Sorry for the extended absence. As of today, I am working on a sizable paper for Law and Literature, editing two professional Law Review pieces, revising my own Law Review piece for publication, and trying to keep up on my reading and prepare for finals. Last night we entertained company, tonight is the Barrister's Ball, tomorrow my family will be coming through town, next Thursday they'll be back through town, next Saturday I'm escorting my wife to the Whitney Awards, and then it will well and truly be finals season.

That said... let's talk about video games for a little while. d^_^b

The Artistic

Now, I've always numbered myself among the "core" gamer demographic--my favorite games of all time include such time-devouring literary classics as Fallout, Fallout II, and Final Fantasy 6. But as you might imagine, my busy schedule doesn't allow for a lot of gaming these days. I've worked hard to wedge some Super Smash Bros. Brawl into my life, because I've been anxiously anticipating that game for well over a year, but for the most part if I'm going to game, it has to be in small chunks, often between classes or during mealtime or what have you. I have approached this dilemma from a couple different angles, with varying degrees of success, but along the way I've enjoyed seeing how gaming is evolving to respond to an aging, expanding demographic.

I started with some short "artistic" pieces after reading this article on Jason Rohrer's artistic game "Gravitation." Basically, these are games that employ heavy symbolism and simple gameplay mechanics to convey a message on par with any epic role-playing game--with a tiny fraction of the time investment. I was more intrigued by "Gravitation" than "Passage," but both were interesting experiences. I also downloaded Rod Humble's games; I have played through "The Marriage" several times and while it lacks the emotional punch of Rohrer's stuff (especially Gravitation), it is slightly more engaging in terms of gameplay mechanics.

The thing about all of these games is that, while they succeed to varying degrees, they communicate on a very artistic level. They are to paintings what longer games are to movies, and so these artistic pieces must by definition compress their message, boil it down to essentials. Gravitation is especially good at this. I was almost as invested in Gravitation's characters after two minutes as I was in Aeris Gainsborough after twenty hours.

The tradeoff, of course, is that Gravitation only entertained me for a few minutes. Progression is limited to a single game, and while I will occasionally go back to experience it, like a new song or an old classic, the first time through is always special in a way that return visits can never quite match. Getting "more" out of a second read or second look is always intellectually rewarding, but it lacks that cutting-edge thrill of Dynamism, I guess.

The Passive

But, as a consequence of my love for story-heavy role-playing games, I was hoping for something with a little more persistence. You know--steady progression, gradual character advancement, that sort of thing. To this end I dipped my toes into the realm of "passive gaming." I picked up PMOG, which is a Firefox plugin that gives you a "character" that advances as you browse the web.

I really like the concept--while I'm doing stuff that I would probably be doing anyway, I am also playing a game! Augmented reality, here I come! But sadly, I found PMOG too much MOG and too little P. The less passive you are, the more the game rewards you, so it has the same problem that every other multi-player game has--all the game's rewards flow to the most active players. Which is okay, I guess, if you aren't trying to build your game around the idea of being passive.

The Social

In between these two extremes is the social game, which I encountered on Facebook. This is a little disturbing but I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise. Facebook "apps" like "Owned!" and "Knighthood" make it possible for me to check in once or twice a day, tell the game what to do, and then not worry about it. They're not quite so passive as the "passive gaming" genre, nor quite so artistic as the "artistic gaming" genre, but I see a lot of potential here.

For example, "Owned" is a great allegory not just of market forces, but of military buildup and intellectual property. In "Owned," you bid for people's Facebook profile pictures. You get more money by inviting friends or giving pictures you've purchased to other friends. The inflation effect on "Owned" dollars (called "Lunch Money") is thus rampant. Everyone keeps buying the same things back from one another, increasing everyone's costs without really accomplishing anything.

Predictably, pictures of suggestively-posed young women are good for turning a quick profit, but there's more to it than that. For example, one of my friends engaged in an over-the-top bidding war for my wife's profile picture. Eventually, hers was the only picture I could afford to buy back... and then my friend inflated her price well beyond my ability to pay. So, with my wife's assistance, I found a way to keep his money and effectively steal her picture back. This little plot cost him around one million "Lunch Money."

I'm not one for fighting dirty, but I thought it interesting in retrospect that, after a long, drawn out death-spiral of a "fair fight," when faced with a choice between admitting defeat or "going nuclear," I reflexively went for the big red button. Had I been presented with such a choice at the outset, I would likely have shrugged it off, but the gradual escalation of (friendly!) hostilities put me in a completely separate frame of mind. Fortunately, my friend is a good sport d^_^b. But this microcosm of military arms buildups was an interesting one.

Trickier still, the way I finagled this "art theft" was to have my wife remove her profile picture and replace it with an identical one. Talk about a great IP metaphor! Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, all engaged in "owning" something that, technically, remains under the complete control of its originator. You can buy someone's picture for ten million "Lunch Money" and they can delete their picture and keep your money! In this bold new era of digital delivery, the analogy is frightening. You bought a song on iTunes, but your computer crashed? Word around the Web suggests that whether you can get your music back is a hit-or-miss proposition, but you will definitely get no refund. How about the revocation of decryption keys on the next-generation Blu-Ray video media? The efforts of companies like Sony to keep piracy at bay might inadvertently result in you losing the ability to play some of the movies you purchased. The right of First Sale is gradually eroding, and the "Owned" application is a great example of what happens next. When you buy things with DRM, your "ownership" is at the mercy of the content providers. Like feudal lords who could never own the land but only "hold" it for the King, DRM makes "intellectual property" a contingent affair.

Despite this potential for carrying on interesting dialogues, my biggest criticism of these games is that they aren't very well thought through. Most of them, in order to succeed monetarily, require you to "recruit your friends" if you want any hope of success. And while I have some friends who are happy to play a game or two, a lot of my social connections are professional in nature, and I don't need to be pestering classmates to come buy my picture in a faux-auction.

Worse, these games have the same drawbacks inherent in most multi-player games--the greatest rewards go to those who invest the most time. This is the fundamental real-life rule that single-player games neatly circumvent. Is it possible--or even desirable--that a multi-player game should find a way around this?

Synthesis

All of this probably sounds esoteric to many of my readers, but I'm just trying to wrap my head around it all. "Video game" means so much more than it used to, and these three subgenres are not the only experimental approaches available. But while each had their respective charms, in the end none of them satisfy me the way "classic" gaming still satisfies me. The artistic games came close, but ultimately I would rather be playing Smash Bros. Brawl.

What do my readers think? Are there other experimental genres out there that you recommend? Am I hoping for too much to think that there might someday be a less time-consuming way to really scratch my gaming itch?