Sure. But, getting the film made and made right wasn't so simple.

Turbo follows 4D fighting game player Hugo (Justin Chon of Twilight fame), who hopes to join a pro-team by winning a Super Turbo Arena tournament.

"People," Conaway recalls, "looked at me like I was crazy."

It wasn't the story that was causing the looks of bewilderment, but Conaway's vision for how the film should be made: An effect-heavy film with a budget of $100,000 USD.

This was Conaway's University of Southern California student film short. "It costs about $400,000 to make an episode of Power Rangers," says Conaway. "So if you think about it that way, it's really not that expensive."

Student films typically cost a few thousand bucks — maybe the price of a sedan at most, not a fleet of sedans. Sure, Turbo was to be Conaway's thesis film, but it was to be more: Atypical. It's Conaway's calling card. This would be a two-years-in-the-making showcase showing he could use to tell a story and made a slick, effect-heavy film. And ultimately proof that this young, up-and-coming filmmaker gets gaming, the internet, convergence.

It all started in 2007. No, actually it started before that with karate, anime and video games. The Last Dragon inspired a young Conaway to take up martial arts in junior high, studying Shorin-Ryu style karate and kobudo until he achieved a black belt. "There weren't many black action heroes that I was aware of as a kid," he says, "so Bruce Lee Roy fighting Sho-Nuff the Shogun of Harlem on a bootleg VHS was my inspiration." (The movie would even go on to inspire the final fight in Turbo!) By high school, he was got a gig as executive editor of game site PSXNetwork.com, going to E3 each year starting when he was 16. There was a stint working at Electronic Arts in marketing. And then there were movies, loads and loads of movies.

Movies took him to USC Film School and to a select motion capture performance class taught by Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis. The class got Conaway thinking about the Uncanny Valley Theory, about avatars, about effects and, even, martial arts. But it wasn't just about making a slick flick. "I wanted to find the story's emotional core," says Conaway. For him, that was the relationship between the two brothers in the film. Conaway was ready to go, Turbo was the picture he wanted to make for his master's thesis. Then, road block. "I didn't get a lot of support at USC for the project," says Conaway.

If he was to make the film using USC's cameras and USC's equipment, well, then, USC owns the film. Meaning? Meaning Conaway could not put it online. How did you see Turbo? On the Internet. How did I see it? Ditto. This is an age in which, if it's not on the Internet, it does not exist. And the only way for Conaway to ensure that the film existed was to get it online, which meant raising the money himself.

He didn't do it alone. Film is a collaborative endeavor — though the director is leading the charge. Conaway and his producing partner, Garrett T. Thompson, set out securing money. Conaway created a press kit — a press kit for a movie that hadn't been made yet, but a press kit that showed the visual vibe of the film. "Neither one of us comes from money, so we had to take a basic grass roots approach to raising the funds," says Thompson. Student loans, credit cards, fund raisers, matching gift donations, grants and any which way they could get the money they needed. "The challenge was convincing people that  we could get this 'crazy Turbo' project done." The reward wasn't some monetary pay-off.

Remember, Turbo is a student film — they were convincing the donors to give money just so the film could get made. That's it. A donation of faith. "When people donate to a short film they are basically doing it out of the kindness of their hearts and pockets," Thompson points out. "They will really reap no monetary benefit, so your passion truly has to convince them."

With initial funds in place, shooting commenced on December 2007. For the next year plus, Conaway and his team would be hard at work on this short film.  "I was never worried about it turning out great, I was just worried that it would take forever to get there," says Justin Lutsky. "To be honest, I never expected this to be such an undertaking.  When I agreed to edit I was anticipating a several month commitment and couldn't really believe we were still working on a short film a year and a half later."

Lutsky had met as contestants on a Fox filmmaker reality show called "On The Lot" in May 2007. Both were eliminated, but became fast friends. Lutsky, a young filmmaker in his own right, was asked by Conaway to cut the film. "Turbo shot on the RED camera, which was fairly new at the time," says Lutsky. "There were no established post production or editorial work flows established.  We essentially had to create our own work flow from scratch and had a lot to learn along the way." Learn as you go, learn as you go.

An effect-heavy film like Turbo needs effects. Lutsky introduced Conaway to the folks at Ember Lab, a start-up digital effects house in Southern California. "With the large amount of VFX work that had to be done, Jarrett could have easily spent his entire budget on post production alone if he had used an established Hollywood studio," says Ember Lab's Josh Grier. "We wanted to propose a bid that fit within his budget and would allow us to sustain our selves for the duration of the project." For the team at Ember, Turbo was their first complete project and the experience of working on this type of film was by far their biggest drive to get involved. That, and the arcade gaming.

"My brother Mike and I lived in Tokyo for about three years and we have always been fond of the Japanese arcade culture," says Grier. "After watching the first cut of Turbo, we knew right away that we wanted a hybrid look, combining elements of the retro eighties gaming culture with Japanese arcade flair." Those retro elements were massaged so that they felt futuristic and a look was developed that Conaway agreed completed his vision. "The most challenging part of Turbo was not a specific effect, but the design work that went into developing Turbo's game system," says Grier. "The HUD, UI and the futuristic TV were featured in about 75% of the shots and all had to be developed from scratch."

Not only was the game system complete mapped out, but the game's mechanics. "People sweat when they play DDR in arcades, right?" asks Conaway. "That's the same idea — Super Turbo Arena is a physical game. Kids want to be Turbo players, not basketball players." The game and its moves was created in the minds of the Turbo team so that it would be possible to play if the tech ever existed.

That's what sells the film — its authenticity. Whether it be the authenticity of Turbo's characters or its video game element, it feels real. Even for a movie wrapped in a sheen of CG and special effects. It feels realer than anything than has come out of the traditional Hollywood system.

Turbo is not perfect, but it's filled with promise. It's a vision of a future when those who grew up playing video games start to make movies about them. Movies that don't suck.

Turbo from Jarrett Lee Conaway on Vimeo.

Though one is obviously dwarfed by the comparison, both figures are impressive in their own right. And both speak to the health of their form of multiplayer gaming. For console games like Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer's meteoric growth is commonly understood. But for LAN parties, still playing games like Counter-Strike, their resilience and persistence are most frequently seen among college-age gamers on campus.

"If anything, I think it's growing" says Nathan Etzell, a senior at Oregon State University, whose 300-member OSU Gaming organization has a prewired, 30-person LAN room at the bottom of a dormitory where at least two large parties are held per term. In January, his club will meet the University of Oregon in the second "Civil War LAN," a gaming tournament named after the schools' football rivalry.

But there is a sense that the PC LAN party — like fraternity parties, all-nighters, streaking, whatever — are something whose time and place comes on a college campus. Out in the cold hard world, PC LAN and direct server support in new titles is dwindling in favor of console multiplayer and proprietary hosting services. Most notably, StarCraft II will not support LAN gaming as it shifts to Blizzard's Battle.net. And dedicated servers are out under Modern Warfare 2, which is now running multiplayer with a combination of Steam and the recently created IW.net for Modern Warfare 2. Both sequels' predecessors had a strong history in dedicated servers and LAN gaming, leaving some gamers feeling betrayed, and some LAN enthusiasts feeling marginalized.

LAN gaming is not gone from the off-campus civilian world. But annual convention hall events with big budgets, entry fees, prizes and sponsorships are different creatures from six people linking up to play Warcraft III. While the former will definitely still happen after you graduate, the latter is less likely. Those six-people sessions are most likely made among fellow gamers, who are likely to find each other in a class, or perusing a bulletin board in a student union.

"Their age group usually involves a lot of what PC gamers are," says Keegan Gormley, whose Big City Gaming in downtown Eugene, Ore. offers constant system-linked gaming and monthly tournaments. "They're mostly college-age students who, in their spare time, enjoy playing a game like Counter-Strike, or another game they've played for a long time."

The players in his $5-an-hour "stadium," — eight consoles connected to high definition, Major League Gaming-standard panel monitors - are largely middle- and high-schoolers, Gormley said. Younger kids are less likely to LAN, he said, because of the accessibility of consoles and the desirability of their most current games.

"There's much more deep-rooting in PC gaming," Gormley said. "Someone who gets into a game on the PC can end up playing it for years," he said. "On consoles, I've seen people drop Halo for Call of Duty, then drop Call of Duty for Flashpoint. For PC gamers, mostly, it's whatever they originally clicked on and killed with."

And that helps explain the persistence of LAN gaming. The standbys of a LAN party are usually real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, or WarCraft III, then shooters such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. TF2 is the most recent of these, releasing in 2007, with others having roots going back to the late 1990s. There's a reason for this.

"It's what people are good at," said Patrick Chinn, one of the University of Oregon organizers for the Civil War LAN, which will be held Jan. 22-23. "One reason people want to play an older game like Counter-Strike is because they've played it a long time and they've gotten good at it. We've done tournaments for games that are brand new, and there'll be some attendance, but they're not as well played."

Plus, by this point, the support histories for the games have either controlled for or patched out of existence most means of cheating. "The tactics in a game like Counter Strike have become so refined that there's no real dick move you can pull," says Dylan Leeds, a senior majoring in digital art at Oregon. And for whatever in-game legislation doesn't cover, LAN gaming offers another control: Being physically in the presence of your opponent. It cuts down on ragequits and unsporting behavior.

"You're more likely to respect someone if you know you're going to see interact with them after the game," he said.

And that speaks to another quality of LAN gaming that, unlike its numbers, can't be replicated or really improved: the human contact of it all.

"If you're playing online by yourself, the hype's really not there," said Josh Bothun, an Oregon senior majoring in computer science and music technology. "It's like you have to intentionally create it for yourself, but you get a completely different experience when people are around you."

LAN parties have an anecdotal culture that just can't be replicated by solitary multiplayer gaming. Often stretching 24 hours or more, they're salted with tales of inside jokes and hyper-caffeination. At major tournaments in the civilian world, bragging about casemods and your rig are their own sideshow, similar to a custom-car show.

"It's more about community," says Gormley, the game store owner. "It's being able to shoulder-shove the person you just killed. It's less about yelling at someone over a mic, and more about actually giving that person the evil eye.

"It gets so elitist online, sometimes," he continued. "It seems like a lot of people don't want to play online console games because they don't get the game in its first week, don't level up their character in time, and then they feel like they can't compete."

It might be easy to assume that anything other than gaming over the Internet, as opposed to a LAN or WAN, is redundant, a relic, or headed for obscurity. But system-linked games bring something to the room that proprietary multiplayer services can't: One's friends.

To use an apt college metaphor: "It's like drinking online versus drinking with friends," Chinn said. "Drinking a couple of beers and IMing with friends is not nearly as much fun as actually drinking with your friends."

On walls around me hung a Wii bowling ball controller attachment, a Wii pool cue, Wii pom poms, and more.

Who makes this stuff? Two amiable Orthodox Jewish brothers — black pants, white shirts, beards, and an offer to their guest of some kosher pastries — sat across from me, cheerful about what they've built and the amazing gizmos surrounding us.

I was at the second floor offices of CTA Digital, a block from where Brooklyn, New York touches the East River, in a short, aged office building, up an elevator painted with an old yellow floor ad for Domino sugar. I was in the spotless show room where Leo and Sol Markowitz's line of sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-useful — and apparently hot-selling — attachments for the Wii and other electronics line the walls. (See their offerings online, then imagine that a lot of that is hanging on the walls of one room that's also big enough for a couple of couches and a big-screen TV.)

The brothers Markowitz are some of the guys who saw in the Wii not just a gamer revolution but a chance to make money selling people things to attach to their Wii remote.

And 200,000 units of their Wii bowling ball controller sold worldwide later, they say, they were pleased to be surrounded by the plastic products of that opportunity.

"We smelled it right away," Leo told me, recalling his first sensations of the Wii's imminent success.

The Wii peripheral market is big and, despite other industry slumps, growing. Of the 58.4 million gaming peripherals sold so far this year in the United States, the NPD group reports that 18.4 million of those are for the Wii. That's up a million from the same date last year.

So even though Sol, an avowed Kotaku reader, playfully cut his brother off early in our meeting about Wii add-ons to remind him that "real gamers don't like the Wii," enough people do like these attachments. They like the tennis rackets and the baseball bats, the imitation light sabers and shotguns. Maybe not the pom-poms — a weak seller — but people like buying Wii peripherals and business is no joke at all. It's good.

CTA has more than 30 employees, a warehouse in upstate New York and design and development teams in Asia. Maybe most importantly, Leo noted, "We have five people who think of things to make 24-7."

They think of things like... the bowling ball. "Why wouldn't you buy it?" Leo said to me, when I ask him what the point is. I argued that people had been Wii-bowling with no ball-shaped shell around their controller just fine.

It makes the game fun for plenty of people, Sol said. "It makes it more exciting." He knows that "real gamers" won't care as much.

This bowling ball was a dream project, a year in the making and spurred by research that showed them that Wii Sports bowling is the most popular activity on Nintendo's console.

"We all knew that whoever comes out with bowling, it's going to be huge," Leo recalled.

Those CTA engineers got to work, trying to craft a bowling ball something-or-other that could fit around a Wii Remote. They didn't want people to chuck a bowling ball controller through their TV, so they tried to design a bowling ball shell that wouldn't function if you didn't wear the shell's wrist strap. Couldn't get it to work right, Sol said. They settled on a design that has two wrist straps and  is sealed with a sticker that must be broken in order to first encase a Wii remote in it. You rip that, you assume the risks.

The bowling ball's good, though it's holes are positioned only for right-handed bowlers. An ambidextrous design hadn't worked. But have no fear, fellow southpaws. "We probably will get into the left-handed business," Leo told me.

I met with the Markowitz men and a helpful colleague for over an hour. Leo repeatedly bounded from his seat on a couch across from me to grab secret prototype after secret prototype of CTA gaming add-ons that will make the bowling ball seem pedestrian. They're secret still, but they're wild.

CTA's been in this business for 16 years, Sol explained. They started with cell-phone add-ons, then moved on to iPod attachments. Now they do gaming add-ons too, like PlayStation 3 chat pads, Xbox 360 cooling devices and iPhone steering wheels. The Wii's been the big one for them lately, and gaming's up to a quarter of their business, though they won't say how much money CTA makes. They sell their attachments worldwide, to electronics stores that once ignored them or shunned gaming.

