I've been building an MMORPG...

...for the Hip-Hop community!

Yeah, I know it sounds random, but the innovative ideas usually do ;) I think I'm on to something here, and pretty soon I'll have a version to share with you here on the blog (assuming we still have some readers...).

You can catch a little YouTube teaser over here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=V_uMZryr-MI

-jason

READ MY BLAGOBLAG

I put up a new post on my personal blog! It's all about gaming so you guys should read it:

http://s0dk.blogspot.com/

The Ultimate ARG

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/garden/12puzzle.html?_r=1&ref=style&oref=slogin

This is a NYTimes article about a 5th avenue apartment that gets converted into a sort of "game" without the client's knowledge, where clues, riddle, and puzzles are imbedded into the house almost like a computer mystery game or an online ARG. Check out the slideshow (my favorite is the door knockers that combine into a crank which opens a hidden apartment) for some examples, but when I see this I just can't help feel that this is reality imitating old games like "Myst".

I have no idea

http://www.yyyyyyy.info/

Moar Blogz

Hay guys,

I'm starting a blog about games, life, cooking, music, etc. You can reach it here: http://s0dk.blogspot.com/

Drop by! I just started it last night and I think it looks pretty ugly but I'll be working on it this summer.

Look what I found!

An Essay on Shadow of the Colossus

I'm going to read it, play the game, and post some form of response. Stay tuned.

Bored? PLAY THIS GAME AND WRITE A PAPER ON IT!!!

So EVENTUALLY I'd like to post some thoughtful discourse and analysis on games/codeart/digital media on this blog, but tonight I'm tired, lazy, and bored so I thought I'd post a few links to games that I have and have not played in hopes that at least someone else's boredom will be staved off for a few hours or minutes.

Darkside Adventures
The Dude's website
A fun game designed in the style of old Genesis/NES games. It gets pretty hard, and I'm definitely stuck on the last level. Still, it's got a fun retro feel to it.

A review of Ether Vapor
Torrent
A fun Japanese Doujin Shmup. Japanese Doujin computer game industry is truly fascinating, and it's almost like an official indie gaming market which is really cool. Anyways, I was going to have links to the game demo proper, but apparently the whole company website is down/missing. Maybe they just moved, or are temporarily down, or gone for good, but it's definitely a fun game, judging by how many times I played it during screening on mute. It gets pretty hard, and there's a cool system where the number of shields and continues your allowed to have increases as you play more times, so you're allowed to mess up more often the more times you die.

That's about all I feel like posting up for now. Later on in the summer, I'll write up a bit about http://0100101110101101.org/ or The Marriage but right now Robot Chicken should be coming on so I'm signing off.

Gnite Folks!
-Jason "The Basin" Lee

Random News

Revive, ye sleeping blog! Revive!

From one of the links on the page (because I'm too lazy to summarize myself):

"The project will culminate in a series of activities in virtual worlds tailored to bring together Muslims and non-Muslims. It will also produce a range of audio, video, and transcript products, along with a policy recommendation paper which will include a list of specific recommendations for the U.S. government on how to use virtual worlds to promote international understanding. The paper will be distributed through government briefings."

Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds

Also, there's this article from GamaSutra, which even gives a name-check to You Have to Burn the Rope:

How can a game be subversive?

Final Post?

Game Game Game Game Game Game Game Game Game ...

Final Paper Proposal

I plan on writing on Rez as well as its relation to games such as Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. I will write on the fascination with association of sound and image as well as the interactivity with the soundtrack. Guitar Hero, moreso than the other two games mentioned, can serve as a promotional vehicle for newer artists, allowing them to be measured, played over and over again next to classic songs. My paper will detail the effectiveness of rehearsed playback yielding familiarity, yielding affinity with regards to the music featured in the game. While Rez allows the user to create music on a more abstract and visually stunning way, both Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution pound their songs into your head by making them a fun challenge to overcome.

WTF?

http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2002/10/26/sex_in_games_rezvibrator.html

A VERY INTERESTING review of Pathologic (dammit, I wanna play it now)

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=67124

Representing Gamespace

Saw this and thought of McKenzie Wark's idea of the "GameSpace" here used to sell XBox 360's, which would no doubt support Wark's belief in dialog between games, game cultures, game industries, and the larger world.

