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.

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!

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]

Related posts:

1. Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

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).”

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

• OhNo!DOOM – Tyler Coey

Related posts:

1. Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE
2. Quotables

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.

Related posts:

1. Quotables: artist Tyler Coey does Sega
2. Boozing in the arcade
3. An interview with Jake Elliott

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.

Related posts:

1. “Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing

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.

Related posts:

1. On writing for print

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.

Strap in! I’m not sure how much I can—or want!—to tell you about this gallery show, but know this: it opens on February 11, and there will be art. Details forthcoming.

There’s something anachronistically stylized—very late-80s/early-90s, I mean—about the forced perspective in this 1998 Game Boy Camera ad. Like, why is his hand way up here when the rest of his body is way over there? I don’t know.

The print ad for Girl Talk: the CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare was what really gave me the heebie-jeebies, though. “It’s just like life but with better graphics,” the ad copy touts. Oh, dear. Worse, if I am interpreting correctly, there is single-player mode. So you are a 12-year-old girl playing Truth or Dare, at your desk, alone. That’s… well, it sounds a lot like my preteen years, OK, but my mother really tried her best to not encourage that type of loneliness.

I have the 1990 edition of the Girl Talk board game (I have it right here, actually), which was really only a pinker redesign of the original 1988 Girl Talk. Since my own girlhood, the game has been rehabbed as Hannah Montana Girl Talk, That’s So Raven Girl Talk, and—yes, I saw it in a Toys ‘R Us—Bratz Girl Talk. (Up-to-the-minute variants on Truth or Dare include “Girl Talk Sassy Stix” and Girl Talk Sparkle Spots.”

So I am staring at this ad for PC multimedia Girl Talk and I’m just like, I have no idea whether that were a good idea.

This Christmas I told my mother about Mohan Srivastava, some dude I first started thinking about ten-and-a-half months ago. Back then I’d written some diary thingie about “cheating,” “stealing,” and “cons.” The February 2011 issue of Wired was about all those things, too—the magazine had included an article about Mohan Srivastava—and reading the magazine was the first time I ever thought more carefully about “game-breaking” and morality. (Belated edit: I just remembered how much I like this book also.)

Over the holidays, my mother and I were watching an episode of The Mentalist together, which I like to watch with my mother sometimes because, even though it is a terrible television show, I like the idea of the main character being a mentalist and skeptic. A mentalist understands all these little rules about people (like how to perform a “cold reading”), and the hero of the TV show uses these talents for good.

This particular episode was about a town where all its residents are obsessed with finding veins of gold. The fictional people in this fictional town are all looking for gold but they are sidelining their lives to pursue it: going broke, wasting money on mining gear, alienating family, pinning every hope to finding those riches. (The episode is also about scams and cons, so I was really enjoying it, even though it was just as mediocre of every other episode of The Mentalist.)

“This really happens!” I said to my mother during a commercial. “People really waste their lives trying like this! On a pipe dream. It’s all just gambling,” I concluded. I was thoughtful.

“Haven’t I told you about Mohan Srivastava?” I asked my mother then. “The geological statistician?”

Srivastava is a type of statistician who consults the evidence, runs the variables through a complicated algorithm the rest of us will never understand, and thereby deduces the location of gold veins. So it turns out that locating a vein of gold is already a “solved game,” just like chess but more intricate.

This isn’t why Srivastava is famous; there are other geological statisticians who can also do what he does. Instead, Srivastava is famous because he realized “solving” the lottery isn’t so unlike “solving” the location of little streaks of gold in rock, and so Srivastava used the same rules and algorithms he already used for his job until, finally, he could no longer “lose” the lottery.

“Isn’t that unbelievable?” I asked my mother. “People will gamble their entire lives away on these little chances but it isn’t even real gambling, because nothing is really random. Or if it is gambling, it’s shooting your arrow blindly, over and over, hoping that you will land in one of these fated spots. And so you’re only gambling on yourself, not really on the location of this gold.” This is also many video games, right? There is a fated, narrative end, but you play on anyway.

The commercial break had ended, and now the eponymous Mentalist had determined the location of the gold by tricking someone else into going to the secret mine ahead of him (our hero, pretending to be a sort of psychic earlier, had really only followed the bad guy there).

Then I asked my mom if she remembered Roger Craig, Jeopardy! champ. She did! She loves him. I asked her if she knew how he had become unbeatable. She didn’t.

So here is the story: Roger Craig created a piece of software to help him study for the quiz show. First he created a huge database of Jeopardy! questions. Then he “categorized” all the questions, probably by hand. But it would be impossible for any one human being to study every category of Jeopardy! question, so Craig assigned values to these categories. Because it’s like, certain categories—like “World History,” say—are going to come up more often than “Ballet” or “John Waters Movies,” obviously. What’s more, correct answers for “World History” will tend to hold a lot more cash value than other answers might. So Craig knew which categories to study harder for. He was essentially looking for veins of gold.

Craig used his makeshift software to quiz himself, and these quizzes also helped him determine that he is just naturally lousy at answering certain categories’ questions.

Therefore, Craig discovered an algorithm: If 1) Craig’s odds of getting an answer correct are low and 2) the category isn’t very worthwhile anyway, then 3) Craig actually knows which categories to tackle and which to leave alone. This was especially handy while he was actually playing the game: Roger Craig would look at the category, consider its worth, weigh its worth against the odds of his knowing the answer and, using a type of math, decide whether or not to go all-in.