They say that even Bed Bath & Beyond is on board now. The brothers recalled that the retailer — not exactly a gaming powerhouse — consented last Christmas season to trying to sell 30,000 of CTA's Wii add-ons, simple things like controller charge stations, and sold almost all of them. The retailer asked for more — asked for the top sellers, even. So, the brothers told Kotaku, CTA has sold Beth Bath & Beyond Wii Sports kits to sell and even a Wii controller shotgun. No word if it's sold next to shower curtains.

Leo showed me a smart one: A belt and holster designed to hold a Wii Remote for users of Wii Fit. He rightly pointed out that the game requires players to use the Remote to start their exercising but then forces them to either put it down or needlessly hold it as they work out on the Wii Balance Board. The holster holds the Remote, freeing the user's hands. And it swivels, letting someone point the Remote to navigate menus without having to un-holster it. That seemed to address a Wii Fit user interface issue.

I asked the brothers if they saw themselves as being in the problem-solving business, the fun business or — gesturing to the Wii Music Kit that lets you embed the Wii remote into shells shaped like a violin, a trumpet, a dog paw — the novelty business.

"We see what the problem is [with a game] and figure out what we can make for it," Leo began.

"We are in the fun business," Sol cut in.

Leo laughed. "We're in the business to sell and make money."

CTA's bowling ball controller may make the company stand out, but they are not the only creators of imaginative Wii add-ons. Mad Catz makes controller shells shaped like Ubisoft's Rabbids characters. Nyko director of marketing Chris Arbogast told Kotaku that one of his company's most creative Wii add-ons was going to be their Party Station: "a combination charging station / beverage container / chip bowl." It's not coming out. "Although it generated a lot of buzz and consumer response, it was not cost effective to produce and was tabled."

Arbogast noted that some of the more imaginative controllers, while fun or aesthetically pleasing don't fit his company's strategy. "We decided on particular accessories that allowed us to incorporate new technology or offer features that were not previously available, like button relocation on our Action Pak pistol grip or rumble in our Kama." Their next big product is their new Charge Base IC.

CTA is well aware that some of this wilder stuff doesn't work. The Wii Music kit has been a slow seller, not helped by relatively slow sales of the Wii Music.

The brothers seem undeterred. They say that their new Wii Sports Resort kit, which includes a bow-and-arrow add-on, a Jet-Ski-style handlebar and even a frisbee shell, is selling great.

And don't worry, those of you who might feel you're too cool for these kinds of attachments. Leo and Sol are making some products for you in mind too. Just wait. Brooklyn's keeping busy.

Nowhere is the realization of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment's pause he said, "Kingdom Hearts."

"Oh, because it has pirates?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It's the flying." The way the game introduces flying the player -– about halfway through its storyline after you've been running and jumping on the ground the whole time -– was like a revelation in game design for him. "Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it's like you knew it was coming. It just felt right."

There's a fantasy fulfillment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it's appealing to a part of your senses that you don't use very much in everyday gameplay.

"We live in a very X, Y world," Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn't afraid to build his games around it. "If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis."

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360 degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character's (or aircraft's) physics so that they don't get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalize the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray's flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager's face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don't realize that there's more to flight than getting off the ground.

"Don't get me wrong," says Gray. "[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation."

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organize a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

"You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?'" said Gray. "If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It's different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,' because you don't get blue keys in the air."

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centerpiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson and he wasn't shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360 degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you're up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there's not much fantasy fulfillment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it's a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don't mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn't last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfill the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: "I don't know where I'm at, but I'm having fun."

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

• Massage Games Don't Always Have Happy Endings
  The Xbox Massage-Makers: Money, Sex Toys & Indie Backlash
  by Stephen Totilo
• 
  
• Intervention
  I Kept Playing - The Costs Of My Gaming Addiction
  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• Meet The FAQers
  For Little Money And In Many Words, These Gamers Help You
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Gaming's Gamblers
  I Can Kick Your Butt, Wanna Bet?
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• The Lone Gamer
  Is Single-Player Gaming In Danger Of Extinction?
  by Michael McWhertor
• 
  
• Frighteners
  What Makes A Video Game Scary
  by A.J. Glasser
• 
  

REVIEWS

Dead Space Extraction Review: Frighteningly Good
PSP: Attack of the Minis
Heroes Over Europe Review: A Flying Shame
FIFA 10 Review: 30-Yard Screamer
MySims Agents Review: Sherlock Holmes Didn't Have To Deal With This $#@%
NHL 2K10 Review: Thin-Ice Capades
Spyborgs Review: Not-So-Heavy Metal
Gran Turismo PSP Review: Steady As A Pace Car
Wii Fit Plus Review: Now I'm A Believer
MotorStorm: Arctic Edge Review: Big Game, Big Fun
Katamari Forever Review: Nothing More, Nothing Less
South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! Review: Throwing Snowballs
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Review: Crisis Hearts
NBA 2K10 Review: Ball, You - Man!
NBA Live 10 Review: Amen for a Revival
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review: Boom Headshot!
Brutal Legend Review: Testing Its Metal
Lucidity Micro-Review: Beauty Is Only Skin-Deep
Ju-on: The Grudge Review: Curse Of The Movie Game
Half-Minute Hero Review: A Good Risk
Zombie Apocalypse Micro-Review: Paint the Town Red
Axel & Pixel Micro-Review: A Puzzling Combination
Borderlands Review: Guns! Guns! Guns!
Critter Crunch Micro Review: Gross In a Cute Way
Bakugan Battle Brawlers Review: Almost There
A Boy And His Blob Review: The Zero Nostalgia Version
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games Review: Going Through the Motions
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Review: The Leap, At Last
Marvel Super Hero Squad Review: This One Is For The Brats
Dungeon Hunter Review: Pocketful of Diablo
Rock Band Micro Review: iPhone Joins the Band
Forza Motorsport 3 Review: Definitively Maybe
DJ Hero Review: You Spin Me Right Round
GTA: The Ballad Of Gay Tony Review: Out With A Bang
Tekken 6 Review: The Lag of Iron Fist
Saw Review: Do You Want to Play This Game?
LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias Micro Review: A Pleasant Gust of Fun

PREVIEWS

Eliminate Preview: Transitive Verbs Are Cooler Than Nouns
Sims 3 World Adventures: Chopsticks, Mummies & the French – Oh My!
New Super Mario Bros. Wii Preview: All The Modes, All The Chaos
Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers Preview: Show Me, Don't Tell Me
FATALE Preview: Alluring, Alarming and Totally Ambiguous
Left 4 Dead 2 Scavenge Mode Preview: Giving Multiplayer The Gas
Jam Sessions 2 Preview: I Fought The Law And Nobody Won
Dark Void Preview: Learning To Fall With Style
Sign Up To Test Zune, Facebook, And Twitter On Your 360
Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron Preview: I'm A Total Space Case
Army of Two: The 40th Day Multiplayer Preview: Extract Some Fun
Avatar Wii Preview: Environmentalism Commando
Dementium II Preview: A Mature DS Game With "Hell Moments"
MAG Preview: Come Back Here With My Tank!
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising Preview: The Darker Side Of Dawn

COLUMNS

Well Played
Why Everyone Should Be Watching the PSPgo
When the Going Gets Tough... Let the Game Play Itself
Windows 7: What Happened to Gaming?
Video Game Speakeasy Slips Into Soho for a Night of Raucous Fun
Can Bigger Screens Save a Shrinking Market?

Stick Jockey
A Virtual Golfer Looks Back On - and Ahead to - His Tournament Career
It's Not in the Game - Should it Be?
Re-Creating a Stadium Before Its First Pitch is Thrown
With NCAA 10, EA Guns for Two Shining Moments

Leigh Alexander
In Praise Of Hard Games

tim rogers
i've been shot!

COVER

• Designed by Michael McWhertor

And I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time.

Looking back, the timing of founding Meat Bun, our video game-themed t-shirt line, makes sense. It started in Tokyo, following an afternoon pounding the pavement in Harajuku, a fashionable slice of Tokyo nestled between Shinjuku and Shibuya. The area attracts the fashion conscious, from outlandish cosplayers to street fashion freaks.

Harajuku is also home to one of our biggest influences, Beams T, a Japanese label that somehow manages to make the stereotypically uncool—including video games, anime and manga—cool. It was after shopping at Beams T, where I purchased an Every Extend Extra t-shirt, lamenting that we'd missed out the label's Dragon Quest anniversary line of tees and bemoaning the fact that shirts from The King of Games were hard to get in the U.S. that the idea of making our own clothes, video game-themed ones, started to gel.

It was just days before the Tokyo Game Show. Wedged between the t-shirt shopping and the promise of playing dozens of unreleased video games, the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

Our goal? To tap into the hard to define culture of video games, a medium which we had been passionate about for decades, and create something that was better than what we were being offered. And we weren't the only ones with that idea. Similarly passionate video game fans, those raised on 8- and 16-bit games were doing the same thing, like the people behind Panic, J!NX, Attract Mode, Starmen.net and its spin-off Fangamer and many others.

So, after foolishly deciding on the name Meat Bun—inspired by a life-giving pick up from Capcom's unpopular side-scrolling arcade beat 'em up Warriors of Fate—we set off to clothe gamers.

My partner in clothing is Scott Spatola, a lifelong gamer who originally introduced himself to me after learning that I'd brought a SNES and a copy of Street Fighter II to college, against my parents wishes. The aforementioned arm-twister, Scott has always been the motivator, a rabid fan of Spy Hunter, Ninja Warriors and Darkstalkers, and the other half of this full-time-feeling side project dubbed Meat Bun.

It always helps to have a friend like Scott, one who's organized enough to undertake the business side of the business—setting up the bank accounts, applying for federal tax IDs, legally incorporating the company. There are just shy of a million little things that crop up in the process of starting to run one's own business, from the minor—like running out of envelopes with 200 orders waiting to be fulfilled—to scary legal threats. What seems like a fun little lark isn't often as easy as originally planned.

"I always said that if anyone ever asked, I'd tell them that starting your own business is F-ing hard, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise," says Sean "Jinx" Gailey, the creative overlord at clothier and accessory maker J!NX. "Real blood, sweat and tears (also real) have gone into this business."

But J!NX has turned those hard-lost fluids into a successful brand and, perhaps more importantly, a full-time gig for its founders.

"Frankly, the biggest challenge was getting over the 'hump,' making that transition from working your day job to solely working on your own business," Gailey says. "Anyone who's working on their own business can relate to that. We didn't take a paycheck from J!NX for 5 years of business, during the 'this is our side business' days. That was rough."

J!NX has been in business since 1999, when Gailey started the company "as a three page website with six designs" running the label from his bedroom. We met Gailey at last year's Spike TV Video Game Awards, bending his ear about the J!NX empire, which, while different from what we had set out to do with Meat Bun, reflected a similar passion for video games and general nerdiness, coated with a cooler shell.

"I wanted to make clothing inspired by our lifestyle, one of video games, pen and paper gaming, geek culture, giant robots, comics and dragons," Gailey says of the origins of J!NX. The clothing company has grown from a bedroom doubling as headquarters to an operation employing 21 people, occupying 18,000 square feet of office and warehouse space and making merchandise for hugely popular games like World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, StarCraft, Aion and EVE Online.

And while not quite understated, for the most part, what J!NX does is offer something to the fan of, say, World of Warcraft that's designed with more of a wink and a nod.

From the barely referential designs from Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy t-shirt maker Panic to the Earthbound obsessed crew at Fangamer—borne of Starmen.net—the subtle approach appears to be a common tactic. For our own part, ultra vague references to The House of the Dead, Ikaruga and Spy Hunter, seemed sometimes lost on the Meat Bun customer.

Reid Young of Fangamer says his company draws much of its inspiration from the Super Nintendo's role-playing game heyday for its similarly obscure designs.

"EarthBound and other SNES RPG's have definitely been our main inspiration," Young says, a fact reflected in the clothing label's EarthBound-heavy catalog. "1996 was pretty much the best summer ever — Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Super Mario RPG from morning to midnight. It's fun to relive those days and, hopefully, inspire new and old fans to do the same."

While the Fangamer store—"Something we hoped would bring in enough money to keep the lights on" over at Fangamer's community-driven side—is now the "main business focus," according to Young, employing three full-time Starmen.net veterans, running a clothing and merchandise label exceeded the EarthBound fan's expectations.

"I never anticipated the amount of work which goes into a single piece of merchandise," says Young. "It sounds easy to slap a design on a shirt, but the amount of time, money, and care that goes into the process is staggering."

Fan response, Young says, makes the grind of shipping thousands of Mother 3-inspired handbooks and t-shirts all worth it.

"Releasing a product, going to sleep, and waking up to find that everybody is as pumped about it as I am. It brings a little tear to my eye," he says.

That may be the most exhilarating part of trying to appeal to a gamer's fashion sense, finding something that people will buy and wear in public, unafraid to wear their love of video games on their sleeve, sometimes literally.

One person who's taking a different approach to the sometimes hazy cloud of "culture" that surrounds video games is Adam Robezzoli, founder of "video game culture shop" Attract Mode. It's an endeavor four years in the planning, one that includes fashion, art, print magazines and more.

Attract Mode's online store opened earlier this year, an effort that allows Robezzoli to "curate and produce unique art/goods related to video games, but also a way to fund pet projects like the artxgame collabs and the DATA BEEZ chip music concert." It also sells t-shirts, giving gamers more wearable options.

The online store offers a broader set of merchandise, however, from video game inspired t-shirts to zines from writer Matt "Fort90" Hawkins to Pac-Man oven mitts to CDs from chiptunes superstars YMCK, Anamanaguchi, Covox, et al.

Personally, when we started doing our own thing with Meat Bun, it was simply an extension of our gaming-related lives, much like what the founders of J!NX, Fangamer, Attract Mode and others have done—turned their passions into something tangible. And, yes, it's sometimes F-ing hard. But you have to wear something, right?

No, actually, I'm not. I've been playing Demon's Souls — a game even its developer admits isn't "a fun game." The action-adventure game casts you as a hero confronting where progress is hard-won, recovery supplies are limited and equipment can wear out. The twist is that when players die, they return as phantoms to navigate the same environments in a weakened state in the hopes of earning their bodies back — that's right, the game actually gets more challenging the more you fail.

