Salon.com > videogames

The future of television: Zombie gamers gone wild

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000

"Head shot, bitch, you just got owned! Yo, are you newbies going to help me capture this flag, or are you just going to stand there with each other's dicks in your hands?"

Spoken by a young man in gamer mode -- wearing microphone-equipped headphones, his hands gripping his game controller, staring frownily into his console screen -- those gracious words are the first line spoken in the first episode of "The Clan" -- a comedy series that debuted in April on Machinima Prime, one of YouTube's most high-profile "channels." The opening dialogue is representative of what follows. It's no accident the show kicks off with an aggro verbal fusillade. It's a calculated statement of purpose.

I've watched three episodes of "The Clan" and I am still unsure as to whether the series is best understood as postmodern cynical satire lampooning gamer culture, or is it really a faithful reflection of the emerging worldview of the "lost boy" gamer demographic. Or maybe "The Clan" is just lousy. Does it even matter? Ultimately, such questions are not for me to decide, since I'm not a "lost boy" and therefore I am not of interest to the Machinima "network."

Living in a pay-to-win world

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Twenty to 30 million new smartphones are entering the Chinese market every month, says Henry Fong, the CEO of Yodo1, a company that specializes in helping Western gaming studios "culturalize" their products for Chinese gamers. Those numbers may be slightly exaggerated but there is no doubt that the market is huge and still growing very fast.

But sheer size doesn't make it easy to crack. Chinese mobile gamers, says Fong, are impatient and utterly unwilling to pay for downloads. If you want to monetize them, you have to grab their attention immediately and figure out how to lure them to make in-app payments.

Impatient? Unwilling to pay for downloads? Chinese gamers sound a lot like American teenagers. If you are wondering where the world of mobile gaming is headed or, even more broadly, where the entire mobile economy is headed, your eyes should be focused on China.

Yodo1 had nine employees at the beginning of 2012, but boasts over 100 now, and is "still hiring like crazy." Fong says the decision to focus on China, where the gaming market has long been notoriously fragmented and difficult to cash in on, was made with the long view in mind.

“Gamers” are not the enemy

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:40:00 +0000

Oh, those sick, twisted "gamers." How will society survive their foul stain?

On Monday, the New York Daily News' Mike Lupica reignited the ever-popular "do video games cause mass murder" debate with a story bound to send young American males into a furor of rage and spitting madness. (That is, if they weren't already in that state after their most recent weekend-long marathon session of "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.")

Lupica quotes at length the hearsay account of an unnamed law enforcement "veteran," who seems to take special care in enunciating the word "gamer" with the hatred and disgust that one might normally employ for "child rapist" or "genocidal totalitarian dictator."

"These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a violent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist. They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I’m actually going to be a hunter.

"There really was no other subject matter inside his head. Just this: Kill, kill, kill. It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games."

Feminist hero dad hacks Donkey Kong for daughter

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:54:00 +0000

Mike Mika is a gamer dad, so it's only natural that he would try to pass on his deep, nerdy love for all things videogame to his offspring. But while the allure of Atari didn't fully take with his young son, Mika says his daughter "jumps at the chance to play games with her old man."

The 3-year-old has a particular affection for Donkey Kong, but wasn't so wild about always playing the Mario character. In fact, she wanted Pauline to save the plumber for a change. She wanted to "play as the girl," as Mika wrote for Wired Magazine.

In a civilian household, this request may have been added to the pile of kid questions that are acknowledged and promptly ignored. ("I understand you want to eat Pop Rocks for every meal. It must feel frustrating that you can't.") But this wasn't any old household, this was a bonafide cool feminist geek kingdom. And Mika, a game developer by trade, knew he could actually do something about his daughter's request. So he set out to hack Donkey Kong and let his daughter save Mario from the barrel-tossing gorilla:

YouTube’s copyright parasites

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:30:00 +0000

The evolving economics of YouTube continue to fascinate.

The monetization of user-created Harlem Shake videos by MadDecent, the label that owns the copyright to the song everyone is spazzing out to, and the YouTube music network INDMusic, is an example of how content creators and owners can make a profit in the age of unlimited sharing without resorting to threats or raging about piracy.

But TechDirt's Tim Cushing has a report on how the same technologies employed in the case of the Harlem Shake are also being abused.

According to Cushing, gamers uploading "Let's Play" videos -- stretches of actual video gameplay captured for the entertainment of others -- have been receiving bogus copyright claims from hard-to-pin-down outfits with names like Agora Aggregator and Digital Minds Entertainment.

“Call of Duty: David Petraeus”

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:02:00 +0000

Everyone's been there. You're watching TV, and you get sucked into what appears to be a movie trailer for a new action thriller. Navy SEALs are taking out a terrorist in some war-torn third-world nation. Explosions! Gore! High-tech wizardry!

A couple of seconds later you realize you've been hornswoggled by yet another commercial for a new first-person-shooter combat game. You were fooled because the graphics were so goddamned realistic.

But I'll bet you didn't know just how realistic modern video games strive to be. Or what a chore it is to keep up with the ever-changing military state-of-the-art.

In the latest installment in Activision's hugely successful "Call of Duty" video game series, "Black Ops 2," released on Monday at midnight, the secretary of defense is a guy named David Petraeus. That might have been a reasonable assumption, as recently as a week ago. But now it's ancient history. Might as well have Ulysses S. Grant running the show.