“Gaming Disorder:” What the W.H.O. Got Wrong, and Why That Matters

According to this article from Polygon last week, the World Health Organization has classified “Gaming Disorder” as falling under the umbrella of other mental, behavioral, or neurodevelopmental disorders. Not only is this dangerously generalized, but it also is patently false for a vast majority of products generated by the video game industry.

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I remember the day that Overwatch was released like it was yesterday; I had been waiting for months to finally have a chance to play this spiritual successor to one of my favorite team-based shooters of all time, Team Fortress 2, and I was thrilled when the game finished downloading and I started going through the tutorial. I continued to play the game for months after release, enamored with the cartoonish environments and character models, the speed of gameplay, and the wait time for matches was incredibly low.

This enthusiasm persisted until the first seasonal event in the game, the Summer Games add-on. As Blizzard had previously stated, all new characters and DLC for Overwatch would always be free, so there was no pressure to purchase anything. This felt like a welcome change from the typical microtransaction fodder that some games push on their fanbase (particularly mobile games, which are downright predatory with regard to their sole focus on small paywalls throughout their products; I’ll get into that more a little later).

The Summer Games came and went, and while the new game mode, Lucio Ball, was pretty spectacularly broken, I still had fun playing with friends, and even got a few of the new character skins that had been created for the event. I never felt the urge to purchase any loot boxes, because I didn’t really care too much about a skin that made Tracer look like a Track and Field athlete, complete with a cape. Beside the fact that I knew every time I leveled up during Quick Play or Competitive matches, I would get one for free anyways. So I just upped my playtime and stocked up on loot boxes, so that I could open them all at once weekly.

Then the next event came around – The Halloween Terror. If I didn’t care about skins and other aesthetics being offered before, I certainly was put in a position to care with the release of this event. At the time of the event, I had a fair amount of personal responsibilities I had to deal with, and was forced to cut my play time down to about a third of what I would normally have been doing, so I decided that the only viable way to get some of the skins I wanted was to purchase some loot boxes, but not a huge amount. Just enough to give me a leg up on the loot box front, so I could have a fair shake at getting the skins I wanted (since you, for some odd reason, cannot just purchase the skin you want directly, especially when they come from limited time events).

This purchase was accompanied by an odd feeling in my gut, something that I had never felt while playing a video game before: Fear.

Not fear like “I’m playing Amnesia alone in the dark and I think I just shit my pants,” more like a gut-wrenching feeling that, by not being able to play as much as I wanted to, I would likely miss my opportunity to obtain the character skins and other aesthetic items that I had seen and really wanted. I didn’t even really know why I wanted them so damn much, to be honest. It was just this pull in the pit of my stomach to spend the money, not to dare miss the opportunity to have a skin that maybe somebody else didn’t have.

I didn’t understand where this feeling was coming from, or why I was feeling it so strongly. I wasn’t even that good at the game itself (and I’m still not, if I’m being honest). But for one reason or another, I just had to have as many of those skins and emotes as I could possibly get my hands on. So I bought one of the lower increments of loot boxes, 10 of them if I remember correctly, and tried my luck. It was, as one could expect from just about anything determined by RNG, a miserable failure. Not only did I not obtain a single skin that I had been after, I only got one emote out of ten boxes that I actually wanted. The rest of the items I received were sprays and voice lines that I couldn’t have given two shits less about.

This inspired another emotional response, one that I was a little more familiar with: Anger.

I bought more.

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This, of course, is the nature of most games’ profitability when it comes to these ancillary purchases. The more frequently you offer additional content that potentially very few players will ever actually obtain throughout the course of normal gameplay, the more you increase the odds of players making additional purchases to try and obtain those items. It’s related to a psychological phenomenon called variable rate reinforcement, and as the psychologist interviewed for this PC Gamer article puts it:

“The player is basically working for reward by making a series of responses, but the rewards are delivered unpredictably,” says Dr Luke Clark, director at the Center for Gambling Research at the University of British Columbia. “We know that the dopamine system, which is targeted by drugs of abuse, is also very interested in unpredictable rewards. Dopamine cells are most active when there is maximum uncertainty, and the dopamine system responds more to an uncertain reward than the same reward delivered on a predictable basis.”

It’s important to note the term “gambling,” as that is precisely what loot boxes draw their appeal from; that strong rush of dopamine flooding the brain when players receive the item they want the most. Think of it like a claw machine full of dollar bills, but also containing one winning lottery ticket worth millions upon millions of dollars. Even if it costs five dollars per play, and your only options are to win nothing, win a dollar, or win financial providence for the rest of your life, odds are that folks will be lining up around the block with stacks of five dollar bills in hand, trying to be the big winner.

The high we experience from the natural chemicals in our brains tied to pleasure receptors drive our behavior, in this case, towards the purchase of hundreds of dollars worth of *chances* to win something we really want. Granted, this effect is more subtle in some games (Destiny comes to mind in particular, because the items offered from their Eververse loot engrams are a bit more neutral in contrast with the other items and weapons one can receive while playing the game normally).

But on the other end of the spectrum, we find the world of mobile game microtransactions, which are geared towards a completely different audience than your average mental image of a “gamer:” Suburban housewives.

By creating a ceiling for all players in these games (I’m specifically referring to games made by King, such as Candy Crush, and other similar titles), and capping the level of achievement a player can reach before they will be presented with a challenge seemingly insurmountable without paying $1.99 to complete the level with five more moves, these companies are essentially preying on this demographic in the most seemingly innocent way.

“Oh, you’re having a hard time completing this level? You’ve tried twenty times in the course of one day and still haven’t managed to beat it so you can progress? Well here’s another option for you…give us $1.99, and you can finish the level right now, no need to be stuck here forever.”

And this doesn’t just happen with that specific sort of puzzle game, either. In fact, according to this article from 2012, not only was 91% of all mobile game revenue generated solely from in-game microtransactions, but Apple held a vast majority of the mobile gaming community, and therefore the lion’s share of the microtransaction revenue.

The primary reason for this high concentration of revenue on Apple’s side of the fence (then, and as I am sure it remains to this day), is due to the stipulation of use of the App Store which requires users to connect a credit or debit card to their iCloud account before they are even able to use any of the apps or services offered in it. As a direct result of this, when a microtransaction notification pops up in-game on your Apple device, all it takes now is two clicks of the power button, a little facial recognition, and you’re on your way to defeating that level you’ve been stuck on for a week.

And let’s not even get into the vast swath of actual casino games on any mobile platform’s App Store, which combine the thrill of winning fake money with the real world spending of actual money, so that you can be a phony millionaire for the low cost of only $50 USD. This, again, is targeted not at the pre-pubescent gaming crowd, but the bored housewife, the elderly man or woman that has little to do with a sizable portion of their day, and so forth. People with expendable capital, and no reservations about spending real currency to achieve virtual goals.

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So what can be done about this? Polygon posted this article last week about the Republican Senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, who has introduced legislation which seeks to regulate “pay-to-win” and “loot box” transactions in video games. That’s a good thing, right?

