Player Two Magazine (Volume 1, Issue 1)

Player Two Volume I Issue I

BACK TO BASICS

Press Start Player Two

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Player Two

Player Two

Contents

Editor-in-Chief Mitchell Geller

Welcome to Player Two...............................3

Production Director Mitchell Geller

I Loved That Game....................................4

Art Director Mitchell Geller

All Your Base...........................................7

Copy Editor Mitchell Geller

Sometimes a Mushroom is Just a Mushroom.....10

Web Editor Mitchell Geller

Angry Birds, Angrier Parents........................12

Director of New Media Mitchell Geller Staff Writer Mitchell Geller Staff Artist Mitchell Geller

Special thanks to: Julie Dobrow Scot Osterweil Josh Aschheim Tufts University

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Letter from Mitchell Geller, Editor in Chief of ‘Player Two.’

Player Two

Looking back less than a lifetime later.

Viewing ‘Tetris’ in a Marxist context.

A Freudian and Post-Freudian look at ‘Super Mario Bros.’

Reviewing ‘Angry Birds’ runs in the family.

Falling Down..........................................14 Dying is the ‘pits.’

The Start of Something.............................15 Cutscenes: can’t live with them? Play them.

It’s a Small World....................................18 A tale of two gamers, or: The truth is stranger than fiction.

Online At: www.PlayerTwoMagazine.com @PlayerTwoMagazine PlayerTwoMagazine.tumblr.com

Congratulations: what you hold in your hands is the first issue of Player Two, the magazine you didn’t know you’ve been waiting for.

Player Two is a magazine that thinks about video games.

We grew up playing video games, and video games grew up with us. We’re not necessarily going to argue that video games are art (or, for that matter, aren’t art), but we’re going to insist that they most certainly aren’t just playthings. It seems vital, at this point, to do more than just fiddle with video games in our spare time.

We’re not going to publish hundreds of pages of previews bugging out over the newest... whatever. We won’t have boring strategy guides or fluffy features. We’re going to think critically, play hard, and argue even harder.

We’re going to apply our favorite (and, sometimes, not-so-favorite) theories – cultural, critical, academic, philosophical, psychological, sociological, hair-brained, etc. – to the games that we know and love.

And the ones that we don’t know. And the ones we don’t like.

We’ll do it all: if you can play it, we will cover it.

Player Two is a magazine for all the guys and gals who grew up playing video games and reading video game magazines and dreaming about video games. And maybe they stopped (I did, for a while). And then maybe they came back into the fold. And now they’re ready for something more tailored, more thoughtful, more mature and more interesting than the mainstream video game press.

Player Two isn’t your primary source for video game news. We’re not going to tell you what to play or how to play, but maybe we’ll figure out why we play. Maybe we’ll shed some light on how we play together and what happens when we play. This isn’t a video game magazine like any video game magazine you’ve ever seen before.

It’s a second look, a second resource. We’re here to talk about playing, to consider, and reconsider, what we know and what we think we know about video games. We’re a second point of view; there’s the mainstream, and then there’s us.

This is Player Two. Play, seriously.

Mitchell Geller Editor in Chief

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I loved that game!

Amnesia, at tention deficit and Millenial nostalgia

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ideo games are the friend that we all had growing up.

At first we always played together, only playing in solitude if siblings were out and no neighbors were around, but soon enough it became a stronger attachment. They filled the hours after school and on weekends, nights spent sprawled on couches, crouched in front of TVs basking in the glow of cyber-car races, virtual magical worlds and pixilated blood geysers. They became a communal interest: where little boys once obsessed over sports or cars or cartoons, it was suddenly Super Mario and Pikachu and Master Chief.

Video games entered the mainstream in the early 1980s. There were arcades and home c o n soles since the early ‘70s, but it wasn’t until the 1985 release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States that things really took off. My generation, then, born in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, is really the first to have lived our entire lives with video games as an important part of our culture.

Even the kids whose parents

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didn’t believe in videogames got to play them at their friends’ houses, or in school where computer games like The Oregon Trail, Zoombinis and Math Blaster were used to teach history, and math, and literacy, and typing.

This generation’s parents were the first to grow up with television as an integral part of their culture and their lives: TV shows from the 1950s and ‘60s were their cultural touchstones.

Their “Who shot JR?” is my generation’s “Gotta catch them all!”

Stores like Hot Topic stock “classic” video game merchandise, t-shirts and sweatshirst emblazoned with Nintendo characters from the 8-bit days, posters and trinkets replicating the games that our older siblings or, ostensibly we played when we were younger.

As the technology advances at breakneck speeds, the transition between “contemporary” and “nostalgic” shrinks to a matter of years, rather than decades.

But it isn’t just a case of “kids played video games and they still play video games now,” or “young people play video games, and remember that fondly.” Mention Nintendo 64 or Pokemon around a group of 20-somethings—or, better yet, hook up an N64 or hand them a Gameboy with a Pokemon cartridge in it (red or blue only, none of the later versions), and watch the immediate transformation.

This doesn’t happen with anything else. Gently reminding a member of this generation of the Saturday morning cartoons, or the picture books, or dolls and action figures from their youth gets them going, but there’s nothing like a quick romp through an 8-bit (or 32, or 64-bit) world to turn a world-weary, cynical smirk into a goofy smile in no time at all.

A quick survey of my peers reveals this to be true: “Pokemon was my childhood . . .

I don’t think I did anything else between third and fith grade,” said one friend, a sophomore at Tufts University, adding, excitedly “I dressed up as Pikachu my freshman year.”

Similarly, another student at Tufts, responded without pause

when asked what his earliest connection with a video game was: Pokemon. While, yes, he supposed, he had play other games before getting that red cartridge for his Gameboy Pocket, Pokemon was the first time he realized that video games were something special. Something he could connect with, something that would have an importance to him.

