Midlife Crisis, Part 3

The most frustrating thing about having a hobby is that you never really have time for one unless you're unemployed and lonely. For better or for worse, I'm neither. This was the case before I bought my new PC, and it's still the case now that I've gotten most of my games installed on it. There will always be weekends, and I have a few hours of downtime after work each weekday, but it becomes more clear every time a new game is released that I'm going to die of old age before I get to finish every game that I deem worth playing. Such is the price I pay for attempting to have a life on the side.

So far, I've actually spent more time fiddling with my PC than playing games on it. Lately, this fiddling has been the enjoyable kind; I've been installing all the software I need, rearranging my desktop icons like the truly obsessive-compulsive person I am, and more generally setting things up just how I like them. For the first few weekends of my PC's existence, however, I had nothing but trouble.

First, I didn't bother getting a wireless network adapter because a stationary computer should ideally be placed where an ethernet cable can reach it. Unfortunately, I needed the computer to be in another room temporarily. To remedy the situation, I tried using something I already had in my closet — a D-Link wireless USB adapter. It worked pretty well until my network started slowing down or crashing every time I tried to use a lot of bandwidth (i.e., by downloading a Steam game). I'm still not sure what the problem was; maybe there was some kind of incompatibility with the router, or maybe something more complicated was going on. Maybe it was my computer's fault, somehow. Fortunately, I don't really need to figure it out, since I'm using a wired internet connection now and I don't really have any need for Wi-Fi (let alone the D-Link adapter) in the near future.

Other problems included a couple of random blue screen errors (most likely caused by an AMD video card driver which I've updated) and various problems with various games. The original Assassin's Creed, for example, refused to start when I first installed it, and I'm not even sure how I fixed the problem. I'd tried a few things, given up, and turned off the computer, and when I tried launching the game again later, it worked just fine. (Actually, I had to turn on compatibility mode for Windows Vista because I was getting a black screen where the opening cut scene should have been, but that's hardly an issue. As often as compatibility mode fails, it should always be the default first move if an old game does something weird.)

Compatibility mode for Windows 98 / Windows ME was also the initial solution for the Steam version of the original Max Payne, which failed to launch even though the process was visible in the task manager. However, even after the game launched, some of the music was gone and the sound effects were severely messed up. Fortunately, some nice guy created his own patch to fix the problem. It sucks that the original developers of old games like Max Payne aren't willing to invest the time and money to solve these problems themselves (especially when they're still selling these old games alongside their sequels on digital services like Steam), and the amateurs who pick up the slack are true heroes.

I'm reminded of Command & Conquer: The First Decade, a box set of a dozen games from the series. A couple of official patches were released, but not all of the bugs were fixed, so fans started patching it up themselves. The unofficial 1.03 patch, a collection of bug fixes and other features, was absolutely essential for anyone who had this particular Command & Conquer box set. But it's not just the occasional issue with an outdated game that often necessitates a third-party fix.

Now that I have a good computer, my older games don't even come close to pushing the graphics card to its limits, which means most of these games will needlessly run at a frame rate much higher than my monitor's refresh rate. Usually, this just causes screen tearing. In extreme cases, I can even hear what sounds like coil whine, an irritating whistling noise coming from inside the computer (not the speakers). This happens on the main menu screens of F.E.A.R. and some other games, presumably because the computer is able to render thousands of frames per second when there isn't much to display.

Turning on a game's Vsync feature (preferably with triple buffering enabled as well) fixes these problems, but a few of my games don't have a working Vsync feature. Each of the games in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy, for example, has an option for Vsync in the settings, but in all three games it does nothing. It's straight-up broken. The optimal solution would be to force Vsync and triple buffering through the control panel software of ones graphics card, but AMD cards can't do this for certain games on Windows 7, and it's my understanding that both Microsoft and AMD are to blame for that. Even with Vsync set to "always on" in Catalyst Control Center, I was getting stupidly high frame rates in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Then I heard about D3DOverrider, a little tool included in an old freeware program called RivaTuner. It's made to enable Vsync and triple buffering in software that's missing one or both options, and it works like a charm. Despite S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s broken Vsync feature, and despite Catalyst Control Center's inability to fix the problem, D3DOverrider gets the job done. Now I'm getting a fairly consistent 60 frames per second, instead of hundreds of frames in-game and thousands of frames on the menu. No more vertical tearing and more no quiet-but-irritating coil whine.

That other first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe, Metro 2033, has its own share of issues, namely that a lot of useful options don't show up in its menu and have to be toggled on or off by editing a few configuration files in Notepad, and it also appears to have a broken Vsync feature. In this case, not even D3DOverrider appears to be solving the problem. Fortunately, the game's poor optimization means that it doesn't always exceed 60 frames per second at the highest graphics settings anyway, making Vsync mostly unnecessary. People with more powerful systems might have to keep on looking for solutions.

All of this is pretty frustrating, but troubleshooting is to be expected when playing games on a PC, especially when the games are relatively old and the operating system is relatively new. I guess I should just be glad that most of the common problems can be solved.

"But if only you'd bought a console," some would say, "your games would just work." That's the favorite argument in favor of consoles. They just work. But now that the short-lived phenomenon of backwards compatibility has gone out the window with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, I don't think it's a fair argument. Most of the problems with PC games arise when one is trying to have a nostalgic experience by playing an old game on a new system, and the other problems are usually the fault of careless developers.

I guess we should all be glad that PC games work at all, considering that our "gaming computers" are not standardized like all the millions of identical Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Since I'm not a game developer, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to ensure that a game is going to work consistently on so many hardware configurations. Maybe I shouldn't be so upset that games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. have a few broken features, or that games like Max Payne continue to be sold without being updated for the current version of Windows. On the other hand, it's harder to forgive professional developers for an imperfect product when presumably amateur developers are able to correct the imperfections without being paid.

Update: It seems that, since I originally wrote this post, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was actually updated with a frame rate cap of 60 fps. I'm shocked that such an old game was actually updated, to be honest, but apparently some people with expensive computers were burning out their video cards by leaving the game paused (thereby allowing the game to run at hundreds or thousands of frames per second for long periods of time). Terrifying.

Midlife Crisis, Part 2

My new PC is up and running. All of the parts arrived about a week before Halloween, I put everything together on a Friday night, and I started installing drivers over the weekend. Since then, I've installed and tested a few somewhat-high-performance games, namely Crysis, Alan Wake, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, L.A. Noire, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. They all run rather well on the highest graphics settings. I've also played a bit of Metro 2033, which I got for practically nothing from the Humble THQ Bundle last November, and it performs well enough on maximum settings as well. There's some stuttering, but that's probably the result of poor optimization and there might be a fix somewhere.

For obvious reasons, I don't own any truly "next-generation" games at the moment, so I'm not sure what kind of performance I'll get out of those. In any case, however, I'm better off with this new rig than without it. My old PC worked surprisingly well with some games (running the Metro 2033 demo at a playable frame rate on low settings), but it totally failed to work with others (namely L.A. Noire which, for whatever reason, was getting about two frames per second). Games ported to Windows from the upcoming generation of consoles can certainly be expected to work my new PC much harder than anything I've played so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs. On the other hand, I can't really say I'm looking forward to seeing what my new favorite toy can't do. After all the time spent on this thing, from finding the parts to powering it on, I want to believe it's perfect.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the final parts arrived — with any luck, I wouldn't have to shop for computer parts again for a few years — but there was still plenty of stress ahead of me. The first hiccup was a return of my supposedly new Gigabyte motherboard to Amazon, since the retail box was not sealed and had some rips in the corners. In other words, it looked like it had already been opened, though the parts inside were still in plastic. Despite my complaints, however, the replacement's box was in roughly the same condition, perhaps slightly worse. Again, however, the inner parts were still in plastic.

I don't know if Amazon was trying to screw me by selling me returned hardware as new, or if Gigabyte was to blame, but I figured I could just get it replaced if it was indeed broken or damaged so I decided to use the motherboard anyway. This might prove to be a mistake, but I was getting impatient. Besides, if Amazon couldn't send me a box that looked shiny and new, I'd have to buy it from elsewhere, and I wasn't confident that other sellers would be more trustworthy than one of the biggest online retailers in existence.

So I started building the computer. Long story short, the motherboard was not dead on arrival, and I've been careful to keep all the paperwork I received for warranty purposes in case something happens later. All of the parts, in fact, seem to be working nicely, even the cheap optical drive. The process of actually assembling the computer was quite an experience, though, since I'd never done it before.

Now that I have done it, building another would probably take less than an hour, but this first build took several. Most of that time was spent reading instructions, looking up computer-building tips, and wondering how hard I need to push to get one part to slide into another. Getting the stock CPU cooler into the motherboard was particularly terrifying, because there's no way to accomplish this without pushing harder than I ever though delicate electronics should be pushed. The same was true of installing the processor itself. I was afraid I'd break it, but those fears were unfounded, since I was doing it correctly and there was no other way.

