The Ending of Mass Effect 3 – Why the RGB Choice is a Wrong One

Fair warning: This is for people who have beaten Mass Effect 1,2 and 3. Heavy spoilers follow below.

I’m going to try not to swear in this. I’m going to try not to come off like the stereotypical angry internet nerd. I really am.

I may not be successful in that attempt, though, because the ending to Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 has turned me into some kind of confused feral animal.

From the beginning, Mass Effect was a franchise built upon choices and their consequences. In fact, the very first thing you do in the game is to choose your Shepard’s origins. And from there, the choices never stop coming at you. Do you let Wrex live? Who do you leave to die? Do you save the Council? Do you fall in love? Who do you fall in love with? Do you stay loyal? Do you bring everyone back from the suicide mission? In the third game, all of these choices come home to roost and the stage is set for the final battle where you expect to see just how bloody and costly your final victory is going to be.

Except that’s not what happens at all.

What happens is that for the second time in Mass Effect history you can talk the final boss of a game into shooting himself in the head. The game does this without even the slightest hint of irony, mind you.

Then you get to talk to the Catalyst Reaper God a glowing child that gives you three arbitrary choices about how everything is going to be wrapped up. Choices that are in absolutely no way, shape or form affected in the slightest by the thousands of previous choices you’ve made up to this point.

The choices are, quite literally, color-coded for you and are, without exception or mitigation, completely terrible.

The Blue choice is to take control of the Reapers. The galaxy is “saved” and then immediately doomed as all the mass relays are blown up. You die and your crew crashes, never to be rescued. Apparently this is the choice the Illusive Man would’ve made, which is odd considering blue is the paragon color in the series.

The Red choice has you destroying all synthetic life – including EDI and the Geth, which, if you were any good at the game, have come quite a long way and are probably helping you out right now – but, hey, you get to kill the Reapers. The galaxy is once again “saved”, the relays blow up, your crew crashes without hope of rescue, but you might actually kinda-sorta-maybe survive this one if you got your multiplayer readiness score high enough. Anderson is who they show making this renegade choice, which is even more bizarre than Illusive Man being used to show the paragon one.

The third choice is the Green choice. Green being the other primary color in the RGB spectrum you see, and one between red and blue (except not at all). This choice involves “synthesis”. Some kind of fusion of organic and inorganic races that will change all life in the galaxy, technomagically. This ending also ends with you dying, the relays exploding and your crew crashing, never to be rescued. Everyone does glows strangely, though.

Just to give a quick summary, that’s three choices for how you want to end the game that have absolutely nothing to do with that huge armada of unified races you spent three games building, or the close personal bonds you’ve forged with your crew, or gives any kind of a damn that they all end with the galaxy in arguably a worse place than it was with the Reapers invading.

Which means, quite simply, that none of your choices mattered.

You could’ve killed your whole crew, turned the galaxy in on itself in a storm of fire and blood and you would’ve gotten the same three choices as some one that walked the precarious tight-rope of galactic peace and brotherhood.

I can understand the production and design pressures to make sure that the third chapter of the game felt as complete for new players as it did for people like me that meticulously played the previous two. However, the sudden, butcherous winnowing of five years of game choices down to three arbitrary endings is inexcusably lazy.

It also sets a dangerous precedent where player choices can be discarded as a cost of admission to the ending of a game. Have a franchise where player choice matters, but don’t want to be bothered to pick up after them? End cap your game like Mass Effect 3 did!

Oh, and the glowing child thing? That’s never explained or even questioned in the slightest. Which has given rise to a sadly hopefully fan theory that the whole thing with the Catalyst is just Shepard hallucinating. I think that gives the writers of the game too much credit and lets them off a hook that should be firmly set in their respective mouths.

Ultimately, I think there should not have been a choice – especially a RGB choice – at the end of Mass Effect 3.

