Ironically I speak no Russian, so perhaps it is appropriate that I discuss this important topic - though those that have met me will tell you that I barely speak English.

Thinking about it all fills me with conflicting emotions - passion, reason and a sense of self loathing.. much like the characters in a Harlequin Presents romance novel. And oddly enough, the back cover of the novel, Harlequin Presents: By Royal Command, sums up my feelings on No Russian precisely:

Prince of Passion!

The only way Lauren can escape from the war-torn island of Sant'Rosa is to marry Guy, a sexy stranger in a fake ceremony.

But reunited with Guy under safe conditions, Lauren is overwhelmed by the mutual feelings of explosive desire!! And he has news for her: he's really a prince and Lauren is obligated to marry him again -- BY ROYAL COMMAND!

 

Oh no they didn't just describe the controversy of Modern Warfare 2!?! Yes they did.

For the record, if I had to choose between living on the bleeding edge of gaming in 2010 and staring at this picture of a tricycle the whole year, I would probably choose the tricycle.

WARNING: Stuck-up rant ahead! I like a good story. Who doesn't? But I'm incredibly bored by this idea that a medium is "mature" when it can "tell a great story." I like a good character, and a provacative scenario, and an interesting past, and choices and consequences and choose your own adventure. Who doesn't? But when these subjects come up in interviews with creators, they usually come off like design problems just waiting to be solved, rather than artistic questions to be explored. It really, really bugs me when a rationalist designer's mentality stands in for creative inspiration as if they are one and the same. The darker implication is that the latter doesn't really need to exist in such a commercial medium as gaming.

For whatever reason, "story" (or its indie inverse, "meta-narrative") has achieved this Holy Grail status in your average gaming discourse simply by default. Let's all conveniently ignore all cases to the contrary -- Space Invaders, Tetris, Civilization -- because they're so much harder to talk about. Gaming is part of that postindustrial culture where "characters" are attached to "franchises" that are bought and sold so that endless iterations of our favorite "narratives" can be monetized. "Story" itself is some kind of valuable unit. I realize this may come across as very naive to the brutal realities of how cultural capital works in the 21st century. I would argue that the oft-repeated concept-catchphrase "when games can tell a truly great story that's when we'll know gaming has finally arrived & established its place in culture etc." seems (purposely) naive to much more important aspects of creativity. For example, a sense of pace, a sense of form, a sense of color, a sense of texture, a sense of atmosphere, a sense of timbre, you know, the senses.

Maybe "great storytelling" is just the new suit-approved shorthand for "the transcendent and/or uncanny experience of being confronted by a piece of art whose pieces all seem to align perfectly and seemingly incidentally like the spines on a lionfish." But I doubt it. If something is being sold, then it's necessary to filter out all those complex, basically irrational machinations beneath creativity. Consumers will need something to hang onto, some quantifiable-on-a-scale-of-1-to-10 reason that ultimately isn't there.

So I think this easy notion of "great storytelling" is actually quite cynical in nature. In any case, it's completely incapable of providing any insight as to why this William Eggleston photograph of a tricycle is considered a masterpiece and why its corresponding body of work was instrumental in allowing photography to "mature" into the color era.

But this isn't an argument for fine art. Galleries are for selling stuff too. It's just that, instead of "great storytelling," they use phrases like "the artist has produced a multifaceted account which challenges acquired knowledge and truths, interrogating geo-political, art historical and gender issues related to given cultural contexts using a range of different media." You know, important-sounding B.S. that doesn't have anything to do with the actual work before you. I guess I am just saying that "great storytelling" is just a red herring; and that the things in games that affect me most, the things I remember most clearly, are the much smaller, seemingly incidental moments that might be accredited to an anonymous sound or texture artist or level designer. Like this room in Half-Life, a donutlike space where you play cat-and-mouse with a couple zombies that, for me, contains something of the whole queasy adventure that followed:

I tuned into a live online broadcast of Tim McVey's attempt to break the world record on the classic arcade game Nibbler around noon last Saturday. By that time, McVey had been playing for 30 hours. He needed to reach a billion and change; his score stood at about 810 million. Some of McVey's family and friends fielded questions from web commenters during the marathon. "What are the chances you won't break the record?" one asked.

