All three bands will be playing at the Hot Topic/Xbox Live/ Rock Band party at Austin's La Zona Rosa on March 13 and March 14. Attendees will also be able to play the game at the part and check out music by other SXSW bands like Flyleaf, Phantom Planet, Chiodos and Drop Dead, Gorgeous.

Full release on the jump.

ROCK BAND™ CELEBRATES THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC WITH SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST DLC FEATURING SERJ TANKIAN, PARAMORE & BLACK TIDE FOR $.99 A TRACK!!!

Rock Band Rocks SXSW at the Hot Topic/ Xbox LIVE / Rock Band party at La Zona Rosa on March 13th and 14th

To celebrate the artistic passion of the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW), Harmonix and MTV Games are offering a special Rock Band™ SXSW DLC Pack starting on March 11th. The SXSW DLC Pack features three hot tracks - "Shockwave" by Black Tide, "Crushcrushcrush" by the pop-punk quintet Paramore and art-metal man Serj Tankian's "Beethoven's C***," each for a limited time price of $0.99 per track.

All three bands will be rocking SXSW at the Hot Topic/ Xbox LIVE / Rock Band party at La Zona Rosa (located at 612 West 4th Street Austin, TX 78701) on March 13th and 14th. In addition to the Black Tide, Paramore and Serj Tankian performances, festival attendees will be able to play Rock Band and check out bands such as Flyleaf, Phantom Planet, Chiodos, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Paramore. SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States attended by music industry tastemakers and journalists, and more than 1,400 performers playing dozens of venues around Austin, TX from March 12-16, 2008. Details are as follows:

Release date: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 (Xbox LIVE® Marketplace)
Thursday, March 13, 2008 (PLAYSTATION®Store)

Tracks:
Black Tide Shockwave
Paramore crushcrushcrush
Serj Tankian Beethoven's C***

***(All three tracks utilize the original master recordings)***

Price: $0.99 (80 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360®) per track for a limited time

Locations: Xbox LIVE® Marketplace for Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION®Store

** Dates for Rock Band game tracks are tentative and subject to change **

In addition to the 58 songs that come packaged with Rock Band, Harmonix and MTV have been offering a robust calendar of new downloadable content every week including packs, full albums and individual tracks to satiate the desire for constantly refreshed Rock Band content. The weekly content has delivered not only mega-star and classic rock acts to Rock Band, this new distribution method for music has seen fans and gamers also embracing developing artists.

Rock Band allows online play and features that expand the boundaries of music gaming. Rock Band downloadable content is playable and integrated into setlists in all game modes including: Solo Tour, Band World Tour, head-to-head competition either locally or online, and from any Quickplay mode. In order to play downloadable content for head-to-head matches or multiplayer online, all players must own the same downloadable track. Downloadable content for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft will be available for purchase via Xbox LIVE Marketplace using Microsoft Points and is downloaded directly to Xbox 360's built in hard drive. Downloadable content for the PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system's version of Rock Band will be available for purchase on the PLAYSTATION®Store through the free PLAYSTATION Network and is downloaded directly to PLAYSTATION 3 system's built in hard drive.

Rock Band is rated "T" for Teen (lyrics, mild suggestive themes) by the ESRB.

What if you could go back, start from scratch, and remake E3 in your own image? With EIEIO in Austin, Texas, that's what developer-centric games publisher Gamecock Media is trying to do: Developer demos for the press, live bands and demos for the public, and drinks for all. The event was loosely associated with South by Southwest this year, and both festivals hope to have stronger ties with each other next year.

It started on a Wednesday evening, at the Alamo Drafthouse—a movie theater that serves dinner and a selection of fine beers. 140 developers, partners, press, and Gamecock staff watched a screening of documentary film The King of Kong—which met with great enthusiasm from the audience.

Gamecock's chief executive, Mike Wilson, took the stage beforehand to give a one-and-a-half minute speech, in which he thanked everyone for being there. "It's really awesome to have everyone in Texas for once," he said in reference to the developers who had traveled from Germany, England, California, Chicago, Houston, and other points on the compass. "God knows we've come to all of your homes enough."