In-game, Craig visibly pauses to calculate his odds of a win. “I’ll bet it all,” he finally says, and his victory is almost too incredible to watch:

I tried hard to explain all this to my mother. Then I asked her whether or not she thought this was “fair” play.

“Of course it’s fair,” she told me.

“I think I agree,” I said slowly—my mother and I both love Jeopardy!—“and I think he earned his win. But some people might not feel that way. He figured out how to beat people who maybe know a lot more about stuff but take the wrong chances. In a way, he won against people he shouldn’t have.”

We both were quiet for a long time.

“Um,” I said, breaking the spell. “So it really is the same as with the geological statistician, because his only real ‘crime,’ if there were a crime, is learning these secret rules of the game, these rules that nobody else understands, so that he never has to take a gamble. See?”

“No,” my mom said.

“That guy could play the lottery and win every time,” I continued, “and so is it fair that other people ever had to play against him.”

“I don’t know,” my mom said.

“What I am saying is, we socially dictate such a fine line between ‘knowing the real rules’ and ‘cheating,’” I mused.

Now I told my mother about pick-up artists and ‘The Game.’ I told her about how we naturally do not trust pick-up artists because that is a sleazy trade.

“Why is that?” I wondered aloud (now I was revisiting a thought I’d first had out loud with a friend on October 30 of last year). “Sure it’s wrong to treat women like gold dust, but a lot of The Game is studying basic tenets of human psychology that maybe other people haven’t bothered with. There are all these little rules most people don’t understand. Is it actually wrong to use those rules, when a person is only really trying to understand how other people work, better than most people do?”

We both were quiet again. Maybe my mother was asleep.

“So we act like it is not moral or ethical to figure out those rules, because we treat it like an unfair advantage,” I told nobody. Now I was thoughtful again.

Hmm. Sometimes, if things start to seem ‘unfair,’ we legislate. We get really legalistic about this type of thing.

Martha Stewart was subject to this. One time she was given a hot stock tip—we might call it a “new game rule,” if we are feeling generous—and now that she possessed this new information, she had to decide whether to play by the rule or ignore it, as if she never had been told how the stock game works. She chose to play by that rule, rather than taking risks, and she ended up in jail for awhile. We call what Martha Stewart did “insider trading.” We don’t like “insider information,” because that means someone gets to play by a ruleset the rest of us cannot access. When anything seems ‘unfair,’ even fleetingly, we collectively feel so victimized.

Or maybe someone is in a casino, gambling. If he is a pretty good poker player, he will know how to watch and play. If his opponent plays a Queen (or whatever), our card shark might realize the hand he was cultivating is finished, and so he folds and still escapes with some of his money. That type of thing is OK.

But what if the same card shark is also really good at counting cards! What if he has developed a machine’s computational agility at knowing where every card is in the deck? Knowing how to do this is difficult but not miraculous, but it is most certainly a type of cheating, and a card shark on a winning streak might might eventually be asked to leave the table, or maybe the entire casino.

A great card shark really impresses us, though, doesn’t he? His knack for counting cards is a real talent, a type of high scam. Sometimes we tip our hat to mentalists and “hustlers,” don’t we, because they can be really creative and talented even as they are defrauding people, and if we are not the person being defrauded, we are so impressed.

“But maybe if we feel like we are the person who is losing something to somebody else,” I continued aloud to my mother, “we decide things are unfair.”

“Hmmmmmm,” my mother said, not thoughtfully but sleepily.

“Anyway,” I said to her, “the whole thing makes me so sad!”

“Why?” my mother asked me, sounding more awake.

“Um,” I said. “We feel like the right thing to do is to not know the secret rules. We feel a lot more sympathy and respect for those hardworking dreamers who keep shooting and shooting those arrows into empty spaces.” Ugh, the losers.

“And,” I said. “And.

“And those things everyone is looking for, they aren’t up to chance at all! They aren’t! They’re, uh, they aren’t chaotic, they’re part of math and a harmonious universe, and they’re, um,” I said.

“It’s like predestination,” my mother the Catholic said.

“Well, yeah! Well, determinism,” I said.

“Which is sad,” she said.

“And scary! And sad,” I agreed. “How terrifying, that you can try and try your whole life, and there is free will, but the ‘free will’ is you, you, never hitting on the ‘right’ thing, this thing that is—”

“Fated,” my mother suggested.

“Yes!” I said.

And here is where this particular blog gets weird.

I sat there, reeling at the idea that your ‘fortune’ is this ancient thing that predates you, and your only hope—if this is the sort of thing you long for, for any type of life success—is to somehow arbitrarily strike on it, or maybe to not-randomly strike on it, if you are some kind of cheater. That idea radically changes everything, doesn’t it? Every philosophy.

Now I wondered aloud, to my poor mother, at what the location of gold veins—just, the literal location of gold veins!—meant for me, for narrativity and storytelling, for game-making and game-playing, for my own sense of religion and life philosophy, and she and I both got worried.

Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything? But I was raised Southern Baptist, where we are taught that there is one final truth, and unless we breathlessly drive toward that final truth, toward that singular golden vein, we are going in the wrong direction. But! there is another part of (most denominations of, excluding Calvinist) Christianity, too, and that is, we all have free will. The concept of free will is tantamount to the type of idea of moral “salvation” I grew up with. It goes: maybe if we stop gambling and choose this one thing, that choice is all the more important because we chose freely. Otherwise, what is the point?

