Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

I had my first blog writing success a couple months ago, when my kidney stone liveblog was picked up by the fantastic art journal Veneer. They’ve placed the article online, with an excellent response by painter Josie Kovash. But I recommend tracking down a copy if you can – it’s an intriguing journal, beautifully produced with a postcard and a small vinyl record inside.

Oh hell yes. In fact, Yes – plus electronica, English vocals, pop and dizzying technicolor candy arrangements. Mastered By Guy at the Exchange was an ‘02 fave, and that’s where two of these songs come from. New album due … later this year? Next?

“Merman”

“Ink Me”

“Lysine [ft. Becky Jacobs]” (sorry about the sound – so buy it already)

So courtesy of Worlds in Motion, and originally from Korea Times, I hear the news that NCSoft’s gaming biz is off – and in particular, their latest title, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, isn’t making bank the way they hoped. This is disappointing to me, as I probably invested more time in this game than any other – not so much because I played it a lot (I think I clocked 10 hours), but because I wrote a Paste feature on it and actually bought a new PC to make sure I had the horsepower to play it. In fact, I bought the very same PC that’s frequently product-placed inside the game itself. I’m not telling you what it is, though; I’m just churlish like that.

Originally I planned to review Tabula Rasa last month, but when all was said and done, I couldn’t get into it. I figured it would take 30-40 hours of playing at least the open Beta to make me feel good about filing a review; instead, I clocked less than 10 and had to pull myself to the PC to play it. It’s not a bad game. But the world it takes place in didn’t engage me: the constant battle, the wide-open empty spaces, the desert/lava theme so prevalent in outer space games, the thin story and the thin way they told it, the bad writing – I mean, one of the quest-givers spoke entirely in bad rhymes; is that supposed to be immersive? – compounded with all the usual problems of an MMOG, the grind, the world that never changes, the high time commitment and low bang for your buck. I didn’t even care that the weird “you have to aim, but sort of not” combat system was kind of a half-assed compromise between a shooter and an RPG: the fact that you could close in and smack the hell out of somebody made up for it. I just found it tiring, instead of alluring. And at the same time that World of Warcraft was starting to grow up a little in its worldbuilding, I just couldn’t commit the time.

On the bright side, you can still vote for its star, Sarah Morrison, as Playboy’s Sexiest Video Game Girl. (And by the way, if I ever develop a fictional property and it includes women? I promise you, those characters are sure as hell never going to be sold to Playboy.)

Last weekend’s Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT took me a few short steps ahead of where the blogosphere’s already chattering. I don’t mean that dismissively: there’s a big difference between slogging through a lot of “the future’s here o noes” blogs, and talking to people in real life and hearing them sum up their passions and ideas. But for all the wild hype and prognostication that tends to crop up at these things, FOE 2 struck me as analytical, and realistic. Not much BS, and lots of good ideas.

I covered two of the panels for Gamasutra. Here are the links and some good pull quotes:

Fan Labor – Raph Koster:

But for all the reasons that web 2.0 companies encourage fan talent and user participation, as Koster observed, they’re not after great content: fundamentally, they want metadata.

He concluded: “They invite the participation so they can measure it. The web is a database. [Users] add to the database. The content is there so we can watch people skittering across it.”

Cult Media (but really, Transmedia Storytelling) - Danny Bilson:

Bilson alluded to a new project he’s designing in Dubai, a theme park that will “data-mine people.”

“I can’t divulge too much,” said Bilson. “But if you wear something on your body that holds everything related to you, and that is persistent … one attraction could be [to turn the visitor into] a character. And it uses technology, it uses motion capture, it uses false reflective surfaces. But the basic concept is if you could take a theme park, a physical space, and everyone could be data-mined, then you could have a live-action MMO.”

Other stuff that caught my ear:

- I’m not particularly interested in how academia and Hollywood relate, but several people praised MIT’s CMS and conferences like this one for bringing show business people together with the people who study them. Heroes’ Jesse Alexander said that he loved the analysis. He even compared it to a kind of therapy.

