Genesis Goodies

Disruption! Oceans! Swimming in the Fun Part!

Friends, aficionados, fans, codgers, yoots, I want to take a moment to discuss your behavior over the past 24 hours. With a minute-by-minute detailing of your psychological turmoil over the naming of a consumer product, a flurry of streaming attention across every second that would make Jack Bauer green with envy and nausea, you have done exactly what a team of marketing and PR folk want you to do: You’ve guaranteed their success.

The Wii.

This is the recently revealed moniker of the new Nintendo game system that has been tempting the consumer populace and enthusiast press for two years. From E3 2004 to April 27^th, 2006, Nintendo has piqued interest not with gameplay or graphics but with an input device and something infinitely more effective than any product display: language. While Sony has shown off some very pretty pictures and Microsoft has rolled out an army of b-list celebrities to get the saliva flowing in anticipation of their products, Nintendo has spent their time rattling off a number of esoteric phrases designed to intrigue everyone. Disruptive Technology. Blue Ocean Strategy. Revolution.

Befuddling and idiotic in the way only marketing speak can be, Nintendo has said again and again that their plan is to diversify themselves wholly from their competitors and to create a new product that effectively drives the technological development of an industry in a new direction. Sure, it would be much simpler to just say, “We gonna do something different and we gonna be different from everybody else and stuff. You’ll like it!” but it’s more effective to confuse the audience just a bit, to keep them scrutinizing and discussing what they’ve been told. Nintendo gave everyone fair warning, told the lot of people paying attention to be prepared. And yet, as each of these tactics have been implemented, the gaming community, not to mention the gaming press, has responded like a room full of six year-olds who just found out that Santa’s actually a Coca-Cola ad.

The freehand controller and the name Wii itself are inherently disruptive. They are foreign concepts introduced to a rabid audience that abhors change and once they were introduced they elicited constant discussion and consideration. After Tokyo Game Show 2005, the industry was abuzz over how silly it seemed that a television remote was supposed to be revolutionary. Eight months later the discussion continues, from the more fanatic blogosphere to the most mainstream of media outlets such as CNN, NBC’s Today Show, and MTV.com. Commentary on Nintendo’s new controller evolved from infantile jabber to thoughtful consideration as its functionality became legitimized by industry developers and coverage became more widespread.

The name Wii is silly and phonetically impossible to pronounce when first seen in print. It’s a far cry from a name like Revolution, which is strong by definition and culturally significant in Western territories, but nigh on unpronounceable in Japanese.

Semiotic-ally pretentious, lending itself to quick satire, and seemingly the latest in a string of peculiar brandings from a company with a shaky history over the last decade, the Wii seems like a bullet to the foot and the community has spoken on this very subject loudly, constantly, and poorly for the past day. Take Matt Cassmasina of IGN’s clever point that Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize Wii as a real word or CVG’s headline “Nintendo takes piss with final Rev name” as just two examples of the press’ intelligent response to the announcement. And who could forget the hundreds of thousands of forum posts across the net pointing out that now gamers can say, “I’m playing with my Wii.”

It has, to put it bluntly, disrupted the industry. It has taken up every inch of mind space available with E3 only two weeks away. By talking and joking and ranting and doomsaying, gamers have delivered to Nintendo one of the biggest marketing victories likely to be seen across all industries in fiscal year 2006. Congratulations, House of Mario. You’ve won this round.

So, everyone addressed above, let me say this: If you hate the name so damned much, stop talking about it. Be silent. Stop braying at each other using zeroes instead of vowels. You’re only making it worse for yourselves by doing what a company, a business, wants you to. Instead, talk about the games that you’ll be playing for the first time come November, games that are wholly different from any others you’ve played over the past thirty years. For everyone else who has taken a second to think about it and considered the intent behind Wii, thanks for giving our pastime a good name. Finally, for everyone who hasn’t started playing yet, see you soon.

With Nothing to Talk About But Movies and the Weather

Warren Spector is not a man to be trifled with. Anyone who is perfectly willing to put Mark Hammil as an ace space-fighter pilot but not as Luke Skywalker in their videogame has testicles the size of Kilamanjaro. Also, anyone who makes Deus Ex is awesome.

