i’ve been asked to speak at ICE 08 as a last-minute replacement. ICE, or Interactive Content Exchange, is Interactive Ontario’s major annual event. The conference draws broadcast, mobile, online and console delegates from as far away as Sudbury.

ICE is also an acronym for the International Congress of Entomology, and a trade show for the gambling industry. So if you lose your house in a business deal or you feel something unpleasant crawling up your leg, you may still be at the right conference. *drum fill*

If you came to the site from the conference and clicked on the Blog Monster, you most likely want to see what we’re all about. Our Games gallery is slim pickins these days, because all the interesting development is going on behind the scenes:

We’re creating five games for a Canadian kids’ teevee production company. The site will launch this summer.

We’re building two games that will be accessible to both deaf and blind players (that is to say, players with one disability or the other … Helen Keller would have a bit of trouble).

Additionally, we have been invited by two different companies to create two massively multiplayer online game demos. One of these companies wrote the book on the genre. We are extremely excited to be working with them!

If you’re here in the midst of a boring panel (hopefully not the one i’m on), here are a few Untold Entertainment articles for your interest:

The Democratization of Game Development

This year’s trend at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco was the sit back, relax, and let your players build the game for you. i approve.

Prince of Persia, Prince of Peace

A mercifully brief jog through the history of Christian video games, and why i’m thankful that Jesus forgives.

Ryan Creighton on The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Steve grills me on gaming for the elderly, mass market video games and how EA’s Rock Band will save the music industry.

Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass

How a supposedly legitimate children’s broadcaster shovels schlock to its young audience, right under parents’ noses.

Canadian Game Journalism: Not Worth It

A serious number-crunching leads to the conclusion that Canadian game journalism rivals a McJob.

Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble

Twenty hours into every Pokémon game, the (likely) pre-teen player walks into a full-fledged casino. At a time when bashing video games is en vogue, this topic is conspicuously missing its fair share of outrage.

Kids’ entertainment juggernaut Nickelodeon announced this week that it will blow out its already 5000-strong game library by 1600 more games, including three more kid-based MMOs, according to Joystiq. Pursuant to my admittedly unprofessional rant a few weeks ago, Nicktropolis Looks Like Ass, i have to wonder whether the newest projects in development over there will follow suit, or if they’ll pay closer attention to quality.

Certainly, Viacom/Nickelodeon’s acquisition AddictingGames.com isn’t exactly a bastion of quality. i was actually astounded when a supposedly reputable corporation like Viacom, with shareholders n’ everything, and a reputation for making quality kids’ entertainment, picked up AddictingGames. Let’s take a quick tour through the library shall we?

i dip into the Action game category and come across two gems. First up, there’s Light People on Fire, where your goal is to run around setting as many people on fire as possible. Innocent bystanders include (naturally) mothers pushing baby carriages.

A few icons down i notice Cannon Crotch, by “F****N Amazing Games”. In it, you must destroy Adolph Hitler’s reanimated corpse with your crotch-mounted cannon before he uses a laser to blow up the moon.

There’s High School Cheerleader, where your scantily-clad character pulls off dance moves in a low-cut top while pervy students watch from the background, and Blood Car 2000 Delux, which has you running down as many pedestrians as possible with your car. Blood Car 2000 Delux proudly states that it’s “Rated M for Awesome”.

No Ratings for Young Gamers

In all my time on the site, i didn’t see a single bona fide ESRB rating or content warning on any of these games.

Addicting Games is one of these online kids-only havens that adults don’t really know about. In every user-focus test i ever did with a room full of kids, we’d let them surf wherever they wanted, and inevitably they’d end up at Addicting Games. The site’s acquisition by Viacom/Nickeloden certainly ensured that adults heard about the site, but honestly: how many adults have actually played the games there? i assume most grown-ups who have visited Addicting Games have followed the link after reading about the acquisition in the trade papers and, after seeing the overwhelming array of icons, promptly left.

i worked at a teevee station that received regular viewer complaints about its programming, most of which came straight outta CrazyTown. One father was very upset that some characters in a show were pretending to be pirates, because pirates “rape and murder people.” Over-protective, i think, but somewhat fair. But imagine the gasket this guy would blow if he found his kid poking around on Addicting Games.