Instead of a choice there should have been a consequence, an effect, from all of your previous choices in the games. That’s sort of how the first game did it, after all. Beating Sovereign was how things had to work out, the question just how you got there, and how many dead friends and foes were in your wake. The finality of the series should’ve been an endgame where all cards were placed on the table and your actions were judged as satisfactory, exemplary or neither.

The game didn’t need you making some ultimate choice to override all of your other choices. Those choices were enough, more than enough, to show the game how you wanted this story to end. And in a game, video or otherwise, it is the player that should get to decide how the endgame looks, no one else.

Maybe I’m just bitter about not getting the little blue babies Liara and my Shepard kept talking about.

Either way, I’m going to believe that this fan-written ending is the real one.

I guess in that regard, you could say that is the final choice I’ll ever make in the Mass Effect games.

Pity it isn’t to play it again.

Mother kills her child for interrupting Farmville

I’m just going to leave this here.

A Jacksonville mother charged with shaking her baby to death has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, was arrested after the January death of 3-month-old Dylan Lee Edmondson. She told investigators she became angry because the baby was crying while she was playing a computer game called FarmVille on the Facebook social-networking website.

Tobias entered her plea Wednesday before Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud. A second-degree murder charge is punishable by up to life in prison.

And then I’m going to point out that games are built using a combination of math, art, storytelling and psychiatry. The last one is especially true of persistent world games. We use systems like B.F. Skinner’s schedules of reinforcement to find the exact number of times a player will perform a tast – say watering their crops in Farmville – before you have to give them a reward. Encouraging the “Well, I’ll do just one more X before I quit” behavior the designer wants. And when we’ve done our jobs correctly, that last time is the time that gives you a reward, causing the player to either continue playing, or look forward to their next play experience. We give them cravings, essentially.

Persistent world games are built to give people a good feeling, and then make them want more of that feeling.

It is an intentionally, deliberately created method of addiction.

So, when you see things like the news story above, think about it in the same way you would when a crack addict burns her house down and kills her infant child.

Because they’re both the same story, of some one who succumbed to an addiction.

Only difference is one of them happens to be available at Best Buy and Walmart and on your kid’s Christmas list.

I Have The Consumption – Metroid: Other M

Let’s get this out of the way right now:

I wouldn’t have bought this game unless Amazon hadn’t pretty much given it to me. A few months back, they ran a deal for it, listing it well under any other list price, and it came with a $20 credit toward my next video game purchase. I’m also pretty sure that I used a previously earned $20 credit to buy it. (I love that stupid rolling credit.) So, bottom line, I paid next to nothing for the game, and because of that, it would have to do a lot to earn my ire.

So, that out of the way, here’s some general information about the game and its history.

Metroid: Other M is a Nintendo Wii game that tells the continuing story of one Samus Aran, space bounty hunter. It is the first Japanese Metroid game produced since Super Metroid. For most of the 00s, the property was in the capable hands of Retro Studios who shocked (and impressed) the gaming world with their first person take on the game. Other M was made by Team Ninja, best known for the bouncing boobs in their Dead or Alive series of fighters, and oddly enough, volleyball simulators. This is the first Metroid to ever deal with Samus’s backstory, and the first one to give her a voice actor. The intent of the game is to act as a bridge between the Japanese and American versions of the property through Team Ninja’s unique take on the classic aspects of the game. Those classic aspects being: room by room exploration and puzzle solving, the finding and utilizing of new items, and, of course, blasting the crap out of any alien life you come across.

And how did Team Ninja do with their first go at one of video gamedom’s timeless properties?

Well…let’s just say I think something was lost in the translation.

And I do mean that quite literally. The writing in Other M has to be some of the absolute worst I’ve ever encountered in a video game. Barrels upon barrels of needless words used to say simple things. There’s lots and lots and LOTS of internal monologging, most of it of the angst-ridden, lifted-straight-from-an-anime kind. And for that to happen in a game like this, it makes me think that something did in fact get lost in translation. Because there’s no way a producer would sit down, hear crap this bad, and then sign a check to pay the person to write more just like it. The Japanese version of the game has to be better…right?

