Throwing your hands up in the air is not a conclusion…

In yet another parallel to Malstrom, Icycalm has decided to shut down his public forum.  Who could have imagined that my blog would get this kind of reaction from Icycalm — much less in so short a time frame?  Well, somebody did see this coming:  ME.  That’s right, I saw this coming.  And I prepared for it. Alex had good reason to require registrants to purchase their posting privileges (after his forum was swamped with spam several times), but locking read-only access behind his new paywall was a response to this very blog.

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Moreover the forum will henceforth be viewable only by registered users, in order to get rid of the countless idiotic lurkers who only come here to find stuff to uncomprehendingly snicker about with their equally idiotic friends in their idiotic forums.

He intends to make compiling my articles more difficult.  Too bad that every article I plan to write about Icycalm already exists in outline form, complete with forum quotes.  And I completed this task a full month before posting my opening introduction!  Even this post was planned that far in advance. I’ve known for a long time that Alex would eventually retreat from running his forum openly, in order to “escape the conversation.”

(All Insomnia forum links will be broken from here on out)

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How do you explain to people like him, for example, that “the conversation” is mere chatter that is forgotten almost as soon as it is written. To be outside the conversation is a privilege! In Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s, and even in Baudrillard’s time, there were plenty of conversations going on as well. And yet what do we have left of them today? — Only Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Baudrillard, of course!

But which part of sending open letters to John Romero and Jason Rohrer was being “outside the conversation”?  Or compiling enormous lists of every page on the internet that linked to him, responding to each with pithy one-liners?  It was only a matter of time before Alex took his ball and went home.  But the thing to push him over the edge was something he’d never encountered before:

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Note that all of these negative points against me come from people who have written thousands and thousands of one or two-liners on the internet, all of which say nothing the least bit interesting or significant. So far no one has actually attempted to write a lengthy and detailed analysis, taking apart something I have written. All the criticism I have so far got is essentially of the order of jeering and cat-calling.

He didn’t even wait for my second analysis article!  It makes me doubt that he really would “love nothing more than to see someone come along and tear his theories apart“.  That would require being a part of the conversation — a conversation for which Icycalm is simply not ready.  His fiery temperament makes it completely impossible.  He’s as icy calm as he is Batman.

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As for my username — people mention this all the time. It’s not that I AM icy calm — it’s that I would perhaps like to become that one day. Like, if my username was “Batman” no one would suppose that I was indeed Batman, etc.

And perhaps someday he will be ready for the conversation.  Until then —

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m posting Icycalm’s response here for him, because he has been preemptively banned from commenting.

Icycalm:

Stimulation is a kind of simulation, retard. In fact they are the same thing. The two concepts are differentiated by the perspective. In the context that the question was posed to me (“what does music simulate?”), we were viewing the problem from the outside — from the perspective of the simulacrum. In the context of your little blog post, you are viewing it from the inside — from the perspective of the subject. In other words: the subject is STIMULATED; the simulacrum SIMULATES.

lol, he still doesn’t get it.  HELL YES the subject is stimulated while the simulacrum simulates.  But the simulacrum simulates a SCENARIO, while the subject’s reaction to the stimulation is called a FEELING.  Am I seriously going to have to explain cause and effect to the world’s greatest living philosopher?  Fine, let’s look at it from the simulacrum’s perspective.

Stick a painting and a gramophone in a closed room.  Keep the lights on and don’t remove the air.  The painting is still SIMULATING a scene whether or not somebody is looking at it.  Is the gramophone churning out a simulation of feelings all by itself? STOP THE PRESSES, THOMAS EDISON INVENTED STRONG AI IN 1899, LOL. Music is an auditory simulation of a scenario where you would HEAR A SOUND.  A duck call simulates the scenario where you are NEAR A QUACKING DUCK.  What scenario does a violin simulate?  Well, what scenario does fucking Tetris simulate?  It doesn’t matter whether or not the scenario is based on something familiar from the part of reality you’ve experienced, it’s still a FUCKING SIMULATION OF A SCENARIO. How you goddamn feel about it isn’t motherfucking simulated you twit.  Not from the inside, or the outside (or the left-side, or the top-side, etc).

