Bustle:

Basically, #GamerGate flooded Frank with inane, wild-eyed criticisms and conspiracy theories until she couldn’t take any more. While she may have been considering a career change for a while prior, as she alluded to above, it’s clear that this latest deluge was the final straw.

I’m not sure whether a writer at Bustle meant to be so on-the-nose with his assessment of my nine-year career, but he’s right. Maybe I’ve been looking for an “out” for a while now.

I am giving myself permission to do something else with my life. What follows is why.

There’s a lot of deliberate misinformation being passed around—some of it downright defamatory—and much has to do with a 500-word op-ed published under my name in The Guardian. (I say “under my name” because the editorial process actually involves a lot of people and their expertise.)

The Guardian article was edited, fact-checked, and approved by a legal department, a process that took four days (maybe three, plus time zones). The Guardian itself is an old and venerable institution, and I am still very proud to have my name appear there.

In the first and several subsequent drafts I provided a disclosure, indicating that I do know Ms. Quinn and financially support her work, but the piece was ultimately published without it, since my views do, in fact, represent those of the paper. There is no “conflict of interest,” the paper determined, in my knowing one of the people about whom the opinion piece concerns. (The footnote has since been revised and updated, however, to reflect everything.)

I find it interesting, though, that my one “controversial” article, the one that “established” me as a “corrupted” video games journalist lacking “ethics,” was—unlike the many, many unwashed essays I have released into the wild—the same one that endured the most rigorous of due editorial processes.

It’s “controversial,” of course, because I decried the harassment and abuse lobbed toward a pair of people, one of whom I joke with online and see at conferences and also pay a few dollars to each month. For the record, I know a lot of people from all walks of life, joke with them online, see a lot of people at conferences, and pay for their work, ordinarily without injury to my career or reputation.

I also like to think I have taken a hardline stance against harassment and bullying, irrespective of whether I’ve ever met the person targeted or, really, whether I even like the person. It’s all immaterial: Abuse and harassment are never okay. That isn’t a particularly feminist stance.

I think, for me, and for anyone who knows me—or even for those who don’t know me, as even Vox refers to me as “a largely uncontroversial reporter and critic”—it’s inexplicable that my career would die on the hill of a single 500-word column. (In stark comparison, the blog you’re reading right now is nearly 1500 words.)

I started out as a staff reviewer in 2005 at EGM, writing 90- or 120-word reviews of video games (PS2, PSP, DS). I worked at Ziff Davis Media 2006-2008. In 2009, after a yearlong hiatus, I got it into my head that I could sneak back into the industry, keep my head down, and write increasingly weird essays about video games. The goal was to keep myself humbly invisible. (I have written before, very openly, about having been diagnosed with agoraphobia in 2008. The same essay describes my father’s Alzheimer’s.)

Since then I have written two whole video game reviews, both commissioned by Paste. The rest of the time I have written, for the most part, essays about my parents dying, or losing my apartment or the dog or whatever. I have also written three times for Vice Motherboard (once about Chop Suey, once about Cho Aniki and, the last time, about Snood), once for 1UP.com (a Mystery House retrospective), and once for the New York Times (“When Death Makes Us Laugh”). That stuff is fun for me.

Oddly, the essay for which I won last year’s Games Journalism Prize is essentially a video game preview, but it is, again, also about death. I have rarely written about people I know—and when I have, I’ve written about people who are dead, to the exclusion of almost all else—because I am a weird, unhappy woman who is obsessed with death.

In 2012 I explained to L. Rhodes the reasoning behind my weird-ass writing: “I didn’t like what came up when you googled my name, and instead of shrinking away, I wanted to take more ownership of the kind of writing I do. To take back my byline, basically.”

It is amazing to me that, after years of exerting some intellectual effort toward this end, I am back at Square One.

Anger they don't control, directed at people they haven't researched, for articles they don't read, on topics they don't care about.

— Christian McCrea (@ChristianMcCrea) September 4, 2014

Baffled by widespread reception to The Guardian piece, yes, I am, but no, I was not blindsided.

As #GamerGate took off—initially, it was a movement, organized mainly on 4chan, denouncing the mainstream games press for its lack of coverage of Ms. Quinn’s apparently salacious sex life—I, too, had to wonder at the press’s imperious silence. I gritted my teeth. No one’s going to say something? Sure, fine, I’ll do it.

And oh, man, what a sucky feeling, to intuit that taking a hard-assed stance opposing abuse (of all things!) is going to somehow put you through the wringer.

I knew I wasn’t the one for the job; rather, I was the last person for the job, precisely because I subscribe to Ms. Quinn’s Patreon. (On that: $5 a month, for three months… that’s $15. I am being taken to task for $15, far less than any journalist’s bar tab.)

To be sure, GamerGate’s debate about Patreon, about those inbuilt “conflicts of interest,” arrived a few months late. In June, in reply to an anonymous question, I spoke openly about the poor pay freelancers make—usually between $50 and $100 per article here in the US, if they are ever paid at all—and, after hemming and hawwing and some over-transparency/TMI about my reasons, I launched a Patreon of my own. I have now had a Patreon for three whole months. (In 2012 I was absolutely prolific. My writing earned me, that year, $500.)

When I launched it, a lot of game developers wondered “aloud” (read: on Twitter) whether they ethically can contribute to a writer’s Patreon. It is an interesting conundrum. I asked a Patreon employee whether people could just contribute anonymously. Hell, I don’t want to know who my readers are.

“Well,” the Patreon employee sighed, “no, but they can use a fake name.”

I have remarked before that nobody, not even Patreon, is quite clear on what “Patreon” is, but we are already criminalizing its use.

When I saw The Guardian’s approved final draft, I knew there would be problems. The Patreon disclosure was gone, Phil Fish’s name had been added, and now the word “gamers” was used. I was disheartened, but not very surprised, to peek into 4chan and discover, in real-time, people confusing my Guardian article decrying abuse, for Leigh Alexander’s “Death of the Gamers” piece. I realized, finally, that I was witnessing a coordinated attack on my own career which, to someone who has never read my work, is apparently indistinguishable from Leigh’s.

It is “damn sad.”

Someone recently asked me on Twitter whether—knowing what I know now—I would do it all over again. I got a little distracted, spent a couple Tweets defending the op-ed, but the truth is, yes. Yes, in a heartbeat.

It’s almost ugly to say, but I’m actually grateful to GamerGate. All this time, I’ve felt beholden to video games, and to the people who make them or play them or read and write about them. Maybe it really is a conflict of interests: my own. It’s conflicts all the way down.

And really, my God, I don’t have to do this. I’ve been given permission to move on to another audience. I have faith in my abilities to do something, anything else, without feeling inhibited or limited by my hobby.

At the fine old age of 32, this once-partying spinster is finally getting married, with the hope of starting a family. With my parents gone, and a new family present (omnipresent, actually—sorry to my mother-in-law), I am beholden to an entirely new set of people.

I can finally understand and appreciate why I’ve watched so many games journalists walk away from all this*—and, bless them, you usually never have to hear about it.

Recently I wrote a piece for The Guardian. Some of you wondered—on this blog, on Twitter, at the Guardian, on discrete forums and image boards, and in our inboxes—why the article, as it first appeared, did not disclose a relationship with Ms. Quinn.

The Guardian actually nixed the disclosure of my relationship with Ms. Quinn, simply because it didn’t strike editors or legal—that is, The Guardian’s legal department, which approved the final draft—as a “conflict of interest” in an op/ed about abuse. The publication determined the disclosure I provided didn’t matter, since my piece is not a review of her work, but a 500-word blog about Internet harassment.

In my disclosure’s original draft, I mention that I have never reviewed one of Quinn’s games (or, ever before, written about her at all) and that I am a supporter of her work. The Guardian piece, at my request, has been updated with brief remarks to that effect.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

Update: A follow-up.

Apologies for shuttering comments, but it seems like the endgame here is further obfuscation, when I feel everything stated above is quite clear.

***

My name is Jenn Frank. You may know my byline: I have worked in the video games industry, at varying velocities, for nine years.

You might best know me from my earliest “mainstream” work—1UP.com, the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, a few reviews in Computer Gaming World, a podcast called Retronauts—or you might know me from my incredibly biased “conflict of interest” work, like creative nonfiction, essays, or my participation in the creation of games like VIDEOBALL and ROM. (I scrupulously leave Super Hexagon out of this because I was paid for that work, a onetime fee, which was the same fee Cavanagh had paid another voice actor before me; and also because, before that collaboration, he and I and Chipzel did not know one another. The Internet, it seems, works in funny ways.)

Though I understand much of my visibility or industry “cred” comes from the former category—all that salaried work or, put more blunt, my understanding of what it means to work for a gigantic outlet with some sort of corporate fiscal backing—I also recognize that literally every accolade I’ve received, including a BAFTA nomination and last year’s Games Journalism Prize, was awarded to “creative” work derived from that latter category.

I also recognize that this same work is often pointed-to, or (with my permission, absolutely) republished by mainstream outlets that have never paid me. All of this is simply to say, some of my very most respected work, which is often lauded and even republished by mainstream outlets, also rarely pays. This isn’t even a talking point: We all know that “creative work” seldom pays.

But the accolades do mean a lot to me; in my old life, I was often warned against writing blogs “too long” or “too heady.” And as a community manager, my job was to protect everyone but myself. Leaving behind that old life for this new one, means a great deal to me.

Here I would add that, as a professional freelancer in this current job-bubble economy, being able to use my degree and experience, at all, are luxuries, not rights. This is why I am so quick to point out how happy I am with my lot in life, to ironically not be “biased” or otherwise be beholden to any given mainstream outlet anymore, or to use—potentially to the ire of others—my “voice” and also years of training, in any way I see fit.

Not only do I rarely have to work with an actual editor, I get to crowdsource my innermost ideas and conflicts via Twitter—after all, my views don’t represent anyone’s in particular, so I can share them all and check what sticks—and, also, I always type in a plaintext word processor with no built-in spellcheck. I am shooting from the hip, here.

So by all means, let us have a continued conversation about ethics, nepotism, Patreon, and how we pay and don’t pay. None of these quite seems related, but all certainly are. Everything is about being uncompromised.

I am a freelance journalist, and Patreon is a website I will tell you, right now, I absolutely use, not as a supplement to my income, but instead as my primary source of income.

By no means am I unhappy with this circumstance: Patreon affords me the use of my degree, a “creative writing” degree from Northwestern University’s English department, which I acknowledge is not a degree we, culturally, reward. But it is an incredibly competitive degree, awarded to a small annual pool of students, and an even smaller pool gets to do an independent study, and then those independent studies are torn down by a panel of professors and Chicago-area writers, and all of this is just to say that ten years ago I graduated with honors after persevering through a number of hoops.

And no, none of that matters in the end. My most successful classmate from undergrad, Karen Russell—a Pulitzer nominee—often seeks, as all creative writers eventually must, university teaching positions, because those roles do provide basic necessities such as “room and board.” All of this is simply to stress, a second time, a third time, and a fourth time, that out here in real life, we consistently devalue “creative work,” even the good stuff.

But I don’t, as a “games journalist,” have the option of a teaching engagement; however, like classmate Russell, I have certainly hustled for pay—for room and board and a “cost-of-living stipend”—in other ways. Currently I do busk via Patreon, through which I offer my paying readership a first look at pieces I might otherwise leave unpublished.

On the subject of “unpublished,” I was recently informed by an editor at a comparatively-big outlet, there is only so much Anita Sarkeesian coverage they can reasonably accept. I quickly withdrew my pitch. I realized—incredibly sadly since, at heart, I am on the side of the major outlet and everyone who must work there to eat—that the biggest websites can’t even compete with Patreon. I can go my own way; I can publish my Sarkeesian piece for, potentially, $1400.

One thing I do get to do, as a freelancer who is not beholden to any one mainstream outlet, is look over, edit, and critique drafts by other writers, with the understanding that these writers are “safe”—that I won’t share their thoughts with others until the thoughts are perfectly “baked”—and that I, as an absolute mercenary, will offer suggestions and criticisms that occasionally border on cruelty.

All this said, I give you—for the first and last time—all of my marginalia from Lana Polansky’s first draft of a piece about “payola.” (The piece itself—“Payola: I Sleep Beneath the Golden Hill”—was just published, which is, for me, excellent timing.)

In my first-draft notes, I start out by warning Ms. Polansky against addressing her own anger. I admit we must not “tone-police,” but that, also, her frustration is shared by anyone who works in video games, including those who might work for mainstream venues (exactly hence all these policy changes themselves). I go on to note that writing for mainstream venues—and this is something I know quite well—“normalizes” writing, produces writing that is frequently “on-brand,” rather than “risky.” (The word I actually wanted to use here was “frisky.”)

She uses the phrase “maintain the status quo,” but the indictment is much worse than that, I point out. “The reality is that many mainstream journalists would like to say something, but cannot. You’re absolutely correct when you use phrases like ‘held hostage’ by the ‘barbarians at the gate.’”

The real issue is with, not escalating up to the status quo, but maintaining, instead, the “lowest common denominator.” (“And that is so much more damning an indictment,” I type to Ms. Polansky.)

I agree that her point—that we drive a wedge among “classes” with this entire debate—is true, but that “freelance” is a class unto its own, an entirely separate class from “salaried,” with its own rights and rulesets, and distance only grows when we create policies that separate the two.

I also warn her about an inaccuracy—no one has yet created a policy against writers who use Patreon, and that policies, at present, only discriminate against games developers—but I must also wonder at this, as well. Isn’t that even worse?

Polansky works as both a journalist and as an independent game developer, so she is better able to articulate this than I am, but, even for my own part, I do wonder at the distinction currently being made between freelance indie designers and freelance writers, any of whom ought to feel free to choose to use Patreon.

I do align more with indie game developers than I do with salaried journalists—and I do apologize, here, since my work is read more by my writer-colleagues than it is by game devs, so all this is alienating—because, like independent game designers, I don’t depend on any one publisher. My work is almost always my own, and what I seek is only pay or distribution. In this way, then, Patreon is essentially Steam sales.

I publicly told Kotaku’s Jason Schreier that, while I recognize I am not a game designer—“support” of writers, after all, is not necessarily being dropped by writers of major outlets—I also recognize that I am most indebted to my own “creative” work, same as many games designers are. As a “creative” writer, have I any longstanding protection from Kotaku’s new policies? If we create these new precedents about “support” of “creative work,” how are all other types of freelancers to protect themselves?

And given all these new policies, I keep asking myself whether I must kill off my own Patreon since, clearly, even having one is apparently a liability of my own appearance of integrity. Of course I must understand the value of being “twice as good,” because I am a woman in your industry. I apologize that you’re all being pressured—now that the Internet has caught on to the fact that you know or sometimes work with women, who are indistinguishable from “SJWs” because they are women—to do the same.

In short: When I write, do I look like a liar? Or, even shorter: Why am I even still here?

Many writer-colleagues, in turn, tell me “no,” I don’t have to worry about these policy changes. They don’t “affect me,” I am reassured. According to many of my mainstream colleagues, I am not in the crosshairs—because I am not a “game designer,” even though my BAFTA nom is for a game—and also, I am not held to the same standards as a real journalist who does actual reportage.

And again, I wonder at all this. I once told Terry Cavanagh—just before I published “Allow Natural Death,” which I asked his and only his permission to write—that I aspire to accomplish with writing what he does with games. I told Cavanagh that I would like to someday produce a piece of writing that respects the reader, by being challenging or torturous, exactly because I know my reader can handle it just fine. And this little anecdote speaks to my larger philosophy: I believe that games journalists and writers are accountable, not only to other writers and also their readers, but also to the people who make these products. This “product,” video games, is the very source, inspiration, and true life-blood, of all that we “games journalists” create in turn.

Make no mistake, this piece only exists because of Patreon. Patreon allows me to write directly to readers. Instead of being paid $50 or $100 from some piddling freelance budget—and if the piece is well-received, the outlet will profit so much more than that—I am able to cut the publisher out of the transaction I make when I write freelance. I hire Patreon as my literary agent, and my readers commission the work. This isn’t charity, this isn’t “support” on any emotional level: This is paid work.

