If You Can't Say Something Nice...

We know all know how the grammatically incorrect saying goes: "...don't say nothing at all." It's pretty sound advice for social interaction. If you're not going to be nice to a person, sometimes it's best to leave them alone and mind your own business instead of causing unnecessary emotional pain or picking an unnecessary fight. I don't think, however, that the cute little rabbit from Bambi had criticism of video games in mind when he spoke his words of wisdom.

When I logged into Steam earlier today, I noticed a new feature: a user-generated tagging system complete with personalized recommendations for my account based on the games in my library and the tags attached to them. I also noticed that some of the players tagging games are very openly opinionated. Some games are being tagged as "bad" and all of its synonyms. Some games are being tagged as "overrated" and BioShock Infinite tops the list. Other examples of criticism-by-tagging are slightly more subtle. The "casual" tag is being placed not only on casual games as they are known in the traditional sense, but also on games deemed too easy by hardcore players who expect legitimate challenge in their games. (Notable examples include the Thief reboot, which is geared toward players who never played the original series or any difficult stealth game, and Call of Duty: Ghosts, the latest in a series of first-person shooters which has long been associated with an immature fan base who would eat garbage if the TV said it was cool).

Kotaku writer Patricia Hernandez noticed it too, and I don't usually comment every time a Kotaku employee writes something that annoys me — I don't have that kind of time — but on this occasion it will serve as a nice excuse to mention a couple of other things that were already on my mind.

"Trolling is definitely a thing in Steam Tags right now," Hernandez writes, and maybe she's not entirely wrong. Surely some tags are being added just for the sake of annoying the fans of certain games, just for laughs. The tags to which she's referring, though, are the ones that merely express a genuine opinion, like "casual" as applied to Dark Souls and "bad" as applied to Gone Home.

I'm not really sure when the meaning of the word "trolling" shifted so drastically. It used to mean saying inflammatory things for the sole purpose of angering other people, especially when the things being said are completely disingenuous. A good troll pretends to be completely serious when he posts deliberately flawed arguments the middle of an otherwise intelligent discussion for the sake of disrupting it. He pretends to be dumber than he is, or more ignorant than he is, because this makes his ignorant comments all the more infuriating, and he keeps this up for as long as possible because the game is essentially over when someone figures out that he's "just trolling." Trolls get attention because of the perception that they're incredibly stupid or incredibly horrible in some other way, not the because of their actual opinions.

But "trolling" adopted a different meaning in mainstream media soon after the mainstream media (thought they) learned the word, and maybe it's because successful trolls on the internet are so good at hiding their true intentions. The whole "pretending" part is conspicuously missing from the outside world's common understanding of what trolling is. Almost any type of online harassment or use of unkind words is, therefore, called "trolling" even if the supposed trolls are, instead of really trolling, just being completely serious and stating their actual opinions (albeit in a rude manner). Those who use the word "trolling" in this context probably wouldn't see through the ruse if an actual troll were trolling them, so maybe I can't blame them for getting it wrong, but I miss the times when words had meaning.

The past few years, I think, have seen the bastardization of the word come to completion. People are now using the word "trolling" even to refer to the expression of just about any unpopular or unacceptable opinion. We're seeing some of it right here in this Kotaku article.

Let's say I've never played Gone Home, but I tag it with the word "bad" just because I know its fans are likely to have a big cry and act like their human rights are being violated, resulting in a ludicrous and humorous display. That's trolling. If I play it and then tag it with the word "bad" because I genuinely think it's bad and should be categorized as such, I'm merely expressing an opinion. There's an important difference that Hernandez doesn't appear to understand. In fact, I'm really not sure if she knows how opinions work at all. The following is an excerpt from the article that comes right after her "trolling" comment:

Let's start with the "bad" tag. It does have games notorious for being poor—The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, for example. It's hard to argue the quality of that game. Gone Home, though? It's not everyone's cup of tea, but that doesn't mean it's bad!

Really? It doesn't? One doesn't get to call something bad when one doesn't like it?

Let's analyze this bizarre logic. Tagging one game as "bad" is totally fine because it was unpopular (or because fellow Kotaku writer Kirk Hamilton thought it was bad too), but tagging the other game as "bad" is incorrect because... why? Because the right people (perhaps the kind of people who read Kotaku) like it? Because its perceived relative popularity means the alternate opinion doesn't exist? Hernandez seems to think that each game has an objective amount of badness, and that a certain threshold of badness (or of agreement on its badness) must be crossed before we're allowed to call it bad. In other words, "bad" is not allowed to be an individual person's opinion. That's kind of strange because, if you ask anyone who has a firm grasp on the difference between facts and opinions, the fact that it's "not everyone's cup of tea" does mean it's bad — it's bad in the minds of people who would prefer some other tea in a different cup.

