We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for the following news.

Back in June, I sent a letter to my congressman, and also my two senators.

Lo and behold, today I received a reply from one of those Senators, Ms. Barbara Boxer. The reply, as you'll see below, is far from a form letter. It addresses the issue of ESRB ratings directly, and though Ms. Boxer certainly leaves her political options open, nonetheless it shows that she (or someone on her staff) read the letter thoroughly, and that she has an actual position, which I find to be reasonable. And yes, that is Babs's actual signature at the bottom.

Also in June, I encouraged other game developers to write to their representatives. I'm quite confident that none of you did. But I did. And I was heard. It's easy to get cynical about American politics, what with the nattering nawabs of negativism and all that. But you know what? When you speak with authority and clarity on a subject you can actually get heard, even if you aren't paying some jackass on K street a million dollars.

So, without further ado...

Listen, I was there at the beginning of loading screens. Back on the PS1/Saturn, we figured the consumer would have to suffer through loading screens for a while, but it would just be a matter of time before the tech eliminated the N64's cartridge advantage.

Boy oh boy, was I wrong.

I've been playing several Xbox360 games, and they ALL have nasty loading times. And don't even get me started on the PSP. This is the second time we've gone through a platform transition, and though graphics have taken a major leap, this awful thing called loading (which is just about the best way I can think of to make a player forget about the immersive graphics they've been watching) is, if anything, worse.

Come on, guys.

It doesn't have to be this way.
Rewind all the way back to PS1, and a game called Crash Bandicoot. In order to get highly detailed worlds and lengthy levels, the clever dudes at Naughty Dog decided to stream levels into memory in chunks, allowing the levels to be indefinitely long without loading. Sure there was some loading at the beginning of a level, but once it started, the player was in the experience for good.

Fast forward a wee bit, to Playstation 2. Once again Naughty Dog showed us how it's done, with the contiguous world of Jak and Daxter free of loading screens entirely. No loading screens. None. And hey, remember all those loading screens in GTA3? Yeah, me neither.

Even on the PSP, which is much and rightly maligned for its long seek and load times, the last game I worked on (Daxter) was played without load screens. Art for a "loading" screen wasn't even created.

On 360 however, the only game I'm playing without incessant loading is Geometry Wars.

My friends tell me that the brutal loads I've been experiencing with Oblivion are the result of some kind of bug, and it can be fixed by holding down some combination of keys while the game boots up. Yo, fire in the theater Bethesda Softworks! This loading is freaking killing me. Didn't anyone QA this game? How can this not be a priority?

Here's the one that really gets me. I'm playing Tomb Raider: Legend on 360, and I get killed (I do that a lot). And in order to restart from a continue point, I have to watch a loading screen. The game is loading the exact section of the world I just died in! I can fathom no reasonable excuse for this. My programmer friends explain that there's some kind of re-initializing or some other horseshit going on. Whatever. The audience, the player, doesn't know this and you can be damn sure doesn't care. We've had what, ten years to engineer around these issues?

It looks to me like the Best and Brightest of the videogames business have been frittering away their time on incremental graphics improvements, while elements that do genuine harm to the player experience have been allowed to fester. Nero fiddles, Rome burns. Same old story.

An analogy...
Let me explain this to you for a moment in terms that might make it more clear. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their book Rules of Play describe something the call the "magic circle" which the player enters into when playing a game. This magic circle applies to any game, and in the case of something like a sporting event, even applies to the fan. So imagine you're walking into your favorite sporting venue, and in the heat of the action, all the athletes stop, untie their shoes, look at them for a moment, then put them back on and lace them up again. They do this repeatedly throughout the game. Take you out of the magic circle yet?

OK but the announcer makes it better by announcing nice little trivia like "a basket from behind the curved line counts for three points!" or "if a player kicks the side of the ball, it will curve dramatically!". Makes it all better, right?

Right.

Let's wise up already
I think we finally have something of a consensus that improved graphics are not going to be enough by themselves to drive players to upgrade their hardware and software. I hear talk about something called "next generation gameplay," or "the HD era." I'm not sure what either of those really is, but if either of them means more, longer, stupider loading screens, I want no part of it, and I guarantee you, neither do the players.

