My heart jumps as I write this — for know that I have crested the hill and come upon the cynical equivalent of Shambhala.

I have not thought of myself in this light for some time.  But I think, far from being hateful, the cynic must emerge to lay down some lines of lambast where it is strongly deserved.

I assure you I strive, especially these days as I have taken to investigating Buddhism, to be nice.  But thankfully Buddhism allows for ass-kicking where it is needed, both verbal and physical.  I don’t know if this is one of those ass-kickings — I don’t want to be so confrontational as this man’s fans.  But it is certainly designed to shed light on this dark corner of the internet wherein lurks something most disturbing.

Preface

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing I consider myself to be apart from a social group.  I certainly do not look it, though, I admit.  Left and right it is assumed I am a stoner or a hipster.  I don’t take offense to either because, normally, I get along fine with either group.  Most stoners are agreeable, open-minded folk.  And, uh, hipsters have introduced me to a lot of good music.

One thing I have never been confused for, is a politically active young person.  I have never to my knowledge been mistaken for a film student.  I am, in the fashion of some portion of videogame enthusiasts, just some guy who loves videogames.  I try my best to ascribe to nothing, take nothing for granted, hear both sides of a conversation.  The man who acts like a college student is not a man I’d like to talk to.  He plays pretend to contribute intellectually while he seeks some self-confirmation.  I have always done my best not to belong to that group, or any other.

Because belonging scares me.  It scares the shit out of me, it does.  Nationalism scares me, unquestioning faith in religion scares me, pride — even deserved –scares me.  The empty-headed defense of what is associated with the ego — what has been allowed to help define a personality and identity — terrifies me.  It promotes a narrow-minded and defensive point of view.

The Business

This morning Penny Arcade delivered a comic about a man whom I know nothing about.  Knew nothing about.  This man is Jesse Thorn.  He tells me that he is “America’s Radio Sweetheart” I have read his blog, watched his videos, and listened to his podcasts in the hopes of drawing a profile.

This guy is a big fucking deal.  This guy has his own convention.  This guy runs a radio show/podcast which is, I guess, just for people in their twenties who enjoy film and MAXIMUM FUN.  It is, I suppose, for those who would ascribe to the cultural maxim he pushes — “New Sincerity”.  I am at this point highly skeptical.

The Penny Arcade comic that led me into this rabbit hole seems to be confirmed.  This Jesse Thorn has, after some bot picked up mention of his name on Twitter, retweeted my comment “Hey Jesse Thorn — you are the embodiment of all that I hate and loathe in this world. Thanks.”

What followed was a short stream of tweets from people that I hate and loathe, ranging from the polite but creepy “think you’ve got the wrong idea about @youngamerican. He’s really a great interviewer, an awesome podcaster, and a rad guy.” to the scary and creepy “why the hate? Is it because Jesse is likable and funny? Is it because he works so hard? Or are you just a mean-spirited asshole?”

Wait — What?

This is apparently a joke.  It is still weird.

Yeah.  So.  I simply said, into the empty void of the internet which I throw my thoughts regularly, that this guy is nobody.  Let me explain.

What I loathe is a happy man.  A happy man who, when I shoot spitballs at him, turns and smiles.  He waves and calls me friend.  I have met people like Jesse Thorn, and he is apparently a figurehead for these sort of people in “Young America”.  I am stereotyping, of course — how else does one voice his opinion other than truthfully with his own bias.

I have a problem with this sort of man.  I do not have a problem with Jesse Thorn.  I don’t know — and don’t care — who this guy really is.  But I despise his persona, which is not new to me.  He prescribes — as some sort of authority — a cultural perspective to American twenty-somethings that promotes the sincere, unabated love of all things for what they are.  When this man wears a flannel jacket he does so not because of the irony associated with wearing a lumberjack pattern as a lanky young white hipster, he does so because he fucking loves flannel.  With the intellectual equivalent of a cheesy shit-eating grin he asks that his followers have no taste, that they consume without judging and appreciate for the sake that appreciation is nice.

