Read into this what you will about current video games, but an important point that follows this is that nobody seems really able to accurately predict which those particular titles will withstand the test of time, and which will make big splashes, never to be seen again. Critics must write for their contemporaries, and so they must apply the standards of their cultural surroundings. And, funnily enough, those standards are very the ones future generations end up laughing at many years later (powdered wigs? tights? codpieces?). So I hope we can keep in mind that a thing’s real cultural value isn’t something one can immediately understand as soon as it is created. It takes years and years of distance, perspective, and context to get a clear picture of what was really significant– what truly mattered– and what was only Salieri’s Axur.

My treasured regular readers know I’ve taken more than a few swipes at what I see as bad writing and other irritating habits of the games press. But there is no monetary incentive, and therefore no real incentive at all, for the enthusiast publications to get any better. So instead the critics or journalists, whatever they may be, cut their teeth and then cut loose.

P.S. I’ve probably exaggerated how terrible life is as a writer on games, so I hope it doesn’t cause any offense.

“Here’s your the chance to show off your skill in team-based military combat.”

“Only two squads will make it to the Finals! These two forces will be pitted against each other in the Finals.”

“Tune in to find out which team earns the Purple Heart, and which is laid to waste.”

- all from GameSpot Tournament descriptions

Whatever your own feelings of Mother 2 may be, my point is that problem of the gonzo approach is that it works best as a piece of writing when the reader hasn’t played the game. Because if he has, he then possesses his own primary experience of that game world, and the experience-based review becomes obsolete, or at the very least, secondary– a travelogue of a place with which he is already familiar. People often take away startlingly different impressions of the things around them, and to a reader with his own experience to compare against, experience-based writing ends up inadvertently becoming about those disparities.

Before anyone leaps to the defense, this is not meant to be an argument against experience-based writing. It is not wrong or undesirable, it is just not necessarily the precise solution to the problem of how to write about games. We still need articles like Rogers’ passionate, plausible and consequential interpretation of Mother 2, but we also need something more. There is an important and unfulfilled place for synthesis in game writing, even though it is made especially difficult by the very thing that makes games so compelling– their interactivity (not only do players bring their own personal biases with them into the world of the game, they can also act upon them in such a way that their actions feed back into the simulation).

Real synthesis cannot be achieved in the intellectually lazy mishmash of the Everyman review, nor can it just naturally arise from the ferment of message boards and blogs. Someone will have to take the initiative.

So do our most favorite, treasured games in the world mean something? Of course they do– they mean something to us as players, because of the way in which we have interacted with the world of the game. The games we sink ourselves into reward us with meaning even if those games hadn’t intended on imparting meaning to us from the very beginning. Ask any dedicated player of World of Warcraft if the game “means” something to them, and it’s clear that it does, even though the actual game on its own makes no earnest claims about The World Today or Freedom Versus Security or Mankind’s Place in the Cosmos.

If you tried to glean some kind of commentary about the world we live in by the way World of Warcraft works, you’d find yourself in an intellectual abyss. Life is a series of quests? Everyone is greedy? Nothing ever changes? When you try to interpret the game on its own terms, sans the experience, you come up empty for meaning, because it isn’t meaningful per se; it’s only trying to be a good game, and the reason why people fondly remember the game today– the reason why it means something to them now– is because of their participation, and their sense of ownership of the events that occurred to them.

In other words, World of Warcraft means something (to millions of people) because it provides the framework for meaningful occurrences, not because it, itself, contains and delivers meaning. And the possibility of interpretation-of-art-as-the-art-itself is, in fact, nothing new– one of the whole points of Dada, by my reckoning, is that meaninglessness can be in itself a kind of meaning, depending on the context in which the conversation between artist and audience takes place. But quickly turning away from the hand-waving theory and getting back to the point: if you sit down at your desk, roll up your sleeves and think, “now, I am going to make something that really means something”, you are already on the wrong track– no matter what medium you are using.

The whole point of pull-quotes is to draw a hypothetical reader – imagine him impatiently flipping through the pages of a magazine while waiting for the dentist or for his plane to reach cruising altitude – into actually reading an article by highlighting a key point, an interesting fact or simply an intriguing turn of phrase. The point is not to stump the reader, nor is it to make him not interested in the article. Right?

That’s not even a sentence! And, why is the word “make” so important?

Thankfully, the article itself features correct grammar.

For some reason, this pull-quote has just as many words in the big bold highlight font as it does in the regular typeface. It’s rather amusing to try to read it aloud with emphasis. I might also note that it seems to erroneously conflate what the original article actually treats as two separate but connected ideas, but it is hard to tell for sure.

Is it unreasonable to expect that if the very first word that the reader sees on the page is “Confused?” in very large letters, that this may in itself be rather confusing? Does it strike one to question if the article is really best served by the pull-quote’s implicit promise to confuse the potential reader?

I promise to try to write something more positive, soon.

We can quickly and easily take things further– much further– than this writer did. According to the postmortem published in January 2008’s Game Developer Magazine, Portal’s project scope included eight full-time developers working for a total of twenty-six months. Valve pays anything but low salaries, so, doing some back-of-the-envelope math allows one to realize that Portal, while certainly cheaper than the biggest blockbuster titles, does not necessarily mean it is the “low-budget” game the author of that piece imagines it is when compared to its scope versus that of other games.

Portal was one of my favorite games of 2007. Its best feature is its smart writing; how unfortunate that the writing about the game cannot be of similar quality.

–Next Generation.

“In looking to the future, we inevitably look to the past as a guide.”

