Worth Reading: 09/22/2014

As I write this, I'm hanging out at San Francisco's main airport, wondering if it would be truly crazy to leave my terminal for burritos I've been missing for over a year now. My stomach...it hungers.

On my flight, I've been digging deep into Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. If it seems like Danganronpa only came out a few months ago, that's because it's mostly true. The original game was released on Vita back in February. With all the other games coming down the pike in the next few weeks, I'm trying to use some travel time to get the game's hooks in me. Unless that happens soon, it's not hard to see Danganronpa 2 joining a pile of games I'll convince myself to try during the holidays. Of course, I never will.

I can't imagine I'm going to put Danganronpa down how, though. I mean, look at that screen shot.

One last aside: I was pretty happy with the comments section on last week's Worth Reading. Obviously, we're going to disagree on a number of points regarding the last few weeks, but a sincere thanks are in order for the many people who worked to articulate those rhetorical distances calmly. As always, if you have anything you want to ask or discuss in private, my message box is always open.

You Should Read These

• "Destiny and Writing" by Cameron Kunzelman

Feelings on Destiny have been mixed, though I fall on the side that's liking it. Much of what doesn't currently work--loot drops, mission structure, frequency of public events--seems fixable. I'm not sure the story can be salvaged, at least the story being told right now. The reason Destiny's storytelling fails, however, is something we're still teasing out. Cameron Kunzelman does a good job articulating the storytelling decisions made by Bungie's writers.

"In the article I mentioned above, Petit mentions that Destiny has a lot of the same trappings as Star Wars. At the heart of this similarity is something we could call 'the evocation effect.' The perfect illustration of this effect is the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars. Luke Skywalker walks in, the camera cuts around the room and shows you lots of different kinds of characters, and then time goes on. The film tells you nothing about them, but they are intended to evoke a world beyond the camera. “Dang!” you’re meant to think, “I bet they all have stories!” They don’t. (Or didn’t at the time. The Expanded Universe probably has total family genealogies for all of them at this point.)"

• "Rise of the Simulators" by Ian Williams

If I'm lucky, I'll have the opportunity to write about games for a long time. Besides occasionally helping Vinny and Drew push around audio equipment, there's no manual labor involved in my work. So it doesn't surprise me to see more games like Cart Life, Euro Truck Simulator, and Papers, Please. While Ian Williams' piece explicitly focuses on the trucking and farming side of things, they all come from a similar place: experiences greatly unlike our own lives.

"We live in a post-industrial America, one where old notions of alienation of labor have been made to seem not radical enough by half through the increasing abstraction of our work. The factory worker of fifty years ago could at least touch the things he or she was creating, even if it was only a piece or two of a larger whole. Now, we’re coders, pounding out lines of a foreign language we might only partially understand in order to create intangible end products for companies skimming more and more of our compensation. Or we call an order to production, only for it to go halfway around the world for quick delivery to the stores we work at, with nothing produced or even handled by anyone we will ever know by processes we’re never really privy to."

If You Click It, It Will Play

These Crowdfunding Projects Look Pretty Cool

• Age of Grit wants to fuse the wild west with a futuristic RPG.
• Grimoire features wizard-on-wizard ass kicking, and I can't really argue with that.
• Judged: A Court Simulation Games gives me some Papers, Please vibes.

Writing From Giant Bomb's Community, Courtesy of ZombiePie

• MeatsofEvil lays out his ambitious plans for this years' ExtraLife charity stream.
• regularassmilk on the current state of game difficulty levels.
• Mento celebrates the 20th anniversary of Master of Magic with a detailed retrospective.
• thatpinguino examines the often tenuous relationship between the NFL and the game industry.
• Marino has a nostalgic throwback and retrospective of the old Whiskey Media trading card system.

Tweets That Make You Go "Hmmmmmm"

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• Danielle Riendeau explores Curtain, a game about abusive relationships.
• Patricia Hernandez keeps trying to kill her sims, even if they won't die.
• Stephen Beirne tries to explain why fans were so frustrated with Final Fantasy XIII.
• Kris Graft breaks down the reasons Microsoft is so interested in picking up Minecraft.
• Laura Hudson has fallen hard for Hatoful Boyfriend, and doesn't care who knows it.
• James Carter wonders how the commercial success of games influences our thoughts on them.
• Josteph Stromberg takes a look at the academia surrounding video game and violence.
• Eric Lindvall digs up the weird places (like printers) people are porting DOOM to.
• Ashley Gilbertson is a conflict photographer assigned to take photos inside The Last of Us.
• Notch talks about Minecraft's earliest days in a message board thread from 2009.
• Brendan Sinclair considers the idea of objectivity in video games journalism.
• Alyssa Rosenberg ponders today's new world, in which geeks now have social power.

