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.

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.

Any given sentence contains within its confines a host of meanings; that of the topical definition of the sum of words, that of an intended idea implied both in and around the meanings established through topical definition and, often, as a consequence of this composite, a potentially unintended meaning.  I personally hold that any given writer or speaker is responsible for the overall understanding of his words, whether intended or not.  Generally, this holds up well enough in the day-to-day life of reading and hearing and understanding through transitions between media types do not prove difficult.  With this in mind, I’ve chosen to look at a presumably unintended implication of a particular computer game: Command and Conquer: Generals.

In C&C:G, the player chooses from one of three different armies, each having different units and structures, and each with the intent of killing the hell out of whomever deigns to oppose them.  This is pretty standard stuff as far as contemporary real-time strategy games go – since Starcraft, most major RTS releases have had, at minimum, three different factions/races that the player can choose from.  What separates C&C:G from most other RTS games, however, is that it decided to incorporate real-world factions, and all of the weight that each culture brings.

Those three factions are the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, and the GLA – the Global Liberation Army.  As stated, each army has different units, although there are clear similarities amongst the three.  For example, all three of the factions have a basic, rifle-armed soldier that is responsible for doing a great deal of the grunt work that their factions require of them.  I am not particularly interested in the similarities of the three gun-toting grunt soldiers, but rather their differences – and even then, I’m interested only in the perceived and implied cultural differences among them as established by Electronic Arts, the game’s developers.

What I found to be the most interesting undertone in C&C:G are the voices of individual units.  Similar again to Starcraft, each unit has a different set of speeches that issue forth depending on what you order them to do, or even if one merely selects the unit.  The Ranger – the USA’s grunt soldier – says things like, “Always prepared,” “Ready for action,” and “We’ll lead the way.”  These are pretty standard tropes for American troops to fall back on, boyscout-like in presentation and always spoken from a position of military dominance.  Things get more interesting when one looks to the Chinese, however, whom say things like “We are the red guard,” “Defenders of peace,” and “China, do not forget me!”

The Chinese voice responses from units mostly revolve around China as a collective, communistic entity; the “we” invoked by the Chinese is entirely dissimilar to that of the American “we,” suggesting for the Chinese that they are part of a far larger organization that supersedes even the military conflict and harkening to the Red Army as a whole (and a key component of China), whereas the American “we” is simply “we” in the context of that particular military unit – the soldiers that are immediately present.  These strings can be found throughout the unit voices for both armies, China continually emphasizing Communistic and collective ideas and the USA considering its military force to be the sole consideration.

More or less, the two ideas presented here are clear and aren’t particularly controversial – at least, when one extrapolates China and Communism a few decades into the future.  What I do find to be particularly controversial, however, is the treatment of the third faction, the Global Liberation Army.

The GLA aren’t merely another player in a global war, but rather a similar extrapolation to that of China – only with various Muslim/terrorist groups found throughout the Middle East.  I do not use ‘Muslim groups,’ or even ‘terrorist,’ lightly, as every image and voice presented by EA for the GLA are inarguably Islamic stereotypes and extrapolations of current images.  Even the name of the basic grunt troop for the GLA – “Rebel” – is suggestive of something more sinister than anything either of the other two armies can provide.  As with the China/USA paradigm, things grow more interesting when adding another faction.

Almost every member of the GLA is suicidal and fanatical, with such choice phrases as “No cost is too great!” and “The higher order shall reign.”  The former hardly needs explanation; it’s a pretty clear image of a suicidal soldier fully-prepared to die for his cause.  Not to say that the Americans and the Chinese aren’t willing to do the same, but neither of these factions actually voice it with the conviction – or even voice it at all – of the GLA.  “The higher order shall reign” is also an almost-damning statement; although it doesn’t quite directly state it, when taken with consideration of the rest of the highlights of the GLA faction, it’s almost the same as saying, “Allah is the one true God” or even, “Islam will dominate everything!”  A final GLA quote, “Our courage will be seen by all!” is even further different from anything the other two factions say; whereas the USA and the Chinese are focused on securing military objectives, defeating their enemies, and winning battles with their voice-overs, the GLA seems to, inexplicably, be terribly concerned with how their actions are perceived by “all.”  “All” is another tricky term; do they mean the people of the world as a whole?  Their brethren soldiers and the enemy?  Just one of them?  Regardless, it shifts the focus from the intent of their actions and their goals and into the realm of public opinion.

This is particularly troubling because, while China and the United States arguably have a national identity, at least militarily, that is effectively portrayed by C&C:G, EA decided to instead use stereotype and fear to paint the portrait of a generic, Islamic nation.  Although in the course of the game it is stated that the GLA arises from no clear nationality and is made of a variety of groups, it nonetheless combines Wahabism with terrorism with absolutely no remorse, or even second thought.  Why is it that this region of the world – culturally, philosophically, and politically – can be represented through such gross and inaccurate stereotypes while the far West and East are not?  EA doesn’t say, and I would be remiss to put words in their collective mouths.

None of these ideas would be particularly relevant had the factions been based on fictional groups of people.  There’s a certain power in creating almost-entirely fictional warring cultures, as it allows statements like those above to be made without actually suggesting anything about real-world counterparts; creative and poetic license can go a long way.  But when groups are so clearly based from real-world groups, doesn’t that mean that anything said about them in the confines of the game are more or less also being said about them in real-life?

Not all Muslims – and certainly not all of the soldiers found in that part of the world – are fanatical, suicidal terrorist figures, and yet they are presented as such in C&C:G.  Why is it that the American stereotype attributes – egotism, a sense of entitlement, and an absolute belief in their superiority – aren’t displayed in as damning of terms as that of the GLA?  The same for Chinese collectivism; it’s looked down on in the game (especially when taken in consideration with the structures the Chinese have, like Propaganda Towers), but it isn’t given anywhere nearly the negative connotation that the GLA are.

Further emphasizing this disparity of tone and, indeed, likeability of the factions, are the units themselves; while I’ll not drag this post out even further by examining them, I’ll leave you with this: the auxiliary foot troop for the Americans is the medic, the auxiliary foot troop for the Chinese is the computer hacker, and the auxiliary foot troop for the GLA is, well, the terrorist – a suicide bomber that kills himself to do an amount of damage to an enemy unit or structure.