Digital Archaeology; OR, A personal history of embarrasing comments

So I had this weird idea the other week. I wanted to go back and look at (read: poke fun at) some of the really old comments I’d left on Michael Abbott’s blog The Brainy Gamer. Follow the digital paper trail, as it were - do some digital archaeology. It’s interesting because it’s a piece of my personal history as a games-writer of varying description and it’s there for all to see.

I got my start at forming and articulating something resembling a cogent opinion on things related to games in those early, heady comment threads back in late 2007. Going back through them, the seeds of the author I've grown into are all present in those comments and it’s revealing to see those beginnings and following the threads back to the present day.

As an exercise in seeing what posts by Michael captured my attention enough to provoke a response, it can also somewhat acts as a tour guide for those that weren’t around at the very beginning of The Brainy Gamer. For a long, long time I read every single thing that Michael Abbott posted on TBG and while I still pay very close attention to everything he posts, I get the feeling it’s become increasingly difficult for him to come up with a steady stream of posts that, to my mind at least, for a while captured the essence of games criticism and discussion. He wasn't just capturing the zeitgeist, he was the zeitgeist. Being on sabbatical and having the time to devote to the blog probably played a big part in what I have come to think of as ‘the golden era’ of The Brainy Gamer. Every post was new ground, every idea was fresh, yet fully formed.

Anyway, onto the somewhat awkward comments that I posted on The Brainy Gamer in the heady days of late 2007 – here displayed in chronological order, from first to last, every single comment I ever posted on a Brainy Gamer post in 2007 (yes, I checked them all) copied and pasted, including time stamp. Please consider following the links back to the original post to see other gems and the original post that inspired me so.

A post called ‘Girls Play Games’ wasn’t the first post I ever read at TBG, but it was the first I ever commented on and here’s what I said,

Ben Abraham said...

Brilliantly put! I'm so tired of other guys who think that they have some God given right to comment away on issues that (lets face it guys) we really have very little of anything new to say about.

Lets toss the discussion over to some people who actually have some knowledge or experience in the area of girl gamers.

Thank you for such a well-rounded informative post!

October 16, 2007 at 02:04 AM

It’s an interesting comment from myself, and looking back on some more recent events I wonder if I shouldn’t have just stopped there and quit while I was ahead. Note that the hyperlink on my name links to my (now very long abandoned) Myspace music page. At this point SLRC was just a twinkle in my eye. Another interesting thing to turn up in the comments section of this article is a link to an Iris Network Directory of women videogame bloggers. It seems crazy to me that I didn’t know this existed until I found it again here, despite it once being in the very same comments thread as myself.

Moving on – the next post I commented on was ‘In praise of empathy and good teaching’ which was a look at Half-Life 2 and how Valve subtly teach the player about the game world without a tutorial. A million-and-one people have made this point since, but Michael was one of the first, making it all the way back in 2007. To call him a game criticism pioneer doesn’t even come close to doing him justice. In the comments,

Ben Abraham said...

Wow...

This is a really insightful analysis of an element of HL2 I've never really thought about before... If you don't mind, I'm bookmarking this article for reference in my honours thesis next year.

October 20, 2007 at 03:58 AM

It didn’t get directly references in the thesis I completed almost 10 days shy of one year to the date of that comment, but it was at the very least played a part in shaping my thinking about games. The next post to attract the dubious honour of a comment from Ben Abraham was ‘Zelda, Meet John Ford’ which introduced readers to Abbott’s love of cinema and the western. Here’s how I responded.

Ben Abraham said...

Yeah, bad idea. Wouldn't want games to become too much like a movie now would we? :P Now... who mentioned something like that just recently...?

Now, if you WERE going to turn a movie into a game, you'd have to pick a David Lean film. I mean, Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago MMO anyone? I'd love to faction grind the Arabs to get them to attack Aquaba!!! Now THAT'S EPIC! :p

October 31, 2007 at 06:33 AM

My comment, in hindsight, feels like someone else speaking out from across the ages – am I really advocating that games should be more like movies? And if so, in what regard? I hazard a guess that it was in regards to videogames treatment of serious fare, which, FYI, many games still aren’t all that crash hot on. However we’ve seen a bit of movement in that direction from the indie game sector, so don’t colour me completely disappointed. Also – I’d still totally play any videogame that managed to capture the essence of a David Lean epic.

The next post to receive my attention was ‘Are game reviews culturally biased?’ to which I deigned to respond to someone called ‘Simon’ who posted a comment before me.

Ben Abraham said...

Hi Simon and Michael,

Simon said:

"The only thing a reviewer can be certain of and speak with any genuine authority on is how a game affects him/her and him/her alone."

This we know to be true, because we agree that opinions and tastes are subjective - BUT if we accept this, then reject the entire notion of a review (and particularly score based reviews) entirely, as any score the reviewer would give are entirely different from a score you would give.

