Nice to see someone other than the usual developer suspects whining about this... And management is a lot more likely to pay attention to securities analysts than bozos like me. Hey.
posted by Greg at 8:59 AM

Ernest Lilley asked me to cover E3 for his site Tech Revu. Whence the following.

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I love games, but man, there are times I hate the games industry. If there's a louder show floor than E3's, I don't care to be on it. Hard to have a conversation for all the blaring music, sound effects, and loud promotional videos playing on huge flatscreens overhead. At least we no longer have to listen to "Infogrames Rocks My World," since that large French publisher has rebranded itself as "Atari," not that there is any meaningful connection between the Lyon-based firm and Nolan Bushnell's one-time California operation.

The theme of this year's E3 was somethingorother about how far we've come, and down in the bowels of Kentia Hall (the lair of third-rate peripheral manufacturers, Korean game operations, and similarly declasse booths for people who can't afford South Hall) was a small area where you could play old arcade titles, Intellivisions, and such. How far we've come is this: a vast wasteland of licensed crap and interminable sequels; a blaring, glitzy show floor boasting thousands of playable games, developed at a collective cost of billions, of which maybe a half-dozen are worth a second glance.

Out on the entrance hall floor is some classic muscle car; hired bimbos stand in front of it wearing dangerously short cut-off jeans and halter tops. Above it is a banner for the game they're promoting; the Dukes of Hazzard, forsooth. Only in the game industry would such a shit license find a home. Are the suits morons, or are they just desperate? Why in god's name would anyone think a fucking Dukes of Hazzard game is likely to outsell something half-way original?

Or if that's not bizarre enough for you, how 'bout this one? Wandering the floor, I encounter a sign saying that if I want to hang out for an hour, I can personally meet Kevin Siembieda, creator of Rifts. Haven't seen Kevin in years, but I don't think I'll wait. Rifts is an okay tabletop roleplaying game they've evidently licensed to do a digital version. Been around for years, has a limited following--this gives me hope that I may be able to flog the rights to Paranoia to some bozo, but, um. Talk about a property with a limited following

The lack of imagination that results in all this licensed drivel extends to other realms as well. On the first day, while I'm waiting to get an armband that will let me onto the show floor to help a friend with booth set-up, I'm standing by a machine that's printing show badges. I glance over, clunk; it just emitted a badge for Vin Diesel, who has some kind of silly game deal. "Atari" is pushing some game in association with some hip-hop guy I never heard of. Wandering the floor, at one point I glance up and some huge screen is show Britney Spears--I never do find out whether it's video or live, not that I care particularly. In other words, having done its best to avoid having people associate games with anything other than the corporate logo, the game industry has no celebrities itself, and has to import them from other fields. Yah right, associating Vin Diesel with a project is going to make me more eager to buy it. Sure

And lets not even talk about the booth babes. This seems to work; I mean, you can see the thin lines of drool hanging from the lips of some of the guys at the show. But I mean, really; if you had product people actually cared about, you wouldn't need this shit, would you.

In the course of the show, I saw only one title that struck me as something other than the same-old same-old--Superpower 2, from Dreamcatcher. Rotate the world, zoom in on California to see nicely detailed topography, select a tank division and send it to Somalia. Looks something like Balance of Power, updated and with a more gritty "conquer the world" approach. Interesting

And Nintendo has a version of Donkey Kong you play by banging on a bongo-drum perhipheral. Cute. I like the Nintendo booth; almost everywhere else, all you get is gritty violent crap, or fantasy bozos with flaming swords. I'll take goofy Japanese characters over that any time.

But this being Tech Revu, you want technical crap, I imagine. From that perspective, this year is the year of the handheld; any rumors that Microsoft was going to make a major XBox Next announcement are false. Instead, we've got the Sony PSP, the Nintendo DS, and the N-Gage QD; since I'm not an authorized developer of any, this is my first chance to play with these devices.

