I’m glad to see that EA’s marketing department thinks so much of their product that they feel the need to tell me how much playing it will piss off my mom. I understand that, 17-and-up rating notwithstanding, they’re marketing to a younger demographic, but come on. When your medium is near universally dismissed as a pursuit for basement-dwelling man-children, maybe you should consider a little sensitivity with your ad campaign.

Today I learned that Firefox’s spellcheck considers both “Internet” and “internets” to be valid words, but scorns “internets.”

To explain what that statement could possibly mean, I’ll have to break down what makes a game a “Metroid” game. It’s more complicated than you, or Team Ninja, might think. Upon first glance, Other M seems to have many of the functional elements of Metroid in place. These include:

• Samus Aran in her battle armor, morphing into a ball
• Upgrades for weapons and equipment
• Shooting energy beams and missiles at space monsters (many from past games in the series)
• Secret passages and other basic environmental puzzles

On the third point above, Other M really shines: I would argue that Team Ninja elevated the combat, traditionally on the easy side, to the same level of challenge and engrossment as other modern, “hardcore” action games. On the other points, Other M seems be going through the motions without any real enthusiasm or clarity of purpose. I wouldn’t be surprised if, somewhere early in development, someone wrote a variant of the above list on a whiteboard somewhere, and the developers dedicated themselves to checking off every item before shipping a game.

But Metroid, like many Nintendo properties, is more than the sum of its parts.

Imagine that someone who had never played Super Metroid was given the task of watching a speed run of the game on YouTube and taking meticulous notes to figure out what made the game such a beloved classic of the 16-bit era. Their final analysis might be a more detailed version of the above list, including such elements as:

• Different suits for resisting heat and the effects of water
• An ice beam that will freeze enemies in place and allow you to touch them unharmed
• A wave beam that passes through walls
• A speed booster that lets you run faster and break through certain barriers
• A grappling beam that allows you to swing from special hooks

And so on, ad nauseum, until they had cataloged every functional element of the gameplay and design. They would still be missing the point. As I mentioned earlier, Team Ninja faithfully reproduced all these elements, but they still ended up with a poor Metroid game. This paint-by-numbers approach to game design is an attempt to gloss over a fundamental failure to understand what makes Metroid fun.

It’s exploration, idiots.

Metroid games have always featured twitch-reflex gunplay and big, over-the-top boss encounters, but it’s no more “about” this combat than oil painting is about covering the white part of the canvas with colors. You do it, sure, but it’s not an end in itself — it’s in the pursuit of an auxiliary goal. In Metroid, the space critters that get in my way aren’t there because they’re fun to kill (although they often are). They’re there to impede my progress through the vast alien wilderness I’m mapping, and my reward for becoming better at fighting them (and for collecting power ups) is that they impede me less.

Super Metroid is my favorite game, even all these many years later, because of the clarity of its design around the theme of exploration. Every other functional element of the game is subservient to this dominant theme: the penalty for dying is lost progress; the responsive and flexible movement controls encourage experimentation to get around the environment more efficiently; collecting power-ups grants access to new, unexplored regions (often through ingenious mechanisms); hidden power-ups encourage prying into every nook and cranny. All these elements reinforce one another, and all of them reward the player’s skill with new places to explore.

I should give team Ninja a little more credit — they do seem to understand the importance of exploration, but rather than designing a game around it they tried to staple it onto a quick-paced, linear action game. The net result is lots of locked hatches that the player knows they can’t get into until later, once they’ve collected an upgrade. Behind these hatches there are no new regions of the ship to explore, only a little cubby hole containing a feel-good missile expansion. Even worse, the game has an obnoxious tendency to corral the player toward their next linear goal by conveniently locking doors that aren’t on the current main path, reducing the player’s freedom whenever it becomes inconvenient to the story progression. Call it Metroid on Rails — just don’t call it a Metroid game.

I have some other gripes about Other M, but they’re minor compared to its basic design flaw. For example, Samus starts the game with all the power-ups she earned by the end of Super Metroid, but then disables all of them out of respect for her ex military commander. She re-enables them at key points in the story, as he orders her to do so. Besides being out of character (and vaguely misogynist), this tactic robs the player of the satisfaction of having discovered these upgrades on their own in some twisted, labyrinthine passage.

Maybe I’m too old; maybe today’s player needs their hand held or they quit in frustration, and any game that dares to buck this trend, offering the player an entire world to explore at their leisure, is begging for bad reviews and poor sales. But I still hold out hope for a new generation of action-exploration games, beautiful modern creations that learn from the mistakes of their ancestors but retain the respect those old games had for the player, their skill, and their curiosity. Shadow Complex was a bright, shining promise of what the genre could be, but Other M is a big step backwards. I’m waiting.

