Dear Computer:

It is with a sorrowful and guilt-ridden heart that I pen to you these words, words that I thought I never would myself utter: I am now the owner of an Xbox 360. It entered my home two months prior, and was gifted to me by my very sweet and kindly mother as a Christmas gift. However, that is not to say that this new console was unexpected or undesired; rather, I directly asked her for one, and had been saving money to purchase one had she not complied with my Christmas wishes. The blame for allowing a new Microsoft console to enter my home lies entirely on my shoulders.

And I am very sorry, personal computer.

But you have changed, dear computer, and I fear not for the better. I am not entirely sure that this was your fault – but I am not in the blame-fingering business. Rather, I’m in the game-fing .. nevermind. I just play games and write about them. Following are a list of complaints that I feel no choice but to levy against you, and I present them here in the hopes that you might address some of them and return to your former glory.

Inclusive vs. exclusivity: My chief complaint, one that has existed for what seems now a decade since I purchased my first computer that did not belong to my parents’, is the nature of your economic status. You are far too expensive.

I understand that the components that make you the monstrous beast that you are do not come cheaply, either in fabrication or design. I understand that your components, when intelligently decided upon and laboriously installed, can provide a vastly more graphic-rich experience than any console can. However, even with these understandings, I feel that you still cost too much money.

To build you, Ataxia, I spent a thousand dollars. I saved money for a long time so that I might construct you, and you did not disappoint; but still, you cost me a thousand dollars, and that is a great deal of money – particularly when compared to the two primary consoles on the market now, the Xbox360 and the Playstation 3, both of which can be owned for $300.

Although the cost of the guts of my computing machine are a good launching point, they aren’t my only concern with the exclusivity of the personal gaming computer. Following close behind is the level of technical expertise required to even use the damn thing. While installing a game and playing it is, generally, simpler now than it ever has been, this is not always the case. For the non-PC-tech-nerd, getting games to work can be quite the chore; does my PC meet the hardware requirements? Check. Have my video and audio drivers been updated recently? Check. Are there sufficient system resources free to play the game after I’ve met the other requirements? Check. So .. why is it still running slowly? How come some of the polygons are stretched across the screen, and why the hell can I not connect to this Borderlands multiplayer game? Dear Ataxia, you are far too difficult to make work.

I could have just bought a new console.

A gaming console would have allowed me to bypass all of this forced education (although I am thankful for it, I cannot help but wonder how many people were turned off from PC gaming as a result), and would have saved me a great deal of money over the years.

Sure, the games are more expensive – $10 more, on average, for a new AAA title – but at least I could have bought them used, dear Ataxia, which is something that you still do not allow me to do. I understand why – because games are much easier to copy and pirate with a computer – but this has resulted only in me spending less cashmoney on games than I would have otherwise.

Sure, I’ve /played/ a great many new games over the years – but I haven’t bought many. I’ve been a poor college student for as long as I can remember, and my budget barely affords me enough to smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer, let alone own new videogames. Instead, I’ve been forced to turn to somewhat more illicit forms of attaining new games – although I’d much rather have purchased used copies at discounted rates.

Instead of allowing me this option, PC game manufacturers, you decided instead to force a series of ever-larger and more invasive forms of DRM down my throat. Remember the Bioshock debacle, in which the game could initially only be installed three times – ever? Or the pain that comes with installing an old favorite game, only to realize that the CD key was missing – and therefore could not be played without purchasing a new copy? Instead of wrestling with the ethics of funding draconian DRM schemes and painstakingly charting the location of all of my CD keys, there would have been – and is – a far simpler solution -

I could have just bought a console.

Granted, piracy remains a major (-ly contentious) issue on the PC. People just don’t want to pay for stuff, but they certainly want to play stuff. But really .. I’m curious, how many fewer games would I have pirated had I been able instead to walk down to the rental store nearby and rent the game I knew I only wanted to play for a few days? The developer’s get their cut from the original game purchase, the rental place gets their cut from my rental, and I get to play the game for an evening for a few dollars. I believe they call this a good value proposition.

Alternatively, I could have purchased some of those games used. Sure, it might generally not be worth the cost of purchasing a used game – Gamestop just loves gouging their customers on them – but they’re certainly a cheaper option that buying the game new, or even over Steam. Unfortunately, DRM schemes, CD keys, and internet activation completely preclude my ability to do so.

What’s more, owning a console – which I am surprisingly more proud of owning than I thought I would be – enables me to play a much wider variety of game. Granted, the PC will likely always be the master of a certain type of game title – the MMO, the sim game, and the RTS/RPG game – but much of the industry has shifted from spending cashmoney to develop titles like these, and have instead focused on more action-oriented games that are better suited to consoles. Even some long-time PC developers, like Peter Molynuex and Epic Games – seem to be developing for consoles only.

The first Fable remains one of my favorite gaming experiences; sure, it had problems, but the thing was so damned charming

Thus far, Fable 2 has been my favorite gaming experience of the last several months.

Yes, I know that I am two years behind. But you didn’t really expect a website about drinking beer and playing games to stay up to date, did you? Oh. Maybe I should work on that.

But even when console releases come to the PC, they’re often ports – and very often bad ones. I understand that not all of the numbers and lines and codes align quite perfectly, but the quality of some ports is absolutely inexcusable. Would patching in real mouse support for the menus be so terribly difficult? Final Fantasy XI was a wonderful example of this; the second-greatest strength of the PC, the mouse/keyboard control scheme, was entirely negated in favor of pressing keyboard buttons to move through menu options, on selection at a time. Although the mouse could be used, the inputs were so laggy that they were actually slower than using the console-style menu manipulation method. That this is at all excusable is astounding to me – but then, having bought both of these games, I find that I am entirely complicit, so I ought to close my beerhole.

Perhaps most indicative of the problems with where PC gaming has gone is the terribly sad case of Modern Warfare 2. Many of the other virtues of PC versions vs. console versions were entirely removed from MW2; dedicated servers, a console, player administration over servers, and, most importantly, the ability to mod the game. Simply put: Infinity Ward released a console game on the PC, and ensured that it played /exactly the same way as the console version/. While not necessarily a bad thing on its own, the ability for players to change the nature of the game to meet a broad variety of playstyles is arguably the greatest strength of the PC – Half-Life would have been a great single-player game, but would any of us be the same without Counterstrike? The enormous plethora of mods and new maps generated by the players in many games have ensured the game was popular and played for far longer than their contemporaries – and yet, some developers, like Infinity Ward, seem to believe that this is a bad thing. To damn the issue even further, Modern Warfare 2 was released as a $60 PC game. To get the same experience -

I could have just bought a console.