After getting all the parts into the case, I experienced another momentary freak-out when I thought the fans on the case were totally incompatible with the motherboard. (The motherboard had four-pin headers and the fans had three-pin connectors.) I was wrong — they can, in fact, be plugged in — but it doesn't really matter now anyway, because I opted to plug the case fans directly into the power supply instead. My only concern now is that I might have created air bubbles in the thermal paste when installing that troublesome CPU cooler, since I picked it up again after letting it make contact with the top of the processor. So far, however, the temperatures don't seem to be reaching dangerous levels.

Given all the minor difficulties I encountered — all of which could have been much worse with a little bit of bad luck — I completely understand why the path I chose is less traveled than others. Most people buy consoles or pre-built computers instead, and I don't blame them. Consoles, in particular, are super easy; they plug in and work. You don't have to worry about whether a game is compatible as long as it has the right logo on the box. Moreover, they're affordable, and while performance might only be "good enough" instead of great, it's hard to tell when you're sitting on a couch ten feet from the screen.

People who choose PCs over consoles are sometimes seen as elitists in the so-called "gaming" community, and it's probably because some PC users feel the need to participate in the embarrassingly pathetic "console wars" that break out between fans of competing systems. Xbox fans and Playstation fans like to argue amongst themselves about which console is best, letting their brand loyalty metamorphosize into some kind of vendetta against everyone who bought the other product as they collectively provide Microsoft and Sony with all the free advertising they could ever want. But the PC user, whose system is built from various parts by different manufacturers, doesn't necessarily have any brand loyalty unless he has an affinity for AMD over Intel, or vice versa. The stereotypically elitist "PC gamer" thinks he's above the petty squabbling of console owners, but he stoops to their level nonetheless when he proclaims that his PC is better than any console and says not-so-nice thinks about everybody who bought one. So I'm not going to do that.

It's true that a good computer can outperform any console, because a console is just a specialized computer and it's never made of the best hardware available. For the right price, a PC can surpass a brand new console on the day of release. Even a cheap PC can beat a console in mid-generation, since PC parts continue to improve while consoles stagnate for up to eight years. The PC user, in a way, is right about his system's superiority. That's why console fans who brag about graphics will usually turn around and claim that graphics don't matter once the PC guy joins the discussion. Either that, or they'll pretend it costs over $2000 to build a PC that plays console games at console-equivalent settings, or they'll insist that the only games worth playing are console exclusives.

But there's really no need to grasp at straws so desperately, because consoles do have their purpose. While a PC is good for the hardcore game enthusiast, a console is a much easier solution for casual play, most often for a lower price. A console is a hassle-free, plug-and-play, guaranteed-compatible alternative for the living room. Let's just leave it at that. I might have considered buying a console myself if I weren't in need of a new computer anyway. It was a choice between a console plus a cheap computer, or one good computer, and I chose the latter.

The worst thing about choosing a personal computer over a console is all the second-guessing that comes naturally with an abundance of choice. Now that I have my PC, I won't be buying another for a few years unless something goes terribly wrong, so I won't get to try all the other hardware presently on the market. I guess that's why some people get paid to review this hardware, but there's nothing like first-hand experience, and I'll never be able to make my own comparisons unless I go and buy more parts than I can afford. Console users have fewer decisions to make when buying their hardware, but people are generally happier this way because they don't have to worry as much about making the wrong choice.

As for me, I'll just have to clear my mind of all those what-ifs, and be content with what I have. That is, unless it breaks.

Midlife Crisis, Part 1

I've been wanting a new PC for a while. In fact, I've wanted one ever since I first played F.E.A.R. back in 2005. The game was fantastic, but the computer I was using at the time was only decent, perhaps good, but not great. Those maximum graphics settings were pretty far out of reach; I think I had to settle for medium. (The horror!) Still, I was an optimist. I simply told myself that, someday, I'd have a computer that could easily run the game on the highest settings.

Of course, that wasn't exactly a promise to spend lots of money. I figured correctly that I wouldn't be getting a new computer for several years, and I knew that even a relatively inexpensive PC in the ambiguously distant future would be far more powerful than what I presently had. Then again, when investing in a new PC, one might as well invest enough to play contemporary games on the highest settings as well. So, whether I knew it or not, I was telling myself that someday I'd blow a bunch of money on an expensive toy.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I started to think more seriously about it. By this time, the personal computer had truly become my video game platform of choice, and the machine I had been using for years was starting to show its age, particularly with some of the more recent games. (I suppose I should be surprised that any of these modern games worked at all on such an old system, which had only been given a few small upgrades over the years). Although I'd only encountered a couple of games that simply refused to work at all, it was clear that it was time to move forward.

After some quick research, I decided that $800 would be a sufficient budget for a replacement. I just didn't know what to buy. My old PC had originally been a family computer not purchased by me, so I didn't know much about how to shop for a computer, let alone parts for a custom build. Of course, figuring this out doesn't really take a whole year. If I'd gotten my act together, I might have been done with the whole process by last Christmas, but I procrastinated. The holidays (and then spring and then summer) came and went before I got around to doing the research, setting aside the money, and making the purchase.

At this point, I could just buy one of the new consoles that are coming out later this year, but I've fallen out of love with consoles in general ever since I started playing shooters with a mouse, namely F.E.A.R. and its expansions. (I don't think I can ever go back to thumb sticks for anything requiring precision. Sure, consoles are still great for any genre that really does play better with a gamepad, but you can play those on a PC with a USB gamepad anyway.) Besides, very few of the games I've wanted to play over the past eight years have actually been console exclusives. Enough of them have been released for Windows that, throughout the lifetime of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I've been content to keep playing on the computer I already owned instead of buying new hardware. Now that I have another opportunity to get on the console bandwagon, I don't think that's going to change.

I can certainly see the appeal in the idea of standardized hardware, though. I've been agonizing for weeks over how best to balance the money I'm spending with the performance I'll get, but console owners don't need to make these tough decisions. I can also see the appeal in the exclusive games if there are enough of them to make a difference. However, I don't want to be stuck on the same hardware for the next eight years with no possibility of upgrading, and I don't really want enough of those upcoming console-exclusive games to justify the purchase of any particular console.

So, a number of weeks ago, I started actively researching PC parts, reading reviews of mid-to-high-end graphics cards and asking for advice in various places. One of those places, for better or for worse, was 4chan. It's worth noting that, on the site's /v/ and /g/ boards, the standard response to any question about PC building is a link to a guide called Logical Increments. I was wary about taking too much advice from a single popular source without going any further down the rabbit hole, but it seems to be a competently written guide, and a good starting place for anyone in my position. As of now, I highly recommend it, but the nature of the site means it changes constantly. I don't know how good it will be any number of months or years from now, if it still exists.

After some further research (which mostly involved lots of careful comparison of benchmarks, reviews, and prices), I did ultimately take quite a bit of advice from Logical Increments, getting a processor and a motherboard presently listed on the site's "Superb" tier and a graphics card which was until recently listed on the "Excellent" tier. Then I added some memory, some storage, a power supply, and a case, as well as an inexpensive optical drive (because I still have plenty of old games on discs), and I was done. Here's the breakdown:

CPU — $194.99
MOBO — $129.99
RAM — $68.46
HDD — $59.99
GPU — $209.99 (before $20.00 rebate)
PSU — $74.99
CD/DVD — $14.99
Case — $59.99

Disregarding sales tax and applying the rebate, this puts my subtotal at $793.39. Most of the components were cheaper than they'd been in previous months, according to their respective price histories, so it looks like I got a decent price overall. Unfortunately, the effect of sales tax (usually a negligible annoyance) was a real bummer.

I made my purchases from three stores — Amazon, Newegg, and NCIX — and while NCIX didn't seem to add any tax to my subtotal, Amazon and Newegg both did. (I think the current rule for New Jersey, though I believe it's going to change soon, is that an online store must charge sales tax if it has a physical presence within the state, so I can only assume that NCIX does not.) After applying the 7% tax to everything but the CPU, RAM, and HDD, my $800 build was suddenly much closer to $850, which I can only bring down to around $830 if I do the mail-in rebate. I'm not sure if I will, though, because I've heard these rebates tend to require that you send in the proof of purchase that is also required to get a replacement under warranty, and I don't want to jump through too many hoops if I need a replacement part. So $850 it is, until further notice. If sales tax had been applied to everything, I'd be looking at $870 (or $850 after the potential rebate), so I guess I should be glad for that.

Did I really get a good deal? I'm sure someone will tell me I didn't. After deciding on my parts, I could have waited months to get the best possible deal on each individual component, but I felt it would be best to buy them all at once. (Keep in mind that I do want to test them all before any of them are too old to return.) I had already considered prices when choosing my components in the first place, and I'd have to do that work again if I waited long enough for prices to start fluctuating away from the low price/performance ratios I'd deliberately sought out, so I just bought the whole list as soon as I was ready. Sometimes prices go down if you wait, but sometimes they go up, and I can't see the future.

