Max Vs. The Internet

Machine Project [map] is hosting a 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, starting this Friday @ midnight. The goal is to build (in miniature) Rome, from 753 BCE to 410 CE, starting with the hut of Romulus and ending when the Visigoths sack the whole damn thing.

It's particularly brutal that a 24 hour event (beginning in the middle of the night no less) is happening the week before Ed Wood, but this is so stupendously awesome that my skull is about to burst with delight.

Schedule
RSVP @ RebuildRome@gmail.com

Magical Wasteland has a succinct, but brilliant post on Five Short Videogame Industry Keynotes. They are pithy and to the point, so I'm afraid I'm not really adding much, but I think we need more of this honest and confrontational style of writing about games industry laziness.

The King of Kong is showing this Thursday at 7 o'clock in Lucas 108. For free, even.

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend you go. As game designers and interactive artists, we often struggle to surface the emotionally compelling parts of our work. The King of Kong is a great reminder about how sometimes our audience finds that part for us, and our work is made all the better for it.

See it if you haven't. It's amazingly inspirational, and your time will not be squandered.

Mailing List notification after the jump.

So it seems we are at a cross roads. I'm going to be using this blog for a non-IMD class over the course of this semester, specifically, Writing 340. Here's the quick scoop on how this came to be.

After a minor registration mixup, I weaseled my way into Mark C. Marino's Writing 340 class. Some of you may remember him as one of the speakers from a seminar last April. I'm looking forward to the class, and hoping it will be enlightening, contentious, or both. The class has a strong emphasis on blogging, and when I asked Mark if I might use my already existing IMD blog (for the sake of generating less inter-cruft and using a system I'm somewhat familiar with), he agreed. I'll be cross posting to another blog, required for the course, so here is Iste Aleator II. Interestingly enough, the course seems to have a strong grounding in the decorum and rituals that have evolved around blogging. Many of our early assignments are geared towards not only setting us up to be semi-respectable on-topic writers, but also to ground us in the larger community of bloggers. Things like seeking out related blogs, writing insightful comments, and profiling another blog take advantage of the social nature of the web to reinforce better writing habits and to prepare our blogs for participation in those larger discourses we've chosen to engage. We have been encouraged to begin under the cloak of anonymity, but that's never really been my style (I believe mistakes must be honestly made, gaffes must be owned, and changed opinions must be sincere if a writer is to learn anything. Failing that, I'm vain), and of course, this being a standard issue IMD blog, that's already impossible.

Speaking of which, is there an official rationale behind giving us these things, or is it a different sort of grand experiment? This is one of those things no one's ever told me, and I've just kept my head down about asking. It seemed prudent to ask now, in this welcome post of sorts.

So welcome. This is Iste Aleator, and I am Max Geiger. In order to stay relevant and avoid drifting too far off into a digital reverie, the official topic for this subcategory/official series of digressions/line of inquiry will be how games can become more like the web. Yes, I realize that this topic has been explored before. However, it has not been explored to my liking. The question begged by "how can games be more like the web?" is "why must games must be more like the web?" and more largely "why must games be more like anything at all?" I hope to couch a number of digressions in questions of games and culture at large, but we'll have to see how things go.

Finally, I doubt I'll match the pace of the IMD's most prolific resident blogger, but should it become annoying (my fears of flooding the post-stack over on the main page were quickly assuaged when I realized the worst I could do was sit at the top of it with a stupid title), I'll be happy to curtail my posting here and surrender to acquiring yet another blog.

Here is a less explanatory welcome, or perhaps, an "about" page. Rather than worry about the circumstances of its existence, or all of those details that add up to how this blog exists, this is the what and hopefully the why.

I've had to do a lot of thinking about games. I'm a game designer. I suppose I'm about to be a producer, which means I'll be a producer who just pretends to design (Quick joke: How many producers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the bulb and the other to hammer it in) or some such. I've been told I have a knack for it by exactly one person (not myself. I don't for a minute believe the hype), and with that absolutely no credibility. I believe in proof by hypocrisy, meaning that I'm wrong, or do things the wrong way, but know there is a better way to do them. If I catch you doing something the same way, then you're wrong as well. This only works because I'm honest about, and I try like hell to make it not the case. The effect is rather bathetic, but hopefully, falsifiable. Credo.

This blog is usually about neat things that I find. Things which lodge themselves in my brain and I have to share them or work through them. A designer told me once that the world, and all the things in it, are all endlessly and perfectly fascinating, and really, if you want to make good art, it can't hurt to start there. I'm inclined to agree. Memes can hijack a mind sometimes, you know? Other times I post things here because it's where they'll get seen. That's the ugly realpolitik of living on the internet and living beyond your means in terms of how much you're expected to read, write, think, analyze, design, and produce in a given day. I wish the faces of clocks had a baker's dozen of hours. What this blog is supposed to be about, what it is about, right now, is thoughts and commentary on the game industry, but somewhat broader than that: I think the web is going to eat our lunch. Games have currently eaten you lunch, Mr. Music, in terms of dollars, and they're gunning for you, Mrs. Movies, and in a little while it'll be the same way for attention. Remember, I wish we had 26 hours in the day, and unfortunately, when it comes to time spent on my ass in front of a glowing screen, something is going to have to lose out. I'm afraid we're all going lose to the web. It's where I waste enough time as is. So rather than hiss and curse and spit at its black magic, I'm trying to pull a Coyote and steal away the magic held in the web and use it to make better games. Simultaneously, the thinking around games needs to grow up. It's puerile, it's awful, and it's shortsighted in ways that make me tremble in frustration. Games sit beautifully at the intersection of emerging art and commerce, and it's a guarantee that in any room full of developers, you are not the smartest person there. Yet in these meeting rooms filled with the philosopher-kings of fun, no one seems to be willing to admit they are completely craven and working for filthy, filthy lucre (not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's come to that honestly, eh?) or stand up and declare that they are making real Art-with-a-capital-A-and-damn-the-torpedoes-while-we're-at-it! If we aren't being reductionist, there's no reason the two can't coexist, but because we are, and because the vast majority of ludic output at the moment is gutless, simpering dreck, I'm about to throw in with one camp or the other just to see a decision made, a line drawn in the sand, a bet placed, and something proven, either by success or failure.

