on the previous week or two

A common sentiment read this week: Videogames are at a position that comics were in the 90's. That position is one of pandering. A market unsure of where to expand next, just as well bolstered by marketing to the kinds of people that devour tales of male chauvinism as it is by those of creators who value equality and better representation.

Videogames are such a massive industry now that if not for the massive amounts of money companies make off of things like movies and cartoons, it'd be easy to say that videogames by themselves surpass the size and scope of the comics market. Yet even though massive in size, they have yet to supplant comic books in terms of storytelling and representation.

A woman in a videogame (Resident Evil)

Nowdays, comic books attraction to the idea of the male power fantasy has started to become something of a running joke. It's less likely to happen outside of the realm of superhero comics and even there the idea of a story offering better representation of marginalized groups is usually welcomed by the people that actually buy comics (not so much the people that complain about them).

People who buy videogames though couldn't apparently more different. What I mean by 'people who buy videogames' is not the same thing as people who necessarily enjoy them or want the medium to develop or grow at all. I mean a particular set of people that have a stack of posters ripped out of old copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly who, when prompted about what game could offer a truly cinematic experience to rival that of film will tell you God of War.

Not to say that people who read comics are inherently better. For every person that buys a comic like Saga there's probably two or three people who don't see why anyone would want to read anything that doesn't involve a man in a cape. Comics march on without those people though - they are starting to become a minority rapidly losing its voice.

What we're seeing this week with what's been going in the realm of games journalism is like taking a time machine to the end of the era of 90's comics. I don't doubt for a second that when more 'indie' comics started getting higher marks at reviews and more creators concerned about using comics to give more credence to stories that weren't specifically about straight white protagonists showed up that if comic fans in the early 2000's had the benefit of websites like Tumblr and Facebook that we would have seen a reaction that was just as violent from comic fans.

A woman in a videogame (Parasite Eve) 

For the people living under a rock: This week, a particular game developers jilted and emotionally infantile ex-boyfriend posted details of her relationships with other people online for all to see under the cover of "revealing" some "corruption" in games journalism. I wont link the article here because the person doesn't deserve any traffic or notoriety. Instead, we talk about him as if he doesn't exist. In the article itself he stretches the limits of proof only when it's necessary to manipulate the reader into getting on his side. Maybe he'll give up on videogames as a hobby and go to work for a billion dollar game company as a marketer.

I'm not going to call gamers "The gaming public" because they certainly don't represent me even if I used to be someone who would have seemed terrifyingly similar to the lot of them. What they are instead is a group of people who likely feel marginalized by culture at large because they tend to lack any amount of it. In any case, these people quickly stuck to that particular writers claims and were only fueled by the latest Feminist Frequency  video releasing around the same span of time.

The purported scandal along with Sarkeesian's timing was the one-two punch that rustled the jimmies of grognards everywhere. Not only did Sarkeesian's harassers come out full force, but a small community grew around the initial blogger in the claim that somehow game journalism was corrupted or invalidated.

 Ella Guro writes a spectacularly apt take on the whole ordeal as it occurred over the last week and a half or so. That might be a more level headed place to get caught up on the rest of the details of what happened and who exactly was involved.

Violence, particularly the kind of violence people have to constantly be surrounded with if they want to interface with being a part of videogames at all has started to permeate almost every interaction between content creators and their audience.

Abuse seems ingrained in the monster collectively referred to as "gamer culture" as if there were anything we could pin down outside of some vague association with green soda and Call of Duty. Gamer culture, like comic culture, is impossibly large compared to what any of the things it's defined as would have you think.

In a slightly heavy handed and hyperbole filled article, Andrew Todd of Badassdigest pretty accurately surmises that for one reason or the next, abuse is thoroughly ingrained in gamer culture because of how the descriptive "gamer" actually came about.

A woman in a videogame (Dreamfall)

While I want to say it was a long long time ago, it really wasn't more than a few years ago that I was locked into the marketing machine's clutches. I ate it up. I say Andrew Todd's observation that gamers see themselves as the victims is pretty correct because I used to embody that line of thinking.