N-GAGE QD

Let's start with the new version of N-Gage, since we can get it out of the way pretty quickly. Basically, it's a fix for the stupider aspects of the original device. With N-Gage 1.0, if you will, to change the game card, you had to shut it down, open the back, remove the battery, slide out the old card, replace the battery, close it, and boot up again. For someone used to a GameBoy, which allows you to yank out one cart, shove in another, and start playing, this was pretty annoying. The QD has an opening on the side, and allows you to hot-swap game cards in and out. It also has the phone speaker and mike on the front of the device, not the side, so you can hold it flat against your head when using it as a phone, instead of sticking out the side of your head like a taco--no more sidetalkin'

It's also shaped a little differently, has longer battery life, and no longer plays MP3s, but otherwise, it's the same as the old N-Gage; a Series 60 Symbian OS device with a 103Mhz ARM processor, Bluetooth and GSM, FM radio, PDA-like address book and planner features. It's still Series 60 Developer Platform 1.0, even though newer Nokia S60 phones are Developer Platform 2.0, to ensure 100% compatibility with N-Gage games. (What's the difference? DP 1.0 is Symbian 6 and MIDP 1. 0; DP 2.0 is Symbian 7 and MIDP 2.0.)

NINTENDO DS

Okay, onward and upward. The line to see a DS looks like Napoleon's army retreating from Moscow, and I'm damn well not going to stand in it, so I don't actually get to play with one, but lack of personal experience has never stopped me from pontificating

Nintendo DS has a dual screen. Yep, two screens, one on each side of a clam-shell device. Now what, you may ask, is the game utility of having two screens? And well you may ask, because the real answer is "fucked if I know." According to Nintendo, it's really cool, and will enable whole new styles of gameplay. Of course, all console manufacturers always say that every new device will enable whole new styles of gameplay, just like every game publisher says that every new game is "compelling." In fact, we have a show floor consisting of thousands of compelling titles, many of them boasting whole new styles of gameplay just like the wholly new styles of gameplay from last year, or the year 1993, actually. But never mind

According to Nintendo, DS doesn't mean "dual screen" but "Developer System"-- whatever. Each of the screens is 256x192 pixels, RGB; the lower one is a touch screen, and the device will come with a stylus. This I like, actually; one of the problems with consoles in general is the lack of a decent pointing device. The lack makes some styles that work dandy on the PC work badly on a console system--real-time strategy games, for instance. You probably could do an RTS on this thing.

It's got two processors, a 67Mhz ARM 946E-S, and a 33Mhz ARM7TDMI--better than the sole 32Mhz processor on the GBA, but still pretty underpowered in comparison to either the N-Gage or the PSP. 4MB of main memory. It supports WiFi, meaning you can in principle both make a connection to a nearby hub, and also establish a local wireless connection to other DS devices nearby--no cellular connectivity, however. And it has onboard support for both 2D and 3D graphics--one area where the N-Gage sucks, by the way, since it has no hardware support for graphics. 16 channel sound, a mike, and two slots--one for GBA carts, and one for DS-specific compact cards that, Nintendo claims, can be up to a gig in size

The GBA compatibility is important; there's a huge library of GBA titles, while both Nokia and Sony are starting from scratch.

In short, it's kinda cute, but puzzling. It's clearly not enough to stave off the PSP, and the dual screens are an oddity rather than a big advance. But if you mislay your GBA, I can see getting a DS, since it'll play all your GBA games and offer its own titles, too. I have to believe Nintendo will be announcing a more highly powered device at some point, though.

SONY PSP

The thing you notice about the PSP is how large, and how sharp, the screen is. 480 x 272 pixels, a 16:9 ratio that looks like a movie screen--and yes, they're planning on releasing movies for the thing as well as games. I can actually see this, and might well prefer to watch a movie this way than letterboxed on a laptop.

It's 333Mhz processor makes even the N-Gage look like a clunker, and of course there's on-board graphic support. Developers claim it's basically close to a PS2 in terms of power, which is pretty startling for a hand-held.

32MB of memory, plus 4MB of DRAM for saved games and such. It also has a slot for a Sony memory stick, I guess for even more saved games.

Games are supplied in the form of a Sony UMD disc--60mm in diameter, but storing up to 1.8 gigs. Woohoo. Small, but still large enough that hopefully they won't get lost in my bag, the way the postage-stamp-sized N-Gage game cards do. WiFi support, plus USB and infrared.

I like this, a lot, and wonder whether Sony is about to turn Nintendo into a smoldering ruin--they make virtually all their money from GBA these days, GameCube is almost an afterthought. If the price is right, Sony may well eat GBA for lunch. We shall see

INFINIUM PHANTOM

While none of the majors had new home console announcements this year, I did spend a little time checking out the Phantom from Infinium Labs. It was announced some years ago, but this is the first time they had actual boxes to show. Infinium is a VC-funded start-up, which is a cause of doubt from the start. Manufacturers traditionally subsidize console systems--Microsoft was losing $100 bucks on every XBox sold when it first launched, for example. (Moore's Law being what it is, they probably lose less these days.) They also charge publishers a "platform royalty" for every game sold--basically, you hope to sell enough games to repay the loss on the box. It's a razors-and-razor-blades model, in other words.

