What it sounds like. It's the most important blog ever written by the most level-headed and modest writer to ever grace this earth....

Okay, more seriously. It'll likely be what a lot of blogs are. Rants and raves about games and systems I love and hate, as well as industry trends. I play a wide range of games on both console and PC, as well as play a good number of indie games on my PC. I've found an absolute ton of gaming gems scrounging for indie games.

Also I've worked in the game industry as a tester for a couple of years so I'll probably rant about that some. It's not the glory job it's cracked up to be.

• 1Dec 07

  Superjock Larry Lujack and Gamespot

  There's probably literally hundreds of blogs being written about Jeff's departure. Well. Departure is sugaring the language up. He got canned. The initial reaction of many of these blogs were to blame Gamespot. However....I have to disagree. I'm also reminded of another time in somewhat recent history where a similar incident happened.

  Larry Lujack was a DJ up in Chicago in the 60's, 70's and 80's. He was an old school rocker kind of guy, and he appreciated the craft of a musician, and was passionate about rock. When the 70's came into full swing, so did disco. Now the suits that owned the radio station cut deals and basically said to the DJ's, "You gotta play X amount of Disco ever so often." Lujack was always a bit of a maverick, and he made his displeasure well known about disco on air. He would only play Disco Duck. That is the only disco song he'd play, and he'd play it over and over again just to satisfy the rules being laid down. It was an utterly awful song, and his doing that was more him giving a middle finger to the executives. Well one day he was on air, he finally got fed up with it. While on the radio, live, he went on about an hour or two rant about the state of things. He told his listeners what he was being made to do, and that he wasn't going to do it anymore, and he wasn't going to play anymore disco. His rant was long, loud, passionate and vehement. He attacked the radio station owners, as well as disco itself, calling them an insult to true musicians. He also cussed quite a bit on live air during prime time hours, which at the time, was against the law.

  This next part is where I'm going to draw another parallel. Everyone in the station was behind him. They never once cut him off, and when the president of the station was beating on the door to be let in, they kept the doors locked. It was only until the police came that they opened the door. They arrested Lujack for swearing on air. Everyone in the station was behind Lujack and what he was doing. They supported him in his actions.

  Gamespot supported Jeff in his too. The day I got wind of it, if you happened to pay attention to the Soapbox that day, every single featured blog was something about Jeff's departure. There were soapbox blogs with titles claiming that Gamepost was completely untrustworthy now. Many of these soapboxed blogs were newly crowned with the emblem as well. Jeff got fired, however someone else at Gamespot was looking out for him. They wanted to make sure his story got out there. They went and found user blogs about him, and made sure they were on the soapbox. I'm sure you've all noticed the soapbox, for the moment, has been taken down. I'm not sure who's behind that, but I'm certain it's more from Cnet, and not Gamespot. Gamespot supported Jeff, and I have no doubt that their selection of soapbox blogs that day was a gesture to stand up for Jeff, and get his message and the truth out there. It worked. The truth is...it was Cnet's management. Gamespot as a whole operation got shoved under the bus, not just Jeff. It also reminds me of Larry Lujack.

  Returning to that analogy. Disco died, and it died quickly. The bands Larry played are still touring now. The Rolling Stones haven't gone anywhere, and even the Eagles got back together. The true musicians of that era transcend flash in the pan fads. Lujack was passionate about music. Jeff, many of the other Gamespot editors, and many of the readers of Gamespot are passionate about games. We come here expecting a certain level of expertise and quality in what we see. Magazines like Maxim and Stuff are fluff. We won't be satisfied reading that, and I feel many of the editors won't be satisfied writing that. I'm also certain they'll move on to better places now that Gamespot is being turned into Maxim:Games.

  In closing, Superjock Larry Lujack was eventually inducted into the radio hall of fame. He transcended things as well. If you stay true to your craft, and true to your passion...suits won't be able to completely bring you down. I have no doubt Jeff will find his way out of this into bigger and better things.

  In closing, I will most likely be cancelling my account here soon. I loved the community, I loved the spirit behind it, but I cannot support a company which would do that to an employee, or an entire arm of their operation. The new management single handedly raped what Gamespot had been built to be, and is trying to water it down. I can't support this level of unethical treatment. Thanks to everyone whom I met here. Thanks to all who gave feedback on my writing, and thanks to all who gave me great things to read in the process. PM me if you want to continue corresponding.

  • Posted Dec 1, 2007 3:17 am GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 5Nov 07

  Shock Value: Why GTA and Jack Thompson aren't all that Different

  When GTA III came out, it really shook a lot of foundations. It did what was then thought impossible and took a living, breathing city and let you wander around in it with unprecedented freedom. It gave rise to the term 'open world gaming'. You could steal whatever car you wanted, drive all around the city freely, and experience a fully dynamic weather, traffic and pedestrian system. Not only that, you could kill whoever you wanted, wage war against the police, and undergo any number of criminal activities, including sleeping with a prostitute to heal your character. Now around this time the various anti-gaming folks at both the extreme left and right of our beloved political spectrum here in the States were looking for a new posterchild to brand as the game that causes kids to go bad. Doom had its moment in the limelight, but they needed something new, something bigger. PC gaming wasn't as mainstream as console gaming. GTA III became that posterchild. It was violent, it celebrated a criminal lifestyle, it was popular, and it was on an accessible medium.