To put it all on the table as ugly as we possibly can: gamers are the opposite of fucking self aware.
Gamers are, to be blunt, generally miserable people that victimize themselves as outcasts of society because they generally lack any sense of empathy or good graces required to actually take part in it. Gamers favorite characters are fucking Kratos and probably Travis Touchdown. Two characters that are completely morally reprehensible.

For Travis Touchdown though, that's the joke. Hardly anyone who is a fan of No More Heroes is proficient enough in understanding parody or literary devices to even know that the character isn't supposed to be liked for any of the traits he exhibits in the games.

The thing about this, the biggest thing and I can tell it's affecting other people covering the story is that there are just so many victims, so many martyrs now. We're reaching a point where as much as it's nice to consider the idea of "gamer culture" being in it's death throes that we can't even keep track of who to stay mad about anymore.

The conversation about what happened has gone on for little over a week and a half now, with all sorts of people beyond the world of videogames starting to chime in. Yet very few people are bothering to raise concern about what the next step is other than continuing to speak up and hoping these people drown themselves out (when evidence points to reasoning that they never will.)

We talk so much about the symptoms lately that the idea of a cure is never presented other than waiting things out and hoping for the best. As much as it's nice to tell ourselves that these are indeed the death throes of a giant and terrifying beast at the same time it sounds an awful lot like we're still trying to convince ourselves that's the truth.

A woman in a videogame (Beyond Good and Evil)

Part of the problem is that any time something like this happens the first part of the dialogue that has to start before any others is convincing people that don't deal with this sort of thing on a daily basis that there's even a problem at all. Even against cries that we're somehow coming for videogames as a medium to uhh make them a better place or something every conversation starts the same way

Over at The New Statesman Ian Steadman gives us a harrowing recap of the many ways so called gamers have tried to discredit Anita Sarkesian and it's much the same as the jilted ex-boyfriend who made a campaign of harassment against a noted game developer. Steadman pretty thoroughly examines the criticism levvied at her and how it's anything but sound - and how referring to straw man arguments as "criticism" undermines any actual criticism that could be levied against the videos (of which I don't think there's much at all)

I don't think the core group of gamers that repeatedly become harassers in the face of having their beliefs challenged are well connected enough or intelligent enough (in a way beyond armchair philosophy) to construct an argument that seems baseless but would have the larger effect of invalidating further works. It's a nasty side-effect of having so many voices cry out together.

A woman in a videogame (Mirror's Edge)

To work towards a solution required better volume control from people capable of doing it. There are a lot of people that could be using their voices to boost the volume of women like Anita's own statements rather than attempting to control the dialogue themselves. Certainly, there are people doing this very thing but it's not enough yet. Telling people that it's not enough is important too, because it makes them keep striving for change.

Finally, at Gamasutra one of my favorite writers, Leigh Alexander, offers her own insight into the situation.
In her article she laments that nobody needs to make games for "gamers" anymore because they're a group that to be blunt, is being erased. Leigh wastes no amount of words saying how much this isn't a problem for videogames but possibly part of the solution.

I've seen a criticism of this specific article that in writing about gamer culture that the article has become a piece that's self evident and is fully apart of gamer culture. This is laughable in a new kind of way. It makes me imagine a horde of grognards chasing a writer down to the chant of "one of us! one of us!' desperate for any lasting amount of validity that the most basic criticism they can leverage at something is it exists in the same space.

As players, it's our space now.


-SKELETONS

SELLERS REMORSE

"I have too many videogames." In an age of programs like Steam and Origin, I see that phrase parroted around by my friends particularly often (and particularly around summer sale season) these days. A common observation is that Steam as a platform has enabled people to buy more videogames than ever before, and with an easy to use digital-only platform the observation definitely rings true.
Could that be taken as a critique, though? That in changing the way we purchase and in the quantity that we're maybe missing out on part of the experience of owning a title?

People are buying more games now - or maybe more people are buying games. Either one of those is probably an apt take on the matter. My personal stance on it isn't that people are buying more. Rather, I think it'd be fair to say everyone has so many titles in our backlogs because we can no longer get rid of our older titles. There is no "Bargain Bin" that appears when a user has discarded a Steam title because there's no way to discard them.

