It’s a great series, made great not only by the characters and storylines, but the world itself. The bullet-point summary I just gave doesn’t do it justice. It’s a believable world filled with real, fallible people, who are caught in the middle of a war that nobody really understands and nobody really wants to be a part of.

Anyway, the whole time I’ve been reading this series, and thinking of the world that Wood and Burchielli have crafted, all I can think of is: there would be a great videogame in this.

Not a direct adaptation of the comic, mind you. The protagonist – photojournalist Matty – sees his fair share of action, but you couldn’t really make a game of it. But there’s a game somewhere in it. Amidst the rubble of Manhattan, amidst an America torn apart by its political identity crisis. A game that’s able to explore not only the literal world of DMZ, but its themes as well.

It's not just DMZ that gets me thinking like this. There are dozens, if not hundreds of top-shelf, well-written, good-looking comic book properties, many of which would make outstanding (foundations for) video games. Fables, Bone, Blame!, Planetary, Global Frequency, Deus Ex Machina, The Goon, The Walking Dead, Hellboy, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the Alan Moore variety, not the Sean Connery one), Tom Strong...the list could go on (and in your mind, comic book reader, probably is). Point being, there are plenty of great comic books out there that could be turned into great video games.

(Note that, from here on, when I'm talking comic book properties, I'm not talking Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. They're not "comic book" heroes anymore. They've moved well beyond that. They're more "pop culture" heroes. I'm mostly going to be talking about series and characters that don't have Happy Meal toys and Nickelodeon cartoon series named after them.)

Consider this: If taking some of the strengths of a comic book - the characters, the fantasy, the world, the look - and dropping them in another medium has worked for Hollywood, there's no reason it can’t work for games. Indeed, no reason it can’t work better in games, as some genres and styles of games (RPGs, adventure, episodic titles) would allow players to explore the depth and diversity of a comics universe to a degree movies could only dream of.

Let's look at Hollywood. They have to crunch years, sometimes decades worth of a comic's character and story development into a two hour movie. And yet they’re often (at least lately) able to not only make a good movie out of a comic, but also a ton of money. Four of the top-ten opening weekends of all time are for comic book movies (Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, Spider-Man & X-Men Last Stand), while a string of other series – Superman, Hellboy, Wanted, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta, Constantine, Daredevil, Catwoman, Iron Man, Hulk and Watchmen, to name just a few – have either or are about to be turned into major motion pictures in recent years.

Sure, this is partly due to the popularity of the franchises. Batman and Superman movies sell themselves. But how, then, do you account for films like Frank Miller's Sin City & 300? Both critically-acclaimed graphic novels, yes, but you can’t tell me every single one of the millions of people who saw both movies also already knew about, and owned, the comics. Yet the films were a hit. Because the comics were awesome.

So would it hurt a publisher or two to start doing the same thing with games? Swallow their pride, realise that an adaptation of an existing work can bring not only great results, but great amounts of cash money as well? I know, there’s a fascination with creating in-house IP at the moment, particularly from guys like EA and Ubisoft, but surely some of the smaller guys – who don’t have plans to turn their games into lines of action figures or cartoon shows – could take an interest in basing a game on a comic series? Especially one that, as I said before, isn't as well-known as an Iron Man or Hulk, and is thus a lot cheaper to license.

Indeed, only a handful of comic-to-adaptations spring to mind. Ubisoft’s XIII was a brave attempt at adapting Jean Van Hamme’s series, which had a unique look but failed because it was...well, a rubbish game. There have been a few Hellboy games – most recently Hellboy: The Science of Evil – but all have sucked, and none have bothered retaining either the comic’s trademark visual style or mood. And Telltale took a crack at crafting an episodic series based on Jeff Smith’s classic Bone series, before leaving it in the lurch to go make more money from Sam & Max.

Which is a shame. I mean, look at the pros involved. The vast majority of “original” IP in gaming is derivative garbage, both visually and in terms of structure. If you're a studio with a great game idea but a generic setting to drop it in, why bother spending all that time creating the year's 117th brown/grey world when you can just license a truly unique one from a good comic series? It’ll come pre-packaged with not just a world and a storyline, but a visual style and overall tone as well.

That's a big pro for a developer. It can not only help a game stand out from the crowd, but can bring an instant fanbase along with it (the notion that a gamer can also be a comic fan, and vice versa, being more common sense than radical relevation). But the pros can be just as great for a comics publisher. Games are a high profile industry, much more so than comics. A game tie-in can, from a business standpoint, help get your property some exposure.

And the creative team? I bet it's great seeing your comic brought to life on the big screen, or even in a cartoon, but comics don't create linear storylines. They create worlds. Depending on the genre, a game could allow the player to roll up their sleeves and really get the most of the universe that the comic creators have laboured over. Let them have deep discussions with minor characters, let them explore areas only mentioned in the comic storyline, etc.

Anyway, enough of the question-asking. Let's look at some examples of what I'm talking about. Or possibilities. Or wild fantasies, as I sometimes refer to them. Developers, next time you think an RTS set in a sci-fi world full of men, guns and tanks, why not think of something a little different. Like Jeff Smith's Bone universe. Scoff if you want, but the comic has factions, it has locations, it has battles - both in the main storyline and in the backstory - heck, it even has an art style to help you stand out from the crowd, its green trees and blue skies being more Sonic the Hedgehog than Supreme Commander.

Hellboy's another good example. Yeah, he's got a shitty movie out, and is about to get a second (OK, second is already out, just not out down here, my bad), but a game - any kind of game - that could capture Mike Mignola's art style from the comic in three dimensions would surely be able to sell itself. Plus, few games can match its setting. Fighting aliens in a metallic corridor is boring when you compare it to fighting a world-devouring worm in an Austrian castle. While you punch cyborg monkeys. In the face.

Murphy approaches video gaming as a sports psychologist, with 30 years of experience in that field. The American Psychological Association’s annual convention this month already discussed research showing the benefits video games deliver in learning and problem solving. Also at the convention, Murphy gave a presentation advocating for the study of competitive and cooperative behavior in gamers.

I had called him out of curiosity about my own approach to video games, whether it was shared in great numbers by others, and what that may say about the gaming community. We ended up talking more about competitive behavior and performance psychology, how it can help define gamers, and be deepened by studying them.

Video games are not treated as seriously in studies as they should be, Murphy argues. He considers that gamers’ behavior can be studied in the same context as participatory athletics, and that researchers might find that online play can deliver the same benefits. Colleagues elsewhere think that the lessons taught by online cooperation and competition could deliver similar payouts in assertion and self-esteem, and are worth a serious look.

“The gamer generation tends to be less risk averse and more willing to try things, even in the face of overfailure,” said Nicholas Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, whose Daedalus Project studies behavior in MMORPG players. “It’s not the main focus of the field, yet, but there is a little data we can extrapolate from it.”

In his presentation at the APA’s meeting, Murphy laid out the case for the study of video game behavior by sports and performance psychologists. He pointed out that video game play rivals youth sports as the social competition venue for young people. Video games also offer advantages in that lab study can capture real-time behavior and decisions in ways that studying athletes can’t. There are also extremely large populations that are easy to find (such as World of WarCraft’s 8 million gamers). Finally, it’s another way to test sports psychology’s theories in a new area of behavior.

Broadly speaking, sports psychology has identified two orientations we all have toward competition and goal-setting. “One is ego orientation: You want to beat others,” Murphy said. “The other is task orientation: I want to get better, I want to learn the skills and improve them.” It’s not an either-or proposition, even though it showed up that way in my behavior with NCAA ‘09. Among gamers, you would probably find these four types:

• High ego, high task: Extremely committed to skill development and want to be recognized as winners. Highly competitive.

• Low ego, high task: Strong team players in cooperative games and environments, and motivated to complete single-player titles.

• High ego, low task: Strong desire to be a winner, but not that invested in developing the skills necessary. In other words, rarely reads the instruction manual.

• Low ego, low task: Participates in a particular game as primarily a social activity among friends, doesn’t want to be left out.

It might surprise you that high ego, high task is the largest group among gamers, according to Murphy. All other groups were equally distributed. That, taken with Yee’s point that gamers are less risk averse, paints a more positive picture of gamers than perpetuated by cultural stereotypes, that of the antisocial loner who prefers virtual interactions in the comfort of his parents’ basement.

As a man who grew up in the analog 1980s, gaming came nowhere near the kind of legitimacy that physical athletic pursuits had for setting goals or achieving them, or certifying you as a well rounded person. But properly researched, it’s possible that it could be seen in that light.

Murphy drew this analogy: Participation on athletic teams is believed to offer lessons of leadership or problem solving elsewhere, and experiences with video games can help gamers set up structured expectations and results in real world pursuits.

“The young, college-bound population that have played lots of different types of video games, it may have caused them to develop some sort of general skill sets to figure out the lay of the land in a complex, challenging environment,” Murphy said. “Because they’ve done that in games, they’re good at seeing what is the goal, and how do you win at the game?”

The game might be one’s high school or college career. “If the game is to get a high GPA, so, how do you do that? What are the strategies? It was an eerie conversation to have,” Murphy said, for gamers seemed able to zero in on the bottom line result, on the expectation that certain choices or conditions would objectively increase one’s progression toward that goal. Clearly, that kind of refined approach can have its benefits in life after school.

It’s not the only way a game can be framed in terms of the real world. Yee’s surveys have shown a relationship between gamers and the avatars they choose — and also the roles within an MMO guild they accept. “People create avatars that idealize or express who they are, and oftentimes they choose characters whose features are exaggerated., So it has a kind of multiplication effect, your avatar has more of those traits that you want, and then some of those effects persist outside the game environment.”