These days, Warren's been a very outspoken critic of his industry. The press and industry leaders themselves have spent the past three years focusing on gaming's transition into the mainstream and technological growth. Certain developers and Nintendo itself as a corporate entity have during that time period been insisting on a push towards greater innovation in design and play in order to nurture an ever growing gamer populace while others like Sony and Microsoft see the future as a natural evolution of gaming's past; better graphics, more powerful hardware, and games as one branch of a grand entertainment web of different media from music to movies centralized in a technological hub in the home. At the International Game Summit in Montreal this past November, Spector gave an impassioned talk on this topic and his vision of videogames' future as a medium isn't all peaches and cream and profit. He acknowledges that while that pleasant mixture is one possible outcome, an industry wide crash akin to what happened in the early 1980s is just as possible. He is currently elaborating on this through a series of articles being published by The Escapist magazine entitled Gaming at The Margins and while nearly all of his criticisms and praises ring true, his specific evidence that gaming could fall based on the precedent of past forms of entertainment is not only false but downright silly in light of such an intelligent argument as the one he's making.

Spector points out five separate media as examples of how quickly the public's interest can be lost in the blink of an eye: radio drama, vaudeville, arcades, the Broadway musical, and comic books. He sites them all as entertainment that were at one time at the height of consumer desirability but what he fails to point out, ironically enough, is that at least three of these were outmoded not because of just waning public interest but because they were technologically rendered moot. Radio drama and vaudeville were quite literally replaced by television. Television provided the exact same entertainment offered by vaudevillian stage acts and radio drama through variety programming and televised dramas, often times by the exact same entertainers who provided them through the outmoded media. Broadway, and the musical itself, despite a renaissance in the latter 20th century, has never come close to achieving the popularity it had in pre- and post-war America on a global scale and has remained a historically small market when compared to television and, yes, even videogames (have musicals ever earned in the billions of dollars per year, even on a relative scale?) Even theater broadly is a poor example as it too was antiquated, perhaps not artistically but popularly, by the advent of television and film. Arcades too lost popularity not because arcade games were no longer interesting to consumers but because game technology grew to offer not only a comparable experience but a more valuable and ultimately affordable one.

And comic books, geez, comic books have never, ever, since 1937 when that first issue of Action Comics hit stands and created the superhero, been a truly mainstream form of entertainment. At least videogaming has started being seen as a respectable pastime for all ages early on in its life. Comics spent the better part of sixty years relegated to the cultural ghetto of being "just for kids."

So, Warren, what is it that will offer consumers the same experience as videogames? What new technology will come and tear the controller away from millions of players across the globe and offer them something new? Virtual reality? Holodecks? Psilocybin mushrooms? A newly discovered continent in the middle of the Atlantic ocean named Hyrule?

I agree with you. I do. Things need to change for videogames to truly blossom into the artistic expression they can, should, and will be. Development costs must go down. We must think of new ways to play. People must stop buying WWE games.

But if you think for one second that Grand Theft Auto is going to go the way of weekly episodes of The Shadow, you are dead wrong.

Sex, Art, Violence, Corruption of Youth

Yep, right there is the big four driving topics of discussion in the mass media of the western world when it comes to games. I've got my own opinions on said matters that I'll no doubt expound upon in the future (in short I'll say that there's not enough, they are, there isn't any more in them than in any other media though the issue of player agency is important to address, and hey, they made me so how bad can they be, respectively.)

I bring this up as of just read James Mielke's interview with Metal Gear Solid auteur Hideo Kojima and he had something very interesting to say concerning the "Games as Art" debate. Check it:

""I don't think they're art either, videogames. The thing is, art is something that radiates the artist, the person who creates that piece of art. If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it's art. But videogames aren't trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It's something of a service. It's not art. But I guess the way of providing service with that videogame is an artistic style, a form of art... Art is the stuff you find in the museum, whether it be a painting or a statue. What I'm doing, what videogame creators are doing, is running the museum--how do we light up things, where do we place things, how do we sell tickets? It's basically running the museum for those who come to the museum to look at the art. For better or worse, what I do, Hideo Kojima, myself, is run the museum and also create the art that's displayed in the museum."

A fascinating take I think. But it's not unlike saying that an image on film or words on a page aren't art until the artist crafts them into something that will effect the audience.

S'a shame that the Metal Gear games can hardly be called games at all. You watch that shit for hours and not much else. For serious.

Dorked Out, Fascinated By the Text, Believing the Hype

My god, this place is a barren wasteland of no posting! Someone ought to really do something about that and frankly Godzilla would be my chief nominee. However, that gigantic bastard does seem to have a penchanct for breaking keyboards with his massive rubber and latex claws so I suppose the burden will rest squarely on my shoulders.

Where to start, where to start. Let's open it up with stuff about games, then move into actual games, and then we'll get ten shades of ponderous about the future of games. Allez cuisine!

