The Perpetual Value Machine

After dumping buckets of money into Valve's little online service this holiday season, I got curious about how exactly they make money by charging things this cheaply. It's not exactly the same process as bulk distribution like Costco and it's not really Wal-Mart either. They basically just sell CD Keys and then wrap that up into this really handy update service with social networking. They have low overhead but not as low as their competitors. Instead, the reason Valve owns this scene is that waaaay back when Half-Life 2 came out, you had to install STEAM. They've had that policy for a while now with all their games. And it looks like it's paying off.

For some reason or another, the process reminded me of a perpetual motion machine that is supposed to generate infinite energy if you just set it up right. Prices go down, value inflates, prices go back up, sales continue. I'm not sure this would work for every single game out there, but something like Madden or Team Fortress 2 would be the prime candidates for perpetual value games.

On paper anyhow, these things never quite work like you'd expect.

A Few Notes On 2010

I was jabbering with my sister over the holidays about good television this year and the subject of Twin Peaks came up. In many ways, it was the first show to attempt the union of soap opera formula with something besides amnesiacs and hospital employees. People die in soap operas, but Twin Peaks was unique at the time for the strong emphasis on Agent Cooper and the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. I usually tell people to watch up to about half-way through Season Two and then watch David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk With Me, which acts as a prequel. After the plot twist the writers had to reinvent the show’s driving force while David Lynch had wandered off to go do…David Lynch type things. It falls apart without the driving mystery and Lynch’s eccentric touch, replacing the concrete formula of who killed who with ham fisted mysticism and convoluted motivations.

My sister disagreed with this advice about skipping the last few episodes, arguing that the ending was a valid statement about the show’s nature. What, after all, is the defining flaw of every great show these past few years? They fuck up the ending. For shows that are all about mystery and watching people interact, tying up loose ends is inherently never going to be satisfactory. It will always disappoint. While a show like The Sopranos chose to end on a touching note before cutting to black, Lynch came back to direct the last episode and end it on an enormous cliff hanger. There are various reasons for this choice, he wanted to coerce the network into funding another season and probably had a few more stories in his head to tell. But in the end, the bluff has a larger meaning in the context of a show about people’s lives: they don’t really end. Something is always going to be happening, interesting or not.

I’m opening with that point because we’re going to talk a bit about 2010. I graduate in May from school and will be spending the summer studying for the BAR. It is not a forgiving test. You take seven 3-hour essay question sections (for each area of law) followed by a multiple choice test that covers everything they left out. I have to pass six out of the seven and correctly answer a certain percentage of the multiple choice. BAR passage is not determined by your score but rather is based on the top percentage of scores so that only so many people pass per year no matter what. Very smart people take this test. This is going to put a damper on my blog output. I will be producing the bi-monthly column as scheduled but I can’t really produce the rest of it anymore. I may discover that I still need a personal escape and continue to write posts while studying or I might be even build up a large enough surplus that you won’t even notice. More likely is that when I have a free moment I will have a glass of whiskey, a good cry, and slap myself into studying more. I’ll be done at the end of July and then I am unplugging from everything. Internet, video games…everything. I’m going to do some backpacking in Montana to figure out what to do with myself and the mess I’m in. I don’t find out my BAR results until November and there is fuck-all chance of me being hired until a firm knows whether or not I’m dead weight. I am in trouble if I don’t pass, but we’re not going to dwell on that.

This isn’t really a resignation post. I’ve got about 9 blog posts already written and have several more sketched out. That puts me well into March and probably April for when I will actually run out of material. Furthermore, Hell will freeze over before I ever quit writing. But I doubt I’ll come back quite the same. The schedule that allowed me to produce all of this material was never a realistic one, just what you can get done if you’re the sort of person whose sick of giving a shit about school and just wants their diploma. I thought about doing a bi-weekly post or maybe some ‘Link of the Week’ gimmick (I mean like jacking someone else's post and rephrasing it, not an aggregate) but I’m not really interested in half-assing something with my fake name on it. Not everything I’ve written is good, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

The finale of Twin Peaks is confronted with the same issue that is becoming the Achilles Heel of most television shows (or some games) today: how do you explain your big mystery? The second half of the season deals with a serial killer obsessed with the Red Lodge, a mystical place where evil spirits dwell and escape into our world. Cooper, at first only visiting there in his dreams, eventually steps through a gateway into the Red Lodge to be greeted by crashing symbols and dark flashing lights. People he has met appear, others he is only seeing for the first time. He walks about, people say weird things, and we are clued into the fact that something very bad happens to Cooper there. Not much else is ever really discussed (though do check out Fire Walk With Me if you have the inclination). What irked me about that scene was that here is the ultimate moment of the second season’s plot arc, here is the equivalent of ‘Who Killed Laura Palmer’? And it just goes by. We see the mystical place, and then the story keeps on chugging along. I suppose I resented the audacity of that, enough to tell people to skip it, but as I find myself writing this post I think I appreciate it a bit more. You’ve got to tell people something, yet all you’re really telling them is that it’s you who's changing.