For example, someone creates an avatar that is physically taller or more imposing. Studies have shown that taller persons exhibit more confidence and show more assertive negotiations. Through his research, Yee has observed some carryover to those who choose these kinds of avatars in MMOs, Yee said, less so in real life than in online relationships. Where participating in a guild, for some. might be a crutch alternative to physical interactions with friends, it can also offer new experiences.

“People will say, ‘I never thought of myself as a leader in life, and then they become a guild leader, and they got something out of that,” Yee said. But, “It’s really dependent on what a player brings to a game.”

We love, of course, when games have themes and messages, when they offer the player a choice - this equates to more complexity, we feel, this places a game on level with other media that aim to make us feel. There's an entire segment of the audience that devotes itself to finding the emotional moments in games; we write essays, post blogs and have forum discussions about Little Sisters, about holding hands with Yorda or getting rid of GLaDOS.

And many of us have even accepted, to some extent, that games are currently a little bit self-referential and insular. They often tread dangerously in the direction of comic books, which by giving comic book fans only and exactly what they wanted, ended up being of interest only to comic book fans and no one else. We see that games, as an interactive medium, have much greater potential than this.

But what happens when a game doesn't create the message from inside its fictional world, but uses a message that already exists?

What if "games as art" in the real world actually looks like something we really, really don't like?

Let's talk about Invaders!.

Anatomy of a Firestorm

By now you've heard the story - at the Games Connection Developer Conference in Leipzig, Germany, digital artist Douglas Edric Stanley presented what he calls an "art installation" - a Space Invaders mod that has players trying to fight off the destruction of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. And it's not winnable; based on the hands-on impressions by Mike McWhertor, it seems deliberately engineered to be an exercise in futility.

According to McWhertor, the exhibit - since closed down by the artist himself amid a firestorm of controversy following Kotaku's initial report - was also accompanied by video clips of American films and President George W. Bush, additional peripheral elements that let us know we had a nebulous "political message" on our hands.

McWhertor's report on Kotaku garnered over ten thousand comments fairly rapidly - Fox News, who can often be said to be on the hunt for a sensational controversy, rapidly picked up the story. Stanley says he's received death threats.

Amid all this, Stanley doesn't appear to have ever stated why he made the game; in the statement he made when he voluntarily closed his GC exhibit, even the artist admitted there was "uncomfortable ambiguity." But a day on which thousands of lives were lost in a tense political climate is a topic so broad and raw as to constitute a wound which might never wholly heal, and emotions are running high.

It doesn't, at a glance, seem like appropriate subject matter for a "game."

Is It Art?

Especially because, if there was ever a time when the "relax, it's just a game" defense was wildly inappropriate, it's now. In a case like this, many of us are so bred-in to defending games against Fox News that we reply that Stanley's work is "art" without thinking much about it - without knowing why it's art, without knowing how we feel about it or what its value is or is not.

It has "messages," people say. It's "making a statement," and that alone is a reason why it ought to exist, why someone with criticisms of American policy is justified in taking one of the most painful days of the modern American's life and making it into an arcade shooter.

It's offensive. It's upsetting. Those who are angry with Stanley have a right to be.

However, that doesn't exclude having a basic respect for his right to have an opinion - and that he found an innovative way to express himself. The artist's statement says "it was never created to merely provoke controversy for controversy's sake," and in taking responsibility for the "ambiguity" he mentioned, Stanley seems to be suggesting that he intends for those who view the piece to discuss it.

Self-expression in an attention-catching way with the aim of presenting a viewpoint with numerous possible angles of discussion. That's pretty much the definition of modern art.

What's The Point?

In fact, Stanley's work is obviously far more "art" than it is "game." The entire issue begs comparisons to Danny Ledonne's Super Colombine Massacre RPG!, an unsettling and involved title that tasks players on the most basic level with acting out the 1999 Littleton, Colorado school shooting in the role of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Ledonne told the Washington Post that his intention with the title was never to glorify the tragedy, but to "confront their actions and the consequences those actions had." Super Columbine RPG! contains several elements that suggest themes of game violence, the connection (or disconnection) between fantasy and reality, and the influence of culture on behavior.

Like Stanley's Invaders!, Ledonne and his title stopped short of providing a direct interpretation - neither artist has been especially specific about "what it means," or in instructing players on how they should interpret their work or what "message" should be taken away.

Art, by definition, is subjective and open to interpretation - that it is a collection of images and themes designed to mean something different to each person who looks at it is part of its nature. Some people were pained by Stanley's Invaders! Some people supported the messages they thought they saw inside. Still others became angry, and in the resulting discussions surfaced many questions along the lines of, "what is the purpose of this game? Why did he make this? What's the point?"

"Contrary to previous reports, I am an American, and it saddens me that we as a people remain so profoundly unable to process this event outside of some obscure, but tacitly understood, criteria of purely anesthetized artistic representation," says Stanley in his statement - by taking issue with so-called "pure anesthesia," he seems to suggest he intends for people to use his game to confront and "process" the events of September 11th in a new way.

Some would say he's been successful in his aim - it's a new way, all right, and it's not "anesthetized." Others will disagree - but the fact that there's no right answer, no pass or fail, no win or lose, is the strongest argument yet as to why Invaders! is art.

The more interesting question, however: Is it a game?

Well, Is It?

It can be argued that a game that's impossible to win - that has no achievable objective whatsoever - is not a game at all. Remove the "art" aspect and pretend we're talking about an image-neutral Space Invaders mod that was designed so that defeat is an inevitability. It defies the logic innate to game design, doesn't it?

Games need rules and they need an achievable objective. It helps if there are rewards and penalties, and information that helps players learn how to interpret and interact with the game environment. Even if the "rule" is something simple as "player needs to go from point A to point B," there is a task, a start point, an end point and a result, even if there's not an end game.

Invaders! isn't a "game with a message." The tasks the creator intends players to undertake have nothing to do with what's on the screen. The real "gameplay" takes place away from the exhibit, in the arena of private thought and public discussion. Ultimately, it has little to do with the game itself at all.

It's a tough call to even call it "games as art" — Okami's brushed-glorious landscape, Braid's radiant, strange skies, BioShock's meticulous Art Deco are "games as art." This is more like "art as game."

Still, semantics aside, Invaders! actually accomplishes everything we've constantly asked games to achieve - it draws mainstream attention. It provokes thought and discussion. It deals with a real-world issue. It's open to interpretation. It's independently-created art.

And it stings, doesn't it, to see our hopes for the medium twisted into such an uncomfortable, painful shape. But let's not let the pain force us to dismiss it. This is an achievement.

And in a way, by embracing Invaders!, we use it in the way the artist intended - we take away from it what we choose. Because there's no way to win Stanley's game - except to take away only the valuable lessons on games, art and ourselves as players.

Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, freelances and reviews often for a variety of outlets including Variety and Paste, and maintains her gaming blog,Sexy Videogameland. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.

There’s always a ‘but.’ The thing that struck me most about Anne Allison’s otherwise interesting essay was for me –- a “gamer” and someone who writes about games –- was that she clearly had little experience with games themselves. As it turned out, she was apparently inspired to look into the Pokémon phenomenon after her children started playing; beyond purchasing and observing, she herself had no experience with gaming. My criticisms weren’t aimed at her thinking or writing or research, per se – no, my quibble was with nit-picky details that didn’t quite ring true.

On the Inside Looking Out

One of the fascinating bits of being an academic is that we can attain “expert” status while being “outsiders.” For some of us, our outsider status is almost a given. It’s impossible for me to be an “insider” when writing about the late nineteenth century or the 1930s or even the 1980s. And really, that’s OK. Generations of social scientists and academics in the humanities have built careers and a sizeable body of work and solid conclusions while being outsiders. The dissonance comes when dealing with topics where “insider” status is a necessary for “expert” status. In the gaming world, outsiders don’t generally become experts –- writers don’t get picked up just because they can write well on any subject. A certain hands-on familiarity with our subject is demanded of us. It is almost a given that gaming is part of our daily life, independent of writing – something that is impossible to replicate when I’m looking at, say, 1930s advertisements.

Allison, a fine anthropologist who has a fascinating body of work on Japan, was clearly an outsider. And it occurred to me that as people (academics) get more and more interested in gaming of various forms, virtual worlds, and the like, the more of this sort of scholarship we’re going to see. At this point in time, I think many people are still a little too lost when it comes to, say, MMOs to write an article tackling the issue – I chatted with one of my advisors, who is a technophobe in his daily life but reasonably enthusiastic regarding subjects that aren’t widely studied yet (in his case, film, and most recently underground and independent film in China), about my plans to do a more current look at the Chinese gaming milieu. To my great surprise, he thought it was a fabulous idea, and added that plenty of academics would like to look at such issues in China and Korea, but don’t know where to start.

But what about when people do start realizing where those starting points are? Do we have whole books to look forward to that just “don’t get it”? And really, who am I to say another academic just doesn’t “get it,” when their scholarship is otherwise unimpeachable? Am I privileging the fan voice? Am I engaging in the same sort of behavior that privileges the ‘native’ voice –- the idea that, say, my Chinese friends are simply more capable of being good Chinese historians than I? It’s not so much an issue of privileging as a difference on opinion as to what constitutes ‘expert’ status. Anne Allison –- as fine an anthropologist as she is -– wouldn’t stand a chance of attaining ‘expert’ status with her writing about the game industry. It’s clear from her writing that she is an ‘outsider.’ But where oh where are those insiders? How is it that I study at a school that houses people like Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto, and I still get the curious stare when delineating my weekend responsibilities?

Inside Out, Outside In

Part of my problem when grappling with this issue is that I simply cannot break away from my disciplinary boundaries. Oh, sure, an article here or there is one thing, but the idea of writing my dissertation or staking my career on gaming? Even if I could convince my advisors — a dubious proposition at best — I just couldn’t bring myself to make the leap. I’m sure I’m not the only person facing such a dilemma. While game studies provides a safe haven for many people, it never would’ve occurred to me to go to graduate school for it — I’m not sure I’d even been particularly happy. I like what I study, but I also like branching out — and I have a suspicion that means I’m going to be sandwiched in between two fields that don’t really want my work, at least as it relates to gaming.