McVey answered all the questions with the same weary, dismissive tone, like the way your office IT guy acts when you ask him how to log onto webmail. This one was no different. "The power could go out," he said. "The game could crash. The machine could be struck by lightning." Off-screen, you could hear a woman in the room laugh nervously. "C'mon, Tim," she said. The concern in her voice wasn't so much that he was being a sarcastic jerk to some well-meaning online spectators—after 30 hours awake, he was entitled to that. Her unspoken reprimand was more fundamental: Don't tempt fate.

Nibbler was produced in 1982 by Rock-Ola, a company that traditionally made jukeboxes and other coin-op machines. It's the basis for the countless versions of Snake that have since popped up on cell phones and elsewhere. You guide Nibbler the snake around various mazes, gobbling up little dots ("croutons") and trying to keep him from crashing into his ever-lengthening body.

While Nibbler is a cute, clever game, it only became famous for a point of trivia: It was the first game in which you could score a billion points. Tim McVey achieved this feat in 1984, scoring 1,000,042,270 over an uninterrupted two-day session. He got his name in the papers, a key to the city, and his name in the record books. The record stood for 25 years until this February, when Canadian Dwayne Richard put up a score of 1,004,328,140. So McVey decided to reclaim his rightful glory.

Except he didn't. I returned to the broadcast—which amounted to a webcam pointed at the Nibbler screen—around McVey's 35th hour. The score was above 910 million, but that wasn't the number that people were watching anymore. Earlier in the day, McVey had stored a huge stockpile of 100+ extra lives (so many, in fact, that the game's two-digit readout couldn't display them properly). Now he had around 60 lives left. Still a lot, but dwindling.

One commenter with an air of authority piped up: "No need to worry until he gets down to around 40 lives." An hour later, he had around 40 lives, and someone else tried to calm the crowd: "It's not a problem until around 20 lives." Nibbler doles out an extra snake every four levels, but McVey was losing them faster than that. "He's going to ragequit," one person said. He was shouted down by a moderator. "Positive thoughts, people."

Because all we could see was the game's screen, we had to piece together the scene from little details. The snake wasn't moving fluidly anymore; poor Nibbler was herky-jerking his way around each maze. We could hear McVey grunt and sigh and complain about his hand. A dog barked, shattering the tense quiet (and presumably any trace of concentration McVey had left), and a woman in the room hissed, "Shut him up!"

McVey only needed a few more hours, but his hand wouldn't cooperate. Later, after the ordeal was over, they'd inspect the game and find that the joystick had stopped working properly, too.

Around 15 lives left, there was a thud as McVey pounded the cabinet and walked away. Ragequit.

Final score: 945,939,420. McVey came back a few minutes later to enter his initials, or rather to enter the three-letter epithet SUX. (I would have gone with the timeless ASS, but to each their own.) His friends tried to console him, tell him that it was "still an amazing score!" but c'mon. He wanted the record, he fell short, and he knew that was all that mattered. It was like trying to tell the loser of the Super Bowl, "Hey, you still won the NFC Championship!" The guy did not want to hear it.

I felt awkward listening in on this moment of personal failure, but I didn't close the window, either. I wanted to wallow with McVey in his disappointment, because in the end, this is what makes the high-score competitions such an epic endeavor: There's first place, or there's nothing. Sure, 946 million is a nice score. And then they'll unplug the machine, and it'll be gone. If it were really as easy as McVey made it out to be—if the only thing that could stop him was a freak lightning strike—nobody would watch. As it is, the next time McVey sets out to retake his throne, I'll be watching.

Things I learned while playing Twitter-based typing game Fast 140 for the past half hour (in no particular order).

• Phillies Sportscaster Harry Kalas died. Many people are sad about this.
• President Obama has eased sanctions against Cuba. Many people are happy about this.
• Phil Spector has been found guilty in his murder trial.
• Lots of people like TweetDeck, Red Dwarf and The Cubs and also like talking about said subjects.
• Many people had a great Easter and hope everyone else also had a great Easter.
• At least one person spent Easter wondering how jesus pooped.
• Easter is harder when it has to be gluten free (I wonder how this affects pooping).
• Correct grammar and punctuation and spelling are not required to get into Heaven.
• Some people are offended by being offered subscriptions to Men's Health magazine.
• Some people treat work projects like the NHL playoffs.
• Robot camp counselors can be jerks.
• Twitter is an even more addictive basis for a typing game than shooting zombies (the previous champion for typing-game addictiveness).
• I can type 140 character at 96.6 wpm, and this makes me the 35th fastest typer in the world (see image) (Update: This is no longer true as of a few hours after this post went up. It was a nice lie while it lasted, though...).