So, posting will continue as normal into March or April. After that, I’ll be going on hiatus for a bit. I figure if you care enough to read my personal blog, I owe you the heads up.

Brainy Gamer Confab

Just a quick post, trying to squeeze a few more seconds of relaxation before the grind starts back up. I was really lucky to be asked back onto Michael Abbott's podcast for 2009 to discuss my GOTY for 2009. I got to chat with Steve Gaynor and Chris Dahleen as well, each of us picking out the game that most impressed us.

I won't spoil the surprise, but it's a good chat.

Playing at Video Game Analyst

Translating my sense of humor to the internet has always been an iffy proposition. I don't really like to mock things directly, radically taking things out of context or steering the conversation into the bizarre is my preference. Dead pan stuff, making people uncomfortable, the joy of the unexpected and seeing the reaction. Unfortunately on the internet all you get is the digital response, which isn't really as good and always leaves me feeling a bit hollow. I tried for a long time but it just wasn't very fun for me.

Ergo, writing like there is a stick shoved up my ass and just bluntly going through the stuff I dug up on a topic. I don't quite remember how my blogging style evolved into this but that's the formula now. Get curious about something, google everything I can find, compile it into a short essay, rinse, repeat.

This week's post, which will be the last for 2009, details me being curious about how accurate my predictions for 2009 gaming trends were. I did okay, but that wasn't terribly difficult because they were so broad and obvious. Which ended up highlighting a larger point about the profession of video game analysts and how the whole process of predicting things isn't all that hard.

I'm also scared someone is going to take the damn thing seriously.

Gauging Load Times in Games

I made a joke on Twitter that taking law exams was like toppling a Colossus from Shadow of the Colossus. After I defeat this giant thing I end up toppling over and having a little more of this black energy enter me. It even has the going unconscious part and waking up confused, although I think that's mostly the Jim Beam. Makes me wonder how this metaphor will play out when I tackle the BAR.

This is one of those times I wrote out something that I think most people know but I've never seen spelled out or discussed. Load times, when we should be critical of them, and when they're just a necessary evil. Space them out properly and organize the design so I'm not watching three different load screens just to do one action, etc.

It'll do for now. I'm seriously running on fumes until these exams are over and I can sleep for a couple of days.

Philip K. Dick's Defense of Video Games

Most discussions on immersion or ontology will involve someone using an example from sci-fi. Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck uses the imaging system from Star Trek to raise questions about what is real in a totally synthetic environment. A movie like eXistenZ, which you can find a brilliant essay on here, uses video games to discuss multiple layers of perceiving reality by having the characters play games within games. By the end of the movie, no one is really sure if reality itself has just become another layer of perceived existence.

While these talking points are useful, I've always been bothered by their reliance on the basic scenario of "Hey, what if I can totally simulate reality?" It's a great way to get the conversation rolling, but that' only one angle on something like ontology. I decided to do a write-up cataloging Philip K. Dick's ideas on reality that tackles several different approaches. If you're willing to acknowledge that a robot has feelings and is sentient, what does that say about you? What does that say about the very concept of emotion? Dick goes so far as to point out that you don't even actually need people to be plugged into some exotic machine for them to take games seriously, just the right cultural scenario.

Dick postulated that there was no really definitive reality. That it's all just perceptions on pure information. That in a very real sense, reality does not exist. I'm not sure I can ever go that far personally, but I think a good ontology discussion might benefit by asking yourself a more basic question.

Real compared to what?

Ten Years of Penny Arcade

Crap, I was walking out the door when I saw that this went up. I've been reading Penny Arcade since...Hell before 2003 at least. Even when all I did was play old SNES and PC games back in college (2001 to 2005) I was still reading them. At this point they're like my afternoon tea, the comic and post are usually up by around 3 or 4 Eastern time and I always hop over before my last few hours of work.

When they posted that they were celebrating their tenth year, I thought that was pretty damn impressive. I decided to do a write-up on their work. I didn't really think that one all the way through, because it ended up taking me months to go through all their material. They have produced a shitload of content in ten years.

You can read the thing yourself to see my broad overview of their stuff, but I think the nicest compliment I can offer is that after reading every comic they have written two to three times, I fully intend to keep on reading.

I'm still looking forward to my afternoon Penny Arcade.