I Settle All Video Game Arguments, Part 2: What Is a Game?

According to the rigorous definition of Game that I will provide, creating "dank memes" IS a video game.

One of the painful things about being in the games biz for a long (LONG) time is that you see the same tedious arguments brought up and rehashed, again and again, by new generations. I am writing a series of posts to settle these debates once and for all.

No need to thank me. When I get the Nobel Prize, don't worry about sending the medal. I just want the money.

This time, I settle a question that has tormented academics and Mad On Twitter types alike: What is the definition of a game?

How This Tedious Discussion Started

When the Indie Boom hit, several games of the genre called Walking Simulators came out and achieved huge financial and critical success. I personally enjoyed many of them greatly. (Despite this, I still use the term "Walking Simulator" because I find it funny.)

When they first gained notice, a certain portion of the gamer community was angered by the acclaim for Walking Simulators, sniffing in response that they "Aren't games."

This is, of course, entirely the wrong way to phrase their complaint. What they should have said was, "These games, whatever their good qualities, strip away everything we value in gaming and don't give us enough hours of distraction for our limited dollars, and the fact they are being treated as the future and only thing of value in our medium fills us with resentment."

Whether you agree with that sentiment or not (and there's plenty to say on both sides), it is a statement you can actually debate on its merits.

But this debate, such as it was, was moot. Last I checked, Walking Sims (even really good new ones) are selling modest numbers and games where you shoot monsters in the face are still making billions.

So there was no reason to continue the argument ...

According to my rigorous definite of Game, this IS a video game.

But Then Academia Got Involved.

A lot of people go to college to study videogames, and some try to create advanced critical analysis of the form. Don't blame me. It's not my fault.

I studied theatre in college, which was a fantastic experience. When I was there, I observed that people new to an art form constantly try to attach firm definitions to everything in it.

"What IS a play? What is acting? What is a work of art? What is the explicit definition of joy? And beauty? Dude, my hands are HUGE! They can touch anything but themselves!"

Exercises like this are not useless. It's good, when you’re young, to spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of your art form. Then you stop, because you realize that the nature of art is a very slippery thing. Whatever rule you come up with, someone else will become awesome by breaking it.

Here's the deal with art: Your brain compels you to make a thing, then you make it, then people dig it or they don't. The end.

Despite this, otherwise sensible people still actually spend time trying to define a game. Google "What is a game" and marvel in wonder. It's really quite the thing. A whole bunch of definitions, none of them adequate, because they're all too broad or too narrow or too abstract.

So I'll settle the issue and save everyone a bunch of time. This is important to me because I'm working on a cool new indie role-playing thing now, and it'll be out soon, and I want to be sure I can call it a game so I don't get in trouble with the FDA or whatever.

According to my rigorous definition of Game, this is NOT a video game.

What Is a Game?

Consider the large, highly profitable genre called Hidden Object Games.

Here's how they work. The game says, "There's a squid on the screen." Then you find and click the squid. Then you do the same thing with a sandwich or a skull or whatever.

Is this a game? I mean, hell, I'm not 100% sure this counts as an ACTIVITY.

But it has to be a game. How do I know? Because "Hidden Object Game" has "Game" in the name.

So just clicking a few times makes it a game, and you have to click just to launch the game. Sooo ...

According to my rigorous definition of Game, this IS a video game.

The Answer!

If you're asking, "Is this a game?" it's a game. Sure! Why not? Who cares? It might be a good game or a long game or a bad game or a word processor.

Semantics arguments are lame. Argue about the content. What is a game is trying to do, how does it attempt it, how well did it succeed, and why? That's all that matters.

Wait. You Didn't Actually Define a Game.

So if you're hangin' out and someone starts to discuss with you what the definition of a game (or gameplay, or play, or immersion, or ludonarrative dissonance) is, do what I do!

Step 1: Nod sagely and adopt an expression of extreme concentration.

Step 2: Point over the person's shoulder and shout, "Hey, what's that!?"

Step 3: Activate the ninja smoke bomb you have in your pocket. FWOOOOSH!

Step 4: Sneak into another room.

Step 5: Talk to literally anyone else about literally anything else.

Problem solved!

According to my rigorous definition of Game, this IS a video game.

This Is Ridiculous. By Your Laughable Definition, Photoshop and Excel Are Games. That Is So Broad As To Be Meaningless! But What If You First Define Gameplay To Be ...

OK, you've broken through. My decades of experience have enabled me to have one simple, unquestionable test for how to peel apart interactivity for a productive purpose from interactivity for an entertainment purpose. First, you ... Hey, what's that!

FWOOOOSH!

As An Extra Multiball Reward For Making It All the Way to the End of This Mess, I Will Settle Once and For All the Question: "Are Video Games Art?"

No. Never. Don't be silly.

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If you're intrigued by giant indie RPGs with cool adventures and epic stories, you can wishlist our next "game" on Steam. News about our work and random musings can be found on our Twitter.

I Settle All Video Game Arguments, Part 1: Game Reviews

There was a ridiculous controversy recently because a games journo was bad at this difficult game. All time spent debating it was time wasted. I am writing this so that such time-wastage never happens again. I live to serve.

"You can speak your mind but not on my time."
      - William Martin Joel 

One of the painful things about being in the games biz for a long (LONG) time is that you see the same tedious arguments brought up and rehashed, again and again, by new generations. I am writing a series of posts to settle these debates once and for all.

Don't bother to thank me. Seeing my own face whenever I look into the mirror is reward enough.

First up, I will settle all debates regarding games reviewers: How good should a reviewer be at a game? What topics are a reviewer allowed to bring up when doing a review? Are review scores and review aggregators a good thing? Does anyone still care about game reviews?

So the next time someone gets Mad On the Internet about a game review or mega-butthurt because the newest installment of their fave series gets a 91% when they KNOW it should have gotten a 93%, you can send them to this page and get on with your life.

A thoughtful and useful review of Avernum. Hmm. Let me check if it's still, 17 years later, making me money? Yep!!!

Why Are You Authorized to Settle This Argument Forever?

