If you read Magical Wasteland regularly, you are probably already aware of Kill Screen Magazine. I contributed a piece to issue #1, the No Fun Issue. It is called “Winner” and is about how overly competitive situations can drive out the fun of games. There is a lot of good writing in this publication. Please check it out.

I recently decided I did not have enough going on and started a Tumblr blog dedicated to interesting examples of video game music, with occasional wanderings into non-game territory.

Finally, due to completely genuine popular demand, you can now purchase an official Magical Wasteland t-shirt. They are not marked up, for I have forgone material wealth in favor of spiritual riches. At least in this case.

Final Fantasy VII makes it seem like selling flowers is kind of a tough job– like most people aren’t interested in beauty at all. Is that true in real life, too?

Sure, to an extent. Most of my customers don’t care about or contemplate the beauty inherent to a flower in bloom, because they aren’t buying them because they like them. They’re buying them to function as symbols or gestures. That’s not to say that quality isn’t important, of course– you’re sending the message that you don’t really care if you just go to the supermarket for the cheap kind.

Speaking of quality, Aeris gets her flowers from the floor of an abandoned church. Does that strike you as a good place?

It’s a terrible place. Most serious florists don’t grow their stock on site because there’s basically no comparison to the kind that can be shipped in from dedicated growers– even considering the time they spend in transit. There’s no sun in Midgar, and the soil quality in the Sector 5 slums is probably abysmal. Plus, there’s a good chance the flowers would wilt in the time it takes her to bring them from the church to the street, since there’s no refrigeration provided by her wicker basket. She could at least get a little cooler or something.

I suppose you could argue that flowers growing in such terrible conditions is purposely meant to indicate some kind of miracle.

Maybe if the miracle is that she gets any business at all. I mean if she wanted to demonstrate the miracle of life flourishing despite being next to a Mako reactor, I could think of better ways than hacking it off at the roots and hawking it for a gil a stem.

A lot of non-adolescent video game heroes tend towards military men or criminals. Were you heartened at all to see a writer as a major video game protagonist? Do you think that makes sense?

I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear about a video game whose protagonist was a fiction writer. Then I read that this fiction writer protagonist could sprint for only about ten feet or so, and I thought, “Yes! They’ve done their research!” For a horror game– sorry, a “psychological thriller,” or whatever the hell Remedy wound up calling it– to have as its hero a horror writer sounded really, really intriguing to me. And it is a great idea. Then I learned that the game was about light and darkness, and that the hero’s name was Alan Wake. That sounded kind of hokey, a little too on-the-nose. It’d be like having a game set in a prison, with a warden as its hero, and naming him Steele Bars. Or a renegade cop game in which the hero goes around renegading while rifling through medicine cabinets for health items, and naming that hero Max Payne. Oh, wait. Remedy already did that.

This is my first complaint about Alan Wake’s take on the writer’s life. There is no writer in America so famous that he would be instantly recognized in every public place he turns up in. Not even Stephen King, I don’t think. His son Owen, also a fiction writer, is one of my dearest pals, so I could probably ask him. In fact, I believe I will, for the purposes of our little inquiry here. (Also, true story: A couple of years ago, I was walking in Brooklyn one morning, and a young guy and his girlfriend walked past me. “Excuse me,” the guy said, double-taking. “Are you Tom Bissell?” Delighted, I said that I was. He said to his girlfriend, “This is the guy who wrote that book I was telling you about!” She nodded, completely not caring about that or me. The guy said he was a fan. Rather than graciously accept this and continue on about my day, I proceeded to creep both of them out by trying to extend the conversation and even intimating that I was available to have breakfast. “We just ate,” the guy said, backing away. It was as mortifying as anything that ever happened to me and marks the only time I’ve ever been recognized in public.) As for all the overt King references, the folks at Remedy obviously read the hell out of him. The flying machinery comes right out of The Tommyknockers, for instance, and the whole idea of rural, small-town, supernatural horror King pretty much invented. I should say that I’m a big Stephen King fan. He was one of the first writers I ever really loved, and who made me want to be a writer. I think he’s hugely underrated and a national storytelling treasure, so I adore the fact that Remedy’s paying homage to him. And yet... Alan Wake is a terrible, terrible writer. You read those manuscript pages and you want to pluck out your eyes they’re so bad. My buddy Rob had the single best zinger I’ve heard about Alan Wake’s debt to the Bard of Bangor: “I think the only Stephen King book they didn’t read was On Writing.”

