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Partly in honor of CorporateAmericaDay, A.K.A. Super Bowl Sunday, I wanted to take a break from my super serious memoir series to talk about a topic near and dear to all of our hearts.

There's a reason you and I love to play video games. It's the same reason we love watching action movies and reading the newspaper and listening to talk radio. It's the true reason for why we watch professional sports, including the Super Bowl.

I'm talking about advertising.

On the rare occasion I'm not being bombarded with logos, slogans, jingles and billboard ads—or basically any moment when I realize it's been longer than two minutes since I've purchased something from an online retailer, big box store, franchise restaurant chain or international beverage company—I just get depressed. I panic. I get this dreadful feeling like my life has no purpose, that I have no purpose. Then I'll check my computer or I'll turn on the radio. Or I'll look up at the frighteningly calm blue sky and—to my relief—see a sponsored blimp flying by, and I'll remember my place in this world as some mega corporation's valued consumer.

I had one of these life-saving moments yesterday while playing Alan Wake on the Xbox 360 [pick yours up today!]. My character Alan had woken up in some kind of therapy lodge for troubled artists (crazy individuals who create things for life-fulfilling purposes). Out of the blue this nice rustic lodge started turning into something out of a Stephen King novel [available from Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.]. Poltergeist objects started chasing me through the halls, and this dark howling presence was taking over. The orchestral score was swirling at high crescendo as my character fled into a small room with a suspended television set. Curious, I turned on the television. And this happened...

I've seen some blatant product placement in video games, but this has got to be the most bizarre example I have ever encountered. Two commercials, sixty seconds long, one for Mustang Drift and another for Verizon.

How did this happen? How much money did Verizon pay to have this commercial inserted in the middle of the game? Did Ford pay more money to have their commercial come on before the Verizon commercial?

What's even more incredible is the game gives the player a “Boob Tube” gamerscore achievement for turning on this particular television set. An achievement for watching a third-party product advertisement! I say “this particular television set” because there are several others throughout the game. Some TVs turn on automatically and show short segments of the game's paranoid character in an isolated writing study and narrating to the camera, and it's part of the psychological mystery of the game. There also are a few other TV sets the player can manually turn on, and these sets air short film clips from a fictional TV series called Night Springs, a clear parody of The Twilight Zone. They're clever little diversions that bring some humorous comic relief to a high-action thriller of a game. That's what makes this mid-game advertisement so jarring. It's unexpected and initially confusing, and then it's over. The player realizes it was just a generic advertisement. There's nothing tongue-in-cheek about it. One might say it's an out-of-game or real life advertisement, and yet it's playing on that virtual in-game TV screen!

Product placement is kind of a funny topic. It's been in film for decades, made notably famous in 1982's E.T. and the young Elliott character's predilection for Reese's Pieces candy. It's become an omnipresent trend in blockbusters ever since, but not without some backlash. There are people on the side of director Michael Bay, perhaps the king of Hollywood product placement, who argues that brand bombardment is a reflection of reality. Then there are critics more on the side of David Lynch, who describes product placement as having a putrefying effect on the filming environment.

At any rate, it should come as no surprise product placement has become an embedded practice in our precious video games medium as well. Where there's a large enough audience, there are corporate sponsors willing to pony up for a piece of the space, be it physical or virtual. Some video games are barely more than product advertisements to begin with. Anyone else remember the comic book ads for Yo! Noid on the Nintendo?

The first in-game advertisement I can remember was, oddly enough, in King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne. It was an Easter Egg trailer for the same developer Sierra OnLine's Space Quest game. Midway through the game King Graham comes upon a screen where there is a large rock with a conspicuous hole. This being a King's Quest game, the astute player will be curious and—much like an Alan Wake player switching on the TV set—type “look in hole.” A humorous diversion commences.

The first time I really remember seeing blatant third-party product placement, however, happened several years later. It occurred in the Nintendo 64 version of Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA. The racing genre has probably always been among the most prone to potential product placement, simply because players enjoy the simulative aspect of being able to drive replica cars from name-brand auto manufacturers. The use of auto brands fits pretty comfortably and inconspicuously into the virtual universe of the game. It makes a certain amount of sense (as a counter example, the Nintendo 64 also had Beetle Adventure Racing!, which was a bit more conspicuous and came out shortly after initial production of the Volkswagen New Beetle). But it wasn't the car brands in Rush 2 that I noticed. It was the collectible Mountain Dew can icons scattered around the various tracks. This was obviously some paid soda-company placement, one of many examples of Mountain Dew cashing in on the “extreme” sports and lifestyle marketing blitz that permeated so much of youth pop culture during the late 1990s.

A couple years later I played Crazy Taxi for the Sega Dreamcast. In addition to the licensed music soundtrack (a feature that was becoming more and more commonplace for CD-based games) the game featured full-on product advertising for Pizza Hut, KFC, Tower Records, FILA and Levi's. This was more noticeable than ever as the advertising wove directly into the fabric of the central game-playing experience. Whereas some in-game taxi passengers had to get to some generic destination like the church or the sports stadium, others would spout out something like, “I need to get to the Levi's store!” I remember thinking this was pretty cool at the time. Not only did it lend the game environment a more familiar-to-life quality, it was just novel seeing an actual Pizza Hut restaurant rendered with such high-resolution (at the time) detail in a virtual open environment.

Since then the practice has become quite a bit more commonplace. Splinter Cell games from Ubisoft had players interacting with virtual Sony Ericsson phones (not to mention zip-lining past giant Axe deodorant billboards, among other things). The titular character of Alan Wake uses Energizer batteries, drives a Ford automobile and has Verizon cellphone service. There are many examples to be found.

I'm not going to necessarily take some high and righteous stand against in-game advertising and its affront on the artistic integrity of the medium. Well, all right, maybe I sort of am. The thing is I don't work in the games industry. It's not really my call. It's the game developers and publishers that have to make their own decisions both about the business and the artistic integrity (or lack thereof) of their individual projects. I've had a hard time tracking down concrete numbers for the amount of revenue generated from the practice of in-game advertising, but one group previously estimated the amount to be about $370 million in 2006 and growing to $2 billion by this year. I would imagine much of the current growth of the in-game advertising market has to do with social and mobile gaming, in addition to console games.

