Category Archives: Gaming

The Mold Republic or some kind of pun like that, I dunno

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Star Wars: The Old RepublicI was reluctant to agree with this article’s extremely negative assessment of Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s F2P model until the author got to his own ideas for how it should have been implemented; then it all began to click into place.

Conclusion? Lock out parts of the story and give free players unlimited access to multiplayer content. In other words, the exact opposite of what BioWare actually did.

It began to make sense to me because it dredged up memories from my childhood, long before “free to play” existed as a business model. Sometime after shareware stopped being a thing, developers who wanted to give away portions of their game for free (as a gift, not a demo, which is a different situation) did indeed tend to give away the multiplayer portions. It was the singleplayer content that would be reserved for paying customers.

It’s possible that this has been going on since well before I remember, but my earliest memory of this happening was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Half a decade later Sierra did it with F.E.A.R. (which is annoying to type, but not as much so as S.T.A.L.K.E.agh my fingers). Just a few months ago EA of all people started giving away the multiplayer-only Battlefield 1942. (I suspect somebody pulled the old “ask them while they’re half-asleep” trick on EA’s execs.)

In all of these cases, the reaction that I perceived amongst gamers was mostly “holy shit that’s awesome.” It was largely seen as a gift, not as a marketing ploy. Given the timing, you could make a reasonably strong case for the latter two being attempts to drum up interest in, and thus ultimately revenue for, the console version of F.E.A.R. and Battlefield 3, respectively, but the fact that people didn’t approach that fact nearly as cynically as they do TOR’s free-to-play system just goes to show that there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about carving up your game and giving pieces of it away for free.

And while there is, correspondingly, a right way and a wrong way to do free-to-play, the fact that publishers now regard it as a business model rather than a gift is probably a large part of the problem. If you give somebody a cupcake (or a hit of crack) in an attempt to entice them into buying more cupcakes (or crack) in the future, they still tend to accept the initial cupcake at face value, because technically there are no strings attached. Poorly-implemented F2P is more akin to giving somebody a free cupcake in a lockbox and then charging them $5 for the key, while still pretending that it constitutes a gift.

Wait, what was my point with all this? I guess that back when developers and publishers had a better reputation for generosity, it was usually the multiplayer portions of their games they were giving away while charging for the singleplayer, rather than vice versa. I’m just observing a correlation there, rather than claiming that A causes B. For the record, most well-received F2P MMOs more closely resemble the author’s other suggestion:

Instead, I’d go the extra light-year and sell alternate space ships. Currently every class only ever gets one ship, but I’d plunk down alternatives and charge a good $50 to $100 in the store for them. Seriously. It’s the ultimate cosmetic upgrade and a perfect example of the kind of thing you can sell for very big bucks.

Of course, if you did that, you’d also have to let players ride on each other’s ships. How else would you show off your new digs to your buddies? Then take another step to add a ship decoration system, where you can get furniture and what not and decorate your ship, much like house decoration in all those other MMORPGs. Have looted decorations, have crafted decorations, and — of course — fill the cash shop with premium decorations.

This pretty much exactly describes Star Trek Online’s business model (minus the furniture), although STO suffers from its acquisition by one of the shoddiest F2P publishers on the planet. At any rate, the STO players who can actually still access their accounts don’t seem to complain too much about it.

Gearbox Software: We’re not sexist, but women suck at games and also graphic rape is badass

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This story’s over a month old, so for that and other reasons I’m not going to go on a rant about it. The fuckupery here should be self-evident. The story, as briefly as possible, is this:

[T]he Mechromancer skill tree that helps video game newcomers is formally called Best Friends Forever. But Borderlands 2 lead designer John Hemingway referred to it numerous times as “girlfriend mode”.

Borderlands 2, just so we’re on the same page, is developed by Gearbox Software. Gearbox Software, just so we’re on the same page, is also responsible for this:

Duke Nukem Forever box coverSo I’m seeing a trend here. John Hemingway was not actually personally involved in the production of Duke Nukem Forever, but the fact remains that Gearbox seems to foster a disturbing tolerance of misogyny.

But as with white people in matters of race, you can’t really be sexist if you just say you’re not:

“There is no universe where Hemingway is a sexist,” Pitchford added.

Yes, yes there is: this universe. But don’t worry, some of his best friends are black women:

“All the women at Gearbox would beat his and anyone else’s ass.”

Tablets and smartphones are not the future of gaming

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At the very least, so far as I can tell, it’s not as inevitable as some like to claim. The enthusiasm of some is understandable. I have an Android tablet myself. I’m not opposed to mobile platforms, or to gaming on them. But sweeping statements like this make me roll my eyes a little:

Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all working on next-gen gaming consoles, but it’s already inevitable that the next great gaming platform is the cloud.