I hate what this man represents in order simply to represent the stance that his ideas are stupid, and should not be followed.  Because they are stupid.  I am trying to be a bit absurdist and entertaining here, so excuse my use of the word stupid — replace it if you like with “nothing new and profoundly un-profound”.  I would proudly stand amongst the individuals who look at this confident “radio personality” with a knack for writing in uncomfortable and straight highschool-english, and I would proudly shout him down — especially because so many daft young people think he’s the cat’s asshole.

His podcast itself seems normal enough.  He speaks in a careful radio voice with a professor’s vocabulary and proceeds to ask his guests how awesome their stuff is.  Fine.  Whatever.  Keep doing that.

The Cult

In this video Jesse un-ironically investigates the exciting world of designer-fucking-denim-jeans.

I guess the real question is, at what point does some niche NPR-like young hipster cult of personality surrounding a balding public radio host who steeps his image with a method for absorbing media become not just oddball and totally fucking batshit wacky?  I suppose it was the moment that Penny Arcade found this guy, and others, upon learning more about it, are equally creeped out.

This is either me being a jerk or these are the very pangs of sanity.

Excuse me now, for the wild plaid-coated masses that are Jesse Thorn’s entourage slam their fists up against my Twitter feed.  I go now to fend off madness, and mad hipsters.

I’ll spare you the history but suffice it to say : I hate the guts out of hardcore mode.  It is an incorrect interpretation of a game, and a sad sign of the ironic continual retreat from arena shooters to what equate to insta-gib matches.  In a search for mil-sim realism the Call of Duty mod community has introduced and standardized a mode that promotes camping, twitch shooting and min-maxing.  At this point Modern Warfare’s hardcore mode makes the original Rainbow Six franchise look like Quake.

It took me this long to realize that I had lost touch with what Call of Duty was.  I was depressed that it had lost itself, and that this was no longer the game I wanted to play.  But I took the plunge back into normal mode, and I’m happy to say that the game is still there.

Players in Call of Duty operate as something that in no way resembles a soldier, especially since the Modern Warfare era began.  The CoD player is a predatory animal, a Jason Bourne on speed.  He sprints past his enemy, double takes and wheels around to snap at him with his ninja blade.  He runs down a corridor full of bullets and throws a grenade mid-leap, only to prone and open fire.  The CoD player is fueled by his own playlist, and he shoots from the hip.  The CoD player makes headshots happen with his iron sights.  The CoD player never stops running the arena like it was a Quake match.

Hardcore mode had me playing the game incorrectly, and I was angry because of it.  When a submachine gun can be a sniper rifle and an assault rifle at the same time, the game implodes.  Guns become chosen for their rate of fire, and scopes are used after firing has commenced, only pulled up for the accuracy bonus.  Players afraid for their lives take up positions in the maps with no elbow room.  In its attempt to make Call of Duty into Rainbow Six it makes it more ridiculous for the player behaviour it promotes.

Everyone I used to play with played hardcore.  They no longer play.  I suspect it is for similar reasons.  But for them, the frantic high speed absurdist arena play that is CoD normal is too freakish.  The behaviour required for good CoD play does not correspond with what the game looks like.  Seeing an SAS team run you over with dual glocks produces some cognitive dissonance.  It’s like seeing a clown play the violin.  It’s like seeing a garbage truck selling ice cream.  You expect a certain behaviour, but what is there is Quake on amphetamines.  With the right music and the right mindset, I can do it.  I still wish there was a real tactical shooter to play, but hardcore does not and will never scratch that itch.

The topic is really interesting to me, it’s about Gaming Beyond Gamers and how game theory and mechanics already are and can continue to be applied outside of video games.

Details can be found here and you can buy tickets here.

The coolest part is I will be sharing the stage with the likes of:

Steve Bocska

Steve is President of Pug Pharm Productions Inc., a company focusing on social networking online games. Steve is the past lead designer, producer, and executive producer at Disney Interactive, Black Box (E.A.), and Radical Entertainment respectively, and past-President and CEO of Hothead Games, winner of the Canadian New Media Association’s award for “Most Promising New Company of 2007”.

Ian Clark

Ian runs RealSpace, a local interactive 3D studio that utilizes video game technology to train people. This can range from simulating life threatening situations to everyday tasks.