This works okay if you're Sony or Microsoft, and have deep enough pockets to swallow the loss in the ramp-up phase--but not so hot if you have limited cash resources like, say, a start-up. So basically, I used to think these guys were smoking crack.

But okay, let's look at it. The Phantom is basically a Windows XP box--AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor, 256MB of RAM, an Nvidia video card, 40GB local content cache. It's got an ethernet port and a couple of USB ports.

Kind of a nice box, in fact; I'd expect to pay $1000 for a PC like this. But it's not a PC, exactly; it's designed to connect to a TV, not a monitor (S-video, RCA, component video, and PAL support; HDTV compatible), and it has no CD or DVD drive (not even a floppy). No expansion slots, not any of that stuff.

The idea is that you connect it to broadband and, instead of playing games off CDs or other media, you download stuff from Infinium's game service, to which you subscribe at $29.99 per month. Indeed, with a year's contract, you can get the box for free--or you can pay $199 for one, if you don't like that deal.

This alleviates my concerns a little bit, by the way--Infinium can take your contract to the bank, and get a cash advance from them on the basis of your contractual commitment to spending $360 over the course of a year. And of course, there's no customization, this is a standardized device like any console, so they can probably manufacture it more cheaply than a similarly powered PC. Maybe they won't need as much cash as I thought.

Infinium's pitch (indeed, its trademarked slogan) is that they offer "any game, any time." In other words, you don't have to go buy stuff, you just log on, decide what you want to play, and go--well, after suffering the download of several hundred megabytes, I guess, but still.

The slogan is, of course, a crock of shit. Since it's a Windows XP box, it won't be running GameCube titles any time soon, for instance. But it can potentially offer any PC game, any time--with agreement of the rights owners. No actual deals with content owners have been announced.

That's the real question, of course; for my 30 bucks a month (on top of my broadband subscription), what exactly do I get? Supposedly, I get some library of games for free, plus the ability to rent additional games for $5 a day, plus the ability to buy additional titles outright at a fee to be determined by the game's publisher.

Um... So for $360 a year, I buy the right to spend more money to buy games that I could buy at the store and run on my desktop machine without that subscription? Uh, yeah. Sure sounds like a compelling value proposition to me.

Now--there is a problem with playing PC titles in a console fashion. When you're on your PC, you're sitting a couple of feet from the screen, at a desk, with the keyboard and mouse in front of you. When you're playing with a console, you're sitting six feet from the TV, holding a controller attached to the console by a long cord. How does this work with the Phantom? Surprisingly well, actually. The Phantom ships with a console-style controller, and also with a lapboard/keyboard thingie. It's basically a board, on which you rest a mouse, with a keyboard cantilevered above the mouse board--attached to the mouseboard on the left side, slanting upward toward the right. (You can reverse that if you're a leftie.) So you can sit on the couch and still play a PC game pretty easily.

Mind you, I don't want to write any novels on a slanted keyboard; carpal tunnel syndrome, here I come. But then, you don't type all that much when playing a game--a few hotkey bashes, maybe the occasional "ph43r my l33t sk1llz!" or "gimme buffs bitch." So you're okay here.

But if you do play a lot of games with tiny text or the like, you probably want an HDTV, regular TV resolution being what it is

So--on the whole, kinda nice engineering, the business model still strikes me as implausible, but we'll have to see how this plays out. I will, of course, have to get one, but uh, that's just me. I mean I've already got twelve console systems (and am currently bidding on a NES on EBay, for the sake of completeness), what's another coupla hundred bucks?

posted by Greg at 12:58 PM

Another non-game post... For which apologies. I'll post about E3 tomorrow, in all likelihood.

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The Bush administration, from its inception, has failed to understand the utility and importance of international law. Amost immediately on election, it pulled out of the Kyoto Agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and has refused to participate in the International Criminal Court. In the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration has claimed that the Geneva Convention simply does not apply, since these are anti-terrorist actions rather than conventional wars. Conveniently, it has also declared that US law (and indeed the constitution) does not apply, either, so long as US citizens aren't involved, and prisoners are kept in places like Guantanamo, the sovereign status of which is somewhat uncertain.

