theHunter

Let me be upfront about one thing:  when it comes to hunting, I am a complete hypocrite. I personally find the practice abhorrent, and yet I love my ham sandwiches, chicken, and steak. I have the luxury of living in an era where I can drive to the supermarket deli and approach the process of buying dead animal flesh as if my Virginia Baked Ham was magically created at the Ham Factory somewhere. No blood spilled, no mess, no suffering. Of course this is a convenient fantasy. Someone has to breed, process, and slaughter an animal who’s just minding its own business in order for me to have my ham sandwich, and though I find the idea of hunting and killing animals distasteful, I still buy ham at the deli every week and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

I've also been guilty of generalizing hunters as a group of ignorant drunken rednecks who just enjoy spraying bullets into the woods, chasing innocent animals down, and killing them. I think Marisa Tomei described my sentiments best in My Cousin Vinny. It was only out of a sense of playful irony that I decided to download Expansive World’s free to play hunting simulator, theHunter. I’d remembered seeing those deer hunting arcade games in bars with light guns that were little more than flashy rail shooters, and was skeptical that a computer game for such a niche hobby would be either fun to play or a competent simulation. Boy, was I wrong.

Why even bother going outside in real life?

The environment in theHunter is breathtaking. Branches of trees obstruct sunlight, with individual rays piercing through the openings. Trees move in the wind, and their leaves fall in its direction, equally affected by light and shadow. Birds sing, small woodland creatures chitter, and the wind blows. Convincing outdoor environments have always been difficult to create in computer games, but theHunter absolutely nails it, and it truly feels like you’re walking through the woods. There are occasional visual glitches, such as small rocks that appear to be hovering an inch off the ground on an incline, and the draw distance on animals could be better (it’s over 200 meters which isn't shabby, either), but such issues are few and far between, and aren’t enough to distract from the truly compelling visual and auditory experience Expansive World has created.

I haven’t had the opportunity to witness how deer, elk, bear, et al. behave in reality, but after playing for several hours, I’m convinced the team behind theHunter did their research. All of the animals move and feel real. They trot slowly, they stop and look around, stamp their hoof when agitated, and bolt when you get too close. Sometimes you’ll find a lone mule deer sleeping on a hill, and other times you’ll see five of them all walking together, having a nice day out.

            

Tracking is easy with the Huntermate (tricorder).

There are two ways to track an animal; by its tracks, and by sound. Sometimes an animal will call out, revealing its approximate location, but most of the time you’ll be relying on your keen vision to spot animal tracks. The game throws you a bone, however, designating an animal’s tracks with a thin, obvious red arch, and if you follow a specific set of tracks, they’re covered by a sold dome-like glow of red to differentiate themselves from the tracks of other animals. Using your handy “Huntermate” (I call it my tricorder), you’re able to get a general sense of the animal’s proximity and direction, and, with enough skill, its gender, speed, weight, and health. There are RPG elements as well. Every weapon has a skill associated with it, which you increase by scoring hits on live animals. Each time you level your skill up, your aim becomes a little steadier, and you’re able to hold your breath to steady your shot longer. You can raise your spotting and tracking skills as well, with higher levels revealing more precise information about your quarry.

            

Currently the list of animals available to hunt in the deer family are mules, whitetails, blacktails, reds, roes, and elk. There are also bears (black and brown), feral hogs, wild boars, moose, coyotes, pheasants, turkeys, and foxes. Quite the list. Some of them can ruin your day too; I've been gouged by feral hogs more than I’d like to admit, and though I've never had a close encounter with a bear, I’d imagine it could end poorly. Fortunately the only penalty for getting gored or clawed is a trip back to a spawn point and a bit of humility.

            

I'd imagine those catch on their share of branches.

There are persistent aspects too. Enamored with a particular spot on one of theHunter’s six islands and don’t want to have to walk there every time you start a new session? You can buy a tent from the game’s online store and plant it there, creating a permanent spawn point. Change your mind later? Dismantle it and set it up somewhere else. Want to make sure you always have a height advantage? Bring along a tree stand that you can attach to nearly any tree in the game, which gives you a great view while also reducing your visibility and scent.

