Infinite Lives

Failures in Edutainment: the mid-’90s “girl game” fad

Jenn Frank — Sun, 13 May 2012 17:51:32 PDT

Brandon Boyer, via Twitter, inadvertently (advertently? well, whatever) directed me toward this post at Jezebel about girl games.

Its writer, Anna Breslaw, opens her piece with a quick hat-tip to a 1995 computer game called Chop Suey, which I’ve mentioned on Infinite Lives thrice before and am about to mention again. That’s because it is a great game that isn’t mentioned often enough. I’m trying to change the world, here, people.

But yes, our coincident timing is totally awkward, ha ha. Earlier in the week I’d snuck a bunch of Chop Suey playthrough videos onto YouTube, hoping to jog memories. (For a long time the only footage of the game available online was Bruno’s.)

But also, I was already laboring over this Chop Suey retrospective. Please do read it! It is a tragedy Chop Suey isn’t better remembered: it was celebrated in its day, and with reason. But most people did not use the Internet in 1995, which is to say, Chop Suey and all its accolades have not been very well preserved. (Duncan’s extraordinarily bizarre death doesn’t help anything; it’s almost impossible to discuss Chop Suey without mentioning that part, too, and the game is thusly difficult to google.)

The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were such a great time for edutainment, and while the medium isn’t entirely dead (your child’s school computer lab may yet have Storybook Weaver!), I do think the middle-’90s’ “girl game” craze went a long way in murdering it. Worse, the “girl game” genre probably scared a generation of woulda-been PC gamers away.

Most girls did not actually play girl games in the ‘90s, of course, because most “girl games” were stupid. Girls are not idiots. Girls are not boy-crazy strumpets. Girls are 8. Girls are 9. Girls play Oregon Trail and You Don’t Know Jack. Can people not picture 9-year olds?

This is what girls really want: girls want horse training simulations; they like fortune-telling; girls read spy stories and tales of adventure and daring; girls enjoy the Super Nintendo version of Mario Kart and computer games about being in outer space. Girls would like chemistry lab sets for Christmas, or planetariums and cheap telescopes, or periscopes and walkie-talkies. Girls like crafts. Girls like Minecraft! Girls like dolls, toy theaters, replicas, scale miniatures, and “character editors.” Girls like She-Ra. Girls like Labyrinth. Girls like sci-fi, unless it’s just a bunch of dweeby dudes standing around talking into their own lapels. Girls like pirates and especially stowaways, and especially stowaways who look like boys but are secretly girls. Girls like scrappy heroines—resourceful, freckle-nosed troublemakers—heroines with scraped knees and scuffed shoes. Girls are impatient to learn something new, and if you don’t give them brain-food they eventually wander off. There! There is your blueprint for a “girl game.”

So, yes, Breslaw’s and my Chop Suey -themed posts both went up on May 12, both incorporating that same playthrough footage. Oops! How embarrassing. It’s a little like arriving at a dance in matching dresses.

Fortunately, the dresses aren’t identical! (Ha, ha, ha!) Breslaw’s piece isn’t about Chop Suey at all, thank goodness. It’s actually about a new project called FEMICOM, an online museum that aspires to catalogue and archive every manner of game-for-girls. This is noble work—it’s why I’ve made Chop Suey evangelism one of my pet hobbies, actually—exactly because the project illustrates the enormity of the gulf between “this game or toy is edifying” and “why would you ever give your child that.”

The nicest thing about seeing this article about “girl games” on Jezebel, though? It’s elicited all these comments, where the readers themselves are essentially sorting the lady-treasures from the lady-tripe. One reader mentions Heavenly Sword for PS3. Oh, boy, do girls love that game. (Because we love third-person beat-em-ups starring She-Ra! It’s pretty much the only game you should give an adult woman. There, I said it.)

Other notable “girl-friendly” game mentions: Sim City. The Sims. Little Big Planet. Metroid. Zelda. Carmen Sandiego. Ecco. Pokemon. No One Lives Forever. Nancy Drew games. Street Fighter, Soul Calibur. Doom, Marathon, BioShock. Killer7 (most girls do really well with first-person rail-shooters; this has something to do with spatial attention). Final Fantasy. Fallout. Diablo. Starcraft. Mass Effect. Star Wars KOTOR. Guild Wars. Skyrim. Braid. Age of Empires. Civilization. Portal and its sequel. (“I loved that about Portal…really the only way you knew the character was female was from the brief glimpses you got of yourself if you lined Portals up right. Her female-ness wasn’t a factor one way or the other in the game.” Thank you, Susan Fry! I agree.)

And a thread, four comments long, about Woodruff and the Schnibble.

And also from the Jez comments,

See, this is why I get so frustrated with the whole conversation about games for girls. If you’d tried to design an ideal non-people based game for little girl me, it would have featured dinosaurs fighting each other, not dolphins swimming around being pretty.

Motherboard – In a Field of ‘90s Barbieland Wreckage, Chop Suey Got Gaming for Girls Totally Right

Required Reading: ‘A Theoretical War, Part 3′

Jenn Frank — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:21:38 PDT

Me: i was reading this tonight
Me: http://www.electrondance.com/a-theoretical-war-part-3/
Me: i was feeling out how joel goodwill feels
Me: i think i like where he takes it
Me: how much about games criticism do you read

Julian: not much

Me: LUDOLOGY VS NARRATOLOGY: THE FUNNEST ARGUMENT

Julian: man I hate it when things become binary

Me: mhm

Julian: that said, I was thinking that I don’t want my game-playing to be interactive infographs either, you know?

Me: ah, here it is!

Narrow definitions of games are perfectly valid within little contextual spaces. Ludology can have its rules-based framework. Narratology is free to pursue games through narrative. Art games can co-exist with the FPS, the RTS and the platformer. They don’t have to compete. Why can’t we have different theories for different situations, each one handling their own definition of game?

Every voice and viewpoint is valuable. What’s so maddening are the destructive attempts to own the word game. Mathematics blossomed into a thousand different branches, so has games and so should the theory. Some will care about narrative. Some will care about rules. Some will care about player experience. Some will care about monetization. And some will try to change the world.

There’s enough space for everyone.

Julian: music is kind of like that too
Julian: hardcore music theorists are all about structure (and usually against tonality)

Me: i inadvertently read that the wrong way
Me: as people who are not hardcore into music theory,
Me: but rather, into hardcore music……… theory

Julian: haha

(This all came up because Julian had actually sent me this, and I became very, “oh, hmm.” )

(P.S. If you happily follow all Goodwin’s endnotes, you might suddenly discover it is a quarter after 10pm and you have not yet washed a single dish or glass.)

Rise of the Welcome-to-My-Meltdown: on video games and working alone

Jenn Frank — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:32:33 PDT

Instead of reading and publishing Kevin’s latest piece, which is still in the queue (sorry, Kevin!), I am directing you toward my newest thing, a review of Anna Anthropy’s debut book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. I might also continue to ignore Kevin. One of my 2012 resolutions is “sly self-promotion,” and I know Kevin will pardon me.

Most people will not read my book review, but I hope they go ahead and read Anna Anthropy’s book. The review itself is about a lot of things, but it’s also about video games and game development and writer’s block and emotional paralysis. I’m a little surprised that Stu used my quaint joke title (“Rise of the Existential Crisis”), but I’m mostly unruffled.