The whole hullaballoo over Abu Ghraib derives, ultimately, from the administration's conviction that international law does not apply; that the Geneva Convention is irrelevant to the current struggle; and that, ultimately, extreme measures are justified in dealing with the shadowy terrorist network.

It is of the nature of dominant powers to resist any attempts to fetter their activities, however those attempts are couched--in terms of recourse to international law or otherwise. Rome would surely never have let its actions be limited by some notional idea of international law; Rome was Rome, and the barbarians deserved what they got. The current situation is largely one birthed by the arrogance of power; the US is the sole superpower, the current administration seems to believe we have a divine mission to police the globe, and any restrictions on the means by which we may do so are unnecessary, and to be rejected.

There is something to this: the ends do justify the means, at least at times. If you assume that the US is always a power for good, and will eternally remain the dominant global power, then any restrictions on that power are undesirable.

Personally, I feel that the US is, by and large, generally a power for good. Certainly, we are sinners; we have waged wars of aggression against Mexico and Spain, wars of extermination against the Indians, wars to suppress independence movements in the Philippines and elsewhere--but also wars to abolish slavery, and wars to prevent global tyranny. Our history should teach us, however, that overweening arrogance is indeed an American trait, and when indulged, generally winds up biting us in the ass.

Let us examine these strictures more closely: Ignoring international norms is perfectly reasonable if a) the US is always a power for good, and b) it will always remain the dominant global power.

Both strictures are subject to challenge.

Let's start with a). The situation at Abu Ghraib should bring immediately home the danger of assuming that we are always a power for good. The US consists of people; people are sinners; power corrupts; and without enforcement of good practice, people will stray. That's why we have courts and a police--and a military. That's why we have laws and rules. Experiments have shown that, in a prison setting, people tend to become abusive, unless purposefully trained and restrained from doing so. In other words, the Geneva Convention is itself a good thing--part of "being a power for good," in fact--and it serves a useful purpose. Abu Ghraib could have, and should have, been predicted; it was inevitable, given human nature, unless the authorities took it upon themselves to =prevent= just such a situation. Instead, they seem to have encouraged it. The world is quite right to be outraged.

Oh, sure, I agree with the conservatives; I assume that most of the prisoners are evil, sadistic, terrorist scum who would happily fly jetliners into office towers with the consequent loss of live of thousands. I =assume= that they deserve to die. But we are civilized people, and they have neither been charged with, nor convicted of any crimes, and the US constitution does assume innocence until conviction. Precisely because they are, in all likelihood, moral monsters, we must treat them with the utmost correctness until their crimes are brought out in the light of a properly constituted court. This is, in fact, virtually what it means to be civilized.

Abu Ghraib makes a mockery of point a). If we are a power for good, let us act like one. That means adhering to our own normal principles of behavior at the very minimum--and possibly to international law as well.

But I'm motivated to write this more because of point b) as well. It is moronic to assume that the United States will always remain the predominant world power. In fact, it's pretty iffy to assume that we will remain such for more than three decades.

The whole of the western world is faced with a crisis of demography; in all advanced nations, the average age is increasing, and all face huge problems with their system of pensions, as the ratio between retirees and the active working population increases. By this measure, the US is actually not badly off--not nearly as badly off as Japan or Italy--largely because we encourage immigration (and, unlike Europe, do a pretty good job of integrating immigrants into our society). If you look at the figures for nations like Japan, you have to assume that, as a power, its high water mark was sometime around 1990--and that it is set for long term, secular decline. In a century, if all goes =well=, Japan will be something like the Netherlands--once a world power, now a prosperous afterthought.

Because of immigration, the US is a little better off--but do remember that our best allies, the only countries that really understand the importance of, well, international law, and commonly accepted decent behavior in international (and domestic) affairs, are Europe and our Asian allies--all of whom face a huge demographic crisis over the next few decades.

At the same time that we, and our friends and allies, are facing a crisis of demography--one that will allow us to grow economically, but more slowly—while powers like China and India are experiencing incredibly rapid growth.

Once upon a time, it was believed that gold was the measure of international power. Gold allowed a (demographically fairly small) nation like Spain to hire mercenaries and support a standing army large enough to dominate Europe (and much of the globe) for a time.

For most of the 20th century, it was assumed that industrial power was the fount of international clout; the rise of Germany and the US, and the decline of the UK, could be measured in the number of tons of steel each produced per year.

