Posts Tagged ‘video games’

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near the video games industry, but I still like to keep up with it in an armchair capacity. One of my favorite sites by which to do this is a blog called gamesetwatch, a collection of essays and links to articles by many industry leaders. One article they had recently was a retrospective on “Time Gal”, one of those old laser disc arcade games that had animated cutscenes that you control via pressing the correct button or moving the joystick in the right way. The author, Todd Ciolek, (who also writes X-button, a fine column at the Anime News Network) pointed out that Time Gal was the first game to have a non-licensed character that players could recognize as human. He goes on to praise the game for having a heroine that was so cute and chirpy, but then there was one line that just made my head spin.

“Misogyny creeps in, of course: Time Gal’s already skimpy clothes get ripped away by T-Rexes and Fist of the North Star mutants alike, and she’ll scream about being struck on the chest or getting bitten on her partially exposed rear. Pioneers are not always proud.”

It wasn’t just what he said, it’s how he said it. Misogyny. You know, creeping in like that. Here you are, pushing through the glass ceiling, but let one of those things on your chest slip out and BOOM! There’s misogyny. The word here is written with such complacency, such blasé, that it’s almost as if the author was describing the sky as blue. To use such a powerful word as misogyny in that way tells me that he doesn’t even believe in what he says. And why should he have to? He’s only preaching the gospel truth. You can see it repeated all over the ‘net. To show women as sexual in any capacity is misogynist. That’s it. Finito. End of discussion.

When there’s an idea that becomes sacrosanct and, dare I say, unexamined, it bothers me. Untested truth is what keeps us from moving forward, making connections and seeing the greater scheme of things. This is part of a pattern I keep seeing again and again in video game criticism. Why is a scantily clad girl in a video game defined as misogyny? “How is that not misogyny!?” is not a valid answer.

Despite being male, I think I can put my liberal arts hat back on and take a crack at this one. Misogyny is the hatred of women. If a woman getting her clothes torn suggestively in a fight is misogyny, then there are a couple of assumptions at work here. The first is that this is sexual objectification, where a woman is judged by her physical attributes independent of her personality and intelligence. This is demeaning to women, and that makes it misogyny.

I have a problem with this. This also assumes that the way a woman looks and how she presents herself has nothing to do with her personal taste, her habits or the culture she comes from. It would seem that this imagery is only defined by how I see it. Big, white male me. Now this tells me that if I look at something and get a rise out of it, it immediately becomes misogynist. I am indirectly dictating what can and cannot be depicted in regards to women. It doesn’t matter if anyone else finds the game cute or funny. Is that feminist? Hell, is that even humanist?

So now that we’ve found out what misogyny is, what’s feminism? What images do game companies produce if they want to be forward-thinking and catch that ever-elusive female audience? Many would point to a game called Portal. It’s about a battle between a sarcastic computer and Chell, a barely seen female protagonist in a formless jumpsuit with no dialog, no expression, and no personality. She is seen as the perfect feminist archetype, as opposed to blond-haired traitors like Super Mario’s Princess Peach. Of course, this can’t explain why Peach herself has female fans all over the world and why her own game, Super Princess Peach, has sold over a million copies.

That, my friends, is why we can’t have compelling video game characters. This is why we live in a video game world populated by bald space marines and sullen amazonian axe-murderers. When we intentionally wall off a part of human nature, we blind ourselves to potential avenues of creativity. A specific, easily recognizable character can make the difference between millions of dollars in revenue and billions.

For the first few months of our marriage, my wife Sara would ask me how I could possibly spend so much time surfing on the internet. Recently I found out this wasn’t a complaint, but an actual question about how to find good stuff to read on the web. I told her that I frequent sites like Digg.com and Fark.com to receive the latest news about technology, video games and STAR WARS! In other words, sites that would not interest Sara in the slightest.