            

The number of ways you can play theHunter are staggering, and playing with friends with the recently introduced multiplayer feature brings a whole new dimension of fun to the game. You can play just for the scenery, strolling along and taking pictures with an in-game digital camera that are then uploaded to your profile on the game’s website, or you can take part in serious competitions with players around the world for in-game rewards. Most players tend to opt for the middle ground, setting their own goals, and enjoying the game’s beautiful sandbox experience. A player who doesn’t want to spend any money gets a .243 bolt action rifle and a license to shoot and harvest mule deer. You have to pay money to get the ability to hunt the entire list of wildlife, and to purchase more advanced rifles, bows and gear, but at $15 for a three month subscription, the price seems reasonable.

            

The concept of “ethical hunting” is fertile ground for debate, but for the game’s part, it wants you to kill animals in the least cruel ways possible. It will yell at you if you, for example, shoot a moose with birdshot, or a pheasant with a high powered rifle. It will also get on your case if you merely wound an animal and fail to track it down to finish the job, leaving it to suffer. They’re small touches, but I appreciated them.

            

Doc, the game's tutorial guide, shames me for shooting a moose with a .44 magnum pistol.

I found myself moving from enjoying the gorgeous environments to, quite to my surprise, getting caught up in the thrill of the hunt – of seeing where the next track would lead – of crouching and walking ever so softly when I caught a glimpse of my prey over the next rise. I’d reach for my deer call and blow into it, attempting to lure the bull closer. Finally, I’d raise my rifle and aim above its forelegs, trying to get a vital heart or lung shot to drop it immediately, instead of a body shot that would turn an easy kill into a two kilometer chase. What was happening to me? I wasn't just playing a hunting game, I was enjoying it!

            

I rationalized it to myself by realizing that I don’t want to kill human beings in real life, but over the course of all the computer games I've ever played I must have slaughtered thousands of virtual people. I suppose virtual animals could fit into that same compartment. There are moments though where you just feel like the biggest jerk in the world. You shoot a doe, wing it, but don’t drop it on the spot. You chase it over a hill, and find it lying on the ground. As you walk closer, she turns her head and looks up at you with those large, dark eyes, as if to say “Why? I don’t understand.” Then you kill her. It’s a testament to the prowess of the developers that macabre moments like that in a computer game could make me feel genuinely uncomfortable.

It's a tough world out there.

Those few moments aside, I've thoroughly enjoyed theHunter, and recommended it to all of my friends. It’s the kind of experience that you can’t really describe accurately to someone who hasn't played it for themselves, but the game is more than the sum of its parts, and my friends, all of whom were initially skeptical, have found it to be a surprising time sink after playing for an hour or so. TheHunter creates experiences that are so difficult to find in other games. It creates moments that you remember. As odd as the comparison may sound, I’d say it’s most analogous to Crusader Kings II in terms of memorable, emergent game play. I can’t remember anything about the last Call of Duty game I played, but man, I sure remember when I stalked a group of five whitetail deer and took them down one after another with my recurve bow, silently, until there was just one left. I don’t remember much about Dead Space, but I’ll always remember when I used my moose call and a male moose called back. I stalked it, and over the hill where I thought it was, a female moose crested. I didn't understand, but I waited, and finally, slowly, the male moose followed behind her. Not wanting to lose either, I lifted my side-by-side shotgun, put the first slug into the male moose, and before the female could react and flee, put the second into her. They both fell where they stood. Macabre? Yes. Memorable? Absolutely.

It isn't a game for everyone, and I still would never hunt in real life, but theHunter creates amazing experiences and if you give it a chance, there’s a good possibility you’ll end up losing yourself in its magnificent world, and also, just maybe, having a slightly more open mind about hunting in general.

Give theHunter a try yourself.

Where Did All These Casuals Come From?

Perhaps this article is a little late in coming, considering we're on the other side of 2013, and casual gaming has been a "thing" since circa 2006, give or take. I'll leave it to the archaeologists to pin down the exact figures. Gamers can be an insular, protective sort of whichever brand of their petty domain they lord over, and I confess at the time I wasn't exactly impressed with a genre of games called "casual." It wasn't a big deal, though. After all, I'm not a big fan of Mountain Dew, but it co-exists on the shelf beside my Dr. Pepper just fine, and everybody's happy. Nintendo was in a fantastic position to push the idea of the "casual game," or the game that could be played in a short amount of time, and be simple enough to pull in consumers normally outside of the gaming market. While they suffered a few missteps along the way, they succeeded convincingly at expanding their market share by creating an entirely new genre of gaming entertainment that few saw coming.