It’s a lot like the fact that Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble. No concerned grown-up ever bothered to drill 20 hours into a Pokémon game to find the full-fledged casino. Likewise, no adult seems to care that while teevee adheres to some pretty tight moral standards, the kid-targeted online world is packed with crap. What’s worse, the people behind this site aren’t shadowy, hard-to-find folks like pornographers - they’re bloody Nickelodeon. It boggles the mind.

Concerned Parents Gotta Step Up Their Indignation

i suppose that concerned parents can only be concerned about what they see, and they’re not bothering to see all aspects of kid culture. Maybe parents can only be so concerned?

Or maybe it’s another symptom of media dinosaur thinking, where somehow the teevee rules don’t apply to the Internetz? (see Building a Coffin for Nielsen) Who knows? You could even chalk it up to the old habit of thinking that certain kid-associated media are “safe” (cartoons, video games, etc). That mode of thinking has proven particularly tenacious.

Fed Up

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that i think playing Light People on Fire will turn kids into raving mad pyromaniacs, or that kids can’t see that the cheap autocidal thrills in Blood Car 200 Delux aren’t a great idea in real life. i just get a little peeved that parents like the Pirate Dad get so irmy about the slightest breach of ethics on teevee, yet Viacom is hosting this overboard, lurid junk-culture free-for-all online and no one says a word.

i worked for Big Media creating advergames for kids. i’ve had my fill of feeding junk to children; i feel the need to purge. The next product i create for children, if i ever hoe that row again, will uphold a solid value system. It will affirm the sanctity of childhood. And it will be a restorative, detoxifying experience for the kids fattening themselves on the trash fed to them by Nickelodeon and Viacom.

MMO-focussed site Massively is also covering the smacktalk coming from Corey Bridges, founder of Multiverse.

A while back someone said that it would take at least a $1 billion dollar super project to take on World of Warcraft. But maybe, as it was with the Roman Empire, the wolves at Blizzard’s gate will be countless smaller tribes made up of the so-called unwashed hordes.

There’s something very appealing about talk like this. It’s the “root for the underdog” spirit in me that really yearns for this kind of turnaround. It also doesn’t hurt that i happen to be the very underdog Bridges describes - a self-funded start-up with MMO ambitions. Of course, his talk should all be taken with a grain of salt, being that Multiverse is a MMO-building platform targeted at those same small teams to whom Bridges makes these promises.

Bringing Down the Old Guard

For part of Bridges’ talk at SXSW08, he mentioned how technology is chipping away at the root of the film and music industry power structure. i’ve had that conversation many times in the past few years, and in posts like To the Victor, the Eyeballs. The trouble that many of us young bucks face is that so many Old Guard media moguls are entrenched in antiquated ways of doing business, and have been getting so fat on those tried-and-tested methods for so long. The industry can only move forward with the help of two people: Mr. Retirement and Mr. That Guy Just Got Hit by a Bus.

Keep reading »

i was interviewed last night on TeeVee Ontario’s serious current events show, The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Tony Walsh over at Phantom Compass recommended me for the gig. i couldn’t understand why he’d pass up the chance to sound interesting and plug his new start-up. Then i watched the show.

Freak-out time: it’s for old people. i don’t mean 30-year-olds, either, who used to be the epitome of old until i turned 30. i’m talking bona fide grey-hairs. Their sponsor is a company offering car insurance to the elderly. On Monday’s show, Steve was interviewing a very stodgy, well-spoken author and military man in Washington who wrote a book on the Iraq war. My heart sunk deeper and deeper into my chest as i fast-forwarded through the show. How was i supposed to follow this? It’s like hiring a clown at a funeral.

In the end, it didn’t go too badly. i couldn’t name the game industry’s third largest publisher, and i inadvertently told the host he looks like a troll.

i also acted like an anti-semetic Jew the way i bashed Nintendo, calling the majority of the Wii library “garbage”. i actually quite like Nintendo (and Jewish people, for that matter - no emails please). Still, there’s no denying that Nintendo’s game consoles constantly disappoint when it comes to third-party software support. You just have to pop over to Metacritic’s Wii section to see a list of yellow and red review scores ranging from “mediocre” to “horrible”, along with a long list of games that were too insignificant to review.

