Hey, so

So hey, it’s been a while. I’m not ditching this blog. (Though Twitter is easier to keep up with.) I’ve just been busy – real, real busy. I’m wrapping up a freelance project that has consumed my life, especially for the last couple months. My work’s almost done now, which has sent me through at least twelve stages of grieving and feelings of loss, confusion, frustration, and finally, relief. If the NDA ever runs out, I’ll be sure to come back and tell y’all all about it.

So, what else have I done that I can actually talk about?

- I interviewed Mark Essen, aka Messhof, for Edge Online.

- I questioned whether film people know anything about making games on KCRW’s The Business – I’m on around 17 minutes in, after Jerry Bruckheimer.

- I wrote a feature on the New Hampshire music scene for NH Magazine. The issue hit stands this week and the article should be online soon. Meanwhile, in case you were crass and cruel enough to say, “What New Hampshire music scene?”, check out this free sampler of 12 great tracks by area bands, including a few I suggested.

- I have an interview coming up with the Dirty Projectors – link to follow.

- Steve Bissette, too. I’m hoping that runs in July, because we spoke for hours and he was really fascinating.

- I reviewed Velvet Assassin, The Path, and Blueberry Garden for the Onion AV Club. Blueberry has taken some real knocks lately, as many folks play it and discover they hate it – or at least, find it horribly lightweight. I found it lightweight too, but it works on atmosphere, and on creating a particular kind of character and setting him in a word that fits his pace, attitude, and capabilities. I got a couple nice surprises out of it, and yes, the review was scaled for value (the pricetag’s only $5). But I will admit that maybe I shouldn’t have given it the same grade I gave Knytt and Knytt Stories – which you can still play for free.

- And I’m behind in reviewing Sister Suvi, whose record is fan-fucking-tastic. Check them out now.

Like I said, I’m done with a major project and I’ve been blowing the last few nights playing games and watching The Mighty Boosh. But breaktime’s almost over, so I hope to get cracking again real soon and tell y’all all about it.

GDC Takeaway: Tiny, Tiny Stories

This weekend, I took part in Michael Abbott’s post-GDC Brainy Gamer podcast, taping a session with Michael and the inimitable, endlessly fascinating Corvus Elrod. I’m honestly still recovering from the conference, and still digesting my notes. Most of my GDC coverage is at the Onion AV Club, where John Teti and I posted daily write-ups. There’s not a lot of spit and polish – we were filing these late every night – but I’m proud of all the stuff we covered and impressed by the interviews and other gets that John pulled in. But looking back over all of this, I see I don’t have a lot of “nutshell” conclusions on what I learned at GDC. So here’s one.

I predict 2009’s GDC will be a watershed moment in how we tell stories in games. And the biggest change will be the death of lengthy, pointless cutscenes.

In our part of the podcast, Corvus, Michael and I talk a great deal about Hideo Kojima and the notoriously long cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. Those scenes, which run half an hour to an hour and a half, have become a running joke ever since the launch of the game; as Michael notes, during his keynote, Kojima almost seemed to anticipate sighs and grumbles from the audience every time he mentioned them. I’ll admit I still haven’t played this game and can’t attest to whether the cutscenes work. But as the jokes about this tactic grow and more and more pointed, I’m starting to feel like the industry has hit its breaking point.

- Cutscenes are boring, and many players skip them.

- Cutscenes are the antithesis of the interactive experience that games promise.

- Cutscenes cost time and money to produce. They may be an obligatory checklist item for AAA-games like Fracture, Vampire Rain, or Dark Sector, but nobody has ever explained to me why those games had to tell their thin stories in such an elaborate way.

- While games are often compared to movies, it’s an awkward fit: games are unlike movies in so many fundamental ways (and are really, so much more like music) that we should be questioning any attempt to jam “cinematic” or “movie-like” elements in games.

Margaret Robertson also made this point at her excellent talk (my write-up is in here; her PowerPoints are here), where she argued that games should learn to tell stories that are tinier, more cost-effective, and yet more engaging than the ones we’re getting now. For example, Space Invaders puts its entire story right in the title. Those two words tell you everything you need to know. And the story to Space Invaders beats the one in Fracture like a rented mule.