Victor Lucas

Victor is creator, executive producer and co-host of “The Electric Playground”, creator and executive producer of one of the world’s first High Definition videogame TV series “The Art of Play” for Gameplay HD, and creator and Emmy-winning executive producer and host of “GameTap News”. Over the years he’s worked with partners including Activision, Sega, Kojima Productions, Bethesda, Disney and Warner Brothers.

Mark Magnusson

Mark is a User Experience & Creative Consultant with Magnus Media. With a 15 year career in digital media, Mark has helped clients win awards from the World Media Festival, Popvox Awards and The Webbys.

When I came of age to properly scour and explore the far reaches of the internet and establish favourite sites, I latched onto Penny Arcade.  But in the age of webcomics I was for a time restricted in my tastes to videogame related webcomics.  I had, through a friend, read The Perry Bible Fellowship, but no new comics are being produced on that front. So one day on Twitter I asked someone if there were any webcomics out there I had missed, not really expecting anything.  Immediately I was directed to http://wondermark.com/ and http://www.abominable.cc/.  The latter is a wonderfully drawn, sincerely written comic that attends to my adult comic needs.  The former is something that, like The Far Side, makes me grin if not laugh at every panel.

Wondermark, clearly, is what this post is about.  At some point I had foolishly established a separate blog here for my rantings that weren’t videogame related, but now my time is precious — so I’ll post whatever the hell I feel like here.  Just try and stop me!  The truth is that David Malki! (he insists on the exclamation), the creator and curator of Wondermark, has issued a challenge to bloggers — anyone who blogs about Wondermark before the end of November may get a free copy of one of his collections; Clever Tricks To Stave Off Death.  This sort of internet challenge requires one to perform, as a whore, and so I have openly complied to write about Wondermark.

It’s honestly not a challenge though.  I have a soft spot for comics like this; a good portion of my childhood was spent reading them — even reading them with friends and sharing the good jokes.  It makes me really happy to see that this new generation of human comic generators have found a place on the internet, to be supported openly by fans rather than through newspaper publishing deals and collection books alone.

So, what makes this Wondermark so special, anyhow.  Intriguingly it’s produced with a combination of editing old 19th century etchings and wood engravings and applying David Malki!’s sardonic, conversational wit.

An example can be found here: http://wondermark.com/557/

Additionally he uses alt tags (mouse over the comic) to add an afterthought.  In the case of the Lipton comic, he adds “We amass information mainly to keep it from our competitors.”

It’s the sort of sometimes dry, sometimes-too-silly ironic wisecracking that some people might get, but might still not like nonetheless.  But for some other people, every piece of it is eaten up like…like something delicious, to be eaten immediately with no questions asked.

Go eat enjoy some Wondermark.  And hopefully I will weasel a free book for myself.

Recently I was attempting to write a review for CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars — it’s a quality arena shooter with some new ideas that work well, and was released for XBLA on June 1st.  When I got to the point where I felt I had to stop and wrap things up with the conclusion, I froze.  Why should anyone buy it?  It’s a fun game, but nobody plays it online.  Of course they don’t — what sort of caveman would be so bereft of online shooters to invest time in a downloadable console arena shooter?

So why was it made?  I have no idea.  Surely it could have been foreseen that the players would not be there waiting for it.  Right?

It’s long been touted as a fact that demographics exist; these fuzzy statistical groups who help determine who a game is marketed to, and to some extent made for.  I don’t know much about that, and my stance is skeptical, but common sense alone at least dictates that fans of something will respond to fan service.  The Dawn of War franchise serves several different groups of fans that coagulate — Warhammer 40k fans, Real-Time Strategy fans, and Relic fans.  I like to think that, mixed in there somewhere, are “fans of awesome shit and big guns”, people who aren’t 40k fans but have been attracted to the IP through Dawn of War’s presentation.

To conceptualize that, I’d like to use the idea of a large single-celled organism — multiplayer gamers.  The organism is made up of many different elements; different sorts of fan groups with their own tastes.  Every so often when a new game is released some piece of the organism breaks off and becomes its own thing — its own community.  It will probably bring lots of different types of fans with it, but they’re all multiplayer gamers.

Thing is, this organism doesn’t just split down the middle for anyone.  If a game has enough gravitas it will cause a split — Dawn of War has grabbed a small chunk of the organism, while Call of Duty 4 has requisitioned for itself a very large part of it, which still cowers before the super-organism that WoW has since developed.