Anyway, here’s the interview:

We talked about gaming for the elderly, about the big business of electronic entertainment, and about how Guitar Hero and Rock Band could save the music industry. At the end of the interview, Steve asked what my favourite game was, and the supressed geek inside of me proved impossible to reign in.

What i realized from attending two Game Developers Conferences is that Americans seem to really have their heads in the sand when it comes to gaming trends and the “next big thing.” Companies like Blizzard have flat-out rejected the lucrative microtransaction payment model for online games, while Far East companies like Nexon and QQ are making a killing on them.

Kid-targeted virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz were already making a killing by the time Raph Koster shocked the room at GDC 07 and said that Club Penguin does more business in North America than World of Warcraft.

It’s unlikely that many Americans, with their freedom fries and their hatred of the French, have heard of France-based studio Ankama Games. My colleagues and i in Canada have been following their work for years. They have some of the most eye-popping 2D artwork i’ve seen in all my life. While at E3 2006, i was able to snag a hardcover book filled with their artwork, and it remains a source of inspiration and drool to this day.

But who knew they could animate? The exciting news is that Wakfu is being made into a teevee series. Buckle yourself into your chair and check out this Wakfu teaser video:

i’ve been to a few great sessions at GDC 08 so far, and i’m sure i’ll write about them at some point. Before we get to that, i want to get this ugly little rant off my chest.

Easily the weakest session so far has been “Now That We’re All Here: Next Steps in Online Play Sessions” by Christopher Romero of Worldwide Biggies. The session title is extremely misleading. For the bulk of his talk, Romero did a project showcase of Nicktropolis, a virtual world on the website supporting US kids’ teevee network Nickelodeon. This was a little eyebrow raising, because the speaker admitted off the top that he no longer works on the project and, as he revealed later in the question period, he left the project between the open public beta and the mysterious multi-month gap that ensued before its live launch.

Ass-Tastic Graphics

Sitting through Romero’s presentation was painful. Quite literally painful. Painful to the degree that i had to HIDE MY EYES from the presentation screen while he showcased grabs of the game. This was for one simple, inescapable reason: Nicktropolis looks like ass warmed over and poked with a stick.

i’ve worked with a kids’ teevee company for over seven years, so i know how strict brand managers can be with their precious properties. i built one simple Flash game with a certain young female explorer character that Nickelodeon owns, and there were some very strict brand rules to follow. i couldn’t deviate from the colour pallette, i had to use an approved still shot of the character, etc etc.

Contrastingly, Nicktropolis takes beloved and tightly brand-managed characters like Spongebob Squarepants and makes them look like they were designed by college interns designing drunk. Back at the kids’ station i worked for, we received fan art that looked better than most of the stuff in Nicktropolis. It’s, honestly, really hideous stuff, and i’m amazed that Viacom promotes the project without the slightest hint of shame or irony.

The Opposite of Sticky

The functionality in Nicktropolis matches its ass-thetics. The virtual world is split up into multiple mini-worlds, many of which promote the station brands. This is the one aspect of the game where brand managers did seem to have input. A Tak and the Power of Juju avatar would not mesh visually with a Dora the Explorer avatar. In an attempt to solve this problem, the Nicktropolis un-gineers force the player to tool a new avatar whenever he enters one of these sub-worlds.

The result, as the speaker sheepishly pointed out, is that your very identity in Nicktropolis is stable as the shifting sands. One of the key hooks of participating in a virtual world is that you get to adopt and invest in an identity. Nicktropolis shreds this idea and throws it out the virtual window, resulting in a virtual world that is impossible to invest in personally and emotionally.

The real-life equivalent of this terrible idea might be a puppy that you’re not allowed to name, or having your own personal photo id card with someone else’s picture on it. Nicktropolis effectively answers the “Where am i” question, but flunks the “Who am i” test that’s so integral to virtual worlds.

Why return to an online community when you essentially have to wear a new body wherever you go? What emotional ties keep you tethered to that place? These are rhetorical questions. The fact remains that Nicktropolis failed at one - if not the - key hook in a virtual world.

