BioShock Infinite: This was my first experience working on a AAA video game. It comes out tomorrow. Clearly I’m biased when I say that it’s amazing, but reviewers seem to like it too. I’m moving on to other projects now that my work with Irrational Games is done, but I’m proud to have worked with such a great team on such an excellent game.

Tropes vs. Women in Games: This is the first in a series of videos examining how women are typically portrayed in video games. If you’re already highly educated and deeply familiar with the history of games, it may seem like a refresher to you. (I learned that Donkey Kong was supposed to be a Popeye game and Star Fox Adventures wasn’t originally about Starfox, though much of the rest of this was already known to me.) Still, this is an excellent introduction to the subject for newer viewers, with some great examples of why gender issues need to be at the forefront of our discussions of games. I really wish this series had existed back when I was teaching “Images of Women in the Media” at a women’s college.

Why Geek Matters: An awfully long time ago, somebody at Forbes wrote a forgettable piece on her frustrations about “fake geek girls.” Over at her own blog, Leigh Alexander wrote a response not just tearing the piece apart, but also arguing more generally that it’s kind of pathetic how self-identified geeks react with hostility to “the normalization of geekdom.” Leigh’s on to something there, but I don’t think we need to discount the value of identifying oneself as a geek in order to recognize and work out problems in geek cultures. And that’s where Gus Mastrapa’s Pretension +1 column comes in. Yeah, this whole exchange is from a whole year ago, but I still felt like it was worth a link for explaining some things that I suspect so many are feeling: “Geekdom is a culture of knowledge and curiosity, of obsessive interest in the arcane. [...] But Leigh is right about another thing, too. We cannot live on being geeks alone. The chameleon in me learned that being well versed in many cultures is not only good for survival, but it also makes you a more well-rounded person.”

Confronting Geek Shame: Along similar lines, I want to draw your attention to Natasha Lewis Harrington’s writings on geekdom and Magic: The Gathering over at Gathering Magic. She’s been doing some great stuff over there for a while, but if you missed her piece on “Confronting Geek Shame” awhile back, it’s worth a look (and, um, not just because she cites me in it). As with Gus’s piece above, it helps illustrate the point of how we are shaped by what happens early in our lives, but we can use that to define ourselves rather than letting it define us.

Hipster, Please!: And finally, I want to give a special shout-out to Z. at Hipster, Please! on the occasion of The Living Bookend, a “better end point, temporary as it may be” for his nerd music podcast, Radio Free Hipster. If you read my dissertation, you know that Z. was instrumental in helping me navigate certain corners of the geek world. And if you know me personally, you might know that Radio Free Hipster has introduced me to music I love, geekified my Christmases, and brought me cheer on my crummiest days. I don’t eulogize projects on indefinite hiatus (said the guy who hadn’t blogged since July), but it seemed like a good time to point out that this podcast has quite the back catalog worth trawling through.

Let’s Sing!: Not too long after I wrote that last post, I got to work on graphic and interactive design for an iOS game designed by Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini. It was my first foray into designing for an iOS app and doing visuals for a video game, so I was pretty excited. Also, it’s really, really fun. (Think “Draw Something, but with humming instead of drawing.”)

Five Ways Games Appeal to Players: I did a bunch of research about why people play games – quite a bit of it appearing in an earlier form on this blog – but finally decided I’d rather get it in front of game developers than just in front of academics. (Long story short: it’s a little more complex than “people play games because of challenge!” or “people play games for different reasons based on their personality!”) I’ve been a fan of Gamasutra for a while now, so I was pretty proud to get this in there.

Hate the Gamer, Not the Game: This piece at PocketNext is specifically about gamer identity rather than geek identity, but I think the sentiments will be pretty familiar to readers around here. While some people wish that terms like ‘gamer,’ ‘geek,’ and ‘nerd’ would go away entirely, normalizing the habits they describe, I think it’s problematic to deny people the right to choose their own terms of identity.

The Worst Company in America: As long as I’m going to defend my fellow nerds with one link, I might as well chastise us with another. This PocketNext piece is about EA winning the Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America” poll over Bank of America, and what problems that might suggest about geeky voting blocs.

