Dear Jen,

First of all, congratulations landing an internship at Kotaku! That was one of the trickiest internships I ever managed to obtain, so that tells me right away that you’re a savvy young female writer.

You know, being Kotaku interns isn’t the only thing the two of us have in common. We’re both writers, gamers, women and oh yeah — we both majorly screwed up. You can read all about my screwup right here, complete with all the embarrassing details.

Our mistakes aren’t exactly the same. For example, you actually did an interview and research while I just waxed philosophic about a meme. (Lesson of the day: that kind of thing is what kills a meme.) That should cheer you up!

I see what you were trying to do with your article. The sassy, flippant style you used is standard in mainstream news. Traditional media treats stories about our geeky interests lightly, categorizing it as “News of the Weird.” Even though we’re geeks, we’re also journalists, and the temptation to write like our more famous, well-paid brethren is tempting. You weren’t trying to alienate your audience at all. You were doing the best you knew how. You couldn’t have known just how seriously the Kotaku audience takes games until you tested it.

Even though you didn’t mean to, the mistake is out there. You’re embarrassed, I feel you. I’ve been there. So here’s what to do now:

• Block 4chan from your computer, especially /v/. In fact, avoid the Kotaku comments on your article as well. These people are strangers who don’t have the first idea about who you are, nor do they deserve to. Don’t feed the trolls.
• Avoid vanity Googling for a few days until people find something else to talk about. (Though I have to admit, I just Googled you and the coast is almost clear.)
• Enjoy the mountain of hits this is bringing to Kotaku. My article was one of the most-read intern articles of the summer. Kotaku needs hits to be successful and it doesn’t matter where they come from or why.
• Remember that it’s better to royally screw up one time than make a ton of little mistakes over and over. I’ve never forgotten about making that public mistake, and perhaps you won’t either. This memory will make you a better journalist. It will always remind you how far you’ve come.

For the rest of the Internet, this will go away quickly. My mistake would have been long forgotten if I didn’t keep dredging it up. And the net is limitless, full of space for your future accomplishments to follow in the wake of this temporary mess.

If you take one thing from my letter, here it is: this is not the end of your game journalism career. It’s only the beginning.

Your friend and fellow geek,

Lauren

Photo from Japanator.

I have to start this out on a sad note. As all my anime-enthusiast readers already know, “Speed Racer” voice actor Peter Fernandez passed away last week. As “Speed Racer” transcends the anime genre by also being one of the formative cartoons of the last century, the obituary ran on a couple of major news sites (MSNBC and CNN). And they both cited Anime News Network.

I started thinking about this after one of my Twitter friends, The Ginachu, tweeted about how funny it was for the mainstream media to source ANN of all places. I agreed that it was strange since ANN is so niche — and now I’m wondering why.

There would be no reason to post at all if the mainstream media had cited a videogame blog. Somehow, in the past decade, videogame blogs have achieved the legitimacy that anime blogs are still fighting for. (Though my favorite hater might disagree on this point.) The heart of the matter is, blogging about videogames has become a paying career while anime bloggers continue to keep their day jobs. This is an obvious generalization, as there are exception to both rules, but let’s be frank — how many anime blogs have made the Technorati top 100? (zero.) How many gaming blogs? (fifteen.)

The obvious theory is that videogames have had longer to embed themselves into American culture. They began getting popular since they found their way into our home en masse in the form of Ataris in the late ’70′s. Meanwhile, anime has only been a sizeable part of American entertainment since the birth of Cartoon Network’s Toonami in 1997. (Why am I not including “Speed Racer” or other early anime in my equation? Because, as my friend The Hoffgod aptly put it, they were no more ambassadors to Japanese anime than “Godzilla” was an ambassador to Japanese cinema.)

As a result, American culture is far more comfortable with videogames than it is with anime, which still, in 2010, is not a household word. And thus, you will see a lot of corporate backed videogame blogs (Kotaku by Gawker Media, Joystiq by aol, Multiplayer by MTV, etc.) But I can’t think of a single anime blog that’s affiliated with the mainstream media. The closest I can think of, of course, is Anime News Network, which has been granted legitimacy by its citations in the mainstream.

That isn’t to say I can’t think of a lot of popular, accurate, and interesting anime blogs. Some of my favorites are Japanator, Anime Almanac, Otaku Dan and Janaiblog. Still, anime bloggers (excepting maybe Japanator? Let me know) do it for love of the genre, not for the money.

