And for my second small post that simply links somewhere else, I’d also like to draw your attention to Text Adventure.

Tiff Chow and I are curating what will hopefully be a totally dope and expansive repository of great examples of text in videogames. From unforgettable splash screens to thoughtfully-placed speech bubbles (ooh, that reminds me… Comix Zone), anything where the text makes you sit up and say “I like the way that looks” will be up there, a couple entries at a time.

But, then again, chances are you’ve already seen this at Offworld. Or Destructoid. Or Infovore. Or Waxy. Or Tiff’s blog. Oder Nerdcore. Ou Graphism.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m late to the party on linking to someithng I had a part in making. Still trying to figure out if that’s sad or awesome. If you’re not already, follow us on Tumblr (or make a Tumblr so you can), and we’ll transport you to…

…sorry. Lame joke.

I’m not usually one to play the “link something interesting” game with my blog, but you owe it to yourself to read this. Angus of Tango Lima Delta Romeo has written a very thoughtful piece on the continuing evolution of “morality” as it’s presented in games (his definition of morality, in this case, is doing your best to achieve your goals within a game; so, as such, it is “moral” to kill goombas in Super Mario Bros).

Aside from criticizing the “invisible hand of God” that keeps a fully tabulated and annotated count of how many “good” points and “not so good” MoralityPoints™ you have, he raises interesting ideas as to how one might truly present moral quandaries to a player, and, therefore, add new depth to “playing” and “beating” a scenario.

But the most interesting parts of moral conflict, the ones that separate pulp and genre from literature, are the ones that are ambiguous and dependent on situation. I ran an Unknown Armies (a pen and paper role-playing game) game for some friends awhile ago where everyone played sort of idealized selves and put them through any number of horrible events that have no grounding in life. Players reactions were surprising. People acted out of panic, anger, fear, attachment, all of the things that many simplified moral codes urge us to deny.

Definitely worth a look, if this sort of thing is up your alley.

Over at Every Game Ever the original plan was to write a little piece about every NA-released SNES game in alphabetical order. For about two weeks, I slogged through te games starting with numbers, and the games starting with A. After a while, though, I lost steam, and it sunk into unfinished obscurity. Two years later, my friends Mekki and Brian berated me until I resurrected it, in a new capacity: many writers, each doing one article every week (well, that was the original plan. Some people are two months behind, INCLUDING BRIAN WHO MADE ME START IT AGAIN). The only rules are:

1) 150-450 words, roughly, unless it’s a special case;
2) At least one screenshot;
3) No number scores (6/10, 85%, etc).

It was a good idea, though. I brought it back and started recruiting friends to write for it. It started with myself, Scott, Angus, Brian, and Mekki. From there, it began to flourish. Monday through Friday, we’d bravely wade into the sports-game-infested waters of the SNES catalogue. I had (and still have) an ulterior motive, though: by forcing deadlines and topics, I got some of my most gifted writer friends motivated enough to actually write something. Looking at those previous blogs will show you how long it’s been since they even wrote something of their own accord.

And, despite my own shoddy writing on the site (my own official excuse is twofold: one, my focus is now on badgering people who are late to submit ASAP; and, secondively, I’m experimenting with copying other people’s writing styles or toying with my own on a weekly basis), it’s going fabulously. We’ve since doubled in authorship. Scotty joined the team, bolstering the ever-important “dick jokes” quota required for a modern website; Travis, too, was recruited for another quota: pretentious English Master’s student-style existential pontification. Adam found the site through my blog (I think) and expressed interest, so I hooked him up to help with the load. Alex showed interest, and contributed to the noise with his debut article on Chessmaster– in all-caps. Tiff Chow joined the team to round it out to a nice, even ten.

Since the site gets little traffic, aside from some very weird search engine results (my favorite at the moment is still last week’s “where can a condom get lost in vagina”), so I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite articles from the site over the past few months. I’ve included links that will allow you to read just that author’s works, as it’s a lot more enjoyable to read one author at a time and develop a sense of their style. These are in random order, except for the first two who I recommend above the rest of us (sorry, everyone, but Scott and Travis truly have this thing locked down — step up your game if you wann be at the top of the next roundup in a few months!).

TRAVIS makes you want to read from the get-go. From his review of the diabetes edutainment title, Captain Novolin: Captain Novolin is a brilliant metaphor for the struggle with obesity and diabetes, but also the simple yet unending fight against temptation that we all face as ultimately flawed human beings.