And so I did. Well, my mother did, and then she gave it to me. Street Fighter IV plays online brilliantly, with essentially zero setup time. Fable 2 taunts and charms me regularly with beauty and an abundance of cleverness. Modern Warfare 2 .. well, that game didn’t get much play, as I’m not that sort of gamer really. The thing streams music and movies to my television from my PC without flaw, and the Xbox shell operates seamlessly and without pause – something I’ve never been able to say about Windows.

So please, dear computer: remember the stuff that made you awesome, and at least try and return to it. Until then, well .. you can call me Salad Dodger, and I’ll be in Albion.

I hadn’t much interest in coming back to Warcraft. I had invested what I consider obscene amounts of time into a variety of characters, and untold hours of social interaction had been lost as a result (not to mention potential job and education opportunities). But this new system, the LFG System as it has come to be called, sparked a renewed interest in me, as one of the chief problems with WoW when I had left before was simply being able to find a suitable group for a dungeon when time presented itself to play. If the promise of the LFG System worked, this problem would be entirely alleviated.

Almost immediately after renewing my subscription (actually, activating the seven-day trial), I realized that the system more than delivered on its promise. Seris, whom I’d left at level 75, was inside of a dungeon with strangers within moments of logging in, and seconds after exclaiming “Hay guys!,” she was slaying a variety of presumably evil monsters and fully succumbing to the promise of easy-access rewards.

At the time, I wasn’t quite aware of what those rewards really were. Emblems of Something or Other, the small currency bits rewarded upon the completion of heroic-difficulty dungeons – more difficult version of normal dungeons – were doled out regularly and easily, and could be turned in for a variety of awesome armor, trinkets, and jewelry. This much I remember from the previous expansion. What I also remembered from the previous expansion was how painfully long it took to acquire them, and the slow process of attaining upgrades from them – as well as their somewhat lack of variety.

But things are different now; there are not only dozens of options of Emblem items, most of which quite good, but there are, and I cannot stress the importance of this enough, dozens of opportunities to attain these Emblems. A run through a heroic dungeon, with each boss granting an emblem, grants an average of three emblems per dungeon – but each LFG System group also rewards the player with an extra two Emblems, as well as a bag of gold. With Emblem items ranging from costing thirty to seventy-five, and fifty emblems attainable in a mere few hours, getting awesome gear became almost painfully easy – alleviating one of the major issues with The Burning Crusade.

Although WoW is in a better state now than it has ever been, particularly for the casual player without time to dedicate to raid, I can’t help but find some aspects of this system troubling. An idea that I’ve subscribed to for quite a long time is that WoW is the arcade version of other online games; things are faster-paced, more straightforward, and often simpler than in other online games, and I believe that this is, in a large way, responsible for the game’s overwhelming success.

The LFG System has further emphasized this arcade nature of WoW over other games, and has, I believe, diminished the single best aspect of Warcraft; that of the social. No longer do players need to cultivate a good reputation to ensure invitations into groups, as what happens inside of groups generated by the LFG System are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. This is because any given group might consist of five players from five different realms whom, in addition to not having encountered one another previously, are effectively barred from ever doing so again. This entirely precludes the need for common courtesy and the forging of friendships; although people are, in general, pretty decent, there is very rarely any actual social interaction between them. The five come together for a particular task, namely the crawling through of a dungeon, and disband immediately after. Aside from making jokes and explaining encounters to players new to the dungeon, there is little reason to attempt to cultivate new friendships.

Which, really, is what made WoW shine so brightly for me when it was released. Within hours of the servers coming online, my room mates

DOS Command grew in this fashion until it eventually merged with another guild, and then later developed into an entirely different guild dedicated towards raiding the high-end content of the game. While the guild was never quite on the bleeding-edge of progression, we did quite well for ourselves, and I still consider many of the players I was involved with to be among my closest of friends, favored over many of the people that I know in real life.

I do not believe that I am unique in this regard; to use another entirely anecdotal example, my brother followed a similar path in Warcraft, and some of his closest real-life friends he actually met in the World of Warcraft. I’ve met them too, but his personality is more compatible with theirs than is mine. But then, I tend to be an antisocial prick sometimes, so this isn’t terribly surprising for me. Moving along.

So then – it appears, to me, that Warcraft has traded this wonderful element of potential social cohesion, which arises from small groups of strangers banding together to defeat the Sons of Arugal and results in what I hope to be lifelong friendships, for easier access to the rewards of ever-increasing numbers, to use Kieron Gillen’s perspective on online games.

The LFG System has seemed to have an impact on the isolated community of my server as well; sure, people are more geared and perhaps playing more than ever, but they’re doing so often without their friends. Although entering the LFG System with friends can make the process easier (guaranteed access to an effective tank, healer, DPS, etc.), it is by no means necessary and seems to add an extra layer of complication to the dungeon-running, Emblem-acquiring process. Sure, Seris will group with guildmates for quick runs (as you can enter the system with a full group of your pals), but this does nothing to alleviate the problem of not being able to make new friends in the process.

I think that the other aspect of this problem – of furthering Warcraft as essentially an arcade-game MMO – is the nature of content and what it has come to mean. (The labeling of hard-mode difficulty dungeons as “Heroic” is highly indicative of this issue, but I’ll return to that shortly.) Generally speaking, the first time or two that I entered a dungeon I hadn’t been to before, my eyes were wide with what new treasures and encounters would be found within. Fights were challenging, bosses were something to be taken seriously, and the dungeon was a reward unto itself.

However, Blizzard has created a system in which these dungeons are not in any way a reward unto themselves – they’re merely an obstacle that must be overcome to acquire the real reward, which are Emblems of Something or Other. This might not be true to the leveling individual, but is most certainly true for players at level 80 entering exclusively into heroic-mode difficulty dungeons. Damage classes with insufficient gear are ejected by vote, as well as tanks without X health points, or healers without X level of mana. The actual experience of the dungeon is rendered entirely irrelevant, and is instead something to be pushed through as quickly and efficiently as possible – and essentially something that is never to be enjoyed or savored. Certain dungeons, like the Occulus, actually trigger a response in many players that ought to be anathema to designers – they immediately leave the instance, willing to accept a 15-minute penalty before they can enter the LFG System queue because they despise the dungeon so thoroughly. As an aside, I find it one of the more interesting dungeons; players have to ride around on dragons and use an entirely new set of abilities, but because this takes a bit longer than other dungeons, players refuse to even participate.