A normal person in Hernandez' position would just say "I disagree with these people," and maybe that's what she's trying to say, but if that's the case then she has a very strange way of saying it. She's not simply stating her own opinion about the game; she's suggesting that some opinions are true while other opinions are false. She's saying it's wrong for anyone to tag Gone Home as a bad game on Steam, not only because the tagging system wasn't necessarily meant for opinions, but more importantly because this particular game wasn't as universally unloved as The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. She's calling it "trolling" and, whether she knows the actual meaning of the word or not, it makes her look like a gigantic moron.

This is just the latest example of a worrying trend in which people take Thumper's advice about saying not-so-nice things and apply it to everything said about their favorite commercial products. In addition to the misuse of the word "trolling" (as usual), Hernandez' article uses words like "unfair" to describe the negative tags placed on games that she likes. Some of the tags being used are definitely uncool — concisely written spoilers and random profanity, for example — but expressing negative (or otherwise unpopular) opinions about a game is not by any means "unfair" and, in my opinion, even using tags to express these opinions doesn't really amount to abuse of the system. It was designed to let players tag games as they see fit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that "gaming" "journalists" disagree. After all, they're the ones who make a living pumping out reviews with inflated scores because their advertising revenue depends on it, while they push the notion that players who complain about bad games are just displaying a false sense of entitlement.

The most popular tags for Gone Home right now are "not a game," "walking simulator," and "bad." Hernandez thinks these tags aren't helpful, but they are if a player wants to know if a game is worth buying. Since tags are more visible if they're more popular, even tags like "good" and "bad" are just about as helpful as the user scores on Metacritic. Tags like "not a game" and "walking simulator" are meant to be humorous but they do give players an idea of what Gone Home is like. They're informative even if they're exaggerations. The "not a game" tag is sure to be the most controversial, but people have been accusing Gone Home of not being a game since it was released, and it's a valid criticism. We don't get to say it's unfair just because it hurts the developers' or fans' feelings.

I sincerely hope that Valve doesn't side with the crybabies at Kotaku by moderating all traces of opinion out of the tagging system. If the people running Steam didn't want opinions to show up in user-generated tags, they shouldn't have implemented the feature at all. Games on Steam are already sorted by genre, and they could have just expanded upon this if they only wanted a dry, boring and sterile categorization system devoid of anything subjective.

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Update (February 15, 2014):

It looks like Valve is indeed moderating the user-generated tags, and on second thought I really can't blame them for not wanting strongly negative descriptors attached to products on their own store. (Tags were never meant to be used as mini-reviews, so I can't even call it a scandal as long as no one is tampering with the actual user review system.) Apparently tags like "bad" are no more, and even the popular "not a game" tag has vanished. As of right now, though, Gone Home is still classified as a "walking simulator" first and foremost, and I think it's pretty hilarious.

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.

We're All Mass Murderers

One week ago, a guy in Connecticut went and killed 20 young children, 6 adults, and himself. If you've been anywhere but under a rock for the past seven days, you've heard all about it, so I won't elaborate. It's a tragedy.

Predictably, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the media and the politicians have come up with a list of scapegoats against which the government is now being pressured to take action. You probably see where I'm going with this. It's the usual list of suspects: gun control, school security, and violence in media — specifically, in video games.

I understand the need to throw the blame around. No one wants to admit that a catastrophe like this one is almost completely unavoidable, so we narrow down the enormous list of contributing factors to an arbitrary few which might, we think, be controlled; we don't even think about the uncontrollable factors because that's just too depressing. So we say, let's tighten security at public schools, and let's tighten restrictions on guns. No one wants to accept that such a mentally disturbed and suicidal person, hell bent on taking people with him when he dies, is going to find a way to do it — even if it's difficult to obtain a firearm, and even if it's not easy to get into the building.

Take a look at this particular shooting, for example. The guy forced his way into a school which had already taken every reasonable security measure. The doors were locked so he shot through a window to get in. Short of multiple armed guards at every entrance (a ridiculously infeasible solution), what were they missing? Metal detectors at the doors, a common placebo in a post-Columbine world, obviously don't help when someone comes in shooting everyone on sight. Maybe bullet-proof glass would have helped, but then he might have crashed his car through the doors, or used a bomb, or waited until the kids went outside for recess. The reality of the situation is that there's no way to make a school impenetrable.

Likewise, there's no realistic way to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. We can try, but there's always going to be another tragedy that occurs despite whatever precautions we take. Bad people are going to get their hands on guns for as long as guns exist — which, by the way, is forever and always, because it's too late to stop them from being invented, manufactured, and sold to millions of people. I could go and steal a gun right now, from a legal gun owner, and kill a guy for no reason, and it will not have mattered what the gun laws were or how the gun's original owner obtained it.

