No-Fail Sugar Cookies

• 6 cups flour
• 3 tsp. baking powder
• 2 cups butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla or almond extract
• 1 tsp. salt
• fresh brains, to taste

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, and mix well. Mix dry ingredients and add gradually to butter mixture. Mix until flour is completely integrated and the dough comes together.

Chill for 1 to 2 hours, or press dough between parchment paper and place in the fridge. By the time you’re finished doing this, the initial batch of rolled dough will be chilled enough to work with. Fry brains and strain them of excess juices. Dry brains on a plate, and crumble over cookies immediately after removing them from the oven. Leftover brain juices may be used in unwholesome ritual ceremonies.

Roll dough to desired thickness and cut into bunny shapes. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Yields one small army of zombunnies.

Poured Fondant Cookie Icing

• 1 – 1 1/2 cups icing sugar, as needed
• 1 tbsp corn syrup
• 1 1/2 tbsp water

Mix ingredients as needed until the icing is runny enough to pour, but thick enough to set. Apply to cooled cookies with an icing bag or jam knife. Plastic baggies with holes snipped out of their corners make inexpensive icing bags, and allow for easy clean-up*.

Visit ZombieGameWorld.com for more fun stuff!

Credits are those long, scrolling pages of text at the end of the movie that you watch just to see if the filmmakers added a special jokey tack-on scene at the end of the flick. If you read closely, you’ll see that they are the names of people who worked on the movie, listed alongside their job titles. In film, there are credits for the big people – the executive producer, the director and the principal actors – all the way down to the little people – the sandwich grip, the second-line gaffer, and the assistant schloob.

If you look closely, you’ll begin to see credits everywhere. They’re tacked on to the beginning and end of teevee shows, they’re inside album liner notes, and they pop up at the end of your favourite home console or computer video games. But the one place you won’t find them is in online free-to-play Flash games – partly because Flash game developers decide not to put them there, and partly because developers are actively blocked from adding credits to their games by corporations with selfish interests.

Flashsploitation

More than just being a token kind gesture recognizing the hard work and effort people put into an entertainment product, for mature industries like film, television and music, credits are actually a key cog in the machine. The CVs and resumes of performers and technicians rely on the credits system; often, your ability to land future jobs is based on the credits you’ve amassed on earlier projects. Because of this, there are unions and guilds strictly guiding the practice of giving credit, in order to protect entertainment professionals from exploitation.

The Flash game ecosystem is notorious for being packed with non-professionals, but we boast our fair share of pros. Many game developers do what’s called “service work” to pay their bills. A company will approach a known game developer, and will contract him to build a Flash game to certain specifications. My own company, Untold Entertainment Inc., is just such a developer. We survive on service work, largely building Flash games and Flash websites for clients like kids’ television production companies. If a prodco has a teevee show, especially if it’s targeted towards kids, they’ll also want someone to build them a web game to help promote and extend their brand. Companies like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Disney regularly contract Flash game developers to build their arsenal of online games.

If you wanted to find out which developers built these games though, you’re largely out of luck. Try fishing through the games on the sites i mentioned and look for production credits – even a single logo of the developer who built the game. With a few rare exceptions, you’ll come up empty-handed, game after game. Before founding Untold Entertainment, i worked at a media conglomerate serving a number of kids’ teevee stations. Throughout my time there, i made over fifty games. i was not credited for a single one.

Keep it Secret, Keep It Safe

Once out in the “real world”, i began to actively ask my clients for credits in the games i produced for them – a logo, at the very least. Credit is one way to boost morale and mutual respect among your developers, and beyond that – it just seems RIGHT, you know? When teevee and film are crediting their most important people down to the very guy who tapes the pylons to the road, it just didn’t seem right that the team or individual who created the entire game wouldn’t be recognized. And having my logo feature in the game somewhere could be a compelling driver for future business. All a prospective client need do is cruise through Cartoon Network’s site, for example, see my logo, and call me up with a contract offer.

Aye – there’s the rub. That’s exactly the situation that a client like Disney or Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon wants to avoid. They don’t want anyone else contracting out “their” developers. More competition for developers means that the devs will be more highly paid, and it may be more difficult for them to get their games made if the best devs are in higher demand.

No Promo

The second excuse i hear for not allowing credit is that these companies don’t want to let on that they didn’t do all the work themselves. There’s this strange macho corporate pride in pretending that all of their interactive work was done in-house – or at least, that’s the excuse they all give me. But a quick look through the credits of any special effects-laden film, for example, shows that individual effects shots are farmed out to numerous different special effects houses. This serves the special effects team in two ways: they can say they worked on Blockbuster 2: the Awesoming, and prospective clients can see their name in the credits, which both increases their brand recognition, and enables clients to contract them for new work.

But surely, a Flash game developer can at least SAY he worked on a given project, right? Actually, no. Many of these clients specify in the contract language that the game developer cannot even say he worked on the game. That means no screenshots on his site, and no link to the game. The developer must disavow any knowledge that the project ever happened, Mission: Impossible style. On one of my contracts, the client forbade me from ever mentioning i worked on the project. This became a sticking point, and when i fought for the right to promote, the client struck a bizarre bargain: i could promote my involvement in the project anywhere but online. Of course, the web is the only place i ever promote my work with Untold Entertainment.

It Doesn’t Ad Up

You could argue that the work we Flash game developers do for these companies amounts to advertising. Creating a game to promote The Family Guy or the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse shows is tantamount to creating an interactive advertisement online. And since teevee commercial spots don’t credit their creators, games promoting shows don’t need to either.

This argument falls down for two reasons: for one, there’s really no room in a teevee spot to credit the creators, but there’s plenty of room in Flash games, as they’re not temporally limited to 30 seconds. On the second count, advertising agencies promote their work all the time. Visit any agency website, and you’ll see the logos for the brands they’ve repped displayed proudly and prominently on the main page. Many sites actually do list credits for the commercials they created. Industry awards like the Clios list teevee commercial and print ad credits in full on their websites.

Credits are important. They serve as proof that a developer completed the work he said he did. They help to increase a developer’s brand awareness, and they help new clients reach Flash game developers that they otherwise may not have known about. Clients who refuse to credit developers, and who actively block developers from promoting the work are preventing the industry from maturing in the name of their own selfish interests.

Resistance by Insistence

So what’s to be done? When I started hearing from new clients that they wanted to use me instead of my more well-known competitor, i asked what he’d done to lose their business. Their answer? “He started getting pushy about credit.” Asking for credit, or even demanding credit that is rightly due to us as developers, is apparently hazardous to your health. It can harm your business. It may even be possible to land new contracts simply by forfeiting your game credit. Clients really seem to go for that type of thing.

But you know what i say? Screw that. The solution is for ALL Flash game developers to demand the credit they are due on ALL projects. Even if you’re not in this fee-for-service racket, you should add a Credits link to the main page of your Flash game as a matter of course. You need to create a logo and preface your own game with it – or simply use your own name (e.x. “A game by Ryan Henson Creighton”) Build your personal brand so that if clients come calling, you’ll have established a credit expectation in all of your games.

If ALL Flash games have a credits page (just as ALL teevee shows, movies, album liner notes, gallery installations, operas, stage plays, and nearly every other mature form of artistic expression or entertainment already has), then it will be simply unspeakable for a client to ask that you remove your name from the game. You can also support the IGDA in their efforts to create a Credit Standards guide, and point your clients to that guide during contract negotiations. For our part, Untold Entertainment now requires credit and promotion rights on all of our contracts – otherwise, we simply don’t take the job. If we as developers band together and demand recognition for our creative efforts as they do in so many other entertainment industries, together we can drag online games kicking and screaming from adolescence to adulthood.

Credits: this article was written by Ryan Henson Creighton, assistant schloob.

And i do! i want Toronto to have a really first-rate, world-renowned game design competition, but Vortex falls so far short of its potential that its participants, speakers and volunteer staff come out scathed every year.

Some of the problems plaguing the event in the past have included an impossibly short six week development time frame from funding approval to event date, lack of interest/commitment from industry (as the competition demanded too much commitment), and an outrageously imbalanced judging process that would make Middle East elections officers blush.

Here’s hoping that this year’s event improves on past transgressions. These are the changes i noticed from touring the new website:

Site’s Set High

The new Vortex website has much higher production values than in previous years. The design is far brighter and more Web 2.0-looking than the black and pink (??!) morass it once was, but the old design lingers in the occasional corner badge and logo treatment. It’s easier to find crucial information, like dates and prices, on the new site.

DIG Didn’t Get Buried

The Vortex site now partners with DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming), a mostly student-focused conference in London Ontario. Last year, presumably due to the six week ramp-up, the Vortex event was scheduled right on top of DIG, and the two events had to fight for speakers and attendance. It’s heart-breaking to see that happen – i’m very glad that this year, the two events are not only co-existing, but cross-promoting. The Vortex semi-finals take place in London at DIG this year; semi-finalists will be ferried for free to the event in a special Vortex shuttle (read: the organizer’s car ;)

The Calendar is Roomier

Last year’s competition clumped three days back-to-back at a rather nice venue near the train tracks, just East of Parkdale – the former site of Mildred Pierce, across the street from Famous People Players (that’s the one where mentally challenged performers put on a black light show – i recommend a visit!) The event felt like a bit of a death march – partly due to some incredibly dull speakers and drab presentations by entrants – so i’m not suprised that Vortex is parceled off into four separate dates, spread out across four months and (technically) two years, on into February 2011. (The site says “ONE room, FOUR days”, because “ONE room FOUR days THREE months TWO years” makes it sound like a sentencing hearing.) i hope this will make it easier for the organizers to source speakers and to get the kind of commitment they need, now that the ask is a little more bearable.

Likely owing to organizer Sari Ruda’s TIFF ties, this year’s event takes place at the new Bell Lightbox building (which may or may not be haunted by the souls of dead Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine, and on whose graves the building was constructed).

Inflation

The fees are jacked, to the tune of a 135% increase for industry entrants, and a 65% hike for students and individual industry team members. There is a multi-tiered pricing schedule (perhaps too multi-tiered?) that enables participants to experience the event’s three big dates a la carte, or as a complete package. Despite whatever lofty goals the organizers put to this event, it’s no secret that Vortex intends to earn money from its participants. i’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but let’s just call a spade a spade. Even at $235, Vortex is a great deal less expensive and contains potentially more (and certainly more game-focused) content than, say, an interactiveontario event like IN10 ($695!!), their recent INPlay conference ($899!!), or the amount of power required for the DeLorean to travel through time (1.21 jiggawatts!!).

FUN FACT: Last i checked, Vortex is a registered charity. That’s right – you don’t actually have to cure diseased orphans or nurse roadkill dolphins back to health to call yourself a charity in Canada.

