A letter to Valve about Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal, and their response

About a year and a half ago after playing through the Orange Box I wrote a letter to the head honchos at Valve and they were kind enough to give me a reply, I figured I'd toss it up here as a record of my thoughts:

Gabe, aka the G-Man,

You mentioned in your commentary tracks that you read every e-mail you get, so I feel significantly more motivated to write one to you. So, let me just go into some things I did and didn't like:

Some General Pros:

• Achievements. Considering that you deliver short, tightly focused games that are meant to be beaten relatively quickly, having an extra means of tracking stats, and measuring the extent to which the player has explored the world to its fullest provides some useful feedback and encourages getting more out of the experience than a single playthrough.
• Commentary. Always fun, hearing about the evolution of the game's design is particularly interesting, and all the mistakes made.
• As always, your game design style favors novelty over grinds and experiencing unique challenges over long and painful stretches of the same old thing

Some General Cons:

• Turnaround time, a good deal of expansion packs and sequels running on the same engine as their original game have delivered more gameplay content (in terms of time) for the number of years spent in development. The schedule may have very well passed your expectations as well as ours, they're great games, but the trickled out pace is slow compared to a lot of series
• New content in each title. Your strategy appears to be taking all your cast of characters, your weapons, enemies, and NPCs, and developing them further by placing them in new environments and settings. Since HL2 in the two episodes, we've seen one variation on a zombie, the hunters, acid spitters, and no new weapons. We've gotten some great environments like the antlion caves, but largely the same cast of characters otherwise, I would typically expect a bit more from an expansion pack, the undersea monster from the teleportation mishap in HL2 has never even shown up.

Some game specific comments:

Episode Two:

• The antlion caves were gorgeous, the texturing felt a lot more real than the typical narrow corriders
• The open-ended battle at the end of the game fighting the striders is one of my favorite moments in the series, it makes practical use of a vehicle, involves some larger scale strategy and resource allocation, and feels more like you're involved in a real large-scale battle rather than a one-man skirmish
• Never been a fan of crossing radioactive waste, or sentry guns that can you for standing up, it makes movement uncomfortable and inspires a lot of quickload for taking a wrong step, much more so than typical gameplay

Portal:

• Great use of the basic game mechanic to set up puzzles, and from the fire onwards it turned from a straight-up puzzle game to an engaging story
• The vast majority of levels are basically setup and training for the game's mechanics and their consequences. For those of us who didn't have a problem figuring out Narbacular Drop for ourselves it takes a bit to get into the meat of the game. What was there was short, and extremely sweet, and feels like a great tech demo, you just wish there was more
• Sparse use of basic actors/element of gameplay: crates, buttons, turrets, those glowy ping pong balls and receptacles. All of which were used to great effect, but for future titles it seems you'll have to involve new elements to keep the gameplay fresh: deal with portals in relation to moving enemies you may have to trick or trap, possibly dealing with an enemy who has access to portals, and maybe even allowing your portal gun to have a "memory" and maintain more than one set of portals

Anyway, keep it up, and thanks for your time in reading this and in developing.

Sincerely,

Mark Newheiser

Anyway, after what looked like some brief forward in the email chain between Gabe Newell and a designer, I got this response:

Dear Mark

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. We’ll keep it all in mind as we go forward, at our usual tortuous pace.

Yours,

Marc Laidlaw

Sending out emails to major game developers is a little bit like writing a personal blog in terms of tossing feedback out into the great googlish void of the internet and hoping someone notices, but it was an encouraging moment for me, back before I was doing any serious writing related to games. Valve is apparently well-known for doing stuff like this in general, they send back custom feedback forms related to fans who mail stuff related to Team Fortress 2, and have mocked up custom comics around their content for the sole purpose of interacting with fans.

Along with Blizzard, they're a company that has an excellent reputation for taking as long as they damn well please to make a game, but ultimately turning out something amazing. And while I'm not sure if the Half-Life 2 episodes really qualify as episodic gaming anymore in any meaningful sense, they've managed to turn out a caliber of game that I'll probably be introducing my kids to many years from now as I gripe at them to check out the classics of my era.

The Philosophy and Ethics of Chrono Trigger

I ran into a book recently called Final Fantasy and Philosophy, part of a series analyzing popular works of media in the light of their philosophical underpinnings. In this title based on the Final Fantasy series of video game RPGs, they talked about the nihilism of its villains, the occasional identity crises of its heroes, how often characters ended up duped and simply used as a tool by someone else, and how players fill in the gaps for the story of a game in a way that's different from other media. But the section I found the most interesting was analyzing the ethics of Final Fantasy characters according to the views of different philosophers: Thomas Hobbes would apparently have been disgusted by the irrational altruism of some fantasy heroes, John Stuart Mill as a utilitarian would have judged them solely on the consequences of their actions, and Aristotle would have dealt out approval or disapproval based upon the purity of the motives for which they engaged in their heroic deeds.