But plotting’s not the only issue. I also heard several great insights about characters. Robertson raised the old F. Scott Fitzgerald chestnut, “character = action”: your characters are defined by what they do (or in games, by what they can do). They’re not defined, or not best defined, by having other characters stand around for an hour talking about them. The history, the troubles, the ambiguous motives and the virtues of a character can all be expressed by what they do in the game. Half-Life 2 – which of course, has no cutscenes – nailed this with the character Alyx: one of the most affecting moments I’ve ever experienced in a game came in HL 2: Episode One, where she briefly broke down and lost control of her emotions, and then pulled herself back together and went back to fighting, and cracking bad jokes. The life she has spent on the run, fighting an overwhelming enemy, and watching her friends and family die, came across in a few seconds, and the fact that we didn’t linger on it – in fact, that we don’t see this side of her again for a while – makes it more powerful.

Even more importantly, however, characters aren’t there because we like them or relate to them. They should fill a need in the game’s mechanics. Clint Hocking and Ben Mattes spoke to this at a small Ubisoft presser/cocktail party Monday night, when they explained the thinking behind the buddy system in Far Cry 2 and Elika in Prince of Persia. In both cases, these non-player characters grew out of a specific gameplay need. In Far Cry 2, they were a resource to manage and to risk as you saw fit. They also had dramatic value – as you’ve seen if you reached the end of the game – but first and foremost, they were useful. The Prince of Persia had a similar reason to create Elika: she’s a save mechanism in the guise of a character, and the attachment players feel to her is a side benefit.

I liked the idea that these crucial story elements, and the emotional attachments they trigger, could stem completely from game mechanics. And it dovetails with my final takeaway on this topic: stories should be tiny. The plot of a game should not exceed the game’s mechanics, and those mechanics probably don’t call for much. Has any recent game told an interactive story better than Portal? There’s not much to it, but it fits the game perfectly. And the elements they don’t have time to explain are left intriguingly ambiguous.

When you think about it, games don’t even need the however-many plots that Shakespeare identified. Videogames really only have three stories:

- The player saves something
- The player survives something
- The player loses something (which is just the denial of success)

That’s it. Many deep, sophisticated emotions can emerge from those three plots. But they should emerge in the experience, in the actions the players take, in the reactions they receive, in gestures and decisions and deaths and tasks and achieving or failing to achieve a goal. They should not emerge from people sitting around talking to each other in a cartoon.

GDC Coverage

(Pic by Sklathill)

This is really just a stub post to tell you all that 1. GDC was awesome and 2. GDC was a little weird, in the best way, 3. I have at least three essays I want to write after last week, plus interviews to type up and other great stuff, and 4. I met dozens of fantastic people, as well as old friends that I’d never actually seen in meatspace.

Oh and also: that over at the AV Club, John Teti and I wrote extensive overviews of the week. John worked like a hero and landed some great stories, and I went around writing up weirdo stuff. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, and as usual, the comments were terrific. Read it all here!

So hey, what’s new

So I’m here at my first morning of GDC. I would publish a Work Links but even though I’ve been eye-achingly, head-scratchingly busy for the past month, I don’t have many links to show for it. A lot of my coolest work (including stuff in Edge #200) has been done with no byline. Other stuff – a press release for David Sylvian’s upcoming album, Manafon, which is one of the most engrossing and beautiful things I’ve ever heard – will run soon. So, if you stop by regularly, just know I’m keeping myself active and interested and busy as hell.

I’ll post goodies from GDC as I get ‘em. I’m going to do a couple of blog posts for the Onion AV Club, look around for story ideas, and of course, meet all kinds of people I’ve never seen in real life, a process that started yesterday morning when I ran into Darius “Tinysubversions” Kazemi and his colleagues right at Logan Airport. First business cards swapped. Achievement unlocked.

