['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a look at how children trump adults when it comes to Scribblenauts.]

What’s the best way to get rid of a bothersome fly? It’s one of the first questions asked by Scribblenauts, the DS game that grants its player access to a dictionary of more than 30,000 nouns with which to solve puzzles. Type the word “Swat” into the game’s dialogue box and a sketchpad representation of the object will ping onto the screen, ready and prepped to squish the insect.

If pushed for an alternative answer, you might try, ‘Insect Repellent’ to shoo the fly away, or perhaps ‘Turd’ to lure it elsewhere instead. And herein lies the genius of this extraordinary database: where the vast majority of games give us a handful of tools with which to solve their conundrums, Scribblenauts offers solutions as wide and deep as our own imaginations. It’s a subtle yet seismic shift: a game that, rather than focusing on what you do with your tools, simply asks which you want to use, chosen from a catalogue of everything.

And yet, the disappointment is that many of the game’s tasks lack invention, posing somewhat vanilla, mundane tasks for you to complete: eliminate the fly, fetch a bouquet of flowers, tidy up the rubbish, make a packed lunch.

This is just one of the reasons that Scribblenauts, which is in at least one-way revolutionary, has received a somewhat lukewarm response from critics and consumers alike. While the technology is a sort of irresistible witchcraft, the application is often dry routine. It’s like someone gave you the power to move mountains and then forced you to spend all day shunting shopping trolleys around Tesco’s car park.

Continue reading "There Was a Young Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a look at a satirical game that reveals much about the state of game design.]

The evidence that videogames may yet emerge from their period of extended adolescence comes not from the dizzying realism of the next Forza, nor from the unrivaled spectacle of the forthcoming God of War, nor even the news that Lara’s improbable cleavage is scheduled for a sober reduction in the next Tomb Raider.

Rather, it's in the emergence of a new breed of satirical web-game, one most famously exemplified by last year's Achievement Unlocked, which poked fun at gamers' obsessional pursuit of Xbox Achievement points and PlayStation trophies.

These snappy experiences parody not the grim clichés of gaming’s stories, settings or visuals but rather the more subtle underlying systems that drive them or, in the case of Achievement Unlocked, surround them. They compel us to play via the very same hooks that big budget titles employ, but their exaggerated presentation and irreverent context encourage us to evaluate the worth of these mechanics and, in doing so, question the very reasons why we find them so irresistible.

Upgrade Complete is the latest such satirical game in this vein. It begins by presenting players with the bare bones of a shoot ‘em up; a blocky, silent retro game whose music, graphics, menus and even developer logos must be bought and upgraded one by one with in-game currency.

At first glance Upgrade Complete appears to be making fun of downloadable content, those upgrades - new costumes, weapons, characters and levels - released by a developer for a modest fee after their game’s initial release. After all, until you purchase a humble loading bar you can't even start this game (the developer 'lends' you $1000 to make this initial purchase).

But as you play on, the game’s target is revealed to be a more substantial and pervasive one: that of the in-game upgrades that furnish our characters with better weapons and abilities, a feature found in almost all contemporary videogames from Fallout 3 to Call of Duty 4.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Chewing Pixels': Downgrade Complete" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a wargame producer doesn't quite find the perspective he was looking for from a consulting veteran.]

“So I’d just like to start by thanking you for agreeing to help us out on this project. It’s very much appreciated by the team.”

“Well, that’s absolutely fine Mr… Mr? I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name”

“Caldwell. John Caldwell. I’m senior producer here at Eternity Games. It really is a privilege to have you here. We’re confident that the unique and personal insight you can provide us into this moment of history will prove quite invaluable to our product.”

The older man shifted a little in his seat, causing his walking stick to slide to the floor from its leaning position on the chair’s armrest with a resounding clack. “Well, I’m not sure about that Sir, but I’m quite happy to help out in any way I can. Your game is about… it’s about the war, yes? Are the kids really interested in that sort of thing these days?”

“Absolutely. And we think that by consulting some veterans we can add greatly to the verisimilitude of the experience we're creating. This kind of thing makes for an excellent back-of-the-box selling point, you know. Young people are keen to learn what it was like to serve on the frontline and games like ours offer them a unique and realistic chance to witness both the horror and the glory of the battlefield."

“Well I can’t say I especially approve of that Mr Caldwell, but anything that might help prevent a young person from going to war and having to see the things that I see is just fine by me.”