The Flip-Flop President: Look, there’s just no way to say this that doesn’t sound awkward: I made an political attack ad against President Lincoln. But it was for a good cause! FlackCheck.org is a humorous spinoff of FactCheck.org, dedicated to educating about political communication through humor. This is part of a campaign to use modern-day political advertising techniques against our nation’s most beloved president, encouraging viewers to think critically about how ads are made.

All right, I’ll try do to better than two months before getting to the next post I have in mind – some links on geekdom by others I’ve been looking forward to sharing for some time now.

La Revanche Des Geeks: I was interviewed last year for a documentary on geek culture by Franco-German TV station Arte. (You know the one.) I don’t speak French or German, but I hearing excellent things about it from people via Twitter, email, and comments around here.

Indian Geek Uprising: I was also recently interviewed by CNN Geek Out for an article on comics creators in India. My own geek studies didn’t look at the development of geek culture in other nations nearly as much as I would’ve liked to have done, so this was a really interesting perspective for me.

Batman and Superman and Spiderman, Oh My!: Rounding out this trio of publications that have interviewed me, here’s a piece from Medill Reports on a superheroes, inspired by the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo. (Not quoted here: a rambling comparison between superhero fandom and sports fandom. The more I think about it, the more similar they seem, geek connections aside…)

That ought to do for now. I should have a post soon, too, with links to some pieces I’ve been writing and producing, and another post linking to stuff I didn’t write, but kind of wish I had.

Just south of Central Park, walking north on Broadway, we were spotted. A group of 50 or so people hurled their attack at us from across the street, shouting at the top of their lungs: “Can we help you?”

We screamed our response: “We’re amazed by you!”

Both attacks flew wide. We announced, “You’re too kind,” and each team proceeded on its way.

Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of “benevolent assassination.” It’s played in normal social spaces, where you don’t necessarily know who’s in on the game and who isn’t. Like the “assassins” games that have been played on college campuses for years, the purpose is to hunt some target and avoid being hunted yourself. In this particular variant, however, there’s a twist: You “kill” enemies with a warm greeting. If you hit the right players with your compliment, you absorb them into your team. If you hit the wrong players, they inform you that “you’re too kind.” If you hit someone who’s not playing – well, it’s friendlier than traditional crossfire, at least.

“We’re amazed by you,” my teammate said politely to passers-by. One woman thanked us. Another gave a dismissive, half-smiling sneer. One group happened to be gathered for a sweet 16 birthday party, and welcomed our cheering. “What kind of treasure hunt is this?” one woman asked, wishing she could join in.

Eventually, we were alerted by text message that the time limit was up. We gathered in Central Park for awards and cupcakes. The victory went to Team Nerdgasm, though my friend and I walked away with glittering, purple fedoras as runners-up. We headed down into the subway, discussing where to head next, prizes atop our heads. As the car started moving, I heard a young guy’s voice nearby.

“Hey, man, poppin’ hat!” I turned to see him offering a friendly smile.

“Thanks!” I said. “I just won it – but hey, you can have it if you like it.”

“Seriously? Yeah, thanks!”

I have no idea whether he actually wanted my hat or whether he was just goofing off to impress the ladies at his side (or both). Either way, the spirit of the game had infected me. I couldn’t hesitate to offer my glittering prize to a complete stranger.

This is, of course, part of the intent behind Cruel 2 B Kind, one of many games held during the Come Out and Play Festival. A collection of “big games,” “ubiquitous games,” or “alternate reality games” (pick your favorite term), it was scattered across three days and a good portion of Manhattan. The games saw attendees putt golf balls down sidewalks, LARP as cowboys, zombies, and wizards, and gesticulate at motion sensors to direct Space Invaders, projected onto a neighboring building. Initially, I saw it as part of the branch of my research concerned with game play and design. I was caught off guard when I realized, after repeatedly hearing people describe themselves as nerds, that I was also doing research for my dissertation on geek identity.