The state of affairs continued until I found an article on Digg called “Top Five Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls”. It basically outlined what I had thought when I had tried to introduce Sara to news aggregate sites. Most of them are sausage parties, populated by nerds who try to break the site for no other than a surplus of time on their hands. You’re unlikely to find articles about non-geeky arts and crafts, parenting or anything else relevant to women. Considering how much of the publishing sector is created by and for women, having web software like Digg and making it completely male oriented is like building a Saturn V Rocket and using it as a Christmas tree. It seemed like the author had pointed out ripe territory for revolution, but many commentors pointed out that the revolution had already happened at www.kirtsy.com.

Intrigued I headed down there and was taken by surprise by how nice the interface is. It’s just 9 self-explanatory categories, and you don’t even have to join to give a “kirtsy” since the site measures the click-through count, not just votes from registered users. What’s more, the users don’t seem to use misleading headlines like “Bike Seat Cuts Off the Nose to Save the Penis!” in order to garner votes.

Now, I’m still going to use sites like Digg and Fark for most of my link hunting needs, but it’s really nice to know that a site like this exists. For one thing, it proves that lines of code and a server don’t make a software package any more than a truckload of hamburger meat and a suitcase full of money makes a McDonald’s. It’s amazing that you can create a news aggregate site that functions like Digg and have it come off as being completely different. It’s a tribute to the human element in software design. And what does Sara think of Kirtsy? Let’s just say she curses my name now that she knows how to waste time on the internet!

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.

While the Angry Video Game Nerd banishes the gaming demons of the past, all is not well in the present day. Video Game companies have gotten larger than ever, with millions of dollars spent on advertising, processing power and celebrity talent to push out over-produced carbon copies of franchises that should have died back in the AVGN’s era. Ben Croshaw was just another freeware game designer/author when he decided to take his talent for MS Paint and droll witticisms to youtube and the video game industry at large. The result is Zero Punctuation.

The title Zero Punctuation refers to Croshaw’s rapid-fire delivery of his video game reviews. After the first two reviews hit youtube, the show was picked up as a series by the Escapist, an internet based video game magazine. The deal resulted in 400 percent increase in the site’s traffic. While the British-born-Australian-based wit of the reviewer offers a certain sense of class to the show, it’s no the only reason Zero Punctuation works. Croshaw achieves the holy grail of criticism in any media. He assails the unassailable, and he makes it work. Take for instance the Smash Brothers Brawl review embedded in the post. Personally, I own the game and love it, but the two characters that generated the most hype, Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake, are only available after slogging through a single player story mode. You will have put in so many hours to unlock those characters that you’ll win every time against your friends who don’t have the game. Your dream of having weekly Smash Brothers parties is effectively dashed. Even if you love the game, the logic behind that observation is impeccable

The only gripe I could have with Zero Punctuation is that Croshaw has a few biases against certain types of games, like Japanese-style Role Playing Games. He admits this, and he’s very fair about it, but he’s never going to be able to do a proper take-down of games like the Disgaea or Suikoden series. He doesn’t understand why those games are crack cocaine in binary code for some people. He tried to comprehend this in his review of “The World Ends With You” with amusing results, but I think we’ll have to be satisfied that he mostly focuses on the hubris of larger, more popular game genres. Lord knows the industry keeps giving him material.

Warning: The video in this entry contains NSFW language.

It’s a scene familiar to anyone who has owned an NES. You’ve worked hard doing your homework, mowing the lawn, and cleaning the kitchen. Your $5 worth of allowance isn’t much, but a trip down to the local video store to rent a new Nintendo game makes the past week’s indignities all worth it. You change to channel 3, blow off the connectors and press power. Suddenly, it all goes horribly wrong.

What was hoped to be a break from our workaday world becomes a personal hell of poor graphics, annoying sound and sisyphean controls. You wish you could put it down, but you don’t want your $5 to be spent in vain. You have entered the world of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

James D. Rolfe created the character of The Angry Video Game Nerd as a joke for his friends. Today the series is nothing short of a phenomenon. It’s the 5th most subscribed series on youtube and 5th most viewed overall. For years companies have looked to make a quick buck off video game fans by pushing out substandard games to make the Christmas rush or to coincide with a movie release. Usually we have game magazines to help us sort out the good games from the bad but some stinkers always make it through. The Angry Video Game Nerd is zeitgeist, an avenging spirit to all of us who at one time or another got shafted to make the bottom line of of companies like Acclaim, Bandai, or LJN.