America’s Army, Full Spectrum Warrior and all the other military recruitment games flashed across Caldwell's mind for a moment. But just as he started to wonder just how many young men had been drawn to real war by way of virtual battlefields, he tore himself off that thought trail and back to the matter at hand.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'Lest We Forget'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a fictionalized account of a real-life tragedy from the heart of Akihabara.]

“IRASSHAIMASE!”

In the fifth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano allows himself a slight nod at the shop assistant’s near-hysterical greeting. Eyes down, he makes his way to the back of the electronics store, around the stack of dusty peripherals for forgotten music games and idiot train simulators.

In the corner there's a set of crumpled, tragic dance mats, all the bright plastic detritus of a long gone Japanese videogame boom.

In the fourth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano makes a beeline for the bargain tray, entertainment platter of the student gamer. Clack, clack, clack, he flicks the cases forward in quick succession, making staccato snap decisions as their titles flit past his eyes: no, no, maybe.

Cracked jewel cases holding broken games: the forgotten work of long-gone studios. If their creators could have seen their creations then as they are now, would they have persevered in making them, he wonders? Probably. Everything and everyone ends up on a bargain tray one day or another, right? Doesn't stop us.

In the third minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano’s fingers pause on the second to last jewel case. Tales of Destiny: a middling RPG stacked behind a misfiled two-year-old Idol CD. 200 Yen? With the sidequests he can probably draw it out to sixty hours playtime which works out at, er, nearly 20 minutes per Yen. That has to be the cheapest escapism in all of Tokyo, he congratulates himself.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'A Tale of Destiny'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a non-joking April Fools update about deep gaming obsession.]

If games are lovers then our promiscuity knows no bounds.

For many gamers, their relationship with the hobby is characterized by a string of flings: transient passions expressed through a fortnight’s worth of devoted and frantic interaction. But, aside from those controlling, abusive marriages that MMO players find themselves in, the fling usually remains a fling. In almost every case, a game exerts only a short-term hold on the head and the heart, one that loosens once the end credits roll or the zeitgeist moves on.

Many gamers have become addicted to the fling cycle. The pre-release hype reaches an irresistible fever pitch, deepening the pleasure of the release. Then, during the days following consummation, forum impressions are devoured, the to-ing and fro-ing of discussion articulating our own experiences and crystallizing our own opinions.

Perhaps Youtube videos are digested during lunch breaks like cherished home movies, screenshots pored over like worn photographs, lover’s guide FAQ techniques noted and absorbed. Then, at night we tussle again, learning one another’s form and function, exploring the boundaries of the experience, our skill and confidence growing with familiarly.

So it is with all video games that grip us and it's the memory of these firework love affairs and the promise of future ones that keep us invested in the hobby, which acts like a pimp to our appetite.

But rarely does the fling blossom into a sustained relationship. Of course, there are those titles, the Wii Sports and Rock Bands that make continued appearances at the weekend when friends come to dinner, but these are games of convenience, not ongoing infatuation.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels - 'The Infatuation'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a surprising press release sheds light on a dangerous profession.]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Video Game Critic Killed Over 7/10 Review

A white, male video game reviewer has been murdered at his home in South London.

Charlie Drummond, a 30-year-old print and web journalist, was hacked to death by between 12 and 20 members of the gaming forum New-Gaf in his bedroom on Saturday morning.

According to police, his attackers had become riled at a review Drummond had written of the, at the time unreleased, videogame, Gears of Killzone 2, a product which the writer valued at 7/10 in a review printed in the Wedge Magazine two weeks ago.

A friend and fellow journalist told the BBC that Drummond’s killers had carved a 7/10 into his forehead using a DS stylus, a reference to the value judgment that apparently led to his demise.

While most of Drummond’s attackers are at large, one man, known at this point only by his online handle ‘Dutka-Fan’, handed himself in to a police station on Sunday morning. The police are yet to issue a statement, however one officer confirmed to the BBC the suspect had “not played the game in question yet”.

A discussion thread on New-Gaf, which ran to 60 pages prior to Drummond’s killing, was filled with expressions of dismay from forum members who accused the writer of “indulging [his] massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention”, arguing that Drummond should “not be allowed to do things like this” and, in reference to the score he awarded the game, elliptically claiming: “This...is...a...lie.”