Yet games are made that have little influence over this organism of multiplayer gamers.  Section 8 sought to steal Tribes fans, but the servers are dead.  CellFactor was released into a void rather than into the writhing hands of fans.

You don’t have to be an established franchise to serve fans, by the way — fans existed before games did.  I’m not sure anyone is a fan of generic, middling science fiction and nameless gunmetal machineguns, but make a game about zombies and you’ve got a starting point.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shame that some creators seem to be unaware of this multiplayer organism, because most of these games are good if not great.  I believe even a small community can foster a game and its developer.

As a kid I spent hours playing Raven’s Soldier of Fortune II, playing in clan ladder matches and playing as a regular on several clan servers.  It was at a time when, to my peer group, the choice was simply Counter-Strike.  I chose to devote more time to SoF II, along with thousands of others to Counter-Strike’s hundreds of thousands.  The community persisted for some time and I believe that sort of following helped solidify Raven as a quality developer in the eyes of fans and other developers.  Even if it turns out they didn’t make a fortune, they survived and with good marks.

Soldier of Fortune II served a niche, that’s for sure.  That niche was probably filled with different fans; maybe it was as generic as “online shooter fans”, but these certain people were attracted.  Me and my clanmates shared a definite love of the game’s level of violence, dismemberment, randomly generated maps, weapons with kick, and cutthroat arena-shooter speed.  We all gushed over it — it was made just for us.

Now, Section 8 was made for Tribes fans — maybe Battlefield fans in actuality.  But it failed to be a better version of those games; the quality here still matters, and so does market saturation.  Battlefield fans have a Battlefield game to play right now — your game will not get those players.  As for Tribes fans, you will not get those players if you don’t live up to their high expectations, if you don’t really aim to be a Tribes-like game.  Section 8 served fans a lukewarm meal while someone else had already prepared a hot meal for them.

Fans are out there, and I want to believe they’re eager to split off and find new games, to join new communities and learn new rules; get better at new games.  I believe all gamers want this.  Don’t give them something fake, find a real niche/demographic/group of fans and attack it — more importantly the developers should be part of that niche, working to fill it.  That’s when the best games are made, you can tell.  Multiplayer games require more time and investment than a single player experience, so it has to be something especially special and it has to last.

Developers should not be wasting themselves on games that people, honestly, are never going to play in the current or predicted multiplayer environment.  Woe is the multiplayer arena shooter who competes with Call of Duty for multiplayer mindshare.  But Left 4 Dead will survive, and so will Red Orchestra, Counter-Strike and I’d like to think Dawn of War.  Because those are fans that wanted something and got it, and they don’t feel like leaving yet.

But as I turn the lights back on and dust this place off, an online acquaintance is gearing up for an independent project.  Borut Pfeifer (of Plush Apocalypse fame) departed EALA some time ago and is bravely setting out on his own as an indie developer.  Or so he hopes.  I have no idea what his budget concerns are, but I would suppose he’s going to have to hire an artist along with having to support himself.

He’s using a funding platform called Kickstarter to put all this together, and he’s counting on at least 15,000 bucks by December 10th.  If you can find the time and the cash, give this man a hand.  He deserves it.

Here’s some info on the game he’s planning to create, which is of the serious variety:

“The game is set in Tehran, Iran, during the post-election riots that took place this summer. You play a father and mother looking for their lost daughter, amidst crowds of protesters and police. It’s a puzzle/action game, set from a 3/4 overhead perspective in 2D. Characters on the street will react to the father and mother differently (because of their gender). You have to get past the obstacles of crowds and police barricades taking into account these differences, sneaking past police, and occasionally having to fight or avoid violence. The game is meant to be about 2 hours of play, downloadable via PC and Xbox.”

You can donate here.

When my older neighbour showed me the secret flute levels in SMB 3, the ones with the ships and the lava, I was blown away.  It was a magical thing.  I played through a lot of that game, but I was very inconsistent.  My early brain didn’t grasp the core concepts; sometimes I blew past level 2 and sometimes I had to give up out of frustration.

