Infinite Lives » Ephemera

Failures in Edutainment: the mid-’90s “girl game” fad

Jenn Frank — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:51:32 +0000

Brandon Boyer, via Twitter, inadvertently (advertently? well, whatever) directed me toward this post at Jezebel about girl games.

Its writer, Anna Breslaw, opens her piece with a quick hat-tip to a 1995 computer game called Chop Suey, which I’ve mentioned on Infinite Lives thrice before and am about to mention again. That’s because it is a great game that isn’t mentioned often enough. I’m trying to change the world, here, people.

But yes, our coincident timing is totally awkward, ha ha. Earlier in the week I’d snuck a bunch of Chop Suey playthrough videos onto YouTube, hoping to jog memories. (For a long time the only footage of the game available online was Bruno’s.)

But also, I was already laboring over this Chop Suey retrospective. Please do read it! It is a tragedy Chop Suey isn’t better remembered: it was celebrated in its day, and with reason. But most people did not use the Internet in 1995, which is to say, Chop Suey and all its accolades have not been very well preserved. (Duncan’s extraordinarily bizarre death doesn’t help anything; it’s almost impossible to discuss Chop Suey without mentioning that part, too, and the game is thusly difficult to google.)

The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were such a great time for edutainment, and while the medium isn’t entirely dead (your child’s school computer lab may yet have Storybook Weaver!), I do think the middle-’90s’ “girl game” craze went a long way in murdering it. Worse, the “girl game” genre probably scared a generation of woulda-been PC gamers away.

Most girls did not actually play girl games in the ‘90s, of course, because most “girl games” were stupid. Girls are not idiots. Girls are not boy-crazy strumpets. Girls are 8. Girls are 9. Girls play Oregon Trail and You Don’t Know Jack. Can people not picture 9-year olds?

This is what girls really want: girls want horse training simulations; they like fortune-telling; girls read spy stories and tales of adventure and daring; girls enjoy the Super Nintendo version of Mario Kart and computer games about being in outer space. Girls would like chemistry lab sets for Christmas, or planetariums and cheap telescopes, or periscopes and walkie-talkies. Girls like crafts. Girls like Minecraft! Girls like dolls, toy theaters, replicas, scale miniatures, and “character editors.” Girls like She-Ra. Girls like Labyrinth. Girls like sci-fi, unless it’s just a bunch of dweeby dudes standing around talking into their own lapels. Girls like pirates and especially stowaways, and especially stowaways who look like boys but are secretly girls. Girls like scrappy heroines—resourceful, freckle-nosed troublemakers—heroines with scraped knees and scuffed shoes. Girls are impatient to learn something new, and if you don’t give them brain-food they eventually wander off. There! There is your blueprint for a “girl game.”

So, yes, Breslaw’s and my Chop Suey -themed posts both went up on May 12, both incorporating that same playthrough footage. Oops! How embarrassing. It’s a little like arriving at a dance in matching dresses.

Fortunately, the dresses aren’t identical! (Ha, ha, ha!) Breslaw’s piece isn’t about Chop Suey at all, thank goodness. It’s actually about a new project called FEMICOM, an online museum that aspires to catalogue and archive every manner of game-for-girls. This is noble work—it’s why I’ve made Chop Suey evangelism one of my pet hobbies, actually—exactly because the project illustrates the enormity of the gulf between “this game or toy is edifying” and “why would you ever give your child that.”

The nicest thing about seeing this article about “girl games” on Jezebel, though? It’s elicited all these comments, where the readers themselves are essentially sorting the lady-treasures from the lady-tripe. One reader mentions Heavenly Sword for PS3. Oh, boy, do girls love that game. (Because we love third-person beat-em-ups starring She-Ra! It’s pretty much the only game you should give an adult woman. There, I said it.)

Other notable “girl-friendly” game mentions: Sim City. The Sims. Little Big Planet. Metroid. Zelda. Carmen Sandiego. Ecco. Pokemon. No One Lives Forever. Nancy Drew games. Street Fighter, Soul Calibur. Doom, Marathon, BioShock. Killer7 (most girls do really well with first-person rail-shooters; this has something to do with spatial attention). Final Fantasy. Fallout. Diablo. Starcraft. Mass Effect. Star Wars KOTOR. Guild Wars. Skyrim. Braid. Age of Empires. Civilization. Portal and its sequel. (“I loved that about Portal…really the only way you knew the character was female was from the brief glimpses you got of yourself if you lined Portals up right. Her female-ness wasn’t a factor one way or the other in the game.” Thank you, Susan Fry! I agree.)

And a thread, four comments long, about Woodruff and the Schnibble.

And also from the Jez comments,

See, this is why I get so frustrated with the whole conversation about games for girls. If you’d tried to design an ideal non-people based game for little girl me, it would have featured dinosaurs fighting each other, not dolphins swimming around being pretty.

Motherboard – In a Field of ‘90s Barbieland Wreckage, Chop Suey Got Gaming for Girls Totally Right

Required Reading: ‘A Theoretical War, Part 3′

Jenn Frank — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:21:38 +0000

Me: i was reading this tonight
Me: http://www.electrondance.com/a-theoretical-war-part-3/
Me: i was feeling out how joel goodwill feels
Me: i think i like where he takes it
Me: how much about games criticism do you read

Julian: not much

Me: LUDOLOGY VS NARRATOLOGY: THE FUNNEST ARGUMENT

Julian: man I hate it when things become binary

Me: mhm

Julian: that said, I was thinking that I don’t want my game-playing to be interactive infographs either, you know?

Me: ah, here it is!

Narrow definitions of games are perfectly valid within little contextual spaces. Ludology can have its rules-based framework. Narratology is free to pursue games through narrative. Art games can co-exist with the FPS, the RTS and the platformer. They don’t have to compete. Why can’t we have different theories for different situations, each one handling their own definition of game?

Every voice and viewpoint is valuable. What’s so maddening are the destructive attempts to own the word game. Mathematics blossomed into a thousand different branches, so has games and so should the theory. Some will care about narrative. Some will care about rules. Some will care about player experience. Some will care about monetization. And some will try to change the world.

