Player Empowerment over the Game

There are eight million blogs about Mass Effect’s ending, but is not one of them. Well, not entirely.

Last month, most of us watched, without dissimulating the awe, the rise of the discontent horde profoundly enraged. “What could possibly infurieted some many good people?” your mom might have asked, “Hunger? Social inequality? The public health system? Politics?” to which you probably would have answer “They didn’t liked a videogame ending”. This is a suitable answer, but we both know that it does not translate exactly into what happened, does it? What I do recall was angered petitions, money gathering [which, fortunately, end up going to charity] and enraged forums posts. Oh, my Thor, how many posts. It has even became its own meme. Despite all possible pesky atmosphere all these claims had, it’s clear that ME3 fans organized themselves in order to make their point.

Jane McGonigal links this organization abilities encouraged by games as a dormant potential to change the word. She believes that all those fans, highly capable and organized, are only waiting a chance to use their powers to change the world. Unfortunately, future does not seems so bright at least to me. People not always like the same stuff and specially, people not always like the same kinds of cultural productions. The different spectrum of options is also a part of what makes us humans, after all. And respecting there differences is also a great deal of living in society. However, when a large group of people start believing that their point of view is more important or, even more dangerous, more truthful and do whatever is in their power to prove to every single soul in the world that they are right, then we have what we call radicals or extremists. And that’s pretty similar to what happen to Mass Effect 3.

Erik Kain make some good points on how changing ME3 ending is not a bad choice. He points out, for instance, that corporate decisions already deeply influence artistic direction or that videogames are interactive medium and, as so, players are also creative involved on the game. This last claim, however, is quite a tricky one. Sure, no one that has ever played a game doubts that playing the result of the game itself with player’s choices and inputs, and, as so, most events on any game rely on player’s own abilities and judgement. However, players only can play or  interact within option already given to them by developers. Games are a cooperative experience constructed both by players and developers as an experience, but bottom-line, players can only experience what was chosen to be presented to them. Even though there is such a clear distinction, do players in some way own part of the creative content on a game since they have interacted to it?

Protest games against SOPA and PIPA

Unless you have been living in a cave in the last couple of months, you have probably heard of United State’s Government poor attempts to put a stop on online piracy, law projects SOPA and PIPA. Both projects are very similar and, if approved, would allow American government to block suspicious IPs indiscriminately, independently from where in the world the server is located. [If you want know more about those law projects, you should check the video in the end of the post]

Projects were voted last week and after a huge public manifestation, both of them were rejected [for now]. Many kinds of manifestation appeared, from traditional petitions and street protests to more contemporary manifestation forms as videogames. Anti SOPA and PIPA games poped-up everywhere stating a point against the soon-to-be voted legislation, specially after a special edition of the Ludum Dare took place themed against the projects.

Here are some of the most interesting ones results.

Sopa/Pipa

Quite dystopic [you will remember Orwell’s 1984] but graphically and muscly beautiful.

[Play Online]

Super Sopa Brothers

photo by tech2

Simple platform game that states a formal protest.

[Play Online]

Congress Chainsaw Massacre

Amazingly gruesome and strangely satisfying.

[Play Online]

Get Informed

$80 bucks Super Nintendo Portable

Not a big fan of Nintendo new gadgets and portables neither willing to wait for Sony Vita? Hungry for something that you used to feel while playing that nowadays games fail to deliver but don’t have so much time to spent in front of a TV or emulator? None of the above, but still thinks Zelda: A Link to the Past is the best Zelda game ever?

Worry not, my friend, because Hyperkin has just solved your problems. Which, by the way, you didn’t even knew you had before reading this. Remember the guy who transformed a full N64 into a portable system? Well, Hyperkin just did this for you. With the Super Nintendo. Yeap, I’m not joking. Yes, you can order it now. And no, I don’t know if its compatible with those tricky-dicky cartridges.

But who cares? Shut up and take my money, Christmas style!

[Spoted by Jordan Devore @ Destructoid]

Not supporting cloud gaming may be “insanity”?

photo by IIISiXIII

There is a big gamma of different companies offering cloud gaming for some time now. Though this particular service of cloud use haven’t been well popularized yet, just consider what cloud storage is making to our documents (as in Google docs, Zoho or Dropbox, to name a few) or cinematic entertainment (as Hulu and Netflix). So, we may wonder, cloud gaming may be something huge in a couple of years.

The use of may wasn’t unintentional. I use it beacause is not a thing we can affirm just now as somewhat sure. Bandwidth nowadays is barely being able to handle delivering non-interactive media, as TV shows and movies (many friends of mine reported serious visualization problems with services as Netflix), just imagine the chaos those same connections would proportionate to their owners when (trying) to display ultra interactive worlds in HD dimensions of high-polygonal models.