In some ways, it’s good that anime journalists are not corporate backed. In hit-obsessed videogame journalism, it can be tempting to write stories about celebrities and sexy women just to attract traffic. Anime blogging is still about quality content, somewhat “purer.” But (maybe because sexy women are such a big part of anime?) the bloggers I mentioned above get more hits than I could ever imagine!

In another way, corporate backing would improve journalistic standards for anime bloggers. Once the blogs that produce the most accurate information start getting backed, it would inspire other blogs in the subject area to raise their standards. And perhaps, like with videogame blogs, potential new writers will begin to be hired based on their journalistic skills (and I’m all about journalists getting hired!)

I think it’s only a matter of time until the big media companies start to notice and acquire anime blogs, the way they’ve added videogame, tech, and celebrity blogs to their empires. Videogames may have had an early start, but there are a lot of hits to be had in anime as well.

Blog posts I found helpful while writing this post:

In this nation of the blind: Anime journalism in the age of blogging

REPOST: What’s happening to the Anime News Network?

Star-Bulletin fostered anime journalism career [cached]

Photo by Flickr user GotchiGirl.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time and energy on self improvement. I’ve started a new diet and exercise routine to try and lose some of the grad school pounds (turns out all nighters + Chef Boyardee isn’t that healthy). I’m honing my skills and updating my resume as I apply for jobs. And I’ve got plenty of other projects on the side to keep me more than occupied.

As you might expect, at times it has been hard to stay motivated. The goals of having a healthier body or being gainfully employed are certainly worthy aspirations to strive for, but sometimes they seem abstract and far away. Why can’t I aspire to them with the same strick, monk-like attitude that allowed me to beat Puzzle Quest 2 in a single week?

As a gamer, I’m well aware that human beings are game oriented. The structured environment and clear cut goals and incentives of a game lay out exactly what the player needs to accomplish in order to succeed. Life, however, isn’t always like that. While it’s a definite thing that I will receive loot for defeating the Orc Lord in Puzzle Quest, I could apply to ten jobs and not get any of them.

Enter Epic Win. This smartphone app allows you to gain experience points and level up your character for doing the tasks you need to do anyway. Gone is the uncertainty that, perhaps, doing 50 situps every day isn’t worth anything. Now I know for sure that it’s worth 300 experience points! Watch the introductory video below:

This shouldn’t be surprising, but according to James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin, video games connect the rewards circuits of the human brain. They’re addictive because they’re learning based, and as the lessons increase in difficulty, the rewards grow in proportion. Video games not only challenge us, but make us feel like our efforts are worth it. The trick behind Epic Win is that it adds incentives to real life to mimic game structure.

Remember the teen who lost 150 pounds on his self-titled video game diet? Once again, video game challenges and incentives were applied to real life in order to make it more engaging. I haven’t read his memoir yet, but I bet his point system for food and exercise is similar to the structure behind Epic Win.

I’m going to give that app a try once it’s released and let you know if it helps me stick to my goals more resolutely. Making life changes is all about manipulating your brain into thinking they’re already habits. If video games can do that for me, it’s definitely worth a shot.

(Thanks to Evan for the Epic Win tip.)

You’re playing a recently released video game. Directly in your avatar’s path, you see a shiny piece of paper, audio clip or DVD on the ground. Don’t bother picking it up.

Past years have spawned a new breed of games that try to toe the line between linear and non linear storytelling. The main story arc is linear, but the pieces you pick up, not so much. And for this reason, they don’t have much leverage on the outcome of the game.

Until now, I’ve always considered video games to be interactive narratives, narratives that rely on the reader as a participant in the story. But while playing Alan Wake, I’ve found that this role can be utterly artificial.

If you’re not familiar with the game, here’s the premise: you must pick up pages of a manuscript you have no memory of writing, and these pages then predict upcoming events in the game. Some of the pages are laid out directly in the avatar’s path. However, others can be easily overlooked and must be hunted for.

It’s true that if you pick up a lot of pages, and can use them to prepare for what happens next, you have a clear edge over somebody who doesn’t pick up as many or any at all. However, it’s not essential that you pick up the pages; the game will keep going even if you don’t retrieve a single one.

The video game itself follows tropes of traditional, linear narrative. By this, I mean that there is a beginning, middle and end (and in that order) and events mainly occur in chronological order. First causes occur, then effects. As for the manuscript, the game intends for it to be linear as it doesn’t allow for much backtracking. But it is possible to pick up pages out of order, whether by exploring the map in a nontraditional way or by playing the game repeatedly, picking up more pages each replay. It’s a non-linear element in an otherwise linear story.