Because I am old, and that makes me wise. Also, once PC Gamer gave one of my most popular and enduring games a 17% review, literally said it was worse than choking to death on your own vomit, and provided a helpful sidebar with a list of rock stars who choked to death on their own vomit.

Believe me, every possible opinion you can have about game reviews, I have had at one time or another.

(Also, we have a kick-ass new indie, retro role-playing game coming out in early 2018, and I want to make sure everyone's heads are on straight before they start reviewing it.)

The Most Important Fact About Reviews

Think about your friends. (For the purpose of this exercise, I will assume you have friends.) When they recommend games/movies/TV shows to you, you take their personalities into account, right?

For example, there are some people who I listen to when they say a movie is good, and there are others who I won't, because they only like cheesy romantic comedies and Shrek. Or some guy will say I have to play Face Obliterator 5000, and I like him and all, but I'm not a fan of the Face Obliterator genre. Or, while his wife is great, no, I don't want to see the new Benedict Cumberbatch movie. Under any circumstances.

They're good people. We just have different tastes. I don't make them watch the long, depressing foreign movies I like, and they restrict their evangelizing Rick & Morty to me to one hour per day. I only accept recommendations from people when I've found their tastes line up with mine. You're the same way, right?

Pick Reviewers The Same Way

Reviewers are just individual humans, with their own tastes, and no one human can be a perfect, impartial justice machine for evaluating a work of art. Any decent reviewer can say how buggy a game is and whether it runs OK on their PC. Beyond that, it's just, like, your opinion, man. 

If you want reviews, don't just sit there. Find a couple reviewers you like and read them. If a web site doesn't have regular reviewers and just uses a rotating stable of whatever recent college grad is most desperate that week, it's not going to be useful to you. It takes work to find a site that works for you, but that's life.

Fun bonus fact: All awards for art, from the Nobel prizes down to video game awards, are arbitrary and meaningless. If you want to obsess about the Oscars, hey, you do you, but don't pretend they have any value beyond distracting you for a minute.

Are Numerical Review Scores Dumb?

On the surface, yes, evaluating a complex work of art and boiling it down to a single number is dumb. I mean, it's not like critics have an Art Scale, and they can put the last Call of Duty on it and say, "This game weighs 8.3 Arts, and the last game only weighs 7.1 Arts, and that's 1.2 Arts more!!! So this game gets a 93%."

Review scores, in practice, are fine. However, remember, a high or low number is just a reviewer giving an opinion, and if you trust his or her opinions, you're fine. High number means they like it. If a reviewer I trust says, "Yeah, this game is a B-," I know what's goin' on.

Is It OK For a A Video Game Reviewer to Be Bad at Games?

Of course. A lot more game reviewers should be bad at games. Fact is, most people who play computer games are bad at them, and they deserve reviewers who advocate for them and can say, "If you blow 20 bucks on this, you'll die 500 times on the first level and hate it. Don't waste your money."

Look, I love laughing at game professionals flailing at games as much as anyone. Remember when that unnamed Polygon writer tried Doom and showed no signs of ever having played it (or any video game) ever before? That was a hoot.

(My favorite bit is when the player unloads a full shotgun blast into a health pack resting on the ground, in what I can only assume is a post-modern deconstruction of late-stage capitalism.)

But some people watched that video and said, "Wow, I should never buy this game," and were right to say it. So the video was useful after all.

This is why I was a huge fan of Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer series, before it devolved into a series of tedious celebrity skits. Watching someone who isn't fully proficient in our art form and its weird conventions struggling to enjoy it can be painfully useful.

In the end of Ratatouille, a supposedly heroic writer gives a good review to a restaurant whose kitchen is infested with rats. GROSS! Never trust reviews.

But This Goes Both Ways, Right?

Yes. Some gamers have very little money and lots of time to fill. They don't want to spend twenty of their limited bucks on a one-hour art piece, and they deserve reviewers who advocate for them as well.

Is It OK For a Video Game Reviewer to Have Strong Political Opinions?

Yeah, why not? A lot of people only want games that support their particular political opinions. They can use politics-fixated reviewers as canaries in a coal mine. The writers are exposed to bad opinions so that you don't have to be.

Again, you have to pick a reviewer compatible with you. If someone doesn't like a game because it's too politically whatever or has too much of the color blue, use that person or don't. You get to choose what reviewers you watch.

What If I Think a Reviewer Sucks?

Don't read their reviews. That'll show 'em!

(And leave it at that. Don't be an asshole to them because you don’t agree with them. Not reading them is really the only vote you get.)

Review aggregator sites would have you believe every Marvel movies is one of the Best Movies Ever Made. Which, I mean, Marvel is fine I guess, but nobody will remember any of these flicks in 3 years.

How About Game Aggregator Sites? Are They Cool?

So you can go to a place like MetaCritic, which averages 50 different game review scores to take all those accumulated opinions and blends them together to create one number which represents Objective Truth. (Interestingly, Objective Truth is, the vast majority of the time, between 70% and 90%).

Look, is this useful? Kind of. I suppose.

I mean, look. Suppose ten people you don’t like give you their scores for a game. That won't be very useful. But what if you take those ten dumb opinions, blend them together, and take the average? That won't be any more useful, will it? Do you think that if you mix a lot of dumbness together, somehow smartness is made? Does this work with political parties too?

But it's all subjective. If you get value out of MetaCritic, use it. It's no sweat off my nose.

But Aren't Game Developer Payments Sometimes Determined By Metacritic Scores? Isn't That Bad?

All Metacritic is doing is getting some numbers and averaging them together. Yes, taking this random number and paying developer bonuses based on it is kind of shady. But on the list of Ways the Game Industry Mistreats Its Employees, it's like 893 out of 1200.

And if you look at the list of Concrete Things That Can Be Done to Make Developers' Lives Better, "Being mad at MetaCritic" is not on it at all.

My kids don't even know video game reviews EXIST, but they will buy anything even mentioned by this guy. God. Why do I even pretend I know anything?

One Last, Horrifying Truth About Game Reviews

I'm ancient, and even I don't use them anymore. There's no review that can tell me anything I can't get by watching the game on Twitch.tv for ten seconds and checking the Steam reviews to make sure it’s not too buggy.

