Does this spell the end for Subject Navigator?

Well, no. Not at all. I actually have some really big plans for Subject Navigator to hopefully be implemented before the end of the year, but you’ll have to wait on that one. But know that before you know it, Subject Navigator will be back at full steam.

• A colleague and I have started up a new website: Empty Pocket Media. I think it’s got a lot of promise, though we are still building content. It’s a cross-media website, dealing with music, film, as well as videogames. All feedback is greatly appreciated.
• I’m heading overseas for over four months tomorrow. This means three months of travel in Europe, and one month in North America. To keep in contact, I’ve started a travel blog here with one of the lamest puns for a title I could think of. So if you’re curious as to where I am, or what I’m up to, check it out and I’ll try and keep it up-to-date.

When I return I start my new thesis and degree more-or-less immediately, so expect Subject Navigator to return with full force and renewed energy. In the meantime, I’ll try and write the occasional article for Empty Pocket Media, and the other contributors will keep it flowing nicely, so please check it out.

I can’t thank each and every one of my Subject Navigator readers enough – over the past few months you’ve really made blogging a great experience for me. So thanks, and I hope to reward your patience with renewed content when I return.

Thanks again,

Dan Golding.

First, I’m no longer working for PALGN. This was a tough decision, as I believe it’s a great website that has given me a number of opportunities. But it was time to move on.

Second, I’m working on two new websites, one videogame dedicated, and one cross media focussed. Both are going to be great, and hopefully allow me to really expand as a writer. I can’t deal out the URLs yet, but needless to say, if you are reading this, you’ll be the first to know when they go live.

Third, you can now access my thesis in a new way (other than clicking the link to your right – hint, hint). It’s now been uploaded and is available at Game Career Guide, a sister site of Gamasutra et al, here. Which, if nothing else, meant I went all squirmy inside as something I’d written was (is?) temporarily on the first page of Gamasutra, if way down the bottom! I hope this opens up a new audience of readers for it, and I get even better feedback than some of the amazingly insightful and thoughtful words I’ve received so far.

Anyway, Subject Navigator should return to normal programming shortly, when I’m not living in boxes and assembling beds. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you stick around for my future projects.

There are few games that have struck me as wanting to be a film as Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Or rather, wanting to be a TV series. The first ten minutes of Hell’s Highway had me seriously tossing up asking its creators if they shouldn’t just have just applied to work on The Pacific instead. The cutscenes – in the beginning, interminably long – have perfected that Band of Brothers tone and feel, and even the musical theme appears to share the same first few intervals. Now, I like Band of Brothers. But I’d rather watch the real thing than play an imitator. My patience was wearing thin, however, I knew several people who swore by the series, so I stuck with it. And I’m glad I did: Brothers in Arms presents a compelling take on World War Two that I don’t think could be achieved in any other medium.

An issue of medium

A case-in-point: there is a sequence in Band of Brothers where our hero, Winters, is asked to destroy a fortified gun station on D-day. He is hugely outmanned, but mounts an incredibly clever plan, which – with the aid of surprise – results in a very successful mission. The end credits of that episode inform me that “Easy Company’s capture of the German Battery became a textbook case of an assault on a fixed position, and is still demonstrated at the United States Military Academy at West Point, today.” But when you watch the sequence, it’s actually really difficult to follow what is going on, and why Winters’ plan is so effective. There are other, perhaps more important things to be gained from that sequence. It’s chaotic, and it’s damn horrible: I would hope to never experience anything remotely similar, even if I was on the victorious side.

But where Band of Brothers, or the moving image generally fails to convey spatial plans and strategies, videogames like Brothers in Arms succeed.

Mapping a firefight

For those of you who haven’t played Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (or possibly other games in the series; I admit to being only cursorily familiar with the others), it cannot be approached like the one-man-band efforts of Call of Duty. In fact, when the game misguidedly asks you to play without your squad the whole experience falls horribly apart. For the majority of the game, though, you are asked to command, in alternating first- and third-person perspective, a squad of soldiers. Other factors weigh in: some squad members may be armed with bazookas, some with assault rifles. Inherently, the gameplay changes. Upon encountering a firefight, the first thing you’ll want to do as a player is not to start picking off enemies and pressing their positions, as in Call of Duty 2, but to open your map. The map allows you to view the location of sighted enemies and their relationship to the lay of the land; where good cover might be and ideal paths to a flanking position.

