How one plays a game matters. Posture, lighting, sound system, image quality — these are all important to a good gaming experience. Lifelong gamers know this; households across America are equipped with obligatory HDTVs and towering speakers so that their escapist fantasies can be made all the more real.

The most important among about interactive media, though, is the input. Controls. “A” and “B!”

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars (Capcom, 2010) is an excellent fighting game. It’s easy to pick up and play, while offering depth to more skilled players in the form of chain combos, baroque cancels, and tag-team special attacks. It looks and sounds great compared to any other fighter out today, and has progressive online play (if laggy where I live). However, no matter what prior positives I or any critic roll off, players will judge a fighter by how it feels.

When Tatsunoko vs. Capcom first came out, I got my first impression from importers and pirates, who all made clear to me that the controls are extremely basic and the movesets shallow. That seemed to be the final word on the game for me: who better to trust about fighting games than people who love them enough to ship them in from Japan?

Then I tried it for myself on a Classic Controller (aka an optional plastic doodad Nintendo sells to make some but not all of its games better; see Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board, Nunchuks, and assorted add-ons) and loved to play! Three basic attack buttons, several specials and supers per character, a pair of special button presses — the game played fine. Why did the red-blooded fighting-game fans dismiss this title, then? I followed up on some friends’ reviews, and aha: they all played with a sideways Wiimote, for which there is just a 3-button, 3-command setup.

Hold on: the experts didn’t try out all the options? They played with 3 buttons and figured, “This is as good as it gets?” On the back of the game’s case and in the manual, the multiple control schemes are clearly displayed. Even adding a nunchuk would broaden the control scheme. Tatsunoko seemed to expose one of the ways in which gamers (hardcore or casual but in this case hardcore) are shallow: instant gratification or bust! No manuals, no experimentation, the game had better be so intuitive and smoothly handled that anyone can pick it up and independently make sense of and master its controls.

Ah, well. The Japanese superheroes of Tatsunoko never triumph without believing in themselves, anyway. Figures that the players who derive the most enjoyment from their games believe in trying new things before making final judgments!

This is not a singular phenomenon, either, nor is it limited to the Wii: when Lair arrived on the Playstation 3, it had all the trappings of an HD wondergame, but its motion-based controls resulted in a lukewarm reception from critics. When developer Factor 5 sent out a guide to its controls to critics, Lair was laughed right out of any reasonable doubt. Is it possible that this will happen again with upcoming game Red Steel 2? The trailers and hands-on write-ups I’ve seen portray it as at least decent, and overall a huge step up from the first game, but then an outlier like Joystiq comes along to inform me that, no, a tutorial and training stage are too much to slog through. The trend of motion-control impatience highlights the importance of agreeable, balanced transitions into games for critics. If the game’s too simple in its early moments (the only ones some critics will review), then it’s a waggle-fest for grandmas. But if the controls are subtle or require some finesse (Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, anyone?), then the game’s just broken and unplayable.

Or a game like Fl0wer could emerge and handle motion controls with the sort of polish and intuition that puts gamers inside their layaway-paid technoportals. Amen.

Next time: I may have seemed to be a lazy blogger this past month, but in reality I’ve been playing No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle and reading Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks, and preparing an entry that incorporates both. This entry only exists to plug a good game and finger-wag haters, really, but from now on I want to post meatier entries that tie into other cultural objects. Such entries take time.

(Tatsunoko screenshot courtesy of Fighters Generation)

(Warning: this article contains heavy spoilers for both the graphic novel and videogame mentioned in the title. Read at your own risk!)

In The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir (2009), Laurie Sandell recounts how she grew up in awe of her father, a man who told outrageous stories about his impressive past and seemed more interesting than anyone else on the planet. Her gullible childhood gives way to a suspecting adolescence and outright offended adulthood, however, when she discovers how all of her father’s stories were fabrications and how he harmed everyone close to him with his scheming, from business partners to his daughters.

A graphic novel unmistakably for the grown-up set, The Impostor’s Daughter is intrinsically about finding oneself after being raised on delusions, and the fallout that causes to Sandell’s personal life. She confronts her flighty love and sex life, creeping addiction to Ambien, and family members who’d rather stick by her father than call him out. The art style is simple but consistent, like a teenager’s drawing pad and seems to be colored by markers. This style reinforces the perspective of a daughter reconciling her father’s role in her life, however, and makes for an easy format in which to dive and accept the story.

