Game Writing is So Bad, It's Not Even Funny

Check out my latest essay on BlogCritics. It asks why game writing is so bad, and comes to the conclusion that it's all economics. Go. Do it. C'mon.......... Please? Thank you.

George Will Feels Blue About Jeans

George Will, the conservative syndicated columnist, decided to lump video games in with his assessment of our culture's juvenility, characterized by the fabric denim. He says that everyone in America is dressing like ten-year-olds when they wear blue jeans, and that we are all making a conscious decision to look as shabby as possible when we do so. (He says instead that we should all dress like Fred Astaire in the picture below) Here's the video game-specific quote from the article: "Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote." It's rather stereotypically grumpy-old-man-ish to me: Culture has changed and I don't like it. Not to mention his support of disenfranchisement of people who play video games is, well, you're on this website, so obviously it goes without saying that you disagree with him, I think.

Gaming Sideshow of the Week: PaRappa TV Show

I'm going to try to stay on topic for all of my blog posts except one each week, from now on. This week, my special gaming sideshow of the week is the old PaRappa anime, of which there are a few episodes on YouTube with some terrible fan subtitles, which I'm not sure are entirely legit (I could almost fill in as much as they say in the subtitles by just guessing from context). Anyway, embedded hereafter is the episode "So This is Love", in which Katy falls in love with PJ the DJ. The episode itself is horrendous, but make sure to watch the intro and credits, which are in exactly the style of a light-hearted anime show.

Six Days in Fallujah

Konami has announced that they are publishing Six Days in Fallujah, an FPS set in the Second Battle of Fallujah in the (currently ongoing) Iraq War. This has stirred up a bit of a storm, mostly from those who have been in Iraq before, as we all only attempt to guess what the game will be like. Some are worried it will treat the subject too trivially, or glorify it, or even make it more of a documentary, perhaps showing white phosphorous attacks or something. We don't know what it will be like, but it has the potential to be the most important game, um, ever.

If this game does choose the documentary route, it will be a huge deal. Few people actually know the details of the Second Battle of Fallujah, and most would probably be surprised that the Iraq War even has named battles. A portrayal of this conflict with some of the nastier bits left in would actually mean video games would have surpassed other media in spreading awareness like this. I'm sure there are films that have brought this sort of thing to light, but not that showed nationwide in theaters. This is a popular, large publisher video game, and even if it doesn't reach Call of Duty 4 numbers, it will still be widely played and recognized.

With my extremely optimistic hopes for this game, it could be considered the turning point for games as mainstream art, video games' "Birth of a Nation", sort of. But, then again, it will probably just be Call of Duty 4 with similarly inane writing and no real relevance beyond the real setting, which will be totally just to get attention on news networks.

Close Range (The Onion Parody)

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

The Onion News Network (basically The Onion's video section) released a video, "demo", and poster for its fake video game, Close Range. The game consists of nothing but shooting people point blank in the face, along with some horses and ostriches to mix things up. The video is basically a parody of the gaming industry's typically shallow, awfully-written, super-violent AAA titles.

I was planning on writing an editorial for BlogCritics asking why there aren't really many funny games any more, and the underlying problem there is that no games have good writing. Killzone 2's dialogue is basically a random mixture of "Holy Shit!" "Whoa!" and "What the-!" over and over, with no interesting, well, anything, writing-wise. Yet, it is likely the top-reviewed and purchased game this year. The Grand Theft Auto series is better (I haven't tried Chinatown Wars) but still not up to any real writing standards.

Why do games have awful writing? Because critics don't care and consumers don't care. You will virtually never see a mainstream video game review take points off on a game for having retarded dialogue or scenes or writing. The Metal Gear Solid series is probably the best-written of major game series, and critics are more likely to complain about the story and writing than admire it, because it's not extremely well-executed either (endless information dumped in one monologue over and over, almost pretentiously confusing as Japanese storylines tend to be in my experience, jarring silly moments that also tend to be in Eastern storylines in my experience). Anyway, if we ever want to really claim that games are art, we seriously need to improve the writing. Games can already look amazing, and they are rewarded for doing so by critics, but there is currently no impetus for engaging storylines.

19-Year-Old Protests Against CoD Animal Cruelty

When you take the "desensitize" argument to its logical and extreme conclusion, you get this. The pointlessly small, monochromatic, and fuzzy screenshot above comes from the Lowell Sun's report on a 19-year-old girl's animal cruelty protest over the game Call of Duty: World at War. Because you shoot attack dogs in the game, clearly she should "fear young kids playing these games and thinking it's all right to do this -- because they do it in a video game." In my experience, kids love dogs more than they love people. And, the dogs in the game will literally rip your throat out if you don't shoot them first. And, dogs are varied enough that we can tell between attack dogs and the 19-year-olds Pomeranians (apparently named Winnie the Pooh and Fluffy, no joke). But, kids are killing dogs in the game, so they'll just feel so compelled to get a gun and shoot the nearest dog that they start itching for it, literally unable to sleep at night without shooting innocent dogs.

This is almost a parody of the "violence desensitization" argument. No, young and impressionable kids aren't going to shoot dogs because they had to in Call of Duty. It's not even an "object of the game" as the 19-year-old says, but rather, as Kotaku says, part of the overall goal of staying alive for as long as you can. So, will kids think they have to shoot every dog they see to stay alive? No, because there are also friendly dogs in the game that tear the Nazis' (or Japanese/Americans') throats out (and kids aren't ridiculously stupid sub-human beings. At least not all the time.)

Finally, a Mostly Okay Bailout Game

Since I've been talking so much about how absurdly awful the online bailout-themed webgame scene has been, I guess I'll provide a slightly less rant-y post here for Budget Hero's updated, sort of bailout-themed game.

Budget Hero's update includes one new "badge" to the game, allowing you to set one of your three requisite goals to be "economic stimulus". In the game, you are allowed to add to and cut from any part of the budget that the game provides for, a fairly sizable choice range. On just dealing with the Bush tax cuts alone, you have about ten different choices, ranging from keeping them to reversing them to reversing them and taxing the rich a little extra. Your goal is to achieve the best possible combination of a balanced budget (one that will collapse later than 2030 or so) and your three chosen goals (like "green", "social safety net", and "national security"). Every budget change you make that helps one of your goals contributes a sizeable amount to coloring in the badge, a fully colored one indicating that you were successful.

This is at least a thoughtful game. You are given many, many choices on what to do with the budget, and you can read a lengthy piece of text for each choice, indicating the situation, pros, and cons to implementing that change. There's a lot of information here, and you really feel the pressure dynamic between cutting your spending to keep the debt manageable and implementing the programs we need, especially with the stimulus.

I have a few problems, though. Your three chosen goals allow you to basically ignore everything else. I chose "economic stimulus", "green revolution", and "energy independence". That means that the game doesn't really penalize me at all if I, say, cut defense spending by 10% (which the majority of players have done, likely out of necessity to come near a balanced budget) or even something uncharacteristic for a liberal like eliminating Medicare, Foreign Aid, etc. Your three goals should matter the most, but the others should still matter. The party wouldn't support a move to privatize defense or something radical like that, even if it's not part of your specific platform to keep national security a priority. But, changing the game so that every possible goal matters would make things even more tense and realistic, and it is just a game.

The game also allows us to assume that we stay in absolute power for about twenty years to actually see all of our economic programs take effect. It takes a while, sometimes. Well, I've written enough already. Play it, it's somewhat educational and at least partially successful at representing the tension inherent in the job.