Note: This is a post highly similar to this one, but since our audience is completely different and I’d rather post it here than have people not follow the link, I hope Darius will forgive me. So…

Darius over at TinySubversions has a much more entertaining and detailed account of this little gaming fracas (go read it!), but in short: Gamasutra, a leading game website, publishes an article about Spelunky, an indie game garnering much critical praise.

Adam Coate, himself an indie developer, leaves a comment complaining that his game deserves more attention than Spelunky, and isn’t getting any.

Debate ensues, with commenters suggesting Adam should improve his attitude to improve his coverage.

Notably, a writer from indiegames.com tells Adam that he received Adam’s original e-mail about his game. However, the e-mail contained no helpful information (like links) to help him find, play and eventually cover the game. The writer came up with nothing even after searching exhaustively for it. He helpfully counsels Adam to learn a few things about marketing (and even eventually proceeds to write a guide to indie game marketing).

Adam keeps whining, eventually submitting the gem: “Miyamoto never had to work for press like this”.

(This is Shigeru Miyamoto, of Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Zelda fame).

Commenters in Darius’ account of this have a field day, and someone brilliantly comes up with an idea for a t-shirt.

I know I’m going to see this at gaming conventions and laugh my ass off.

- I signed up to give some money monthly to the AIDS foundation and they gave me a bag of goodies. Inside, among other things, was a condom with word AIDS printed all over the wrapper. I think that would kinda kill the mood… but I guess abstinence is good prevention too.

- This week I’m finishing a game project I’ve been producing for the Ubisoft Campus for the past little while. I find I’ve been rebitten by the game production bug. I’ll definitely be looking for a game to produce as soon as I get back from…

- Rome. On Sunday I’m leaving for a short solo romp in the Italian capital. Will eat gelato and prosciutto, visit Roman stuff, draw, do yoga and take a side trip to Pompeii.

Well boss, it’s starting to look like a real production. I’m leaving around 7:30 PM, the creative director called me a castrator in public today, and I can’t tell you how happy I am.

Yahtzee excels at eloquently expressing my thoughts.

…basically I’m just so fucking bored of shit like this. The improbably Warhammer 40k-esque power armour. The automatic healing. The overcompensating macho beefcakes with voices like they’ve had their lips clamped around exhaust pipes their whole lives. The schizophrenic design-by-committee flitting between whiny drama and goofy wisecracks. The obligatory female support character with the no-nonsense attitude and permanently cocked hips. The monstrous, dehumanised, unequivocally evil baddies. The inevitable betrayal from the jaded authority figure. I’ve gone through the same banal motions so many times it’s increasingly hard to talk about them in any meaningful or interesting way.

To be honest, I’m not even really that tired of playing these games when they’re done well, I’m just really sick of seeing only these kinds of projects get real funding and attention. Of course, the cost of game development is such that publishers can’t afford to take many chances and have to guarantee hits for themselves, so it’s not a simple problem to solve.

But still, when you think of the talent, intelligence and passion that this industry has, it’s a huge shame.

Someone took exception to the fact that my BAFTA picks reflected only the small variety of games I played last year. True, but the nuance is I don’t play games I don’t like; I don’t feel bound to play unenjoyable games out of professional duty. I only feel duty-bound to try to play them. As entertainment, they shouldn’t be work to consume.

This reminds me of something a friend once quipped to me: men will watch any sci-fi, good or bad, whilst women will only watch good sci-fi. Translation: depending on how you feel about a form of entertainment, you’ll have different thresholds of tolerance for them.

In film school, I prided myself on seeing every film that came out. This eventually broke down when I found myself obliged to consume upsetting or violent movies I really didn’t want to see. By then my career had veered away from film, professional duty no longer applied so I gave myself permission to avoid them. As a result, some notable greats are still in the limbo of the unseen, for various reasons: The Pianist, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, 28 Days Later, Boys Don’t Cry.

I’m way more willing to see movies of questionable quality because I like them better than games, but also because they are much less of an investment. I haven’t lost as much time and money if I see an entire bad movie as I have if I play a bad game halfway through.