I’m new to freelancing, by the way. Many people were surprised when I gave up the celebrity gossip blogging gig, which was a sure bet, a daily, paid exercise that I enjoyed doing. And anyway, freelancing is hard—really hard. Most people can’t do it. I am not sure I can. I haven’t been any sort of success (hasn’t anyone noticed I’ve only published two things since February?).

At some point I might have to give it up. It makes me very happy, kind of, to sit here and write nothing and hate myself, so I’m not sure I will give up so soon, but I keep thinking about it.

But what no one tells you is that it isn’t a living. In fact it’s the total opposite: it’s figuring out how to afford full-time freelancing.

Writing for yourself is luxurious, and like all luxuries, it can be expensive. Even at this early stage in my tiny career I already waste a lot of time. Mostly I waste time trying to devise sneaky plans to help myself afford this glamorous, bohemian lifestyle.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have been married. I’ve been single for a while now, but this is my first real experiment with being mostly-alone and beholden only to myself. Whenever I sit and rest I suddenly remember I am wasting money. I can’t believe how expensive it is to just sit and breathe.

Emotionally, I didn’t realize the all-or-nothing proposition freelancing would turn everything I write into. I knew that I would need to learn to write faster, sure, but not this much faster. I always thought I was fast. I’m slow. S-L-O-W.

And the stakes for writing were so much lower when I was able to go into a day job, or when I was taking care of my parents! If I published a heap of bullshit, it wasn’t the Worst Thing. Now it is the Worst Thing. (Then again, I am very stingy with what I’ll put my name on. For one thing, I think blogs, sometimes news, are sapping “creative nonfiction,” AKA the Lost Art of the Magazine Article. Internet writing is the norm nowadays, and what we once called “articles” we now call “longreads.”)

Talk about a crisis, though: every day in March, and then April, that I couldn’t seem to finish Anna’s book, was another day of lost wages, never mind my ever-forward march toward an eviction notice and eventual death. (“April writer’s block brings May electricity shut off,” I repeated to myself on the couch, really beginning to lose it.)

This turns an ordinary case of writer’s block into a thunderous chorus, one of your own making, singing a paean to your dreams’ own inefficacy. That’s a terrific feeling! to use every generous window of opportunity others have given you only to prove that, besides not being very good at life, you’re also some sort of couch-bound idiot.

I don’t mean to talk so much about money, but it is an interesting feeling, the feeling of slowly starving to death. It isn’t just money, or misspent time, or whatever, but the starvation part is so much gravy. Or at least I wish it were gravy. Sorry, I’m hungry at this very moment.

(05/07 edit: If you are clever enough, you can eat for just dollars a day, so I hope you ignore journalist Earnest Cavalli when he advises Twitter to “hug me” and mail me instant ramen. For one thing, I already eat enough instant ramen and, if anything, just mail me toilet paper. God, I’m kidding! The point is, these might become things you start planning around, which doesn’t help Writer’s Block any.)

The rest of last month’s crisis is laser-honed on Anna’s book, which itself is a pep talk about getting your ass into gear and not waiting around. The text is meant as empowering, not discouraging, but boy, did it turn me into a mess.

I sent an email early this morning about how, in my role as the “unreliable critic,” I hope other people only feel encouraged. This is a strange thing to say, probably, because I often sound so cynical or depressed. I’m really only sadistic. No, I did not put that part in the email.

What I did put in the email was this, and even though it is really only meant for the one person I wrote it to, I think it does clarify my own slack interest in the nitty-gritty of game development, which doubles as my profound interest in games’ authors themselves: “It is extremely queer,” I wrote my acquaintance, “to dedicate your life and its mission to games. I think—and I agree with Anna here, and this is a real fulcrum of her book—that even just the goal is a profound goal, because it lends so much weight and credence to the form, that so many people would become so dedicated. See?”

“I don’t mean to be so gushy,” I continued in another paragraph, “but we’re a pack of odd ones, aren’t we?”

It’s strange that I used “we” right there, as if I were lumping myself in with some marvelous group. I wasn’t, not intentionally.

Actually, I was thinking of the bizarre people who bizarrely choose freelance. These people sit straight up in bed one night and realize that not being able to write exactly what they’d like to write is WORSE THAN DEATH. WORSE THAN DEATH. That is the only reason you would ever choose freelance-writing over a nice life. Freelance is mostly work and drinking but occasionally includes starvation and folding yourself into a ball on the sofa, where you cry out for intervention. I like to cry out to both God and Steven, but sometimes I phone Cass or my mom instead.

My mother doesn’t think it’s strange that I like writing stuff, but she thinks it’s strange that I mostly like to write about video games. She even thinks it’s strange that I’ve shelved all plans to make a video game. My mother’s attitudes make sense, I guess. But when you play a game, and I play the same game, and then we compare our notes and we’ve had these separate experiences (or maybe the same one), that’s amazing! That’s why people write, too!

Since finishing the book and its review, I’ve gotten only a little better at freelancing. I stay fastened to my laptop a little better—my apologies to Twitter—and I’m getting better at saying “no,” or generally knowing when to excuse myself from friends. In the past you couldn’t get rid of me! Now I’m slightly more aware of a clock ticking. I might even check the time and announce I have to leave! (In some cases I am overdoing this. One text message went “What happened?” and I realized I hadn’t noticed thirty days going by.)

Whitney has taken it best. She says I am a better friend now—more “accessible,” she says!—which is great, that she feels this way, because I am actually ignoring people more than ever.

There’s a book I need to reread called A Writer’s Space. I meant to reread it before publishing the book review, but I guess I had better reread it now. I read it when I was at home alone with my adoptive dad, who had Alzheimer’s at that time, which made writing difficult.

The book is about battling yourself and others—usually friends and relatives who can see at a glance that you are painfully “not busy”—for workspace. The book does not explain how to deal with a family member with Alzheimer’s, but it did teach me how to win a fight against myself, at least.

Of course the doctor who wrote the book talks about deep breathing and feeling very zen. Is that helpful to everybody? Probably not.

In that case, I might also recommend a passage from Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. She is not so patient. In fact, she is extremely irritated about being interrupted:

I don’t know, maybe if I had an office job people would call me all day and ask me to run out and do things for them, too. But somehow I doubt it. No one ever asks me to take time off for them when I have to teach. Folks respect the fact that I might get in trouble from a boss or disappoint my students. But when I’m my own boss and don’t have a designated space outside the home to call “my office,” it’s a constant battle to get taken seriously. For me, it’s usually a losing battle.

My mother: worst offender. I turn off the phone so I won’t hear from her. In my book review I hyperlink to the full-length version of my interview with Jake Elliott; I inadvertently linked to the page where my mother is shouting—shouting! shouting!—for a slice of pie.

Ariel Gore’s advice is, literally, to outright lie to people, to tell them you’ve left town. I haven’t done this, since I’m usually out of town anyway, but I’m going to start.

Part of defending your workspace, though, is protecting it from yourself. You have to get so much better at not doing what you want to do, which is go out with Robyn, or vacuum. When I have writer’s block, my apartment sparkles. Currently my sink is loaded with dishes, which means I’m in a good headspace.