So yeah, blame guns... but be aware that blaming guns only works if your solitary goal is to assign blame. If you actually want to get things done and solve problems, it's pointless. To use a classic (or perhaps trite but still valid) argument, even a total ban on guns would only disarm those civilians who obey the law, and murderers typically don't. Obviously, this is just an example to illustrate the futility of trying to place limits on something for which there's already a black market, and I'm aware that the goal here isn't to repeal the second amendment. Nobody whose opinion is worth a nickle actually wants to ban guns altogether, for then we'd truly be at the mercy of the thugs who still manage to get them. The sensible approach, anti-gun folks say, is to take a careful look at gun regulations and see if they need to be adjusted.

There's a lot of talk about smaller magazines, for example, but reloading isn't that hard, especially when the innocent children you're shooting aren't fighting back. In a perfect world, the ultimate goal of gun regulation would not be to make criminals kill us more slowly, but to keep guns only in the hands of law-abiding citizens. In reality, that's a pretty tough job. Everyone's a law-abiding citizen until his or her first crime, and if that first crime is mass murder then we're boned. If only real life were more like The Minority Report. If only we could know who the criminals are in advance and take away their rights accordingly. But there are some realistic precautions we can take. For example, perhaps the shooter's mother, from whom the guns were stolen, should not have been allowed to have firearms in the same house as a person who was known to be mentally ill. Although I suppose one doesn't always know when ones offspring is crazy enough to shoot up a school, dealing with mental health is probably a good place to start.

And that's what matters, really. The guy was crazy, and we might never know for sure why he did it. Yet, in looking for reason where none exists, politicians have been quick to point instead to a culture obsessed with violence — yes, the culture in which nearly all of us live healthy and functional lives without committing mass murder — and this, of course, is where video games are mentioned. After all, the shooter in Connecticut played video games, according to news reports. That's right, he played violent games, with guns in them, and that must have driven him to kill people... because, as we all know, that's a totally normal reaction to violent video games... and it's not like playing video games is totally normal behavior for an entire generation or two. (In case you missed the sarcasm, what I'm saying is that the killer's possession of violent video games is neither significant nor newsworthy, but that doesn't stop a bunch of technophobic old people from directing a large portion of the blame at the one thing they truly don't understand.)

I shouldn't need to point out that life-long exposure to war-themed, assassination-themed, murder-themed video games (and movies and books) has never given me any desire to kill a bunch of people in real life. But why not? Shouldn't I be going on a killing spree right now? I've killed so many virtual people in video games that, if they were real people, I'd be worse than Hitler. I'm a virtual mass murderer, just like everyone who ever played a first-person shooter. I grew up on shooting things. Even so, I turned out just fine, and I know a few million people who can say the same. Maybe it's because I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Maybe it's because I know the difference between right and wrong, even without the help of some religion to continually threaten me with the idea of eternal damnation. Maybe it's because I'm not mentally ill.

But hey, that doesn't really matter now; conservative politicians and sensationalist newscasters know that video games cause violence, because that's the only explanation for what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, right? A crazy guy played video games, and therefore video games made him crazy? Well, that's what we're supposed to believe, but I don't. If someone is evil enough or crazy enough to actually murder 26 people, he certainly doesn't need to play video games in order to get the idea of using a gun as his instrument of death. Furthermore, it's fairly obvious that people who don't play video games are vastly overestimating a first-person shooter's ability to immerse the player. Contrary to what pundits and crackpot psychologists will claim, players are aware that it's only a game and, in the absence of some crippling mental deficiency, they won't be led to believe that really killing real people with a real gun is just as fun and harmless as competing against friends in some crazy deathmatch-style game with cartoon violence and infinite lives.

The shooter played video games just like every other 20-year-old guy I know. There are reports that he was obsessed with them — that he spent all day in his basement playing Call of Duty — but if he truly had a video game addiction (and if such a thing even exists), that's more likely a symptom of his mental illness than a contributing factor. Surely we should all recognize that the act of playing Call of Duty, one of the most popular video game series of the past few years, is not a warning sign that we should hope to use in order to predict school shootings. At least, I certainly hope not. Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies worldwide in a single day, and 13.7 million copies to date in the United States alone.

That's a whole lot of potential school shootings. If video games create murderers, we should all be soiling our pants and heading for the bomb shelter. Fortunately, the available data doesn't really support the idea that violent video games cause violent acts. (Some further reading here.)

But I'm not too bothered by the blind insistence (regardless of the absence of any reliable evidence) that violence in media is destroying the moral fabric of our society. That's an opinion you're allowed to have, as far as I'm concerned, though I do strongly disagree. What really bothers me is that the people making these claims just don't know anything about video games. If they had pointed solely to the most gruesomely and graphically violent first-person shooters in their quest to find something to blame, then at least their arguments would be coherent. Instead, intentionally or not, the media is once again portraying all of gaming as an amoral pastime for misanthropes, while failing to realize that some of the most popular games of the past decade — I'm looking at you, Portal — simply aren't violent at all.

