Names carry weight. They give a group of people and the products they create an identity. For companies like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and others, those names are associated with memories, even if those words have little meaning.

Sega, for example, is simply a portmanteau of the words "service" and "games." Nintendo, officially, a direct translation from the Japanese to mean "leave luck to heaven." And Sony, well, that's a fabricated word, a twist on the Latin word "sonus" and the familiar "sonny."

But how did video game developers decide upon the likes of Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Harmonix, and the recently re-christened Visceral Games? And what the heck is a Capybara, anyway? We asked game development studio founders to explain themselves.

The studio that started us wondering just how one settles on an identity was the young Capybara Games, a Toronto-based independent group of initially a dozen game developers. The team most recently had a double showing at E3 2009, with Critter Crunch for the PlayStation Network and Might & Magic Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DS.

The studio is named for the world's largest rodent, the capybara, a relative of the guinea pig that can weigh more than 200 pounds. How exactly does one decide to identify oneself with a giant South American mammal?

"Unfortunately, with 12 very different opinions on what makes a cool name, coming to a unanimous decision was impossible," Nathan Vella, Capybara co-founder and Art Director said. "We bitched at each other for far too long before deciding on a fair and democratic process. Names of varying quality, from ‘surprisingly awesome' to ‘literally the worst name ever' were tossed out by members of the group, and each person chose their Top 3 from the pool."

No one, however, decided the name "Capybara" was "surprisingly awesome."

"In the end, Capybara was unanimously everyone's second or third choice… and so it won the name election," Vella said. "It was the name everyone thought was 'ok' but didn't really want to win. That's democracy for you... you're not picking the best, you're picking the least-worst."

There was an unintended metaphor in Capybara's "least-worst" choice, Vella says.

"At this point we had not yet realized the irony or accuracy that we were naming our 'guinea pig' of a company after the world's largest guinea pig. In hindsight we totally should have caught on to that earlier."

The developer informally calls itself Capy, as seen in its logo. But it employs a "modern day mustache hero" known as Hank Hudson as its official mascot, not a capybara—though Vella jokes it has flirted with taking an Argentinean agency up on its offer to open a capybara farm.

Another developer that didn't go with its first choice for a studio name was Resistance and Ratchet & Clank developers Insomniac Games.

Before the Burbank, California area developer shipped its first game—the first-person shooter Disruptor for the original PlayStation—it went by a trio of other names: Planet X Software, Outzone Software and Xtreme Software. That last name almost stuck, as the company had already incorporated itself as Xtreme prior to announcing Disruptor. Then it found out someone else, a database company, was already using it.

"We only had a few weeks to come up with something new," says Ted Price, president of what we now call Insomniac Games. "So we hung a whiteboard in the office and began writing down everything we could think of. There must have been 200 names on the list."

Some of the rejects? Ragnarok, Black Sun, Ice-9 Games and Blue Moon Turtle.

"Seriously, Blue Moon Turtle," Price admitted. "However, every name we liked was already being used by someone else. We actually got permission from Kurt Vonnegut's estate to use Ice-9 but someone else was already using it without permission."

Faced with the prospect of launching Disruptor anonymously, a last minute suggestion arrived—Insomniac.

"It was one of those rare moments when everyone looked at each other and said 'Yeah, that works,'" according to Price. "It definitely described us at the time. We sure weren't sleeping much."

From our discussions with game development studio founders, it seems like the best piece of advice they can impart about naming one's studio is to check early (and often) to see if someone else is using your descriptor of choice.

Such is the case with Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and, when it first formed, "music software technology."

Eran Egozy, Harmonix co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, says that he and general manager Alex Rigopulos debated over a key aspect of the developer's name, whether to spell it Harmonics or Harmonix.

"The 'ix' ending won," Egozy says. "Hey, it was the mid-90s." To be clear, the company's full name is, in Egozy's words, the "somewhat awkward" Harmonix Music Systems.

"Unfortunately, we did not check to see that harmonix.com was already taken when we named the company," Egozy says. "So our domain name is harmonixmusic.com. If we had checked, maybe the company would be called something else now."

One video game maker that did get an opportunity to change its identity was Dead Space and Dante's Inferno developer Visceral Games, once known by the more sterile EA Redwood Shores or, unfortunately and informally, EARS.

Glen Schofield, general manager of the newly re-branded Visceral Games explains.

"There were a bunch of names we threw away," he says, culling hundreds of ideas and concepts solicited from Redwood Shores team members. "I got tons of great ones but I really wanted a name that had a real meaning for our studio. Visceral just worked perfect as it is a term we use all the time to describe the feeling we want in our combat. It captured our more mature or action type games we make."

The developer's very web site is behind an age-gate, highlighting its mature focus.

The name change had support from the top, with president of EA Games label Frank Gibeau and CEO John Riccitiello supporting a more autonomous model, already seen at individually named EA developers like Criterion, BioWare and Pandemic.

"They welcomed the idea of studios having a distinct identity," Schofield says. "Once I mentioned it to Frank he kept asking me when we were announcing the name. He wanted it changed right away, it was pretty funny. But obviously once you have a name you then have months of creative and legal wrangling before you can go live with it."

Visceral's coming out party, as it were, was a little different from start up studios who sometimes choose their names under the gun. It had time to plan, hire an outside brand agency, and build a style guide for the new identity. Then it went public with a studio-wide meeting, press release, site launch and a tasty visceral treat.

"We painted the walls and hung up mounted artwork from our games," Schofield says. "We had posters, decals and a shirt for everyone. There was even a huge Visceral skull cake waiting. It's the only time we've ever had to have a cake maker sign an NDA!"

And that was that. "When the meeting was over the entire place was now changed and we were ready to move on as Visceral Games."

That sense of identity is something that Uncharted developers Naughty Dog share, with employees (positively) referred to as "the Dogs." The explanation for that choice is much simpler than some of the other stories we'd heard.

The company, formerly known as JAM—hey, it was the mid-80s—when it shipped its first game Ski Crazed for the Apple II, was changed to Naughty Dog the next decade. Founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin were "dog lovers," with Rubin often taking his puppy to work.

That continues today, with current co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra giving their dogs a second home at the Naughty Dog offices.

And the names of their dogs? Pogo and Trumpet. How those names came to be, we'll just have to wonder.

[Photo Credit]

While video game publishers aren't quite as afraid to release new titles during the summer months as they used to be, there is still a dry period between the last games of spring and the beginning of the fall holiday season. Just because there aren't quite as many games to play doesn't mean you can't still immerse yourself in your favorite titles. We've compiled a list of quality reading materials to keep you steeped in game culture throughout the hot days of summer and beyond.

Fiction
What makes a great work of video game fiction? Strong writing helps, but it's the more supportive nature of gaming fiction that makes a title stand out. The author must not only tell a compelling tale, but tell it in such a way that, when the reader returns to the game, they find the nature of their relationship to the title has changed. Whether it enhances familiarity with one of the title's characters, or deepens our understanding of the game world, video game fiction excels when it changes the way we experience what we play.

Here is a list of some titles that excel at adding depth to the games they are inspired by, as well as a few that have inspired games on their own.

The Divine Comedy Author: Dante Alighieri Publisher: Various First Publication: 1300's Thanks to Electronic Arts there is a 14,000 line poem on Kotaku's Summer Reading List. If you are going to play and hopefully enjoy the loose video game adaptation of Dante's Inferno, you may as well familiarize yourself with the source material. It may be a dense, allegorical vision of the Christian life and afterlife, but it's also considered to be one of the greatest works of world literature, and being able to discuss such things really impresses the opposite sex at fancy dinner parties.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne Author: David Gaider Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC Pub. Date: March 2009 Who better to pen a prequel novel to an upcoming role-playing game than the lead writer for the game itself? David Gaider of BioWare has lent his writing talents to such classic games as Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and his work translates quite well onto the printed page, as evidenced by his first novel, Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne. The book tells the story of a Maric, the son of the Rebel Queen, seeking to reclaim the throne of Ferelden following his mother's murder. The story is compelling and entertaining, setting the tone for the upcoming game quite nicely. I really appreciate it when the lore comes before the game, letting the player step into the action feeling as if they have a deeper understanding of the world they are about to experience.

Ender's Game Author: Orson Scott Card Publisher: Various First Publication: 1985 What's a science fiction novel from 1985 doing on Kotaku's Summer Reading list? Aside from the fact that Chair Entertainment is working on a downloadable title based on the novel, Ender's Game is one of the ultimate video game-themed novels of all time. The story centers on Ender Wiggins, a young boy who is part of a class of students at Earth's Battle School, where they train gifted children to take command positions in humanity's war against the alien Formics. The children are trained using simulators - high tech video games that place them in the midst of virtual battles, commanding fleets in what could be the ultimate real-time strategy game. Woven into the science fiction plot is a poignant coming-of-age tale, making Ender's Game a book that delivers on multiple levels. If you've not read it you should, and if you have read it, shush.

Gears Of War: Aspho Fields Author: Karen Traviss Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: October 2008 Author Karen Traviss was at her best when she wrote the Star Wars: Republic Commando novels, and now she takes that same understanding of both combat and camaraderie and applies it to the Gears of War universe, telling the story of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago in a way that the games never could. Her book takes them from childhood to the battle of Aspho Fields, where they must face a dark secret about Dominic's brother Carlos. Traviss seems to understand the bonding of brothers in battle better than most male writers who tackle the same sort of subject matter, making for an entertaining read no matter how you feel about the series itself. Traviss revisits Gears in late July, picking up where the second game left off with Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant.

Halo: Contact Harvest Author: Joseph Staten Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC Pub. Date: October 2007 Wait, isn't the latest Halo novel The Cole Protocol? Yes it was, and that's why I am recommending Halo: Contact Harvest. If you want a novel that tells a compelling story set during the early days of the war between humanity and the Covenant, you'd be better off avoiding Tobias S. Buckell's The Cole Protocol and reading or re-reading Contact Harvest. As Staten did with Sergeant Johnson in Contact Harvest, Buckell tries to develop Captain Jacob Keyes in The Cole Protocol. Wile he succeeds in telling a multi-layered story with well-developed characters, they aren't likable characters that you'd want to know the story behind. On top of that, I'm not even that hardcore a Halo fan and I noted several inconsistencies between the game and the book. In Contact Harvest, Bungie writer Joseph Staten takes a character that isn't more than a caricature in the game and develops him in a way that changes how you'll view his appearances in the Halo series.

Halo: Uprising Author: Brian Michael Bendis Artist: Alex Maleev Publisher: Marvel Enterprises, Inc. Pub. Date: June 2009 While I hate to use the phrase "must-have", this hardcover collection of the four issues of Marvel's Halo: Uprising comic book series is indeed just that, bridging the gap between Halo 2 and Halo 3 with a compelling story and some fantastic artwork.

Hellgate: London Trilogy - Exodus / Goetia / Covenant Author: Mel Odom Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: June 2007 - August 2008 Simon Cross never believed in demons. Despite the fact that his father raised him in a hidden underground commune belonging to the Templar, an organization training in secrecy to defend mankind against a prophesied invasion from the infernal, Simon lacked the faith of his fellows. He left the commune in hopes of finding a normal life. But when the gates of hell do open, Cross finds himself drawn back to London to lead a desperate battle to save humanity. Mel Odom treats Hellgate so much better than the game deserves to be treated. If the game contained just a small portion of the personality Odom gives his characters it would still be operational in North America today. The third book is a bit of a letdown, feeling rushed, possibly due to the game's impending failure, but getting there is one hell of a ride. Forget the bad game. This is a series of good books.

Mass Effect: Revelation / Ascension Author: Drew Karpyshyn Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2007, July 2008 The Mass Effect novels, Crecente's contribution to the Kotaku Summer Reading List, are more prequel than companion. They add to the already-rich lore of the Mass Effect universe. With BioWare's own resident novelist and lead writer for Mass Effect Drew Karpyshyn penning the stories, you can expect a level of detail that no outside author could hope to deliver.

Metal Gear Solid Author: Raymond Benson Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2008 Given that the author has written James Bond novels, one has to overlook Raymond Benson's Bondification of Solid Snake in this adaptation of the first Metal Gear Solid game. The book follows the plot of the game closely, adding little details that should please fans of the series. It fleshes out some of the character's motivations quite nicely. The only issue is the characterization of Snake himself...which one has to admit wasn't all that deep in the game. Benson takes a few liberties with the character, giving him Bond-like quips that don't quite jibe with Snake as we know him today. Still a good read, and with Benson busy penning the novelization of the game's follow-up, Sons of Liberty, we might as well get used to his writing style.

Nova: StarCraft Ghost Author: Keith R.A. DeCandido with an introduction by Chris Metzen Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: November 2006 The tragic and often heart-wrenching story of Nova, Emperor Arcturus Mengst's most deadly Ghost operative. When her parents are murdered by a rebel militia, young Nova lashes out with her devastating powers, killing hundreds in the blink of an eye. She finds herself alone in the streets of Tarsonis, pursued by a special agent tasked with hunting her down. Definitely a book that deserves to be read. DeCandido's portrayal of Nova's plight touches all the right chords, and the tragedy of the situation is made all the more poignant by the fact that this is a novel based on a game we may never see.

Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel Author: A.B. Sina with Art by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puviland Publisher: First Second Pub. Date: September 2008 The Prince of Persia isn't a person, but rather an ideal or spirit that certain Persian princes embody. This is the theme that poet A.B. Sina presents in this lovely graphic novel inspired by the video game series. The book follows the story of two princes, separated by time but entwined by fate, with Sina's words texturing the canvas on which artists Pham and Puviland practice their craft. A bit hard to follow at first, once the separate story threads are braided together the tale truly takes off. As an added bonus, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner provides a brief history of the game series in the volume, neatly counterbalancing the more artistic take on the legend.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy Author: S.D. Perry Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: October 1998 This one goes way back, but when I asked for staff recommendations for the list, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy was the first thing out of AJ's mouth, and so here it is. She claims the first book is the best in the series, with the quality slowly dwindling thereafter. That's a bit odd, because I remember reading an Aliens series by S.D. Perry that followed that exact same pattern - a strong start followed by diminishing returns.

StarCraft: Dark Templar Series - Firstborn / Shadow Hunters / Twilight Author: Christie Golden Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2007 - June 2009 Archaeologist Jake Ramsey, hired to explore an unearthed Xel'Naga temple, finds himself bonded to the spirit of a long-dead Protoss mystic. Driven by the mystic's memories, Jake sets off on a journey that spans the universe. The three book series sees its protagonist pursued by the Zerg, hounded by a powerful Dark Aarchon, and taking a good, hard look at humanity's role in the universe. Author Christie Golden has penned a large number of licensed novels in her time, and there's a good reason she is constantly tapped for said duty. While other adaptation authors simply familiarize themselves with their subject matter, Golden seems to fall in love with each universe she visits, and that love shines through on every page.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Author: Sean Williams Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: August 2008 Sean Williams takes the already-compelling tale of Darth Vader's secret apprentice and fleshes it out in vibrant detail, creating an excellent companion piece to the video game. It's a great example of a novelization that adds a layer of depth to the source material.

Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning: Empire In Chaos Author: Anthony Reynolds Publisher: Games Workshop Pub. Date: August 2008 The battle between the Empire and the forces of Chaos escalates in this solid companion to the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. It's basically a classic fantasy tale - a band of characters from different backgrounds find themselves thrust together against a backdrop of war. You've got your innocent maiden who finds herself in possession of tremendous power; your tough-as-nails anti-hero; an enigmatic elf struggling to overcome the language barrier; and a dwarf who takes the grumpy dwarf routine to a new level. A bit formulaic, but a solid read.

World of Warcraft: Arthas: Rise of the Lich King Author: Christie Golden Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: April 2009 Yes, it's another Blizzard book by Christie Golden, but as I mentioned previously, there is a reason she is tapped to pen some of the most important stories in video game fiction. The story of Arthas' transformation from paladin of the Silver Hand to evil lord of the undead is one of the most classically tragic tales in Azeroth. Golden handles the details with an expert pen, building up Arthas Menethil's world and then slowly tearing it apart.

Non-Fiction
While some of prefer their video game reading to tend to the fantastic, others prefer to take time during the summer months to brush up on their facts, get a little bit of back story, or wax philosophical on their favorite titles in preparation for the busy fall forum flaming season. Here's a handful of more-grounded gaming reads.

Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers Author: Brian Ashcraft Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: January 2009 Didn't think I'd miss this one, did you? Written by our own Brian Ashcraft, Arcade Mania takes us deep inside the arcades of Japan, exploring not only the games themselves, but the colorful people who play them, presenting both history and culture in equal servings. I enjoyed the quirky page layouts almost as much as I enjoyed the actual words, and while I would have preferred a bit more lead in and lead out, all in all it's one heck of a good read.

Guinness World Records Gamers' Edition 2009 Compiled by Guinness World Records Publisher: Guinness World Records Limited Pub. Date: February 2009 Because we have to use the bathroom in the summer as well.

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games - And What Parents Can Do Authors: Lawrence Kutner, Cheryl K. Olson Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: April 2008 You've probably seen quotes from the husband-and-wife writing team and references to this book on Kotaku before, and you'll more than likely see them again. The pair studied some of the habits and behaviors of some 1,300 middle-school gamers in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and their findings are some of the most balanced ones I've seen. Many violent video game studies feel like they have an agenda, be it to condemn video games or exonerate them. Grand Theft Childhood moves the focus away from that debate and directs parents' attention where it should be anyway - their own children.

High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Second Edition Authors: Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Pub. Date: 2nd Edition, December 2003 This one was Ashcraft's suggestion, but I couldn't agree more that High Score! deserves a place on any video game reader's list. DeMaria and Wilson take on the history of the video game industry, from its humble beginnings as dots moving on a screen to the coming of the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox. They break things down by company, era, and geographical region, making it the perfect book to just open up to any random page and begin reading, or as Ashcraft puts it, "Great to pick up and put down whenever you are on the throne."

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy Editor: Luke Cuddy Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: November 2008 If you think far too much about the Legend of Zelda series, then here is a book for you. The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy is a series of essays that explores topics both confined to the game, as in Rachel Robison's "Shape Shifting and Time Traveling: Link's Identity Issues", to more all-encompassing philosophical fare, which we see in Paul Brown's "Hyrule's Green and Pleasant Land: The Minish Cap as Utopian Ideal". It's equal bits absurd and insightful.

This first edition of the Kotaku Summer Reading List presents a rather broad range of titles, from fantasy and science fiction to philosophy and scientific study. Hopefully you'll find something worth a sunny afternoon read somewhere amongst the selection. Of course, this certainly isn't the end of this list. You are all part of Kotaku as well, so now that we've shared some of our favorites, it's your turn to share some of your own. After all, the only thing better than reading a good book is sharing a good book.

We've heard a million times about how the cultural presence of games is growing exponentially thanks to the watershed of Nintendo's motion control, burgeoning casual audiences and IP that now more neatly spans the world of film, games and books than it has in the past.

At that same E3 event, renowned film director Steven Spielberg referred to the controller as the last hurdle to overcome in the quest to make video games approachable to everyone. With all this talk about new audiences and the tech designed to serve them it's easy to get excited.

It's also easy to feel a little lost in the shuffle. For gamers who've been there since before anyone cared about making games "for everyone," having that object in our hands was more than a way to access the game world – it was half the appeal. Anyone who's ever pulled off a chain of combos in a console fighter can tell you about the joy of expertise and control.

More than that, the controller is a cultural object that has for decades defined a pastime – there are those who know how to use it and those who don't, and being one of the skilled has always been a way for gamers to self-identify. Who would we be without it?

What's So Wrong With Some Barriers?

As creative director and co-founder of New York game development studio Area/Code (best known for Parking Wars), Frank Lantz's work focuses on using social media and connectivity to bring games and game-like entertainment to entirely new audiences. But he still sees the value in keeping some barriers intact.

"Sorry to sound elitist, but I like that not everybody understands how to play games, and I doubt that I'm alone," says Lantz, who's also director of New York University's Game Center. "That games require effort and a particular kind of tricky literacy is one of the things that makes them cool. Would pianos be better if everyone could play them? Would punk rock sound better if your grandparents liked it?"

Gamers may suffer some kind of identity crisis as the familiar markers of their beloved niche evolve – or disappear entirely. The solution to that one's easy: Get over it. Like it or not, it's clear that gaming's not a "niche" anymore, and its shape will change.

The more pressing issue is whether or not controller-less gaming will truly make the medium richer. Making something "more accessible" doesn't necessarily make it better.
"It's not about reinventing the wheel," Spielberg said of Natal at E3. "It's about no wheel at all." But the wheel remains an object essential to mobility no matter how transportation advances – even airplanes have them.

Objects In Hand Can Help Gameplay

Designer and Savannah College of Art and Design professor Brenda Brathwaite's been said to have more continuous years working in the game industry than almost any other developer, and her concept of game design has evolved to encompass both digital and non-digital play. In addition to designing games and teaching others to do the same, Brathwaite works on tabletop and board game projects, where physical game pieces are a crucial component.

For her, it's all part of the same world. "Baseball, the Olympics, Ticket to Ride and Bionic Commando are all games, and they share certain core characteristics, one of which is the ‘controller,' the way in which the players interact with the rules to produce the play," she says.

Her latest project, Train, is aimed at provoking players to think about the Holocaust. Players lead grim, gray boxcars full of little yellow pawns. The draw cards along the way that release some of the figurines or slow the train ride.

Only when the first train reaches the "goal" do players learn that their final destination has been the Auschwitz concentration camp. When Brathwaite unveiled it at this year's Triangle Game Conference, audiences were awed, and some were even moved to tears.

The train's tracks are laid out on glass panes that intentionally recall Krystallnacht, and the game's rules are written on an SS typewriter — the interactions between player and objects are part of what inspire Brathwaite as a designer, and part of what makes Train so impactful to players, she says. Brathwaite meticulously and thoughtfully considered each and every object in Train, and how each could support the game experience.
"We often talk as game developers about creating situations where the player has to make truly meaningful choices," she says. "I wondered: What would happen if I put that much attention into each component of the games themselves?"

Reducing the physical interface, then, might mean less immersion for games.

Is The ‘Invisible Controller' A Fantasy?

The argument in favor of controlling a game with your body is that it'll make the experience more like interacting in a lifelike way – but Lantz suggests this idea might be as much of a fantasy as "total" virtual reality.

"Games are experiences that are stylized, constrained, constructed," says Lantz. "They'll always be some aspect of the interaction that needs to be learned that the player needs to become literate with." For example, the experience of playing Wii Tennis may be just enough like real tennis that the player is more aware they're playing a video game – not less.

The idea of a perfect, "invisible" controller, then, is just as much a fantasy as the "seamless" simulation – and Lantz believes these two fantasies are interrelated, potential components of the same unrealistic goal.

"People associate these two things because of the power of the fantasy of some perfect, seamless, idealized game that's ‘just like life' — as if there could be such a thing, as if it would even be useful if there were," says Lantz. "By the way, something that no one mentions is that one of the reasons that the Wiimote is so intuitive is that people know how to play tennis!"

At some point, a Wii Tennis player must have had someone show them how to hold a real racket, or have had the experience of viewing tennis matches in order to understand the way racket and ball are intended to interact. A tennis racket is already a perfect controller for an existing game – without it, Wii Tennis wouldn't be "intuitive" at all, Lantz says. Does that mean motion controls are limited to only translating things people already have an idea of how to do? If so, that's quite a limitation.

The ‘Immersive Fallacy'

Lantz and a community of professors, veteran designers and authors like Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen have defined this principle as the "immersive fallacy" – it may seem like the logical next step toward immersion to make the controller first more like a real object, and then to make it disappear, but that progression actually restricts games, not expands them.

Maxis' Chris Hecker agrees with the immersive fallacy principle –a game controller as "abstract interface" can act as a proxy for almost any kind of action. "Our brains do an amazing job of mapping the abstract degrees of freedom of the controller to the verbs in the game," Hecker says. "By contrast, if you make a plastic guitar controller, it will only ever be used for guitar games." (Note: Although it is true that non-music applications for guitar peripherals are rare, an exception is 2008 IGF finalist Fret Nice, which was recently picked up for XBLA and PSN by Tecmo and is a 2D platformer playable with a guitar controller.)

With no controller at all, the game designer has two choices: simulate the exact actions, or represent complex verbs through short-cut, symbolic motions that will by nature become complex enough a language that it would have been simpler to use a controller to begin with, says Hecker.

"Would ICO be better if you had to stand up and yell and hold out your arm all the time?" he asks. "Going the other direction… is raise-your-left-hand-and-shake-it any more meaningful or accessible than push-the-triangle-button?"

Lots To Gain

Despite a need to be wary of hype, developers still have good reason to be excited about the possibilities in new control schemes. Lantz hopes that the physical interaction will help the game experience itself come to the forefront, instead of being overshadowed by talk about hardware and devices.

"If you think about the quintessential image of GTA IV, it's basically a screenshot," says Lantz. "But if you think about the quintessential image of Rock Band or Wii Sports, it's an image of people in a room doing something. The real human bodies of the players are part of the game! It's wonderful!"

And new technology always means exciting new ways to look at game design and player behavior. Designers like Brathwaite who value the tangible, like Hecker who's pleased with the possibilities in the abstract, and like Lantz, who loves modern controllers, can enjoy what Lantz calls "new opportunities to solve interesting problems and experiment with new game structures and new kinds of experiences."

That means that, for the moment, a big appeal for developers in controller-less input schemes might be their novelty. Gesture-based gaming, living room peripherals and other non-traditional control developments may have done a great deal to expand the audience and introduce new types of gaming experiences – but perhaps a "novelty" won't supplant our familiar controllers in the end.

After all, the wheel is not in need of reinvention. And if it ain't broke, why fix it – or throw it away?

[Image of Brenda Brathwaite's Train with credit to Geoffrey on Flickr.]

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

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• Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again Micro-Review: App Alternative
• Red Faction: Guerrilla Review: Bustin Makes Me Feel Good
• Prototype Review: Alex Mercer SMASH!
• Swords & Soldiers Micro-Review: Violence Included
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game Review: Survival Comedy

PREVIEWS

• Batman: Arkham Asylum Preview: A Thinker's Brawling Game
• Madballs in Babo Invasion Preview: A Game With Balls
• Wii Sports Resort Preview: Motion Game Of The Year?
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Preview: Pigs Might Fly
• Wolfenstein Re-Preview: Sans Mecha-Hitler
• Shadow Complex Preview: Where's The Morph Ball?
• Tony Hawk Ride Preview: Feet On, Most of The Time
• Lost Planet 2 Preview: I Want To Be Inside You
• WireWay Preview: Drawn to Flight
• Marvel Super-Hero Squad Preview: Lego Without Lego
• Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter Preview: Wii-Drawn
• Darksiders Preview: Blasts From Pasts
• MX Vs. ATV Reflex Preview: Right Stick Re-Imagined
• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Preview: Time For Change
• PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe Preview: Marital Bliss
• Halo 3: ODST Firefight Preview: OUHave12
• Dexter iPhone Preview: Bits And Pieces
• Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment Preview: Disturbing Yet Familiar
• Muramasa The Demon Blade Preview: So, So Pretty
• Saw Preview: Should I Be Enjoying This?
• MAG Preview: Generic Action Game
• Jumpgate Multiplayer Preview: Shades Of Descent
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Preview: There's A Light
• Afrika Preview: And It Hurts That My Friends Never Stood Downwind
• G.I. Joe Preview: The Rise Of Contra
• PixelJunk Shooter Preview: Hot And Cold-Running Co-Op
• Split/Second Preview: Race Track Go Boom
• Fat Princess: A Fistful of Cake Preview: Fatter
• Splinter Cell Conviction Preview: A Smoother Operator
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii Preview: Classic Mario, Endless Play
• Alan Wake Preview: Shoot Twice
• LEGO Rock Band Preview: Building Family Fun-Time
• Batman Preview: Not A Bat-Toosie In Sight
• Gravity Crash Preview: Retro Evolved

WELL PLAYED

• The Great Experiment
• Kotaku's Best of E3 Awards: Hair Dragons, CatBats and Light Graffiti
• iPhone: The Great White Hype?
• Bethesda's Big Move

COVER

• by Michael McWhertor

Earlier this week the company behind post-apocalyptic video game hit Fallout 3 bought the developers of famed shooter Doom putting two of the most respected talent pools in the industry, id Software and Bethesda Softworks, under one umbrella: ZeniMax Media.

The result, analysts and ZeniMax says, will be studios that can spend more time on the creative process and less cutting deals with outside publishers. It also will mean the blending of the technological prowess and creative artistry of two of the most respected game makers in the industry.

The deal, though, is likely the sign of the times says Game Changer Research analyst Billy Pidgeon.

"Those stuck between small independent studios and mega publishers are very vulnerable," he said. "A good strategy is to look at where a developer can win."

That means focusing more on niches and, when necessary, buddying up with another niche developer. In the case of id Software and Bethesda, the two are each masters of a certain type of game: first-person shooters and role-playing games respectively.

"It is possible to narrow to a niche and then dominate in that space, so you can compete better," he said. "A lot of people are going to be disappointed that id didn't remain independent, but it's tough to be independent and these mini-consolidations are better than, say, being swallowed up by Ubisoft."

Pidgeon says he thinks this is just the first of what will be more of these mini-consolidations, developers buddying up so they can publish their own games instead of having to pay a chunk of their profits to larger companies to get their games out.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michel Pachter agrees, saying that he wouldn't be surprised if ZeniMax were to purchase or team up with other leading developers like Gears of War creator Epic Games and Left 4 Dead developers Valve.

"For Valve and Epic to stay independent maybe they ought to roll up together," Pachter said. "If ZeniMax brought in Epic and Valve then suddenly you would have a powerhouse."

The impetus for these consolidations, he says, is that increasingly the larger publishers are less interested in promoting and publishing games that are created and owned by other developers.

"Publishers have abandoned third-party developers and everything is moving in-house," he said.

The desire for the creative talent behind an endeavor to own the product of their work isn't limited to games. In 1919, Charlie Chaplain, Douglass Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, tired of earning money for big movie studios, consolidated their talents to form their own studio: United Artists.