In short, no one—not even Patreon as an entity—quite understands what “crowdfunding” is, not yet. But we are already putting editorial policies in place against it. No, not against me personally, but against independent game designers, certainly.

Initially I thought my work was being prioritized ahead, and other types of creative work discriminated against, but now I am not so sure. Because if I am not held to the same standards—and I do believe “creative nonfiction” is every bit as genuine a style of reportage as “news” is, but I also believe creative nonfiction is the exact same thing as a “newsgame”—why am I being let off the hook?

As I publicly said to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, I would certainly hope to someday write something so good, my colleagues and fellow writers, and would-be editors, would like to “engage” with my work on the same level as we already do “video games.”

And now I can arrive at only one conclusion: It isn’t that my work is “above all this.” On the contrary, my work is so valueless to my industry—and I absolutely mean this monetarily—they’ve left me and my work out of their policies. My industry, like the “gamers” (whoever that shadowy group is), has left me behind.

The point repeatedly being made, in this ongoing conversation about “ethics,” “integrity,” “conflicts of interest,” is that the video games industry protects its own. It does not. It protects readers.

Or as Arthur Chu writes, convincingly, for the Daily Beast, “The degree of consensus largely forced on game reviewers by their audience is shocking.” Chu is absolutely correct. The conflict-of-interest here is not that writers and game designers know one another. It’s that we always yield to the harassment.

More to the point, the industry will leave you behind just as quickly as you can say “the thing about Japanese game design is—” because, yes, yes, we are all held hostage by our own fear, every last one of us.

In her first draft of her essay about “payola,” Polansky refers to a group she describes as “among the least-protected and thus most politically-threatening.” And while the least-protected writers are often women and minorities, there is an argument to be made that these “most politically-threatening,” “least-protected” people, are, including straight-white male writers, freelancers.

And we know this is literally true. Few freelance writers have until now had health insurance—I for one have not—and I have also been open about my medical bills and about my dead mother’s bills, and MRSA and Alzheimer’s and god damned everything. I have also, in the past, been sure to remark on the poor pay freelancers receive. (Again, I sympathize with the editors at major outlets, who rarely have any control over their freelance budgets. The problems come from the very top and trickle down.)

This morning I read a feature article—written, at the time, anonymously—by a freelance war reporter who receives £70 for every article she submits from Gaza. The piece is about very literally being made to work without protective gear. “Woman’s Work,” the article is titled, and it is about doing whatever it takes. “Editors only want ‘blood’,” she writes. Freelance writers always bend to mainstream publishers, not the other way around.

The feature’s author, it turns out, is named Francesca Borri. She is real. In a new piece, which is really about the beheading of freelance journalist James Foley, Borri finally goes on the record:

Writing a piece on freelancing for the Columbia Journalism Review last year [Borri] called freelancers “second-class journalists,” but she said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Gaza that it’s more honest to call freelancers “exploited journalists.”

When it comes down to protecting freelance authors, “there is no standard policy,” the article goes on to say. Freelancers have no safety net, no publisher to come to their rescue in wartime. Freelance writer Michael Luongo goes on the record on the subject of publishers who sent him to Iraq: ”’We want work from you but we won’t officially commission it’ because we don’t want to be connected with you if something happens. The editor knew he’d go anyway, he said.” In this way, the freelancers themselves are the danger. They themselves become the liability.

And although neither Gaza nor Iraq is in any way “video games journalism” (!!!!), mainstream publishers are willing to put freelancers on the “front lines,” so to speak, but if and only if it comes at no fiscal or seemingly-ethical cost to the business. There really is a transaction being made here, and it is one of convenience.

All publishers are willing to abandon freelancers—and here I will name self-subsidized game designer Zoë Quinn, whom, if you are a journalist at one of two major outlets, you can no longer buy product from using Patreon—on the front lines of a battle, a battle to create or report (or whatever it is freelancers do) without receiving death threats about a video game. We hang Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian or whoever out to dry. We, “video games,” do not “take care of our own.”

On the contrary: We expect freelance professionals to function as our avatars, to say and do what we ourselves wish we could say and do. And when the battle becomes too much—when the fight is too great, the baddies too numerous—we absolve ourselves by shutting off the Xbox.

***

Comments are closed here, but do feel free to tear it up over here, heh heh.

• Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:31:53 PDT
• Moral Kombat Panel Discussion (3:30EST)

• Jack Thompson debates Lorne Lanning (N’Gai Croal as moderator)

  There are two winding lines. There’s the media line, which will enter first, and there’s a longer line for general admission. A man in the media line turns to me and suggests that we are about to witness a nightmare. “I’m nervous,” I agree.

  The Moral Kombat panel discussion is intended as a follow-up supplement to the premier of Moral Kombat, a documentary about the issue of videogame violence. When I discover this, I deeply regret having missed it. Director Spencer Halpin acknowledges both sides of the violence-in-games issues; for the purposes of the following panel, attorney Jack Thompson and game developer Lorne Lanning represent each side of the larger, ongoing debate.

  At the entrance to the VGXPO theater, though, each line of people is anxious: the panel is already running quite late. As the media line moves toward the entrance of the theater, I open my bag to be checked, but am instead urged in. The general admission line, however, must have all bags opened and inspected. I can only imagine that security is checking for tomatoes, stink bombs, or guns. For that matter, the panelists themselves are escorted by bodyguards.

  It’s 3:52 pm—that’s 22 minutes after the scheduled start time—by the time I’ve found my seat near the front. Onstage, Jack Thompson is having a good-natured, even animated conversation with games journalist N’Gai Croal. Lanning sits on the right side of the stage, Thompson on the left, and Croal, the panel’s moderator, is seated between them.

  Both Thompson and Lanning wear suits. Thompson looks kind of like a nice presidential candidate—by this I mean he wears a red tie [editor’s note: Thompson later writes to say it was orange, actually]. Lanning wears a turtleneck under his jacket, sitting casually and leaning (I’ll soon discover that, even when he’s irked, he leans back coolly, never once uncrossing his legs at the shins). Mr. Croal is dressed casually, wearing a crisp suit jacket and striped dress shirt with jeans.

  In the theater itself, no photography or filming is permitted, save the cameras already on tripods in front. As I understand it, the panel’s taping is planned as Moral Kombat’s DVD bonus footage.

  N’Gai Croal, sitting between the two men, initiates the discussion. “How did you come to be in a movie like Moral Kombat?” he asks.

  Jack Thompson begins. “Spencer Halpin called me, and he explained who he was, and in spite of that—”

  Thompson’s quip doesn’t go unnoticed, and the audience, filled with gamers and VGXPO convention-goers, is already chuckling. As for the panel itself, Thompson explains that he prefers participating in live media to being recorded because “you can’t be edited. Being edited is a scary thing.”

  His stance on Moral Kombat, the final product? Jack Thompson says he defends Moral Kombat as “fair and … artistically true.” He goes on to say that “the documentary goes beyond just videogame wars. ...I’ve been involved with what has been called the culture war for 20 years. If I hadn’t, I’d still have brown hair.” And, on the other people who participated in the making of the documentary: “I think there are people of goodwill on both sides of the [violence in games] issue. I think two of them are sitting on this stage.”

  Lorne Lanning, who is also featured in the film Moral Kombat, jumps into the matter of ‘morality’ in games. “In the beginning of the videogame industry,” he says, “our games were recognized as … having more ‘nutritious’ value.” He goes on to say that Moral Kombat serves as a “really intelligent portrayal” of the more modern issue of violence in games, and the different lenses and stances therein.

  As for the issue itself, Thompson quips, “We’ll resolve it here today.”

  Thompson begins to speak and, when he is at ease, it becomes clear that his phrasing is careful, and his viewpoints themselves are surprisingly moderate. He simply and succinctly indicates that he feels that technology is an incredible educational tool, and urges developers to ”...act responsibly to use this incredible technology… in a responsible way.” He continues to say that ”[n]o one in their right mind” thinks that violence, in and of itself and used to artful ends, is the crime, or that games alone are to blame—”There’s violence in the Bible!”

  But, Jack Thompson continues, the seemingly extreme stance against these aspects of morality—the “intolerance” of viewpoints even remotely approximating his, or the “ostracization” of people who speak out on the issue, “makes a person like me inevitable.”

  This is a moment that stands out to me, and it’s going to become difficult for listeners—indeed, for Thompson himself—to negotiate. Because, as the panel continues, Jack Thompson, the man, will be reasonable, articulate, and logical. Jack Thompson the inevitable spokesperson and figurehead, however, often seemingly contradicts the man sitting in front of us.

  Jack Thompson is still speaking, though, as the passionate human. “We need to be careful here about what we’re selling the kids. I don’t mean to be a filibuster here, but not only should the artist be [careful] with their art…”

  Thompson soon transitions into matters of the neurological differences between children and adults, acknowledging that children’s minds are infinitely more malleable. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing this quality of children’s development, and being responsible in turn.

  Lorne Lanning is eager to respond to Thompson’s definition of responsible videogame design. He describes the modern zeitgeist as “a consumer-driven, sheeple society” in which children aren’t even exposed to the real threats and concerns of the modern age—looming things like war and a dying ecosystem. According to Lanning, the reason for a game like Oddworld is to produce something “more substantive,” creating a “toy” with “legitimacy.” Lanning sums up on responsible consumerism, responsible game design: “If we can capture this much mindshare, we can make a better world.”

  The men are cool, even-keeled, and visibly respectful of each other. In turn, this room is—I hate to say that it is surprising to me, but it is!-perfectly quiet, respectful, and pensive. As I look around the room, I see youths and adults with their hands held to their chins, visibly deep in thought. Lanning is an audience favorite, to be sure, but Thompson is certainly surprising the crowd.

  Jack Thompson acknowledges an allegiance to the kind of responsibility that designers like Lanning seek. “We can’t be fractured,” he says-and it’s a moment that startles me, because this is a rather polarizing man saying this. Thompson goes on to expound on our united investment in the Common Good.

  Thompson continues with a brief anecdote: Someone said to him, at an event, ”’I want to thank you, Mr. Thompson, for uniting all gamers.’ To what end? I asked him.” This was the juncture at which a gamer first explained to Thompson that he had given them one thing, one philosophy, to unite against as gamers. “And although I thought it was rather eloquent,” Thompson admits, he concludes he doesn’t necessarily think it’s right. “On both sides of the issue,” he continues with a visible melancholy, “there is a concern for humankind. ...[We need to] sit down and reason with one another on so many areas.”

  But Lanning kicks the debate up a notch, seemingly suddenly, and really goes for the jugular. He points out the difference: Thompson has a very particular agenda, while the gaming industry simply doesn’t have one. Furthermore, the gaming industry spends so much to advertise a single game. Thompson’s efforts, conversely, don’t cost a thing. Lanning says, directly to Thompson and seemingly around Croal, “You’re getting billions of money in airtime. For free.”

  Jack Thompson seems taken aback. “I’m not part of the twenty billion dollar industry. I don’t have PR… I don’t have the resources [of someone in PR at TakeTwo, for instance].” He continues, “I think there’s something of a misconstruction that I’m… roiling the waters, all on my own.”

  Lanning objects to this, remarking that after a school shooting, JT was on the television within two hours—”They asked me,” Thompson says helplessly—but Lanning continues. Jack Thompson, he says, has an agenda and a business model and a brand. And as Lanning discusses this in increasingly heated tones, the room grows uncomfortable.

  There’s a long pause, then, before Thompson responds: “Gee,” he says, “I thought this was going to be friendly.”
  The audience of gamers laugh and applaud for Thompson.

  Then Thompson responds directly to Lanning’s allegation: “I’ve been called a massacre-chaser, an ambulance-chaser…” There’s no gain, no money in it, Thompson insists. Furthermore, “I believe that when people are injured, they have a right to have a spokesperson. ...I’m proud to represent people like that.” He concludes with some sort of remark about “the kinds of gamers that don’t have the ethics you have,” possibly referring to the audience on the whole.

  Something in Thompson’s comment sparks Lanning, and he turns to address Croal, the moderator, directly: “If there’s something untrue in there, N’Gai, I don’t want to be the one to call it out! Come on!” For a moment, the audience is again quite tense.

  “Stop, stop,” N’Gai says. I’m… I’m the moderator.” This is enough to generate some laughter and claps.

  N’Gai then speaks, carefully and thoughtfully, as if to help Lanning out. How can Thompson call a game a murder simulator? How can a game like Doom reproduce anything approximating the experience of shooting a firearm? The game, after all, is point-and-click.

  Thompson responds, but then he says: “These are all complex situations. No one in their right mind would say a videogame can turn an angel into a demon.” This moment causes much of the audience to shift in its seats.

  But Thompson continues. The real trouble, he says, is that absolutely anyone can buy any M-rated game. “Any kid of any age can walk into any retailer and buy any game. ...When is the videogame industry going to adhere to the labeling on their products?” This causes several audience members to nod along in spite of themselves. The kid sitting next to me mumbles to his friend, “It’s the parents!”

  Croal wonders aloud, though, how retailers are responsible. Isn’t this particular point, after all, analogous to kids sneaking into an R-rated movie?

  Lanning agrees. “It’s an honor system,” he says, remarking that the movie theater itself is not held liable for children in R-rated movies.

  Then Lanning makes a point that ought to have been made many times in the past: videogame violence, versus what it is that is actually being sold to kids under some rating or guise, “are two separate issues!” Lanning is exasperated, now, expounding on the general marketplace now using labels as trickery. He talks about rampant consumer deception—food labeled as organic that really isn’t, organic at all, for instance.

  “Consumers have a horrible time of being able to identify anything,” say Lanning. A consumer can’t tell what actually comprises the product itself, never mind identify to whom the product is even really intended.

  Lanning quickly backpedals, then: “We think the ESRB already does a wonderful job. The retailers need to do a better job”-as well as parental responsibility, he says-”but the game industry cannot be held captive” by the habits of retailers, or the kind of dirty pool they play.

  But the games industry can do something, Thompson tells Lanning. Thompson says he’s long proposed that developers and publishers simply find out which retailers are deliberately selling to minors and then “withhold product” from those particular chains. Thompson goes on to challenge publishers to show retailers that “you’re serious about the age ratings” on your own games.

  Thompson then alludes to the incident in which his own 15-year old son walked into a Best Buy alone and purchased a Mature title, if only to make a point. “When Doug Lowenstein says he [believes that parents shouldn’t let their kids play these M-rated games], I believe him! But don’t sell the game to my kid when I’m not there!”

  Thompson goes on to say that “the age ratings on games are inaccurate” and that they “don’t do anything!” Frankly, says Thompson, it might be best if the current ratings system were ditched altogether, since it’s strongly apparent that no one is serious about it.

  Croal regains control of the conversation: it’s strange, he says, “when you consider that Tipper Gore…[and others]... come out of the 60s… but they’re the ones who put the stickers on CDs…” The kinds of people who now seek to legislate, he remarks, are the ones who once touted personal liberties and responsibility.

  Lanning says, then, “Whoever controls the airwaves, controls the perception. ...We’re at war right now” and here, Lanning means war-war, and not the war on gaming violence, “and it was sold to us by the government [via] media who were not doing their job.”

  There’s a back-and-forth here—I can’t make it out because the two young men next to me are now hissing at each other, engaged in their own microdebate. I’m fairly certain, though, that Thompson now springs onto this issue of media, of history being rewritten by the winners, and begins to lapse into the liberal media/antagonized evangelical argument.

  Lanning is now beyond irked. He asks us, the audience, to raise our hands if we identify as Christian. The room hesitates, but arms go up one by one. “Half the room!” Lanning narrates for Thompson. Lanning then raises his own hand. “I was raised Christian, too.” He’s about to make a point, but Thompson continues where he left off.

  Thompson describes what it is like to be targeted, how people go after him and attempt to have him disbarred. “I think there is an intolerance, against people like me—[although the perception] seems to be that [media outlets are] at my beck and call.” Thompson says that there is an “intolerance” of the “religious perspective of things,” because the media is controlled by a small number of people who… he hesitates, and doesn’t quite complete this thought, perhaps because of Lanning’s earlier illustration: Christians, and people who hold Christian beliefs and ideas of morality, are by no means in the minority. Lanning makes a series of strong points here.