What a good way to start the week =)

That Minecraft article is really interesting.

Good to see the Hideki Kamiya video made it in this week.

I liked Brendan Sinclair's article as well.

@patrickklepek You seem to have added the bulldozer image link twice and one failed to work.

I was expecting that Modern Doom video to be a cynical satire on the state of modern shooters, but man that actually looks really cool -- those reload animations!

Yeah, toiling game about law! Give me all the suffering of having to drag your butt out to a courtroom at the county seat which is an absolute hole of a city filled with gangs and sadness. Tell me why when my father came home each day from work he spent the few moments he had when he wasn't working doing the hobby he enjoyed which was not spending time with his children.

... Or maybe that's too personal. Will there at least be a dedicated "bang the gavel" button?

Huh, there have been many "if Doom was made today" videos, but I feel like that one in particular misses quite a few obvious points. Modern shooters for example make a point of never having you, yourself, open any doors (the doorways you're supposed to go through are either already opened, or will be breached by your AI companions - the first Call of Duty even made a point of that in the tutorial), they don't have any pickups, especially not of the automatic kind, and generally don't let you stray from the main path the way the "Modern Doom" video starts off with. The player's health wasn't even regenerating!

It was kinda funny that most of the stuff was taken from Brutal Doom though. That mod is kinda missing the point of Doom too.

I think this one mostly gets it right:

Thanks Patrick!

I wish there was a journalist out there that wrote about why fans of Final Fantasy also like XIII. It's like the professional outlets really only care about one viewpoint when it comes to that game.

Do games comes down the pike? I always thought the saying was "down the pipe" @patrickklepek! I could google the truth to find out but oh well.

Thanks pk!

Edit: I keep mulling over Chris Plante's tweet and it keeps rubbing me the wrong way! Does he think that most people who get hacked "deserve it"? In the least aggressive way I want to say that there is 0 special about Mr. Plante. People on the internet get hacked, and it's not because you really deserve it or not, it's because someone wants to fuck with you. I'm thinking about it way too much but it just comes across weird and a little self indulgent/woe is me in a world where everyone and their dog gets hacked. Patrick still gets shit from people and I never see him tweet "this is the thanks I get for talking to you about games? sheeesh!"

Meanwhile, the Kamiya video is grreat.

Well, you can actually play that version of Doom @yummylee, minus the silly COD bits - it's a mod called Brutal Doom.

Hey @patrickklepek the image in the Simulation game story has some text in the caption that's messing with the format.

Other than that bug another great Worth Reading :D

Unless that happens soon, it's not hard to see Danganronpa 2 joining a pile of games I'll convince myself to try during the holidays. Of course, I never will.

I can't imagine I'm going to put Danganronpa down how, though.

Finding it hard to follow what your saying here, even if that "how" is supposed to be "now" it seem pretty contradictory

Without sounding lame and cynical, isn't this kind of the problem with games media? We tend to only get one perspective in so many places. In the world we live in popular consensus = fact. Here are some famous ones:

- FFXIII sucks

- Destiny is a dissapointment

- Quiet is an inappropriate female character

- Dynasty Warriors games are junk

- Swery's games are "so weird" but "not good"

- Call of Duty is cannibalizing itself

It goes on and on.

@fisk0: That is way better. Brutal Doom is really awesome though don't be crazy

@geraltitude: I know what you mean. There are a lot of cases where one viewpoint is latched on to as THE viewpoint, and dissent feels ignored if not discouraged.

