It’s definitely a reasonable point of view. Certainly no developer has any responsibility to be particularly literary or high-minded. Anyone who listens to Idle Thumbs knows my personal distaste for the game is hyperbolic and probably comically exaggerated at times. But, actually, it’s a genuine frustration, because to me it is emblematic a larger issue. Here, slightly tweaked, is the comment I made in response to Leigh’s post:

“I just don’t see why this is based on Dante’s Inferno. If, as some have claimed, the core market doesn’t care about the game’s adherence to its ’source material’ — and surely it doesn’t — what usefulness is it to claim association in the first place?

“This could have been simply a game influenced by Dante’s imagery, as so many creative works have been over the centuries, rather than actually claiming to be any kind of even remotely meaningful adaptation of the poem. To me, it’s an amazing vindication of the claims of video games’ inability to thoughtfully construct ANY kind of meaningful thought: here’s how video games adapt one of Western culture’s defining literary works, and it consists of brutally ripping apart demons for eight hours, surely complete with idiotic throwaway one-liners.

“I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

“That’s clearly not a dealbreaker for me, since I still play a lot of video games, including the ones covered in the category I described above, and it doesn’t bother me all that much; if it did, I wouldn’t play, write about, and talk about so many games.

“But by claiming to have anything to do with Dante’s Inferno, this game loudly echoes that trend in a particularly frustrating way. It could have simply been called ‘Righteous Duty’ or whatever bullshit name [edit: Clint Hocking suggests 'Demon Hunter,' 'To Hell and Back,' 'Love be Damned,' 'Infernal'] with the same plot and mechanics — they could have even given Dante a shoutout in their ridiculous PR pitches — and I don’t think I would have batted an eye. But as the game industry’s big-budget, highly-publicized representation of a work that everybody knows by cultural osmosis, even if they’ve never read a word of it, it’s a big huge fucking depressing failure.”

God of War, which many have pointed out as a counterpoint to the general opinion I espouse, takes that latter approach. But while I’m not personally a God of War fan, it doesn’t offend me as a gamer; it’s just not my kind of game, mechanically speaking.

God of War is directly influenced by Greek mythology, but it doesn’t claim any kind of definitive association with a particular work in its title. Rather, it uses the cultural source material as a rough touchstone. Dante’s Inferno, ironically, appears to depart even more from its source material than God of War does, but makes an implicit claim that it is more related.

As Clint Hocking points out in a comment following mine, this also has the side effect of delegitimizing any hypothetical future video game interpretations of The Divine Comedy. (There have been “adaptations” in the past, but none with anywhere near the visibility and marketing might of an Electronic Arts production.) It basically guarantees the video game take on Dante’s epic to be juvenile nonsense. It may be a fun video game; I make no claims about that one way or the other, but it certainly isn’t what its title says it is.

I also don’t mean to imply I have any desire for a better Divine Comedy game; it’s never something I’ve particularly longed for, and I don’t mean to call for it now. I’m not saying EA should be making a game closer to the source material; I’m saying they should never have claimed the association to begin with.

If none of my arguments have been at all convincing, just load up this incredible video and skip to about 4:50. Maybe the whole interview is a piss take. But is that really relevant, when it appears to be 100% accurate anyway?

In supporting Ashton in his efforts, EA is offering Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower on Twitter a copy of every game EA makes in 2009 for the gaming system of their choice and, to have a character based on them that can be played in The Sims 3 if Ashton wins.  The Sims 3 will also donate 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the 1 millionth person who follows Ashton on Twitter (REGARDLESS of a win).

Earlier this week, actor Ashton Kutcher announced via YouTube that the number of his Twitter account followers rivaled that of the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, and that upon beating them to the 1 million member milestone, he would punk CNN founder Ted Turner if the Internet made it happen.  (Click here to watch the video that started it all.)

Specifically, he said he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner’s house and post the video of it if he won the showdown.  To sweeten the deal, Ashton also promised to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day on April 24.