I can’t waste time re-explaining things that were already perfectly clear.  I’ve got a schedule to keep.  This space was intended for pointing out all the times Icycalm has called things written on the internet “slander”, thereby displaying his gross ignorance of the fact that SLANDER DOESN’T EXIST ON THE INTERNET.  SLANDER IS A LEGAL TERM FOR TRANSITORY SPOKEN DEFAMATION.  WRITTEN, BROADCAST, OR PUBLISHED DEFAMATION IS CALLED LIBEL. We’re never going to get anywhere if I keep humoring him like this.  There’s a great deal of work to be done.

What’s the stupidest phrase on Insomnia?  I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the following quote.

Icycalm:

[music] simulates feelings.

Need another clue?  Here.

Icycalm:

I explained elsewhere in this forum that music simulates feelings. People listen to the music they NEED to listen to. These are simply the feelings I NEED to feel.

I don’t know when this first started to bother me, but now every time I run across it I have to shake my head.  I mean, really?  Do I have to spell it our for you?  If you are feeling something, then you are feeling a real feeling — FULL STOP.  Still having trouble wrapping your head around that?  Let me break it down for you.  When listening to exciting music, you are not pretending to be excited in order to convince someone else.  You’re not simulating the behavioral effects of an emotion.  So you’re not acting.  You are not empathizing with someone else’s excitement like you do while watching a movie (although film music may be employed to heighten the emotion you get from an empathetic reaction).  So you’re not “creating a mental model of another sentient or semi-sentient being’s emotional state.”  And finally, you’re not imagining what it would be like to be excited.  You are actually excited.

Things get worse once he throws videogames into the mix:

Icycalm:

Everything [in a game] “simulates feelings” — even the colors, even the text.

Ridiculous!  Nothing of the sort is being simulated in a game.  That little dude on the screen doesn’t feel a thing — he can’t.  Feelings in videogames is just as nonsensical as violence in videogames.

Icycalm:

The concept of violence in videogames is absurd for the simple reason that the concept “violence” is indefinable in the context of virtual worlds. It is a concept fundamentally linked to reality. It was invented to designate a process that can only occur in reality, and makes absolutely no sense outside of it. Outside of it, the word itself simply becomes illegible — meaningless.

Feelings are indefinable in the context of virtual worlds, because they too are a concept fundamentally linked to reality — the reality of sentient creatures experiencing different mental states.  The emotional response to interactive simulations of events may occasionally be weaker than what the real/non-simulated version of an event would induce, but it’s not simulated in any sense of the term.  When a hidden-camera show pulls a prank on someone, the situation is simulated but the target’s reaction is genuine.

Icycalm:

In a movie, you cry when you see someone hit someone else with a sledgehammer in the face. You empathize with the fate of the person that got hit: this is where the tears come from. In a game, HOWEVER, you cry when someone hits YOU with a sledgehammer in the face. The tears come because IT HURTS, not because of empathy.

Call it synesthesia, call it a mirror box, I don’t care.  It’s all the same electrochemical impulses running down the same synapses.  I’d expect someone capable of this would be careful enough to not make such a dumb mistake.  I’m almost tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt and presume he just missed a letter.  Surely, Icycalm ought to be able to distinguish between between simulation and stimulation.  Stimulating your optic nerve to produce the image of a wolf in your head is not the same thing as imagining a wolf.  Whether the signal comes from light bouncing off the fur of “the largest wild member of the Canidae family of carnivorous and omnivorous mammals”, or from light bouncing off colored dyes on a sheet of paper, or from a device beaming the signal directly to your brain, the sensation has always been real.  It is only in madness and delusions that an internal simulation becomes mistaken for external stimulation.  Though in his defense, no doubt, Icycalm would declare madness to be a kind of sanity.

Third-degree burns aren’t really the opposite of frostbite.

After my 3DS post, it’s only fair I wrap things up with a look at Sony’s next new, new handheld.  While its name is temporary, the hardware is probably final.