Yet, even if I did get a good deal on these parts, I can't help but wonder if it was simply a bad time to buy a PC, given next month's launch of Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The next-generation (and soon-to-be current-generation) consoles are as close as they'll ever be to state-of-the-art. Although this PC will easily crush the outgoing generation in terms of performance, it won't have such a strong lead for very long. It's also worth noting that many games released for Windows are actually ports that were optimized for consoles, so the performance on a PC might be worse even if the console has weaker hardware. Now that consoles are suddenly getting more powerful, I can only hope my PC will be ready for whatever I throw at it.

We also might see further price drops in the AMD graphics card I bought, since a new round of AMD cards have just been released. Everything I bought might be cheaper when Black Friday comes around, as well. Waiting for the holidays might be the best time-for-money trade-off I could have made. However, my experience with Black Friday sales is that the deals aren't as good as people think and everything sells out fast, so I can't even be sure that waiting for late November would have helped.

In any case, there's no sense in worrying about it now. I don't spend money on myself very often, so if the computer works and I enjoy using it, I'll call it a win. I'll admit that $800 plus tax is a pretty hefty price tag, though, especially when I haven't included the peripherals. (For the immediate future, I'll be using the monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse from the old PC.) I haven't even included a copy of Windows (since I'm still trying to decide between 7 and 8).

To put things in perspective: My brother just got a new laptop for around $1000 (and my computer will play Crysis a lot better than his), but the cost of that laptop probably includes an extended warranty. The cost of mine doesn't. I'm putting my faith — perhaps too much faith — in manufacturer's warranties, which might screw me over if one of my parts dies two years down the line. Buying additional protection plans separately for each important component likely would have pushed my budget over the edge. But at least I'll be able to replace a single part without replacing the whole rig. I'm not sure if my brother, or any console owner, can say the same.

All that really concerns me right now is the Sapphire GPU, since I've heard that Sapphire's customer service is somewhat lackluster. On the other hand, I've heard some good things about the quality of their cards. I guess I'll just have to hope mine isn't defective; if it is, I'll just have to hope I can arrange for a new one without too much trouble. If worst comes to worst, and my new PC explodes after a month, I'll just hope I'm selected for beta testing one of the prototype Steam Machines, preferably the one with a GTX Titan. (Please?)

In times like these, the most comforting thought is that what's done is done; my PC is ordered and will be arriving in many parts shortly. At least, that's what I hope. Thanks to the free shipping from Amazon, I might not get to put this beast together until the weekend before Halloween. In the meantime, I'll keep on playing old games and some indie stuff from Humble Bundle. The Binding of Isaac, by the way, is a fantastic game. I regret that I didn't get around to it sooner.

Family Sharing on Steam

Recently, Valve announced yet another new addition to Steam, called Family Sharing, which is to be launched in limited beta next week.

The new feature will allow you to authorize a "shared computer" on which others can download and play the games on your account. The official announcement doesn't specify whether these other players will need to be on your Steam friends list, but it's safe to assume they'll need to make their own separate Steam accounts if they haven't done so already. In return, they'll get separately logged achievements and saved progress for the games they "borrow" from your library. According to the FAQ shown here, up to ten devices can be authorized for sharing at once, but only one person is allowed to play the games from a single library at any given time.

The idea of sharing games on Steam sounds like a pretty big deal — a game changer, if you'll allow the terrible pun — but is it all it's cracked up to be? While you and some of your friends could, in theory, share the same pool of Steam games, time management would be an issue. Since a friend can only borrow your library when you're not playing, the Family Sharing feature amounts to little more than a safer alternative to the unofficial method of sharing Steam games — that is, letting your friend have your password.

Tighter restrictions might also be implemented later on — it's easy to imagine some kind of time limit on "borrowed" games, for example, or a drastic decrease in the number of shared computers allowed, or a drastic decrease in the number of games available for sharing — so we can only wait and see if the finer details of Family Sharing prove too good to be true after the beta is over. In the meantime, it might help to read those details carefully. There already are some games which can't be shared, according to the Family Sharing FAQ, namely those requiring "an additional third-party key, account, or subscription." While this limitation is technical, it makes me wonder if some developers will make sure their games are exempt from sharing by implementing any of these already-quite-irritating requirements.

So let's say Family Sharing doesn't live up to our expectations. Does this mean Steam's version of sharing is a bad thing? Not really. Any amount of sharing is extremely valuable for those who like to try before they buy (especially when playable demos are such a rarity these days). A lot of players supposedly engage in piracy for this purpose alone, and Family Sharing might present an alternative to some. It all depends on whether getting a friend to share on your computer (and then finding time to play when he or she is offline) is more of a hassle than finding a good torrent. As always, Steam has to treat piracy as a competitor. The problem will never go away, so the only real solution for digital distributors is to make their services so convenient that we don't mind giving them our money.

For many, however, no combination of convenience and competitive pricing can change their view that digital goods mean a loss of consumer rights. Being allowed to resell a thing that you've purchased is often considered a right, but it can't be done with Steam games. There's no thriving second-hand market for downloaded content because customers are rarely allowed to transfer "ownership" of what they've purchased. Even sharing without breaking the law can be difficult. While Steam can certainly try to remedy this situation, it might not be feasible for a digital distributor to emulate the way in which physical media can be shared legitimately among friends and family. Digital rights management always gets in the way somehow, often ruining the experience, while the total absence of digital rights management leads people to stop sharing and start giving away free copies. Neither scenario is ideal. (There are some DRM-free digital distributors, like Humble Bundle and GOG.com, but they're basically operating on the honor system, and they can only pull it off because their customers like them enough to support them voluntarily.)

Although any publisher of any intellectual property, retail or digital, might prefer that your friends buy their own copies of whatever you have, borrowing physical media is so commonplace that nobody really complains. But is it only allowed because it can't be avoided? Nintendo didn't try to stop me from lending my copy of Metroid Prime to a friend back in 7th grade because lending GameCube discs is legally and socially acceptable, but what's more important is that, unlike a digital distributor, they had no way of stopping me. The same can be said of music CDs, paperback books, and anything else you can physically hand off to your good pal. It always felt a little unfair that digitally distributed games like those on Steam — or, in fact, any game protected by any form of DRM, even if it comes on a disc — cannot be shared in the same way as your favorite book... but hey, maybe we're just spoiled by centuries of unauthorized sharing gone unpunished.

In any case, Steam's new Family Sharing feature will not erase all the perceived injustices of DRM, and Valve had its own arguably evil part to play in the rise of online DRM with the introduction of Steam back in 2003, but it seems to be a step back in the right direction. (At the very least, it certainly isn't a step in the wrong direction, since they're giving us some new options and taking none away.) The new feature on Steam certainly isn't a perfect imitation of "real" sharing, but it's a decent compromise.

The known limitations, while forgivable, are numerous. For example, your Steam library is shared not with a person but with a single computer, which means the so-called borrower cannot simply play your shared library anywhere he or she wants. Furthermore, you cannot lend a dozen of your games to a dozen different friends, since your library can only be shared on ten computers. Finally, since only one account can access a lender's library at a time, a single borrower essentially reserves the entire library instead of grabbing a single game. You can't let your friend play one game while you play another, so it's kind of like lending your copy of The Kite Runner to a friend when all the books on your shelf are glued together.

This kind of sharing does have some perks, though. After I lent that copy of Metroid Prime to that friend, I never got it back. If you're sharing your Steam games, you don't have to worry about this, and you can even boot your friend out of your library while he or she is playing if you've decided it's your turn to play. (According to the FAQ linked above, the other person will be given a few minutes to finish up or to buy their own copy of the game. How kind.) Better yet, since it's all digital, there's no "sorry, I scratched the disc" or "oh man, my mom sold it at the yard sale." The fact that your entire library is shared at once can also be a good thing, unless your friend is a young kid who needs to stay away from your bloody murder simulators.

It's entirely possible that Family Sharing will make Steam more attractive to those who usually avoid buying digital copies. Many of them, however, will probably continue to avoid Steam on principle, regardless of how Steam's features and restrictions might affect them personally. Even those of us who are always online, and always signed in, can be annoyed when going online and signing in is a requirement for installing a game. Even those of us who don't think Valve is likely to go suddenly bankrupt can be angry about what would happen if our accounts were to vanish into thin air. Even those of us who only care to share our Steam libraries with a single friend might be critical of the fact that we can't allow more than some arbitrary number of shared computers. Unfortunately for consumers of PC games, however, DRM is a fact of life. It has been for years. At least Steam makes it relatively painless most of the time.