Check out this update on EA’s offer by Ashton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8AcfKGaEI

[I have no idea what "event" this is all about. I'll leave out the PR contact addresses, but at the bottom of the press release it looks like somebody forgot to actually fill out all of the press release template information. Observe:]

Promotion Name
Try phrases like: dramatic savings, clearance, overstocked, reduced rates, buy 1 get 1 free, treat yourself, you deserve it, and don’t miss out. Insert a link in the promotion to your website. Because links are tracked, you can see which promotions generate the most interest in your customers.

Our Price: $
List Price: $
S & H: $

Use this block to tell the audience about your company. A short paragraph or a few sentences including your company’s location, description and website is ideal.

# # #
Add any trademarks here

[This whole amazingly ridiculous block of text appeared in my inbox just minutes ago, accompanied by the following image:]

So anyway, here are three for now. All instruments and vocals are me.

• Building Fences (download)
• The Slow Creeping Realization (download)
• Tell Me (download)

As I find more and tag them, I may make additional posts. There are probably a couple dozen in total, including instrumentals and bizarre random stuff.

I don’t really want to get deep into MGS4 here, because there were some things about it I liked, but I was struck by some of the comments given by GameSpot editors in the video posted alongside the choice, at least for the minute or two of it I watched. Most of them had to do with the game’s storytelling aspects.

“It finds a perfect harmony between gameplay and storytelling,” said one editor. “Some people said, ‘I watched it as much as I played it,’ but that’s part of what makes it so incredible,” added another.

To me, MGS4 had less of a harmony between gameplay and storytelling, and more of a yo-yo. I find it somewhat sobering that in a decade of astonishing progress in rendering, physics, interface, scale, and complexity, the high watermark for video game storytelling (at least, according to one particular site, notable for being both highly ubiquitous and read, and extremely long-running in internet time) has gone from being exemplified by elegance, breathtaking creativity, and amazingly sharp dialogue to being exemplified by overblown melodrama, ludicrously cumbersome plotting, and cheap tragedy.

It’s probably also worth noting, since this is ostensibly about games, that measured either in terms of pure hours or more charitably as a proportion of overall game time, Metal Gear Solid’s non-interactive cutscene content (including bits where you just move a camera around) probably outweigh Grim Fandango’s by several times—and Grim Fandango is a graphic adventure game.

Just sayin’.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. What at first seemed like unfortunate sparseness now feels to me like a canvas for emergent gameplay (those well-worn buzzwords). There’s your recurring sickness; the unreliability of found weaponry; the combination of almost uniformly dry environments, video game-y inflammable objects, and fire that propagates convincingly.

The game’s persistent component parts feel designed to convey a convincingly (but not flashily) coherent world, but even more importantly to increase the chances of memorable things happening.

In addition to progressing the game’s main quest line, you can help out your buddies with their own tangential objectives, sabotage arms dealers’ competition to open up new weapon options, or perform hit jobs for that old game chestnut, the deep mysterious unnamed voice.

I find myself constantly telling people stories about my own Far Cry 2 experience. Sometimes they involve the game’s rather basic plot, and sometimes they don’t. This is not something I usually find myself doing.

There was the time, very early in my playthrough, when I got out of my 80s-era hatchback to track down a diamond in the jungle using the game’s No Country For Old Men-esque homing beacon, forgot where I parked the car, passed out from malaria trying to find it, and was safely awoken by the buddy character I had recently rescued.

Or the time I was patiently scouting out an enemy encampment with my sniper rifle scope and startled by nearby sudden movement, reflexively snapping my crosshairs over to the source — and finding my sights trained on a young gazelle that had wandered out from some overgrowth.

Or the time I had just blown up an entire base in a domino-like chain reaction, with a single well-placed rocket; turning to leave, I found myself blinded by the reflection of the high noon sun on bright white sand dunes — and out of the shimmering brilliance trotted a pair of zebras.

These events, just a few examples of the many Far Cry 2 moments I take pleasure in relating, are not even particularly remarkable in and of themselves. Part of the game’s success is its sense of restraint — another area that works against it in the short term, but for it if you decide to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Unlike its predecessor (with which it shares only the most tangential thematic bonds of environmental openness and…shooting), there are no supernatural or science fiction elements to Far Cry 2.