Sometimes the games are so horrible that they conjure up evil spirits in the form of special guest stars. The Nerd has fought Bugs Bunny, Freddy Kreuger, the Joker and Hallowe’en’s Michael Myers among others in his quest to defeat the malformed games of days gone by. The episodes usually end with a crescendo of profanity and a usually creative and hilarious way of destroying the offending game cartridge.

Some people might criticize the nerd for his use of profanity and scatological references. However, most of us who are old enough to remember the humiliation of renting or buying these game are quickly passing the age of 30. The makers of these games made a living fleecing kids out of their allowances. We need an adult response to provide closure for the consumer scars of the past. We need to see our rage blaze across the screen like a righteous fire. We need the Nerd.

Looking at this computer setup, I can’t tell if I should be impressed or frightened for the person who built it. The Link goes to more pictures. What do you think?

Link

In case you were counting, this is my 100th post.

Hello Everyone!

James Strocel here. I’ve just spent the last week compiling the myriad of contact information I’ve gathered over the years. This message is to make sure all of it works. This list is a combination of my family, friends, co-workers at the various jobs I’ve had, and classmates at the various schools that I’ve attended. That being said…

Wow. Look at you all.

There are almost 300 of you in this contact list. I can’t believe I’ve had the privilege of associating with such extraordinary people. You’ve been all over the world, all six populated continents. If any of you out there has done a jaunt to Antarctica, let me know. Some of you have been to Africa to help out. A couple of you are bringing kids home from there. Some of you are at sea. Some of you have served, will serve, are serving in the Military. Some of you are scientists, trying to figure out what’s happening to this planet. Some of you are selling houses, others are protecting them through the fire department. There’s at least one of you in every branch of the media, be it print, film, music, cartoons or video games. There are mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and even a few grandparents. Some of you I haven’t always seen eye to eye with. Some of you may even be wondering why I bothered with this e-mail at all. But I guarantee you this: Each and every one of you in some small way has made me who I am. Even the people I have known only a short time. There is nothing without meaning, and so much meaning is yet to come.

Now that the obvious facts are out of the way, let’s get down to business. As you may know, I got married last month to the sweetest, most beautiful girl in the whole wide world. I want to thank again everyone who showed up. The pictures can be seen at

http://www.james-strocel.com/gallery

It may be old news for some people out there, but I’ve received some requests for them after I first posted them on the website, so I’m covering those of you who I may have missed. I have assumed the duties of managing our yearly Christmas letter. If you’re reading this message, you are going to get one in your e-mail. If you don’t want one, please let me know! Don’t just set up your spam filters and think I won’t notice! I’m also trying to set up a mailing list for my blog, so if you actually enjoy hearing me shoot my mouth off please let me know as well. The blog will also contain any important family announcements I may have. I hope all of you are enjoying the weather, wherever you are.Call me up and tell me your life story some time!

Sincerely,

James Strocel

An enterprising group of animators with too much time on their hands have decided to animate a fanfic from the computer game “Half-life”. Never before has so much effort gone into making something so advanced look so amateurish. Does anyone know where I could find that upbeat background music?

It seems like every discussion on the state of originality in video games is punctuated by someone screaming about Katamari Damacy. It was released to the Playstation 2 in 2004 in the market of over-produced first person shooters, and sports games. Players were happily non-plussed at the bright colors and deceptively simple gameplay. While it is held up on a pedestal for breaking through the one-note state of the industry, it should be noted that Namco, the game’s developer was the same company that produced such hits as Pac-man and Dig-Dug. Katamari is simply the continuation of this stylistic tradition with its simplistic graphics and obtuse game objectives.

As the game starts up, we are treated to a monty-pythonesque opening with the King queen and Prince riding around the cosmos spreading love, joy, and mushrooms to the animals of the world. Take from this experience what you will.

