My colleague and coworker Leigh Alexander yesterday published a semi-defense of Visceral Games’ (nee EA Redwood Shores) upcoming “adaptation” of Dante’s Inferno (entitled Dante’s Inferno). By “semi-defense” I mean she didn’t explicitly and enthusiastically endorse the game, but generally supported its right to exist under EARS’ chosen title and its self-professed association with a work that, to a large extent, set the direction for the modern Italian language.

It’s definitely a reasonable point of view. Certainly no developer has any responsibility to be particularly literary or high-minded. Anyone who listens to Idle Thumbs knows my personal distaste for the game is hyperbolic and probably comically exaggerated at times. But, actually, it’s a genuine frustration, because to me it is emblematic a larger issue. Here, slightly tweaked, is the comment I made in response to Leigh’s post:

“I just don’t see why this is based on Dante’s Inferno. If, as some have claimed, the core market doesn’t care about the game’s adherence to its ’source material’ — and surely it doesn’t — what usefulness is it to claim association in the first place?

“This could have been simply a game influenced by Dante’s imagery, as so many creative works have been over the centuries, rather than actually claiming to be any kind of even remotely meaningful adaptation of the poem. To me, it’s an amazing vindication of the claims of video games’ inability to thoughtfully construct ANY kind of meaningful thought: here’s how video games adapt one of Western culture’s defining literary works, and it consists of brutally ripping apart demons for eight hours, surely complete with idiotic throwaway one-liners.

“I know it’s not the duty of any individual game designer to ‘justify’ games to anyone who doesn’t play them, and it shouldn’t be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON’T have anything to say; most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON’T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.

“That’s clearly not a dealbreaker for me, since I still play a lot of video games, including the ones covered in the category I described above, and it doesn’t bother me all that much; if it did, I wouldn’t play, write about, and talk about so many games.

“But by claiming to have anything to do with Dante’s Inferno, this game loudly echoes that trend in a particularly frustrating way. It could have simply been called ‘Righteous Duty’ or whatever bullshit name [edit: Clint Hocking suggests 'Demon Hunter,' 'To Hell and Back,' 'Love be Damned,' 'Infernal'] with the same plot and mechanics — they could have even given Dante a shoutout in their ridiculous PR pitches — and I don’t think I would have batted an eye. But as the game industry’s big-budget, highly-publicized representation of a work that everybody knows by cultural osmosis, even if they’ve never read a word of it, it’s a big huge fucking depressing failure.”

God of War, which many have pointed out as a counterpoint to the general opinion I espouse, takes that latter approach. But while I’m not personally a God of War fan, it doesn’t offend me as a gamer; it’s just not my kind of game, mechanically speaking.

God of War is directly influenced by Greek mythology, but it doesn’t claim any kind of definitive association with a particular work in its title. Rather, it uses the cultural source material as a rough touchstone. Dante’s Inferno, ironically, appears to depart even more from its source material than God of War does, but makes an implicit claim that it is more related.

As Clint Hocking points out in a comment following mine, this also has the side effect of delegitimizing any hypothetical future video game interpretations of The Divine Comedy. (There have been “adaptations” in the past, but none with anywhere near the visibility and marketing might of an Electronic Arts production.) It basically guarantees the video game take on Dante’s epic to be juvenile nonsense. It may be a fun video game; I make no claims about that one way or the other, but it certainly isn’t what its title says it is.

I also don’t mean to imply I have any desire for a better Divine Comedy game; it’s never something I’ve particularly longed for, and I don’t mean to call for it now. I’m not saying EA should be making a game closer to the source material; I’m saying they should never have claimed the association to begin with.

If none of my arguments have been at all convincing, just load up this incredible video and skip to about 4:50. Maybe the whole interview is a piss take. But is that really relevant, when it appears to be 100% accurate anyway?