I don't know if recent events have just made me more aware or if I've just been paying more attention to these kinds of articles in general, but man I'm seriously getting bummed out by the state of games writing. The articles featured here always have a VERY fascinating *premise*, but then the writing itself usually doesn't do it justice, at least for me. Most of the stuff written about Destiny feels rambling and unfocused, and usually doesn't even touch on the challenges that make writing in a video game (especially one as "gamey" as Destiny) so much different from any other medium. The Destiny topic is rich for examination, but even the deepest articles are just scratching annoyingly at the surface. The Euro Truck article examines the kind of culture that has grown around seemingly boring sim games, but I get the impression that the author has a very misguided understanding of the phenomenon or what catalyzed it. He touches on the similarity of those kinds of games to actual "work," but fails to expand that idea to the medium as a whole (to which it definitely applies, and would be an interesting discussion to have). Hell, he doesn't even bring up Goat Simulator, which is the gosh darn epitome of that entire phenomenon and culture! Is it ignorance or just complete apathy in the topic he's writing about?

Video games are so unique in every aspect, and are such a fascinating topic ripe for interesting discussion, but we seem to lack the good writers with loud enough voices to make it happen. Or maybe we lack an audience. It's sad.

@skippysigmatic: I could not agree more. At least with recent events, articles and different pieces are being scrutinized more in a fair way. The content should matter, not the headlines.

I'm surprised there is no follow up to Jenn Frank this week. After her being "driven out" of the industry, she is already back writing about games.

@hailinel: I suspect part of that reason is that the fans that like XIII, only "like" it and don't love it. This is very different from almost any other entry in the final fantasy series, where you can always find a particular subset of fans that will vigorously defend their love for a particular game in that series.

It also doesn't help that of the many things of XIII that are liked are the more mechanical aspects of the game such as the battle system. The story was serviceable and badly fleshed out the world lore and sense of place, especially in comparison to predecessors.

Also all recent FF characters have fans, with the exception of XIII, where the personalities are at best tolerated and at worst extremely disliked.

That 2009 Minecraft message board thread is a trip. I remember first hearing about Minecraft via g4tv.com back in early 2010. The world was so innocent then.

The attempted hacking of Chris Plante is unjustifiably rotten. Full stop.

But that tweet, in saying "this is what I get," effectively discredits all the people who enjoyed his work, complimented his work, respectfully disagreed with his views and, not for nothing, signed his paychecks. Those six years weren't given away. They were a gift a lot of people would trade their last six years for in a heartbeat.

Giving more influence to the few assholes who tried to hack you over the thousands who made your job fun does no favor to an already toxic climate.

"I can't imagine I'm going to put Danganronpa down how, though. I mean, look at that screen shot."

how = now?

This is a surprisingly complex topic I could write a whole paper about, but to be brief, I think a lot of that games media consensus (which is a negative thing, to be sure) comes from media folk's acceptance of their peer's opinions. And in how instant and wide spread those opinions now are because of social media. That is in itself totally harmless, but it absolutely has some unintentional consequences.

I've been listening to old Bombcasts in chronological order, and it's fascinating to see how their perception of games they hadn't played change as twitter became more of a thing. They went from, "Well, I liked that dev's last game so I'll check out this one." to, "Well, I liked that dev's last game but I hear bad things so I don't know." Again, no malicious intent. They're just fans themselves who look to people they trust for advice before they spend the time and money on something. But in an ironic way, they remove the inherent subjectiveness of reviews and even just passing opinions by passively promoting and accepting other's opinions as their own. Perpetuating a single or a few reactions as the general consensus. There have already been multiple cases in those bombcasts (I'm right after E3 2010, FYI) where Ryan or Vinny will say they checked out a game and liked it, and Brad chimes in with a, "Huh. People on twitter said it was terrible."

There was this very subtle change where their impression of other reviewer's consensus skewed from drawing on past experiences and reading their actual reviews, to absorbing twitter comments.This subverts a lot of the "rules" that games reviewers have tried to strictly follow for a long time to allow them to give the most accurate and whole impression of a game as possible.

For example, if a reviewer is bored by the first hour of the game, doesn't like an early voice actor, or any bad initial thing, that might make it into their review, but it might also seem insignificant and maybe even turn into a positive after they play more. But with twitter, that raw reaction goes out to everyone and every other games reviewer, potentially skewing their own impressions before they even play it.

I could imagine if Half-Life came out today, there might be a few reviewers who couldn't resist grabbing their phones for a quick, "Thought I'd be shooting aliens. Been stuck on a train for 5 minutes. :/". And even if their final review didn't complain about that and praised the game's intricate world-building, other's opinions could be based more on that tweet than the review.

Again, just a tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle, and none of it is intentionally misleading, but I think it could be very positive if some reviewers took a look at not only where they draw conclusions from, but also the impressions that they give to the public during the review process.

