Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Got a promo of Dark Sector last week, and not to scoop my own review, but it’s a gold-plated stinker. Funny story though: I’m going through the press kit, and I find a comic book – which was illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. Bill Sienkiewicz! Trippy-ass illustrator behind some of my favorite Marvel comics in the ’80s, still a legend today. What’s he doing making a promotional tie-in for a totally mediocre shooter? I’d feel better if he had wound up in dog portraiture or something.

As I was reviewing it, I checked the Gamespot forums, which are usually a pretty entertaining read. A lot of the people who bought the game are raving about it – saying that if they were reviewing it, they’d give it an 8 or a 9, or telling other people to buy it, or pouncing all over anyone who suggests that it might be kind of just average. These folks are raving about it.

Leigh Alexander recently sparked a flamewar over fanboyism, specifically around Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But the characters in that game already have a fanbase. The only reason I can think that anyone cares about Dark Sector is the investment they’ve put into it over three years of watching previews, and looking at screenshots, and telling themselves it’ll be awesome. And then they drop sixty bucks on it and start playing, and get, if not an awesome experience, something they can blow a weekend on. At that point, they talk themselves into liking it, and a mediocre game gets promoted to “exactly what I was expecting.” And the fact that they’ve probably played a dozen better games in the same year doesn’t matter.

So, Zero Punctuation. It’s a hit. And I’m not jealous. Really. Why would I be? Because he shot into superstardom while so many of us freelancers and reviewers plod along, unrecognized, waiting for even one reader to post a comment that mentions us by name and spells it correctly? Me jealous? Nah.

Ben Croshaw – I had to go look up his actual name (take that!) – writes and animates Zero Punctuation, and not only do I think he’s a great watch, I think he’s a boon to the entire business of game reviewing. He may even elevate the practice of writing about games. But there’s a caveat.

Yes, he’s funny, he’s knowledgable, and he’s crass. We should follow his lead on at least the first two things. The problem is, many new critics – they’re probably registering at blogspot right now – will only follow the third thing: they’ll think that crass is the new crit, that being gross is the way to get attention. The key to Croshaw’s importance is that he’s gross – but being gross is not, by itself, a good idea.

Dick jokes are an easy sell – think of Bill Hicks, promising to his audience that he’d throw some dick jokes at them after one of his long-winded genius spiels about the one central consciousness that is God, and what Reagan’s doing to fuck it all up. But they are funny.

The game crits business actually needs more dick jokes. There’s a school of thought among gamers that game reviews should be really boring and objective. When I see people argue with the grade on a review, or complain because we spent half of a BioShock review talking about the themes and politics behind the game and none of it talking about the plasmids, they tend to say that game reviewers should be factual and “objective.” We should be like Consumer Reports or Olympic judges or some other body that will sit, blank-faced, in front of a piece of software and evalute it in purely technical terms.

That would be really boring. I got tired of the “are games art?” argument a long time ago, but I’m ready anytime to have the “are games just software?” argument – and I think that’s an argument we’re losing. Too many people who make or purchase video games think of them in the same general camp as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, as something that’s defined by its requirements document and the execution of its project plan. At some point, you have to switch to thinking of it as an intangible, sui generis work of art that came into the world to unscrew your head from your neck. This has been the baseline for rock music, but it’s strange for game developers – just read their interviews.

Making dick jokes really helps you cut out the chaff: “I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to benchmark this game against 10 different configurations. I make dick jokes.” Yet that just clears the air for what really matters in the review. I have to hand it to Croshaw and also to Penny Arcade that they write great reviews by going straight to the heart of what they like or dislike about a game. Once you make it clear that you’re not pretending to be Consumer Reports, you can drill down to the points that matter. I think Penny Arcade is probably better than anybody at finding the most important argument for or against a game and making it simply and succinctly. And they do it in an entertaining way, as does Croshaw. It’s probably no coincidence that these multimedia presentations are more compelling to gamers than our dull old text-only reviews, but that’s another issue.