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'Video Game Critic Slain Over 7/10 Review'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time - a sad tale.]

The candle snuffed itself out, a wisp of smoke curling upwards and around the wooden beams of the cottage. He sat, body hunched, forehead rested dead upon the kitchen table. In front of him a row of empty bottles lined up like icicle soldiers, beside them a scrumpled note rocked in the near imperceptible breeze that breathed down the chimney and about the room. The fire was turned to embers. Through the numbness, he felt his body growing cold.

There were no tears: he had known this day was coming and so its arrival brought with it little surprise. He had conjured the sense of loss he now felt many times in the past, curious of the pressures and pains it would one-day inevitability exert on his heart. As such, he was familiar with today’s feelings, even if their intensity was far keener in reality than in imagining.

On the floor next to the chair lay a crumpled dress. It was pink with a rustling skirt, peach buttons and a ribbed bodice. There was a hollow in the centre of the bust, the hole left by a plucked jewel.

Earlier, before the drink and fury, he had torn the dress from her wardrobe, held it against his face and breathed in so deeply his lungs burned. Then he crushed it in his arms until his strength ran dry.

A rap at the door.

“Who is it?” he croaked, raising his head from the table.

“It’s-a-me. A-Luigi,” came the muffled reply.

“It’s open.”

“Brother,” Luigi nodded, closing the door behind him with a click.

“Here,” the first man said, voice brimming with sorrow, pushing the note across the table toward his sibling.

Luigi un-scrumpled the piece of paper, and in a low voice, read aloud what was written on it:

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'In Another Castle'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a video game-related adventure in late-night London.]

It's eleven ‘o clock on a Saturday night and London’s drunk.

She gets like this from time to time, usually at the weekend. Sometimes the booze manifests itself in shouts and swagger, in furious fistfights sicked up by bar doors onto the pavement outside. Tonight though, the city’s wrapped in a gentle sort of inebriation, an exaggerated swaying on the tube ride home, eyes clenched shut with concentration: down stomach, down.

Five minutes walk from Piccadilly Circus’ bright lights and slogans sits the Trocadero, the capital’s largest remaining amusement arcade. A hen party, all crooked tiaras and bleared mascara totters past the giant double doors: these tall escalators and polished floors are no place for cocktails on high heels. Inside, rows of arcade machines buzz and bleep, attract mode sequences beckoning the curious with the promise of pixel adventure.

Kids stand idly by with studied nonchalance, glancing at player performances here and there with self-conscious dispassion. Five minutes with Guitar Freaks and maybe you’ll be a rock God to them; five minutes with King of Fighters, you’ll probably be a laughing stock: either way, you won’t know.

Upstairs, to the right of the central escalator that runs like a spinal column up from the building entrance to its summit, stands a Dance Dance Revolution cabinet. It holds pride of place, dominating the scene with its bulk and neon and noise. It must still be the operator’s highest earning machine to warrant such a valuable location.

All around a crowd of teenagers and young twenty-somethings loiter. They are not here to play. They are here to perform and to be performed to. Here, in this spot, at this moment, London is sober. And, yes: she’s about to dance at you.

Continue reading "Opinion: 'Chewing Pixels: Children of the Revolution'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin.]

“Wow. This is excellent wine.”

She is exactly right. This is excellent wine.

In fact, that’s not the half of it. This is an excellent restaurant. The excellent food we are about to order will have been cooked from excellent ingredients by an excellent chef and we’ll eat it to the soundtrack of an excellent jazz trio (whose standards we’ll pretend to know by name).

The waiters, perfectly poised between attentiveness and professional detachment will provide us with excellent service. The loud bits of conversation that float over from our neighbours’ tables will be spoken by an excellent clientele, one that brims with that cozy warmth that comes from relaxing in excellent surroundings.

Outside it is cold and slush, a city returning home from a day’s Christmas shopping, shivering and spent in service to capitalism. But inside, here at this table, in this glass, all is peace and excellence.

Continue reading "COLUMN - Chewing Pixels: 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time - why video game retail might be important for the soul of gaming.]

“Um, hi. Do you think you could tell me anything about this game? I, er, found it on the bottom shelf back there.”

“Gunstar Heroes? Hmm. I’ve not heard of that one. Let me take a look.”

This is Mad Andy. We’re not friends and that’s certainly not a nickname of my invention. Rather, it’s the name Andy’s given himself and, by extension, his shop, an independent, second-hand video game store based in South London.