I couldn’t help but notice the parallels, then, between Sandell’s story and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In the game’s well-timed double twist, you discover that not only has player-character Harry Mason been dead for 14 years, but your in-game therapy sessions – the ones that alter certain characters and environments – have been as his grown-up daughter Cheryl. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that your fact-finding adventure as Harry was simply a romp through Cheryl’s subconscious and history, recounting how her life played out in the wake of her parents’ divorce and father’s death.

Under this “ghost in Cheryl’s mind” interpretation, your (and thus her) responses in therapy reflect a mind that is still under her father’s influence, refusing to let go of a man who left in the prime of her development. Everything Harry encounters in Silent Hill about arguing couples, teenage rebellion, and the like are all moments chipped from Cheryl’s psyche. In the nightmare sequences, when the Raw Shocks try to dogpile Harry, they might no be trying to kill him so much as hold him down so he’ll freeze in place like everything else (this also excuses the lack of gore/boss monsters in the game, a decision of Climax’s that only makes sense at the game’s end).

I admire The Impostor’s Daughter and Silent Hill for their ability to draw us into a character’s (especially female) mind through such accessible means (respectively, a lightly rendered graphic novel and “survival horror” video game). Their lack of judgment is also inviting: Sandell has her vulnerable moments, but she never demands the reader’s sympathy nor does she hate herself. She simply did what she did. Cheryl’s past, however much we can trust in Silent Hill, doesn’t determine who she is in the therapist’s chair, only who she used to be. The Harry the player brings to her determines how she’ll move on.

These are the kinds of stories that I think have the potential to elevate storytelling in games (and would for graphic novels too, were they not already saturated with biographies). The gaming media trips over itself to praise Nathan Drake from the Uncharted franchise as a “human” character, when he has all the B-movie escapades and sex to be expected from a cookie-cutter action movie hero.

Charming, to be sure, but far from human. Just a reminder: Drake’s internal conflict can be summed up by this exchange:

“You can’t always be the hero, Drake!”
“I guess you’re right. *pause* No, I must be the hero!”

Some cues from deeper ladies might help the guys with guns find heart to match their impeccably detailed bump-mapping. Otherwise, my interest in game protagonists will freeze in nostalgia like so many 8-bit remakes.

Urged on by a couple of friends, I spent this past year catching up on a TV series called Lost. Some seasons were better than others — seemed to me like the stalling, odd-numbered seasons always set up the more satisfying even-numbered seasons. As the seasons went by, I noticed that the writers weren’t tying up all of their loose ends, and that by the end of season 5, with only one season left in the series, there was almost no way that every little plot hole or mystery could be addressed without introducing an Architect-like character from Matrix Reloaded.

But that’s ok! Lost’s strengths have more to do with the journey than the conclusions of any given dramatic arc, and even if season 6 is wretched and spotty, I’ll remember the series for its process, not its ending. I have yet to finish Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Climax Group, 2009), but I’m already sure it can be judged by the same standard.

Silent Hill as a series has always found its strengths in morbid mystery and chilling atmosphere. At least, I take the popular opinion at its word – I never beat the first Silent Hill because of its scenario alone. Wandering unarmed through a foggy town, with only radio static to warn me of danger? Yeah, I hedged my teenage bets on the Resident Evil series, where I was encouraged to kill monsters, not dread them.

How deliciously ironic, then, that I wasn’t all that thrilled with Resident Evil 5 because it was nothing but shooting, and I’m loving Shattered Memories because the only way to deal with monsters is to run away.

The meat of the game comes from investigating Silent Hill (the place) as Harry Mason, a man who’s crashed his car in the eponymous town and has lost his daughter, Cheryl. He’s armed with a flashlight that casts beautiful shadows, a phone that comes with several nifty features, and the occasional flare to ward off freaks. The gameplay is split between exploration and nightmare segments – Harry’s either discovering ghost stories and backstories of the town, which are creepy to see and learn, or he’s being hounded through a frozen, ice-filled version of the town by faceless figures.

As noted before, I’m only (I estimate) midway through the game, but the mystery of Cheryl’s disappearance and Silent Hill’s story at large is dawning on me, and the game is largely satisfying at this point, which may or may not be spoiled by the curtain call. Sections of the game are punctuated by flashbacks to a therapist appointment in which the player’s responses determine changes in the game’s appearance or behavior — for example, the task of coloring in a house and its family determines the color of the house and its family’s clothing. Your responses to questions about sex and alcohol will be reflected in Harry’s conversations with townspeople. It is worth noting that the voice acting in this game is convincing: dramatic without being hammy, and chummy in a way that never sounds like a bland reading.

The graphics, too, are oddly appropriate for the game, with excellent lighting effects, individual flakes of snow, and gripping transitions in and out of the nightmare sequences. Every so often, Harry will find a shadow of a person that will become clear after he takes its photo with his phone. This usually leads to an intensely personal voice message (heard, like everything else on the phone, through the wiimote speaker) reflecting a different tragedy that took place in Silent Hill, and I suspect they’re all linked.

