published works

Cultivating Fear

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “How to Make Fear“.

With Halloween at hand, surely there must be some way to warp the festive energy to our own analytical ends. Just see what happens when you invite us to a party! Don’t fret, though – though full of long words, our museum of terror takes the well-oiled form of a top ten list. We know how you like your information, and it’s in bite-sized individually wrapped treats. Please… be our guest.

Pongism, or: What’s the Point of Videogames, Anyway?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part ten of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

We play them, we critique them, sometimes we enjoy them, sometimes we make them. To what end, exactly? Outside of screwing around in search of that elusive “wheeee!”, what exactly do we mean to accomplish? Why videogames? Why do we even bother? It stands to reason that whatever keeps drawing us back to the darned things, it’s got something to do with their basic nature; something that appeals to our own.

Five That Didn’t Fall

  • Reading time:53 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part nine of my ongoing culture column for Next Generation. After the popularity of my earlier article, I pitched a companion piece about companies that had lived past their remit, yet technically were still with us. On publication we lost the framing conceit and the article was split into five pieces, each spun as a simple bottled history. In turn, some of those were picked up by BusinessWeek Online. Here’s the whole thing, in context.

A few weeks ago we published a list of five developers that made a difference, helped to shape the game industry, then, one way or another (usually at the hands of their parent companies), ceased to exist. One theme I touched on there, that I got called on by a few readers, is that although in practical terms all the listed companies were indeed defunct, several continued on in name (Atari, Sierra, and Origin), living a sort of strange afterlife as a brand detached from its body.

This was an deliberate choice; although Infogrames has been going around lately with a nametag saying “HELLO my name is Atari” – and hey, why not; it’s a good name – that doesn’t make Infogrames the historical Atari any more than the creep in the purple spandex with the bowling ball is the historical Jesus. (Not that I’m relating Infogrames to a fictional sex offender – though he is a pretty cool character.) The question arises, though – what about those companies which live on in both name and body, yet which we don’t really recognize anymore? You know who I’m talking about; the cool rebels you used to know in high school, who you see ten years later working a desk job, or in charge of a bank. You try to joke with them, and they don’t get a word you’re saying. You leave, feeling a mix of fear and relief that (as far as you know) you managed to come out of society with your personality intact.

The same thing happens in the videogame world – hey, videogames are people; all our sins are handed down. This article is a document of five great companies – that started off so well, ready to change the world – that… somehow we’ve lost, even as they trundle on through the successful afterlife of our corporate culture. And somehow that just makes us miss them all the more.

The Nose Before Your Face

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eight of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Value of Simplicity”.

So lately we’ve been swinging back toward thinking about games as a medium of expression. It’s not a new concept; way back in the early ’80s, companies like Activision and EA put all their energy behind publicizing game designers like rock stars – or better yet, like book authors – and their games as unique works by your favorite authors. This all happened just after figures like Ed Logg and Toshihiro Nishikado started to extrapolate Pong and SpaceWar!, incorporating more overt narrative frameworks and exploring more elaborate ways of interacting with the gameworld. From this initial explosion of creativity came Steve Wozniak and the Apple II, providing an easy platform for all of the early Richard Garriotts and Roberta Williamses and Dan Buntens to come.

Then stuff happened, particularly though not specifically the crash; the industry changed in focus. On the one hand we had ultra-secretive Japanese companies that – like Atari before them – usually didn’t credit their staff for fear of sniping and for the benefit of greater brand identity; on the other, what US companies remained tended to inflate beyond the point where small, expressive, intimate games were economically feasible. And then there’s just the issue that, as technology grew more complex, design teams grew larger and larger, making it harder for any one voice to stand out, leading to more of a committee-driven approach.

Museum of Terror

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So after rattling around the city for a while, I eventually turned up a copy of this — the first localization I’ve been really proud of. Actually, a few poorly chosen words aside, I really like it. It’s been long enough that I barely recall writing any of it, so I guess I’m in a fair position to be impressed.

Aside from the localization — which really does flow well, I must say — the overall package is just handsome. Appropriately schlockish typeface and blurb on the back cover. Nice quality paper and printing. Complete, in order, and well-documented. And hey, they even superimpose the sound effects over the panels themselves, instead of simply noting them in the margins — a novel approach for Dark Horse. A nice package, overall.

Here are a few carefully-chosen samples, captured about as well as possible on the weird scanner in the other room:


So. I recommend it! And there are at least two more of on the way, both of which I recall as superior in at least one respect. The only problem you might have is in actually finding a copy. Although it’s part of the same push that Dark Horse has been giving to Kasuo Umezu’s Scary Book series, you can find the latter anywhere and — I swear — nobody’s ever heard of Museum of Terror, much less put out an order on it. The only place I managed to track down a copy was in Japantown. If your local Borders doesn’t carry it, I just suggest ordering it online. Amazon’s got a good price, especially for how damned thick this thing is.