Things made some sense when they singled out Call of Duty, a game which does, in fact, put players in the role of a soldier who goes around shooting people (though, more accurately, the soldier shoots enemy soldiers in a time of war). But even if they hit the nail on the head, here, I think it was blind luck, since it's pretty clear that most of the people calling for a boycott or a ban on violent games can't even tell one genre from another. Immediately after the shooting, people were so quick to blame Mass Effect — a role-playing game better known for its sex scenes than its shooting — that a mob-like raid on the game's Facebook page began before the real killer was even identified (and ended shortly thereafter).

The media also pointed to StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game, and I think this is especially ridiculous. Not only is this not a mindless murder game; it's not even a shooter. As a strategy game, it's all about resource management, map control, and positioning of troops. Furthermore, StarCraft is to Chess as Call of Duty is to beating your head against the wall. You could judge StarCraft based on the number of virtual "people" who die in a typical match — surely, that number is well into the hundreds, or even thousands — but the player isn't assuming the role of a guy with a gun. The player is the commander telling all the guys with guns where to go. Since real-time strategy games like StarCraft don't put a gun in the player's hands, the experience absolutely does not bear any resemblance to walking into a school and murdering a bunch of children, not even to the sickest mind.

So yes, the game is violent in the sense that its central theme is armed conflict, but it's an idiotic example to use if you're trying to draw some tenuous connection between a mass murder and the killer's enjoyment of interactive media. To some, I guess, the presence of any violent theme is bad enough. But most of these "violent" games, I think, aren't simply violent for the sake of eroding our children's sense of morality. The typical video game has a story, every story involves some form of conflict, the most dramatic conflicts tend to be violent, and violent conflicts in the modern world begin and end with the pull of a trigger. Want fewer war-themed games? Let's have fewer wars. It's not that we should just give up and blame human nature, but we can't expect every video game to be full of super happy rainbows and sunshine either.

Video games consistently imitate life, so even if life does imitate video games on rare occasions, you can't say that video games are the source of all our problems. And, again, it's nothing if not completely illogical to blame video games for a mass murder just because the murderer was one of a billion people who play them. (I bet he also took history classes in high school, but I'm not blaming those history teachers and their lessons about war, because there's no real correlation, let alone any evidence of causation.) There isn't even a very good reason for the news people and the politicians to pick on video games, in particular, so much more than other forms of media that supposedly glorify violence. What about movies and TV shows?

You could say that video games are special because of the level of interactivity that's missing in other forms of entertainment, but I'm beginning to doubt very much that this has anything to do with it. No, video games are special because they're the "new" thing that too many people still don't understand. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they would have blamed rap music. Fifteen or twenty years before that, they would have blamed comic books.

But why does it matter what the news people think? It's not like they're actually going to persuade the federal government to ban violent video games. What they might do is try to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors, and if they want to do that, they can go right ahead. They've already been trying that for a long time, though. In theory, minors can't actually buy M-rated games from most stores, because these stores voluntarily enforce rules regarding the ESRB ratings, but most minors have these things called parents, and parents invariably buy video games for their children without even looking at the ratings.

If young, impressionable children playing violent games is indeed a problem, then irresponsible parents are the cause. They buy games like Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year-old kids, and then they turn around and complain when they see how violent the games are. If they educated themselves and paid attention to the ratings, there would be no complaints, because the video game industry is already holding up its own end of the deal. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that parents ignore ratings, because most parents are old people, and when I say "old people" I'm not talking about age; I'm talking about the fact that they don't know what's going on because they didn't grow up playing video games. As a result, they think video games are just toys, exclusively for children. So they think every video game is appropriate for children, and they're shocked when they find out the truth.

And that's why we have this funny situation in which video games are, according to gaming-illiterate folks, appropriate for no one. If you're an adult and you play video games, they say "you're too old for that!" If you're a kid and you play video games, they say "you're too young for that!" What's the appropriate age?

I say it's any age. There's a video game for everyone.

I think the average adult's completely inadequate understanding of video games is the source of a lot of confusion. They see that Black Ops is the most popular game, so they assume that every game is like Black Ops. But this is just so far from the truth that I don't even know where to start. So I won't start. I'm not even going to waste my time suggesting a list of wholesome and non-violent games for old farts to play in order to broaden their understanding of video games both as an entertainment medium and as a form of artistic expression. They should sit down and find their own way like the rest of us did. It's not hard. All you have to do is look past the mainstream garbage for one second.

Until they do, I'm going to disregard everything they say. Honestly, would you listen to a guy's proposal for a ban on violence in movies if you found out he had never watched a movie in his entire life? Of course not. So why would you listen to a guy talk about violent video games when you know he's never played a video game? I wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.