"I need all of you in top form for tomorrow," Wilson continued. "There are bulls to be ridden, there are Rollergirls to be boxed, and somewhere in there, we're going to fit in some videogames."

When tomorrow did come, the weather had changed: rain threatened, and the temperature became considerably colder. On the edge of downtown, several dozen members of the game press eat a warm breakfast at Jamie's Spanish Village, a place that Gamecock president Harry Miller remembers frequenting when he was attending college in Austin.

Once everyone was lined up, a media handler explained that, because of the number of European outlets participating, the actual games coverage is embargoed until next Wednesday.

In a rare and interesting look into the Gamecock PR machine, the handler instructed the press: "Just talk to the developers, let those guys tell you what they're up to, and they'll really give you the flavor of their games and what they're doing...it's really all about them today."

With that, the group crossed the street, entering Stubbs, a barbecue restaurant and live music venue, to start the demo circuit. A room in the dark limestone basement was being used by FireFly studios, the British developers known for the Stronghold franchise.

In a room flickering with candles, and a massive glowing red demo PC on a billiards table, designer Simon Bradbury talked through some of the gameplay features in their upcoming Dungeon Hero game, commenting that you weren't so much a hero, "as a psychopath."

The studio is also completing Stronghold Crusader Extreme. This is something Bradbury points to proudly as a company: knowledge of the European market. For example, Firefly's Stronghold outsold Grand Theft Auto when both were released in Germany.

Past the coincidental dungeon, there's a small stage which has Mushroom Men from Red Fly Studios. They've developed it so the DS version gives players back-story on the Wii version, which has been getting attention for it's "first-party attention to detail."

Out on the porch, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball and Insecticide are being shown. The charming Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball will be on of the most played games that day. And Insecticide's pedigree of former LucasArts vets, plus the episodic PC content, just could make it the next Sam and Max.

Upstairs is Hail to the Chimp from Wideload games. It's a cross between Super Smash Brothers, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And when the Rollergirls arrive later in the day, the game is an instant hit as they watch, cheer, and applaud when each round ends; they share similar gameplay and tactics.

When asked if Gamecock would publish a Rollergirls game for the Wii that uses the Wii Balance Board and the nunchuck controls, Wilson replied, "Anything that involves Rollergirls is A-OK." Wilson adds that he isn't on the green-lighting committee, but adds, "Personally, I'm all for it: as a gamer and a Rollergirl fan."

Across the gravel lot in a side shed is Section 8, from developer TimeGate. The futuristic shooter has another year-and-a-half of scheduled development, so some details are understandably sparse. One publishing executive told Kotaku that there are also some features being safe-guarded because of their simplistic brilliance. This is to say, other games still in development could copy the clever features from Studio 8, were they made public.

Robert Siwiak, a producer at TimeGate, says that one of the things they've enjoyed working with Gamecock is, "they embrace originality." He talks about how the studio worked on expansions for F.E.A.R., and some things they wanted to do weren't possible, because they contradicted the publisher's style guide. But doing something original means there aren't the same restrictions when it comes to cannon. "They've afforded us the ability to go to whatever extremes we want," Siwiak says of Gamecock, who they knew from the beginning would be "the perfect publisher to work with on a title like Section 8."

Further along is Legendry from developer Spark Unlimited. It's a shooter that can aptly be described as Halo meets Gears of War, with mythological creatures. And hidden in the last building of Stubbs compound is Velvet Assassin, from developer Replay. The stealth-action game recently changed it's name from Sabotage, and now more prominently features a more interesting true-life female protagonist.

Before the doors open to the public, Wilson explains the lineup of bands, which include: Carolyn Wonderland, Johnny Hootrock, Del Castillo, and The Yard Dogs Roadshow. "It's a lot my favorite bands," he says. "It's really my show, for my own entertainment. [But] I hope a lot of crazy musicheads come out."

In the scheme of game industry events, he explains: "I think this is a micro-show, if you will, but I think all the new shows need a public element to it," Wilson predicts. "We've got four games we're going to let people play tonight. I think it's a really good element, to [include] Joe Gamer."

