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on early review copies

This morning I woke up and saw the news about how Bethesda is no longer sending early review copies of games out. I then did the stupid thing I tend to do of tweeting out my own reductive take while completely oblivious to the fact that there is already a heated debate going on around the news. So here is the other thing I tend to do of explaining what I meant in a longer blog post.

My take was that I would sorta be okay with all publishers not sending out early review copies. There would be clear, immediate repercussions of this that are obviously bad:

Players buying the game on day one won’t have an opportunity to read critical writing about the game before they buy it, relying solely on the publisher’s marketing.

Freelancers who rely on getting review copies early and then pitching a review to an outlet would be screwed

It would allow publishers to much more tightly keep the lid on complaints about their game before those pre-orders have been claimed.

it gives youtube and streaming ‘influencers’ even more power over consumer choices.

Those are all valid responses and, without a doubt, the only reason Bethesda would want to not send out early review copies is because they think that will help them make more money off players. Just as they used to think sending out review copies will make them more money, which is also the only reason they ever did that. It can’t be stressed enough that publishers only ever give journalists access to anything if they think they can profit from that information being spread.

My issue is with the broader, ingrained culture of hype, pre-orders, and day one purchases (which I will now just call hype culture) that both publishers and the traditional press depend on financially. It’s a culture less concerned with considered critical takes of a cultural form (which is not to say the writers struggling to work in that culture aren’t concerned with this; they usually are and they manage to produce excellent writing in spite of this culture very often) and more concerned with pedalling enthusiasm to maintain attentive audiences always ready to be exciting about the next big thing.

Here are some words I wrote about hype culture after No Man’s Sky was released:

Pre-orders are the ultimate conclusion of this culture where we are so excited for what videogames will one day become that we would rather pay for future games—imagined games—than for games that actually exist. Preview material (straight up curated marketing material) becomes a replacement for the critical evaluation that is meant to take place in a considered review after the game’s release so that we can all buy these future, imagined games.

Gamers being excited about games that aren’t out yet benefits three parties:

The sellers of the videogame who can sell a creative work before any evaluative review or disgruntled mate can recommend otherwise.

The distributor of the videogame, for the same reason.

The enthusiast press outlets who, in reporting on imagined games, motivate the enthusiasm in their readership to keep being excited gamers about the future and, thus, to keep wanting to read content about games that are not out yet.

Videogame players do not benefit from being excited by imagined future games. They are made excited to be commodified.

But I wouldn’t even say it is the press’s ‘fault’ or that the press, now, could even change this. What I would say is that there is a complex, structural economy of parties that, for decades now, benefit from gamers being excited about videogames that are not released yet, and that player-buyers themselves are not one of those parties. The entire game industry and game journalism industry is built on this structure.

In that piece I was mostly talking about what is promised about a game before its release. I was talking about previews and marketing more-so than reviews, but it is a part of the same culture. Until a game is in the shops, the publisher has complete control over what is said about their game, in part through the non-disclosure agreements journalists are forced to sign in exchange for an early review copy. No Man’s Sky did not send out review copies so when the game leaked, Hello Games could do nothing to stop the outflow of negative responses.

But this is the exception, not the rule. Look at Twitter when an embargo lifts and see all the journalists tweet out their reviews at the exact same minute, now that the publisher has so kindly told them that they are allowed to talk about the game now. Every time it happens I feel a little embarrassed and a little frustrated. It’s like a desperate feeding frenzy. Everyone hoping their review is the one the reader reads, that it will be out just enough seconds before the other ones. But not too early. No. We promised the publisher we wouldn’t do that. I picture the publisher standing over the fish pond with some reader breadcrumbs, sprinkling them in the water for the desperate journalists.

My problem here is not some boring or cliche “the press is in the publishers’ pockets” straightforward accusation. It’s never that simple or true. My problem is that in the hype culture that both game publishers and journalism have cultivated for decades now, game journalism outlets are largely dependent on a drip-feed of information from the publishers. Without the publishers explicit support with preview events, developer interviews, trailers, and, yes, early review copies, journalists are locked out of that lucrative hype culture.

Which is a problem now that youtubers and streamers exist who are much more reliable, from the publishers’ perspective, to stay on-brand in their reviews. Not held back by critical or journalistic concerns, these influencers exist, largely, to be entertaining to watch. For a big publisher, the influencer is now a much better way to market the game than game reviews that always run the risk of being negative. Essentially, in the hype culture that both journalism and publishers created, the publishers are deciding they don’t need the journalists anymore, and they are correct.

Game journalism can react to this in two ways. The first is to try to keep up. To try to keep in the race and keep speaking to that hype culture that has served them so well for decades and which has all but shaped the popular game discourse we have nowadays. Most of the negative responses to my tweet this morning accept that this is how it must be. Game journalism must survive and must ensure those people buying the game on day one have our critical takes with which to make an informed purchase. So this is going to be shitty for freelancers and lead to more rushed reviews as everyone frantically tries to get back from EB or Gamespot and rush through that game and get the review up as close to yesterday as possible.

The second possible reaction is what I want to see happen, what I think needs to happen, but which would be a long and arduous slog and, really, probably isn’t going to happen in any immediate or straightforward way. Journalists can not care about keeping up at all. They can say goodbye to the hype culture that has served them so well for decades but which, really, was always dependent on the self-serving dripfeed from corporate publishers. They could stop trying to provide informed consumer advice for people who purchase a game on day one, because people who buy a game on day one (self included) are already not making an informed decision; we are making a decision based on marketing and brand loyalty, reviews or not. They can foster a readership that is less concerned with immediate reactions and more with reviews as actual, considered evaluations of creative works. Topical, but not immediate. A readership happy to read a review a week or two after a game’s release. This could quite well mean losing a bunch of their current readers. But perhaps it could cultivate a different readership.

