Wanted to try a weekly view of what I’ve been reading and what’s making me think. So from Gamasutra:
Brett Fujioka wrote about Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. Yeah, this was more or less the last game I played before I put down gaming, meaning it was the last game I played in an uninterrupted stream from Mario onward. During that period games changed a lot, and thankfully they changed just as much when I quit because the industry is quite a bit more mature and the second MGS game of the Playstation era might have been an important part in that. Fujioka states that post-modernism in Japan grew up with anime and that makes a lot of sense to me and though the MGS creator is famously meta with his game design this article sheds some light on just what that really means.
EA held an event, hopefully the first of many within the industry, dealing with LGBT issues. While I’m an outsider to the LGBT community there seem to be clear concerns in some aspects of game culture not being as tolerant or as respecting as they should, and though we can all point fingers or say it’s not our problem these things have a way of getting worse before they get better and sunlight is the best disinfectant. So cliche but I think it works here where developers not only need to admit that the community playing their games might be more diverse than ever but that they have a part to play in whether that community is a positive or negative place for those labeled as “other”.
Reddit:
Reddit has basically been a constant stream of Amazon.com costumer reviews each more 1 Star than the last. And someone working for EA, supposedly, let off an open letter on the aggregator claiming the ocmpany was failing at it’s core values which they supposedly want all employees to follow. The Sim City launch is a massive problem for an industry continually finding piracy and their responce to it changing their landscape. From the gamers who pirate as many games as possible to the protection software locking down games to the new “always on” internet idea the industry finds itself with companies like Blizzard and EA making really dumb decisions regarding how to best deal with the problem. Though this definitely is a problem. Think about watching a movie, you probably already have several ideas as to how you could watch it be it over a streaming service or on demand or cable or piracy. Gaming is a newer media and tastes and perceptions about how consumers access the media are not only still being formed but in flux between digital and hard-copy formats. But “always on” internet connection as a way of verifying games is not the right move and EA shouldn’t have used this method for such a popular game. EA is also doggedly persuing a strategy of implementing multiplayer and micro-transactions for games once thought off-limits to all of that material. Seriously, I don’t know if there’s going to be much demand for this publisher in 10 years once they’ve drilled down everyones love for the franchises they own like they have been for another decade. I can’t imagine people looking at the next Sim City iteration without this bad taste in their mouth after this launch. Maybe I’ll write about launches and pre-orders and all that at some point, but for now I’ll just say that the launch is the closest games can get to an opening weekend. The time when every puzzle solution isn’t on the internet and when people aren’t talking about the game in the past-tense. It’s kind of an important ritual and EA, like Blizzard before, have tarnished that one moment where gamers allow themselves to really relax and experience a new game on it’s own terms by using draconian anti-piracy methods.
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9342980.page?ClickID=atn9lkzozlzzz9koytskaw0zaravrpslnsrn
This post is so perfect, with Kip Katsarelis a senior producer on the game talking about the server progress in an update, and without much hesitation a poster mentions that EA saw the pre-order numbers and knew how many people were getting the game. The fact that so many people were going to get online and download their game as soon as possible to get a game in before going to bed or just decided to forego work and planned to enjoy a Sim City inspired sick day and EA thought they wouldn’t download the game as soon as possible. Why would these people pre-order the game? Seriously. If someone wants to download the game 2 days later they’re going to buy the game two days later, and EA knew the pre-order numbers. So lazy.
Kotaku
This was really the best description of the Sim City launch issue. Blizzard had “Error 37” but Sim City was a multi-faceted failure, with some not being able to download the game with others having several other issues all creating distinct failures.
GDC2013
http://www.gdconf.com/news/dragons_dogma_la-mulana_tokyo_.html
The GDC is going to have Hideaki Itsuno talk about Dragon’s Dogma. Yeah, that’s going to be interesting since I recently got interested in that game I really want to know about the development process and I haven’t seen much on it.
As well as all those posts, a suprisingly EA/Sim City focused week, the first of Tropes Vs. Women: in video games has come out.
So this is an important idea for me right now because of reading Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim novel. Often a novel finds we expect a happy ending, and while that can change from generation to generation or culture to culture Lucky Jim is expected to go from a twirp to become Lucky Jim at the end with the trifecta of “job, girl, life” having fixed themselves. I’m by no means opposed to this, if the protagonist has grown and adapted to the world and in Lucky Jim the answers Jim finds are quite interesting including the relationship issue. There’s a girl Jim has a falling out with, but she says that she’s not leaving her boyfriend for Jim since that would just be giving up. She is a complex character attempting to survive and thrive in her own world and that happens to be in this other relationship. The fact that she shows this determination to work on her relationship might seem problematic at first but also gives her a true sense of worth and discipline that many female characters lose when they are turned into completely symbolic trophies.
When a person attempts to persuade me that the Nintendo era was the “Golden Age” of gaming, or that retro games are better in some way than the modern gaming world I have a hard time accepting it. Partially because they’re trafficking in a nostalgia for something I remember for what it was and partially because they’re just wrong. Mario, Zelda these are series that have continued as “legacy” franchises but whose true potential as agents of change are long past. Any time a “good” Mario game comes out the truth is it’s a chance for Nintendo to get cash and not for the medium to advance. And while many remember this era with rose colored plumber glasses the reality was there wasn’t any less hate or negativity it was just a time where people accepted that heros would save damsels and that soldiers fought aliens. The depictions of women, of those a culture considered as an outsider were every bit as problematic as anything considered the worst of the medium now, only these weren’t legacy or retro titles meant to be interpreted nostalgically but were the main images the medium was telegraphing. For some Mario games might bring them back to a simpler time and good for them, but I prefer to live in a world where Mass Effect or The Witcher portray cultures and races as issues of greater scope versus scaled down mis-representations for simplicities sake. Yeah the issues are more complex and we don’t feel like the hero as often or as easily as scaling a castle and defeating a koopah allowed but hiding in a world with those representations doesn’t make the modern world any easier and it definitely doesn’t make it, or the people that choose those games, any better than the rest of us. While EA is getting hammered, as they deserve to, for Sim City they have also slowly lead the charge in portraying contemporary sexuality in a somewhat realistic way in an unreal medium. Though I don’t want to suggest they are anything close to resembling an ethical corporation Nintendo has survived for years by consistently kidnapping a princess and in some ways I’m glad I grew out of that.
On the other side of things Senator Rand Paul filibustered a nomination this week of CIA man Brennan. I might not agree with everything the man says, I am a libertarian so often I disagree with other libertarians as much as the other political ideologies, he was bringing to bear some serious issues. We can’t fight the future any more, and we can’t put it off. Serious changes are coming in regards to how we not only understand warfare but how that process is dealt with and drones are a major facet of that. I’m not going to ask anyone to believe or think one way or another but please do something good for yourself and spend an hour on the search engine of your choice educating yourself on drones and US drone policies. As well if you are a citizen of another country examine your government’s policy regarding un-manned military engagements. I’m not going so far as saying we’re going to need to be prepared for mech combat, though that might be interesting, but how warfare takes place is changing yet the motives are not. These issues are going to be coming up more frequently and if you have some idea of what the reality is from your own research into the subject you won’t have to take someone else’s word for it.
logansjog 