I really, really don't want to play l'enfant terrible of the games industry (and that seems a bit presumptous of a college student in his final semester, that whole speaking for the 60,000 anglophone North Americans employed in this vocation), and I don't want to write a sweeping manifesto about games, or indie games, or writing about games, because all of those have been done. They've all had a marginal impact. Most have failed. What I want, and what you should be taking away from this, is the sense that you've just seen Diogenes with his lamp lit in broad daylight. Here's a trainwreck of a man, and what he's shouting doesn't make a lick of got-damn sense (and does he have to swear so much?), but at the same time, there's something noble about looking for the truth in all of this. For whatever reason, we've stifled ourselves. Shut ourselves down, and surrendered whatever artistic freedom we once had. We need that freedom back, and with it, the liberty to say what is good and what is bad. We must clamor for the former, and deride the latter.

We're on the threshold of something big, and something wonderful. Chances are, it's already happened and we're just trying to make sense of what that something is. Games are our shared future, just as they have been our shared past. In the short run, there are some very hard, but assailable problems facing game designers and developers. It's time to make story (I will stab the man who uses "narrative" as a verbal crutch) play nicely with emergence and interactivity. It's time to start treating AI as a first priority feature. It's time to bring modern gameplay into everyone's hands: rich, poor, young, old, man, woman, able-bodied or no. It's time to let games broach difficult, troublesome topics, to get into messy ethics and moralities. It's time to treat the scholarly study of games a real discipline unto itself, to embrace the syncretism with other disciplines that implies, while standing firm and rejecting the dregs of their work as dreck when it is useless or harmful to the discipline of gamecraft. We must stop coasting on novelty, while staying novel ourselves.

There are many, many reasons I am deeply and ardently in love with games. Here is one of the shorter ones: they are a form of Gesamtkunstwerk, and therefore, an expression of our highest humanity.

So that is what this blog is about: games, but games because they are human. Because in every game, there are players.

Writing 340's homework for today: profile and evaluate a blog. Raph Koster, I choose you! This is a little short, and formated poorly, but it has to be in on time. I'll correct it like Nice Pete's Peach Titus at the next opportunity, but until then, it's getting hidden behind a cut.

Off-Road Velociraptor Safari may be the most exuberant game I have yet played this year.

We've been asked to blog a short post on what politics, specifically, the presidential election, means for our topic. I am not a particularly political person: I do hold strong political beliefs, but they are not particularly common, nor ordinary. Add to this obstinacy, the unwillingness to compromise some principals in favor of others, and I am not easily wooed. I am more easily convinced by arguments to avoid voting than I am convinced that our republic needs my token participation in order to legitimize it. I am perhaps, overly bitter and cynical, but then, it's hard not to sometimes.

But all of this is deeply personal and inappropriate for this space. But by their very nature, politics is the public expression of what one's personally held beliefs are, with the ultimate aim of codifying those beliefs into a body of law that a set of citizens have agreed to submit to. It doesn't matter what color your state is, you're still wrong, and I resent you and your politicians for the attempt to impose your beliefs on me. By and large for the most part, we can argue until we are blue in the face, fail to reach common ground even if we acknowledge one another

Which is why I think games have a chance in escaping the whole process. Which isn't to say that there isn't a strong influence on games from the political sphere. The controversies of the 1990s, so reminiscent of the hysteria surrounding (in reverse order) rap music, films, rock and roll, comic books, surrealism, films, the waltz, Romanticism, novels, secular music, (I suppose) poetry, maybe fire, stone flint hand axes, and originally bipedalism. There is nothing new under the sun. Change has been scary since forever. Now that we have a group of musty legislators empowered to slow down scary changes (the senate is a fairly old invention) confronted with a new, scary set of changes.

Largely, these things are irrelevant. The ESA does a reasonably good job (in my uninformed opinion) of serving as a lobby for the commercial interests of our industry. Likewise, the VGVN seems a little bit hysterical when it claims "video games are being threatened by legislation on the federal, state and local level, and it is time for gamers to stand up and voice their concerns." At a grassroots level, I'm content to let these organizations pull their weight. I don't think Arizona's HB2660 is going to stop anyone from enjoying Grand Theft Auto IV anytime soon.

The larger issue at stake, if we've learned anything from the recent Mass Effect controversy, is one of free speech. It seems narrow minded to pretend that games, just because they are a relatively novel form of expression, deserve additional special regulations. That said, the number of politicians who still seem to thing that they can regulate speech, especially in this day and age (hint: internet) is infuriating. Thanks for electing them!

I'd be willing to embrace a principled politician who had the correct position on free speech, security, copyright, and net neutrality, but frankly, the market will do as it sees fit, and games will follow suit.

The biggest thing stopping the emergence of AO titles full of tastefully mature content (Titus: The Game) isn't The Man in Washington. It's Wal-Mart.