But the problem is, how does the proposed law define a “microtransaction?” The full text of the bill is available here, but here is the general idea:

“An add-on transaction to a interactive digital entertainment product that […] eases a user’s progression through content otherwise available within the game without the purchase of such transaction; assists a user in accomplishing an achievement within the game that can otherwise be accomplished without the purchase of such transaction; assists a user in receiving an award associated with the game that is otherwise available in association with the game without the purchase of such transaction; or permits a user to continue to access content of the game that had previously been accessible to the user but has been made inaccessible after the expiration of a timer or a number of gameplay attempts; or with respect to an interactive digital entertainment product that, from the perspective of a reasonable user of the product, is a game featuring competition with other users, provides a user with a competitive advantage with respect to the game’s competitive aspects over users who do not make such a transaction.”

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

Unless there is potential for all DLC to fall under that same umbrella (specifically with regard to the sections which specify purchases which allow users to accomplish certain achievements of receive rewards that otherwise would not be present in the base game). In fact, nearly every single piece of major DLC additions to games are specifically designed with these parameters in mind; they come with their own in-game rewards and achievements that players who have not purchased the content cannot obtain.

While this may not be a problem for games that focus more narrowly on generating revenue through their IPs by creating extremely appealing opportunities for players to spend more money than what is initially purchased with any new game title, it would deal a devastating blow to other games which have been strictly designed to offer a base game experience, then add to that a new set of experiences in the same game world to prolong players’ enjoyment of the title.

It is critical that lawmakers take these definitions into account in great detail before approving legislation to ban or more strictly regulate all additional financial transactions in all games, because not all games are designed to be money sinks, and especially smaller developers trying to earn a living on their craft would be hit hard if they had no recourse but to make an entirely new IP every time they wanted to earn more money, as opposed to being free to create more content for an existing IP and sell it to their player base for a nominal fee.

Video game creation is an art form, and when the demand is high enough for that piece of art that the consumer base wants more, there should be no legal recourse which would deny them that, nor deny the developers the fruits of their labor, which is vast and incredibly intricate. However, predatory microtransactions, pay walls, and especially “pay-to-win” game structures should absolutely be regulated more closely.

But throwing a blanket disorder qualification on all forms of video game “addiction” is a really terrible start down that road towards sensible regulation.

-b1nx

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Anthem Is Okay, Everybody Calm Down

Yes, I am aware of how the title of this column reads, and no, I’m not joking:

Anthem is fine.

The term is loosely applied, granted, but for a Looter Shooter swimming around in a sea of shitty Battle Royale games, it’s really not doing so poorly for itself.

Make no mistake, this is no compliment. Anthem has already been decimated in the media for a menagerie of reason, not least of which the fact that it has literally been crashing consoles, both on PS4 and Xbox One devices. Some rare cases have even seen users report that their console bricked as a result of running Anthem, and is now just a very expensive paperweight. To say nothing of the facts that the game play could be described as painfully average, the UI is somewhat clunky, the gear system is on the verge of being wholly boring, and the gun mechanics (and, for that matter, the existence of weapons players can acquire) are almost entirely arbitrary.

But the game is fine. Seriously.

Anyone who is a fan of Looter Shooter-type experiences has played games like Borderlands or Destiny, and can likely remember a time when Borderlands would not stop crashing, or the virtual cornucopia of launch issues (and ongoing issues) that lasted through the release of Destiny 2. What we are seeing with Anthem is legitimately nothing new, especially not for expansive, open-world experiences such as the titles listed above. And, in a way, Anthem is doing better than these other titles, in the sense that people are still playing it. Then again, the same thing was said of Destiny 1, which despite being absolutely chock full of flaws and inconsistencies, still had a reasonably sized player base throughout the duration of the game’s life, and still does even through the release of the sequel (which has many, if not all of the same problems as the first game, even now).

But, as one might expect from a dumpster fire that has been burning as long as EA has, they do not maintain any sort of public records related to player statistics, or times of day that they play. In fact, a representative from Origin expressed to me that those statistics are only maintained internally, and that they are only disseminated in quarterly reports within EA itself. The game is also only available digitally through Origin on PC, which negates any sort of tracking like what Steam provides (which includes concurrent Steam users, the top 100 games played, and download/support statistics). The representative I spoke to also intimated to me that the console platforms might have their own metrics that they make public, but regardless of whether such a thing exists or not, it is abundantly clear that EA/Origin, and maybe even BioWare to a degree, are not into disseminating such statistics about their game, whether it’s because the title isn’t doing well, or simply because they don’t ever release that sort of information.

My point in suggesting that it’s doing just fine is exactly that – because it is, in comparison with other games of its kind. Much like Battle Royale games, the player base is attracted to the game type, not necessarily the game itself. Some people enjoy being dropped into a large map area which they are free to explore in any direction they choose, possessing minimal supplies, and attempting to survive an onslaught of attacks from enemy players. Others enjoy collecting loot in a predominantly PvE environment on an endless loop, eventually being capable of tweaking builds and stats on gear, and shaping their character in the image they desire with items they collect in vast open world settings. Whether a game or series itself is successful or not is no longer measured by specific titles, it mostly comes down to the type of game, and how well-executed individual titles are in comparison with one another.

In Anthem‘s case, it functions exactly as other games like it do: There is a system which allows players to progressively level their gear and weapons as their character level increases, which they advance by going on cooperative “expeditions” with other players and by exploring the game world on their own, and there are end game activities and events which are gated from anyone who does not possess the necessary credentials to access them. It’s a simple formula, but one that has made this sub-genre of games very appealing to certain gamers. And despite all of its issues, Anthem is still listed as the #15 “Most Watched” game streamed on Twitch this month, and is the third or fourth game down when browsing the top streams on Mixer.

To me, this signifies only one thing – much like Destiny, through all of the fire and bullshit, Anthem has a devoted fan base that is playing it regularly, and who will likely ignore all the bugs and issues because they actually enjoy playing the game, and appreciate the interface and functions of the game that BioWare has laid before them. I did this with Destiny for several years, as I’m sure many others did. But I suppose my point in expressing all of this is to say that regardless of anyone’s personal opinions, or media responses, or player reviews, some games – no matter how “bad” they are – are still worth playing to those who appreciate them. And the rest of us should probably just chill, and stop tearing the game to shreds unless we’re actively engaged in playing it.

Because Anthem is fine. It’s just not as functional as we might have anticipated.

But none of these games are, realistically speaking.

-b1nx

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More is Less? – Being A Casual Player In An “Always On” Gaming World

I can very clearly remember being about nine years old, beating Nintendo games and thinking to myself:

“That was it?”

Too often, I felt cheated when I completed a game, because it just didn’t have enough to do to make replaying it worthwhile, even for the sake of nostalgia years down the road. It was great fun while the game lasted, but eventually it would just become another title on a shelf, something that you hold onto despite the fact that you’re unlikely to ever even touch it again. It becomes a symbol of where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished, an achievement long before the Xbox was a twinkle in Microsoft’s eye.

Now, at 34 years old, I am surrounded by tens of thousands of titles, AAA and indie alike. They are vast and incredibly time consuming, and require intense focus and diligence to complete, especially when attempting to 100% the game (collecting every available achievement and completing every available task). It’s mind blowing. And a bit much. Of course, this sentiment is likely rooted in the cold hard facts of growing up; I have a family now, and I work between 50-60 hours a week at my day job, at which I am a supervisor so I am unable to blow off work for a day because I don’t feel like going. The amount of time that I have available to fully invest myself in a game is the tiniest fraction possible of what I used to have, so even when I try to play some of these games and do anything significant in them, it is wholly frustrating when I find myself unable to do so.

