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Steve Jackson Games, purveyors of such fine products as Car Wars, GURPS, and Illuminati, has started to sell electronic (PDF) versions of many of their publications. Without draconian copy-protection technology or other whackiness.

Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

A. No. That would interfere with your use of them. We just have to hope that we can sell enough to honest people to make up for what gets stolen by the kiddies and cheapskates.

Sadly, life is such that pencil + paper gaming is never likely to become a serious hobby for me again. When I was a student (highschool, dropout, and university) I used to play all the time. For the full length of one glorioius summer we had 5-7 people playing at least weekly, if not more often. From these times emerged such things as my love for King Crimson, and such strange insider funninesses as “Grope the Mega”.

Ah, me. Good times, good times.

Now, however, I’m a grown up and all my friends are grown up, and most of my friends don’t live anywhere near me (distributed, for the most part, evenly across North America from Nova Scotia to California and back again). Scheduling is nearly impossible, even for the local crew (all, like, 4 of us), and so forth.

Games like World of Warcraft sort of fill that gamery urge for me, but it’s a different animal than P&P gaming on almost every level. It wears a thin mask that makes it look a little bit like a “role playing game”, but it’s not. There’s no role playing. There’s no creativity. There’s no bending the rules. There’s no chance to stock your rogue’s pack with thin wire, chalk, packets of the Dust of Disappearance, thin bladed saws, silk rope, fine lockpicks, a bag of marbles, tiny caltrops…and other such “just in case there’s an emergency” items. Quests are static and unchangeable — everyone who runs a particular quest does the exact same thing — there’s no opportunity for a Dungeon Master to tweak the details to fit the party.

I miss proper P&P gaming. Even if Never Winter Nights had managed to deliver a module creation/editor system that wasn’t eye-stabbingly difficult to use (in other words, one that regular creative DM types could pick up and actually do something interesting with in about, oh, 2% of the current time it takes), it wouldn’t have been the same. As soon as you add graphics and sounds to this, it stops being a vehicle for imagination.

There is only one generation of gamers who grew up pencil and paper gaming. The original Dungeons & Dragons (Chainmail) was produced by Gary Gygax in 1971. The year I was born. Zork (arguably the first mass-market CRPG) was released in 1980. The Atari 2600 (for many of us, our first home game console) came out in 1982. Now the world is saturated with XBoxes, PS2s, GameCubes, high end gaming PCs, Game Boys, and an ever growing collection of other new gaming devices.

P&P gaming is a fringe thing, relegated again to the nerd world of back rooms at comic/game shops with big folding tables, bad chairs, too much Coke, and huge bags of chips. Video gaming is mainstream. In the end, however, will anyone think back, 20 years from now, and fondly recall that one time in Halo when they were the Master Chief and blew up hundreds of The Flood to finish the level? Will there be the same warm nostalgia I feel when I think back today to that time when my not-too-bright but hellishly-strong fighter (nicknamed “Slay” by the rest of the party) hauled out her gleaming bastard sword (shields are for pussies), ran through that guarded jail, and killed everything that moved before the mage could even get his wand out?

I bet not.

World of Warcraft is a good game, but it’s not a collaborative piece of interactive fiction. It’s fiction, and it’s interactive, but it’s not a collaboration. I miss that part most of all.

Ah, good times.

Matt Sakey wrote an article about game reviews and how much they tend to suck. I wasn’t sure I was with him on it until he clarified his stance saying, “The gaming press shouldn’t become ponderous scholarly dissertations on the meaning of the ludic experience. There’s a place for that, as there is a place for scholarship in all media, but it’s not for mainstream consumption.” I agree. Wholeheartedly.

Game reviews need to be smarter, while book reviews need to be less scholarly and more targeted towards regular people.

Maybe I should write something less over-coffeeish about why these book reviews are overwrought. Ostensibly the game reviews and the book reviews have, in me, the same audience. Why are they so different? Is it so inconceivable that a gamer might also be a reader, and vice versa?

I’m not even entirely sure why this is bothering me so much today. Why isn’t there a good, collaborative, non-commercial book review weblog out there?

Or is there?

Drinking my first coffee this morning, I read two reviews, one of “Mech Assault: Lone Wolf” (game, XBox), and the other of “I Am Charlotte Simmons”, Tom Wolfe’s latest novel (book, Hardcopy). The constrast in writing styles between game reviewers and book reviewers amused me.

Game Review Excerpts

• Delivers more onscreen pyrotechnics than a Kiss concert.
• The new mech designs with new weapons also give a strong presence but it’s the addition of the battle armor and VTOL that makes the biggest impact.
• There is still a bit of linear gameplay in the single player mode which could be a bit more in depth and dynamic, but as it is, blowing stuff up has never been more fun.
• It’s the perfect mix of old school mech action with an arcade feel to it.
• While there’s occasional pop-up and clipping, those glitches are trumped by smooth animation and incredible explosions. When an enemy Mech is trashed, the bright blast lights up the screen and ripples the surrounding terrain in the most satisfyingly way.
• The sheer joy of destruction, variety of mechs and plethora of game types result in a fun if slower-paced online action game. This giant robot might not save the world, but it’s still a pretty good pal.