Best to keep any guesses to myself for now until the ending, which can take its sweet time arriving, because I’m still shining light on the dark corners of this town.

Scribblenauts (5th Cell, 2009) broke my hiatus. If you know anything about the lifespan of a hobbyist blog, then you know that’s an achievement.

My reasons for being gone have something to do with the fall semester of grad school and a little more to do with the bottomless well of reading material at the library where I work, but it also has to do with complacency towards games this year. If gamers aren’t supposed to rush up to bad guys to shoot them in the head, they’re supposed to execute quick-time button-press events disguised as combat combos. And everything old isn’t new enough to make me finish them: Wario Land Shake It! had me hooked until I realized the main adventure wasn’t the focus of the game at all.

Scribblenauts isn’t an adventure, headshot, or predictable button press unless you make it one. Every level is a brief situational puzzle for hero Maxwell, who wields a notebook that will generate any physical, non-vulgar, non-copyrighted noun for his application. The task of generating a vast field of meta-tags to cover all properties and behaviors of the dictionary and drawing sprites to cover them all earns developer Fifth Cell a seat of honor at this year’s gaming table of honors. When I misspell a word, the notebook will suggest words to me, most of them completely new to me (scientific names of animals, or slang terms for boats).

The puzzles are a joy to solve, not for the direct route but for inventing the most bizarre solution. Is a dog giving you trouble? You could blow a dog whistle to calm the dog down, or summon El Chupacabra to keep it in line. Want to ride a gorilla across the map? Why not six?

Kids can summon internet memes, adults can summon obscure folklore beasts — the appeal of this game is endless. To be fair, though, there are some control and physics issues. As everything is controlled via stylus, it is easy to accidentally move Maxwell into danger when you meant to hand him a jetpack. And running into objects often reveals how paper-light they really are, to the point that some enemies or obstacles can be glitched past. But levels are designed to be solved several different ways, the game rewards original items over repeats, and restarting or even skipping a level is easy. Scribblenauts has its flaws, but they are smudges of dirt on a bright, earnest kid who wants to share every toy in the world with the player.

The free-form nature of the game can be a double-edged sword: could you entertain yourself for hours on end with Wikipedia: The Interactive Artbook? Or would you give Maxwell wings and a shotgun whenever possible, notebook be damned? The game’s magic won’t happen if your objective is to beat every level as quickly and obviously as possible. Nor will the game’s objects always play out as you wish (a beekeeper afraid of bees?). But the game will play, in ways you can’t in any other game, and with more potential and replay value than most.

Prescribed: For imaginative, creative, outside-the-box thinkers, or anyone who wants to laser sword duel with a vampire on the deck of an aircraft carrier

Ask Your Doctor If: You have any known allergies to colorful worlds, whimsical physics, imprecise controls, or miniature level design

Bit.Trip Beat (Gaijin, 2009)was a complicated technicolor remake of Pong, all things considered: you twisted the wiimote to move a paddle up and down to bounce away dots that arrived in time to the game’s music. It just so happens that the colors and patterns were mesmerizing, music contagious, and controls precise, making it one of the most exciting titles to hit WiiWare (I liked it enough back then!).

Now the bit trip is in its second stage with the sequel, Bit.Trip Core (Gaijin, 2009). The mascot of the series, Commander Video, is still traveling through space, this time meeting up with others of his species. How appropriate, then, that cooperative multiplayer is now possible, perhaps to alleviate any frustration from hitting a brick wall in solo mode.

The game is played by holding a direction on the d-pad and pressing 2 to create a beam for a split-second. Dots and lines approach from all corners of the screen in a rainbow of colors. The tiered gameplay of Bit.Trip Beat is still intact, so consecutive hits results in a mode of fireworks and extra beats, creating a marvelous 8-bit display worthy of a massive screen (even if it would test your peripheral vision in dizzying ways).

Trying to spot colored dots flying in against a moving 3D background can be tricky, but the busy screen rewards focus. I wouldn’t call defeat frustrating in a Bit.Trip game; the key to completing each level is playing to the beat of the music. It’s possible to play through blindly reacting to each bit that appears on screen, but the game would soon become firing at a flock of birds with a slingshot. Think of the game as a one-button keyboard and listen for the patterns of the music as much as you watch for bits to enter the screen. As far as I’ve played so far (1 1/2 levels out of 3), the patterns are always consistent and using the music beat is reliable to time your beams.