So I have thirty games I never intend to play again. There's really no 'easy' way I could give those titles to another person that wouldn't result in my entire library being completely invalidated by being banned. Otherwise, I can 'hide' them and they vanish from my Steam library and are relegated to being a cold nagging that tugs at the back of my mind.

confronting your own habits in a videogame - PC/PS3/Xbox360

My guarantee is that if we, as players, had every game we had ever bought on any system we would all have massive and possibly literal libraries of games. With so many different ways of purchasing games online - and lately fewer and fewer ways of getting rid of them outright or simply letting someone else have them has essentially meant there is no "letting go." Did you buy DMC? Too bad, because now that game is going to haunt you into your grave.

Of course consoles still depend on physical media, but that line is getting more blurred with each iterative generation of hardware. Even just little over a year ago there was the possibility that software for the Xbox One would be 'locked in' when it was loaded on the system for the first time, prohibiting people from trading or borrowing games.

 Microsoft fortunately made the wise decision to scrap that feature (I love it when negative components of design are still referred to as features) before release. It was only awhile before that, and hardly a long while to boot, that a digital-only console would have been considered a novelty. Let's not mention the Xperia play here.

Stores still widely featured PC games on shelves (in actual boxes!) and if you had a ton of games on your system it was probably because you went out and bought them. Which was of course accompanied by the sight of a lot more looming towers of jewel cases (if you're a retro collector like me) or the black-box clam shell packages.

Of course it's not like those things went away, but companies have gone a long way to make it even easier to purchase titles digitally. When I first started collecting videogames I made it a point to collect anything "interesting" that either went against established industry norms, or had something to offer besides bland storytelling and flashy instant-reward gameplay. The first victims of my rush to get rid of things were anything that had to deal with God of War, a decision I still don't (and never will) regret. If anything, getting rid of anything remotely associated with that franchise was probably the closest experience I will ever have to a Zen awakening. "Finally, no more bad videogames" I say, my chakra aligning.

Anyway.

One of the first franchises I took an interest in was Legacy of Kain. It's Vampires for Videogames, written through the language of Shakespearean play for an audience that grew up rolling their eyes any time someone mentioned that Anne Rice was like, totally cool.

From a mechanical standpoint, in the entire series, Legacy of Kain always skewed more "interesting" than "good". In an entire series that remains sadly unfinished, there's probably one game that's wholly enjoyable to play from start to finish. Legacy of Kain is however, one of those series' that set out to do something interesting and tells an incredible (and incredibly convoluted) story from beginning to end.

It was for that reason that I set out to collect the entire series, at a time when I enjoyed videogames as a medium but didn't necessarily understand them. My obsession started with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a depressing and somewhat nihilistic open world action game for the original Playstation.

Soul Reaver was an easy pick because it was in the ballpark of games that have A) never been re-released and are B) still regarded as cheap to acquire. No need to pay hundreds of dollars for a factory sealed copy, when you can find them on eBay for  just a couple of dollars.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 (PS2)

Eventually I'd acquired almost the entire series, save the original PlayStation title and genesis of the series.
I even made an effort to play the entire series that I owned up until that point.
Now, this isn't meant to be a critical condemnation of the series, but at the time these games were made before 3D action was the norm for titles. With no Devil May Cry to base themselves off of, the series had a relatively simple and frustrating approach to combat, with more focus on exploration and "puzzle solving" (because this was also the days when dragging cubes was a puzzle) with little regard to how the rest of the game worked.

Why I wanted to collect the Legacy of Kain series more than anything, even the writing, was the fact that it was one of the few contemporary series to evolve fully with trends that the rest of the industry worked under. The series progressed from an overhead dungeon crawler at a time when they were vogue to becoming a Devil May Cry style action game.

I was, at the time, misguided. For all of the interesting design choices the series showcased, that inherent 'gameplay' was never the focus the developers intended. It was always about the story they were trying to tell of two characters struggles against causality

Legacy of Kain was always trying to stay relevant at a time when there was generally several gaps in years of production. It had to effectively grow with the changes the industry made to whats popular, but I don't think the core team of developers strong point was ever mechanical refinement.

