gerablog

Back in 2005 Rod Humble came out with The Marriage which has since become the card up the sleeve of everyone in the Are Games Art? debate as an out and out art game. He did the blog circuit and wrote something or other on The Escapist about it. The draw was the use of formal game rules as a tool of representation, which he detailed over here, making it one of the weightiest examples of conceptual art in video games.

That was a few years ago and whether games can be art or not is old news. Of course they can be; you’d be hard-pressed finding anyone in the industry saying otherwise these days. Art Games, News Games, Serious Games. The independent game industry is swimming in genres and games that are trying to legitimise the medium, and it’s fraught with the potential to make valuable artistic statements in strikingly new and engaging ways.

But there is a dark cloud, a shadowy gorilla that we’ve refused to acknowledge: A lot of Art Games suck. For every talented game Auteur of our generation there are the leagues of screaming idiots waving their Computer Science degrees around, continuously spamming Gambit’s mail pool with that bit of concept art they once drew where they replaced Chung Li’s face with Ayn Rand; A lifetime's collection of weird brother-in-laws rattling on about how the world needs a game about the plight of Esperanto speakers or something just as nebulously poignant. Art Games often get slack for ideas that don’t seem as well-rounded as they probably should be.  Braid’s bizarre Atom bomb/broken romance idea that Blow refuses to explain, most of Tale of Tales’ work. The modern Art Game feels like the products of a flawed critical standard in an industry that laud ideas, any ideas, more than well-developed artistic talent. An industry that perpetuates the philosophy that on a long enough bell curve even unintelligible ideas look impressive when you're comparing them to Wet.

And with that in mind here’s Coil.


 

Coil is an example of a game that is quite interesting for as many legitimate reasons as it is for just being almost pointlessly incomprehensible.

This is the 2009 IGF nominee for Innovation by designer Edmund McMillen, the guy that did Super Meat Boy. It's a short flash game made up of six mini-games that are all held together by an ongoing prose story which carries on between every segment and it looks like this:

It’s fitted in a kind of slow and sombre style, full of dark organic artwork and a kind of broken music box soundtrack.

The gameplay is filled with a number of interesting bits. There are no actual instructions given at any point in the game, so discovering what exactly you’re meant to be doing each level, let alone what controls you’re meant to use, is part of the appeal. You’re essentially dealing with a set of traditional minigames throughout, from shooters to basic puzzle games. However without instructions the aim of discovery in the game becomes the primary aspect of gameplay and that really helps invigorate the fairly bog-standard minigame tropes you’re working under. In fact for many of the levels it took me a good five or ten minutes per level before I recognised what sort of game I was even playing. Beyond that the resonating aspect of the game is the atmosphere throughout which feels incredibly foreboding as if you’re committing some kind of terrible act when you successfully make it through each level.

It’s also has this thing in it:

WTF ARE YOU

This is McMillen's self-described experimental, autobiographical art game. More than the gameplay itself, the focus turns to the symbolism and plot that’s been integrated into the game. The storyline, from what I can tell, is a metaphor for rape when it’s not about a sperm that turns into some sort of flying alien squid. At least I think that's what’s happening. Where the prose seems to suggest a woman hitting the bottom, the visuals invoke the story of sperm that shoot each other in the face with weird sperm arrows.

The interpretive difficulty of the game is no fault of the prosey story woven through out. In fact that’s only reason I have any clue of what's happening at all; the language in the game is the best figurative tool McMillen has to work with. Unfortunately for him I’m not sure that’s something you’d want in an interactive, visual game when the visual cues the game gives you feel impossible to even begin to interpret.



Without the short story tacked on throughout the actual premise of the game is so impenetrable it feels like McMillen is guarding it like a fucking Templar secret. I noticed that particularly once I hit level four and the aim appeared to be to manoeuvre a giant sperm thing by repeatedly clicking on a picture of a spleen.

