Infinite Lives

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.

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.

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.

Derek and I have been spending an awful lot of time in Glitch, the free-to-play MMO that launched, finally, last month. (And when I saw “an awful lot of time,” I mean it. I’ve gained noticeable weight in the last three days. I’ve practically forgotten to keep eating, breathing, pooping, et cetera.)

Gameplay is ostensibly based on, of all things, the theory of ‘infinite play’ as outlined in this ultra-slim work of philosophy. The real point of Glitch, then, is “to continue the game for continuing-the-game’s sake.” There are gods and cities and objectives, sure, but there is no win: there is only forward.

In the earliest portions of Glitch, the dreaded ‘tutorial’ phase is scuttled in lieu of a long, unslodgy process of exploration. Your “Familiar”—he’s a google-eyed rock at the top of the screen, with occasional speech bubbles blooming from his sweet, mouthless little face—will give you small, achievable quest missions, which are less ‘go fetch’ and more ‘go discover!’ Your Familiar also helps you learn different “skills,” which open doors, in turn, to other skills. (When the Familiar is “studying,” his blank visage assumes a pair of reading glasses, adorably.)

Your autodidacticism is always and invariably rewarded with a triumphant trill, maybe even a badge or trophy, but then there’s that terrible carrot—there’s always more. And here is the truth about Glitch: the tutorial never ends. Because you’re always learning. That’s the game. And this could make you feel tired, but instead, it makes you feel awake.

My Second Life avatar, awestruck by almost a thousand other avatars (click for a closer look).

“Mixed reality” artist Kristine Schomaker—Gracie Kendal in Second Life—is completing work on 1000 Avatars, a tower of larger-than-”life”-size avatars photographed from behind. Get it? Because, in a third-person game like Second Life, you only see your own backside—Kristine’s photos reflect how Second Life users actually come to visualize their virtual selves.

Her statement of intent is here.

• 1000 Avatars (direct link)

Look, I realize that Mac gaming is, on the whole, an oxymoron, like ‘jumbo shrimp,’ ‘diet cake,’ and ‘libertarian.’ And if you want to play on your Apple laptop, why, you’re even worse off—seemingly relegated to ports, casuals, freebies, and castoffs. Until recently, even Apple admitted you were better off dual-booting into XP.

But you bought a MacBook Pro anyway, knowing full well what you were signing onto. “It’ll be a dedicated workstation,” you told yourself. “I’ll only do work on it; I’ll be careful with disk space and RAM; I’ll spend all the rest of my days trying not to covet PC gaming.” But one morning you woke up and you realized iMovie wasn’t cutting it anymore. I need to download ten games that are totally ideal for my MacBook Pro. That’s what you said. That’s what you sound like.

Fortunately, I was sitting at my word processor when I distinctly heard your cry of despair. And your cry of despair coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Mac, erm, two weeks ago.

What luck, then, that I’ve made this list of ten games! Each one is downloadable, every one, ideal for MacBook gaming. Enjoy!

In keeping with this blog’s current trending toward pictureless confessionals and ridiculous ruminations on avatars, here’s more of the same.

I wasn’t allowed to play RPGs as a kid.

More specifically, I wasn’t permitted to play computer games in which you could create or alter your own character. Sometime, maybe a year and a half ago, I mentioned this fact on a podcast which, along with my semi-lyrical overuse of the word “totally,” seemed to arouse some bafflement and curiosity. “Why wouldn’t her mom let her play role-playing games?” some folks wanted to know. I hadn’t elaborated—I’d only mentioned it offhandedly—and perhaps that caused some people to be discouraged.

Of course, I was surprised by their surprise. Do these people not know, I wondered, that playing fantasy games will turn you into a warlock and your bedroom closet into a portal to hell?

I obviously have some lingering issues.

The power of urban myth

I was born in 1982, and I spent almost all of my childhood in a small, conservative town in Texas, during what I’ve now heard called the “Satanic Panic.”

The late 70s and early 80s are banner years for contemporary legend anthropologists. Urban myths—the likes that get a foothold among small-town Christian fundamentalist communities—were running amok. In 1977, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s allegedly copped to being a member of the Church of Satan. Fact. And in the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that Cabbage Patch Dolls themselves were possessed by demons. Duh.