  Most major news outlets tend to not cover games, that is until something like this comes along and makes headlines for corrupting our poor innocent youth. Stories ran about how games trained our kids to be criminals, and of course targetted GTA as the main offender. News magazines would have special pieces run where they would show GTA, and then interview 'respected' psychologists to explain how the game's realism and immersion was more dangerous than any form of media for promoting violence. Headlines would run about violent teen crimes, blaming video games as the culprit for why they lashed out in the manner they did. This would be followed by more experts that were brought forth by the extreme left and right proclaiming how video games could corrupt. What game, at the time, was the centerpiece of all this? GTA of course. All manner of news shows were in a flurry to cash in on the stories. Everything from the morning news, to Dateline were showing footage of GTA, paired with expert opinions on how dangerous it is.

  What it also did was provide GTA an absolute ton of free advertising. Everyone knew about GTA because of these stories, even people who might not otherwise keep up with gaming. This was all thanks to the absurd amount of media coverage. While the message about it was negative, not everyone may have taken it that way. What it did do was plant a seed in everyone's head about the existence of this game, and what it allowed. There may have been a great deal of people who got interested about the game from these programs, despite their attempt at painting it in a dangerous light. The rash of shock stories and news coverage probably helped sell a lot of games. Every time the game was blamed for a real world crime, that only helped generate the kind of controversy that draws people to something like moths to flame. Nothing sells better than controversy. The shock value of the game, and the media's attempts to fueled it...leading it to be even bigger than ever. It didn't hurt there was a legitly good game underneath all this controvesy either so once someone tried it out, there's a good chance they probably got hooked into it.

  Now lets turn to our pal Jack Thompson. Those of us in the gaming community don't have much love for this fella. He's on a crusade to do all he can to strip the 1st amendment from the realm of gaming. He's out there to push any law he can that restricts what can be in a game, and how they're sold. He'll also go on a number of crazy displays where he attempts to sue any number of big name developers and publishers for any crime a mentally unbalanced teen commits. If the police find a violent video game in that kid's room? You can bet mister Thompson has a lawsuit for just about every game developer and publisher around. We, as a community, tend to brand him as some ignorant buffoon everytime he pulls a stunt like this. However maybe we should take a step back from this and look at it from a different angle.

  First off, the guy isn't dumb. He's been through law school and passed the bar exam. This is not an easy task. Second, while his off the wall crusades seem like a joke by many, there is one thing they do. They make headlines. They always make the headlines in the gaming community's equivalent of a Dateline or other news organization. While we might mostly disagree with him and his off the wall antics, we do talk about it. We bring up his points to each other. We blog about it, and we write about it in numerous venues. We do what the news outlets did to GTA. We, in effect, help him get his message out there. We might put it in a very negative light. We might pair his views with a myriad of reasons why he is wrong, but nonetheless, there's a chance a lot more people know about him and his ideals than otherwise would.

  He's doing what GTA did. He's using the shock value of his crazy and over the top antics to get the basic idea of his crusade out there. Anytime he does some hairball scheme like try to sue every big name publisher, he makes headlines. Everytime he makes headlines, gamers talk about him in various formats. His message spreads, and more and more people can take a look at what he's doing. While they might find his methods foolish, they may agree with some of the underlying points that 'video games might be bad'. This is where things get dangerous. It doesn't matter that people write off his grandiose theatrics, but they are taking in his message. The funny thing is? It's the gaming community thats helping carry his message the best. We're the ones doing his dirty work.

  So I might be careful before I call the guy dumb next time. It's always an incredibly dangerous move to not respect people that you oppose. If I pull back for a moment and look at the bigger picture, he might be the one laughing at us everytime we get worked up over his latest ordeal. What can we do in response? Not react to him. If he puts on theatrics, the best thing to do is to give him an empty playhouse. If he has no audience, he doesn't have anyone walking out of the show talking about it, spreading the word. If he gets no response, his efforts totally fail and fall flat, and he just simply looks like a fool for doing it in the first place. However everytime he pulls a stunt and people get worked up over it and talk about it? He wins. The best way to deal with a hotheaded blowhard is to give him no air at all to blow.

  So in effect I'm helping him again here by shining the spotlight on him. However I hope this time we can all take something away from it. I hope that we can sit on that urge to rant and rave about him, and just pretend he doesn't exist from here on out, so he'll disappear in the wind.

  • Posted Nov 5, 2007 8:40 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 31Oct 07

  Comedy and Games: Oil and Water?