This causes a problem when I try to refer to games like Alan Wake as interactive narratives – whether or not I pick up the pages, it doesn’t affect the plot of the game. The only gauge is mental — how much or how little I grasp of the plot at which time. My participation in the story falls to its lowest possible form.

The Bioshock duo of games follows the same pattern. As your avatar moves through the game, he must pick up tape recordings to listen to in order to piece together the story. Missing a well hidden tape does not change anything but the player’s mental grasp.

What could be the purpose of installing non-linear elements in a linear game? Replay value comes to mind. In both games, the reward for picking up the pieces of the story is all in your head. You don’t affect the ending of the game just by knowing a few more tidbits. It’s no Heavy Rain, where the consequences to not picking up the pieces are dire to the plot. In that game, finding enough pieces of evidence can be the difference between the good and bad ending, between the life or permanent death of a character. But in Alan Wake, what’s the worst that can happen? You start scratching your head when a guy with a chainsaw pops out of nowhere? Even if you lose, you can regenerate.

Purposeful or no, linear games with non linear story elements are picking up in popularity. Aside from the games I already mentioned, Resident Evil 5 and Dead Space 2 follow the same path. I have a few theories:

1. Artificial sense of purpose. A true interactive narrative takes a LOT of work to build. Well done, it would take the form of a sandbox game, where any narrative path the player chooses is possible. Obviously, this isn’t usually feasible so video games rely on players believing they have far more choices than they actually do. By having players hunt for pieces of the plot, they feel like they’re affecting the game even when the outcome does not change.

2. Breaks up monotony. All of the games described are single player. Picking up plot elements can enhance the mood of the game and introduce new voices without slowing down the gameplay with actual new characters. It adds a lot of interest to the game for very little effort.

3. Achievements unlocked. In recent years, nearly all video games have begun to offer achievements for basic things in games. One of the standard achievements is for collecting items, such as Kerotan Frogs in Metal Gear: Snake Eater or gemstones in Uncharted. Pieces of the plot are far more interesting to collect than frog dolls, making the achievement more interesting to go after.

All this said, I’m really enjoying my play-through of Alan Wake. Only thing is, I’m not going to waste my time hunting for the hardest to find manuscript pages.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about this, but blogging is as much about your audience as yourself, and I think this is something you all would like to hear about.

The day I pissed off 4chan appears to be the thing I am currently most infamous for on the Internet. I had forgotten about the whole experience until I read an article on Geekosystem that alluded to my mistake. So here’s the whole story!

When I started my internship at Kotaku, my boyfriend John was especially worried about me. He made me change all my passwords online and make sure my domain information was secure. He was concerned that as an intern on one of the big geek sites, I’d be a public figure and therefore a target. I took his advice, but I didn’t believe him. I was going to be an intern, not an editor. I’ve lived my online life conservatively enough that strangers haven’t cared about this smalltime journalism graduate student in D.C.

However, I made a pretty bad decision. I wrote about something that mattered a lot to 4chan, especially /v/: the nicknames of the new starter Pokémon. When I was interning at Kotaku, I rarely got to write my own stories — that’s just not what interns do, anywhere really — so I did my best to pitch original story ideas. My Nobuo Uematsu scoop was an example of this; none of the editors had met him so it made sense for me to write that story. And when I heard my friends on twitter talking about their invented nicknames for the new starting Pokémon for Black and White — news to the editors — I was allowed to write that story, too.

On Kotaku, it’s policy to ask permission before reposting stories, but not images. When reposting images, Kotaku instead takes care to link back to the image producer so they can share in the traffic. So when writing the Smugleaf story, I reposted photos from Deviant Art authors with credit… except for one photo. I couldn’t find the artist, so I posted it creditless with a note to please help me find the artist. That artist turned out to be a 4chan poster. And it turned out the meme itself originated on 4chan. As one Kotaku commenter warned me, “/v/ is pissed.”

The ire of 4chan was suddenly upon me, complete with ad hominem attacks on the article and here, my personal site. Overnight, the top Google search for my website was “Lauren Orsini nude.” (Some 4chan posters had the idea to find naked photos of me and get me “fired” from Kotaku. Luckily, those don’t exist!) I followed the advice I’d heard about getting 4chan to move on, mainly not “feeding the trolls” or responding to any of it. Arguably, writing an article on the subject isn’t doing that at all, but I think it’s been long enough.