And yet I love it.

I can't stop playing, and I can't really figure out why. Aren't games supposed to be accessible, and isn't frustration supposed to be a killjoy? What's the allure in this difficult game?

Expanded audiences and accessibility are major watchwords in the present era of gaming. Microsoft Game Studios' Bruce Philips recently unveiled research at Gamasutra showing that even among Xbox 360 games where completion rates are highest, most users only get about half the potential Gamerscore. And 30 percent of users don't finish some of the most popular and widely-played titles Philips studied. His theory – and that of numerous other designers crafting games designed to be appealing to wider audiences – is that frustration is what makes players give up.

But even though I'm definitely frustrated with Demon's Souls at times, I'd say I'm even more driven to succeed and to conquer than I've been in a long time. What gives?

"I do not think that games must be accessible to be appealing," Demon's Souls producer Takeshi Kajii told me in an interview. "If you make a game accessible it will expand the audience. However, if we were to make all games accessible, wouldn't you eventually get tired of the same thing?"

Kajii explained that in creating Demon's Souls the team sought to return to the core of what's fun about games, and relied on three tenets: challenge, discovery and accomplishment. "People commonly say Demon's Souls is hard because of this, but we never made the difficulty needlessly high for the sake of being hard, nor did we intend for it to be a selling point," he said.

Steep difficulty can be appealing. Take the case of indie action-adventure title Spelunky, where the sense of discovery and achievement is maximized by stiff odds. "I think that a tough challenge can make a game much more enjoyable," said creator Derek Yu. "Don't we feel the most fulfilled when we overcome something difficult? Without that feeling of getting better, a game turns into a chore - something that you do as a distraction rather than something you do for fulfillment."

The key to effective difficulty, as opposed to frustration that's just frustrating, is all in the implementation. "Doing something hard isn't fun in and of itself," said Yu. " It's not fun to sit in an empty room and try to balance a ball on your head for 10 hours straight. To make challenge effective, you have to provide an interesting game world and create deep mechanics that are entertaining to play with and very satisfying to master."

Nels Anderson, gameplay programmer at Hothead Games, also feels it's important to delineate between frustration and meaningful challenge. "Being frustrated usually means the player cannot determine a way to improve or progress," he said. "Part of the reason Demon's Souls works so well is because you understand why you failed."

Demon's Souls' Kajii says that failure needs to be an ever-present possibility if the player is to feel a sense of accomplishment. "We designed it so that players are likely to die if they aren't paying attention," he says. "By maintaining this intensity, players will be constantly nervous while playing, but [will feel] a tremendous sense of accomplishment is their reward for doing so."

Achievements are more valuable, then, when there's a lot at stake – and failure is less frustrating when it's clear to the player where they messed up. "Demon's Souls is a game where you ‘die a lot,' but as I've already said, it is geared so that you will acknowledge that it was your own fault," said Kajii. "Players will keep playing because they know they can get past a certain point by taking a different approach, using their imagination, and thinking about how to overcome obstacles."

In a game like Demon's Souls, then, a frustrating death is simply the game informing me that my strategy didn't work. The mechanics are such that I can't blame the game, and my failures never feel unfair. I can then tackle the exact same obstacle with a different approach, until I figure out a tactic that will help me succeed – and victory's all the sweeter thanks to all of my struggles on the way.

"Dying in a video game is like losing a tennis match, or getting rejected when you ask a girl out, or looking at a painting and not understanding its meaning. You'll always learn something and the next time will be better," said Yu. He says that if dying's fun, that makes it all the better – and Demon's Souls also features an interesting twist on death.

Enriched by its multiplayer element, the game allows players to see the bloodstains of other fallen heroes, and touch them to view how they died. Players can leave notes and messages for one another warning of tough spots up ahead, and can also recruit the phantoms of players that have died to help them handle challenges. Kajii says this system of strangers helping strangers came from a real-life experience of his, a time when his car was stuck on a snowy mountainside.

Numerous stranded drivers all banded together to push each of the cars in turn, but Kajji couldn't stay behind to thank his benefactors, lest he end up stranded again. "I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I'd ever meet the people who helped me again... Maybe if I'd met them somewhere else, I would've made friends with them... Many thoughts crossed my mind," he said. "This occurrence of helping complete strangers was strangely very memorable, and I kept thinking about it for a very long time.

"Demon's Souls is a game where you die many times, so I thought this idea of helping others would be a great fit. It's as simple as, ‘We all die so easily, so let's help each other out,'" he adds. "Unlike other RPGs, each player unfolds their own story, and each encounter with a phantom player expands and diversifies their experience."

Designers are right to be concerned with players finishing fewer titles, and they're right to offer low barriers to entry for expanded audiences – to a point. "I think in an attempt to avoid frustrating players, the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater in terms of difficulty," said Hothead's Anderson. "It's a pretty common misconception that players want easier games."

He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MIT's Gambit Game Lab: "Players are more critical of a game that's too easy than one that's too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, there's no way to make a game that's too easy harder," Anderson continued. "However, as soon as players feel they don't have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative."

Frequent death and frustration don't need to be viewed as engagement-breakers in games – as long as the deaths are meaningful and educational, and as long as the player's frustrated with themselves, not the game. The most important factor is clearly that players must be able to see what they can do differently to surmount a challenge.

The tactic that finally gets me over a bridge swarmed with archers, or through a narrow hallway packed with vicious wolves, might not be the same one that works for another player, but it's one I've developed on my own, through trial and error, experimenting with the environment and with my own abilities.

"This act of trial and error in a tense atmosphere is the heart of challenge and discovery, leading to the strong satisfaction of accomplishment," says Kajii. "I'd say Demon's Souls is not a ‘fun game,' but a ‘game to have fun with,'" says Kajii. "The goal is not to find a pre-defined answer — instead the answer is something created by the player on their own through their own play-styles."

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Players putting their money wheretheir mouths are, betting that they are better, betting that they will win and betting with money. "Let's face it," says 30-something Scott Popular, "money makes everything interesting."

Popular is a regular on the fighting tournament circuit and self-described tourney "hype man." His job, he says, is to "keep the hype" during tournaments, and he's dead right: money may not make things better, it may not make things more fun. But, that twenty or that fifty will, without a doubt, make things more interesting.

It doesn't matter where the tournament is, but you can bet, there are players there picking up extra cash. You might be the eighth best Melty Blood player, but the eighth best Melty Blood doesn't win anything besides the feeling of satisfaction. It's not like the tournament is a front, that's not the case at all. "You don't want these money matches near a proper tournament," says Popular. They get in the way, they're a distraction. Money matches are not why people enroll in fighting game tournaments — most don't even know about them. They're often in an invite hotel room or off in some corner or banquet room somewhere. But search the boards, the forums, and there are people trying to set something up, make something happen.

"While the large majority of players and spectators aren't involved in money matches," says Capcom's Seth Killian, "they can still be quite common on some games. Especially as you get towards the finals, or during a marquee matchup, you'll hear a lot of shouting about who likes which player, for how much money, and at what odds." Before Seth Killian was a manager at Capcom USA and before he had a Street Fighter boss named after him, Killian was making his mark on the fighting game circuit. "It's a friendly thing with no centralized system — just player to player bets," he explains.

Betting is done usually in "First to" sets: First to 7, first to 10, etc. The first player to win seven matches, or the first to win 10 matches, wins. "Common bets include: Who will win the set, an obvious bet, who will win the next match, or even who will land the first hit," says Killian. Players may put up the money themselves or might pool money as is often the case in region rivalries — the top West Coast player vs. the top East Coast player. Side bets can round out the action. First hit bets are for those there to gamble, who want that instant rush. Bets can get complicated and interesting by using characters that are typically considered "weak" (Gen, anyone?) to mix-mashing fighting styles (rushdown down attack player vs. run-away-run-down-the-clock player). If bets get too complex, then players and punters will divert their attention to a more straight-up match.

As video game tournaments become bigger and bigger, there's the inevitable push to legitimize tourneys as actual businesses. Gone are the days winners were handed paper bags with money symbols scrawled on them in fat, magic marker and stuffed with cold, hard cashola. Winners must fill out a myriad of sheets including tax forms for Uncle Sam. More reputable tournaments will pay up in a matter of weeks, while there are horror stories from the shadier events of it taking up to a year and a half to get the tournament winnings.

Make a name for yourself as a world class fighting game player, and you'll find yourself with players lining up to play you — for money. The challengers might think they can win, or they might view the experience of getting their ass kicked by a world class player as a postcard to themselves. It's not always the top players who draw the big money matches, but the middle level players that might make the most interesting match-ups. "Some of the bets can get quite large," says Killian. "At a tournament I was at just a few weeks ago, two players faced off in a 'first to 10 wins' match in MVC2 for $13,000."

But is this legal?

"Federal law does not have much interest in gambling," says I. Nelson Rose, an attorney and a senior professor at the Whittier Law School in California, "unless it is organized crime or the federal government has to get involved, as with interstate horse racing." One of the leading experts on gaming (here, gambling) law, Professor Rose is the author of the upcoming Internet Gaming Law. "There's too much social betting to begin with." Whether it's an office pool on the Oscars, a round of horse shoes or even Governors making friendly Super Bowl bets (which might even violate their state's laws!), social betting is so pervasive in society, that eradicating it would be a fool's errand on the part of the government. Instead, the federal government focuses its attention on those who can make money off of gambling, typically organized crime. "The enforcement of gambling laws," says Prof. Rose, "is low on the list of priority's of the federal government."

"If it is truly a game of skill," says Prof. Rose, "it is not gambling. And if participants are merely betting on themselves — more of an entry fee than a wager — it would not fall under any federal law." According to Prof. Rose, those "bets" players are putting on themselves could legally be considered "an entry fee." Side bets would not fall under federal law either as federal gambling laws do not apply to patrons of bookies. In short: Federal gambling law applies to those who are making money off the act of gambling and not simple wagering on games of skill.

It's the state laws where things get sticky. In the United States, gambling laws differ by individual states. Some states have old and outdated gambling laws on the books. Take California, which says it is illegal to bet on contests of "skill, speed and endurance". Other states, such as Arizona, are starting to even take measures to make wagering on games of skill difficult. States having measures on gambling is not unique. "All of the states have prohibitions on gambling," Prof. Rose points out, "but again, most exempt games which are predominantly skill." If video games are games of skill and not chance, then it could very well not fall under state law. Some states restrict even games of skill. The question is largely: Are fighting games in fact games of skill or chance? Play a couple rounds with guys like Daigo Umehara or Alex Valle and see how far luck gets you.

"The appeal for money matches is simple," says Popular. "It's cash in hand, right away." You play to win, bring your best game and "not some experimental bullshit tactics" says Popular. Once that is cash on the table — or more often than not, television set — it starts. And it ends when the fight is over. "You're not going to rage quit in a room with a people betting money," says Popular. "No way."

Rage quitting and the arcade tradition of fighting games are driving forces for the perceived needs for players to hash things out in person. "Money matches can also be a way to settle scores between players who have online drama," says Killian. Web start-up BringIt.com is offering an online matchmaking service that using a ranking-type system to match players of similar skill levels in money matches. Players pay beforehand via PayPal to reduce the risk of sudden quits or "connection problems".

The federal Wire Act prohibits anyone in the gambling business, Prof. Rose explains, from using interstate wire infrastructure to transmit info that can be used in placing bets on sporting events. BringIt.com side-steps that as competing in video games is, as previously defined, a game of skill. Players are not "betting", but rather putting money as an entry fee. BringIt.com makes its money on the match-making service it offers, by taking a 14 percent service fee on each match players accept or enter. "However, there are nine states within the U.S. where the participation in skill-based video game tournaments for cash prizes is not allowed," notes BringIt.com. "At this time, if you live in the following states, you may not play for cash prizes on BringIt: Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Tennessee, and Vermont."

But for some, the appeal of money matches isn't the money and isn't even the winning, but the millisecond before a decision is made, the gut reaction. Many of the top fighting game players do gamble on cards, craps and slots. Some of them are as good at gambling as gaming, good enough to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. "To play fighting games is to gamble," says Killian. "These guys gamble with every move they make — the gambling sensibility is aligned perfectly with fighting games."

And those thinking of playing money matches at the next big fighting tourney, Killian offers this advice: "Capcom's position would certainly be to check your federal, state, and local laws regarding gambling, and to follow them."

[Pic]

Models and hipsters wander the streets mingling with star-truck tourists and Hollywood starlets. Restaurants and boutiques vie for curb-space among million-dollar apartments and two-by-two patches of grass and trees.

But last Thursday night the biggest crowds weren't those forming to catch a glimpse of Lindsay Lohan's private shopping spree, but the nearly thousand-person line that wrapped around three sides of a trendy block of nondescript buildings.

The line of people stopped in the middle of a sidewalk a good 200 feet from the object of everyone's attention; A small shoe store.

The excited crowds, dressed in t-shirts and some toting laptops, cameras and joysticks, weren't here to mingle, snap pictures or shop, they were here to play.

Inside the packed shoe-store, temporarily decorated with posters and art of winged super heroes and martial artists, people gathered in tight clusters around flat screen panels to get a chance to play game developer Capcom's latest fighting video game.

"The idea of fight club came straight from the down-and-dirty arcade roots of Capcom's fighting games," Capcom community manager and legendary Street Fighter pro Seth "S-Kill" Killian tells Kotaku. "Chris Kramer and I were really excited to get our community hands-on and playing the games, and to recreate that gritty, fun atmosphere of getting together for in-your-face competition."

Last week's impromptu Capcom Fight Club took over a two-floor shoe store. The top floor was packed with video game consoles, televisions, pizza and players. But a second line greeted those trying to make it down the stairs to the darkened basement.

Crowded between the plain plaster walls of the basement, packed from concrete floor to pipe-lined drop-ceiling, gamers gently pushed their way to the end of the single narrow room where a 20-something DJ spun records on two turn tables, her face blank as she stared at a laptop screen.

The crowds undulated toward her, staring over and past her head at a darkened big screen television, two white, over-sized joysticks pushed sitting on either side of it on translucent pillars.