It’s important to state: I’m not saying cloud gaming is doomed, however, I just believe that it a bit soon to say that it’s our messiah. That being said, here it is what  Gaikai CEO, David Perry, has said at a GDC Online panel.

You don’t want to be a console that doesn’t [offer cloud gaming]. This future is coming, trust me. We’re well-funded. This is going to happen. OnLive is already making it happen. You need to be prepared for that.

Well… Tell me about faith (or looking out of the company’s interest).

GDC Online: Cloud Gaming’s Fast-Approaching Future [Destructoid suggested link]

Death As a Bullet Point

Doesn't seem very fair, does it?

The resilience to take a right-proper beating can mean the difference between surviving harsh living conditions or succumbing to the elements. Most folks would rather avoid surly activities such as crucifixion and live skinning. Yet, there exists a subset of games enthusiasts among us who thrive on self-inflicted grief. Some would even go so far as to pay sixty dollars to be kicked in the crotch, have their flesh set ablaze, followed by impalement with a rusty implement and finished off with the twisting of the diseased blade buried in a fresh slit.

This generation has seen the divide between hardcore and casual become a blatant sight. Dark Souls and its predecessor Demons Souls have galavanted to the front of the crowded games market championing the notion that games should be a challenge. In doing so they’ve found an audience steadfast enough to surmount these gauntlets of masochistic euphoria. Players resilient enough hold on to their wits during the insane, sudden spikes in the challenge have recounted tales of bosses who dispense nothing but one hit kills and hours-upon-hours of progress lost to the ether of time. The Souls owe much of their design credo to the Rogue-like genre.

The corporate thinking behind modern video game design mandates that a complete product should ship in a state in which it can be feasibly and reasonably completed by the majority of its audience at the standard difficulty setting. An industry, currently in the midst of sequelitis and lead by sales figures must stand by the status quo. As it turns out, letting people play through a sixty dollar roller-coaster ride, then charging them another sixty the following year for another such jaunt is quite profitable.

The web URL for Dark Souls, “preparetodie.com,” reaffirms to fans of the masochistic romp that everything they loved about Demons Souls is intact.

To compound the difficulty both entries eschew another convention the difficulty setting. The Souls games’ use a single soul-crushing setting.

Dark Souls wears its predecessor’s infamy on its face much akin to the way it flaunts the soft skin torn from the tender hides of its victims. Terrorists and fictional home front wars are replaced by protagonists with charred epidermises and giant, fire-spewing monstrosities who kill you in half a heartbeat.

World myths are teeming with examples of heroes surmounting unspeakable pain and horror. Many such personae are exalted to unenviable state of martyrdom. One need only riffle through The Bible for the most famous of examples. Wording such as stout masochist, unwavering martyr and firm punching bag are selling points the likes of which may never find their way onto the resume of average employment seeker. Still, a person who can take a hefty, swift strike to the nether regions without so much as showing a crack in their composure. It is perhaps for the best that I leave the ordeal of delineating the line between torment and elation to a man with a higher testicular constitution for self-inflicted flailing.

Let used videogames alone!

Photo of our polemic CEO by M. Concepcion to examiner.com.

There is a lot of fuzz lately about second-hand videogames sales, specially after Quantic Dream’s CEO, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, stated “And my calculation is, as Quantic Dream, I lost between €5 and €10 million worth of royalties because of second-hand gaming.” Quantic Dreams is the company behind Heavy Rain, a game widely known for encouraging players to play it only once.

I could go on and on about the matter, pointing out pros and cons in each side of the dispute as serious journalism demands us to. But, guess what, that’s not a journalism blog. I won’t do anything like that. Instead, I’m going to write here: books.

Yes, you read it right, books.

Books are one of the first kind of mass-produced creative work to be available to sale in a good quality. Unlike paintings or sculptures, which were a handcraft artistic piece of work for a long time, since Gutenberg created the movable type printing, in around 1439, nearly every piece of word could be mass published and mass sold. Being mass printed, however, didn’t mean one or a group of creative minds wasn’t in charge of creating the content of the book, pamphlet or gazettes.

As printed material, videogames are also the mass reproduction result of a creative composition. They also involve a team of skilled workers that will use the best of their intellectual production in order to create a cultural piece. So, both the player and the reader will buy not the intellectual property of this creative work but instead a material reproduction of it.

However, in one of these industries, selling the used material reproduction was never actually questioned and is a common practice. In the other one, never the less, is being pointed out by some developers as a “shot in the foot” or a way by which some clever gamers use to not play a cent for the poor developers.

Needless to say one of this industries is using the wrong approach around the matter. Would it be the one with almost 40 years of development or the one that is around 500 years entertaining humans? When I find it out, I’ll let you guys know.