samred.com | ©2012 Sam Machkovech

Effective this week, I am joining Seattle news and arts outlet PubliCola.net as its GamesNerd. I have been proud to write about gaming for over two years in Seattle, and with PubliCola, I look forward to intensifying that writing with more local coverage and, as a result, more national impact.

A few things you can expect:

* PubliCola.net will be home to the city’s most comprehensive coverage of this weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, full of panel impressions, hands-on game reports, and chats with the region’s most promising indie game makers. It’s the biggest gaming festival in the nation—not to mention the first hobbyist con to ever sell out in the Seattle area—and I’m proud to once again deliver the coverage that its rabid fanbase merits. Keep your eyes on PubliCola this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for PAX impressions, or come back after the Labor Day holiday for a comprehensive wrap-up.

* Within the next week, my first feature will debut for PubliCola. My report on the state of Seattle’s games industry doesn’t just tell the history, nor does it settle on congratulating our status as top gaming zone in the nation. It takes a hard look at why the industry has remained the region’s cultural stepchild for so long and how it can shine in the face of a down economy.

* Weekly updates at PubliCola will go beyond the typical reviews-driven fare, seeking out our region’s game makers, promoters, and players to tell the best gaming stories in the region.

If you’re a part of the regional games scene—from the biggest producer to the lowliest clan member—don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d love to feature you in future articles at PubliCola. Contact info is in the sidebar to the left. Thanks for reading, and I’m excited about dragging you along to my nerdiest career move yet.

Sam Machkovech
GamesNerd, PubliCola.net

Yes, Paul… I’m sure the people who made The Beatles Rock Band will spare you a free copy of your game. Paul McCartney talks video games, official Beatles MP3s, and this fall’s remastered Beatles catalog in a smashing good interview in a games magazine.

I’m at Neptune Coffee in Seattle and am approached by a younger acquaintance from the tutoring center down the block. She asks what I’m up to, and I tell her I’m working on an article about video games. I start in on the story’s angle—-I never leave a “what are you doing” query hanging—-when I realize the look on her face hasn’t changed for a few sentences. Like she’d seen her idol picking someone else’s nose.

I pause long enough for her to start in with “I just don’t know about…”

I interrupt. “You mean, you think it’s silly for people to spend their time staring into screens, acting like they’re brainwashed by machines, yes?” She nods. I’m driven to win her over, to compare gaming to TV, movies, and books (just cuz it’s on paper doesn’t make it any less of a meandering timesuck), to posit that interactivity doesn’t neuter artistic impact by default, to talk about the shared experience of the form.

The funny look returns, and with it comes an angle to her neck that can be measured by protractor. “How is it really interactive if everyone’s staring at a screen?”

I’d recently read an article by the President of the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), a pro-gamers’ lobby, in which he round-aboutly asks gamers to defend their hobby when afforded the opportunity. He believes gaming will be stuck in the reputation ghetto as long as gamers don’t “take ownership.” But in his article, Hal Halpin goes a little too far, likening anti-gaming sentiment to bullies picking on his son. Hal, the competitive, hostile bent to your piece is all wrong; it’d be rude and condescending to “defend” Adam Sandler movies, so why should making a stink over a twitch shooter like Halo be any different?

Hal’s problem is that he defends an industry whose icons and leading examples are dictated by sales, not artistic impact. And that’s the issue I face when looking back at the angled, squinting face in front of me: that the vocabulary of fine films, books, and television shows isn’t the same as for games. Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Flower, and Super Columbine Massacre are tangential to the American gaming zeitgeist, yet A Clockwork Orange, Invisible Cities, and Freaks & Geeks are perfectly parallel to their respective forms. My hope to make an impact with namechecks and comparisons is voided by the basic roadblock of vocabulary. Will this always be the case with the learning curve of each separate game, compared to the passive consumption of most other media?

This is why I was excited enough about Natal to post about its debut; that its “gesture to play” mechanic might tear down one wall of gaming’s grammar, in a way that the misleading “motion” control of Wii has yet to do. Movies don’t need instruction books, and I’d hope a game that recognizes hand swipes in the air wouldn’t, either.

