Should We Keep Ignoring Sports Games? (Bogost: "No.")

(source photo by Scott Ableman)

In his talk "What is a Sports Game?" at "FROG 2010" (never heard of it!), renaissance man of game design theory Ian Bogost cracks a few eggs of knowledge on you about sports games. (Since not all of us have an hour to spend watching this, I've extracted the main talking points below:)

Our current, incredibly underdeveloped theory of sports games is this: sports games are simulations. We watch professional sports on TV, then go on to play the licensed game with licensed properties and likenesses of professional players and John Madden's licensed voice saying licensed things with a sportscast-style user interface and presentation. Just compare a still from an ESPN sportscast and a screenshot and the resemblance, from the HUD to the camera angles, is uncanny.

If we're to say they're simulations, we have to think about the act of simulation; specifically, the "thing" one simulates must be a stable, discrete thing in order to simulate it.

But modern soccer as we know it (or "football" as the rest of the silly world calls it) has transformed through hundreds of cultures, variants, rulesets... It's not stable. We don't just plug some VGA cables into a rulebook and get a "simulation." The Mayan version of "football" existed for millenia; who's to say our "football" is more "football-ish" than their version of football? Thus, sports are largely originless, and only exist as long as we're willing to repeat playing them over and over.

So... I Played a LARP: "Ghost Engines in the Sky" by Nick Fortugno

low-res photos ripped (under Fair Use) from the New School Free Press article on the same game

... apparently not all LARPs are about throwing lightning bolts.

It was Nick Fortugno's "Ghost Engines in the Sky", set on a mysterious train in 1850. You're one of many passengers -- stricken with short-term amnesia, of course -- and you have to find out what happened / who should get blamed for it. Overall it was pretty cool, but I felt like there were some issues with the facilitating, signposting and the procedural rhetoric...

(*extensive* SPOILERS after the jump)

(this LARP relies heavily on fresh, unspoiled players -- like, literally, if you read anything more, then consider yourself banned from playing this game *forever.* If I could adequately critique this game without spoiling it, I would... But I can't, especially when it defies the popular conception of a LARP.)

Still Hyping: Atom Zombie Smasher

Brendon's unveiled the teaser for his newest game:



I'd say more, but I'm under a strict media embargo.* 

("Radiator Blog! Your #1 fan site for all things Brendon Chung.")

* ... Not really.

On All That Gay Stuff: A Statement

I, of all people, have the least interest in getting typecast as "that guy who always complains about gay stuff in video games." However, the combined weight of Rock Paper Shotgun and Jim Sterling's vast and powerful Twitterverse have motivated this statement... (plus, I'm getting bored of arguing about this)

0) To everyone who can't fathom how I could so horribly misconstrue Jim Sterling's words: have you forgotten the 3rd image he posted in his article? You don't remember? Well, here, let me link you to the image of a man getting fingered, with an effeminate anime-style gay male character photoshopped on top.

That is the face of your beautiful, tolerant, post-sexuality paradise: it's riding on a steady undercurrent of homophobia and revulsion of what gay sex represents. Wait, no, you're right: Jim Sterling included that image because he wants you to like it and be tolerant! Of course.

... or is his point that gay sex is funny / gross, so video games should avoid it -- because only normal people should have normal sex, right? However, let's assume that image is completely innocuous and Jim Sterling means completely well, as so many people have assumed for some reason. Okay:

Chris Hecker's talk at NYU Game Center, 18 November 2010

So me and a bunch of people got to play Spy Party at the NYU Game Center. The food was pretty good too. (And the poster for this event is stunning.) Altogether, a classy affair.

If you're not sure what the game is all about, there are plenty of write-ups that you should read first. After the public playtest, we listened to Chris Hecker talk for the better part of an hour. Here's my write-up / notes from the talk:

* * *

First Chris Hecker apologized a lot for being unprepared and stuff. Then he started talking. (Pretty much everything here is paraphrase.)

Most games have you constantly moving. In Counter-Strike, for example, you're constantly adjusting your trajectory, your view angle, etc... but in Spy Party, constantly moving / fidgeting means death. The idea here is that video games should also be about performance; sometimes your playthrough is just "good enough" and you live with your mistakes, you improvise. The key to being a Spy is moving with confidence; be Zen. (Though NPCs also randomly fidget too, just to fuck with the sniper.)

But right now, there's a big problem with Spy Party -- a master Spy cannot perform a mission if a merely decent Sniper is watching. Ideally, a master Spy should wipe the floor with a decent Sniper, regardless, but that isn't the case. Once the Sniper learns a few heuristics, the game goes from heavily favoring the Spy to heavily favoring the Sniper.

Crosspost: "Gay (But Not Gay)..." at the Border House

If you want a social-critical / social justice perspective on video games, you might like some of the stuff at The Border House. And I'm not just plugging them because they had the extraordinarily good taste to re-publish my blog post; they have some genuinely good stuff there.

For example, this post on Grace Holloway and race in BioShock 2 almost makes me want to try to get through BioShock 2 again... Almost. (Maybe I'll just re-install it for Minerva's Den.)

Now Hyping: "Atom Zombie Smasher"

+1 hype to "Atom Zombie Smasher," an upcoming release from the always-groovy Blendo Games... It's not released yet, but you're going to like it. Keep it on your radar. (And read the always-amazing flavor text.)

Attempt to Survive?!

Anyone play Attempt to Survive?

"No weapons. No enemies. Flashlight. Thoughts."

I had never heard of it until I followed a referral back to a French blog about FPS mods. Here's a hasty English translation with my limited French skills:

"In Attempt to Survive, you play a pacifist, a protagonist who speaks and moves but doesn't do anything else. Here, it's about exploring a countryside devastated by a nuclear bomb, to trace back your roots -- in this case, your parents' house. The voice over is in Russian (fortunately with English subtitles). The environments, resembling the Eastern Europe of Half-Life 2, are very ugly and the whole thing lasts barely half an hour and your character isn't always as talkative as in the trailer... Which is really boring and honestly the whole thing lacks professionalism; they didn't even remove the HUD and crosshairs. It kind of reminded me of Post Script, except it's less awful. [ouch! -R] But we should be generous and give these developers a second chance in the form of Horizon."

You can always count on the French to be Frank with you... or maybe they simply don't understand art. Anyway, I'm going to try it in the coming week and report back. (Or you can do it for me and leave warnings in the comments!)