It remains to be seen whether the price hike will scare students away. i felt last year that one big improvement would be to cull the entrants far more mercilessly, to avoid these drawn-out days where groups of ten college students would cluster around the podium mic, not saying anything, while their ordained leader would mumble something incoherently about the year-end project they (barely) completed.

i’m not saying that students shouldn’t be involved, but i think there must be a better way to help train and inform mediocre presenters during the boot camp phase of the event. i’m picturing something like an interactive presentation workshop (rather than a podium sermon) where participants get to stand up and practice their public speaking skills in front of the group. We did something like that two years ago with the feds when they ran a GDC preparedness seminar. It was a video conference between Toronto and Montreal delegates, and we were each asked to give our “elevator pitch” – a one-minute spiel on ourselves and our companies in case we met Rich Investor von Jinglepants travelling between the 4th and 18th floors or whatever.

Clarity

The Vortex Competition has vastly improved its stated intent. Here’s what the main page of the site said last year (i’m recounting this from memory, mind you, because i couldn’t find an archived copy of the site):

Hey, kids! Do you love to FRAG N00BS with your BFG on your PS3 while GETTING CRUNK?? Do you have a GREAT GAME IDEA that came to you while you were HUFFING GYM SOCKS? Super! Give us $100 to enter our game design competition and you could win $2000 and an Xbox 360! Daaaaaaaaamn, son!

In stark contrast, here’s how the site frames this year’s competition (emphasis mine):

Enter with your submission for a game concept or prototype. It will be reviewed by the stellar Vortex industry panel from whom you’ll receive feedback. Some of you will then get the opportunity to actually pitch your concept or prototype at the Vortex competition. The Vortex Conference and Competition is the only place in Canada where emerging game designers and developers can present their concepts to an outstanding line up of international industry honchos, financiers and venture capitalists in the hope of winning the competition and along the way getting their creation to market. Think a kinder, gentler “Dragon’s Den” with massive networking opportunities and prizing, coupled with industry sessions and coaching from the most successful entrepreneurs in Canada.

“A kinder, gentler ‘Dragon’s Den’”. That’s the key, folks. That’s what Vortex was supposed to be all along, and only now is it being made crystal clear. Gone is the phrase “game design competition” from the site. That’s because Vortex isn’t a game design competition. It’s much more about the bidness of games. Successful entrants and presenters will have their entire gameplan worked out, from timeline and budgeting, to development and marketing costs, to actual marketing and launch specifics. This is a presentation of a game concept as a business proposition. If you’ve ever applied for one of Canada’s content funds, or pitched a game to an investor like a VC, angel, or the Bank of Mom, you’ll know that the actual game idea is only one component in the complex machinery of your proposal. i’m very glad to see that the intent of the event is being made more clear, and i hope word spreads about what’s expected of entrants.

Final Words of Warning

Am i going to enter this year? i’m actually amazed Vortex hasn’t shown up at my office with a pipe bomb by this point. i’m not their favourite person. If i enter, i’ll likely be burning my $235 entrance fee, because it sounds like they’ll be culling their entrants. And man, they’re probably itching to “cull” me.

Take a quick look at their Privacy Policy, where they admit they’ll share your personal details to “like-minded organizations” and possibly hit you up for money. If you’re not cool with that, make sure to opt out, and to wait their two business days (!!) to be removed from the list.

Finally, i find it amusing that Vortex claims to be “only place in Canada where [you] can [present your game] in the hope of winning the competition”. So … Vortex is the only place in Canada where you can win the Vortex competition? That’s most likely true.

However awkwardly written, the sentiment that Vortex is the only place in Canada where you have access to industry “honchos, financiers and venture capitalists” is a bit off the mark. Thankfully, there are a LOT of great game-related events going on in this country. Here are just a few (and i’ve highlighted those that are free to participants):

• FITC
• Hand Eye Society
• Montreal International Game Summit
• Unite
• FlashInTO
• FlexCamp
• IGDA
• DIG
• Jalloo
• GDC Canada
• Gamercamp

Go forth and game!

The story continues today. A new client – an animation company – asked to partner with us on a Request for Proposal. They asked me to provide a credits list. i had never heard of such a thing. i told them that i could provide a list of games and projects we’ve worked on, but i confided that i hadn’t actually been credited on anything. This was despite over two years of operation as Untold Entertainment.

Disavow All Knowledge

A prospective client, a broadcaster, contacted me a few weeks ago and asked me to bid on a project. i came back with a very competetive price, but one of my stipulations was that i wanted to link to the finished project from my website, and to host a video of gameplay on my site in case the client’s link ever went down. The prospective client adamantly refused to allow this. “Media Conglomorate X is a self-contained, self-sufficient entity that does NOT outsource work to vendors (even though we do).” The issue was a sticking point for me, and i declined the contract.

Still another teevee client made it a make-or-break condition of a contract on a six-month job that we didn’t link to or mention the project on our website. We could talk about the project in any medium other than web, including (presumably) film, teevee, physical sell-sheets, and interpretive dance. They allowed for these, knowing that the only place we promote our work is on our website.

i have taken work from teevee clients who have revealed to me that they’re no longer hiring a colleague of mine, because he has started asking for credit on final projects.

The Credit Double Standard

This all leads me to believe that while those of us who have been involved in video games all our lives see it as a legitimate medium, the Old Guard – particularly teevee people, and especially Canadian broadcasters – don’t. Everyone who works on a film, down to the seemingly most insignificant person who holds the lunch platter (the “sandwich grip”), gets credited by name at the end of the movie. And in cases where animated movies or special effects-heavy flicks outsource shots to other production companies, you see those production companies listed by name, with all of their employees individually credited.

Ever read the liner notes on a music album? The guy who played the triangle gets a credit.

Ever watch the credit roll at the end of a teevee show? The Executive Producer on the broadcaster side who had nothing to do with the conception or production of the show gets a credit – usually top-billing.

But what do they give a web game developer who handles the art, animation, programming, writing, voice-over, sound effects, music composition and performance, bug testing and sandwich holding? Bupkiss. No credit. And worse – the threat of a lost contract to anyone who dares ask for credit.

Disgrace

i know many of the posts i write here are rife with griping, ranting and finger-pointing, but in this event it’s justified. Old Guard teevee types who pack a show’s credit list with names, but who refuse to acknowledge that a single soul (and in my case, ONLY a single soul) worked on a video game supporting that show, should be publicly shamed. So here i am, publicly shaming them.

For shame!! The people who work on a project must be credited for their work on that project. Vendors must be permitted to showcase that work on their own sites, so that they can successfully contract more work. And the medium of video games – web games included – must be treated as a significant one. The creators of web games are worthy to be recognized to the same degree as producers of film, teevee, music, and radio.

The correct answer is “SEX”.

It annoys me to no end to see “GENDER” on a form asking me whether i have a penis or a vagina, because gender is not determined by that factor alone. Gender – masculinity and femininity/maleness and femaleness – is determined by a number of factors, and is not solely influenced by the amount of testosterone / progesterone / estrogen / Legolas / pepperoni in your body. i reflected on this while i read guest author Julia Barry’s How to Create/Market Games for Women article on Taylan Kay’s “The Selling Game” blog.

Sissy Boy

i comment a lot on violence in gaming, often complaining about it, as i would if i were a filmmaker who wanted to create great films, but the dominant genre in my industry was porn. Or if i was a television producer, and the top-ranking shows were fishing shows, and you couldn’t get any considerable love or attention unless you created a fishing show. It’s depressing.

But i was reminded throughout Julia’s article that i have had a far different upbringing than most men. i was raised the only child of a single mother who abhorred violence of any kind. Most of the men in my life were baddies. And today, i am the only male in my family unit save for the two cats, and we cut off their testicles years ago.

So when i rail against violence – when i commit to non-violence in my company credo – i’m doing so from a unique position where, through my upbringing and conditioning, i skew further toward the feminine end of the gender spectrum than the masculine end. And i’m okay with that. It helps me to appreciate and understand Julia’s perspective far more than if i’d been raised on a steady diet of blood n’ tits.

Barbarians at the Gate

With many videogames, we are entrenching a world of values where boys impress each other by being violent, and girls impress boys (and compete with other girls) in being pretty and inviting of sexual encounter.

i agree with Julia here, as long as we replace “are entrenching” with “have entrenched”. It feels like this attitude of betterment-through-beheading has been firmly set, and we are enslaved to it. This value system was already in place in other media while the pioneers of video games were creating Space War!, Pong and Zork on monstrous machines at the turn-of-the-80′s. Video games were far less visceral while i was growing up – not because we lacked the technology to depict dismemberment and disembowling, but because i believe the people creating games were kinder, gentler and more thoughtful. Dare i say it? More feminine.

It wasn’t until the 90′s that jocks got involved in gaming in a big way, thanks mostly to id software. Suddenly, there was an influx of customers whose needs were being catered to – in this case, manly red-meat-eating macho MEN with back hair and cocks the size of SUVs who wanted to kill, compete, maim, humiliate, screw, devour, shoot, mock, explode and teabag their way to that thrillingly blunt endorphin release that the more reasoned among us can achieve with a particularly stimulating crossword puzzle. Simply put, dumb, base males aged 18-35 hijacked the video game industry in the early 1990s, and they remain the ruling customer class to this very day.

But Julia’s article gave me hope: hope of a day when we see a similar shift as the jock renaissance of the early 90′s, and game developers figure out how to best appeal to women – how to reliably give ladies their endorphin release (hint: it takes longer, but they can experience it multiple times). Then – who knows? We might see another complete shift that sees the game industry dominated with games about buying and selling real estate, improving situations through the power of colour and texture, nurturing the growth of plants and animals, stealing each others’ friends, and other more feminine pursuits.

Hope Only Exists in an Alternate Universe

Realistically, though, i don’t see this happening, unless we see a major shift in the way electronic entertainment is designed and built. The dominant programming languages, techniques and methodologies, hardware and software have all been designed by certain types of men, so that the same types of men can understand and use them to create more tools and technology, which beget more tools and technology, and so on. All of these created elements play to the strengths of an analytical, scientific mind – the type of mind that is most often found pulsating inside a body that has a penis. PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL ME INSISTING THAT WOMEN CAN ALSO BE ANALYTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC. i’m speaking generally here. And generally, the tools and technologies have been built by nerdy males and for nerdy males, and now that the beget-ball is rolling, it’ll be very difficult to stop.

In trying to create “girl” games … companies pander even more to gender stereotypes. Marketing games to girls shouldn’t mean making everything gossipy and pink, yet there are countless products in that vein. Games and toys aimed at the female population are often shallow, fluffy screen versions of dress-up and shopping.