Or maybe that is not true, either. I’m not sure. Everything is in flux, so I am thinking out loud.

I know, I mentioned Calvinism. I know that determinism, predeterminism, and predestination are commonly-confused terms with nuanced differences. I struggle, too, to not conflate them. But I have written lengthily—even here! Right here on this blog!—about my longstanding fear of determinism, which I only hope isn’t a thing.

Because if I were to become convinced the game of life is “solvable,” whether with or without algorithms, I very constantly wonder whether I would be able to also live ethically. Can I? Can we? Can we really live ethically while believing in golden veins? Many philosophers say no. I’m not sure.

So I said all this to my own mother, and she and I were both worried for me.

ETA: John Peter Grant expands on these ideas, connects them more tangibly to games, and—oh, just read this.

I think my favorite part about the gAtari 2600—besides, you know, the body of the guitar is an actual 2600—is how the “frets” are just these ginormous footpedals, all fused onto the “fingerboard” in a row.

No, I realize the pedals are actually being used to play loops (Right?? And then the “whammying”), but they look hilarious. This machine does not sound hilarious, however. Rather, it sounds awesome.

• Hack A Day – The GATARI “2600” Musical Instrument

• cTrix

This video has been around for maybe a day and a half, tops—in Internet Time, it’s already months old—but I really enjoyed its not-too-malicious dramatic reenactment of the dumbest, most interesting Holiday Shopping Nightmare human interest story ever told in 2011.

Also, Revision3’s Anthony Carboni is nowhere near jacked enough to play Paul, the villain in this melodrama, and this bit of miscasting is charming all on its own. (Kotaku and Escapist have the full deets, but the video might be enough.)

There are a lot of things about this I don’t understand. I don’t quite understand why “Dave,” the unhappy customer, forwarded his ongoing, charged email exchange to Mike Krahulik (“Gabe” of Penny Arcade, AKA the hotheaded one), except that Dave needed some muscle on his side. Mike tried his best to mediate, which is weird enough anyway, but there was little reasoning with “Paul,” the erstwhile giant of PR (whether he is even a PR guy is up for debate) who until recently had mishandled the marketing for some weird video game peripheral. Which, if you are wondering, did not ship in time for the holidays, and how dare you email Paul about this, Dave.

In a way I do feel bad for Paul. When a shipment is trapped in customs, you might feel helpless, especially when the holdup is not your fault. You can’t get frustrated with other people, though. Like, you just can’t.

So it turns out Paul might be a little bit of a nutjob; unsurprisingly, Paul no longer has a job.

And yet, and yet. There is so much pleasure—so much schadenfreude!—to be derived from this entire Greek tragedy, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m getting off on it, along with the rest of the mob. It’s just so much fun to see a juiced-up marketing guy finally get peed on, isn’t it?

But why do we even feel that way?

Er. Most games journalists have such a distaste for PR people—please, stop me if this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule—maybe because we often get stuck rewriting press releases as pretend-news. Sure, I’ve had misunderstandings; I’ve had tiffs. Ugh, marketing. Ugh.

Why the disdain, though? Most PR people are authentically very nice! Obsequious sometimes, sure, if they’re doing their job. Pesky? All right. And it does seem like some of the girls exercise and drink vodka-sodas and wear tight pants and go clubbing after work (sorry!). But no PR person has ever really made my life miserable. In fact, PR people have split cabs with me, asked me about my job and my life, and taken me to dance clubs. Like I’m a swan-in-waiting! Or the ugly sorority sister, I’m not sure which. So there’s this palpable cultural divide, but PR people do go out of their way to not be jerks. I think back on the inventive ways I’ve maligned PR people—they try to be so nice, and you can get away with murder, hilarious murder—and in retrospect I know who the real jerk is.

I am struggling, in fact, to think of even one marketing person I’ve ever sincerely disliked as a human being, and the answer is, Me, Just Me, Anytime I Ever Did Anything that Felt Like Marketing, Even in Passing. God, can I be passive-aggressive. (The other ugly reality is, a lot of professional games journos, the married ones [which is impressive in itself; I think very few journalists manage to stay married], when suddenly faced with unemployment—and I am describing people for whom the financial dangerousness of freelancing is not an option, because there is a house and all these mouths to feed—will move swiftly and directly and invariably into the arms of PR, or marketing, or community-management, or whatever can crush a writer’s dignity readily and wholly.)

For my own part, I can only think of one industry email exchange that ever even approached rudeness. Long ago, a famous video game developer, in keeping with the spirit of his ‘pose’, contacted me to “get the ball rolling” in an email that was flip and obnoxious. I was actually kind of giddy when I received this email—certainly not offended, because I myself have hammered out some peevish emails to bosses—but I also didn’t know where to begin with my reply. So I… didn’t… write… back. I didn’t write this famous important dude back! The next morning, I received a second email, and this one was apologetic, deferential, and over-polite. And I was giggling as I wrote a very professional reply, but I was also very “Oh, no! This guy thinks I’m mad at him! That’s awful!”

And lately, the only strongly-worded email I’ve sent was to a company that sells and ships dog ornaments. Dog ornaments. These were sculpted ceramic dogs, intended to be looped onto little paperclip-hooks. I was writing on my mother’s behalf, of course. I did not receive a strongly-worded email in kind; I fixed that ish right up. (No, my mother did not owe money for a dog ornament. How dare they.)