So what does this new device do?  Sony says it does “PS3 quality” graphics on its 960 by 544 screen, which is roughly half the resolution a PS3 runs at.  I’d joke about it costing half a PS3, but that’s probably not too far off mark.  What’s interesting here is that Sony has tried to follow Nintendo’s original strategy with the DS by adding additional input options — so many that you can’t use them all simultaneously.  This is a Nintendo design concept, dating back to the N64 controller’s 3-way design, which was seen again in the DS, and again in the design of the Wii controller.  Each allow different combinations of input, giving developers the option to choose which one fits their game best.  Sony added a second analog stick, two touch surfaces, and tilt control, in an attempt to leapfrog whatever input options Nintendo would add to the DS’ successor.  And here they succeeded: the 3DS circle pad will undoubtedly suffer from the same game design issues the lonely PSP analog nub had.  But all this feature counting casts the original DS in a new light.

From Gameboy to DS, Nintendo added two new inputs and one video channel: Touch, Microphone, and a top screen.  From DS to 3DS, Nintendo added two new inputs and one video channel: circle pad, tilt control, and a second top screen channel.  The Nintendo BS prediction would have been right on the money if it just had a few more input options.

Sony feared this hypothetical monstrosity.  It was that fear that drove them to add as many new controls to the NGP as would fit.  Sony intends for the NGP to be a developer’s system, like the original DS.  It will be interesting to see if developers go after new control inputs, or new stereoscopic outputs.  Will depth perception or dual analog and dual multitouch interest them more?

One thing that might sway them is that the install base of the DS may prove to be a detriment to the success of the 3DS.  Remember how the enormous install base of the PS2 was supposed to provide an initial boost to PS3 sales?  Instead, the legacy of its predecessor held sales back, even with backwards compatibility.  Imagine how much worse things would have been if Sony had followed up the PS2 slim with a PS2i and a PS2XL!  (The PS2i would have featured a half-baked PSN, and the PS2XL would have come with a Duke-sized Dualshock, of course.)  After having seen what little difference the DSi update did for new games, the 3DS update will not succeed with consumers without games that were previously impossible to make.  Of course, the same is true for the NGP.  The inevitable iOS ports and PS3 novelty tie-ins won’t suffice.  But at least they don’t have to worry about the install base of the PSP:Go!

This post marks the end of an era.  Consider it my parting gift to all the readers I’ll soon be alienating, and the last hurrah for market analysis.  I’ve been planning this for months.  Things are about to get very, very exciting.

One year ago Sean Malstrom announced that he would be closing his blog. By now it should be apparent that he never had any intention of stopping. I’ve done my best to provide an information source for recovering Malstromites, with some hope that I could help set Sean on a path to a better understanding of video games and not merely business. Sadly, he still hasn’t learned a thing from all my attempts to correct him. Look here, he’s still confused about structured and unstructured play—to the point that he’s calling old Mario games “emergent gameplay” and calling the new Donkey Kong Wii game “scripted garbage”! Over the last year, I’ve made just about every correction that can be made for Malstrom’s idiotic chatter. But he goes right on posting “Kinect LOL” videos without understanding that Microsoft simply took motion control to its logical and inevitable conclusion: games that must auto-correct for the lack of precision of their gross motor skill inputs. His final post of the year comparing “Old Nintendo” to “New Nintendo” was so aimless and comical that he began to sound like Robert Pelloni.

Just as I was about to write him off forever, a post of his caught my eye. Sean responded to an email on game philosophy? This could get… interesting.

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This is a reason why academics do not tend to have much influence outside academia and why philosophy majors remain unemployed.

If these people are so brilliant, so much wiser than anything, if they have all the answers, why are they unable to make anything on the same scale as say… a Shakespeare or someone else? In fact, why are they unable to make anything that sells at all?

Oh my, it’s the “let’s see you do better—than Shakespeare!” argument. But why Shakespeare of all people? Wouldn’t Nietzsche or Baudrillard be a better fit? And why does Sean expect philosophers to “make things that sell”? Watch out, here comes Sean with more Shakespeare…

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
“Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Do you realize that Shakespeare absolutely mocked [philosophers]? All the poets did.

I’m pretty sure that’s taken out of context, unless Sean was trying to talk about ghosts.

Let’s take a moment here to address something that’s always bothered me about Sean. Every time he quotes Shakespeare I cringe a bit. Not out of any dislike for the Bard, but out of disgust for Sean’s upside-down perspective on him. For example:

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You can go back to Shakespeare who wrote plays at the time which were popular with the masses but not popular with the ‘critics’ at the time. It was not considered quality work then. Yet, today it is the poetry of the ages.