I will say that some games have been able to make great artistic statements about consumer culture through the parody of corporate branding. I've already alluded to the Space Quest series so I might as well do it again. The third game in the old adventure game series introduced a fictional space-age fast food franchise called Monolith Burger where the player character has to stop and fulfill some quest-triggering tasks. The experience at the burger joint involves waiting in line and ordering from a huge menu of products, then sitting at a window-side booth and eating the meal. If the player eats too much the character will later have to stop and vomit before re-boarding the docked spaceship. Developer Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV makes mind-boggling use of corporate parody through fake Internet ads, fake company billboards and all kinds of parodied franchises, including fast food restaurants. I'm not sure there is anything funnier than walking into a virtual GTA IV Burger Shot joint restaurant and having the customer service kid behind the counter greet the player with … well, watch this video (profanity).

Let's face it. Grand Theft Auto games would not be what they are if they had to kowtow to demands of corporate sponsors. Financial independence means creative independence. This sort of parody has a way of holding a mirror up to society and thus exposing its foibles and absurdities. Corporate product placement in games, I would argue, has more of a numbing, normalizing effect, further acclimating the masses to the ubiquity of public relations in every facet of our daily lives.

There's an interesting niche of post-modern philosophy and rhetorical criticism called hyperreality. Hyperreality deals with the concept of the human consciousness and its hypothetical inability to distinguish reality from simulated reality. Mass media and technology play a huge role in this discussion. For example, say a child grows up in a suburban home watching television shows that portray other suburban homes of similar décor and substance. A critical-minded child might grow up to question which came first, the so-called “real-life” suburban home or the simulated suburban reality depicted through the television—sort of a chicken/egg scenario. Does the TV living room look like the real-life living room or is the real-life living room made to look like the TV living room? What exactly is imitating what? Which is the copy? What is authentic? That's probably a poor description, but hopefully it points to something worth thinking about.

Sometimes I shudder at the conditioning effect of ubiquitous trends, be it in technology, advertising—you name it. Isn't our culture saturated enough with crazy consumerist mindsets and false implanted needs for certain goods and services? Did anyone happen to notice how many outraged Wall Street occupiers went around equipped with Apple iPhones and their high-cost service plans? I don't mean to judge, but are smart phones the new entitlement (just like bubble-priced, debt-mounting houses and college tuitions during the 2000s)? It seems to me the human race has precious few battlegrounds left to fight off the perception, if not the reality, of mega-corporate dominance. Why continue to normalize this practice if we can help it? How far removed are we from the world of Network, where everything we do—whether we acknowledge it or not—is for the glory of Dow Chemical, Starbucks and NBC Universal and their subsidiaries?

Or, as David Lynch asks, "What kind of a world is this?"

Final Disclaimer: I did not spend money to play Alan Wake. I'm borrowing it from a friend. (I'm not sure if that makes me a bad person.)

Poor Boy's Complaint — a video game memoir [Vol. 3]

THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE
An interesting thing happened in our family that directly related to my dad's mid-life career as a freelance graphic designer. Sometime around 1987 my family got a home computer. Yes, a home computer. The kind of home computer that showed letters and images on a screen. The kind that emitted beeping-blooping electromagnetic sounds through built-in speakers. The kind of home computer that ran licensed computer games!

Well, sort of.

I mean, yes, it was a legitimate home computer and it played some games but … well … you see, Doctor, it wasn't just any old computer. It was … a Macintosh. An Apple Macintosh SE to be specific.


I guess you could say my dad was a man ahead of his time. He was so ahead of the times he didn't HAVE time to waste on convoluted operating systems that required the knowledge of entire secret languages just to run programs. DOS prompts? We haven't got any DOS prompts. We don't have to show you any stinking DOS prompts! No, really. It's super easy. Just use this thing called the mouse—drag it around with your hand on its cute little mouse pad and watch it correspond to your on-screen cursor. Yeah. Now move your cursor over to this “folder” and double click this button on your mouse to open this … ahem … “window.” Now just double click on the little icon thingy for whatever it is you want to run. That's it. Oh yeah, it's got a keyboard too, you know, for WRITING WORDS AND SENTENCES! Seriously, why didn't this Mac OS baby catch on with the rest of the consumer base? Okay, okay. That was obviously a trick question. It did catch on—as a bastardized version sold by a different company under a different name.

But that's neither here nor there. The point is that even when I somehow caught a break as a video game-deprived child I caught the most laughable break possible. First of all, this was a monochrome computer. In place of greens, reds, purples and blues, this monitor had gray, lighter gray, darker gray and slightly lighter or moderately darker gray. Secondly, this was a Macintosh. Companies didn't make games for the Macintosh! And when they did it was only out of sheer pity for moping people like me, sometimes months, if not years, after first releasing on the PC. Remember what I said about sloppy seconds? I mean, there were the exceptions. Prince of Persia? Classic game. Incredible game. Developed on an Apple II. You want other examples? Well, I haven't got any others off hand.

Here's my point, Doctor. Let's use an analogy. Imagine there's a kid who grows up and who just really loves professional sports. This kid learns all about collecting sports cards and—most importantly—rooting for the professional sports teams based in the nearest major city. This kid just pines and yearns for the day his nearest-major-city professional sports team has a killer season and makes it all the way to the national championship—and wins! Now, imagine this kid grows up in the greater metropolitan area of … I don't know … Seattle, Washington. What do you know? It's a city with three professional sports teams. Count 'em. You've got football, baseball and (this is still the 1990s) basketball. It could be worse, right? Those Supersonics actually won a championship, albeit before the kid was even born. The Seahawks made it to the playoffs that one time in the late 80s. The Mariners … well, they had a pretty amazing run in 1995. BEAT THE YANKEES IN FIVE GAMES OF THE FIRST ROUND OF POSTSEASON … before losing the American League pennant to Cleveland. Surely, one of those teams is bound to win a championship SOME DAY. I mean, come on, the odds! And yet, what year is this now? 2012! I'm sorry, I need to go … I've ... I've just got something caught in my eye.