What I am saying is, Paul is anomalous. He is nothing like the average PR person, as the average PR person tends to be very nice. Or indie developers, who have to do their own PR, they tend to be very nice also. I don’t think Paul is representative of games culture at all?

Oh, some people are willfully bombastic—even twerpy—and yeah, I’ve emailed threats that I cowrote with my legal person up in corporate, but even those were, I don’t know, nice? They were nice, measured, understanding, compassionate legal threats. (Of course I would think I’m “nice,” but seriously, now. Nothing good has ever come of an email sent in a hurry.)

I am trying to wrap my noggin around my own schadenfreude, and I think the word I’m looking for is “horror.”

Many writers, for instance, are horrified at the very thought of PR—it’s the machine that kills artisticalness! or whatever—and they project that horror as a type of disdain. But PR people are paid to be nice. If you have ever been a CM or worked retail, you know how difficult it is to be paid to be nice. You will kill yourself trying to stay nice. This weirdo, Paul? He’s gaily breaking every marketing rule. That is horrifying. Why is it so horrifying?

And it’s great fun, almost always, to crucify every socially aberrant behavior.

Which is not to say that “Paul” is in the right—he isn’t, and for the love of God, he should maybe pursue a course other than marketing, some course that won’t tax his writing skills, say—but again, why do I hate Paul so much?

Why do we all hate Paul?

As Mike Krahulik tells it, it’s because Paul is a “bully.” Oooh. We hate bullies. I really hate bullies. I, too, wish bullies would lose their jobs, exactly the way Paul has lost his job, publicly and cruelly. But bullying is not aberrant in certain professions; rather, bullying can be the hatter of success. Few people have gotten far on “nice.”

But we are sitting here on the Internet at all because we believe in the Internet’s ability, when speaking in one chorus, to invert the social hierarchy, whether to recognize RAW TALENT that otherwise wouldn’t be acknowledged, or to topple bullies and give them what-for. That hope is why I boarded the Internet in 1993, as a miserable preteen, and I bet that is part of the reason you are here now. We champion underdogs.

But when I was briefly a CM I discovered how easy it is to suddenly become the “bully” in any given narrative—this is to say, to become the person at whom the rest of the Internet is angry. It is a surprising position to find oneself in. And while it feels interminable and is forever googleable, it thankfully does not last.

I think I’m talking about this because Dave, in the Kotaku comments, became so apologetic. (This might be due, in part, to Paul’s apology.) Dave never intended his customer-service complaint to explode the way it did, now that we all hate Paul. Has Dave ruined Paul’s life? Dave wonders; Dave worries. Dave worries about becoming our champion. Dave worries about the way we have all seized on Paul.

Paul isn’t a nice guy. Paul shouldn’t even be in marketing. The world is full of not-nice guys; less so, marketing has some not-nice people, people I myself have never chanced to meet.

Still, maybe Dave is right to worry about us.

Update: Owen Good of Kotaku took the same stance as I did, only stronger, and the backlash in the comments—-calling for his op/ed to be “unpublished”!—-is so extreme, I cannot even.

AKA Spook
Level 9 · text adventure · text parser · 1989
Platform · Amiga · Amstrad CPC · Atari 8-bit · Atari ST · C64 · DOS · ZX Spectrum
Download · DOS · Spectrum

There is only one reason I would ever deign to tell you about some boring old text adventure, and here it is: Scapeghost is awesome.

For one thing, the game is well-written—we hardly get to applaud computer games for good writing anymore!—and for another, it is authentically creepy.

A lot of the creep factor is indebted to the atmospheric artwork that accompanies each new location’s block of text. (One 1990 review calls the VGA art “photorealistic,” which, no, but all the versions really are very good.) You can’t interact with the pictures—that’s the sort of thing you’d find in Déjà Vu, a super-duper-early Macintosh point-and-click adventure game—but each backdrop goes a long way in establishing the setting’s grim moodiness.

You were Alan Chance. You were a good cop; now you’re a dead cop. You were trying to bust a dirty drug deal and now, in death, everyone assumes the worst about you. You wake up at your own funeral. You can practically taste the mist.

From the get-go, this adventure is slim on real mystery. If you already know to follow the one especially-suspicious dude, he basically confesses to your murder under his breath. God, why do murderers always talk to themselves? I ask you.

So you already know the identity of the two-timing detective who offed you. All that’s left is to vindicate your own death… FROM BEYOND THE GRAAAAAAVE.

In the beginning you can only pick up very small, light objects—a leaf, or maybe a flower petal, say—but if you pick up incrementally heavier little objects, you can eventually carry things like pebbles and scraps of paper. Soon you’ll be flipping switches and toppling fragile objects! You’re like a real ghost now!

There are other ghosts in the cemetery, too, and if you can assess what each ghost needs and somehow fulfill that need, you’ll be able to enlist each ghost’s help one by one. Here’s a hot tip: jot down the names of each ghost, or maybe the useful objects you notice lying around, whatever. That’s right, just scribble a list of words as you play. This is because, rather than telling the software you’d like to go north, east, north, north, you can use shorthand like “GO TO EDNA.” That’s wonderful. In playing text games and MUDs as a kid, I hated drawing those maps. I’m terrible at knowing where I am; once I do draw myself a map, I can’t even read it. I am definitely better at remembering landmarks—you could say I’m “object-oriented” maybe?—and this made navigating the game’s spaces a real treat instead of a chore.