Designers, start going to the mat, and quit letting lazy and/or chauvinistic programmers convince you that "better graphics" are the way you'll make a better game. You know better.

Programmers, you know better, too. At least, you'd better.

Producers, I'm counting on you. You're the key to this whole thing getting better, and don't think for a moment you're not.

How about we set a little goal: By the holiday season of 2008, no games should have play-interrupting loading screens. Who's with me?

So, E3 is dead.

I have to admit, I am genuinely stunned by the amount of 'good riddance' sentiment being thrown toward this news from inside the game development community. While I can see that E3 was incredibly expensive for those who were footing the bill (the publishers and platform holders), to me the cancellation was nothing more than a cold-hearted business decision, and will have the same kind of deleterious effect as most downsizings.

For me the loss of E3 cuts two ways. One is personal... I will quite simply miss it. The other though is that I honestly worry what this portends for the games industry. How will the loss of a focal annual event impact the standing of games in the popular culture?

Loss of a Friend
I went to every E3, even the ones in Atlanta, and several CES shows before it. And when May of 2007 rolls around, I will be very sad.

It's no exaggeration to say that I used to begin looking forward to the next E3 as soon as the prior E3 wrapped up. I would always go to at least two days of E3, even if I had no particular business to conduct. I would play many games, see many friends, and as much as I could, try to soak up the zeitgeist of the current industry. Are there a lot of FPS games this year? Do the Xbox 360 games really look that much better? I remember when the Xbox and Gamecube launched, EA had a display of Madden running on all three of the new platforms (Xbox/Gamecube/PS2) side by side. This was an incredibly useful demo regarding what the three systems would be capable of graphically.

What's the ratio of PC to console games on display? Wow, NCSoft sure has a big booth, with lots of games. They must be in it for keeps. Looks like everybody's doing an FPS this year. Oh man, did you see the Superman game, that was crap! (this particular comment being valid for a number of E3 shows). Mario and Crash... which one will win? How come they're not letting anybody play Tomb Raider? Did you see the line to see World of Warcraft? Dude, those "I'm Leroy Jenkins" shirts are hilarious. I think Dreamcast is dead. Who's playing at the Sony party this year? Wow, look at all those accessories for the PSP! I think Xbox is for real. The Chinese are in Kentia where the Koreans were two years ago. Looks like everybody's doing an RTS this year. Where do you suppose those Gizmondo guys get all their money? Gran Turismo looks amazing on PS2. Did you see Conker's Quest? I don't get The Sims. If I see one more cel shaded game I'm going to puke. What ever happened to Conker's Quest? Who's playing at the Sony party this year? I think Acclaim just doesn't get it. Ubi Soft has some great games. Any sighting of Conker's Quest? Hey weird, the US Army is here. 3DO looks like they've finally given up. I'm all jumpy from drinking that Bawls crap. Looks like everybody's doing an MMO this year. If Rockstar is trying to convince us they're all dicks, it's working. Why is everybody lining up to see Daikatana, anyway? You know what I liked - Pikmin. Looks like everybody's doing a sandbox game this year. I can't believe Nokia is still sticking with the N-gage. Who's playing at the Sony party this year?

These are all things I've said over the years at E3. All things that I observed at E3. You think I won't miss it?

A Cultural Icon Evaporates
Sure I understand that E3 was fundamentally a subsidized event, but its size and scope nonetheless served as a touchstone for games as a part of popular culture. If you were a national media outlet, and you only covered one games event for the year, there's no question it was E3. The big magazines, national papers, a smattering of cable TV outlets, all would descend on E3 to report on the games industry.

Was E3 the games industry for real? Certainly not. But neither are the Oscars the reality of Hollywood, but it's still a day for everybody to think about the movies. What will they cover now? I'm not sure. The "New E3" isn't going to fill the gap...that's more for the publishers to do business. GDC? God, I hope not. DICE? No, that would be silly.