This is why more than 500, perhaps a thousand people traveled to the shoe store last week, ignoring the famous, the rich and the beautiful, standing in line, then snaking through a sweat-drenched crowd of gamers in a packed basement: The chance to catch a glimpse of Super Street Fighter IV.

Due out early next year, the latest iteration in the wildly popular fighting franchise draws crowds where ever it goes.

"We've done Fight Clubs in LA, New York City, Vegas, San Francisco, now New York City again," Killian said. "Basically fight clubs are there for us to help (gamers) get hands on the game before it's released..."

Thursday night Killian made his way to the end of the basement every hour from 8 p.m. to midnight, turning on the big screen to hoots and hollars and then booting up a copy of Super Street Fighter IV.

"We have many happy press here tonight who wish they could play, but they cannot, Killian says into a microphone, the game playing behind him on the screen. "This is for you the community, so enjoy."

Less than eight people from the thousand or so who showed were able to get their hands on the unreleased game playing on the big screen, but no one complained. Instead they rooted for the randomly selected gamers, cheering and jeering during the impromptu match-ups each hour.

Between presentations games returned to the two dozen or so smaller flat screens mounted on the walls in the basement and upstairs, playing the already released Street Fighter IV and the soon to be released Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, both fighting games.

But Fight Club isn't just about the virtual fights. Capcom makes sure that the irregular, underground events tap into the deeper elements of pop-culture and art that inspire many of their games and in turn inspire art.

"We hire local and notable artists for every event, and have worked with groups like IAM8BIT, Meatbun, Triumvir, and Jim Mahfood, just to name a few," Killian says. "Street Fighter in particular runs so deep in our culture that there's a great supply of amazing artists inspired by the games and characters.

"We cook up a 'you can only get it here' limited edition, unique t-shirt that we give away at every event, and in my opinion they're pretty rad."

The first Capcom Fight Club happened with almost no notice and no marketing.

"At the very first club we basically told nobody that wasn't in my phone, and we still had 300 Street Fighters showing up to a skid-row warehouse in downtown LA," Killian said. "The attendance has increased at pretty much every one since then, as word continues to spread."

Despite the almost exponential growth of the marketing parties, the Capcom Fight Clubs somehow manage to maintain their gritty, grassroots feel.

Graffiti of in-game characters decorated the walls of the shoe store in Soho, people quietly slipped in and out of the video game speakeasy with quiet affable patience and everyone waiting in that monstrous line got their chance on a game.

Arcades may have died in America, but the people who played in them still thrive, it's just that now they have to travel to find their community.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

In British Columbia, a college student flips open his laptop and fires up his PS3.

In San Antonio, a guy picks up another three memory cards on the way home from working at JC Penney.

These are the peculiar markers of the GameFAQ author, whose pursuit and completion of a video game guide - dozens of hours of uncompensated labor - seems to walk the fine line between video game obsession and expertise. It's a world in which 20,000 words can be considered small for a full walkthrough, and committing to write one means at least a week, and more likely two or three, devoting all of your spare time to playing, pausing, and taking notes. And it's a labor that, with rare exceptions, provides zero material reward.

"I've gotten one bounty, for The Lost and the Damned," Robert Allen Rusk says, almost with pride. He's talking about the gift cards that GameFAQs offers for being the first to produce a complete guide to a new game. Rusk picked up a $60 gift card for his work on Lost & Damned, which weighed in at 58,216 words - roughly 200 pages if it were a paperback novel. His work on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were each more than twice as long.

"I haven't done anything with that gift card," Rusk said. "I may save that one for Christmas."

I talked to Rusk and others among the more accomplished writers - authors who have handled very large games, who have published sizeable guides or sizeable numbers of them, and authors who have been the first to produce walkthroughs for current, high-demand games. As someone who's reviewed video games, I've felt that the demand to produce credible, authoritative work definitely interferes with, and in some cases crowds out altogether, one's normal enjoyment of a game. But at least I get paid for that.

Not so with these writers. They get to pick their games, of course. They stop and start and battle procrastination and hustle against deadlines, often ones internally set. But in the end, they definitely started doing it because they loved a game, and they keep doing it because playing a game this comprehensively seems to wring every last atom of enjoyment out of the disc.

"It might not seem that fun because it takes a long time," concedes Tony, a 20 year-old at the University of British Columbia who asked to be quoted by his pen name, ChaosDemon. "But these [developers] put years and years into making the game - and you got more out of it, because you had to break it down, and know everything about it."

More Impressive Than Achievements

Among a gaming completionists' many badges of honor is the 100 percent achievement. No matter how many hours of your life you lost to the game, that gold (or platinum) trophy, that 1000 Gamerscore achievement, it's definitely respected as the mark of a serious gamer.

But they aren't the ones pausing a game to take notes on a laptop at every checkpoint, or draw out maps on doodle paper and then figure out how to get their point across in ASCII text. And then they aren't sitting down to write dozens of pages about it. There aren't any achievements for this sort of thing, and it's hard to get across why you're going for it.

"I've been embarrassed to tell people about it, to tell you the truth," says Paul Williams, 23, of Brisbane, Australia. "Telling someone I write 20-page strategy guides on how to beat these games is not the greatest thing for my ego. But my parents and my girlfriend know about it, and they're all very supportive. They know it's a hobby and it's not the most important thing in my life."

Williams was the first (and so far, only) writer to produce a walkthrough for Halo 3: ODST for GameFAQs, not that he's bragging about it. He found it to be almost a fluke experience, owed in part to ODST's notoriously short campaign mode that's drawn some complaints.

"I was surprised at how fast I was able to get something up," Williams told me. He's written guides for Fable II, Resident Evil 5, and a partially completed one for Gears of War 2. ODST was atypical, compared with his other efforts.

"When you start, you at first don't realize how much work it is," Williams said. "Halfway through, when you feel yourself getting close to just having had enough of it, you realize you've done all this work and you might as well stick to it."

No matter how passionate they were for a game, the writers I talked to admitted that burnout inevitably becomes an issue. "The first time through is always fun," said Barry Scott Will, 43, of Richmond, Va., an IT director for a church who just finished a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 guide. "When I'm writing for a game, I play through it at least twice or sometimes three or four times. By that third or fourth time, it's just work."

Rusk, the Grand Theft Auto guru, was a game tester in the late 1980s for Broderbund Software, LucasArts, and later a studio in Colorado Springs. Guide writing offers flashbacks to those days, he says, and not necessarily in a good way. "Being forced to play constantly, you start hating the game," Rusk said. "There's a natural burnout writing a guide, you just want to get it out the door.

"But I don't lose my sense of enjoyment," he insisted. "The thing here is I love the games I work on. I love the Grand Theft Auto games. I love getting my hooks in and working on it."

Writing Walkthroughs For Minor Profit

ChaosDemon - aka Tony, the 20-year-old in British Columbia - wrote his first guide as an 11-year-old: It was for Pokémon Stadium 2 on the Nintendo 64. "Some days I wasted a whole day when I wasn't at school, just working on a guide," he says.

It didn't kill his grades, actually. "My English teacher didn't like me that much," he says, "but she commented 'Your writing is better than what I expected.' And it was probably because of the guide. You have to be very organized in your writing."

To say there's no benefit to the FAQ writer beyond a sense of satisfaction is false, of course. Some have found a writing voice, others a readership, and a few have turned their work into paying freelance gigs. Rusk collected $500 when his Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay guide was published in a 2004 strategy guide-compilation drawing on material from GameFAQs contributors. Williams, the Australian, was offered (and accepted) a gig writing an exclusive guide on Call of Duty: World at War for the Web site CheatPlanet.

Will, the father in Richmond, Va., has monetized his GameFAQs efforts further, building a site called papagamer.com where e-books employing the text of his GameFAQs guides are uploaded with graphics and other enhancements and sold for $5. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which took him 10 days to complete, is the latest offering. Will sees his GameFAQs work as a kind of loss leader, providing free and comprehensive advice on a game with an upsell to a more robust, premium guide elsewhere. He says he's never made more than "a few hundred bucks a month," at what he does.

"It's not much more than a hobby that pays for itself," Will says. "In the past few months though, I've tried to boost my sales, so this is like a second job."

Will started his guide writing on Knights of the Old Republic II ("still a big fan of that game") to help gamers in BioWare's forums who kept showing up with the same questions. But as a father himself, he came to understand the real service of free guide writing - to the parents of frustrated kids, who can't be helped with a video game neither mom nor dad understands the way they would a bike or toy.

"I really get a feeling of accomplishment when I get emails from somebody who bought the game for their child, and the child gets frustrated, and that gets the parent frustrated, and they come online and get the help they need and everybody's happy," Will said. "And I've gotten emails from people in their seventies, playing games. I got one email from a man stationed on a ship in the U.S. Navy. He had one game he'd brought with him, and he wanted me to email my guide (Dungeon Siege II) to him."

Williams has seen this kind of gratitude, too: "I've gotten some seniors who wrote in to thank me for my Metal Gear Solid 4 guide. For my Wall-E guide, I get pretty frequent thank-yous from parents. It's cool. It's like, whoa, people actually appreciate this."

Drawing The Line

Not everything they play gets reviewed FAQ written about it. ChaosDemon, who put out a Batman: Arkham Asylum FAQ between summer school and the fall semester, wants to take his time with Uncharted 2. Williams, down in Australia, adores Japanese RPGs but won't touch them for FAQs. "I love those games, but I'll never write a guide," he said. "I hate to get interrupted when there's a big epic story unfolding." Plus, to comprehensively play a Final Fantasy or Star Ocean game - to anything close to 100 percent, "and write about it," would take, "years and years," he groans.

Rusk, the San Antonian who's hoarding memory units for The Ballad of Gay Tony, enjoys but won't review Lego Star Wars. Earlier this year he tried Watchmen: The End is Nigh and enjoyed it enough that the guide he wrote for it became "an intro to the Watchmen universe for newbies."

But the solid bet is, by the end of the year, they'll be writing something.

"I don't watch TV," Will said. "Instead of watching TV, I play video games. Some people watch a sitcom, a drama and the nightly news, I come home and play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

"When you get down to it," he says, "we're gonna play the video games anyway."

Note: Do you write walk-throughs? Try your hand at posting one here.

During the course of my tenure at Kotaku I've referenced my days in EverQuest on many occasions, but I've never elaborated on what went down back then. Recent events in my life have brought that period to the fore, and I've decided to share my experience with our readers.

In November of 2000, my life was going well. I had a lovely girlfriend, a serviceable vehicle, and a job that paid more than enough for me to survive while catering to my increasingly expensive video game habit. Within four months, it would all be gone.

Good Intentions

At the time I was sharing an apartment with a friend of mine named Dustin. Dustin was a great guy, but he spent his entire downtime sitting in front of his computer, playing a video game called EverQuest. I had encountered the game before, having participated in the beta for Sony Online Entertainment's massively popular multiplayer game, but once the game went live I lost interest. I just couldn't see myself paying a monthly fee just to play a computer game. Oh, how things have changed.

Having nothing much else to do at the time, I'd sit and watch Dustin play. He'd explain what his Monk character was doing in the game. I was a spectator as he progressed, learning to feign death, earning new weapons, and taking on greater challenges as he got closer and closer to the level cap.

So when I wasn't spending time with my girlfriend, Emily, I would watch Dustin play. Or I would tool around on various text-based MUSHes and MOOs online, role-playing with people all over the world. I'd been into science fiction, fantasy, and comic books since I was very young, so slipping into an imaginary world came easy to me. Perhaps a little too easy.

Towards the end of 2000, Emily and I broke up. The reasoning behind this is far too stupid to delve into…let's just say we were both young and a bit foolish.

I became depressed, and Dustin had just the thing to cheer me up.

The Scars of Velious expansion for EverQuest came out in December of 2000. My roommate, perhaps tired of my moping over my lost love, picked up a copy of the game for me as a Christmas present. I installed it, created a half-elven Bard, and soon our apartment had two guys in the living room at all hours of the day, faces bathed in the glow of monitors.

Within a week, the game that hadn't affected me at all nearly two years previously had become an important part of my life. Soon, it would become my life.

If I wasn't asleep or at work, I was playing EverQuest. The former was becoming a rarity. I would go into work, and I would still hear the sounds of EverQuest orcs in my head. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was speeding through the Greater Faydark zone, killing pixies and turning in quest items.

In January of 2001, a man with a tow truck came to my place of employment and took my car away. I had fallen behind on payments without realizing it, and Nissan had decided they wanted my Sentra back. My first thought as I watched the tow truck drive away was how many hours walking to and from work would take from my EverQuest time.

I worked at a company called FranchiseOpportunities.com, maintaining and creating websites, but increasingly my time there was spent either communicating with my EverQuest friends or browsing websites for tips on the best equipment and techniques for grinding experience points and gold. It was impossible for my co-workers not to notice. In February of 2001, Joseph Lunsford, the owner of the company, called me into his office.

"It wasn't an easy decision," Lunsford told me this month when I went to see him and talk to him about the person I used to be. "You were was amazingly bright. I was convinced there wasn't anything you couldn't do. You showed so much promise, but your interest in work just fell off. Projects started taking longer to get done, and it was obvious your head wasn't in it. You left me no choice."

I was in tears back then. I felt unbelievably pathetic. I had no car. I had no job. Joe had handed me my last paycheck and about $120 he had in his wallet, and sent me on my way. I took a taxi home, broke the news to my roommates (we had moved into a three-bedroom to split the bills three ways), went into my bedroom, started up EverQuest, and forgot about everything.

According to Dr. Hilarie Cash, the executive director of the reSTART internet and gaming addition recovery program and co-author of the book "Video Games & Your Kids: How Parents Stay in Control," retreating inside a video game to avoid real world problems is a common cause of "video game addiction."

"I would definitely call it video game addiction, which is a subset of internet addiction. Many of the things [you] described to me are typical of a video game addict, particularly the way that real life shrinks away for the addict, living more and more in the virtual world."

And that's exactly what I was doing. I had been a confident and outgoing young man who enjoyed hanging out with my friends, spending hours chatting about absolutely nothing while smoking cigarettes and drinking countless cups of Waffle House Coffee. Now my social dealings involved helping online friends camp a rare monster spawn, or discussing class balance on my guild's chat channel.