Maybe in an alternate universe, the creative team hired someone like Shinji Mikami to give directorial input on the franchise. Alas, Legacy of Kain had the misfortunate in being developed in a time when there was seldom cross-polination of Japanese developers in Western studios.

Oh well, I decided it wasn't worth it. Bad investment, why did I buy these games? So even though it took me an incredibly long time to track down Blood Omen 2 in a presentable manner, I traded them out for fuckin' Radiata Stories or some other basic PS2

Why do I beat myself up about Legacy of Kain and its all of the hella weird design choices it exhibited over the years?

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen

 It's that sinking feeling of sellers remorse calling after me. It was one of the first - and last- opportunities I'd get to experience the feeling.


If you're a lucky one who's never let go of anything under the pretenses of a fair sale, Sellers Remorse is the strange regret you feel when you think the sale you just made was a bad decision. Maybe the thought crosses your mind that the person you've sold it to isn't going to appreciate it (the person who bought Defiance from me said "So it's like God of War with vampires right?) or even you're simply upset that it no longer belongs to you.

When I was "Building My Collection" (I still kind of am) I ran into this all the time. I would trade one game for another one that I absolutely had to have. I absolutely hate the sellers mindset. I've only ever bought a videogame I wanted so that I could enjoy it, not so it could sit on a shelf. Yes, I own Parasite Eve II because I thoroughly enjoy it. That's just my bad taste overriding rationale.

But I handed almost all of the Legacy of Kain series to a guy who wanted to buy them because he needed to fill a space on his shelf marked with the name of the series. I remember the schlub so well because I tried to hold and interesting conversation with him about where videogames were going as an art form and he was convinced that Infinity Ward was going to be the future and that videogames needed to draw from cinema.

Why did I do that? I'm a terrible judge of character and I hate collectors but not enough to not trade with them, that's why. Yet with every time a game like Suikoden II is re-released on Playstation Network, it drives the cost of the original games  down and people that actually want to play them in their original format can finally enjoy them.

Videogames second hand market is collector driven. As an industry (art form?) videogames have no "criterion collection" unless the original publisher themselves decides to re-release a title. Sometimes this is even impossible because of how content rights in the world of videogames work, as in the case of Mega Man Legends 2. A game which can probably never be re-released unless Capcom is willing to re-record every bit of dialogue.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance

So, in an example I use all the time: If you want to play it be willing to pay hundreds of dollars.
Or emulate it, which is a crime.

Now, with Steam we're seeing a different kind of market play out. I own dozens of games and I know people that sometimes own hundreds. Not only are we purchasing different, but there's really no way for us to "get rid" of games by trading them to someone else.

The market for PC titles now is being consumer driven. We're really driving it with our dollars - through things like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Both of those models do have huge problems with them, but there really needs to be an equivalent for classic games.

Sellers remorse isn't some 'big deal' but it does highlight an outlaying problem with archiving of videogames. At one point it is possible there might not be a way to re-visit older titles. With the way the ESA cracks down on emulation sites and these days, and how few titles are actually being re-released we're facing an absolute loss of history.

So my sellers remorse isn't because the dweeb that I traded games with wont appreciate them. It's because I'm worried that I wont get to experience them again, despite the impact they actually had on the rest of the medium. The videogame industry isn't respecting the medium enough to have people actively engaged in it enough to worry about this kind of stuff, either.

If the most popular videogames are all some God of War / Uncharted level monstrosities, I wouldn't exactly consider them a "serious medium" either and would have no interest in thinking them being cataloged and retained could have any artistic merit.

What kind of future am I looking for? an entirely digital one, or one that still heavily relied on physical media? That's a question that isn't going to be answered if just one person is asking it. Sellers remorse itself isn't a thing I have to deal with very often and is quickly becoming the kind of problem only collectors run into.

I can never get rid of the Magicka franchise, bought on a whim once during a summer sale, and that's almost as bad as giving away something I really enjoyed.