Okay, I see the point that we find reviewers that share similar tastes to us, but the key is that they are *similar* not the same, so again, any judgment that the review would pass wouldn't automagically be at all relevant to us.

That said, there is obviously a place for review if for no other reason than because people want it - they don't want to trust the publisher / developer that their game is more worth their $120 (and yes, here in Australia that is the RRP of a new release Xbox 360 title), so we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

November 06, 2007 at 07:15 PM

Look, look! The SLRC URL finally makes its appearance in the hyperlink on my name! I doubt I had anything useful to say as yet, since my first ever post worth reading was the April ’08 entry into the Blogs of the Round Table, but still. The seeds were well and truly sown. The comment also displays my early reliance on the subjective nature of experience as a focal point for much of my thinking and writing, a trend that continues to this day. New Games Journalism didn’t know it yet, but I was coming for it and I wanted it bad.

My next Brainy Gamer comment was on a post Abbott wrote about the ultimately forgettable Blacksite: Area 51. In a post called ‘Blacksite: Where's my subversion?’ Abbott asks where the much touted ‘subversive’ part of the game was to be found, and laments its notable absence. I weigh in with my two cents,

Ben Abraham said...

Gamasutra had an interview with the guys from Army of Two just a little while before the Blacksite interview came out. THAT game has my hopes for the kind of politically aware shooter that you have in mind. Although I fear it could easily go the same way... I desperately hope not. We've got enough shooters, how about some morally interesting/challenging ones?!

Thanks for they update on Blacksite, as well. I was as intrigued as you, but I know I'm probably never going to get the chance to play it. Now I know I don't have to.

November 16, 2007 at 10:07 PM

And as far as prescient statements go, that one was pretty spot on – I never played Blacksite and Army of Two came and went without getting my dollars. I did however go looking for a video of Blacksite on Youtube and it really did look like it belonged in 2007.

In ‘Face time with Mass Effect’ Abbott notes that he wants to try and experience the game sans-pre-release hype. He also notes that his theatre background makes him particularly interested in how the acting and dialogue is handled. I added,

Ben Abraham said...

Michael said

"My training is in the theatre, so I come to video games with a strong predilection for vivid characters and well-told stories."

And yet... you don't think games should become more like movies. Okay, fair call that telling a good story doesn't automatically make it a movie, but I still think that it's interesting.

Don't get me wrong though, the more I think about it and the more I read about it, the less and less I want games to try and become cinematic. I also think that comparing them to movies, and analysing them in cinematic terms does games a disservice, so I guess I'm just playing Devils advocate here.

It's an interesting question that George poses too... how to tell a story with a lousy actor. I guess there's plenty of other ways to do it in film, though - camera angles and stuff. Hmmm. I dunno. Just thinking out loud.

Happy holiday season (as it apparently is for you Northern Hemisphere folks).

Cheers,
- Ben.

November 23, 2007 at 07:19 AM

What was I smoking in November of 2007? Did I really want games to become more cinematic? Did I even know what that implied? Or was I perhaps envisioning something like the more recent Call of Duty games or Uncharted 2 with their sweeping set pieces and roller-coaster ride experience? It’s quite amazing how much my taste in games has changed since November 23, 2007. That’s almost two years yet it feels like no time at all. At least I was showing signs of progress towards seeing that games are not like movies.

The next comment was on a post interestingly titled ‘Mass Effect: The game that wanted to be a movie’. Now what would Ben-Abraham-who-wants-games-to-be-movies have to say about this, given his predilection for cinematic game experiences? Funnily enough, nothing about the actual merit of Mass Effect’s cinematic approach, rather I chose to read far, far too deeply into the relationship between blank, unresponsive on screen avatars and blank, unresponsive gamers. Quoth myself,

Ben Abraham said...

Try this for a second. Think about how the camera and Shepherds actions, about what Duncan mentioned, lack any "reaction shots" and how everyone stands there passively swaying a bit - doesn't that seem to mirror *very* closely what we the actual PLAYERS are doing? That seems significant to me.

I wonder if this could possibly be why we can generally accept this kind of action from 'our avatar' - because we are doing essentially the same thing.

Think about it, we never really let out an audible gasp when a 'shocking plot twist'(TM) is revealed in a game, do we? Or maybe you have, but I know I've never had this kind of experience. I'm not really sure what kind of an implication this would have on the cinematic/non-cinematic debate, but maybe it represents a different type of engagement with the medium from film. (Seems self-evident perhaps, but then again, plenty of game designers seem to be arguing the opposite) For example, movies can make us jump in our seats and they can make us cry, which no video or computer game has ever done to me before.

*sigh* It could come down to simply being in the same room as a 50 other people all sharing the same/a similar experience, but I think that I could go on forever about this and I've got to end my comment somewhere... might as well be here.