There’s enough space for everyone.

Julian: music is kind of like that too
Julian: hardcore music theorists are all about structure (and usually against tonality)

Me: i inadvertently read that the wrong way
Me: as people who are not hardcore into music theory,
Me: but rather, into hardcore music……… theory

Julian: haha

(This all came up because Julian had actually sent me this, and I became very, “oh, hmm.” )

(P.S. If you happily follow all Goodwin’s endnotes, you might suddenly discover it is a quarter after 10pm and you have not yet washed a single dish or glass.)

Formspring Tuesday: Why “virtual reality” will never catch on

Jenn Frank — Tue, 01 May 2012 22:34:57 +0000

Some of you might know that I cultivate and maintain a semi-active Formspring account, where I try to answer both queries about video games and humiliating questions about my personal life just as accurately and plainly as I can.

Recently somebody asked,

What happened to virtual reality? Remember the promise of a Sega Genesis and Atari Jaguar helmet in the mid-90s?

This is a great question! My reply is off-the-cuff, and now that I’ve written it I think I might like to expand on it later. But here is v1.0 anyway:

VR just gets turned into other stuff. Like, Second Life was actually supposed to be a type of VR, with the headset and haptic feedback and everything.

What it really comes down to is, people aren’t ready and willing to look that fucking stupid. And they never will be.

Did you ever seen the “early adopter” on the airplane, watching his movie in his little hd widescreen movie spectacles? The year was like 2001ish, and that guy was a full-on dweebazoid. He takes a segway to work, and he’s happy because he’s living in the future, and I’m glad for him, but his eagerness to strap every type of laser to his body will never, ever be cool.

Similarly, I remember seeing a prototype for a type of wearable keyboard—it fit in the palm and it was really easy to learn to touch-type—in a magazine called ‘Shift.’ Boy, did they try to glam up that wearable keyboard, but there was no way. Attaching a computer to your body is not, will not be “cool.” The problem with VR is, if anyone catches you wearing a headset, you might as well close down that OKCupid profile.

I’m borrowing a lot of these points from an article I read—I don’t remember when or where—about the consistent lack of commercial success with all these repeated iterations of the “videophone.” Sure, times have changed since that article was written, insofar as Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are totally viable, but the truth is, I’m not going to take some random call when my hair is a nest and my face is splotchy, just like I’m not going to run down to answer the door.

Here’s an unhappy truth about technology: the real obstacle is vanity. Take elevators, for instance. There once was a hotel elevator, and it was too slow. The elevator’s inventor thought long and hard about how to speed up the elevator’s mechanisms. Do you know what he did instead? He put up a mirror. He hung a mirror right next to the sliding elevator doors, because people wouldn’t notice the subpar elevator technology. They’d be too busy looking at themselves.

Post-mortem: I’m not sorry

Jenn Frank — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:10:23 +0000

Follow-up: in March, during GDC, writer Dan Cox interviewed me via email about this “controversy.” His questions, along with my answers, probably go much further in explaining my attitude. My editor and I also explain our “go big or go home” mentality—as well as our happiness in playing the roles of villains—in the final quarter of this episode of Unlistenable.

OK, I’m sorry for just one thing: I’m sorry I have such a wonderful editor.

I was barely into the thread itself by the time I was hard at work on a YouTube-type comment.

In considering both the comment thread and the blog above it—which I’d interpreted as some litany, as some unreal catalogue of hither-and-thither complaints—I wanted to respond, because I know that professionals who are enmeshed in any sort of politic business are unable to respond to these types of criticisms, or with any passionate emphasis. This makes me angry all on its own.

Also, professionally and personally, I was deeply unimpressed.

As my remarks snowballed, though, I realized I should write something for myself, just to let it all out. Well, and when I say “for myself,” I mean “for Infinite Lives,” which is my site and oh my god I periodically drag my co-writer through the mud when I irresponsibly follow some wild livejournal tangent.

So suddenly I wasn’t working on a frothing Internet comment at all; I was writing a piece for this very site instead.

My editor IM’d, wanting to know whether my column were finished yet, and I was very, “NOT NOW I’M BUSY” to him. He wondered what I was writing, so I sent it to him in four or five chunks over IM. He announced he wanted to publish it, and from there we really giddily lost our minds, our enthusiasm mirroring and magnifying. He cut one chunk and I cut another, and now we agreed the piece was totally ready to go. He gave it a much better title and suggested some images, and I told him I was all-in. I endorsed every addition myself. I was furious and happy.

For me, it was as much about “fun” as it was “ire.” I decided, if I were going to feel irate about something, wouldn’t it be great fun to just run all the way? Because it’s totally true—I’ve forced my writing to be this very level-headed, contemplative thing for a long time. I’ve always held that “manners are how we show strangers we care,” and I certainly believe it.

But I’ve also noticed I do that thing girls do: I rely on “hedged” diction to couch everything I say in some sort of apology. Maybe it would be nice, for once, to forget judiciousness.

So here the article is again.

In the course of what I wrote—which I admit I haven’t reread ever since we published it, out of real, sheer terror at whatever I said in the moment, probably something seething about grinding my enemies’ bones with a pestle into powder—I am sure I made much of having worked in a “mainstream” capacity in the past.

And I’ll explain why: it’s sickening that people in “mainstream” arenas don’t get to defend themselves fully and blood-boilingly. (Since having worked in “mainstream” “games” “journalism,” I finally returned to retail, where people might believe your politeness makes you an idiot, or else they believe that the man and woman at the cash register aren’t actually the owners of the business. Surely the chip on my shoulder is calcified by retail work; that’s fine.)

It does make me angry that being a “mainstream” writer means you never get to say what you mean. Mainstream businesspeople never get to defend what they “do.”

You never have an opportunity to defend yourself, because your primary motive is to do the work you already do in this stiflingly politic way. Have you ever been trapped in a position where you are not allowed to defend yourself, or where you happily make yourself the scapegoat at every opportunity? It’s an incredibly helpless, please-kill-me feeling.

