Long ago in a philosophy class my teacher touched upon the well-known thought experiment called “the brain in a vat,” in which an imaginary subject’s brain is placed into a tank of something approximating cerebrospinal fluid and hooked up to a supercomputer that feeds it artificial stimuli that is comparable to kind the “real world” would provide. At its most basic level, the experiment brings into question what is “real” or “true” since the mind (we assume the brain is the mind, here) in the vat, by definition, is unable to determine if it is in the “real” world, or merely a brain in a vat. These kinds of theories were popularized through cyberpunk fiction and movies like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, which in turn affected the way we think about computers and the Internet.

Though I am not really equipped here to discuss the real implications of the possibility of a brain in a vat, I thought that another interesting area of inquiry might be how some (evil?) demiurge might construct such a mechanism using what we currently know about real-time virtual reality– or, in other words, video games.

Continue reading "Coining the Faceless Wind" »

Chances are that if you work on big-budget video games for a living you’ll eventually make something with Nazis in it, and while the coming of that day may not be a surprise, the news that your project will be released in Germany often is. Why would Germans want to play a game where they mainly shoot other Germans? you think. But Germany is the world’s second-largest market for many types of games, and a World War II theme has never been shown to harm a title’s sales there. At the same time, playing a game localized properly for Deutschland and set in der Zweite Weltkrieg can be like experiencing an unsettling alternate reality: all the Nazi symbology and slogans are gone– effaced completely. The vertical crimson banners still hang but are emblazoned with the iron cross or another innocuous symbol in the center, and those dual lightning bolts of the SS, so ubiquitous on your reference material, have been totally scrubbed away.

Continue reading "Don’t, Mention, The War!" »

“I think there’s something wrong with the way her breasts don’t sway. A chest that large– they should have some bounce, shouldn’t they?”

Hiro was tired and his eyes burned. He bit the inside of his lip to distract himself. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Have you ever seen a well-endowed woman’s breasts? I mean in real life, like right in front of you. Not in a porno.”

“Sure– now and then.”

“Don’t lie. I can tell when you’re lying.” Kazu had the controller in his hands, making the girl crouch over and over.

Hiro took his glasses off and rubbed his face. Delineate deformable regions, grab acceleration data from the bone in the torso. “I can implement that, sure. You want it on all of the female characters?”

“Put it on the characters that make sense to you. I’ll review it later.”

After Kazu had gone Mayuko crept up behind him. “What was that about breasts?” she said conspiratorially.

Continue reading "Soft Body Dynamics" »

Earlier this year, writer and critic Michael Thomsen appeared on the webcast version of ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson and declared Nintendo’s Metroid Prime trilogy “the Citizen Kane of video games”. The segment was not particularly persuasive, being a collision of film history, video games, and the evening news– we see quick cuts between Kane’s bold swaths of shadow and three-dimensional laser combat with space aliens, while Thomsen says something about loneliness– but the piece struck a chord in the video game community, which emitted a loud and derisive collective snort. The reaction of Anthony Burch at Destructoid was typical: he wrote “are you fucking kidding me?”

Continue reading "He Was Always Trying to Prove Something" »

Planck v.0, the game prototype that a group of talented people and I have been working on over the past several months, has just been submitted to the 2010 Independent Games Festival. A slightly higher (but not high enough) resolution video is available directly on Vimeo.

If you missed Morrowind, one of the observations you make when starting The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the sheer number of discreet objects in the world. Every shelf is loaded with books and every table set with candles, plates and goblets, each of which can be picked up or taken. It occurs to you to proceed in the normal role-playing game way, gathering everything you can get your hands on, but it quickly becomes apparent that, much like the real world, most items are a burden to carry and basically worthless– certainly not worth the trouble of stealing them and reselling them later. So you spend most of the rest of the game not paying attention to these things, treating them as the background art they seem to be. It is probably only incidental that they can be moved and dropped like other, more important objects.

Continue reading "The Way to a Man’s Heart" »

In the early days of personal computer multimedia (when it was black and white, and before the Internet stole its momentum) there were very few well-trodden paths. Much time and effort was spent simply trying to determine by trial and error what would and wouldn’t work, technically, artistically, and financially. But while the era produced its share of instantly obsolete reference guides, profit-minded shovelware, and other experiments of ambiguous worth, some classics were also born– many of them now sadly forgotten. One of these was If Monks Had Macs, a collection of HyperCard stacks originally released as shareware in 1988, and which grew over time; its most recent incarnation was described by MacWeek magazine as “a 24-piece collection of essays, electronic books, games and music linked together with the very personal touch of author Brian Thomas.”