In Conclusion

Take responsibility for yourself. Accept that the world is full of people different than you and there's space for all of us. As long as they're not punching you in the nose, people are allowed to have dumb opinions in their dumb heads. When choosing who you allow precious space inside your own head, choose someone you trust.

I will trust in the good people of the Internet to take this sensible advice and act with a bit of basic empathy in the future. I consider this entire discussion closed.

One Final Small Bit Of Whimsy

For a games web site, there's a huge advantage to having reviews written by inexperienced, eager people who try to stir up arguments instead of calming them. Those people work cheaper, and their work tends to stir up anger which gets more clicks. Sure, these poor writers/targets get screamed at, but that's what they were hired for. Their employers don't care as long as the clicks keep coming.

In the end, however, we’re talking about video game reviews. In the global scheme of things, game reviews are REALLY unimportant.

Here's what keeps me up at night: How do we know that the journalists covering politics, the economy, and wars aren't being picked in exactly the same way?

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If you're intrigued by giant indie RPGs with cool adventures and epic stories, you can wishlist our next game on Steam. Give it a terrible review if you want. We just need the attention. News about our work and random musings can be found on our Twitter.

The Life and Merciful Death of the Fad Controller

Sorry, grandma. This doesn't exist anymore. I guess you should have bought more than the launch title.

Over the years we have had console gaming, the perfect control mechanism for our entertainment has emerged.

Our thumbs, those nimble and durable pieces of flesh and bone, operate the joysticks and buttons. Our trigger fingers work the triggers. The rest of our fingers, stupid and useless, hold the controller stable. And our bodies are left to peacefully recline and decay on the couch. (Because if we wanted to actually use our bodies for anything, we wouldn't be playing video games.)

This control mechanism easily allows two joysticks, four buttons, a d-pad, a touch pad/Back button, two triggers, and two bumpers. Enough inputs to easily handle even a very complex game.

(You can also push the joysticks in to provide two extra buttons, which is how controller engineers tempt game designers into making mistakes. If your game uses pushing down on a joystick as an input, please move that command to a real button. If you don't have a button free, just lose that feature. Your game has too much stuff in it as it is.)

Yes, the modern console controller is a marvel of design and functionality.  Yet, brave game designers are never satisfied with mere perfection. They are always coming up with new, weird fad controllers to tempt us. This article will describe the lifespan of this process.

Harmonix tried to teach players how to actually do something. It didn't work out. Moral: Never hope for anything to ever get better anywhere ever.

Why Make a Fad Controller?

Part of it is artistic exploration, I suppose. The desire to elevate our new art form to new and undreamt of heights.

The real reason is money. There's a lot of money in this biz, but there's also a ton of competition. A new sort of game that catches the consumer's fickle eye will result in a fortune. Guitar Hero and Rock Band both sold well over a billion dollars. The motion controllers of the Wii led to that console winning its generation (old people like fake bowling).

Employees of game companies need to keep coming up with ideas to justify their salaries, whether you want them or not. No executive wants to go to E3 to say, "We're treading water another year. We have the same old crap. YOLO!"

In the end, all we’re trying to do is reach an increasingly jaded, desensitized audience and present something new enough to raise their heart rates above rest level for five freakin’ seconds.

You ask: How on EARTH did they ever get anyone to buy the Wii Fit board? Answer: Pornography.

Phase One: The Shock and Joy of the New

So fad controllers are made. What is a fad? Something new and exciting, which hordes rush to buy to get a bit of newness and variety in their mundane, repetitive lives.

Maybe your fad is motion control, to get the pudgy masses off their couches. Like the Wiimote, or Playstation Move, or the Kinect, or the Wii Fit Board. ("No, THIS will be the peripheral that gets gamers to exercise while they game LOL!")

Or maybe it's the plastic version of a real life peripheral, to better simulate something in the real world. Like a guitar or drums. Or maracas. Or bongos. Or, for the suicidal, a skateboard.

Most attempted fads fail, of course. Some, however, caught on and made a bunch of money. Bloggers, ever hunting for the next Hot Take, gazed upon them and proclaimed a new exciting future for gaming! Then, a few months later, reality set in.

How will we get people to play Guitar Hero again? I know! We'll make the controller incomprehensible and beige!

Phase Two: The Bloom Comes Off the Rose.

The thing about fads: The newness wears off. Purchasers start to think, "Oh. Wait. This isn't holding up that well." And they move on in droves. A fad is a massive wave, and waves always recede.

I was a diehard Rock Band fanatic. I played it a ton. I went to many Rock Band parties. Enough of them to say with some authority: For the vast majority of humans, 3 songs is all it takes to get tired of Rock Band. (Some blame the music game crash on too many titles coming out per year. This is nonsense. If your genre can't handle 5-6 titles a year, it's a crappy genre.)

Phase Three: The Fatal Flaw Becomes Apparent.

Most fad controllers fail for one of a few simple reasons:

1. They just aren't precise enough to support more than a few crude, simple games. (e.g. Wiimote. Wii Fit Board. Kinect.)

2. The controls are precise, but the games you can play on them turn out to not be that interesting. (e.g. Any music game ever.)

3. Even if it's a decent controller and a cool idea, it's tied to one platform, so no major developer ever bothers with it. (e.g. Wii U Tablet. Also, did you know that big pad in the middle of a PS4 controller is a full touch pad and you can do little drawings on it and stuff? It's OK, nobody else did either. Why would any developer who supports more than one console ever use that feature?)

4. The controller requires getting up off the couch. I'm not doing that. (e.g. Almost every fad controller.)

If the controller is lucky, a few more games get written for it after the initial release. They made bank at first, but now they are tanking with increasing severity.

Now comes Phase Four, the endgame. The company who makes the fad controller has two choices: The path of the canny businessman. Or the path of the insane Viking.

I want Star Wars Kinect dancing videos to be the new Rickroll.

Phase Four, Option One: Give Up and Take the Money

Seriously, if your product becomes a fad, you can make a TON of money. When the big cash river stops coming in, accept that your product wasn't actually going to change everything forever. Cease production, count your winnings, buy another Tesla, and never speak of it again.

Phase Four, Option Two: Double Down!!!

