I was reminded about this game via a link from the famous Shawn Elliot twitter feed about Wii Play selling ridiculous amounts of copies.

First off, the numbers are alarming. Even to those in the industry, but I Wii Play is a good game! The mini-games have a great amount of appeal. Ok, I’ll give you the fishing, the matching game, the bubble-position crap and I’ll even throw in the cow-race. Those aside, and mind you many of those games get picked up by plenty of people, have you played the shooting game? Air hockey, billiards? Ok fine, those aren’t 19.2-million-sold good. What does that leave… Hmm…

Wii Tanks!!!!

Yep. It’s an AWESOME game. In fact, I think it’d sell for $10 alone on Wii-Ware just fine. There are 100 levels. If that’s not enough, add in a level generator and a way to share levels online, or perhaps a 1on1 competitive multiplayer element and you may just have another flagship Nintendo game just in its own rite. It’s easy to forget, stuffed in with all the other mini-games with its slim cardboard sleeve CD-case, but it’s worth hours of entertainment just for the co-op Wii Tanks experience.

Notice that article references three major games that are all sequels… or quadrals? [MGS4, GoW2, Halo3]. Perhaps Nintendo has done something different and is being rewarded in a big way.

Games these days are full of controversy. I’m not talking about the wanton violence or rated R dialogue, that’s yesterday’s news. I’m talking about the growing pains of an industry going through its adolescence in an effort to come of age. The industry doesn’t really know how it’s going to do it, but it certainly knows why it wants to:

“Because I wanna be taken seriously damnit! Ughhh nobody respects me!”

~Video Games

Of course this isn’t completely true, but it’s how we’d all expect a teenager to act going through that all-to-painful “transition period”. It’s our duty to speak in hyperbole with an abundance of melodrama.

The problem is, or perhaps therein lies the solution, that there’s a lot of debate going on about how this is all going to happen. One side of the coin says: “Just keep doing what we’re doing, we’ve always taken it seriously and if we stay the course the rest of the world will catch up.” The other side says “We’re not going to be taken seriously if we don’t push things further, elevate our craft to a “high art” that adds something more than just “fun” to the myriad artistic endeavors out there.”

Most recently, Shawn Elliot was called out for being on the latter side of the coin. Pushing games journalism under a critical lens, attempting to uncover some of the problems within his trade by putting out a call to action through an online symposium. To most of us on neither side of the coin [most coin metaphors would like you to believe that you can only be on one side as that makes up most of its surface area, but many of us don't believe in these coin metaphors and remain in the middle somewhere] this all seemed well and good, like a fellow trying to improve things for the greater good.

But not everyone agrees. Some on the opposite side of the coin, let’s call them the “old sk00lers”, vehemently disagree to the point of making a forum thread on the subject stirring up the “new sk00lers” into a tizzy.

As a developer this was all very entertaining to me. Seeing just about every games journalist I follow come together on this forum thread berating the opposition with BBQs and LOLlerskates. I got a chuckle out of the whole thing, but then today I was thinking… “Is this what journalists think of our debates with all this business of ‘being taken seriously’? Are they secretly laughing in the windows?”

I’ve been involved in many heated discussions, both online and offline, about the terrible question of “are games art?” Which is simply another way to say “Why don’t they take us seriously!?” And it seems as though that that some high-falutin’ journalists are recognizing the art-game side of things, but really with mainstream Esquire it ends up not being about the games themselves, but about the romance surrounding them. Something I’m guessing Jason doesn’t give a shit about.

I don’t think either side is wrong, it’s all necessary for the growth of the industry and in the end, all of this pain is going to good use. One day we will grow up, get laid, and stop worrying so much about the rest of the high school and start focusing on what’s really important. The games.

I’m lying in bed here picking the scabs on my arms from a “casual” game of football over this Thanksgiving while mulling over recently edited game design lectures about meaning in games. It’s all very fuzzy and wreaks of that in-between dream state that so many strange and wonderful ideas come from. I call them 2AM ideas. And while in the morning they may have lost their magic, at least in that feverish rush to jot them down on the nearest parchment there exists some excitement that out of the madness of my subconscious something new and interesting has come forth.

Oh yea, back to football. A lot of my friends don’t understand my passion for football [of the American sort]. Some of them watch it, others even follow a team or two, but most care not to “lower themselves” to view such a primitive spectacle. I say that pretentiously here, but I do understand their view. By all rights, football is the war replacement that feeds the public’s need for resolved conflict through some kind of mock-violence. I get it. And I don’t care, because that kind of sociological crap works well on paper, but rarely in practice. Plus, it’s boring and no fun.