Going outside was only necessary when I ran out of smokes or beverages. I lived off $.30 pot pies from Wal-Mart and cheap bags of rice. I was taking care of my most essential needs, but only barely. Often times I would fall asleep in my chair in front of my computer with EverQuest running, waking up hours later to start the cycle all over again.

Even now my memories of the period are a blur of Oasis runs, power leveling, and experience grinding. My mother remembers those days much more vividly.

"Mike was unavailable for most of that period," she recalled recently. "There was no way to contact him, except to do a 'drive by' preferably with a bag of groceries in the back seat. I remember trying to talk to him. Such a fine mind and wild sense of humor; all covered up and hidden deep inside again. He listened half-heartedly and was easy to anger. He was going down fast, even to the point of telling how it really was and not just what you wanted to hear."

Hearing her talk about it now, I can barely believe it had gotten so bad, but I tend to hold on to positive memories more than the negative ones. Like the day Emily came back.

Brief Hope

It was three months after I was fired that Emily decided to give us another chance. I wasn't the same man she had been with before. I was relatively skinny, and my hair had grown ridiculously long. As we lay curled up in bed one evening she commented on how my belly had disappeared, which tickled me to no end. It seems perverse to me now. It wasn't as if I had been dieting or exercising; I was taking pride in my own malnourishment.

My existence slowly started gaining some semblance of a real life again. Emily went out one afternoon and brought me a stack of job applications, which motivated me to go out, get my hair cut, and go to my first job interview at a Fast Signs down the street. Looking slightly more human and feeling more alive than I had in months, I got the job on the spot. It was amazing how fast things had turned around. Unfortunately, it wouldn't last.

In an odd twist, my EverQuest friends were now worried about me.

I hadn't been around, and they missed my sense of humor and my enthusiasm. My ability to twist four Bard songs at a time didn't hurt either. These people needed me. I was important to them, and I couldn't let them down. Looking back, I can't believe I missed the irony there.

So I started playing EverQuest again. At first it was only on the nights that Emily couldn't make it over, but soon I was back to my regular play schedule – every waking hour. I was regularly late to work, and called in sick at least once every two weeks so I could stay home and play.

Then came that fateful night.

The woman I had once told was the love of my life was sitting undressed in my bed not a foot away from my computer desk, begging me to join her, and I kept putting it off. I was so close to level 40 I could taste it. I was in the Dreadlands, kiting large enemies back and forth, killing them slowly with my Bard songs. I still remember the urgency I felt, along with the annoyance that this woman was trying to keep me from reaching my goal. Couldn't she understand how important this was to me?

She had certainly tried.

"Back then I just figured I was dating a gamer, and that's how it was going to be," she said to me recently. "I hadn't dated many guys at that point, and my older brother was the same way. He worked, came home, and played video games."

Eight years later it became obvious that my lack of attention toward her weighed far more heavily than either of us had suspected.

One morning in late September of 2001, I called my job and quit. Whatever justification I had for this at the time doesn't matter. The reason I quit was because I was tired of making excuses for being late, and I just wanted to play EverQuest.

Emily and I had grown further apart. During my time at Fast Signs I purchased an old car from my sister, only to discover I couldn't get insurance for it due to my driver's license being suspended over a previous ticket, ironically issued for driving without insurance. Rather than actively working to fix the problem, I slipped deeper into depression. I would let Emily take the car, driving it with a "TAG APPLIED FOR" plate on the back, but wouldn't go anywhere with her for fear of being pulled over and sent to jail. Instead, I would stay home and play EverQuest.

The last time I would see her — until 2009 —was two days after her birthday in early October. I had let her take the car to her party, but refused to go with her. She reacted by keeping my car for two days without contacting me. I responded by telling her to return the car and the keys and get out of my life. She did just that.

And I kept playing.

A New Beginning

December rolled around again, one year after I had taken my first steps into EverQuest's world of Norrath, and I had completely changed. I went from being a strong independent person to a gaunt, unshaven, unshowered recluse, completely withdrawn from the outside world.

My roommate, once one of my greatest friends, was threatening to throw me out of the apartment if I didn't find a job. But I had absolutely no motivation. The only time I left my dwelling was to scavenge for food at my parents' house, or to grab a quick shower, as our apartment's hot water had been turned off.

I remember feeling like a ghost, drifting through the waking world unnoticed. Luckily for me, my mother was looking out for me as best she could.

"He didn't look like Mike anymore," she remembers now. "He was scary and pitiful. I was afraid he was suicidal or dying of some mysterious disease. It broke my heart and I knew that coming home and taking the pressure off would be the best medicine for him."

And so on January 1st, 2002, at the age of 28, I moved back in with my parents. It wasn't an instant cure for my addiction – as soon as I convinced them to let me order DSL I was back online again – but something had changed. I started spending more time hanging out with my parents and less time sitting in my computer chair staring at little computer people doing little computer things. I had responsibilities. I had a support system. I had a stable platform to launch myself from instead of the quicksand I felt I had been standing in before.

Within two months I had found myself a job at a local gas station. Later that year I started speaking with Joe Lunsford again, proving myself through contract work until he decided to hire me on again in 2003. So I once again had a job, a girlfriend, and eventually my own apartment, sans roommates. That's where I was in 2006, when Brian Crecente contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write for Kotaku. That's where I am now.

It would be easy for me to pin my problems on EverQuest, and society in general would accept it without question. I could say I fell prey to an addictive video game that nearly ruined my life, but I would know that wasn't the case.

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place. It was my responsibility to control how much I played, and the SOE spokesperson I contacted regarding my story agrees.

"EverQuest is a game," the Sony Online rep told me. "The majority of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers play the game in moderation enjoying the gameplay as well as the community interaction the game provides. As with any form of entertainment, it is the responsibility of each individual player to monitor his or her own playing habits and prioritize his or her time as necessary. It is not our place to monitor or limit how individuals spend their free time."

Dr. Hilarie Cash agrees as well, though she suspects that game developers are actively engaged in trying to make their games more addictive.

"Some blame can be laid at the feet of developers, making a conscious effort to make their games more addictive. It's analogous to the tobacco industry, trying to make tobacco more addictive. It works to their benefit. That having been said, it's up to the individual to take responsibility for how they play."

During our conversation, Dr. Cash also likened gaming to gambling. Some people can walk into a casino, lose $5, and call it quits. You have to know your own limits, and be conscious enough of them to know when you are in danger of going too far.

My own solution to my potential for MMO addiction is rather simple. I've managed to turn a habit that once interrupted my work into something I actively have to do for work. It's no longer escapism if I am doing my job. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but if I am going to be that gullible I might as well take advantage.

As for Emily, she's sitting behind me as I type this, playing Peggle. I'd ask her to come to bed, but I know how important getting to that next level can be.

"I threw it together in class," Le Clair told Kotaku during a phone interview this week. His creation, Rumble Massage, is no game. It's a program that makes an Xbox controller vibrate on command. It was launched in January through the Xbox Live Indie Games program, which enables amateur developers to sell peer-reviewed projects online through the Xbox 360.

Rumble Massage currently sells for $1. Earlier this year, a porn star reviewed it on the G4 network, an awkward detail Le Clair has shared with his mom. "Most people treat Rumble Massage like a joke, which it is," he said. "It's not a joke like it's stupid. It's a joke in that it's not serious."

Since Le Clair shook up the Xbox marketplace at the beginning of 2009, there have been five more massage programs. They've been made by developers in New York, Italy and France. They've been made by developers desperate to fund projects of which they can be more proud. They've even been made by at least one person with a real interest in massage.

The massage apps have also become loathed by a community of amateur game developers who feel the vibrational programs have distracted critical and consumer attention away from the actual video games that are developed and sold in the Indie Games marketplace on Xbox Live.

"I think they really hurt lots of developers who are trying to use the platform as it was intended," Indie Games developer Nick Gravelyn, told Kotaku. He's the 22-year-old Seattle-based creator of a couple of Indie games, including the recently-released Pixel Man. He soured on the massage apps once Le Clair's project spawned successors. "I've talked to people who have never been to the Indie Games section ever," he said. "When I asked why, there was a substantial number who respond with: 'It's all sex games and stupid apps.'"

The scorn from the XNA Indie Games community has registered with the massage-makers. Benedetta Sciacca, a 34-year-old artist who lives near the Mt. Etna volcano in Sicily with her husband and a kennel of pets. "I was not interested in fast money," she told Kotaku. She had tried to make her massage app the best-looking of the bunch and was hoping it could reach the same general audience she targeted with cocktail-making apps she's made for mobile phones and Xbox Live. Her program presents a series of Shiatsu massages illustrated in an Asian brushwork style. She based the massages on her research in Shiatsu and tested the single-player and couples massage with friends over a three week period.

When Sciacca uploaded the app for peer review, she heard the anger. "I'll do my best to fail this…if it get[s] into review," one XNA user wrote on her playtest thread. "Enough with the massage clones!" another wrote, "I'm sure you can make a game that is better and more original than that." She is set to release a game in a couple of weeks, she said.

Shiatsu Massage made it out of peer review and onto Xbox Live in June. It's been downloaded 90,000 times. It sells for $1 and, according to Sciacca, said it has sold through 5,000 copies. (Microsoft declined to confirm any download figures for Indie Games projects. A rep said that the company leaves it to the developers to share.)

The common take on all these massage apps is that they're sex toys. Sciacca excludes hers from that. "It is not intended to be a sexual toy," she said. "It is a real massager, tested to be effective and with instructions to use it properly."

Others encourage the sexual reference. The tongue-in-cheek YouTube commercial for Spectra Musical Massage, a massage/music-visualizer app made by Long Island-area Pow Studios, concludes with a woman putting an Xbox controller down her pants. That was "a way to acknowledge that, yeah, yeah… we know, we know," the program's lead developer, Betson Thomas, 24, told Kotaku.

It's easy to see why some would assume there's a sexual intent in these applications when one features a mode to enable Xbox Live users to rumble each other's controllers remotely. Such a mode is the stand-out feature in Remote Masseuse, the product of a 28-year-old developer who would provide only his or her Xbox Live username, Entrager. His was the second of the massage programs, developed before Rumble Massage and released just prior to Valentine's day. He said he's received "a surprising amount of positive feedback, with several couples e-mailing me to thank me for creating it."

Asked what me makes of the sex toy comments, he wrote to Kotaku, "I developed Remote Masseuse to be used however people wanted to use it. I think it makes a great cat toy. You set one controller next to your cat and make it vibrate with the other." Entrager said Remote Masseuse has netted him $15,000. He's made it for the iPhone as well.

Le Clair, the starter of this trend, said a sexual use of Rumble Massage was not intended back when he hatched the idea. "I didn't want to pander to that," he said. But he attributes the success of his program, downloaded as a free demo 300,000 times so far, to two things: 1) His decision to give almost all of its contents except for its highest vibration setting away for free and 2) "Obviously it has to be because of the whole vibrator thing."

Whatever made the massage apps popular fueled some of the later entries in the field. French Indie Game creator Pascal Ginda admits he simply needed the money he thought a massage app could provide. Petank Party, the first Indie game from his team at UFO Games, didn't make enough money to keep his group going, he said in an e-mail to Kotaku. "So we looked at the best selling apps and two massage games were in the top 10. After downloading them, we thought we could do better." He made and released one called A Perfect Massage (pictured at the top of this post). It has sold well enough to both enable his team to test a new engine and, Ginda said, to "take a big risk and make a bigger game." Ginda's honesty about cashing in has rankled some XNA Indie Game developers.

The massage makers, however, are not completely at odds with the game creators. Entrager, the Remote Masseuse developer, agrees with the likes of Nick Gravelyn that the apps have been too much of a distraction from real games. "I think Microsoft should provide a clear separation of the two so that people that want games can find only games and people that want apps can find apps," he said. Within the Indie Games section, the massage programs are included in an "other" section, along with virtual fish tanks and birthday-card-makers. That makes them still a sub-set of "games."

Gravelyn, the one non-massage developer interviewed for this story, admits the confusion has provided some motivation. He said he'd come to think that he'd either have to wait out the trend or "have something so cool that it beat out the massage game fad." His Pixel Man game has already sold well enough to make it into a Major Nelson top 10 list of weekly Indie Games sales and it's netted him more than $1,000, motivating the daytime contract developer with a decent profit and level of awareness for a game that took about a dozen hours to make.

So much for separation of massage app and games, though. The massage trend has spawned a new phenomenon: Developers are now including massage modes in games that might not appear to need them. Minneapolis-area stand-up comedian Pat Susmilch got together with friends this year to develop Cold War Commander, a simple side-scrolling action game requiring players to collect jellybeans and avoid Communists. "Towards the beginning of production for Cold War Commander, during a 'creativity session,' I jokingly said that our next game should just be something that maxes out the rumble so you can put it on yourself," he told Kotaku. "We all had a good laugh, because that was the dumbest thing ever … A month later Rumble Massage was released and we learned that lots of people were stupid enough to buy that. We included it in the game to both garner more sales and lift a middle finger to everyone who already bought Rumble Massage."

The ploy failed, and the game has sold just 120 copies so far. Public reaction has been muted. "I usually just get messages on my Live account saying that the game sucks and I should be ashamed of myself," Susmilch said, "Without any mention of the massager."

The 2009 surge in massage games may be subsiding, not just for those sticking the mode in a Cold War platformer.

The massage programs don't chart as highly as they did earlier this year, when they regularly clustered near the top of the best-sellers list for Indie Games. Pow Studios' Spectra Musical Massage, released in August, has been downloaded only 3,765 times and purchased 117 times — 83 times in the U.S., three times in Japan, once in Italy — according to its developer. That has profited Pow $200.

Thomas said his team didn't sign up for Indie Games to make massage apps, "but we felt it could help us gain some exposure." He said the app was "de-evolved" from a music-gaming project Pow still hopes to create. "Like everyone else, we were ... trying to figure out how to be successful in this environment." Pow's true focus is on a musical-based shooter the team is developing called Muzikaze.

That original massage-maker Le Clair is also looking forward to life beyond the trend. He promises he's done with the genre. In fact, he's using his earnings to pursue his dream. He and a couple of friends are moving to New York to set up a company called ZXB Games. He wants to make a modern-day pirate-hunting game and the cushion of cash made more comfortable by that well-massaged $60,000 means something important to Le Clair. "We can bootstrap it," he said.