I also wrote a feature for the Wire alt-weekly about Kittery-based performance and art space Buoy. I’m really proud of this feature. I wish I’d given myself for more time to work on it, but this is a group of talented and lively artists who I’ve been following for a while, and it was great to speak with them about how they approach this awesome and “no proft” venture. If you’re traveling through Portland or Boston and you either want to see a show or book one, check the place out. The awesome Nat Baldwin plays regularly, and they’ve booked Dirty Projectors, Sister Suvi and Shapes + Sizes (who were both AMAZING), and Chriss Sutherland, and they have a show coming up in April with Mary Halvoron and Jessica Pavone. And a gallery show with Jacob Ouillette is on the calendar for April 3. Whatever you’re into, they’ll find a way to blow your mind.

And I wrapped up the Battlestar Galactica recaps. You can read them all here. Now that it’s over, (and now that I have my Friday nights back), I realize I’m really gonna miss that show. I don’t watch many shows but when I’m in, I get sucked into my fiction, and that was one of my favorites.

Too bad the ending was a dud.

Work Links

So yeah, I’ve been busy. Blogging has lapsed. Not gonna pretend otherwise. I’m working on some other projects,

But let’s post some links of stuff I’ve been up to lately.

- Edge Magazine commissioned me to review Rise of the Argonauts. They’re my favorite glossy gaming magazine, and it was a hoot to review this. Fun backstory: I got the assignment during that ice storm last December, when we were trapped at the Motel6, and accepted it even though my whole family was packed in a hotel room with no XBox. The power came back just in time to finish the game and make my deadline. (Well, first it kept crashing on my XBox. So I stole the XBox from work. Resourceful!) They even kept my Achilles pun.

- Battlestar Galactica – I recap, you decide. The show has been … complex this season, and comments are through the roof. I think it’ll make a great DVD when it’s done and you can digest it in one go. For now? Join us every Friday night to ask the eternal question, “Why the hell don’t they just go back to Kobol? It looked pretty nice.”

- I wrote a press release and posted an interview with Sweet Billy Pilgrim, a fantastic UK band recommended to fans of dreamy Brit-pop, bands David Sylvian likes, and stunning, rich music. Give it a listen. I found their new record extremely beautiful but came to like them even better when I got to talking to Tim Elsenburg and got a whiff of his sense of humor. Yes, once again, full disclosure, I got paid to write this, but I wouldn’t do press releases for samadhisounds if they didn’t have such impeccable taste. Plus, this work is the reason I have David Sylvian’s upcoming release here on my desk. Early report: it is horrifyingly beautiful.

- My interview with Mouse Guard’s David Petersen finally ran. Interesting guy. He makes good points about world building, and explains a lot about the inspirations for the comic.

And I’m on Twitter, daily. Sad!

I know, doesn’t look like I’m that busy. But I am, dammit. Crazy, drowning busy. I have a couple other projects cooking, a slew of essays and pitches to cook, and a five hour interview with the great Steve Bissette to transcribe. So stay posted.

One other thing. Close readers may have noticed that I filed a bunch of reviews for Variety last fall, but not this winter. There have been cutbacks at Variety, meaning fewer game reviews and the layoff of Ben Fritz, who got the axe with 30 other staffers. (This is all public knowledge, or I wouldn’t print it.) I had a whole post in mind about this, but I guess what it boiled down to was that when I heard the news, I got really depressed. Not because I was losing some assignments – I mean, that’s life – but because Fritz strikes me as the kind of guy who really should be in this business and in a staff perch, covering gaming from a hard-eyed business journalist’s perspective and marshalling a serious team of writers (I mean jeez, Tom Chick and Leigh Alexander?) for coverage that really spoke to his audience. It was one of those moments where you wonder, if they don’t keep a guy like this, where are we headed? I don’t see the games writing space in competitive terms. Maybe it’s because I wind up helping my friends find gigs far more often than I try to steal their lunch, but I believe we’re in a vital and expanding space. We all win when we have great editors, and we all lose when major outlets cut their talent.

But on the bright side, the Cut Scene blog is contracted for another three months. So, see? Sometimes the good guys win. Or at least, win something.

They’re Here. They’re Fake. Get Used to It

I regularly find myself defending alternate reality games, even though I never play them. They’re a weird, unpopular niche game that’s even more demanding and sometimes, absurd than massively-multiplayer online gaming. They attract a highly geeky – though otherwise diverse – audience, who bring commitment and laser-sharp brains akin to those of people who solve cryptic crosswords or play Nethack. ARGs aren’t for everybody. They’re probably not for me.