“It’s a very strange thing to come to the city, go outside, walk in the streets, and play games if you’re over the age of eight.” My interviewee said the last word with a sharp emphasis on the final word – eight – acknowledging the absurdity that one might find implicit in the idea of adults playing outdoors like children. He searched for more words. “And that’s, that’s the really neat thing about – I mean, people should do that,” he said with a laugh.

Promoting this ideal is one of the major motivations behind the Come Out and Play Festival, though taken to a certain extreme. At a panel on the second night of the Festival, designers and organizers attempted to explain the rationale behind these games. “There’s so much stuff to play with in cities,” explained Franz Aliquo, the co-founder of a water-gun “assassins” game. “I think kind of getting older and getting away from that kind of makes you nostalgic for that stuff. I think slowly people are starting to see the city more as a playground – a huge playground – rather than kind of the designated spots to play.”

Jane McGonigal, games researcher and co-designer of Cruel 2 B Kind (among other games), cited the strength of online communities as part of her inspiration: “When I think about making reality-based games, it’s not because I think games aren’t real enough, and that we have to take them back from virtuality and put them back into reality – it’s that I think reality isn’t virtual enough. I think that games engage us, they give us skills and motivation and people to work with and a sense of purpose and a sense of responsiveness, and if we can map that onto everyday interactions and our everyday social ecologies, that we will feel a lot better in our everyday lives.”

Game designer Frank Lantz followed up by describing such reality-based games as “a double movement,” mingling the traditional and the contemporary. These games comine physical, childlike play and face-to-face social interaction with complex rule systems and data at our fingertips via mobile computing devices. “In some ways,” Lantz reflected, “we are like the hillbilly astronauts of game design.”

“Is this a ‘geeky’ phenomenon?” one audience member asked. Maybe, to some extent, for the time being, they conceded – though Come Out and Play’s 500 registered attendees ranged from ages six to 60, frequent gamers and curious fun-seekers alike. “These are public games,” co-organizer Nick Fortugno later told me. “They should be for the public.”

This is something different from other geeky gatherings. Comic Con International, for example, takes over San Diego by force for one weekend, flooding the population with geekdom by sheer numbers. Come Out and Play, on the other hand, brought together a few hundred people, mingling gamers, geeks, and the general populace. Its playful activity is designed for everyday environments, rather than simply spilling over from a swelling convention center. It isn’t quite like games you might play on a TV, or on a computer. It isn’t about feeling at home, free from prying eyes. It’s about feeling out of your element, leaving behind the security of insulated social spaces and darkened rooms with glowing screens. It’s about bringing geek culture out into the light of day, but it’s also about giving the light of day a geeky glow of its own.

“See, it’s mostly about being antisocial,” one woman told me, describing her experiences with World of Warcraft as we walked. I was following alongside her and two of her friends, self-described science geeks from a nearby medical school. They were playing Journey to the End of the Night, sort of a combination between a race and a game of tag. “I’m a geek by myself, and playing a game.”

“Antisocial isn’t necessarily a nerd quality,” her friend said. She had noted earlier that she played Magic: The Gathering, a collectable trading card game, and sometimes attended anime conventions.

“Yeah, but that’s, I’m not equating that with being a nerd, I’m just equating that with like my gaming experience. It’s like, aww, I just want to sit at my desk, in like, sweatpants, and like, kill things. How can I make that happen?”

“Yeah,” the anime fan acknowledged, “but you’re doing it with six million other lonely and sad people!”

I followed them until they ran into a chaser – one of the people who was “it” in this tag-race. He bolted after them, and they broke into a sprint, but he was able to catch up to one of them. The would-be escapees backtracked to join their friend, catching their breath. As they donned the yellow caution tape that now marked them as chasers, a couple New Yorkers wandered by.

“Raccoon City, man,” one guy exclaimed. “I’m telling you, this place is turning into Raccoon City.”

* * *

On a relatively warm February weeknight, wandering through Rittenhouse Square and mumbling to myself as I struggled to phrase something for a paper, I caught an unusual sight: Jedi. A group of six or eight men and women in loose-fitting clothes swung around swords with glowing, green and red blades, striking dramatic poses as they leapt and parried.