It was interesting seeing the entertainment of my generation dissected in a fairly readable fashion by writers who were clearly fans of the games themselves. One title from a sister series I wish they had taken a

crack at is Chrono Trigger, my love affair with which is documented elsewhere, and which I've recently gotten my girlfriend addicted to through a bit of geek evangelism. So in that same spirit, I figured I'd try to do a similar analysis for Chrono Trigger. Spoilers will ensue, but if you haven't played the game at any point during the last 14 years in which it's seen release on the Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo DS, drastic measures will probably be necessary to motivate you. For the uninitiated who need a recap, you could start with the game's Wikipedia article, although I'll explain most of the important points as I go.

One of the interesting features to Chrono Trigger is the extent to which your choices have actual consequences in the story. Video games are notorious for letting you get away with anything, it's assumed that anything in the world you can interact with you're supposed to. You can typically burst into people's houses and take anything that's not nailed down (or if it is, pry it loose), and help people or ignore them as you see fit. Early on in Chrono Trigger you're put on trial for "kidnapping" a princess when she simply ran off with you, and whether or not you're declared innocent or guilty depends upon a variety of actions you might have done or not done. If you tried to sell off the princess's pendant that's a strike against you, likewise if you stole someone's lunch, and the extent to which you're honest about the mistakes you made also affects the result. It puts you in a reflexive state of mind very early on in the game, the decisions you make very well could have consequences, you're not necessarily just going to watch the story play out for itself, your actions could conceivably change the course of events.

This idea reaches its culmination in a variety of "what-if" scenarios that make up the game's endings. Your heroes are technically capable of doing what it takes to save the world at almost any point in the game's story, and the point at which you decide to do so and short-circuit the game's plot decides what ending you'll get. As a result of your meddling in time you can end up changing the family history of one of your main characters, cause humans to no longer be the dominant species on the planet, or set off a battle to the death between two of your potential protagonists.

But concerning the questions of ethics that Final Fantasy and Philosophy raised: how defensible are all of the heroes of the game in their motivations for trying to change the fate of the world? The trio of characters you start the game with, Crono, Marle, and Lucca eventually learn that the future is a wasteland with humanity virtually destroyed because of a planetary parasite named Lavos, and they decide to devote themselves to stopping that from happening. They aren't exactly fighting for their own lives, the disaster which ruins the planet occurs a thousand years after the time in which they live, they could theoretically live out their entire lives along with the next fifty generations after them before the human race is placed on the verge of extinction.

In The Last Question, Isaac Asimov makes the point that all human civilization is doomed to eventually die: unless entropy could somehow be reversed, all the usable energy in the universe will eventually be spent and humanity will die out. Humanity's lifespan is limited by the amount of available energy in the universe making the death of the human race inevitable. If Crono and company could go far enough into the future they might always find be able to find a post apocalyptic state where humanity has died out. Still, intervening in the events connected to Lavos could buy the human race millions or billions of years, at the risk of endangering the lifetimes of Crono and his friends. From a utilitarian standpoint, the trade-off is clearly worth it, but does it past the test of Hobbes' self-interested morality?

When Crono and his friends make the decision to save the future, they're fugitives from the law in their own time—Crono as a result of a false kidnapping charge, Lucca for breaking him out of prison, and Marle for abandoning her kingdom for the sake of her friends. Although they could ignore the coming crisis and simply live out their lives, they have very little to lose in terms of their connections to the present. As far as their connections to other time periods are concerned, at that point, they could either live out their lives in the past, which they already learned might prevent them from being born in the future if they alter events, or they could live in the post-apocalyptic future they're trying to prevent. In a sense, their quest to save the world is also about finding a world for themselves that they could live in. Both because they're unwilling to accept a timeline in which their world is destroyed, and because nothing else in their lives shows any promise at that point.

From the point of view of pure self-interest, their most viable way to improve their lives might be to find a point in time where their actions couldn't erase their own existences and in which they could live out their lives without interference. Much like the specter of global warming or environmental disaster centuries off in the future, it's hard to argue for why anyone would devote their lives to preventing a far off calamity at their personal expense, other than feelings of self-righteousness or a strong psychological need to know the future will be viable for much longer than you and your children's children will be around. In the end their motives probably aren't purely selfish, or purely noble, they're leaving behind one world to try to fix another.

