GameMisinformer (article)

One day, comrades, we will live in a worker's paradise where we are all equal and money will have no value. Yes, one's value will determined solely by what they are able to produce for everyone else to use as they need; not by the amount that they are able to horde, comrades. It will be a new utopia, free of avarice and amorality, once only the fevered dream of Marx or Rousseau. Until that day, however, I will continue to have my money plucked away by GameStop.

Ever since the messy fiasco that was Brink, I've avoided buying video games new (Skyrim being the exception - soul sucking, meme generating, life destroyer that it is). In this used game buy-and-resell-a-thon I've wound up with the GameStop discount card affair. Which is useful and all, but like a clandestine tab of LSD lodged in a cheese curd, there's something extra that struck me by surprise. And has left me uncomfortable. And it was made of paper, also.

A free subscription of GameInformer is the subject of the acid analogy (obviously). While I appreciate magazines, and all of the charm that a paper version of the internet holds, this and similar publications reek heartily of a distinct lack of integrity. There's a million reasons for it, and I don't blame the writers. No real writer would ever want to beat their integrity over the head and leave it bleeding in the moonlight. The soupy, red, puddle that forms around the 'zine when I leave it on my nightstand is very telling, though.

I have to wonder what it's like to write for a mainstream video game magazine/e-zine. Each month I thumb through the odd article in GameInformer, and I just feel bad for the poor mooks that paint up the downfalls of the video game industry like it's a good thing.

"We've experienced the pivotal Racoon City outbreak through the eyes of Jill, Chris, Leon, and Claire, but what was it like for the Umbrella operatives?" opens Tim Turi of GameInformer. "Let's see how Capcom is going to siphon the last few putrid juices out of the dead horse this year!" seems like it would have been more appropriate. My true hope is that Turi is as disillusioned with unnecessary sequels as I am and his opening was a tongue-in-cheek jab at the game; like a movie critic wondering if George Lucas' next project will be to show remake The Clone Wars from the point of view of R2D2.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD received attention in the same issue, and for a brief moment I was excited. The article opened with a, call it what it is, shameless hit of nostalgia for people old enough to appreciate two minute level timers. Then, transitioned nicely into beating on the franchise for its eventual derailment into sophomoric hijinx, and name dropping, over gameplay.

To my chagrin, the reporter blithely went on to say that THPS:HD was a carbon copy remake of all of the most popular levels from the first few installments. There's no way that I'm the only person in the world that has bile rise in their throat when a remake is announced. Who reads this and is excited by it? Who decides to write this stuff? Who gets excited and buys this crap at launch?

You see, the problem with these magazines is that they reinforce the idea that repetition and big titles are good. Yes, yes, I'm aware that I'm flirting with the pretentious "indie or bust" type crap right now, but put the pitchforks down, the beret and turtle neck are staying in the closet. Information is what originally drove these magazines; hence, the "informer" in GameInformer. Now, though, the line between information and marketing is so badly skewed it looks like a roadmap of Europe. Every problem that is strangling innovation out of the video game industry is squarely perpetuated by this kind of shameless ad mongering.

Articles like these instigate excitement over something that is simply not exciting. There's no question that each year's new Resident Evil or Tony Hawk or any other heavily franchised game installments will be playable, but that's all they are. They are average. They are nicely put together and provide fun distraction for around 10 hours. Painting average games up like they're going to revolutionize the way we play games is doing nothing but putting a cork into the creativity bottle. When something original and fun finally does come along, it doesn't get so much as the time of day from developers.

Remember when the first Guitar Hero came out? Get the hell out of my office, you do not. Why do you not remember? Because it was weird, and new, and freaking hard, and likely to be crushed by Dance Dance Revolution so no one cared to push it. Look at it now! Well, its churning out half-baked installments and doing exactly what I’m against, but that’s not the point. The point is that things that are new and original never get the attention they deserve, and that’s squarely because of media publications that won’t quit drooling down our earholes that the next annual Call of Battlefield and Forza Worldcup Batman is going to make us forget our families they're so good.

So who is to blame in all this? Who is responsible for the bleeding magazine on my table? Again, I don't blame the writers for all of this, what I truly feel is sympathy. I'm sure that they are just doing their jobs and writing what is assigned to them. What they write is smudged by their editors. And their editors have it smudged by the ones above them. And they, the ones above them, and so on, with the all-important ad revenue having the final say. I can only try to sympathize with the writers that have their hard polished work muscled over by the signers of their checks; like greedy children plunging their smearing fingers into a refined, clay, statue.

World of Warcraft Abuse (article)

World of Warcraft is the closest a person can come to doing hard drugs without ever actually taking any drugs. That's not to say that it's a mind altering, euphoric, rush that can't be described. It's actually pretty easy to describe WoW; imagine clicking pixelated dragons for six consecutive hours and you've got endgame content. It's saying that it ruins people's lives.

I've always considered myself a weekend warrior when it came to the World of Warcraft epidemic. I've played off and on since shortly after launch, but never for more than a month or two at a time. In the hundreds of hours I've frittered away running around clicking gnolls, I've wrestled into submission a pretty daunting image of what effect WoW has on people.

I really first noticed it after coming out of a multi-day binge of quest grinding and instance running. For three days I'd done nothing but play the game, sleep a few hours, and hastily eat enough to keep my stomach quieter than my speakers. Eventually, I emerged, blear eyed, from my bedroom; squinting against the light of the hallway. I remember my internal monologue spouting off "Well... time to get my life back together.".

Because that's what World of Warcraft does to people. Like a drug addict coming off a long stint of some conglomeration of household cleaners cooked on a hotplate in a dropout's basement, I realized how filthy I was, how badly my clothes smelled, how little I'd eaten, and how many of my friends' calls I'd ignored.