Oh, and also, thanks a bunch Michael for taking the time (just about ever time) to answer and respond to our comments! Not every blogger does so, and it sets you apart! Here's hoping you never get swamped with a billion commenters... then again... you might like that. :)

November 25, 2007 at 07:34 AM

I certainly ask readers of my comment to ‘think about it’ a lot. I wonder what that said about me at the time. Think about it.

No really – please do. I assert that I’d “never really let out an audible gasp when a 'shocking plot twist' [was] revealed”, which was probably true at the time. But have I since? I rather like to think that I very well may have, but whether that’s to do with games actually improving or my choice to engage with games improving I have no idea. It’s certainly something that writing the Permanent Death story has forced me to think about – is Far Cry 2 the greatest game ever or is it just because I made it that way with my own efforts and attentions? And does it even matter? Also: note to self, if I ever use “maybe you have, but I haven’t” again in a sentence take it as a sign that I should probably stop talking from inexperience.

All these questions must remain unanswered for the time being, because it’s time to move onto the next comment, which as it turns out is about “listening to artists talk about their work”. In ‘That one big idea’ Abbott highlights how Super Mario Galaxy creator Yoshiaki Koizumi talks about one simple idea influencing the game in a profound way.

Ben Abraham said...

Wow. What a simple idea. And yet, so profound. If you think about it, the concept of a "flat" world is pretty foreign and artificial to us, as we ourselves inhabit a spherical world, and there are no walls to run into.

Neat stuff Michael, thanks for posting.

December 05, 2007 at 08:17 AM

The flat/round distinction is an interesting one and I wish I had a Wii to play Super Mario Galaxy on and experience first hand.

Next on our merry trip through time we come to a post about the general lack of original stories in games. In the plainly enough titled ‘we need new stories’ Abbott suggests some non-standard stories that game makers could use to avoid the Space Marine / Fantasy / Apocalypse tropes. Mostly it just boils down to games exploring stories about people other than hulking space men, but the comments thread takes off, running long and deep.

Ben Abraham said...

This is a long argument, so I'll try and keep mine input short,

I agree with Chris and Michael. If game dev's want their games to be taken seriously as an art form, then geeze, they bloody well had better get cracking on working to expand what their audiences expect from games. And the only way that I can see that happening is to make some mistakes while they experiment and do things exactly like Michael said.

I also wonder as to why you have made the arbitrary distinction between 'indie' developers and 'propper' developers, Simon. I just don't get it. Sure there are differences in team size, budget, etcetera, but they are both making games, right?

To bring it back to the original argument, that we should be encouraging the game development community to try telling some different stories, I would only like to say that I wholeheartedly agree that the current imbalance in storytelling is detrimental, but it probably will straighten itself out. I'm not an expert on art history, but I believe that with most new media forms, like film and television (and dare I include novels too? Perhaps turn of the 19th century Sci-Fi pulp novels, ala Jules Verne) that one success tends to send off a frenzy of copying and imitation. However I thing that, over time, it evens out. Here's to hoping that the gaming community matures as well (as we certainly are doing) and wakes up to the situation.

Up until recently Rock Paper Shotgun were saying on their 'Hey, developers!' page that the "Chance of the next annoinced MMO not having Elves: 3.062%" or something similar. :)

December 11, 2007 at 08:33 PM

Who is this contentious Simon fellow and where ever did he go? I’m presuming it’s not the same Simon as Simon Ferrari, but if it was that would be cool (let me know, eh Simon?). There was never a hyperlink in said persons’ name, so it’s entirely possible we may never know. I’m a bit yucked out by all those spelling mistakes; sadly I don’t think I’ll ever completely get beyond making those. Other things of note in the above comment: My love for Rock, Paper, Shotgun remains unabated to this day, in addition to being still just as interested in making future predictions based on past experience.

Next we actually have another comment on the same post – I would hazard a guess that it was one of the very first lengthy comments conversations on The Brainy Gamer. Somehow, everyone else gives up before I do and I pipe up at the end of it all with this comment,

Ben Abraham said...

Gosh this post is getting a lot of comments. And it's getting one more.

As to what Chris Stubbs said about emotion driving the games of the future, I can't help but wonder if current attitudes towards emotion are rather underdeveloped in the industry. Emotion is not simply an action/reaction response. We generally are quite unable to predict how one person will emotionally respond to something. Case in point being music. While we can make distinctions about the 'mood' of a piece, i.e. whether it is upbeat, sobmre, etc, we have no definite way of knowing how a person will emotionally respond to that mood, other than by projecting based on how we respond (a rather hit and miss kind of method).

The relatively young field of music therapy has established a general pattern, however, that if music 'meets us where we are at' emotionally, then once it has our attention, it can take us in to new places. The primary way that this is applied in music therapy is to calm down over excited patients, many of who have mental disabilities prohibiting normal verbal communication.

