Intelligent Artifice

The whole Vice City “racism” thing December 28, 2003

Well, a lot has happened regarding this issue since I last talked about it.

Rockstar Games announced they were going to remove the offending material. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg got involved. Haitin-Americans have filed a lawsuit. Florida legislators demanded the game be banned. The State of Florida announced they wanted to investigate Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for possibly violating state hate crime laws.

There were protests outside a Wal-Mart in Florida (and outside the Rockstar New York offices). Yet Wal-Mart is continuing to sell the game. It would seem they only censor products that might offend middle America (e.g. too much sex) or that criticize Wal-Mart itself (some artist’s album was banned because it contained a critical song).

CNN reported on the whole issue. I suppose this is hardly news anymore - they’ve been reporting on the games biz for quite some time now.

Jane over at Game Girl Advance has commented on the issue.

Finally, I’ve been quoted out of context, and some bulletin boards discussing this issue have linked to my original post.

This had a bit of a chilling effect on me, and has made me think a lot about this kind of post. And you know what? I’m not going talk about this kind of thing any more. Or at least I’m not going to add my own comments. Rockstar Games has a pretty tight communication policy (it usually involves ‘no comment’). The more I explain and defend my stance on this whole matter, the more I may appear to be defending Rockstar Games. And that is something I neither want nor should do.

It’s too bad. I modified my original post a bit. I was also very much tempted to quote another line from Vice City - one from the opening cut-scene. But that would be mean (especially to Cubans), and might be misconstrued as being something other than a mere joke.

Update: the New York Post has an article up that advises readers to sell Take Two stock. It mentions the following regarding to the content of GTA and Vice City:

This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands.

Update 2: Thad “lead programmer on GTA3 Xbox” Frogley has commented on the New York Post article, as has Penny Arcade.

Update 3: jvm, occasional reader of this site, has written to Slashdot about two opposing views on the New York Post article, one on the Video Game Ombudsman, a site I don’t know, and one on his own site, Curmudgeon Gamer.

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Fight Club

Vivendi is making a game based on Fight Club. It’s - wait for it - a fighting game. Because we all know fighting was what Fight Club was really all about. Perhaps there will be a level set in a Fürni catalog? With fully destructable furniture?

Coming soon:
Citizen Kane - the newspaper tycoon sim.
Apocalypse Now - the stealth FPS.
Deer Hunter - the deer hunting game.
The Godfather - the GTA3 clone.

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Two games with Teddy

You may have heard of the very cool and intuitive 3D modeling application Teddy - it’s been around for a while. It was developed by Takeo Igarashi, and by now he has developed a more advanced version, called SmoothTeddy (which, alas, does not run on the Mac).

Kokoro reports that there are two console games out that feature this technology.

Kaijuu No Shima (The Island Of Monsters) allows you to create your own monster. This movie, if you are able to watch it, shows how well the monster creation and customization was implemented. It looks like a very nice interface.

Rakugaki Kingdom apparently also allows you to create your own monster, but that’s all I know about it.

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Music for games December 27, 2003

I just discovered Music4Games.net, a site entirely dedicated to, ah, music for games. Sadly, the “About Us” doesn’t say anything about “them”, just about their lawyers. Still, sorta kinda interesting, and good to see specialized sites like this popping up.

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Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex December 26, 2003

I am a big fan of Masamune Shirow’s comics - Orion, Appleseed, and especially Ghost In The Shell. I am also a big fan of Mamoru Oshii, director of movies such as Angel’s Egg, Patlabor 1 and 2. He is also the director of the Ghost In The Shell animated movie - one of the few works I can think of which survived the transition from one medium to another. Shirow’s casual cruelty was replaced by Oshii’s melancholy. Both works move me, although in different ways. It’s one of my favorite movies.

Mr. Shirow has been working on a sequel to his comic, just now coming out in an English translation (it’s already out in German, but I prefer reading it in English). Production I.G., the company that made the original movie, is working on a sequel (have a look at the 13.3 MB trailer if you haven’t already). It is again directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Masamune Shirow.

And Production I.G. has also made a TV series called Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Which, as I just read on Slashdot Games, is being turned into a game (you knew I’d get there in the end). A futuristic anti-terrorist shooter, from the looks of it. Yippee.

Shirow fans may want to know that there is a new all-CG animated movie being made (check out the 5.52 MB teaser). It looks a bit more exciting than the earlier effort to turn this great comic into a movie (and check out that Studio Proteus link earlier for news on Appleseed 5…)

(Yes, I know, I probably mixed up all the Japanese first and last names.)