  There’s a moment, here, when Lanning mentions that Rupert Murdoch is a Christian, and Thompson remarks that, actually, he’s Roman-Catholic. There are a few gasps; in my seat, I bury my face in my hands. Croal says, ”...Moving right along…!”

  But Thompson recovers. “No, no!” he says. “I think Murdoch hiself” would insist on that distinction. This point is fair enough, and the audience almost tangibly relaxes. But, Thompson says, no matter how Murdoch identifies himself—as Christian, or Roman-Catholic, or whatever morality he might identify as—”I would not say that Rupert Murdoch is an honorable person.”
  There’s a beat, and then Croal quips, “Neither would we.” The audience applauds and laughs, and Thompson and Lanning each stand from their seats to shake hands. This moment is sincere, quaint, and genuinely funny.

  Croal tosses a hardball toward Lanning: in the documentary, professor Henry Jenkins indeed asserts that videogames do, on some level, ultimately cause a mind to somehow trivialize true violence.

  Lanning has his own thoughts on desensitization, again broaching the matters of the state of things today, and violence and war. By Lanning’s measurement, even our current government itself trivializes violence, by essentially selling it to the populace as a way to fix things.

  As for Jenkins’ assessment, says Lanning, we frankly know little-to-nothing about the science of the mind. “When people see this in a CAT scan, that in an MRI, and say this is why he committed that crime… When it comes to the human mind, we have so many things to do to understand” the science and neurology of the mind, or, for that matter, causality—discerning what influences what, or how.

  Lanning goes on to remark that, “while videogames proliferate like never before, [violent crime has been dropping.]” And in the long-term scope, this is certainly true. Lanning asks about our priorities: “If we’re really looking out for kids,” he wonders, why are we going after something as piddling as games?

  Thompson acknowledges that, although causality is certainly very complex, violent crime has, more recently, been on-the-rise. He makes a muddled point and—I’m guessing here—it sounds to me like his point is, if you look at it like a graph charting the long-term, violence is dropping, but if you look very closely and at a graph of more recent years, violence is on the incline. This makes a certain statistical sense, and to that end, both men are actually correct.

  Lanning is frustrated. If there are so many variables contributing to violent crime, and if Thompson acknowledges and respects this point, why simply go after videogames? Here, Lanning again accuses Thompson of being driven by money, this time more directly. “I’ve won one case!” Thompson contests (having to do with videogames, he means).

  Lanning says that this simply isn’t true, and that he’s already consulted Thompson’s Wikipedia page, and…—Lanning is interrupted as we all laugh heartily.

  Thompson joins in the moment of Wikipedia-blaming. If you knew all the fallacies on Wikipedia, Thompson smiles “you might like me more.” He goes on to list a number of factual errors about him on Wikipedia. Some of the audience nods, a little chagrined.

  For the first and only time, someone in the audience shouts a question. This person makes a rather politely-veiled Penny Arcade jab, wondering aloud whether, were Thompson to win the next big case, would give his earnings to charity?

  I can’t quite parse how Thompson responded, particularly in retrospect and from my notes, but it was somewhat in the affirmative. Whatever Thompson says, though, it elicits another round of attack from Lanning.

  Lanning says, pointedly, that he grew up in a hardworking family, taught to respect that kind of selfless labor. The videogame industry is a hardworking industry, he says. In Thompson’s world, however, just one victorious court case means a “six million dollar payoff! And even if you give some of it to charity,” Lanning concludes, Thompson’s still sitting awful pretty.

  Thompson is very annoyed at this juncture. “Since you want to make this personal!” he says. And this is fascinating, because although Thompson has recovered from each of Lanning’s earlier accusations, this time he sounds less like Thompson-the-person-in-the-panel, and more like Thompson-the-soundbyte:

  Thompson describes the TakeTwo case, and within this context, returns to an extreme stance. Even with all the variables that occur in the creation of a murder—the ratings, the stores, the game itself—”but for [that is to say, with the exception of] the game,” people would still be alive.

  Thompson goes on to say that a game like GTA—a cop-killing simulation—is a game made by “sociopaths who are technically adroit,” but otherwise produce something that teaches nothing but “sociopathy.”

  By this logic, asserts Thompson, while so many variables contribute to the making of a killer, in the end, the game—and therefore its creators—is the variable most at fault.

  This is a terrifically tense moment, so N’Gai Croal pauses to make a point: he asks everyone in the room to raise their hands if they are among those gamers who ever have played a GTA game. The room is now a sea of arms.

  Lanning says, “That’s what we’re debating—faith vs facts. Jack has faith that” games are killing. On the other hand, there are the “facts”—which prove that games cannot be held responsible, if only because of violence being on the decline. Lanning reminds us, then, to follow the money, returning to his earlier point of the six billion dollar payoff. Jack Thompson is, duly, very defensive.

  If Thompson agrees that a lot of variables go into making one human shoot another human, then why only go after the game’s maker? Lanning says that, clearly, the real reason is the money that is to be made. The real reason someone would dedicate himself to attacking one variable in a complex algorithm of violence-causality—a variable whose involvement in the outcome is based on, at best, tenuous science—is, again, that six million dollar payoff.

  The room is again quite tense, and the discussion itself, circular and repetitive. To everyone’s relief, N’Gai Croal announces the Question-and-Answer period.

  The first question is given to Amber Dalton, who was a panelist herself earlier in the convention. She begins by applauding Thompson for willingly coming into “a den of wolves.” She makes several points about matters of personal responsibility, and the commonalities in each man’s argument. Thompson responds.

  Then there is this exchange a little later:

  Querent: “Before videogames, what would you use to explain earlier school shootings?”

  JT: “You really want me to answer that?”

  Querent: “Not really.”

  Thompson agrees that so many variables contribute to any one event, no matter the event’s nature. He finally explains the legal grounds for pursuing the game itself. In legal terms, Thompson explains, for proving “legal causation” in court, you simply must prove that one puzzle piece, one event or action or entity, was a necessary component. This particular moment in the Q&A strikes me as most fascinating.

  Another querent begins by describing himself as “someone who is both a gamer and a lawyer.” He then asks Thompson about the distinction between old, violent art like Beowulf, and new art like GTA. Thompson responds, but Lanning follows it with a different response: “The distinction is six million dollars.” There it is again!

  The panel discussion concludes with all three gentlemen onstage looking like old friends. Thompson, Lanning, and Croal all make themselves accessible after for a short while, all conversing with straggling audience members.

  There is a small press event scheduled to follow, though, and Lanning and Thompson both are ushered out by their respective escorts.

  ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2014/08/29/moral-kombat-liveblog/feed/ 2 497 http://infinitelives.net/2014/07/27/on-destiny-and-game-widows/ http://infinitelives.net/2014/07/27/on-destiny-and-game-widows/#comments Sun, 27 Jul 2014 09:48:01 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=5029 not your mother."]]>

  “I hate this,” I piped up.

  “What,” said Ted.

  “Can I be honest?” I asked my husband-to-be. “Work, I don’t mind. Playing games, I don’t mind. This? This kills me. I hate this. I don’t like feeling like your mother. I’m not your mother.”

  Then I gave the Destiny alpha my most damning condemnation:

  “I don’t appreciate being made to feel like I don’t ‘get’ games.”

  If I thought I’d loathed the Destiny alpha, wait’ll I witnessed the beta, which launched this month.

  “Can you text the petsitter?” Ted asked me in a low voice. Our flight had just landed in Philadelphia.

  “And tell her what,” I harrumphed. We were on our way to Aunt Doris’s house. The day after next, we were going to a massive family reunion, Ted’s. That night, we were heading to New Jersey to visit the other half of the family, also Ted’s. I hadn’t slept in at least a day. I was cranky.

  “Can you ask her to turn on the PS4?” Ted asked.

  He whimpered this. He was genuinely hurt—hurt!—that he wasn’t playing along with others during the Destiny beta.

  And he was holding his Vita: He was planning to stream Destiny, from our living room in Texas, onto his Vita. The petsitter, meanwhile, was coming to the house twice a day to give my dog meds, walk her, feed the cats. On July 14, the petsitter had given my dog her heartworm pill.

  “Are you,” I asked Ted, and I took a deep breath, “shitting me?”

  “No?” Ted whispered.

  “Absolutely not!” I bellowed. (We were standing at the airport’s downstairs baggage carousel.) “No! No, I am not doing that! I am not texting our dogsitter!”

  After two long days of Ted’s visible suffering, I handed him my phone. “There,” I said.

  On the screen: an iMessage exchange, in which I describe, in excruciating detail, how to plug in our television and its periphery, and how to turn on a Playstation 4.

  “Thank you!” Ted said to me, with sincere gratitude.

  His enthusiasm was short-lived, of course. “It isn’t working,” he sighed, setting his Vita on the kitchen table. How my heart thrilled to see him put the Vita down. He looked miserable.

  I felt my heart’s thrill, and I noted it. “I hate feeling like I’m your mother,” I told Ted again. I quivered. “I just hate it.”

  ---

  In actuality—and please, never reveal this to Ted and his family, because I do like being spoiled—I am a low-maintenance woman. In truth, I can subsist for years at a time on zero attention, like an emotional camel.

  Still, I am familiar with the concept of the “game widow” because—in the olden days, anyway—she was everyone I was not. In the olden days, I was the video game player; I was the one staying up till 5am typing. Oh, your girlfriend doesn’t play video games? You wish she’d “get” it? Puh-leeze.

  In my fifteen years of dating, I have turned many a boyfriend into a “game widower,” ditching him on Night Out, rushing off during intimate moments, surely leaving him feeling, always, strange and impotent.

  I remember, in the much older olden days, my mother walking into my bedroom and pointing toward my computer. I had probably refused to come to dinner until I was “finished.” “I wish we’d never bought that thing!” she hissed. I was 13.

  ---

  Some years ago, there was a book titled Game Widow, authored by one Wendy Kays. Married to a video game developer herself, Kays’s book was intended as a relationship advice manual for women.

  Instead of offering real advice, though, the book is an indictment. “Addiction” is a word used time and time again. Worse, the book conflates the games industry—long hours spent in programming and development—with video “gaming,” or leisure time. As anyone in the industry knows, these two values are not commensurate.

  Ted is a game developer foremost, a hobbyist second. I’m exactly the same way. Ted knows I get angry or frustrated at interruptions, no matter whether I’m working or playing a video game, but I know the two are very, very different. I know it’s not too much to ask, to be left alone anytime I’m typing an essay.

  But if I’m playing Dyad? An interruption can be frustrating, because hello my attention is diverted from you. But that isn’t how leisure time works. There is an unspoken rule that, if I am playing Dyad and suddenly I am needed, I must quit Dyad.

  ---

  “Why Don’t Game Widows Play Video Games, Too?” Wendy Kays titles a 2008 Game Widows blog post. She begins,

  All game widows are pressured to try video games at some point. Many gamers actually buy games for the non-gamers in their lives, in an attempt to entice them into playing. Most gamers have pure motives for wanting their game widows or widowers to play. They know their spouse, their parent, their child, is not happy during the time they play, and want to include them in the pleasure they get from their game. But some just hope that if the naggers play too, they’ll stop protesting.

  So why is it game widows won’t just play video games, too?

  First:

  Puh-leeze, I definitely thought to myself in 2008.

  ---

  Destiny, Ted explains, is a living world, “like an MMO.” As such, there is no “pause,” Ted says.

  Ted and I are getting married. I need him to sign his name to something, probably some contractual thing. “Teh-duh!” I intonate, separating his name into two distinct syllables. My clarion-call carries across the house.

  “Just a minute!” he yells back from the living room. A half-hour passes. He’s on the Vita for at least two more.

  Later, Ted tells me there is no “pause,” not in the sense where games often have a “pause.” He isn’t even playing multiplayer; he is on a solo mission. “I can’t put the game down,” he explains to me, helplessly.

  This, I do understand.

  I am not angry with Ted. I am furious with Destiny, however. Due to a design flaw—in this case, the flaw is with a game that cannot be paused—I am finally experiencing true relationship strife.

  Destiny is only playable for the next couple days, or so Ted informs his mother, who is in turn only visiting for the next couple of days. She and I are waiting for Ted to set down the Vita.

  It is so easy for me to become Ted. Ted is playing the game correctly, which is to say, he ignores me until any solo mission or match is finished, just as the developers intended.

  Thanks to Destiny, and by Destiny’s very design, I become the howling woman in the living room, begging Ted to find a stopping point. I hate it. I hate it. I am now the worst type of “game widow.” I am a complete and total nag—I am a woman who needs Ted’s half of things done—while simultaneously understanding I am some sort of hypocrite.

  ---

  “Why don’t you just create a Destiny character?” Ted idly asks me, his eyes fixed on the television, his hands on a controller.

  By now, Ted has been playing for days. I suppose that’s normal for a “gamer.”

  “No offense,” I say, and I say this lightly, “but I no longer have any desire whatsoever, to play that fucking idiot game.”

  ---

  “Are you not going to mention the fact,” Ted recommends to me, “that I talked about all this on Twitter?

  “And about the lack of pause?” Ted concludes. Now he smiles at me: “I got a ton of support from dads.”

  That’s very nice, but instead of feeling sorry for dads, I feel sorry for moms.

  For a while, Ted and I had a Pokemon problem: Ted hid in the bathroom to play. I knew what he was doing, too, because literally nobody can shit that much. And I was annoyed. Unless I locked myself into the toilet, as well, I couldn’t keep up with him. I stopped playing Pokemon after one week because—cooking, cleaning—I knew there was no way to catch up with Ted’s toilet breaks.

  I am only angry because I imagine my eventual children imagining me as the fun-killer.

  Of course, before I met Ted, I wasn’t going to be married or have children at all. Now I am (already!) the fun-killer. I am the woman who watches her husband disappear, and I am upset, and that is what makes me, according to my own set of ethics and virtues, a bad person.

  ---

  The Destiny beta finally ended, and Ted immediately began playing Titanfall.

  “Ted-duh!” I yell across the house.

  “Just a minute!” Ted shouts. And, thanks to Titanfall’s design ethos, it’s true.

  ---

  ETA: This Penny Arcade forum comment (!!) from one John Ham, very neatly synopsizes the column, so if you’d like a tl;dr, skip there! P.S. Ted is not actually an asshole.

  ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2014/07/27/on-destiny-and-game-widows/feed/ 34 5029 http://infinitelives.net/2014/06/19/the-map-is-not-the-territory/ http://infinitelives.net/2014/06/19/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:22:44 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=5020

  I do remember some things about my birth father.

  I do remember his impossibly long stride as he came down the airplane’s gangway. I remember his brown guitar case in one hand, his duffel in the other. I remember the worn leather patches on the elbows of his corduroy jacket. I remember the way his sly smile swelled into a boyish grin as he walked toward me.

  I was nine years old when this happened, but I do know that this memory is almost certainly correct.

  It’s almost certainly correct because I rarely visualize that moment at all, and also because I’ve never, ever written about it, or even discussed it.

  So I’m sure the memory is “real,” see, because I haven’t screwed the memory up yet.

  ***

  Tomodachi Life is a video game about avatars.

  At the game’s outset you are invited either to import Miis—these are avatars usually created each by its own maker—or to recreate your family and friends entirely from memory.

  You may also specify, for each of these avatars, whether that character is “related” to you and, if yes, how: You can assign relationships like “father,” “mother,” or “sibling.” (Presumably this is all to safeguard your avatar from an ugly romantic pairing.)

  You can also tell the game whether an avatar is your “spouse,” but Tomodachi Life doesn’t seem to take that particular type of relationship into account—the game apparently match-makes couples at its own whim, whether or not you’re IRL-married.

  Once a Mii is either imported or designed fresh, you may assign any number of characteristics to it. Perhaps she walks quickly, or talks quickly. Perhaps his gestures are broad and ebullient. Maybe she is extremely self-serious; perhaps she is “relaxed.” You can also tweak settings until an avatar’s vocal tone, timbre, and cadence are exactly correct. The avatar goes on to read game text aloud in its bizarre digitized voice.