Alex Seropian, the founder of Bungie, and now Wideload, recalls an E3 many years ago, when Halo was first being shown. "Back then, E3 was a known quantity." With EIEIO, he says, there are hopes of something worthwhile building. So what does he think of a combining the showcase for game journalists, and the orgy for music fans? He grins. "Two great tastes that taste great together."

At 4:00 PM the beer is being unloaded by the case. At 5:30 PM, the Coronas are still being unloaded. Which sets the stage. The gates will open to the public at 6:00 PM. Besides game demos, and drinks, and bands, and performers, there will be a mechanical cock to ride (a mechanical bull, refitted with a rooster head), and over-sized boxing gloves for sparing with Rollergirls.

The evening beings with a burlesque performance: two girls representing chickens, one representing a pig, and a man dressed as a farmer, run round in circles on a bed of hay to the musical sounds of the he-haw version of Closer by Nine Inch Nail.

So the evening has started. It will go until ten, or midnight, or two. Wilson jokes that Velvet Assassin features a Burlesque level, and that it's market research, which could lead to Burlesque: The Game. Another title is suggested: Burlesque Hero. Wilson considers. "Burlesque Tycoon. That usually works—tycoon."

But the friendship between game developers and burlesque performers isn't one-way. One of the evening's performers with the stage name of Miss Maulie, told Kotaku that her best friend is a game developer, and that he's currently working for Blizzard in California.

In the end, there are many ways to measure success. "We've got people who can take or leave the whole Gamecock silliness," says Wilson. "Apparently, a lot of people want to be serious about this business, and it doesn't always go that well with my take [on it]."

So what's his hope for the outcome of this first EIEIO in Austin, Texas? "Regardless of how you feel about [silliness], that everyone here will be going: they've actually got some pretty fucking good games." Wilson says that it takes two years to make these games, something that people may forget, and something that makes a start-up publisher look sparse through the first cycle.

As the journalists begin to leave, they're given demo units for DS games, CDs with trailers and screenshots and other assets. They also get a Gamecock sock. Inside is a Gamecock shot glass, bottle opener, guitar pick, and magic lantern that projects the Gamecock logo.

What's the most common question asked? "What do you do with just one sock?"

This year's event, still labeled a showcase for independent developers, will take place on March 6 at Stubb's Bar-B-Q and will feature a day of gaming and a night of "Texas hospitality."

"South by Southwest is known as a mecca for indie film makers and musicians and there are a ton of game makers in Austin, so it seems like a natural fit," said founder Mike Wilson.

Gamecock decided to move their Expo For Interactive Entertainment, Independent and Original from Los Angeles' E3 to Austin because Wilson said they feel like SXSW is a better fit for their event.

Wilson said there will be eight games on hand, including titles from Wideload, Red Fly Studio, Spark Unlimited, Replay Studios, Firefly Studios and TimeGate, as well as a few surprises.

"While we have enjoyed providing an entertaining respite for the industry during the painful California-based trade shows of years past, it has always been our dream to show people how we really do it down in Texas," he said. "We want this E.I.E.I.O. to be part video game expo, part backyard carnival, part indie revival. And, as E.I.E.I.O. leads right into SXSW — the annual mecca for independent artists from all walks of life — we are heading-up the charge to get the best and most original games here."

So far, the publisher, a rebirth of 90s' publisher Gathering of Developers, has brought two games to market, Auran's poorly received Fury and Nintendo DS thriller Dementium, which arrived to above average but mixed reviews.

"IGN gave (Dementium: The Ward) shooter of the year for the DS, we were happy with it, it didn't review as well as it could of because of one flaw," Wilson said. "We want to work with (developer Renegade Kid) again), that game we're very proud of."

The company will hit its stride this year, Wilson said, with the release of a slew of games including Mushroom Men, Hail to the Chimp and Xbox Live game Pirates Versus Ninjas Dodgeball. Wilson said that the publisher may also be looking to the Playstation Network and WiiWare as potential future platforms.

"This is kind of a make it or break it year for us," he said.