The Second World War becomes less of a mediated experience in Brothers in Arms as immediate strategy. It’s a case of keeping your head down and out-planning the enemy: exactly as portrayed in Band of Brothers, except now we really understand the situation. We choose to position our bazookas to open fire from the well-covered front while our assault team flanks from the side. We decide to send out the gunners into a hail of bullets to try and reach that first line of cover.

The strategic desensitizer

In a sense, this is – from what I can gather – one of the most authentic representations of war. Obviously, I’ve never experienced war and I would never, ever want to presume that I understand what it feels like. However, from what I can tell from documentaries and historical accounts of first-hand experience, the idea is that you force yourself to overcome your fear and gain control long enough to outwit the enemy. You ignore the very real possibility of death because you have to in order to survive.

The irony is that in creating the same set of circumstances and decisions in a videogame, Brothers in Arms asks us to desensitize our fear and shock at war and plan our next move. We don’t get the same horrific thrill that we do in Call of Duty 2. I believe that the developers were well aware of this, which is why Brothers in Arms also features some pretty extreme gore aimed shock us back into our non-videogame understanding of the Second World War. However, let’s not completely write off the insight that Brothers in Arms offers. Regardless of what it does for our present-day, immediate understanding of the situations it throws us into, there must be some worth in experiencing war for what it was – if only to allow us to reflect on it later. How many young soldiers even managed to master their fear in order to act the way Brothers in Arms demands? And what did it do to them as human beings to do so?

Photo credit: Skalas2.

There is definitely a place for theory and lofty concepts. A blog is one such place. However, I very much admire L.B. Jefferies’ sentiment when he suggests that there comes a point when theorising is useless without practical implementation: “Talk is cheap and in abundance on the internet, it’s actually doing something that’s in such short supply. If you want things to change, just act that change out yourself.”

In that spirit, then, I’ve decided to put my money where my mouth is, and instead of presenting Subject Navigator readers with another post on how one concept from one medium is like a different concept from another, I’d like to analyse a game or two. I want to look at some World War Two videogames, overpopulated as the genre may be, and think about what their gamespace says about their approach to the period. I’m starting today with Call of Duty 2, and I’ll be continuing later on in the week with Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway.

[Also, a quick note that I'm away this week, so this blog is currently running on autopilot. I'll be responding to all comments when I get back, though.]

Enemy space

The interesting gameplay element to Call of Duty 2 (and indeed, other games in the series) is that ownership of space is treated as paramount. The further you make it, the more successful you are. This is because major sections of the game continue spawning enemy soldiers until an invisible line is crossed by the player. Shooting enemies is therefore often only helpful in that they won’t then be shooting at you as you stake your claim over the next area.

This is key in creating the mood of the game, and it has three important effects. One: often, this technique is cited as a drawback in generating realism. No German encampment had the limitless supply of reinforcements I’ve mowed down, for example; it also promotes a real Rambo complex, as it won’t be your comrades who will move forward and save the day. Two: importantly, this strategy also forces the player to think in spatial terms. It isn’t, as it is in so many games, simply about how quickly you can train your sights on the enemy. The player has to think strategically, to take out enemy soldiers before moving forward, but to move forward quickly enough to find cover before the next wave appears. World War Two combat, according to Call of Duty 2, isn’t just about shooting; it’s about shooting and moving.

The third point, however, is the most interesting one. The ‘invisible line’ approach allows Call of Duty 2‘s developers to pin the entire game to the player’s movement. Not only are enemy waves triggered and silenced through movement, but so are events. The player becomes the cart to Call of Duty‘s theme park ride.

The World War Two theme park

If you’ve ever been on a theme park ride worth its salt, you’ll know how story related events happen around you as you go past. In the classic Pirates of the Caribbean ride, for example, some of the animatronic characters are on constant loop for all to see, but others will perform specific actions only when a cart goes past. In the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, a Tyrannosaurus Rex smashes through the roof of your enclosure just as you are about to ‘fall’ down its gigantic water slide. In the back lot tour, Jaws only attacks when you’ve reached a certain point.

