Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Today in The Escapist I’ve got an article on the idea of an “open source canon” in transmedia storytelling. If you’ve got a transmedia property and a rabid fanbase, why not let them help you tell the story? Why can’t I take the Star Wars universe and write some new droids in there?

This is similar to the concept of “wiki-media,” as discussed by folks like Robert Kozinets. “Wiki-media” is the idea of taking an abandoned property – say, Star Trek - and opening it up to the fans, wiki-style. Wiki-media is an open invitation to those diehards to make all their free-wheeling creative contributions – from stories to film to comics to whatever - a new part of the universe. Fan art is cheaper than what I’m describing, because you wouldn’t need an expensive online game to help them along.

But I still like the idea of using games to facilitate this stuff. They offer quick rewards, structured participation, and support for both the die-hards and the casual interlopers. I’ll also admit: as much as I dig Jenkins and that whole crowd of convergence culture vultures, I haven’t bought into the fan fiction/fan art thing. Someday soon I’ll try to find the best examples and see what I think. But I’m just not sold yet on the idea that they’re engaging to anyone but the community that’s making them.

Either way – this idea of shared, but guided authorship, needs far more exploration. But I’m pretty happy with this as a starting point.

Other articles this week:

- Inventory: 14 Tragic Movie Masturbation Scenes – A little lower brow, but this was a fun piece to write. I was up late all last week watching movies about people beating off. Can you believe I almost forgot Bad Lieutenant?

- Review: Vampire Rain – Why did this piece of crap get a C? Because it is what it is. Most of the reviewers who slammed it seemed to expect more out of it – that you should be able to fight the vampires instead of evading them for most of the game, or that the dialogue shouldn’t be so crappy, or that there should be multiple paths through each level. It’s a very simple game: each mission is an obstacle course, and you have to finish it. It’s not worth $60, at all – more like $15 – but I don’t grade on price, I grade on the quality of its ambitions and how well it fulfills them. This is a limited game, but within those limits, there’s not much to complain about.

(Photo courtesy the World Series of Videogames)

I knew a guy in college who said that he could watch any kind of sports on TV, as long as it had two sides competing against each other. Football, logrolling, rock paper scissors – as long as two teams have to face off, you can make a spectacle out of it.

So why is it so hard for competitive videogaming to catch on in the mainstream? CBS Sports took a chance on a one-hour broadcast this afternoon. On the off-chance that the (as we’re often reminded) multi-billion dollar gaming industry might have young, desirable fans who watch television on Sunday afternoon, CBS took footage from the World Series of Videogames tournament in Louisville, Kentucky, stuck two d-list hosts in front of it (some guy who made out like every single round was the Battle of the Bulge, and a woman who kept looking way off to the left at her teleprompter), and threw it on the wall to see if it stuck.

I play games, but I’ve never watched a competitive match. And this broadcast didn’t make me want to start. For one thing, sports are about suspense and build-up. You follow a team, you get their story, you root for them to succeed. But this Louisville match had no context – what is the “World Series”? How many games led up to this, and where does it end? Who are all these teams they keep talking about – Team Pandemic? Team Irritation? I don’t get how any of it works, or who I want to root for.

Ultimately, it came off more than anything as an ad for the games. We saw a lot of footage of Guitar Hero 2, with three judges grading each performance on difficulty (you get bonus points for playing behind your head), style (how much time you spent waving your arms and looking like an asshole), and accuracy. The accuracy judge was my favorite – they pulled someone named Becky “Aktrez” Young and made her read off the numbers that the computer helpfully adds up for you. The idea of having any humans involved in this thing struck me as odd, since letting the computer grade you is pretty much the whole point of videogames. But they had to do something to make the match interesting, because GH 2 on television sucks. Aside from “style,” there’s not much strategy or variation to the game: you try to play as accurately as possible and fiddle with the multipliers to boost your score. Dud notes were audible but in a face-to-face duel, it was impossible to tell who was hitting them. I’d rather watch people knit.

Sidenote: the only woman in competition on this show was some GH 2 player named Kelly “Tipperqueen” Law-Yong, who got a biographical spot but, as it happens, was knocked out a while ago and didn’t make the finals. Still, giving screentime to Law-Yong and her red miniskirt must have seemed like a no-brainer compared to the two shlebs who were still in competition. (She also has a commercial. And her own website.)