Mad Andy pulls a dog-eared phone directory from the shelf behind where he’s sitting, and plants it with a dull thud on the counter with that officious sense of purpose some men display when called upon to give advice.

Tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, he flickbooks through its tatty pages, every now and again calling out the name of a game that catches his attention as it flits past his eyes alphabetically.

“Altered Beast, Another World, Bomberman, Contra, D,…”

The book’s a catalogue of every game ever, or so it seems to the thirteen-year-old me. More accurately, it’s a price guide compiled by goodness–knows-who, listing the buy and sell rates for games current and past. Armed with this tome, every independent videogame store knows how much to buy in a second-hand game for and how much to mark it up in order to secure fair but essential profit without undercutting market rates.

As well as prices, the book also boasts reviews, again, written by God-knows-which sorry freelancer. These pithy one-line assessments are accompanied by a score out of five, two pieces of information that gives the salesman everything he needs to issue customers with an authoritative recommendation.

“Elite, Frogger…Ga…Gi…Go. Ah! Here we go: Gunstar Heroes. Hmm. Well what do you know! It’s a good one. Look, right there: ‘Fast, frantic, frenetic scrolling shoot ‘em up. Five out of five.’”

Our sorry freelancer is a fan of alliteration.

“Whoa.” I look down at the back of the box in my hands. “Treasure? Never heard of them.”

Continue reading "Column: Chewing Pixels - 'Second-Hand Memories'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a look at Fallout 3 and morals.]

Washington D.C. is a bleak and difficult place to eke out an existence. From the moment you exit the relative safety of Vault 101 and take your first lungful of radioactive breeze, it’s clear that Fallout 3’s development team has created a post-apocalyptic capital wasteland of grim authenticity.

Indeed, if a player harbours any sort of perverse attraction to the idea of living in an anarchic, rubble strewn, radiation-soaked America, Fallout 3 soon dampens it. These streets, or what’s left of them, are relentlessly hostile. Every can of coke requires a chemotherapy chaser, every rival scavenger you meet while traipsing over the endless debris would put a bullet in your eye sooner than look into it.

This is an America whose dream died a long time ago; whose selfish, writhing instincts were revealed in full when the blanket of social responsibility and respectability burned up in nuclear fire. But while Fallout 3’s America is a bleak place indeed, it is still very much the land of the free.

You see, with anarchy comes a giddy sort of liberty. Despite the hostility of its geography and inhabitants, Fallout 3’s world is pregnant with opportunity. As with all contemporary open world videogames, you are free to be the kind of person you want to be. Should you so choose you can steal from the poor or help them; you can speak with unshakeable politeness or unflinching rudeness; you can make friends and share resources or make enemies and take them. Post-Christian as well as post-apocalyptic, the sum of your moral choices in Fallout’s world is then represented by a karma stat.
But, as with any open-world videogame, the opportunities, while wide and not always binary, are subject to their own limits and boundaries. These are the restrictions imposed by both technology and premise. Technologically, you cannot build a plane from scrap metal in Fallout 3 and fly away to a new, radiation-free existence as a sheep farmer in Australia, for example.

And the boundaries of the scenario mean that you could never be a pacifist in this world. Instead, the choices you have are whether to sneak past the shotgun-wielding leper or to take his head off with a fat boy missile. The basic need to survive in a city whose inhabitants’ existence depends on depriving others of resources is common to every player, whoever they want to be. To play Fallout 3 is to embrace violence: it’s a dog eat dog existence where cruelty and murder are an inescapable reality of the setting.

There is also a third kind of restriction on player freedom in the game, one that forbids a particular action both technically possible and narratively plausible.

In Fallout 3, you cannot kill children.

Continue reading "Chewing Pixels: 'I Kill Children'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a message from the future.]

One of the grandchildren is browsing my achievement points. It's a record filled with tens of thousands of entries, an indelible, almost embarrassing testimony to a life spent in games.

She looks round. “Grandpa, what’s your favourite videogame of all time?”

It’s always been an awkward question but these days it’s near impossible to answer truthfully. She might as well have asked about my favourite meal. Who can possibly remember every plate of food they ever sat down to? You know that you ate most days and you know that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details of what was on the menu, how it felt in the mouth, what it smelled and looked like are all lost to time.