- When we talk about transmedia properties, it’s easy to cite games, television, websites – but we don’t often talk about toys. Several panelists talked about their fond childhood memories of playing with Star Wars toys, and I’m right there with ‘em: I never reenacted scenes from the movies with those things; I always made up my own characters, stories, and whole worlds. They were a major storytelling tool. That’s great to remember, especially because tie-in toys are usually considered nothing more than cheap little pieces of plastic. (And truth be told, that first Hoth set was crap.)

- At the Advertising and Content panel, I learned a new term: Stylisode. It’s a webisode that’s built around a brand. MTV makes them for Hampton Hills. You can stop vomiting now.

- Yahoo!’s Marc Davis, who spoke on the first panel on Mobile Media, demonstrated TagMaps: it’s a mapping tool that links to photos taken and posted on Flickr. The tags and locations associated with the Flickr photos are displayed on the map, to highlight the places people find the most interesting. You can automate much of the tagging, and as Davis showed us, he could take cameraphone photos out the window of his hotel in Cambridge and upload them via ZoneTag, which automatically tagged where they were taken.

My love of Battlestar Galactica knows almost no bounds – and has not gone unnoticed. Starting this weekend, I’m going to write-up Galactica for the Onion AV Club’s new TV Club, starting with a Razor, the movie that airs tonight on the Sci-Fi channel. Warning (obviously): spoilers.

And savor this while it lasts, ’cause we won’t be back again until at least April of next year – depending on the writer’s strike.

By the way, if you missed Razor and don’t want to buy the DVD, you can watch the seven “Flashback” minisodes right on the Sci-Fi channel’s website. They take place at the end of the first Cylon war and they are hella fun.

So I’m coughing up a review on Mass Effect right now, and I’ll spare you the gory details and the final letter grade (hint: not an A) that I’ll be giving it over at The Onion. After my excited posts of last week, I felt more lukewarm by the end of the game – still one of the better BioWare RPGs, but it was less a classic like Knights of the Old Republic and more like – well, you know when you start a genre book and you just can’t put the damn thing down, and the writing’s sloppy and there are typos and the cover’s cheesy, but you just have to get to the end? And the end still doesn’t knock you out? I could go on about how the incredible hype and AAA-prestige that latches onto titles like this blinds critics and fans to the not-quite-awesome product that finally hits the stores. Leigh among others has been blogging on that tip.

But instead, let’s wrap up my earlier post about the girl-girl alien thing.

So I wound up creating a female character. Stop looking at me like that. Given a choice, I always play women, and the female Commander Shepard is voiced by the inimitable Jennifer Hale. If you don’t play as a woman, and specifically as a kick-ass renegade woman, you’re missing some of the most entertaining dialogue of the year. So I picked a woman – but I wasn’t one of those guys who was slack-jawedly jonesing for a sex scene. In fact, I figured I would probably skip the romance subplots. Even as an observer, none of the NPCs I was meeting were that interesting. You meet the handsome, earnest guy with a sensitive backstory – who’s a total drip. And then you meet Liara, the blue-skinned alien chick, who also turns out to be a drip: she’s a scientist and researcher of ancient history who gets all nerdy and nervous whenever you talk to her one-on-one. She’s nice enough, but not really my type.

Let me also add that the NPCs in this game are a major step back for BioWare. They never talk with you in the field, aside from a couple generic lines about how “This building is very cold” or “This planet is very hot.” The extended get-to-know-you conversations I’m used to never happen. And as for flirting? Your romance options basically hand themselves up on a platter: the first time you get to talking with them, they start dribbling about how impressive and intriguing you are and, hey, space is lonely and sometimes it’s fun to share a bunk. In fact, they don’t even say anything that romantic. They basically just say, “Keep talking to me and someday we’ll have that sex scene you saw on YouTube.”

