"A Japanese friend of mine told me very casually, in a totally matter-of-fact kind of way, that the difference between Japanese and American cosplay is as clear as moeru and naeru," says Patrick Galbraith, author of The Otaku Encycolpedia, University of Tokyo PhD candidate and cosplaying Akihabara tour guide. "Moeru" means "to bud", while "naeru"is an antonym and means "to wilt"."

"My friend said that when he sees a Japanese cosplayer, the response is moeru, and when he sees a non-Japanese cosplayer," continues Galbraith, "the response is naeru. He didn't mean any harm, but this is a pretty damn racist statement." It is a sentiment shared by Westerners, too, believing that Japanese cosplay is superior, placing it on a pedestal.

The history of cosplay is intertwined with the West — it was not developed in a vacuum! The word cosplay was coined by journalist Nobuyuki Takahashi and first appeared in print in an article he wrote in a June 1983 article in the magazine "My Anime."" Takahashi shortened the word to "cosplay" after hearing that "costume play" was not actually an English word. A direct Japanese translation of masquerade, with its aristocratic nuances, would not suffice. "Costume" and "play,"" both borrowed words in Japanese, became "cosplay," In the early 1980s, attendees at doujin manga show Comic Market, or Comiket, began drawing pictures of their favorite manga and anime characters on their shirts. This evolved into a handful of individuals dressing up as actual characters.

While Japanese fandom was trying to find its footing in expressing itself, its American counterparts had been dressed up at science fiction conventions for decades. Takahashi was surprised to see Trekkies in full Star Trek gear at the 1984 Worldcon (The World Science Fiction Convention) in Los Angeles. Takahashi hoped that the trend would catch on in his native Japan, and now had the newly minted term he needed to sell it. Geek culture is largely universal. The idea of dressing as one's favorite characters — whether that be from Star Trek or Mobile Suit Gundam — has undeniable appeal.

"Cosplay" is Japanese for "costume play" — individuals dressing up in costume. In Japan, it is not restricted to video game, manga or anime characters, but can encompass dressing in all sorts of outfits: maid, nurse, schoolgirl, etc. The term is a shortened form of borrowed English, yet cosplay is viewed as something uniquely for and by the Japanese.

In the West, dressing up in costumes has a myriad of meanings — all different. There is a rich and long history of masquerade in European aristocracy, which was centuries later appropriated by the sci-fi expos as "costume contests" with participants dressing up as characters from domestic movies or TV shows. The West gave birth to Halloween, a holiday in which children don typically monster costumes. Finally, there is cosplay.

For Japanese, the appeal of dressing up like anime, manga or game characters is understandable. "We see these characters all the time on TV," says multimedia artist Julie Watai, who also does modeling under the name Ai Amano. "And because of that, we view them in the same category as pop stars or actors." But, unlike the popular thespian or rock star, it is not possible to actually meet these characters. They exist in video games, on television screens and in the pages of manga. Dressing up as those characters gives them a chance to, not meet that character, but to become one with that character in a sense. "Not everyone likes these characters in Japan," Watai notes. "But they can dress up as maids or other cute costumes that are sold in Japan." For the Japanese, dressing up and having fun is cosplay.

"It seems that costumes inspired by anime, manga, video games, light novel, figures and so on have come to be called cosplay in the United States," says Galbraith. In Japan, however, Galbraith notes that it would be considered cosplay to dress up as Jack Sparrow or a Stormtrooper. Cosplay could even be considered dressing up as a policeman or a nurse. Americans have separated cosplay with earlier costume costume-wearing traditions (masquerade and Halloween) by East and West — "cosplay" is a Japanese word, so it, for Westerners, encapsulates Japanese popular culture. When the word was re-imported into the West from Japan, it was assumed that the origin was completely Japanese and associated with video games, anime and manga by default.

"In all fairness, I don't think this is really a misappropriation of the word," notes Galbraith. Almost no one in the United States used the word cosplay, or probably even knew it, before the arrival of Japanese culture." Thus, the connection in the minds of Westerners between cosplay and Japanese popular culture is natural and makes sense. What does not make sense is the notion that cosplay is exclusively Japanese or that Japanese cosplayers are intrinsically better at cosplaying than their Western counterparts. It's not that one is better than the other, they're just different.

"A lot of times, American cosplayers are just having fun with it, which is fine," says Patrick Macias, editor of mag Otaku USA. "But in Japan, where the otaku spirit runs deep, I get the sense that you can't be as casual about your fandom, so there's a sort of perfectionist streak that runs through the cosplay community there." That means, far less goofing off, Macias continues, or you don't really see silliness like dressing up as a giant Death Note book. The Japanese seriousness has even given birth to a chain store dealing in cosplay costumes called Cospa." "In America, there's no dedicated chain of cosplay stores like Cospa where you can walk in and buy professionally made costumes or accessories," adds Macias. Those who didn't get a gold star in arts-and-crafts can find the goods they need online. Those that can't must make their costumes. "So Western fans tend be more DIY and crafty, which I think is good." These homemade crafts can lead to spectacularly amazing cosplays or amazingly horrid — that's part of the charm.

"I notice a lot of people tend to focus on cosplayers who have just started out or tend to pick out unflattering photos of Western cosplayers," says American cosplayer HezaChan, who has been cosplaying for 9 years and has made 30 different costumes. "There are just as many "bad" Japanese cosplayers and unflattering photos of Japanese cosplayers." And while the number of "bad" cosplayers could very well be the same, the number of bad Western cosplayers is proportionate to the number of bad Japanese ones. The reason for the higher number of bad Western cosplayer pics isn't necessarily the cosplayers' fault, but rather, the subculture surrounding it. In Japan, the kamekozo ("camera kids") act as PR machines for popular cosplayers, creating a grassroots idol culture. Kamekozo typically specialize in the best cosplays and largely focus on female cosplayers. These images are uploaded onto popular cosplay and even otaku news sites.

This Japan-cosplays-better-than-the-West is hardly a sentiment shared by all. "Online I've seen literally tons of great cosplays from Westerners!" gushes Watai. "Westerners are much better at cosplaying characters designed with an American or European style than Asians are. They can actually look like the physical embodiment of those characters." But many game or anime characters exist in a cultural netherworld, being designed out of a hodgepodge of features and motifs, looking "Western" to the Japanese and looking "Japanese" to Westerners. "Japanese cosplayers routinely voice their jealously of Western cosplayers who have features like green eyes or blonde hair — all the things they have to work hard to make a part of their costume, these foreigners were born with!" says Macias. "Meanwhile, Western cosplayers will sometimes don black wigs and contacts to look more 'Asian.''"

For the nearly the past thirty years, cosplay has been a conversation between 3D and 2D, between East and West and reality and image. It started out in the West under a different name and was appropriated by the Japanese and then reintroduced back to the West. There is no group of people that is stereotypically "better" at cosplay. And the act itself is deeper than Photoshopped images or cleverly staged stage shows — it offers insight into the very fabric of our cultures, what makes us different and what makes us the same.

[Bottom photo Rhys Berresford] [Pic]

Wondering got us to asking, so we asked around. And people like Ken Levine, Sid Meier, Gabe Newell, David Jaffe and Aaron Greenberg were kind enough to provide us with answers. Some wanted world peace. Others money. One wants to hear less Wham. Not sure Santa's the right person to be asking that of.

Anyway, without further ado, here's what some of the video game industries biggest names (and, uh...us) hope to find under the Christmas tree come December 25.

Pete Hines, Bethesda
"I'd like to see the USA make it to the semifinals of the World Cup, or Wake Forest make it to the Final Four. Or both. And I'd like enough time to get through the pile of new games I need to play and haven't gotten to yet. And money. And world peace. But mostly money."

Gabe Newell, Valve
"I decided I needed a hobby, so I started teaching myself how to be a machinist. I've got a CNC mill, surface grinder, heat treat furnace, and lots of other devices designed to launch various body parts across my garage at high velocity while on fire. Once you start going down this path, it makes putting together a Christmas list pretty easy as there's a near infinite amount of stuff that you can convince yourself you need. For example a year ago I'd never heard of Harvey Tool's 270 degree undercutting end mill (#23204-C3), and now I can't imagine how I'll be able to make it through Christmas day if I don't get it in my stocking. Band-Aids would also be nice..."

Sid Meier, Firaxis
"A Rickenbacker guitar! Playing and composing music is my second most favorite thing to do – next to making games of course! I've wanted one of these guitars for a while – hope Santa is reading this article."

Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft
"The Wire box set. Because you can never have too much knowledge about the how the game is played."

Hideki Kamiya, Platinum Games
"I would like lots of cute girlfriends for Christmas because I don't really have any cute girlfriends right now."

Todd Howard, Bethesda
"I'd like more time to sit in my basement and play video games. I don't know that I've been nice enough to my family to deserve that though, because I'm usually in my basement playing video games."

David Jaffe, EatSleepPlay
"As an agnostic who celebrates BOTH Christmas and Chanukah, my wish list includes: tickets to the Jay-Z concert at Staples center in March (I THINK my ex is getting them for me, but don't tell her I know, cool?!?), a fantastic time with friends and family over the holiday, for the spirit of God/the Universe/whatever you choose to call it to continue to flow thru me and the amazing team at Eat Sleep Play so we can provide fans a great deal of joy and happiness in the new year; great jobs for all my gaming colleagues who are out of work right now; and finally and most importantly: health, understanding, love, and much peace to us all, especially to those who are suffering. Much love, ya'll! Have a great holiday!"

Ken Levine, 2K Boston
"I'd like to get a working internet connection, Comcast! My guildmates need me! And damnit, I've been good enough to deserve a trip to the Scarlet Monastery."

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox
"All I want for the holidays is for single vendor DRM to die and be replaced by a global/universal identity and credential system that is loved and adopted by all. If that can happen, I guess it would also be cool to get one of those Taun Taun sleeping bags :)"

Frank O'Connor, 343 Studios
"Is it too much to ask Santa for a 50 inch Samsung LED TV? It's not because of the picture so much as it's the absolute, wafer-thin flatness of it. I have already been cheated, by life, out of a flying car. I just want a TV that looks like it would melt in your mouth. And then I could watch a documentary about world peace on it."

Ben Judd, Capcom
"If I could get anything for Christmas it would be a reduction in the amount of times I had to hear "Last Christmas" by Wham! in the various convenience stores, department stores, even the local pork cutlet shop. All of those not living in Japan, thank your lucky stars you this song doesn't have nearly the exposure in your country as it does in Japan. I have a very high threshold for pain... I even didn't mind Hanson. But hearing this song more than 100 times in a single 30 day span can break any man. Any man."

Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, Microsoft
"I need Bioshock 2 to be worthy of the first game. I need it to be great! Can't start next year with a broken heart."

Atsushi Inaba, Platinum Games
"I'd like a deserted island, surrounded by emerald green seas. I think even if I really shouldn't, having an island would make me feel like taking a vacation."

Luke Plunkett, Kotaku
"What do I want, readers? I want the complete Battlestar Galactica collection on Blu-Ray. I'll probably end up with something else, since that's so damn expensive, but we're talking about what I want here, not what I think I'll get."

Brian Ashcraft, Kotaku
"A weaker Japanese yen — way weaker. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD PLEASE!"

Stephen Totilo, Kotaku
"I want all my comics to magically turn into trade paperbacks, my old cassette tapes to suddenly be on my iPod and all my video games accessible from harddrives instead of discs. And I want all of that to be indestructible and always accessible, please? Oh, and more time to read would be nice."

Michael Fahey, Kotaku
"I want to know how to read and speak Japanese for Christmas. It would be lovely if this was something you could receive in a box with a neatly-wrapped bow around it. See, I've imported Final Fantasy XIII, and while I am to the point where I can make out a word in katakana if you give me a few minutes, I am relatively sure that won't do in this situation. Other than suddenly having knowledge of a language that takes years to learn, my list mainly consists of harder-to-find games. Bust-A-Groove for the PlayStation (I own a Japanese copy I can't play in anything,) and Thousand Arms. I would kill for a nice copy of Thousand Arms, probably my favorite RPG on the PlayStation. I suppose killing isn't in keeping with the season. I'd...hug an orphan for a nice copy of Thousand Arms."

Amanda Glasser, Kotaku
"Well, since I didn't get The Hangover on DVD for Hanukkah, I'd like that for Christmas, as well as Family Guy's Something Something Dark Side. The holidays are usually a real drag at my house and I'm forbidden to play video games because it's not 'spending time with the family,' so I'll need funny stuff like this to watch while the family is in the same room with me.

"Also, I'm still holding out for that pony."

Owen Good, Kotaku
More than anything I want a conference championship in either football or men's basketball for North Carolina State University. That's all. Not a Final Four. I don't even care about the Orange Bowl. Just a fucking Atlantic Coast Conference championship, which I've won a thousand times on my Xbox 360 in NCAA Football and Basketball, but which my school hasn't seen in real life since Jim Valvano and Bo Rein. Both coaches died young, and tragically. My wish doesn't really have much to do with games, unfortunately. But you asked, and when I honestly think of something that would make me happier than I have ever been in years, if only for a day, that is it.

PIC via Matti Matilla's Flickr photostream

"I was working for Codemasters at a new studio of theirs, managing a team of programmers," explains one developer who wants to stay anonymous. "We were originally set up to work on new projects, but predictably ended up doing work on a game called Operation Flashpoint 2 (recently released) that was in death march."

This developer and his team of programmers spent months on the project – for some, it was three months, and for others up to six — before being reassigned to a new project. But another six months down the line, Operation Flashpoint 2 was again in need of extra hands, and this developer was pulled back onto the project – "dropping everything on the current project and bringing my team with me," he recalls.

The developer himself left Codemasters before Operation Flashpoint 2 shipped – and once it did, he was surprised to find no one from his team received credit on the game, despite the fact that by the project's end some of them had spent some 18 months working on it. There was "very little appreciation at the time or since," he says.

"OFP2 was a seriously broken project, with two or three restarts, and a very high turnover of staff," he reflects. "Looking through the credits list it was disturbing to see how many people had been left out, presumably because they either weren't part of the core team who finished it or had left the company before it shipped."

[UPDATE 12/17: Codemasters says its crediting is reserved for "Those that are with a team through the successful completion of a game, or those that completed their contribution to a specific element of a game," but notes it has a "Thanks to..." section for "those who may have not have been on the project at its completion but whose work the team felt contributed significantly to the final game."

The company also says it rectifies errors and accidental credit oversights with title updates to its games. Our anonymous developer says that to date his team is listed simply with a reference to their studio, without his or any other individual names included.]

But the frustrated developer's story is not unique, nor is there any one studio or publisher that bears the brunt of these kinds of complaints. It seems in this case, the lack of credit on the final project was something of a penalty for developers who left either the company or the struggling project mid-cycle – and the anonymous developer says this is an all-too common slight that often happens whether leaving the project was a staffer's choice or not.

And it gets more complex. Just as common as a studio's failure to assign credit is the use of game crediting as leverage – a way to get more work out of developers for less pay, or to force a designer with a particular specialty to stay on a project when there's another one at his studio on which he'd rather work. The fact that in most cases, credits aren't agreed on until a project's end means there's plenty of room for bargaining and bullying.

For example, rather than promote someone at the "Associate" level to "Lead," with the appropriate title and increase in salary, a studio may ask an employee to assume the workload and responsibilities of a Lead with either the implication or explicit promise of appearing in the credits that way.

These credit-based pseudo-promotions save money at studios – who get someone doing the work of, say, a Lead Producer while only paying for an Associate Producer – but it also can tangle the final product: Too much of this and it's easy to see how key roles in video game development are assumed by people who are overworked or even unqualified. It also causes long-term, wider-ranging damage: If your title and salary don't really matter because everyone's pushing for that credit, what does your job role really mean, and why aspire to further qualifications and real career growth?

Even worse, this is something of an under-the-table practice – with nothing to protect a developer whose studio might go back on its word for any number of reasons when it's time to write up the credits. That's happened more than once to pseudonymous developer and blogger Spitfire, who joined a project as a mid-level artist but had assumed a Lead role by the time the game shipped.

But the credits didn't reflect his additional responsibility – and when he asked for an explanation, "I was simply told that I wasn't really a Lead on the game. Mind you, there was no real reason not to give me proper credit. [Neither] my salary, bonuses, nor any other form of compensation were based on title. It was simply an intentional and painful slight."

Another time, at the same studio but on a different project, despite clear responsibilities as a Lead, Spitfire says, "my name was just thrown in with the rest of the artists in my discipline. Again, I went and pressed the issue, and I was told that it was too late... The manuals had already gone to print, and we were about to press a submission disk. No one would even answer whose fault it was for the lack of a proper credit… the complete lack of concern by everyone involved above me was a real shocker and actually hurt."

It's more than an issue of what label appears next to your name in the small print, adds Spitfire: "When you're working 80+ hours getting that baby to market, sacrificing time with your family, your personal life, loved ones, etc., just to ship the product, and then you don't get the right credit? It's beyond enraging. It literally shows that your employer doesn't care about you."

Stories like these are endless. A survey by the International Game Developers Association, the trade group that represents those who make games, conducted a survey that found 35 percent of respondents say they "don't ever" or "only sometimes" receive official credit for the work they've done.

But so fraught is the issue that it often goes uncontested. It's only the rare high-profile example that makes it into the realm of public controversy – Last year, Mythic Entertainment drew fire for its decision to credit only current staffers on Warhammer Online, and at the time sources told Shacknews that Mythic "made sure not to include anyone who was not in the office the day of the credit list creation."

The outcry in the developer community sparked a debate between Mythic and the IGDA, who called the lack of proper Warhammer credits "disrespectful." At issue was the most popular reason studios say they withhold credits: They're afraid developers will feel free to ditch a project whenever they like, if they don't have the incentive of crediting to make them stick around. Studios also claim that revealing a full list of their staffers exposes them to unsolicited recruiters and poachers, and they're afraid to lose people.

But the IGDA says that's just a cop-out: Chairperson Jennifer MacLean said in a statement on the Warhammer controversy that these reasons are "arbitrary, unfair and in some cases even vindictive... they simply don't hold up." The IGDA established a crediting standards committee in 2007, aiming first to evaluate the scope of the problem and then to develop a universal standard for roles, titles and the way individuals must be credited.

It has since published draft guidelines and a standards proposal in beta – but none of these are yet final, and few of the developers I spoke to for this article were aware of the status of these initiatives, speaking to the enormous challenge the issue poses.

But why does it matter to gamers whether a developer is listed at a game's end as "Lead" or "Manager""?

According to the developers we spoke to, it matters a lot: "By not crediting, we undermine the individual's contribution," says the anonymous former Codemasters employee. "Accordingly, these developers feel less emotional and creative involvement in future projects. This helps lead to big teams of disenfranchised people, and a corresponding reduction in the character, charm and personality of the finished game."

In other words, good games are made by invested, creative people. Yet another anonymous developer – notice a trend here? — says the lack of consistent crediting is "just another point towards the general feeling of 'it's the game industry - we shouldn't expect it to be a mature, professional place.' It affects how people behave at work, and how people behave at work affects what goes into the game (sometimes in surprising ways)."

It also helps ensure the game industry stays insular, rather than diversifying with talent from other disciplines, he says: "A talented, up-and-coming artist isn't going to want to choose the game industry, for example, if he knows he's going to get dicked around and disrespected."

So why don't more developers speak up? It's a vicious cycle, my sources say: People who feel less like individual contributors and more like interchangeable machinery cogs that their employer can swap around at any minute don't want to risk rocking the boat. Especially in today's economy, people are just happy to have a job in the industry of their choosing. So the culture of silence continues, and perpetuates the destructive idea that gaming is only a stepchild to more formalized media industries.

With the IGDA hard at work on standards, a solution may be on the horizon. In the meantime, remember: Video games are made by human beings, and whether you like their work or not, it's important for consumers, the final audience, to remember that— because those who employ them often don't.

[ Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Modern Warfare 2 is a sexist game. On this fact, I think most people agree because it's a war game, a typical male fantasy. Beyond that, though, the game omits women from its experience almost entirely. If you skip the infamous No Russian level, the only female contact you have is an automated voice telling you all phone lines in America are down. There are no women in the bunkers, no women in the chain of command, and I'm 90% sure that that poor astronaut also isn't a woman.

To be fair, the lack of women in Modern Warfare 2 doesn't seem as blatantly sexist as other video games where big-breasted bimbo women are shoehorned into the story for the main character to drool over. However, excluding women — who make up more than half of the world's population — from the entire cast of characters is still sexist. Like branding every copy of the game with a No Girls Allowed stamp.

Sexist or not, though, Modern Warfare 2 captured the hearts and minds of at least three feminists simply by being a good game. There may have been moments when my friends and I as women felt uncomfortable — like riding in the Humvee in the mounted gun position; there was something a little too butch about that. Overall, though, I had to conclude that we weren't shut out from enjoying this male fantasy. We just have to ask if there will ever be room for us to exist within it.

Originally my two friends and I weren't planning to spend our entire night in playing Modern Warfare 2. It was just an item of curiosity, like stealing my big brother's Playboy magazine to show off at a slumber party. The game had been out for about a week and everybody was talking about it, particularly the No Russian level. So after a gracing the first level with our presence, we decided to keep playing and see what all the fuss was about.

Two days later I still hadn't left my friends' house. Empty takeout containers littered their living room and the fashion magazines and nail polish had been abandoned in the kitchen. We were at the final level and we were screaming our heads off with all the high-octave fervor of preteen girls at a Jonas Brothers concert.

SPOILER WARNING: MODERN WARFARE 2

That moment went something like this:

"Ohmigod, you have to catch him! Don't let him get away!" This was from Felicity,* a girl in her early 20s who works in local government.

"Ooohhh... He killed Ghost!" This came from Tiffany*, a classmate of mine at Mills College — bastion of feminist principle in the West — and the owner of the PS3. She insists she bought it for the Blu-Ray player but we've all seen the stack of PlayStation One games on her bookshelf.

"We know he killed Ghost, we were there! Oh! Oh! Quicktime event!" That was me, the games journalist who couldn't name a single feminist movement leader.

After negotiating who would perform the quicktime event (me, because Tiffany pointed out I play games for a living), we sat back and soaked up the final moments of Modern Warfare 2 almost in revered silence. After the credits sequence ended, my friends and I stayed up late into the night, gossiping, mooning and moaning over every little detail in the game. Sort of the same way we do for movies we like starring people we'd like to sleep with.

