Max Vs. The Internet

Act One, wherein an attempt is made to ennumerate and evaluate one of the leading collections of personal commentary and meditations on game design, Raph's Website:

"Profile! What is its name and subject?"
"Raph's Website covers a variety of subjects, but its largest posting category is 'Game Talk.'"
"Who writes it? What is their relation to the field?"
"Raph's Website, is surprisingly enough, written by Raph Koster, who is a prominent game designer as well as being an author, and musician."
"Where are they located in the field?"
"Fatuously, San Diego, California. Less literally, Raph is a widely respected game designer, who served as a lead designer on Ultima Online, creative director for Star Wars Galaxies, and he now has his own startup, Areae ("places" in Latin). He also wrote a little book (seriously, it's short and half the pages are cartoons or diagrams) called A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the simplicity of which is a testament to its utility."
"How frequently do they post?"
"Almost daily, sometimes more. About 5 times a week, by rule of thumb."
"How popular is the blog (by activity and/or technorati rank)?"
"Raph's Website has a Technorati authority score of 467 at the time of this post. It also has 24 Technorati fans."
"Mention (and link to) the two most interesting posts."
"40 ways to be a better (game) designer and Project Horseshoe: Influences. 40 ways is interesting because it not only offers advice for budding designers, but it enumerates said advice as well. I saw Influences cited somewhere (I can't for the life of me dig up where, and I wish I knew so that I could cite them in turn, as is their due), but it struck me. Maybe not with eloquence, but with an essential rightness, the sort of blind conviction that is indicative of lazy thinking on my part and no small measure of rhetorical skill on the part of the author. "
"Evaluate! How well does this blog relate to your work?"
"I'll be the first to admit right here and right now, my topic has largely been grifted from Raph's statements around the Metaplace project he's doing through his start up, Areae Inc. The idea Metaplace advances, that of embedding MMOGs (or perhaps, instead of Massively Multiplayer Online Games, Persistent Multiplayer Online Games) into the web, and by extension, one's web presence, has interesting implications (which I'll admit to not having thought through yet, and likely, whatever I write will lead to a "yes, and--" kind of response)."
"To what extent is it scholarly, academic, professional?"
"While I would shy away from calling Raph's website scholarly, academic, or professional, there are definite shades of professionalism in his writing. The tricky thing about game designers is that they tend to be playful, even in their writing, so the usual standards of staid professionalism don't really apply. That said, there is a great deal of sincerity to what Raph's writing, as well as depth of knowledge and insight. It's clearly not just a rant-box, and his posts are lucid, informative, and well written. His blog is not the equivalent of some mentally-mushy comfort food, but a square meal, like your mother would want you to eat. It can usually give you a thought to carry with you through the day."
"How rich or detailed are its posts?"
"Most of the posts are short and to the point, but usually there are posts of substance once or twice a week. As with all things, sometimes more, sometimes less. How does one categorize the practice of posting poems on Sunday? A short poem is often not a rich or work, nor does it seek to convey a wide range of topics, but it is instead honed and detailed, and thought has been applied to crafting its brevity."
"Who is its audience? How relevant to the field are they?"
"I believe the audience in large part, to be composed of people interested in games and game design. Some of the commenters are well known in their own right, but many are part of that seething mass of web-borne hoi polloi that we (you and I, dear reader) are part of."
"How might this blog feed your work?"
"Well, aside from having developed a shameless interest in a project associated with the blog, Raph keeps a sharp eye on the trends around him, from news to the essays that other people write. If something interesting comes along, I'll be sure to snap it up and comment on it."
"How will your site differ?"
"Well, I'm not Raph, for one, and that counts for a lot given the personalized nature of blogs and blogging. Frankly, I'm nowhere near his level of talent or expertise, but I am a fresh set of eyeballs interested in a similar set of problems. I may not be able to approach his renaissance-man stylings, but my own interests ought to see me through. I doubt I'll ever be in competition with him, and he could probably destroy me on weight of reputation alone should we ever take up some debate between us (unlikely, but this is the internet, where miraculous, terrible, ridiculous things happen faster than you can count them). But if we're thinking of the web as a game, which is worthwhile from time to time, it's important to remember: don't hate, reciprocate. We'll see if my stylistic stumblings lead down a path worth following. "

Act Two, wherein the collected works of Yahtzee are considered:

Ben Croshaw [wiki] hit the internet like a rabbit punch, swift and ruthlessly. Zero Punctuation, his weekly, ranting comic/animation was quickly absorbed by The Escapist, and in the process, their non-video page views increased 394%. Yahtzee's pithy, rapid-fire (in his own words, "fully ramblomatic") style of narration works, and seems to have an enduring charm beyond the initial novelty of his pace and commonwealth accent: his videos are still putting up good viewer numbers, despite the occasional editorial misstep (his video review of The Witcher included a brief machinima coda which was widely derided as an execrable attempt at the format). In addition to critical and comedic written works, Yahtzee is also a game designer in his own right, having released a number of independent games on his website. When people like Greg Costikyan make a lot of much ballyhooed noise about how games lack a proper tradition of criticism, that there is no actual critique to be found in most of the writing about games, it does a disservice to the work of popular satirists like Yahtzee. We would do well to remember that games are still a popular medium, and that while it is worthwhile to elevate the discussion surrounding their design, production, and consumption, such discourse is likely to arise from the popular vernacular surrounding games at the moment.

