Between the strange ape-skeleton monster, the complete lack of cooperation with spatial geography as we commonly understand it, and the inevitable death of your character, clearly Temple Run 2 is in fact secretly part of the Cthulhu mythos, and your intrepid adventurer is fleeing through the weird geography of an alternate dimension, completely unaware that they are no longer on Earth and that they can never return to it. Discuss amongst yourselves.

I’ve been watching Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and have generally enjoyed it. You know who doesn’t? A Mister, um, DanimalCart on the Kotaku forums. To be fair, his complaint is more eloquent than some of the crap Sarkeesian has dealt with, so I thought it was worth further examination:

I don’t agree with the majority of Sarkeesian’s work and many of the examples she brings up don’t strike me as overtly based in sexism. However I also don’t begrudge Sarkeesian for trying to point something out and she deserves respect just like any other human on the planet. I can even agree that some sexism does exit in gaming I am just trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If it’s not clear which baby is being thrown out with the metaphorical bathwater, it will be shortly.

Sarkeesian typically shows evidence and uses examples that only go in service to support a thesis she has already made before researching a topic. She does not consider financial issues, publisher/developer relations and other factors that contribute to story/character decisions.

It seems to me that Sarkeesian’s approach boils down to 1) discuss a basic androcentric cliche and 2) cite a dozen or more instances where video games have utilized same. I’m not sure how much more research DanimalCart thinks she needs to do to justify her position, or how he knows she is cherry-picking data to support a predetermined conclusion.

As far as mitigating factors are concerned, I think she thoroughly addressed the way financial issues and publisher-developer relations affect the use of, say, damsels in distress as a plot device. Video game publishers have a financial issue in that they want to make money. Video game developers are obligated by their publishers to make games that will sell. Games about male characters rescuing helpless female characters are reliably easy to sell to male audiences. This is a motivation for sexism, not an excuse for it.

If you have played ICO, you will know that the character Yorda works with ICO as an equal to escape together throughout most of the game and she has mystical powers that ICO does not, is taller than ICO and more mature as ICO is a boy. Yorda even saves ICO’s life at the end of the game, and is no mere damsel. The game also features beautiful environments, great atmosphere and is a truly unique and beautiful experience. Sarkeesian reduced one of the greatest games of the PS2 into another example of sexism, which may be why some are so put off by these videos.

I’ve never even heard of Ico before this week, but nothing in this paragraph proves that Yorda is not a damsel in distress. From what I can find online, Yorda is helpless to escape her plight, in spite of mystical powers (or height I guess), without the help of a male character controlled by the player. It may be more complex than Mario saving the princess, but the male is still the subject and the female is still the object of his efforts. Acknowledging that is not tantamount to dismissing everything good about the game.

Frankly, I don’t sense that Sarkeesian is arguing that the games she criticizes are necessarily bad, or even that the tropes she discusses are inherently bad. Her main point is that the tropes are used excessively, with little thought given to what they say about the video game industry’s treatment of female characters. The Legend of Zelda can be an awesome game and a rather un-feminist game at the same time. There’s no harm in admitting that, unless maybe you think it’s awesome because it’s not feminist, which would be kind of weird.

Women don’t want to be portrayed poorly or reduced to sex objects and Men don’t want labeled as misogynist pigs. Sexism is bad, everyone can agree to that and no one wants to be accused of it or have it applied to them. When tensions start at such an elevated height, a certain level of tact is required when trying to talk about them on a larger forum. To gamers, Sarkeesian displays all the tact of an uninvited construction crew coming in your living room at 5:30 in the morning and Jackhammering.

Here’s where we get to the root of the backlash against Sarkeesian. Like I said, I enjoy Tropes vs. Women, but when I watch it I find myself becoming defensive. I know she’s going to challenge my preconceptions, and I don’t want her to suggest that behavior I take for granted is sexist. If I played more of the games she discusses, the show would probably make me uncomfortable, so I can see why gamers would liken her to an unwelcome interruption. DanimalCart’s fallacy, though, is to suppose that Sarkeesian ought to maximize his comfort while lecturing him about feminism, when he would be most comfortable if she didn’t lecture him at all. There is no fun way to be told “your favorite games aren’t very good at depicting women,” and she isn’t obligated to make it fun.

Notice that it’s DanimalCart’s living room and Sarkeesian is the uninvited pest, even though she clearly enjoys video games as much as he does. Because she’s questioning the sacred cow, whereas he’s reflexively guarding it. The gaming community, like any other fandom subculture, is devoted to the purity of a common interest (in this case video games) and tends to be pretty insular and jingoistic, especially if they feel bullied by outsiders. In this worldview, you’re either with gamer culture or you’re against it:

The gaming media is running a giant game of guilt by association. By running articles and putting a spot light on these nasty comments [by gamers against Sarkeesian], perceptually they were not outliers anymore; they were the voice of the community. How in a span of 20 years did the stigmata of gamers go from “nerds who live in their parents basements” go to “every white male gamer is a sexist, misogynist asshole”?

Simple: Twenty years ago people didn’t know what nerds in the basement were saying or thinking, but now you can go on the internet and see. The issue isn’t so much that gamers are all misogynists, though. It’s that, far too often, their response to stories about misogyny in gaming is to circle the wagons and defend gaming from external criticism, rather than address internal ugliness. Thus: Sarkeesian criticizes video games, gamer culture harasses Sarkeesian, gamer media critcizes gamer culture, therefore the problem is Sarkeesian and the media!

Look at how this very site trashed Katie Couric for her uneducated and research viewpoint on video games. Kotaku ran four articles about “Couric-Gate” calling her one episode “one-sided, fear-mongering”, encouraged gamers to tweet at her with challenging viewpoints and did a victory lap when she offered a mea culpa. Where is that for Sarkeesian’s work? Couric ran one 40 minute episode on gaming; Sarkeesian plans to run 13 parts each over 60 minutes in length making just as grandiose claims of the ramifications of gaming. Where is the analysis in the gaming media?

“Analysis” here may be read as “knee-jerk defense.” Whenever someone suggests the entire medium of video games is to blame for something–Joe Lieberman, Jack Thompson, Katie Couric–the community rises as one to protect gaming from the ignorance and fear of outsiders. It’s a comfortable position to take, hunkering down with one’s “countrymen” against some boogeyman in the name of an unimpeachable cause. It also reduces a fandom’s capacity for self-examination. Gamers who are uncomfortable facing Sarkeesian’s arguments choose instead to pretend they’re a persecuted minority, under attack from all sides and finally betrayed by their own news outlets. They want her to be the next Jack Thompson, because that simplifies the conflict.