More than anything, if you have some sort of perverted, demented friend who thinks she can make it as a freelance writer, oh my God, please try to be patient with her. No, she cannot afford to go to the movies, and she isn’t insulting you when she gets off the phone.

I also encourage anyone who is thinking of freelancing or making video games—you know who you are!—to choose the steepest, shittiest path, because you will be so, so pleased with yourself, even though two nights ago you watched Rachael Ray while you ate a Lean Pocket.

***

05/07: This is a murky post, I realize, but I do feel great—only occasionally does the full spectre of my sense of incompetence really loom—and I only want to stress that, if you take it upon yourself to rearrange aspects of your life to allow for freelancing, you can do it.

I want to always be encouraging, if in my usual backhanded way, and I hope you—whoever you are—know that there’s nothing to be scared of. Yes, even if you are freaked out constantly, as I am. OK! Thanks!

Formspring Tuesday: Why “virtual reality” will never catch on

Jenn Frank — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:34:57 PDT

Some of you might know that I cultivate and maintain a semi-active Formspring account, where I try to answer both queries about video games and humiliating questions about my personal life just as accurately and plainly as I can.

Recently somebody asked,

What happened to virtual reality? Remember the promise of a Sega Genesis and Atari Jaguar helmet in the mid-90s?

This is a great question! My reply is off-the-cuff, and now that I’ve written it I think I might like to expand on it later. But here is v1.0 anyway:

VR just gets turned into other stuff. Like, Second Life was actually supposed to be a type of VR, with the headset and haptic feedback and everything.

What it really comes down to is, people aren’t ready and willing to look that fucking stupid. And they never will be.

Did you ever seen the “early adopter” on the airplane, watching his movie in his little hd widescreen movie spectacles? The year was like 2001ish, and that guy was a full-on dweebazoid. He takes a segway to work, and he’s happy because he’s living in the future, and I’m glad for him, but his eagerness to strap every type of laser to his body will never, ever be cool.

Similarly, I remember seeing a prototype for a type of wearable keyboard—it fit in the palm and it was really easy to learn to touch-type—in a magazine called ‘Shift.’ Boy, did they try to glam up that wearable keyboard, but there was no way. Attaching a computer to your body is not, will not be “cool.” The problem with VR is, if anyone catches you wearing a headset, you might as well close down that OKCupid profile.

I’m borrowing a lot of these points from an article I read—I don’t remember when or where—about the consistent lack of commercial success with all these repeated iterations of the “videophone.” Sure, times have changed since that article was written, insofar as Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are totally viable, but the truth is, I’m not going to take some random call when my hair is a nest and my face is splotchy, just like I’m not going to run down to answer the door.

Here’s an unhappy truth about technology: the real obstacle is vanity. Take elevators, for instance. There once was a hotel elevator, and it was too slow. The elevator’s inventor thought long and hard about how to speed up the elevator’s mechanisms. Do you know what he did instead? He put up a mirror. He hung a mirror right next to the sliding elevator doors, because people wouldn’t notice the subpar elevator technology. They’d be too busy looking at themselves.

Adventures in Shit Games: Cho Aniki #1 and #3

Jenn Frank — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:49:15 PDT

I promise, I’m really trying to not use Infinite Lives as my own professional pinboard these days, but I do have a column about Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantou Hen at Vice Motherboard:

The game’s wackiness and camp are superficial. They’re just show. All the while, Bakuretsu’s characters and backdrops hint at something darker. To borrow from Baudrillard, there is a gradual “perversion of reality” until, at last, we are looking at a “facsimile” with “no original copy.”

Really, I’ve never had so much fun writing something in my life. Am I really serious? Who can tell!

I also made a supplementary video:

Motherboard – Adventures in Shit Games: ‘Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantou Hen’

Games I’ve never played: Shiny naked men in space

Link can’t lose

Jenn Frank — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:22:08 PDT

Aled Lewis, “Hyrule Forever”

A review of ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ in under 1,820 characters

Jenn Frank — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:01:10 PDT

I’m a big, big fan of “My World of Flops,” an ongoing series of movie reviews by Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club. “Flops” conducts post-mortems of critical and commercial failures, reevaluating each film with fresh eyes. And Rabin gives every movie a fair shake (his review of Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered is, in a word, generous), ultimately grading each film as a “failure,” a “fiasco,” or a “secret success.”

I have always held that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the 2600 is a “secret success” (Kevin agrees), and when Rabin first announced to Twitter that he was going to score the video game for “My World of Flops,” I was floored with delight.

For one, this is the first time a video game has ever made it to “Flops,” and E.T.’s notoriety certainly qualifies it for inclusion. For another, the “Flops” series was only meant to last a single year; not only has it endured, it has spiraled out of control! Video games! Licensed video games! What next?

So I was totally thrilled when Rabin tweeted that his review is complete:

@nathanrabin I just turned in my first, and possibly last game-themed My World of Flops piece on Atari’s E.T. It is less than glowing.

In an effort to rally interest in Rabin’s upcoming E.T. review, I took to Twitter to inflict my own opinion of the game on everybody. There are a lot of inactive verbs. The whole thing could stand a rewrite.

Here, now, and unedited for posterity (mostly), are my E.T. tweets.

jennatar In honor of E.T. (Atari 2600, 1982) making it onto @nathanrabin’s Flops, here is my GLOWING review, presented one painful line at a time.

jennatar E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is about an extra-terrestrial named E.T.

jennatar In it, you play ET. You are trying to assemble an “interplanetary” phone, because you believe in liberties and that VOIP ought to be free.

jennatar In the game, your only ally is a 10-year-old child named Elliott, here rendered in stark, rudimentary pixels.

jennatar In the film, Elliott’s idealism and childlike naïveté are tested when Spielberg replaces all the guns with walkie-talkies.

jennatar Your adversaries, alas, are numerous. There are, for instance, a number of gov’t agents who are trying to strip-search you.

jennatar There are also scientists, no doubt working for Big Pharma, who probably want to capitalize on your organs and turn you into the latest pill

jennatar Despite all that, your greatest obstacle, poor ET, is yourself. Yes, the landscape is riddled with enormous pits. Step carefully, ET!

jennatar You could become a captive—by your own hand!—in one of these deep furrows, which itself is a metaphor for the “liminality”

jennatar For you are a stranger in a strange land, stretching yourself across space and time in search of a moment of connection, and small candies

jennatar It is during these liminal fugues, when ET is lower than ground itself, that most players, disgusted, switch the Atari off.

nathanrabin @jennatar Color me impressed. Beats the hell out of my infinitely more verbose take.

jennatar @nathanrabin Shh! Not yet; I’m not finished.

jennatar That players leave w/out finishing—that is, without making “contact” with “home”—is a potent metaphor for a collective lack of agency.

jennatar Finally, the graphics are OK but maybe the framerate could have been better. I’m not sure the 2600 is being pushed to its full potential 3/5

P.S. This E.T. “strategies” video rules (thanks, Andrew!).

Lost & Forgotten: ‘Extra Terrestrials’ for Atari 2600 rediscovered

Why soccer games?

Jenn Frank — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:44:05 PDT

Two nights ago I went to a small book-release party for a writer called Adam Levin (he wrote a book called The Instructions, and his new book is called Hot Pink). I didn’t know most people there, but I did know Adam, Adam, and Ben. I was very socially nervous.