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Update: December 31, 2012

I haven't written anything new on this stupid blog for the past ten days, so instead I'll just post some additional reading here. Though I don't agree with everything contained within the following articles, I found them somewhat interesting:

Senator Calls for a Study of Video Game Violence
Violence and Video Games in America
The Numbers Behind Video Games and Gun Deaths in America
'Halo 4' Won't Make Your Kids Violent: Why Parents Should Play Video Games With Their Kids

(Wait a minute... why is the best gaming-related journalism coming from a site like Forbes?)

"I'm Not a Gamer"

If you've watched TV in the past month, you might have noticed some odd Nintendo 3DS commercials.

In each one, a celebrity talks about a video game and then says, "I'm not a gamer; with my 3DS, I'm a _____." (The blank, of course, is filled with some other title relating to a hobby, career, or activity.) The goal here is obviously to sidestep any negative connotations associated with the word "gamer" and, more importantly, to attract those potential customers who don't call themselves gamers but who might enjoy a casual game once in a while. They want everyone to know that 3DS games are not just for video game enthusiasts; they're for everyone. It's also pretty clear that they're marketing to girls.

Both of these things are fine.

Do I like the commercials? Well, not really. Celebrity endorsements are meaningless to me, even when I like the celebrity, and in these cases, I can't say that I do. (Prior to looking them up for the sake of writing this post, I had never heard of Gabrielle Douglas, Dianna Agron, or Sarah Hyland. I'm sorry, but I don't care about the Olympics or gymnastics in general, and I don't watch Glee or Modern Family.) On top of that, the games they're advertising look pretty stupid. Even so, I appreciate what they're trying to do.

Not everyone does, though. The commercials have, predictably enough, provoked a minor backlash from those who are somehow offended by Nintendo's supposed abandonment of the word "gamer" and all those who self-identify as such. Browse the YouTube comments if you need an example. Why, they ask, does Nintendo think "gamer" is a dirty word? Why are they intentionally targeting everyone except gamers with their game-related ads? And if these girls are playing video games, aren't they gamers too? Why deny it? Why go out of their way to deny it?

The people behind these seemingly reasonable complaints are forgetting that "gamer" still is a dirty word to nearly everybody who isn't one. Even though we've seen, in recent years, a peculiar movement to redefine "gamer" such that the label applies to everyone who ever enjoyed a video game, most of us haven't forgotten that the original definition was considerably less inclusive. You don't become a "gamer" at the very moment you buy a handheld Nintendo console, and this is for the same reason that I don't call myself a "biker" just because I own a bike.

If you're correctly using the word "gamer" to describe yourself, it means you see video games as a legitimate hobby — you take them seriously, you spend a lot of time on them, and playing them is a part of who you are. It's easy to see why this could be alienating to someone who, for example, might just want a 3DS for the casual puzzle games and the kid-friendly platformers, or someone who likes to play iPhone games on a long bus ride but doesn't know (or care to know) the difference between an Xbox and a GameCube. This person isn't likely to buy anything marketed specifically to gamers, and Nintendo had only good intentions in their attempt to distance their product from such troublesome vocabulary. Did they have to do it explicitly? Probably not. But they successfully sent the intended message — that you don't have to be a "gamer" to play a Nintendo game.

It's easy to argue that everyone who plays games is a gamer but, if you don't take "gaming" seriously, what's the purpose of the label? I know how to bake cookies, but I don't mention in my Facebook profile that I'm a baker. Likewise, you don't need to call yourself a gamer just because you've played Angry Birds on your smartphone. Oh, you have an Xbox? I'm not impressed. Not even playing Call of Duty: Black Ops makes you a gamer. Not even Minecraft. And it's not even a matter of contrasting these (almost sickeningly) mainstream games with material which some might find to be a little more sophisticated. It's about devotion to a hobby. If you have as much passion for games as a devoted, IMDb-addicted movie buff has for movies, you can call yourself a gamer without sounding like a complete douchebag.

Personally, I don't even like using the word outside of discussions of the word itself, and I don't identify myself as a gamer despite the fact that I've been maintaining a gaming blog for nearly five months. In my own opinion, the word just sounds completely idiotic. The word "game" never needed to become a verb.

Unfortunately, this idiotic word is becoming absurdly overused by people who play only one or two games casually but nevertheless attempt to adopt the label so they can be part of some non-existent "nerd culture." There's another term which, by the way, doesn't need to exist. I'm not sure exactly when people decided that "nerd" was the new "cool" but it needs to stop. The so-called nerd/geek culture is composed almost entirely of fake nerds and fake geeks — a bunch of hipsters who choose to identify as nerds and geeks just because they want to be different, and they go on and on about how proud they are of their nerdiness and geekiness but they don't actually have any nerdy or geeky interests aside from their manufactured nerd/geek pride and a vague interest in "science" (which, to them, probably means spaceships and dinosaurs).