Thankfully, the visuals that accompanying the hooky words and voices are pretty, if plastic in a way that only things from Japan are capable of being. It’s like they refuse to acknowledge that people have pores or any sort of skin texture on their side of the Pacific. And the pre-rendered bits are absolutely stunning, and never overly long.

But, Zach, you’re thinking, the core of any Metroid game isn’t the story or the writing or the cinematics, it’s the damned combat and exploration. What about that? Is it any good?

Yes, it is.

Well, most of it, but I’ll come back round to that in a minute.

The Wii controller, when not used as something you wave at your TV like a vibrator at a hooker, is a simplistic thing, and Other M knows it. You’ve got three buttons and a control pad. One button shoots, one button jumps, one button rolls you up into a ball. That’s it. And Other M manages to get a hell of a lot out of those three buttons and a control pad.

First off, the game is in a kind of pseudo-3-D. It has depth occasionally, but for the most part, you’re moving about on a 2-D plane, so the control pad doesn’t have to worry about doing a whole lot. Just point in the direction you want to go, and it’ll take care of itself. Most of the combat revolves either around you mashing a button to blast something, or holding a button to charge up and then blasting something. Some times you have to jump on something or run up to it before you blast it, which leads to these very cool little finishing movies.

Speaking of, the jumping and rolling are simplified to. Wall jumping just requires you to hold the control pad in one direction and mash jump, it’ll take care of the rest. Bomb jumping, once a necessary skill for beating older Metroid games is a thing of the past now, too. There’s also a dodging mechanic called sense something or other that I never could properly figure out how to make work on command, but it did a good enough job of keeping me safe by letting me do what I was already doing that I didn’t think about it. That’s pretty much the summation of the core combat mechanic of the game: it does its job without making you think about it. It just works. Which is probably the best compliment you can give a system like this.

But about that one thing I mentioned I’d come back to earlier. So, for the most part, the game’s in third person 3-D. The camera is somewhere floating above your character, and you’re hopping about and blasting things. But then, you’ll need to shoot a missile or scan something, and you have to take the Wii controller, which you’ve been holding horizontally for hours now, and point it at the television. At this point it goes into first person mode, allowing you to lock on to things, scan them, and blow them up with missiles.

The motion sounds physically awkward, but it really isn’t. The Wii controller is a tiny thing, and moving your hand around it is a breeze. But, then there’s the problem of when the game like to make you do this. It’s never at a convenient time. It’s always at a time when there are thousands of mutant spaces bees swarming you, trying to make passionate love to your innards with their mutant space bee stingers. The result is more stressful than it needs to be, and it really breaks the flow of a solid combat system.

The exploration part of it seems to remain idiot proof, thankfully. Upgrades are hidden all over the areas you are blasting your way through, some of which (most, if I’m going to be honest) you can see when you first pass through an area, but you can’t get to. You’ll either have to come back and get then when you’ve gotten a new toy, or claim them when the looping level design brings you back into a room from another point. It’s a time-tested and proven system that gets the most out of art assets and keeps the level designers thinking. Hell, in Other M they’ve even gone one step further and given you an indicator to let you know if there is an upgrade hidden in the room once you’ve killed all the bad guys in said room. It wants you to explore, and it wants you to be rewarded for that exploration.

On the whole, I’m mixed about Metroid: Other M. On one hand, it’s always nice to see new views on classic properties, and Team Ninja certainly hit a lot of high notes with the game. But, it also reminds me why the Japanese share of the game market is shrinking like a scrotum in cold water. The clunky dialog and lack luster stories just don’t hold up to the likes of Western mega-games like Halo, Mass Effect, Modern Warfare. Other M feels like something I’d download from the Xbox Live Arcade, not a multi-million dollar triple-AAA title. That’s not to say I don’t think that this game is worth the time it takes to play it, because I believe it is, there are just too many mistakes to make me ever want to play it again.