My guess? Games will just see a long, predictable decline in cultural relevance.

The counter-argument goes, with a broadband world, MySpace and Xbox Live and all that, face to face contact is passe. Games can be marketed directly to consumers, so what's the point?

I say bullcrap. While I definitely believe in these outlets for both promotion and community, I don't believe it's possible, at least not yet, to generate a genuine cultural event online. I suspect that the people making this argument have never felt comfortable with the status of games as a genuine participant in popular culture. They long for the old days when games were a smaller, more comfortable community, and the makers and consumers had more in common. For these folks, E3 got more and more uncomfortable as time went by, and I understand this.

But you won't be surprised to hear that I respectfully disagree. I love the fact that games have become part of pop culture, and that the audience has become stunningly diverse in age and interest. And the people on the edges of that diversity are the ones we risk losing by canceling E3. The hardcore, the nerds, we'll never lose those people. But the loss of the hoi polloi, that's what I fear, both for the reduction in the market, but more importantly because it might drive us to be a more elitist, less inclusive industry. I don't want that.

Come next May, I think I'll throw a party. A nice wake seems like the least I can do for an old friend.

RIP, E3.

David Jaffe recently made a blog post in which he said that he's lost interest in creating single player adventure games, and proceeded to get hated on in a really big way for his post.

Dave's blog is read by a lot of fans, so probably the bulk of his hate mail was from those fans. But I'd wager that a fair amount was from David's colleagues in the game industry, and this disappoints me greatly. But then again, it's nothing new.

schadenfreude (n): pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.

As an industry, this is something we're really good at. We seem to resent each other's success so mightily, we're practically unable to acknowledge it. Hell I'm guilty of it far more than I should be. But I'm trying.

I think that schadenfreude is a lot of why people hate on a guy like Jaffe. He made a hell of a good game, he gets some props for it, we can't just let it lie. I'm not saying that Dave should get a free pass for life just because he made one good game - one of the other guiding principles fame in of any entertainment medium is "what have you done lately", and this has some validity. But God of War is a fine game, and Dave paid his dues working on solid stuff like the Twisted Metal series to get there.

As far as David's actual post, well I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. The question he poses implicitly, as to whether or not games are or should be fundamentally narrative experiences, is a valid intellectual question, and though David's blogging style is more personal and conversational, this shouldn't change the question at hand. I think it would be fun to respond directly to David's question, but that's a subject for another blog entry.

At the very least, let's give David props for putting together one of the more entertaining metaphors I've seen in a long time - carving a story in a wall with a trumpet? Man, that is good shit. I love that.

And I saw nothing in David's post that made me think "self-important, pompous ass" either. At least, no more self-important and pompous than a blog like this one. What I saw was a thoughtful expression of a highly personal opinion born of his own first-hand experience. I'd call that pretty legit commentary, whether or not you happen to agree. (Hey somebody's gotta do it. It's not like we have a strong tradition of game criticism out there...)

Indeed if you look at the history of David's blog, he goes out of his way to say nice things about people and their games and movies and whatnot. Sure David has an opinion, and his recent success has given his opinion a platform. But though I have to agree with the 'loudmouth' assessment (as does David), he's had every opportunity to be a prick to the rest of us, and he hasn't done it.

In short, Jaffe is not a hater, and we should learn from that.

I watched a great interview online a while ago that was filmed during E3 I think, and it had Harvey Smith, Will Wright, David Jaffe and Cliff Bleczynski. During the interview, Dave turned to Cliff and told him not to listen to the haters. Cliff is another one of those guys who gets it from the haters a lot, because of his extensive press exposure. But I've read what Cliff has written, and I've looked at his games - Cliff is a real game designer, far from the useless press whore he's frequently made out to be.

So you see this is the problem. It's easy to be a hater, easy to exercise your god-given right to schadenfreude, but when you do so, especially publicly, you're poisoning the well and keeping other thoughtful people, who maybe don't have the thick skin of a CliffyB, from speaking up. Guys like David Jaffe have better ways to expend their emotional energy than absorbing the barbs and arrows of his colleagues, and he couldn't be blamed if he takes his blog dark again as a result.