Be A Real Guitar Hero [GayGamer]

Alice Taylor did a magnificent job of catching the feel of the Will Wright SXSW speech, but just in case you wanted to see the one-armed Will in action here's a wonderful vid from the show. Creds to zachinglis for the shaky cam work and Gauphastus for pointing it out to us. Brian Crecente

I just got out of Will Wright's keynote here at SXSW in Austin; a packed ballroom, a gobsmacked crowd. We got a Spore demo - an on-the-fly, operated by Will Wright demo - during which we got to see Spore from tiny slug to entire galaxy. We saw a player-generated facsimile of the Star Trek Enterprise scoot about the universe, planting monoliths, dropping in on planets, creating ozone layers and greenhouse gases and planet meltdown. We skipped through star clusters, and watched stars form, visiting player-inhabited stars of neighbouring space.

Spore really is a universe. I hadn't quite grasped how BIG it is. It's as big as players will make it, and it's beautiful to boot. Will is, as I'm sure you know, an entertaining speaker; he skips about massive amounts of information and data with ease and clarity. You can see Spore's influences: The Sims, Black & White, Star Wars, Star Trek. Robert Heinlein maybe, Darwin of course.

Here: I took some notes, I'm reproducing them here so you can grab an idea of what it was like. Don't take them verbatim - Will's a lighting speaker - but it should give you a bit of a gist of what he said... Alice Taylor

All those pics you just saw from the Hubble I thought I'd inflict on you, and I broke my arm skiing, and I've had way too much coffee today so we're going really fast today.

I figured SXSW is this filmy, interactive thing, festival, so I thought I'd talk about story, then about a week ago I read the description of what I was actually supposed to be talking about, which is Spore ... so I've done a mashup of story and Spore for you here.

So a few thoughts on storytelling. First why .. I hate stories, stories that my computer tries to tell me. Story's been the model from movies, it's kinda our heritage. But first of all the nature of story... I look at the world as a simulation. Here's a world stage. Lots of things cascade into the next stage. And certain things cause changes in other things.

Story causes a chain and conveys it to a viewer... a story's all about the chain of events, very linear, unchanging, you've all seen the same version of Star Wars.

But games are very open ended. Also, movies are primarily visual. Games are primarily interactive. So when we take away the control from a player, we're taking away the most important thing from them. It's like going to the movies and showing a blank screen...

Different games have different levels of interactivity, in some sense... here's chess... [..] we're trying to generate the largest rulespace in a game. This is the opposite of science, where we try to find simple rules to describe all this data. There's this topological difference.

It's because of the POV. When you're telling a story in a movie, it's from a chosen POV, it's all controlled, but games, games look like this [screen of wiggles and randoms]. You go up here, you lose, so you go back to the beginning. Over here, you lose, try here. Back to the beginning. So movies are far more compelling than interactive drama, because interactive drama is quite flat.

But empathy is really important to me. Movies have these wonderful things called actors, which are like emotional avatars, and you kinda feel what they're feeling, it's very effective. Films have a rich emotional palette because they have actors. Games often appeal to the reptilian brain - fear, action - but they have a different emotional palette. There are things you feel in games - like pride, accomplishment, guilt even! - that you'll never feel in a movie. I felt so bad about beating my creature to death in Black & White.

Stories are about empathy, and games are about agency. I'm causing what's going on on screen. Can I do this? Can I accomplish this? These models are cognitive technology. They're the original educational technology. They involve abstracting the world. Both of these respond to being stuck in time, but we wanna move experiences outside time... so...

[slides]

A lot of stories start out with here are all these characters [Leia, Luke]... and the structure is pretty fuzzy. A much wider set of possibilities can unfold from the beginning of the movie; think about Star Wars. Causal links. Think of that scene from Indiana Jones and all these traps are going off, you're filling in all these possibilities yourself, what if he falls in the hole, what if , what if .. and that makes it interesting. Star Wars grips you in the realism of the backstory, the fact that the ships were dirty [tells you something]...

With linear stories you want to start amplifying. In Star Wars, it all comes down to these two possibilities - the rebels are crushed, or the Death Star blows up. One of the fundamental things I've found as an interactive storyteller is that in linear stories the director knows the future. He or she knows the minor details that are important to present to you. But we [interactive storytellers] don't know those things. Ours are chaotic systems. Very minor initial conditions can lead to wide-ranging end conditions.