Book Review Excerpts

• More than a trifle but less than a masterpiece, the novel is an entertainment, and as such it seeks first to amuse and second to inform.
• So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision — I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it’s still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author.
• Mr Wolfe’s gifts for sartorial detail, verbal tics and all the tiny gestures that define place in the social pecking order are on hyperkinetic, at times tiresome, display.
• If it shares some Dickensian virtues, such as exuberant, lovingly crafted grotesquery, it also has Dickensian vices, such as long-windedness, and a fundamentally unbelievable heroine.
• The proportion of rant overload to silky observation has much increased.
• The problem is that Wolfe, whose writing has always been grossly adjectival and chic-specific, has failed to capture any news of interest about American youth, and comes off instead like one of those horrible professors who tried to make you listen to Imagine while simultaneously getting off on his status as a pedagogical errant.

The world, I think, needs a blending of these. At very least, we need book reviews written by people who sound less like annoying college professors who have never learned how to write for a non-academic audience. Less intellectual wanking, please, and more actual communication. Thx!

Addendum: This is not to say, of course, that I like most game reviews. I don’t. I find the authors generally untrustworthy and usually under-informed. The only game reviewers I actually trust and rely upon are the Penny Arcade guys, but that’s because 1) I know they’re not on the take, and 2) I know they actually play games. Tycho also writes well.

“Gamers are everywhere and they’re everyone. They are your friends, neighbors, co-workers, relatives, and kids, they lead responsible and caring lives, balancing their enjoyment of interactive entertainment with many other activities important to a well-rounded lifestyle…”

OMFG LOLZ 4TW!!!1!1~~1!

So, ok, maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like games such as Grand Theft Auto. Not only do I not like them, I find them offensive, plausibly damaging, and utterly unnecessary. It’s a very particular sort of game that I don’t like at this level — games that work to provide a reasonable emulation of real-life crime, violence, drug-culture, and that encourage you, as a player, to become part of that world, rather than setting you up to fight against it. In other words, I’m not a big fan of games where the whole point is to have the player role-play a real-life bad guy.

Give me aliens. Give me Sith. Let me run around being a dagger-wielding zombie chick with a bad attitude and a distaste for Night Elves. Set me up with a BFG and some nail guns running around being a Space Marine on Mars. Better yet, give me a hunk of desert and a bit of fertile land along a river and I will build a civilisation. Let me build. Let me create. Let me fight the bad guys. Let me solve crimes. Let me make-believe in a fantasy world. Don’t…don’t have me commit serious (epic, even) analogs of real-world crimes and reward me based on how many people I kill, prostitutes I control, or drug money I bring in. Well, you can offer me the chance to do that if you like, but don’t sell it to the ten-to-fifteen year old set, m’kay?

Now, of course, there’s the ESRB and their video games rating guide, but it’s not exactly all that useful. First off, “the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce the ratings at the retail level, [but] we do work closely with retailers and game centers to encourage them to display ratings information and not sell or rent certain product to minors”. Secondly, most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to a) know about the rating system, b) actually use the rating system to select games for their children, or c) really have the first clue wtf the kids are doing downstairs on the X-Box in the first place.

I guess that’s actually secondly, thirdly, and fourthly.

Anyhow, I think the actual creation of these games is ethically questionable at the best of times, but I understand the most fundamental reasons for doing so: they make millions and millions of dollars. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example, “could be looking at 3 million copies sold in the opening weekend”. At around $50 US per copy, that’s, oh, $150,000,000. In the first weekend. Not an insignificant motivation.

I suppose I just wish that ESRB ratings were (far) more rigorous and better enforced. People are going to continue making these games, for obvious bottom-line-feeding reasons. Parents, however, aren’t going to suddenly wake up tomorrow and be more actively involved and responsible with regards to their childrens’ lives. Which is sad, but true. This being the case, I’d just like to see the video games treated more like…well, more like something that’s rigorously rated that has those ratings enforced at the point of sale. Movies, I suppose. Or…porn mags. Or something.

That’s enough of that, however. I started this post talking about Apple for a reason, and that’s because the Postal people have just released their sequel, Postal2: Running With Scissors for the Mac, and Apple is refusing to carry the title. “The controversial game has been given a M-rating (Mature audiences) along with a first-ever ‘Intense Violence’ sublabel from the ESRB.” Really, if you go look at their website (WARNING: FRONT PAGE IS NOT WORK FRIENDLY) you’ll see that the “M” rating really doesn’t cut it. “AO” (Adult Only, 18+) is what it should have, and that should be enforced at the point of sale by retail drones checking valid photo ID. But I digress…

The Postal site describes their latest product as follows:

Forget what you know about first person shooters. Walk a week in the Postal Dude’s shoes.

Freely explore full 3-D open-ended environments. Interact with over 100 unique NPC’s including Gary Coleman, marching bands, dogs, cats and elephants, protesters, policemen and civilians, with or without weapons.

POSTAL 2 is all about choice; experiment with everyone and everything.

And remember… it’s only as violent as you are!

Which really begs the question: if you’re not running around exploring this open-ended environment with a shotgun and a lust to kill anything that moves, what, exactly, are your interaction options? For all I know there’s a learn-to-be-a-chef-while-playing-mahjongg mini-game, but I’m doubting it.

Wrapping up: I think the Postal people are basically dumbasses for saying things like “The company that brought us the famous ‘1984′ Superbowl commercial has obviously become Big Brother” and believing it.

You buy the ticket, you take the ride. That’s all there is to it.

China, sensitive about issues of national sovereignty, has banned a computer sports game that classifies Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet as countries and has threatened to fine Web sites that supply the game and net cafes that let patrons download it.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.