For example, as a devoted Fallout fan, I was thrilled to learn that Bethesda was finally going to get to test drive their multiplayer vision for the franchise in the form of Fallout 76. I was also excited (on a completely different level) to see that the newest expansion for Destiny 2, Forsaken, appeared to be the equivalent of the game-fixing D1 expansion, The Taken King, and the subsequent April balancing patch that followed, and effectively made D1 into the game it should have been from the start. Both of these games were what I wanted to spend all of my gaming time playing, so I set out to do just that.

What I discovered was that the amount of time that I had available to devote to either of these games was not even close to what the games demanded. Bungie has made a significant effort to increase the amount of activities that are available to players (mostly folks who were diehards in D1, but started D2 expecting a continuation of what was already a pretty well-balanced game, but instead found a dumpster fire with a Destiny logo on the cover and immediately became disillusioned and abandoned ship. Forsaken put the game back on course, and added a menagerie of new activities and a new game mode, Gambit, the game’s attempt at integrating the worlds of PvP and PvE players. There are also titles that players can unlock, which appear below their emblem in-game and are unlocked by completing certain tasks within the Triumphs tab of the menu.

While all of this is well and good for players with unlimited (or at the very least, substantial) amounts of time to devote to gameplay, it really doesn’t do casual gamers any favors. By the time I had reached the power level cap of 600 after months of grinding at a very slow pace, the Black Armory expansion came out and bumped the cap once again, essentially erasing my progress and not allowing me to enjoy being at the maximum level for more than about five minutes. Granted, this is not the “traditional” way in which Destiny typically handles DLC or the leveling process in general; in D1, to attain the highest possible light level, it was necessary for players to finish the raids, suffer through the weekly Nightfall strike regularly, and the grind was palpably long. Now in D2, I have reached the maximum power level without having done any of the raids or raid lairs, and I only remember doing a Nightfall once, before any of this new content had even launched.

I know that I just said that casual gamers haven’t been done any favors by this influx of new and time-consuming content, and that might seem a bit odd considering that I’ve essentially just highlighted the fact that the developers at Bungie have made it possible to essentially just grind your way through boilerplate content to reach the pinnacle of power levels. But the problem isn’t in the accessibility of this content, it’s the quantity of it. Destiny is not meant to feel like No Man’s Sky, some infinite universe of possible landing points and activities to complete; it has an end. It is finite in story, but continues with Gambit and the Crucible, with the introduction of raid lairs to supplement the hardcore PvE player’s habit. With the release of this new content, and looking forward to the next year of Destiny 2 content drops, the game is looking quite the opposite of finite, and at a certain point, actually looks a bit more crowded than I was expecting.

Meanwhile, while I struggle with the vast amount of content in one game, Fallout 76 is on the other side of that particular spectrum. Despite the map in 76 being roughly four times the size of the Fallout 4‘s, there is still relatively little to do except following the main questline and building a C.A.M.P., unless you’re willing to navigate the NPC-less terrain in search of holotapes for fetch missions. The other complication is obviously the multiplayer elements of the game, but the real issue is how much more complex the game seems on the surface than previous Fallout releases, especially with regard to the perk system and crafting of items/consumables. I have only logged in two or three times, but even as a seasoned Fallout player, I have felt incredibly lost in 76. It also hasn’t drawn me in to the story to a degree that compels me to invest any of the very little time I actually have to play anything on trying to navigate through this “new” system.

This feels a bit like getting shot in the foot for me; it’ll hurt, but it’ll heal. I can wait for the next full Fallout release to get my post-apocalyptic fix, but I’m not particularly pleased about it. One of the things that I have always enjoyed the most about Fallout is the ability to pause the game as I need to so that I can, for example, sooth a sleepy two year old back to sleep, or corral an adolescent cat who has made it her life’s mission to destroy everything in my apartment, and I look forward to the next proper entry in the franchise so that I don’t have to worry about getting murdered when I’m sitting idle in my Pip-Boy menu.

Now that I think about it, the inability to pause and handle life as it comes when playing many of these newer titles is probably my biggest beef with the industry currently, especially when being AFK for too long results in in-game penalties. I understand that small children get frustrated when someone leaves a match (intentionally), and demand some sort of retribution from developers, but when the player on the other end of that disciplinary action was actually just putting their kid back to sleep, or had to answer the door, or use the restroom, that player feels singled out as a problem that is really a systemic one that spans across the gaming community; the inability of game developers to realize that their games are not the only thing that people who play them do with their time, and they shouldn’t be. Overwatch is one of the worst offenders, because not only is the game a competitive, always-online multiplayer title by nature, the community which has developed around it demands competitive regulation at all times, even in a Quickplay match. While this is somewhat more understandable in a game of that nature, applying that same standard to a game like Destiny 2 and the PvP game modes contained within is preposterous; there is no competitive element to the game (apart from the competitive mode, which is essentially just a more challenging playlist with more highly skilled players than QP), and punishing people for having lives outside of video games is rude, at the very least. You can even get kicked from the game world for being AFK when playing solo PvE activities, due to the game’s engine running on a “shared world” concept which likely prioritizes maintaining connection for people who are actively playing.

People pay for games because they enjoy playing them, and everyone’s personal life is structured differently. Should people have to choose between playing the games that they truly enjoy and their lives? (Hypothetical question, Woodcock).

Honestly, this is partially the fault of the rise of streaming, which has created an entirely new demographic of gamers who actually attempt to make a living broadcasting games for others to watch. Of course, there are no guarantees during any live broadcast that everything will go as it should, even when playing offline games; however, this is not to say that developers are ignorant to this new cross section of people who purchase and use their products, which lends itself to a higher standard of quality assurance, and consistent quality of life improvements to most games that are gaining the most traction with subscribers to different streamer’s channels. People who game for a living are almost always pandered to first, because while the average customer purchases a game once, plays it until they are done with it, then moves on, a streamer who plays any game exclusively or with any regularity is essentially just providing the developer with a shit ton of free advertising in addition to paying for all offered content, often opting to pick up special deals and capitalize on every bit of content that they can use to generate their own content and keep their viewers interested.

Of course, I’m not at all insinuating that streamers shouldn’t have the opportunity to do what they do with as few interruptions/hinderances as possible. I will say that pandering more specifically to streamers than casual gamers creates a very undesirable friction between developers and a majority of their customers, who don’t sit down to play their games with the intention of playing for eight hours straight for a “live” audience. It makes me miss games like the Bioshock series, or Serious Sam, single player games which provided a quality FPS experience without removing the ability to pause. As it stands, however, I see nothing but more “always on” titles on the horizon, because many gamers desire that shared experience over playing solo. But eventually, the gaming industry will have to find an effective way to bridge the gap between casual and competitive, or risk deepening the divide.

-b1nx

UP NEXT: Outer Worlds: Fallout In Space?

