Thoughts, games and other stuff

A common theme in the games industry is comparing the state of games right now with the cinema industry at the same age. "They already had their breakthroughs like Citizen Kane!" is so old hat now that it's painful - the implication being that games have nothing to show for themselves. There are impressive games already, but the typical responses to this criticism from games industry apologists are 1) In the modern industry, producing games is so expensive that games have become conservative much faster than film and 2) that games and cinema are very different mediums, and the comparison is just not valid. While there may be merit in the first claim, I'm a firm believer in the second. Games are different from cinema - very different.

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from     Al King
to     gaben@valvesoftware.com
date     Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:50 AM
subject     Steam Guard and Sales, or The War Against Charitable Fraudsters
mailed-by     gmail.com
     
The only time I've had trouble with Steam Guard is in trying to purchase things.
I'm happy to have in-client access locked to one computer, but being able to buy games at any time with access to the internet is quite useful.

Frankly, I don't find people with my password using it to buy me games that sinister?

Cheers,

Al King

I haven't played MMOs. Full stop. Eskil Steenberg's pretty one tempted me but I never got round to it. But then a bunch became free to play on Steam, and a couple of friends who love superheroes decided to start playing Champions Online, so I decided to give it a go. When I wrote the title, I was preparing to pan the bullshit tutorial - but then I realised the first 10 minutes of the game were total genius.

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Okay, I'm turning on comments, but I'll moderate, and I'm not going to just allow all non-spammers, I'll only allow interesting contributions. Okay? Doesn't mean I hate you if I don't let through your comment through, course: think of it as a curated display of interesting perspectives or some shit.

Two common musical analogies are, to my mind, exactly backwards.

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Writing about Far Cry 2 and its meaning made me realise something about the nature of games.

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The other day I played Guitar Hero 3 for the first time in a while. I started playing Sunshine of Your Love on Expert, despite never being especially accomplished at the game; the solo is a bit insane. So I jacked open the training mode, chose the solo section and started practicing it, first on the slowest speed and increasing when I felt I'd done well, and the hit-note percentage was above 90. I'm sure I'm the only person to have ever done this, this sentence is a lie. But this innocuous sounding story made me realise something:

On the low difficulty levels, Guitar Hero is basically about having fun. Press buttons, flick a bar, hear awesome guitar noises and screaming fans. Escapism! Surely that's all it can be? After all, you don't very well learn how to play guitar, do you? The eternal criticism: "why don't you go and actually play music?"

But you can't play Expert Guitar Hero without practice. Or, I can't. When you play on Expert, the game is no longer "about" escapism at all. It's about trying something over and over, and getting better at it. Guitar Hero on Expert is about learning. Escapism is just the payoff, brilliantly designed though that payoff is. You have to wonder if that's the intent of the original designers, or if it is the result of a purely pragmatic addition to make things easier on players. You really do. If you don't feel like wondering, I'll wonder twice as hard just for you.

Note: This was written as a portfolio piece so I'd have some writing to show the RPS guys. Also because it was fun. More games writing to come, probably.

 

The following essay is spoileriffic. You will know about critical turning points in Far Cry 2 if you read it. But, um, if you haven't played it yet then let's face it, you're probably not getting round to it any time soon, so you'd best know what's worthwhile about it.

The sequel to 2004's Far Cry isn't the last place you would expect an homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. After all, the first game had shades of The Island of Doctor Moreau, with a mad scientist trying to create a new species of very ugly and bad tempered apes for, one imagines, what he felt were good reasons. It is, however, probably the last place you would expect an earnest exploration of morality, a philosophical successor to Conrad's classic or, given the very nature of sequels, a burning desire to break new ground in game narrative.

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A thoughtful complaint at the portrayal of teleportation in popular culture is this: "But aren't they actually dying? Isn't the person ceasing to exist at one end, and a mere copy appearing at the other end?" That the answer to both these questions is no actually follows pretty trivially if we take our best current theories seriously (to steal a phrase from David Deutsch), but it still might weird you out, so I'll try to talk you through it.

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