One time I rented a combat flight sim for the NES.  I think I saw a plane once.  I spent the rest of the night barreling endlessly through a  depthless blue sky, sitting in a badly rendered cockpit.  I didn’t know what to think.

When I was old enough to graduate to our family’s old Mac (which was something like eleven years older than me) I finally, after grueling diplomacy, had secured for myself a copy of Warcraft II.  The older kids on my street all played it, and I was ecstatic.  I waited several hours for the game to install on the computer.  I then started up the world editor, thinking it was the game (this was my first time installing a computer game) and ended up “playing it” for about an hour.  I realized something was up.  This looked like the game, but there was some essential functionality missing.  There was no attacking, units did not move from point A to B (only when I moved them there, as per the editor’s rules), and surely nothing was fighting against me.

After some time I found the actual game.  Clearly, it became “my game”.  My first game to fully figure out, I think.  I learned the tech tree, unit costs and which spells did what.  I became pretty adept at beating the computer.  I was not even aware that it had multiplayer capabilities, but I was happy with it.  Even so, eventually I stopped playing.  I moved on to Age of Empires II and Unreal Tournament, and proceeded to figure them out.

Shadow Complex has led me to this nostalgia, because it brings me back to that sense of mystery and bewilderment.  I never played the Metroid/Castelvania games as a kid, so I don’t associate it with those respective tropes.  But it has brought to might the sense of mystery that used to bind me to games, and that led me to view them as very big things.  Because of my ineptitude at Star Tropics I inferred that, surely, it must be an endless world.  Looking back it must have been a very short game when compared to today’s norm.

I find myself backtracking, checking my map with a wrinkled brow, retrying areas over and over trying to figure out “the way” to pass the test.  I feel lost but powerful and capable as well.  I hope I never attain the completionist’s knowledge of the game and lose my sense of awe.

It is strange that this is considered “old school” game design.  Surely it is part of World of Warcraft’s artificially extended world.  I wish other games would consider tricking their players rather than putting them on track to “play along”.  It breaks my heart when I’m surrounded by urban detritus and see that rubble piles block all routes of movement besides “the path”.

To be timely for a second, I’m also ready to be somewhat disappointed with Halo ODST.  I’d rather the open world be the entire game, with new missions to accommodate it.  Instead the bulk of the game, as I understand it, will be played through “flashbacks” in the traditional Halo mission style.  Frankly I’d find it a relief to just get lost in a dark city, in enemy territory, all alone and trying to find my way back to the rest of the boys.  I’d like to just do that, for a change.  What I don’t want to do is jump in a tank and go to point B where I will fight bad guys until they stop coming.  I just played that out in my head, cut together from past experiences.  The shooting will be fun, yes.  But I have done that already, that mission.  I know the outcome most certainly.

Should it not be some tenet of game design to keep your players “in the magic circle”, unawares of your machinations?  Should it not become more important in sequels?  That’s not a knock against Halo ODST; it’s a convenient example and I can’t wait to play it for other reasons.  I just want some of that wonderment back.

I’m a thousand miles above the Coral Sea in a P-51 Mustang.  It’s a slow, heavily armoured bulldog of a fighter outfitted with more .30 .cal machineguns than you can shake a fist at.  I’m so high because of the physics of dogfighting; we’re in an air dominance war with Japanese Zeroes, they’re much lighter and can out-climb us.

So while my mates circle below me, small as flies, I’m upside down craning my view down through my cockpit searching for Zeroes.  When I spot one coming over the first mountain from their carriers I put my game face on.  I bring my view back down to stop looking through the top of my cockpit window and I cut the engines.  With no thrust I don’t have to manoeuvre and can enter a freefall dive.  After I right myself I gun the engines, but lightly, to position myself above my prey.  He has no idea what is about to happen.  As I dive I fly on a curve to slow myself down but keep my momentum going — slowing down in a dogfight will always get you killed, but going too fast will make you useless as you fly past enemies.  Because I’ve come down from behind, this chap has his sights set on my flyboys who are getting the business done on fair terms.  But right now, fair isn’t my game.