But I respect them, and I’m fascinated by them. Most people admire ARGs in theory rather than in practice. I guess that’s true for me, although I believe there have been successful ARGs. The Beast, I Love Bees, and Year Zero were by all accounts well-run and big hits. When we read about marketing ARGs today, and see a news story about some TV show or blockbuster film has an ARG attached to it, it’s easy to think these are cheesy, purely commercial ad campaigns meant to rile up a narrow slice of the fanbase and launched purely for the novelty of it. But reading about an ARG midway through is not the same as discovering it on your own – any more than seeing kids play Guitar Hero at the local BestBuy can compare with playing Rock Band drunk with your friends. ARGs are meant to be discovered through some lucky moment of serendipity, and explored through a process that ARG fans refer to as “falling down the rabbit hole.” You find a clue that catches your attention, you pursue it, and it leads you to somewhere strange and intriguing. If it doesn’t catch your imagination, there’s no point.

Personally, though, I don’t pay attention to the genre in hopes of finding a rabbit hole. I’m intrigued by it because it reflects a phenomenon that’s already happening in all media. ARGs are games that don’t fit in a game console, or on a board. They can take place across many platforms, including the real world. They shadow our reality and bleed into all the channels that touch our daily routines. And they’re not alone.

Back in the old days, people dug pop culture properties. You would read Spiderman or watch a movie or read a book, and your imagination would take over and immerse you in the world of this particular property. You would choose to believe in it: you didn’t expect Superman actually to fly by your window, but he took up about as much of your brainshare as if he could. (Occasionally, actually, you might pretend that it was real. I remember around age 13 trying to see if I was developing mutant powers like the X-Men. I wasn’t.)

So fast forward to the Internet age. Today, we interact with our favorite properties. And the characters aren’t just characters on a page, but imaginary friends. You can play as Spiderman in a video game, and you can also effectively hang out with his buddies or knock heads with his villains. The fact that fictional characters are also blogging, or running Twitter feeds – either in conjunction with a TV show, or just for yuks - or even talking with us, and posting on our blogs, and hanging out with us in virtual worlds, is a very small step forward from what we were all doing before that. Some of the people on Twitter who are most annoyed by ARGs also spend the most time talking about who they dated in Persona 4 and why. Do you really see a difference?

In the Brainysphere, some game bloggers are still annoyed that a few of us continue to interact with PixelVixen707, even though she’s been revealed as a character from an upcoming novel. And it is a little odd to talk games with someone who does not exist. But I guess it never threw me because it seemed so natural, in our ecosystem, for an imaginary person to be talking about these imaginary worlds and relaying experiences about something that was made-up, immersive, virtual and wholly fake in the first place.

The other problem with ARGs, of course, is that they’re usually tied to marketing and ad bucks. But so is everything. The Office is one of many shows that not only runs ads but deftly weaves in extremely heavy product placement. It pays the rent, and I’ve never heard anyone boycott the show over it. And usually a property is an ad for itself. People obsess over game-related merch. If you go by the old shorthand that a touring band makes more money off the t-shirts than the door, then the band effectively becomes an advertisement for its own line of clothing.

But ad money or no, I’m convinced this trend of imaginary properties and made-up people bleeding into every channel of our lives, interacting with us in every way short of standing right behind us and breathing in our ears, is just going to grow. Leigh suggested that this trend of people starting fake Twitter feeds is a meme that will, and should, flame out soon. She may be right about Twitter feeds like BahHumbugElf, but across all media, I believe the opposite. I think these imaginary friends are just going to root themselves deeper and deeper into our online lives.

And if I had to pick one reason I’m convinced of this, it’s because we all have to become such characters in order to fit ourselves online – a little smarter, a little funnier, a little brasher or moodier than we are in real life. The fictional properties we love are doing nothing more than meeting us right in the middle.