There's a thin line in the world of art between quite interesting and deceptively rubbish and Coil sits somewhere between the two. The consensus has been that the genre is just too affected, hell even Anthony Burch thought The Path should tone it down a notch. But I don’t think pretension is really an adequate critique in this situation. Pretension is the kind of thing that needs to be reserved only for Vice parties or guys who brew their own hemp lager, not the sort of people who can script in Python.  What makes a bad Art Game isn't necessarily the designer with delusions of grandeur; it's that Art Games become exempt from criticism on the basis that the baffling and indecipherable might just be art.

*Part 1/Part 2

Arise fair Havisham

Havisham smells like hot banana and secretes rare biofuels.  If you rub her right she can run your car a block just by collecting dew from behind her knees. She’s a gentle pink siren and she wants you to know how hard her love can be:  Your nose touching the tip of her nose, your hands exploring her every lump as you stare into her eyes until you become so sexually aroused you are literally levered off of her body.

Havisham wants you to lay your eggs in her, then she’ll recharge and refuel on the liquid in your spine.

Morrissey and Havisham are star crossed lovers, crossed mostly because Havisham is fucking out of her mind while Morrissey’s heart beats only for the sound of passable but largely rubbish mid-eighties rock. It’s a complicated relationship and like any 90lbs schoolboy in his position Morrissey treats their hideous, unemployed, unhappy, unloving love with the scared eyes of a large lost deer, bolting between the two giant passing vans of Havisham’s hammy thighs.

As I explained back here somewhere their house is a handsome combination of a room with a guitar in it, a bar and a toilet-kitchen with beds I would later delete as part of a sinister test to see how many phone-ordered babies it would take to break Morrissey down.

The house that love built

I posited that he’d turn to the drink in a matter of days, hoping it would turn in to a slightly interesting simulation commentary about Simclass situations undermining Simtalent and how it effects the Simwill-to-live or something but instead he just spent most of his time outside in a park, taking hour after hour to perfect his guitar skills while slowly starving to death. Unemployed and generally useless he spent most of his time pissing about in town where I couldn’t be bothered to scroll around looking for him. After a day and a half of him trying to avoid Havisham, his SimAtrophy finally kicked in and I found Morrissey a couple of blocks away passed out on a bench and drenched in his own stinking fluids, just like a real New Wave star.  

In the meantime, Havisham had already begun to accumulate her spawn over the phone, along with the free maternity leave cash the game provides when Sims start churning out kids. Luckily Sim Government laws are lax enough to not bother enforcing any sort of adoption check-up that might look into if she’s melting their babyskin into lamp covers.  When the adoption agency shows up to the door with a basket in hand Havisham just entices them with the womanly charms of someone who injects frogurt into their ankles and no questions are asked.

Because the Havisham/Morrissey cash flow was put largely into the purposes of buying those outdoor flamingo things I never got around to buying basinets so Havisham lovingly assembled all of her new babies like a chicken finger platter all over the floor.

The adoption service came by on an hourly basis until their carpets looked like a bioluminescent ocean floor with babies growing out of it like stinging fronds and I had to move out most of the furniture to make room. Then the game stopped letting me order babies.

Evening sets on Sims 3.

After pressing something in Build Mode Havisham and Morrissey’s dole bunker now opens out onto a spectacular view of lawn jutting out through SpaceTime from a cosmic forge in their front yard. Thanks to the truly amazing customisation options now their patio pond towers like a giant weird finger over the neighbourhood, keeping silent watch over the nine baby Nigerians.

Baby JohnMaddenXXL gets left in the specialty leaking shower room

Like the devil himself Havisham has many faces, but the most prominent one is unconscious on the floor. Since getting babies she pretty much spends the rest of the game passed out after gorging herself into a wintery slumber on one of the plates of food left on the ground at some point. 