So here’s where we get back to that “throw the baby out with the bathwater” business; in this rush to reduce the debate into absolutist terms, Sarkeesian’s critics end up accusing her of dealing in absolutes. She thinks games aren’t feminist because she doesn’t understand them! She identifies sexist tropes in games because she wants those games to be eradicated! Combating sexism is fine, but this nut thinks all gamers are sexist, and she wants to destroy all video games! Absolutely none of this comes across in Sarkeesian’s videos, but since she doesn’t go out of her way to deny it hard enough, gamers feel free to assume it’s true.

I do think DanimalCart is right that Sarkeesian would do better to take into account the extraordinarily thin skin of her audience. Nevertheless, the greater onus is on her audience to grow the hell up.

As a sidenote, this is as good a time as any to point out that I now have a Tumblr precisely for things like this which I want to link to but which are not really, most of the time, post-worthy in and of themselves or which I don’t feel like discussing at length. (I just really happened to like this.)

FLAPJACKS: So I hear you’ve been talking about the Dead Space games a lot lately.
ME: Well, yes.
FLAPJACKS: I hope you have touched upon the most important thing, which is that Dead Space 3 is terrible.
ME: I didn’t think it was that bad –
FLAPJACKS: Yes, because you are a wriiiiiiiteeeer and therefore it is all about your precious story. But even you have to admit that Dead Space 3 is an awful, awful game.
ME: Well, I did kind of snicker when you came to those little step-ups where Isaac could clearly just clamber over were it not for Impassable Wall Fiat, so he had to use his magic telekinesis to make a tiny ladder appear and then climb up the five-foot-high ladder.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, that was very stupid. But you forget that vast chunks of the game are just the same six rooms, repeated over and over again. There is The Room That Always Has Baddies In It, The Room That Usually Has Baddies In It, The Corridor, The Other Corridor, The Room That Intersects With The Corridor (And Usually Has Baddies In It), and The Elevator. It got so that I could predict from exactly which stupidly obvious air vents the baddies would pop out from and try to stab me.
ME: I will concede that the game was much more repetitive in its level design than the first two Dead Space games, sure.
FLAPJACKS: Good. Will you also concede that the level design, in addition to being repetitive, is usually stupid? I mean, stupid in the way that calls attention to its limitations. Like, for example, the “puzzles” where the solution is literally painted on the wall right in front of the puzzle itself. It’s like the designers wanted to shout at you “YOU ARE A DUMB.”
ME: I preferred to think of that as password encryption being so hardcore in the Whateverth Century that the only way to truly hack it was to go totally analog.
FLAPJACKS: If that were the case, then why didn’t they just rely on the magical Doors Which Only Unlock When It Is Time For The Game To Let You Go There? I mean, in the previous games, they at least always bothered to come up with explanations for why that shit was happening. “Hold on, Isaac, I am going to hack that shit remotely so you can go through” as opposed to “welp, new objective, go that way, doors magically work now.”
ME: Those silly future people!
FLAPJACKS: Or the “electrical engineering” puzzles which were literally just “can you move both of your joysticks at once – okay then you can pass” challenges. Or the puzzles where the voiceover message of Dead Person Twelve tells you exactly what you have to do. Were the previous Dead Space puzzles too hard for some people? Who were these people? Were they just drooling all over their controllers and throwing a fit when that was not enough to win the game?
ME: Speaking as a true PC gamer in his opinion of consoleheads and Call of Duty players, I have to admit that is a distinct possibility.
FLAPJACKS: And the weapon crafting! Who wasted their time on this? You tinker for a bit until you get the guns you already know are good! “Oh, so if I do this and this, I get the pulse rifle with the grenade launcher? Why would I need anything else, then?”
ME: Well, that’s not fair. In the first two games, there was no gun that had stasis built in to its regular firing effect and which effectively put you in god mode for ninety percent of the game because when you shoot things and put them into slow motion, Dead Space gets hella easier in a hurry. Also, in the first two games there was no chain lightning gun. Did you play with the chain lightning gun?
FLAPJACKS: No. Why?
ME: Because the chain lightning gun hits everything at once. It kills the first guy and then does damage to all the rest of the guys. If you up the damage enough you can generally clear entire rooms with one shot. Also, you give it stasis so it also puts them in slow motion so you can stomp to death anybody who didn’t die from the first shot.
FLAPJACKS: So your point is that they invented a new gun for total no-skill twinks.
ME: Yup! I played it through on hard level and it was… not hard at all.
FLAPJACKS: And then there were the microtransactions!
ME: I do not believe for one second you spent any money on microtransactions for this game, mostly because anybody with even a tiny amount of gameplaying skill would never, ever need to spend money on microtransactions for this game.
FLAPJACKS: Well, no. But I am offended they exist!
ME: That’s fair. Did you also want to complain about how fighting against humans with guns made it seem like a Gears of War clone?
FLAPJACKS: No, that bit was not too bad. It was a nice change of pace from fighting the same six zombies again – and I mean “the same six zombies,” because swapping out the babies-with-tentacles-that-shoot-at-you for dogs-with-tentacles-that-shoot-at-you does not make for new zombies in spirit – especially when I had to fight the zombies and the Scientologists with guns at the same time. That was practically the only challenging part of the game. I think, in total, there was about six minutes of it.
ME: Okay. So I am going to concede all your arguments. Okay?
FLAPJACKS: So I win?
ME: Not precisely. I will cheerfully admit that as a game, Dead Space 3 is ill-thought-out as compared to the first two games, which were… let’s say “competent” or maybe “workmanlike,” because they weren’t really inspired per se.
FLAPJACKS: Excuse me, but not just anybody can come up with “zombies in space” except the writers of Mass Effect and Halo and…
ME: But you’re getting away from my point, which is this: Dead Space 3 isn’t a great game, but it’s still a pretty good story – yes, I can see you getting ready to draw out that word sarcastically, but it’s true. It’s a pretty good adventure story that you happen to be playing along with. And I enjoyed it on that basis, and I particularly enjoyed it because Isaac Clarke is not a douchebag.
FLAPJACKS: Why is that so special?
ME: Because most video game protagonists are douchebags! Nathan Drake from Uncharted is a quippy, smart-aleck douchebag. Kratos from God of War is a roiding douchebag. Ezio Auditore is badass, but he is also undeniably douche-adjacent at the very least. Guy From Far Cry 3 is an entitled preppy douchebag who learns the Simplicity of Native Life, which is the only possible way he could go even douchier. And so forth.
FLAPJACKS: And your argument is that Isaac is not a douchebag?
ME: In the first game, Isaac is in desperate self-denial that his girlfriend is dead – like, “actually sort of crazy” levels of self-denial because he blames himself for encouraging her to take the mission that gets her killed, which lets the evil alien thingy take advantage of his mind. In the second, he has literally been totally crazy for the last three years as a result of surviving the first game. In the third, he is withdrawn from the world and just totally wants to give up on everything as a result of surviving the first two games. Douchebag characters would just be all “whatever, here are some awesome one-liners about shooting limbs off of dead people.” The most Isaac can manage is mild sarcasm whenever life is more difficult because now he has Fetch Quest #80 to do before he can save the universe again. The rest of the time, he is painfully earnest, because he is going through the valley of the shadow of death in real-time and he knows it. Isaac Clarke is a guy who gets traumatized when he has to kill the guy who betrayed them all to the baddies and stole his girlfriend, because Isaac is a good dude.
FLAPJACKS: I like this dichotomy you have set up and look forward to the list of Good Dudes in video games. And also the inevitable jokes about Bad Dudes.
ME: Right. And that’s why, even though Dead Space 3 is a mediocre game, I didn’t mind, because so long as Isaac is a good dude, I am willing to stick around for the ride. Good dudes are the ones whose stories you want to follow. That’s why we all played The Walking Dead even though it was about ten times less of a game than DS3 was: because Lee was a good dude too. From what I hear the new Tomb Raider has Lara Croft being a good dude too, so I’ll probably play that.
FLAPJACKS: Are we allowed to call her a dude?
ME: “Dude” became gender-neutral about ten years ago, dude.