Should You Buy It? Sure, once it drops about $10 in price. There aren’t that many solid Wii games out there, and Other M, despite its flaws is definitely a solid game.

Other Things Like It: Shadow Complex (better in every way), Lara Croft: Guardian of Light (more puzzle-y, and co-op is an added plus), Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid (See why they call this genre “Metroidvania”)

I am going to be a published author

Late last week, Pat reminded me about this project called 48 Hour Longshot Magazine (they got sued by the TV show, don’t ask). The concept is simple: create a magazine from start to finish in 48 hours. Post a theme, all content is due 24 hours later, and then 24 hours after that, a print on demand magazine is posted for sale.

This time around, the theme was Comeback.

Here’s what they said about it.

Interpret it how you want. After all, comebacks are morally neutral. Disgraced politicians, the Taliban, and Whooping Cough have all come back. But beautiful babies have too, their little kumquat hearts restarting just in time.

You can come back from anything, even death.  This is a hilobrow concept. Sports teams stage comebacks. Skirts stage comebacks. Ideas stage comebacks. Even Lassie. Lassie always comes back home again. It is all theater, in a way, with very specific requirements. The preconditions are forever the same: you have to lose before you can win; it has to vanish before it can return; you must have faith.

Maybe some comebacks don’t seem so serious to you. What is significant about a basketball team coming back from 16 points down in the fourth quarter to win? It reminds us to hope. What is meaingful about the fashionability of the length of a skirt? It’s in the mechanics. Inch by inch, we get to witness change. It may seem like you’re analyzing hem lines, but they are just a stripped down and convenient model for how the world happens.

And there’s another definition, too. (Your mama probably knows it.) Maybe one time, someone said something to you that was real mean, and as you stood there, stinging, the most perfect retort rose into your brain and flew out of your mouth. It landed flush, and your opponent was staggered. You walked away proud, even though you don’t like violence. There are those comebacks, too.

About the only thing that unites all these things is that the best comeback is the least statistically probable. Comebacks are a reminder that weird stuff happens in the world! Norms are made to be deviated from.

So what did I do with that?

The nerdiest fucking thing possible. I wrote about game design and video games. Specifically about fungibility. A term that refers to how easy it is in a game to jump from last place to first, or fall from first to last. A metric of flexibility, sort of. I started writing Friday night, conked out around 1 or 2, woke up and finished the bit, shipping it off to Longshot at around 11am local time.

At about 11:10 local time I decided what I’d written was probably just a nerd game theory wankery and went on with my weekend.

But, low and behold, about 28 hours later, guess who’s name crawled up on the list of accepted submissions.

What? No. Mine, you assholes.

And here I am on page 24 of Longshot Magazine, #1.

I’m curious to see what they’ve done with my bit, because it looks like they’ve copy edited it down by about 300 words. And that’s probably a good thing.

So, yeah. There you go. My first published work.

If you want to buy it (which all of you should, the project looks awesome, I’m probably the low point of the whole thing), you can find it here.

I know a lot of you are printheads. This is the sort of project you should be looking at. Using new media to make relevant and interesting old media.

Blizzard brings their Real ID – and real names – to their forums

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.

That is part of a bit published on Blizzard’s official Battle.net forums, the Blizzard discussion run hub for all of their video game properties. For those not familiar, Blizzard makes World of Warcraft, a persistent world MMO with a sustained player population somewhere north of several European nations. Oh, and then they make Starcraft, a video game with a professional gaming league in South Korea and where a two cable networks broadcast footage of the decade old game 24/7. Last but not least is Diablo, which is really just a giant time sink based around the cover of late 80s metal albums. That didn’t keep it from selling a bajillion copies, though. All three of these games are having either expansion or new versions releasing in the next two years. Which mean Blizzard’s forum traffic is going to go through the damn roof.

Probably why they want to get a handle on the incessant flaming and troll wars that are common place.