So I was sitting in the Rainbo next to a person who had introduced himself earlier as Carson, and now he was turning in the booth to ask whether I were also a writer.

After a long think I blurted “Yes!” and this made Carson laugh, because I really had been having trouble deciding, in the moment, whether I might also be one. Carson wanted to know what kind of writing, and I told him games writing, which is to say, writing about video games and game culture. Carson asked me whom I’ve written for, and I told him about a magazine from awhile ago, and he was very impressed.

“But I don’t do that now,” I corrected myself in a hurry. “There are other types of games writing, instead of news or scores.”

Carson was frowning now, and he wondered if there were any particular genres I play. This was a much harder question. “No,” I said finally. “And you?”

“FIFA,” he said. “Only FIFA games.”

I laughed, and I told him that I hate sports games except for soccer, and now I was pulling my cell phone out of my bag to show Carson an anonymous Formspring question I had received lately, which was in response to my stupid dumb thing about sports video games. The question reads:

Why soccer games?

So I showed that question to him. Carson became animated.

“I’ll tell you why!” he said.

“Tell me,” I said, a little helplessly.

“Because you have control over all the players!” he said. “So there’s more room for strategy because you can control every individual on the team.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, propping up my head with the heel of my hand. “Sure, and I think that’s actually why I keep talking about how much I love NBA Jam. For SNES?”

“Yeah!” Carson agreed. “There are only two players to each team, right? And you can control both players?”

“Passes, layups, yeah. Also,” I said, lifting my head and adjusting in the booth, “there’s something about other sports games that’s a little too much like ‘brackets.’ I am not interested in brackets.”

“What about those weird sports management games, though,” Carson suggested. “Have you ever played any of those?”

“No, but—” I said.

“I hate them,” he said.

“Well, after I watched Moneyball,” I said, “I started to think that kind of math was really interesting, and I began to wonder whether you could put that sort of strategy into a game.”

“Oh, hmm,” he said, nodding.

Later Carson wanted to talk about video games writing. I had just been regaling Adam—the other Adam, not the one with the book—with an abbreviated history of pinball in Chicago. (Pinball was illegal for many years here because it was a “game of chance.”)

I lost a game of CSI pinball and sat down on a couch.

“So what type of writing?” Carson asked me.

I tried hard to describe a type of writing.

Uh, experiential*, uh, a diarist’s, um, essays about, um, hmm, uh, they uh, hmm.

“Kind of like how Grantland is with sports writing,” Carson said, nodding.

I shuddered at the idea because it is so uncool to like Grantland anymore, but then I nodded anyway, because, yes.

“I’ve talked about this with a few sports writers, now,” I told Carson, “and although I have almost zero interest in sports, I have decided sports writing is the thing most like writing about games.”

“Sure!” Carson agreed.

“I mean, even the cereal box writing, it all falls distinctly within the purview of what’s called ‘enthusiast press.’”

“Well, there’s also a lot of sports writing,” Carson said carefully, “about the feeling of, ah, of watching a game.”

For a moment he was silent.

“People really do think they can interact with a game,” Carson said thoughtfully. “Like, a game on TV. They make sure to watch from their favorite seat in their favorite bar, or they’ll wear a lucky jersey.”

I nodded. “That’s true. My birth-dad always wore his lucky 49ers baseball cap.”

Rituals, superstitions.

“It’s a little bit crazy,” Carson said, “to think that you can influence a game or… or somehow exert this control over its outcome.

“Here’s something,” Carson continued without taking a full breath. “Do you think that people who play video games are a little, uh, sociopathic?”

I looked at him. I started laughing.

“Um,” I said, looking around.

“What,” he said.

“Um,” I said, laughing harder and wiping my eyes. “I had a conversation very much like this a few days ago.”

“Well, because,” Carson who plays only FIFA said, adjusting on the couch so that he could lean forward, “just that need to dominate something so completely, to have that kind of control over something, over all the other characters.”

I laughed again. “I’m… I’m not sure that’s sociopathic. Or, you can maybe also control your environment, too, depending on the game. Isn’t that a human thing to want? Like, ah, we’re all a little… helpless. And if games are about escapism, or an illusion of agency….”

On March 2, I was standing with a Berliner as his friends were playing Foozball. My friend Robyn was standing a little distance away with another man, and I kept stealing peeks at her, trying to decide whether she needed to be rescued. She seemed OK.

“You know,” I said to the Berliner, “we call the actual game ‘soccer,’ but isn’t it interesting that we call that,” and I pointed at the table, “Foozball. Like, Fussball.”

“Not really,” he said, totally unimpressed with my hobbyist etymology. Then he added, “Here’s something interesting, though. At home we call it Tischkicken.”

“Table kicking,” he and I said together.

Actually, neither of us were being terribly interesting, because I guess depending on where you live, it is sometimes called Tischfussball.

I watched his Berlin friends play Foozball for a while, and then I excused myself.

When I was talking to Carson two nights ago, I began thinking about how, especially in 8- and 16-bit games, you can control all the players as one, as if they all spatially share this one axis. I started thinking about that, and about the Foozball table, about how so many players on a Foozball table might share only so many axes.

And you don’t have absolute control over each player on a Foozball table—you have a kind of relative control instead, and then there are all these gutters for a soccer ball to slip through or between, as if Foozball were a little like pinball.

I think this was the idea Carson had been hinting at all night: that gamers are a strange bunch, that wanting “absolute” control instead of “relative” control is some type of personality disorder, that it might be healthier to stick with Foozball.

*Yeah, I realize this isn’t a fully-formed piece of writing at all, so you can just knock it off with your snark this instant.

Post-mortem: I’m not sorry

Jenn Frank — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:10:23 PST

Follow-up: in March, during GDC, writer Dan Cox interviewed me via email about this “controversy.” His questions, along with my answers, probably go much further in explaining my attitude. My editor and I also explain our “go big or go home” mentality—as well as our happiness in playing the roles of villains—in the final quarter of this episode of Unlistenable.

OK, I’m sorry for just one thing: I’m sorry I have such a wonderful editor.

I was barely into the thread itself by the time I was hard at work on a YouTube-type comment.

In considering both the comment thread and the blog above it—which I’d interpreted as some litany, as some unreal catalogue of hither-and-thither complaints—I wanted to respond, because I know that professionals who are enmeshed in any sort of politic business are unable to respond to these types of criticisms, or with any passionate emphasis. This makes me angry all on its own.

Also, professionally and personally, I was deeply unimpressed.

As my remarks snowballed, though, I realized I should write something for myself, just to let it all out. Well, and when I say “for myself,” I mean “for Infinite Lives,” which is my site and oh my god I periodically drag my co-writer through the mud when I irresponsibly follow some wild livejournal tangent.

So suddenly I wasn’t working on a frothing Internet comment at all; I was writing a piece for this very site instead.

My editor IM’d, wanting to know whether my column were finished yet, and I was very, “NOT NOW I’M BUSY” to him. He wondered what I was writing, so I sent it to him in four or five chunks over IM. He announced he wanted to publish it, and from there we really giddily lost our minds, our enthusiasm mirroring and magnifying. He cut one chunk and I cut another, and now we agreed the piece was totally ready to go. He gave it a much better title and suggested some images, and I told him I was all-in. I endorsed every addition myself. I was furious and happy.