* * *
Okay, maybe I got a little sidetracked. Macintosh or not, to a five-year-old kid who didn't know any better this computer was a big deal. We were talking about games right? Well, this thing had 'em. Loads of 'em. My dad, bless his heart, got hold of some floppy disks that held like 20 freeware games each! You would be amazed at the stupid things a little boy can content himself with when his experience can't comprehend anything more advanced. It was like giving a Christmas present to an infant who can't get over playing with the wrapping paper. It was like a Facebook game to a bored/retired housewife. This computer had a backgammon simulator, a Hearts card game simulator. One of the disks had a Missile Command knockoff. There was a simple turn-based strategy Daleks game where a tiny little avatar man had to avoid these advancing, randomly place Doctor Who cyborgs and get them to crash into one another. The player had a cool one-time-use force blast that disintegrated any bad guys in the player character's immediate vicinity. Or if the player was essentially stalemated, they could call upon the teleport function, which would respawn the character to any random tile on the screen—perhaps directly next to an advancing Dalek! That's what we call tension, ladies and gentleman. I remember another game involving a helicopter and clicking a button to make a skydiving stuntman try and land into a moving horse-drawn hay cart. The animation of that little stick man flailing its limbs as it fell toward the earth. Unforgettable. And the smooshing sound that resulted when the poor jumper landed on the earth—or the horse or the cart driver—so satisfying.


This was the era of fun. The era of innocence. An era when computer games and education really could go hand-in-hand. We played Math Blaster. We played Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego? Good God, my sister was a master sleuth at that game. Again, there was tension! Following a trail and apprehending the suspect, hoping to God almighty you had nabbed the right person. And if you were really good and solved like fifty cases—finally bringing to justice Ms. SanDiego herself!

But even these games, Doctor—talking about them is only like enjoying the cartoon short before the main feature. Our humble Macintosh may have served many purposes, but I will always remember it as the computer that played King's Quest. Wikipedia and other wonderful online resources will describe the King's Quest series as a seminal collection of titles in the graphic-adventure computer game genre. That wouldn't have meant anything to me back in 1987. To me, King's Quest was pure survival horror—text-based survival horror, yes, but survival horror nonetheless. I mean, here was this vulnerable Graham character wandering around a monster-infested medieval land with absolutely no means of defense (until, perhaps, you acquire the magic shield, but … never mind). Step into the wrong screen and risk being torn to shreds by a wolf, bludgeoned by an ogre, ransacked by a dwarf, enchanted by a sorcerer or kidnapped by a witch. The game had this wicked little musical cue signifying when a monster was present. It sounded like pipe organ. And it wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this would happen seemingly at random. You would just be walking around the forest, trying to get to the next screen and—BAM!—there was that music. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-duuuuuuuum! At first I literally could not watch this game. Maybe I wasn't yet able to disassociate fictional danger from real danger. When I got older and began playing the game by myself, I was a nervous wreck. I would sweat. I would have to pump myself up just to traverse from one screen to the next. Eventually my parents purchased the official game map and hint-book, and I discovered how to beat the game without having to cross any of the potential monster screens.

Then a funny thing happened. I fell in love. It probably helped that this period of Macintosh gaming corresponded to the same period of my life when I learned to read and write. King's Quest was like a high-tech fairy tale. It had a dragon's lair, a Leprechaun kingdom and a land in the clouds—all in the same 30-minute-or-less adventure. It didn't matter that I'd played through the game before, because playing through again was like re-reading a favorite storybook.

King's Quest was just the gateway drug. Then there was King's Quest II. Then I discovered Space Quest, and oh how I loved Space Quest. If my King's Quest devotion was like going to church every Sunday, then I became a bonafide Space Quest evangelist! This game was so incredible, it's about a janitor saving the universe—how could I not share it with others? My poor friend Jon. It hadn't been that much earlier that I had been the poor boy being subjected to manipulative two-player Super Mario Bros. games on other people's Nintendos. Here I was inviting my new best friend over to our house to play a text-based adventure game. The whole game! Now, there was no easy way to accomplish this sort of task. One person would get to sit up front in the comfortable office chair and control the keyboard and all of the typing—me. The other person would have to sit in the hard kitchen chair and try to watch from about five feet back. It's a miracle I ever kept Jon as a friend. I'm sure I must have gone through every nook and cranny of that game. I know myself too well. It wouldn't have been enough for me to just plow through the screens, showing my friend the basic concept of the game before going outside and tossing around a softball, or anything interactive. I would have stopped to “look at...” every description of every pixel on every screen—because that's how I played.


What am I saying, Doctor? That's how I still play games! What's wrong with me? I can barely get through a modern Grand Theft Auto game without making myself practically role-play every stupid minute of the experience. I mean, here's an example of my neurosis. Say my GTA IV Niko Bellic character watches a few programs of an in-game television show—like one of those stand-up comedy bits with Ricky Gervais. Then Niko goes out on a mission and—oops!—dies. “Oh crap!” I inwardly tell myself. I didn't save my progress before going out on that mission, meaning my Niko Bellic character just lost that in-game experience of watching that TV show. This doesn't necessarily mean I will go and rewatch that program, but I would be lying if I said it didn't bug me. I feel guilty for skipping through ten-minute cab rides. I practically have to discipline myself! Thank God the game doesn't give me the option of watching the character sleep!

Poor Boy's Complaint — a video game memoir [Vol. 2]

It's not enough just to say I never got my own Nintendo. I mean, isn't it absurd, doctor, for a child of single-digit years to covet so badly something that will cost his struggling parents—I don't know—three days' wages? That's three days of stressful, perhaps backbreaking labor that will contribute neither to the family dinner nor the property taxes, not to any pending car repairs, back-to-school clothes or—God forbid—to something for their own happiness and pleasure. We're talking $200 for a glorified toy, and that's not including sales tax! What was I thinking being so selfish? And yet—what do you know?—other kids' parents saw fit to buy Nintendos for their families! That's right, I'm in school now. I can start complaining to my mom about how the other kids at school get to do this and that. No, it's not enough just to say I never got a Nintendo, because the reality of not having something does not diminish the desire for wanting it. Quite the opposite.