I have spent most of my post-high-school years trying to not be brash or bombastic, and it’s just so passive-aggressive. And what would it be like to be aggressive, without all that horrible passivity? I wondered about it.

So I figured, sure, people might enjoy hearing what I sound like when I yell in the living room, absolutely livid, about almost anything. Because I do: I shout and point in all directions, just hissing and spitting, trying to work out my feelings. Sometimes this means I can make an outline later, so that I can write some well-conceived, mannerly thing, but just for fucking once I just wanted to set down all the hissing-and-spitting. I thought this might be interesting for my core readers, or at least it could be more fun for me.

OK, maybe I was bored. Maybe I was bored, but I wasn’t being disingenuous: I meant everything I said. Oh, man, did I.

Wouldn’t that be fun, though? I marveled. People have been getting a little too comfortable around my writing these days, I reasoned. Maybe people should not feel so comfortable. Maybe they ought to know I am a loaded gun. Maybe I should take a worthwhile opportunity to say what I really think.

Maybe I could learn how to not say “maybe” and start saying things with a little more certainty and authority.

I idly wondered how this attitude might look on a woman. What would the response be like? It thrilled me.

I decided I wanted to play a villain. It would be so much fun! I wanted to play with the fact that I am not an emotionally generous person. I think I was—sometime in the past—but I’m not right now. (I also wanted to reinforce that you should be more frightened of the judges’ very humanity than of the mechanized “process.” I think this is a fair point.)

This all might have been selfish of me: I might have not helped anything. That’s too bad.

“I don’t have any strategy here at all,” I admitted to my editor in an IM. In real life, I sighed. But my “career” has taken hits before: I don’t have so much to lose. I should be allowed to say what other people would like to say. I should even be allowed to say what I would like to say.

I am only just now trying to explore where “no manners whatsoever” and “meanspirited” diverge. Where do they diverge?

Anyway, I told my editor, “Let’s put the ‘go’ in the ‘go-for-it.’”

My editor did suggest we omit some of the article, especially those parts where I confess all the ways I ever went wrong as an IGF judge. I said no way. I said I wanted to be beyond reproach. He said all right.

I also demanded that my editor cut a paragraph about why I didn’t judge IGF this year. The paragraph was intended to promise game developers that I had nothing to do with this year’s drama; instead I found myself listing sad things. My editor cut the section at my insistence.

Maybe an editor ought to be more persuasive, but I am happy mine was not.

And anyway, those parts we kept are important, they are part of my argument: I am not too sure there is a way, in any system of checks and balances, to democratically account for human error. It isn’t even real irresponsibility: it’s just being human. Robots cannot review a game. Sure, robots cannot give up on your game, either, but they also cannot critique it. For better or worse, we do rely on humans to have all these things happen.

And there is human error coming at this from all sides. Certainly it is terrifying for me to advise, as a former professional and current outsider, that perhaps developers should examine their games a little harder for problems. If someone—someone who is explicitly commanded to play your game—is bypassing your game, there might be an issue. Really! That idea hardly seems controversial!

Of course, I also believe that checks-and-balances are already built into the system. I’m not sure, at least at this early juncture, there is a way to change my mind. In the original column I say it—“you can’t do better”—and it’s just the thing someone says in an abusive relationship. But I really, really mean it. I’m not sure you could scoop together a better, more varied assortment of humans to play a single game.

So there is human error. But there is always human goodness, too, always there to overcompensate. And the humans involved in this particular system always have the best hopes in mind. You can republish every piece of personal correspondence they mail—sorry to bring it up again—but I won’t change my mind.

This part infuriated me most, I can freely admit, and I feel very reconciled about overstepping the bounds of politeness, manners, and decency in addressing this. Maybe it was totally “eye for an eye” of me. Maybe I scooped up too many fish in my net. But I will wholly admit my goat was got, at the outset, because some people had a bad attitude about some very, very nice people. (Here is the other troubling thing: we are all “nice people,” all trying to help one another out. Again, why call someone out over loving you?)

Perhaps it isn’t so “cool” of me to fight for something so “mainstream.” I joked to my editor that my conservatism was beginning to show, but also that IGF’s only real sin—the only reason their intelligently-devised process is held up to such speculation and skepticism—is that they are so “mainstream.” Would any other process get so widely smacked-down?

I believe the machine works. I mean, I’ve gone back to see what games won the awards I thought someone else ought’ve won; I can see why which games win. The machine really does weed out the worst. I do believe that.

I also believe that decrying the machine undermines every winner all the years previous. This makes me furious. Do we no longer care about all the games that have already won? We are talking about incredible games. Where is any evidence of nepotism? This makes me angry, too.

Before he published my rant, my editor asked me if I were ready. He asked me if I were prepared for the repercussions. I told him that, after I formally took my first professional job but before I’d actually moved across the country for it, I’d already had my first penis photoshopped into my mouth. Was I ready? Please.

There were only a couple reactions that were really inappropriate. I was due them, though: I was curious about what it might be like to try to sound like a man on the Internet. So I found out.

This next part is a quick aside about what it is like to post your opinion to the Internet:

One guy accused me of “Girl on the Internet Syndrome.” Really? Really, guy? I’ve been on the Internet since 1993, and I’ve long since grown out of the shock of also being female. He also wondered who in the IGF I am boning, which was a little bit more astonishing. I might be a little lovey-dovey about IGF—you can accuse me of wearing rosy goggles all you like—but I certainly haven’t gotten any sex out of it. (Someone should have told me! That might be exciting!)

Another guy recommended I die. That remark was deleted! I was sad to see it go! I asked my editor about it, and he said we had “policies” already in place. Aw. It’s nice that we have a “safe space” in the comments section, and I thanked him for this.

But all these comments were pretty much anomalous. Honestly I was surprised by their infrequency.

But there was one complaint that really jarred me while all the others didn’t. That one came from a game developer named Anna Anthropy.