This is a picture my mate Jason Hinchcliffe took of me recently at the quarterly Toronto boardgaming convention playing Virgin Queen:

(That’s me over on the left – managing to stay around “not too fat” but unfortunately it is going on top. Stupid aging.)

This was my fifth play of the game (four in person and one via the VASSAL engine). Virgin Queen is a very, very long game. When I say “very, very long,” I mean a full play of it, with experienced players, takes anywhere from six to ten hours. Virgin Queen is deeply asymmetric – each of the six powers (Spain, England, France, the Ottomans, the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestants) has their own strengths and weaknesses, special rules and unique victory conditions. It is a stellar example of wide-open game design because there are simply so many things you can do: go to war, of course, but there is also ways to earn points through religious conversions, piracy, exploration, arranging state marriages, patronizing the arts and sciences, spying and assassinations, and so much more.1 Every power is carefully balanced against the others: the Turks spend most games dividing their time between naval battles with Spain and land battles with the Holy Romans, while the English explore, set up colonies, and generally want the Protestants to do well (but not too well), and France just wants to earn a lot of points in a hurry before it gets the crap kicked out of it by everybody else.

Virgin Queen is epic in a way most games can’t be – not just because of its length but because the game wisely uses that length to become immersive. I was brought into “serious” boardgames when I was young, which means the late Eighties and early Nineties, and I played Avalon Hill and Games Workshop boardgames that had heft – games like Britannia, Fury of Dracula, Diplomacy, Republic of Rome and of course the granddaddy of all super-gaming, Civilization (i.e. the one Sid Meier drew inspiration from for his mega-enormous computer game series, and which eventually spawned a decent boardgame spinoff of its own after several false starts). These were “you aren’t going anywhere soon, are you” types of games, but by their very nature they made you want to stick it out – simply because the longer you play a game, the more you care about it. Not necessarily winning, but seeing it through to the end. It becomes a simulation-esque experience – you inhabit your power or country or character as if you were in the middle of an epic RPG session, because assessing your risks and strengths isn’t just about board-reading in a game such as this – it is about knowing the table, reading your fellow players. And it might be hard to set up a session, but it’s always worth it in the end.

Virgin Queen is also somewhat special in that it is not only a long game but a long card-driven game. Card-driven games are traditionally a subset of wargame (although VQ is not a wargame, really, even though it is published by GMT, probably the foremost wargame publisher still going strong); the idea is that you have a hand of cards, and those cards are both events and also action points, and generally – depending on the game – you play a card each turn for either action points or the event or sometimes both at once. Twilight Struggle, the current #1-ranked game on Boardgamegeek, is a card-driven game, and although it is classified as a wargame it really bears a lot more similarity to many area-control Euros because instead of using the cards to move around your armies, you’re instead using them to gain influence around the world as either the USA or USSR.2 But I don’t think that’s why Twilight Struggle is the voted-best game on BGG; I think it has that honor because card-driven games are also, in and of themselves, immersive. Whenever you play a card, you are effectively re-writing history in your side’s favour – either using the event so that it helps you as much as possible (or hurts you as little as possible – a core element of many CDGs is that sometimes you have no choice but to play a “bad” event), or refusing to play it and instead get points. “No, there will be no invasion of Czechoslovakia today. I am going to use those points to firm up Soviet influence in India instead.” (Personally I think 1989 is actually even better at doing what Twilight Struggle does than TS does it, but that’s a bit of a minority opinion.)

The combination of card-driven mechanics with an epic game just makes Virgin Queen all the more enthralling; you just don’t notice the time rolling by until somebody checks their watch and you realize you have been playing this game for four hours already and you’re only just wrapping up turn two. That’s the sign of a great game, to me.

(Also I was France and I totally won for the first time.)

1. England earns VP every turn that Elizabeth I remains unmarried. [↩]
2. And it is three hours long so it is also fairly epic in its own right. [↩]

I’ve been reading a bunch of people complaining that Bioshock Infinite might not re-define the first-person shooter experience. You know the drill: every time a new FPS game comes out, you get the same old litany:

• “I don’t get to make any real choices and all of the in-game choices I get to “make” just ultimately result in either the same thing happening in a different way, or a different cutscene at the end”
• “I’m so sick of doors that don’t open and why can’t I go explore off in the directions they don’t want me to explore”
• “Every game has a pistol and a rifle and a grenade launcher and a BFG, why can’t I get different weapons”
• and of course “why can’t this be more like System Shock 2?”