They’ve gotten their share of flack for this, though. Several different groups have suggested that this policy would lead to game conflicts spilling over into real life conflicts. That the lack of anonymity could in fact be dangerous to the player base.

I have absolutely no idea why people would think something as trivial as video games would inspire people commit acts of violence. I mean it’s not like there’s a history of that happening all over the world. And every video game player I know is a even-tempered, emotional mature adult. There is absolutely no way anything bad could happen from this.

Oh, wait? What’s that, young lady? You’ve got something to say?

….fuck.

This is a terrible idea, but it is going to be a blast to watch.

My schadenfreude organ is turgid at the clusterfuck that’s going to follow in the wake of Blizzard’s decision.

Magnasanti

At first I was going to dismiss this like I would any speed run or high score game video. But after a few moments, the scale of what this person has done hits you. This video is the culmination of years of bizarre obsession and study, into something that has next to no real value. Much in the same way that performance car enthusiasts spend thousands to make their cars a few hundredths of a second faster to the legal speed limit, this man has traded years of his life to find the perfect Mandelbrot pattern to optimize a virtual city’s development. And he didn’t come arrive at it by chance, either. There is a level of knowledge here, in engineering, math, procedures, that speaks of a higher education, and an application of that knowledge through experimentation and observation that utterly impressive.

I’ll never understand why this person did what they did.

But I will always respect the achievement this is.

A bizarre, bizarre achievement.

It must be a slow as shit news day at CNN

Because they’ve dredged up a story that’s horrendously old about an Japanese eroge called RapeLay and they end it with this stinger:

“No one should play a game where the only way to win…is to rape.”

Yes. Because something I wrote about nearly a year ago, and something Something Awful lampooned three years before that is even close to news?

At this point anyone who is aware of the eroge market in Japan knows it is fucked up and vile, but the fact that you’re resurrected a dead story to try to stir up some sensationalism is utterly pathetic.

I know you’re losing the 24 Hour News War, CNN, but at least man up and try to do some real journalism before your death rattle.

Please?

More Morning Japanese Horrors

Remember how I told you about that horrific Japanese eroge “Real Kanojo” (”Real Girlfriend”) a few days back? Well, turns out all those special…um…”effects” the game was touting only happen if you’ve got a fairly beefy computer. People with less powerful machines are greeted with remarkably different results. As seen below:

Kotaku has the full gallery of such disasters here.

Good morning, the Japanese are here to scare you

This is a still from a Japanese eroge (erotic-game) called “Real Kanojo” (“Real Girlfriend”). You have the ability to virtually…umm…whatever is going on in that picture to an impossibly proportioned digital doll. Those crazy perverts even built in a facial recognition system into the “game”. If you hook up a webcam, the pixeled succubus will react to your facial cues.

Via Kotaku.

The Fallout from Modern Warfare 2

Over the last few days Microsoft has banned approximately a million consoles from their Xbox Live network. The wave of bannings comes on the heels of the release of Modern Warfare 2, which is already the biggest selling video game in history…only three days after is launch. The bannings were targeted at players who were using pirated copies of the game, and were requested by the game’s publisher, Activision.

Ok, so, that’s the news bit.

But then there’s what happens when you put pressure on a fungible group like software pirates. Over the past few days, the web has been flooded with banned Xboxes for sale on eBay and Craig’s List. The system still work as a device to play games, but nearly all of their multimedia functions, like streaming from Netflix, were tied into the Xbox Live network. This is something that the purchaser only finds out after the sale has gone through. Brick and mortar retailers are getting hit in the same way, and since they don’t check the machine’s status on Xbox Live in most cases, neither they or the customer have any idea that the system is effectively lobotomized until it is too late.

The aftershock from the ban wave will hit families that are looking to save some money during the holidays in a tight economy. Sure, a $299 Xbox 360 for $100 on Craig’s List may seem like a great deal, but buyer beware. Odds are the system is one of the walking dead. But in a way, that could be a silver lining. If a family couldn’t afford the online component of the system, the banned system would be perfect for them.

