An addendum to the below post, I give you this, courtesy of Luke Dicken’s recommendation:

I told you we could reclaim the word “geek” with a little work! Holy shit, is that MC Hammer?

Can we all stick to ogling the Evangelion babes for free? (Taken at last year’s Tokyo Game Show).

You might have to blame Mr Tim Rogers’ influence at Kotaku for today’s long rant. His disposition has infected me. But it’ll be an interesting read because I have never posted an article in the midst of this kind of bloodlust. Get out of my way! I have something to shout at you.

I haven’t met many maladjusted gamers. In fact, they seem particularly well adjusted. They work in every profession and are some of the kindest, funniest , most outgoing people I’ve ever hung out with. My own gaming friends, for example, who accompanied me on my liberal coffee-drenched way through university, are now doctors, lawyers, network administrators, writers, secondary school teachers; one guy works for the government in some sort of James Bond job that I’m pretty sure he’s not allowed to talk about, one for Google, others I know are dotted around the world. Some of them went into the videogame industry, which, I should point out, also takes incredible smarts, smarts technologically and creatively (which they’re now handing out BAFTAs for). These people are you and me. These people are people we see every day in the pub or at work. I am one of these people too. You can’t mistake us. We are intelligent, normal people.

Imagine then, my disgust, at every time it is implied that someone who plays videogames is a social recluse, someone with no social skills, someone who is unattractive or somehow socially inferior. It’s not always directly implied; sometimes it is very subtly but cuttingly indirectly implied. It can be seen in some the faces of the older generation, for example, when I tell them that I work /worked for a videogame company.

“Isn’t it full of nerds?” they ask, looking in amusement at me, like they are bringing me in on the joke.

For the sake of politeness, I take it with a smile and a laugh, but this is not the sort of reaction you’d get from the same person if you told them you worked in other avenues of media.

“Do I look like a nerd?” I ask.

“Of course not,” they say. “You look normal.”

This answer always gets me. (Not least because I am a stunning beauty.)

I then go on to explain, attempting to be sarcasm-free, that there are quite a lot of “normal” people who make games and play them. In fact games companies are almost entirely populated with these “normal” people. I explain that games make more revenue than their beloved Hollywood (which, too, had to fight to get its artistic recognition). That gamers are now on average thirty years old with a mortgage and well-adjusted, Viva Pinata-playing kids. I often get a blank look, or a smirk, as if to say, “Talk as much as you like, love, I don’t believe you. Game companies are full of social recluses and spotty geeks.”

When I go out of my way to explain that I too, play games, there is another reaction that goes on that I sometimes get from my fellow sisterhood, especially from mothers, which never fails to make me feel disappointed in my ovaries’ inability to control my unruly temperament.

“That’s horrible,” they say. “How can you play games when they’re so violent?”

There is always a definite undertone of but you’re a girl going on here. A kind of weird you are the lifegiver thing with a gesture towards my biology. As if my maternal instinct is anulled by my interest in war games or adventure stories. There is the assumption that by virtue of being female, I am somehow better than men, that I would have a better, more moral stance than men. That I would have better “standards“ on my entertainment. How insulting it would be to my male friends if someone suggested I had a better moral compass than them just because of my femininity.

Then, when I ask them if they’ve ever seen a war movie they reply in the positive – without a hint of irony. “But I wouldn’t watch it with my children around.” Brushing aside the touchy subject / assumptions that people make about videogames and violence – surprisingly I too, do not look at violent images with a kid in the room, would never give the controller away willingly to one, would never buy an 18 rated game for a kid. I don’t know a male my age who would either. And I play a variety of videogames, thank you very much. There are “genres”. And violent videogames make up a very small part of those genres.

Personally, I’m fed up of people stereotyping what I can and cannot do, and stereotyping male gamers as soap-dodging reclusive freaks, when they clearly are as awesome, and as goddamn “normal” as I am, as much as anyone can be normal. The assumption, too, that games make us violent is completely unproven. I played Grand Theft Auto through my formative years, and there’s nothing I’ve done in my life that would make anyone think I was maladjusted, socially reclusive, or for want of a better word, a mental. And I cannot stand people looking at men who play videogames as being so either. Give us ten to twenty years, dudes, we’ll all be running your social security with the compassion it is due. This goes for you too, Titchmarsh. …Grudgingly.

I’m not entirely absolved of blame. By virtue of engaging these stereotypes, I am legitimising them, forming them, making them malleable. There are no pretenses behind the name “Game Fatale”; the irony is not lost – we are engaging these age-old stereotypes for exploitation, getting our own back almost, on a label that has become cliché. I personally also have a kind of “take the word back” relationship with the word “geek” (Weezer are freaking cool geek chic and I’ll throw a rum/coke at anyone who says otherwise); but how else are we supposed to look at these labels if not the way the world constantly pushes them at us? I have no specific beef with the word “geek” itself, just the implications it has in tone when applied by some people, which we can change. If you apply the word “geek” to a girl, it is different to if you’d done it to a guy. Why? Why is being a girl geek ever so slightly “cooler” than a guy geek? Is it because girl geeks are sexualised and fetishised? Yes. And is it because guy geeks are ridiculed? Yes. Fuckin’ A! Both stereotypes are sexist; I’m mad as hell and I can’t stand it any more.

