PixelVixen707

If you’ve ever skidded near the hardcore scene, you’ve probably met the ringleaders who keep the whole thing together - the tattooed, self-made intellectuals who can keep a scene together, bring the bands to town and line up the venue, the couches and the eggs the next morning, and read and actually get all the existentialist philosophers. Sharp, articulate, organized, and yet unwilling to turn their talents to running a bank or holding elective office, these are the people who put the “DI” in “DIY.” They’re the secret behind punk scenes that are as healthy as they are unhealthy. Because these same guys and girls will get in a mosh-pit and tear it up, Docs knocking and blood pouring and fists flailing until they get out and talk to you about when they quit drinking and turned on to Earth Crisis. All night.

I’ve known and respected enough brainy punks to recognize the same type in Left 4 Dead.

Notes on Mirror’s Edge, which I can’t put down.

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The star of Mirror’s Edge is a woman, named Faith. Senior producer Owen O’Brien told Forbes that unlike so many of our comely, shapely or chest-blessed game heroines, Faith “wasn’t trading on the fact that she was a sexual being.” The player inhabits her, rather than ogling her. But I called bullshit on that claim at the start of Chapter 1, when a cutscene shows her in a blatantly sexy position: tapping away at her computer, surfing the “chatter” of cyperspatial data.

Thanks to cyberpunk, lithe women surfing the ‘Net read as highly erotic. Not because the geek boys are hungry for geek girls - though my mail tells me there’s that - but because we now see it as sexy to insinuating yourself into the infinite information stream, and to soak in the world’s secrets like a bubble bath. Whereas macho hackers bang away at the keys until they get what they need, and then slam the laptop closed with a crunch.

Faith’s city is digital, and of course, so is she. I’m far from the first to say that Faith has little cred as a flesh-and-blood creature. She doesn’t sweat. She doesn’t show fatigue. At the end of a run, pumped with adrenaline, she never throws up. The developers get credit for the little details that make her seem real: e.g., if you stand still and look close while she’s stuck in an elevator, you’ll see the view move subtly in and out, with her heartbeat. But maybe she just has network lag.

What I wouldn’t pay to make her break wind.

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Zach has a brother named Lucas. He’s like a skateboard on a trampoline. He won’t sit still unless he’s gaming or drinking, and his heart is gold and we both love him.

He loves parkour. Naturally I sat him in front of Mirror’s Edge so I could get his take. These aren’t exact quotes, but they’re close:

“Okay. No way could you survive that fall. Is this Tokyo? Or Osaka? Tokyo? Totes Osaka. No - no - grab the pipe! It’s right there! Grabbbbit okay got it. Why can’t I look left? I get nilcho perception here. Tunnel vision. The tunnel vision is bogue - oh shit I can flip back! I flipped. Snag a gun - wait what, I can’t shoot? - ‘kay I shouldn’t shoot but I can shoot? Shoot shoot shoot shoot dammit fine. Sock him. Sock him! Hey - I turned! Way, the sliding kick, that’s cool - FINE I’m running again. Run run run, that’s cool, no wait, I can get this jump, wait, where are my feet? The hell wait why’s the fence electrified? It’s on a roof! Wait OH DAMMIT I DROPPED look at my hands DAMN! I’m done.

“So, got any pops?”

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At the end of the day, it’s clear why they made Faith a woman: this is not a game where you run into trouble, but a game where you run away from it.

O’Brien admits it in that Forbes piece. A game for guys would quickly become a shooter, that sent you head-long into one group of grunts after another. It’s easier to believe a woman would be agile, which is to say, weaker. The whole point of Mirror’s Edge is to run away from threats. Why? Do they think a physicist waving a crowbar can take out an alien invasion, but this fit, nimble superathlete can’t?

But I’ll let the game off the hook for one reason: it works. The few times I’ve felt pressed to grab a gun and defend myself have felt cheap - but spotting into a pack of cops and bolting the other way is a genuine thrill. And when five cops are shooting at you? Anyone would beat it.

Back when I was a punk-ass teen, I often provoked the police. I remember a getaway in a three-story parking garage with a Krusty the Klown bong in my pocket, and a hundred yards later, I understood the meaning of parkour before I even knew the name for it. Forget about standing up to the man or the patriarchy or the anyarchy: I got away.

Mirror’s Edge is frequently frustrating and none of the courses is fun until maybe the third runthrough, when you’ve memorized the path and can fly through it without thinking. But when it hits flow? It’s spectacular. The controls are unreliable: I’m doing this one on the PS3, for the motion control, which turned out to be useless. But the fundamentals are sound. If you hesitate on a jump, you won’t make it. If you pause to think, you could get shot. Momentum is everything.