There are some who are struck by Divine Madness. They are the true believers, who really believe they are changing gaming forever. Like remember when Harmonix convinced itself that Rock Band fans actually wanted to learn to play a real instrument?

The greatest such tale: When it became clear that the Kinect was only good for dancing games, Microsoft could have accepted its limitations, cashed their huge checks, and moved on.

But no, humility is not the Microsoft way. They were determined to explore the Kinect's maximum possible potential. So they not only kept it around, they built their entire next console generation around it. With disastrous results.

But it's all right. We'll always have the cautionary tale, and the wonderful memories.

It's OK, VR Beard Guy, YOU GOT THIS.

Phase Five: Regret and Garage Sales

The final destiny is the same. The story starts with a beautiful dream, moves on to cargo ships full of cheaply made plastic drum kits, and ends with piles of the things filling garage sales and thrift stores everywhere.

I mean, seriously, isn't it amazing? Factories in China made millions and millions of shoddy plastic drum sets. They were shipped across an entire ocean and delivered to households in America, where they were played for probably 2-3 songs and then thrown in a dumpster somewhere.

Think about how much effort went into this project! Someday, historians and economists will look back on that whole event and ... Well, I don't know what they'll think but we're going to come across pretty awesome.

How Does VR Enter Into This?

I should point out that this whole cycle has absolutely nothing to do with the VR craze. I mean, sure, VR goggles are really expensive, make lots of people sick, and have yet to come up with an actually compelling title. But it's fine. VR is the future. Bet your mom's bottom dollar on it.

I'd like this picture but with grandparents in the goggles instead of pasty tech nerds. It could be the beginning of a really lousy episode of Black Mirror.

So What Have We Learned?

Nothing.

That's the wonderful thing about the game industry. Almost everyone burns out of it by the time they're 35, so whatever institutional memory they developed disappeared and a new generation of worker bees is brought in to make all the same mistakes again.

So when the next weirdly-numbered generation of XBox comes out in a few years (Working Name: "XBox Eleventy Five"), you can look forward to its new motion controllers about three years after that. They will sell ten million units, have two decent games, secretly send pictures of your clothes to Forever 21 for marketing purposes, and your kids will LOVE it. For three days.

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You can buy our awesome, easy to control games here. We are also on Twitter.

Edit: Changed the Harmonix guitar caption to something a little less unkind.

No, Video Games Aren't Art. We're BETTER.

Do you think this should fill me with shame? Because it does not.

"When I was twenty, I worried what everything thought of me. When I turned forty, I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. And then I made it to sixty, and I realized no one was ever thinking of me."
- Bob Hope, as told by Patton Oswalt

I used to argue passionately that video games were art.

Then I stopped arguing about it, because why bother? Of COURSE video games are art.

Now I see that it's a waste of time thinking of video games as art. Why would we game designers ever aim that low?

I Don't Want Art. I Want Transportation.

I just finished playing DOOM. Like many, I was amazed by how awesome a game it turned out to be. Penny Arcade had the perfect description for it: "Playable sugar."

DOOM had three of the best boss fights I've ever seen. Punishingly tough and yet scrupulously fair. When I died, I could say, "OK. I know what I did wrong. I won't do that again." When I fought those bosses, I was utterly transported. The rest of the world vanished. When I won, I was sweaty, wrung out, and completely satisfied.

I love literature and theatre. I love great movies. Yet, I can't remember any work of art, no matter how good, that consumed and drained me as much as the Cyberdemon in DOOM.

When I beat it, I felt proud. It is dumb to feel proud about something in a video game. The feeling was real nonetheless.

Nobody considers DOOM a work of Fine Art. Nor should they. Bloggers are not grinding their gears contemplating the True Meaning of DOOM. Nor should they.

It's not art. It's simply awesome.

Why would I ever be unsatisfied with Awesome?

Put this in front of me, and I will be lost until the sun comes up. Nothing else has that power over me. Should I be ashamed of this? Because I am not.

We're Doing Fine Without You.

It always peeves me when some blogger says, "Video games are OK, I guess, to the simple-minded. But they're not enough. They are unworthy. They're [string of negative adjectives], and it is up to me, hero that I am, to FIX them at last!"

Get over yourself. Video games are fine. No, they're not fine. They’re doing GREAT, by every possible metric.

Number of titles? The market is gruesomely flooded. (Gruesomely for developers, I mean. For fans, it's an overwhelming embarrassment of riches.)

Number of fans? Video games are popular to the point of global invasion. Find me a human, and I will find a game that can addict them.

Financial success? We're a 100 BILLION USD a year industry. We're huge and getting bigger every year.

Artistic accomplishment? Creativity? Look up any Best Games list from 2014 or 2015. Video games are breaking new barriers in craftsmanship and artistic expression every year and turning profits while they do it.

Diversity? Pick any demographic group, and someone is making games to cater to them personally. It's one of the great advantages of a gruesomely flooded market. (Of course, not every game will cater to you personally, but that's not possible or desirable. Other people get stuff they like too.)

Video games are taking over the world, and they're doing it in style.

We're winning because we offer something better than art. We offer Experience.

If you don't think Pong is fun, try it with friends. It holds up.

I Understand The Last of Us On a Higher Level Than You

The Last of Us is a truly great game. Many have written about it, including me. I recommend it very highly.

But here's what bugs me. The cutscenes of The Last of Us told a very good story. Those cutscenes, all together, would make a solid B+ zombie movie. But when bloggers wrote about it, they treated the actual game part of The Last of Us as this sort of useless, irritating, vestigial limb.

Without the gameplay, the action, the battle, the fear, the dying again and again, The Last of Us is just an above-average zombie movie. The true greatness of the experience is in the sneaking and the stabbing and the shooting and the dying. (LOTS of dying.)

Here's Why.

Would You Survive the Apocalypse?

It's not a hypothetical question. I mean it. Think about it. Five seconds from now, zombies leap in through the window. Civilization is OVER. Would you make it through?

Well, here's a way to think about the question.

Imagine starting a game of The Last of Us on the highest difficulty level. (Or The Walking Dead. Or DOOM, for that matter.) Go into it blind. Try to play through the whole thing, front to back, without dying.

