Op-Ed

Consolize. According to the Wikipedia entry, it's the process whereby an arcade game board is modified for use on a standard television set. But lately, the term has taken on a new and sometimes emotionally-charged meaning for a small but particularly dedicated group of gamers, to whom it means something entirely different: The process whereby a PC videogame is modified for use on a standard gaming console.

Due to popular demand, we're going to give a sort of poetry circle / book club thing a try. Vishnu help us.

The game for August is Psychonauts, the wacky, but surprisingly deep platformer by Doublefine. This one got a lot of critical acclaim, but tanked at retail. Which means its right up our alley.

Check out Lara Crigger's fantastic article on the game.

The problem is that, at least here in America, Ebert is right. As a result of social pressures, gaming is not an art form in the United States. It's not art in Britain or Germany or Australia. Maybe it's art in France; they've given Miyamoto medals, after all. But around the world, gaming is restricted, hemmed in and censored by organizations thinking of the children so we don't have to.

This is the kind of song that made Guitar Hero the dream machine it is today. Wailing solos, long slides and furious fretwork ... If we could do these things in real life, we'd be rock stars. But playing a real guitar is hard. And the graphics aren't as good. And, let's face it, not everyone is cut out for life in the fast lane. Sure life is sweeter when you're on the bus, but that bus never stops, and sometimes, you just want to sit at home on the couch and eat Chinese food, while taking five-minute-at-a-time journeys down the road of rock. And for those times, "Round and Round" will do nicely.

Team Humidor, the faithful editors of The Escapist, has been sweating for weeks over what we hope will be the best collection of issues about games and gaming yet.

I think the answer lies in the community-building nature of our pastime. Gamers have invested their lives into a hobby that, unlike most others, does not weaken its grip in the rocky wasteland of adolescence and remains a calling into adulthood. Gaming is a link not only to our past, but as a high-tech industry, it embraces the technology that can link us together.

Games play best when their interfaces are transparent, and the disconnect between player and game starts to vanish. Loading up game screens with buttons only serves to diminish immersion. I'm looking at you, Twilight Princess, and the ugly graphical representations of the Wii controller you stick all over the edges my screen. I know it's a Zelda tradition to clearly show the controls mapped to Link's tools at any given moment, but must I really admire such a beautiful game through a tangle of Wii remote glyphs? I have to believe the minds behind Nintendo's most brilliant first-party titles can do better.

I'm a big sports fan - I won't lie. I watch them, I play them and I read about them. A lot of sites run what are called "power rankings," a ranking of every team in a league, which evaluates each team's chance at winning a championship relative to everyone else. As a season goes on, the power rankings change as injuries, trades and reality enters into the mix. And I thought, "Hey, the game industry is pretty competitive. Why don't we have something like this?"

And lo, The Escapist Power Rankings were born. Below, you'll find a list of 20 of the most significant players in the industry, along with five cellar-dwellers.

Throughout the 1980s, most of the problems swirling about American youth could be safely attributed to three factors: heavy metal, marijuana and Dungeons & Dragons. Videogames were on the radar, but more as a symptom than a cause, and game developers, their efforts tightly constrained by technological limitations, went about their business largely ignored by the mainstream. But in 1992, everything changed.

Removing a story from its natural medium, in many cases, is a waste of a perfectly good story. Though there are a few exceptions, in general, ripping a story from its original format tarnishes the experience. Gamers may know this lesson even better than the most cynical book lover. Just the same, it seems like a videogame is optioned for a movie adaptation every other week. This past Tuesday's showing of a live action snippet of a possible Halo movie did nothing to alleviate my frustration; though it was well put together, it had the ambiance of a fan-film set in the world of the Alien movies.

That E3 has fundamentally changed hasn't quite sunk in yet. It's part of the reason I didn't go this year, because I hadn't accepted the certainty of change. It's difficult not to reflect on previous shows where one would quickly lose track of all the new games. Suddenly we have been thrust from the world where LucasArts alone might announce six games at E3 to a scenario where Wii Fit and Scene It! are worth mentioning at major press conferences.

Veterans of decades of E3s at the LACC can no longer dangle their attendance badges like ears collected from Southwest border raids, signaling to all their superiority. At this point, there isn't a single soul who's yet navigated the gauntlet of ballrooms, boardwalks and shuttle buses awaiting us in Santa Monica, and this is as good as it is bad.

On the good side, we'll probably score a number of impromptu meetings with Important Persons, just by happening to be near their conference rooms when some poor sod scheduled himself to be there immediately following his previous meeting six hotels away and didn't make it. On the bad side, we're just as likely to be that poor sod.

A self-described Christian conservative and Republican, Thompson's beginnings were innocuous enough. Born in 1951, he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Denison University, went to law school at Vanderbilt University where he met his wife, then moved to Florida in 1976. He joined the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church where he became a born-again Christian, got involved in local politics, and if that was the end of the story he'd be well on his way to a very normal, moderately successful and otherwise wholly unremarkable life.

Alas, it was not to be.

I think it's extremely laudable that developers are willing to take on issues like religion, politics and science. Where I take issue, though, is central to the medium: choice. In a movie or a book, we need to rely on the content to provide us with multiple viewpoints. If a film wants to ram a single interpretation down our throats, our only real alternative is leaving the room.

With the shiny, new, "invite only" E3 about a week away and sales, manufacturing and other various numbers streaming in, now is as good a time as any to take another look at the state of the industry.

For starters, and this is not purely fanboy nonsense, the PS3 is in trouble. The good news for Sony? So is the Xbox 360.