Reading11: Trigger Warning

Oh video games. For all the good that you can and have done, and hours of beauty and joy that you have brought to millions, so often you end up the scapegoat blamed for so many of the problems we see in the world. In all honesty, I never really know what to say or think about many of the social issues tied to, well really anything. I feel like the problems are things that I need to be aware of as I go about my day, and I am not one to invalidate how another feels about one thing or another, so I know it is important to stay informed as to what can be possibly problematic. 

I cannot say much of anything to the effects or lack thereof of games on gun violence, or violence of any kind. Much of the research I have seen to this point has been, at best, inconclusive and often disproves the correlation, but the public opinion is still vehemently in support of the idea. That sort of dissonance is always incredibly irritating to me, the clinging desperately to what you want to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Addiction is a more interesting problem, if only because it is something that games could do something about, but are at times designed to do the exact opposite. As this becomes a more serious problem, with more and more cases reported every year with more severe consequences leading to pretty morbid presentations in History of Computing classes, and there are hundreds of instances where people spend tragic amounts of money, it seems clear to me that something needs to be done here. And fortunately, steps are being taken in regard to this. Governments are stepping in and putting the same restrictions to many games as are brought on casinos and other forms of gambling. And if certain sections of the gaming world want to continue down this path and become more casino and less art, more of these systems of checks will need to be put in place. The ESRB, in its current state, is alright when in comes to keeping kids from being able to buy games they shouldn't be playing, though there are easy ways to take advantage of that system, but is not built to handle cases of microtransaction addiction. In cases like this, a sort of gaming commission needs to step in and monitor activity similar to that of a casino. 

In my eyes, games are mostly a product of a lot of these social ills than they are a cause for them (although I suppose their is an argument for a sort of propagation of the problem). Sometimes, games try to act as a cure for social problems, trying to connect people and bring positive experiences and give examples of good representation and strong meaningful characters and experiences. Other times, games try to calculate how to best keep people clicking and giving more of their money. The latter is, for me, a significant problem, and has kept me growing farther apart from the gaming culture. But hopefully things can turn around with some of the push-back from the community with some of these practices, although if people continue to pay up in the way they have, there is no reason for studios to make any change.

Reading10 - eSports

One of the best things about video games has always been that you can show off how much better you are at it than another person. This is why we have ranking systems and online sharing and all these other features to be the very best, like no one ever was. In recent years this has taken a bigger twist, to the point where the competitive nature of some of the most popular games becomes a spectacle of itself, and eSports are on the rise. Turn to ESPN2 on a slow news day and see League of Legends matches between some of the highest-ranked players in the world. The EA Sports Madden Ultimate League apparently has its own subsection on the WatchESPN app. Ultimately, I am in support of the growing eSports movement, and have enjoyed watching some of these events.

Way back when, I think around 2006, I was first exposed to the idea of playing video games competitively. Growing up, I really only played single-player (and still do to this day) and the only competitiveness came from wanting to have a story that one-upped that of a classmate or friend. But on some slow weekend in baseball season, as I was absolutely not going to watch baseball, I stumbled upon an ESPN showing of some Madden 2005 tournament. It was a crazy show, with surprising focus given to sort of reality show elements in almost equal part to the gameplay. I got super invested in players who used systems that I liked, or tried to play in what I felt was the best way and wound up watching some 6 hours that one day. And it is good fun, I think, to see people who are so passionate about something, no matter what it is really, and do it extraordinarily well. There is a sort of artistry to mastering a game that is similar to the artistry that goes into creating it. More recently, some of the eSports communities have grown bigger than short tournaments for cash prizes and have become a profession. My favorite of these is pictured above, the eMLS cup. In this case, the real professional football clubs in the US and Canada have signed top-ranked players and supporters of their teams to eSports contracts, providing them with sponsorship in exchange for their representation of their brand. This kicked off (no pun intended) just a few weeks ago at the PAX East convention, the first time all 19 of these now professional EA Sports FIFA players came together to bring to their club a piece of pretty legitimate silverware. The show was really enthralling, and I wound up being more invested in these games of FIFA than I was in the actual game of real-life football I had on the TV. The surprisingly full crowd, the commentary from former MLS players, and the incredible skill of these people playing the same game I have put hundreds of hours in was really incredible.There's a sort of meta-game to these sorts of eSporting events, and with so many different ways to build teams and play the game each match brought its own excitement.

