costik's blog

Everyone gets both digital and non-digital games for Christmas at our house. Well, I only get digital ones, since I'm the one who buys the tabletop games.

For me: Civilization IV: Colonization. Looks like a straight remake of the original Colonization (which I still have, and quite liked years ago) in the Civ IV engine. A little disappointed at that, in that I would have liked to see more features, but I'll certainly give it a shot, and like the fact that I can play as the Dutch. (I want to play as the Swedes, though -- yes, their colony in Delaware was short-lived, but there's an interesting alternate America.)

For Karen: Agricola and Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility. I quite liked the earlier Harvest Moon games, and so far this looks like an improvement -- more interesting things to do, and skills charge-ups reduce the tedium of watering your crops. Agricola is an Uwe Rosenberg game, and really at the high end of complexity for the Eurostyle -- at least as complicated as Puerto Rico. It'll take us a while to get into it.

For Vicky: Civilization Revolutions, Fable 2, and Medici. Can't go wrong with Sid Meier and Reiner Knizia. Though she also recently bought herself Kudos 2, so maybe that counts too.

For Betsy: Shadow of the Colossus and Oasis -- the Alan Moon boardgame, not the LeBlanc & Leker downloadable game. Colossus is a few years old, of course, but at her Mom's house, where she spends most of her time, there's just a PS2. Also, since she's learning German, Karen got her Die Siedler von Catan: Deutschland Edition, auf Deutsch, on the theory that figuring out the rules will help her with her studies.

For Simona: Candy Land. Well, she's only 5. Next year, Labyrinth Junior, though.

Wolfire, the developers of Lugaru are offering free copies of the game through Christmas as a promotion for their forthcoming game, Overgrowth.

In Lugaru you play a 3D rabbit, using your awesome kung fu to rebel against the wolves who oppress your people. One interesting aspect is the mouse-control system for hand-to-hand combat, which feels and looks vastly more like martial arts than, say, the ridiculous button combos of streetfighter games.

It's available for Mac and Linux as well as PC, too.

You do have to jump through a couple of hoops to get your copy, though (mainly joining a fan page for Overgrowth on Facebook); a full explanation is here.

A Feed for Games

My friend and business partner Nathan Solomon recently mused about the possibility of "a feed for games". The idea at its essence is to try to combine the open, viral, dispersed nature of something like RSS and harness it to utterly change the way people discover, download, play, and (sometimes) pay for games.

Games Online are Web 1.0

At the moment, people who offer games online are stuck, in essence, with Web 1.0; they put up software on a site somewhere, maybe host it on places like Download.com or try to make deals with the Oberons and RealArcades and Kongregates and Direct2Drives or Big Fishes of the world. As a result, the only way gamers can find interesting new games today is by browsing and searching widely on the Internet, and the only way developers can reach a large number of users is by sacrificing a huge portion of their revenues to websites with large traffic volumes.

This Sucks. There Has To Be Something Better

That sucks -- both for gamers, who have to work hard to find cool games, and for developers, who have to work hard to find an audience. And you know what? There are only two kinds of people who actually care about games: the people who play them, and the people who create them. Everyone else just gets in the way. Why are we rewarding the people who get in the way instead of the people who care?

Is there a way to harness Web 2.0 technologies to make things better, and easier, and cooler, and more interesting for gamers and developers alike?

Harnessing the Power of Web 2.0

What if there were a way for people to link to games that's more meaningful than a simple link to a download or Flash game site? What if sharing affiliate revenues was automagic, instead of requiring separate registrations at different corporate sites? What if it were possible to build mashups and applications on top of the way games are shared? What if there were a better way to harness the Internet's virality to spread the word about games? What if it were utterly open, so everyone from a garage developer to EA could us it? What if it allowed casual developers to break free from the current business model, where they sacrifice 80% of revenues to the distribution channel, by sharing a much smaller percentage with others who link to them? What if indie developers could use it to reach something more than a tiny audience?

