I forgot. I received the first issue of the Kill Screen magazine. It is an extraordinary magazine! Of course it’s even better when you read it in the right environment.

KillScreen on the Beach

It’s a quite inspiring collection of extremely well-written and insightful articles. For example, “Big Buck Hunter” dives into the world of modern arcade shooter gallery games. Another article reviews the fascinating history of pinball machines, focusing on the political coup that led to their prohibition. Another article is a haunting analysis of the symbolism and emotional effect of the most shocking video game bosses.

It’s finally a very different kind of video game magazine. It fixes a lot of the mistakes that crept into the video game magazine mentality because of their computer technology background. Kills Screen finally ignores technology and customer reviews. It deals with the culture of gaming instead. A good example of the success of that formula is my favorite article from the first issue. It’s called “King of the Ogres” and it’s written by Nicholas Geist. It’s a bittersweet story about the author’s WoW addiction and his relationship with a woman not familiar with games. He reflects about what it means being a geek today. He expresses perfectly the awkwardness of being emotionally involved with a virtual world on the one hand, and constantly second-guessing yourself up to the point of being repulsed by the game’s culture on the other hand. It struck a chord with me. But the reason why this is a proof that Kill Screen’s formula works is that my girlfriend (a complete non-gamer) read the article too. She enjoyed it quite a bit and we were were discussing it the entire evening. Try this with PC Games.

And yeah, the 1st issue also includes a slightly chaotic interview with me. So I’m biased. Get Kill Screen anyway!

You might have noticed that I didn’t post yesterday (If you didn’t: forget I said anything). That’s because I went to meet up with two friends to finally play some StarCraft II again. We started at 5pm and – SHOOOOOOOOOM – the world just went away. If I didn’t have a job we would be playing still. The fascination, the trill of playing this game on-line with friends is simply undeniable. The mind-blowing thing is that this is just one of many faces of enjoying StarCraft II.

On an obvious level, there is the single-player mode and that’s just extremely well-made. Yes, it has a shallow story and it suffers from some forgettable writing. On the other hand, the mission design and the campaign structure create one of the most diverse, polished and engrossing single-player experiences I have witnessed in a long time now. It sets the standards on how to make games and can easily satisfy alone.

But it’s not alone. There is multi-player as well. And I just now realized that multi-player offers dozens of very different styles of play as well. You see, at first sight it might look like there is not much difference between 1vs1 and 3vs3 – it’s the same thing with just more players. Oh, but there is, there is.

When you hear people talking about competitive-level StarCraft multi-player, they often refer to 1vs1. It’s two players dueling each other. It’s an entire universe of intricate strategies and counter-strategies, mind-games and insane control skills. Once you get on-line and dive into this world the challenges you encounter are those of human cognitive capabilities. The game asks you to remember and execute to do 50 things all at the same time. Surprisingly, won’t be your hands that will hold your back, it will be your mind. The game will also challenge your emotional stability. Can you keep this peak performance even when the fear and then the disappointment of defeat is stifling your every thought?

1vs1 is an intense, hardcore experience so it’s no wonder it’s not for everybody. A lot players opt to play exclusively 2vs2, 3vs3 or 4vs4 – teaming up with friends to battle against teams of strangers. And that’s fine too. But it’s mind-blowing how different that game becomes as a result. In 3vs3 the counter-strategies and mind-games play a less important role. With 3 players executing their own strategy, it’s simply impossible to create a perfect response to everything. Even early scouting – a crucial technique in 1vs1 – becomes less relevant. It takes too much time and doesn’t deliver clear answers. What you need instead is flexibility and good communication with you team mates. You need to be able to modulate your strategy so it’s in-tune with the timing of your teammates. You need to also be able to drop everything you do to help out a teammate at any time. The reward is an emotional amplification. Every defeat is so much more devastating. But every win is an epic victory to be celebrated, remembered and re-told.

In 3vs3, the “Match History” goes beyond history. It becomes Legend.

And that’s just the tip of the eisberg. I haven’t played too many 2vs2 and 4vs4 games yet, there might be subtle nuances. Also, I heard that the game changes significantly in higher leagues. And then there is Free-For-All. And then there are custom games. And then there is comp-stomping. Each mode makes small adjustments to the same potent formula that result in fundamentally different, fresh and exciting experiences. I just wished I had a year or two to explore and enjoy that wealth. But what’s becoming clear now is that StarCraft II is here to stay, so there is no need to rush (yes, of course pun intended). We can take things at our pace. We have scheduled regular 3vs3 meetings now.

Remember just a few years ago when Web 2.0 was the thing? There was this euphoria in the air that thing were changing for the better. Google, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Skype. Everybody was blogging. The music industry was dying. Newspaper publishers were getting nervous. Social media were just around the corner. It felt like the web was finally short-circuiting a lot of old conventions. Hack the planet!

But not anymore. This is how the web looks for me now.

This image description is not available in you country.

The wonders of IP Geolocation APIs brought back a thick portion of the old bullshit again. Now, the supposedly global information network we called The Internet got a few borders. It basically became a regional information network. So if you live in the US you might not be aware that in Germany almost every YouTube containing copyrighted music is unavailable, we have no Hulu and no Netflix – not even on Xbox (but we still pay more for XBL). Speaking if Xbox, we don’t have a lot of games on Steam and Xbox either. There is no Doom for instance. Not even if you create a US account. It will track your IP and block any downloads. There is hardly anything as infuriating as following a link to “a video you must see!” and receiving an error message because the guy, who made that video put his favorite song in the background. And you know, hearing that would be a cardinal sin… but not in the US. Probably the most ironic example is the famous Martin Luther King speech. The one with “I have a dream”? Yeah, that’s not available in Germany because some parts of it apparently belong to Sony.