I just finished reading two books recently, one filled with a bunch of things I already happened to know and another filled with really neat stories that I had never even fathomed. The first is Chris Kholer's Power Up: How Japanese Games Gave the World an Extra Life and the other is Smartbomb by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby. Kholer's book is a ton of fun if you are a fanboy who's yet to learn the ins and outs of 80's/90's glory days gaming lore. In the year 2029, when Videogames 101 is an elective for every incoming freshman at every university across the land, this is going to be a great primer for them. It should be noted though that Kohler is a Nintendo zealot in the truest sense and this guy devoted at least 20 pages of his text to sucking Shigeru Miyamoto's dick with the intensity of a blackhole. Then again, who the hell can blame him? Smartbomb is downright fascinating for anyone who plain enjoys interesting stories. It is for the most part a creative nonfiction telling of the history of videogames, from Higinbotham's Tennis for Two all the way to the 2005 GDC. Half of every chapter is devoted to deeply personal reported passages that are subtle, deftly written, and occassionally moving. This one's worth your time.

So much games man. So much games. As of late I've been devoting far too much time to Final Fantasy 4 on the GBA, Animal Crossing DS, Elektroplankton and a few other odds and ends like Pikmin 2, which I've only just now gotten around to checking out. But even though these are the things I've been playing and spending my time with, they aren't the games that are occupying most of my mind. Like a god damn midnight epiphany that led to a morning walk at dawn coupled with a hot cup of coffee, Dragon Quest 8 has spread like the hanta virus throughout every cleft of my brain and shows no signs of leaving.

I finished Dragon Quest 8 well over a month ago after pouring 90 hours into a single play through. This has never happened to me before. Without getting overly verbose, I'm going to tell you the single reason you should play this game regardless of whatever type of entertainment you're into: Dragon Quest imparts a sense of adventure, a desire to wander and discover and search throughout every inch of the digitally rendered playground that it is that I haven't experienced since the first time I played a Zelda game. Dragon Quest is so pretty your eyes will hurt. The fights are fast and fun. The soundtrack is parasitically memorable. Dragon Quest is sweet. Dragon Quest kicks ass. If you don't play it, you don't know what fun is and you probably have sex with dogs.

Not to shit whimsy on y'all but I've got to say, 2006 is exciting stuff. People are actually discussing at large whether or not videogames are art. Just take a look at the whole Roger Ebert debacle this past fall. People got fired up when that bespectacled gossamer said videogames couldn't have an emotional impact akin to film. They got in the discussion. They cared. And he hashed it out with them. NPR just reviewed Katamari Damacy. People are talking. Get pumped.

The Future Is Now, A Winner Is You

I am not insane. I have just been evilly reprogrammed.

So yeah, a Neo Geo AES system is impractical for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that one controller is comparable in size to the conceptual PS3 design, but I'll be god damned if playing 15 year-old games on that box isn't a slice of lightly toasted charm.

Enough pondering though. I wanted to share with all of you my brand new theory!

You see, I believe that The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess (TLOZ:TTP OMG PWNED NTBUSWAB!) is actually the new R.O.B. for the Nintendo Revolution. The Robot Operating Buddy was the grand trojan horse of videogames. The US game playing public was suffering from some serious post-Atari E.T. apoplexy back in 1986 and the notion of selling these woozy saps a new game console was absurd, so Nintendo packaged the thing with a failed Japanese peripheral and made the NES looks like a shiny, um, dull-grey toy. But it was still a toy, a product that was understandable and easy to bring into the home. Little did everyone know that Super Mario Bros. was lurking in there like a craven god-hero waiting to lead a world into an entirely new medium. They fell for it too. Mario got into everyone's house and he still hasn't left, eatin' up all the food.

2006 is a different world dear friends. Everyone done wants to play the big movie game. They want the Master Chief. They want the 20+ hours game time, the big immersive world, the orchestrated score. That's what they understand now.

Twilight Princess is easy to sell because it's just a videogame. A grand sweeping videogame that has Link in it, but just a videogame nonetheless. Whether it adopts any potential play mechanics inherent in the new Revolution controller is a moot point. The Revolution can play it is all that matters, and the name Zelda alone, regardless of hi-def gaphics or what have you, will get that little white box and it's wacky controller into people's houses.

But they won't be expecting the new things it can do.

It's gonna move in. And it's not going to go home.

Zelda Trojan Horse Theory exeunt.

And oh yes, NTBUSWAB? Not to bring up Star Wars again but...

S'useful.