  Once you’ve assigned X-many values, Tomodachi Life evaluates the avatar’s “personality” using a rubric resembling the Myers-Briggs. In this way, one friend—a slow-moving, serious woman—is a “confident brainiac.” Another—a quick-moving fellow with a flair for the dramatic—is an “outgoing” showboat.

  ***

  “But Ted,” I teased my fiance, “this is the old you.”

  “Don’t delete me!” Ted cried. “Didn’t you fall in love with the ‘old me’ when we first met?”

  At the beginning of my Tomodachi Life, there were only two Mii avatars in my “MiiMaker,” one of whom was a thinner, clean-shaven Ted.

  I initially hadn’t realized I could import more Mii avatars through the 3DS’s Streetpass Plaza; now I had two Teds to contend with. There was the out-of-date Ted I’d downloaded from our WiiU a year earlier, and then there was the new, up-to-date Ted I’d streetpassed just this week.

  And since Old Ted’s avatar and mine were the only two avatars on the island at first, my Tomodachi Life “lookalike”—the game explicitly refers to your doppelgaenger as a “lookalike”—had already begun to fall in love with the Ted of Last Year.

  “Fuck it,” I told real-life living-with-me Ted. “I’m just gonna delete Old Ted. While I still have a chance, you know?”

  “Don’t do that!” Ted insisted, suddenly and weirdly attached to the Old Ted Avatar.

  “Look,” I replied lightly, “I’m sure she’ll eventually fall in love with New Ted.” Here I meant, once I’d deleted the old WiiU avatar, my “lookalike” would fall in love with the next-newest cast member, Ted From a Week Ago. After all, I’d marked this character as a “spouse,” too.

  She didn’t.

  Instead, my doppelgaenger wanted to romance two of her male colleagues. “No, no, no!” I shouted at the tiny screen. “This is all wrong! This is so wrong!”

  The dissonance didn’t end there. One avatar, one of my best guy friends in real life, insisted on having a haircut. “I’m tired of my hair,” his avatar harrumphed.

  NO, I told the game.

  No! Because my friend doesn’t need a haircut, or if I do give him one, how is he supposed to resemble himself?

  I dressed another avatar in clothes she would approximately wear. “She doesn’t like it,” the game grumbled at me. I shopped for clothes until I found an ensemble she’d hate.

  “She loves it!” the game told me giddily.

  ***

  In-game I can set another avatar as my “father,” “mother,” or “sibling.” But in life, I can’t. Oh, I could fudge the facts a little, sure. I could invent a little avatar of my best friend and call her my sibling for the hell of it. I could make avatars of Ted’s parents and recast them as mine.

  Sometimes, in-game, I wonder how—if I were made to try it—how I might design an avatar of my birth father.

  I don’t remember his face very well. I do remember his ash-brown hair, his green eyes, and his eyelashes, which were long and black and curled like a cartoon’s. I remember that he was grand and lanky, at least to a nine-year-old girl. I do remember his twice-broken nose.

  But, trickily, I don’t actually remember what any of these details look like. Rather, they’re ideas of memories. They’re things I remember remembering.

  Now, when I try to remember the details of his face, there is no memory. Instead, I find my head filled with simple mental sentences—“He has green eyes.” “He has ash-brown hair”—and the still-frame images I ought to have of him are instead replaced with entire spoken paragraphs.

  ***

  There is a picturebook on my shelf, ‘Stories Every Child Should Know’, copyrighted 1936. It is bound in fine blue fabric; its title is printed in barely-faded gilt. My adoptive mother used to read to me from it because her mother used to read aloud from it, too.

  Ted never had a chance to know my adoptive parents. He’s never met any of my family. I sometimes joke that, as far as he knows, I made them all up. It’s a sick joke: He moved into my childhood home with me, so that we’re surrounded by photographs of them, and books.

  I opened the picturebook to its first page and, automatically, Ted began to read aloud.

  “Stop it!” I screamed. “Please, stop!”

  Ted looked at me, confused and hurt. I caught my breath.

  “Please,” I said, quieter now, “please, please don’t do that. You’ll overwrite the… I still have a distinct memory of my mother reading, and you’ll overwrite it.”

  Ted nodded grimly.

  “You can overwrite it someday,” I conceded, “if we ever have children. I mean, we’ll have to. We’ll have to read out loud. But I’m not ready for that.

  “But also,” and I started to laugh, “also, you’re reading it wrong.”

  ***

  As I’ve uploaded my friends’ avatars to Tomodachi Life, I keep guessing at the characteristics I think they might give themselves. “How would this person describe herself?” I am always wondering.

  Still, I am acutely aware that I am the one who is, in fact, authoring their personalities.

  To my credit, they seem enough like themselves. My close friend Daphny, according to the game software, is a “trendsetter,” which she really is. A friendly colleague was designated as an “outgoing” “leader,” which I liked for him. Ted was given the “showboat” personality, which I guess is sort of true. (“I love being the center of attention!” my fiance’s avatar shouted at me. It rang tinny: Maybe Ted does love being the center of attention, but he would never say so.)

  As I imported a friendly acquaintance’s avatar, though—and this avatar belonged to a someone I haven’t seen in at least a year—I began to wonder if I had his “personality” wrong. And if I did have his personality wrong, wasn’t that… unfair? Sinister, almost?

  Because, if I do have him all wrong, I’m memorizing this backward version of him, cementing that version of him in my head, instead of knowing him for the way he really is.

  I began to overthink it. I began to worry.

  In a sense, aren’t I doing that to every friend in Tomodachi Life? I am secretly writing my own mental sentences about people I’ve met, and I am making those sentences permanent.

  It’s almost like when someone appears to you in a dream, and he says something wrong, and you’re angry at him the next morning even though he never really said that thing.

  ***

  My adoptive mother appears in every single dream I have. Whenever I wake up, if I can remember the dream, I make sure to remind myself that I was the one who wrote both halves of our conversation.

  ***

  I do remember the way, as he disembarked the plane, my birth father’s stride lengthened. His little smirk broadened into a grin.

  I remember his smile because one of his front teeth was missing.

  That one excrutiating detail changed his appearance so much, somehow. He looked so different to me. I think I must have taken a step back.

  My birth father stopped several feet away from me. He stood there motionless. His smile faltered.

  I remember this, not because I can picture him without his teeth, but because I remember my sudden, deep embarrassment.

  I remember my birth-father pausing in his walk toward me. He stood there, silent. Finally he said, “Daddy got some teeth knocked out.” I nodded, and we left the airport that way.

  In one particular memory, I can see a gold cross earring dangling from my birth father’s ear. It is a half-inch long, gold-plated, jittering from his earlobe and catching the light.

  I probably remember his earring because I asked him why he was wearing it. He told me it was because we were going to church. It was his church earring.

  ***

  Tomodachi Life is a game about avatars.

  More important, it’s about the avatars you create. It’s entirely about how you choose to remember others.

  The problem with nonfiction writing—the problem with remembering anything, ever—is that, with each act of remembering, the photograph might fade. With enough remembering, the mental image dissolves completely.

  With enough remembering, I am left with an oversimplification, an abstract map of a memory. I am left with a mess of so many sentences about a person, with just a cartoon of a face.

  I cannot remember my birth father’s face.

  I can remember specific details, but none of these is a salient fact about his appearance. Every feature is a mistake. I’m left with elbow-patches on his sports jacket, his boyish, toothless grin, and that’s it. That’s all.

  “The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears.”

  ***

  This review of Tomodachi Life is based on an earlier piece of writing, “Lapse,” from 2004.

  Related posts:

  1. “1000 Avatars,” an installation in Second Life
  2. Avatars, part II of III: Cartooning (or, the Importance of Hair)

  ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2014/06/19/the-map-is-not-the-territory/feed/ 2 5020 http://infinitelives.net/2013/07/01/lets-play-nothing-you-have-done-deserves-such-praise/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/07/01/lets-play-nothing-you-have-done-deserves-such-praise/#respond Mon, 01 Jul 2013 08:35:15 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=5007

  I just played through Jason Nelson’s latest, Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise (via Terry Cavanagh at Free Indie Games).

  I wrote about Jason Nelson’s games right here in late 2010; NYHDDSP basically picks up where Jason Nelson’s School of Games left off. It’s a send-up of big-budge AAA titles, and in particular, the way those video games reward the player for jumping (and landing) in the correct places, for moving in a straight line from point A to point B. This game, like the best AAA titles, rewards the player with huge, unwarranted explosions.

  One common reward in these types of games (and indeed, in most games) is the Power-Up. Of course, once the player achieves higher jumping ability—in NYHDDSP this ability is called “Super Legs”—the platforms are accordingly spaced farther apart. Since any New Ability is usually also necessary to proceed in a game, the player has ultimately “gained” nothing at all. He is, in essence, jumping the same distance as before.

  Still, NYHDDSP might be less a condemnation of Obvious Game Design so much as it is a scathing remark on a larger “entitlement culture.” It’s taking piss out of achievement badge bros who have completed the same tasks another million players have already achieved. This has broader social implications. Especially in the educational system, but also in the workplace, students and underlings who conform are also rewarded: for falling in line; for showing up on time; for jumping when they are supposed to jump; for completing life in the “right” “order.”

  Completing NYHDDSP is less a matter of skill or intellect than it is a sheer act of duty—so why do we, the players, tend to feel so triumphant? For accomplishing even the bare minimum required to “pass” or “progress”?

  I didn’t notice during the first playthrough, but in NYHDDSP the player’s sprite is moving through the human body, specifically through its limbic system I think? In the next-to-last stage—a Coin-collect in which the player’s score artificially inflates by literal leaps and bounds—the player passes through the human head.

  This is all an interesting thought experiment. But maybe the final stage ends too quickly. Its thesis—that we all play video games in a race against our own (geographic, sociocultural) alienation, to ward off our own sense of inefficacy—is a damning one.

  Related posts:

  1. Talkin’ bout Jason Nelson’s art games

  ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/07/01/lets-play-nothing-you-have-done-deserves-such-praise/feed/ 0 5007 http://infinitelives.net/2013/06/23/i-get-angry-too/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/06/23/i-get-angry-too/#comments Mon, 24 Jun 2013 06:43:24 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4986

  Recently, online, I picked a battle that isn’t mine to pick. Relief finally came in the form of an email. “My wife and I are Quaker,” the letter-writer explained; I was immediately overwhelmed.

  My mother never identified Quaker as such, but when she was new to Christianity she was mentored by a Quaker, by a man called John Steiner. She spoke of this person a lot. She took certain ideals to heart and, although she would certainly tell you that her message, as transmitted to me, got all mixed up, some ideals really did glom onto me. I am anti-war; I am terribly conflict-averse; I believe in compassion and inclusion. I still identify as Christian—and make no mistake, I have several crises of faith in a single day—but none of those crises has anything to do with whether God, as I interpret Him, composed human beings lovingly in His own image. (Mostly my crises are about me being a shitty person. I am trying to learn to become more patient with myself.)

  Principally, though, I am terrified of my own anger. Very few people have witnessed it, but they can tell you it’s an ugly, remarkable thing, a thing that gets away from me before I can grab back onto it and rein it to shore again. Like most people, I figure, my anger usually has something to do with an issue of “justice.” When I have been at my very angriest, my mother used to sigh—oh, my mother!—and warn me, “Jenny, don’t talk to people that way.” Now, here in her shadow, I am beginning to think she is right.

  I understand the argument against “tone arguments.” I also hate tone arguments. It’s usually an unfair thing, this gambit is, demanding the other person sacrifice all emotion—indeed, all humanity—for the sake of being “calm,” “reasonable,” “rational.” These are loaded terms, denying a speaker all the emotion—which is, absolutely, another type of data, what we call “experiential data”—he or she is feeling. Women especially are socialized to couch their assertions of opinion with words like “I am beginning to think” or “sometimes I get the feeling,” which are all ways of preemptively apologizing for holding any opinion or valueset at all. Even now I’m using a type of passive speech, as a defense mechanism, certainly, so you will not feel like hitting me.

  As we slowly open up and allow ourselves to discuss a hostile tech culture—or any hostile culture—it’s easy to use hostile language ourselves. This, I think, may be a mistake. If we are to make ourselves understood, I do think there is great value in “tone” as mediator. It would be peculiar if we ran around shouting, for instance, at little children, at hotel receptionists.

  I don’t mean to diminish the concept of “righteous indignation,” either—righteous, because we are in the Right, and indignation because we recognize we or someone else is being disabused of human dignity. But bad behavior is not always the same thing as bad people, and “righteous indignation” is not the same as blind fury. We speak to one another with respect because we want to preserve dignity for all.

  “We have many new tools to communicate,” Professor Michael Abbott writes, “but our powerful tools have outpaced our abilities to harness them responsibly. It’s just so easy to be mean.”

  I would take it a step further: when a writer or speaker becomes mean, is the motive to inspire change in the person she or he is addressing? Or is the intent only to make an example of the person? I’ve been guilty of the latter (even very recently!). But to dress down individuals, make it personal—even if the person is not necessarily someone we’d enjoy lunch with—seems vindictive and cruel. Because it’s almost never the person; it’s the pattern of behavior that is the real problem. To that end, we are all, indeed, victims of our own culture.

  This is all hypocritical of me to say: of course I have been uncompromising at times, and so I have been brash. I owe some apologies. But when I first decided to identify as “feminist,” I had to ask myself if I were also comfortable with friends and colleagues holding me up as an example of What Not to Say—could I be comfortable with being made an-example-of myself? I’ve continued to mull over it, and I guess I am.

  I think I believe the human heart, like video games themselves, has the capacity to change other hearts and minds. The heart is made up of a lot of things—anger, fear, experience—but it is also an aggressive agent of love. Maybe I am saying this way works better for me: that anger can work but, for me, it almost never has.

  For my own part, though, I believe the heart and mind should be used holistically. I believe video games are the most compassionate integration of the two because they extend to your listener, as a sort of olive branch, the opportunity to walk in other shoes for minutes or hours at a time.

  [Image source: Brain Pickings – Helen Keller on Optimism]

  • Postscript (added): I feel like changes happen in two ways. They happen either in subcultures or in the mainstream, which are two potentially wildly-differing tacks. The first issue of Memory Insufficient, edited by Zoya Street, brings together some of the smartest writers working in games to talk about gender and queerness. Meanwhile, to mainstream outlets, doctoral candidate Samantha Allen presents this worthwhile challenge.

    On a micro and macro level, both defy the “norm.” Street brings a higher caliber of writing to groups under- or mis-represented, while Allen asks the mainstream to enforce a civility of discourse.

    For my own part, I guess I’m still not clear on which group I’m in—subculture or mainstream—and in any given moment I struggle to understand whom my message is directed toward. Probably the answer is, not “up the middle,” but just kind of both. It’s hard for me. I’m still negotiating it. But that does not, will not, change my message, which is one of advocacy and faith in change.

    Related posts:

    1. Daily Linksplosion: The Really Angry One

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/06/23/i-get-angry-too/feed/ 4 4986 http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/29/this-weeks-quicknotes-feminist-frequency-horror-movies-and-toys-for-tots/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/29/this-weeks-quicknotes-feminist-frequency-horror-movies-and-toys-for-tots/#comments Thu, 30 May 2013 00:40:47 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4978

    What horror movies and video games share in common

    Late last night I tried my hand at posting to Medium for the first time. It was something I was originally going to post here but, you know, it ended up over there instead, so whatever. The blarticle at Medium is called “On Consuming Media Responsibly,” and it’s all about my love of violent, misogynistic horror movies. I’m a student of the form, I get overexcited when a movie tries anything new, and I also enjoy movies that suck and do everything wrong. (The greatest insult, I always warn, is just being boring, and even then I don’t mind being bored when a movie is otherwise doing good work.)

    I bring up my horror movie fetish because Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian is currently in the throes of the usual gamer backlash, which is really alarming, because she isn’t asking anyone to give anything up. No one is saying “video games are bad, burn them”; Sarkeesian is simply focusing a critical or analytical lens on video games, in a way that is surprisingly nonconfrontational and not even particularly judgemental. Well. All my thoughts are actually already in the Medium link, so check it out.

