Some time ago I stopped understanding how to use the Deli.cio.us cron; I’ve consequently relaxed in culling roundups of games-related writing I like. This, I think, is bad. I wonder how much terrific writing is slipping past me.

So I am back with an all new, not-automated Linksplosion.

By the way. It’s Death Week at Unwinnable, and I am very proud of its EIC, Stu Horvath. His piece, “On Death and Gaming,” was reprinted today at Kotaku.

The column stands on its own, but the explosion of reminiscence and reflection in the comments really underscores what cathartic, nourishing work Horvath has done.

There is a style of good experiential writing, and maybe it takes a certain type of experience, then, to know it when you see it. When people know it, though, they are on the same page. They gush. Check the comments. (Also, see the story’s second half. Also, there is newly a third act, which is the most fascinating of all of them, to me, except it waits until its very last paragraphs to even acknowledge video games. I think this is fine.)

The allure of “retro gaming” could well have a great deal to do with memory, with remembering where you were and what you were doing when you felt this one thing. I could make so much more fuss over why video games and death and loss and loneliness are all so connected, but I will stay simple, recommend that you read Stu’s articles, and encourage you to think about how video games connect to your own sense of grief and loss. Because it’s there, it’s there, even if you haven’t connected all these intermingling narratives yet.

I am also into emergent gaming and, uh, agoraphobia.

This is why I really appreciate writer Shaun Gannon’s piece “Professional Gamer.” Gannon has been experimenting with some different types of writing, and this one is maybe like a poem about fearfulness. I bet you’ll like it.

I shouldn’t try to explain anything else, and anyway, you people are not dense.

The website Critical Distance recently invited games writers to discuss “being other.”

Kotaku Australia editor Mark Serrels was up for the challenge, and his “Meeting My Daughter for the First Time (In the Sims)” really struck me.

I am scared of babies, but I am getting to the age where I ought to reconsider my worry, too. But there is a bigger thought, here—about avatars, about artifice, simulacra, that movie Synecdoche, NY—that also occurred to me. I like thinking about how we do and do not resemble our own avatars, about how self-perception is so skewed. But Serrels’ essay goes a step further.

I have heard of people using video game sports simulations to play “future games” and estimate sports brackets, as if sports video games could be accurate ecosystems anyway.

But suppose you were able to use a game to simulate your future son or daughter? Suppose you were secretly and grimly terrified about seeing the outcome? Suppose you played The Sims and discovered your own sense of relief? I am all for existentialism and all its blues, but this was a surprisingly pleasant column.

Related posts:

1. On writing for print

I am about to try something really new. I’ve said that before, but this time I definitely totally mean it.

Lately, I have been getting messages from friends (Allan) about an essay of mine that appeared in Kill Screen Magazine, Issue 3: Intimacy. People, this thing was published in April. Come on.

Obviously I think you should buy the US$15 magazine, which is still available. I know a lot of people get irritated at the idea of spending that kind of money on printed media, which baffles me, but some people believe everything should be online for free. They’ve gotten used to a certain type of accessibility, and I guess that’s OK.

There are a lot of reasons you should buy the magazine, though. For one, it isn’t that old, and it’s a really good issue, and $15 isn’t that much money, and you will have this magazine forever, unless you lose it. For two, we need to support print media right now. (This is very much like a plea I meant to post back in April.) For my own part, I was already paid for my contribution to the magazine, so just buy the magazine, already. For another, we owe the person who ably and singlehandedly edited the piece, writer Chris Dahlen, because he really did do most of the work. Without a good editor, I A) would have given up, or B) would have written something much longer/shorter/worse, but probably just option A.

I wrote this essay, “All the Spaces Between Us,” very specifically for Kill Screen Magazine. It had occurred to me to pitch it to Chris one night in the car, I think in October 2010, when I was going down the highway. (This is how the magic happens, you guys.)

I realized I had some things I wanted to talk about, but if I wanted to go all the way, all-in, I’d have to write for print. That’s because the printed word affords you a freedom you don’t really get with Internet writing. Everyone can see Internet writing and then pass it around, so you have to watch what you say. Plus you don’t want to experiment with putting your whole soul on the line for strangers, and then here comes Joe Dickhead in the comments, picking it apart. Listen, Dickhead! That’s what college was for! OK!

With print, though, people have to pay for the privilege of taking your writing seriously, and because your writing isn’t very muscular anyway, a lot of people are going to flip past your essay. That’s a very freeing feeling, to know that a lot of people won’t stop to read, or else they will get exhausted and stop reading before you ever start making your Very Important Points.

What this all means is, if you can put a humiliatingly personal essay behind the wall of a garden—that is, if the reader has to pay for it, wait for it to arrive in the mail, flip to it, and then stick with it, which, these are an awful lot of hoops—then you are free to say what you like, because all the readers you never even wanted to read your essay already got weeded out. See?