How would one apply this idea to gaming? I would propose that a game that wants to 'emotionally' reach me, would need to be able to somehow establish where I am 'at' before I could be taken anywhere, emotionally. At the moment, I think we have to put ourselves into the position that the game is assuming we are going to be in, and I would like to see that change.

Example 1: Valve's player monitoring stuff - they have the technology built in to examine how well or not we are playing a game - why not do things like dynamically change the pacing of the game according to our performance. Change the music, lighting or other aspects, depending on time of day. And that's not taking into account any kind of actual biofeedback systems such as pulse rate monitoring or anything. We can do so much better!

December 14, 2007 at 09:05 AM

Wow, I’m bringing music therapy into a discussion about emotion in games? Way to go 2007 self. Notice how my staunch belief in the subjective nature of experience rears its head once again. In hindsight, I can kind of see an unmentioned third approach to engaging player emotions – that the player chooses to engage and makes it so. Is it enough, however, to reach the theoretical heights of complete emotional involvement? Probably not, but either way I don’t think it happens without it, so it’s a bit of a conundrum.

The same day as the above, I also commented on a piece called ‘In search of narrative, character, and empathy’ which was an announcement that Michael was going to replay A Mind Forever Voyaging and Planescape Torment and write about them Game Diary style. I fondly recall both series. My own comment was this innocuous request for clarification,

Ben Abraham said...

I'm sorry, I wasn't entirely clear on this, are you actually going to go back and play these games? If so, sounds good! I look forward to hearing what you've got to say about games that I've never played before! :)

Growing up gamer in the 90's, I never played anything pre... maybe.. '98? At least, not in the sense of playing them the minute they came out.

December 14, 2007 at 08:41 AM

Which is true – I didn’t really play very many games, and certainly never on Day 1 of their release. The ‘Vintage Game Club’ that Michael would later establish in 2008 would do similar things with classic games of yesteryear, and I participated in a number of the first few playthroughs.

We’re coming up on the end of the 2007 year and the end of our little retrospective. On December 19 Abbott started writing about Planescape Torment. Picking up on something about NPC characters, I added this gem of a comment…

Ben Abraham said...

What about Murray from Monkey Island 3? He is still my favorite, lovable disembodied head from any videogame! :D

December 19, 2007 at 09:00 AM

It’s true. Murray remains my favourite, lovable disembodied head from a videogame.

Next, on ‘Day Three’ of his Planescape playthrough, Michael Abbott decided he wanted to slow down his playing, take more time and be a little more thorough. In response, I quoted Radiohead. As you do.

Ben Abraham said...

To quote the chorus of a song by a famous British rock band,

"Hey man,
slow down.
Slow down.
Idiot slow down,
Slow down."

Enjoy your leisurely stroll through Planescape.

December 22, 2007 at 09:03 PM

I was very much in the grips of a swooning addiction to the delicious ear noise of Radiohead. This is another thing I may possibly never get over. Also of note is Abbott’s philosophy that games are best enjoyed at a leisurely pace, with the slow motif would coming back with his memorable use of the ‘Chew your food’ metaphor a year later.

The second last comment I would make in 2007 was on a post called ‘A plea for journalistic integrity’, which was a discussion of the tragic death of Zoe Garcia. If you recall, Garcia was killed when her older brothers allegedly tried out “Mortal Kombat” moves on the girl and abused her until she died. Amongst this is a discussion of how games had, and have, become easy targets for meadia beat-ups, and I posted this comment:

Ben Abraham said...

I really think that gaming is *just* about at the tipping point where so many people now play and have first hand experience of video games that, surely, public opinion will recognise this kind of story as exactly you have said it to be, a sensationalist, headline grabbing story, and that sooner rather than later, prominent media outlets are going to be left with egg on their face. Most people know better than this, and it is only destroying the media's credibility in the public eye.

So, don't get too worried about it - we'll get there.

December 26, 2007 at 11:56 PM

I’m beginning to think that we experienced the tipping point for this phenomenon in Australia perhaps just a week or so ago. Melbourne’s The Age Newspaper ran a sensationalist story about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the leaked footage of a terrorist attack level. The piece was clear sensationalism at its disgusting best, and yet the comments thread on the article was full of commenter’s ridiculing the piece as exactly that. I can’t see this sort of level of awareness going backwards anytime soon, so I think we may be on the downhill run to wider game acceptance. Of course, game literacy and experience will get us only so far, but it’s certainly a start. Like I said in 2007, “we’ll get there”. Hey, that was another of those prediction things.

Last post for the year of 2007 was this, on Abbott’s “Don’t trust the skull: Final Thoughts on Planescape Torment”:

Ben Abraham said...