The challenge here is that women – and men, for that matter – don’t know what’s good for them. i remember sitting at a panel discussion on this topic, where the game developer said that they tested a number of themes and concepts on little girls and female gamers, and the results that consistently scored the highest involved pink, shopping, dress-up, baking, and pets. The OOO (Three Rings) crew defended the sexy, skimpy female pirate clothing in their Puzzle Pirates online game by revealing that not only did pirate bikini tops sell better than other female characters’ clothing, but that they started the game with more modest attire and were hounded by their female players requesting sexier clothing options.

So this begs the question: are less-sexualized, more thoughtful and more “3-dimensional” (as Julia puts it) games something that:

1. all women want
2. some women want
3. all women should want, but don’t know it
4. some women want on behalf of all women, who should really know better?

My suspicion is that it’s that last point, in which case i suppose i am similarly one man in a minority of men who want something better on behalf of all men. Masculinity and manhood are not proven through achieving the most headshots, or ripping the most still-beating hearts out of digital characters’ chests, in the same way that femininity is not demonstrated by combing and washing the sparkling mane of your pink flying unicorn vagina pony. A better, more balanced world, both virtual and actual, lies somewhere between the extreme ends of the gender spectrum.

Nexon’s Min Kim was recently interviewed by Gamasutra about the company’s upcoming virtual world Block Party. During the interview, Kim rattled off a list of the eight types of items you can sell in an online game.

When it comes to items, they can serve eight purposes, says Kim: function, envy/prestige, recognition, collecting, rarity/scarcity, competition, friendship, peer pressure. These are the keywords, he said several times, that you should be thinking about when designing your items to sell.

With the likes of MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap offering Flash microtransactions, i thought it would be worthwhile to explore Kim’s list, and to provide examples to flesh out his examples. Some of these item classifications bleed into others. Most of them need to hook into some sort of multiplayer game, because they’re driven by social interactions. But there are ways to structure your game to leverage feelings of envy and aspiration that don’t require a live multiplayer server, which i’ll explain in this article.

1. Function

The first item type is one that affects gameplay, like the downloadable tracks in Rock Band 2. Other, more generic examples are things like guns that provide extra firepower, and winged mounts that let you fly clear across a virtual world. Often, these items have the most perceived value to a player because they actually do something. Occasionally, they’ll even give a player an advantage over other players during gameplay.

The danger is that by selling functional items, you risk alienating your player base, creating a class system of haves and have-nots. When poorly designed, functional items can actually exclude players from playing together; in the case of Rock Band, all four band members have own a downloadable track in order to play through that song together. It’s not long before a group of online strangers have to default to the songs that shipped with the disc, because none of them own identical set lists. Electronic Arts faced a lot of flack when players learned they would be charging extra money for in-game weapons in Battlefield: Bad Company that many people thought should have been included with the experience.

2. Envy/Prestige

Virtual clothing fits nicely into this category. In a multiplayer game, everyone wants to stand out. We can all recall the pain of spending half an hour tooling up a character for a virtual world, only to jump into that world to find that half the game’s population chose the same hat, boots and skin tone. Finding your twin online isn’t quite as annoying as wearing the same dress as another girl to prom, but it’s up there.

Some games are even designed so that all of the free players (or “hobos”, as i like to call them) look just similar enough as to annoy the player. A quick hit with the credit card is enough to straighten that out – one dollar buys you a new wardrobe item that no one else has. That is, until everyone else spends a dollar to have it, in which case you need to keep ponying up the real-world cash to stay ahead of the fashion curve.

The Xbox Live service recently added an Avatar Marketplace that consists solely of Envy/Prestige items.

3. Recognition

Recognition items that are based on player achievement, like trophies, banners and crests, are difficult to sell. These are most often freebies that a player unlocks by accomplishing something in the game. One way that i suppose you could monetize this type of item is to enable the player to pay to turn a free achievement into a concrete item.

Let’s say, for example, that they player can buy a statue of himself to put in the town square, but ONLY if he kisses seventeen muskrats. The player goes out and accomplishes this amazing feat, but has no real way to show it off – no one is going to go digging through the player’s mission log to uncover that particular accomplishment. So the player pays $23.95 real-world dollars to convert his achievement into the statue to brag about his prowess with muskrats.

Another option is to charge players to unlock badges, trophies and achievements that other players come by honestly. This kind of thing can go on in an after-market area – for example, while researching this article, i found a site that purports to sell you Pogo Club badges for $5 apiece.

Of course, players who spend a million hours mastering a game to unlock the Magic Whizzwang cry foul if you start selling Magic Whizzwangs to players with more dollars than time. There are a few strategies you can adopt here:

1. Do it anyway, and cry yourself to sleep on a bed of money.
2. Run the after-market site yourself, but don’t put any corporate branding on it, so that it looks like some shady fly-by-night site is selling badges, but you get all the profit
3. Don’t do it, and risk losing out on a potentially major source of revenue.

There’s not a lot of difference between selling achievements and selling powerful in-game weapons. In both cases, you’re monetizing “time-poor, money-rich” players over “time-rich, money-poor” (AKA hobo) players. The difference is purely psychological: we think of awards as something to be earned, not bought. Of course, graduate to the Real World and you’ll find that most things in this life are earned with money, awards included.

4. Collecting

This is one of my absolute favourite item types to design. When i was working on The Sitekick Proejct for Corus Entertainment, i designed a number of often complex item collections, where certain items had to be combined like Voltron to unlock other items. i didn’t quite reach that Mecca where i had kids combining their Voltron uber-items to unlock Super Mega Ultra items, but i can see that’s where my career would have gone if i had stayed. :)

Of course, the natural progression for The Sitekick Project or any game like it, with its big empty Pokemon-inspired list and it’s 1000 some-odd items is to charge players for items so that they can fill in gaps in their collections. While it’s a reasonably compelling prospect for an adult, you have to understand that maintaining complex collections is a psychological attribute of your people, and completing that sticker album or plastic pony set becomes absolutely crucial. It might be worth a few bucks to mom and dad to stop junior from having the DTs and just buy one or two missing items.

5. Rarity/Scarcity

The Sitekick Project also had its share of rare items, but of course it picked up its cues from other games – most notably CCGs, or Collectible Card Games. And CCGs owe it all to baseball cards.

The very best way to monetize rare items, incidentally, is to follow the baseball card model: items are sold in packs. Some items are rare. The player must continue to purchase packs filled with mostly mundane items and “doubles” in the hopes of stumbling upon a rare item. You can even produce rareities in tiers: you can go from “rare” at .01% probability to “legendary” at 0.001% probability. Rare items are usually shiny.

Depending on your scruples as a designer, you can also charge your players a large fee to flat-out buy a rare item. Just make sure the price is high enough to deter most players, who will likely end up spending more than the cost of the buy-out price fishing for rare items. This is the crane game principle that leads you to spend $35 trying to snag a $2 stuffed animal out of the machine, when the same amount of money could have gone towards a perfectly nice Gund bear at the Hallmark store down the street.

Another way to sell scarcity is to release a series of items and to arbitrarily limit their quantities. Of course, since the items are digital, scarcity is entirely artificial. Imposing an item quantity on them or selling an item for a limited time only is a great way to see completist players snapping stuff up like it’s an End of the World Sale. And once a player buys a limited item and the sale expires, it becomes both a Rare and Prestige/Envy item in one fell swoop.

6. Competition

i had trouble interpreting this one, and discerning it from Prestige/Envy items. There are a few ways i can think of to charge for competition:

1. Sell tickets or entry fees to competetive events
2. Build in a competetive aspect and charge players for the item with which they compete (a friend of mine bought a lot of Xbox games so that he could get a higher GamerScore than me. The Achievements are free [with purchase of game]. The purchase of game isn’t.)
3. Sell the game itself and let players be competetive on their own. For example, you can see an air hockey table as a furniture item for a player to store in his room. The player can challenge friends to come to his house and beat him at air hockey. You can even build in a “home advantage” to an air hockey board that a player owns – perhaps the owner of the table always gets to go first?

7. Friendship

Korean game Cyworld popularized virtual gift-giving, and went so far as to make those virtual gifts expire, which blew my mind. This was years before North American designers were even thinking about virtual item sales, and the Koreans were already pioneering a virtual sofa that you could buy with real money and give to a friend that would vanish in a puff of smoke after two weeks. It boggles my mind.

8. Peer Pressure

Again, this is a subtle thing to distinguish from a Prestige/Envy item. i think the difference is that a Prestige/Envy item is something that one person has that you want. A Peer Pressure item is something that EVERYBODY has. You want it not because it’s a particularly attractive item, but because you don’t want to feel left out.

Here’s how i see this working: throw a toga party in your virtual world. Hype it HUGE. Have everyone mail away (in-game) for a toga, and cut off mail-in toga orders at a certain point. Then just grind away on the hype machine for a week, while the players can’t order a toga. On the day of the party, everyone who sent away for one receives a free toga via in-game mail. You can also find other ways to give away togas for free on the day. Make sure it’s well known that EVERYBODY must have a toga to properly party.

When over half of your players have a toga, and the other half do not, make togas available as an impulse item for x real-world dollars (or cents). Then, sit back and watch people snap up those togas.

This is a good way to avoid pissing off your players: you gave them every opportunity to get a toga for free. The players who have to buy togas have only themselves to blame.

Here are a few additional categories of virtual item types that i’d like to add to Min Kim’s list:

Sustainability Items

These are items or services that constantly suck players’ resources to keep them playing. Picture a car combat game where you have to keep buying gas. Tamagotchis were essentially giant drains – you had to keep feeding and playing with your virtual pet, or else it would die and you’d brick your device.

The Sims characters are on constant drains – their hunger, happiness, fun and social lives are constantly sapped as you play.

If you build out a lot of gameplay beyond keeping your virtual parasite happy and emotionally well-adjusted, completing mundane tasks like feeding and watering your online identity becomes a bore. So you can sell players items like auto-plant feeders, dog-walking services and extra gas tanks, instead of making players drill for their own crude.

Charity Items

i very much like the idea of virtual items that are tied to some sort of charitable cause. The red movement pulled this off with their Facebook gifts, and i can see it working elsewhere as well.

Insurance

You haven’t yet seen a virtual world where a tsunami hits your virtual house while you’re away and wipes out all your tchotchkes. That’s because i haven’t designed my own virtual world yet. But in my dystopian vision, you can buy fire, theft, flood and gigantic lizard insurance to protect your goodies from various Acts of Ryan.

Feature Locks

At the beginning of most virtual worlds, you design your avatar and choose a house. The designer can then lock these two features, and others like it, forevermore. Once you choose your look, that’s it. It’s done. Once you choose a neighbourhood to live in, you have to abide by that choice. Once you choose your character’s name, it’s locked in for all time.

This enables you to charge a lofty real-world price for a key game feature that you’ve already built. Charge the player a “plastic surgery” fee to go back into the character creator tool. Good fun.