And all of this misses the point. An FPS might not be a full-on rail shooter, but it’s still about going through the steps of a story; the very nature of an electronic game outside of a full-on-free-form game like SimCity (back when SimCity was not shitty, as it has apparently become) demands a relatively linear progression. Even sandbox GTA-style sandbox/action games have linear progressions built into them – it’s just that the main story has its linear progression while the side stories and one-off-events have their own, and you can bop around the various timelines as you like but you’re not going to get to skip stuff as a rule. The ultimate expression of this, of course, was Telltale’s Walking Dead game, which was excellent and also barely a game in any meaningful sense (it was much more of an interactive movie than anything else), but so long as the writing was rock-solid, who cared that your gameplay was relatively minimal?

Of course, an FPS offers more gameplay than The Walking Dead does, but ultimately ninety percent (at least) of the gameplay in any FPS is tactical – shooting battles. That’s why you play a first-person shooter: to shoot things. The weapons in any given FPS will generally be the same – in function if not form – as they will be in others, because there’s really only a limited number of ways to shoot things with guns (or magic staves, or whatever). Generally when something really neat comes out that breaks the mold for “types of guns available,” it will become a focal point of that game’s play (like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2). And then it will get copied by other games (like Dead Space with its Kinesis module). But this is good! Because when I play an FPS, I want to shoot things immediately and get into the story. I don’t want to learn HOW to shoot the things. I want to point the gun and shoot at them.

And yes, System Shock 2 was a genius piece of work, but it is to modern first-person shooters as Lord of the Rings is to fantasy novels – its influence (multilateral gameplay, an experience/skillbuilding system in an FPS, superb writing) spreads deep into modern design and everybody will always, on some level, feel that any other effort comes up short. Whenever somebody bitches about how they don’t make games like System Shock 2, it just feels like they’re saying “and why wasn’t that play as good as Hamlet?”

I play first-person shooters in order to shoot things. If I can shoot things in an enjoyable fashion, then the game is good. BulletStorm is probably my favorite FPS of the last few years because it wisely decided to take a new tack with first-person shooting – e.g. turning stunt shots into sport and also into character advancement – but also because it awarded me points for shooting baddies in the nuts, or grav-stomping guys into the stratosphere, or bouncing them into lava with explosions. Because that was fun, and made the stupid achievements every game seems it must now have into something actively meaningful. But mostly because it gave me points for shooting baddies in the nuts. Not every FPS has to be a genre-bending exploration of philosophy. Deus Ex: Revolution is not inferior to Deus Ex because you can’t choose the ending. (It is inferior because a single choice you make halfway through the game can render the game effectively unwinnable.) BioShock is not inferior to System Shock 2 because the moral choices you make are effectively all but meaningless. (It is inferior because you get built-in respawn points, which is silly.)

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t want our first-person shooters to be as good as possible. But a solid FPS is not to be sneezed at, especially when most people haven’t played it yet.

‘Smash Up’, by AEG, is pretty much a do-it-yourself version of all the “high concept” stories out there that slap two memes together as a substitute for actual creativity. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? The ones where some screenwriter says, “Oh, zombies are big right now, and steampunk is very in…I’ll make a ‘steampunk zombies’ movie! I’ve earned my million bucks!” Luckily, ‘Smash Up’ gets all the good ones out of the way quick so that you don’t have to waste your ten bucks watching the inevitable ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ adaptation.

The game has eight factions (Zombies, Aliens, Dinosaurs, Pirates, Wizards, Robots, Ninjas, and Tricksters–your basic leprechauns/gremlins/sneaky mythic beasties) with an expansion on the way that adds four more (Steampunks, Ghosts, Killer Plants, and for some reason Bear Cavalry.) Each faction has a deck; each player picks two factions and shuffles them together into one bigger deck. So in one game, for example, my Zombie Dinosaurs will vie for supremacy with your Robot Ninjas (and Bob’s Pirate Wizards and Jane’s Trickster Aliens…the game is rated for 2-4 players.) Each faction has its own particular strengths; Zombies, for example, have loads of cards that come back out of the discard pile for more, while Dinosaurs have the biggest and stompiest minions. Part of the trick is picking combos that work well together.

You don’t directly duke it out, though; you each work to conquer a series of bases operated by hapless humans. Each base has a “breakpoint” (the total amount of minion power needed to conquer it) and a point total (the amount of points that the base is worth.) When enough minions are at the base to reach the breakpoint, the base is scored; the winner gets the first number of points, the runner-up gets the second, and third place gets the third number. (In a four-player game, player four is SOL.) Any minions at that base then get discarded, and a new base is drawn to replace the old. Whoever gets to 15 VP first wins.

Play is very simple: You can play one action card per turn, one minion card per turn, and then you draw two cards. But the action and minion cards pretty much all have special abilities, each of which reflects the abilities of the faction, and so a lot of complicated strategy comes out of those very simple rules. If you have zombie pirates and a base near breakpoint, you can play a Saucy Wench to kill your opponent’s minion, then row over a Zombie Lord in the Dinghy to score the base and get first place. Then, on your next turn, you can play They Keep Coming Back to replay the Zombie Lord…and, in the process, play two extra minions at the other two bases. The mechanics are easy to learn, but it feels like you’re constantly discovering new tricks to pull off.

The game is fishing for expansions a little too obviously (you know that they’re going to be coming for your money again and again when the box has slots for sixteen extra factions beyond what it comes with) but it’s got a lot of replayability, and it’s simple enough to teach in under five minutes. It’s also easy enough to master the rules to play with your kids, which is nice, because they’re going to want to play any game that lets them make Dinosaur Ninjas and Zombie Wizards. I’d recommend it as a fun party game and a light break between longer and headier games.

