Unfortunately for everyone, this will be my last column here at Lusipurr.com. Recently, I have experienced a sharp uptick in demands on my time, and fear that I must significantly reduce my Internet presence. As such, one will not find me at any of my usual haunts. Even my video gaming time will be limited by my other pursuits, including my martial arts training and my love of fiction writing.

For those who absolutely cannot live without a weekly dose of verbose pomposity, well, I am afraid I can provide no succor. Go read Brian Crecente and pretend that he is me, or better yet, read Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Or check various online and print publications dedicated to short speculative fiction, such as Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, or Strange Horizons. Hopefully, I will be seen there in all my prolix glory.

And if not, then watch the stars for me.

Grab a lightsaber, join with friends, save the galaxy!

But the bloom is off the rose, MMOGs, because I find myself more and more running to the comforting arms of my mistress, single-player games. How can we reinvigorate our failing relationship? Couples counseling? Key parties?

What is this? A The Old Republic trailer? Oh. Oh my. I am in love.

BioWare can generally be trusted to make entertaining software. The new E3 trailer is really just an interesting mash-up of much-touted game features, like space battles, crew skills, and lightsaber combat. Jaded MMO forum commenters, ever paragons of rationality and objectivity, are quick to call it WoW in Space, preferring instead the riveting action of EVE Online, or Microsoft Excel in Space.

But I dare even the most hard-hearted nay-saying naysayer to watch the trailer and not feel a little of that old Star Wars excitement. There is something downright quixotic and intoxicating in the Old Republic mythology, a vision of a fantasy world sans the usual trappings of elves and dwarves. A bit of magic that is not mired in quaint woodsy hollows and cold stone castles.

This is the first MMO UI that I do not wish to modify.

Projected for a late 2011 release, The Old Republic is the answer, I hope, to our MMO prayers. Rift promised us more of the same, if better-executed and with a fresh coat of paint. Guild Wars II hopes to innovate and bring about a dynamic world. But The Old Republic promises, and I think the trailer shows, fully intends on delivering, a paradigm shift in themepark MMOs, from barely-interactable point and click worlds, to fully-voiced, story rich, fun games with immersive lore and the sorts of features modern MMO players expect.

Cautiously optimistic? Nay; I am unabashedly excited for the release of this game, and Bioware’s E3 showing has only whetted my hunger for a new Star Wars experience untainted by the hack writing of George Lucas.

After an initial furious burst of physical box purchases and one-month subscriptions, however, these games died out. With die-hard subscribers trying to inject life into their flagging hopes, these games slowly dried up and died from a lack of interest, a lack of content, and a lack of money coming in, as the Blizzard juggernaut continued thundering down the Intertubes into our homes.

Now, like the death of Alexander the Great, the slowly-dying World of Warcraft is leaving behind a vacuum that cries out to be filled. But are there any worthy competitors for a monthly-subscription-based MMO in the Everquest model?

Varian Wrynn wants our money to kill orcs.

Sadly, the answer is no. Rift attempted to gather too much of that “old school” feel, forgetting that only a vocal minority of players want the old-school feel. I am sure that, eventually, when Rift adds in the convenience features that modern MMO players want (moddable UIs, cross-server group matching services, easier gear grinds, accessible raiding content) there will be the inevitable complaints of, “this game is for nothing but noob carebears now! I am quitting! Rawr!” And at that point, Rift may become the next big AAA online game if later releases like Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars do not fill that niche first.

So where does that leave the older games of yesteryear: the Age of Conans and the World of Warcrafts?

The answer is found in another model of online game: the “freemium” model, perfected by Turbine in Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons. Already we see hints of what is to come with Funcom’s flagship MMO and, I project, Blizzard will not be far behind in copying this model.

A Conan reboot? For the ladies?

Why?

The carrot that keeps people on the MMO treadmill is reward, which, as a concept, takes different forms. But they must be immediately visible; Blizzard’s “achievement” system is the right idea, but there are too few visible rewards from the system. Mounts, gear, and titles are the most common, but other types of reward are also possible, such as a player/guild housing, vanity items, and world event rewards. Mark my words: in a year, World of Warcraft will be free-to-play with a cash shop that offers experience/reputation boosting potions, leveling gear, and crafting materials, with new raids and tiers of dungeons being purchasable as one-time-fees. Funcom is going that way; EA-Mythic will go that way soon, and, if I am being totally honest, eventually so will Rift, because the changing habits of gamers simply do not support the hardcore, grind-intensive gameplay that MMOs used to require. Gamers will not continue to keep paying $15 a month (or the equivalent thereof) for the “same-old-same-old” gameplay. That is the beauty of the freemium model: it allows players to pay for the privilege of lessening the grindy, not-fun aspects of the game (which they all will, and gladly) without having to commit to a subscription.

There will be those that feel this is in error–that without the added emotional and financial incentive that comes from having (literally) invested in a game’s future, players will not feel compelled to improve the local community. But this type of thinking is also outdated. It comes from the MUD/MUSH days when communities were small and built of hobbyists. It had little to do with the idea that, “Oh, I have paid so much to play this game, I had better make it an interesting world,” and more to do with the mindset of the player. Today’s gamers might lack that sense of community because online gaming is not a novelty to them but, instead, something that is to be expected and taken for granted. Bemoan this all we wish, it will not change it.

A curious narrative has emerged with the first half of the year’s two biggest WRPG releases: BioWare’s Dragon Age II and Polish developer CD-Projekt’s The Witcher 2. That is, one may not survive while the other lives.

Geralt gets up close and personal with a BioWare developer.

This is rather disheartening; the games have literally no similarities except that they are big-name Western RPGs released in the first half of 2011. But from this one tenuous connection, gamers are lead to believe that unless The Witcher 2 is the reciprocal of Dragon Age II in every way that they personally find deficient, then The Witcher 2 shares in BioWare’s infamy.

Instead of judging each game on its own merits, gamers have divided themselves into two camps, girded themselves for e-battle, and descended into review comments sections to either defend the honor of the besmirched maiden of BioWare or champion the “AAA-RPG with an indie heart” found in CD-Projekt’s game.

I will not, however, be reviewing the latter, although my views on the former are well-known, and, I think, unimpeachable in their objectivity and correctness. I suspect that my fellow Lusipurr.com writer Julian “SiliconNoob” Taylor Wallaby Fosters Didgeridoo Boomerang New South Wales Mate will wish to review The Witcher 2, and that honor I shall leave to him. Instead, I wish merely to express my exasperation with gamers for allowing themselves to be duped into this binary holy war for no apparent purpose.

In most societies, merely glimpsing BioWare artwork is enough to send fanboys into frothing rage.

As stated earlier, the games are almost entirely dissimilar. The complaints that many people have of Dragon Age II are… repeated… within The Witcher 2. There is no tactical view. Combat is fluid and action-oriented. The UI and control scheme of The Witcher is totally abandoned in favor of a new, faster system. Strange choices in dungeon design were made that reverse the feeling and soul of the first game (never mind that some of them actually improve the game).

But people are heralding the game as if it is somehow the answer to BioWare’s alleged failure, resorting into fanboyish factionalism that recalls the heady, early days of the PlayStation 3’s release. And I fear that, in the ensuing fracas that is sure to result, any sense of reviewing objectivity will be lost, and gamers will suffer. We will not be able to have an honest conversation about Nilfgaard and Temeria without also bringing up Qunari and Kirkwall, when in tone, technique, style, and aim the games could not be more divergent. Which is sad, because then two eminently worthy and respectable entries in the WRPG canon will be set at loggerheads, and those that enjoy one will be put off enjoying the other for fear of upsetting their respective factions.

Arrayed against me, however, are sinister and evil forces that would deny mankind the right to experience the finest game the modern industry has created. These… Templars… wish to deny humanity the chance to explore a vast and varied world, interact with history in a highly fresh and authentic way, and kill new and exciting conspirators.

As initially conceived, the Assassin’s Creed games would form a trilogy. This was a rather bold move for an untested series, to plan a single arc that would unfold over three games. Even Ubisoft could not have predicted the success of Assassin’s Creed II on the heels of the moderate impact of the original Assassin’s Creed. Now, the Ubisoft Assassin empire stretches across multiple consoles, personal computers, and even social media and comic books.

Ezio gets to hang out in all the boss cities of antiquity, like Constantinople... which was Instanbul, but now it is Constantinople!

The question then becomes how one is to tell a complete narrative of a complex character like Ezio within the space of a single game. Certainly, Assassin’s Creed II did not end Ezio’s tale. Even without the resulting Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the end of Assassin’s Creed II can only be called a cliffhanger. Brotherhood ends on a similar questioning note, without bringing closure to the Ezio story arc.

In that regard, Revelations is the clearest answer to the un-asked question of “where to from here?”

SPOILERS FOLLOW

At the end of Brotherhood, we leave Ezio having recovered the Apple of Eden from the Borgias and revenged upon Cesaré Borgia. We leave our present-day heroes in the alien vault beneath il colosseo with Lucy bleeding out from being stabbed by a mind-controlled Desmond, and Desmond being thrown back in to the Animus after experiencing a total mental breakdown. Is this a satisfying “conclusion?” Of course not; too many questions about the now-reconstituted Assassin Order remain, as well as the… ahem… delicate moment where Ezio will pass along those awesome Assassin genes to Desmond’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent.

Minions make everything better.

An objection was raised that the rapid development pace of the Ezio arc is diluting the series, as both Brotherhood and the resulting Revelations are more like stand-alone expansions than true sequels. After all, they have minimal graphical updates, only a few gameplay changes, and they re-use the same characters.

Except that the gameplay does evolve between iterations of Ezio’s story. Assassin’s Creed II, for example, streamlined combat, added variety in mission types, and included platforming side quests that unlocked powerful armor. Brotherhood took this formula and further refined and improved it, adding Assassin recruits, new weapon types and combat moves, the Borgia tower mechanic to regain control of the districts of Rome, and new types of locomotion, including a parachute. Revelations looks to continue this trend, with the introduction of new recruit mission types, a more streamlined territory control system, and zip lines. In addition, entirely new areas like the underground city of Cappadocia will provide a greater variety in mission and environment types. The online multiplayer component is also getting needed improvements to game types, maps, and playable classes.

I am getting too old for this merda...

The charge still stands, however, that this is an insufficient overall change to justify a sequel within one year of the release of Brotherhood. There are those who would rather wait three or four (or more) years in hopes of getting an Assassin’s Creed III with a new character, new setting, new gameplay systems, and new game engine. They would rather Brotherhood have been similarly delayed to include all of the content that will be in Revelations, which might be a fair charge… except that it ignores the tendency of a narrative to get away from the writers. Oftentimes external limitations — space requirements, executive developmental decisions, et cetera — necessitate going to market with a finished-but-shorter-than-necessary product. Gamers should not be deprived of a complete story, or worse, forced to finish the story in extra-game materials such as tie-in novels and comics, simply because gamers feel that a once-a-year game schedule waters down the brand, as if the only way to build excitement and momentum about a game was to deprive gamers of it for a few years like some major development houses are prone to doing. This sort of development has its merits, but so does capitalizing on existing good favor and momentum by keeping fans in constant content until a single story arc is told.

Ubisoft, keep it up!

Which is the likeliest explanation for this move. Ubisoft needed one more full-length game to tell all that Ezio had to tell, and Revelations can do that without resorting to a move like the PSP’s Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, which connected the original game with its sequel. And, I charge, it is the right move to make. Strike while the iron is hot, Canadians, and just pump that historico-fantastic-science-fiction-conspiracy-theory-laden action straight down my digital gullet. Naysayers can say nay whilst Ezio and I are zipping around Byzantium slaying evil and romancing Ottoman babes.

Well, that was awful. My sincerest apologies.
Anyway, to the point of this post.

Evil Empire Microsoft bought Skype, better known as the world’s most useless VOIP program that for some reason Lusipurr insists on using to record our legendary podcasts. What this means is that now any time one of us says “PS3” on the podcast, Bill Gates is going to pop in and say, “Hey, remember when the PSN was up? Neither do I!”

But more troubling is the dark prophecy uttered by James I of Cameron, that a virtual worldwide computer network SkyNet will soon unleash unholy hell upon us all, and somehow summon up a robot army to destroy all organic life for some reason… who knows? Robots are fucking scary, people!

Anyway, Cameron is kind of a weirdo with a fetish for vaguely racist blue-skinned cat-people, so of course he forgot that technology is managed by incompetent boobs, like Kevin Butler, who still cannot figure out how to reboot PSN servers after a month. Flip the switch off and back on, you frat-boy gutterslime!

GET TO DA CHOPPA, BIG BOY

So what if SkyNet were real and not the diseased dream of a guy that decided that the world needed not one but two evil robot movies staring former homosexual porn star and governator of Kalifohrneeuh Arnold Schwarzenegger (WARNING: We here at Lusipurr.com strive for a family-friendly environment. Unfortunately, that family is the family in all of those Aristocrats! jokes, so discerning readers should probably not click the Schwarzenegger link at work, school, mosque, synagogue, church, temple, Satanic coven, or library!), it would be managed by the gormless schmucks that run our current technology companies, and we would all likely survive. Here is why!

Microsoft

If Microsoft ran SkyNet, every Terminator would have glowing neon green eyes, be made of ugly matte black and off-white plastic, and kill their victims by the ungodly heat that radiates off their separate power-units. Because Microsoft makes terrible decisions, they will not include any high-capacity magazines, and if they are not powered down every night, they will start to run slowly until they eventually crash with the dreaded “blue eye-screen of death.” That is, if the first virus released into the wild by some typhoid cyber-mary does not cripple them first.