Step Right Up

As you can see, you need to be a bit of a PT Barnum type in order sell virtual items online. We’re talking about selling something that has no inherent value, that costs you zero dollars to reproduce, and that lives or dies on the human psychological foibles you’re able to tap into. The morality of all this may be questionable, and i’ve heard some folks call virtual item sales downright evil, especially when it comes to selling virtual items to children. But i have another perspective:

1. Having been a child myself (and, in fact, remaining so to a large extent), i know first-hand the real joy that a virtual thing can bring. Some of the most amazing places i’ve been, some of the most interesting people i’ve met, and some of the funniest things i remember have all been from video games, while many of my real-life experiences have fallen far short of my virtual experiences.

   And when i laid that last sticker down in my Panini He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sticker album, i knew that the scads of allowance money i’d burned collecting those stickers had been worth it. In my own small child universe, i had accomplished something. i had followed through, and i had achieved.

   And today, employing much of the same determination, focus, and vision, i continue to achieve.

   

   Thanks to He-Man, i am also aggressively homosexual.

2. If rich people are so well-off that they have nothing better to do than to spend their money on non-existent items, more power to them. i willl gladly take their money and build out the charitable arm of my company, so that real people with real needs can eat real food.

This way to the great egress!

One of the most-repeated tips i heard at the Casual Connect conference a few weeks ago was to develop a strong brand. Customers like strong brands. Strong branding unifies all your … your stuff under one label. Strong brands are about striking, professional-looking logos, consistent use of colours and fonts, and maybe even some sort of manifesto or feeling that you emit.

Our over-arching brand is called Untold Entertainment. The word “untold” means “lots”. Lots of entertainment.

Our Brand’s Origin Story

It bothers me a little when i go to a conference or a function, and i’ll meet a few new people in a huddle, and someone will say “who are you?” And i’ll say “i’m Ryan Creighton. i run a small game design studio in Toronto called Untold Entertainment.” And the person will say “Oh? What type of work do you do?” And this jackass over here – the one in the sweater vest – will say “It’s untold! He can’t tell you! RAH HA HA HA!” Then he’ll slap his knee and go out and kill someone while drunk driving.

But it doesn’t happen all that often. Most people know what the word means. And most people have heard someone use the wording “untold entertainment” in casual speech, usually to describe something outlandish. Example: “So i was at the fair today, and they had a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws. Untold entertainment.”

In fact – and i’m not kidding – our original company logo was a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws.

This was my Facebook avatar at the time (and still is, actually):

i’m not a big comic book fan, but i had this idea of creating a corporate website that looked like one of those junk pages in a comic book, full of special offers for useless and exaggerated products like “moon shoes”, “secret decoder rings”, and “asthma inhalers”:

This is as far as i got before my friends and loved ones (thankfully) stopped me:

Thinking that the saturation was the problem, i kept the logo and moved to a completely black design, and continued to flounder:

In my former life working for a broadcaster, i illustrated a few games using a crude, sketchy style that a lot of people found enduring. (Like Dr. Seuss, i drew things all silly-looking because i’m not very skilled at drawing things for serious. UNlike Dr. Seuss, i toil in relative obscurity.) So the logo evolved into a hastily-scribbled monster gnawing on a cardboard sign, which tested very well with 18-35-year-old women who are married to me.

With our first published Untold Entertainment website, we tried to convey the outlandish “untold entertainment” theme. We had a cartoonish bomb that dropped sausages, and other strange things. Everything was in a doodly, sketchy style:

The Brand You Know

When we hired our first (and to date, only) devoted artist, Mark Duiker. i asked that he stick to the established art style. He seemed a little dismayed. But he eventually pulled off the fantastic-looking ornate marginalia you see around the site today. These doodles are also found on our company letterhead and invoices.

The official company colours are red and browny yellow. These are also the colours i painted my bedroom, a few years before starting the company.

Through the carefully-drawn but careless-seeming visual branding, i hoped to convey a devil-may-care, mischievous, even dangerous attitude that was nevertheless playful and whimsical. The blog monster in our nav shouts too loudly. The gigantic tongue menu that appears when you roll over our About button is completely inappropriate for a professional site. The Twitter bird at the top of each page is just a little out of control. And if we ever get around to launching it, the monster that plucks letters from the project abstracts on our main page to spell naughty words will delight and outrage you. (i’m not making that up either. It exists.)

The Principle of the Thing

The company has five stated principles which, if you haven’t read them, i’ll repeat for you here:

• uncompromising honesty
• constant communication
• the sanctity of childhood
• non-violence in gaming (barring the presence of zombies)
• the use of entertainment to improve, rather than degrade, the human condition

“Constant communication” is in there to give us a competetive edge over game vendors who, i’ve heard, don’t return emails or phone calls to their clients.

We list “uncompromising honesty” because i don’t think many other studios can commit to that. i’ve also heard word that our competitors will pretend that everything’s going smoothly until deadline day, and the reason they weren’t answering phone calls or emails the whole time is that the project went to pot two months ago and they were too lilly-livered to fess up.

We’re courageous enough to fess up. If something’s not going to work, or we’re not going to deliver on time (whether through our own fault or otherwise), we’ll say so. Uncompromising honesty, constantly communicated.

And the other three points stem from my own worldview. i believe in the sanctity of childhood – in other words, you shouldn’t host games about setting people on fire with no content warning when you know damn well that children visit your site regularly, because you own a kids’ teevee channel. *cough* Viacom *cough*

Non-violence in gaming, because i think every other game developer on the planet has the whole violence thing pretty much covered. We’d like to tackle something a little more innovative. (The caveat, of course, is that zombies are pure unfettered evil, and they’re just gonna have to die. Uh … again.)

Entertainment to improve the human condition … when i wrote this, i may have been thinking specifically of Joe Cartoon putting rodents in blenders, or people developing rape games, or Happy Tree Friends, or any of the dreck that people fill their minds with these days. If you catch us creating “Britney Spears Must Die” games or “Close Range“-style games, by all means, please call us out on it.

So What’s On Your Mind?

i’ve been giving a lot of thought to developing a games portal. i’ve been considering Big Fish Games, the heavy-lifter in the casual downloadable space, and what they did right to haul in all that traffic (Kajillions of players a day, i’m told – but i think that might be an exaggeration.) Here are a few things i think they figured out:

1. Define your audience. (Big Fish Games targets middle-aged women)
2. Develop a strong brand. BFG’s official colours are blue and white, with a green accent. Their logo is professionally-designed, with a fish character that stays on-model (ie doesn’t look unsettling or retarded) in various poses.

   

   A face only a mother could give her life’s savings to

3. Cook up some kind of tag line. BFG’s is “A New Game Every Day!” Our is “We Make Flash Games”, which will have to change when we finally kick Flash to the curb and indulge our new mistress, Unity3D.
4. Devote significant time and energy to customer service.
5. Track every player action within an inch of its life, and act on the stats you collect.
6. Take 70% of all shared revenues, then cackle evilly and return to your coffin before the sun scorches your ashen skin.

Surveying the Landscape

So with these points in mind, i gaze across the Flash game portal space. i think about branding, and what a strong brand looks and feels like, and then i look at the top ten games that bring traffic to our roving game Two By Two in the MochiMedia distribution network.

Let’s keep it simple and just look at the logos. Beneath each logo, i’ve noted the number of plays the game has enjoyed from each portal:

(For the record, i had not seen the Free Hobo site before writing my Cash Cow Part 2 post on Members, Owners, and Hobos. And here i thought i was so original :)

So please understand that i’m depicting these logos in the best possible light, apart from the rest of the portal structure, which goes a lot like this:

Kicking Midgets

So at this point, i feel that creating a Flash game portal to compete with these guys is like entering Lance Armstrong in the Special Olympics. There are obviously a lot of folks out there who want a quick cash-in, who will pull a few SEO tricks and surround a mountain of free content with a fence of unscrupulous advertising and call it a day.

To the victor, the spoils. Big Fish has dominated the casual downloadable space because they’ve taken additional steps to make their service successful. So here are a few things i think we can learn by looking at the good (BigFish), and the bad/ugly (nearly every Flash portal):

1. Pick an audience. Have the guts to go for a niche, and see if you can’t go after anyone but the hyper-critical (and stingy) teenaged boys that dominate the space at the moment
2. Build a strong brand – think of a style bible, a tagline, and a brand personality. Make sure that brand appeals to your target audience.
3. Listen to your audience. If you get complaints about your portal from teenaged boys, please ignore them. But if the black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminists you’ve identified as your target audience air their complaints or make suggestions, listen up! Do what they say. Then you’ll be treated to an ever-expanding audience of black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminists. And finally, you’ll have the black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminist market cornered.
4. Once you corner your niche market, pick a new, related group and expand outward. It’s like playing Risk. But you won’t land that first group unless you listen carefully, and tailor your service to them.

Let’s Fix This Mess

i hear a lot of talk about making people “fall in love” with your game. They can fall in love with your service, too. And once they open their hearts, they’ll open their wallets. i don’t know about you, but i don’t want to play on a portal that doesn’t respect me – that thrusts ads in my face and doesn’t carefully manicure its collection of games and tailor the library to my tastes and interests.

That’s why we don’t have other audiences playing Flash games. What self-respecting educated father of four adult children wants to wade through a site like Newgrounds looking for a game amidst porno Pokemon cartoons and Muslim terrorist dress-up games? That guy has a credit card, but i’m not getting anywhere near his money if i make him endure bad branding, inappropriate content, and an assload of ads.

The creator of Fantastic Contraption popped in here recently and said that the poor quality of most Flash games made it easy to compete – to totally snooker everyone out there and stand apart. i see the same opportunity with Flash portals. So why don’t you create your own? The industry could stand a little sprucing up.

If you’re a Flash game developer, you’re in at the ground floor of a new service: payment systems for Flash games. These systems make it easier for game developers to charge money both for their games, and for things within their games. Here’s how it works:

1. Player pays real money to buy fake money through one of these systems.
2. Player spends fake money on virtual stuff. As a game dev, you can technically charge for whatever you like: level packs, hats, extended versions/director’s cuts, etc etc. The sky’s the limit.

It’s So Workable, It Just Might Work

i’ve been following the microtransaction model for a number of years. It’s been crazy popular in places like Korea for a good long time, and it was amusing to see the initial resistance and resentment in North America to the idea. Panels at the Game Developers Conference were filled with folks nibbling their fingernails and asking “Will it really work over here?” and “Won’t players be angry with us?”, with at least a few devs boldly insisting that micropayments are strictly a Southeast Asian cultural anomaly, and the system won’t work here. Meanwhile, in the other room at the Worlds in Motion (virtual worlds) summit, early North American pioneers of those systems were running panels titled “Can You Believe We’re Making All This Money?” and “Who Wants a House? Cuz I’ve Got a Bunch of Em”.