Youtubers and streamers will always be more enthusiastic than the enthusiast press. Those readers who solely want enthusiasm will leave (are leaving) the press for the youtubers and streamers. I want to see a cultural shift in the game journalism discourse that adapts to this by abandoning that audience altogether and instead fosters one less concerned with what is coming out tomorrow and more with thinking about, for a little bit longer, what came out this week or fortnight or month. Unsurprisingly, this is something that was a lot easier to do when game journalism existed in monthly magazines and not the 24/7 news-diarrhoea of the internet.

I argue this from my own self-serving perspective of more considered takes being what I want to read, and hype culture being what I want to see dismantled—what I think needs to be dismantled before we can really begin to start preserving and maturing videogames as cultural works and not just commercial products. But I also think it’s the only real way game journalism can survive in a world where dudes who shout at a face-cam on youtube are much more immediately ‘useful’ for big publishers than critics. The enthusiast audience is lost. The post-enthusiast press (lol sorry) needs to adapt to and essentially create for itself a readership that is happy to read about a game a week after it comes out. Such a move would lessen game journalism’s dependency on publishers (increasingly a one way street), and it would essentially be more pro-consumer than one that pedals in and lives off hype culture, because hype culture is only ever anti-consumer.

As my second tweet said much better than my first tweet, Maybe the whole culture of feeling pressured to buy a game the day it comes out is fundamentally broken & only profits publishers. It used to profit journalists too! But increasingly that’s not the case, as Bethesda’s move makes abundantly clear. I would like to see that culture abandoned by game journalism, and I think game journalism needs to abandon it they are to survive the rise of influencers looking to just entertain.

#game journalism #hype #previews #reviews #bethesda

Switched Players

Some preliminary thoughts on Nintendo’s shifting target demographic sparked by the Nintendo Switch reveal video.

The Switch looks like an interesting console! The video demonstrated pretty well how, at least conceptually, Nintendo expects you to be able to use the device, swapping seamlessly between lounge room and out in the world. What was striking about the video, however, was the people shown to be playing the Switch. It was almost exclusively twenty-somethings who live independently but go and hang out with mates or sometimes have to fly somewhere. Young adults with lives. No families or little children or mums. Twenty-somethings and their mates. Maybe you could write a thinkpiece about the Switch’s versatility as reflecting the impermanence and volatility of life as a millennial under late capitalism. You can have that one for free.

Let’s rewind over a decade to the Wii’s release. I remember being in the first year of undergrad and all my fellow male gamer friends scoffing at its weird name and its low specs and all its ‘casual’ games (I don’t think we used the word casual yet back then, but that is what we meant). The Wii then went on to be the third-best selling console of all time. What Nintendo very intelligently did was voluntarily walk away from the console war arms race they helped construct in the late 80s. Instead of continuing to cultivate and then market to a very particular and niche gamer audience that cares about existing franchises and better specs and the such, Nintendo decided to market a console to everyone else. And it payed off incredibly.

Through the late 2000s up until, well, yesterday, you can see this in most public-facing Nintendo advertising (of which I don’t include Nintendo Direct which is very much directed to that remaining niche that loves Nintendo so much they will watch an ad for an hour). There was that DS commercial with women assuring the camera that “I’m not a gamer” before talking about how great the DS is. Games like Wii Fit and Brain Training. Throughout the Wii years, Nintendo largely didn’t care about gamers (at least insofar as its public facing image was concerned; it still had its nostalgic franchise). There were other audiences to go for. Much much larger audiences.

Then the smartphone happened. I remember a Nintendo keynote at my first GDC, in 2011, with Reggie Fils-Aime almost trying to rally a call-to-arms against the glut of cheap (not yet really free-to-play) casual and mobile games. At the same time, Apple was holding a conference literally across the road. The term ‘disposable’ game was thrown around. It was a tension felt throughout that GDC between the old guard of game development and these new startups like Zynga making a lot of money very quickly and, it seemed, very cynically. They didn’t care about the art, man.

But for Nintendo the outcry seemed personal. I don’t believe they really cared about ‘disposable’ mobile games damaging the reputation of videogames a la a mid-80s American console game crash. They were concerned that the exact market they had finally convinced to buy a console with the Wii was exactly the market most likely to want to play these smartphone games. The casual player, opposed to the gamer, is just looking to kill some time. They are invested and care about the games they play, to be sure, but they are not going to make time to play videogames. Videogames have to make time for them. They have to be immediately learnable and they have to be immediately playable. The smartphone was perfect for casual games. Even better, you didn’t have to go buy a new piece of hardware. You already own a phone.

I don’t know if anyone has made a direct correlation between the decline of the Wii and the rise of the smartphone, but I think there’s definitely a connection, at least anecdotally. The smartphone became the home for casual games. It stole the Wii’s audience.

(In 2010 Jesper Juul published the book Casual Revolution, all about the rise and importance of casual games. The book predominately focused on the Wii, as the exemplary casual game platform at the time Juul was writing the book. It’s telling that nowadays, when reading Casual Revolution, almost everything Juul says about causal games seems even better suited for smartphones than the Wii.)

So then Nintendo released the WiiU and despite being an incredible console, it did real badly. It did some cool tech things. It was clearly designed during the height of tablets’ popularity, and maybe Nintendo thought they could get that casual audience back with a console that looks and acts like a tablet and also uses WiiMotes. Maybe they thought they could also convince some of their lost gamer audience to come back as well with the thumbsticks and the graphics.