That’s hilarious. Well, not possessing any real ability to write doesn’t seem to have stopped certain authors from tearing up the charts in the real world, has it? I mean, maybe Alan Wake is a bad writer on purpose, in a brilliant commentary on the hit-driven media industrial complex. And maybe he’s famous everywhere he goes because that’s just the kind of story a middling writer would write himself into.

Your points are valid ones. We live in a world, after all, in which Dan Brown is read by millions. But I really don’t think the intention was to make Alan Wake a cruddy writer. Do you? Let’s talk about the other stuff Alan Wake gets wrong, writer-wise. The first is Barry, his agent. New York literary agents do not talk and act and dress like Joe Peschi. New York literary agents are smoothies, fashion conscious, and extremely cunning. Would you let Barry negotiate your contract? I wouldn’t let him negotiate a candy-bar purchase. Also wrong: Barry is Alan Wake’s childhood best friend, apparently. Your agent should NEVER be your friend, much less your best friend, much less a person you grew up with. Also wrong: Alan Wake’s wife designs his covers. No publisher on this planet would let an author’s spouse design his or her book jacket. I can’t even begin to explain why that is just stupendously wrong.

Here’s a hypothetical situation. You’re been writing a lot, doing good, and suddenly it feels like you lost your inspiration - your writerly mojo. For two years you don’t put down a word. What would you do? Does a tiny Alaskan fishing town next to an Oregon-style forest sound like just what the doctor ordered?

Funnily enough, that’s the one detail I thought was actually pretty good. I went to the Canadian Arctic once to write. I was hardly attacked at all by night monsters, though.

At some point, there’s frustration with their near-total dominance over people’s assumptions about the medium. There is more to video games than this, you want to shout. We can make them look like anything we want to now: like hyperreal fantasy matte paintings or spare sumi-e brushtrokes or totally abstract fields of light and color.

And Space Invaders embodies not just the look but the whole feeling of gaminess. It’s right there in its name– almost naïve in how totally descriptive it is, as if the idea of coming up with something that sounded more clever wouldn’t have occurred to its creators in a million years. You could hear the title for the first time and already know what must be done to the invaders from space: the same thing you do to them in every video game.

Visual and cognitive shorthand persists. The Chinese restaurant still has bamboo stalks crawling up the sides of its menus. Maybe in time something will come along that better embodies games, or what people imagine games to be. But right now I can’t think of anything more emblematic.

For one, even if it is well-written and acted, you can often undermine the weight of someone’s words by running away or swinging your sword or throwing a grenade while they are being spoken, unless all control is taken away during the scene. You will see developers stuff you into a tram or some other kind of apparatus that provides a fictional basis for restricting your freedom of moment and action for the duration of the conversation while, at the same time, providing at least a token sense of interactivity (perhaps you can look around, for example). But this solution isn’t all that ideal; besides feeling artificial, it often bores people. Watch someone play during these sections and they’re moving their camera in little circles or zooming in on a guy’s nose or getting a snack.

Secondly, spoken lines in games are often saddled with not just story exposition, which can be clunky in even the best films, but gameplay instruction, too. Imagine a movie that contained not just the background of its fictional premise but tried to work in some hints on how to operate your television as well. No matter how cleverly it is disguised as something happening in the game’s fiction (calibrating your sensors, or whatever) it does not actually fool anyone.

Communication is also the idea behind why your opponents will unwisely shout to each other– “I lost him! Where did he go?”, the instant you crouch behind a crate. The soldiers are stupid to behave this way, you think. But you still want to know if you’re in immediate danger or if it’s safe enough to reload and recover your health. In real life, people who fight each other try not to telegraph anything and neutralize their targets before they have a chance to recognize what is happening to them. But the player of a video game needs this chance to respond and recover, so we place some of the responsibility of creating the chance upon the dialogue.

And in games with frequent combat situations, the dialogue is usually handled by two different pieces of technology: the completely dynamic “barks” or battle chatter, which is triggered in a somewhat randomized fashion in reaction to game events, and scripted mission support dialogue. If you play many games, you have probably heard these two systems step on each other: “Nice job, rookie, let’s get to the warehouse DIE, ASSHOLES! –unlock that door”.

There is a further complication to all of this: spatialization. In games our agents often traverse great distances. A game designer can place a sound file on a game object, and the game’s audio system can situate that sound file inside its model of three-dimensional space. But while it can fade the sound or apply filters to it, it cannot dynamically change the quality of a human voice in intensity or performance.