“With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn’Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters. In addition, a couple of the stagnant groups of bad dudes between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar will be removed, while some of the roaming groups will have their pathing altered. These changes are not to make this instance easier, but rather to make it a slightly quicker run and more in line with some of the other Wrath dungeons.”

In other words, this change isn’t being made to make the dungeon more interesting, more entertaining, or more in line with the difficulty of other dungeons – but simply to make it faster, to lower the wall in front of the player to achieve their rewards. The actual object of the instance, the progress through it slaying spider-things and their overlords because they are evil, and even just simply to have fun, is marginalized in favor of how bloody long it takes. As an aside, this dungeon takes about twenty-five to thirty minutes, compared to fifteen to twenty minutes for other heroic dungeons. Entertainingly, and perhaps damningly, these dungeons, not played for their challenge or lore or entertainment but the speed at which rewards can be achieved, are called heroic.

Still, I am conflicted. I get to do more of the stuff that I love – hurting monsters with swords and killing bosses to get bigger swords – than ever before, and the process is more streamlined than it ever has been. At the same time, the other key component of online games (for me, anyway) – social interaction and making new pals – is almost entirely removed from the gameworld. It’s a difficult struggle; I feel more engaged than ever before (thanks not only to the LFG System but to a plethora of other improvements to the game), and yet I feel more socially isolated than ever before.

I’m not sure if there are many other players that feel similarly about this. A resurgence of old-school guilds with old-school players engaging in the game casually has allowed the social element – at least in guilds – to remain. Perhaps those players are content not to make new friends by playing with them, and to rather keep close those ones they’ve had for years.

How about myself? Well – I don’t know. The claws of the Lich King seem to have wrapped themselves around my greedy, big-number-loving throat, while my heart weeps at the loss of new and engaging social interaction outside of /trade while simultaneously praising my brains for letting it hang out in private chat lobbies with old Warcraft friends. Which will win out?

I’ll think about it later, as my LFG System queue just popped and more Emblems are calling.

And then, immediately after, I realized that it wasn’t – at least, not in terms of what Arntor (that Windir album) does for the theme of the evening. Arntor is an album of dualities, and often ones of polar extremes. Among the most aggressive and screechy of [very] late-90’s black/folk metal, Arntor was nonetheless painted to a canvas of enormous complexity and artistry that can be as blunt as a sledgehammer and delicate as, well, the finesse with which my room mate can pull off a cross-pass scoring goal in FIFA 10. It is this artistry and finesse that I think unites the two and distinguishes it from more American music and past times, such as football and Slipknot.

So: folk metal, 40oz, and FIFA 10 – they all go quite well together. Inseperably well together, as FIFA 10 is a game about isolated, beautiful moments of synchronization that are entirely amplified by the effects of the alcohol. The surprise interception followed by a fast-paced goal-scoring breakaway. The feeling of handling a complex passing situation flawlessly, and finding yourself balls-deep in the goal net with little opposition from the keeper. You know the sort of moments – those ones that memorialize the ridiculously awesome plays of a game’s history, the ones that every fan has seen in the form of some compilation or another. Generally, I am uninterested in these things, but somehow, inexplicably to me, FIFA 10 makes these moments shining and glorious for me. (Even though my room mate is almost always the one on the winning side of such encounters.)

A bit of disclosure, though: I’ve played FIFA 10 exclusively in LAN multiplayer mode with my room mate, so that will predictably color my thoughts on it. However, I’m a bit of the opinion that the function of any arena-based game like this – and any sports game is, by definition, an arena game when it migrates to vidscreen-and-controller status – is to facilitate competition between two (or more) human opponents. Sure, npc-type opponents can be present, but the focus ought always be on the humanoid. It is unlikely that this is an at all fair way to approach FIFA 10, however, as it was pretty clear to me that a fleshed-out LAN experience was not the intention of Electronic Arts. At least, I really hope it wasn’t.

For all of the successes of the actual gameplay of FIFA 10, such as seemingly faithful modeling the flow of a professional soccer game that my room mate is so fond of praising, essentially no framework exists in the LAN multiplayer that would make this experience a cohesive and fulfilling experience. While the single player game has options to create and edit plays, players, and teams as well as the actual behaviors of each of the these, the player in a LAN game is allowed to create a team and choose between home or away colors. Formations can’t even be changed in this mode; you’re permanently stuck with the formation that is defaulted to the team. Although I was not expecting stat-tracking for LAN games, it still would have been nice, although it does appear that these are collected when signed onto EA’s servers with the game.

The controls of FIFA 10, at least with around 10 games played, remain confusing in and of themselves even – and perhaps most especially – during gameplay. Most of the jubilation of actually performing one of the miracle-type sort of plays is knowing that I somehow got the ball and the player to go exactly where I wanted them to, even though I’m never quite sure how I managed to. There are two bogeymen at fault here; the way the game determines the direction the ball will be kicked, and the way the game determines how hard you wanted to kick the ball.

Determining shot strength is perhaps even more painfully delicate, and this mostly seems due to the fact that different measures are used for different sorts of kicks. For example, the level of force needed to execute an effective cross-pass is much higher than the level of force needed to shoot an effective shot on the goal from the same distance. Although this need for precision and multiple sets of power measures may suit some of the more hardcore fans out there, I found it an enormous turnoff.

These complaints aside – FIFA 10 is great fun, especially when played next to a friend and near a large bottle of beer. It’s quite easy to get caught up in the adrenaline-moments of the game and lose track of how loudly you shout when you finally pull off that elusive goal (sorry, Landlord Mary), as well as the intensity of your taunts to your room mate. A rather well-done instant replay features allows for the reliving of beautiful moments or vicious slide tackles, and provides a great capstone for an otherwise overly positive experience.

Game scoring stuff can be found here.

And then there are games like Risen, for whom boss encounters seem inevitable but somehow alien to the experience. Having just completed Risen, I found it to be one of the finer open-world RPG games I’ve played in awhile – and it was brutally difficult, often punishing a slight mistake with a player death. For me, that level of difficulty made the game engaging – for the majority of the game, I felt like I was the weakling shipwreck survivor that the plot told me I was. After tens of hours digging through ruins and working my way up the monster badass food chain, I eventually felt – both through getting damn good at sword play and attaining the sweet loot of the ancient world – that I could kill anything on the island.