EA Supports Ashton Kutcher in Twitter Showdown

In supporting Ashton in his efforts, EA is offering Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower on Twitter a copy of every game EA makes in 2009 for the gaming system of their choice and, to have a character based on them that can be played in The Sims 3 if Ashton wins.  The Sims 3 will also donate 5,000 mosquito nets in the name of the 1 millionth person who follows Ashton on Twitter (REGARDLESS of a win).

Earlier this week, actor Ashton Kutcher announced via YouTube that the number of his Twitter account followers rivaled that of the CNN Breaking News Twitter feed, and that upon beating them to the 1 million member milestone, he would punk CNN founder Ted Turner if the Internet made it happen.  (Click here to watch the video that started it all.)

Specifically, he said he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner’s house and post the video of it if he won the showdown.  To sweeten the deal, Ashton also promised to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day on April 24.

Check out this update on EA’s offer by Ashton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8AcfKGaEI

[I have no idea what "event" this is all about. I'll leave out the PR contact addresses, but at the bottom of the press release it looks like somebody forgot to actually fill out all of the press release template information. Observe:]

Promotion Name
Try phrases like: dramatic savings, clearance, overstocked, reduced rates, buy 1 get 1 free, treat yourself, you deserve it, and don’t miss out. Insert a link in the promotion to your website. Because links are tracked, you can see which promotions generate the most interest in your customers.

Our Price: $
List Price: $
S & H: $

Use this block to tell the audience about your company. A short paragraph or a few sentences including your company’s location, description and website is ideal.

# # #
Add any trademarks here

[This whole amazingly ridiculous block of text appeared in my inbox just minutes ago, accompanied by the following image:]

I was digging through my hard drive this week and I came across a whole bunch of scattered songs I recorded over the last few years, then pretty much forgot about. They’re all in various stages of execution and completion, but I figured I might as well put them somewhere. Originally I planned to go back and clean then up a bit, but tracking down all the original project files and track recordings strewn across four hard drives proved to be too impossible.

So anyway, here are three for now. All instruments and vocals are me.

• Building Fences (download)
• The Slow Creeping Realization (download)
• Tell Me (download)

As I find more and tag them, I may make additional posts. There are probably a couple dozen in total, including instrumentals and bizarre random stuff.

Ten years after declaring Grim Fandango its Game of the Year for 1998, GameSpot has bestowed that same honor for 2008 upon Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

I don’t really want to get deep into MGS4 here, because there were some things about it I liked, but I was struck by some of the comments given by GameSpot editors in the video posted alongside the choice, at least for the minute or two of it I watched. Most of them had to do with the game’s storytelling aspects.

“It finds a perfect harmony between gameplay and storytelling,” said one editor. “Some people said, ‘I watched it as much as I played it,’ but that’s part of what makes it so incredible,” added another.

To me, MGS4 had less of a harmony between gameplay and storytelling, and more of a yo-yo. I find it somewhat sobering that in a decade of astonishing progress in rendering, physics, interface, scale, and complexity, the high watermark for video game storytelling (at least, according to one particular site, notable for being both highly ubiquitous and read, and extremely long-running in internet time) has gone from being exemplified by elegance, breathtaking creativity, and amazingly sharp dialogue to being exemplified by overblown melodrama, ludicrously cumbersome plotting, and cheap tragedy.

It’s probably also worth noting, since this is ostensibly about games, that measured either in terms of pure hours or more charitably as a proportion of overall game time, Metal Gear Solid’s non-interactive cutscene content (including bits where you just move a camera around) probably outweigh Grim Fandango’s by several times—and Grim Fandango is a graphic adventure game.

Just sayin’.

Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and offers little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. Read the rest of this entry »

I was in GameStop several hours ago picking up Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 for PC (a game I have been anticipating to an unusual degree for the last eight months), and I saw something on the rack that caught my eye. Besides the fact that GameStop even had a PC section that was on a wall-mounted rack rather than just a ramshackle endcap, I mean.