While one of these students still plays video games with zeal today, the other has since laid down her Gameboy. Both, however, were extremely eager to tell their favorite stories, and share what Pokemon, and a myriad of other games, meant to them when they were kids, and what they still hold for them today.

These games tore us, as children, away from T.V., away from sports, from action figures and dolls and running around wildly in our yards and playgrounds.

The fond childhood memory is no longer of warm summer nights playing stickball or street hockey, it’s warm summer nights battling pocket monsters.

On his recent debut album, Nostalgia, Ultra, R&B crooner Frank Ocean, of the OFWGKTA collective, taps into this mindset and crystallizes the impulse towards this particular type of, as it were, nostalgia: the album’s intro and a number of interludes throughout are named after classic video games from the 1990s: Street Fighter, Goldeneye, Soul Caliber.

They aren’t typical rap album skits or samples of their soundtracks or sound effects. Rather, they’re fuzzy clips, all less than thirty seconds long, seemingly recorded on cassette tape.

They’re the sounds of clicking buttons, and starting and stopping of some electronic device: tinny bleeps and boops, a faint whirring, the exhalation of breath. They sound like some distant, half-faded memory from childhood, like the experience of playing the games that the short tracks are named after.

This fits in with the rest of the album, which recalls the stereotypical childhood memories, playing outside with a childhood crush, wishing for a father who is never around, the fears of getting older, first love and of what it means to grow up.

But now we can add to this list “video games.”

But it isn’t just Frank Ocean representing this seemingly premature yearning for the “good old days” of video games in music.

The past two decade have seen the rise of whole genres devoted fully to a love of video games, from the niche chiptune genre, in which the music is created using nothing but the actual sound chips from old video game systems and computers, specifically Gameboys and Commodore 64’s, to 8-bit music, which uses modern synthesizers and computers are used to make music that sounds similar to, though unquestionably more advanced and melodic than, the music from classic 8-bit games.

At the same time, these influences have also been seeping into traditional electronic music, which in turn has been influencing mainstream pop to the point that “electro-pop” no longer seems like a necessary genre descriptor when everyone from Ke$ha to Kanye West is heavily influenced, and modified, by electronic, video game-inspired sounds.

Despite the musical acknowledgement, this mindset hasn’t fully leaked into the mainstream yet, leaving film and television mostly lacking this influence. The dearth of video game-inspired cinema and television is easily explained, however: the people who control the production of these forms of mass culture are of an older generation. As the old guard moves out and is replaced by generationx and –y, and whatever they’re calling the post-millenials, it’s a sure thing that video games, and their influence, will be front and center in film and T.V., rather than featured as some awkward plotdevice or kitschy joke.

It’s going to be interesting to see how video games will be treated in the coming years. This pub-

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lication, as well as others such as Kill Screen, and the myriad of new, serious-minded websites and blogs which seem to crop up every day, herald a bright future for interactive entertainment. The debate over the classification of video games as an art form is still raging, heated as ever, but it seems that the days when producers tried to pigeonhole video games as sports or competition (such as many illfated attempts to popularize competitive video game competitions as “electronic sports” since the late 1980s, and game shows like Nick Arcade) are thankfully gone.

Video games are clearly more than simply distractions or time wasters.

With budgets eclipsing the biggest Hollywood blockbusters and profits to match, as well as legions of fans, both casual and hardcore, a change will be coming in how we, as a society relate to these games. It seems pointless to try to pinpoint one lesson to take away from this nearuniversal nostalgia for the games of our youth, but our leisure time is spent in vastly different ways today than it was a decade ago.

For one thing, simple games, like internet Flashbased games, cell phone games and, most recently, Facebook games are now more popular than ever. The Oregon Trail was recently released as a Facebook game. This means that now anyone with a Facebook can log in and drown in a river, get lost, shook buffalo or, yes, die of dysentery.

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Anytime, any computer: instant blast from the past.

Over thirteen thousand Facebook members “like” The Oregon Trail’s official page. That’s just the players who chose to take time out of playing to click the “like” button. The number of actual players is likely many times that number, and it’s safe to assume that a majority of these players also played them game as children.

We have been swept up by this wave of nostalgia. For years it’s been said that my generation has no attention span. We jump from one thought, one distraction, one moment to the next, seemingly unfazed by the past or the prospects of the future, concerned only with the right now.

Right now.

Now. Now. Now. But clearly this isn’t true. The stupid grin on your face when you first saw the picture of Pikachu right here proves just how lost in the past we really are.

It also proves, however, that our sense of time has been completely collapsed. We feel nostalgia for a time not so long gone; Pokemon, for example, only came out in 1998.

That’s less than fifteen years ago.

Our memories don’t remember so well; we can look up anything we want online anytime, so we don’t need to hold as many memories in our heads. The major edifying experiences in our lives, then, like childhood obsessions, stand out in the fugue of the few years we’ve been alive.

Amidst the haze of the turn of the century’s major events – 9/11, the O.J. trial, the Clinton scandal, the myriad of wars and conflicts, oil spills and crises and natural disasters: The Oregon Trail. Crash Bandicoot. Mortal Kombat. They stand out like brilliant points of light.

We didn’t know, back then, what sort of future we would see.

Maybe, somewhere, we want to go back to that ignorance, those simpler times.

Maybe it’s just what every generation goes through. A last-ditch screaming, clawing, teary-eyed refusal to grow up before we are forced to do so. Maybe we really are the so-called rejuveniles, a generation so fully, incomprehensibly flawed beyond belief, somehow tricked into living two ages at the same time.

Or maybe not.

The “Greatest Generation” was forced to grow up. The “Baby Boomers” had to revolt.

The “Generation Xers” had t o slack off. Is my generation’s lot in life, then, to do… whatever it is we’re doing? Are we going to be defined by, and remembered for, our video games and our premature nostalgia?