As satisfying as riding the bit trip is when I’m playing perfectly, there’s a definite confusion when I slip up and can’t make sense of the flurry of bits filling the screen. Thankfully, though, each level is broken into phases and not one steadily difficult stream. Players need not reach the end unscathed; merely entertained and in step behind Commander Video will have to do.

Prescribed: for retro junkies, music/puzzle aficionados, good WiiWare content

Ask Your Doctor If: Color blindness could limit players’ ability to tell apart certain bits’ patterns

(art by Ty Dunitz; gameplay pics from Nintendo.com)

I had a crisis of confidence in my routine recently, mostly brought about by the facebook game Mafia Wars. In terms of gameplay, it’s as simple as “click here for EXP and here for money, and here to test your stats against a semi-anonymous player you’ll never meet.” What redeems the game into becoming a habit is the social aspect. Because I have friends who are into the game and help me along through bonus loot, and I’ve recruited additional friends who I can help along, the redundancy of the game is laundered into mass delusion. I certainly wouldn’t play the game alone, building stats and money like a tower of Babel to nowhere — but even with multiplayer, that’s what Mafia Wars is. It’s like running on a hamster wheel for your fitness regime, but riding out the experience because you can see your friend’s wheel from here. The basic action of the game doesn’t change through participation.

Aside from the (illusion of a) social aspect, players in Mafia Wars regenerate their characters’ resources (health, energy, stamina) over time. If you left the game and returned ten minutes later, you could do a few things and leave again. This mechanic is devious in how it gets into players’ (my) head, with the hours of a day being counted for how many more casinos I can now rob in addition to, say, getting off work or waiting for a movie to end.

On the other end of the Highs & Lows of Gaming pendulum, I’ve discovered* and tried my hand at “pixel art,” here meaning the creation of physical sprite graphics using paint, mosaic tiles, or beads. My process so far is simple:

1. Map out a pixel grid on graph paper, taking stock of how many of each color tile is needed
2. Get supplies, including pixels, background material, and adhesive
3. Place tiles on background surface to double-check graphed sample and tile quality
4. Establish a straight “bottom border” and glue each tile/bead into place; let dry

As you can see, my version of this art is really a paint-by-numbers with glue and colored bits. I’m nowhere near proficient enough with art programs/design to create my own sprites, and am content turning digital game art into something tangible and enjoyable outside of a gamesphere. It also makes me feel arts n’ craftsy, with part of the fun coming from planning out the sprite and figuring out an affordable way to obtain materials (“I love it when a plan comes together!”).

Pixel art represents a way to bring a link a love of games to the real world, something Mafia Wars can’t do (for me at least). MW boils down to numbers over skill and obsession over passion. It’s still fun to take part with friends, though, so I won’t quit it just yet. Sticking colored bits to boards to represent videogame art, though? There’s a habit that shall remain unbroken!

Bonus: examples of pixel art that merge formats, one with gritty realism and the other with real-world props.

(click images to go where I found them and see others)

*Yes, I made an entry some time ago that featured pixel art using beads, but I wasn’t trying it out back then.

Original manifesto can be found here. Given how EGM tanked (and might come back?) and the state of online game journalism, I think the sea of text that awaits you below is worth a close read. Credit goes to Games Are Evil for linking me to this! -RH

“The New Games Journalism”

This may turn a little manifesto, but forgive me. It’s a juvenile form, but such posturing can occasionally serve a purpose. And sometimes, as Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting is currently informing me, just saying it could even make it happen.

I return from Delfter Krug and an evening with comrades. After the traditional lusting after barmaids and discussing the various challenges facing the geek nation, we turn to one of the conversations that I, as a devotee of the gaming press, prayed that was happening somewhere in the universe at any particularly moment.

It was, simply, Games Journalism: Where now?

The money men are worried – and have been worried forever – about the encroaching nature of the internet on mags. They’ve got a point. Games magazines are, primarily, buying guides, offering either information about forthcoming games or definitive reviews of said shiny consumer items. What to get excited about and what to put money down on, basically. Web coverage does both, and usually quicker.

Secondly, they operate as a shit filter. You buy a mag so you don’t have to spend all your life doing the necessary research to find everything out youself: A digest of what’s knowing in gaming. While keeping track of what’s actually worthwhile with forthcoming stuff is a little trickier , sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic handily gather every web review in existence together and average the score. Assuming equality of judgements – which is a big assumption, but outside of the current piece’s mandate – this is perhaps the finest shit filter ever invented. Anything genuinely good will be picked up. Abstractly, anyway.

So why buy mags?