Systemic change is difficult to affect in academia. Critiques of the ‘traditional’ academic structure abound, and there are plenty of people trying to think ‘outside the box.’ Unfortunately, even the “outside of the boxers” frequently wind up reinforcing the box — it’s difficult to get outside the structure totally. Our studies and careers are predicated on being able to fit into some category or another. Specialization is the name of the game, and once something gets really entrenched, it frequently becomes a means to an end.

The Afterlives of Game Studies?

I admit I harbor some suspicion for ‘_______ studies’ programs, be it ‘Asian studies’ or ‘American studies’ or ‘game studies.’ This stems partly from the fact that area studies (of which East Asian 'studies' is an honored part) is the granddaddy of all those other studies programs — which means we’ve had considerably more time to ruminate on the meaning of our ‘field’ and the benefits and limitations of the (in theory) multidisciplinary approach to a particular area. We also have a collection of books with frightening (for a youngster at the beginning of his or her career) titles such as Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, with even more terrifying essays contained within. The great cynics of area studies make scientists’ doom and gloom predictions about global warming sound positively cheery in comparison.

One of the greatest critiques is that despite the best intentions of most of these sorts of programs, they frequently wind up becoming an end unto themselves — not a space for a variety of disciplines to gather, but a discipline in and of itself. I have the utmost respect for many of the ‘game studies’ academics I’ve had the pleasure of having exchanges with, but I have to wonder where the field is going to be in 20 or 30 years — will we be seeing a volume entitled Playing Games: The Afterlives of Game Studies? One would hope not, but surveying the scene from the area studies corner of the Academy leaves me with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. While I don’t think Ian Bogost et al. need to worry about being put in service to the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War, I’d be surprised if some of the same things that have tripped up area studies don’t wind up being obstacles for our much younger disciplinary cousin.

Blundering Towards Enlightenment

At the Kotaku pre-E3 party, an MA student introduced himself to me and queried me regarding my academic path. He expressed some surprise when I said I was an historian — ‘Oh, but I thought you were in game studies?’. He looked mildly disappointed when I said no, just a boring modern Chinese historian here. It got me thinking — will ‘game studies’ become an exclusive club, like many other ‘studies’ are? What boxes on the CV are we going to have to mark to be considered valid and serious researchers of games? How is the discipline hierarchy going to shake out?

There are clearly a lot of interesting and creative people currently working on gaming in an academic context, and I sincerely hope that ‘game studies’ continues to be a place where academics from a variety of disciplines (but common research theme) have space to share. I hope that even the older and stodgier disciplines like my own will begin to come around to the idea that games and gaming are legitimate fields of inquiry, and valid sources to draw from. This, perhaps, is the greatest challenge: academics are frequently cranky and highly defensive of their respective disciplines. Many of us do cross boundaries with ease, but it can be a tough row to hoe when it comes to breaking new paths, especially when it comes to what constitutes an appropriate source base. It took quite some time for film to develop into an accepted source for historical study, for example, and students of material culture still find themselves up against a brick wall when talking to certain colleagues.

I’ll admit that I won’t be upsetting the apple cart in history any time soon — I wouldn’t be allowed to write my dissertation on such a ‘new’ topic as gaming or virtual worlds in China, even if I wanted to, and it would probably be academic suicide (at least as far as traditional history departments are concerned). That doesn’t mean I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring, of course — but trailblazing visionary/rebel I am not, at least not when it comes to arguing for games. I already have a little notebook with references, citations, and impressions for my not-so-far-away article, but the constraints of working within a reasonably stuffy discipline mean that until I have tenure, it’s a sideline. An interesting and productive sideline, but a sideline nonetheless. I do hope that there will be room for my future students to maneuver between the rigid, traditional structure and the ‘upstart’ fields like game studies.

Game studies, like any discipline, will be going through growing pains — we’ve been writing histories for thousands of years and it seems that every year brings some new problem that needs to be hashed out. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer addressed some of these issues in a recent interview that appeared on GameSetWatch:

… there is already a field called game studies, and some of us aren't comfortable with where that's going or don't feel we quite fit in there. Game studies is taking a fairly traditional academic approach to research and scholarship, and as a professor who has done my share of papers and conferences, I'm trying to go another way. I want to write about games at the place where they are being discussed most vigorously, online and amongst gamers. I greatly respect what game studies is doing - and I've benefited from this work - but I've reached the point in my career where I'm not terribly interested in traditional academic research anymore.

In many respects, we’re coming from the same position and, at the same time, pretty far apart. It’s not that I’m not interested in traditional academic research regarding games, I’m simply interested in it on my own terms – and in my own field. I wonder, though, if that leaves me on the outside looking in and the inside looking out. It’s an odd gap to straddle — I just hope it's not an impossibly wide gap to bridge.

New Year's Day 2008. Austin's last-standing coin-op, Einstein's Arcade, was shuttered. That's where Harvey played Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike every damn day and duked it out in countless tournaments that drew up to 80 spectators. This is where he practiced for the Evolution Championships series. "It was a moment of despair in my life," he recalls. That was his hotspot, his hangout, poof gone.

But instead of simply bitching and moaning, Harvey and his friends thought of an action plan: Let's buy the machines from Einstein's and open our own arcade. After working out a deal with Einstein's owner, Harvey and a friend found themselves the proud owners of 8 coin-op machines. "In the meantime," he says "I immediately began looking at retail spaces in the city to get an idea of what was possible." Before they knew it, the two had a lease ironed out for the summer.

Like most children of the 80s and early 90s, Ryan Harvey grew up feeding coins into machines. The Texas-native's earliest memories were standing on milk crates so he could reach the joystick to play Vs. Super Mario Bros. "I played a ton of arcade games as a kid thanks to generous parents and arcade games conveniently located any place we went," he recalls. "I was hooked from the very start, and also have fond memories of Legend of Kage followed by Black Tiger a bit later on." Quarters flowed at family arcade outings.

As the decades continued, the games took more and more quarters. And American gamers shifted further from arcades to living rooms. "Arcade gaming died out in the U.S. for many reasons, but I don't think any of them are the reasons most people think about," says Harvey. "The number one reason it died here is because of our coinage system. The Japanese coin system is coincidentally perfectly made for arcade gaming with 50 yen and 100 yen denominations (50 cents/1 dollar)." Japanese arcade gaming was always based on the hundred yen coin, making it easier for player to pluck down one coin, compared to the increasing number of quarters.

And when U.S. arcade owners found out that prize games made more than actual arcade video games, fewer and fewer titles were imported from Japan. This caused a trend, Harvey points out, in the 90s from the "real" video arcade to the entertainment venues that rule today. "Ultimately, I don't think it's a matter of Japanese people being any more into gaming than Americans," he adds. "Arcades have been successfully marketed in Japan and adapted through an era of change; the U.S. operators just gave up."

While mini-malls and pizza parlors housed American arcades in the 1980s, along with the occasional mini-mart or gas station having a cabinet or two, Japanese arcades were located in urban centers, close to major train stations. On the way home from work or school, players could duck in for a quick game or two. "Japan is a culture built around easy transportation in metro areas, and there is always an arcade close by if you're in the city," says Harvey. American, a few notable expectations aside, is not.

Harvey should know. He spent a year abroad at Obirin University outside Tokyo as a Japanese major. His free time was spent climbing through countless Tokyo arcades, but most of his time was spent in a small local arcade called "Game UFO".

"Game UFO was a small mom-and-pop arcade," remembers Harvey. "It was dirty, didn't always smell great, and generally looked like it was about to fall apart. However, this was the kind of place you could go and make life-long friends, and the arcade machines were always in perfect shape. The regulars diligently attended almost every day, myself included when I lived there in 2005." It made such a big impression on him that he's even named the Austin arcade Arcade UFO after it.

That feeling, you know, the one you get being in the same room as your opponent or friends or even strangers is exactly what Harvey wants to bring back to Austin. "I want to bring back that feature which is long-lost in most of the arcades still standing in the U.S. today," he says, "the feeling that the other people in the room actually play video games and enjoy them as much as you do."

So far, the local support in Austin has been overwhelming, and Harvey is hoping that his arcade, Arcade UFO, will join the ranks of Austin's other local landmarks like Alamo Drafthouse, Bird's Barbershop and Thundercloud Subs. "Local businesses in Austin have been extremely supportive and helped to make sure everyone knows about us," says Harvey. "I couldn't be more thankful!"

Arcade UFO opens August 29th and the arcade's website is here. "Most people assumed that this meant regular video arcades were done, but I respectfully disagree," says Harvey. "I just think it hasn't been done right for a long time, and that's exactly what I plan to do!"

SAN DIEGO, CA—Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games, was the featured speaker on the Comic-Con International “Xbox 360 Gears of War Showcase” panel, over the weekend. Sitting alongside was comic book writer Josh Ortega, who worked with him on the Gears of War 2 story, and New York Times best-selling author Karen Traviss (Star Wars: Republic Commando), whose first of three planned Del Rey novels, Gears of War: The Battle of Aspho Fields, hits store shelves October 28.

Travis received an e-mail from her Del Rey Editor, Keith Clayton, asking if she could do a fast turnaround on a military game tie-in. After asking around and being told that Gears of War was “Traviss town” material, she acquiesced.

“If I don’t like something, but I’ve taken the money, I maintain a tactful British silence if asked for my opinion on it,” said Traviss. “I certainly won’t lie and gush over it, but I won’t talk it down either. So if I say I love something, I love it. And I bloody well love Gears.”

Travis, who began her writing career as a journalist, said Gears is the best-looking game that she’s ever seen.