I won't say they're adding this Family Sharing feature out of the goodness of their hearts — that's not how businesses operate. The most altruistic motivation they can have is the hope of bringing in new customers by improving their image. In this case, they might also be responding to the problem of accounts being shared off the record. You can share your Steam account without the help of Family Sharing simply by giving your password to a trusted friend, and Valve obviously knows some people are doing this. Instead of alienating customers by enforcing tighter restrictions, they're embracing the idea of sharing, but with sane limits. They can't stop us from sharing our accounts, but they can try to keep sharing under control if they can convince us to do it their way.

Going Nowhere Rather Slowly

For the first few months of its existence, when I was between jobs, this blog was essentially a weekly project. Now that I've been employed at not-so-enjoyable jobs for almost a year, while struggling to balance multiple hobbies with personal relationships and weighing the possibility of going back to graduate school, I fear it's becoming a monthly one. I'll try to step it up, because I know that writing makes me happy even though I'm often too tired to write, but the schedule of this blog has always been "when I feel like it, when I have time, and when it's done."

This kind of schedule isn't always very kind to time-sensitive subjects like coverage of game-related news and commentary on current events, which is why I've only written two articles for Gather Your Party. In fact, this kind of schedule isn't kind to any of my ideas unless I stop watching TV and commit to working. I have a few things in the works, but I've had to choose carefully which things get written down. I'd like to write a detailed analysis of every game I play, but that wasn't happening even when I had all the time in the world, and it certainly isn't happening now.

I guess this will have to suffice: Torchlight II is fun but like any game in the genre it becomes an endless and slightly grindy search for better gear and you realize rather quickly that the entire game is just a glorified, rather complicated, weighted random number generator; Serious Sam 3: BFE doesn't improve the series with the addition of sprinting and iron sights, and if this is meant as a parody of modern shooters then it's only funny because the iron sights hardly seem to do anything at all; Heretic is a fun game but my decision to do a vanilla run before trying a source port might have damaged my eyes.

Anyway, I'm not dead, and the gradual decline in the frequency of posts on this blog doesn't mean that I've lost interest or that I've run out of things to say. Mostly it just means I'm spending more of my personal downtime actually playing video games. And I guess that's a good thing.

Steam Sales: Not What They Used to Be

This article was also published on Gather Your Party on June 12, 2013. Read it here.

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Today marks the beginning of yet another seasonal Steam sale. This typically means another themed event to accompany the daily discounts, and this year's summer sale is no exception, but users who aren't already enjoying the recently introduced Steam trading cards might be less than thrilled about the nature of this event. The Summer Getaway Sale predictably implements the new feature with the unveiling of ten Summer Getaway trading cards.

Always in search of ways to convince potential customers that Steam is more than a typical online distributor with some neatly packaged digital rights management, Valve has famously made a habit of supplementing its well-known seasonal sales with themed objectives, contests, and other giveaways. Last year's two big events, however, were arguably lackluster compared to those which had come before, and this isn't a nostalgia-induced observation.

The Great Steam Treasure Hunt of December 2010, for example, was a pretty big deal. By completing special objectives related to in-game actions and community participation, Steam users could enter into a series of drawings to win free games. Every two days, 20 people won the top five games from their wishlists; 3 users then won a hundred games at the end of the event. The Steam Summer Camp Sale in 2011 followed a similar format with a few differences, namely that a single "ticket" was earned for each completed objective. Three of these tickets could then be exchanged for something at the prize booth (e.g., free downloadable content for a Steam game). Each ticket earned also came with automatic entry into another free-game sweepstakes in which 100 people won ten games.

The Great Gift Pile event, which took place the following winter, was perhaps the most notorious Steam event to date. This time, each completed objective came with one of three prizes: a lump of coal, a coupon, or a free game. Seven lumps of coal could then be "crafted" into a non-coal prize, and any remaining lumps of coal at the end of the event were used as entries into yet another Steam game give-away: One lucky person won every game on Steam, 50 won ten games, 100 won five games, and 1,000 won the Valve complete pack. Unfortunately, Humble Indie Bundle 4 was going on at the same time, and the name-your-own-price bundle included Steam keys for some of the games whose achievements were needed to win prizes.

People quickly realized that, by creating dozens of Steam accounts and buying dozens of bundles for $0.01 each, they could vastly increase their odds of getting free stuff without spending a lot of money. All of that free stuff could then be traded back to their main Steam accounts. Because of this easily exploited loophole, Steam ran out of third-party coupons before the event was over, and Humble Bundle was forced to raise the minimum price for Steam keys to $1.00.

Compared to the previous events, the Summer Sale of 2012 was a massive step down. Discounts went on as usual, but the sale was devoid of any contests or cool prizes, possibly due to the previous event's Humble Bundle shenanigans. Only a few community-based objectives were posted for the duration of the sale, and the only reward for participation was an easily obtained Steam badge. The following Holiday Sale was more of the same.

These last two events did come with a couple of new features which return this summer: Flash Sales which roll over every few hours (like Daily Deals on crack) and a Community's Choice poll to determine which of three games will go on sale next. It should be noted, however, that the games featured in Flash Sales and Community's Choice polls often seem to end up being featured as Daily Deals anyway.

So here we are, at the start of another sale, and again there are no sweepstakes or contests in sight. Furthermore, with the absence of any specially themed achievements or objectives, it looks like the last remnant of the old Steam events has been swept aside to make room for something presumably more lucrative.

This event's special badge can only be earned by crafting all ten Summer Getaway trading cards, and these cards can be obtained in a few ways. The easiest is by casting Community's Choice votes (three of which are good for one card), yielding a maximum of one card per day. Unfortunately, this only works if your Steam level, based on previously collected badges, is 5 or higher. If not, or if you can't check into Steam every few hours for the next eleven days, you'll have to turn to alternative methods: spending money on Steam (which is likely Valve's favorite option), crafting badges for games you already own (which involves collecting other sets of cards), trading other items for the required cards (which means you need something worth trading), or simply buying the cards from other users on the Steam market (a monetary transaction from which Valve takes a small percentage).

As Valve continues to push the new trading card feature, frequently adding to the list of participating games, it's possible that the use of trading cards to earn a badge, as opposed to the completion of special achievements, will be the norm in future Steam events.

Steam Trading Cards Out of Beta

Steam's trading cards, mentioned briefly in this way-too-long post about virtual trading cards in general, are out of beta today. I already had the pleasure of "collecting" some of these cards a few weeks ago, thanks to a Steam friend who sent me a beta invite, but my participation thus far (spurred by curiosity alone) has been strictly passive. I got my standard card drops for Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 by running each game for a couple of hours, but I've yet to go out of my way to collect an entire set of cards for any given game.

It hardly seems worth it, since doing so would likely require trading with strangers or giving money to strangers; one is irritating and the other is insane. Meanwhile, it seems the only material reward for obtaining a full set of cards is the possibility of a coupon alongside a bunch of virtual things that are no more useful to me than the virtual cards used to pay for them. On the other hand, all of these virtual things are worth something to someone, so more substantial material rewards — monetary rewards, in fact — might be within reach if you know how to work the system for a profit.

How It Works

For those of you not in-the-know, the newly introduced Steam trading cards are the latest in a series of secondary features added to the already-bloated Steam Community over the past year or two. (Steam Market? Steam Workshop? Greenlight? What are these "Community Hub" things and why do these discussions need to be separate from the existing Steam forums? I think I've had enough.) Unfortunately, these trading cards don't do much, and they're not part of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering. They're just collectibles. You can exchange a set of them to get a handful of virtual prizes, but in the end it all boils down to more collectible stuff in your inventory, more cosmetic features on your profile, and perhaps a bigger ego if you're actually proud of this.

Your first few trading cards can be earned by playing any the applicable games, and additional cards can then be received from three-card booster packs which are given out at random. However, booster packs don't seem plentiful — at least, not at this time — so getting a complete set of cards before the heat death of the universe will likely require trade of some kind.

For most games, the initial gameplay-induced card drops are based on playtime only, so you don't have to do anything in-game to get them. In fact, you don't even have to play; you can just get your cards by idling at the main menu of each game. (If I remember correctly, it only takes a couple of hours to get your maximum share of trading cards from any given game, much less than the length of a typical playthrough, so whether you're playing the game or leaving it paused for card-mining, there's no grinding involved here.) The only games with special card-dropping rules are the so-called "free-to-play" Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which only drop one card per $9 spent on in-game items.

Leveling Up

So what's the point of all this?

Here's a hint: Money. But I'll get into that shortly. First and foremost, these trading cards give you another reason to care about your Steam Level, an arbitrary indicator of coolness according to Valve, which appears on your Steam profile. A user's level is based on experience points which are in turn earned primarily by accumulating badges. What are badges? Well, actually, those are nothing new.

Most of the badges on my own profile are from participation in Steam's sale-related events from previous years. (Valve has a history of using the Steam community as a platform for meta-games aimed at getting its members more involved and excited about spending money, and sometimes this involves handing out specially themed achievements for the various games on sale during an event. These achievements often translate to badges and thus to experience.) Badges and experience points can also be earned for being a long-time member, participating in beta tests, and — predictably — owning lots and lots of Steam games.