@billyok: The tweet struck me as unbelievably egotistical to me. "People tried to hack my personal accounts last night. I gave 6 years to illuminating the best parts of video games and this is what I get." He's asserting two things:

1. That he's somehow "given" himself to the video game community, which is so incredibly conceited that it feels like a joke.
2. That people tried to hack his accounts as a direct response to his status in the video game world, which is simply an unfounded assumption.

I wasn't even really aware of the guy until I saw that tweet get shared. I don't know what his views are or how exactly he's contributed to the gaming world, but that tweet by itself is pretty damn lame.

@tuxfool: There are fans that not only love it, but consider it their favorite. And I don't mean in that dismissive "Your first is your favorite" sense. I love the game and the characters. Lightning is one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters, and I say this as someone that first came into the series with FFIV on the SNES.

The generalization that fans only like XIII and don't love it is in itself dismissive.

Did Rami not follow that tweet up with an explanation or did Patrick just not post the follow up for some reason? Cause as it stands that tweet is pretty meaningless on it's own.

@hailinel: Maybe then I should say that fans that love it are probably in a far greater minority when compared with other entries. This small minority means that you're less likely to get somebody with the impetus to defend it.

This is purely anecdotal, but you get many more opposing opinions and various aspects of the other games reflecting the greater passion behind those older FF games. So every time somebody dismisses some aspect of XIII, you're less likely to get somebody to oppose that opinion or that the opposition isn't as clearly demonstrated or strongly worded.

All this is also happening at the time when FF is massively losing its cultural relevance and in many ways this loss of prominence creates a stronger association with the negative feelings towards XIII (and its sequels).

If FF survives and XV manages to increase the series' prominence, I suspect the XIII games will suffer in ignominy when compared with previous and succeeding FF games.

Rami continues to be one of my very favorite indie game developers around.

@tuxfool: How are we to measure a proper majority or minority when the press is only interested in one side of the debate? I've read more dismissive articles about the game over the years than I care to count, and they all cover the same ground. Very few have actually gone to the effort of taking the other side.

This isn't about the game's relative place in the series. Everyone ranks the games in their own manner, anyway. This is about there being anyone willing to write from the standpoint less popular among the press, as the most common points espoused come from a journalism echo chamber.

I don't really see how Goat Simulator factors in. That's just a throwaway joke in the title meant to riff on the tons of actual simulator games that most of us make fun of. That's not really a part of whatever the simulator games are. The oddly popular train/farm/truck simulator games are what is more interesting since those are striving for actual realism in recreating jobs that are commonly thought of as boring and labor-intensive. For the same reason I think Patrick's examples of Cart Life and Papers Please don't really fit into the same phenomenon since those are trying to tell a story and evoke certain empathetic feelings, instead of just accurately recreating an actual job that people do.

Though I will agree that I've read a lot of articles recently from Worth Reading and otherwise that have had an interesting premise but have been otherwise half-baked or failed to maintain coherence. A couple weeks ago there was an article comparing blockbuster games to blockbuster movies that made absolutely no sense beyond the premise. I'd say it's likely web authors spending most of their time having to pitch a story premise and not enough time to write it. Coming from a field where I could spend weeks obsessing over outlining and writing hundreds or thousands of words, there's a lot of painfully under-edited and under-researched stuff on big name websites that doesn't make a coherent argument throughout.

@hailinel: The press isn't some monolithic entity and views expressed are generally as varied as the user base behind it. I'm sure I have read some articles espousing some positivity on XIII (I can't recall any however), but as I stated before the loss of prominence and general negativity have spurned many to attempt to reason out explanations for this loss of prominence.

There are very valid reasons why the XIII is disliked and any defense never seems like a convincing counterbalance to the negative aspects... until somebody manages to express this such that people recall these positive aspects whenever the subject of XIII appears.

@deathpooky: It sort of comes back to the fact that many good writers don't write about games. People who like games write about games. Sometimes these people are like Patrick, and have great writing skills alongside their love of video games. But for the most part, they exist in a world where the public attention span is about 36 hours, so they opt for quantity (and speed) over quality in most cases.

It's great to see the Generation 16 video get posted up there. It is a fantastic series by one of the guys on the podcast that is tied with the Bombcast for the best gaming podcast there is.

