360 degrees of… nothing?

So the biggest gaming news of the week was the big MTV Xbox 360 unveiling. LIke most people, I found it to be totally vapid and lame. (If you didn’t catch it, there are torrents out there) For those looking for more substance, there is the ourcolony video as well as tons of other previews.

This makes me wonder why Microsoft (oops, I’m sorry, I mean Micro$oft!) is doing it this way. What seems to be going on is a dual pronged launch. The MTV for the mainstream people and the online stuff for the hardcore. However, I can’t imagine that the MTV special got anyone excited. It was the exact same thing as the SpikeTV Videogame Awards — a great example of people who don’t play videogames trying ever so hard to make videogames cool. The similarities were striking. The same big warehouse that was dimly lit with laser beams flashing, the same lack of actual videogame content, and many of the same b-grade celebrities. Wow, Elijah Wood plays videogames! (While I loved the Lord of the Rings movies, is there anyone that would describe Elijiah Wood as cool??) This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since MTV and SpikeTV are both owned by Viacom.

While this might make the case against media consolidation as well as the case that corporations are full of incompetent people, it also brings us back to Microsoft. If there is any company that is less cool or less sexy than Microsoft, I can’t imagine what it is. However, even Microsoft must have realized that this MTV thing wasn’t going to satisfy gamers, so they hedged their bets with Our Colony. But if you go to google news and search for Xbox, you’ll get lots of hits, but not much coverage from mainstream media. Perhaps the real coverage will come next week with E3, but right now, it doesn’t seem like the mainstream media cares. Is Microsoft just throwing money out the window with this then? Sure, they can afford to, but is any of this working? Gamers online are excited about it, but does anyone else care?

I’ve got no thesis statement. I’ve got not real point here, but the vapid wasteland of the MTV spot combined with the more substantial our colony video as well as the near-astroturfing of the gaming sites makes for interesting advertising. Is it significant the an online video that is only a few minutes long seems to be much better received and much more news worthy than a 30 minute program on MTV? Who knows. But it sure is interesting to kick back and see the hype unfold. The real test will be on the day the Xbox 360 goes on sale.

EA tatoos were legit, I guess

Been pretty busy lately. But now that the Spring semester is over, I should be posting more regularly. I’m sure my faithful readers, all ten of you, will be glad to hear that.

Back on the first of April, I wrote about a press release that said that EA was tattooing IU students. At the time I thought it might have been some sort of April Fool’s joke since I hadn’t heard anything about it. However, it seems like it really happened. Warren Christopher Freiberg wrote a column in the Indiana Daily Student that has the title, Everybody Sells Out Sometimes and he mentions that he was one of the people that got an EA tattoo. The column is about the notion of putting a corporate logo on your body, but it does verify that the tattooing did take place.

I stand corrected.

Sick! Sick! Sick!

I’m at that stage where I can feel the flu coming on and I’m dreading it. I just have to stay healthy until Tuesday and then my papers will be written. Just ’till Tuesday.
On another note, over at Gamasutra, there is a new article entitled, “The Psychology Behind Games” that uses Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of flow. I wish I’d thought of that.
Of course I’m just kidding. I did write (link to rtf file) about it and it was a chapter in my Master’s thesis. While it seems obvious that it should be applied to developement of games rather than just analysis, I chose not to do so since that wasn’t my interest. It is interesting to see someone take that viewpoint on it. It certainly never hurts to have someone else write about Flow. Maybe sometime the idea will catch on.

Just catching up…

It is coming down to the wee days of the semester so I’m pretty busy with coursees and teaching. In fact right now I’m taking a break from grading before I go to a group meeting! On the bright side, I am sitting outside working on my laptop and using the university’s wifi, proving that Indiana University is, indeed, the most unwired college campus.

On the gaming studies front, I got my paper, “Gaming Mind, Gaming Body: Mind/Body Split for a New Millenium” into the Digra conference a record day early. Then I noticed that I had somehow been removed from the schedual, so I had a mini-panic attack and emailed people and got put back on. Of course, now I seem to be on a panel with game design people, which is odd, but at least I am on the schedual. Now let’s just see if I manage to get into the proceedings book rather than just on the DVD with the rest of the riff-raff!
On a related front, I’ve been told that my long in press essay in the Doom: First-Person Reader book from the Ludologica series is still in the works. Maybe some day I will get to read my own work in print. Except the book is in Italian… and I don’t know Italian… Of course that means that I can still put it on my vita with some confidence that an US jobs I apply for won’t be able to see how bad it is!!!