Today, power isn't measured in such gross ways; the silicon chip in a smart bomb is far more important than the weight of its explosive. Once small bomb, placed adroitly, is far more effective than a B-52-load, dropped indiscriminately from above (as we used to do over, say, Dresden). Ultimately, 21st century power isn't about industrial prowess; it's about brains.

Going into the 21st century, the US has a lot going for it. We have some of the best universities on the planet. We have a political and legal system that rewards entrepreneurship. True, most of our citizens prefer to get degrees in English literature instead of physics, but we attract a lot of, say, Indians and Chinese, who do get degrees in physics, and often stay in the US, because the opportunities here are enormous. And yet--we are an aging dominant power, faced with rapidly expanding newer powers that will ultimately challenge us.

We have something fewer than 300m brains. Both China and India have over 1b. Give them rapid enough growth to educate enough of their population, and they will not merely match us--they will outpace us.

The 20th century was the American century. The 21st century--will be the century of China.

I don't personally view that as (necessarily) a threat; great powers come and go, and it would be rankest arrogance to assume that the US is, and will forever be, number one. But it is a worrying prospect; China is, after all, a Communist nation, ruled by an unelected nomenklatura still steeped in nonsensical Marxist notions, and still at least notionally hostile to capitalist nations such as (ahem) America. And history is rife with examples of emergent, unsatisfied powers that seek to use their growing power to alter the status quo to their own benefit--Germany and Japan, for example.

What happens in 2052, if China gets really pissed off about Taiwan and invades--and has a large enough fleet to defeat ours?

The emergence of China (and India, which worries me less) is inevitable. It's going to happen. And the day when we have to face up to the fact that we're number two (or three, or seven) is also inevitable. It's going to happen.

The question is: How do we manage the transition? How do we ensure that the international order of 2100 is one we're pretty happy about--even though "G7" now means China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, the EU, and the US--in that order?

The answer to that is dirt obvious: We need to ensure that, in the 22nd century, all the major powers adhere to a reasonable and intelligent system of international law.

And yes, it's possible to be reasonably happy, even if you're number seven. Are the Dutch unhappy?

If China, and the rest of the world, acknowledge that wars of aggression are wrong; that free trade is in everyone's benefit; that civil liberties are important; that democratic societies can, by and large, be expected to abide by their treaties--then we'll have an international order in which we can be comfortable being number seven.

At present, it's an iffy proposition. The Cultural Revolution wasn't that long ago. Mao Tse-Tung was at least as bad a mass murderer as Hitler or Stalin--he probably killed more people, albeit if you have the population of China to start from, this is easier. China has reformed, but only part way. We need to integrate them into the international system, to make them a supportive partner in the global order.

The alternative is almost too frightening to contemplate. The "old powers" beat emerging Germany only because they had the emerging US to call upon. No one is going to be able to constrain China--except, perhaps, the Chinese.

We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia.

As the "predominant world power," it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that's foolish from a more long-term perspective. International law may sometimes seem like an unnecessary constraint on our own behavior, but a hundred years from now, we're going to be quite eager for reasonable constraints on the behavior of powers that will then be more powerful than we will be.

In short, the US needs to start behaving like a good global citizen, even when that is painful and annoying. We need to do so for two good reasons: First, because failing to do so casts doubt on our claim to be a force for good; and second, because our global dominance is temporary (and anyone who doubts that has read no history)--and we will want, in future, other countries to behave like good global citizens, even at their own cost.

The immediate actions we should take?

Announce that we accept that the Geneva Convention applies to all prisoners taken in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though those were not conventional wars.

Invite Red Cross monitoring of prisoners in future.

Welcome United Nations participation in Iraq as we prepare them for self-rule, however noxious that proves to be.

Accept the principle of elimination of all agricultural subsidies, in order to restart the Doha round of the international trade talks.

Reiterate our warnings to the Chinese that, despite our distraction in Iraq, any invasion of Taiwan will be met by immediate US military intervention (while assuring them that we consider Taiwan a province of China, and fully expect its eventual peaceful reunification with a free and democratic China).

Agree to participate in the International Criminal Court, without reservations.

Reopen negotiations for the Kyoto agreement, acknowledging that global warming is a global problem that can only be met through global action, while seeking to alter some specific terms that seem motivated more by green ideology than by firm attachment to reality.