Growing up young, I was always pretty athletic, a bit of a natural at a lot of things to do with physical coordination. By the looks of my trophy case, I’m a natural born basketball player, but the reality was, and still is, that I loved football with every bone in my body. I wanted to play. My grandpa was a star quarterback for his high school, even made his high school’s top ten athletes of the century. My dad, also a quarterback for his high school. He taught both my brother and I how to throw a pass. We watched college football players like giants, and their coach a god. Every game I watched either televised or in person was the biggest thrill of the week, and perhaps some of my happiest memories were of large come-from-behind-down-to-the-last-second victories shared with good friends and family.

But that’s not the real reason I love football.

In seventh grade, there was flag football. I was a star. Running the option with our star quarterback, we went undefeated. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 2-3 touchdowns a game. But then came 8th grade. Pads. Helmets. The whole outfit was cumbersome. I was small, quick and nimble. The once perfect model for a flag football player, now the bottom-of-the-barrel tackle football player. But that was good. That is where my love for football starts.

I had no chance to make the A squad. Since last year, it seemed like all the players were now a full foot taller and I had shrunk. Peering out my helmet, I could barely see past the linemen hunched over the line of scrimmage. So I settled into my spot on the B team. I played defensive back and returned punts for the first half of the season. It was alright, but what I really wanted to do was return to my halfback spot. It was a different animal. The option [pitch pass left or right from a quarterback roll-out] was no longer in our repertoire. We had to hold onto the ball. In practice we ran drills for this kind of thing. Two of our gnarliest linemen would stand on the 2 yard line, stomping their feet in anticipation of the next in line. I wanted it. My heart is racing just thinking about this while I write. The coach handed it off to me out of the blocks and i barreled through them, fighting and pumping my legs, never quitting. I didn’t make it into the endzone, but be damned sure I wanted to.

I did it again. And again. I didn’t stop. I loved the challenge, the odds stacked against me. The coach recognized this and he pointed it out to our A team that practice. My fellow teammates knocked me on the helmet in celebration of my perseverance. That is why I love football. The bonds it can form, the character it builds and the lessons it teaches to those who give in to its greatness. From this one season, I gathered a sense of duty, accountability, work ethic and discipline that I would have had a hard time finding elsewhere. Few other places is this offered than in the competitive war-zone of American football.

Now. If you’re too old to play football, or just not impressionable enough. To understand the beautiful things that this sport can offer, I recommend going out and watching the movie Rudy. It is the only movie that I have ever actually cried at. I’m not trying to be macho here, other movies have choked me up, but Rudy made me weep when I was 11 years old [prime number].

What does this have to do with game design? Have you lost it?

~confused reader

Well no, I haven’t lost it. I was thinking about all this in terms of what it is I want to players to feel/come away with from playing a game. Then I got to thinking about football due to my wounds from a recent game, and thought: “Well, what did I learn from playing football?” Well this is it. But video games these days don’t attempt to instill honor and sacrifice into the latest version of Madden do they? But why not? I’m guessing if people played a game like that, they’d love football quite a bit more and probably would start a petition to ban any and all half-time shows full of glittered bimbos and pop-stars for the sake of the integrity of the sport, but that’s another post…

A lot of folks compare the video game industry to movies. I know I used to. And to some extent I still do. The film industry is still relatively young and lots of people have dreams of “playing a movie.” Movies have a little to do with video games, but not much. Nonetheless, looking towards older forms of media is a good start in developing a language for talking about this new medium of video games. Why not books? Music? Or just plain life? Let’s break it down.

Why do we want to be a movie?

As I pointed out earlier, gamers once thought the ultimate gaming experience was playing something so real, it was like playing a movie. Words like “cinematic gameplay” have become selling points on large titles beefing up their integrated cut-scene chops. But what does film [as an art form] really have in common with games?

• They both involve moving pictures. [film, animated frames etc.]
• Both attempt to deliver some kind of narrative.
• They are both linear. [A point of contention, but games are linear, because the player lives within a linear time-frame, i.e. Planet Earth. Even non-linear games can't erase the player's memory.]

Frankly, the comparison has much more to do with business/industry behind-the-scenes types of deals than it has anything to do with the process and expressive characteristics of the two mediums. Hollywood has acted as a model for large publishers/developers to produce games, and it may have been a good move for the industry, but not the art form.

Hey, devs are the new rockstars!

As much as I’d like this to be true, it’s simply not going to happen. The process of creating games is not an act of performance. Their memes and humor can be translated into a culture of sorts, but that’s about it. And besides, watching people develop games is boring. Trust me.