If you’re buying a used system and hoping for it to work online – watch your ass.

Japanese game market is wilting on the vine

“There are so many issues we have to solve, and the biggest challenge is that the market in Japan is shrinking — they key is gaining success in the US and Europe,” stated the exec. “At the time of the original PlayStation the Japanese market was one third of the global market, and production costs weren’t that high — so we were able to generate profit from that market alone.

“But now we’re in the era of the PlayStation 3, and the Japanese market is only one fifth of the global market — when it comes to production costs, those are swelling, so it means that unless we gain success in the overseas market our studio will go bankrupt,” said Kobayashi. “It’s a crisis we recognize.”

Found on Kotaku this morning from Yasuhide Kobayashi, the VP of Sony’s Japan Studio.

I know it is the running joke right now in gamer circles to deride the Japanese for lazy game development, and for the most part its earned. The last great Japanese games were early to mid through the PS2 life cycle, which was almost a decade ago at this point. But to see a decline of this magnitude is amazing.

It also makes me wonder about way the numbers are being judged. Titles sold or dollars spent? Japan sells more hand-held units than anywhere in the world, and a DS game costs about half of what a XBOX 360 or PS3 game costs. The numbers could be skewed toward places where people sit on their asses in front of giant flat screen TVs instead of where people play games on commuter trains.

You can feel your brain start to scream less than 10 seconds in

Blame Tim.

I’m fucking worthless today

So, here’s a picture of a claw game that spits out fake plastic breasts.

From Japan, of course.

I’m not even going to talk about the fact that the name of the game is the code word for the successful surprise attack by the Japanese against Pearl Harbor in World War 2.

Nope, not gonna mention it at all.

Japan’s on again, off again, kinda maybe not really on again affair with Eroge

Oh, Japan, Japan, Japan. Why can’t you just have normal sex? Why do you have bring in eels and octopi and things I don’t dare mention for fear they’ll come for me in the night. Is it because your men are overworked and suicidal? Is it because nearly all of your young female population has at least one STD (Infection rates has high as 82%!)? Are the pressures on your society so great that you just can’t fuck like a normal person? And if so, are things like this really how you want to relieve that tension?

For the rest of you, a primer.

Eroge (sounds like pirogi) is the Japanese portmanteau of erotic and game, erochikku gēmu. Originally starting out as games with romantic elements, with possibly a little titillation as a final reward, the genre branched in its early stage. One branch became the “love simulators” where players attempt to woo a girl through extended dialogue options. The other branch ran off gleefully into the night with the titillation, poured a roofie cocktail down its throat and came back the next morning with the broadest range of pornographic video games you can imagine. Both branches have become firmly embedded in the otaku sub-culture, sort of like every male owning at least one Playboy over the course of their life.

The eroge industry, like the Japanese porn industry on the whole, is massive. There are literally thousands of these games, most of them falling in the less-than-nice end of the spectrum. With technology growing like it is, more and more of these games are coming to market. Eventually, the shoe had to drop, just like it did back in 1998 when the Japanese finally got off their ass and banned any erotic material depicting fictional characters under the age of 18. That ban was targeted at producers of hentai that were doing stories about underage teenagers. In this case, the shoe dropping was a city council woman in New York City named Christine Quinn working in party with New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and Equality Now. It came to her attention (probably because the exact same thing was playing out in England) that eroge were available through online retailers like Amazon.com, eBay.com, Buy.com and Overstock.com. Using Japan’s place as a signatory on the 1985 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the advocacy groups were able to send the Japanese press into a bit of a tizzy over the games.

The first really weird part of this? The game they singled out as being the most egregious is 3 years old. The game is called RapeLay, and it tells the story of a Japanese subway groper, or chikan. The details are nauseating, but not uniquely singular. Hell, this game was featured on the humor site Something Awful back when it came out, and they took a moment to say that they can’t wait for the pro-censorship in video games people got a hold of it. I don’t think they could have predicted that it would take three years for that to happen.