“The art matters a lot to me,” said Traviss. “I’m a visual person and I cue mainly off the images. I’m not joking when I say much of the art is pure Carvaggio – it’s all such perfect lighting. Everything about it, from the concept art to the execution to the animation, is utterly spot on.”

As a writer, Travis never approaches a job as a pre-existing fan. She said if she’s already a consumer of a property, it kills the thing as a pleasurable experience for her because the working process involves dissecting it and having to look at the strings.

“If you come to a universe cold, not as a fan or even as someone who knows anything about it at all, you tend to see a very different world,” said Travis. “I knew bugger all about Star Wars when I was asked to write it, and the first thing that struck me was that the Jedi were pretty despicable on the ethics front, and had I been interviewing them I’d have had some hardball questions to ask. So that was the emotional spark I grabbed hold of and used. From that one moment of ‘God, what a bunch of master-race hypocrites...’ came a whole series. I treated it as a real scenario, not a kids’ science fantasy with wizards, and examined it just as I would have done had I still been a reporter. I don’t know how else to tell a story, actually. It’s much more about posing questions than giving answers.”

In addition to working on tie-in novels, Traviss has established herself within the literary community with her six-part Wess’har series. Although she doesn’t play videogames, she loves the way they tell stories.

“That’s why I’d love to write for games,” said Traviss. “That will horrify my more high-minded readers who are still in shock that a ‘literary’ novelist like me has sullied herself with tie-ins at all, but I really do see games (and comics, of course) as the ultimate form of storytelling, because they engage you on more levels. Novels are fine, they’re my living, and I don’t think I do too badly at them, but they are, by their very nature, limited. Pushing those limits – creating a vivid sense of a visual or physical experience just from words on a page – is a genuine test of skill, but add sound, images, variable outcomes, and even tactile/ kinetic effects these days, and it’s the difference between the two-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland and the 3D world we live in. It’s a bigger test, a more complex puzzle. And I love exploring things like that.”

Working with Epic Games and Cligg Bleszinski on this project has opened Traviss’ eyes to the world of videogames. She said one of the things she loves about tie-ins is the collaboration with people who do a very different job than she does — artists, composers, software designers, audio producers, etc.

“The buzz of working with people who can strike sparks off you really raises your game,” said Traviss. “I’m not an imaginative, wildly creative person – I’m analytical, a question-asker, and my fiction comes from deconstruction and observation – so the really creative types are a good foil for me. I need to surface from the isolation of writing my own books and get a ‘fix’ of working with other people for a while, or else I’d go nuts. Or I’d be nuttier than I am now, anyway.”

Traviss said working with Epic has been a great experience, especially given the quick turnaround time she was given for this first project. And the relationship was pretty open, although there were some rules.

“The one constraint from Epic that I thought would stuff me was that I couldn’t use Marcus as a point-of-view character,” said Traviss. “I write very tight third person POV, no authorial intrusion, and that’s how I navigate the story, so I felt that my right arm had been cut off. I griped about it, believe me. But I’m glad now that it had to be that way. It forced me to show Marcus wholly through the reactions and thoughts of those around him. It created a whole new avenue for me. So much about the Gears world is buried, emergent, unknown, glimpsed in shadows. He’s almost a microcosm of that.”

Traviss discovered through her work on the Gears of War novel that game technique actually mirrors how she writes fiction. She sets up the characters thoroughly, with a psych profile, and then lets them loose in a scenario to see what they do, very much like a computer model.

“It’s why my books often catch me out and don’t end where I first expected them to when I started writing them,” said Traviss. “I suspect this is why I have such an affinity for game tie-ins. I can see much more potential in games than ‘reader’ writers can, perhaps. It’s a radically different way of writing. I’m not holding the steering wheel. I just identify it or build it, and then the characters take the keys and I’m left watching as they roar up and down the road.”

Traviss relied on Gears’ cinematics and the story bible as her reference points, and just filled in the rest. She said there was a huge amount of scope to fill gaps.

“Actually, everything I needed to know about the characters – and characters are the story, as far as I’m concerned - was in a couple of the cinematics in some magnificent brush-strokes of characterization,” said Traviss. “That’s how brilliant the game is. For example, the cinematic in the Raven after Dom rescues Marcus sets up the whole character dynamic of those two in a couple of dialogue lines and gestures. I knew those blokes right away, just from that.”

Traviss really got into the world of Gears, going into some minute details that not even gamers might have thought about.

“I really love the whole idea of chainsaw bayonets,” said Traviss. “Being a boring pragmatic type, though, my first thought was how much cleaning and maintenance you’d have to do on a real Lancer for every grub you carved up. (And the power supply - how long does a charge last? But I digress.) I was talking it through with a buddy who’s serving in Afghanistan, and we decided it would be a long, messy job. Think about it; ever cleaned something simple like a meat mincer? And that’s usually just lean meat, not bones, fat, and connective tissue too. All I could think of was stripping down a Lancer and trying to get all the crap and gristle out of the chain. Lovely. And what’s the best way to apply the chainsaw? How much weight, what angle, how far before you have trouble pulling the blades clear? What happens to all that debris flung out from the wound? That’s the kind of stuff a novelist has to think about. You really need to be curious about it, because it tells you what your characters will be doing for a big chunk of their day...anyway, more of that in the book itself. I promise. Messy as hell!”

As in, blogs run by video game platform holders, developers and publishers. They're interesting entities! And here's why: blogs came to prominence as an easy way for the average person to throw some stuff up on the internet and get people talking. By their very nature they're informal. So what business do these massive, global corporations have in saddling up and getting into the whole blogging thing?

The answer’s not as simple as you think. Yes, there are PR benefits to be had, but that’s a cynic’s answer, not to mention a shallow one. What kind of PR? Are they tapping new markets? Consolidating existing ones? Trying to make amends for previous PR disasters? And – most importantly – what are they getting out of these blogs besides from PR?

I ask this because these blogs are doing so much more than what you’d traditionally label “PR”. They’re engaging directly with their fanbase. They’re talking with them, listening to them, replying to them through blog posts and comments. Theyre not just telling their fans what they think they should be hearing, they’re listening when the fans talk back, and sometimes even doing something about it.

Which is new, very new, at least for this industry. So to get a little more information on these blogs, see what some of these companies are really getting themselves into, let’s take a look at three of the biggest, most prominent company blogs out there: Microsoft’s Gamerscore blog, Sony’s PlayStation.Blog and Capcom USA’s Unity Blog.

In examining each, I’ve not only spoken with the blogs themselves, but taken a look at how well they’re doing their jobs, in terms of both blanket PR coverage (ie the drip-feeding of news) as well as what’s potentially an even more important aspect: how well they’re able to cultivate and foster the growth of a community.

GAMERSCORE – What, no Major Nelson? Nope. Love him or hate him, his website is little more than an Xbox Live (as opposed to Xbox 360) noticeboard, and his podcast is a podcast, not a blog. No, when it comes to Microsoft’s shot at tapping the blogosphere, that job’s left to Gamerscore.

One of the oldest company blogs around (and by far the most senior of those we’re looking at today), Gamerscore was established in October 2005, as part of Microsoft’s long-running desire to focus on community with their Xbox platforms. “From the concept of the first Xbox, having fun playing with others, and being able to connect online has been the key to the system’s success”, says John Porcaro, Xbox’s Director Online Community.

“Because we’re gamers at heart, many of us were plugged into the games community”, he continues. “We were listening to online conversations going on about the Xbox, and about our games, and we wanted to be more a part of the conversation. Creating an official blog gave us a way to communicate more directly, more quickly, and more informally”.

On the whole, it’s been a successful venture for Microsoft. They’ve got the core 360 owner in their sights. The Gamerscore guys are great at providing readers with stuff like an inside look at gaming events (with their Flickr galleries), as well as serving as the only official MS website where you can find not just major Xbox news, but the minor stuff like XBLA announcements as well.

On the downside, it can at times also feel a little too targeted, coming off as occasionally sterile, and it lacks the character and personality that you’d expect from such an informal arena. So while it’s been useful for Microsoft as a PR tool – quite literally, since Gamerscore also are often first to publish Microsoft press releases – it hasn’t really developed the kind of community vibe you’d have expected to see for a console as community-focused as the 360.

PLAYSTATION – At the start of this piece, I raised the possibility that some companies may be into the whole blogging thing in an attempt to make amends. Try something new, do something right in the PR sphere where, previously, they may have been having…issues. Issues like those Sony faced in 2006-2007, with their $599/Massive Damage/Last-Gen PR firestorm.

Now, in mid-2008, the PS3 is slowly recovering from its woeful launch, and the PlayStation.Blog has been in many ways the keystone in this amazing turnaround in Sony’s relatonship with its userbase. Sony’s Director Corporate Communications Patrick Seybold says of the blog’s timing and introduction: “We felt there was a new level of transparency people just expected from PlayStation, and we had the desire internally to open up in the interest of building trust and a healthier dialogue with our customers”.

“Not only do you get an immediate read on the pulse of your most passionate fans, but you get to bring them a bit closer into the fold and share more details about the reasoning behind certain decisions — it is a win-win opportunity”, he continues. “I saw PlayStation.blog as another opportunity to show our fans that we are as loyal to them as they have been to us for all of these years”.

Updated on (around) a daily basis, it makes no bones about its PR focus. It’s as serious as Microsoft’s Gamerscore blog, perhaps even more so. There’s no fan art or YouTube clips of old toy commercials here, it’s all cold, hard facts. Or, at least, the posts are. Where the PlayStation.Blog shines is in the site’s comments section, which have often proved to be a more useful source of information than the posts themselves.

While an original post – whether by Sony or one of their third-party developers – may contain some pertinent information, PS3 users are able to comment directly under the post with questions. On 98% of major sites, those questions may as well be rhetorical. Nobody would read them, let alone answer them.

