Not actually being Italian, and having only pidgin Italian language skills, buying videogames in Italy is a bit of a crapshoot. You can never be completely sure of what languages are going to be on the disc when you stick it in your machine. Some publishers will put handy little charts on the back of boxes saying whether the text or voice, or both, are in Italian, but this isn’t entirely reliable. Sometimes you’ll pick up a game that proudly announces “Completamente in Italiano” (completely in Italian), but this isn’t always true. Mirror’s Edge, for example, even has Asia Argento providing the Italian-language voice-over for Faith, but this is entirely optional, you can choose to play the game in English. In other words – what they’re saying is that yes, the game on the disc is completely in Italian, but it’s also completely in English too. Other times though, they’re a little more literal. Completely in Italian, no other options. I’ve been stung with this enough times to completely kill any impulse-buying of videogames¹.

Anyway, my point I’m trying to make with all this is to highlight that you’d think I’d be totally psyched for digital distribution, right? I’ll never have to worry about language problems again – if I’m looking at the English-language version of the Xbox Live Marketplace, then the games I download will almost certainly be in English too. No more linguistic Russian Roulette! Microsoft recently took this whole digital distribution thing a little further by announcing their Games on Demand (GoD) service. It’s sort of a retooling of the “Xbox Originals” option which allows you to download entire Xbox 360 games to your hard drive, without having to go to a shop and buy a retail product.

Now, let’s leave aside the issue of tangibility for a second (I buy things to own THINGS, things I can touch), and let’s focus instead on one of the problems I’m having with this idea – price.

There’s an established economy of games. They come out, then a few months later, once the lustre has washed off and they’re sliding down the sales charts, the price comes down. This way, the people who are really excited about a game can pay full whack for it, and the rest of us can ‘dabble’, picking up games we’re unsure about for a cheaper price. Call it the fanboy tax – extra cost for being an early adopter. Then you also have second-hand games, where you can pick up a game for next to nothing. The only problem with this, from the games publisher point of view, is that they don’t see a penny of the money that comes from the second-hand games market. It all goes to the video game shop that sells it.

Digital distribution doesn’t have any of this. There’s the occasional discounted item. A few bucks off one particular game, but nothing to get too excited about. For the most part, prices remain the same. And it’s easy to understand why. Regular, brick-and-mortar retailers have to move stock. There’s no point having a game sitting on the shelf years after it’s being released. They need that shelf-space for new games that are even more likely to sell, so they’re continually dropping prices on old games. Digital distribution doesn’t have this worry. The game can stay on the server for years and it doesn’t really cost them much to keep it there. For example, let’s look at Oblivion’s infamous horse armour, one of the most maligned pieces of downloadable content ever. It came out costing 200 Microsoft points and got almost universally panned for being a ridiculous waste of money – not least of which because PC gamers get this kind of content for free. Personally, I’d LOVE to see sales figures for this item, because I’m guessing they’re pretty low. Despite this, if you go onto the Xbox Live Marketplace now, you’ll find the horse armour still going for 200 microsoft points. This is content for a game that came out over three years ago and is still going at full price.

Is this some Long Tail bullshit coming into play? Maybe, on some spreadsheet, somewhere, it really does make more sense to sell 10 horse armors at 200 points than 100 horse armours at 50 points. I don’t know. The point is, there’s little of the traditional drop-off you’d expect from videogames.

I personally don’t tend to buy videogames at their full price. There’s only a couple of games I cared enough about to buy on day one. At an estimate, I would say my games collection is split into thirds – one third second-hand, one third bought at a discount or during sales, and one third bought at full price. But here’s the rub. Each game I have for a particular system is another reason for me to remain loyal to that system. My Xbox 360 has red-ringed twice already and is likely to die again, and this time it will be out of warranty. When it dies, what am I going to do? Am I going to abandon the 50-something games I have? Of course not, I’ll probably pony up for a new Xbox 360 console. Each one of the games is another reason for not wanting to leave it. Now, imagine I only had a third of those games – I don’t think I would have much of a problem is throwing two fingers towards Microsoft and saying “Balls to you guys, call me when you can make a console that doesn’t kill itself every six months.”