I remember Mark Serrels pointing out on Kotaku Australia years ago how damaging the name probably was. The audience Nintendo rallied to the Wii doesn’t care about technology arms races. They don’t want to buy a Playstation 4 because the number is higher than the Playstation 3. The WiiU just sounded like a new type of Wii, and we already own a Wii so why would we buy a new one?

Now, Nintendo has accepted that the casual audience is on smartphone. We’ve seen stories the last year about Nintendo finally allowing its different franchises to appear on mobile phones and deals made with different mobile developers and publishers. A Mario infinite runner is coming out soon. Nintendo seems to know that mobile is where they need to go if they want to keep some of that casual, non-gamer videogame playing audience. So much for the glut of disposable games.

And that’s where the Switch’s reveal video comes in. From who we see playing it in the video, it looks very much like Nintendo has accepted that casual players do not want specialist hardware. To make a home console sustainable, it needs a dedicated and invested audience, such as the gamer provided for the past decades (and still does for Microsoft and Sony). So now we have these fashionable millennials playing these established franchises and pre-existing games like Splatoon and Skyrim. They look like the sort of sneaker-wearing, instagram-filtered people you’d expect to see in a Sony Entertainment Europe PlayStation ad. It’s still a relatively diverse group. They’re not quite ‘gamers’. They all have lives outside of videogames. It’s important they have those lives, because then we can see them take the Switch with them to those lives.

So it sort of feels like the Switch is for the grown up gamer. The videogame player grown out of being a gamer. The millennial pushing 30 who has to walk the dog or get a plane or who actually doesn’t hate sport like he did in school when he was a nerd. It looks like it is trying to capture an audience it thought it might win over with the WiiU while also holding the casual players. Like, okay, here are those WiiU games again but on a different console. How about now?

It also looks like it is trying to claim to have solved one of those decades-old ‘problems’ facing videogames: getting home console quality videogames on a portable device. Of course, this was never actually a problem, and never actually solvable as it ignores the different ways people engage with games in different environments (and really, the Vita already did it and that didn’t go so well for it, did it?). It’s like the issue of realistic graphics or, in the 90s, getting arcade quality games in the home. It was something gamers were convinced they want in that techno-progressivist sort of way, but which was really always a misdirection birthed by an industry that pedals in The Next Big Thing. But anyway, the Switch seems to be making the claim that now, finally, you can take your home console games out there with you during your busy, late-twenties life.

Not as ‘mobile’ games but as ‘portable’ games. They guy playing games on the plane seemed the best example of where they expect the Switch to be played. Not for five minutes on your daily commute. These aren’t these sorta games. This is Skyrim (a game two-generations old but exemplary of the sort of ‘deep’ console play that was very much not the Wii or WiiU. Seeing Skyrim on the Switch is almost a sort of reassurance). These are games you want on that 9 hour flight.

So there’s something there and I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but something about how Nintendo’s target demographic shifted for the last decade away from the gamer culture Nintendo itself created in the late 80s and early 90s towards ‘everyone else’ and, now, is shifting again to… what? To some sort of post-gamer world? To an audience that Nintendo hopes will be dedicated enough to commit to a home console, but who is also too busy to really ‘be a gamer’ in the way Sony and Microsoft still hope you will be. A world where one particular generation still really wants to play committed console games but rarely has the time to sit down and do that.

#nintendo #switch #wii #wiiu #gamers #gamer #player #game culture #videogames

“You can play chess with some rocks in the mud, or with pieces that look like the Simpson family rather than kings and queens. It would still be the same game. The ‘royal’ theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess” (Aarseth 2004)

The Tragedy of Gamers as Anti-fans

(This is a timely reminder that anything that appears on this tumblr is very much half-baked)

Been thinking a bit lately about the ongoing No Man’s Sky backlash. Not just those who felt they had been tricked by marketing into buying a game that was different from what they wanted who then got (or are trying to get) a refund and then move on. More those dedicated anti-fans who seem to have a real investment in not just not enjoying the game but ensure others, too, do not enjoy the game. Those who feel betrayed by the game’s very existence and who seem to want to mobilise more of a mass movement of refunds and complaints and bickering to get back at those filthy liars at Hello Games.

These are mostly just people talking on reddit and neogaf and so, really, should be largely irrelevant, except they are given relevancy. I’ve seen websites report even more missing features and lies because a single redditor’s game seemed to briefly hiccup. Now these are articles have little update paragraphs above them clarifying that the entire post is actually factually incorrect, but the point remains that many outlets are happy to translate the fury whirlpool sinkhole of places like reddit into validated outrage.

So I’ve been thinking about these people and that investment they must have in order to feel so so so slighted by the mere existence of a game like No Man’s Sky. Not just its lack of multiplayer (really the only feature I think it is fair to say Hello Games and Sony were misleading or at least unclear about) but its entire existence. How dare this game release for $60. It’s not worth $60. You hardly do anything in it.

I’ve been thinking about more than just consumer advocacy at misleading marketing (which, again, is fine). A lot of this fury reminds me of backlash against ‘non-games’ (ie. mechanically minimal experiential videogames) whenever they dare creep out of itch.io or personal websites to appear on the gamer’s own land of Steam or consoles or the expo stage. The backlash against Proteus, against Dear Esther, against Gone Home, against Depression Quest. The backlash against No Man’s Sky reminds me of that cultural clash in its vigour (albeit not in the violence directed at the women who developed some of those above games).