This brings me to the real reason I am writing about this. The trigger, if you will. These gamer stereotypes are so intensely ingrained into society these days that you can even make money from them.

Please look at this – it’s Kotaku’s report on the site called Game Crush. I couldn’t link you at the time of posting to the site, because it was so bombarded with hits that it went down a few hours ago. But I saw it. And it was a headache on a page.

There are three assumptions that this system works on. Firstly, that in order to get to play against a girl online, you have to pay one. Secondly, there is the assumption that male gamers cannot talk to a girl without doing it through videogames. Thirdly, there is the assumption that one of the reasons that people go online to game is to pick up chicks. Or that they wished that were possible.

Look. There are plenty of us girls out there playing games. As Matt Hickey at Crave says, rather getting to the point, “any real gaming girl would set her profile to “Hurty” and kick your ass” (his emphasis). The reason we all game is for enjoyment. We have fun doing it. You don’t have to pay us to be there. Girls actively pay Xbox Live so that they can game. There should be no other reason a girl logs in other than to play the actual game. I’ll get back to this later.

Second: As I have just mentioned, I do not know one male gamer who is this sad, lonely stereotype that Game Crush seems to assume is out there. This is sexist and stupid. It makes me angry. It should make you angry. I think the main demonstration that this stereotype doesn’t exist is the huge sense of bewilderment going on at the Kotaku message boards. The guys there are puzzled and insulted, the girls there think it’s a joke. Gamers who are boyfriend and girlfriend are on there illustrating the total lack of need for any kind of gamer prostitution. It’s humiliating for us all.

Thirdly, though I guess sex and the internet will always be linked, you have to wonder at people who want to hurl sexual absurdity over the internet at each other during a videogame. Personally, if I were forced to ever solicit someone over the internet, having to do it during a frenetic game of Halo would be the most distracting thing in the world. I’d rather get the Master Chief to corpse hump my opponent’s dead virtual body than bother trying to show my boobs to him over the internet. What self respecting gamer would use up the screen space anyway?

This brings me to my main point – these girl gamers at Game Crush? If they really liked (or were good at) games, wouldn’t they just be gaming for free? Yeah but, you can make money from it. Sure – and it’s cool while it’s their choice. But they are fetishizing the real girl gamers, and they are exploiting the hell out of men.

Let’s drop the illusions. As a woman who plays games, I am not your entertainment. I am not here for you to look at. I am not here for you to attempt to flirt with. I am here to win, to lose, or to get all your bases to belong to us. If you are here to flirt, you are going to get your distracted ass kicked. Because this is a gaming arena. It is not a bar or a club or the pulled-back seats of your Camaro.

The most insulting thing about the service that these girls provide is that it is purely a pretence. They are attractive women who uphold a pretence that they like to play videogames. If you have to pay them, then it is not a real “like”. It is a transaction. They pretend at pleasure from games, and from talking in this manner. For this reason, you will never get these women into bed, and you will never be satisfied from interaction this way. It’s like going to a strip club: they pretend they are aroused, but really, they are not. If you want to pay for this hollow interaction, feel free, I guess.

Alternatively, find yourself a girl who genuinely does want to play games, who gets a real kick out of playing them, whom you are attracted to, and she is attracted to you. Because that is why you find girls who play games attractive. Because they have something in common with you. Then, when you find her, put the games aside and do something far more fun than exclaiming at a fuzzy image U R SO HOT LOL THIS IS AEWSUM. It would save money, anyway.

PS http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20030526

To quote Max Payne 2: “The rain was comin’ down like all the angels in heaven decided to take a piss at the same time.” It’s storm season in Kagoshima, Japan it seems, and it’s always when I’ve got to go to the gym or Iaido practice that the angels really need to go.

It’s been a while, and since my last post many games have gone by. But let’s have a look at the heavyweight shall we? Heavy Rain.
Heavy Rain is like the soul mate you knew was out there but you didn’t quite know when they would arrive. And then when they do arrive, they bring a great thriller movie with them as well as the next best thing in videogames.

I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I’ll avoid talking in detail about the plot as much as possible. Unfortunately the plot is where the meat is. Perhaps I should begin by a few early observations, let my mind wander over the idea of storytelling in games, and then follow through with my opinion of the game as a whole.