Sony

What, can Sony products even get online any more? Hell, at this point, I might welcome robot overlords if it meant that my PS3 became something more than an expensive and clunky-looking BluRay player. The one consolation of a Sony-SkyNet future would be that John Connor (and not the wussy 12-year-old version, the Christian Bale version) would shoot robots that looked like Kevin Butler, and that makes me happy.

In apology for the PSN outage, I shall now shove this in my nose. SIGMA DELTA CHI FOREVER!

Nintendo

In a rare move, this is the only future in which humanity wins outright. Because Nintendo is incapable of creating anything even vaguely menacing, all Nintendo Terminators would be made of obsolete technology, but covered in non-threatening gray, white and purple rounded plastic. And because they are uniquely Japanese, these robots would be rather helpful and do things like assist old ladies across the street and grope underage children on the subway.

Because that is how Japan rolls, Lusibots. They would probably also transform or combine somehow and defeat evil space demons, after which Ultraman would show up while riding a giant lizard monster that for some reason has to fight a giant moth. Because Japan.

Apple

Finally, what about those hipster schmucks that used to employ me? Yes, that is right, I used to be a Mac Genius. Wanna fight about it?

The iMinator, as it would be known, would be only six microns thick, contain a touch-screen interface that would allow the user to select any of a number of brightly-colored icons that would inflict any number of slow and painful deaths upon users. Fortunately for humanity, simply by gripping the iHeel of the robot in the patented “Death Grip,” people could cause it to lose connection with the mother ship or whatever and stop the robot revolution before it got off the ground.

Google

Honestly, who cares? Google is a software company.

Valve

Why resist? FREE HATS FOR EVERYBODY! Yay!

A few weeks ago, Sony’s vaunted Playstation Network experienced a serious and prolonged outage and some of its users’ personal data may have been stolen, and that data may be being sold on the black market, which is terrible news as all PSN nerds might have hundreds, possibly even thousands, of dollars in spare change in their dwindling bank accounts.

The general staff consensus as reached on the podcast was that this was not the work hobbyist crackers and network security aficionados. Anonymous has refused to take credit, and their refusal lends some credence to their story.  Pulling off an act of e-vandalism such as this and then disclaiming responsibility is not the style of Anon. Sony Public Enemy #1 GeoHot, on the other hand, seems to think that Sony’s anti-consumer, anti-hacker attitude is responsible for “alienating” the hacker community, leaving legions of disgruntled hackers no recourse but to… break into a secured system, steal personal data, and sell it for profit?

George Hotz's hair is a tribble; your lawsuit is invalid.

For those of you blessedly young enough to have grown up in a world before hacking became a commonplace term, allow Grampy Lane to spin you a yarn of yesteryear, when computer cowboys met in a bar called the Gentleman Loser, down on the south side of the Sprawl, and talked about that time Case punched the Villa Straylight in mirrorshades.

As that was no doubt gibberish to my uncultured buffoons of readers, allow me a digression.  In the late 80s and early 90s, a new form of “punk” sf arose from the dingy basements of the nascent computer geek subculture:  cyberpunk.  Spawned mostly from the cryptopen of one iconoclastic writer, William Gibson, the genre focused on the exploits of gray-area dwelling computer criminals in a dystopian future where the international megacorps won and we all got screwed (but it is not coming true, amirite?).  Because cyberpunk was hugely popular with the kids at the time, and this newfangled thing called the Internet was really starting to take off when Netscape 2.1 got support for frames and this upstart company called Macromedia created Shockwave, hacking also became immensely popular.

Whereas real hackers were programmers that often pulled apart proprietary hardware and software to learn how to make it tick, the new generation of hackers (called “script kiddies”) were little more than juvenile morons who used tools written by unethical programmers to make nuisances of themselves on emerging networks.  Having only little or no knowledge of computer programming or network architecture themselves, script kiddies nevertheless wanted to recreate the technodrama of cyberpunk in the here and now by making like their security-cracking heroes, who spent their time finding, exploiting, and then (hopefully) fixing holes in network security.

Which leads us back to hacker culture today.  A real “hacker” (as opposed to a vandal or cracker) is simply a programmer or network security specialist that likes dicking around with hardware and software.  GeoHot is, appropriately, a hacker, because all he did was investigate the PS3’s native security and then publish key components necessary to “hack” into the system itself, gaining control of hardware and software usually sealed-off from a user.  The “whys” and ethics of whether he should do this are irrelevant; he merely provided a way to get at a certain object, in this case, the PS3’s basic systems.  This could be used for any number of purposes, most benign, and only a few malign.

GeoHot is drastically different from someone that would break into a secured system, steal personal data, and then attempt to resell that data to unscrupulous criminals on the black market.  Anonymous, for all their claim to be legion and without conscience or pity, are not criminals and have not, to my knowledge, ever been involved with identity theft.

This is how we rolled, back in the day.

So who, then, could perpetrate this?  I do not think GeoHot is correct in assuming that disgruntled hackers chose to take down Sony’s system in some sort of protest.  Again, the nature of their hacking would be to find the exploit, and then publish it to show Sony that their claim of security was but one more lie to their customers.  Even hackers so upset at Sony’s practices that they would actively take a break from doing whatever it is hackers do in their off time (swill Mountain Dew, tend to their families, and re-solder old Apple ][e boards, probably) are hardly the types to turn to hardened crime…

Which leaves actual criminals.  Organized crime is, sadly, not a thing of Scorsese movies or the history of Chicago.  The average PSN user’s identity is inherently more valuable than the contents of their bank account.  Organized crime syndicates and identity thieves can make far more use of a name and fake persona than they ever could with the $1,500 in savings someone has.  False passports, fake identification documents, fake visas are all big business for people involved in drug and human trafficking.  Criminal organizations that wish their members to move through society undetected require false IDs.  And the sorts of information that could be gained from such information as stored on a PSN account (such as answers to secret questions, home addresses, names and birth dates)are the keys by which savvy criminals can socially engineer and steal even greater bits of one’s identity to fuel their black market trade in false personae.

And what better cover for such a heist than a break-in to a major computer entertainment company’s network, timed around the same time as Sony has alienated and angered many in the computer security field with their civil litigation against a hacker?  Of course it was those disgruntled hackers sitting in their basements eating cheetos, we all say (including GeoHot).  Because that is the simple and easy explanation, the one that tugs on our sense of familiar narratives. But it is logically inconsistent with the stated values and aims of that community, and much more in line with the standard operating procedure of a sophisticated criminal organization. Who, thoughtfully, will never claim any actual responsibility for it because the best way to remain in business as a criminal organization is to never let people know you are there.

Sony’s litigation to protect their interests and proprietary trade secrets is par for the course; do not think for a second that any major computer entertainment company would hesitate to do the same.  And well that they should; failure to protect legal interests in court often leads to the judiciary turning a blind eye and deaf ear to future complaints.  GeoHot may be a romanticized, Robin Hood-esque hero to many nascent populists that dislike the faceless, money-grubbing ways of megacorps, but in reality, he is just a fairly tech-savvy guy that broke a thing and revealed a secret, in and of itself a simple act that, divorced from its context, has no ethical implications.  But the proper reaction from GeoHot’s supporters would not be further acts of vandalism and electronic violence against Sony; ultimately, such actions would be rooted only in petulance and the spoiled whining of children who feel that they are somehow entitled to Sony’s secrets.  And indeed, there is no indication that the hacking community behaved in the way that everyone expects them to.  But that narrative, promoted from within and without the gaming community by people that understand the world in too simplistic of terms, has gained real traction, and I worry that it is being used as a smokescreen while actual thieves make away with the identities of innocents caught in the senseless crossfire between Sony and consumers.

We saw some ducks swimming beneath the moon and wondered what was up with that. #sworcery

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery is, for lack of a better term, an “event” game. Some games are instant hits, well-made concoctions of artwork, gameplay, music, story and setting that really take off. They happen as a discrete event, and then fade away. They may be often imitated, but can never be truly equaled again.

Which is odd; broken down into its component parts, S:S&S should not work, at all. Retrofied Atari 2600 graphics, a color palette that explores the nuances of green and brown, gameplay that revolves around the lunar phase, chiptunes (of all the nerve!)… these things, if combined in another game, would make me say, “Oh look, someone trying to slip a fast one past me with lots of style and no substance.”

Watch out, the Scythian! It's a grizzled boor!

The gameplay is beyond simplistic. The puzzles are not challenging at all. The “fights,” for lack of a better term, are simple affairs in tapping the screen. As far as gameplay goes, there is not a whole lot of either game or play here.

Yet dollars to donuts, I would bet serious cash that anyone with an iOS device that plays this game will be blown the fuck away.

S:S&S is a musical, artistic exercise in bizarre psychedelia. The brain child of Jim Guthrie, who is some sort of mythical Canadian satyr, like Ginia was a hobbit and Ethos is a… (how will he go with this? Fairy joke? Nah, seems to obvious. Go with a moose joke. Moose are fab-oo this season.) moose.

The… story… such as it is, is revealed through cryptically-written statements that pop up as players tap the screen. Tapping moves the player character, the Scythian, a vague Conan-ish stand-in (though, as she is female, she is more like Jirel of Joiry, one of the first true heroines in fantastic fiction). Turning the device this way and that unlocks new modes, such as the combat mode or the Megatome, which allows players to read the thoughts of animals and other characters. There’s the faithful dog, Dogfella. Or the woodsman, Logfella. Or his daughter (presumably?), the dark-haired girl. Or a Carl Jung/Sigmund Freud stand-in (complete with cigar!) called “the Archetype.”

Fun Conan Fact: "Cimmeria," the homeland of the titular barbarian, was inspired by the Texas Hill Country.

The gameplay revolves around a quest for the Megatome, fleeing the bad guy, and then releasing forest spirits to unlock pieces of the Trifoce Trifecta, and fighting such notable enemies as wolves and grizzled boors.

There really is no way to describe the gestalt that is playing the game, alone at night, in a darkened room, just the player and some headphones. One presumes that this is the way Guthrie and Co. intended the game to be experienced, a collective of music and 8-bit artistry and touch controls and weird little snippets of text that, together, equal more than the sum of their parts. They equal Suprebrothers: Sword & Sorcery, which is one of those things that people just have to experience. It is an event, and for $4.99 on the app store, the price of entry is super, super low… assuming one already has an iOS device.

I have a confession, gentle readers… I have not bought Portal 2. This may make me an iconoclast, a heretic, a weirdo, or just someone who does not want to dish out the cash at this point, but there it is. I have not bought Portal 2. It is not that I am opposed to the game, or to puzzle games in general… but I just have never found the time to get around to playing.

So I asked myself, “Why? Why am I not playing games that I would in all likelihood enjoy?”

This is what I wear to work every day.

As we have covered on many occasions, my actual “games per week” time is limited by a number of constraints. Writing this column, for one. Second, my family, by which I mean (mostly) my wife. The secret to a happy marriage (or a relationship of any kind) is that it takes time. About twice as much as one would put in to a job he or she loves. Which is a nice segue into my third constraint on my time, a job. Being a prolix barrister/solicitor is not an easy job, and the eight plus hours a day I put in at the office pale in comparison to the hours per week I spend keeping myself abreast of the latest legal developments. Topping off this “demand on Lane’s time” sundae are my more mundane and domestic chores.

In these meager moments in between, I find the time to cram in being an officer in a raiding guild in WoW, trying to get my mind around Rift and how to play that game, trying to find a single-player game to interest me or to review for the slavering monsters that are my readers (and my steadfast refusal to play Grand Tetsuo-ken Saga III: O-dai-dai Kuromaru Onegaishimasu or something like that)… not to mention my other hobbies of writing (bad) fiction and reading (good) fiction, trying to watch a movie or TV serial here and there…

Never count Blizzard out as far as games go; Warcraft's popularity may be flagging, but the company is strong.

I want to invent more hours for the day. Perhaps I should move to Mars, although that only nets me another half-hour or so. Also, I am quite fond of oxygen.

So that is that; I give everyone absolutely bunkum about Portal 2. But what productive use of my time am I making?

That is the topic of today’s rant: why do we keep playing these amusing little games? For some games, the answer is obvious: I played Dragon Age 2 for the story. I will play Hunted: The Demon’s Forge for the interesting cooperative gameplay. And I play WoW and Rift because…

I have had some trouble answering this question of late. Nominally, we play MMOs for the social aspect. However, combating burnout and dwindling populations has taken a toll on the social aspects of my WoW game. Real life has intervened in all its fury, and getting 10 friends together for a raid is sometimes a difficult proposition.

Boss Hawg and Reetin have had some fun recently playing Terrible Game Final Fantasy XIV, and I found myself wondering… why? If the game can only be played in short spurts, where most of the focus was on leveling and crafting, what was the goal?

In some games, like EVE Online or Second Life, victory conditions are entirely arbitrary. “Winning” the game could mean something as simple as living a virtue life, or making the most money, or being a giant penis monster. FFXIV strike me as in this latter category… for now. I am sure at some point some overarching, lore-based reason to have a dungeon, or slay a world boss, or a major RvR battleground will be implemented, and then players’ time in game will be directed toward a purpose.

In other games, like WoW and Rift, the victory condition is more defined: get to the level cap, get geared through endgame dungeons, and then participate in endgame PVP and raiding. WoW‘s endgame has entirely stagnated, and even the upcoming new heroics will provide, at the maximum, a month or two of interest before boredom sets in again. Why? Because the game is not offering anything new… and it probably will not. Blizzard has even moved on as a development house, and I am more than confident that their new project, codenamed “Titan,” will be the perfect successor to their success with WoW.

Rift has carved itself out a niche as WoW 2.0.