To borrow a term from the massage world, that's one way to get a happy ending.

Some of the scariest experiences I've had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you're supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theater could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don't distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can't predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you're experiencing instead of rationalizing it away as "just a game."

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here's how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you're a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it's no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. "In a horror game, when you're walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game," he says. "You look at the world a lot more intently because you don't know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there's a lot for the light to play across."

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You're walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the gray steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man's torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don't realize what's happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the gray wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It's beyond scary to me — it's flat-out disturbing.

"Scary is the result of lot of things," Milham says. "The first thing you've got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game]."

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character – even though you're able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. "One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,'" says Milham. "If you're too fantastic with something, you don't really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away."

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here's another game that can freak you out, even though it's not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you're following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. Okay, fine, that's canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn't just playing with Batman's head. It's playing with yours.

"During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they're constantly just inches from the Scarecrow's grasp," explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. "We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety."

But unlike a slasher flick where you're yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call 9-1-1, you're the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he's been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you're walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can't be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

"[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn't have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context," says Whitworth. "The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player's confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up."

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that's similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player... like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That's probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

"A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what's coming next, that sort of endless tension," Milham says. "You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don't [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn't.' And then... OH MY GOD!"

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

As once singular experiences give way to more multiplayer, more cooperative gaming, we can't help but wonder: Is the single-player-only game in danger of becoming extinct? And if it is, who's really to blame?

The annual pre-holiday game release flood, now spilling into early 2010 thanks to numerous delays, is filled with marquee multiplayer-driven blockbusters—Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Halo 3: ODST. It's also filled with brand new names, games from developers who have seemingly capitulated to the rising clamor for more multiplayer.

"[Multiplayer is] the most requested feature we get," says Todd Howard, executive producer of The Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3 at Bethesda Softworks, so far resistant to the trend this generation. "So we do consider it every time... and every time it loses, but I suppose you never know."

Entering the multiplayer fray soon are titles like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog's sequel to its purely single-player PlayStation 3 debut. The list also includes BioShock 2, due much later, but also based on a title lauded for its story-driven solo experience and Brutal Legend, famed designer Tim Schafer's first stab at a multiplayer game.

Also due this November is the game that could outsell all of those highly anticipated releases, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a four-player cooperative spin on the side-scrolling formula.

While the latest Nintendo platformer may not be the first game in the series to sport a multiplayer component—portable games Super Mario 64 DS and New Super Mario Bros. both featured wireless multiplayer modes in a much more limited capacity—rarely has a Mario Bros. game focused so heavily on cooperative play. Not since, well, the original Mario Bros.

There is some cause for concern for the solo-only player. Massively successful games like Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Valve's Left 4 Dead offered shorter campaign modes in favor of a more robust multiplayer feature set. And StarCraft fans may be more than perturbed about the late release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, already sliced into three campaigns, largely due to delays with Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer service.

If more publishers and developers follow suit in shifting more focus to multiplayer, will the lone wolf suffer?

The addition of multiplayer to games that have relied on their single player strengths is done for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that the game buying public has simply come to expect it as a series sequelizes and evolves. It's an oft-demanded feature from the community, even in series that tend to be strictly single-player.

While Bethesda's epic role-playing games tend to be limited to solo adventures these days, the developer has flirted with multiplayer in the past, with Howard pointing to games like The Terminator: SkyNET. But he sees the tacking on of multiplayer as a potential distraction.

"With the big RPG stuff, I think adding multiplayer distracts your efforts to put the best massive single player experience you can out there," Howard says. "I'd rather use that development time to make the core experience of being a lone hero better."

That distraction was a common concern among PlayStation 3 owners when Naughty Dog and Sony lifted the veil off Uncharted 2: Among Thieves' multiplayer features. Fans lamented that co-op and deathmatch would ill-fit the game and, worse, could detract from the solo adventures of star Nathan Drake.

"Right at the start of the development of Uncharted 2, we decided that we wanted to create a multiplayer game," explains Richard Lemarchand, co-lead designer at developer Naughty Dog. "During production, the single player and multiplayer designers sat together in the same room, and the majority of the artists, animators and other team members that worked on the multiplayer levels worked on parts of the single player game as well. This meant that the quality bar of each part of the game was constantly being inspired and raised by the other parts of the production, and that everything came together with a really cohesive feel."

Fortunately for fans of the single-player Uncharted: Drake's Fortune campaign, Naughty Dog didn't sacrifice that portion of the game at expense of adding a handful of multiplayer modes. In fact, they offered a longer single-player mode

"We had lots of reasons to [add multiplayer] — we love multiplayer games and really liked the idea of Nathan Drake's play mechanics in that context, we wanted to develop ourselves technologically in an area that we hadn't touched for a few years, and, if we're totally honest, we thought that we might see some bonus sales as a result."

That's one of the other key reasons developers add multiplayer components to their games, to ensure that a consumer looking for something to play beyond the eight to twelve hours needed to complete a solo campaign will still see value in their purchase. It's a feature that publishers hope will dissuade consumers from renting or reselling their games.

Games like Bethesda's Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion help retain their value with much longer campaigns and a regular flow of single-player downloadable content, an alternate solution to the multiplayer extension.

"It comes down to doing whatever you need to do to keep people playing your game for months on end," says Cliff Bleszinski, game designer at Epic Games. "The guys at Bethesda realized this with Fallout and are doing what is essentially episodic content with their expansions. Make them keep the disc and keep the game on their mind. That's the goal."

Even without that after-market, post-campaign content—like Gears of War's regular stream of multiplayer map packs, a tactic that has worked well for the Halo and Call of Duty series—Bleszinksi still believes the single-player game can survive.

"It's still possible for an entirely single player game to do well," he contends. "Look at how Assassin's Creed cleaned up at retail. BioShock did well also, although they're adding a multiplayer component in the sequel."

While successful, the addition of multiplayer to the multi-million unit selling BioShock may be illustrative of the changing expectations of consumers. If there's little to do but replay a narrative-driven campaign, many gamers appear quite happy to resell their discs and move onto the next game.

"The best way to combat people trading in your game is to simply make it better in whatever way works for you," argues Todd Howard. "People trade in cars with poor value. Our DLC is a good way to add to the value of the base game and give folks yet another reason to keep playing."

Or consider Nintendo's solution — add a multiplayer component to just about everything, even if the game has a lone wolf history like Punch-Out!! or Super Mario.

The Wii's online multiplayer capabilities may not be as robust as those offered by Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam or Battle.net, but multiplayer matches of two to four people on the same couch, each armed with a Wii Remote, may hold equal appeal to Nintendo's expanded audience. And if Nintendo is selling extra Wii Remotes, they're likely finding it appealing too.

The four-player New Super Mario Bros. Wii one-ups the traditional platformer experience, ensuring that players needn't wait their turn to play as Luigi or be relegated to the simplified co-op present in Super Mario Galaxy.

The success of Wii Sports, Wii Play and Nintendo's ensuing first party titles, with their local multiplayer appeal, may not be limited to just Wii games.

"It's interesting how many people have told us that they played Uncharted: Drake's Fortune with their spouse or another family member in the room, which perhaps marks the arrival of a new and different kind of multiplayer gaming!" notes Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand. "I'm partly joking, and partly serious –- as games hit higher bench-marks of quality as entertainment, I think we're going to see people finding new ways to enjoy them together in groups, whether it's SingStar parties or an evening in on the couch with some popcorn and Uncharted 2."

That said, Lemarchand says that, at least at Naughty Dog, storytelling is still important. "Even though multiplayer gaming has exploded in popularity in the last few years, and attracted a lot of business interest as a result, I think that single player gaming has a really healthy future."

• Kid And Play
  Gaming Before Chemo, A Child's Escape
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Star Power
  Four Out Of Five Stars: How User Ratings Will Boost Your Xbox Experience
  by Blake Snow
• 
  
• $40 For That Old Thing?
  How Used Games Are Priced
  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• Visit Scenic New Mombasa
  Halo 3 ODST Multiplayer Tour: Bungie Will Be Your Guide Today
  by Matt Cabral
• 
  
• Gimme A D!
  In Defence Of Sports Games
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  
• Gaijin Works
  Want To Work In The Japanese Gaming Industry? Here's How
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• I Love Your Top!
  Kotaku's Fall Fashion Special
  by AJ Glasser
• 
  
• Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
  Pieces of You: Rebuilding Myself On Consoles
  by A.J. Glasser
• 
  
• Minority Report
  The Non-White Gamer's Experience
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• The Other Con
  Asia's Other Game Convention: Singapore Shines in September
  by N. Evan Van Zelfden
• 
  
• The Art & Science Of Short Shorts
  How To Dress A Tokyo Game Show Booth Lady
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• Missing In Action
  Where Are All The "Next Gen" Games?
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  

REVIEWS

NCAA Football 10 Review: Be True to Your School
Space Invaders Infinity Gene Micro-Review: Evolve or Die
Fat Princess Micro-Review: Let Them Eat Cake
Fallout 3 Mothership Zeta Micro-Review: The Final Frontier
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A Darklord Micro-Review: A Horrifying Thought
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Micro-Review: It's Gonna Take You For A...Yeah
The King of Fighters XII Review: Still Royalty?
SingStar Queen Review: Play The Game
G.I. Joe Review: Now We Know
Art Style: Precipice Micro-Review: But What If It's Art?
TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled Micro Review: "We're Really Hip"
Madden NFL 10 Review: Slow and Steady Wins the Game
Ashes Cricket 2009 Review: Middle Of The Order
Shadow Complex Review: Genre Upgrade
NFL 2010 Micro-Review: Season on the Shrink
Red Faction: Demons Of The Badland Micro-Review: British Girls On Mars Go Wild
Resident Evil 4 Mobile Edition Micro-Review: Learning to Read With Zombies
Batman: Arkham Asylum Review: The Dark Knight Is A Bright Light
Wolfenstein Review: Occult Following
Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station Micro-Review: A Curious Experiment
Trials HD Micro-review: Tribulations
Guitar Hero 5 Review: Do The Evolution
Defense Grid Micro-Review: Mmmmm... Raspberries
The Beatles: Rock Band Review: Blisters On My Fingers
Gamer Movie Review: More Second Life Than Counter-Strike
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Review: My Cup of Tea
Contra ReBirth Micro-Review: The ReBirth Of Challenge
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story Review: A Fawful Good Time
Scribblenauts Review: Embrace Your Inner Geek
Trine Micro-Review: The Fat Knight
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Review: It Takes Two, Baby
WET Review: Swords, Guns and Flawed Fun
Persona PSP Review: This Time It's Persona
Mini Ninjas Review: Hitman: Lunch Money
Halo 3: ODST Review: The More Vulnerable Edition
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up Review: Heroes And A Half-Smash-Bros.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade Review: Hot Springs Eternal
Need for Speed Shift Review: Switching Gears
PSPgo Review: A Peek Into the Future of Gaming
Zuma's Revenge Micro-Review: Bridging The Mom And Son Gap
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Review: Fortune Shines on Drake
Madden iPhone Micro-Review: The Biggest Small-Time Football

PREVIEWS

Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron Preview: To Fire The Ion Cannon
Guitar Hero 5 Wii's Roadie Battle Preview: Bring On the DS
Mario And Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games Preview: Luigi Controlled with a Rear End
Brütal Legend Multiplayer Preview: Mazel Tov, It's An RTS
The Beatles: Rock Band Preview: Story Mode, Beatles Beats & Beyond
Fairytale Fights Preview: The Brothers Grimm Never Looked So Gory
Wet Preview: It All Happened So Slowly
Battleswarm: Field of Honor Preview: Choose Your Genre
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Preview: Better Than A Blue Shell
The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces Preview: Guileless, But Not Innocent
Ju-on: The Grudge Preview: Hide All But One Of Your Wiimotes
Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga Preview: Making The Jump To Home Consoles
Red Faction: Guerrilla PC Preview: PC Gamers Get Best Version (If Their Rigs Can Handle It)
Order Of War Preview: Almost Everything Is In Order
Fighting Fantasy Follow-Up Preview: Fear My Stylus
Dreamkiller Preview: What Dreams May Die
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle Preview: Sex Is Not The Motivation
Contra Rebirth Preview: Surprise, It's Tough!
Star Trek Online Preview: Boldly Going Places
Bit.Trip Void Preview: The Stick's Turn
South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! Preview: Yellow Snowballs Added
Axel & Pixel Preview: It Looks Like Nothing Else
Nostalgia Preview: The Winds Of Staying The Same
NHL 2K10 Preview: Zamboni Smackdown
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Preview: Floor Of The Year
The Warriors: Street Brawl Preview: Go Home To Play
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Multiplayer Preview: War Is Hell. And Mostly Colorless.
Army of Two: The 40th Day PSP Preview: A Fixed Perspective
Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier PSP Preview: A Blast From The Past
LittleBigPlanet PSP Preview: PSP Platforming At Its Cutest
Undead Knights Preview: Tag! You're A Zombie!
GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Preview: Crimes For The Crazy Rich
Tetris Preview: Adding and Subtracting From A Classic
Petz Preview: There's Some Strategy Here
LEGO Indiana Jones 2 Driving Segment Preview: Smash! Crash! Rehash!
Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes Preview: Split Personality Gameplay
Wii Fit Plus Preview: One Fat Slice Of Cheese
DJ Hero Preview: Gonna Need A Bigger Lap
PixelJunk Shooter Impressions: An Improving Flow

LIVE

QuakeCon Coverage
Gamescom Coverage
Blizzcon Coverage
Penny Arcade Expo Coverage
Tokyo Game Show Coverage

COLUMNS

Well Played

• The Real Video Game Danger: They're Too Safe?
• QuakeCon Faces a Crossroads
• Video Gamers Get Their Woodstock
• A Reignited Console War Means A Happy Holiday For Gamers
• Could Gaming Soon Overshadow Music in Seattle?
• The Problem With Reality
• Bakugan: Contender to the Pokemon Throne?
• Tokyo Game Show Slump Casts Shadow Across Industry

Stick Jockey

• Sports Ads: Everything You Want in a Video Game - and Less
• Madden Launch Returns to Its Roots - for One Weekend Only?
• In a League of Your Own, Where Your Word is Law
• The Art of Calling an Unseen Game/a>
• In the Preseason, 2K Sports Reports First
• So I Went to a Fight, and a Video Game Broke Out ...
• Where Madden Plugs a Gap, Another Sees a Running Lane
• What Makes a "Real" Sport in an Unreal World?