Like I said, neither one of them did it for me. But of the two, Liara was the less obnoxious. She gave me a whole spiel about how her race is entirely female, meaning they reproduce bisexually, and their matings are a serious union of body and spirit, and it’s really a whole credible thing that they go around the galaxy banging aliens of either gender. Like, it just made perfect sense the way she explained it. Also, maybe if we had sex, I would get to father a kid. In real life I’m a dad, and in virtual life I’ve been a mom. But a lesbian dad? That would be new.

Also – and I don’t mean any disrespect to Liara, or any other fictional characters in this game – but have you ever been far away from civilization, and you really wanted a cheeseburger? That’s how I role-played this one. I figured Commander Shephard could use a good, hot cheeseburger.

But that didn’t mean we hooked up. No sir. We kept working, saving the galaxy a planet at a time, chatting between missions. Liara was all into me, but at the same time, nervous about taking things too fast – plus, the galaxy’s about to blow up, and it didn’t seem like a good time to start something serious. About halfway through the game she said she wasn’t ready, I said that’s fine, and then – she dropped the subject! That was it. Somehow I’d blown the romance subplot. And I was never going to get that Paramour achievement (worth 10 points).

Or so I thought. The night before the last mission of the game, I’m typing away at some space age keyboard thing when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Liara. She wants to come in and talk, but – well, clearly she wants something more than that. She was lonely, she was nervous and – well, don’t we all feel that way sometimes? Don’t we all need a little company? And well, I don’t need to tell you, she got it.

But look. That wasn’t my goal. It just happened. I didn’t get this game, choose that character and follow all those options just so I could say that I became a lesbian dad in space. I didn’t set out to watch a sex scene in a video game. I mean, how hard up would anyone be to play hours of a video game just for a cutscene? And I don’t even think it was as persuasive as some of the other romance subplots out there – I mean, I could go on for pages about Annah in Planescape, and that just ends in a smooch. Sure, this was a lot more cinematic, but I never bought Liara’s attraction to me, I didn’t like how little conversation and build-up we had, I just didn’t buy the whole thing. Liara promised me a “life-altering experience”: I sure didn’t get that.

But at least I got my cheeseburger.

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PSST: If you enjoyed this, check out my new GameSetWatch column.

This segment on WYNC’s On The Media was totally fascinating – Jamie York talks about the history of the old renegade radio stations that opened over the border in Mexico to evade the US law. The first one was started by a doctor who sold “goat glands” (gonads) as a fertility treatment. To reach the States, he cranked the power up to 1 million watts – enough to set birds on fire mid-air and make the broadcast audible on barbed wire and people’s bedsprings. Obviously lots of sound clips, too.

You can download or stream it here.

So I’m at the Bartos Auditorium in a basement on the MIT campus, attending the Futures of Entertainment conference. Maybe half the people in the audience have their laptops open. Surge suppressors are at a premium, and the sound of clicking sounds like rain.

I was going to liveblog some of this, but it turns out that the MIT kids are doing it for us … I defer to their transcript.

And be sure to check the Tex Avery cartoon.

So this is my last Mass Effect post. Two things: From now on, I’m going to call it Ass Effect, in honor of all the writhing blue ladies stocked throughout the game.

Second: Like other recent BioWare games, Mass Effect feels lumpy. It’s cinematic, with long, movie-like sequences – and even though you can nudge the dialogue, I still found myself doing my bills in front of the screen, an honor I usually reserve for The Colbert Report. At the same time, you’ve got shoot-outs. You even have to aim and take cover. When you’re flying around in your big space ship, you zip around a 2-D map of the galaxy – but before you get to whale on the alien flora and fauna, you have to take down notes on the mineral content of Whoozitarius and the length of the day on Badabingus. In fact, there’s a ton of text content to read through if you feel like it, about the aliens, the worlds, the histories, the technologies – and when you pick up new information, the game doesn’t even stop to make you read the dialog – it just gives you a little “ding” to tell you that you’ve written something in your codex, and you can look it up at your leisure.

When I put on my game critic hat – which looks something like this –

- I don’t like lumpy games; I like well-balanced, seamless games, where every element comes together into one killer experience – like Half-Life 2, or Portal, or Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD.