This isn't to say that critique is unnecessary, antiquated, or a foolish pursuit. But we need to re-evaluate how such critiques are produced. It's entirely possible that excellent essays regarding games and play are being produced somewhere-- I have yet to see anything written above the level of rigor presented by most popular magazines (The Escapist being a prime example of this). Most openly available writing about games outside of heavy books published by university or vanity presses tends to be material that is related to the field in an ancillary fashion, and as such, not entirely relevant to the actual business of play.

With Yahtzee, and popular critics and journalism at large, the business of writing is grounded in play. It isn't enough to engage in a thought experiment and then neglect the grounding of engaging with their subject matter on its level-- through play. Often, this is the crucial groundwork academics and outsiders ignore. Too often we see pretenders to the title of critic earn their hand-cramps at a keyboard rather than a thumbpad. It is enough to have their sons play through the game for them, after refusing to learn the controls. Any critic, even one outside of his expertise, has an obligation to undertake some professional due diligence when offering his thoughts on a piece of work. With the popular voice, this due diligence (if someone coins "dude diligence" I will burst a blood vessel in my face) is a given. With such solid grounding, Yahtzee has at least earned the right to employ the ethical appeal implicit in his highly subjective, first person reviews.

But that, maybe, is entirely the point. Yahtzee has earned the right to be brutally honest by eschewing the ivory tower. He, like any other good satirist, understands that the honest which underlies his craft, and with it, how to use a raucously foul-mouthed style to deliver it. His cartoons were nothing short of a minor revelation. Every gamer can likely recall a bull session with their friends where disses were dropped and props were offered for the faults and features of the games they were currently playing. Yahtzee does exactly the same thing, but throw in some comedic goblin silhouettes and on-the-nose visualizations and the whole enterprise gets cranked up to 11. His willingness to address not only why a specific game is bad, but why the recurrent tropes of its genre have grown stale and are largely failures.

His willingness engage with game-craft adds an element of fearlessness to all of this. By offering up his own work, Yahtzee proves too things: first, that he can take what he dishes out (even if it's shot back at him in his own style, albeit less ably), and second, that he's willing to put theory into practice. This sort of satirist-creator role isn't new, but it is rare. The only other example that springs readily to mind is Erik Wolpaw who managed to parlay his writing experience from Old Man Murray into a job writing on Psychonauts, and then on to a little game named Portal. Wolpaw as well seems to be willing to take his own medicine, for after unleashing the Start-to-Crate review metric upon the world (where games are judged on how quickly the designers broke down and used crates to provide ammunition and health, rather than design a better solution), one of his more memorable characters is in fact, little more than a crate. If being able to take it, as well as dish it out, is any measure of success in creating interactive entertainments, then Yahtzee is well ahead of the curve.

The willingness to put theory into practice, to criticize and still risk failure, is laudable. Frankly, in a field lacking rigor and often mired in intellectual cowardice, it is refreshing to see someone willing to participate in the very practices they are scrutinizing.

I saw an interview with Alan Moore once (I swear this tangent will bring us back home), where he spoke about he had declared himself a magician on his fortieth birthday. His express purpose was to make his friends think that he had leapt head-first off the deep end, and in his own words, he quite rightly had. At that point in his life, he had realized that words are magic (or I suppose we should spell it "magick"), and that to use them is to use a higher order of power beyond their symbolic coding. I'm fairly sure he was sincere, but the example he gave made me think he was a touch less bonkers: satire. To put a satire on one's enemies, according to Moore, is a fate worse than death. Kill a man and his family, and you end his genetic line. Satirize that same man, and do it well, and he will be remembered and mocked forever, his verbal destruction coded into culture at large, a creative act that preserves the folly of a man in order to skewer him for it endlessly, something capable of turning his own descendants against him. I think it was an excellent, if over stated point. In a cultural context, games hold a similar cultural power. It seems necessary that they be kept in check as well, that their stupidities and petty evils be pruned while it is possible, before the ink on the pages of cultural memory dries, leaving us with an inferior experience.

Satire then, is a key part of that pruning, and the work of Yahtzee points towards a just application of such satire. At least someone is trying.

Act Three, or an apologia for this blog's existence outside of classroom requirements:

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.