Life on the battlefield we call Internet Game Journalism is a cold, harsh existence. But for one night I was able to crawl out of the trenches and shake hands with the enemy to help the kids.

In an annual traditional, Kotaku’s Brian Crecente threw a big game nerd party that has come to be known as: The Kotaku Child's PlayFundraiser. Or as we like to call it in Denver: The One Cool  Videogame Thing That Happens Here, Rather Than In Some Snooty Place Like San Francisco or Brooklyn.

The even went down in a perfectly dingy, grungy and epic Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom. This building used to be one of the crown jewels in Denver’s dance hall history. And now it’s a place plastered with concert posters and black paint apparently trying to hold back the grime. Oh, and it has the most excellent disco ball you have ever seen. I would say it is more like the Death Star of disco balls.

In addition to Brian’s magnetic personality and flowing pirate locks, and a full rock stage set up with Rock Band and DJ Hero, the Fund Raiser attracts game fans with the promise of winning schwag.

Ah schwag, that magical crap that game publishers send to journalists in an effort to tease out a little sympathy, buy a little extra attention and make you wonder things like—If they spent less on the schawg and more on the development if the game would suck less.

But schwag it is and schwag the Kotaku empire collects. Mounds of it. Heaps up it. Piles and piles of t-shirts, toys and bric-a-brac of every imaginable type.

And all you need to do to win is show up, donate $10 at the door and get a little ticket.

For me, it was a magical night of winning. I’ve been to all three Fund Raisers, and never won a thing. You’d think that I wouldn’t want to win schwag. But I do. I wanted to win bad. And this year….I won! In fact, I won one of the coolest things given away that night: A limited edition Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360! A 360 I tell you!

Problem is, I have a 360. And the other problem is, I just couldn’t see how I could justify keeping or selling some ridiculously expensive piece of schwag. So, I did the only thing I could think of at the moment:

I sold it to a guy in the crowd for $300. All the profit, like all the money raised that night, went directly into the Child’s Play charity bucket.

Combine that with probably 300 plus people donating at thedoor and a silent auction that brought in well over $1,000 (I mean it had to, a collector’s edition of Uncharted 2 sold for $1,000 on its own. I guess it’s worth even more on eBay—so says somebody’s iPhone), and you get a tidy pile of cash for a good cause.

I’m already looking forward to hitting the Kotaku event next year. It’s a great chance to hang out with game fans and local developers (And,yes, there are a bunch of devs in Denver! Sony Online, ever hear of them? Oh, and the guys doing this seriously cool outer space MMO Jumpgate, and the Lego Universe guys? Lot’s going on in Colorado, let me tell you).

Most of all, Brian deserves a ton of applause for putting this party together each year, out of his own pocket and time. Even if he works for those other guys.

 
Brunel University: Home to the 4th DiGRA Conference

I’ve been to E3, where publicity bots battle to death the lasers and smoke machines. I’ve been to GDC, where the giants of the industry wave beer bottles and slosh suds onto your shirt in crowded parties. I’ve been to the Tokyo Game Show where costumed warriors bleed a love for games hard to imagine in the West.

But tucked into a little pub in the western suburbs of London talking to a bunch of academic game researchers remains one of the best moments in my life as a game writer.

After spending the last four days listening to game researchers from all over the Europe and North America talk about what makes videogames tick and what motivates gamers to game and why all this electronic entertainment stuff matters at all, you realize that the medium has come a long way since hardcore fans finished deconstructing every stray pixel in Super Mario Bros., or started writing Metroid fan fiction. Even more, games have a lot of room to grow.

In between arguments about ontology and wisecracks about Heidegger, my conferenced days filled with light bulb moments while taking in the Digital Games Research Association Conference. Some of the less inscrutable moments include these tidbits.

• Jesper Juul lead a panel discussing the idea of bad games. Much as cinefiles have turned the worship of bad movies into a wry form of film appreciation, Juul set up a talk about the fun in playing really rotten, broken games. Ever tried China Miner? It appears to have a difficulty curve like a flat brick wall in your face. The game is so hard that it is almost impossible to play. Big Rig Racing feautres the lowest Metacritic score of all time and apparently has no AI, no collision detection, no opponents, and no QA (But backing up allows you to accelerate to infinity). Trying to have fun with what appears to be one of the worst games ever released becomes a peculiar challenge. Apparently, a few years ago TIGSource.com even held a B-Game Festival. Sometimes bad can be good.
• Besides providing an interesting commentary on how survival horror has, by turning into an action-shooter style of play, started to disappear as a genre, a set of presentations on horror games pointed out that Resident Evil 4 has an odd commentary on work embedded in the game. Leon keeps his inventory in a briefcase and battles is his way up through a hierarchy of bosses. Nice work, if you can get it.
• Mikael Jakobsson noted that Xbox 360 games with more achievements sell better. So, adding achievements to a game does seem to help convince players to hang onto their games longer rather than turning them over to the used game store. Or maybe, popular games just have more achievements.
• Where else than a game conference can you get quote like this: “We have a whole generation of young men who want to dance, who want to dance with their hands,” said  Graeme Kirkpatrick referring the posture of gamers sitting on a couch with a controller in their hands.
• Or, sociologist Bart Simon explaining why people want to pretend to be Jedi’s, even when the Wii control isn’t a very accurate light saber input device. He figures the fact people cannot completely immerse into the fantasy because the Wii doesn’t allow a fine enough level of control is just fine. We want play, not virtual reality. “Without the screen,” he pointed out “the fantasy ends.” In other words, one reason games are fun is because they are not real. Real, it turns out, just isn’t that much fun.