It All Came Together at the End

One of the great headaches of game reviewing is the challenge of finishing an entire game in time to write your review, especially when you’re on deadline, and the game is, say, Grand Theft Auto IV. With that game shipping to many critics only days before their eagerly-awaited reviews had to run, a lot of us actually had a chance to admit we hadn’t played it all the way to the end before filing. But the rest of the time, there’s a presumption that we actually will make it to the end. And if we didn’t, that we’ll be very, very quiet about it.

I don’t want to get into the lengthy backs and forths on this issue here. Instead, I just thought it would be fun to take a survey of the games I played this year – most of which I reviewed, for one venue or another – and try to determine if the ending actually mattered. Did my overall impression of each game change significantly once I got to the end? And why?

I tried to write this with minimal spoilers, but if you’re concerned, you might want to skim.

Here are the results:

THE ENDING MATTERED
Far Cry 2 – I was impressed that the game ultimately addressed the protagonist’s atrocities.

Fable II – Almost every major event and choice in the game feeds into the final scene of the game. How can you assess it – or appreciate it – without seeing the end?

Braid – Nothing stirred as much discussion as the epilogue, or had as much impact as the final sequence of platforming.

Rise of the Argonauts – … because I couldn’t believe that in an ostensible Greek tragedy, the ending was so cut-and-dried.

THE ENDING DIDN’T REALLY MATTER
Fracture – The story was inconsequential, and the bad boss fight was no worse than what came before it.

Dark Sector – Again, I was asleep long before the ending.

Condemned 2 – The conclusion was disappointing and inconclusive, but so was the rest of it.

Gears of War 2 – The last act was no better, or worse, or more eventful than any other part of the game. Even the penultimate act, and the resolution of Dom’s search for his wife, didn’t really change my overall impression of the game. Though I guess the lack of a bruising final boss fight, and the fact that the story gets more muddled instead of more interesting, might turn some folks off.

Noitu Love 2 – The final twist in the story is neat, but also feels tossed off.

Fallout 3 – If anything, I cut the final scene some slack in spite of a mindbogglingly bad bug that made the final sequence nonsensical (specifically: there’s a life-or-death decision – but the sidekick standing right next to me rendered the whole problem moot. Nice way to screw up the end of a brilliant game, guys)

So, there’s a limited sample. So far it suggests that the ending only matters if it makes a great game even better – otherwise, it’s either too little too late, or it’s worth overlooking. But this needs further research.

How about y’all? Which games really changed for you after you got to see the end?

User-Generated, Machine-Mediated Content

(Image from Flickr - no idea who made the mural)

Going into 2008, a lot of folks had high hopes for user-generated content. We expected to design our own lifeforms in Spore, build whole levels felt-and-cardboard wonder in Little Big Planet, and write the next “Young Folks” in Guitar Hero World Tour. Even though the 90-9-1 rule is well-established (thanks Brinstar for this link), and nobody expect that every single gamer would suddenly become a creative mastermind. But it’s fair to say we hoped this would become a “thing.” It reminds me of the excellent music documentary Scratch, where a whole generation of turntablists talk about discovering turntablism because they all saw Herbie Hancock’s “Rock-It” on TV and watched Grandmaster Flash scratch records, and they said, “Wow, a turntable can do that? I want to try!”

At the same time, games like Little Big Planet or for that matter, Spore, implied there would be more for the 90% to do while the 1 and the 9 were creating and sharing all that great content. I haven’t seen any pans for LBP, but there’s a gulf between the raves and the yawns, and user-made content is partly to blame. (Spore has too many of its own problems to factor into the discussion.) Never mind that we might enjoy a flood of levels from other users: it’s unlikely that the common gamer will finish a level, produce something she’s really thrilled by, and see much of himself in what’s happening on the screen.

User-generated content clicks when the user can go, “Hey, that’s me!” In games, this has required learning specialized and even arcane skills like: platformer level design best practices, 3-D modeling, simple scripting, and how to fart around with kludgey interface tools (looking at you, Second Life). As I said in Variety, it struck me as funny that games were expecting people to suddenly master and embrace these practices when the two things that people produce and upload by the gigabits every minute of the day – text, and photos – are just left out.

So why don’t we aim for a new tier – something that takes a chunk out of the 90, to lead it closer to the 9 and the 1? Why not give users a chance to enter something personal and creative, but let the system mediate, moderate and filter it into something useful?