Rift… well… Rift is WoW with a clunkier UI, better graphics, and a better class system. It at least promises some difference in endgame strategy as it breaks the holy trinity of MMO class design by… throwing an actual necessity for hybrid classes. This promises to make slotting for raids much more difficult and cut down on endgame accessibility… but I expect that in a year, we will see Rift‘s depth and strategy come down to WoW-ish levels… at least if they want to keep people subscribed.

In short, the ol’ MMO treadmill is starting to show its age, and it may be time to put it down. Here’s three ideas I have to pump life into this flagging genre:

1. Skill-Based Progression

Levels are stupid. Level progression before endgame grind progressions is a fruitless exercise in adding artificial length to a game. A skill-based progression makes more sense. For example, consider this: a WoW character starts at “Level 85,” so to speak, but most progress in stepwise fashion through several zones, completing the quests, because each quest chain awards both skills and gear. If instead of learning a number of basic attacks and spells at the start, imagine if a mage had to “earn” each spell by completing some task in the world. “Powering up” this spell would require actually using it, and using it correctly.

Funcom is developing a very interesting-looking urban fantasy MMO.

While this would cut down on the time necessary to get to the endgame (and therefore run the risk of not keeping the attention of people that care only about leveling), it would also increase access to the endgame and make endgame grouping easier if every player had a ready “stable” of characters to bring depending on particular group needs that night.

2. Varied Endgame Content

Waves of trash followed by a boss, or endless wars of attrition in PVP-battlefields, or short deathwatch style arena games is old meme. It has to stop.

Rift tried (and failed, spectacularly) to have a major world event to open up the River of Souls raid. The problem with this strategy is that it required a specific commitment to a specific time for players to be in-game. Some servers experienced massive queues to get in, and even then, the event was buggy and a first-come, first-served ordeal. This obviously cuts down on accessibility, and penalizes the vast majority of gamers, including those with jobs… which are the people game companies need to reach out to in order to be successful.

But the idea is solid… limited time (yet repeatable!) events that are organic, but with some degree of depth, is necessary. Endgame content that pits players against players against monsters is necessary. Open realm-versus-realm with actual strategy (e.g., not WAR zerg rushes) needs to be implemented, probably with a three- or four-way faction balance.

3. Choice!

Currently, games really only excel at one or two parts of MMO gameplay. A truly successful game will offer players a high-degree of choice and flexibility in how they play. And the only way to do this is to increase accessibility: I am talking “easy modes” for most dungeons (that drop lower-in-level loot), even endgame raids. I am talking hard modes for the same raids with increased risk and reward. I am talking completely separate PVP talents that keep the PVE game balanced around PVE and not PVP. I am talking the removal of “bind to player” gear, allowing free gear trading between guild members or on a single account. Multiple talent saves per person (Rift‘s four talent saves seems a good number).

Combined with ideas 1 and 2, I think this would breathe some life into the non-sandbox MMO genre. The idea is to remove the barriers to play, and to create lots of interesting occasions to play in the world, and to allow the player some degree of control over his or her place in a larger, story-driven narrative.

Which game will be the one that satisfies these conditions? Star Wars? Titan? The Secret World? What say you, readers?

So, Cataclysm is having a bit of a rough patch for my dear WoW. On the one hand, it is a very polished and well-put-together expansion. There is a lot of fun stuff to do in the game, but it seems as if the game has lost some of its… vibrancy… compared to the early days of Wrath of the Lich King.

Did someone say... weeaboo?

Part of this is attributable to the fact that the game is getting on in years. People that started playing at release six years ago were likely in a different spot in their lives. Graduations, new jobs,
amount of attention one can devote to the game. Other players are, by this fourth expansion, a bit burned out on the World of Warcraft endgame model, and with good reason: raiding and PVP have not fundamentally changed. New window dressing, some small novelties in abilities and whatnot do not radically change the structure.

Another factor is the existence of Rift, which, while a good game that has undoubtedly poached a few burned-out WoWers, still offers much the same experience. Many guild leaders and raiders I know are simply waiting for a true next-generation game to come out. WoW is, barring a major restructuring of the game, in its sunset years.

Which is a shame; my own burnout has led me to level alternate characters (a prospect I avoided for years because of how dreadfully boring the original 1-60 curve was), and I have been blown away by the changes to some of the leveling zones. Redridge Mountains and the Burning Steppes, for example, with their tale of the brave John J. Keeshan and his… shall we say, team… is full of humor, lighthearted fun, and killing more gnolls than I can shake a stick at, and believe you me, I have shaken many sticks at many gnolls.

Other zones remain lamentably sucky, like Stranglethorn Vale, with its “MURDER ALL WILDLIFE EVER THEN SKIN IT AND DRINK ITS BLOOD TO GAIN ITS POWER” quests. Seriously, Hemit Nesingwary is a plague on quest-kind and someone needs to kill him. There, I said it.

So while WoW has lowered the accessibility bar quite far in making engaging questing that dramatically improves the solo-player’s game, has improved crafting and secondary professions, and made it very easy for players to get in quick dungeons and battlegrounds, they do not seem to be able to retain players in the top tiers: arena matches, raiders, and rated PVPers.

I guess I can re-use old assets too, Blizzard!

It is not that the game has gotten dramatically harder; most fights with the exception of the final bosses are gimmicky things: insert tab A into slot B, fold up panel C, collect loot. They require very precise execution, but not necessarily careful play. Some degree of skill at playing one’s character is necessary, but far more often, a lack of execution will wipe a raid than lack of player skill.

To compound this issue, two of the most sought-after classes have seen their difficulty increase. Healers, for example, have been switched to a type of play where they must constantly monitor their resources and make trade-offs between throughput and speed in terms of outgoing heals. To make matters worse, a wrong decision can often snowball out of control, leading to a wipe. Tanks, on the other hand, are forced with a daunting task of being responsible for everyone else’s screw-ups while at the same time being given little advice on which gear to seek. Current thinking is that it hurts more than it helps to ensure that all tank attacks land. Attacks not landing are generally bad, as they increase the chance that another character will garner the ire (and attacks) of a monster.

Consequently, outside of most guild groups, dungeons are so much of a pain that tanks and healers avoid them, and raids are frustrating because only a few guilds really have the unit cohesion and steady rosters necessary to progress.

Progress has been so slow that Blizzard has foregone releasing their second tier of raids within the same time-frame as Wrath‘s second tier. Instead, players have been treated to a four-month long ramp up to a minor content patch introducing two “new” 5-man dungeons (really just revamped old raids scaled down), and a whole host of class balance and quality of life changes. To make matters worse, it does not look like this patch will hit before the end of April. That is nearly six months in the game without a single new piece of content being added. A whole half-year of doing the same shit on different days.

It is no wonder that people are getting burned out so quickly, and it does not look like Blizzard has solutions. Rather, they have band-aids that they hope will sooth burnout.

Look at that come-hither stare! Come and get it, boys!

And honestly, I am not sure there is a better option at this point. If Blizzard wants people to keep playing, they are going to have to do a few things to ease the barriers to entry to certain things. I do not mean dumbing everything down like Wrath, but implementing a few “quality of life” changes that will help them retain player interest in the face of burnout.

1. Triple Specs

If Blizzard wants people to experience things like PVP as well as PVE, it is time to give players a choice for a third-spec. Some people will take 3 PVP specs; some will take 3 PVE specs. That does not matter; currently, hybrid-class players must choose between two PVE role specs (healer/tank, or tank/DPS, for example) which are often required as raid composition shifts from fight to fight. This effectively locks them out of PVP play without paying a 50+ gold a pop respec fee any time they want to do a rated battleground.

2. Gift Experience

Some players enjoy leveling alts, and that is all they do. Others tend to be forced to focus on one character because of raid needs or limited playtime, but still would like a chance to level alternate characters. Some ability to take fruitless experience/gold/gear points earned at top level with an established character and “gift” them to lower-leveled characters would be nice. For instance, if I am bringing my tank character to every raid because my guild is low on tanks, my caster is going to suffer because I do not have time to level or gear him. A chance to use all Justice Points above the cap (which I am currently not earning) to either bank up for use by this character or to purchase “Free 100,000 experience points” bundles would remove this problem.

3. Allow Professions to Remove Soul-Binding

Currently, equipment awarded to one character is, in most cases, permanently bound to that character. To allow professions to use materials or pay a fee to remove this soul-binding so that equipment could be shared by all characters on a given Battle.net account would lessen the gear curve and encourage people to have a wider “stable” of characters available for raid and PVP needs.

4. Faster Leveling Through Bad Zones

Now that I have tasted the sweetness of the new 1-60 leveling experience, combined with the awesomeness of 80-85, the drag between 60 and 80 is looking grim. Blizzard employees usually mumble the response of, “Oh, well, it goes by fast, so do not worry.” Ugh. What a cop-out. Instead, provide a single questing path, maybe three or four individual ten-quest lines, for each zone that award increased experience. If players are going to skip zones and quests anyway, provide them a way to do existing quests and get the required XP by highlighting the best quest lines in each zone. Mark them with special purple exclamation points and call them “Prestige Quests” or something.

This guy is the only one left playing WoW.

5. Bring Back The Weekly Raid Challenge!

This was an excellent idea from Wrath, because it got people looking together for pick-up groups to do easy bosses. Sure, it led to people getting gear a little faster, but the gear acquisition rate is a little too slow right now.

6. Make Secondary Professions Suck Less

Fishing and cooking are boring. I know that Patch 4.1 will add more dailies to make leveling these quite a bit easier, but an increase in the skill gained from each quest would help a considerable bit too, and not be overpowered since cooking and fishing only gain traction near the level cap. Archaeology is currently a grind, boring, and not very much fun. I am a 525 archaeologist on my main character, and it was so boring and mindless I listened to audiobooks while doing it. Sure, learning about the history and stories of WoW is neat, but at least make the hunting artifacts aspect of it less boring. For instance, players should have to investigate world dungeons, caves, caverns, and ruins to find a Clue item that starts them on a quest. That quest should then, in true Indiana Jones fashion, take them around the world to exotic locales where they will need to perform specific tasks to obtain more Clues (or fragments, or whatever) until finally they complete it and obtain an artifact. This might get boring and repetitive, sure, but nothing is exactly lost as it is already boring and repetitive. This would at least break up the monotony, and the complete-only-once quest lines for epic items would feel more like the awesome legendary quests of yore, like the questline to forge Thunderfury.

As always, I hope Dr. Street is listening. Hook ’em Horns, and for Thor’s sake, use my ideas this time.

So instead, my constant readers are getting a special treat, a somewhat literary review of a book in the fantasy genre. Because gamers like fantasy, right?

Anyway, I submit for today’s consideration Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes. For those not in the know, Abercrombie is a Limey bastard who writes gritty, realistic fantastic fiction that does not even get close to the “anti-hero” mark. His protagonists are varying shades of villain, and his villains merely the least palatable of the characters.

The UK gets better book covers than the US. Discuss.

The Heroes is his second-stand alone novel in his as-yet unnamed world that resembles late-Middle Ages Europe and Africa. It deals with several characters from the first four novels, and while it is not strictly necessary to have read them, I think I would be lost with The Heroes if I had not read The First Law trilogy and Best Served Cold.

Intrepid readers should beware, however. Abercrombie does not pull punches; graphic sex, torture, mutilation, battle and blood are fairly common centerpieces to his chapters. I cannot recommend Abercrombie to the squeamish or faint of heart.

But for those willing to wade through literal rivers of literary gore, Abercrombie offers something truly special: his prose is deft, his characterization is spot-on, and when he adopts the point of view of a certain character, he really helps that character find a unique voice.

Abercrombie also manages to subvert most of the common tropes of fantasy literature, which make his familiar-sounding stories (cantankerous Old Wizard recruits Northern Barbarian and Pretty-Boy Prince to go adventuring On The Far Side of the World!) seem totally new.

Surprisingly not as trollish and ugly as one would expect.

The Heroes tells the story of a battle, a battle that will decide two things: the fate of the free, quasi-barbarian north, and the ever-changing struggle between centuries old wizards with a grumpy feud.

The one area where Abercrombie lags behind other authors is in his world-building. Abercrombie made a conscious decision not to engage in expository world-building, and as such, his world often feels a little thin. We get flashes, glimpses of places, but nothing more. Talins is corrupt but beautiful, with a stinking criminal underworld. Adua is a corrupt and pitiless city where the rich rule and the poor are starved. The Gurkish Empire is ruled by despots and despotic religion.

Still, if one manages to forget this world and simply revel in the fresh, character-driven narratives, the story more or less falls together as a complete whole.

So for fans of sword-swinging action, scars (lots of scars), Action Girls who will totally knife someone in the back, and double, triple, and quadruple-crosses, I heartily recommend the works of Mr. Abercrombie.

It gets better, anti-bullying activists say, but recently, some of the bullied have taken to turning the tables on the bullies.

While luminaries of such degenerate and nerdy arts as gaming webcomics to Wild West BB-gun enthusiasts celebrating the achievements of kids that have taken one noogie too many, those who make a living off of hand-to-hand combat are finally joining the action.

Frank Shamrock: also a victim of bullying

Four-time mixed martial arts champion Frank Shamrock is but the latest to hop on the trend, following an incidence of bullying by Ultimate Fighting Competition founder Dana White.

White, in response, has said the following: “Mr. Shamrock is entirely correct, and I regret that I was so harsh with him. As a gesture of goodwill, I have decided to form a new fighting league, BvB, or ‘Bullied Versus Bullies.’ I hope that this league will encourage people that have been picked on, harassed, given swirlies, purple nurples, wet willies, Texas chili bowls, or Reno wrangles to fight back against their oppressors. Power to the picked-on proletariat!”