For me, it was as much about “fun” as it was “ire.” I decided, if I were going to feel irate about something, wouldn’t it be great fun to just run all the way? Because it’s totally true—I’ve forced my writing to be this very level-headed, contemplative thing for a long time. I’ve always held that “manners are how we show strangers we care,” and I certainly believe it.

But I’ve also noticed I do that thing girls do: I rely on “hedged” diction to couch everything I say in some sort of apology. Maybe it would be nice, for once, to forget judiciousness.

So here the article is again.

In the course of what I wrote—which I admit I haven’t reread ever since we published it, out of real, sheer terror at whatever I said in the moment, probably something seething about grinding my enemies’ bones with a pestle into powder—I am sure I made much of having worked in a “mainstream” capacity in the past.

And I’ll explain why: it’s sickening that people in “mainstream” arenas don’t get to defend themselves fully and blood-boilingly. (Since having worked in “mainstream” “games” “journalism,” I finally returned to retail, where people might believe your politeness makes you an idiot, or else they believe that the man and woman at the cash register aren’t actually the owners of the business. Surely the chip on my shoulder is calcified by retail work; that’s fine.)

It does make me angry that being a “mainstream” writer means you never get to say what you mean. Mainstream businesspeople never get to defend what they “do.”

You never have an opportunity to defend yourself, because your primary motive is to do the work you already do in this stiflingly politic way. Have you ever been trapped in a position where you are not allowed to defend yourself, or where you happily make yourself the scapegoat at every opportunity? It’s an incredibly helpless, please-kill-me feeling.

I have spent most of my post-high-school years trying to not be brash or bombastic, and it’s just so passive-aggressive. And what would it be like to be aggressive, without all that horrible passivity? I wondered about it.

So I figured, sure, people might enjoy hearing what I sound like when I yell in the living room, absolutely livid, about almost anything. Because I do: I shout and point in all directions, just hissing and spitting, trying to work out my feelings. Sometimes this means I can make an outline later, so that I can write some well-conceived, mannerly thing, but just for fucking once I just wanted to set down all the hissing-and-spitting. I thought this might be interesting for my core readers, or at least it could be more fun for me.

OK, maybe I was bored. Maybe I was bored, but I wasn’t being disingenuous: I meant everything I said. Oh, man, did I.

Wouldn’t that be fun, though? I marveled. People have been getting a little too comfortable around my writing these days, I reasoned. Maybe people should not feel so comfortable. Maybe they ought to know I am a loaded gun. Maybe I should take a worthwhile opportunity to say what I really think.

Maybe I could learn how to not say “maybe” and start saying things with a little more certainty and authority.

I idly wondered how this attitude might look on a woman. What would the response be like? It thrilled me.

I decided I wanted to play a villain. It would be so much fun! I wanted to play with the fact that I am not an emotionally generous person. I think I was—sometime in the past—but I’m not right now. (I also wanted to reinforce that you should be more frightened of the judges’ very humanity than of the mechanized “process.” I think this is a fair point.)

This all might have been selfish of me: I might have not helped anything. That’s too bad.

“I don’t have any strategy here at all,” I admitted to my editor in an IM. In real life, I sighed. But my “career” has taken hits before: I don’t have so much to lose. I should be allowed to say what other people would like to say. I should even be allowed to say what I would like to say.

I am only just now trying to explore where “no manners whatsoever” and “meanspirited” diverge. Where do they diverge?

Anyway, I told my editor, “Let’s put the ‘go’ in the ‘go-for-it.’”

My editor did suggest we omit some of the article, especially those parts where I confess all the ways I ever went wrong as an IGF judge. I said no way. I said I wanted to be beyond reproach. He said all right.

I also demanded that my editor cut a paragraph about why I didn’t judge IGF this year. The paragraph was intended to promise game developers that I had nothing to do with this year’s drama; instead I found myself listing sad things. My editor cut the section at my insistence.

Maybe an editor ought to be more persuasive, but I am happy mine was not.

And anyway, those parts we kept are important, they are part of my argument: I am not too sure there is a way, in any system of checks and balances, to democratically account for human error. It isn’t even real irresponsibility: it’s just being human. Robots cannot review a game. Sure, robots cannot give up on your game, either, but they also cannot critique it. For better or worse, we do rely on humans to have all these things happen.

And there is human error coming at this from all sides. Certainly it is terrifying for me to advise, as a former professional and current outsider, that perhaps developers should examine their games a little harder for problems. If someone—someone who is explicitly commanded to play your game—is bypassing your game, there might be an issue. Really! That idea hardly seems controversial!

Of course, I also believe that checks-and-balances are already built into the system. I’m not sure, at least at this early juncture, there is a way to change my mind. In the original column I say it—“you can’t do better”—and it’s just the thing someone says in an abusive relationship. But I really, really mean it. I’m not sure you could scoop together a better, more varied assortment of humans to play a single game.

So there is human error. But there is always human goodness, too, always there to overcompensate. And the humans involved in this particular system always have the best hopes in mind. You can republish every piece of personal correspondence they mail—sorry to bring it up again—but I won’t change my mind.

This part infuriated me most, I can freely admit, and I feel very reconciled about overstepping the bounds of politeness, manners, and decency in addressing this. Maybe it was totally “eye for an eye” of me. Maybe I scooped up too many fish in my net. But I will wholly admit my goat was got, at the outset, because some people had a bad attitude about some very, very nice people. (Here is the other troubling thing: we are all “nice people,” all trying to help one another out. Again, why call someone out over loving you?)

Perhaps it isn’t so “cool” of me to fight for something so “mainstream.” I joked to my editor that my conservatism was beginning to show, but also that IGF’s only real sin—the only reason their intelligently-devised process is held up to such speculation and skepticism—is that they are so “mainstream.” Would any other process get so widely smacked-down?

I believe the machine works. I mean, I’ve gone back to see what games won the awards I thought someone else ought’ve won; I can see why which games win. The machine really does weed out the worst. I do believe that.

I also believe that decrying the machine undermines every winner all the years previous. This makes me furious. Do we no longer care about all the games that have already won? We are talking about incredible games. Where is any evidence of nepotism? This makes me angry, too.

Before he published my rant, my editor asked me if I were ready. He asked me if I were prepared for the repercussions. I told him that, after I formally took my first professional job but before I’d actually moved across the country for it, I’d already had my first penis photoshopped into my mouth. Was I ready? Please.

There were only a couple reactions that were really inappropriate. I was due them, though: I was curious about what it might be like to try to sound like a man on the Internet. So I found out.

This next part is a quick aside about what it is like to post your opinion to the Internet:

One guy accused me of “Girl on the Internet Syndrome.” Really? Really, guy? I’ve been on the Internet since 1993, and I’ve long since grown out of the shock of also being female. He also wondered who in the IGF I am boning, which was a little bit more astonishing. I might be a little lovey-dovey about IGF—you can accuse me of wearing rosy goggles all you like—but I certainly haven’t gotten any sex out of it. (Someone should have told me! That might be exciting!)

Another guy recommended I die. That remark was deleted! I was sad to see it go! I asked my editor about it, and he said we had “policies” already in place. Aw. It’s nice that we have a “safe space” in the comments section, and I thanked him for this.

But all these comments were pretty much anomalous. Honestly I was surprised by their infrequency.