"I heart Ghost," I declared. "He can carry me on his back to a helicopter any day."

"Oh come on," Tiffany replied. "You can't even see his face. MacTavish, now he's dreamy."

"The mohawk's not doing it for me," Felicity contributed. "He'd have to wear his snow cap and goggles to bed."

It struck me then to wonder about our behavior. First of all, I thought it was weird that we were lusting after Ghost and Soap as if they were Brad Pitt and Jason Statham. Second, I noticed we had moments of masculinity when our typical female language ("Omigod! Eee!") was replaced by more aggressive language ("Kill that guy! Run and knife! Go loud, go loud!"). Finally, I thought maybe we failed at being feminists. Modern Warfare 2 is sexist but we played it — and not just played it, loved it.

That last point is important because it's part of a catch-22 in the video games industry: Developers don't make games for girls because they assume girls don't play games, and because developers don't make games for girls, girls don't play video games. In other words, if I accept Modern Warfare 2 as awesome despite being not having a single female character for me to identify with in it, will Modern Warfare 3 also lack female characters?

I brought the drama up with Tiffany first. "It is possible to enjoy something despite it being sexist, not because it's sexist," she said. "I think there needs to be a move away from the language that makes some things for boys and some things for girls so we can enjoy things without using gender language."

To me, that's typical "Millsbian" language — it sounds nice, but it doesn't offer any solutions. So I asked Tiffany if she thought the game would be better with a playable female character in it.

Tiffany said no, she didn't want to play as a woman, she just wanted to see women. The non-playable character women in No Russian don't count because they offended her (and me). Here's why: they all seemed to be wearing the exact same purple shirt whereas the male NPCs had a variety of outfits. It's like the developers had no idea what women wear and copy-pasted one character model into the level to save time.

Above: Spot the women. Now spot the women without purple shirts.

Felicity mentioned the purple shirt ladies as "not real women" too, but she didn't seem nearly as offended by them as Tiffany and I were. She's inclined to forgive Modern Warfare for not really having women in the cast because she prefers that to Japanese role-playing games where all the girls are cutesy, skinny and have huge tits.

"I would have been OK with some of your radio commands coming from women, though," she said. "But I'd be more worried about having a playable female character because it might seem more like they shoehorned a woman into the game."

That made me think of the first Modern Warfare. In that game, there is a female helicopter pilot in a combat situation. For the majority of the level, she's helping your male character out — then at the end, just as you're about to escape a nuclear blast, she gets shot down and your character goes back for her and dies trying to save her.

This triggers my feminist rage in two ways. First, it's inadvertently suggesting that men wouldn't go back for other men on the battlefield — only for women (and from there, it's not much of a stretch to conclude that women shouldn't be on the battlefield). Second, it's implying that women can't drive. Seriously, why couldn't some of the male pilots get shot down?

I give Modern Warfare 2 credit for not repeating the female pilot nonsense. But at the same time, I feel like they wasted an excellent opportunity to give me, Tiffany and Felicity a female character we could easily relate to without feeling like she'd been shoehorned in: the D.C. Invasion levels. You really think the U.S. Army would care about the no-women-in-combat-zones rule when the enemy is in the White House? You would see every able-bodied adult on the battlefield at that point.

That's ultimately what I'm asking for from Modern Warfare 3: room to exist within the male fantasy. I don't just want to lust after Ghost and Soap — I want to imagine myself there with them. I don't just want to know that women are in the Army by hearing their voices on a radio — I want to see them fighting for their country the way I would if the enemy were at the gates and my country needed me. I want developers to know that I play video games too, so they should pander to me as well as men.

*Names have been changed.

"I hate sports games," Kristen says with a weary laugh, reminding me for about the fifth time this Thursday night "I had to ask someone what a sack was. They said it's when you tackle the quarterback. I said, 'Which one is the quarterback?'"

Only in name are Kristen and I playing Madden NFL Arcade. Instead we are "boosting," - throwing games to each other, more or less, to rack up multiplayer achievements. I've already gotten 50 points the easy way. Now it's her turn.

It is a substantial part of how Kristen, whose last name I'm withholding out of concern for her privacy, has become, according to one leading compilation, the No. 4 ranking woman, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Her tag is CRU x360a - go ahead, look it up. Kristen - CRU or Crubie to some online - is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom in northwest Indiana. You call her extremely motivated. You can call her obsessed. You can also call her an achievement whore, like she hasn't heard that from every piss-ant with a 5,000 gamerscore in the underground zone.

Bottom line, she's is really effective at piling up her gamerscore. But she's not sure when, or if, she will stop.

A Race to the Top

"It was a friendly race at the time," Kristen says of the beginning, three years ago, when she got serious about her Gamerscore. "It was to 20,000. My buddy was at 15,000 and I was at 13, I was 2,000 behind him. I said, 'OK, this might take years.'

Kristen had bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 and, like most, it wasn't because it offered achievements. She was a multiplayer gamer on a few titles she enjoyed - shooters mostly. Then she joined a Gamerscore league. And then she got into this side bet.

"Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half," she says. "It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit."

Soon enough Kristen managed to fall in with some elite players in the achievement grinding world. One, named Smrnov, who is the global No. 10 on MyGamerCard, praises Kristen's team-spirited achievement hunting. "CRU was unselfish in the help she offered our team, and has always been reliable for getting the game time in, which is a very hard trait to find for spanning so many different games, versus a single one," he says.

Stallion83, the global No. 2 on that list, played with Kristen in those early days, and was most recently her boosting partner on Damnation - a terribly received game. ("We managed to have fun talking about The Leprechaun movies," he says. "Party chat has made some of these games less painful.")

"She was just a nice person," Stallion83 recalls,"like one of the dudes. Most girls cause drama and try to get attention. I didn't see that with CRU." Both he and Smrnov heap praise on Kristen's FPS skill. "A great FPS player," says Smrnov. "In addition, she's very good about figuring out the best strategy for completing a game quickly and doing all associated research. She has both gaming skills and gamerscore skills."

But that doesn't keep Kristen from going after the kids' stuff, too. Last week, Spongebob: Truth or Square put her over 165,000. It's a cute detail but it barely scratches the surface of Kristen's performance over the past three years. Nor does the four-game Gamefly subscription, in constant rotation. That's to be expected. And the shelf full of games, many of them years old and still waiting to be played, well, what would you consider impressive? A hundred and sixty?

She bought Jumper: Griffin's Story - one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster. It didn't work for Sing It: High School Musical or Hannah Montana, so, she had to belt those out herself.

"They're easy enough songs; It's not bad, there's no one looking at me while I'm playing it," Kristen says, "but my friends (on Xbox Live) see it, and all the guys can't believe I'm playing that game."

Remember that deal a few months back, when a someone tried to round up a 1,000 players to log in to NBA Live 07 and get the 100 gamerscore achievement for 1,000 players being online at the same time? Kristen was a part of that, with two versions of the game, one she had to go out and find for $3 at a game store, and the other playing on her Japanese 360.

Yes, she has an NTSC: J console. Kristen got that to play BioShock's Korean version, which has a separate achievement list. She's gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. She's gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in Japanese. "I haven't even opened the Saint's Row 2 Japanese version, or the Saint's Row 1 for that matter," Kristen says. She's eyeballing a PAL console, but even an Arcade will be close to $300 with shipping and, "Do I really need to play BioShock again?"

Some of the region-locked Japanese games she plays are bought by pooling money with Stallion83, Smrnov and others in the ultra-gamerscore crowd, and the group then trades the discs around by mail. One game, Clannad, was picked for its low-hanging fruit. It's a "visual novel," sometimes called a dating sim, but as the choices are all text-based the gameplay should be pretty easy, right?

"It's a text game, and you have to choose A or B, you only have these text options," Kristen said. "But I'm sitting there on Google Translate trying to translate these strategy guides and match up (Japanese) characters to make my choices. And I'm thinking 'Why the hell did I buy a Japanese Xbox and this game, this is just retarded.' It's so embarrassing trying to match characters to a language I don't even know. I've spent $400 on a game I can't even read."

It makes me wonder. These are called games. And technically, she's playing them. But is this even fun? Is this ever fun?

"I definitely play more games I don't enjoy than games I do," she says. "Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don't enjoy."

Kristen's husband doesn't even know why she sticks with it, if something like CSI: Hard Evidence is so unfulfilling for her to play.

"Sometimes I'll be playing, and he'll ask, 'Did I have to buy that or did someone else buy it?'" Kristen says. "And I'm like, 'Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?' And he walks away, saying 'I can't believe you're playing that.' To me that's more embarrassing than playing Disney: Sing It."

A Mother's Work

Kristen is careful to remind me that she does have a life outside of gaming. "I'm an avid paintball player; I have my own gun, although that's also another expensive hobby," she says. "But yeah, I'd much rather go out to a bar, go bowling, play darts or pool than sit at home and boost games all night. I'm still young."

She's also the mother of a six-year-old girl. You can do the math there, it means Kristen became a mom at age 18. Before then, she was a rather typical kid, if a little tomboyish, and absolutely delighted by video games. Kristen says she's played them since she was five. When she lived with her parents, new games and new consoles were common, especially around the holidays. When she had her daughter and moved out of the home, her original Xbox and her beloved NES - which she still has even though it won't work - stayed behind. The Xbox 360 she bought a little more than three years ago marked her re-entry to games since having her daughter.

Sometimes mother and daughter play - Spongebob was one such example. But Kristen had to load up one of the five other gamertags she keeps on the console for family and friends to play. Boosting games might sound out of bounds to some gamers, but it's entirely within the ultra-gamerscore ethos. What isn't, however, is having anyone get an achievement for you. Even your six-year-old girl.

"She climbed up and said, 'Let me play,' so I said, 'Just a second,' and put her up with another (gamertag) and let her play," Kristen says. "Sometimes she'll say 'Look, Mom, I got an achievement too!' She gets excited."

This isn't something Kristen wants to encourage. "I don't want her to get addicted like I am though," Kristen says. "She doesn't really see me play too much, actually."

Her husband, Jeff, doesn't game much at all himself. He owns a towing business that provides a comfortable lifestyle and accommodates both his interests and Kristen's gaming. He's rather mellow about all the time she spends with games, if not the money, and keeps both in perspective. Some guys have wives who spend a ton of money on clothes, or dislike spending as much time around the house as she does.

"I have some hobbies myself that are fairly pricey and I can't really blame her for that," Jeff says. "However, occasionally a string of new games will come out within a two day span and magically a few hundred dollars will be missing from the bank account. With as much time as she has allotted for video games and the kid I can account for her whereabouts at any given moment so I'm certain that she isn't cheating on me."

Even pressed for a ballpark estimate, Kristen doesn't know how much her obsession with Gamerscore has cost in the preceding three years. "My pro system is $250, my Japanese console cost $400, the hard drive I put on it was $50 - I don't want to see the number, and I'm sure Jeff doesn't want to see it," she says. "But I think it would be cool to know."

There's another number about which she seems even less enthusiastic, though. And that's the next big milestone for her gamerscore.

Calling It a Career

Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it's with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It's almost like she doesn't want to get there, for what it will force her to consider.

The simplest answer is by far easier said than done: Just quit. "I keep saying when I get 200,000 gamerscore, I'm going to retire," Kristen says. "There are people who do that. I say it now, but I don't think you can ever actually quit. It's like a drug. It is addicting."

And she uses that word often enough that I figure I should bring up the subject. Carefully. I would never say video game addiction isn't real, knowing that real people do indeed battle it. I also believe it's a topic given to alarmism. And I'm not a psychiatrist, so it's not my place to go diagnosing other people's behavior. But I ask Kristen anyway. Maybe, has she ever considered talking to someone about her gaming?

"I wouldn't say I need to talk to someone," Kristen says after considering the question for a long moment. "I'm not hurting someone by doing this. My family life is not being hurt. Granted, it's like an addiction, but I'm not hurting anyone. Well, I'm getting little sleep sometimes, but that's on me.

"Besides, I saw where someone had gone to be treated at a rehab center for video games, and it was something like $30,000 a year, and I thought, 'Do you know how many Xboxes and games I could buy with this?'" she says, without a trace of irony. "I don't think so."

When Kristen is most at ease with her gamerscore is when it describes how she's good at something. How she's figured out a way to beat the system; or how she's actually put in the time to get the "General" achievement in Call of Duty 3 - getting 40,000 points in ranked matches - to collect a rare 100+ gamerscore achievement.

"It's very much a personal pride thing, being ranked in the top five in the world in something, whether it's gaming or the fact I'm a female gamer," Kristen says. "I'm never going to be in the Olympics, so I'll be a great gamer. It's something I know I'm good at."

But I hope when she breaks 200,000 she can put the controller down. She spent the first three years of her adulthood being a mom. I suggest to Kristen that, maybe, she's spent the last three in front of a console, trying to get some of that lost time back.

Kristen ponders this, and seems to agree. "Maybe," she says.

Maybe then she can call it even.

When I wasn't washing green slime out of every crevice of my body, I spent my time cheating my way to first place at celebrity bowling tournaments (Tell no one.) and schooling Aaron Carter at foosball (Tell everyone.). As glamorous as that was, I took a break from acting for educational purposes and soon landed my first "real life" job: A Game Advisor position at GameStop.

I quickly learned a few things about working there:

1. Men reserve more games when I wear low-cut shirts. Women, not so much.
2. Children may urinate, defecate, and/or vomit on the store carpet, resulting in me cleaning up said unholy bodily substance before realizing I could have tricked my co-workers into doing it.
3. Every attempt by mouth-breathing fanboys to lock horns about how much GameStop sucks while I'm ringing them up for $500 worth of peripherals ends with me choking on my own drool because I care so little.

Whenever a customer recognized me, they would immediately ask why I went from humiliating myself on television to humiliating myself at a game store. The answer was simple: It was a block away from my condo.

…Which segued into my REAL answer: I am infatuated with video games.

As a game enthusiast, I love not only playing games, but the history of gaming, the storylines, the soundtracks, the voiceover acting, and discussing them for hours with other gamers. But being an actor first and a gamer second, the things I love most about games are the characters, and their capability to stir up genuine emotional reactions from players.

Movie characters are roles performed by real, living actors. Game characters, while voiced by living actors, are simply computer creations. With today's graphical technology flirting with Uncanny Valley along with ever-improving game dialog, do characters in video games have the same ability to conjure up feeling from the viewer/player as actors in motion pictures?

On one hand, video games consume more of your time than simply a trip to the movie theater. The more time you spend with your computer-generated lead, the closer you two become. You can almost feel an imaginary high-five from your character after overcoming a treacherous obstacle, like getting past that unreasonably strong white-haired assassin in No More Heroes or finally showing Zeus the meaning of the phrase "Kratos Smash!" Most often, I will walk out of a two-hour movie and feel somewhat familiar with the characters, but not enough to say I really know them. I rarely reference the leading man or lady from some blockbuster-of-the-week in the days following my viewing of the film, while I will spend the rest of my life remembering my seven(plus)-hour journey with Dante and Nero from Devil May Cry 4 or Nathan from the Uncharted series, and how good it felt to be part of the victory instead of just an observer. Finishing Odin Sphere after over seventy hours of gameplay, and realizing my adventure with the amazing characters was over, left me with an empty feeling. From this perspective, video game characters connect better with humans than those in movies.

On the other hand, the remembrance of your long journey may not necessarily be a positive one. An extended meet-and-greet with characters in games may cause your mind to associate negative traits with these heroes. For example, sure, the Prince from Prince of Persia 4 had some incredible moves and fought like a badass, but why did he have to communicate like every arrogant frat boy I've ever met and immediately wanted to punch in the mouth? (Okay, that's from a chick's perspective. Get off me.)

On the living and breathing side of things, actors have been evoking audience emotion since nearly the dawn of film. From Rick and Ilsa's tragic romance in Casablanca to the heart-wrenching performances at the end of Saving Private Ryan, a superbly acted role can conjure up laughter, tears, and reflection from the audience. Perhaps the reason for this stems from the old saying that less is more. Unlike a game, where you can explore environments, talk to other characters, and sometimes choose even what your character says, a movie gives the audience just enough information about the characters to understand the story – no more, no less. The rest is left to the imagination.

Picture Casablanca as a video game. Gameplay would force you to be with your main character, Rick (Humphrey Bogart), for a long period as you navigate through the game. As a result, you would develop a kinship with Rick, like you do in the movie – just in a different way. With ten times more dialogue, you would more fully understand his way of thinking and relationships with the other characters at the same time you are running him into walls, getting him killed by Nazis, and yelling at him to reload faster. Pretty standard for a game.

Then you get on the tarmac. Your digitally rendered Humphrey is grasping Ingrid Bergman by the shoulders, telling her to get on that plane. However, Humphrey's motions are stiff, his eyes are too glossy, his teeth are…weird, and his arms keep magically passing through Ingrid's shoulder. The scene would still play out in a melancholy fashion, but you wouldn't quite feel their pain and passion the same way as in the film, where you can literally see into the souls of the actors.

When I was thirteen, my acting coach refused to give me comedic scenes to perform because they were too easy for me. She'd give me scenes where I'd have to cry. I struggled for months, and even tried cheating by pinching the crap out of my eyelids when my coach turned her back. Turns out she could see the pinch marks. (GOOD IDEA, THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD LISA.) But one day I figured it out. Crying took preparation. I had to take a few moments, think about something tragic I'd been through, and get into a state of mind that made me pale in the face and ran chills up my spine. Not only did the camera see the tears, but it picked up the pain in my eyes, and the subtext of a discontent, troubled mind. I became relatable to the audience.

Digital characters, no matter how good the graphics, cannot get in a state of mind. They can't draw from experience – only real, living actors can do that. While voiceover actors have that ability, their emotion can only go so far when they're talking through a computer creation. From this perspective, movie characters connect better with humans than game characters.

LET'S QUICKLY RECAP SO WE CAN GET BACK TO OUR RAIDS:

Movies connect with audiences because of the actors, who are real people with real pasts. Video games connect with players by making them part of the story. If the thought of Elena being dead caused me to tear up the same way Armageddon did, I'm going to go ahead and say these two art forms are finally on an even playing field.

Obviously, in the end, video games are supposed to be a form of entertainment! I mean, who really cares about emotion when we can have infinite rocket launchers? Anyone?

Lisa Foiles landed a role on Nickelodeon's primetime sketch comedy series, All That, in 2005 after the show held a nationwide casting call. Aside from hosting countless Nickelodeon shows, such as On-Air Dares and Snick's Sleepover Jam, Lisa's other memorable roles include a recurring part on Disney Channel's Even Stevens and FOX's Malcolm in the Middle. Lisa currently works as a graphics/web designer in Portland, OR where she acts in various Portland-based commercials, such as the recent campaign for Raving Rabbids TV Party. Her free time is spent riding sport motorcycles, writing for Save Point (www.loadsavepoint.com), and of course, playing video games.

For more information, visit Lisa's official website.

Read the rest of our celebrity columns.

In video-gamer vernacular, this is called a "double jump." To a gaming outsider, the concept might not make any sense. It might even be flagrantly ridiculous.

To a gaming outsider, actually, that a game character encounters so many situations wherein he needs to jump in order to proceed might in itself be foreign or bizarre. Before we can properly talk about double jumping, we probably have to talk about jumping.

The fact seems to be that, in games of ancient times, jumping was a chief mechanic because it offered a moment-long variation in what would otherwise be a game about getting from point A to point B.

The ancient game template calls for a hero beginning at an origin, seeking a destination, impeded by obstacles. "Obstacles" can be either dangerous objects or bottomless pits. "Dangerous objects" can either be barrels rolling down ramps in Donkey Kong, bullet-like projectiles of mysterious or known origin, or enemy characters. The player deals with dangerous objects by avoiding them. In a two-dimensional game presented at a side-on angle, this means jumping. In a two-dimensional game presented by a top-down angle, this means walking around it. "Enemy characters" can either be grunts, mini-bosses, or bosses. Grunts are easy to deal with. Mini-bosses are more harrowing experiences, and bosses are occasionally cinematic in the struggle they put the player through.

Super Mario Bros. allows the player to surmount obstacles mostly by jumping. In fact, you don't have to kill a single enemy in Super Mario Bros. You can jump over or otherwise avoid every one of them. Super Mario Bros. is also elegant enough to make the jump function an attack in itself. Most enemies are killed or otherwise dealt with by jumping on top of them. Jump on top of a mushroom-like Goomba, and it flattens and dies. Jump on top of a turtle-like Koopa, and it retracts into its shell. Now you can touch the shell to send it flying in one direction. If it touches other enemies, they die. However, it can ricochet back and hit you, either hurting you or killing you. If you are Little Mario, it kills you. If you are Big Mario, it turns you into Little Mario. If Little Mario eats a mushroom, he turns into Big Mario. If Big Mario touches a Fire Flower, he can throw fireballs, which can kill all enemies on contact, except the black beetle things, which are an exception, because a game like this needs one little exception of every flavor in order to stay spicy. Oh, and there are also the Hammer Brothers, who jump near-randomly and throw hammer projectiles at an eclectic angle. You can kill them by jumping on them, by jumping up at a block they are standing on, thus hitting them from beneath, or by throwing fireballs.

Super Mario Bros. is not the bad guy. In fact, Super Mario Bros. is the ultimate good guy. I might have mentioned it before, though I am adamant in my belief that Super Mario Bros. is a perfect video game design. It is not, however, an inimitable miracle. The problem is that game developers, including Nintendo themselves, have been trying to imitate it in the wrong ways.

What's perfect about Super Mario Bros. is that it teaches you how to play in its opening ten seconds. We have a character on the left side of the screen, facing right. We instinctively know that we have to move to the right. We move to the right. A block with a question mark on it floats in the air above our character's head. Two steps to the right of this block is a series of many blocks, some with flashing question marks, and some of solid, scary-looking brick. Floating above this series of blocks is another question mark block.

Just as we see this buffet of blocks, a mushroom-shaped monster-like thing becomes visible, moving from the right to the left.

This thing is moving, then, in the exact opposite direction of the hero. This subliminally communicates to us that this Other Moving Object is our enemy.

We simultaneously wonder: how do I reach that block? And how do I kill that enemy?

In the old times, we only had two buttons on the controller. We'd have plenty of time to press one of them before the enemy killed and/or ate us. This is how we'd learn that we can jump.

