http://www.rock106.ca

And so the last British horse crosses the finish line.

Actually I have no idea whether or not any media coverage in the UK has focused on the potentially addictive nature of video games. Though it does seem a little silly to talk about now. But if they’re going to talk about it, I’m going to talk about it because it shows my penchant for deep intellectual thought.

Let’s get that obnoxious feeling out of your mind where you’re thinking you might have heard this before. You HAVE heard this before, likely from a lot of different places and/or concerned mothers/church groups. The most comedic presentation of why video games can be so addictive comes from a popular listing called 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted from the highly intellectual and always right Cracked.com.

This is the part where I sum up the Cracked article so you can spend less time reading something less entertaining instead of more time reading something more entertaining. If you obsessively read Cracked lists, or you just don’t care about the reasons, you can probably just skip ahead to the video of the dragon on fire for the summation of why games can be addictive.

Long story short, a lot of games – especially subscription based ones – operate on the system of “push the button, get a reward”. One could argue that it doesn’t matter when the reward isn’t real but if you’ve spent money and invested time to get it that, by definition, makes the reward have inherent value. If that doesn’t sell you then Google “buy WoW gold” and see if you get any hits. And then wipe your hard drive. Visiting any of those sites is the computational equivalent of sticking a breakable glass rod where a breakable glass rod ought not be stuck. If I know anything about accounting – and I don’t – I know that thousands if not millions of dollars rifle back and forth through the selling of virtual currency of World of Warcraft alone not to mention any other number of online games where such a thing is possible.

So, push button, get reward that has value. Now make it so that the button doesn’t give a reward every time you press it. It gives the idea that not only does pressing the button a lot of times mean your chances of being rewarded are increased, it also gives you the idea of “I can’t quit now! The NEXT ONE could have the Sword of 1,000 Truths!” which sounds a lot like slot machine addiction. Or just super-optimism.

So, push button, get reward with value, but don’t get it all the time. Next step is to make the button far far away. The game starts you out with getting rewarded fast at first but progressively slower the more you play. This means that your level 1 character will get to level 2 a helluva lot faster than your level 84 character will get to level 85. Rather than pissing a player off, this just makes a player play harder when they’re just about at that next level. Like driving faster when you’re near the end of a long trip. Or a conveniently placed ramp…

Then they put that point of reward either at the end of a distant undertaking that you can’t stop doing doing midway or you don’t get rewarded OR at a point so close you can do a boatload of them rapid-fire style like eating chips. And if Mark Messier has taught me anything, it’s that I will miss my flight and forgo multimillion dollar contractual obligations for chips. Unless the chips ARE my contractual obligations… Whoa…

Oh, also, the game will punish you if you don’t keep pressing the button that sometimes rewards you. Usually in the form of degrading your achievements the same way a brown recluse spider bite will degrade YOU until you win the Oscar for best makeup.

So, push button that’s far away OR really close, get valuable reward, but not all the time. Or ELSE. Final step: make you enjoy it which is just good game design. To enjoy what you’re doing you need to have some say in what you’re doing, something to keep what you’re doing from being repetitive and some visible connection between what you’re doing and reward. And because a lot of games do this a hell of a lot better than pretty much any office job, you’re going to like your game more than your work.

The final formula becomes this:

Go push the button that’s far away without stopping before you get there OR the one that’s really close a whole bunch of times, get a valuable reward but not all the time. OR ELSE. Because this is kind of more fun than anything else you were going to do anyways.

It’s a pretty complex and involved process and based on the modifications over the years to World of Warcraft – because it’s what I know – you can see the game developers implementing more and more of these practices in their game. Possibly for fun, possibly to drain your soul or possibly because they don’t have anything more fun to do either.

I counter with we’re lazier than a hairy sloth on a hot day in July. Also, diminishing returns.