Okay, so that’s the upside to dick jokes. The downside? People don’t realize that they’re not the point of the piece. Croshaw gets away with it because he actually knows what he’s saying and, in fact, seems bitterly critical toward anything that doesn’t meet his standards; witness the way he takes apart little old Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Another great example? Film critic Mr. Filthy. Yes, he’s filthy, but he’s a great storyteller, and he also knows what he’s talking about.

The problem is, a lot of gamers are – well, let’s just say they’re happy with the dick jokes. That’s why I’m so worried about the future spawn of Zero Punctuation. They probably won’t make videos, they’ll just roll around in the shit. You can even see this in some of the game reviewers getting published today – my favorite example is the Village Voice’s review of The Orange Box, where Gary Hodges starts a piece on one of the most important releases of last year by saying he was worried the price tag would bend him over and sodomize him. (Nobody told him that a lot of the Voice’s audience would pay pretty well for that – check the classifieds.) I actually suspect the Village Voice Media chain runs this style of reviews because they think gamers want this kind of humor. Maybe they’re right.

One last point, though, about what really makes Zero Punctuation and also Penny Arcade work so well. It’s not just that they’re funny, or that they’re informed. My guess is that people love their work and their voices because they’re so relatable as gamers. If you were hanging out and having a game night with pizza and beer, these are the guys you would want sitting on the couch with you. They know more than you do, but they don’t lord it over you. They’re funny and sarcastic, but they love gaming like they have nothing else. And ever since someone decided to take a show for twentysomethings, about twentysomethings, and call it Friends - as in, “if you’re lonely, these are your … ” – it’s been clear that the hang-out factor is paramount.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Neal Gabler has the best analysis I’ve ever read of John McCain’s relationship with the media. It goes beyond stating he has one, and comes up with an intriguing argument for what they have in common:

What makes 2008 different — and why I think Mr. McCain can be called the first postmodernist presidential candidate — is his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press and, more important, his willingness, even eagerness, to let the press in on his own machinations of them. … This sort of disdain might be called a liberal view, if not politically then culturally. The notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic is a staple of “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Real Time With Bill Maher” and other liberal exemplars, though they, of course, implicate the press in the idiocy. Mr. McCain’s sense of irony makes him their spiritual kin — a cosmological liberal — which may be why conservatives distrust him and liberals like Jon Stewart seem to revere him. They are reacting to something deeper than politics. They are reacting to his vision of how the world operates and to his attitude about it, something it is easy to suspect he acquired while a prisoner of war.

That last part, of course, is the kicker – that he came out of the event that made him an unimpeachable hero, with a worldview closer to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

Half the fun of being over 20 – okay, over 33 – is to take a look back at what I played with as a kid and milk a whole column out of it, for other oldsters who remember it and for youngsters who might be curious to learn more. That’s what I did this week for my GameSetWatch column, and while the tone of my article feels mixed – I’m sorta critical, sorta nostalgic – I hope it’s clear that I loved these books to death when I was a kid, and I had a blast going back through them this month (although this time, I’ll admit, I cheated a ton to check out the alternate paths).

Also confusing was my review of Condemned 2: Bloodshot, where I got so lost explaining what a mixed bag it was that at least one reader thought it sounded awful. It’s not awful – it’s just … a mixed bag. It tries ten difficult things and does five of them exceptionally well. I see I gave it the same grade as Mass Effect, which seems about right.

Last work update: I “redesigned” my web site home page, where I keep all of my writing clips and major news. It still looks primitive as hell, but it’s a little easier to read. Check it out!

My Paste and Onion collegue Gus Mastrapa has a new gig, writing the weekly media criticism column at GameDaily. His first column is an interview with one of his heroes, the New York Times‘ Peter Olafson, who used to share the “Game Theory” column with Charles Herold. Gus starts the column raving about Olafson’s writing, and I could do the same about Gus. His writing is consistently engaging, enlightening and knowledgable; he’s mature, yet he’s still a blast to read. Should be a great column.