But there was one complaint that really jarred me while all the others didn’t. That one came from a game developer named Anna Anthropy.

Anna is working, as both a developer and a critic, from a fringe wherein she is able to point out issues of “otherizing” and “dismissiveness.” She is either sensitive or opportunistic to these cues—I am not always sure which, because I agree with her about 50/50—but when she makes a stink, I listen more carefully. This time, when she perceived that I was using silencing tactics (in this case, “Oh, you think you have issues? SHUT UP,” which is certainly how one should interpret my rant), I had to take inventory of what I had said.

Anna had crammed the point into a quick joke, into two short, well-timed lines, and it was important that I stop and listen.

Am I bullying? Did I create an unsafe space for game developers—including those people who take issue with the system already in place—for making their criticisms known? Because that really would be dangerous, if I have actively created a space where it is frightening to make needs known.

This last count is harrowing. I am still wrestling with it.

So if I am sorry for anything, it is for being a bully. I would really hope I hadn’t been. I would not want to be a bully.

There was an article someone linked, soon in the aftermath, about whether it were “possible” to be a “writer” in the “digital age.” It was entirely about those slow, careful things we write, with consideration, in a vacuum, versus those things one is tempted to post in a hurry, however carelessly, to the Internet.

But in that article, one famous author noted that he would never willingly sign his name to his own “rants” and “blasts.” I did. I marched, however haphazardly, from posting a comment to posting a column in the most visible forum I have. I put my name on it. And even though I am scared of my own wrath—even though I really fear being a bad person—by God, yes, I’d do it all over again.

VERY LATE EDIT: It turns out I’ve delivered some of these same opinions before. (In the comments: “You know what happens to indie games mainstream-reviewers want to criticise severely? They don’t review them. Like, obviously.” —Kieron Gillen)

Rotting Cartridge: What’s Wrong with the IGF
Unwinnable: The IGF is Just Fine—You’re the Problem
Penny Arcade Report: Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank responds to Independent Games Festival drama with logic, and some anger – (hang out in the comments)
Andy Moore – IGF is awesome, and not perfect – (hang out in the comments)
Rotting Cartridge: RE: What’s Wrong with the IGF

Linksplosion: Martin Amis, ‘Minecraft,’ and Emporium Bar Arcade

Jenn Frank — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:18:24 PST

Hello and hi. I collected a couple links a couple days ago, but I hadn’t yet posted them—until now! Lucky you!

Joystiq – Minecraft building blocks (via Metafilter.
The correct reaction is “what the—”
Eater – Emporium Arcade Bar Opening in March
A Barcade-style barcade is coming to Chicago, and everyone is freaking out:

Expect a focus on Midwestern and local beer with half of the beer on tap always being from the Midwest. The plan is to rotate their selection often, so there will always be new brews to try. There will also be a large whiskey list, with a selection of standard and upscale varieties. A full bar will be available as well and there may be more specialty cocktails down the line.
Writer Martin Amis once penned a video-game near-classic, Invasion of the Space Invaders. The Millions has a review of the book (via Slate).

Since the book is impossible to buy used, some Good Samaritan is publishing Amis’s book’s very best lines as a Twitter feed.

Related posts:
1. Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, July 07, 2010
2. Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

Tunnel Snakes rule

Jenn Frank — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:08:33 PST

Some days I am happy to be alive.

(Thanks to Mike Emmons for, uh, whatever.)

ETA: as a scant few members of Kotaku’s readership rushed to mention, yes the video is old OK.

How I feel about Sports Games

Jenn Frank — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:59:06 PST

I like using Formspring. Every once in a while I’ll get an interesting question about video games and how I feel about them, which is incredibly gratifying/ego-stroking.

Sometimes I bluff, but sometimes it turns into this “thought experiment” prompt and I end up stream-of-consciousnessing some overwrought missive (look out! It’s how I actually write everything, ugh).

And very rarely am I so pleased with my Formspring answer, I might repost it here. (And then again, once in a great, great while I get a vaguely lewd question, but this happens not so often as you might think, which is nice.)

This afternoon, as I was hurriedly typing something about Adam Levine’s new record label, I received this question:

So we’ve established games are art. Are sports games (something like Madden ‘07 to pick a random one) art?

What a great question! It’s exactly the type of thing I plan to cop out on answering, too, because who can answer a thing like that? So I defy you to call my bluff. Below, the full text of my Formspring response:

Well, don’t pick a random one at all! Pick a specific one!

OK: Take ‘Sin City.’ I read the comic, didn’t like it. Thought it was very pretty; hated it. Right? So I already knew, going into the movie theater, that I wasn’t going to enjoy the movie in that regard, because I already don’t enjoy Frank Miller. (I’m not the hugest fan of the way Robert Rodriguez treats women in his movies, anyway.) Outcome: I enjoyed ‘Sin City’ HUGELY. After, I kept trying to understand why. And I realized the movie absolutely elevates “facsimile” to art.

A number of years ago a friend of mine was working on his Masters thesis in “themed environments”—I think his research is still ongoing, actually, even though he has his degree—and we talked a lot about simulacra, artifice, how the Tiki Room at Disney is like a video game, real surreal stuff. When he wasn’t working on his Masters, though, this cinephile liked to collect or make reproduction-quality movie props. Once I saw them I was totally obsessed with them, the same way I am obsessed with action figures and scale miniatures. You absolutely could not have convinced him these handmade movie props weren’t objets d’art, and as such I was not allowed to handle them.

You might think of any sports game as an attempt at a “scale miniature”—this genre is classed as a type of “simulation,” after all—and so a very good sports game might impress the same way a working model train, with all the bells and the smoke and the tooting, and then the little trees and motorized signs, might be riveting.

But that’s only facsimile, isn’t it. What does it take to elevate “facsimile” to “art”?

The last sports game I played with any real depth was probably ‘NBA Jam’ on SNES*, so I’m pretty far out of my element. But a lot of that game’s enjoyment comes from, it isn’t really a simulation at all, is it? I mean, it appropriates the functional design vocabulary of a “sports game,” but it hardly aspires to any sort of “realism.”

What about ‘Hot Shots Golf’? I’ve always called it a “Sunday game” because it is lazy and fun and nothing like a real PGA Tour. Then again, I’m not sure it constitutes “art,” but you know, at least it’s something different.

Similarly, while I like racing games, I do much better with games that delve into the fantastical—something like ‘Burnout,’ maybe something with a lot of blood and guts—than I do with, say, a NASCAR sim. These “fantastical” games willfully fudge the real-world physics of driving (which isn’t to say I haven’t managed to learn to execute a “drift” in my own car, because depending on the highway, I can, and good god I am probably going to kill myself sometime), but they do this while appropriating real-world architecture, like buildings and lights and sounds, all to ground the game in an accessible vocabulary. (Then you have F-Zero and wipEout which, ah, don’t. They don’t do this at all.)

So I don’t play enough “hard” simulation to readily assess whether a “scale miniature” can be the same thing as “art,” because I can’t (and why would I want to?). I CAN say that I recently watched ‘Moneyball’ and began to wonder whether games already apply the same kind of math to sports games. Wow!

But—and this is working from my experience as a person who avoids sports and “sports games” at any cost—I think you can add new, unlikely dynamics unto a “sports game” that really fundamentally change the experience from “artifice” and “simulacrum” into this new thing. Is the new thing “art”? Well, now we’d have to talk again about what art “is” and what art “does,” and no, thanks.