The title appears over the Prince, who is standing in front of a bumpy sphere of some sort. A press of the start button summons his father the King, a large, cylindrical disembodied head with the voice of a record scratch. After laying a guilt trip on you for making this space for learning how to roll, an overlay appears containing the PS2 controller and six icons detailing how to roll forwards, backwards, making turns, and stopping. The icons light up as you successfully achieve each task. Once all the tasks are completed, the King reappears to praise you on your skill. The King disappears, and then you have to master moves such as the quick turn, charge ‘n’ roll, look, and jump. This game has an interesting approach to the learning curve. It invites experimentation with controller, and it tells you when you are making motions that are useful to the game. However, the game does not let you progress until you have learned the basics.

When all this is done, you are treated to a cinema scene of the starry night sky. One by one, the stars wink out, until the gigantic form of the King hurtles by, smashing all the stars, even the moon. Naturally, this poses a problem when a King destroys his Kingdom, even though he secretly enjoyed it. So now it’s up to the tiny Prince to bring all of the stars back to the sky. After all, the King’s problems are his problems, and he still has to repay him for that whole giving him life and raising him business.

The object of the game is to roll up as many objects as possible on to the Katamari, a strange ball that can stick to anything smaller than it. These objects will then be turned into the new stars in the sky. The Prince is only 5cm tall, so naturally, we start off small. The first goal is to make the katamari 10cm in diameter. There is no time limit, so you can get used to the controls. The game marks the first object you roll up. In this case, it was a die. You are on a card table, picKing up matches, tacks, erasers and small insects

Once you reach 10 cm, the King reappears and takes you home on the royal rainbow.
We get a few more pointers on the gameplay in a simple children’s book format. The katamari can’t roll up objects larger than it, oddly shaped objects will put the katamari off balance, and the katamari can be rolled up objects like steps. People can only be rolled up after being hit. The screaming man in the diagram hints at the cartoon mayhem we’ll cause throughout the course of the game.

From there we are taken to the score screen, where the gargantuan King holds you in one hand and the katamari in the other. First he measures the size of the katamari, then statistics are displayed telling you the top 3 objects rolled up. In this case it was snacks, stationary, and necessities in that. The King then releases the star into the heavens creating a 10 cm wide jelly star.

We are then taken to the true front end of the game, the Prince’s planet, where you can check the statistics on your past exploits, as well as save and change other options on the game. From there you can head to the planet earth for more rolling goodness, or visit your cousins on the neighboring space mushroom.

On earth, we begin making star number 2. This time, you have a time limit of six minutes and a minimum diameter of 20cm. This is the first time that you can “Die”, or fail to reach your goal in a given level. The array of objects is staggering. Lego blocks, mah jong titles, frogs, The developers did well to choose a very simple polygonal format for the game’s graphics. As you collect lots of objects, confetti and doves appear next to the Prince. There is a living room, and a yard, with a garden. It’s funny that no one seems to notice this small ball of stuff rolling around. The King appears from time to time to mark milestones on your task.

There is something hypnotic about the rolling katamari. Puzzles like Tetris and Bejeweled are about assembly and respect for structure. With all of these objects in there, it’s kind of an organic form of assembly. As more and more objects get rolled up, the ball gets more detailed, varied, and more importantly, larger.

For the second scenario, 35.8 cm was my total. The King was quite impressed. It turned into a bratty star. Another cinema scene appeared. A blocky brother and sister are watching Ultraman on TV when mom comes out and says it’s time to go. A newscast comes on and says the stars disappeared from the sky. The scene ended with a “to be continued” title card.

On the planet, we put on the winter scarf, and started to make star 3. This places us in the city, and apparently there is another present that we can find. This time we start at 10 centimeters, giving us opportunity to become even bigger. It put us in the small dog-small child category of engulfment. After this we have an 83 cm messy star and another cinema scene with the blocky family. Another scenario involves the creation of the constellation cancer, where the object is (non-euphemistically) to collect as many crabs as possible.

Katamari enchanted the gaming community with its relatively simple gameplay and incredibly detailed game world. Players are rewarded for their time by allowing them to explore new areas and collect new objects as the game progresses. As the Katamari expands, so does the player’s realm of experience. If game developers gain any experience from this game, it’s that it represents the interactive transaction in its purest form. The player pushes, the game pushes back in bright and colorful ways. It just keeps rolling on from there.

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