An article and an interview
About two weeks I had my first ever paid-for article published. “Are Videogames Conservative?” appeared in the September edition of The IPA Review (57:3).
Today, Libby Price, a presenter on Melbourne radio station 3LO, got in contact with me to do a radio interview. I managed to schedule a break in my Berlitz training so I could do the interview live from Ôsaka at about 16:40 Australian time. Thanks for the opportunity, Libby: it was great fun. Dad managed to tape the interview for me, and played it back to me over Skype tonight. It sounded really nice: a good, relaxed interview. Not bad for a first try.
First article, first radio interview. What a couple of weeks it’s been… And that’s even without considering my move to Ôsaka, and my new job.
Tôkyô Game Show 2005 or a month in Japan (part the fourth)
Note: I compressed the thumbnails too much when posting this, so please click on the the images to see the full-size, full-quality versions.
Saturday 17 September
Even though Tôkyô was 2 hours and about 3000¥ in train fares away, I could hardly not go, given that I’m a videogames researcher and all…
Makuhari Messe, where TGS is held, is, in fact, not actually in Tôkyô, but about 30 minutes away, in Chiba prefecture. Getting out there requires changing trains at Tôkyô, and crossing to the new platform takes a good 10 minutes. The two different lines are nearly 1km apart, and there are airport-style travelators for lazy commuters to take between them. The Chiba area is quite nice, since a lot of the buildings are newer and less cramped than in Tôkyô, and the presence of the bay near parts of the train-line impart a feeling of spaciousness that I haven’t experienced too often since I came to Japan.
The convention-centre area in Makuhari. Note the clear blue sky, which is not a regular feature of Central Tôkyô.
Another shot of the Makuhari area. Most places in Tôkyô don’t look this new or this clean.
Entry was cheap at 1400¥, but considering I spent around 4000¥ on train tickets, it didn’t end up being a cheap day.
Inside, I was struck by a mixture of awe and disappointment. TGS is an internationally significant trade show, and this year had never-before seen footage of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 (for PS3, no less) and a load of demo pods with playable games for the as-yet-unreleased Xbox 360. Despite that, though, it’s still a trade show, just on a larger scale than anything I’d seen in Melbourne.
The most impressive thing about TGS, dare I say it, was the booth-babes. (I’m fully aware that if Sam still reads this blog, she’ll have a field-day with that.) Seriously, the publishers showing at TGS had hired some of the finest looking women I’ve ever seen to pimp their brands. What was particularly striking about them was the toned-ness of some of the bare legs and bellies on display, though that may just be a consequence of the Japanese physique and lifestyle. There were loads of guys decked out with digital SLRs taking photos of the booth-babes. I can only hope they were photo-journalists, but they were probably more like the owner of this blog, whose hobby seems to be travelling around taking photos of race-queens and booth-babes. For myself, I was too modest to take photos of them, so for a representative shot, I have to poach from the race-queen guy:
Taito probably had the most ridiculously skimpy costumes of any booth.
On the games side, it took me a while to figure out what was important, just because everything was treated in such a blazé fashion.
Though I hate Microsoft’s desktop software as much as any other *nix-loving, markup-language-coding computer geek, I’m ready to give them credit for the best showing of TGS 2005. Microsoft put in a lot of effort, and came up with the best-designed booth based around a concentric-circles design concept. It featured a digital-lifestyle showcase in the vein of those mock rooms at IKEA, a giant screen for show-reels, and most importantly, banks of actual Xbox 360s for playing demos on widescreen, flat-panel HD monitors.
The front of Microsoft’s stand.
The digital lifestyle area, from far-enough away that no-one would stop me taking photos.
The Microsoft stand from above.
One of the Microsoft booth-babes. I’d say the concept for this costume didn’t quite work. It’s a shame I wasn’t taking pictures of the girls, because there was a woman in a great one-of-a-kind outfit behind the Microsoft desk, who no-one on the web seems to have got a photo of. It was in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey: kind of 1960s air-hostess, but in white and green.
Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 itself doesn’t seem to live up to the best-of-show booth design. It’s nice to see high-resolution graphics on the HD monitors, but at such a level of detail, it’s easy to see some of the graphical shortcomings of the first-generation titles. They’re beautiful, but I can see the PC catching up with Xbox 360 in a year or so.
Harder to catch will be the PS3. Showcased by the MGS4 demo on show at the Sony booth, PS3’s capabilities are a massive jump from PS2, albeit with a disturbing indication that, like PS2, the PS3 has inadequate on texture memory. Next to near-photorealistic character models, blurry textures on close-up wall surfaces were an extremely unwelcome sight.