The trading card thing factors into all of this because each complete set of cards associated with a given game — all eight of the Half-Life 2 cards, for example — can be exchanged for a badge. (The same badge can then be "leveled up" multiple times by collecting the same set of cards again and again.) Along with each badge comes the aforementioned handful of virtual goodies, which may or may not include a coupon, as well as a bunch of experience which raises your Steam Level. Having a higher level then increases your chance of randomly getting a booster pack of three cards.

At this early date, however, it's not exactly clear how frequently one might expect to receive a booster pack. As I mentioned above, it seems pretty rare. The trading card FAQ only shows the percentages of increased drop rates associated with each leveling milestone, and indicates that booster packs are "granted randomly to eligible users as more badges are crafted by members of the community." Without more information, I'll just have to wait and see how long it takes me to get a booster pack, if I ever get one. Frankly, however, I'm more interested in how Valve is controlling the number of cards in circulation.

Artificial Scarcity

Logging playtime will only get you half the set of cards for any given game — for example, four of the eight Half-Life 2 cards — and that might include duplicates. In the absence of booster packs, a player who doesn't trade will literally never earn a badge, and a player who only trades card-for-card will literally never be able to craft badges for all of his or her applicable games. In such a system, allowing cards to be permanently consumed in the badge crafting process would very quickly lead to a shortage. Booster packs fix this, but giving them out willy nilly would lead to an ever-increasing surplus. I can only assume that the cards being exchanged for badges are the very same cards being redistributed in booster packs. After all, that would make loads of sense, especially if we're supposed to pretend that these imaginary cards are to be treated as actual collectible objects like Magic cards or vintage stamps. If it is the case, however, the seemingly miniscule odds of receiving a booster pack would suggest that a relatively small number of users are actually crafting badges.

In any case, while a user who doesn't trade still does theoretically have a chance of eventually crafting a badge, the system heavily encourages trading, which is far more convenient. The only question is whether you're trading cards for cards, or paying cash. Even more convenient than finding a stranger who has what you need, and needs what you have, is looking up exactly what you need on the Steam Market and buying it. Sounds crazy? It's already happening. Thousands of cards are showing up on the Steam Market, with the rare foil cards going for a few dollars and regular cards ranging from around 40 cents to just above a dollar. This doesn't necessarily mean that just as many thousands of cards are successfully being sold, but the list of recently sold items on the market's main page does show a few cards every time I reload it.

This brings me to Valve's other motivation for getting into the virtual trading card business. Simply put, the whole thing is designed to suck more money from the wallets of those who are prone to trading card addiction. Some people, like me, are driven to obsessive completionism in video games; for other people, that completionism extends outside of video games to stuff like this. There are people out there who will not feel complete until they've collected every card. It's not inconceivable that some poor soul might actually buy one of these trading-card-enabled games on Steam for the sole purpose of getting more cards to trade. For the slightly less insane (but equally addicted) collector, the Steam Market is there with individual cards for sale, always waiting, tempting you with an easy path to your next badge.

Free Money (But Not Just For You)

For everything sold on the market, Valve takes a small transaction fee, so even though they aren't selling cards directly to users, they're still making money. In addition to these user-to-user card sales, the introduction of this trading card meta-game brings a mess of other items to the market as well, namely the emoticons and profile backgrounds that are earned with the creation of each badge. As long as the market is alive, Valve is making money just by keeping the servers turned on.

Evil, huh? But none of this is particularly bad for the user. Sellers on the market can make some extra change to put toward their next game (if they don't want their cards and don't mind viciously undercutting thousands upon thousands of other sellers), and buyers needn't worry much about the transaction fee unless they plan on turning around selling the very same items they just bought (which appears to be a losing proposition when each buyer pays more than each seller earns). Some have allegedly made a significant profit (in Steam Wallet credit) by purchasing cards and selling whatever rare items come out of badge crafting, but I can only assume this requires some cleverness and some luck. Trading card hustling and associated caveats aside, though, it's pretty nice to have an official means of selling items that you don't want to keep, even if your Steam wallet will only grow by a few cents.

So it's not all bad, but don't think Valve is doing us any favors; if you try to look at this from the developer's point of view, all of our usernames turn into dollar signs as usual. If you think you're going to get rich by selling all your cards, think again. Valve, on the other hand, has created yet another way to generate revenue by doing very little work. They've created their own little economy in which everything is heavily taxed but nobody really cares.

In other Steam-related news, this year's summer sale is due to start pretty soon. No one ever seems to know the exact starting date, but last year's summer sale started in mid-July, and in the previous year it started at the end of June and overlapped with the July 4th holiday. I probably already own most of the Steam games I'd be willing to buy this summer, and my backlog is already long enough thanks to the incessant Humble Bundle events, but I look forward to another Steam event nonetheless. (Maybe I'll get another badge.)

The Problem with Trading Card Games

Scrolls, the upcoming collectible-card-based strategy game from Minecraft developer Mojang, enters its open beta phase today. Essentially, this means you can buy the not-quite-finished game for less than its full price and start playing early while they work out the bugs and make improvements. Some part of me wants to partake in this, because the game looks pretty interesting (and because we all know how playing Minecraft quickly became the most popular thing since breathing), but the rest of me doesn't want to touch this game with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. It looks fun, but I'm conflicted.

Collectible card games are an interesting thing. I want to love them, because I think they're so cool in theory. I wanted to love Magic: The Gathering, the original trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast back in 1993. The concept of such a card game is ingenious, both for its unique gameplay and — let's be honest — for its potential to rake in huge wads of cash for the owners.

Over the past 20 years, new sets of Magic cards have been released on a regular basis, and the total number of different cards seems to have surpassed 13,000, yet the game still remains accessible to newcomers. New rules are introduced all the time, and the balance is tweaked with each new expansion, but the earliest cards can still be used (outside of certain tournaments) together with the ones printed today. The number of possible combinations in a 60-card deck isn't even worth counting.

The ability of each player to create his or her own customized deck of cards, drawing from a collection unlike that of any opponent, is what makes this type of game so fun to play. Unfortunately, this makes the gameplay inherently imbalanced, unless we consider the start of the collection process to be the true beginning of any given match (and that's a stretch). Even then, a game like Magic too often requires continual monetary investment if you want to remain competitive, and this feature (while I'd like to call it a flaw) is by design. I played Magic for a brief period of time, several years ago, and my cards might have been only half-decent back then, but they're total garbage now. More powerful cards and better gameplay mechanics are created with each expansion to keep players spending their money. Of course.

There's also a certain threshold of monetary investment required in order to become competitive in the first place, and that threshold is probably going to scale in proportion to the size of your opponent's paycheck. Things might be balanced within a group if everyone involved cares enough to go on eBay to buy selectively the individual cards they need for one of a few strategies deemed viable at the expert level, but this isn't always affordable. Meanwhile, for more casual play in which most cards are obtained from random packs, the guy who wins most often is going to be the guy who spent the most money on his collection. The three pillars of succeeding in Magic: The Gathering are building a good deck, making the right in-game decisions, and (perhaps most importantly) owning better cards than the other guy (which is where the "collectible" aspect comes in).

When a video game affords even the smallest advantage to a player who spends extra money (e.g., through micro-transactions), we call it "pay-to-win" (even if this isn't literally true) and we hate it because it feels so wrong. It is wrong, because the delicate balance of the game in question is either compromised or completely destroyed. Being at a disadvantage sucks, and if you give in and buy your way to the top then the challenge is gone and the game quickly becomes pointless. (In the most extreme cases, you've essentially just paid to see the words "you win" on your screen, so congratulations on doing that.)

A lesser form of pay-to-win merely allows players to spend some extra money to skip past a seemingly endless grind, as is the case in many so-called "free-to-play" games. This doesn't necessarily destroy the game's balance of power (because the advantages being bought can also be earned through dozens of hours of play), but it does highlight the major flaws already present in the game. If a person wants to pay more money simply to get less gameplay, the game probably sucks (and the person playing it probably hasn't realized there's nothing left to do if you're not grinding).

In the video game world, all of this is positively awful, but most collectible card games are pay-to-win by nature. Sure, they're fun to play if you're up against someone whose skill level and deck quality are in the same league as yours, but if you play against a guy whose collection of cards is twice as big (and twice as expensive) then it's completely unfair.

When I first heard of Magic: The Gathering Online prior to its release in 2002, I thought it might be a little more fair (and affordable) than its tabletop equivalent. I assumed (or at least hoped) that each player would be given access to the same pool of cards, or perhaps that better cards might be unlocked by winning matches, or something. At the very least, I naively believed that players wouldn't have to buy all of their virtual cards at the same price as physical ones because... well, you know, because they're not real cards. Unfortunately, Magic: The Gathering Online is identical to the original card game except that the cards aren't made of card stock and ink.