Havisham’s deep outdoor hibernation is peppered with occasionally waking up from her induced coma to spend time making a Geocities shrine for the actor who played Andrew on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

 

Unlike Havisham Morrissey less Faye-Dunaway-shrieking-about-wire-hangers and more like an awkwardly vacant Haley Joel Osment who’s fallen into an tar pit. Overall he represents the least notable of video game characters: The unemployed seventeen-year-old New Wave father of 9; the tiny shetland pony of the rock music farm. It’s a shame because it’s a niche idea that’s got to have a demographic  to match. While Havisham is busy with her sugar coma Morrissey inexplicably becomes the brains and driving force of the family even though I designed him to be incredibly self-indulgent and fixated on his career. Now instead of busking in a forest he spends hours on end aimlessly holding babies which is pointless because as I’ve stated before Simbabies don’t seem to actually require food or attention. It wouldn’t be that bad if he wasn’t literally dying while doing it but I guess childcare is enforced by some kind of brain implant in all sims. Even Havisham would suckle the nearest Simbaby she was next to when she was conscious. They would do this for hours when awake, moving from one baby to the next like an endless toddler production line.

VISUAL METAPHOR

He hasn’t touched his guitar in days. He does not sleep. Morrissey wanders the moors of his offspring and takes five hours trying to get from the fridge to the shitter while avoiding the stacks of plates and newspapers that have been accumulating like a defensive border made from bits of stuff found in an olympic vomitorium. The ground is crusty with newspaper that hasn’t been recycled since they bought a TV.

His vital signs have plummetted and he hasn’t been able to eat since the kids created a human wall by sleeping in front of the fridge until I finally just deleted it when it got to the point that nothing was happening and I was bored. Havisham never complained about it because she was mostly passed out on a sidewalk around this point but I guess food matters because the fuzz ended up coming to the door about the kids.

Soon after the Nigerian babies managed to get whisked away into some sort of portal bathysphere by an adoption agent played by Lionel Richie. Apparently when they reach toddler stage you’re meant to feed them and not tab out mid-game. Then with only salad made weeks earlier to sustain them Havisham and Morrissey died. It was a bit sad because they were fairly pitiful looking by the end of it but to be fair they were mostly assholes.

 

SHATTERED DREAMS

Silence now covers their house like a large, boring blanket. Morrissey’s tombstone sits next to his untouched guitar as a totally natural and not pre-thought visual metaphor. The game lasted about two actual days and in the end didn’t really prove anything other than the poignant “children make you die” conclusion. And the added footnote that having kids in Sims 3 essentially will negate any original characteristics you’ve given your Sim in its creation; turning your sim in to nothing more than a miserable, slowly dying bot, forced to go through its pitiful life picking up stinky babies as their clockwork winds down. Just like real life.

In the middle of June I started the episodic Sim epic Havisham and Morrissey, first introducing the story’s sulking kitchen boy, Morrissey. Morrissey was the struggling Northern artist-cum-father of about twelve Kenyans adopted over the phone, as part of a DEEP and IN DEPTH look into VERY REAL and A BIT RACIST Simulated class fatalism. Today I introduce Havisham.

 

Havisham is Morrissey’s horrorwife.



Havisham is like what you would get if you crossed The Penguin with a sticky theatre curtain from Nevada rockabilly club, or like Beth Ditto if she had a flaccid cock hanging from her face. Her personality traits were essentially meant to make her the worst person imaginable: a sort of venomous, black eyed widowmaker who is too lazy to cook actual meals so she just eats fly-laden leftovers that were never thrown out because I forgot to buy a sink. She briefly worked as a cook when I accidentally clicked something.

As far as I can tell, once your sim has a job, at any point that you manage to get a baby you’re automatically given a weekly allowance as some kind of child care policy worked in to the game. Also part of the EA child rearing policy is that baby-ordering is run through the same service as pizza delivery and that all babies are BLACK.



Out of Africa

Other useful true-facts:

• Babies don’t eat!
• Babies can’t die!