Especially when reasoning like this is applied:

By the end of this year, a number of Android devices will be able to stream flagship console games and the experience will feel just like you are playing a game console hooked up to a TV.

No, it won’t. Because when I want to play a “flagship game,” I don’t want to do it hunched over a 10-inch screen. I’ve played a couple OnLive games on my tablet, mostly for the novelty. It was an interesting and (again) novel experience, but not one that would ever, ever replace my everyday PC gaming experience.

People want to play video games on the go, there’s no question about that. We’ve been doing it since the Game Boy came out in 1989. (Or, if you had an Epyx Handy Game, you’ve been doing it since 1987, but I think I can safely guess that you didn’t have an Epyx Handy Game.) Smartphones and tablets have been serving that function since their inception, as well, and doing a fine job of it (especially if you have a few emulators on your Android device, as you should). But the purveyors of this “tablets are the future of all gaming ever!” nonsense always focus solely on the graphics. They’re very impressed that tablets and smartphones can output (roughly) console-quality graphics these days, and they’re right to be impressed.

But many of them appear convinced that this is all it takes for tablets to replace consoles. They’re wrong. Say you want to play a console-quality manshooter on your tablet. There are plenty of these (ostensibly) out there. But after playing for about three seconds, you realize that touch controls are a pretty shitty way to play a manshooter. But that’s okay, because an increasing number of tablets these days support gamepads! And just like that you’ve eliminated all the advantages of the tablet as a mobile gaming platform. Congratulations.

See, if I’m sitting on an airplane, I don’t want to take out my tablet, prop it up, then take out my gamepad, unwind its USB cord, plug it in, and sit there looking like a complete tool on an airplane. There’s a reason the DS and PSP (and every handheld console that came before them) have controls integrated right into their bodies.

Incidentally, if tablet gaming is the future of all gaming, why are so many successful Android and iOS games migrating to PC? (See here, here, here.)

Well said (re: Mass Effect 3)

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I’ve deliberately avoided wading into the waters about the ending of Mass Effect 3, if only because I’m pretty sure nobody cares about my opinion on it. Suffice it to say I fall on the “displeased” side of that spectrum. Anyway, Ethan Gach sez:

To my mind, to disparagingly call those consumers who are petitioning BioWare for a new ending “entitled” is not only extreme, but misguided. It fundamentally misunderstands the business relationship that gaming companies have actively sought to foster with their customers. Companies like EA expect consumers to spend extra money for content that is arguably part of the “core” gameplay experience. Why shouldn’t consumers seek to shape the kinds of DLC that are released in response? For while some are arguing that frustrated consumers are asking BioWare to sacrifice its creative vision and authorial integrity, the truth is that most video games already did that a long time ago, and of their own accord.

A gamer notices that women have personalities in addition to boobs

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I was surprised by the quality of Bob’s discussion of the portrayal of women in video games, if only because I haven’t generally been led to expect reasoned opinions about feminism from gamers or even gaming journalism. And while it’s true that this is a topic that has been discussed to death, Bob does make some novel points about the way body language is used in designing video game characters. As he says, the root problem isn’t putting sexy people in video games; the root problem is that male video game characters can be sexy and still have personalities, while sexy female video game characters’ personalities often don’t extend beyond “likes showing off her cleavage.”

Why yes, we do live in a culture where rape is more acceptable than consensual sex

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Duke Nukem Forever box coverThat’s right, it’s another Duke Nukem Forever post. But I’m not really interested in discussing the content of the game itself, except briefly. Yes, it’s horrifying. That much is well established. Instead, I’d rather put the game in a certain context – a context that doesn’t justify the game or its content by any means, but does point to some disturbing trends in our culture.

Anna at A Random String of Bits covers does a good job covering the nature of the content of the game, and at one point she quotes a particularly enlightening Destructoid review:

…at times, the game’s attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific. One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

In itself none of this is incredibly surprising – though certainly it’s very disturbing. The game walks the player through the kind of scenery described above, but the game does not allow you to attempt to rescue the women, nor does it seem to understand that you might want to. (Well, you can kill them to put them out of their misery.) What kind of hero does that make Duke? Well, as Destructoid says, certainly not a likable one.

DNF takes the “damsel in distress” trope to an extreme, and not in some clever, deconstructionist way so much as just a stomach-churning way. The women in the game are literally objects with no agency whatsoever. Say what you will about Alyx Vance, but Valve at least acknowledges that women are people.