Continue reading "If Monks had Macs; Meat and Conversation" »

For a while I picked snippets of “bad” writing about games and posted them here. It was amusing, and made for easy updates, but I’ve decided not to continue doing it. By picking egregiously poor constructions or obvious typos, I shifted the discussion to one about following the rules of spelling and grammar– a component of good writing, to be sure, but certainly not the only one. Writing with no low-level structural flaws whatsoever can still be completely terrible. Additionally, I found that pointing out others’ bad writing gets some people indignant, who’d vengefully comb my own writing for errors (I try my best, but I doubt it could really stand such close attention). I did not want to be the Lynne Truss of game journalism. Even if everyone instantly had the clearest understanding of the difference between composed and comprised, for example, writing about games would not miraculously be better because of it.

Continue reading "Come to It Any Way but Lightly" »

I usually prefer not to write about games immediately after I’ve finished them. The excitement of the experience can get in the way of the ability to evaluate it, and the internalization of the mechanics can take a while to unwind. It’s akin to writing about a relationship immediately after it has ended: one single emotion is likely to dominate, and it is difficult to understand what really just happened. What I was able to summon immediately after Braid was released was a simple parody– something that, while amusing to write, was ultimately a rather flippant reaction to a work that was clearly the product of a long and often lonely struggle. The game, of course, deserves better.

Continue reading "Forever is Composed of Nows" »

One of the benefits of writing about games is the discovery of normally hidden elements that work to make things happen behind the scenes, such as the ever-present but little-discussed pizza.

I wish I could say this blog was started with only the most noble of intentions, but the truth is that I began writing Magical Wasteland as a way to give vent to some of my more personal frustrations with the industry in which I labored. I wrote anonymously in order to protect my employers from anything off-message (the number of big-developer bloggers who have gotten in trouble at one time or another for something they wrote on an ostensibly personal site is, I suspect, close to a hundred percent), and to protect myself, especially during the time I was working as part of a team whose members with more public contact information had been, without exaggeration, stalked, and more than once. I was also sniping at what I saw as “bad writing” in the enthusiast press, and, combined with my inextinguishable penchant for being a smartass, was sure to make trouble for somebody at one point or another.

The anonymous days, however, are over. Now, the only people I can cause difficulty for are me and my wife (who is used to that idea). After many years of working on very big games I have decided to try something new. Floating untethered without an idea of exactly where one is headed is an odd sensation, but one that I hope will turn out to have been necessary: the right decision. I am designing and writing, and hopefully all of the game journalists who have held deep in their hearts fiery vendettas against me for lampooning their typos– I’m flattering myself, I know– will see fit to forgive, and look upon my future creations with a benign eye. Magical Wasteland will continue to be a place for my personal thoughts on games, and future updates on the other things will come from more appropriate venues. I’ll conclude this little announcement of a post with a quote that I hope I will not get in trouble for, from the good people of Bungie (whom I all still love dearly, don’t sue me please), occasioned by the studio’s triumphant, nearly miraculous departure from Microsoft on July 7th, 2007. “The road to World Domination,” they wrote, “is twisty, and paved with bumps, potholes and sweet, sweet jumps.”

Fuel is an open-world driving game that takes place in an unimaginative post-apocalyptic future where gasoline is a form of currency. For a title ostensibly about the employ of vehicles to cover distance, the handling and the physics are unaccountably poor (in fact, driving in Fuel feels more like the requisite on-wheels interlude in a major action game than something actually meant to be about driving). But for a few days I was strangely fascinated by Asobo Studios’ deeply flawed attempt at a new racing franchise, solely because of the game’s free driving mode, in which one can explore what its developers claim to be the largest contiguous playable landmass ever created: over five thousand square miles, an incredible scale considering The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion successfully brought to life an epic, free-roaming fantasy in an imaginary space said to measure a tiny-by-comparison sixteen square miles.

Continue reading "Fuel, A Tragicomedy in Two Acts" »