Certainly, the player can soak up more bullets than the enemies, and the AI is not going to win any strategic matchups, but when it comes to the setting and the feel, few exaggerated liberties are taken — a surprisingly (and, to me, unfortunately) uncommon approach in video games.

Africa is not rendered in a particularly stylized way, and the events that take place are often only as over the top as the player makes them (and that potential is there, if you want it).

This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go. One doesn’t really appreciate Far Cry 2’s attention to detail in that regard until the time has been invested to generate enough of the unique moments that result.

Far Cry 2, headed up by creative director Clint Hocking (a vocal proponent of exploration and player-driven experiences in games), is not for everybody. It has its flaws — the frequency at which enemies respawn, for example, is frequently and justifiably called out.

Some of its impressive features, like its partially self-constructing narrative, are handled quietly enough that most players may not even notice them at work. And, in the end, some may find its fundamental gameplay building blocks too repetitive to hold interest to completion.

But Far Cry 2 does succeed where many games do not, despite frequent claims by marketers — and very few shooters even attempt to go there at all. On the opposite side of the design spectrum as the Half-Lifes and Call of Dutys (impressive games in their own right), Far Cry 2 doesn’t so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player as it does to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, letting the player loose in that world.

From the checkout line, I noticed the game on the right, Shattered Suns, which from a distance appeared to be Games for Windows-branded; compare the front panel strip with Petroglyph’s GFW-branded RTS Universe at War. Though Games for Windows Live has failed to make even the slightest splash, I’m an advocate of the broader GFW initiative, which aims to standardize various elements of PC gaming in useful ways, so I wandered over to check it out.

As you can clearly see up close, developer and publisher Clear Crown Studios (a small local outfit, as it turns out, just south of San Francisco) simply listed itself and the game title at the top, using the same layout, color scheme, and a similar font to the Games for Windows strip.

That a studio would do such a thing struck me as bizarre on two fronts: that it didn’t simply enroll in the GFW program, which as far as I’m aware is completely free to developers and has the potential of getting your game some Microsoft co-marketing, and that Clear Crown apparently believes GFW is widely-known or ubiquitous enough that some sales would be coaxed out of this ploy.

As it turns out, the game—also an RTS—released to  pretty conclusively poor reviews and my curiosity didn’t blossom into a purchase. So the tactic (”Games faux Windows”?) didn’t help the button line today, but they say no publicity is bad publicity.

Update: As my Idle Thumbs colleague Jake Rodkin reminds me, participating in Games for Windows is only free in the sense that it doesn’t involve royalties or fees to Microsoft—obviously the time and effort involved in implementing the standards must be factored into development time and budget, which is not necessarily feasible for all teams. My point was simply that Clear Crown felt the program’s cachet was worthwhile enough to try and create the impression of participation, but if it really considered it of value, it could have enrolled fully—and if not, just left the fake branding off entirely.

This week we featured special guest Steve Gaynor, designer at 2K Marin on the upcoming BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams. Steve’s a great guy, and he writes a great blog—I’m sure you will find his comments sufficiently insightful and enlightening.

The biggest topic of the podcast was BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, whose announcement event Nick and I attended, but there’s also discussion of weird Fable II shenanigans, Yakuza 2, and a dubious sponsorship by little-known Gaming Grub competitor Ultra Boost. iTunes!

That’s not to say the game’s mechanics surrounding those elements define the game, but I’ll focus on them here because they are areas not commonly explored in the actual gameplay mechanics of most fantasy-set action RPG.

At least, they aren’t often included with this kind of impressively egalitarian scope. With remarkably few exceptions, all property that seems like it should be ownable in the game can be purchased, be it a private home or a place of business. This includes a castle.

And matching that breadth, so too can you marry or engage in (strictly off-screen) intercourse with nearly any non-quest-related NPC with whom your sexual orientation and gender are compatible; each citizen is classified as straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nobody in Albion has passed a defense of marriage amendment.