Spoiler warning might be a good idea. Then again... it is such an ancient game.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm intrigued by the game, especially its Momento like elements (I thought that was one of the most convincing movie twists of all time!) I think that your experience with the interface is a similar sentiment to one expressed by Leigh Alexander when she talked about 'going soft' in terms of difficulty in the Castlevania series of games. She found incredibly hard one particular reissue of an older one.

Is PST abandonware yet?

December 31, 2007 at 02:40 AM

No, Planescape Torment is most definitely not abandonware, younger self, it’s apparently about to be re-released by Interplay for about $15.

That was the year of 2007 according to Ben Abraham and his comments on The Brainy Gamer blog. Was it good for you too? This little retrospective-meets-introspection thing was good fun for me and If you’re trying to read (too much) into it you might care to make a prediction about the future of SLRC. From this navel-gaze of a post and the general quiet here in recent weeks, you would not be far wrong to wonder if I was contemplating something rather final.

In case that’s too much ambiguity for you, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with respect to SLRC. I guess it rather depends on what happens before the end of the year.

Also, you patient readers deserve an update on the Permanent Death novel-thing – I swear, it’s still coming and hopefully soon.

Interview: Justin Keverne of 'Groping the Elephant'

Justin Keverne is a gentlemen currently residing in the United Kingdom and a fellow blogger about games. He recently interviewed me about my Permanent Death experiment. I agreed to answer his questions on the condition that I get to ask some of my own, mainly to do with blogging about games, cultural differences between the UK and North America, as well as some more general questions. Here are his responses in full:

1) What is it like living in the UK and writing about games?

I can’t say I’ve known anything else so there’s not a great deal I can compare it too. Living in the UK can be frustrating at times, a lot of Publishers forget that people outside the US play their games, and so they make a big deal of release dates, or special offers that are simply inaccurate or unavailable to me. I doubt I have to explain that aspect of it to you as by all accounts the situation in Australia is even worse.

As for the writing about games aspect, well its part of who I am, I don’t think that would change wherever I lived. I’m not sure how much of it is influenced directly by my living in the UK. Actually no, on reflection I think not being in the US does have an effect; when almost everything you play is created by somebody in another country you can sometimes feel a little safer picking holes in it. As a Designer looking for a professional job I’m torn between being overly critical and playing things safe in case I end up interviewing for a job with a company I torn into. Since most companies are not in the UK I think I’m maybe liable to grant myself more freedom when discussing their games.

2) What sort of cultural acceptance is there of games, and games writing, in the UK?

Well everybody knows what video games are which something, I suppose. I’d imagine everybody under forty here has played a video game at some point and has some pleasant memories of them.

Because of the Spectrum ZX and BBC Micro, there was a huge home computer gaming, and amateur game development, scene in the early eighties; the heyday of the 16K era.

I don’t think it would be a lie to say that most people with high level positions in the tech sector probably started their careers copying code for games out of magazines and manually typing them into their Spectrums and BBC Micros. After that it was the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Growing up I had the latter and it was not uncommon for significant portions of large retail shops to be dedicated to shelves and shelves of Amiga, and Atari games. Moving into the PC era, the UK used to be at the forefront of development, with companies like Bullfrog and Core Design. Games, gaming and game development, are a huge part of the cultural history of the UK though I doubt many people are actually aware of it anymore.

Gaming magazines have been a stable of UK culture for years, growing up there was a running conflict between the magazines for the Amiga and the Atari, Amiga Power, ST Format and other magazines with similar titles. Then there’s PCZone which has been running since 1993, a number of successful writers in the UK have cut their teeth on such magazines, including Charlie Brooker (Writer of Big Brother Zombie cross over Dead Set) who wrote for PCZone in its early years.

Television dedicated to video games were also very popular and successful throughout the 90s, with people like Peter Molyneux appearing on Bad Influence and Games Master. There was also the superb, if utter mental Bits, which featured three women discussing and reviewing video games, Aleks Krotoski who now writes for The Guardian newspaper, and the BBC started her career there. At one time Games Master had a cultural cachet approaching that of something like Top Gear. [While US readers may not get this reference, I’m sure fellow Oz readers will. Top Gear is fantastic – Ed]

Recently though such shows have started to disappear, they’ve become increasingly marginalized until the only place you can find them is on select satellite channels, usually those described as being “For men”.

I’ve mentioned The Guardian and that is maybe one of the few serious newspapers to include intelligent and mature commentary on video games, from the likes of Charlie Booker, Aleks Krotoski and Kieron Gillen. You can find video game reviews in almost every newspaper and “men’s magazine” (FHM, Maxim etc) but they are usually extremely poorly written and styled as pure reviews. The Guardian actually includes editorials and more critical pieces dedicated to games and gaming culture.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a huge history of talking about games and treating them as another part of our culture that is being lost. A lot of the really smart games writers who have been around since the Amiga and Atari years are starting to move on to different things and the quality of new writing about games seems to have decreased dramatically.

