Op-Ed

Like a lot of geeks, I have a touch of the OCD. You wouldn't know it from my workstation, my apartment, the clothes I wear or my general demeanor, but it's there. Look under the carefully disheveled surface and you'll see it festering like a bad case of herpes, just waiting to break out.

I have some friends in PR and marketing. They're not major fans of my work sometimes, and with good reason. I often have less than flattering things to say about their role in the grand scheme of things, the circle of life governing this, the gaming industry. That's not to say I don't appreciate what they do (quite the contrary), but I spend far more time focusing my words on how they get in my way than how they help me - and you - get what we want out of life. A good advertisement, in the words of David Ogilvy, sells the product without drawing attention to itself, and that's something I can get behind.

This essential freedom central to many upcoming games is widely praised by players. In reality, though, is this freedom really all that great for gaming? Now that it has begun to take its place in popular culture, and attention is finally beginning to be paid to stories in games, will personal narratives help or harm gaming's path to media acceptance? Is a personal narrative within a game ultimately "better" than a canned story created by the designers? Those are big questions and can be broken down into a number of elements: validity, meaning, emotion and community.

Jim Greer is an old-school idealist. Co-Founder of independent game community site, Kongregate, he was formerly Technical Director at EA's casual game site, Pogo and before that worked on a number of games, including a few entries in the storied Ultima series. Last year he decided to make a go of building his own independent game site and co-founded Kongregate.

On the face of it, that's all you'd need to know, really. Former minion at one of the largest casual game sites in the world breaks off and founds one of his own. Happens every day. The game industry is literally rife with such stories, and most of them end in failure - or smashing success. To try and guess which category Jim Greer will fit into, one must dig deeper.

The brightly colored gems shimmer as I run my mouse over them. They disappear with a satisfying chime when I line up three in a row, heightening in pitch and volume during a chain reaction. Another sounds when I make a row of four and generate a sparkling Power Gem. The best is when I swap out the Hyper Cube. Lighting flashes out at the climax, and each gem shatters with a satisfying crash.

Twenty minutes later, I've scored 826,790 points. The rest of my game stats do not matter. Not the number of special gems I created or the longest number of cascades, just the score.

Once in, you just can't stop. Nothing holds me quite like it. Not Bookworm or Mahjong. It's Bejeweled2 or nothing.

The level of discourse online is already considered haphazard enough, so the growth of a medium that discourages crafting reasonable arguments, relishes in off-the-cuff remarks and fosters a one-take mentality of discussion only serves to reinforce the problems that already exist.

When I was in school, learning grammar and punctuation, handwriting was stressed over typing, and the proper way to format a letter did not begin with downloading a macro. More emphasis was placed on proper checkbook accounting than written communication, but that's not to say I didn't absorb all there was to learn. Rather, it was considered more or less an optional exercise, like joining the Latin club, and just as sexy.

Toady, however, we're back in the 19th Century. People still talk on the phone (or VoIP), but written communication is making a comeback in a big way. Email and IM are the tools of this generation, and web forums and message boards have taken the place of letters to the editor or the million man march. Sadly, our educational system has not caught back up, and many an English teacher is still wringing her hands in frustration over modern man's eschewing of the written word. If only they knew. If only they were web-savvy. Because, honestly, we need them.

Just under a year ago I wrote my first article for The Escapist, bemoaning the state of story, character and dialogue in gaming, elements almost invariably relegated to the nether regions of planning, somewhere between settling on the audio effects for blood squelching and deciding what hilarious nicknames to give the developers in the end credits.

As a flip-side commemoration to that piece, it's time to offer praise where praise is due. Here then, a little late for the Oscars, is a selection of categories and awards for story and character as arbitrary as Forrest Gump's defeat of Pulp Fiction in 1994. If you have better suggestions, let us know.

Zeraus writes with the pulse-pounding conviction of his contemporaries, and his switch-backed tale easily covers the complexities of computer hacking and game design. He's set out to tell a tale of startling authenticity about the perils - and triumphs - awaiting us as the internet gaming generation comes of age, and browsing through protected Wi-Fi networks becomes as easy (to some) as surfing channels. He almost pulls it off.

Last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was the culmination of years of an arms race between the console makers and third-party software publishers. Every year bigger booths, louder music and babe-ier babes cluttered the show floor. Faced with a future of multimillion-dollar booths and an inability to actually conduct business at what was supposed to be a business show, Sony, EA and Microsoft just called it quits. Rather than continue a show without their big spenders, the ESA canceled E3 2007 late last year.

So why, you may be asking yourself, are there not one but two E3 events slated for 2007?

I feel like one of those PC gamer die-hards complaining about the lack of precision versus the keyboard+mouse combo, and I'm not unaware of the irony. I'm a relatively recent console machine convert, and now play very few games on a PC. But I am apparently still stuck enough in my old ways that a divergence from even the console's relatively loose control scheme has me in a tizzy. Perhaps I should get over myself, but I don't think I'm alone here.

Maybe what we need is a good old fashioned crisis. Certainly the last one, the great videogame crash of the 1980s, kicked the industry hard enough to recreate itself in the form of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Shooting is a shallow but delicious pleasure, like chocolate. One chocolate is divine. 30 chocolates make you sick. And firing guns every moment for 20 hours loses its mystique pretty damn quickly, which is one of the reasons every single-player FPS is a lot more fun at the start than at the end.

As far as recruitment techniques go, it's first-rate, and definitely a departure. As for the iPod, "it's a symbol," says Kern. "In some cases, we're looking for very special purpose people in very special purpose fields, and in another it's a sort of general thing. But ... the message is personalized, and there's also the website. When you go to the website, it's completely dynamic ... custom tuned for you, down to even suggesting a role that we think would be interesting."

A recurring theme in many of his blog posts is the concept of "brand dilution": Once an intellectual property or brand has made successful contact with the enemy (in this case, you), doing more with the brand runs the danger of weakening it. Games have this problem in spades: Sequels, spin-offs and mediocre ports can lay low even the mightiest of gaming icon.