Sony’s booth also had lots of PS2 and PSP software on show. Of the PS2 stuff, Level 5’s Rogue Galaxy and Capcom’s gorgeous Okami caught my eye. Despite most gaming news outlets complaining about a dearth of PSP gaming software at the moment, there seems to be a lot in the works, judging by TGS, including online titles like a PSP version of Capcom’s Monster Hunter. The software on display looked extremely polished, shaming the software on show for Nintendo’s underpowered, but conceptually interesting, DS.
Also worthy of note were some new or developing trends in evidence. Mobile gaming is huge in Japan, and there were loads of booths dedicated to mobile software, some of it of very high quality, like Taito’s port of Ys, a scaled down version of the latest PSP version. Square Enix’s mobile iteration of the Code Age IP could also be interesting. There was also a huge array of online games, many of them from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean developers. Several colleges offering courses in game-development and game-related graphic design also had booths at TGS. It’s pleasing to see that there are now plenty opportunities for formal education in the area, although there’s arguably still no better way to learn a skill (like game development) than by practicing it as a hobby while working in some soulless part-time job.
So that was TGS 2005. Not bad, but I’m not sure I’d go back next year if I wasn’t already in Tôkyô. Seeing new games and hardware trimmed with hot Japanese booth-babes is fun, but it’s no substitute for just sitting down with a good game, which is the heart of the videogame experience.
Sunday 18 September
After going back to Ôta after TGS, I again came into Tôkyô to meet some friends from Melbourne in Ikebukuro. The end result of so much travelling was that I spent about 12000¥ over the weekend. Ouch! Though there’s nothing to do in Ôta, the expense of going to Tôkyô was really hurting me.
I met up with Jim, Hamish, and J***** (I’m so sorry J: I messed up your name when I met you, and I still can’t remember!), in Ikebukuro. The two J’s are animators, and had just finished a big job on the upcoming Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows before heading to Japan on the pretence of going to TGS for work. Our first stop was Gyôza Stadium at Namco World, a sort of theme-park inside a shopping centre. Gyôza stadium is basically a hawker centre that sells nothing but a bewildering array of gyôza, and drinks. I could only afford to sample the daiichi megumi (if I recall the name correctly – 500¥ for 5 pieces), but they were pretty good.
After that, we went to Harajuku, where we walked through the Meiji-jingû shrine and surrounding gardens before taking to the busy shopping strips.
A giant shrine-gate at the entrance to the Meiji-jingû area.
The guys did want to check out the famed ‘Harajuku girls’ that get costumed up and show off on the bridge outside Meiji-jingû, but it was too hot for many of them to be out. Something worth noting about the bridge and TGS is that of the apparently significant number of men who like doing cosplay in women’s clothing, most if not all are quite ugly to begin with, and make horrendous-looking girls. [Shudders…]
After Harajuku, we headed for Akihabara so the guys could check out the huge stores there specializing in comics, animation, and related paraphernalia. In one store, I found this great example of Engrish:
What a jerk!
Then it was back to Ikebukuro, where we watched some Family Guy and talked about geek culture. :-) The guys went to check out Shibuya in the evening, but sadly I had to leave about 8pm to make sure I’d get the last train out to Ôta.
That was probably the best weekend I had while living in Ôta. (Was? Past tense? Stay tuned…) Thanks to Jim, J*, and Hamish: Japan is the most fun when you’re in good company.
Technorati Tags: anime, Japan, media, Tôkyô, videogames
Eight Virtues
If you don’t get this post, don’t worry. It’s a geek thing.
Today I’ve been redrafting the chapter in my thesis about the history of RPGs, and had to find out what the Eight Virtues from the Ultima series were. Ultima IV was a real milestone in videogame history, in that its hero, the Avatar, appeared in a world that had just been saved from villains three times. The people of Britannia were looking for ways to transcend their bloody past, and were building a code of ethics to guide them into a glorious future. It was the first RPG I know of that really thought about what was needed to build a good society, and possibly the first videogame that incorporated an explicitly formulated moral code that the hero was expected to adhere to.
Those whose memory of the games is clearer than mine may remember that the Eight Virtues of the Avatar are:
- honesty
- compassion
- valour
- justice
- sacrifice
- honour
- spirituality
- humility
Ultimas IV—VI asked players a series of questions to discover what virtues they favoured, to determine what the PCs attributes and class would be. Some of those questions have resurfaced as online, Ultima-themed “personality” tests. There’s one that uses graphics from Ultima IV (lots of clicking through required to get to the test), which, like Ultima IV itself, asks so few questions that you’ll have an affinity with a different virtue every time. Alternatively, there’s one that asks loads of questions but doesn’t conclusively tell you which virtue you favour.