–GameDaily.

“Listen, writing is hard.”

–The Escapist.

1. Surfer Girl probably isn’t actually a woman.

2. If Surfer Girl is a woman, she’s probably some kind of secretary or an assistant to a powerful and well-connected executive.

3. Yeah. Surfer Girl must be, like, this receptionist who sleeps around everywhere to get all her information... well, she may also get messages from tipsters from time to time.

The conversation usually diverts from there into some stories of promiscuous women that the people in the group have heard about.

Trilogies seem to be the new way to pitch big games.

The basic idea is that so much investment is required up front to create a new franchise that two more installments down the line (with lower production costs) are all but required to recoup the cost. This is sometimes referred to as a “Lord of the Rings” model, since that is supposedly how most of the profit on those films was made. Sequels tend to do well in games generally, and this development model ties in very nicely with marketing (“the story we wanted to tell was just too epic for one game”) and with Wall Street (“we aren’t just publishing games – we’re creating lasting entertainment franchises”). Additionally, if the first game tanks, the next two can always be cancelled. So, it seems like we can expect to see trilogies, whether the material really calls for one or not. Tying in with this is the next trend:

I think we’re in for more familiar-looking sequels, because the games will strive to use as much of the same art and environments as their predecessors as they can get away with. This kind of re-use has always been around in some form or another, but the expensive nature of next-generation asset creation is going to make this strategy even more compelling. Investing cash into big, complex environments like fully traversable cities for one single game just won’t make sense to the money men, and they’ll want to defray that cost across as many games as possible. Increasingly, the industry will be asking gamers to play through the same environments again, with some cosmetic changes, and a few new gameplay mechanics thrown into the mix.

The worrying state of Japanese game development.

Akira Yamaoka touched on this in an interview with Brandon Sheffield, and it’s absolutely true. Broadly speaking, Japanese game development is several years behind the West from a technological standpoint. This is pretty clear if you’re a middleware provider dealing with studios in both regions, or if you do technical reviews of a wide variety of games in development, but it’s also apparent simply in the scope and the number of next-gen titles we see coming from each region. Is this a real problem, or does it not really matter? If it does, what should be done about it? This is an interesting and important story that I hope an enterprising game journalist with good contacts in the Japanese industry could really dig into at some point.

– The Wall Street Journal (editorial).

– Kotaku.

Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.

Iteration is the key. Everything is about iteration. How many times can I use iteration in this talk? Iteration, iteration, iteration. This is how you make good games: by iterating.

The more you iterate, it doesn’t matter what direction you’re going in or what you actually do, as long as you get the number of iterations up. This process (iteration) is what turns all the bad stuff into the good stuff. Here’s a graph showing game quality and number of iterations approaching infinity together. This graph proves my point.

3.

For our last project we used Scrum, and boy, are we glad we did. There is no way anything we did would have been possible without it. What is Scrum, you ask? It’s a set of new terminology for things that already happen when groups of people work together. For example, instead of a “meeting,” you have a “Scrum,” and so on.

You should use Scrum too, since it will solve all your problems. If I’ve piqued your interest, sign-up sheets for my specially discounted seminars on Scrum can be found clipped to the bottom of your conference program.

4.

The game we made was great – because we’re great. We are just a group of awesome people. We never crunch, and we go to the beach every other Friday to play volleyball. Even those times when we did crunch, we had delicious catered meals. And there was one time we got a masseuse in the office. Awesome. Yes, our studio’s amazing array of perks and benefits keep us happy and doing our best work all the time.

We have a ton of open positions we need to fill very quickly so please send us your resume as soon as you can.

5.

The game industry is in trouble. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing before. We need to do this other thing, which is the thing that I’m doing. I said this last year but none of you came with me. Well, this time I really mean it.

Midway has a different, more radical idea. It’s smaller and has less resources than a large company like Activision, so it needs to be even smarter. They come up with a plan to get what they feel is the next-best thing. As it happens, there is a company, called “Epic", which specializes in and is famous for its pork. Midway strikes a deal with this company: Epic will provide its range of base ingredients for use across all of Midway’s restaurants. And looking at the list, it’s quite impressive: not only are there many varieties of pork-based meats, such as delicious bacon, ham, and hot dogs, there are also arrays of spice mixes formulated for pork, various barbeque sauces, and so on. The executives at Midway imagine a future in which all their restaurants will be able to base their dishes on a combination of the ingredients that Epic has made.

When they tell the restaurants their plan, the response is mixed. “The idea itself isn’t bad,” the chefs say, “but are you telling us that we have to reformulate all our recipes to be based on Epic’s pork?” The people who run Midway understand this concern. “There will be a rough period as we transition over to being a pork-based company,” they say, “But the benefits will pay off in the long-term. Eventually, all our restaurants will be running on this pork-based system, which will reduce costs and meal preparation time because you’ll have basic ingredients to work with right out of the gate– instead of having to make them yourselves.”

The period following is rough going. Some of the restaurants have trouble retooling their recipes to incorporate the pork-based ingredients into their dishes. Additionally, although Epic had claimed that pork was an extremely versatile meat, it turns out to be particularly difficult to work into meals meant to be served on plates and flatware provided by Sony Corporation, one of the world’s major restaurant suppliers. To make matters worse, a new style of food is growing in popularity; associated with a company called Nintendo and served on their own plates, this style of cuisine is, among other things, kosher, and technically can’t include anything based on pork at all.

So, the moral of my little story? Bacon is an ingredient– not a strategy.