The next character to join the group's quest is Robo, a robot abandoned in the future by his creators and originally part of a group of AIs intent on cleansing the planet of humans and making it a viable place for Lavos's spawn to breed. He turns on his fellow AIs and joins Crono and the gang on their quest, motivated initially not by abstract moral principles or even a concern for the human species, but simply out of loyalty to his friends who had helped him. Much like the others, he has few connections to the world which are even worth severing, and joining Crono and the others simply gives him something to do with his life. A life that may even be effectively immortal: at one point the party is able to drop him off in the past to help repair a forest and pick him up four hundred years later. In Robo's case, living out his life apart from the influence of Lavos' destuction of the world may not even be a possibility, at some point he might simply be forced to either live in a future in which he is one of a handful of intelligent life forms or create a different future for himself to live in.

Another character who joins the party does so largely out of loyalty to the group, a woman in pre-historic times, Ayla, helps the party recover their means for travelling through time, which gets her tribe in trouble and causes the party to help her in return. After that point she simply is along for the ride, it's not even clear she understands the full significance of the quest her friends are involved in other than her loyalty to them for their assistance.

The last pair of characters face the most complicated tangle of moral choices. Frog was cursed by the magician Magus and turned into a frog-like creature, and joins Crono at first simply for the sake of revenge and to end the war that has harmed the people of his time period. When Magus and Crono's party are hurled through time as a result of their battle, Frog stays on to seek his nemesis, and eventually comes to stay with Crono's group out of loyalty to Crono for his assistance and presumably sharing in their goal of saving the future.

The last playable character in the game is Magus, who could be seen as either a villain playing at being a hero or a hero playing at being a villain. His role is unique in that you have the option to either kill him or let him join your party. The reasons for killing him would be that he's regarded as an evil man who's responsible for a lot of misery and death: he started a war between humans and magic users, he killed Frog's best friend and turned Frog himself into an amphibian—a curse that can only be removed with Magus's death. The reasons for letting Magus live are a little more complicated. Magus was originally a prince of a kingdom in the distant past that had discovered a way to siphon off Lavos's energy and turn it into magic and other amazing abilities. He was virtually abandoned by his mother in her quest for immortality, left with only his sister and his cat for company, and after Lavos finally awoke and destroyed their civilization he was hurled into the future. Finding himself abandoned as a child in the middle ages, he sought to acquire enough power to get his revenge upon Lavos, only to be hurled back in time to his kingdom before the disaster as a result of the fight with Frog and Crono, whereupon he tried to defeat Lavos himself unsuccessfully.

Are Magus's actions defensible from a utilitarian standpoint? Possibly, if only because his actions had the potential to cause more good than harm, even if his own motives were essentially driven by a selfish desire for revenge, and offset by his sadism and cruelty in dealing with those less powerful than himself. Whether or not Magus's crimes outweigh his potential for good is a choice that's left up to the player. Frog can either kill him and avenge his friend, or let him live, in which case Magus offers his services to the group in trying to save the world.

Unlike Crono and the others, Magus has very few human connections motivating him—when you see him as a child he's an emotionally stunted and withdrawn youth, and when you encounter him as an adult he's a detached and cynical man. As a child he only cared about his sister and his cat, as an adult he even ignores his cat when it runs up to him. However, he is willing to risk his life to protect his sister and listens to her wishes (and those of his younger self) in sparing Crono and his friends when given the chance to kill them. There's not even any evidence he forms any attachment to the group if he joins Crono's side: when Robo lists his friends that have changed him Magus isn't included in the list, and if the group saves the world alongside him, Marle asks if he plans to go search for his sister, and Magus leaves without saying a word. The only things Magus does to redeem himself is to tell the party how they can save Crono in the event that Frog chooses to kill Magus, and to offer his help to the group in rescuing Crono and defeating Lavos in the event that you spare him.

Magus approaches pure nihilism at some points in the game. In one ending he states: "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to be destroyed, I must simply laugh." But in spite of his apparent resignation to futility, he follows it up by saying "I'm coming, Lavos." Similarly, after telling Crono's friends that all who oppose Lavos meet certain doom, he chooses to join them in their quest regardless. Faced with confronting a being who represents the very source of his own power, he considers it an impossible task but chooses to try anyway.

The game gives you the option to kill him or not because either choice is understandable in a sense—after you finally hear Magus's story, you know enough about him to decide for yourself whether or not it excuses his actions and whether or not making Frog whole, achieving revenge, or having the help of a powerful wizard in saving the world is more important. The choice as presented to the player isn't even whether or not to kill him or have him join your party: it's simply whether to kill him or not. If Frog refuses to take Magus's life and abandons his quest for revenge, Frog simply walks away, and Magus soon chases after him to offer his assistance. The player has to decide whether they feel more sympathy for improving Frog's situation or Magus's, and to determine whether Magus's campaign of revenge can be forgiven, and whether the consequences of Frog achieving his revenge are worth it.