I paused in my walking and mumbling. Playing with lightsabers is just not something people do out in the open in the local city park. That kind of play usually stays behind the closed doors of convention centers. It was a spectacle, though it didn’t seem to be bothering anyone. In warmer weather, that space might have been occupied by people tossing a Frisbee, playing with a dog, or sitting on a blanket. I wandered over.

“Hi,” I announced from a short distance. Some turned to face me, smiling. “Are you guys part of some, uh, organized lightsaber group? Or are you just, ah.…”

A tall fellow immediately swung around the lightsaber in his hand, holding out the hilt for me. Another answered, “We’re from PA Jedi. You’re welcome to join, if you like!”

I was a little shocked – not so much from the invitation to join in itself (which I found rather touching), but by being offered use of a replica lightsaber that could have cost its owner upwards of a hundred bucks.

I explained I was working on a paper on video games, but I appreciated the offer all the same. One of them produced a glossy, postcard-sized flyer with more info about the group, the kind that I’d expect to see handed out for free at a convention. I took it, thanked them, and continued with my walk.

Dressing up and playing with toy weaponry marks one as among the geekiest of the geeks, so it’s relatively rare to see such activity flaunted outside. When a photograph in Google Street View caught an image of two guys in costume and battling with foam weapons, blog writers and visitors even on fairly nerdy sites derided the duo with headlines like “LARP Nerds Busted by Google Street View” and “Google Street View Captures Your Shame.“ When people gather in a park and hold out lightsabers to whoever expresses passing interest, they’re well aware that they’re going to be seen as a little odd.

I visited PA Jedi’s website. Several members have photos of themselves posed with glowing lightsabers, some in costume. They profess their desire to meet “like-minded geeks,” offer gentle self-deprecation (“Yes ladies, I’m single!!”), and express how the best thing about the group is being in “a family that looks out for each other.”

It’s possible that, for some members of PA Jedi, going out into the park is a kind of activism, a chance to reclaim public spaces, assert the value of playfulness, encourage the visibility and promote the openness of geek culture. Personally, though, I just got the sense that even though people might think they were weirdoes, they were having too much fun to care.

We’re launching with a bunch of reviews already up, with plenty more on the way. I’d especially like to draw your attention, however, to some of the commentaries and features I’ve been working on over the last few months, including pieces on…

• what roleplaying games look like when they don’t involve playing roles;
• game controls in a world without buttons;
• some lessons learned from Glitch;
• the evils (and some of the good!) of cool-down timers in game design;
• an argument in defense of pointless games;
• and the ethics of “freemium” as a business model.

I’ll have more to say soon about some of the other venues I’ve been writing for. For now, though, I’m too excited about this project finally seeing the light of day to share this space with anything else!

1. Just because women buy misogynistic products, or sleep with artists of misogynistic products, does not mean that those products don’t express misogyny. […]

4. Feminists are not always looking for something to be angry about. But it’s hard to overstate the sexism in American popular culture. […]

6. Liking art that is misogynist, racist, sexist, or homophobic doesn’t necessarily make you those things, and indictment of that art doesn’t have to be an indictment of you. […]

Folks need to breathe a bit. I think our conversations about culture would be a lot healthier and more interesting if we could hold two thoughts in our hands at the same time and acknowledge that we like problematic stuff. Because really, we all do.

She’s responding to recent discussions relating to rap music, but the connections to ongoing debates in geek culture struck me as so relevant that I couldn’t just link to it on Twitter and move on. I want to be able to refer back to this later, as these debates seem to end up in the same places every time.

I came across this pre-trick-or-treating photo while rummaging around a box in my mother’s house, looking for photos for a documentary, and today seemed like a good day to share it. In case it’s not clear, this lineup includes a robot, a ninja, a pirate, and a zombie. (I’m the tall one.) All we were missing was a monkey, and we would’ve had a complete geek zodiac.

Thanks to Jarrod, Jeff, and Stephen for permission to share this one with the world, roughly 20 years after it was taken.