If you make it, you survive the apocalypse. If you're one of the 99.9999% of people who don't make it, you die. You help make up one of the mountains of skulls that serve as DOOM background.

Try it. It's an amusing exercise. It took me five tries to get through the tutorial of The Last of Us, so I know where I stand.

I had a much older relative once who thought she was immune to video games. Then this infected her. Eventually, she shook free, but she never again dismissed the power of our craft.

Of Course, This Isn't Literal Truth.

Obviously, the skills to win a video game are different from the skills needed to literally survive the End of Days. I know this.

The Last of Us, the actual game part of it, is trying to do something impossible. Like, literally impossible. It is trying to give us a glimmer of a portion of a sensation of understanding the experience of the end of the world. It doesn't succeed, of course. It can't.

But it does come closer to putting us INSIDE that experience than anyone else. We're not watching, we're doing. We are, in an indirect way, mediated through joysticks, living an experience. We are taking part in a compelling demonstration of how fragile our lives are. How utterly inadequate we are to the challenge.

The Last of Us can trick our brains, for a moment, into thinking we're struggling for survival. Similarly, Minecraft can trick us into feeling like we're building something glorious out of nothing. Cookie Clicker creates a powerful sensation of growth and progress, abstract but compelling.

When I write a game, I try to make you feel like you have power. Then I try to make you feel the awesome, terrifying responsibility of having power. When I force you to make a tough decision, for a brief moment, I can reprogram your brain and take your thoughts somewhere they've never been before. This is amazing.

That is, at heart, what the games we make are. They are tools we creators use to compel and rewrite your brains. We haven't begun to come to terms with the power we've unleashed with these toys, these addiction machines.

This is an integral part of childhood now. It will only stop being thus when it is replaced by something even more powerful.

SimCity Isn't Art.

Nor is Civilization. Or Halo. Or Space Invaders. Or Castle Crashers. Or DOOM. Or Super Meat Boy. Or Hearthstone. Or League of Legends. Or Clash of Clans. Or Minecraft. Or Pac-Man. Or Solitaire. Or Pong. Not art. Why would they aim that low?

They provide consuming experiences. They are compulsions.  I'm not going to argue that they're High Art. They aren't. They're SuperArt. They take over your brain and let you get lost in them.

I can see why Artists look down on what we do. They have no choice. They certainly can't compete with us. What we do is irresistible. Authors and playwrights are dinosaurs, and we're throwing the asteroids. We'll let Film and TV survive. For now.

Atari Adventure doesn't look like much. Yet I've seen this silly thing compel people, young and old, for a whole evening. Not an evening many years ago. An evening NOW.

"But What About Games That Do Try To Be Art, Smart Guy?"

They're great. I am a huge fan of video games borrowing storytelling techniques from obsolete art forms. Beginner's Guide. Gone Home. Her Story. Firewatch. All worthy titles that fused game elements with more mundane art forms to create things that felt new and fresh.

A lot of indie games now are movies that you stroll through with the WASD keys. You can make a neat game this way. I’ll probably buy it. Just don't think it makes your work inherently superior to more gamey games. If you're just telling a story at me, well, a lot of media can do that. When I play Overwatch or Dark Souls or Civilization, I am transported in a unique way only video games can provide.

This is my game. It doesn't look like much. Yet, for 20 years, I've gotten fan mail telling me how addiction to my work threatened relationships and livelihoods. Good.

I Am Done Apologizing For My Craft.

I have been obsessed with video games for as long as they have existed. These strange, shaggy, crude, profane, elegant, lovely creations are my life's work. I love them.

However, video games have a crippling self-esteem problem. We are desperate for validation, and this makes us targets for any shyster who wants to take advantage of us.

Roger Ebert says he doesn't think we make art, and we lose our minds. Some people seriously claim games don't deserve the journalism due any industry of our massive size, even while ripoffs and shoddy goods are an epidemic. Academics and print journalism write about us in terms that are condescending, uninformed, and occasionally slanderous, and we cravenly respond,  "A newspaper cares about us! Please act like we're worth something! Please!!!" When you are sufficiently desperate for validation, even abuse can feel like love.

Enough. Developers and gamers are working in a symbiotic relationship to create something entirely new, a craft unlike anything in human existence thus far. We are exploring a new realm of possibility, and I count myself truly blessed that I get to take part in it from its infancy.

I just finished a game called Avadon 3: The Warborn. It's pretty cool. It has a lot of neat scenarios, choices, characters, battles, and just plain good stuff. I made a little world for you to try on for size. I hope you like the little toy I made. I've already started building two more.

Video games are so powerful that they can even disrupt the Magic of Friendship.

We've Only Taken the First Few Steps of an Epic Journey!

Want to pitch in? If you have ideas, suggestions, or feedback, we designers need to hear them.

Don't get me wrong. While our craft is awesome, it's still young. We still have so many ways we can improve. There are so many sorts of things we can and should do (design, technical, storywise) that we aren't yet. We need everyone's feedback to make a great thing better.

But I personally do require one thing: That your criticism be delivered with respect and love for the craft. If you don't like video games, don't play them. Fine. It’s your time. But we're already pretty terrific, and we're getting better. Fast. With or without you.

Stop using the word 'art'. Erase it from your dictionary. It's too weak a word. I want nothing less than to compel you. I am coming to consume all your thoughts, all your attention. I want to absorb you to the point where it threatens your marriage and your livelihood.

Video games should not interest or impress you. We should scare you. Video games are taking over the world. You haven't even seen a fraction of what we can do.

Gaming Needs To Have More Arguments. Here Are Some Topic Suggestions!!!

Today, I argue for more argument on the Internet. I freely admit that this is a Hardcore-difficulty rhetorical maneuver.

I just got back from the Game Developer's Conference, where I met a ton of cool people who write indie games and attended many panels. Everyone I met was perfectly lovely. Indie developers are a bunch of friendly, outgoing, huggy folks, and they could not have been kinder to me. I appreciated it.

Yet, there is one thing I find fascinating (and maybe even slightly worrying): In several days around my peer group, talking and drinking with them, I did not hear one argument.