Mag’s offline abilities and toilet-based browsability are one thing, clearly. The second traditional reason is that they’re mostly – and there’s exceptions, clearly – hugely better written. If you want a little entertainment with your information, mags are where to turn.

Ironically enough, you’d be hard pressed to find a money man who actually believes this point. While none have quite dared say it to my face yet, an increasing number are opining in smoky boardrooms that the quality of writers simply doesn’t affect a games magazine sales so they might as well turn to recruiting armies of kids who don’t know better straight from college, burning them out in a year, and then getting another set. There’s been companies who have worked on this assumption ever since the dawn of videogame journalism, and it’s an attitude that appears to be spreading.

The reason why the money-men’s line has been gaining credence is that things are pretty tight in publishing. Sales of this generation of magazines have been nowhere near what they’d expecting. The biggest selling British games mag circa this period in the games console cycle was 450,000 or so. The current best-selling title has managed 200,000. This doesn’t look good on spreadsheets, so they’re tightening their belts and looking for places lose a few pounds. Creating a culture where Editorial is basically disposable is one, certainly.

However, it’s in these periods of a magazine’s industry’s life that comes the chance for radical change. When things are bad, it’s a war between money-men who want to keep profits by reducing costs and the editorial who want to keep profits by being better. The idea of “being better” is somewhat alien to the money-people, who’ve pretty much forgotten any idea of what creative impulses actually are – or, more relevantly, the ability to have faith in anyone else’s.

So, to choose a parallel, at the turn of the millennium the money men came to prominence in the music mags, and pretty much destroyed them all. In a similar situation in the seventies, the music’s press slump was reversed by discovering a new underground to write about and new writers to express their love of in increasingly imaginative ways. Ideally, since I selfishly enjoy writing about games while still wanting to be able to meet my gaze in the bathroom mirror, I’d prefer the latter.

In other words, it’s war for the future of games journalism. The default win position is for money-men – they hold all the power, after all. It’s up to editorial to just prove them wrong through an act of magic, since that’s what all creation actually is. The good news is that there’s a fair few editors who realise this, and are conjuring up their master-plans to create a space to express this sort of thinking. I won’t name them, because it’ll just embarrass the fellows. Hopefully, there’s more I don’t know about.

Hopefully.

There’s also all sorts of games writers who don’t give a toss about the craft of what they’re doing, either having completely forgotten why they were doing it in the first place after being stomped by their superiors or never really had a clue in the first place. In many ways, it’s these people rather than the money-men who are the enemies. The money-men – as their name suggests – are only interested in money. That’s fine. It’s like objecting that a Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn’t chomp down on tofu. The mediocre hacks filling positions that could be taken by people wanting to write brilliantly are what will kill the British games magazine. Not that they’re bad people, you understand – many are utterly lovely. It’s just that they’re wasting the potential of the form with their total lack of commitment and/or talent.

If Games Journalism is just a job to you, you really shouldn’t be doing it. The word should be “vocation”.

Right – everyone up to speed and are now either thinking I’m an arrogant wanker for calling other people hacks after some of the rubbish I’ve written or – in the case of my peers – wondering if I’m talking about them. Oh, shush. Stop worrying. As if it matters what I think about you. The question is, am I right and what are you going to do to prove me wrong.

What do I suggest doing about it?

Well, I’m not suggesting we do a Pol-Pot and year-zero everything we’ve ever done. The main body of games journalism will remain the same. Reviews that don’t serve their basic consumer-informing purpose are worse than useless. Previews – one of the most despicable words in the lexicon, randomly – are still going to appear. What I’m suggesting is in addition to rather than replacing the old order – though I’d suggest a greater stringency when producing work that’s in these more established traditions. Just be good, y’know.

In the early seventies Tom Wolfe edited a collection of writings from the previous few years entitled “The New Journalism”, which provided exactly that. This journalism was intensely personal, throwing away the rules of standard journalistic discourse like the pretence of objectivity and an embracing of the “I”. We’re talking about people like Capote, Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. While Games journalism – having nabbed a lot of its tricks from the people who nabbed a lot of tricks from the New Journalism people – uses a sizeable chunk of those already, it hasn’t really thought about how the core of that philosophy really applies to videogames.

In the last year or so we’ve started. In a nod to Wolfe, I’m going to call it the New Games Journalism, just because it needs a name if this essay’s going to be decipherable to the human mind.

Embarrassingly for myself and my professional peers, the first real signs of this form didn’t appear in the pages of game magazines, but on the net. Early-period State was painfully close to a new paradigm for games writing, but was hamstrung and eventually foiled by its elitism, its faux-intellectualism and insecurity. They’re all forgivable faults, since the writers were the gaming equivalent of zine-kids, trying to find a voice which didn’t sound too shrill. But still: depressing.