Link

Open Source Games

In light of my recent presentation I felt it was appropriate to mention another phenomenon besides modding that's going on right now:

http://www.wesnoth.org/

"Battle for Wesnoth" is an open source developed turn based strategy game that is released for free and not commercially developed. Although the game itself is not very rhetorically interesting in the context of most of the things we talk about in class, its means of distribution and development are. Furthermore, it comes with its own editing tools along with source code, making its "open sourceness" readily available on multiple levels of computer knowledge. I'm going to look a little more into this but in the meantime enjoy that game along with a wikipedia list of other open source games out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games

Pokemon Modded for 2008 Election

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ANIMATED GIF,
but apparently Blogger does not support that, so check it here.

Found on the interwebs. I'm not completely sure if it constitutes a mod (I know it would fail the Galloway definition), but interesting none the less.

sorry for the late post!

In his chapter on Countergaming, Galloway defines the differences between gaming and countergaming. He identifies 5, to which he adds another, largely unrealized difference: gamic action versus radical action. Through the fulfillment of this, he believes, countergaming will realize its true potential as political. Galloway argues that thus far examples of radical action have been difficult to find. Instead, most avant-garde artists have focused on game mods that focus on other mediums such as painting, video, and animation. Instead, he calls for new grammars of actions and alternative algorithms as opposed to new grammars of visuality. He identifies Jodi’s work as apolitical (juxtaposed with Jean-Luc Godard’s work as “hyperpolitical”) because it seeks only to abstract, not to modify gameplay. He calls for an era in which artists subvert traditional expectations of gameplay itself, as New Wave cinema once did for film—it eventually realized countercinema as cinema. Galloway is also concerned with the productive relationship thus far between fans/artists and corporations, citing appropriation and redistribution of fan game mods by fans. He argues that this is noteworthy because most, if not all other mediums have had a contested battleground between fan and corporation (the Star Wars corporation suing fan fiction writers, etc.). Although I tend to agree with Galloway, that avant garde games have not yet realized their potential for subverting traditional grammars of action, I wonder about his dismissal of subverting visual grammars as categorically apolitical.

One point he makes that I found interesting is his insisting on a different definition for reality for game use. More specifically, he finds that the distinction between reality and fiction itself is not useful so he dismisses it as an unproductive category for gaming/countergaming. Galloway writes that there are numerous examples of games that reject fictional narrative in favor of “real-life scenarios” such as a restaging of 9/11 (122). He argues that the “conceit of real-life simulation” has been a staple of game mods for several decades. Reality is also a staple of traditional games that are based on increasingly more representative “real-world” maps. He defines this as apolitical because, as opposed to cinema, reality is not a political import. He thus dismisses reality versus fiction as a useless classification for gaming. Considering the very political hype around increasingly high verisimilitude violent video games, is this dismissal productive? I am skeptical that a game reconstructing the events of 9/11 is necessarily rejecting the traditional narrative tradition of video games in favor of a “real life scenario.” Where does his term “simulation” fit into the debate between reality/fiction?

Beyond Sexual Representation: Sexual Transgression and 'Orgasm Girl'

Where sexualized female avatars, voyeuristic fan culture, and fetishisized video game characters draw a line of propriety, 'Orgasm Girl' makes direct game play out of the seduction, and arguably rape, of a female character. Your objective, as listed in the game's Tutorial is to "giv[e] young girls intense orgasms while they're asleep." The tutorial then re-emphasizes the need for the targeted girl to remain sleep: "give the sexy girl an orgasm while she's asleep WITHOUT waking her up. If she wakes up, it's game over."

From this first introductory direction, a societal transgression seems to be taking place. They culture of "giving girls orgasms while their asleep," is immediately associated with the act of rape, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. It is firstly non-consentual, as one individual (constituted by the player) acts upon another, without the latter's consent or agreement that would be notably suggested by consciousness. Secondly, 'Orgasm Girl' involves an invasion of privacy, legal and societal, that is visually suggested by the bed, and undergarments that the target girl will wear in the game. She appears to be somewhere private, at ease, while the player's character appears to be an intruder, someone trespassing upon private property, into a visual and sexual realm likewise regarded as private.