It clicked for me right in chapter one, the scene in the office building. The cops rush out of the elevators and I picked in a split second which way to run. And I run, and run, and hop off a balcony and slide down a sheer glass wall of a building with bullets ringing behind me. “DO NOT RUN!” shouts a bullhorn, and I block it out. Cops close in to the left. A grate starts closing - and I slide right under it, and scramble up and keep sprinting, and I don’t sweat, and I don’t think. “You don’t want to know what’s behind you right now,” says the voice in my ear, “just keep running.” And I do. I’m a teenager again, and I’m five again, and I’m a bullet that shot itself, and I’m running, and nothing will make me stop.

(Thanks to Vorpal Bunny Ranch for the Forbes link, and for his gender analysis)

Let’s pick at the carcass of the standardized game review. It was born in the dry, cash-corrupt dirt of the enthusiastic press. It grew into a bloated, overdetailed and understimulating monster via the web press, flirted with a patronizing respectability in the mainstream media, and lights up, here and there, in the blogosphere. If you had to make an anthology of great games writing - and I mean, an editor is holding a gun to your head, right now, and your grandmother’s too - you could find maybe ten or twenty pieces that will survive the ages. But your editor will run out of bullets before he gets anyone to read it.

Sound harsh? Well, there are good critics out there. They just happen to work in a stillborn format. I sense a consensus from some of gaming’s best writers that reviews aren’t cutting it. We hem and haw over their shortcomings - ethical, literary, and intellectual - and pick on little logistical problems, like how someone’s going to finish GTA IV on deadline and still have time to enjoy it. But nobody faces the problem head-on.

My personal edit-hero Simon Carless recently wrote that write-ups of experiences pose a strong alternative to the standard review. The gaming blogosphere prospers here - take Leigh Alexander’s write-up today about getting wrapped up in just the first section of Fallout 3. And if you scan my reviews for the past year, you’ll see me switch from straight-up reviews to, well, whatever I feel like. Without raising the dreaded “new games journalism,” people are looking for experiences and reactions rather than bullet-point assessments. They want us to treat games as architecture, restaurant, social space, fleeting spectacle. You don’t review a rave. You don’t review baseball.

Here’s my latest obsession: TwitterCrit.

Let me preface this with a salute: to all the veterans or people with family who have served, you have our respect and love. I hope someone else raked for you today.

A wave of chagrin has hit the games press, all over a silly, harmless little thing: war. Yes, some people have started to feel bad about war, and the glorification of gunfire and bloodshed. Owen Good, normally Kotaku’s Associate Editor of Boobies, took a stand against the trailer for Call of Duty: World at War (which dropped today, on Veteran’s Day, natch). He feels that the amped-up hard rock soundtrack doesn’t do justice to a war that caused the death and displacement of millions. And of course, Far Cry 2 is a war game that makes you hate war (or at least, hate Far Cry 2): it’s set in a Somalia-like anarchy where warlords murder the populace - and the player’s as damned as the rest of them.

When did war become such a bummer?

Last week didn’t go as planned.

No, that’s an understatement. Last week didn’t go like anything I’d ever planned.

I don’t like to get personal on this blog. It’s not why you came here. But this was a bad week. I was on a run here, writing my silly, snarky posts about the latest game I’d stolen from work. But real life got in the way. My boyfriend Zach Taylor – you remember, I wrote about him last week – got a case. He works as an art therapist at an asylum, and they threw him to the wolves on this one, and … well, many of the details are already in the news. Zach got the Martin Grace case, the biggest one of his career. I can’t talk about it here, both because of patient confidentiality and because, well, what happened this week is something I don’t know how to talk about. Some things happened right here in our neighborhood, in our home, that I can’t explain. And Zach – well, Zach violated my trust, is the only way I can put it. I’ve only dated him a year, but I don’t really “date” him. We’re together. I stand by my people and my love is real. And when someone pulls away from that? I don’t like it.

But I don’t want to blame Zach for everything. It’s my hang-up too. I believe in a rational world. Physics, chemistry, and biology. I don’t believe in a god, God or goddess. When I roll my eyes back in my head and take a drag and stare at the sunset in Central Park, surrounded by the races of the world in a celebration of pagan oneness, I don’t feel that tug of spirituality you all say you get. I am neither religious nor spiritual. If you can’t see, count, or weigh it, it ain’t there.

But I don’t have an answer for everything.

Here’s a story: I’m five or six years old. I’m visiting family who live out in the woods, in rural Oregon, and I’m in the driveway. I’m crouching, and I see a shelled bug, maybe a beetle, walking through the dirt. I take a stick and crack the shell.