Talk At Your Favourite Characters

The speaker spent a long time explaining the challenges he and his team faced designing Nickelodeon’s ChatBot system. This is a feature where you can converse with the station’s key characters using technology that dates back to at least the C64 where i first saw it. It’s little more than a text parser that analyzes certain key words and spits back an automated, robotic response. The C64 ChatBot i played with was a virtual shrink:

You: i like candy. Do you like candy?

Virtual Shrink: How does candy make you feel?

You: It makes me feel happy.

Virtual Shrink: How do you feel about happy?

You: Uh …

Virtual Shrink: Tell me more about your mother.

And so on. Even when i was eight years old and it was 1988 or whenever, this technology was fun for about five minutes and then we moved on to something else. You’re not going to convince anyone, kid or otherwise, that a ChatBot is bona fide Artificial Intelligence. You’re also not going to spend a whole lot of time interfacing with a ChatBot because frankly, the thrill wears off a little faster than your favourite chewing gum flavour.

And yet, Nickelodeon really pushed this feature on its release, ballyhooing the fact that you could “interact with your favourite Nickelodeon characters!” During launch week, i jumped into Nicktropolis and (after throwing up in my mouth a little), i beelined straight for Spongebob’s house.

And there he was! Spongebob! Or a reasonable facsimile. Well, more like an unreasonable facsimile, really. And he was … standing there. Staring. Staring at the wall.

i walked up to him with my horribly-animated anchovy avatar and, using the prohibitive white-label chat system, started asking him questions. i don’t think he responded. Even if he had, i’m not sure i could have been more disappointed.

Romero talked at length about how he and his team ate up a large portion of development time retooling the 3rd-party ChatBot solution to make the responses match the characters’ personalities. This, to me, is like meticulously decorating your dumpster bin. It’s not worth the effort to church up a fundamentally crummy feature.

What the dev team should have done was create a handful of what i like to call “puppet avatars” - characters that people on the live team can inhabit and walk around as. If virtual worlds are essentially theme parks, then these puppet avatars are the costumed characters, with the added advantage that they can actually chat with the players.

With puppet avatars, you might not see Spongebob in the game all the time, but those few times you did see him and got to ask him your burning question about the script error in episode #332, you would be RILED UP. It would be like catching Mickey and Minny smooching and hopping into a silver carriage in a scripted costumed character appearance at Disney World. i saw it happen there when i was seven, and i’ve never forgotten it.

Fifty Bazillion Kids CAN Be Wrong

To wrap up his presentation, the speaker used the same dodgy metrics that Viacom uses to paint the project in a better light. He talked about stats like the number of people who have signed up for an account or the number of rooms created in-world. In my opinion, the only stat that’s worth its salt in this case is “number of currently active players”. Active players can be people who have logged in in the past month, say. Active player stats really say something about the utility, stickiness and enduring appeal of your virtual world after the initial marketing push.

In other worlds, the total sign-ups might hold a little more water. But Viacom is pulling the digital wool over the media’s eyes because its existing membership base was rolled into the Nicktropolis membership system. That means that every kid who watched the immensely popular teevee station and signed up for member content was considered a Nicktropolis user, even if he signed up years before Nicktropolis was an ugly little gleam in a developer’s crusty left eye. That’s what i call dodgy marketing.

i also happen to know a little something something about the relationship between a teevee station and its support website. Basically, anything you launch on the site, if it’s supported on-air, will get far more plays than it might even deserve. i’ve seen numerous mediocre games launch on my former employer’s site, and the gameplay statistics come out rosy because a good portion of the on-air viewers decide to come and check it out. As game designers, we started to pay much closer attention to repeat plays when we analayzed whether a game was successful or not.

Sucktropolis

With Nicktropolis, Viacom and Nickelodeon are keeping the bar very low for online kid-targeted virtual worlds and MMOs. Kids don’t deserve the shovelware that their favourite brands feed them in the form of video games, from crummy licensed console titles to boxes of Krusty-Os with sharp metal sprockets inside them. In the face of the hype, the number-fudging and the self-congratulatory back-patting, i am declaring that this emporer has no clothes, and looks pretty rough in the nude to boot. In my opinion, Nicktropolis is a shameful, horrible waste of resources and a disservice to Nickelodeon’s once excellent online brand.