Anna is working, as both a developer and a critic, from a fringe wherein she is able to point out issues of “otherizing” and “dismissiveness.” She is either sensitive or opportunistic to these cues—I am not always sure which, because I agree with her about 50/50—but when she makes a stink, I listen more carefully. This time, when she perceived that I was using silencing tactics (in this case, “Oh, you think you have issues? SHUT UP,” which is certainly how one should interpret my rant), I had to take inventory of what I had said.

Anna had crammed the point into a quick joke, into two short, well-timed lines, and it was important that I stop and listen.

Am I bullying? Did I create an unsafe space for game developers—including those people who take issue with the system already in place—for making their criticisms known? Because that really would be dangerous, if I have actively created a space where it is frightening to make needs known.

This last count is harrowing. I am still wrestling with it.

So if I am sorry for anything, it is for being a bully. I would really hope I hadn’t been. I would not want to be a bully.

There was an article someone linked, soon in the aftermath, about whether it were “possible” to be a “writer” in the “digital age.” It was entirely about those slow, careful things we write, with consideration, in a vacuum, versus those things one is tempted to post in a hurry, however carelessly, to the Internet.

But in that article, one famous author noted that he would never willingly sign his name to his own “rants” and “blasts.” I did. I marched, however haphazardly, from posting a comment to posting a column in the most visible forum I have. I put my name on it. And even though I am scared of my own wrath—even though I really fear being a bad person—by God, yes, I’d do it all over again.

VERY LATE EDIT: It turns out I’ve delivered some of these same opinions before. (In the comments: “You know what happens to indie games mainstream-reviewers want to criticise severely? They don’t review them. Like, obviously.” —Kieron Gillen)

Rotting Cartridge: What’s Wrong with the IGF
Unwinnable: The IGF is Just Fine—You’re the Problem
Penny Arcade Report: Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank responds to Independent Games Festival drama with logic, and some anger – (hang out in the comments)
Andy Moore – IGF is awesome, and not perfect – (hang out in the comments)
Rotting Cartridge: RE: What’s Wrong with the IGF

Linksplosion: Martin Amis, ‘Minecraft,’ and Emporium Bar Arcade

Jenn Frank — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 02:18:24 +0000

Hello and hi. I collected a couple links a couple days ago, but I hadn’t yet posted them—until now! Lucky you!

Joystiq – Minecraft building blocks (via Metafilter.
The correct reaction is “what the—”
Eater – Emporium Arcade Bar Opening in March
A Barcade-style barcade is coming to Chicago, and everyone is freaking out:

Expect a focus on Midwestern and local beer with half of the beer on tap always being from the Midwest. The plan is to rotate their selection often, so there will always be new brews to try. There will also be a large whiskey list, with a selection of standard and upscale varieties. A full bar will be available as well and there may be more specialty cocktails down the line.
Writer Martin Amis once penned a video-game near-classic, Invasion of the Space Invaders. The Millions has a review of the book (via Slate).

Since the book is impossible to buy used, some Good Samaritan is publishing Amis’s book’s very best lines as a Twitter feed.

Related posts:
1. Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, July 07, 2010
2. Super Button Mashers: a Gamer Tribute at OhNo!ARCADE

Tunnel Snakes rule

Jenn Frank — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:08:33 +0000

Some days I am happy to be alive.

(Thanks to Mike Emmons for, uh, whatever.)

ETA: as a scant few members of Kotaku’s readership rushed to mention, yes the video is old OK.

How Infinite Lives came to pass

Jenn Frank — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:25:18 +0000

Wired’s Chris Kohler:

Found: A lifetime ago, @jennatar and I sat in a diner and brainstormed website names on a placemat.

The year was 2006! According to Kohler, I registered this domain the very next day. Other names in the mix: duckdragons; pixelface; any fabricated word that could combine some “variation on a popular Japanese word in the U.S. lexicon” or “variation on (peripheral).”

On death, motherhood, and ‘Creatures’

Jenn Frank — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:04:25 +0000

I picked a pretty opportune moment to start writing for Unwinnable: it was the site’s “Death Week,” and if there is one thing I love to think about, it’s death.

One night I finally settled on an idea for “Death Week,” drank some beers, and wrote an article. It’s like a much shorter version of some of the longest articles I’ve done, so it was an interesting experiment. I really enjoyed writing it! I was comparatively concise!

You can read it at its real home, Unwinnable, or you might read it at Kotaku, where the heroic Kirk Hamilton has republished it. I recommend reading it at Unwinnable if only because I wrote it specifically for Unwinnable, but at Kotaku there is the benefit of the influx of comments. I love this. I already know what my article sounds like, so the real interest, for me, will be in what others say. When there are all these simultaneities in experience, I get really happy. So far the comments are really inspiring.

Finally—and I mentioned his article before, but—Mark Serrels’ piece for Kotaku Australia went a long way in influencing the piece I wrote, too. When I described his article last week, I started talking about my fear of kids, and this has probably continued to haunt me till now.

“Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing

Ads for Game Boy Camera and ‘Girl Talk’ (1998)

Jenn Frank — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:04:00 +0000

I posted these to my Twitter account this morning, but here they are again: two ads from the November 1998 issue of Teen People.

There’s something anachronistically stylized—very late-80s/early-90s, I mean—about the forced perspective in this 1998 Game Boy Camera ad. Like, why is his hand way up here when the rest of his body is way over there? I don’t know.

The print ad for Girl Talk: the CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare was what really gave me the heebie-jeebies, though. “It’s just like life but with better graphics,” the ad copy touts. Oh, dear. Worse, if I am interpreting correctly, there is single-player mode. So you are a 12-year-old girl playing Truth or Dare, at your desk, alone. That’s… well, it sounds a lot like my preteen years, OK, but my mother really tried her best to not encourage that type of loneliness.

I have the 1990 edition of the Girl Talk board game (I have it right here, actually), which was really only a pinker redesign of the original 1988 Girl Talk. Since my own girlhood, the game has been rehabbed as Hannah Montana Girl Talk, That’s So Raven Girl Talk, and—yes, I saw it in a Toys ‘R Us—Bratz Girl Talk. (Up-to-the-minute variants on Truth or Dare include “Girl Talk Sassy Stix” and Girl Talk Sparkle Spots.”