I could go on hypothesizing and posturing and trying to psychoanalyze my generation and the times we’re living in forever, but the truth is that only time will tell.

There are as many different ways to understand our popular culture as there are to experience it: different academic, philosophical, socio-economic and personal viewpoints. But regardless of where we are viewing it from, it is an undisputable fact that from now on, like it or not, video games are a major part of that culture.

Like it or not, long live video games. Long live Pikachu.

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Developed during the Cold War, is Tetris Communist propaganda or the ultimate freedom fighter?

It’s traveled from the USSR to the USA, lept from system to system and even from the screen to the real world. But everyone’s favorite puzzler is still quite the puzzle.

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scant few years before the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a group of programmers produced a piece of software that, despite the Iron Curtain, would quickly take over the world. It was there in the USSR that, in 1984, a game (quite possibly the most played of all time) was developed which would have a greater impact on getting video games into the mainstream than any other before it. Tetris is as simple as the most primitive video games— Asteroids or Pong, if you will—but ramps up the replay value exponentially.

A Tetris player’s aim is to organize falling blocks – seven shapes in total, each composed of four smaller units, every possible arrangement of four blocks: an I, an O, a T, an S, a Z, a J, and an L – (“tetrominoes,” hence Tetris: a portmanteau of “tetra”/“tetrominoe” and, for whatever reason,“tennis”) into straight lines to avoid filling up a rectangular space (10 spaces

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across, 20 spaces vertically).

When an entire row is filled horizontally it is cleared, to the player’s relief, and the rest of the pieces shift down to fill the newly open space.

Tetris was programmed on a primitive mainframe by a group of young programmers attempting to make psychology-based games. Instead they made one of the most innovative and addictive games ever made. The game was quickly ported to PC and, in the late 1980s, “Tetris” made its way to the Western world.

It has since sold 125 million units, not including the countless unofficial rip-offs and take-offs of the original game.

In a 1988 New York Times article, Peter H. Lewis described the game as “surprisingly addictive.”

The article heralded the release of Tetris in the United States, and discussed the surprising appeal of the game. Now, more than twenty years later, in the era of hyperrealistic graphics, 3D games and massively multiplayer online gam-

ing, the original Tetris still holds extreme appeal and infinite replay value.

The simplicity of Tetris makes it instantly playable, and it’s availability on nearly every console, computer and hand-held unit, and in most arcades means that more or less everyone has access to it.

The goal of lining up blocks to gain a high score is easy to grasp, and the fact that the game gets harder as players get better (the tetrominoes fall faster with every tenth line that is cleared) means that it has the “flow” (a concept in modern video game design describing the sweet-spot where the is just intense enough to keep players interested) to be highly addictive.

Tetris’s universal appeal set it up to influence the design of nearly every video game, especially puzzle games, to come after it.

As Jeremy Parish, in his history of Tetris, describes the game as “a nearly perfect expression of the concept of video games.”

One thing that makes Parish’s statement less than totally true is

that Tetris is ultimately an unwinnable game. The current worldrecord high score for Tetris is 999,999, and, while it seems like play should be able to go on forever, it has been statistically shown that at some point the ratio of tetrominoe shapes generated—specifically a long line of S and Z blocks—will inevitably be skewed so that it will be impossible to fit what falls into full lines.

But for most players that’s irrelevant.

The game, for nearly everyone, will end before the program shut them out. So in that sense it never stops.

But does it matter?

Everyone plays Tetris in his or her own world. It is insulated and it alienates us not only from each other, but from any end-goals we might have. This would seem to

A giant game of Tetris was played on the side of the science library at Brown University in 2000.

be a mini-version of capitalism viewed through a Marxist lens, but Tetris’ place in the capitalist system is somewhat ambiguous. It’s

the perfect distraction (in Marx’s own oft-quoted words, an “opiate for the masses”), something to keep the people entertained while they’re not working on the products from which they have been alienated, but it also serves as procrastination. Once Tetris is available on personal computers and on portable gaming devices and, most recently, on cell phones and mp3 players, there is no stopping the play. Rather than working in the capitalist system, playing Tetris halts work altogether.

While the play itself mirrors how the system should work, the fact of the game itself serves as a sign that this cannot work.

So does Tetris, then, rejects Marxism?

Not necessarily.

The game-play itself mirrors, in many ways, the ideals of a fully-functioning Communist system. The goal of Tetris, again, is to clear a large tower by organizing the smaller individual pieces into a uniform row, which subsequently disappear from the

un-uniform whole, ultimately destroying the tower. These small blocks can be understood as the “base,” the term Marx used to describe the modes of production which affect the larger tenets of society, termed the “superstrcutre.” The tower made up of the falling tetrominoes can easily be read as this superstructure.

In Marx’s writing, the base doesn’t totally dictate the superstructure, and the superstructure doesn’t exert direct control on the base, rather the two have influence over each other. This is how it works in Tetris, too.

The pieces – the base – materialize and fall into place as differentiated pieces, but as they join the larger unit they lose the traits that make them (semi)unique and become just part of the whole.

New tetrominoes – members of the unorganized whole – continually materialize, fall down the screen and join the mass: there is no end. Although they seem different, all of the pieces, when they are broken down, become simple single square units: the uniform, unchanging, non-differentiable masses of an ideal Communist system.

As the pieces are organized into perfect lines, ten square blocks across, the lines are cleared: these units have been fully consumed by the system. As one line is completed and disappears the player experiences a rush, which translates to the desire to keep going, to do it again.

It’s a strange type of reward for an experience that, to those unfamiliar with video games, would no doubt seem wholly alien.