Of course, virtual currency systems do work here, as evidenced by Microsoft’s successes with its GamerPoints (AKA “BillyBucks”), enabling the creators of Rock Band and others to pocket obscene amounts of cash in dribs and drabs for virtual whatsits. Microsoft’s new fall Xbox 360 seems to exist only to take more money from people in the form of digital doodads for their avatars. Proprietary systems have been rolled out in numerous other games and portals, including Three Rings (OOO) Puzzle Pirates with its dual-currency system, and the WildTangent game portal, where players can spend virtual coins to “rent” games. But no one has thought to capitalize on the literal kerfillions of players in the Flash casual games space. Until now.

There are three companies i’m aware of who are rolling out virtual payment systems for Flash games: MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap. Please let me know if there are others. They all work roughly the same way: pay real money for fake money, and spend fake money for fake things in fake games for real thrills. One of the key take-aways for me from GDC 07, by the folks running the “Seriously. My Pants Are Woven From Hundred Dollar Bills” panel, was this: do whatever it takes to enable your players to give you money.

What they meant was that you should provide as many payment methods as possible if you want to take as much money as possible from your players. This came up in the context of the myriad wild and wooly ways that Europeans pay for things online. (The French, for example, pay by cheque. True story.) The speakers advocated pay-by-phone, PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, SMS, and a number of crazy payment methods i’d never even heard of. (Pay with your own hair? What the heck is that about?)

Untold Entertainment Enters the Fray

So here we are, poised to release a few games in the no-longer-free-to-play ecosystem. These are early days, and i have no idea which microtransaction system will take the biggest piece of the pie: MochiCoins, GamerSafe or HeyZap. And frankly, i don’t care. Why should i have to choose between them? Here’s what i want to do:

ME: Hey Player! Wouldn’t this game be more fun if your character was wearing SexyPants??

BUTTON: Hell yes!

ME: Great! A pair of SexyPants will cost you 95 cents.

BUTTON: Pay via HeyZap!
BUTTON: Pay with GamerGold!
BUTTON: Pay with MochiCoins!

Sounds good, right? i’m not shutting anyone out. i’m not preventing the GamerGold folks from buying SexyPants. i don’t particularly care which system the player supports – i just want to take his money.

However

The scenario i described above can’t happen at present, because MochiMedia has written into their terms of service that devs shall not hook multiple transaction systems into their games. GamerSafe and HeyZap have not made this stipulation. So i can have a game that either allows MochiCoin payments exclusively, or i can have a game that allows for GamerSafe and HeyZap payments. And that, in my professional opinion, stinks.

This type of exlusivity is NOT analgous to going into a restaurant and ordering a Coke, and the waitress says “Is Pepsi okay?” because the restaurant has an exclusive arrangement with PepsiCo. No – this is much more like eating your meal (Coke or Pepsi nothwithstanding), and trying to pay with your VISA card, but the restaurant only takes MasterCard and American Express. If i walk into a store and they don’t make it convenient for me to pay with a commonly accepted system, i walk out of that store and i don’t come back … but not before i punch someone right in the face, because that’s how angry it makes me.

Three Facts About Payment System Exclusivity

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for developers. We want to lower the barrier to entry for our players, especially since getting people to buy goods in the formerly-free-to-play space is already an uphill battle.

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for players. It’s forcing players to wait until a clear winner emerges in the Flash virtual goods space. Why would i sink my money into GamerGold only to find that every single game supports HeyZap or MochiCoins? i’d better play it safe and let early adopters figure it out for me. When a leader emerges, i’ll start spending my money.

No, Mochi’s exclusivity clause is only good for Mochi. It’s a clear attempt to be the only game in town, and to monopolize this service in its infancy. And we all know what happens with monopolies, don’t we? You end up rolling a “3″ and landing on Park Place with a hotel, and then you get reamed up the pucker.

Thankfully, it’s still early enough in the make your voice heard about how this stuff will work. If you think Mochi should play nicely with others, why not toss them an email here?

team@mochimedia.com

Or, if you think they’re making the right decision, give them a call and let them know:

(415) 680-3740

Or, you can just voice your opinions in a comment on this blog and bathe me in sweet, delicious Internet traffic.

For my part, i believe they’re hurting players and devs right out of the gate in an early, unnecessary bid for domination. Given the choice, i’d rather support two systems than one – HeyZap and GamerSafe. Ideally, i want to support all three, along with any other system that enters the space. So i’m making a public appeal to you, Team Mochi, to rethink your policy. i’ll even use your first and last names here so that your Google vanity searches will bring you to this article.

On George Garrick! On Jameson Hsu! on Bob Ippolito! On Vixen!
On Comet! On Cupid! On Justin Wong! On Eric Boyd!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the stair!
Renounce this proviso, and please grow a pair!

Raph pulls it out of the nerd fire in the final few paragraphs by admitting his actual moral outrage over the inclusion of torture in gaming.

Honk if You Hate Murdering Hookers

i’ve written a heap of posts lately about morality in gaming, and to see the topic cropping up all over the place, i begin to wonder whether it’s finally an issue on the industry’s radar. (Or is it just that news media tend to criticize games more harshly around the holidays?) The more i read, the more i learn that i’m actually not the only person who abhors a lot of the M-rated content in today’s best-sellers, but that there’s a moral minority of insiders growing slowly more vocal on the topic.

Coming out of a tradition of wonderful story- and character-based graphic adventure games from LucasArts and Sierra Online, to training in the industry while the walls crashed down around me and games like DOOM began to take hold, i look forward to a future where the games are less about soulless criminal joyrides, and are a shade more uplifting.

MTV Multiplayer has an article where they talk about how Sigourney Weaver passed on voicing Ripley for some upcoming Aliens games. Her reasoning was twofold:

1) The designers’ Ripley was out of character, swearing like a sailor and shooting up sick people and human marines (in addition to the expected alien fodder)

2) The developer had previously been involved with a game she called Redneck, where you “shoot animals.” She likely meant Redneck Rampage.

i was recently interviewed by local news (an event i can’t seem to stop yammering about), and said in the unaired portion of the interview that the overboard, extreme content in gaming will likely calm down once more women, older people and (hopefully) kids from younger generations have their shot at making games. And in a recent post about Fallout 3, i lamented the fact that very few people were calling game devs out on content that was “not okay”.

Well, karma’s a bitch. Here’s a 59-year-old woman taking a stand against what she feels is overboard game content – content that misses the marks of artistry and quality by a country mile. And it’s not just another crazy lawyer from Florida or paranoid hockey mom making the call. i imagine Sigourney Weaver holds a lot of sway over the profitability of these Aliens games. i for one dislike playing cover songs in rhythm games, and movie-based games starring soundalike actors.

If you appear in a video on YouTube snorting lines of coke off a stripper’s jubblies, it may be difficult for you to have a successful career in politics later on. Similarly, if you’re planning on making a lifetime career out of this game development thing, you might want to give careful thought to the content decisions you make early on. Sigourney Weaver could come back to bite you.

One reporter recently phoned it in, shoehorning me into the standard “think of the children” conclusion in his story on video game violence and the link to real-world aggression:

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2008/12/04/ryan-creighton-on-city-news-at-6-with-dr-karl/

The reporter claims that i said the key is “supervising your children”. i said no such thing. He asked me what parents can do to supervise their children, and i responded. That’s a far cry from me initiating the point.

Why end on the “supervise your children” note? Because it’s the stock-standard and most clichéed way to end this kind of report. New media, like North American sitcoms, just regurgitate the same six plotlines: the unexpected dinner guest, being double-booked at prom, the hilarious misunderstanding, the way in which video games are harming your children, and the shocking diet secret that car companies don’t want you to know.

The Missing Link

Proponents of the video-games-as-murder-simulators viewpoint desperately desire that tangible link between games and bloodshed. They want that shackled teen to look into the camera, blood streaking his face, and say “Halo made me kill.” But if being a Christian has taught me anything, it’s that nothing – not even an outright admission like that – will sway skeptics.

If Jesus were to return to Earth in glory, riding on a cloud, with the WWE entrance music of a thousand celestial trumpets blaring, and news media the world over caught the event on camera, and if he were to rent a condo in Vancouver and use his Brother P-Touch to write “JESUS LIVES HERE” on his mailbox, you know there would be folks saying “Bah … i don’t think he’s really Jesus.”

So it would go with **__HaloKiller69__**. The poor kid would admit, before God and man, that his favourite video game excited in him an animal lust to murder that entire kindergarten class with a pair of barbecue tongs, and disbelievers would still say “yeah, but he was crazy to begin with. It’s not the game’s fault.”

Crazy By Default

There are crazy people in this world, sure. There are people who will just suddenly snap and imitate the behaviour they’ve seen in a movie, on teevee, in a video game, in a book … and who knows what’s going to do it? For Charlie Manson, it was a Beatles song. For Mark David Chapman, it was Catcher in the Rye. i didn’t hear or see anything in that song or that book that would say to me “go out and kill people”. Chapman and Manson are what i like to call “plumb crazy”.

But there are lesser degrees of crazy. i call it “copycat crazy”. Here are a few examples:

• Three kids watch the hanging of Saddam Hussein, and commit suicide by hanging
• A little boy watches animated characters Beavis and Butt-head play with fire, and then burns his baby sister alive
• Teens watch a South Park episode satirizing prejudicial bullying and, not understanding satire, plan “Kick a Ginger Day”, resulting in numerous redheaded kids being beaten up in the middle of bullying awareness week

It’s far easier to find more examples of kids and youth engaging in crazy copycat behaviour, but there are some crazypants adults in there as well: like the Alberta filmmaker accused of shooting a movie about luring someone online and murdering him, who then actually lured someone online and murdered him, wearing the same mask as the villain in his movie. As it turns out, the filmmaker was a huge Dexter fan. Probably just coincidence, right? i mean, he enjoys Scooby Doo too, but he never went hunting for ghosts – which means we can completely disregard the Dexter thing ,yeah?

So sure, there are outrageously crazy people out there, and any little thing is going to set them off. Until we figure out how to cure crazy, i’m not so worried about them. But a strong case can be made for the copycats. If there is enough copycatting going on out there, and there appears to be, i would rather have media that depicts people hitting each other with socks, rather than media that depicts people exploding each others’ heads with hand grenades.

In Christianity, we have this concept of opting out of our personal freedoms for the benefit of our weaker brothers and sisters, for whom those freedoms may be a stumbling (and/or murdering) block:

1 Corinthians 8:9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak.

But it’s my RIGHT to do what i want, dammit!