But browse the comments section on a PlayStation.Blog post and you’ll find developers rolling up their sleeves and answering questions. And answering them properly. And, in doing so, often providing some extra information, the kind of stuff that may not matter to the PR team when formulating a press release, but may be vital to the kind of hardcore user that’s bothering to comment on a company blog. How many frames per second it’ll be running at, when a European release may be announced, that kind of thing.

It’s not perfect, however. Again, like Microsoft’s effort, the PlayStation blog can come off as feeling a little sterile, a little “corporate”.

CAPCOM - Capcom’s blog (well, technically a network of blogs, but we'll roll them up into one for convenience) is, due to their status as a developer/publisher, a little different. They have a lot less technical information to keep their fans occupied with: they don’t need to update you on the status of their online network or on upcoming firmware notices.

Which, in this case, works to their benefit. Because in place of that more mundane stuff comes an increased focus on doing what blogs do best: nurturing a community by getting down amongst it and having a laugh, rather than trying to will one into being via some great, old-fashioned PR machine.

“The goal has been to create the kind of place that I would like to be as a Capcom fan if I didn't actually work for the company” says Capcom’s Seth Killian. “Since I spent most of my life as exactly that kind of person, this wasn't hard to imagine”.

”Mostly I just wanted to have some fun, talk more directly with fans, and sidestep the corporate-speak death that makes games seem like they suck. I use it as a chance to do some really in-depth stuff on the games, to share some behind-the-scenes Capcom shenanigans, and to showcase all the amazing Capcom-related fan stuff that's happening”.

Yes, they run PR. They’ll post about hype for upcoming games, the odd screenshot gallery, etc. But they’ll also post crap you wouldn’t dream of finding on most other company websites. Like opportunities for fans to come in and test upcoming games. Links and translations to the Japanese websites of Capcom games. Stupid old YouTube vids of Street Fighter commercials from 1993.

You know. The kind of stuff that goes beyond PR, and attracts a fan, keeps them around and, through engagement with other fans and the company itself – turns them from fan into super fan. Yes, this has a downside, namely the fact you’ll be drinking the Capcom kool-aid straight from the source, but then if you’re a die-hard Capcom fan, is there really anything wrong with that?

I’d love to now go into detail about what each company’s approach to blogging really means, and why they’re taking the approach they’re taking, but I can’t. And that’s what makes this so interesting. These guys are flying by the seat of their pants. This whole “community” thing is new ground for the gaming industry, and two of these three blogs (Sony & Capcom) are only a year old.

All three men I spoke with were adamant that, as new as their blogs were, the pace that blogs and social media have been running at could soon render them out of date, and out of date before blogs have even had a chance to develop their own set of “dos and do nots”. Being aware of that, they’re just running with what they feel is right, and so long as they’re able to communicate with their more hardcore fans, they’ll keep pushing on.

Capcom’s Seth Killian sums it up best when he says “I think the current corporate feelings about the blog are, in order: vague confusion, excitement, fear, a different kind of confusion, and amusement. That might not sound good until you realize that just last year the feelings were: fear, anger, and seeking revenge, so we're headed in the right direction”.

It’s not hard to imagine that Sony knew Microsoft would choose E3 to make its curtain-call announcement of Final Fantasy XIII for the 360. It’s likewise reasonable to believe they searched their catalog of works under development for the best candidate to generate any buzz. What we got was a mixed bag — the trailer of an incredibly expansive shooter, but it didn’t even have a title. It was just MAG: Massive Action Game. It sounded tempting, but very incomplete.

In fact it was shown to a focus group less than a month before E3. One among that group, after seeing the MAG E3 debut, reached out to me, under a promise of anonymity, to describe what was shown and asked of the group. Put simply, MAG — whatever title it comes out under — will be a mercenary combat MMO. We're told that it will more than likely carry SOCOM branding, as Zipper Interactive is behind it. And if so, it could be called SOCOM: Shadow War or SOCOM: Zero. Though Sony did stress it was a brand new IP at the press conference.

For purposes of identity protection, my source, who has experience in other video game focus groups, will be called Orange. Being identified could cost Orange, and others, future work.

“They gave us six options for taglines at the end,” said Orange, who could only remember four: MAG: Shadow War; MAG: Zero; MAG: Global Assault and MAG: Final Hour. Orange said the group liked Shadow War and Zero. Orange reasoned that Zipper Interactive's involvement means all signs would point to a repurposing of SOCOM IP for this one, rather than creating a new title outright. Indeed, when providing me visual examples of certain factions that he observed, Orange used images from SOCOM 3.

“We were all deliberating what sort of game it was similar to, and for the most part, SOCOM and Planetside (another Sony title) were the only names that came out, based on what we have heard and seen,” Orange said. The group members saw, or was described, gameplay but could not perform it themselves, which indicated it was in a far less complete stage than other games for which Orange had been in a focus group. All the group saw was a “touched up” version of the trailer that ran at E3, Orange said. Then they were asked questions, mostly regarding the game’s story and the scope of its battles.

SOCOM and Planetside were the closest cousins, Orange said, because the game involves “troop like gameplay with a 3rd person view. The game is set following catstrophic events in the near future — “2015 to 2020, around there,” said Orange — in which mercenaries, aligned with certain factions, are engaged in relentless secret wars for control of resources.

Orange saw three factions — Americans, based in Alaska (“I can assume a snow level,” Orange joked) Europeans and a Middle East faction. Orange provided two .jpgs from SOCOM 3 that were close analogues to the MAG Europe and Middle East factions. If Sony chooses to go forward like this, the obvious Middle East motif could cause some PR problems (although, “It was a black American soldier they showed us, if that makes up for it.”) To Anglo players, that kind of garb clearly says “terrorist,” and not mercenaries, especially considering the regular fatigues and high-tech suits worn by Americans and Europeans, respectively.

Orange said the presenters focused on two topics: Whether the story justifying the state of current events in the game was believable enough for gamers, and whether the scale of combat was appealing. MAG is promising multiplayer battles of up to 256 participants, broken down into 8-member units aligned to one of two sides. There will be no third-party intercessions on any battles, Orange said.

“For MAG they were all about scale,” Orange said. “That was the word they were going for. Massive (as in the scale of the level). With 256 players, they don’t want it to be a clusterfuck of deathmatch. They want vast levels where troops can approach from all angles.”

At that scale, you can be an independent operator assigned to one unit, knowing none of the others on your side, or you can gather up to seven of your friends and jump in as a squad, with other participants added in if your unit totals less than eight. Obviously, it’s not obligating you to find 127 of your closest friends if you want to see the largest scale of combat MAG will offer.

That said, mission objectives for these battles will definitely be in the hands of a few human players. We’ve reported on the concept of ranks in MAG, where players accumulate experience and ascend a shot-calling ladder within the game, such that they are either grunts, lieutenants, or generals in charge of the whole operation. You’ll ascend in rank according to a points accrual system that Orange was able to describe loosely.

“When they were describing it, it kept reminding me of Alterac Valley from World of Warcraft, if you are familiar,” Orange said. “What happens is: You get points for contributing with your troop/overall team. If you happen to win or do better than the rest of your team, you get more points. So the more you play, or the more points you get, the higher your rank goes.”

Some speculated/wished that at high command levels, the game moved back into some sort of top-down/RTS interface. That sort of happens. “Everyone is in the field,” Orange said, “but the person in charge is capable of looking at the map and commanding the overall group or individual troops. He is also capable of things like airstrikes and parachute drops. He could either control and babysit from far back, or jump right into the action [with a weapon himself.]”

Orange didn’t like the fact another human player could set all the mission parameters. “Why would I want someone telling me how to play the game?” Orange said. “Perhaps I know more about the certain terrain than they do, should they have the ability to penalize me if I don’t listen? Granted, penalizing and kicking were not mentioned but they’re always a possiblity.

While Orange did not see individual character classes or their abilities demonstrated, Orange came away with the understanding that all units could be comprised of a single class if they desired. Also, once a character achieved a certain point ranking, certain options became customizable, such as appearance and equipment/weaponry upgrades.

In all, Orange described an appealing game, and it’s a logical progression from MMOs set in fantasy contexts. After all, there are, at least for narrative purposes, kingdoms and heads of state in those worlds too, and adventurers set off on individual quests and find combat there. Given a good enough story to set it up, what should preclude that kind of experience in the modern world?

Don't forget that since this is all coming out of a focus test it could be very pie-in-the-sky stuff, though certainly ideas that are tickling Sony's collective grey matter.

"I needed a sounding board," says Tokyo based localizer and former Team Ninja member Andrew Szymanski. "So it was great having Matt and Hiroko." Andrew, who joined Tecmo after college and recently left the company last September, did an excellent job localizing the first Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, but felt it was somewhat stilted. If game development is a group effort, why should localization be solitary? He was able to convince Tecmo and Microsoft to let him bring in Matt and Hiroko for the NGII localization.

It was a reunion of sorts as the trio had previously worked on Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and Dead or Alive Xtreme 2. "One of the things that helped me convince the higher ups," recalls Andrew, "was that Matt and Hiroko both are authors and write books together.” Both are best known for titles like Yokai Attack! or Hello, Please!. “For localization, your skill at writing English is actually more important than your Japanese," says Matt. If you don't know a Japanese word, you can always look it up or ask someone. But if you can't string together a sentence, you can always, no wait, you're screwed.

Team Ninja knew Ninja Gaiden II wasn’t aimed strictly at the Japanese market. "The main target for Ninja Gaiden II was the West," says Andrew. “The market is global, and Japan is more global than ever before.” And since it’s a game targeted for a Western audience, it needed to be written in a Western language: English. The game’s story was conceived by Ninja Gaiden II’s director Hiroaki Matsui in highly detailed, manga-like stories boards.