"Bethesda and id getting together is like United Artists getting together," Pachter said. "They got together because they were tired of being employees. They decided they want to own the IP."

"That's what ZeniMax is doing. Bethesda and id are independent developers and the fact that they are going to stay independent is good."

The idea of ZeniMax buying up or partnering with other talented developers isn't just a theory, it's one of the reasons the company raised $300 million in 2007.

"We continue to have discussions with a variety of third-party developers which make the kind of games we like and has the kind of folks we do business with," said Pete Hines, a spokesman for Bethesda Software. "We've heard from a lot of people from every quarter since this news came out."

That's how the deal with id Software started, as a friendly conversation between ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman and id president Todd Hollenshead.

"They were talking about what we could do together," Hines said. "And the more they talked the more they realized that if we got together the whole would be better than the sum of its parts."

It would also allow id to get away from the biggest problem they have, being a small cog in a much larger publisher's machine.

"Now they get to be a whole part of the process and the know the publisher will be fully behind them," Hines said.

Under the new arrangement id Software will remain mostly untouched and be allowed to do what they do best: Make solid games. But the deal will give id Software the ability to expand their stable of developers, said Hines, who had just returned from a trip to id Software's Texas studio.

Already the company is preparing to ramp up their studio from two development teams to three, he said. That means there's a better chance that they will be able to keep the development of their four key game franchises—Doom, Quake, Rage and Wolfenstein—all in-house and rely less on outside development studios.

There's also quite a bit of excitement around the idea of Carmack, widely known as a skilled programmer, helping Bethesda tackle some of the issues they've run into in game development. That could mean everything from helping Bethesda create iPhone games and Bethesda helping id on downloadable content for their games to the two solving more technical issues together.

"We also hope from a creative standpoint," Hines said, "that [the two studios] can do more together."

In case you've never seen the show, Robot Chicken is an animated series that runs on Cartoon Network (and other channels across the world). It's a sketch comedy show, which uses stop-motion animation to portray parodies of characters and settings from recent popular culture.

To find out how strongly gaming runs through the heart of the show - and the show's creators - we spoke with Tom Root, producer and occasional voice actor on the hit Cartoon Network series.

"I think most of the Robot Chicken writers have multiple consoles, and we're just as likely to be playing some sunshine-spewing Wii game as we are some grim, apocalyptic first-person shooter" he says. "Personally, I like to mix it up. I finished Fallout 3 and then moved on to Lego Batman, then the latest Tomb Raider, then Tiger Woods golf. I'm pretty scattered."

While everyone involved in making the show may be a big gamer, do they ever worry that not everyone watching the show might be? "I think we rarely worry about whether viewers recognize the references we're making, as long as WE recognize the references we're making", he explains. "Our philosophy has always been, 'If we find it funny, other people will find it funny', so that's all we worry about. Making it funny. To US. Heh heh heh."

Which leads us to wonder; as games grow increasingly popular, does he think in the future, they could take pride of place in the next generation's version of a show like Robot Chicken? "Our popular culture is getting so fragmented and niche-y, I really wonder what "pop culture" is even going to mean in 20 years", he says. "There are so many entertainment options that our shared experience as a culture is getting pretty tenuous."

"For example, can you imagine Johnny Carson's ''Tonight Show' audience understanding a Pac-Man joke?" Root continues. "Sure. Can you imagine Jay Leno's 'Tonight Show' audience understanding a Niko Bellic joke back when GTA IV was the biggest thing in video games? I can't. So it's hard to say whether video games will dominate entertainment culture in 20 years. I think nothing will dominate because there will be too many entertainment options to have a clear winner."

It's no surprise that alongside skits based on movies, comics, TV shows and action figures, video games have featured repeatedly on Robot Chicken. The highlight? In our opinion, the Final Fantasy burger joint sketch. Root agrees.

"Our Final Fantasy VII sketch from season two is one of my favorites", he enthuses. "We were all such big fans of that game when it came out. I think when I pitched that sketch, I was playing clips from the soundtrack CD to help sell the moments I was making fun of, and the other writers were like, 'YES!' And then the animation and the graphics were so spot-on. I'm really proud of that one".

And his second-favourite? "Another one of my favorite concepts — which got cut prior to animation, sadly — involved the Needler weapon from Halo. Because everyone knows the Needler sucks. I'd rather fight the enemy with a pair of nail clippers than a Needler". This scene, while cut from the show, will be included in a rough form on the release of season four on DVD.

Aware of the writing team's openness towards video games, and of the similarities between the premise of Robot Chicken and what they were working on with Spore, Maxis and Electronic Arts recently teamed up with Root and some of the show's other creators and writers to create a series of missions for the upcoming Spore expansion pack, Galactic Adventures.

"The folks at Maxis are fans of our show and asked us to help them demonstrate the game", Root explains. "It was a good fit. Our show is nothing but short-form madness, and Galactic Adventures lets players create their own short-form missions that can get as bizarre and as crazy as you want to make them."

While none of the Robot Chicken writers helped with the design of the expansion itself, they did play a role in the development of its missions. "After a day at EA learning the game, each of the writers came up with 10 one-paragraph pitches for possible adventures," Root says.

"Each list of pitches got winnowed down to one or two missions to be fully scripted. One writer, Hugh Sterbakov, had the poor foresight to write an entire trilogy, so he ended up writing twice as much as the rest of us. I think we ended up with about 10 total missions, but they might still be slogging away on Hugh's trilogy."

The experience wasn't as easy as the video here would have you believe. While good comedy is good comedy, regardless of the medium, the Robot Chicken writers ran into some unexpected obstacles (unless you're in the games business) when trying to write for a video game.

"I think I bent my brain in half trying to figure out ways to keep the player on track and experiencing the story the way I envisioned it", he says. "Plus, I also wanted my missions to be fun and have some repeat playability. In my mind that meant loading the levels with characters to murder. The problem was, the more murder-able characters I added, the more dialogue I had to write."

"When I look back at some of the games I've played in the last few years, like Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, I have a newfound appreciation for how impossibly freaking hard it must be to write games that epic and make them not only actually work but also make them kick ass."

So having tried their hand at games writing, could there be a future in the business for Tom or any of the other Robot Chicken writers? "I personally think helping out with in-game dialogue or gags in a game or two could be fun, but I don't have the attention span to spend years and years developing a single game from the ground up", Root says.

"I have no doubt that our other writers could do it, though. Some of the sketches Mike Fasolo writes have the kind of epic scope that could only be captured in video game form. He's always writing things like the Earth splitting in half, then an asteroid splitting in half and the asteroid halves blowing up the Earth halves. Come to think of it, that sounds like a pretty good game."

A lot better than this one: "I wish we could take the Left 4 Dead framework and replace the heroes with Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Doug Goldstein and Hugh Sterbakov [Robot Chicken producers/writers]. How hard could that be? The engine already exists! Doug and Breckin would end up ignoring the zombies, arguing about which one of them wrote our 'Emperor's Phone Call' sketch and shooting each other. Hugh would keep threatening to use his shotgun on himself. The possibilities, people..."

So Robot Chicken features video games. The writing team love video games. They now have video game design experience. So I ask, what are the chances of us ever seeing a Robot Chicken game? Surely the show's sketch comedy format is ideally suited for, say, a collection of mini-games spoofing popular gaming series or characters?

"Funny you mention that!", he says. "One company came close to pulling the trigger on just such a game, but as of yet, no luck. We're definitely open to the idea, though. And by 'open to the idea' I mean 'dying for it to happen'."

The Bureau's mission: To needlessly expose the wide gulf between video game physics and the laws of the real world; to pursue, to a pointless degree if necessary possible, the logical extremes of any mathematical given; to ask the questions that do not really deserve to be answered; and as an ultimate, Quixotic pursuit, to finally define the real world value of one hit point. We do this in the name of science for all mankind.

Our first journal of study is hereby submitted, dealing with three metrics - weight, speed and momentum.

Dr. Owen S. Good
Director, Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures

WEIGHT
Game: Fallout 3
Test Subject: Vault Dweller

In an RPG, you'd expect to have some distorted encumbrance measurements. Players have been hauling around a full cabinet of arms, plus full plate armor, plus a spare set of armor, plus dual-wield crossbows, plus 500 bolts, plus turkey dinner, since this kind of game was played on paper. It's why D&D invented the Portable Hole.

Fallout 3 measures weight in vague units of "WG." Of any RPG that caps carrying weight, it seems to let you carry a lot. Like a U-Haul's worth. In my latest game I deliberately created a guy with 4 strength because I wanted him to travel light and carry only that which was useful. But as you can see in this recent loadout below, I'm still stowing a spare set of recon armor in case a Glowing One makes me dump in my Brotherhood suit.

Weapons: A3-21's Plasma Rifle, Combat Shotgun, 28 Frag Grenades, 15 Frag Mines, Mesmetron, 3 Plasma Grenades, 4 Plasma Mines, Plasma Pistol, 9 Pulse Grenades, Scoped .44 Magnum (56 WG)
Apparel: Enclave Officer Hat, Power Armor, Power Helmet, Recon Armor. (71)
Aid: Blood Pack, 9 Buffout, 3 Dirty Water, 14 Med-X, 15 Mentats, 2 Nuka-Cola Quantum, 4 Psycho, 17 Purified Water
9 Rad-X, 25 RadAway, 6 Stealth Boy, 79 Stimpak, (sue me, I'm a HP whore), Sugar Bombs. (28)
Miscellaneous: 16 Bobby Pins, Carton of Cigarettes, Cherry Bomb, Conductor, Fire hose Nozzle, Ink Container
Leaf Blower, Pack of Cigarettes, 5 Pre-War Money, 12 Scrap Metal, Key ring with 14 keys on it (29)
Ammo: 202 rounds .44 magnum, 20 darts, 285 Energy Cells, 50 Mesmetron Power Cells, 493 Microfusion Cells, 280 Shotgun Shells. (0 WG)
Total WG: 184

What bothered me about Fallout was not so much that the heavy weapons, like a Flamer, weighed only "15." Maybe they're made from futuristic lightweight metal. No, it's more that a pair of freaking TWEEZERS was equivalent in weight to a motorcycle helmet. It's not even that the WG figure represents a total encumbrance factor – that either the item's size or fragility makes it difficult to carry - because a pool cue has the same WG figure: 1.

So I chatted up Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3's game director, about this. First off, is "WG" equivalent to anything?

"Not really," Todd said. "It's sort of close to pounds, but we intentionally don't really say what it is. It actually started based on the weights we used for The Elder Scrolls, which most people don't know are the also-amorphous ‘stones.'"

OK, fine. If they didn't peg WG to something, I will. And I'm going to base it on the weight of beer. A bottle in Fallout is 1 WG. In real life, a bottle of beer, depending on how stout it is, will weigh roughly three-quarters of a pound when you figure in the glass. By figuring my total burden as it relates to at least one item in my possession, I could start imagining how large a load I was carrying around.

But what I couldn't measure is ammo, meds and chems, which have no weight value - and I wasn't going down to the local needle exchange to weigh whatever approximates a Jet syringe. Why didn't Bethesda give them a weight? Because in the game, these are very valuable items. Why wouldn't an RPG, which is more based in realism and more dependent on choice-making than other genres, also require players to be more conscientious about what they're carrying?

"In regards to ammo and money, it's just too granular a decision for the player, if they had weight," Todd said. "You don't want to make that a choice for the player; he already has to manage so much in his inventory and you need things he can find that are an instant win - ammo, money, drugs, etc, things that help keep him alive and playing. It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."

Yes, but when a Gatling Laser weighs the same as a frosty 18-can fridge pack of Miller, your decision to carry two is not because of their combat utility but the resale value in Rivet City. Todd said that's entirely valid reasoning, and strength is meant to enable it.

"Much of your character's power comes from his stuff. The more he has, the better he is. Even if he's not using it, it becomes money," Todd said. "Players get pretty good at the value versus weight game quickly."

You might figure that, in the long run, it all balances out. Tweezers are overweighted, bazookas are underweighted, and everyone gets along. But my previous loadout would weigh 138 pounds (1 WG = 0.75 pounds) and still fill up a Public Storage room. Todd insisted that developers discussed the question of how much a player should be able to carry, "right until the end. … We kept narrowing and narrowing what a low-strength versus high-strength gave you, because it was too powerful."

Was too powerful? In the finished game, a Fallout 3 character with the bare minimum strength of 1 can carry 160 WG. I searched for a real world comparison, and this is the best I could do: The Improved Load Bearing Equipment in use by the U.S. Marine Corps since 2005 can carry - ready for this? - 120 pounds. If beer is our unit of measure (and why shouldn't it be?) that converts to 160 bottles of beer (or WG). In other words, any vault reject a notch above total weakling - a 2 strength or better - will out-lug any Marine, even the one assigned to carry the mortar and shells.

Partly to spite Bethesda, I created a character with 1 Strength and assigned the rest of the points to more useful attributes. I never use melee weapons, anyway. I also manually assigned weight to my ammunition and chems (1 for units of 10). I quickly saw how right Todd was.

In Fallout, your ability to meet more difficult challenges depends a lot on the equipment you have, and it's usually items you build or buy that prove the difference. Financing that comes from the resale of surplus items, not the discovery of treasure. Realistic strength would leave you endlessly grinding before starting the next job.

As for ammo, I gave up on that shortly after a raid at the Super-Duper Mart. I was robbing Raider corpses for spare rounds to fight off the survivors and writing down the totals. It was indeed too granular a decision, and got in the way of more pressing challenges.

So, even though with a 5 strength, you can run from Megaton to the Arlington Public Library loaded down like a Peruvian donkey, let's just say the future is made of super-light plastics. And the radiation turned everyone into Lou Ferrigno.

[Images from the Fallout Wiki]

SPEED
Game:Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Test Subject: Carl "C.J." Johnson

Originally, I wanted to test the scale speeds of the Team Fortress 2 characters, especially Scout, who could probably outrun Carl Lewis like a Porsche outruns Stephen Hawking. The problem with this, as with other games, is measuring the distance those guys cover in real world units. I'd have to know, say, Heavy's IRL height (6'5?") and be able to lay him end to end over a straightaway to get its real distance. I'm not a modder, and I wouldn't have that kind of time anyway.

So I then looked to the Grand Theft Auto series. From Claude to Niko, you've always had the ability to overtake a moving car on foot and jack it. I really wanted to know these guys' running speeds, and they live in cities with structures based on real world ones. Unfortunately, everything in Liberty City is a compressed distance, so running Niko across the Broker Bridge still wouldn't tell us much.

But in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there's this Easter egg, which identifies the specific dimensions of the Gant Bridge, including a length of 159.7 meters. During the first few tests, something seemed way off. First, 159.7 meters isn't even a 10th of a mile, and C.J.'s runs - at a sprint - were keeping up with traffic and returning mile times of 17:41. So I had to measure this bridge for myself. If I knew the actual scale speed of a vehicle in the game, I could derive its length. This database lists all such attributes.

Thus aboard an NRG-500 motorcycle running at its top speed of 118 mph, I made five maximum-speed trips across the bridge, at a flying start, with a median time of 18.15 seconds. If the Gant Bridge really was 159.7 meters, the bike would have been doing 20 mph, not 120 mph. It's possible they're talking about a distance shorter than the one I was using - toll booth in San Fierro to concrete strip at Tierra Robada - but at top speed, the bike should be able to cross 159.7 meters in just under 3 seconds. Either way, 160 meters is a fraction of the bridge's length as it relates to C.J.

So, at top speed, the bike is traveling at 173.16 feet per second. Multiplied by 18.15, we discover the length of the Gant Bridge is 3,142.85 feet, which is nearly 1 kilometer. As another control, I went back and rode with traffic, matching its speed. We crossed the bridge in 1:09.16, which is 30.98 miles per hour. I damn for sure could see a developer setting standard traffic speed to something round, and 31 mph is almost 50 kph. So, I'm pretty confident the sign is incorrect, and I got this measured as close as possible.

Now, back to running it. C.J. has five paces on foot: a walk, a "brisk walk," a "jog," and then two sprints, one with the A button held down, and another that provides a burst of speed by rapidly tapping it. The C.J. I was playing had maxed all of his physical stats, so he could achieve top running speed and not tire out, at any distance. Back at the bridge on foot, I took him through the five paces.
Walking
At his slowest C.J. covered the distance in 8:22, which equates to 4.2 miles per hour. Frame of reference: 4.0 is the fastest most walk on a gym treadmill. At the "brisk walk" pace, C.J. covers the distance in 4:44.03. Remember our treadmill? This "walk" is more than a jog, it's 7.54 miles per hour. It's equivalent to a 7:57 mile time. My best time in the mile - running - is 8:21, five years ago.

Running
Now it gets good. At the third pace, "jogging," C.J. crossed the span in 2:43.16. If he held that pace he would run a marathon in under two hours, which is unprecedented. Holding down the A button, C.J. crossed the bridge in 1:38.11, or 21 miles per hour. That's a mile in 2:44.84, which is inhuman. Remember Roger Bannister? The first mile under 4 minutes? C.J. would run the first one under three. He would beat the world record holder by a larger margin (in seconds) than he would have lost this year's Kentucky Derby.

Sprinting
Rapid-tapping the A-button gave C.J. just a 16- second advantage, which means this loses its effect pretty quickly. Still, at minimum one can assume some world-class sprint times. How world class? Try torching Usain Bolt's records in the 200 and 100 by two and one seconds, respectively - 17.1 and 8.58 seconds. Granted, that speed figure is derived from a running start. Real-life sprinters have to react to a gun and get up to speed. But, remember, C.J.'s sprint lost effect, I'm not sure exactly how far in, so most of this time was derived from a run at the standard "A" pace.

Incidentally, C.J.'s motion capture actor was Eddie Goines, a star wide receiver at North Carolina State University and a classmate of mine. I knew him pretty well, as well as a sports writer knows one of the team's stars, anyway. As a flanker, he set all the receiving records that Torry Holt and Koren Robinson would later break. As a freshman, Eddie was the fastest on the team, clocking a 40 yard dash in 4.35. A 4.09 is thought to be the NFL record. CJ's time is 3.15. I'm sure Eddie would be delighted to know that, at least in a video game, he's by far the fastest human alive.

MOMENTUM
Game: Assassin's Creed
Test Subject: Altair

No one would expect to fall 40 stories onto the top of a parked car and survive. However, at least it stops the body from crashing all the way through to the ground. Now imagine falling that height into a pile of hay that's roughly 2 meters wide by a meter and a half tall.

That's the first "leap of faith" in Assassin's Creed, from the tower at Masayaf. Holy catfish, that poor bastard who jumped with Altair at the beginning was lucky to get off with just a broken leg. And it is far from the steepest drop in the game. The infamous steeple on the cathedral at Acre is nearly twice as tall. Fresh off our victory in San Fierro, the Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures set out not only to fix its height, but also to calculate how much hay you'd need to land safely.

Ubisoft verified that Altair's height and weight, for purposes of the game's physics, was 6 feet and 190 pounds. This would be useful in calculating his stop. But that's all we got from them. However, one of the locations in the game is Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, whose dimensions are known. The structure's walls are 11 meters tall. Putting all this information in the hand of a trained scientist - devoted reader Matt M. - we were able to come up with some good estimates.

Matt worked up all three heights, but let's use Acre's as it is the most impressive. We were able to time the drop from the top of the steeple -4.1 seconds - using this video (which I downloaded and measured frame by frame). Working backward, we found that its real-world height would be 82.37 meters - about 270 feet. In the game, Altair is accelerating to 39.69 meters per second, acquiring a momentum of 3,420.48 kilogram-meters per second.

That's certainly a large number, but what does it mean? Matt breaks it down:

Basically, whatever catches him has to has to reduce that momentum to zero in under 0.05 seconds, which is the difference in time between Altair falling 82.05 meters and falling 80.05 meters at that speed. That means in the space of 2 meters - which is a little lenient since the floor of the cart is, what, half a meter off the ground? - the hay has to provide 68,298.25 Newtons of force. It's 136,596.5 Newton meters of work, which is a ridiculous thing to ask of hay.

Certainly, Kotaku Weights & Measures does not want to be unreasonable in its dealings with dead vegetable matter. And I'm not sure what could provide that kind of stopping power in that space, other than Kevlar. Or pavement. So I asked Matt if he could figure how large a haystack would be required to cushion a fall from such a height. We used the elasticity of military-grade bungee cords as a guide (using specs found here).

In the case of Acre, the haystack would be so big it would dwarf most other buildings in the game - 40 meters (131 feet) at its point, 67 meters (219 feet) wide at the bottom, if the dimensions conform to the original tiny pile. The freefall into such a mass of hay would last only 2.87 seconds. In terms of volume, it's more than 2.7 million cubic feet of hay - 2,695 times greater than what Altair is leaping into. I kept picturing Phil Hartman sitting atop the amazing mountain of Colon Blow cereal.

Alongside this you can see comparisons, to scale, of the heights Altair falls at the Dome of the Rock, Masayaf, and Acre, and of the size of hay he hits in the game relative to the size he would need to survive. "Leap of Faith" indeed. Sounds more like Altair's in a suicide cult.

The Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Matt M. to this post. Follow him on Twitter.

In honor of Father's Day, we celebrate dads in video games: from the good to the bad to the "Luke, I am your father kind," that don't fulfill any fatherly duties beyond lopping off a limb. Join us now in separating the Bill Cosbys from the Darth Vaders.

Fathers in… Role-Playing Games
Much like mothers, fathers in role-playing games often are killed early in order to inspire the hero to leave home and avenge dear daddy (and mommy) and the rest of their destroyed village. However, there are some dads who stick around. When they do, they're usually playable support characters their son or daughter's active fighting party, or they show up in flashbacks and hallucinations to offer pep talks and parental criticism. Here are a few of these fatherly figures:

Jecht, Final Fantasy X – Father of Tidus: He's an alcoholic all-star blitzball player who insults his son to toughen him up. Instead, he winds up alienating him. Only after son and father find out they're dead do they make up with a manly high-five.

Kaim, Lost Odyssey – Father of Liram: Kaim believes his daughter is dead, but when he rediscovers her as an old, sick woman, he gets around to some parental duties like making funeral arrangements and babysitting the grandkids.

Pankraz, Dragon Quest V – Father of The Hero: Pankraz travels the world with his son and eventually sacrifices himself to save The Hero from monsters. Alas, he can't save his son from being sold into slavery from beyond the grave.

Walter, Suikoden Tactics – Father of Kyril: Walter goes into exile to protect his lover and bastard son but decides to keep Mommy's identity a secret. He gets turned into a fish monster and attacks Kyril before another party member puts him out of his misery.

James, Fallout 3 – Father of You: Daddy dearest ditches you in Vault 101 and goes to find a cure for irradiated water. When you finally catch up with him, he sends you on a deadly quest and then bites it in the name of science. And, uh, saving you – that too.

Uriel Septim VII, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Father of Martin: Had several legitimate sons to stock the throne with heirs, but wisely kept a child out of wedlock just in case a Daedra Lord killed all of his other kids. Instead of fostering the boy to a vassal or something noble, Septim stuck Martin in the church to keep him out of trouble.

Best Dad… Pankraz, because, while he couldn't keep his son from being sold into slavery, he didn't hesitate to take on a horde of monsters to save him.

Worst Dad… Uriel Septim VII, because, really, it was bad enough for Martin to be born a bastard – even worse to have Daedra Lords come after you because of some dude you've never even met. Thanks for nothing, Dad!

Fathers in… Fighting Games
Fighting games have a high volume of fathers. Apparently, popping out a few kids is the thing to do after winning world martial arts tournaments. But no father in any fighting game seems to have thought the decision to become a father and a world martial arts champion at the same time all the way through: Either you're abandoning the kid at a young age so they invariably follow in your footsteps just to find you. Or – worse – you actively train them in your fighting style so they can grow up, follow in your footsteps and then kick your ass.

Raphael Sorel, Soulcalibur series – Foster father of Amy: Raphael got kicked out of his own family for killing some crazy noble and found the orphaned Amy wandering the streets of some French town. He took her in, raised her, trained her and went completely crazy trying to create a perfect world for her.

Frederick Schtauffen, Soulcalibur series – Father of Siegfried: Frederick left his infant son to go fight in the Crusades. While he was gone, Siegfried fell in with a bad crowd and wound up beheading his own father in a misguided act of patriotism.

Seong Han-myeong, Soulcalibur series – Father of Mi-na and wannabe foster father to Hwang: Teaches both children how to kick some serious ass, but winds up favoring Hwang with family heirlooms. When Hwang refuses Han-myeong's offer to adopt him, he tries to marry Mi-na to Hwang. Mi-na runs away.

Cervantes de Leon, Soulcalibur series – Father of Ivy: Somehow fathered the hottest thing in the Soul series and then tried to devour her when she comes looking for his sword, Soul Edge.

Heihachi Mishima, Tekken series – Father of Kazuya: Throws his son off a cliff to toughed him up, throws him down a volcano out of spite and basically does nothing but try to destroy his son for the entire Tekken series.

Kazuya Mishima, Tekken series – Father of Jin: He may not have thrown his son off any cliffs, but Kazuya's revenge aspiration against his own father eventually turns his son against him. Also, it turns his son into a flying demon thing.

Marshall Law, Tekken series – Father of Forest: Law sees more of the insides of restaurants than he does of his own son, but he stops at nothing to pay the hospital bills when Forest wrecks his motorcycle.

Lau Chan, Virua Fighter – Father of Pai: Abandons his daughter to fight in the World Fighting Tournament and has the nerve to act surprised when she devotes her martial arts career to kicking his ass.

Bass Armstrong, Dead or Alive series – Father of Tina: Two words sum up his entire parenting technique– over and protective.

Fame Douglas, Dead or Alive series – Father of Helena: Fame knocks up a world-famous opera singer and then doesn't marry her; but he does leave his daughter his effed up company, DOATEC, after being assassinated. Thanks, Daddy!

Raidou, Dead or Alive series – Father of Ayane: Raped her mother. ‘Nuff said.

Dhalsim, Street Fighter – Father of Datta: Dhalsim serves as a father to his entire village by entering the World Warrior tournament to raise money for them.

Best Dad… Bass, because he loves his daughter too much to let her dress like a slut – unlike Cervantes.

Worst Dad… Heihachi, because he throws his son off a cliff and into a volcano; and he imprisons his grandson. Somebody call Child Protective Services!

Fathers in… Action Adventure and Survival Horror Games
It's hard to feel warm and fuzzy about fathers in these types of games because they're almost always an antagonist. Even the well-meaning Dads who just want to protect their offspring usually wind up doing the opposite by turning evil, letting work consume them or by losing the family farm to a rival rancher. But, even if they're real jerks, they're still fathers and they deserve their due on this day.

Joe Hayabusa, Ninja Gaiden – Father of Ryu: Leads an entire ninja clan and raises a badass ninja son.

William Birkin, Resident Evil 2 – Father of Sherry: The guy's got no time for parenting – he's so married to his work he becomes the last boss.

Mr. Burnside, Resident Evil: Code Veronica – Father of Steve: Not only did he raise his son to be a whiny loser, but Mr. Burnside also thought it'd be a great idea to steal from the Umbrella Corporation, thus getting his wife shot full of holes and landing him and his son on a zombie-infested prison camp island. Great going, old man.

Harry Mason, Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories – Adoptive father of Cheryl and possibly Alessa, depending on which ending you get: Harry probably shouldn't have picked up a strange child on the side of the road, but damned if he doesn't do his best to hang onto her – even when the monsters start showing up to kill him.

King Zora XVI, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Father of Princess Ruto: He loves his daughter, but is too fat and lazy to go save her when she goes missing inside a giant fish monster.

Talon, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Father of Malon: Talon is a narcoleptic rancher who makes a good living for himself and his daughter on Lon Lon Ranch; but unfortunately, he has poor taste in employees. Pro tip: don't hire somebody with the hots for your daughter.

Deku King, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask – Father of Deku Princess: Overprotective doesn't quite sum it up – this is a guy who tortures small animals when his child goes missing instead of looking for her himself.

Bowser, Super Mario Bros. series – Father of Bowser Jr. and seven other Koopalings: He lets his kids run wild with pirate ships and magic zappy wands. Not exactly parent of the year material.

Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong series – Father of Donkey Kong Jr.: He'd rather hang out with his nephew, Diddy Kong, than his own son. What does that say about his fatherly reputation?

Kratos, God of War series – Father of Calliope: He's away from home a lot, fighting wars and when he does come back, he kills his kid in a God-induced rage. She goes to heaven and he tries to visit, but that would kind of break the world, so he leaves her be.

Kento Marek, The Force Unleashed – Father of Galen, aka Starkiller, aka Vader's Secret Apprentice: He escapes the Jedi purges with his wife and young son and hides out on Kashyyyk. Vader shows up, kills him and takes his son to train/raise.

Dr. Light, Mega Man series – Father of Mega Man: Okay, so he didn't provide Mega Man chromosomes; but Dr. Light built him and raised him. So he's like both father and mother to Mega Man.

Nate Harlow, Red Dead Revolver – Father of Red: If nothing else, the old man sure taught his son to shoot.

King of All Cosmos, Katamari Damacy – Father of The Prince: His binge drinking wiped out the world, and he sent his son to clean up the mess. What a role model.

The Mourning King, Prince of Persia – Father of Elika: He makes a deal with the dark god Ahriman to resurrect his daughter, sends his men to capture her and then unleashes pure evil by destroying the Tree of Life.

Best Dad… Harry Mason, because he could have adopted some other orphan, but no – he went through Silent Hill for his Cheryl. That's a dad who cares.

Worst Dad… Steve Burnside's dad, because, while Kratos might've killed his kid, too, at least his daughter went to heaven instead of a zombie-infested prison camp island.

Fathers in… Shooters
Dads are the stars of shooters. Even if they're not the main character, they very often drive the plot even from beyond the grave. This is probably because a lot of cultures have a manly mythos of the son surpassing the father and it's bled right into the manliest of video games. Even with all that testosterone, there's room for really great dads. And some really awful ones, too.

Eli Vance, Half-Life series – Father of Alyx: Eli lived the simple life of a scientist at Black Mesa Research Facility with his wife and young daughter. Then things explode as they often do in the profession and his wife dies. He eventually falls in love with another woman, but to his dying day, he never stops loving his daughter.