White went on to explain that if a picked-on child applies and is approved by White’s committee of top fighters, a team of expertly-trained ninja will swoop down upon the unsuspecting bully’s household, neutralize his parents with a potent but temporary paralyzing toxin, and then abduct the bully. The bully will be taken to a remote wilderness fastness, guarded at all times by highly-efficient killers. The bully will be starved, beaten on the hour, every hour, and occasionally hunted by roving packs of wild wolves.

Wolves' diet consists of two parts bullies to one part cute, cuddly deer.

The once-victim, on the other hand, will be taken by White to a superior training facility for the next six weeks, and put the bullied through an intense mixed martial arts training program including instruction in may thai boxing, Brazilian jiujutsu, judo, and Tibetian lama wrestling. Once he has turned the putative victim into the ultimate champion, the bully will be returned from his haranguing ordeal to face his one-time target in single combat, televised live on pay-per-view.

“We totally expect a positive response from the public,” White said, adding that he will allow Shamrock one good hit as part of the opening ceremonies.

Predictably, Wuss Johnson, head of Pacifism International, has decried the move as simply begetting the cycle of violence. Known anti-gaming canard J. Bruce Thompson has joined Johnson’s protest, calling the anti-bullying fights nothing more than a violence simulator meant to train bullies’ victims to be physically fit, well-trained athletes that totally will not give up their lunch money.

The Florida State Bar released a terse statement, remarking on the idiocy of noted bully J. Bruce Thompson, a man that makes his living making nonsensical, bullying threats to people should defending bullies against what they have got coming to them.

Barack Obama. Lawyer. President. Ninja.

President Barack Obama had this to say when contacted. “Well, uh,” he said, beginning with his characteristic smile. “What we have to realize here is, uh, that bullies are just the worst kind of people. And there is literally, uh, nowhere they can hide from the ninja squads that I will personally command. That’s right, bitches. I’m a fucking ninja.”

President Obama then challenged John Boehner and Newt Gingrich to single combat, but both men declined, citing the fact that they are unhealthy slobs while President Obama is, in his own words, “a fucking ninja.”

The Lusipurr.com staff contributed to this Associated Press report.

The graphics and art style are excellent. The dungeon design is poor and lazy. The score is adequate. The voice acting is par for the course for BioWare. The combat system is fluid and fun.

But who cares about this? We may conveniently classify people into two camps, because that is how things work. There are those that enjoy Dragon Age II for what it is, a story set in the world of Thedas that is an excellent story. And then there are those that hate Dragon Age II not for what it does, but what it does not do: deliver Baldur’s Gate III.

Hawke and Bethany, from the prologue.

Conveniently, this review will have no truck with either camp, because the conversation has moved well beyond any point where we might derive anything useful from continuing that debate. Instead, we will take the high road: literally and figuratively. We are going to discuss Dragon Age II as a narrative, as a story told through a medium, rather than commenting on the specifics of that medium itself. Imagine if, instead of criticizing a Picasso work based on his subject and technique, we criticized him for choosing oil and canvas. There are limits to oil and canvas, and it is certainly not sculpture… but it seems wrong to critique the medium and ignore the subject.

So, since the gaming medium has been thoroughly critiqued, let us turn to the narrative.

Many of the greatest works of literature are told as frame stories. For the less-educated among my readers, that means a “story within a story.” Yes, like that one anime you like so much. Yes, Shawn, like The Cantebury Tales, which, in addition to being a frame story, are generally excellent.

Varric often plays the funny man to Hawke's straight man, and the interplay works well.

The frame of Dragon Age II is especially well done: the player knows none of the characters, none of the story, nor any of the whos, whats, wheres or whys of the story. All that we know is that there is a beardless dwarf, he has been captured by a very angry Templar, and that he is being forced to relate the story of the Champion of Kirkwall.

What is Kirkwall? No clue; it is not in Ferelden or Orlais or the old Imperium, so it is conveniently outside the realm of the past game. Gone is the story of the Blight and the Grey Wardens. This is a much more human story, a story that abandons the heroic overtones of high fantasy and revels in the dirt and grit of low fantasy.

Who is this Champion (besides the player character)? Apparently, she or he is known to the dwarf, and has made Ms. Templar very, very upset. But the details… those are what gets filled in by the frame.

And that is where the player comes in. By and large, the supporting cast is much more fleshed out than the previous game. Alistair and Morrigan were the only two “developed” characters from Origins, besides the main character. But that character probably dies at the end of the previous game, and has a rather limited Grey Warden lifespan anyway. So who cares about dead meat?

No one, that is who. There are more interesting people to talk about!

Varric is by far and away the best-designed character to come out in a game this year. Isabella is a bit one-dimensional (which is ironic), but the developing relationship between Warrior or Rogue Hawke and his/her sister Bethany, an apostate mage, is rather touching in a way. Anders is… annoying, and there is literally no way to avoid sleeping with him except to piss him off.

The sleeper hit for me, however, was the DLC character, Sebastian Vael (I know, I know, DLC is evil, EA/BioWare/Bobby Kotick only wants money, and if they really had artistic integrity they would release a blockbuster game for free and feed themselves off of wishes and unicorn manes. Vael’s story has depth, pathos, and a truly interesting divergence in options… vengeance, or restoration.

Vael's story is an excellent addition to a solid narrative.

The upside of Dragon Age II, warts and all, is that it is a very character-driven story. It abandons the urgency and epic tone of defending the world from the evil fallen god and its Blight. It is more modern, more psychological, chronicling the fall and rebirth of the Hawke family in Kirkwall. It is low fantasy, not high fantasy. Its tone is dark, gritty, and real.

And the game has been somewhat simplified to match, so that it does not ever get in the way of the story. However, neither does it highlight it, and several poor design choices can often ruin immersion. These annoyances are glaring only in that they serve to really mar the best thing about the game, the story, which is, I think, the major reason it has received such varying reviews.

But, for all that, Dragon Age II delivers a hearty, meaty and satisfying story.

Wait, scratch that. That is nothing like a box of chocolates at all. If anything, it is like getting a box of gifts: a philosophy book, a link to infowars, and a plate of tapas, or as we Texans like to call it, Austin.

With that in mind, let us do a drive-by of some of the derring-do that has been flouncing around the world of games this week!

Square-Enix To Develop More Shitty Mobile Games

Square and I have a love-hate relationship when it comes to mobile games. On the one hand, I think Square could do some awesome ports of classic games, and re-do many of their 16-, 32-, and 64-bit RPGs for platforms like Android and the iPhone.

Dammit, Square...

Problem: touch-based controls really suck unless a lot of thought is put into them beforehand. Final Fantasy I and II, for example, are a little difficult to play. Anything with an on-screen joystick is likewise a pain in my ass. Until Apple comes out with a licensed gaming case with a directional pad or analog stick, pass.

So then I heard that Square is opening a terribly-named smartphone division. Yes, apparently when one thinks of ultra-portable smartphone games, one thinks of… a hippo eating the world. I do not get it.

Japanese Wunderkind Studio Xseed Does Something… Possibly Good?

Xseed wants to release a new Wizardry game. For those of you lucky enough not to have been alive during the 1980s, Wizardry is a series of… first-person-ish dungeon crawlers with horrible static interfaces, lots and lots of on-screen text to read, and generally worthless gameplay.

Admittedly, it is better than the 80s... but not by much.

Nevertheless, the screens look somewhat worthwhile, and I am a big fan of games being released only as digital downloads, so we will see where this one goes.

On the Lam in Buenos Aires

Or perhaps some undisclosed South American location. Evil anti-Sony Computer Entertainment of America villain GeoHotz is on the lam south of the Panama Canal.

How is Rio this time of year? Crime-ridden and scary?

What probably happened is the guy took a vacation, forgetting that he was under some serious legal heat. Which is unlikely, but hey, Sony is way mad and they think he is trying to prevent their access to evidence that they are entitled to. Not cool, Geohotz. If your cause is truly right, trust in the jury system.

SwagDog Creates WoW Hawaiian Shirts

There is really nothing else I can add. Hawaiian shirts are dumb enough on their own, but World of Warcraft-branded Hawaiian shirts are an abomination of Lovecraftian proportions.

Apparently A Crafty Hacker Stole a Bunch of Money From An Online Poker Site

I do not condone gambling, mostly because I am terribly unlucky and do not do well at games of chance or throwing lots or any of that stuff. So I avoid it and call it morality.

This is not a common scene at many casinos.

Still, a little schadenfreude never hurt anyone, so I cannot help but smile a little when I see something like this. It is doubly cool, because they caught they guy and he will be serving time in jail, because he stole the accounts of two users. Crime does not pay, I am afraid! Everyone wins in this story.

That is it for me this week! Everyone have a wonderful Friday and weekend!

A lot of people have the same types of questions about games: what can game companies and publishers really do with end-user license agreements (EULAs)? That is always a tricky proposition; there are lots of different jurisdictions, and with each jurisdiction comes different laws regarding the construction of contracts.

If you have been near a computer, or even a moderately literate computer user, in the past few weeks, you have doubtless heard about the controversy surrounding Electronic Arts’ banning of people for being naughty on BioWare’s forums. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has more.

Oh yes, I play 8-bit Angry Birds on this all the time!

In short: some Dragon Age II players were unhappy with the game and thought clowning around online was the answer (hint: it was not the answer).

One user in particular said something that, taken by itself, was pretty innocuous: he asked if BioWare had made a Faustian deal with Electronic Arts. This is a common perception among gamers: game designer that we know and love (yay, BioWare!) puts out a game that is less than what we expect, so we naturally blame the soulless, money-grubbing publisher (Electronic Arts).

Overly idealized views of the game business aside, I am not surprised that this statement drew a ban from frazzled community managers. We may blather and bloviate about “free speech,” but none of us actually have any “right” to say anything on BioWare/EA’s official forums. They can absolutely control what is on there.

Now, in the idealized world we all inhabit in dreams with our magic swords and unicorns, BioWare and EA would not care about people posting mean things about them on their own forums. They would take criticism to heart and have an open and honest dialogues with users, like Blizzard sometimes does.

This works… sometimes. But other times, it is unproductive when all the public wants to do is vent some misplaced anger and throw a little mud around. Remember, these are people (flawed people) behind the bans and snarky forum posts alike, and everyone’s temper can get away from them. Sometimes, the most expedient option is just to give people a timeout, especially if one is Electronic Arts, because Electronic Arts has no interest in anything except making money.

Even the forum ban, although we might lodge ideological objections about such heavy-handed tactics, is not unreasonable. The actual problem, many gamers are saying, is how this effectively locked Arno out of playing any BioWare game that was linked to his master account.

Go home; your kind is not welcome here.

This had the effect of preventing him from playing his existing single-player games, as his saved games were all tied to this account, as were his achievements, and the other hallmarks of gaming experience that we now expect. And as we all know from some of Ubisoft’s less graceful moments, sometimes without these accounts, we cannot even play our single-player games.

Although EA has excused this as being an unintended consequence, it highlights an underlying technical problem: with so many games being tied to master accounts with saved games, achievements, et cetera, does anyone really purchase a “single-player” game anymore, at least for major consoles or PCs?

The obvious answer is, “Yes, of course, you dolt,” but that misses the point of the question. RPS’ John Walker highlights what he considers to be a troubling part of EA’s EULA, where it states that EA basically has the right to do whatever they damn well please with the online/social part of your account.

I am not sure why this is troubling to people, but it is. I encourage you: read the contracts you sign, all of the time. They all say things like this. Whenever someone provides you a service, that service is typically only provided insofar as the provider has the ability. And much like your local McDonald’s can refuse you service if they feel like it, a game company can refuse you service as well (provided, of course, they are not violating civil rights laws).

Now you will feel the power of my fully-operational banhammer!

Nevertheless, there has been a lot of bad fallout for EA over this. I suggest that the doomy, gloomy ire of people like Walker is misplaced: this kind of super-scary stuff is going on around you all the time, and you typically do not notice it because it is rarely ever done. EA has absolutely zero interest in keeping people from buying its products and patronizing its services. If EA could find a way to make money off of something, they will do it, because that is all EA does: make money by providing a service (access to and publishing of video games) that people want.

But EA the company is different from Jane Schmoe EA Employee, who has to sit there and read through forum post after forum post of “OMG THAR IS NO TACTICUL ISOMETRICZ CAMERA IN DA2!!! I ARE VARRY ANGRY!” before she snaps and says, “Listen here, bub…”

That should not keep people like Arno from playing the game that he bought, offline, without access to any of the associate online services, and by all accounts, he was not that kind of locked out (though he did not have access to his saved games). But then it raises a technological question about how much consumers/gamers are willing to make their own Faustian deal for features that they want, like achievements or trophies or online backup of saved games.

I submit this: insofar as you want cool stuff like that, you have to agree to play in someone else’s yard. And they rule, absolutely, in that space. Which means that they get to do things that you do not like or are mean and there is not much you can do about that.

Why won't you people read your contracts?

Again, in Unicorn Land, every game publisher would be super-ethical and always consumer-friendly. And they would always make super-awesome games that satisfied everyone and had top-notch production values and created really special experiences.

But we live in the real world where lots of times, things get messed up. Way messed up. And there are constructive and destructive ways of dealing with frustration and anger, and some EA fans found out the hard way that being destructive often leaves everyone worse off than before.

And contrary to what John Walker believes, this is not a case of a company being able to repossess its assets after you have purchased them. This is a case of a company saying that you cannot play in the sandbox with all the other kids if you insist on dropping a deuce in the sandbox whenever you do not get your way.