Unlike in real life or in that bit in Trainspotting, Sim babies are never dead or slightly off. The game forces you to be responsible for weird immortal doll things that, as it turns out, don't even fucking eat food unless you gavage them. In fact you could probably lock one up in a room until its toddler years and they only seem to come out of it lightly unhinged as evidenced by a previous game where I tried this and he just grew up to be actor Steve Buscemi:



Having given Havisham the personality points of Lazy and Hates Children Morrissey was put in the position of responsibility of taking care of the babies while Havisham continued to pursue her own personal interests which include A Chair and Buying Babies. This basically would work against the character programming in the game from when I first made Morrissey to only be interested in arts-oriented goals. In fact even though Havisham was programmed to hate babies her character  automatically coos and picks up the nearest horrible, dead eyed Victorian doll-faced adoptee she’d see when it would begin to cry. So regardless of how the character’s traits were formulated all Sims are identical in how they react tenderly to the endless deathpit of baby screams. What resulted was a pointless treadmill of coddling and forcefeeding weird immortal highlander babies over 18 hour stretches, pushed by the game's inherent pro-baby protocols and resulting in mass tragedy.



Tune in next time for...When there is actual plot exposition

Imagine the magic spawn of Xtreme sports enthusiasts and guys with proto-aspergers and you basically get Robin Burkinshaw's Sims drama "Alice and Kev". Alice and Kev is an Xtreme minimalist playthrough of Sims 3, a kind of mawkish human interest story about fake homeless people. Now imagine the homeless Sims competing to see who can stand around idly for the longest without inevitably dying from insufficient waffle intake or something. That is the plot arc of Alice and Kev.

Apparently just leaving your Sim in a pool and deleting the ladder is passe and the only way that'll get you thoroughly wanked over by gaming virtuosos is by creating a blog based on watching Sims develop a thick crust of piss fumes around their torsos over the course of months. So I figured while I'm scratching the bottom of the barrel for Geralog topics I may as well make a weird, desperate grab for attention by repeating more or less the exact same thing.

So hey Robin Burkinshaw. I see your rubbish Alice and Kev and I raise you Havisham and Morrissey. Yeah! And the pictures on your blog loaded a bit slowly for me one time. How does that taste?



Like any Greek tragedy Havisham and Morrissey is a multi-layered story about adopting fifteen babies and succumbing to exhaustion and disease after I briefly walk away from the computer. On its deeper, more pulpy level it is a commentary on socio-economic issues in Northern England and therefore much better than whatever is happening here. Unlike Robin's in-depth study of the harsh realities of finding waffles in your neighbours house, Havisham and Morrissey was an attempt to see what effect totally fake class fatalism had on pre-programmed SimSuccess so I built a house with three rooms and forced Havisham to repeatedly order babies from the adoption agency to rack up unemployment cheques.

The main protagonist of this story is really Morrissey: a struggling musician who is probably quite good but it's impossible to tell through his thick veil of twat.




For the most part he spends his time standing about and looking like a bit like a 13 year old Winona Ryder while his wife uses her free time to loiter up against the kitchen counter for the three hours that's required to make an Orange Shake.

I started the game by giving him the ambitious and musically-inclined loner traits which basically forced his reptile brain to pick up a guitar the minute he entered the house, then spend the rest of the afternoon strumming for 15 hours to get to the end of one verse of Hot Cross Buns. In fact for the first three days he really just spent his time standing in a corner creating rubbish rock tunes while speaking to no one at all, only stopping occasionally to agonisingly piss himself, just like the real Morrissey. Had I not soon intervened by trying to order thousands of babies on the telephone Morrissey would be destined for stardom instead of spending his last days mopping his and Havisham's piss from in front of the lounge chairs. But naturally this was all just part of the Gerablog XTREME social experiment to see whether family life would cause his dreams become dashed on the rocks like a tiny baby seal. The answer, poetically, was actually that he would starve to death in front of a herd of toddlers who wouldn't move out of the way of the fucking fridge.

Stay tuned for more on...Havisham and Morrissey!