The second weird part of this? The key fanner of the flames in Japan is the New Komeito Party, a Buddhist-centric political party that seeks world peace and all of the joys that come along with that. Their chosen method to fan the flames? Using their ties with the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) to get them to run false news stories about the Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCS), the trade group for eroge manufacturers. The time line of events goes something like this. TBS gets the EOCS to sit down with them and talk about the potential of banning the production of violent eroge. TBS then takes this interview and cuts it to make it seem like the EOCS is going to announce a prohibition on these kind of games. Some how the EOCS catches wind of this and freaks out. TBS offers them a second interview and the EOCS declines, not wanting to be even more misconstrued. So, TBS just runs the hacked up story and says to hell with the EOCS.

This was probably the goal of the New Komeito Party in the first place. TBS isn’t known for being the most scrupulous of media outlets (think FOX News crossed with TMZ), and in getting them to run a story saying the EOCS is going to ban these games the New Komeito Party has primed the pump of public outcry if the EOCS doesn’t ban them. They even managed to get TBS to include the June 2nd meeting of the EOCS as the announcement date of the ban.

Pinned in a corner, the EOCS sent out a fax to all of their member companies at the end of their June 2nd meeting stating that from this point on, there were to be no more rape simulators. They would work with individual companies who had games already in development or were prepping finished games for production. There was no vote taken, and the decree is neither contractually or legally binding. It also doesn’t affect the cottage industry of game developers who work outside of the umbrella of the EOCS.

So, that seems like a pretty straightforward victory, right? Well, nothing is straightforward in this winding story. The first game the EOCS worked with after the decree with was a lovely title called (rough translation here) “Gang raped by the entire village ~girls covered in milky liquid~“. After the EOCS made its changes the game will now be called “The trap set by the entire village ~bodies covered in milky liquid~“. The game hasn’t hit shelves yet, so no one knows if there were content changes made to the game or not. My best guess is that the EOCS is going to usher in another generation of tentacle porn and ghost cocks with their changes. Both were ways that porn producers side-stepped the Japanese government’s restrictions on showing explicit penile insertion.

So, from an MP in England and a City Councilwoman in New York, we jump to another Japanese censorship ruling that I have no doubt will end up spawning a dozen more unsettling sub-genres but never actually direct the core issue.

Right now, the Japanese islands are in turmoil. The population is in freefall. In five generations, the nation of Japan won’t have enough people to keep up their own infrastructure. This isn’t helped by the lacksidasical view taken by Japanese youth toward their own sexual health and development. Nor is it helped by the national escapism and fantasy in their pop culture. The otaku is a part of normal life, but a life that sends people into themselves, not out into the world. The final summation is that products like eroge are methods to make people money. Which is to say, they need an audience who is willing to pay for them. As long as that audience exists, they will exist. The better use of time is not spent attempting to ban them outright, but rather to address the core societal problems that cause people to develop such violent notions of sex and sexuality.

No. Fucking. Way.

Yale’s been putting up a few classes a year as “Open Courses”, and I’ve been paying off-handed attention to them, but I apparently missed this one.

ECON 159: Game Theory

Description:
This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.

Course Aims and Methods.
Game theory is a way of thinking about strategic situations. One aim of the course is to teach you some strategic considerations to take into account making your choices. A second aim is to predict how other people or organizations behave when they are in strategic settings. We will see that these aims are closely related. We will learn new concepts, methods and terminology. A third aim is to apply these tools to settings from economics and from elsewhere. The course will emphasize examples. We will also play several games in class.

Now I have even more shit I want to push through the brain meats.

Quotations

“The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ — usually after severe alcohol abuse — and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere.”

-Peter Molyneux

Nnnnggghhhhhh…..