Our speech in real life is a remarkably complex and variable thing. There is a myriad of factors– distance, context, emotion– that modulate the way we sound. But you cannot record several different versions of a line and fade in between them like you can with engine sounds or gunfire. In the recording booth, actors can pitch their performance to a distant target, but chances are in the game that distance will be quite different than what was imagined.

You will often hear lines of dialogue that come in loud and clear, as if the character who spoke them was right next to you, but he is not actually around, and you have to check your minimap to see where he is– dozens of meters away, or in the next room. Or a character begins saying a line and suddenly takes off, running full-speed ahead of you into the level, her standing around voice trailing into the distance unnaturally. The only easy solution to this is essentially a cop-out: having these voices come at you over the radio, crackling with static even in the future, or the “mystical voice in your head” fantasy equivalent.

Even tightly controlled situations, such as the interactive conversation systems in role-playing games, have their share of challenges. Tom Bissell in Extra Lives describes how actor Jennifer Hale had to read hundreds of lines convincingly but tonally consistent enough to allow a believable conversation to be assembled out of them on the fly. Hale’s performance is remarkable indeed, and for me one of the most enjoyable parts the Mass Effect series. But it has no arc; it simply can’t due to the way the game works. Her tone at hour one is her tone at hour fifty.

Now is the part where it seems obvious to conclude with a look forward to some magical future technology that will come along and solve everything for us. In a decade’s time, maybe we will be able to take actors’ performances and pestle them into a kind of meta-reading of the line, from which we can simply query for the appropriate one: tell the player to set the charges with 5 urgency, 2 annoyance and 2.5 flirtiness. This does not seem out of the range of possibility given what we can do with audio right now. At the same time, though, I can’t help but think that would be unnatural in its own way.

I pulled on the generator cord several times and the machine sputtered to life. With the power restored, I turned back towards the gate again, noticing that light on the switch had turned from red to green. But a shrill noise signaled that my journey back would not be without an enemy encounter.

The Taken came at me as they usually did: in a group of three, with two weaker ones to the sides and a larger tank charging at me head-on. As I strafed to the left and right to avoid their ranged attacks, I nearly expended all of the batteries I had just picked up trying to shine away the darkness in their bodies. But it was fine because I still had seventeen more.

After he disappeared, I started on my way to the gate again.

Unfortunately, I had relaxed too soon. Thinking I was safe, I had let my guard down. Before I knew it, four more Taken now surrounded me. They were too close, blocking any escape, ready to kill me. I pulled out a flashbang grenade as fast as I could.

Brilliant white light flooded the area, burning away the Dark Presence and saving me from certain death. I was relieved. As the twisted forms evaporated into slivers of light, I realized that my kill count with the flashbang had reached fifty. A sense of achievement washed over me.

Imagine it doesn’t stop there. While the readers are reading, you watch them the entire time. How long does the average page take to finish? When does their pace slow? When do they skim? Imagine a camera on these readers’ faces constantly, tracking their eye movements across each page, data that is then aggregated and mined for trends. Imagine their brains wired, too, looking for activity related to rational reasoning, emotional response, excitement, imagination.

The data you gather feeds back into the revisions, and, two weeks later, you are testing your novel again.

When the article came out, I pointed a friend towards it, feeling proud of myself for being part of something deemed a big deal by the cover of a Condé Nast publication. But my friend came away from the article upset, even disturbed. Though the writer had almost flippantly tossed off the notion that video game development also “involves artistry, obviously,” he clearly saved his real swooning for the lab– for the thousands of hours of recorded play, the gigabytes of log files, the propellerhead science– not so much the game as an experience.

“Where has the creativity gone?” my friend asked.

Nobody really disputes that playtesting in some form or another is indispensable in order to make good games, of course. Understanding how an audience may react is tricky even in a linear medium such as the novel. At least there, we can assume readers will start at page one and continue to the end. In games, though, our agency enables our habits, and out habits become our blinders. You don’t consciously know that you always strafe to the right to avoid grenades– you just do, and your design ends up reflecting that. The choice then is to ship it that way, or to show the game to a lot of people, some of whom will instinctively dodge to the left or backpeadal or who might try to bunny-hop over the damage radius (something you’ve never thought to do).

It’s no surprise, then, that the playtest’s leading proponents, including developers like Valve and Bungie, are often known for the high quality of their titles. The feedback is valuable because games are systems with many moving parts, players included, and predicting how it will all interact is impossible for a single person or even a group of people. Psychologists tell us that once something is learned it is very difficult to imagine having not known it. The playtest allows us to see what it is like to not know our game.