The first chapter is drier, but it’s a terrific introduction and tutorial nonetheless. In small space, part one establishes what sort of things you might want to do, how to accomplish those things, and so on. It also establishes rules of the game-world: ghosts gain “permanence” and substance the more they do, but ghosts will be temporarily felled, for instance, by flashes of bright light.

The game is not timed—rather, it is turn-based—but as Alan Chance, you have a limited number of turns before sunrise. If you aren’t able to complete the first “night” in “time,” you can move right along to the next chapter anyway, if you like. That really takes a lot of the frustration out of the game.

In part two, “Haunted House,” things start to get much more interesting. The parser command “CONCENTRATE” (spoiler?) allows the late Detective Inspector to psychically replay the nefarious goings-on that ultimately conspired his death. Timing becomes much more important now; you’ll find yourself using your turns carefully so that you can avoid, say, the headlights of oncoming cars (spoilers).

In the final, most action-packed chapter—appropriately titled “Poltergeist”—you get to terrorize the bad guys and rescue a lady. Good luck!

If you have even an inkling as to how to tackle Scapeghost, the game’s pace moves at a clip. The writing is whip-smart and wry. And a little unexpectedly, the game is funny! Oh, it plays its creepy atmosphere straight, sure, and you generally won’t be chuckling, but sometimes Scapeghost gives in to its own silliness.

As a point-and-click adventure, even modern gamers would poop themselves. As a work of interactive fiction, Scapeghost is phenomenal (although frosh gamers might want to keep a walkthrough handy).

Scapeghost’s contemporary critics often complained about a “lack of creativity.” This is pretty baffling. I kinda want to go What the hell did people play in 1989, then, except that I can already guess: fantasy-adventure, cyberpunk sci-fi, dungeon-crawls. Sighing, I have to acknowledge the wafer-thin plane that divides “tired” and “classic” and call it a draw.

Odds and ends

• As you can imagine, it is very difficult to not repeatedly call Scapeghost “Spaceghost.” If you see any straggling errors, please let me know.
• I’m not sure what it’s like to be dead, but I bet it feels a lot like this. Spooky.
• The text parser does not recognize the word “at”. “To” is fine, apparently, but “at” is too much, too much.
• Level 9 was known for combining drawn or bitmapped graphics with text. The developers were thisclose to producing an officially-licensed Doctor Who game (source), but the project fell through.
• Level 9’s first five releases shipped on tapes packaged in ziplock baggies, as was the fashion then.
• Level 9’s first release, Colossal Adventure, was a reworking of Colossal Cave, or ADVENT, for home computers. (Adventure also inspired Ken and Roberta Williams to form Sierra On-Line.)
• Scapeghost was Level 9’s final—and reportedly “least successful”—game. It sold 15,000 copies at about twenty bucks a pop. Scapeghost was written by Pete Austin. Level 9 shuttered in June 1991.
• I filched screenshots from Scan0017 and Myabandonware.

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2. Daily Linksplosion: Weird Dreams edition

Sierra is pleased to present this living Christmas card. It is intended to help you demonstrate the color and sound capabilities possible with today’s personal computers while promoting the Christmas spirit within your store.

As an added bonus, you may customize this program each time you run it with a message of your own. This allows you to advertise your sale items, or to wish your customers a Merry Christmas in your own words.

This program is hard disk installable and is meant to be run in the morning and left running all day.

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1. Happy holidays from the Wilderness
2. Classic television, arcade style

That man, Kinn (also known by his handle “Robotron,” or by his real name, Kim) was more than just another guy who played video games in the Metro Detroit area. He was a patriarch to the gaming scene who worked to foster a sense of community, and whose breadth of classic gaming knowledge made him nigh-unstoppable in games such as Mr. Do, Burgertime, and Zanac. An old school player through and through, Kinn grew up in the heyday of arcades in the late 70s through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. He worked in arcades, won local tournaments in games like Robotron: 2084 (leading to his handle) and generally enjoyed gaming as a pastime on par with fishing, comic books, and cheesy science fiction featuring robots. Naturally he picked up the consoles of the day as well, and even started importing Japanese games in the early 90s once catalogs became available to purchase them through.

After a grievous injury on the job, Kinn lost his left leg, limiting his chances to take part in his more active hobbies and exacerbating preexisting health problems he already had to deal with, and so he spent more of his time with games and movies at home. While he did not entirely eschew modern gaming systems and genres, from the Dreamcast era on he focused his new purchases on arcade-style shooters (shmups, STGs, whatever you want to call them), multiplayer games such as Mario Kart, classic games, and of course, fighting games. Due to this fairly small trickle of new content he was picking up –- both domestically and imported –- he was able to focus much of his new-game budget on the newest releases for his favorite console, the Neo Geo, right up until the end of the console’s run, topping off at over 60 games before he ultimately sold the whole thing. In context, these were all critical components to a weekly event he held at his house off of 8 Mile since the 90s, known as Friday Night Gaming, or FNG.