Recently I got myself a Kindle. That’s yet another great example that pushed my buttons. The Kindle itself is not availible in Germany at all. Amazon redirects German customers to the US store where you can import it paying some customs fees. But at least they deliver quickly. But then the Kindle store is horribly crippled. For starters there is no explicit German Kindle store. You need to shop in the US Store. That’s actually what I want to do anyway but then a lot of the books won’t be availible. For example, I can’t buy Huzinga’s Homo Ludens on a Kindle registered in Germany. I can’t even get a sample of that. What I can do is to pretend I live in the US by setting a US address in my Kindle settings. I did this and it enabled me to buy a couple of books the REAL US Store. I thought the problem was solved. But then Amazon changed their mind and decided to start Geolocating my IP all of a sudden. Back to square one.

So get this. In order to enjoy the privilege of purchasing books with my money on the Kindle which I also paid for I need to jump through a bunch of hoops and register to a Virtual Private Networks service located in the US and use that to access the Amazon site. Until they find a way to block that as well, that is. The irony is that I can buy the print editions of said US books just fine. Even Homo Ludens. Free delivery as well.

Why are you continuing to break the Internet like that?! What the hell is wrong with you people!! Who is benefiting from this anyway?

In an attempt to get around the bullshit I’m currently in the process of checking out USAIP. They seem to be easy to use and serious. I noticed both are rare qualities in this business. The upside is that I might finally be able to enjoy all this other stuff I have been missing out on! I will let you know how that went.

Recently I found myself often discussing the definition of what is a successful movie / book / game / pie recipe. Here is the thing. Avatar was successful right? It cost a fortune but it made quite a few fortunes in return. A lot of people saw it. It even started this whole 3D fad we have to endure now.

But then some dude comes around and compares it to The Matrix. Now I don’t really have the numbers but it’s safe to assume that Avatar made much more money than The Matrix. If you have the numbers, go smart-ass on me. Even though it made more money than The Matrix I would argue that Avatar pales in comparison. Yes it was a financial success and yes many people saw it. But The Matrix didn’t just made money. It contributed a great deal to our culture.

The Matrix defined the cinematography of action movies in the years to come. After Matrix no other movie could come out without Bullet-Time or at least some form of Slow-Mo. But it goes beyond simply movies. In a presentation at last Clash of Realities Bernd Diemer from Crytek singled out The Matrix for finally making programmers look cool. Of course, it set new standards for fashion but it also introduced new ideas we associate with programmers and hackers, permanently changing the way we would perceive them. Perhaps the simplest way of measuring this cultural impact is to simply look at the memes, spoofs and memorable quotes from the Move: “Red Pill, Blue Pill”, “Woah! I know Kung-Fu”, “There is no spoon”, “Welcome, Mr. Anderson”, the whole concept of “seeing trough the code” and many, many more.

With that in mind. What do you remember from Avatar?

*The sound of crickets* “I guess there were those blue guys. What did they call them again? Navi or something? Yeah, there were cool.”

Even if Avatar was such a huge success financially, the only thing it brought us was 3D. The movie itself was well-made and hit all the right spots emotionally but I didn’t leave any significant mark on our culture.

Here is the same test with a different recent Movie. What do you remember from Inception?

Aaah, now we’re talking! Being in Limbo, dreams within drams, that scene where the world curls up, “getting the kick” and so on. I mean, even the Music:

My point is: even if Inception didn’t make as much money as Avatar, it’s much closer to being a new kind of Matrix than Avatar. But of course, measuring success this way is much harder. However, I chose to do it anyway. Because I’d much rather work on a games-equivalent an Inception than on an Avatar.

What’s your suggestion for the new Matrix.

I’m back from Vienna and decided not to post yesterday due to exhaustion. The last couple of days were quite taxing. FROG was exciting! The conference was part of some big games festival. The location was Vienna’s town hall – an impressive and intimidating location. I held my presentation in this room with historical banners on the walls and chandeliers the size of compact cars.

Here’s where the magic happens… for realz

The rest of the building was turned into a miniature GamesCom complete with an eSports tournament. Too bad I didn’t have the time to check everything out.

But I had an opportunity to meet Katie Salen. I had also the pleasure to make a schnitzel with Ian Bogost (he made an argument that we were actually making the schnitzels by ordering them). We were accompanied by Chelsea Howe, a person I can only describe as a wicked servant of Evil – she is working for Zynga. Actually I’ve met Chelsea at last GDC already and by pure chance she is on a tour of Europe with a friend. She just happened to be in Vienna at that time and discovered the conference by pure accident. What a small world.

After the schnitzel it started to rain cats and dogs. Ian turned out to be the only one in our group who had a umbrella and an idea where the next subway station was. As he led us for a surprisingly long time trough the poring rain, it started to dawn on us that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to blindly trust the only person who wasn’t in danger of getting wet.

But that little bit of water turned out to be just a little splash compared to the dose I received on my trek from the train station to my hotel. The rain intensity increased to Origami Killer levels and the walk lasted at least for 15 minutes. Lesson 1: Take an umbrella with you. Lesson 2: Don’t save on Hotels if they turn out to be in the middle of nowhere. But I had a great time nonetheless. It was an inspiring day I’d gladly repeat again.

The term Bogost-Man is a reference to this article on Gamasutra which Chelsea dug out. I was just about to bash the text for presenting tired, outdated psychology theories and ending on a rant about how games designer’s only goal is to fabricate fun. On a closer inspection the text turned out to be satire. It makes me sad that the games culture is in a state where the irony of such pieces is too subtle to be instantly recognized.