And in general: Acting as though the support and contribution of our allies is important, worthwhile, and supportive of an international order that we find important, as we seek to establish that order as something that emerging powers will also find in their own best interest.

As for specific actions that =you= can take: Well:To vote for an administration that is likeliest to behave in this fashion. If you suspect this means I doubt that you should pull the Republican lever, you are right… But then, the last time I voted for a Demoratic presidential candidate was—never. I may make an exception this time around.


posted by Greg at 10:33 PM

Off to E3 in a couple of hours, thought I'd mention a few things that caught my notice recently first.

Infinium

Infinium Labs has been around for a few years pushing its Phantom console, which has never actually appeared (but is now theoretically supposed to hit the market in Q4). I've basically thought these folks were smoking crack; you need deep pockets to subsidize a console system to the point that license revenues from product sales start to produce profits, and no venture-funded company (read: 3DO) has ever succeeded in launching a new console system for this very reason. The last time I looked, they didn't even have an answer to the question of "What's your business model." News reports over the last year or so haven't been reassuring, either; reading between the lines, it seems pretty clear that the company's founders were, err, ethically challenged, and were forced out by the investors, who have installed new management.

But some recent events have made me rethink, if not entirely changed my mind. First, Infinium hired Kathy Schoback and Wallace Poulter, both of whom are smart people, and clearly wouldn't join the company if they didn't know something I don't. And second, they today revealed their business model; $29.95/month subscription, but you have to pay for games on top of them, and can also rent titles for one day for $5. They claim "all PC games are compatible," which I don't entirely believe, even though it's an Windows XP device; and most importantly, the hardware will be free with commitment to a year's subscription (but $199 otherwise).

It may not be immediately obvious, but the "free device with year subscription" approach solves the "you need deep pockets" problems. How's that? They'll be able to take those year-long contracts from subscribers and, in essence, factor the receivables--borrow money, at a discount to face value, from lenders on the basis of assured future revenues.

This still isn't great from a consumer perspective--basically, I have to pay for broadband, then pay them another $30 a month for the privelege of paying more money to download and install games over the service. It's as if the only way you could get an XBox was by subscribing to XBox Live. So I'm still skeptical--but less so than I was.

Pac-Manhattan

Second, the Sunday Times Styles section had an article (free registration required) about Pac-Manhattan, a game put together by one of Frank Lantz's classes at NYU. (Frank is a NY-area game designer, currently doing work for GameLab and PopNYC, and an occasional commenter on this blog.) Essentially, it was a live-action game--one "Pac-Man" and four "Ghosts" running around the streets of the Village, directed via cellphone by controllers at a computer set-up at NYU, with the action followable on the web by anyone who wanted to.

Quite cool, and in the mold of the games run in the UK by Blast Theory, but apparently the folks involved in these kinds of games are using a term which deserves to be shot before it receives wider replication: They call them "big games." The problem is that this is meaningless; a five CD game isn't a "tiny game," and the only real distinction between "big games" and LARPs is the ability of others to participate in realtime via the Web. We need a better term here, and quickly, before we're stuck with this awful one. Any suggestions?


posted by Greg at 1:01 PM

So yesterday I received a copy of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, $39.95 from MIT Press. It's an interesting project, consisting of a series of essays from impressive people (to pull a few out semi-randomly, Espen Aarseth, Chris Crawford, Henry Jenkins, Ken Perlin...), coupled with responses from others, and further responses from an online discussion site for the book, which may be found here.

This makes it another of a so-far limited group of books that use web discussion as the whole or partial source of a book of ideas (Replay is another), and interesting in that right. It's also a look into the old game-story chestnut. I haven't gotten too far into it, but the following claim from the accompanying press release is going to be the starting point for this morning's rant:

"Isn't it possible, though, that many hugely successful computer games--those that depend on or at least utilize storytelling conventions of narrative, character, and theme--can be seen as examples of electronic literature? And isn't it likely that the truly significant new forms of electronic literature will prove to be (like games) so deeply interactive and procedural that it would be impossible to present them as paper-like 'e-books'?"

Now, let's consider the central, loaded term in this claim: Literature. What do we mean by that--and more importantly, is what we mean by "literature" remotely relevant when discussing games?

Most bookstores shelve all fiction together, usually in a section entitled "Fiction and Literature," implying that there is a distinction (and indeed there is: John McPhee may be literature, but he is not fiction), but that Borders, say, has made a corporate decision to shelve them together. Interestingly, they also shelve genre fiction separately--thus, science fiction, mysteries, and romance are, implicitly, neither fiction nor literature, which is, of course, nonsense. But of course, bookstores are in the business of helping customers find the kind of stuff they like as efficiently as possible, not in the business of literary analysis, and this is therefore understandable.

