Oh! Internet

I decided to go online in order to see if anyone else was writing about the Nigerian gaming scene and I found a couple of articles written by Mayowa Tomori on the Nigerians going to the World Cyber Gaming Tournament this year. The article shed some more light on three of the contestants and he was quite supportive of our going at all. They are definitely worth a read and I am going to be following up on the company that is organising the whole thing, La Kraft Entertainment.

All that was quite inspirational and it made me feel good to be a gamer, and a Nigerian gamer at that until I decided to have a look at the comments on this one in particular.

Wow. The degree of stupidity and quite frankly, ignorance on display was quite disheartening. Usually, I get annoyed by most internet comments pages, but this was just outright reprehensible.

To think that people who are supposed to be in a land that grants them exposure, education, opportunities and infrastructure that one would think would allow them to develop in a better way are just wasting all their opportunities away. And the worst part is, I can see how it can happen. When you're in a culture that can afford to support, and in fact actively encourages individualism and freedom of thought, most people will probably go for the meanest and laziest path available to them.

It scares me sometimes as we rush headlong into a democratic and 'developed' society. Is that what is waiting for us? A new generation of internet idiots waiting to suck at the teat of a fibre optic cable with no sense of propriety? It is no wonder that the majority of gamers who were commenting on various blogs and sites during the whole Resident Evil 5 racism wahala were completely oblivious to how imagery in the game could even be construed as racist. I remember watching the video, and I would be the first to admit that it didn't make me think 'racism' the minute I saw it, but after a bit of thought it did come off a bit indelicate. Not racist so much as using racist stereotyping.

All that most of them saw was a black man saying that blacks should never be zombies.

Well, I guess this is even more of a reason for more Africans to get into the game development/playing scene. The more these net kiddies see real Africans and African inspired games the more used to our culture they could get. Instead of getting it all from news reports about wars, killings, and from Black Hawk Down on blu ray.

The Internet Luxury.

Spore is finally out! Spoke to my brother in England about it yesterday and he was saying that it was all over the place. It was at that precise moment that I realised that I wasn't all that interested in Spore.

This is not because I think it is going to be crap or that Will Wright sucks or anything like that, I generally am not really a sandbox type of player and so have missed a lot of his games. In this case though, I think it is more the fact that it seems a majority of the game experience is directly related to trading and seeing other peoples' spore creations is quite a deal breaker for me.

I mean, forget the DRM. Who cares that the game is going to allow you to install the game three times before you have to call them up and get more installs? I can see it being a problem, and on principle I don't like it, but for me, the main thing is the dependency on internet.

I could have maybe bought it on a whim (and maybe I still will), but the reliance on internet is quite depressing. It seems like a lot of games, and more particularly, single player games, are beginning to require the internet in some way shape or form.

I remember installing Half Life 2 on my PC then having to reformat it. Re-activating it on Steam on a rubbish connection like the one I have in the office is not fun at all. I don't want a game that people are saying a lot of the fun is going to come from seeing and experiencing other people's creations! To be fair, I don't know whether this is true or not, but I honestly just feel that if you are making a sigle player experience, the addition of downloadable elements and so on should enhance instead of complete.

Spore is even not that bad, at least you can buy it for the PC. What about games that are only available on a console internet store? Rez HD? Tried to get it and guess what? Xbox LIVE doesn't accept Nigerian post codes as legit. Pixeljunk Eden? Same thing. I am not even going to think about Bionic Commando or Braid or Castle Crashers or Ikaruga or...the list goes on and on. And this is when I can even get the console online at an acceptable speed.

So much gaming and I have been cut off from it not because I can't afford the games, or because I don't want to play them, but because of where I live. At least with boxed games I can pick some up whenever I travel, but these will just sit and exist for me on youtube and desktop wallpapers from the internet. I see people on various blogs talking about how annoyed they are with Spore and its DRM, but of course nobody even bats and eyelash at the fact that one of the major unique selling points of the game is linked directly to availablity of relatively fast broadband internet. Why should they? They seem to take it for granted.

How I wish that we in Nigeria had the luxury to complain about having only 3 installs on a game that we can get full mileage out of. Or even hell, having the luxury to even play one of these download-only games.

Looks like I might have to start travelling with my consoles if I want to get some of the good downloadable games out of them. I might also have to try and get a foreign credit card in order to buy and play the majority of them.