Going back to the different views of ethics, how would the famous thinkers of the past have weighed this modern fable? Plato believed that revenge should not be executed for the sake of achieving justice but to prevent offenses from recurring, which would make Lavos a fitting target for revenge but Magus an unworthy one. Aristotle similarly believed that revenge had to be exercised in moderation against appropriate targets, while Christian philosophers would say that undertaking revenge was the domain of governments and God, and best left to a higher power, whereas acting in defense of others would be acceptable. John Stuart Mill might argue that killing Magus would only be worthwhile if the good done by it outweighs the evil, and that unless you could claim that turning Frog back into a human outweighs taking a life, the sacrifice would not be worth it. And Immanuel Kant might simply argue that every evil action deserves a proportionate consequence, and that Magus ultimately deserves to die for his actions in ending the lives of others.

Ultimately however, the only opinion that matters in the game is the player's, and the game both sets up the moral challenge and allows the player to resolve it as they see fit. The player fills in a story in a few ways, making choices to affect the plot, and naming each of the game's characters, although as previously stated, with only three exceptions, the characters have an underlying identity and name behind the one you give them, your ability to make them your own is necessarily limited.

Chrono Trigger ends with a bit of self-interpretation: the initial explanation presented for your ability to travel through time is that Lavos's energy creates distortions in time that your party is able to use. At the end, the characters suggest that it may be a different phenemenon, that you may be experiencing the planet watching its life flash before its eyes after it was destroyed by Lavos, based on the fact that all the time periods you visit are a reflection on important events connected to Lavos and the fate of the planet. In the game the desire to travel through time is really just a desire to fix your mistakes and correct what went wrong, and by the end of the game you have a chance to set a number of events right and help repair the lives of each of your main characters. Crono and his friends come to face with death several times, sometimes being forced to accept it, and sometimes being able to overturn it.

Chrono Trigger is a game that's enjoyable both to play and to reflect on, it isn't simply all nuggets of philosophy to chew on or an enjoyable transient experience that shines purely in the moment, but a little of both. It's a well-executed game that manages to get a number of things right at the same time, and I'd still point to it as the best example of its particular class of game that there is.

For those who want more, this author has come up with an existentialist reading of Chrono Trigger that looks in depth at the whole plot of the game, not just the main characters and their motivations.

Long-running Movie Franchises and Comparing Game Reviews to Movies

I've written in the past about trilogies, and the different patterns their relative popularities take, often falling off with each movie. (in many cases, you could argue that if the movies didn't get worse they would have kept making more and it wouldn't just be a trilogy. Similarly if the first movie wasn't exceptionally good in the first place it wouldn't have gotten any sequels) Recently I was poking around rottentomatoes and decided to look at the patterns for long-running movie franchises.

Star Trek is a well known example, the rule of thumb is that the odd movies are terrible and the even movies are good, although the most recent two break the rule: (I'm usingrottentomatoes ratings for this. I prefer rottentomatoes to imdb because imdb is user-driven rather than critic-driven, and is wildly skewed towards newer movies, although surveying critics you still have the problem that older movies tend to have fewer reviews available, and a much bigger selection bias)

Star Trek I The Motion Picture: 50%
Star Trek II The Wrath of Kahn: 90%
Star Trek III The Search for Spock: 76%
Star Trek IV The Voyage Home: 84%
Star Trek V The Final Frontier: 21%
Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country: 81%
Star Trek VII Generations: 48%
Star Trek VIII First Contact: 92%
Star Trek IX Insurrection: 54%
Star Trek X Nemesis: 36%
Star Trek XI (2009): 95%

By contrast, the Harry Potter movies have all done decently well critically without falling off, and the strengths of the movies seem to compare to those of the books:

Harry Potter 1: The Sorceror's Stone: 78%

Harry Potter 2: The Chamber of Secrets: 82%

Harry Potter 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban: 89%
Harry Potter 4: The Goblet of Fire: 88%
Harry Potter 5: The Order of the Phoenix: 77%

Harry Potter 6: The Half-Blood Prince: 83%

In contrast, the Bond movies:

Bond 1: Dr. No: [Sean Connery] 98%

Bond 2: From Russia with Love: 96%

Bond 3: Goldfinger: 96%

Bond 4: Thunderball: 91%

Bond 5: You Only Live Twice: 70%

Bond 6: On Her Majesty's Secret Service: [George Lazenby] 81%

Bond 7: Diamonds are Forever: [Sean Connery] 67%

Bond 8: Live and Let Die: [Roger Moore] 64%

Bond 9: The Man With the Golden Gun: 50%

Bond 10: The Spy Who Loved Me: 78%

Bond 11: Moonraker: 64%

Bond 12: For Your Eyes Only: 71%

Bond 13: Octopussy: 47%

Bond 14: A View to a Kill: 39%

Bond 15: The Living Daylights: [Timothy Dalton] 73%

Bond 16: License to Kill: 73%

Bond 17: Goldeneye: [Pierce Brosnan] 80%

Bond 18: Tomorrow Never Dies: 56%

Bond 19: The World is Not Enough 52%

Bond 20: Die Another Day: 59%

Bond 21: Casino Royale: [Daniel Craig] 94%

Bond 22: Quantum of Solace: 64%

And just for good measure, a marathon video game series (it's worth noting that these stats are from meta-critic, which uses a weighted average of reviews rather than simply the percentage that are positive):

FFI & II: (PS1) 79%, (GBA) 79%

FFII: (PSP) 63%

FFIII: (DS) 77%

FFIV: (DS), 85% (GBA) 85%

FFV: (GBA) 83%

FFVI: (GBA) 92%

FFVII: (PS1) 92%

FFVIII: (PS1) 90%

FFIX: (PS1) 94%

FFX: (PS2) 92%

FFX-2: (PS2) 85%

FFXI: (X360) 66%, (PS2) 85%

FFXII: (PS2) 92%

Part of the problem with game reviews is that they seem to be clustered in a much tighter space than movie reviews. Final Fantasy VI, VII, X and XII are very different games and are probably not even preferred by the same people but they all received identical scores. I've also heard X-2 particularly reviled by fans of the series, but it's hard to gauge what an 85% means for games.

Or for another franchise:

Secret of Monkey Island (remake): (PC) 85%, (X360) 87%

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: N/A

Curse of Monkey Island: (PC) 89%

Escape from Monkey Island: (PC) 86%

Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: (PC) 79%, (Wii) 79%

In the Guinness book mentioned below, I saw an interview with the creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, saying he liked Curse of Monkey Island but wasn't a big fan of Escape, but you wouldn't know the difference from looking at their scores.

And one final comparison:

Zelda I: (GBA) 84%

Zelda II, The Adventure of Link: (GBA) 73%

Zelda: Link to the Past: (GBA) 95%

Zelda: Ocarina of Time: (GC) 91%, (N64)99%

Zelda: Majora's Mask: (N64) 95%

Zelda: Four Swords: (GC) 86%

Zelda: Minish Cap: (GBA) 89%

Zelda: Wind Waker: (GC) 96%

Zelda: Twilight Princess: (Wii) 95%, (GC) 96%

Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: (DS) 90%

This list makes marginally more sense, since Zelda II is kind of reviled as the oddball cousin of the series, but it still has a score that would be pretty good for a movie. So the question is, why are game scores more concentrated? You could argue that the quality of a movie is strongly related to how good its story and acting are, factors which are very hard to get right and get progressively trickier the longer a franchise runs. Games on the other hand are often judged by gameplay which could be comparatively easier to optimize and perfect, you could certainly make the case that in the world of games there are more people who know how to design a fun game to play than tell a good story.

But it still seems like scores for games are weighted higher. From the entire history of film, 59 movies have a metacritic score of 90 or above, 37 from the last 9 years. 85 PC games claim the same honor, 65 from the last 9 years. There are 5 DS games over 90, 60 Xbox360 games, 32 Xbox Games 12 PS3 games, 63 PS2 games, 29 PS1 games, 8 Wii Games, 14 GBA games, 26 GameCube Games, 17 N64 games, with no data on earlier consoles. Considering that there's probably some overlap, you're still looking at a list of 351 must-play games, which would take a lot longer than the aforementioned 59 top-rated movies.

To try to get a sense for how large the world of movies and games is, IMDB lists 700k movies, GameFAQs has 17788 PC games, 2891 DS games, 1559 Xbox360 games, 1259 xbox games, 831 PS3 games, 4723 PS2 games, 4397 Playstation games, 1849 Wii Games, 1756 GBA games, 804 gamecube games, 400 N64 games. So your total game library for those consoles is something like 38,257 games. Metacritic for comparison has 11805 games and 6339 films. So that gives you something like .008% of all movies are must watch and .9% of all games if you consider them out of the total pool, and out of metacritic's pool there's roughly 3% must-play games and 1% must-watch movies.

IMDB has a very different methodology for movies since their ratings are user rather than critic-driven, 3 movies have a 9.0 or above, 250 have an 8.0 or above, but unfortunately it's difficult to do an apples to apples comparison for how they rate games since the site isn't primarily designed around both.