"You may call me a dreamer..." So let's dream together. Let's try to think of what "Web 2.0 for games" would look like -- and then think of what kind of technology we'd need to make it happen. And not worry, at this point, about how to make it happen; if we can envision a buildable technology, we can worry about how to fund its development later.

What Does It Look Like?

How do we create a technology that lets developers find an audience more easily; that lets gamers find games they like more easily; that provides incentives to spread the word about good games; that's a win-win for everybody -- everybody who actually cares about games, anyway?

Nathan's term, "a feed for games" presumes that it looks like RSS -- but maybe it looks more like Twitter, or YouTube, or something else entirely.

The Future's So Bright, You Gotta Wear Shades

Here's my idea of the future:

• Gamers say, "This is the best and easiest way to find PC games I like."
• Indie developers put up their games, viral distribution and linkage brings them to people's attention, if they strike a nerve they can become major hits.
• The Pogos and Yahoo Games of the world say to Oberon, "Why do we need you, we can simply build on this open solution, and earn at least as much money as you pass on to us."
• Casual game publishers tell the portals "No we won't pay you 80%, because you simply cannibalize our sales through the open platform that makes us most of our money."
• EA and other major publishers say "Ah, Internet distribution of PC games is a solved problem, now, we simply adopt it."

What Do You Think?

That's the end game -- but of course, it has to start smaller. It has to start with simple technologies that make life better for gamers and developers alike. "RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication;" what we want is something like "Simple Game Syndication." It has to be easy for people to use -- and easy to build more comprehensive applications on top of.

How do we start?

What do you think?

Welcome back to the Union. All is forgiven.

So Friday, I spoke at the New Museum, a museum in New York's Lower East Side that's devoted to, if you will, more modern art than the Museum of Modern Art caters to -- for MOMA, "modern art" apparently began at the turn of the century, and ended somewhere around 1975. This of course leads the New Museum to showcase all kinds of vaporous and foolish stuff, but also things that are imaginative, weird, and worthy of attention. Thus, if you will, the Met caters to dead art, MOMA to recently dead art, and the New Museum to living art.

Which of course is one reason I was eager to participate -- even ten years ago, the idea that anyone out of the arts community would be looking to games would have been, well, very odd indeed. And the idea that the pretentious half-charlatans, half-genii who, in every generation, constitute its avant garde should be interested in fuckin' games is, you know, tres cool, mes amis.

The event was organized by Ed Halter of Rhizome, an independent arts organization associated with the New Musuem; the other speakers -- who in many ways I think better deserved a place on the rostrum than I -- were Mark Essen (You Found the Grappling Hook, Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist) and Jason Rohrer (Passage, Cultivation, Police Brutality).

I talked a little bit about the indie games movement and some games I admire (presentation here), and Mark and Jason presented some of their games. The conversation following talked about what indie games are, the Ebert "games cannot be art" thing (idiots are everywhere), and a lively q&a with the audience.

The audience itself was interesting -- mostly art dweeb rather than game geek types, though Frank Lantz, avec fils et claque was prominent at the front of the audience. However, apparently Auntie Pixelante (Mighty Jill Off) was in the audience -- I'd like to have met her.

Afterward, I went out to a local watering hole with Frank Lantz, et claque aussi, which was interesting in its own weird way; a bunch of game geeks drinking heavily, talking game design, and playing Threes Are Zero with a die-rolling app on Frank's iPhone, surrounded by well-dressed boy and girl 20-somethings eagerly attemping to pick up and hump each other at a hip lounge in the too-hip Loisaida, with the lot of us ignoring the temptation of cuties for the more rarified pleasures of intellectual drivel about games.

Game studies blog Gameology has an interesting post discussing our recent reviews of Muslim Massacre, Roach Taster, and Iji -- comparing these very diverse games from a different light. Call it metacriticism; a critical view of our criticism. We're pleased.

Bringing together prominent game designers, artists, and critics, Next Level takes a look at the recent rise of indie gaming: a vibrant new culture of individually made and self-distributed video games that blur the line between digital art and creative entertainment.