Prime time is no longer the stronghold of television anymore, according to some data released by Nielsen. These days, gamers of all shapes, sizes, genders and ages, are turning to computers and consoles for entertainment. Of course, this data does not yet take into account programs recorded using Tivo and DVR, but it is certainly a shift. And what, if any affect has Hulu had on TV viewing? I know I watch a lot of programs there instead of watching them when they air because it is more convenient. Does this factor into the decline Nielson is seeing?

The most popular console remained the PS2, but usage is on a decline and should be out of the top spot in a few months. The report also suggested that Xbox 360 and PS3 users are more engaged and less likey to watch TV during prime-time.

 So what were the most popular games on the PC? According to the data, which tracks 185,000 PCs (Dec. 2008), free games were the most popular. And by free games I mean solitaire and Minesweeper. When those kinds of games weren't being played, it was World of Warcraft.

More data:

- The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were the most used consoles with the Wii having the fewest average usage days and the shortest daily average number of sessions of the big three. Of course, the PS2 blew away all three at a whopping 28.3 percent usuage. Of course this usuage is on a downward trend.

- Females 25 years + make up the largest block of PC game players accounting for 46.2 percent of all players and 54.6 percent of all game play minutes in December 2008.

- The most played games on the PC are card games from Microsoft, with the most played game being Solitaire - more than 17 million players for the month of December 2008.

Want more? Read this PDF file or check out the Nielsen Blog.

You might have seen this video of Mister Rogers chatting with a boy about Donkey Kong. I stumbled on it yesterday through some idle "Related Videos" clicking, and I was charmed.

The clip shows why Mister Rogers was such a unique force in kids' TV. His approach is straightforward: He talks to Brandon about games. There's no moralizing; we're not railroaded into a lesson. Nobody worries that Brandon is going to play video games too much, that he'll never go outside, that he'll go on a barrel-murdering rampage because of Donkey Kong's pernicious influence. As kids, we loved Mister Rogers because he engaged us with unadulterated respect and honesty, as he does here.

And then they open up the machine! "We're interested about the insides of things," Rogers says, so Coin-Collecting Keith flips over the joystick board on the mint Donkey Kong cabinet. If I had seen this episode when I was a kid, I would have been in rapture. As an adult, my reaction was pretty much the same, with one difference—I think kid me would have been wowed by the complexity of the game's inner workings, but now I'm impressed by how simple the electronics were. A handful of contact switches fueled a timeless arcade classic. Bite it, Sixaxis.

By the way, Coin-Collecting Keith? That's Keith David, who went on to roles in Crash, Platoon and a slew of video games including Fallout and Mass Effect. Given the intensity of his later work, you have to admire the restraint David shows when little Brandon snaps, "DOWN isn't really used in this game!" I think my response would have been a little less like David's "Heh-heh, not very much," and a little more like, "Heh-heh, keep shooting your mouth off and I WILL DESTROY YOU, DEMONSPAWN." Anyhow, moral of the story is, I can't wait to have kids.

Oh, and before any would-be sticklers complain in the comment threads, Mario was indeed a carpenter in this early stage of his career, so Brandon has that part right. Shigeru Miyamoto invented the plumber backstory for the later game Mario Bros.

Just had an interesting chat with a good PR friend of mine. This individual has been having an ongoing battle with the marketing folks about review scores: How are they arrived at, what goes into a score, why can't PR people control the press (?!?!), etc. Then the topic of price came up. Does that factor into it? Interesting question.

My answer? It depends. If you get a game for $20 and spend 15 hours on it and enjoy it, you probably think it was worth the money. But buy a $60 game and finish it in 15 hours, it probably had better be some of the best gameplay in your life to make it worth the money. In that case, price is definitely a factor and should be factored into a review, especially in Crispy's format of Buy, Try or Fry. Also, is the game an expansion? How much is added to the game for the amount of money you had to lay out?

By the same token, the Wii is viewed more as a family console. Most Wii games run no more than $49. In this case, your target audience should come into play. Is this game worth a trip to the movies for a family of four? Or is it a more serious franchise aimed at the more intense gamer? And along those lines, are PS3 and 360 games that are aimed at families or younger kids worth $50-$60 just because they were developed on a higher end platform? I think those questions need to be asked and weight given to them when playing the game and determining enjoyment value.

So my advice to my PR friend was to tell the marketing people that price definitely should play a factor in review scores, and they do when I look at games. Enjoyment level definitely scales depending on how hard your wallet is affected.

What's your take? Should price be a factor?