Slate Magazine - Gaming

The Path and the slow video game movement.

Chris Suellentrop — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:53:11 EST

"The Path is a Slow Game," its makers warn, and perhaps that should have scared me off, for I am a Slow Gamer. It's not merely that I'm dunderheaded. I'm also a plodding, open-mouthed, rose-smelling completionist. Games that others play through in five, 10, or 40 hours routinely require 10, 20, and 80 hours of my time. So when The Path's designers, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn of the Belgian game company Tale of Tales, predict that players will need "about six hours" for "a satisfying experience," I should have anticipated that I would need more than 12 just to get an alternately frustrating and curious one, and that it would take me seven hours just to figure out what in the name of all that is holy I was supposed to do.

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Should the United States ban RapeLay, a Japanese "rape simulator" game?

Leigh Alexander — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:14:48 EST

For a brief window in the mid-2000s, video games became politicians' favorite piñata. Joe Lieberman and Ted Kennedy spoke out against 2004's JFK Reloaded, a game that let you re-enact the Kennedy assassination. The "Hot Coffee" modification to Grand Theft Auto—which allowed players to (poorly) simulate intercourse with in-game girlfriends—left Lieberman and Hillary Clinton in a huff in 2005. That same year, the Illinois Legislature (among many others) banned the sale of violent games to minors, with then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich sending a message to "the parents of Illinois" pointing out that "98 percent of the games considered suitable by the industry for teenagers contain graphic violence."

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Flower is the only video game I've played that made me feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy.

Chris Suellentrop — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:49:17 EST

Last week, when the hard-core gamers of the world were supposed to be firing up the Lost and Damned, a new, downloadable episode of Grand Theft Auto IV, I instead decided to spend more than $400 for the privilege of playing a $10 game. I bought a PlayStation 3—a system I had consciously avoided to date in favor of the Xbox 360 and the Wii—so that I could download Flower, a little marvel of a game that casts the player as a series of petals floating in the wind.

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Will KenKen be the next Sudoku or a passing puzzle fad?

Matt Gaffney — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:24:00 EST

You are powerless to stop KenKen. Perhaps the new Japanese arithmo-logical challenge, which debuted in the New York Times on Feb. 8, will burrow into your brain on account of a significant other, who will plead for your help as she softly coos the game's tantalizingly simple rules. Or maybe a boring subway ride will leave you staring at a discarded newspaper, from which an unsolved KenKen will silently beckon your understimulated brain. However it goes down, don't try to resist. The marketing wheels, greased by the promise of Sudoku-style riches, are already in motion. New York Times puzzle maven Will Shortz calls it "the most addictive puzzle since Sudoku." He'd better hope so, as Shortz has already put out a slew of books of this computer-generated brain-mangler, with titles like Will Shortz Presents KenKen Easy to Hard Volume 3, Will Shortz Presents: I Can KenKen! Volume 1, and Will Shortz Presents the Little Gift Book of KenKen.

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What's killing the video-game business?

N. Evan Van Zelfden — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:27:10 EST

Like pretty much every industry these days, video-game publishing is in some financial trouble. Electronic Arts, the world's largest game publisher, best known for Madden and the Sims, lost $641 million in 2008's fourth quarter. Activision-Blizzard, owners of the cash cows World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, reported losses of $72 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. (They lost $194 million the quarter before that.) THQ, the third-largest publisher in the United States, and known for lucrative licenses ranging from the Ultimate Fighting Championship to Pixar, had $192 million in losses over the holidays and is laying off 24 percent of its work force.

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