Or: how i am 8-bit—an art show devised out of an unbridled love for 80s videogame nostalgia—came to be.

Monday, February 14, 2005

While Nintendo and Atari originally wanted to sponsor the event, I can’t wait any longer for things to make their way up the corporate ladder. Approvals are a bitch!
    Keith Robinson of Intellivision Productions, (a blast from the videogame past), has stepped in to help us out. As I’ve quickly learned, putting on an event of this size requires a lot of money: promotional materials like flyers, postage to send them out, security, entertainment, liquor, bartenders, gift bags…
    Oh yeah, we locked in one of my favorite bands—8-Bit Weapon—to play the opening party (they compose their music on old-school hardware like a Game Boy and Commodore 64), and even scored Gerardo (of Rico Suave fame) to preside over the event. Intellvision’s awesome PR maven, Josh Stecker, is even going to help out with nabbing us some more media attention.
    At this point, any kind of aid is much appreciated. This show just keeps more bloated by the day.

Friday, March 18, 2005

‘Wow!’
    That’s all I could say as I stared at Greg Simkin’s submission.
    ‘WOW! WOW! WOW!’
    He calls it Pac-Man in Hospice, and it features a slew of geriatric gaming icons, aged and decrepit… Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Mario, Q*Bert. Man, the image of a wrinkled yellow geezer sucking down pellets through an IV is just too cool! I can confidently say that people are going to flip out when they see this in person. Jensen was right: this guy’s gonna be huge! Like Mark Ryden huge!

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Arguably, Amped 3 was one of the most significant launch titles for the Xbox 360.

Games released at the launch of the Xbox 360 were always going to be judged by their graphics.
    It was a given. This was the next generation, after all. Gamers had been promised photorealistic sweat on punch-drunk boxers; clothing that flowed with every Spinning Butterfly Kick; draw distances and in-game eye candy that seared retinas and served them up—smoking—on a patina of high definition wizardry.
    For most development studios, then, launch was a no-brainer: be it an original title or a cookie-cut cheap port, pump up the pixels for high-end, low-risk re…

CLICK!

Cue 70s elevator music, laced with irreverent animation. Cue sock puppets making rude gags. Cue blipcore anime, retro gaming, psychedaelia, smack talk, meat by-products posing as marketers. Cue old cartoons, new illustration styles, hot snowboarding gear, Scooby-Doo plot lines, mashed-up, Communist/hedonist/Indian/Viking mystic awesomeness with a smattering of chill.
    Cue Matthew Seymour, talking. The executive producer of Indie Built Games, his mouth opening and closing. The 15-year veteran of the games industry, saying, ‘Right off the bat, that’s very short-sighted. I mean, we’re trying to innovate here and innovation isn’t only in graphics, for @%$!-sake. It’s in story, it’s in immersion, it’s in gameplay, it’s in bringing a new entertainment idea to people. Or at least rejigging the old ones.’
    Matt, connecting with all kinds of thoughts now, adding, ‘As we all know, everyone stole from the Greek tragedies and Greek dramas; and we’re just retooling those over and over again. But, at the same time, if we’re able to put it into a videogame and make it interactive, who really cares what it looks like graphically, if it’s something you care about? There’s only so many first person shooters you can play before someone says, “I don’t give a…”
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Who’d want to put down Australia’s gift to Metal Gear Solid? Nobody we’d want to know.

The phone call with internationally-acclaimed, Perth-based artist Ash Wood has been going for almost two hours, and the conversation has become more of a chat than an interview. My feet are up on my desk and the audio cassette in my recorder ran out a good 10 minutes ago.
    Somehow, the topic of elitism has come up and Ash starts to tell me about a few instances where Australian designers have put down his work. I quickly slip my feet off the desk and lean in towards the speaker phone.