Diminishing returns is the idea that the more you have of something the less happiness you get from it. The example professor what’shisnuts gave me is that if you want an ice cream sundae more than anything right now, and you get an ice cream sundae, you will be pleased as punch at the prom (after its been spiked). Then you figure that sundae was so good, you’ll have another one. So you have another one and it’s pretty awesome. Then another and it’s still kind of awesome you guess. Then another and its alright. The pattern keeps going until not only does the sundae not make you happy but it’s making you UNhappy cause it’s making you sick and/or your stomach lining has torn and you’re leaking vanilla ice cream.

Even though today’s games are (sometimes) incredibly complex and designed to keep you from experiencing just such a stagnation of rewards, You’re still going to be going to the same game over and over again to get rewards that are, while maybe not identical, strikingly similar. If you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, you’re going to experience diminishing returns. Especially after you’re denied your Starcraft II victory by a professional gamer that averages 400 APM and kills you just by logging into the same match as you.

On its own, this would take a looooong time for you to wake up and smell the complete waste of the past 6 years of your life. But the diminished joy from in-game rewards doesn’t have to reach zero for you to get up and bugger off to play with a hoop and a stick.

Or Playstation. Whatever. The point is that with the real world requiring you to, at very least, get more money to keep playing your games, you’re going to be exposed to things that will seem more and more appealing than getting another in-game achievement. Or, like Kevin Butler up there will tell you, there are other video games that also want to be played with. Many of them using the exact same eeeevil techniques to get and sink their claws into your woefully short attention span for more than an hour. That may be just like saying “you’ll kick that blow addiction as soon as you start eyeing up the meth” but that’s only if meth is convenient. Any true gamer has his or her focus on one specific field meaning if they play Halo they won’t go anywhere near a Playstation and the Final Fantasies contained therein for fear of being ridiculed by the rest of their Combat Evolved bretheren for being gay. If they want to switch they have to put some effort into it. So the lure of other games really only gets them off of the game that they’re on because the next drug is too far away.

Really, all it takes is one person to show romantic and/or sexual interest in the gamer at that point and they’re pretty much done.

Also, this whole thing only really applies to gamers forced to live off of their own income. Child gamers especially don’t need anything this complex to get them absorbed and don’t need a whole lot more than parental intervention to make them stop either. When your child freaks out over not being able to play his or her game, the kid should probably be cut off. Or if it’s a man-boy-child, you should probably just leave him to his reward button.

Warning: Language and hilarious rage to follow

I think, if there was a point to all this, the point would be that if games are to become addictive, the gamer has to have almost nothing else rewarding going on in his life to an even greater degree than he or she would to become addicted to drugs or gambling or tanning.

Having said that I’m going to buy the fourth version of World of Warcraft tomorrow.

Hold my calls.

We all need to take a minute to talk about Portal.

It’s a mind-bendingly good game from only a few years back that only had one flaw: it wasn’t long enough. From a marketing standpoint that’s nothing but good because it results in a stampeding, slavering horde of adolescent to adult nerds that desperately need more Portal to justify their meaningless existence.

Enter Portal 2.

After escaping the deadly tests put to the protagonist by GLaDOS, the hero escapes the Aperture Science testing facility and tries to regain consciousness on the pavement outside. Luckily there’s a handy dandy robot ready to drag her right back in. Not the best of story turns, especially considering it was patched a long time after the game was released but at least they weren’t planning on cashing in by assuming there’d be a franchise or something similar. From there the hero starts doing even more slapping physics in the face while working for the same maniacal A.I. that tried to kill her in the last game for reasons that can be deemed unfathomable.

The brilliance of Portal (2) is only partly in the gameplay. The function of the portals are both hard to wrap your head around and simple at the same time (demonstrated by the explanation “speedy thing goes in speedy thing goes out”) and simple yet clever things are always entertaining at the very least. That same winning combination can also be seen in the writing of Portal’s antagonist. Simple word substitutions like “We’ve both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret” and end credit songs that make GLaDOS sound like part jilted lover and part sociopathic mad scientist. It takes effect even before the first time you hear her say “You will be baked and then there will be cake” and maintains the drape of paranoia that covers your character when you’re in a facility completely controlled by a being that had to have a morality core installed in it “after [she] flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make [her]  stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.”

