patrick miller writes about videogames

from a chat with a buddy of mine on facebook:

i think everyone should just play morridomvergil against him

and go for the coin toss

he should just enter a tournament

and be forced into a hell of his own choosing

nothing but morridomvergil

let him continue to win

confine him to a world where no one plays any other team

make him miserable

break him

how long do you think you could stand to play that

he’d like

open a closet door

and be scared

to find hidden missiles

and the best part is

everyone else would still be having a great time

playing marvel

except him

i imagine him walking over to a money match setup and seeing everyone smiling and laughing

and then as soon as he shows up everyone shuts up and picks morridoom

i think you’d last a month

and then you’d cry

Another GDC is over and done! Most shows I go to leave me with a certain sense of hopelessness, dread, and exhaustion (see pretty much any post-show musing post I write on Insert Credit) but GDC always leaves me excited and inspired (if still exhausted). Now that I’ve had a good 36 hours or so to cool down and stare at a wall for a bit, I think I have recovered enough brainpower to write a decent GDC wrapup.

Progress, slowly but surely

GDC continued the gender talk that the gender-related dustups in tech and on the Internet two weeks ago (the stupid 40 Hottest Women in Tech bit and Adria Richards/PyCon), but in a more positive tone overall.

On one hand, the IGDA co-sponsored a professional mixer/party with startup incubator YetiZen (which had topless models at a party during last year’s GDC) that had some female dancers there, and took a whole bunch of flak for that. The next day, Notch had his Skrillex party, which had some paid female models hired to mingle in the VIP section, and that got people’s attention too (this is one of those weird standard party-industry practices that honestly should probably just go; Jason Killingsworth did a neat interview with his sister on this topic). And my colleague and friend Lizzie Cuevas posted a pair of heartbreaking tweets within three hours of each other:

On another note, I just saw off my little sister, a Computer Engineering major, at her first @official_gdc. They grow up so fast. :’)

— Lizzie Cuevas (@lizziecuevas) March 29, 2013

Apologies to my little sister at GDC who had to experience her first seriously inappropriate comment from a male attendee.

— Lizzie Cuevas (@lizziecuevas) March 29, 2013

On the other hand, there were great things happening, too. Anna Anthropy took her turn during a dev-rant session to read a modified version of Cara Ellison’s poem “Romero’s Wives”. A group of incredible women in the biz (ranging from Brenda Braithwaite to Leigh Alexander to Mattie Brice to Robin Hunicke etc.) did a fantastic panel called 1ReasonToBe that picked up where that #1reasonwhy Twitter discussion left off. Yes, our industry is still deeply problematic, but I am reassured by our industry’s collective willingness to talk about this kind of thing, at least to relative to where we were just a few years ago.

I started blogging about race and games about seven years ago, in a small blog called Token Minorities that I updated in-between undergrad Philosophy classes. At the time, not many people were writing about this kind of stuff; Bonnie Ruberg kept a blog about sexuality and gender in games called Heroine Sheik; occasionally we’d see stuff on Racialicious about games. That was about it. Compared to back then, it feels like I’m practically tripping over interesting, intelligent people writing about games, the industry, and power. It feels like we’re on to an excellent start (if only just a start).

Indies are culture

While kicking off the IGF awards on Wednesday, Andy Schatz (Monaco) said something along the lines of “We indies aren’t the counter-culture any more, guys…we are culture.”

It’s true. (Or at least, it’s true at GDC.) We are seeing an explosion of creativity in video games, aided by ever-lowering barriers to entry, and all eyes are on the folks doing new and cool things with the form — not games with numbers in the title and a hand holding a gun on the right side of the screen. No, the money is not there yet, for the most part. But it’s amazing how much cool work people are doing out there, people you’ve never heard of, making games you could have never thought of in a million years.

Congratulations, folks: You’ve made it. Now as you go on to continually remake and reinvent this medium, let’s try to reinvent the business and industry behind it.

Games writing/journalism needs to catch up

I must confess to a certain amount of jealousy whenever I go to GDC, since I don’t make games, really. I run into lots of fellow journalists, editors, and writers there, and I’m always a bit bemused by how much cool, awesome stuff the devs are doing — and how much cooler that is than anything the writing folks are doing. We need to step up our game and innovate like the devs are.

Still minimal interest in competitive games

It always makes me sad to see how little attention or thought people give to building, feeding, promoting, and sustaining competitive games and player communities. Never mind that Riot Games is arguably the biggest success story from the American games industry in recent memory; industry thought leaders simply don’t seem to notice. I was swapping Street Fighter tips with Capy Games president Nathan Vella at a party, and when I left he said “But who will I nerd out with?”