At the same time as Nintendo's Wii was opening gaming to new markets, new hardware was being made that seemed like a match made in heaven for these small, low-weight types of games, namely the iPhone and Android's mobile devices. In these mobile devices you have a telephone with a processor fast enough to run demanding programs and display the results on high-resolution screens, and the devices just got faster, slimmer, and more beautiful with each revision. The hardware was there, and the games soon followed - a deluge of them. Most poor, some good, and only a few fantastic, but the land had been seeded, small developers were making money programming simple games in their homes hearkening back to an era in the early 80s where small groups could make simple but popular games like Ultima (one person) and Wizardry (three people), and more importantly make money off of them. A resurgence of  indie gaming has also come along for the ride, with both new and seasoned developers having a greater access to potential customers than ever before, especially if they're fortunate enough to land on Steam's GreenLight distribution platform.  

What does this all mean for your average consumer who grew up playing the original NES and was blown away by 3D polygonal fighting in Battle Arena Toshinden in 1995? This consumer always played the games, always bought the new consoles, and occasionally upgraded their PC when they could afford it. Speaking as one of those people, this casual revolution didn't really hit me until sometime in 2010. Sure, I'd heard murmurs about it, usually derogatory from fellow "true gamers" who regarded the "casuals" as a regal person might sniff their nose at the "commoners" in the street. I didn't really get it at the time - all I knew was the sphere of gaming was widening, and with it, the definition of what being a "gamer" meant was gradually changing, and the stigma was even starting to become less pronounced.  Whatever benefits came with the casuals, I certainly wasn't prepared for the sheer numbers of new players to my sport.

Right now there are over 100 million mobile gamers out there and there are no signs of that number slowing anytime soon. I'll be honest, I've never really enjoyed playing games on a telephone (outside of a few roguelikes and maybe I'll admit to tossing some ill-tempered ornithological specimens on occasion, but using a phone as a platform for gaming just never did it for me. But you know what? It's doing it for over a hundred million people, new customers and consumers to our grubby little club of gaming, and with them they bring their gaming dollars, which can only be good for the industry as a whole. More gamers = good. It means more independent developers getting involved on the scene, and more small studios willing to take chances on games that break the common mold such as the thoroughly excellent Gone Home.  

So where do I fit into all this?  Personally I hate it when I hear some gaming journalist talking about how the whole industry needs to be shaken up every x-couple of years, or someone else crying out that we won't get six more Call of Duty games because of these upstart mobile developers taking soccer mom market share. Developers and publishers are keeping their eyes on what segments of the market are pulling in what types of returns, and I'll argue there's room for all of us at the table. As much as the thought of a "Game Monetization Summit" makes me wince a little, there was one, and some ostensibly really smart guys who know what they're talking about say that the big spenders of console and PC games are by and large keeping the industry alive (currently via monitization), which means more games for that bracket of consumer. So let's all relax and welcome our Android and iPhone carrying brethren. They may seem a little weird to you at first, sure, but don't forget, you're also getting older. I remember my dad thought I was weird sometimes. And as long as I'm researching facts, did you know that forty-five percent of gamers are women? I bet you didn't. 

Behind the Purse Strings of "Free the Games"

It's been over a year now since the indie games console OUYA went from Kickstarter darling to its dubious place today as the first inexpensive Android-based games console. The company itself made over eight million dollars on their Kickstarter, and were able to leverage their success to convince venture capitalists to part with $15 million of their own money. This infusion of cash, while not enough to save the troubled little box, is enough to keep it on life support for the next several months. Of that money, OUYA set aside one million dollars for their "Free the Games" fund which offers to match funds that game developers raise from Kickstarter if certain conditions are met. This announcement was met with some skepticism given the difficulty most OUYA Kickstarter games have getting funded in the first place, never mind reaching the considerable goal of $50,000.

