"Once upon a time, games were competitors. Now, primarily, they're entertainers. They aimed to beat you. Now, to be beaten. Our language says much, really. While we've talked about difficulty curves forever, the problems now are 'difficulty spikes.' No one ever critiques a game for a difficulty-trough - because the former stops you getting anywhere and the latter is just something you coast through."
"The few initial pot shots that struck my nameless, faceless virtual self manifested physically as a forceful poke in the front and back of the lower left region of my gut (presumably to replicate the lovely feeling of the bullets entering in one direction and exiting out the other). It's an odd sensation that - under more intense gaming circumstances - could prove rather startling if you didn't expect it. Within seconds I was getting hit all over. I even tolerated being punched repeatedly by a daft beast simply because it provided a slightly different impact."
"Games have gotten very good at guns, physics, audio and graphics that leave the real world looking low-res. Off to the side and down a few alleys, they're also pretty good at porn. I like these things, all of them, not to mention bouncing around like a prat with a plastic guitar, being addicted to World of Warcraft and those perverse Japanese cooking sims.
"But someone needs to send out a search party for sex appeal."
"Gamers are a shrewd bunch. Each time developers release a new piece of information regarding their work in progress, the gaming community snaps up every shred and meticulously pores over it. With each screenshot and list of potential features, their expectations for the game gradually coalesce into a snowball of hype. And while it can cause games to fly off the shelves on release day, hype can also be fatal."
"The problem here isn't the old town-gown conflict; it's not that game studies scholars look down their noses at the working-class gamers who happen to reside in a virtual neighborhood that borders their own. If that were the case, gamers - including academics like me who study games but remain firmly outside the 'game studies' camp - could just say, 'Well, Douglas, we hate you too."
"Arriving at the initial crest of enthusiasm toward Valve's Team Fortress 2, Team Roomba's video showing an array of petty, hilarious and oft imaginative cruelty was an immediate memetic sensation. Griefing is usually little more than plain sadism; but with the right soundtrack and frame-perfect editing, Team Roomba's videos have turned it into - whisper it - a kind of comedy performance. Or, at least, something other than just being a douchebag."
"In a multiplayer deathmatch of Half-Life 2, all hostilities spontaneously ceased as we all grasped the wondrous possibilities of the gravity gun. Thoughts about where to find the best sniper position or the quickest route to the assault rifle spawn vanished from our heads, replaced with one shining thought: Could we get a wrecked car up the stairwell and onto the roof? The answer was a resounding 'no,' but we managed to get it up two flights of stairs and only crushed four people in the process."
"My parents had bought me a Commodore Amiga a year earlier, considering that 'there could be a future in this computer stuff,' and figuring I would use it to learn computer programming or other future-related skills. But I had way better things to do with the machine, like diving into a universe of pixellated softraunch, bondage, forced marriages in wedding parlors, 'censored' bars that humped to the cadence of the fornication they were supposed to suppress and Spanish Fly abuse."
"They say comedy is subjective, that a sense of humor personal, indefinable, unique like a snowflake. That's bullshit. Comedy is universal. Everyone laughs and everyone is funny. Some jokes (and people) are funnier than others, some jokes are funnier to certain people than others and some jokes are funnier when certain other people aren't around, but everybody laughs at something. Usually, we're laughing at each other."
"You know what's hilarious? All the sad buggers. People who live in the richest countries in the history of the world; with cheap food and free porn; where syphillis, typhoid and rat plagues are no longer the usual ways to die; with endless entertainment and all kinds of science fiction awesomeness happening every day ... and whine about it."
"It might come as a shock, however, to discover that programmers are generally stubborn when it comes to learning how best to handle new technologies. 'Programmers are very resistant to change,' says Albrecht. 'They're generally very intelligent people - game developers in general are very smart - but programmers just don't like change. They like their standard environment. They like their standard compiler. They like what they're used to, and they have a lot of momentum behind their beliefs.'"
"'Peter [Molyneux] was making it seem we were all going to be super rich and making these fantastic games - which I think he believed at the time. [Mucky Foot] just threw away those share options. ... You could have at least sat it out for three or four years and have made lots of money.' I'm talking to the Mucky Foot primaries, 11 years later. There's an audible pause. 'If I'd stayed there, those share options would have been worth half a million pounds,' Mike Diskett sighs. 'We'd have been wearing hats made of money.'"
"Early reports said Heartland would be a game that could make you cry - the Holy Grail of game developers from EA's early days to Steven Spielberg today. 'On one hand, it was supposed to be emotional,' says Jaffe. 'We wanted players who are sensitive types like myself - that cry at Hallmark commercials - we were hoping that those types would actually cry, and that other players would still feel something that came close to an emotional response.'"
"The game was a money loser for Microsoft. Additionally, Microsoft was diverting marketing dollars and manpower from Allegiance to support another space game, Freelancer. Allegiance was subsequently thrown to the wolves. Understaffed and rife with bugs, cheaters began exploiting issues they knew wouldn't be fixed. 'Microsoft Research and The Zone just got fed up with people ruining it for everyone and always felt one step behind' says Alderman. Eventually, Microsoft gave up and pulled the plug."
"When Majesco shut down Taldren Inc. in 2003, illegally attempted to recruit talent away from the studio and stole source code using planted 'assistant' developers, I asked everyone I knew to never touch anything with a Majesco logo on it again.
"This is a story about big against small, about corporate espionage and a man-child producer with a thing for Stevie Case. This is a story I have been waiting years to tell."