Let’s call this “user-generated, machine-mediated content,” pronounced UGH-MECK. Here are some examples.

- Games can show newer players the paths left by older ones. This is already happening in the Mirror’s Edge time trials, or (UPDATE: fixed the name) Jesse Venbrux’s “Deaths”, which shows you the scattered bodies of other players.

- I’ve never run into a quest in an MMO, and rarely in a single-player RPG, where I actually had to type something in during a conversation. We’re nowhere close to a natural language processor in these games. But why not use simple algorithms to parse simple comments and invite simple levels of creativity? Here’s an easy example: in World of Warcraft, a quest giver can tell you to go to such-and-such city – and write the mayor of the town a haiku or a limmerick that uses the word “axe.” Any text entry that follows the word and syllable count and includes that word will pass. It doesn’t have to be art. But players would have a lot of fun with this.

- Ever since Twitter exploded, people have written many programs to parse and analyze and psychoanalyze what people are typing. How about just porting it into a game? In The World Ends With You, players can “scan” the thoughts of the people around them. The canned text written for the game is good, but I’d love to eavesdrop real-time in real Twitter feeds.

- So many games include bathrooms. Why can’t we all write on the walls?

- I’m a sucker for a good Flickr mash-up. If you throw in a few tags and search for photos marked “interesting,” you get fascinating results – for example, my favorite one, Snapp Radio: an Internet DJ plays a song; Snapp Radio looks up the tags for that song on Last.fm; it uses those tags to find relevant photos on Flickr. Sometimes you get photos of the band, but in one case, I was listening to a Clash song and saw street riots, pictures of George Bush, and awful mismatched furniture – the colors “clashed.” It’s a bit of a parlor trick, but I’d love to see more games use pics this way, for a collage effect or just for a headtrip. I understand Little Big Planet will be able to import your pics by right about now. But I’d love to integrate with Flickr as well. Surprise me.

… and I didn’t even touch on music.

What are some other ideas? Or other examples of people who are making this work?

My Year in Review

If you come here often, you’ve probably noticed I’m a sporadic blogger and often just use this for random stupid comments about stuff like the election (now over), or to post work links. If I had all the time in the world, I’d write more here, but freelance stuff eats up most of my time. Still, I like having a place to send people who want to keep up with my work.

So: here’s a list of stuff I wrote this year, plus a couple blog posts and goals for next year. I wish I could be selfless like Simon Parkins and list all the stuff I enjoyed from other people this year. But I’m on deadline right now to review the new Tale of Despereaux game. So, sorry – it’s all about me.

Features and Interviews
Max Tundra
Harmonix Music Systems
Jonathan Blow
Battlestar Galactica’s James Callis
Game composer Tommy Tallarico
Bill Frisell
Felicia Day
Game designer Jordan Weisman

Reviews
Music
Subtle, exitingARM
TV on the Radio, Dear Science
Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville
Nina Simone, To Be Free

Games
Fallout 3
The World Ends With You
ForumWarz
Spore

Television
Battlestar Galactica (s. 4) – Recaps

Other Essays
Better Late Than Never: Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
Kid Rock 2.0
Let’s Burn Down Africa (in Far Cry 2)
Should Games Be Childish Things?

Also Appearing In …
The Pitchfork 500

I also recorded my first (totally amateur) album, for the RPM Challenge. Which is coming up again soon, by the way …

My goals for next year: More essays and features. More interviews. And fewer game reviews, which ate up all my time this year; the weekly reviews for the Onion led to a kind of lost winter and spring.

I already have a few projects and interviews lined up for the new year, plus my new gig reviewing for Variety. So, high hopes for 2009, and for the new Obama administration, and for fewer ice storms and a better economy.

And if I don’t post again this year … happy holidays, and a happy New Year’s to all of you too! Your comments and clickthroughs here have made a lonely freelancer very, very happy.