James McCloud, Star Fox series – Father of Fox: Clearly James did something right in parenting Fox; he inspired such filial piety that his son hallucinates him during boss fights.

Andrew Ryan, BioShock – Father of Jack: Andrew had Jack out of wedlock with stripper/dancer Jasmine Jolene and didn't get to spend any time parenting him. Mommy Dearest sold the embryo off to Andrew's enemy. Ryan Sr. might make a big fuss about a man choosing; but, the truth is, you can't choose your children.

Big Daddies, BioShock series – Father of Little Sisters: Big Daddies have no blood relation to Little Sisters and probably no soul, either. But they do what all good daddies do: protect the bejesus out of their babies with power tools.

Roy Campbell, Metal Gear Solid series – Father of Meryl: He lies to his daughter and says he's her uncle for most of her life, but then relents and calls her his "pride and joy" at the most inopportune moment. Later, he gives her away at her wedding.

Jack Raiden, Metal Gear Solid series – Father of Rose's son: To his credit, Raiden probably would have been a great dad if his wife had lied and said she miscarried the baby. But, since she did lie and tell him that, he let himself be turned into a high-tech version of a Ken doll and now his son is really going to have daddy issues despite his parents getting back together.

Big Boss, Metal Gear Solid series – Father of Liquid and Solid Snake: Daddy must be so proud of his clone sons. One of them is a chain smoker with a terminal illness and the other one keeps trying to bring about a nuclear holocaust. He probably should have spent more time raising them instead of trying to kill one or both of them.

Adam Fenix, Gears of War series – Father of Marcus: Supposedly he's some kind of genius and like James McCloud he must've done something awesome to inspire filial piety that borders on insanity. His son winds up in prison for abandoning his post to save Fenix Sr. during an alien invasion.

Sam Fisher, Splinter Cell series – Father of Sarah: Sam is so devastated by his daughter's death he spends an entire game avenging her. Drunk drivers and assassins beware a bereaved father, especially one who's a secret agent.

Best Dad… Eli Vance, because he loves his baby girl without smothering her independent spirit.

Worst Dad… Big Boss, because one lousy man-hug does not make up for the sheer number of times he tried to kill his son.

(Dis)Honorable Mentions
Shinnok, Mortal Kombat – He's only Raiden and Shao Kahn's dad in that awful movie, Annihilation, so he doesn't count as a video game dad.
Homer Simpson, Don Corleone, Darth Vader – They've all got a presence in video games, sure, but their status as good or bad fathers comes from the shows and films they're from, not from the games they appear in.
Dr. Tenma, Astro Boy – Father of Astro Boy and Tobio: Like a lot of Dads, Tenma was married to his work until the day his nine-year-old son Tobio died in a car accident. Then, he turned his work into his son, created Astro Boy as the son that would never die. Unfortunately, he wouldn't age, either – so Tenma sold him to a robot salesman.
You, Fable II, The Sims games and Harvest Moon games - Just as with moms, even if you play as an upstanding paragon of parental vigilance as a dad, you're going to be guilty of neglect at least half of the time.

That does it for dads this year. Think we missed somebody important? Drop a line in the comments. And don't forget to call your dad on Father's Day!

Is the buzz surrounding Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch deserved or just the byproduct of a vocal, technophile few?

While major mobile game developers like Apple-centric ngmoco and international powerhouse Gameloft all say the Apple devices are just a small share of the mobile market, they also all agree that the impact it is having on mobile games is unprecedented.

"Apple's introduction has been a watershed moment for the industry as operators and handset manufacturers are increasingly focusing on their offering around apps and storefronts," said Jill Braff, the Senior Vice President of Global Publishing for Glu Mobile. "We're excited about the iPhone and iPod Touch market – it's certainly a unique and compelling platform in the mobile business. "

Trip Hawkins, Digital Chocolate CEO and founder of Electronic Arts, says that he's never seen a new device become important as fast as Apple's iPhone and its App Store, which allows people to buy software and games on their iPhone or Touch through the device.

"Apple devices have only scratched the surface of demand so far," he said. "Apple will provide sustained long-term growth, but they have also galvanized competitors who will help further expand this 'nextgen' consumer smartphone marketplace. Today Apple is talking about tens of millions of devices but they are the archetype for a market for several billion devices.  It is already a big deal to us but the best is yet to come."

With 40 million iPhone and Touch owners, it seems hard to believe that the Apple smartphone generates as much interest as it does from developers who create games for a potential market of billions.

Why care what one percent of what the total market things? Mobile developers say that's in part because iPhone owners tend to buy a lot more games on their device than typical mobile phone owners.

Many, including Neil Young, founder of developer ngmoco, also sees the platform as the future for mobile gaming.

Mobile game sales had stagnated, he said, until the iPhone came along. Now most of the industry's growth, he believes, will come from the iPhone.

"Gross App Store revenue is going to be about half a billion dollars in 2009," he said, pointing out that that includes all applications, not just games. "We are just at the very, very beginning of an incredible explosion of mobile gaming. You are now seeing this blend of usability and capability driven by the ease at which people can develop for this platform and the ease that customers can get games on their devices."

"This isn't just about mobile gaming, it's about portable gaming. The impact on not just mobile gaming but handheld gaming is huge. The (Sony's) PSPgo is clearly a reaction to the iPhone."

Despite singing the praises of the iPhone and its importance in the larger mobile gaming market, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile and Gameloft are still hedging their bets, continuing to do a bulk of their development for other mobile platforms.

Glu's Braff says the company has dedicated about 30 percent of their development resources on the iPhone and other smartphone devices.

"While developing for devices like the iPhone is very important to us, a large part of our business still comes from traditional platforms like Java and Brew," she said.

Hawkins was a little less specific, saying only that the iPhone is Digital Chocolate's "number one platform priority," adding that their development tools allow them to "leverage our creative assets to many platforms."

Gameloft's Gullemont says the iPhone and Touch are just one of the 1,200 devices Gameloft develops for, but that the developer has assigned 500 of the company's 3,500 developers to work on games for the platform.

"The iPhone is very significant, very important," he said. "I think the iPhone is showing the way. That's why we dedicated to it very early a large number of high quality developers."

Despite what he and others say is Apple's enormous potential in the mobile games market, Guillemot says that Gameloft is "still largely invested in mobile phones."

"There are 40 million (iPhone owners) versus 4 billion (mobile phone owners)," he said. "There is still some way to go before the balance of power shifts."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The first few World War II shooters Chen played floored him. We were all floored until the last Great War became such a vanilla setting for shooters. Old hat, and don't we want something new?

With games like Flower and flOW, that's exactly what Chen tries to give players: Something new. And he's giving them that via a new method for console gamers, digital distribution. Each year, video game after video game hits retailers. Few of them we remember; few of them stick with us. The rest sit on our shelves with nothing more lasting than the plastic boxes they came in.

ThatGameCompany doesn't do sex or violence. "I've played a lot of first person shooters as a child," says Chen. "I don't see the need to improve my headshot." More importantly, he doesn't see the need to make games to have other players improve their headshots — not because he's some prude, but because it's been done. A gajillion times.

"I joke that we probably have the highest per-day rate of conversations about ethics and morality when it comes to making video games," says ThatGameCompany president Kellee Santiago. "We take artistic responsibility very seriously, as we believe we owe it to players to always provide them a meaningful experience in exchange for their time and money." Something more meaningful than exploding barrels or ridiculous cleavage. Something neither black nor white, but gray.

For Chen, his earliest emotional connections to entertainment were via gaming. "My parents restricted what I watched on TV and the books I read," he recalls of his childhood in Shanghai, China. "I guess they were worried about content." Instead, his computer engineer dad got him a computer (a PC-286), figuring that it would inspire young Jenova to follow in his old man's footsteps. It instead inspired him to spend an inordinate amount of time gaming. "They thought I was studying," says Chen. "They didn't even know I was playing computer games."

Chen did follow in his father's footsteps — to a point. He got a Bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003. But he wanted to somehow combine his computer science background with his love of art and enrolled at the University of Southern California. "When I came to America, I couldn't believe how green everything was," Chen recalls. "It was such a shock — like the first time I cried." An ocean away from dense, urban Shanghai.

"I met Jenova in 2004, when he took my seminar in critical game studies," recalls associate professor Tracy Fullerton at USC's Interactive Media Division. This was the first time USC offered the grad school study of games at academic level. The students debated and discussed game theory, and, when they were finished with that, they debated it some more.



Students were asked to keep a "design journal." "The idea was to get students to really think about the games they were playing, to analyze them in terms of their mechanics and the types of play they promoted," says Fullerton. All the students did the assignment, but Chen did more of it, turning in a hundred or so pages of analysis of the games he was playing. "It was incredible," says Fullerton, "here was this guy who was pretty quiet in class but it was clear that there was a lot going on in his head."

Everyone has ideas. Everyone has things going on in their heads. It's a matter of getting them out of your head and onto paper — or in this case, into an actual game. 2004 — one year after Jenova had come to America — was a watershed. At that year's GDC, he checked out the indie-slash-student games. "Honestly, I wasn't that impressed."

Chen put his money where his mouth was, and pitched what would become Cloud — what Chen calls "a game that's not a game" — to Game Innovation Lab at USC, which Fullerton directs. It wasn't Chen's first game, as he'd worked on a couple PC titles while an undergrad in Shanghai. This was, however, his biggest. "We would give the team $20,000, a place in the lab and faculty advisement and see if we could make something truly innovative," says Fullerton. "So we chose the idea for Cloud out a bunch of ideas – of all of them, it seemed the most intriguing and definitely risky."

Three months later, the end result was risky. Risky, elegant, beautiful and deceptively simple, where simple is not a euphemism for simplistic. The dreamlike Cloud let players fly through the sky, leaving a fluffy vapor trail behind. While Chen ended up taking an industry job under Will Wright at EA, he and his USC classmate Kellee Santiago were able to parlay Cloud into a three game deal with Sony. To date, ThatGameCompany has turned out two of those titles: fl0w and Flower.

In an industry where first-person-shooters continue to dominate, these titles stick out. They're gentle games about gentle things and are almost poetic in their lack of specific meaning. According to Chen, "The fact that we have funding from Sony to make these crazy games says something." Perhaps it says how far the industry has come — that there is a place for a unique developer like ThatGameCompany.

Sony seems to think so — well, at least at Sony. "New concepts like Flower which really go outside traditional design can sometimes be hard to communicate to consumers and even internally," says Sony Santa Monica's external product development direct Tina Kowalewski, "but at Sony we would like to think we have the foresight to take well-calculated risks which provide us content players cannot find anywhere else and production schedules which make such risks viable."

"Games need different hues of color," says Chen."Novels and films has many different genres. Games are mostly action. Most focus on primal feelings. And the industry is constantly produc[ing] Hollywood summer blockbusters." They are summer blockbusters not only in the non-stop action, but in their bloated budgets and endless sequels.

While titles like Flower clock in at a couple of hours, that does not mean they are casual. "Casual games," says Chen, "are too shallow." What they are is easy to get into. ThatGameCompany wanted to make a new, yet totally accessible experience. In Flower, for example, Chen's small team removed everything that made test-players utter the word "fuck" in frustration.

"Having a player play a sequel or grinding through to boost game play time is a crime," says the iconoclastic Chen. "And if we did a sequel, it would have to be something new. That's why it's easier just to do a totally new game." Chen and ThatGameCompany are moving on to their next challenge: a new project that they've just began. "This new game is slightly larger and more of a challenge," says Chen. "The game concept is big. It's risky." Riskier than games about clouds and flowers? "Yes."

Photos

Here are the staff of Kotaku's picks for the best of 2009's Electronic Entertainment Expo:

Best Console/PC Game

After three years in hiatus, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell returns with a stunning new look and style of play that is sure to reinvigorate a flagging franchise.

Splinter Cell Conviction (PC and Xbox 360) is Ubisoft's fifth installment of the Clancy-inspired secret agent stealth game, streamlined to make sure players never have to leave the game for instruction, objectives or back story.

Instead of wasting gamers' time with mission briefings or cut-scenes, the game projects everything into the world as you play. Mission goals appear as giant text painted across buildings, or splashed across the scenery as Conviction's Sam Fisher passes through it, cut-scenes are delivered in real-time black and white movies projected on the walls of the rooms he is standing in.

Embedding objectives into the scenery of missions isn't the only change Conviction delivers. Other new features including the ability to put Fisher on autopilot and have him take out a room full of "marked" enemies, a more stylized look for the game and interactive "interrogation" scenes.

Runner-up: Star Wars The Old Republic (PC)

Best Portable Game

In Scribblenauts (Nintendo DS) players work to navigate child-like Maxwell through a hand-drawn world on his quest to collect Starites. The side-scrolling puzzle game does have a significant twist. To aid Maxwell on his journey, players can drop items in the world simply by writing the word on the DS screen. Developers boast a substantial dictionary of words that include everything from guillotines to robot zombies, all of which players can interact with.

Runner-Up: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Nintendo DS)

Best Downloadable Game

In Q-Games' PixelJunk Shooter (Playstation 3) you have to rescue miners trapped underground by piloting a spaceship through the maze of tunnels. Miners aren't the only thing you'll find underground, some areas are also filled with pockets of lava or water. Blasting holes under these pockets allow the liquid to spill out. If the lava mixes with water it forms rock, if it mixes with miners, you have less miners.

Runner-Up: Shadow Complex (PC and Xbox 360)

Best Original Title

Brutal Legend (Playstation 3, Xbox 360) gives players control of epic-roadie Eddie Riggs who has been sent to a fantasy heavy metal world to do battle alongside headbangers and musicians. The game's fiction is all pulled from the sort of art you'd expect to find on bad heavy metal record albums, and its humorous story is backed by a hefty cast of voice actors including Jack Black, Lita Ford, Rob Halford and Lemmy Kilmister.

Runner-Up: Alan Wake (PC, Xbox 360)

Best Sequel

Ubisoft's willingness to reboot their stealth franchise and turn it into something different will go a long way in making Splinter Cell Conviction (PC, Xbox 360) a hit.

Runner-Up: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PlayStation 3)

Best New Hardware

When Microsoft unveiled Project Natal (Xbox 360), their controller-free motion controller, during E3 earlier this month the reaction was almost incredulity. Not that Microsoft would be able to garner any attention with another motion controller, but that a high-definition camera could let you interact with games without the help of anything else. Using just the camera and the 360, Project Natal can let you drive cars, swat balls or even interact with a virtual child.

Runner-Up: PSPgo

Best New Gameplay Mechanic

Scribblenauts' ability to turn your written word into a little cartoon version of the item is astounding, add to that the ability to blend these items so they interact with each other or can be wielded by the hero and you have the best new mechanic to hit a video game since Nintendo perfected the waggle.

Runner-Up: Invizimals' (PSP) monster-catching camera.

Best Weapon

In the weapon-centric world of action video games, swords, guns and tanks are all played out. Enter Bayonetta (Playstation 3, Xbox 360). The eponymous heroine with the Sarah Palin glasses can quad-wield her guns, carrying two pistols in her hands and two more strapped to her ankles, and unwind her black hair, which she wears as a jumpsuit, to turn it into giant fists, high-heeled feet and even a dragon .

Runner-Up: Left 4 Dead 2's frying pan.

Best of 2010

It has been four years since Team Ico released Shadow of the Colossus to critical acclaim. The action adventure game delivered an emotional story and reinvented the way people thought about game design, turning the titular Colossus into living levels that had to be tracked down, climbed and destroyed.

During Playstation's E3 press conference, the team unveiled their latest work: The Last Guardian (Playstation 3). The game appears to revolve around the relationship between a boy and a giant feathered creature. Not much to go on, but fans of Team Ico know the developers will deliver.

Runner-Up: Mass Effect 2 (PC, Xbox 360)

Biggest Game Changer

Sony's $250 PSPgo is more than just another portable, it's the first time a major gaming hardware company has jumped entirely into the realm of digital downloads . Its success could blaze the way for digital only gaming, its failure could set the movement back by years.

Runner-Up: Wii Vitality Sensor (Wii)

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The PSPgo is a slimmed down version of Sony's Playstation Portable. The device, set to hit stores on Oct. 1 for $249 in either black or white, slides apart to display its controls and features 16GB of internal memory. But most importantly, it lacks any sort of drive to load or play games on. The original PSP uses small UMD discs to load games. The PSPgo will get all of its content digitally, via downloads.

This download-only approach to a gaming device will be the first time a major gaming hardware company has jumped entirely into the realm of digital downloads and could have serious implications for many facets of the industry including the reselling of used games, game publishers' reliance on retailer shelf space and piracy.

John Koller, director of hardware marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said Sony's decision to launch the PSPgo was driven by consumers' increased interest in digital content, like music, TV shows, movies and even games.

"It became very apparent over the past 18 months that the portable gaming consumer wanted larger, richer, deeper content available digitally" Koller said. "The PSPgo is the first and only handheld device to offer these larger, richer digital gaming experiences, and from our discussions with consumers, publishers and retailers, this was absolutely the right move to make at the exactly correct time.

"The launch serves as a lesson to the industry of the strength of digital distribution. PSPgo will address this market and help drive this trend forward."

Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with Game Changer Research, says the move is huge for both Sony and the industry, making publishers less dependent on retailer shelf space and helping to cut down on the growing secondary market of used game sales, something publishers don't earn any money from.

"Using a digital download only business model brings Sony in direct competition with Apple, and the Playstation Network is already in competition with Microsoft's Xbox LIVE marketplace," Pidgeon said. "The PSPgo's download only design will help SCE transition its customers and its media delivery to online distribution. This will make Sony appear more cutting edge and will pave the way for future devices that are supplied by digital distribution."

While the PSPgo and its download approach to gaming may be the future, that doesn't mean the device doesn't have some significant hurdles to overcome.

Koller says the biggest challenge will be ensuring that there is enough content by the time the system launches to make it an attractive system for gamers.

"The old saying that content is king is even more true with the PSPgo launch, and we'll be meeting that challenge through the digital launch of virtually every title launching on UMD from now on, as well as converting over 300 catalog UMD titles to digital for the PSPgo launch," Koller said. " It is important to note though that we will not be walking away from the UMD business – in fact, we view the UMD as critical to the platform's long-term success as there are still many consumers who prefer physical goods."

Sony is also looking into a program to allow existing PSP owners to convert some of the UMD games they already own to digital versions playable on the PSPgo, though Koller declined to say how many games will be convertible.

Pidgeon thinks the biggest challenge will be convincing retailers to sell the device in their stores because traditionally retailers make much more money from the sale of software than they do the sale of the hardware that plays it.

"Retailers stand to lose big if consumers buy handhelds and consoles but not software for those devices, and the secondary resale market goes away," he said. "So it is going to be difficult to keep retailers as partners for hardware distribution if you cut them out on software."

One middle ground, Pidgeon points out, is selling voucher codes for digital games in stores.

Koller says that Sony has already been in talks with retailers and that their reaction to the PSPgo has been "overwhelmingly positive."

"With the dawn of the digital gaming age, particularly with the launch of the first full game digital platform in the PSPgo, retailers are becoming very creative in how they work to become a part of digital networks and sales," he said. "And we've become creative in how we have crafted a new business model to meet how and what retailers sell."

And Pidgeon thinks this is just the first step for Sony and its new PSPgo. He believes that the PSPgo will do quite well at retail, triggering a price drop to $200 as the company ramps up production. And while Sony says they will continue to sell the original PSP, Pidgeon thinks the PSPgo will slowly replace it and that there is even a successor to the PSPgo on the horizon, one that will include a touch screen and an integrated phone.

"The PSPgo will be a good way to bridge to a next generation download only device," he said.

And could this lead to download only consoles?

Pidgeon thinks that home bandwidth limitations mean the next generation of consoles will still be disc-based, but that online deliver will become much more important down the line.

When asked if there was a download-only PS3 in our future, Koller remained tight lipped.

"Our consumer research shows that many people still continue to prefer purchasing games on tangible disc-based media, and we'll continue to serve this segment of the market, while also providing digital content to the growing segment demanding this format," he said. "We have nothing further to announce/discuss at this time."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

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  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• Advertising Rage
  Indie Devs Turn to In-Game Ads After Piracy Strike
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• From Concept To NXEcution
  The Untold Story of the Xbox 360 Avatars
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  
• Blipsters
  The Chiptunes Band That Just Might Break Through
  by Leigh Alexander
• 
  
• Sentience Fragment
  Are Our Games Alive?
  by John Gaudiosi
• 
  

REVIEWS

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review: A Pretty Good Start
• Equilibrio Micro-Review: Tilt and Break
• Klonoa Review: Do Hew Wahoo?
• Fallout 3 Broken Steel Review: An Epic Postscript
• Fable II See The Future Review: Wear Shades
• Velvet Assassin Review: Lie Back And Think Of England
• Burnout Paradise Cops And Robbers Micro-Review
• Top Gun Micro-Review: Affirmative, Ghost Rider
• Plants vs Zombies Micro-Review: The Seeds Of Success
• Peggle iPhone Micro-Review: Touching Balls Never Felt So Good
• Punch-Out!! Review: Call It A Comeback
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour iPhone Micro-Review: Fore!
• inFamous Review: It's Electric
• Rock Band Unplugged Review: It's The Frequency, Kenneth
• Bionic Commando Review: Grabbing Hands Grab All They Can
• Terminator Salvation Review: I Hate Robots
• Terminator Salvation iPhone Micro-Review: Rise of the Apple Machine
• Pictobits Review: For The Love of Pixels

PREVIEWS

• DC Universe Online Preview: Doomsday Smack Down
• Dragon Age: Origins Preview: Violence, Lust and Betrayal
• Kung Fu Hustle Preview: Do The Hustle
• Fight Night Round 4 Preview: No More Rocky
• Killing Floor Preview: Holy Co-Op Survival Horror
• Red Faction: Guerrilla Multiplayer Preview: Wrecking Crew Jazzes Things Up
• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Multiplayer Preview: All The Pretty Horses
• Darksiders Preview: The War of God
• Metroid Trilogy Preview: The Game So Nice, You Can Play It Thrice
• Dead Space: Extraction Preview: Can't Stop Shaking
• Army of Two: The 40th Day Preview: Total Fistbump Destruction

WELL PLAYED

• Sony Prepares An Army of Playstation Evangelists
• Big News Bound For E3
• Invasion of the Plastic Peripherals
• The $80 Million Inspiration For Disney's Latest Wii Game
• Capcom Goes West

COVER

• Aperture Science Security Camera - Laid out by Michael McWhertor, based on Michael Watson's original work

The Experience Playstation Now program had a "beta test" of sorts earlier this month, with Sony employees well-versed in the ins and outs of the Playstation Portable and Playstation 3 setting up temporary shop in a select number of Best Buys across the country.

The idea for the program is fairly simple: Get the Playstation 3, the Playstation Portable, into peoples' hands, explain all of the things they can do, and people will buy them.

"This allows real, live passionate people to reach out to consumers," said Kim Nguyen, marketing manager for the Playstation 3 and Playstation 2. "They will answer some basic questions and tell people things about the Playstation 3 they may not know."

The merchandising representatives will tell people about the PS3's games, but also answer questions about the built-in Blu-ray player, about the hard drive, about going online with the console.

"This is the sort of dialog we want to have with our consumers," Nguyen said. "The root of this program is education. We know people see the Playstation 3 as a very expensive machine. In order for them to appreciate the value of the Playstation 3 they need to see all of the benefits."

While both Microsoft and Nintendo have tried their hand at different forms of marketing, this is the first time, Nguyen believes, that a console maker has created a program to talk directly to consumers on such a wide scale.

Sony has experimented with other forms of advertising as well, from the traditional to the viral and all three console makers also have kiosks in stores across the country where potential customers can check out their consoles and the games available on them. But Nguyen said that Sony's kiosks, located in 15,000 stores nationwide, aren't as personal as this new initiative.

"Kiosks are very passive," she said. "No one is engaged with you, there is no dialog, no questions and answers."

Nguyen said the pilot program for the Experience Playstation Now was held in a handful of Best Buys across the country on a Sunday afternoon.

"We wanted to get out into the market and get our feet wet," she said. "We tested it out in a few stores and are getting feedback. Now we're going to regroup and discuss how it went before we rollout the program for the rest of the year at more retailers."

The marketing team behind the program checked in with the Best Buy locations to see if there was an increase in Playstation-related sales and how customers responded to the program.

"The initial feedback has been way over expectations," she said.

The next step will be to start rolling it out at other retailers and in other locations, something Sony plans to do very methodically.

"We do plan to grow this program slowly," Nguyen said. "We have to be cautious."

Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services for EEDAR, thinks the idea is a gamble.

"In our industry we don't really see much grassroots marketing," he said. "That has been common with political campaigns or for sampling food in stores, but not in gaming.

"It's going to be tough to predict its success. It's a new venture that comes with a hefty cost."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Anyone who's played through a game like Microsoft's Fable II (who can forget your virtual dog?), BioWare's Mass Effect (with its robust roster of non-playable characters) or seen Sony's upcoming Heavy Rain (whose developer, Quantic Dream, promises a new type of relationship between player and character) may have wondered to themselves whether gaming, which is still in its infancy as an art form, is heading towards its inevitable Citizen Kane threshold. More than the graphics or surround sound, the latest game consoles' processing power are bringing to life AI-controlled characters unlike anything experienced before.

But what are these sentient beings that help or hinder gamers as they explore vast virtual worlds? Are the Locust Horde who hide behind blockades and orchestrate flanking attacks in Gears of War 2 the first step in some type of real-world AI nightmare like the apocalyptic future displayed in Warner Bros. Pictures' Terminator: Salvation? Will Steven Spielberg's next original game for Electronic Arts, which remains untitled, deliver on its promise of making a gamer connect with a female avatar emotionally?

Rather than go to the usual suspects of talented videogame developers, Kotaku set out to ask experts in the fields of Hollywood movie magic, theme park creators, robotics experts and AI specialists to answer the question: Do the AI-controlled characters in games qualify as robots or some other form of artificial life. Are those creatures who are at the player's mercy in Lionhead Studio's Black & White games truly virtual beings?

Akhil Madhani, technical staff director, Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development said that the term "robot" is used to describe a physical system, usually with the ability to respond to a changing or unstructured environment.

"As such, I don't think that most people would consider a videogame/virtual character to be a robot," said Madhani. "Nonetheless, algorithms used to program the behavior of a virtual character (not knowing the algorithms used in this case) may have application for a (physically embodied) robot."

Futurist Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, has a much more sci-fi vision of gaming and the future.

"In short, our games have indeed evolved into crude life forms," said Frey. "Innovations in the digital world are happening exponentially faster than in the material world, so the digital beings in games will soon become far more lifelike, and will eventually step out of the screens and exist as 3D avatars, interacting with us, much like other people."

Frey believes the not-so-distant future will be inhabited by 3D avatars that will act like digital clones, sitting in for us at meetings and other types of gatherings, and learning from each interaction.

Others have a more realistic vision of the games of tomorrow.

Chris Darken, conference chair for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment and an associate professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that while game AIs have become more and more lifelike as a general trend and game characters are getting more information about their environment, and are processing it in more realistic ways; game AI is about creating a user experience, and game programmers are right to use whatever shortcuts and engineering tricks they can muster to produce the best possible experience given the budget of their project.

"Most game related AI today falls into the field of expert systems," explained Michael Schmidt, a Ph.D. student at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab. "In other words, they attempt to mimic and reproduce certain behaviors that we might expect a human to do; like path planning, avoiding obstacles, reacting to the user, etc."

"This is indeed very similar to some research that is going on in robotics," added Schmidt. "However, new research is beginning on to how robotics and AI systems can learn and understand their self and environment on their own, such that their behavior is self-emergent. Ultimately, we will have robotic and AI systems that won't need to be reprogrammed and redesigned for every task, but instead emerge naturally on their own".

Over the past four decades, videogames have evolved from the black-and-white graphics of Pong and Asteroids to lush 3D worlds that are actually now playable in full 3D thanks to new stereoscopic technology. Game AI has progressed from Super Mario Bros.' Goombas to Sega's Seaman to the aforementioned "best friend" in Fable.

"AI in games has come a long way, from simple look-up tables, to scripted interactions, and even some machine learning," said Schmidt. "However, it has only begun to scratch the surface of artificial life. The artificial life field is concerned with understanding and reproducing several essential functions in biology, such as evolutionary pressures and dynamics and self-reproduction."

Schmidt believes future videogame AI will likely move from expert systems, such as scripted behavior, toward more and more evolved and self-emergent behavior.

"Ultimately, everything from an AI creature's morphology and appearance to its behavior and interaction with the user could arise naturally from the environment and simulator itself," said Schmidt.

Like videogames, Hollywood technology is evolving at a record pace. Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, said that if you need an operator, it's not a robot. If it can perform its functions without intervention, it could be called a robot depending on what those functions are.

"I'd say that the game character is a robot if it would normally (or historically) be dependent on player input to perform its functions," said Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop. "In that case, the AI would be serving a robotic function."

"I have to believe that the future of the game industry belongs to game makers whose characters delight their audience by displaying realism and intelligence in new and unexpected ways," said Darken.

At the end of the day, it's still the gameplay that matters. But improved AI does offer more challenges to gamers and helps immerse the player more fully in these worlds.

What's That, Now?

Chiptune music – tunes made using hacked sound chips from video game hardware – is as well-known to many gamers who snap to the nostalgic bleeps and bloops as it is known to fans of creative electronica. Artists like Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Minusbaby and many others are honored scions of the chip scene. It wasn't until an unassuming band of surprisingly young (early twenties!) fresh-faced boys began bringing intense rhythm and joyful tunes from an NES chip — coupled with whip-sharp rock — into Williamsburg's feverish indie music hub that something changed. A road for chiptunes music to reach a wider audience began to open up.

They're called Anamanaguchi, and bleeding-edge culture rag L Magazine has named them one of New York City's ‘8 Bands To Watch' for the year, along with other up-and-coming indie rock heard-ofs like Savoir Adore and The Beets. The L does call the chip integration "a gimmick," although you can't blame a more conventionally hip publication for being not-so-wise to the longstanding and broad chiptunes landscape. This includes the work of the 8bitpeoples collective and its 50-plus strong list of participating artists, many of whom play the celebrated Blip Festival every year.