But where did former Team Ninja lead ninja Tomonobu Itagaki factor in? According to Andrew: "Itagaki-san's main responsibilities are, of course, overseeing the development of the whole game, but he is often focused on combat design, enemy AI, level design, and other key gameplay elements. He trusts Matsui-san implicitly for art and story direction, and thus we mainly worked with Matsui-san to develop the dialogue, worldview, and key story points. He also relies on my judgement when it comes to the localization and the entire English version of the game as a whole, so it was great having the freedom and support to bring on Matt and Hiroko and create an English script that we were all proud of. It goes without saying that Itagaki-san has final say over everything that goes into the retail game, and it was a tremendously satisfying feeling to hear his words of praise when it came to our finished voiceovers and other localized assets. It was great seeing him say ‘Submit, or die!’ in English as he watched the cutscenes!"
At work and after work over bottomless beers, Matsui gave Andrew very vivid instructions of how he envisioned Ninja Gaiden II’s story and world. “These Team Ninja guys live and breathe this stuff,” says Andrew. “So much stuff happens outside the office because they’re always thinking about whatever they’re working on.” Andrew then typed up a rough English draft. Andrew then reconvened with Hiroko and Matt to punch up the first draft — which was also in English. Meaning? That the script Team Ninja was working from was in English and all the motion capture and voice acting was in English.

Even though it was being written in English, the trio were striving to make sure it stayed in line of what a ninja would actually say. Explains Andrew, “The question we always asked ourselves was ‘Is this ninjy?’” Basically, would a ninja actually say this. Continuing, he adds, “So I ninja would never say ‘I am going to kill you.’ Instead, a ninja would says, ‘You will be the bloostains on my blade.’ That’s ninjy.” Andrew, Matt and Hiroko weren't simply pulling out a dictionary and digging through to find words that “match”, but rather, entrenching themselves in the game from head to toe and back and again. “The first rule of localization,” says Andrew, “is to integrate localization into the development process.” But this wasn’t *just* localization — Ninja Gaiden II was something else entirely, somewhere between translation, collaboration and straight-up writing.
Ninja Gaiden II is the game as Team Ninja conceived it — no compromises. “It turned out exactly the way we wanted,” says Andrew. Team Ninja’s plan, the original impetus, was to create a throw-back — you know, a spiritual successor to something you would’ve played on the Nintendo Entertainment System. “This is a game where ninjas fight dinosaurs,” says Andy. “If you can’t have fun with that, where can you?”

"The hardest projects I've worked on have been the ones where the client doesn't appreciate the value of a good translation." says Hiroko. "Or ones where the contribution of a native Japanese speaker to the English version isn't appreciated, which happened more often in the early days. The easiest ones are the projects where the dev team welcomes us in as part of the process, because the closer the you can work with the people who designed the game, the smoother the whole process goes."

No matter how good your localization skills are, nothing can compare to working directly with the team that made the game to ensure that their vision makes it to gamers outside Japan. That's exactly what happened with Ninja Gaiden II. If any of the localizers had questions about what the developers originally intended, then Hiroko and Matt could immediately turn to Andrew. If Matt or Andrew had any questions about the intricacies of Japanese culture or nuances, they could refer to Hiroko. “It's so rare that a native Japanese speaker confronts an English speaker about their English translation,” says Matt. “I'm not talking about errors, necessarily, but more like nuance.” You know, the stuff between the lines, not on the page. The ninjy.

[Andrew, Itagaki Pic]

Two weeks ago saw an extraordinarily successful, more-than-72 hour Super Mario Marathon that raised more than $11,000 for a gamers' charity for kids. This week, four Mega Man enthusiasts are finding out how hard of an act that is to follow — as a fund drive anyway. A new web site indicates that game marathons are a mushrooming craze, capitalizing partly on gamers who enjoy watching others fail at classic console titles. The question is, how long will it last?

The Megamanathon was hatched "about five minutes after we started watching the Mario Marathon," said Alex Willingham, one of the four gamers taking a tour of the Mega Man Series. Three hours into their marathon, which began 9 pm EDT Friday in Nyack, N.Y., they'd raised $210 for Child's Play, the same beneficiary of the Mario endeavor. As of noon Saturday, they'd upped that to $230.

They're still having fun, of course. But the Super Mario Marathon logged more than 100,000 unique viewers and 120,000 viewing hours, and it sounds like a lot of others got the same idea from watching it. A site, Gamemarathons, went online shortly after the Mario Marathon and is trying to be the go-to place for coordinating these contests, to cut down on overlap and redundancy. There's a Speed Gamers Marathon going on right now; a Rare Marathon that just finished, and Guitar Hero and Metroid coming up next week.

"Every marathon right now will find the Mario Marathon tough to follow," said Matt Hayden, who launched Gamemarathons.com. He estimates 85 percent of the marathons listed there so far are being done for charity. Those that are gaming for a cause are clearly differentiated from those that aren't.

"[The Mario Marathon] was so wildly successful and well advertised that no marathon can hope to achieve the numbers they did in terms of viewers and money," Hayden said. "But then again, the marathons should never really be about competition or one-upping the one before. Each one is uinique, and even if it raises $5, that's $5 a charity didn't have before, and it was a weekend of entertainment for at least a handful of people."

Willingham agrees, seeing more potential in the casual, drop-in entertainment value of a marathon. "As far as fundraising goes, it may be an idea beaten to death," Willingham said. "As recreational marathoning entertainment, it'll last as long as there are games to play."

He and his cohorts — Cory Hunt, Charlie Basler and Damon Amador, all college-age guys — had the itch to do a marathon, cause or charity regardless. But Willingham also thinks the marathon has some entertainment potential for viewers. "It's like a television show for geeks," he said. "You log on each weekend, and watch more dorks fail."

Hayden sees it a little differently. "Boring people who don't interact will break a marathon and bore the viewers no matter what game they're playing," he said. "Fun people will bring in viewers and retain them. People didn't watch [the Mario Marathon] for hours on end to see Mario games. They watched to see the guys, and became so enamored of them they were given nicknames. Brian [TK's] dog and wife became the most popular characters."

The Megamanathon, even if it hasn't raised as much as the Mario Marathon, poured out the same kind of effort and has developed its own following. hey've earned afan art gallery (including tributes to "Bagel Girl," the only female on the scene.) All the participants have gotten nicknames from those dropping in to watch. A PR effort got our attention, and local news as well.

But at this point, barring any flood of donations, the marathon's biggest success will likely be its completion, rather than the amount raised. The Mega Man gamers have the will to finish out the series, but others might not.

"I'm worried that upcoming marathons, especially the hastily prepared ones, will peter out once the inspiration from the Mario Marathon has worn off," Hayden said. "Just about every one that's planned for the next 2 months admit they were directly inspired by it. But that's why I created GameMarathons. I wanted the phenomenon to be more organized and be more widely accessible by everyone on the Internet, not just those who have to rely on word of mouth or a lucky mention on a popular site."

The Megamanathon will likely last into Sunday, Willingham said. They started with original Mega Man, and have been drawing titles out of a hat at random. They're playing the Mega Man Anniversary Collection and Mega Man X Collection on a Wii, using a HORI Digital GameCube pad. You can follow their progress on their site.

Gamemarathons [Site]
Megamanathon [Site]
Super Mario Marathon [Site]

Soulcalibur’s Ivy may be the poster child for this annual augmentation – literally. It seems with each passing year, her endowment multiplies, ushering in each passing technological evolution with more ludicrous, top-heavy jiggle than the era before.

But it’d be unfair to pick on Miss Valentine. After all, unrealistic body types in games are nothing new, a conversation-starter as old as Lara Croft. The fact that “sex sells” and the proliferation of exploitive body types is a cultural pandemic, not simply a video game issue, is the easy way to explain it, but the “easy” way is seldom very enlightening, nor does it help us learn about why we play.

What does it all mean, in an interactive medium where realism, immersion and engagement are the primary goals? Are we seeking idealistic images as avatars for ourselves, to complete the fantasy of power that gaming can provide?

Is this a case where the gaming audience has been misjudged through the ages by marketing teams who assume each and every one of us is a vapidly salivating 15-17 year-old male – until their assumptions have unconsciously shaped our taste?

Is This What We Want?

Again, it’s an easy pastime to criticize our society for leaning too heavily on unrealistic stereotypes for male and female bodies. It can actually be an enlightening exercise, when you’re on a packed subway or on a crowded street, to simply take a look around you, and see what human beings really look like. Chances are the handsomest man you see will not be a broad-muscled he-man, nor will the loveliest lady be a leggy siren with burgeoning cleavage.

However, most of the heroes in popular entertainment are still uncommonly beautiful; ugly or even merely common looks are still considered a plot device or a character trait, and with a few exceptions, games generally seem to lag a bit behind film as far as discovering the appeal in the common. Even men with war-torn, unattractive faces, still have heroic bodies, usually.

But that’s because we don’t want games to be common, do we? Picture a fighting game where the characters were simply ordinary, dressed in suitable exercise gear, and not particularly special to look at. That would be true realism, and even with some glorious game mechanics, you’ve got to admit it’d be a bit boring.

It seems we don’t really mean it when we, as gamers, say we want “realism” – what we really want is an appealing fantasy so vivid we can really believe in it. A world where the women are titillating and the men are fierce, rendered with such eye-catching density that we can almost reach out and touch it.

The Flesh Is Weak

At the same time, we as an audience seem to reach a general consensus in rejecting games that seem to be manipulating us with too many crotch-shots. Using overblown flesh visuals and overt, eye-to-brain sexuality is a quick and dirty shortcut to emotional engagement, when we’d rather be drawn in by things like, oh, I don’t know – good characters, perhaps, a compelling backstory, and maybe, just maybe, really solid game mechanics?