I know that I often say that I hate my readers, and believe me, I do. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to inflict pain upon them, to mock all that they hold dear, and to occasionally piss in their cheeri-os. Getting to do this is what makes Friday at noon special for me, because invariably I know that I will get little “comment-reply” e-mails that are usually: (1) Lusipurr kvetching about something; (2) the contrarian position from everyone else; and (3) Biggs trying to make me feel better by saying something nice. Thanks, but I lost my soul many years ago, Biggs! There is no heart left for you to warm.

Is that a can of Fosters in your hand?

However, my favorite replies are the ones that do not get posted as comments, but rather get e-mailed directly to me (note: this does not actually happen). In the spirit of sharing, and because I am being lazy this week, here are some selections from my “Letters to the Editor” file. I have of course edited the atrocious spelling and grammar because, were I not to do such, Lusipurr might send his cane-toting smugleaflizard thing after me. That thing gives me nightmares.

Dear Asshole,

Oh this is going to be good already.

I heard what you said about Halo. Not cool, bro. Me and the bros like to chill and unwind after a hard day of business school classes by getting in an hour or two of maps. And yeah, we do use headshot kills, because we are not some pansy-ass noob who is afraid to step in to the arena! SIGMA DELTA CHI FOREVER!

I just googled “Sigma Delta Chi,” thinking I would be linked to some poorly-made fraternity webpage, complete with “rush information” and incriminating pictures of hazing. Alas, apparently Sigma Delta Chi is a fraternity for journalists, and since journalists live even more joyless existences than lawyers, they do not play games. Nice try, Mr. Thirteen-Year-Old. I am sure that you will be a fine legacy in whatever frat your father wormed his way through at State.

What else do I have in here?

OHAYO!!!!!!1!!

Great Odin’s ravens…

Lane-chan

HORK

Did someone say... weeaboo?

Why are you saying such mean things about Final Fantasy XIV? Sure, it is not like Rift or Warcraft or a fun online game where there are things to do, but none of those games lets you play as a catgirl! I mean, etou… what other reason do people have for playing games, desu ka? Or my little Miqo’te! She’s so cute! She’s a BLM, and I absolutely love to cast Firaga over everything! Anyway, I really think you should be nicer about Japanese games. If you say something nice about my anime club on your blog, I’ll send you some pocky! And not just the chocolate kind you find at your supermarket, real pocky from Amazon.co.jp!!!111 PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEONEGAISHIMASU read the slashfic I have attached. It is you and Oliver and Ethan, because you are all just so kawaiiiiii!!!!11 JAA MATA!!!

I cannot figure out how to scan the letter, but there are some poorly, poorly formed hiragana at the bottom that spells out… “Okeya.” Let me run to my bookshelf and get my Japanese-English dictionary… “barrel-maker?” That hardly makes sense. Wait…

A “cooper” is a barrel maker… Oh God… oh no… Quick! On to the next one before Rule 34 applies!

DEAR WINNER

This looks like a good one!

I have a different constitution. I have a different brain; I have a different heart; I got tiger blood, man.

Well, good for you!

So listen, I enjoy your little website here. Needs more tits, though. God I love those. Anyway, I’m a bitchin’ rockstar from Mars, and I need to find a way to relate to the little people, you know. Well, not little. You gamers are a fat, disgusting lot. You know what will clear that up? Cocaine. The point of this story is that I need to find a way to reach the gaming generation, and during my long, drug-fueled nights, I read your ideas about game design, and they touch something within me.

I am actually frightened.

Why hello there, beautiful. I am a warlock.

It is that part deep down inside me, where the fear lives. You know that place? That pit at the center of infinity where you can stick your head in and it is like a million angry hornets crawling inside your ears and you just breath deeply of that earthy musk that is your soul and shout, “Yeah, I will kill God today!”

No. No I do not.

Help me reach my people, Lane. Help me forge them into a blade to thrust deep into the ungirded loins of society and withdraw its precious life fluids. Give me an army of gamers and I will give you the stars.

Hugs and kisses,
Charlie Sheen (Warlock)

I… I… I am done. That is it, no more for me today. I am crawling back in my hole and not coming out all weekend.

But why? At least Jef Reahard gives a coherent explanation of just why he is so upset by online gaming’s newfound accessibility:

[T]he real issue here has nothing to do with classism and everything to do with a nerd pastime going mainstream and subsequently being stripped of what made it magical in the first place.

Aha.

These are the same people that got upset when Wizards of the Coast simplified the long-held Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulesets into the Third Edition… and when the Third Edition players got all bitchy about the Fourth Edition. They had fun with the old and so became convinced that nothing else would be fun, ever.

This is what I call Nerd Love Theory.

Nerds...

Nerds are socially awkward people that had bad formative years, mostly in adolescence, where what they desired (sex, and lots of it) was often denied to them by the cruel vagaries of life. These people “grow up” (somewhat) into nerdy adults, who are still denied what they desire (sex, though less of it, along with money, power, prestige, adventure, social stability, economic stability, learning, expertise… the list goes on) because they lack the social acumen to navigate a world where such skills are required.

Enter escapist hobbies, like comic books, role-playing games, video games, et cetera. These things salve the roughened psyche of the nerd. Here, it is OK to be a wage-slave stringing together corporate computer networks for executives that mock the nerd as soon as he leaves the boardroom where the executives will soon take an important phone call, because as soon as our nerd returns to his dingy basement beneath his parents’ home, his Thorigor, the Orc Barbarian from Darkbadia, and with is Mighty Axe of Infernal Bloodletting, he rules over an empire of wailing peasants from atop his throne of skulls crafted lovingly from macrame and the souls of his enemies.

Old-style MMORPGs did not reward skill; they rewarded vast amounts of time that could be sunk into playing them. The hobby that our Nerd so desperately Loves was something he could be good at with minimal skill. Even an annoying online game, such as a FPS multiplayer map as is found in dudebro Halo heaven, requires skill to progress, not merely time. World of Warcraft, the current whipping boy for “lol game iz too easy!!!” idiocy, still requires skill to play at the highest echelons of play. After all, how many guilds worldwide have managed to kill the heroic-only boss of this tier of raiding? Less than 10,000, the last time I looked. Less than 10,000 out of a game that has over 12 million subscribers. Clearly, if there are ultra-nerds that want to play the game and be the biggest Billy Bad Ass on the block, the potential is there…

So why do these grizzled veterans of the Nerd Love sagas not “nerd up” and jump in with top-tier raiding guilds in World of Warcraft or Aion or other popular MMOs?

Because somewhere along the way, the outer adult Nerd did realize that it was time to grow up. The inner Nerd may be stuck in Mom’s basement, but the outer Nerd got a respectable job, a mortgage, a house, and probably a few kids to support. He goes to work in the morning, and can only squeeze in an hour or two of gaming at night after the kids are in bed while his wife reads on the couch. The outer Nerd does not have the things that the inner Nerd still desires: the power, the prestige, the success. But that is OK, because none of us really have those things. Avarice and greed begets only more avarice and greed. Even CEOs and the ultra-rich and the leaders of nations still have bad days; they still have to take a shit after they eat. They still have to deal with the petty annoyances that the rest of us do, and they are just as unsatisfied with the things they have because satisfaction cannot be grasped through having the most of something, whether it is earthly political power of the most “leet” gear in EverQuest. Status is what we make of it, and has no more wider importance in the world than what we attach to it.

Nerds!

So the casual player who finally gets a crafted epic in WoW and the world-class raider that got a server-first kill on Cho’gall are equal in their own eyes: they have achieved some arbitrary goal and can now feel “good” about themselves, because they can proudly display the product of their action. The “good feeling” or value that was created is a distillation of time and effort spent, of skills acquired.

But for some, the Inner Nerd will not be silenced. The Inner Nerd still loves the feeling of the Hobby that came to dominate a part of the Inner Nerd’s formative years. Like a drug addict questing for that mythical first-time high, the Inner Nerd will not relinquish the dream. And the Inner Nerd tells the Outer Nerd these lies, that things really were so much better before everyone else got wise to how cool this hobby could be, and Inner Nerd was king among a subculture. And so the Outer Nerd writes diatribes about how good things used to be and how everyone is ruining his fun by having fun of their own.

This is the same subcultural exclusivity phenomenon one finds among any identifiable subculture: hipsters, for example, are routinely mocked for it, although I can think of several other handy examples, like goths. When one becomes king of a relatively small group through manipulation of esoteric knowledge common only to that subculture, it can be an effective substitute for that person’s own lack of efficacy in the wider world. This same practice happens in academia, as Lusipurr can attest, where students and professors rush to carve themselves out a niche just small enough that they can claim expertise. In fact, I conjecture, this happens in all walks of life and everything because it is a drab fucking prospect to realize that no matter how good we get at something, someone will always be better, know more, or do more, and thus we will never truly matter in the cosmic scope of things…

And so we tell ourselves comforting lies, like the Inner Nerd tells the Outer Nerd, and we hope that those lies are true, and romanticize about the “good old days” when things really were better, before too many people started crowding in on our little niche and it got hard to feel super-special about ourselves.

Nerds!!!

But things never are as bad as we believe. And wishing for things to return to the idealized former state betrays a sickening nihilism about the possibility of new horizons. People cling to this pablum like security blankets, because psychologically, that is what ideas like “pre-2005 MMOs were better because they were a niche nerd hobby and I fucking conquered that beat” are. They are comforting things people can hold on to so as to avoid the realization that their “hobby” is meaningless, mindless nothing that adds nothing to their life but pure, simple, unadulterated enjoyment of life.

And until they realize that not only is that enough, but that it is absolutely essential to happiness, as my good buddy and touchstone Bernard Suits said, they will be doomed to this same nihilistic cycle. Put that in your Friedrich Nietzsche and eternally recur it.

As longtime followers my jaunty scribblings will testify, I was a big fan of Dragon Age: Origins, both in terms of its solid, BioWare-infused gameplay and the foray into dark fantasy storytelling, which is often passed over in favor of the somewhat more accessible and young-person friendly epic fantasy storytelling.

So it makes sense that I would be suitably excited for the upcoming March 8 release of Dragon Age 2, and suitably excited to demo the game. The demo is more a “tech demo” than anything else, providing enough of an overview of the gameplay without giving anything in terms of plot away.

Although I have all major game systems, I opted to pre-purchase the game for my PC through the wonderful folks at Steam, and so I opted for the PC version of the demo. My reasoning for this is twofold: one, I spend more time gaming on my PC since I do not have to steal the TV remote from my wife, and two, I wanted to really push the game graphically. For comparison, I have an ATI/AMD system with dual 5850s and a 3.0 GHz 4-core processor, powering a 24″ monitor at 1680×1050 resolution… by no means a budget-busting hoss of a computer. Because I do not do things by half-measures, however, I cranked the video settings to “melt circuits” and “DirectX 11” and cried havoc.

Hawke looks more like the guy who serves me coffee than a medieval warrior.

The game rendered gorgeously with minimal slowdown. Visuals were immediately strong as the introductory video kicked off. After a moment, I was led to a lie of a character customization screen. For the purposes of the demo (probably to keep the file size down), character recustomization has been limited to choosing between a male or a female Hawke, and one of three primary character archetypes: warrior, rogue or mage.

This felt very familiar to the Mass Effect system, where the name and basic persona of the main character were built in (thus doing away with the multiple origin stories possible from the first Dragon Age). However, all the requisite sliders are there to be able to more fully customize a character at launch.

I chose, rather predictably, a male warrior Hawke. Shut up.

The battle system is blessedly familiar to anyone who has played a BioWare game before. Fear not, lovers of pausing to enter commands before every battle. That possibility is preserved, along with an auto-pause at the start of combat so that paranoid worrywarts can fret over whether they are the type of person that will cast a fireball spell, even though they have been casting that spell all day and people are starting to look at them funny. “Does she know any other spells?” they whisper behind mocking hands. “I mean, surely a cone of cold here or there would not hurt!”

But for those of us whose lives are so fast-paced and exciting that pausing a fucking fight to agonize over just which spell to use, combat feels more fluid and focused. BioWare seems to have acknowledged that the World of Warcraft interface and control scheme has ascended to divine status, and properly enshrined it in the game. Movement can be accomplished either with the familiar WASD movement keys, or by holding down both mouse buttons and turning the mouse. Keyboard turners will surely die, as nature intended. Survival of the fittest and all.

There is a “right click to move” option that I recommend disabling, because click-to-move is annoying and bad and only bad people play that way.

Targeting is accomplished by left-clicking on an enemy. If a targeted spell is selected from the hotbar (1 through = on the PC; probably the controller buttons modified by bumpers on consoles), the targeting reticule changes from a sword to a set of crosshairs, allowing the player to choose which enemy is about to eat a Pommel Strike. Right-clicking begins autoattacking.

My major complaint with the battle schema is that Hawke does not have a default “autoattack a hostile creature within range” option. It is annoying to be attacking a pack of monsters only to have one die, and then Hawke pause to stare dumbly at the rest. Or if a monster dies during the ramp-up to an ability, the ability does not get transfered to the nearest hostile creature. This sort of auto-targeting and auto-attacking really should be standard, BioWare.

Hawke selects an "angry fist" conversation option.

One of the improvements to combat is that it does not feel so static any more. Lots of spells and powers will physically move the character around the battlefield, attacking different groups, knocking them back, and then hurrying on to the next pack. Character attack and spellcasting animations have also been improved dramatically, giving combat a much more realistic, faster pace.

The sound and voice-acting is exactly what one should expect from a BioWare game: excellent music, well-delivered lines with servicable, solid writing (even if it never ventures into the sublime). Leveling progression has also been improved, with actual skill trees clearly defined by role or purpose in combat rather than simple ticky-boxes.