Duels of the Planeswalkers looks like a nice alternative, even with its relatively small number of cards, until you realize that you can't even build your own deck. This is no surprise, though, since Wizards of the Coast doesn't want this game to be a viable alternative. Duels of the Planeswalkers is meant to draw in new players and get them hooked, so they become frustrated by the lack of deck-building options and graduate to buying packs of cards, be they physical or digital. The virtual cards in Magic: The Gathering Online, despite being virtual, have monetary value because Wizards of the Coast doesn't let you do whatever you want with them. Artificial scarcity makes them seem as rare as the physical cards printed in limited runs on actual paper.

Digital game distributor Steam recently unveiled its own trading card meta-game, which is still in beta, and it's proving to be a nice example of how such artificial scarcity can make something desirable even if it has no real value, no purpose, and no practical function.

Players with access to the beta test can earn virtual trading cards for their Steam Community accounts by logging play time in certain Steam games. These currently include Borderlands 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Don't Starve, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2, as well as the free-to-play games Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 (but only if you spend money on them). You can get up to four cards per game just by playing, while eight cards from a single game comprise a complete set. The fact that you can only earn half of any set on your own means that trading (or buying from other players) is a necessity.

Once you get a complete set, those eight cards can be turned into a badge and some other items. The badge is good for nothing at all, while the other goodies that come with it are mostly vanity items, like emoticons and points to "level up" your Steam Community account. (There's also a chance of getting a coupon, but my experience with Steam coupons is that the discounts they offer are less impressive than the ones you see during a typical sale.) The whole thing seems pretty dumb, but you can already see cards for sale on the Steam marketplace, and that doesn't usually happen unless people are buying. There's also a demand for those vanity items. Apparently, some users even made a profit by buying lots of cards and then selling the goodies that come with each badge.

In general, things that were specifically made to be collected usually don't have a lot of real value to collectors. However, if you turn that collection process into a game — even if it's a stupid one — people go nuts. If people are willing to spend real money on virtual trading cards just so they can earn virtual badges and virtual emoticons and level up their Steam accounts for virtual bragging rights, it should be no surprise if the same people are willing to spend money on virtual trading cards that give them an actual advantage in an online game. I can't really blame Wizards of the Coast for taking advantage of this kind of behavior. But when the game is a competitive one, I just don't like the idea of buying victories, even if it's done in an indirect and convoluted way.

A true trading card game, even if its entirely virtual, is going to have some level of imbalance. If each player draws cards from a unique collection, it's never going to be completely fair. All of this might be okay, however, if everything were unlockable through in-game actions and accomplishments. Naturally, I was hopeful when I first saw Scrolls; the official website tells us items at the in-game store can be bought with the gold earned by playing matches, and this presumably includes new cards (called "scrolls" because it sounds so much cooler). However, a "small selection" of items can also be bought with "shards" — a so-called "secondary currency" which you can buy with your real-life credit card.

So how significant is this "small selection" of in-game items? How much of an advantage can you gain by immediately purchasing everything that shards can buy? I can only assume the advantage is pretty significant; otherwise there would be no point. The real question is of whether a person who paid $10 more than you (and doesn't deserve the advantage) is distinguishable from someone who played 20 hours longer than you (and earned the advantage). As long as it's possible to unlock everything that matters through gameplay alone, and as long as doing so is feasible (i.e., not a 500-hour grind), there's some hope for this game.

Mojang has claimed that Scrolls won't become a pay-to-win game despite its purchasable items, but developers say a lot of things before their games are released. The only reason to believe them is that the game does in fact have an initial cost — in other words, it's not "free-to-play" so the developers don't need to rely on in-game purchases to turn a profit.

The cost of access to the open beta is $20, which isn't so bad when you consider the average cost of a modern video game, which tends to be around $50 or $60 regardless of quality. (While this high cost applies mostly to console games, high-profile PC releases tend to follow the same model with some notable exceptions. Runic Games, for example, earned some praise for selling Torchlight II at $20, which gave the action role-playing game a significant advantage over its controversial $60 competitor Diablo III.) Assuming that Scrolls turns out to be a decent game, this discounted price for early access is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately for Mojang, I've been trained by Steam sales and Humble Bundle events to refrain from buying anything unless or until it's dirt cheap. With some patience and good timing, I could buy a handful of older games for the same $20 and I'd be sure to enjoy at least one of them. It doesn't take long for the price of a game to drop, and this is especially true of PC games now that developers are realizing they need to compete with piracy instead of trying in vain to stamp it out. As a result, people who play PC games — or the "PC gaming community" for those of you who can say such a thing with a straight face — have come to expect their games to be inexpensive. $20 is a good deal, but it's not great.

I certainly don't mean to imply, of course, that we should all wait a few years to pick up Mojang's new release. After all, we don't even know if it will ever be subjected to such brutal price-slashing. Furthermore, Scrolls is a multiplayer game which might only be fun for as long as the number of players remains high, so the time to buy is now, if you want it. The problem is that the game is a risky investment and my spending limit for such a risk is so low.

That limit — the point below which a risky investment becomes a risk worth taking and any potential buyer's remorse becomes bearable — is different for everyone. For me, it's about $5. That might seem like a ridiculously small figure, but it's what I paid for BioShock a few years ago. It's what I paid for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's also what I paid for the first two Max Payne games combined. I almost bought Metro 2033 for $5, but I waited and got it for even less. I got Killing Floor for $5, a few years ago, and I've put more hours into that game than anything else I can remember. None of these games were new when I bought them, but I still enjoyed each of them at least as much as any $20 game I ever bought.

None of this is really a complaint about Scrolls or the open beta price tag in particular. But I might be more willing to spend four times what I paid for Killing Floor if I actually knew Scrolls would be a worthwhile purchase. Isn't there some way of trying out a game before its release without paying $20 for access to a beta version? Oh, yes, a free demo certainly would be nice. Maybe we'll get one of those later on... but we probably won't.

No Sequel for Alan Wake (Yet)

This article was also published on Gather Your Party on May 23, 2013. Read it here.

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Today brings good news and bad news for Alan Wake fans.

The good news is that, for the next week, you'll be able to get both Alan Wake games for very cheap, along with some previously unseen goodies. The bad news is that it's the last we'll be seeing of this series for a while.

After a five-week break, Humble Bundle has gone back to its weekly sales, a practice which had initially lasted for less than a month before being put on hiatus. The flavor of the week, as you might have guessed, is Remedy Entertainment's third-person, horror-themed, psychological thriller Alan Wake. The bundle includes the original game alongside its ambiguously canonical and unnumbered follow-up, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, as well as a whole bunch of bonus content, some of which has never been released.

As with most other Humble Bundle sales, you can pay whatever you want (down to one cent), but you'll need to pay at least a dollar to get Steam copies of the games. Oddly, unlike most other bundles, there doesn't seem to be any material incentive to pay higher than the average contribution. Surely, you could just do that out of the kindness of your heart... but if you're not that kind, these games will never be cheaper. The bundle is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it, even if you prefer the Steam keys, because a similar Steam bundle (minus previously unreleased bonus content) has only gone as low as $9.99 in previous Steam sales.

With this bundle also comes an announcement video from Remedy Entertainment creative director Sam Lake, which might have Alan Wake lovers crying themselves to sleep like Half-Life enthusiasts have been doing for the past five-and-a-half years.

The video, addressed apologetically to Alan Wake fans, reveals that Remedy is working on "something new, something big" — but the key word here is "new" which means, of course, that we're not talking about the continuation of an existing franchise. There's no way around it, so Lake comes out and tells it like it is: Alan Wake 2 will not be released in the foreseeable future.

This might come as a surprise to fans who were paying attention when Remedy seemingly dropped a few clues about an upcoming sequel. Most notably, Sam Lake tweeted a cryptic quote, the same heard as a backwards message in a song performed by Poets of the Fall as the fictional heavy metal band Old Gods of Asgard. It seemed promising, but maybe we shouldn't have been so excited.

The "town called Ordinary" might have been the setting for the next game in the series, but it might also have been a simple reference to the setting of American Nightmare, the game in which the song is featured. That game, after all, does take place in an unnamed town. (The narrator calls it Night Springs, but this is the Alan Wake universe's parody of The Twilight Zone, so if any part of the game takes place outside of Alan's mind then this disembodied voice can't be trusted.)

Regardless, it looks like Alan Wake 2 is on the back burner. Remedy "worked hard to make the sequel happen," says Lake, but the project apparently suffered from a lack of sufficient funding. Although total sales of the original game have exceeded 3 million copies, he notes, it was by no means an instant success upon its release. This makes throwing money at a sequel a risky investment, especially when the success of a modern game is judged so heavily on pre-order sales. One might expect a sequel to do better in that department, given the existing fanbase, but it would seem the franchise is cursed by its initial sales performance.