Leigh Alexander

• Bang Bang, Is Creativity Dead?
• Why We Love To Hate Activision - And Might Be Wrong

tim rogers

• The Everything Disease: A Forensic Analysis of the Popularity of Pokemon
• Stop Telling Me What To Do!

COVER

• Designed by Michael McWhertor

It's something that's been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It's open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn't get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven't crafted a level, they've built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can't imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don't call them truly "next gen" games. Why? Because they fail my "next gen" test, that's why.

Here's the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it's not what I'm calling for the purposes of this piece a "next gen" game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it's a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they're nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn't do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true "next gen" games.

Now, I'm not saying all games NEED to be 100% innovative. That's an impossible requirement. Ridiculous, even. Not every single game idea is going to bust outside the box. I like my latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty as much as the next man, and the world will spin just fine with the majority of games simply plodding along, doing what the last one did, only slightly better. Still, a man can want, can't he?

So why do we have so few this time around? What's the problem? There's refinement under the hood. There's games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can't help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you'd have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn't feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90's – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can't be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today's games beyond the superficial. It's just, we can't see it. Chatting with Bethesda's Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

"I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it's also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you" he says. "So it's just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they're there. I'd guess there's just as much pure 'design innovation' with this generation as there has been in the last few."

"Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they're the worst part of a game. I'm interested in how games simply start."

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. "There's been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn't kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards" Howard adds. "The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that's not an innovation, that's simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

"My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply 'work,' that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else."

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we'll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

Though always an industry mainstay, Activision didn't start to take its place front-and-center in the core audience's shooting gallery until years recent. It was theGuitar Hero and Call of Duty, franchises that became Activision's golden calves; early incarnations of those titles broke ground and dazzled audiences.

Then came the sequels, the sequels, and yet more sequels. As the publisher's stock soared (ticker: ATVI) its triumphant executive became a vocal and often controversial mainstay in the business press – and by extension, the gaming consumer press.

"Hating EA is so last year," CEO John Riccitiello told Kotaku at E3 in 2008, talking to us about what Electronic Arts had learned from its old ways of doing business – ways that look an awful lot like how Activision appears to conduct itself these days. All across the internet, it's clear: Gamers have crowned a new Evil Empire.

Who Is Bobby Kotick?

I, as a games biz reporter, have been given interview time with most major publishing execs more than once – most of them believe it's important to reach out to us from time to time as a way of reaching their consumers. I've never even been in the same room with Mr. Kotick. And while Activision is often responsive to media inquiries regarding its games, calls for comment on business articles or questions about the company itself – such as my request for info for this article – usually go unanswered.

But as an industry analyst, it's the job of Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter to check in regularly with top execs and get the info shareholders need to make investment decisions, so he's fairly familiar with the bombastic executive. "Bobby is friendly to a fault, funny, very smart, and quite engaging," says Pachter. "He is a bit flip, in an entertaining way, and I think it translates in print as cocky. I like him a lot, and think that his public persona has been twisted by the gaming media, making him into a ruthless factory head."

Kotick's "public persona" continues to raise eyebrows all on its own. Asked recently by an analyst on a quarterly conference call about the rising cost of packaged game software – bolstered, in no small part, by Activision's higher price points on peripheral-equipped games, Kotick said that "if it was left to me, I would raise [software] prices even further," and chuckled along with his execs.

Just a joke it may have been, but hardly a tasteful one in a recession, where cash-strapped consumers were likely to catch wind of his cavalier attitude. It's just one example why a wash of anti-ATVI sentiment pervades the comments sections and forums that impassioned gamers call home. Contrast that to Nintendo's stated promise to "keep people smiling," EA boss Riccitiello's common refrain that quality must precede profitability as a goal, and Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's regular praise for his development talent on every quarterly investor call.

But Kotick's most recent round of cold talk was the most eyebrow-raising: he recently said his goal's always been to "take all the fun out making video games." As for the working environment at Activision? "I think we've definitely been able to instill in the culture the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we're in today."

The widely-publicized quote, delivered at an investor conference, was easy flamebait. Gamers' passionate nature and yen for controversy is part of what defines them as a community – and hating can be fun, as exemplified by this resulting parody song from IdleThumbs' Chris Remo, who says it's "based on the teachings of Kotick."

But what do Kotick's employees think, living in an environment of "pessimism, skepticism and fear"?

Nose To The Grindstone

"Kotick basically says that he was partially quoted out of context, and partially the humor of the situation at the time isn't conveyed in the quotations," says a level-headed employee of one of the publisher's internal studios, speaking under condition of anonymity. Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling also seemed to take it as a joke, if you recall his subtle riff on the snafu during a recent Modern Warfare 2 event.

Numerous Activision insiders who didn't want to be quoted said that Activision, as a corporate entity, treats them well – individual developers are more likely to encounter conflicts of studio bureaucracy on the development side rather than on the publisher-side, something of an unusual scheme of events in game development.

The high-pressure, goal-driven environment also means tensions across rival internal studios flare up more often, as we saw with the public spat between Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling and Activision producer Noah Heller, representing Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War. Of course, the culture of achievement also means that prominent designers on projects like these drive very, very nice cars, we're told.

Our source has never himself met Kotick, but says he's heard little ill of him – he compares what he hears to "people who know Bush, where despite what you think about his policies, they all seem to think he's a cool guy to sit around and have a beer with."

The Bad Behavior

Industry sources say, though, that other gaming companies don't feel quite so positively toward Kotick – in particular, that such a cash-flush company is leaving it up to the others to shoulder the collective cost of piracy protection and first-amendment lobbying via their Entertainment Software Association dues. That is a point of contention.

Activision was the largest publisher to defect not only from last year's E3, but from the ESA – the trade body that represents the interests of all game developers. And while this year, the publisher returned to E3, it still won't rejoin the ESA: "We have our own issues that are not the industry's issues," Kotick has said.

But Activision is part of the industry – so as much smaller publishers manage their pricey ESA dues to support pro-industry lobbying and public awareness campaigns, Activision, one of the world's wealthiest, is sitting out its share. And that decision is viewed in a poor light by other companies.

Also worrying is Kotick's pattern of levying lawsuits against the defiant. Activision dropped gamer-darling Brütal Legend, from its publishing slate in the Vivendi merger because the eagerly-anticipated title, plus other Sierra games, "lacked the potential to be exploited every year on every platform," as Kotick said at the time.

But when EA picked up the game, Activision sued – a move an EA spokesperson now-famously likened to "a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy." ("Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," chimed in creator Tim Schafer.)

Under Kotick's stewardship, Activision seems to be developing a propensity for the sort of legal challenge that makes it look like a bully. There's also the imbroglio over turntable games, when Activision bought embattled developer 7 Studios — who'd been working on Scratch: The Ultimate DJ for Genius Products. Genius now alleges Activision levied its legal muscle and some "unsavory business practices" to delay a possible rival to its own turntable-equipped DJ Hero. Activision mantains its involvement with 7 Studios provides the developer with much-needed financing, and that Scratch had fallen behind in production well before its acquisition.

A Culture Of Cash

Pragmatic gamers may not like Activision or Kotick's ways, but will assert the man's just doing his job and doing it well: The games industry is still a business, after all. He has, at least on the books, earned some compliments – and mad money to go with them. The 46 year-old Kotick has helmed Activision since 1991, and in 2007, the NPD group pegged the publisher as the industry's biggest. Activision's 2008 saw four consecutive quarters of revenue growth – and that same year, Forbes says Kotick earned $15 million for his work. That's twice what EA's John Riccitiello made as head of Activision's nearest rival.

And when he's not running the game industry's newest and biggest Death Star, evidence suggests he might not be such a bad guy. He participates in charitable organizations as a member of the Board of Trustees for The Center for Early Education, chairs the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Tony Hawk Foundation – making his game franchise figurehead happy, sure, but the Foundation also puts skate parks in disadvantaged communities.

Nonetheless, Bobby Kotick doesn't seem to care what gamers think. Should he? Pachter points out that when "the old" EA was churning out content with less attention to quality, the resulting gamer backlash did, in his opinion, injure the company's bottom line.

"The argument about consumer fatigue and lower product quality is sound," Pachter concedes. "There is only so much innovation that can occur, and annual games are less likely to be innovative than bi-annual or tri-annual games." It's possible that Activision's business strategy and public persona may one day come home to roost, as it did for EA.

Until then, what can gamers do? Not buy Modern Warfare 2, the holiday season's most-desired title?

...Yeah, right.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Every year there are two shows at the Tokyo Game Show: the games that are played and the clothes that are worn. While cosplayers have the market cornered on outrageous spectacle, it's the booth companions that often provide the most revealing look into a company's corporate culture.

"The traditional booth companion uniform — you know, the short skirts, the high heels, the vinyl — are designed to appeal to men," says Xbox Japan's Yuichiro Aoki. "Our uniforms are designed to appeal to women." That in turn, Aoki believes, will make the booth companions feel more comfortable. "We didn't want to force the girls to look sexy. We wanted their appeal to come out naturally. Maybe this is just my opinion, but I think that's when women look their most beautiful."

Booth uniforms tend to run on cycles for some companies, while others change it every year. Last year, Japanese newspapers reported that Microsoft would be revealing a new booth companion uniform. While the company has had varying degrees of success, Microsoft has been picked for best booth companion uniform by game magazine Famitsu year after year after year at TGS. Famitsu quoted one attendee as saying, "Microsoft's outfits didn't seem to reveal much at first, but look again, and..."

In uniform-crazy Japan, there was considerable buzz about what the new Microsoft 2008 uniform would look like. Xbox Japan marketing exec Jyoji Sakaguchi said, "Every year, our booth companion outfits get an extremely favorable reception, and they are very popular among women. This year, we're going to finally introduce a new design for the outfits. During the booth companion fitting, things like 'Wow, I want to wear this outside work!' were overheard about the cool costume."

The design process began in early fall, and a hand-made prototype was created before the show. After it was approved, Japanese craftspeople produced the finished product. This year, Microsoft once again rolled out last year's model.

Uniforms dominate the Japanese landscape. It's not only cops, firefighters and train station employees who wear standardized outfits, but elevator operators, office ladies and taxi drivers. While researching the book I am writing on Japanese schoolgirls, it's been surprising to see how the design of uniforms often dictate to young women where they want to go to junior high or high school — often as much or more than academic reputation!

"Often when booth companions from other companies are on their break, they say that they think the Xbox booth companion outfits are so cute," explains Aoki. A lot of the girls who apply to be booth companions say they did so because they like the uniform." Microsoft isn;t trying to lure other companies' booth companions. It's not like that at all.

At 32-years-old, Aoki is Microsoft's creative director for the Tokyo Game Show. Fashionably dressed in a black sweater, blue button-up and camo pants, he's got a clip board in his hand, ear piece in his ear. The first days are always the most nerve racking, he says. Besides handling the Xbox 360 TV and print ads in Japan, Aoki overseas the TGS booth lay-out, any graphic design work that needs doing as well as conceptualizing the look of the booth companions. "I was heavily involved in designing the uniforms," he says. "We wanted it to be modern and something that the girls could actually wear outside."

And the girls do want to wear it outside. "But Aoki-san won't give me a uniform to take home!" bubbles 23-year-old booth companion Megumi. "This uniform is so cute, and it's comfortable — it's actually wearable." This isn't the first time Megumi has worn the Xbox Japan TGS outfit — she was one of 10 or so booth companions involved in the design process, offering opinions on what kind of clothes she would want to wear. While other companies dictate TGS wear to companions from on high, Xbox Japan involved them from the start. A closer look shows how playful the uniform is with visual gags like "Information ?" written on the seat of the uniform's shorts.

Design-wise, Xbox Japan tried to message the freedom and customization that the Xbox 360 platform gives players. So while users can swap out hard drives or use different colored controllers, the booth companions can do likewise: Belts come in green and silver, and there are hats for companions who want to wear them. "I think the hats are so adorable," gushes Megumi. There are metal star pins that the girls can put where they like. "It's easier to stand in cowboy boots than in high heels all day," adds Megumi. The ability to swap out accessories gives the uniforms customized, while keeping a standardized look. Megumi's favorite thing about the uniform is that, around her neck, she wears an Xbox LIVE-type gamer card with her name and photo on it. "I think it's really cool," she says. "It personalizes the experience, for me."

Out of the approximately 120 girls that auditioned in late summer, only 40 or so made the grade. Those that did attended a lecture on manners to ensure they interact with customers in a polite and respectful fashion. Decorum and manners play a large part in Japanese culture — ditto for the Tokyo Game Show. As part of their training, the companions also took a five hour seminar about the Xbox brand and Xbox LIVE. To help facilitate the experience, the booth companions were broken down into groups lead by core staff. So someone like Megumi who has experience working with Xbox Japan would oversee and help train new girls. At the end of the show each day, all the girls lined up in front of the booth, posed for photos and then bowed in unison.

"We don't have a predetermined idea of what kind of girls we want," says Aoki. Uniforms run small, medium and large — but even then, it's possible for the girls to customize the outfit. Straps on the back of the suit make it possible for quick and easily tailoring: tighten the straps for those girls who want a tighter fit and loosen them for girls who need more room. The shorts can be rolled up and buttoned in place for those who want their legs to appear longer and can be rolled down to minimize unflattering thighs. Because the uniform is open in the chest, revealing a bikini-type top, it's also possible to accessorize with a stole-type scarf for those companions hesitant to walk around with their shirt open all day long. Xbox Japan and its design team have thought of everything that can make the companions more comfortable as they do their job.

"Because the girls are in shorts and wearing stockings," says Aoki, "they also don't have to worrying about the kinds of things girls in mini-skirts have to." Meaning? "They don't have to worry about people seeing their underpants and can just relax. Our goal is to make sure the girls feel comfortable with the uniforms and comfortable with the Xbox 360," Aoki says, "because honestly, that will motivate them during the show."

But in Singapore last week, Games Convention Asia drew 102,500 attendees during four days of business and public exhibition. That total number might not be as large: but consider if you will, the population of greater Tokyo is 12.7 million people while the entire population of island-nation Singapore is 4.7 million people.