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Sometimes a Mushroom is Just a Mushroom

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uper Mario Bros. is a bizarre game. Players take control of a small man who races through 32 levels straight out of some drug-dream they will never have, killing everything in his path, running, swimming, spelunking, hopping and jumping all in the name of saving some princess.

But what’s the motivation, realistically speaking, to save the Princess? The game begins with no exposition: it simply drops Mario into world 1-1. From there players are urged on only by the everdwindling timer, and the mandated left-to-right motion both ingrained in Americans since birth (in this way playing the game can be understood as “reading it”) and forced upon players because sections of the level which go off screen are instantly locked, preventing backtracking.

But those are strictly consequences of the game design. The princess is of no concern to players—her existence isn’t even revealed until the end of the first world. At this point, after Mario has traipsed through four deadly levels, navigated a castle and defeated

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one of Bowser’s minions (although the name of the villain isn’t known, either) he is confronted not by a princess, but by a small creature with a mushroom hat on his head.

“Thank you Mario!” the little man says, “But our princess is in another castle!”

Toad, as it turns out this character is named, appears in each subsequent castle—levels 3-4, 4-4, 5-4, 6-4 and 7-4—with the same message. After each epic run and each battle with a level boss, Mario is confronted not with his fair lady, but with the same mushroom-hatted man. After each meeting with Toad, Mario is seen destroying the castle.

Mario works his way through four levels in each world only to learn that his princess is not present, greeted, time and again, with the maddening Toad and his chipper declaration that “our princess is in another castle!”

Toad is the player’s guide. We

romp through levels, stomping on enemies, collecting coins, and show up in a castle needing some sort of validation, something to keep us

“After each epic run and each battle with a level boss, Mario is confronted not with his fair lady, but with the same mushroom-hatted man.” playing.

But chances are that even without Toad, players would keep playing the game. Even without a story people would play. It’s a need to see things through, aided not only by the fact that the game is specifically designed to be completed, but that all of the mechanics of the world of Super Mario Bros. work, and the product is, for whatever reason, fun to play.

Discounting the fun there are a

number of reasons why, even without a third party motivating us, we continue to play. A Freudian might suggest that Super Mario Bros. allow us to act out the struggle between our death drive, Thanatos (the compulsion towards returning to the inorganic), and Eros, the life-affirming drive that, according to Freud, compels us to seek out propagation and life.

If we take this Freudian stance it is not only easy to understand the motivation behind the game, but also the game’s internal logic.

Super Mario Bros. becomes like that aforementioned drug-dream, minus the drugs and, instead of it being a personal dream filled with the intricacies and oddities of each individual’s psyche, it is someone else’s dream. In this case one from Shigeru Miyamoto, the game’s designer.

Through this psychoanalytic lens the game is fairly easy to pull apart: Mario’s motivation is classically Oedipal. Replace “princess” with “mother,” and “Bowser” with “father,” and it plays out just like the classic story. Mario, the son, goes through a journey, kills his father and rescue(/marry) his mother. At the end of the game Mario has done just this, he fights Bowser, kills him, and rescues the princess.

At this point his quest is over.

And then the player is forced to either replay the game or turn it off, effectively killing Mario.

This ending satisfies both Thanatos and Eros: Mario has reached the woman – whether we understand her to be “mother” or “lover” is somewhat irrelevant at this point – so we can infer that he will engage in some life-producing activities, and he has also, effectively, died. It is a perfectly therapeutic ending.

But, assuming the player finishing the game is not a skilled Super Mario Bros. champion, he or she has died many times before this conclusion. This still ties back with the Freudian reading, but allows us to move easily from the Freudian perspective to a post-Freudian view of death that can be applied quite nicely to the reading of Super Mario Bros.

“Through this psychoanalytic lens the game is fairly easy to pull apart: Mario’s motivation is classically Oedipal.”

Slavoj Zizek, in his essay on the Lacanian notion of the two deaths – a death in the biological order which is death as we know it, and one in the symbolic order, which includes the complete annihilation of everything which represents a person – explores video games as an example to explain this theory: Or take the example of video games, in which we deal, literally, with the difference between the two deaths: the usual role of such games is that the player (or, more precisely, the figure representing him in the game) possesses several lives, usually three; he is threatened by some danger – a monster who can eat him, for example, and if the monster catches him he loses a life – but if he reaches his goal very swiftly he earns one or several supplementary lives. The whole logic of such games is therefore based on the difference between the two deaths: between the death in which I lose one of my lives and the ultimate death in which I lose the game itself.” (from “You Only Die Twice,” available in The Sublime Object of Ideology)

Here Zizek pinpoints the postmodernist idea that nests in almost all video games: as the character – here, Mario – proceeds through the game he is likely to die. He is likely to die many, many times. Many recent games have replaced the onehit-one-death design to give players more leeway and be somewhat truer to life, allowing players to gradually take damage before the characters dies, but in Super Mario Bros. any false step sees the death of the character.

As Zizek notes, the character dies in the biological each time he is killed in the game, and his ultimate death – the death in the symbolic – occurs not only each time the whole cache of lives is depleted, but also, as previously mentioned, each time the game is completed as well as each time the game is shut off.

Every time a player turns on their game system to play Super Mario Bros. the deaths are wiped clean, the process restarted. The universe is created anew and Mario is effectively born. In the original game it is impossible to save your progress, so each game begins the same way, with a small version of Mario at the start of level 1-1. He has no experience with the world, none of the skills he gets from the various items available throughout the game. He has to learn everything anew, adapt to his environment in the same ways each time.

Super Mario Bros., then, really is a perfect waking dream. Its logic may be alien, the settings strange, the music hypnotizing and the story more or less nonexistent, but the game offers an escape where things don’t always make sense, and they don’t have to; it’s a comforting place to come back to and lose yourself in.

Run through Super Mario Bros., go to sleep: what’s the difference?

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T

he other day I got a call from my dad: “Hello?”