I guess the first thing you notice about Heavy Rain is that it has beautiful graphics. Everything, even up to the gore and grime, is kind of beautiful in Heavy Rain, and everything has a sharp focus that makes you curious about the environment. It is obvious they spent a long time on getting you creeped out, unsettled, and on edge – and part of this is provided by how detailed and in focus your environment is. You play several different main characters which switch between chapters. These characters (it’s 3rd person so you can gaze endlessly at the main characters’ perfectly formed butts) also move convincingly and organically and look beautiful at the same time. That in itself adds to the weird creepiness.

The second point of note, even in the beginning, is that the atmosphere is overbearingly weighted with apprehension. Even from the first scenes in Ethan’s idyllic family house you wonder if a piano is going to come crashing down on his head. I think perhaps this was the first signal to me that Heavy Rain knew exactly how to engage my feelings and twist them for all it was worth.

Quantic Dream is good at hooking an audience and unloading tense situations on them, but last time they made a game that seemed to have great storytelling promise, I felt a little betrayed.

It’s not something that I’m proud of, but doubt about Heavy Rain’s ability to follow through started to creep into my mind about the time that I noticed its ability to get me emotionally engaged. I unfairly judged Heavy Rain by its vastly inferior predecessor, Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit started out engaging me like this; except that halfway through the game it was obvious that not only was the main character schizophrenic, but the game was too. And not in a good way.

The problem with Fahrenheit? They set the game up in a fantastic way, and then bottled telling you the story that you really deserved; the one that they promised. I think in literary terms this is called breaking the “Author/ Reader contract”: in the beginning of a narrative, certain obvious gambits are employed by the author that indicate the way the story will pan out. An author fulfills his or her “contract” by satisfying the readership’s expectations of a logical, satisfying ending, and treating the reader as an intelligent and active reader – especially in mystery stories. In return, we as readers give up time, money and suspend our disbelief in an act of trust.

Unfortunately this trust was broken with Fahrenheit. I think I’ve complained before to many people that games claim to be made for adults these days and then end up treating us like we’re children before long. Any suspension of disbelief that I did have for Fahrenheit was broken by the sheer out of the blue ridiculousness of some of the plot twists.

In Fahrenheit, you end up having to battle an Evil Anthropomorphic Internet Artificial Intelligence (which seemed to base its appearance on eighties fashion), when you thought you were on some sort of gritty noir-style plot line. There was no indication that this Tron-inspired AI nightmare was going to happen; and it made even less sense to the plot that we were going there. Combined with an ill advised delve into ancient Mayan history (or something), and a fortune-telling granny with an overly pivot-happy wheelchair (we span her around madly, cackling for hours at the bizarre lack of animation and the hilarious imagery before us), Fahrenheit descended into farce. Ironically, in the early scenes they were trying to make it look like the main character may have lost his mind, when really it looked like halfway through the game development the designers had lost their sanity instead.

But as I said, I was unfairly prejudging Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain is through and through gritty, wholesome noir with a great deal of thriller and a splash of horror thrown in. Gone are any references to megalomaniac AIs from the eighties; it seems like they really got on their “game” (so to speak). The story is solid, the characters believable, and there are some little corners of the game, although entirely incidental to the main plot line, that are completely delightful. For example, one encounter with a crying baby can lead you to change its nappy and feed it (should you choose), simply because his movements and sounds are so damned lifelike. And believe me, I have a real phobia of becoming a mother. When the thing giggles after feeding you almost feel kind of proud. It kind of leads me to think that they really did mocap the baby. (Does “Mocap the Baby” sound a bit like an 80s rap song to you? No, me neither.)

I was blown away by the power Heavy Rain had to string me along, addict, and bring the story to a satisfying, believable close. The most satisfying thing about this game is the story, and this time, the trust is never broken. It’s engaging, it’s scary, it’s full of tension and intrigue – it has twists that are genuinely surprising and still don’t break that authorial contract. You’re in safe hands.

Some of the voiceovers are dodgy, yes, and occasionally the lines were so cliché my toes curled in on themselves – and sometimes, the sheer “emo” vibe (“Emoitude”? “Emocity”?) that constantly radiates from it made me think the makers were going to segue some Fallout Boy into the soundtrack … (SPOILER: There is no Fallout Boy! /wrists) But these things are insignificant compared to the developers’ achievements.

Heavy Rain uses its videogame format to bring the kind of involvement in a story that a movie can’t provide – it’s difficult to come out of the bubble once the game sucks you in. Any main character can die during the span of the game, obviously dramatically changing the way the story plays out; and you can miss vital clues or choose to alienate other characters. I really dislike Quicktime Events in games that put them in just to punctuate the experience – but this game has developed them to a fine point so that almost all your gameplay is done through a mixture of button choice and split second reaction times. It works very well. I highly recommend it if you like your movies erring on the side of the thriller, or you miss the old school point-and-click mystery. All in all, a seminal gaming experience. Also, Madison’s arse was very finely crafted. And I want to steal her jacket. (Any ideas where I can purchase it? Thought not.)

P.S. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you want to get a copy of Fahrenheit just to battle the Evil Eighties AI and wheel a granny around. I curse you all!