Lake remarks that Remedy could have done something "less ambitious" (i.e., less expensive) with the next Alan Wake, but explains that such a compromise "wouldn't have done justice to you... to us... and certainly wouldn't have done justice to Alan Wake." Perhaps, while we lament the indefinite postponement of what might have been a great game, we should be glad that Remedy Entertainment was unwilling to spoil the franchise with a mediocre cash-grab sequel. Lake is careful not to suggest that another Alan Wake will never be made; he only makes it very clear that now is not the right time.

Fortunately for Remedy, money isn't an issue for their new project, Quantum Break. The trailer, first shown at the Xbox One reveal, has live-action footage, a creepy girl with special powers, a bridge disaster, and some poor guy dying in slow motion. Sam Lake calls it the "ultimate Remedy experience" drawing on everything the development studio learned from Max Payne and Alan Wake.

Aside from these vague hints, not much is known about the upcoming release. The game is said to be an Xbox One exclusive, but only time will tell if this is set in stone; Alan Wake was an Xbox 360 exclusive before it was released for Windows a couple of years later, so we can afford to be optimistically skeptical. Maybe the same thing will happen again.

Until then, the Alan Wake Humble Bundle sale, along with an accompanying sale on Xbox Live, is Remedy's big thank-you to all of its fans. Sadly, it seems a bit too much like a tentative funeral for the franchise. The last minute of the announcement video is a live-action clip of various Alan Wake paraphernalia being locked in a crate and wheeled off into the back of a warehouse. The crate is labeled "Do Not Open Until..." but the date, of course, is hidden and will likely remain unknown until the Quantum Break franchise has run its course.

Government vs Video Games

When depictions of gratuitous violence in media come under attack after every mass killing, video games predictably take the majority of this misdirected blame, especially when the killer is twenty-something or younger. Good people who play video games, when they hear of this, are either indifferent or outraged, but no one is ever surprised. I bet no one was surprised the first time it ever happened, either. This kind of reaction might be reckless and inappropriate, but — let's be honest — it's understandable.

When a guy shoots a bunch of people, and they go into his house and find a video game in which the objective is to (virtually) shoot a bunch of (virtual) people, it certainly looks pretty incriminating. I can hardly blame the pundits and lawmakers for jumping to conclusions. More damning yet is that violent video games, unlike any of the violent movies this killer might have enjoyed, have an interactive element which puts the player in direct control of that violence. In the case of first-person shooters, it allows the player to pull the trigger.

Never mind the fact that ownership of these games is so common that their presence in the home of a killer is almost meaningless. When an innocent child plays Call of Duty and doesn't kill anyone for real, it's not nearly as newsworthy as the social outcast who (allegedly, according to some guy, maybe) became addicted to online first-person shooters before slaughtering children. People who get all of their information from the news are obviously going to have a skewed perspective. Those who think they see a correlation, and then blindly make the illogical leap to causation, don't fully realize that the video game has become such a socially acceptable pastime. They don't understand that recent spree killers who are known to have played video games did so only because they were, at least in this particular way, somewhat normal.

It's not entirely insane to draw bad conclusions about the effects of violent media when you simply haven't been told that an entire generation has been willingly exposed to everything from Mortal Kombat to Halo without a disproportionate number of individuals developing psychopathic or violent tendencies. The effortless and instant gratification that we get from video games and other computerized gadgets has only turned us into a bunch of lazy slobs. If it's true that violent crime has actually decreased in recent years, it's probably because we're too lazy to go outside and kill people even if we want to. We'd rather order pizza from our video game console and continue yelling obscenities into our headset while we 360 no-scope the kid on the other team and then brag about how tough we are.

Studies on the possible effects of exposure to violent video games continue to contradict each other, as do the self-proclaimed experts, but if video games do turn young people into murderers then it sure isn't obvious to those of us who actually play them. The gray-haired people who disagree with us have only an outsider's perspective.

Regardless of the facts, the usual scapegoat is used and abused every time a national tragedy prompts a discussion of what might be done to prevent violence. While cooler heads and logical thinking usually prevail, logic necessarily goes out the window for a period of time after every widely publicized act of senseless violence, because during such a time it's considered rude not to be ruled by your emotions. (If something terrible happens and you're not immediately calling for the public execution of the first possible suspect without waiting for a trial, you're a traitor; if children die and you're not calling for billions of dollars worth of unnecessarily legislation, you just don't care about children.) Proposals to restrict the content or sale of video games inevitably pop up here and there, and we all argue about them until our faces turn blue. However, by the time these proposals hit modern interpretations of the First Amendment like a brick wall, we've already forgotten about them, and things go back to normal until the next school shooting.

The cycle is currently in the process of repeating itself, thanks in part to last year's mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut. The push to depict the video game as a dangerous brainwashing tool has since gone into overdrive — not only because of the particularly horrific nature of this killing, and claims that the young perpetrator played too much Call of Duty, but also because violence in media had already been on the public's mind since the earlier shooting in Aurora, Colorado. After the more recent bombing attack in Boston, Massachusetts, I almost expected the anti-gaming sentiment to graduate from "video games cause violence" to "video games cause terrorism" (for it's almost a certainty that at least one of the Tsarnaev brothers had been exposed to at least one video game featuring some form of violence, and that's usually enough for a sensationalist news article). Fortunately, though, it seems that video games are only a plausible scapegoat until the T-word is used.

Regardless of which (if any) crimes can be linked to the consumption of video games, politicians are once again trying to fix the apparent epidemic of violent crime (i.e., a few high-profile cases) by campaigning for tighter restrictions on the medium. This is happening now in my home state of New Jersey, perhaps most notable today for hosting awful reality TV shows and having many of its tourist attractions ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. Am I worried? Maybe I would be if I were 12 years old, but as an adult, I'm outside the scope of any realistic attempt at regulation. Should anyone be worried? Not yet, since all of the proposed legislation I've seen is useless and inconsequential, as if government officials are just trying to look busy without rocking the boat too much. (And I guess that's normal.)

Earlier this month, for example, we heard of an assemblywoman who wants to ban playable M-rated and AO-rated games from public places. While such a proposal isn't by any means outrageous, someone clearly goofed up the details, because the idea as written is little more than a nuisance and a waste of tax money. Such a law, pertaining specifically to video games that are playable in public, could only affect arcade games and those console set-ups in video game stores. But the ESRB — creator of the M and AO ratings — doesn't even rate arcade games, and as for the playable console games in retail stores, I just couldn't care less if I tried. Last time I went to Best Buy, the games on display were kid-friendly platformers and Kinect nonsense.

To get arcade games back on the chopping block, they could just remove the references to ESRB ratings from the bill and apply the restrictions more broadly to any game featuring violence, but the popularity of arcade games is so low that passing the law would hardly be worth the effort. There are a few arcade machines at my local movie theater but nobody plays them. (And when the price of a single play has gone from $0.25 to $0.50 and sometimes $1.00, why should they? We all have video games in our homes now, and we can play them all day without losing a bunch of quarters.) There are still some standalone video arcades along the boardwalk (assuming they weren't all washed away when that hurricane blew through the Northeast), but they don't tend to have more than a few violent games. At worst, they'd have to toss the latest installment of Time Crisis or House of the Dead.

Meanwhile, New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whose high approval ratings have made him somewhat of a big deal) wants to prohibit the sale of M-rated and AO-rated games to minors without parental consent. This idea actually makes some sense, if you believe in the ESRB rating system. Of course, such a law would run afoul of a Supreme Court decision that overturned a similar law in California on the grounds that video games (like other creative works) are a protected form of free speech. For this reason, Christie's plan is likely to fail. But, hypothetically, what if a law restricting the sale of violent games were passed anyway? And what if it weren't immediately overturned by a higher court? I've composed a list of all the things that might change in my life as a direct result:

• There might be fewer underage brats in the online games that I play.
• I might need to bring my driver's license when I drive to the local video game store.

... That's all I've got.

Whenever we hear of possible restrictions on the sale of games to minors, there are those who act as if an outright ban on violent video games is in the works, and listening to all the unwarranted outrage is really tiring. Whether it's all a kneejerk reaction by people who jump to conclusions without carefully reading the news, or a genuine fear of a "slippery slope" that ends with blatant censorship, such an alarmist response is just as unnecessary and unhelpful as the actual legislation that's being proposed.

With a law in place, not much would change for most retailers and consumers, since the industry's self-imposed standards are almost identical to what our elected officials want to enforce. The ESRB recommends that M-rated games not be sold directly to anyone under 17 years old, and most retail stores already go along with this. In fact, on average, game retailers are doing pretty well at keeping these adult-oriented games out of children's hands. According to the FTC, it's easier for a minor to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie than to buy an M-rated game, so it's nothing short of ironic that my governor thinks we should be looking to R-rated films as an example of proper regulation and then "setting the same standard" for video games.

