The Sub-Cockle Area

I know this is just a rant, but it warms my heart to read [guardian.co.uk]. There are some good points made with an excess of emotion. What’s not to love?

Games ~= Porn

On the same topic of how society at large views those of us who work in the industry that I previously commented on here and here, N’Gai Croal’s [newsweek.com] blog hosts a guest piece by former Eidos Interactive president Keith Boesky [blogspot.com] regarding how games are about as respected as pornography. Here’s a teaser:

All I can do is talk on a personal level about a life in a career my parents don’t understand and living on the receiving ends of disapproving stares everywhere from cocktail parties to school open houses.

I don’t really know how we got to this point. Maybe it’s because games are still considered toys. Even though most households own a game console, the vast majority of people consider videogames to be for kids. But if this misconception were the genesis of the low regard, Mickey Mouse would be mentioned in the same breadth (sic) as Jenna Jameson.

Well worth the read, you can view it here [newsweek.com].

10,000 Years Ago, Everyone Thought the Sun was a God

This [artcenter.edu] is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in ages.

New book: “Grand Theft Childhood”

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do [amazon.com] has just been published, and is already getting a ton of press. Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson are the Directors (and founders) of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media are responsible for one of the first well-publicized studies about the effect of video games on our youth that actually supports what we gamers already know: games are scapegoats. I’m really looking forward to getting my copy and giving it a full read-through, and I’ll hopefully time find to post my thoughts here. In the meantime, give this G4 interview a look [g4tv.com], it’s quite gratifying.

Watch This, Gamers

Players Only, Scott Steinberg’s new online show covering video games, takes a look at where the industry is now and where it’s going. This first episode is basically just a huge montage of interviews with game developers, but it is really worth a watch. A couple of the clips hit interesting notes I’d like to comment on.

Firstly, Nolan Bushnell [wikipedia.org] – the founder of Atari – stated that the games industry started to fall off as soon as the controllers got more complicated than a button and a joystick. His statement almost seemed accusatory towards the industry in general and specifically the R&D that lead each console make to create a slightly more complex controller. I’d like to point out that although I think his comment is correct, getting to this point was definitely a product of evolution rather than revolution. If you look at the controller on the system that succeeded the Atari 2600 [wikipedia.org] – the Nintendo Entertainment System [wikipedia.org] – you see that they actually only added one more button. The select and start buttons were just migrated from the console itself [wikipedia.org] to the controller so that players wouldn’t have to get up and move to the system every time they wanted to use those functions.

Secondly, I really loved Sid Meier’s [wikipedia.org] comment at the end of the video that these new players the Wii has drawn in are really just people ’sampling’ games. We have no idea if they will actually make games a normal part of their entertainment time, or if they will just eventually move on to the next fad. One of the things that always attracts me to interviews with Sid Meier is his well-balanced, common sense analysis of the industry.

Finally, Brian Crecente [kotaku.com] stating that the Wii has yet to prove itself… that strikes me as a pretty ballsy comment. I agree with the sentiment, but I’d like to take it to task on it’s implied target. Sometimes I feel like developers like to talk up the Wii (which a few people in the show do, including American McGee [wikipedia.org]) just because of it’s popularity in the marketplace. I think it’s telling that Johnny Lee [cmu.edu], an academic just doing this mind-blowing ‘headtracking’ using Nintendo Wii components [youtube.com] as a ‘project’, has created something more compelling than any of the dozens of professional game designers who have been creating Wii games for the last couple of years. It’s not the Wii itself that needs to be proven (the tech is a new direction and capable of some interesting things, even if it’s can’t do one-to-one movement matching on screen), it’s the developers and Nintendo that need to step up and show us why we should consider the Wii anything more than a toy. I’m not going to deny that it’s fun to play with, because it is – but the games on Wii are a far cry from the ‘games as art’ and innovation that developers are always quick to point out that they are aiming for.

All told, a very interesting first show. If they can keep up this level of quality and access to industry veterans, I’ll be very eagerly awaiting every new episode.