If design by playtest creates the most perfect games, however, then how do we reconcile this with games as a medium in connection with the arts? For while it is easy to accept the notion that in mass-market entertainment there may very well be the optimal action film trailer, or the optimal casino layout, to speak of art in its artiest sense as a thing that can be optimized in one way or another is heading down a tricky path. If game design is actually a series of tests, and we employ scientists to perform empirical research to determine the best path, then where (like my friend said) has the creativity gone? Given a certain set of goals, is there a “correct” game design, an optimal design from which any further innovation is unnecessary?

When put this way, it is tempting to try to refute the design by playtest as a practice that can get in the way of an auteur’s personal expression: if people find a part of my highly idiosyncratic art game frustrating, well, that’s just part of the point. (I am a frustrated artist, after all, and my art is to make you just as frustrated as I am.) If we want games to travel into this realm of meaningfulness, the argument continues, we will just have to learn to accept unorthodox control, impossible puzzles, and general obtuseness as part of their repertoire.

Whether or not this is true, I think the uneasiness we get from a reliance on playtesting most often stems from the way it can feel like the tests are telling us what to do– that as creators we have relinquished our control to the mob of the focus group, or to some impersonally codified rules of human behavior. Over-dependence on playtesting, we fear, may lead us to a middle-of-the-road game that is the average of all games, unremarkable in every way.

These are legitimate concerns. But it is also important to remember that as personal as they can be, art, entertainment and video games are all transactions: things that occur, somehow, in the space between the creator and the audience. The playtest is a tool, one that has evolved to help us grapple with that single most important quality of games, the reason they are so beguiling and why they are so problematic: their interactivity.

Used properly, playtesting does not tell you what to do, so much as it tells you what you have in front of you. It shines a light into the possibility space of the game– a light of a different color or from a different angle than you are used to, one that makes possible a better understanding of its true shape. In this sense, a game designer’s artistry is not thwarted by the playtest. The artistry is present in how he or she reacts to the results. Data is just data, and it is up to us to decide what we will do about it.

It’s not that a little has gone wrong, or that one big thing has gone wrong, but everything we can think of has gone horribly, impossibly wrong in Fallout 3. The game has its share of silliness and humor, but ultimately the weight of its utter devastation is crushing. The original Fallout was pessimistic about humanity, but still tempered by its own self-regarding goofiness. Created and taking place in Southern California, what player couldn’t sense the existential absurdity and the surreal black humor of that post-apocalyptic wasteland? Fallout took us to a place where simply striving to scrape by in a horrible, incomprehensible world could be darkly funny.

Modern Warfare 2’s depiction of the American capital is more freshly destroyed. In fact, the player witnesses its undoing at the hands of the Russians, for reasons that may have been clearly explained but which have left little lasting impression upon me. We navigate through the White House as it is engulfed in flames, wounds still bloody, emotions running high. “So when are we going to Moscow,” asks one soldier angrily. “Not soon enough, man. But I know we’ll burn it down when we get there,” answers another. Intentionally or not, the scene suggests the beginning of a modern war taken to extreme, paranoiac, Dr. Strangelove heights– and the kind we experience the ultimate result of in Fallout 3.

Designers of linear shooter levels often think a lot about showmanship, and though I have heard several team-specific terms for scripted spectacle, my favorite is “‘oh shit’ moments,” meant to designate things that happen during the level that ostensibly cause the player to think or say “oh shit” when they see them. In this sense, almost any part of the Modern Warfare 2 campaign that isn’t the gameplay of attacking a position or defending one is occupied by an “‘oh shit’ moment”– with “oh shit, they bombed the capital and took over the White House!” being just one in a string so long and constant that the punches turn into a pummeling.

The problem with design by “‘oh shit’ moments” isn’t the approach itself, but a narrow view of what kinds of things make us exclaim in the first place. Watching a bridge collapse or a nuclear bomb go off might be one type of these moments, but there are other smaller, quieter, subtler realizations and incidents that can be just as powerful. As it is, though, the baffling sequence of world-changing events that the player is buffeted with in Modern Warfare 2 gives rise to a gnawing, unfocused anger. We are hurt and upset, but at whom? The planet is a messed up place, but what can we do to fix it? There is little to indicate any specific agenda, belief or “meaning” inserted into this game on the part of its developers. It is, I think, best understood as a product of its world.