Portal is an achievement in gaming and even more so an achievement in writing. It’s going to be fun to see what kind of horrible things she tells the main character in the next game.

And by fun I mean disturbing.

The official setlist for Rockband 3 hit the web just yesterday. The link’ll take you there OR I could just lay it all down here for you:

2000s:

• Amy Winehouse, “Rehab”
• At the Drive-In, “One Armed Scissor”
• Avenged Sevenfold, “The Beast & the Harlot”
• Dover, “King George”
• The Bronx, “False Alarm”
• The Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1″
• HIM (His Infernal Majesty), “Killing Loneliness”
• Hypernova, “Viva La Resistance”
• Ida Maria, “Oh My God”*
• Juanes, “Me Enamora”
• Metric, “Combat Baby”*
• Paramore, “Misery Business”*
• Phoenix, “Lasso”*
• Poni Hoax, “Antibodies”
• Pretty Girls Make Graves, “Something Bigger, Something Brighter”
• Queens of the Stone Age, “No One Knows”
• The Ravonettes, “Last Dance”
• Rilo Kiley, “Portions for Foxes”*
• Riverboat Gamblers, “Don’t Bury Me…I’m Still Not Dead”
• Slipknot, “Before I Forget”
• The Sounds, “Living in America”
• Tegan & Sara, “The Con”
• Them Crooked Vultures, “Dead End Friends”
• Tokio Hotel, “Humanoid”*
• The Vines, “Get Free”*
• The White Stripes, “The Hardest Button to Button”*

1990s:

• Faith No More, “Midlife Crisis”*
• Filter, “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
• Jane’s Addiction, “Been Caught Stealing”*
• Maná, “Oye Mi Amor”
• Marilyn Manson, “The Beautiful People”
• The Muffs, “Outer Space”
• Phish, “Llama”
• Primus, “Jerry Was a Racecar Driver”
• Rammstein, “Du Hast”
• Smash Mouth, “Walkin’ On The Sun”*
• Spacehog, “In the Meantime”
• Stone Temple Pilots, “Plush”
• Swingin’ Utters, “This Bastard’s Life”

1980s:

• Anthrax, “Caught in a Mosh”
• Big Country, “In a Big Country”
• The Cure, “Just Like Heaven”*
• Def Leppard, “Foolin’”
• Devo, “Whip It”
• Dio, “Rainbow in the Dark”
• Dire Straits, “Walk of Life”
• Echo & the Bunnymen, “The Killing Moon”
• Huey Lewis and the News, “The Power of Love”
• INXS, “Need You Tonight”*
• J. Geils Band, “Centerfold”
• Joan Jett, “I Love Rock N’ Roll”*
• Night Ranger, “Sister Christian”*
• Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train”*
• The Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”
• Roxette, “The Look”*
• The Smiths, “Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
• Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
• Whitesnake, “Here I Go Again”*

1970s:

• The B-52′s, “Rock Lobster”*
• Blondie, “Heart of Glass”
• Bob Marley, “Get Up, Stand Up”
• Chicago, “25 or 6 to 4″
• Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water”
• Doobie Brothers, “China Grove”*
• Elton John, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”
• Foreigner, “Cold As Ice”*
• Golden Earring, “Radar Love”
• John Lennon, “Imagine”
• Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”
• Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”*
• Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”
• Steve Miller Band, “Fly Like an Eagle”
• T. Rex, “20th Century Boy”
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “I Need to Know”
• War, “Low Rider”
• Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”
• Yes, “Roundabout”*

1960s:

• Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations (Live)”
• David Bowie, “Space Oddity”
• The Doors, “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”*
• James Brown, “I Got You” (I Feel Good) — Alternate Studio Version*
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Crosstown Traffic”*
• The Who, “I Can See for Miles”

I’m more than a little bit excited for this setlist I can tell you that much. The Beast and The Harlot alone guarantees that I’ll be getting this game. Then there’s all these little quirky songs that a different genre of people have heard of like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 which actually grow on you if you’re an indie loser deep down inside. Metric’ll hook my wife in and any chance I get to pretend I’m Slipknot is a win. And that’s just the 2000s list.