Somebody needs to explain to Sean that upon Shakespeare’s death the public that enjoyed his plays went on to enjoy the plays of Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. The public did not immediately immortalize him; they were happy to move on to whatever came next. It wasn’t until the 19th century that his work was rediscovered and fully appreciated. This took time, and the critical analysis of generations. Constantly painting Shakespeare as a confirmation of the excellent taste of the masses is plain stupid. Using that as a defense of Wii Sports, however, is unfathomably ludicrous.

But I digress. So what “philosophy” is Sean refuting here? To summarize, Sean received an email suggesting that the difficulty involved in simulating “interactions between humans” to the same degree of realism that we can already simulate “interactions between solid objects bound by newtonian physics” may be the reason for games primarily dealing with physics simulations instead of social simulations. Strangely, the emailer attempted to back up this obvious and banal observation with Daniel Dennett’s theory of intentional stance. At the first mention of philosophy Sean completely lost track of the emailer’s argument, and proceeded directly to his stockpile of bad analogies.

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Since you seem to have the answers, go out and make a “Hamlet” or an “Othello”.

Here is something I want you to consider: that you are not actually engaging in any philosophy or even thought at all. I want you to consider that you have not left the imagination arena and are engaging like a philosophical Don Quixote. Think of it as a bad Star Trek episode where the characters have fun on the Holodeck, return to the rest of the ship, but they don’t realize they are still actually on the Holodeck.

Really, Sean, intentional stance isn’t that hard to apply here. For example, most players would think that space invaders are descending towards their ship because space invaders hate humans. That was easy, wasn’t it? Too bad it doesn’t help our understanding of video games one bit. I suppose philosophy could be used to provide a deeper or more comprehensive understanding of video games, but where would you find somebody with such mutually-exclusive interests? It sure isn’t Sean, that’s for sure.

Personally, I’d rather see Malstrom talk about the fact that uDraw is selling well, despite shipping with a controller that duplicates the pointing function the damn console comes with. Ah, but that would require Sean to understand the differences between fine and gross motor skill. What a shame.

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People who understand things do not get on a soapbox and declare they understand it. They just do it.

Ironic advice, as usual. It gets more tiring every time he does it. And I’m very tired.

Who am I kidding; I can’t do this right now. I’ve been experiencing a lot of insomnia recently, and I fear it may be affecting my writing. I need a month to rest, clear my head, and start anew.

Big things are brewing.  Can you feel it? It’s like the ice before the thaw, or the calm before the storm.

In our last installment of “Ignorant Suggestions“, Sean Malstrom had the audacity to tell Shigeru Miyamoto he should have made Crash Bandicoot instead of Mario64.  So what famous gaming legend is Sean spewing his ill-informed advice at now?  You’ll never guess to whom these pieces of “friendly advice” were directed:

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Story in video games is all about repercussions. If the player’s actions do not show repercussions in the storyline, the player feels cheated.

Unless the player can create repercussions in the story, any video game story will feel ‘tacked on’. The most important part of a video game is the human who is playing it. Everything revolves around his actions. Even the story.

Believe it or not, Sean has just taken it upon himself to lecture Warren Spector about story and choice in game design.  I’m going to let that one sink in for a moment.  Does Sean have any idea who he’s talking to?  Any idea at all?  Where was Sean in June of 2000?  Perhaps under a rock—that was itself beneath an even larger rock?

Warren Spector’s Deus Ex has been the gold standard in choice and repercussion game design for over a decade.  Suggesting that Warren Spector “learn a thing or two” from Wing Commander (made yet another decade before Deus Ex!) is ridiculous and unneeded advice.  Deus Ex had repercussions big and small from both dialog choices and decisions made in combat.  Sean is only familiar with the “harvest or save” pattern from Bioshock, the “Renegade or Paragon” pattern from Mass Effect, and the “Jedi or Sith” pattern from Jedi Academy.  Deus Ex never went for such simplistic “Good or Evil” tropes, opting instead to present events and choices in such a manner that the player was encouraged to make their own moral and political judgments about what they had seen or heard.  The game’s title alludes to the phrase “deus ex machina”, or “God from the Machine”.  But by omitting the final word “Machine”, it was left as an open-ended question for the player to decide—through actions—not through a multiple choice questionnaire.