As much as I enjoy eSports and so many others seem to as well, I don't think this is a thing that needs to get much bigger than it is. I think it is great when this sort of thing stays in its own chunk of the market, with passionate fans and invested spectators coming together to enjoy something wonderful. However, if this were to try to grow too much, and to attempt to become "legitimized" to the level of an Olympic sort or something of that degree, I don't think I would enjoy it as much. In the same way that many people harp on the classification of chess as a sport, should the eSports community attempt to garner that same sort of respect, their would be enormous push-back from especially vocal groups that would take much of the joy out of the thing. I love that eSports are a thing, and that they are growing in their own market, but I would hate to see it go the way of some of the larger sports leagues, where excessive media coverage and repeated scandal take the joy out of the games being played.

Reading09 - Modern Arcade Reflection

Once such a large part of the lives of particular groups of people, arcades now are few and far between, and often not very popular. I remember fondly time spent at Chuck E. Cheese and other kid's play places where video arcade games won you tickets to exchange for different toys and such. There are also some great bars where the old arcade cabinets combine with craft beers to make for truly delightful occasions. On the whole, however, I struggle to see how these games matter at all in the larger scope of gaming. The products themselves are by and large inferior to a free app you could pull up on a phone and considerably less than the modern PC or console title. As more of the gaming peripherals come into the home, the arcades cease to have purpose. For awhile I would have argued that there is charm and value to arcade titles. Many employ unique and interesting game mechanics, and unique input tools that could not be experienced anywhere else, and can be used to push the boundaries of how we are able to play games. But as technology has developed, more and more the uniqueness of arcade cabinets lessens and most of the same, and many far superior, experiences can be had with any other sort of gaming, and without the need to be tied to a particular geographic location or the need to shell out rolls and rolls of quarters.

I could be incorrect in my assessment, of course. There are personal biases that keep me from getting much of anything out of the arcade experience. In a lot of ways, it seems similar to why I do not enjoy bowling, and it seems little coincidence that the two activities often appear side-by-side. Personally I do not see any reason that many of these arcade are failing. Sure, a lot are kind of gross and not terrifically maintained, and Strikes and Spares did not do a lot to fight this line of thinking I already had, but even places like DisneyQuest, a massive video-arcade "indoor theme park" in the Walt Disney World complex are failing to keep up with the technical superiority and entertainment value provided by modern games. There may always be a market of kids who want to win that remote-controller helicopter and drunk twenty-somethings going buck wild at Dave and Buster's, but every year it seems like arcades are less and less important to smaller groups of people, and I cannot think of anything that could be done to turn that trend around.

The best thing an arcade can be now is a social experience, and no longer really one of technical intrigue or gaming prowess. Good times can still be had with a great group of friends around a cabinet trying to one-up each other's high scores, with everyone sort of back-seat driving, shouting their best strategies or trying to trip up the player, but I do not think that the arcade is really a part of the gaming world anymore, and honestly that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Reading06: Computer Graphics

Everyone seems to talk about computer graphics. Not everyone, maybe, but certainly a massive portion of the Reddit communities I read. People always like to brag up their own machine's graphical capabilities and dunk on the inferior setups of the plebs around them. The graphical quality of a system or game often comes up as a defining reason for why a person will or will not play a game. In film as well, people will praise some films for terrific use of computer graphics while absolutely hammering others as absolute messes of CGI nonsense. Personally, I love what graphics can add to modern entertainment and my graphics and VFX courses have been the highlights of my time at Notre Dame, but I do not think they are everything. The important thing to me is that visuals add to the overall experience, and not attempt to be the whole experience.