After a while games lose their definition in memory too. You know that you played most days and that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details... A few stand out, for sure, but most slip forgotten.

It's been six weeks since I was told that I'm dying.

The problem with death, for the lifelong gamer, is its supreme familiarity. There aren’t hairs on my head to measure the virtual lives I’ve lost over a lifetime of play. So when you’re told you’ve three months at best, it’s easy to be flippant.

In my time I’ve fallen foul of countless mis-timed jumps, stray bullets, car crashes and drug deals gone wrong; I’ve flown fighter jets into solid ground at 300 miles per hour, fallen under the heavy tread of a London bus and watched incredulous as my space ship dissolved in the mute explosion of a sun. The blocks reached the top of the screen time after time.

Playing a videogame is to enter into a state of inescapable impending doom: they are the moments between leaping from the clifftop and hitting the rocks below. Games only become games when you’ve a Game Over screen to avoid. Lives, profoundly perhaps, only gain value when they can be lost.

In a way then, videogames are the ultimate preparation for life’s ultimate event: through them you’ve died a million times.

Yes. Death should be easy: it’s virtually all I’ve ever known.

Continue reading "Opinion: Chewing Pixels - 'Death of a Gamesman'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, he ventures into his MMO past to find out whether buyer's remorse exists, where virtual characters are concerned.]

“My total time played is 110 days, 23 hours and 11 minutes. See? No time at all compared to some!”

This is Lindsay Machin. For the last three years she has spent every day or so playing make believe in the magical kingdom of Vana'diel. It’s a lifestyle with which I’m familiar: battling monsters, earning gil, questing with friends and strangers into the early hours. After all, four years ago it was me who sold her the entry ticket.

Delve into the world of an MMO and you’re buying into more than just a video game. You’re taking on a new reality, one that makes almost as many demands of you to succeed as real life does. A year or so in to the first global console MMO, Final Fantasy XI and I needed out but, having imported a PlayStation 2, harddrive and copy of Final Fantasy XI from America at great expense, I also needed some recompense.

That’s where Lindsay came in. I sold her my MMO life via an Internet forum as a way out. Now, nearly four years later I’ve tracked her down to find out what happened when the experience left my hands and fell into hers.

I’m wary of MMOs; they steal time in a more relentless and vicious way than other videogames do. I‘ve see friends’ lives turned upside down by their unyielding intrusion. And the thought that I pushed something so potentially ruinous onto another human being has nagged at me for the last few years. I’ve some guilt to assuage.

“So, I guess my first question is…” I pause. "Actually, truth be told it’s probably my only question. Did I ruin your life?”

“Hehehe. You saved me a lot of money actually. Think of all the other games I would have bought if I wasn't playing FFXI every night. Actually, I did still buy a lot of other games, but I just didn't play any of them…” She seems sure. Too sure perhaps.

“Ok. Seriously, did I ruin your life? What's the stat for your character's logged time in weeks and days? Tell me you never lost a job or a boyfriend because of this game. Please.”

It’s a reasonable question. While we in the West are yet have any of those Korean news stories of withered boys dead at their screens after three straight days spent playing an MMO, Square-Enix still saw fit to put a warning at Final Fantasy XI’s start up screen. “Have fun in vana Diel,” the message reads each and every time you log into the game. “But don't forget your family, your friends, your school, or your work." Even the publisher’s aware that this is a videogame that can ruin lives.

“You did not ruin my life,” she answers, two parts smiling, one part annoyed now. “I have made real life friends who I love through playing FFXI. Some of us meet up every 6 months or so, but I’m in regular contact with three people who play, and through them have made even more real life friends, including some who I consider to be amongst my closest now.

Continue reading "Chewing Pixels: 'For Sale: Hero Shoes. Once Worn.'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, he attempts to understand why Christian-themed gaming is so maligned.]

Earlier this week gaming news outlets and blogs caught wind of a forthcoming, independent gaming release from hitherto little-known developer, Digital Praise.

Appropriating the form and function of Harmonix’s Guitar Hero series (itself perhaps inspired by Konami’s Guitar Freaks games) Guitar Praise offers the faithful - at least, those of the affluent, American, evangelical variety - the chance to play along with their favourite pulpit-rock acts, just as Jesus would have wanted.

In the game’s press release Digital Praise promise players that, once they lay down the $99.95 entry fee, they’ll soon be “rockin' with the best while praising the Lord!”