‘WHAT? Why would they want to do that?’ I ask. ‘Why would anyone want to say that Ashley Wood isn’t cool?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Ash. His typically laconic tone, slightly English in accent, carries for the first time the barest hint of wounded indignation. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘that’s how you should start your article: why would anyone want to say that Ash Wood’s not cool?’
    We take a moment to laugh uncontrollably, and I jokingly agree to his suggestion. But inwardly I’m already dismissing the idea, certain that I’ll begin this piece with some uber-sharp reference to Ash’s emotionally charged Metal Gear Solid art, his obsession with drawing women and robots, or his grand plan for reclaiming the videogame industry from corporate bean counters and committees.
    Only now, looking back over the transcripts and revisiting his art, do I realise the importance of ‘cool’ to Ash Wood.
    For many Australians, cool is something we’re marketed; something engineered; something we see in trashy magazines draped around the actor/singer/sporting hero that’s promoting it.
    Cool is why we have on-display DVD collections in our lounge rooms, and why we shell out a hundred bucks for a game such as Sports Manager 2005, when it has about 10 dollars worth of extra features over the 2004 edition.
    Cool is beating a 3D model to a pulp with a lamp post in the latest licensed game of whatever.
    For 35-year-old Ash, however, cool is something else; something much more personal. It’s an internal monologue, a motivation, an outlook, a moral and creative code. It’s who you are and what you do when you’re being true to yourself.
    But cool is also what makes Ash dangerous.
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While gamers often complain about the number of ‘ordinary’ videogames making their way onto shelves, it’s not uncommon for an exceptional title to completely miss out on public support. Working in PR for Ubisoft Australia, Owen Hughes writes about his experiences of a sadly overlooked title that’s still close to his heart: Beyond Good & Evil.

It was 2003, and after a development cycle of around three years, game luminary Michel Ancel’s latest opus Beyond Good & Evil (BG&E) was finally released.
    Ancel had previously brought Ubisoft good fortune with his Rayman games, and reviewers lucky enough to have access to early game code of BG&E were gushing with praise. We watched as the high review scores and awards piled up for Ancel’s labour of love, finally vindicating the lengthy development timetables and style revisions the game had undergone…
    The sales, however, were in direct contrast to the critical acclaim.
    Released in the busy November period, BG&E barely managed to move enough units to fall into the top twenty charts.
    What went wrong with BG&E’s launch is open to interpretation. A more simple and obvious question—once you look at all the evidence—is why would anyone expect it to do better than it did?
    A game’s path from concept to publication is a very long and convoluted one. A key element that determines a game’s success is the impact it makes on the decision makers: retailers that are asked to support a product in-store; the media that are asked to champion the title so their readers know of its quality; and internal staff within the publisher who must be persuaded that the product is worth investing in.
    Ancel was lucky that he had backing from the highest level of Ubisoft. The company was practically built on Rayman sales, so many felt Ancel deserved the time and resources required to recapture that lightning. But on seeing the game at each E3 outing and various other trade events, others were not so sure.
    When you present a game to a retailer, you’re lucky to have their attention for more than five minutes. Sequels rely only on you quoting success stories of the previous iteration; sports and racing games utilise the sales of similar games in their genres to back their case; while licensed titles require that the retailer has faith in the license rather than the quality of the affiliated product. When you go out there with something entirely different and unique—a product that’s proving difficult for even the publisher to summarise in a sound bite—you may as well beg retail to take it.
    During the busiest periods of retail, any sensible retailer would want to churn customers through the store. Keep them happy and get them out quickly. And the best way to answer a consumer’s immediate needs is to find out what they already like. Similarly, with so many game purchases made during the holiday season by gift-givers—parents, relatives and friends of gamers—it makes sense to start with what the recipient already owns or likes.
    ‘Does your son like soccer? There’s a new Pro Evo game out this week.
    ’He liked last year’s Need For Speed game? There’s a new one of those I bet he doesn’t have.
    ‘Into Harry Potter or Dragon Ball Z? We’ve got new titles in that series over there, next to the Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man sequels.
    ‘Do they like award-winning adventures featuring a female photojournalist and her talking-pig uncle as they travel around a planet in a hovercraft trying to root out a conspiracy within the highest levels of government?’

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Gaming’s ‘invisible wall’ might not be the dead end that we think it is.