So I am staring at this ad for PC multimedia Girl Talk and I’m just like, I have no idea whether that were a good idea.

We hate Paul

Jenn Frank — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:56:08 +0000

This video has been around for maybe a day and a half, tops—in Internet Time, it’s already months old—but I really enjoyed its not-too-malicious dramatic reenactment of the dumbest, most interesting Holiday Shopping Nightmare human interest story ever told in 2011.

Also, Revision3’s Anthony Carboni is nowhere near jacked enough to play Paul, the villain in this melodrama, and this bit of miscasting is charming all on its own. (Kotaku and Escapist have the full deets, but the video might be enough.)

There are a lot of things about this I don’t understand. I don’t quite understand why “Dave,” the unhappy customer, forwarded his ongoing, charged email exchange to Mike Krahulik (“Gabe” of Penny Arcade, AKA the hotheaded one), except that Dave needed some muscle on his side. Mike tried his best to mediate, which is weird enough anyway, but there was little reasoning with “Paul,” the erstwhile giant of PR (whether he is even a PR guy is up for debate) who until recently had mishandled the marketing for some weird video game peripheral. Which, if you are wondering, did not ship in time for the holidays, and how dare you email Paul about this, Dave.

In a way I do feel bad for Paul. When a shipment is trapped in customs, you might feel helpless, especially when the holdup is not your fault. You can’t get frustrated with other people, though. Like, you just can’t.

So it turns out Paul might be a little bit of a nutjob; unsurprisingly, Paul no longer has a job.

And yet, and yet. There is so much pleasure—so much schadenfreude!—to be derived from this entire Greek tragedy, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m getting off on it, along with the rest of the mob. It’s just so much fun to see a juiced-up marketing guy finally get peed on, isn’t it?

But why do we even feel that way?

Er. Most games journalists have such a distaste for PR people—please, stop me if this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule—maybe because we often get stuck rewriting press releases as pretend-news. Sure, I’ve had misunderstandings; I’ve had tiffs. Ugh, marketing. Ugh.

Why the disdain, though? Most PR people are authentically very nice! Obsequious sometimes, sure, if they’re doing their job. Pesky? All right. And it does seem like some of the girls exercise and drink vodka-sodas and wear tight pants and go clubbing after work (sorry!). But no PR person has ever really made my life miserable. In fact, PR people have split cabs with me, asked me about my job and my life, and taken me to dance clubs. Like I’m a swan-in-waiting! Or the ugly sorority sister, I’m not sure which. So there’s this palpable cultural divide, but PR people do go out of their way to not be jerks. I think back on the inventive ways I’ve maligned PR people—they try to be so nice, and you can get away with murder, hilarious murder—and in retrospect I know who the real jerk is.

I am struggling, in fact, to think of even one marketing person I’ve ever sincerely disliked as a human being, and the answer is, Me, Just Me, Anytime I Ever Did Anything that Felt Like Marketing, Even in Passing. God, can I be passive-aggressive. (The other ugly reality is, a lot of professional games journos, the married ones [which is impressive in itself; I think very few journalists manage to stay married], when suddenly faced with unemployment—and I am describing people for whom the financial dangerousness of freelancing is not an option, because there is a house and all these mouths to feed—will move swiftly and directly and invariably into the arms of PR, or marketing, or community-management, or whatever can crush a writer’s dignity readily and wholly.)

For my own part, I can only think of one industry email exchange that ever even approached rudeness. Long ago, a famous video game developer, in keeping with the spirit of his ‘pose’, contacted me to “get the ball rolling” in an email that was flip and obnoxious. I was actually kind of giddy when I received this email—certainly not offended, because I myself have hammered out some peevish emails to bosses—but I also didn’t know where to begin with my reply. So I… didn’t… write… back. I didn’t write this famous important dude back! The next morning, I received a second email, and this one was apologetic, deferential, and over-polite. And I was giggling as I wrote a very professional reply, but I was also very “Oh, no! This guy thinks I’m mad at him! That’s awful!”

And lately, the only strongly-worded email I’ve sent was to a company that sells and ships dog ornaments. Dog ornaments. These were sculpted ceramic dogs, intended to be looped onto little paperclip-hooks. I was writing on my mother’s behalf, of course. I did not receive a strongly-worded email in kind; I fixed that ish right up. (No, my mother did not owe money for a dog ornament. How dare they.)

What I am saying is, Paul is anomalous. He is nothing like the average PR person, as the average PR person tends to be very nice. Or indie developers, who have to do their own PR, they tend to be very nice also. I don’t think Paul is representative of games culture at all?

Oh, some people are willfully bombastic—even twerpy—and yeah, I’ve emailed threats that I cowrote with my legal person up in corporate, but even those were, I don’t know, nice? They were nice, measured, understanding, compassionate legal threats. (Of course I would think I’m “nice,” but seriously, now. Nothing good has ever come of an email sent in a hurry.)

I am trying to wrap my noggin around my own schadenfreude, and I think the word I’m looking for is “horror.”

Many writers, for instance, are horrified at the very thought of PR—it’s the machine that kills artisticalness! or whatever—and they project that horror as a type of disdain. But PR people are paid to be nice. If you have ever been a CM or worked retail, you know how difficult it is to be paid to be nice. You will kill yourself trying to stay nice. This weirdo, Paul? He’s gaily breaking every marketing rule. That is horrifying. Why is it so horrifying?

And it’s great fun, almost always, to crucify every socially aberrant behavior.

Which is not to say that “Paul” is in the right—he isn’t, and for the love of God, he should maybe pursue a course other than marketing, some course that won’t tax his writing skills, say—but again, why do I hate Paul so much?

Why do we all hate Paul?