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[In Wing Commander] if something happened like you ejected (right before your ship blew up), it was not a ‘game over’. The STORY went on despite you failing in your mission. What would happen is that the storyline slanted more and more towards the Terrans losing the war. The worse you did in your play, the more the Terrans would lose. The better you did, the more the Kilirathi would lose.

Sean’s precious Wing Commander uses the story as just another “score”, where victories add to the “success” plotline, and failures inch towards a “defeat” ending.  Death was not the only variable in Deus Ex.  While the game initially suggested the player would be ranked on “violence vs non-violence”, this was only a ruse to make the player not immediately realize the larger impact that choices unrelated to these two extremes would have on the story’s outcome.  In years since, designers who admired this game have dutifully implemented binary morality systems in their games, failing to realize their archetype only recorded the distinction between lethal and non-lethal tactics for the first few missions!

Undoubtedly, Epic Mickey’s “Paint vs Thinner” mechanic will serve a similar purpose.  While it will have some effect upon the game’s outcome, far more subtle and complex choices will be the defining values that twist and mold the game’s plot.  How could Spector forget his accomplishments of the past, even if uninformed fools like Malstrom may not know of them?

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When a game maker keeps talking about story, I get scared. Spector saying the concept of the game was pitched from Disney executives is worrying. What do executive dorks know about video games?

Is this a case of Sean actually questioning the game planning decisions of businessmen, instead of his usual complaints about whining creatives?  I thought I’d never see the day!  Of course Sean still manages to get it wrong the one time he could have been right.  The businessmen here only offered a premise, with no details on how the game should be built.  Most of the time we see business loons demand popular elements from games that have been successful (Give it an open world!  Cover based combat!  Regenerative health!) in hopes that the similar bullet-points on the back-of-box would result in similar financial liquidity.  This time they merely asked that the intellectual property they held be given a chance to shine again.  Does anybody realize how hard this is for Disney to do?  Look at how they’ve been treating their old material these days:

Yes, the above clip is from the Disney Channel in the year 2010, not 1993.

The “Fantasy Sci-Fi” game Spector spoke of in the interview Sean linked was to be a spiritual successor to Deus Ex.  The fact that Spector was instead asked to work with a megabrand that had lost its way has been compared to another auteur asked to creatively revive a well-known franchise.  I expect similarly successful results.

Minecraft has become an internet phenomenon.  It has made quite a bit of money, and generated its fair share of buzz.  And you know who comes running at the scent of greenbacks…  Sean Malstrom recently weighed in on the popularity and addictiveness of Notch’s dreamland:

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I haven’t seen a game this engrossing in a long time. It’s budding phenomenon on PCs reminds me of a certain game in the eighties. Like Minecraft, that game from the eighties was very ‘blocky’, was made by one eccentric bearded engineer, was graphically behind gaming by decades, yet it took over the world. Imposters! Step aside! This is the heir to the Tetris phenomenon.

I’m going to have to stop you there, Sean.  Minecraft is about as far away from Tetris as you can get.  Tetris’ draw was a short and simple ruleset for a spatial reasoning puzzle with linearly increasing difficulty spiced by a dash of Russian exoticism from its origins and aesthetics.  Tetris’ mechanics are direct interactions with binary data—a Tetris well is literally filled with ones and zeroes.  Matrix translations and rotations are triggered by timers and microswitches.  Its legacy will be closer to that of Chess than Mario, Zelda, or even Minecraft.

Minecraft, however, is a complex and deep simulation game.  From the procedural environment, to the liquid physics, to the crafting tech-tree, to the redstone switches, Minecraft is a game dense with interactions between complex rulesets.  To compare something like that to Tetris shows an inability to grasp the vast gulf between the two games.  It also shows a lack of understanding of the appeal of either game.

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There are some people who do not even mine in Minecraft. … They just keep going with endless wandering. There are no ‘walls’ to this game world. It is the closest we’ve seen to infinite especially in 3d form. And what you are not seeing … is that there is a rich, vast underworld of linked caverns full of underground rivers, magma, and minerals. In other words, Minecraft has more content than most games put together.

While the spectacularly absurd hyperbole is par for the course with any Malstrom post, Sean is once again contradicting himself (also no big surprise).  Not only that, he’s contradicting something he’s repeated time and time again!