A nerd is, in as few words as I can manage, a person with relatively obscure interests that take precedence over the desire for social acceptance. It's not something you can become by dressing a certain way. It's not a label you can adopt by choice. Playing a video game or reading a book or watching a science-fiction movie does not make you a nerd. Wearing glasses does not make you a nerd. Doing your homework and getting good grades does not make you a nerd. If you've ever written or spoken aloud the phrase "I'm such a nerd," you're almost certainly not a nerd. If you're popular, you might have been a nerd many years ago, but you're not one now. If you ever made fun of the nerdy kid in high school, you're not a nerd. Likewise, if you ever made fun of the gamer kid in high school, you are not and never will be a gamer. So please stop saying you are.

To get back on topic for a moment before I wrap this up, I'd like to point out that Nintendo shouldn't be trying to market to hardcore gamers anymore, anyway. It's pretty obvious that Nintendo has built up a reputation as a creator of family-friendly consoles and a publisher of kid-friendly or otherwise casual games. Perhaps they've done this at the expense of the hardcore audience, and maybe that was a mistake, but right now I think they're better off trying to maintain the audience they have, rather than attempting to steal hardcore gamers away from Xbox and Playstation. If this means advertising the 3DS as a console for non-gamers, so be it. The people who were somehow offended by these "I'm not a gamer" commercials probably weren't Nintendo fans anyway.

Humble Bundle Strikes Again

As many of us already know, the sixth incarnation of the Humble Indie Bundle is on sale right now, and will be available for another six days. I didn't exactly come here to plug it — I'm not on their payroll — but it's hard not to say a few nice things about a pack of games that you can buy for almost nothing. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read this so I don't have to explain.) It's been more than two years since the very first Humble Bundle, and they've gotten a whole lot of good press since then, so there's no need for me to rave about how awesome it is. But, for the record, it's pretty neat.

Of course, despite the pay-what-you-want model, not everyone loves Humble Bundle. Some game developers have expressed doubts that being part of a Humble Bundle sale is really a profitable and worthwhile venture. (Customers can choose where their money goes, and the recommended "default split" for the current bundle is 65% to developers, 20% to charity, and 15% to Humble Bundle, Inc., but the average amount, per game sold, that a developer gets is probably rather low, since so many consumers will pay as little as possible instead of paying what they honestly believe the games are worth.)

Furthermore, a lot of people have some bad things to say about indie games in general. While many have taken the extreme view that so-called "indie" developers are the last hope for originality in a stagnating video game market saturated with too many nearly identical and equally overpriced first-person shooters, others go to the opposite extreme; they look at indie games and see cheaply made, outdated, pretentious hipster trash. In particular, any mention of "retro graphics" is sure to draw a lot of mockery and criticism, though the indie developers keep using this term in marketing their games, probably for the sake of appealing to older players and anyone else who treats "retro" as a codeword for cool.

If you like indie games and you don't have a job, the Humble Bundle is perfect for you. On the other hand, if you're not fond of indie games and other "retro" stuff, you should probably pass on this deal. The games in a Humble Bundle sale generally aren't the big-budget, high-definition, mainstream type. There's no such thing as a Humble Call of Duty Bundle as of yet, so good luck naming your own price for that.

I should also mention that "pay what you want" is slightly misleading... but only slightly. Technically, it's true, but the Humble Bundle guys aren't idiots; they do employ a few tricks to encourage customers to spend more than the bare minimum. (Otherwise, they'd probably never make any money, except from the generous and wealthy few who donate thousands of dollars.) While you can pay as little as one cent for the five core games that make up the bundle, you won't really be getting the whole bundle. There are always a few extra games, some added later in the sale, reserved for those who spend more than the average amount. (You'll also have to spend at least a dollar if you want keys to activate the games on Steam.) Since a lot of people choose to exceed the average contribution by one cent, so they can get all of the games, that average typically creeps upward slowly throughout the sale.

With the four games that were just added yesterday, Humble Indie Bundle 6 is now up to ten games: Rochard, Shatter, Space Pirates and Zombies, Torchlight, and Vessel can be stolen for a penny, but you'll have to beat the average (just above $6.00 now) to get Dustforce, Bit.Trip Runner, Gratuitous Space Battles, Jamestown, and Wizorb as well. Five games for a penny is great, but ten games for six bucks and change is pretty good too.

It's worth noting, however, that Humble Bundles often include a few repeats, and this one is no exception. Specifically, Bit.Trip Runner, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Jamestown were included in Humble Indie Bundle 4, and Humble Indie Bundle 4 included (as a bonus) the first five games from Humble Indie Bundle 3. Sometimes, if you already own a previous bundle, you might find that paying above the average for the next one isn't as great of a deal as you might have hoped. Since activating a bundle's Steam key won't give you giftable copies of any games you already own, there's no benefit to buying a game twice. You'll just have to decide whether the other games in the pack are worth your hard-earned pocket change.