As Mike Krahulik tells it, it’s because Paul is a “bully.” Oooh. We hate bullies. I really hate bullies. I, too, wish bullies would lose their jobs, exactly the way Paul has lost his job, publicly and cruelly. But bullying is not aberrant in certain professions; rather, bullying can be the hatter of success. Few people have gotten far on “nice.”

But we are sitting here on the Internet at all because we believe in the Internet’s ability, when speaking in one chorus, to invert the social hierarchy, whether to recognize RAW TALENT that otherwise wouldn’t be acknowledged, or to topple bullies and give them what-for. That hope is why I boarded the Internet in 1993, as a miserable preteen, and I bet that is part of the reason you are here now. We champion underdogs.

But when I was briefly a CM I discovered how easy it is to suddenly become the “bully” in any given narrative—this is to say, to become the person at whom the rest of the Internet is angry. It is a surprising position to find oneself in. And while it feels interminable and is forever googleable, it thankfully does not last.

I think I’m talking about this because Dave, in the Kotaku comments, became so apologetic. (This might be due, in part, to Paul’s apology.) Dave never intended his customer-service complaint to explode the way it did, now that we all hate Paul. Has Dave ruined Paul’s life? Dave wonders; Dave worries. Dave worries about becoming our champion. Dave worries about the way we have all seized on Paul.

Paul isn’t a nice guy. Paul shouldn’t even be in marketing. The world is full of not-nice guys; less so, marketing has some not-nice people, people I myself have never chanced to meet.

Still, maybe Dave is right to worry about us.

Update: Owen Good of Kotaku took the same stance as I did, only stronger, and the backlash in the comments—-calling for his op/ed to be “unpublished”!—-is so extreme, I cannot even.

Happy holidays! 1986 style

Jenn Frank — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:07:48 +0000

Sierra is pleased to present this living Christmas card. It is intended to help you demonstrate the color and sound capabilities possible with today’s personal computers while promoting the Christmas spirit within your store.

As an added bonus, you may customize this program each time you run it with a message of your own. This allows you to advertise your sale items, or to wish your customers a Merry Christmas in your own words.

This program is hard disk installable and is meant to be run in the morning and left running all day.

What ‘Glitch’ cannot teach us about being alive

Jenn Frank — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:46:54 +0000

I stand by my initial, glowing review of Glitch, for the most part, but I injected it with some lovey-dovey romance that now only feels disingenuous. Anytime I accidentally scroll past my Glitch review, I feel little stabs. So in the interest of truthfulness, I need to revise.

A week after I wrote that thing, we got into a weird fight. We were supposed to go on a date, which was going to be nice—we had been playing a lot of Glitch together, instead of working or hugging, and we never really got out and did anything nice for ourselves.

And I mean, he and I were playing a lot of Glitch. I can’t remember when I was so addicted to a game. (1993?)

Instead of being a metaphor for intimacy, maybe it became a stand-in for intimacy: just a young couple, late at night, sitting across the room from each other, typing more than talking. Or maybe we stopped playing as a team, because it was easier to wander off—an “every man for himself” sort of thing. It wasn’t like Portal 2 multiplayer; it wasn’t like collaborative play in Terraria. (Call of Duty is supposedly the number-one relationship-ruiner, since you were wondering.)

So I was getting dressed for our date while he waited. I don’t know why I was so nervous. I asked him, twice, to stop pacing. The first time was a joke. The second time I mentioned it, he shouted something and made for the front door. And then he stood there, giving me a chance to apologize to him. He stood across the room, and then he came very close to me and said something, and waited. I don’t remember what he said—I couldn’t hear him anymore—and I didn’t say anything.

I was so rattled. And I walked off. Then I heard the door slam.

I ran into the street in my socks, calling, but he wasn’t there.

It was a non-fight, until I did that thing girls do. I cried awhile, and then I got out my cell phone.

Ladies! Don’t do this, ladies! Don’t text angry things while you’re panicked! “Who do you think you are?” you might ask someone you supposedly love so much. “Why do you always do this?” you might lie.

I was really furious now, so I, uh, I moved out of my little treehouse in Tii Quarter, in Glitch.

Oh, how stupid. That’s what I thought to do? To go, “Boy, howdy, I’ll show this guy I mean business by moving out of a virtual place.”

But we had been operating only in metaphors for a few weeks, which is not healthy.

And I went from apartment to apartment in Glitch, looking for a new one, keeping one wary eye on the real estate listings, worried someone else was going to buy my treehouse and its two chickens and its crops and trees and pig because, OK, I just wasn’t sure I was making the right decision.

And I realized I regretted it—that there was no better place, in-game, for me—and so I bought my treehouse back for more than I’d sold it.

And I logged back in, once, maybe a few days later, and he was gone. He wasn’t there.

He’d moved out of his little treehouse next door, and someone else was already living in it.

So. That was the last time I logged into Glitch.

I mean, I leveled my character on my phone sometimes, thinking maybe something would change between us. I’d see that I had finished learning one skill, and so I’d tap to learn the next skill, and that was all.

I ran into a friend, and this friend asked me whether we had found an apartment together yet—and he meant in life, not in Glitch—and I put my hands over my face and shook, like such a girl.

He played a few weeks more. I couldn’t. Glitch was only fun with two people, for me. When I was up late at night, and he was fast asleep, I was still playing Glitch with him in mind, trying to get one level past him. I was only playing because we were playing.

Last night I finally deleted my Glitch account. It was not easy. It was not easy.

This is probably the dumbest, lamest thing I have ever written. I don’t know how to make it incisive.

What ‘Glitch’ can teach us about being alive

Watch for the changes and try to keep up

Jenn Frank — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:38:27 +0000

Put your pants back on and take that seat over there. Good, thanks. Let’s hash some things out.

Let me start by reminding you that I’m a girl. Not only that, I’m an angry girl.

Joel Johnson, Kotaku’s fairly-recently-appointed Editorial Director, posted a little article titled “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku.” (Evidently, Johnson has been taking a lot of flack for Kotaku’s new editorial direction[s], which is increasingly fluid and interesting.)

And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.

“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.

So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:

Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.

And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.

Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!

Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.

He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.