As I’m given to understand it, Sony announced the other day that the astonishing perfection of the CD-based Playstation, which had been superseded by the even more astonishing perfection of the DVD-based Playstation 2, which had then been rendered obsolete by the Blu-Ray vision that was the Playstation 3, had in turn become an outmoded and worthless piece of crap compared to the forthcoming Playstation 4. The reaction I’ve heard (which is, admittedly, reading a bit of Penny Arcade and Kotaku, because I didn’t even bother with the PS3 let alone caring deeply about a hypothetical game console that they wouldn’t even show people at the press conference) is a resounding “meh”. Why might that be? Apart, of course, from the fact that they wouldn’t even show people the console at the unveiling press conference.

I’m starting to form a radical theory about why the latest generation of game consoles (Wii U, PS4, and whatever Microsoft is going to unveil in a wek or two) have gotten such lukewarm receptions. It’s probably going to be controversial…heck, I’d say there’s no more than a 50/50 chance that it’s right…but I think that there’s not actually as much incentive as the game companies think there is to improve the performance of their consoles. In short, I’m starting to believe that the age of video game hardware improvements is coming, slowly but surely, to a close.

This isn’t to say that they can’t do any better. I’m sure that processing power is improving on a very impressive curve, if only because the experience of my entire life has been one of computers getting constantly better (when I was born, the brand-new state of the art personal computers had 16K of RAM.) While there does at some point have to be a plateau for the improvement of the computer, we’ve not found it yet and we don’t even really know where it might be. So this isn’t a “man will never reach the moon” type rant about how they’ve reached the limits of how good a gaming console can get.

It is, however, true that there is a point of diminishing returns in terms of how well these improvements in processing power will translate into practical, measurable gains in the finished product. The previous jumps in technology have been immediately obvious to the average consumer; someone playing an Atari 2600 would see the NES as a clear improvement over their machine, just as the Super Nintendo was obviously better than the NES, the Playstation was immediately better than the Super Nintendo, and the PS2 was eye-poppingly better than the PS1. But with the PS3, there wasn’t the same level of “eye candy”. It was better–of course it was better–but it wasn’t a quantum leap the way the PS2 had been over its predecessor. That was the opening that let the not-quite-as-powerful but much cheaper Wii in to lead the market; it wasn’t as good as the PS3 or the XBox 360, but it was good enough and it was about $350 cheaper.

And while the PS4 is bound to be an improvement over the PS3, developers already have enough processing power to make astonishing games that are beyond our expectations. Slight improvements in skin texturing and particle physics isn’t going to make the next Batman game better than ‘Arkham Asylum’; clever game design and innovations in playability will. Being able to represent more figures onscreen at any given time, doing different things isn’t what makes a game great; if it was, ‘State of Emergency’ wouldn’t have been as dull as dishwater. We have reached a point where it’s not how much power your machine packs, it’s what you do with it.

The question is, what does this mean for the industry? Because it’s clear that Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft have a marketing strategy that involves avoiding market saturation for their product by putting out a “new, improved” version every six or seven years and coercing the software companies into supporting only the latest toys. But if the buying public doesn’t make the jump, what does that do to the company that just spent hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D? Can software companies afford to gamble that there’s no need to design games for the next-gen platforms? Or is the system simply “too big to fail”? Will the buying public just continue to buy next-gen consoles simply because the assumption that they must be better has become too ingrained? Something tells me there has to be a reckoning at some point for the continuing push for an ever-better system at all costs, but I can’t predict when it would be.

If you think you can, feel free to share it here! I’ll buy stock based on your recommendations, but hey, no pressure.

Have been reading a lot of reviews of Dead Space 3 lately, and although I am not terribly concerned about it – mostly because it is not on Steam, and these days if it’s not on Steam I’m not gonna bother buying a game, frankly – but there are a whole lot of people who are apparently really pissed that the franchise is no longer really a horror story but is morphing into an action series. It’s understandable to be peeved, because if you like something when it is one thing, you might want more of that one thing than of another thing. But in the case of Dead Space‘s narrative progression, there is no choice: so long as you want the story to continue, then the horror aspect of it has to eventually end.

Consider: the first installment of most horror franchises is all about fear of the unknown (which, whether said unknowingness is derived from shock or suspense, is the most effective type of fear in a dramatic sense). In Alien, for example, the fear is generated by the characters genuinely having no idea of what they have found re: the crashed spaceship and the aliens therein, and then having no idea of the capabilities of the alien itself. In Dead Space, the characters are ignorant of everything at the start of the game and have to gradually learn what the monsters are, why they kill people and consume corpses, what happened on the ship, et cetera, and what is “known” to the player is only known because of genre osmosis (spaceships have artificial gravity, asteroids can fuck up your spaceship, and so on). In fact Dead Space neatly inverts several tropes to play against the player’s “knowledge” early on – for example, shooting the space zombie monsters in the head actually does nothing (you have to shoot off their limbs instead), which makes a player’s first encounter with the uglies more tense when the space zombies aren’t behaving as space zombies ought to behave according to the rules they already know. But those rules are arbitrary, and Dead Space gets that, which is why it works as a horror narrative. Often the scariest moments in the game are those times when one of your allies’ radios clicks on and shocks the hell out of you because you are primed to think “monster jumping out” whenever you hear something you weren’t expecting.

But when we progress to the second installment of a horror franchise? If your protagonist from the first installment has survived (and due to the inherent nature of sequelitis, they probably have done) you can’t rely on lack of knowledge to provide horror, not entirely, because now both your audience and your protagonist know stuff about the monsters. The answer to continue to create horror, then, is generally a combination of two things: firstly, add some more stuff the protagonist/audience didn’t get a chance to learn the first time out and use that to create fear of the remaining unknown, and secondly take what is already known and recontextualize it in a manner that presents new challenges and threats – fear of the known. In Aliens, we find out that the Aliens are basically an insect race and that they aren’t simply mindless killing machines because they can organize ambushes and evade traps (fear of the unknown) and we also get to find out what happens when there is a lot more than one Alien to deal with, even if you have lots of guns (fear of the known). In Dead Space 2 we find out what the space zombies can escalate into (it is bad) and that there are more varieties, including some which are just not conventionally kill-able like all the rest (fear of the unknown) and we also get to fight the space zombies in new locales, and also there is that bit where you have to stick the needle into your own eye (fear of the known). And this blend usually-but-not-always works.