“Hi Mitchell.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Good, but I’m mad at you, you know.”

“Why?” “You told me about that ‘Angry Bird.’”

He meant Angry Birds, the unbelievably successful cell phone game from Finnish game publishers Rovio Games.

Originally released in December of 2009 for the iPhone, Angry Birds has sold over 12 million copies for the iPhone alone, and has since been ported to the Android market, the Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable, Palm OS, Windows and Mac. The game is elegant. It’s simple. It’s fun. “Angry Birds” is nearly perfect. It’s hard to imagine improving on the game’s formula. There is a plot, which is important for video games, I guess, but it’s almost an afterthought—the birds are mad

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at the pigs because the pigs have stolen their eggs. That is all. Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter.

“Use this slingshot to shoot birds at these intricate structures and pop pigs,” the game instructs us.

“Ok,” we respond, ready to sink untold hours into the pursuit of swine sortie to avenge the animal animus.

You don’t need much to play Angry Birds: just a finger (one is enough, really. And if you don’t have one finger you could always use a Slim Jim, like they do in Korea. Seriously.) and all of the time in the world.

The game sucks up time like some sort of adorable time-vampire. It’s an amazing boredom killer and a surprisingly good stress reliever. It’s a game where you’re rewarded for wanton destruction, and if you screw something up the worst that happens is you have to replay a level, an action accomplished with a couple of taps of that one aforementioned finger. What could be better? If only real life were so simple, and real vendettas so much fun.

The graphics are cute, crystal clear 2D animations of a variety of birds—from the standard red bird, to the

yellow speed bird, the black bomb bird, and the others—and some silly green pigs and the bizarre structures they try to hide in. But there is no hiding from the avian wrath.

There’s no reason that Angry Birds should be so great. It’s a simple game that happens to be perfectly suited for quick bursts of play. It requires little skill, it’s totally forgiving, and it’s cute as allhell. I can’t explain it, and frankly I’m glad. It’s like what E.B. White said about humor: “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the

thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

Only instead of a frog it’s Angry Birds, and instead of scientists it’s nobody. If we understood why we play, I don’t think that we would play.

Similarly it’d be easy to try to map political ideologies onto Angry Birds, but that’s no fun. I don’t think my parents wants to think too much about why they’re fling-

ing birds at pigs—even the mere suggestion of something more than the simple story might stir their ire even more.

The Breakout clone Brick Breaker used to be the cell phone standard, but Angry Birds most def-

initely takes the cake. Just don’t tell your parents about it.

After talking to my dad about Angry Birds, I gave my mother a call to see if she, too, was hooked on the game. Not only was she totally addicted, but she wanted very much to share her thoughts on the game. To, if you will, explain her own personal rage.

Angry Birds: THE Game for Everyone

By Gloria Geller

I

don’t know why the caged bird sings, but one thing I do know is why I play Angry Birds, it’s to get those smug pigs. That’s right, those I repeat, smug pigs. I have had a life long aversion to pigs. First because they are not Kosher, and second because I’m a Baby Boomer and it’s in my DNA: Vietnam, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, Kent State, anti-war protesting…bad pigs, etc.

Okay, enough of that. I have never been any good at computer games and am not an early adapter of technology. All you have to do is just ask all those people laughing at me (my family) when I played Mario. I have no hand-eye coordination and don’t know my left from my right, so I have a handicap when it comes to game playing (except for Boggle and FreeRice.com). However, from the first moment I downloaded Angry Birds on to my Android phone and saw those pigs destroy the birds’ home I was hooked: I wanted to be an instrument of revenge.

A great game (and believe me, Angry Birds is a great game for people of all ages), it pulls you right in, addicts you to its quirks and keeps you going hypnotically. This is perhaps why Angry Birds is the most

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popular game downloaded to smart phones. Also it takes very little actual skill and a lot of time.

Even I finally understand the allure of video games all because of some angry little birds each possessing different powers, all of whom need help destroying an ever growing rank of smug pigs, pigs who erect all sorts of insidious barriers to try to outfox the birds and, by proxy, you.

Sometimes this is easy and takes a matter of minutes, giving me the feeling of complete competency and triumph.

Then there are the times when just one segment of the game takes a person of my abilities (read: none) many weeks of frustration and sorrow to complete (level 1-21, for example).

I have watched others play somewhat faster than me but with the same intensity, and when the game is completed, just like a good book or movie, they want more, just like me. This truly is one great game.

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Falling Down

I

t was cold and dark and filled with bones of those who had made the same mistake as him… how many years before? A snake slithered across Harry’s lame leg. He brushed a scorpion off of his arm.

Harry had jumped too late. One second, a matter of millimeters. Now he was going to die at the bottom of the pit—who had dug all of these pits anyway?!

He knew what he had signed up for. But the pits were never real. The crocodiles and the fire, the scorpions, the snakes, those rolling logs – those were all real. Those were tangible realities that he understood as he ran through the jungle, collecting the treasure.

But those pits.

Who had dug all of these pits anyway?

How many had died in these pits? For what cause?

Adventurer. Treasure hunter. Trail blazer. Pitfaller was not a line on his C.V. Pit dier was certainly not something he had aspired to. In second grade his teacher had asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. The list included president, pilot, doctor, teacher, movie star, fireman, army man, nurse and all of the other jobs that eight year olds know about. Harry had not volunteered “snake-bite victim.”

The jagged end of his broken femur was jutting out just above the knee, poking here and there through his pants. Flies were swarming around the wound. There was no hope. All of the treasure he had collected – the gold and silver bars, the diamond rings, the bags of money – none of that could save him now.

Those, too would be lost at the bottom of the pit.

His son was four. He left the day after the birthday party. He told him that he would be back soon and that when he got back they would go on vacation. He could see the boy standing at the front door waiting. No one would tell the boy that his father was dying at the bottom of some hole somewhere.