In a linear drama you can show the causal chain; in interactive drama you can't so much. We're playing with it in movies in interesting ways: interesting sub-plots (Magnolia); one of the things that keeps your interest is your wondering how these back stories are going to come together. This is a common thing that people do with causal change. Timecode is another version of this. It's parallel multi-threaded storytelling.

One of my favorite types of movie is one that's going along, la la la, and then suddenly it takes a crazy turn and it's like holy shit! This is not the movie I was expecting to see...

Memento is really interesting causal change. As events unfolded, each point caused you to re-evaluate what happened before. You had to reconstruct what happened - it's like a puzzle game. One of my favourite gamelike movies is Groundhog Day. You have this sequence, and then... it's back to the beginning. And it happens again. And again. It was a really interesting example of the director knowing the future as well as the past. Every day you'd seen the differences... you'd cover an eternity of experience.

This is something we really should be doing with games, if a player has failed on the same miserable level three times in a row, shouldn't we let them skip that level?

I'm going to attempt to try to tell you about game stories and player stories, which I find far more interesting. You may be familiar with CAVE OF TIME books. Here's this Branching model. But this is very expensive. Too many branches. Here's a Gating story: Quake's kinda like this. You can do what you want, as long as you find the key to get to the next level. Hybrid is another model... Gated plus Branching... but a player will actually play a very small percentage of these trees. So this has been the downfall of these tightly topographical branching narrative stories. [They're expensive and inefficient.]

Here's an interesting version I want to present to you: Generated. You have story fragments, with triggers... you can put them together like Legos, and form a story over time. It sort of makes causal sense. It's a form of procedural storytelling. One of my favourite short stories of all times is Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling.

There was this karma computer in this book. The more the protagonist obeys this karmic computer, the more other players would help him. I find this fascinating to think about with multiplayer, where other players could help you [...]

Media is malleable in this new generation. A computer used to be a fancy calculator, but nowadays it's really more of a communications device. So I think we are looking at technology as player-centered rather than broadcast-centered... the masses are creating their own cool stuff and they share it around with each other.

Players invariably come up with stories about what they did in games. They're never describing a cut scene. I categorise these as Unintentional, Subversive and Expressive.

Unintentional is when a player comes up and finds a bug, and they make a back story.
(e.g. spontaneous combustion in early versions of The Sims).

Subversive are where players are trying to push the envelope in different directions, exploits and cheats, etc. In Battlefield '42 you get coordinated cheat activities done as a group, filmed by players and uploaded.

Expressive are more like what we see in The Sims where players have an intentional message. Here's GTA: I spent my entire time creating a character, a semi homeless person hanging out with my homeboys and doing tricks on my bike. The Sims... people started playing it, and they'd be verbalizing the story as they played it. They were reducing it to a linear story - so we put up a web page for them to upload these stories, and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of them. Players became performers. The game became a storytelling tool. People were writing their own 'levels'. Machinima takes it even further.

[Player stories]

So kinda thinking about storytelling, looking at the computer and looking at entertainment, it's more about listening to a story rather than telling a story. It's about listening to the player stories; those are the ones they care about. We can map this. With neuro-linguistic programming you're taking a real sentence and decomposing it: there's something very similar in stories I think.

You can have the computer understand, "Oh I see, this is a boy meets girl story", etc. If we know what the goal states are, we can present dramatic obstacles, things to amplify the drama. The whole thing comes down to an epic struggle, perhaps. If we can parse the players intended story, we can change the lighting, the music... the events! If it's a horror story, we can add spooky music... we can add zombies. Maybe we drive events to clarify a story, and then actually you've created a movie. I think this [generative power] might happen by observing lots of parallel players and pulling the data out of that.

I'm thinking the Truman Show, where you would allow the player to run around with a certain amount of free will, and the computer is like the director, who controls the envelope around Truman but can't directly affect his movements. The Truman Show is basically a game. I wish games were more like the Truman Show. Can you bust out of the game? Groundhog Day is like a game for mapping out the possibility space around you...