Cast your mind back to the very first time you laid hands on a 3D platformer. For most, it was probably Super Mario 64.
    Remember looking up and seeing the castle? All you wanted to do was go to that castle, and after a few manic leaps and cartwheels, you bolted across to the big white wall and jumped at it for a while. Then you spot the moat, and without even thinking—bolstered by the exhilaration of having spent half an hour throwing yourself against a wall—you dive in.
    You’re swimming! Rad. You can touch the bottom! This is brilliant.
    What’s this? The moat is a river? Wow! Wait, there’s a pond at the end of the river? Fantastic! What’s that in the distance? An island? Let’s get out there!
    Bump.
    Wait! Stop. Get a proper grasp of the controls. Swim across to the bank, onto the grass, back in the water. To the island!
    Bump.
    It’s right under your nose, but you can’t reach it. No matter how hard you try.
    Welcome to your first invisible wall.
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From the very moment that French writer/director David Cage appears in-game to explain his unique control system, it’s evident that the ‘interactive drama’ Fahrenheit is going to be a completely different experience­—not to mention a monumental gamble.

// This is not your usual action/adventure game. In fact, forget almost everything you know about the genre. Quite literally, this supernatural thriller rewrites it all; from the stylised context-sensitive control system and ‘MultiView’ split screen techniques, to the way in which social and psychological behaviour impacts on gameplay. But the most impressive achievement of Cage’s Fahrenheit is the one that underpins it all: its narrative. Developing a technique of his own—one he calls ‘bending stories’—Cage has successfully created a game where narrative is not only a primary component of gameplay, but the emotional and relational drug that will have players bound to their virtual counterparts.

// Is narrative the new gameplay revolution? David Cage thinks so.

Jump:Button Mag: Fahrenheit is both a fantastic story and a truly great game to play. Why do you think people are attracted to the art of storytelling? And how does Fahrenheit fit within this framework?

David Cage: Telling stories is one of the oldest human activities. Each time man created a new media, he used it to tell stories: paintings in grottoes, writing, theatre, cinema, television. Human beings love to feel emotions, and stories are a great way to feel many different and intense emotions without having to leave your chair.
     Videogames are just following the same path. After having focused on primitive emotions like fear, anger, power, frustration or competition, games are now ready to move to more evolved and interesting emotions. Storytelling is a great way to do this. But there are two issues: 1) there is no established language for interactive storytelling; and 2) the videogame industry has to understand what storytelling can do for it.
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Like some people I know, music and videogames have fallen into bed together

So, here it is: I have a friend named Sonia*. She’s a psychology major, Asian, likes to go out. You can usually find her knocking back breakfast beers at the local cafe come 5 a.m. most weekends. With her designer fringe, shitty day job, Onitsuka sneakers and weekend drug habit, Sonia is your typical music scenester—a minor player on the fringes of the local music scene. Or, at least she was. That all changed the night she slept with Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas…
    Well, to be honest, nothing really changed; Sonia simply became known as the girl who slept with Will.I.Am. Still, for better or worse, that was her claim to fame.
    Of course, Sonia slept with Will.I.Am around 2003 when the Black Eyed Peas toured Australia for the first time. Back then, they were only starting to make inroads into the mainstream and were allowed to scoff drugs and bed the locals as much as they wanted to. They were merely ‘keeping it real’. There was no Fergie, no Justin Timberlake collaborations and no platinum plaques to speak of.
     These days, it’s hard to escape the group. They’re all over the radio, the television, the internet—wherever you choose to lurk. Mind you, that isn’t saying much. Hotdogs from Big Brother got his own television show. The Crazy Frog ringtone reached number one in the charts. And George W. Bush is the US President. Clearly, the level of competency required to reach mass media saturation or, for that matter, get elected to the highest office in politics, isn’t what it used to be. There is, it can be argued, little prestige in being the smartest person in a roomful of morons.
     So, how does one gauge success when someone as chronically untalented as Hotdogs or George W. Bush can be forced down our throats on a regular basis? Who are the true stars in the midst of this low rent approach to mass media notoriety? What is the next big arena?
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