Who had dug these pits? What possible reason could there have been for these pits? Surely they couldn’t just be to protect the treasure, could they?

He stared up at the tiny point of light so many hundreds of feet above his head, the gaping mouth of the pit. Sunlight trickled in, but he was too deep, covered in too much darkness – a horrible, musty shroud – all of the sunlight… it just didn’t matter.

The blood was still flowing out of his punctured leg. There was no reason to suture it. Stave off the end just a little bit longer?

It got impossibly cold and heavy in the hole. The black was closing in and he didn’t resist. He looked up and took his last breath.

He could’ve sworn he saw himself swinging over the pit.

•

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Player Two

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T

he producers of both Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Grand Theft Auto IV, two of the best-selling and best-reviewed games for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, do something very interesting with the introductions to their games: they’ve made them fully interactive.

Previous entries in both of these series have featured introductions that have followed conventions and been little but extended cut scenes. Players, after eagerly unwrapping the games and loading them into their consoles, have been forced to watch the story unfold like a movie. The previous Metal Gear games are notorious for their epically-long cut scenes—few blinked when a rumor circulated that MGS4 would feature multiple 90-minute cutscenes. But nope. Right from the get-go you’re playing. There’s a little bit of exposition and scene-setting, but both games drop

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Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots seems to be more interactive than it’s predecessors thanks to shorter cutscenes.

players right in to advance the introduction themselves.

There are more exposition and cut scene later on, but players get to do what they paid to do: play.

GTA IV starts on a boat with protagonist Niko Bellic talking to a deckhand. The ship sails in and Niko’s cousin, Roman, is waiting for Niko’s arrival, blisteringly drunk.

In one of the game’s few morallysound moves, players assume the role of Niko and are forced to drive the two men to Roman’s apartment to avoid drunk driving.

During the driving sequence Niko and Roman chat a bit, providing some back-story and characterizing the men. Once they arrive at Roman’s apartment there is a second cut scene Immediately after this scene, however players are given free rein in Liberty City.

MGS4 starts quite similarly, providing a bit of narration to set the scene, then shoving players into action as Old Snake, forcing them to navigate through a battle, sans

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weapons, gear, instructions, a map or radar in order to pick up these items at a rendezvous spot.

It makes the games feel more interactive all the way through, rather than shoehorn a story into

“It makes the games feel more interactive all the way through, rather than shoehorn a story into some action or vice versa.” some action or vice versa. Even in the Metal Gear Solid series it often felt as though the sections between the cutscenes were only there to propel the character from the location of one extended bit of exposition to the next.

A few hours into Metal Gear Solid 4, players are faced with a half-hour long cutscene filled with big buzz words, nefarious sounding plot points, and kooky conspiracy theories as only Hideo Kojima, the game’s creator, can churn out. But

they’re not hard to swallow, as bizarre as they are, because players are fully invested in the characters, whether or not they fully understand what’s going on or recognize the cast of returning characters. As the list of questions and mysteries grows, so does the excitement. And it all started the minute the disc was slid into the system.

It seems wholly revolutionary for these games – action adventure games in which the stories are often treated as being just as important as the game play – to have limited introductions, but, just based on the nature of the medium, all games really should ultimately highlight player interaction.

We play games because we want to play games, not watch movies.

Sports games have had it right forever, basically. The first match played in the latest Madden NFL game or Fifa soccer game offers no exposition, no cutscenes, just game play. Sure, sports games don’t have linear stories, as we might think of

it, but they have stories nonetheless. Stories that gamers often know already – the stats of their teams, each player’s individual history, etc. – but they also learn through playing.

But it is exactly because of this dependence on player knowledge that sports games can get away with not having long expository sections. If a game featuring a brand new sport was produced it would no doubt have a lengthy training section, and, quite possibly cutscenes showing how play should look. This is, for the most part, what the cut scenes in games like GTAIV or MGS4 serve to do. They show players how they should be playing by outlining goals and introducing what the player is playing for, and engaging players so they’re compelled to see the game through.

It might seems that increased graphical capabilities and memory have, for a while at least, pushed game designers to move closer to

making interactive movies, but that’s not always what gamers want.

It works in some cases, to be sure: adventure games have always relied heavily on extended non-interactive segments, or otherwise highlystructured sections requiring very little player interaction, going back to Dragon’s Lair, a game which required such little player interaction that arcade owners worried people would stop playing it if they figured out the predetermined patterns.

“For the past four decades video games have been squarely one thing. And now that thing is changing.”

Recently Heavy Rain, a game described by its producers as an “interactive drama,” made a splash—no pun intended—by severely limiting player-actions, toying with conventions and stretching the definition of what a video game could entail.

These exceptions aside, things are definitely advancing and evolving. The aforementioned “Heavy Rain” isn’t the only game pushing boundaries. While both sides of the “are video games art?” debate might have quieted down a bit, the next question to ask might very well be “what are video games?”

For the past four decades or so video games have been, more or less, squarely one thing. And now that thing is changing. Just as film took on a multitude of forms with the introduction of technologies such as sound and color and, most recently, advanced 3D, video games aren’t necessarily just playthings or simple interactive toys anymore.

So the introductions of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV might very well represent more than a subtle design choice or some gameplay feature; they might be signs of what’s to come.

•

Though it often looks like a movie, Grand Theft Auto IV is one hell of a video game.

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17

J

ust based on sheer probability there’s a good chance that I’ll never be the best at anything. I don’t really feel bad about it, I just accept it. There are definitely things that I’m good at, maybe even really good at.

Overall, though, I don’t think I’ll ever be in the highest ranks of anything.

It’s weird, then, to know someone who is among the best at something.

It’s even stranger to know a few people like that.