To make matters even more difficult, there’s also the lack of a physical product. There are two main issues here. One, without a physical connection to an object, it’s even easier for me to walk away, because it just doesn’t resonate with me as something I own. A great case in point is the Wii. Like any dumb prick, I’ve gone onto their Virtual Console and re-bought a whole bunch of games I’ve already bought multiple times before. But if my Wii was to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t be all that upset, nor would I be in any rush to replace it (apart from wanting to get back to EA Sports Active, but that’s another post). It’s because I don’t feel like I actually own those virtual console games. They’re just virtual. This is stupid and shallow, I know, but then again, so am I. The other problem is that without the issues surrounding physical distribution, such as shipping, boxing, pressing the discs etc, it’s hard for me to gauge exactly what constitutes a decent value-proposition. Without all the detritus, how much is a triple-A game actually worth? I can hear my wife’s voice right now reminding me, “it’s worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it”, but that really doesn’t answer my question for me. How much would I reasonably be willing to pay for it?

Hopefully, Microsoft are looking at the iTunes App store and taking notes, because the economy there seems to be finding a new model to work off. Games are cheap and used to drive sales of other games. Frequent discounts also help drive sales – as an example of this, think about how many people bought Peggle when they reduced the price to $1. Or even look at Steam, which is constantly reassessing the prices of the games it offers.

On the one hand, I’m all for Microsoft’s Games on Demand. It’ll take all of the headache from buying games and only just feed into my misanthropic, agorophobic nature by meaning I never need to leave the house and deal with another human person again. It also feeds into my impulsive tendencies by making it possible for me to, once again, think about a game and buy it almost instantly. On the other hand, if the price model is all wrong, I think I’d still rather just buy the stuff online and wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive. You see, it’s all still a bit of an experiment, and one I’m not entirely sure I want to be part of.

1. Although even this wasn’t enough to stop me playing through Call of Duty 4 in Italian when I didn’t understand a word they were saying. [↩]

Thoughts I had while looking at TheBig Picture’s coverage of the Iranian elections (in order they came to me):

1. A couple of random boilers aside, Iranian women are totally hottt.
2. Does Iran have an awesome universal dental system? Even the old woman in #32 has perfect chompers.
3. Mousavi supporters are mostly young, hip and progressive. Ahmadenijad supporters are dicks. Look at the terror in the eyes of that wheelchair-bound supporter they yanked into the air.
4. I need a beard-comb too. Look at how luscious that cleric’s beard is!

We just got back from a few days in Barcelona. It was my first time at Primavera, and I came back completely wrecked, so here are some lessons we’ve learned for next year.

1. Research bands a bit more next year. I only started listening to bands towards the end there, which meant that I went to see bands I hated (Liars) and missed bands I probably would have liked (Marnie Stern). Going to start early next year, come up with a proper schedule of bands I want to see.
2. Book a nice apartment early, tell people about it, tell them beds go on a first-come, first-served basis.
3. Bring lots and lots of pharmaceuticals. I’ve got a bad cold now that I’m sure could have been avoided if I’d only been guzzling down the Berocca during the festival.
4. Pack shorts. Sure, it was only 20 degrees in Barcelona, but my skin sees the sun so rarely that I should use every opportunity I can get.
5. Work on some kind of GPS locator system. I spent €40 on credit over the weekend, just to call and text people “Where are you? Wait, where? Someone wave or stand up so I can see yis.” I figure a kind of a cut-rate MacGuyver GPS locator would be less expensive.
6. Booby-trap my wallet. Final tally: Muggers/pickpockets: 5, Irish Chumps: 0. They didn’t get me personally, but that was mostly just luck. Next year, I’m putting an dye-pack in my wallet.
7. Have a liver transplant waiting for me when I get home.

ps – 2010 already! Fuck!

Believe me, it was an extreme act of desperation that drove me to picking up a copy of Click Magazine. I was facing an hour’s wait at the opticians, I had walked off without a book, and the only newsagent nearby had an abysmal selection of magazines and newspapers. So I was pretty happy to have found anything that catered even slightly to my personal tastes. I thought, how bad can it be?

