The Escapist has an article about a new art game called Lose/Lose, that attempts to add a sense of permanence and consequence to the standard shmup formula by deleting a random file from your hard drive every time you shoot down an enemy alien. Although it probably won’t be a huge hit for obvious reasons, as an art piece it makes an interesting statement, and is worth a look.

However, I found this part of the artist’s statement to be kind of funny:

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

Putting value in totally abstract commodities that are managed by systems we don’t understand well? Obviously, he hasn’t been paying much attention to the recent financial crisis. We’ve been off the gold standard for a while now. Going back even further (MUCH further), consider all the abstract commodities like love, companionship, esteem, and sense of belonging that we routinely put in the hands of other people - probably the most incomprehensible machines on the planet.

I just love it when people act like we were living in a totally concrete world until about 30 years ago when computers suddenly introduced the idea of abstraction. Not True.

Youtube user keinert has uploaded some videos of some pre-digital arcade games - electro-mechanical predecessors to modern arcade machines from before microcircuitry became cheap and ubiquitous. Keinert treats viewers to lots of minor details and there’s some real ingenuity on display here, evidence of clever designers trying to create compelling experiences despite severe limitations. This stuff borders on steampunk…

Gamepolitics has links to the recent game violence episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit on YouTube. The infamous duo attacked the topic with their usual M.O.: lots of hard facts, an equal amount of foul language (no nudity this time, oh well) and, for those who stick with it to the end, a moment of sober reflection and a truly moving moment of television.

Facts I learned that I didn’t actually already know, which I’ve tried to verify (with mixed results):

1. 665 high school students have died playing football since 1931. This is true according to a report by the National Center for Catastophic Sports Injuries, but it is actually a little bit bullshit itself, since fatalities per year have dropped considerably since 1931 because things have been done to reduce these “catastrophic injuries”, so going back all the way to 1931 inflates the number a little. Nevertheless, 7 kids died playing football in 2008 and that doesn’t include another 7 fatalities where football was considered an indirect cause (actual causes in these cases are things like heat stroke and heart problems).  So that’s 7 kids dead because they were attacked by another kid who was told to do so by a grownup in charge as part of a friendly game.  I’d say the number of deaths/year is, on average, probably more than the death toll from school shootings which, at best, can be considered a very indirect result of playing violent videogame.

2. The FBI and Secret Service have found no connection between school shootings and videogames and the only common thread they could find among school shooters is that they are male and depressed. I’m not sure where they got this info from. This “Threat Assessment” released by the FBI in 2007 mentions violent videogames numerous times in terms of profiling possible school shooters. Its possible that the “male and depressed” bit was found in a study that wasn’t trying to find a videogame connection.

3. The largest school killing spree (44 dead, 58 injured) was committed with explosives in 1927 by a 55 year old man. According to Wikipedia, Andrew Kehoe did it because he was upset about property taxes. I shudder to think how bent out of shape he got about zoning regulations…. So it is true, but Penn’s use of that fact to illustrate that not all school killings are done with guns was a bit pedantic to say the least.

Offworld waxes ecstatic about Treasure World for the DS. On the one hand, a game that essentially brings casual geo-caching to the masses would seem to be a great way to dispel fears that videogames will turn our children into shut-ins. On the other hand, the pessimist in me wonders how long it will be before some kid chases stardust into someplace he/she doesn’t belong, and the game gets blamed for luring our kids into into danger. If that’s not irresistable fodder for junk-news shows (ie. all news shows these days), I don’t know what is.

Yup, I’m a control freak. I’m obsessed with controllers and user interfaces, so I decided to create a little recurring column just to talk about them.

Today I thought I’d talk about a particular controller feature that I’ve always been fascinated with: The START button. It’s been featured on the controllers of almost every console for more than 20 years and I’m pretty sure it started with the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  Early NES games featured primitive menus that were navigated by cycling through the options with the SELECT button and signifying your choice by pressing START.  This was a holdover to similar buttons located on the body of consoles like the Atari 2600.

At some point, developers realized that the other controls on the pad were perfectly capable of performing these tasks - the d-pad allowed the player to move the selection cursor down and up (!) and the A and B buttons were more comfortable to press and the B button and gave players a “back button” to return to previous menus.  All in all, it made menu navigation work much like playing the game itself.  The START button continued to be used for its secondary purpose of pausing the game (which is consistent with the dual-purpose PLAY/PAUSE buttons found on modern stereo equipment) and, as more advanced games required more sophisticated controls, the SELECT button was quickly relegated to other tasks.

Technically, the START button did retain its original purpose - most games had a title screen that simply said “Press Start”, which the player had to do in order to get to the menu.  This is a bit of an odd design decision, though.  Since the title screen will only accept one input, any button could be used.  It seems like it would be simpler to display the message “Press ANY Button” and accept any input accordingly.  That would at least save novice players from having to hunt for the (usually tiny, out of the way) START button.  The only reason I can think of for these screens to exist as they do is to justify the labeling of the START button as it is.

And label it as such they did, as one controller after another featured the eventually ubiquitous START button.  Meanwhile, its pause functionality was, in most games, expanded to include a menu that would pop up when the game was paused.  One of the most common items on this menu was EXIT or QUIT, allowing the player to go back to the main menu.  In other words, even though the START buttons wasn’t really neccessary to start games, it was being tasked to pause and stop games.  Yet every major console developer continued to label it START and force users to press it at the title screen for no reason!

It is ironic, yet ultimately unsurprising, that the first company to release a major console without a START button on the controller is the same company that started it all: Nintendo.   The simple, streamlined controller of the Wii features no button marked START.  But as I play my newly downloaded copy of Tetris Party I decide, mid-game, that I want to try a different game mode…

How do you pause the game?  How do you bring up the menu to quit?