Call of Duty 2, like many first person shooters since Half Life 2 is functioning on the same principle. Bullet holes appear in the pipeline you are creeping through; you are dizzied by the blast of an explosion and as you move forward, an enemy tank drives over the top of your trench. These are ‘canned’ events and will occur every time the player reaches a certain point in a level, but they all work.

And what works best about them, other than creating a cinematic ultra-real feel to events, is that the strategy allows a linearity for the developers to control. The player can still feel in control and feel like the outcome is totally dependent on their actions, yet still in a sense be lead through events as intended by design.

A place to be

Call of Duty 2‘s gamespace therefore has interesting repercussions for representing the Second World War. The War as a theme park is a place to be, a place to experience, to hear and watch, to be taken through history. In this sense one could argue that Call of Duty 2 is morally reprehensible, but I also think that the mode of representation is important. The War is not a place one would actually want to be. It is a place to be thrilled, yes. But it is also a place to be horrified, as row after row of men are cut down before you, as bullets whirr sickeningly close overhead, as brave and good-natured comrades are violently killed in a millisecond. There is a value judgement implied in describing it as a ‘war theme park’, but it isn’t quite as simple as the surface would suggest. It is precisely the elements that make it ‘ride-like’ that allow it to comment on the nature of the Second World War.

Next: why Brothers in Arms tells a crappy story but gets war games right.

Photo credit: DanieVDM.

When researching my thesis, I looked at quite a few theories and theorists of space, place, and geography. Perhaps the most interesting discovery I made last year, however, was Guy Debord and the Lettrist International’s concept of psychogeography. Debord was a French Marxist who found influence in the ’60s, largely due to a fascinating book called Society of the Spectacle. He was also probably more than a little alcoholic, and ended up shooting himself in 1994.

So what can a dead continental philosopher tell us about videogames?

Psychogeography might sound perhaps more than a little like senseless jargon, and certainly, Debord biographer Vincent Kaufman remarks ”This apparently serious term, ‘psychogeography’ comprises an art of conversation and drunkenness, and everything leads us to believe that Debord excelled at both.” But there is something there, underneath the admitted humour that I imagine the term has been treated with in the past.

According to Debord himself, “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” To me, then, this seems like a perfect encapsulation of an approach to level design. The space of videogames is often consciously organised in order to convey game rules and strategies as well as fiction in an organic fashion. Designers, it seems, may seek to influence gameplay and player behaviour through the design of space, as I have argued before on this blog.

The design of the environment of a First Person Shooter is intended to influence player behaviour within the modes of play presented by the game: kill without being seen. Move without being followed. The player that is best at reading the environment will have an intrinsic advantage over others. This is made even more obvious in games that are highly linear; I’ve used Portal as an example a thousand times, but I’ll use it again – the game space in that game is designed explicitly to engineer specific responses, feelings and strategies from the player. Getting the fully powered-up portal gun is a case-in-point: the design of the level moves the player in a circular motion around the device so that it becomes the focus of the space and the play. Finally, when the puzzle is completed, players only approach the gun via a slow-moving platform, using the physical space to build suspense.

Admittedly, a lot of Debord and the Lettrist’s writing on psychogeography centres on the use of something they called the dérive. This was a (almost certainly humorous) strategy to illuminate the strength of psychogeography. Debord described it as, “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Some implementations of it are very much literally drifting through a city, letting themselves experience it in ways they hadn’t imagined. Others, perhaps more interestingly, have used it in more directed manners, such as this set of instructions to navigate London in a straight line. Others still, like attendees to the Psy.Geo.Conflux walked through New York using algorithms to guide their way. I remember reading somewhere (I can’t for the life of me find the link) of one person who decided to navigate London using a map of Berlin.

This is obviously done with a great deal of humour, but there is an interesting point under this. What would playing Portal like we were trying to play Super Mario Galaxy tell us about design? What would setting up a computer bot to play through Super Mario Galaxy in the fastest possible time, tell us about design? It mightn’t be very fun, and it might just seem a little bit stupid, but I’m certain that eventually, we’d pick something up that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

The year 2008 was nothing if not a great year for intelligent discussion of videogames. Every month, it seemed to me like a new blog would pop up with an amazingly insightful analysis of some new game, and I’d be forced to go through their backlogs for everything else they’d written. Underneath it all, there is a real community thriving here; one that talks to itself and many hundreds of silent readers out there in the great internet ether. So, I decided, as much for myself as for any visitors of this blog, that I’d try and map out the Brainysphere; those blogs which have discussed videogames in 2008 in a manner beyond the surface. I’ve tried as best as I could to include everyone I have read this year, and to not link directly to their blog but rather, to what is in my opinion their best post for 2008.