It was at this final moment that the trouble with boss encounters began to plague Risen. The sweeping majority of the game is spent fighting beast-type monsters or humanoid-type monsters, with the latter carrying weapons and the former using tooth, claw, and brute force. Each of the variants demanded a different approach; wolves and stingrats require a shield to block, guys with swords quite effective parrying and lunging, and ashbeasts require well-timed dodging and precision strikes with large weapons, as shields are useless against them. For the most part, this system worked well – it required a flexibility on my behalf that wasn’t usually immediately obvious, and only trial and error could defeat various enemies.

Even the very first beast encountered – an evil, cruel-looking and overlarge sea-vulture – was initially challenging. Blind, over-aggressive swinging resulted in pecked-out eyes and blood on the sand. Wolves, when attempted without a shield, lead to being killed while trying desperately to parry. Hell, even gnomes – which look astonishingly creepy – were enormously difficult initially.

And they really are depressed and angry – the vast majority of interactable NPCs encountered are assholes, often cursing at you and occasionally picking fights with you. Their attitude never quite seems forced and never quite feels trite – often, it simply feels believable, which is quite a testament to the writers over at Piranha Bytes. Most people were believable with what seemed to be legitimate struggles. Surprisingly – mostly because it seems to happen so rarely – I never quite felt like somebody’s bitch when I was off running errands for them, and my taking up of their quests often seemed the best thing to do. Not just because of the potential for a reward, but rather because it sounded fun.

While there didn’t seem to be a great deal of optional, side-quest type stuff to Risen, the quests presented had just the right amount of variety, mood, and adventuring to keep me thoroughly engaged throughout. Often, I was more interested in questing for people more to see what they would do than how it would benefit me. Some were entirely social; solving a murder in the Volcano Monastery meant interrogating monks, digging up graveyards, and even becoming a drug dealer. One notably long quest required the befriending of a bar maid, an imprisoned lord, uncovering a smuggling operation and, finally, traipsing around the island with a treasure map, digging up the bodies of mutineers. Although these quests were ultimately of the “Go here, find item, bring it back” variety, my reasons for undergoing these quests were varied enough that it didn’t seem problematic or, more importantly, at all boring.

Scoring can be found here.

As part of my videogame analysis and criticism course, this week’s readings focused on violence, racism, and sex in video games.  Two of the readings, which focus on violence and sex, were mostly from the mouths of game developers; they can be found here. Although these three issues are clearly contentious and controversial in gaming – from all perspectives, including that of the player, creator, and parent of the player – none of the readings, and indeed almost none of the readings I’ve done in this field, actually relate to how these games view women.  Predominantly, I’m finding, as sexual objects, often devoid of the personality found in their male counterparts in the same game.

I found the What They Play piece paricularly disturbing considering that  it addressed sex inside of videogame worlds and narratives, and focused directly on the act rather than the participants as if it were some sort of Roman arena game and the participants unworthy of notice by the spectators as being “people.” Is the sexual act – both as an “unchanging” thing from game to game and the detail in which it is rendered – really the only thing worthy of exploration in a piece like this? I do not think so.

Mass Effect contained a sex scene which generated enormous amounts of controversy. However, as I did not play Mass Effect long enough to develop a sexual relationship, I cannot comment on it directly – but I can comment on what I have experienced. To do this, I look to three games that have captured my attention in recent months, and the suggestions that they make about sexual relationships, those games being The Witcher, Risen, and Champions Online. (Note: Champions Online doesn’t seem to actually have sex acts inside of it, but I am interested in it as far as it portrays physical characteristics of women.)

To begin: The Witcher. A dark, brooding, and often difficult action-RPG game from the eastern side of Europe, The Witcher follows the path of Geralt, a monster hunter, in his quest to figure out what in the hell is going on with the world. While a rather great game on its own that I enjoyed immensely, its treatment of women as sexual objects is nothing less than childish. So childish, in fact, that when Geralt conquers a woman – often by way of showering her in gifts and complements without actually developing any sort of real relationship – a trading-card-style piece of artwork is shown of the woman in an often comprimising position. By comprimising, I mean draped in nothing but a sheet with a black cat centered directly over her crotch. By childish, well -

Although the actual sexual act is shown in blurry, hasty camera shots that reveal no actual details about the act, the process of getting to the act is perhaps more disturbing than anything the act itself could be. Encountering a woman in The Witcher is tantamount to initiating a mini-game; the first question tends to be, “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” followed by (assuming that the answer was ‘yes’), “How can I get her to fuck me?” The second question is relevant because each woman seemed to have a particular path that must be followed to convince them to engage in coitus; as mentioned above, some women seek gifts, like flowers or chocolate. Some require a topical, conversational relationship and can be rhetorically convinced to disrobe and engorge. Others require Geralt to undertake a quest of sorts, and reward him with fleshy trophies and a trading card.   (Here is a link to a video with all of the sex cards.)

My language concerning the first question asked when encountering a woman is important and intentional: “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” I feel the most crass language is necessary here, as the object here isn’t even getting to potentially see a naked lady: rather, it’s a mission to collect a trophy. In a game genre dominated by item-collection, little more can be expected when the player is given a trading card for a sexual conquest.

In a similar vein as The Witcher, the recent Pirahna Bites’ game Risen treats women similarly, although doesn’t objectify them quite as literally. For example, as written about by Alec Meer on Rock, Paper, Shotgun , the first woman – and the first NPC the player encounters – is dressed in a bikini top and a long skirt. To quote Meer, “At this earliest of stages, I don’t have the foggiest what the game’s general attitude to women is – but the first example Risen gives of it is not a positive one[,]” and I found that upon finding myself in this situation that I absolutely agreed.

of which lacked women altogether with one notable exception), and found that women exist in quantity only in the whorehouse. Whether it was out of curiosity or chauvenism, I solicitied one of the prostitutes, paying her owner fifty gold pieces.

Almost thankfully, the game neglected to provide me with even a cutscene, instead blacking the screen out and having my character deliver stereotypical lines about how he had places to be. Incidentally, she said I was the best that she’d ever had, and gave me a magical scroll as thanks. At least she didn’t give me a trading card.

The Witcher and Risen, in addition to being similar thematically and in terms of genre, are also direct narratives from the game writers to the player. This sort of relationship forces a certain responsibility on behalf of the game-maker to understand the messages that they are sending: similar to a novelist and a film maker, the views of the artist are often expressed by their characters, whether consciously or not. It’s pretty easy to play through The Witcher and Risen and have eye-roll (or disgust) moments and move on, chalking it up to male chauvinism and sexism at the developer level. They’re both pretty clearly games targeted at 20-something men, and should probably be viewed as such.