Out of the 11805 games on metacritic, 2549 do not have sufficient reviews for a ranking, 125 have a 30 or below, 436 have a 40 or below, 1136 have a 50 or below, 2446 have a 60 or below, 4688 have a 70 or below, 7250 have an 80 or below, 8914 have an 90 or below, and of course, 9256 have a 100 or below.

For the 6339 movies on metacritic, 366 do not have sufficient views for a ranking, 483 have a 30 or below, 1162 have a 40 or below, 2052 have a 50 or below, 3176 have a 60 or below, 4431 have a 70 or below, 5420 have an 80 or below, 5878 have a 90 or below, and 5973 have a 100 or below.

To look at this another way:

Games:

N/A: 21%

0-30: 1%

30-40: 3%

40-50: 6%

50-60: 11%

60-70: 19%

70-80: 22%

80-90: 14%

90-100: 3%

Movies:

N/A: 6%

0-30: 8%

30-40: 11%

40-50: 14%

50-60: 18%

60-70: 20%

70-80: 16%

80-90: 7%

90-100: 1%

Metacritic sets its bars for overall positive at 60 for movies, 75 for games, which seems to be the midpoints of both distributions. I'm struck by a few oddities: it seems like games are always getting better on a strictly objective track, they're getting more content, better production values, and presumably game designers are getting more skilled--while storytelling in movies doesn't change at nearly as fast of a pace. Do games have less granularity for review scores because we're still seeing the first generation of a lot of technologies and reviewers aren't qualified to distinguish between similar efforts yet? A game is also a very specialized experience, a movie may be intended for almost anyone to watch and passively experience, whereas someone who is not any good at a first-person shooter will get next to no enjoyment out of it. Games tend to be reviewed by their hard-core fans in a particular genre, and reviews are written to inform fans of that genre, it may be that games don't face a wider swath of scathing reviews simply because it's already assumed the market is specialized towards the people who want to play that particular type of game.

And of course the most obvious criticism is that gaming journalism is extremely dependent upon gaming advertisers compared to critics in other media who have other sources of support, with examples cited of game reviewers being fired after trashing a game from a big sponsor. And the gaming press needs to keep their readers interested to stay afloat, and good news about upcoming hype for games always sounds better than bad.

This isn't purely academic, I myself write reviews for adventureclassicgaming, on a discrete 1-5 star basis. I consciously seek out games I'm more likely to enjoy playing and reviewing, and the scores I give out have to be weighted to the scores I've given in the past, and the expectations of the industry of a whole. We may just be at a point where a four/five star game means an excellent effort that people will enjoy rather than an absolute timeless masterpiece everyone must play.

The Guiness Book of World Records on Adventure Games

I stopped into a Barnes and Noble today and spotted a copy of "The Guinness Book of World Records, Gamer's Edition 2009". It's a fairly silly concept, the records seem to be determined by a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one. They're not based around the sort of questions you would naturally ask like "What's the best-selling PC game of all time?" They invent categories to fit their content rather than content to fit their categories, like when they have a record for the game with the largest number of recorded dialogue segments when discussing The Longest Journey. It feels more like a book of game-related trivia disguised as earth-shattering records than anything else, and more done arm-in-arm with game creators as a promotional outlet than for the sake of genuine research. But such is gaming journalism.

They had an interview with Al Lowe about Leisure Suit Larry that I appreciated, Al had been nice enough to chat with me in the past about some of the things I'd written about adventure games out of the blue, and I appreciated that they let him get a dig in at the current "interpretations" of Leisure Suit Larry that he's unfortunately uninvolved with. One thing that struck me as particularly interesting was that they labelled the whole genre as "Point 'n' Click Adventure Games". Again, I write about adventure games myself, the name unfortunately shares some overlap with games like Zelda that are thought of as "adventures" in the exploration/puzzle-solving sense. I prefer to define adventure games by their gameplay mechanics, saying that they're chiefly concerned with solving related abstract puzzles connected by a story, whereas its closest cousins in the world of genres put the focus chiefly on action or on solving self-contained puzzles for their own sake.

Adventure Games are almost certainly best known for their days in point and click, but the chapter in the Guinness book talked about everything from parser games to games on the Wii and the DS. The basis of an adventure game obviously isn't the point and click interaction, although that's been a huge part of a lot of games on the PC, it's about puzzle-solving. I suppose there's really no completely self-evident term to describe it since "puzzle games" like Tetris are all about real-time dexterity rather than abstract puzzles, but it's odd to see the community described according to terms they don't normally use themselves.