I did manage to find time to finish FarCry. As friends who have played it assured me, it did get better. It is interesting how a game grows on you. There’s a paper topic right there! Also it is interesting how a certian small feature can make or break the game. For me, the binoculars that would locate the enemy on the radar and the sniper rifle were essential to my enjoyment of the game. Before I had those, I hated the game. Once I got them, the game became much more fun.

OK, 9 more papers to grade and an hour and a half before my meeting. Think I can get them done before the meeting? Me neither. But I’m giving a test tomorrow, so I should be able to finish it during that.

There and back again…

So I made it back from the Popular Culture Association in sunny San Diego. There were 6 videogame panels in two days and although I missed a couple, the 4 I caught were great. If you’re looking for a nice conference to go to you could do worse than the PCA.
The flight back was a nightmare, however. I had a flight from San Diego that left at 10pm pacific time back to Indianapolis.. …via Newark! I had a 3 hour layover in Newark and didn’t get back to Indy until 11:30am the next day. A 6ft4 guy in the back of the plane ain’t a god time.
While I was waiting in Newark I also had a unique experience. I’ve got friends from all over the world so I think I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding non-native speakers of english. The woman working at the airport stumped me though. She had a Mexican accent, which, again, I like to think I can do a pretty good job of understanding. However, on top of that, she had a New Jersey accent! That threw me for a loop.
Waiting for me when I got back home was my newest addiction: DDR! I played it at the Game On exhibit in Chicago and realized that I am horribly out of shape, so now I am on the DDR exercise routine! The fat is just melting away!

g4m3rs 4 gØd part II: l33t 4 teh lØrd

Those with a good memory may remember that back in September I saw a flyer for a Halo party put on by a religious organization. I guess these guys were ahead of the curve. Over at Water Cooler Games, I saw a link to a story about The Saga of the XBox – ”How To Witness Using Halo 2” that talked about a couple of ministries using Halo 2 as a way of reaching people. The original article, How to Witness Using ‘Halo 2’ gives more details on it, as well as an interesting interpretation of the Halo story. As someone who once wrote an article comparing Doom to working in a corporation, I can appreciate interesting interpretations.

However, I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off using Painkiller which is about fighting demons anyway? Still, it is an interesting phenomenon. I wonder how they feel about the laws attempting to ban the sale of games like Halo 2 to minors?

Game over man! Game over!

I went to the Game On exhibit in Chicago last Monday and I give it thumbs up. I had heard that they used emulators, but almost all the machines there actually were on original hardware. They did have one MAME machine connected to a big screen but the rest were actual arcade machines and consoles. I finally got to play an Atari Jaguar and have to agree that it does have a very odd controller. It seems like it your fingers should go up in the front but it doesn’t have trigger or shoulder buttons.
There were some omissions, of course. Computer games were under-represented. There was no Doom, or Quake or even Ultima or Diablo. There was, however, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Other omission were online games of all kinds and fighting games (there was a copy of one of the street fighters). In fact, the only FPS game was Metroid Prime which people claim isn’t really a FPS at all.
Despite these holes, the exhibit was rather complete with everything from Space Invaders to DDR, from Donkey Kong to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. We spend three hours in there playing games. All in all, it was worth the trip. Check it out if you can!

A “Far Cry” from how it used to be…

A long time ago I wrote:

Dear Game Developers,
Stop pissing me off. Let me use both of my cd drives when I install your games.
Thank You.

Well, yesterday I saw Far Cry on sale for $19.99 and so I bought it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the DVD version, but the 5 CD version. I got home and began to install it. I put disk one in my main cd drive (which is of course a dvd drive…) and put disk 2 in my other cd drive (which, of course, is also a dvd drive… see a pattern here?). I had anticipated on trying to switch the drive letter when it asked for disk 2. However, imagine my surprise when it asked for disk 3! It automatically knew that I had disk 2 in the other drive and didn’t even ask me for it. Sweet! I applaud Crytek or ubisoft or whoever it was that made the installer smart enough to know I have two disk drives!

However, as far as the game itself goes… All of you people that gave it 90% and higher. Where can I get some of that crack you’re smoking? I mean, I’m only an hour into it or so, but the game seems really blaa and unremarkable. Sure it is all outside, but that’s more or less the only remarkable feature I’ve seen so far. Of course I have barely gotten into it, so I won’t judge it too harshly, yet. It might get more awesomness-ativity later on.

In other news, I’m heading up to Chicago Monday to take in the Game On exhibit. I’ve been waiting for this to get stateside since I got the book and wrote a review of it (thank goodness for Archive.org! even though Joystick101 is back online, the archives seem to be missing and I can’t find my original copy of the review). I’ll be sure to give my rundown of the exhibit when I get back in town. Check out some other people’s comments over at slashdot.