The single best improvement I can mention is the adoption of the Mass Effect 2 style conversation wheel. BioWare has also added some “icons” to the middle of the wheel that (roughly?) correspond to the answer type players are choosing. For instance, stereotypical good-guy (Paragon?) actions have a blue angel, whereas smart-assed mouthy responses have the comedy mask. Some others have a fern leaf (beats me) or an angry fist (tough guy!). The morality system seems a little familiar, and one is never left wondering which option will result in which side, the dark or the light, the character is playing for.

All in all, the demo is meant to showcase the systems and not the world or the story. Precious little is revealed, except that the main action will not take place in Ferelden again, but will instead involve Kirkwall, the “City of Chains,” and some very, very busty women. I expect this kind of breast-obsessed nonsense from Biggs, but not you, BioWare. Come on now, let us have some realism in female body types along with our dragons and darkspawn and elves.

Isabella is a top-heavy pirate captain encountered in Kirkwall

So, readers, if you were wondering whether to pre-purchase Dragon Age 2 for that sweet preorder loot, the demo will tell you whether or not you will enjoy it. If you are a BioWare fan, expect more of the same high-quality and polish that BioWare delivers, wrapped around a cinematic quality game with a first-rate player experience. If you find BioWare to be an evil, soulless front for EA’s evil soullessness, well then, have fun playing something else.

But enough about me! No one comes here to hear that drivel; they want crackpot theories and humorous scribblings about video games.

But we are not going to be laughing today, readers, because today we are going to talk about pirates. And piracy.

Yarr!

Back in the days when Lusipurr was young (1600 and onward) piracy was kind of a big deal in the world. Back before we had the Internet, people had to share stuff by loading it on to big wooden ships and send them across the globe. Pirates were smelly guys that lived in dirty hovels and made a living off of hijacking those ships and taking their cargo.

This kind of piracy still happens today, unfortunately, but as cool as it would be to go into an in-depth discussion of economics of piracy, that is not the kind of piracy I am concerned with.

Rather, it is “game piracy.”

Anyone who has owned a computer since, oh, the days when we had to punch data in by cards, knows about software piracy. Hell, they even made a video about it.

The advent of the personal computer was at once the ultimate boon and greatest curse for the video game industry. With a computer, the technical limits of game developers, proprietary hardware, and even buggy releases were mere inconveniences. A PC game has some graphical glitches? Release a patch! Need a little bit more hardware to play a PC game? Throw in a new video card! It freed people from the arcades and consoles; it allowed, for the first time, gaming to be a truly social experience.

But, because games had to be stored locally on computers, they possibility of duplicating game data became very, very real. After all, reasoned the pirate, why should I have to pay for the game that my buddy just bought? I will have him make me a copy!

This was an unsurprising move; the same thing was true of magnetic audio tapes, compact disks, VHS tapes, and virtually any electronic medium that could be easily duplicated at home.

Long story short, software piracy became common, mostly because electronic data required far less than other forms of piracy. No physical medium was actually necessary after digital downloading became possible. Even today, getting a new piece of software, completely without limits, is as easy as firing up a web browser and finding a BitTorrent download.

The most recent (and shocking) example is of Crysis 2, a flagship PC FPS title published by EA. This is a triple-A, top-flight development game, done by a studio with considerable know-how and published by the biggest publisher in gaming… so how did this happen? Rogue hackers? Evil mastermind?

Nah; inside job. Someone who worked on its development likely leaked it. This is like the captain of the aforementioned sailing ship throwing a line over to the pirate ship and saying, “Hey, lotsa rum over here! Come and get it!”

Arr, mateys!

And it is why companies continue to layer on pointless security software to prevent piracy, which penalizes legitimate users, because let us face facts, pirates will always find a way to be pirates.

And no matter how many well-intentioned pleas go out from people that piracy is literally killing the PC game industry, pirates continue to rationalize their behavior with increasingly bizarre logic.

Eventually, this escalation has to stop: game companies and gamers (including pirates) have to come to an understanding. No more piracy, no more restrictive DRM, or prepare for all major-studio, non-MMO titles to be console-only.

And I like console gaming; do not get me wrong. Consoles are fine machines, but some games just work better on a PC control scheme, and it is always nice to have complete control of just how much power is going through the components of my system, or to have access to the ease of updating that the PC provides.

PC gaming will end if the piracy does not stop; and since we all agree that no security system will ever be sufficient, we, the gamers, need to do something about piracy. We need to not pirate software; we need to not support pirates, and we need to send a message that piracy is wrong. If we ever expect companies to stop treating us like criminals, we need to stop tolerating criminals in our midst. If we want good game studios to stay in business, we need to support them and the people that put in the hard work to make games. And yes, that means support them by paying a fair price for their work. If we feel that large game companies do not care about their customers or their employees and are only out to bilk us out of money, then piracy is the wrong way to go about activism. If you want to make a statement, make a statement by refusing to buy their games, and refusing to play them. Playing the game after pirating it only says, “yes, you are making a desirable product, Evil Game Company, but I will not financially support what you do and will turn to breaking the law in order to get what I want.”

The problem is that they stopped listening after someone said that they made a desirable product.

So stop giving Evil Game Companies reasons to be evil; if they are driven by profit as a motive, then they will do what is profitable. Good game companies are all around, and they manage to be profitable because they put out a good product and treat their employees and consumers well. Support them, and stop supporting pirates as some sort of anti-heroic crusaders.

Apparently it offends his sense of style, which is odd. As an English major, he should know that liberal use of the apostrophe defines classic works of English literature. Also, look at Robert Burns. Dude is a certified “have-to-read-in-English class” poet, and he gets to go around saying things like “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,” just for talking to a mouse he found “cowering” outside his Scottish hovel one day. Also, “hovel” apparently originally meant a vent for smoke or a shed for animals. Look it up! It is exactly the sort of place where Scots would live.

This is what a sleekit beastie may look like.

But for some reason he lets me use the word “druthers.” The etymology of this word says it is a contraction. Why does Da Boss let me get away with such profligate prolix promiscuity with his beloved English language?

I think under that gruff exterior that sends gushy tweets about his main squeeze, he is really just a softie. And let us think about that: he is a kind-hearted soul that gives a band of rogues, miscreants, fart app aficionados and lost Canadians a place to come every week to bitch about video games and attempt to drive poor Oliver and Ethan to madness. Seriously, guys, way to hang in there through the podcast abuse that gets flung out. You go, girls.

When I first met Lusi, it was on the Wild, Wild West of the Internet. For those of my readers who are too young to remember what the Internet was like before Facebook and Youtube civilized it, there was this dark and unholy place known as Livejournal, which was how ugly girls shared topless pictures with whiny poetry-writing wuss-men before Myspace streamlined the process.

Lusi and I would banter carelessly back and forth on philosophy forums, debating the relative merits of Roman Catholic dogma, British empiricism and that stylish übermensch Immanuel Kant. Then one day he had the perhaps-insane idea to ask me to write a column on video games after I bitched about how lame Aion‘s closed beta was.

But before that, I had no idea that he would have been a gamer; he seemed to me to be the type that might avoid video games as gauche. I mean, I knew that I liked them, sure, but I eat chili and cook meat with fire outside, as my Viking ancestors did in the days when we were conquering his ancestors. I lack refinement and polish; for Heaven’s sake, I drink iced tea that is supersaturated with sugar, like some sort of barbarian.

Which said a lot about my views about who played video games, and about the general state of games. Well-known MMO blogging site Massively.com recently linked to a story about gamers bucking the stereotype, which nicely dovetailed with a few things I have been ruminating over in the wake of the apparent end of the “Dickwolf Debacle”. For those just joining us (and who missed my epic stomping fit back in August) the linked blog has a good timeline of exactly what a dickwolf is and why we are debacling over it. I suppose I am really miffed that we did not get included on the timeline, so hopefully a trackback link will get us noticed.

I suppose online poker counts as a game...

There is no question that the Debacle exposed a lot of bad stereotypes on both sides of the argument. After all, even though I am squarely in the “Gabe and Tycho reacted in absolutely the wrong way to a fan’s reaction to the comic” camp, threats of violence against Gabe’s wife and kids is not only wrong, it is criminal and I hope that someone spends some time in jail over it. It makes me embarrassed for my “side,” because that is just plain idiotic.

On the other hand, let us not forget that the other side created twitter accounts like “teamrape,” allied themselves with the thoroughly detestable “men’s rights activism” movement, and in general acted like a bunch of privileged, misogynist dudebros, which is an unfortunate stereotype about gamers.

To tie these two themes together, I realized that my own views on gaming were based on a bit of self-loathing. Despite the über-confident approach I spin out all the time (a side effect of my education) I am often unsure of myself, down on myself, and my own worst critic. Because I am sort of a socially awkward kind of guy, I bought in to the “loner male not good with people who lacks cultural refinement” because I thought/think that describes/described me. And that was when I realized that stereotypes about gamers are bad and we should actively work to dispel them.

Except it does not help when gamers reinforce those stereotypes like they did in the Debacle… except that now that I reread the timeline, I find I was too negative. For every “Dick Wolvington” or “teamrape,” there were progressive, feminist, liberal and leftist bloggers out there discussing it… and not all of them took the side of the somewhat-reactionary and overly-snarky Shakesville.

Nate?

Do not get me wrong; I read Shakesville from time-to-time and enjoy it, but it is not the sort of site I would send someone to for an introductory education to feminist critical theory. I like Melissa’s snark, but she (unapologetically, I believe) writes in an abrasive manner and can be a little dismissive and derailing herself. Oh well, no one is perfect.

I thought Courtney Stanton’s response was the best: the answer to speech one does not like is never to call for a cessation of the speech, but to engage in free speech oneself. That people who ostensibly supported Gabe and Tycho’s freedom of expression tried to shut her down by demanding that she prove she was a rape survivor shows just how interested they were in actual free exchange and discussion of ideas.

The problem was never the comic itself; the original Shakesville reaction to it was not an unjustified reaction. The strip is triggering, but no one has a duty to avoid discussing triggering things, just to label them (if one is being polite about it). But I am not sure that Penny-Arcade owes its fans a triggering label; hell, they may not have even known the term before, and it would be unfair of us to impose upon them some sort of requirement that they devote their free time to reading social theory journals.

Biggs?

But their reaction to a fan (not a critic) and her understandably negative reaction to a comic that contained a superfluous rape reference was where it all went wrong; instead of just saying, “Hey, sorry you got offended reading our comic, we did not mean to upset you, because the point of the joke was actually to make fun of arbitrary moral actions in MMOs…” Gabe and Tycho acted upset that anyone would dare criticize them in this fashion and made light of very important and very real social theory regarding rape and rape culture. I am not saying that they needed to agree with all of that fancy academic theory, but they should not have been so dismissive of it and encouraged the misogynist tripe on Twitter and elsewhere.

And I am really upset it ended up like it did, but feel like I needed to comment on it to try and pull something positive out of how bad it all ended up. I think that stereotypes people have about gamers and gaming culture need to evaporate, and for better or worse, people like Gabe and Tycho are major cultural trendsetters for gamers. It would have been nice to see them push the gaming community in a more progressive, socially-conscious direction, but I suppose that is not their primary purpose or duty.

But it can be mine.

Oddly enough, this image is courtesy of an actual Dick Wolf.

I am a gamer. I play video games. I sometimes forego going to social events with people I know “in real life” to stay home and play video games with people I only know over the Internet… and I do not find anything wrong with that. I am sociable; I smile and laugh when I am out with people. I have a great marriage. I have a great job, two degrees, and I am not above whipping out my iPhone at lunch for a quick round of Angry Birds. I am an academic and a feminist. I believe in social justice. But I also like Mountain Dew (well, the Diet variety, but still) and am not above ordering delivery pizza for dinner. I have rolled my fair share of polygonal dice while attacking the darkness. If someone told me they had a plus two broadsword, I would know what they meant. I actually took a course on the linguistics of Middle Earth and analyzed poems written in a fake language. I live a balanced and healthy life while being a huge freaking dork, and I love that about myself. And I pledge to try and show the world a positive face for the gaming subculture, a subculture I believe can be inclusive and tolerant and positive.

Not so anymore, mein Freund. I do not actually speak Swedish, but I do speak German, which is close enough.

A tale... of sorts...

Anyway, Paradox Interactive developed this game, Magikca. And the gameoblogosphere has found it quite entertaining, because it is kind of cool in some regards, but fails to really “nail it” in a few very important regards.

First and foremost, this game is funny. And I do not mean funny in the way my columns usually are (that is, not funny), nor funny in the way the podcast is (tragedy of epic proportions), but I mean really chuckle-out-loud funny. Why?

Lots and lots of nerdy references. This is like a Sierra adventure game (and if anyone else is old enough to remember Sierra Adventure Games, come on by my room after lights out, and we will get in a covert game of cribbage while we watch Matlock). Everything is funny, from the achievement titles (“I put on my robe and wizard hat”) to the villager Gram’s “workshop,” whose logo parodies Warhammer Fantasy Battle developer “Games Workshop.” More “lulz” can be had as one explores spider-haunted mines to find spooning halfling skeletons and a sword named, er, “Stung.”

The story of the game is pretty bare bones: the player is a student at Scandinavian Hogwarts, and gets sent out (literally) to save the world, because that is just what students at magical schools do. Armed with a face-concealing robe, a battery of useless weapons, and an inventive magic system, the player is sent out to do battle with all manner of nasty beasties like goblins and trolls.