Further Reading

Over at his Clickable Culture blog, my fellow Canadian commentator Tony Walsh had the nuts to deride this steaming pile far more eloquently back when it launched:

‘Nicktropolis’ Fails on Many Levels

That Nicktropolis is a terrible product isn’t an industry secret. But why a respected conference like GDC would invite Chris Romero to showcase it is.

Untold Entertainment is, not surprisingly, in no way affiliated with Viacom or its subsidiaries. All images used under Canadian fair dealing review provisions.

Massively’s Tateru Nino has succinctly spelled out why mainstream media plays dirty pool in its coverage of “new” media in Why mainstream media hates the Internet, games, MMOs and you:

Games and the Internet are ultimately perceived as a threat to mainstream media’s long-term profits and marketshare. Mainstream media doesn’t want you spending hours meeting friends and doing business in Second Life - they want you spending hours drooling at this season’s ‘reality’ TV shows.

i used to work for Canadian Big Media, where the reluctance to dive whole-hog into online ventures was palpable. The company was run by an old boys’ club of former teevee ad execs. i could daily hear the screams of the employees trapped in steerage class in the hull of the Good Ship Television, torn open leagues back by the Internet iceberg, and already on its rapid decline to a dark and watery grave. And there they were, the old media captains, proudly and pig-headedly manning Good Ship Television’s bridge, clinging to the metal carcass as it sank.

And the band played hail to the chief!

i’ve been reviewing video games for many years now. i’ve written the Holy Trinity of Ews - reviews, news and previews - for print magazines, websites, and TV commercials. My side gig as a game reviewer has taken me to E3 in Los Angeles, to a swanky highrise in NYC’s warehouse district, and to the passenger seat of a souped-up street racer on Toronto’s exhibition grounds. And through all of this, i’m compelled to draw one final conclusion: being a game journalist is not worth the effort.

This Movie has 42 Hours

When uber-famous and once-chubby film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games will never be viewed as art, he was only defending his best interests. If games were considered art, as movies are, then maybe he’d be asked to review them. And if Ebert reviewed games, he could no longer spend a simple hour and a half with the source material. No, Ebert would be like the rest of the schlubs in game journalism, sweating his way through a 40-hour first-person shooter in his rec room, while throngs of drunk Southerners on XBox live hurled racial slurs at him.

Not only is the rec room a far cry from an empty theatre, but the time Ebert puts into his job makes economic sense. i myself make $75 for a one-page magazine article. i used to write online reviews in exchange for used copies of review games at a rate of about 3 reviews per “free” game. Your average (new) video game in Canada costs $70. That works out to $23 per review.

Let’s look at what went into writing that review:

It’s All About the (Absence of) Benjamins

The writing itself took about an hour. So far so good - $23 per hour is a fair wage for a freelance writer.

Now let’s factor in the time it took to view the source material. Today’s console games clock in at 20-40 hours. We’ll take the minimum - 20 hours. $23/20 hours works out to $1.15 an hour. A buck fifteen? Uh-oh. Suddenly, this is turning into a losing game.

At this rate, the freelance reviewer can’t afford to finish a game before submitting his review. And here’s my dark secret: i never did finish the games i reviewed. The game companies would send review copies one week before street date at the very earliest. With a full-time job, it was next to impossible to beat these games in that time limit. And as we’ve seen, it didn’t make economical sense to do so anyway.

So what’s fair? Let’s say a stingy reviewer spends 2 hours playing the game. 2 hours to play + 1 hour to write = 3 hours. $23/3 is 7 bucks an hour, which you could also earn slinging hash at the local burger joint.

Sounds grim? A colleague of mine revealed that his magazine paid him $2 for a capsule review. Two dollars. Mind you, capsule reviews go something like this:

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Shoot bugs and space pirates with a cool gadget arm. i liked the explosions, but some parts were short. In summary, gimme mah two dollars, bitch.

They’re a lot less effort to write. But if you sip a three-dollar Starbucks while writing them, you’re basically paying for the privilege of being a game reviewer.

