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.

Electroplankton

Playing Electroplankton is everything you want out of a piece of media really; it makes you smile and you don't notice how wide until you stop to blink.

Toshio Iwai, an interactive media artist whose work is known for blending both visual and audio elements, was approached by Nintendo in 2004 and asked to design a piece of software that made use of every feature on their DS system; both screens, touch screen control, and a microphone. What Iwai made is a music creation game that allows players to manipulate vibrantly colored plankton creatures on the screen by touching them. They make sound, change shape, and form melody over a provided rhythm (and sometime silence) that makes up the background. You touch the plankton, the plankton sound off, and while you might expect this to end up sounding like a caucophonitastic mess, it works. Spectacularly. You know that scene in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where Beethoven walks into the keyboard store and the salesman's all like, here listen to this? He starts playing one of the demos and Beethoven just grins like a baby. It’s a lot like that, but with a stylus in your hand.

There are ten different tracks and plankton to play with and some are more effective at letting you feel like you’re creating songs than others. Tracy is a great introduction, really letting you get a feel for what you're supposed to do with the game. The following plankton Hanenbow is ambient and soothing and really guides you into experimenting with all the different functions on the DS. Luminaria and Beatnes really bring the art and the audience together. There's a real sense of give and take between the player and the game, when you start to feel like you might not be controlling it anymore, that you're just listening to some bit of preprogrammed music some fancy artist made before you touch the screen again everything about it is different.

Electroplankton's important for a few different reasons, not the least of which is that it's one more piece of software released in the past six months the really proves the legitimacy of Nintendo's push for new ideas of play. Touching most certainly is good. It's also important because it's a new idea and at this point, videogames need new ideas more than ever. In Iwai's liner notes that come with the game, he writes about how the things that fascinated him as a child inspired Electroplankton, the things that made him want to discover, create, learn, and play. Go get it. You should be playing too.

The Boxes

First post. Testing the waters. Words concerning Electroplankton later today.