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Content has wrongly been seen as ‘game length’ or ‘game data’ where it is actually ideas and what the player takes away when the game is over.

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To be crystal clear: Content is not data space, art and sound assets, or the size of the game world.

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The textbook definition of ‘content’ in video games has always referred to the art assets and sound assets and overall playtime and ‘size’ of the digital world. After the UGC disaster, I began talking about ‘content’ and how it was a driving force for people wanting to buy games. It is said, “When Malstrom says content, he must be meaning value.” But no, I meant content. I actually mean the substance of the work and not necessarily the value of it.

Sean is still running in circles with his “content” definition, which I solved for him ages ago.  Sean’s “Content” is gameplay (better understood as Game Mechanic Aggregate), and his “Mythos” is Subject Matter (or as some would refer to it, Theme).  And, yes, Minecraft does contain many interesting and interlocking mechanics.  Defensive structures require materials, mining for the materials puts you in the same dangerous darkness you were collecting the material to escape, fighting the monsters gives you access to materials you can’t get anywhere else, these materials allow you to build items that can help in either mining or fighting, both tools and weapons degrade over time, etc.  But to randomly state that Minecraft contains “more content than most games combined” takes a great deal of stupidity.

Sean then went on to pad-out his post with a litany of erroneous statements on how and why Minecraft has been successful.  Below I will address the most bone-headed of the lot.

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The Big Myth: Minecraft is successful because it is a ‘sandbox’ game.
Expect this to be repeated over and over again. It looks like a ‘sandbox’ game only by a surface only analysis. Look deeper.

This is stupid and wrong.  Minecraft is a literal sandbox; it takes the sandbox concept to its logical conclusion: building sand castles.  You see, Sean needs to learn a little bit about Structured play and Unstructured play.  Structured play is playing Baseball; Unstructured play is “playing catch”.  Don’t mistake Unstructured play for an “absence of rules”, because “the game of catch” is still bound by the physical rules of gravity and whatnot.  It is simply less formally defined and unscored.  In Minecraft, you can dig a hole and bury your avatar in it, and you will “win” the survival game just as much as if you had mined for days and built a castle.  The meat of the game doesn’t lie in mere survival, but in bending the procedural content to your will.  The act of creation is the most rewarding of the mechanics.  It is also rewarding to see what you’ve built, and to show it off to others.  (This is the primary appeal of UGC.)

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–Emergent Gameplay
Emergent gameplay contrasts with the more scripted gameplay. Scripted gameplay has become so prevalent that developers no longer imagine any other sort of gameplay. “Give me freedom, developer! Let me go explore!” “No! Here is another cutscene for you to go through. And once you finish the first dungeon, you get your item. You must do it my way.” Emergent gameplay is the game acting like a well tuned clock rather than a conveyor belt (trying to ram ‘experiences’ at you).

Emergent gameplay is still the wrong term.  Real emergent gameplay would require a system that intelligently rewrites rules during play, which of course, would require AI far beyond anything we currently possess—all for the dubious goal of playing under inconsistent rulesets.  Minecraft is certainly not emergent gameplay.  Minecraft is a complex set of rules that have interesting interactions (ie, a game).  Whether or not goals are explicitly spelled out doesn’t change this.  Yet structured play and unstructured play are still very different things.  The two will always coexist, regardless of the “Hardcore Apocalypse” Sean is always prophesying.

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–No artstyle.
This game has no artstyle. It isn’t even trying to get an artstyle. And this is how games used to be. … Atari Era or 8-bit Era … these games had no intentional art-style.

This is a meaningless statement.  All art has a style, be it minimalism, surrealism, or rococo—style is inescapable.  If Sean meant to say the game was artless—that the visual design was unskillfully and carelessly made—he would be wrong there too.  Minecraft possesses a very intentional art style, explicitly chosen, and superior in aesthetics to its predecessors.  Minecraft was initially inspired by Zachtronics Industries’ Infiniminer, a similar game of multiplayer cube placement.