With my finger firmly on the pulse of the Internet I’ve started my very first Twitter account only nine months after Dog Whisperer Cesar Millar - So now you can watch me fail to regularly update another one of my accounts. I had hoped to make a sort of fictional concept piece but was having trouble coming up with anything really decent so amuchmoreexotic  suggested I run with the first idea I come up with. This led to my rubbish opus MolyneuxBrain. MolyneuxBrain is the heartwrenching story of world famous Peter Molyneux whose brain is haunted by a ghost.  It is narrated by Molyneux' brainghost and follows their George-and-Lennie-esque relationship. Later on his brain will become haunted by other ghosts who enter in through his pons medulla (which doubles as a doorway to the dead, naturally). This will lead to a GHOST WAR. Stay tuned!


MolyneuxBrain

Yesterday I watched a homeless man have a yelling match about the quality of music he was belting out during his topless meth high. To be fair, HM suggested "You shouldn't judge me if you haven't heard me really sing" which seemed sensible if you ignore the bit afterwards where he ran after someone for about two blocks shouting visit my website while spelling out his entire URL which I immediately scored onto my arm like a sneaky Michael Herr. People often complain about the extent that technology has saturated culture but if it weren't for the Internet I would have made the false assumption that Elvis Nelson was just a normal man with bits of food stuck to his hair instead of realising that really he and I are just alike with our shared ability to recreate circa 1997 AltaVista sites. Realising the poor are on the Internet is one of those moments where you know you're living in the future, with all of its electric toothbrushes and aliens depositing their eggs into your chest cavity.

Continuing my theme of being at least two years behind Internet trends here’s a video of Yahtzee’s television show pilot.

Game Damage comes out of the Mike D School of Reverse Psychology where 'bad' is a bit like 'actually good' but objectively it’s mostly rubbish. It's one of those ideas that was probably quite good to begin with but was conceived during a horrible lapse of judgment. The end result of the show seems to more or less be two Australians and a Scot competing to see who is the most wrigglingly awkward while trying not to look as if they've been preserved in a veneer of their own sweat. It’s probably one of the most unsettling review programmes I’ve ever watched just because of that; they all look like some sort of House of Mirrors cross between Me and Lloyd Christmas dipped in shellac:

It's the kind of set up that was likely meant to be a response to programmes like Electric Playground who had discovered the rubbish material-to-wankable host ratio pretty early on in the game. EP made more or less of a career from parading Jade Raymond's uncanny valley face around enough times to distract everyone else from the kilos of mindless next-gen rhetoric they'd pile into their scripts. Game Damage on the other hand is the kind of thing that you or I would make if we had the sort of hubris necessary to bill a television show about Australians doing sketches from a rented couch.



The show's wildcard is Internet-famous Yahtzee who's unfortunate fatal flaw in person is that he's a cock. It's a bit of a weird twist considering Zero Punctuation was always a perfect example of how to pull off Angry Nerdo comedy without seeming like the sort of person who was slightly unhinged. It's like one of those moments where you realise Lou Ferrigno has started shopping at Tesco and he's one of you after all, only that Yahtzee takes it one step further: bypassing the cache of minor Internet celebrity by dressing as if he's part of some kind of pantomime re-cast of The Maltese Falcon and speaking as if he's never heard actual human language before.

Game Damage is like watching Yahtzee attempting to win a talent show by impersonating Yahtzee; punctuating every word with weird over-pronounced sarcastic Yahtzeeisms. Most people don't actually talk the way they write but human-Yahtzee recites every line in an eery Yahtzee character-voice. Sadly he's not even funny cock. He just wafts of angry proto-aspergers nerd cock, like stumbling into a sealed room operated by The Lone Gunmen just as "Ringo" Langly begins yelling something about the original BSG being more 'pure' and then starts calling you a queer. Some of his purebred comedy lines include overly pronounced gems like:

"Rated PG for PRETENTIOUS GIT" and "Peter Molyneux should shut his big fat GOB for once"

If you're not already pissing over your flaccid cock in laughter then maybe watching someone in a Master Chief costume aimlessly wander through a market for about eight minutes worth of film will do you in. Crack a grin as he spends 15 entire seconds pretending to eat crisps through a mask, guffaw as he tries to buy a cheeseburger but comedically forgot his wallet in his other awful bargain costume. Feel your ribs literally split through your skin as you buckle over and die when tries on a sun dress. Bask in the unending Benny Hill-like music loop.