Unlike game nights I’ve seen from most other people, Kinn’s were open to anyone who wanted to come and play some games. He would advertise the events on a variety of forums that he was active on, including shoryuken.com, neo-geo.com, atariage.com, 1up.com, shmups.com and undoubtedly many more that I never learned about. Additionally, he lived near the legendary Wizzards Arcade, once located on 8 Mile near Gratiot, where all the local fighting game players would compete in everything the arcade would stock, such as the Samurai Shodown series, Mortal Kombat, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Guilty Gear X, Puzzle Fighter, and yes, the KOF series. Once the arcade would close down for the night at around 1 am, many of those players would roll on down the street to Robo’s to join in FNG, where frequently the Neo Geo and PS2 imports like the Guilty Gear XX games were stars of the show. Game selection was done purely democratically, with the players themselves choosing what went on at any given time. Depending on how many people were there and who they were, this meant the popular releases of the day such as Super Smash Bros. Melee or Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike had about as much chance as oddball games like World Heroes Perfect, Tecmo Bowl, Karnov’s Revenge, or League Bowling as getting thrown onto the big TV.

KOF was always very popular. Kinn owned nearly every single Neo Geo cart of the KOF series, only missing King of Fighters 2000 and and King of Fighters 2003. Unsurprisingly, the most popular editions proved to be the newest releases and the acclaimed KOF 98. KOF 2001 may have topped them all however; Wizzards declined to get the arcade release, but Kinn picked it up as soon as it went on sale. As a result, 2001 became THE game of FNG for months, running for hours, both at the beginning of the night and again once Wizzards would close. On a few occasions there were over 30 people packed into his living room, hallway, and kitchen doorways watching the game and waiting for their rotation; eventually he proposed making it a “team game” where a person would choose a character on a team and they would hurriedly swap controllers in between rounds. By no means was 2001 the best KOF game, but the sheer amount of time sunk into it and the nostalgia make it one of my favorites in the series. Even once King of Fighters 2002 came out, 2001 still would find its way back into the rotation.

Eventually additional setups were thrown together in the kitchen and in Kinn’s computer room, so more games could get played when the main living room TV was pretty much locked down. Generally these ended up being “old school” games like Mortal Kombat II and Street Fighter II Turbo for Super NES, 80s game collections for PS1 or PS2, or just another place for people to run Guilty Gear XX when the living room was taken. Moreso than games, however, FNG was a place to socialize, and it was a regular occurrence for people, Kinn included, to just hang out in the kitchen or computer room and chat, usually over some Happy’s Pizza. Eventually, however, the game night crowds began to dwindle a bit partially because of Halo nights other community members were running, and shrunk moreso once Wizzards closed for good in 2004. Despite the shrinking attendance, his own health problems, and the addition of romance to his life from his eventual wife, Kinn continued to run them every few weeks right up until he moved into a new home off of 7 Mile. He ran a couple more dedicated FNG sessions there as well, but not trusting the neighborhood, they quietly ended around 2009, and simply became gaming sessions whenever friends visited. At one of the last FNG nights I recall playing some of the newer crop of fighters, such as KOF 98 Ultimate Match, Arcana Heart, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix. It was truly the end of an era, though none of us quite realized it at the time.

Last year, on October 15, 2010, I popped over to Kinn’s newest home in the suburbs for our own FNG. A few of our friends I asked were unable to join us due to work or other commitments, but he had gotten a friend of his named Dale to join in for what we planned to be a night of shooters. Kinn was never a huge fan of CAVE games, but was intrigued by Deathsmiles footage he had seen, and really wanted to check it out. I decided to surprise him by bringing along a Vectrex with a game he loved as a kid called Rip Off, which he said only a party store a couple miles from his house ever had, leaving him to walk the entire way to play it with his buddies. After nearly 30 years he still had skills in the game and promptly topped my score in it, while Dale showed us all up in Deathsmiles, Mushihimesama Futari, and ESPGaluda II. As always, though, we got to discussing various movies, comics, cartoons, and games, and Robo and I talked about how amazing KOF XIII looked. We were both incredibly excited to play it at the time, and he requested that I come back over during the week with some of our old crew to help set up his game room so he could kick-start a new era of FNG to take advantage of all these new games.

The next morning, while checking websites before work, I discovered he had passed away.

It’s strange the things that bring to mind the man and his gaming sensibilities (which admittedly hewed close to my own). Kinn was an incredibly nice fellow who treated practically everyone like he’d known them for years, and was very supportive and helpful to anyone who wanted to game or talk shop. He would frequently refer to himself as a “scrub brush” in fighters, but that never stopped him from jumping in and getting a few wins, and his commentary for some of those games still come to mind years later. Not many people got the “Eat at Wizzards!” joke he’d make every single time Marco Rodriguez pulled out the wooden sign in Mark of the Wolves (Wizzards was a restaurant before it was an arcade), but he made the crack every time, and it was funny every time. He also would be blown away anytime people did something unexpected and nice for him; my friend Jay brought him Christmas dinner one year, and I surprised him for his birthday in 2002 with an Atari VCS with many of his favorite games that he had long since sold and regretted losing. Nowadays, playing something for the Neo Geo, or a shooter, or an old early-80s game, or even King of Fighters XIII bring him to mind. In a sense I still am competing with him using his old memory card save data with his high scores on it, and he still holds some of the highest scores on the PS3 leaderboards for Shatter, a year after he has passed on.

More than anything, however, he struck me as the sort of person the gaming community at large should strive to be. He didn’t like FPS games, but he didn’t talk down about the people who played them. He didn’t talk down to women who came by FNG to game. He treated everyone with respect, even online, and was generally supportive even when he was competing. More than that, though, he welcomed people into his home and fostered a sense of community that has endured even after he passed on. Any time I toss on KOF XIII I remember him and all the good times we had, gaming and chewing the fat.