One variation on the Cabbage Patch legend held that Xavier Roberts signed the buttocks of his doll-progeny to signify that he had blessed each one in the name of Satan. These bits of trivia were pronounced at the tables of our elementary school lunchroom as cold, hard evidence that evil dolls could, in fact, murder you in your sleep, if they wanted to.

Now that my readership has appropriately flatlined, I am permitted to publish the second in a three-part series of journal entries about my quest to create the perfect avatar. In part I, we talked about caricature, and I obnoxiously examined what makes my own face distinctive. Now, we examine what, exactly, makes cartooning effective. Here’s a hint: HAIR.

Seeing in the Abstract

Let’s talk cartooning.

In his wonderful work of literary and visual criticism, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains (emphases his):

...I’m going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.

When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.

How do cartooning, caricature, and avatars relate to videogames in a broader sense? The key, I think, is iconography. Take a look at Character Design for Mobile Devices, wherein realistic character design and artistry are pared down to their simplest and most fundamental pixels.

“How did you feel,” 1UP editor James Mielke asked Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, “about seeing your elaborate illustrations transformed into such tiny sprites?”

Amano replied with an elegant description that could be applied to any type of icon. ”...Back then, ...my art couldn’t just go into the game without major adjustments,” he explained. “So I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art. Here’s an example: when you say ‘Mount Fuji’ and you make a motion like this”—here, Amano makes a peak sign with his fingers—“everybody knows what Mount Fuji looks like, so they get the mental image in their head. So I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.”

This is the first in a three-part series of journal entries about my quest to create the perfect avatar. It will not be a perfect or academic analysis. In fact, it may be the least formal of the entries at Infinite Lives, simply because it treads some personal ground. In part I, we’ll examine what makes my own face distinctive. Then, and for the next three days, we’ll take a look at my subsequent attempts at avatar creation, gauging how they have succeeded or failed. The final piece will appear here this Friday.

During the NXE beta, someone sent a message to my Xbox. I didn’t recognize the handle, but he apparently knew me. “Your avatar looks so much like you!” he wrote. I frowned. “I hate my avatar,” I wrote back curtly. Then I clarified: “The hair is all wrong.”

He wrote back, confessing he hated his own NXE avatar. You know, the hair.

Later, at a Thanksgiving dinner among friends, I complimented someone on his NXE avatar. “I liked mine,” he agreed. “But yours was incredible.”

Was it? I wondered aloud. “I haven’t worn my hair that way in a year,” I reminded him. He seemed really startled, slowly realizing that I was right. I do not have short, shaggy hair. Not anymore.

The art of avatar creation is, at times, the same as the art of caricature. It could be said, too, that caricature is the equivalent and perfect polar opposite of vanity, that willful misrepresentation of yourself as someone more attractive than you really are (see also: Myspace angles). Caricature is here defined as not only an exaggeration, but as a “grotesque imitation or misrepresentation.” And because caricature is a deliberate misrepresentation, in a perfect parallel with the art of vanity, it willfully contradicts reality. Your identity on the Internet, as in the workplace and in virtual worlds, is probably a work of willful caricature.

This is what I’m doing right now.

My Second Life avatar is sitting in my stead, attending the fourth-ever Living Game Worlds symposium, streaming live from Georgia Tech. And right now, Raph Koster is speaking. The symposium focuses on the interplay between, and I quote, “multiplayer games and virtual worlds.”

You too can attend Living Game Worlds via Second Life (fitting!), if only you click here. Of course, if you wouldn’t be caught dead in Second Life, you may also participate by opening the live streaming video in one window and keeping IRC open in the other.

I think I want to talk more about this soon, but right now I’m really just enjoying it.

edit: It’s over! Until tomorrow.

What’s really neat is, the IRC channel and the theater in Second Life are ‘bridged,’ so that everything the kids say in IRC pop into Second Life, and at the same time, Second Life users appear as users in the chat room. Neato.

I mentioned the INN Revival Project in passing to Josh, my e-friend of over ten years, who, like me, had a Sierra Network account in the early- to mid-nineties. “Yeah,” he said of INN Revival, “too bad that never took off.”