1 Corinthians 10:23 “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.

Because i don’t know about you, but at the end of the day, i’d rather be hit with a sock. And if this limits my freedom to watch head-exploding grenade movies, it’s a price i’m willing to pay to avoid having my head exploded. With a grenade.

The Untold Entertainment offices actually received more screen time. If this exhaustive look into my take on video game violence and parental involvement doesn’t sate you, be sure to read some of my other articles on the subject:

• Me and Miyamoto: Lamenting Fallout 3
• Lest We Reset
• Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass
• Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble

Behind-the-scenes commentary follows:

Reporters see what they want to see. My interview with Dr. Karl was on the light side of three minutes long – here’s what they decided not to use:

(transcript approximated from memory)

Dr Karl: Do video games cause people to act out violently?
Ryan: You’re always looking for the smoking gun – that one incident where someone plays a violent video game, and then runs out and kills people, and there’s a direct link there. My take on it is a bit more subtle. i don’t care to find a direct link. i think that if you’re filling your head with violent imagery all day, it may not lead to you killing people, but it could result in you being a surly jerk to people.

Everyone says “the children! We gotta protect the chiiildren!” Anything that we try to protect children from is usually dangerous for adults, too – pornography, gratuitous violence, smoking, gambling … none of this stuff is good for you, no matter how old you are. For me, it comes down to this: if you’ve just spent your entire weekend shooting cops and murdering hookers with a chainsaw, you should take a long hard look at your hobby and re-evaluate how you’re spending your time on this Earth.

Dr Karl: But what about the research? What does the research tell you?
Ryan: The research is conflicting. One report came out last week linking video game violence to aggression. Another study links listening to sexually explicit song lyrics to increased sexual activity among teen girls. But over in the UK, they’ve done studies that link game violence to aggression, and then another study refutes that claim, and a year later the next study makes the link again. They watch this kind of thing very closely in the UK, because they’ve had a number of incidents where young people have tortured and killed each other. It all depends on who’s funding the study, because you can always manipulate the data to prove your point.

(note: in his report, Dr. Karl fails to mention the conflicting studies, opting only to say that a recent study links video game violence and aggression)

Ryan: (still talking a mile a minute) Gamers get their backs up about this issue, because none of them want their video games to be taken away. Gamers will try to dismiss and disprove these studies, because they think that finding a link between video game violence and real-life aggression means they can’t play Halo or Grand Theft Auto any more.

People say that we’ve got all this extreme content because it’s a young industry that needs to mature. And when they say that, they’re not talking about the age of the game industry – they’re talking about the age of the people in it. This industry is run by a bunch little boys – men with Peter Pan complexes like me, who still read comic books and collect toys, and who love zombies and think violence is great. Those are the people who have to mature, and it’s not until more women and older people and people from younger generations get involved that the type of content in video games will change, i think for the better.

Dr Karl: Is there any way to tell whether a video game is appropriate for younger players?
Ryan: (wondering if he’s being serious, or playing inquisitive for the sake of his viewers) Uh – yes. Nearly every game sold in North America has been rated by the ESRB. Those ratings are on the back of the game packaging, and they very clearly list the objectionable content in the game.

Dr Karl: The ES-what? We’re not up on all the acronyms and lingo.
Ryan: (still wondering if he’s just playing dumb) The ESRB. Entertainment Software Ratings Board. They handle the game ratings for North America. Different groups rate games for the UK, Australia, and other regions.

And before you even walk into the store, you can go to their website and look up a game’s ratings. The games receive a rating before they even ship.

Dr Karl: (the camera is off now) Can you show us that site?
Ryan: (realizing Dr. Karl is doing a segment on video game violence and is learning for the first time that games have content advisory ratings) Uh .. sure.

i then proceeded to walk Dr. Karl through ESRB.com, showing the newly expanded game content descriptions for games like Fallout 3. The descriptions list the asterisked curse words that are used in the game. Dr. Karl asks his camera man to tape me pointing at the words – f*ck, sh*t, g*sh d*rn, etc.

The camera remains off while i urge Dr. Karl to go talk to Bedlam Games, a Toronto studio that’s actually building one of the violent titles his story is talking about. i thought it was important for a reporter to look at a story from various angles, especially the opposing viewpoint. Alack, no – the only two sound bites are from me, and a guy who works with Dr. Karl at the Centre for Addition and Mental Health. [edit: industry pal Gavin Friesen points out that it's the Centre for ADDICTION and Mental Health. i always thought there was something crazy about mathematicians. - ed.]

i realize that as a reporter, you can’t be an expert on absolutely everything you cover, but it might suit CityTV to hire someone more media savvy to produce segments about media influence, and leave Dr. Karl to the segments on doctorin’.

Still, it was all worth it to see our receptionist Norma swoon when Dr. Karl came into the office. She has a tiny little doctorcrush. :)

Opinion: Why I Can’t Go Beyond the First Five Minutes of Call of Duty: World at War

The comment thread that follows is surprisingly civil (perhaps due to the author’s threat of banning racist participants.) It’s really interesting that some readers refuse to play the game because it contains footage of actual WWII executions, while titles like Gears of War 2 are okay because the carnage is fictional. i was very surprised to see some folks suggesting that excessive violence is, by definition, excessive, real or otherwise.

Not long ago, i anointed myself the game industry’s lone Jiminy Cricket. But the comment discussion following this article gives me hope that the game industry’s insiders – players, critics and commentators – aren’t afraid to call foul when the medium they love lets them down.

Shiggy Shunned

Every so often, there is a violent incident and “they” attempt to blame it on video games. “They” are never gamers themselves – “they” are always mothers, teachers, advocates, priests, newspaper reporters, or crazy-go-nuts Florida lawyers. “They” are rarely ever gaming insiders, so it’s very easy for the gaming community to band together and dismiss these claims as coming from out-of-touch outsiders with no business commenting on gaming.

Only recently did a respected insider speak out against game violence. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, Nintendogs – as “inside” the game industry as it gets – spoke out against video game violence in a teevee interview. In a message forum that i frequent, even Shiggy, one of the most respected creators in the industry, was dumped on by the violence-worshipping hive mind.

World’s Tinist Violin

The game community lacks a moral conscience, and that unnerves me. i live in Canada, a country where the goverment is structured such that an opposition party monitors the majority party’s every move. The game community needs its own Jiminy Cricket, because it’s getting a little out of control. i’m offering myself up as that cricket.

i’m a professional game developer of over eight years, and a lifelong gamer. i have written and published many video game reviews for national publications, and have written and appeared in lots of game commericals for Nintendo and Microsoft. i have been playing games since the early 80′s, back in the stand-up arcade days. i am as much a game community insider as you’ll ever meet. And, as an insider and this industry’s self-professed Jiminy Cricket, i have to get something off my chest:

With Bethesda’s upcoming megahit Fallout 3, the video game industry has gone too far.

Fallout 3 is the sequel to a highly regarded video game franchise set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. In the first two games, you must survive and scavenge from a barren wasteland scarred by a nuclear catastrophe. The world is bleak, grim, and violent – and a whole lot of fun, thanks largely to the surreal and somewhat saracstic 1950′s motifs peppering the game. Most notable of these is Vault Boy, the games’ cheerily-drawn mascot, who depitcs various Perks in the game. Perks are special abilities that range from night vision to sharp-shooting to reduced drug addiction. (Yeah, really.)

Flash forward to now, as Bethesda Softworks has released its first-person update of the franchise with Fallout 3. i was excited when i heard the sequel would be built on the Oblivion engine, so i snapped up whatever bits of news about the game i could find.

Then the video previews started rolling in. i was dismayed – sickened, in fact – to find that the new game is unreasonably violent and gory. In every video i watched, the player character was shooting enemies and the camera was zooming in for a slow-motion close-up of bloody geysers spurting from dismembered leg stumps and arm-less shoulders. In one particularly unsavoury clip, the player punches an enemy so hard that his fist goes straight through the enemy’s head and knocks it off his shoulders – all in a glorious fountain of blue-black blood. All in borderline pornographic slow motion with extreme close-ups.

i’m not a big fan of gore, but i did still want to play the game, so i rationalized this. i figured the designers must be demo’ing the game with the famed “Bloody Mess” Perk turned on – that’s the one where people die as violently as possible. But the more i watched the videos, the more it seemed that gross, spurty violence was the norm for the game. Fallout 3 was summarily crossed off my Christmas wish list.

When i was cruising IGN, an online video game magazine, i came across a video where the Fallout 3 designers were discussing the morality in the game. “This oughta be good,” i thought, and i clicked “play”.

What follows is an abbreviated transcript from the video. These are the actual words of a few of the actual Fallout 3 production team members, as they speak over the afore-mentioned shots of exploding heads and fountains of blood:

I often try to start playing as a good character, but there’s so many tempations in the game. There are just so many instances where it’s like, you know you’re talking to someone, and – i dunno – your gun goes off by accident, and you blow their whole head off and you’re like “Whoops! That was … fun. Let’s do that again!” Once you start going down the path of evil, it’s a lot of fun.

Istvan Pely – Lead Artist

It’s a real joy buzzer to be evil. It’s something we wanted. There’s some evil Perks that are almost too engaging not to pick.

- Todd Howard, Game Director

But i think for a lot of players, there’s this inherent, sort of, you know, it’s the i-get-to-do-something-that-i-could-never-do-in-real-life. I’m living out my darkest fantasies, you know what I mean? I can talk to an old lady or an old guy and have him be a character, and then I can KILL him, and – you know – really FEEL like i KILLED a person. And then i can, like, you know, pick up his head and put it on a shelf. And i look at it, and it’s like “i was talking to that person five minutes ago, and now i’m not.” You know? So it’s THAT type of thing. It’s – we’ve really crossed that line between the – you know – between reality and fantasy there.

Emil Pagliarulo – Lead Designer, Writer

Gaming industry, let me be your mom for a minute. Let me be your Jiminy Cricket and say this to you: this game is not good. This is not a good way for you to spend your time, either as content creators or content consumers.

Is Fallout 3 going to drive some people crazy in the brainpan and cause them to run out into the streets killing people? i don’t know. That’s the claim many of the video game outsiders make, so i’ll leave them to it. That’s where the argument has been for many years, and there’s no sign of movement from the entrenched insider attitude that games don’t cause you to flip out and kill people.

Lighten Up, Mom

The counter-arguments have always been “it’s just a game!” and “It’s fantasy, not reality!” But listen closely: here are some game deisgners working on a title, bragging about the fact that they’ve “crossed the line between fantasy and reality”. They’re delighted that you can decapitate someone and keep the head as a trophy on a shelf. They talk about all these details gleefully. They are delighted with themselves.

This all has the ring of pre-schoolers saying dirty words to each other. When i was in day care, there were these two little boys my mom told me not to hang out with at the playground. i didn’t know why. Every day, they would mysteriously disappear into this orange play tube. i was always curious about what they were doing in there, so one day i joined them.