My first issue with “An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”—which was published by the Border House, a blog you should absolutely add to your Feedburner, and please don’t think I am assembling a firing squad aimed at either them or at the letter’s goodhearted author, Mattie Brice—is the title. The title! Because: where does our issue lie? With Joel Johnson? Or Kotaku? I mean, “Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”?

If the issue is only with Kotaku, oh, boy, you’re coming a few years late to the party.

Kotaku is a Gawker-style website—what am I saying, it literally is a Gawker site!—and when you aggregate interesting factoids, you’re going to be slumming in the lowest common denominator’s neighborhood, always. No, please, stick with me. I hate to cop to my own subjectivity, but true story: since June, I have been writing for a celebrity gossip website for money, and it’s honestly the best gig I’ve had in maybe my whole life. I applied for the job a month before my (adoptive) dad’s death: I can write what I want usually; it super-coordinates with my life’s schedule and time commitments; I’ve actually been reading this gossip website since 2005ish; I love my coworkers; I am sometimes proud of my work because I am sneaking some pretty progressive stuff onto the site, probably to everyone’s horror; I actually replaced Molls McAleer, which is kind of cool; and all the rest. But I really do have to post nudie pics if I am the first to a “story.” It can be gut-wrenching.

I remember the first time I told my mother I was about to put a photo of a penis onto the Internet, and I think she could see I was basically begging her—her! This 80-year-old, immobile, mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, just-widowed and bereaved Christian woman on dialysis—to excuse me. Absolve me, please! And yet it’s just how that machine works, because I really do write for a celebrity gossip aggregator. Yes, duty calls! There are moral and ethical questions every day, and some days, there are even invasions of privacy and hacked cell phones and Scarlett Johansson’s ass, and it’s my first time ever being on the uglier side of certain ethical web dilemmas, all because I was the first of my coworkers to stumble across Scarlett Johansson’s ass that morning.

And so I do have to talk to my mother, every single time. Time and money, by necessity, have become important to me. Maybe I really am a bad person. But good God, it’s my job to post asses just as politely and ethically as I can, and I do my damnedest to personally mitigate that job requirement with feminist leanings and progressive politics, and I try to be satisfied with myself. Yes, open-letter author Mattie Brice, we do seek to be absolved, all of us. I only added these paragraphs because I wanted to. Let’s move on from this aspect, I hope.

So perhaps, at an aggregator site, you’re going to get a lot of facts wrong; you’re working fast; you’re going to post headlines as they siphon into your RSS reader, journalistic integrity be damned. That is how a certain style of paid writing works. No, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t. (In acknowledging this, I am actively agreeing with Mattie Brice’s fine open letter, OK.)

Now, in my old life, where I worked at a big-budge video game website—one of the biggest, for a time!—we might have collectively rolled our eyes at Kotaku a little. We did! Us! We did! All of us at some gigantic corporate-owned website, where cosplay galleries were all the rage! Because when Kotaku was breaking a story, we knew we had to go back and fact-check every freaking headline, and we were left picking the wheat from the chaff. But the truth is, that big-budge video game website I worked for was waaaay-aaaaay less progressive than Kotaku from the very get-go, in part because we scarcely covered fringe culture—even though the real weirdos at work, who were into Game Center CX, independently developed games, anime, and video games that only released to Famicom, were trying so, so hard to cover those things.

But then, at Kotaku, something much more interesting started to happen? I mean, Kotaku has always been interesting, but when Stephen Totilo joined the ranks—and to be sure, there were already some pretty fine writers at Kotaku, but when Stephen Totilo signed on, as Deputy Editor, right under Crecente in the hierarchy of importance—I sincerely doubt I was alone when I arched an eyebrow. He’s a really fine critic, and thoughtful; his reputation well precedes him. The hell? I remember thinking. What is Stephen Totilo doing, defecting to Kotaku? I doubt the “old guard,” Kotaku’s longstanding readership, even understood what they were getting when they got Stephen Totilo.

The capable and artful Leigh Alexander had already been around awhile, a goodly time before Totilo, as a columnist. She has long contributed editorials to Kotaku even as she constantly relays these very developed news stories for Gamasutra. If you somehow aren’t familiar with her byline, she’s all business, but then, too, she’s the Average Jane guys love and girls adore, and even that assessment shortchanges the woman. But suddenly, suddenly! Here comes Kirk Hamilton as a Features Editor. The man worked at Paste, OK, but something fascinating and quirky and helpful and truthful has been happening to his writing for a long while, and here he is now, devastating Kotaku with his truth bullets. (No, how could I be subjective? I love these writers.)

I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but by the time Joel Johnson signed on, he was so totally screwed: something has been happening to Kotaku for a little while now.

Their white male readership has noticed, and they have taken aim.

Kotaku’s Joel Johnson? Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

When I met him, he was Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson, telling the world about hip, hip cell phones. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Instead, he was Joel Johnson creating a communications network for victims of Hurricane Katrina. A little while later, he was Wired’s Joel Johnson; then he was BoingBoing’s Joel Johnson. Who is this Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

What I’m saying is, you have very goodheartedly and inadvertently made it personal. I think your issue is not with Joel Johnson. It is with Kotaku, a job that the man was grandfathered into, and Johnson only just now has a say in its coverage. And here is the heart: you are confusing the person with the job’s role.

Moreover, Joel Johnson is strong enough to change the site’s editorial direction over time. So wait. Just freaking wait. I have done my very, very best to explain machines to you; this is how machines work. It’s ugly, and I hate it, and I’m sorry. But wait.

You can say that changes in Kotaku’s coverage aren’t coming fast enough. That’s fine, but it also defies the point of his Kotaku article, wherein Johnson is actually addressing a cultural whiplash, admonishing longstanding readers for their claims that changes are instead coming too quickly.