Discussions about games and ethics, games and aesthetics, women in games, teaching about games, writing about games and more has kept the last four days mind-spinningly interesting. Sure, these topics are not the usual fodder of game boasting gossip about the next big thing. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Academics exist to work through all the possibly interesting and meaningful stuff to try and make sense of the new, the unknown and the unexplained. And every once in a while they come out into the light of day to share what they’ve come up with.

Take a look for yourself when the conference  papers eventually show up online: www.digra.org.

I’ve played a lot of games, and by a lot, I mean A LOT. It’s one of the perqs of the job—you get to see and try out a lot games. So, on the rare occasion that I  haven’t had a chance to play some big game, at least Ihave heard of it.

Then today, I get this in my inbox:

"On the heels of last week's unveiling of Ship Simulator Extremes, Paradox Interactive and VSTEP released a brand new trailer for the recently-announced title at Gamescom today. With over 450,000 copies sold of the original title, the series returns to take you deep into the heart of themost extreme conditions on Earth."

In case you don’t like reading, let me highlight the two relevant parts:

"On the heels of last week's unveiling of Ship Simulator Extremes, Paradox Interactive and VSTEP released a brand new trailer for the recently-announced title at Gamescom today. With over 450,000 copies sold of the original title, the series returns to take you deep into the heart of the most extreme conditions on Earth."

So, to put this in perspective, that’s about a half million copies sold of a game that let’s you simulate driving boats around.

This tells me several things.

1. I had no idea that so many people were interested in boat simulations.

2. I had no idea there was such as a thing as a boat simulator.

3. Therefore, I suck

But there is hope. With the new game launching early in 2010, you can bet this one is on my radar and I won’t miss playing it this time. I mean, if you are really honest with yourself, getting to play Capt. Stubing and driving the Love Boat around has to be one of those secret fantasies you have always harbored. Right?

Take a minute, if you will, and let’s talk about Spore and The Sims.

I recently wrapped up a review of The Sims 3, and was reminded how much I have enjoyed that series and relatively speaking, how little joy I’d derived from Spore.

And, since I didn’t have much else to do this weekend besides drink and ponder my own senseless existence, I started thinking, “What the hell? Why isn’t Spore as good as The Sims?”

First off, I want to discard the “Will Wright has lost his magic” argument.  Spore is a wondrous piece of work. It shimmers like an exotic tropical fish with brilliance.  I just find, that after playing with it for a few hours, it gets kind of dull.

Yet, I couldn’t wait to load up The Sims 3, customize my fat, uncouth slacker and hit the neighborhood in an effort to freeload and screw up other people’s lives.

Something seperates these two games and I wanted to come up with a plausible reason for it. 

From a technology point-of-view, I imagine that Spore uses some of that alien tech pulled out of the Roswell wreckage and The Sims 3 is just a very clever, albeit, massive spreadsheet with some 3D art on top. So, it’s clearly not the technology that is the issue.

Both games feature a wonderful open-ended, make up your own story kind of game play that confuses gamers who demand a story, no matter how juvenile or pointless.  So, it’s not narrative, or lack thereof.

Is it graphics? Sound? Animation? The quality of the manual ?No, no and no.

I’ve come to the conclusion, as "Solient Green" put it so eloquently: It’s people.

As cool as that flying eyeball creature I made, I just can’t identify with it as easily as I can a person. I find more in common with that saucy redhead down my Sim street, or the looser dude I made in the game more than any kooky kreature I have concocted in Spore.

Playing The Sims, any version, any expansion pack, I can reel out any soap opera storyline I that catches my fancy. In Spore, the tale is always:  Freak I control dominates freaks that I don’t.

Boring.

Funny, this recent interview in the New York Times tells it best. Will Wright is a student of human nature. Let’s hope in his next game he leaves behind the infinity of space for the infinitely more interesting world of people

I didn’t go to E3 this year. I know, you probably didn’t either. But after 12 years in a row of wallowing in the annual excess of that particular event, it felt pretty weird to be at home, reading blogs and just taking notes.

But as my jealously over all the free drinks, bag fulls of schwag and glimpses of starlets has subsided, I realize that I didn’t miss much.

Call it sour grapes, or call it a wakeup call. It hardly seems to have mattered sitting out this year. To get Shakespearian about it, E3 is “all sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Following along online the various musings of reporters better at uncovering facts than me, with better access to key players and, in many cases, just smarter news heads, I learned nothing that I couldn’t have gleaned from reading the ample press releases that poured over the wire: Microsoft ha sa motion controlled kickball game that may or may not demonstrate actual technology, Sony is going to launch another new really expensive game platform and Nintendo is just going to smugly count the money for the time being.

Oh, and Rock Band will feature Beatles songs. Except that we already new that.

So what did I actually miss by not being there? I have to face facts that E3 is a sort of Mecca for gamers, and by that, I mean it’s a spiritual center for the whole gaming enterprise. It makes people happy to think that there’s something bigger than them, and E3 is that for gamers. So I am beginning to think of E3 as similar to Christian radio. If you bother to listen for awhile, you’ll find out that they really don’t have anything new to say day in and day out, just more of the same churned over endlessly. On the other hand, if you are a believer, it must be nice to have the entire universe processed through such a narrow lens.

And just like you don’t need a radio to express a devout belief in a higher power, you don’t need to go to E3 to be a hard core gamer.

Then again, just looking at my unused E3 press pass sitting on my desk makes me want to cry.