This weekend, I attended the Penny Arcade Expo for the second time (and the first as a Hothead employee). I didn’t get booth duty this year, which was fortunate, because I’m not sure I can stand being around all the noise and nerd sweat for too long without my head imploding, so instead, I wandered around, poked my head into panels that were either so boring that I left after five minutes or so full that I couldn’t actually get inside, [1] and attempted to socialise — namely, with Max Battcher, John Green, assorted Telltale people… and my co-Hotheads, but I see them all the time, so that hardly counts.

Hmm. By the way I wrote that, you’d think I had a terrible time. The truth is, I actually had fun, if only because I had a good excuse to break out of my normal routines. And I managed to stay in a rather chipper mood, to the point that John pointed out that I appeared to be a lot more… shall we say… “bubbly” in contrast to the more pointed sort of writing style through which I present myself on internetland. Then again, I’d say I came more for the interesting people than for the expo itself. The expo was really just a way to bring said people together, really.

Anyway, in case you haven’t seen them already, you ought to check out the DeathSpank teasers that Ron posted. They’re delightfully silly.

I played through the first episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People last week, and was pleasantly surprised by it. Granted, my motivation to play was more to do with wanting to see what my former colleague Mark Darin was up to than with being a fan of Homestar Runner — although I did enjoy a few Teen Girl Squad movies back in the day, I’ve never been a devout follower of the site. Still, I found the writing reasonably clever and the art style delightfully iconic. Mark did a lovely job as lead designer; despite the fact that there was a slightly confusing backwards puzzle at the start, I was never stuck in the game for very long, and enjoyed having silly minigames to poke at in the meantime. [1] All in all, it was a good couple of hours of fun, and I wait for the next episodes in anticipation.

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This month’s Blogs of the Round Table topic asks the ever-so-fascinating question of whether video games teach socially responsible lessons. Considering that I spent a little too much time dabbling in moral philosophy courses in university, and thus know that there are many different ways to answer this question, I’m going to start by dividing this question into three parts: Can video games teach socially responsible lessons? Do video games teach socially responsible lessons? Should video games teach socially responsible lessons?

My answer to the “can” question is a pretty straightforward “yes”. Video games have as much, if not more potential to convey positive themes and messages as other artistic media. People of the Roger Ebert school of artistic thought would likely disagree with me, citing the presence of interactivity and player input on the story as harmful to the author’s intended didactic goals. Personally, however, I believe that interactivity has tremendous power to teach by example rather than by rote, which I’m pretty sure has been proven to be most effective and personally meaningful, and tailoring said examples to the player’s current worldview and preferences makes it even moreso. For further reading on this particular topic, I highly recommend the book Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost.

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The nice thing about having kept up this blog for over three years is that when I’m feeling anxious and out of sorts about something or other, I can pull up the archives and discover that I was complaining about the very same thing two years ago, and that I was eventually able discover a solution to my problem and move on. Right now, I’m at yet another point in my life where my most recent finished work is making me cringe in comparison to what I think I can accomplish right now. Interestingly, this was also the case in September 2006. Of course, after I wrote that particular post, I went on to create… *goes back and counts* …five more interactive experiments since then. At the time, I thought I was improving leaps and bounds over my older old stuff, but now I’m not so sure. I mean, yes, I tried a lot of new things… but did that make my work any good?

I’m also at a point where the stories aren’t really coming to me. Or rather, I can’t come up with a new, original story that I’d like to stick with for any length of time. This tends to make me feel inadequate as a creative person; if I’m not being creative, then what use am I to the world? At a point like this, I can theoretically “remake” some of my old stuff to make it more polished, but I have a surprisingly strong aversion to actually doing so. Perhaps it’s because of the way I think of my work at a given period of my life as a “time capsule”. I don’t want to mess around with the content, and I find the idea of doing a direct port to other systems/engines to be completely and utterly dull and not worth doing unless someone’s giving me gobs of money.

Ah well, at least I’ve got Stage! to keep me busy for now. And DeathSpank too, for that matter. Both are things I know will end up far superior and polished in comparison to my solo stuff. There really is something to be said about having other people around to complement your strengths and weaknesses with their completely different strengths and weaknesses. I just need to get over the idea that I always have to be coming up with things on my own in order to be properly recognised and respected.

The Last Express is a remarkable classic masterpiece of a game. The rotoscoped art direction, iconic and yet realistic all at once, still looks fantastic for its 1997 technology. The setting and characters are rare and unusual for a video game, and are rife with deep historical symbolism. The fact that everything happens in real-time made me feel like I was actually there, eavesdropping on these fascinating fictional people like a fly on the wall. I came away feeling inspired to create something with a similar feeling, in my continued quest to author stories that one can truly explore.

The Last Express is a confusing mess of a game. Without the help of hints, I had no idea what to do. I hated being punished for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or rather, for not doing the right things at the right time because I was at the wrong place when the game was telling me what the right things to do actually were. I also noticed how, as in many adventure games, the aliveness of the game would come to a grinding halt once the computer ran out of things for people to do or say at a particular point, but the fact that everything was supposed to happen in real-time exacerbated the problem for me. Plus, there was puzzle gameplay, which I can tolerate and sometimes even enjoy in normal circumstances, but which completely stresses me out if I know I’m being timed. [1] I came away with a resolve never to invoke those kinds of feelings in a creation of my own… that is, unless it became absolutely necessary for the story to convey them. But I doubt it. My true goal as an artist is to empower people, not to frustrate them.

Despite the flaws, I did stay up late at night finishing the game, just like I do with novels I find myself deeply engaged in. However, I now find myself in need of another fascinating narrative to suck myself into. Hmm…