However, once I thought the initial burst of energy was well spent and a fair chunk of the better writers absorbed into the gaming press in one form or another, State produced something that managed to embody everything I’d want the New Games Journalism to be. It’s by a gentleman who works under the name of Always Black, and is entitled “Bow, Nigger”.

It’s a memorable piece of writing in at least a dozen ways, but is firstly notable for reading like games journalism without being anything like a piece of any games writing you’ve ever read. It’s going to lead to a lot of copyist features, the huge majority will vary between average and utterly rubbish. Which is fine. Innovation tends to do that. How many uninspired Hunter S. Thompson riffs have we had to sit and shudder through? What, hopefully, we’ll also get are the pieces that Hunter’s verve and vision inspired without being simple plagiarism.

“Bow, Nigger” lies outside the main thrust of “serious” games journalism: that is, the analytic tradition. A bad games journalist would write in imprecise generalities, talking about something’s “gameplay” and urging you to “try before you buy” or similar page-filling rubbish. A good one would look at the game, take it apart, try and understand how it works and inform the reader of their findings. Some people did it in a reductionist manner, taking a game to its smallest dynamics and components. Others – like Owain Bennallack’s memorable description of the Sims as an “Apologia for Consumerism” – managed to take a more holistic approach. The apex of the tradition, if only because it’s the only example where someone got the entire length of a book to talk about the mechanics of the form in a sustained and intelligent fashion, was Steven Poole’s “Trigger Happy”.

No matter what the precise form this tradition takes, it works of a single assumption; that the worth of a videogame lies in the videogame, and by examining it like a twitching insect fixed on a slide, we can understand it.

New Games Journalism rejects this, and argues that the worth of a videogame lies not in the game, but in the gamer. What a gamer feels and thinks as this alien construct takes over all their sensory inputs is what’s interesting here, not just the mechanics of how it got there. Games have always been digital hallucinogens – but games journalism has been like chemistry, discussing the binding reactions to brain sites. What I’m suggesting says what it feels like as the chemical kicks in and reality is remixed around you.

While drug-poetry is certainly one approach to the subject matter –and one the earlier State experiments turned to – it’s not the strongest. “Bow, Nigger”, while being clearly totally subjective, austerely embraces Hemmingway’s cleanness. The tone has to be confessional – what happened to you and how it made you feel – or people simply won’t believe it, or be interested. Pub anecdotes with delusions of grandeur, essentially.

(One thing Sony got entirely right was their “I have conquered worlds” adverts. That’s exactly it – in fact, says more about the games playing experience than a year’s subscription to most games magazines)

While sections of this approach can be useful in traditional reviews – in fact, in my most celebrated review of the first Deus Ex I used a repeated motif of scenarios to show the game’s freeform action nature – the required objectivity of also providing worthwhile purchasing advice limits its freedom of expression. Ideally, such segments will either be the entire piece or used in a punctuated manner to illustrate points by metaphor.

As an aside, in my first deliberate attempt in writing New Games Journalism, it’s this latter approach I took. I hope it worked. In fact, “Hoping it worked” should be a real centre point here. I haven’t “Hoped it worked” in a piece of games journalism for around four years now, because I knew exactly what I was doing. This is about doing something where you /don’t/ know exactly what you’re doing.

While rewarding in itself, this form is interesting in that it fills a space in a traditional games magazine set-up. A game will be covered hugely in advance of its release, with an array of previews, first-plays, interviews before the orgasm of the review… where after the game may never, ever be mentioned again. No other pop-form disregards its subject with such alacrity. Films are re-reviewed and covered forever. Whole music magazines such as Mojo will pore over albums that have been around for decades. Even the more recent music press will review live gigs of bands between releases.

It’s somewhat ironic – or rather, impressively dumb – that in my particular corner of publishing that the second the readers have a chance to play a game is the exact point where a games magazine has stopped talking about them in anything but the most cursory manner. New Games Journalism in the above form is one way of doing exactly that, in an interesting way. From how it feels to be at ground-zero in a Planetside bomber attack to your own personal relationship with SHODAN from System Shock 2, a piece properly constructed and written with proper attention to the human condition will be entertaining. That is, it’s not enough just to say what happened – you have to make people understand what it felt like to be there when it happened.

The phrasing in the last line brings me to the second half of New Games Journalism’s dogma. “What it felt like to be there when it happened”. In videogames there is no “there”. You’re either sitting in front of your PC or slumped in your front-room, controller in your hand. It’s all happening inside your head, induced by how the sound and light you’re bombarded with alters depending upon your whim and inclination. You’re experiencing something that simply doesn’t exist. This is the games-form’s own peculiar magic, and what we have to explain.