These tests are so far from being valid that it’s ridiculous, but the questions are all based on imaginary situations, and they’re fun for nostalgia’s sake. If you’re looking for humour, there’s also the oddly-named Test of Avatarishness Purity Test, which doesn’t really test your personality, or have anything to do with the Virtues, but is a lot more fun than the others. It asks, among other things, “Have you ever been threatened by big red evil faces on your computer screen?” I have, and was deemed 32% Avatarish.
Tests aside, which of the virtues do I favour? Well, I think it’s honesty.
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All my draft are belong to you
On Monday, I completed the first draft of my PhD thesis: Kingdoms Without Borders: Single-player role-playing videogames’ aspirations for the future of human society. Today, it’s exactly three years since I formally commenced the course. So things are going fine. I’ve got an extension, and a full six months to redraft. I’ll be going chapter by chapter, so in the next few months, expect to see a “public beta” version of the thesis build up, until the full thing is online.
The whole reason I started this site in the first place was to get feedback on my work, so please, check back in the coming months, read some of the thesis, and tell me how and why it sucks. Praise will be accepted, too, but it’s not so helpful.
World of Warcraft, my first MMORPG
A little while ago, I mentioned that I was keen to start playing Lineage. Well, I did start it, and despite the fact that I’d paid US$15 upfront via PayPal because NCSoft insisted my credit card verification number was invalid, I think I only managed to spend about half an hour on it. It’s an old game, and it hasn’t weathered well. The graphics are lacklustre, and the pixels look huge on my 15” Powerbook. Each sprite seems to have only about two or three frames of animation, the interface isn’t intuitive, and the chat box is small and filled with an ugly font. Despite it being the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) with the world’s biggest subscriber base, and an Asian one at that, I wasn’t keen to keep playing. I intend no offense to NCSoft and all the Lineage players out there: I’m sure there’s a great game hidden behind the lacklustre visuals, but I can’t be bothered finding it.
Meanwhile, while I was writing my PhD instead of playing Lineage, I was becoming increasingly certain that I should be playing the only other A-list MMORPG for Mac: World of Warcraft. So I went and bought a copy, despite being hellishly in debt already, and began, last night, to play. Okay, so technically Lineage is my first MMORPG, but I didn’t even take my character there past level one. I also played Legend of the Red Dragon (a.k.a. LORD) on a BBS in the mid-1990s, but though it was online, and multiplayer, it wasn’t massively anything.
World of Warcraft (WoW) looks great, and though I’d had a brief look at the manual, I learned most of the interface just by experimenting, and through the help the game offers to new players. After a bit of solo questing, I was quickly recruited into a guild, and shortly thereafter invited to a party (the RPG kind, not the RL kind) for some co-ordinated levelling up. Battles are real-time, and require a lot of interaction on the part of the player: this makes them more exciting than they would be if it was just a matter of clicking on an enemy once to make your character attack repeatedly. I’ve got a few old RL friends playing WoW at the moment, but they seem to be scattered across different servers. Looks like I could be spending my time between Blackrock (the server where most Australians play), Feathermoon, and Dalarn.
This morning, the power supply on my PC shorted and took out my motherboard with it ($210 to repair it! :-(), so I’m now especially happy that WoW works on my Mac. I wasn’t banking on such disasters, and in fact had decided to play a MMORPG on my Powerbook because I’m planning to go and work in Japan in about six months, and won’t be taking my desktop PC with me (obviously). Thanks very much to Blizzard for bringing the MMORPG of the moment to the Mac platform.
One thing I was less than impressed with: the conversation. Okay, there’s a wide range of people playing out there, and they’re not all novelists and PhD students, but come on! Talk about something other than which class is the best. At the very least, there’s the issue of who one’s character is named after. I saw one Battosai (from Rurôni Kenshin) and a Yuffi who was playing with a friend’s character and didn’t realise that she was probably named after Yuffie from Final Fantasy 7.
I suppose I might as well inject a theoretical point, here, too. It interested me to see that two kinds of experience work side by side in WoW. In his M.A. thesis, Videogames of the Oppressed, Gonzalo Frasca, summarising other people’s theories about the topic, identifies two main kinds of ‘games’: ludus and paidea. Ludus are the goal-oriented games: they offer rules that define clear winning and losing situations. Paidea, on the other hand, is more like “play,” where there are no clear goals and the fun is in experimenting with different situations and configurations. WoW, and no doubt other games as well, particularly other MMORPGs, show that the line between ludus and paidea isn’t clear-cut. WoW gives players goals, in the form of quests, but there’s also fun to be had from experimenting with different kinds of player-characters and play-styles, or from just riffing with other players using the chat system (if you can find someone who either wants to crack jokes or is interested in talking about something else than the game mechanics).