It is worth considering here, how these notions of transgression and trespass, that present the game as social uncouth, may be a product of what Michel Foucault has called "the Repressive Paradigm" in the his History of Sexuality. In this paradigm, sexual practice and discourse are made taboo by social factors connected to changes in the economic-political landscape of 18th century Europe. Today, Foucault argues, there is a the rhetoric of release, "liberation" from sex as a tabooed act, and thus 'Orgasm Girl' might be read as a direct challenge to the way privacy, rape, sexual abuse and advancement, are treated and controlled by paradigms born of repression. In short, 'Orgasm Girl' may be construed as a challenge of conventional sexual practice and glorification of the liberation of sexuality that Foucault details in his History.

But even if this is the case, 'Orgasm Girl' clearly disrupts 'appropriate' sexual practice, with a problematic alternative, and it is this act of sexual gaming that we must critically engage.

Aesthetic Overview

From the onset, 'Orgasm Girl' stresses the "adult" nature or its gameplay. "18+" warns the first title seen in the Flash game's intro, "contains scenes of strong sexual themes and nudity." The game then flashes to the game developer's animated banner: "Dark-Street.com Development," with a single star-like reflection edging along the first "D." "Dark-Street.com" is an ironic, if not ominous title for a company that would develop a game relating to heavy sexual themes, the suggestion of rape, and the depiction of non-standard sexual narratives. "Dark Street" would seem to be an appropriate location for such transgressive sexual acts.

Next, 'Orgasm Girl' presents the legs of a woman, covered with nylon tights, framed by a pink border with the camera panning suggestively up, following the legs of the woman to a short skirt, a bare midriff, a bosom barely covered by a thin scrap of white shirt, and a face heavily covered in make-up. Above this woman, a halo blinks strangely. The woman lets her hands rest on her wasp-thin waist, and stares at the user.

In the Tutorial, the user is instructed that this is his/her character, "Orgasm Girl the hottest lesbian angel around and she has only one objective: giving young girls intense orgasms while they are asleep." The halo then, oddly placed on the woman on the title screen connects this description with who the player controls. The player is this woman, and this woman is "Orgams Girl." The Halo also suggests an odd semi-divine quality, either referring to the "lesbian angel's" ability to gain access to the private space of the target girl, or engaging in the old cliche "you look like an angel," angel being a metaphor for beauty.

Clicking "start" one goes to a new "info" intertitle, providing a logistical data to the target girl. She is given just a first name, "Ashley," an age "18," eye and hair color, "green" and "blonde" respectively, and a "shaven" prompt with the word "yes" next to it. Each of these characteristics construct a highly sexualized object of desire. The age, "18," reminds first that she is legally of the age of consent, and second that she is of age to appear in pornographic material. Both of these qualities are problematicized by the fact that she is not awake. She may well be of the age of consent, but her conscious consent is still required. Appearing in pornographic material likewise requires a certain conscious agreement of the depicted subject. Eye color seems completely ironic, as you never see the eyes of a sleeping individual who must stay asleep. The "Shaven" category is left unexplained with the tacit assumption that it doesn't need to be; the type of character playing the game understands completely what this means. And in that regard, the "yes" answer, seems to be the desirable response.

Hands On Gameplay

Click Start again, the game begins. The player is suddenly afforded a near-totalizing view of a girl at sleep. The view is raised slightly as if to suggest that the player is poised over the target girl, not lying down beside her. The totalizing view, perhaps meant to suggest the floating perspective of an angel also allows for substantial access to the target girl. So in this way, the perspective becomes indicative of the power dynamic. The player is entirely in control of the target.

The player interacts with the body of the target girl. He/she is afforded a number of 'tools' to exchange out the default "idle" mouse point. There is "rub" marked visually with a small hand, "grab" signified by a snatching hand, "items" marked with an intersecting tool and wrench, and "shop" marked with a shopping cart.

Navigating the body, the user finds that the "rub" tool allows for the massaging/stimulating various regions of the girl while "grab" allows for the pulling down and removal of the girls cloths. Each stimulus/wardrobe adjustment causes a change in the interfaces "orgasm" meter and "state" bar graph. The orgasm meter is the game's objective: pushing the needle from rest into the orange and then red zones will not only score points for the player, but elicit "sexual" noises from the girl, and obviously, increase her state of consciousness. Perhaps the bouncing needle of the orgasm meter suggests an erect phallus, rotating with arousal into an upright position.