Music runs an interesting parallel to games insofar as that it relies on technical excellence [muscianship] but it ends there. Music is moving because of its rhythm, exploring the pace of the human heart and elaborating on that in order to control our emotions. That’s a gross oversimplification, but I think it works here. Music can only go so far until it is performed live. It’s then that the connection is made personal between the author and our ears joined with “the moment.” When, all at once, everyone is engaged simultaneously in both the creation, execution and retention of the musical expression at hand. When done right, it is an awe-some experience, and often a religious one for me. But without those elements of the musicians playing their piece, the collective audience receiving it and the overwhelming fact that we all know it’s “all happening now,” that is lost.

What’s the most interactive ancient media?

Books. Words are the most abstract representation of an idea we’ve ever had, and somehow we manage to communicate using their tiny minutiae everyday. This doesn’t exclude speaking either. Speech is the most ancient form of communication, but still, the word “tree” has absolutely nothing to do with a real tree. It’s just an abstract piece of data used to represent something explicit to a certain group of people. But I’m going to leave speech, since that’s performance art. But in books, this is where the interactivity comes in. It takes a brain to translate all that crazy language into workable imagery that can be understood, moved around and formulated into a world. The simple nature of words and representational glyphs generate an environment for the reader to imagine their own world, in their own way, whether it be separate from the author’s intention or not.

Games are the same way, not just video games. The rules of the game provide a world of bounds for the players to interact. Even if the game is sound and proven, players may choose to play it in a way that they think is fun, and perhaps outside the intention of the author. Say for instance, team-killing in co-op Halo to prevent any progress. While Bungie may not mind, their original intention for the co-op experience probably had more to do with the pacing of the action and drama of each mission than accounting for 50 master chief corpses blown sky-high with a pile of frag grenades after hours of assassination TKs.

But that’s what ’s great about our video games, isn’t it? Expanding the bounds of the worlds we love to inhabit. In great books, the worlds will travel with me. They’ll follow me into my sleep and iterate inside my dreams. The reality of that world, that impossible “science fiction,” becomes real in my head and all those books had were some ink on a book of paper. I’ll cut it short, but here’s a few more about books and games.

Also, from a business perspective. Books are bought and consumed in private. They are not to be spoken aloud, played or shared. You purchase games in the exact same way. There are no video game premiers [Cliffy B aside], and no awards for best performance [screw the VGAs, it's an adapter not an award], and you can’t go see it with a date. You possess it, and consume it on your own time however you want. Sometimes you don’t play your game for weeks and then come back to it, to that… bookmark.

Nonetheless, the artform of writing still has little to do with designing games themselves. It is much more useful to think of the experience of reading in regards to playing video games, than applying the process of writing to game development.

Playing games in the car.

There’s really no prior medium to inform us on the nature of interactivity. Well except one. But it’s one that was here all along. Life. I know. I’m really deep. But seriously, one of the most interesting quips about game development I’ve ever heard is the little story from Miyamoto on how he got the idea for Mario.

I got the idea for Mario while riding a train. I had a window seat and found tracing the trees and clouds with my finger to be pretty entertaining.

~ Miyamoto, not the quote, but paraphrased by me

I thought this was genius, and immediately thought back to all the games I would play with my brother when riding in the backseat of our station wagon. We’d come up with some stupid stuff to pass the time. One game was shooting all the birds with our “laser” [a recessed cap that covered a screw on the door handle] while calling out “got one!” to one another. Perhaps more promising, I would pick out a speck of bug guts on the windshield and focus on it. By moving my head around, I would dodge the oncoming terrain, weave between the dotted lines of the interstate, and jump around in the clouds. To this day, this is probably why I play with an inverted mouse/joystick.

There is nothing more interactive than life itself. And often, a single life has no real cumulative meaning. Even those with great purpose, such as MLK, Ghandi or Bill Gates [wait, what?] have meaning as icons to the greater society. Unto themselves, their lives were [and are] probably much more fragmented than we would care to know. Our lives are filled with short bits of meaning when the pieces come together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of their parts. My life is chaotic, imbalanced, unfair and mostly dull, but it is the most important thing in the world because I am doing it!

Comparing games to other media again!?

Maybe I’m late to the party, or just hung around too long to be kicked out onto the patio with road-beer in hand. This is just my thought-vomit over the last few days of driving around the barren Midwest.

This feature on Gamasutra about the future of video games under a new President may seem like it’s pro video game. And it is. The intentions are good and we shouldn’t have to have a ratings system imposed on us. In a perfect world. But to me, between the lines, what if the gaming industry starts seriously lobbying some of these politicians? We’ve got the cash. Well, not me, but the industry at least…