Parenting, Gaming and Addiction

In less than two months (eleven weeks to be exact) I will be a gamerdad. Needless to say, I have done a lot of thinking about what to do once my boy is here and I'm responsible for (mostly) shaping him and his values. I also read just about everything I come across about parenting. One of the websites I have stumbled upon is ParentHacks and more specifically an article titled "Video Game Addiction. Talk Amongst Yourselves." The author's family owns a Wii and the family loves it but is a bit nervous about the "addictive personality" that has emerged in her kids.

It's a good topic that spurs a decent discussion of the numerous methods employed to manage gaming time. It's all very fascinating for me because as a pre-gamerdad, I didn't have to think about this stuff. Now I now have to think about not only how I'll manage my own gaming time, but my kid's as well and what he can pay. While at the same time, I take a bit of offense to the addictive qualities that the mainstream puts on gaming, categorizing it in the same ghetto as smoking and alcohol.

Then one comment caught my eye and directed me to an essay by Henry Jenkins about the validity of casting gaming into this negative light.

A few highly publicized stories, particularly around Massively Multiplayer games show that some people do let their gaming get the best of them, forgetting (or refusing) to sleep, shower, eat, or take care of loved ones. Of course, any activity from work to working out can have an adverse impact on our family, health, and relationships.

Most pleasurable activities stimulate the release of brain chemicals.We don't know how, say, playing a highly competitive game of basketball affects the brain because you can't sit in an MRI while playing point guard, but we do know that working out also leads to increased dopamine. So does eating food. Basically, if we banned activities that lead to changes in brain chemistry, the species would die out from starvation or a lack of procreation. Maybe just plain boredom. And once we start asserting that some activities are simply more meaningful than others, we are back in the business of making cultural, rather than "scientific," judgments and in that space, it is hard to justify why the AMA should have any more say than, say, professional organizations devoted to studying the cultural impact of media.

If I fail at everything else as a father, I hope at least one things sticks with him: diversification. I'm a gamer and I work in the video game industry, but it's not who I am. I am also soccer player and a mountain biker. I like to go out with my wife and friends or stay home with a book, movie or a select few TV shows. I dabble in game design and obviously I blog. All of these things combined make up who I am and yet I am not addicted to any of them (well, maybe Lost).

On a side note, it still amazes me how crazy the "casual" market is eating up the Wii. I guess that's why Nintendo is making billions of dollars and I'm not.

Peter Molyneux is Awesome

Lionhead's leader, Peter Molyneux, receives a lot of flack for over hyping his own games. I thoroughly enjoyed the original Fable but apparently many felt it didn't live up to this aforementioned hype. What I give him props for is taking risks. Many games set out to achieve one, maybe two, new things in subsequent sequels. Mr. Molyneux goes all out tries to include a half a dozen or more somewhat revolutionary game play mechanics in one go. That takes balls.

In addition, he's apparently pretty funny as well. Gamasutra put together a top ten list of his memorable quotes from last weeks Game Developer's Conference. My favorite:

It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here.

Former Co-worker on Xplay

Seen in the video above is Ali Zandi, a former co-worker of mine who has moved on to bigger and better things over at Pandemic. We tested Smackdown '06 together and it looks like he doing good for himself. Keep up the good work Ali!

Cool Job Postings

While reading through the daily Gamasutra newsletter, I always browse through the job postings. 2k Marin really out did themselves with their descriptions for several available positions on an unannounced project (Bioshock 2, perhaps?) I've posted two of my favorites.

Animator:

If you made the most awesome flip-books when you were a kid and were undeterred by the unimaginative people who told you that you could never do that for a living, but you continued to refine them until they intersected with computers and you actually started to pay the rent, you might be just who we're looking for. As an animator with 2K Marin, you would be responsible for animating characters using a combination of keyframes and motion capture.

Lead Designer:

You see straight to the heart of games. You are able to hold, fixed in your mind, the paradox of their simultaneous existence as both systems of mathematical purity and as living, breathing emotional entities. This either makes you a genius, or insane, or both. Such distinctions are irrelevant - you're down to earth like that.

Hopefully this sense of humor is not stifled by a possible assimilation.

Fun Friday: Zero Punctuation at GDC Edition

I haven't posted anything from Zero Punctuation in a while because he's become ridiculously famous and his videos are everywhere. Anyway, he was featured in Ken Levine's Bioshock lecture and is was hilarious as usual. He also did a 2007 Year in Review video for the Escapist which is rather good as well.

Halo 3’s Theater: Where're the Videos?