Game on, old friend.

• The new defunct FNG page
• Facebook memorial page

I stand by my initial, glowing review of Glitch, for the most part, but I injected it with some lovey-dovey romance that now only feels disingenuous. Anytime I accidentally scroll past my Glitch review, I feel little stabs. So in the interest of truthfulness, I need to revise.

A week after I wrote that thing, we got into a weird fight. We were supposed to go on a date, which was going to be nice—we had been playing a lot of Glitch together, instead of working or hugging, and we never really got out and did anything nice for ourselves.

And I mean, he and I were playing a lot of Glitch. I can’t remember when I was so addicted to a game. (1993?)

Instead of being a metaphor for intimacy, maybe it became a stand-in for intimacy: just a young couple, late at night, sitting across the room from each other, typing more than talking. Or maybe we stopped playing as a team, because it was easier to wander off—an “every man for himself” sort of thing. It wasn’t like Portal 2 multiplayer; it wasn’t like collaborative play in Terraria. (Call of Duty is supposedly the number-one relationship-ruiner, since you were wondering.)

So I was getting dressed for our date while he waited. I don’t know why I was so nervous. I asked him, twice, to stop pacing. The first time was a joke. The second time I mentioned it, he shouted something and made for the front door. And then he stood there, giving me a chance to apologize to him. He stood across the room, and then he came very close to me and said something, and waited. I don’t remember what he said—I couldn’t hear him anymore—and I didn’t say anything.

I was so rattled. And I walked off. Then I heard the door slam.

I ran into the street in my socks, calling, but he wasn’t there.

It was a non-fight, until I did that thing girls do. I cried awhile, and then I got out my cell phone.

Ladies! Don’t do this, ladies! Don’t text angry things while you’re panicked! “Who do you think you are?” you might ask someone you supposedly love so much. “Why do you always do this?” you might lie.

I was really furious now, so I, uh, I moved out of my little treehouse in Tii Quarter, in Glitch.

Oh, how stupid. That’s what I thought to do? To go, “Boy, howdy, I’ll show this guy I mean business by moving out of a virtual place.”

But we had been operating only in metaphors for a few weeks, which is not healthy.

And I went from apartment to apartment in Glitch, looking for a new one, keeping one wary eye on the real estate listings, worried someone else was going to buy my treehouse and its two chickens and its crops and trees and pig because, OK, I just wasn’t sure I was making the right decision.

And I realized I regretted it—that there was no better place, in-game, for me—and so I bought my treehouse back for more than I’d sold it.

And I logged back in, once, maybe a few days later, and he was gone. He wasn’t there.

He’d moved out of his little treehouse next door, and someone else was already living in it.

So. That was the last time I logged into Glitch.

I mean, I leveled my character on my phone sometimes, thinking maybe something would change between us. I’d see that I had finished learning one skill, and so I’d tap to learn the next skill, and that was all.

I ran into a friend, and this friend asked me whether we had found an apartment together yet—and he meant in life, not in Glitch—and I put my hands over my face and shook, like such a girl.

He played a few weeks more. I couldn’t. Glitch was only fun with two people, for me. When I was up late at night, and he was fast asleep, I was still playing Glitch with him in mind, trying to get one level past him. I was only playing because we were playing.

Last night I finally deleted my Glitch account. It was not easy. It was not easy.

This is probably the dumbest, lamest thing I have ever written. I don’t know how to make it incisive.

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Put your pants back on and take that seat over there. Good, thanks. Let’s hash some things out.

Let me start by reminding you that I’m a girl. Not only that, I’m an angry girl.

Joel Johnson, Kotaku’s fairly-recently-appointed Editorial Director, posted a little article titled “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku.” (Evidently, Johnson has been taking a lot of flack for Kotaku’s new editorial direction[s], which is increasingly fluid and interesting.)

And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.

“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.

So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:

Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.

And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.

Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!

Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.

He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.

My first issue with “An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”—which was published by the Border House, a blog you should absolutely add to your Feedburner, and please don’t think I am assembling a firing squad aimed at either them or at the letter’s goodhearted author, Mattie Brice—is the title. The title! Because: where does our issue lie? With Joel Johnson? Or Kotaku? I mean, “Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”?

If the issue is only with Kotaku, oh, boy, you’re coming a few years late to the party.

Kotaku is a Gawker-style website—what am I saying, it literally is a Gawker site!—and when you aggregate interesting factoids, you’re going to be slumming in the lowest common denominator’s neighborhood, always. No, please, stick with me. I hate to cop to my own subjectivity, but true story: since June, I have been writing for a celebrity gossip website for money, and it’s honestly the best gig I’ve had in maybe my whole life. I applied for the job a month before my (adoptive) dad’s death: I can write what I want usually; it super-coordinates with my life’s schedule and time commitments; I’ve actually been reading this gossip website since 2005ish; I love my coworkers; I am sometimes proud of my work because I am sneaking some pretty progressive stuff onto the site, probably to everyone’s horror; I actually replaced Molls McAleer, which is kind of cool; and all the rest. But I really do have to post nudie pics if I am the first to a “story.” It can be gut-wrenching.