The hero's head bonks into the question mark block. A deliciously crispy ping sound echos as a golden coin pops up and disappears. Where did the coin go? Who knows! At the top of the screen, we see a coin symbol and a number: "01". We realize we should get more of those.

The enemy is drawing nearer. The only thing we know how to do is jump. We press the jump button. We jump just high enough to jump over the enemy, and survive.

Or maybe we land on the enemy's head, and he dies. Points are added to our score. We think, "Cool".

By now, we know that question mark blocks give us good things. What about the ugly brown bricks? We jump at one. It throbs. It doesn't break.

We hit the next question mark block, and a mushroom pops out and begins spontaneously sliding across the ground. Of course, we pick it up, because the last question mark block only gave us good things. Mario grows larger. If we jump at a solid brick again, we find that we can break it.

The player will learn, when he makes contact with an enemy, that being Big Mario means you can survive two hits before dying. If the player doesn't pick up the mushroom and instead touches the first enemy, he will also learn that being Little Mario means you die after touching one enemy.

So what we have here is a game with a strictly limited move set (walk, run, jump) in which two of the three actions (walk, run) serve the short and long-term goals (get from point A to point B), albeit in different capacities (run to move quickly, walk to line yourself up minutely for tricky jumps) and the last of the three actions (jump) is linked to multiple (nearly all) immediate-term goals (avoid enemies, kill enemies, avoid obstacles, obtain items).

In this game, the character's vital status is portrayed entirely through the game graphics: if Little, Mario dies in one hit; if Big, Mario survives two hits. If Big and White, Mario can survive two hits and throw fireballs.

What if the player manages to complete the entire game on his first play-through, without touching a single enemy or even falling into a bottomless pit? Even as a person who has seen or experienced many improbable events, I can't imagine this ever actually happening. Has a human being of such impeccable reflex and intuition ever existed? This is a crucial question, and the answer is "I don't think so". If you or someone you know is this particular human being, plz upload something to YouTube plz. I'd love to see how gracefully you can tie your shoes (winking smiley face) (note to many curious readers who emailed me last month: no, "(winking smiley face)" is not a bizarre copy-editing tick; it's just something I've been doing on the internet for a couple of years).

PIC

Let's go one further, and say that this genius player doesn't even ever pick up the Fire Flower. Let's say he never uses the warp zone, and he isn't particularly bent on picking up every last coin. He takes his time — though not too much time, of course, because his time is somewhat strictly limited. Let's also say that he only kills enemies on accident, or when it feels as though it couldn't be avoided (even though we've established that it can be avoided).

At any rate, if the player is good enough to play the game straight through, without dying or even being injured, on his first time ever playing through the game, would that necessarily make it impossible for him to feel tension, pressure, or event delight at his own success? In a bad game, he could probably get away with not enjoying the experience. In Super Mario Bros., I'm pretty confident that even the virtuoso / jackpotman / idiot savant would enjoy the experience thoroughly. The reason why is so difficult to articulate that even Nintendo has failed to replicate Super Mario Bros. universal success in the (nearly) twenty-five (!) long years since its release.

I am pretty sure that I haven't gone a single column on this website without mentioning Super Mario Bros. and why it's a great game, though for the sake of those who came in late, let's go over it again:

1. It's simple: you can proceed entirely to the end of the game by only walking, running, and jumping

2. It's elegant: it provides the player with a robust, flowing experience that requires him/her to use every imaginable permutation of the small set of player character actions

3. It's "artistically" confident: the game is about a man in overalls who grows to twice his normal size when he eats a mushroom, and it doesn't dare to explain the reasons why

In 2005 — again, I realize I'm repeating myself — Nintendo proclaimed that many gamers had lost touch with the games of today, and that they sought to win those players back. Their proposed solution was to make games that appealed to people who didn't play games. Someone at Nintendo must have said, during an important meeting, that people who didn't play games had played Super Mario Bros. (proof: Super Mario Bros. was a lot of people's first game). Nintendo's knee-jerk reaction to this reality was to release Super Mario Bros., perfectly as-is, as a budget-priced Gameboy Advance cartridge. Okay, that worked a little bit. Eventually, Nintendo began to make games that weren't games, like Brain Training. These sold hugely. In board rooms around Japan, game developers conspired to "think like Nintendo." Instead of interpreting "think like Nintendo" as "think of good ideas that might appeal to people the way Brain Age appeals to people", they instead seemingly interpreted it as "rip off Brain Age".

I guess this mostly brings us to the present. People from outside the gamesphere climb over one another to inform us that games are not art. Maybe they will be, someday, some say, though by and large, at this very moment, they are not.

Gamers get all up in arms whenever someone says games are not art. Roger Ebert got truckloads of hate mail for daring to insinuate that games are not art. I read through a lot of blog posts or comments around the time Roger Ebert said that. Most of the enraged kids were quick to point out how the games industry is making so-and-so many billions of dollars more per year than the film industry, and that was a little weird. Since when does monetary worth translate to art? Whatever happened to artists being starving?

Some say, games don't have an equivalent of "Citizen Kane." I say, games don't have an equivalent of "Ben Hur," either. The problem is consistency, "artistic conscience". Man, I feel like I talk about this all the time. People ask me about this on the street, sometimes. It's weird. Sometimes they say that I only like Super Mario Bros. because I was a kid when I played it. No, I'm immune to the nostalgia thing. Also, I haven't matured emotionally since about age five (I was a mature kid), and I'm not afraid to admit that. Super Mario Bros. had the formula perfect.

What happened, though? Super Mario Bros. took an industry that was basically a fat and ugly infant, and turned it into a toddler with a popsicle addiction. Twenty-five years later, games are making more money than movies. They are not, however, making All The Money In The World. So maybe people could be making better games.

It's not vilification to portray game developers as money-grubbing businessmen. This is, after all, a business. However, it maybe it vilification (in the most awesome way) to insinuate that, in the videogame industry, the games are often being made by the types of general-entertainment "fanboys" that, in the movie industry, would consider it the highest honor to get paid a salary to fetch Steven Spielberg his coffee.

Maybe that sounds meaner than I intended it to. Oh well! Too late! It's all typed out now, and god knows I still haven't found my "delete" key.

I like to mention this interview with Tetsuya Nomura that I read in Weekly Famitsu a couple years ago, on the subject of Kingdom Hearts II. In this one issue of Famitsu, Mr. Nomura, a man who found fans after designing the characters for Final Fantasy VII, is interviewed twice — once on the subject of the upcoming Blu-ray release of a special edition of a film he had "directed" about what happens to the Final Fantasy VII characters after Final Fantasy VII ended, and once on the subject of the Final Mix re-release of Kingdom Hearts II. A few huge things pop out and touch index fingertips to the readers' maybe-moist eyeballs:

In the interview re: "Advent Children" (the Final Fantasy VII movie special edition / re-release), he talks about how the computer graphics will be more detailed, to truly wield the power of a larger storage medium (Blu-ray, in this case). For example, the main character, Cloud, has dirt on his face during one particular scene, to "better illustrate the intensity of his struggle." Mr. Nomura then quips that these are "details that only the true fan will appreciate."

Furthermore, on the subject of "Advent Children", Mr. Nomura explains, when asked if both language tracks (English / Japanese) will be available on the disc, that only English will be available, because of both "storage issues" and the fact that, and I quote, "we estimate that most of the buyers of this special edition will be people who already own the movie on DVD", so they want to give them a language track they haven't heard before.

On the subject of Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix, Mr. Nomura was asked why they made a "Final Mix" after saying, in a Famitsu interview on the subject of the original Kingdom Hearts II, that the goal with Kingdom Hearts II was to make a game that would not need a "Final Mix". Mr. Nomura's answer is that, sadly, without actually releasing something and seeing how the world perceives it, it's nearly impossible to tell what could be improved or added to it; "And, of course", he adds, crucially, "I thought of my own ideas for new content, as well".

The biggest fire alarm rings when Mr. Nomura says, of the joy of developing Kingdom Hearts II, that nearly every interviewee during the team-expansion phase clapped his or her hands with joy, reported that they were huge fans of the first Kingdom Hearts game, and/or (this is crucial), asked Tetsuya Nomura for his autograph.

What I'm saying is, can you trust such people to give an objective opinion during the game development process?

In short, games are made by fans, for fans. The would-be critics are, more often than not, fans. Despite being fans of games in general, game developers often fear the outside world of game fans to a point of near-absolute subservience.

I'm not going to say any more about that. We're going to leave the tip of that iceberg uncovered and do a little bit of stargazing.

(Jerry Seinfeld voice) What's the deal with jumping? I mean, who does that? Who jumps everywhere they go? Have you ever noticed just how much you jump in most video games?

I've been over this before: characters like Nathan Drake and Lara Croft appeal to us because they are realistic human beings with flawed and amusing personalities or wicked pyramidal breasts. They draw us into their real-like-rule-having real-like worlds, and then they do maybe sixty-six explosive pull-ups in the space of three minutes, pulling themselves up so hard that they spring high into the air, grabbing onto the next ledge. We either see this the first time and lol, because we know this can't happen in real life, or we keep playing the game without thinking about it, because we've never tried to do a pull-up in real life, and that if we ever try and fail to do one, we will no doubt attribute our failure to the fact that we don't have breasts like Lara Croft. For the former type of gamer, the games' ridiculousness escalates until we obtain a shrewd enough detachment from the proceedings, at which point we are maybe-sanctimoniously able to "sit back" and "relax" and "enjoy" it because, after all, it's "just a game." In the case of the latter type of gamer, they will grow up to think that this is what games are, this is what happens in games, and if this sort of thing doesn't happen in every single game on earth, the game is stupid and/or for losers.

So, why do action / adventure game characters jump so much?

In short, it's because games since Super Mario Bros. tend to be about moving from point A to point B. Name me one action game where your long-, short-, or immediate-term goals at any given time don't include a Point B. You can't! It's just not possible! (Tower defense games don't count!)

Games are about moving. And not just any moving. No mainstream hit game has managed to perform the feat of being about merely walking or running at one speed along featureless terrain. Games need to give us terrain, obstacles, and opponents, in order to make our journeys interesting. If the journeys aren't interesting, we wouldn't be taking them. Games are entertainment. The journeys they present us are wholly optional activities, in the context of human living.

Games are wallpaper, or ornamentation, for the rooms of our lives. Films, too, are wallpaper for the rooms of our lives. Films contribute to the human maturation process so profoundly that modern philosophers (some of whom aren't dead yet, so it wouldn't be kind to name-drop them) have even taken to acknowledging their influence as vital. The best way to approach this point is to quote a minor character in Edward Yang's film "Yi Yi," who tells a girl, on a date, that his unseen, unnamed uncle says "People live four times longer these days because of movies." How scary, and true.

Do we live longer because of videogames?

Games are wallpaper for bare rooms of our life-chapters. They're a hobby(, though, like all hobbies, they might also be a job). Games are entertainment. Movies play out in front of us. Games do not. Movies are passive entertainment. Games are active entertainment.

You can construct a film entirely out of scenes where characters sit at a table, talking to one another.

You can sit at a table in real life with your friends, talking about whatever. However, it will never be exactly like a scene in a film. Maybe, in the film, every character in a conversation knows something that one other character doesn't know. Maybe someone's life is at stake. Films have taught us how much it sucks when someone's life is at stake.

You can't make a game about people sitting at a table, talking. Buried deep in the psychology of games is this absolute, burning need to see something move. Remember the first time you ever used a television remote to turn a television on, or change channels? You might have been three years old, or you might have been nine. Games speak to the part of your psychology that was ecstatic at that precise moment. The need to move something that isn't yourself, to actively participate in something, is so deeply buried in the psychology of games that no game controller since the Atari 2600 has lacked an input device whose purpose is innately understood as solely to move your main character.

Maybe it's hard to think back this far: When was the first time you realized that the joystick moved Pac-Man, or that the control pad moved Mario? With Pac-Man, it was easy; you might have been in an arcade, and the joystick was the only input device. Well, there was also a start button. Arcade games were easy to understand, because the function of each button was written right there next to the button.

Or maybe you first played Pac-Man on an Atari 2600. The shape of the standard Atari 2600 controller communicated so much to the player. The joystick was this big tall skinny smokestack of a thing, and the only button was this little dime-sized red thing. It was red, a stark contrast against the black plastic of the controller, so as to stand out just enough, and tell you, "Hey, I'm important," though it did not dare approach the monumental majesty of the joystick. And what a word, "joystick"! It's a stick, which brings you joy. What is the joy? The joy is that you are remotely making something inside your television screen move. After all those years of watching news anchors discuss earthquake or fire death tolls, or watching game show contestants flub simple questions and miss out on Brand New Cars, now, you finally had the opportunity to direct the action inside the television screen.

It's obvious that the joystick was the most important part of the controller, just as it was obvious that the button was absolutely essential. In many games, the button served only to start the game. In some games, it allowed you to shoot. So there we had the birth of most modern genres of game, in Space Invaders: You move, and you shoot. You can even take cover under little shields. Wow, Gears of War is such a Space Invaders rip-off (lol).

The Nintendo Famicom / Entertainment System arrived at a point when game designers were so good at making the same old games that the people started revolting at the sameness of them all. They call this the "crash" of the games market. It must have been right around Super Mario Bros. that Nintendo realized it was probably best to not make too many new franchises, to keep the cards close to their chest and only release new games when they were significantly big and ground-breaking enough. Too many games tired people out.

That said, around the time of Super Mario Bros., games were facing an evolve-or-die situation. The public reputation of games in general had fallen through the floor. People needed a really good reason to care again. Super Mario Bros. was that really good reason.

Twenty-five years into the future, we have lots of games, and even more people playing them. I have a friend whose daughter is old enough to play and enjoy Pokemon. We're passing games on as a tradition, a habit, or a traditional habit. Well, hey, traditions are just habits we can share.

The games market is always looking for ways to get More Money. The two methods for getting More Money are:

1. Make people who like games buy more games
2. Make people who don't like games like games

Accomplishing #1 is easy: Make games that people who like games would probably like.

#2, however, is something no one seems to have worked out a perfect formula for.

Meanwhile, twenty-five years in the past, we had Super Mario Bros. After nearly a decade of games where either movement or shooting were the chief joys, we finally had a game where the movement felt amazing (Mario accelerates, he slides to a stop, he squeaks when he turns around, he jumps higher the longer you hold the button), and where the shooting (of fireballs) felt genuinely unique (they bounce at such neat, quirky angles). What we had, in Super Mario Bros., was a game of "artistic conscience."

A year later, we had Castlevania. Oh man. I've been waiting for this part!

I love the Castlevania games; I love them enough to pick them apart viciously. Castlevania games are invariably about a hero on a quest to kill Dracula or someone who is good enough friends with Dracula to be dangerous. Most of the time, the journey leads through Dracula's castle, colloquially referred to by Transylvanian residents as "Castlevania," because it's a landmark and they have to be proud of something.

In the original Castlevania, the hero, Simon Belmont, did a lot of stair-climbing. Staircases were represented graphically as diagonal lines with little individual stairs etched into them. To ascend a staircase, you approach it and press up on the control pad. The hero begins walking up the staircase. He ascends the stairs slowly, "realistically". He can't jump while ascending a staircase. He can, however, swing his whip at monsters who might be flying or jumping in his direction. Some of the most ferocious memories of the original Castlevania aren't of large set-pieces, or even any particular small set-pieces. They are of single repeated moments of dread, of when you're climbing up some stairs and you see a bat flying at you from the right side of the screen. Bats don't fly in a straight line. They kind of wobble up and down a bit. In your brain, you do a quick calculation: If the bat wobbles a little bit down or a little bit up before his flight path intersects the staircase, at your current speed of ascent, you would not be able to move, from your current location, to a position higher or lower than that bat's trajectory. So you are going to have to either

#1 take the hit, or
#2 kill the bat

Now comes brain calculation #2: The business end of your whip is only so-and-so pixels high. The bat is about six times higher than your whip's height. So where do you need to stand, on this staircase, to be able to destroy this bat with the highest probability?

Thankfully, in the original Castlevania, a shrewd player can always kill the bat. No evil variable will ever tumble out of nowhere and render the act impossible. The game is impeccably balanced, though it may seem cruel and unforgiving. The secret is that the bats, though wobbling in flight pseudo-randomly, only spawn from pre-determined parts of the screen. All you need to do is put two and two together, position yourself accordingly, and press the kill button.

The feeling of hesitating just too long on a staircase, performing some unnecessary calculations, thinking way too hard, and then failing to turn around in time, so that the bat whaps you in the back and Simon cringes, hops back, and falls like a sack of potatoes right off the side of the staircase — it's burned into the classic old-school gamer's brain.

PIC
Later years would equip us with such rollicking, frustrating, sticky friction-memories as: Trying to walk up a hill in Super Mario 64, trying to ascend up a hill from a walking speed in any Sonic the Hedgehog game without pressing the jump button, et cetera. In Super Mario 64, it's maddening. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's like we're trying to make things hard on ourselves. Castlevania planted the seed in us. We want, we need, to feel that friction. And Super Mario Bros. planted the seed in Castlevania: Games aren't just about moving, they are about rubbing against the surface of the world.

Castlevania released to a soon-to-be-devoted cult audience, wearing its flashy quirks on its sleeves and pants and on the back of its shirt. The whip was a weird weapon. Previous games had featured guns that fired projectiles out of a location in the middle of the character's body (ship) in a straight line. Those projectiles generally continued until they hit something. In Castlevania, the whip fires at about the character's chest height, it stretches only so far, and its effective area is only so high and so wide. In order to get anywhere in the game, the player had to master the knowledge of the precise tiny pixel block that represented his avatar's offensive influence. Most crucial to this knowledge was how far said pixel block existed from his character.

Then there were the stairs. And the quirks of all the secondary weapons. And the jumping physics: Simon jumps up in what looks like a crouched position; you can control the length of the jump until a certain precise point, after which he falls straight down like an axe. It's pretty safe to say that Castlevania was made this way on purpose. If they didn't want friction and physics in their game, they would have made something bland and simple. Japanese side-scrolling games had existed for several years without friction, or even without specific quirks. Games like Dragon Buster, where your character floats mouse-cursor-like over a featureless world, swinging a sword at a boring angle. And some side-scrollers had remarkable quirks, like Legend of Kage, where your character can jump two screens straight up, albeit without any really interesting physics. (Also, Legend of Kage scrolls from right to left, instead of from left to right.) Castlevania must have been made the way it was made on purpose: Eschewing huge game-mechanic related gimmicks for general friction.

What was the selling point of Castlevania? Well, it was a game about horror movie monsters. The schlock-smiths at Konami saw fit to craft a game that found a perfect excuse to fit Dracula, werewolves, Frankenstein's Monster, Medusa, and the Grim Reaper into the same story. They figured that this level of instant familiarity would translate to perfect success.

Actually, wait, where did Castlevania really start? Konami seem to have the information under some kind of G-14 classification, so let's make up theories: Maybe it was the music. Maybe the music composer was tooling around with the sound chip and was like, "Whoa, listen to this horror-movie-music shit I have going on right here. It sounds like a pipe organ." Or maybe some game designer went, "Oh, man, this simple character I created has really weird jumping physics and his weapon is quirky as hellllllllll," and some other guy was like, "Okay, let's fit this into something. Hey, that dude over there got something to sound like a pipe organ, and that guy is drawing sprites of werewolves, so let's see what we can do". (Actually, I just looked up the music composer on Wikipedia, and it turns out she was a . . . she. I just added her as a friend on Facebook! I love Facebook friends! If you're reading this, be my Facebook friend (so lonely).)

I'd like to think Castlevania began with the staircases. Simon Belmont is a more old-world, realistic kind of dude than Mario. Something tells me that a game programmer at Konami played Super Mario Bros. and found it funny that Mario jumps all the time. One of the more iconic images of Super Mario Bros. is the staircase at the end of each stage. It's as high as the screen. There's a flagpole on the other side of it. You climb the stairs, and then you jump off, trying to hit the top of the flagpole. Or, well, technically, if you are a kid with an imagination, you try to jump over the flagpole. Hell, twenty-five years later, if you are an adult who was once a child with an imagination, you still try to jump over the flagpole. Traditions are habits that so don't hurt us, we just have to share them.

So, wait, why are the "stairs" on this staircase as high as Little Mario's head? Even Big Mario, who is technically a giant, has to jump to climb each individual stair. Isn't that a little weird? One answer would be that the "staircase" isn't actually a "staircase." "Staircases" are architectural features that facilitate movement between one floor of a building and another. Without stairs, we'd have to learn how to jump. I had a dream just two weeks ago, to be honest, where I got home to find that the landlord had demolished the staircase leading up to my apartment, and informed me that he'd drilled a hole in the middle of my living room floor, and that I would need to learn how to jump three stories straight up. In the dream, I kicked him in the nuts and started crying, though in real life I probably would have just started crying.

The staircases at the end of the stages in Super Mario Bros. are not actually staircases. They're just the rare case of a Rorshach test in which everyone gives the exact same answer (you know, like that one that looks like a dead dog): this arrangement of blocks Looks Like a Staircase. The brain is triggered: Jumping, eventually, comes to feel weird and ridiculous. So maybe some hotshot at Konami goes, "You know, stairs exist in real life as real things. It feels like work to climb a staircase, just like it feels like work to walk or run long distances. Super Mario Bros. made running and walking into fun. Maybe we can make staircases fun?" Maybe this maybe-plan backfired, depending on your perspective. You might have thought the original Castlevania was a bone-crushing, too-difficult experience. You'd also be a rube, unable to wrap his head around simple genius!

Okay, that was mean. Let's say something I don't like about Castlevania: The very beginning of the game. You're outside the castle. The first time you play the game, you don't know who the hell you are, or why the hell you are who the hell you are. You press one button, and you jump. You press another button, and you lash out with your whip. Congratulations, you now know how to play. Now, right in front of you, there's a candle. The candle is glowing, the flame flickering with a brilliant two-frame animation. Okay. Maybe you walk right past it. The game is, if nothing else, atmospheric. That much you can tell already, just standing outside the first level. Hell, you might play Castlevania for ten minutes, performing pretty poorly at the first stage, before your friend comes in and shows you that you can whip the first candle, and a power-up falls out. Touch it, and your character freezes for an instant. Now his whip is, like, twice as long. Wait, why would you give me that right away, before I have even had an occasion to use the whip to kill anything (aside from a candle)? That's weird.