For awhile I’ve thought about just posting the first two sections of the essay right here on this website. The parts about Second Life, sex, and avatars might be interesting to a lot of people who play in virtual worlds, I reasoned, but I chickened out anyway. Or maybe I think the sections about neurology are more important, and I worried that just putting up a chunk would somehow undermine everything.

But I haven’t yet convinced you to spend $15, and that’s fine. And that’s why I’m going for it!!

For a nominal fee, I will let you have a copy of my essay! I know, what a jerk! And I know that not everyone will want to pay a tiny fee, and that is why I feel so liberated!

For 99 cents—that’s the cost of one measly MP3!—here’s what you will get:

• ~15 real-life pages of the overwrought written word
• which comes to about 8,500 written words, actually
• in .pdf form
• set in Garamond!

And that’s all I can promise.

Once you have it, maybe you can print it out and pretend like you are having the Full Magazine Experience. Maybe you will even decide that you would like to read it in Kill Screen instead, with the glossy pages and all the strange and wonderful paintings that José-Luis Olivares made for it, and then you would like to go spend those 15 hard-earned dollars I was talking about before. Or, possibly, none of those things will happen, you’ll get bored with the essay, and then you will have 750 KB of dead weight on your computer.

And there you have it! That’s my idea of a sales pitch!

So here it is. You may download it for 99 American pennies. (Don’t worry: payment processing eats up 56 of those pennies, I have discovered.) I’ve never done this before, but it is pretty easy to get ahold of me if there are any problems.

Related posts:

1. “Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing
2. Kill Screen, issue #1: the No Fun Issue

Many more extrapolations and insights at the link.

• Global Nerdy – Videogames of the Future, as Predicted 25 Years Ago via intweetion

Hi, mom. Hi! It’s me! Yeah, hi!

What? No, I haven’t taken the GRE yet. Hang on, hey, I was calling to tell you—hmm? My driver’s license? Um, nuh-uh, I didn’t renew it. But I—huh? Well, I mean, probably. No, I mean, I’ll get the oil changed, I think I can do that for twenty bucks at the Car-X. What? Yes, we are. No. Yes. Yes. Probably a movie or something. No, I think I’ve actually stopped losing weight. What? Well, ramen and granola, mostly. OK. OK. OK. I don’t think so? OK.

Hey, I was actually phoning to tell you about my article in the magazine. What? No, my article. Well, the magazine is called Kill Screen—uh, no, it’s a video game magazine, I guess “kill screen” is like a video game, uh, term.

But it’s Kill Screen, issue number one, the “No Fun Issue,” and my column is about gender and sex and sexism and uh genderism, and the magazine is twenty dollars. What? No, I get one copy. No, I just get the one copy of it. No. No, I’m keeping my copy. You have to buy your own copy. No. No. Yes. Hmm? Well, even though you can kind of already read my piece online for free, you know, the magazine is published like quarterly, and it’s ad-free and glossy and ninety-six pages long, so since this is a really nice magazine or whatever, like, I couldn’t just publish the old version of the column. So I added a lot to the original piece and we all workshopped it, and so it’s like a really different article now, in some ways, but I think in good ways.

Anyway, I guess that’s all. OK. OK. I will. Mhm. Yes. OK. I will. I will. OK! Talk to you later. OK. OK. Talk to you later. Bye! OK. OK, bye! Yes. I will. Bye!

• Kill Screen Magazine – Issue One: The No Fun Issue

Related posts:

1. On writing for print

• Kotaku – When Instant Death Was Only A Step Away
  The blargh is about Space Quest, but hang out the comments section afterward for some really cool videos (like Waxworks which, let’s face it, you’re basically playing to see how graphic your deaths can be, but that game is totally impossible, so, oh cool someone made an age-gated YouTube video).
• Boing Boing – This Gaming Life free online
  Let’s all read a book, for free! Oh, look. Here is a book I have always wanted to read.

Follow us on Delicious! »

So anyway, Bill Mudron, who is a reputable artist and my third or fourth -favorite person in the world, is working on some weird Nintendo history thing, I don’t know. Looks like a book or something. He just uploaded a book jacket to his Flickr. Whatever.

• Flickr – ‘the Nintendo history book’

The author of Game Widow (and reluctant Dr. Phil guest guru) investigates the collateral damage caused in relationships by game addiction. Kays’ own husband is a game developer.

From the back of her book:

Is your loved one constantly monopolizing your computer or TV to play video games? [editor’s note: Actually, yes, he monopolizes my Xbox.] If so, you might be a game widow. Wendy Kays, former game widow, is here to help. In this book, she successfully bridges the gap between those who game and those who don’t by sharing invaluable advice and practical strategies for reclaiming your relationship with a video-gaming spouse, friend, or family member.