The other two games were Fight Night Round 3 – which looked stiff and confusing, and about as convincing as two guys with punching nun puppets – and World of Warcraft. I should explain the other big problem with this show. Sports is about anticipation. It runs long. Football games go for hours and hours, and nobody cuts out the dull parts. But the World Series broadcast edited down old footage, meaning you got one minute of a GH 2 performance, or the highlights from a Fight Night bout. There was no time to build up suspense, and in fact, it was pretty hard to follow much of what was happening, or reflect on who was the underdog, or really anything. I play games, and I was getting a headache.

Dud of the night was Warcraft. Having played the game for a while, I was actually curious to see some best-of-breed players and hear what strategies they use. But here’s what it boiled down to: teams of three toons each played in the arena, double elimination, and … you couldn’t see a damn thing that was going on. The user interface doesn’t translate to TV, and the subtleties were cut out by the way they whittled down the footage, and even the close-ups of one guy whacking another just looked confusing. It made me wonder if CBS Sports has anyone on staff who, you know, understands what works on television. Two announcers helped you figure out who was getting killed by who, and they did their best to build up some drama: one of the teams won the first round handily, but lost the second, and oh man, it’s anybody’s game so – nope, sorry, turns out the first team really was better. One pack of nerds got the prize, the other got the boot.

But I’ll give them props for the end. The two Guitar Hero finalists tied early in the hour, so they came back to break the tie – with a head-to-head dual. On Buckethead’s “Jordan.” As far as I could tell, CBS ran the entire song, and although it was tough to tell who was ahead, watching two guys actually locked in competition side by side was actually kind of compelling. The fat South African guy was winning on accuracy. The guy from Minnesota kept slipping up, but at the end he smashed his guitar controller on stage, and people seemed to dig that. And in fact, he got an extra point for style because of that move – and he won the round. Not because he pulled ahead during the solo, or kept up his multipliers. Because he broke his guitar.

I know that a weekend-long tournament would have more to offer than one hour of crappy footage. I know that the “OMG games are big and big money and they’re hard and these guys are the best” coverage got on my nerves, because if you have to try to build buzz for something, it’s probably already out of its depth. Football announcers don’t have to convince their audience to take football seriously. Their sport has a little something called “legitimacy.”

But more importantly, sports should tell a story. It’s the ultimate serial storytelling medium – seasons start and end, villains win, heroes lose, your guys beat their guys, there’s a giant climax and then you start again the next year. Star players and regional teams pick up their fans, and the coverage of a sport – the press, the live broadcasts – takes time to tease these stories out, to highlight the drama, and to give everyone a reason to care. This one-hour broadcast did none of that, and without that, the “action” was just a lot of mostly-white guys who spend too much time playing video games. Why do we care who wins?

So sue me: it took me this long to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. I read comics in the ’80s, usually Marvel stuff, and gave it up in high school without ever checking out “the good stuff.” (I didn’t read Watchmen ’til I was 25!) Last month I finally got around to the Sandman graphic novels, and the process of reading them has been incredibly powerful. I almost feel like an impressionable teenager again.

Not to say that Sandman only appeals to teens. But I’m guess it hits the hardest when you’re an adolescent and your brain’s a little more plastic. Take the first two volumes, which are by far the darkest so far. Gaiman has a great take on human nature: we are free to do what we want, and to be whatever we dream. Man only goes to hell if he damns himself. Whole civilizations can change in the space of a dream. The seven members of the Endless – Dream, Despair, Desire, etc. – manipulate mankind, but it’s clear that (Death aside), we’re still the bosses of ourselves.

And yet. Each of us has a dark side, secret urges, shameful histories, and unknowable hang-ups. Something deep inside each of us is dark and wrong. This is clearest in the issue where Doctor Destiny takes over a diner and alternately tortures and coaxes confessions out of all the customers – a random sampling of Americans, who all have awful stuff in their heads. If regular people live like this, what about the rest of us?

Put these two themes together, and you’ve got the two great themes of adolescence:

- I can do anything!

and

- Why am I so fucked up?

The two stories that really struck me were about dreams shaping a whole society: “Dream of a Thousand Cats,” where the cats want to take back the world from the humans, and “Ramadan,” about the mythical past of a city that was the pinnacle of civilization – 7th century Baghdad. The details are so evocative and the struggles of the main “dreamers” in each plot so compelling – it makes you feel that you can dream a better society, because the great, lost worlds that each character grapples with are so tantalizingly close. Were the mythical Baghdad or the world of the cats literally true? Gaiman knows how to make them feel tantalizingly close, and how to make the case that they’re as good as real if enough people believe in them. Now that Baghdad’s on the downswing again, the stories are even harder to take.

(Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy – Henry Jenkins interviews him about it here – sounds like he’s been reading Sandman as well. That book’s going on my must-reads list.)