A Cosmetic Conundrum

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part seven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under a different title; something like “The Problem With Game Consoles”. People seemed to take this article more seriously than I intended.

In May I finally saw a PlayStation 3 up-close – and dear lord. Whereas the Xbox 360 at least puts on a pretense of tenability, sucking in its gut like a real man, Sony’s system sets a new standard for girth. Maybe it was the rotating display, walled behind likely-bulletproof Plexiglass – yet I swear it must be the most outrageously massive game console that’s ever been designed. And that’s on top of looking like a space ship based on the template of a waffle iron. Whereas the Sega Genesis looked like you could top-load a CD into it, the PS3 looks like you could top-load a side of bacon.

The Crying Game

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part six of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under the title “Can Videogames Make You Cry?”.

A few weeks ago, Bowen Research published the results of a survey, on the role of emotion in videogames. Hugh Bowen polled 535 gamers on their own views and history, with the end goal to rough some kind of an objective analysis out of their subjective experiences, and thereby maybe to shed some light on what emotional effect videogames have had in the past. The paper is well, and humbly, written; its conclusions, though, are less than revelatory: the only genre that tends to elicit reasonably complex emotion is RPGs (presumably Japanese ones), while other genres all inspire at least some basic kind of motivational urge in the player – be it rage or fear or what have you. Meanwhile, the paper is full of comments about Aeris, and the profound affect of her death on people who had never played Phantasy Star II.

The problem, I suppose, is in the question being asked: “Can videogames make you cry?”. It’s a binary question about a complex issue, much like asking whether Americans are happy and then concluding “sometimes!” And indeed, Bowen’s answer seems to be “well, yes… probably. In theory.” A second issue is the way Bowen approached the issue as a matter of statistics – and then based his analysis on the subjective responses of a skewed sample. “Gamers”, as with any obsessives, have by nature a peculiar perspective of their medium – a medium which, furthermore, is not yet refined as an expressive platform.

The question should not be whether videogames are capable of eliciting complex emotion – as, given the complex analog weave of our brains, anything can result in an emotional response of any depth and sophistication. Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish), how much emotional potential videogames might ideally hold, and – assuming some degree of innate potential – how best to insinuate emotion into the framework or theory of a videogame. Or rather perhaps, how best to cull emotion from that same framework.

Home of the Underdogs

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part five of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, then reprinted by BusinessWeek, under the title “The Lasting Impact of “Failed” Consoles”.

The videogame industry is usually portrayed as a battle of titans: Xbox versus PlayStation versus the Nintendo Whatever, butting heads over the biggest market share. The winner, by virtue of winning, will lay the law for future generations. This is a tough industry, where the ruthless survive and the weak or incomprehensible are savaged and devoured.

A curious thing about videogames is that, underneath the bluster, you’ll nearly always find that the “losing” platforms – from the Sega Saturn to the Turbografx-16 – are in many ways either objectively superior to or subjectively more intriguing than what “won”; what they typically lack is balance. Like root beers or politicians, typically the top candidates rise to the top not out of pure excellence; they rise because they serve the basic desires of the greatest audience while offending the fewest.

Mascots and Messages

  • Reading time:16 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part four of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under a different title; something like “The Problem with Mascots”. Somewhere between this article’s completion and its publication, one of my more vocal “fans” started a forum thread about Sonic the Hedgehog. He felt a few of the points were similar; I think something in my description of Sonic. Considering this is one of my least favorite articles, I sometimes wonder if it was worth the bother. Still, here it is again.

I wrote a while ago that there’s maybe one good Sonic game for every two flops. At the time I was halfway kidding, setting up the premise for a silly “top ten” list. Where I wasn’t kidding, I was speaking from a historical perspective rather than a contemporary one. As much as I have loved the guy, I’m aware that Sega hasn’t done too well by Sonic for a long time – to the point where he’s now the butt of dumb jokes on semi-respectable business websites. Since the Genesis we’ve seen, what, one truly great Sonic game?

When Sonic and Sega came back with the Dreamcast, they did it with a collective bang. Everyone cheered at his return, and at Sega’s. Then came a less interesting sequel. Then Sega went out of the console business, and suddenly there didn’t seem much point to Sonic anymore. More games kept coming out, each worse than the last, each building on the least compelling parts of Sonic Adventure. People stopped caring about the character, then started mocking him. Sega tried to address the problem with Shadow: a grittier, cooler answer to Sonic. Without even playing the game, people immediately wrote off the character, Sega, and everybody involved with the franchise.