(This is one of the screenshots used to display the graphical improvements to the Witcher Enhanced Edition, and is the most common image found when searching on Google for it.  Interesting choice of subject matter.)

However, some games – like Champions Online – are perhaps even more subversive in their views on women than even games like The Witcher and Risen. In Champions Online, as with many other online and role-playing games, the player is allowed to customize the physical appearance of their character. This allows for a veil to be placed in front of the eyes of the player, shielding them from what might be sexist ideas that the game-makers may have: surely, if the player can create their own character, then if it is a false, media-driven idealized image of a woman, then it is the fault of the player.

But what if the player cannot help but create this “idealized woman”? I should probably explain what I mean by “idealized”; the purpose of Champions Online is to create a superhero-type character that can aspire to physical and mental perfection, flawless in physique and in mind. Unfortunately, the “idealized” woman of Cryptic’s otherwise pretty-decent MMORPG happens to be the “idealized” woman of American media; tall, long-legged, large-breasted, seductively-hipped.

(full-size for maximim here, full-size for minimum here)

Alright, so this speaks to what Cryptic views as the “ideal” woman – but what does that have to do with an excellent and staggeringly-flexible character-creation tool? Problematically, for all of the options allowed in character creation, small, reasonable breasts are simply not an option. Literally, not an option – see the screenshots below. Damningly, when creating a new character and enterting the “Custom Body” menu, the “Breasts” slide bar begins fully maxed-out. Further, it appears to be difficult (if not impossible) to create a more masculine-looking woman. One of the variants allowed in character generation is the posturing of the character; average, heroic, huge and beast for the men, and average, heroic, vixen and beast for the women. My favorite posture for male characters it that of the beast; hunched over, ready to lunge, ready to kill – but the beast posture for women is rather a girl leaning forward on one leg, which looks nowhere near as badass or aggressive.

The other stances are also troublingly sexual; even average, which for the males means standing with both feet firmly planted and not favoring either side (you know, standing normally and at-ease) .. but for females means flaring the fingers ever-so-slightly and ever-so-coyly, with one leg bent forward at the knee. In terms of posturing, hip and breast size, it is impossible to create a non-over-sexualized female character.

In The Witcher and in Risen, the player could choose not to progress down avenues of fucking women NPCs, and is actually fully-capable of treating women with respect and dignity in the course of their adventures. However, in Champions Online, the player is explicitly barred from playing anything but a

full-hipped, skinny-but-long-legged, fully-breasted woman that carries an appearance of lustful detachment.

Although the quests are generic and boring and lacking and character and, thus, tend to avoid putting women into any sort of constricting role in the confines oftheir narrative, the female figures of Champions Online have nevertheless managed to be more chauvenist and objectified than any of those found in The Witcher and Risen. Many, many more games provide examples similar to these three in the ways in which women are viewed as sexual objects first and characters second, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another that managed to do this with its character creation system alone.

Unfortunately, I believe that the reason topics like this aren’t really addressed, either in the form of assigned readings for a class or from the mouths of interviewers and game developers, is because the way that women are viewed just isn’t thought about. Even though there are more female gamers out there now than there ever have been, it’s still very much a male-dominated pastime. I fear that as a result of this, game developers write their female characters exclusively for men. Not that this justifies anything – far from it – but I believe that it explains a lot.

And that’s part of remedying the situation – it isn’t enough to say, “This is happening.” It isn’t remedying anything by saying, “Men make games for men.” If gaming writers are slowly beginning to feel comfortable confronting sex and racism in the context of a game, then they can become comfortable with those most-dreaded of frameworks: feminism. It really strikes me that the best way to shift the perceptions of women inside of a game is to be able to identify bad perceptions where they lie, and point others in that direction. Once people know what to ask for, I’d like to think game developers would be willing to give it to us. Or maybe just me, but hopefully not.

I don’t know, though.  I’ll close with a quote from one of the developers of The Witcher from an interview with 1up:

“In the game, you can pick up girls. I’m going to show you where to find one, and you can go to bed with her.” Um… OK. We hit the village and quickly find a milkmaid willing to chat. After being impressed with a bouquet of flowers, the maid leads Geralt off the screen to do the deed. In return, I am rewarded a playing card and a painting of the milkmaid topless and pouring a ladle of milk over her bare breasts. “Through the whole game, when you pick up a girl and go to bed with her, you receive a card like this,” says Iwanicki. We observe an awkward silence.”

-Michal Iwanicki

Below, some of the other male/female pose comparisons of the Champions Online character creator.  Note: all poses we made using the default costume, face, and body options.  Note the muscle definition of each, and keep in mind: these are supposed to be superheroes.

Heroic Pose:

Vixen and Huge Pose:

And, finally and most damningly, the choices for average:

So, DiRT 2 was pushed back so Codemasters can make it much more graphically awesome.  While I don’t generally care about racing games .. the tech demos make me wish I did.  And do.  Two of the tech demos beneath the cut.

Jack Monahan’s blog, Gausswerks Design Reboot, is a wonderful internets-finding of a great idea followed with wonderful execution.  The idea here is to take concepts and ideas found in previously-released games, and breathe some fresh life into them – and his life-breathing is a wondrous thing, presenting fascinating windows into sequels of what could be.

My favorite was his treatment of Gunther Hermann , one of the top partially-cyborg agents of UNATCO in the fantastically visionary game Deus Ex, and the game he envisioned was called Laputan Machine.  While I have no idea what Laputan means (turns out, it was where Gulliver went in his travels.  Thanks, Wikipedia!), here is the original concept:

In Deus Ex (2000) Gunther Hermann is mostly a punchline: a psychotic dinosaur, a mechanically-augmented agent rightfully fearful of being made obsolete by the new-model nanotech Denton brothers.

But picture a prequel centered on Gunther’s descent into monsterhood. Start with a well meaning field agent with the deck stacked against him. End with an echo of a man, steeped in blood, pleading for a clean slate.

A friend once told me what they wanted out of games was feeling “like I had just jumped out of an airplane with no parachute.”

Laputan Machine is about that suicidal freefall: a series of choices between bad and worse, how a man’s moral compass is broken by way of desperate self-preservation.