Storytelling in Games, and a comment on notability

I just got another article published on strange horizons discussing storytelling in games, which brings my body of work on game theory topics to five major pieces so far, as seen in the sidebar. I've written about four areas which share little overlap, the uses of story, music, and puzzles that are unique to games, and issues related to the perceived fairness or balance of multiplayer games. 

I've fleshed out adventure games and abstract puzzles the most, writing two articles talking about the use of interfaces in that genre and the different forms that puzzles take. When writing I spend a lot of time defining what I see as the essential concepts then building from there, which is why writing two article in a specific area such as puzzles has reaped greater rewards than just laying out the groundwork.

Some of my inspiration for writing in this area has been reading some of what's been written about games already in the books First Person, Second Person, Third Person by the MIT Press. First Person was primarily academic criticism and commentary on games, Second Person had a lot more input from game designers on how they made their games and some interesting projects, and Third Person is about the potential and techniques used for long-running stories.

And on a side note, there are roughly 6,706,993,152 living human beings on the planet, 369,285 of whom have passed Wikipedia's standards for notability and earned their own article, which means that roughly one in every eighteen thousand people are "notable", the top .006% of humanity. Assuming you could resist the urge to hover over the stream of facts and misinformation flowing about you, it would be nice to make it in that number.

Writing about gaming, and fairness

So far I've written four major pieces about the underlying theory behind video games, with two more hopefully on the path to publication. I've written two concerning adventure games, discussing them in terms of interfaces and puzzle-solving, I wrote one piece concerning game music and its potential in adapting to gameplay, and most recently I had a piece published talking about issues of fairness and balance in multiplayer games. My future writings relate to storytelling in games among other things, but I'll talk more about that when I get there.

My scope in talking about these things has gradually broadened, I started out just trying to describe a particular genre of game I was familiar with and delve into its underlying concepts and pitfalls, and I've gradually broadened my scope to include other genres of video games, multiplayer games, and eventually came to talk about other types of games aside from just the electronic variety.

Sometimes my writing will be based upon a sudden insight in understanding a particular area, or the fruits of researching a topic and considering all of its aspects, but this most recent essay on fairness is borne of frustration. My own frustration in dealing with unbalanced or skewed gameplay, and my complete dissatisfaction with some of the other pieces I've seen written about this issue, which were largely self-congratulatory and considered the purpose of gaming to be winning at all costs, which I think is missing the point. And rather than vent my grievances through outward displays of emotion or retreat by escaping from my preferred mode of escapism, I chose to channel my angst into marketable prose.

If you've never had the pleasure of dealing with an unbalanced gameplay experience or endured the gloating of uncharitable players, I'd encourage you to hang out in an online game for a while and further your understanding of man's true nature. And for those of you who can relate to feeling like you haven't been dealt a fair hand, my basic goal was to discuss and dissect the issues surrounding fairness in gaming without falling into the trap of showing the arrogance of a winner or the axe-grinding of a loser. And to do that you have to sit back and think about what would be fair to everyone, no matter where they're coming from. It's probably the most widely applicable topic out of all the ones I've covered, I think the feedback on this piece could be the most interesting yet.

Every time I sit down to talk about games and analyze a particular area, I feel the urge to follow up on my tangents and extend the conversation further. A lot of these issues are connected, and just talking about how people relate to multiplayer games has me think of a number of other social and psychological factors that relate to games. Having spent so much time in "research" in this area, I'm glad that I still feel like I have plenty of things to say.

On doing reviews, and the philosophy of taste

I've been writing reviews for an adventure gaming site for a while now, and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how I think they ought to work. This post was inspired by my own experience in trying to write reviews, and a particularly pretentious review I read recently. (in case you're curious, the main reason I wanted to read the review was to learn how well the movie worked as an adaptation and a movie in its own right, and since the bulk of his commentary was expressing his dislike for the original story, I didn't find it informative to someone with my interests)

First of all, I'd just like to say that I hate reviews that feel like their main point is to show off, and prove that "they get it" while no one else does. This can be done by heaping praise on a movie or game that no one else seems to get, or scoffing at a popular work as being shallow and enjoyed by less cultured minds. I want to read a review to find out if I'd like something and what makes it stand out. I don't subscribe to the idea that there is an inherently "good" notion of taste in terms of what people ought to like, and that reviewers and high culture are meant to guide people towards the better things in life. People ought to enjoy what they find enjoyable, not what someone else tells them they ought to like.

