Tag Archives: Editorials

Editorials, Games, iOS, Tech

Digital Board Games

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One of the regrettable gaps in my nerdish upbringing is that I never got into board games. By the time I was old enough, Dungeons & Dragons seemed old news and far too much like hard work, and dalliances with Games Workshop productions only lasted as long as it took to spend a couple of weeks’ pocket money on a single figure. My experience with board games beyond Monopoly and Mouse Trap therefore stopped with more accessible options like Hero Quest and Operation Aliens.

Neuroshima Hex

As it seemingly has with so many other media, it was the iPad that’s shaken up board gaming. It doesn’t take long for iOS gamers to get beyond the fool’s hope that [insert favourite PC/console game here] will transfer to touchscreen controls and inevitably get into the gateway drugs like Words With Friends, and from there it’s not a massive leap to the harder stuff. For me it was Neuroshima Hex followed by Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer but Ticket To Ride, Catan and Carcassonne all seem to be notably vicious when it comes to digging those claws in. Those are particularly good conversions that show board games and the iPad to be such perfect bedfellows that I’m desperate for some of the more highly regarded big names to make the transition.

Really, it solves all of the problems, mainly logistical, of modern board games. No like-minded friends? Online play solves that. No time to dedicate a few hours to a game? Asynchronous multiplayer with push notifications renders it a non-issue. No shuffling cards. No missing pieces. No setting up and clearing away afterwards. No possibility for mistakes in tracking stats and damage in complicated battles. Purists may decry the lack of physicality, but I’m perfectly happy with a big touchscreen and several games in something the size of a magazine.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer

I find myself jealously eyeing up games like the well-regarded Battlestar Galactica tie-in or something different like Arkham Horror, hoping for someone to make the effort to adapt them so that I can get the co-operative experience without having to pay £40 for the box and, you know, find real people to play with. I’ll probably end up murdered in a ditch somewhere if I start inviting randoms round to play.

I’m sure physical gaming has as many purists decrying the proliferation of sub-£5 touchscreen downloadables as video gaming does, but they’re just as wrong. It’s another example of how the digital world is broadening the horizons of once-inaccessible corners of gaming, and it’s a very good thing.

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega

Pirates or Preservationists?

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There is some good in the ruthless drive of technology, pushing gaming forward into easily defined generations of hardware, in that it’s allowed phenomenal progress in only a few decades. The downside to such rapid development, though, is that the past gets left behind, and without efforts to preserve it, it’s lost.

I can watch any almost any movie from any decade on some form of disc or streaming service nowadays, even if they were produced decades before digital video, the Internet and even televisions existed, and it’s essentially the same experience as anyone who saw it on day one. I can walk into any of a range of high street shops and find popular films from the 30s and 40s, brand new and easily accessible.

Contrast that with games. Try finding a particular game from outside the top 40 new, or anything but the most popular games from last generation. Try finding anything from the generation before that. There are, of course, services like Good Old Games, which are certainly good things, but what happens to games from long-dead developers or ones that aren’t deemed commercially viable? What route is there to play, say, Spectrum games? PC Engine? Almost any system has at least a couple of gems, but it’s impossible to play them without getting lucky on the used market or resorting to piracy, both of which we keep hearing are as bad as each other from the publishers’ perspective.

Some classic publishers like Nintendo and SNK are still going concerns in one form or another and so can offer their older games, and that’s fantastic. I’ll happily support those offerings, especially those that allow me to pick and choose reasonably priced and well-emulated individual games. But for plenty of older material, that’s not an option – it’s not like you can download some C64 games onto Commodore’s latest machine.

It’s when you start looking into community-led preservation efforts that you realise how much better they are than their official equivalents. Perhaps the best example is World of Spectrum, which not only functions as a massive database of information on Speccy games but also offers the majority of them to download or to play in a Java-based emulator directly on the site. Scans of covers, cross-referenced articles from the magazines of the time, meticulous attempts to preserve every version of every game, and all with the admirable ambition of being a comprehensive, free museum for an important period in gaming history. It’s not done for profit, and when actual games are offered to download, it’s done with the permission of the original developers and publishers.

Even for classic hardware without the following to sustain a site of such size – or, perhaps less defensibly, those from a couple of generations ago that are still the subject of poorly emulated and overpriced compilations – chances are a glance at certain more seedy websites will unearth a torrent with every game and an emulator, tied up in one handy download. Illegal or not, until this industry takes a step back and realises how inaccessible its past really is, I’m crediting the pirates there with providing a valuable service.

