as: "[Mike] was an asshole to people who have every right to be offended by jokes about violence that affects them every day of their lives. He doesn’t have the right to tell them otherwise. No one does."

The comic was not the issue. That's not the criticism. The problem, Jerry (if I can pretend to speak to him directly), was trying to merchandise a fictional monstrosity whose only purpose is rape (which he doesn't acknowledge) and then abdicating your responsibility to communicate (which he does.) He neatly avoid acknowledging that intent doesn't matter, once an idea is in the wild, it has a life of its own, the variety of which would surprise its author.

Jerry and Mike will get another bite at the apple on Friday, next Monday, next Wednesday and however long they choose to keep publishing. Yes, they fucked up, but this is not their only time at the plate. That's the nature of serial publishing. Make the next ones better, guys. Be more careful in the future.

(Also: I don't think I need to explicitly explain why making a tshirt out of a fictional entity whose only purpose is rape is bad.)

I think bitmob put it best when they ask for people to not wear their Dickwolves shirts at the Penny-Arcade Expo, so I'll quote them and be done:

We don't...get to decide whether someone else’s issues are valid or not. If someone says to us “Seeing these t-shirts triggers me into horrible PTSD and causes me substantial amounts of distress,” our choice is to either respect those feelings and seek not to cause that distress, or tell them “Sorry, our right to wear these shirts is more important than your not having panic attacks while walking the halls of this event you would otherwise attend.”

I listened to this song (and maybe even this version) last night approximately 30 times in a row. It's by former Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna (who has had a number of other projects that are far more successful, but that's the one I'm choosing) and is called I Wish I Was Him.