Developer Lionhead Studios (and, one suspects, designer Peter Molyneux in particular) very much wants you to be aware of its sex-related feature set: the first item I encountered for sale by a merchant was a condom. Not long afterwards, my dog excitedly guided me to some buried treasure, and then panted and wagged his tail excitedly as I dug up another prophylactic.

Propositioning partners basically involves performing a bunch of wordless, amusing social gestures in front of them until their social meters indicate they’re willing, and then inviting them to your bed with an expression you can acquire in the game. Marriage proposals are similar, with a wedding ring icon on the “love” meter indicating when they will acquiesce to your proposal.

Those condoms come into play when you do the deed. There’s a binary choice of protected sex or unprotected sex each time; heterosexual couples can bear children.

Essentially, every non-quest-related interpersonal interaction you will ever have with other human beings in Fable II is predicated on acting like an idiot in close proximity to them for a few minutes. The expressions are well-animated, enjoyably voice-acted, and enjoyable, and it’s fun to learn more of them over the course of the game, but the mechanics behind them are so transparent that they become nothing more than a means to an end, which doesn’t feel like what the game intended.

That’s the downside of giving you so many options when it comes to personal things like marriage: the overall impact is dulled, because they have to be replicated systematically for everyone in the world. Even after I was gone for ten full years undertaking a grueling quest of world-changing importance, having returned physically bulkier and extremely scarred with all my hair gone, my (lesbian) wife simply greeted me with one of her usual exclamations of, “So nice to have you home!” and another token gift of a health potion.

(Quite some time later, she abruptly divorced me for no discernible reason.)

My dog, on the other hand, seemed genuinely thrilled to see me again, and I was informed he had been loyally visiting the location of my departure with the firm conviction I would return. It resonated with me much more strongly, and as big a proponent of procedural and systems-driven mechanics as I am, it did say something for the storytelling usefulness of individually-crafted content.

It helps that the dog actually is a genuinely enjoyable component of the game — Molyneux’s pre-release hype of canine companionship panned out. The dog helps you find useful things, joins into your fights, sticks by your side, endears himself adorably to townsfolk, and generally acts like a dog.

That’s one big advantage the dog has over human interaction: while the game’s human interaction is perhaps necessarily abstracted, the dog’s role is a lot closer to depicting reality. One of my favorite moments in Fable II is when I start running and my dog follows suit, overtaking me and anticipating where I might be going, as if we’re having an impromptu race. It feels real in a way the game’s systems-driven human interaction doesn’t.

So as it turns out, it was the real estate mechanic that became a major drive for me to acquire wealth and fame in the world of Albion, possibly superseding the critical quest path in that regard.
“BUY THE CASTLE AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS,” (caps original) a giddy Molyneux screamed at game journalists in a note included with the review code. Intrigued by his exhortation, I made it an unofficial goal to do so. One of the first things I did after reaching the game’s first major town was to spend more time than I want to admit working as a blacksmith (a golf swing-like mini-game) until I had enough money to buy the blacksmith’s shop.

Businesses will generate income, while homes can be inhabited or rented out, so the more property you own, the more money you can make to acquire more property. You earn even when you’re not playing <i>Fable II</i>, but as far as I can tell you make 12 times as much when the game is on (paid out every five minutes, as opposed to every hour when it’s off, based on my calculations — yes, I calculated it), so I admit to pulling the NES-era shenanigans of leaving my console running overnight.

It became almost an obsession of mine to buy every building possible. I think I must have done so, or at least gotten pretty close, because at one point, totally separate from any quest-based objectives, I received an Xbox 360 achievement that declared me Queen of Albion, apparently by default because I owned so much of the kingdom.

Like many other parts of Fable II, the property mechanic works into the morality system. In addition to the customary good versus evil duality, there are also things like karma, and attractiveness, and how much you are feared. When you buy a building, its asking price will be affected by how the current owner feels about you, and you can affect regional property values by committing crimes or going so far as killing homeowners. When you own property, you can raise or lower rents or prices, which then affects
your karma.

Though I’ve only played through Fable II once so far, I plan on playing through it again with the intention of creating a considerably different kind of character, with a different public perception — the game gives me the impression that is quite possible.