The hubbub died down in a few days. I was expecting my editors to yell at me for it, but on the flip side, they were psyched! Since my article was 1) original and 2) controversial, it got 70K hits in just a few days, making them a lot of money. They told me not to worry about what people said. I knew this already; in today’s online age, journalists become part of each story they write. I like to think that it’s helping me develop an even thicker skin.

In summary, I’ve learned that any subject can be controversial. I thought that since I don’t write about politics, I don’t touch on anything abrasive, but now I know better. We geeks are extremely passionate about our hobbies. Bobby Kotick at Activision realized this too late — treating video game fans flippantly earned the otherwise mild mannered man the title of the most hated person in the video game industry.

Also, I need to be careful about the word “meme.” People don’t like to hear that something is or isn’t a meme. They just like things to be left alone where they can grow on their own. (That’s just one buzzword I’ve gotten in trouble for using in my time at Kotaku — my most recent article involves the term “reverse sexism” which I never considered to be a point of debate before!)

Anonymity online has become the best and worst thing about the internet. People can say things without being persecuted for their beliefs, but on the other hand, they can also reveal the cruelest intentions of their humanity since they never have to stand behind their comments. 4chan is an incredible site, spotlighting and forwarding Internet trends faster than anyone else. I wouldn’t have even had a story without 4chan! However, it can also be a spiteful community, suspicious of anyone who purports to post their content elsewhere. I view the boards with awe and not a little trepidation.

I’m not going to ignore a topic from now on just because I think it’s controversial, but I’m certainly going to pick my battles wisely. As for another article about fan art and memes, it’s just not worth it.

(Alternate title: “That’s interesting, all former Kotaku interns appear to be listed dead or missing.”)

I have a confession to make: I know nothing about video games.

I used to think I did. I routinely play or watch my best friend or boyfriend play the latest titles on the Wii, XBox 360 and Playstation 3 as soon as they are released. I’ve been playing RPGs since I was in elementary school. I laugh at Penny Arcade.

But nope. Compared to the knowledge of the Kotaku community, editors, writers, and especially commenters, I don’t know a thing.

In other words, the first thing I had to do to intern at Kotaku was to get over myself.

As one of the top video game blogs on the Internet (the top one in fact, if you judge by Technorati), Kotaku has the largest readership out of anything I’ve ever written for. So before now, making an error wasn’t a big deal. Of course, making an error is NEVER a good thing in journalism, but the stakes have never been this high for me. Last time it happened, while I was working for the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, I received a single phone call from a local citizen that I had spelled his name wrong.

This time, in my article, While Pokémon Come and Go, The Healing Center Stays the Same, at least ten people noticed that I mixed up the order on Emerald and Fire/Leaf. It was definitely embarrassing. I both admired how deeply people cared about the subject matter, and felt humbled to realize I knew much less than I thought.

So the biggest impact of my internship so far is that the importance of fact-checking has been magnified for me.

By now you’re probably asking, what about the glamorous side of video game journalism, Lauren?

Well, as much as I love my internship at Kotaku, I haven’t encountered that. Sometimes the editors get cool promotional items from companies, to play games before they’re released, and to attend events for free, but does anyone really expect that the intern gets to do that? I didn’t, so I haven’t been disappointed.

I want to let you know: interning at Kotaku is hard. I work every week day for at least a few hours, I do a lot of research and copy editing, I don’t always get to write stories. When I built the fighting game infographic, I had less than a day to turn it around. The bulk of my work involves seeking out guest writers and guest blog posts on games to republish (let me know if you’ve seen a good one recently!)

Sure, the editors are incredible to work with and being in the Kotaku chat room has me laughing out loud at least once a day, but let’s not get away from the point.

Brian Crecente didn’t put up this photo in his intern request article for nothing! It’s a fantastic internship and I would love to intern there for the rest of my life if I could (except I kind of need to find a job that pays money). But a lot of people I talk to seem to have a glamorized idea of what working in game journalism is.

Just like any other field, you have to work your way up. I think I work a lot, but Brian, Stephen, the Mikes, Luke, and Owen work around the clock. When it comes to putting out a breaking story, they drop everything to put it up in the earliest and most accurate way. It’s an intense job, and the deadlines never stop. It’s also often a thankless job, with more criticism than praise for articles.

If you’re looking for a career in video game journalism, it’s not just going to materialize overnight. The editors at Kotaku work harder (and at the very least, longer hours) than the employees anywhere else I’ve interned or worked. When they play advance copies of games, it’s on a deadline, not for fun. When they attend conventions like E3, they’re working constantly to cover them.