The gaming community greeted the story with exactly the kind of all-caps, spluttering incredulity one might expect. One droll commentator at Boing Boing quipped, “The game refuses to boot on Sunday mornings, so I hear.”

The story gained widespread coverage because, while there have been Christian-targeted videogames before, including such titles as 1992’s Joshua: Battle of Jericho for the NES, 1994’s Spiritual Warfare for the Gameboy and 1995’s Bible Adventures on the Genesis, such releases are still unusual enough to be ‘newsworthy’ when they do crop up.

The Evolution Of Games For Diverse Audiences

In part this type of coverage is a sign of gaming’s relative immaturity. Since the scales fell from Hollywood’s eyes following the financial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, studios have been clawing over themselves to sign up blockbuster-size Biblical-themed projects in search of the Christian dollar.

But the older movie industry has always been adept at serving a diverse range of audiences, tastes and interests. Gaming is only just beginning to diversify in similar ways and we are unused to our hobby being appropriated by (or targeted at) minority groups as a way of spreading their word, exploring their history, espousing their worldview or promoting their agenda.

So when that does happen the news is reported in a way that the announcement of, for example, another Buena Vista Narnia film will never be.

It’s important to note that the seizure of cultural forms by minority groups, (be they Christians, homosexuals or even international terrorist groups) signals the maturation and diversification of a medium, not its stagnation or a scarcity of ideas.

Continue reading "Opinion: Guitar Hero Praise: What’s Wrong With The ‘Christian’ Videogame?" »

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[In a special version of his regular GameSetWatch column, British games journalist and producer Simon Parkin interviews editorial leaders from Eurogamer, IGN, and Edge Magazine to produce 'a snapshot, albeit partial, into the state of the specialist gaming press in mid-2008.' Oh, and the picture is how the games press are portrayed, not necessarily how they are.]

Few avenues of journalism are so dimly regarded as the specialist gaming press. Viewed as little more than hobbyists covering an adolescent industry, game journalists earn few accolades and command little respect from their peers in the older mediums. And readerships too can be vicious in their skepticism, accusing gaming websites and magazines of being fawning mouthpieces for the industry they cover, their writers rarely breaking real stories or offering anything approaching lucid commentary or incisive critique.

Poorly paid and overworked, a minority of game journalists continue to cover games full-time into their thirties, drawn away instead by more lucrative jobs in gaming PR, acquisitions, consultancy or development itself.

But despite this grim, stereotypical overview, the gaming press is far from an impotent one. The disrespect it attracts is more than matched by raw readership figures, which would be the envy of many a news editor in 2008. The biggest-hitting gaming websites attract in excess of a million unique hits a month, and even boutique-y publications, such as Edge Magazine, while boasting monthly ABCs of only 31,304 issues, exert a global influence on the industry and its consumers that few specialist publications manage.

As the games industry matures and diversifies, so too does the range, breadth and ability of its commentators, reviewers and critics. There are those who are writers first and gamers second, who love the games industry enough to be able to examine its products with white honesty, rooting out the real stories behind the precision-written press releases. And, of course, leading, coordinating and inspiring these writers to produce their best work, work that bucks the stereotypes, are the editors who steer the publications, define their tone and set their boundaries.

GameSetWatch directed a clutch of identical questions to five of western gaming journalism’s most prominent editors: Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell, IGN’s Tal Blevins (Vice President of Games Content), Kotaku’s Brian Crecente, Edge Magazine’s Tony Mott and Gamespot’s Ricardo Torres.

In the interview we ask each man (and they are all men) for their perspective and approach to game journalism, the relationship between advertising and editorial, what the most popular articles and posts are with readers and what advice they would give to young writers looking to get into the industry.

All five editors initially agreed to take part but only three actually delivered their answers. Their replies are presented here in full to offer a snapshot, albeit partial, into the state of the specialist
gaming press in mid-2008.

Continue reading "In-Depth: 'Meet the Editors: The State of Game Journalism'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. Here's a story about games led him to and from vice city.]

One, two, three, four fingers uncurl. I don’t see them because I’m past her window by now, but I hear them in the reaction of the beery men stood around.