But Mass Effect gave me an idea. Why should you have only one way to experience this game?

I’ve been looking for games that work on multiple platforms. Skyrates supports a Flash web client, e-mail, and instant messaging, but it’s still a relatively casual game. But let’s look at what you could do with Mass Effect.

- Play the game on your XBox

- Use your cell phone or a Flash client to keep your ship flying around the galaxy – maybe for a trade game, a la Skyrates. (This wouldn’t fit neatly into the story, but there must be some kind of errands you could send the ship on, to keep them busy when you don’t have time to play.)

- Use your cell phone or a Flash client to visit some of these random planets and play little mini-games on them.

- The cinematic content is great. Why not give you the option to sit back and watch a couple hours of it – to pipe it to your TV and watch the protagonist walk around talking to the other characters, following the romance stories, and getting into arguments? You would lose the interactive dialogue options, but the game could pick a script that follows the way you’ve been playing: if you’re compassionate, you’ll see the compassionate version of each scene.

- And as for all that background story stashed in the game – as you unlock it, the game should throw it on a personalized website so you can read it at your leisure when you’re at work.

Mass Effect’s biggest hook is the story – the giant, space operatic narrative and grand backdrops and smokin’ dead aliens at your feet. You want the big-budget game to get that big-budget experience. But adding more platforms won’t dilute that – it’ll just suck you in deeper, and make you more excited for the main show – beating the boss battle, on the XBox 360, in a world you now know inside and out.

Tomorrow I’m headed to the Future of Entertainment conference at MIT, where some of the brightest lights in the multimedia biz will talk about when you’ll be able to watch a movie on your iPhone while playing the online game in another window and tapping into the ARG using the built-in GPS – and then remix it all and post it to YouTube. Raph Koster for one wants games that support multiple platforms; Mass Effect offers a template for how you could do it right.

So I’m a couple hours and two major plot points into Mass Effect, and the best part so far is … the ethics system! I know, right? Holy crap, what’s more fun than that? (Not the combat system … )

If you’ve played other BioWare games, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you’ve seen how it works: the game watches the decisions you make throughout the game and nudges you over to a “light side” or a “dark side.” In the case of KOTOR, it was mostly a case of morality: act like a callous jerk, and you wind on the dark side of the force; help people, make sacrifices and always say the most polite thing you can come up with in conversations, and you become a Jedi.

But anyone who’s played Dungeons & Dragons knows that the alignment grid has nine points: not only are you good or evil, but you’re also lawful or chaotic. You can be a good guy who breaks the rules, a tyrant who turns the law to evil, and so on. The older D & D games like Planescape: Torment used the system to great effect (and wait, did I just namedrop Planescape again this week? Well hell, how can you not)?

Mass Effect only has two sides, not nine – but instead of morality, it judges you on ethics. You can become a Paragon or a Renegade. As far as I’ve seen, in both cases, you’re trying to do the right thing – i.e., save humanity and bring peace to all squid-headed aliens everywhere – but you can go about it the right way, or the fun way. This also means you can fight for the right cause, but be a complete dick about it.

In games that push you toward good or evil, the evil plot depends on a lot of contrivances: you still have to tackle the villains, stop the super-weapon, bring peace and order, and whatever, but you have to have your own selfish reasons for doing it. Usually I play as a good character. In the big picture, I want everything to work out. But here, the whole space opera can move down one path, and I just get to decide how badass I want to be along the way.

So far, that’s very badass. The renegade dialogue is hella more fun. It’s also great when you see your list of options come up with a big, red bolded one that’s basically the “Gordian Knot” option: instead of thinking your way through a negotiation, you can just jump to the big red option and tell them you’ll knock their face in if they don’t go your way. I’m sure you get more points for being smarter, but again, the dialogue is worth it.

We’ll see how well they keep it going through the whole (20-30 hour) story, but so far, this is one of the best parts of the game – and one of the only things that makes this tightly-scripted story “interactive.”