However, by the time you get to the third installment of your horror franchise, you are pretty much out of “unknown” unless you just start making shit up that might technically work within the narrative from a logistical standpoint but which isn’t exactly aligned with everything you’ve done so far. (Some people accuse Lost of having done this, and although it is not a horror show per se, they had kind of a point.) Given that the fans of your story will generally resent the out-of-left-field “unknown,” all that leaves you with is fear of the known – and at this point your protagonist has suffered so much in the first two installments that they’re not going to be credibly scared of any of it any more. (Not a horror example, but consider how John McClane changes in the Die Hard movies – in the first couple, he frequently desperately prays that some plan of his will work and that he won’t die, and then as the third and fourth progress he is increasingly blase about the insane things he is doing, because his fear has died.) Fear of the known can usually be planned for and dealt with, and when one has to improvise, one knows what will and won’t work within reasonable limits. (The obvious exception here is Cthulhu-style horror where knowledge of the enemy is either actively dangerous to have or completely meaningless because the enemy is too powerful for it to matter, but as a general rule, protagonists in that milieu don’t last past one story for reasons which are fairly obvious.)

In other words, the difference between a horror movie and an action movie is, mostly, the protagonist’s degree of knowledge. Which means as any horror narrative continues and develops, it by necessity has to gradually drift towards being an action movie (or something else, but action is the easiest progression because the two genres are so similar and both strive to hit the same adrenalin-producing nerve in the viewer), simply because the protagonist will learn more and more – you can see this even in many regular horror movies within the three-act structure where the hero, in the third act, finally confronts the baddie. That progression is practically a staple of slasher flicks, and so slasher flick franchises generally invert the formula and remain horror films by having new protagonists in each installment while keeping the same baddie around. Of course, then you run into the problem with that formula, which is that each iteration will feel more and more repetitive until you decide to put Jason in space because what the hell else is left to do?

…Robo-Rally.

For those of you that have never played, it is one of the most chaotically fun board games ever, pound-for-pound. You steer a robot through an obstacle course (one that involves, over the course of the various expansions, lasers, flamethrowers, radioactive waste, crushers and bottomless pits, among other things) using your hand of cards to program the robots. On a given turn, for example, you might tell your robot to move three forward, turn right, move two forward, turn left, and back up one. The trick is that everyone lays down their cards, and then flips them over at the same time. So your robot might, on that example, move forwards, get rammed two squares back while turning right, move two forward onto a conveyor belt that moves it sideways two more, turn left and go two squares further down the conveyor belt, then back up into the path of a flamethrower. (Timing rules resolve which cards happen first in the event of a question.)

This is pretty universally regarded as a great game. If anyone has a complaint (and of course, some people do, because I don’t think there’s ever been a game that every single human being has liked) it’s that the game is a little book-keeping heavy. You have to remember the sequence of events on each phase of each turn (When do lasers fire? When do crushers crush? When do conveyor belts move?) as well as the timing rules, and the slightly complex-but-brilliantly-insane rules for damage. See, as your robot gets damaged, it has less “memory” to process your commands, resulting in a smaller hand size. If your hand size gets smaller than the number of cards you need to lay down each turn, you have to leave some of your cards in place from turn to turn. Thus, a heavily damaged robot from the previous example would end each turn with “turn left” and “back up”, and you’d have to decide what order to place your only three cards in before the robot ended the turn by swiveling and reversing.

The other complaint, which is minor, is that there’s a limited number of boards and a large space requirement. You need a big table to play Robo-Rally, and even with the total number of expansions, there are only 26 courses. Admittedly, that combines to make…oh, crud, I can’t remember whether this is combinations or permutations, but either way it works out to an insanely huge number…but the point is, it’s a game that begs for a custom board editor.

Oh, and as one tiny final issue, as cool as the whole thing sounds in your head, it really does mostly involve pushing little miniatures around a board in practice.

All of these issues could be resolved with a good Robo-Rally computer game. (Yes, I’m aware that Game Table Online has a computer version of Robo-Rally. I have never, on any computer I’ve ever owned, been able to get it to work. Nothing against the undoubtedly hardworking programmers who made it, but “able to work” is, in my mind, a primary component of a “good” computer game.) With a computer handling all the timing issues, turns would move smoothly and easily (and very quickly, too. A game would go from several hours to about thirty minutes.) A board editor for Robo-Rally the computer game would be child’s play. And if you wanted, the computer game could store the turn-by-turn info and transform it at the end into a CGI cut-scene video of your robot’s odyssey through the factory floor.

Seriously, with the exception of that last part, this could be done as a Facebook game, a smartphone app, a Flash game, pretty much anything. It is a greatly popular board game already, and would be even easier and more intuitive as a computer game. And it’s just crazy fun, too. Can’t we, I dunno, get a Kickstarter going to buy the rights from whoever’s got them, and make this happen or something? Because in my head, this is awesome.

So a few years ago I pointed out that Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was a terrible and stupid idea, and that if you are going to have a DC fighting game, then it should be a game where the characters are all super-strong and punch each other through buildings and where everything explodes when you throw it at people, and it appears that DC paid attention and then, because we are talking about DC Comics here, did it, but went and fucked the bag.

Because come on. A game where you have Harley Quinn and the Joker fighting Superman is a stupid game. A game where Batman, who is not even in Bat-Hyper-Power-Armor, can punch Doomsday through a building is a stupid game. A game where DC heroes are trying to murder the other guys (seriously, look at Superman and his heat vision and tell me he is not in killing-psycho-mode) is a stupid game. Basically, DC should have run the hell away from the Mortal Kombat people, but instead decided that what they really needed to do was embrace the terrible Mortal Kombat people and not incidentally run with all of the worst design ideas invented in Arkham City (“hey, let’s take Arkham Asylum and, you know, basically make it worse in every possible way”), except even more than that. As I have said before: as a general rule, DC Comics and good video games go together like Santa Claus and conquering the Martians.

(Man, imagine how much more pissed I might be if I still bothered to read DC comic books. Which I don’t. I don’t even bother pirating them, because DC comics are so unreadable these days that they are not worth “free.”)

Ginkogopolis was fun the first few times I played it, but eventually I found the novelty to wear off. For those unfamiliar, Ginkgopolis is ostensibly a game where you are building a futuristic city, but realistically it is a sort of area-control tile-laying game – except it also incorporates drafting cards (in order to lay the tiles to build the city), resource management (as you need to generate the thingies you need to build the tiles – plus the tiles themselves – plus victory points, which are a resource in and of themselves) and palette building (because as the game progresses and you build higher towers, you will get more abilities and need to strategically synergize the abilities you get by building the appropriate towers). If this all sounds complex, that’s because it is complex – I find it generally takes even veteran board gamers at least one play to get used to the rules, but once you do, the rules design is actually quite masterful and elegant (really, it’s quite a triumph for so many mechanics to flow together so seamlessly).