The game's only winning condition is orgasm. Its only losing condition is "Ashley's" waking up. Being too cavalier, perhaps too 'masculine' and direct, like removing her skirt and immediately massaging the vagina, will inevitably cause Ashley to wake up before she orgasms, and lose the game for the player. No, a rapid approach will not work. Instead, the player is forced to develop a strategy of patience and gradual escalation. Massage this, remove that, wait for the sleep state to return to normal, then make an attack.

Interestingly, satisfying Ashley is difficult, even frustrating. Simply stripping her, to reveal an anime-like sexualized cartoon, may satisfy the player's voyeuristic urges, but will not beat the game.

Ultimately unable to beat the game on my own, I sought help. A short how-to video on GameTrailers.com had all the answers, the procedural rhetorics I had either not realized or employed. But on top of the video, at moments of patience or repeated action, commentary condemned the would-be player of the game. "Use this time to reflect on how much of a pervert you are" stated on title, superimposed over the waiting for Ashley's full sleep state to return. Or "It may take a while (to massage Ashley's breasts into arousal) oh well, it's not like you've got a real womans boobs anyway." Each of these messages may explicit what players (particularly male, heterosexual players) are feeling at this time.

In any case, the way to win "Orgasm Girl" is to 1. remove the skirt 2. wait til sleep state normal 3. massage right nipple in circular pattern til orgasm meter leaps into orange. 4. massage pubic area of the vagina until into red orgasm meter zone. 5. purchase sleeping pills 6. apply sleeping pills. 7. massage pubic area until orgasm. This rhetoric will work every time, though the games "win screen" suggests that there 3 secrets to be unlocked, and that certain bonus will be awarded to the player based on getting the skirt off, the underwear off, the bra off, etc. After winning, the player is given 1500 points and put back into the game.

The most suggestive part of the winning procedure is the use of "sleeping pills," again recalling the transgressive, rape dynamic of the game's pretense, and also suggesting a creepy dynamic wherein an already sleeping girl is drugged. After the winning the game, and armed with 1500 points, the player is given the opportunity to buy even more sleeping pills and therefore dose Ashley even more. This will allow the player to achieve "the bonuses" buy stripping Ashley completely without her waking up. This also cements that game as a direct engagement with a form of rape/sexual transgress.

Play Orgasm Girl

Eternal Darkness

Since spring break, I have played a game (not finished yet...) which my suitemate has been badgering me to play since last year: Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem. The basic premise of the game is simple enough: after the mysterious death of her grandfather, a young (naturally attractive and blond...) female protagonist returns to her family home in Rhode Island to unpack the circumstances surrounding his death. Lovecraftian in mood and heavily influenced by Gothic literature (gameplay begins with an Edgar Allen Poe quote), ED at first seems like nothing more than a standard puzzle-solving adventure game where you happen to encounter supernatural opponents to destroy. You take turns alternately playing (3rd person perspective) many of the historical figures who play a role in the century-sprawling narrative of the story surrounding the return of evil unknowable forces to our world.

However, the interesting thing about the game for me is not so much the gameplay or the narrative, though the narrative is particularly engaging and almost unrelentingly dark. Rather, it is the concept in the game design of 'sanity' as an attribute. Gamers will be familiar with health, mana, maybe even ammunition or stamina bars which deplete with use in many games, but this is the first game I have ever known to contain a sanity meter representing with a green-colored bar just how badly the character's interactions with the supernatural have affected his or her ability to perceive the world. You start with a full bar of sanity and every time you encounter a monster, your sanity depletes, but you may recover it by performing a special finishing move on a monster after you have dispatched it.

So what does the bar do and why is it interesting? When your sanity gets too low, the first thing you notice happening is a shift in the orientation of the camera, similar to cinematic reframing, that moves your view on the gamic world ever more skewed and asymmetrical. The actual game camera gets less and less coherent, and the angles shift askew and too close to your character. The camera already resists any sort of omniscience, dependent as it is on moving your character to specific locations before shifting the view. This makes for a deliberately antagonistic gameplay experience mitigated only by your ability to 'heal' your sanity meter later in the game, a facet which, though narratively cohesive, seems almost like cheating. It wouldn't even be fun to do but for the gravity and sheer 'what the fuck value' of the hallucinations your character starts to experience when your sanity almost depletes.

WARNING SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!

So here is the interesting part: when your sanity gets really low, your character starts having hallucinations represented in-game by programming designed specifically to break the fourth wall and mess with the player's head. For example, your character will walk into a room with low sanity, and at this point you will probably already feel a little uneasy with the skewed camera and creepy music and graphics, and then all of a sudden, all of your limbs will start falling off one by one, slowly enough for you to start freaking out before the screen flashes white and you reappear back in the room you just left, whole and in exactly the same position you were in before.