    Medium as a medium

    I really like what Medium and Zeen are both trying to do—but I have to wonder whether content creators and distributors are on the cusp of getting all pinboarded and Tumblr’d out. These are platforms that kind of get their content for free, to which I’m opposed, but they also “curate” what becomes visible, so a newcomer has a much better shot at being read. This isn’t a new publishing model, no, but it does work.

    What’s most interesting about Medium, though, is you can invite other collaborators to make edits before publishing, and then once it’s published readers can comment in the margins. A lot of this ends up being minor recommendations and tweaks, so the work kind of turns into this living document. Which is weird—an article might look completely different if you decide to read it a day later—but as a result people have been really responsive even in other channels, especially on Twitter.

    Toys for tots

    When I read articles like “How Video Game Developers Are Abandoning the Traditional Controller to Create Immersive Experiences,” I just picture Elijah Wood in a colander:

    “You mean you have to use your hands??” “That’s like a baby’s toy!!!”

    Ugh, kids these days.

    Related posts:

    1. Video Game Feminist of the Decade: or, when “You” is a girl

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/29/this-weeks-quicknotes-feminist-frequency-horror-movies-and-toys-for-tots/feed/ 1 4978 http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/21/the-oculus-rift-is-probably-here-to-stay/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/21/the-oculus-rift-is-probably-here-to-stay/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 11:27:59 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4963

    Some quick thoughts.

    A little over a year ago I wrote a short, half-baked thing for Infinite Lives, Why “virtual reality” will never catch on. Now, fewer than 400 days later, my little treatise already seems outdated and quaint. Oh, sure, the crux of my argument remains true: there is virtually (hah! Virtually) no way to not look like a complete idiot while wearing a VR headset. But now I have to begrudgingly admit VR is a fad that will not pass.

    New World Notes, a blog heretofore known for its Second Life coverage, has been following the Oculus Rift with great interest all this month. That’s because, in late April, Linden Lab confirmed plans to integrate the Oculus Rift headset with Second Life. (Before Second Life, Linden Lab itself aspired to create a virtual reality metaverse, headset and all. What we call “Second Life” was originally just a proprietary creative toolbox, intended for building virtual-reality environments.)

    In a post titled Oculus Rift Makes Virtual Reality a Shared Group Experience, New World Notes includes this delightful video. In it, Katie—she’s the one in the VR headset, on the verge of toppling—needs to be held upright.

    A recent research article, Rats! Why virtual reality doesn’t feel ‘real’, explains what is the matter with poor Katie. She is experiencing a kind of VR-made “vestibular dysfunction,” a sense of off-kilteredness that lives somewhere between the inner ear and Katie’s own neurons. Her neurons, by the way, are doing a bangarang job of misinterpreting the Rift’s onscreen visual data—none of which jibes with real-world data like “I’m trying to get my physical bearings in this kitchen”—and as a direct result, Burly Friend has to kind of scoop her up.

    I know you’re never supposed to read the YouTube comments, much less respond to them, but I kind of just couldn’t help myself:

    

    It is possible to play with an Oculus Rift and stand upright at the same time, and it’ll be fascinating to witness how gamers gradually rewire ourselves to accommodate this new technology.

    Anyway, here’s a Vine I took at Giant Robot LA a few nights ago. A thoroughly disoriented young woman is attempting to play with the Oculus Rift using Kinect hand gestures; meanwhile, an early adopter of Google Glass surreptitiously films her by brushing his index finger along the Glass’s stem.

    We are truly embarking on a brave new world, here. I was recently advised to read Snow Crash in preparation.

    Related posts:

    1. Formspring Tuesday: Why “virtual reality” will never catch on
    2. Identity in Second Life: part one

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/21/the-oculus-rift-is-probably-here-to-stay/feed/ 3 4963 http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/13/on-bullying/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/13/on-bullying/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 13:14:08 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4944

    content note: depression, suicide, bullying

    I don’t know whether it’s okay to talk about this. Maybe it doesn’t help.

    At present, we don’t actually know for certain whether a game designer has taken her own life. We don’t know any concrete details leading up to it. All we have is speculation, conjecture.

    Although she had a fan following, she was not a “public” figure by any stretch of the word.

    We do know with certainty, however, she’d recently become the target of incessant bullying. Shortly before she made the gruesome announcement, she presented an Internet forum with a screenshot of her inbox, indicating that most of these attacks were cruel remarks about her birth gender. She may have been trans, maybe not.

    There isn’t a word for how horrifying. I hope she’s alive. I hope she only decided to take a temporary break from the Internet and that she will have an opportunity to get on with her life. Or I hope her suicide attempt failed. I hope she intended it to fail.

    We do know this: while the rate of attempted suicide among the general population is 1.6%, as many as 41% of transpeople have attempted suicide. The numbers of LGBT children who have attempted suicide hover around a similarly startling 30-40%. Familial rejection, economic strife, and systemic or institutionalized transphobia and homophobia all play roles in these suicide attempts.

    But let’s not minimize the incredibly damaging effects of outright bullying.

    In early 2012 the Center for Disease Control noted that the rate of teen suicide has spiked in recent years. The CDC’s 2012 report went on to estimate that one in 12 teenagers has attempted suicide, with 20% of teenagers indicating they have been bullied. Among schoolchildren, girls plan or attempt suicide in greater numbers than boys.

    There are other risk factors in play, of course. The CDC lists physical illness, isolation, clinical depression, loss, and hopelessness as factors. There are genetic and environmental factors to consider, as well—I find “local epidemics of suicide” to be among the more chilling.

    Bullying is so insidious, though, because it takes most of these preexisting risk factors and escalates them in the worst possible way. Bullying among schoolchildren is consistently diminished or shrugged off as the natural order of things, even as children gain greater access to communications technologies that allow their meanspiritedness to be “liked,” be “shared,” and “go viral.” School administrators seem especially complicit, probably out of helplessness and inefficacy.

    School shootings and suicide have stoked concern about youth bullying, but acknowledging so-called “adult bullying” is still very much taboo. In those cases we especially expect the victim to “shake it off” and “toughen up.” Bullying can happen to anybody.

    Bullying has always existed, but culture at large has changed. We like to think the Internet is a “great equalizer,” thanks to the ease with which a flip commenter can take anyone else down and bury her. We are all armchair critics now; thanks to anonymity and the “submit” button, we can escalate attacks from the professional to the personal with a single carriage return. We can research other people for “ammo.” We can orchestrate entire mob-like pile-ons. Long after we’ve forgotten typing an insult, the victim will remember it. She can probably quote it word-for-word. She can call it up using a search engine and stare at it until she drives herself over the edge.

    I feel like I don’t get bullied very much anymore, least of all professionally, since I’ve had the luxury of picking and choosing my own readership. I’m also very aggressive about choosing my own close friends. But in the past I have been a bully, and it required other people to call me out on my bullshit for me to even notice. I think, given the right circumstances, anyone can become a bully.

    I am trying to practice empathy in my daily life, but sometimes it’s a challenge. I find, in my stabs at becoming a better friend and ally, I buy a lot of books, do a lot of weird leisure reading. I constantly have to reevaluate myself, reeducate myself.

    We have to be so careful with our fellow humankind. We must exercise personal responsibility on a macro scale.

    Hey! What is this doing on a videogames blog?

    Yeah, take a look around. We celebrate homogeneity and conformism like no one else. We are the sum opposite of progressive. We think apathy is cool, even though apathy literally kills other people. Sometimes industry “luminaries” say things and you, like, have to just stare in awesome embarrassment, as if that person were your beloved-but-totally-racist grandfather instead of a comparatively spry fortysomething.

    No, no deep thoughts here; just unfocused, blanket alarm.

    May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. I’ll go first: I suffer from crippling anxiety and I struggle to leave the house. A sports writer named Scott Neumyer recently published a piece titled “I Am Royce White,” which describes panic attacks better than I ever could. A surprising number of industry types wrestle with anxiety, OCD, or clinical depression. Games are just one way of connecting. I’m happy to share that priority in common with you, dear reader.

    In a perfect world we’d all be much more open with our personal struggles, although—in these contemporary times, where Facebook and Twitter are all part of the individual’s “brand identity”—I understand why that isn’t feasible. In fact, I think persistent connectedness has made us all much less eager to share, more invested in privacy and obfuscation.

    Probably the best we can do for ourselves and for one another is to remember we are loved, know we are loved, actively work to surround ourselves with love instead of toxicity, and practice self-love. (Not like that, necessarily, but whatever helps!) I also recommend becoming a dog owner, but that might just be me.

    I just don’t know what else to say. There are resources, and there are people who love you. You are loved.

    • National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
    • Samaritans
    • The Trevor Project
    • Take This

    Stock photo via Mom It Forward. Yes, really.

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/05/13/on-bullying/feed/ 2 4944 http://infinitelives.net/2013/04/29/ahhhcade-at-the-san-francisco-moma/ http://infinitelives.net/2013/04/29/ahhhcade-at-the-san-francisco-moma/#respond Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:43:43 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4917 Two of the best events at this year’s Game Developers Conference were, technically, not GDC events at all.

    First there was Lost Levels, a rotating, three-ring speaking engagement held one afternoon in the Yerba Buena Gardens. That event was exciting in a punk-rock “this is our happening!” way. And except for I quickly discovered I suffer from serious allergies—the venue was mostly shorn lawn, and more than one person wondered aloud why I was apparently crying—Lost Levels’s freeform “microtalks” were among the GDC’s very best.

    Then there was Ahhhcade, an interactive games gallery held on the first floor of the SF MOMA. It was similar to Lost Levels and in multiple ways: it was a one-day event; it was open and free to the public; it was also maybe poorly documented. (GDC panels and talks are usually filmed and stuffed into “the Vault,” which is to say, though the conference itself can be inaccessible for some, the talks are generally available.)

    Ahhhcade, curated by Sarah Brin and Babycastles, was wonderful. Anthony Carboni, tireless friend to Indies, will explain:

    For my own part, I was so excited to finally play Ian Bogost’s Guru Meditation as it was meant to be played! (I own the iOS version of that game, knowing full well it is a flimsy facsimile of the original Atari 2600 software.) I am a great fan of 2600 homebrew as it is; meanwhile, Professor Bogost’s software gamifies my favorite pastime, which is sitting still. I decided—in hopes of being the first person in the world to try this, actually—to play the iOS and 2600 versions simultaneously. To do it, I seated myself on the balance board and opened the game on my iPhone.

    My hands were trembling. The experiment was a total failure. Still, Professor Bogost encouraged me, and my good friend Brian Taylor captured it:

    

    

    The real reason I attended Ahhhcade, though, was to experience Doug Wilson’s latest collaboration, Marvelous Melodies of Mutazione.

    And the reason I decided to attend GDC itself was to co-host the ordinarily-London-based radio program One Life Left! It’s really the only radio program or podcast to which you ever need to listen, and what an honor and pleasure to participate!

    In our final GDC episode, fellow host Ann Scantlebury and I excitedly flip out on poor Doug (14:44). I loved my Mutazione experience, and I kind of get lost in explaining why. Ah! I am the worst interviewer in the world.

    Incidentally, I do not at all remember recording the first episode of One Life Left’s GDC series, which is incredibly funny because, in it, I clearly state that my goals for the week include “remember an evening after it happens.”

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2013/04/29/ahhhcade-at-the-san-francisco-moma/feed/ 0 4917 http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/29/allow-natural-death-post-mortem-aka-thanks/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/29/allow-natural-death-post-mortem-aka-thanks/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:30:50 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4900

    For fuck’s sake, Internet. What are you even trying to do to me.

    I laughed and cried a lot today. I did those two things at my laptop, and also in the real world.

    I have had the strangest—and yes, since you are wondering, the drunkest—week. (I try to warn against using alcohol as a crutch, because that attitude is dangerous, but there’s also a palpable reason nine or ten brain-murdering beers are popularly accepted as a legitimate type of “truth serum.”)

    Ah. About this week. Here are all my work-related updates: in a career highlight, my friendly acquaintance Maura interviewed me about Boyfriend Maker, an iOS game. My ire at a dictionary became a hot story at Boing Boing. For one brief, shining moment, women in the games industry suddenly became an important subject, and I was privileged to add my voice to their numbers.

    Today people contacted me privately, sometimes about my mom’s death, but sometimes about my ongoing patience and generosity (ha!) as I’ve gleefully engaged in online conversations about misogyny and misandry. Some of those private remarks—again, remarks on both topics, death and sexism, really weird for me—came from people from my past: old roommates, classmates, coworkers, friends from junior high who also knew my mother. Thank you.

    It is a wonderful feeling, sometimes, just to not be alone. It is why anyone logs onto the Internet ever.

    Meanwhile, in real life, a pastor friend invited me to a poetry slam. Another family adopted me for Thanksgiving. My best friend drove over to my house with toilet paper because I can barely take care of myself. I recently made a phone call to my local Internet service provider’s billing department, and when I gave the woman—a complete stranger—the name on the account, she fell silent. “Girl,” she said finally. “Oh, girl.”

    There is nothing so debilitating as crying while you try to pay a stinking bill. I also consistently cry at the veterinary clinic.

    Since September, every day of my life has been a challenge, a battle, a chore. The things I do every day—all boring, unfortunately—are my biggest, saddest, most boring secret.

    I hope I only share the good parts, though. Actually—and it’s strange to admit this, even as life as I once knew it has effectively crumbled—mostly there have been only good parts.

    I am going to write about games writing now, AS I DO. Here are some quick thoughts, organized in no way whatsoever.

    On the one hand, cynicism is an important defense mechanism. It’s a type of filter. We all employ it, particularly when we lead these bizarre shadow lives on the snarky, snarky Internet, these lives that invariably mirror—but very seldom mimic—our real, waking lives, our everyday interactions with friends, family, coworkers. Attorneys. Funeral directors. Cousins. Therapists. The lady at the convenience store. If we didn’t find filters for our feelings, we would be overwhelmed by them. We would all be absolutely traumatized by our own weird brains.

    On the other hand, cynicism is stupid, lazy, and boring. It’s a type of fear, and it’s an awful shortcut to take. It’s how we dismiss other people’s feelings, yes yes, but especially our own.

    I don’t want to be that person ever. I want to always give the benefit of the doubt.

    (Please note: “irreverence” is different. Irreverence is acknowledging a crisis’s horrible worth and then undermining it for sheer comedic value. Levity! Please, some levity!)

    In February, after I’d written a rant and posted it, a longtime friend politely cautioned me against masquerading as a cynic and a villain. “You don’t want it to become true,” he said something like.

    I was, and am, gobsmacked by how correct he is. Cynicism—even the very façade, which is what it almost always is, anyway, a façade—is an incredibly dangerous trick to play on yourself. It is a cruel lie we do unto ourselves because the reality of all things is just too marvelous, too outstanding.

    Here is the reality: we are all dying. Every one of us will die before his time. None of us will ever be older than a very expensive old chair. Nothing you do matters, really, except that the rest of us are all right here, dying with you, either slower or faster, but always definitely. Someday, if you’re very lucky, you will have a reader or a child—same thing—who is born into a mean world you, thank God, finally left.

    You can write a pained, grief-stricken article about your mother, but in a few short years, months, or weeks, someone else is going to describe you even better. It’s all useless. It’s vain, useless hubris to even try.

    This isn’t sad. This isn’t scary. It’s only unfair. It’s only life. Time and love march on without us.

    That is the human condition—it’s this gigantic, crippling, paralyzing, existential thing—and we often combat it with cynicism.

    We always aim to shoot from the brain, but we tend instead to shoot from the heart, despite our very best efforts. We want to rely on science and numbers because memory is unreliable, but in the end it’s only feelings that are “true” anyway, because feelings are just there. They’re always valid, even when they don’t make any sense. I think John Hodgman probably did it best when he wrote a column railing against the word “meh.”

    Well.

    I think video games—more than writing, believe it or not—have the capacity to take all these disparate, diverse human experiences and reframe them in a way that helps, not just life, but every individual life, make so much more sense. That’s because the best video game, like the best writing, puts you into someone else’s shoes for minutes, hours, or days at a time. While you are wearing those shoes it becomes profoundly easy to understand how the shoes’ owner makes emotional sense. I think that is so important, to realize you are just one, and yours is unique and important, but you are just one.