The temptation to over-analyze comes into play with 2004’s Metal Wolf Chaos, too, even though it takes its cues from the opposite end of the spectrum of seriousness. Featuring the wrongest and most likeable depiction of Washington D. C. that I can recall, this practical joke of a video game from Japan tells a story where the U.S. President, channeling Bill Pullman from Independence Day, climbs into a missile-packed walking mech to combat a turncoat, villainous Vice President. The hoax-like nature of the game extended to its commercial prospects, too– only ever released in Japan, exclusive to the original Xbox (one of the region’s worst-performing platforms ever), and yet only featuring English voiceovers. Did any of its creators at From Software really think this thing had a chance?

Co-workers of mine imported a copy when it came out and we gathered around to watch President Michael Wilson activate his mech– emblazoned with the Seal of the President of the United States– and burst through the windows of the White House in an outsize explosion. “Okay! Let’s parteeeeee!” he shouts, voiced by a man obviously selected on account of his being American and living in Tokyo and not on his acting ability. We laughed for hours over those hammed, halting voices, or how Air Force One takes off from a secret runway beneath the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, or the way the White House is shown surrounded by random skyscrapers.

The problem with Metal Wolf Chaos (besides it not being that good of a game) is the way it falls into the crack between satire and camp. The premise sounds like a sure-fire comedic winner but in execution the jokes fall weirdly and uncomfortably flat. We are used to judging everything on a one-dimensional scale– a line that stretches from “serious” to “sarcastic,” such that one could be one or the other or some blend of the two (as in “I was half-joking”). But Metal Wolf Chaos exists somewhere outside of this line. It does not criticize anything enough to call it a parody– it plays its own ridiculousness totally straight. And while one could think of it as a commentary on America’s politics, especially of the time (the coup-leading Vice President is named Richard Hawk), it might also be self-centric to assume that the game is actually about the country it depicts at all.

The only time I’ve ever been to Washington D.C. myself was when I was a child. We saw the requisite sights and took the vaguely educational tours, and I remember it all being relatively peaceful– in contrast to the video game versions I would experience much later. The memorials were not being blown up or falling apart or playing host to intense firefights. Instead people sat on park benches eating lunch and watching the cold water of the Potomac. I stared at spacecraft and dinosaur skeletons in the Smithsonian museums.

I might have been naive about it then– unthinking of the fact that close by, everything negative we associate with national politics was going on– but I also think it’s worth considering how the worst decisions in the world can be made by agreeable people on a clear day in an airy building made of gleaming stone. Perhaps landmarks can be useful for more than the fantasy of seeing them maimed. Perhaps we can take our presentation of a country’s injury or decay beyond the immediately physical. With today’s technology it is easy to recreate and reinterpret how things look. But what about recreating how things are?

Part I. EVE Online. The BART.
Part II. Press pass. Jenova Chen.
Part III. The Metreon. Infinity Ward.
Part IV. Workflows. Fluency.
Part V. Baiyon. Incandescence.
Part VI. Parade. Trauma.
Part VII. Trends. Video Games.

Part One. The call; the journey.

Part Two. The people.

Part Three. The atmosphere.

Part Four. The meaning, or lack thereof.

Please enjoy.

It is well understood that ert is important and a big deal. Many people pay respect to ert– and as such, if games became ert, then respect would be paid to games. This means we could talk about what we do in good company by saying “oh, I make video games,” and our interlocutors would respond “oh, yes, games– they are a kind of ert, aren’t they?” And we all know that this is certainly not the case right now.

To confuse matters further, there is also a contingent who have spearheaded a kind of backlash against the question itself– games, they counter, should be about something else– having “fon,” apparently, and thus it is lamentable that anything else (especially ert) would be the concern of those who make games, particularly because the quality of being “fon” interferes with, or somehow contradicts, the quality of being ert. Which begs another important question: can games be both ert and fon at the same time?

Many further symposiums, blog posts and ert-fon diagrams will be necessary to answer the question definitively.

Though I am not really equipped here to discuss the real implications of the possibility of a brain in a vat, I thought that another interesting area of inquiry might be how some (evil?) demiurge might construct such a mechanism using what we currently know about real-time virtual reality– or, in other words, video games.

The first is summed up by The Matrix, wherein all of humanity are brains (plus their bodies) in vats, and interact in a kind of shared hallucination. The video game equivalent of this is probably a massively multiplayer online game, like World of Warcraft, or a more freeform online world such as Second Life, where each avatar is piloted by a human brain through the world of the game and interacts with other brains in their own vats through the various methods that the game provides.