Monahan continues forward with concept-level artwork and, surprisingly perhaps, concept-level music taken from other artists.  In this case, he chose Portishead’s Machine Gun – a song I’d not heard before (must be on the neweralbum?), but find chillingly fitting with his painfully dystopic vision of Gunther.  The bits of concept artwork he throws into the mix are also painful in their presentation, and when taken with Machine Gun, well – the idea of Laputan Machine is pretty much driven home like a knife in the dark.

But his greatest ideas aren’t in overarching ideas for game concept; rather, they lie in the specifics:

The more indiscriminate the killing, the higher the bodycount, the more unstable Gunther becomes and the more he gives in to the mech-augs enabling the bloodshed, dimming his conscience and humanity. Give in to the machine too quickly, or kill too many and Gunther loses it, the game ends prematurely with the first major alternate ending: Gunther being put down like a rabid dog by his disappointed handlers.

He even draws on further games, like the time-honored cyberpunk favorite Syndicate, and its system of agent upgrades – slowly, the avatar of the player becomes more man than machine, and as with the best cyberpunk fictions, this loss of humanity represents the greatest struggle of Laputan Machine.

The Design Reboot blog looks to have around 20 entries.  Some, such as the most recent, pull from horror-game Alone in the Dark, and others, in a vein similar to that of Laputan Machine, pull further from Deus Ex in the form of Flatlander Woman.  While I won’t go into the specific details of this one, I’ll tease you with a quote and say that it sounds to be every bit as engrossing of a game concept as I found Lauptan Machine to be;

It seems legitimate to assume that an elite assassinwho can turn invisible would equate morality to a single question: did anyone catch me? And of course, Anna Navarre has never been caught. Not yet.

Consider Flatlander Woman: a stealth game where the years of training, mechanical augmentations, and the cloaking device ensure that stalking prey is only as sporting as cat and mouse.
Killing isn’t the hard part, but it is the problem: like most FPS players, Anna prefers to resolve her issues with a liberal application of violence. It also happens that there are no unkillable NPCs in her world.

note: all images in this post are courtesy of Jack Monahan.

Here, let me put my head on the chopping block: I think graphics are incredibly important in videogames.

Before the axe falls, however, let me explain my reasoning.

First and foremost, good graphics – even excellent, bar-raising ones – will not save a bad game from being a bad game. Gothic 3, I’m looking at you; it doesn’t matter how much you tart up a whore, she will still be a whore. Unless you tarted her up as a a maid or Lady Liberty or something and she actually became one of those and ceased in her whoring, then she’d be something different – but if the shifts in appearance are merely cosmetic, then she’s still a whore. Similarly, dressing up a terrible game in the trappings of an excellent game will not make it an excellent game.

Hell, games are even disparaged for succeeding on account of being attractive and not a whole lot else – because the worst thing in the world is something that is vile and terrible that’s pleasant to look at, isn’t it? There’s something incredibly offensive about the idea of Hitler having actually been a beautiful, elegant, but coyly attractive woman.

Further, it isn’t just the graphical implementations of a game that make it beautiful and stunning; there have been many games that, while attractive and easy on the eyes, are nonetheless visually awful. East India Company, I’m looking at you – you may have been optically charming, but boy, did your interface and overall design suck.

That last bit – the design part – is where the importance comes in, and is vastly more important to me than how realistically hair follicles sway about in the setting sun. Are those human-tendrils drifting about framed by golden rays, or are they just kind of hanging around attracting computerized ions? Do the hairs caress the face of the avatar, speaking to some higher purpose, or are they merely .. just there, popping around at random?

Crysis is an excellent example of a game that succeeds on all graphical measures – as well as gameplay ones. The twisted contortions of a North Korean’s (is it more PC to just say, “Korean”?) face as you strangle him show a weird, oxymoronic care and love to design, as well as the interface encasing your visual field. The explosions, even though developed years ago now, remain among the most realistic I’ve ever seen, demonstrate not only enormous technical accomplishment on behalf of Crytek but also of their understanding of aesthetics. From a design point of view, trucks and men under grenades do not just explode without purpose – each injection of fire-red and burning-flesh orange into the visual field bring balance with them, highlight something, or merely contrast the calm blue of the sea and verdant green of the jungle.

Crysis would still be a good game if the graphical slate was wiped clean and replaced with primary colors and black-and-white smoke from the explosions – but it wouldn’t be a great game. Nomad’s often-desperate leaps from cover object to cover object to unfortunate North Korean would still be thrilling, and that first battle with the nano-suited guys would still be harrowing and demanding of the player. But really, would it be so compelling if it didn’t look as .. well, as bloody real as it does?

I don’t think so. Fallout 3 is a pretty good example of a graphically excellent but blandly-designed game; repetitive, post-apocalypse-red-and-orange environments, generic hills, and childishly violent mutant-man-explosions are pretty for awhile, but certainly got boring. The HUD, Pip-Boy or whatever Bethesda called it, was a nightmare of utility; while the aesthetic matched that of the yesterday-technology so prevalent in the game and looked nice, it was a nightmarish bore to use and the ion-green-refresh stuff became more of a hindrance than a utility, distracting from the damn thing’s purpose: to read stuff about the game. Design aesthetics, then, are about more than just looking good: there should be an actual /purpose/ to each design choice, and this purpose should innately reflect itself in the game.

A game doesn’t need, by any means, to be on the cutting edge of graphics technology. World of Warcraft certainly wasn’t, but it used low polygon counts and a dated engine to its advantage – Blizzard built a game that would run on damn near any computer, and would almost always look at least “alright” while doing so. But WoW’s beauty wasn’t in its textures – its beauty resided, and even resides, in superb color choice and shape implementation. Every set piece and costume item accomplishes something; it draws attention to an important area, lightens a dark-and-evil Whenever playing WoW, it was almost always painfully apparent to me that the guys that designed the game managed to get way further through design school than I ever did.

That’s part of my problem, I think – I was a design student. It taught me a love for aesthetics, an adoration for stuff that looked good, and that often, simple things have the most visual appeal. Right now, I’m playing two games; Heroes of Newerth, and Champions Online. While both are elegantly attractive, I’ll return to why the latter is successful shortly. Heroes of Newerth, like World of Warcraft, makes use of a dated graphical engine. In fact, it looks, at best, like a souped-up version of Warcraft III. Given that WCIII is like, I don’t know, almost a decade old or something, it’s hardly surprising that S2 games managed this – but what /is/ impressive is that they managed to retain Blizzard-level design.