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The EU Copyright Directive (And How It Affects The Entire Internet)

In case you were unaware, the Internet is constantly being assailed by lawmakers the world over for a menagerie of reasons – whether it’s the fight led by America’s FCC and its director Ajit Pai to eliminate Net Neutrality, or the EU’s latest piece of bad Internet legislation known as the Copyright Directive, a free and open Internet has a vast number of very vocal and powerful opponents. However, it would be easy for the average person to assume that these legal battles, if won by those fighting them, would only apply in the country where the legislation is being considered.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the Copyright Directive, we would be wrong to assume that it only affects the EU if it is approved. Quoting from a piece published on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website, on September 12, 2018, “members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like tweets and Facebook updates; photos; videos; audio; software code — any and all media that can be copyrighted” (Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Today, We Fight Back.) The column continues by describing three provisions in this piece of legislation that passed in the Parliament:

Three proposals passed the European Parliament, each of them catastrophic for free expression, privacy, and the arts:

1. Article 13: the Copyright Filters. All but the smallest platforms will have to defensively adopt copyright filters that examine everything you post and censor anything judged to be a copyright infringement.

2. Article 11: Linking to the news using more than one word from the article is prohibited unless you’re using a service that bought a license from the news site you want to link to. News sites can charge anything they want for the right to quote them or refuse to sell altogether, effectively giving them the right to choose who can criticise them. Member states are permitted, but not required, to create exceptions and limitations to reduce the harm done by this new right.

3. Article 12a: No posting your own photos or videos of sports matches. Only the “organisers” of sports matches will have the right to publicly post any kind of record of the match. No posting your selfies, or short videos of exciting plays. You are the audience, your job is to sit where you’re told, passively watch the game and go home.

At the same time, the EU rejected even the most modest proposals to make copyright suited to the twenty-first century:

1. No “freedom of panorama.” When we take photos or videos in public spaces, we’re apt to incidentally capture copyrighted works: from stock art in ads on the sides of buses to t-shirts worn by protestors, to building facades claimed by architects as their copyright. The EU rejected a proposal that would make it legal Europe-wide to photograph street scenes without worrying about infringing the copyright of objects in the background.

2. No “user-generated content” exemption, which would have made EU states carve out an exception to copyright for using excerpts from works for “criticism, review, illustration, caricature, parody or pastiche.”

This is more of an informative post for Americans who might not be aware of this legislation than anything else, so I won’t offer up much in the way of commentary. However, here are a couple more links to EFF articles which do a far better job of explaining what is happening than I could:

What Is Article 13? The EU’s Divisive New Copyright Law Explained – Wired

What’s Next For Europe’s Internet Censorship Plan? – EFF

EU Internet Censorship Will Censor The Whole World’s Internet – EFF

European MPs Vote In Favor Of Controversial Copyright Laws – Engadget

The EU’s Horrendous Copyright Proposal – National Review

For all of the people who reside in the EU and happen to read or share this article, please contact your MEP as soon as humanly possible and verbalize your opinion on this legislation; the consequences for the Internet in your countries as well as worldwide will be catastrophic should this Copyright Directive become law. For my American readers, all we can do on this side of the pond is hope that reason and logic prevail, as the implications for content creators who make their living on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, social media users, and everyone else who uses the Internet are palpably awful.

-b1nx

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Project xCloud: But Why?

I was browsing my news feed earlier, scanning for anything worth reading. I was disappointed to find the feed clogged up with Fallout 76 pre-beta critiques (and quite frankly, I’m a little curious how Paul Tassi still has a job, apart from cranking out more asinine crap writing than I can keep up with – and as a connoisseur of crap, I know it when I see it). Then I came across an article by Peter Rubin at Wired about Microsoft’s new pet project – Cloud-based gaming (Project xCloud – Wired). This topic is not exactly the most enticing yet, as no one at Microsoft or anywhere else has really figured out how to effectively reduce latency on non-AAA devices for streaming purposes (yet). But it certainly inspired me enough to sit down and get violent with my keyboard, because the discussion of cloud gaming, particularly with regard to AAA gaming on portable devices, stirred up the memory of an argument that I’ve literally been making for years: Sony and Nintendo both have created lesser versions of their AAA capable hardware which can be taken on the go, and yet Microsoft has consistently been focused more on cranking out the next Xbox home console with more bells and whistles. What I’m getting at here is why, with the success of the Nintendo Switch, has Microsoft not immediately jumped on the portable console bandwagon

For a long time, the technology just wasn’t there. The very notion of taking an OG Xbox game anywhere but your living room was laughable. But we have entered an unprecedented era of technological advancements in gaming hardware, and the Switch is tangible proof that AAA gaming can be done on the go. Nintendo was honestly pretty close to achieving this with its earlier handheld line, the DS. While games weren’t true to form AAA titles, they were more engaging and graphically advanced than their predecessors. The original DS line is still one of the top selling Nintendo handhelds of all time, and though sales for the New 2/3DS lines have dropped off substantially from the original, Nintendo has said that they will continue to produce new titles and maintain support for the 3DS at least through the end of this year, with minor rumblings of a newer version of the system potentially in the works as well (though given the tentative success of the Switch, it seems unlikely).

(Source – ARSTechnica)

The Switch’s portable AAA experience allows players to take some of their favorite titles on the go, and despite a ridiculously low battery life, has many players using a Nintendo device more than any of the other major console manufacturers. Working together with major developers like Bethesda, ActiVision, Square Enix, and Capcom, Nintendo is slowly building a massive catalog of readily available and future AAA titles on their new flagship product. And given that sales for the Switch for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2018 jumped to 15.5 million units, increasing their profit margin over 500% and helping to increase their total revenue for that period to $9.66 billion (Source – Investorplace.com).

This is the part of the story where I start to get confused about Microsoft’s plan to focus on streaming from ANY device, instead of one that is proprietary to Microsoft. Granted, that decision says something about their commitment to their customers and the freedom they wish to extend to them in direct contrast with their previous consoles; however, it goes without saying that from a strictly financial perspective, they stand to benefit much more from releasing a new device AND method of downloading or streaming games to that device, than they ever would releasing a cloud-based game streaming service on its own. One of the biggest issues I see with this is the matter of input, and how much this sort of venture would rely on simulated game pads like those we see in many current mobile game ports. The problem with utilizing a simulated input interface is that it necessarily dumbs down the control systems of every title that isn’t a driving sim, because between latency issues and the unreliable nature of haptic control systems, it would feel more like a chore than fun to play a majority of available titles. To say nothing of the fact that virtual controls detract from the experience, and make any gameplay feel more like you’re playing Candy Crush than Assassin’s Creed. And when the Switch offers both mobile and AAA experiences in one coherent package, it’s tough to even suggest a concept that would offer any less.

Of course, the other obvious option is utilizing Bluetooth-enabled Xbox controllers to play on multiple devices, which is functional, but also removes all convenience and portability from the concept. At that point, we might as well be talking about the viability of the Nvidia Shield, which is touted more as a useful tool for streaming video than it is for gaming at this point. Basically, the opportunity is there for Microsoft to utilize the advancements they have made in xCloud and apply them to a new handheld system, which would be sure to at the very least cause a considerable stir in the mobile gaming market. It seems to me that much of the hype for the Nintendo Switch was centered around making living room available away from your home; couple that with the fact that no other handheld console has allowed players such a wide pool of content to draw from, and it’s not at all difficult to understand why players were able to look past the not-so-subtle middle finger that was the Wii U.