The problem wasn’t really Shadow, or his game – even the concept behind it, for what it was worth. Heck, people didn’t even have to play it to dismiss it. The problem was that it didn’t seem like Sega knew what the hell it was doing anymore.

And Then There Were None

  • Reading time:25 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part three of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Five that Fell”.

For all its immaturity, you can tell the videogame industry is getting on in years. With increasing, even alarming, frequency, the faces of our youth have begun to disappear – forced from the market, absorbed into conglomerates, restructured into oblivion, or simply retired from the grind.

The first big wave hit back in the mid ’90s, when increased development costs, the demise of the American arcade, and the shift from 2D development left dozens of small and mid-sized developers – from Toaplan to Technos – out in the cold. Those that didn’t die completely – Sunsoft, Vic Tokai – often pulled out of the US market, or even out of the videogame business. Western outfits braced for the storm by merging with larger and ever larger publishing conglomerates, rationalizing that it was the only way to survive in an uncertain market.

The second wave came only a few years ago, after the burst of the tech bubble. In effort to streamline costs, parent companies began to dump their holdings left and right, regardless of the legacy or talent involved. Those that didn’t often went bankrupt, pulling all of their precious acquisitions down with them. Sometimes the talent moved on and regrouped under a new game; still, when an era’s over, it’s over.

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

The Ends of the World

  • Reading time:27 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.

For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.

Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway.

This Week’s Releases (May 22-26, 2006)

  • Reading time:9 mins read

by [name redacted]

Episode forty-one of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

Steambot Chronicles
Irem/Atlus
PlayStation 2
Tuesday

You have likely read, if you like to read, of a game called Bumpy Trot; this site in particular, in the hands of Japan columnist William Rogers, has taken every possible opportunity to name-check the game – resulting in a blurb on the its Atlus USA site. Here’s where I remind you of its Western name – the Haruki Murakami-esque Steambot Chronicles – and mention that it really is nifty, for what it is. For a more elaborate description you can turn to NextGen’s “Ten Best Games in Japan” column for last year; for here, suffice that it’s sort of like a Zelda game done right, thrown into a post-GTA sandbox, and produced on a shoestring budget by a sincere bunch of underdogs who aren’t used to making this kind of game. So it’s a little wonky, and a little glitchy, and it doesn’t know what it’s not supposed to do, which results in as many weird decisions as inspired ones. It’s not really made for prime time, and yet it’s got so much heart and it’s got such good ideas that it’s got the workings for a real sleeper hit. Give it some hype and some word-of-mouth, and this game will surpass expectations.

Atlus has done a pretty good job on the localization; the voices are… solid enough, and the writing is appropriately stark. Though something tells me the game might have made more of an impression with its original Japanese name, the new one maybe fits the game a little better. This is only one of maybe a half-dozen impressive new acquisitions Atlus USA had to show at E3; if Atlus can just get the word out the way it did with Trauma Center, this could be one of the company’s best years yet.

This Week’s Releases (May 15-19, 2006)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Episode forty of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

New Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo
Nintendo DS
Monday

Out of all the pre-release devisiveness, in my experience New SMB takes the ribbon. Every time the game’s brought up, the Internet melts just a little. There’s no pleasing anybody! Maybe that has something to do with the game’s own conflicts: it wants to both revisit the style of Super Marios 1 and 3 for the NES and to “update” it with all the advances since Super Mario World. It wants to both play on nostalgia and to attract all the new and disillusioned eyes who have gravitated toward the DS. It wants to both be the successor to the Super Mario Bros. mantle and to come off as something altogether new.

So what we’ve got is a forward-pressing 2D platformer (as with the NES games) that calls upon the moves introduced in Super Mario 64 to help Mario more precisely explore a 3D world, flashy gimmicks introduced in Smash Bros. as a kind of a joke, and a whole lot of silly scripted events and mechanic-wanking intended to impress the pants off of anyone who thinks he knows how Super Mario Bros. works. And yet, it’s kind of fun. Maybe it’s a little too concerned with the past instead of with doing its own thing – and maybe it’s too concerned with making the past appealing to people who weren’t there at the time – yet maybe the gamers are a little too concerned about Mario.

In its overkill, its mix of old and new, the game clearly isn’t taking itself very seriously. The game gives off an air of exuberance; it knows it’s just screwing around, and it doesn’t care. Within those constraints, New SMB is pretty neat. The past has had its time; if you’re going to bring it up again, you’d better either take it somewhere new and inspirational or have shameless fun with what’s there. Ikaruga and Jonathan Blow’s Braid do the former; New SMB does the latter. Fair enough.