There's this concept in games called the magic circle. When people play together, they sit and respect the rules. People outside the magic circle don't need to observe those rules. But if you enter it, you're agreeing to be bound by those conventions. Story's the same thing. It's a shared experience. Story circles started around campfires, and has evolved into more structure environments... we have these huge formal things in movie theatres, but it's shrinking back again with television. Shorter shows, in the living room, or even on video iPods. This is like fractal storytelling. I don't have to go to a movie theater or a living room to watch a story now, I can do it on the bus.

Interactive is riding this generational wave. It's a cultural overtake process. There's a lot of people who've spent a lot of time with linear, but this whole generation is coming up... who are more comfortable in interactive. Games are being thought of as a tool for self expression, like a hobby but also like a tool or ...

Players love making content in games. We've been riding that wave a lot. They love sharing and collecting content. Some people love just organising it. The power of that collective effort is amazing. You're seeing this on social network sites. But most of the content is not so good, and a smaller percentage is great, but as we give them better and better tools, we'll increase the quality of what they're doing.

Not only is it of value to them, but to others as well. So we can model the players ... we can understand what they like and what they're doing. How they move across the game play landscape. What they buy. We can look at social networks. Or even social interaction frequencies ... are they being mean, or nice, are they friendly? We can build elaborate models predicting this behaviour.

So with Spore... if we could give a player a tool to build a tinker toy, and the computer takes that and presents it back in hi-res oitput: this is creative amplification on the player's efforts. What if we could take those assets and collect them all on a server and categorise those, and then predict what they'd like and bring it back into their world? This is what Spore is like. I wanna take the player out of the protagonist of Luke Skywalker, and put them in the world of George Lucas. This is SETI, Drake's Equation... here: I'm going to show you a quick demo.

A lot of the work on Spore is about player tools. In the Sims it was about... you had to create the assets outside the game. There was lots of friction for players to create stuff. So the process in Spore of playing is the process of making assets. And we collect and redistribute these assets automatically as part of the game. We're able to build a kinda infinite sized world ...

Here's your little creature. He eats food pellets. He grows. We're going to transition between many orders of magnitude as we grow up. [Gets eaten] you finally move out of the water and onto land... so it starts like 2d Pac-Man, and it evolves... into a 3D 3rd person... here's my little guy... we're on land. We're a slimy slug thing. This world... at this point it's a really simple game of evolution: eat, survive, and reproduce. [Gets eaten]

Damn I wasn't supposed to die. Okay.

[laughter]

We want this to feel very tactile and toylike. This bit is really like play. Here's a mouth, here's limbs. I'm putting mouths on his arms. The game tries to interpret the player's intent. A lot of these parts have little morph handles... each part represents several hundred [states]. It has aspects of clay, Lego, Mister Potato Head.

So now I've created this 3D mesh in mere minutes, we've reduced 3 days of art gruntwork into a few milliseconds. Now we have to bring it to life, the computer will analyse where the legs are, how it dances, how it poses... we well as how it fights, eats. Stuff like that. The computer is dealing with mesh, texture, animation, all on the fly procedurally. And every different property is going to behave differently in the game.

We want the computer to be totally focused on what the player has made. It has to be front and centre... here, he's grown up a bit... [Skips ahead] so over time you end up managing whole tribes of your creatures, and civilizations... eventually they can build spacecraft. I want this game to bring up lots of interesting issues for the player. Where might life go? The future of life? The effect that life can have on the universe, it's philosophically staggering.

I studied Montessori's philosophy and methods. She basically wanted kids to explore the world themselves using toys and objects, learning the meaning of things... and I want to build a game where a player is going to come across the Copernican Principle, say, and you walk away thinking of the meaning of life. Or what the future might take.
[Wright chooses a Star Trek machine model]

One of my real aspirations of this is I wanna see interstellar wars between Care Bears and Klingons.

[laughter]

The cloud ray here increases the greenhouses gases... we can play out The Inconvenient Truth here. You can see oceans rising, cities destroyed... I can heat it up too and I can combat the rising levels by heating the planet enough to melt the oceans but that sort of kills off everything. My planet's melted!

[laughter]

So in some sense the entire planet is a toy.