I thought it was pretty hilarious that we were the nerds at a games industry party, but there it is; for all the things that catch a game industry professional’s interest, actually getting good at playing video games is surprisingly absent. It’s funny; it feels like we’re learning to take games seriously in all kinds of ways, but mostly from the side of artistic expression, since that is seen as more mature than the pursuit of skill for its own sake. Which makes me sad. But, hey, baby steps, I suppose.

-patrick miller

So gender and tech has been a hot-button issue lately (well, since forever, really). Anita Sarkeesian released her first Tropes vs. Women video, Adria Richards got fired from her job in developer relations for calling out an inappropriate joke she heard at PyCon, and now, with perfect timing, bro-mag Complex published a list of the 40 Hottest Women in Tech, which includes one of my colleagues and a handful of the few women in the game industry.

Ugh. Tasteless, awful, stupid. And, naturally, no one on the list had given their permission to be included, which is just the worst.

My favorite part, however, is the bit where author (excuse me — as per his Twitter, “Professional Content Generator”) Luke Winkie decides to disavow the article, first by saying that he tried to make the article about “normal-looking women” (that’s not really any better) and then by claiming that the editor replaced over half the women he had included with “people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue.”

And when people insisted he publish his original draft, he said that “unfortunately my original list was written over in the google doc by the new list :(” Dude, Google Docs has revision tracking. Just go to File > See Revision History. Until you do this, you have zero credibility whatsoever. If you’re going to throw your editor under the bus, you need to actually throw your editor under the bus.

Meanwhile, Winkie’s ex-girlfriend apparently put him on blast on Twitter. The price of his dignity is $500, apparently. Considering the original manuscript was commissioned at 50 women instead of the published 40, we can basically figure that he’s willing to single out and offend accomplished professionals to the tune of $10 per woman. That’s $10 to remind some of the most talented people in our industry that at the end of the day, men are still going to judge them by their appearance above all else. I had no idea patriarchy was so cheap to reinforce.

Here’s the deal: I understand the decision-making process that can lead to that kind of stupid decision from an editorial perspective. (It’s called “pandering,” and it means you don’t respect your readers.) If you want to stick around in this biz without being immortalized as the douchebag who wrote that one article at the absolute worst time possible, here’s what you do.

If it really was your editor’s fault, the best thing you can do now is to pull the original list and publish it on pastebin. (If you don’t have the original list because what you wrote is, in fact, the original list, write one up really really quickly and publish it.) Distance yourself from Complex as best you can. Donate your $500 paycheck to a nonprofit org for women in technology (I just googled this list). You may never work with Complex again, but at least when an editor at another pub Googles your name and finds that you were the dumbass who wrote that article, they can at least see that you managed to make amends as best you could.

Now let’s all read the 40 Hottest Cats In Tech and ignore Twitter for the weekend.

-patrick miller

okay that’s enough serious business on this tumblr, back to marvel stuff!

-i started playing on PS3, and bought a PS3 stick and everything. holy CRAP it is bad. it drops a whole bunch of frames on certain levels, and even if i’m on the training stage i drop frames each time i activate sougenmu, which makes timing loops a bitch. maybe this is why zero doesn’t win majors.

-online play is really, really bad. lag just removes like eight layers of depth from the game because it’s so hard to move around, much less time attacks or combos. i lost to a deadpool/doom/vergil player that just jumped back and threw grenades while calling doom missiles. TWICE. I LOST TO THAT TWICE

-i started playing wolverine. i’m really bad with wolverine. 

-as part of a project i am working on, i started playing AE again. i’m realizing a whole bunch of stuff about ryu that i’ve never noticed before (because i’ve never really played ryu seriously in SF4), like the fact that fireballs are way worse than they are in ST! man, i don’t like AE as a game, but it’s fun to relearn something.

Just popping in here to point out something that showed up on Reddit earlier. Destructoid EIC put up a post about how half its readers use adblock. The post itself isn’t anything new (it’s not the first time that D-toid has engaged with this issue, either, I don’t think). But read the Reddit comments thread for stuff like this:

Sorry guys, people are willing to do your job for free. Maybe not to the same standard but they’ll always be free press and accountability on the internet regardless of whether people are paid to do it.

My hobby is video gaming, reading about them on sites is a nice extra but nothing that I couldn’t do without.

I might seem like an arsehole but it’s the truth.