Peer Review

When i first got into game journalism, i couldn’t understand why all the local game reviewers were dicks. They’d either try to sell me on their experience and ask if they could write for “my” publications, or they’d openly ridicule me. After a few years, i now understand why. It’s hard to be friendly when you’re competing tooth and nail for $7/hr freelance work.

The industry is very competetive, but it’s more a battle of personalities than anything else. A reviewer won’t excel because his writing is better; he’ll get work because he has work. Success begets more success. The ability to schmooze with the PR agencies representing the big game companies is paramount. Without that, you’d better see that your homeless shelter offers free wi-fi.

There’s a particular Toronto reviewer who writes for every publication in town because he writes for every publication in town. He’s universally despised by the other journalists for being slim on talent and guaranteed regular work. And he’s also a dick. Like any other industry, it’s not what you know. It’s who you know. But in the microscopic Canadian game journalism racket, it’s an all-or-nothing game. Knowing someone means the difference between getting all of the work, like that guy, or getting none of the work.

The Junkets

By far the worst part of the business is attending the press junkets. The big game companies pay their PR agencies to throw lavish parties to preview their products. If you hope to get anywhere in the industry, you have to attend all of them, from the fancy Gears of War launch party to the Hannah Montana Adventures karaoke night. Many of these events drag on for hours as you shuffle from game console to game console, straining to hear the audio, trying to get a good sense of the gameplay while roving waiters constantly foist cheesyweeners on you, and PR people whisper Satanically into your ear.

The events’ raison d’etre is for PR reps to spew a string of positive game buzz into your ear in the hopes that some of their phrases will wind up in your review. They’ll blab on endlessly about the very worst back-of-the-box blither you’ve ever heard. Regard:

You: (trying to figure out how to control your character)

Rep: Crash Bandicoot: Smashypants is the latest in a long, proud series of games starring the loveable daredevil marsupial.

You: Uh-huh.

Rep: You can see that the developers spent most of their time really livening up the spectrum of colours in this game, and ensuring that the gameplay appeals to fans of squad-based go-kart party shooter titles.

You: Right. It’s uh … it kind of sucks.

Rep: (face falling for an almost imperceptible moment) Well, the developers really listened to fan feedback and wanted the control scheme to be challenging enough for some players, but not so challenging that it was too difficult to play.

You: No - it really sucks. It sucks worse than Crash Team Cook-off. It’s not even as good as Crash Bandicoot’s Brain Blenders. It’s really, really bad.

Rep: Well, it supports 4-players in a local splitscreen match, and you can choose the colour of your character’s hat.

You: Why doesn’t it support no players? Cuz that’s how many people are going to enjoy this thing. Can you tell me why i have to press START to see my health metre? Or why my character only moves forward when i eat a berry? Or why the problems with the last Crash game haven’t been addressed at all in this piece of nonsense?

Rep: …

You: Do you have any developers here? Is there an artist here who can defend the decision to make my character look like a warmed-over salami? Is there an animation director here who can talk about why these characters have three frames of animation in their run cycles?

Rep: Uh … no. But we have the producer here.

You: Okay … send him over.

…

Producer: Hi! Crash Bandicoot: Smashypants is the latest in a long, proud series of games starring the loveable daredevil marsupial.

You: …

Producer: And you can change the colour of your character’s hat!

You: …

Waiter: Would you like to try a cheesyweener, sir?

—————–

You’ve essentially spent hours at this junket - and there are multiple junkets every week - so that you can write a $2 preview piece on a game you barely played. That’s what i was always doing at the junkets - asking to speak to a member of the production team. But the junkets are never stocked with people responsible for building the game - only people responsible for spinning the game. i really wondered who would fall for these transparent tactics.

The year that Nintendo debuted their DS system at E3, they made a few points clear in their presentation: “it’s all about the power of two. You have two screens. Two media slots. Two ways to connect.” Et cetera. Fine.

A day later, as i was wandering around the show floor when i overheard a couple of exciteable young bloggers (due to the likes of whom E3 was eventually cancelled). One blogger was enthusiastically telling the other blogger “it’s all about the power of two. You have two screens. Two media slots. Two ways to connect.”

i see.