George Trusca and Paul Dale “P.D.” Pedevillano are, not to be too broad about it, good at things.

Specifically video game things.

The weirdest part, though? Well...

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I’ve been friends with George since second or third grade, and P.D. since freshman year of college. George and P.D. both played a lot of video games, and got very, very good at them. They both rose to prominent positions in extremely niche spheres, and their stories – or should I say story – are one of those bizarre little coincidences that are far stranger than fiction.

Things like this happen every day, but without video games their particular story would have been impossible.

Before video games, though, this particular story starts with George.

George

George and I bonded instantly as kids are wont to do. It could have been anything—our nerdiness, our dispositions, the proximity of our houses or desks in class. Whatever it was we became fast friends and stayed that way.

George was always intensely

driven. To this day he still has that drive to be the best at everything. I guess that’s something he shares in common with P.D.—but never mind that right now.

When something piques George’s interest it becomes an all-consuming goal to learn everything about it.

He throws himself headfirst into new worlds until he either masters them or finds something he’s more curious about. He had done a little of everything before reaching college: he was a black belt by middle school, a world-ranked collectable card game player, and, later, an award-winning video editor.

And, more often than not, I had no idea.

So it came as a huge surprise at the time, and then, in retrospect, no surprise at all, that, for a while at least, George was something of a celebrity in certain circles.

But let me back track a minute.

Microsoft first discussed the Xbox in 1999, mentioned somewhat off-the-cuff by Bill Gates in a num-

ber of interviews. It was officially confirmed by Microsoft the following year, and in November 2001 it was released in North America.

George got an Xbox for Christmas that year. We were in seventh grade.

George was the kid who organized Halo parties: days filled with pizza and soda and greasy teenagers crowded around two TVs in his basement—two small rooms filled with trophies and medals of George’s previous victories. He set up a local area network (LAN) so that eight of us could kill each other, virtually, at a time.

Then Halo 2 came out and George, already hooked on Xbox Live—Microsoft’s online network for their console—playing under the pseudonym Titan VIII, jumped ship from playing with us to playing against virtual friends. Friends who could keep up with his “killing sprees” and “killtaculars.”

Those Halo parties were bush league. He was ready to move on to George and the author in third grade class portrait.

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the majors.

George was good at Halo 2, but he got better, quickly. We stopped seeing him much, and he stayed holed up in his basement playing the game for hours a day. It was all he talked about. His friends became worried.

What we didn’t realize is that George had found a new group of friends online. Guys with names like MADD0G, Versatile and xCommanderx. He played with these guys whenever they got online, often scheduling times to “meet up” to play. And it wasn’t just Halo 2, they were playing whatever they could.

But it was mostly Halo 2 that kept George’s attention.

He wasn’t the best player out there. He won a lot, but there were certainly better. There were guys who played for money, professional gamers. There were guys who literally did nothing but play Halo. There were guys who were just more talented.

There was also, it turned out, a whole community of people who recorded themselves playing video games and uploaded the footage onto the internet for other likeminded gamers to watch, critique and, ostensibly, drool over. These

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videos weren’t of the gamers, but of the gameplay. Using various cables and cards and programs, these gamers captured the video from their TVs and recorded it to their computers’ hard drives. From there they would often edit the footage to music and stitch together the most impressive clips they had, assembling “best of” videos known as montages, borrowing a term from film editing, following in the footsteps of Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker who pioneered the use of montage in film more than a century before.

There were entire websites and online forums dedicated to these videos, and George, as usual, dove right in. And, for a while at least, he didn’t tell anybody.

In the summer of 2005 George saw his first montage, a video called “Blue Fire” by a guy calling himself Walka. The video, which features the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” by Rage Against the Machine, is little more than a three and a half minute clip-reel of the player’s best kills. There’s almost no flourish or technicality to it. In retrospect it really isn’t much to see. He’s a good player, but the video is… lacking.

George remembers it a little differently, though:

“[Walka] had a crazy video and I wanted to be that good. I picked up on how the pros played through watching their videos and I became ridiculous . . . I taught myself how to edit. I learned how to use Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, and some [Adobe] Illustrator. It took a long time but it was worth it.”

George spent months on each montage, compiling footage, editing it, tweaking it in postproduction.

He was a genius at work. He’d show me what he was working on, from time to time, and I didn’t always get it. I thought it was cool to look at, but didn’t realize that anyone really cared about this stuff. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

George brought a level of craft to his Titan VIII montages that wasn’t seen anywhere else; he jokingly claimed that he “revolutionized the game,” but it might not be so much of a joke.

Rather than “clip-reel,” the aesthetic that he went after was of an action movie trailer. He loved Halo 2 and made videos that were worthy of the game. He would do visually interesting things, unique set ups and edits between clips, and set everything perfectly in time to

thundering orchestral scores, culled from his ever-growing library of film scores and electronic music.

His most watched video got 20,000 views.

Keep in mind that he was doing this before YouTube was a major player. That’s 20,000 people downloading his video to watch it. Taking the time to seek it out and download it. It got to the point where George’s montages were discussed by people intimately involved with the creation of Halo 2, the game that his videos were such loving tributes to, on their production house’s website.

Posts on Halo2Forum.com eagerly anticipated each new montage.

When he released trailers for his third and fourth montage, and the trailers themselves became events, discussed in hundreds of message board posts.

He was getting requests from people he didn’t know to play with him constantly, and being hired to create montages for other gamers, at a rate of $50 for each minute of the final video. Appearing in one of

his videos, either as a teammate or someone getting killed, was becoming something of an honor in and of itself.

And the whole time his friends really didn’t have any idea.

I knew George was on another level. Whenever I had film projects I’d bring them to George for help with post-production. To this day I’m still blown away when I re-watch the video he helped me edit about “The Great Society,” complete with startlingly edited clips from the Zapruder film. He was working on our high school’s television station, teaching the teachers things they didn’t know. He taught himself skills that most people go to school to learn; autodidactic to the extreme.