I don’t think this is a coincidence. Beyond the lack of multiplayer, the anger hardcore gamer subcultures have at No Man’s Sky is largely the minimalism of its mechanics. It was marketed and dreamed as this big massive space adventure. That final videogame where you can do whatever you want and as I went into in my review, this rubs against the very minimal and simple experience the game actually is. I was saying long before No Man’s Sky came out that it looked like an intergalactic walking simulator. I mean this as something very exciting, but I failed to consider the fallout that was always going to happen when a walking simulator got released for $60 on a disc.

If people were mad at games like Proteus, Gone Home, and Depression Quest for daring to step on the sacred gamer lands of Steam and consoles (those territories that belong to real gamers to play their real games), then they’re mad at No Man’s Sky, in part, for being a trojan horse of one of these non-games wrapped up in the plastic seal of a AAA release with a AAA price. Not just simply because they feel ripped off (but that is certainly part of it) but because it feels like an encroachment on their territory.

Myself and others have written enough things elsewhere about how ‘gameplay’ and ‘gamer’ were very deliberately cultivated through the late 80s to the modern day as a very specific type of videogame player and a very specific type of videogame experience. Together they produce a dominant culture. The gamer who players Half-Life and Final Fantasy VII because they have good gameplay over the player who plays Angry Birds and Candy Crash because they look and sound good. Gameplay is an essence of those games that the real gamer validates as real games, and so gameplay is reinforced as an entirely socially constructed marker of quality. Good games have gameplay and thus determine what gameplay is going forward. Games without this gameplay are bad games. To say that walking simulators don’t have gameplay, even though they require a player no less than the most complex action games, is to say they have the wrong essence; they produce the wrong experience. Essentially: they are the wrong genre.

Videogames have expanded in recent years so that, as Leigh Alexander rightly said, gamers don’t have to be your audience anymore. There are so many other people playing and spending money on videogames. Gamers are visibly becoming the niche they always actually were. The rise of casual games on the Wii and smartphones at one end of the spectrum, and the rise of altgames et al thanks to more accessible middleware at the other end have both contributed to this. Videogames are now both more mainstream than AAA and more alternative than AAA.

But AAA still owns the high budget spectacle experience, and there is undeniably something glorious about indulgent, high-budget spectacles. This is really why I still love AAA games despite their general homogeny: they can still do some cool things that could not be done beyond AAA. This is essentially why my favourite ‘genre’ of AAA is those games that feel like they really should not have been allowed to exist. Those weird and broken and messy and self-indulgent titles. i’m thinking of games like Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, and Homefront. Games that are broken in fascinating ways. Or, on the other hands, AAA games that are just really sincere and unpretentious about just being a silly, high budget romp, like the Uncharted games, or Wolfenstein: New Order.

Those AAA games that are broken in interesting ways are rare because most AAA games can’t afford to be. All the ones I listed above were financial disasters in one way or another. The sorts of people who will pay $60 on a game (the sorts of people who have been trained to find certain types of games worthy of $60) like a very specific thing: gameplay. And no AAA game can deviate to much from this mould without feeling the gamer’s wrath. AAA made this bed when it made the gamer, and now it is stuck in it.

So No Man’s Sky entered this space. Whether it is AAA or indie is not a useful question (the answer is simply ‘yes’) but it entered this space, and people felt mad at it for being $60, even aside from the multiplayer fiasco. This game is interesting, I’ve seen no shortage of people say, but not for $60.

What makes a game worth $60? An easy answer, usually, would be length. Proteus isn’t worth $60 because you only play it for half an hour or so. Perhaps a certain level of graphical quality to prove this game cost a lot of money to make. Depression Quest isn’t worth $60 because it doesn’t have high-def graphics. Just text. But both of these fall down when it comes to No Man’s Sky with its limitless ‘content’ and really quite beautiful graphics. So what is it missing then that make people so made it dare release for $60? The right sorts of gameplay.

No Man’s Sky lacks the essences that gamers have been cultivated to believe (and which they have cultivated themselves) is worth spending $60 on. A certain amount of challenge and agency and freedom. More so, people felt deceived into thinking that No Man’s Sky possessed a large amount of that essence that they want, that gameplay. Be that the fault of marketers or gamers themselves is an ongoing debate that has no easy answer, but certainly: No Man’s Sky had framed itself in a particular, gameplay-orientated way in order to muster the pre-release momentum that a game releasing for that price needs to.

Which sort of gets me to the point I actually want to make: there are particular kinds of videogame experiences that can only be achieved with a large budget and the hope that enough people will be interested to justify that budget. At the moment, only a specific kind of high-budget game is possible because of how gamer culture has been cultivated and solidified, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Yet, games like No Man’s Sky are exciting because, masterpieces or failures, they push against that strict border of what can be done in a $60 title by trying to do something else. This is always going to be an imperfect project as it needs to work within existing constrictions (this is why No Man’s Sky is criticised as both having not enough gameplay, and being too arbitrarily gamey by different audiences). But they can be interestingly imperfect. Importing teething problems of pushing a boundary to see what else can be done in a space.

The tragedy of gamers is the desire to push back against this. To not just be fans of what speaks to them but anti-fans to what doesn’t. To see any imperfect attempt at experimentation as an attempt to open the floodgates and wash away the walled city. A scandalous affair of betrayal and deception and Trojan horses invading their platforms.

The ways in which corporate marketing, critical discourses, the influences of the most popular titles on the next most popular titles all perpetuate each other so that specific kinds of videogame experiences can only exist in specific budget brackets and in specific conceptual digital spaces/storefronts.