Compliance with this standard would surely be even higher if it became a legal issue, but parents would still be able to buy the games for their kids, which is exactly what they're doing now. Most young kids who play Call of Duty: Black Ops II didn't sneak out of the house and take a bus to the nearest GameStop to buy it. They got it from mommy for Christmas. The fact that so many minors are playing violent video games, while so few are actually buying them, means a lot of parents have no problem with providing the consent that the proposed law would require.

Meanwhile, parents who don't want their kids playing violent video games can easily enforce this decision at home, and this is already happening too. A kid who buys an M-rated game without an accompanying adult isn't necessarily doing it without parental permission; in fact, he or she probably does have that permission, implied or explicit, because otherwise the game might end up in the trash soon after entering the house. Some parents, of course, are just neglectful and stupid, but that's not the government's business. There's no need for state legislators to step in and raise everyone's children.

For all these reasons, passing a law to enforce age restrictions would be little more than another waste of time and money, regardless of whether video games have anything to do with violent behavior in children. On the other hand, for all the same reasons, I'm finding it hard to care whether this or any similar law is passed, now or in the future. Do violent video games cause violent behavior? Almost certainly not. Does this mean adult-oriented games are appropriate for kids? Not necessarily. Although the government might not have the right to enforce it, parents should decide what their kids play and I applaud game retailers for enforcing the age restrictions even when no law is in place. You won't hear me complaining if the government spoils the fun for a relatively small number of kids who actually manage to buy Grand Theft Auto behind their parents' backs without being stopped at the counter.

I'm on Twitter.

The frequency of new material here on my lonely blog has decreased considerably since I first began. My continued employment is partly to blame, as is my tendency to write long posts (which, in the absence of abundant free time, are too often started and never finished). Consequently, I've been juggling a backlog of unfinished posts on top of an even larger backlog of unfinished games.

To give myself some room for opining without committing to 3500-word blog posts, as well as to create a dumping ground for opinions that simply aren't worth that many words, I've finally decided to join the rest of the world and make a Twitter account. (Now, finally, my thoughts can be limited to 140 characters!) I can't guarantee that I'll actually use it more than once a year, but it might be cool.

Roger Ebert & Video Games as Art

It was many years ago that Roger Ebert first claimed, controversially, that video games are not, and never will be, a form of art. (He wrote about the subject on a number of occasions since then, at times giving a little more credit to video game development as a creative endeavor but ultimately maintaining his stance. I don't want to summarize the whole drama, which occurred over several years, but you can still find his articles if you go out and search for them.) The typical response from a subset of video game enthusiasts was, and still is, to treat him like Hitler for having such an opinion. Although Ebert hadn't said much about video games since 2010, people never did seem to shut up about it, and his recent death has prompted a revival of the tired debate.

And, to put it bluntly, I'm a bit disgusted by how that debate is going. I've always thought that the question of video games as an art form was an interesting thing to discuss, but I've never been on a crusade to prove one point or the other, because I have things to do and because I never really thought it was a crusade-worthy issue. Some people, however, were seriously upset by Ebert's opinion... so upset, in fact, that they never got over it, and went on Twitter after his death to get the last word. To be honest, the problem with this behavior isn't that it's tasteless or childish, which it is. The problem is that they really do care this much. The problem is that they're so insulted by the idea of a video game being less culturally relevant than a famous painting or a piece of music — or even a critically acclaimed film — that they spend more time arguing about it than actually playing the video games they supposedly enjoy. They think it's their duty to defend video games from these accusations of — I don't even know what — being toys, perhaps, which is what they are.

The people who have devoted so much time to debating with Ebert on this issue, both during the last few years of his life and in the few days following his death, have almost certainly lost their marbles. They've also, I think, lost sight of what matters. Remember when gameplay was more important to video games than artistic integrity and all this other stuff? Remember when we used to play video games for fun, despite the video game's generally bad reputation as a mind-rotting waste of time for losers, without spending so much time worrying about what other people thought of our hobby?

Remember when the success of a game was dependent on more than the advertising budget because developers actually released demos instead of relying entirely on trailers consisting only of pre-rendered scenes and dubstep? Remember when video games were actually hard because the developers knew that overcoming a difficult challenge is more satisfying than watching a movie with some intermittent gameplay sequences and frequent quick time events? Some people don't, because they were too busy making fun of people like me before video games were cool, and because they never actually played a video game before the release of Mass Effect 2 (or whatever super-mainstream, over-hyped, space-marine-themed title convinced them to give video games a try).

Times have changed, and it would seem that a lot of today's so-called "gamers" can't enjoy their video games unless everyone accepts their hobby as something deep and meaningful. They're not happy unless everyone on Earth is aware, and agrees, that video games are works of art that deserve to be treated as works of art. Anyone with a dissenting opinion is dismissed as ignorant.

I've always supported the notion of video games as art, in theory. However, after seeing the absurdly desperate manner in which this position has been defended against the inevitable skepticism, by those who dare to call themselves "gamers" even though they obviously don't like games enough to enjoy them without external validation of their hobby's importance, I'm beginning to wonder if I should distance myself from these people entirely. At the very least, for the sake of clarification, I feel the need to write this addendum to my earlier post about video games as art.

Although I did write, in that earlier post, that I don't see a reason to explicitly exclude the medium from the definition of art, I do recognize that most video games just don't fit the bill. Perhaps only a few of them do. Perhaps none, if your definition of art requires that the art in question be up to the standards set by great writers, painters, composers, and performers in the past. While I've technically taken a position opposite that of Ebert, in arguing that games can be works of art in principle, I don't get offended when someone tells me that my favorite video game isn't a work of art. Even if I disagree, it's hard to care, since I don't play video games for their artistic value; I play them because they're fun. I argued that video games can be art for the sake of argument only, and I'm fully aware that we rarely see a video game that can be artistically valuable (in the same way that a movie is artistically valuable) while simultaneously being a good game.

Many will tell you that video games, as a rule, absolutely are an art form, but that this art form is at such an early stage of development that it has yet to be appreciated. To be honest, I think this is ridiculous; the video game itself is not a form of art, but rather a set of rules. In its most basic form, a video game is similar to a traditional game, like checkers, except that its rules are enforced by a computer instead of the players themselves. If and when a video game is appreciated as a work of art, it's almost always because some form of artistically creative work has been blended with that set of computer-enforced rules that defines what a video game is.

MoMA curators might disagree, as they chose some rather simplistic games like Tetris and Pac-Man for their video game collection, but the reason for their inclusion (as "outstanding examples of interaction design") is not exactly consistent with the typical justifications for treating video games as works of art. It seems to me that most video game enthusiasts would point instead to games with complex stories, visual aesthetics, well composed music, and skilled vocal performance. In the absence of these things, a video game might be an example of great design — and I can certainly appreciate that — but it's not the type of game that anyone cares to discuss when the "video games as art" debate is had. To fit the definition of "art" that people normally use in this context, a game needs to be beautiful, moving, and worthy of critical analysis beyond a simple commentary on its gameplay.

In other words, the idea of the "video game as art" most often refers to a hybrid medium, and the video games most often placed in this category are those which imitate or incorporate other existing art forms. What makes the video game different from those existing art forms is its ability to immerse the player, and to allow the player to become a part of the experience instead of an observer. So while gameplay is important, you do need something other than gameplay if you want to convey any kind of meaning. More importantly, the final result needs to be cohesive. The inclusion of a story alone does not make the game itself a work of art unless the story is truly interactive; when the gameplay is merely broken up by occasional cutscenes, you might as well have made a movie instead. And most story-driven games fail in exactly this way.

For these reasons, I would say that video games can be art, and that such games do exist, but I don't think they're the majority. Most games are just games, to me, and even those who think I'm wrong — even those who would argue that all video games are art by definition — would surely concede that only a few of them are good art. (You can say that film is an art form, but no one says with a straight face that the average action movie is a work of art, so there's no reason to do the same for a medium whose status as an art form is already disputed at a fundamental level.)

I disagree with Ebert in principle, but as I see it, everything he wrote was entirely reasonable. He wasn't telling us that video games are garbage or that they shouldn't be enjoyed; his argument was based mostly on his understanding of how "art" is defined (which, I should mention, is rather subjective). He didn't seem to think highly of video games overall, but he was respectful. Perhaps he was more respectful to his opponents than they were to him; some of them reacted with such anger that one might think video games were their religion and Ebert had insulted their prophet.

Perhaps we should have simply disregarded his opinion, on the grounds that he admitted to having neither any exposure to video games nor any desire to change this, just as one would disregard a video game critic who says "movies are not art" without ever having watched one. But it was still an opinion he was allowed to have. Furthermore, no one should have demanded that he give video games a try, in order to validate his opinion, when he'd already decided that he wasn't interested in doing any such thing. You don't have to spend dozens or hundreds of hours on a hobby to know whether it's worth your time. I've never tried collecting stamps but I'm pretty sure I'd never enjoy it.