Curious about Game Widow? Me, too.

And for four more days, a PDF of the book is free for download (direct PDF link).

• Game Widow – 30 Day Download Page via gamewidoworg.blogspot.com

• Seattle Times – Former “game widow” shares her heartache and how she got her husband back

Now, with the continued assistance of the University of Potsdam Press, DIGAREC has collected, edited, and published the sum total of the May 2008 conference. The result: a finished book, Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, with keynotes and lectures divided and edited into chapters.

Essays include “The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft,” “The Space-Image: Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games,” “The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army,” and “Différance at Play: Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play.”

Incredibly, DIGAREC opted to publish the book as a free, downloadable PDF—but make no mistake, this is a proper book (with an ISBN and endpages and everything!), suitable for your Kindle or e-reader. It’s a pretty hefty tome. Oh, and yes—it’s all in English. (My German isn’t that good.)

• Universitätsbibliothek Potsdam – Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games (via)

Amazon gives the book’s description thusly:

With both young and adult gamers as loyal fans, The Legend of Zelda is one of the most beloved video game series ever created. The contributors to this volume consider the following questions and more: What is the nature of the gamer’s connection to Link? Does Link have a will, or do gamers project their wills onto him? How does the gamer experience the game? Do the rules of logic apply in the game world? How is space created and distributed in Hyrule (the fictional land in which the game takes place)? How does time function? Is Zelda art?

Ugh. If these musings are any indication as to the content of the upcoming book, count me out. It will sell thousands of copies while real philosophy languishes on the shelves of your library. I’m not saying video games aren’t fertile ground for philosophic discussion, this one just seems…a bit surfacey.

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy is scheduled to hit booksellers in late November.

• 61 Frames Per Second – Philosophy? In my Zelda?

Kohler received said information from Nintendo directly—not through a formal press release, but instead through a text message.

That’s a text message that Nintendo of America just sent to journalists’ phones, knowing they’d be away from their desks covering E3. (The company used the same delivery medium to announce the Wii MotionPlus controller on Monday.)

Although Kohler’s SMS message from Nintendo isn’t the main point of his update, I find this unbelievably interesting. Two days ago I noted that I’d followed E3 news and rumors using Twitter almost exclusively—and using the new Twitteriffic iPhone app, at that. “When I look over my Twitter friend-feed,” I’d said (yes, quoting myself is bizarre), “it’s like this extremely concise liveblog written by ten or twenty people.”

When Howard Rheingold published Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution just six years ago, the book read, at best, as doe-eyed optimism, and at the very worst, as science fiction. At the time, it was impractical for the average American to browse the ‘mobile web’ using any ordinary mobile handset (if I recall correctly, my then-Sprint contract referred to text messaging as “mobile e-mail” or some such gibberish). Even the title, Smart Mobs, seemed a misnomer at the time. The neologism was obviously derived from another new term, ‘flash mobs,’ itself a sort of misnomer. After all, here in the States, any zombie mob or Improv Everywhere performance seems, even now, to require weeks or months of preparation. These events are hardly ‘flashes.’

So when Rheingold described mobile technology as an efficient medium for grassroots messages, or as something that could ”[transform] cultures and communities in the age of instant access”—in his book, Rheingold pointed to the many public demonstrations, “organized through salvos of text messages,” which resulted in the 2000 impeachment of the Philippines’ then-president Joseph Estrada—the idea of cell phones as a means toward political or cultural revolution seemed absolutely foreign, metaphorically and literally. Wasn’t AOL’s instant messenger service enough? Who used a mobile phone for anything except to let your dinner party know you’d be late to the restaurant? Or, for instance, when Rheingold discussed the idea of “wireless quilts,” or when he mentioned things like 3G (on the same page! Page 136!), it seemed completely out there: even the average technophile was still a year or two away from picking up his first wireless router.

And when Rheingold wrote about Finland’s preoccupation with location-based gaming, his description totally predated the ubiquity of English-language expressions like ARG. And even in the present day, it’s difficult to explain location-based gaming even to tech hipsters: I recently had a hell of a time trying to explain the concept to my section of the iPhone waiting line. Only an employee of Limbo, a Finnish social networking site that makes use of mobile technology and the iPhone’s GPS, knew what I was talking about.

Rheingold mentioned, in 2002, that those mobile phones that sell best in Japan all include, beyond the usual alphanumeric characters, a “heart” symbol. I was astonished. Who were these people? I wondered. This was well before I’d started punctuating my SMS messages and informal correspondence with <3, after all.