This is what I find upsetting and frustrating about the No Man’s Sky backlash. Not the fact that some people don’t like it or don’t ‘get’ it. There are plenty of entirely fine reasons to dislike the game. Not even that some people want a refund for the game being different from what they’d been led to believe it might be (an entirely fair desire, to be sure). What I find upsetting is that dedicated and ongoing backlash. The anti-fans. Those dedicated to tearing down the game on their subreddit and neogaf communities that are then validated as ‘sources’ in news stories, almost solely because the game is not the sort of game they want to play.

It’s a very visible and tangible backlash from that central, cultivated audience that works to say: don’t experiment in this space, don’t be weird, that is not what happens in $60 titles. Don’t fail in interesting ways. Be safe. Stick to good gameplay. Abide by our markers of quality that you imbued in us decades ago, and don’t dare try to challenge those markers or provide alternatives beyond a very finite spectrum. Stick to your $10 ‘indie’ bracket if you want to do that, your free itch.io games. Be safe and conservative. Don’t experiment. Don’t dream.

I tweeted a link to this article on the bus about the “broken promises” of No Man’s Sky. I made the claim that “Unless the game is already available, literally nothing a dev says/shows about the game is a ‘promise’.” I then followed this up with another thought: “Which if nothing else means the press is long overdue in thinking about how it presents pre-release material and helps cultivate hype.”

A lot of people read this as me saying we shouldn’t hold devs responsible for what they say before a game’s release, that they can say whatever they want with no responsibility. Really, though, I meant the opposite: nothing a developer or a marketer says about their game before it is released should be taken as indicative of what the game will ‘actually’ be like. Nothing at all. All pre-release material (trailer, interviews, previews, playthroughs, etc.) should be treated with the utmost, complete cynicism and skepticism.

There’s a few different aspects of this (so smashing it all down to two tweets was a really good idea).

Firstly: games change during development. Games aren’t finished while they are still being developed. When a developer speaks about the game they are still making, the game they are clearly very excited about as Sean Murray was clearly excited about No Man’s Sky, everything they say is going to be aspirational. it’s only ever going to be what they hope/expect the final version of the game they are currently making to be. I don’t believe any developer really knows exactly what the final version of their game is going to look like until they’ve finished making it, just as I don’t know what a piece of writing is going to look like until I finish it. Things change. I have a general sense of what sort of experience I am aiming for, but the particulars is always up for grabs. As it is in any creative endeavour that is trying to bring a non-existent thing into existence. My students exhibited their games to the public last night. These games are very different from the ones they thought they were making even a week ago. When a developer says ’This game will be X’ it should always be read as ‘At present, we expect this game to be like X’.

Secondly: marketers inflate the truth and tell untruths and stay conveniently quiet about less sexy truths. We know this. When videogames aren’t involved, we’re pretty good at being critical about this. When Apple says I can buy a new Macbook ‘from $500’ I know that the $500 model is going to be the most bare-bones, smallest, shittiest model and most of the models will be $2000. Because that is how marketing works. There are pro-consumer regulations in place to prevent marketers telling outright lies, sure. That is good. That doesn’t mean consumers don’t still need to be critical and cynical in how they interpret the information marketers say to them.

Core game demographics are not very good at being critical of game marketing. Preview material is typically read as factual information about what a game will be and not content that exists exclusively for marketing purposes to make people spend money on a thing.

But that’s not simply because videogame consumers are gullible idiots. It’s because the pre-release marketing hype of publishers is super integrated into the day-to-day reporting of game journalism and how videogames are talked about generally. We always want to talk about the next big thing. The next final videogame that will, finally, be the one. Marketers sell us that myth because they know we have always lapped it up. Being excited by the next thing is the treadmill that all of gamer culture has been running on since the mid-80s.

Gamers being excited about games that aren’t out yet benefits three parties:

The sellers of the videogame who can sell a creative work before any evaluative review or disgruntled mate can recommend otherwise.

The distributor of the videogame, for the same reason.

Videogame players do not benefit from being excited by imagined future games. They are made excited to be commodified.

I do not buy the argument that Hello Games (or even Sony, really) deliberately lied or misled anyone. I do believe that they knew this videogame would motivate very powerful imaginations and excitement in a particular audience and were more than happy for that excitement to accelerate and inflate expectations so as to increase sales. I don’t think that is lying. I think that is marketing.

Pointing out that neither the enthusiasm of developers nor the commercial concerns of marketers should ever be considered a ‘promise’ is not to say they have no responsibility or get off scott free. On the contrary it is the opposite. To never take pre-release statements about a game at its word. To always be cynical and disbelieving of any and all pre-release material, be it a straight-up commercial or a preview published by a good writer on an established game journalism website. Pre-release material is marketing material or, at best, second-order marketing material.

The best way to ensure player-buyers are not ‘duped’ into spending their money on games that are not what they believe them to be is to tear down the whole culture of ‘hype’ and ‘pre-orders’ and ‘day one reviews’ and expos full of unreleased games. It is to not wait until weeks after a game’s release before it is pointed out that the dev’s words on what the game will be probably shouldn’t be taken at face value.

We can talk about how marketers ‘should’ act in a pro-consumer sort of way, sure. But that seems idealist and not too helpful to me as marketers are always trying to find ways to frame the truth in a particular, beneficial light. More useful, I think, is to teach consumers to be more critical of what they listen to about un-released games. That would require more insight into how games are actually developed, and also more insight into how preview material comes into existence as a drip-feed of regulated information. But no one really benefits from consumers being more critical in this. Gamer culture is a cultivated, enthusiast, techno-determinist culture. It is about keeping an audience persistently excited by what comes next and persistently disappointed by what is available now.