The Chiptune Scene

Chiptune artists form a rich community. Some play NES chips, others play Game Boys, and some even play Atari STs and the like. Their performances are usually accompanied by artistic visuals – picture a performer playing frenetic, throbbing sounds on a hacked Game Boy wired up to a sound system in front of a projection screen lit up with a pulsewave of damaged pixels, and you've got the idea.

But this community's been historically something of a private one – although video game fans often easily recognize and immediately adhere to the retro sounds that comprise the sonic landscape, the majority of chiptune artists have always been strict about divorcing themselves from associations with simple video game nostalgia. They don't play "video game music," and they don't want you to assume they do.

When it comes to Anamanaguchi, The L says a they're "a band that should be heard by everyone, and not just devotees of a micro-genre." You may be getting the idea that there's something different about these kids. Rather than restricting themselves to the occasional chip-specific festival with other soundchip artists – although they play those, too – Anamanaguchi does shows at New York's coolest venues alongside a diverse range of popular rock, hip-hop and DJ acts, and the band – most of them still students – are fast becoming the talk of the town.

Who Are These Kids?

"We're using the 8-bit sounds as a piece of the picture instead of the whole thing," says Peter Berkman, who plays the band's lead guitar and does the majority of the songwriting and soundchip programming.

"It was definitely a deliberate decision, but not one that I made thinking I'd be able to 'get more fans' or something," he adds. "It all stems from having a really musical background, I think. In electronic music there are always artists who strive to be more technical than musical, and we're definitely the other way around."

In fact, Berkman's primary influences aren't chiptune artists at all, but bands like Weezer, Seattle-based emo pioneers Sunny Day Real Estate, and Omaha indie rockers Cursive. So what drew him to start messing around with NES soundchips? "Definitely the nostalgia aspect and the youthful simplicity of the sounds - it's a great, happy aesthetic," he says.

By adhering to the tenets of the chiptune scene while attracting a broader set of music fans with their upbeat rock sound, Anamanaguchi is forming an unlikely bridge between video game hardware and indie rock fans in New York.

"That's kind of the story of my life, being a bridge between a 'nerd' and 'cool'," concedes Berkman, who spent nearly an entire year of free time in high school with friends making Weezer covers on a four track, eating donuts and playing Mega Man X and Contra III. "I'm kind of like a weird hybrid between Steve Urkel and Will Smith."

"I was never the kind of kid who would go out drinking in high school, but I also wasn't the kind of kid who shut myself out from everybody else - I guess I was really lucky that I had an awesome core group of friends who all recognized how strange suburban life is," he says.

Beyond Nostalgia
Berkman says the minimalism inherent in programming soundchips helps composition come to the forefront. "8-bit music is almost like the 'punk rock' of electronic music, where everything has been getting so highly produced and complex that sometimes it's important to just go back to the basics and work with very simple building blocks," he says.

In that way, this musical migration toward lo-fi chiptune sounds as a rebellion against electronic music's high production values can be likened not only to punk rock, but to the increasing popularity of simple, pixel art platformers like Cave Story and Spelunky as an escape from the graphics-intensive, triple-A style that's become dominant in the video game scene.

But although the production of Anamanaguchi's music and that of other chiptune artists might have originally been motivated by a fondness for video game hardware, Berkman joins other chip artists in rejecting further associations with the game scene. "I grew up playing video games as much as the next Generation 2K-bro, but I view it as something that's separate from my music," he says. "I think it's also important to make the distinction that we aren't writing video game music — I'm thinking way more about [The Beach Boys'] Brian Wilson and old Rivers Cuomo [of Weezer] than Hip Tanaka — who rules, though — when I'm composing."

Other chip artists "sound literally nothing like video game music and no doubt get frustrated when people don't get past that," he says.

Bridging Separate Worlds

Berkman also maintains a fascination with what he calls "absurd things — bargain bin VHS tapes, public access TV shows" – and says the juxtaposition between the sounds of an old Nintendo and updated, upbeat rock music is "another one of those absurd, surreal things that shouldn't work, but totally does."

Indie rock show listings bible OhMyRockness, a home base for anyone and everyone who follows local music in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, agrees: "The music Anamanaguchi creates is not really meant to be a whimsical nod to our video game playing youth. First and foremost, they're about rocking you out, but they're also part of a larger experiment to make a big sound that rises above the limitations of the out-dated and limiting hardware the band uses."

Anamanaguchi has provided an example that helps other chiptune artists diversify their music, and helps music fans diversify their listening. Damon Hardjowirogo of local two-piece act Starscream says Anamanaguchi's Power Supply EP "acted as a gateway to the chip music scene … The original idea for the band was a two-piece of electric bass and drums," says Hardjowirogo. Now, he and his bandmate George Stroud both play Game Boys in addition to drums and bass (oh, and they wear Transformers masks).

Anamanaguchi's success, accessibility and all-around good cheer might be a good model for game fans looking to diversify their interests. "As a band though, we definitely have some cred in both worlds. We're very lucky in that we can play a show at Death By Audio in Brooklyn with a crazy hip hop group, and then fly over to Seattle and play PAX with The Minibosses. They're both worlds that I love, but balance is really the key. It's always important to log off of Reddit once in a while to get some fresh air with some hot, sweaty kids."

Leigh Alexander is Gamasutra's news director and authors the Sexy Videogameland blog. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.

Photos by: Marjorie Becker

First officially unveiled at E3 2008, Microsoft's Avatars were seen by many as an attempt to cash in on Nintendo's success with their "Mii" characters, caricatures that had become wildly popular as the individualized mascots of Nintendo's new Wii system.

Included as part of a wider upgrade to the Xbox 360's user interface, dubbed the "New Xbox Experience" (or "NXE"), the Avatars were designed by the team at Rare to be part-dress-up doll, part-online identity, and, rather than being simple Mii clones, were the product of years of hard work at both Rare and Microsoft.

This is their story.

IN THE BEGINNING

"We (Rare) had been mulling an idea like this for several years", says Lee Musgrave, Rare's lead artist and one of the people primarily responsible for the design of the avatars. "The idea that you could play multiple games, bought separately, with the same (self-styled) character is something that we thought was pretty compelling, and something that would really be a benefit to the console in general".

Rare's initial idea for their avatar system was simple: create a single identity, tied to a user or a user account, that would be represented by an on-screen character of the user's design, and which would be able to be carried over between games.

"We kicked the idea about internally, did some very scant groundwork on the kind of technical work that would be required to get something like this to work, flung a few emails about our thoughts across the Atlantic [to Microsoft's head offices in Redmond, Washington]...and then Nintendo announced Miis".

Oops.

Unsurprisingly, Musgrave says, momentum on Rare's project began to pick up pace after Nintendo first unveiled their own avatar system in May 2006. Rare's thunder was stolen by the Kyoto company's bold, console-wide initiative for their new Wii console.

But with stolen thunder came renewed focus for the team at Rare. "When we heard through internal grapevines that the Xbox platform team were putting together a completely new dashboard interface", Musgrave says of Microsoft's initial plans for the NXE, "we made it our business to get the work we'd already done on ‘shared characters' in-front of them".

Rare's fledgling avatar system (indeed, it can be said Rare itself was fledgling at this stage, with the company having failed to deliver a certified AAA hit since being purchased by Microsoft in 2002) was shown to Microsoft. Microsoft loved it, green-lit the project with a new, greater scope (the avatars would now be bound to the console itself) and things took off from there.

WHO WAS DRIVING?

By this stage, the project was being driven by a select number of Rare personnel: head of production Lee Schuneman, designer Dale Murchie, art head Lee Musgrave and animator Nick Makin.

"The project team working through early ideation," Musgrave says. "And [the] concept [team] worked closely with the Xbox LIVE team to ensure the avatar's became active, living, breathing personas across the consumers' entire Xbox 360 experience."

"Once we moved from pre-development into actual implementation, about a dozen core team members from Rare worked hand in hand with Xbox to bring our shared vision for the avatars to life". These extra hands included Chris Sutherland, Bjorn Madsen, Rod Boyd, Gareth Lough, Ryo Agarie, John Doyle, Will Overton and Rare's internal animation and rigging teams.

NAILING "THE LOOK"

"We labored long and hard on the look of the avatars from the outset", says Musgrave. "Our main goal was to create a style that did not alienate ANYBODY . . . this was about bringing people TO Xbox, not turning them off, and we deliberately went about creating something that was intrinsically human, but customizable to a point where people could express their personality within the system".

"At the same time, we were careful not to make it SO customizable that it became a playground only for highly creative people who wanted to turn their Xbox avatar into a monster. We danced around the exact level of creativity to open up with Avatars several times, and I think we eventually hit a spot with the faces, hairstyles, clothing and accessories that allow people to portray themselves pretty nicely, and with a certain ‘edge' if they are so inclined."

Throughout this piece, you can see examples of early concept work for the Avatars, Rare's art and design team toying with several varying styles of character before slowly approaching the short, stocky figures that would comprise the finished article (final image at bottom of article).

As for what the Avatars wear, Musgrave says that, rather than attempt to dress the Avatars themselves, Rare enlisted the services of a number of fashion consultants. These fashionistas helped Rare "put together hundreds of pieces of visual reference from all kinds of fashion styles and genres", which Rare then modeled and modified to fit the Avatar's art style.

Of course, the avatars didn't launch with "hundreds" of pieces of clothing. And six months on from release, additions to those options have been few and far between. But Musgrave says that the initial range of clothing options available – whose limited nature and range has drawn a little criticism from users – is "actually something that is not fully appreciated yet", with many articles of clothing designed in the Avatar's gestation period yet to see the light of day.

Musgrave is also at pains to point out that the clothing options "can be added to infinitely over time, to give us angles into pretty much any kind of trend or genre that you could imagine." So if happy pants come back in, people, don't worry: your avatars should be covered.

PUTTING THEM TO WORK

So the look and idea of the avatars was coming along. Yet for them to actually mean something, they had to be more than just dress-up dolls. They had to be characters. Avatars that didn't just represent a gamer physically, but could be controlled by them as well.

"We ensured throughout the entire technical development of the Avatar system that we kept one eye on the big prize, which was getting these things into as many places, products and games as possible", says Musgrave. "To this end, we actually wrote TWO avatar systems that are available for other developers to use, and a whole boatload of documentation and guidelines as to how developers should go about using avatars in their own games".

The first of these allows developers to take a console's Avatars and, using the 3D model as a base, rip still images from them in a variety of poses. This is the simpler of the systems, to be used mainly for games or programs that use 2D images, and users can even try it out themselves: it's the same tech employed by the "photo session" tool used to snap a pic of your avatar for a user's gamerpic.

The second system is more complex, and allows developers to lift an avatar model's geometry and textures and use it in a 3D game. While we haven't seen much use of this to date, Musgrave says that this tool can be "slotted into the code of any ‘in-development' Xbox application", so it shouldn't be too long until Microsoft – like Nintendo already has to great success - starts using avatars more extensively as game characters.

THE MUSIC

With the art and technology now sorted, there was one more thing to take care of. The music — which, for an avatar system, sounds meaningless! They're a visual thing, after all, so music…eh, whatever.

Yet anyone who has created an avatar will know that perhaps the most endearing aspect of the whole thing is the music featured, and in particular, the catchy chimes that play when a user saves changes to their Avatar.

This crucial, yet under-appreciated side of Avatar development was handled by Rare music man Steve Burke, with help from Dale Murchie along the way.

GO FOR LAUNCH

The Avatars made their public debut with the release of the New Xbox Experience on November 19, 2008. And while the NXE brought welcome changes to the 360's dour user interface, it quickly became clear that the main attraction of the update were the Avatars, their widespread use and acceptance allaying any concerns that they would be ignored by the 360's less "cuddly" user base.

"The main thing that I think we achieved here, and the main part that really lines up with our initial hopes for the project, is the level of integration and permeation that the avatars enjoy on Xbox 360" says Musgrave. "The success of the Avatars is down to the fact that they have been allowed/forced into all corners of the system. There are Avatars on the very front page of every dash of every Xbox, and when you buy a new box, one of the first things you are prompted to do is make an Avatar".

Indeed, Avatars have become a standard character across Microsoft for the Xbox 360, with executive avatars taking the stage at major presentations, and the characters also taking pride of place on Xbox 360 packaging and promotional material.

THE FUTURE

With the avatars having successfully made the journey from abstract game novelty to console mascots, creators Rare are looking towards the little guys' future.

"We have a list of about twelve million things we'd love to do with the avatars, their clothing and accessories, and how this all might cross over into the real-world . . . and there are several of these ideas that are being worked on behind the scenes right now", Musgrave says.

"Step one is complete: we have the look, the system and the tech. Step two is . . . due."

Warner, 25, an environmental artist who had worked at Relic Games on Dawn of War II, expected to lose copies to piracy. He'd already begun pondering what might be a third option in the ongoing zero-sum struggle between keeping gamers happy and ensuring they give you money for your work. But if nothing else, the torrenting of Raycatcher provided a good argument that someone in the indie sector should try building a game supported by product placements and in-game advertising. And after this experience he figured, why not him?

"I think people are voting - they're just not interested in paying for games any more," Warner said. "The DRM is getting cumbersome, and everyone hates it. I think we're at a point where indies have to consider a new revenue model. Because it takes a long time to make a game."

Warner and another partner, Mitch Lagran, 22, formed Vancouver-based Greener Grass Games to explore just that - a free, browser-based and ad-supported game. The thought of in-game advertising may make the skin crawl for the gaming cognoscenti who form the most evangelical constituency of independent development. The practice may be, on the AAA retail level, a disappointment so far, with slender prospects until a terrible economy rebounds. And browser-based games may have yet to catch on in North America the way they have elsewhere. But games are not built for free, and these two developers- and others - think it can be done at this smaller scale.

"I don't want to do anything The Man-ish," Warner said, acknowledging the stereotypical disconnect between an indie developer, who's supposed to be making better games because he's freed from corporate trappings, and product placements, a nakedly capitalist practice.

"But in order to make games consistently, we need to make money," said Lagran (left). "Otherwise, we can't pay the rent. And if people pirate a lot, advertisements make sense."

Warner had no illusions that Raycatcher (built with another partner) was going to make him rich. Just getting it onto Steam was a learning experience and an accomplishment, he said, akin to a writer getting one's first novel published. But the aftermath - from piracy to patching - poses disincentives to the independent developer, who began wanting to make the cool game he always dreamed of making, and finds that he's inherited a lot of problems and obligations he hadn't imagined.

"The money we're making off Raycatcher, it doesn't justify working on a project for a long period of time; I can't support myself on it," Warner said. Especially when you release a game, and it has bugs, and you have to fix them. In a certain sense, when you release something for money, it's almost like you create a liability for yourself."

The way Warner (right) sees it, the game he and Lagran really wanted to make - a narrative, 3D first person adventure set in an alternate reality - can be done quicker, more cheaply, and with fewer of the headaches that come from a commercial downloadable release like Raycatcher.

In their development histories, Warner as an artist, and Lagran as a programmer, shared the same zeal for the immense back story that is created during a game's design, and only partially revealed during its play. The game they are building, untitled as of now, opens that faucet of creativity. Through exploration and observation, players uncover how they got where they are, what they're supposed to do, and advance the story to its conclusion in a game reminiscent of the Sierra and LucasArts adventures of those companies' 1990s heyday, with elements of Myst.

Such a dependence on observation lends itself to advertising. What kind will players see? Their game, still untitled, will be a 3D, first person adventure, so everything you might see in the real world is on the table, Lagran says. Unity 3D, the engine they're using, supports video texture mapping, so a television displaying a video ad is one example. Outdoors, billboards are a given. Product and brand placement could show up as a poster in a character's bedroom.

"If there's going to be a poster on the wall, and a brand on that poster, you might as well make it a real one," said Lagran, a programmer whose experience includes work as an artist on PowerUp's Night of a Million Billion Zombies. Other possibilities include getting a link to a magazine article, targeted to their player demographics. Or opening up a laptop in a university setting in the game, and getting directed to the web site of that university, in real life.

For all of these, however, Lagran and Warner have to make separate and sometimes competing sales pitches, to gamers as well as advertisers. For advertisers, they're hawking a new and effective way to reach a targeted audience's eyeballs. For gamers, they're saying in effect, don't worry, if the advertising is done well, you'll barely notice.

"I've definitely played games with (in-game advertising) and it's never bothered me," Lagran said. "The only time it does is when it's out of context, the random logo that doesn't fit, like you're in a sci-fi world and you see the Apple logo."

So it's clear that the sponsors are going to have to fit organically into this story, somehow, says Warner, who offhandedly confesses a "seething hatred" for pushy, repeated or conspicuous advertising, probably because he's studied hypnosis. "I don't hate products or people making me more aware of products - I buy my clothes the same places as everybody else. But people getting leverage on me emotionally - Axe (body spray) makes people insecure about their sexuality for example - it's very manipulative and a form of bombardment. There are more tactful ways."

And that's where his and Lagran's sensibilities as artists will help an indie developer do it better.

"I could be delusional, but I haven't seen anybody else, really, doing it at this level," Warner says - meaning advertising within fully-rendered 3D games played online.

That points to another condition of the gaming market they hope to exploit: Low expectations. Casual flash games with advertising, while showing an audience increase (67 million in 2007 to 86 million in 2008, with a 28 percent bump in ad views, isn't looked to as any kind of a memorable gaming experience. "They're almost so casual that they're not considered real games," Lagran said. "We want to capitalize on the idea that these browser games are nothing, and make one that feels like a full-fledged game that you'd download…. I think that's where the industry is going to go."

Of course, it already has, notably in Asia, with North America lagging behind. One portal under development, also based in Vancouver, is Dimerocker, and it too envisions enough potential for in-game indie advertising that it has secured venture capital and is building an API to serve ads to developers that list games there.

J. Joly (he goes by his first initial), Dimerocker's founder and VP of content, considers his venture very much borne of the indie-scene aesthetic, envisioning a portal where users and developers communicate with no middlemen, in a give-and-take of release, adoption, feedback, revision and re-release. The portal is also geared toward distributing games built with the Unity 3D engine, which Greener Grass Games is using. Both studios consider it the fastest way to get a professional quality game into production.

"A great Unity game can be done with a 2 or 3 man team and $100,000," Joly said. That translates to considerable development agility and, by using the advantages of browser-based games, can target them to specific emerging markets such as, say, Brazil, skipping the overhead of traditional retail or downloadable releases, while making money back using Joly's API. Lagran and Warner contend they don't need eye-popping numbers to do well. "I think we're looking at between 50,000 and 100,000 impressions in a month, and we should be pretty good."

That's the concept, anyway. It's not something so ahead of the cutting edge that everyone's shooting it down, but it's not to say in-game indie advertising is unqualifiedly the next great thing.

"I'm a venture capitalist; I support the little guy," said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, with an expertise in social media and casual gaming. "The short story here is in-game advertising has been a little bit of a disappointment. It's not lived up to expectations as a major driver of revenue. That was true even when the ad market was strong, and obviously there's an advertising recession going on right now."

Even though recent (and not exactly disinterested) research projects a $2 billion in-game ad market by 2012, the company releasing that sort of figure, IGA Worldwide, is itself in trouble, trying to secure additional funding but also exploring selling itself off, after losses of $11 million in 2007 and $26 million in 2008. Microsoft also just laid off a quarter of the workforce at Massive, its advertising service.

Sure, the scale of the ad sales operation undertaken by an indie game house might not be so large that it needs to hit the kind of numbers larger publishers want to see. But "I guess it depends on what you define as a success," Liew said. "The challenge still is one of demand. And if you're smaller and more targeted, you do have fewer things to offer."

Liew understands Lagran and Warner's instinct to shift to web-based games, but wonders if the in-game advertising is even necessary. "Piracy is what led people in Asia to shift to free-to-play games with digital distribution models," Liew said. "This is a solved problem. Perhaps we can consider using the solutions that are out there."

Dimerocker would be one of those solutions, with plans for a traditional model of free play leading to premium content, with some microtransaction capabilities. But that doesn't particularly differentiate that portal from the others in that space, which is part of the reason why Joly's pushed into it.

This of course is the business plan; what it may meet in reality bears watching.

"Most marketers characterize in-game advertising as experimental," Liew said. "Given the major budget cuts people are seeing, they're not feeling super experimental. And given the context that this has not lived up to expectations, in a recessionary environment, it's going to be a tough challenge for them."

Perhaps, but at least the price of failure, if it comes to that, will be comparatively low. The episodic nature of their project allows them to either continue a successful IP, or cut their losses without having wasted time and development on a full game nobody really preferred.

"Right now, we're 10 grand in the hole, and it's all borrowed money, friends and family," Warner said. "Even if the first episode is a bomb, my mom isn't gonna get the repo man after us."

And they're banking on the goodwill of gamers who will give a game a chance and understand the tradeoff - that free content has to be supported some way. It's true that their exploration of advertising came about, in a sense, because gamers would not support a previous effort with their own money, and worse, pirates stole it. But gamers shouldn't feel that in-game ads are some form of punishment.

"DRM," said Lagran, "would be a punishment."

Six Days In Fallujah, which was announced and then abandoned by its publisher last month, was a game both hyped by its developer for its potential to be a game-documentary and scrutinized by game critics who questioned some of its Gears of War influences. To the public it became a flashpoint, a warning of video games perhaps going too far.

Is a game like Six Days in Fallujah even necessary? Coming out in favor, obviously, is Fallujah developer Atomic Games' President Peter Tamte. "Our point is that videogames are interactive, and they're the medium of choice for an entire generation," he told Kotaku this week. "Therefore, we should use this medium to deal with relevant issues while they're still relevant."

What obstacles are keeping the industry from tackling the sensitive subject of real-world warfare? And what divides the experts?

The Question of Fun

"It's not a great start that the Creative Director at Atomic Games is on the one hand talking about trying to "present the horrors of war" and on the other hand make 'entertainment'". - Dan Rosenthal, Iraqi War Veteran

When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. "We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience," he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts.

As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. "It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun - war is not fun - but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way."

Bogost cites the example of Blackhawk Down, the film adaptation of Mark Bowden's novel about military forces attempting to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid during the Battle of Mogadishu. It isn't the sort of movie you walk away from feeling good or happy, but it was a positively engaging experience for many film-goers. It wasn't fun, but it was fulfilling and by extension, entertaining.

Handling Sensitive Material

Retired U.S. Army Colonel John Antal is an author and a game developer, but he also spent 30 years of his life serving in the U.S. Army. From his unique perspective as a game industry insider who has led Soldiers from the level of a platoon to a regiment, Antal has his doubts that the industry could handle such a sensitive subject with the reverence it requires.

"There is a vital and very important role for video games and interactive entertainment in recording historic events," Antal admits, "But when you are talking about headlines - real situations involving real people - you really have to treat the subject with great reverence or it will fail. There are few interactive entertainment companies that even come close to being able to handle that properly."

The current war is perhaps more sensitive and politicized that any previous conflict. Every day, critical information of tactical importance is being transmitted. Horrifying images of soldiers wounded and killed in action began to circulate within days of the conflict starting. Antal compares this to World War II, where the first images of a dead U.S. soldier didn't appear until very late in the war. Just because we have easier access to information than ever before doesn't necessarily mean we should use it.

As for Atomic Games admittedly working with Iraqi insurgents on the development of Six Days in Fallujah? The former Army colonel was quite clear on his opinion of that matter.

"If you're working with the enemy, that's called treason. The jihadist killing our people today would love to get a larger audience to perpetrate their hate. If you think that reporters and filmmakers and interactive entertainment developers are not part of this world and their actions have no consequences, then you're wrong. There will be no virtual world in a real world run by the Taliban."

The Problem of Public Perception

If the distinction between fun and entertainment confuses the games industry, one can only imagine what it does to the general public, a large portion of which still see video games as light entertainment. Take the reaction of former Colonel Tim Collins, a decorated Iraqi war veteran who spoke up during the early days following the announcement of Six Days in Fallujah:

"It's much too soon to start making video games about a war that's still going on, and an extremely flippant response to one of the most important events in modern history. It's particularly insensitive given what happened in Fallujah, and I will certainly oppose the release of this game."

In a time where movies, documentaries, and books pertaining to the war have already been release, often to critical acclaim, the news of a video game covering those same subjects is referred to as "flippant" and "insensitive".

According to Bogost, reactions like this are part of an ongoing media literacy problem. People are just not willing to accept the fact that video games, like any other entertainment medium, are capable of handling a serious subject with the respect it deserves. Based off of media coverage of a game which only tangible assets were a handful of screenshots and a short video clip, a large portion of society was ready to dismiss Six Days in Fallujah.

Conflicting statements between publisher Konami and developer Atomic Games certainly didn't help the matter. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Atomic President Peter Tamte is quoted saying, "For us, games are not just toys", while in the same article Konami states that "At the end of the day, it's just a game."

"We have to insist that there's not a subject that's off limits and there aren't things that we can't do," Bogost said. "We can do it more or less effectively, but there is no sensibility that we have to account for."

Some might say that's dangerous thinking, including John Antal. "Every author, every filmmaker, every interactive entertainment developer creating a product is responsible for what it does and its after effects. Aristotle wouldn't agree with that."

Extreme statements aside, Bogost has hopes that the situation is slowly changing, citing a most unexpected catalyst - Nintendo's Wii Fit. Not only does the peripheral attract a whole new audience to the gaming market, it also affects them on a deeply personal level. The key to changing public perception lies in letting people know that games can be about much more than simply sitting on the couch, shooting at aliens. As silly as it may seem to "hardcore" gamers, Wii Fit does just that. It's ironic to think that Nintendo's focus on a wider audience

The Final Fate of Six Days In Fallujah

As for Six Days in Fallujah, developer Atomic Games remains quiet on the subject of finding a new publishers, instructing those interested to "stay tuned" for further developments. While some remain firmly opposed to the project, others believe it's a game that needs to see to see release, as Ian Bogost puts it, "if only to be another example of how to do things well or poorly."

"Arcades are where you can truly level up your game against many opponents with no lag issues or rage-quitters," Valle says. "Maybe those rage-quitters can still leave mid-match and cause a scene or something. Playing online on a console is more of a tool for execution and strategy." In short: Play online if you want to practice, play in arcades if you want to fight.

As with most in his generation, the 31 year-old Valle came of age when online home console gaming wasn't event a glint in SEGA's eye, an age American arcades got golden again. Players slapped down stacks of quarters and could find SFII cabinets anywhere the things could fit — not only the obvious slick carpet-covered arcades, but also dingy laundromats and musty corners in gas stations. "I'm an arcade gamer," says Valle, "so I was used to playing the arcade version of whatever fighting game there was available." And that means, playing at a stand-up cabinet, standing next to your opponent.

"Back in the 90s you either played sports, decked out your car, or played Street Fighter II," says competitive fighting champ Valle. And some, like Valle, played SFII like it was a sport. Valle would walk into arcades with his gelled hair and wife-beater tee and other players would whisper, "Hey, it's that Ryu guy." When he wasn't getting kicked out for winning too much, Valle was drawing crowds — first in local tournaments, and then in national and international ones. Street Fighter was the game he started playing competitively, and not just in arcades against punters, but against the best of the best.

Players needed guts of iron. Way back in '96, Valle put himself on the map with his fight at Southern Hills Golfland arcade with rival John Choi at the B3: Battle By The Bay, the unofficial West Coast Street Fighter Alpha 2 arcade grand championship. Two years, at the SFA3 World Tournament, Valle went head-to-head against Daigo Umehara (yes, that Daigo) in Daigo's first international fight.

Before he went on to dominate to tournament scene between 1996-2001, a young Valle first cut his teeth on early arcade fighter Karate Champ. It wasn't until later that he began seriously playing titles like Street Fighter II, Virtua Fighter and Tekken.

Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Los Angeles, Valle recalls his home country in context of gaming: "I went back to Peru around my 13th birthday, just around the time Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition was released. Only thing I remember from Peru was that I gave up my old-school first-gen Gameboy to my cousin."

Valle excelled at more than fighters — platformers, sports games, whatever. But it was playing against others and playing against others in arcades that kept drawing him to the genre. "I love fighters because of the different styles of competition and the satisfaction of winning more matches than anybody in any given day," says Valle. "Life is good when you made that guy break another 5 dollar bill in the quarter machine."

His style was and still is aggressive. Aggressive and relentless. Relentless and brutal. "Almost instantly, Valle understands your game, and from there he gets inside your head and just violates you," says Seth Killian, long time Valle pal and resident Street Fighter expert at Capcom. "While some other top players would hang back and try and grind you down, he pioneered his own 'rushdown' style, where he was on you so fast, and in so many different ways, you were constantly on the defensive. While you were trying to figure out what just happened, he was on you again with a new setup, so his opponents would really just fall apart. It's paralyzing." Valle explains, "There isn't much time to think when the game starts, so my strategy involves overwhelming my opponent before they can adapt."

As the 1990s drew to a close, more and more arcades fell by the wayside. Home console kept gaming in the living room. "Our beloved Southern Hills Golfland closed down as well as a lot of other arcades soon after," Valle recalls. "Competition was very rare to find and no new games to play either."

While Valle initially had slight difficulty in adjusting to playing fighters on consoles ("I'm an arcade gamer," he points out), he's completed the transition and plays Street Fighter IV on Xbox LIVE Arcade evenings after his day job at an MMO company doing Spanish QA and web functionality for our game portals. He's not simply blowing off steam from a day at the office, and these sessions are less "playing" and more "training" for the upcoming EVO Championship Series in Las Vegas this July. Valle enters EVO, because of his history with the tourney — it goes way back to when it was the B series. "EVO also knows how to cater to fighting game community better than any organization out there," he says. "Plus, EVO is the hardest tournament to place in the US as a national tournament."

As American arcades have diminished and declined, the gap between consoles and arcade hardware has closed. "Console and arcade versions used to be vastly different back in the day," Choi says. "But that is no longer the case today and arcade and console ports are 99% accurate for the most part." The usual gameplay differences, Choi continues, are due to the hardware processing speed and minor bugs. "General gameplay is usually the same."