Did you know that, in a Japanese game development environment, the word used to describe "level design," since the Famicom era, has been "haikei," meaning "background" or "scenery". This is very important to understanding the way the Japanese have historically approached making games.

I've personally had the postmodern pleasure of having to explain to a few Japanese game developers that "level design" does not, in the West, mean what the level looks like: It means the things that happen in the level, and how they are laid-out. In Devil May Cry, "level design" is deciding that the first stage is going to look like a church.

Level design in modern Japanese games, by Western standards, is pretty abysmal. In the first stage of Devil May Cry 4, we have a part where the player comes into a circular plaza, which is then surrounded by a glowing red wall. Enemies then appear out of mostly nowhere. The "producers" — the "brains" behind this schlock — have seen fit to solve the puzzle of the moment by deciding that the enemies are demons, and everyone knows that demons have the power to basically materialize out of the ground or thin air. We fight them until they stop appearing. When they are dead, the glowing red wall vanishes. We are now free to move forward into the only path forward.

Eventually, we're inside a building. We walk by a door. We look at it. A message tells us: "It's locked by a mysterious power." We continue down the hallway. There's another door. We look at it. A message tells us: "It's locked. You need a key." Then the camera pulls back, and we see the mysterious-power-locked door slide open. There's a box behind it. We walk back. We open the box. The box has a key in it. We go back into the hallway, unlock the door in front of us. We exit into a circular plaza. A red, glowing wall appears around us. Enemies materialize. We fight them until they die. The wall disappears. We are now free to move forward. Et cetera.

Why are Japanese games able to get away with this? The reasons are simple, and huge:

1. The character designs / setting / story are meticulously researched to appeal to the target demographic

2. Something in the game (in Devil May Cry, combat) is polished / nuanced to a point where players will not complain if anything / everything outside that thing (combat) is bland

What's alarming is that all signs point to Japanese games being made this way entirely on purpose. I once suggested to a Japanese game developer, many years ago, that we try to make the levels interesting, in addition to making the combat fun and the story appealing to the target demographic, and the immediate response was "Why?" The ultimate form of the refusal was, "Devil May Cry doesn't bother, so we won't bother." In Devil May Cry, the tasks between battles really are tiny and asinine. Find an orb in a risk-free environment where the biggest challenge is figuring out where your character is on the screen and then use it to somehow open a door, et cetera. Your reward is more of the combat that you crave.

We can find hints of the Everything Disease in this, again. Many of the players playing these games might not care about the graphics or the character designs, though can you really blame developers for maintaining their conviction that the players all care about everything in the game? Some players merely appreciate the challenges posed by the battles. They may like the feeling that they have achieved a level of super-legitimate competence at the labyrinthine reflex-oriented tasks the game sets before them — revving up a motorcycle-sword while dodging enemy attacks, stringing together hits of a combo, avoiding detection from enemy AI patterns just long enough to execute unanswered strings of button-press-triggered combinations. Good money says that a decent percentage of Street Fighter IV players couldn't care less about the characters or the graphics or the music — they just want to play online, and win, and know that they are doing something better than someone else, someone who exists in the real world. It helps to know that the "something" is difficult. We know something is difficult when we fail at it at least once. We know something is very difficult when we fail three or four times.

In Devil May Cry, the naturally emerging "level design" is basically a commercial break between delicious opportunities for failure. Usually, it's the "scenery" department that slaps these segments together. That's kind of how it was in the old days, though maybe not quite.

Back in the old days, games were smaller. Programmers, level designers, and game designers tended to be the same people as the play-testers. In the case of Castlevania, you've got a guy with a whip, and you've got some stairs, and some enemies coming at him, and he can either climb the stairs, stay and fight, or get hit. The challenge of developing a game like this is laying it out in a reasonable fashion, so that it gets harder as it goes along. You want the hardest bosses to be at the end. You want the hardest platform segments to be later than the segments obviously constructed to help the player learn how to jump.

In the original Castlevania, the team likely sat down once they knew the game was about a big castle full of horror movie monsters, and decided what the motif for each stage would be. Stage one would be a hallway. Stage five would be a clock tower.

Back then, the game design vocabulary was limited. You hear a lot of people talk about how the Nintendo sound chip was so primitive that a composer needed to make a really good track or the music would fall flat. The corollary is that "restriction forces ingenuity".

Ingenuity is . . . probably better than "innovation."

Yes, what I'm saying is that "older games were better" — though mostly by default! Castlevania was such a simple game that, unless all of the obstacles were laid out in a common-sensically escalating manner, people would have freaked the hell out and hated it. Super Mario Bros. was the same way, technically, though Castlevania is more interesting in a modern light because it cutely tried to tell a film-like story, and its stages were home to background art that grew increasingly more portentous of some bombastic finale.

The original Castlevania didn't set the world on fire. It was quirky and well-made, though its horror-movie setting might have put some people off. It carved out a niche, and its developers no doubt felt that they could eat off it for a while. Other game developers saw Castlevania and knew that they couldn't make games about horror movie castles themselves, and that a whip was too obvious a thing to imitate, so they resigned to make their own game in a unique kind of setting.

We ended up with lots of games. Some of them were great. After maybe five years, we had a lot of games with enough unique hooks to populate one really huge, bombastic, great game.

Eventually, what happened, was the Feature Snipers showed up, and nobody ever needed to do anything original ever again. These trained eyes took aim on the whole of game history, and picked out the targets that could be separated neatly from their respective games' settings and never be noticed.

One of the features to be famously and widely sniped was the double jump. Many snipers sniped it from Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, which was in itself a non-numbered Super Famicom sequel to a non-numbered MegaDrive sequel of a Famicom version of an arcade game. The truth is that Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts actually sniped it from someplace else. It might have been Dragon Buster, which I conveniently mentioned earlier in this wall of text.

Why in the flaming hell could you double jump in Dragon Buster? Some old arcade game connoisseur is probably going to lecture me for this. I don't care. The feature is superfluous. You jump, and then you jump again.

In Super Mario Bros. 3, you can land slowly by flapping a raccoon tail as you jump. Okay. That feature probably came out of the same psychological place as mushrooms that make a man instantly grow to twice his size. The feeling of using a raccoon tail to float is not without nuance. You need to press the button repeatedly; the desperation of Mario's situation on the screen translates into the desperation of your fingers, translates into the desperate solution on the screen. The best games play desperation ping-pong with us. In Super Mario World, it's arguably dumbed down: When Mario is wearing a cape, you just hold a button, and he floats slowly down.

In Super Mario World, you can kind of double-jump, by jumping off Yoshi's back. That doesn't count as a true double jump, because you can't do it any time, at will.

No, the first Real Double Jump in games was in Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, in which King Arthur fights zombies and monsters in an effort to rescue a princess who you see in the opening scene, so you don't feel too bad if you give up without ever rescuing her (most people do). In Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, you jump, and then you jump again. You can do this whenever you want. The Japanese instruction manual calls this the "Harrier Jump". The distinction is important. The Harrier Jump only allows you to increase the vertical element of your jump. It's so full of nuance it's almost sick. Before a certain point in your jump trajectory, you can't initiate the Harrier Jump; past a certain point in your jump trajectory, you can't initiate the Harrier Jump. You have a short window. And anytime you do it, all it does is boost you up vertically.

It constitutes a huge risk. You can survive two hits before suffering scary death in this game. Enemies and their projectile spawn litter the screen. You need to master the precise feel of the Harrier Jump in order to use it effectively. "Effectively" means any manner that won't get you killed.

Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts represents an important point in the timeline of action game evolution because the idea of an idiot-savant playing entirely through it on his first try is damn near inconceivable to any self-respecting astropsychologist. Learning to come to grips with the "feel" of the character is even more essential in this game than in the earliest Castlevania titles. You could conceive of someone accidentally understanding all of the necessary skills of the first Castlevania game between the castle door and the first zombie. Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts is too chaotic.

The funny thing is, after Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, people started generally making easier games.

They did not, however, stop making games with double jumps.

I said earlier that even if a savant played through Super Mario Bros. on one life on his first try, he would still understand and maybe appreciate the unsettling feelings of challenge. A psychological Grand Canyon separates Super Mario Bros. from Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts in this regard, and a psychological Pacific Ocean separates Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts from every other game that has sniped the double-jump feature.

Sensing an opportunity to make "more money" on a "new game console", Konami set about making Castlevania: Symphony of the Night "something different." The market research apparently showed that Role-Playing Games were popular, and previous Castlevania games, such as the acclaimed Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse had flirted with non-linearity, multiple playable characters, and development of said characters. So Symphony of the Night emerged as a kind of lumbering RPG / action game chimera.

Symphony of the Night is one of the names that gets thrown around whenever fourteen-year-olds argue about the "best game ever." One of the names it gets thrown against with great vigor is Super Metroid. If you ask me, both of these are very nice games, maybe even great games, though neither of them is the best game ever, because they are deceptive and insincere. You might as well just go ahead and declare The Jam's cover of the "Batman" theme song the "best rock song ever," if you're going to say Symphony of the Night is the "best game ever".

Maybe I confused someone when I said that. I'm sorry. Though my extemporaneous prose style might lead you to believe otherwise, I am actually a proponent of simple, clean, shimmering game mechanics. I like games to be about progress. About moving forward, either by chunking forward, clunking forward, frickting forward, crunching forward, or whatever have you. I don't like when games glide on by, and I don't like it when they throw me against the wall, nor do I like it when they waste my time. I especially don't like when they piss on my lawn and say they're the sprinkler repairman. My favorite game of all-time is Out of This World, which I understand a lot of people pretend to like. I am not pretending.

What's disingenuous about Symphony of the Night? It has a double-jump. The double-jump is something it gives you later in the game. Prior to getting the ability that enables the double jump, you might have come across a wall or obstacle just too high for you to jump over. So the game gives you this supernatural power, tosses off an in-game-world explanation for its existence, and then you're off. You get the double jump ability, you test it out. You sure can jump high! This should help you get somewhere previously unreachable. Maybe you get the double jump ability and turn the game off (unlikely — getting new abilities, market research shows, instantly renews a player's interest in the game). Maybe you leave the game turned off for several weeks. When you turn it back on, you sure as hell can't remember where any previously-too-tall obstacles had been. So you open the map, and check out where the "explored" areas end. You can "solve" the "overlying puzzle" of the game by going to every dead end and seeing if the reason for your previous failure to explore that area had anything to do with not possessing the double jump ability. Eventually, with every little ability the game gives you (the ability to turn into mist, et cetera), you can solve every level-design-centered "puzzle" in the game. It's not so much solving a puzzle as unraveling a sweater. Now, of course, this game has neat little action challenges, too, and monsters to kill. It's just — there are no Castlevania staircases. All the stairs are Super Mario Bros. stairs — you have to jump to get up each stair — or they're bland inclines. The game takes the Castlevania wallpaper and transplants it into a wider-audience-friendly game.

People love this sort of stuff. They love watching numbers go up. Why? I guess I can understand. I have this tape measure that I can operate with one hand. It has a little fastener on it. I can put it around my waist or chest or upper arm, and measure the growth of my muscles. I measure them every Sunday night, to see if my week in the gym paid off, and how. Grinding is part of life. It can be for money or for health. Then it finds its way into our entertainment. People like watching numbers go up in RPGs, they like watching their dudes do more damage. They like getting new items in Zelda so that they can use them to defeat previously invincible enemies, or bridge previously impassable chasms. Symphony of the Night gives players the ability to double jump before giving them the ability to turn into mist, before giving them the ability to fly like a bat, all in the name of making different areas accessible. The player eventually comes to sense his "ownership" of the game environment. This type of lock and key game design, super-commonly called "gating," is all over, and it works on lots of people.

Why doesn't it work on me? I don't know. I'm not pretending, here: It's never worked on me. I also never believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or God. I've never been scared during a horror movie. I guess I'm the target audience for the "Saw" movies.

It's like, when I fight a really hard boss and am then awarded with a double jump ability that allows me to jump over a tall wall way back earlier in the world of the game, all I can think about is how dumb it is that I'm tracking back through the easier segment of the game, only now it's maybe a little easier because I can jump higher. I'm actually fairly confident in saying that the earlier areas of Symphony of the Night aren't any easier because of the double jump, though let's imagine for a second that they were. Now, when you jump over that tall wall and enter the next part of the castle, maybe the enemies in there are harder, meaner, or stronger than the enemies were in previous areas. Usually, they're just stronger. That means, if they hit you, they do more damage. If you've already gotten good at avoiding taking damage, that might not matter so much. Why would you want to make the game easy after a hard part? That's weird. That's like shuffling a deck of cards, asking me to put them in order, and then taking them back when I'm done and immediately shuffling them again as soon as you've confirmed that they are indeed in the right order. It's not sincere. It's mean. If I need a break from the game, I'll pause it. You know what's a good way to handle this sort of thing in an action game? Split the game up into combat-heavy segments and then exploration segments. Uncharted 2 does this fairly well — it's fairly evenly striped: action, exploration, action, exploration.

I said that escalating skill acquisition makes people feel like they "own" a game world or character. It never makes me feel that way. I know the game isn't real. I know I'm just playing a game. When a Zelda game gives you the hookshot and teaches you how to use it over the course of a fairly long dungeon, it feels like something. And then, later in the game, you're in a dungeon, fighting some monsters. There's a spike pit. On the other side of the spike pit is a panel on a wall. You know that this panel is the kind of panel you can hookshot over to. You kill the monsters, open the menu, choose the hookshot, aim it, and pull yourself over. This is what bothers me: There's no risk. There's just a reward. You open the menu, choose the hookshot, and grapple over. The "challenge" is "remember what this thing is?" The "solution" is "open the menu and equip the hookshot". The reward is invariably "Yay Unlocked: You Are Going Where the Game Designers Want You To Go". In Super Mario 64, we have a righteous double jump of justice, its reward being twice the height of a single jump, its risk being that you need enough solid ground in front of you to properly land and use precise timing in order to execute it. Then you have the triple jump. And you have the amazing sliding long jump, and the excellent wall jump, and the delicio-awesome squatting super-high jump: these all have their own little unique physical quirks. They are available to you, the player, from the very start of the game. The game is so confident that just moving the character is fun and can provide for a million great level design situations that it gives you a playground to move around in freely right at the beginning of the game. (Quick aside: why doesn't New Super Mario Bros. feature the sliding long jump? That's the greatest, best, and tastiest jump, damn it!)

Then we have psychological accidents like Banjo-Kazooie, where you have to earn the double-jump, and Donkey Kong 64, where if I'm not mistaken you have to collect a few hundred items simply to unlock the regular jump and attack functions (that's a joke (not a good one)). This is all in the name of "replay value," all in the name of hinting at an illusion of depth. Though I tell you, man, every time a game like Zelda makes me take out the hookshot and use it because, what the hell, the dungeon designer figured that you might not have used it in a while, or the game designer might not want you to be doing the dungeons out of order, every time a so-totally-not-the-game-of-the-decade game like BioShock shows me a guy standing in water and then has a voice-over chew my ear off with hints about how I can equip my lightning ability to electrocute people standing in water, all it does is strip away a layer of the wallpaper, and reveal another layer of wallpaper underneath.

Playing games like these, I always get the impression that it's all wallpaper, and no walls. All reward, no risk. And, most importantly, it's never my choice. Moments like these reveal — to me — a weird little inferiority complex. The games are deadly desperate to mask their existences as merely simulations of making some character move. And you know what? Noticing how flimsy some games are kind of makes me hate all games. Uncharted 2 makes me press the X button just to step up onto any platform higher than the hero's waist. Zelda: Ocarina of Time let me pull myself up just by walking toward such a platform. Why Uncharted 2 makes me press a button is wholly understandable: It makes me feel like I'm doing something. It's great, and it works, though if I'm having a bad day (most days (so lonely)), I might be in a mood to sit there and think that's dumb. It's basically like, you're making me press a button just to move. Isn't that what the analog stick is for? And then, the devil on my left shoulder realizes that there isn't an angel on my right shoulder and decides to say something halfway nice: Would you rather the game's hero be a gray sphere in a world full of other gray spheres? And sometimes I'm feeling in the mood to say "Yes! I would!" And then there are those times in Uncharted when there's a "puzzle", when the character says "Hmm, I bet if we do something here in this room, we could open the way forward", and I'm like, "I'm pretty sure all I have to do is look at the place I'm supposed to go and then scan the walls for hand-holds, and then try to find where the lowest hand-hold is so that I can then jump onto a box or something and start climbing over there." Can't I just have an "I get it" button? Sometimes, as Nathan Drake himself says halfway through Uncharted 2, "I'm so tired of climbing shit." The "I get it" button — listen to me, over here. Before someone tells me I should go watch a movie, or something, I'll tell myself.

(Quick Aside: Hey, why hasn't EA Sports ever made a marathon running game?)

((Quick Aside #2: If Sega approached the next 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game from the jumping-off point of "Hold a button to accelerate", maybe they could get somewhere.))

So here's a big, ugly problem. Gating manifestations such as earned double jump techniques have become, in and of themselves, traditions. In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you don't actually have to get the blue or red clothes, which increase Link's defensive power. However, in Super Metroid, you do have to get the Varia Suit in order to survive the high temperatures of Norfair. When and why did this shift happen?

A basic law of capitalism is that businesses need to grow every year, or they're not doing it right. I have a friend who makes clothing by hand. Her business is growing steadily in popularity, gaining a larger helping of fame with every passing month due to her devotion to making original clothing by hand with a staff of fewer than ten. The more famous her brand gets, the more the demand grows. The more the demand grows, the more tempted she is to hire more staff and make more clothing. However, she knows she would be spreading herself too thin. World fame means people would be ordering her clothes from around the world, consistently depleting her stock to zero while removing the clothes entirely from the streets of Tokyo, the place where word-of-mouth spawned its original popularity. If her business stays the same size, then imitators, backed by larger companies, will step in to make similar clothes and sell them at lower prices to a wider audience. The decision is to either stick to your guns and keep doing what you do, until eventually someone else does it better, for more people, or "sell out" and grow, possibly alienating your friends and definitely inspiring competition. At the end of the day, it's sheer luck of the draw that something like a fashion brand manages to survive as "the real thing" in a sea of imitators with all its original intentions intact.

Back in 2002, Sega released a followup to their Panzer Dragoon series. Panzer Dragoon Orta was developed by Smilebit, of Jet Set Radio, who were not the original developers of the Panzer Dragoon series. The previous shooting game in the series, Zwei, had been a masterpiece. It was all about shooting — pointing, aiming, shooting, locking on, firing crazy missiles. The challenge ramped up evenly, until eventually the game was coasting up into the stratosphere of sweetness. Depending on your play style, the dragon your avatar rides would change shape and color at the end of every stage. It was neat. The overall game didn't change much: You were still flying, and shooting.

Orta was not nearly as good a game, probably because the new developers figured they had to "add" something to the game, or die. So they added this thing where you had three types of dragons: the big one, the medium one, and the little one. The big one was painfully slow and fired powerful shots and devastating lock-on shots. The medium one could move alright, and fire pretty good shots and normal lock-on shots. The little dragon was really fast, and could only fire weak regular shots. What you do in Panzer Dragoon Orta is you press a button to change the type of dragon you are at any given time. However, there are parts of the game that are literally impossible to pass without taking damage unless you change into the speedy little dragon, just as there are parts where only the big dragon's lock-on fire can hurt a certain type of enemy. This is beyond the game designers saying, "Hey, check out this thing you can do" — it's them saying, "Hey, we made this cool thing for you to do, and now you have to do it or die." Super Mario Bros. never made you throw a fireball, and people loved it!

The train of thought seems to be that games are like businesses. They're not. Games are much more like films than fast food chains. Like, well, the film industry is hooked on remakes, and sequels, too.

You know what is like a business, though? The games industry. You know, all Orta needed to be was Zwei with better graphics and maybe better level design.

Then again, we've established that some video game developers still don't "believe in" level design. This would be like a film studio saying a movie didn't need a script — just put the actors in front of a green screen, tell them they're in the desert and that they're thirsty, and see what they come up with.

Many games show the player something he can't do, only to let him do it later. Zelda games will usually show you doors you can't reach, only to allow you to access them later via use of some item. Lots of the time, in Zelda games, the finally accessed room or cave leads to some optional item, like a piece of a heart container — collect four (or five, these days) to increase your maximum hit points by one. Zelda games manage to be quite thrilling in spite of themselves, sometimes, despite all the weird disconnects running rampant. You might be able to see the entrance to a cave, and just not possess the ability to hookshot over to it. Sometimes, you get the hookshot, swing over, enter the cave, and see a wall that requires a bomb for you to open. Sometimes it feels really good to throw down a bomb and uncover the loot — like a real good experience in the toilet.

However, it strikes me that games, these days, use these weird gating techniques so that they don't have to bother thinking about how their game is laid out, or even what's in their game. Why can't every game have one Really Fun Thing in it, like the Portal Gun in Portal?

Sometimes, though, gating the player beyond his will can still translate into a wonderful game experience. Dragon Quest famously shows players locked doors in the earliest stage of the game that you'll return to every time you get a new key, just to be told that the key doesn't fit. Eventually, when you get the key that fits, it feels like something huge. Dragon Quest games also have characters with personalities and histories. The story moves forward, and time ripens in the world of the game. When the time is right, the key is yours.

Then there are games like Final Fantasy VI. I loved that game. It was about something — a Dickensian, fantasy history opera-thing. It told you a story, and eventually it gave you keys to the world and told you to solve the puzzle. In the second half of the game, all the characters are spread apart. You play as one character bent on killing the despot ruling the world. You can go straight to him and try to kill him if you want. You probably won't be able to. Or you can fly around the world in your big flying boat and try to reunite your party members. If you go for that, that's literally tens of hours of game, right there. They're not side-quests: They're optional game segments.

I'm going to begin to turn this cruise ship back around! Be prepared:

I'm going to copy and paste (and bold the interesting parts of) a paragraph from the Wikipedia page about Symphony of the Night, which is, among other things, longer than the Wikipedia entry about the film "Patton", which was, incidentally, the only film that my father's father, who loathed entertainment in all forms (except those tobacco-related) had ever watched in its entirety (and he watched it twice):

Symphony of the Night has a liberal control scheme compared to its predecessors in the Castlevania franchise. Aside from attacking, jumping, and basic movement, Alucard is inherently able to perform both a downward flying-kick and a back-dash. While the downward kick may never be discovered or employed by a player, the back-dash (activated by a single button press) is an easily employed method of evading enemy attacks. Because it is faster than Alucard's normal walking speed, a player may back-dash as a slightly faster method of travel through the flatter areas of the castle. Yet another use of the back-dash is attack canceling, a technique common in fighting games: by activating the dash just after an attack lands Alucard's attack animation is interrupted, allowing the player to bypass the attack's recovery animation and instead perform another action. Evasive dash moves also appear in later Igarashi-produced Castlevania titles.