Other, more pretentious, bookstores often have two different sections: one for fiction, and one for "literature." What is the distinction between the two?

At the extremes, the distinction is clear: Proust is literature, V.C. Andrews is not. Indeed, most of what is in the Literature section is there largely because it is musty in age. Anything written before, say, 1940, and still in print, is instinctively shelved under Literature, even though it may (like, say, Dickens or Dumas) have been written and read as the 19th century equivalent of ephemeral pop cult trash. By mere longevity, any work transcends its original origins and becomes "literature." And indeed, there is some validity to this; literature is, ultimately, supposed to be "the good stuff," writing of merit, and something that lasts a hundred years has evidently been deemed by a great many people as "good stuff," regardless of the original reactions of the academy (and the academy, to be sure, has a way of catching up with popular tastes in the long run--if Dumas is still in print, you can get a PhD by studying Dumas, even if the bewhiskered academics of his own era thought he was trash).

Problems arise when we move to contemporary literature, however. Stephen King: Literature or "fiction"? Fiction, surely (although I strongly suggest that, a hundred years from now, handsome Modern Library hardcovers of his work will be shelved under Literature--assuming books, bookstores, and such distinctions still exist, and assuming that anyone reads, of course). Jonathan Lethem: Literature or fiction? That one's harder; Lethem is clearly literarily ambitious, but most customers will probably look first in fiction. Still, the canny bookstore owner will shelve Motherless Brooklyn both places -- and Gun, With Occasional Music under Science Fiction as well.

Frank McCourt: Literature or fiction? Well, Christ almighty, a Pulitzer should be worth something. Literature, I suppose.

But this points up the trickiness of the distinction. Literature (excluding that literature which is non-fiction) is fiction. All literature means is "the good stuff," and what constitutes "good stuff" is purely a subjective consideration, except that we have collectively decided to agree that anything sufficiently old that still has a readership qualifies by default. There's a hair's-breadth of difference between C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien, but you'll find one under Literature and the other under Fiction.

Literature is another one of those value-laden terms that applies to an artform. Terms like these come in threes, invariably: They read sci fi, you read science fiction, I read speculative fiction. They write doggerel, you write verse, I write poetry. They go to the movies, you watch films, I enjoy cinema. They read trash, you read fiction--I read literature. It's all the same stuff; the different terms imply value, nothing more--and value is inherently subjective.

It's true that, if we are to take games seriously as an artform, we also need terms to distinguish between "good stuff" and "bad stuff," even if such distinctions are inherently subjective, because, after all, there is work worthy of study and work that's candyfloss. It's also true that it's hard to find the three-word terms to encapsulate this for games, perhaps because the critical study of games is in its infancy. I'm struggling to come up with them now: they play twitch games, you play videogames, I play--ergodic literature?

I think not...

First, it is true that many games are tightly bound to story (I've written on this subject elsewhere), but it is equally true that many games are not. No story in chess. Nor in Europa Universalis, Civilization, or Tetris, not unless you stretch the meaning of "story" beyond reason. As I have said before, and will doubtless say many times again before I die, games are their own artform, and while analogies to other forms are sometimes useful in understanding games, it is a rank and obvious error to attempt to perceive them solely through the lens used to understand a different form such as, say, literature. To make an analogy to a wholly different form: Music is not a storytelling medium. Many musical forms are indeed tightly bound to story--opera, the musical, the ballad--but many others are not--symphonies, the classic 3 minute rock song, house. Just so with games.

In other words, it makes sense to borrow the term "literature" to apply to "the good stuff" in games only if you begin from the proposition that games are a story-telling medium. If you do not, then you need a different term, one not so tightly tied to the concept of narrative.

I will refrain from proposing such a term, lest I be subject to ridicule--unless we're satisfied in sticking with "the good stuff," the tendency is to reach for Latin, and I certainly don't want to be saddled with calling good games "bonoludes" or some such damn thing. Besides which, pretension is what the academy is good for, and even if Aarseth's valiant attempt to make "ergodic literature" stick is doomed to well-deserved failure, doubtless the emerging discipline of game studies will hit on a better term than I, who need more coffee in any event.






posted by Greg at 10:07 AM