    The game developer Phil Fish, a couple years ago, said he didn’t understand how I cope. (I’ll thank you to know he is an extremely sensitive individual and oh my God if he ever sees this, know that I hereby bequeath my childhood unicorn collection to one Kathleen Sanders, because I am going to be murdered in cold blood.)

    “Beer,” I joked to him. Then I immediately voiced my astonishment: Phil, Phil of all people, understands fear, anxiety, anticipatory grief, loss, and the sheer pain of waiting, of worrying things are about to go all wrong.

    I reminded him, then, and let me remind you, too: I’m fortunate. I’m lucky. What I endured is what you all will endure, if you’re only just lucky enough to have old parents. If you have fine old parents, you will someday know the long, plodding, metered grief of watching them slip away. I’m 30 now—I gave my youth to an unwinnable fight—but I’m 30, I’m still so young, and I’m not sorry, I’m not sorry, not for one second.

    I think a lot of my columns this year were letters I sent from the depths of my grief, but if you think for one second I’m ungrateful, I’ve done us all a disservice. I know how lucky I am. And I’m so proud. And I’m proud of my parents—over time, they let me use them as examples, let me humiliate them in my writing—and I’m just so proud of my high school guidance counselor mother and my farmer father.

    This year—slowly, so slowly, as I’ve braced for my nightmare while also piecing together my hilariously unironic and literal worldview—I have been enormously gratified to befriend a number of new people. I used to think I didn’t need any new friends, that I’d had quite enough of everyone ever. (I’m still the world’s worst friend, but this issue tends only to come up around holidays.)

    “Actually,” I typed to one Richard Clark earlier today, stunned at myself, “2012 was not such a bad year.”

    It’s all been building and growing. Anna Anthropy taught me about the diversity of voice, of video games’ enormous, indescribable value as a medium and a force. She and Daphny David have helped me understand the value of sharing those experiences in a way that makes emotional and rational sense to the end user. Together, they’ve taught me to stop apologizing for feeling feelings. Or—it’s even murkier than that. Those two women advocate making things, writing things, doing things, not because you will strike on fundamental, universal human truths, but because there is only the funny possibility you might. That is the endlessly funny thing about being alive.

    Mattie Brice—another among a pool of impossibly talented critics, and she is so good to me because I introduced myself by picking a fight with her—very recently taught me that emotional vulnerability is a type of courage and strength. (She teaches me things every day, but this is the one I’m stuck on currently.)

    Patricia Hernandez, an important writer who has at an impossibly young age found her voice, consistently imparts the importance of taking an idea and then murdering to death it in an IM window. Brian Taylor and Gus Mastrapa helped me understand ordinary anxiety, of using “personal essay” to cope with great big lonely fear feelings. Leigh Alexander has assisted—as a professional first, friend next, as a writer, confidante, gamer, person, woman, and then feminist, in descending order—by promising me the work I’m doing is good. A games critic named Tom Francis made a video that I think I perhaps didn’t agree with at first, only because it threatened to mitigate my ire at things, but I’ve found my ideas of compassion very slowly changing as a result of his sheer mellowness, and it’s adapted anything I write. Philippa Warr helped me understand the tremendous value of simply asking other people for help. One woman—I don’t know her name—contacted me after I told a short anecdote about Second Life online, because she recognized herself as the other person in the story (I told her, and it is true, that she changed how I write and what I want to write about). My good, good friend, colleague, and collaborator Cara Ellison has helped me make sense of the bizarre ecosystem that threads sex, sexuality, gender, feeling, and compassion into one magnificent tangle.

    There are so many others—Lana! Luke! Brendan! Ben! Others! So many others!—who have shown me that writing about “games” can be anything, do anything. You can be smart, can be funny, can literally do anything inside of a single and potentially incoherent sentence. I’m so, so proud of everyone I know.

    This is not name-dropping—this is annotation. These are those thank-you letters I never remember to send right after Christmas, the emails I forget to send.

    This year, I’ve also met my most valuable editors.

    Stu has advocated my setting exactly what I think and feel on paper, even when I fear (or know!) I am wrong. Ian Miles has been a sounding-board for all of my strangest thoughts, from the academic to the neurotic, helping me parse all of them. Chris—whom I’ve known for awhile and am privileged to work with again, this time as a sort of peer—was the first editor who made sense of my brain and heart thoughts with tough line edits and furious marginalia. (“You think you’re editing, but you’re actually doing the work of a cognitive behavioral therapist.”) Joey—ah, Joey!—aggressively headhunted me, coaxing me into writing by assuring my of my writing’s very marketability and merit.

    Similarly, there are other editors and bosses who have entrusted me with certain writerly and ethical responsibilities, and I am always torn between “Thanks” and “What is the matter with you.”

    I have two best friends. Three. Possibly five. But one of them is a woman called Whitney. She used to be my boss. Another best friend is my high school English teacher. Obviously I have some trouble keeping personal and professional friendships straight or separate, and I am the luckiest for it.

    All right. There is an article I wrote very recently—we published it today as part of Unwinnable’s “Family Week”—owing very heavily to all these people. It is titled “Allow Natural Death.” (My editor at Unwinnable, Stu, did me a profound solid just by titling it for me—once the draft was finalized, I could not even pretend I was emotionally equipped to so much as try to put a name on the top of it.)

    I also owe a few game developers—specifically three distinct, radically different people—for talking to me privately, helping me sort rational thoughts and irrational feelings into numbered lists and taxonomies. I think, because game design approaches our unique experiences in this holistic way—algorithmically, mathematically, narratalogically, rhymically, graphically, musically, poetically—these folks, whether they know it or not, really are best at glancing over my wholly alien experiences and weighing in, and in stunning, remarkable ways, on whether my writing or ideas make any sort of “design sense.”

    I want to thank Terry above all for placing sustained faith and support in me—in my voice, my literal, out-loud, spoken voice, of all things—and for making Super Hexagon. I have now repeatedly teased him about my projecting ponderous meanings to his scrupulously economical work. His difficult, torturous, brilliantly sparse games change how I want to write—you know, not in this case, this mess of a Livejournal blog, but in general.

    You probably don’t care to know this, but once I watched that video of Super Hexagon’s endgame—and I was already thinking about all these people, all these things—my column about my mother farted out of me in about a half of an hour, almost fully formed.

    A few people wondered how that column relates to games. On the one hand, I don’t know. On the other, that is exactly how.

    Oh, yes, this was supposed to be about writing, wasn’t it.

    It was not my strongest piece but, as anyone who saw the first draft might attest (the piece was largely unchanged, but it was ultimately lengthened), it was me at my tersest. I tended toward very simple sentences, few of which were overworked.

    About simple sentences: we seldom have “complicated” feelings; what we really experience, instead, are nineteen simple feelings simultaneously.

    I would change a lot about my column if I could. (My close friend Dan—who was my counselor at writing camp when I was a teenager—knew exactly where I was going when I unsubtly, ham-fistedly mentioned my fear of needles. I knew I went wrong there. I just knew it!)

    What I’m saying is, I’m pleased that anyone has related to my strange lack of finesse, to bare and utterly artless bones. I think, even at our maddest or saddest or most hopeless, we strive for a type of authenticity or sincerity. I do, too.

    I did not always feel that way. For many years, my favorite work was a play called “The Cocktail Party,” written by the miserable Christian existentialist T.S. Eliot, who was a man who really liked cats, if that tells you anything. He maintained that every person is an island and that we all die in either physical or emotional solitude, hopelessly misunderstood.

    Games prove Eliot wrong.

    I began all this with a brief rumination on cynicism, my least favorite type of lie, and I want to hop back into it.

    Cynicism is a valuable filter. Cynicism, very literally, is a defense mechanism, the very act of refusing to put hope and love and faith and trust in things, or in people.

    But people are so much more valuable.

    I have slowly discovered that if you consult people—if you crowdsource a single idea, a single feeling, or if you beg your friends to very honestly and cruelly edit you—people will edit you, will help you master your thoughts or feelings, can order you to cope even when you don’t want to cope. People aren’t a crutch: they’re an ally, a sort of ability.

    You can embrace people, not cynicism, and your fellow humankind can serve as your filter instead—wading through your ideas for you, finding the good ones.

    I think I run the danger of sounding incredibly self-congratulatory here. For that reason, and in the interest of transparency, here is my disclosure: I am not particularly powerful or competent or patient or generous. I’ve sent three emails in the last 60 days that each demonstrated, each in a very ugly way, my capacity for being small and mean and powerfully unfair. My unfortunate instinct is to burn bridges, not forge them.

    Also, I am trying to learn to be kinder to myself, yes.

    Anyway. When I look at the work you do, whoever you are, I am reminded again that the world is so much bigger than my small heart, and that I want to be better than myself.

    I have said this before, but we are all linking arms on the lifeboats. That is all there is.

    Thank you for helping my contemplate in so many meaningful ways. For better or worse, I didn’t write about my mother at all. You did.

    In other news, since you are wondering about my boring, boring life: tonight I wrote the hardest email of my life, explaining to a relative why she may not have my mother’s dog.

    “This responsibility is a real privilege,” I told her. “She gets me out of the house. She gets me up in the morning. She gives me something to do, someone to take care of, somebody to love.” Then I sincerely thanked her for volunteering.

    ---

    One last thing, and although it does have to do with both earnestness and with crowd-sourcing, I admit I am now being incredibly shameless:

    “So your article is doing well,” my best childhood friend Cassie said to me this morning. “That’s neat. When all those people click to read it, do you get a lot of ad, uh—”

    I stared at her. She stared back, and for a split second I swear I saw her eyes cross.

    “Oh, no,” she said.

    “My bad,” I replied.

    Related posts:

    1. On death, motherhood, and ‘Creatures’

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/29/allow-natural-death-post-mortem-aka-thanks/feed/ 13 4900 http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/24/cant-spell-pirate-without-irate-on-drm-and-punishing-the-customer/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/24/cant-spell-pirate-without-irate-on-drm-and-punishing-the-customer/#comments Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:47:28 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4883

    I am livid. Which superficially might sound very stupid, except that this kerfuffle combines ethics, DRM, social networking, and my integrity, all in an interesting and infuriating tangle.

    I was at breakfast with one of my very closest friends—a retired English and Latin teacher—and her son. Her son and I had just started arguing over the pronunciation of the word “diaspora” when, half-joking, I pulled my phone out of my handbag and played a recording of the word aloud at the table.

    Then I stared down at my phone. I frowned. My friend wanted to know what the matter was.

    “Um,” I said, blushing furiously. “Um. This is weird. My cell phone is accusing me of stealing the Oxford Dictionary of English.” I blinked. “That was a really expensive piece of software.”

    Some of you might already know about the Enfour dust-up. Here’s a quick recap anyway: at the beginning of this month, the developers at Enfour announced they were putting anti-piracy measures into their software. (Enfour develops and publishes iOS versions of the Oxford Dictionary of English and the American Heritage Dictionary, among others.)

    How did Enfour intend to combat piracy? By auto-posting tweets to their users’ Twitter accounts! But the clever plan backfired when the tweet—a confession of “software piracy”—began appearing on legitimate users’ Twitter accounts, too.

    How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will.#softwarepirateconfession

    — Jenn Frank (@jennatar) November 24, 2012

    
    

    Enfour has since launched a “crucial maintenance release” to iTunes, and the issue has seemingly been resolved.

    Of course, that makes little difference to the Enfour customer who, ahem, discovers that a “critical update” is waiting for her in the app store queue only after she has confessed, to 3,454 of her readers (not to boast or anything), that she stole some software. (Until hours ago, Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman had confessed to the same crime via Twitter as well.)

    Worse, Enfour’s software has a built-in “nag” notification. “I am a software thief!” the Oxford Dictionary of English repeatedly told me. It continued to notify me of my crime—and, inexplicably, in first-person tense—until I had gotten to a WiFi network to update the software.

    

    I found Enfour’s accusation especially insulting given the price I paid for the software—US$55. That is to say, the iOS version of the Oxford Dictionary of English costs the equivalent of a dense printed-and-bound volume of the very same. Worse, I grumblingly upgraded from the 3G to the 4S a year ago explicitly to purchase this expensive dictionary software (in fact, it was the very first purchase I made in iTunes once I was home from the AT&T store). I have frequently taken to Twitter to manufacture arguments over the cost of Enfour’s Oxford application, always defending my purchase.

    Some are wondering whether the auto-posted tweet constitutes “libel”; still others wonder why a customer would ever permit the Oxford Dictionary access to her Twitter account. I remember seeing the app’s request pop up, and I’d simply assumed the dictionary had added some sort of social networking functionality, something like “share this crazy new word with your friends!” or whatever. (Enfour’s software integrates very nicely with another app, the excellent Terminology, which does indeed include a “Twitter” button along with each definition.) At no point did Enfour disclose its intention to “post to Twitter on [my] behalf,” however. The request seemed perfectly innocuous.

    One user did deny Enfour this permission request, and he discovered that Oxford booted him from the software entirely. This is to say, he could not use Enfour’s Oxford at all unless he granted the dictionary permission to humiliate him publicly.

    

    Enfour has since admitted there was a “glitch” that caused “false positives” in the software. What’s especially harrowing, though, is that Enfour apparently mined the data in the iPhone itself in an effort to determine, not whether Enfour’s own software is pirated, but whether any software on the iOS device is pirated. This is ominous news for anyone with a jailbroken phone; for my own part, my device is perfectly legal (to a fault), but I do have a copy of TestFlight, a type of software that allows me to test beta builds of developers’ apps.

    The timing of my auto-posted tweet was ironic, to be sure: at breakfast I had been crowing about finally rooting my Nook Glow. That is because I will endure DRM safeguards if I must, but I would also like to read my already-legally-purchased Kindle books—anthologies, mostly—on the e-reader of my choice. (“What if you purchased a book but you could only read it in the kitchen,” I reasoned aloud to my friend and her son, “never in your living room?” I’m pretty sure my greatest crime here is “voiding a Nook warranty.”)

    I am a longtime and fanatical opponent of DRM—well, and of proprietary software in general. It’s taken me a long time to get my Mac to stream to my Xbox, my iCal to sync with my GoogleCal. Not only do I dual-boot into both OSX and Windows, I frequently run my Mac in “coherence” mode, an unholy mishmash of both operating systems. Years ago I did build a “Hackintosh,” but I used a real, out-of-use copy of OSX to do it. I’m willing to go the extra mile to avoid “brand loyalty”—whatever it takes, thanks.

    Some years ago I needed to review a game for Computer Gaming World; the game, a commercial build, was reinforced with Stardock protection. (Edit: Here, a reader suggests I probably mean StarForce. While that makes a lot more sense, I remember it differently. It was a Sherlock Holmes game, which is Stardock, but a quick search says my beef is really with TAGES.) When I attempted to run the game on a MacBook Pro using a real copy of Parallels, and in a paid-for copy of XP—see a pattern emerging here?—I was notified of my piracy, and the game would not run. I did review the game using my office PC, but only in my off-hours, meaning I had to take a cab home every night. In short, that turned into a pretty expensive review for me. (This summer, outraged customers encountered the same headaches when they tried to emulate legitimately-purchased copies of Diablo 3 from within Linux environments.)

    So DRM measures consistently have this problem, and it’s the reason lie detector test results are legally inadmissible in court: alas, the “false positive.”

    I’m not saying that piracy is okay—the truth is, it never is. Unless, of course, you’re trying to watch foreign television programs, or build your own DVR. Or convert your legally-purchased iTunes library to stream to your Xbox. Or make your friend a mix CD for her bridal shower. Or upload a supercut to YouTube. Hmm. Okay. Maybe it’s the litigiousness of things like DRM and SOPA that go a long way in revealing exactly how much gray space there really is.

    Sure, it’s okay, even noble, to combat piracy. In a way, Enfour’s decision to post auto-tweets from seemingly counterfeit software makes hilarious sense: culture has shifted so that we now post an announcement to our “timelines” anytime we log hours into a video game or throw financial support into a Kickstarter. Instead of “gamifying” only our achievements, why not also gamify shame?