I’ll admit that I laughed when a Bush official told Ron Suskind, “We make our own reality” – that all the practical-minded pessimists in the country are stuck in the “reality-based community,” while the evangelical Bush administration has a new vision, ostensibly of freedom and democracy, and that they can shape the world to meet it. I’m in the reality-based community too. But I understand the power of dreaming. I want a leader who wants to bring democracy to the world. I want all of us to dream, and I want to see more of our pop culture take the lead on those dreams – not by bringing back political songs or protest music, but by tapping that more mythical, elemental vein of the dream of a thousand cats.

That’s part of what inspired me to write my Pitchfork column today, Panic Ain’t a Slogan. This one’s about a more immediate problem, the problem of forgetting the value of human life – or as I wrote in the end:

“Music works best not when the message is spelled out in the words but when a movement– maybe a groundswell– erupts through the art. And we don’t have it yet. It’s incredible that Jihadists get more mileage from their martyrdom videos than we do from our music. Instead of pretending they don’t read the paper, the Jack Whites of the world have to nut up and start fighting for love, truth and justice.”

But the problem of dreams is the next step – the problem of having the power to bring the world together and do anything we want, with the knowledge that we never seem to do the right thing. Or as Gaiman put it, a thousand cats will never work together – no matter what.

Earlier this week I was batting around ideas with Jessica Price on how to review alternate reality games. ARGS are large, complicated, and run in real-time, which means they take time and skill to summarize. That’s also why us casual observers need a reviewer to help us out: ARGs are huge and unwieldy, and even ARG fans can’t keep up with them all.

Jessica just took a run at a review of one game, which starts at the blog Essentially Invisible. It’s a really good review/commentary/summary, especially because I’ll probably never play this game – especially after hearing what she thought of it – yet I learned a lot about it, and through it, about ARGs.

Can’t wait for the next one!

So the question has come back – the one Ebert put in the news a couple years back, and that he’s arguing again: are games art? Or to split hairs, are they high art?

I hate this question. I hate that it’ll never go away. But I’ll admit, it’s a useful late-night dorm bull session question, and a good way to dissect what you expect or don’t expect from the medium that’s sucking away up to dozens of hours of your life every week.

By way of purging, I’m going to put my stake in the ground. Games aren’t art. They’re clearly something other than art. At their best, they’re a hybrid of the Mona Lisa and the telephone. But they’re definitely not high art, and to explain why, I’ll borrow some arguments I’ve heard about jazz music.

The “high art” that’s survived from before the 20th century had to be built like a cathedral. We’ve had millenia of pop culture, centuries of folk music, plenty of folk storytelling – I’m sure when the lute was big, there was a John Fahey of solo lute playing, and he was probably mindblowing. But none of that matters, because none of it survived. To get something that would stay in recorded history, you had to record it and preserve it, which took a lot of effort. The work had to stand on its own – Beethoven’s force of personality is pretty much a footnote now that the work has survived, and Mozart’s own quirks are kind of a trivia question that doesn’t really do much to legitimate his work, Amadeus aside.

Now, in the 20th century, it became easier to record everything. And it became easier to record moments. Jazz has always had a problem where the brilliant men and women who added to the form seem slightly less prestigious than the Bachs and Beethovens of yesteryear, and to some extent, it’s because they rely on the players and the performances for their greatness. Ellington is “the great jazz composer” but his works are incomplete without the signature soloists who performed it. Miles Davis is great for how he managed his bands as much as the music he wrote or arranged. (There’s a management case study in the Cellar Door sessions alone.) Ornette Coleman has written many great pieces, but the improvised melodies in the middle or the interaction with Don Cherry has cemented his stand.

At the same time, jazz has a problem: even at its best, and even with the benefit of the studio, jazz has turned out few “perfect albums.” Sure, there’s A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue, and maybe Black Saint and Sinner Lady and The Shape of Jazz to Come, but I feel like I’m running out here. Rock makes “perfect albums,” but jazz albums rarely capture a start-to-finish masterpiece. That kind of consistency is anathema to the work. If you’re a serious jazz fan, you’ll delve into “the complete sessions of so and so” or “whoever at the wherever, all five nights,” or pick and choose from multiple versions of “My Favorite Thing,” or best of all, catch these people live.