Anything said about a game before its release is said so in order to make people excited enough to buy before anyone has a chance to tell them why they shouldn’t. But I don’t think promises/lies is a useful way to think of this because that is a dichotomy that always has the possibility of being tricked into believing something false. Instead, pre-release information needs to be critically engaged with as always skewed, always coming from a particular perspective, and always having a particular goal to enthuse.

(A finally note: there is a difference between being disappointed that a game is different at release than what you had hoped it to be based on pre-release material, and feeling ‘lied to’ or ‘betrayed’ because the game is not what was ‘promised’. Here I am talking about the latter. Being simply disappointed a game is not something it is not is fine.)

(A finallier note: I also think No Man’s Sky is preeeeetty much exactly what Hello Games said it would be (with the exception of never explicitly shutting down the multiplayer hype) so I would contest that Hello Games ‘broke promises’ even if I didn’t contest that framing pre-release comments as ‘promises’ at all wasn’t already inaccurate. Instead, I feel people are very excited to be knowingly disappointed in a game that lots of people were excited about and which, beyond a very particular core culture, a lot of people seem to be thoroughly enjoying. But that’s something I’ll address when I finally write my own review/essay of the game.)

(Okay, one more note. How interesting that we consider it ‘fraud’ that Sean Murray never really shut down the idea of the game being multiplayer in pre-release interviews and stuff, despite the fact that on the screen on PSN where you buy the game, the screen with the information about the game you are about to buy, it says ‘single player’. There is a broader discussion here about what information around a game we consider descriptive, or what information we consider marketing.)

Here is Lewie Procter, perhaps the best pro-consumer games writer with a different opinion. Again, this is where I’d say that being disappointed and crying betrayal are different by a few degrees.

Here is what I think is the best essay on what No Man’s Sky actually is that has been written so far. Completely avoids the smug “well, actually, did you know procedural generation doesn’t mean endless content?” insufferableness of some other reviews.

Excitement, Hype, and No Man’s Sky

I hate hype. I believe hype and the technophilic progressivism it serves to be one of the major roadblocks stifling how we write and think about games (and how we value them, generally). I cringe my way through every E3 as I watch twitter work its way into a froth for each repeated promise for New Gameplay Experiences that we all know are going to be the Same Gameplay Experiences at a slightly higher resolution. I hate the constant focus on the new and the next that leaves the now and the old by the waysides in a history that the game industry has no interest in preserving. Hype is cultivated by publishers to ensure games sell before games are available for sale (and, more importantly, available for review). I am really excited about No Man’s Sky. Like, really excited. It sounds really good and like exactly the sort of game I will sink a bunch of time into. It sounds like precisely my jam.

But I hate hype and its relentless carrot-and-stick focus on the future.

I’ve long thought about how I internally resolve these two positions. How can I be this excited for a game that isn’t out yet, while still absolutely hate ‘hype’? I think I’ve found my answer in the various misguided and self-smart thinkpieces warning us all that No Man’s Sky might, god forbid, not be very good. Forbes posted this one today. And, uh, Forbes posted this one late last year. These pieces, and others like them, seem like opportunities for smug writers to claim they are not as duped by the corporate hype machine as everyone else (admittedly, for similar examples, check out my twitter timeline around every E3). But they also seem to miss the whole reason why people are excited about No Man’s Sky and what it is at the very least aiming to achieve.

The central criticism seems to be that the trailers show a lack of variety in activity: “But what do you really do?” has become the hallmark question and concern which seems to completely misinterpret what is being presented as a very minimal universe-sized walking simulator. This ground for potential disappointment seems embedded less in what the game’s marketing is and isn’t telling us and more in pre-conceived notions about what a ‘big’ game should be.

It doesn’t have enough stuff to do. That seems to be the main concern. On the other hand, hype is generally pedalled as “look at all this new stuff you can do!”. This seems like a disconnect.

Flipping it around, why do I find No Man’s Sky exciting? It’s not like I think it can’t possibly fail. Of course it could. The procedural generation could be unexciting and render it so you just feel like you are visiting three planets over and over again (though, my time spent wandering Minecraft’s endless terrain makes me less worried about this). The GTA-stolen wanted system seems like an entirely tacked-on thing to appease a more core gamer crowd. The guns look really silly and sound worse.

But what they are promising is so exciting. More important is how they are promising it. The way that at every expo and in every IGN EXCLUSIVE video, they are explaining how the procedural generation (supposedly) works and how this seemingly impossibly large game is actually feasible. They explain it in such a way that you think, you know what, that sounds like a thing that is possible. Then, even if No Man’s Sky is itself unable to live up to that promise, the promise is still exciting. Like, this sounds like something videogames, and only videogames, could do. I think that is what so many people find exciting. That sense that this is possible.

There’s an episode of The West Wing where the president wants to say in the State of the Union that within a decade they will cure cancer. There’s no evidence of this, but he thinks saying it will make people excited enough that it could happen. He compares it to previous State of the Union promises of making it to the moon. That’s sort of how I feel about the pre-release excitement for No Man’s Sky. Regardless of what the game might end up being, what they are promising to do (or I guess, more generously, what they are trying to do) is innately exciting and worth being excited about.

I think that is different than accepting wholesale the hype of large publishers promising the world with every iteration of the same old AAA genres. The caveat, of course, is that maybe it isn’t. Hype works by passing as self-initiated excitement. Sony might just be really, really clever. But I don’t think those really hoping that No Man’s Sky achieves what it promises to achieve have been duped, even if the game ends up failing in some way. I think they are just excited about this thing that videogames are definitely capable of achieving.

#no man's sky

New research project: these fucking things.