The Relationship

A big part of the job is building up relationships with the game companies. The current Big Three - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo - should be your first stop. The goal is to convince them to send you a steady stream of review copies ahead of the street date so that by the time you post a “news” item, it’s actually news.

How hard is it to convince a PR company to send you games? Well, i wrote reviews for the website of a national kids’ teevee station. A third-party metrics company tracks the site at around 1 million unique visitors per month - mostly kids, one would presume. i had to pound the pavement and build the relationship with one of the Big Three, the one who launches a lot of family-friendly entertainment - for over two years before they’d send us review copies. A game in Canada costs around $70 - considerably less if you’re the company pressing the discs - yet they didn’t consider a game review promoted to 1 million viewers a month to be a viable exchange. Not to divulge my former employer’s precious secrets, but an ad banner on their site goes for a price tag considerably North of 70 bucks.

Even after you’ve convinced the Big Three that you’re worth the effort, you have to chase down all of the third parties. Activision, Ubi Soft, Namco, Atlus, Konami, Koei … you fight tooth an nail to find the contact people for these places. Maintaining that many separate relationships for your $7/hr is like working the counter at McDonald’s and having to call up all of the farmers who supply the various types of food to the supply distributor. And then you have to convince Farmer Tucker to send you a Chicken McNugget.

But You Get Free Games, Right?

Easily the biggest perk for a game journalist is getting games before anyone else does. But that sneak preview comes at a dire price: you have to play the game like a maniac, plowing through it as fast as possible to get that review ready for launch day.

From October to December, which i’ve dubbed Video Game Season, you have to make bitter sacrifices or risk burning out completely. You’ve got Mass Effect, a 40-hour game, in one hand, and The Orange Box, containing five separate games, in the other. Do you kill yourself playing and reviewing both of them to keep up your PR relationship to continue receiving games? Do you play one in its entirety and do a review, hoping you’ve earned enough cred with the other company to let one slide? Or do you take the time to enjoy Thanksgiving with your family?

One of my most eye-opening experiences was in New York City, at the pre-release press junket for the Nintendo Wii. Sitting in the front row was a young guy hunched over his laptop, madly pecking away at 80 words a minute before the event even began. His face was ghostly pale, might not have shaved for weeks, and his hair was like straw. When the Nintendo reps took the stage and started the presentation, his fingers flew faster than ever. He was live-blogging the event, posting a live online play-by-play of everything the reps were saying.

That young man was Matt Cassamassina, a prominent game journalist at IGN. Matt, if you’re reading this, listen to me: you need to eat some broccolis. You need to go outside, peel off all your clothes, and let the sunshine hug you. i feel badly for you.

Matt is clearly earning more than the $7/hr scraps we Canucks are scrounging for, but at what cost? He asked his questions, and he got nonsense political PR doublespeak back. i don’t know how he does it. He must really enjoy it. Me? PR doublespeak just makes me angry.

Here’s the kind of PR idiocy you can look forward to as a games journalist. Back when Phantasy Star Online was being launched for the Nintendo GameCube, there had been no other online games for the system. i wondered how Nintendo was going to enable the online functionality. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: So, Phantasy Star Online is launching soon. How’s that gonna work? Is Nintendo releasing a modem adapter for the system?
Rep: No.
Me: “No”, or “you can’t say”?
Rep: Nothing’s been said, and we’re not supporting online capabilities with the system.
Me: But you have a game launching on it called “Phantasy Star Online,” right?
Rep: That has been announced, yes.
Me: But there will be no online capabilities for the system when it launches?
Rep: That’s correct.
Me: … So uh … let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Phantasy Star Online, released exclusively for the GameCube, AND TITLED PHANTASY STAR ONLINE, will be … offline?
Rep: That’s correct.

Matt, i don’t know how you do it. You may look like an underfed scarecrow, but you’re a stronger man than i.

The Rundown

See, Roger Ebert’s a clever cat. He puts in his hour and a half (sometimes three hours - damn you, Peter Jackson!), and saunters out of the theatre, dusts the popcorn from his silk ascot, and wonders what he’s going to say about it. It’s in his best interest to slag video games til he’s blue in the face - God forbid he’d ever have to sit through one to write a review.