Each of the almost-60 characters has a unique profile and color set, similar to the classes of Team Fortress 2; great care has gone into ensuring that each look not only unique, but are immediately identifiable when viewed by an experienced player for a nanosecond. Even when two full teams of five converge and spells begin flying, the difficulty is never in figuring out which blob of polygons is which character, and this holds true for their skills, too. Rather, the difficulty comes in figuring out how the hell to survive and maybe just maybe kill the enemy motherfuckers – and really, shouldn’t that /always/ be the difficulty in a game? Sure, part of this is because each character has, on average, only two activated skills that need a graphical implementation – but still, that’s almost 120 fully differentiated bits that, at any given time, are immediately recognizable not merely as specific spells, but of also belonging to specific characters.

I think a game that pretty much everybody in the world thought was awesome was Portal. Really, I’ve never seen a game sweep the gaming world in such a fashion – can any of us nerds hear “Still Alive” and not grin like a new father holding his newborn for the first time as if to say, “Look at how awesome this is!” Now – would Portal have even been able to /function/ without high-level design aesthetics? Would the heart cube have been half as charming if it was a mere cube, rendered grey-and-white with a heart? Would it have been nearly as panic-inducing had the final conveyor belt leading to the “cake” not looked and felt convincing? I do not think so.

Great design and well-executed visuals permit gamers to become more engrossed and, to use the buzz word, immersed in the game world. No longer are we required to imagine that we’re a chainsaw-swinging psychopath, because we can, through visual trickery and cleverness, actually be that chainsaw-wielding psychopath. This is not to say that things have to look real; Team Fortress 2 hardly looks like real-life – but just the same, everything meshes so well together that it feels like we really are a cartoon soldier rocket-jumping our way to victory.

To return: I’m playing Champions Online at the moment, and find myself compelled to continue playing, for more than any other reason, because everything looks so godamn wonderful. Nothing actually looks real, not the way Crysis’ Korean-jungle-valley-forests-at-sunset looked real – everything looks like a damn cartoon! But a wonderfully rendered and thoughtfully implemented cartoon, with just enough detail to be, inexplicably, immersive.

And it’s a weird feeling to feel immersed in a world of repressed-homosexuality supermen, fascist-fuck-half-man-soldiers, and cyborg-ninjas. The last, incidentally, is what my character is. One of the choices I found most initially jarring was this little black “horizon” line that appears on the exterior edge of most surfaces. It’s sort of like the kind of drawings us average dudes make – every object has a clear outline. This is why most of us can’t draw a nose or a hand for the life of us – these things are defined by their shadows, not their outlines.

Yet, somehow, the outlining in Champions Online works beautifully, drawing attention to game objects and making them stand out in contrast to one another, differentiating one building from the next, and even allowing giant lightbulbs to exist without looking like giant polygons. That, really, is the huge accomplishment of the system – the game doesn’t look, generally, like a computer game. It looks like a comic book! – and this is exactly why, on a visual level, the game succeeds so well. Cryptic knew exactly what aesthetic they wanted, and the designers followed up on this beautifully.

This – an actual /knowing/ of what the overall aesthetic of a game should be – is what makes or breaks a game for me. Knowing it alone isn’t nearly enough – the designers must also be able to determine if the design actually /works/, as often – like with Fallout 3 – I find that it does not. Heroes of Newerth, World of Warcraft, and Crysis have something in common – each game knows exactly how it wants to look, and knows that the idea works.

As said earlier, wonderful graphics cannot make a terrible game a great game – but they can make it an experience worth having. I’ve found that, over the years, far too many gaming writers just love to shit all over graphical considerations for games, stating the now-cliched idea of them not being important and don’t make up for bad gameplay. We know that. Everybody knows that. But to push them to auxiliary considerations so frequently is madness – if image quality isn’t important, why aren’t ‘Graphics-Aren’t-Important’ folks still using VHS? Fallacious argument, to be sure – but I feel it makes my point, if one assumes that all new films are available in VHS as well as DVD and whatever other new-fangled formats are out now.

What I will say is this: terrible graphics, design, and overall aesthetics will, to me, ruin an otherwise good game. I thought that the newly-released indie title AI Wars was a fascinating concept – but absolutely terrible visuals made the game such a chore to play that I just couldn’t get into it. Similarly, the still-in-beta Fallen Earth had such muddied and dated graphics that, even if the game was good (it was mediocre at best, alas) on all other counts, I just couldn’t have taken it seriously. Partially, this is because I spent a thousand fucking dollars a year ago, and I want to feel like I’m getting value out of that investment and pushing the old rig as far as she’ll go.

More than that, however, its because I feel that game developers that don’t hire talented designers simply do no respect gamers. If your interface is a chore to navigate and actually makes the game harder than intended, you’re doing something wrong. If a player cannot look on-screen and immediately identify everything he ought to be able to, you’re doing something wrong. If, at least once in awhile, a player does not stop and stare in wonder and awe at a clever bit of scenery, charming character design, or a humorous sign, then your game has aesthetically failed.

Good design is eternal, and can elevate games to legendary status. Poorly designed and implemented games are temporary and illusory, even if they sell well. Look back on your favorite games of times’ past, and ask yourself: how many of them are poorly designed? If you’re anything like me, then that number is very low indeed.

by way of RPS, whom got it by way of this guy’s Twitter, whom may or may not have found it from somewhere else entirely elsewhere.  I don’t know!  Here is what I do know: that the chair can beat the pyro!  Awesome video fun time below.

This should make you so interested that you go out and play it right now!  There seem to be a good few servers running the add-on, and it looks particularly charming – may end up reinstalling TF2 just to try and kill people as a desk chair.  Or a hopping-frog.  Or a bit of wood!  Or maybe a big lamp!  Or, quite possibly, as some SCRAP IRON!

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that we’ll be using a traditional 10-point scoring system with one decimal placement; ie, a score can range from 0.1 to 10.0, with any variation in between. Personally, I feel that no single aspect of the game should receive more consideration than another; the score is meant to represent the game as a whole, and therefore it should represent this. This means that the gameplay and mechanics of a game should not be able to outweigh graphical considerations and replay value, or any other scoring variable present. Working from this, I propose the following:

1: Five categories for any given game: Visual Representation, Gameplay and Level of Immersion, Mechanics and Technical Considerations, Quality of Narrative, and Connectivity. A breakdown of each will follow.

2: Each of the given categories are worth a maximum of 2.0 points (or whatever title you wish to give the metric).