In the mail today I got a copy of Insecticide for the Nintendo DS. I stuck it in and gave it a try, ’cause that’s what I do, and started to get used to the controls – only to find a serious problem. The basic mechanism is you hit the buttons to run around, and tap the stylus to the screen to look around and aim your gun. You can also do everything with the buttons on the left and the right of the screen, but that’s no fun – you want to use the stylus. That’s why you play with a DS.

The trouble is, there’s no mode for left-handed people. The key buttons are already on the left, which means you have to hold the stylus in your right, which means you’re screwed.

Other games I’ve played on the DS, like Metroid Prime Hunters, let you switch hands. A lot of people in this country are left-handed. I don’t know the numbers, but it’s a lot. And in other countries, too. Looking in the manual I count almost 20 people who did QA for this turkey, but I guess none of them were left-handed, or else they would have said something, like, “Could you take a few hours to change this so people can use the buttons on the right instead of the left?”

I’m really starting to understand Obama’s speech earlier this week, about how we still need to form a more perfect union. I’ve never felt so discriminated against – at least since Fargo, when I saw how Hollywood really feels about my Scandinavian-American heritage. Fuck those guys, too.

I can’t explain why, but I never watched South Park regularly ’til a couple weeks ago. I was a fan of Beavis & Butthead, The Simpsons, even The Animaniacs, but somehow I slept on this because I thought it was just crass and stupid. Turns out the show is shockingly good, and the poop jokes are just gravy.

Probably what I like best about the show are the boys, and the scenes where they just act like boys. To take one example, in “L’il Crime Stoppers,” the four main characters are playing cops and trying to crack cases around the neighborhood. They only run into a problem when some rich kids who are playing FBI usurp their authority. The way they play make-believe is so convincing, including the over-the-top bloody fantasies, it made me hope my kid’ll play the same way someday.

I bring it up because I just finished typing up an interview with Jordan Weisman, a game developer who’s (apparently – see the interview when it runs) working on games for kids. One thing he told me is that kids don’t play the same way they used to. Maybe 30-40 years ago, kids as old as 10 would engage in free-form make-believe play; today, it ends around 8. After that age, kids move on to rule-based entertainment – card and board games and especially, anything in the electronics aisle. Once they make the transition, any kind of freeform play looks like “baby” play. And kids don’t want to seem like babies.

My kid loves to make up stories about his Thomas trains and look for deer poop in the woods. I’m hoping we have a few more good years.

And oh yeah – Tasha Robinson had a terrific interview with the creators this week in the AV Club.

… in its entirety, on YouTube.

Full text here.

What I love about the speech isn’t the grandiose theme but the specifics – that he can speculate about white men automatically going for John McCain, that he can tell a story about his white grandmother once being afraid of black men passing her on the street, that he can bring up OJ, or this line about his campaign worker, Ashley:

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

He doesn’t snowball anything – and he’s also not sweeping or grandiose. It’s not a cheer to the rafters speech. And it’s not an angry speech, either. He’s just playing a whole new game here.

Sitting in a meeting this afternoon for five hours I looked up and noticed the Starbucks cup of the guy sitting next to me, and it had one of those “The Way I See It” slogans written on the side. It was the best I’ve ever read. It went like this:

My cousin in Tibet is an illiterate subsistence farmer. By accident of birth, I was raised in the West and have a Ph.D.

Awesome. Awesome. You couldn’t put the Starbucks consumer fantasy any better: that for every one of us book-learned, white-collar Mac-laptopping Starbucks junkies, there’s someone in a poor country who makes an honest living from the land and just doesn’t get hung up about it all. Like trading carbon credits, but for dickheadedness.