I remember the first time I told my mother I was about to put a photo of a penis onto the Internet, and I think she could see I was basically begging her—her! This 80-year-old, immobile, mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, just-widowed and bereaved Christian woman on dialysis—to excuse me. Absolve me, please! And yet it’s just how that machine works, because I really do write for a celebrity gossip aggregator. Yes, duty calls! There are moral and ethical questions every day, and some days, there are even invasions of privacy and hacked cell phones and Scarlett Johansson’s ass, and it’s my first time ever being on the uglier side of certain ethical web dilemmas, all because I was the first of my coworkers to stumble across Scarlett Johansson’s ass that morning.

And so I do have to talk to my mother, every single time. Time and money, by necessity, have become important to me. Maybe I really am a bad person. But good God, it’s my job to post asses just as politely and ethically as I can, and I do my damnedest to personally mitigate that job requirement with feminist leanings and progressive politics, and I try to be satisfied with myself. Yes, open-letter author Mattie Brice, we do seek to be absolved, all of us. I only added these paragraphs because I wanted to. Let’s move on from this aspect, I hope.

So perhaps, at an aggregator site, you’re going to get a lot of facts wrong; you’re working fast; you’re going to post headlines as they siphon into your RSS reader, journalistic integrity be damned. That is how a certain style of paid writing works. No, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t. (In acknowledging this, I am actively agreeing with Mattie Brice’s fine open letter, OK.)

Now, in my old life, where I worked at a big-budge video game website—one of the biggest, for a time!—we might have collectively rolled our eyes at Kotaku a little. We did! Us! We did! All of us at some gigantic corporate-owned website, where cosplay galleries were all the rage! Because when Kotaku was breaking a story, we knew we had to go back and fact-check every freaking headline, and we were left picking the wheat from the chaff. But the truth is, that big-budge video game website I worked for was waaaay-aaaaay less progressive than Kotaku from the very get-go, in part because we scarcely covered fringe culture—even though the real weirdos at work, who were into Game Center CX, independently developed games, anime, and video games that only released to Famicom, were trying so, so hard to cover those things.

But then, at Kotaku, something much more interesting started to happen? I mean, Kotaku has always been interesting, but when Stephen Totilo joined the ranks—and to be sure, there were already some pretty fine writers at Kotaku, but when Stephen Totilo signed on, as Deputy Editor, right under Crecente in the hierarchy of importance—I sincerely doubt I was alone when I arched an eyebrow. He’s a really fine critic, and thoughtful; his reputation well precedes him. The hell? I remember thinking. What is Stephen Totilo doing, defecting to Kotaku? I doubt the “old guard,” Kotaku’s longstanding readership, even understood what they were getting when they got Stephen Totilo.

The capable and artful Leigh Alexander had already been around awhile, a goodly time before Totilo, as a columnist. She has long contributed editorials to Kotaku even as she constantly relays these very developed news stories for Gamasutra. If you somehow aren’t familiar with her byline, she’s all business, but then, too, she’s the Average Jane guys love and girls adore, and even that assessment shortchanges the woman. But suddenly, suddenly! Here comes Kirk Hamilton as a Features Editor. The man worked at Paste, OK, but something fascinating and quirky and helpful and truthful has been happening to his writing for a long while, and here he is now, devastating Kotaku with his truth bullets. (No, how could I be subjective? I love these writers.)

I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but by the time Joel Johnson signed on, he was so totally screwed: something has been happening to Kotaku for a little while now.

Their white male readership has noticed, and they have taken aim.

Kotaku’s Joel Johnson? Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

When I met him, he was Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson, telling the world about hip, hip cell phones. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Instead, he was Joel Johnson creating a communications network for victims of Hurricane Katrina. A little while later, he was Wired’s Joel Johnson; then he was BoingBoing’s Joel Johnson. Who is this Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

What I’m saying is, you have very goodheartedly and inadvertently made it personal. I think your issue is not with Joel Johnson. It is with Kotaku, a job that the man was grandfathered into, and Johnson only just now has a say in its coverage. And here is the heart: you are confusing the person with the job’s role.

Moreover, Joel Johnson is strong enough to change the site’s editorial direction over time. So wait. Just freaking wait. I have done my very, very best to explain machines to you; this is how machines work. It’s ugly, and I hate it, and I’m sorry. But wait.

You can say that changes in Kotaku’s coverage aren’t coming fast enough. That’s fine, but it also defies the point of his Kotaku article, wherein Johnson is actually addressing a cultural whiplash, admonishing longstanding readers for their claims that changes are instead coming too quickly.

And here we have arrived at the crux of my ire: Joel Johnson is on your side. What side? Your side. Aformentioned writer Mattie Brice (I love you!) accuses Johnson of “handwaving,” of a lack of willingness to discuss “the issue,” and I just cannot begin to grok that. I might offend you with this, but Kotaku has never been for minority groups. No, I know, and I hate that, too, and I always have. But it’s changing. Let it change. Kotaku cannot, will not, be a “safe space” tomorrow. And that’s maybe the real point: Kotaku has always tried to maintain its finger on the pulse, and the fact that Kotaku is changing tells you things are changing.

P.S. May I remind you how entirely different this whole thing is from that dumb dickwolves thing, not that aaaaaaanyone has confused the two. But if they did? Remember: in posting, Johnson was opening up a forum for conversation and understanding, which means his intentions were different from the beginning.

• From Johnson’s Twitter, here’s an interesting deconstruction of both sides of the argument.

• ETA: Also, Jayson Young supports and encourages both Brice and Johnson for each stepping up to the plate.