General gameplay, but not arcade gameplay. They're different, and anyone who has played both knows it. "I'm just fortunate to have grown up at a time where fighting game competition was at every corner," Valle says. "The experience from crushing my opponents on a 2-player, side by side arcade cabinet far outweighs online gaming." According to Valle, the younger generation will take time to overcome that type of pressure from playing someone up close and personal. "Sometimes the best chance of winning is the presence of confidence rather than the skill at hand."

Toy Story Mania! is being developed for the Wii with the help of Disney's imagineers and designed to replicate the experience of the 4D ride of the same name.

Toy Story Mania! the ride opened in Disney's California Adventure and Disney's Hollywood Studios in 2008. On the ride, park-goers board a carnival tram and ride along a track that whips them in front of large screens featuring stereoscopic 3D animation. The ride also features blasts of air and water, with four plastic pop guns that are used to shoot virtual pies, darts, balls and hoops at the screen to score points.

The attraction is broken up into a practice round and five games, including balloon pop and plate break levels, and a Woody-themed pop-gun shoot-out on a faux western set.

To shoot the virtual ammo, people on the ride pull back on a string attached to the over-sized guns and let go to fire, simulating a pop gun. Disney Interactive show producer Stephanie Pickens, one of the imagineers who worked on the ride, said the gun can register up to ten shots a second.

The ride also tracks each players scores, showing the scores at the end of each run and also listing the park's high scores for the day and month.

The ride cost an estimated $80 million to create and requires more than 150 computers to run. It is, Pickens said, the first true video game ride in a Disney park.

The team behind the ride faced a lot of challenges, said Sue Bryan, Walt Disney senior show producer.

"It was harder than you might have thought," she said. "We have 3-year-olds, grand parents, teenagers, avid gamers, people who swear they never want to play a video game who might be riding this."

And because the ride is relatively short, people need to feel successful instantly to have fun.

"Traditional carnival games are fun, but are not necessarily out to make people feel successful," she said.

So the team started by creating a mock-up of the ride, building the set with foam core, the car out of plywood and the guns out of PVC pipe.

"Our big goal was immersion," she said.

After deciding on the ride's design, the team of imagineers started mocking up guns for the attraction.

"We tested levers, buttons, but we ended up with a pull string because it feels like a pop gun, viscerally, when you use it," she said.

When Walt Disney Imagineering started working on the virtual portion of the ride, it became a lot like making a game, Pickens said.

The giant screens and the graphics needed to have accurate physics and had to be able to know exactly where the shooter was located and pointing at all times.

"We needed to render projectiles precisely to make sure it feels like it comes out of your gun," Pickens said.

Both Pixar, the people behind the Toy Story movies, and Disney animators worked on the animations for the ride's games. The games, while relatively simple on their surface, also have a surprising amount of complexity built into them.

Some of the animations have two stages, like a hen house that when shot sprouts chickens. There are also Easter eggs, or secrets built into the games, like clouds that shower high point targets when shot.

When Disney decided to create a video game based on their ride they turned to Papaya Studios.

"We spent a lot of time with the video game development team," Pickens said. "It's crazy, crazy detailed."

While the Wii game doesn't have air or water effects, some of the games levels will include stereoscopic 3D graphics. Where the ride features 56 game screens, the Wii version has 30 mini games.

Because the game relies on the motion controls of the Wii remote, it does manage to capture much of the same feel of the ride and Disney hopes that spells increased sales. In fact, the game will be sold at the two parks right outside of the ride.

If successful, it sounds like Disney may explore bringing other forms of video game interactivity to some of their parks and with those new rides will likely come new video game ports of theme park reality.

"Interactive play is really popular at our parks," Bryan said.

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

In honor of Mother's Day, we celebrate moms in gaming – from the bit parts to the big players. Some are examples of the best parenting you could imagine; and some are so evil, they're unfit to be called "Mom." Join us now as we separate the June Cleavers from the Joan Crawfords of video game mothers.

Mothers in… Role-Playing Games
Role-playing games have the highest number of moms of any video game genre. This is because RPGs have huge, sprawling plots with huge, sprawling towns and a huge, sprawling casts of characters who you may or may not encounter depending on how you play the game. In most RPGs, you see moms as non-playable characters in towns, in flashbacks depicting the hero's reason for revenge. Some RPGs even have them as playable characters or main villains. Sadly, RPGs are also the number one "mom dies" offender, as nearly every RPG features a plucky youth out to avenge a destroyed village that usually has within it a dead mother – or at least one that's been turned into a monster.

There are way more mothers in RPGs than we could count – especially if you're going through side quests, all PC RPGs, all Japanese RPGs that were never released in the US, Final Fantasy X-2 and every single optional flashback for every possible playable character. So we've populated this list with moms who 1) had the most impact on the game's main plot or that 2) appear in the game beyond a single expository cut scene. This leaves us mostly with moms who appear in Japanese RPGs; but be sure to apologize to your dead mother in Fallout 3 for us.

Mada, Dragon Quest V – Mother of the main character: Mada gets kidnapped and becomes the subject of his quest.

Matriarch Benezia, Mass Effect – Mother of Liara T'Soni: Benezia is enslaved and later killed by Shepard in battle, but she makes up with Liara right before dying.

Polka's Mom, Eternal Sonata — Mother of Polka: this country lady is very well adjusted to time loops and apparently never taught her daughter not to talk to strange 19th Century composers she might meet while wandering around at night.

Yohn, Suikoden Tactics — Mother of Kyril: Yohn is a mute demon trapped in the wrong world who sticks around to care for her son, even though he doesn't know who she is for pretty much the whole game.

Gina , Chrono Trigger — Mother of Chrono: In one of the game's endings, Gina accidentally goes into the time portal, thus restarting the whole plot from the beginning.

Jenova, Final Fantasy VII — Mother of Sephiroth (sorta): Jenova is... an alien? We're not even sure she's a she, but "she" spends a lot of time in a jar and looks creepy.

Angeal's Mother, Crisis Core — Mother of Angeal: This small-town lady is very nice to all of her son's friends from the army, even the ones that turn evil and cause her matricide.

Queen Brahne, Final Fantasy IX — Mother of the real Princess Garnet and foster mother to her lookalike of the same name: Brahne gets fat, turns evil, tries to kill her adoptive daughter and later repents and dies in Garnet's arms.

Sarah Sisulart, Lost Odyssey – Mother of Liram: Sarah goes a little crazy and turns herself into an old woman when she thinks her daughter's been killed, but turns back into a hot nerdy chick when she finds out she has grandkids.

Seth Balmore, Lost Odyssey – Mother of Sed: Seth is immortal, but her son isn't, which is sort of weird for both of them. But they're both pirates, so there's some common ground at least.

Best Mom: Yohn… because she's selfless as only a mother can be.

Worst Mom: Jenova… because she's emotionally unavailable. And responsible for Sephiroth.

Mothers in… Fighting Games
Fighting games have a fair few mothers among their playable characters. The plot structure (or lack thereof) leaves room for all kinds of people to enter whatever world championship fighting tournament of the week is going on for various reasons that don't necessarily make any sense. So if you can have a panda, a geisha, a cyborg and whatever the hell Voldo is supposed to be enter a tournament for personal gain, a mother doesn't seem like such a weird contender. Here's a list of a few prominent mommies:

Sophitia, Soulcalibur series – Mother of Patroklos and Pyrrha: Sophitia is an Athenian who fights on behalf of the Greek God, Hephaestus, to regain Soul Edge. The sword entwines itself with her daughter's spirit, forcing Sophitia to spend eternity defending Soul Edge from anyone who tries to claim it. She's protecting her daughter.

Michelle Chang, Tekken series – Mother of Julia: Michelle fights in one of the Iron Fist tournaments to rescue her kidnapped mother and then adopts an abandoned baby named Julia. Then Julia goes on to fight in an Iron Fist tournament to save Michelle when Michelle gets kidnapped. Circle of life.

Dural, Virtua Fighter – Mother of Kage: Dural probably started out as a good mom when she was human, but then she got kidnapped and turned into an evil cyborg. That knocks her out of the Mom of the Year running.

Jun Kazama, Tekken series – Mother of Jin Kazama: Jun is the Chosen One, a wildlife activist, and a single mom. Over the course of four games, she somehow found time to save pandas, birth a son, thrash a bunch of her extended family and possibly fake her own death or perhaps dies for real when her house burned down.

Nina Williams, Tekken series – Mother of Steve Fox via in-vitro fertilization: Nina is a world class assassin who gives birth to a son while in cryogenic sleep. Though it appears she couldn't care less that she has offspring, she does neglect to assassinate him. That counts as maternal instinct, right?

Maria, Dead or Alive series – Mother of Helena: Maria is a world class opera singer who had an affair with the head of a sinister corporation. She later took a bullet for her bastard daughter onstage in the middle of an aria… what a way to go.

Crimson Viper, Street Fighter IV – Mother of Lauren: C. Viper is a working mother in the spy profession. Her life's goal is destroying the weapons produced by a sinister corporation, but somehow she made room in her busy schedule to have a daughter.

Justice, Guilty Gear – Mother of Dizzy: No one's really sure how it happened – least of all Dizzy, who was found abandoned at age 3.

Best Mom: Maria… because nothing says "Mommy loves you" like taking a sniper's bullet to the heart.

Worst Mom: Crimson Viper… because she's a workaholic. Did she even call her kid after fights? No!**

Mothers in… Action/Adventure and Survival Horror Games
Here's where the role of the mother in video games become complicated. Because these types of games usually have a more focused plot than fighting or role playing games, adding a mother usually means casting her in a narrow role that doesn't include speaking parts. Occasionally, these moms even wind up as antagonists by default. However small their part, though, these mothers sometimes make an appearance worth mentioning. Here are a few notable examples:

The Queen, Ico – Mother of Yorda: She basically had a daughter so she could sacrifice the kid and live a bit longer. I guess some species do eat their own young, but jeez…

Annette Birkin, Resident Evil 2 – Mother of Sherry Birkin: Depending on how you play the game, Annette either hid the G-Virus in her daughter's locket or cures her daughter of the T-Virus. Either way, she did abandon her kid during a zombie apocalypse. Poor form, Mom.

Amelia Croft, Tomb Raider series – Mother of Lara Croft: Like her daughter, Mrs. Croft has issues with touching ancient artifacts she probably shouldn't. Luckily, Lara learns from her mommy's mistakes and everybody's happy… until Lara has to shoot zombie Amelia when they meet up in Underworld.

Mrs. Sanderson, Chibi Robo – Mother of Jenny: Mrs. Sanderson has real marital problems that cause her to lock herself in a bathroom and threaten divorce, leaving all the housework to Jenny and her toy robot.

Ex-Mrs. Hopkins, Bully – Mother of Jimmy Hopkins: This woman lacks both fashion sense and parental priorities. She ditches her kid at a boarding school to run off on a honeymoon with a new husband and then sends Jimmy a fugly sweater at Christmas.

Maggie Monday, Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse – Mother of Andrew Monday: Like Jimmy Hopkins' mom, Maggie could use some priority adjustment. She lets her son's city get sacked by zombies and then becomes a zombie herself so she can marry Stubbs. This basically leaves Andrew with a wrecked city and a zombie for a stepfather. Thanks, Mom!

Ma Cipriani, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories – Mother of Toni: Toni never called his Ma while he was in hiding. Given that she dates guys who are into paraphilic infantilism, I can see why. Ma puts a hit out on her son and then calls it off in a fit of maternal pride when Tony finally becomes a made man.

Best Mom: Amelia Croft… because not even good moms get it right all of the time and how was she supposed to know that sword would teleport her, her husband would die and her daughter would be left an orphan?

Worst Mom: The Queen… because what she did to Yorda is way worse than what Joan Crawford did to her daughter. You think being hit with wire hangers is bad? Try being turned to stone.

Mothers in… Shooters
Here's where you barely see any moms at all. The shooter genre is reserved for masculine things like guns and aliens and spies and other stuff that doesn't leave much room for maternal influences. You'll find a lot of dads in shooters, though – but Father's Day isn't for another month, so sit tight.

*SPOILER WARNING: BioShock, F.E.A.R. 2, Metal Gear Solid 4*

Jasmine Jolene, BioShock – Mother of Jack: Jasmine was Andrew Ryan's mistress and a "dancer" which is 60s code for "prostitute." Even if she didn't accept money for sexual favors, she was certainly in a hurry to accept money for her freshly-conceived embryo. That's worse than the fairy tales where parents trade firstborn sons for magical enchantments.

Dr. Bridgette Tenenbaum, BioShock and BioShock 2 – Mother of all the Little Sisters and the Big Sister: Tenenbaum didn't give birth to any of the poor darlings, but her research created them. She eventually stepped in to foster them and shower them with toys and secondhand cigarette smoke to make up for the brainwashing.

Eva, Metal Gear Solid 4 – Mother of Liquid and Solid Snake (kinda): Eva would have gladly had Naked Snake's babies the ol' fashioned way, but the Patriots had other plans. She eventually serves as surrogate mother to the clone babies Liquid and Solid and starts calling herself Big Mamma to compensate for having nothing to do with mothering them.

The Boss, Metal Gear Solid 3 – Mother of Revolver Ocelot and the US Special Forces (which one do you think she's more proud of?): The Boss probably had no business leading the Battle of Normandy while nine months pregnant. But despite being a bad mom to Ocelot, The Boss wins major motherhood recognition as a Mother Goddess figure to at least half the cast of the Metal Gear Solid series.

Alma Wade, F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin – Mother of Paxton Fettel, Point Man and countless telepathic clone soldiers: Alma became a mother at the tender age of 15 against her will. It's hard to tell if she harbors any feeling for her offspring conceived in captivity – bloodlust sort of obscures any tender intent. However, in Project Origin, Alma's grown up a bit and appears to have invested in being mother to the protagonist's baby, which she deliberately conceives.

Best Mom: The Boss… because out of this sorry lot, she's easily the best role model.

Worst Mom: Jasmine… because she sold her only son to his father's enemy before the son was even born. That's like the opposite of mother-like behavior.

(Dis)Honorable Mentions
Sora's Mom, Kingdom Hearts — She has one line and the whole first part of the game is about her son trying to build a raft to run away from home. Clearly the parenting thing isn't working out.
Mother Brain, Metroid — "She," if that's what that thing in the jar can be called, is an alien with no maternal feelings whatsoever.
You, Fable II, The Sims games and Harvest Moon games — Even if you play as an upstanding paragon of parental vigilance, you're going to be guilty of neglect at least half of the time in these games.

At this point, you're probably wondering why Cooking Mama isn't anywhere on this list. Apart from the lack of a convenient genre into which to cram the game, there's no evidence that Cooking Mama is even a mother. Do you see her kids at any point in the game? For all the player knows, she's just calling herself "Mama" so she doesn't have to call herself a chef, the poor self-hating hash slinger.

That's all we've got for the best and worst mothers in video games. Think we missed somebody important? Drop a line in the comments. And don't forget to call your mom on Mother's Day!

**CORRECTION: C. Viper occasionally does call her daughter after fights. But the workaholic ruling still stands.

• Who is Chuck Greene? And Why is He So Good At Killing Zombies?
  Dead Rising 2: 7,000 Zombies and Plenty of Chainsaws
  by Brian Crecente
• 
  
• A Tale of Tale of Tales
  The Path For Art Games
  by Leigh Alexander
• 
  
• Drama!
  How Not To Address Homosexuality In Gaming
  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• DS Gets An A
  Nintenducation – A New Take On Edutainment
  by A.J. Glasser
• 
  
• Hi, My Name Is Phil And I'm Independent
  Going Indie: Fez Creator Phil Fish's Moment Of Clarity
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• Looking Back At Looking At 2009
  Virtual Reality: The Year Twenty-O-Nine In Video Game History
  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• A Brief History of History
  Can Games Handle History?
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  
• The Video Game Capital of the World
  A Claim to Fame, in the Dodge City of Video Games
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Way Off Broadway
  All That Jazz: Video Game Musicals
  by A.J. Glasser
• 
  

REVIEWS

• Edge Micro-Review: Elegance, Cubed
• BattleForge Review: Collectible Card-Time Strategy
• Rhythm Heaven Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Metal Gear Solid Touch Micro-Review
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena Review: Fumbling In The Dark
• Ninja Blade Review: Ninja Tragic
• Company Of Heroes: Tales Of Valor Micro-Review: Unconditional Surrender
• The Godfather II Review: The Don Does No Favors
• Demigod Review: Aspiring To Godhood
• Excitebots: Trick Racing Review: ***********
• Zeno Clash Review: Not One For Your Father (Or Mother)

PREVIEWS

• Dexter iPhone Preview: Dexter Does Interesting Things
• Battlestations Pacific: Lets You Win the War With Japan
• Prototype Preview: My Type of Game
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine Preview: Claws of War
• Preview: Spore Galactic Adventures – The Cake Is a Portal
• Saw Preview: Condemned or Dragon's Lair?
• MySims Racing Preview: It's What Mario Kart Wii Should Be
• Rock Band Unplugged Hands-On
• Top Gun iPhone Preview: Bringing Back The Cold War
• Hands-On With Uncharted 2 Multiplayer, 3-Player Coop
• Star Trek D-A-C Preview: Boldly Going Where Others Have Been Before
• Dark Void Preview: Break Neck Speed
• Resident Evil Archives Preview: Survival Frustration
• Spyborgs Preview: Why Waggle
• Fate: Unlimited Codes Preview: Fight
• MotorStorm: Arctic Edge Hands-On: From The Land Of The Ice And Snow
• Tekken 6 Preview: When Pigs Fly
• Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao Preview: An Eyes-on Experience
• Bionic Commando Multiplayer Preview: Can't Get the Swing of Things
• Street Fighter IV Preview: PC Fighting
• The Munchables Preview: Eat It!
• Klonoa Wii-make Challenge Preview: Yep, It's Challenging
• We Cheer 2 Preview: Now with 40% More Male

WELL PLAYED

• DSi Inspires Fiscal Responsibility
• Spore Creator Wants to Make Toys Fun Again
• Adult Gaming on the DS: The Chinatown Conundrum
• What Ails The World's Biggest Gaming Platform?
• Capcom Goes West

COVER

• Capcom's Dead Rising 2 - Designed by Michael McWhertor

Last month, Japanese game developer Capcom gathered journalists from around the world to Monte Carlo to show them their line-up of new titles and talk a little bit about their struggle to deal with that shift

Among the developers on hand was the producer of Lost Planet, the designer of Mega Man and creator of Dead Rising and the co-producer of zombie thriller Resident Evil 5.

"Five years ago, Capcom was at the very bottom of the industry, it was up to me to figure out how we were going to get us out of this pit," said Mega Man creator and head of Capcom Research and Development Keiji Inafune. "I realized the key word we had to focus on was globalization. It's not that Capcom hasn't had global hits, but there was a long time when key products weren't selling around the world."

Inafune said the company realized they had to "strengthen their will", to take risks and create games that traditionally would have been easy to reject.

That thinking lead to a revitalization for Capcom, with the developer creating Dead Rising, a free-roaming game about a photojournalist's fight to survive a zombie-infested town and expose the truth to the world. It's also a game with a distinct Western look.

"Back when we made Dead Rising I remember distinctly a lot of Japanese development and publishing houses said is this a title that is being developed in the west, because it didn't look like anything being developed in Japan at the time," Inafune said. "It was always our intent to make a game that was distinctly western stylized from the start, so to have other developers tell us that, was the biggest compliment we could have gotten."

But when the game hit the U.S., western press and developers noted that while the game looked western, something about it "felt Japanese," he said.

Inafune said he realized then that if Capcom was going to do a Dead Rising 2 they should go all of the way and have a Western developer make the game.

When Capcom met with Canada-based Blue Castle Games, the thing that sold them on the developer was the fact that they saw the original Dead Rising as a Western game with some unique Japanese elements to it.

"It was that one statement that made me realize this was the one company that could make a proper Dead Rising sequel," he said. "Our big challenge to ourselves with Dead Rising 2 is to try and find the right blend between western design and Japanese design."

Inafune added that Capcom isn't trying to "rip off" what is popular in the west, they're after something new, "the perfect combination of western and Japanese game design."

One of Capcom's other big titles, Lost Planet 2, has gamers fighting across a slowly thawing frozen planet for limited resources. Interestingly, though, Capcom's Jun Takeuchi, who worked on the original title and Resident Evil 5, says Lost Planet 2 won't be trying to find that blend.

"Inafune talked about Dead Rising 2 being a game trying to combine the best of Japanese and western design and make it into something new," Takeuchi said. "I think that's a great idea, but Lost Planet 2 is taking a slightly different approach.

"What we are trying to do with Lost Planet 2 is different. We want to take a Japanese designed game and make it a success in the west."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Sure, X-Men Origins: Wolverine may try to act as a beginners' guide to the breakout character from Bryan Singer's X-Men movies - We try to pretend that Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand doesn't exist 'round these here parts, thank you very much - but there's only so much you can fit into one movie. For all the rest, click the links below.

A Brief History Of Wolverine
A beginner's guide to Wolverine's complicated backstory.

The Secret Origin Of Wolverine
Who came up with the character, and just why he's always been a bit of a creative orphan.

All In The Family
It's not just Wolverine, you know; meet his kids. And he has a few.

The Best There Is At What He Does... Which Is What, Exactly?
What are Wolverine's powers? We explain.

Wolverine Eternal
You can't keep a good man down. Especially when he literally can't stay dead. We look at why Wolverine just doesn't know how to quit.

Audiences constantly demand video games fight familiar boundaries. We're sick of the same old, same old. We want creativity, artistic integrity, elegance and depth–or do we? Do players know what they're asking for when they look for "more" from games? And if this is really what we want, then what's with the mixed reception–both cultural and economic–when we get it?

We've seen it happen time and time again. A game can ring all the right bells in response to the clarion call for "art," for "legitimacy," for "more" – and yet fail to penetrate the market in a significant way. Examples? We asked for an adult game on Wii ever since the platform launched, and if you believe the internet, the lack of Wii games for grownup, hardcore gamers is a potentially lethal chink in Nintendo's armor.

Yet March NPD revealed that Sin City-inspired, artfully violent MadWorld, which on paper is exactly what we asked for, performed only modestly at 66,000 units. Similarly, GTA: Chinatown Wars' underwhelming sales performance on DS has been made an avatar for the idea that mature content on popular platforms just doesn't pull audience attention — even with high ratings. Then, of course, there's Capcom's classic Okami example, the last-gen avatar for the baffling case wherein creative success doesn't match up to the commercial.

Here at Kotaku last month, we talked about all the ways in which M-rated content isn't really yet mature. Now, we look at the viability of art games–and as sick of the "games as art" issue as most are, we wouldn't be so tired of hearing it if there weren't something missing, either in the conversation or in the games themselves. What's holding them back?

Designer and academic Ian Bogost recently theorized that what players are really asking for when they kick around the issue is not simply art, but legitimacy– in other words, we know that games are capable of affecting players more deeply than the silly thrill of the headshot, so we want to see them try.

And yet the response to art games is usually mixed. Neither the critical press nor the consumer base seem to be universally decided yet on how to receive the work of developers like Jonathan Blow of time-bending Braid fame; Jason Rohrer, creator of thought-pieces like Passage and Gravitation, or Tale of Tales, who's slowly advanced on the art game scene with both The Graveyard, a brief essay on entropy, and the darkly allegorical The Path.

Off The Beaten Path
Tale of Tales' The Path is the latest game on the scene to confuse traditional "gamers." It's an exploration horror title that relies allegorically on the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood to provoke thoughts about innocence, curiosity, expectations, violation, growing up – or, at least, that's what the response has been from some. Beyond that, it's difficult to describe without spoiling– The Path might provoke you to think about something else entirely, and so the best way to understand it is just to play it.

Notably, it's open-ended; it's not task-driven, and whether or not there are "win" conditions is up for debate. It's a game that asks audiences to reconsider what a game "is," but let's not wander off The Path to tackle that issue today. Steve Gaynor, designer and author of the Fullbright blog, has an excellent door-slammer: "'Is it a game' is almost as useless as ‘is it art,'" he says. "Did you play it? Congrats, it's a game."

Gamers act very fatigued of familiar conventions; there's a jaded, blasé attitude toward re-skinnings of the same old thing. Yet we often see confusion and hostility toward games that experiment with new ways of reaching players–maybe part of that is because both audiences and designers are stuck in old ideas about what games "are."

That's what Tale of Tales believes, so perhaps it's unsurprising that The Path is a non-traditional game–the developer's two-person team, Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey, are not traditional developers. In fact, they never set out to make games, and spent most of their careers as storytellers in other media – sculpture, painting, performance, graphic design and music, to name a few. The pair's fascination with fairy tales and old mythology came out of the desire to work with existing story language rather than fight the fact, as they say, "we weren't the greatest fiction writers in the world."

"In 2002, we threw ourselves into the reluctant arms of game development," the pair tells Kotaku. "Because, unlike the web technology we had been working with before, games technology was still continuing to evolve towards ever greater ways of making interactive art. It seemed like game technology would allow us to finally really create what we had only been simulating before."

Stuck In A Rut?
Samyn and Harvey chose to work with video games, then, because they believed in the idea that games are capable of delivering art and story in unprecedented ways. But they admit to being a little disappointed at how rigidly both game developers and players insist so strictly on established conventions.

"We quickly found out that many game developers don't think of their technology as a medium for artistic expression or even for touching people or telling stories about the world," say Tale of Tales. "To our surprise they were really fond of the very traditional game structures that they had inherited from board games and arcade games. And they enjoyed very much re-skinning the same game over and over."

Regardless of how you feel about The Path, there's no universe in which a desire to try new directions for video games is a negative. "We're exploring the enormous potential of this medium for art-making. We're not interested in purity," Tale of Tales explains. "We're not so interested in the history of videogames or the traditions of game design. We're taking the medium at face value and poking at it to see what it can do."

But the team admits they were shooting for "commercial potential" with The Path, moreso than with Tale of Tales' Independent Games Festival award-nominated art game The Graveyard. But speaking on whether audiences are actually willing to pay $10 for The Path– "we tend to be pessimistic," say the pair. "It seems to be very difficult to find an audience large enough to support our production without extensive effort outside of the purely creative activity."

Pushing The Borders
Another inhibitor to greater commercial and cultural viability for art games is the difficulty in reaching mainstream audiences. Tale of Tales actually hopes primarily to reach non-gamers through work like The Path, but explains why that's a complicated proposition: "The main thing that seems to be blocking this progress–if we're allowed to call it that–is the difficulty of approaching markets outside of the market for games," they say.

"The games industry is very well organized and very successful within its own ecosystem. But it has optimized all of its systems and habits for internal use. As a result, only gamers like games. And everybody else doesn't understand them or is even disgusted by them. Which is problematic for us. Essentially, we make games for non-gamers—and, in general, non-gamers hate games."

Designer Jason Rohrer, known for poignant titles like Gravitation, Passage and IGF Innovation Award-winning Between, has bypassed the entire issue of the commercial viability for art games by making all of his titles free to download. "I'd say that Tale of Tales is not making games at
all, but something else entirely," he says. "They call their works ‘games' out of simple marketing convenience."

From that perspective, it makes a little more sense that gamers hesitate to vote with their wallets in favor of games like Tale of Tales' if they're not meant to be "games" as we know them.

"Works like Braid and [Rod Humble's] The Marriage, on the other hand, are undeniably games. You can win both games, and in the case of The Marriage, you can also lose," says Rohrer.

Still, there's no saying that The Path would be a commercial juggernaut even if it adhered to more familiar definitions of "game." Says Rohrer, "It's not clear to me that ‘gaminess' is correlated with commercial success. Braid was a commercial success and was generally embraced by mainstream players, while The Marriage was given away for free, and arguably couldn't have been a commercial success if it was sold."

Rohrer says that game length, replay value or other measures of the amount of time players can spend with a game is a common way by which people determine their financial valuation. "Braid is more valuable to [gamers] because it takes five hours to complete; it contains a few dozen puzzles. The Marriage is like a single puzzle, and if you figure out what the mechanics mean, you are done playing."

It's easy to blame the audience for not receiving progressive games the way they "should." But Rohrer argues that the primary obstacle to growth for art games is actually an absence of depth: "We're trying to push the medium forward into more meaningful territory, but we haven't figured out how to do that while also preserving the features that make games an interesting medium in the first place," he suggests.

And Rohrer says it's worth pointing out that lack of depth isn't just a problem in art games–it's a problem for most games. "Mainstream, commercially-successful games aren't deep–they're just really long," he says. " Long and shallow. Art game makers have rejected the notion of making a game unnecessarily long by repeating the same gameplay filler over and over for 40 hours. But what art game makers are producing instead are short and shallow games, at least in terms of gameplay."

So it's not that gamers don't want art, and it's not necessarily that the audience is unprepared to embrace new definitions of games. The issue may just be that even though they push boundaries, art games suffer from the same problems as all video games do.

Looking Down The Road
It's not all bleak news for art right now. "We do continue to be surprised by the amount of people within the games audience that do appreciate our work," says Tale of Tales. "So some things can change on the inside as well… There are even hardcore gamers to whom The Path is a true revelation."

"The Path seems to be selling to some people, which shows that there are some people who are willing to throw down money on it," agrees UK journalist Kieron Gillen of the Rock Paper Shotgun blog–where staffer John Walker posted complex but ultimately mixed impressions of the game.

"In fact, I suspect at the end of all this, The Path will end up doing financially better than the average indie game which recapitulates what we've seen a thousand times before –because it's exploring a relatively fresh niche," says Gillen.

And Gillen suggests it may not be such a problem if people appreciate art games, but are unwilling to spend money on the experience–the Tate Modern in London, for example, charges ticket fees for special exhibits, but the majority of visitors to the gallery simply visit the free exhibits.

Tale of Tales says it's "quite pleased" overall with The Path's sales, even factoring in the "steep drop" within a week of the game's release. That's a normal sales pattern, but it means the pair has work yet to do in order to help the game reach more people.

"Two years from now, we will draw our conclusions," say Tale of Tales. "So far, it doesn't look like a project like The Path is commercially feasible without arts funding–at least not within the current games community."

