In spite of having had many weightier and more meaningful ideas and events to report since the start of my de-facto blogging hiatus of so many months, I have decided to briefly interrupt my silence with such an underwhelming announcement as the following: Contra 4, a game to which I have made various significant technical contributions, has been released. And though I a) have a developer's copy of the game, and b) I get a free official copy, I'm thinking this one might be worth a trip down to the local game store for a purchase.

Maybe it's because my current job's in the industry, but it feels like there's never been more hype over video games than now, with all the brouhaha that's being kicked up over the next generation of consoles--I say next but by Sunday it'll officially be current instead. When I was at E3 in the spring, I found myself so completely saturated with neon and gunshots that it was hard to take any of it quite seriously, but half a year later there's a sense that something deeper is brewing, something more significant than the usual incremental step in technical glitziness.

What's gotten everyone by the balls at the minute is the Wii, Nintendo's incredibly-hyped gyroscope-enabled console that comes out this Sunday. While there's been relatively little coverage of the Wii in mainstream media--certainly I've seen many more XBox commercials on TV than anything to do with the Wii--most of the special-interest press seems convinced that the Wii is going to steal a large chunk of the market from Sony, whose own 3rd-gen PlayStation console was released in limited numbers today. I've been told by some that the lack of Wii advertising is in reality some kind of deliberate negative publicity on the part of Nintendo, who, so the theory goes, is afraid that anticipation for the Wii is too hot for what the production lines can actually support this winter. That's a wacky explanation to me, but accurate or not, it sort of represents how far gone expectations for this thing have become. The way Nintendo's managed to capture the hip consumer's imagination and adulation through style points and out-of-the-boxness is very much Apple-like, and you even begin to suspect this was entirely on purpose when you look at the smoothed-over minimalist aesthetics of both the Wii's print/web marketing and the actual console itself.

And yet it took me about 120 seconds of watching Gears of War played through the office's XBox 360 and high-definition TV to convince me that what we're really going to see is the Wii getting thoroughly trashed by its more muscular competitors. I'll give Nintendo about 6-12 months of heady excitement followed by a sharp decline, which in the video game industry means it'll be essentially dead on arrival. The Wii's hardware is at least three or four years behind the curve, and I've heard reliable reports from actual developers that the wireless remotes that have been so important to the hype are in fact disappointingly limited and weird-feeling (and let's not forget that it's inherently copyable and improvable tech, whereas a deficiency in processing power is, in the world of consoles, incurable). My own theory about the lack of Wii television adverts is that the marketers have found it really difficult to show off the remote control system (to wit, having actors waggle a plastic baton around in mid-air as if they're swinging a sword/shooting a gun/punching the air) in a way that doesn't look silly and unremittingly gay--and gay's absolutely the right word there, in its hip, co-opted 21st century sense, the one that evokes a knowing, ironic, and fundamentally insincere nostalgia for tight pants and flamboyantly effeminate men who dance with loose-limbed abandon, which itself evokes certain uncomfortable and yet deeply-held notions of childishness, mental deficiency, and straight-out insanity.

Then there's the fact that Nintendo's whole strategy with the Wii is ultimately retrograde, a kind of Good Ol' Times penny-arcade cartoon artifice dressed up with a rhetoric of simplistic, "innovative" fun. Actually I think there might be something substantial there, something purer and more artistic than the reality-simulation that most of modern gaming is headed towards, but from an economic standpoint there's no way it's going to comprise a dominant portion of the market. When it's done right (which is incredibly rare and hard to do), you get something like Tetris or Zelda, which in no way pretend to be real but are more like supercharged board games or coffee-table puzzles, i.e., the sort of activities that engage your primate delight in geometric niceness or attaching causes to effects.

But what's really going to sell is plain old escapism. Watching Gears of War, a game that I think is on a completely new plateau, was a minor revelation for me. The game had none of the polygonal feel that's typical of even the most recent 3D games--it was more like watching a fully-rendered CG movie, only the game images were fully interactive and drawn in real-time. There was absolutely zero difference between the aesthetics of gameplay and those of the cutscenes--this partly because the former is suffused with scripted events and voice-overs and basically really well-directed, but I have to think the real key is in the seamlessness of the graphics. What we're dealing with here is the fact that video games are starting to cross this theoretical threshold past which so little is left to the imagination (and disbelief is suspended via aesthetics to such a degree) that we've reached a new kind of entertainment that's complexly but identifiably distinct from its historical forebears.

Lest I start to sound a little too much like a game industry shill, I'll have to bring up the fact that all this tends to offend a certain prurience I've developed regarding the effects and psychic value of video games. What all the threshold-crossing and immersiveness of next-gen gaming implies to me is that we're also heading towards new, yet-unseen levels of stultifying, soul-denying, and downright unhealthy entertainment. I don't mean to be too dismissive of the low-culture here, but think about the kind of role something like TV plays in your life: sure, it's fun and you're informed by it, but you also pay for it with your physical inactivity and time wasted and with all of the ads consumed in the process. What we're looking at with the new consoles is a style of gaming that's able to match, for the first time, the levels of hypnotic escapism that you could only achieve previously through blockbuster movies, and available via online ordering and distribution without your needing to get up from the sofa. These are purely technical achievements but their effect is hardly a technicality. I sort of think we are on the verge of something new.