None of these ideas are very inventive, no, but that’s because you can apply them to all sorts of media and environments.

*this is a lie; I actually play a lot of soccer sims; for illustrative purposes, I lied.

P.S. After I tweeted about this, writer Nick LaLone recommended that I follow along on his Madden 2012 odyssey. With zeal, Mr. LaLone!

An interview with Jake Elliott

Jenn Frank — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:56:05 PST

I interviewed game developer Jake Elliott in time for last year’s Indie Games Festival, but I never posted it anywhere. I knew the interview was too, too long for publication, okay, but it was just so great, I didn’t want to let any of it go. (I interviewed Jake over Skype during the big Chicago blizzard.)

Now, there is a far more readable version of this interview at Unwinnable.com; in the meantime I got special permission to post the less-edited version right here.

Jake’s latest work, The Penguin’s Dilemma, will be a playable installation at Super Button Mashers, a gallery exhibit opening February 11 at Chicago’s OhNo!DOOM. Don’t miss it! I’m serious!

Jenn: Let’s see. Uh, so. I should have reread my notes before this.

Jake: Oh, that’s cool. I don’t have any notes to work from.

Ha! That’s awesome. Also I am really bad at interviewing. I’m okay at having a conversation, though?

Well, okay! That’s fine!

So you’re actually nominated in [last] year’s IGF Nuovo category for A House in California. And this is an adventure game with really simple images, and simple, kind of graphical parser commands?

Yeah.

And I played Hummingbird Mind yesterday, and in comparison it seems like that game is simpler to play? Because it’s maybe all [conversation] trees? But visually it’s actually more complicated?

Yeah. It’s, like, photos….

Yeah, it’s photos, right. Exactly. So I guess I was curious about the aesthetic decision you made with House in California.

I mean, mostly it was a strategy about what I thought might be—like, I don’t really have much skill in rendering graphics and drawing, or anything like that, so it all kind of started as a strategy about how I could do everything in a game, for myself, without borrowing graphics from other people. In something like Hummingbird Mind, they’re all Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr that I did some processing on.

Oh! I didn’t realize that. I actually—
Yeah, I don’t call it out anywhere, but I mean, I credit the people in the—

No, I thought maybe you actually, um, had just, like, wandered around your apartment or neighborhood…

Right. I wanted to do something like that, but then I didn’t, and I just stole most of them. Or borrowed them, or whatever. Used them. [laughs]

I made my best childhood friend play—I didn’t make her play it—but my best childhood friend played A House in California. And halfway through, I asked her to stop playing it? So that we could go do something else?

[chuckles] That’s cool.

No, but she wouldn’t! And she played it to its end. It isn’t a long game, but she played it to its end. And she does not play games. So it seemed like it was this really good crash course—for her—in adventure game logic.

That’s great.

And I know that it was also part of the—was that kind of the—I mean, is that on purpose? [laughs] Like I know that it was part of the Learn to Play exhibit in, was it Cupertino?

I mean, I wasn’t thinking of it as a tutorial—yeah, it’s funny, the name of that thing, and I never really understood exactly why they called the exhibit that, or what the title meant, exactly, but—

Well, I can tell you why! Because I watched my friend play your game, and it was like, oh, this is really perfect, as an exhibit. And it’s the kind of thing that maybe other people would hover around, going, “Go! Do that! Click on the cloud!”

I guess I can…. It does resonate for me, the idea of it being a tutorial or someone’s first encounter with that genre. It was real important to me that you couldn’t make any mistakes in that game. So every action you do has a response. Like, some text hidden behind it?

I enjoyed that, actually! I think I got through the game … not missing anything.

Oh, wow.

Which is maybe the completist, or completionist, in me.

[laughs] Yeah, that’s a lot of text. I’m glad, though, because I wrote all that text, it took me a really long time. So it’s nice to know somebody read it all.

And my best friend did, too! Simply, you know, to see what would happen.

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s great, because also, the main kind of criticism that I heard from people that I showed it to, or people who wrote about it online, was that is has that kind of—what they would always talk about as this “adventure game logic,” or something where you’re trying to guess what the designer might be thinking, and [the logic] doesn’t really follow players.

And I thought about that, very early on when I was making the game, that this might be something that would happen, with these very weird [parser] verbs and these weird sentences that I wanted to have as part of the game. So I wanted there to be kind of like an advent calendar discovery thing, where there’s something underneath everything you flip over. So that it felt more you’re discovering what the words are, rather than discovering the logic.

I actually take a lot of issue with that criticism! I almost personally feel defensive, because the thing I really enjoyed in watching my friend play was, she did know what to do next in any given moment. And for her it was just, how to accomplish it? And so it was like she was learning this dream-logic language. And she knew that she needed to do something to get off this one screen, for instance. And so she automatically puts it together: Oh, why don’t I just look at the sky. And I asked her, while she was playing, How did you know to do that? And she said, I don’t know.

[laughing] Yeah, it, right, subconscious. Intuitive, some kind of…? [chuckles]

Right, exactly! But it is very much about trying to understand the dream-logic that the game’s author is directing you toward. And I wanted to talk to her about that, but our conversation was really clipped. Because we didn’t know how to talk about that.

Oh, yeah, right. Because she’s not a gamer.

She’s not a gamer! Well, and it’s not something I’ve ever asked, you know, someone who’s fresh to gaming about. How do you know? I don’t know. So there is something really interesting about the player’s decision-making, I guess.

And it’s kind of a weird case, this one too, because it doesn’t hold your hand, necessarily, there’s no instructions, really. But then, also, there’s not like a whole lot of freedom, exactly, and you can’t move through the game in a different pattern than the one I’ve built. You can play around in each space, but you can’t—there’s not a whole lot of agency, as far as progress through the game, so it’s kind of in a weird spot that’s not quite Farmville, and not quite Grand Theft Auto, you know? [laughs]

Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

How Infinite Lives came to pass

Jenn Frank — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:25:18 PST

Wired’s Chris Kohler:

Found: A lifetime ago, @jennatar and I sat in a diner and brainstormed website names on a placemat.

The year was 2006! According to Kohler, I registered this domain the very next day. Other names in the mix: duckdragons; pixelface; any fabricated word that could combine some “variation on a popular Japanese word in the U.S. lexicon” or “variation on (peripheral).”

Quotables: artist Tyler Coey does Sega

Jenn Frank — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:20:58 PST

“Growing up you were either a ‘Sega kid’ or a ‘Nintendo kid.’ I was a Sega kid!”

—Artist Tyler Coey on Sonic the Hedgehog. His piece appears in the upcoming Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!Doom, opening February 11.

OhNo!DOOM – Tyler Coey

Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

Jenn Frank — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:49:20 PST

This could well be the first-ever ALL GAMES-THEMED exhibit to ever open in Chicago.