There, in the orange tube, far from the meddling reach of their moral watchdogs, the grown-ups, the boys would say words like “fart” and “wee” and “bum-bum” to each other and giggle maniacally until the recess bell rang.

Watching this Fallout 3 video, i am reminded of those boys – so pleased with themselves for wallowing in territory they were always cautioned to stay away from.

Think of the Children!!!

Another defense the insiders always troll out is where they say “It’s rated M! For MATURE! It’s alright as long as kids don’t play it.” Of course, kids do play it. They always get their hands on it. And thanks to the blind-spot adults seem to have towards video games, it’s far easier for a kid to get ahold of an M-rated video game than it ever was for me to find a mouldy old 70′s skin mag in an abandoned tree fort in the forest when i was that age.

But let’s leave kids out of this. i’m talking to you, Joe Gamer and Joe Game Developer. The reason why we put content warnings on things is not to protect the children. We’re not saying that such content is okay, as long as you’re an adult. The things we put warning labels on are not alright, even if you ARE an adult. The things we try to keep away from kids – cigarettes, pornography, excessively violent imagery, profanity, gambling – are things that are bad for people. These things are bad for people of any age. They’re bad for you. They’re not healthy for you to consume, and they’re not healthy for you to create.

The danger is not that we will create or play a game about killing people, and then go out and kill people. It’s much more subtle than that. As any musician can tell you, you become proficient at what you practice. The more you do evil, the more you want to do evil, and evil comes to you more easily. And by its creators’ own admission, yes, Fallout 3 does enable you to practice evil. By the giddy enthusiasm demonstrated by the creators, i’d say the game probably encourages you to practice evil.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

It may be a much more difficult thing to prove in a lab, but i will make the claim, without benefit of scientific research, that a gamer who spends hours upon hours playing a game in which he aggresively and graphically murders hundreds or thousands of game characters, shooting their limbs off and shattering their skulls into tiny fragments – i’ll wager, with assured accurcy, that that person will exhibit more aggressive, downright dickish behaviour to his fellow man than the guy up the street playing Rock Band.

So as your Jiminy Cricket, gamer, let me assure you: it’s okay for you to take a pass on Fallout 3. There’s no reason anyone should think less of you. You’re making a moral choice not to fill your head with unpleasantness, with nasty things. You’re choosing to not practice evil. You are meditating on the true joys of your human existence – patience, kindness, humility, gentleness, and love.

Forget the chart-breaking sales. Forget the hype. Don’t feel pressured by a single-minded and amoral mob to “live out your darkest fantasies” in a video game.

The opinions expressed in the following post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Untold Entertainment Inc., its employees or its affiliates.

i’ve been closely following the Little Big Planet recall fiasco with a few opinion articles. Let me make my stance crystal clear:

1. Sony should not have recalled the game to avoid offending Muslims
2. One year earlier, Sony dealt with the Church of England’s much weightier complaint unevenly, effectively telling them to take a hike
3. It’s okay to speak up when something offends you
4. It’s NOT okay to demand changes to media when it offends you, except in cases where that media is in your face and unavoidable (ie subway posters, billboards, etc)
5. If the offending media is avoidable, do your best to avoid it
6. Burning the mother down is not okay
7. Burning the mother down is not the sole prerogative of one particular religion
8. Sony handled the two cases unevenly because they feared that one religion, and not the other, would burn the mother down
   OR
   Little Big Planet is a very important game for the company, and Sony needs as much publicity as possible

A Strongly-Worded Letter

In an effort to demonstrate how a game company should handle a complaint from a religious adherent, i complained to Harmonix on the Rock Band message boards that some of the songs in the game were offensive to Christians. As predicted, the forum thread survived about fifteen minutes in the wild before being locked by a moderator, who vowed to pass my suggestions on “to the proper channel.” (By that, i think he meant the channel that shows over-tanned preachers with impossibly white teeth mugging into the camera for an hour on Sunday mornings.)

User ElPinko echoed my earlier statements:

Bah, What’ll the christians do if we don’t do things their way? Write a letter? Hold a fete?…

and later, proving him/herself to be someone after my own heart:

Guys guys, religion is not to be laughed at. No seriously, don’t laugh. They’ll slaughter your family.

Early forum posters were divided between those who caught on, and those who didn’t. Those who understood the reference called the post satire and found it kinda funny. Those who didn’t were a smidge upset.

A few of them recommended i take my appeal to the (deceased) song lyricists.

User Dovanon hit our site and complained to me about my offensive sea monster game. Good one.

Push That Boundary

i thought that to push the envelope a little, i would actually snail mail a letter to Harmonix and EA, asking them to pull three songs from their game that some Christians may find offensive. What i found really interesting is that Nintendo has had a long-standing history of not allowing religious imagery in games on their consoles. Crucifixes, for example, were a total no-no. From the above-linked citation of Nintendo’s content policy:

Nintendo will not approve games for the NES, Game Boy or Super NES systems which:

reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes of language; this includes symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God, Gods (Roman mythological gods are acceptable), Satan, hell, Buddha;

Clearly, then, a game with the lyrics “I’ve never been a sinner / never sinned / i’ve got a friend in Jesus”, or “Jeeeeeee-susssssss Chriiiiiiiiist / deny your maker” would never fly on the Wii. Sadly, the age of 8-bit censorship has come to a close, opening the flood gates for pernicious filth like the Mario Party series. (Let me clarify: Mario Party doesn’t actually offend my moral sensibilities. It’s just a terrible bunch of games.)

i was honestly worried that if i did write to Harmonix, copying Nintendo, and demanding a patch for Rock Band 2 on the Wii, there was a sliver of a chance they’d take me seriously and pull the Alice in Chains song out of the game. Then, of course, you’d have Rock Band players (and many more people who don’t actually play the game) complaining that “Man in the Box” was the absolute best song on the disc, and how dare i, etc etc … until some religious-esque fervor might be stirred up in THAT group and something would get burned down. Probably me.

Jesus Saves … Rock Band

The odd twist is that Harmonix just announced (through IGN) twenty new add-on songs for Rock Band 2 that players can unlock using a code shipped with the game disc. Pay close attention now:

• The 88 – “Sons and Daughters”
• Authority Zero – “No Regrets”
• Between the Buried and Me – “Prequel To The Sequel”
• The Cab – “Bounce”
• The Chevelles – “Get It On”
• The Cocktail Slippers – “Give It To Me”
• Dealership – “Database Corrupted”
• Endeverafter – “I Wanna Be Your Man”
• The Ghost Hounds – “Ashes To Fire”
• Hollywood Undead – “Young”
• Kutless – “The Feeling”
• The Len Price 3 – “If I Ain’t Got You”
• Lesley Roy – “I’m Gone, I’m Going”
• Opiate for the Masses – “Burn You Down”
• Semi-Precious Weapons – “Magnetic Baby”
• Shaimus – “Like a Fool”
• Thenewno2″ – Crazy Tuesday”
• Tickle Me Pink – “The Time Is Wrong”
• Underoath – “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
• X Japan – “I.V.”

Wait … what was that? Did that list include Kutless and Underoath? My Jesus sense is tingling …

By cracky, those are two Christian bands!

My only explanation for all of this is that in the two day turnaround since i posted the message to their boards, Harmonix/EA did the right thing and decided to make amends by including two Christian bands on this free song roster, to offset the offense brought by “Man in the Box” and “Let There Be Rock” (or “Spirit in the Sky”, depending on your level of sensitivity).

i hereby applaud Harmonix and EA for responding so immediately to my outrageous and ill-founded complaints about their game, and on behalf of all Christians everywhere (because we all think exactly alike), i accept the companies’ apology.

(Oh … and to the seething and riotous crazy Christian mob that’s been waiting in the wings: you can extinguish all your flaming you-know-whats and call off your plan to [hrm hrm hrm] the Harmonix headquarters this weekend.)

The opinions expressed in the following post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Untold Entertainment Inc., its employees or its affiliates.

Pursuant to our comparison of the Church of England’s complaint against Sony for depicting a bloody violent shoot-out in a digital Manchester Cathedral in Resistance:Fall of Man, versus some guy’s complaint about two Qur’an verses being sung in Somalian on a background track in Little Big Planet, i have decided that as a concerned Christian, i should take similar action.

Offensive? Take Your Pick

So which game offends my Christian sensibilities? Gosh – there are so many to choose from. That’s to be expected, because few game companies would heed a similar complaint from a Christian, while a Muslim’s complaint causes them to bend over backwards ordering a worldwide recall.

For the sake of this illustration, let’s go with Rock Band 2. Just like the offended Muslim gamer, i posted this message in a public forum related to the game in question:

Subject: very urgent about Rock Band 2

To: Electronic Arts and Harmonix

While playing your latest game, “Rock Band 2″, I have noticed something strange in the lyrics of some of the game’s music tracks. When I listened carefully, I was surprised to hear some distortions of very familiar Bible verses, as well as some questionable content regarding Jesus Christ, the central figure of Christianity.

The words are:

1. In the track “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains: “Jesus Christ, deny your maker”
2. In the track “Let There be Rock” by AC-DC, the vocalist repeatedly sings the refrain from Genesis 1, “Let there be”, but replaces the word “light” with the words “guitar”, “drums”, “sound” and “rock”.

I asked many of my friends online and offline and they heard the exact same thing that I heard easily when I played that part of the track. Certain Christian hardcore gaming blogs are already discussing this, so we decided to take action by emailing you before this spreads to mainstream attention.

We Christians consider altering the sancitifed words of our holy scriptures deeply offending. From the Word of God:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. – Revelation 22:18-19

Further, to suggest that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, should “deny [His] maker” (denounce his Father), is particularly sensitive for many of us.

We hope you would remove these tracks from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it.
We hope you act immediately to avoid any confusion and unnecessary controversy, and we thank you for making such an amazing game.

Regards,

Ryan
XBox Live id : UntoldEnt

Granted, this is not a perfect experiment. We’re talking about two different world religions, two different games, and two different publishers. We also have Sony, who need some serious publicity to boost their system-selling game’s profile to bail out their flagging PlayStation 3 console. EA/Harmonix are not in such dire straits with Rock Band 2, but who can say? When the first Rock Band was released, i imagine they spent a pretty penny refurbishing or replacing broken peripherals to avoid public outcry about the toys’ shoddy workmanship.

And with the impending release of competitor Activision’s Guitar Hero: World Tour, this controversy may be just what they need to draw all eyes to their title. Sales of Resistance: Fall of Man spiked during the Manchester Cathedral controversy.

My Hypothesis

i’ll put money on the forum mods locking the post or, more likely, deleting it, mere moments after it goes up. If the post stays up, i’ll be widely accused of trolling. No one will be afraid that certain radical Christian factions will torch EA head office. Absent of the vague threat or fear of violence, the Christian concern will fade into the background.