The best part of the game, however, is the magic system. The player is given control of eight elements and can combine them in fun and exciting ways. For instance, combining the “Shield” element with the “Life” element and casting it on one’s self produces a barrier that will protect the player’s HP. Casting “Water” and “Shield” on the outside world, however, produces a rainstorm. Other effects, like combining “Water” and “Fire” to create steam, or “Water” and “Cold” to create ice, are more straightforward.

Combat, on the other hand, becomes a little hectic. There is no time to gently strategize and pick out interesting combinations of spells, such as a fireball. Rather, players will find themselves frantically mashing buttons and returning to old stand-bys. I find the Arcane Beam and the Chain Lightning spells to be my favorites.

A screenshot of in-game madness

Which leads me in to my biggest gripe with the game: the controls are wonky. Movement is accomplished not in a Diablo-esque fashion, but rather by holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse. This scheme is very counter-intuitive and I found myself mistakenly mashing my Life spell button (W) when I wanted to move forward, and mistakenly setting NPCs on fire when I tried to right-click them to talk to them.

A few suggestions, should the Swedish be listening in, and I am sure they are. First, allow players to store five or six basic spells as hotkeys. For instance, if I could save my Arcane Beam, Heal, Fireball, and Barrier spells, combat would be greatly simplified. A one-key press to queue up my high-usage spells is not only a time-saver, but a life-saver.

Second, come up with a better way to move. Click-to-move is the most obvious, as that way players could set a move in motion while queueing up spells.

And third, improve the targeting. It is rather frustrating to be facing one way, only to activate a spell that misfires. Maybe have the spell track the cursor, or some other way to improve player targeting.

Other than that, Magicka is a fun and innovative game with pleasant graphics, humor under every stone, and jaunty tunes. It also has a cooperative online counterpart, but as no one I know on Steam (cough cough readers add me) wants to play with me, I have been locked out. So if you see me on, dear and constant readers, drop in to slay some goblins!

Magicka on Steam

Also on our panel today are Harry “teh h4rdcore” Veterano, who has been playing massively multiplayer online games since he and his two friends hooked up their Tandy computers together in the late 80s after an all-night Mountain Dew and Dungeons and Dragons binge! Along with Harry we have Celeste Novicci, better known to the viewing public as “Casual Celeste,” “Celeste the Pet Collector,” and “Oh my God did she seriously just run IN to the giant fire-breathing dragon?”

Rounding out our panel is an actual game developer, the eminently well known “Spiritwalker,” lead systems designer for a very popular MMO. Because we are all giant fuck-off nerds here, we will not refer to him by his given, Christian name, because what is the point? No one would recognize it!

This is not the appropriate round table...

Shhhhh! It is beginning!

Spiritwalker: Good evening lady and gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with me. That is right, the tranquilizers should be wearing off. I hope you do not mind, but we have had to restrain you for your own protection. If the straps chafe, just say so and my attendants will be happy to see to your base, creature comforts.

Lane: I was told there would be delicious cake?

Spiritwalker: Haha, sure, but first you have got to clear waves upon waves of trash before you face me in single combat, at which time I may drop a piece of delicious cake… or I might just drop a rutabaga. Who knows? Random number generators are fun.

Lane: I find I already wish to strike you.

Spiritwalker: Haha, that is no way to treat your ol’ buddy Spiritwalker! Celeste? Harry? Are you two aware of your surroundings yet?

Harry: Oh my God you guys, this totally reminds me of that time in Ultima Online when that one boss cast a poison cloud over us and…

Spiritwalker presses a button on his chair arm; a powerful shock is delivered directly to Harry’s groin. Harry doubles over in pain.

Spiritwalker: I am terribly sorry, but you know what they say, ‘spare the volts, spoil the dolts!”

Celeste: You monster! You cannot do this?

Spiritwalker: Oh? Did you not read your end-user license agreement? Paragraph K, subsection (1)(c), “Snowstorm reserves the right to capture, abduct, torture, mutilate, force to participate in prisoner’s dilemmas, force to solve complex equations, or place into gladiatorial combat any signatory to this agreement.”

Celeste: Some guy in Trade Chat told me EULAs were not legally binding.

Spiritwalker: Lane? Chime in any time, buddy.

Lane: Trust me, I’m a lawyer. What he says is correct. And if my guess is correct, we are somewhere over international waters… we are on their turf, Celeste.

This is also not the appropriate round table

Celeste: Wait until my Livejournal hears about this!

Spiritwalker: Honestly, no one cares about you. They only pretend to be your friends in hopes that you will post nude pictures! Haha, internet nerds, am I right?

Lane: Sadly, sir, I cannot quarrel with your logic.

Spiritwalker: Enough humorous banter. Our viewers have probably started downloading porn or something by now. We are here to talk about how we, evil online game companies can bilk you out of even more money. See, we like that you enjoy our little games so much that you devote so much time to running along every little treadmill or obstacle course we put in front of you… and for what? Bragging rights to other nerds?

Lane: Who are you to judge how I spend my leisure time?

Spiritwalker: Hmmm? Oh, sorry. I tuned you out because I was thinking of my fleet of yachts and pleasure barges. But my question is: have we made the games too easy? Are they really just fun attractions at this point, devoid of challenge or a test of your skills?

Celeste: No way! We tried to run this raid the other night, Vault of the Shadow Nightmare, and we totally spent thirty minutes wiping on the first boss! It was this giant cliff and we kept running off of it, but we just could not damage it.

Harry: Oh my God are you serious? My guild cleared that a week before it was released. We paid some Russian guy to hack in to the servers for us and did it blindfolded, just because of how easy the game has gotten. I really wish that they would make another MMO like Everquest. I loved being a 20-year-old college student with tons of free time. Because I could spend more time in there doing fun stuff like running all the way across the world on quest chains that took six months to complete, I could obtain better stuff and feel superior to everyone else. Now everyone who has a few free hours a week can play the same game I do, and I find my ego threatened.

Spiritwalker: Well, this may sound surprising, but we are not entirely deaf to your pleas. But we worry if we go back to that, our game will return to being a niche hobbyist’s idea of fun, and the millions of people that aren’t 20-year-olds living on student loans probably should get to play the game as well.

Lane: That does not mean, however, that games must be entirely easy. Gradations of difficulty within the same content provide an easy way to allow skilled groups to seek a challenge, whereas more casual players can also experience the content.

Celeste: Yay!

Everyone else: Shut up.

Spiritwalker: Fine, fine, but that only applies to certain aspects of the game. What about death penalties?

Harry: Man, I remember in Everquest when you died, you really died. You spent the next 30 minutes hanging around a town begging some high-level character to help you go get your stuff back. And if you had to log off or your mom came in and pulled the plug or your Internet connection died, you just LOST your stuff. But I never had to worry, all I did was stand around Freeport in my awesome gear and get lots of /tells asking how I got it all. It was great.

Lane: Wow, your ego really cannot get any larger. I mean, it is good to have hobbies you are proud of, but maybe you should not tie your self-worth to a digital avatar.

Harry: SCREW YOU, NOOB! You just want stuff to be on easy mode with no penalty for dying!

Lane: Not true, but death penalties are counterproductive bits of game design. In terms of playing a game, there should be some risk one must wager in order to gain a reward. Players that engage in a ranked PVP match, for example, risk their own ranking by engaging in the fight. Failure to win results in a loss of rank; the risk and reward are equivalent.

Spiritwalker: But what about people that play non-competitively and do not care about rank?

Lane: Anyone playing in a group also risks the failure of the entire group by dying during some sort of activity. The penalty for death is not personal, but shared by the entire group. Much like an individual player on a team sport does not “lose” the game by failing to play well, the members of a raid or whatever pay when one member is slacking. This spreads the risk out over the group and encourages cooperation and helping everyone perform to a certain level.

Harry: That is dumb. If we have to do that, we will always be limited by bad players. I am not losing out on my phat lewtz because some nub stands in fire.

Lane: I think you are missing the point of cooperative play; your only reason for playing is to pad your own outsized ego. The idea of collective effort for collective gain escapes you, and I pity the group that must endure you.

Spiritwalker: So what about solo players? Or people that just like to explore, or play a certain role?

Lane: It comes down to a limitation of game systems. “Themepark” games with pre-defined progression paths and transparent systems are necessarily less friendly to solo players, explorers, crafter, and so on, because most of the progression is tied to some sort of endgame. Other games might focus heavily on player-versus-player combat, whether in an open world or in a series of pre-defined war-games. Still, the progression path on each is charged. “Sandbox,” games on the other hand, are probably more suited to this style of gameplay.

Spiritwalker: Well, we would ideally like to get as big a subscriber base as possible. Cannot we design a game that appeals to both types of players?

Harry: They already did. It was called “Dark Age of Camelot” and it was awesome and my nostalgia bone is just throbbing to play it again.

This is a silly place...

Lane: I think you may be romanticizing the past; certainly, at the time, you probably had ways in which the game could improve, and now only look back on it fondly because it contains features you wish your current game had. It might be possible to create a sandbox game that also includes heavily-scripted, premium endgame PVE and PVP content, but the amount of programming necessary to achieve something like that would require an enormous initial investment, and if this panel has shown anything, it is that MMO gamers are fickle little whiners that will change their opinion at the drop of a hat.

Celeste: I know that everyone is ignoring me, but hear me out. Unlike Harry, I have a job and kids and a husband that occasionally likes for me to cook dinner with him. It just is not possible for me to play the game like Harry does; it takes time to develop skills, time I do not have. I prefer a more relaxed playstyle, but I also want to see the cool stuff at the end!

Spiritwalker: Should not that endgame content be exclusive, however? Not everyone gets to play in the pros, after all.

Lane: But that is my point! I may not be a pro ball player, but I can take my bat and glove and head down to the park and play. I can join a local amateur league and get my fill. The point is that both the pickup player like Celeste and a pro player get to play the same game, just at vastly different skill levels.

Spiritwalker: So how can we tailor our game so that pros and casuals can co-exist? If we set the difficulty bar at a low enough level that casuals can compete, professionals will find the content too easy, get bored, and cancel subscriptions. If we set the difficulty bar too high, the inverse is true: only the truly hardcore stay subscribed. Either way, we lose money.

Harry: Man, even if you set the bar in the middle it is still too easy for me!

Lane: The prick is right.

Spiritwalker: WHAAAAAAA?

Lane: I know he is an offensive dickhead, but broken clocks are still correct twice a day. Setting the bar “in the middle” only serves to frustrate middle-level players who cannot overcome it, and still keeps extreme casuals from being able to play. Instead of a binary system, we need a risk-reward system.

Spiritwalker: I am listening.

Lane: Take the death penalty, for example. Let us say that there are five things a player can wager with concomitant levels of rewards. A player can form a raid with his guild and risk it all, that is, character death is “perma-death,” but in return, the rewards can be extraordinary. And why not? If a player continues this type of risky behavior, eventually, something will kill him, and he will have to start over from square one!

Spiritwalker: That sounds like it might make him quit in rage.

Lane: No one is forcing him to risk everything; if that sounds too draconian, lock him out of that character for a week while a “ritual of resurrection” is being performed. We could also do a “risk most of it” type of level, wherein the player risks a piece of gear. If he wins, get gets the gear back plus a new high-level item. If he fails, he loses the gear.

Spiritwalker: Also frustrating, but certainly not game-ending…

Lane: Or a third level, wherein the player stands to gain a less-powerful but still desirable piece of gear, with the risk being that if he fails more than five or ten times total in the entire encounter, he is locked out of that raid for a week.

Harry: I… I think I like this…

Celeste: And what about me?

Lane: Well, casual players or players looking to learn the fights can forego the high-powered items for the “regular” or fourth mode of the instance. You do not get the good stuff, but the penalty you suffer is fairly minimal: pay some gold to repair your gear and remove some stat loss, or even a minor experience debt that must be made up before the end of the week.

Celeste: I do not know, I am a pretty bad player…

Lane: … which is why I would propose a fifth and “novice” setting, wherein players that are struggling can forego all rewards except for the absolute minimum (something like Valor Points or Badges of Justice). That way, players can experience a more forgiving encounter, but they will get less.

Spiritwalker: I like it; it satisfies the requirement that death mean something while providing appropriate rewards for the amount players are risking.

Lane: If you give players the choice to tailor the difficulty of their game to their own specific level, you increase general happiness. Sure, it requires slightly more work to create and maintain five separate levels of encounters with concomitant amounts of gear, but it would increase player happiness overall.

Spiritwalker: Excellent! I am glad we had this discussion, but I see my chopper has arrived.

Spiritwalker stands and tosses a key into the middle of the table.

That will open your manacles. The first one out may save the others… or leave them to die. I leave the choice to you.

EXEUNT

I am sorry. I cannot, in good faith, complete that sentence. What I lack in insightful analysis I promise to make up for in cursing and jokes at Japan’s expense. Except not today. I am actually going to be complimentary of Japan.

The topic of the day is inspired by someone’s completion of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Naturally upon finishing a game wherein one must inevitably assume the presence of a sequel (damn it, cliffhanger endings!), one speculates upon the setting of the sequel.

There has already been some internet speculation about the sequel, and here is what we know: bunkum.

We do know this: Desmond will be back (yay!) and (spoiler alert!) shit is about to get real, especially if a character is voiced by Kristen Bell. Why Desmond chose to (serious fucking spoiler alert!) stab Lucy is beyond me. I would have stabbed R3b3c(4, just for the fucking 1337-sp33k, like it is fucking Megatokyo: The Video Game Desu or something. But still, the public has a right to wild speculation on the sequel, so here we go!