On the other hand, maybe it might not mean so much at all. At the office we've got an entertainment center stocked out with pretty much every electronic diversion you can think of, old-school and new, and yet most of it goes unattended, which is legitimately shocking and seeming entirely out of character for a building-ful of nerds. Generally if there's anyone on it, it's a few people from the creative staff who are not so much playing the games as studying them with neutrally-engaged, work-like expressions on their faces. The things that actually get the most of the attention at work are the foosball table and ping pong table and indoor basketball hoop.

One of the benefits of working on video games designed for six-year-old girls is that I get automatic entry into the medium-exclusive, medium-cheeseball nerd spectacle that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, now ongoing at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Prior to attending I had the following expectations:

1. I would see more nerds than I have ever seen in my entire life.
2. The male-female ratio would exceed 5.
3. I would not be impressed by anything I saw there.

I was +1 upon arrival. Even before as we parked the car, we beheld flocks of industry insiders trudging from the parking lot to the convention center, and it was an impressive parade of mohawks, pasty-white skin, camos pants, couch potato obesity, Asian girlfriends, and seriously excessive gadget fetishism along the lines of filming the concrete facade of the convention center with an expensive digital camcorder while waiting for the crossing light to change. There was a guy we ran into who made a thirty-second, straight-faced pronouncement about some free Nintendo t-shirt and the elaborate means he would employ to acquire one. There was another guy who was playing his PSP while waiting in line to play another game, wrapped up like a hungry child with a Twinkie, all the while oblivious to the fact that he was in the way of a whole crowd of people trying to get by.

When we showed up we patrolled around the Sony floor for a little while and elected to get in line for a peek at the Nintendo Wii; the Wii is officially knocking the publicity shit out of the PS3 and Xbox and we only decided to hop into the ridiculously long queue after we met another guy from the company who'd give us cuts. It took us about 90 minutes to get to the primary Wii exhibit. This stretch of time we filled with many very, very bad puns on the word "Wii"; these puns felt old and unfunny and lame from the moment we heard the announcement of the name "Wii" but have nonetheless been the subject of countless penis jokes at the office for a solid two weeks running, and with absolutely no sign of abating whatsoever. While waiting in line, one guy gave an attractive passerby some directions and then turned to us, pointing suggestively at his groin: "In fact, she can play the Wii right now if she wants." "I've actually been playing with the Wii for years now," announced another guy.

Pleasantly, I was mostly wrong about the woman thing. I assumed there would be the painfully awkward situation in which the female population would be composed exactly of dog-faced, bespectacled industry skags on one end, and struggling actresses oozing out of the booths with leather bustiers and plastic broadswords on the other. Instead there were numerous respectably-presented girls with whom I'd be delighted to flirt save for the crushingly total inappropriatness of the entire situation. To take nothing away from the women of the gaming industry at large, what I really wasn't expecting was the number of camera-weilding nymphs with media badges--that girls who do photography or play music have automatic appeal makes not very much sense but is anyways a pretty basic fact of life. Also surprising was how well-informed, confident, and generally competent some of the booth babes were when they were working the E3 crowds. This actually gets me every time I go to an expo, which probably says something about how readily I jump to the conclusion that hot chicks are dumb. (For example, when we walked by the press table for the gaming mag Tips & Tricks, manned exclusively by booth babes, I just had to mention that they ought to call that magazine Ho's and Tricks instead. There was no way I was going to miss making that joke. Zero chance. I was laughing out loud even before I started to say anything. Anyway, I don't think the guys I was with got it.)

There is this weird split in the way game industry does its marketing at E3--the same institution that loads the floor with C-rate models also has some pretty weird attempts at subtlety and sophistication in their advertising campaigns. Sony's mantra was "Play beyond" or something, and there were abstruse and fairly silly commercials playing on video feeds all over their exhibit. One featured a girl swinging monkey-bar style from hanging ring to ring with a vaguely orgasmic smirk; after the girl navigates a few rings, the camera pans back and it's revealed that she's swinging over a river of lava. Another commercial had two counterposed fists playing paper-rock-scissors, the twist being that the fists would transform grotesquely into computer-modeled paper sheets, rocks, and scissors. I think they are trying to communicate the innocence and pure funness of their games, while beating their chests about their technological ability to put that funness in interesting contexts. They do a terrible job of getting this across. Even aside from the fact that the commercials are terribly constructed from a craft standpoint, the entire idea is just whacky and forced to begin with--it's easy to imagine behind these videos the exaggerated posturing of twentysomething English majors desperate to convince themselves that marketing can be more than what it actually is.