So let’s look at games. An at the same time, let’s look at the internet. All of a sudden, everyone can participate. Everyone can play and contribute, to some extent. There’s a Duke Ellington somewhere, but we’re his team. Games aren’t high art because they depend on the player as much as the software, but not all of the scenarios you give the players are equal. So maybe the great game artists are the people who create the most engaging and thoughtful scenarios – the ones where the players learn the most about themselves (through thought or action). The Jane McGonigals who get people to go out in the streets and do silly things (though whether she’ll be a formative early designer or a mainstream talent – e.g., a John Cage or a Philip Glass – remains to be seen). The best MMO designers who create the most memorable (separate from “the most fun”) virtual worlds.

This is the part of the argument where everyone should just start arguing, about the games they find most artistic or the characteristics and mechanics they find most thought-provoking. (For me, the two best “art games” I’ve ever played are Planescape: Torment – for the way it applied interactivity to its themes and symbols – and Grim Fandango, for its story and its concept of the afterlife.)

Either way, we’re back at a question about the point of art. There are two broad ways to criticize art: by judging the work itself, or by studying the work alongside the artist who made it. I’m with the latter. I want to communicate with the artist. I’m willing to see works of art as imperfect media for facilitating those communications; I’ve tolerated a lot of less-than-genius stuff because I want to know more about the people who make it. It’s actually probably my softest spot as a critic.

I don’t just love games for their own sake, or for the sake of playing them. I love them because they’re the easiest point of participation in the larger conversation that’s going on across the Internet, around the world, and inside our own heads. With the Internet, we have many new ways to share ideas and share ourselves. But games give structure, pleasure and reward to participation. They create spaces where it can happen more easily. And I don’t want to have to defend that process as “high art.” Like so many other works by people who aren’t yet dead, it’s clearly something else.

EDIT: Changed “jazz albums rarely capture an end-to-end session that stands the test of time.” – which is so wrong – to “jazz albums rarely capture a start-to-finish masterpiece.”

Was at the playground today and I saw a heavy-set man sitting alone on a bench, facing the playground, and starting the new Harry Potter.

Why didn’t he just hang a sign around his neck that said, “CHILD MOLESTER”?

We don’t have the book yet. My wife wanted to order the British version from Amazon.co.uk, because the Bloomsbury editions have awful cover art (see above), and they keep all the British slang like “punter,” and “bloody,” and “snog,” and “bugger my cunny.” My level of excitement is way under control. I enjoyed books 3 through 5, but the sixth book fell limp for me in so many ways, from the abortively handled teen romances to the nagging feeling that all the best action was happening off-camera, in Draco’s and Snape’s heads. Harry was the dullest kid in the book but the story couldn’t leave him behind.

But who cares what I think, I don’t even know how the last book ends. I know who dies at the end, though: Scholastic’s share price. Good luck finding another cash cow like that! And by the way, your mascot Clifford is fucking retarded. My kid is two and he’s already too old for it.

“Wuthering Heights” is one of my fave songs, but from this video I couldn’t tell you why:

My favorite part comes when she gets to the word “window” and holds her hands palms out and mimes a window.

During the all-night Iraqi debate this week, the Senate wheeled out cots for everybody – and per The Note, I guess they’re really for show. (I honestly didn’t know. This pomp and circumstance eludes me.)

But Jake Tapper reports that a couple Senators took the chance to catch some zzz’s.

This week’s Escapist focuses on game journalism, and it’s pretty good – but I have fatigue from going over and over the same points about why game journalism isn’t smarter, gutsier, and more compelling.

So rather than do that thumbsucker myself blog-style, I thought I’d jot some notes on what I’ve learned as Games Editor for Paste Magazine. As always, this stuff is worth what you’re paying for it.

Paste Magazine has been a challenging and sometimes frustrating gig, for one simple reason: we’re selling steaks to vegans. Our readers largely doesn’t play games. Many readers probably think of games as a kind of narcotic brain rot for tweeners and basement-confined idiots. We can’t afford to be lazy. So we set out to get much better game reviews, from the best writers, for an audience that doesn’t necessarily care. This is a section that converts people, using small chunks of text. People don’t care about the combo moves. They don’t want to read a review that starts, “The name is Bond. James … well, you know the rest.” They want ideas.

(All the daily papers and glossy magazines that are trying to get into the game crit biz would do well to follow this mindset, and stop hiring writers that sound like somebody’s nephew.)

It’s hard to find writers who can go there, or who even want to. Not easy to find readers, either – but they’re starting to find their way in. The idea is to find the things that elevate games from sport to culture. The common elements or challenges that any intelligent person can latch onto. It’s not easy to make the reviews “relatable” – although I think Jason Killingsworth’s first hand account of slaying at a live Guitar Hero II match had a lot of everyman hooks. But you’re trying to cough up some brain food. I don’t know anything about dance, but I sat through and enjoyed Swan Lake a few years ago. Gears of War is the same deal. Humans are curious. Give them something to chew on.

k, so here’s a list of …

DO’s:
- Write like you give a damn. (We all forget to do this.)