Also check out his Chrono Trigger review. It’s some of the best game-related writing I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s a crime he isn’t writing more about the games and the industry. But there is a difference between your standard unsophisticated video game story, upon which I now smirk from my ivory tower, and something like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a fantasy/sci-fi genre epic translated from Japanese, and it wasn’t written by professionals in either language, I’m fairly sure. This is, generally, not a recipe for the most delicious of successes. But it’s something special. It has a rather intricate narrative of time travel and the alteration of the future through your actions; it has characters that, to some extent, come alive. It has a nasty, big-boss villain who you can even convince to come to your side, if you do it right. It has multiple endings and a terrifying final boss that destroys worlds and waits for you at the terminus of every timeline, like a living, breathing dark god of entropy.

SCOTT manages to turn many of his pieces into hilarious little bits of short fiction. From his review of Andre Agassi Tennis: I’m glad these 16-bit graphics don’t allow the detail necessary to see the disappointment on the faces of my family as they sit in the audience and hold back tears of shame and disgust. How did this spastic even find his way to the tennis court? I knew there was something wrong with him…spends his whole day watching Mr. Belvedere re-runs and eating Sun Chips out of a dirty wooden bowl.

Or, check out his write-up of California Games II: I hoped that once the drug testing was done, I’d be banned from the California Games forever. Too many dark memories, scattered fragments riding a wave of victory that took me through the silver-lined gutters of stardom. Once you’ve won a California Game, the ultimate test is detoxing from the heady fallout of athletic recognition. Party people. Opiates fell like candy from the sky into my open mouth and I twitched slightly and pulled the hair of a supermodel. She screamed in outrage, but there were others waiting to take her place.

WILL (that’s me!) misses the simpler times. From Brett Hull Hockey 95:Originally I was going to talk about the weird 3/4 perspective in this game, and the even weirder old guy with greasy hair who POINTS at your coaching resource allocations with his HAND, in effect being a living cursor, but what’s the point? You don’t care about that. I don’t care either. I do, however, care about a bygone era where kids had artifacts other than the ones you see in poorly-encoded Youtube videos.

SCOTTY hates rudders, even though the word sounds sort of dirty. I hate flying games. Flying games are way too complicated and there’s usually no pay off. It’s like trying to sleep with girls that listen to NPR and check Pitchfork every 5 minutes. I just don’t have time to devote to something that won’t end in burgers or orgasms, or if I’m lucky, both, in any order I see fit.

MEKKI gets why Battletoads included two modes. From Battlemaniacs: The game is full of great times for two players. You can select between two modes. In one mode, you can hit your teammate. In the other mode, you can’t it each other. The first is great for trash talking. The second is great for actually making it anywhere in the game.

BRIAN managed to truncate every story ever quite succinctly, with Art of Fighting: (the) Art of Fighting’s plot is simple enough. Ryo’s sister gets kidnapped. Ryo and his friend Antonio Banderas go save her. Along the way you uppercut some dudes. The end.

ANGUS has been MIA for a while (finals tend to do that), but he’s coming back with a vengeance. From his recent article on Beavis and Butthead: It would be a beat-em-up if there was any sort of combat system. It would be a platformer if it had platforms. It would be a puzzle-platformer if it had any puzzles. It plays a little bit like A Boy and His Blob. Except the blob doesn’t do anything. And you can slap it. Repeatedly.

ALEX hasn’t been with us long, but his first review, of Chessmaster, is a lot of fun:
THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S CHESS VIDEO GAME, FUCKERS! THIS IS ON SOME REAL, STREET-LEVEL SHIT. TOP OF THE LINE MOTHERFUCKING CHESS GRAPHICS! INSANE MOVES! WHITE KNUCKLE ACTION! THIS IS THE BAD BOYS 2 OF CHESS VIDEO GAMES FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO!

ADAM, as well, is new to the site. He has two reviews up (should be three later today!) and he was lucky enough to start with everyone’s archnemesis: the snackfood tie-in. But maybe I’ve been asking all the wrong questions. Would it sell a pack of Cheetos? Probably it would!
“Screw this, Cheetos are heaps better than this game. Wanna get some Cheetos?”
“HELL YES.”