This makes us Travel Journalists to Imaginary places. Our job is to describe what it’s like to visit a place that doesn’t exist outside of the gamer’s head – the gamer, not the game, remember. Go to a place, report on its cultures, foibles, distractions and bring it back to entertain your readers.

The thing with travel journalism or reportage is that it’s interesting even if you have absolutely no inclination of going there. “Bow, Nigger” – and, hopefully, similar future pieces dealing with other game-created social structures – excels in this area, describing in detail the social mores a warring culture created, all on their lonesome. Since every online begets their unique world, this should be particularly fruitful: an anthropologist would think he’d died and gone to undiscovered native heaven to have so many unreported cultures to investigate.

Now, I guarantee I will never play Jedi Knight II multiplayer in my life, but to hear about this strange world these people have created… well, it’s as fascinating as the courtship rituals of whatever Amazonian tribe is being exploited in this weekend’s broadsheets. In fact, it’s this quality that makes “Bow, Nigger” stand out from most games writing – that it felt like a newspaper article rather than anything in the specialist press. That is, you’ll be interested in it even if you didn’t give a fuck about videogames. While it’s using videogames as its subject, what it’s really talking about is the human condition.

And that, I think, is the key to the whole thing. New Games Journalism exists to try and explain and transfer the sensations allowed by videogaming to anyone who’s willing to sit and take time to read it. It paradoxically manages find a way to be more accessible to the average human being by actually concentrating on the real reasons why people devote huge chunks of their waking hours to games rather than obsessing in tedious detail over the ephemera that surrounds it (How many levels? how many guns? Can I be Goro?). It asks the question “Why game anyway” and then gives as many answers as they are people, as interesting as people, as precious.

So that’s what our old-new way of thinking about games boils down to. A new dogma to drive around the intellectual motorway.

1) The worth of gaming lies in the gamer not the game.
2) Write travel journalism to Imaginary Places.

Let’s see how fast it can go.

Kieron Gillen, Bath, England.
23rd March 2004, 2:04 am

*****
This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.

With every new game release, gamers look forward to new forms of storytelling, interaction, graphics, control…but what about comfort?

Satou Ichi uses the term “gamer stance” to describe a player’s natural playing state. “This goes beyond mere sitting-place. It also means the way you hold your controller. This changes from game to game, as not all games use the same controller,” and that last part is truer than ever since this year’s E3.

Sony and Mirosoft have entered the motion-control market, likely following Nintendo’s success with its wiimotes and balancing board. Sony will put out its own motion-sensing and pointing wand, and Microsoft is going to launch the Natal, which senses objects, motion, and voices in a room. How these will be used and felt interests me because, button-wise, the industry has hit an absolute wall. It makes sense to insert innovations to make the competition seem outdated, but I think motion controls will ultimately end up like today’s console controllers: standardized until minor ergonomics and color schemes are all that separate one Plastic Scrap of Interfacing from another.

All of which makes Nintendo’s “vitality sensor” such a curiosity. Fingers and thumbs can only click so many buttons at once on a controller. Motion wands can only be shaken and twisted so many directions. Even balance boards and motion detectors are limited, in my opinion, by what gamers will put up with in pursuit of an immersive, FUN experience. But tracking the player’s pulse? Now we’re getting inside biometrics in a way that makes the body a voluntary, rather than obedient, controller.

The trick’s been pulled before by games that build HOV lanes through their fourth walls. The Metal Gear Solid series, for example, is no stranger to addressing how the player feels after each game’s button-mashing trials. In two of the games, the player is instructed to place the controller against their arm after particularly mashful sequences so that the controller can “massage” using its rumble function. Konami knows survival would mean a minor ache in the average arm. At least two segments in Metal Gear Solid 4 place the player in situations that require hasty actions but enormous distractions to boot. “Don’t take your eyes off the prize, no matter how good the other half of the screen looks!” The game plays with the tension generated by its plot, delivering two kinds of experiences at once (playing and watching) and daring the player to let one experience overpower the other.

Now imagine that the game knows how excited you are or aren’t in a given sequence. Maybe it sends more obstacles to swarm your path; maybe the screen brightens or your character’s speed increases to correspond with your pulse. One thing’s for sure: survival-horror titles will get downright sadistic with players’ emotional comfort. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is already said to change in-game scenarios based on a questionnaire to the player — the vitality sensor sounds like an ideal lie detector to raise the stakes even higher. You lied about celebrating Mother’s Day — let’s see how you handle characters withholding gifts from you, then!