- In a blurb, you can’t talk about everything – so focus on what you actually care about. XGau is the master of this, as well as the master of cramming more information and stronger arguments than anyone would expect into a less-than-150 word space. But XGau doesn’t have a checklist saying, “Make sure to mention if the bass player’s any good.” And so you shouldn’t have a checklist saying, “Gotta talk about the control scheme,” or even, “Gotta compare this to the last three games in the series,” or “Gotta address how disgustingly violent it is,” or “Gotta acknowledge how well they did the backgrounds.” Only write about the stuff that bolsters your argument.

- Make a more interesting argument than, “This is good,” or, “This is bad.”

- Don’t be scared to go out on a limb, ever. It’s easier for an editor to pull you back in than to push you to do something more interesting.

- Find an angle beyond the game. Does it have something to do with real life (politics, religion, whatever)? Can you even just pretend that it does, to highlight something important about the game?

- And last – and really, I’m practically giving away my Onion secret weapon here – but find games that nobody has heard of and give us a reason to care. I don’t know why more people don’t seek out the Eets and Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD-type games of the world, as opposed to the twelfth movie tie-in of the year. Unsung games are more interesting, they have stories, you can easily talk to the developers, and some of them are really good.

Why don’t more journos flock to this stuff? I promise you, if I got a new mp3 by a Finnish-Japanese teen starlet who was hot in Helsinki and lining up remixes, and I dropped it sound-unheard in a room full of music bloggers? Blood would drain under the doorways. But stick pre-XBox Eets in front of professional game journalists and they’ll go back to wondering when Assassin’s Creed will drop. Lame.

DON’T’s:
- Hand in a crappy review and then tell me how glad you were to have gotten that over with

- Talk about game mechanics unless it’s absolutely essential. The fact that you can take cover in Gears of War is not interesting; the fact that the mechanic makes the game slower, more cautious and more like paintball than the unrealistic “run around and shoot people in the face” dynamic of Halo 2 could be more interesting, if you describe it more compellingly than I just did.

- We need more verbs and adjectives in this biz. Music has its list of cliches (“groove,” “angular,” “glitchy”); someone should draft one for game reviews. We can do better. ActionButton.net is fond of using the term “crunchy physics” – I like that – it’s vivid and accurate. But think about, say, people who write about what it’s like to cruise down the highway on a motorcycle – game journos should try to capture that same language, that same excitement. When they do, I feel like they often pause or act embarrassed, because they don’t think a computer game measures up to intense real life experiences. So find that thing in the game that gives you that thrill – and learn to believe in it. And write like hell about it.

- Don’t feel like your hands are tied by anything but the need to hand in a great piece of writing. If you let the game justify the writing, you’ll hand in the same story as all the other people who want to review Halo 3. Let the writing justify the game.

After close to two years with Paste, we’ve raised the bar for ourselves incredibly and almost impossibly high in terms of how far on a limb the writers have to go before they file a review. I wish I had more examples, but we only just started posting to the web – yeah, I know, I know – but when I look at each issue, I’m just astounded by how hard everyone’s working and how talented they are.

One last “Do”: editing other people – good writers and newer ones – is a great way to learn to write. So if you ever get the chance, do it!

One more gaming post today. The gaming press, and especially the mainstream press, doesn’t seem to “get” indie and bargain gaming. Hand-wringing articles about why the indie space hasn’t taken off rub shoulders with articles like this week’s Clive Thompson thing, where he argues that there’s no gaming equivalent of a b-movie – implictly arguing that budget games are bad games because budget games are bad software. As the people in the comments argue, he’s just not looking hard enough. (Between Vampire Rain, Touch the Dead, and Bullet Witch, I feel like I’m reviewing one b-movie-game a month.)

Cheap games can be fun. Flawed software can make hilarious (and playable) games. And indie games – which are cheap games with a patina of cool – can be amazing. People wonder why there’s no market for indies, and it’s largely a press thing. Eets was a great game even before XBox Live Arcade picked it up. The titles are out there.

So here’s GameTunnel’s list of their Top 100 Indie Games, drawing on games they’ve reviewed for their excellent monthly panel. I’ve gotten a lot of ideas for game reviews from GameTunnel. Almost all the games they review are free-to-try, easy-to-install, and lots of fun. Catch ‘em before they go to the XBox.