If you believe your blog, or someone else’s blog should be here but isn’t, please let me know in the comments. Any omissions are purely because I am not superhuman enough to keep up with the lightning pace of the Brainysphere, or I simply forgot.

Without further ado, and in purely randomised order, these are the first 29 blogs of the Brainysphere:

• Game Design Advance is a great little blog run by two designers. Often incendiary, my favourite post for their year was ‘The Case Against “Art-Games”‘.
   
• Graffiti Gamer is the personal blog of Australian writer Daniel Purvis. Of late, he seems to have taken a real shine to first person recollections of gaming experience; the best example is ‘Where Friends Do No Justice: Narrative in Left 4 Dead’. It’s cheating, but I also have to give in and link his wonderful Escapist feature on de Blob.
   
• Elements of Meaning is a young blog (about as old as this one), with some promising material. I very much enjoyed this take on Fable II.
   
• The Brainy Gamer. It was an outstanding year for Michael Abbott. He continues to serve both as inspiration and a hub for younger game bloggers, including myself. My personal favourite was from much earlier in the year, where Michael took a look at what simulations actually simulate. Definitely one of those ‘why didn’t I think of this earlier?’ moments.
   
• Cruise Elroy is a remarkable, music-focussed videogame blog run by Dan Bruno. Choosing a post of the year was a no-brainer here: his Ocarina of Time series must be some of the most engaging content I’ve read this year, full stop. You owe it to yourself to check it out, if you haven’t already.
   
• Insult Swordfighting is the relentlessly engaging blog of journalist Mitch Krpata. Many this year have highlighted his wonderful New Taxonomy of Gamers series, so instead I’m going to point to the equally thought-provoking piece, ‘When is a Game Finished?’.
   
• Man Bytes Blog is probably the oldest blog in this list, so I’m sure it needs no introduction. The post of the year from Corvus was ‘Don’t Show, Don’t Tell’; a point-in-case as to just why he’s the professional storyteller in the room.
   
• SLRC is the home of game blog gadfly (as recently described by Michael Abbott) Ben Abraham. Although it’s difficult to go past his amazing thesis on music in videogames, his post of the year must be ‘Hocking’s Masterpiece’, his eloquent praise of Far Cry 2.
   
• Noble Carrots is a fantastic little blog run by British student Spencer Greenwood. Some of the best blog posts are more about raising questions than providing answers, and in his post of the year, Spencer does just that by asking ‘Are Some Thematic Concerns Incompatible With Games?‘
   
• The Quixotic Engineer, run by Canadian Matthew Gallant, posts less frequently than others but is always worth reading. Immensely popular this year was his ‘A Brief History of A and B’, for good reason.
   
• Fullbright is one of those rare blogs that speaks to both designers and those not in the industry. Run by designer Steve Gaynor, ‘Being There’ was one of the posts of the year.
   
• Magical Wasteland possibly sits on the outer of the Brainysphere, being that it updates infrequently and tends to point out bad writing and faults with ‘games journalism’ more than it posts original content. Nonetheless, there are some really insightful pieces here, and none more so than ‘Tell Me What Art Is and I’ll Tell You What Games Are’.
   
• Vorpal Bunny Ranch, the hilariously named blog run by Denis Farr, is one of the most consistently interesting sources of gender and sexuality-focussed videogame criticism on the web. The post of the year was Denis’ take on female protagonists in ‘Gendered Violence’.
   
• Graduate School Gamer is an unusually in-depth blog that I’ve really only just caught up with. The author manages to be intelligent on a wide range of topics, but the best so far is a recent comment on ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Umbrella Corp’, in which Resident Evil 5 is analysed with the help of Edward Said.
   