Inside, I don’t see guts: I see more bugs – little bugs, like white worms, all alive and moving on their own. The beetle’s shell – the entire shell – is empty. Nothing in it but those worms, and set free – or left helpless – they scramble and crawl away.

I used to think about it a lot. I never doubted the memory, so I had to explain it: How can a bug be made of nothing but other bugs? Did the worms move the legs? Was it like an AT-AT, or a Trojan Horse? Were the worms maggots? Do maggots live in their mothers? The only thing I know is what I saw: that beetle was alive, but when it died, it was nothing but a shell. And science hasn’t helped. What do you do when you see something that could actually be impossible? Even something as small as an insect? I chose to let myself forget it.

I play video games, and I write about video games. I spend hours every week searing my eyeballs with made-up landscapes. But it’s not real, and I don’t pretend it’s real. It’s a challenge and a release, but it’s not an escape. I know who I am and where I am, and I know what I see in these games. It’s always something I understand - and something I control.

I choose to live in a rational world. But we saw things this week that were not rational. I’m not happy with Zach – I don’t think he knows how unhappy I am - but I’m not happy with myself either. Maybe later we’ll talk about it. For now, I need a couple days off.

Kyle Orland at his CrispyGamer gig saw fit to quote me in his recent Press Pass column about hype. Hype? I know hype! And now it’s official.

What hype can do, though, is force an outlet to pay attention to a game. “I object to big marketing campaigns because they effectively tell us what to cover in the first place,” said game blogger Rachel Webster. “If enough money backs a title, and if the fans and publicity force it onto our radar, then we have to review it prominently, even if it’s Too Human. … The press should always have the power to ignore. Even when we deal with blockbusters.”

Kyle, by the way, that’s Rachael with an “a” … but no worries, you can fix it next time!

The boys at Introversion sound upset. They released this nice indie title named Multiwinia, and nobody’s playing it. This after the awards and hype for Darwinia and DEFCON: how dare the industry blow them off? How much cred must they stack before everything they produce gets instant fawning love?

Introversion screwed up bad. I know it’s vital to be indie-friendly nowadays, to give as much love to the little guys as the AAA-titles and publically traded publishers. But this was October, and we’ve had just a few 20-40 hour masterpieces to contend with. I’ve seen just a third of the multi-layered apocalyptia of Fallout 3. And you’ve got … stick figures?

Now that I’ve gotten that rant out of the way, I have something vitally important to tell you all: Multiwinia is a hoot! Play it now!

I love my boyfriend.  When I have time, I try to be a dutiful girlfriend. But I have a confession to make: I never visit him at work. In fact, I can’t stand to go to his office. And you’ll understand why, if you’ve ever heard of the Brink.

Zach works as an art therapist at an insane asylum. I have no problem with asylums: I used to sneak into an abandoned one late at night, when I went goth as a teenager, and believe me, I had some good times and some good scares. But that doesn’t compare to the Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital. In a nation of wretched institutions, it’s the wretchedest I’ve ever seen.

The thing with the Brink: it gives me the heebies. At the same time, I’ll admit I’m intrigued. The last time I visited, I had a shocking sense of déjà vu as I realized what the entire setting – the bare grey walls, the flickering lights, the childish scrawls on the official bulletin boards – looks like a video game. But is it a survival horror? Or a first-person shooter? When the crazies come, do I get to shoot back?

Will Wright has long held the crown as the leading maker of “God games” - games that give the player near omnipotent powers over some world, to shape the very earth and winds and treat the people as nothing more than a statistic. The long-awaited Spore may have knocked the crown off, as players found its lightweight God-dom less than irresistable. Or maybe we’ve just moved on: maybe the idea of playing God and manipulating a whole world seems a little cold. If I can flick a cow-creature across the ocean with my fingernail, how much could he really have meant to me?

This past month, a different type of game prevailed. Fable II, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 - “the F game trio,” as Michael Abbott just tweeted - each gave us open worlds and bustling populations. As players, we stood above the plebes - and yet, we were still of the people, and the choices we faced at the end of each game felt intimately important. In fact, the stories ended with sacrifice, and even martyrdom.

Forget about playing God: the market now belongs to the Jesus game.

Quick thought.  I love Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer podcasts, and his new Confab series is a gamer View in the making.  But question for your gamers: when do you listen to games podcasts?  How do we find the time?  Do you have a long commute?  The gym?  Do you listen while you’re drifting to sleep?  I try to do it when I play other games, and that was a problem last time: Michael and his guests kept raving about better games than the one I was playing.  It was teeth-gritting.

Dear Readers: What’s your solution?