When the fifth Humble Indie Bundle came out last spring, I already owned Psychonauts, and none of the other games seemed appealing at the time, so I passed. In retrospect, I'm starting to regret this decision, since I've heard such good things about Bastion and some of the other games. I can only hope they'll be repeated in future sales. This time, I'm facing a similar dilemma: I already own Torchlight — arguably the most important game on the list, considering the highly anticipated release of Torchlight II last week — and I also bought Humble Indie Bundle 4 last winter — easily the best video game purchase I've made in recent memory. So I already own four of the games in Humble Indie Bundle 6, but six bucks for the remaining six games is still a sweet deal.

To put things in the proper perspective, Dustforce alone is currently $9.99 on Steam.

All in all, you can't really go wrong with the Humble Indie Bundle, since any one game is typically worth more than what you'll pay for the whole pack. And if you're content with only getting the five base games, you could always be a cheapskate and pay only a cent. Of course, if you do this, Humble Bundle, Inc. probably suffers a net loss due to bandwidth and transaction fees. Honestly, you might as well pirate the games, and I guess that's why so many people do so despite the fact that the games are practically free. Or maybe they just can't be bothered to put in their credit card information. Or maybe they don't have credit cards. Or maybe they pirate things out of principle because they're super bad-ass renegades who break all the rules because shut up.

The games in the Humble Bundle aren't just cheap. They're also free of digital rights management, playable on every operating system that matters, and available in torrent form in addition to a direct download. In other words, they've made an effort to appease even the pickiest of players. They've eliminated every good reason to pirate their games, but it still hasn't eliminated piracy.

I'm getting a bit off-topic now, but this is something to remember next time someone tries to justify piracy by citing high prices, intrusive DRM, inconvenience, or a general desire to deliver a slap in the face to big, evil corporations like Electronic Arts. The fact is that people turn to piracy no matter how low the price of the game, or how reasonable the publisher's behavior, just to avoid paying at all. It's not my place to judge those who engage in software piracy — the extent to which it actually harms the game industry is still up for debate — but pirates should just accept that what they're doing is a selfish act and nothing more. They should be able to make their decision and live with it, without trying to rationalize it after the fact, but they still come up with all kinds of excuses and pass the blame around. Simply put, they're in denial.

For those of us who don't mind sending a few dollars to the hard-working people who make our favorite pastime possible, the Humble Bundle is a great opportunity to grab a few interesting games without breaking the bank.

What Makes Video Games Fun?

A lot of "hardcore gamers" (regardless of whether they identify themselves as such) will tell you that the video game industry is in sad shape. It's not just because of the past decade's unfortunate shift toward increasingly more intrusive digital rights management, or the recent trend of releasing "extra" downloadable content on day one to encourage thoughtless and irresponsible pre-orders, or the deliberate efforts to use both DRM and DLC to destroy the used game market. Rather, it's because they think that too many of the games being released today are crap.

And they're not just talking about shovelware that nobody buys. This is popular crap. So what's up with all the hate? Well, it should be no surprise that the games which tend to attract the most violently negative attention are always the popular ones. After all, if you want to complain about a genre, a feature, a console, or a developer, you pick a popular game as an example, and then you claim that the chosen game means the downfall of gaming as we know it. This has been happening for a long time. But in the past few years, I've been reluctant to shrug it off as the usual fanboyism, hipsterism, and attention-seeking antics of a vocal minority. It's more likely indicative of something else.

As I see it, this backlash is due to recent changes in the industry which aren't entirely imaginary. The industry is, in fact, changing, and not just in response to the emergence of nearly ubiquitous high-speed internet service, which facilitates digital distribution and piracy alike. Video games have changed also because of their growing audience. Thanks to cell phones, social networking sites, and a few other things which should never have games on them, games have crossed farther into the mainstream than ever before. Meanwhile, those who played video games back when it was an obscure hobby reserved only for children and computer geeks have grown up, and some of them are still playing. It's only understandable that some of these old-schoolers would be a bit shocked by the current state of things.

So, what is the current state of things?

It's complicated, and there are a lot of little topics I'd like to bring up — e.g., how girls went from "eww, you play video games, you're such a nerd" to "hey, I can be a gamer too" and "tee hee, I'm such a nerd" — but most of these things are too far off-topic and will have to wait for some other week. Simply put, if I can allow myself to get to the point, casual games and social networking have taken over. It's not hard to see that this is an expected (and perhaps necessary) consequence of video games getting a slice of that mainstream pie.

Games directed at casual players get a lot of hate, particularly from the more "hardcore" gamers, many of whom grew up when video games were considerably less forgiving than the ones made today. For these players, the whole point of a game is to provide a challenge. Winning should be a struggle; that's what makes it so satisfying. This is why they fail to understand the casual audience. More importantly, this is why they're angered not only by strictly casual games but also by the perceived "casualization" of modern games as a whole.