I have so many problems with Click, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Let’s start with the overall tone of the magazine. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Its masthead screams “Ireland’s gaming, movies & technology magazine.” What’s that old saying about being a jack of all trades and a master of none? It applies perfectly to this magazine. It tries to cover a whole range of topics, but then offers nothing compelling for any of them. The news is already out of date and the reviews are for movies that have mostly already come and gone from the cinema. Worse still, the features straddle the line between “toothless” and, more unforgivably, regurgitation of press releases. For example, an interview with Martha Rotter, a developer from Microsoft Ireland, asking her about her favourite gadgets. Mobile? Latest Windows Mobile 6.1 doo-dad. PC? Samsung netbook running Windows 7. She owns a Mac Mini, but installed Windows Home Server on it and uses it to store media. One gadget she absolutely couldn’t live without? A fucking Zune. Seriously hard-hitting stuff, guys. Woodward and Bernstein are shitting themselves.

I also have problems with the way things are written. Reviews don’t seem to match the score. The text of the Role Models review is generally positive, but then drops a 3/5 score which seems to come from nowhere. They finish their Patapon 2 review by saying “The most original game of the year? Probably.” Really guys? The most original game of the year is a sequel? Isn’t that a contradiction? And you would be hard pressed to find a single article in the entire magazine that doesn’t start with a few paragraphs of history on whatever is being said. It might seem like I’m just picking nits at this stage, but this kind of lazy writing genuinely bothers me, especially in days when magazines with genuine voices and something to say are closing down all around us (EGM, Blender).

It’s still early days for Click, and maybe, just maybe, things will improve. But, despite some problems, most magazines I really care for ¹ had strong writing coming out of the gate and only reached the level of insipidity as Click is showing when they reached the end of their run. I agree that there is a market for an Irish magazine dealing with games, movies and technology. Is Click that magazine? I don’t think so.

1. I have an extra-special place in my heart for Neon – RIP [↩]

In an interview with Empire magazine, Steven Lisberger, director of Tron, talks about the way technological constraints forced him to make the decisions that gave Tron its distinctive look. He says

Now, one looks at videogames and they’re so realistic … In some ways, the capability to generate reality, which was supposed to liberate us, has actually limited us.

He’s saying that modern videogames are being forced into the technological arms race where every game has to strive for a new level of reality, and that this is affecting creativity within the medium. Now, with all due respect to Mr. Lisberger – and I count Tron as being one of my top 20 films of all time – this is horseshit. And what makes it worse is that it’s commonly repeated horseshit.

Like the other horseshit-repeaters, Mr. Lisberger is mistaking “pushing the boundaries” for “moving the goalposts.” What do I mean by this? Well, it’s probably more easily explained by example. We all know that animation has moved on enormously in the last 15 years. Disney (briefly) killed off its 2D animation department in the wake of computer animation brought in by Toy Story. And now everything is moving towards completely 3D movies like Bolt and Monsters v Aliens. Does this mean that traditional animation is dead and that all animated movies must use the latest whizz-bang computer graphics?

Fuck no.

In the last few years we’ve had Les triplettes de Belleville and Persepolis. These are both films that have used extremely traditional animation methods to tell their stories. There’s no doubt that they could have been done using 3D computer animation, but the creators chose not to. The option was there for them, but they decided that their stories would be better told through traditional means. Fair enough, right?

So why can’t the same be said for videogames? For a perfect example of this, look at the Wii. It completely ducked out of the graphical arms-race and has carved out a solid niche with titles that deliberately do not strive for reality, and we’re seeing terrific amounts of creativity there. No More Heroes, Mad World… Christ, even Wii Sports has its own style. And there’s no denying the success of the Wii.

And this isn’t limited to the Wii. There are also things like Braid and the PixelJunk games, which also sidestep the need for a perfectly rendered reality. And these aren’t particularly unknown games either. I figure if a game has a review from Soulja Boy, it’s safe to consider it fairly well known. And it’s not as if there’s even a basic level of graphical fidelity that serves as a barrier to entry for videogames. Look at the stuff Jason Rohrer puts out. His development machine for Passage was a 250Mhz PC – a machine that’s probably over ten years old at this stage.

I guess my point is that I’m sick of this “modern life is rubbish” bullshit being spouted by people. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we must. Technology is limiting you, Mr. Lisberger? You’re just using it wrong.