Questions for the Shawn Elliott Symposium Participants

UPDATE: 12-22 – For what it’s worth, I think my reaction to this whole thing has been too negative. I’m usually not this negative. I don’t think the Symposium isn’t worth doing, and I think Shawn and the contributors are putting good work into it. It doesn’t cover the topics that interest me, but that really doesn’t matter to anyone but me. If I wanted to hear about other questions, I could try to throw my own Symposium and try to do all the hard work Shawn is doing myself. My only real criticism is that the 14,000-word length of the post is excessive, and gets in the way of what it’s trying to accomplish. But I regret being so negative or implying that any of my ideas are inherently any better than what anyone else is talking about.

Original Post …

The other night I was crunching on a deadline that kept me up until 4 AM – so naturally I blew part of the night online, reading and then Twittering about the first installment of Shawn Elliott’s Game Crit Symposium. I’ll be honest, on my first read, I had a visceral reaction to the post. For a couple reasons:

- It’s 14,000 words. That’s way too long. If so many elite, busy writers are going to contribute to this, someone should pare it down to a readable form.

- Because every single thing that everyone wrote seems to have been included, there’s a lot of repetition, which obscures the writer’s differences without adding new ideas.

I’m also not really engaged by the topic, even though – or maybe because – ratings are something I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with. It’s sort of an interesting thing to worry about, but it’s also well-tread ground. And much of the commentary discussed how the writers have to deal with the demands of other people – editors, publishers, publicists, or random jerks on message boards. It didn’t tell me as much about the problems these writers wrestle with on their own, and where they’re culpable for their actions, and what mistakes they’ve made.

After a few tweets, N’Gai Croal suggested that if I have such great questions for the panel, why not run them up a flagpole. So what the hell. If I were moderating and I had all you people in front of me and were asking you questions, here’s what I would ask. These probably have nothing to do with the goals of the Symposium. But here goes:

Q. Who is your audience? On what do you base your impression of them?

Q. Much of games writing is poor. Really poor. I regularly find examples on major gaming sites that are sub-college paper quality. Sites like Kotaku write informative reviews that show no love of the written word whatsoever – they’re just lists of pros and cons, and maybe that’s all that the fans want. But is that enough?

Q. Are critics covering the right things? I’m one of many people who think that the stories in games like Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 – or hell, Rise of the Argonauts – get short shrift. Shouldn’t evaluating the story be mandatory? And when we evaluate it, are we giving it points for depth, or actually criticizing whether the plot, themes, and characters make any sense? (I’m looking at you, entire last third of BioShock.)

Q. How can we do a better job with interviews, and specifically, treating gamemakers as artists? Why are so many interviews with designers either boring, or technical (”Tell me about your experience with the Unreal Engine”)? I wouldn’t ask Lou Reed how many amps he brought on tour. And I wouldn’t let David Byrne read me his sales presentations. How can we do a better job of drawing out the gamemakers’ vision of their properties?

Q. How do the mainstream media and the enthusiast press compare? What can they learn from each other? My personal view is that the mainstream media has much better writers, but much tougher audiences. When Owen Good at Kotaku repeatedly mocks the NYT’s Seth Schiesel, and in fact, doesn’t even seem to recognize his byline, it drives me insane – but is Schiesel kidding himself that the NYT is going to keep him on as a full-time critic, and is Good, who does blockbuster biz interiewing strippers, really on the right track?

Q. The games blogosphere, especially the brainy games blogosphere, is flourishing. So what’s the next step? I see our blogs as a running conversation like we’d have at a bar together – Twitter is good for this, too – but not all of our pieces are publication-quality yet, and there’s a lot of copy to read through with few guideposts (although roundups like this are a great start). What can games bloggers do to refine and capitalize on their ideas?

Q. How relevant is the written word at a time when media – including web comics (Penny Arcade) and animated YouTube shorts (Zero Punctuation) are far, far more popular than any critic working in the printed word? We’re in a media-literate age working with kids who have camcorders built into their phones. Should we ask ourselves if maybe 800-1,000 word pieces of text just aren’t going to do it for them?

Q. The “where’s our Lester Bangs” question won’t die. I’ve been hearing it for at least six years, and I’m sure it’s been around for longer. I’d like to hear everyone’s personal take on where they think they, or their colleagues, are falling short, to make us obsess on this so much. Conversely, if someone really is out there writing like a house on fire, who is it?