Fuck you, world. I didn’t need to see shit like this today. Not in the state that I’m in. Fuckers.

BlizzCon started today

For the uninitiated, Blizzard is, without any doubt or room for argument, the most successful video game company in the world. They own three main intellectual properties: Diablo, StarCraft and WarCraft. Each, in their time, has been responsible for millions of hours of lost productivity, huge sections of the Internet slowing to a crawl, gang fights and at least few random fuckers playing the games so long that they fell over dead from forgetting to tend to their bodily functions. Their yearly revenues are in the billions of dollars. More people play their games on a daily basis than live in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles county.

Diablo is a point and click fantasy action game that introduced an entire generation of soon-to-be goths to their first pentagrams. Everyone called in an RPG, but it was really a way to make people buy more pain medication after they developed Carpal Tunnel syndrome from all that clicking. I hated this game, but it did change the face of how people viewed fantasy games and helped to bring PC gaming back from the brink of death. They are working on Diablo III right now, and the Internet neckbeards are up in arms because apparently the teaser screenshots Blizzard has shown have this weird shit called “color” and “light” slathered all over their “dark” and “brooding” game.

StarCraft is a futuristic realtime strategy game that is over a decade old and it is still played as something of a national nerd past-time in Korea. There are three fucking cable channel dedicated to nothing more than watching people move little men around the screen. But, oh man, what those crazy Koreans can make those little men do is amazing. I played a good bit of StarCraft in my youth, and I can say that it is the only competitive video game in history to achieve perfect balance. What is more impressive is that they did it with a trinary balance (three sides) instead of the traditional binary balance (two sides, ala chess and checkers). They are currently in the process of making StarCraft II. When that game launches I fully expect Korean to disappear from the map.

WarCraft is their third major IP, one that started as a fantasy RTS prior to StarCraft. But, what you really need to know is that Blizzard made a persistent world game out of WarCraft that launched back in 2004. Since launching the game has grown to have over 12 million world wide subscribers. Blizzard rakes in around 150 million dollars a month from this game. In movie revenue terms they are releasing Iron Man every month of the year. The second expansion is slated to come out for this game in a few weeks.

I’m talking about this because BlizzCon started today. BlizzCon is a giant Blizzard fan wank. Tens of thousands of nerds gathered in Anaheim, California to worship at the feet of Blizzard. And this isn’t some small thing. We’re talking about a group of nerds equivalent to the population of a good sized town showing up to this. And the best part?

Some of them dress up.

Please tell me what I’m looking at. Please.

EDIT: The smartest thing anyone has ever put in the gift bag at an event populated by nothing but unwashed nerds.

Jack Thompson disbarred

The Court approves the corrected referee’s report and John Bruce Thompson is permanently disbarred, effective thirty days from the date of this order so that respondent can close out his practice and protect the interests of existing clients. If respondent notifies the Court in writing that he is no longer practicing and does not need the thirty days to protect existing clients, this Court will enter an order making the permanent disbarment effective immediately. Respondent shall accept no new business from the date this order is filed.

Oh, glee, glee, glee.

Check out his wikipedia page if you want more information, but basically, Jack Thompson is a man who doesn’t believe in anything but very, very bland types of fun. And if you piss him off, he’ll turn into a wonderful ball of rage and self parody. He’s campaigned against rap music and movies, but his main target was always video games. The world is now a better place that this idiot can’t be sueing everyone in the industry at the drop of a hat.

Word on the street from the Austin Game Developer’s Conference

From a text message Tim sent me:

Homeless dude to Jessica Mulligan, “I like your hair, man.” Dude didn’t know what the fuck.

For those not aware, Jessica Mulligan is a near legendary figure in the persistent world community. She’s been working in it for as long as people have been dialing into each others machines to play games. Her talks are musts whenever I attend conferences, and she’s notorious for raking the games industry over the coals when it deserves it.

Oh, and she’s also a six foot six transsexual with a booming voice who smokes like a chimney.