It doesn’t take long for the technical issues of this approach to become manifest. Every brain would need its own powerful client machine to “render” and feed the brain stimuli; the client machine would also need to connect to a central server in order to reconcile each client’s version of “reality.” Coordinating the actions of many brains in vats together– people jostling each other in a crowd, for example, or playing in a band, or multiple cooks in a kitchen– would tax a system of any known design enormously. Complex physical simulations would need to be carried out either by the central server and propagated instantaneously to all clients or calculated completely deterministically on each client simultaneously. Such coordination is extremely difficult to achieve even with the relatively simple information that networked games must share today. (The only way I can think of that this might be possible is if the system does not actually run in real-time, and that each “frame” of reality we experience is actually the result of days or weeks or centuries of calculation on the part of the demiurge’s computer system. But one imagines him getting as impatient as we do with poor frame rates.)

There are other problems with a Matrix-like scenario, too: how would such a system handle human births and deaths? Is our pet dog or cat a smaller brain in a smaller vat somewhere? The line between what is simulated versus what is “real” blurs in many ways in this arrangement, making a consistent illusion of reality difficult to define, let alone manage.

The second major brain in a vat scenario is the solipsist one: you are the only brain in a vat, and the vast world you perceive is generated solely for your benefit. Serious philosophers usually recoil from solipsism, and for good reasons. One is that there’s no place good to take it (the world is false– okay, so now what?). Another is that it doesn’t feel right morally; we must accept the existence of other beings in order to behave well. Believing that others do not really exist leads one down the road to psychopathy.

The games that best encapsulate this form of the brain in a vat are in my opinion Bethesda Softworks’ recent role-playing games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3. In these games the entire world is created solely for the entertainment of the singular player, who is the only “character” possessed of agency in their vast worlds.

As a game developer, the solipsist model seems much easier to manage. After all, one of the most important things a game does is decide what not to do: the game’s renderer decides what not to draw, the sound system decides what doesn’t need to play, the artificial intelligence decides what enemies do not need to think. The complex graphics, soundscapes and interactions we enjoy are due to these judgements– if our consoles actually tried to process in full what was going on around us they would chug to a halt.

We have all heard the koan about the tree falling in the forest and its sound, or lack thereof, in the absence of observers. In terms of a video game, the answer is obvious that if there is no observer present there is no reason to calculate the observable property (armchair quantum mechanics enthusiasts may bring up the Heisenberg uncertainly principle here). In terms of technology, a singular brain in a vat could be much more easily convinced it is in a “real” place, especially if it has never known any other world.

Between these two extremes there are some compromises available, such as the idea that perhaps only two or four or six brains exist in vats– though situations like that seem more the province of science-fiction plotting than a serious possibility.

None of this idle speculation is to suggest I believe the world is indeed simulated, so I’ll close with a paraphrase from Borges: the world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Matthew.

The practice of regional censorship of internationally created media is nothing new, of course. But the technology of video games can make alterations more precise and more surreal than a black bar or a jump cut (the same system that switches out a game’s spoken language or text for localization can swap any asset in the game itself, so it is usually quite simple to configure builds of a game for certain territories that have special rules). One could be in the same virtual room as a player from another country and be looking at the same wall and be seeing two entirely different things. So though we extoll the shared experiences that multiplayer games can give us, the potential for fragmentation of experience– of, indeed, a kind of reality– is just as possible.

Hiro was tired and his eyes burned. He bit the inside of his lip to distract himself. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Have you ever seen a well-endowed woman’s breasts? I mean in real life, like right in front of you. Not in a porno.”

“Sure– now and then.”

“Don’t lie. I can tell when you’re lying.” Kazu had the controller in his hands, making the girl crouch over and over.

Hiro took his glasses off and rubbed his face. Delineate deformable regions, grab acceleration data from the bone in the torso. “I can implement that, sure. You want it on all of the female characters?”

“Put it on the characters that make sense to you. I’ll review it later.”

After Kazu had gone Mayuko crept up behind him. “What was that about breasts?” she said conspiratorially.

Mayuko looked disappointed. “That’s it? I thought you were talking about real people.”

“No, in the game.”

“Boring. I suppose they do look pretty strange right now, though.”

“I think I’m beyond being able to even notice,” said Hiro, slouching in his chair. It was very late.

“You seem unhappy– are you upset about it being too sexual? Some kind of Christian morality thing?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Hiro said. “It’s just, I guess for me, this is a little disappointing.”

“Tomorrow why don’t you try telling him what you think, then? Aren’t you old classmates?”

Hiro shrugged and slouched some more.

“What are you doing? Don’t look at idol movies,” said Kazu, the next day. “Watch an anime or something for reference. I don’t want the breast motion to be floppy and liquid. It should be springy and hold together.”