I think that’s in no small way due to the fact the UK has lost the position it once had, the death of Bullfrog and the relative failure of the studios that formed out of it was a big blow to the UK game development scene.

It’s tragic really when one of the most known gaming franchises in the world, Grand Theft Auto is created in Scotland and most people don’t realize. The UK still has some incredible talent but I think a lot of it overlooked as the big Publishers have mostly abandoned their offices in London for continental Europe and New York.

Anyway, I’m not bitter at all... Ahem.

3) What kind of cultural differences do you think there are between the US and UK games press?

That history with the Spectrum through to the Amiga and the PC, has given a lot of the more established UK games journalists a distinct home computer bias and it can be clear in their work. The SNES was never as big here as it was in the US and other countries and the associated love for Zelda and Mario doesn’t seem as strong.

Also as a culture the English in particular (Can’t speak for Scots or Welsh) have an overriding sense of wry cynicism, I think it’s probably a post-colonial attitude. We used to own most of the world and now we don’t and as a culture I think we’re still a little bitter about that and can act like we’ve seen it all and done it all before and that nothing is new to us.

What I’m basically saying is I think UK, and specifically English, gaming press are a jaded and hard to impress bunch, who still long for the days when the UK ruled the gaming world with the likes of Bullfrog, Core Design and Psygnosis.

That’s a general attitude I feel is shared by UK gaming press and it’s one I can’t help but share. I didn’t really think I was so nationalistic in my tastes but I have realised that as much as I respect Garnett Lee I find it difficult to pay attention to a ListenUP podcast if John Davison is not on it. In fact I think John and Garnett are a good example of the differences between US and UK press. Garnet seems easy to impress and loves almost everything, where as John is cynical, cautious and only really impressed by something that’s significantly new or different.

4) Do you think UK game design differs significantly from US game design?

I think the ingrained cultural cynicism pushes UK designers to try and do things differently. I also think there’s a tendency to focus on ensuring a game has a strong central fantasy, being a hero in Fable, exploring ancient tombs in Tomb Raider or cyber punk paramilitaries in Syndicate. I think the aesthetic idea usually comes first and then a game is built to create that sensation and fulfil that fantasy.

I’d say in comparison US game design has a strong focus on iteration and refining an idea over time.

Also the attitude to sex and a humorous approach to sex and sexual activity is something shared by most people in the UK, we grew up with Benny Hill after all, and that can clearly be seen in most games developed here.

In terms of the pure creativity I think UK developers have a tendency to look to literature and subjects outside the field of gaming for their inspiration. A lot of that is probably because they learn programming as a hobby growing up with their Spectrums and Ataris so what formal education most UK designers have was not focused on games at all, they have degrees in Chemistry and Engineering instead of Computer Science.

I think US develops rely more on movies and television for their inspiration. I’m not trying to make a judgement call here as I think both approaches are valid, and after all I still think Halo is fantastic even if it is basically ripping off most of Aliens.

5) Do you feel more of an identification with UK writers than with US writers?

That previously described home computer bias is certainly something I share having grown up gaming on an Atari ST, as is the cultural cynicism. Also I find the type of references used by UK games journalists are ones I’m more likely to have some awareness of, using Football as a metaphor is something I can understand more than using Baseball.

That’s a general attitude element that I share, however on a person level I actually find myself identifying with the folks from Rebel FM more than anybody. Anthony Gallegos in particular seems to share a lot of my tastes on games, and it probably helps we are both sexually frustrated Star Wars geeks. I also appreciate his frank honesty which I think can be rare in games journalism.

6) Do you think there is a hierarchy in videogame critics blogging? If so, what does it look like, where would you place yourself, and why?

I think there probably is and I’m not sure I’m particular happy about that. I think there’s a hierarchy based on who you know, who you link to and who links to you, and I think that can be problematic. There are some really intelligent writers around who I didn’t know about until very recently, Alex Raymond, Simon Ferrari and several others, and I think the way blogs are set up can be rather incestuous, with discussion staying within that circle of linkage.

I also think it’s too easy for the “cult of personality” to take over and people are praised for who they are more than what they write. I think Michael Abbott is a prime example of this, I really do think he’s probably one of the nicest human beings I’ve had the fortunate to talk to. At the same time I think some of what he writes can feel obvious and of little interest to me, on the other hand some of it is also borderline profound, so it’s swings and roundabouts. However I see a lot of people treating his work as sacrosanct as if he can say no wrong, or that his opinion somehow carries more weight than others. His recent post about Scribblenauts and Bowser’s Inside Story seemed to have provoked ire disproportional to its content because I feel a lot of people somehow expected something else from him. Personally I agree with him on this particular issue, but I fear readers have been using his work as validation of their own opinions and that can be damaging to the discussion of video games.