I'm not saying don't mutter your resentments to yourself or your peers in private - that's not realistic, schadenfreude after all being part of human nature. But when a person says something interesting or controversial in a thoughtful and reasonable way, respond in kind or don't respond at all. I.E., don't be a hater.

Keep it up Dave.

In thinking more over the weekend, I feel compelled to comment a bit further on my rather harsh indictment of the PS3. None of this softens my views, but might provide a bit more justification.

To my mind, there are two absolutely crucial blunders in the PS3 which have led them to bring to market utterly the wrong box. The first, over-speccing of the hardware, is shared somewhat with the Xbox360; the second, inclusion of blu-ray movie playback, is Sony's burden alone.

Over-Specced Hardware
Somewhere at the crossroads, Sony forgot what a game console is. Historically, a game console has been the best hardware that could be made to meet a certain price point. Consoles have been riddled with compromises, particularly in whatever happened to be the most expensive components of the day (usually memory), in order to hit a crucial price point that makes the console an easy holiday purchase for a family.

This is really a story about consoles versus personal computers.

Now computers being what they are, consoles also historically had certain advantages. Mostly, because they are such specific-use devices, they were frequently able to do things, particularly graphically, that general purpose PCs were unable to do, sometimes at any price. This was particularly true during the 2D era.

Even as PCs reached the raw compute capability to emulate the custom hardware in the consoles, the price differential between the console and the PC made the prospect of purchasing the latest Sonic game on PC seem ludicrous.

At this point however, PCs are so powerful, and so filled with custom hardware themselves as concerns graphics, that consoles must really stretch in order to maintain this historical window of dominance.

But you see, that's where Sony (and their lapdog Microsoft, too) get it all wrong with the current generation. As they continue to try desperately to stay out front of the PC, the consoles get bigger, noisier, heavier, kludgier, and most importantly, they get expensive.

In other words, the console manufacturers are making these boxes completely backwards: they forgot to build the best box for the dollar target. Ironically, Microsoft may be in the better position purely by way of having come out earlier. Their box is made of older, cheaper components and thus is really more akin to what the consumer really needs or is willing to pay for. And not meaning to quote Jason Rubin too many times, but the consumer really doesn't care about the supposedly-huge benefits of the "HD era".

And here's the real irony, and tragedy - none of this makes the even-more-expensive PC any more attractive as a game system. What we're really risking is a contraction in the overall market, and that's a shame.


That Stupid Blu-Ray Drive
Perhaps Sony Computer Entertainment was forced into this folly by its corporate parent, but that makes it no more forgivable. But blu-ray, and HD-DVD for that matter...those formats are straight up DOA. For me this is really similar to the problem the music industry manufactured when it tried to recreate the economic magic trick it pulled with the Compact Disc. The CD was so superior in so many ways to the analog media it replaced, it was a rare opportunity for the medium to actually be the message in music. Same thing with DVD over that clunky piece of crap called VHS. The first time I saw a live demo of DVD, I said to myself "I gotta get me some of that DVD!". It was compact, re-usable, had groovy menus and extras, and the picture quality was a quantum step above VHS.

I suspect that in time, a physical video format will supersede DVD. But it will happen slowly and may take years. Maybe not quite as slowly as the (probably never) adoption of SACD/DVD-audio, but it's sure not a must-have for your average movie fan. No, on both the video and audio fronts, iTunes represents the future. iTunes, for all its popularity, represents a step down in aural quality from CD, but it's still plenty good enough, and the convenience just can't be beat. Same thing for movies. I've got no interest at all in HD-DVD, but I do love those video podcasts.

So here's Sony, crippling their Playstation future with an optical drive that nobody wants.

This is just as dumb as it gets, in my opinion. Remember the PS2's limited memory? Well that's because memory was the most expensive component in the box, and Sony was smart enough to know they had to keep the overall cost down. Now we have the manufacturer pulling out all the stops on the most expensive component in the box, the optical drive. This would be dumb enough if it wasn't also a component that has no meaningful use. That's a serious double-whammy.