Hiro said, “Well, before, you were talking about experience with real women, so I thought you wanted–”

“Are you crazy?” said Kazu. “What about this character makes you think a realistic treatment is called for? Look at her design! Don’t be ridiculous.” He paused, studying Hiro’s face, then pulled up a chair and sat down. “What’s bothering you, classmate? Your eyes have been so heavy-lidded lately.”

“Nothing. I’m just tired. Maybe I’m a little worried about– I thought we were making something a little more universal. But lately the game seems more and more about, you know, fan service.”

“‘Fan service’ doesn’t mean the audience is only in Japan,” Kazu said. “You know, Gotoh just came back from a big convention in Los Angeles and said his most otaku-oriented titles are the ones that are selling the best abroad. Besides, how much more ‘universal’ can you get than a sexy character? That’s a language that everyone immediately understands.”

Hiro nodded, deciding not to explain he meant something slightly different.

“You still don’t believe me, I can tell. Let’s get a foreigner’s opinion right now– where’s Fastow?”

“Come on, we don’t need Fastow here,” said Hiro, but Justin was already close by, maybe close enough to have heard him say that.

“Uh, it doesn’t seem wrong to me,” said Justin, after they’d explained. “It will certainly attract attention– I can guarantee all the American blogs and message boards will make posts on it. But I don’t think it will exactly surprise anyone, either.”

“See?” said Kazu. “He likes it. You’re being overly prude, Hiroyuki. It’s the influence of your parents– your upbringing.”

Hiro hated the constant mention of his background as if that one detail explained everything about him. His parents were not overly censorious, and just because he was a rarity did not mean that was the whole of his being.

“I mean, sure, there’s sometimes a disconnect over the context in which each culture places sexualized content,” Justin continued, unaware that his role was already over, “But it’s not as if comics, anime and game fans haven’t been already exposed to these kinds of elements many times over. I think they’re used to it. Some Americans might think it’s embarrassing to admit enjoying such content, but they do just the same.”

Mayuko ordered another beer before he could refuse. “Go on, pour out your heart to me,” she said.

Hiro took a long sip. “How many is this? I’ve lost count.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can pay me back tomorrow.”

“Sure. Well in school I studied computer science because I thought that was my talent, but it took me a while to realize that it might not be my number one interest. As I’ve worked at this company I’m finding it harder and harder to be interested in the kinds of games we’re making, and I’m looking back on my life, just wondering where it went, and wondering where I can go next. What avenues are open to me? I don’t think there are any. I’ll always be implementing someone else’s vision, even if that happens to be not particularly inspiring.”

“That sort of talk reminds me of my grandfather,” said Mayuko, “He was a lathe operator in a machine shop for basically his entire life. I don’t think his generation had the same idea of ambition that people our age do. He just assumed he would always operate that lathe forever. The idea that money or power could be obtained was completely alien to him. So to excel inside the constraints he’d been dealt was the only thing he could do.”

“Whatever,” said Hiro. “No offense, Mayu-chan, but I’m not some long-suffering character in a sappy television drama about life after the war. I’m a programmer in the modern world, and I’m already thirty one, and I have things I want to do but I can’t do them because I’m stuck working for laughable wages for a ‘friend’ who thinks nothing of asking me to put in ridiculous amounts of overtime to make his insipid video games. For fuck’s sake, thirty one!”

“Why are you so worried about your age? A lot of people have–”

“Yoshinori Kitase directed Final Fantasy VII when he was thirty one.”

“You shouldn’t compare yourself to–”

“Hideki Kamiya directed Devil May Cry when he was thirty one.”

“Are you saying you want a–”

“Fumito Ueda directed Ico when he was thirty one.”

“Would you shut up for just one second?” said Mayuko. “You’re making random comparisons that have no meaning! You’re not them. You’re you. Why are you so worried about this? I had no idea you had this strain of ambition in you.”

Hiro took another drink. “I wouldn’t call it ambition, exactly. I just hoped for something more. Something a little better than implementing algorithms for breast bounce for my old classmate who, I should add, was always partying in school and got good grades anyway while I actually tried to study hard and did like shit.” He pounded his fist onto the bar like a cartoon character. “Is that okay? Is it alright to acknowledge I want more than this?”

Mayuko shrugged. “Sometimes it can’t be helped, right? Sometimes there’s nothing to be fought for, nothing to win, and the only thing on the line is your pride.”

“So you’re saying the only thing I can do is be proud of doing what I’m ordered to do? No matter what it is?” he said, and snorted. The izakaya’s loudness with its wall of chatter enveloped his head like a wet towel. Coding forgettable bits of soft-porn silliness might be all that he had any right to expect from his non-charmed life, but if that was the case he would just need to understand that human existence would not make him happy or fulfilled.