Taste the warm rush of saliva when you quickly realise at 1:18 in the video that Yug literally wants to fuck Yahtzee*

*If you can be bothered to make that into a gif for me then I might get you a super secret reward prize, but I probably won't.

The history of role-playing games is long and full of tribulation; not since the Blitz has the nation mourned so emotionally than when it lost its youngest generation to the introduction of RP servers over the internet. And now you too can join in with the tears because baby’s got a brand new WoW character.

It’s fitting, really. Now that I’m done with my university semester and have come to terms with losing my will to do anything at all it seems that forced abstinence and a career in writing online erotic fantasy is only the natural progression. Yet even after developing a level of muscle atrophy that is rivalled only by Richard Ashcroft or children in Uganda who live on a steady diet of tin, I’ve still never quite sunk to rolling on an actual Role-Playing server. 

Technically the only difference between Role-Playing servers and the proper kind is that instead of simply mingling with twelve-year-old petulant and unruly jerks and is perpetually broken, RP servers also offer equally woeful guilds that offer rules like this:

The Baptism of Salt

At the first opportunity after gaining level 10 (in WoW, or roughly 8 hours played time in other games), the character will be taken to a body of water (preferably the ocean or a saltwater sea) along with a Drowned Priest. There, the lowly Saltwife will die by drowning (stay underwater until the breath meter runs out and die). Then the Drowned Priest will resurrect the character and promote them to Ironborn saying, "What is dead can never die; but rises again, harder, and stronger"

And

[We] are exactly like fantasy vikings

But more specifically the difference is that you create a character back-story and stick rigidly to that. Having played my character for two days now it’s really proof if proof were needed that it only takes a few easy steps to successfully transform in to a thirty-year-old agoraphobic shut in and World of Warcraft is pretty much your #1 entry-point to this brave new world of courting guildmates entirely in ASCII characters.

Brief History: Rasputino was a man of epicurean taste who spent most of his days eating truffles off of a diamond encrusted inlaid serving tray balanced on the back of the Tsarina he was balls deep in. Things changed when one day while he was drinking sherry from the skull of a saint and having a vision of a sad goat he was stabbed by his fellow statesmen and left for dead. Now he wanders the frozen plains of Russia like a lone wolf, in cognito after taking on the alias Rasputino. What was his real name? No one knows.

Spurned and alone, Rasputino is forced to live amongst the people as they do. His task now is to join forces with his countrymen to revolt against the crippling imperial dynasty that was once his home. But who will join him? Luckily,  no sooner had Rasputino stepped foot in the deepest sector of Eastern Europe’s frozen heart had he befriended the king of the wolves, Amaroq son of Dachshund the Great. Rasputino bowed to the king whose kindness and just heart was known through out the land and then danced 'til twilight on his frozen corpse after beating him over the head with his oversized mallet when Amaroq stared vacantly back at him in return, not understanding the concept of bowing because he is a dog.

Abandoned by his newly formed guild, Rasputino is left only with a single trusted advisor, the warrior Hjhgjk

 

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It takes a perverse labour of love to keep producing clutches of simulation games but Will Wright has reliably been churning out a whole assembly of them for nearly two decades, resulting in one of the most well-received franchises in the industry. His newest pet project, Spore, offered real genre-hopping simulation: it’s part MMO, part RTS, part Sandbox game, and features some of the most impressive character design possibilities in any game that I’ve seen. This would be great if the thing was actually any fun to play. Instead Spore is more of a high-concept creature creator that straddles the divide between “creative” and “almost stunningly dull”, relying on hours of grinding through tedious mini games just so you can rack up enough money to buy a new leg to grow in the middle of your creature’s face.  