  Lots of movie and book genres have come over into the realm of gaming with great success. Action is by far the most prevalent, but many others have made the leap as well. Horror games are fairly popular, and a great deal of suspense elements find their way into other games. Even mystery and romance work their ways into our hobby in their own little ways, usually in the form of adventure games like Phoenix Wright, or RPGs along the lines of the Final Fantasy Series. What about comedy? I suppose recently with The Simpsons Game and Portal there's been some good genuinely comedic options for gaming, but how come this genre generally has very sparse offerings, and has yet to really make the leap into the gaming medium?

  I will grant that a lot of games try to add in the odd humorous elements here and there, such as the occasional easter egg to reward a player for peeking under the rocks. There's also some jokes thrown in most games to break up the pacing. It's sort of like most modern summer blockbuster action flicks however. They mix in the jokes with the action and it tends to be a pretty good formula for some good mindless fun. The same holds true for games, especially with a series like Grand Theft Auto working a myriad of little jabs and jokes here and there. Still, the focus on the game is on the action, and the plot itself isn't terribly funny, nor is the majority of the story dialogue. The jokes that are there are usually pretty thin too. They're either the comedic equivalent of the one liner that needs no setting up, or just baudy bathroom and sex jokes. Neither of these really amount to some really good and deep comedy.

  A lot of the most truly funny games have been in the adventure genre, or games close to that genre. Tim Shafer earned an incredible reputation for the witty humor present in the legendary Secret of Monkey Island series. Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door has a tongue and cheek plot thats loaded with jokes and jabs at a variety of things, as well as some of the most truly enjoyable witty dialogue. The comedic value of both these games is pretty central to their enjoyment, which is a rarity among all games. However the adventure genre is not nearly as popular as it once was, and the offerings are pretty slim these days. To find a comedic gem among those is even more rare. The adventure genre also is one that much more closely mimics how movies work. It's a very linear series of events and scripts that happen based on the player finding all the right objects, and using them in the right places. The level of interaction the player has is often minimal compared to other genres of gaming.

  While we've had a few truly good comedic games crop up lately with The Simpsons Game and Portal, what is it about comedy that doesn't translate well into gaming? I'll offer up a few ideas as I see them. The first, and I think the most important is timing. Truly good, deep and layered comedy requires timing. It's not merely what is going on, or what is being said, it's when it all occurs. Timing is very central to good comedic delivery, and timing is a lot harder to achieve in a game because the player is going through the experiences at their own pace. Game designers have some control over things with scripted events and the like, but otherwise the player is in total control of when and how the experiences are encountered. This makes it a lot harder to plan for a growing series of events to lead up to a comedic climax. If things aren't timed perfectly, the humor will fall flat. Games make it very hard to achieve very precise timing of when certain events occur, and what is said.

  Another drawback to gaming in this regard is that often most games are very focused on a single character, and the majority of the story is told from that one character's point of view. The player will often be confined to knowing just what that one character does, and is oblivious of any other events that are supposedly happening in the game world. This isn't the case with movies or even books. Often times the viewer is given an omnipotent view of all the events going on from a multitude of points of view. This allows the writer to create comedic situations based on the viewer knowing a great deal of things the characters don't, and watching as different characters fumble their way to their goals. This allows for many levels of great comedic layering, which is very important for deeper styles of comedy. Games make it very, very hard to use this technique since the point of view is narrowed down to a sole set of eyes usually. Some games do make use of showing the player the plot from different angles, but not nearly to the extent done in movies, and it isn't done nearly as often.

  Heroism. In most games, you're the hero. You start out weak, and grow powerful until you're able to crush whatever it is in your way. In many comedies, the hero isn't terribly heroic. In fact they might be quite the opposite. There's a lot of comedic potential in watching someone without the capabilities to deal with the circumstances try to get out of various situations, or even outright fail. This is hard to do in a game where the object is generally to overcome greater and greater challenges with an ever growing set of tools and more powerful abilities. Gordon Freeman might be a science nerd, but he's a science nerd with a powerful hazard suit and a constantly expanding arsenal of heavy weapons. The nature of games challenge the player to achieve a goal through their own skill or prowess. They reward the player for playing well, and getting through the various challenges. In a comedic movie we can watch a hero continually fail at reaching the goal, and have them attain it through dumb luck or circumstances. A game wouldn't be terribly fun if you won just because 'you got lucky'. It is awful funny to watch someone find as many ways as possible to fail at reaching a goal however, it just doesn't make for a very fun game where you always lose.

  This makes it very hard to write deep and layered comedy that we see in movies into games. The very medium of gaming just doesn't lend itself very well to these classical techniques. For now I suppose we'll have to be content with witty one liners from characters in the game, as well as well the placed easter egg. We could also hope we see more games like Portal, and possibly more games like The Simpsons Game, but hopefully with some better mechanics and gameplay. In the future? Maybe we'll see comedic techniques tailored to the very unique nature of gaming. I'm not terribly sure what these would be however. I love to laugh though, and I'd love to be able to laugh more while enjoying my gaming hobby.

  • Posted Oct 31, 2007 8:59 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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