In less than three weeks, two Kickstarter projects have met those goals. The first is Gridiron Thunder, whose ambitious goal of $75,000 dollars was broken in only a couple weeks, by 126 backers, and only 112 of those backers have registered for the program's reward tier, and almost all of them at the low-donation level, meaning the significant volume of cash to back this product was put up by people who don't want to be identified or rewarded for their role in it.  We're talking thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, even. So what happened, here? The most likely conclusion is that the bulk of the project is self-funded by the developers or their friends so they can get a free $75,000 check from OUYA. A simple bit of social engineering if you have the capital to put up - after all, who would say no to a free seventy five grand?

The second project to reach its funding, a point-and-click style adventure game, Elementary my Dear Holmes, also saw a sudden infusion of cash over the past couple days which pushed it to its $50,000 goal. More interesting are the profiles of these recent backers.  A few examples are below:

I'll spare the jokes about how nice it is that the Mona Lisa, Thomas Jefferson, and a pack of candy have taken a sudden interest in the future of the OUYA. These accounts were all created on or about the same time, and have just been sitting dormant. Not pictured are Harrison Ford, Peter Dinklage, Natalie Portman, and a slew of others. It's the next backer, however, that moves this from petty scam to plain disgusting.

That's nice. A woman who's been missing for two years and is most likely dead, found the time to back "Elementary, my Dear Homes" exclusively for the OUYA. About halfway through August 27th, these fake pledge accounts were noticed by enough people that the creator of the Kickstarter began to take some heat. A pledge comments on the situation (as reposted on Something Awful):  

And that's not even half the list. Not even a third. After Victory Square Games, the company behind Elementary, my Dear Holmes, started getting heat from this, suddenly these backers began to assume other identities. For example, our missing woman, and the only Kickstarter contributor from Palm Coast, Florida became Zoyi Alex.

And our friend Jefferson Taylor, from Johnson, Vermont, became Jefferson Tremonti.

Someone spent a lot of time and effort creating multiple Kickstarter accounts specifically for this purpose.  A man on the inside of the company? Perhaps. An unpaid intern for OUYA? Maybe. The most obvious culprit would be the game designers themselves, because who wouldn't want tens of thousands of dollars for doing virtually nothing. The other possible explanation is this is a move by OUYA itself in an attempt to make their program look successful, and hopefully encourage more developers to take a stab at it themselves. After all, it's only venture capital money - it's not OUYA's. For OUYA's part, they've been dutifully ignoring any inquiries on the situation:

Today Mike Suszek of Joystiq wrote about these first two games to successfully meet their goals for matching funds, while completely ignoring the bigger story at hand. Inquiries from readers about the validity of the funding were rebuffed initially, but Joystiq finally updated their original story claiming that they were looking into the matter.

Megan Farokhmanesh, writing for Polygon, follows up with their own announcement of OUYA's "Free the Games" program's first apparent successes with a 141-word piece. No question of where the money came from, or any other important questions that aren't difficult to find out. The only people interested in getting to the bottom of this are those writing in the comment section of her article, as seen to the right.

This is just another example of the spittoon that is modern video game journalism. One thing's for sure; this story is going to get far more interesting.

Gone Home - In ~250 Words

If I had to pin a definition on Gone Home, I'd call it more of an experience than a game, and probably the closest game of its kind I could compare it to would be something along the lines of Myst. There are no jump scares, zombies, or physical horrors to run from. Instead, you're drawn into a fully realized and believable world of a family and their lives as you explore their empty house.  

It's difficult to write about Gone Home in-depth without saying more than I should; I certainly don't want to ruin the experience for others, and you should go into it as blindly as possible. I will say that it reveals a touching and complicated coming of age story set in the mid-90s, and as a man born in 1980, the atmosphere of re-creating 1994 was amazing, from the items in the house, to the music, to the references. None of it felt ham-handed or shoehorned - it all just "fit." This isn't a game meant to be played by kids. There isn't anything graphic, but rather it's a game that would be difficult for someone to appreciate completely if they haven't gone through the slings and arrows of being a teenager.  

I'm very delighted to see Gone Home getting universal praise from professional reviewers, and I hope more developers will take a chance on original game development. Gone Home is currently on Steam for $19.99, and you should buy it.