Not that the rest of the tracks aren’t good but the clear winner in this whole package, by far, is the 1970s list. Honestly, any list that beings with Rock Lobster is a winner. It could be a list of pocket lint and so long as Rock Lobster was the first thing on it, it’s like Snoop Dogg in a candy-pimp suit. Smoke on the Water, Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, Radar Love, Bohemian Rhapsody and then ice that birthday cake with Werewolves of London, Low Rider and FREEBIRD you’ve got a recipe for success.

As a side note, Rockband 3 will feature a keyboard for you’re almost-rock-star fantasies. It looks almost exactly like the parts you would see for lead guitar except you won’t have to strum anything. And the similarity continues in that knowing anything about piano will probably not help you play the keyboard in Rock Band 3. Seems a lot like a gimmick to sucker more people into buying the game (especially when you see the lead guitar part for Queen’s Somebody to Love from Rock Band 2) but with a setlist like this, I could only care less if I really really tried.

When this comes out I’m playing Low Rider until my eyes bleed.

May 22nd is Pac-Man’s 30th birthday. 30 years ago, a little yellow guy that kinda looked like a pie chart was the absolute greatest thing in video games. It rocked our world.

Were we thinking about the way games would be today when Pac-Man first came out? Was it even possible then? The animation in video games today completely annihilates the special effects of any movie from 1980. Anything like Final Fantasy XIII or World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto would have been such a far-fetched idea that it would be nothing more than flights of fancy.

Now that we’re here, though, looking back… Is the gameplay better? With a sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto you run around all the live long day being an all-around hooligan and you can do so with complete disregard for the main storyline (also the in-game law). In Pac-Man it was simple. Eat the dots. Don’t touch a ghost. The big dots make the ghosts eatable for a short time. That’s it! And it enthralled people. Now we pay 15 bucks a month to run around for hours on end not actually accomplishing anything in a game. Or we drool at the graphics during double-digit hours long tutorial.

Is the gameplay better? Yes, most definitely. It can be infinitely complex or hard-hitting and straight-forward or sometimes just as simple as Pac-Man itself. But the way games play out has absolutely imoproved. It’s more the content that we have issues with. It’s kind of like now that we have all the flavours of ice cream in the world, we can’t decide which one we want the most.

When we just had vanilla, vanilla was awesome.

To cap off the work week, I have something pretty stupid cute.
As a stage-setter: the internet-famous music video for a game called Plants Vs. Zombies

And to follow it, a one-and-a-half year old kid that has a visible addiction to said music video. Do yourself a favour and either watch it the whole way through or just skip to 2:45. Addiction is never pretty.

There’s a game. It is called Cooking Mama. In it you go through various ingredient preparation steps to complete the goal of making various cooked foods. It’s also heavily suggested that guys don’t play this game. That is to say it’s essentially only targeted at the female populace.

I guess that’s okay? They do market testing for these sorts of things and they would market it as something more unisex if that was what their demographics were shown to be. And if the numbers are showing that more girls than guys play Cooking Mama, then it only makes sense to gear the advertising and the style of the game towards girls. And when you’re talking about cooking one of the biggest household names is Martha Stewart. And as such the people who made Cooking Mama have gotten in bed with Martha Stewart to produce a line of games based on Martha’s cooking.

Now that that’s tied bundled up I can get on to bitching.

In the announcement of these new Martha Stewart Cooking Mama games, Martha had this to say:

“Women are increasingly engaged in social gaming. We feel confident that this new offering will delight loyal customers who are active in the space while introducing a new generation to the brand.”