Over at Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton offers a fairly comprehensive round-up of critics’ comparisons between the game and its trailer, and some thoughtful consideration of why so many seemed so let down. What was so special about this situation that it should provoke such strong reactions? It is, after all, just an ad, and everybody knows by now that cinematic game commercials typically have little to do with the actual gameplay experience. Why get so worked up about the game being different? Kirk hazards a guess:

The trailer was well-made and engaging; it channeled a hugely popular TV series (Lost) and it showed a little girl getting brutally murdered as her mother looked on. But I think the real reason for the trailer’s impact was that it promised us something that, as it turned out, we wanted very badly.

We may not have known it at the time, but I think we want a zombie game that is tragic and sad, action-packed and tense, full of loss and emotional catharsis. We want a game to make us tear up, to show us impossible loss, to make [us] come to terms with the actual risks and small but human costs of a deadly viral outbreak. Brilliantly, manipulatively, the Dead Island trailer promised us that, and our desire to see our wish fulfilled outweighed our skepticism. It was fun to believe that maybe, just maybe, this game would be different from the others.

I think he’s close, but not quite there. As Tom Bissell writes at Grantland, “There is, anyway, only one story worth telling in a zombie game, and here it is: See those zombies over there? You should probably get away from them.” Sure, on a thematic level, zombies represent all kinds of metaphors about consumerism or our inherent primal nature or whatever – but at the end of the day, the plots tend to be pretty much the same.

I don’t think the world is specifically clamoring for the most emotional zombie story ever. Rather, I think we just want more games that tell stories worth caring about at all, told in a way we haven’t seen in so many other games already. Dead Island looked like it might be one of those games, and it wasn’t.

Big-budget video games with complex narratives are still pretty dominated by the genres typically associated with geeks and young men: science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, with the more “realistic” end of the spectrum occupied by gangsters, soldiers, and cowboys. Think back to the most acclaimed stories in video gaming and see if you can come up with one that doesn’t fit into one of those subsets. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Fallout, Shadow of the Colossus, the Final Fantasy series, and even the Uncharted games end up at something fantastical by the end. (Honorable mentions go to anything published by Rockstar, though I wonder if it’s no coincidence that they have more mainstream appeal and also come up less often in the “games that made me cry” conversations.)

These are, of course, not exclusively the domain of geeks; they’re also the blockbuster genres of Hollywood action movies. Hollywood, however, has also managed to make some stirring dramatic content in other genres. In video games, if you want drama and high audiovisual production values, you pretty much have to accept that the story’s also going to have wizards, space marines, or – sure, what the heck? – zombies. I imagine that “an emotional story about zombies” must have been seriously enticing for some of the people ogling that trailer, but I think it was too explosively popular for that to be all that was going on.

This is what I think happened: We almost got a rare taste of what we keep insisting video games can be. Meaningful. Emotional. Thought-provoking. Artful. And – this is key – different. The trailer made us wonder if it would be different not just in its story, but in gameplay, each component complementing the other.

When was the last time you saw a major console release that told a grand story and really played differently? The first title that comes to mind for me is Heavy Rain – a deeply flawed title to be sure, but so much broader in its story, in its scenes, in the ways that you could interact with its world, than perhaps any of its peers. Other games map one or two constantly repeated actions to each button – press RT to shoot, X to reload, A to jump, over and over again – but Heavy Rain had us cradling a baby to sleep, searching a crime scene for clues, escaping a car in a wrecker. The controls didn’t always work very well, but the approach meant that we got a real story rather than the same action scene played out over and over again in different settings. No wonder that so many who saw Dead Island’s trailer speculated that it might be “Heavy Rain with zombies” – we haven’t really seen other games attempt any story with quite so much range in emotion and content, successful or otherwise. We expected something more than another game about whacking monsters with blunt instruments.

I don’t think we can really hold it against Techland for not meeting our expectations with Dead Island. It’s a rare developer that can risk a AAA console release that bears practically no resemblance to any known genre of gameplay. After all, it’s something of a truism among critics and developers that a game with a good story but cruddy gameplay isn’t worth playing, whereas a game with a cruddy story can still be playable. And it sounds like Dead Island is playable, at least.

I think it’s worth noting, though, that so many of us really hoped for this to be that other game, that special and different game. There’s an audience waiting for this, and I suspect that the developer who finally pulls it off will be celebrated and imitated for years to come – with or without the zombies.