"But we don't intend to stop at its borders. Perhaps The Path can find commercial success in a whole new audience. We'll let you know."

"Maybe when we do this a few more times, and when other artists and designers join us, the audience will get more used to these ‘divergent games' and the landscape will change accordingly."

Why "change the landscape"? Plenty of gamers just want to play Halo, and that's fine. But pushing the boundaries of traditional design is the only way video games will gain a greater cultural presence. Without titles like The Path, games risk being relegated to permanent insularity. Audiences and designers who care about games must play– and buy – these kinds of games, and accept their role in the future legitimacy of the medium. Otherwise, "games as art" will remain nothing but a tired talking point.

And they almost certainly won't be the last. Homosexuality has long been a controversial issue amongst gamers, developers, and publishers alike. With the ever-growing popularity of online games, players often bring their intolerance online, sharing it with their friends, teammates, and guilds. This tends to lead to knee-jerk reactions from the industry, with an unfortunate emphasis on the word jerk.

Consider the example of SimCopter. A designer named Jacques Servin decided of his own accord to include a bit of beefcake in Maxis' SimCity spinoff, giving birth to "himbos". "Himbos" were shirtless, Speedo-clad men with nipples as bright as runway lights. The men would gather together in large numbers on certain dates, taking the place of some of the scantily clad women originally featured in the game. Servin, himself openly gay, included the bit of secret code on a lark, figuring Maxis would find it amusing.

They did not.

The Easter Egg was discovered shortly after the game's initial release, with 78,000 copies making it out the door beforehand. Jacques was terminated, and Maxis created a patch to remove the half-dressed men, also offering a service where customers could call in to get their disks replaced. Jacques' comments at the time neatly summed up the atmosphere of the early 90's.

"I didn't do it out of anger, just kind of `Why not?' I can't quite figure out why they would be so angry. It's not a game for kids; it's for 20-year-olds. But you put gay and kids anywhere in the same sentence and people explode."

SimCopter was released in 1996. A decade later and game developers were still reacting poorly to homosexual concerns.

In 2006, Blizzard scolded a player in their popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for advertising her guild as gay and lesbian friendly, claiming she was violating the game's harassment policy. Following up on the issue the player, Sara Andrews of Tennessee was informed that her advertisements might cause other players to become abusive. Players who otherwise would have been content to sit at the auction house shopping for spell components, driven to the brink of homophobic madness by the mere mention of gays and lesbians.

After spending several years playing World of Warcraft, one could sort of see their point...but that point is beside the point. In trying to invite others to a guild where they could be comfortable, this player was exposed to an extremely uncomfortable situation. A situation that sparked threats both legal and otherwise against Blizzard.

Lambda Legal, one of the nation's oldest organizations dedicated to protecting gay and lesbian rights, examined the situation and came to a conclusion that seemed sensible to everyone but Blizzard: "You can't tell gay and lesbian people that they have to be quiet so other folk won't harass them."

Blizzard eventually apologized to both Lambda Legal and Sara Andrews, calling the situation an "unfortunate mistake", explaining that their game master who dealt with the issue misinterpreted Blizzard's rules, and that "it has always been, and will remain Blizzard's policy that LGBT-friendly guilds are allowed to announce their existence, and to recruit members in the same manner as any other guilds."

The World of Warcraft incident highlights one of the key issues that developers face when dealing with the subject of homosexuality. It generally isn't the reactions of the developers and publishers themselves that cause problems. It's their perception of how the players will react that results in them making unwise decisions.

Case in point, Microsoft's handling of a situation last year involving an Xbox Live gamertag. A gamer going by the handle "theGAYERgamer" was surprised to find his gamertag banned from the service, with Microsoft requesting that he change it before playing games over Xbox Live. According to reports, the company had received complaints that the name contained sexual innuendo and was in violation of Xbox Live policy. More recently, a lesbian gamer was banned from Xbox Live because her profile indicated a sexual preference.

Some would say that sexual preference has no place in online gaming, with Microsoft stating that a gamertag that read "theHETEROSEXUALgamer" would be treated the same way, but it isn't quite the same thing. Heterosexuality is a popular assumption. Homosexuality is considered an alternative. A straight male doesn't have to go out of his way to let women know that he is straight.

Things are looking up for Microsoft, having recently been in talks with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation regarding their Xbox Live policies. Perhaps they can come up with a better way of dealing with the homosexual lifestyle other than simply hiding it away.

This leads us directly to the recent troubles with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Following cries of discrimination following a moderator post stating that gays and lesbians did not exist in the Star Wars universe, community manager Sean Dahlberg apologized using the following excuse:

When I first built the word filter list, I added a variety of terms to the word filter that have been used numerous times in derogatory messaging.

While the SimCopter example was one of childish retribution by a developer who felt he was unfairly treated, both the World of Warcraft and Star Wars situations stemmed from employees of the respective companies that felt they were counteracting bad situations. Unfortunately, both representatives chose to attempt this by ignoring the fact that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered exist. You can't address an issue like this by sweeping it under the carpet. That just creates bumps in the carpet that someone is eventually going to trip over, getting hurt in the process, and that hurt will rest on the shoulders of the company that did the sweeping.

What makes situations like these so tragic is the fact that other companies have taken great strides towards accepting "alternative lifestyles" in the recent past. Rockstar Games allowed for same-sex kissing to occur in Bully. Many massively multiplayer games not only allow for gay and lesbian couples to get married, but issue press releases to announce the feature. BioWare itself allowed for same-sex pairings in their epic science-fiction role-playing game Mass Effect, standing strong in the face of the controversy that those gameplay elements drew from the mainstream media.

The internet is a haven for intolerance. One could say the anonymity afforded by the world wide web serves to enhance it, allowing bigots to open their mouths wider without fear of someone placing a well-deserved fist there. We cannot ignore this fact, but we also cannot ignore the large population of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered gamers. Hiding them away is not the answer. Sure, they will be subject to ridicule and strife by those less understanding among us. It's almost unavoidable. The point is, just like anyone who doesn't fit into societal norms, I'm sure they'd rather walk tall and dodge the occasional cruel barb then hide who they truly are.

Games are no stranger to schools, of course. Think back to the 80s when at least 30 minutes of every school day was given over to drowning your wagon in Oregon Trail in the name of History class, or letting your SimCity fall to ruin through crime and tornadoes on behalf of Social Studies. From the first school-sanctioned games like these to the full-blown edutainment of today, it's safe to say educators are aware of the learning potential in video games.

But taking a step further and actually developing a curriculum around the Nintendo DS takes innovation – and money. After all, there's only so far math drills can really take you whether you're on a PC or DS and money for education systems still doesn't grow on trees.

Leading the charge toward a Nintenducation in the UK is Scotland. Their Centre for Games and Learning (aka The Consolarium) is an extension of the Scottish Government Schools Directorate that presents teachers and education administrators with ideas for implementing all kinds of gaming consoles into schools.

Derek Robertson, National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning and administrator of the Consolarium, says that the use of the DS in schools is now commonplace, compared to when he first introduced the consoles to schools in 2006. "Initially I purchased 30 [Nintendo DS consoles] and carried out my first Dr. Kawashima [aka Brain Age] trial. The extended trial saw us handing out over 450 consoles to support our project."

The Consolarium encourages schools to the use the DS for more than just math drills and brain training puzzles. "We suggest that schools follow [the Brain Age] methodology although they are free to trial other approaches," said Robertson. "Our main approach is not to prescribe a series of lesson plans but to suggest how the game, be it Nintendogs or Hotel Dusk, can be used as the contextual hub about which learning in a variety of curricular links can grow from."

Translation: students get to play Hotel Dusk. In class.

This application of the DS to schools marks a paradigm shift in the relationship between games and education. In the old days (by which I mean the 80s and early 90s), Oregon Trail and SimCity were phased out in favor of more learning-specific software like Math Blaster. There's nothing wrong with dressing up multiplication tables in interactive software, of course. But it did limit learning opportunities to whatever the game was programmed to do and it put teachers in a hands-off role.

With games like Nintendogs, teachers get to be creative, designing lesson plans around what happens in the game. For example, teachers in two Scottish schools used the virtual pet sim back in 2008 as a way to tempt kids into reading up on the first dog in space. Students also wrote stories about their Nintendog and competed with their classmates in the in-game competitions for real life prizes from the teacher. This year, another Scottish teacher has used the Nintendogs initiative to launch an art project where students tried to use what they saw in the game to influence the dogs that they drew or painted in real life.

Although the success of these programs is hard to measure (aside from teacher, parent and student testimony), something clearly seems to be working for Nintenducation. Robertson said Scottish schools are starting to shell out for their own consoles because they've seen results from the Consolarium's initiative. One school even received a donation offer within the last two months for 2500 DS consoles.

Meanwhile, in England, the Consolarium's ideas are starting to catch on. Dawn Hollybone is a teacher at Oakdale Junior School in London where students aged 7-11 are getting their hands on both Brain Age and Professor Layton to further their education.

"We use the consoles for 20 minutes a day," she said. "Each year group has a session timetable per day and then I ask that they use it at least three times a week. The use of these is planned into each individual lesson, [so if it's] part of a maths session, then it may be used as a mental starter to warm up… or as part of a Literacy lesson, the class may use the reading aloud programme or syllable counter."

Additionally, Hollybone also uses PictoChat as a way to bulk up writing exercises by having students write to one another and collaborate on projects.

"In this way they are not merely 'just' playing the games they are used as a way into a lesson or as a plenary," Hollybone said.

It all looks incredibly awesome (or maybe we're blinded by jealousy); but there are some concerns that critics have raised over DS usage in schools. There's the obvious "games don't teach kids" arguments we're used to hearing from the Oregon Trail days; but there's also a valid concern about the cost of putting a DS in the hands of every school child. Not all school systems are as small Scotland's or Japan's – and here in the US, the cost of public education through taxes barely covers school lunches, never mind a $100+ console plus $30 games.

"I suppose costs are a barrier but if that's all we have to worry about, then great," said Robertson. He said he's more concerned about getting the message out to critics of the methodology itself that games are good learning tools, not some subversive pop culture enemy. "There is still a worry over the media's general propensity to perpetuate the moral panic argument or for the impact to be lost in an intellectual debate, but I feel as though we have managed to change attitudes… and are helping to change attitudes beyond our [borders]."

Japan seems to have their back at least — in Kyoto Prefecture (Nintendo's home base), Nintenducation is still going strong in Yawata City after being introduced about three years ago. Last month in neighboring Osaka Prefecture, there were reports that the Osaka Board of Education approved a measure that would allow 10 middle and elementary schools in the area to incorporate the DS into the classroom experience.

So what can we expect for the US schools? Nintendo couldn't be reached for comment on this feature, but we did get in touch a middle school history teach and a DS-fluent parent to get their take.

Caitlin Ferguson is a 9th Grade Geography teacher at Port of Los Angeles High School in California. She herself doesn't own a DS, but having seen it in the hands of some of her friends, she's vaguely aware of its educational potential. But in a school system where High School students already have regular access to computers, she thinks a Nintendo DS might be overkill.

"They're lackadaisical as it is," she said. "If they're getting the work done… I could see using it as an enrichment tool, rather than a curriculum tool." An example of that would be letting students play Brain Age only after they'd completed their regular math assignment – instead of before.

Ferguson did acknowledge that teachers could take Nintenducation a step further if the school passed out DS consoles to students. For example, she suggested that a Life Skills class could assign students an exercise where they compare Cooking Mama recipes with real-life cooking recipes and pick out all the differences.

Ultimately, though, Ferguson's concern about putting the DS in schools is that it will be a barrier between teacher and student. "There's so much interaction [that happens] between teacher and student," she said. "It can't be replaced by a DS. Neither can the work."

Ferguson's concerns about the line between work and play are echoed by parent Julia Temple. Her son is in 3rd grade at St. Paul's Episcopal School in California and for the money she pays, she doesn't want him playing games instead of traditional learning.

"I wouldn't be happy if they gave [students] DSs at school," Temple said. "I could see that maybe it would engage children… it could make for a positive experience." But to her, the DS is a toy used for having fun, not for learning; she thinks the time a student spends gaming would be better spent with a book.

Temple said she was alright with students learning on computers, though, because she sees them as a part of everyday life that students have to learn eventually. "The DS is very limited," she said. "You can do more on a computer."

But, like the critics, Temple's biggest concern is cost: "Ultimately, I don't think they should have DSs in school because we have so many other things we could be spending money on."

We may not see Nintenducation in the US anytime soon because of the economy. But if Japan and the United Kingdom show consistent promise with their DS programs, it may be only a matter of money and not of principle that keeps the consoles out of school. Like they say, knowledge is power - and like Nintendo used to tell us back in the 80s: "Now you're playing with power."

He was toiling away in a Montreal game studio Artificial Mind and Movement, one of many working on some movie-based game. The game he'd been working on it in his own time was up for two awards at the Independent Games Festival at GDC. That game was Fez.

The game stars 2D fez-hat-wearing Gomez on an adventure on a 3D platform world. The pixelated title looks like something you could have played as a kid, but didn't — you poor bastard. Blame the M.C. Escher-esque level design and a 2D-3D platform perspective shift.

"I'm pretty sure Fez could have been made on a SNES without the 3D graphics," says Fish. "The world rotation thing could have totally been faked by having 4 parallel 2D levels that you 'rotate'. The gameplay here really doesn't depend on the modern tech." What it does depend on is some fancy programming from lead programmer Renaud Bédard.

It's an ambitious game, and an easy one to possibly screw up, Fish points out. "We've spent a lot of time working on tools, and figuring out tons of little technical and gameplay details." All this had to be worked out before making the game, and the tech that powered the game needed to be built from scratch. "Making a 2d/3d game is hard," says Fish. "I have to design and draw everything 4 times, basically."

The son of art school dropouts, Fish had art in this blood. That, and gaming. When he was four, his parents got a Nintendo Entertainment System.

"I remember playing Zelda for a good 3 years straight," says Fish. "At that point it was already clear that its what i wanted to do for a living." (No, not play Zelda.)

His parents encouraged his interest in gaming with his father translating The Legend of Zelda into French so the Quebec born and bred Fish could follow the game, while his mom got "scary good" at Tetris.

"Did you know Tetris ends at some point?," Fish asks. "I saw my mom beat Tetris once. There's a shot of the kremlin or whatever and little penguins parading in front of it."

It's upon the backs of these games, or rather, the memories of these games, that Fez owes its existence to. Fish calls the game "a love letter to an alternate past childhood." With Super Paper Mario comparisons abound, the main 2D-3D stage shifting concept was gestated long before the Nintendo released its platform — a game that Fish isn't impressed with.

Before Fez, Fish was doing art for project with an indie from Toronto named Shawn McGrath. Things fell apart, there was a disagreement and they both went their separate ways. "So the basic 2d/3d idea was Shawn's," Fish concedes. "But the look and feel of the game, that's all Miyamoto and Miyazaki."

The game wasn't finished, but a buzz was building. The game's trailer appeared in October 2007, which was the first time that producer Jason DeGroot saw more than shaky cell phone cam footage of the game.

"Right then I knew that I had to be more involved in things," he says. DeGroot, a fellow Canadian, was living in Japan at the time and had only known Fish since meeting him at an E3 party the year before. DeGroot, who's been making tracks GameBoy Camera after it came out in1998, is also responsible for Fez's hypnotic score.

Those IGF nominations didn't hurt. "I pleaded with my boss to let me go to GDC — not even send me there, like they were doing for so many other employees, but just let me go," Fish recalls. "They wouldn't give me clearance to leave." IGF Fez awards or not, Phil Fish, you are not going anywhere. "So I had to quit right there and then," he says. "That's when I became indie. It felt good."

The next month, Fez picked up up the Excellence In Visual Art award. That felt better. Ditto for the praise colleagues gave the title. "Fez twisted my brain a little when I played it," says World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel, "and that's one of my favorite feelings in games."

A month before GDC 2008, the relatively unknown Montreal-raised Phil Fish, who had been kicking around the Canadian indie scene since the middle of the decade as Philippe Poisson, was suddenly on everyone's radar, giving speeches, talking to press. Mr. Big Shot. Every major publisher was trying to get a piece of him, and with Fez hype train leaving the station, Fish felt like he was doing something right. Next thing he knew, he had a government loan, a new start-up called Polytron Corporation and a full-time job working on Fez. Still indie, but no longer unemployed.

Not bad for someone fired from Ubisoft, who still calls his experience at the publisher "the worst experience of my life." It was his first gig in games, and initially he was jazzed.

"The way these people make games, it's so horrible," he says. "Hundred of people on your team, you don't know any of their names. It's so big and impersonal." Some people find ways to persevere, to grow in that environment, Fish adds — like weeds pushing up through cracks in concrete.

"In my case it made me want to give up games altogether," he continues. "It was an extremely dark period of my life. Years and years thinking this was my dream only to realize it's a sweatshop."

Gaming was changing, the way games were being made was changing and with the rise of the video game blogs, the way gaming was covered was changing, too. Everything was in flux. Indie developers were saying "Screw the corporate ladder" and going off and making their own games — devs like Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Young developers, like Everyday Shooter's Jonathan Mak, weren't even climbing that ladder.

Even with Fez slated for mainstream consumption, Fish and his three person strong (DeGroot, Bédard and, well, Fish.) Polytron Corporation still wear their indie badge on their sleeves for as long as they can. No corporate office suits here — Polytron Corporations sits in a big open room in a small converted studio apartment. "Incidentally, we're located right across the street from Ubisoft," says Fish. "Or is it Ubisoft thats right across the street from Polytron?" All depends on how you look at it.

The most unpopular President in America's history has taken the White House, leading to heretofore unseen levels of civil unrest. On the island of Ibis, experiments with Third Energy technology have brought bloodthirsty long-extinct reptiles forward through time. The Allied Nation Task Force has invaded North Korea after a ruthless general with a cache of nuclear weapons at his disposal took over the country, and an untrained member of an elite military taskforce prepares to enter an offshore clean-up facility on a mission to rescue some very important hostages.

This isn't a 2009 one would find plastered across CNN or debated on Fox News. None of these events have happened or will happen, but to some of us they're even more familiar than reality. This is the 2009 that countless gamers have experienced on their computers or via their consoles since 1987 – more than twenty years worth of 2009.

The Real Year So Far...
2009 is already shaping up to be an eventful year in real-world history. The first black president in American history has taken office. The global economy is in a shambles. Violence continues to plague the Middle East. Satellites are colliding in space; a massive earthquake has ravaged parts of Italy; and real-life Somali pirates are running rampant.

Though the world may seem like an increasingly dark and dangerous place, it could be a great deal worse. Just take a look at some of the major events that have occurred in video games set in 2009.

Light Years Ahead
Writing games based in the future is very much like throwing darts. The closer you get to what you're aiming at, the more accurate you become. A game based in the year 2009 written in 1987 is bound to offer a much wilder interpretation of what the world looks like than one written in the year 2000. It's a phenomenon we like to refer to as the reality curve, readily demonstrated in the games that portrayed 2009 as an age of highly advanced technology.

	Mega Man (Capcom 1987 - Nintendo Entertainment System): Mega Man fans will argue back and forth for hours concerning the actual dates in which the various games in the series take place, but we've decided to take a far simpler approach. With the first three games taking place in the year 200X, it's pretty safe to assume that at some point this year in the video game universe, Dr. Wily has unleashed another army of evil themed robots, each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses for the titular blue bomber to exploit, such as "Allergic To Squirrels Man" and "Shoot Me Right Here Man".
	Dino Crisis (Capcom1999 - PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, PC): Renowned scientist Doctor Edward Kirk, thought dead for years, turns up alive on the island of Ibis, where his experiments with Third Energy technology have resulted in a rift in time and space, which allows vicious dinosaurs to invade. This is exactly what happens every time a scientist pokes about with time. You'd think they would have learned this by now.
	Incoming (Interplay 1998 - PC, Dreamcast): In 2008, aliens attack our lunar base. By June of 2009, we're prepared to strike back. A rather straightforward vehicle shooter from Rage Software, Incoming presents a rather optimistic view on how the people of the world would react to alien invasion. In reality we'd need to form several committees and commissions to investigate the nature of the threat and countries would argue over who got the first shot at the invaders. Eventually the whole situation would be resolved by Naval snipers.
	Abuse (EA, Bungie, Red Hat 1996 - PC): In this 2D shooter, protagonist Nick Vrenna becomes falsely imprisoned in a facility where scientists are experimenting with a nanotech virus called "Abuse". A riot occurs, turning the prisoners into monsters, but luckily our hero is immune. Fancy the only man immune to a terrible virus winding up at the same prison where the virus is accidentally released. What are the odds?

Years Of War
War never changes. If this is true, why bother setting a game with a war setting in the near future? For some titles it's a simple matter of keeping up with a pre-established chronic logical order. By the time Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was released in 2001, the previous title in the series had already established events up to 2005, so 2007 and 2009 were used to advance the story.

Another reason to give a military-themed story time to breathe is to distance it from current world events. The first nine years of the 21st century have seen more than their fare share of major terrorist acts and armed conflicts. Setting a game even a few years in the future, as was the case with Rainbow Six: Lockdown, adds a much-needed air of fiction to the proceedings.

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (LucasArts. 2005 - PS2, Xbox): Mercenaries takes place in an alternate North Korea, after the ruthless General Choi Song leads a successful coup against his father President Choi Kim in order to keep the country from reuniting with South Korea. The revelation that Song is stockpiling nuclear weapons causes the Allied Nations Task Force to step in and topple his regime, only to have Song himself escape with the launch codes for missiles currently under production in secret locations. The player takes the role of a mercenary, tasked with tracking down Song and his secret underground army before the weapons are ready to launch.

Mercenaries effectively uses the four year time jump along with the change of location to help distance events in the game from events in Iraq and Afghanistan that influenced the development, though certain similarities still shine through, such as the use of the "Deck of 52" to keep track of Song's henchmen. Major movers and shakers in Song's organization are represented by face cards from a deck of cards, much like the system Coalition forces used in Iraq while tracking down members of Saddam Hussein's government. You can hardly blame them - the concept has major motion picture written all over it.

Army of Two (EA, 2008 - Xbox 360, PS3, PC) : The story in EA's Army of Two actually spans sixteen years, from 1983 to 2009. Over the course of the game the pair slowly uncover a plot to privatize the military, leading to a final confrontation in Florida between the mercenaries Elliot Salem and Tyson Rios and their commander at the Security and Strategy Corporation headquarters.

Rainbow Six: Lockdown (Ubisoft, 2005 - PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, PC): The anti-terrorism theme has been quite the popular one this decade, for obvious reasons. Rainbow Six: Lockdown is an excellent example of how a game uses a near future setting to sidestep association with current events. In the year 2009, counter-terrorism unit Rainbow must stop the Global Liberation front from unleashing a man-made nanotech virus called "Legion", which has a mortality rate of "Yes". Team Rainbow triumphs in the end, once again keeping the world safe for squad-based shooter players around the globe.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Konami, 2001 - PS2): Chronologically the fifth game in the wildly popular Metal gear series, Sons of Liberty actually begins in 2007 with Solid Snake, only to jump to 2009, putting players in control of the wet-behind-the-ears Raiden as he takes on a mission to rescue the president and other hostages from the Big Shell cleanup facility. Raiden eventually learns a great deal about himself, the shadowy Patriots, and how to get around a gigantic enemy fortress while covering his private parts, eventually foiling a terrorist plot to take over New York City.

The time jump in Sons of Liberty's instance, was the combined result of established continuity and series creator Hideo Kojima's diabolical plan to replace Solid Snake with a naked blond man.

Shattered Union (2K Games, 2005 - PC, Xbox): 2009 is just the beginning for Shattered Union, a turn-based tactical game from PopTop Software that based a "What if?" scenario on the oft-challenged results from the 200 and 2004 presidential elections. What if the wrong man for the job had been elected? David Jefferson Adams is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States at the beginning of the game. This leads to a large amount of civil unrest and, eventually, domestic terrorism. The assassination of the president via low-yield tactical nuclear weapon after his second term begins in 2013 leads to the second American Civil War, which the Europeans and Russians can't help but get involved in. You know how those Europeans are, always interfering with international affairs they have no business in.

An Eerie Year
Unexplained supernatural phenomenon has always been a cornerstone of fiction, and interactive fiction is no different. So pervasive are tales of ghosts and spirits in our society that the theme can be transplanted into any setting, from a Victorian-era vampire tale to monstrous aberrations in the depths of space.

Despite having the entirety of human history and beyond to choose from, many game developers choose to set their scary stories in the near future or present day. Why? It's a simple matter of familiarity. It's much easier to stir strong emotions or present a believable setting for supernatural goings on when the player is somewhat familiar with the world in which the events take place. Even better, setting a horror or suspense story a few years in the future allows the developer to intersperse the unfamiliar with the familiar, adding to the player's unease almost imperceptibly without taking them out of the experience.

Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009 - PS3, Xbox 360): Capcom has done an excellent job thus far of keeping their Resident Evil series up to date with reality, hence Resident Evil 5 being the only title in the timeline actually released in 2009. This almost means that it's one of the more realistic games set in 2009, despite the bio-terrorism angle.

The current day temporal settings along with the remote locations games in the Resident Evil series traditionally take place in add a certain sense of realism to the survival horror franchise. On one hand, the events depicted in the game could almost certainly never happen. On the other hand, if they did happen, would we know?

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (Atlus, 2006 - PS2): In a modern Japanese city, a group of high school children do battle in the space between one day and the next in order to prevent the end of the world. The player plays the role of the nameless protagonist, returning to the city after 10 years and joining the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad, a group consisting of teens that remain conscious during the Dark Hour, a secret time between days infested with shadowy creatures.

For North American players, Persona 3 was a role-playing game mixed with a quirky time-management school activities. For Japanese players who could better relate to the school structure presented in the game it was something a bit more personal, heightened by the near-future setting.

Left 4 Dead (Valve - PC, Xbox 360): Does Left 4 Dead take place in 2009? The writing is on the wall, literally. Scribblings on the walls in certain levels give us our only hint to the purposefully story-light setting of Valve's co-operative survival horror masterpiece. All we know is that somewhere in Pennsylvania something terrible happened, the dead walk the Earth, and you've got to make your way to safety. The date in this case is almost inconsequential. Instead of blasting us with heaps of story based in October, 2009, Valve has left it completely up to the player to decide what events led to their predicament, which should make October of this year quite interesting for fans of the game.

Indigo Prophecy (Atari, 2005 - Xbox, PC, PS2): Indigo Prophecy begins in January of 2009, where a series of grisly murders is being perpetrated by citizens seemingly possessed, driven to mercilessly slaughter innocent strangers. What begins as a crime drama quickly becomes a supernatural thriller, culminating in a series of events that will change the face of the world forever.

The Year In Review
Over the course of twelve months, the end of the world has been narrowly averted on five separate occasions; six major threats to the Earth's security have been neutralized; and the United States has been set on a course that will eventually lead to a new Civil War. On top of all of that, Dr. Wily's evil robots have spent the better part of the year raining down specifically-themed destruction.

Technological advances have served us well in the defense of the planet against evil robots and invaders from outer space. Unfortunately, at the same time they've also resulted in the creation at least three different deadly viruses, several different flavors of robotic war machines, and the temporal displacement of flesh-hungry dinosaurs. Technology also could have been the cause of the zombie uprising in Pennsylvania, though no reporter dare get close enough to investigate, even if they have covered wars, you know.

The worst thing about all of these tragic circumstances? For the most part each one is the result of some sort of human failing. Greed, over ambition, lust for power, scientific irresponsibility - we brought all of this on ourselves. The only possible exception is the alien attack, but knowing humans we probably did something to tick them off in the first place. It's what comes from being the top of the food chain (not counting aliens and dinosaurs). With no natural enemies, we have to create them ourselves.

As Years Go By
While 2009 was certainly an eventful year in video game chronology, we have to keep in mind that this is just one period of 12 months in a period that spans the whole of human history and far into the future. Just last year a plumber from the Mushroom Kingdom and his friends faced off against a group of anthropomorphic animals on Sonic and Mario at the 2008 Winter Olympics, and next year the fragile peace between the fictional nations of Osea and Yuktobania erodes in Ace Combat 5. Not to mention more killer robots.

Imagine the same sort of timeline as above, only covering the entire history of video games taking place or involving both real and alternate versions of the planet Earth. How many wars have been fought, invasions repelled, epidemics prevented, mysteries solved, and conspiracies uncovered? Creating such a timeline would be a truly massive undertaking, but one that would grant us tremendous insight into what the sort of shape the world would be in if the entertaining diversions we've enjoyed over the years had basis in fact.

For now we leave such ambitious projects for more idle hands, drawing what conclusions we can from the data we have before us. The conclusion? 2009 was not a good year to be a video game character.

All kinds of things.

See, games do history a little differently. Other mediums, such as film, books and even comics, are re-telling a story. They add drama and embellish the facts to varying degree (see: Braveheart), yes, but in essence, they're historical, as they're re-counting actual events.

Games, though, are interactive. You're not being told a story. You're the one telling it, acting it out. Every man you kill, every city you conquer and every nation you destroy isn't a case of retreading history. It's rewriting it.

Which, in many ways, is exciting! It's a blast seeing Babylon become an atomic power in Civilization, or to see Sweden become a global superpower in a game of Total War. But in many ways, it's also a challenge for developers. How do they balance the need for some degree of historical accuracy with the need to create an entertaining video game?

Some don't. There are developers – and these can often be found creating games in which action is the primary focus – who use historical events as a bullet point on the back of the box. The glut of Second World War games over the past decade are probably the best example, using the 20th century's most brutal conflict as nothing more than window dressing for a fast-twitch action experience.

Which is disappointing. Like any other medium telling a historical tale, there is always a danger that the audience, presented with a product that is claiming to be "historical", takes the action at face value, which can colour and distort their impressions of a particular period or sequence of events.

"There is potentially great hazard in attempting to reduce the nature of conflict to a simple matter of button-bashing" says Dr Cliff Williamson. Cliff is the senior lecturer in Modern British and American history at Bath Spa University, nestled in (and named after the key attraction of) the ancient Roman city.