I can press the little blue house button, but that menu only allows me to exit all the back to the Wii menu, which isn’t what I want to do.  It turns out that, in order to duplicate that START button functionality, I’m supposed to press the (+) button.  Yeah, that’s intuitive.  Given that the START button, however mis-named it might be, has been very usefully employed for pausing the game and bringing up menus in pretty much every single console game in over 20 years, you might think that Nintendo would find it sufficiently important to put a button marked PAUSE or MENU on their controller.

After all, the (+) and (-) buttons aren’t even very useful.   They’re primary use is to flip channels in the entirely underwhelming Wii channel sytem, but this is obviously a very specialized purpose that isn’t applicable to any games and, like the SELECT button before it, the functionality can easily and intuitively be duplicated by the D-pad (which is used for channel surfing on many modern TV remotes anyway).  Considering Nintendo’s obvious attempt to aggressively strip away unneccessary controls, its hard to understand why they chose to add these buttons and not a PAUSE or MENU button.

Its actually one of many UI decisions on the Wii that leave me scratching my head.  But its a mistake that Nintendo made, and Nintendo is on top again so, if history is any indication, we should be seeing lots of controllers with useless (+)(-) buttons on them.  Then again, maybe if the new motion detection controls being developed by Microsoft and Sony take off, we just won’t have any more buttons to mislabel!

It has come to our attention that you have fallen down one of the many bottomless pits that inexplicably litter almost every platform game ever made.  First of all, let me be the first to applaud you on your performance up to that point.  You were able to make it most of the way through the level without taking a single point of damage and that’s something to be proud of.  In truth, you only made a small, understandable mistake and one that was easy to make (especially considering we designed everything around the pit specifically so that you would fall into it).  However, falling down a pit is a special kind of mistake that warrants the same punishment as several of the other ordinary, bone-headed mistakes that you might make, which is why we had to send you back to the beginning of the level.  We regret that none of the many power-ups that you had been dutifully collecting could save you from this fate.

You made the wrong mistake.

Unfortunately, bottomless pits in platform games are a genre convention that we are powerless to affect and they have to kill you instantly because if they didn’t then the surreal fantasy worlds we create would be marginally less believable (so don’t give us any of that Sly Cooper crap).  It is, for some reason, very important that there be a category of hazards whose consequences are completely divorced from your performance in the rest of the level, and that’s that.

Thank you for playing our game, and we look forward to needlessly frustrating you in the future.

Your’s Truly,

99% Of Console Game Developers

The debate over media violence is one that is relevant to many gamers, as well as parents of gamers. As I was getting caught up on my RSS feeds I came across some videos on the topic, one of which is funny (though rather gory), the other is tragic (but kinda funny).

First, the tragic, a story by Charlie Brooker for the BBC about the coverage of the recent shooting in Germany. In the second half it juxtaposes the advice of a forensic psychologist about how best to cover these stories with clips of the media epically failing to follow said advice, suggesting that the news media is just as complicit in spreading violence as any other media.

On a lighter note, The Onion asks the question “Should We Be Doing More To Reduce The Graphic Violence In Our Dreams?” in a hilariously spot-on round table debate. As I said though, it does get rather gory and disturbing (at the 1:59 mark).

Should We Be Doing More To Reduce The Graphic Violence In Our Dreams?

“But I don’t want a dead baby.”

“Well then why did you come to Best Buy?”

Brilliant.

UPDATE: If you prefer sex to violence, you might want to check out this other, NSFW, clip from the Onion about how porn is inflating our children’s expectations about sex, which talks about games like Grand Theft Auto near the end:

Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

This was posted on gampolitics.com a while ago, but I just had to compare it my mockup of what The Fifth Estate thinks game boxes should look like.  Although mine was meant to seem absurd, it really doesn’t hold a candle to this real-life example, which almost makes the title unreadable.  Apparently, knowing what you are buying isn’t really important when the government doesn’t think you should be buying it.

The controversies over videogame violence and addiction are, of course, just the latest in a long history of moral panics over things like Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal music, comic books and even the waltz.  Knowing this, I always wondered if there were similar concerns triggered by the advent of cheaply available books after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.  It wasn’t hard to imagine, but I never had a concrete example until I came across this article on gaurdian.co.uk.  about Samuel Auguste André David Tissot’s book, Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons, with Proper Rules for Preventing Their Fatal Consequences, and Instructions for Their Cure.  The article features some choice quotes in which the good doctor relates cases of patients suffering from fainting, palpitations, complete and total hair loss, madness, and ironically, idiocy as a result of too much studying.

Although I naturally felt vindicated by reading the article, I was surprised by the source.  I always imagined these concerns coming from illiterate, uneducated parents who were somehow able to scrape enough money together to send their children to school and then didn’t know what to make of their newfound tendency to sit and stare like zombies for hours on end at the incomprehensible squiggles on the page.  To hear this sort of thing from a highly educated, obviously literate person came as a surprise.

Then again, given what some of our so-called experts say about videogames, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

(via Mind Hacks)

For those who don’t recognise it, the graphics in the banner are from my favorite arcade game of all time, Wonderboy In Monsterland, captured from an actual game that I played in which I was able to buy all the “legendary” gear.  Today, another milestone: beat the game on one credit and broke 1,000,000,000pts!  Yay me.  Apparently its possible to get a lot more by “leeching”, but I don’t like to waste time.

I was also suprised to find that somone posted a walkthrough series for this game on Youtube:

Not the best game ever made, but I always had a soft spot for arcade games that tried to be RPG’s and bad “engrish” translations.  This one and Cadash ate a lot of my quarters back in the day.