• Sexy Videogameland is another blog that needs no introduction. Although videogame journalist superstar Leigh Alexander’s best writing tends to pop up on sites that actually pay her to write these days, the year was still good for SVL, with ‘The Four Month Bell-Curve’ an excellent example of her insight.
   
• The Autumnal City is an often intriguing and promising blog by Creative Writer Travis Megill. Of note this year was Travis’ observations on ‘The Need For Revision in Video Games’.
   
• PixelVixen707. A testament to ‘her’ skill as a writer: not only was she outed as an ARG earlier in the year, but she now appears to be forgiven and still churning out interesting posts, even if comments regarding her ‘real’ life border on creepy. I enjoyed her (perhaps facetious) commentary on Gears of War 2.
   
• Banana Pepper Martinis, the other side to PopMatters’ pseudonymous L.B. Jefferies, this year turned out probably the most engaging series of posts on the theory of criticism, culminating in the final, brilliant post on Pauline Kael. It’s ironic that a man who so strongly advocates the practice of theory over the theorising of it would end up creating the best post on criticism theory all year.
   
• Malvasia Bianca, David Carlton’s home on the internet, is a blog on a wide variety of topics; but when he covers videogames, he’s usually absolutely on. A highlight this year was ‘Shadow of the Colossus as Living Structure’.
   
• Acid For Blood is another terrific blog that sometimes focusses on feminism and videogames. I was especially taken with her analysis of Mirror’s Edge in ‘Parkour and Gender’.
   
• Groping the Elephant, another more-than-a-funny-title blog represents Justin Keverne’s insights into videogames. Another blog I’ve only just caught up with, I loved Justin’s thoughts on ‘The Cost of Killing’ in videogames.
   
• Experience Points is a joint venture from two very interesting minds. Recently, Jorge examined the often-overlooked lack of physical touching between characters in videogames in ‘A Touchy Subject’.
   
•  The Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World is the online home of classics professor Roger Travis. I stumbled upon his blog after a wonderfully divisive Escapist article earlier in the year, and haven’t failed to be intellectually stimulated since. An early highlight: ‘The sand-box of epic and the rails of GTA (2)’.
   
• Hit Self-Destruct is a blog with so much good material that I don’t know where to start. Duncan Fyfe, a New Zealander (close enough to feel I can claim him as an honourary Australian) writes some of the best and most engaging material available through all the links on this page. What better place to start, then, than his most recent post on Michael Abbott, and really, the foundations of our community?
   
• Level Up - I tried to avoid including people who get paid to write their blogs on this list, but N’Gai Croal’s contributions are generally too big to be ignored. This year’s Critical Hit? ‘Objection: What’s Missing From Mainstream Reviews of Videogames? Oh, That’s Right–Gameplay’.
   
• Versus CluClu Land usually has so many good posts that I’m tempted to make a compendium of them rather than one simple link. Forced to choose from the philosophising blogger’s backlog, however, I nominate ‘Jazz and American Game Design’, a post with a title that almost made me weep with joy when it popped up in my RSS reader.
   
• Discount Thoughts, Sparky Clarkson’s gaming and science blog, made perhaps the best discovery in 2008: when he posted his ‘Critical Thinking Compilation’, he suggested to us all that in fact, yes, we can be seen as a coherent community with visible threads of conversation and discussion. It’s a wonder nobody did it sooner. Here’s hoping for more.
   
• Save the Robot is the regularly enlightening blog of freelance journalist Chris Dahlen. Chris’ best for the year was his late observation that ‘Games are Software’, though I must also mention his A.V. Club interview with Jonathon Blow as the most infuriating interview of the year.
   
• GameCulture Journal Blog is the home of Bobby, a scholar in training at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There are some really fascinating, if infrequent insights here, and for me, the pick of the bunch is ‘Riding on the Metro: Fallout 3‘.

My plea for 2009? There has to be a way of combining this content without losing its wonderfully diverse character. There are so many threads of conversation here, so many different voices and thoughts that it seems a pity to reduce it all to too many RSS feeds amongst thousands.

EDIT:

The inevitable forgotten entries:

• The Game Critique is a newly minted blog with promise. I enjoyed The Swain’s ‘End of Year Post’ – hopefully a blog that we see more of in 2009.
   