I was surrounded by Nintendo everywhere I looked! My first friend from kindergarten was an only child and—let me tell you, doctor—he had a Nintendo. I mean he had everything else in the world, too, but the Nintendo! I'd played Super Mario Bros. a few times but I don't think I had any idea there were so many other freaking games until I went to his house and beheld that glorious cartridge rack. The thing must have held close to 25 games in its five-by-five arrangement, and this kid was just 5-years-old!



In 1989 my mother took me to see The Wizard. Do you remember that one, the feature-length Nintendo advertisement with the kid from The Wonder Years? The “I love the Power Glove, it's so bad” movie with the autistic kid playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on a TV screen bigger than God? Did she have a clue what kind of torture this kind of indulgence put me through?

Nintendo in the late 1980s was like asbestos in the '50s. You couldn't not breath it if you tried. After Mouse Trap I'd learned to be a bit suspicious of commercials, sure, but I was still a kid. Do you understand what it did to my brain the first time I watched a TV spot for Marble Madness, doctor? There it was again, that magical land of chutes and hazards, only this time what you saw in video was pretty much what you got. This was too much! I needed an outlet for this stuff, and so one day in Mrs. Stanley's first-grade class I wrote a one-page short story about Marble Madness. For fun! Marble Madness fan fiction, doctor.



In fact, one might have thought school was a relatively safe haven, but would you have guessed our elementary library had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine? On Monday mornings after the kooky librarian released us from the semi-circle story-time hostage zone, all of the boys would flock to the shelves to drool over the latest glitzy issue. I, of course, would content myself with some perfectly fine two-month-old edition and suckle unbothered upon the centerfold spread of, say, the entire Metroid level design. Hence I acclimated myself to what would become the pattern for the rest of my childhood and adult life, forever settling for the sloppy seconds of the greater video game culture, the flotsam and jetsam of all the seaward passengers who hopped from sinking ship to sinking ship like drivers changing freeway lanes.

Little did my innocent mind yet comprehend how fickle were the hearts and fingers of gamers. There’s a reason I have no memory of seeing Atari 2600 boxes on store shelves. That era had come and gone before I was old enough to form a coherent thought (Also, I happened to be born during the same year as—ahem—E.T.). Before I knew it the great Nintendo I never had was dead. Because in its place was something so new and so stupidly better than the Nintendo you wouldn't know why the hell you had ever even bothered to waste your time with that dumb machine's cramp-inducing rectangle of a controller in the first place. That's right. Nobody wants a Nintendo anymore, not when YOU CAN HAS … wait for it … SUPER NINTENDO? And actually, doctor, I did get a chance to play one of these bad boys hot off the factory line when my only-child friend from school got to rent one—from the grocery store of all places (I told you this stuff was inescapable). Would you believe it? And it really was like a million times cooler than the old Nintendo. I think I experienced some legitimate vertigo playing the third level of Contra III, our two characters blasting away at alien invaders above that magnificent 16-bit industrial landscape. What a trip! It seemed the sky was the limit.

BUT AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE...

Let me pause here, however, and return to the subject of my household environment. In case you hadn't already gotten the impression, I grew up in a good Christian home. I'd say the most pagan thing we ever practiced as a family was to erect and decorate a Douglas fir tree in our living room each December to celebrate the birth of our savior. And we did dress up in costumes on October 31, but it wasn't for Halloween—no, no, no—and it certainly wasn't for trick-or-treating! My mom dressed me up like a cowboy so I could go to church and celebrate something totally different called the Autumn Festival or, better yet, All Saints Day!

Our household had its own version of the Hays production code—my dad. He was usually the one to either red-light or green-light whatever my sister and I watched on TV, but also the music we listened to and the types of items we got to take home from Toys-R-Us. In other words, whatever was going to be absorbed into our impressionable young brains better not have too much sex, violence or foul language. Understandable. But it also better not glorify witchcraft, magic or any business remotely demonic—meaning ghosts, goblins, gargoyles and I'm sure plenty of other things beginning with the letter G. Let's just say I never watched Beetlejuice as a kid—the cartoon or the film. We never had cable, so that excluded any of the smut on MTV. But we also weren't supposed to watch Scooby Doo because it had monsters? Well, dad, my sister and I watched Scooby Doo regardless (when you weren’t home), and let me tell you, none of the ghosts and monsters were ever actually ghosts or monsters. They were crooked masked adults trying to scare away those meddling kids! I mean, maybe the monster issue was just my dad’s excuse because he really didn't want to tell us what the crackpot sleuths were obviously smoking inside the Mystery Machine, or the real reason why Velma got off on getting into dangerous scrapes all the time with the Fred and Daphne (Hint: It wasn’t Fred). I’m sure my dad would have locked away the television if we'd grown up in the era of Harry Potter.

That’s all well and good, mom and dad. You’re the boss(es). But my first experience with your charismatic church was pretty traumatizing in its own right. I remember when I was five years old being dragged against my will to a series of evening family events at dad’s new church where the people put on some kind of good-versus-evil, God-versus-Satan puppet show. All I remember were these periodic noise contests where members of the audience, sometimes the boys and sometimes the girls, were supposed to scream at the top of their lungs in order to thwart evil and—ultimately—send puppet Satan back into the Lake of Fire. I was not a scream-in-public kind of kid, barely old enough to understand what was going on. That crap scared the hell out of me, which I suppose was the point to a certain extent. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as I remember it.

I know I didn’t have it as bad as that kid James who lived in the tiny house right off the main bus route to school and whose sweetheart of a dad (who looked liked he was 90) waved like a parade Santa Claus to every God-forsaken driver speeding by. I’m pretty sure James had to wear bifocals in kindergarten, the poor kid. Unfortunately, it didn’t win him any makeup points coming to school in a neon orange Jesus hat (well before it was the ironic thing to do). Anyway, those nasty kids at school sure made fun of him for being the resident Bible Boy. One time in fifth grade our teacher had to stop reading to us a series of young-adult fiction books called the Witch Sister series because some undisclosed student’s religious parent complained to the school about it. Those post-recess reading sessions were like crack to us! Poor, poor James. The intimidation he withstood! Everyone knew who was to blame. I mean, who else’s parents lit up a Christmas-lights cross on the front of their house 365 days a year? Lord knows I always tried to be nice to James, but this kid was defenseless. Talk about having no sense of humor—I can still picture that blank stare! I’d love to read his memoir. Do these parents ever have any clue as to the backfiring effects of their insane interventionism? Anyway, I don’t think James played any Nintendo growing up either.