I'M SPOILING FOR A FIGHT!!!

Indie gaming is changing very fast. Our art is expanding in every way and getting tons more press. Our business is booming, to the point where it is actually significant. (The figure I heard at GDC was that indies are grossing over a billion USD a year, which is a real business by any measure.) Indie devs are artists, and our work is now a Big Deal.

But here's the thing. Artists are a proud, passionate, opinionated lot. Look anywhere in the history of art, and you will find passionate (even furious) debate. People used to riot at concerts and the theatre, for God's sake.

Indies have a lot of things to argue about. Our art form is very, very new, and there are countless unanswered questions. Hell, there are more questions than answers at this point. Nobody seems to know anything about anything. We should be figuring some stuff out. We should be having debates. Noisy, vigorous debates.

Therefore, I am going to, in my humble and retiring style, suggest a number of Open Questions In the Field of Indie Development and Marketing. I think they are all issues intelligent people could disagree on and have a heated debate about. If you are hungry for a good topic for a panel or article, help yourself. You’re welcome.

I freely argue with gamers and developers, because I am respectful and thoughtful and know that we are all bound by the Magic of Friendship.

A Selection of Topics For Argument

We know it's possible for your game to be a hit or to fail. What about in-between? Is it still possible for new indie devs to chip out a sustainable, middle-class career, building a fan base and serving an underserved niche? If so, how?

So how DO you figure out what price will maximize earnings for your game? Does it depend on genre? Production value? How much media attention you get?

Should indie games be cheap? Indie games have long been cheaper than AAA games. This is an advantage. Is it a good idea to give it up?

I have long believed that one of the great advantages of indie gaming is that people like us and think we are cool. Thus, people want to keep us in business. Buying our games makes them feel good. Is this true? Do indie developers have an ethical responsibility to maintain the reputation of our industry? (This is a tough question. If an indie dev wants to do something unpopular, but it will provide the money he or she absolutely needs to stay in business, I'm not sure I could in good conscience tell them not to.)

Have indies let their quality control slip? If an indie is selling a strictly non-functional game, should we be pressuring them to remove it from sale? (I am a long-suffering Mac gamer. So many indie Mac ports are seriously broken or just plain non-functional.)

Are free to play games ethical? If so, are some sales practices for them ethical and some not? If so, how do you tell where to draw the line?

Computer games are a 100 BILLION dollar a year global industry that employs multitudes and entertains countless people. Given that, does our industry deserve a serious, professional media that adheres to reasonable journalistic standards? If so, do we have it?

Have I gotten myself into trouble even asking those questions? Also, am I being unfair? Is it even possible to make money doing rigorous old-fashioned journalism anymore? In any field?

Customers expect new games to eventually go on sale. Is this a bad thing? If so, how should indies act in order to extract more money from customers? If there was a way for us all to collude to keep prices high, should we do it?

Most agree that Steam Early Access is, overall, a good idea. That said, how developed should a game be before it's allowed into Early Access? How long is too long to wait for a game you bought early (or on Kickstarter) to be actually released?

If you're making an episodic game, how long is too long to wait to release the final chapter? (Bear in mind that if you take, say, five years, a percentage of your purchasers will be DEAD before the final part is out. As the gaming audience ages, this percentage will only increase.) How many years have to pass before you cross the line from eccentric, unpredictable, lovable creator to something far less respectable?

When playing a competitive game, should trash talking be allowed? How do you tell when trash talking becomes abuse? If all trash talking is bad, should it be removed from every competition, including in real life?

While I love many Walking Simulators and have recommended many of them in my blog and on Twitter, I also like to use the term Walking Simulator because I think it's funny. Am I a bad person? I play casual games on my PS4 all the time, but I still joke about Filthy Casuals and Console Peasants. Is this abuse or harmless japery? How do we find the line between the two?

Most agree that game refunds are, overall, a good idea. Should we push every platform to offer them? If so, when should a customer be allowed to get a refund?

Most agree that user reviews are, overall, a good idea. However, user reviews enable a few disgruntled cranks to brigade your game's page and directly attack your sales. This really sucks, but it seems impossible to prevent it. Can it be prevented? If so, how do you do this without enabling developers to simply remove bad reviews they don't like?

The most common story I've heard from indies lately is: "We did a ton of PR work. We got a lot of positive attention. Our game still didn't sell well." Does this actually happen or is it just my imagination? Is the universal advice of, "Indies need to do tons of PR or die," actually correct? What sorts of games is it true for?

I have read many articles saying that developers should have high self-esteem and confidence and avoid Imposter Syndrome.  Yet, my self-hatred is what drives me to improve, and my terror is what drives me to work hard. Is there really one optimal developer emotional state?

I was hugely disappointed when Steam's program for paid mods and add-ons failed. I think this is a good potential route for indies to make a name and a living. Is a working for-pay mod system possible? If so, how would you make it?

One of the best ways to make a living as an indie is to find a much loved but underserved genre and start to serve it. Are there any underserved genres left?

Do Let’s Plays of your game always increase sales? Suppose you don’t want long Let’s Plays of your games. Do you have the right to prevent them? Is a long duration Let's Play a copyright violation? How long until a big lawsuit forces twitch.tv to only allow streaming of your game if you give them explicit permission?

Are schools that teach game design and programming a good deal? How useful are the degrees they offer if the recipient leaves the industry? Is anyone doing long-term studies of this issue? When a young dev asks me whether he or she should blow $80K of after tax money to study game design, what the hell should I say?

Finally, video games are a TOUGH business. Many indies go into it with the strategy of, "Newer give up. Never surrender." But not all of them can make a living. Isn't there a point where you SHOULD give up and/or surrender? How do you tell when you've reached it?

I am going to transition from My Little Pony to Naruto header images, as my daughters are forcing me to watch Naruto. All 80000 episodes of it.

“Great. More arguments on the Internet.”

I can picture you now, sighing and shaking your head. "The last thing we need is more discord, more shouting," you may well be thinking. It seems like the whole Internet is good for nothing but shouting. There is a small number of assholes out there now, doing enormous damage. I don't deny it. To deny it would be willful blindness.