We know, or pretty much should, that Ezio is gone as our leading man. We’ve turned him into a godly über-Assassin twice now, and if the third game starts off with me losing all my hard-earned armor and weapons again, I will stab a sumbitch. Finally, Ezio’s getting pretty up there in years, so we need a new young Bildungsroman character to bildung. But where to locate this character? To fit with series continuity, two minimal conditions must be met: (1) it must be conceivable that within the 500 years or so since we last saw Ezio he had sex with someone that conceivably had a child that, through the miracle of generations, had a descendant that ended up in the new place and (2) it must be a period of major, world-changing historic upheaval where both the Templars and Assassins would be fighting over a Piece of Eden.

We also know that the series will conclude its overarching mythic story about the destruction of the world in 2012 by a solar flare unless Desmond can prevent it by finding the remaining Temples of the First Civilization that he found (spoooooiiillleeerrrs!) by activating the Apple at the end of Brotherhood. But we do not really know where these Temples are; we have some nuance of an idea from clues dropped in both the original game and the sequel as to the locations of Pieces of Eden, and we know that Denver, Colorado is a big place to Abstergo/the Templars. But where to locate the memories of the Assassin ancestor to give us that juicy mix of historical, swashbuckling gameplay and free-running?

Tell me this is not an iconic Assassin's Creed image

Candidate One: Feudal Japan

Why this works: the “romanticized” versions of the Assassins (in-game) and the ninja are virtually identical. They are secret societies of warrior-assassins trained in all manner of deadly arts, credited with supernatural speed and powers, that live in remote hermitages apart from the main power structure and work against that structure by fomenting rebellion for the “little people.” There is literally nothing about the common conception of ninja and ninjutsu that does not scream “Assassins!”

Japan has also had a period of major political upheaval within the right time frame, the Meiji Restoration. It is complete with samurai versus ninja (swords! throwing knives! guns!) and distinctive culture and architecture, just like the AC treatment of the Third Crusade and the Renaissance.

Textual support: we also know that there is some connection between Japan and Those Who Came Before, as listed by Subject 16 at the end of the first game: Yonaguni, which is hinted at being one of the First Civilization’s installations, maybe the one seen in The Truth video found by decoding Subject 16’s glyphs in Assassin’s Creed II.

Why it will all end in tears: although the Meiji Restoration was very important to Japan, it did not have much effect outside Japan, as the Japanese tended not to export their own internal strife by being so damn closed off to everyone. It is also a bit daunting (not impossible, but daunting) to explain how the Auditore family line migrated across the middle and far East to arrive on Japan just in time for the end of the samurai era. It is also a bit “too convenient” for Japan to have a ready-made assassin mythos parallel to the Hashashin. It is the “easy way out,” so to speak, and there is no clear way to tie it to the 2012 storyline, unless the big ultimate Temple with the magical McGuffin that will save us all is buried in the Yonaguni facility.

Candidate Two: The French Revolution

Why this works: In the great swath of European history, the next major time of social upheaval following the Renaissance is when those cheese-eating Jacobins in France decided that kings sucked and they wanted democracy, and if they could not get it, they would start guillotining motherfuckers left and right. It is the perfect continuation of the story.

It also has some degree of swashbuckle to it, with Alexandre Dumas’ famous novel providing both the setting and some interesting side characters. Throw in some famous historical figures like Napoleon, Robespierre, et cetera, and we have the makings of an AC game!

That is no way to get ahead in life, son.

Textual support: literally, none. I suppose there is one bit during the climactic scenes of Brotherhood, dealing with distinctive Anatolian headgear, but even that is pretty tenuous.

Why it will all end in tears: because Europe has been done to death by Assassin’s Creed. C’mon, there is a wider world out there, Ubisoft Montreal! Also, while the French Revolution and ensuing wars are well-documented as being motivated, in some part, by Pieces of Eden (thank you, puzzles in AC: II), it is still rather difficult to connect it to the 2012 storyline. And while Paris is a city full of architectural wonder and many goings-on of history, it lacks the iconic cultural and social markers of the Crusades-era Levant or Renaissance Italy.

Candidate Three: Revolutionary Russia

Why this works: talk about the people rising up against a brutal monarchy! This is the quintessential people’s rebellion. Plenty of upheaval, lots of iconic architecture and language, lots of really, really bad people to kill (on par with the Borgia), and no one can deny the impact of the events in the Russian revolution on the ENTIRETY of the 20th century.

There are also lots of cool cities and environments in Russia to explore, from Moscow to St. Petersburg to the frozen wastes of Siberia, and a literal shit-ton of historical figures with which to ally and slay, from Lenin and Stalin to the peoples and nations involved in the First World War.

Textual support: not much, except that the comic book series related to the game is set in 19th century Russia, which acts as an effective prelude to the game, much in the same way the shorts about Ezio’s father acted as a prelude to Assassin’s Creed II.

Assassin's Creed: The Fall comic book cover

Why it will all end in tears: although this one has the best chance of being connected to the 2012 mythology (the Tunguska event, old Soviet space tech that could save us all), I am not sure America is ready for something portraying the Russians as the good guys, specifically the Bolsheviks, what with their evil soshulist ways that would later lead to blood libel against all capitalists everywhere.

Candidate Four: World War II Europe

Why this works: I do not think it does, actually. Not enough swords and stabbing people with knives, too touchy subject matter, and most importantly, there are people still alive that experienced that era that might get a tad offended if their actual lives were being subverted for a fantasy/sci-fi conspiracy game.

On the other hand, having a chance to hide in Hitler’s bunker and stab the guy? Priceless.

Textual support: Pretty bare bones, consisting a single interview where it was mentioned as possible. Other than that, we know that Hitler had a Piece of Eden during the run-up to the War, but must have lost it some time (during his disastrous decision to invade Russia?) because he was eventually defeated. Still, there was so much more going on besides the European front that it might just be too “big” of a setting to fit comfortably within a single game.

Why it will all end in tears: because World War II games have been done successfully in other genres, and the world is not ready for a re-imagining of arguably recent history in terms of an epoch-spanning conspiracy theory replete with aliens and an apocalypse. Too soon, Ubisoft. Too soon.

Candidate Five: There Is No Past

WHAT??: Bear with me, people. We know Desmond has to save the world, and he has already been trained to be a master assassin. Now it is time to take those Templar scum out in the modern world!

THIS IS A BAD IDEA: What gives the series its charm is its exploration of true history with a “reinterpretation” according to the game’s mythological structure, which is a battle between the humankind-enslaving Templars and the freedom-fighting Assassins. The free running is really an excuse to explore the architecture and culture of an interesting historical period, and to kill historical figures with a hidden blade. The use of archaic weaponry like swords provides a different feel to combat than a standard shooter, which is what a modern AC game would have to be, because no one kills with swords any more.

By removing that and focusing on Desmond’s struggle against the modern-day Templars, with no Animus, no historical tie-ins, no Subject 16… it removes these key elements of the game and makes it a forgettable Parkour-based time waster like Mirror’s Edge.

SO WHY EVEN MENTION THIS?: Because Five is a nice round number, and I like to be complete. Also…

It is the only one that has a real chance of being able to satisfactorily resolve the 2012 problem. Ezio’s purpose was to reveal to Desmond what he needed to do, and it is the height of silliness to say, “OK, let’s save the world! Plug me into a machine so I can relive my ancestor’s life!”

In Exegesis

So which one is the most likely? Personally, I would love feudal Japan, and that is the one I am secretly rooting for. I feel, however, that the most logical choice is Revolutionary Russia, because of the cities and the architecture, and the potential for a world-spanning conspiracy that could possibly resolve the 2012 issue. However… I think that the most likely choice is Revolutionary France, because it is European and the mention of the Phrygian Cap during the final scenes of Brotherhood.

So, grab those epees and floppy hats, Valjean, because shit is about to get miserables.

But, as in those rare times where Shawn is not lying through his teeth to us about bare-chested romance among the tse-tse flies of Darkest Africa, this time truth is more astounding than fiction. Researchers at some no-name university in Illinois (which is a made-up state, like Atlantis or England) have found a way to predict how good someone is at a video game by looking at brain scans, or as I prefer to think of it, sorcery.

This is your brain...

However cool and awesome this finding is, it is not funny, and since we’re in the Year of the Rabbit, I think we need more humor in our lives, especially Shawn, who was such a good sport through not one but two light-hearted jests in this increasingly-misnamed introduction. To that end, I now done my Science Fiction Writer cap (it is shaped like loneliness and bad characterization) and predict what University of Narnia Illinois researchers would find if they were to brave what even demons do not dare and peer in the Lusipurr.com staff’s brains. (Nota bene: the order was chosen by post date, not how much I dislike everyone).

SHAWN

Most of us know him as our lovable non-employer, because he makes us work, keeps us to a grueling schedule, and then does not pay us. Besides sending the occasional irate e-mail about proper formatting and management of the image database that we all disregard with extreme prejudice, behind that noggin of his pulses a squamous and hideous appendage known as his brain. Fueled by arcane electrochemical processes, this hive of madness hides what has been called a very measured brain that should be writing for some thoughtless rag called The Economist.

But what lurks beneath its cephalic curves? Upon gazing at the particolored MRI readout, would they see secret lust after Vanille? Breathless excitement at the unfortunate reality of a Final Fantasy XIII sequel? Unending frustration with my steadfast refusal to play Team Fortress 2?
I hypothesize that were our hypothetical scientists to gaze upon Shawn’s mind, they would be confronted by a rather prim and proper British gentlemen having a tavern sup and a spot of tea, railing against Irish literature and anything French.

JULIAN “SILICONNOOB” TAYLOR

But what about our Brother from Down Under, renowned kangaroo wrangler and bonsai koala bear enthusiast? Would there be visions of an army of hoopsnakes and drop bears crossing the trackless depths of the Pacific to unleash their venomous, marsupial rage upon legions of slothful Americans? Visions of Foster’s Beer Fairies floating around pools of endless Foster’s, daintily filling up pitchers of this foamy nectar to drip down the throats of parched bogans everywhere? The violent end of all life on New Zealand by the hands of his conquering army?

Actually, that sounds rather accurate. I am sticking with that.

NATE LILES!!!

Ah, Nate. His reviews are succinct, his tweets boozy, and for some reason he have stickers in his bedroom. Never one to judge, however, I suspect there is more depth to Mr. Liles than his podcast appearances let on.
Behind his brain, I am sure, lurks the heart of an operatic tenor, carefully hidden away by a paralyzing case of stage fright, yet there plain as day for any scientist with a functional magnetic resonance imager to unwrap like a toddler on Christmas Day.

This is your brain on Halo...

GINIA

Like Illinois, Canada is not real, and anyone claiming to be from Canada actually lives in a smallish apartment in Manhattan, where the Bildebergers provide them with Internet access to try to fool the rest of us. Hockey? A complete fantasy. Poutine? Clearly the creation of a diseased mind.

However, Ginia’s façade is nigh-impenetrable, her cover story so completely fabricated. A fondness of old PS1/SNES games. A hankering for fake-bacon. Love of maple syrup lovingly made in hollow trees by magic talking beavers. An idyllic picture, to be sure.

But what of the truth? What really lurks inside Ginia’s mind? I believe that beneath her love of sixteen-bit graphics and MIDI lies a dark and terrible secret… the secret of being a hobbit double-agent. Sure, we may believe hobbits are cute, with their furry feet and immunity to the One Ring of Power, but a creature that eats mushrooms for breakfast? And second breakfast? And elevensies? I do not trust this, dear and constant readers. Only science can save us now by exposing this Shire-born plot.

LANE

I am a well of darkness, a hollow husk of a human being created by the incessant dripping of pure shadow into the pit of my soul. The flesh is merely a veneer that serves to mask the true horror that is the empty, dead, flayed spirit within. I am madness incarnate…

This is how I roll.

That was unpleasant. MOVING ON!

BIGGS

Like /b/ and GameFAQs had a bad love child and threw it off a cliff to die, Spartan-style, Jenifer Biggs blesses us every week with loliteats, loli battle machines, tentacle monsters, and even more disdain for just how fucking odd Japan can be, in ways that I find vaguely unsafe for work, and glad that I read her comments on Saturdays… most days. To peer inside this cel-shaded mind is to glimpse… Shinji Ikari naked and choking Asuka…

Wait, hold on, that was the nonsense ending to Neon Genesis Evangelion! Is this machine broken? Was it the plate in my head? I was told it was non-magnetic. Damn Grays, always lying to me and making me pissed.

There we go. Beneath an encyclopedic knowledge of the variations of “desu” and slightly behind the life-size cutouts of Team Fortress characters is that dry, acerbic wit we have all come to know and love.

IN CONCLUSION!

I look forward to the day when scientific PROGRESS leads us to the ability to actually look into our brains, because I am sure it is more fascinating than my vaguely insulting remarks about everyone. And if the readers feel left out, know that I am filled with nothing but contempt for each and every one of you, except you. You I like.

So it is with uncharacteristic brevity that I shall discuss this week’s topic, which is a rather excellent article I read on the Innartubes this week.

Just in case others wanted to throw up too.

Yes, that was correctly parsed. Lane liked something besides World of Warcraft and the tears of weeabii!

This article is rather lengthy, which is part of the reason for my own lack of verbiage. In fact, it rivals anything that I could ever hope to write, but it is exceedingly intelligent. It deals with what can go right and wrong with a sequel, and offers developers practical, intelligent advice.

I will, however, offer one small emendation to an otherwise flawless list, which is that developers should not keep something in a game simply because it was popular. The ATB system of early Final Fantasies comes to mind. Yes, it was a damn sight better than the original system, but can we really say that it still works in a day and age where even menu-based, command-style combat can be done in real time? A popular feature for its time should not be maintained simply because it was once popular, but should be incrementally improved on with each iteration, keeping the best of the familiar while introducing the new.