As you all are probably aware of, I am really interested in subjectivity, and particularly interested in how video games reinforce a certain kind of subjectivity in gamers. Eternal Darkness seems like it tries to break this. It deliberately antagonizes the character in a way that is non-competitive. That is, there is nothing you can do plot or goal-wise to prevent these hallucinations or beat them, they simply happen and you endure them. After you gain the ability to heal your sanity, a very curious conflict arises in the gamer: do you keep your sanity low and risk freaking out, or do you secretly enjoy the hallucinations?

I find this to be a phenomenally interesting question, and it raises many other thoughts on subjectivity: does a game have to reinforce an ideology of teleology to be successful? How does this kind of antagonism function in games as opposed to old media like film and the novel? If in fact hallucinations affect your gameplay, how does that construe your subjectivity and aim in the game differently than in other games which would superficially appear to be similar puzzle-solving types? How would any of the theorists we have studied so far respond to this?

One last hallucination (this one really freaked me out): I navigated to the menu screen to save my game. I pressed the save game button only to see a pop-up declaring 'deleting all save games' followed by a progress bar which moved for a brief few seconds that felt like an eternity. Afterwards, the game flashed me the message 'all saved games deleted' before flashing back to my character in the room I had been in previously, leaving me standing in a dark room somewhat hyperventilating over the perceived loss of nearly 10 hours of time.

The developers Silicon Knights are coming out with a new game soon called Too Human based on Norse mythology. I'll be the first in line at GameSpot.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Preliminary Game Analysis

The game I chose to play was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the Xbox 360. At the most basic level possible, the premise of the game is that there are terrorists abroad that must be stopped before they do something terrible. While the story is purely fiction, it serves as a powerful commentary of the “modern” world. This analysis will focus on the political subtext of the game as a whole and on a specific mission that I found particularly interesting.

The very title of the game tells the player that this game is going to take place in the present. This is important in understanding what it illustrates about today’s world. One of the most blatant political positions that the game takes lies in the role that the player takes on. In this game, the “good guys” are the British and the United States and the “bad guys” are fictional Eastern-European/Russian terrorists. This clearly reminds one of the politics of the Cold War. I also find it interesting that the designers chose to make up an enemy, but chose to use real-world “heroes.” Furthermore, like many games, it is always assumed that the position of the main character is the correct one and the game never stops to question the motivations of the terrorists. We never get to explore both sides of the conflict. This political subtext is clearly indicative of the position that it is the role of the United States and its allies to police the world. The game makes it look like it is our responsibility to do this because nobody else will.

There is a mission in the game where the player is in the gunner position on a helicopter and his job is to protect friendly forces on the ground. The mission is played through the lens of an infrared camera that positively correlates the heat of an object with how white it is. The only way to tell who is on your side is by the presence of a flashing strobe on the friendly characters. I found this mission to be particularly telling of the ideological framework under which this game operates. For example, this mission is incredibly easy on all the difficulties. Nobody ever shoots at you and the only way to fail is essentially to shoot the wrong things. You are given the option of choosing between three completely different weapons. The first is an extremely powerful machine gun that makes people explode when you hit them. The second is a grenade launcher that fires pretty quickly and can take out hordes of people in one reload. The third is a huge missile that takes out large areas and reloads slowly. I go into details on the weapons because it becomes clear to me that the mission is only there for “fun.” In this mission, you essentially get to take out dozens of lives from an omnipotent, overhead position in any way you please. The fun is supposedly derived from the simultaneous lack of danger and desire to kill as many people as possible in a short amount of time. This becomes even more interesting when one discusses the few ways to fail the mission. For example, you’re free to destroy whatever buildings you like except for a large church. The church doesn’t have any implications to the game besides the fact that you’ll fail if you hit it. Although blowing up civilian buildings and homes is perfectly acceptable, the game suddenly has a problem with the destruction of a Christian house of worship. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if an enemy kills a friendly soldier because you can only fail if you kill one. You don’t fail if you kill civilian. The existence of these rules perpetuates the idea that casualties are acceptable as long as they aren’t allies. This mission is a perfect example of the real-world political subtext under which this game operates.