One of the really nice things with a toy like this is you can give people long term dynamics over short term sense. It's so hard for us to think over the long term, longer than 100 years, but by using these toys we can help people to think and understand [..]]

See this planet. It has primitive life, as we play through evolution, we're trying to capture most of the dynamics of evolution. As we move into the future I want the game to focus on fictional landmarks we have. Lots of these levels are based on my favorite science fiction... here's my Monolith tool. I'm looking at my favorite sci-fi movies and figuring out what the landmarks are. So see... they've built a tribal society around this monolith, and let's see, maybe I can get them to worship me... I have to be careful. Hmm. I don't think he wants to worship me right now.

We have this idea of a "Sporeopedia". It's how we categorise everything you've seen so far in this world. This Sporeopedia builds automatically; we took stuff from x-files, star trek, war of the worlds. Eventually you can pull out into interstellar space around our star and we have lots of... look, Hubble objects. The player can go around like a tourist, visiting this little space zoo. It gives people context for things they're seeing. Here's an unexploded star, they're like the birds of the universe, these beautifully coloured things...

Every star system will have planets you can interact with, and many will be inhabited by other players' species. We're seeing thousands of stars... but this is a small fraction of the galaxy we're building here. So basically that is Spore.

[rapturous applause]

You can take any human technology and take it as a new extension of our body. Telescopes extend our eyes, cars our legs, telephones our voice. Computers do a lot of these things but the most important thing is that they extend our imagination.

This is a very powerful thing, an amplifier for imagination.

We use computers for entertainment, education, social spaces. How is this going to impact the world going forward? Every now and then the world goes through a huge paradigm shift... sometimes by social shifts, sometimes only once or twice in a lifetime. Some are grass roots, some are top down, and some take us by surprise.

We have a lot more heading our way. More political and social issues. Obviously environmental issues. Some people are issuing warnings.

But when we look at games specifically and entertainment in general, games often have this perception of mindless toys, but they can be much more than that. They can help us develop systematic thinking. They can help us build accurate models of the world around us; and hopefully these things will help us change the world just a little bit for the better.

The games writer for Salon and the embedded journalist in Second Life rallies Kotaku readers in a war to save games from their worse enemy—the gaming press. This is an expanded version of a talk delivered March 11 at South by Southwest s ScreenBurn Fest in Austin, Texas.

Why do games, for the most part, unrelentingly suck such ass? If you happened to hear veteran designer Greg Costikyan s acclaimed rant last GDC 2005, you d think the trouble was due to the rising cost of development, and outdated distribution models. He is right as far as it goes— but right in a way that doesn t leave much hope for change.

After covering the game industry for some five years, I think I ve found the primary source of the trouble. Not the only source, but the weakest link in the greater chain of suck and more key, the one that can be hammered at by blogs like Kotaku.

I found it at an E3 cocktail party in Beverly Hills, shortly after I d begun introducing myself not as a journalist but as a writer with the virtual world Second Life—not a game per se, but close enough, evidently, for folks on the business end of the industry to lower their shields. The topic was the gaming press, and on that subject, the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.

Press previews are very important to our sales, he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Retailers don t know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those.

And just like that, the gaping mouth of suckage was staring me in the face. Or rather, it had always been there, but I just hadn t noticed until then.

For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it.

And the circle jerk is complete. All started by the gaming press, in their preview section.

Consider these excerpts selected at random from game magazine previews from last year:

Batman Begins and The Incredible Hulk No longer are you limited to just reading about your favorite superheroes for once, you truly are the superhero.

Rainbow Six: Lockdown we re quite certain that the new online career mode will justify a purchase.

Call of Duty II We don t need any more convincing [on the studio s qualifications to make this game.] The hard part now will be waiting until this fall, when Call of Duty II hits shelves.

These aren t impartial descriptions, let alone critical evaluations. These are words that directly drive sales. None of these previews had a single critical word to say either, except perhaps to point out easily fixable technical issues and missing content.

Ask yourself if you ve ever read anything like the following in a preview:

While technically impressive, there s really no design feature here which hasn t been done before in previous games.

The story looks like one more series of boring cutscenes you ll be skipping past, since they re pretty much derived from a dozen movies you ve already seen.