One of the above videos popped up in my Youtube sidebar and the thing looked so weird I clicked on it out of curiosity. I’ve never before heard of an “Avenger Reflex controller” but they look like they’ve gotten press attention before. Maybe. What I gather is that they are designed particularly for pro-players of first-person shooters, and they allow the player to press what I typically call the ‘face buttons’ (I wish we had a standard vocabulary for gamepads) without moving their thumb from the right thumbstick. Further, the bumpers can be press without moving the index fingers off the triggers.

So, firstly, yes this thing looks hilarious and the niche of ~pro gamers~ it’s trying to appeal to is sort of cringeworthy (on the company’s website, most of the decals they offer are skulls and guns and the such). But it is also so fascinating both for what it is, and for the language both its own marketing as well as these videos (still kinda its own marketing) speak about it in.

Background: if you’ve looked at my thesis at all, or maybe this article, you would know that what hands do on a gamepad is a huge interest of mine. When we use a gamepad, our hands are out of sight and, ideally, out of mind. But what our hands are doing, the movements of our fingers through space and their resistance against rubber and plastic is the conduit through which we feel any sort of connection to the movements presented on the screen. Through the gamepad (or the touch screen or the motion sensor or the keyboard and mouse) we translate bodily movements into a binary code and, going the other way, perceive the physicality of immaterial objects.

We don’t talk about what fingers do on gamepads, the particular minute movements they make, but they are so important to actually understanding how a player engages meaningfully with a gamepad-played videogame. But of course, some people do talk about them, mostly the pro-gamer types for whom those micro-seconds spent traversing the distance from the right stick to the A button is of paramount importance. Pro-gamers are thinking very consciously about what their hands are doing—if not while they are ‘in the zone’ during play then certainly while they are practicing. So as cringeworthy as a video like these ones can be to watch, the language used is so fascinating. Discussions of fingers ‘travelling’ and of saving on ‘travel time’. The Avenger website talks of ‘hand fatigue’. It’s like teenage Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger have a Call of Duty Youtube channel.

So anyway, why these things are fascinating to me: because they work to even further minimise the amount of bodily movement required to engage with a videogame, which is paradoxically a medium defined primarily I would argue by its fundamental need for bodily movement. While we have VR and smartphone and gestural and eye-tracking technologies working to incorporate more and more and more of the player body into digital data through the surveillance of sensors, this little overlay for a traditional gamepad controller is trying to minimise it. Though, contradicting this, it is ‘minimising’ it through increasing the devices sensitivity to the player’s movements, so in a sense it is a part of the same paradigm of bodily surveillance by digital media as are Kinects and WiiMotes and GPS all that. Also, look at the fucking things. The spider legs jutting out of your gamepad makes the fact that this game requires you to move your body more explicit even as it works to minimise the amount of bodily movement required.

I also find the design of it fascinating. The larger, curved leg coming out of the A button is so you can sort of push your thumb downwards and hit it with the middle of your thumb while its tip is still on the right stick. The B buttons little level is so you can sort of tilt your right hand and bump it with the base of your index finger. Simply to design this visually disgusting but haptically beautiful thing requires an intimate knowledge of how hands and gamepads fuse together, and that is really interesting to me.

Anyway. I think I am going to write something about these things but I’m not sure what. I need to do more research. I just purchased one for the PS4 so I can actually try it out myself. I don’t even know if any pro-gamers even actually really use these things, so I guess I need to find that out to. But even if they don’t, the existence of them is still real interesting to me.

Hit me up if you know anything about these things that I don’t know or know of any critical/academic writing about them.

#gamepad #controller #phenomenology #game studies #these fucking things #musings

One of the greatest things about Just Cause 2 was the movement. You had this extensive repertoire of Ways To Move (grappling hook, parachute, walking, falling) which could each be combined and sequenced differently to achieve a really satisfying and fluid movement across the map.

Just Cause 3 not only recaptures this pleasure of movement but iterates on it with the wingsuit. It’s one added feature, but it combines with all the existing abilities to exponentially increase the ways you can traverse the landscape. I’m especially enjoying combining the wingsuit with the grappling hook to climb hills.

When you crash with the wingsuit, you ragdoll for a while. Note how in the middle of this video that while I am ragdolling, I am still able to grapple onto the bridge and seamlessly continue my adventure. It makes the occasional crash as satisfying as the crashes I avoid.

This is a really great game.

#just cause 3 #just cause 2

videofame

I’d been meaning to write something about the Final Fantasy VII remake ever since the reveal trailer at E3 earlier this year. I’ve been wanting to address the inevitable (and not entirely unfair, I guess) cynicism at a nostalgia-exploiting cash-in. The whole “You know it can’t recreate the original” sort of skepticism.

There’s certainly something to be said for the way the games industry deliberately fosters a sense of personal investment in a title, then ignores that title for a decade, and then taps back into that investment that has now fossilised into nostalgia to cash in all over again. But in the case of Final Fantasy VII, I don’t think nostalgia mining tells the whole story. To write off the excitement for the new trailer as uncritical nostalgia is to ignore what made Final Fantasy VII so special for so many.

The sense of ‘immersion’ that so many videogames (and before videogames, so many other artworks throughout the centuries) strive for their audience to feel comes from a desire to be fooled by flat moving images on a screen to feel like you have really been transported to another world. This is always doomed to be an imperfect project, and the most interesting videogame titles are aware of this. The most interesting videogame titles play with this desire to be immersed rather than with immersion itself. Metal Gear Solid is one example, in the way it combines its hyperrealism with corny breaks of the fourth wall.