Let’s sit back and watch it unfold, shall we?

The opinions expressed in the following post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Untold Entertainment Inc., its employees or its affiliates.

Video game news sources everywhere are reporting that Little Big Planet will be delayed after publisher Sony issued a worldwide recall of the game. The trouble is that the vocals in one of the background music tracks contain phrases from the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam. One player pointed this out in a forum post, explaining:

We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending.

The trouble i have here, and it should be obvious, is that like the forum poster who complained about the game, i am also an adherent to one of the world’s major organized religions. And, like the forum poster, i take also offense at certain game content. But unlike the forum poster, i am a Christian.

In order to progress through EA’s new game Rock Band 2, i have to repeatedly play through a song by Alice in Chains called “Man in the Box,” which contains the lyric “Jesus Christ, deny your maker”. Being a Christian, if i were to complain about the song to EA, do you suppose they would issue a worldwide recall to pull all of the games out of stores a week before street date so they could remove the song? Hardly. And why not? What’s the difference?

The difference, friends, is that Muslims have funny predilection towards burning shit down.

A History of Violence

If Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists were to complain about Fun Video Game and the publisher didn’t pull the product, the most they could expect is – what? A stern prayer vigil? A strongly-worded letter? A weak and short-lived retail boycott?

But Allah forbid if you offend certain Muslims. Certain Muslims, if provoked by – oh, i dunno – a few doodles of their prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), tend to get up to the following shenanigans:

There are plenty of things in video games that offend me – as a Christian, and as a decent human being. You can pay a hooker for a handjob in Grand Theft Auto, and then subsequently murder her with a chainsaw and take your money back from her corpse. You can punch an innocent human being’s head off his shoulders in the upcoming Fallout 3, and keep it in your inventory as a trophy, or decorate your room with it. And these games are mainstream. There’s tons of this stuff out there.

What’s the solution? Will any of these game companies modify their game content to suit my sensitive sensibilities? Doubt it.

What if i tell them that their games offend me as a Christian? No dice – they won’t budge.

But what if Christians reinstate the crusades and start burning shit down again? Apparently, that is the salient difference between the way comparitively moderate Christians are dealt with, and the way Muslims are dealt with, owing to the fact that their ranks contain violent consolate-torching radicals.

To counter this point, you could take the example where Sony was petitioned by the Church of England over the game Resistance: Fall of Man. Sure! That’s fair. Let’s compare, shall we?

The Complainants

Christian case: The Church of England, the official representatives of the Christian faith for an entire nation

Muslim case: Some dude in a web forum

The Complaint

Christian case: Sony released, as its flagship title for the launch of its new PlayStation 3 console, a game where players engage in a bloody gun battle inside a digital replica of Manchester Cathedral – an active, functioning real-world church where real Christians can go every Sunday to worship their God – in a real-world city plagued with real-world gun violence where real people are getting really killed.

Muslim case: Two passages from the Muslim holy book are sung in Somalian in a background music track.

The Recourse

Christian case: The Manchester Cathedral level is integral to gameplay. The player must play through this level to experience the remainder of the content on the disc.

Muslim case: The player can – and this is pretty crazy – push the MUTE button.

The Reaction

Christian case: Sony shows considerable “resistance” by issuing initially obstinate statements, saying

Resistance: Fall of Man is a fantasy science fiction game and is not based on reality. We believe we have sought and received all permissions necessary for the creation of the game.

and

Historical buildings are often used in entertainment…[such as] iconic movie scenes involving Godzilla and the Tokyo Tower and King Kong in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sides with the Church of England, saying

I think it is important that people understand there is a wider social responsibility as well as an interior responsibility for profits.

Muslim case: Sony’s Director of Corporate Communications issued this statement:

We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologize for any offense that this may have caused.

The Result

Christian case: Sony issues a so-called apology:

We do not accept that there is any connection between contemporary issues of 21st Century Manchester and a work of science fiction in which a fictitious 1950s Britain is under attack by aliens. It is not our intention to cause offense by using a representation of Manchester Cathedral in chapter eight of the work. If we have done so we sincerely apologize.

The game remains on store shelves, unchanged.

Muslim case: Sony issues an immediate recall of Little Big Planet in the United Kingdom. A short time later, the company commits to a wider recall and worldwide delay of one week while the offensive content is removed from the game.

My Conclusion

i can only infer from this fiasco that people are afraid of Muslims, and perhaps rightly so. Anger them, and their radical minority (a minority large enough to form an enraged mob rampaging through the streets of Beirut), will take violent, aggressive action against your publishing company, publication, or country.

The forum poster who originally complained about this issue did so irresponsibly. As a Christian, i wouldn’t dream of asking EA to remove “Man in the Box” from Rock Band 2. And if my religion had a very recent history of radical, rampaging mobs burning places down in protest, i would be even less inclined to complain. i would be embarrassed that a violent minority represented my faith on the world stage (as it has in Christianity’s history).

The read i get from the poster’s intentions are “Hey Sony: please fix your game. If you don’t, i can’t be responsible for what my obscenely muscular and emotionally unstable cousin Tim-bo over here might do to you.” It reeks to me of renouncing radicalism on one hand, and wielding the radical minority like a seething, violent silent partner on the other.

So what’s the solution? i have a few ideas.

1. Muslims gotta calm that action down. If the content offends you, don’t purchase the content.
2. Companies gotta stand up to this simmering threat of extremist Muslim overreaction by refusing to be bullied.
3. Christians gotta start burning more shit down.

Earlier in the week, Joystiq linked to What They Play, a site where concerned parents can learn more about video games and their content. My gut tells me that any parent savvy or interested enough to find this site is also a solid enough child-rearer to actually sit down beside young Billy and gently ask him why he’s learning to shoot cops and murder hookers with a chainsaw.

There’s been a lot of noise lately about violence in games, thanks to a recent release by a particular company who shall remain nameless, only because i’m tired of hearing about them and don’t want to reward them with any further publicity. (Perhaps if we stop talking about them, like some magical wood sprite, they’ll cease to exist? Here’s hoping.)

Sex and violence are set squarely in the sights of video game detractors. But because the worst parents are out living the life that crime games depict, and the best parents can only stand a few minutes of gameplay geared for kids, a third partner in the Axis of Video Game Evil has gone unnoticed: gambling. It’s a fact that very many video games, including the best-selling video game series of all time, give kids everything they need to incubate a gambling habit from a very young age.

One of the most wildly successful game series in existence is Pokémon. Consistently topping the game sales charts and outselling its home console competitors, the handheld game targets young children. Pokémon takes kids to a fantasy continent where they can capture and battle a zoological mishmash of creatures, from small woodland fuzzies coursing with electricity, to huge ice dragons trapped deep inside labyrinthine caverns. It’s enough to put even the most vigilant parents to sleep. And while dad dozes on the couch, junior is introduced to the seedy underbelly of the Pokémon world. About 10 or 15 hours into every handheld Pokémon game, players wander into a fully functioning virtual casino.

Slot machines crowd the room, enthralling non-player characters who sit there for hours on end and never move. When the player talks to them, these characters repeat the same phrase over and over again, robotically, their eyes glazed over by the bright lights and blinking buttons. The player can pay an abstracted fee to buy coins for use only in the casino. He then tries his luck at games of chance in the hopes of earning rare prize jackpots; in this case, the prizes are animals that the player can add to his macabre menagerie to further his cockfighting career. That is, if he manages to pry himself away from the hypnotic allure of the machines …

The Canada Saftey Council calls video lottery terminals the “crack-cocaine” of gambling. There are a few key differences between the virtual gambling machines that lead to bankruptcy and suicide in the lives of gambling addicts, and the Nintendo DS your son or daughter is clutching:

1. Video game gambling doesn’t cost “real” money.

Real-money transactions in MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) may change this trend, but for now, video game gambling is done with virtual currency, and the prizes themselves are virtual. This argument holds true for most kids’ play activities. They don’t drive real cars. They don’t play real “house” or “doctor”. Their toy lawnmowers blow bubbles, and their toy cell phones beep the Sesame Street theme.

But the purpose of play is to train kids about real-world living in a safe environment. When kids practice talking on toy phones, they’re inadvertently rehearsing phone conversations they’ll have with real people when they’re older. If a child spends his or her time pulling virtual slot machines with virtual cash, it can be a primer for a very real addiction in the future. What’s of concern is not the loss of real money, but the formation of a real habit.

There’s slim difference between virtual currency and real-world money. In the real world, time is money. Mom spends time working at her real job, and she earns money. Kids spend time playing video games, doing the same mundane and repetetive tasks like slaying identical monsters a thousand times over, and they earn money. It sure sounds like work to me, even if it’s play-work. What, then, might a practiced video game gambler do when he grows up, repeats a mundane task at work, and earns real money?

2. In-Game casinos put the house at a disadvantage.

Most games that use in-game casinos favour the player. In the Pokémon series, the point is not to pull slots until your family disowns you and you end up selling your shoes for a few more casino chips. The game designers want players to win the rare prize animals, with a little bit of slot-pulling “effort”. The cold truth of real-world gambling will hit a player hard when he strolls into his first casino expecting the same success he enjoyed while playing games like Pokémon.

3. It’s just a game.

The same argument that video game apologists use to dismiss violence in video games can be made about gambling: it’s just a game. If a person plays a video game and then mimics behaviour he learned from the game, the problem was with the person all along, and not the game. A predilection for violence is seen as a perversion. Video games only inspire smouldering sociopaths to awaken their inner demons; perfectly normal players will take it all in stride.

That excuse falls a little flat when it comes to gambling. Johhny Gamer primes his mind for hours of practice-gambling in video games, and then graduates to virtual gambling sites or brick-and-mortar casinos when he’s older. It’s tough to argue that he had a dormant gambling addiction the entire time, and that he’s now somehow acting on his base gambling urges. To say nothing of violence, gambling and money management are learned behaviours. Money is an abstract concept that must first be understood to be mishandled. Suggesting that a tiny baby is born with an innate, perverse desire to play bingo strains credibility.

Game Over Before it’s Begun

It comes as no surprise to me, a dyed-in-the-wool gamer, that gambling is the fastest growing addiction among teengagers, according to America’s National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. Today’s teens are the Pokémon generation, having grown up on video games that make gambling attractive and available. Today’s CNET article What Kids Learn in Virtual Worlds discusses how, at the very least, video games teach kids to worship at the altar of consumerism. We may reap the spoiled harvest of rampant spending simulators and virtual gambling schools when, in a few years, today’s MMOG players grow up and get summer jobs earning real cash.

Would you like loans with that? Can i Biggie Size your credit card bill?

Have a nice debt!