We’ll just have to follow the progression of this new idea as it unfolds to get a better picture of where Microsoft is going with this, but the idea of moving away from static consoles to some form of mobile Xbox platform is definitely interesting.

-b1nx

UP NEXT: Maybe Destiny, maybe Binding of Isaac: Repentance, still no streams until further notice 😦

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Destiny 2: The Forsaken King

It’s that time of the year again. E3 hype trains are prepping their runs through our living rooms, bedrooms, and basements, and developers are preparing to literally blow the doors off of our computer cases with presentations showcasing what they believe to be their finest work, in the hopes that we will all ham-fistedly shove hard earned dollars in their general direction.

Of the many developers planning sizeable reveals for the conference itself, some of them have reserved their own company selected time to apprise us of the latest and greatest with their games. To wit, Bungie has just released their first vidoc regarding the “Year Two” expansion plan for Destiny 2, entitled Forsaken. This expansion is set in a new area based around the Reef, a frequently utilized locale from Destiny 1, which functioned mostly as a social area and the hub for Trials of Osiris and the Prison of Elders. More accurately, this series of expansions will be set in the Awoken homeland, which after the events of The Taken King…well, let’s just say that there will likely be a ton of new places to explore and characters to interact with.

I’m not going to go into a long description about the plot, or even really talk much about what is coming and how it is coming to us. Instead, I’d like to focus a little bit more on what I think is honestly the most relevant aspect of any of this new content: The Taken King. “But that’s a D1 expansion, bruh. Why do you have to bring up the past?”

Simple.

TTK represents the high water mark for the entire Destiny franchise. Both PvE and PvP had been tuned to as near to perfection as they could be, the content wasn’t utter garbage, and there were a slough of new and exciting features that were released; we got our hands on new subclasses for each character class, as well as new exotics, new loot across the board, and a “new” enemy to test it all out. Forsaken aims to do the same thing, except there’s one small problem.

We’ve already had a Taken King-level expansion.

What I’m getting at is that I am still completely baffled by the fact that Bungie reached the absolute pinnacle of Destiny development when they released TTK (and subsequently, Rise of Iron), yet they chose to almost completely scrap that success to release the nightmare that was (and to a degree, still is) Destiny 2. I understand the need for innovation completely; the video game industry is a multi-billion dollar a year business, and if you want your product to outshine all the rest, you need to bring the kickass original content. Especially if you’re pushing a game like Destiny, which relies on game world user population numbers to stay afloat. There’s a damn good reason that Eververse is pushed as hard as it is – developing game worlds this massive and detailed doesn’t come cheap, and expansions only bring in so much capital.

In the spirit of that sentiment, I’d like to officially go on the record as firmly believing that charging for expansions, offering tchotchkes and aesthetic crap for real world currency, and pushing the hell out of your IP like it was the hottest new designer drug to make it more desirable for a larger group of consumers is par for the course in the video game market, and should not be viewed as highway robbery by a bunch of scam artists trying to swipe dollars out of your pockets with shitty content.

HOWEVER…

When you have in your hands a nearly completely fleshed-out game, which had a rocky start but eventually made a relatively grand return to public favor, it makes ZERO SENSE to toss all that work in favor of a new system which may or may not be received well by your already loyal fanbase. It’s bad business practice, and even worse when measured up to any modicum of truthful advertising. This is exactly what happened with Destiny 2, and it is just as confusing as it is infuriating to watch from the perspective of a dedicated consumer.

So what does this mean moving forward into the second year of Destiny 2 content? Frankly, I think it means that Bungie is well aware that their game is not being looked upon favorably at this point in time. They are also likely painfully aware that it was their own folly of desperate “innovation” that landed them in the hot seat with their customers. Their response to this overwhelmingly negative sentiment is to go back to the source, and pull out some old tricks and shine them up, hoping that with a gradual return to greatness, their innovative wanderlust won’t be for nothing, and will keep players coming back until they inevitably release another title in the series.

For players, it means that you have to once again decide whether you’re going to be a fan of the game with faith in continual progress, or a fan of the game who can never get over the atrocities committed by these evil, horrible people who dare to attempt to create entire worlds out of thin air in a valiant (albeit somewhat foolhardy) attempt to fucking amuse you. One thing will never change about Destiny, no matter how many iterations of the game we go through, or how good or bad each one is in practice:

The concept of the game will NEVER be bad.

That’s why we all keep coming back, because we love this game, for good or ill. We complain about it, rage on social media about it, and write long diatribes on internet blogs about it because we care about it. We want to watch it grow (and even sometimes change), we want to see what the developers have up their sleeves, no matter if it’s great or terrible, and we want to interact with all of the friends we have online and the new friends we have made as a result of being involved with this game. I actually sat down the other day and went through my friends list on my Xbox, and I came to the realization that of over 200 people on that list, I had met well over half of them playing Destiny. That is astounding to me. I play plenty of multiplayer games, but none of them have ever made me feel a sense of community and fellowship like Destiny has.

So to the consumer, I say this:

Are you in, or are you out?

To Bungie:

Bring it on.

(But do try not to suck quite as much, my blood pressure is high enough already, thanks to Bethesda’s flair for the dramatic).

-b1nx

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Fallout 76: Finally, Some Good News in 2018

Nearly two weeks to the day in advance of the Bethesda E3 presentation, the company has teased what appears to be a brand new, full Fallout release, entitled Fallout 76. The trailer is full of potential clues regarding what the game is, where the story will take place, and perhaps even some plot elements as well, but I think it’s important to take a look at all of the things that are more than likely false about the conjecture people have thrown out there so far…by adding more conjecture to the mix! The trailer can be seen here, and I recommend watching it prior to continuing to read this article (for obvious reasons):

Fallout 76 Teaser Trailer

Firstly, there has been some speculation that Fallout 76 may potentially be an abridged game, or perhaps a Fallout Shelter-like experience. This is almost assuredly false, for a few different reasons. The structure of the teaser trailer itself is indicative of a game with more than just mobile game elements, and there is very clearly a longer story to be seen in this new release. It’s also worth noting that Vault 76 has been mentioned in the Citadel in Fallout 3, but was the only DC-area vault listed on that terminal that did not actually appear in the game. If there was ever a company that would go to the trouble of foreshadowing the eventual release of a game for 10+ years, it’s Bethesda.

Another indicator that this will be a full Fallout release is the history of Fallout releases themselves, starting in October 2008 with Fallout 3. Almost exactly two years later, in October of 2010, Fallout: New Vegas was released. Moving ahead to November of 2015, we saw the release of Fallout 4, the next game in the series proper. And here we are, a little over two years past that release, watching a teaser trailer for a new Fallout game which, by all appearances, looks aesthetically very similar to the graphics found in Fallout 4. My guess is that this game was developed directly alongside Fallout 4, using the same assets, engine, and basic structure, but was designed to be released on a similar timeline as Fallout: New Vegas was 8 years ago.