From the checkout line, I noticed the game on the right, Shattered Suns, which from a distance appeared to be Games for Windows-branded; compare the front panel strip with Petroglyph’s GFW-branded RTS Universe at War. Though Games for Windows Live has failed to make even the slightest splash, I’m an advocate of the broader GFW initiative, which aims to standardize various elements of PC gaming in useful ways, so I wandered over to check it out.

As you can clearly see up close, developer and publisher Clear Crown Studios (a small local outfit, as it turns out, just south of San Francisco) simply listed itself and the game title at the top, using the same layout, color scheme, and a similar font to the Games for Windows strip. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bit cheesy to keep linking to new Idle Thumbs episodes, but we’re trying to cobble together a listenership so here it goes again. You should totally check it out, that would be rad.

This week we featured special guest Steve Gaynor, designer at 2K Marin on the upcoming BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams. Steve’s a great guy, and he writes a great blog—I’m sure you will find his comments sufficiently insightful and enlightening.

The biggest topic of the podcast was BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, whose announcement event Nick and I attended, but there’s also discussion of weird Fable II shenanigans, Yakuza 2, and a dubious sponsorship by little-known Gaming Grub competitor Ultra Boost. iTunes!

When I think about Fable II, I think about real estate and sex.

That’s not to say the game’s mechanics surrounding those elements define the game, but I’ll focus on them here because they are areas not commonly explored in the actual gameplay mechanics of most fantasy-set action RPG.

At least, they aren’t often included with this kind of impressively egalitarian scope. With remarkably few exceptions, all property that seems like it should be ownable in the game can be purchased, be it a private home or a place of business. This includes a castle.

And matching that breadth, so too can you marry or engage in (strictly off-screen) intercourse with nearly any non-quest-related NPC with whom your sexual orientation and gender are compatible; each citizen is classified as straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nobody in Albion has passed a defense of marriage amendment.

Developer Lionhead Studios (and, one suspects, designer Peter Molyneux in particular) very much wants you to be aware of its sex-related feature set: the first item I encountered for sale by a merchant was a condom. Not long afterwards, my dog excitedly guided me to some buried treasure, and then panted and wagged his tail excitedly as I dug up another prophylactic. Read the rest of this entry »

So far, so good with the weekly schedule. We recorded the second episode of Idle Thumbs last night and got it published this morning.

This week features plenty of hands-on reporting on Diablo III and StarCraft II, as well as discussion about the various Blizzard announcements (some of which are a little controversial) and a bit from TGS. There’s also plenty of hands-on from LittleBigPlanet and Fable II. Hands-on is in the air. ‘Tis the season.

Also, I composed and recorded the track “The Fanboy’s Lament,” this episode’s namesake. It can be heard during the podcast in context, with the discussion of the events that prompted it, or downloaded directly from the Idle Thumbs front page. The goal is to feature this kind of musical interlude from time to time on the show if people enjoy it.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS if you haven’t yet, and we do have iTunes up now. Tell your friends about Idle Thumbs! We don’t really know how to promote this thing.

And feel free to send questions, comments, or feedback to questions@idlethumbs.net — we’ll read and address it on the show.

(Update: iTunes support kicked in! Hooray!)

First things first: Idle Thumbs is back in podcast form. Go check it out. If you never knew Idle Thumbs existed in the first place (a likely scenario), feel free to read on for some self-indulgent history and explanation:

In 2004, as part of a team of mainly San Francisco Bay Area- and United Kingdom-based writers, I helped launch Idle Thumbs, a gaming site that (we think) at least partially succeeded in its goal of delivering video game writing simultaneously entertaining and informed. It’s hard to pin down what exactly the Thumbs ethic was (there was more than one heated argument to that end) but it definitely had one.

At least, for a little while. As it turns out, that sort of endeavor is difficult to maintain indefinitely, particularly when you’re doing it entirely in your free time. On top of that, the limited-but-fairly-unusual exposure we got through the site became for many of us something of a springboard to other (paying) jobs involving games. Read the rest of this entry »