Singapore seems to have an events culture where something is always going on. Inside the massive Suntec Centre you might find a food fair on one floor, shoe sales, and a games convention that posts highers number than Seattle's annual Penny Arcade Expo.

There's a crowd at the top of the escalators, and the first thing you hear is the whir of cameras as attendees snap photos of cosplayers. Stormtroopers are posing for photos, too, and inside you're handed an ice-cold bottle of Coke Zero as you browse the exhibits.

It's almost like a home and garden show, where you can buy games and merchandise in addition to previewing an upcoming game like Borderlands. Admission is free, and organizers say they learned to adapt the idea of Asian gameplay, because the local audience expected something to buy. Not just the experience, but also a game they can take home.

Electronic Arts has a booth, which sells The Beatles: Rock Band and the latest FIFA game, and Nintendo is represented by their local distributor. Sony exhibited in a previous year, but this year Sony and Nintendo are only participating in the business side of the show where developers and publishers have private meetings.

"Next year, we expect a little more, once the economy is picking up," says Jorg Zeissig, from Leipziger Messe International. LMI, incidentally, is the same company behind the popular Games Convention event from Leipzig. While that show is now overshadowed by Cologne's Gamescom, they have found some traction in Singapore

Christopher Thompson, general manager for Electronic Arts in Asia, says this has been a unique year for shows. Tokyo Game Show is about platforms, and Asia needs a neutral show. His point is proved by the variety of both platforms and business models represented on the show floor. According to Thompson, Singapore has "a good gaming culture," and is also a highly profitable market.

"It's not easy to compare them, because it's a totally different concept," Zeissig says, when asked compare Games Convention Asia and the Tokyo Game Show.

Tokyo is great in terms of media announcements from the Japanese publishers, and it's good to attract visitors from all over Japan, but basically the show is made for the Japanese market, believes Zeissig.

According to Zeissig, the goal of the show is to bring international business and trade visitors to Singapore, which is set up for opportunities between creative minds, developers, and publishers. Next year, he plans for more exhibitors and more content to be showcased and more announcements to be made on the show floor.

Games Convention Asia features an international developer conference, and partnered with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences to host the first DICE Summit Asia, which drew inspirational speakers like Demigod designer Chris Taylor, and PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura.

"You do see diversity on the show floor, in the conference as well, that you don't see anywhere else at this point in the entire region," Zeissig notes. Not only is there Singaporean content, and participation from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia, but China, Korea, and Australia, as well.

Nabi Studios, a Singapore-based developer was showcasing Toribash, which will be released by Nintendo in the fourth-quarter of 2009. The game, subtitled "Violence Perfected," is a turn-based fighting game that has ragdoll robots trying to decapitate each other using rock-paper-scissors moves. Toribash started as a free-to-play PC, and expects further success on the WiiWare platform this Christmas.

Besides demos, local visitors get to participate in regional tournaments - this year saw the launch of the One Asia Cup. Sponsored by a powerful local publisher and operator, IAH Games, the tourney featured $100,000 in cash and prizes for players of EA Sports' FIFA Online 2 and drew teams from across Southeast Asia.

And it seems that, locally, cosplay is an important part of playing games - as one resident noted, there isn't much to do in Singapore, and this fosters creativity, offering an outlet to those who make their own costumes.

While the on-stage contest at the close of Games Convention Asia offered the winner a trip to Australia to compete in the grand finals of the Asia Pacific Cosplay Championship 2009, the high-energy emcee took the opportunity to evangelize his audience, urging mommy and daddy to support their children's interest in developing costumes.

The audience remained exceptionally well-behaved and polite, even with the raucous emcee singing the theme from Ghostbusters to a pair of shy female contests representing characters from the recent Atari game.

But the emotions surfaced when the audience started singing along to the Village People's YMCA, as sung by a cosplayer representing Major Armstrong from Square Enix's Fullmetal Alchemist adaptations.

If there's a lesson to be learned from Games Convention Asia, it's simply that gamers want to gather each year for an event that celebrates interactive entertainment. They don't need major announcements about hardware pricing, nor do they need to preview every title from next year's slate.

The game industry looks to E3 and TGS for big news. They look to PAX because it's highly anticipated by the fans. There's something significant at these shows.

And yet, Games Convention Asia suggests that, in the future, hundreds of thousands of gamers in the major cities of the world will be satisfied with an annual festival to celebrate games - even without significant announcements and revelations and celebrities. GCA showcases games as just a normal part of life

And the spreading normalization of games culture might be the most significant thing to come out of this Singapore show.

Drawing it out of him, Mills says it's because of the avatar's body language. And while Mills doesn't say that's really a white guy on his screen, palette-swapped to look like him, he's pretty clear this representation is not from his neighborhood.

"I can make him look like me, but have you noticed, when he's standing right there, the way he moves? It's ... weird," Mills said. "He puts his hand on his hip. He twirls his head. I've never seen people who act like that."

It's a little thing and the discussion moves on. But it is evocative of just how conscious one becomes of these differences, during a life spent playing as characters who look nothing like you.

And in matters ranging from avatar creation and character representation to the marketing and affordability of games, non-white gamers' experiences speak of a video games community that is, at best, insensitive to their membership in it, sometimes to the point of obliviousness.

Kotaku sought out several non-white gamers, some of whom also write about their experiences, to discuss what being an African-American or Hispanic gamer means. In an American games industry dominated, marketed to and consumed mostly by white males, discussions of race and class can quickly hit a wall, blocked by insistence that the subject is inappropriate for a pursuit that should be colorblind in basis. Ideally, yes, it should. But race matters — it always will — in a different way for video games.

Recognizably You

Rafael Sanchez is 23, lives in West Covina, Calif. and has enrolled in graduate school to get a master's degree in computer science. He wants to go to work in game development. If he does, Rafael would be among the 2.5 percent of developers who are Hispanic, according to an International Game Developers Association survey of its membership. A similar percentage of "recognizably Hispanic" characters can be found in video games, according to a study released recently.

Sanchez considers this matter from a game design perspective. "Looking at the casts of fighting games, it really is the only genre where you get a diverse cast," said Sanchez, who writes on the blog Latino Gamer. Many of them begin with a small cast, he said. "As each grows, the initial token, it's a black guy that's thrown in - Eddy Gordo in Tekken, or Zack in Dead or Alive. You usually see the black person first, because they make the most obvious contrast to the white characters on the roster.

Because a "recognizably Hispanic" man is difficult to reduce to visual cues such as black or white skin, "it's harder for [game developers] to think of how to include us," Sanchez says. "And when they do, they can't think of any way to do so other than stereotypes of Mexican wrestlers."

He doesn't say any of this bitterly. "I don't think there's anything malicious behind it; you write what you know," Sanchez explained. "If the game developers and writers are largely white people, I can't really expect them to understand my reality."

The same IGDA survey said its development community is 83 percent white. Blacks comprise 2 percent. Asians make up 7.5 percent, but in a sector with such a strong history across the Pacific, the issue of their representation is notably different from that of black and Latino characters.

Mills, the gamer from Georgia, is resigned to the reality that the characters he plays, reads in comic books and sees on television at best represent him in the values they carry, rather than what they look like. Mills' brother Reginald, nine years older, loved comic books, and parked Fergus in front of the television when the cartoons came on, indoctrinating him to Batman's continuity. Bruce Wayne's upbringing made him "almost like a role model."

"You become so used to it," Mills said. "You turn on the TV, the main character is white. Play a game, the main character is white…You don't think about the underlying meaning of it. It's just what's going on. People really do think of it as the norm; you make a character, he's going to be white."

Why should any of this matter? Dmitri Williams, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, who conducted the study of demographic representation in video games released last month, argues that they represent a market opportunity for publishers.

"If we could get past the issue of racism and think market dynamics, if I'm a young Latino kid, I'll probably be more interested in a game if it has Latino characters," Williams said. "The strong backlash people have is: This is a political correctness issue, and ‘I'm being told how to think and feel,' and ‘I'm being told I'm a racist.' None of that is necessary. You can just look at the numbers and see that some groups should be showing up, in games, in greater numbers."

He points to the cultural impact a generation earlier, when black characters began appearing on television in meaningful roles.

"Any time someone from an under-represented group made that first appearance, it was a big deal for that group," Williams said. "Bill Cosby starring in ‘I Spy' (in 1965), that was a real breakthrough role for African-American actors [on TV]. And it led to whites and African-Americans thinking of themselves in new ways. The simple presence of a group is important."

But if minority gamers represent a market opportunity, game publishers seem slow to pursue it. In fact, another aspect in which non-white gamers feel excluded is in the marketing. If games are pitched or made with their interests or lifestyles in mind, they feel it's usually the next sports title.

"I walk into a GameStop, and they probably think I'm there to buy NBA 2K9 or Madden," Mills said. For the record, his favorite game is Metal Gear Solid 4. He prefers action/adventure games.

Gary Swaby, 23, a Briton of black Caribbean ancestry, living in Luton, England, believes that marketing reinforces, more than anything else, the image of gaming as a predominantly, if not exclusively, white activity. "They're definitely trying to market to the masses, and the white families would be their biggest audience," Swaby said. "Most white people are probably in a better financial space than black families, or those of other cultures, and that would mean they're the market [publishers] are going after. I can't remember seeing a Wii commercial with a black family. Blacks are assumed to be poor. That's definitely an issue that can't be ignored." Swaby said he spends between 400 or 500 pounds ($660-$830) annually on games.

Sanchez, while not endorsing stereotype, does find some truth in his own experience as a Hispanic gamer with not much of a disposable income for games. "I walk into a GameStop, I go straight to the used PS2 rack," he says. With tuition for California State-Los Angeles coming due, the games he's writing about on his site, lately, are older, cheaper games. "If I'm talking to someone with more money, and I mention the last game I reviewed, he'll ask why I'm talking about that instead of some $50 or $60 game. I'm straightforward. These are the games I can afford right now.

"When someone has more money, they are able to be more lighthearted about these things," Sanchez continued. Those of us who can't afford the $50 as easily, we put a lot more thought into our purchases. Before I got my Wii, I had been thinking about it for months. [A friend] was very surprised by how much thought I had put into it."

What could be marketed more to Hispanic gamers? "Well, racing games," said Andreas Almodovar, 28, of Oldsmar, Fla. "We love getting into the car industry, love customizing our cars. I think the gaming industry, like [with] Midnight Club and Need for Speed, have tapped into something. I just wish they would take it a bit further."

The Importance of Being Louis

The Koalition, a site dedicated to the interests of the urban or hip-hop gamer, as they put it, was just cited as the best tech blog by the Black Weblog Awards. Swaby and Mills are contributors. A.B. Frasier, 23, of Newark N.J. is its managing editor, and he says the site was created in part to introduce and expose African-Americans to other types of games, since the community is largely seen as sticking with sports and shooter titles.

But his site's efforts can only go so far. "A lot of kids play games, and I could sit up here and try to introduce these games for the black community, but the truth is it still has to appeal to them. And I think a black character does that," Frasier said. "But it has to be done in a way that everybody can accept."

A good example? Frasier picks Louis from Left 4 Dead. Louis is a black protagonist and a playable character who participates in a way that is not conspicuously or stereotypically "black." He wears a tie. He looks like he stumbled out of the office to start blasting at zombies. Frasier says he even saw Left 4 Dead advertisements on hiphop sites, and says the game has very strong uptake in the black community.

"Valve really did a great job putting a black character in their game," Frasier said. "Not every black guy speaks like Cole Train [in the Gears of War series.]"

Hardwiring a minority character into a game, without stereotype, is a powerful statement, above any game that allows customizable avatars of any ethnicity. As Williams, the researcher, sums it up, "People are probably not going to opt in and say, ‘I've got my squad, but I really need a black guy. I really need a Hispanic guy on it.' They're probably going to create guys who look like themselves."

Game character diversity is not just an issue about the interests of non-whites but about the effect it has on white gamers. Williams brings up the subject of "mainstreaming," something highly debated in communication science. Basically, the theory holds that watching enough images starts to move one's perception toward what they see in the images. Williams, who has studied video games for 10 years and calls himself a hardcore gamer, did a study early in his career that showed that, after playing a game, people said they thought the game world they'd visited was more like their real world. "That's a cultivation effect, and it happens," Williams said. "There's no reason to think it wouldn't happen with race as well."

So the upshot there: The more a white gamer — or a gamer of any ethnicity, frankly — spends time in a homogeneous environment, the cues about race and ethnicity sent by games become even more important. Especially if they're the only or the predominant mass medium being consumed. "Imagine a Latino kid, who lives in an all-Latino neighborhood," Williams said. "If they were only exposed to images of white people through the media, those images will probably have a bigger impact. Contrast that with a Latino who lives in a diverse neighborhood who interacts with white kids all the time. The images from the games won't matter as much."

Walking in Someone's Shoes

Asked what they'd like to see most, all the non-white gamers I talked to have their preferences. Almodovar would love to see Hispanic characters in the Battlefield 2 series and why not? The U.S. military's Hispanic population has grown steadily over the past decade.

Frasier? "Why can't a guy like Hip Hop Gamer be in G4? One 30-minute show, would it really hurt that much?" Such programming would go a long ways to inclusion, he feels. Sanchez, a role-playing game enthusiast, "would love it if there was a Square-produced RPG that had a brown protagonist."

Swaby wants to know "why can't we make a game with a black character, and market it to everybody?" Of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas stands as the most notable effort in this regard. The game also is five years old.

But what they don't want more of is pretending that race somehow is not an issue, when it is one in every other mass medium in this multicultural society. The consumption of white-dominated mass media by a diverse consumer base is a legitimate, serious topic.

And if games belong to that equation when the discussion is about their artistic value, or their economic impact or cultural relevance, then they also belong in the discussion of the consumption of white-dominated, high-demand mass media by a broadly diverse consumer base. Holding up one's hand to declare it's not an issue will not make it go away.

"It's because a lot of people haven't been taught it's important," said Frasier, speaking of race and the history of race problems. "A lot of people playing games now are young, and brought up in areas where everybody gets along, so I don't think they see the problem. You have to live the life in the shoes of a person of color to understand where they are coming from."

For certain, he's lived enough lives in the shoes of a white character.