Please check it out. While they can’t all be hits (I turn beet-red when I think about how bad some of my articles were. My Axelay acrostic poetry stands out as one of the most embarrassingly pathetic jokes I’ve ever commited to a computer), there are gems worth looking to as great pieces on games you (and, usually, the author) have no interest in.

And if you’re interested in writing, let me know. We may add a couple more in a month or so.

I didn’t expect to generate so many comments on my dam-bursting logorrheic last post. Really, I wrote it because it was floating around in my mind, and it was the closest thing to something bloggable that I’ve come up with in a month. As such, I thought I’d spit it out and people might get a little amusement.

Instead, I got a bunch of comments that challenge my position, and that really put my brain into overdrive. I think we fail to challenge people’s opinions far too often on this whole Internet vidyagame blogging sphere thing, and I truly appreciate the feedback. So much so, that I’m writing this response! It might be worth reading the first article before this one or else it may not make sense.

Matthew Gallant was the first to post, and he said:

Of course memory == binary, so that’s another direction you could take.

This is in reference to my use of the word “mems” to replace “videogames.” He’s right, and mems is close to memes, so… bines? I like bines.

From commenter mad, I got this response:

There is history here; see Chiptunes, 8-bit, 16-bit.

Naming it after the memory makes it feel static, like data. Naming it after the processor makes it dynamic, which is what games are typically all about.

Compare also to processes, executables, etc.

I see what you’re trying to do here; but, the only problem I see is that it assumes that a… a mem… (you know what? for the sake of the argument, I’m jsut going to call ithem mems for the rest of this entry) must be dynamic. Why didn’t they name “the film” after the projector? Because to name an artistic medium because of a characteristic you assign to it does a disservice to anything that wishes to use that medium to illustrate the opposite of that characteristic. What if a mem’s purpose was to communicate stasis, or stagnation? The only truly neutral way to name it is to simply name it for what it is on (ie. film, memory/binary)… not what takes it from that form and displays it (as a projector or processor would).

mad adds:

also note:
video games are about graphics
computer games are about numbers
most players don’t care about the other stuff :P

But, they don’t have to be. They can be about whatever the originator wants them to be about.

teh_red_baron says:

And then there’s ‘movies’, or ‘moving pictures’.
I think ‘videogames’ is fine. It’s inextricable. All it takes is exposure for people to respect the medium.
But I still like what you’ve attempted here.

The terms movies/moving pictures, while not perfectly accurate (after all, there are experimental films where the pictures does, in fact, never move), is restrictive but nowhere near as restrictive as forcing every piece of computer-assisted interactive entertainment/art to be a game. While exposure is key, so is changing some of the very language we use to describe the medium. After all, respected games are still games.

Eric J:

in the middle days of Infocom, they decided that the moniker “interactive fiction” was too clunky to go on, and announced a contest to have it renamed.
The contest ended without a winner, nobody was able to come up with anything decent.

I rather fancy the term interactive fiction. What else could explain it better? Plus, it shortens to IF, which is bloody brilliant for so many reasons.

Travis’s response will need to be broken up, I reckon, if I’m going to respond to it at all properly:

The problem goes beyond nomenclature. The medium of which we speak is largely composed of, yes, games. It is to games that we look when we want to make some kind of critical artistic analysis.

It is indeed largely composed of games, but it doesn’t need to be. I agree: the nomenclature isn’t the only issue, but, it is one that needs to be assessed.

Can a game be art? Is chess an art? What about Puerto Rico? Is good game design an art form - establishing balanced choices and keeping players entertained and stimulated throughout? What about playing a game - is there art in being a mindboggling Street Fighter expert? Does that mean polevaulters and gymnasts are artists too?
There is a philosophical distinction between “design” and “art,” one that only became pronounced after classical times. Building a beautiful chair that is like a minimalistic sculpture is surely art, but building a GOOD chair became delineated from that. Some would suggest that the gap between them is narrowing again.

This skirts the original question, which is, why must the medium only be games? There is interactive scuptural art which is certainly not called a “game”– immediately to mind springs an exhibit where a robot was sweeping a floor. When people approached it, it would sweep more feverishly. By the end of the night (accidentally, I might add), it had managed to etch a design in the buffed concrete underneath it. That’s not the point, though; while the generative art it created is interesting, the point was the interactive structural piece. Why does all computer software need to be a “game,” then? That robot wasn’t a game. Whether the creation of a game is art or not is meaningless — the question is, why must we call any attempt at art within the medium a “game”?