3. (This is only an idea) Each of the point values ought to be justified in a short sentence, followed by a possible caveat. Ie, “Visual Representation Score: [World of Warcraft's] art direction is fantastic, but low-polygon models make it appear dated.”

Category Explanation (Using World of Warcraft as a source)

1: Visual Representation: This includes not merely how advanced and high-tech the graphics of a given game are, but also the artistic direction and merits of them. To use the example from above, World of Warcraft had some of the best art direction I’ve ever seen; at any given moment, the color choices and shapes create a near-flawless harmony between player avatars and the environments they inhabit. However, the low polygon count of any given object in-game, combined with the frequent terribly-mismatched armor and weapons, make it painfully clear that we’re still playing a game and not watching a cartoon. Score: 1.6/2.0

2: Gameplay and Level of Immersion: This is likely to be the most contentious category among critics, as it will likely be the most subjective. This is where the “fun” aspect of a game comes into play – how great does it feel to chop that orcs head off, and how rewarding was beating that final boss? Level of Immersion relates to how integrated you, as a player or writer, feel within the game. Do the sounds create an ambiance that actually makes you scared to open that next door? Do the monsters you encounter feel like living, breathing creatures with purpose, or merely mindless automatons that exist solely to die at your hands? Example: The gameplay in WoW is fast and frenetic and, at times, incredibly demanding of the player due to the staggering variety of possible actions. Unfortunately, it falls to the same issue of most MMO-style games; click a monster to target, press button 4 to use a special attack, and then press button 5 when you dodge to use a stronger special attack. As with most MMO’s, the level of immersion extends only so far as the player is willing to suspend his disbelief; monsters stand stationary or trod along paths, oblivious until an encounter with a player occurs. Even then, most monsters simply stand and swing their weapons, never moving, repositioning, or engaging in anything that might actually make the player believe the monster actually cared about winning the fight. Score: 1.4/2.0

3: Mechanics and Technical Considerations: This is where a writer examines how well the game actually works. Do certain abilities feel grossly underpowered and useless? Do the control inputs lag at critical times? Example: WoW’s combat system has been tuned to the degree of high-caliber military applications, with each ability seemingly weighed in both combination and opposition with all others in the game. While some abilities are very strong, like the warrior’s Execute, it is keenly balanced by only being useable at certain key times. The controls and interface, once customized, are brilliant – information is presented clearly and effectively and work very well with the traditional mouse and keyboard setup. However, the lack of collision detection means that players can run through each other and monsters, and sometimes the character models have overhangs and weapons that stick into their legs. Score: 1.8/2.0

4: Quality of Narrative: How is the writing in the game? If the game is story-based, how believable and compelling is the story? Are the characters well-rounded and interesting, or dull and typical? If there is not a written or even clearly-stated story, how is the extra-literal narrative (Portal is a great example of a game with phenomenal Quality of Narrative without ever actually stating what’s going on) as portrayed by environments and actions? This category can take into consideration other categories, as narrative is a composite of all things represented. Example: Aside from the sarcastic, name-dropping and geek-culture loving jokes found throughout, World of Warcraft isn’t terribly compelling on its own: the main goal is the acquisition of items and gold. Although the various NPCs and enemy monsters generally have a token story behind them, it clearly wasn’t the focus of WoW. However, through clever graphical tricks and relying on the community to create storylines of their own, WoW managed to create a Quality of Narrative a bit ahead of other games released in a similar time window. Score: 1.3/2.0

5: Connectivity: This category relates to how Internet-connected any given game is, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be multiplayer or downloadable content. This is also one of the more flexible categories; obviously, it isn’t fair to attach a hardline weight to multiplayer when a game contains absolutely no connectivity with other players. Therefore, it must be judged on what it does have; is the multiplayer matchmaking system (for FPS, strategy and so on) robust and customizable? Are there indie maps hosted, for free, by the game publisher? Does the game allow for a formalized friend and enemy system? Example: World of Warcraft shines strongest in this department, as do most online games – the nature of playing in an online-only world ensures that one cannot play WoW without doing so without other players. Content patches, which introduce new areas of play, class changes, and other game tweaks, are frequent and, aside from formal expansions, are entirely free. Unfortunately, the patching system – which relies on a bit torrent network – it notoriously finicky, giving some players very high download times and others excessively slow ones. Game servers, in addition to having rather long periods of downtime for patches, servers are also restarted once each day in about hour-long cycles. Obviously, it sucks to be you if your playtime regularly falls during these restarts – which occur very early in the morning. Score: 1.8/2.0

Which gives us a score of 7.9 out of 10 – which seems substantially lower than what I would have given World of Warcraft had I, without categorizing individual aspects of a game, given it initially. This speaks to another question that I’m undecided on: should there be extra points that I can give to WoW in this example? How would having a 0.5 “flex” score work during the review process? It would allow great games that fall just a bit short in several areas to make up a bit of the points if they really are greater than the sum of their parts – and it would allow to reduce the score of a bad game with great individual parts. I’d also like to further explore breaking down the five categories; maybe break some of them down into four 0.5-part segments, a couple of them into two 1.0 segments, and so on. This strikes me as a bit more professional and analytical way to do so – it also seems that it might get the closest at generating an effective composite score. Of course, this system would likely be terribly impractical – especially if justification for each of the segment scores were given.

The thing with game scores is that they tend to merely provide validation of opinion to reader’s; although they might be more inclined to read a review of a game that receives a 9.8 as opposed to 7.8, the most attention is almost always drawn to a game’s score /after/ a reader has played the game. The furor that came from the Edge review of Killzone 2 came almost exclusively from players that had already played the game. I’m curious about an aspect of those verbally-violent readers; were they so upset because Edge was defaming their /game/, or their /opinion of the game/? It strikes me that if a reader adores a game, and reads a review that gives the game a very high score, then the reader will think to himself: I was right – it really was a great game. But should the opposite happen – and the game receive a low or mediocre score – will the reader think to himself, “This author is saying I was wrong!”? I think the verdict is always gonna be out on that one.

Some final thoughts: although this system is by no means as refined as I want for it to be, I believe that it will provide a good starting point. I’m still not sure whether or not games NEED to be scored, as I fear that it unduly influences both how a reader sees a review and a game, and I’m not sure I want that sort of leverage. Just the same, I will be scoring each game I play for 40oz, but posting it intentionally separately from the original article. Those scores can be found here: 40oz Game Scores