    I’ve stated this before, publicly and privately, but as a freelance writer my only real collateral is my sense of integrity. That is what I have to trade on. There is something peculiarly invasive about having an attack on my integrity come from my own phone—from my dictionary!—and posted to my own Twitter timeline. I think I would still feel that way even if I had stolen software for iOS, in fact.

    And there’s the rub again, that issue of the “false positive.” It’s very Minority Report: as Enfour has proven, you can’t just use an algorithm to weed the unethical from the ethical. Using “workarounds” and “hacks” may well be suspicious, but it sure isn’t unscrupulous.

    Edit: I meant to say it somewhere in the course of writing this diatribe, but I got a little trigger-happy. Anyway, I thought Jonatan Söderström handled the issue of piracy very elegantly when he politely directed pirates to a Hotline Miami fix. He didn’t say it explicitly, but I feel like there was a subtle message embedded: “Not that I’m judging too harshly, but legit copies of this game are already patched.” Very, very nicely done. Edit #2: This!

    Update: Boing Boing is on it.

    Also, I apparently missed Enfour’s “apology” [pdf]:

    Nevertheless, a number of users with certain system configurations were affected during this time period. Some may still be if they haven’t updated to the fixed version. If you are not running the latest version, we urge you to update your app immediately to avoid the potential embarrassment of an unexpected tweet.

    According to Enfour’s apology statement, the errant tweet was sent because I put my phone in “sleep mode” before closing out of the app. (Who closes an iPhone app, like, ever?) The statement goes on to claim the tweet was sent if the user actually chose to “send” a tweet—this simply is not true. Rather, the application asked for permission to access my Twitter account, and then, voila! (Finally, the statement stresses that no data was compromised and that Enfour has “removed” the “anti-piracy module” from the latest software.)

    Again, Enfour’s dictionary apps have been “fixed,” but customers who haven’t updated to the newest version are in for a splendid treat. No telling whether Enfour plans to “fix” the module and try to implement it again.

    Related posts:

    1. EarthBound is no p***y; it will destroy you

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/11/24/cant-spell-pirate-without-irate-on-drm-and-punishing-the-customer/feed/ 16 4883 http://infinitelives.net/2012/08/05/you-arent-really-buying-a-goat/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/08/05/you-arent-really-buying-a-goat/#comments Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:10:23 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4855

    Late last month, in the course of conversation, my colleague J.P. Grant asked me about the business model of any particular blog. Like, how do you curate content? (Or aggregate it, depending on who you ask.) How are writers paid? Are they always paid? How, please, does a website make money?

    These are complicated questions. They’re also things I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and if everyone knew all the ways, we could quit our day jobs. Also, they’re things I tend to discuss only with my editor, because business practice is as much a moral debate as it is anything else.

    Still, I launched a business seven years ago by hand (my friend is still running it). I know about secure servers; I know how to become an LLC. I’ve worked for a business that makes half its money shipping internationally. I know how to look genuine while selling people on a product I don’t actually like. I know a fair amount about intellectual property; I know how Nigerian scams work. I know how to sound sincere and be insincere. I know how to fill out a shipping form that nearly circumvents customs. I know a surprising lot about user retention, page clicks, traffic, advertising, what a daily scramble is like, and really evil things far, far too nefarious to describe (“the more you can blockquote, the better for SEO,” “forge an intimacy with your readers and they’ll never realize they’re reading a sponsored post”).

    “No, these are good questions,” I told J.P., “because these are questions I ask [my editor].” I added that I’m “heavy duty when it comes to being a mercenary businessperson when it is theoretical.”

    “Jenn Frank: Theoretically Running This Shit,” J.P. typed.

    In the end, if we all did the things we knew how to do in the interest of “success”—whatever “success” is—we would be awful, manipulative people.

    Besides, bad ethics really is bad business practice. Most people can guess when they’re being swindled and, if anybody were to ever uncover that a post were sponsored or a system were being gamed, the backlash would be terrible.

    Meanwhile, “banner” advertising—a vestige of the print medium—simply doesn’t work, and running them makes your work seem less credible anyway. So even speaking theoretically, my real recommendation is always complete transparency.

    I told J.P. a secret, then, about Infinite Lives: it’s already paid for. For the next several years, I can leave it here, only updating it as I like—it’s already paid for.

    Donations.

    So if I have any debt, it’s a social one. It’s part of an understood contract.

    When I realized Infinite Lives was paid for, I stripped the ads, I explained. Then I asked J.P. if he’d ever noticed the donation link. He hadn’t.

    Have you? Because there’s a link here somewhere. But it isn’t panhandling, because I respect my readers—a great deal!—and readers don’t like being hit up for spare change.

    “In the interest of transparency,” I concluded to J.P., “you have to stop thinking of a website as a magazine or a newspaper. No paid posts, no ads.”

    “So is it doubly weird,” J.P. asked me, “when, say, Penny Arcade does the whole ‘pay us to remove ads’ thing? Given that the ads probably aren’t huge moneymakers anyway?”

    “I’ve thought a lot about that!” I replied. “This might be an unpopular stance, but I don’t have a problem with it. They are changing the product: a Penny Arcade without ads is a new Penny Arcade.” What I mean here is, according to Kickstarter’s strict rules, one can make the case that Penny Arcade is on the right side of the law.

    “Penny Arcade has also proven that readers and players can be unbelievably charitable people,” I continued. ”’Take my money!’ We pay with our wallets. I mean—we VOTE with our—gah!”

    I think if you are going to discuss the ethics of monetization, in this era your conversation will always turn toward Kickstarter.

    It’s been a really organic evolution, this road to Kickstarter, and not an evolution I think I like. Maybe I should stop thinking of Kickstarter as a bizarre mutation of Save the Children, except that it kinda is.

    But Kickstarter is only natural, I guess. It’s the very next step from organizations like Heifer International and Farm Africa, especially since a lot of the time you aren’t really buying a goat.

    And because a goat is seldom a goat—sometimes a “goat” is money better spent on other things—we ended up with things like Kiva, all these charities that help jumpstart entrepreneurs with a loan, as opposed to a donation. And here we are now: instead of feeding the poor, we’re funding entire businesses.

    I didn’t say all that to J.P.; rather, I said something more like “it’s kind of a jump from Heifer International.”

    I went on to say that it ought to be a good model, and it is except, at its potential worst, Kickstarter has become a way of taking pre-orders, of measuring popular opinion.

    “And [in the case of games], circumventing a stagnant publisher model,” J.P. added.

    “Yes, that’s true,” I said.

    But maybe the moral question of Kickstarter—which really is what we were weighing here, even though we’d never outright agreed on those particular terms—was the “expectation of a reward,” J.P. suggested.

    I pointed out that a lot of pledge drives do the same thing, except they are very careful to never use the word “reward.” Instead they tell you that, for a donation of a certain size, you’ll receive a ‘gift,’ “as opposed to ‘I am buying an extremely expensive coffee mug,’” I typed.

    For J.P., the ethical question was more a matter of, and these are his words, “a limited pool out there among individuals, and this is yet another source that is competing with charity for private dollars, but in a way that blurs the line between donation and investment.”

    “As such,” I agreed, ”[my editor] was very surprised when I went off about Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter. About how there ought to be a cap, no one needs all that money, even I need money, how can this many starving people invest in an unannounced game. And then I went on and on about feeding the poor.” Of course I am not really annoyed with Tim Schafer; rather, I’m peeved that more people aren’t upset about starving.

    “Well, this is the thing, right,” J.P. replied. “We live in a society, and particularly in gaming culture, where there is this fetishization of owning stuff.

    “But more than that, there is this fetishization of private enterprise and a disdain for public interest projects.”

    J.P. tied this, then, to politics especially, and only now that I’m reviewing what he wrote, I’m seeing that I could have gone off in another direction.

    “Right, so the consumerism thing,” I typed instead. “Oh, boy, was I put off when I had to log into Kickstarter to shut off any social networking stuff—a change that I only knew about thanks to the unsolicited emails about who was now my friend on Kickstarter.

    “First of all, I do not care to broadcast the projects I have participated in funding. People can read that in one of two ways. ‘That’s all?’ OR ‘I thought you were unbelievably poor; what are you doing funding all these things?’ You can see what types of things I assist and with what frequency or infrequency. You could, if you were a psycho, attempt to measure my philanthropy in every way.

    “So I am agreeing with you, yes, with the idea of gamifying or trophyfying my philanthropy, where instead of being an action, it becomes yet another thing I have.

    “Like a star in my crown: I have a car. I have a house. I have a Kickstarter profile. I have a WHAT WAIT WHAT.”

    J.P. agreed. “Yes, philanthropy is not a thing you have.” There was a long pause. “Unless you’re a douche,” he concluded.

    “Correct,” I typed. “And there’s a certain Joneses benefit dinner mentality there that is really tacky and skeevy.”

    I stalled.

    “That’s right, tacky,” I continued. “Which I’ve recently realized is a place on my morality spectrum. Some things aren’t morally wrong in a lawfulness sense; they’re just tacky.”

    “Heh, I like that,” J.P. typed, but now there was no stopping me.

    “Sorry, I’ve been obsessed with types and levels of ‘wrong’ lately, and a few weeks ago I realized that one spot is ‘tacky’.

    “Do you know how, if you suffer social anxiety especially, you feel guilt even due to a social faux pas or gaffe? Soon after college I realized that my guilt-o-meter doesn’t understand the difference between types of wrong. Doing something ‘wrong’ socially is of course nothing like doing something ‘wrong’ morally. I’m also a terrible moral relativist, so—
    “But a lot of us are taught right from wrong, but not types of right and wrong. So we have the same crippling guilt feeling from using the wrong fork as we might running over a dog. Or at least, I tend toward that, to review a gaffe long after it happened. Like mispronouncing paella in front of my boyfriend’s dad when I was 20.

    “So I realized that ‘tackiness’ is a pit stop on this spectrum, and a lot of issues I have morally with Kickstarter aaaaaare… tackiness.”

    “Q.E.D.,” J.P. typed.

    “And this I said to [my editor],” I continued. “Penny Arcade thing: morally wrong? Nope. Tacky to someone? Maybe. But there is the argument that it isn’t against the rules.

    “If the spectrum of wrongness goes God-wrong, law-wrong, socially wrong, tacky, this is pretty much the least offensive of the Wrongs.

    “I guess the spectrum of wrong sort of hinges on how many people you can offend in what way. Clashing colors are tacky: aesthetically offensive, but hardly punishable. ...Sorry, again, very obsessed with this new idea.”

    J.P.: “Are you? I couldn’t tell.”

    Me: “Sigh.”

    “Well, on that,” J.P. typed, “I think one of the issues particularly in this space is that many people do not have perspective on where a given incident or thing falls on the spectrum. The reactions are out of proportion with the severity or intensity of the event.

    “So you get BS outrages like the Mass Effect 3 ending conflated with actual outrages, like Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.”

    “Right, exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly why I’ve been harping on the spectrum of wrong with myself: so I don’t have guilt or a sense of outrage with myself disproportionate with little daily errors I commit. But yes, exactly. Not that I didn’t love the Mass Effect outrage, where suddenly every gamer was very invested in narratology, in plot! I thought that was hilarious.

    “Although…! A lot of skirmishes in public places have to do, not with the offense itself, but with an ongoing argument about where the wrongness DOES fall on a moral spectrum.

    “Certainly some gamers feel there is a lack of proportion with the way other gamers respond to certain images or trailers in games. The onus is on other gamers, then, to prove the wherefores of the degree of offense,” I mused, “which is difficult to do, at least in that case.

    “So the argument is not only over whether something is right or wrong, but also what type of wrong, to what degree of wrong, how damaging the wrong.”

    “Well said,” J.P. said.

    “Boy,” I said.

    “Yeah,” J.P. said, “I’m reaaaaally glad I only do this shit as a hobby. Wow.”

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/08/05/you-arent-really-buying-a-goat/feed/ 4 4855 http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/20/i-must-be-blogging-from-beyond-the-grave-because-i-think-i-just-died/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/20/i-must-be-blogging-from-beyond-the-grave-because-i-think-i-just-died/#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:18:38 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4837 I promise to stop posting spit-takes to the Internet, but there was a comment left on game designer Mitu Khandaker’s blog some weeks ago that might be worth revisiting. Maybe you’ve already read it; the comment itself rapidly gained some, uh, notoriety.

    In said comment, one of Khandaker’s readers took Katie Williams to task. Then his remark alarmingly turned its lens toward Basically All Females Everywhere. I don’t think the comment was intended maliciously, exactly, and there is a great deal to be said for women choosing to behave with force and agency, but the author kinda came off as a sack of shit.

    You don’t have to read the reader’s comment at all, though, because someone helpfully created this bit of machinima, forever preserving—nay, immortalizing—this truly brilliant blog comment, for my children and children’s children to always cherish. An Heirloom Comment.

    Yeah, yeah, okay. I know I just promised I wouldn’t post any more spit-takes, but you should also know I pressed “play” on this video and then literally spat Diet Coke everywhere.

    P.S. Mitu Khandaker was recently interviewed at Electron Dance.

    P.P.S. Aha! Speaking of “video games were invented by men,” 1UP.com just published my retrospective of Roberta Williams’s seminal 1980 game Mystery House. Here it is!

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/20/i-must-be-blogging-from-beyond-the-grave-because-i-think-i-just-died/feed/ 3 4837 http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/18/i-get-tired-of-talking-about-it-too/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/18/i-get-tired-of-talking-about-it-too/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:44:27 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4829

    Man. Man. I don’t think I’d ever used the word “gender” in a piece of writing until 2010. Wow! What a strange time for me, too. I was three months’ out of my six-year on-and-off romance/cohabitation thing, very freshly single and really bumbling around, extremely “over” writing about video games, and meanwhile I’d begun reading a lot about learned helplessness. You know, just for funsies. Er.

    Yep, before 2010, I’d never used the word “gender.” What a dumb word.

    Actually, that might be a lie. In school I did write a paper about women who join subcultures: it focused on Flora Belle Jan, the self-identified “flapper” journalist, and also, of all people, Mimi Thi Nguyen, who was a punk zinester and music journalist in the ‘90s. I likened both women to the not-very-fictional Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans, a woman who meticulously works to desex herself (Kerouac tells us she has short hair like a man’s, and that she wears dress slacks), all to be taken seriously as a Beat writer. So I bet the word “gender” must’ve snuck into that college essay somehow.

    In Subterraneans Mardou is driven to the brink of her own wits, suddenly all too aware that she is, now and forever, ostracized by her chosen “subculture,” some niche group with which she had once so identified. Jan and Nguyen experienced similar psychological breaking points and very willfully severed themselves from their own established writing careers. In fact, I’m sure in my paper I accused them of “fleeing.”

    It was kind of a weird paper to write for Asian-American history class. It was kind of weird that I took the class at all—but I needed a history credit to graduate! Oh, well. I think I got a B.

    It would also be weird if, six years after having been suddenly hot-dropped into video games journalism, I were to—very abruptly, and with a personal sense of finality and closure—acknowledge some of my own patterns of experience.

    Aha, but that’s just what I did with my current column at Unwinnable, “I Was a Teenage Sexist.”

    Oh: what’s the column about? Okay. Well, I was an awful kid, a terrible adolescent girl, and a superficially nice but increasingly hostile young adult, all in spite of myself. I considered myself “one of the guys” and was an absolute horror to other girls.

    I also take some space at Unwinnable to describe “internalized sexism,” which is when a woman fancies herself an exception to her own gender—which becomes double-ungood when she uses that same value-set to tacitly condone abuses done either to other women or to herself. I talk about different kinds of hatred, especially a burgeoning, unresolved self-hatred. Basically, it’s like if you combined “Nathan Barley” with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Wait. That cannot be the correct analogy. Oh, dear. You had better just read the piece.

    The article is honest and heartfelt even at its worst, but I also think it’s way more guarded than it looks. That cautiousness isn’t necessarily deliberate, either: one person remarked “she got a lot worse than what she put in that article,” which chilled even me, the article’s author, and made me rethink what I’d left out.

