Digital Cream

My local paper in Brisbane, Australia, the Courier-Mail, came out today in print and online with an article I was interviewed for earlier in the week. I am going to be in a forum in a couple days about the same subject. The article quotes me on my views about games and parenting. Check out the article online.

My son Dylan urged me to play Portal, a new game contained in Valve’s “Orange Box“ product. I already had good reasons to check it out– an amazing design riff; a Cinderella story of birth as a student project at DigiPen; and I heard bizarre rumors that it exhibited a real sense of humor. However, watching Dylan fall through an infinite chain of portals while flipping the gravitational axis made me fearfully recall a childhood viewing of The Man With The Golden Gun which put me off the hall of mirrors for years. Dylan assured me that it was not nearly as confusing as it looked, but as he gleefully recounted to his friend Harry yesterday, I once got lost in a single room in BioShock. (I crept around a bloody lab table, came upon the door through which I entered the room, exited through it thinking it was a new door, and then wandered in confusion wondering why everything looked vaguely familiar.) In any case, I screwed up my courage and gave Portal a go. I was delighted in all the ways that the game’s many fans have already extolled, but I want to especially point a prophetic finger at a feature of the game which I predict will soon be commonplace, and the game world made all the better for it: Portal has optional commentary by the game creators, much like a DVD commentary track. This is very cool and I am bursting to tell you why. (continued »)

On Friday night my son Dylan took my place playing BioShock on the 360. I’d had my couple hours and couple beers, and was starting to make dumb mistakes as he watched with gentle sniggers of amusement. I know he’s a far better player than me, so I was expecting to be pretty impressed when he took the controls. What I was not expecting was the realization that my son is a species entirely different from, and superior to, my own.

The forward edge of this realization came last year when I watched him play Battlefield 2 on the 360 (which, I know, to many is like painting with a bar of soap, but it was fun for a while). I noted that he could do a couple things I had not mastered, such as to run backwards with a zoomed-in sniper scope headshotting the hapless guy trying to nail him with an SMG. I consoled myself that I’d not had as much practice, and anyway, Dylan is smaller than me; his nerve pathways are probably 25% shorter.

But watching him take over BioShock led me to inescapably conclude that while his arms and nerves have gotten longer, they must have dropped in temperature to become some kind of supercooled nanoconduits autoconnecting to a hyperbrain the size of a planet. So I really should not feel bad about the pwnage; it is simply a cross-species competition, like a jaguar racing a mollusk. (continued »)

I’ve been playing BioShock on the 360 for a few weeks now, often in the evenings when my brain is too puddly to code but not ready for sleep. My son Dylan has been watching me and he has been playing it himself. I will likely write a few posts about it. In this post I want to extol the game’s overall mood of imposing, sinister breakdown and corruption. I was a great admirer of its ancestor System Shock which had a similar mood. (continued »)

I was interviewed for an MSNBC article about parenting and video games by Thomas Loftus. Most of what I have to say is in a sidebar article alongside the main article. Thanks to Jason Della Rocca (IGDA president) for the referral!

Do you think I should someday write a book such as “The Gen-X Parent’s Video Game Survival Guide”? Leave me a comment or drop me a line if you think I should move it toward the top of my to-do list…

Here are the full notes I sent to Mr. Loftus, which talk a lot about my approach to video games in my home, as both a father and as a game developer. (continued »)