Op-Ed

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.

Rumors have been flying all year that PC MMOG elephant Blizzard was either working on a console MMOG or not working on a console MMOG. Meanwhile, the new consoles have continued to gain traction, bringing the long-hyped possibility that a console could rival the PC in both power and software offerings even closer to a reality. So where are the MMOGs?

It's been a long time coming. Envelopes have been pushed and boundaries have been challenged. Technology has given us the ability not only to depict levels of violence that were unimaginable a decade ago, but to actually flail our arms about in a spastic mimicry of the act; meanwhile, the public sees increasing levels of violence among the young in schools and homes and cries out for something to be done. The biggest surprise is probably that it took this long for it to happen, but nonetheless, the Entertainment Software Rating Board's decision to slap an Adults Only (AO) rating on Rockstar's soon-to-be-released killfest Manhunt 2 has created almost as big a splash as the game itself is expected to.

My article in Issue 101 of The Escapist, titled The Breasts that Broke the Game, discussed the ESRB's decision last year to re-rate Oblivion from a "T" for Teen rating to "M" for Mature, based, in part, on the availability of a mod that could render all of the game's female characters topless. The proximity of the announcement from the ESRB to that year's E3 trade show meant the gaming press was focusing on other issues, and an important moment in the history of game rating was passed over in the wave of E3 hype.

Response to the article on the forums was heated, indicating there were many sides to this seemingly naked issue. The ESRB took the most vigorous exception to the piece, suggesting that, in fact, boobies did not break the game.

In a follow up interview, ESRB President Patricia Vance spoke with The Escapist on a number of topics, outlining for the first time ever, their specific reasons for re-rating Oblivion (and it really wasn't just the breasts).

We thought we'd chosen a safe, although titillating, assortment of stories from across the spectrum of gaming's history to highlight for our "controversy" issue. Stories that, although controversial in their time, were now more or less moot points. Stories we could safely poke with a sharp stick without fear they'd leap up and bite our faces off. In fact, we intentionally avoided the Hot Coffee and school shooting minefields for Issue 101, mainly to avoid muddying the waters of introspection with any misplaced moral panic.

Boy, did we have it wrong.

The little console that could conquered our hearts and homes, blowing away analyst and fan expectations with sales so high it's still almost impossible to find one in stock. However, with the six-month mark come and gone, the first adopter crowd is starting to grumble. Discontent is setting in among the people that waited in line and those of us who managed to snipe one via relentless page refreshing. We've saved the princesses - Twilight and otherwise - and gorged ourselves on nostalgia at the Virtual Console buffet. Wii Sports tried our patience and hurt our elbows, and we've finally put it aside until the next time we've had enough drinks to make it sound like a good idea. It was fun while it lasted, and it's a neat concept, but it needs more. Now, the little white box lurks under the TV, unused for weeks and months on end, and we wonder if this is it. The revolution we anticipated seems to have fizzled out, especially when the PlayStation 2 is still the place to go for neat games on the cheap.

Observationally speaking, there is a notable disconnect in the consciousness of the gamer nation, where people are fundamentally optimistic about the future of gaming, yet incredibly pessimistic about the business of the industry.

Shortly before the NGE launched in November, 2005, SWG developer Jeff Freeman made one entry on his blog. Freeman was a recruit and disciple of SWG Creative Director Raph Koster. His title was "Lead Game Play Designer," which despite appearances is a relatively junior position in the many-layered SOE hierarchy. Unluckily for Freeman, this single post turned out to be the sole instance of any SOE employee - or, heaven knows, any LucasArts marketing executive - taking any responsibility whatever for any aspect of the NGE:

"So don't get the crazy notion that I'm "in charge" here. "The Man" is a many-headed beast called Management. I just try to help it make good decisions. With regard to game mechanics, it even lets me decide, sometimes."

In recent years, it's been fashionable to criticize the press for the emotional trauma previews engender, and often for good reason. Previews rarely offer measured critiques of upcoming games, and even when they do, they usually undermine their concerns with unbridled optimism. In the worst scenarios, previews merely regurgitate the carefully crafted, gushing content generated by industry representatives.

And yet, we love the stuff.

Nintendo and I have been friends for a long, long time. Going all the way back to the launch of the NES in the US, Nintendo has been a childhood buddy, growing up with me. We laughed in the days of Super Mario Bros. and Link to the Past, spent endless hours together during the Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time era, and I tried to keep his chin up during the lean GameCube years.

Confidentially, since around 2000, Nintendo has had kind of a rough time of it. I'd read about how well the DS was doing, but we only caught up every once in a while when something really great came out on that platform. As often happens in situations like this, we sort of lost touch with each other. We went our separate ways.

It's just not feasible to achieve hardcore gamers' goals in WoW without repetitive gaming, to the point that if you identify as a hardcore gamer, you're probably a farmer, too. I'm sure Molten Core is a great instance, but after the 30th run, that glazed expression you're wearing is very familiar to an RMT farmer's an hour before quitting time. And that, I think, is why the people who take their time to become part of a gaming community are so vocal about farming. They run into farmers more than casual players because they're trying to farm, too, only they call it "grinding," a simple change in nomenclature that's enough to create a gaming Red Scare.

The sad truth is most games hardly have enough story in them to make decent games, never mind entertaining movies. Stories are little more than a device in gaming, something to get the player from point A to B. And suitably enough, the stories are just a device in game-based movies too - a marketing device. Why waste effort on creating and publicizing a world or original character when you can just mangle a beloved gaming franchise, which people will only watch out of morbid curiosity, anyway?

There is, for me, some line that might eventually be crossed where the effort to marry reality and virtual reality might be too real and by extension too disturbing. I love videogames for the separation from reality, and the closer games get to producing real-world situations and conditions, the more uncomfortable I become.