Or these:

There are people willing to write articles, post content and the like which adds to the hobby without being paid. Many even pay their own hosting site fees for the privelege. It isn’t to say that there’s no place for professional game sites, but in an age where gaming has never had more hobbyists and everyone has access to the internet, do we really need RPS, GiantBomb, Destructoid, Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, the Escapist and god only knows how many other sites to all basically either regurgitate the same news stories or provide reviews on games? The willingness to make a professional site does not entitle a company to the right to succeed. Not in this field.

I could quite happily make do with community-based discussion and reviews as you might find on Reddit (outside of r/gaming, naturally). In fact, many times I get a more accurate impression of a game this way than via professional games journalists - e.g. Skyrim (the fact that that game was universally praised just baffles me).

I don’t adblock this website or that website. I am not a “reader” for a specific website. I browse the web. I read from aggregate and crowd-source curated internet. I adblock the entire internet, because it’s not one segregated website anymore, its one giant mess of information, and you can’t trust any of it. I think publishers trying to make money on the internet are fighting a losing battle against people who are willing to do it for free. If Destructoid can’t afford to pay its writers what they deserve, then the writers should leave, Destuctoid should shrink and become a smaller more focused entity, or make way for Joe Blow in his basement doing it for free after his 9-5 job. After he quits his job, grows his website, sells it to a conglomerate and then complains that it doesn’t make enough money, he can do the same and John Doe can start his turn at the wheel.

The thing is, none of the gaming websites need to exist. We have intelligent redditors and bloggers in the wild that are passionate about talking about video games that don’t need ad revenue; since they write about games as a hobby.

Some of the gaming journalists do a decent job, but I’m not going to lament their extinction either. There will always be passionate fans that will fill the gaming discussion void for free.

Folks, this is your readership (or the readership you’re trying to get). And this is how they think about your work. Ten more years of the same stuff isn’t going to cut it.

—patrick miller

Posted it on my Gamasutra blog this time. The intro:

(Yet another disclaimer: Everything I’m writing about is based on my own experiences, observations, and conjecture.)

In one day, I’ve read two excellent articles and one rather hilarious Twitter spat between a bunch of grown-ass men, and all of them are about the subject of tech journalism (specifically, how bad it is). Naturally, I feel obligated to chime in, and since the last post I wrote about the business of games journalismcaught so many eyeballs, I figure I might as well weigh in on the oft-thrown-around claim that games journalists are hacks and idiots and can’t write.
Since this is weighing in at about 4000+ words, I’ll offer a tl;dr: Hate the way games journalism is designed, not the journalist.

(This is what I do on Sunday evenings, I guess. Someone sing this. And make the lyrics more awesome.)

Once upon a time

A few matches ago

I logged on Xbox Live

You left training mode

You found me

You found me

You found me

I guess you didn’t care

And I guess my yomi’s wack

Cuz at the match start

You took a jump back

Foot diving, foot diving, foot diving

And I fall down

You land next to me

And I realize i’m eating level 3 

Cause I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So shame on me now

You noob you know you should never win

Bet you drop that combo

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So mash H hard now

It’s like you’re just checking buttons

Now i’m landing in a hard knock down

(Storm’s MVC2 FP sound?) Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Screw that wolverine

Go play devil may cry 

Don’t act like you don’t know 

vergil is just godlike

You’re mashing, you’re mashing, you’re mashing

I see you teleport

You burn x factor 3

Put on the gucci belt

I hope we’re not on stream

I’m salty, I’m salty, I’m salty

Play Morrigan

Like I’m Chris G

But I realize

I just got bodied

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So shame on me now

You noob you know you should never win

Bet you drop that combo

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So mash H hard now

It’s like you’re just checking buttons

Now i’m landing in a hard knock down

Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Then my Doom assist, you’re snapping in

You just helm breaker

just helm, just helm breaker, just helm breaker

Yeah

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So shame on me now

You noob you know you should never win

Bet you drop that combo

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

So mash H hard now

It’s like you’re just checking buttons

Now i’m landing in a hard knock down

Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Oh, oh, scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

I knew you were scrubby when you first hit

scrubby, scrubby, scrubby

Played in a small (~14 people) Marvel tournament in Fremont today and spent most of my time getting beat down by Windzero’s Frank/MODOK/Haggar team in casuals. It’s pretty nasty. I won’t go into details right now, but that MODOK shield assist makes point Frank real dangerous.

