I’ve witnessed a few conversations about the possible identity of Surfer Girl by a group of men. This is how they play out:

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.

I return to my fondness for Insert Credit, which is (was?) one of the world’s first truly honest blogs about video games– honest as in aiming only to represent the authors’ thoughts, with no advertising, no comments, no attempts to enhance credibility with appearances. The site ran a feature posted on August 21, 2003 about how to improve, or at least move forward, the dismal pseudoscience we in the industry call “game journalism”. It seems worth rereading in light of recent controversies. Writers on games that you may have heard of, if you bother to pay attention to the bylines at all, such as Brandon Sheffield, Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh, Chris Kohler, and Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade) weigh in with personal thoughts on the matter. It’s too bad we don’t see enough of this energy shine through in the work they do for their day jobs. It probably doesn’t sell well.

It’s a common mistake to assume that the delivery of some big message or the exploration of some weighty modern theme indicates the possession of an underlying intelligence. Thus, there’s an incorrect perception by some commentators on the game industry that games which do feature these elements are necessarily “smarter” than their counterparts that do not.

This naïve and unfortunate attitude is on display in full force in a new interview on Gamasutra with Derek Littlewood, the Project Lead of the forthcoming Haze—not by him, but by the hysterical game industry journalist that is interviewing him. “Did you make Haze because you were simply fed up with the stupidity of most video games?” he asks at one point. Later on he repeats much the same thing, in an accusatory way: “Why are games so stupid? Who's to blame?” Beyond being bad journalism, this is a completely misguided line of questioning. A game (in fact, any form of art) does not need to have a message to be smart.

A good counter-example is Portal. Erik Wolpaw, its writer, made this point in a sly way in his own recent interview:

Also, there is cake. Why’s that?

Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they’ve got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2006 (the last one, as it happens), an independent Canadian developer, Silicon Knights, displayed its latest project in development, entitled Too Human. The demo was, by all accounts, a disaster– technical problems abounded, nobody understood the product and the enthusiast press were quick to pile on large helpings of ridicule. Since then, the founder of the studio, Denis Dyack, has been visibly upset, defensive, and borderline obsessed with the fallout of that demo. He mentions it to nearly anyone who interviews him and he even tried posting on Internet forums to defend himself and his studio (to predictable results). Recently, he said he feels like he’s been through “eighteen months of hell”.

I do hope we all can stop picking on him and his project, at least until it is released. All parties acknowledge the game was not ready to be shown in May of 2006, and any further hounding of the people behind this title seems rooted solely in the knowledge that Dyack is a risible figure– he will react if we tease him, so tease him we must. As hardcore gamers, we are used to being cynical. But as fellow developers, perhaps we can show some support for this independent studio with a solid track record (Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) and their pursuit of their huge ambitions. Denis Dyack is easy to make fun of because he wears his heart on his sleeve, as the saying goes. He is genuinely trying his hardest to push the medium forward in the best way he knows how. Why can’t we support him? It’s clearly what we would want, if we were in his shoes.

As has been understood for millennia, names are important – they designate us and therefore play a part in defining who we are. For a game development studio, a name is not just a hint at the kind of mindset within, but a blank slate upon which a reputation can be built. Some of the best developers’ names have value that is nearly incalculable; any new release announcement from them is automatically widely reported, simply on the basis of their pedigree. So it is with great disappointment that we note that, in some bizarre idea of a reward for completing BioShock, the publisher Take-Two has decided to rename Irrational, the studio that created it, into the faceless, dead, and insulting “2K Boston”. Gone, now, is the chance for Irrational to create its own identity in the vein of Blizzard or Bungie: to anyone who is unaware of the developer’s work, it’s just a branch office of a struggling publisher. This seemingly innocuous change is a big loss for Irrational and a setback for developers in general.

You never truly begin to understand a language, no matter how much you are exposed to it, until you try to speak it and write it yourself— until you grapple with it to express your own thoughts and feelings. In the same way, through no amount of just playing games can one really get to the bottom of what they are about, why they exist and where they are going. To play a game is to be forced to come to terms with the game’s limitations, but to design a game is to face the world’s limitations.

When you have been making games for a while, you become acutely aware of what the real triumphs are and where the corners were cut. Features that once seemed like difficult feats of technical trickery to you are exposed as the developmental equivalent of a parlor trick, while the very best games soon become all the more impressive to you, knowing acutely all the hurdles they must have overcome. If you want to appreciate games to their fullest– as everyone who professes to love them should – don’t just play games. Make them.

As a cost-saving measure, Activision has joined the ranks of publishers that do not print the full credits for a game in the accompanying manual. Rationally, this may seem like a small, perhaps inconsequential loss in the overall battle for the recognition of talent and hard work (the credits can still be seen in-game, after all). But it’s somehow saddening all the same. Not everyone hungers for fame or recognition beyond that of one’s close friends, but as a kind of professional courtesy it doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive. A name in print is nice, as any journalist will tell you.

Recently it became a widely reported news item that the Xbox 360’s lack of a guaranteed hard disc drive was “holding back” the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. But in a thinking, reasoning reality, this shouldn’t have been news at all. Having to struggle against the technical limitations of all consoles is, indeed, one of the chief challenges (one might say problems) with the multi-platform development strategy in place at the major publishers. During the PS2/Xbox time period, the PS2 “held back” dozens of games because of its own lack of a hard drive and mostly inferior specifications. Now the tables have reversed, but multi-platform developers are still mostly doing what they have always done – develop for the lowest spec machine and then port upwards.

At any rate, there is nothing in the Microsoft requirements that says a game can’t work better with a hard drive as long as the game works at all without one. In other words, developers for the 360 are quite able to take advantage of the hard drive if they have the time, ability and inclination to implement a system that can work in either case.

Sometimes I get the sense that people have started to consider video game graphics a “problem” that has been largely “solved,” and that any further development is an exercise in diminishing marginal returns. Like a skyscraper, after too many stories have been added the building becomes too expensive and simply not worth the effort to construct. It is then usually suggested that now we can finally stop worrying about graphics and go on to begin making the great, innovative gameplay we’ve all been waiting for (even though we do not really seem to agree on what that actually is).

However, just the opposite is true: the more development that has taken place in this area, the more that is possible to expand upon. Instead of a single skyscraper, the development of graphics technology is more like the construction of roads: the more development that takes place, the more valuable the resultant network as a whole, and the more further development becomes possible. The next generation consoles have opened the way to all kinds of new territory– areas of which we are really only beginning to scratch the surface in shipping products. There is a huge amount of work still to be done: a myriad of problems to be solved, and plenty of opportunity to seize.

Welcome to Magical Wasteland, a new blog on video games and the industry that creates them. I'm Matthew, your mysterious host.

The opinions expressed here are and will always be the personal views of the author and never those of his employer.