Tiny Subversions

Watch Will Wright's Spore presentation. Do it.

Nothing like 170-odd spam comments to the blog to force a man to disallow anonymous commenting.

I just finished Psychonauts, and I have a lot I want to write about. I am going to write a series of pieces talking about what is so damn revolutionary about particular parts of this game. But then I realized: spoilers! So first, I am going to direct you to Play Magazine's absolutely spot-on review of Psychonauts. So you should read that review, buy the game, finish it, and then read my analytic pieces. Or, if you never plan on playing the game, read my pieces, then be convinced and play the game. Don't blame me if I spoil some surprises for you. You've been warned.

XYZ Computing reports:

At this year's E3 (May 17-20) Agetec will launch its Anti Booth Babe campaign. Believing that booth babes take attention away from the games, Agetec wants to change the focus back to where is should be. They plan on doing this not by refusing to have booth babes, but instead by hiring ten unattractive woman to work their booth. [emphasis mine --Darius]

First things first. I definitely like the idea of skewering or somehow criticizing booth babes in a playful manner. I just don't like booth babes. They make me feel cheap and sleazy. They make me feel like I'm in an industry run by me, but when I was 15. This is a scary feeling.

However, I find the idea of "hiring ten unattractive women to work" a booth to be hardly an interesting or useful commentary. I don't know if "unattractive" was a characterization that the author of the article made, or if it was a characterization that Agetec made as part of their PR packet, but I don't like it. It implies that you're either a booth babe, or you're unattractive. Yes, there's some feminist art I've seen that takes a standard "sexy" image and subverts it by putting a normal-looking woman on it (I wish I had links) . But in no cases that I've seen have the normal women been referred to as "unattractive"--one point that these pieces make is that there can be different metrics for attractiveness besides the ones that the media likes to push.

Since I have incomplete information, there's 3 situations that could be going on:

1. If the company is putting up normal women and calling them "unattractive", then I think that's a really bad call.
   
2. If the company was misinterpreted by the journalist, then okay Mr. Journalist, watch your language for connotation!
3. If the company has hired women who are physically attractive, but treat all the game developers and journalists and expogoers like crap--now that would be subversive! I would applaud.
   

But as it stands, the company's move seems playful, but not very critical.

So the game companies that I've been talking with so far have been saying things along the lines of, "You're great, but not quite what we're looking for or have the capacity to hire right now."

That's fine. I'm an optimist with lots of self-esteem, so I believe that they're telling the truth. This seems like the kind of obstacle with a simple solution:

• be persistent
• continue to be generally excellent
• continue my hobbyist game development (building my portfolio)
• continue my mad networking
• be persistent

Ah well. We'll see what's up. In the meantime, I have a research job for the summer doing really neat hive-intelligence-based algorithms for adaptive networks (which is funny considering that I don't want to be a tech guy).

So my friend Bill just posted something regarding the educational games that I had linked in my del.icio.us sidebar. His sub-argument is that the educational games on that site aren't really "games." But I beg to differ.

If you haven't played these games, go do so; they really only take a minute or two of your time. Bill is saying that these aren't "gamey" enough to actually count as games. But let's look at one of them, "Place the State - Advanced". You are presented with a blank map of the United States, and you are given states, sequentially, to drag and drop onto the map. The states disappear after you place them, so you only get to see one state at a time. The game keeps track of your average error in terms of how many miles off you were in placing the states.

I contend that this is a game. I like to use Salen/Zimmerman's definition of game:

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome. [my emphasis]

In the context of this definition, a "system" has four elements: objects, attributes of objects, relationships among objects, and an evironment (context). Let's look at the old checklist.

• System: the objects are the states, the objects have attributes (shape, preferred location), the objects are related (one of the challenges lies in remembering how they are related geographically), and it all takes place in an environment (the blank map).
• Conflict: the conflict is a classic, single-player puzzle.
• Rules: there are rules governing placement, scoring, and object behavior.
• Quantifiable outcome: absolutely! It grades you with numbers on how well you did. Can't get more quantified than that.

Of course, you can certainly take exception to the definition that I'm using. I happen to like the Salen/Zimmerman definition because it is inclusive. So many definitions of "game" out there exclude things that intuitively feel like games to me. While I think that this definition may err a little bit on the broad side, I'll settle for a definition of "game" that includes everything I think of as a game, plus a little extra.

What it comes down to for me is: if it feels like a game, it's a game as far as I'm concerned! Though theory and definitions are great to have, too.

All that aside, Bill's overall point is that we need educational games that are more than glorified flash cards if the educational games sector is ever going to be taken seriously. I agree with him 100% on that front!

So last night, I'm hanging out at the Boston Postmortem, getting my networking groove on, when I notice that the guy I'm standing next to is wearing a really old-school Looking Glass shirt (it was old-school because it said "Looking Glass Technologies"). I didn't recognize his name from his name tag.

"I couldn't help but notice the Looking Glass shirt," I said. "You guys were great."

"Thanks," he said.

"I had the wonderful experience of working with some ex-Looking Glass people at the Indie Game Jam."

"Oh really?"

We get to talking about LG folks at the Game Jam for about 2 minutes. Then I ask, "So, what is it you did at Looking Glass?"

"Oh, I founded the company."

Foot. In. Mouth. I knew the name 'Paul Neurath' looked familiar. -20 old school points for me!

I just purchased a new domain name and moved my personal website over to it. Behold, Internet, the glory of Tiny Subversions.

Incidentally, I am hosting this on TextDrive, which I discovered via Jon Aquino. I was intrigued from the moment I saw their specs page. They give me shell access!

So I finally bought Psychonauts, which I was looking forward to very much. The short: I really really like it! I'll write more about it later.

However, I had pre-ordered this game from GameStop. On Wednesday night, I got a voicemail. I listened to it--it was from an unknown number. When the message came on, there was a sexed-up woman's voice.

Hi, I'm Iris, and I'm just calling to tell you that...

I thought I had been left a message by a phone sex company, until I heard the next part.

...your pre-ordered game is available at GameStop on [blahblah] street.

Uh. Yeah. How weird. It made me feel... dirty. For more on this phenomenon, you should see Robin's various neat ruminations.

I haven't updated in almost a week. That's pretty bad, I know. But I have a good reason: for the days of April 24 to April 28, I was busy finishing up my thesis, which my big paper on using critical theory to look at games. I even managed to finish it! The days since then have been spent interviewing with a number of game companies. So I'm doing gamey things, but it's been too draining to actually write about.

My last day of classes ever is on Tuesday. Then more interviews, and then hopefully I'll have a job. At a game company. That would be nice.