“Super Button Mashers,” opening February 11, 2012, features an incredible roster of artists:

Aya Kakeda, Alex Willan, Ben Spencer, Blütt, Brandon Garrison, Brain Killer, Brian Stuhr, Brian Walline, Brianne Drouhard, CHema Skandal!, Cory Benhatzel, CZR PRZ, David Palumbo, David Rettker, Eric Broers, Glen Brogan, Isaac Bidwell, James Liu, Jason Castillo, Jenny Frison, Jeremiah Ketner, J.Shea, Joey D, Jordan Elise, Lana Crooks, Leeanna Butcher, Luisa Castellanos, Martin Hsu, Matt Hawkins, Matthew Ryan Sharp, Max Bare, Melissa Sue Stanley, Mike Budai, Mike Graves, Mr. Walters, Natalie Blue Phillips, Nathan West, Sean Dove, Shawn Smith, Shayne Labadie, Steff Bomb, Steph Laberis, Tyler Coey, Yosiell Lorenzo, Zoë Bare, and Plush Team

What an all-star cast! I am so damn thrilled I don’t know what to do with myself.

And one more thing: curator Max Bare somehow convinced Chicago’s own Jake Elliott to submit an arcade game to the exhibit! It is an all-new game, and it will be playable at the show.

OhNo!Doom
Super Button Mashers Mega Opening
February 11, 6:00 PM-10:00 PM
1800 N. Milwaukee
Chicago IL 60647
Tuesday and Thursday 4:00 PM-10:00 PM
Saturday 12:00 PM-7:00 PM

Isaac Bidwell, Donkey Kong.

Yosiell Lorenzo, Princess Toadstool.

David Palumbo, The Graveyard.

On death, motherhood, and ‘Creatures’

Jenn Frank — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:04:25 PST

I picked a pretty opportune moment to start writing for Unwinnable: it was the site’s “Death Week,” and if there is one thing I love to think about, it’s death.

One night I finally settled on an idea for “Death Week,” drank some beers, and wrote an article. It’s like a much shorter version of some of the longest articles I’ve done, so it was an interesting experiment. I really enjoyed writing it! I was comparatively concise!

You can read it at its real home, Unwinnable, or you might read it at Kotaku, where the heroic Kirk Hamilton has republished it. I recommend reading it at Unwinnable if only because I wrote it specifically for Unwinnable, but at Kotaku there is the benefit of the influx of comments. I love this. I already know what my article sounds like, so the real interest, for me, will be in what others say. When there are all these simultaneities in experience, I get really happy. So far the comments are really inspiring.

Finally—and I mentioned his article before, but—Mark Serrels’ piece for Kotaku Australia went a long way in influencing the piece I wrote, too. When I described his article last week, I started talking about my fear of kids, and this has probably continued to haunt me till now.

“Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing

“Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing

Jenn Frank — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:34:19 PST

Some time ago I stopped understanding how to use the Deli.cio.us cron; I’ve consequently relaxed in culling roundups of games-related writing I like. This, I think, is bad. I wonder how much terrific writing is slipping past me.

So I am back with an all new, not-automated Linksplosion.

By the way. It’s Death Week at Unwinnable, and I am very proud of its EIC, Stu Horvath. His piece, “On Death and Gaming,” was reprinted today at Kotaku.

The column stands on its own, but the explosion of reminiscence and reflection in the comments really underscores what cathartic, nourishing work Horvath has done.

There is a style of good experiential writing, and maybe it takes a certain type of experience, then, to know it when you see it. When people know it, though, they are on the same page. They gush. Check the comments. (Also, see the story’s second half. Also, there is newly a third act, which is the most fascinating of all of them, to me, except it waits until its very last paragraphs to even acknowledge video games. I think this is fine.)

The allure of “retro gaming” could well have a great deal to do with memory, with remembering where you were and what you were doing when you felt this one thing. I could make so much more fuss over why video games and death and loss and loneliness are all so connected, but I will stay simple, recommend that you read Stu’s articles, and encourage you to think about how video games connect to your own sense of grief and loss. Because it’s there, it’s there, even if you haven’t connected all these intermingling narratives yet.

I am also into emergent gaming and, uh, agoraphobia.

This is why I really appreciate writer Shaun Gannon’s piece “Professional Gamer.” Gannon has been experimenting with some different types of writing, and this one is maybe like a poem about fearfulness. I bet you’ll like it.

I shouldn’t try to explain anything else, and anyway, you people are not dense.

The website Critical Distance recently invited games writers to discuss “being other.”

Kotaku Australia editor Mark Serrels was up for the challenge, and his “Meeting My Daughter for the First Time (In the Sims)” really struck me.

I am scared of babies, but I am getting to the age where I ought to reconsider my worry, too. But there is a bigger thought, here—about avatars, about artifice, simulacra, that movie Synecdoche, NY—that also occurred to me. I like thinking about how we do and do not resemble our own avatars, about how self-perception is so skewed. But Serrels’ essay goes a step further.

I have heard of people using video game sports simulations to play “future games” and estimate sports brackets, as if sports video games could be accurate ecosystems anyway.

But suppose you were able to use a game to simulate your future son or daughter? Suppose you were secretly and grimly terrified about seeing the outcome? Suppose you played The Sims and discovered your own sense of relief? I am all for existentialism and all its blues, but this was a surprisingly pleasant column.

On writing for print

Excerpts from Ben Jackson’s essay in the upcoming ‘Distance’

Jenn Frank — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:26:28 PST

My friend Nick Disabato recently founded a quarterly print publication called Distance, which pledges to underscore “longform essays about design and technology.” It launches next month.

Nick himself is something of a comparative media Renaissance guy, and on the whole I trust his judgment. Last week he recommended I skim an excerpt from one of the magazine’s first essays. The piece was written by somebody named Benjamin Jackson. Nick suggested I might find Ben’s work “interesting.”

Um, yes. Yes, I found it interesting. Why, a week and a half earlier I had hemorrhaged something passingly similar to Ben’s excerpt, albeit nothing so cohesive.

You owe it to yourself to read Ben’s essay, too, because it connects seemingly disparate ideas about patternicity, carrot-dangling, “gambling,” and the ethics of the con:

It was later revealed that the machine, more commonly known as the Mechanical Turk, was an elaborately constructed ruse, where a highly-skilled human chess player of extremely small stature was hidden in the cabinet. Openings on the sides revealed gears, levers and machinery designed to misdirect the viewer into thinking that the Baron had devised some mechanical means of intelligently responding to a player’s moves.

The Mechanical Turk is an early example of unethical game design. Later examples include three-card monte, in which a spectator is shown a card, is asked to follow it with their eyes, and is then misled into following the wrong card. Many casino games are unethical: for example, slot machines usually randomize their payouts to ensure that players keep coming back, even when they’re clearly losing money. But unethical traits can appear in any game, no matter how subtle, and a recent crop of games shows a fuzzier moral ground.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns: common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin take advantage of deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards in much the same way as the slot machines described above. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools5. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

What, with all these concurrent ideas about “scams,” is Ben readying to describe to us?

ZYNGA. He is about to discuss ZYNGA.

A longer excerpt appeared this afternoon at The Atlantic. Now you can really see how cohesive Ben’s piece is. It is all about the maturation of the con, how Zynga lands us, hook, line, and sinker.

Here is an especially magnetic aside about “what” makes a “game” “good,” and why we might choose to invest in any game the way we do (it strongly borrows from the sociological idea of “cost,” wherein every human relationship is a type of transaction):

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Really exciting stuff; I can’t wait to see what the entire essay contains.

You can help Nick Disabato kickstart Distance over here.