Do you find yourself doing things like this in videogames? I find myself doing it all the time. I might have mentioned before that my first priority when playing a new game is to make it look as ridiculous as possible. Usually, all this requires is to twirl the analog stick in circles and marvel at the lack of a cornering animation (which, remarkably, Bayonetta has — maybe that's why Famitsu gave it a 40/40).

I don't make games look dumb because I am a mean person — no, I do it tentatively, like dipping my toe into a swimming pool. I want to know if it's safe to let myself go ahead and be immersed into the experience. I don't want to jump in only to find out later that I can conjure intense silliness out of thin air at a crucial part of the game.

Sometimes, like in Symphony of the Night or Super Mario Sunshine, there's a weird little game mechanic like the back-step or the belly slide that allow you to move through the game at a far breezier speed. This makes the game look ridiculous; however, once you realize just how efficient it is, you will find yourself unable to stop doing it. Of course, the developers don't intend you to do this, though it'd be hard to believe the testers didn't discover it and do it themselves.

This sort of thing has built up to a weird crescendo, of late. Games like Star Ocean 4 give you a run ability partway through the game, and then let you use it all you want. The run ability happens to look ridiculous. If you keep jabbing the button, it looks like your guy is having a seizure at the speed of sound, just floating frictionlessly along the ground. I mean, this thing was programmed in intentionally. You will never be penalized for using it. And it looks ridiculous. Therefore, we must conclude that the developers wanted it to look ridiculous, maybe because ridiculous-looking fast methods of travel existed in popular games like Super Mario Sunshine.

This is getting weird. It's way too weird, now. Why would you want a feature like that? Why would you think that the kids would be enraged if you didn't have a feature like that?

Then we have games like Oblivion, where the player has the option to just open the menu at any time and warp anywhere in the game world at the touch of a button. They call this "quick travel" or "fast travel". It's the video-game-world equivalent of a word processor's "search" function. Hey, consider this, genius game developers: When your game world is so large that fast-traveling within friendly areas is considered a necessary design element, maybe your slow travel sucks and/or your game world carries the tone of a theme park after hours, with you playing the role of a widowed octogenarian with a broom and dustpan.

Games are active forms of entertainment, mainly about movement. Movement is the point of games. It should be fun. Films are static, and can be about anything, really, so long as they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. My favorite game of 2009 might be Canabalt, which is about a guy running from an unseen threat. We never see the threat, though we don't doubt its scary nature, because our guy is running so fast that he literally can't stop. All we do is jump. The presentation is beautiful. Just looking at this game, you can say it's a complete piece of work. You need only glimpse three seconds of it in action to know the full scope. You don't even need to see the character die to know that death is imminent, and that, maybe, this guy's attempt at escape is futile. It tells you a neat little story, and impresses you with a cute little catharsis, in about as much time as it takes you to tap your finger on an iPhone screen.

When you jump through windows, glass shatters with a perfect sound effect; when you land on a roof where white doves are perched, they scatter randomly and flutter away.

Then we've got Kingdom Hearts II, where you have two buttons: Yay and Awesome. Press Yay, and your hero just completely flips the fuck out all over the screen. Keep pressing it and eventually all the enemies will evaporate. Sometimes, a huge triangle appears on the screen. Press the Awesome Button to make Something Awesome happen. Then there's Bayonetta, where, sometimes — it's like a pachinko jackpot, really — you can summon a "torture attack", where you press a button within a somewhat lenient window, causing an iron maiden or guillotine to materialize out of nowhere and destroy an enemy. How does this work? Well, of course, the story deals with supernatural things, so just take the game's word for it — our heroine is a person who can materialize torture devices out of nowhere, just because, why the hell not?

In Shenmue, they called these Quick Timer Events. In the current Japanese games industry, they call them Action Button Events.

ABEs are a cancer in the duodenum of game design. They're all over God of War and, well, anything else, really. Sometimes, even fantastic games like Uncharted 2 wedge these in, only in dull no-risk situations. Like, you have to crank a lever to open a door, and you have to crank it really hard, so you have to press a button a whole bunch of times. Maybe this is to keep players from getting through the door before killing all of the enemies in the area, in which case I guess it's kind of neat, because it adds context to something (having to kill all the enemies in an area before being allowed into the next area) that many games sometimes don't give context for.

Developer Ninja Theory put an ABE about three seconds into their game Heavenly Sword, prompting Ninja Gaiden director Tomonobu Itagaki to call the game a load of bullshit. Itagaki reported that ABEs were a waste of time. Representatives of Ninja Theory said that ABEs are used to make the player feel like he is part of the dynamic cinematics happening on the screen, rather than sit passively as an audience member. Itagaki didn't comment further. He very well could have. I'm no Itagaki-worshipper, though I like to think his games exhibit a stellar sense of being in control of your character, and they manage to let you do all kinds of sweet little things like intuitively run up walls. Then again, Itagaki also once said that Resident Evil 4 sucked because your guy had to stand in place to shoot, and that was "unrealistic"; the man obviously learned the majority of his life lessons from John Woo films and/or Contra III: The Alien Wars, so maybe I'm giving him too much credit. (Just kidding, Itagaki! Call me! (Don't say you don't have my phone number (even though you don't (it's such a boring excuse)).)

Publisher From Software, in the same year that they released the excellent Demon's Souls, put out a misunderstood little ABE-heavy ninja game called Ninja Blade. Don't play it — it sucks. Oh, that was mean. Well, it does some neat things, at least. Early in the game, there's a boss that spits shock waves at you. You have to run down a hallway, dodging the shock waves. Get to the end of the hall, and you can wail on the boss. Eventually, he does the shock wave thing again. Now the camera zooms into your character. He's got his sword against the shock wave. Press the sword button repeatedly to push against the shock wave with your blade. When the camera zooms out, you find that your dude has been pushed down the hall. If you failed to hit the button enough, you might be pushed all the way back to the end of the hall, meaning you'll have to dodge all those shock waves again. This is neat — a progressive ABE.

Then there are moments like in Dead Space, where a monster grabs your leg with some tentacle. After a moment, you realize that despite the cinematic camera angle, you can still aim and shoot your gun. Uncharted 2 does the same thing a couple of times. It always manages to feel kind of neat.

"The ideal game", I guess, would be a sublime mix of rock-solid game mechanics and lots of neat little interactive movie sequences where you're basically doing only things that your character does repeatedly in the game (like shooting).

ABEs are designed to allow the player to "feel" (not "be totally") "in control" of something far more nuanced and dynamic than what goes on in the game. Maybe we'll be seeing a BioWare RPG at some point soon, where dialogue is all ABE-activated. That could be hilarious.

Right now, we have games like Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, games centered on simple though deep play mechanics and an online community element. Though we In The Know know that the makers of Left 4 Dead are also genuine crafters of entertainment masterpieces like Half-Life. Valve is shrewdly using Left 4 Dead to boost their reputation. One day, they'll make a big-scale Half-Life-level event again, and "artistic conscience" will enter the feature snipers' list of "things to watch." Maybe overnight — or maybe over a couple of nights — everything in the games industry will change.

When I was in a hospital recently, I noticed lines of colored tape on the floor. At one junction, the red and purple tape veered off to the left, and the orange and blue tape veered off to the right; the black and green tape pointed the way forward. No doubt these lines of tape point out the way to various departments of the hospital, guaranteeing that those in charge of transporting patients get them to a doctor's care as quickly as possible.

When I was in Shanghai last month, I noticed that every street sign contains a compass, pointing out which direction you are headed, and on which street.

One of the things that originally helped me decide to live in Japan was the feeling of being able to get lost. Tokyo has very few named streets, and everyone navigates by landmarks. I know my way around by now, and I rely on fabricated entertainment to fulfill my desire to get lost in something. Lately, it's the old Russian novels. I read both Anna Karenina and War and Peace while riding trains, planes, taxicabs, or toilets during 2009. Why do games always have to have mini-maps and navigation arrows? Mini-maps are the game equivalent of dozens of dog-eared pages in a thousand-page book. Ten years ago, mini-maps felt like game-y touches; now, in the era of GPS, it makes them feel too real. Games are an escape from a world where jumping is not a mode of transportation; why is movement always something handled in such a businesslike fashion? Why mini-maps? Why fast travel? Fast travel is a quiet admission that the Slow Travel Isn't Always Fun. Why can't the Slow Travel always be fun? Did you ever play Breath of Fire III on the PlayStation? There was a part where you have to navigate through a desert by the stars. Okay, so that part probably infuriated a lot of people — not me, though! These days, we've got great graphics — why not give me big horizon-filling landmarks, and make them be my only guide? Let me figure things out, let me enjoy moving.

Two more things: last year, I was on a subway train that stopped in a tunnel in mid-voyage. Across from me sat a woman who was busy tooling with a Rubik's Cube. She had a knit in the center of her forehead and was biting her bottom lip so hard I was on edge, waiting for blood. She had no idea what she was doing. No rhythm, no reason. She was just clicking that thing around like crazy. At one point, the announcer came on to apologize — apparently someone had committed suicide in front of the train before ours, so we would be held up for a little while. The woman looked up, just then, and saw me looking at her. Instantly, her face turned red. She got up, ran to the next car of the train, in which there were no available seats, and stood with her back to the glass, continuing to click around on the Rubik's Cube.

Then, two nights ago, I stood on the same subway train, going in the opposite of the direction I'd been going a year ago. Seated in a corner was a clearly autistic man, quickly solving and then unsolving a Rubik's Cube using a tried and true method. He might have been a tournament-level Rubik's Cube solver. The thing is, once you know the method, it's just a matter of plugging away. Did you know there are kids who speed-run Portal? That's so weird. I looked at that guy and I thought about the woman in the train roughly a year ago, and I thought about people's grandmothers pretending to like Wii Sports simply because they relished the opportunity to converse with their grandchildren, and I realize that, really, any given one of us, at any given time on any given day, is a mere psychological molecule away from being that guy, repeatedly solving and unsolving a Rubik's Cube on a bus or train.

tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net (stay tuned this month for a big-time Action Button revival! lots of cool stuff coming; bookmark it asap, etc); he lives in tokyo; friend his band on myspace! mail him at 108 (at) actionbutton (dot net) if you have something to say or are a game developer and would like to arrange to send free games.

Illustration by HARVEYJAMES™. Buy prints of this illustration at attractmo.de/!

Jumping video: Performed by Jack Fields and Hannah Miller, Music by Ben Burbank.

Over the course of two days, I gazed upon California's beaches from a distance. I walked by the swimming pool and hot tub a dozen times. I ate at the Fess Parker Doubletree Resort's finest restaurant. But unlike the resort's guests there for a getaway, I never left the hotel grounds, never set foot on the beach or hit the tennis court. Instead, I spent every waking hour playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, eyes glued to a television screen.

This was Modern Warfare 2's "review event," a three-day affair at which members of the media played through the game's single-player campaign and multiplayer components.

I'd driven a hundred miles to get there, to play Infinity Ward and Activision's blockbuster shooter for a review. It was my second time sequestering myself in a hotel room to evaluate a video game. I reviewed Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV under similar conditions at a hotel in San Francisco over the course of four days. Other members of Kotaku have attended invite-only review events for titles such as Halo 3 ODST.

Typically, those review event conditions range from comfortable to exceedingly comfortable. In the case of Modern Warfare 2, rooms were outfitted with large screen televisions, thundering surround sound systems, optional professional quality headphones and robes and slippers embroidered with the game's logo.

While uncommon, the prevalence of these types of events is increasing. Bungie and Microsoft held similar review events for their most recent Halo releases. Events have been held for BioShock, Gears of War 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. And publisher Electronic Arts recently invited the media to play cooperative military shooter Army of Two: The 40th Day, at which reviewers could get early access to a build of the game, but only after playing an organized co-op session in New York City.

Review events are not the norm. Typically, publishers and PR firms mail reviewers a copy of the game—some copies only work on special "debug" game consoles—and a letter that entrusts us to hold off on running the review until a certain date.

The practice of making the reviewer go to the game, at a review event, rather than send that game to the reviewer, has raised ethical concerns that such events influence the opinions of the reviewers who take part. Some say the events make it difficult to form an impartial critical opinion of a game under such circumstances. Whether through direct interference or as a byproduct of being catered to with travel, accommodation and the free gifts commonly given at such events, allegations that reviews are "bought and sold" at events paid for by publishers can tarnish the credibility of a review at best, mar the reputation of a publication or video game at worst.

So why do publishers and developers hold these sometimes contentious review events?

Halo developer Bungie, which held review events for Halo 3 ODST in advance of the game's retail release, cites multiple reasons for hosting such things.

"Looking back at Halo 2, my first Bungie review title, we built these events around a desire to deliver the best possible experience to players," says Brian Jarrard, community lead at Bungie. "We had nice HD televisions, 5.1 surround sound and a comfortable environment. It was a way to help make sure reviewers experienced the game the way Bungie intended."

(Rockstar Games and Infinity Ward did not respond to requests for comment about their respective review events. Activision reps declined comment when asked.)

A comfortable, high-fidelity experience may be important to game creators. But so is control.

"Usually, the cited reason for a review event is disc security," says Jeff Gerstmann, co-founder of Giant Bomb and former editorial director at Gamespot. He's participated in and approved coverage of numerous publisher-held review events over his course of his game review career.

"I understand the desire to keep control of all copies of a game, as pre-release piracy is certainly a real issue," Gerstmann says. "But considering that games get leaked out ahead of time even when these events happen, I think it's safe to say that the media isn't out there leaking copies to pirate groups, especially in cases where we're receiving discs that only run on debug consoles."

Bungie's concerns go beyond illegal distribution of its games. Jarrard says that content leaks and story spoilers are something developers work hard to protect.

"I'm not sure we would have been able to keep [the surprise of] playing as the Arbiter a secret if we mailed out hundreds of discs weeks before the game shipped," he theorizes, referring to a key Halo 2 plot point. "The same could be said for plot twists found in Halo 3 and ODST. We spend up to three years crafting these stories and experiences, and it's very important to the team that fans can enjoy the game and story the way we intended."

In the case of Modern Warfare 2, some of the game's content had already been leaked onto the internet via YouTube by the time we'd showed up to review it. When I reached the game's infamous "No Russian" chapter, I'd known about the content—but not the context—of that mission for the past 24 hours. The game wouldn't ship to stores for another two weeks.

But that didn't stop Infinity Ward and Activision from taking security precautions to prevent further leaks. The review version of Modern Warfare 2 I played was hand-delivered to reviewer's rooms with four employees in tow, the hard drive installed and physically locked to the console.

My Grand Theft Auto IV experience saw similar protections, with an executable running from the hard drive that required a special memory unit to play. Rockstar Games reps asked us to carry the memory unit with us whenever we left the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 unattended.

Jarrard said that he finds the "vast majority" of game reviewers to be trustworthy, honoring agreements designed to prevent leaks and piracy, "but it's still easier to control embargoes and protect story elements when everyone is there in person with discs that are all accounted for."

Having dozens of video game reviewers in the same room brings with it benefits to games with multiplayer components. Jarrard points to the difficulty in organizing multiplayer game sessions in advance of widespread releases, sessions that sometimes require dozens of players.

"That would become very challenging to do in a world where a few hundred people were sitting in their own offices all over the world trying to coordinate a game when outward facing Xbox LIVE support isn't even turned on yet," he says.

In Modern Warfare 2's case, Activision and Infinity Ward assumed control of one of the resort's ballrooms, offering reviewers a public space at which to play the game's multiplayer and Spec-Ops cooperative modes during day two of the event. My experience with GTA IV's multiplayer was more private, playing solo against Rockstar quality assurance team at a remote location at the review event and later against game journalists during Rockstar-scheduled sessions from home.

Gerstmann believes—and I agree—that multiplayer sessions held at remote review events often provide a more accurate, more efficient early look at a game's online component than the alternative.

"Sometimes these sessions work out great," Gerstmann says, "Sometimes they're sparsely attended or not entirely representative of the average user experience. I played Call of Duty: World at War online with a couple of journalists and a handful of QA guys who were instructed to take it easy on us. That didn't feel terribly 'real' to me."

But there's a catch. "The downside of testing multiplayer in a controlled environment (like a review event) is that you have no idea how the game will react in an actual real world situation, where ping times and the quality of the average player's broadband connection are a major factor."

Fortunately, many publishers distribute retail copies of games experienced at review events before the retail release. In the case of Modern Warfare 2, which wasn't sent to reviewers in advance, early distribution and broken street dates offered Kotaku and other outlets a chance to play substantial portions of the game at home.

Gerstmann stressed the importance of "never letting the event be my final time with a game before running a review."

"The events I've attended—Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Gears of War 2, and Modern Warfare 2—gave me plenty of time to see everything," he says. "But in all of those cases, I replayed the single-player again, start to finish, at home before writing a review. In all cases I was also able to get in substantial multiplayer time thanks to the street dates being broken and average consumers getting their hands on the game ahead of schedule."

MTV Multiplayer's Russ Frushtick, who participated in one of Bungie's Halo 3 ODST review events, feels the practice is ultimately damaging to a reviewer's opinion of a game.

"While reviewing games can be enjoyable at times, nothing makes it feel more like work than having to plow through a game over the course of 24 or 48 hours," Frushtick says. "And, on top of that, you're forced out of the comfort of your home and office, at times traveling across the country, to slog through an experience that most people will play over the course of a few weeks."

"Unfortunately the importance of having a review as close to a game's release often trumps a reviewer's desire for comfort, but it's the sort of decision that needn't be made," he says.

Bungie's Brian Jarrard sees another potential negative aspect to hosting such events.

"Reality is that these events are often only reserved for 'top tier' media due to space and cost which means a lot of the little guys are left out," Jarrard says. "I'd wager that these fansites, bloggers and more community-oriented outlets probably don't like being last to review a big title because they can't get an invite to the event or get an early copy of the game. Perhaps that leaves a bad taste in their mouth."

Dan "Shoe" Hsu, former editor in chief of EGM and Bitmob.com co-founder—who has since returned to the revived Electronic Gaming Monthly print magazine—has his own concerns about the nature of review events. He's personally participated in review events "under a 'controlled environment'" for 2K Games' BioShock and Bungie's Halo 2.

"I have very mixed feelings about this," Hsu says. "At EGM, we would never, ever want to taint the reviews process in any way. Our readers don't play games under these conditions — in nice hotel suites with developers, producers, and PR nearby. Why would we as professional critics? Can we fairly review something if we're playing under different circumstances than our audience?"

"At the same time, who would we be hurting if we banned such events? Those same readers," Hsu says. "Now we can't get a review out to them in time for it to be relevant."

The perception that review events are score-inflating wine and dine affairs isn't difficult to understand. Activision and Infinity Ward shouldered the cost of hotel rooms—including ours—and travel expenses for some of the other attendees of the Modern Warfare 2 review event. It also paid for the meal we enjoyed at the aforementioned fancy restaurant. The robe and slippers, too, but those we gave away for charitable purposes.

In the case of our extended Grand Theft Auto IV review event, our parent company paid for our flight, hotel room and meals. But Rockstar reps joined us for a dinner.

Did those so-called perks influence my opinion of either game? I'd like to think they didn't, confident that I can separate external factors from the core experience. I personally find the practice of video game review events an inconvenience. They provide an opportunity to remain focused on the task and title at hand, but traveling to play a game for days on end is not my preferred method of review.

Veteran game reviewer Jeff Gerstmann has similar thoughts about the "misconception" that these assignments are "cushy" or "lavish."

"There's nothing lavish about being cooped up in a dark hotel room for two days. It's annoying," Gerstmann says. "And unless you have direct questions about a game, the company reps at the event usually just stay out of your way. Most of the time they don't even ask us what we thought of the game. They just sort of hang back and, I guess, hope for the best."

"I sort of get the impression that no one involved on either side really enjoys these events," Gerstmann adds. "But between us wanting timely coverage and publishers feeling protective of their biggest releases, I don't see these events going away anytime soon, either."

Bitmob's Dan Hsu may say it best.

"As long as the game reviewers can treat the product fairly and objectively, the same as if he were playing at home or in his own office, I don't see a big problem with this," Hsu says of the conditions. "It's either that, or if you want a truly untainted review, stop listening to the professionals and get your feedback from the community instead."

After all, football is not like most other sports represented in video games. It is not a game of inches, of innings, of lines, or mechanical plays. It is, as die-hard fans of the game will tell you, more than a game.

It's an artform.

Few, if any sports on earth are so free-flowing, so open to an individual player's interpretation of how the game should be played, and how they'll go about playing it. It's why arguments over who is the "best" player in the world are often pointless; Pele and Maradona are incomparable, as are Best and Beckenbauer, Figo and Zidane. It's like arguing whether Picasso is better than Van Gogh, or Mozart sharper than Beethoven.

What makes the game such a joy to watch, and gives the players the freedom to express themselves individually, should make a video game adaptation a nightmare. In American Football, for example, things are very structured. There are self-contained plays, there are limitations on what is happening at any one time. It's very mechanical. A lineman blocks, within a small area of the field, and that's that. A field goal is from a fixed point on the field, with the kicker making the same approach every time. You see where I'm going with this.

But football is all over the place. Ten of the eleven players could be anywhere on the pitch at any given time. The ball can go anywhere, in any direction, in the air or along the ground. Possession can change hands ten times in two minutes. It's a playground, a well-manicured sandbox.

None of which seemed to matter while playing FIFA 10, which both looks and plays as close to the real thing as any sports game I've ever played. So how do you model a video game, which by its very nature is a long string of pre-determined actions and reactions, on something so free-flowing and unpredictable?

The answer is both simple and very, very complicated: you go and bury yourself up to your neck in the sport.

After all, it's hard replicating something if you're not intimately familiar with it. So we caught up with the brains behind FIFA 10 to see how the team go about turning what for the developers is a lifelong obsession into something millions more would call the same thing.

MATCHDAY PREPARATION

According to FIFA 10's producer, David Rutter, it all begins with the development team's diversity. "We're in the process of building a ‘team wall' at the studio with pictures of all the guys showing where they're from and what teams they support", he says. "At last count we had people from 18 different countries, speaking 10 different languages".

