"Sometimes skepticism isn't helpful, it's just you being an asshole." - Philosophy Bro

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Around mid-December of last year I was approached independetly by two magazines that wanted to do a couple of short interview/features in their publications about Permanent Death. I have now very kindly recieved a copy of each and I’ve scanned in the relevant pages for your perusal.

The first comes from German games magazine GEE Mag, and my answers to the interviewers questions have, naturally, been translated into German. I guess if you really need to know what I have to say about why I chose Far Cry 2 for permadeath, etc, you could ask either of Denis Farr or Sebastian Wuepper to translate for you (I’m sure there are others).

The second is part of a longer piece about Permanent Death as well as Robin Burkinshaw’s exceptional ‘Alice and Kev‘ blog-form machinima tale. It’s from the UK publication GamesTM, and it’s quite a cool feature.

Justin Keverne told me that also in the March issues of GamesTM is a big interview with CLINT HOCKING, which, as Justin pointed out, is very fitting.

Thanks to Oliver Klatt and Chris McMahon for the interest in Permanent Death and for being such nice interviewers. (Read more for the English mag pages…)

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So I just got finished writing my final post for SLRC, it’ll be up by the time anybody reads this.

And here’s the thing, I wanted to say something about videogame journalism after Michael Walbridge’s recent post “So You Want To be A Games Writer: Don’t”. But I don’t really have anything to add except a resigned sort of agreement with Walbridge.

It’s a tough gig, this we know, but until very recently (think, since Crispy Gamer went down) the prevailing narrative has generally been along the lines of “If you’re good enough, try hard enough, for long enough, you’ll make it into something eventually”. This prevailing narrative is now highly suspect at best, an outright fabrication at worst. After reading Walbridge’s post and linking it on Twitter, N’Gai Croal noticed it and spread it around a bit more before linking to this post by a guy in pretty much the same position as Walbridge, but who has been at it for a lot longer – waiting ten years to ‘make it’ as a games journalist is a long, long time.

Then in the Sunday Papers I think someone (or perhaps Gillen himself) linked to a World of Stuart blog post looking at videogame magazine numbers and their meteoric plummet into obscurity and irrelevance. As I said in my final post at SLRC – blogs are to blame! No really, think about it – if we’re giving it away for free (and there are so many people that are) why is anyone going to pay? It’s an economic reality acknowledged by so many of the professional journalists that come out of the woodwork to comment on Walbridge’s piece.

But we’re not going to stop blogging are we? And even if ‘we’ did, no one else would, so other economic or social or technological model needs to be devised. Enter, Rock Paper Shotgun.

On his personal site, Jim Rossignol writes about how the four horsemen of RPS have worked to create the RPS community and how it really has payed dividends. Heck, I love what the site is doing so much that even I’m a subscriber. It’s interesting to me, however, that even as a community site RPS has to police its comment threads. Again, that decision has payed dividends by elevating the community and the quality of discussion. RPS comment threads can be counted on to be some of the best out there on the net (as long as neither piracy nor DRM gets a mention – which is itself such a well known fact amongst readers that it’s become a running gag and another testament to the sense of community the site has engendered).

One last cool thought by Mister Rossignol, “Online readers begin to regard certain sites as bases from which to head out onto the web from.” Facebook, Twitter, and (for PC game enthusiasts) Rock Paper Shotgun. The holy trinity.

The following is an edited conversation I had via instant message with one of my oldest friends, two days after christmas ’09.

Guy-mitchell: X’s family does this thing where everyone buy s $20 present then they all get wrapped up and put in the center, one person’s name is drawn, and they choose and unwrap a present.

Ben: Isn’t it amazing what everyone else does for Christmas?

Guy-mitchell: The next person to have their name drawn can either unwrap another one or ‘steal’ one that’s been opened.

Ben: That’s awesome!

Guy-mitchell: If yours gets ‘stolen’ you can steal someone elses, or unwrap a new one. It’s fricken’ awesome.

Ben: haha

Guy-mitchell: One of the key rules is that if something’s been stolen from you, you can’t steal that item again thus being in a couple becomes a strategic advantage.

Guy-mitchell: At one point, I stole the gift my wife’s Grandma had and then it was stolen another 5 times after that… hectic.

Ben: Must have been a really good item!

Guy-mitchell: The key is to find something to bring that lots of people will want, thus causing the most chaos. This year it was a sham wow kit and a set of golf balls.

While cruising the Rock, Paper, Shogtun ‘Writers Hive’ sub-forum out of a general curiosity with what was being written there I stumbled upon this response to a Tom Bissell piece about spoilers.  Somehow at the time it was published I missed reading the original, owing to a dislike of the crispy gamer website layout, further compounded by a feeling that Crispy Gamer ignored/patronised the critical games blogging community while being nearly identical to us (see previous entry ‘Crispy Bacon’ for a bit more about this).

Anyway, the thread began as a (negative) response to Bissell’s piece in defence of. . . I’m not really sure what. The right to get emotional when having games spoilt for you? I don’t really know – but the important thing was that it got me reading the original Bissell piece and upon finishing I felt like shouting and jumping for joy. Finally! Someone else who feels the obsession with avoiding spoilers is “a pox that must be eradicated”.

Now I’m not one to proscribe how others should or should-not behave, so I’m fine if others want to worry about them on their own web places. Just don’t ever, ever expect me to – certainly not here. If I refrain from them on Twitter or elsewhere, it is only ever out of courtesy for those who do care. Among game critic types I feel it’s generally well acknowledged that spoilers come with the territory.

