Kill This Noise

News flash: Lester Bangs is fucking dead. So is Hunter S. Thompson.

People have to stop asking stupid goddamned questions like, "How come nobody's like Hunter S. Thompson anymore? How come we don't have assholes like Lester Bangs kicking around?"

Those are stupid questions. Ask them if you want, but they're the worst kind of wanking, like asking why there's no Citizen Kane of videogames. Or why there's no Marcel Marceau of competitive hopscotch. Or no truffle of bubble gum.

I will henceforth refer to such a question as "The X of Y Postulate."

I've seen at least two articles about how videogame critics need to take more drugs and insult more devs, but that's more than enough to signal a moratorium. The call and response that results doesn't push anything along.

The thing about "The X of Y Postulate" is that it inevitably gives you a lot of reasons why Y isn't in any way similar to X - but little else.

So we won't ever have a Hunter S. Thompson of videogame criticism because there was only one HST, and we never had an HST of anything - we had a writer who wrote about things in his particular voice, a voice that was compelling and authoritative and thoroughly fucked up. Remember that he wrote sports columns for much of his later life. His last non-sports column, written on September 11th a few months* before he would kill himself, is one of the most chilling and prescient things ever written - ever.

It was a response to an event, though - it wasn't of anything.

This should be the last time I respond to this topic, until six months from now when someone asks the same questions all over again.


Note: This post isn't particularly topical, not in blogpost time - it's at least two or three weeks past freshness, but it was stinking up my Drafts page so I sprinkled some salt on it and served it up hot. The inspiration comes from this article on Pitchfork - there was a similar essay around the same time, but I can't find it at the moment.

*update: pointed out by Patrick Dugan in the comments - this statement is wildly off the mark - he would kill himself in 2005, which, even when broken down into months, would not qualify as only a few. Duly noted. Still, I hated his sports columns. But then, I'm not fond of sports.

Casuality

Could a casual game lead to political action or social change?

How much information can you communicate through a casual game before it moves beyond its casual appeal?

After much careful thought and consideration and slamming my head into the wall, I admit that I don't have any clear answers.

But it's compelling to imagine a mixture of The Daily Show and Bejeweled, even without knowing the specifics of that vision.

Casual games represent a great delivery mechanism - small downloads, easy-to-learn systems, low overheads and cross-demographic appeal.

I'm thinking about ARGs and flash mobs - could they work as part of a Get Out The Vote effort? What if a scavenger mystery culminated on election day? What if registering to vote yielded new clues? Would people consider such a game casual or hardcore?

A campaign run with a digital token game spread through e-mail and cell phones. Responding to questionnaires, volunteering for events, every little action is rewarded with a pack of tokens. These virtual tokens carry memories of your actions - you can level them up and then play against a computer or real-life opponent. I'm thinking a mix of Checkers/Go, with the altered tokens extending the rules set.

Maybe a policy group creates a puzzle game. Blocks of words fill the screen. The words are adjectives and nouns. Players attempt to create chains of words that will yield a policy problem at the bottom of the screen, along with several different suggestions. The game will build a map of the player's responses and show them where they differ from the policy group. The player won't just get the party line, however - levels will delve into differing viewpoints and relevant historical events in bite-size chunks.

I think we're already seeing more complex games altering society. MMOs, especially, are changing the way people interact. Second Life is a great example -- I'd like to see the concepts of SL stripped down and placed into a browser, maybe even a simplified interface that would directly translate into the full experience.

For that matter, I'd like to see a candidate for public office with an SL persona.


Link: Watercooler games has examples of political and activist games.