We sense when the marketing campaign is trying to buy our attention with a huge neon sign emblazoned with “XXX,” and we resent that. Contrary to outsider belief, gamers comprise a spectrum of age ranges, motivations for play, tastes and preferences – if we’ve been caged into a single demographic in the past, it’s only because that makes it easier for the folks upstairs to sell us things. That’s just business, but games are personal to their audience.

We’re in a state, now, of continually considering what our young medium is and what we can expect to get from it, where we want it to go. We’ve richened in many ways, but are still using shortcuts – long cutscenes in lieu of narrative environments, high-powered explosions in lieu of crafted plot climaxes, and raw, primal flesh in lieu of subtler kinds of power.

We’d like to look at beautiful fantasies we can believe in, but that’s not all we want.

What We’re Fighting For

And there’s no backlash like that of the internet-based gamer audience when it doesn’t get what it wants. So if we’re not all salivating teenage boys, and we resist being bought with cheap sex alone, then why does the stereotype of unrealistic bodies in games persist? Why is Ivy’s exponential bustline such a hot issue to our community?

Maybe the genre has something to do with it. While most video games feature a hot woman at some juncture, fighting games seem to have the highest and most diverse population of them. Fighting games ask you to “choose your fighter,” and while those games generally are made or broken on game mechanics, part of the appeal is that the character images we control may be representations, unconsciously, of ourselves.

In a mechanics-driven genre, the star of the game is the player’s skill level. Yes, Taki might be beating Astaroth silly for mysterious reasons of ninja vengeance and sword-obsession, but it’s really about you, challenging the machine, or your friend, for control-pad dominance. Whose looks, and whose body movements, best represent you?

Though, is anyone reading this article five-foot-eight and 110 pounds with a 22-inch waist and a triple-E breast size? (And if you are, can I steal your figure?)

Assuming that body types in games represent ideals, and that game bodies are stand-ins for ourselves to some extent, we still haven’t figured out a good reason why we want to look quite this way.

Survival of the Fittest

The idealization of the human form in art is nothing new. When Botticelli painted Venus, or when Michelangelo chiseled David, we can assume they were not, at least on a conscious level, creating depictions of themselves, or even what they wanted to be. And if we think of games as art to the extent that we’re able to use them as vehicles for self-expression, the same holds true for our Soulcalibur lineup.

Venus was an archetype of female beauty, in the humanoid tradition of Greco-Roman gods; David was an archetype of male beauty, both representative of human evolution taken to its highest condition. And our fighting game characters are archetypes of what they represent – fearlessness, aggression, purposefulness, and primal fierceness. It’s even arguable that tapping into adrenaline-fueled aggression when we play video games is a biological replacement for how we as humans felt in an era when we had to fight more overtly for social dominance, physical superiority, the best mate, the food we had to kill to eat.

That’s Darwinism at work – survival of the fittest. And so in a game where you survive on your skills, you want to look like the fittest. Why not go over-the-top and be such an ideal that it wouldn’t be possible for you to exist in the current genetic landscape?

The Unanswered Questions

So even though we’ve generated a theory for why we like to be obscenely perfect women or aggressively idealized men when we play video games where aggression or combat is at the core of the gameplay (and that’s most games, really), there’s still one issue left – how does this affect us, and what does it mean for the future of games?

As a female, I’m not sure whether my perception of other women – or of myself – has been affected by the avatars I see in the games I play every day. I do know that, when I take that quick look around the crowded subway car to see how other women really look, I am always a little bit surprised – but there’s no clear way to blame games for that, when it’s such a pervasive complex in other entertainment media.

I do know that some of my female peers feel that the flesh displays in gaming are degrading to them – even if that primal, aggression-based exposure supports the core tenets of a particular title. And I’ve often wondered how my majority-male peers in the gaming audience feel about how men are portrayed in games, and whether being continually exposed to powerful, armed brawlers on the warpath makes them feel more or less powerful in their “real” lives.

Not to mention the fact that gaming is in steady pursuit of wider-spread cultural legitimacy. And while it’s good that many “casual gamers’” play habits are helping them understand ours better, and that Rock Band has made all kinds of folks quit believing that the console is a mysterious tool of evil for immature people, we’d really like it if people could appreciate our core titles the way that we do, consider the value in the things we find most valuable.

And if, when they take a closer look, all they can see from a distance is that we like tits, there’s going to be a problem.

While I’ve said before it’s not constructive to consider anything “just a game,” a game is still not in and of itself real, and that’s part of the appeal – we can explore fantasies, see and do things that aren’t possible in the real world. And we all, of course, can delineate the difference between fantasy and reality, right?

So, with a good reason or not, are idealized body types harmful or helpful to the identity and maturity of gaming? Next time, would you rather see the debut of a demure, complex Ivy – or one with bigger jugs than ever?

But Brian Kaldenberg, in a way, defies that altruistic mode. He sees NCAA rosters also as a very profitable business, and that makes him one of the most despised figures in a community where reputation and motive have as much currency as the accuracy of one’s work. In message boards and private conversation, Kaldenberg is routinely accused of plagiarism, arrogance, and deceitful practices. But with a combination of thick skin, patience and guile, he has become probably the most successful of anyone who sells NCAA rosters for more than a suggested donation. And Wednesday, sending more shockwaves through a jittery community, he acquired another leading NCAA roster domain, thus unifying the top three URLs returned for a search of “NCAA rosters” on Google.

“It’s hard for me to understand why they care so much that I sell it,” says Kaldenberg, 25, who since the last release of NCAA Football has managed to make acquisitions of his top two, hostile competitors — fkrosters.com and DT Linder’s PSXSports. “I think it’s because I was not the pioneer. The pioneers definitely are DT and FK. Then I came along and did it differently and made a lot more money.”

Kaldenberg’s replacement of PSXSports’ front with an image of a Monopoly board, for the time being, may also illustrate the acid relationships he has with others. He insists that was a wink-and-nod to Linder, who had likened PSXSports and Kaldenberg’s original Gamerosters.com to keystone properties in the popular boardgame. But others see it as a message that Kaldenberg is coming to drive out any roster editor, for profit or otherwise. And they care about Kaldenberg’s profit motive because for them, NCAA Football is a goose whose golden egg is not money, but the ability to freely change any or all of the names in sports gaming’s deepest universe.

“We’re concerned that if sites keep charging for rosters, the NCAA may ask EA to pull the editing feature,” says Chris Jacobs, a site admin for freeNCAA09rosters.com, a free counter-site to Kaldenberg’s for-profit empire. “The game would be ruined if we were stuck with HB #15 all year.”

On that sentiment, all agree. No college sports title releases with any current player’s name or likeness, thanks to NCAA bylaws. In professional sports simulations, where superstars opted out of collective deals and refused to allow their likenesses to be used, a few absences are nettlesome. To have not just an entire league, but the largest league of any (and March Madness’ 341 teams is even larger) makes gaming with and without complete roster files a night-and-day experience.

Thus sprouted the community of roster editing, with Linder among its progenitors. (Kotaku attempted to reach Linder before the sale of PSXSports but he did not reply. Efforts through others didn’t return a comment before this article was originally posted.) And despite well sourced ventures such as Kaldenberg’s and his closest competitor, Nick Cain’s Sportrosters.com, the free roster community could only be beaten if editing were killed altogether. They make their product first for themselves, then share it to others, and are apathetic about its profitability or market potential.

“I’ve had people volunteer to help me and say that we could work nonstop on the roster file,” said Victor Vasquez, who owned fkrosters.com before selling it to Kaldenberg in December, then reconstituted his efforts on fairdale-kings.com.“But I know only how accurate my work is. I know the homework that I put into this file every year.”

Kaldenberg began with Gamerosters.com in 2004 while a junior at Iowa State University, and approaches it as much as a businessman as he does a fan. He appreciates the value added by a strong roster file (gaming with rival Iowa — he lives in Iowa City — when he plays online) but also foresees the potential in the business and an end-game. “My ultimate idea is to grow the Gamerosters portfolio to the point a gaming site or gaming e-tailer makes me an offer I can’t turn down,” Kaldenberg says, claiming he received a six-figure bid last spring but “I just didn’t feel like it was the right time yet.”

Some might think the right time has come and gone. The addition of the EA Locker feature to this year’s NCAA football game, depending on your point of view, is either pro- or con-roster editing. Through the EA Locker, Xbox 360 and PS3 gamers may share roster files freely across the network. That sets up a competing viral spread of three roster types, none of which can be monetized:

• Fully researched and edited rosters bought by the community (Kaldenberg’s)

• Rosters which are the same in content, but distributed for free or a donation (Fairdale-Kings and freeNCAA09rosters)

• or incomplete, fan-oriented rosters built by individual players which are tailored to specific schools or conferences and contain inaccuracies or wholesale omissions elsewhere.

Working in Kaldenberg’s favor is the number of offline-only players who want rosters. Custom rosters were only available for use online beginning with last year’s title, meaning a large group of players who only game in offline modes, like dynasty or campus legend, care only for accurate rosters and neither need them online nor seek them out there. Also, EA Locker is available for free on PS3, but only through XBox Live Gold on that platform, representing a separate barrier. Vasquez, his adversary, himself agrees that there are more offline gamers than online.

Also, Kaldenberg trusts in a consumer instinct built on the notion that someone offering a product in a free market has a business motivation to provide an accurate and superior, product. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t buy discount meat off the back of a truck. “People are willing to pay for what we offer and pay for the peace of mind knowing they are getting a quality product,” Kaldenberg says. “Similar to how people are willing to shell out $60 for a steak at Ruth’s Chris.”