So how’s my internship going? It’s a great experience. However, it’s far from the paradise of nonstop gaming and little work that some people imagine it to be.

If you have specific questions about my internship, ask me in the comments.

(Note: Almost all my links open to spoilers. If you haven’t played, don’t click!)

I finished Heavy Rain last week (if it is possible to finish; I only got a few of the game’s 22 endings) and I can’t get it out of my mind. While I was working through it, I felt like I was living a double life. I had assimilated so well into the HR universe that I feel like I have now had many more life experiences than I actually do. The combination of the compelling story and innovative controls felt real to me.

But as a journalist, playing the game wasn’t enough and I just had to start reading reviews. And if you’ve been following Heavy Rain in the slightest, you know that the reviews have spanned from love to hate.

It felt like I read a lot of less than stellar reviews of Heavy Rain. “Sending out the message to publishers that this is what we consider an artistic triumph is terrible,” writes Jim Sterling at Destructoid. “…it’s not very fun,” said Russ Frushtick at MTV. Moving towards the middle, Kotaku tepidly countered, “Who cares if you’re having fun, as long as you’re interested?” And on the opposite side of the spectrum, Joystiq’s Randy Nelson calls it “as entertaining as any good Hollywood thriller, but far more engrossing,” and Gamespy’s Anthony Gallegos claimed it was “the most intense emotional experience I’ve had with a controller in my hand.”

Wait, these guys all played the same game, right?

This would be a good time for me to get up on my soap box about what’s wrong with video game journalism. But this time, I don’t think that’s the issue.

This time, it’s about differing comparison standards.

Until Heavy Rain, games were compared to games. You might, for example, say Halo and BioShock are similar as a means of comparison, but not, “Halo is not half as good as Saving Private Ryan!” They’re different genres with different means, goals, and audiences. What’s unfair for Heavy Rain (and the developers brought this upon themselves for calling it an “Interactive Drama”) is that it’s so innovative and so different from its contemporaries in the video game world that some game journalists are comparing it instead to movies. You’ll notice that the reviewers who compared Heavy Rain to a movie were notably less impressed than those who compared it to other games.

Yes, Heavy Rain is evocative, compelling, and mysteriously caused my thumbnail to end up half its regular length, but it’s not a movie and people looking for one when they play it are going to be disappointed.

This is the third installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, which I have published here in three parts. In this section, Ledonne and I discuss the upcoming video game, Heavy Rain, violence in video games and how the media reports violent crimes.

Q: Heavy Rain, have you heard of it? It’s being touted as the first of its kind- an artistic documentary, an interactive drama. I wanted to ask you what you think about it.

A: What I can say is that concept is not entirely new but that concept has never really been accepted commercially and so I think what many game designers I’ve talked to have said is, “Look, we’re going to have the tools at our disposal to make video game that you could think of more as art games that aren’t using the conventional commercial assumptions about video games being fun and entertaining and fast paced and easy to understand and comfortable to play,” but those games are really up against an entire demographic that has been carved out by the video game industry to not accept games like that. Here’s the bottom line- when video games came out, they were installed in saloons and bars and pubs and places like that and adults would go and put quarters in these games while they were having fun at a pub and I think video game publishers and developers said, “Well, if we’re going to expand this market, we need to get the video game into the American family’s home, we need a way to make a video game seem commercially palatable to a broader audience.” And so systems like the Atari and especially the Nintendo in 1985 capitalized on creating fun family entertainment and it shows everyone in the family sitting around a TV having fun, it’s usually the girls watching, the boys playing, video games. But what has happened in the last ten years is that video games have begun to become much more sophisticated, they’re going to have more mature audiences. But video game makers still present it as the whole family huddled around the video game, as they would play Operation or Scrabble or something like that. So until that mindset changes, you’re going to have some really incredible artistic video games that a very small segment of people who read the New York Times and go to art museums are actually going to play, and most video gamers are going to go on message boards and forums and say, “LOL this game sucks, the graphics suck, this game is so boring” because they’re expecting it to be like Halo 3 or Gears of War or Assassin’s Creed and it’s not going to be like that at all.

Q: Graphics are getting better and better. Do you think that today’s first person shooter is actually going to desensitize kids to violence because they look just like people now. (more…)

After reading Leigh Alexander’s article in Kotaku on Katawa Shoujo, a dating sim where the player tries to woo physically disabled and disfigured high school girls, I was too curious not to give the game a play-through*. The fact that another female gamer described this as a “polished, surprisingly compassionate and complex love letter to disabled girls,” inspired me to try to determine which politics were at work within the game.