@deathpooky: As somebody trying to break in, I can tell you this: games writing barely pays at all, and when it does timeliness is of the essence. Because of this you'll see very little editorial oversight, even on major sites. It's a sad state of affairs, for sure.

I think Brendan Sinclair is looking at the smallest thing that could be claimed to be subjective as an excuse for no objectivity in news reporting.

Game reviews and opinion pieces should be subjective while also being factual. News reporting should be as objective as possible. Even Reuters recognizes that you cannot be completely objective If you were writing about a dictator, and there is proof they are killing citizens. No one expects objectivity where the reporter might give the other side the benefit of the doubt of a good reason for those killings.

Choosing to report the earnings of a company before or after the layoffs is not a big issue regarding subjectivity. Even reporting that earnings were up because of those layoffs is not entirely subjective if you have facts to back up the story. Reporting the layoffs are because they are women and the CEO hates women, even if 90% of those affected were women, is purely subjective and not factual, unless you have evidence to the fact.

To tie it to gaming: we may have one case where a game blogger might think it is a shame that you can't play as a female in co-op in AC:Unity without making claims about the developer in an op-ed; another where a writer calls the developers sexist because the protagonist in Deep Down is male in a news article about the game. I'd expect subjectivity in the former. I'd expect professionalism in the latter.

@tuxfool: Any defense that you've read, or in general? It seems odd to say that no one that likes or loves the game is incapable of defending it or extolling what they see as positive. I've read numerous defenses from forum users and blog posts, yet these arguments never appear in the press. Or are recognized by the press, for that matter.

@hailinel: Fairly sure it was in the press. But unfortunately the positives in that game are rather sparse, at best you can use the same argument as Destiny:

Deeply flawed, however I had fun with it. Inscrutable story and bad characters. Interesting gameplay loop.

at some point you just have to accept that game isn't well liked enough to warrant a strong defence.

@tuxfool: That's your opinion. Do not confuse that with objective fact.

I have recently fallen down a deep, deep euro truck simulator 2 hole and I can't get out. Every now and then I stream myself driving for hours on end listening to the most dad rockiest music out there. Thank you, nostalgie rock.

@hailinel: How can any opinion or speculative article be "Objective Fact". You can justify opinions but doesn't make it any more objective, this isn't science.

@tuxfool: By stating it in a tone and manner that paints it as factual. It's something people on the internet are far too guilty of perpetuating.

@hailinel: I'm confused as to where I'm implying fact. I'm merely speculating on potentially common sentiments that lead to less than staunch defence of XIII.

Modern Quake is much more poignant than Modern Doom.

That Destiny piece is pretty damning, and really hits the heart of my impression of it. More importantly, I'm rather happy to see that the post-release hype and reviews aren't trying to prop it up with flimsy nonsense, and most are instead opting for a "Oh well, but at least its fun," approach. Unlike what we got on FF13.

I also found the Value Judgement article to be pretty interesting. I follow games industry news a lot, though I don't buy games that often, and form a lot of opinions on the industry as a whole. But when I sometimes stop to examine why my opinion of a game is what it is, every now and then I find myself internally praising or having generally good opinions of a game without having any reason for it, and vice versa. Maybe press releases and reviews get to me more than I think.

The game violence article I found really interesting. I did a research paper on violence and video games a few years ago for an intro- english class (which I got an A- on, if you want to know), and I ended up concluding that while there is a correlation between violence and video games, the bigger issue is lazy parents that buy Call of Duty and GTA for their elementary-schoolers out of either naivety, ignorance, or just to shut them up. This article finds something I didn't even consider; violent video games attract violent people, hence the correlation. This is going to have me thinking for a while.

You don't see how Goat Simulator factors into a discussion about the very genre it's parodying? It's quite a successful game and it only exists because of the culture that the article is describing. I'd argue that its mere existence is integral to the discussion.

@hailinel: agreed, I stopped after 13-2 but I enjoyed 13 quite a bit. Maxing out every character in each class was a blast. And farming adamantoises.

In response to the Modern Doom video (Which while okay) is definitely not a good comparison

This one however is

@skippysigmatic: Goat Simulator isn't a parody of that genre. The only thing it parodies is the aesthetic - the menu and the logo, and perhaps you could consider the ugliness and the glitches as part of that aesthetic as well. The way it plays is completely different from the simulator games, and not just because it's silly and you play as a goat. It is a Tony Hawk game, multipliers, open world, environmental modifiers, and all.