I guess you can't blame parents for trying. My dad went through a lot of different jobs growing up. He swept chimneys. He sold Amway products. He sold spas and stoves. He also did some freelance ad-design for local businesses, sometimes getting paid in traded goods and services (such as about 200 free skating sessions at the roller rink, one time). Around 1990 he got ahold of a lead to do some graphic layout for this startup company called Wizards of the Coast, basically a bunch of geeks who worked out of their basement—actually, maybe you've heard of them. I guess my dad went to one of those geek's house where they had just tons of Dungeons and Dragons type of memorabilia (surprise, surprise) and they dressed all gothy. “Some pretty dark stuff,” according to my dad. Well, dad did a little ad work for them, some kind of graphic with a dragon and a globe. Turns out the wizards liked it and wanted him to do some more work—although, here's the catch. They were a pretty new company so they kind of didn't have much actual money yet, and so maybe he would have to work for something else, like some company shares? I can only imagine what must have run through my dad's head. Could anyone in 1990 really have imagined what unbelievable global market share these passionate nerds would manage to dominate over the next 10 years and beyond. Who knew there was such profit to be had in spells and sorcery? Wizards of the Coast company shares, huh? Hmm. Sounds pretty good, but ... you know what, guys? I'm afraid I'm gonna have to pass. I've got a request for some ad work from the guy who runs that hotdog stand over there. He's offered to pay me in bratwursts. So … maybe some other time.

Poor Boy's Complaint — a video game memoir [Vol. 1]

THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE COMMERCIAL I'VE SEEN

So imbedded in my consciousness were those jaw-dropping images from the television commercial that when I secretly heard the news of how my older sister—and I, by extension—was to receive an honest-to-God Mouse Trap game for her eighth birthday, I literally lay awake at night in anticipation. My imagination gave way to our soon-to-be-shared adventures of being transported to that insane alternate reality, where boulder-sized marbles chased us down slippery red chutes and giant cages fell down to entrap us. It wasn't so far-fetched of an assumption, was it? I'd been to those McDonald's playgrounds and slid down their yellow plastic slides four times my toddler height. And yet when the birthday party came and my eyes actually beheld that medium-size cardboard box, I think my skepticism immediately set in. (Can we really call it skepticism? I suppose not. Skepticism is the inheritance I received as a result of that tragic episode, the unshakeable fetter I drag locked around my ankle to this very day—skepticism the bitter outcome of that disappointment and that which has never allowed me to embrace high hopes for anything truly spectacular in my life ever again!) It was simply a matter of drawing from my limited knowledge and perceptions of space and dimensions that caused me to mentally puzzle over how such a tiny box could physically contain the necessary components to the set piece I imagined from watching that dazzling commercial.



Well, doctor, you can bet my sister tore open that box, and after studying the plastic pieces and rules sheet the two of us ended up playing what ended up being a rather crappy board game. The makeshift mouse trap might have been amusing, I suppose, had it actually functioned successfully more than one out of ten times. It had some neat little moving parts, but nothing that spawned the same level of tension and excitement that would have resulted from shrinking to the size of a game mouse and trying to actually outrun or otherwise physically participate in that nefarious contraption.



It was my first encounter with false advertising, and I had been had. I knew from then on that the world was cruel, its promises empty. But there was another realization—a proto-realization, perhaps, which was this: The fantastical representations achieved through video special effects could be infinitely more fascinating than the world of reality. In other words, give me video or give me death!

THANK YOU, SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?

I can't say for certain what was the first video game I ever played. Maybe it was the Atari 2600 Frogger, or the arcade Pac-Man. I know that—miracle of miracles!—my parents actually had a four-player PONG system they would alternately conjure forth for our familial pleasure and whisk away to some dark nether place known as “storage” once it had served its purpose.

I think it's safe to assume, however, that upon laying my eyes for the first time on Nintendo's magical Mushroom Kingdom, I was obsessed with video games for life. Oh, Mario! Luigi! You ridiculous little men with your incessant running and superhuman jumping! Your Alice-in-Wonderland mushrooms and your totally non-hippy flower power! Secret plumbing passageways and warp zones galore. Your magnificent leaps over hellish pits of fire. And that music! No one who listened to those siren songs would ever be able to purge them from memory.

At some point during those waning years I remember going to other people's houses where these machines called Nintendos took their places at the right hand of television sets. Why these Nintendos were not constantly in use by their owners, I could not fathom. In fact, most people who kept these machines seemed extraordinarily stingy with them. I think my uncle had one. Was I ever offered the chance to play? No. There was even a Nintendo at my in-house day care (Curses, that place was terrifying, what with the caretaker's son constantly threatening to piss on me for no apparent reason, and the overweight caretaker in her commanding baritone threatening to take away my treats for the day for any potential bad behavior—except that I never received any treats to speak of regardless!). The caretaker's husband, who looked like a mean version of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, would on random days be at home, and on these days he would sometimes be playing what I later came to learn was The Legend of Zelda. I was supposed to be taking a nap in the living room, but how could I with that epic video journey being played on the television screen a mere ten feet away? At any rate, I never played that Nintendo either.

Was I too young to be entrusted with such things? Was I supposed to ask someone? Heavens, no! I was raised to be the politest, most submissive little boy imaginable. And was I polite! You couldn't put a piece of mud in my tiny little hand without me giving you a deserved “Thank you” in return. I couldn't ask you to desist from punching me in the face without including a token “please, sir.” I remember one day after my parents had hosted a large church party, my dad pulled me aside behind the house and told me he had something to say to me. Good lord in heaven, what had I done? “I just wanted you to know how proud I was of you today,” he told me. “All of your 'pleases,' and 'thank yous,' and your 'you're welcomes.'” Boy was I proud! Is that the kind of boy who goes to other people's living rooms asking if he can play their Nintendo? I think not!