First, they are big. How big? Bigger than both the music industry and Hollywood.

That didn’t answer any real question about the nature of video games, but it does give you a sense of scale. Regardless of how you feel about them, video games are an essential part of modern society.

However, mainstream society dismisses them as a juvenile waste of time, in some ineffable but furious way a graver vice than other isolated, passive forms of entertainment like television, film, or reading (not that anyone reads, just saying). I recently found the following pseudo-anonymous screed linked from an erotic photo blog I read:

The average video-game player is thirty-fucking-four years old. Every other generation had a career and a family by then. Get your shit together, us! We’re basically the explosive diarrhea generation.

This kind of critique is easily dismissed, and should be, as the self-hating whining of an underachiever trying to scapegoat their failure. I guess when you lack even a basic understanding of the topic you’re criticizing, it’s not hard to be this wrong. Yes, the average gamer is 34. My older brother is, in fact, the average 34-year-old gamer. He has a solid career and 3 children. He and his kind (and mine, for that matter) are quickly entering the mainstream, although you wouldn’t know it to listen to the dang liberal media*. An entire generation is playing video games, but the mainstream is content to treat gaming, the most ascendant and important cultural trend since the television itself, with a slack-jawed mixture of condescension, befuddlement, and fear. You might be surprised how often they hit the trifecta in a single story, actually — pretty much happens whenever a white teenager shoots someone.

With only mad jibbering coming out of the mainstream on the topic, people who care about this kind of thing look inward for insight. Jesse Schell recently gave a talk at a gaming expo, worth a watch even if you don’t have any interest in gaming as a hobby. He gets the importance of gaming, really gets it, on a level that most people don’t. He sees gaming-like activities permeating every aspect of our society within a decade, and from where I’m sitting it looks like he’s right.

The aspect of gaming that Jesse Schell thinks is migrating to the real world is the same one we exploit when we wire up a rat’s reward center in its brain to a switch on the floor of its cage, and it steps on that switch over and over until it keels over from exhaustion. We know from scanning live brains that this region lights up equally readily in response to getting fed for a hungry person, looking at porn for a man, hitting a jackpot for a gambler, and incrementing the Xbox Live gamer score for a gamer. The neural mechanism that is ultimately responsible for all addiction literally cannot tell the difference between biting into a cheeseburger when ravenous and getting a sweet frag on Live. Almost all successful games exploit this mechanism to some extent, and some of the most successful ones effectively wire into the brain directly, just like we do to those poor (but happy) lab rats.

A few months ago I poured about twelve hours into an indie game called Miner Dig Deep. There’s no reason anyone should call the activity in this game, which involves tediously digging thousands of feet underground and then riding elevators back to the surface, “fun.” But it is fun. It’s so fun it’s hard to put down. It’s fun because it randomly but consistently rewards you with ever more valuable gems as you delve deeper underground. You can sell the gems for money, which you can use to buy better equipment, which lets you dig deeper or faster or longer, which is how you recover even more valuable gems, completing the cycle. I found this pointless cycle so incredibly rewarding that I always, always had to make an effort to put the game down, to not head back down to the bottom of the mine for one last haul before bed. In the game’s defense, it’s a charming piece of cottage art, complete with an original guitar score. But to call its gameplay mechanics Pavlovian would be generous.

As Schell mentions, the largest part of the Zeitgeist is harvesting virtual tomatoes in Farmville. I haven’t gotten on board; not because I wouldn’t like it, but because due to experiences like Miner Dig Deep I know I would, and I don’t have the spare time to get involved with it. There’s quite a lot of scholarship on Farmville being written, such as this one out of SUNY. It’s interesting because it accurately assesses the role that social obligation plays in Farmville’s success, and then absurdly concludes that this obligation is the only reason anyone plays. I love picking apart this kind of academic drivel, because it sounds so plausible to read if you’re willing to settle for appeal to authority over actual observation; for semantic niggling over real debate.

Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?

True, I did produce this kind of sophistry on demand when I was earning my own liberal arts degree, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call out egregious bullshit when I see it. I don’t have to; Farmville players get it, and this guy doesn’t. Every one of those pumpkins is a bump of coke. The activity is its own reward. If you don’t understand this about the medium, you shouldn’t attempt to form an opinion.

Successful writer Tom Bissell recently spent three entire years doing nothing but snorting coke and playing Grand Theft Auto 4, which is about as perfect a complementary activity as I can imagine.

The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer and almost relaxing. This coke, my friend told me, had not been “stepped on” with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next 30 hours straight.

There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.

