Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

(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?

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.

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?

I’ve been letting my kid borrow my BlackBerry. These pics crack me up. These are all just things that he felt like taking pictures of.

I know there’s plenty of accident in these, and the fact that he takes each pic at weird off-angles is partly ’cause he doesn’t know to steady the camera. But that last photo, of me waiting in line at the Motel6, is genius. Look at the guy stuck waiting in line behind me. He’s totally saying, “How the hell long do I have to wait here, and what the hell?”

In case I owe you an e-mail or you’re just wondering why you haven’t heard from me, well, we had this badass ice storm here in New Hampshire, and I still don’t have power. No need for sympathy or condolences, all it means is that my family’s holed up in a perfectly clean Motel 6 and I’m a little fried and annoyed every waking moment. And yet I’m still filing reviews! I’m a madman!

Working right now on a write-up for this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition winners, and I’m sure whatever I cough up is going to stink, so be sure to check ‘em out yourself.

UPDATE: Back online as of Tuesday night! All’s well that ends well. Hmm, so now what’s my excuse for not blogging more …