That having been said – I’m not that wild about it. It’s okay with three players and gets worse with four and five. Why don’t I like it that much, you might ask. Well, it’s an area-control tile layer like Carcassonne is, but where Carcassonne spreads out over an entire table, games of Ginkgopolis tend to build upwards and be extremely vicious (since you are therefore building over each other’s tiles a lot). “But Chris,” you say, “you like vicious games.” True, but I like them to be strategic, and due to the way the rules work and the game generally plays, this is far more a tactical game of “what is the best play available to me on my turn” than anything to do with long-term planning, because the game’s design actively prevents you from planning long term: often you will find yourself simply picking the least worst option on multiple turns, which makes the game feel as though it is particularly luck-driven. This is because the game is particularly luck-driven. So is Carcassonne, of course – any turn-taking tile-layer will have a luck element to it – but Carcassonne’s design means you can always go start something else in an effort to score points. In Ginkgopolis, that option is not really present to you. Worse, in Ginkgopolis, some of the upgrade cards you can get over the course of the game are just plain better than others (tower-building cards are better than outward-expansion cards, generally, because towers are less easy to build over), which makes the game feel even more luck-driven.

I don’t mean to trash the game overly. As I said: the design is very clever indeed, and frankly, it’s only a 45-minute game or so once everybody knows how the rules work so it being luck-driven is hardly a killer factor. But my weakness for boardgaming is city building games – I desperately want the “Sim City in a box” experience (where you have to worry about taxation, and the environment, and keeping citizens happy), and I buy every city-building game that comes out, and invariably they disappoint. (I may just have to design that game myself.) So Ginkgopolis gets graded on a curve, which might not be entirely fair, but who said life was fair?

I had been looking forward to CO2 for over a year. It had so much going for it! Designed by Vital Lacerda, who did the excellent Vinhos (one of my favorites of 2011), and with a killer theme – you’re trying to build renewable energies to stop global warming from annihilating the planet. (As a side bonus, the game’s theme caused an immense amount of butthurt to conservative board gamers who took the game’s existence as a personal insult, to which I can only say HA HA HA HA HA.) I was totally expecting a home run here.

And… yeah, no. The game is complex – not killer complex, but complex enough that there are strategies, obviously. And Lacerda’s clearly tried to incorporate the theme into the mechanics in many ways (ramping energy demands as time progresses means that if you don’t build renewable energy plants fast enough, countries will just build fossil fuel plants to meet demand instead, for example). And the board itself is honestly just lovely to look at. But the problem with the game, for me, is that the core mechanic doesn’t really feel right. The core mechanic in this game is a three-step process: on your turn you either start a energy plant research project, convert a research project into a pilot energy plant, or convert a pilot plant into a full-on power plant. Except you can convert other people’s things. Which from a game standpoint is necessary because otherwise the game doesn’t work, but thematically it doesn’t really make sense and from a gameplay standpoint it just feels so arbitrary that it kills the mood – and this is the opinion of everyone I’ve played the game with. Which is a damn shame, because I really wanted this one to be good.

I got the chance to play Terra Mystica a few weeks ago and then again last week. This was the critical darling of the Essen game fair this year, so I was interested to give it a go. And… it’s not bad, certainly. It’s basically a riff on the sort of area control you might find in Through the Desert, where you place pieces on the board and then control those areas forever. Terra Mystica is a lot more elaborate, though – each player has a different fantasy race with different powers that affect the game differently, and each player gets, like, inns and castles and monasteries and all that sort of thing, and everybody’s castles and inns and monasteries do different things, and there’s a sort of power meter which you can use for additional free actions, and…

Terra Mystica isn’t a bad game – far from it. It’s quite a pleasant brainburner, and the game is perfectly solid. But after playing it twice, while I would play it again without complaint if people wanted to play it, I feel no need to own it or suggest it be played ever again – because, really, it’s just Through The Desert with more bells and whistles (and fewer camels), and in this case I think the simpler game is the better experience because Terra Mystica’s challenge is mastering the logistics of your own species faster than other players to get your pieces on the board, while Through The Desert’s challenge is getting in other people’s way with your pieces which you just PUT on the board. And I prefer that second one.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been playing nearly as many boardgames as I’d like these days; after storing up an entire wardrobe full of games for a rainy day, we’ve been in a situation for about two or three years where someone’s always working nights and/or weekends. Plus the little one is only now getting to an age (7) where she can play a lot of games. Unless we wanted to limit our game selection a lot, games had to happen after bed.

But I did want to mention a board game that’s worked really well for our family, and which is a lot of fun in general. ‘Castle Panic’ is by Fireside Games, and is a cooperative game (there’s actually a clever competitive scoring mechanism, which I’ll get to in a moment, but we generally don’t use it because of the aforementioned seven-year old) where you take the role of defenders of the Castle from a horde of monsters. Each turn, you play cards from your hand to hit monsters, and each turn, you are required by the rules to place and move monsters. Players are allowed to trade cards, which is important as each card can only hit the monsters in a specific part of the board, and each monster takes a certain number of hits to kill. (You rotate the piece to show its current hit point total. Some monsters, called “boss monsters”, have special abilities when played.) When and if the monsters get to the center, they destroy first your Castle Walls (which are replaceable) and then your Towers (which are not.) If you can wipe out the entire horde before they destroy all your Towers, you all win! If not, you all lose.

The competitive bit, which is as I say quite clever even though we don’t use it, is that only the player who scores the last hit gets credit for the monster. If the Castle survives, you total up the hit points of the monsters you kill, and the winner is the one with the most points. But if everybody loses, nobody gets the points, on account of it doesn’t really matter who made the most kills if you’re all murdered by a vicious horde of orcs, trolls and goblins. So the trick is to find ways to avoid helping players in ways that would actually benefit their score, while still helping them enough to avoid gruesome death at the hands of the monsters.