The first time I was offered the chance to play was at the house of my parents' friends from church (hell, all of their friends were from church!). These people were awesome. There I sat with the controller in my little hands. World 1-1. Okay. This black pad moves me around. There's one of those little angry Goomba dudes. I've seen other people do this before a hundred times. Push this button to jump and … what? I died? Within the first five seconds? How humiliating! But wait. I get to try again? I think by the end of that night my sister and I learned how to get through those first few levels pretty well. There was always that nagging decision to be made regarding whether to skip the bulk of that first level altogether by going down that second or third pipe or to stay above ground and try to collect that hidden 1-up mushroom before the first bottomless pit.



Remember, these people were cool, and they left me alone to play, even if I completely sucked. And I did. They were adults who understood they could play Nintendo to their heart's content just as soon as we left for the evening. They were not the spoiled, adolescent assholes who let you go into their bedroom (seriously, what kid was so lucky to be allowed to have their own Nintendo in their bedroom?) to play Super Mario Bros. with them—but only on two-player. This was the biggest scam of a multiplayer mode ever invented, a trick for bratty rich boys who had Nintendos to play on the visiting poor boys who did not. Invariably, this punk kid (he doesn't deserve for me to remember his name, and I don't) and later others would say something like, “Hey, why don't you go first?” Snicker, snicker, snicker! I would launch from the starting gates of World 1-1 and—being totally out of practice since my last time playing—die at the non-hands of the first Goomba. Oh yeah, laugh it up, buddy! Laugh at the poor boy's expense. Player 2 is next, and—guess what?—this piece of shit has to plow through the whole game in one life while I get to sit and watch. And you know what? I was so starved for Nintendo since my last meal I would do it almost gladly!

Oh, father, do you realize what this punk kid is probably doing today? He's probably a coked-out corporate executive somewhere, trying to decide whether to spend his holiday bonus on a jet-ski or a 72-inch plasma TV. And what am I doing now, father, your polite little boy? I'm reminiscing with the good doctor here, maintaining a pathetic blog and wondering where it all went wrong. So thank you, father! Thank you, mother! Thank you and you're welcome!

Borderlands — Loot me plenty!

(NOTE: I started writing this post a few weeks ago and never quite finished. I was going to segue into a larger discussion about the way 3D game worlds identify the interactive elements of the environment. Then I decided against that and sort of left this post hanging to write about KOTOR. Anyway, I went back and tried to wrap this piece up and ... well, here it is.)

I've been playing a bit of split-screen Borderlands on the Xbox 360 with my wife for the past few days (make that a few weeks ago), mostly going through the first two downloadable content (DLC) add ons. We each went solo through the main game back in early 2010, although a few times I went in cooperatively with some friends over Xbox LIVE. I liked it then, and I'm still intrigued by it now—even if I'm getting anxious to move on to new horizons altogether.

The thing that really clicks with me is the game's setting—a pastiche of post-apocalyptic art direction and pop culture sensibilities but without the apocalypse. The story actually takes place in the future on a distant planet called Pandora, which some time not long ago was colonized, raped for precious minerals and then abandoned by one of several reigning mega industrial-military corporations. As to be expected, the corporations essentially treated the planet like a giant toilet, leaving behind several civilization's worth of scrap metal and derelict cities, as well as heaps of discarded high-tech firearms and, worst of all, a free-to-roam-and-pillage population of imported convict laborers now left to their own recognizance.

The player enters this fictional setting basically as a treasure hunter, stepping off a bus into a barren landscape and a run-down town without any real resources to speak of. It reminds me a little bit of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (one of the greatest films of all time), in that the players similarly find themselves trapped in a bleak purgatory just as soon as they have arrived. (I admit, this particular comparison may be a bit of a stretch. I might, however, come back to this film in the future as an exhibit for talking about the use of tension in storytelling.)



The art direction is very Mad Max (specifically, the latter two films with the bigger budgets). It's also highly stylized with bright cel-shaded graphics. By "bright" I don't necessarily mean colorful, because the landscape itself is pretty much all manner of scorched-earth browns, oranges, some reds and grays. The sky, however, is a magnificent clear baby blue, which is what really gives everything else its added character. It's that rich, bright blue that lightens not only the scenery but the mood of the entire playing experience and compliments the over-the-top violent humor within the game.

Borderlands is partly famous just for the story of how developer Gearbox Software actually went through and completely changed the game's visual style about three-fourths of the way through the development cycle, up to which point the game had been built with more of an aim toward photo-realism. The decision to scrap that previous work was so drastic and caused the art director so much personal stress that she quit the team and changed careers entirely. And yet I think most would agree it was the right decision.



The game, of course, does have its detractors, some of whom deride the game for being just plain boring. It's a position I think I can understand, because the game starts off pretty slowly and even deeper into the game the overall simplicity of the experience doesn't really change. I remember almost giving up on it myself. What propelled me to continue, however, was the visual world of Pandora itself. I guess I just find the chaotic, ramshackle architecture of Pandora more interesting than other people.

The game became more enjoyable when new and larger environments became available to explore. I've listened to the opinion of several people who talk about how the game should be played cooperatively with three other friends. That can make for a good time, for sure, but doing so is like playing the game on steroids. There's a quality to the experience that's otherwise lost, the slow and rewarding discovery of stepping into a new environment for the first time. Borderlands actually earned a spot on ign's recently-blogged-about 100 Greatest Video Game Moments, I think for a similar reason.

At several points in the game the player has to venture through various bandit encampments, usually to go assassinate some quirky bandit leader. These various fortresses, like RPG dungeons, become more elaborate as the game progresses. Charging through with friends is one way to tackle these scenarios, but going solo can be fantastic. I, for one, like to stop and listen to the desperado music. I chose to play through the game as a hunter, which makes my character proficient with sniper rifles. As I progress through the environment and waves of bandits come out charging from their confines, I like to play it cool and pick as many off from a distance as possible. Then, when the action dies down, I heed the words of Christopher Walken as Bruce Dickinson: I "explore the space." One thing Gearbox got right with Borderlands was giving the player incentive to explore. It's pretty simple. They just made the game a loot-fest.