• Click Nothing is CLINT HOCKING’s design blog, and an astoundingly terrific source of insight when it is (infrequently) updated. Of interest throughout the year was Clint’s discussion of Far Cry 2 through development to reception, ending with the most recent entry (which has much the same sentiment as this post), ‘Critical Condition’.
   
• The New Gamer, recommended by Ben Abraham in the comments. A brief look yielded two points: one, it’s very nicely designed; and two, a good article on ‘Playing Through Ugly’ in Mass Effect. 
   
• Writer’s Cabal Blog is another recommendation by Ben. A quick glance reveals a very nice, short piece on ‘Shoe the President: When Games Write Themselves’. And, Anne just dropped by to let us know of perhaps a better post, ‘SXSW preview: Game story and gameplay’.
   
• Above 49 was suggested by TheGameCritique, and although there are only a handful of posts over at the blog, they represent an excellent start. Take a moment to stop and check out ‘Stop and Smell the Pixels: Are Some Games Better in Smaller Doses?’. There are some excellent ideas here.
   
•  Lesbian Gamers, also suggested by Ben, is a site I’m not entirely sure whether to include simply because it seems a little more like a news/reviews site than a blog. Nonetheless, I promised I’d take all suggestions, as certainly, I’m not the arbiter of this community, so here is a nice take on ‘Gay video game characters – if they are in the closet, how do we know?’
   
• Critical-Gaming Network is a suggestion from Justin in the comments. I hadn’t seen it before, but it’s well worth a place in this list. The fact that I’m absolutely taken with the most recent post, and the first one I looked at, ‘DS Design: Maps’ says something about the blog’s overall quality.
   
• Gamer Quest is another young(ish) blog with great potential. There is a terrific, well-reasoned defense of the year ahead for the Wii (a console I admit I haven’t turned on in some time) with ‘Wii Are Getting Better’.
   
• Game-ism is a blog that I have to admit I just plain forgot. ‘Still Alive? She’s Free’ is one of my personal favourite posts of the year; I even considered referencing it in my thesis, but couldn’t fit it in. Some terrific work here.
   
• Infovore, the blog of Tom Armitage, was suggested by Christopher Hyde in the comments. ‘Africa Wins Again: Far Cry 2’s literary approach to narrative’ is a passionate and stunningly insightful analysis of Far Cry 2, and well worth reading.
   
• Raph Coster was recommended by Kim Pallister in the comments, and there is certainly a lot of really engaging material to choose from (going back to 1998!). Koster is, of course, the author of the influential ‘Theory of Fun’, but I’ll point out this nice little piece on ‘Do players know what they want?’  
   
•  Gewgaw, also recommended by Kim Pallister, is the blog of Robin Hunicke, academic and who worked on the terrific Boom Blox. This is an interesting insight on gender and designing.

There has been overwhelming response to this post, which is really terrific to see. Thanks to all who stopped by. Please feel free to continue to suggest blogs to add to this list; most people who drop by this post seem to click on quite a few to check them out, and its nice to continually expand our (now not-so-little) community. The following blogs have been added on or after the 11th of January.

• Play this thing is a blog run by Greg Costikyan, an reoccurring figure in the history of intelligent discussion of games, and Patrick Dugan, a game designer. They have a great team of contributors, including the brilliant Emily Short, who is also responsible for this great interactive fiction blog. Play this thing features one game per day, and looks to be a fascinating resource. Check it out here.
   
•  8-bit Hacks, run by Steve Amodio, is about as old as this blog and already has some terrific stuff up. In particular, check out his ‘Why Mega Man 9 is important and I’m not just old.’
   
• Gameslaw is a site I hadn’t run across before. It seems to run on a gamespolitics.com model, analysing news on the games industry from a legal perspective. I’m not a lawyer, nor particularly interested in the machinations of the law, so I’m not really in a position to recommend or disrecommend the site, but their most recent post on ‘What would happen if Jack Thompson were to sue us for defamation’ was well worth a read.
   
• Words on Play is one of those blogs that I stumbled upon a while back, but forgot to return to; there isn’t a huge amount of content there yet, but there is an absolutely terrific ongoing project on ‘The Secret Books of Games Design’, a series tracking books indirectly about videogames, such as Scott McCloud’s famous ‘Understanding Comics’.
   