Last week Roger Ebert returned to a statement he made years ago: that video games can never be art. Again, it’s possible to imagine a way for a person to be this wrong; I think in Ebert’s case it’s a combination of advanced age and a profound misunderstanding of the medium he tries to critique. For example, he believes he can experience a game without playing it. For a better, more nuanced rebuttal to this absurd position than I could write, see Mike Thomsen’s at IGN.

The reason football is not art is because its rules were designed with the primary goal of competition. Competition is only one of a great many different experiences that a videogame can create. Games can also be about losing, and not competing at all. They can be about love, the impossibility of relationships, the beautiful indifference to our individual life choices, urgent intimacy in the shadow of death, sexual anxiety, and confrontation with life choices to which there are no right answers. There are games that, using the language of authored interaction, invoke all of these ideas, and many more beyond.

For myself, I simply know they’re art. I can’t feel otherwise; too many gaming experiences have affected me deeply, too many to count, in ways that only the finest non-electronic art ever has. And so I know they’re art the same way I know I love looking at naked ladies. The fact that they’re also a lot like a slot machine doesn’t change that in the least.

*The term “liberal media” is used here ironically and is not meant to imply the existence even of a centrist media.

Like bacteria, the organism infects other cells through osmosis, then mutates and reproduces agamogenetically.

Agamogenetically is a real word, not a made-up sci fi word, so they’re in the clear there. But if there’s one thing I learned in high school biology, it’s the definition of osmosis: the diffusion of water across a semi-permeable membrane. It is certainly not a means for anything to infect anything else… unless by infect, you mean hydrate. Bacteria don’t “infect other cells” this way because they’re not water molecules. Also, because bacteria don’t “infect” other cells, seeing as they are single cells themselves. Cells are into some kinky shit, but they don’t enter one another.

It’s kind of funny: I’ve come to accept and expect a sub-7th-grade understanding of science from our news media, but for some reason, I feel like the nerds at EA should know better. If nothing else, this kind of glaring error in a “scientific” document achieves the opposite of immersion in a medium that’s striving for it.

This talk is to a technical audience (an engineering class), so if you get lost just pretend he’s saying “magic.” The quick takeaway: his company has developed a more efficient way to stream HD video, which allows them to run games on big honking servers in a data center somewhere, while you just need a tiny (maybe free) device in your living room that never, ever needs upgrading. Instead of you upgrading to a new console every 5 years, they upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware behind the scenes every six months. In the video game industry, this is the biggest paradigm shift since the NES proved that home consoles could be profitable in the USA.

As with any new technology, there will be winners and losers. A brief list of each:

Winners:

• Hardware manufacturers. Intel and nVidia are going to clean up as high-end compute and graphics hardware turns into a co-op business.  Instead of relying on bleeding-edge early adopters to buy their newest cards and chips, they’ll be able to count on millions of rank-and-file consumers paying for access to a timeshare of the same.  Even better, a consumer PC gets upgraded once every 3 years, but servers in the data centers will get new hardware on a continual, rolling basis.
• Developers and publishers. No license fee to the creator of the platform (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo).  No need to port games to multiple platforms.  No piracy cutting into the bottom line.  Instant, globally applied patches.  No up-front investment when printing and shipping discs.  Indie developers in particular stand to make a killing compared to older distribution methods.
• OnLive and shareholders. They’ve got proprietary technology that is going to make it very difficult for another upstart to attempt anything similar. That’s on top of their 3-year lead time. Expect for them to own this market for the next decade.

Losers:

• Retailers.  Retail stores are going to be cut out of the market completely.  Online stores like Amazon are going to fare no better than brick-and-mortar shops — the business of selling physical disks is simply going to evaporate.  Used stores, needless to say, are likewise out of luck.  If you haven’t started shorting GameStop stock, start now.
• Game pirates.  Unlike with DRM for movies and music, which is laughably easy to circumvent, there is simply no way to steal games from OnLive short of stealing someone else’s account information.
• Innovative controllers. Nintendo has largely succeeded in the hardware wars because of its innovative control schemes for the Wii and the DS.  Before that, it invented the analog stick.  Before that, it invented the directional pad.  With the advent of on-demand gaming, controls will be standardized and more or less frozen, possibly with the exception of special-purpose controllers for blockbuster games like Guitar Hero.

Gaming has already surpassed Hollywood as America’s most profitable form of entertainment, and as movie executives finally pull their heads out of their asses and realize that preventing piracy is impossible we’ll start to see those massive resources shifted to where they can get the best return. This doesn’t mean the death of big-budget blockbusters in the near term — but it does mean that games will routinely get the level of financial commitment thrown at Avatar and other mega-blockbusters. Game execs currently wring their hands over a budget of $15 million. That’s going to change.