I’ve also heard several different people, including known Fallout info leaker Jason Schrier of Kotaku, postulate that Fallout 76 has the potential to be an online, multiplayer game similar to The Elder Scrolls Online (though probably on a lesser scale). I one thousand percent disagree with this, namely because Fallout has always been, in practice, a single player experience. It fits very well with the “Lone Wanderer” dynamic that Bethesda has created in every other Fallout release, and I just don’t see them looking to alter that. Moreover, I think that many fans of the game, while they would appreciate the novel idea of introducing multiplayer to Fallout, would end up being disappointed with the final product, and we would potentially see a meltdown in the fan base similar to what is happening with Destiny 2 right now (massive upheaval and abandonment of the IP altogether). Bethesda knows this, and would never risk such a negative reaction to one of their two biggest game series.

That being said, I don’t think it’s entirely out of the question that we might see some kind of multiplayer element being introduced in Fallout 76. The general consensus in the community seems to be that a Fallout MMO would be terrible, but a co-op mode in addition to the traditional single player experience might not be such a bad thing. Of course, everything is just speculation at this point, so it’s best to reserve judgement until we have a clearer picture of what this game’s mechanics and structure will actually be.

There was also rampant speculation as to the location of this chapter in the Fallout series prior to this trailer; some were beyond insistent that the next game would take place in New Orleans, and wishful thinkers (like myself) would have very much liked to see a Fallout title set in the Pacific Northwest. However, given the John Denver song playing on the radio singing about West Virginia, and the fact we are already aware that Vault 76 is in fact a DC-area vault, speculation of anywhere other than a rural West Virginia setting falls kind of flat. Sure, there are other potential locations where Vault 76 might exist which still fall into that same category, but Bethesda typically isn’t all that veiled about the locations their games explore.

As for the plot of the story of this new title, I feel that I would be doing everyone who reads this a disservice by attempting to ascertain what it might look like. There are, however, some general observations that can be made, but again, we can only work with what we are presented:

-The date on the early model Pip-Boy featured in the trailer is set to the 27th of October, 2102. This is significant for a couple of reasons, predominantly that this date would be almost exactly 25 years after the bombs fell in 2077. This also correlates with the canonical story of Vault 76, which describes the vault as a “control vault” operated without the presence of any of Vault-Tec’s typically horrifying human experimentation, whose doors were set to open precisely 20 years after a nuclear holocaust and “force out” the residents into the wastes for evaluation and examination.

-There are two awards in the trophy case which seem to suggest that the player character for this new game voluntarily stayed behind in the vault for an extra five years (perhaps to maintain core system functionality, or as part of some hidden and likely despicable Vault-Tec experiment). One is congratulatory of the character for eating “mystery meat” (typically a reference to cannibalism in the Fallout universe), and the other is an award for participation in something called the “isolation program.”

-The rest of the vault is littered with the remains of a large party, likely celebrating Reclamation Day and the return of vault dwellers everywhere to the surface after twenty years underground. While there are no signs of death per se, we do see a dirty backpack and pre-war hat on the bed, leading to the assumption that this particular vault dweller has already been outside of the vault at least once.

Beyond this information, the actual plot of the game is anyone’s guess. I won’t be speculating any further about the game’s plot or characters, but there will be several follow-up articles to come in the next month that will detail everything that we know for sure about Fallout 76, and once the game is released there will be a lot more to discuss. For now, however we get to revel in the news that there is in fact a brand new Fallout game likely being released later this year, and regardless of the lack of more specific details, news of this new title is plenty exciting.

So tune in June 11th for another article, where we will discuss the E3 conference in general, the Bethesda presentation, and hopefully, more concrete details about Fallout 76.

-b1nx

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Swatting Finally Claims First IRL Casualty

Gaming culture has for many years been dominated by stereotypical imagery of thirteen year old children, screaming profanity and racial slurs into headset microphones at complete strangers.

There are also caricatures of overweight, mid-30s wastoids living in their mother’s basements and playing World of Warcraft day in and day out; or the crass, neo-misogynist who cannot believe that any female would ever play video games (and when he encounters them, he berates them and tells them they shouldn’t have ever picked up a controller); or the trolls who lurk in every single popular title just waiting for the perfect opportunity to ruin someone’s experience. These depictions of gamers exist because they are real, to some degree, and there are real-world examples of every one.

Today, sadly, we add a new character to the list: The sore loser who, as a result of becoming so agitated with another person while playing a video game, gets an innocent man killed.

On December 28th in Wichita, Kansas, a man opened his front door and was immediately shot by police. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, but was later pronounced dead. The tragic part about this story is that this man (identified as Andrew Finch, 28 year old father of two) did not have any idea why the police might be showing up to his door that night; the Wichita police were responding to a homicide/hostage situation call they had anonymously received at Finch’s address.

What had actually transpired to set this chain of events in motion is quite possibly one of the most enraging, utterly preventable tragedies to come out of 2017, and unfortunately has been a long time coming.

For years now, “Swatting” has been a despicable prank played by gamers on one another when their anger over interactions in the digital world boils over into reality. Common practice is to report a fraudulent crime at the offending player’s address which is just heinous enough to merit a massive, tactical response from law enforcement; bomb threats, hostage situations, homicides, and so forth. The average result of this is, shockingly, a good scare and an odd YouTube video account of what happened when streamer A was swatted by streamer B. One of this site’s first articles was about Swatting, and offered as an example the incident which occurred during a broadcast by Alexander Wachs, AKA Whiteboy7thst, which was captured by his face cam; essentially, you see the streamer leave his chair after hearing something in his front room, then minutes later, a female police officer in full tactical gear with a German Shepherd can be seen searching the room. Whiteboy7thst Swatted Live On Stream

Alexander Wachs, AKA Whiteboy7thst (photo courtesy of the Chicago Tribune).

In that particular situation, it was reported to local law enforcement that there was an “armed and suicidal individual” at Wachs’ address, and the police responded according to their established protocols for such a situation. While they did manage to find at least 30 grams of marijuana in his house, Wachs did not face any drug charges according to an article from the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/bolingbrook-plainfield/chi-whiteboy7thst-marijuana-charge-dropped-20140911-story.html). This example is one of many that has somehow ended peacefully over the last eight years or so, but Andrew Finch was not so lucky.

The worst part of this most recent Swatting horror story is that Andrew Finch did not even play video games, according to his mother, and he certainly had no idea what the police would be doing at his front door that night. In fact, the only two parties involved in this situation who could have possibly known why the police were at the Finch residence that night were in different states altogether.

Two gamers involved in a private Call of Duty match were having an argument after the match’s conclusion, over the embarrassing sum of $1.50 which had been the match wager.

Screencap from the match in question (courtesy of umggaming.com).

One player threatened to (and subsequently did) contact another player with an established history of Swatting, known online as SWAuTistic, in order to threaten the other player.

25 year old Swatter Tyler Raj Barris, AKA SWAuTistic.

For one reason or another, the player being threatened offered up an address, purportedly his own, as a destination for the Swatter to hit; it was obviously not his own address, but rather the address of the Finch residence in Wichita, Kansas. When SWAuTistic made good on his threats, calling local law enforcement and telling them that a man at Finch’s address had not only shot his father in the head, but was also holding his mother, brother, and sister hostage, a law enforcement response team was dispatched to the Finch residence. Moments after they arrived on scene, Andrew Finch opened his front door for the last time.