New games are increasingly encumbered with DRM, sometimes to the extent that the game will become unplayable if the studio and its authentication servers ever go offline. That’s all well and good now, but the experience of the last few years and the fact that it only takes a glance at the big developers of the SNES generation to see how few of today’s will still be around in another decade suggests that the only hope for the future playability of those games is either to hope that studios in their death throes have the wherewithal to produce a patch to nuke the DRM or to let pirates do it. Only one of those options is anywhere close to being a sure thing.

It’s important to note that I’m not going to support those who are pirating current games because they want them without paying, even if it’s those people’s work that ultimately allows the mass archival that I’m championing. The best examples of these projects are done on long dead platforms that aren’t going to cost anybody any money, and taking revenue from the industry – and, arguments over exactly how much aside, it does cost publishers money – will only affect what is left to preserve in the future.

Editorials, Games, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox

I Won’t Miss Game

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In case you’ve missed the news, Game is on the ropes. Given that Game Group owns Gamestation, the only specialist high-street gaming retailers going under seems to be a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, which will leave us with the hardly stable HMV and… well… that’s it. Here in Bournemouth, with no large supermarket branches in the town centre, if Game and Gamestation go there will be absolutely nowhere to buy new games at retail – used from CEX, or the slim hope that the Tesco Express starts selling big releases.

I’m not going to deny that almost no high-street presence is a bad thing for the visibility of gaming, putting it entirely into the hands of online retailers and forcing platform holders’ hands in getting their digital distribution systems together. High-street electronics stores haven’t exactly been thriving either, and the low margins on hardware have always made them lukewarm on gaming at the best of times – again, none of them in my town – so it’s not unfeasible that some towns will have nowhere to buy games of any kind in the near future, unless you count an iPhone from the O2 shop.

But even despite these onrushing problems, I won’t mourn Game when it goes.

It’s been everything that’s wrong with games retail for a long time. Coupled with the supermarkets and online retailers, it mostly killed off the once-thriving independent retail market, which, for me, took away a big part of the gaming community and places where I made friends I still have today. No indies meant no import games in shops, but moving entirely online hasn’t destroyed that market and it won’t for the games market in general.

Having Game be this industry’s sole representative at retail has been embarrassing, frankly. Looking around one of the shops, it’s both a typical example of a retailing dinosaur, struggling to sell new product as it claws desperately to the RRP that no one expects to pay any more, and devalues games by looking and acting like it’s only patronised by people who like shopping in a glorified pawn shop. I don’t feel good when I bite the bullet and go in because I need a product immediately but find myself stuck in the queue behind a kid haggling over how little he’s being offered for FIFA 08, or when I buy something new and get nudged towards saving a whole £5 by buying the used one with stickers all over it and not a penny for the developers I’m supporting. No wonder people who only go in for birthday and Christmas presents think gaming is for people with a mental age of 12.

I appreciate that I just went after the notion of the RRP and that digital distribution has a lot to learn there, but without the likes of Game complaining, platform holders – and, you’d hope, the developers themselves – are free to actually compete on price. I fear Sony and Microsoft’s enforced pricing structures here, but I’m sure they’ll fall into line eventually. Microsoft has already shown itself willing to compromise on restrictive policies, with more rumoured to come, under pressure from gamers and developers, and all the collapse of retail means is that a lot of this learning is going to be done on the fly, perhaps sooner than we anticipated, more out of necessity than design.

So farewell, Game. You won a couple of battles, but you’re going to lose the war.

Editorials, Games

Losing My Religion

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Even beyond the mediocre showings from the platform holders, this year’s E3 was bad. It’s the first time in many years that I’ve come away from the show without a single new game added to my wish list for the year, and although my preorder list for the rest of 2011 is impressive, they’re all in the September-November window and are never going to command my full attention with that much competition. We’re now more or less halfway through the year and I’ve bought one new retail game.

Without a gaming PC to take advantage of the resurgence there I’m in a console generation that feels like it’s running on fumes when the last one was producing some of its best stuff, and we’re firmly in the transitional period between the introduction of new hardware, which seems to be getting a tepid reaction so far, and unwanted attempts to keep the older systems on life support. Announcements that would have had me dancing in the streets a few years ago now barely register, and a big number on the gaming folder in my RSS reader will have me reaching for the ‘mark all as read’ button rather than settling down to pore over what’s new.