I received the strangest question in an interview once: somebody wanted to talk to me about MC Frontalot, who coincidentally has a new album out. They wanted to know why rap about nerd things, or make comics about nerd things…. I scrunched my whole face up, and the region between my eyebrows shifted tectonically from plain to mountain. But he could not see this, so I was forced to express my confusion with the human words.

This was a person writing an article for a newspaper, a device which transmits culture, but he didn’t seem to understand what he was doing! Maybe he was confused because he was taught to “speak” without “voice,” that is, to communicate neutrally. Maybe he found the printing press in the woods, and operates it via dimly understood rituals. But here’s the apparently impenetrable math: people create culture. And they create it by describing the world in terms which are relevant to them. Who does he think makes all this stuff?

All that changed was the hand on the tiller.

I find myself having a similar conversation quite a bit. I try not to hold it against people who don’t understand, though. It’s not always obvious to outsiders why the whole “nerd” thing would remain relevant to us into adulthood. I guess that’s why I wrote a dissertation trying to explain it.

At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? “Yes.” Strike one. How often? “I’m preparing for a tournament this weekend.” Strike two. Who did he hang out with? “I’ve met all my best friends through Magic.” Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. […]

So what did I learn? Google the shit out of your next online date. Like, hardcore.

I’m not writing this to condemn the author of this article; a sizable portion of the internet seems to have done so quite extensively already. Nor am I writing this to speculate about what Gizmodo, a heavily nerd-trafficked blog, was thinking in running the article (though the “nerd bait” theory seems reasonable). Rather, I’m writing this because I think I might disagree with the message many of my fellow nerds take from this story.

The message I saw implied in many responses to this story – mostly in the form of tweets and blog posts – was that this is why we geeks have to hide who we are. I see just the opposite. This is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t feel the need to hide who we are.

I can see why people get the other message from it. This is precisely what we were conditioned to fear growing up: irrational judgment, and public dismissal by those we can’t help but admire and find attractive. From the outside, this looks like a geek nightmare come true. The savvy but hapless nerd gets a date, only to get laughed to his face. The embarrassment goes public, and the geek is mocked in front of the entire world. (A post about your dating life on a blog with many millions of viewers is certainly public on a broader scale than high school gossip, but high school sure feels like the entirety of the world while you’re there.) It is easy to point at this and ask if it’s any mystery why we would hide our own interests.

Take a moment, though, to see this from another perspective. The story doesn’t end with that Gizmodo post. Soon after I read it, the story exploded in my Twitter feed, with links and responses among the folks I follow.

Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander)
i think magic the gathering is incredibly nerdy. but i’m not a champion at anything. would TOTES date him.

Joey Comeau (@joeycomeau)
I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I’d way rather go out with a Magic: TG champ than a Gizmodo editor. Any day.

Gus Mastrapa (@triphibian)
If you are not a geek ally you are a geek enemy.

I also had a spirited little side discussion with some friends about how the fellow in the article probably wasn’t interested in having his real name used this way, but perhaps that’s neither here nor there.

The responses I’ve seen to this have been overwhelmingly condemning of the original post. That may represent a minority opinion in our culture at large, but it’s still part of a broader trend of people being unashamed of their geekiness and less judgmental toward nerds. In high school, we might have belonged to just a small group of geeks. As adults, however, it’s a lot easier to find others like us. And on the internet – perhaps even on internet dating sites? – we are legion. This story started with a single person’s snap judgment, but blossomed into a showing of nerd support.

I’m not saying that you should make your Magic: The Gathering and D&D exploits the centerpiece of your online dating profile. For better or worse, managing how we present ourselves in everyday life is fundamental to normal social interaction in our culture. I hope this story illustrates, though, that we don’t need to actively hide who we are for fear of judgment, at least as adults. Yes, sometimes we will be judged, but our world is bigger than it was in high school. We no longer have to deal on a personal level with those who dismiss out of hand, once we’ve been dismissed (or dismissed them ourselves). And once we’ve gone our separate ways, we can get back to to dealing with those who are more open-minded – and those who might even leap to defend our nerdiness in front of the world.