And the variety doesn't end with the developer's passports. The teams they support reflect the corners of the earth from which they all hail. Being a Western studio means support skews heavily towards the English game – not just Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs fans, but also less glamorous sides like Leicester and Queens Park Rangers. There's plenty of international support as well, from Barcelona to Inter to the…Vancouver Whitecaps, the studio's local team.

Being, you know, important to the job, EA Canada staffers are able to indulge that support in a number of ways. Live games from all the world's major leagues are broadcast both on TVs in the studio and streamed to the developer's monitors, while for more real-world research they also have a number of season passes to the aforementioned Whitecaps (who, interestingly, engage in an annual showdown with Microsoft fanboys the Seattle Sounders). And that's just the local stuff; with members of the team always travelling across the globe, they also take in games across more prestigious competitions, like the Premier League and Champions League.

For a more hands-on approach to studying the inner workings of the game, the team can draw on the knowledge of some former players. One of FIFA's gameplay producers, Aaron McHard, was a former member of the Jamaican national team's youth squad, while Kantcho Doskov, an animator, is one of the best "tricksters" (think juggling, balancing, etc) in the world, having been a finalist at the Red Bull Freestyle Championships.

For everyone else — the team's Sunday league superstars — EA Canada have built the developers their own football pitch on the site, so they can pop out and do some "research" whenever the urge takes them.

THE GAME PLAN

In order for the game to play like a realistic game of football, the actual players on-screen needed to do a decent job of mirroring their real-life counterpart's abilities and performance. After all, it's no good to anybody if Wayne Rooney can't shoot, Lionel Messi can't dribble or David James suddenly learns how to keep something out of his net.

To make sure FIFA's players act like real players, then, EA have gone Roman, managing their "scouts" in multiples of ten. So, there are ten core database managers at EA Canada. Those ten then supervise another 100 "football experts", who are the ones actually inputting each player's individual attributes into the game. Then, below those 100, there are another 1000 or so hardcore fans from all over the world, who go over each stat with a fine-tooth comb and provide feedback.

And if that's not enough, Rutter also says the development team are constantly receiving "feedback" from Premier League stars themselves, satisfied (or dissatisfied!) with their numbers.

With the attributes in the database, it's then over to the animators, who have an equally important task ahead of them; just as it would stand out if Wayne Rooney wasn't scoring, so too would it stand out if he ran around all legs and arms like Peter Crouch, instead of all shoulders and potato head like he should.

Every year, professional players are invited into the studio to perform motion capture work on every aspect of the game. Dribbling, free kicks, shooting, tackling, throw-ins, penalties, slide tackles, you name it, it has to be captured. Sometimes, these are "professional" in the sense they're local players. Other times, they're "professional" in the sense that they've captured moves performed in the studio by the likes of Ronaldinho, Miroslav Klose and Sergio Ramos.

KICK OFF

During FIFA 10's initial marketing push, much was made of the introduction of 360-degree dribbling, something that sounded minor but actually promised to revolutionize the way the game controlled. Once the game was released, however, things turned out a little differently. Sure, the 360-degree movement was a big improvement over previous years, but it wasn't the best part of the game's controls.

No, that went to something intangible. Something you couldn't really put on the back of the box. It was like the Force, all around you, binding everything together.

"I do think a lot of the fluidity of 10 came, not just from 360, but from improvements to our trapping system which is the system that controls how the player moves and controls the ball", says Gary Paterson, the game's creative director. "This system was improved in lots of different ways to ensure that it was as fluid as possible and this I think made a big difference to the feeling of fluidity."

The other key aspect of gameplay is the ball physics, which determines how the ball reacts to things like player contact and weather. For a game built entirely around the movement and collision of a round ball, it's obviously very, very important.

"The process we go through is like this", says Kaz Makita, executive producer on the game. "We will build a foundation of how we want the ball to behave in different situations, then test the different situations in game. We focus our testing on how we want the ball to behave and we go through a process where we refine it until looks, feels and plays authentically.

"The big challenge is how the ball interacts with a player because these interactions are limited by the number and variety of animations, something we are constantly updating each year. We make huge improvements each year with ball and player interactions but sometimes the variety of animations do not enable us to satisfy realism. We built a new animation engine so we could create a much deeper library of player behaviours, which enables us to create deeper, more authentic ball movement, but the challenge remains to build animations to fit with ball physics that look and feel authentic."

Patterson adds: "I guess the ball physics has two components: the physics formulae and the variable constants that we pass into those formulae... We have some very smart guys here who have been able to provide us with accurate ball physics formulae, but getting the constants for how a football passes through the air is very tricky. So much so in fact that we contacted a Physics Grad at a local university to help us define them. I'm pretty happy with the results but I think we will continue to tweak and tune."

Realism, however, only goes so far. "Once you have the ball physics, you have to use it authentically, and this part is just as tricky", Paterson says. "For example how much spin should be on a cross, what does a shot look like when the player miss-kicks it? All these things obviously affect the authenticity of our game and this is perhaps where we bend the rules a little to try and ensure we get a fun game. For example, in real life, crossing the ball is very inaccurate, many crosses go too far, or out of play, but in FIFA this would be very frustrating and upset the balance of the game (as you would be discouraged from crossing), so yeah, we have to bend reality a little bit."

NEXT WEEK

While FIFA 10 is currently king of the sports games, both in terms of sales and critical approval, the "10" after its name and the fact it's from EA Sports means it will only remain so for another ten months or so. Once FIFA 11 rolls around, changes have to be made. After all, just because it's the most realistic sports game on the market doesn't mean it's perfect.

So, what can we expect from next year's game, as the developers continue to strive towards presenting us with the perfect game of football? "We have been having a lot of conversations this year around game speed and game difficulty, as some of our gamers want slower and harder gameplay, more simulation" says Paterson. "This is a tricky one as it would mean we would have to alter one of the core gameplay concepts that we have built the game on thus far…"

World of Warcaft is important. The developers tell Kotaku they even dared to dream that they'd some day get a million subscribers. But to tell the story of the fifth anniversary of WoW, we first have to look at the game that started 15 years ago, Warcraft.

It All Started On Arrakis

In 1992, Westwood Studios released a game that changed the way real-time strategy games were made. It was Dune II, the first RTS to incorporate mouse movement, resource gathering, technology trees, and unique weapons and units per faction, all elements that are still being used in RTS games today.

The game caught the eyes and imaginations of several members of Silicon & Synapse, a game development studio that had mainly focused on porting games from other studios. After a brief stint as Chaos Games the studio took on the name Blizzard Entertainment in 1994.

As Blizzard art director Sam "Samwise" Didier explains it, the team's fascination with Dune II led directly to the development of its first blockbuster hit, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

"Back in the Jurassic period we all loved playing games like Dune II. We got inspired and thought this game was awesome and wanted to make something like it. We were all big fans of Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and we wanted to make a fantasy world real-time strategy game."

Taking cues from existing titles was the norm for Blizzard in the early days. Samwise points to another early Blizzard title, The Lost Vikings, which was born out of the team's love for PC puzzle game Lemmings from DMA Design, the studio that would go on to become Rockstar North of Grand Theft Auto fame.

So Blizzard took the formula established in Dune II and expanded upon it in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, adding goals beyond simply building your army and decimating your enemies. Players found themselves rescuing friendly forces from enemy camps, assassinating key members of the opposition, and rebuilding ruined towns. It was also the first RTS game to feature hand-to-hand combat and magic.

One more important innovation was borrowed from a decidedly different sort of game – Doom. Inspired by the fun of playing Doom together, Blizzard added the ability to play multiplayer battles via modem and local area network to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a feature that would become a key feature of the RTS genre.

Expanding The Story

While Orcs & Humans laid the groundwork for games to come, it was relatively light on story. Blizzard rectified that oversight with the game's 1995 sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, elevating Azeroth from game setting to fully realized fictional world.

The game saw the Orcs and Humans gather allies in the Trolls, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Gnomes, laying the foundations for the Alliance and the Horde as we know them today. The game and it's expansion pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, introduced characters and locations that would play a large part in the games to come.

Tides of Darkness also expanded on the multiplayer of the original game. In 1999, Blizzard released both the game and its expansion as Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, allowing players to engage in multiplayer matches over the internet using the Battle.net service introduced with 1997's Diablo.

Class Clowns And Failed Comedians

Along with solidifying the world of Azeroth and strengthening the foundation for the fiction that would grow with each new game in the franchise, Warcraft II also established another signature feature of the series: its sense of humor.

"We had lots of class clowns and failed comedians on the team," explains Didier. "We never really took it too seriously. We wanted really cool characters and events while making fun classic fantasy stereotypes. We included anything we thought was cool, serious or humorous."

For instance, clicking on a unit once in Warcraft II elicits a normal verbal response. Click repeatedly on a unit for no reason and they become annoyed, spouting humorous phrases like "are you still touching me?" Samwise cites this feature as a prime example of adding humor to a game without alienating those craving a serious experience. "Only the people who wanted the comedy had to deal with it."

The Lost Chapter

As Warcraft was inspired by Dune II, Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was inspired by classic LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. Development on this adventure game began soon after the completion of Warcraft II. Using a combination of cartoons and point and click adventure gameplay it would tell the story of the Orcs trapped in Azeroth following the destruction of the Dark Portal, and the rise of the famed Orc warchief Thrall, Sadly, the game never saw the light of day.

In a move that Blizzard would later repeat with StarCraft side-story Ghost, the company canceled the game days before the 1998 E3 Expo in Atlanta, despite the game being mostly complete. The animation was finished, the puzzles in place, and even the voice over work had been fully recorded, but Blizzard felt the game wasn't up to their high standards.

In an announcement issued on the 22nd of May, 2008, Blizzard explained the cancellation to fans. "The decision centered around the level of value that we want to give our customers. In essence, it was a case of stepping up and really proving to ourselves and gamers that we will not sell out on the quality of our games."

When asked if there was ever a chance of Adventures being released, Samwise was skeptical. "We're not taking the old one and finishing it. It wasn't up to par and we'd have to polish the hell out of it. DVDs are really popular because of deleted scenes, but when you watch them you can see why they weren't included in the movie. That's what Warcraft Adventures is."

Still, Blizzard felt the story of Thrall too important to gloss over, commissioning Star Trek novelist Christie Golden to write Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, a novel that bridges the gap between Warcraft II and the next game in the series, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Further Evolution

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, released in 2002, delved deeper into the lore of the series than ever before. It chronicles the rise and fall of Arthas Menethil, the prince who would become the Lich King; introduces the Night Elves and the Undead; and introduces the Burning Legion, the demonic scourge of the Warcraft universe.

Deviating from previous entries in the series, Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, integrates storytelling into the gameplay itself, rather than feeding the player through mission briefings. This allowed for a more seamless and immersive game, further cementing Blizzard's reputation as top-notch storytellers.

Warcraft III, like Warcraft II, included a World Editor program, allowing players to craft their own scenarios and maps, and players took full advantage of the feature, creating their own game types. One such custom game, Defense of the Ancients, gave rise to a new sub-genre of RTS, in which players control a single champion that gains levels and abilities as it battles alongside computer-controlled units. Defense of the Ancients-inspired games like Gas Powered Games' Demigod and the recently released League of Legends from Riot Games serve as a lasting reminder to the legacy of Warcraft III.

Welcome To Our World

In early 2000, Blizzard's development team found themselves fascinated by another type of game.

"Everyone here had been playing a bunch of Everquest and Ultima Online," says Samwise Didier. "It goes all the way back to the whole Lost Vikings/Lemmings thing. It was a genre we enjoyed, and Warcraft was a good fit."

Blizzard announced World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer take on the Warcraft universe in 2001, and for three years fans eagerly awaited their chance to take their first steps into the world of Azeroth, unfettered by the rules of the real-time strategy genre.

The game would pick up the story four years after the events of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, with the world split into two major factions – the Alliance and the Horde. Players would experience the battle for Azeroth from an entirely new, more personal point-of-view.

As the 2004 release approached, Blizzard was aware it had something special on its hands, though some members of the development team had more faith than others. World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack relates a particularly amusing story about a pep talk given by Blizzard co-founder and lead designer Allen Adham.

"Allen Adham got everyone on the team in a room to talk about how great his confidence was in the game, and how he thought we had something great. He said, 'One day this game will have a million subscribers.' No one believed that. We thought it was crazy. We thought, 'You're a liar.' There was no way that any game would have a million subscribers."

World of Warcraft launched in North America on November 23, 2004. Fan reaction to the release was so massive that the game was plagued with downtime and server queues for the first week, as Blizzard opened new worlds to deal with the exploding population. By December 2005, the game had 3.5 million subscribers. By December of 2008, that number had jumped to 11.5 million.

How does a PC game attract 11.5 million players? World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton says the game has something for everyone.

"It's easy to learn, but hard to master, which attracts different sorts of gamers. The hard to master part keeps the hardcore players around, while the casual players enjoy the wide variety of things to do," Chilton explains. "Ultimately it's just a really good game."

Massively Mainstream Appeal

The success that World of Warcraft has achieved over the past five years is nothing short of astounding. It was the best-selling PC game of 2005 and 2006 according to NPD data, knocked from the top spot in 2007 by its own expansion, The Burning Crusade. In 2008 the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, took the top spot.

The success of the game goes far beyond sales numbers. World of Warcraft has become a pop culture phenomenon. It's been used to advertise products like Coke and Toyota, while its own advertisements have feature pop culture icons such as Mr. T and William Shatner. A 2007 episode of Comedy Central's cartoon South Park, "Make Love, Not Warcraft," won the 2007 Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program.

Like Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft is a game that has gained recognition far beyond its already expansive audience. For a fantasy game that is strictly PC-based, that's no mean feat.

The Future

So where will the World of Warcraft be in another five years? Tom Chilton delivers a blissfully blurry outlook for the world's most popular subscription-based MMO.

"One of the cool things is: who knows where it will go next? The world itself is filled with so many possibilities. We've got outer space demons. We're about to add little green guys and werewolves (in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion). There are so many different directions you can go in. Magic, guns, machines – anything we want to come up with we can fit into the World of Warcraft with no problem."

And the continuing success of World of Warcraft doesn't preclude the possibility of a Warcraft IV. Just don't expect it any time soon, with teams tied up with Diablo III and StarCraft II.

Real-time strategy or massively multiplayer, the Warcraft universe continues to make its mark on the world, with each new game and expansion adding layer upon layer to a tale that J. Allen Brack believes could go on forever.

"We've got quite a bit to do before we run out of ideas. New people are constantly joining the team, bringing their own ideas with them. The full story will never truly be written."

Check back all week for more stories related to World of Warcraft's fifth anniversary.

Sure. But, getting the film made and made right wasn't so simple.

Turbo follows 4D fighting game player Hugo (Justin Chon of Twilight fame), who hopes to join a pro-team by winning a Super Turbo Arena tournament.

"People," Conaway recalls, "looked at me like I was crazy."

It wasn't the story that was causing the looks of bewilderment, but Conaway's vision for how the film should be made: An effect-heavy film with a budget of $100,000 USD.

This was Conaway's University of Southern California student film short. "It costs about $400,000 to make an episode of Power Rangers," says Conaway. "So if you think about it that way, it's really not that expensive."

Student films typically cost a few thousand bucks — maybe the price of a sedan at most, not a fleet of sedans. Sure, Turbo was to be Conaway's thesis film, but it was to be more: Atypical. It's Conaway's calling card. This would be a two-years-in-the-making showcase showing he could use to tell a story and made a slick, effect-heavy film. And ultimately proof that this young, up-and-coming filmmaker gets gaming, the internet, convergence.

It all started in 2007. No, actually it started before that with karate, anime and video games. The Last Dragon inspired a young Conaway to take up martial arts in junior high, studying Shorin-Ryu style karate and kobudo until he achieved a black belt. "There weren't many black action heroes that I was aware of as a kid," he says, "so Bruce Lee Roy fighting Sho-Nuff the Shogun of Harlem on a bootleg VHS was my inspiration." (The movie would even go on to inspire the final fight in Turbo!) By high school, he was got a gig as executive editor of game site PSXNetwork.com, going to E3 each year starting when he was 16. There was a stint working at Electronic Arts in marketing. And then there were movies, loads and loads of movies.

Movies took him to USC Film School and to a select motion capture performance class taught by Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis. The class got Conaway thinking about the Uncanny Valley Theory, about avatars, about effects and, even, martial arts. But it wasn't just about making a slick flick. "I wanted to find the story's emotional core," says Conaway. For him, that was the relationship between the two brothers in the film. Conaway was ready to go, Turbo was the picture he wanted to make for his master's thesis. Then, road block. "I didn't get a lot of support at USC for the project," says Conaway.

If he was to make the film using USC's cameras and USC's equipment, well, then, USC owns the film. Meaning? Meaning Conaway could not put it online. How did you see Turbo? On the Internet. How did I see it? Ditto. This is an age in which, if it's not on the Internet, it does not exist. And the only way for Conaway to ensure that the film existed was to get it online, which meant raising the money himself.

He didn't do it alone. Film is a collaborative endeavor — though the director is leading the charge. Conaway and his producing partner, Garrett T. Thompson, set out securing money. Conaway created a press kit — a press kit for a movie that hadn't been made yet, but a press kit that showed the visual vibe of the film. "Neither one of us comes from money, so we had to take a basic grass roots approach to raising the funds," says Thompson. Student loans, credit cards, fund raisers, matching gift donations, grants and any which way they could get the money they needed. "The challenge was convincing people that  we could get this 'crazy Turbo' project done." The reward wasn't some monetary pay-off.

Remember, Turbo is a student film — they were convincing the donors to give money just so the film could get made. That's it. A donation of faith. "When people donate to a short film they are basically doing it out of the kindness of their hearts and pockets," Thompson points out. "They will really reap no monetary benefit, so your passion truly has to convince them."

With initial funds in place, shooting commenced on December 2007. For the next year plus, Conaway and his team would be hard at work on this short film.  "I was never worried about it turning out great, I was just worried that it would take forever to get there," says Justin Lutsky. "To be honest, I never expected this to be such an undertaking.  When I agreed to edit I was anticipating a several month commitment and couldn't really believe we were still working on a short film a year and a half later."

Lutsky had met as contestants on a Fox filmmaker reality show called "On The Lot" in May 2007. Both were eliminated, but became fast friends. Lutsky, a young filmmaker in his own right, was asked by Conaway to cut the film. "Turbo shot on the RED camera, which was fairly new at the time," says Lutsky. "There were no established post production or editorial work flows established.  We essentially had to create our own work flow from scratch and had a lot to learn along the way." Learn as you go, learn as you go.

An effect-heavy film like Turbo needs effects. Lutsky introduced Conaway to the folks at Ember Lab, a start-up digital effects house in Southern California. "With the large amount of VFX work that had to be done, Jarrett could have easily spent his entire budget on post production alone if he had used an established Hollywood studio," says Ember Lab's Josh Grier. "We wanted to propose a bid that fit within his budget and would allow us to sustain our selves for the duration of the project." For the team at Ember, Turbo was their first complete project and the experience of working on this type of film was by far their biggest drive to get involved. That, and the arcade gaming.

"My brother Mike and I lived in Tokyo for about three years and we have always been fond of the Japanese arcade culture," says Grier. "After watching the first cut of Turbo, we knew right away that we wanted a hybrid look, combining elements of the retro eighties gaming culture with Japanese arcade flair." Those retro elements were massaged so that they felt futuristic and a look was developed that Conaway agreed completed his vision. "The most challenging part of Turbo was not a specific effect, but the design work that went into developing Turbo's game system," says Grier. "The HUD, UI and the futuristic TV were featured in about 75% of the shots and all had to be developed from scratch."

Not only was the game system complete mapped out, but the game's mechanics. "People sweat when they play DDR in arcades, right?" asks Conaway. "That's the same idea — Super Turbo Arena is a physical game. Kids want to be Turbo players, not basketball players." The game and its moves was created in the minds of the Turbo team so that it would be possible to play if the tech ever existed.

That's what sells the film — its authenticity. Whether it be the authenticity of Turbo's characters or its video game element, it feels real. Even for a movie wrapped in a sheen of CG and special effects. It feels realer than anything than has come out of the traditional Hollywood system.

Turbo is not perfect, but it's filled with promise. It's a vision of a future when those who grew up playing video games start to make movies about them. Movies that don't suck.

Turbo from Jarrett Lee Conaway on Vimeo.

Though one is obviously dwarfed by the comparison, both figures are impressive in their own right. And both speak to the health of their form of multiplayer gaming. For console games like Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer's meteoric growth is commonly understood. But for LAN parties, still playing games like Counter-Strike, their resilience and persistence are most frequently seen among college-age gamers on campus.

"If anything, I think it's growing" says Nathan Etzell, a senior at Oregon State University, whose 300-member OSU Gaming organization has a prewired, 30-person LAN room at the bottom of a dormitory where at least two large parties are held per term. In January, his club will meet the University of Oregon in the second "Civil War LAN," a gaming tournament named after the schools' football rivalry.

But there is a sense that the PC LAN party — like fraternity parties, all-nighters, streaking, whatever — are something whose time and place comes on a college campus. Out in the cold hard world, PC LAN and direct server support in new titles is dwindling in favor of console multiplayer and proprietary hosting services. Most notably, StarCraft II will not support LAN gaming as it shifts to Blizzard's Battle.net. And dedicated servers are out under Modern Warfare 2, which is now running multiplayer with a combination of Steam and the recently created IW.net for Modern Warfare 2. Both sequels' predecessors had a strong history in dedicated servers and LAN gaming, leaving some gamers feeling betrayed, and some LAN enthusiasts feeling marginalized.

LAN gaming is not gone from the off-campus civilian world. But annual convention hall events with big budgets, entry fees, prizes and sponsorships are different creatures from six people linking up to play Warcraft III. While the former will definitely still happen after you graduate, the latter is less likely. Those six-people sessions are most likely made among fellow gamers, who are likely to find each other in a class, or perusing a bulletin board in a student union.

"Their age group usually involves a lot of what PC gamers are," says Keegan Gormley, whose Big City Gaming in downtown Eugene, Ore. offers constant system-linked gaming and monthly tournaments. "They're mostly college-age students who, in their spare time, enjoy playing a game like Counter-Strike, or another game they've played for a long time."