And you know something – just as an aside? I’m fucking sick of seeing this kind of shit put out time and time again with a bunch of boilerplate proclamations about how it’s “manly” and a “celebration of masculinity.” That’s the line we’re fed over and over when a game or movie comes out; the people behind them act like masculinity doesn’t get celebrated enough in our culture. It does (more than enough, by far), and I’m tired of being told that the way to celebrate my penis is by pretending that it’s what makes me worthy of regard as a human.

But anyway, in the blog post linked above, Anna said something that helped me put this vile shit in context:

I would suggest that, if we’re going to have a rating system at all, the ESRB’s rating of M is dismissive of the seriousness of rape; this game should absolutely be AO.

Well yes, obviously. But it’s not, and I agree that giving Duke an M rating despite featuring on-screen graphic rape is incredibly dismissive of the seriousness of rape. But what disturbs me even more is the kind of games that do get an AO rating in the US. The first one that jumped to my mind was Fahrenheit, which we in the US know as Indigo Prophecy. Some content was cut from Indigo Prophecy in order to avoid its initial AO rating, and that content was… a single consensual sex scene. (Well, also the shower scene shows Carla’s nipples in the non-US version.) The ESRB’s reasoning was that the sex scene was interactive, but I don’t care how interactive it is, because it doesn’t feature murdering women who are in the process of being raped. In my mind that makes it a fair bit less “adults only” than DNF.

Similar censorship occurred in the case of The Witcher. Its US release also had a lot of content cut out (all of which was later reinstated in a downloadable patch, fortunately), because there’s a hell of a lot of sex in that game. The Witcher has received criticism from some for its protagonist’s philandering ways, the way he seemingly treats women as conquests, and the way the game itself portrays those women (admittedly, there does seem to be a correlation between a woman’s breast size in the game and how likely she is to be horny for Geralt). But again, however you feel about the portrayal of sex in The Witcher, it’s all consensual. And yet that gets censored and DNF gets a pass.

Are you starting to notice a trend here? It’s almost like our culture reacts more strongly to depictions of consensual sex than it does to depictions of rape! And yes, it does, because while rape scenes may be portraying violence, consensual sex scenes are portraying women with subjectivity and agency, making sexual choices for themselves, and as we all know that’s way worse. Let’s take a peek outside of the world of video games for a final example:

Emily Browning was left fuming after her sex scene with Jon Hamm in Sucker Punch was axed from the upcoming action movie in a bid to please U.S. censors. [...]

She tells Nylon magazine, “I had a very tame and mild love scene with Jon Hamm. It was like heavy breathing and making out. It was hardly a sex scene… I think that it’s great for this young girl to actually take control of her own sexuality. Well, the MPAA doesn’t like that. They don’t think a girl should ever be in control of her own sexuality because they’re from the Stone Age. I don’t know what the f**k is going on and I will openly criticize it, happily. So essentially, they got Zack to edit the scene and make it look less like she’s into it. And Zack said he edited it down to the point where it looked like he was taking advantage of her. That’s the only way he could get a PG-13 (rating) and he said, ‘I don’t want to send that message.’ So they cut the scene!”

I respect Zack Snyder for that. And that’s pretty much all I respect Zack Snyder for. But yes, just to reiterate, consensual sex = R, while rape = PG-13. What a lovely country we live in.

Leave It to Vault Boy: Privilege, Nuclear War, and Exploding Heads

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Vault Boy

If you follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, you’ll recognize this as my avatar. If you’re a fan of the Fallout games, you’ll recognize it as Vault Boy (not Pip Boy). I use him as my avatar because I, too, am a huge fan of the Fallout games, but also for a more pertinent reason: Vault Boy is basically a symbol of privilege.

The lily white skin and Aryan hair wasn’t chosen lightly. There’s a lot of commentary about classism and mid-20th-century cultural conformity hidden under the surface of the game’s premise. The fact that the game’s designers recognized the connection between those social attitudes and the perpetual warfare state that America was becoming around the same time, which is ultimately what leads to the nuclear annihilation in the game’s universe, is heartwarming.

(A lot of the subtlety and subtext embedded in the Fallout lore was lost with Fallout 3, of course, but that’s what happens when you let Bethesda design your video games.)

The series’ retro-futurist aesthetic wasn’t chosen at random, after all. Retro-futurism in general has gotten a bit trite, in my opinion, and in fact this was true even when Fallout was released in 1997. But the visual design doesn’t stand alone – it’s an important component of the game’s thematic purpose, which is to take American society in the 1950s, with all its gaping ideological contradictions, xenophobia, and normalization of white suburban life, and extrapolate that straight into the 21st century, where it all gets vaporized by a global nuclear exchange.