If one more slightly different looking set of futuristic weapons is so goddamn important to you that you re willing to part with $50, why, this is the game for you!

None of this is meant as a slam at all individuals in the gaming press, many of whom are personal friends who have my respect and sympathy. Generally they are just as pained by the compromises they feel they must make by running non-critical game previews. (I m not claiming purity for myself, either; in retrospect, for example, I regret over-praising a technology demo of Molyneux s Black and White without ever asking uncomfortable questions such as, Where s the, um, game? ) I don t even think the press does it in exchange for all the free trips, gifts, and other benefits that publishers ply them with. They do it for fear of losing early access to games and their developers, and endangering their advertising revenue.

But they are gamers, too, and they must feel just as keenly the indignity of hyping crap. Like any dedicated gamer, they can tell when a game is fundamentally bad or undistinguished, even in Beta; they know that a game with unoriginal gameplay will still be unoriginal, after all the bugs are rooted out and the unfinished levels completed.

Talking with them, I can sometimes seem to see a mortified look in their eyes, a kind of Stop me before I hype again! plea. We saw an example of this personal tumult in recent months, when Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Dan Hsu unleashed a rant about fellow editors who sold coverage for ad space—a groundbreaking story that most of the gaming press cravenly failed to follow up on. It s gotten so bad, members of the game industry are themselves begging for the press to reform witness God of War s David Jaffe much-discussed critique of the gaming media. (Both Hsu and Jaffe s editorials, it s worth noting, didn t show up in game magazines, but in their personal blogs.)

If editors were to break this unspoken agreement they ve made with publishers to write groveling previews, they d be heroes to gamers everywhere. They d also be out of a job. Which is why it s up to gamers to save them from themselves and in the process, to help save games.

This is where blogs like this come in.

Starting in April, Kotaku will launch a regular feature called Preview Ho of the Month , and the object is to name and shame.

Preview Ho will be a compilation of the most egregious, blatant promotion for unreleased games from across the gaming press. We will challenge the editors of these magazines and websites to justify their hype on behalf of their advertisers products. We will ask them why they gave so much glowing press to games that were so unfinished as to be design documents with conceptual art, or gave any attention whatsoever to yet another movie spin-off with no perceivable originality at all. In doing so, we will go after previews as they exist now for what they are: the mortal enemy of good games.

This is a task that will require the help of every reader of Kotaku who also reads game magazines. Go hunting for these handjobs, clip them out, and e-mail (au@kotaku) the text to us. Help us find the biggest Hos and win public praise—and the satisfaction of knowing you helped create a future of better games.

Think what a gaming press which no longer acted as the publishers fluffers would look like, where journalists felt free to state their actual impressions of a game in preview Beta. There would be some pissiness in the beginning, yes; some publishers would threaten to yank their advertising, after particularly harsh previews. All for the better: this would push magazines to court more non-gaming advertisers, and thereby, expand their audience demographic. The less dependent on game ads for revenue, the more editorial freedom they ll have, in future issues. No longer able to rely on the gaming press booster-ism, publishers would be forced to take more creative risks. They d also put more effort into creating playable demos early on in the development process, to generate a fan base the old-fashioned way, by earning it.

Meanwhile, the gaming press would actually become a genuine force for good and innovation in games; honestly harsh previews would kill or suspend projects in early development, or force studios to rethink crucial elements of the design. In the same way, honest positive previews would build up buzz for the titles that deserved them. We would see more games like Katamari Damacy, which began its life in the US on a single demo machine on the E3 floor, while the publisher devoted its promotional resources to less worthwhile games only to see gamers (largely gamers who blog) drag it into the spotlight.

Bloggers have transformed the mainstream media (think Dan Rather and those fake memos), US politics (think Trent Lott s hasty retirement after praising a segregationist), and Hollywood (think Ain't It Cool News, an ur-blog that forced the film industry to improve their geek genre films.) It is time for blogs to do the same thing for the game industry, breaking the closed circuit of suck once and for all.

Sometimes game journalist/sometimes game developer Wagner James Au writes the New World Notes blog, the journal of the online world Second Life.