I'd like to say, "Online games like WoW appeal to us at a most basic level.", but I know that in reality I should just say that "WoW appeals to us at a base level" because the Warcraft Jabberwocky spends its time either consuming money, or picking competitors from its teeth. Either way, there's shockingly simple exchange happening when a person plays the game; that is, they click a button and something good happens. The parallel between B.F. Skinner's pigeons and teenage shut ins with skin problems is stifling.

World of Warcraft has always designed itself to take a long time to play. This really works to their advantage. With a difficulty curve as gradual as a hole in the Amigara Fault, it's easy for players to learn and adjust to what's happening to them; never wanting to stop clicking their buttons for rewards. Three expansions later the length and gradualness of the game's curve rivals Mt. Fuji. That's a long time to lose yourself.

None of this is to say that World of Warcraft is bad. I can't blame the game for people ruining their lives. There are messages in the loading screens explicitly telling you "Go outside, you loser", you can dictate the number of hours per week you can play; since the outbreak of deaths due to online games, Blizzard has tried to remain something of a harbor.

I've actually renewed the old weekend warrior status myself in the last week. I also haven't missed any school, have seen friends regularly, and, oh shit! wrote an article. I don't exactly know what to derive from the hard drug analogy and my own "middle way" approach to Warcraft. I don't want to say that doing heroin or crack is cool as long as it's in moderation, but, well, I have a newly rolled Orc warrior that needs to explore just how overpowered the Fury tree is now, so I'm not going to worry about it.

Horror in the Atmosphere (rambling)

Genres are something of an enigma to me. I've heard a million people argue that genres aren't important. Just go with what you enjoy! Music is a pointed example of this. Plenty of times people have told me, "Jeremiah, listen to music that is pleasing to you, don't listen to the genre!". And that's beautiful on paper, but fascism is beautiful on paper, too. Have you ever tried to carry a conversation with these people? Their massive inability to specialize leaves them babbling incoherently about the single of the week on the radio. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be boxed into their genres of choice, like it was a social caste, but for the love of God, choose something and get to know it.

For quite some time now horror has been my genre of choice in most things (he said, in an elegant transition). Maybe it appeals to my innate tendency to be morbid in nature, but scary things have always been my bag. Even when I was an apple cheeked, little, boy, I remember staying up late and watching The X-Files, alone in the dark; huddled under a quilt.

The X-Files isn't exactly dictionary definition horror, but I think it has held up the spirit for a long time. Horror has gotten the short end of the proverbial stick as far as genre identification goes. With so many facets in the horror jewel, it's hard to identify what's what. A person could argue that Hostel is horror, but someone could also argue that I Am Legend is horror. I like to think that examples like those two are movies with horror elements, but not crisp, straight line, horror.

Elemental horror, horror broken down to its most basic piece, is something that is hard to find these days. In America, at least. Without coming off like an annoying, tail wearing, "kawaii ^_^", Japanophile, let me say that Japan has been destroying America in terms of horror for ages. This is because the Japanese have a long cultural history of scaring the hell out of each other, and have learned that monsters are scary when you can't see them. Let's bring this back to a video game perspective quick.

Everyone and their nukekubi has been blowing a lot of air about how Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the most terrifying thing since Opera forgot to put her make up on. And while I'd sooner flay my own fingernails off with a flat head screwdriver than become another honking goose in the hyping flock, yes, it's scary enough to have made me rethink just how thirst I really am on a few late nights. The point is, literally nothing happens for the first few hours of Amnesia. I don't think you can take damage even if you try for at least the first hour. And even then it happens because a section of all doesn't like you getting to cozy to it.

The antithesis of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in this regard is most likely Dead Space 2; a game that opens with a person being impaled, having their face melt, tendrils poke out, and then scream in agony not 6 inches from your freshly woken eyes, all while the intro credits are still on the screen. What happened to pacing? This isn't to say that Dead Space is bad. I played the absolute shit out of Dead Space 1, but it just wasn't scary. Sure, I jumped the first time a possum playing Necromorph sliced my knees off, but by chapter 3 I was just shooting every corpse I came across from a distance out of insurance.

Living in anguish of the thought that grotesquely misshapen nightmare creatures are waiting to give you an impromptu tracheotomy is the vessel that drives proper horror. Being to afraid to explore a small room because you're so sure that when you turn around there will be an abomination standing in the door frame is the atmospheric hole-in-one.

This atmosphere is what makes or breaks the entire experience. Hearing the tiny creatures that you've read about in a bloody journal scurry around the insides of the walls is scary. Knowing they're there, and that at any moment they could break out, skitter sharply up your chest, and plant serrated fangs into your throat, is scary. Being lost in a dark basement, trying desperately to relight your lantern, hearing boards break in the distance and not knowing if it's the rotting weight of disrepair or the subjects of nightmares breaking from their prisons, that's terrifying. That is atmosphere.

Yes, I'm aware of the irony that Frictional, the company that made Amnesia, and its spidery predecessor's, is not Japanese (they're Swedish, for anyone keeping score). This just goes to show that country of origin isn't a big deal, though. Unless its America.

Like I said earlier, The United States has been dragging its heels on the pacing and atmosphere front; and I feel this is most evident in movies. The professional-ish writer that I am, I researched what Americans called the scariest movies of last year. Contenders were Paranormal Activity 3, a third installment prequel (in the industry known as a "cash cow") trying desperately to get in on that atmosphere that overly critical jerks bang on and on about, by throwing in humor and fake-out startle scares. And Insidious, a Poltergeist clone with startle scares. Shine on you crazy diamonds.