I  wrote a piece for SLRC about the same time last year, in response to a conversation between Michael Abbott and Clint Hocking on a Brainy Gamer post. What Hocking was getting at with his comment was quite similar to what Barnett and Bissell are saying here – that no-once can spoil the self-authored aspect of gaming with a description. In his post, Abbott’s scope was initially only to argue the case that spoilers were detrimental to games criticism in general, not going so far as to claim as Hocking did that spoilers never really spoilt the experience. For Abbott, who I would label as someone very invested in the presented textual story in games, spoilers probably would be relevant, as he seems to have an interest in keeping his knowledge of a game’s story unspoilt. For Hocking, Bissell and myself the pre-written story is the least interesting part of a game.

Returning to the forum post, half-way down the thread Jeep Barnett (of Valve software; one of the original Portal developers) pops in to add some comments and aligns himself with Tom (and myself) in a strong dislike of spoilers. Barnett highlights the following salient point about why worrying about spoilers is only ever going to diminish what Bissell calls the ‘the lizard-brain surprise’ aspect of any game;

…the most interesting thing about gaming is that its interactive experience is partially your own creation. Knowing how a game can play out contains none of your authorship and so it’s very little like playing it yourself.

And I really, truly agree with Barnett & Bissell – it’s probably a personal preference. I also think it’s telling that a couple of the people doing what I find to be the most interesting stuff with videogames right now – Hocking with Far Cry 2 & Barnett with Portal – are the ones to agree about the unimportance of spoilers. But that probably says more about our shared taste than anything else. Perhaps Abbott’s own tastes and opinions are changing.

So I just got done reading an article on the now-defunct website Crispy Gamer, and it read to me like another affirmation of the idea put forward by Geert Lovink that blogging is a creatively nihilistic endeavour. It’s an idea from his book ‘Zero Comments’, which deals with internet culture and blogging. It’s too unwieldy a concept to go into great detail here, but suffice to say, Lovink believes the medium of the blog does some things intrinsically that destroy old institutions and cultural paradigms like old school authoritative, one-to-many mass media.

The Crispy Gamer piece also reminded me of my one brief appearance on ABC TV’s Good Game, in which I talked about blogging and tried to play the apologist for the critical videogame blogosphere. That part of the interview got seriously cut down, the sense that I’m pretty keen for blogs remains. And so Crispy Gamer’s John Keefer – who also appeared in the segment pooh-poohing blogs for their lack of journalistic standards/integrity/ethics, etc – isn’t really around anymore in the sense that the site has now folded, most of those videogame blogs that lack standards are still going strong. Keefer advocated old-media standards for the internet, and sadly, it hasn’t done him and his team much good. I blame the blogs.

While writing the TWIVGB series for Critical Distance I have seen a virtual land-rush of new (videogame) blogs, but it doesn’t take any special insight to know that blogs of all kinds are not going away any time soon. Which indicates to me that there’s now even more bloggers out there, bringing down old-media with a million tiny cuts. Whether they’re trying to or not is irrelevant, if Lovink is right, and I think he is. They may love their newspapers and their radio stations (I certainly love my Sydney Morning Herald) but it doesn’t change the fact that the exercise we are engaged in with blogging “zeroes out” old media and fails to replace it with a new ideology… unless you count the right for everyone and everyone to be heard. But as Lovink notes, in a culture where every voice believes it has a right to be heard, the result is that no one is heard.

You can re-watch the Good Game video on their website here. Or you can watch the YouTube rip uploaded by Daniel Primed just so he could rail against the injustices and failings of the segment on his own blog.

For the record, I think journalistic ethics is terrifically important. But then, blogs are almost certainly changing that too which means I’m also clinging to an outdated ideal. In reality, to try and steer the ship of journalistic integrity at this late hour would be a bit like steering the Titanic right after it hit the iceberg.

So as I lay here on my bed, wearing my Red Dead Redemption t-shirt that I now use as a Pyjama top, I was reminded of my preview time with the game back in early December of 09. I wrote up a thing about it for Pixel Hunt, in which I focussed mainly on the world building aspects of the game. They were quite impressive. At the same time, however, I was shown one section of a mission that was very un-impressive as it was obviously in an unfinished state.

At the time, they were demoing a mission by shooting a canon at a series of scripted horse and carriages in order to defend the main gate of a fort. After the first carriage was blown and it’s wreckage strewn across the road, subsequent carriages got stuck on the blown up wreckage. It was oddly fascinating to me to watch the AI which, at so many other points in the game, had performed so well to now fail so spectacularly to avoid the obvious wreckage. I kept expecting the horses to go around, but they just kept running straight into it and getting stuck, their hooves sliding over the ground in place as the animations struggled to catch up with their abrupt and complete halt.

It was interesting to see one part of the game so clearly bugged, and it had a kind of humanising effect on me. Rather than blast the game for being ‘broken’ (or simply, and perhaps more charitably, unfinished) it’s since made me realise that this thing, this game, was made – and for it to be made it was made by someone.

Game development has always been an abstract thing to me – even thought I’ve made games in ZZT and Megazeux before – it’s so hard to imagine that there is someone (or multiple someone’s) out there who are in charge of making everything behave normally. This is probably harder to do than I often give games credit for.