I’m curious to see the comments on Fable II in contrast with those on Bethesda’s upcoming Fallout 3. Both are Western-style RPGs (that is, they put an emphasis on player-driven, rather than tightly-directed, character definition and development) that purport to be heavily about moral choice and living worlds.

Both seem to want to coax similar feelings out of their players, but they are wildly different in their execution. Fallout 3 is darkly tongue-in-cheek, has a vast sprawling nonlinear world, uses a pretty
in-depth shooting system, and (as far as I know) doesn’t do much with sex and real estate. Fable II is often joyfully goofy (though it has its darker moments), consists of locations connected only by a fast-travel system, features streamlined and button-mashy combat.

In my gaming fantasy land, I’d actually like to see a convergence of the two: a more Bethesda-influenced Fable game, retaining Fable’s bright, inviting color palette and unique/social economic mechanics, but set in a truly open world rather than a disconnected one.

Oh, and please put the next one on the PC, so I can just point at the guy I want to select rather than make vague suggestions to the game’s slightly-too-context sensitive targeting system.

But for now, despite some elements that lay its video gameness a little too bare Fable II is an extremely playable, and impressively unique, expedition in an inviting fantasy world.

This week features plenty of hands-on reporting on Diablo III and StarCraft II, as well as discussion about the various Blizzard announcements (some of which are a little controversial) and a bit from TGS. There’s also plenty of hands-on from LittleBigPlanet and Fable II. Hands-on is in the air. ‘Tis the season.

Also, I composed and recorded the track “The Fanboy’s Lament,” this episode’s namesake. It can be heard during the podcast in context, with the discussion of the events that prompted it, or downloaded directly from the Idle Thumbs front page. The goal is to feature this kind of musical interlude from time to time on the show if people enjoy it.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS if you haven’t yet, and we do have iTunes up now. Tell your friends about Idle Thumbs! We don’t really know how to promote this thing.

And feel free to send questions, comments, or feedback to questions@idlethumbs.net — we’ll read and address it on the show.

First things first: Idle Thumbs is back in podcast form. Go check it out. If you never knew Idle Thumbs existed in the first place (a likely scenario), feel free to read on for some self-indulgent history and explanation:

In 2004, as part of a team of mainly San Francisco Bay Area- and United Kingdom-based writers, I helped launch Idle Thumbs, a gaming site that (we think) at least partially succeeded in its goal of delivering video game writing simultaneously entertaining and informed. It’s hard to pin down what exactly the Thumbs ethic was (there was more than one heated argument to that end) but it definitely had one.

At least, for a little while. As it turns out, that sort of endeavor is difficult to maintain indefinitely, particularly when you’re doing it entirely in your free time. On top of that, the limited-but-fairly-unusual exposure we got through the site became for many of us something of a springboard to other (paying) jobs involving games.

The site became a zombie, occasionally revived but largely languishing, and our forum community dwindled to a small cadre of uncommonly-dedicated daily posters. We’re hoping they’ll get some more company in the coming weeks and months.

In the years since the Thumb’s conception, all of us involved have held the idea of the site near and dear to our hearts, and it’s gone through a few brief resurgences. Finally, we think we’ve hit on a way to bring the Thumb in a way that’s sustainable and enjoyable: as a weekly podcast.

Hey, listen!

Certainly there are already innumerable gaming podcasts to enjoy, but we think we’ve got some good things going for us. We all work in the industry from day to day—myself as an editor with Gamasutra, Nick Breckon as an editor with my former employer Shacknews, and Jake Rodkin as a graphic designer and community coordinator at developer Telltale Games—and, we think importantly, we record in person for Enhanced On-Air Chemistry. No Skype. Discussion is off-the-cuff and informed.

A few notes: Our website is somewhat temporary; the design will grow out a bit as we bulk up with more episodes. Stop by our forums; help that community grow. Send us questions; we’ll answer them on air. And proper iTunes integration should be ready any time now, whenever Apple gets around to it. (Update: iTunes support is here! Get it now!)

Tell your friends! Coming up this week we’ll have plenty of hands-on BlizzCon discussion. And possibly a new song. And more.