It gave me an idea for a Starbucks game. A lot of virtual world games hang on the idea that you get to make a character and live that character’s life. So how about a game where your fantasy self is some humble, self-actualized peasant who doesn’t ask for much but always gets it? And every so often you could log in and play as your fantasy farmer self.

In fact, maybe you could play as a character who grows fair trade coffee. And every time you go up a level, $1 goes to literacy programs.

Stop me now before I make someone a billion dollars!

So this year, close to 800 people finished the RPM Challenge (meaning, if this is the first you heard, that they wrote and recorded an entire record in the month of February). Disc done, they’re supposed to bring it in person to the Wire office in Portsmouth or get it in the mail by March 1. And what happens when it shows up?

People rip ‘em. One by one.

I came in last night to make a small dent in the pile, and while the two of us were ripping discs on four machines (and typing in metadata – next year kids, use CD-text … ), we kept queueing up songs. I’ve said before that I’m a huge fan of the music made during the RPM Challenge. Because nobody makes a polished, professional recording, you aren’t looking for home runs or Pitchfork Best New Music candidates: instead, you’re focusing on music at its genesis – the surprises, the one-take performances, the moment when someone comes up with an idea and runs with it. Instead of hearing what an artist thinks the world will like, you get to hear what they like – what kept them up ’til 5 AM looking for the perfect sitar sample. I’ve never heard an RPM album that its maker didn’t give a damn about, and the passion’s almost always infectious.

I only browsed a limited sampling of 30-40 albums last night. Some things grabbed my ear immediately. (I’ll link them here so you can go to the artist page and listen to their clips – scroll down the page to find the player).

The almost folktronic editing and effects of Toronto’s Jordan Fine was warm and intriguing, and so was Super Happy Fail Party’s super-catchy “Rollercoasters & Lemonade,” which brought everyone in the office to a standstill. I Love Jen!’s project, The Erection Year, was thrown on as a lark for the title and stayed on for about three or four tracks: it’s power-punk for reals, and “I’ll Stuff Your Ballot Box” earns its title.

On the weirder end: S. James Curtis describes himself as a fat guy in a basement apartment in Ontario. He cut two records, and said one of them was an homage to “knife play” – and rereading his blurb, I think he meant the Xiu Xiu album, maybe, but I thought he was talking about the practice. Either way, it’s disturbing. Also disturbing, but harmless was The Microtonal Music of Prent Rodgers, who wrote The Soundtrack to the Donner Party. Rodgers uses a microtonal scale that uses 53 equal divisions of the octave, which means at first it just sounds out of tune, but gradually becomes pretty damn cool.

Portsmouth’s Color was already a hotshot jazz/groove/improv trio, so no surprise they’d record a great session; I love the Fender Rhodes. Halifax’s Jacuzzi Berkley and the Grufundos Pumps describes itself as a kind of RPM-inspired pick-up band, playing roots, folk and bluegrass, but don’t be fooled – these guys really smoke, and they can sing and write too, which is usually the stumbling block. Oh, and EDITHED’s “Innerspaces” was sexy – I’ll be watching out for them, especially Finnish singer Anna Francke.

And I’ve already posted about Seth Fortin’s music. In many ways he sums up the challenge and purpose of RPM: he’s stationed in Iraq at Forward Operating Base Warhorse (hence his album name, Music For Forward Operating Bases), but he managed to scrounge up the time and equipment to finish the album. He brings in a couple collaborators (I dig the violin on the Messaien?-influenced “Folk Song For The End Of Time,” especially when he screws up at the start of the take but the mistake is left in), and tries something different on every track, from songs about the soldier’s life to abstract instrumentals. And he not only makes himself sing – he even raps. I wish he’d uploaded “Cancer” and a couple others, but you can hear the whole album here.

Like I said, I only heard a fraction of the projects. All of them has a story and a reason to exist. Start browsing at the artist lists. And be sure to look for a Listening Party near you for Friday, March 28. They’re popping up damn well everywhere.

(And oh yeah, my project’s still up there too.)