The "Let's Play" Revolution

Some forms of entertainment are timeless, such as drinking with your friends, or cutting it on the dance floor. Humans have been enjoying these traditions in one form or another since we learned how to turn potatoes into alcohol and whack a stick against a stone to create rhythm. Technology allows us to enhance these experiences (now instead of sticks we have dubstep), but it also creates new forms of entertainment that weren't possible even a decade ago. In this case, I'm referring to the rise of the "Let's Play" (LP) phenomenon, which has taken YouTube by storm over the past few years. A let's play is simply a recording made of someone playing a video game, usually with commentary.  Doesn't sound that great on the face of it, right? And yet many people who create and publish these videos have amassed followings of several thousands, and some in the millions. Those with substantial subscribers have even been able to monetize their YouTube channels, effectively getting paid to play video games for a living, and that's pretty cool.

What's more amazing is that a select few of these enterprising gamers have made watching their videos actually fun. As with any form of entertainment, there's a lot more chaff than wheat, but there are some genuinely interesting personalities out there who make the experience of watching a video of a computer game go beyond a dry technical act and use their commentary to turn it into performance art. LPs also give you the chance to watch people play old or odd games that you might not have even heard of before, and there are some channels specifically dedicated to old PC games of the 80s, Japanese games that never saw a US release, and genre-specific titles such as real-time strategy games.

All of this is why I sometimes find myself settling in at the end of the day excited to watch MikeNnemonic's LP of some obscure game I've never heard of instead of watching some sitcom on TV. Finding competent let's players can be tricky business, though, and there's even a YouTube channel by Slowbeef and Diabeetus from the website Something Awful dedicated to mocking LP videos by commentators who just haven't quite popped, to be charitable.  To my credit, my own videos haven't been featured by them (yet).

Ten years ago who would have dreamed this would be a thing?  It makes you wonder what's down the road for us.

Games Journalism – or Why we Can’t Have Nice Things

Anyone can be a “games journalist” today.  All it takes is a basic understanding of spelling, grammar and a website. Unfortunately, the word “journalist” implies a certain level of integrity and responsibility that is all but absent in the field of gaming. Journalism, at its ideal, requires critical thinking, awareness of tonality, who your audience is, the grand scheme of the subject you’re writing about, and at the end of the day, what it all really means.

There are only a couple game journalists that I follow these days, and the majority of them work for Giant Bomb. These are mostly people who have been in the industry for at least a decade and have the distinction of being crotchety old 30+ people like myself. One other example is Ben Croshaw, whose one-trick pony satire belies a deeper understanding of the games industry and gives him a platform to make some insightful comments about both game makers and consumers that he can get away with because they’re shrouded in humor.

In most cases you get banal reporting that serves little more than to take the marketing points of a company’s game and expose it to the writer’s audience. In the worst case you have people like Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid who outed a transgendered woman on Twitter and then proceeded to insult and mock those who called him on it, creating a Twitter meltdown that resulted in him getting suspended indefinitely and potentially fired.

As one who spends more time playing video games than he should, it’s frustrating to see the lack of standards in the gaming media. Of course, not all gamers are the same, or are interested in the same kind of coverage. When I was younger and the industry was evolving, we didn’t have the range of choice in gaming that we do today, and had to take what we could get. In a lot of ways, gaming journalism was hamstrung by being a niche media market with a limited audience. Now, years later, the industry has evolved to the point where the word “gamer” has lost a lot of its formerly derogatory edge, the market has expanded to take over the living rooms of Middle America, and a vibrant indie gaming scene has spawned more creativity and consumer choice than ever before.

And yet journalistic standards remain largely the same. There’s a cavalier attitude in the industry that needs to change for gaming media to become as respected as traditional journalism.  When editors and writers make offensive statements on Twitter and then defend them with righteous indignation, there’s a problem. When gaming writers are recorded talking about how they find Nazi SS uniforms sexy during a drunken tirade, there’s a problem. And it’s not because we can’t say dumb things – we’re only human, and we make mistakes, but when we’re representing a company, an industry, and a subculture, we have a responsibility to exercise a level of judgment beyond what we might say to good friends behind closed doors.

Make no mistake, there are good, hardworking, and responsible journalists in the game industry, but their efforts are easily overshadowed by amateur writers who give gaming culture a bad name.