The color choices of Infiniminer were clashing and muddy.  Translucent collision-free boxes abounded, creating a cluttered appearance.  The sound design consisted of harsh synthesizer blips in response to any action.  Compare this to the tasteful earthen browns of Minecraft’s trees and dirt, the cool green of the leaves and reeds, and the appealing blue sky.  Minecraft’s sounds are all realistic samples, carefully mixed to create an idillic atmosphere.  The differences are striking.  Remember, even NES games varied in visual quality.  Can Sean tell the difference between these two pictures?

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–Accessibility
I don’t have much to say about the accessibility. The controls are so ridiculously simple. The concept of the game is so ridiculously simple. Like Tetris, everything is simplified to blocks.

Minecraft does not succeed in accessibility, because crafting is a black box game, the controls are decidedly not intuitive (destroy your workbench with a pickaxe to pick it up?), and joining multiplayer servers involves entering IP addresses by hand.  The vast majority of players did not “figure out” the crafting system—they found the patterns for items online.  And we all know what kind of players tolerate these kinds of things…

Which brings us to the questions of exactly who is playing Minecraft?  Logically, only people who have heard about Minecraft are playing it.  Now, Minecraft didn’t explode after being featured in USA Today, or appearing in an episode of The Jersey Shore, or receiving a plug by Oprah.  Minecraft exploded in popularity after being featured by Valve, gaming news sites, and Penny Arcade.  If you haven’t figured out what I’m getting at yet, I’ll lay it out for you: Minecraft is a game played by the Hardcore (Malstrom included).  What feature was added to Minecraft that triggered this explosive growth?  Online (not local) survival multiplayer.  Minecraft is a game of long-term investment and user generation content (as in the experience of creating is the entertainment).  It sure is funny that self-proclaimed lapsed gamer, king of the casuals, Sean Malstrom, would tell the world that the only thing to distract him from his hardcore science-fiction digital wargaming (Starcraft 2) was a hardcore fighting/mining/crafting/building sim!  What’s the matter, Malstrom?  Wii Sports Resort and New Super Mario Bros Wii not holding your attention as long as you thought they would?  It is to laugh!

So how Hardcore is Minecraft?  You can build a computer in it.

Now where did we last see something like that happen?

Sean Malstrom’s been yapping about “Maternal Instincts” in Metroid Other M for over a year now.  From his earliest predictions of the game’s impending failure (which would be a direct result of concerning itself with maternal instincts), to his most recent gloating over the game’s low sales (which simply had to be due to the maternal instincts!), Sean has never stopped harping about maternal instincts being the final nail in Metroid’s powercoffin.

Malstrom:

[Nintendo is] no longer interested in making fun video games. They are interested in ‘expressing their creativity’. How else to explain the demand for a new game like Super Metroid and we get ‘maternal instincts’ Metroid that explores Samus Aran’s ‘mommy issues’ involving a space jellyfish.

Malstrom:

NES Metroid had no cutscenes, no dialogue, no ‘maternal instincts’ (you didn’t even know she was a girl), and relied almost entirely on its core gameplay.

But is this the case?  Do the low reviews and low sales all stem from the game concerning itself with the fact that Samus is a girl?  Or is Sean yet again misdiagnosing a situation he isn’t capable of understanding?  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know the answer.  To explain why, let’s dive into the history of the franchise, and the history of Samus’ femininity.

The first Metroid game ended with the unexpected revelation that the avatar you had been controlling was female.  It is well known that Samus was not originally conceived of as a female character, with the decision being made near the end of the game’s development.  Since the decision was made so late in the process, it had little chance to impact the larger design of the game (Although perhaps Mother Brain was named at this time).

Yoshio Sakomoto:

When we were almost done with the development of Metroid, one of our staffers casually suggested “Why don’t we make Samus Aran a female character to surprise the player?” Back then I thought it was a nice idea, but I couldn’t foresee what a huge impact this would have on the future of the franchise. Up to this day, I’m thankful to the person that came up with this idea, although I honestly can’t recall who actually made the suggestion.

While Sakamoto can’t remember who made the suggestion, it is likely the suggestion was influenced by an American science-fiction film released seven years earlier.

Yoshio Sakomoto:

I think the film Alien had a huge influence on the production of the first Metroid game. All of the team members were affected by HR Giger’s design work, and I think they were aware that such designs would be a good match for the Metroid world we had already put in place.