In September of 1996, one of the most significant achievements in computer graphics was achieved, and the lives of every person living and past and yet to come would be altered irrevocably. Probably. Because this was when Naughty Dog and Sony Computer Entertainment brought the wacky world of Australian animals to the big time in the form of a genetically mutated bandicoot named Crash and his effort to thwart the mischievous plots of Dr. Neo Cortex. I could literally write a book on the beauty and lore that is the world of Crash Bandicoot, and some if it may even be canon and not a huge arcing meta-story that I use when going through the entire series over a spring break, but that would not go into what this title meant for graphics moving forward. What Crash did was it used the video capabilities of the PlayStation OG while emphasizing polygons over textures (*GASP*). Now, programmers had way more polygons, able to work around the system's lack of texture correction and polygon clipping. As I think was mentioned this week, the game was made to feel cartoon, using vertex animation instead of skeletal, using a much more sophisticated three-to-four joint weighting instead of a traditional one-joint. Getting the detail that at the time was astounding (and I still think looks decent today) involved a pretty buckwild mix of algorithmic texture packers and level design tools that worked around the limited memory, hidden paths and environmental pieces to keep to the 800 polygon limit, and a bunch of bidirectional 10x compressors to keep the 128-megabyte levels to the 12 allowed by the PlayStation's RAM. But I don;t love the game because I love the development tools that made it or the interesting stories of working around the limited hardware, I love it because it is a fun platformer title with a unique style that really vibes with me personally and characters that I love over a long series of games that I grew up with and keep close to this day. Yes, it is great that the graphics are as they are and the game got credit from critics for this, but that alone is not what makes it great and important to me.

In general, graphics have improved significantly over the years, and what we have today is vastly superior to what was available even only 5 or 6 years ago. Games and films now are able to create literally jaw-dropping moments of beauty that contribute to amazing experiences like I had with one of my favorites of the last couple years, Horizon: Zero Dawn. But again, I worry about praising graphics too much, as there is certainly a downside. At times, people believe a pretty product will paper over the cracks of what is not in general a very good experience, as happened with EA's attempt to bring back Star Wars: Battlefront (and a lot of what has come out of large studios of late). They absolutely nail their graphics and sound and make truly beautiful trailers with their game, but actually playing the game is pleasant for about 1 and a half minutes. There just isn't anything there. All style and no substance is often worse to experience that something that is truly bad, as you build up an expectation in your head based on what you are seeing that just is not met by what you experience. That let down leads me to get less out of a game than a bad Atari title. It is brutal to think what could have been if these tools, the wonderful graphical systems and soundscapes, could have been put to better use. The experiences that can be brought with computer graphics, and I believe only with computer graphics, are legitimately inspiring, and I hope more good than bad comes out in the future.

Reading05: Gaming Gimmicks

Not all games are played on a sofa or at a desk. Electronic entertainment has grown to have a plethora of ways to interact. Motion Detection, Dance Pads, electronic instruments and other forms of control have found some serious success and carved out a decent chunk of the market with these titles. Just like how a lot of "passive" games were first developed to showcase the computing power of new machines, a lot of games have been made and many have found success showing new technologies, in particular motion detection. So, let's get personal.

Personally, I hate this stuff. I do not enjoy playing games on these sort of systems. On the Wii, the titles always felt silly to me, and things like Wii Sports and Mario Kart are for a different sort of person than myself. The Kinect was pretty bad at doing most things, and required obnoxious amounts of space to function at all. Guitar Hero and their many variants and Rock Band spin off things I never had any reason to play. Just like with Wii Sports, I can just as easily go out and do the real thing and enjoy it much more than what can be done with games. If I want to golf, I would rather walk down to the driving range or even just take plastic practice balls out to the yard. When I want to play the guitar, I take out one of the several real instruments that I own and play. When a group of us want to get together in a band, we just did that with our actual instruments in a buddy's garage. So, these things never had much appeal to me. That doesn't mean they are useless, though. I know a lot people really enjoy all these things, and that is great. My family members have always loved being together and playing Just Dance games on the Kinect or Wii, and there are good things to be said about things that can bring groups of people together. But I personally would rather not ever play them. So I do not.