Still, even with respect to movies, my limbo of “ought to see movies” is uncomfortably crowded, and since I’m now trying to reorient my career towards film, those lost souls are coming back to haunt me. I’ll probably bite the bullet and consume all those depressing and unsettling greats in a fell swoop, perhaps interspersed with all the insubstantial Princess Diaries I’ve also (but rightly) skipped.

I’m curious: what do you do when you need to consume something you dislike because it’s required for your professional culture?

ACTION & ADVENTURE
Call of Duty 4, which I finished in two sittings last week; it was overall one of the best put-together games I’ve ever experienced, complete with a couple of moments of genius and unfortunately a few of intense frustration. As a game I’d probably give it a 95%, which means it ranks about the same as a movie I’d give a 60% rating to.

Other nominees include Fable II and Grand Theft Auto IV, both of which I found too abysmal to play more than an hour.

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed

BEST GAME
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I’m tempted to say Rock Band, though I’ve never played it. I just love the idea of Rock Band.

CASUAL
Wii Fit narrowly steals this one from the excellent Boom Blox, due to its superior replayability (not to mention a theme dear to my heart).

GAMEPLAY
Mario Kart Wii was my game addiction of 2008, with Call of Duty 4 in close second.

MULTIPLAYER
Of the nominees, I’ve only played Left 4 Dead and Mario Kart Wii in multiplayer mode so I won’t choose, but I’m surprised EA Montreal’s Army of Two didn’t make the cut. It was one of the best co-op experiences I’ve had in the past year. Most frustrating co-op game: Fable II. Just lots of broken gameplay overall IMO.

ORIGINAL SCORE
This isn’t really “original score”, but I have to give Fallout 3 a big shout-out for its awesome 1940s soundtrack.

STORY AND CHARACTER
I’ve played several of the nominees, including the story-driven Mass Effect, but I wouldn’t really vote for any of them as having an “awardably” compelling story or profound character development.

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed. Although it wasn’t a great success in terms of gameplay, Assassins brought the medium some breakthroughs in terms of animation and artificial intelligence.

USE OF AUDIO
Call of Duty 4: the one game where I actually noticed the quality and immersiveness of the audio.

GAME Award of 2008
Call of Duty 4

My honourable mentions: Mario Kart Wii, Boom Blox, Army of Two

Last week in the closing keynote of the Montreal Games Summit, Jonathan Blow said that games are fundamentally a sucky medium in which to tell a story.

He made a lot of compelling arguments supporting this. Roughly paraphrased:

- The storyteller isn’t in perfect control, especially when we try to give the player freedom, so we can’t use a lot of the narrative devices available to other media;

- Oftentimes the game’s rules actually go against the story’s meaning and direction, as there generally isn’t really any thought put into making them gel with each other in the first place. It wouldn’t be hard to change this, but you can never really tell how gameplay will be interpreted narratively by the player until it’s tested. And if it’s found that the rules don’t support story, this isn’t usually seen as a big enough problem to justify going back and change the game.

- Story needs to flow forward, and the challenges (to the player) inherent in a game keep preventing this from happening. To remedy this, some have reduced difficulty in their games (eg God of War), but this is cheating the medium, essentially turning it into a movie that you have to mash buttons to keep going.

The fact that the medium inherently keeps us from telling good stories is a conclusion I’ve reluctantly been inching towards, and Blow may have gotten me the rest of the way there. Of course the maturity level of the general gaming audience is a factor, but could we even tell a compelling story (integrated with gameplay so we’re not actually a movie intercut with play), if we wanted to?

I was expecting, after this conclusion of his, some sort of “so here’s how games should tell stories instead: “, but that’s not what came. He basically said that we shouldn’t try to tell stories; rather, a game’s meaning should be suggested in a much more implicit way, one that is derived almost osmotically by experiencing the work, like the meaning of a painting.

At first glance, this seems to me a tall order for an industry that isn’t known for its subtlety. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, we can’t even tell a compelling linear story when we try (even if the dialog of Mass Effect had been punched up, the story would still have sucked for a so-called story-driven game). Can we really be expected to do something even more challenging such as collectively producing a contemplative work of art?

Iron Man the movie hit the theaters yesterday, and the game hit stores. The PS2, PSP, PC and Wii are the ones I got to produce. The next gen SKUs were done by Sega’s own studio.