You start the game playing a cell in what amounts to a ten-minute-long eating simulator with all the tedium that implies. Your main goal may as well be to loiter around aimlessly until something that you’re able to digest accidentally bumps in to you because the controls are too horrible to even bother with. I literally covered my cell’s body with spikes and sat around while poor, unsuspecting protoplasm filleted themselves on my face as they swam by. It took about eight minutes of floating around but in between hurtling myself against pieces of broken meteor enough times to somehow become sentient, and eating the remains of my filleted peers I was finally able to leave my watery, Java applet-worthy purgatory. This entire section seems to only really serve as piss-poor exposition for the rest of the game because once you get on land anything you took from your cell stage naturally becomes completely useless to you.

But what it leads to is probably the one impressive part of the whole abysmal game: the character creator. Thanks to the truly amazing character customisation options you have almost limitless design possibilities. With this I was able to plan out as evolutionarily hopeless a creature as I could devise and set him off on the world to see how long he could survive, and thus Theresa was born. My species amounted to a bulbous, bowling pin disaster whose head was cracked all the way back so his eyes faced in the opposite direction at all times. Two arm stumps grew out of his neck like massive pinkie fingers and he was held up by two more fleshy pegs which made him pretty much too inept to do anything other than spasm around silently. For finishing touches I left him completely hairless. When I was done Theresa looked like a cross between a Vienna sausage and a Thanksgiving turkey.

The second phase of evolution seems to involve more horrible point-and-click navigation as you stumble across herds of creatures that look like they’ve crawled out of a drainage lagoon. At this stage you can choose from two equally non-entertaining game tactics: to befriend them or to attack them. If you're starting to feel increasingly apprehensive about the game then don't worry, your anxiety is well founded. Spore's creature phase raises the bar of almost cripplingly boring game play to unparalleled heights by catering to the niche fan-base of people who have been waiting for a game to fulfill their intense desire for a weirdly grueling series of Simon Says. Befriending other species requires what feels like an endless chain of miming dances and posing for your peers in hopes to somehow impress them. After doing this innumerable times you can enlist the help of fellow genetic-reject mercenaries on your road to befriending and attacking countless others. Considering Theresa had no hands his attacks were limited to somehow biting his attackers with his perpetually upright grimace and after wandering around for a few minutes my creature was killed by some kind of walking bee. Getting killed at this stage just reloads your last save, but because it’s so mind bogglingly easy to retrace your steps there is almost no consequence to dying whatsoever.

By both the tribe and civilisation stage your creature is stuck with the same design and characteristic you gave it during its original creature phase, only you can give them hats now.  Both tribe and civilisation stages are nearly indistinguishable in their real-time strategy game play but bizarrely it’s during the RTS that you realise there’s no real strategy involved at all aside from flinging troops in to battle endlessly in an effort to make it to the final sandbox phase: Space. This probably sounds deceptively non-horrible to those of you casual gamers who just want simplicity for simplicity’s sake. But with the vast amount of stupid, repetitive simplicity this game is just shy of causing me physical pain.

In the end Spore is essentially the “man against nature” of sim games in that it is a constant battle against the natural forces of irritation and boredom just to keep playing. It benefits almost entirely from its creature creator mechanic but the actual game elements come across as badly composed filler.

 

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who hate Jack Thompson, and those who are Jack Thompson. Oh look, here's some more deranged rubbish .

I'm not really sure what is worse, the fact that he’s been trying to constitutionally throttle the entire games industry on the off-chance that the wrong word in a video game might accidently penetrate the cocoons of America’s kids, or the fact that he's doing it Again. Thompson has essentially made a career out of miming the kind of pointless comments that have passed through townhall.com's digestive tract and been shit out stillborn; adding to it a Pavlovian response to video games that results in frothing at the mouth about the kind of stunningly ill-conceived hyperspiritual nonsense that would make a Grand Inquisitor blush.  