And here we have arrived at the crux of my ire: Joel Johnson is on your side. What side? Your side. Aformentioned writer Mattie Brice (I love you!) accuses Johnson of “handwaving,” of a lack of willingness to discuss “the issue,” and I just cannot begin to grok that. I might offend you with this, but Kotaku has never been for minority groups. No, I know, and I hate that, too, and I always have. But it’s changing. Let it change. Kotaku cannot, will not, be a “safe space” tomorrow. And that’s maybe the real point: Kotaku has always tried to maintain its finger on the pulse, and the fact that Kotaku is changing tells you things are changing.

P.S. May I remind you how entirely different this whole thing is from that dumb dickwolves thing, not that aaaaaaanyone has confused the two. But if they did? Remember: in posting, Johnson was opening up a forum for conversation and understanding, which means his intentions were different from the beginning.

From Johnson’s Twitter, here’s an interesting deconstruction of both sides of the argument.

ETA: Also, Jayson Young supports and encourages both Brice and Johnson for each stepping up to the plate.

“Break out” your 2600s today: a ‘Breakout’ flashback

Jenn Frank — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:14:23 +0000

Breakout, based on a concept by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, was designed by Steve Jobs (with pal Steve Wozniak doing all the heavy lifting, of course). The game was released in May 1976, just two months before Jobs and Wozniak unveiled their first creation as Apple Computer.

Here are some game-winning tips:

Daily Linksplosion: Saturday, August 27, 2011

cronjob — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:00:08 +0000

Rubens’ Tube Zelda from Brad Silcox on Vimeo.

CNN.com – Why most people don’t finish video games
When I was 11, my mother actually wouldn’t ALLOW me to start a new game until I’d finished the last one. (I think I lied to her about finishing a game, twice.)
BuzzFeed – Flames Dancing To Zelda Theme Music
Your favorite Nintendo theme music, with wiggling flames keeping time
Gamma Squad – Classic Video Games As Dramatic Plays
‘Theater of the Arcade’ at the FringeNYC Festival.

Daily Linksplosion: Monday, August 01, 2011

cronjob — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:00:23 +0000

Young Princess Zelda by Salvador Ramirez Madriz (via Gamma Squad)

Kloonigames – Crayon Physics Deluxe is now available for Mac and Linux
YYEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Play This Thing! – Inside the Haiti Earthquake
A fair critique of the playability of ‘Inside the Haiti Earthquake,’ an award-winning "newsgame."
IndieGames.com – Indie Game Site GameTunnel Relaunched
Do you know how I found out about GameTunnel’s relaunch? THROUGH PROJECT WONDERFUL. I was like, "Oh, look, I can run a new ad from… GameTunnel? Whoa." I should add that this redesign is aytch oh tee tee, HOT, all electric apple and slippery menus.

Also worth noting: indie developers can submit their games for review. Like, there’s an actual spot to do that, right in the navigation header. I love that.
Kotaku – Retro Game Master
Eh? Kotaku.com has been covering the everloving Jehoshaphat out of ‘Retro Game Master’ (née Game Center CX) all summer, and I was none the wiser! Corrected.
Wired Magazine – Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique
"Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. ‘Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,’ he says. ‘We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.’"

I made you something!

Jenn Frank — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 03:00:10 +0000

So yesterday I decided it was time to get serious, grow some professionalism, and brand my Twitter page as if I were suddenly some sort of social media maverick. And wow, what a bad fit. I don’t think putting my email address on my Twitter page was the right decision for me at all. It’s just so douchey, right?

My friend Chris has said to me—and I think this might be true—that my tweets are all “snark and mortal peril.” Ugh, I hate when Chris is right. I generally tweet only when I’m annoyed, or if something has just almost hit me. I can’t brand that stuff! And I will need to be extra-careful with Google+, because there are only so many ways I can announce that I’m angry before everyone in my “circles” “mutes” me. We’ll see.

Nonetheless, while I was working on my Twitter background in Photoshop, I started thinking of the 1982 short film Arcade Attack, which is all about how Space Aliens are Invading the City and Murdering Pinball.

Inspired (sort of), I found a Manhattan skyline, complete with a Radiator Building—which looked more like a Chrysler Building until I sawed the top off—and then I grunged everything up using Eduardo Recife’s Photoshop brushes. The Invaders are just dingbats, anyway, so I basically did zero work.

My new Twitter background, as I discovered seconds after I uploaded it, makes for a terrible Twitter background. So I debranded it, rebranded it, and uploaded it as downloadable desktop wallpaper for you! I don’t know who on Earth would ever want Infinite Lives desktop wallpaper, so I’m sorry.

Here’s the good news! The image’s dimensions are 1920×1440, which is the size of nobody’s monitor, so if you clip the top of the image to fit your widescreen monitor, it’s debranded again like magic.

On my MacBook, using the “Fill Screen” desktop setting:

TL;DR: Here, have some wallpaper.

Here’s the best Pip-Boy 3000

Jenn Frank — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:02:46 +0000

Late last year, Internet Guy Skruffy Nerfherder (yep) briefly sold a limited run of Pip-Boy 3000 kits, and I only just found out about them. So much for what would’ve been the best anniversary gift ever, huh.

Skruffy based the kits on his own resin sculpt, and—well, see for yourself, how amazing his Pip-Boy is:

My favorite part is the Pip-Boy’s “LCD,” which is just a little pane of plexiglass illuminated with LEDs. With the light diffused through a slip of paper, and with a green gel on top, the screen gets that authentically murky glow. (Don’t even get me started on the hinge.)

Also, I really admire that Skruffy took the long way around. Because some people have simply been cramming iPhones into their cardboard Pip-Boys, OK. And while running iOS 3000 (or better yet) is fine and dandy, physically putting your iPhone into your PipBoy is, just, what?

I am saying this as a person who is trying to figure out what to do with her spare iPhone, in fact. Hm.

Anyway. What was I talking about? Ah, yes: craftsmanship.

The RPF – Pip-Boy 3000 Build-Up

Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, July 12, 2011

cronjob — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:01:07 +0000

Boing Boing – My Little Pony flash game
The ultimate labor of brony-love. Plus, mighty creepy-ass.
Unreality – If Comedians Took on Video Games
As always, there are no women in comedy, but these are pretty much spot-on. (via @nealsales)