This week at GDC, Ninja Gaiden 2 was announced to include a Saved Film feature that is similar to Halo 3. Even though I’m interested in the game, I really like this feature and think this is where Halo 3 really innovated. I’m sure we all expected a flood of cool and exciting videos from the game. I even posted a few videos myself thinking that I had done something cool and that others might enjoy it. Turns out, it wasn’t that exciting to other people.

There were a couple of hits: it started with an spectacular grenade stick, an improbable sniper suicide, death by a traffic cone,and finally a wrong place at the wrong time barrel kill. Since then there have been no videos of late that have reached the same level of interest on the Internet (if I’m wrong, let me know). The game is still the first or second most played game on Live, by sheer volume there should be exciting and humorous videos being released all the time.

Forge had a lot of promise as well. The first amazing thing that came out of it was truly a work of art. Then we saw an amusing Mario tribute before degenerating to an over the top suicide competition.

Did gamers lose interest in these features? Did they forget about them? Maybe they’ve found it to be too time consuming to play with when they’d rather be actually playing the game. Maybe the community isn’t as creative as we hoped. Either way, it’s a shame.

Bungie should have implemented an easy export feature. Taking screen shots and the ability to share with other people who own 360’s and Halo 3 was not enough. There needed to be an easy way to either get the videos on your own computer or YouTube. This is where real editing can be done and peer review escalates exposure into the mainstream.

I fear that Ninja Gaiden’s feature will probably suffer the same fate, especially since there has yet to be some kind of competitive multiplayer mode announced that would, in my opinion, inspire the best videos.

Assassin’s Creed Bug Helps Earn Achievement

I have finally gotten around to playing through Assassin’s Creed and I love every moment of it. While many of the mission types are repeated, they never feel stale or repetitive. The AI may follow fairly static paths but the crowd seems so dynamic that a mission is never the same when retrying it. Additionally, assassinating someone with the hidden blade never gets tiring or old, it is always satisfying!

One of the achievements requires the player to remain in a fight for ten minutes. While that doesn’t sound like a long time, that’s a lot of blocking or running in a circle. The game has a fairly well known reputation for being a bit buggy, nothing game breaking as far as I know, but it’s a big game and they’re bound to make it in to the final code. At one point while riding my horse through the kingdom, I was attacked by one of the Templar Knights. This attracted several other enemies and I decided to high tail it out of there. I had my sword out and was running at full speed straight at a wagon full of hay to hide in. I attempted to jump into the wagon at the last second but instead of jumping off of the horse, Altair stood up and froze. I lost most functionality and I couldn’t get off of the horse, but I did become invincible. Since the enemies were still trying to attack me, I thought I would put the above achievement to the test. I got up and went and made lunch. When I came back, the achievement had been unlocked! Sweet!

Apparently I’m not the only one who has come across this issue as I found a YouTube video confirming that it’s probably not a fluke but a fairly repeatable issue. I assume that it was not severe enough to fix, probably causing more issues than was worth. In the end, I had to exit out of the Animus and reload my memory but fortunately I had just saved and didn’t lose a lot of progress.

On a side note, the game has many collecting achievements with the flags and Templar Knights. I traditionally hate these achievements but I came across an excellent site with very good maps for all of their locations. With this help, I’m well on my way to a perfect 1000/1000 in this game.

Fun Friday: Playing Catch Up Edition

Since I've missed a few Fridays, here's a video and a comic. The video is from the voice cast of SpongeBob (whose games I've had the pleasure of working on) dubbing their voices over some of the most memorable movies of all time. The comic is from Penny Arcade regarding the new DS game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and it is downright hilarious. Enjoy.

Yes, Please

No More Heroes is structured around a series very dramatic assassination missions. Without giving anything away, there are ten or so of these, and each mission plays like its own little episode -- you get the background, you prepare, and then the fights are both cinematic and climactic. There's a satisfying conclusion when you win, and it feels just like you've watched an installment of your favorite serial television show.

The game's comic tone, stylistic elements and real "character's characters" help with this, too. There are plenty of things to mess around with outside of the mission structure, so there's more to do if you have more time -- but everything generally can be digested in one tidy bite if you haven't. And the depth of experience doesn't suffer, either.

How cool would it have been if each of No More Heroes' missions was released separately, once per week, digitally? And you and all your friends who were interested in the game could get excited together looking forward to the next crazy part-time job, the next larger-than-life boss character, and then all tune in together for the latest? Then the next day, you hit the official site to see a sneak peek of next week's fight and blabber about it -- reflect, speculate, enthuse, complain -- on the forums? Would be fun, eh?

GameSetWatch - Opinion: Our Inevitable Episodic Future

One More Reason to Not Shop at Wal-Mart

In an effort to "protect the children" from the ever risque box art, Wal-mart is going to start placing M Rated games in 3/4 paper sleeves. In other news: R rated DVDs will still be displayed next to the "Family" section.