Max Vs. The Internet

Gary Gygax passed today. We lost one of the greats. I never met the man, but his work, and the work that resulted from it, has touched and shaped my life in ways that I can't even begin to enumerate. I imagine many of you are in the same boat. Roll a 20 on the curb.

Gary Gygax on Wikipedia
More coverage at Kotaku, Boing Boing

The Game Education Summit 2008 call for papers has just gone out. The event itself is taking place June 10-11, at SMU.

You can download it here, or read a copy after the jump:

We've been using Pageflakes in Writing 340 to aggregate our research. Here's mine:
http://www.pageflakes.com/Envarh/.
Come along with me after the jump for a tour of its multifarious and glittering features!

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.

A quick head's up: there's a 10th anniversary screening of The Big Lebowski 7:30 PM Saturday, March 29th at The Egyptian.

I'd post more details or a link, but The Egyptian's website is pokey at the moment.

As a media scholar, I can only offer the following postulate: whatever cinema started in the early 20th century reached its apotheosis with this film at the end.