Different ways of interacting with technology a bit of buzz, especially since different people are different and enjoy different things. I hate Guitar Hero, but I know there is a group of friends of mine playing Rock Band down the hall right now. And that is great, there should be these options and different experiences that people can have. Looking forward, the push seems to be for Virtual and Augmented Reality systems. Developers want to bring users even closer to the experiences than was ever possible before, physically bringing people into the action, and surrounding their senses with it, in the case of VR, or bringing the virtual world into one's perception of reality with AR. I have never used any sort of VR thing, but I am sure there is potential for great success with it. But, seeing as I know nothing about how it works or how it feels to use, I will say little if anything more on the subject. AR, on the other hand, is something I do have some admittedly limited experience with. This comes mostly through Nintendo and Pokemon Go and some simple titles on the 3Ds. It was really awesome to see Pokemon appear out in the real world on my phone's camera. For about 5 minutes. Just like with motion detection and rhythm games gimmicks, when the novelty of the new technology faded, I lost pretty much all interest in using it. It makes for a few interesting and unique moments but honestly did not add anything exceptional or necessary to my gaming experience. The uniqueness of the visual quirks that this gave did not change the fact that what I was playing was not a particularly engaging experience, and I often felt that all of these things rely on the technology to make people interested, and do not do as much actual work giving an entertaining product that utilizes these new technologies to enhance the experience. The games should be using the fancy new tech to enhance their ability to tell their story and engage the audience, rather than just being a skin plastered on a sort of toy. Well, I guess that is just if the companies want me to buy in to this stuff. Clearly they do fine without my personal support, and as long as they stay successful they will continue doing what has made them so.

Reading04: Gaming in the 90s

According to my Steam Library, I've put an absurd number of hours into prepping for this weeks assignment. And that is just on the HD remaster of one of my favorite games: Age of Empires II. This is a game that I have been playing since I found the Age of Empires Gold 3-CD set at a Staples, and got the original Age of Empires, Rise of Rome expansion, Age of Empires II and the Conquerors expansion. I have spent literal weeks of my life meticulously developing my bases in this fantastic world. I never even played the game right, and I only played against other human beings on three or four occasions (which involved some buck-wild third party setups as the remaster did not yet exist and the official servers had long been shut down. Such were the days of middle school). When I handed down my old laptop to my younger brother, the very first thing we did was LAN party some AoE. I took the soundtrack files off the CD-ROM and put them on my iPod Nano. Seriously. I found the thing a few months ago and the Age of Empires II theme is the most played song on the thing. Well, the album is actually second to the Pokemon Gold and Silver soundtrack, but those are shorter songs. But I digress.

These are RTS games: real-time strategy. Until I found the Elder Scrolls series, these were far and away my favorite games to play. My first multiplayer game experience and game development experience came with Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne one summer at iD Tech Camps. I really started down computer science because of these games, not just what they were in gameplay and the memories this has given me, but also in their fantastic modding support, with full scenario and level editors that I used at least as much as the games themselves. With all of these games, I could literally write thousands of words as to what makes each one great, objectively and personally in my life, but I have now actually read the prompt and see that the reflection is more about games and I should stop ranting on about Age of Empires. The faster I get this thing written, the sooner I can go back to procrastinating my machine learning assignment and hit up another round. But one more clarification, in case P.Bui is curious. When I say I never played the game "right," I didn't play any of the "story" scenarios until last year, and I never rushed developments and tried to crush the CPU players in record time. I played the game where my base was not a base but a city, and built it up like one would in an empire building title like Civilization, with an excessively elaborate defense structure and ridiculously over-the-top invasion strategies that involved conquering opposing peoples with only 1 builder, 1 monk, and 1 trebuchet. Build a square of wall, build a tower, monk convert any opponents, trebuchet castles and town centers. I would drag games out to take 6 or more hours. The minimap would be just my team color in every single pixel with the number of outposts and walls all over the place. Age of Empires is one of the greatest games ever made. But anyway, on to the actual thing I am supposed to address.

So, consoles. Above is the first console I ever got. It was passed down to me from my cousin Tyler as a Christmas gift in 2003. It was one of the most vividly happy memories of my life, and one of only maybe two things I can recall to still even literally right now as I am typing this thing make me tear up from joy. The original system saw its time come to an end, but I do still proudly own one of these and many of the same games from that day. The same discs. In the same cases. Since like 2000. Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing, Madden 2003, and Gex: Enter the Gecko. I have kept these, and will continue to hold onto them. The first game my kid will play is going to be that same copy of Spyro the Dragon. No joke. The point of this story, though, is to say that I did not choose the console, it chose me. I did not ask Santa or my parents for this, it was given to me and it changed my life. I couldn't tell you a darned thing about why this is better than the SEGA genesis (but it is) or the N64 (but it is), but I can tell you there is nothing you can tell me that will make me think anything other than this. My favorite console ever is the PlayStation2. I still have one, and I still play it every time I go back home. For me, a big reason for this is probably nostalgia. I love going back, turning the thing on, seeing the old blue cubes floating in space, and being 7 years old again. My favorite thing about it was that not only can it help me relive the glory days of Madden 05 and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal and literally dozens of my favorite games, but also lets me keep playing my Spyro and Crash. Backwards compatibility is my favorite thing in the gaming world, and I am sad that it doesn't really seem to exist much anymore.