There was a long pause in the conversation (Mayuko seemed chastened by his acerbic ranting) and Hiro gazed drunkenly at the bar’s other patrons. Surely, playing the cards that the universe dealt was its own kind of art. Not everyone has talent and not everyone has skill. Not everyone is in the right place to take advantage of either, and even then the vicissitudes of the world operated under their own cruel inhuman logic such that a man’s power diminished into nothing but his ability to influence others and his meager personal understanding of craft.

Craftsmanship. Suddenly there was Mayuko’s grandfather in sepia tones hunched over a third-rate lathe making cheap tin toys in the aftermath of the war (what a schmaltzy thing to envision!), meaningless knickknacks that he poured his sweat into because it was the only thing he cared about– the only thing he could care about.

It was true that one could not always choose what work one did, or where, or how, or with whom. Sometimes, the only real choice was how seriously one could take that work, and to what degree it could be accomplished.

The Bible says: whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might–

“Well, that’s fine,” Hiro said abruptly, slamming his pint glass down a little harder than he meant to, his nose flaring with alcohol. “I’ve decided. I won’t program Kazu’s stupid feature for him just because he asked me to. I will do it for myself. And I will program the greatest goddamn breast physics in the world.”

The real debate, then, is about what exactly we’re going to muster to show the world to prove that what we’re doing isn’t just a fun diversion, but something of genuine cultural import. And the irritation with Thomsen seems to stem from him calling Metroid Prime a work of art for the ages with about as much guile as a schoolboy proclaiming the genius of a trade fantasy novel he read over the summer in front of the rest of the class. “That’s what you’re going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form?” Burch wrote. “You’re going to show him the morph bomb and expect him to nod repeatedly, and admit that the story of an extinct bird race and a woman with a bazooka on her arm is just as meaningful as La Dolce Vita? Seriously?”

Well, what else can we point towards? Thomsen picked Metroid, he told me, partly because he was just trying to talk about something that he personally responded to, and felt had some connection to the technical innovation for which Kane is known. But there are many other games out there with thoughtful, artfully constructed designs– games absent of laser beams in space, games that when played invite us to consider the rules and the mechanics that govern the world around us. We give these games awards and talk about them in polite non-gamer company as proof of their worthiness, but ask a typical gamer about the most memorable moment in his playing life and he is as likely as not to mention the time he sniped five guys in a row to save the day in a particularly hotly contested multiplayer match.

The idea that the embarrassment of admitting you really like games might be mitigated by pointing out that there exist certain works of interactive art that deserve to be taken seriously also doesn’t hold water when one looks at the fate of comic books, which, despite having been blessed by many works of absolute sincerity, seriousness and subtlety over the years, have largely failed to make a dent on the popular imagination as anything other than the province of the juvenile in body or mind. And how video games may or may not avoid the marginalized fate of comic books is another worried strain of thought running through the industry’s creatives. It serves as a warning to those who assert that cultural acceptance is simply a matter of time, that we can wait around for a coming generational shift. Michael Abbott, a professor at Wabash College who teaches theatre and film, notes his students usually aren’t particularly impressed with Kane when he screens it for them, but that they aren’t therefore automatically interested in video games, either: “From time to time I mention games in my class, and sometimes they respond and sometimes they don’t. They’ve all played games, sure, and see them as a fun thing to do. But the idea that one could think critically about games, that one could take them seriously, is really quite foreign to many of them.”

Real maturity, then, is about more than just appearances. It is about what lies underneath. Even though Burch wrote scathingly that Thomsen’s comparison “makes our most beloved art form look like kid’s stuff, and us like a bunch of idiots,” the very same day Destructoid also ran a story entitled White Knight Chronicles 2 has pointy boobs, droopy boobs. The implication of this being that treating games as the inwards-facing exclusive province of boyish adolescence is perfectly acceptable as long as Mom and Dad aren’t looking; if they are, though, hide the controllers and put on a tie. This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist while we continue unbridled our wildly passive-aggressive approach towards the artistic establishment, equal parts brash and defensive, trying to look older and more experienced than our years: the hallmark of youthful insecurity.

So before we can confidently come forth with our own particular offerings towards the sum of human cultural output, the light of civilization, it seems we must continue to gyrate through this adolescent process of self-discovery, as awkward and humiliating as it can be. Whether we like it or not, however, learning to be comfortable in our own shoes is not a journey that we can delay indefinitely.