Won the first two matches or so, lost to Windzero 3-0 in winner’s (almost took a game or two but dropped some rather important combos), played one of the guys I had beaten earlier and won, then blew a 2-0 lead against the other guy I sent to losers to finish 4th. 4th place gets me a Rock Band patch and keychain, or something. Hurray.

Great experience, though. It’s the first time I’ve been able to sit down and play a protracted set of casuals before a tournament, so by the time things started up (about 3 hours after i got there) I felt nice and relaxed. Between yesterday’s tournament and today’s tournament, I’ve really come to appreciate a few things about tournament playing that I’ve never thought about before:

• Developing a “new player routine” as a kind of psychological test to learn more about the kind of player you’re going up against if you’ve never played them before (Doom missiles is really good for this)
• Developing several different patterns and levels of aggression for each of your characters (the guy who got 2nd played a lot of runaway Doom, which was infuriating, and when I played him in casuals I got a bit overeager and made some mistakes)
• Learning how to pay attention to every single UI indicator the game gives you (greyed out assists, for example)—particularly handy when you’re not wearing headphones
• Why Wolverine has more tournament success than Zero even though Zero is almost always considered the better character (AKA why I want to learn Wolverine and copy PR Rog’s Wolverine/Doom/Vergil team)
• How to make on-the-fly adjustments after getting owned by new tech 

I stopped competing seriously pretty much once I started college, since I wanted to focus on school stuff (and I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t find any regular tournaments anyway). Then, it seemed like kind of a waste of money and time — I could have more fun playing more games per hour at a console session with my buddies, and spend less money besides. But with UMVC3, I’ve pretty much only played the game at console sessions with my buddies, which means I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of how my team and tech is supposed to work, but I need to expose it to lots of other people to make it better. So I’m really glad that I’ve been making it out to other sessions with new people thus far, and I hope I’ll be able to continue that up until Evo at least. Putting myself out there and playing more (and keeping this blog) has really made it easier for me to figure out how I can step my game up further, and kept me motivated besides.

Well, that was exciting! I wrote a long-ass post yesterday about where I see the future of games journalism going in the post-1UP era, and a whole bunch of generally high-profile colleagues and such read it and passed it around on Twitter and Tumblr and such. Somewhat hilariously, I wasn’t able to easily track many of these conversations. I guess that’s the downside of trying to talk to people on such a decentralized platform. Oh well!

Over the last year or so, I’ve really started to put myself and my writing out there a little more (particularly on Insert Credit, which is where that last post would have gone if it weren’t for that stupid Google malware blacklist), and whenever my stuff gets linked a lot of people say it’s “cynical.” Which is funny, because I don’t think I’m an overly cynical guy at all. At least, I’m pretty happy with my life and how things are going, and while I may have a rather sarcastic streak, I think I tend to be a rather optimistic person overall. The thing is, the perspective I am inclined to adopt in these editorials (I write them usually after a major games event, like a GDC or an E3) is one about analyzing how institutions shape the way we do our jobs making games and writing about them, and I guess that is depressing to some people.

Anyway, now I have a few more people reading this tumblr and following me on Twitter, and I imagine they’re probably expecting a whole lot more insightful observations about games journalism. Joke’s on you, folks! I will probably continue to write things about games journalism from time to time (things that are “cynical” or “realist” or “educational” depending on whether you manage to pull in a steady paycheck from this gig or not, I guess), but I mostly use this blog to write about fighting games and stuff. Which is what the rest of this post is about.

I just got back from a Marvel tournament at the MADE that had like 18 people in it or so. Won my first few matches, then lost a close one to some guy, then played my good buddy Bihn and lost to him 3-0. I’m 0-2 against friends in tournaments now. Fantastic.

I’m slightly disappointed with my performance, but each loss was one I could have won (I was never outclassed like I was against Falcomist) and I am quickly discovering that Nova is my problem matchup, so I’m paying extra attention to that. Better to find that out now, than to find that out at Evo.

On the plus side, even though I barely hit any of my Zero combos (for some reason, the more I practice lightning loops, the worse I get at actually doing them), and I made a whole shit-ton of stupid mistakes, I still managed to squeak out a few wins. If anything stands as a testament to how awesome my team is (see the posts about team design from a few days ago), it’s that it can win despite my best intentions.

Anyway, tomorrow is a new day, and a new tournament! I’ll be heading down to Fremont to slug it out this time. I’m making a conscious effort to re-enter the world of competitive fighting games, and I feel rather lucky that I can now hit up the MADE every friday, perhaps stop by a San Leandro session on Tuesday, maybe check out the Freedemonia El Cerrito sessions on weekends, etc. and really level up.