I guess the most important things to me about a console are the games that it lets me play, as a lot of my favorite games are exclusive to the PlayStation, but also the reason they are my favorite games is that I have had them for literally almost 20 years. And that isn't even just Sony PS1 stuff. The desk drawer to my left has the same GameBoy Color I got in 2001 and the same Pokemon Silver cartridge from the following year. My favorite games and consoles are the ones with which I have the deepest emotional connection, because I am just a great big ball of feels. Maybe there are technically better things out there, maybe I just missed out on playing all these greats, but that's fine. I wouldn't trade my purple dragon friend for anything.

Reading03: Political Correctnesses (Or some other PCs)

In the world of gaming, there is one power that has risen above all others. One way that has made itself seem the truest way to experience electronic entertainment. I am fresh out of fun being had make this seem like more than it is so here is a little bit of a goof instead of a proper formal introduction to the bulk of this entry. Wow, that went longer than it probably needed to. That is quite odd, as I certainly do not need to be padding to hit the word count, I actually have things to say on this subject. The subject in question is the rise of the personal computer and its impact upon the gaming world, and the introduction here instead of a ramble was meant to come to a climax with a joke of some sort about the culture of the PC Master Race subset of the gaming community but I could not think of anything that I found particularly funny.

The 1980's saw the rise of personal computers in the home and workplace, with Apple and IBM waging a sort of hardware battle to put these machines in every home. This brought about a new way to play games. Whole libraries were created for the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the greatest of all MS-DOS. Playing games on the computer offers a few different things that are not available on consoles, such as more robust control schemes using full keyboard and mouse inputs, and access to greater quantities of memory. Gaming on the computer leads to fully different experiences than those given on the console. As a general rule, especially in early days, a lot of the interaction in computer games is between the player and the computer, while a lot of especially early console games focused on a cooperative or competitive experience. Instead of providing a way to prove your superiority over a friend or family member, playing these early computer games tend to be more about solving a series of puzzles or otherwise showcasing the technical greatness of the machine.

In the last reading, you may have noticed I talked at relative length about my time playing the Oregon Trail on DOS, so I won't dive much more into that particular title. Instead, I will go farther back into my childhood, to the only reason I have any understanding of world geography: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? This is a franchise which has had a multimedia cultural influence on me. I grew up not just playing the computer game (the one pictured here, and also a later edition), but also the board game, watching the television show, and most importantly through the musical stylings of Rockapella on the album of the same name. But this game is actually the first in the franchise. released by Broderbund in 1985. Fun fact, the game was originally released with a copy of the World Almanac and Book of Facts. In the game, the player character, a rookie in the ACME Detective Agency, must track down and apprehend criminals of the V.I.L.E. organization and their leader, the titular Carmen Sandiego. Gameplay consists mostly of menu navigation, using the graphical interface to investigate different locations, gather clues about the suspect, filing for an arrest warrant when enough information is gathered, and flying to different cities around the world. By solving enough cases and returning enough artifacts to their rightful location, the player ranks up, given more challenging cases until you eventually come face to face with Carmen herself. I went back to play this game, and honestly it is still pretty great. The only thing that doesn't fully stand up to the test of time are the actual geo-political factoids that fuel the game, making a few thing more challenging as references and hints do not hold true in the modern world.

Carmen Sandiego is one of many games that I feel would not work on consoles. These sorts of strategic games, ones for which more thought and more intricate variation of input is needed, do not work well on consoles. Consoles, and their ergonomic controllers and emphasis on graphical flashiness, are excellent for action games and sports, adventuring and immersion, but not for every style of game. Strategy games, I think are the best example of something that does not translate well to a controller. Not that it has not been tried, but it is a much smoother experience to command armies and control civilizations with the full capabilities of a computer over the specialization applied to game consoles.