I know I’m blowing this out of proportion but it’s a classic tale that I’ve heard from pretty much every woman gamer I know. When you say “Women are increasingly engaged in social gaming” and you’re talking solely about a cooking game, you’re being sexist. Straight up. You can focus your advertising on your demographic – in this case women – but you cannot operate under the assumption that this is the only thing that you demographic does. Women gamers do not just play Cooking Mama and Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. Women gamers play all the stupid games that guy gamers do. And a lot of the times they’ll play them better strictly because of the chip they’ll get on their shoulder ever time a greasy basement dweller – or in this case a rich ex-con -tells them that they should be playing Cooking Mama.

Like I said, I’ve blown this out of proportion. Martha Stewart would never publicly give any acknowledgement to thinking that women only play Cooking Mama-esque games. But it’s a reflex thought pattern that’s going to be around for a long long time. Probably because it’s deeply embedded into our society from years of mental conditioning or something equally psychobabbletacular. I just want to draw attention to the fact that women gamers are under an aggravating stereotype that’s probably not going to go away. It pisses them off.

If you tell a woman playing CoD4 that she should go back to Cooking Mama, just be thankful she can’t teabag your corpse after the 87th kill.

P.S. There are infinitely more numerous and better platform from which one should be arguing about equal treatment for the sexes. Since I play games every single day, I know more about this one than I do any other. It’s not a particularly relevant platform for social discussion but hey, nothing I talk about is.

P.P.S. Cooking Mama is a decent game

World of Warcraft.

I just wanted to make sure that I gave you chance to sod off before reading any farther into this post. There was a new thingreleased for the game World of Warcraft recently called a Celestial Steed. It’s a winged pony that only exists in the game of World of Warcraft and your WoW character can ride it for the low low price of $25 per pony.

I think we can all say that we’ve spent 25 bucks on something more stupid than a make-believe pony. Or maybe not. Either way, $25 doesn’t seem like a whole lot until the number start getting crunched. This flying glue bottle came out just yesterday and the virtual line up to download this thing was in excess of 80,000 people. Math dictates that over two million dollars were made from these people alone. The time frame that this was happening in also dictates that this make believe pony was making Blizzard Entertainment 500,000 dollars per hour.

Naturally this number has lessened now that most people have their my little pony on LSD. But I’d like to know exactly how many hours they were running at a 500,000 dollar-per-hour rate. Because it doesn’t take much for that wage to make you smile

“We need to stop making games that are super hardcore. But we’re afraid because we don’t want to lose the hardcore population.”

This comes from Max Beland, Creative Director on Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Convition, a game that tends to attract hardcore players in a two-on-two deathmatch scenario but also enjoys the company of two friends looking for a good game to play.

What this quote says is that Ubisoft, or at least their creative director, wants to make hard games but they don’t want to lose people that want easy games. Why don’t they want this? Casual gamers are a market that’s just been tapped in recent years. And the money is flowing like honey. Really warm, watery honey from a very large container. So now the quote becomes “we’d like to make hard games but we don’t want to lose the boatloads of money”. A justifiable fear I’d say. One doesn’t get to be the director of creation if one doesn’t keep in mind the monetary endgame of what their making does one? But here’s the thing. This quote can just as easily be read as “we want to try something wicked but we don’t want to lose money.”

It speaks volumes of an industry, not that unlike from many others, that is afraid to take chances. That’s why independent games are gaining in popularity. Some games (read: most games) today are very much about graphics and to a lesser extent, realism. The digital artists are put into the forefront for their work – and that’s good – and the gameplay designers are upstaged – which is bad.

An easy way to understand what I’m saying is to hop on a Wii and play New Super Mario Brothers Wii. It’s a new game that plays nearly identical to games released in 1990 and 1991. While nostalgia does factor in, it’s the gameplay that truly sells you. And this is a formula that’s been dormant for nearly two decades. The graphics, the story, it’s all at a cartoon – even cutesy – level. But the gameplay is so simple yet so addictive that you can play for hours. This is the lost heart of most games today.