I spin this way and that as he does in order to get a fix on him and swoop with him, so I can get on his tail and blast him out of the sky.  I only need a few seconds.  Well, I only have a few seconds.  Once he realizes I’m here he’ll start jinking and I’ll have to follow him to get the kill — giving his guys time to gun me down as I awkwardly manoeuvre to catch him.  So I need to do this right, especially after all that time climbing, searching, and diving.  But I manage to remain calm.  This sucker is mine.  I can feel it.  I get on his tail as he swoops by a mountain, hoping I’m not close enough yet to show up as an enemy flyer on his HUD.  But he doesn’t juke, just keeps flying forward, climbing just a bit.  I climb with him and squeeze off bursts, careful not to overheat my guns, just above him.  He rises right into my stream of tracers and a second later his fuselage explodes as I fly through the twisting wreckage, victorious.

I jink and flip and fly low over the water, then twist around a mountain and climb.  I don’t know if his friends saw me, but I have to fly as if they did.  I need to make my getaway.  I get my answer as tracers fly too close to my cockpit.  Knowing I can’t out-climb a Zero I twist and enter a dangerously fast dive.  I pull up, almost too slowly against the momentum, and come up just above the water.  No more tracers.  I fly over one of our friendly carriers to patch up some of the small hits I took during my run and then climb again with Red Baron aspirations.

Now the people who surround me (literally and in my life in general) are more or less jaded.  That’s not only a bad thing — in some cases it could be considered part of the job description.  What struck me today was the general blase attitude of my compatriots towards the announcement of a Monk class for Diablo III.  I’m not a fanboy by far (I never played it quite enough to claim that) but frankly I’m dazzled by the production quality and the “something extra” that Blizzard sprinkles into its games.  People might think my amusement is a conscious choice; a wilful ignorance towards a property I know is nothing special, surrounded by so much pomp — because I might want to enjoy it to the fullest by shielding myself.  But that’s not what’s going on.

Evil Dead.  I love it.  I love the camp, I love Bruce Campbell, and the awesomeness of slick shotgun fights is such that I’m willing to ignore the fact that there can’t be enough ammo in that shotgun to spew out all that whoopass.  But it’s not ignorance that drives my grinning love for it — it’s love of the genre.  It applies to me; was made for me.  Regardless of its status among other cult films or film in general, the Evil Dead movies are something special for me.  The same thing goes for old zombie movies in particular, there’s some charm in the low budget attempt at social commentary through horror that is comforting, and makes it easy to watch if not exceptionally entertaining.

This is why I still, to some extent, adore what Gears of War is.  To many people it’s a bunch of juvenile meathead fantasy, but to me it’s a flawless execution of an adrenaline-powered fever dream.  It’s something genre redefining not because of any innovation but because of its re-imagining of the utterly generic.  I think it takes bolder creators to add their own take to an old and worn out stereotype than to create something new — because there is always the (rightly applied) excuse that it’s new, so go easy on it.  It’s the start of something — it’s rough.  Redefining a genre is about roughing up an old dog and getting him to use a shotgun, screw old tricks.  It’s not pretentious and when it is serious it comes off as cheesy, which when applied conciously comes off as genuine.

Now Diablo III is powered by a hype machine and cradled by a seething mass of waiting fans — but that’s no reason to hate it.  Those fans are anxious because that game is made for them.  Stop picking apart the numbers, the people want it because of the execution — the remaking and updating of something they haven’t yet stopped loving.  After all, games are about execution of content, not the idea of the content.  To that end, sometimes the execution is what people love first and the content second, and both above newness.

It burns a hole in my chest when people give a lazy-eyed look when I mention the Monk is a class in Diablo III.  They can’t be excited about it, whether they’re being overly reductionist or they can’t like it on the basis that it’s a popular rpg with no chance of commercial failure.  I have no beef with people who just plain aren’t into it — they have their own genres they’re fervent about.  But there are a good chunk of very intelligent people out there who, in shaping themselves as analytical creatures, can’t think laterally to understand what the factor of attachment is that ties people to their genres.

As some of you may know I am now the multiplayer dev tester for Dawn of War II at Relic.  This blog will remain separate from all that, but I think this deserves some more attention — we’ve just launched the There is Only War update which patches the game from v1.32 to v1.5.  The multiplayer game has been completely rebalanced.  Check out the release notes here.