The players in his $5-an-hour "stadium," — eight consoles connected to high definition, Major League Gaming-standard panel monitors - are largely middle- and high-schoolers, Gormley said. Younger kids are less likely to LAN, he said, because of the accessibility of consoles and the desirability of their most current games.

"There's much more deep-rooting in PC gaming," Gormley said. "Someone who gets into a game on the PC can end up playing it for years," he said. "On consoles, I've seen people drop Halo for Call of Duty, then drop Call of Duty for Flashpoint. For PC gamers, mostly, it's whatever they originally clicked on and killed with."

And that helps explain the persistence of LAN gaming. The standbys of a LAN party are usually real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, or WarCraft III, then shooters such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. TF2 is the most recent of these, releasing in 2007, with others having roots going back to the late 1990s. There's a reason for this.

"It's what people are good at," said Patrick Chinn, one of the University of Oregon organizers for the Civil War LAN, which will be held Jan. 22-23. "One reason people want to play an older game like Counter-Strike is because they've played it a long time and they've gotten good at it. We've done tournaments for games that are brand new, and there'll be some attendance, but they're not as well played."

Plus, by this point, the support histories for the games have either controlled for or patched out of existence most means of cheating. "The tactics in a game like Counter Strike have become so refined that there's no real dick move you can pull," says Dylan Leeds, a senior majoring in digital art at Oregon. And for whatever in-game legislation doesn't cover, LAN gaming offers another control: Being physically in the presence of your opponent. It cuts down on ragequits and unsporting behavior.

"You're more likely to respect someone if you know you're going to see interact with them after the game," he said.

And that speaks to another quality of LAN gaming that, unlike its numbers, can't be replicated or really improved: the human contact of it all.

"If you're playing online by yourself, the hype's really not there," said Josh Bothun, an Oregon senior majoring in computer science and music technology. "It's like you have to intentionally create it for yourself, but you get a completely different experience when people are around you."

LAN parties have an anecdotal culture that just can't be replicated by solitary multiplayer gaming. Often stretching 24 hours or more, they're salted with tales of inside jokes and hyper-caffeination. At major tournaments in the civilian world, bragging about casemods and your rig are their own sideshow, similar to a custom-car show.

"It's more about community," says Gormley, the game store owner. "It's being able to shoulder-shove the person you just killed. It's less about yelling at someone over a mic, and more about actually giving that person the evil eye.

"It gets so elitist online, sometimes," he continued. "It seems like a lot of people don't want to play online console games because they don't get the game in its first week, don't level up their character in time, and then they feel like they can't compete."

It might be easy to assume that anything other than gaming over the Internet, as opposed to a LAN or WAN, is redundant, a relic, or headed for obscurity. But system-linked games bring something to the room that proprietary multiplayer services can't: One's friends.

To use an apt college metaphor: "It's like drinking online versus drinking with friends," Chinn said. "Drinking a couple of beers and IMing with friends is not nearly as much fun as actually drinking with your friends."

On walls around me hung a Wii bowling ball controller attachment, a Wii pool cue, Wii pom poms, and more.

Who makes this stuff? Two amiable Orthodox Jewish brothers — black pants, white shirts, beards, and an offer to their guest of some kosher pastries — sat across from me, cheerful about what they've built and the amazing gizmos surrounding us.

I was at the second floor offices of CTA Digital, a block from where Brooklyn, New York touches the East River, in a short, aged office building, up an elevator painted with an old yellow floor ad for Domino sugar. I was in the spotless show room where Leo and Sol Markowitz's line of sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-useful — and apparently hot-selling — attachments for the Wii and other electronics line the walls. (See their offerings online, then imagine that a lot of that is hanging on the walls of one room that's also big enough for a couple of couches and a big-screen TV.)

The brothers Markowitz are some of the guys who saw in the Wii not just a gamer revolution but a chance to make money selling people things to attach to their Wii remote.

And 200,000 units of their Wii bowling ball controller sold worldwide later, they say, they were pleased to be surrounded by the plastic products of that opportunity.

"We smelled it right away," Leo told me, recalling his first sensations of the Wii's imminent success.

The Wii peripheral market is big and, despite other industry slumps, growing. Of the 58.4 million gaming peripherals sold so far this year in the United States, the NPD group reports that 18.4 million of those are for the Wii. That's up a million from the same date last year.

So even though Sol, an avowed Kotaku reader, playfully cut his brother off early in our meeting about Wii add-ons to remind him that "real gamers don't like the Wii," enough people do like these attachments. They like the tennis rackets and the baseball bats, the imitation light sabers and shotguns. Maybe not the pom-poms — a weak seller — but people like buying Wii peripherals and business is no joke at all. It's good.

CTA has more than 30 employees, a warehouse in upstate New York and design and development teams in Asia. Maybe most importantly, Leo noted, "We have five people who think of things to make 24-7."

They think of things like... the bowling ball. "Why wouldn't you buy it?" Leo said to me, when I ask him what the point is. I argued that people had been Wii-bowling with no ball-shaped shell around their controller just fine.

It makes the game fun for plenty of people, Sol said. "It makes it more exciting." He knows that "real gamers" won't care as much.

This bowling ball was a dream project, a year in the making and spurred by research that showed them that Wii Sports bowling is the most popular activity on Nintendo's console.

"We all knew that whoever comes out with bowling, it's going to be huge," Leo recalled.

Those CTA engineers got to work, trying to craft a bowling ball something-or-other that could fit around a Wii Remote. They didn't want people to chuck a bowling ball controller through their TV, so they tried to design a bowling ball shell that wouldn't function if you didn't wear the shell's wrist strap. Couldn't get it to work right, Sol said. They settled on a design that has two wrist straps and  is sealed with a sticker that must be broken in order to first encase a Wii remote in it. You rip that, you assume the risks.

The bowling ball's good, though it's holes are positioned only for right-handed bowlers. An ambidextrous design hadn't worked. But have no fear, fellow southpaws. "We probably will get into the left-handed business," Leo told me.

I met with the Markowitz men and a helpful colleague for over an hour. Leo repeatedly bounded from his seat on a couch across from me to grab secret prototype after secret prototype of CTA gaming add-ons that will make the bowling ball seem pedestrian. They're secret still, but they're wild.

CTA's been in this business for 16 years, Sol explained. They started with cell-phone add-ons, then moved on to iPod attachments. Now they do gaming add-ons too, like PlayStation 3 chat pads, Xbox 360 cooling devices and iPhone steering wheels. The Wii's been the big one for them lately, and gaming's up to a quarter of their business, though they won't say how much money CTA makes. They sell their attachments worldwide, to electronics stores that once ignored them or shunned gaming.

They say that even Bed Bath & Beyond is on board now. The brothers recalled that the retailer — not exactly a gaming powerhouse — consented last Christmas season to trying to sell 30,000 of CTA's Wii add-ons, simple things like controller charge stations, and sold almost all of them. The retailer asked for more — asked for the top sellers, even. So, the brothers told Kotaku, CTA has sold Beth Bath & Beyond Wii Sports kits to sell and even a Wii controller shotgun. No word if it's sold next to shower curtains.

Leo showed me a smart one: A belt and holster designed to hold a Wii Remote for users of Wii Fit. He rightly pointed out that the game requires players to use the Remote to start their exercising but then forces them to either put it down or needlessly hold it as they work out on the Wii Balance Board. The holster holds the Remote, freeing the user's hands. And it swivels, letting someone point the Remote to navigate menus without having to un-holster it. That seemed to address a Wii Fit user interface issue.

I asked the brothers if they saw themselves as being in the problem-solving business, the fun business or — gesturing to the Wii Music Kit that lets you embed the Wii remote into shells shaped like a violin, a trumpet, a dog paw — the novelty business.

"We see what the problem is [with a game] and figure out what we can make for it," Leo began.

"We are in the fun business," Sol cut in.

Leo laughed. "We're in the business to sell and make money."

CTA's bowling ball controller may make the company stand out, but they are not the only creators of imaginative Wii add-ons. Mad Catz makes controller shells shaped like Ubisoft's Rabbids characters. Nyko director of marketing Chris Arbogast told Kotaku that one of his company's most creative Wii add-ons was going to be their Party Station: "a combination charging station / beverage container / chip bowl." It's not coming out. "Although it generated a lot of buzz and consumer response, it was not cost effective to produce and was tabled."

Arbogast noted that some of the more imaginative controllers, while fun or aesthetically pleasing don't fit his company's strategy. "We decided on particular accessories that allowed us to incorporate new technology or offer features that were not previously available, like button relocation on our Action Pak pistol grip or rumble in our Kama." Their next big product is their new Charge Base IC.

CTA is well aware that some of this wilder stuff doesn't work. The Wii Music kit has been a slow seller, not helped by relatively slow sales of the Wii Music.

The brothers seem undeterred. They say that their new Wii Sports Resort kit, which includes a bow-and-arrow add-on, a Jet-Ski-style handlebar and even a frisbee shell, is selling great.

And don't worry, those of you who might feel you're too cool for these kinds of attachments. Leo and Sol are making some products for you in mind too. Just wait. Brooklyn's keeping busy.

Nowhere is the realization of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment's pause he said, "Kingdom Hearts."

"Oh, because it has pirates?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It's the flying." The way the game introduces flying the player -– about halfway through its storyline after you've been running and jumping on the ground the whole time -– was like a revelation in game design for him. "Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it's like you knew it was coming. It just felt right."

There's a fantasy fulfillment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it's appealing to a part of your senses that you don't use very much in everyday gameplay.

"We live in a very X, Y world," Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn't afraid to build his games around it. "If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis."

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360 degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character's (or aircraft's) physics so that they don't get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalize the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray's flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager's face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don't realize that there's more to flight than getting off the ground.

"Don't get me wrong," says Gray. "[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation."

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organize a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

"You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?'" said Gray. "If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It's different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,' because you don't get blue keys in the air."

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centerpiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson and he wasn't shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360 degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you're up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there's not much fantasy fulfillment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it's a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don't mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn't last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfill the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: "I don't know where I'm at, but I'm having fun."

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

• Massage Games Don't Always Have Happy Endings
  The Xbox Massage-Makers: Money, Sex Toys & Indie Backlash
  by Stephen Totilo
• 
  
• Intervention
  I Kept Playing - The Costs Of My Gaming Addiction
  by Mike Fahey
• 
  
• Meet The FAQers
  For Little Money And In Many Words, These Gamers Help You
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Gaming's Gamblers
  I Can Kick Your Butt, Wanna Bet?
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  
• The Lone Gamer
  Is Single-Player Gaming In Danger Of Extinction?
  by Michael McWhertor
• 
  
• Frighteners
  What Makes A Video Game Scary
  by A.J. Glasser
• 
  

REVIEWS

Dead Space Extraction Review: Frighteningly Good
PSP: Attack of the Minis
Heroes Over Europe Review: A Flying Shame
FIFA 10 Review: 30-Yard Screamer
MySims Agents Review: Sherlock Holmes Didn't Have To Deal With This $#@%
NHL 2K10 Review: Thin-Ice Capades
Spyborgs Review: Not-So-Heavy Metal
Gran Turismo PSP Review: Steady As A Pace Car
Wii Fit Plus Review: Now I'm A Believer
MotorStorm: Arctic Edge Review: Big Game, Big Fun
Katamari Forever Review: Nothing More, Nothing Less
South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! Review: Throwing Snowballs
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Review: Crisis Hearts
NBA 2K10 Review: Ball, You - Man!
NBA Live 10 Review: Amen for a Revival
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review: Boom Headshot!
Brutal Legend Review: Testing Its Metal
Lucidity Micro-Review: Beauty Is Only Skin-Deep
Ju-on: The Grudge Review: Curse Of The Movie Game
Half-Minute Hero Review: A Good Risk
Zombie Apocalypse Micro-Review: Paint the Town Red
Axel & Pixel Micro-Review: A Puzzling Combination
Borderlands Review: Guns! Guns! Guns!
Critter Crunch Micro Review: Gross In a Cute Way
Bakugan Battle Brawlers Review: Almost There
A Boy And His Blob Review: The Zero Nostalgia Version
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games Review: Going Through the Motions
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Review: The Leap, At Last
Marvel Super Hero Squad Review: This One Is For The Brats
Dungeon Hunter Review: Pocketful of Diablo
Rock Band Micro Review: iPhone Joins the Band
Forza Motorsport 3 Review: Definitively Maybe
DJ Hero Review: You Spin Me Right Round
GTA: The Ballad Of Gay Tony Review: Out With A Bang
Tekken 6 Review: The Lag of Iron Fist
Saw Review: Do You Want to Play This Game?
LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias Micro Review: A Pleasant Gust of Fun

PREVIEWS

Eliminate Preview: Transitive Verbs Are Cooler Than Nouns
Sims 3 World Adventures: Chopsticks, Mummies & the French – Oh My!
New Super Mario Bros. Wii Preview: All The Modes, All The Chaos
Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers Preview: Show Me, Don't Tell Me
FATALE Preview: Alluring, Alarming and Totally Ambiguous
Left 4 Dead 2 Scavenge Mode Preview: Giving Multiplayer The Gas
Jam Sessions 2 Preview: I Fought The Law And Nobody Won
Dark Void Preview: Learning To Fall With Style
Sign Up To Test Zune, Facebook, And Twitter On Your 360
Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron Preview: I'm A Total Space Case
Army of Two: The 40th Day Multiplayer Preview: Extract Some Fun
Avatar Wii Preview: Environmentalism Commando
Dementium II Preview: A Mature DS Game With "Hell Moments"
MAG Preview: Come Back Here With My Tank!
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising Preview: The Darker Side Of Dawn

COLUMNS

Well Played
Why Everyone Should Be Watching the PSPgo
When the Going Gets Tough... Let the Game Play Itself
Windows 7: What Happened to Gaming?
Video Game Speakeasy Slips Into Soho for a Night of Raucous Fun
Can Bigger Screens Save a Shrinking Market?

Stick Jockey
A Virtual Golfer Looks Back On - and Ahead to - His Tournament Career
It's Not in the Game - Should it Be?
Re-Creating a Stadium Before Its First Pitch is Thrown
With NCAA 10, EA Guns for Two Shining Moments

Leigh Alexander
In Praise Of Hard Games

tim rogers
i've been shot!

COVER

• Designed by Michael McWhertor

And I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time.

Looking back, the timing of founding Meat Bun, our video game-themed t-shirt line, makes sense. It started in Tokyo, following an afternoon pounding the pavement in Harajuku, a fashionable slice of Tokyo nestled between Shinjuku and Shibuya. The area attracts the fashion conscious, from outlandish cosplayers to street fashion freaks.

Harajuku is also home to one of our biggest influences, Beams T, a Japanese label that somehow manages to make the stereotypically uncool—including video games, anime and manga—cool. It was after shopping at Beams T, where I purchased an Every Extend Extra t-shirt, lamenting that we'd missed out the label's Dragon Quest anniversary line of tees and bemoaning the fact that shirts from The King of Games were hard to get in the U.S. that the idea of making our own clothes, video game-themed ones, started to gel.

It was just days before the Tokyo Game Show. Wedged between the t-shirt shopping and the promise of playing dozens of unreleased video games, the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

Our goal? To tap into the hard to define culture of video games, a medium which we had been passionate about for decades, and create something that was better than what we were being offered. And we weren't the only ones with that idea. Similarly passionate video game fans, those raised on 8- and 16-bit games were doing the same thing, like the people behind Panic, J!NX, Attract Mode, Starmen.net and its spin-off Fangamer and many others.

So, after foolishly deciding on the name Meat Bun—inspired by a life-giving pick up from Capcom's unpopular side-scrolling arcade beat 'em up Warriors of Fate—we set off to clothe gamers.

My partner in clothing is Scott Spatola, a lifelong gamer who originally introduced himself to me after learning that I'd brought a SNES and a copy of Street Fighter II to college, against my parents wishes. The aforementioned arm-twister, Scott has always been the motivator, a rabid fan of Spy Hunter, Ninja Warriors and Darkstalkers, and the other half of this full-time-feeling side project dubbed Meat Bun.

It always helps to have a friend like Scott, one who's organized enough to undertake the business side of the business—setting up the bank accounts, applying for federal tax IDs, legally incorporating the company. There are just shy of a million little things that crop up in the process of starting to run one's own business, from the minor—like running out of envelopes with 200 orders waiting to be fulfilled—to scary legal threats. What seems like a fun little lark isn't often as easy as originally planned.

"I always said that if anyone ever asked, I'd tell them that starting your own business is F-ing hard, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise," says Sean "Jinx" Gailey, the creative overlord at clothier and accessory maker J!NX. "Real blood, sweat and tears (also real) have gone into this business."

But J!NX has turned those hard-lost fluids into a successful brand and, perhaps more importantly, a full-time gig for its founders.

"Frankly, the biggest challenge was getting over the 'hump,' making that transition from working your day job to solely working on your own business," Gailey says. "Anyone who's working on their own business can relate to that. We didn't take a paycheck from J!NX for 5 years of business, during the 'this is our side business' days. That was rough."

J!NX has been in business since 1999, when Gailey started the company "as a three page website with six designs" running the label from his bedroom. We met Gailey at last year's Spike TV Video Game Awards, bending his ear about the J!NX empire, which, while different from what we had set out to do with Meat Bun, reflected a similar passion for video games and general nerdiness, coated with a cooler shell.

"I wanted to make clothing inspired by our lifestyle, one of video games, pen and paper gaming, geek culture, giant robots, comics and dragons," Gailey says of the origins of J!NX. The clothing company has grown from a bedroom doubling as headquarters to an operation employing 21 people, occupying 18,000 square feet of office and warehouse space and making merchandise for hugely popular games like World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, StarCraft, Aion and EVE Online.

And while not quite understated, for the most part, what J!NX does is offer something to the fan of, say, World of Warcraft that's designed with more of a wink and a nod.

From the barely referential designs from Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy t-shirt maker Panic to the Earthbound obsessed crew at Fangamer—borne of Starmen.net—the subtle approach appears to be a common tactic. For our own part, ultra vague references to The House of the Dead, Ikaruga and Spy Hunter, seemed sometimes lost on the Meat Bun customer.

Reid Young of Fangamer says his company draws much of its inspiration from the Super Nintendo's role-playing game heyday for its similarly obscure designs.

"EarthBound and other SNES RPG's have definitely been our main inspiration," Young says, a fact reflected in the clothing label's EarthBound-heavy catalog. "1996 was pretty much the best summer ever — Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Super Mario RPG from morning to midnight. It's fun to relive those days and, hopefully, inspire new and old fans to do the same."

While the Fangamer store—"Something we hoped would bring in enough money to keep the lights on" over at Fangamer's community-driven side—is now the "main business focus," according to Young, employing three full-time Starmen.net veterans, running a clothing and merchandise label exceeded the EarthBound fan's expectations.

"I never anticipated the amount of work which goes into a single piece of merchandise," says Young. "It sounds easy to slap a design on a shirt, but the amount of time, money, and care that goes into the process is staggering."

Fan response, Young says, makes the grind of shipping thousands of Mother 3-inspired handbooks and t-shirts all worth it.

"Releasing a product, going to sleep, and waking up to find that everybody is as pumped about it as I am. It brings a little tear to my eye," he says.

That may be the most exhilarating part of trying to appeal to a gamer's fashion sense, finding something that people will buy and wear in public, unafraid to wear their love of video games on their sleeve, sometimes literally.

One person who's taking a different approach to the sometimes hazy cloud of "culture" that surrounds video games is Adam Robezzoli, founder of "video game culture shop" Attract Mode. It's an endeavor four years in the planning, one that includes fashion, art, print magazines and more.

Attract Mode's online store opened earlier this year, an effort that allows Robezzoli to "curate and produce unique art/goods related to video games, but also a way to fund pet projects like the artxgame collabs and the DATA BEEZ chip music concert." It also sells t-shirts, giving gamers more wearable options.

The online store offers a broader set of merchandise, however, from video game inspired t-shirts to zines from writer Matt "Fort90" Hawkins to Pac-Man oven mitts to CDs from chiptunes superstars YMCK, Anamanaguchi, Covox, et al.

Personally, when we started doing our own thing with Meat Bun, it was simply an extension of our gaming-related lives, much like what the founders of J!NX, Fangamer, Attract Mode and others have done—turned their passions into something tangible. And, yes, it's sometimes F-ing hard. But you have to wear something, right?

No, actually, I'm not. I've been playing Demon's Souls — a game even its developer admits isn't "a fun game." The action-adventure game casts you as a hero confronting where progress is hard-won, recovery supplies are limited and equipment can wear out. The twist is that when players die, they return as phantoms to navigate the same environments in a weakened state in the hopes of earning their bodies back — that's right, the game actually gets more challenging the more you fail.

And yet I love it.

I can't stop playing, and I can't really figure out why. Aren't games supposed to be accessible, and isn't frustration supposed to be a killjoy? What's the allure in this difficult game?

Expanded audiences and accessibility are major watchwords in the present era of gaming. Microsoft Game Studios' Bruce Philips recently unveiled research at Gamasutra showing that even among Xbox 360 games where completion rates are highest, most users only get about half the potential Gamerscore. And 30 percent of users don't finish some of the most popular and widely-played titles Philips studied. His theory – and that of numerous other designers crafting games designed to be appealing to wider audiences – is that frustration is what makes players give up.

But even though I'm definitely frustrated with Demon's Souls at times, I'd say I'm even more driven to succeed and to conquer than I've been in a long time. What gives?

"I do not think that games must be accessible to be appealing," Demon's Souls producer Takeshi Kajii told me in an interview. "If you make a game accessible it will expand the audience. However, if we were to make all games accessible, wouldn't you eventually get tired of the same thing?"

Kajii explained that in creating Demon's Souls the team sought to return to the core of what's fun about games, and relied on three tenets: challenge, discovery and accomplishment. "People commonly say Demon's Souls is hard because of this, but we never made the difficulty needlessly high for the sake of being hard, nor did we intend for it to be a selling point," he said.

Steep difficulty can be appealing. Take the case of indie action-adventure title Spelunky, where the sense of discovery and achievement is maximized by stiff odds. "I think that a tough challenge can make a game much more enjoyable," said creator Derek Yu. "Don't we feel the most fulfilled when we overcome something difficult? Without that feeling of getting better, a game turns into a chore - something that you do as a distraction rather than something you do for fulfillment."