Featuring artist and game designers Mark Essen, Jason Rohrer, and Greg Costikyan. Moderated by Rhizome staff writer Ed Halter, an author, critic, and curator whose book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games was published in 2006.

More here.

I've said before that no one should deem to criticize a game they haven't played. Therefore, I played this thing.

Muslim Massacre is a stupid game. It's a straightforward third-person shooter, graphics reminiscent of the eight-bit era, but with aiming via mouse movements and Robotronesque gameplay -- without, you know, the wit or complexity of Robotron.

It surely wasn't designed to explore anything about the space of possible games, or offer anything novel, or of particular interest, in terms of gameplay. It also, unlike Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is not a thoughtful exploration of its subject material, nor does it offer anything like the pathos and emotional context of that game's mid-game photography of the aftermath, nor does it offer anything like cogent commentary on the easy resource of digital games to cartoonish violence.

It's just a stupid, adolescent, thumb-against-the-nose-and-waggling-fingers "fuck you". It exists, apparently, simply to create the controversy it has, in fact, created. It does not, in itself, have anything particular to say. "Making a broader meta-criticism," as the99th would have it? Don't make me laugh.

Mind you, the 1st Amendment is not totally a dead letter in this country (no promises for whether it remains such after President Palin is sworn in), and the twit who created this game has a perfect right to create it, yadda yadda. Yes, protection of free speech requires us to protect both speech with is offensive (which I don't view this as, particularly), as well as speech which is stupid (which this game surely is). But for all those who have attacked this game -- and therefore given it attention, and exposure it in no way deserves:

If some idiot made a blog posting saying we should kill all the Moslems, would you pay attention? If someone posted a similarly stupid YouTube video, would it receive this level of press attention? If someone did a Photoshop image of bin Laden fucking a goat, would you think it noteworthy, or worth a protest?

Why does the fact that it's a game make this any more noteworthy?

Games are just another medium. You can say stupid things as easily in a game as in any other form. You can also say very important things in the form of a game, and I hope we'll see more of that in future.

But get over it. Muslim Massacre is not important. It's just another idiot talking, in code instead of in prose or images or video. The world is full of idiots -- and making things in code is easier and easier, you know.

Stop it. Return to your regular programming. Don't play this thing.

I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, you try to raise your kids right. And then... something like this. It really makes you ask yourself, "Where did we go wrong?"

I mean, you don't complain when your kids sign onto your main and mail themselves a few gold, because after all, you remember when a few GP would have made all the difference in the world, and anyway, what's a gold or two? But this....

Maybe it's the tusks, and the horns. Running with a dangerous crowd. You have to admit, dark elf boys are kind of wuss. And let's not even talk about gnomes.

Or maybe it's part of the separation process. Getting away from your parents. For sure I can't ever visit her in the Undercity.

I guess it's just prejudice on my part.... And I suppose I'll just have to get over it.

But if she starts to date Undead... Well. Somewhere, you have to draw the line.

David Parlett recently posted The Arts of Contest on his site; it was written as an introduction for an exhibition of oriental games mounted by the Asia Society in 2004, but it well worth reading in its own right. In addition to a survey of the ideas of the folks beloved of game studies academics (Huizinga, Sutton-Smith, et al.), it provides Parlett's own definition of 'the game' (which not surprisingly is quite close to Salen & Zimmerman's -- formalists of a feather). There's also a bit of a survey of the history of asian games, but it's worth reading precisely because it's a concise and well written precis of a lot of the thinking behind game studies. I was particularly struck by this:

"Real games are played for fun: their goals and purposes are self-validating - that is, intrinsic to the fact of play itself rather than to those of everyday subsistence. Goal-directed activities may be called games in a metaphorical sense, but perhaps only to play down the element of danger, or to play up the unpredictability of outcome. What makes a game "real" rather than metaphorical is when the players agree that they are in fact playing a game and not using a gamelike procedure in pursuit of practical, functional ends. Real play comes to an end when its players report back to the real world."

A very clear discussion of what I tend to call the fictive nature of games.