Cliff is also, handily, a keen gamer.

"The most serious issue for me is the separation of the protagonists from the nature of the regime they represent", he says. In reducing history's protagonists to characters and factions, Nazis are reduced to targets, crusaders to a selectable faction. You don't, for example, perform missions in Company of Heroes rounding up a town's Jewish population. You just do the "fun" stuff.

But while some games do a poor job, there are many others that do not. And the ones that get it "right", in Dr. Williamson's opinion, may surprise you. Because while open-ended games like Civilization – which let you completely rewrite the history books – may seem the least historically responsible, in many ways, they can be not only incredibly historical, but educational as well.

How? It's all in their structure. Their building blocks. Civilization, for example, may sound ridiculous by allowing you to convert Britain to Islam and build a fleet of Zulu fighter bombers, but scratch the surface and the game design that got you to that stage in the first place has been teaching you some very important lessons about history.

"I think that the games like Civilisation and Total War series are less of a problem to historians", Dr. Williamson believes, "as they do offer an insight into the forces that shape history via technology trees and an appreciation of the subtleties of diplomacy".

So while you may not be learning the true history of Britain's religions over the millennia, you're learning something potentially even more valuable: an understanding of the dynamics of history; of the forces that have shaped, and will continue to shape, human society.

While Dr. Williamson mentions Civilization and Total War, other similar games that instruct you in the "dynamics of change" are Pirates!, Colonization (yes, there's a Sid Meier theme here), Paradox Interactive's strategy titles (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis & Victoria) the Age of Empires series and Railroad Tycoon.

That's a historian's take on matters, then, but how do the developers of probably the year's biggest "historical" game feel about portraying history in their games? And how do they reconcile the need for accuracy with the need to make a game fun?

"Whilst we pride ourselves on historical accuracy in our games, we only take it as far as it's entertaining." Says Kieran Brigden, from Total War developers The Creative Assembly. "We could, for instance, represent the coffee or spice trade more fully in Empire, but we chose to keep it included but not as a full market system. "

Why? "Because although it would have been more accurate, it wouldn't have been as fun for the majority of players."

This challenge of balancing history with fun when developing a historical game is hard enough. But then, developers making history games are often faced with an even tougher challenge: balancing their own take on history.

The field isn't science. Outside of simple facts – there's no disputing the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, for example – much of history is subjective. How it's told depends on who is telling it.

"History is always contentious, one man's hero is another's villain", Brigden says. "Everything down to national flags can be disputed." So include one nation in a game and you could insult another. Make one nation stronger than a rival and you'll upset customers.

The Creative Assembly face this challenge the same way they do the accuracy vs fun debate: fun has to come first. "We try and treat these issues with respect, but always with an eye to entertainment as our ultimate goal", says Brigden.

Which explains why, for example, Empire: Total War only depicts a handful of the 18th century states that made up what we now know as Germany, while Dr. Williamson says that, if it were accurate, there should have been around 300. Including all of them may have been more accurate, sure, but Empire: Total War just couldn't handle that many "postage stamp principalities" clogging up the map.

So The Creative Assembly struck a balance. And that balance goes back to what Dr. Williamson says about the "dynamics of change". Yes, the final game shipped about 296 Germanic states short of 300, but in playing the game you still get a sense that Germany as we now know it was, in the time period, fragmented and surrounded by hostile states.

So as far as this "balance" goes, in the end, we're split. For every shoddy shooter set in the Second World War or Vietnam, which outside of uniforms and gun effects has done little to really deal with the people or events underpinning the game, there has been a game like Civilization, Colonization, Total War or Railroad Tycoon (a personal favourite of Dr. Williamson's) able to show us how history actually works.

But as we move forward, and games grow not only more realistic-looking but are pitched at larger and more "accessible audiences", the challenges facing developers in treating history with respect will only grow sterner. Something that, in a surprise for an industry that in many other ways is often labelled as juvenile, Dr. Williamson reckons it might just be able to handle.

"There is the potential for games to mess it up as badly as the film industry has at times, because for every Das Boot made there is a U-571 just around the corner", he says. "The tension is always there".

"But I feel that the gaming industry - with young, involved and devoted developers - is still very respectful to the need to be faithful to the past."

However uncomplicated and guileless it may seem, Ottumwa still is the Video Games Capital of the World. The honor might be 26 years old, self-bestowed, and rooted in the long-gone days of arcade gaming. But no other city has laid claim to the title. And Ottumwa hasn't abdicated it. And some think this place might be a good location, some day, for a video games hall of fame.

The Claim to Fame

Chris Hoeksema, 29, lives in Ottumwa and grew up in nearby Pella. He thinks Iowa embodies perfect video game country. "There isn't much to do in this state," he says. "There's only so much cow tipping you can do before you get bored." When he and his friends did, they headed down to a roller rink to feed quarters into its machines.

Hoeksema was only 3 years old when Ottumwa was the epicenter of no less than a pop culture earthquake. The stories of that time were sort of murky half memories, built as much on what others recall as what Hoeksema himself thinks he remembers - video games lining the streets, records being set, the governor coming to town, stuff like that. But talking with others of his generation, the memories matched up. The stories of Ottumwa were true.

Ottumwa's heyday was unique enough to Hoeksema that, at least, it shouldn't risk going another few years of being barely remembered or almost forgotten. And more than Ottumwans should remember the significance. "We thought, wouldn't it be great if we could revive the idea that Ottumwa is the Video Games Capital of the World," Hoeksema said. So he left an email message for a guy whose name he'd heard, someone who had been in Ottumwa around the time: Walter Day.

"Walter's response was just - ‘Call me.'" Hoeksema said.

If Ottumwa has any legacy in video games it is owed to the out-and-out miracle of self-promotion wrought by Day, who put an arcade there in 1981 called Twin Galaxies. Video gaming was in its nova stage as a pop culture phenomenon, and in a January 1982 cover story on the craze, Time magazine reported that 15 million was the highest mark ever achieved on Defender, the iconic side-scrolling space shooter from the first arcade boom, literally engineered to provide an average of 90 seconds of gameplay. One of Day's local players set out to beat that score and did so, racking up 24 million in front of a tremendous crowd and a media throng.

Day contacted Williams Electronics, the maker of Defender, to ask if they would certify the score as the highest ever. Williams didn't keep such records. It didn't know what the highest score was for this game. Neither did any other game maker for theirs. The only one with anything close to a comprehensive database of scores was Day himself, who had gathered as many as he could from visits to more than 100 arcades he'd made while scouting out a good location to open one.

So Day did the only thing he could think to do - he certified the score as the world record, the first one recognized by Twin Galaxies. Then he called the leading game manufacturers and recommended they refer all high score inquiries -they got dozens per day - over to him. Within minutes his arcade got an inquiry, via Midway, about a high score on Galaga. From that first query a quarter century ago to today, Twin Galaxies, of Ottumwa, Iowa, is acknowledged as the sanctioning authority for all scores, times, marks and achievements in video gaming, arcade or console.

More than just a few game companies and industry media took notice. Mainstream outlets seeking a sense-of-place location for features on the video games inevitably sent reporters to Ottumwa, thanks to Mayor Jerry Parker's shrewd proclamation of the town, on Nov. 30, 1982, as the Video Games Capital of the World. "The Dodge City of Video Games" is how a wire service put it, with world class players from all over the country, and others too, having their showdowns in Ottumwa's "Video Game Olympics." Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, joined by top Atari executives, would visit Ottumwa. Ultimately, Life magazine took a picture that became representative of America in the thrall of its first video game love: Sixteen guys, all elite players, lined up in the middle of Main Street behind six arcade cabinets and a cohort of Ottumwa High cheerleaders.

"There was not one obstacle at any point back in that time," says Day, a trim, bearded man known for singing and writing his own songs, wearing a referee shirt, and speaking in soaring "feeling bites," rather than sound bites.

The media and the public had this cultural need to get their arms around video games, and they found it in Twin Galaxies," Day said. "A bunch of phenomenology that was already in place found Ottumwa to be its lightning rod."

He's confident that can be channeled again.

"I want to get the spiritual attention of Ottumwans, and say, ‘Look what we've got here in the palm of our hands.'" Day said. "It may just be merely planting a seed. But if we can get the collective recognition by people here in Ottumwa, the movies and the tradition and the legacy and the Life magazine picture, and say, ‘Shouldn't we be doing something about this?'

"Ottumwa should be the site for the video game hall of fame."

The Case

No one has yet planted the flag for a video games hall of fame in the United States. Perhaps the closest anything might come is a "Walk of Game" begun inside the Metreon in San Francisco, almost purely as a private marketing venture. It only inducted two "classes" and fizzled out in 2006 after being largely ignored. The longest running and most notable museum exhibit on video games is Videotopia, which is a traveling exhibition with no permanent home.

Ottumwa's biggest problem, in being considered a credible home for video game history and achievement, is that the gaming culture it represents is extinct in America. Arcades are long gone - few more so than Twin Galaxies itself, which closed in 1984 partly as a victim of the infamous video game crash.

"People haven't really heard of it," said Dr. Mark J.P. Wolf of Concordia University in Wisconsin, one of the foremost historians of video gaming, who edited "The Video Game Explosion," the subject's first scholarly work. "But then again, Cooperstown, N.Y. is best known for the baseball Hall of Fame, and what was it known for before that?"

Actually, Cooperstown had less of a factual connection to its subject than Ottumwa, however obsolete, does to its. The story describing baseball's invention in Cooperstown has long since been debunked. What's important is that the idea of a Hall of Fame there was unilaterally acted on by the community's leaders, after a wealthy resident bought a relic baseball that had been found in a nearby barn.

"It's not like you have an artist's colony for video games, a place where you have a whole bunch of things developing over time," Wolf said. "Maybe the closest thing would be something like Silicon Valley, where you have most of the companies. But you'd think they'd have funded something like that by now. It's interesting that they haven't."

The answer may have as much to do with self-interest, corporate rivalries, or the instinct to promote only one's brand, games and/or console. But as Cooperstown proved, just because a pastime doesn't have singular home doesn't mean one can't be found. And Wolf doesn't think Ottumwa is too farfetched, for a few reasons:

• Independence. If a hall of fame were funded principally by one company, "it's hard to believe someone like Microsoft would be unbiased about the achievements or significance of PlayStation as they would be about Xbox, and vice versa," Wolf said, "whereas Twin Galaxies is not beholden to any particular company."

• Permanence. Few brands are as prominent today as they were at the beginning of video gaming - Nintendo being about the only one. Companies have been bought, sold, folded and moved. While the Twin Galaxies arcade is closed, its record book is an institutional memory spanning all generations of games, Wolf said. "It would make sense to most of the public to have a hall of fame somehow connected to high scores."

• Location. Yes, it could actually work in Ottumwa's favor. Sure, it's about four hours from the nearest major airport (Kansas City) - so is the baseball Hall of Fame. "It's still a central location in the United States," Wolf said. It might be out-of-the-way, but it's equally so for both east and west coast tourists.

Jeff Anderson, the owner of Videotopia, the nation's leading traveling video game exhibition, doesn't reject the idea of a hall of fame in Ottumwa, but is skeptical considering the realities he's seen in more than a decade of touring his show. "I guess you could say it's a crossroads of America," Anderson said, "but at the same time, it'd be the last place I would expect a museum would really have the kind of draw you'd need."

That's speaking, of course, from the standpoint of an exhibition hall showcasing any artifacts from video game history it could get. The kind of scale one would imagine of a full service hall of fame would require "a ridiculous electric bill," for starters.

Anderson said he's heard of several abortive attempts to open video game museums and/or halls of fame, most recently in Orlando, Fla. The efforts broke down pretty quickly, largely because of the overhead - storage, maintenance, staff, utilities - people confront once they crunch the numbers. By his estimation, a full service video game museum would need to bring in at least 1,000 visitors per day, if not upwards of 2,500.

Anything in Ottumwa would have to start small, and establish some sort of position. Maybe in hopes that when larger interests inevitably explore this concept, they'd decide to back or buy into the existing one.

"Sooner or later there'd be interest in (starting one)," by a big company, Anderson surmised. "But gaming companies now don't really have a direct line to the past. Technology began at a very different place then rather than now."

If They'd Come, Would You Build It?

Earlier this month, Ottumwa's annual Home Expo sold out the 30,000 square foot exposition floor at its brand new Bridge View Center, a 95,000 square foot events hall at the bend of the Des Moines river. The culmination of more than a decade of work and planning, built with the help of $7 million in state funds, Bridge View is proof that Ottumwans get big things done.

Would the community ever put that kind of muscle behind video games?

"There probably is something there that we're not capitalizing on, and probably should," said Terry McNitt, the executive director of Ottumwa's chamber of commerce. "We do need something to brand our town. And when I look at this thing, it's there. Nobody's ever taken this sort of thing and run with it."

McNitt, like any good chamber leader in a town his size, launches whole squadrons of facts and selling points when you ask what Ottumwa's got going for it. The population, for starters, has actually grown there recently. It may be difficult in hard times to get members to ante up for the annual holiday lights celebration. But it won't last forever, and tourism definitely gets the attention of merchants, who healthily back things like bringing a statewide bicycle race back through town, because of the near-doubling of the population the event brings.

After a recent meeting with developers looking to stick a steakhouse chain in town, McNitt was told Ottumwa is a "sleeper" community - the fact it can draw 125,000 from a 70 mile radius is significant to those who write checks that start bulldozers and cement mixers.

"I think there are probably things that have been covered up that need to be brought back," McNitt said. "Gaming, it's so huge, there's so much history, and it's only going to continue to develop. I don't see it dying. If we were able to establish a hall of fame, I imagine it would do nothing but grow."

But there are a lot of dots to be connected before anyone even starts writing a business plan.

"It's definitely going to be a hard sell," said Hoeksema. The movement, if it can be called that, has as of now a visionary, and a young man very proud of his hometown, and two business development leaders interested in hearing their story, but no definitive leader yet. Whomever that is will have to answer some fundamental questions - who should be honored? Will they even show up? Will such a place have an educational mission? If so, what is it? And every step of the way, who is going to pay for all this?

For the moment, Hoeksema and Day aren't opposed to making a unilateral declaration of Ottumwa as the home of a hall of fame, much like Cooperstown did in 1935, and trying to open something, anything. Such declarative chutzpah was, after all, integral to the city's short, but bright, history with video games years ago. It may begin as a list of names on a plaque, and a console, and a computer where you can peruse the Twin Galaxies database, in one of the many open shop fronts on Ottumwa's Main Street.

Yet who knows. It might one day become the thing we all want it to be, the repository of an art form's history and the shrine to those who wrote it, and all the great games going back to the legends of the arcade, lined up in a great hall. Like wax museum gunfighters in Dodge City again. In the video games capital of the world.

[Top photo originally published in LIFE Magazine, November 1982]

• The Empire of the Sword
  The Cut Scene: Inside The Video Game Weapon Replica Business
  by Michael Fahey
• 
  
• M-Rated
  Growing Up Games: When Will Mature, Mature?
  by Leigh Alexander
• 
  
• We Are Going To Eat You
  Zombie!!! Games of the Living Dead
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  
• School of Rock
  What Guitar Hero and Rock Band Can Teach Us
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Game Epicenter
  Ten Plus Spots Gamers Should Visit In Japan
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• Color of Duty
  The Art of War
  by Owen Good
• 
  

CRITIQUE

• Spore: Life, The Universe and Montessori
  Maria Montessori: The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore
  by Brian Crecente

REVIEWS

• 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand Review: In Da Club Of Da Crystal Skull
• Watchmen: The End Is Nigh Micro-Review: The End Can't Come Soon Enough
• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon Review: Party On, Marth
• Resident Evil 5 Review: A Mutation of Fun
• Peggle XBLA Review: Extreme Fever!!!
• Puzzle Quest: Galactrix PC Review: Lost In Space
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Review: Huang In A Million
• Empire: Total War Review: A Whiff Of Grapeshot
• Resistance: Retribution Review: More Action Than Shooter
• MadWorld Review: Simple Jack
• Patapon 2 Review: A Familiar Beat

PREVIEWS

• Burn Zombie Burn!: It Is What It Sounds Like
• Dexter iPhone Does Interesting Things
• Wolfenstein Preview: Into the Veil
• Excitebots Trick Racing Preview: Excite Trucks Gets a Make Over
• Section 8 Preview: Death From Above
• Punch-Out!! Preview: Slick, Punchy Design
• Boom Blox Bash Party Preview: Slingshots Ahoy
• Terminator Salvation Preview: Please Don't Come Back
• Batman Arkham Asylum Preview: The Challenge Modes
• America's Army 3 Preview: Army of One... Plus Two

WELL PLAYED

• Realism Will Be Key to Beatles Rock Band Experience
• Clash of the Gaming Titans
• Apple's Portable Game
• Could The Future of Gaming Be Console Free?

COVER

• Spore - Designed by Michael McWhertor

Takarazuka is no stranger to adaptations; their five troupes have each put on works based on Western literature and films, Japanese mythology and even popular manga throughout the group's 96 year history. The Cosmos Troupe — newest and most experimental of the Takarazuka gang — handled the Phoenix Wright adaptation, rendering the DS esquire down to the last detail along with his colorful cast of supporting characters. Because they the adaptation with developer/publisher Capcom's blessing, they had a certain quality standard to live up to.

Clearly something clicked as Capcom and Takarazuka are continuing their collaboration for the musical Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2. Takarazuka's success in adapting a video game into a musical begs the question, then, of when we can expect to see a major-production video game musical in the United States.

The answer: We're almost there.

Below: From Les Freres Corbusier presents Dance Dance Revolution

Just a little over a year ago, Les Freres Corbusier presents Dance Dance Revolution completed a successful run at the Ohio Theater in New York City (off-Broadway, but still Broadway). The production wasn't in anyway affiliated with Konami, but because it's a comedy "loosely based on" DDR, it falls under the protection of parody law in the United States.

Even with that legal cover, Alex Timbers, Les Freres Corbusier's Artistic Director said, "It wasn't parodying Dance Dance Revolution per se. But no one was purchasing tickets because they thought it was DDR."

"I'd already done a musical based on Buck Hunter," he said, revealing his tendency to hang out in video arcades for inspiration. "I had, on a lark, written [a DDR musical] — and at that time, I'd never played it — but we did a really sort of low-budget production of it and it was really fun, it was a huge hit."

In his adaptation, Timbers invented a plot to go with the music that was taken mostly from Dance Dance Revolution Disney's Rave Remix. The story is set in a futuristic totalitarian society where dancing is illegal (think George Orwell's 1984). The "dance prophet" Moonbeam Funk arrives to shake things up for the no-fun government — and that's where the Dance Dance Revolution part comes in.

After a summer stock production, Timbers brought on professional video designers and took their vision of Dance Dance Revolution to the next level. They got a larger venue in New York and planned to stage the production in a bar where the audience could be a part of the action instead of just the spectator (and of course drink).

"It was a success in that it sold out before its first performance," said Timbers. "And the show was good. It's a little hard to quantify it in theater [where productions are expected to lose money]. But it definitely felt like it met all expectations and exceeded them."

Timbers said that for some the production was a "sweetly loving ode" to DDR, while others said they wanted to see more of the actual game in the show.

"Though," he said, "I have no idea what that show would be."

Below: From Jonathan Mann's Mario Rock Opera.

Chances are it would look something like Jonathan Mann's Mario Rock Opera. Not this crazy puppet version, mind — but the live action one-act musical staged as part of the California Institute of the Arts student showcase in 2005.

Writer-director Jonathan Mann said he'd always wanted to do a Mario musical. "The first video game memory I have is of playing Mario at a babysitter's house," he said. The nostalgia he felt for the game in college was so powerful, he found a way to sneak it into his curriculum. "I was in the writing program at Cal Arts, which is sort of this really wide-open [program]. As long as you justify what you're doing you can make whatever. It was technically my thesis project."

Mann's adaptation draws from the basic themes in most Super Mario games: princess gets kidnapped, Mario jumps on goombas, wash-rinse-repeat. Mann expands the idea of Mario as the everyman, painting him as a hero in an emotional crisis.

"He realizes he's this Sisyphean character who's done this thousands of millions of times," Mann explained. "And he has a sort of existential crisis and he becomes really depressed. And at the end of the first act he dies at the hands of Magic Koopa."

Boy, I can't tell you how many times that happened to me.

Below: The CD cover for Mario Rock Opera.

"Most of the teachers didn't totally get it," Mann laughs. "I just don't think that they understood [because they'd never played the game]. I had to frame it in this sort of Joseph Campbell [premise] to sell it to them. But everyone who saw the finished piece enjoyed it. I think they enjoyed it whether or not [they'd played the game]."

That will be the ultimate challenge of adapting video games to musicals: Can the script and the music build off of the premise the games on which they are based and still be fun for everybody to watch?

San Francisco Bay Area theater critic Sam Hurwitt thinks it's possible. As a critic who specializes in reviewing plays and musicals based off of movies and books, it's not hard for him to imagine what a video game musical adaptation would look like or how soon he'll be reviewing it.

"It's only a matter of time," Hurwitt said. "You've got tons of people who play video games going to movies, so they're making games into movies… and a lot of movies are being adapted into musicals."

There are two problems with this from Hurwitt's perspective, though: the first is that adaptations in general don't leave a lot of room for originality in musical theater.

"The thing with musicals is you'll often have the temptation to completely revamp the story to make it more musical friendly — maybe give it a happy ending or something," he explained.

The second thing Hurwitt is a little leery of is the lack of narrative in many video games: "In the case of something like Super Mario, it's not that much of a story. You can't have two and a half hours of just somebody jumping over turtles and knocking over things to get to the princess."

Clearly he hadn't seen the Mario Rock Opera.

Ironically, Hurwitt's concerns address each other. If a game has a weak or non-existent narrative, there is more room for a would-be adaptation to get creative.

Left: Another scene from the Dance Dance Revolution production.

"[Video games are] exciting and incongruous in a way that allows you a lot of latitude," Timbers said. "Doing a musical based on Toy Story, for example, you know what that's going to be. But doing a musical based on Dance Dance Revolution, that's exciting and mysterious and there's a lot of creative latitude."

Even something like Mario which follows a very clear (if basic) narrative is still a wide-open field in terms of creativity. Just look at the Mario Ice Capades show (do not look at the film bastardization adaptation).

Endless creativity in adapting video games to musicals presents its own set of challenges, though. Les Freres Corbusier presents Dance Dance Revolution hasn't caused any Konami lawsuits so far (hooray for parody law!). But if rouge theater companies start staging musicals "loosely based" on licensed properties left and right, chances are a game publisher will take exception.

It's this fear of corporate pressure that's kept Mann from completing acts two and three of his Mario Rock Opera — and from exploring Metroid or Zelda operas, which would be his ultimate dream. "If I had some help, I could do it," he said. "I got kind of burnt out doing Mario all by myself."

But even if he got funding and a troupe like Cosmos, Mann would still be afraid of Nintendo quashing the project before it even got going.

"You will not find someone that thinks that there is more of a market for this kind of thing than me," said Mann. "I put two years of my life into it. But… every once in a while someone will call me up and say, ‘Hey, Mario Opera – it's a great idea' and their first question is ‘do you have the rights?' And my answer is ‘No' and their second question is… Well, they don't have a second question."

Left: The Phoenix Wright musical's promo poster.

That doesn't mean it's impossible – but it will take time and some vetted examples of success to convince both theater people and game companies that video game musicals could, in fact, rock. Fingers crossed, Takarazuka's Phoenix Wright production will clue other publishers in to the idea that there's a market for video game musicals.

They may already have. Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to make his musicals into games; Takarazuka already has Phoenix Wright sequels in the bag; and — rumor has it — EA is shopping for theater companies to look into adapting some its licensed games to the stage. (Our contacts at EA were unable to comment on the rumor one way or the other.)

"The real test is not going to be a video game musical's fealty to the video game — although that could be interesting — the question is how entertaining is it as an evening of theater," said Hurwitt. "In order for it to work, it's great for it to appeal to the fan base of the video game… but it also has to have some sort of crossover, to play to somebody who hasn't played the game. If the video game theater audience crosses over a bit more [into musical theater]… it's only matter of time."

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2 hits Bow Hall in Hyogo, Japan on August 21 and will come to Tokyo's Akasaka ACT Theater September 5. Jonathan Mann is hard at work on getting the first act of his Mario Rock Opera animated; and although Alex Timbers doesn't have any future plans for video game adaptations (yet), his next show will feature live robots on stage. That's not too far off from a Super Robot Taisen musical, right?

Spore, Will Wright's far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It's also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright's greatest achievement isn't delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It's his ability to touch a gamer's imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

"In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms," Wright says. "You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it."

"Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that's almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model ."

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

"Her aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright's) games," said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. "Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori's work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

"To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within."

Montessori's first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

"The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy," Wright said. "Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we're going to learn about this.

"The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?"

And that's not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

"I build more interesting toys than interesting games," he said. "I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

"The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy."

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

"Play is a toy version of problem solving that we're going to encounter later in life," he said. "Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

"It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively."

An Elegant Tool
"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world" — Maria Montessori

Wright's first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

"I bring it up every now and the," he said of his Montessori education. "It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. "

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

"They're critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they've had the ability to do that from a very early age," she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realize that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

"When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics," he said. "It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

"When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out."

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

"It's about getting a player creatively engaged," he said. "Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things."

But Wright contends that Montessori isn't as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn't, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

"I pick themes, things I've been fascinated with, then it's ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?'," he said. "Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable."

Instead, Montessori's influence is more subtle.

"I don't think it's something you work into a game, I think it's inherit in the structure itself," he said. "It's in the design premise.

"It's an elegant tool. It's not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job."

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright's games failing is almost as important as winning.

"Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality," said Goodwin. "The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

"Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process."

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

"One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success," he said. "As long as it's diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game."

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

"In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and hit a creature and you fail a different way."

Wright's games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

"It's the failure that's fun," he said.

But what you won't find in Spore is any form of direct competition with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

"Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense," Goodwin said. "The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do."

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

"Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills," Goodwin said. "So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don't see Wright with a lot of competition in his games."

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn't trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn't designed to be "dead on accurate".

"If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it's meant to show a grand arch, the story of life," her said. "The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L."

"I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There's a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren't too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective."

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

"A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity," he said. "When you give them a tool to make things that they didn't think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it."

Goodwin says Spore "amplifies the imagination."

"When I look at Spore, that's what it seemed to say to me," she said. "That it really uses the imagination.

"Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori's work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover"

They are, she said, manipulative materials that go from something concrete to the abstract.

After the game's launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

"People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve," he said. "It was really about ownership at some level."

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori's book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don't inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

"Where Montessori is very child centered," he says, "we are very gamer centered."

But modern games aren't as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

"If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear," he said. "But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player."

And it's that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori's methods.

"I'm not trying to evangelize Montessori," he said. "I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they've doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose."

Swords, axes, staves, and daggers line the walls. Racks filled with cruel-looking implements of destruction stand before giant sets of armor. Every possible surface contains metal instruments that could kill in the right hands, from butterfly knives to broadswords taller than your average man.

The video game sword replica business is a multi-million dollar industry which has grown in great leaps and bounds over the past several years. From Prince of Persia to Mortal Kombat to Halo, new weapons come to market at an astounding rate, selling out nearly as quickly as the local sellers can import them. Leading the way is replica dealer Empire Swords.

An Empty Hand Craves A Sword
The sword has long been a pivotal aspect of human culture. Much more than a weapon of war, the sword has been used to represent triumph, defiance, loyalty, betrayal, and even love. As children we took up sticks, participating in mock battles between good and evil in our backyards, given courage by broken tree branches we imagined as gleaming weapons of old. Now, in this age where our weapons are represented on screen, our hands reach for plastic controllers instead of imaginary leather-wrapped hilts, and the sensation is nowhere near as satisfying as swinging real steel.

That's where the video game weapon replica business comes in.

Up until several years ago, there really wasn't that much of a market for video game replicas. Cutlery shops carried the odd assortment of martial arts weapons along with the rare recreated movie prop, while medieval weapons dominated the collector's market, doing huge business at Renaissance Fairs and science fiction conventions.

Early video games simply didn't warrant weapon replicas, as the weapons represented in such games were too crude to carry recognizable characteristics. Swords weren't much more than straight lines, and there isn't much of a collector's market for accurately recreated straight lines. It wasn't until the late 1990s that video game weapons really began to develop distinctive a character all of their own. There was a cloud on the horizon...a cloud with a very, very large sword on his back.

An Audience With The King of Swords

It crosses my mind upon entering Empire Swords that were a group of time-displaced Vikings find this shop, the Wal-Mart wouldn't stand a chance. Then the shop's owner comes out to welcome me, and I think, "Too late, the Vikings are already here."

Perhaps he isn't a Viking, but Empire Swords' owner Scott Marlatt, with his long hair, high forehead, and steely gaze, looks every bit like he could step back through time and be perfectly comfortable living by the sword. In a way, that's what he does.

Despite his anachronistic looks, Scott was an internet pioneer in the replica sword business, back when martial arts weapons were the order of the day. He says that in 1999, his eBay store was one of the twelve largest in the world, though eBay couldn't hold his ambition for long. Soon Scott launched his first direct sales website, www.EmpireSwords.com, which soon gave way to www.KingofSwords.com. Over the past 10 years his store has been featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, the Discovery Channel, and The Learning Channel.

The Rise of the Video Game Replica

If anyone could be said to be an authority in the replica sword business, Scott is that person, and a few years ago he was there when the entire industry changed.

"Up until two, two and a half years ago, traditional sword sales were the katanas, medieval weaponry, standard military replicas and fantasy. Over the past couple of years we've gotten to where the most popular swords every day are anime, video game, and new movies."

Within the course of a few years, video game and anime replicas have become somewhere between 30-40% of Scott's business and that number is growing as quickly as new weapons can be made...and that's pretty damn quick.

The majority of unlicensed video game weapon replicas come into the country from manufacturers located in China and Pakistan. The creators obtain a reference, which often times consists of screenshots from the video game they plan on replicating, and from the point they have a prototype it takes roughly 90 days before importers in the United States get their hands on the finished product. The process goes so quickly, that sometimes the manufacturers will create weapons based on early, unfinished screenshots or concept art, resulting in weapons that don't quite match up with their in-game counterpart.