The key to effective difficulty, as opposed to frustration that's just frustrating, is all in the implementation. "Doing something hard isn't fun in and of itself," said Yu. " It's not fun to sit in an empty room and try to balance a ball on your head for 10 hours straight. To make challenge effective, you have to provide an interesting game world and create deep mechanics that are entertaining to play with and very satisfying to master."

Nels Anderson, gameplay programmer at Hothead Games, also feels it's important to delineate between frustration and meaningful challenge. "Being frustrated usually means the player cannot determine a way to improve or progress," he said. "Part of the reason Demon's Souls works so well is because you understand why you failed."

Demon's Souls' Kajii says that failure needs to be an ever-present possibility if the player is to feel a sense of accomplishment. "We designed it so that players are likely to die if they aren't paying attention," he says. "By maintaining this intensity, players will be constantly nervous while playing, but [will feel] a tremendous sense of accomplishment is their reward for doing so."

Achievements are more valuable, then, when there's a lot at stake – and failure is less frustrating when it's clear to the player where they messed up. "Demon's Souls is a game where you ‘die a lot,' but as I've already said, it is geared so that you will acknowledge that it was your own fault," said Kajii. "Players will keep playing because they know they can get past a certain point by taking a different approach, using their imagination, and thinking about how to overcome obstacles."

In a game like Demon's Souls, then, a frustrating death is simply the game informing me that my strategy didn't work. The mechanics are such that I can't blame the game, and my failures never feel unfair. I can then tackle the exact same obstacle with a different approach, until I figure out a tactic that will help me succeed – and victory's all the sweeter thanks to all of my struggles on the way.

"Dying in a video game is like losing a tennis match, or getting rejected when you ask a girl out, or looking at a painting and not understanding its meaning. You'll always learn something and the next time will be better," said Yu. He says that if dying's fun, that makes it all the better – and Demon's Souls also features an interesting twist on death.

Enriched by its multiplayer element, the game allows players to see the bloodstains of other fallen heroes, and touch them to view how they died. Players can leave notes and messages for one another warning of tough spots up ahead, and can also recruit the phantoms of players that have died to help them handle challenges. Kajii says this system of strangers helping strangers came from a real-life experience of his, a time when his car was stuck on a snowy mountainside.

Numerous stranded drivers all banded together to push each of the cars in turn, but Kajji couldn't stay behind to thank his benefactors, lest he end up stranded again. "I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I'd ever meet the people who helped me again... Maybe if I'd met them somewhere else, I would've made friends with them... Many thoughts crossed my mind," he said. "This occurrence of helping complete strangers was strangely very memorable, and I kept thinking about it for a very long time.

"Demon's Souls is a game where you die many times, so I thought this idea of helping others would be a great fit. It's as simple as, ‘We all die so easily, so let's help each other out,'" he adds. "Unlike other RPGs, each player unfolds their own story, and each encounter with a phantom player expands and diversifies their experience."

Designers are right to be concerned with players finishing fewer titles, and they're right to offer low barriers to entry for expanded audiences – to a point. "I think in an attempt to avoid frustrating players, the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater in terms of difficulty," said Hothead's Anderson. "It's a pretty common misconception that players want easier games."

He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MIT's Gambit Game Lab: "Players are more critical of a game that's too easy than one that's too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, there's no way to make a game that's too easy harder," Anderson continued. "However, as soon as players feel they don't have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative."

Frequent death and frustration don't need to be viewed as engagement-breakers in games – as long as the deaths are meaningful and educational, and as long as the player's frustrated with themselves, not the game. The most important factor is clearly that players must be able to see what they can do differently to surmount a challenge.

The tactic that finally gets me over a bridge swarmed with archers, or through a narrow hallway packed with vicious wolves, might not be the same one that works for another player, but it's one I've developed on my own, through trial and error, experimenting with the environment and with my own abilities.

"This act of trial and error in a tense atmosphere is the heart of challenge and discovery, leading to the strong satisfaction of accomplishment," says Kajii. "I'd say Demon's Souls is not a ‘fun game,' but a ‘game to have fun with,'" says Kajii. "The goal is not to find a pre-defined answer — instead the answer is something created by the player on their own through their own play-styles."

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Players putting their money wheretheir mouths are, betting that they are better, betting that they will win and betting with money. "Let's face it," says 30-something Scott Popular, "money makes everything interesting."

Popular is a regular on the fighting tournament circuit and self-described tourney "hype man." His job, he says, is to "keep the hype" during tournaments, and he's dead right: money may not make things better, it may not make things more fun. But, that twenty or that fifty will, without a doubt, make things more interesting.

It doesn't matter where the tournament is, but you can bet, there are players there picking up extra cash. You might be the eighth best Melty Blood player, but the eighth best Melty Blood doesn't win anything besides the feeling of satisfaction. It's not like the tournament is a front, that's not the case at all. "You don't want these money matches near a proper tournament," says Popular. They get in the way, they're a distraction. Money matches are not why people enroll in fighting game tournaments — most don't even know about them. They're often in an invite hotel room or off in some corner or banquet room somewhere. But search the boards, the forums, and there are people trying to set something up, make something happen.

"While the large majority of players and spectators aren't involved in money matches," says Capcom's Seth Killian, "they can still be quite common on some games. Especially as you get towards the finals, or during a marquee matchup, you'll hear a lot of shouting about who likes which player, for how much money, and at what odds." Before Seth Killian was a manager at Capcom USA and before he had a Street Fighter boss named after him, Killian was making his mark on the fighting game circuit. "It's a friendly thing with no centralized system — just player to player bets," he explains.

Betting is done usually in "First to" sets: First to 7, first to 10, etc. The first player to win seven matches, or the first to win 10 matches, wins. "Common bets include: Who will win the set, an obvious bet, who will win the next match, or even who will land the first hit," says Killian. Players may put up the money themselves or might pool money as is often the case in region rivalries — the top West Coast player vs. the top East Coast player. Side bets can round out the action. First hit bets are for those there to gamble, who want that instant rush. Bets can get complicated and interesting by using characters that are typically considered "weak" (Gen, anyone?) to mix-mashing fighting styles (rushdown down attack player vs. run-away-run-down-the-clock player). If bets get too complex, then players and punters will divert their attention to a more straight-up match.

As video game tournaments become bigger and bigger, there's the inevitable push to legitimize tourneys as actual businesses. Gone are the days winners were handed paper bags with money symbols scrawled on them in fat, magic marker and stuffed with cold, hard cashola. Winners must fill out a myriad of sheets including tax forms for Uncle Sam. More reputable tournaments will pay up in a matter of weeks, while there are horror stories from the shadier events of it taking up to a year and a half to get the tournament winnings.

Make a name for yourself as a world class fighting game player, and you'll find yourself with players lining up to play you — for money. The challengers might think they can win, or they might view the experience of getting their ass kicked by a world class player as a postcard to themselves. It's not always the top players who draw the big money matches, but the middle level players that might make the most interesting match-ups. "Some of the bets can get quite large," says Killian. "At a tournament I was at just a few weeks ago, two players faced off in a 'first to 10 wins' match in MVC2 for $13,000."

But is this legal?

"Federal law does not have much interest in gambling," says I. Nelson Rose, an attorney and a senior professor at the Whittier Law School in California, "unless it is organized crime or the federal government has to get involved, as with interstate horse racing." One of the leading experts on gaming (here, gambling) law, Professor Rose is the author of the upcoming Internet Gaming Law. "There's too much social betting to begin with." Whether it's an office pool on the Oscars, a round of horse shoes or even Governors making friendly Super Bowl bets (which might even violate their state's laws!), social betting is so pervasive in society, that eradicating it would be a fool's errand on the part of the government. Instead, the federal government focuses its attention on those who can make money off of gambling, typically organized crime. "The enforcement of gambling laws," says Prof. Rose, "is low on the list of priority's of the federal government."

"If it is truly a game of skill," says Prof. Rose, "it is not gambling. And if participants are merely betting on themselves — more of an entry fee than a wager — it would not fall under any federal law." According to Prof. Rose, those "bets" players are putting on themselves could legally be considered "an entry fee." Side bets would not fall under federal law either as federal gambling laws do not apply to patrons of bookies. In short: Federal gambling law applies to those who are making money off the act of gambling and not simple wagering on games of skill.

It's the state laws where things get sticky. In the United States, gambling laws differ by individual states. Some states have old and outdated gambling laws on the books. Take California, which says it is illegal to bet on contests of "skill, speed and endurance". Other states, such as Arizona, are starting to even take measures to make wagering on games of skill difficult. States having measures on gambling is not unique. "All of the states have prohibitions on gambling," Prof. Rose points out, "but again, most exempt games which are predominantly skill." If video games are games of skill and not chance, then it could very well not fall under state law. Some states restrict even games of skill. The question is largely: Are fighting games in fact games of skill or chance? Play a couple rounds with guys like Daigo Umehara or Alex Valle and see how far luck gets you.

"The appeal for money matches is simple," says Popular. "It's cash in hand, right away." You play to win, bring your best game and "not some experimental bullshit tactics" says Popular. Once that is cash on the table — or more often than not, television set — it starts. And it ends when the fight is over. "You're not going to rage quit in a room with a people betting money," says Popular. "No way."

Rage quitting and the arcade tradition of fighting games are driving forces for the perceived needs for players to hash things out in person. "Money matches can also be a way to settle scores between players who have online drama," says Killian. Web start-up BringIt.com is offering an online matchmaking service that using a ranking-type system to match players of similar skill levels in money matches. Players pay beforehand via PayPal to reduce the risk of sudden quits or "connection problems".

The federal Wire Act prohibits anyone in the gambling business, Prof. Rose explains, from using interstate wire infrastructure to transmit info that can be used in placing bets on sporting events. BringIt.com side-steps that as competing in video games is, as previously defined, a game of skill. Players are not "betting", but rather putting money as an entry fee. BringIt.com makes its money on the match-making service it offers, by taking a 14 percent service fee on each match players accept or enter. "However, there are nine states within the U.S. where the participation in skill-based video game tournaments for cash prizes is not allowed," notes BringIt.com. "At this time, if you live in the following states, you may not play for cash prizes on BringIt: Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Tennessee, and Vermont."

But for some, the appeal of money matches isn't the money and isn't even the winning, but the millisecond before a decision is made, the gut reaction. Many of the top fighting game players do gamble on cards, craps and slots. Some of them are as good at gambling as gaming, good enough to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. "To play fighting games is to gamble," says Killian. "These guys gamble with every move they make — the gambling sensibility is aligned perfectly with fighting games."

And those thinking of playing money matches at the next big fighting tourney, Killian offers this advice: "Capcom's position would certainly be to check your federal, state, and local laws regarding gambling, and to follow them."

[Pic]

Models and hipsters wander the streets mingling with star-truck tourists and Hollywood starlets. Restaurants and boutiques vie for curb-space among million-dollar apartments and two-by-two patches of grass and trees.

But last Thursday night the biggest crowds weren't those forming to catch a glimpse of Lindsay Lohan's private shopping spree, but the nearly thousand-person line that wrapped around three sides of a trendy block of nondescript buildings.

The line of people stopped in the middle of a sidewalk a good 200 feet from the object of everyone's attention; A small shoe store.

The excited crowds, dressed in t-shirts and some toting laptops, cameras and joysticks, weren't here to mingle, snap pictures or shop, they were here to play.

Inside the packed shoe-store, temporarily decorated with posters and art of winged super heroes and martial artists, people gathered in tight clusters around flat screen panels to get a chance to play game developer Capcom's latest fighting video game.

"The idea of fight club came straight from the down-and-dirty arcade roots of Capcom's fighting games," Capcom community manager and legendary Street Fighter pro Seth "S-Kill" Killian tells Kotaku. "Chris Kramer and I were really excited to get our community hands-on and playing the games, and to recreate that gritty, fun atmosphere of getting together for in-your-face competition."

Last week's impromptu Capcom Fight Club took over a two-floor shoe store. The top floor was packed with video game consoles, televisions, pizza and players. But a second line greeted those trying to make it down the stairs to the darkened basement.

Crowded between the plain plaster walls of the basement, packed from concrete floor to pipe-lined drop-ceiling, gamers gently pushed their way to the end of the single narrow room where a 20-something DJ spun records on two turn tables, her face blank as she stared at a laptop screen.

The crowds undulated toward her, staring over and past her head at a darkened big screen television, two white, over-sized joysticks pushed sitting on either side of it on translucent pillars.

This is why more than 500, perhaps a thousand people traveled to the shoe store last week, ignoring the famous, the rich and the beautiful, standing in line, then snaking through a sweat-drenched crowd of gamers in a packed basement: The chance to catch a glimpse of Super Street Fighter IV.

Due out early next year, the latest iteration in the wildly popular fighting franchise draws crowds where ever it goes.

"We've done Fight Clubs in LA, New York City, Vegas, San Francisco, now New York City again," Killian said. "Basically fight clubs are there for us to help (gamers) get hands on the game before it's released..."

Thursday night Killian made his way to the end of the basement every hour from 8 p.m. to midnight, turning on the big screen to hoots and hollars and then booting up a copy of Super Street Fighter IV.

"We have many happy press here tonight who wish they could play, but they cannot, Killian says into a microphone, the game playing behind him on the screen. "This is for you the community, so enjoy."

Less than eight people from the thousand or so who showed were able to get their hands on the unreleased game playing on the big screen, but no one complained. Instead they rooted for the randomly selected gamers, cheering and jeering during the impromptu match-ups each hour.

Between presentations games returned to the two dozen or so smaller flat screens mounted on the walls in the basement and upstairs, playing the already released Street Fighter IV and the soon to be released Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, both fighting games.

But Fight Club isn't just about the virtual fights. Capcom makes sure that the irregular, underground events tap into the deeper elements of pop-culture and art that inspire many of their games and in turn inspire art.

"We hire local and notable artists for every event, and have worked with groups like IAM8BIT, Meatbun, Triumvir, and Jim Mahfood, just to name a few," Killian says. "Street Fighter in particular runs so deep in our culture that there's a great supply of amazing artists inspired by the games and characters.

"We cook up a 'you can only get it here' limited edition, unique t-shirt that we give away at every event, and in my opinion they're pretty rad."

The first Capcom Fight Club happened with almost no notice and no marketing.

"At the very first club we basically told nobody that wasn't in my phone, and we still had 300 Street Fighters showing up to a skid-row warehouse in downtown LA," Killian said. "The attendance has increased at pretty much every one since then, as word continues to spread."

Despite the almost exponential growth of the marketing parties, the Capcom Fight Clubs somehow manage to maintain their gritty, grassroots feel.

Graffiti of in-game characters decorated the walls of the shoe store in Soho, people quietly slipped in and out of the video game speakeasy with quiet affable patience and everyone waiting in that monstrous line got their chance on a game.

Arcades may have died in America, but the people who played in them still thrive, it's just that now they have to travel to find their community.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

In British Columbia, a college student flips open his laptop and fires up his PS3.

In San Antonio, a guy picks up another three memory cards on the way home from working at JC Penney.

These are the peculiar markers of the GameFAQ author, whose pursuit and completion of a video game guide - dozens of hours of uncompensated labor - seems to walk the fine line between video game obsession and expertise. It's a world in which 20,000 words can be considered small for a full walkthrough, and committing to write one means at least a week, and more likely two or three, devoting all of your spare time to playing, pausing, and taking notes. And it's a labor that, with rare exceptions, provides zero material reward.

"I've gotten one bounty, for The Lost and the Damned," Robert Allen Rusk says, almost with pride. He's talking about the gift cards that GameFAQs offers for being the first to produce a complete guide to a new game. Rusk picked up a $60 gift card for his work on Lost & Damned, which weighed in at 58,216 words - roughly 200 pages if it were a paperback novel. His work on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were each more than twice as long.

"I haven't done anything with that gift card," Rusk said. "I may save that one for Christmas."

I talked to Rusk and others among the more accomplished writers - authors who have handled very large games, who have published sizeable guides or sizeable numbers of them, and authors who have been the first to produce walkthroughs for current, high-demand games. As someone who's reviewed video games, I've felt that the demand to produce credible, authoritative work definitely interferes with, and in some cases crowds out altogether, one's normal enjoyment of a game. But at least I get paid for that.

Not so with these writers. They get to pick their games, of course. They stop and start and battle procrastination and hustle against deadlines, often ones internally set. But in the end, they definitely started doing it because they loved a game, and they keep doing it because playing a game this comprehensively seems to wring every last atom of enjoyment out of the disc.

"It might not seem that fun because it takes a long time," concedes Tony, a 20 year-old at the University of British Columbia who asked to be quoted by his pen name, ChaosDemon. "But these [developers] put years and years into making the game - and you got more out of it, because you had to break it down, and know everything about it."

More Impressive Than Achievements

Among a gaming completionists' many badges of honor is the 100 percent achievement. No matter how many hours of your life you lost to the game, that gold (or platinum) trophy, that 1000 Gamerscore achievement, it's definitely respected as the mark of a serious gamer.

But they aren't the ones pausing a game to take notes on a laptop at every checkpoint, or draw out maps on doodle paper and then figure out how to get their point across in ASCII text. And then they aren't sitting down to write dozens of pages about it. There aren't any achievements for this sort of thing, and it's hard to get across why you're going for it.

"I've been embarrassed to tell people about it, to tell you the truth," says Paul Williams, 23, of Brisbane, Australia. "Telling someone I write 20-page strategy guides on how to beat these games is not the greatest thing for my ego. But my parents and my girlfriend know about it, and they're all very supportive. They know it's a hobby and it's not the most important thing in my life."

Williams was the first (and so far, only) writer to produce a walkthrough for Halo 3: ODST for GameFAQs, not that he's bragging about it. He found it to be almost a fluke experience, owed in part to ODST's notoriously short campaign mode that's drawn some complaints.

"I was surprised at how fast I was able to get something up," Williams told me. He's written guides for Fable II, Resident Evil 5, and a partially completed one for Gears of War 2. ODST was atypical, compared with his other efforts.

"When you start, you at first don't realize how much work it is," Williams said. "Halfway through, when you feel yourself getting close to just having had enough of it, you realize you've done all this work and you might as well stick to it."

No matter how passionate they were for a game, the writers I talked to admitted that burnout inevitably becomes an issue. "The first time through is always fun," said Barry Scott Will, 43, of Richmond, Va., an IT director for a church who just finished a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 guide. "When I'm writing for a game, I play through it at least twice or sometimes three or four times. By that third or fourth time, it's just work."

Rusk, the Grand Theft Auto guru, was a game tester in the late 1980s for Broderbund Software, LucasArts, and later a studio in Colorado Springs. Guide writing offers flashbacks to those days, he says, and not necessarily in a good way. "Being forced to play constantly, you start hating the game," Rusk said. "There's a natural burnout writing a guide, you just want to get it out the door.

"But I don't lose my sense of enjoyment," he insisted. "The thing here is I love the games I work on. I love the Grand Theft Auto games. I love getting my hooks in and working on it."

Writing Walkthroughs For Minor Profit

ChaosDemon - aka Tony, the 20-year-old in British Columbia - wrote his first guide as an 11-year-old: It was for Pokémon Stadium 2 on the Nintendo 64. "Some days I wasted a whole day when I wasn't at school, just working on a guide," he says.

It didn't kill his grades, actually. "My English teacher didn't like me that much," he says, "but she commented 'Your writing is better than what I expected.' And it was probably because of the guide. You have to be very organized in your writing."

To say there's no benefit to the FAQ writer beyond a sense of satisfaction is false, of course. Some have found a writing voice, others a readership, and a few have turned their work into paying freelance gigs. Rusk collected $500 when his Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay guide was published in a 2004 strategy guide-compilation drawing on material from GameFAQs contributors. Williams, the Australian, was offered (and accepted) a gig writing an exclusive guide on Call of Duty: World at War for the Web site CheatPlanet.

Will, the father in Richmond, Va., has monetized his GameFAQs efforts further, building a site called papagamer.com where e-books employing the text of his GameFAQs guides are uploaded with graphics and other enhancements and sold for $5. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which took him 10 days to complete, is the latest offering. Will sees his GameFAQs work as a kind of loss leader, providing free and comprehensive advice on a game with an upsell to a more robust, premium guide elsewhere. He says he's never made more than "a few hundred bucks a month," at what he does.

"It's not much more than a hobby that pays for itself," Will says. "In the past few months though, I've tried to boost my sales, so this is like a second job."

Will started his guide writing on Knights of the Old Republic II ("still a big fan of that game") to help gamers in BioWare's forums who kept showing up with the same questions. But as a father himself, he came to understand the real service of free guide writing - to the parents of frustrated kids, who can't be helped with a video game neither mom nor dad understands the way they would a bike or toy.

"I really get a feeling of accomplishment when I get emails from somebody who bought the game for their child, and the child gets frustrated, and that gets the parent frustrated, and they come online and get the help they need and everybody's happy," Will said. "And I've gotten emails from people in their seventies, playing games. I got one email from a man stationed on a ship in the U.S. Navy. He had one game he'd brought with him, and he wanted me to email my guide (Dungeon Siege II) to him."

Williams has seen this kind of gratitude, too: "I've gotten some seniors who wrote in to thank me for my Metal Gear Solid 4 guide. For my Wall-E guide, I get pretty frequent thank-yous from parents. It's cool. It's like, whoa, people actually appreciate this."

Drawing The Line

Not everything they play gets reviewed FAQ written about it. ChaosDemon, who put out a Batman: Arkham Asylum FAQ between summer school and the fall semester, wants to take his time with Uncharted 2. Williams, down in Australia, adores Japanese RPGs but won't touch them for FAQs. "I love those games, but I'll never write a guide," he said. "I hate to get interrupted when there's a big epic story unfolding." Plus, to comprehensively play a Final Fantasy or Star Ocean game - to anything close to 100 percent, "and write about it," would take, "years and years," he groans.

Rusk, the San Antonian who's hoarding memory units for The Ballad of Gay Tony, enjoys but won't review Lego Star Wars. Earlier this year he tried Watchmen: The End is Nigh and enjoyed it enough that the guide he wrote for it became "an intro to the Watchmen universe for newbies."

But the solid bet is, by the end of the year, they'll be writing something.

"I don't watch TV," Will said. "Instead of watching TV, I play video games. Some people watch a sitcom, a drama and the nightly news, I come home and play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

"When you get down to it," he says, "we're gonna play the video games anyway."

Note: Do you write walk-throughs? Try your hand at posting one here.