Final Fantasy VII is a more subtle example. What Final Fantasy VII did that was so fascinating was to lean into its technical limitations. Final Fantasy VII had maybe four or five different levels of graphical fidelity (the field map with its chunky characters and flat backgrounds; the battle map with its slightly more detailed characters are real-time environments; low-fidelity pre-rendered cut-scenes; high-fidelity pre-rendered cut-scenes). Many other games at the time had two layers (gameplay and cut-scenes). In both cases, there is a sense that each of these levels exists on a hierarchy of realism where the higher fidelity ones are closer to depicting how the world ‘actually’ is while the lower fidelity ones are further from what the world is ‘actually’ like.

You see this in games at the time that would use spectacular full-motion video cut-scenes to show the character doing all sorts of spectacular stuff before returning to the lacklustre play: here, this is what you are really doing; imagine this while you are pressing the buttons in that abstract representation we depict in real-time.

Because Final Fantasy VII had so many of these levels of representation, each making different claims to realism (and then the extra layers of the other texts in the Final Fantasy VII franchise including Advent Children, Crisis Core, etc.) it became easier to accept that none of these layers were the real one. To play Final Fantasy VII was an act of make-believe, not so different from when you go to the theatre. A character crouches and stands up again, and you have to imagine they were setting a bomb’s timer. A character waits patiently in battle to take their turn, and you have to imagine that this is an abstract representation of how the battle ‘really’ happened (this is true for all turn-based game systems). The world map is not ‘really’ the world but, literally, a three-dimensional map that abstracts the party’s movement across it.

This is true for all videogames and all artwork that strive to have their audience feel a sense of presence in a world beyond the frame (we trick ourselves into not seeing the ink on the canvas; into not seeing the black between shots of a film). But Final Fantasy VII consciously renders it very explicit in a way few videogames do. Regularly, Final Fantasy VII says, “look, this is not what is really happening, but here is a prompt for you to imagine what is really happening.”

Now, tie this together with the absolutely fascinating, surreal, bizarre, uncanny world that Final Fantasy VII paints. This weird impossible clash of cyberpunk and high fantasy. This story that is complex and grim and silly and whimsical. For those that loved Final Fantasy VII, it was like a siren’s call luring us into this mesmerising world that you could never quite touch because the ‘actual’ world was obscured behind these layers and layers of representation which are our only means to access that reality that they obscure.

So Final Fantasy VII was, more than anything else, enticing. It never let you have that thing that it made you really want. It would let you smell the amazing dinner but never let you taste it.

That is why *the idea of* a Final Fantasy VII remake is so exciting to so many. Not just because “that was a good game and I want to see it with sweet graphics lol”, but because it is a promise to finally get to taste that delicious meal we’ve been smelling for a decade.

Trailers like the initial reveal and this new gameplay trailer today are working to say, look, this time it is not an abstract representation, this time you will get to walk around the real Midgar. This time you will see the real Cloud and Barrett and AVALANCHE actually talk to each other.

Of course, this is the same carrot-and-stick that allows the games industry to constantly sell us new hardware. Because this is not what Midgar really looks like. This is still a layer of abstracting representation, and in another ten years it will look just as obscuring as the initial game. Trailers are still marketing. But the emotions they are evoking and the experiences they are promising transcend simple ‘nostalgia’. They tap into and exploit the yearning that Final Fantasy VII fostered in so many people. That is something that is still worth being cynical about, but it is more than a simple desire of nostalgia and ‘better graphics’. It is a desire to reach just that bit closer to this world we’ve been reaching towards for so long.

#final fantasy vii

ghosttowngoldie

Workin’ on a small game about ANZAC POWs who are arriving home after being through hell.

Hardest part of this twitter hiatus is not posting a million screenshots of Just Cause 3 sunflower meadows.

I am on the third day of a month-long social media detox. I have deleted Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine (not that I use the latter two any more) from my phone and from Chrome’s bookmark bar. I am doing this mostly because I was unhappy with how I’d come to check my social media constantly and unconsciously, and I felt like it was negatively consuming my time. The hope is that after a month away, I will be able to return with a bit more deliberate care as to how I let those services into (and as part of) my life without it becoming all-consuming.

So far, it is pretty weird! I am struck by just how regularly I’ve pulled my phone out with the intent of refreshing this or that feed while doing some other task: brushing my teeth, waiting in a line at a store, waiting for Just Cause 3 to load. More distressing is my attempt while writing or researching to go back to Chrome after nearly every other paragraph to check social media. In the past, these procrastinating checks would find me stuck in hours-long chats about nothing that important. Yesterday, I had finished a task and realised I was just refreshing my email and my rss feed over and over again in lieu of a social network. I took myself away from my computer for a bit, then came back and worked on another task.

It has also been somewhat isolating. Helen has been away for the past day so I’ve really spoken to no one. I thought I would make a deliberate effort to stay in touch with people via email or instant messaging or texts for the month, but so far I am yet to do that. I am playing Just Cause 3, and not instantly tweeting my opinions about it. I am seeing big headlines on the news such as yet another shooting in America and thinking about all the tweets that would be flying around, feeling both guilty and relieved that I’m not participating.

So it is really weird! I expect it might get less weird as the month goes on. At this early stage, I feel like I still know what I am missing out on. In another week or so, I might be so detached from the social media conversations that I will be more content in not being there. The difficulty will be keeping up to date with what is going on (both in the world and in games). I will need to more actively read websites through sources other than people linking them on social media. I have dusted off my Newsblur profile for the first time in years.

I am going to continue to produce writing through this month almost as an experiment to see if anyone still reads it when I am not on twitter constantly linking to it. I am not optimistic, though.

Anyway. That’s where I’m up to here in meatspace.