“400 Euros?!" “She must be kidding”, “F***ing princess”, “She’d be lucky to get 40”

Albert Camus described Amsterdam’s concentric canals as being like the circles of hell, the crimes becoming denser and darker the more you progress through them. If that’s true then this girl’s huge 1st floor window advertising space stands at the fiery epicentre. She leans in, back arched, hand on knee, lingerie-clad hind in the air, eyes masked heavy with makeup and affected lust; four fingers uncurled.

These brutes, these heavy louts, are as much her tormentors as prospective lovers. They mask their disappointment at her prohibitive cost with loud, retorting undervaluations.

Prostitution, at least, of the kind offered in Amsterdam, is a game whose stakes include, perhaps more than anything else, self-esteem. It’s legal here so sellers can refuse clients in relative safety. Prices are adjusted on the fly: raised sky-high for the repulsive, kept reasonable for the reasonable.

So when a group of boorish British men are quoted 400 Euros for twenty minutes funtime it’s as much an attack on their self-esteem as their consequent rejection of the offer is on hers.

“She will only sell herself to me for how much?”

“He wouldn't even pay that?”

Halo 3. It’s a press trip and I'm here to play Halo 3, not sex tourist. I have wife and child and my desire to keep everyone happy in those roles mercifully outweighs any baser instincts right now. But go sightseeing in Amsterdam and these are the sights you'll inevitably see.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'Sex and Tetris'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This latest instalment gets right to the heart of ecumenical matters.]

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been longer than I can remember since my last confession. These are my sins:

I killed a man. No, too modest. On every continent and in all countries, across centuries, worlds and dimensions, in times of war and times of peace, my trail of dead is one frag short of endless.

I masterminded the genocide of countless Civilizations and annihilated every city on Earth each time I booted up Defcon.

I’ve committed patricide in Lego Star Wars, matricide in Final Fantasy VII, sororicide in Bioshock (little sister had it coming) and pesticide in Viva Piñata.

I colonised America in Anno 1701 and killed all of the Indians (but hey, if it works in my favour, I did help put an end to World War II around 73 million times).

I blew up a sheep in Worms. Come to think of it, I blew up a worm in Worms. I wiped out all of the ants in EDF2017, all of the bats in Symphony of the Night, all of the mice in Chu Chu Rocket and all of the light in The Darkness.

My Nintendog ran away.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'The Gamer’s Confession'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This latest instalment deals with Nintendo's marketing of the 'Touch Generations' series as something beyond games.]

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. Find the fun and… snap: the job’s a game! And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see: that a…spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go dowwwn, medicine go down”

Had Mary Poppins pursued a career in game design, rather than choosing to nanny rich kids in Kensington, she’d probably be working for Nintendo right now. Her assertion that every real life task contains an ingredient of fun that, if identified and emphasized, can turn a chore into a game mightn’t be original, but never before has it been so in vogue with game developers.

Nintendo’s ‘Touch Generations’ family of titles has helped define a new gaming market space: games that mimic those real life activities most people go out of their way to avoid. Mental arithmetic, dog walking, eyesight testing, exercise and aerobics all repackaged and re-branded by Nintendo as gaming’s brave new future.

So effective has the company’s work been in mining entertainment from the mundane that their spoonful of pixel sugar could probably make a game out of pulling pubic hair from a bath plug. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the premise of WarioWare.

Continue reading "COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'Touch Generations? Con Generations!'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This latest instalment deals with video game reviews and scoring - the good, the bad, and the ugly.]

Last month a British games journalist reviewed Xbox Live Arcade’s Penny Arcade Adventures for two different publications. In one of the magazines the game scored 4/10 while, in the other it was awarded 68%. While it’s a discrepancy that caused some to raise their eyebrows, most commentators acknowledge that the difference simply reflects each publication’s own particular use of the numerical review scale.

Two weeks later Microsoft announced their plans to remove games with an average Metacritic score of 65% or lower from their XBLA service. If the decision on whether to keep Penny Arcade Adventures on the service were to be based solely on the judgement of this reviewer, its fate would swing on which review was looked at.

While a game’s Metacritic or Gameranking average score has often been used to dictate the size of a development staff’s bonuses, EA’s decision to use numerical scores as the criterion for dictating whether games can be sold on their service or not has elevated the numbers issue a whole new level of consequence.

Some argue that scores represent different things to different publications, one title’s 4/10 being another’s 68%. Others question why, when scores rarely tally with a game’s commercial success, we should use them to make commercial decisions? Always, the question behind the question is: do review scores actually matter and, if so what do they even mean?