If this sounds like a buzz machine for an unreleased peripheral that could very well flop on arrival, then I beg your pardon. The gaming industry knows our gamer stances and how slowly we’ve crawled out of them just to accept toy guitars and drums, much less full motion control. The vitality sensor looks like a ripe device for asking our innards for direction instead of our steady limbs.

Stuart Brown’s video above is about play and its importance in a creature’s life. I’m starting with Brown because what he says about play sounds a lot like Steven Johnson’s book I love, Everything Bad Is Good For You. Both emphasize how play, in all its forms, can encourage creative thinking, muscle control, and social interaction. Check them out if you ever need food for thought about your favorite hobbies.

On the other hand, there’s the sentiment like Moshe Kavalin’s, an 11-year-old who recently got a college degree. When asked about his plans for the future, he said, “I feel it’s a waste of time playing video games because it’s not helping humanity in any way.” He’s a kid who doesn’t want to sound lazy, so I have no animosity toward him, just the quote. What needs to be stressed here is that Kavalin thinks playing videogames is a stalling activity. However, he practices martial arts and the piano. He plays the piano, and whenever I hear an opinion one way or the other about “playing videogames,” I think about what they’d be saying if “videogames” were removed. Kids these days and their obsession with composition!

Without play, psyches crack. Brown presents a fair amount of evidence about the limits of learning without play. But is there a bad kind of play? Could videogames be damaging? This divide is always hard to pin down, since anyone committed to a hobby believes it’s healthy while others just don’t know what it’s like. This is probably at its worst with gamers — a population in which the user is engaged and reacting, but to an observer is a state of twitchy hypnosis. I’ve experienced both sides when playing my Nintendo DS: one moment I can be immersed in some piece of chess-like strategy in Advance Wars; the next, I spot my dull reflection in the console’s screen and do a double-take. It’s a bizarre moment, and I have no conclusions about it. But it comes with the territory.

Can “bad” or at least “lazy” gaming be defined by what it’s not? If gaming (which is playing, remember) can be called a great stress reliever and fantasy simulator, then it’s not saving the world. It’s a tool of the status quo. Should games be heralded according to a balance of pure entertainment value and intellect/emotion? I think it’s fair to say that, if one stays stuck in a genre with minimal expansion, that genre will lose airs. That link is as much about Heather Chaplin’s accusations toward male game developers as Leigh Alexander’s reaction. Will bullets and missions and marines always be our most popular escapes (The Sims says no)? Will we one day value a game based on its fun and impact? I remember the first time I played Metal Gear Solid and, though I knew about nuclear weapons, the game’s frequent bits of real-world trivia made me want to learn more about stockpiles and waste disposal.

How far does the role of videogames go? What is the industry’s potential compared to how you use it now? Is a game worthwhile for as long as it makes you think? Should it be tossed aside when it’s no longer teaching, no longer fun, or both? Do all games (and forms of play) and their genres contain rewards?

This is all just food for thought and play. Feel free to share your comments.

The games of Daniel Benmergui are short but deep, a stone’s throw into a pond that finds its source in the emotional core of videogame storytelling. That may sound like an exaggerration, but I don’t mean “emotional” in the sense of an epic whose ending reduces you to tears or a hidden truth revealed that exposes your internal feelings. The closest thing I can think of to compare to Benmergui’s games is a comic of about fifteen panels’ length that invites you to mix and match its panels to shape the story as you see fit, its different transformations all complete in themselves.

Ludomancy is the name of Benmergui’s blog, where some of his games are hosted, if not linked to in-browser screens courtesy of Kongregate. To explain how his games work is to explain how to “beat” them, though half the fun is finding the multiple endings to his brief scenarios. I’ll describe one of them, and leave you to discover the means to the rest:

I Wish I Were The Moon

(click image to play)

The scene above is what you get, with the background slowly moving by. You control the frame of a camera, and can move your snapshots to other areas of the screen to make things interact. For instance, you could snap a shot of the boy on the moon and move his picture next to the girl on the boat. They’d be together, and the moon would float out of view and into the background (this is one of several endings). Sometimes a comet will pass in the background, or a duck. Experimentation is key, and resetting the screen is simple.

In a gaming landscape that flows with dialogue trees and Positive/Negative endings, Benmergui’s small games point to where better decisions in games could go. Results more cumulative than “you win/lose this level” are necessary to prevent burnout in story-based games. Online games like The Sims and World of Warcraft gain mileage through the promise of no two game sessions having to be exactly alike, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s premise rested on replaying the same three in-game days to experience every event within. Combined with the creative powers of Ludomancy, these game designs could turn repetition on its head.