Others, like the Halo energy swords, sound great on paper but don't quite meet expectations. "We were really excited when we heard it was coming, going as far as to promote it heavily on our site, and once it came in we were like...okay, that's a toy."

Sometimes an existing product coincidentally turns out looking like a video game weapon, as is the case with the Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones Daggertail Chain Whip, seen above. It comes packaged in a box that announces it as a "Professional Chain Whip", which of course shouldn't be confused with your more amateur chain whips. It's obviously not the Daggertail, but it's certainly close enough to sell to fans.

The Master Sword - Made In Pakistan

A favorite from my own personal collection, the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda series is one of the most replicated video game weapons on the market today, with different versions crafted for different games from different companies.

This version, at least according to Empire Swords, is Link's Sword version 2. It has a stainless steel blade, a cast metal handle, and an etched pseudo-Triforce towards the base, similar enough to be recognizeable without being too close to draw a lawsuit. It's a bit wobbly, but shiny enough to see the reflection of my beard in when I attempted to take a close-up shot of the etching. It's a nice enough rendition, I suppose. Certainly closer to being a Master Sword than I am to being Link.

The only real problem I have with my Master Sword is the fact that the pommel has a big "MADE IN PAKISTAN" sticker on it, that for some reason I can never bring myself to remove. After spending countless hours throughout countless games trying to get to the point where I was in possession of this sword's virtual counterpart, and here it was in Pakistan the whole time.

Games Pushing Steel

Between the Empire Swords store and the Empire of Swords website, a wide variety of anime and video game properties are represented. You'll find two different version of Bloodrayne's arm blades, two different Halo energy swords, two different weapons from the Legacy of Kain series, and a smattering of Soul Calibur weapons, including Tira's ring blade. There's a lot to choose from, but certain properties sell better than others.

"The biggest properties? It's going to be a fight between Bleach, Legend of Zelda, and Devil May Cry", says Scott, slipping out from behind his desk to show me one of their latest offerings, the Vergil's Yamato Sword from from Caocom's Devil May Cry series. Using a Japanese PVC figure of Vergil as a reference, it's one of the better replicas I've seen, detailed down to the custom scabbard.

Of course Scott's answer might have been quite different a year and a half ago, before one gaming company put a stop to unauthorized weapon replicas using their properties.

Square Enix Deals A Mighty Blow

Before February of 2008, the Final Fantasy series dominated the video game replica industry. Ever since Cloud Strife appeared with the gigantic Buster Sword on his back in 1997's Final Fantasy VII, fans had been clamoring for recreations of the iconic weapons from the series. Over the years, the Buster Sword has been reproduced in multiple forms, from a simple and cheap giant wooden version to the masterfully crafted amalgamation blade seen in the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent's Children. "The Buster was the number one selling sword in our entire history as a company," says Marlatt.

Each new game in the series brought new iconic weapons. Seifer and Squall's gunblades from Final Fantasy IX, Tidus' giant fishhook sword from the 10th game in the series...even Sephiroth's ridiculously large katana were all recreated, selling by the truckload to rabid fans around the globe. Business was so good that shops formed solely to sell Final Fantasy recreations.

Then Square Enix decided that enough was enough, filing a lawsuit in U.S. federal court to halt the import and sale of Final Fantasy replica weapons.

The lawsuit turned the replica weapon business on its ear, with resellers like King of Swords scurrying to pull the products from their catalogs, fearing that Square Enix would target them. As hard as the resellers were hit, Scott says the fans were hit harder.

"The fanbase were the most upset when we removed the weapons for sale. They were asking why...they were mad at Square Enix." Marlatt went as far as to try to reach out to the company in order to reach some sort of agreement, but Square Enix wasn't buying what he was trying to resell. "We contacted their corporate headquarters in California and Tokyo right when this happened, and they had no interest whatsoever in producing any sort of weapon replicas."

In February 2009, Square Enix finally settled their federal lawsuit, and while resellers like Empire Swords came through unscathed, importers such as the Marietta, Georgia based TrueSwords.com were hit hard, with a substantial portion of the money awarded Square Enix in the lawsuit coming from the Atlanta-area.

Now a single Buster Sword sits behind a door in the back of Empire Swords, a reminder of the game series that changed the entire replica weapon industry.

In Before The Lock - The Final Buster Sword

Just before Square Enix dropped a legal bomb on the Final Fantasy replica weapon business, the most intricate version of Cloud Stryfe's Buster Sword hit the market. Patterned loosely after Cloud's multi-part Buster from the computer animated film Final Fantasy VII: Advent's Children, this monstrosity consists of six different pieces that can be put together to form one giant weapon.

Separately, the major pieces only loosely fit the definition of a sword - lengths of sharpened metal with grips of varying degrees of practicality at the end. Put together they actually form a rather attractive weapon, though one far too heavy to actually swing, and it's only a third of the size of the sword featured in the movie! That Cloud has some seriously strong arms.

Untapped Potential

The Square Enix lawsuit actually punctuates one of the oddest aspects of the video game weapon replica business. Despite millions of dollars being spent of relatively low-quality video game weapon recreations each year, hardly any of the products are officially sanctioned by game publishers. With the exception of non-functioning promotional weapons like the Gears of War 2 replica Lancer or the ultra-expensive World of Warcraft's Frostmourne sword commissioned by Blizzard, most game companies shy away from officially stamping their name on huge pieces of pointy steel. Why?

Well, because they're huge pieces of pointy steel. As lovely as millions of dollars worth of licensing fees may be, the potential bad publicity generated the first time a teenager accidentally stabs himself in the stomach with Link's Master Sword far outweigh the potential gain. Fending off claims that video games cause violent behavior in children is much easier when you aren't arming them.

Is The Video Game Mightier Than The Sword?

The effect that video games have had on the replica weapon business is a testament to the growing influence that gaming has on our culture. Gamers' love for their favorite franchises have transformed the replica marketplace, bringing new life and new customers to an industry that generally found inspiration in ages long passed. Just ask the King of Swords.

"Video Game & Anime sword replicas sales and production have continued to grow very rapidly over the past few years. It is quickly becoming one of the most sold and sought after series in the sword market. Who doesn't want to hold their favorite heroes weapon in their ands, even if only to quietly display it on a shelf or wall? With new games, new series, new heroes, and new weapons constantly being released, I believe we'll continue to see new generations of replicas offered in the years to come. It's the fans that keep the games "alive" and the swords that won't let them die!"

With 30 million iPhone and iPod Touch users around the world and 25,000 applications available in their online store, Apple's smartphone has suddenly become competition for the likes of gaming giants Nintendo and Sony.

While Sony's Playstation Portable has 50 million users and Nintendo's DS has 100 million, both systems have been on the market for more than four years. It took Apple only eight months to hit 30 million and that's drawn a lot of attention from game developers.

Last year, Neil Young left gaming publisher Electronic Arts after 11 years with the company to start a mobile game publisher that focuses on the iPhone.

Ngmoco has since launched five games, some free, some for sale, on the platform, Young said. As of this month, those games have been installed on about 7 million devices, he said.

"The market is super heated. The pace of adoption is going way faster than the DS," he said. "When I left Electronic Arts there were a good group of people who thought I had lost my mind, now they think I made the right decision.

"This year we are expanding our pipeline, we plan to release 15 games this year."

Most surprising to Young has been the discovery that so many hardcore gamers are drawn to the system.

"iPhone is being adopted as a handheld," he said. "It's different than the PSP and the DS. It terms of capacity, it is more powerful than the DS, and the second generation is as powerful as the PSP in terms of processing."

"It's got a multitouch screen, and can hold all of your media. It's always on, always with you, always connected to the network."

While Young says it would be easy to bring PSP and DS games over to the iPhone doing that would ultimately be a disservice to iPhone owners.

"The iPhone deserves people trying to create games for it in the way that Nintendo tries to create games for the Wii and DS," Young said.

Ngmoco's top selling paid game is Rolando, a quirky puzzle game that has you tilting the iPhone back and forth to move animated blobs through a course while trying to protect them from dangers.

The original game sold for $10 and recently received a handful of extra levels for free. Young said his company plans to release two more iterations of the game over the next year, one in late May or early June and another in November.

The quick turnaround is something that he never could have done with the DS or PSP, both because of development time and because gamers typically don't respond to sequels so quickly. But not so with the iPhone.

"I'm surprised at how quickly people are consuming software and how frequently," he said.

The end result, in this case, will be three games that total about $30 and deliver 150 levels stretched over 50 worlds. That's less expensive and bigger than a game for the DS or PSP, Young points out.

"You are getting way more value, dished out over a year," he said.

And Young says that a recently announced update for the iPhone will make the device an even better gaming platform.

The new update, announced in California earlier this month, would allow developers to sell new content for an existing game through a built-in store. It would also allow players to talk with one another while gaming and supports local multiplayer gaming through Bluetooth. Most importantly, it opens the door to let games notify a person when a friend wants to play.

Both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 have similar services.

"The new iPhone OS 3.0 is a major software release packed with incredible new features and innovations for iPhone customers and developers alike," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. " It will keep us years ahead of the competition,"

While the iPhone can stand on its own as a gaming device, Apple hasn't done much to market it as one. Aside from a few game-themed commercials, the iPhone is still touted as a phone first.

The next obvious step, it seems, would be for Apple to introduce an iPod Touch specifically aimed at gamers.

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

It's a trickier question than meets the eye. As players, it's easy to yearn for more adult content in games. Part of this is curiosity–sex is always titillating on a base level, after all, but more than that, the interactivity and apparent potential for narrative depth that video games offer prompt an interest in how human fundamentals might show up in games.

Another part of it, though, is that we're eager to see some of our video games reach a level in theme and narrative that we can consider sophisticated, that has a place in conversation among grown-ups. Sure, some games have taken a few brave steps– but while wide audiences applaud the sophistication in how sex and violence are presented in today's film and television dramas, when Mass Effect came out in May 2008, it was not permitted even a tasteful moment by most of the mainstream press, and even gamers treated it like a novelty they could distill from the rest of the game's context.

Although BioWare's Ray Muzyka hoped that Mass Effect's sex scene would help lead the way to validating games as an art form, the disconnect here is that we're equating sex with maturity. To be fair, that's not necessarily an unfit thought pairing. As long as sex remains a fundamental part of human adulthood, it will play a role in sophisticated human interaction in entertainment narratives whether in games or elsewhere.

Defining Maturity
From Lara Croft to Grand Theft Auto, though, it seems video games have tossed in a pair of boobs and called themselves mature–but that's what adolescents do, not adults. Writer and designer Erik J. Caponi of Bethesda Softworks agrees: "We think of the word 'mature' as a rating more than we think of it as a narrative goal or a certain set of subject matter," he says.

"The word really has two meanings when we apply it to media. One is 'not appropriate for children' and the other is 'exploring subject matter in a sophisticated fashion,'" Caponi explains. "Ironically, the word mature when applied to games tends to have a very childish connotation."

As he aptly puts it, "Maturity does not come from the number of f-bombs you can manage to drop, but rather from the subject matter that you choose and how you explore it."

Dangerous Themes
Writers Guild of America award-nominated designer Keith Nemitz wanted to explore more sophisticated adult subject matter in his acclaimed indie Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, a story-driven puzzle RPG that features teenage girls winning out against bullies and sinister mysteries.

But last month Nemitz came up against one of the primary obstacles to maturity in games: a reactionary audience offended by its themes. DHSGiT was pulled from casual games portal Big Fish Games due to an outcry from uncomfortable players who felt the game promoted bullying. The bigger issue around the game's takedown, however, was a late-game scene that asks the player character to protect her friend from an attempted rape by shooting the perpetrator in the head.

Fans of DHSGiT took issue with the tonal shift in what was generally a black-humored, somewhat lighter narrative up to that point, but most of the game's complainants at Big Fish had enough at the very idea of a scene that involved rape, murder and teenagers, period.

But Nemitz defends the scene's inclusion, explaining its role in the story. "It's a critical plot element," he says. "It serves two purposes: The primary purpose is to challenge the player with the true evil of rape, and to assert it is a situation where survival may require killing. The assault's realistic appearance in an otherwise fantastical narrative is meant to shock."

"Reactionaries crying out against this part of our game couldn't deal with the shock and therefore wanted to be protected from the game," he says. "My opinion."

Misperception And Risk
Bethesda's Caponi says situations like Nemitz's occur because even as the audience for games continues to expand, too many people still view them as childish. "In the current environment, there will always be a number of people who react negatively to the inclusion of sexuality or sexual themes in a game," he says. "And so long as the notion that games are exclusively for children persists in those people's minds, we can just expect that."

Video game publishing is already a high-risk proposition as it is, and conservative approaches to sexual content in games is just good business sense for publishers in the current environment. "The industry is about making money," Nemitz admits. "I'm an indie developer, but one of my goals is to earn a living. That means my products need to appeal to an audience large enough to pay the bills every month." In the end, Nemitz slightly edited the controversial scene in his game to make it much clearer to avoid misinterpretation of his intent.

But Caponi notes how comic books eventually earned their license to explore more adult themes as the perception that they're only for children began to fall away. "The public at large understood that like any art, some comics are suitable for children, and some aren't," he says.

"I think that this is happening more and more every day with games. And the more it does, the less risky telling mature stories will be, and designers will be able to explore those subjects without risking financial failure."

Still Growing
Unfortunately, a high-risk business climate and stodgy consumers aren't the only obstacles to grown-up games. It's easy to blame widespread political furore over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' hidden Hot Coffee scene or a Fox News' infamous Mass Effect "SeXbox" campaign of ignorance for the limitations placed on adult content in games– but a hard look at where games are on their evolutionary path shows that in many ways, games just aren't there yet.

Nemitz is blunt: "I think the majority of game designers aren't mature enough to make games with mature themes well," he says. "It's the difference between Uwe Boll and David Lynch. Most computer games deserve Uwe Boll to make movies of them. How many games are worthy of David Lynch?"

To be fair, games are quite young relative to other media, and the idea that games could be used to tell stories and provide more complex experiences than just twitch-jumping over pixel pits is even newer. With so much still in development, it's hard to blame games for acting like adolescents about mature content– they are adolescent, only just now beginning to learn how to express themselves.

"When you look at film, there are certain things we know we can expect from scenes. We have a sense of how graphic violence will be, we know roughly how sex will be shown," says Caponi. "In games, we haven't really established that language yet, so it's difficult to judge when you might be pushing things a bit further for effect, or when you're backing off of things to allow them to be understated."

In effect, games are just hitting puberty compared to the elegant ladies of film and the established and ageless scions of literature, who've had much longer to establish their unspoken language. "We have very little of that to go on," says Caponi. "Right now, that language is being developed. That's one of the reasons why I believe that this is a silver age for gaming. We're starting to come into our own, and there is a lot of exploration and experimentation to be done as our storytelling matures."

Why It Matters
With all of this complexity and challenge around sex and maturity in games, it's tempting to toss the issue out entirely. Why do we even need grown-up games? Can't they just be fun?

Plenty can, of course. But there's an appetite for sophistication in games as the audience that grew up stomping goombas now reaches adulthood, and yearns for games to grow with them. Part of that growth means the ability to derive emotional and intellectual sophistication from games, and sexuality can play a role.

"Sexuality can inspire any emotion, from love, to violence, to despair, to bliss, and I think that a willingness to approach it from a mature angle absolutely will help us create better stories," says Caponi. "Relationships inspire emotion, and emotion motivates both story and the player as a participant in that story."

Every player creates his or her own experience in a game, but creating relationships within the narrative can help players become more immersed and invested in the gameworld, Caponi says. Not only can complex adult storytelling enrich games, but sophisticated games have the potential to enrich storytelling as part of culture.

"One thing I am personally interested in as a narrative designer are the ways in which games are the only medium where the player can be an active participant in the relationships and narratives of a story," he says.

Possibilities For The Future
Nemitz believes that finding tactful, tasteful ways to push the limits can be a starting point for further maturation in games. "Writers and designers can readily implement mature themes without being shocking, and perhaps that is the best way to bring intellectual respect to the art of games," says Nemitz.

For an example of how this worked in the past, one can look to Old Hollywood's Production Code. It held sway over content in the movie biz from 1930 to 1968, providing moral guidelines over what was and wasn't allowed to be portrayed in films. In effect, it was censorship — editing out nude scenes, childbirth scenes and any kind of content that made "perversions" appear sympathetic, for just a few examples. It limited films, but ultimately it challenged directors to find new ways to portray maturity, and Nemitz believes that game designers now face the same challenges — and will end up benefiting from it in the same way.

"In one aspect, the old movie code may have helped to mature the art of film," he says. "Directors didn't back down on the content. They creatively worked around the code's limitations."

Whether or not audiences are ready for games to start pushing the envelope is a different matter. "We've been pounding visually gimmicky stuff into gamers for decades. Few have become hungry for enlightenment," says Nemitz. "People, especially Americans, are not ready to deal with mature content, because the system protects them from it. It is time, however, to expose them to it."

Caponi is more optimistic that audiences are "without a doubt" prepared to receive more adult content in games. "I think the audience has been ready for a long time," he says. "I look forward to the sort of stories that we'll see as developers expand their ability to tell mature stories."

Truly adult stories will need to evolve beyond a single sex scene in a game, and developers will need both resourcefulness and genuine maturity to craft nuanced, complex adult content. The adolescent years are always awkward — let's hope a healthy adulthood follows for video games.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

So what better time to take a look at zombies, their role in video games, and how games go about implementing the concept of a horde of the living dead!

If you want to get historical, zombies are, as far as we know, first mentioned on the record in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Which was written around 4000 years ago.

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

You'll also find historical precedence for zombies in medieval European texts, Haitian Voodoo lore (where the dead can be revived and bound to a master) and mythical tales from every other corner of the globe, including the rather unappealing prospect of dead Viking warriors rising from the grave to fight the living. But really, the zombies we know and love - and the zombies most commonly recycled throughout modern popular culture, including games - come from George A Romero's films Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978, pictured below).

Both movies revolve around a central, similar story: a group of survivors barricading themselves into a space to protect themselves from a horde of the walking undead, who are feasting on the living and destroying human society in an apocalyptic event. Both movies were also smash hits. They've been remade several times over, and have served as the primary source of reference on all things zombie for countless other films, novels, comic book and, yes, video games about zombies.

There are several reasons for this. On a cheap, superficial level, people love the gore. Walking corpses are messy, and they're out to eat people. Which is also messy. But it's also terrifying. The concept of a world overrun with creatures whose sole purpose is to eat you is bad enough, but when those people are your former co-workers, friends and family, it adds an extra layer of intimacy to the horror.

There's also a message. In Dawn of the Dead, the film is as much a criticism of our consumer-mad lifestyle as it was a tale of flesh-eating corpses, with the zombies portrayed as mindless vessels shambling around the one thing in life that still mattered to them beyond the grave: the mall. Indeed, the real danger in the film isn't even the zombies: it's the psychological trauma the survivors are forced to endure, along with the attacks of other violent, selfish humans.

Over all the near-countless zombie tales recorded over the past forty years, most also retain a number of core characteristics when it comes to portraying the zombies themselves, which games (for the most part) also stick to. First, they're stupid. These are corpses, after all, all they do is shamble around groaning and looking for somebody to eat.

Speaking of shambling, despite recent (and less recent, in the case of cult Italian director Lucio Fulci's works) filmmakers attempting to tell you otherwise, zombies should be slow. Simon Pegg, British comedian and Shaun of the Dead (pictured, above) actor/writer, puts this best, saying "speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting "Boo!" and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread."

Secondly, they "turn" people. The presence of the horde is already indicative of this, but zombie tales are rife with incidents where loved ones and/or trusted friends are attacked and bitten by a zombie, with the result they then later become a zombie and themselves have to be killed off.

And finally, they explore how, like in many other "apocalyptic" scenarios, humans cope with situations of extreme adversity. The survivor/survivors of a zombie story have to deal not only with limited food, supplies and communication (not to mention millions of zombies), but also lawlessness and the breakdown of human civilization as we know it.

So how, then, is this modern concept of the zombie – honed to near-perfection for four decades by writers around the world – applied to video games, both in storyline and, more importantly, game design? Let's take a look at a few notable examples – and speak with Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek – to find out.

Resident Evil

We had to start here, didn't we? It's not just the most popular zombie tale in video gaming, it's one of the most endearing across popular culture as a whole. Indeed, it's been credited by many with reviving the entire zombie genre, bringing it back into fashion during the 90's (the first game was released in 1996) in a decade when it had otherwise been relegated to b-movie schlock in other mediums.

But Resident Evil didn't just bring it back. It made a complicated (some may say convoluted) story out of it, with a corrupt and negligent corporation responsible for a series of viral outbreaks, creating a lore which not only adds to the appeal of the series for die-hard, but injects a much-needed sense of "corniness" as well. Nothing like throwing zombie dogs and Spanish midgets into a story about man-eating corpses to lighten things up.

In recent years, the series has moved away from its roots to challenge the very definition of the term "zombie". Where zombies are normally associated with the walking dead, Capcom's last two Resident Evil games have instead featured villagers infected with an alien virus. These guys are not only still "alive", but retain much of their human capabilities, such as communications skills and the ability to use weapons, tools and even vehicles.

Does this mean they're even zombies anymore? Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi certainly thinks so. "Until recently, zombies were seen as beings who couldn't run", he told us (well, almost recently...Fulci's City of the Living Dead (1980) had running zombies). "Tastes have changed a little bit, though. Now it's okay to have fast zombies. So sure, I think that enemies that communicate and use weapons can certainly be seen as zombies, maybe a different type, but zombies nonetheless".

Left 4 Dead

In many ways, Left 4 Dead takes an approach to the walking dead that can best be summed up as "different". There are zombies with "superpowers". Zombies are sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes acutely aware of you, other times completely oblivious.

Oh, and you can kill them by shooting them in the leg.

But while the game takes a creative liberty or two with the established idea of a zombie, it takes a meticulous approach to the feel of a zombie apocalypse. The game captures the bleakness of such a scenario perfectly, with dim lights, ruined cityscapes, and most poignant of all, scrawled letters to loved ones found on walls throughout the game. All are haunting examples of a society in decay.

"There have been other zombie games" says Valve's Chet Faliszek, who served as writer for Left 4 Dead, "but they always gum it up for me. They make it about evil men or evil corporations or evil… you get the idea. We wanted to have Left 4 Dead be about The Zombie Apocalypse."

"This is one reason we chose to avoid going in depth over the cause or what exactly is happening when you first start the game" he continues, explaining the game's emphasis on "realism". "We wanted to throw the players into the world of the zombie apocalypse the same way the characters were. A good test to see how you would last with complete strangers during the zombie apocalypse is to jump in a Left 4 Dead game with three strangers."

In other words, Left 4 Dead's aim isn't to portray a zombie apocalypse. It's to help you prepare for one.

Dead Rising

Not quite the mainstream name Resident Evil is, but still a fantastic title, one which we think does a better job than any other of really getting zombies "right". You play a man trapped in a mall overrun by zombies, and have to survive for three days. That's it. For those three days you'll have to make use of everything inside the mall you can get your hands on to stay alive, from umbrellas to lawn mowers, often with gory – and hilarious – results.

There's more than a touch of Dawn of the Dead present in the game's premise and setting – indeed, it attracted a lawsuit over similarities to Romero's film – and that's probably why it succeeds: because it comes closest to delivering a game that apes the feeling of dread you'd associate with a zombie apocalypse.

Example: 99% of zombie games are using zombies as a bad guy. There are a finite number of them, they come at you, you kill them. And you kill them in a confined, linear space. Meaning that the zombie has been reduced to a mere "target". It could be a zombie, it could be an alien, it could be a monster, doesn't really matter.

But Dead Rising placed you in a large shopping mall with tens of thousands of zombies. And they're all around you. Your resources are limited, and while a single zombie rarely presents itself as a threat, 100 zombies in a group does. And it's a threat that's always there. These are the kind of things a good zombie story plays upon, and sadly, Dead Rising is one of the only games to make full use of them.

At least, until Dead Rising 2 comes out, at any rate.

Above, we've touched on a few things the "major" zombie games do right, and a few things they do, well, wrong. But of those core zombie story traits we listed at the start of the piece, there's one thing zombie games seem to shy away from doing at all, and that's "turning".

If you've read Robert Kirkman's "Walking Dead" comics, Max Brook's World War Z or seen Romero's Dawn of the Dead, (or even Shaun of the Dead), you'll know that zombie stories are at their best when major characters are bitten, and transition from being one of the few remaining good guys to being one of the countless millions of bad guys.

It's so powerful because it rolls so many themes and emotions together. A main character is dead. The ranks of the enemy have grown larger. And the good guys are now faced with the hardship of "killing" someone who is, yes, an zombie, but was also once an ally or loved one. And that's all rolled into the one event.

But games don't seem to want to go there. You'll see minor examples, sure, but does Leon have to put a bullet in Ashley's head at the end of Resident Evil 4, after it's revealed she's been bitten? Or does Zoey, having been bitten by a Hunter in a round of Left 4 Dead, then rise up to take a chunk out of Bill's backside? Nope. And for a medium that's so obsessed with proving its creative chops, in providing experiences that are truly emotional, continually leaving such a powerful story element out of games seems a strange omission.

So why leave it out? Faliszek has an easy answer, saying it's for design purposes. "Early on we decided we wanted it to be about team-work and the connection you had with your team", he said. "While I love the mistrust that "turning" adds to movies, the best implementation in a non-zombie horror film being John Carpenter's The Thing, it really works against the core mechanics of the game. We wanted to keep you together as a cohesive unit always working together to escape."

And Takeuchi's thoughts? "You know, that's a good point, why don't we see that in games? I'm actually not sure myself. Is it just a coincidence...?"

No, sadly, it's not a coincidence, because it reveals a shortcoming in zombie games that even Capcom, masters of the genre, are prone to dabble in. For all their gore, and all their brain-eating potential, zombies are not a literal threat. They're slow, they're stupid, they can't open doors, they can't drive after you. Instead, their threat is a metaphorical one, something Romero understood when he filled a mall full of brain-dead shoppers and a handful of desperate humans.

The real danger wasn't necessarily in being eaten alive. It was in how you'd deal with prospect of a never-ending horde of zombies that, while mindless, were innumerable and existed for no other reason than to find you, and eat you. How you'd cope with seeing your friends and loved ones eaten, then come back and try to eat you. It was in seeing humanity for what it really was once you penetrate the thin veneer of society: a violent, selfish mob that consumes itself with greed once the zombies have eaten away at law & order.

Zombie games of the future, take note.

By themselves they may not teach you how to be a part of a bona fide rock band, but two instructors whose job it is to do so say the games have some qualities that make them a worthy adjunct to a true musical experience.

"I know there are some haters out there," said Aldo Noboa, a guitarist of 30 years and co-founder of the Paul Green School of Rock Music. "But I'm always looking for ways to inspire people to experience music. And that's not a guitar, of course, but it's very, very interesting how they set it up. I definitely see some constructive aspects."

The benefits are not directly connected to making music, an experience both games only replicate at best (although Guitar Hero: World Tour's music studio mode goes a little further with musical experimentation.) But in nuturing an appreciation for music, or breaking down performance anxiety, or just letting someone get comfortable posturing with a prop guitar, rhythm games have a legitimate place, they say.

Big Kids
Studies and claims have tied the popularity of Guitar Hero and Rock Band to actual music performance for some time. A British study says the games' popularity have inspired children there to experiment with music. There are unverifiable claims Guitar Hero is responsible for a surge in sales of real guitars. And anecdotally, most know of someone who's bought a real instrument after falling in love with the game, or, at least, has thought about it.

This hasn't translated to a legion of ADD youngsters begging for music lessons and half-serious about doing the work. Not for Noboa, anyway, whose School of Rock Music is "a bit more over the top" than typical guitar lessons. Students, typically younger ones, not only learn their instrument, but learn to perform with it in the context of a rock and roll band. But few, if any, are showing up because Guitar Hero convinced them they could do it, he says.

However, "I do have several adult students with kids in the program," Noboa said from his San Francisco office. "They play these games too, and I can say the adult students who have arrived to us, at the very least, are inspired by these games and the experiences they have with them."

On the other end of the spectrum, Power Chord Academy, which likewise teaches a music-and-performance curriculum at locations nationwide will be teaching a specific rhythm game skills camp over the summer. Part of the reason for the course, Power Chord's Dave Wood said, was to capitalize on Guitar Hero's strength as a search category, and try to offer something that would steer kids Googling that over his way. But he doesn't trivialize what the game - especially World Tour - has to offer.

Actual skills
"Tone recognition, that would be the main thing," that these games build, Wood said. Playing a familiar song, one builds a basic understanding of what key is supposed to be played next. Going further, "in [World Tour's] recording platform, you can program the notes, people can say, I want these notes to work with, and it gives a good deal of autonomy and understanding to what the person is doing."

Other actual music skills? Rhythm, obviously, and not just with the drums."You're not deciding on the pitch because you're being told what button to hit, so it is all about the rhythm," said Wood, who surmises some means of selecting pitch would be among the next developments in this genre's evolution.

And then just conquering stage fright and building stage confidence. "We attract singers who have gotten their feet wet with this and are wanting to try it out for real," Wood said. By the same token, playing with a virtual band where the music won't come to a screeching halt, no matter how poorly one plays. "You have a level of confidence with the song you're playing, knowing that the bass, drums, everything is going to stick along with the same rhythm more or less," Wood said. "You don't have to worry about the drummer literally losing the beat, because even if he does, there's still something there."

Noboa, although he speaks admiringly of what the games have accomplished, takes a little more circumspect view. "There are no fundamentals already in place from [playing] these games," he says, "other than inspiring greater general interest and curiosity." However, "these in turn do not seem to establish any pre-sets that would require retraining from old habits, etc."

But rather than brood on a "101 Dalmatians" syndrome - the fad everyone wants, but no one wants to commit to, seriously - Noboa sees it in more positively. "Say it does inspire them to go to a music store and take a look at guitars and think, hey, maybe I want to do take this a step further."