The Mammon Philosophy

Via Kotaku, a blip from Hideo Kojima as to why he’s putting MGS: Peace Walker on the PSP:

With the PS3, you’ve got a whole range of middle- and high-school kids who can’t play your game because their parents don’t let them play video games at home. Those kids can whine at their parents all day about how the game’s anti-war and anti-nukes, but they’ll just respond ‘Well, you’re still killing people with guns, aren’t you?’ and brush it off.

Thanks for that, Kojima. Thanks for perpetuating the common illusion that kids play video games while parents just don’t understand. Congratulations on brushing off the post-teen demographic which might’ve also been interested in this game. And way to go with tacitly implying that virtual violence is something to be hidden away, kept from the prying eyes of those who might have a problem with it, rather than putting it out in the open and engaging in a dialogue about it. I get that you have issues with authority figures (see also: the eight million hours of cutscenes about the Patriots) but damn, bro, give the parents a little credit.

Reading an article about Six Days in Fallujah, the recently canceled title which would have been the first game to be released concurrently with the conflict it featured, I came across this line from oft-cited Gamasutra columnist Ian Bogost:

“We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don’t even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience.”

This had been my problem with Six Days from the start: the gaming business, not to mention its respective media followers, has been so focused on marketing for virtually its entire existence that when titles come along which deserve a deeper perspective, they don’t know what to do with them. Konami, the company behind Six Days, is a big name, which means they’re looking to turn a big profit. And that means pumping the brand, throwing up as much information as possible to break through the nonstop press machine — and assuring gamers that they will enjoy playing the game. It should be simple to fashion a manner of PR that connects without offense, but they blew it by trying to connect “war” with “fun.” Which it apparently is, when it’s a recreated war that was fought by our parents or grandparents, lost on the youth market’s collective memory. But not when it’s happening right now, when we turn off the console and see the caskets coming out of the planes on the news. Then the connection brings fear and outrage from a variety of sources.

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Much as Marle unwittingly follows Crono to the telepod demonstration which sucks her into the middle ages, you can now follow me on Twitter! Simply attach your account to mine in the manner of your choosing, and you’ll receive updates on my latest posts, gaming accomplishments, and other sundry activities such as previews of my movie reviews. I feel this is a good alternative to posting directly on Mammon every time I have a fresh observation about SMB3 that only lasts a matter of sentences before sputtering out.

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A hallmark of the Metroid Prime series — okay, hold on. I feel weird saying that a subset series that only started one console generation ago, despite being built on a storied franchise, already has its own hallmarks. It’d be like saying that a key component of Mario games is Goomba-stomping after only the first three titles. And yet, core gamers will note that I was very upset when I learned that the Goombas of Super Mario World could not be stomped, only flipped over and kicked around like common Troopas. Interesting how quickly we the gamers will adapt to new technologies or motifs, even in spite of our haranguement of them on message boards.

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MadWorld isn’t out until March, but the developers are already talking sequels. Catch this exchange in an interview at That VideoGame Blog with producer Astushi Inaba:

TVGB: So if this is a big success will you move on to a different title on the Wii or are you thinking about sequels?

AI: Platinum Games has several rights so we’ll be developing something new after this, but if there is a lot of interest in MadWorld then maybe we will make another one.

Not to turn this quote inside out with meanings that aren’t there, but some of the usual suspects are already treating this as a given. What particularly stings is that the news is routinely paired up with a reference to “some of the developers” having been part of the team that brought us Okami, a game much more deserving of a true sequel (not just a Wii-make) than an as-yet untested new property. But even that would be pushing the prognostication envelope too far. Why can’t we ever concentrate on the games that are coming out now? Does the gaming news media machine really devour so much information every day that we can’t sate it with actual titles, forcing the invention of speculative products from thin air to keep the RSS feeds running? Surely someone has another set of panty-shot screens from Street Fighter IV or some more honed rage over allegations of racism in Metroid. (”Samus Aran doesn’t care about Elysians.”)

Of course, I have a vested interest in keeping this sort of Ouija-board reporting down, since I’m generally playing games after they’re released, so perhaps my own editorial bias should be critiqued as well. We’re none of us free from sin.

In the wake of the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee’s released statement that parents should have a “red button” to disable online games, a prominent Canadian game design philosopher has suggested that even further steps should be taken.

“Your game-obsessed kids need a good spanking,” said Simon Roberts of The Mammon Industry. “Spank ‘em until their cheeks are red.”

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If there’s one problem with today’s games, it’s that the number of large-scale treks greatly outweigh the simpler start-to-finish titles. It seems as if all but the most casual of titles are now packaged with “adventure” or “storyline” modes, sending players on journeys that deliver an overload of information as a balance to the time spent actually playing the game. And woe unto you if you get a game that was designed from the ground up as an adventure: every dungeon (palace, temple, abandoned nuclear missile complex…) has a story, a secret, and a four-minute cutscene detailing its connection to the NPC who oh-so-gently goaded you into visiting it with a series of yes/no questions where the answer was always yes.

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Heather Mallick has an article up on CBC entitled, rather titillatingly, Porn is in the air that we breathe. Hey, with a headline like that, how could I possibly ignore it? And I was rewarded for my keen sense of exotic editorial excavation with a fabulous picture of Madonna in a corset (circa 2004) and this gem of a quote concerning the explicitization of society:

Snoop Dogg popularized hard-core rap, daughters started demanding Bratz dolls (dressed like hookers) and glittery abbreviated stripper clothes, sons began rapping and killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto.

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When I was young (or so much younger than today) I used to hate Maridia, the token waterlogged area in Super Metroid. I hated how its passages would crisscross each other in a confusing fashion, how the quicksand could suck you into an earlier area if you weren’t careful, how you could gain access as soon as you had a Power Bomb but then couldn’t actually get anywhere without the Gravity Suit. It was a tease and a blockade all wrapped into one lousy late-game region, and it drove me nuts.

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This got past my radar on the weekend, but luckily a clarification put it back on front pages today: Electronic Entertainment Design and Research helps companies make profitable games… or not, as the article explains, detailing how different features (multiplayer, cross-platform design) can be hit-or-miss in terms of overall profitability. The big figure that everyone is tossing around from this story is the percentage of games that become profitable: 4% of all games that enter production, and 20% of those that reach the market.

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