Are the majority of today's video games a lot easier than the ones of my childhood? You bet. But is this really a terrible thing? Not necessarily. Difficult games still exist, and we should keep in mind that a lot of older games were only hard because of their lack of a save feature. (Wouldn't a lot of modern games be damn near impossible to beat if saving weren't an option?) Other old games were stupidly hard because of poor design, and still others were intentionally made difficult because they were short and would have been beaten too quickly if they weren't frustratingly hard to finish. (Truly master Super Mario Bros. and you can beat it in less than five minutes; without using warp zones, it can still be done in less than half an hour.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, playtime can be extended in ways that don't involve dying repeatedly, and games can be entertaining for reasons other than sheer difficulty.

So now we get to ask an interesting question. What actually makes video games fun? Some say it's the challenge, while others will say it's the story/characters/immersion (for single-player games) or the social experience (for multiplayer games). Still others, I suspect, would say they just like to blow things up. In reality, for most people, it's a combination of all of the above.

How much, in particular, should difficulty matter? From the developer's point of view, a game should be difficult enough to entertain the experienced players — to let them know that winning takes effort so that winning feels good — but easy enough to avoid alienating the casual players who might not even bother to finish a game if it frustrates them at all. Personally, I think most developers have done a pretty good job of accomplishing this. Say what you will about the harm caused by pandering to the casual audience, but most games worth playing have multiple difficulty levels, the easiest of which is usually tame enough for "casuals" and the hardest of which is usually a challenge for anyone who never played the game before. Nobody should be disappointed unless a developer makes a serious miscalculation.

This is why I was surprised to see such a negative reaction to this article on Kotaku a little more than a week ago, in which Luke Plunkett gives a fairly reasonable rebuttal to Assassin's Creed III lead designer Alex Hutchinson's (rather preposterous) claim that "easy mode often ruins games." (It's kind of funny because Assassin's Creed, a game with only one difficulty, isn't that hard, and the same is true of all the sequels I've played.) I'm not a big fan of Kotaku, nor am I a fan of Luke Plunkett, but I have to agree with him here. At least, I agree with his headline. A game can't be ruined by a difficulty setting.

I'm willing to say that the "easy mode" of a game can often be the worst version of that game, as Hutchinson claims, but the inclusion of an easy mode surely doesn't spoil the whole game unless it's the only mode available. Don't like easy mode? Play on hard. If the harder settings are still too easy, or if they do nothing but make the game more tedious, you've picked a bad game. If the harder settings are locked until the easier ones are completed, you better hope the easier settings are hard enough to keep you entertained for a single playthrough; otherwise, you've picked a bad game. Bad game design happens, but if you're blaming it solely on the inclusion of an "easy" mode, you're probably overlooking a deeper problem.

Still, I won't say I agree with Plunkett completely, since he has entirely different reasons for disagreeing with Hutchinson's argument. Specifically, he makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't care about difficulty at all, and that he plays story-driven games only for the story. He probably wouldn't mind if a game like Assassin's Creed III consisted of no interaction besides "press X to continue." And if you're like this, you probably should ask yourself why you're playing games at all, rather than watching movies or reading books. If, on the other hand, you can appreciate the unique things that games have to offer, instead of just complaining that everything is too hard, then your idea of "fun" is just as valid as that of the hardcore gamer dude who plays everything on the hardest setting and skips all the cutscenes.

So where do I stand?

Let's just say I was more than a little annoyed by the fact that it's literally impossible to lose in the 2008 version of Prince of Persia. I won't go so far as to say that the protagonist of a game needs to be able to die, and "losing" is hardly a setback in any game with a save option (assuming you use it often enough), but being automatically revived after every fall in PoP 2008 seemed like a step down from the rewind system in The Sands of Time, which actually required some minimal skill and had limits. If there's no consequence for falling off a cliff, the sense of danger and suspense is gone and the game becomes only tedious where it might otherwise have been exciting.

On the other hand, you know I'm a sucker for story-driven games, and the need for a genuine challenge can be subverted by decision-making and role-playing elements. Since Choose Your Own Adventure books were terrible and there's no equivalent in the movie world, I think it's pretty safe to say that the existing technology used for video games is the ideal medium for straight-up interactive fiction. I see no reason not to take advantage of this. The problem is that what might be described most accurately as interactive fiction, and not as a traditional video game, will nevertheless remain stuck under the category of video games. This tends to generate all the wrong expectations. Story-driven titles are often criticized for having too much "story" and not enough "game" (even if the developer's primary objective, admittedly, was to tell a story).

Regardless of how far a developer decides to take the storytelling aspect of a product, and regardless of what you call it, the fact is that difficulty (and, indeed, gameplay itself) often matters less when story matters more, and if you're looking for a serious challenge, you should probably stay away from plot-driven games, even ones like Assassin's Creed. They make it difficult enough that any given mission might take two or three attempts, but they know they're not serving the hardcore crowd exclusively. Sometimes, though, I think the hardcore crowd still hasn't caught on.