Excuse me? This is a common misconception, I told him. “But they never got the INN software to work!” Josh protested. I let him know that the INN Revival is alive and well! And it isn’t a huge overhaul of the INN software—it’s actually the same software (mostly), emulated in DOSBox!

Getting Back to Our Roots

The ImagiNation Network, AKA the Sierra Network, was among the earliest virtual worlds and online multiplayer gathering spots. With the exception of LarryLand, which was densely packed with casinos and lewd talk, the virtual world was targeted at family values and wholesome, clean fun. In MedievaLand, you could hop into Shadow of Yserbius, a proto-MMORPG, or either of Yserbius’ sequels. Yserbius was an early graphical MUD that is, today, extremely clunky by WoW standards, but compared to the earliest text MUDs I telnetted into, was absolutely breathtaking.

In a way, Yserbius was INN’s downfall. AOL, who owned and operated Neverwinter Nights, purchased INN from AT&T, simply so they could shut the Yserbius operation down. Neverwinter Nights is credited on Wikipedia as being the first MMORPG to display graphics—this, I think, is absolutely debatable (not only because of Yserbius’ place in the canon, but also because of Mad Maze, the online Prodigy MMO).

Now that Josh knew INN was being played on PCs and laptops all over the world, he wanted in. But how?

“I assume you’re on a Mac,” I sighed. “It’s trickier than installing DOSbox for PC.”

Of course, the process isn’t that tricky; the real problem is, the steps are mostly undocumented.

What follows is the explanation I gave Josh. It’s tailored for Mac users like me, with OSX as your operating system. If you’re a PC user, these instructions might not do you much good—with a little extra reading, you’ll see that setting up DOSbox and INN for PC is actually easier. You can do it!

Last night, the conversation briefly turned to Halloween costume plans. “What are you thinking of going as?” Greg asked me.

I admitted I probably wouldn’t do it, but I’ve certainly paid it a lot of thought (and research) since early summer: “My Second Life character,” I told him.

Greg was startled. It seemed a little obscure, didn’t it? Wouldn’t I get tired of explaining it to everyone who wanted to know what I was supposed to be? He didn’t say it outright, but I think I knew what he was getting at—isn’t it too nerdy? Wouldn’t I be embarrassed?

“I am not ashamed!” I said to him. And in fact, if I were feeling especially bold, maybe I would rollerskate everywhere. Just like Jennatar, my Second Life avatar, who is pretty much me, except she always wears a flight cap and rollerskates everywhere and flies away from awkward dance parties on a dirigible.

I don’t play World of Warcraft, but I certainly understand what it is like to develop a deep attachment to your avatar, and also the subsequent desire to dress up as that avatar for Halloween. So, somebody, anybody, please, please, please buy one of these and get dressed up and take photos and post them to your Facebook.

While the Night Elf makeup isn’t entirely convincing, the Orc mask really nails the WoW aesthetic.

• Annie’s Costumes – Official World of Warcraft Costume Masks and Makeup Kits (via)

“My character was running all over the place,” I wrote in 2005, “and I freaked out because I was like, ‘If I were running this much and this often, I would weigh 90 pounds.’ And then I quit playing because I felt like I should have been investing more time in, uh, moving.”

I’d just sworn off playing Final Fantasy XI for PS2. That version of the MMORPG had come bundled with a proprietary hard drive; consequently, I’d felt obligated to play the game for months. I had tired of levelgrinding, and of fetch quests, but above all I was tired of running.

Over at Hack a Day, there’s a blurb about two guys who wanted to “see what it would be like to run as much as their World of Warcraft characters”—I guess the existential weirdness of watching your avatar live more healthily than you do had gotten to them, too.

These WoW fans rigged two treadmills up to their computers and, in full WoW regalia, commenced on what they’ve christened the RL Race Across Azeroth. The whole write-up (edit: since removed) is hilarious, the rig itself is extremely clever, and the corresponding video (edit: since removed?!) is adorable.

• Mana Energy Potions – RL Race Across Azeroth
• Truveo – Race Across Azeroth
• Hack a Day – World of Warcraft on a treadmill