Tiny Subversions

So yes, not much posting recently. I've been really busy moving to a new place much closer to Boston.

However, in other news, classicgames.org, the DOS shareware gaming website I ran 5 years ago, is back in business! With new features and stuff! Amazing. Thank Kevin F. for that.

I found the following on Boing Boing:

Fleshbot points its gnome-booty-craving readership to a hidden nude mod in World of Warcraft which is much tamer than the GTA: San Andreas sex scene that has Hilary Clinton's britches in a bunch. This one's no big deal, says Fleshbot, but will still be exciting to those "curious and/or desperate [enough] to sit through a twenty minute download just to catch a glimpse of a few naked female characters doing the Macarena and some simulated oral sex." [emphasis mine]

Okay, will somebody please explain to me what "a hidden nude mod in World of Warcraft" actually means? To the best of my understanding (I'm being condescending here), a mod is a modification of an existing game, typically executed by fans of the game, i.e. not the developers of the game itself. A "mod in World of Warcraft" does not make sense. It doesn't even parse. There are a few ways I can imagine finding hidden naked characters in a game.

If there is a series of special actions you can take in-game to enable you to see naked characters, that is an Easter egg, and was put there by at least one developer. Usually an Easter egg is endorsed by the developer, like the Star Wars or Sam & Max references you used to see hidden in every LucasArts game from the early '90s. But occassionally the Easter egg is unauthorized, as in the case of the homosexual Easter egg in SimCopter. Authorized Easter eggs absolutely should meet the standards of the ESRB rating that the game merited.

If there is a file you can download off of a third-party server which changes the game code and enables you to see naked characters, that is a mod, and the developers are not responsible for that content, because somebody else did it! To blame developers for a mod would be like blaming J.K. Rowling because someone wrote the word "fuck" in a library copy of the latest Harry Potter book.

From what I can tell, the content of the GTA sex mod is actually present in the game, and the third-party mod just unlocks it. This is a fuzzy in-between case. On the other hand, this World of Warcraft thing looks like it's just some extra content created by someone else. No news items I've read have explained it completely to my satisfaction.

I discovered via Robin's blog that Majesco is in trouble. This makes me sad. Among all the publishers out there, they seem like one up-and-coming publisher that is not entirely risk-averse. having taken on Psychonauts and Advent Rising. Ah, well. Time will tell what they end up doing.

In case you didn't know: Matt Sakey is a very, very good journalist. I've been reading his monthly "Culture Clash" columns on the IGDA website ever since they've existed, and he is consistently the best games journalist I read. I'm not just talking about the content of his articles--I mean the form, his journalistic integrity and writing style, the angles that he takes on the topics he chooses, and the humor (tasteful-yet-brutal: like Greg Costikyan but with more tact).

Also, I did not know until re-reading his bio today that he is the author of what I consider to be the best article about a game series ever written: Stealing Beauty, which concerns the Thief series of stealth games for the PC. If I wrote a book called The Best Game Writing Ever, that piece would definitely be included.

Completely by chance, Craig and I got to have lunch with Matt at the Game Developers Conference this year. We just randomly sat down at a table with this guy (or the other way around), and he turned out to be our favorite games writer. We had a great conversation for an hour--Matt had just missed Will Wright's Spore demo, so we told him all about it, probably drooling on his lunch.

Anyway, Matt is a great guy and a great writer and you should read everything he has ever written. Really. At least check out this month's column. This whole post was spurned by how damned impressed I am that he has the cajones to say what he has this month.

For those of you who know what Façade is, you should drop what you're doing and start downloading it now.

For those of you who don't know what Façade is... it's an interactive drama that blew my mind at the 2003 Game Developers Conference. At the time, I was but a young greenhorn in the games game, and Façade was the most jaw-droppingly amazing thing I had ever seen an interactive simulation do. (Note that I'm carefully avoiding characterizing it as a "game," since I'm not quite ready to call it one, having never played it.)

The best pithy description I can give is that it's like playing in a one-act play on your computer. The technology is amazing, and I don't mean the graphics. I mean natural language processing, the drama engine with the "beats" that Andrew so tantalizingly spoke of back in '03, etc. Robin has a great take on Façade over at her blog.

Anyway, you should grab the game. It's really worth your time. I'm downloading it as we speak--it's about 800MB through BitTorrent, so it might take all day for me to get it. We'll see. I can guarantee you I'll be talking about Façade some more later on.