“Game journalist” is one of about three game industry jobs that outsiders think are awesome: game journalist, game tester, and game designer. The layperson thinks “aw, sweet - you get to sit around and play games all day!”

The game journalist gets to sit around and play games all day. Spending time with the family or earning money for rent? As far as Canada’s concerned, it’s a dicey proposition.

The game tester gets to sit around and play game all day. One game. Singular. And he has to play it for months on end, taking notes as it constantly breaks. But at least he gets to pay his dues and move up in the industry, perhaps being promoted to:

Game designer. This guy has to play the same game over and over again too, but he’s got the added burden of fixing all the problems himself. Still, if he’s an independent, he can license his titles to a casual games portal and go home to sleep on a pile of money-coated money.

“How callous”, you say. i often warn people about turning their hobby into their career. All too often, you’ll end up hating both. But if your hobby/career brings in enough money to buy the games you want to play, instead of forcing you to play That’s So Raven 3, so much the better. If your job, be it testing toys or shovelling goose poop off the parliement lawn, funds a trip to the zoo with your daughter, and the occasional escape to the Caribbean with your family, i’d say you’re doing alright.

… provided we’re talking about the real zoo, and not Microsoft’s Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania.

Here’s what you can do with a terrible costume idea and an hour and a half to kill:

The idea, naturally, is a robot that changes into pants to blend in with his terrestrial surroundings. i can picture such robots waging fierce battles against each other - say, a necktie (the evil “Neckotron”) vs. a pair of pumps (the sass-talking “Heel It”). i’m not sure what my Pantsformers name is.

Perhaps “Pantaloons Prime”?

Post your favourite Pantsformers name!

There weren’t any surprises at the preview event today, but it was nice to get some more face time with Rock Band, even if you have a face like mine.

It looks like i’m screaming like a rock god, but i’m actually wailing in agony at how hard it is to play those plastic drums. If you crank the game all the way up to MEDIUM, you’re in for a world of hurt. i rocked the mic and aced the Clash song with 100%, but only because it was set to EASY, and because i have golden pipes like a choir of hard-rock angels.

There was no one on hand to give a demo of Eye of Judgment, a game that basks in its own complexity. i’m a big fan of spending far, far too much money on toys while many people in the world suffer, so here’s the rundown:

The Eye of Judgment is a CCG (collectible card game) that you play on your wicked expensive PS3 console. The game is comprised of a camera (the titular “Eye”), a fabric play mat, the game disc, and a starter deck of cards, all of which will run you approximately $cha-Ching, plus applicable taxes.

i’ve done tons of promos for Japanese toys where the anime support show has all kinds of monsters crawling out of them because they toys themselves are too dull to make an exciting show - stuff like spinning tops, marble shooters, and transforming plastic marbles. The toys themselves might have a sticker of a monster on them in real life, but on the teevee show, some gigantic dragon or flaming slug actually BURSTS out of the toy and does battle in mid-air.

Eye of Judgment is the first physical game where that kind of thing actually happens.

The camera points at the mat. You put your cards on the mat. Registration marks on the cards are read by the camera, and the software figures out which cards it’s looking at, and which way the cards are facing.

The rest is pure monster-popping action, yo.

That’s my hand on the card with a monster popping out of it on-screen! WOW! Then the monsters FIGHT! Something about this game totally grabs the little boy in me and does not let go. It’s all Indian in the Cupboard-style. Toys coming to life. And FIGHTING. My heart skips a beat.

Here’s a quick video where i spin one of the cards around so you can get a better sense of it. Unfortunately, that’s all i could figure out how to do because the demo jockey was off stuffing his face with crab cakes or whatever.

Eye of Judgment is an excellent way for rich kids to exert their financial dominance over other kids in the playground. If you’re playing this game, you or your parents are in the top percentile of the world’s wealthy. And you’re squandering your power and privilege on making computerized monsters leap out of paper cards to fight each other.

Whether you applaud the spawn of the idle rich or lament the worldwide child poverty crisis, the fact remains: Eye of Judgment brings a tear to the eye.

And some judgment.