This story should not only infuriate us as members of the worldwide community of video game enthusiasts who, at any point in time could be subjected to the anger-fueled whims of a childish poor sport; it should also concern each and every person who is not part of the gaming community. It is baffling to even attempt to rationalize how this sort of action could be seen as a “joke” or “prank” under any circumstances. Personally, as a gamer and a gaming journalist, I cannot help but feel a modicum of responsibility for Andrew Finch’s death. We have all known about this horrific practice for years, and yet we have done little or nothing to combat its practice, or at the very least raise awareness so that these nightmare scenarios might be prevented.

Then again, how are we to stop the testosterone-driven rage of adolescent gamers whose parents would rather they sit in front of a glowing screen all day than actually be forced to spend time with their children? What measures can be taken to prevent the mind of a maladjusted, sore loser from thinking that something like Swatting is a viable and acceptable method of venting their frustrations, apart from raising them to utilize other outlets for their aggression from an early age? And even then, can we guarantee that they will listen?

At this point, I don’t believe that anyone has viable answers to any of these questions. I am sadly amazed that it took this long for something of this nature to come out of the Swatting trend. I wish that the gaming community as a whole could be a little less petty about everything in general…we are at times the most entitled, snotty little hobbyists on the face of the fucking planet, and this time, that mentality cost an innocent man his life. I hope that reflection on this incident and positive change can come from such an emotionally stagnant culture, but I’m certainly not going to hold my breath waiting.

All we can do now as a community is self-police, take personal responsibility for our own actions and emotions, try to move forward, and never forget the first man to lose his life to the whims of a guy who lost a dollar fucking fifty playing a video game. It’s stories like this one that make it harder and harder to rationalize video games as the “harmless” hobby we all know they can and should be, and I hate that my first article in months has to be about a totally avoidable tragedy that should have never happened. However, I will gladly play the part of the grim stenographer, and hope that anyone who reads this will take steps to ensure that, at least in their own existences, tragedies like this one are avoided in the future.

Stay safe out there, be excellent to one another, and ring in 2018 with an unwavering resolve to be a better human in all aspects of your life. We are only incapable of altering our pasts.

-b1nx

*As of the writing of this article, the Swatter known as SWAuTistic (real name Tyler Raj Barris of Los Angeles, California) has been taken into police custody in L.A. County on a fugitive warrant, though the actual charges Barris faces are unknown at this time.

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Polybius: A Study in Digital Mind Control

There have been countless examples throughout video game culture which have suggested that a good time was not the only intended result of a game’s programming. Strange bugs and glitches, unexplained occurrences and even specifically designed digital nightmares have been discovered or exploited in hundreds of games.

There are those which are relatively innocuous, such as the final screen in Pac-Man (known as the Map 256 glitch) that turns the final screen of the game into an unbeatable jumble of numbers and characters on one side. There are also more intense, and at times disturbing instances in some games.

Luigi’s Mansion, for example, contains a “lighting glitch” in the attic of the mansion, where on a certain wall that is illuminated every so often by a flash of lightning, the player’s shadow appears to be hanging himself. Often times, these bugs are explained away by developers as simple texture errors. But in one instance, an entire game inspired not only interest and curiosity, but fear and paranoia.

The game is known as Polybius, and while it may just be an urban legend, it does raise some interesting questions about what sort of other applications video games might have in the real world.

The YouTube channel known as Ahoy has recently posted an hour-long documentary on Polybius, which can be seen here.

Ahoy goes into great detail about the game specifically in this video, and I highly recommend watching it in its entirety as well as his other content. He is by far one of the most organized and intelligent content creators on YouTube, and the sheer amount of research he put into this documentary is outstanding.

To give a brief background for the purposes of this article: Polybius was first whispered about in the media around the year 2000, but the game surfaced initially in 1981 in a suburb of Portland, Oregon during the rise of the coin-op arcade.

The story basically intimates that a handful of these machines were placed in various back alley arcade destinations, and visited regularly by men in black coats who never removed money from the machines, but rather appeared to be collecting data. People who played the game were said to have curious side effects afterwards, including physical illness, amnesia, night terrors, and behavioral changes.

After one month in circulation, the machines were all mysteriously pulled from their locations, and no further information was found regarding who had made them or why they had been removed.

At least that was the story.

There are some clues about the game which seem to suggest that the legend may have some merit: For instance, the name Polybius is taken from the name of a Greek historian whose name translates to “many lives” (who was also from a region of the Greek Empire called Megalopolis, in Arcadia). The company who supposedly created the game, Sinneslöschen, is almost proper German for “to erase senses,” or “to become senseless.”

However, given that the twenty-one year gap between the supposed introduction of these cabinets is followed by an initial mention on internet media in the year 2000, the popularization of the myth in 2003, and then a dead end, it’s relatively safe to assume that the game was no more than a myth.

Still, the existence of such a story alone makes one question how a video game could potentially affect a player’s senses and their ability to reason. Or, down a darker path, how they could be used to condition and control users.

Every video game in existence is based on some form of Pavlovian response mechanism; perform action “A,” receive reward “B.”

In the early days of the video game revolution, the reward was simple, usually amounting to nothing more than a high score which would be saved on the cabinet so long as it was not reset. Over the years, these rewards became more and more complex, as did the actions necessary to receive them. Games began offering “achievements” or “trophies” for performing specific actions within the game during the modern console era, creating an entirely new way to play many games and altering methods players might use during a standard playthrough.

In the case of Polybius, the gameplay was described as unconventional, with strange geometric shapes and patterns dancing around the interface. Since the game is almost assuredly a myth, it’s impossible to know exactly what sort of data the men in black coats could have been pulling from the cabinets. It is interesting to consider how something so subtle as what sounds to be an early version of Geometry Wars could have such an impact on the human psyche.

The malevolence inherent in the Polybius legend, however, is likely enough to cause just about anyone to shy away from even hypothesizing about the game or its effects.

But what if the game in question was a tool specifically designed to teach real-world responses via a digital medium, effectively training the player to perform actions in their life or their job?

The Xbox title Full Spectrum Warrior (2004), was initially designed at the request of the United States Army’s Institute for Creative Technologies, or ICT, in conjunction with developer Pandemic and published by THQ. The ICT was tasked with making advancements in the field of virtual simulation technology, which included the proposed exploration of virtually training soldiers for combat operations.

Full Spectrum Warrior was just that: A virtual combat simulator, which limited the player’s input options to the issuance of commands to two different squads, simulating the role of a commanding officer in a live fire scenario.

An article from Popular Science on the subject contains this quote from Michael Macedonia, then-Chief Technology Officer for training and simulation in the US Army:

“We spend a lot of time and money training colonels and generals, but we’ve never had anything good like this for squad leaders.”

This sentiment seems to hold true more often than not as time passes. The modern battlefield is dominated by small squads of soldiers, and a massive array of technologically-based weaponry and surveillance devices. What better way to train the men and women of our military than a video game simulation?

UAV pilots in particular operate an interface that involves using a joystick and several buttons while monitoring a video feed from the craft, and while it may not be comfortably likened to playing a video game, training in a game world environment is an acceptable method of teaching these soldiers how to operate a drone effectively and accurately.