Thanks to Blahxmahn, who demonstrated how to organise a party while levelling up his (or her) new character. Sorry I didn’t get to see your level 37 warlock, because Sahbrinah (thanks also) showed up with her warlock and helped me do the quest I needed to learn to summon an Imp. Oh, wait: I just realised that Sahbrinah, a level 37 warlock, probably is Blahxmahn. Duh. After that, I went to sleep, it being 2am and all.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (review)
Ubisoft Montreal Studios. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. 2003. Ubisoft Entertainment. Gamecube, PAL.
This game spent a long time on my “currently reading” pile (okay, so you don’t read a videogame, but there are books on that pile, too), unplayed, and then the latest issue of Edge (#146) published a reminiscence on the game and gave away the ending, in which the hero rewinds time to the game’s beginning in order to avert the death of a lover who will no longer remember him. But Edge has gushed about The Sands of Time for ages, giving it a 9/10 in the review, talking about it ever since, and finally complaining about how the developers turned the Prince from a BBC-accented aristocrat into a trash-talking bad-boy for this game’s ‘edgier’ sequel: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, and this reminiscence was no different. How could I fail to be affected? After all, I hadn’t left the game alone because it was bad: I just had other things to do. I didn’t feel like doing any writing yesterday, so I picked it up again.
Now that I think about it, I played it pretty much all day: from about 08:30 to 23:30, when I finished it. There was a small break to play with Ubuntu Hoary, decide to repartition my Powerbook’s HD to get rid of it (see Wiping Linux off my HD), to cook dinner, and talk to my Dad, who stopped by, but for the most part, yesterday was just a big block of videogaming.
I never liked the original Prince of Persia, or Prince of Persia 2, for that matter. They lacked pace, the swordfighting was too difficult for my early-teenaged brain and its mediocre fine-motor skills, and as with many action games of the time, their plots were so thin you could measure their depth in nanometres. When I heard that the series’ IP was being resurrected, I thought the new game was going to be as lame as when Infogrames renamed themselves Atari.
But The Sands of Time is different. Unlike Infogrames, who seem to have forgotten that Atari went down like the Hindenburg in a massive videogame-market crash over 1982-83, The Sands of Time’s developers have noted of the lessons of history. It’s a contemporary game, and it borrows well from some of the finest titles of recent times.
This game, like its eponymous hero, is a bit of a thief, but it is at least a discerning and skilled one. In large part, The Sands of Time is a rip-off of Ico, which is itself sort of an updated version of the original Prince of Persia . The game takes place in a single, if massive and labyrinthine, locale which gives the game most of its charm, and its hero, like Ico’s, has occasionally to protect an only somewhat helpful female companion. The game also steals from the Blood Omen series, adopting its practice of having the hero give often snide voice-overs that indicate how he perceives his world, what he thinks of the people within it, and what he’s currently doing. This last feature is an elegant rebuttal of the implications of Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen’s arguments in the first issue of Game Sudies: that interactivity and narration are mutually exclusive. Sure, you can’t rewrite the dialogue, and it doesn’t change as a result of your in-game choices, but this is a narrative game: the hero narrates it while you play, usually without interrupting the action. Fortunately, the narration is witty, subtle, and in the end, touching.
One of the greatest pleasures of videogaming is exploring finely crafted imaginary worlds, and The Sands of Time excels in this area. Pushing on towards the end around 22:30 last night, with the Prince climbing the Tower of Dawn, I really started to remember what it’s like to be awake in the early morning, seeing a sunrise and breathing crisp air while you’re concentrating on something more pressing. Together with the fine narration, and controls that allow the player to execute the Prince’s acrobatics effortlessly, environments such as these (see the screenshot below) make the game feel like a finely crafted work of art.
It is, of course, flawed in parts. Battles can be too long, and the fact that enemies will respawn until you kill a number of them that the game knows, but that you don’t, means that repeated death can leave you without hope that you’ll ever get past a fight sequence. Climbing the Tower of Dawn at the end, without the Dagger of Time that lets you rewind to avoid death, also results in a final platforming sequence in which you are repeatedly sent back to the last save point without any idea how far you were from the next one when you died. I did, however, experience no problems with the famous difficulty spike which occurs early in the game when fighting the Prince’s zombified father, and which reportedly caused many players to give up permanently (well, at least according to Edge).
I’m glad my videogaming prowess is better than it was in the days when I was defeated by the early levels of the original Prince of Persia.
8/10.