The biggest tip-off that this is what the series is really about comes from the intro of Fallout 2, which is a tad bit less subtle than its predecessor. In the intro, an orientation video instructs survivors of the nuclear war to use the GECK to render the wasteland habitable again. This is the promise it makes:

Screenshot from Fallout 2It’s an amusing moment the first time you see it in the video; GECK stands for Garden of Eden Creation Kit (the name is goofy because it was originally a joke in the Fallout manual before it became a real thing in Fallout 2), so when it promises to revitalize the wasteland, you’re expecting images of lush vegetation and fertile oases. But as it turns out, in a twist that shouldn’t surprise you as much as it does, what the middle- and upper-class Americans watching the orientation video consider “habitable” is suburbia. The image of a post-nuclear suburbia is a lie, of course, but it’s the image the people want to see.

Fallout 2's GECK

Retro-futurism: Like steampunk, but without the hard-on for Victoriana. (Oh yeah, almost forgot, this is the GECK.)

A lot of post-apocalyptic books and movies portray the apocalypse as a sort of reboot for the human race. The society that gets built on the other side of Armageddon may or may not be ideal, but it’s essentially a tabula rasa. The result could be anything, and there’s no telling if it’ll resemble the consumerist military state of post-WW2 America.

That’s something that would inevitably terrify the privileged classes of pre-apocalypse America. They don’t want a reboot – the status quo is working out just fine for them, thankyouverymuch. And those privileged people are the ones who can afford to go into the Vaults, so when you hand those people a GECK, saying, “This will fertilize the soil so you can farm!” isn’t going to come across as a great sales pitch. The only future they’re going to feel comfortable looking forward to is one where they can still live in their comfortable Leave It to Beaver fantasyland in which they get to pretend that they’re the hard workers of the world and the people outside their neighborhoods, the ones growing, delivering, and preparing their food, among other things, are a bunch of lazy bums.

This class anxiety isn’t confined to the intro videos. In fact, a lot of the violence that occurs in the world of Fallout is part of larger, ideological conflict regarding what kind of society the people of that world are trying to build for themselves. There are those who want to be capitalist overlords, those who want a purely egalitarian society, and a lot of people in between. And the thing that makes all this work in F1 and 2 (and the thing that’s missing from F3′s ridiculous caricatures of class conflict) is that the people involved don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing. They’re fighting one battle at a time, be it against corrupt casino magnates or armies of supermutants, and are largely unaware that they’re engaged in a battle of ideologies that will decide the future shape of society.

The irony, of course, is that the nuclear holocaust everyone was so afraid of during the Cold War would have been caused by our country’s destructive foreign policy, a policy designed specifically to sustain the very middle class that was so afraid of a post-nuclear world without cul-de-sacs and front yards. The military-industrial complex seems to believe that it can remain balanced on the razor’s edge of perpetual warfare. Fallout is a game about what happens when they fail.

Straight Male Privilege Dude Sez: Stop making games for people that aren’t us!

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(h/t No More Lost via Lady Victoria at Manboobz)

I had a real problem with the sexuality in Bioware’s RPGs prior to Jade Empire. Namely, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, where you had two romance options: one was the opposite of your PC’s gender, and the other was a woman. In other words, your choices, depending on your choice of PC gender, were two straight romances, or one straight romance and one lesbian romance.

Commander Shepard finds that it's far easier to transgress traditional gender boundaries when the genderless alien he's having sex with has breasts and is voiced by a woman.

This tends to give off the impression that the lesbians are only there because it gives their target demographic of young males boners. But in their other (relatively) recent RPGs they’ve done something about this. Jade Empire and both Dragon Age games have hetero, gay man, and gay woman romance options. This is an excellent move away from heteronormativity on their part, and I was pleased with them for doing it.

But a certain Bioware fan is not happy about this one bit. As a straight male, he’s accustomed to being pandered to exclusively, and he’s got all sorts of rationalizations about why it should stay that way.

His name is Bastal, and he’s here to call Bioware out:

To summarize, in the case of Dragon Age 2, BioWare neglected their main demographic: The Straight Male Gamer.

I don’t think many would argue with the fact that the overwhelming majority of RPG gamers are indeed straight and male. Sure, there are a substantial amount of women who play video games, but they’re usually gamers who play games like The Sims, rather than games like Dragon Age. That’s not to say there isn’t a significant number of women who play Dragon Age and that BioWare should forego the option of playing as a women altogether, but there should have been much more focus in on making sure us male gamers were happy.