Even worse might be "Wii" itself--even the ongoing and constantly crude panning of this name doesn't do justice to how catostrophically dumb it is. More specifically, it isn't the badness of a particular idea but rather the lengths to which a bad idea is taken that really does the damage. The first prominently featured link on the Official Wii home page is labled "Philosophy", and leads to this absolute stunner:

Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.

Wii will put people more in touch with their games ? and each other. But you?re probably asking: What does the name mean?

Wii sounds like ?we,? which emphasizes this console is for everyone.
Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.

Just asinine. It is a punch to the gut, obviously something dreamed up by a group of people mutually reinforcing their self-delusion for months on end. I can sort of guess how this happened: one or two really idealistic marketing guys get laughed out of a meeting room but manage to impress one of the partners, and so then other people are willing to give the idea the benefit of doubt, and then there are mock-ups made, everyone is working hard to make it work and the snowball starts to pick up speed and mass, and then people have put in way too much effort to even consider looking behind, to even allow the holy-shit-just-what-are-we-doing-and-what-have-gotten-ourselves-into feeling to sink in for longer than a second--the thought is just way, way too terrifying--and what dissenters are left have nothing to do but accept the fact that the only option is to slam the gas to the floor, get the thing red-lining, and hope they can smash through the enormous brick wall that has been erected in front of them. "Wii" doesn't detract from the technology itself, and people who are excited about the games will obviously buy it no matter what, but let's not fuck around here: it is as close to an objectively stupid name as I've heard, and I would probably make unfavorable judgments about your value system and personality if you announced that you thought it was a good idea.

I didn't get to play any of the new marquee games for the Wii, but I did get a chance to noodle around with its much-touted and argued-over gyroscopic controller. I give it a qualified thumbs-up. I heard murmurs from all over the floor about how surprised people were about how responsive the controller it was, but it also seemed to me that people were having quite a hard time getting the thing to do what they wanted it to do; it's either a learning curve thing, or a bust waiting to happen. I don't have the imagination to get too excited about this thing, as I think it adds very little to a game hit tennis balls with a swing instead of pressing the B button, or to shoot things by pointing at the screen as opposed to aiming with a mouse. The new Zelda game looked very much in this mold, with superficial replacements of certain button presses with aerial gestures (e.g. drawing-a-bow motion for shooting arrows, overhand swings for chucking boomerangs) put over an otherwise familiar-looking game. The new Mario game, on the other hand, looked thoroughly fresh and badass, but since I didn't get to play I am not certain it uses the controller well either.

The best part of the day was when I stopped at a booth for the PC real-time strategy game Company of Heroes. A guy standing at the exhibit offered to demo the game for me and it occurred to me that he was probably a developer or producer or otherwise intimately related to the making of the game. He gave me a rundown of the game's key features in a mostly non-sales fashion and talked at length on the goals the development team had--they wanted to make the terrain destructible and modifiable by the player, and they wanted to emphasize the value of taking and holding territory. I didn't ask for such a thorough explanation, but I thought it was neat to hear about the creative decisions, which, I suppose, is much more interesting to me than the actual gameplay and graphics. It was also nice to have a real conversation, as opposed to the "Hey check out this astonishing blippity doodad thing here" which I got a lot, e.g. when I asked the guy at the Nintendo exhibit if the Wii did hardware or software emulation to provide backwards compatibility for N64 games, he told me to talk to public relations.

Maybe the truly strange thing of the day was how fundamentally unexcited I was to attend what was essentially a massive, cutting-edge arcade with free replays. I remember as a kid being excited to go to a laundromat convention with my friend's family because there'd be one or two arcade machine vendors there; I remember reading issues of Nintento Power over and over and fantasizing about each and every game; I remember just dying to get a SNES console; I remember spending hours fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys so I could play the crappiest games imaginable. There is this mix of ADD and boredom and self-consciousness that I get when playing most games nowadays, like I have played the exact same game before with a slightly different cosmetic presentation, like I already know what's coming, like I feel like I've basically figured out what a game is about thirty seconds into it, like I'm sure that playing any further would be an unrewarding waste of time. There is this weird feeling that I am just watching an algorithm run itself.

Barring the occasional Knights of the Old Republic or Virtua Tennis (which in essence are either 10-hour movies or social grease for friendly shit-talking amongst friends), this is what happens to me now every time I sit down to play a game. This may be something I have truly and unequivocally grown out of, as opposed to many other things--procrastination, fear of rejection, not thinking before speaking--that I haven't. That's a tough way of putting it, since it's not really that I think games are kids' stuff. Undeniably, I do feel guilty playing games, since I always feel there's something more constructive I could be doing, but the boredom is real. Part of the blame has to go to the games themselves, since they emphasize prettiness and gadgety novelty (this during a time when I have been continuously less and less impressed with what computers can do the more I learn about them, which is not a whole lot but still a bit), and are on average incredibly repetitive and unoriginal. It is a little bit how I feel about jazz music. But Zelda and Mario are the Coltrane and Miles of gaming for me, so I might have to give the Wii a chance when it gets released.