It's interesting to look back and see how the early first-person shooters dealt with environmental interaction. In games like Doom the player would go around looking for doors, switches, keys and supplies. The supplies—meaning ammo, guns and health packs—were sprites and later three-dimensional icons scattered in particular locations throughout the levels and stages. The player character just had to walk over them to pick them up. Then some games like Duke Nukem 3D came along and started to emphasize different kinds of interactivity. Pressing a button in front of a toilet made it flush. Sink faucets spewed tap water. And pixelated strippers stripped ... sort of.

I think people eventually started to get tired of these things. Some games started changing the formula more drastically. Halo made the player hold no more than two guns at a time and its sequel did away with health packs altogether.

In general, I think first-person shooters abandoned the notion of exploration in favor of more straight-forward—think one giant corridor after another—level design. Games became more about the challenge of getting from one checkpoint to the next and overcoming specific placement of enemies or enemy spawn points in each section of the level. Don't get me wrong, for the most part I think these changes made shooters better games. Did anyone back in the 1990s ever actually finish Wolfenstein 3D or Doom 2 or even Duke Nukem 3D? Without cheat codes? Not me. After a while, looking for door keys got pretty tiresome (those games also used to give me motion sickness).

With Borderlands the loot gathering acts as a reward for exploration. And the loot isn't difficult to find. There are cash boxes, lockers, toilets, dung piles, mailboxes, trash bins and other "containers" scattered about every nook of the map that yield random contents of cash, ammo and weapons. Each one of these containers is in some way color coded green for easy recognition. It's a similar green to the little light that shines from the caps lock button on an Apple key board.

While it may not be the perfect solution, I think it gets closer to answering the question of what to do with some of these incredible open game worlds that are interesting to look at but serve little other purpose. Collecting a few virtual bucks here and there can go a long way. At the same time, the idea of loot as "reward" for the player enters the dangerous territory of the literal "Skinner Box" that I talked about in my first blog post. Push a lever. Get a candy. Push lever again. Get another candy. So who knows?

The above pictures were borrowed from www.giantbomb.com and borderlands.wikia.com.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic review - "I have a bad feeling about this."

I remember a time in my life when I relished all things Star Wars—Star Wars toys, Star Wars computer games, Star Wars Monopoly. It was a romantic period when Episodes I, II and III had yet to be made, before George Lucas himself had to finally tarnish our once gilded perceptions of his brilliant creation. It wasn’t some monumental event or epiphany that dulled my Star Wars fervor. I think I just grew up and became a more cynical—I mean, critical—person.

Anyway, I finally finished the Xbox version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and I suppose it’s time I try and write up my review. So here goes.



KOTOR is supposed to be a game about saving or conquering the galaxy. It’s supposed to be about traveling to remote planets and participating in a fantasy adventure with a ragtag band of allies. Whether or not it succeeds along these lines is sometimes up to the player and depends upon how well they are either able or willing to suspend their disbelief.

The game is also supposed to be about following a moral path and slowly crafting the story of a hero or villain based on one’s choice of available words and actions. The game I played, however, was like taking, constantly failing and constantly re-taking a fifty-hour series of multiple-choice personality tests prepared by an emotionally challenged computer programmer—or SmarterChild. It’s like playing Apples to Apples, an otherwise fantastic game, with a group of strangers who you come to find out have no sense of irony or sarcasm.

I suppose my first clue that things would be weird was early on in the game when I found my character, Roq Bandai (I’m so awesome at naming characters), agreeing to stand in as a dance audition partner for some random alien babe in a bar—er … sorry, cantina. The dialogue cut away to a ridiculously awkward animation segment, during which my character was tasked with selecting what kind of corresponding motion to make. The girl had sort of prepped me and I think warned me not to risk attempting any complex moves too early lest I trip up and make her look stupid in front of the talent agent. So I tried my best to lay down the best selection of dance options, but on my third input prompt—thinking it might just be the dazzling finale this so far tame-looking audition needed—I told my character to move in circles around my partner. It didn’t quite dazzle anybody. The girl accused me of purposely sabotaging her performance, and I guess the game did the same because it immediately let me know it had given me an undisclosed number of Dark Side points. And here I was just trying to help. Mind you, this whole encounter happened while I was supposed to be figuring out how to rescue a captive Jedi master so that we could get off the planet and resume the task of winning the war against the evil Sith empire. So I reloaded my previous saved game and I don’t remember if it took one or two more tries, but I eventually got the sequence of inputs right and moved on.



I found this same basic scenario repeated ad nauseam throughout the entire game. The game would present me with some kind of increasingly complex challenge whereby I would either fail or succeed based on my selection of dialogue options. This wouldn’t be so bad, perhaps, if the game ever gave me an understandable clue as to why I had failed or succeeded. One time I was trying to help a guy in the desert get disentangled from a series of rigged-to-explode droids by hacking into a robot and performing honest-to-God text-based math puzzles. There is absolutely nothing in the game that helps the player learn how to, out of the blue, identify complex number sequences, some of which I could not figure out. I felt like an idiot. Thanks, KOTOR.

During a side quest much later in the game I found myself acting as a lawyer for some old man who was on trial for murdering his lover. I must have gone through that entire trial about 20 times before I got the judges to find the guy innocent, which is the outcome I wanted. I’ll admit I’ve thrown my controller down in games. If I die for the umpteenth time on some blasted Super Mario World castle level, I might get angry. But I don’t think I’ve ever gotten genuinely pissed off at a game due to frustrating dialogue navigation.

Unfortunately, the game’s combat proved just as unintuitive. I wanted to understand the game’s mechanics. I really did. I read the manual and tried to wrap my head around its interconnected systems of skills, attributes, saving throws and the almighty random-number generation. In my research I came to discover that just about everything in the game—every blaster fire, every lightsaber swing and every force-manipulated lightning bolt—was determined by a virtual 20-sided die roll. I guess it’s a Dungeons and Dragons thing, except the game doesn't actually let the player participate in any of this. I never got to see what numbers were rolled, only whether or not something landed or missed. There's sometimes too much happening on screen at once to keep track of it all.