Furthermore I think disproportional worth is given to the opinions of professional game designers... Oh wow I really am bitter aren’t I, jeez. [No, not really. Angry, maybe…– Ed]

What I mean by that is that from my own perspective I disagree with EVERY game designer I’ve ever heard speak, I mean EVERY ONE. The designer I share the most opinions with is Warren Spector but even he has said some things that just make me shake my head. As for Raph Koster and Will Wright, well suffice to say I don’t agree with pretty much anything Raph says and Will scares me with his intellect but his opinions on stories in games make me laugh derisively. I’m not saying these people haven’t earned some respect, but I do think with such individuals everybody needs to be careful to avoid the “cult of personality”, which isn’t helped by some designers apparent unwillingness to discuss ideas with those they don’t consider their peers.

Yeah I can do the CLINT HOCKING joke as much as anybody else, but I am eternally grateful for his willingness to actually discuss his design philosophy and defend it when necessary. I agree with him on a lot of things, and it’s great to actually debate with him on the parts I don’t.

Discussion of video games needs to take place in an arena where opinions are judged on content and insight not on whose idea it was, and any form of hierarchy can all too easily lead to the unjustified assignment of worth to an opinion even when it’s patently dumb. Everybody has stupid ideas and if our barometer for worth is the individual not the idea we could easily let those occasional stupid ideas be given worth they haven’t earned.

7) What do you like about English weather?

In all seriousness I actually really like rain, I have a strange tendency to actively go out in it and stand staring up and the sky getting soaking wet. It’s such a wonderfully tactile experience having weather you can touch. Sadly we don’t get too much torrential rain, it’s usually just drizzle (Is that a colloquialism?) [We call it drizzle in Oz too – Ed] and mist.

I think what all English like about the weather, and the simply reason we do discuss it so much, is that it’s unpredictable and rarely the same two days in a row. It’s an easy discussion to have as there’s always something to say about the weather when you live here.

8) What is a gerund, and why did your people invent them?

I actually had to check Google for that so I’m really not the right person to ask.

9) Do you tell people that “I’m famous on the net” as a videogame writer? Why/Why not?

No.

I suppose you want something more than that, well I don’t and I probably never would because I consider that a lie. I don’t think I am famous on the net, and I also don’t think I’m a video game writer. I’m a designer and everything I write is an extension of that, some of what I’ve written might have a critical bent but it’s always written, at least from my perspective as a design piece.

I’ve discussed the representation of the mentally ill in Batman: Arkham Asylum but I also made a point of providing an example of how I’d have modified the design. I make no bones about saying clearly that I want to be a professional game designer. It’s a position I’ve interviewed for twice and been unsuccessful but I still call myself a designer if anybody asks what I do. Of course you could argue that’s just as much a lie as saying I’m a video game writer. Either way I hardly think I’m famous.

10) Do you talk about games with your real life friends? If you don’t, would you want to if you could?

All the time, it can actually be a problem. I tend to play a lot of Co-Op with my housemate, or just sit and watch him play something in single or multi player, and I will usually give him a running commentary: “This is a stupidly designed level, why the hell does the enemy spawn there, if they moved it there it’d have a better angle on us as we came through here and let also allow us to see it before we rounded the corner and got insta-killed...”

I can also get very angry as bad game design and I’m sure sometimes he’d rather I just shut up. It also helps that at least three of my friends all have professional game development jobs, two as Programmers and one as a Designer.

11) Tell me what’s so good about this Thief game.

I could use all these phrases like cascading failure states, intentional play, emergent behaviour, shared authorship and a dozen others, but I’ll refrain. All of those statements are accurate but the main reason the Thief games, and in fact everything created by Looking Glass Studios is worthy of attention is that they are intelligent games made by very intelligent people that neither try and hide that fact nor talk down to their players. They expect players to be willing to engage with the world and the design and will reward those players who are.

Playing System Shock 2 and Thief made me smarter, it contained ideas and concepts that I didn’t fully understand but which were presented in such a way as to make me want to go away and find out what they were. Irrational and Ion Storm did the same and 2K Marin, 2K Boston and 2K Australia are continuing that tradition.

Also I adore Looking Glass Studios because they were always willing to discuss the philosophy behind the games they made, there are Post-mortems of Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2 available on Gamasutra and the proceedings for the last few years of GDCs are full of presentations by Looking Glass Studios alumni.

For a more specific description of why I adore Thief and System Shock 2, I’ve already written about them on Groping The Elephant: Thief II – The Metal Age; System Shock 2.

Writing those two pieces was pure joy, without doubt the easiest things I’ve ever written. I could write twice as much again and still not say everything I wanted to. If Thief or System Shock 2 is selected for the name Vintage Game Club game I think my head will explode; which is why I’m trying to stay quiet about how excited I really am. [Thief was chosen for the VGC game #8 – Ed.]