Japan has long been ahead of the curve; incidentally, the first chapter of Rheingold’s book is titled “Shibuya Epiphany.” In the introduction to Smart Mobs, Rheingold writes of his visit to Shibuya in 2000:

I learned that those teenagers and others in Japan who were staring at their mobile phones and twiddling the keyboards with their thumbs were sending words and simple graphics to each other—messages like short emails that were delivered instantly but could be read at any time. When I looked into the technical underpinnings of telephone texting, I found that those early texters were walking around with an always-on connection in their hands. The tingling in my forebrain turned into a buzz. When you have a persistent connection to the Internet, you have access to a great deal more than a communication channel.

It wasn’t until 2005, at E3, that I realized text messaging was the best way to collaborate, particularly with coworkers on the crowded, noisy show floor. I wasn’t a latecomer to SMS, per se, at least not by North American standards. Like many of my ilk, I didn’t own a cell phone until 2003, and even then, I tended to leave it behind in my apartment. But by 2005, enough people owned cell phones; mobile technology’s subsequent ubiquity made text messaging worthwhile and reliable. Indeed, the value of every other social networking technology—SixDegrees, Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Facebook—is wholly contingent on whether everybody else uses it. What is technologically and sociologically viable on a mobile device is very different from what is possible on the computer, the Xbox, and the web, if only because, in 2008, everyone has one, and it is always on. This new fact intrinsically changes the way we are using cell phones.

Kohler’s text message from Nintendo, in lieu of a formal press release, strikes me as impossibly efficient, and also impossibly Japanese. Five or six years ago, the text message would have struck me as, well, impossible. Now, every journalist is accessible by mobile on the show floor, and where each might have been stingy with giving out his mobile number six years ago, today, he gladly surrenders it to the Nintendo Rollodex.

And as part of the ongoing Dark Knight marketing, a link to each new ARG ‘scavenger hunt’ is sent to its players via text message. While mobile social software like Dodgeball and Limbo have yet to catch on in the U.S.—here, the thought of faceless followers knowing your every move is, in a word, creepy—services like Twitter have inexplicably caught on. What’s more, that service has transitioned into an almost wholly mobile service (does anyone still use the web interface? Besides me, I mean), and over a very short span of time. Even the Facebook and Myspace iPhone applications have seamlessly turned onetime web-based services into excellent mobile software. We are very new to what Rheingold calls “a persistent connection to the Internet,” and we are more receptive to that new freedom than we ever might have guessed in 2002.

How long until other PR groups catch the SMS fever? How long until those one-off Twitters and strangely-punctuated SMS messages become fodder for genuine news? Until they become the news itself?

I wouldn’t have called Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution a must-read back in 2002: although it seemed, at the time, valuable and interesting, its subject matter was not yet totally applicable or crucial. How the times have changed.

This is by no means a stand-in for a review of Smart Mobs. I’d never intended to write about the book at all, least of all for Infinite Lives. Perhaps I should reconsider. Online multiplayer had an extremely narrow market six years ago; therefore, sections of the book that didn’t exactly pertain to videogames half a decade ago are, in 2008, absolutely relevant. “When I learned to see the signs,” Rheingold wrote, “I began to see them everywhere—from barcodes to electronic bridge tolls. The other pieces of the puzzle are all around us now but haven’t joined together yet.” In the ensuing six years they have joined together. Smart Mobs effectively predicted a sociological reality.

• Game Life – Nintendo: Wii Outsells Xbox 360 In U.S.
• Smart Mobs – About the Book

Two years ago, independent game designer Steve Swink wrote an essay, an amazing, brilliant manifesto titled “Principles of Virtual Sensation.” In this design primer, Swink lists the tenets of movement and animation, and how these principles correspond to virtual sensation, which in turn makes for what Swink simply calls “good-feeling gameplay.” But what is virtual sensation? Swink explains:

Driving a car, you have a very strong sense of the position of that car, the feel of steering and controlling it, of mastery. This is the ability that every person who’s ever learned to drive a car has: the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body. There is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation. [...] Many people also find this pleasure in video games, where it is both distilled to its essence and free of the constraints and dangers of more physical activities. You can change the turning radius of a car, but you can’t change gravity. This experience of control is derived from an artificial kinesthesia. This is the ‘feel’ of the game, the thing that makes your mom lean left and right in her seat as she tries to play Rad Racer.

If Swink’s essay leaves you wanting more, don’t worry!

Game Feel: a Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation is over 300 pages of game design philosophy, with plenty of insights from Swink’s indie design peers. (Incidentally, Phil Fish of Fez designed Game Feel’s cover jacket.)

Game Feel drops this October.

• Amazon preorder – Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation
• Steve Swink – “Principles of Virtual Sensation”
• Via

Related posts:

1. Make a 3D video game, dance at the afterparty