That's because all of the combat happens in real time. As soon as someone gets hostile, it’s on. The player could theoretically just put the controller down and watch the game randomly generate attack and defense sequences for each member in the player’s party. The player might even win the battle. What the player is supposed to do, on the other hand, is micro-manage these inputs by constantly pausing and un-pausing and switching characters and monitoring everybody’s status. While the battle itself might take 20 seconds in real time, the act of pausing and managing the combat might stretch it to about a minute-and-a-half affair. It’s clunky but it works. There’s an amusing delay between input and action that I suppose is necessary for synchronizing all those turn-based actions. It can be like throwing a bunch of quarters around the carpet, one at a time, and watching your cat react in astonishment at each new phenomenon.

It’s amazing they got a tabletop simulator to look so much like an action game, but I can see why BioWare ditched the turn-based stuff altogether in their next game, Jade Empire. This game wanted to have to have its Tarisian ale and drink it too. I actually thought the combat was kind of fun until the end of the game, which was one giant dungeon crawl with fight after fight after tiresome fight, and I realized the combat had just been a welcome distraction from wandering around such a drab, boring environment.

Maybe I should segue here into my petty gripe, which is that the graphics, by today’s standards, are pretty crappy. I’d say they’ve aged about as well as Mark Hamill’s skin. Navigating through most of the game world felt about as exciting as wandering through the corridors in Wolfenstein 3D. And the Star Wars art style just didn’t make for a very aesthetically appealing world.

I imagine there are benefits to working within an established franchise universe. People like to see things that are recognizable and referential to their pop-culture interests. A Star Wars RPG does have some neat things going for it, even little things like customizing one’s lightsaber. But after a while, a stingily guarded franchise such as Star Wars can get pretty stale and repetitive pretty quickly. Just because the first Star Wars movie had a memorable scene introducing the inconic Mos Eisley cantina, why does every location in the Star Wars universe have to have an identical looking cantina and why can’t they call it something besides a cantina? It’s called the Star Wars “universe” for crying out loud! Why does it have to be stuck in 1977?

It wasn’t a completely bad experience. I mean, let’s not forget this. After waffling for the first quarter of the game regarding whether or not I wanted to be good, bad or ugly, I decided to try and walk the straight and narrow. My first playthrough as Roq Bandai—a purple lightsaber wielder—was ultimately a story of (clumsy) love and redemption, also one of a giant amnesia-related plot twist. I even got the girl. Then I replayed the last chapter as a total psychopath to get a taste of the dark side outcome. The fact that BioWare was able to craft a singular game story based on these wildly different moral choices is an interesting achievement, and I wonder very much how that approach will inform their soon-to-launch MMO endeavor. But I think I might be done with BioWare games.

(Final Recommendation: If anyone still happens to be interested in original Xbox games, I would recommend they skip KOTOR and go straight to Jade Empire, which was a stronger game set in a more interesting universe. It also takes half the time to finish, and I personally think that’s a good thing.)

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic gets two out of four stars. I don't have a graphic, so use your imagination.

Signature moments

This is interesting. The Internet lords over at ign.com have seen fit to unveil a new list of the top 100 video game moments. It's ... interesting, especially the first 40 percent of the list, which includes some relatively obscure titles—Deadly Premonition, OutRun 2, Wild ARMs, 3D Monster Maze. Not quite what I was expecting. Which is fine.

Personally, I love lists. Can't get enough of them. They can be a great instigator for conversations and voicing disagreements. I learned long ago that you can't take these things very seriously. Except when you do, and it's great. In 1998, right before I turned 16, I watched a special CBS presentation of the American Film Institute's 100 Years 100 Films. I then spent the next 10 years tracking down and watching copies of each film on the list I'd never seen. By the time time I finished, of course, I was older and better able to appreciate that the esteemed connoisuers of celluloid over at the AFI offices were neither the be-all nor the end-all of critical opinion. Even a list 100 titles long can have some crucial missing components. Still, it creates a way to celebrate whatever it is we love about whatever it is we're listing.

So the idea of talking about video game moments seems like a fitting idea. Isn't that what all these different games look to provide—memorable moments? I would like to think so. But then I actually browse through the list, and suddenly I'm not so sure.

Some of the items on the list commemorate particular game levels or locations—or seeing a particular game world for the first time and getting that wow factor. Other items mark the first time the player performs a particular game mechanic, like drifting in Ridge Racer or rocket jumping in Quake. And then there are the plot spoilers, such as ... Aerith dies. So sad.

I think part of the problem is the list makers felt compelled to represent certain seminal games, and in doing so either boiled their overall greatness into one big vague moment or simply plucked out one of many interconnected game elements—usually the wrong one.

Anyway, I don't intend to dig too deeply into the final list, only to contend one particular choice.

I'm talking about greatest moment #76, "Billie Jean" from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

"Grand Theft Auto has always been the cool video game, the one that reached out and appealed to a mass audience. But GTA has never been cooler than when you first cruised the streets of Vice City at night, tuned into Flash FM, and heard the opening bars of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. It pulled you back in time to the eighties, when Jackson was still the King of Pop and neon-pastels were still fashionable. It underscored your first experiences of the environment: the garishly-lit beach-front hotels and discos, the insistent dealers and prostitutes, and the squalor hidden down backstreets. This was Vice City, and it was yours for the taking."

"Billie Jean," is that really your musical selection? Nice attempt, ign, but no. That song is still on the damn radio. You might just as well be driving down the streets of present-day Spokane, Washington, listening to Michael Jackson. That song is so ubiquitous it doesn't transport anyone to anywhere. No, the greatest moment of that classic GTA game is cruising the streets of Vice City in a stolen Ferrari imitation car, on a clear sunny day, and ramming your vehicle at full speed into an oncoming motorcyclist. Watch the rider go flying (it's so wrong and yet it feels so right) as the in-game car stereo blasts into the chorus of this song.



The title says it all. If there's any standout track from the Vice City soundtrack that crystalizes the wild 80s, it's this signature single from mascaraed hair band Autograph. You will feel the need for speed and you will bang your head all the way to your drug-deal destination on the other side of the Starfish Island bridge. Or you'll listen to those lyrics, "For every minute I have to work, I need a minute of play," and you'll suddenly ask yourself—why the rush? This cocaine empire can wait while I go throw some hand grenades into a random busy intersection. Turn it up!


(Final Fun Fact: I admit I might be a little biased in my opinion. Go ahead and watch that video again. While you're enjoying the music, make note of the band's bass player, Randy Rand. That's my mom's cousin.)