At a glance, review scores seem to be the most harmless of things. While good critics will bemoan having to reduce a 1000-word piece of incisive criticism to a number on a 10 point scale (or, um, 19 point scale if you’re GameSpot), to the average consumer they offer a useful shorthand reference point with which to compare different titles and inform buying decisions.

Continue reading "Chewing Pixels: 'Video Game Review Scores: Pointless or Pertinent?'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time - an intriguing discussion of how limited access to Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV may have affected its initial reception.]

Judgments cast before they'd been adequately weighed; words sold before they’d been properly valued; shallow opinions that should have been presented as the first word in a conversation but were dropped with the clacking gavel pound of a conclusion. Yeah, every writer has regrets.

Four weeks ago in this publication I referred to Grand Theft Auto IV’s depiction of immigrants as being more nuanced and sympathetic than that demonstrated by the exquisite Baltimore-set television drama, The Wire.

The exact words were: “[Niko Bellic’s] portrayal should do more to warm viewers to illegal immigrants than any of the (nevertheless awesome) characters in, say, the culturally-acclaimed TV series, The Wire.”

While it seems like a harmless enough statement it was an idiotic comparison considering the heavyweight dramatic nature of the television series and the shits-and-giggles, tongue-in-cheek parody of the videogame.

But what’s really nagged and irritated over the following weeks is that, with a little distance and perspective, the bold proclamation was so obviously made, like so many from within our industry, with the aim of elevating videogames to the respectability of more established (read: accepted) media via bald association.

The opinion piece was written following a short weekend's playing of the game just prior to its release and, as I’ve played on through the rest of the story, the fault lines in that specific claim have become ever more apparent. While I adore the slow pacing of the first few hours, the way Nico starts off on the straight and narrow and is dragged into the shadows of the American Dream by forces of poverty and necessity, the game soon enough swings into full adolescent-posing-as-adult narrative fizz.

There’s nothing particularly unusual or wrong with that, especially when sat alongside Hollywood’s output, but claiming it has anything particularly meaningful to say about the immigration issue is stretching the game beyond its purpose.

More interesting than this whiny narcissism are the forces that brought about my (and ten thousand other professional) snap judgments of the game.

Continue reading "Column: Chewing Pixels: '11th Hour Reviews: PR’s Dirty Little Game'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a new GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin in which he explains what you should think about video games - or in this case, game journalism - and why.]

Charlie was a gamer who decided he would write
(not fair: Charlie was a writer who chose games for his insight)
Calloused thumbs
Filled with twitch
Muscle memory
Now to earn a living from his (2nd) favourite teenage hobby.
A critic,
A reviewer
This is how he'd spend his days;
Ten hours, then a judgment, then the promo to ebay.
First came his blog,
Then their website,
Then his words in national print.
Then reactions, reader comments
Critic critics?! Narcissist.

Charlie was quite brilliant
His prose tight and rare
His words perspicacious
His final judgments fair.

But Charlie was a drop in a tidal wave of choices
His commentary discarded
For more forgiving voices.
Still, he reasoned in his head, with marked maturity:
“I'll reduce game writing’s volume but raise its fidelity”

Continue reading "Chewing Pixels: 'A Cautionary Tale for the Young Games Writer'" »

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['Chewing Pixels' is a new GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin in which he explains what you should think about video games and why.]

Niko Bellic is the most likable Grand Theft Auto protagonist we’ve yet seen.

He’s smart, funny, loquacious and you get the feeling that his brushes with (and reluctant employment by) Liberty City’s criminal underworld are born from poverty and necessity rather than an inherent tendency toward violence and viciousness.

He’s seen things.

This much we know from his infrequent moments of soul-bearing wartime recollection (which never feel forced) and so he exudes the kind of scarred, tough maturity that comes from surviving the bleakness of battle rather than the posing immaturity of so much gangsta pastiche.

That Rockstar decided to cast the player as an illegal immigrant for their hero is cause for celebration, not eye-rolling derision. He is an asylum-seeking protagonist with more depth and character than ten thousand lantern-jawed American heroic archetypes.

In fact, his portrayal (at least to those with half an eye open) should do more to warm viewers to illegal immigrants than any of the (nevertheless awesome) characters in, say, the culturally-acclaimed TV series, The Wire.

Continue reading "Chewing Pixels: 'GTA IV: The Immigrant Issue'" »

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