Maybe I’m old fashioned. Maybe, because I treated Atari Pac-Man like it was some sort of deity from on high, I may never truly appreicate the amazing graphics of a game before I appreciate the gameplay. But in my eyes the biggest issue with any game today is that everyone afraid of taking a chance on a truly novel concept but moreso, they’re focusing on baffling us with BS rather than dazzling us with brilliance.

Having said that, taking a 20 year old game and making it look new isn’t so much brilliance as it is good marketing.

P.S. It pays to note that nearly none of this will ever be remedied. It’s an imperfect world and as such, we have to hold on to what few good games that are left. But if we do, we’re clearly nerds.

Nerd

Moonwalker Arcade

This is the Michael Jackson game that has already been created. It rocks my mind clean in ‘twain. Especially at 0:36 of the video where red-suit Michael Jackson and robot Michael Jackson force an impromptu dance party on their enemies, thereby erasing them from the existence of time.

I mention this now because Sony has put pen to paper on a 200 million dollar deal with Michael Jackson’s family that allows them to make 10 new Michael Jackson albums, 10 new DVDs and 10 new video games between now and 2017.

Moowalker Arcade is just a taste of what a Michael Jackson game could look like. And while I am laughing at it, I know that I’ve played worse.

Okay so, the Playstation Moveis not a terribly original name. But I guess neither is Wiimote. But at least one of them came out years ago.

The Move is the latest thing that we’re supposed to believe is gaming innovation. But just looking at the pictures above can demonstrate that, will a little bit of imagination, the Move is just a black Wiimote with a pretty ball on top. I personally give that ball less than a week before people start breaking it off (accidentally or otherwise).

The rest of the device flaws can be picked out just by watching the always entertaining Kevin Butler try and sell the Move from the far and distant future of November, 2010. When you first see someone using the Move, they’re implementing two Move remotes and a Playstation Eye camera. I still haven’t bought four controllers for my Wii. And these revolutionary items always cost more than anything else like them. Perhaps it’s an extra charge for the revolutionary housed within.

In the second bit of the video Mr. Butler says that the Move has buttons on it and that is a good thing. It may not be 100% on the above picture but the move has MAYBE five to seven buttons on it. By contrast, the Wii has 8 buttons on it. I’m not saying, I’m just saying that if you’re going to advertise that your thing has buttons on it, make sure that someone else doesn’t have a thing with more buttons on it. That leads to remote envy.

One of the other big problems that I’m seeing with the Move is that it’s relying a lot on the Eye camera. Which does not come standard with every PS3 much less every PS3 that most people bought years ago. Now, the Eye sells for less than a new game so it might not seem so bad. But with basic math, if you buy 10 new games that require the use of the Eye camera, you’ve just put a 2 dollar tax on each of those games. Couple that with the fact that even after the Move comes out, not every game is going to rely on the Move remotes and the Eye camera, and you’re only realistically buying maybe 3 to 5 games that use the camera at all.

Like I’ve said with a couple mouseovers, I want to buy anything that Kevin Butler tells me to. He’s a funny guy. But the Move is a bad idea. It’s trying to catch a trend that’s had all of its flaws exposed. And somehow I doubt the Move’s ability to overcome those flaws. If you want an example of Playstation already having failed to catch a trend, remember the Sixaxis and know despair.

It’s like you had a car that the makers decided would be so much cooler with this new gadget in it. But the gadget costs triples the cost of any drive you take, it can only be used on special roads, it’s completely useless on regular roads and another company has already been making this gadget for years and they’ve already made it better and faster. That doesn’t make much sense.

But then again, Kevin Butler told me I should buy one…

Also, I can’t just forget this stuff so easily. I may never sleep or buy anything from Sony ever again.