The nice thing about a cooperative game, especially when you’re playing with a child, is that it takes advantage of the natural friendships that you already (presumably) have with the other players. With everyone working together against an honestly pretty brutal monster placement system (at least once a game, you will draw the monster tokens in a way that makes you genuinely feel what it’s like to be at Helm’s Deep before the Riders of Rohan showed up), there’s a strong feeling of teamwork and camaraderie that builds up quick. Plus, if you have a player who’s not quite in tune with the strategy in the game (like, say, a seven-year old) the game allows you to show each other cards, trade cards, and offer advice.

The expansion, ‘The Wizard’s Tower’, opens up the horde with a lot of creatures with new powers (flying monsters, super-boss monsters, and fast moving cavalry), but levels the playing field a bit with a Wizard’s Tower that grants you access to a second deck of cards with more powerful attacks and special defensive cards. The new super-bosses are game-breakingly tough at times, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of taking out a Dragon with a Hammer of Light.

It’s a fun game, best for an atmosphere of non-intense play (which I feel is honestly the best way to play any game, but that’s just me…) and you can be pretty loose about the “10 and up” age requirement. I’m definitely looking forward to another expansion.

BOARD GAMES:

• Virgin Queen. Most people here will never be inclined to play VQ, given that a proper game of it lasts anywhere from five to nine hours – I managed to play it three times in 2012 and consider that a mammoth accomplishment. But it is a near-perfect game if you want to do what it does, which is reasonably simulate Elizabethan-era Europe within a not-insanely-complex game structure. It’s still quite complex, of course, because this is a game where all six factions (one of whom isn’t even a country, but simply “the Protestants”) have their own ways to win and their own distinct advantages, and where you can earn victory points in any number of ways – by promoting or crushing Protestantism, by colonizing the Americas, by advancing scientific discoveries or great works of art, by arranging politically-beneficial marriages with other players, or of course by going to war and stomping face. But all of it requires that you delve into truly deep diplomacy on a level that few games ever approach. What an experience.
• The Manhattan Project. Too many new worker placement games just leave me thinking “well, why didn’t I just play Caylus instead of this, because it’s a better game than this was.” TMP bucks that trend by actually doing something very novel and different with worker placement – instead of having organized rounds of “okay, we all place workers – and now we resolve the workers,” TMP goes free-form and makes placement of workers and removal of workers a player choice. This, combined with gameplay that encourages players to metaphorically punch one another in the face, made it a definite favorite for the year. Tzolkin, recently out, does much the same thing but with a giant gimmicky set of plastic gears, and Tzolkin is a fine game, but I still prefer TMP.
• Hanabi. I generally am not interested in most cooperative games because they tend to end up being a thing where the loudest/pushiest player dominates everybody else’s gameplay. Hanabi neatly kills that off by making it impossible: this is a cooperative card-laying game where you never see your hand and where the other players are strictly limited as to what they may tell you. It’s a brilliant little design that rewards ingenuity and deductive skills. Great game.
• Android: Netrunner. Unlike many I am old enough to remember the original Netrunner CCG, which was brilliant in theory but brutally flawed in practice – it arrived at the dawn of CCG design when people still didn’t quite realize how to balance games, so Richard Garfield’s excellent two-player asymmetrical bluffing duel CCG, which was superb right out of the starter deck, collapsed when you started designing actual decks. The modern revamp basically fixes all of that and adds some new, interactive mechanics to up the tension level, but other than that is still the same great game – just better on all counts.
• Love Letter. AEG takes a genius design from Japan – a deduction/bluffing game with only sixteen cards that plays up to four players – and then inexplicably rethemes it to their stupid new pre-made Tempest setting, on the assumption that anybody will care about their stupid new Tempest setting. Whatever, the game is still amazing.
• The Twelve Doctors. A print-and-play asymmetrical two-player dueling game based on Doctor Who where one player is the Doctor and one player is the Master, reaching into every corner of the Who mythos for its cards, and which manages the almost-impossible combination of both being a richly thematic game about Doctor Who while also being a very good game in its own right, a tactical blend of area control and San Juan-style hand management. And yes, there is a Jelly Babies card.
• Colonial. An aggressive 18th-century economic/exploitation game with a lot of clever mechanics. It’s abstract, but the good kind of abstract that exists to simplify rather than make overly simple – and it of course has numerous brutal diplomatic options as well. Terrific fun, with gorgeous components and cheerfully amoral gameplay.

MUSIC:

• Skrillex feat. Ellie Goulding, “Summit.” Skrillex gets possibly more undeserved shit than any musical act going, whether it is cheap WUBWUBWUB jokes or stupid gags about his nom de plume, but this is a perfect counter to that – it’s not dubstep at all, but instead a contemplative and somehow epic bit of melodic trance. It’s gorgeous.
• Lumineers, “Ho Hey.” On the non-technological side of things, we have this almost painfully simple and earnest love song, a love song stripped down to bare essentials, if you will – if it were a car, it would be one of those barely-a-cars where you have a seat, an engine, an undercarriage and wheels, and nothing else. But it works. Basically it is like listening to Mumford and Sons except, and this is the key bit, you don’t actually have to listen to Mumford and Sons.
• Pegboard Nerds, “Revenge of the Nerds.” Lovely crossover between 16-bit chiptuning and dubstep. I think that is enough to say right there, except that I will add I first heard this as part of a fake “Wreck-It Ralph” soundtrack and I like this better than anything on the actual soundtrack (which is hardly bad, come to think).
• Florence and the Machine, “Spectrum.” (Also the Calvin Harris remix.) Because every generation gets the Tori Amos it deserves – and every generation deserves a Tori Amos, really – and Florence Welch is apparently proof that this generation is particularly deserving for some reason I do not yet understand, but I’m willing to run with it if I get to snag stuff like this for my iPod on the side.
• July Talk, “Paper Girl.” This song is so. Fucking. Dirty. Loved this Tom Waits-meets-Dido brawler months ago, still love the fuck out of it. Feel like I need a shower after I listen to it, every time, and that is the highest compliment I can pay it.
• Azealia Banks, “1991.” Because it has been too long since I heard a true machine-gun female MC spit out rhymes like that.
• Everything from Madeon’s new album this year but especially “Finale.” Because it’s great. This is what I wanted electronic music to be twenty years ago and it is just getting to doing it now. Took you goddamn enough, you broad musical genre you.
• Japandroids, “The House That Heaven Built.” Because duh.