Yet, we can't let those assholes keep us from doing the work we need to do and figuring out the things we need to figure out. We should provide the assholes a good example by showing them that respectful criticism and debate still exists.

I really enjoyed GDC, but the talks there left me with more questions than answers. Tough questions, that could use some real debate. When I wrote about the Indie Bubble, a lot of indie devs called me out on this point or that, and it was awesome.

Indies are decent people, and we like each other. This means that we can afford to have a few arguments. It is possible to debate someone, even passionately, even with shouting, and still love them and go out for drinks with them at the end of the day. I do it with my family and friends all the time.

This nightmare is what comes up when you do a Google Image Search for "Naruto fights." So. Um. Don't do that.

In Conclusion

When I was young, I loved a good argument. I don't really enjoy debates anymore. I'm a lot more chill in general now.

But I will still argue, not because I enjoy it but because it is my duty. Frequent, vigorous, respectful debate is good for a community, an industry, and an art form. Debate is the Darwinian crucible in which bad ideas are burned away and good ideas emerge, purified in fire.

(The key is to make sure that only bad ideas get burned away, not people.)

I’m going to try to defeat my cowardice and start blogging again and chipping away at this pile of open questions. I hope, when I’m dumb, people point it out. If you think I wrote something wrong and can provide actual reasons to prove your case without resorting to cheap ad hominem attacks, I hope you’ll take your shot at me.

Then, if you manage to score a point on me and we meet at a convention someday, I will happily buy you a drink. Something reasonable. Jack Daniels quality. None of this top shelf crap. I'm not made of money.

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As always, you can get fresh opinions and news about our games at our Twitter.

The Witcher 3 Is Amazingly Written, and People Should Talk About It More.

The three best-known characters of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

(There are light spoilers ahead for The Witcher 3, starting about halfway through. Even if you haven't played the game, you should still read all of this article, as it is a good article.)

A large part of the purpose of this blog is to pick apart interesting video games, so it would be shameful for me to pass up one of this year's most exciting titles, the Polish hit RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

I've been playing computer RPGs since they existed, so I'm sort of burned out on the genre. I play them for market research, but I rarely finish them and almost never enjoy them. Thus, I can give The Witcher 3 the highest praise I can give an RPG: When I stopped playing it to do something else, I wasn't happy about it. I found it to be, and yes, I can't believe I'm saying this, a ton of fun.

It's also full of fascinating design. It does some things in writing I've never seen in a game before, and parts of the game completely blew my jaded self away. I would have loved to see game writers and critics pick apart the machinery of this game and show what new things it did and why it did them so well.

Didn't happen, so I have to pick up the slack. Alas ...

Putting On My Critic Hat

There was some vigorous critical debate about The Witcher 3 when it came out, but it primarily centered around whether this Polish game, made by Poles and set in a fantasy Poland based on Polish books, had too many white people.

(Side note: Did you know that many Eastern Europeans, who occupy a large, diverse region with a long and rich history, severe poverty, and recent history of vicious oppression, find it intensely irritating to be thoughtlessly lumped into the huge, vague category of "white people"?)

The question of whether the Polish people deserve the right to make their own representations of themselves without getting permission from affluent North American academics is one I plan to leave entirely alone.

Instead, I'm going to say something about The Witcher 3 that will probably severely agitate some readers: It is a terrific, much-needed dose of diversity for the game industry.

It is possible that some of us are overly fixating on the unicorn thing.

There's a Lot of Sorts of Diversity.

My wife is a Hungarian immigrant, and her half of our family is Hungarian and Polish. I'm not going to pretend for a second to be an expert on their cultures, but I have had a few decades of close observation. Enough to say this:

The Witcher 3 feels like it was written by people who spent a lot of their childhoods at their parents' and grandparents' feet, hearing stories about the horrors of World War 2 and the following Soviet occupation. (Or like the game was written by people who suffered that misery directly.)

Eastern Europeans have always seemed to me to be a tough, serious people living in a historically dangerous part of the world. Appropriately, this is a tough, serious game, full of unfairness and arbitrary cruelty.

The Witcher 3 feels like it is written with a keen awareness of what it is like to have your country occupied by brutal outsiders. Coincidentally, it comes from Poland, a country whose experience of the 20th century was, let's say, traumatic. For them to use that experience to produce a work like this is something we should treasure. It is a valuable thing.

Video games tend to approach politics in a simplistic way. The Witcher 3 is obsessed with politics. It shows again and again how the decisions made by those in power filter down and affect (usually painfully) regular people. This is not a game that sugar coats anything. Anywhere. Ever.

So This Is Where We Lose the Game Critics

Much modern gaming criticism is based on this basic theory: Popular culture shapes how people think, which shapes the world. Therefore, art is inherently political. It should focus on showing the world in the lovely state we want it to be, as opposed to the unpleasant way it might actually be.

(To see an example of this viewpoint, consider the well-known Tropes vs. Women video series. Go here and read the last three paragraphs of the transcript.)

The Witcher 3, on the other hand, depicts a medieval, war-torn, highly patriarchal society. It is only rarely judgmental. The game sets up how its world is, and then it deals with the consequences, logically grinding from one inevitable event to the next.

This game doesn't lie to you, even if some want it to. It comes from a land that knows full well how cruel the world can be, and it knows that ignoring that cruelty is an insult to our ancestors, the ones who withstood it in order to make a world for us. This leads The Witcher 3 to a lot of really interesting places, and I’m genuinely surprised game writers haven’t dug into it more.

It is a game full of grim humor, some of which was a bit much for me. (For example, I absolutely would have cut the gwent card with the joke about "raping for Redania.")

It's also a game where horror sits side by side with silly humor and pop culture references. There's nothing unusual about this. Humans often use inappropriate humor to deal with difficult circumstances. (Example: Google "jewish nazi jokes". Or just watch any old Mel Brooks movie.)

Video games need more of this. Our industry tends to approach politics and other real world conflicts in a simplistic way, with black and white morality and good/evil choices that don’t line up with how things really work. For all its occasional whimsy, The Witcher 3 reflects real thought about humanity and how it bears up (or breaks) under oppression.