Beyond that, should “video games” remain in the arena of gaming, or should there be attempts to move beyond entertainment to a more artistic realm? As you say, most art is not “fun” in the same sense of the rest of its medium. I have fun reading a good entertaining story, but when I read Joyce or Faulkner it’s not “fun.” It’s satisfying, it’s engaging, it’s fulfilling, it’s mind-broadening, but not fun.

I think that, as a medium, there’s absolutely no reason that it shouldn’t be explored in pursuit of experiences other than fun. I can’t justify that; it’s an opinion. I don’t think humanity would be where it is now had film or literature simply stayed in the realm of fun, though.

But how else can people be motivated to engage in something so interactive? How else can their interest be gained, especially in terms of a medium so deeply embedded in our minds as a game? The video game is so closely tied to the engine of industry, and so young, that I don’t foresee it breaking away from being fun - usually mindless, shallow fun - for profit. Of course, film and books and music are massively profit-based as well. There exists still a strong current of “art” film and “literature,” at least, which is driven by artistic needs and desires rather than entertainment = money.

There exists a similar current within gamemaking. It’s a lot smaller, and much more stunted, but in time, it will be a force, given the current trajectory.

I really don’t foresee the imminent success of a game that isn’t “fun” to play, but on the other hand we are seeing some now - the one where you play a grandmother walking through a cemetery, and all you do is walk and wait to potentially die, for example. Probably not “successful” but it has been published and received news stories from various major websites.

Exactly. It moves away from gameness, but is still called a game. Wherefore?

mad again:

Games of poker, chess, football, war, the heart…. with money, pride, life or love on the line, all games contain anticipation, drama, conflict, hope, tragedy, catharsis. There’s always a context, a history; there are colorful characters, their developments and revelations. To win or lose is simple and pure; but it provides a reason, and a meaning to everything that surrounds it.
Games aren’t supposed to be fun because they are fun, but because that’s what can sell to people who just want to have… fun! Trying to distance oneself from games not because of what they are but how they’re sold is kind of meh…
..‘Game’ is the perfect word though. My argument is that the only reason it seems like an improper term is because the markets, media and even academia, have co-opted the term to suite their needs. To rebel against the word ‘game’ because of how they use it, is to implicitly buy into their worldview.

The question isn’t, though, what defines a game: the question is, why must “game” define so much? It’s as much a misnomer as when someone calls commissioned urban aerosol art (yeah, I just called it that) “graffiti.” It misses the point. Furthermore, I’m not sure the word game is being misused. Sure, there are dozens of entries in the dictionary for “game,” but to me, it means something that’s meant to challenge in a way that can be defeated. Art can’t be defeated; it does challenge, but that’s a different definition of the word “challenge.” You can interpret a piece of art; you cannot master a piece of art, though. I want this medium to have the opportunity to be interpreted without being mastered.

Ben Abraham writes:

I think that “video game” (or videogame if, like me, you prefer) comes close to describing what they’re usually “put on”, since they’re usually on some sort of video screen.
I also think that the conventions around memory say that something is stored “in memory” rather than on memory derails your argument a bit.
What’s wrong with ‘Computer Games’? That *is* what they are played/put on, after all - some kind of computer. In fact, ‘computer games’ used to be my defacto term for video games before I picked up that convention.

Whether it’s in or on, memory is the place it is put to be worked on, distributed, and consumed. But, the point is twofold– not only is “video” outdated, but “games” is as well, in my opinion.

And, finally, Tellurian writes:

There’s the constantly ongoing bitchfight between consoleros and PCgamers wether you’re talking computer- OR videogames, since one term supposedly doesn’t fit the other’s contents.
Going in the “Movie” direction, the term “Interactive” could be coined there, since that IS the common element of these.
“Yesterday I watched a movie and played some online interactives.”
Yeah still sounds a bit like a 70s sci-fi version of today.

Interactives is indeed another possibility. Originally I was going to try to work with that term. But, at some point, I decided that I couldn’t derive a punchy, one-syllable name from it. Certainly nothing that could invade the public arena like “games” already has. As far as computer vs. video goes– do people actually argue about this? I call it whichever comes to my mind first, generally.

The point is, basically, that I have a problem with calling the entire form “games” when the medium has potential to be more than games. Calling it games means that people are not only less likely to make non-”games” due to the name, but people are also less likely to accept those non-”games” for not being fun, even if they have something else to offer.