Katawa Shoujo, Japanese for “disability girls,” is a game developed by Four-Leaf Studios, a group of anonymous members of 4chan. By now you’re probably expecting the worst from this game, as I was. However, “the internet hate-machine” is capable of producing empathy from time to time, as in this case. Far from the insulting parody you might expect, this game treats disabled individuals as human.

In the game, you play as Hisao, a high school student coming to terms with his status as a disabled person, having just discovered he suffers from Arrthymia, and sent to a school for students with special needs. While Hisao’s condition is invisible to others, the potential love interests in the game have disabilities that are anything but. You can choose to befriend disabled girls ranging from blind Lilly to burn-victim Hanako (and thankfully, Part One doesn’t allow any type of interaction beyond simply befriending the girls).

Game play is engaging. The dialogue and description is not only well written but belies a great deal of research into how each girl copes with her disability, details including how legless Emi uses different prosthetics depending on whether she is running track or walking to school, or how armless Rin eats lunch (with her feet). In other words, instead of putting the emphasis on the disabilities themselves, the main focus is on how each girl deals with her unique challenges.

The dialogue presents two views on disability. In some ways, disability is understated. “If I don’t mention [her disability], it’s like not discussing the elephant in the room,” Hisao says to the librarian. She replies, “It’s only the elephant in the room if you make it that way.” On the other hand, most plot points depend on assisting the girls in things they can’t do, like carrying things for armless Rin or informing blind Lilly of what the sunset looks like. This isn’t any different from other games in the dating sims, where you do favors for women to win their affection, but they still reveal the girls to be defined by their disabilities.

I talked to my friend John B. about the game, since his brother was born with Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that confined him to a wheelchair until the end of his life. He agreed that the game was surprisingly respectful and compassionate towards disabled people. However, his view was that this genre might not be the appropriate vehicle for spreading goodwill towards the disabled. So far, Four-Leaf has only released Part One of the game, and Part Two is likely to include nudity or worse (the studio has not said, but it’s logical to assume this since most games of this genre do). No matter how well done I’ve found the game to be, the ultimate goal still seems to be fetishizing disability.

As Alexander suggested, Katawa Shoujo takes the empathy we feel for disabled human beings and attempts to eroticize it. However, even this can be seen as a success. In this game, disabled people are seen as consenting and capable romantic partners, instead of the half-humans they are sometimes portrayed to be. I was impressed, but I won’t be playing part two anytime soon– disabled or not, pretend dating isn’t for me.

*Part One of the game, that is. The second part has yet to be released.

This is the second installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, to be published in three parts. In this section, Ledonne shares his views on interactive narratives, and weighs in on how his own interactive narrative, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, fits into the canon.

Q: One thing we’ve touched on is how, in interactive narratives, you think you have a lot of control, but you don’t really have as much power as you think you do- it’s what the author of the narrative is influencing you. It’s linear at your own pace so it’s still going to go to the place that the creator deems. What do you think about that?

A: I know a number of game designers who have confided to me or they’ve said out loud in panel discussions, “You know, we’re actually not giving the player the opportunity to do whatever he or she wants, we’re giving them that feeling, we’re giving them perhaps that illusion. But ultimately all you’re doing is creating lines of codes, and on some level we’re still experiencing life in a linear way, we can’t travel through time, we exist in a three dimensional space and have gravity. So there’s all these restrictions in our real lives and in our virtual video game lives that are actually sources of constraint, so we don’t have no limitations, but I actually think that’s probably a good thing. If you were to exist, and there have been video games that have tried this, if you were to start a game with no explanation as to what it is, what you’re supposed to do, you don’t know what the controls are, and you just sort of go around and interact with objects but there’s really no clear reason as to why, you kind of have this existential moment in the game where you’re not sure what the purpose of the game is or what your purpose in the game is. So I think as much as we talk about interactivity, I think people still really secretly desire some elements of vary straightforward linear experiences in the game world because without that the experience just really falls apart. Some games do this in a more open ended way, “sand box games” like maybe The Sims or whatever where you can freely explore and experiences things. But even games like that have all kinds of assumptions built into them about how you’re supposed to interact with the game, and those are sort of, much like life, as with any game whether it be a video game, a board game, a sport, or an activity you play, there are rules to govern what the limits of the game are and how you play the game.

Q: I’ve heard that this is a negative, when interactive narratives are used in the news, that games do not give you that many choices and allow the creator’s bias to seep through. So you don’t think this is a negative? (more…)