    But then I decided nothing too important was missing after all, and then I felt really good, like I could probably go the rest of my life without owing anyone whatever bad parts of some story. If someone says, “What was it like for you as a woman,” I can just shrug and say, “I wrote about it once,” and then point at the article instead of the experience itself. That lends a nice, healthy buffer.

    The essay is four days old now—well, it’s actually two weeks old, but it only went up four days ago—and I guess what I’m saying is, it takes awhile to internalize certain things, un-internalize them, and process them again. And then there’s the question of whether you want that diarist’s hemorrhage all over your editor Stu’s website. Sorry, Stu!

    I guess the column eventually works its way around the room to some other stuff, too. I only later heard it called “Somebody Else’s Problem,” which is really accusatory and uncomfortable!, but I do try to carefully describe that feeling of “That’s Not Me.” As in, “I am not a terrible person who anonymously says terrible things to [group], sight-unseen, for no reason.” The very nicest, kindest people have these very polite blinders on. They keep their heads low and their noses clean. Those are the nice people I mean to poke at with my little column.

    And this is a trick I’ll very openly cop to using in my writing, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Look how much nicer you are than I! Poke, poke. It’s so easy for you to be kind and ethical! Poke, poke. Boy, if there were a more vocal majority of nice people, you’d sure be the one for the job! Poke, poke, jab.

    For better or worse I don’t think the column ventures into any really strong opinions: it doesn’t take a real stance on the Anita Sarkeesian furor, except to imply that it’s wrong to abuse people on the Internet; it doesn’t explicitly name “rape culture” or use too much gnostic feminist vocabulary; it doesn’t take “female representation” to task in the way you might initially worry; Tosh.0 isn’t mentioned once.

    Instead, I am a young feminist, standing on the ground floor, eyeballing the drawing board.

    The basic takeaway of the thing, which is the part Kirk Hamilton wanted to share with Kotaku, is the rather benign notion that feminism is simply about anti-sexism.

    Of course, the passage Kirk quotes has a very long lede—3500 words go far, spatially, in padding the conclusion’s punch—and although the article itself isn’t too marvelously incendiary, perhaps this little set of parentheses really does make for too punchy an excerpt. Readers will especially be on their guard anyway, so I guess the reader reactions aren’t surprising, even though those reactions are very different from other responses the piece elicited.

    A couple people did come to me directly with concerns, and I agree my handling of some subject matter is problematic. Most imminent for me is that needling worry that any mishandled language will cause a type of pain, and I am still trying to decide whether I pass or fail. (This is to say nothing of the brief, sharp, immediate backlash Unwinnable received for including a screenshot of Anita Sarkeesian’s fictionally-but-alarmingly-bludgeoned face, itself a subject for an entirely different article, which already exists, by the way.)

    So… why even write about all this stuff now? Just now? So suddenly?

    I mean, I sure cooled my heels on this one. Way to hop on that gravy train!

    I think Leigh is absolutely en pointe when she addresses a broadening dialogue about the mainstream’s latent, persistent sexism. “Maybe we’re making up for lost time,” she wonders, adding, “People who’ve been silent for a long time are louder when it’s finally time to be heard.”

    “We women are learning and exploring too, assessing our own roles in the landscape and how we want to express ourselves,” Leigh continues.

    I think that’s also true—not even in a “oh, suddenly we’re all feminists!” way, necessarily.

    Like, for my own part I’ve been noodling with creative nonfiction for a (long) while, and even though I don’t think of that genre as particularly gendered, in video games, where this style of writing is still blushing and nascent and new—and probably more the purview of Gus Mastrapa, Tom Bissell, Tim Rogers—I’ve already heard the “personal essay” referred to as a style of “women’s writing.” Ha! That’s weird!

    But I get it. There’s a subset of us—although it’s a pretty even sex split, here—who are enthusiastically and supportively yelling at one another to keep it up with this type of writing, and what a strange feeling to stake our flags right in that crevice. And it isn’t exactly “Kotaku Core,” but it isn’t really niche anymore, either!

    Wow! We live in such a maddening time! Look at all these people writing, making videos, making video games! A lot of them are very good at it! It’s all very exciting! That is why a lot of people, including women, are very serious when they stress what they have to contribute, and then daringly contribute it. Everybody ought to live that way, with that sense of adventure and passion!

    But about that landscape: some terrains still seem to have more silt, or less. What attitudes will be grown in those barren spaces? Why do some people—people who possess passion, the right sense of adventure—get shouted down always? That hardly seems correct. That unnerves me. And now there is this new unnerving thing happening, with all the extra shouting over the din that was already there! I think they’re battle cries, or battle hymns maybe.

    For a self-avowed feminist (oh, that word!) I am not very vocal, kind of the way you’d never want to admit to being Lutheran or Libertarian or Occupy. But then I see really good writers and makers being shouted-down. Well, never mind, then; go ahead and add my voice to their numbers! Ah, I’ve again tried to write a concluding paragraph, and it’s just too punchy. Well.

    Finally, the darling image up on top—in which an anonymous woman ponders her childhood idol, Rambo—is from Kotaku. (I think that is Kirk’s doing, as well.)

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/07/18/i-get-tired-of-talking-about-it-too/feed/ 2 4829 http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/03/linksplosion-t-shirts-hefty-seamstress-and-more/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/03/linksplosion-t-shirts-hefty-seamstress-and-more/#comments Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:00:53 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4814

    I’d promised to write something, anything!, for Artifice Books, but its editor Tadd was not too sure about my very first pitch, a catalogue of movie clips in which women get punched in the face.

    So I scrapped that plan, and instead I have written on the subject of George Buckenham and Jonathan Whiting’s Hefty Seamstress. I recommend playing the game, too (it’s over here).

    

    I got a really nice, personalized press email from “Gnome”—his real name is Konstantinos Dimopoulos, I’ve just learned!—and he is campaigning hard for the Bundle-in-a-Box Adventure Games bundle. As with many other bundles, this collection is pay-what-you-like; not only are seven games included, a copy of the well-received Ben There, Dan That! is in the mix. Why, yes, the games are DRM-free, since you were wondering. In the meantime, the Bundle-in-a-Box heralds the launch of The Sea Will Claim Everything. All this can be yours for just hundreds of pennies! PC adventure gamers, you can’t beat that!

    

    Aled Lewis’s “How They Died” is now available as a T-shirt.

    

    I’m not sure Buff Monster’s new series of minis is supposed to look like Katamari, but ALBOTAS is right to make the comparison anyway.

    

    Foldskool Heroes (via it8bit) is a downloadable template that you can turn into custom papercraft of your own. I really like this! It sort of reminds me of those blank vinyl Soopa Coin-Up Bros figurines.

    Related posts:

    1. Spore T-shirts and posters
    2. Daily Linksplosion: Friday, December 25, 2009

    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/03/linksplosion-t-shirts-hefty-seamstress-and-more/feed/ 1 4814 http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/01/what-to-do-when-youre-depressed-prey/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/01/what-to-do-when-youre-depressed-prey/#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:45:07 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4806

    My last post here was about my friend Brian, and this one is, too.

    I don’t think I’ve talked lengthily about anxiety or depression in any public venue, but I will say that, after a pretty serious breakup in college, I tried Celexa. That did not go well. If you are under the age of 24, maybe don’t try that drug. Still, I think I can tell you, without tipping my hand totally, I have a lot of the same problems BT has. I’ve talked a lot about crippling paralysis and numbness, for instance, and when an event throws me off-balance—receiving a text message on Tuesday afternoon, say—it can be hard for me to get all the way out of bed and eat something. It can be a pain to force yourself out of your own head and neuroticism. Leaving the house helps. Taking a little trip might help.

    For Brian, a visit to Chicago was just what he needed! No, I wasn’t a particularly helpful friend. But! I did convince BT to play the game Prey. Oh, Prey. What a brilliant, stupid game! It is a little like Portal, a little like Portal 2, and it explains its game mechanics using awful Cherokee stereotypes! Check it out! (It is a genius game, actually, but when Brian shouts from the sofa “How did this even get made?” the implicit answer really is, “Oh, barely.”)

    In his latest piece at Unwinnable, “Stuck,” Brian talks a little bit about depression, about “play” as a creative act (oh, it is), and—ahem—especially about Prey.

    “You’re constantly moving forward, crossing whatever bridge or going through whatever portal is in front of you because it is in front of you,” Brian writes. Best of all, the game doesn’t want you to get stuck. “That’s a nice feeling,” Brian adds, “to be moving forward.”

    Here, Brian is quick to underscore that he isn’t speaking in metaphors at all. In-game progress is no microcosm, no synecdoche, no grand framework for understanding life. Prey—a short game that, in this case, was a steal at eight bucks—is very, very low-investment. But forward movement is forward movement.

    So moving through the game is its own success, its own reward, same as making yourself brush your teeth and eat a waffle at 9am. Success!

    • Unwinnable.com – Stuck
    ]]> http://infinitelives.net/2012/06/01/what-to-do-when-youre-depressed-prey/feed/ 3 4806 http://infinitelives.net/2012/05/29/nerd-notes-game-shopping-with-brian-taylor/ http://infinitelives.net/2012/05/29/nerd-notes-game-shopping-with-brian-taylor/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 09:20:12 +0000 http://infinitelives.net/?p=4787

    My friend and colleague Brian Taylor visited Chicago over the weekend, and I tell you, I barely got to drag him all over town the way I’d planned. In another life we might’ve gone to Three Aces, Grange Hall Burger Bar, and all the other places the foodies have not yet discovered and ruined. We did visit Myopic, but there wasn’t time enough to go around the corner to Quimby’s. (We did hit up the Paramount Room, even though I warned the burgers aren’t as good as advertised, and then my hamburger was ridiculously delicious, and then I felt foolish in a really nice way.)

    Mr. Taylor and I went directly from the airport to Videogames Then & Now, which is this fantastic store out in Norridge. If you are ever in Chicago, do yourself a favor, rent a Zipcar, and make the drive.

    We ought to have recorded ourselves talking in there, because we were hilarious. As a matter of fact, the gentleman behind the counter thanked us for being such lively loiterers, and I admitted to him that ordinarily I am very in-and-out of that store, all business. This time I was excitable, even a little bit twerpy; I’ve seldom had so much fun in public.

    BT and I spent a long time among the stacks of NES cartridges. We are both great fans of the MacVenture games and their NES ports, and I found Shadowgate pretty easily. Brian wanted his own copy of Déjà Vu, and I located that pretty nimbly, too. I also snatched up the NES Gyruss—that “tube shooter” is only the greatest arcade machine ever—while Brian, who is even more into hardboiled crime fiction than I could ever aspire, picked up a bizarre little game called Nightshade. I hope he decides to write about it.

    BT nearly convinced me to buy NBA Jam for Game Boy; I’d googled game footage on my iPhone right there in the store, and we marveled at what a full game experience was packed onto that tiny cart. (He could not convince me to even consider this abomination, no matter how he tried.)

    In the Xbox 360 aisle I began raving about Prey, which I remembered as short, strange, brain-bending, and unironically racist. Used copies were priced to move at just $8, and soon enough I had talked both of us into snagging copies. (BT would find his chance to make good headway through Prey the next day, because I took like two hours to get ready for the concert.)

    We also sat down with an old issue of Nintendo Power and basically copy-edited it. We flipped through multiple “how to beat” and “cheat codes” books, too, a couple of which were authored by Jeff Rovin.

    “The cover of this book reminds me of—did you ever see that Unauthorized Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book?” I asked Brian.

    “I had it!” BT said. “In fact, I think it may have also been written by Jeff Rovin.” (ATTN BRIAN: it sure was!)

    Of course I soon began shouting about the perfect invention that is the Nyko Perfect Shot, which is a gun-shaped saddle for the Wii remote. My favorite FPSes are “on rails,” I love light guns, and as something of a former arcade rat I very fervently believe—and I am plagiarizing Margaret Robinson when I say this—“touching hardware matters.”

    Now I lamented in-store that I have only one Wii light-gun game (“It’s Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles,” I told Brian, “and I loved co-op because it stopped Nik and me from arguing, for once”). Brian laughed, then assured me that House of the Dead: Overkill would be worth my while.

    Then, immediately after we left the game store—and this is the probably most ridiculous part—we popped a U’ey and drove back to a GameStop to look for Dead Space: Extraction.

    Back at the ranch, I demanded that BT look at some of my favorite Atari 2600 games. Most of these are really beautiful ports of fuller arcade experiences.

    Someday I will write about the thousand iterations of Gyruss—I’m a little horrified by the NES reinvention, actually—but I do believe the 2600 port is the most jaw-dropping of all of them. Seriously, this music is incredible:

    I also showed him Berzerk; 2009 was kind of a dark year for me, I explained, so every day after work I’d come home and sit on the floor and play it. It is so spare, so austere. “I don’t think of it as a port,” I told him. “I really think of this as the true version of the game.”

    Instead of treating the game as a fast-paced shooter, I make Berzerk into this slow, contemplative thing, where I patiently wait behind electrified walls until the robots destroy themselves. It has never occurred to me to play it any differently, and now I was blurting “I think I’m playing this wrong,” and BT was saying, “I think you are!”

    I play videogames on an eight-year-old HD cathode television, and when it finally burns out or breaks, I will probably pay through the nose to have it repaired. This decision has something to do with my affection for light-gun games, which sometimes rely on scan lines, but it has everything else to do with the Atari 2600. Professor Ian Bogost has made much of the value of phosphorescent bleeding, and in a game like Berzerk the walls really do burn blue in the eeriest way. (Here is its original arcade incarnation; note how luminous the walls’ glow.) I explained all this to Brian because I was suddenly embarrassed about my television set.

    I also showed BT Solaris (“Like, the Tarkovsky film?” “NO”) and Space Shuttle, which was a gift from Kevin. BT was especially smitten with that game, because—and I did a terrible job of demonstrating this without the game’s reference sheet—the 2600’s six switches are meant to represent the shuttle’s control panel. The game itself is a meticulous procedural.

    The Video Game Critic deftly explains:

    In addition to the normal joystick controls, Space Shuttle uses all of the console buttons to control things like primary/secondary engines, cargo doors, and landing gear. The manual is a thick, 30-page booklet containing procedures, diagrams, and charts. A quick reference sheet is also included, and there’s even a template to place over your console switches! The screen displays the instrument panel and a view out of the windshield.

    BT started talking about what a novel thing it is, to have the hardware itself become such an integral part of the game experience, and I responded with some weird anecdote about a magical game I had played in childhood, but anyway I agreed with Brian. Then we talked about how emulation always fails in some way anyway, but in this case it fails spectacularly.

    Brian played Shadowgate for awhile, and then I started playing the NES version of Uninvited. I began to panic as my character was gradually overcome by the forces of evil, shouting that I didn’t realize the NES version had a “time limit.” I shut the console off. (Now I discover that the NES version doesn’t have a time limit—it’s much more insidious than that. I am carrying a single item in my inventory that is A) useless, and B) slowly killing me.)

    Later I told Brian we ought to have recorded our reaction shots to the title screen of Solstice. We looked at each other, and our faces were like “Whooooaaaaa!” (If we had only known!)

    We were completely stunned. “It’s prog rock!” I shouted. “Fantasy psychedelia! Wizards and mushrooms!” (I’m not actually ‘into’ progressive rock, although I inexplicably become furious whenever I discover someone does not love Electric Light Orchestra.)

    And although Solstice is 8-bit, we could absolutely hear what musician Tim Follin was getting at. “Can you hear it?” Brian asked me. “Like a tin whistle?”

    “Yes, yes, yes,” I agreed. “And this guy is like way into lutes.” Incidentally, with thirty seconds’ research, I located this photo of Follin holding a mandolin, which I figure is close enough.

    I regret not knowing about this visionary sooner, as he’s already retired. But I was pleased to discover that Frank Cifaldi interviewed Follin in 2005.

    In the end it is probably all right that Brian and I didn’t record ourselves saying or playing anything, because it would’ve gone on for hours and hours.

    Related posts:

    1. What do you do when you’re depressed? ‘Prey’

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