But Bastal, you might be asking, how do you know straight males are such an overwhelming majority of Dragon Age players? Oh, don’t worry, Bastal has you covered with exact figures and percentages pulled straight out of his ass:

The straight male demographic is a huge demographic. I’d put the number that over 80% of RPG fans are males. They all like different things, this is a group numbering millions. Now you also have another group, the homosexual group, I’d say generously, that this group represents 5%.

Well, that settles that. And like your average conservative pundit, Bastal sure does long for the days when you could just pretend that the unprivileged groups didn’t even exist:

Its ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamer, when in the past I would only have to say fans

Those women and gays have invaded our games, dammit! They’re moving into our neighborhoods, taking our jobs, and now they’re playing our Dragon Age! I’ll bet Obama forced the banks to approve loans for unqualified gays and women to purchase Xbox 360s, too!

David Gaider, a senior writer at Bioware who served as the lead writer for both Dragon Age and its sequel, responded to Bastal in an appropriately pointed manner:

The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer”. They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else.

[...]

And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

I take my hat off to you, Mr. Gaider. I was impressed enough when Bioware started including gay romance options in their games, and I’m even more impressed to see them standing firmly by their decision without flinching or apologizing.

Bastal replied with the cluelessnses and predictability of someone who wonders why there’s no White Entertainment Television:

The idea of privilege is ridiculous. The “privilege” always lies with the majority because if your goal is to make a game that will be liked by as many fans possible, then it makes sense to focus on that largest group. Why should one fan’s enjoyment be more important than five others? It’d more accurate to call “privilege” the idea that some minority group gets special preference for political points. If you really want to be all-inclusive, then I don’t see why homosexuals should get special preference while leaving other minority groups out.

I don’t think Bastal understands the implications of Gaider’s statement that Bioware has “good numbers [...] on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO.” See, Dragon Age contains a layer of Internet interactivity that, frankly, was forced on it by Bioware’s new owner, EA. I’m not a fan of it, but the point here is that Bioware’s servers kept track of the path each player was following through the game, and every decision each player made. I know this because the information is reflected in my online profile at Bioware’s community site. It makes perfect sense for Bioware to compile this information in order to get a statistical overview of what parts of the game people most liked, and use this information to inform the design of the sequel. That’s just good business sense.

But as Gaider himself points out, it doesn’t really matter. Unless their numbers showed that nobody was taking advantage of the gay romance options (and we all know that’s not the case), the fact that the people who do are in the minority doesn’t mean they have less right to play a character who reflects their sexuality. I’m certainly not saying that you should have to player a character that reflects your sexuality, but the ability to do so is a privilege straight male gamers have enjoyed for a long, long time. And Bastal doesn’t like women and gays getting to sit at that table with him. If they must play games, they could at least have the decency to pretend to be straight men; wouldn’t want to offend poor Bastal’s sensibilities.

Instead of bitching about patriarchy, let me take a moment to bitch about a video game

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Gamers everywhere are filling their underwear with whatever sexual-arousal-related emission applies to their gender at the release of the new Elder Scrolls V trailer. Allow me to provide a voice of dissent.

I mean, I just have to wonder: Has anybody looked past the bombastic music, the voice of Max von Sydow, and the effin dragons long enough to notice that this is terrible? Generic fantasy world, generic fantasy story, and blatant rips from Dragon Age, and everyone is excited about this? (In fairness, Dragon Age‘s setting is pretty damn generic, too, but as a game it’s also far superior to anything Bethesda has produced ever, sooooooo…)

If it follows the pattern of the series thus far, culminating especially in Elder Scrolls IV, it’ll have a pleasantly huge, admittedly well-detailed game world, brought to life with shallow roleplaying, simplistically implemented factions, AI that’s so advanced and groundbreaking that it manages to be laughably terrible, and the worst leveling/stat system imaginable. Oh yeah, and a generic, overblown story.

I will admit that Elder Scrolls IV had me excited about its story, until I realized that the only reason I was excited was because it was being narrated by Patrick Stewart.

What’s particularly funny to me is that some people are convinced that Bethesda is just so great at making living, breathing worlds. They’re not. They’re good at making large, reasonably well-crafted worlds. But living and breathing? Please. They spent a great deal of time making NPCs that walk around and stare at a different wall depending on the time of day, all to mask the fact that their worlds are actually pretty static and, beneath the surface, have no real existence beyond what’s needed to serve the story and the player’s perspective.

There are games that do a far better job of portraying a persistent, living world, but they don’t generate the hype that Elder Scrolls does because they look like this

and this

That’s right. I went there. I just implied that Elder Scrolls is too mainstream. I’m the gaming equivalent of a hipster.