Kaldenberg won’t divulge specifics, but says he has served close to 10,000 customers since 2004, seeing his year-over-year demand double in each of the last three years. (Vasquez boasted he had more than 20,000 registered users when he ran the site, some of whom have migrated to fairdale-kings.com)

Kaldenberg’s operation requires seasonal employees — working on a PS3, PS2 and Xbox set up in an office — and a full-time business operations manager (the business also manages rosters for March Madness and other titles). But such growth has yet to attract the notice of the NCAA. “No one from the NCAA or EA sports has ever contacted me regarding roster editing,” says Kaldenberg, who has sought legal opinions regarding his exposure in his current venture.

Truth is, EA may not need to sue anyone out of existence, especially if that risks destroying a feature the majority of its installation base adores. If it can tip the balance so that works that are both complete and free win out on its network, that returns roster editing to the community of nonprofit enthusiasts and eliminates those making money off the NCAA or its amateurs’ likenesses. Jacobs and others see such an advantage being tacitly swayed to nonprofit editors.

“Our site is part of the EA Community Leaders program, and privately, we were told that they don’t like people charging for rosters,” Jacobs said. “Hence the EA Locker feature in NCAA 09.”

For its part, EA did not respond to an emailed request seeking comment. Roster editors say this is not a surprise: the ability to edit a roster is a content feature any publisher would, reasonably, not want to give up. In this case, discussing it inevitably acknowledges the cottage industry, for profit or otherwise, that provides gamers with full rosters against NCAA wishes. The less EA reacts, the less the situation is under its control, and the less it is accountable to its licensing partner.

Kaldenberg, if nothing else, is resilient and adaptable. His own record with his rivals proves that. In December, he won fkrosters.com through a third-party offering process. Vasquez, the site’s owner, says he didn’t know who was buying the site until the offer (made through GoDaddy) was accepted. Kaldenberg says Vasquez had every opportunity to reject the sale after learning of his bid.

Kaldenberg said Linder reached out to him late last year, offering him control of both the “Park Place and Boardwalk,” of roster mod domains, and hence the reason for the Monopoly board on PSXSports on Wednesday. An original package price of $16,000 in December eventually winnowed to $7,000 in June, said Kaldenberg. Linder, reached Thursday, said he offered the site because he was competing in a saturated broader market serving sports gamers, and wanted to rebrand his efforts in the roster-only space. To that end he launched EArosters.com on Thursday, his fourth URL since beginning his roster efforts in 2001. Linder said both sides reached an agreeable settlement.
"Brian and I are both competitors and I certainly appreciated his sense of humor," about the Monopoly board on his old URL, Linder said. "Brian purchased Park Place and Boardwalk, but he has to worry about people landing on Marvin Gardens or Pennsylvania Ave first. I just placed hotels on my green and yellow monopolies."
But if anything, Kaldenberg's survival in a cutthroat business environment has taught him valuable business lessons that many 25-year-olds don’t experience firsthand.

“I’ve learned to turn a deaf ear,” Kaldenberg said. “People say bad things about you, and I used to fight it and get upset, and then I'd just see it make matters worse. I’ve matured since my younger days, and I stay away from internet message board controversies. Customer service is more important. If a customer has a question or needs assistance, it’s much more important for me to spend my time responding to customers than to respond to someone criticizing me on another website.”

Kaldenberg’s largest for-profit competitor, Nick Cain’s sportrosters.com, remains somewhat above the fray and agnostic about the fate of for-profit roster editing. Cain, who only became interested in NCAA football because he found the gameplay more engaging than EA’s Madden series, said roster editing represents only 2 percent of a business portfolio that has included poker applications and adult business ventures.

Cain says Kaldenberg also approached him about buying sportrosters.com, but refused after being put off by the negotiating style.

“He bragged about his revenue,” said Cain, himself a coder who outsources his roster work to Indian writers working on console development kits. “We’ll I don’t bank on this money. This is funny money to me. I spend an hour a day maintaining my web sales. He can put up monopoly boards all day. But if EA Sports closes the door, well, it was fun while it lasted.”

I was pleased that the article provoked thoughtful, in-depth discussion about the treatment of race, gender and other social issues in games, but in debunking a single individual's attack on Grand Theft Auto, my intention was not to provide a blanket pass to games that permit (and arguably, in this case, promote) antisocial behavior. So I was more pleased at the commenters who criticized the virulence of my GTA IV defense than I was at those who agreed with me (though, hey, who doesn’t like to be agreed with?).

One of the ways I rationalized what I’d written is by noting that games are scapegoated and crucified at every turn by people who’ve never even played them, and that this unfair public flogging threatens the medium’s potential for mainstream legitimacy.

Why those who make games don’t defend their own craft vigorously is a question for another time, but my position has been that the least we can do is to return these volleys when they’re aimed our way. If we want to see games truly thrive and grow away from stigma, it’s our responsibility, really.

And that’s why the most irresponsible thing we can ever do as gamers is to speak the phrase, “It’s only a game.”

We Live At A Flashpoint

It can be said that it’s fair for gamers to be defensive. After all, we’ve got heaps of prejudice to confront. Social, ethical and political warriors seem to feel they can tear down the things we love after only second-hand experience, our generational peers have called us strange for decades, and the myriad brilliant little revelations we’ve discovered through play over the years go completely overlooked in the broader world we belong to.

We’ve also developed a heavily internet-based culture. Many of us have plenty of “real world” gaming pals, and online game services make it easier for us to play with friends we can actually speak to. But a strong central vein of the gaming audience does its group socializing on the boards, blogs and forums that comprise the backbone of our world, and that format means that we’ve got the ability to react immediately - with all the force and venom that anonymity enables. That reactionary, passionate society becomes self-perpetuating.

Those are the largest reasons why our community arguments around games are so passionate. And when someone, rationally or otherwise, criticizes a game’s themes for being too violent, too sexual, racially offensive or gender-biased, we can almost predict the number of comments the discussion will spiral madly into, with a sigh, and a here we go.

We can understand clearly how we came to be so defensive, and to an extent we recognize the necessity of standing up for ourselves. But if we engage in what one Kotaku commenter referred to as “screeching industry apologetics,” we must beg the question: are we really serving games?

Looking in the Mirror

I sometimes enjoy being violent when I play Grand Theft Auto. And sometimes I just enjoy the mission-based gameplay, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the ragdoll physics of a body crumpling over the hood of my car to be cool, and I suspect many of you would be at least slightly untruthful in that assertion, too.

I used the wrench a lot of the time in BioShock just because I loved the satisfying thud of metal on Splicer flesh, the meticulously crafted clink and thud, the way my victim dropped like deadweight. Someone programmed that in, deliberately, as if just for me.

Sometimes when I’m playing a first-person shooter, I wish the skull splattering would be just a little more grisly. Satisfying.

I was a Little Sister killer, and feel the game experience was more meaningful because I went there.

We can do these things and many more in our games; we can shove, shatter, abuse and denigrate. We can ogle Soulcalibur breast physics, we can get “environmental kills,” pantyshots, a meat hook.

Suppose you didn’t play video games at all, and merely were a person who fantasized for two to three hours each day, or however much time you spend gaming on a daily basis, about wrenching people in the head, about chainsawing half-dressed women, or about mowing people down during a war. Or about that quintessential chestnut: hiring a prostitute only to beat her up and take your money back.

Would you be healthy?

Our Own Little World

Now, be calm. Of course, it’s a great big leap between playing a game and having a really unhealthy conscience. A game is, well, a game, and games are neither reality nor reality-simulators. But as realism becomes a priority in development, as we demand more immersion, more emotional impact, more game worlds we can really believe in, “it’s only a game” will become more and more a flimsy excuse for why we love to do what we do.

We so desperately want “more choice” in games, more freedom, and more insight into how our choices impact the game world – and this is because we want to experiment. Human beings no longer live in an era where they must fight each other for social dominance, survive harsh elements or kill their food, but some lingering relic of that instinct probably persists, and it’s probably that itch that we scratch when we’re playing a violent game.

At least, that has something to do with it. Another part is, I think, we enjoy learning about ourselves based on the actions we take in simulated environments. Of all the things we do in games, very little of it can safely, legally or literally be replicated in reality – we’ll never fly a spaceship, we’ll never save a planet, we’ll never sleep with a blue alien.

And obviously, not all the things we do in games, not nearly, could be construed as reprehensible. Gamers also love their peaceful Azeroth sunsets, their epics of aging mercenaries, their interludes of salvation.

But when we defend attacks on game content with “geez, it’s only a game,” then we’re also relegating those moments of meaning to mere two-dimensional thrills.

The Hard Questions

“It’s only a game” is a phrase that agrees with all of those who ever looked down their noses at the medium, who want to nutshell it as a child’s plaything, who want to promote the kind of prejudice that will keep games from ever achieving widespread respect for everything they are.

When gamers ask whether the imagery of a white man shooting through a vacant-eyed sea of African villagers feels all right to them, we do ourselves a massive disservice when we simply dismiss questions like that, when we attack each other.

Whether or not you like murdering whores in GTA IV, we do ourselves a massive disservice when we fail to use that as a springboard to consider our own, and our community’s attitude toward women.

So it may be our responsibility to defend games, to explain them when they’re misjudged, to support our right to the full spectrum of emotion and experience they offer, both delightful and disturbing.

But questions like MTV Multiplayer's Steven Totilo's (our kind guest editor this week), asking, "Are Games Our Fantasies?" ought not to be brushed under the rug.

It must also be our responsibility to uphold a willingness to examine games, to discuss them civilly, to be willing to see what we're saying about ourselves through play. To have answers for the really hard questions: “Do these actions we take in games affect us as people? Does interactivity make it unfair to compare harsh content in games to the same content in movies?”

We want to defend, we want to react, and we want to forgive, because we want to love games and everything about them. And sometimes, we just don’t want to think at all, and we’d rather just play, thank-you-very-much, and that’s fine.

But don’t say “it’s just a game.” For gaming’s most passionate fans, there should never be any “just” about it.