Similarly, the character of Warrant Officer Ripley was originally written as a male character.  The decision to cast Sigourney Weaver in the role was made just before filming began.  But compare the timing of the gender changes for the characters: Samus was rewritten as woman at the end of the project, while Ripley was cast as a woman while the sets were being built.  Given the “impregnation” concept Ronald Shusett developed as the Alien’s defining trait, the idea of a female lead had probably been in the back of his mind from the beginning.  The influence of this decision had an even larger impact on the sequels.

The Metroid sequels are also more conscious of Samus’ gender; the most notable instances being Metroid II and Super Metroid.

After defeating the Queen Metroid in Metroid II, Samus discovers a hatchling metroid.

The hatchling metroid is shown to think of Samus as its mother by following her, and helping her leave the level by destroying obstacles.  The narrative goal is conveyed through the game’s mechanics, not through a cutscene or voiceover.  This is good design.  If a narrative element can’t be delivered by playing the game, it has no place being in a game.

Early on in Super Metroid, the hatchling metroid is captured by Ridley.  This provides a narrative goal (rescue the baby metroid) and a game goal (shoot everything between you and the baby metroid).  Consider this: While Mario is driven to rescue Peach by Masculine Instincts (which need no elaboration), Samus is driven to rescue the baby metroid by Maternal Instincts (rescuing a defenseless “baby”).  And yet both could be considered opposite sides of the same fundamental instinct!

Near the end of the game, Samus is attacked by a giant metroid that suddenly backs off, and begins cooing.  Without a single text box of explanation, the connection to the baby metroid at the beginning is made.  The baby metroid’s sacrifice at the very end is presented in an identical fashion, without explanatory text.  It also serves a purpose for the game’s mechanics, by restoring the the player’s energy, and providing the final weapon to defeat Mother Brain.

What would these games be like if they were non-interactive and had copious amounts of poorly-written narration over them?  Something like this:

Now we get to the heart of the matter.  What is Metroid Other M about?  Before we look at the story we are told in cutscenes and voice-overs, let’s look at the story told by the game’s mechanics:

• Extremely long slow-paced non-interactive cinematics frequently interrupt play. Auto-targeting aims for you.
  This is a game about the unimportance of player input, and therefore the player.
• Linear level design, with each new objective from Adam highlighted on a complete map.
  You are not a free agent exploring the unknown.  You can only follow the path.  You can only follow orders.
• Weapons and powerups are not collected, they are authorized by Adam.
  This is a game about submission.

Other M does not concern itself with the elements of Maternal Instincts that inspire bravery and strength; it instead centers on femininity as a weakness.  Previous games presented Samus’ gender as the source of her strength.  Dealing in Maternal Instincts did not doom Metroid Other M—employing mechanics that narratively weaken a strong female character did.

Finally, what can be said of the story we watch, the controller resting on the floor?  Even after all the talk of baby metroids, bottle ships, and babies crying, Samus isn’t even the character who is placed in the role of being a mother.  Instead we witness two different characters performing the roles of “mother and child” dysfunctionally, immediately before the very last boss battle, which is literally a fight against the control scheme’s auto-aim!  Following that, the only “maternal relationship” in the story is abruptly and unceremoniously ended on a sour note.  Even on a cinematic level, the handling of maternal themes is completely botched.  Samus’ obedience to Adam is nonsensical and hollow.  The relationships with the other soldiers is underdeveloped and forgettable.  Samus gets scared of Ridley and can’t shoot him.  The list goes on.

Malstrom:

So why aren’t we getting [a game like Super Metroid for the home console]? Why are we getting a game with tons of cutscenes, dialogue, and discussions of Samus’s ‘maternal instincts’? The answer why has nothing to do about a quality video game. It has everything to do with developers wishing to ‘express their creativity’.

No, Other M is the result of a lack of creativity.  It takes no effort to record a voice-over artist dully describing feeling like a mother to a mysterious alien lifeform—showing that relationship through game mechanics requires a far greater degree of cleverness.  Creating moments of recognition for the player without spelling everything out for them is difficult.  Flat-out telling the player what you are referencing is easy.  Making a game where progression through advancement of skill is gradual and smooth is difficult.  Doling out enhancements mechanically when needed is easy.  And sadly, Team Ninja took the path of least resistance every step of the way.