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Merry Christmas December 25, 2003

My cold, which started last week, got dramatically worse last night. Today, I had to cancel a nice dinner with a friend that I was looking forward to.

This has nothing to do with games, but may help to explain my reduced posting frequency.

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Fun with Mary Sue December 24, 2003

Theresa Nielsen Hayden has written an enormous blog post about the Mary Sue story. To quote the exact definition:

MARY SUE (n.): 1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment. 2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author. 3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories. 4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”

I thought this might be more related to games than it turned out to be. Oh well. Go read this comic. It’s funny.

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An interview with Will Wright December 23, 2003

Gamespot has published an interview with Will Wright. It is chock-full of good insights, as is to be expected from someone who summed up 70 years of science in one hour at this year’s GDC. Among the many gems:

GS: What do read into the people choosing to be bad? How do the two–good and bad– relate?

WW: I think by exploring the bad side you’re really just mapping the envelope of the system…you’re getting a sense of how far off you can go. The good side is more of your creative palette. For example: Now I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do my favorite family, or I’m going to tell a story, or I’m going to re-create my favorite sitcom or whatever. I think that side feels like it’s a bit broader creatively. Everybody has a different definition of the good side. So that’s probably a more expansive landscape that people will explore. And that’s where people get more imaginative, in a sense, and it also reflects more on their personality. The bad side just a kind of exploration.

…

GS: Is game design a naturally subversive activity–or is it just you? Or is that a bit too psychoanalytic…

WW: Well, when you say subversive, it’s just another form of a player taking control. I think for most people, their kind of general aesthetic with games is that the more I control this experience, the better the game is. And I don’t mean control in terms of I can always win by pressing a button, but control in terms of I can choose to go off into an interesting path, and the game will support that path.

This animal we’re calling subversion is really just empowering the players to not hit walls as often. A lot of these bugs we could prevent just by reining in the scope of the game design You know, it’s the fact that that territory, that that landscape is so large that we cannot possibly test it that gives rise to these things. At a fundamental level it’s kind of convergent with what I would call “good game aesthetics.”

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An interview with Walter Murch December 20, 2003

Editing is perhaps the aspect of moviemaking that is the most alien to interactive entertainment, at least the way it is currently being made. Outside of non-interactive sequences, the cut is simply not used. It is one of the principal tools of the moviemaker to evoke emotions, but it is also associated with authorial control like nothing else.

Nevertheless, I found this interview with Walter Murch, legendary editor of Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and The English Patient very interesting. He needs to convey a coherent and emotionally involving message by assembling many different bits into one smooth whole. Game developers face the same challenge. He has changed tools and workflows many times throughout his career, and he is able to give a lucid explanation about the pros and cons of each working method. Process and workflows can have a huge impact on the quality of a game, and it is interesting to hear someone from a different creative industry talk about it. I particularly liked his view on the disadvantages of random access:

Are new editors missing anything by learning on non-linear editing systems instead of older systems, or is that older editors waxing nostalgic?

I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which — in the right proportion — is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.

The other “missing” advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.

It seemed counterintuitive to me at first, but it shows some of the psychology underneath the creative process. In his book “In The Blink Of An Eye”, he expands on this theme.

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Stuff December 17, 2003

I am, in fact, not dead. Although I do have a cold. Some random stuff to prove I am at least physically present:

• Thad exposes the truth behind the PS3 concept graphic that can be found on many respectable sites.
• How to use a hacked Xbox as a media center.
• Have you ever come across something about ‘gaming’ only to find out it was about ‘gambling’? Wired has an article about people who design gambling videogames for casinos.
• You may already have heard of this: Underage prostitution for real money in The Sims Online, and subsequent censorship by EA.
  Here’s an interview with one of the evildoers. More commentary and meta-commentary can be found on Terra Nova. Update: Another interview.
• Tweaking NPC AI - in Lord Of The Rings.
• I still love weird peripherals. And I think there may be a future for these things. Interoperability + Personalisation + Branding.
• Augmented reality Quake. Augmented reality rules - it just seems like the way to go. I was brainstorming about things like this back at Kalisto, when we had a patent on the use of live data from sports events.
• EA Canada is hiring - away from Radical Entertainment, as it happens. After Ubisoft Montreal, now this.
• Several companies are now doing things with the combination of Gamecube and Gameboy.

(From all over the place.)

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