In games and movies there's frequently a gulf between what is critically acclaimed and what is popular. There are a couple possible reasons for this: the people who write reviews could have different tastes from the general public and be looking down on what's popular, or the people who write reviews could be better informed than the general public as to what's out there, and often end up preferring titles that didn't get multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns supporting them to make them successful. If someone were to ask me why my tastes often range outside the mainstream, I'd tend to prefer the latter explanation. I'd like to think I'm capable of enjoying the latest blockbuster as much as anyone else, but I might be aware of more obscure titles that didn't get as much attention that I might prefer. Of course, it might also be true that my tastes are slightly off from the general public's to begin with: there's a component of ego involved both in having different preferences from the masses and being better informed, to the point where some people may claim to like something until it gets popular and no longer confers upon them the special status of liking something obscure.

In an ideal world where I was capable of putting ego aside, my own tastes and reviews would reflect as accurately as possible how inherently enjoyable something is, regardless of popularity. And when exposing anyone else to the things that I like, I wouldn't do so by criticizing the things they've found that they like, but by suggesting that there might be some other stuff out there that they're missing out on. Perhaps the most important thing I want to emphasize is that I don't have high hopes of changing people's innate preferences: if someone doesn't like adventure games, I doubt I can convince them to like it in the space of a conversation or review. Taste is certainly adaptive, in many cases the more you get exposed to something the more you learn to appreciate it, particularly in games where being unfamiliar with the basic concepts can make a game frustrating and awkward to play. But I don't want to force my own set of preferences onto other people. The best I can do is describe how well a movie, game, or other piece of art does what it was intended to do: I may not be the world's biggest fan of romantic comedies but I can recognize when one is done well, even if I may cherish more secret glee at seeing a psychological mind-bending flick. To a certain extent any reviewer is tied to their own tastes and preferences, but a particularly bad reviewer is one who is incapable of appreciating something which other people might legitimately enjoy. And my ultimate goal as a reviewer is to answer that basic question: "Would you enjoy this?" by describing my own experience with it, and trying to recognize what it does well in areas that other people might enjoy.

Movie and game reviews could be measured with a two-dimensional metric, a score of how much enjoyment you would get out of it dependent upon your personal preferences in taste and genre. The reality of course that reviews usually get boiled down to a single metric, a star rating, and even these are frequently getting summed up in a meta-metric like Rottentomatoes or Metacritic, which describes what percentage of critics liked something or what the average score is that it's getting. This is subject to a few limitations, a few publications may have very strict standards and hardly ever give out five star reviews, some publications may grade-inflate, the metric may weight popular blogs alongside serious publications, and it may lead to the unfortunate phenomenon that the body of a review, which provides the most detailed information about how enjoyable it might be, would mostly go unread. It's almost an attempt to replace analysis with raw data; rather than relying on a single expert who says whether something is likable, you survey a sufficient mass of experts to see how likable it is on the whole--such sites often even put a summary of what their users thought of something alongside the critics. Works of art and enduring quality can now be evaluated on the basis of how they're received rather than what any one person says, although the jury is still out on if it's better for a movie to be enthusiastically loved by a few or simply enjoyed by everyone. The popularity of review aggregation could diminish the role that experts play and the influence they individually wield, but I still think reviewers serve a purpose in being more readable than the average forum post online, less prone to a selection bias where people only bother to review things they like, and hopefully being a better informed source.

The last point I want to make is in regard to taste is a factor that complicates our ability to know what we like. People often get confused as to what they actually enjoy as opposed to what they think they enjoy, or worse yet what they think they should enjoy. According to Malcom Gladwell's Blink, if you give samples of various jams to people and ask them to select the best ones, the ones they pick will generally correspond to what experts say are the best. But if you ask them to select the ones they think are the best and explain why, they'll get it wrong. People are fine at understanding what they like, until you ask them to explain it, in which case they're likely to get it wrong unless they've trained themselves in understanding their own reactions. A lot of times our internal models of what we think we like bear little resemblance to our own actual reactions, and we can convince ourselves we had a different experience than we did based upon what we thought should have happened. You can have situations where someone enjoys something at the time but underrates their experience later on and declines to try again. Add this on top of the fact that someone's enjoyment of something like a movie may be influenced by a number of factors that have nothing to do with the work itself, such as who they saw it with, and reviewing anything becomes even more subjective.

Having said all that, in describing what makes something enjoyable I'm not necessarily referring just to the immediate visceral experience you get from something, my own taste lies to the intellectual as well as the immediate. I would certainly rank highly works that are particularly original, leave you with something meaningful, or make you think on top of the emotions you directly experience, even though I recognize that that isn't what everyone is looking for. Reviewing and evaluating art is a complicated process that's necessary because getting into a book, movie, or game requires a lot of investment before you discover whether it was worth it for you. It's a tricky task, and frequently very subjective, but I still intend to try.