Michael Abbot of the Brainy Gamer was rejoicing in one of his posts about the increasing quality and availability of online games, and how mazing it would be for a plastic free future. I dunno whether a download-only future for games is one that I am really looking forward to. Well, that is if our government and the various companies that provide internet to us here at ridiculous prices will ever begin to take getting us as a country connected seriously at all.

Of course, this is not to say that the rest of the world should wait for us to catch up, but it would be nice to know that we were even thought about at all when they are making these decisions. After all, do they really think that just because they do not officially distribute here that no one is playing video games?

We need to be bigger.

E3 is done and most of the gaming web is filled with reports, keynote speeches, interviews, features, trailers, the works. It is also filled with moaning, whinging, and groaning about how lacklustre it was, and how people are just disappointed. Now, this is nothing new of course and so this is not really what this post is about. What it is about is the type of people that gaming seems to attract the most -

Self-centred, immature, twats. There. I said it. I was browsing kotaku, just trying to catch up on some of the E3 news that I had been postponing, and I came across their article on Wii music from the Nintendo Developer Roundtable. If you read that post first, it will explain the rest of my rant to follow.

The responses have just been disheartening. Are people just so blinkered that they can focus on one quote by Miyamoto and take it to mean that Nintendo had betrayed them and it is time to lament the good ol'days? Or is it the medium of text that by its nature can remove the context of a statement without careful phrasing? Or is it just Kotaku stirring up controversy?

Man, I am pissed. Just because he said that since it wasn't gamey it was better than a videogame, doesn't mean that he believes that games are stupid, or that Nintendo won't make 'gamey' games any more. This is a man who designed and put out Mario Galaxy! A game that most people went gaga over online last year. Less than ayear ago! Maybe some perspective is in order? Anyone ever think that maybe Miyamoto was just annoyed at all the press that has led to people believing that normal games are not being put out on the Wii and this is feeding back into the publishers and some developers who now seem to believe that the Wii is not for their more mainstream fare? He hears it again one more time, and he responded a bit testily? Hell, I would! Screw you and your videogames then if Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime, Boom Blox, Lost Winds, Trauma Centre, Mario Kart, Excite Truck are not gamey enough and make our console solely a casual console. Yes! Wii Fit is better than a standard videogame! We are making people exercise. Yes! Wii Music is better than your standard videogame! We want to get people interested in music! We are attracting a crowd that is interested in more than just shooting, jumping, breaking, burning, and destroying things.*

Imagine that, I can say all this and I don't even own a Wii. It's not rocket science to think bigger/wider.

Sometimes I fear that videogames as most of them currently are reinforce this sort of attitude in gamers. Most games offer instant gratification for relatively little input, empower the player and place them in the position of Campbell's Hero archetype. They make the players feel special. And entitled. People whinge when they don't get what they want and refuse to look at a bigger picture or even the other side of the argument. These games do not ask for them to do so either. In fact, games pander to this demographic. I believe game designers should try and take a more active role in trying to destroy this mindset by creating more game systems that subvert or oppose this way of thinking. There should be more games like Shadow of the Colossus where the standard videogame trope of being the powerful hero on a quest to save someone is subverted in a really great way through the use of the gameplay and the visuals.

Where are all the thinking gamers? Do they still only play Go, or chess? Where are the ones that play videogames? The gamers that game not only for fun and relaxation, but also as a source of understanding themselves better, and in the case of competitive games, their opponents as well, or even gaming as a means to enlightenment. Speak up people! Maybe if gamers had more people like that to look up to, maybe we could excise our community from the general mess that the current generation seems to be developing (We could also create a better image of our pasttime. After all, if you meet someone who plays chess or Go, or one of those types of games, it is natural to assume that they must be smart on some level). We should not accept all the limited thinking that is going on!

Then again, maybe the problem is not most gamers and the fact that games could maybe be reinforcing this behaviour. It could just be that the internet attracts a LOT of people, and unfortunately, most of humanity is just plain not interested in thinking or being bigger.

UPDATE: Just ran across some links with game designers talking about implementing some of things I am ranting about on here. One is a link from The Brainy Gamer, who by the way is also a very good example of the kind of gamer I am hoping we have more of. The second is from the creator of The Baron (reviewed here) and Fate (also reviewed by Emily Short here)

*This could be completely wrong of course.