Needless to say, the guy is completely batshit and his legal history is just about littered with some real gems. Included in the confused and confusing mixbag is a comparison between ESRB ratings and Goebbels propaganda, and his time dedicated in the late eighties to suing Janet Reno for touching his fucking arm. But bringing the crazy levels to a rolling boil is his assertion against Sony Playstation:

"The Japanese have for a very long time dumped pornography into this country in a fashion they would not tolerate in their own country. It is another version of Pearl Harbor....The Japanese have a contempt for our culture which is patent. There [sic] dumping of garbage into our culture is a slow motion version of Pearl Harbor".

Xenolols! He just made up some bullshit. Adding fuel to the delusional fire, Thompson scores a xenophobic hat-trick by pandering to Republicans, readers of Stormfront and cunts alike.


Fat-handed twat

Thompson is pretty much the Kwisatz Haderach of the Christian right, the result of a century-long breeding program designed to eliminate the peculiar genetic defects that cause some human beings to want to innovate and celebrate free speech. But the best part of all of this is his complete martyr complex. He literally believes he is saving the world. And in a way I don't even blame his intentions; any attempt to protect kids is generally commendable. It's too bad his gentle Mother Theresa-like heart is filled with poison bile. Jack's save the children campaign is little more than a scorched-earth policy; it's the kind of out-of-touch deep-south justice that has made policy makers of the last ten years seem like they've been living in a fallout shelter since the Truman era.

Michael Mateas is a prof and video game designer who's managed to make it in to my pretty nebulous list of favourite AI Researchers. I doubt you recognise his name unless you ever bother trolling game studies blogs, but it's likely you've come across at least one of the games he's helped design. Facade in particular garnered a lot of academic acclaim for being the first successful AI-based electronic narrative: becoming a bit of a pleasure sock for the likes of Kotaku and even being called the most important game in the last decade by Ernest Adams. It's actually a brilliant little project, but my interest in it is specifically in Mateas' idea of procedural authorship.

As an academic Mateas suffers from an affliction of making up bogus terms that I don't understand. But if you're lucky enough you're usually able to find some sort of material that explains it all well enough.

Here's a video that's over an hour long that you won't watch:


Mateas takes a position that tries to reconcile player-agency with authorial control in video games. This follows the common ludological conceit that narrative is fundamentally incompatible with the player's ability to have control over his actions or the plot arc, and is instead railroaded into doing what the designer has dictated. In other words,any kind of agency in a video game narrative is always in one way or another going to be predetermined. Think about video game flavour text which basically tries to add depth to the game but in a superficial way that is based on triggered responses. Mateas' argument is that explicitly scripting actions creates an undynamic game experience. Instead he opts for introducing situations and NPCs that react dynamically to player action based on the reactive planning language ABL. ABL programs are organised as a collection of many different behaviours which are activated based on how naturally they fit with the actions the user takes. So a behaviour like 'yawn' will be scripted into the game but when, how, and why it is activated is based on the actual dynamic context that is being generated by player interaction.

In his words:
"what the architecture should do for you is allow these behaviours to mix and match richly and for multiple behaviours to be active at the same time, and to get a behaviour that makes sense out of the character that doesn't look like dithering or thrashing....for instance the system is figuring out that [grace and trip's] overt emotion is happiness but [they're] covertly they're really upset so it needs to create a strange smile but with this look of surprise when a certain topic is brought up, and so on"

So authorship in a game becomes entirely procedure based; rather than explicitly dictating the actions of the plot, the real role of the author here would be to create framework while the user propells the actual story. It brings up some interesting questions about the nature of content versus form, ludology and narratology, and even the role of the author.

A Briefing on Why I'm Writing about Video Games:

Largely because real life is rubbish

Introduction: Hi.

If you happen to have been actively searching for a new blog to follow which only caters to about 4% of your actual interests then you might just have hit the jackpot. Gerablog is the sister-blog of Corlimey: a far better livejournal devoted largely to talking about soul crushing angst and Babybell-related topics. By design Gerablog exists as Corlimey's more focused counterpart; This includes topics about video games as art, digital copyright laws, pro-am journalism, online networking communities, Internet publishing, MMOs, creative commons, P2P, and other topics that will make this site utterly fucking unreadable to anyone else.