Last night we went to the movie, then home with the newly purchased game and I watched Jonathan play. The evening was a very cool ride, a happy culmination to 18 months of hard work.

When I produced Happy Feet, access to assets was complicated by the fact that the movie was being produced in Australia. Nevertheless, the whole team got to see the movie at various stages of its production. I had therefore seen it three times by the time it was released.

With Iron Man, the film crew was extremely open with assets, and we visited the set, witnessed some scenes being shot, met director, cast and crew, saw flight animation tests and the Iron Monger suit in the “flesh”, visited Stark mansion and saw Iron Man suit concept art, but I never read the script or actually saw the movie. Consequently, having been allowed access to some information, without seeing the finished product, just made the whole thing extremely tantalizing.

And last night was the biggest payoff a superhero fan could wish for. The movie is awesome, definitely up there with the first Spider-Man for superhero movies.

Go. And make sure you stay until the end of the credits

A large part of the game Mass Effect involves conversation with other characters. They say something to you, you pick among a choice of replies and they react to what you say. Depending on how charming or intimidating your own character becomes over the course of the game, more extreme dialog options become open to you. Experimenting with how characters will react to different lines is most of the fun of the game for me.

But I knew this could get really good when I was admiring a beautiful view with Kaidan, my male subordinate, and he inadvertently let slip something that suggested he was into me.

Now, it doesn’t matter that poor Kaidan looks like Erik Estrada and is written the way a male game designer thinks I want a man to be (basically a 32-year-old telekinetic virgin). I felt the same fuzziness, the same “whoa, did I just hear that?” feeling in my gut as when a new romantic interest is expressed in real life. I wondered how far it would go, and suddenly all my conversational choices with Kaidan revolved around nurturing the budding flame.

Later in the game, I met Liara, a knockout of a blue-skinned alien chick who’s also a socially awkward scientist. No matter what conversational options you choose, Liara wants you bad and overcomes her geeky shyness to let you know it. Indeed, nothing you say seems to turn her off (written the way a male game designer wants a woman to be?). She wasn’t particular about the fact that I’m a female, either. See, her race, the Asari, only has females (yah). In fact, she’s so easy that the first time I played through the game, I accidentally slept with her. And by trying to be a weeeee bit coy with Kaidan, I ended up crushing him.

So the next time I played it safe, acting all but abusive to Liara (because let’s face it, I felt she’d violated me in the first playthrough) and playing mother hen to Kaidan’s paper-thin male ego, and successfully ended up with him in the end.

In a surprising development, last night the two of them confronted me to make a definitive choice. Oh, the drama. I opted for Kaidan but noticed that I did have the option to ask if I could have them both. Now THAT, my friends, is replayability.

In other situations in the game, I wanted to choose one option to see what would happen, but just couldn’t morally bring myself to do it, or would feel truly sorry for the impact I’d had. I couldn’t abstract away the emotions just to satisfy my game designer’s curiosity. And that’s huge.

Mass Effect doesn’t come close to giving me as powerful or complex emotions as I’ve felt watching great cinema, but it comes closer than any game ever has before, and to me that’s a step forward for the medium. I guess the most important thing it made me feel, then, is hope.

Today, Patrick asks, who’s the most awesomest company you can work for in your field? Which company would be the equivalent of playing for the Montreal Canadiens in the 70s? Which would be like playing for them now?

I thought about it, and one of the first that sprang to mind was BioWare. There’s a company that in a bitch of an industry conditions-wise, manages to crank out top-notch games on their own terms, whilst succeeding in being a recognized leader in the area of quality of life. Of course, being in Edmonton, they could only ever hope to be the Oilers, not the Canadiens, but hey.

However, as you may know, BioWare was bought a couple of weeks ago by EA, arguably one of the most infamous games companies for quality of life issues. To some developers, this is like Luke joining forces with Vader. Yesterday Jonathan, a BioWare stockholder, received papers to sign related to the deal. We joked about his stopping the 860M$ deal by failing to return the signed documents on time, and thus becoming a grass-roots hero of game developers everywhere. We wondered how much of a loss he would be willing to take to nix the symbolism-heavy deal.

But no, BioWare will be absorbed into EA, thus motivating the question, if you define awesome by good conditions and quality products, who’s the awesomest NOW?