Decades into the form’s popularity, I’ve stopped believing that a single hit game will change people’s minds. No, gaming doesn’t need its Gone with the Wind, and it doesn’t need avid fans preaching its gospel. Maybe gaming needs its CinemaScope, a novel approach in which the toy aspects of gaming can be overwhelmed with the inspiring, emotional reactions we have to any life-changing form of art.

I didn’t say any of this to my acquaintance. I say, “Maybe a game will change your mind some day.” She responds, “Maybe.”

Stunt-racing video game Burnout Paradise gets all the little things right. With fewer loading pauses, the game doesn’t halt between races. Frame rates are smooth. Paradise’s developers have even given away bunches of free, downloadable bonuses.

These details are what we gamers beg for from so many developers, but I still have a bone to pick with Paradise. In its multiplayer cooperative mode, players drive together through the game’s sprawling city with a variety of tasks: rip donuts in a particular parking lot, then set up a super-stunt where everyone crashes into each other in mid-air, etc. Wild stuff. Trouble is, you can’t roll co-op with friends on the same screen. Everybody needs a copy of the game, a console, a TV and an internet connection.

Used to be, video games were a major couch activity for groups of friends. What has changed? My take on this troubling gaming trend can be found in this week’s issue of The Escapist.

My previous gaming articles for The Escapist can be found here.

[reprinted from my original report at Slog]

Minutes ago, Microsoft concluded its annual E3 keynote presentation, an event filled with old game ideas: killing, driving, killing, Final Fantasy, Rock Band Beatles, and on and on and yawn. But after the sequel party ran its course, Microsoft unveiled something different: Project Natal, the full-body motion control camera system for Xbox 360.

Game makers have tried doing motion-sensitive camera games, where a dinky webcam captures your body, then converts its silhouette into a game character, swiping at enemies and whatnot. But those are clumsy and inaccurate. In theory, Natal will take that concept a step further, using its cameras and sensors to turn you into a virtual wireframe skeleton that can accurately steer a car, dribble a soccer ball, or, of course, punch a dude in the face, all with nothing more than your body as the controller.

It also has a microphone for speech commands and doubles as a webcam complete with Minority Report-style waves of hands in the air to flip through menus and send photos to friends. But is this thing for real? Hard to tell 100%; most of the introduction was with concepts, not real games, and one of the three actual demos was a spastic, imprecise and confusing-looking dodgeball sim.

More interesting was the painting prototype in which a guy waved his hands toward the screen to aim splotches of color, Pollack-style, at an on-screen canvas. He pulled off his painting quickly and precisely. After that, MS debuted a creepy project that looked straight out of A.I.: Milo, the “My Buddy” of video games, made by Fable creator Peter Molyneux.

“He can recognize our faces, our voices, and our emotions in us,” Molyneux said as a woman had a goddamned conversation with a 9-year-old synth-boy. He recognized key phrases, then repeated them back to carry on conversation, and he’d mope and turn his head down when the tester mentioned things she knew he was uncomfortable with, like homework. (Molyneux gushed that the tester knew what Milo disliked and was building “a relationship” with the psuedo-child.) In the demo, Milo eventually babbled about his inability to draw a fish for his homework assignment.

The tester grabbed a piece of paper and drew a simple fish. She then held it up to the TV screen, and Milo grabbed the paper, recognized its fish shape, and thanked her. Wow. On Xbox Live, this is a huge step up from the usual interactions with idiot, racist teens (though lord knows how poor, little Milo would react to having one of them hand him a drawing of a penis).

No release dates, no prices, no games announced. But the Natal demos were convincing enough for now. I can’t imagine any game makers topping this for the rest of the week’s E3 games conference.

When Yoshi’s Island hit stores in 1995, mainstream 3D gaming was already wowing shoppers with brand-new “graphics”–that ever-important buzz word through the ’90s. Along came this weird Mario spin-off, though, and 2D crayon strokes ruled the day. It was possibly the first video game to set atmosphere and theme with deliberately distinct art direction, rather than merely push the hardware of the time to its limits, a peculiar idea at the time. In many ways, YI was a trailblazer, but only in the past few years has the retro/indie movement seen art direction take precedent and, more importantly, shape the best new-wave game experiences out there right now.

My emotional reactions to Yoshi’s Island were born anew this week when I stumbled upon this live-band take on one of the game’s themes. Even without the game in question, it’s a cute ditty, but the song definitely has some crayon strokes to it.