He was playing in some Major League Gaming tournaments, and won a few competitions, but montage making was George’s main game. Things calmed down a bit after his fourth and final montage, but for boys of a certain age Titan VIII was something like a hero.

It hit first hand for George when he went off to college, “During

freshman year of college, I just met some of my floor mates and we were talking about Halo and Xbox Live. I mentioned my gamertag [Titan VIII], and they were fans of mine. That was awesome.”

The reality of my friend’s fame crystallized for me in much of the same way.

P.D.

See, around the time that George was moving up in the virtual world, Paul Dale —P.D., as I would come to know him, when we lived together freshman year—was also busy making a name for himself.

P.D. played video games on Xbox Live. P.D. played a lot of video games on Xbox Live, and was, by all accounts and rankings, very good at them. P.D.’s specialty, though, was Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.

The game’s multiplayer mode pits two spies against two mercenaries. The spies and the mercenaries each have their own strengths and weaknesses, requiring hours of play and serious strategy to rise above

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Even when he wasn’t playing video games P.D. was always fiercely competetive.

the ranks of the everyday player.

This was P.D.’s arena.

P.D. got his first Xbox when he was in eighth grade, after playing Halo at a friend’s house and, for all intents and purposes, falling head over heels in love with the game: he had to have it. Two summers later he was up to playing ten hours of video games a day, nearly all of them devoted to Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. It wasn’t long before P.D. had climbed the ranks, ultimately peaking at number eight on the world-wide Xbox Live leaderboards.

P.D. had the skills to compete professionally, but for the most part he played for himself, and nothing more. His friends were off at camp, or working summer jobs, and he was home. Home with his father’s new 52” projection T.V. which, he recalled fondly, he burned images into by playing video games for so long, so often. He competed in a few competitions and tournaments in Halo, but his specialty was Splinter Cell, and there was no money

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in Splinter Cell. It was a huge game when it came out, and everyone played, but it wasn’t a fast-paced game that anyone could pick up and play, like Halo. Rather, it required a time investment: the learning curve was steep, to say the least.

When Halo 2 came out P.D., along with the rest of the video game-playing world, switched to that game and, as is to be expected with his particular history, was quite good at it. And it ran in the family: P.D.’s younger brother competed at the annual Major League Gaming (MLG) in 2007 when it was held in Chicago, making it nearly to the finals, only to be knocked out by a professional team.

Just as George had found a tight clique of online buddies, P.D. soon began playing with a group of people who matched his skill-level. The guys P.D. played with, like George and his online crew, were into montage making. P.D. never got into that part of the culture – for him playing was the first and last thought when it came to video games. He followed

the montages, mainly watching the videos produced by the professional MLG players, but was thrilled to appear – as an enemy combatant – in one video that was making the rounds online.

Worlds Collide

By the time I met P.D. our freshman year of college his gaming had slowed down a bit; he still played online, but the excitement had faded, and any hopes of going pro were long gone. He still had his war stories, though, which he often bragged about with another of our roommates, one who had followed the pros closely during high school, and could rattle off a list of his favorite Halo montages.

And naturally one of George’s/ Titan VIII’s montage topped that list.

And naturally that was the video that P.D. appeared in: see, P.D.’s gamertag was xCommanderx, one of the guys that George played with on a regular basis.

And naturally no one believed me that not only did I know what

video they were talking about, but that I was friends with the famous Titan VIII.

When I got George on the phone to prove it they couldn’t believe it.

And that’s when I came to understand that here was this whole world that I had no idea about.

From an outsider’s perspective, even an outsider with close ties to insiders – to the insiders – it’s a strange, strange world. I was a gamer, I thought. I spent a lot of time on video games: playing them, thinking about them, reading about them, talking about them. For a few years I was, I thought, as obsessed as the next guy. But I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. I was not spending dozens of hours a week diligently practicing, cultivating relationships online with people I would never meet, or becoming the best at anything.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, pop scientist extraordinaire, suggests that in order to succeed in any field you need to put in about 10,000 hours of practice. I can say, without any doubt in my mind, that I have not put in 10,000 hours of practice with video games. Not any specific

video games, just any video games at all. In my life I don’t think I’ve played for 10,000 hours. With that same degree of certainty I would guess that both George and P.D. have spent far more than 10,000 hour each on Halo 2 alone.

What both of my friends have done is impressive, I think. I’m still not quite sure. And yeah, it’s just one of those silly little coincidences – one of the millions and millions that ebb and flow to make up this thing we call life – that two of my closest friends were online partners in crime; heck, I probably even played online with P.D. before meeting him on move in day. But people remember this stuff. These guys lived and breathed these games and these videos and these relationships that could have never existed before.

Video games remain one of the few types of media that’s not wholly accessible to amateurs enthusiast on the production level. Where anyone can film a video or record an album not everyone can just sit down and make a video game. But these montages allow the fans to do just that. The most recent version of

Halo even has a feature that allows players to save game play footage right to their Xbox’s hard drive and download it onto their computers.

And people are doing this, too.

The grandmasters of the artform, like my friend George, have found a place in a canon that will likely never be known outside of a small circle comprised of like-minded boys – I hesitate to call them men, and looking through the list of videos online none of them seem to be by women, in name or in narration – of a certain age. But the boys are out there, doing their thing.

Recently my teenage cousin who lives in Sidney, Australia sent me a video he had made of himself playing Halo. He knew I had done some video production myself and wanted my opinion on some of his editing.

He told me he was using some other, older videos as inspiration, and he sent them to me so I could see what he was talking about.

And I bet you can guess what video it was.

•

P.D. (right) dressed as Super Mario for Halloween, with the author (left)

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Game Over 24

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