How can we suggest that video games are both responsible for providing valuable training for soldiers AND creating mass murderers? Doom was highly scrutinized by parents and commentators after the Columbine massacre in 1999, as both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played the game frequently before killing twelve of their classmates with automatic weapons.

The entire Grand Theft Auto franchise (as well as pretty much anything else that Rockstar puts out besides that shitty table tennis game) has found itself the butt of extremely similar scrutiny. Then-Senator Hillary Clinton even advocated for new, stricter regulations on video game sales after the now-infamous Hot Coffee mod was released for GTA: San Andreas.

Yet according to Peter Gray, PhD and research professor at Boston College, video games can actually increase cognitive function and perception levels. There are also a number of different studies which report similar results when testing cognitive ability in gamers:

“The best proof that video-gaming improves these abilities comes from experiments in which all of the participants are initially non-gamers, and then some, but not others, are asked to play a particular video game for a certain number of hours per day, for a certain number of days, for the sake of the experiment.  In these experiments, the typical finding is that those who play the video game improve on measures of basic perceptual and cognitive abilities while those in the control group do not.” psychologytoday.com

However, this doesn’t fully explain how it is even logical to correlate casual video game use to real-world violence. Unless you’re in the military, where your virtual combat training is specifically designed to facilitate survival and good decision making in live combat situations.

It’s precisely these assertions that make the Polybius legend so unnerving.

What if a game was implanted on modern gaming devices which was designed to manufacture a specific psychological response in the brain? Can we be sure that, even as human beings of sound mind, that we would not succumb to the whims of the programmers?

The primary speculation regarding the origins of Polybius are punctuated by references to the MKUltra program utilized by the CIA between 1953 and 1966, which was “concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.”

While this is unlikely, as the MKUltra program was officially halted in 1973 (and was primarily focused on the potential uses and applications of LSD as a form of mind control), it’s not so far-fetched to think that a similar program could still be in effect today. Especially considering how many of our day to day interactions are governed almost entirely by the internet, social media, and other technological means of interaction.

The trick is to make sure that our devices of all types, useful as they may be, remain ancillary to personal interactions with others and the world around us. That’s right, guy who just can’t seem to stop playing Candy Crush despite the fact that it’s a horrible, soul-sucking pit of a mobile game…I see you.

Just because the bell rings doesn’t mean you have to start drooling uncontrollably.

-b1nx

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Bethesda Creation Club: Who Cares?

There seems to be a big fuss over Bethesda’s Creation Club, the latest bit of content which has become available for Fallout titles and Skyrim, And I’d like to take a moment and explain why no one who plays these titles should give a shit. This article is the result of reading at least ten other articles which explain that Bethesda is evil for charging people for mods, and literally desiring to better acquaint my face with a brick wall. In a nutshell, Creation Club is an all-new, developer supported collection of mods and various add-ons for Fallout and Skyrim. Bethesda has partnered with community members for both titles who have designed the additional content, and given their creations the full backing of a developer support team. Additionally, they are charging consumers for said content based on the service that they are providing as administrators, and subsequently kicking down a portion of that revenue to the content creators themselves, not to mention creating new mods and content internally to offer through the same service.

“Well that doesn’t sound too bad,” you might be saying to yourself about now, “why wouldn’t they do that in the first place?” I couldn’t say for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that it has something to do with a company who is trying to make as much money as possible from their product not wanting to share that revenue with some nerd who made a ten hour extension mod for Morrowind. However, this is not the first time in the history of video games that something like Creation Club has come about.

In 2012, Bethesda began talks with Valve regarding the Steam Workshop, a similarly-themed portion of the Steam website which allowed for content creators to sell their mods to gamers via the Steam medium. During these talks, Bethesda was adamant that the content available on the Workshop remain free for all users:

“At every step along the way with mods, we have had many opportunities to step in and control things, and decided not to,” it wrote. “We wanted to let our players decide what is good, bad, right, and wrong. We will not pass judgment on what they do” (PC Gamer, 2015; http://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-responds-to-outrage-over-paid-skyrim-mods/).

This suggests that Bethesda was opposed to the very insinuation that mods should ever cost players money, and further that they wanted no part in attempting to moderate a fan-created piece of content. And who could blame them? Content creators for video games in general range from advanced programming gods to junior script kiddie hacks who just thought it would be cool to make a mod for Grand Theft Auto where you can have your tits visibly flapping in the wind as you murder innocent bystanders. No self-respecting company would want any part of moderating that sort of mess. On a more product-based line of reasoning, however, this quote reflects that Bethesda, while not willing to directly moderate unlicensed add-one for their games, does have a sort of admiration for the modding community; one that says “we love the content you’re creating, just don’t ever say it came from us because we don’t want to be culpable if your shitty programming ruins little Johnny’s computer.”

Of course, there are also DRM (or digital resource management) issues to consider, especially with the ever-present issue of illegal downloading and copying of IPs. But considering that all Skyrim DLC was actually released completely DRM-free, as was the entirety of Oblivion, it’s difficult to fault Bethesda for attempting once again to further regulate additional content for their games. Especially in such a way that allows them more control over the entire process, and the moderating capacity to cut back on any liability that might fall on them as developers for faulty content.

On the other hand, there are those who for one reason or another simply aren’t satisfied with the base games that Bethesda releases (most of which have campaigns and side quests which can take gamers hundreds of hours to complete). These voices are the ones which immediately scream bloody murder any time a company even suggests that they might charge them for something that was once free, and their perspective (albeit indicative of someone with far too much time on their hands), is somewhat valid in most cases.

This particular situation, however, seems to be less dire than some in the past. Many of the mods which are available through the Creation Club are user-created, and can still be obtained via sites such as FilePlanet for any hardware platform (though it may take a little more effort on consoles). The rest are developed and maintained by Bethesda directly, for which they have every right to charge money as the content’s creators. If you really want that armor set from Fallout 3 in your Fallout 4 wardrobe, there’s nothing stopping you from purchasing it directly from Bethesda and enjoying the benefits of developer-based regulation and maintenance. There’s also nothing stopping you from going to a modding website and finding someone else’s version of the exact same goddamn thing for your character, which you’ve probably spent far too much time building anyway.

Personally, I never got into mods for games. For ninety-nine percent of the games that I play and enjoy, the base game and paid DLC are more than enough to keep me entertained. Perhaps that’s why this particular issue seems pretty cut and dry to me. But if I ever got the urge to play through some of those older titles again, and wanted a fresh take on the game, I would go and download the JSawyer mod for Fallout: New Vegas (essentially a director’s cut), or I would look into the expansive upcoming Fallout: The Frontier mod, which looks to be one of the most extensive pieces of content ever created in the Fallout series.

The point I’m trying to make here is simple: Barring any explicitly illegal activities, you can still find and use whatever mods you damn well please for these games despite the existence of the Creation Club. Just because Bethesda is attempting to make a few more bucks off of the new content they created for your favorite games doesn’t make them monsters. It makes them a business, which like all other businesses, wants to make money on the sale of the goods and services they provide. You can choose to completely ignore these mods, or you can pay money to have them. The world is your goddamn oyster. One thing is for certain; bitching about it on the internet isn’t going to change anything.

-b1nx

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