Microsoft gets a passing grade here. Somebody realized that the HD-DVD idea was a loser, and made it an optional add-on. Watch how many they sell. It won't be many. (I can't excuse MS though for the exclusion of a cheap part like the hard drive. That's just stupid IMO.)

Sorry Sony, but the more I think about it, the more I can't stand the PS3.

A few weeks removed from E3, what still sticks in my mind is a single number, and that number is six hundred.

Specifically, six hundred dollars - the price of the Playstation 3. Don't even start with me about the "cheaper" PS3 SKU. Just like with the bogus Xbox 360 'core' system, this is a cynical, terminally crippled offering whose only real use is as a PR tool. The PS3 launches at six hundred bucks. Take it or leave it.

Here's my gut reaction as a consumer to the $600 PS3: How come when every other tech thing I buy is getting cheaper and doing more and more, game consoles are getting incredibly more expensive to do basically the same thing? Fuck that.

I have to think, this has to be the reaction of the mainstream consumer base to the $600 PS3: Fuck That.

Not to sell Sony too far short, they seem to have sensed this. So we have Kutaragi-san now giving interviews trying to convince consumers that they should be comparing the PS3 not to their existing game console, but to their PC. Yeah, right Ken. After successfully selling tens of millions of Playstations and PS2s to consumers for the exact reason that the last thing they wanted to do for entertainment was to put another PC in their homes, you're trying to convince them that you were actually wrong all along.

Nintendo, meanwhile, is smelling blood in the water. Iwata-san said recently that the Wii "is not a next generation console." What sounds initially like some kind of admission of defeat is in fact a stroke of genius - Nintendo understands that in terms of raw technology, the consumer is basically done. The "HD Era" as Microsoft likes to call it is pretty much a crock of shit, and graphics look pretty damn good already. If God of War can look as good as it does and run at 60fps, we're pretty much done, and for those paying attention, Jason Rubin told us as much almost five years ago at GDC. But Nintendo is offering something new where it actually has resonance: in the input device. The Wii's gestural controller may succeed or it may fail, but either way, that's something I'm actually willing to spend money to find out...especially if as Iwata-san suggests, I will only have to pay a current-gen price for the opportunity.

But $600 for the same old shit with more polygons and pixels? Fuck that.

I'm trying to think of the right historical analogy for how I feel about PS3, and though it's highly imperfect, the best I can come up with is the Sega Saturn. I remember the first E3, when Sega announced the machine, showed amazing games like Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally and dropped the bomb that it was "available in stores today!" After the incredible success of the Genesis/Megadrive, It seemed like all Sega had to do really was show up for the next generation. And here they had seemingly dealt the death blow by beating Sony and Nintendo to market.

But none of that mattered. Sega's Saturn was an overpriced and underwhelming hardware, difficult to program for and with bits of it (the second CPU) kludged in when initial performance failed to live up to expectations. Developers struggled with it, consumers lost faith, and though the Saturn didn't knock Sega out of the hardware business, it knocked them out of the business cycle, and despite the fact that the Dreamcast actually addressed a great many of the Saturn's technical shortcomings, it was too little, too late.

Obviously the parallel doesn't really work at the detail level; Sony did not try to 'time the market' with the PS3, and the hardware does look at least equivalent to its competition. But the disconnect with the consumer looks very real to me. And though I have no doubt whatever that there will be a PS4 at some point, I wonder what kind of market share it will be attempting to inherit.

As anyone can tell you, my bona fides as a Microsoft hater are about as strong as anybody's. This blog after all is composed on my Mac - the tenth Macintosh I have owned. And though I admire the hell out of Nintendo's games, I have never been accused of being a fanboy. All the while, my relationship with Sony has been responsible for the entirety of my good fortunes in this business. So watching Sony stumble is not something I relish. I greet this feeling with a combination of sadness and disappointment, and having to re-assess what has been a wonderfully successful partnership.

But...six hundred bucks?

Fuck that.