That is why I say The Witcher 3 is a great example of diversity in our industry. There are many sorts of diversity. It brings diversity of thought, perspective, history. It is infused with a different, harder way of thinking and regarding the world.

If you are an academic preparing to write the 1000000th article on Proteus or Gone Home or Spec Ops: The Line, might I direct you to a title that is under-examined and worthy of analysis?

(Mild spoilers start here. Keep reading anyway.)

It is possible that some of us are overly fixating on the unicorn thing.

Family Matters.

No discussion about storytelling in The Witcher 3 is complete without mentioning its already-infamous Family Matters questline. It's already been written about a bunch, so I won't talk about it too much, since I want to get into a cooler bit later on.

Basically, this is a quest where a local warlord asks you to find his lost wife and child. Which escalates into a local warlord who asks you to bring back the wife and child who fled his abuse. Which escalates into finding a wife and child who fled and became ensnared in powerful, dangerous local magic.

It's not far in. It's the first major chapter. If you care at all about storytelling in video games, YOU MUST PLAY THIS SECTION. Do it on the easiest difficulty setting if you need to. (The Witcher 3 has some balance issues. It's too hard early on and too easy later.)

This section takes a ton of weird plot threads that seem unconnected, ties them all together effortlessly, throws in some stunning set pieces along the way, and ramps up to an excruciating ending full of impossible choices. It’s really good.

After that, there's a looong chapter in the city of Novigrad that is fun, but a bit overlong. It also occasionally throws in piles of dead women for cheap shock value, which is hacky. (This is a point where I agree with the Tropes vs Women videos.) It's my least favorite section, but it still has a lot of good stuff.

Then you're on the Isle of Megavikings (sorry, Skellige), which has some very cool, involved quests full of epic combat, punching-oriented politics, and painfully slow boats.

Then the main character, Geralt, is reunited with his basically-adopted-daughter, Ciri. This is where the coolest part (to me) starts. First, a few words about women in The Witcher.

Shut up, Newman. Nobody will ever love you.

Sorceresses and Goddesses.

The Witcher's most interesting characters are all women. The more recent books the game is based on focus on the women (Ciri and Yennefer, mainly). Even in The Witcher 3, there are multiple scenes where the women are doing the planning while Geralt shuffles around nervously nearby.

Gender politics arguments are not usually the morass I choose to get bogged down in. If you want to dig into these discussions, this Kotaku article is a reasonable breakdown.

All this brings me (finally) to the thing I loved most about the game: The relationship between the hero, Geralt, and his ward and surrogate daughter, Ciri.

My Favorite Thing About the Witcher 3.

Ciri is your standard fantasy Mysterious Power, Destined To Do Great Things. The first part of the game is Geralt trying to find her. The second part is him protecting her and helping her do the Big Fantasy Thing she needs to do.

Here's a key point. For all your running around and questing and gwent-playing, Geralt is not the main character in Witcher 3. He is a secondary character in Ciri's story.

Forget Fighting. How Good a Dad Are You?

So at the end, Ciri does a Big Thing. I think the game could have done a better job explaining what she was doing and why, but that would be adding more content to an already overstuffed game. The important thing is that this event is what the hours and hours of running around, confusion, and carnage has led to. Her thing. You aren't even present for it.

But you DO matter. Remember, you are Ciri's mentor. For the final stretch of the game, Ciri comes to you for support and guidance. The way you support her is vitally important. It determines whether she completes and survives doing the Big Thing.

All of the things you say and do that make a difference don't seem to be that important, but they are, in fact, vital. A few offhand words you don't think twice about can have an enormous effect on someone else, and it's not always fair. (You know. Like in real life.) All of the most important decisions in the game seem like False Choices.

False Choices?

Role-playing games, including my own, have a lot of what are sometimes called false choices. These are points when you make a decision or express your opinion, but your choices don't have a concrete effect on gameplay.

I don't believe false choices don't make a difference. In fact, they are hugely important. By asking the player to mentally engage and form an opinion about what is happening in the game, you are directly shaping the player's experience.

Remember, video games are just tools we use to affect our brains. The only important thing about a game is how our brain perceives it. Any choice, even a false choice, affects our perception of the game. All choices matter, even if they don't affect your stats.

The difference with The Witcher 3 is that all of the most important decisions are hidden in plain sight. They seem like false choices, but they directly change the ending. Your words have enormous importance to your child, but they seem irrelevant to you. It's exactly like ...

As a bonus, here is a lifetime's worth of nightmare fuel.

Being a Parent.

I have two kids. It has been endlessly frustrating to me how bad a job pop culture, especially video games, does depicting this fundamental human experience.

The Witcher 3 is the first game I've ever played that really engages my parent brain. When Ciri came to me for advice, my experience raising my own daughters had an affect on what I chose.

Yes, it can be unfair. You can think you're doing or saying the right thing, and it all falls apart. Welcome to parenthood.

I think this is cool and unique, and I wanted to make sure it didn't pass without comment. It's a shame it all happens so late in the game, because it's really well-crafted.

A Few Odds and Ends.

The Witcher 3 contains a card game called gwent, and yes, it is as addictive as you've heard. However, I don't think it would work out well in real life. The computer game has absolute control over the cards you can possibly own at any point. A real-life designer doesn’t have that ability.

The Witcher 3 is mostly an open world game, and it shares the sins so many open world games have: A needlessly fiddly crafting system. Lots of meaningless encounters and collectibles clogging up the world. Too much time spent looting giant piles of boxes, one at a time, each of which contains something useless. Honestly, stick to the main questline and side quests as much as you can.

I enjoyed the combat. Invest in the spell that lets you charm bad guys. It makes many fights easy and hilarious.

The speed at which this game can go from light-hearted whimsy to full-on Game of Thrones never failed to surprise me.

I want Keira Metz to be in every video game I ever play again ever. I want Tetris to be nothing but little falling Keira Metzes.

Apparently, rumor has it that The Witcher 3 also depicts a sex scene atop a stuffed unicorn. This is exactly the sort of needless immaturity that keeps video games from flourishing as an art form. The Witcher 3, your mother and I are very disappointed in you.

Finally, no discussion of this game would be complete without a link to Conan O'Brien's terrific Clueless Gamer segment.