• Ordinary Swords is another new blog for this community, and like others on this list, it already shows promise. Here is a nice post on Gears of War 2, violence, critical thinking, and more.
   
• Sirlin, another blog from a games designer, David Sirlin (partially responsible for, among other things, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix). I liked the thread on balancing games that goes through his whole blog, and it starts (more or less) here.

There are many pleasures to be found in videogames. Some games are varied and diverse; others are more focussed on particular pursuits. Some games are almost solely directed towards the pleasures of competition, of challenge, of skill. Others are instead of the pleasures of a world: of interaction, of creation. 

These things we know videogames do very well. But we’re slowly realising that these aren’t the only things that videogames are good at. With casual games, we’re seeing that there is quite a lot more to the medium than we’ve assumed. Casual players, for example, don’t seem to like difficulty. Casual players like to get in and get out, enjoying the experience but leaving the grinding to those who need it.

Michael Abbot today wrote about the new Prince of Persia and the difficulty issue that some commentators have complained of. Certainly, many hardcore players don’t like the lack of punishment the game doles out and the consequences of its generosity. But by the same token, I’m certain many will embrace the accessibility provided by the pulling of the Prince’s punches. This is a crucial point: if we can be disinterested in challenge in games, what then else can we be interested in? Exploration and navigation are some of the ideas I am most obviously interested in, as I have argued through this blog and in my thesis. However, I think these ideas are linked to a larger concept that videogames do very well: being.

Iroquois Pliskin wrote of 2008 as the year of ‘being there’. It’s an illustrative metaphor, as Iroquois aptly shows just how important this year was for the immersive depth of our videogame worlds. But he also hones in on the point that made some see 2008 as an off-year – not with the ‘being’, so much as the ‘doing’. The problem with Grand Theft Auto IV was not with the wonderful world, but with what one had to do in it. The same, Iroquois suggests, can be said about Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and other major 2008 videogames. There are probably ways to overcome this, and certainly in the future we will have videogames with great worlds and amazing things to do in them (if we don’t already).

However, I want to argue that for 2009 and the future, ‘being’ should be just as much of a point as ‘doing’.

This medium, this wonderful new medium, has given us a whole new language to communicate and depict experience. We don’t have to just use it in the pre-established modes of competition, challenge and skill. Why can’t we just be?

This is how videogames could be used to more effectively communicate memory, feeling, emotion. We could have biographies – where the player simply navigates the memory, the life of a subject in a dream-like state. The simplest description might be some sort of cross between The Graveyard and Flower; an experiential world where goals are only loosely present and vaguely desirable. The greatest achievement is to be there; to experience, to see, to hear. To be a digital tourist, a sight-seer (or perhaps more accurately, a site-seer) of sorts.

We could reconceptualise the music of The Beatles through a navigable space; visiting Strawberry Fields, seeing Sergeant Pepper’s band and counting how many potholes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. While watching a recording of Cirque du Soleil’s Love show, I was struck by just how much I wanted to interact with the performance of The Beatles’ music. I didn’t want to play it – I have a guitar for that. I wanted to perform it. I wanted to experience it on a level that only a videogame could give me: I wanted to be there. 

The ability to be and not do could be immensely powerful. It would allow us to experience the world, our history, our imagination in ways that those original, hopeful theorists of videogames thought some far off dream. It would allow us to convey ideas, to revisit time and place far gone, or not yet imagined. Our experience would be shared in ways similar, but inherently different than the goal-oriented ways we currently play. Importantly, it would allow videogames to say new things about topics I had thought inappropriate for the medium. It might show us Hiroshima before and after the bomb. It might take us through a history of physics, from Newton’s apple to the inner workings of Einstein’s mind. Most immediately, it would enable us to experience the wars of the Twentieth Century as more than the view down the barrel of a gun.

The current modes of videogames are incredibly popular and widely loved for good reason, and I am in no way proposing that they be done away with. But we should open ourselves up to these new experiences that the medium offers us: the experience of being. So in this post, a manifesto of sorts, I want to see if we can momentarily turn away from what we thought games were about. Let’s imagine being, and not doing.

- EA CEO John Riccitiello is frighteningly honest on why the console war is good for EA.

And with that, we return you to normal Subject Navigator programming.