See not all UK gamers are jaded and cynical... No wait actually I am as Looking Glass Studios no longer exist and I still blame Eidos even if it was really the fault of the gamers who didn’t realise how much good gaming they were missing.

12) Are you having a nice day?

I am now. Work was once again tiring beyond my capacity to cope with it; I am not designed for manual labour. I also had to come home to my housemate and his girlfriend arguing again which is “nice”. But at least he’s just picked up Halo 3: ODST (Which was part of the reason for the argument), so I’ve been watching him play that this evening.

After finishing off these I’m going to watch the latest GameTrailers TV episode, and then spend most of the night either playing Resident Evil 5 (Just picked it up on PC), or Thief Gold.

Thanks for answering my alternately serious and frivolous questions.

The Week in Videogame Blogging

Straight into it: What has been worth reading this week in videogame blogging?

The Brainy Gamer has two pieces this week; the first is ‘Gee Whiz’, about a visit by prominent author James Paul Gee, known best for his writing education reform and his book ‘What videogames have to teach us about Learning and Literacy’. The second is ‘Cold Jungle’, an opinion piece about why Far Cry 2 left him out in the cold. Be sure to check out the comments thread on that one.

Insult Swordfighting has another of his unique amalgamation of Gamespot user submitted reviews for the as-yet unreleased game ‘Resident Evil 5’. I like these posts, because Mitch Krpata has to add so little to the “reviews” themselves to highlight their ridiculousness and by extension, the absurd level of hype often surrounding upcoming videogames.

Versus Clu Clu Land goes admirably high-brow in discussing Theodore Adorno’s ideas about ‘the culture industry’ theorising that it may explain some things about why we play games like Golf and Halo in his post ‘On Masochism’. Iroquois Pliskin also writes about the departure of venerable game journalist N’Gai Croal from his regular position at Newsweek – because obviously ‘Games Journalism Needs Games Journalists’ and good ones at that.

Level Up, in it’s first and also the last entry in Noted on the Blogs is the now defunct blog of the aforementioned N’Gai Croal. He posts his farewell post in which ‘The Man Behind the Royal 'We' Says 'So Long'’. I personally learnt a lot about blogging by reading Level Up – his talk about developing your own voice in writing guided my own early efforts. Croal will be gone, but not forgotten I am sure.

Rock Paper Shotgun, which is now apparently the UK’s biggest gaming blog, can always be guaranteed to have something worth reading. This week the best has to be ‘Bangalor Galore - An Empire: Total War After Action Report’ by RPS sometime-contributor Tim Stone. The ability to capture the sound and the fury of a battlefield in writing about a videogame is why RPS is consistently among the world’s best. More relevant to the business side, an interview with ‘Capcom on Digital Distibution, PC Ubiquity’ reveals a surprisingly forward thinking and proactive game developer. They remind me of Valve Software, actually. And lastly from RPS, less a piece of writing and more promotional video: ‘Laid Back Payback: Soviet Assault Blues’ which is notable for an emerging trend in utilising music effectively in promoting games (Remember those Gears of War trailers? I actually wanted to play that version of the game – the poignant, introspective, intelligent one).

Banana Pepper Martinis proves why L.B. Jeffries is one of the best semi-professional writers out there this week by synthesizing ideas from Carl Jung and some work done by psychologists studying dreams in the post ‘Videogames and Dreams Part 1’.

Hit Self Destruct is the blog of Duncan Fyfe, who I know nothing about other than his name and that he lives in New Zealand. However, geographic isolation means nothing when you have as unique and distinctive writing style as Fyfe, which he shows in a mini-series of posts this week called ‘Domestic City’ of which there are 9 parts. They focus on games in some strange, hypothetical future where people take games seriously or something! Like that’d ever happen…

Pentadact, by actual professional games writer Tom Francis, writes a great series of travelogue posts about Fallout 3. Strictly speaking not from this week, Francis writes somewhat New Games Jouranlism-ish in ‘Fallout Girl: Striking Distance’, and it’s a cracker of a read. I wish I had that much fun in Fallout 3.

Pixel Vixen 707, everyone’s favourite Alternate Reality Game blogger writes in ‘The Buddy System’ how it’s often the little things, rather than the overwritten, unbelievably corny storylines in games that mean the most to her. I’ve come to realise that I feel similarly, and much prefer compellingly immersive details to overblown narratives.

Hardcasual the satirical website with a decidedly ‘Onion’ feel writes just about videogames. This week take a tongue in cheek look at both the ridiculousness of some claims that videogames are a waste of time in ‘Video Gamer Realises Frivolity Of Hobby’ and at… I’m not quite sure what, in the post ‘Other Blogs Just Popular Because Girls Write Them’. Pre-empting calls that “Oh teh noes gurlz are taking over mah game blogz!!!!1!!!!1!” perhaps?

Lets go with that, until next week readers!