As silly as it sounds when games like Uncharted 3, Skyrim and Dark Souls will soon be upon us, I really feel like I’m falling out of love with gaming. It’s something that’s been an important part of my life for a couple of decades and it just seems to slowly be slipping away with barely a whimper.

Those certain classics might salvage something for this year, but it feels like papering over the cracks. It’s like Transformers 3, ending with something spectacular to make people forget the shitfest they just sat through and leave with a smile on their face.

Is it just me, or is something broken? Maybe I’m just too close to things now and I liked it better when I was on the outside looking in? Maybe everyone’s decided to write this generation off and try harder next time? It certainly feels that way when well over half of my purchases so far in 2011 have been bargain-priced games from the last few years that I missed out on when they came out. I like Civilization V, Undead Nightmare, Heavy Rain and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but they’re not going to fill up my GOTY list come December and they certainly what I was expecting to be filling my gaming time with at the turn of the year.

I hope I’m just being dramatic, but still, the next generation can’t come soon enough.

Editorials, Games

But seriously, are games art?

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Now this is a one-time-only thing, because although this is an important argument in a sense, it’s one that I’m sick to death of hearing about. Someone says otherwise, gamers variously trumpet the likes of Ico or flame the person in question, and then we repeat the whole thing again a few weeks later. Roger Ebert has done it again, with the prominent movie critic reiterating his stance that games can never be art. Some points I agree with, some I disagree with, and some of his statements are factually wrong; gamers’ responses have ranged from decent to predictably defensive and/or vitriolic.

So, are games art?

Yes.

Any creative product is art, be it a film, a game, a painting, a sculpture, a novel, a poem, a play, or anything else. As far as I’m concerned, this is indisputably true, and if I could quite happily leave the argument there.

The difference comes in artistic merit. The Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David and the doodle on the back of my notebook are all art, but no one’s going to argue that the former two are worth far more, both monetarily and in every other sense. Likewise, Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey are both far more worthy than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but all three are art in some sense. Creating art is one of the primary motivating factors to all but the most commercial of filmmakers, and as a result there are a lot of films with artistic merit.

Artistic merit is where gaming can fall short, because it’s still treated as a commodity, an industry driven by sequels and following the leader. Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Okami, BioShock and Grim Fandango are examples of games that I would consider to be artistically important for various reasons, while I couldn’t say the same for FIFA or the latest movie-licensed game. FIFA is art, but I’d never show it to someone to show them what the medium can do beyond be a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

My personal opinion is that part of the problem is that there aren’t enough gaming auteurs. Too many are designed by committee and marketing departments, and while I could reel off dozens of great directors, authors or musicians from the last 30 years who have created true art within their media, there still aren’t that many in gaming. Miyamoto and Kojima are two who can be assured top billing and have the clout to get their pet projects made on their name alone, but beyond them you’re probably going to be struggling already, and knowledge of them outside those who follow the industry is almost nil. There’s also very little opportunity for people with big ideas to get their game through development and then into gamers’ hands through commercial channels, with the indie art project games usually either curiosities on the PC or, at best, a sleeper hit on the iPhone.

I’d almost say that the early arcade games did a better job of being artistic in their own right, because they were gaming in its purest form – interactive art, often made by a handful of people. Things like Electroplankton are their direct descendants.

I’m sorry if this seems like doom and gloom, but we have to remember that gaming is a young medium. It’s only 15 years or so that it’s been able to tackle the bigger issues by presenting us with something beyond bleeps and bloops – although my previous point on the artistic merit of those stands – and those gaming auteurs are starting to emerge, however slowly. Film wasn’t taken seriously as anything more than a technical gimmick at the beginning, and rock music was once the downfall of civilisation that games now are.

When today’s gamers are tomorrow’s art critics and we have more developers whose body of work is big and pretentious enough to be called an oeuvre, and maybe when you can make a go at getting an independent game on the shelf next to the new Call of Duty, then we’ll be the ones complaining that this new-fangled holographic VR nonsense isn’t art. That’ll show ’em.

Editorials, Life

Busy Times…

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Just a quick post, really, to say that I’m still around and this site isn’t dead, and with any luck I should be back to business as usual before too long. A mixture of moving house and having to get Internet access sorted, deadlines at work, and not actually playing that many games for a combination of the aforementioned reasons has conspired to keep me away, and the relative dearth of news hasn’t helped. But with a return for a series that I have an affinity for next week – I’ve already been through the demo several times, and I’m chomping at the bit to get my hands on the full thing – as well as some potentially interesting developments, I foresee plenty to talk about.

In other words, reports of my disappearance were an exaggeration. More soon.