Games that evoke

So I was walking around downtown San Francisco today when I was struck how it reminded me of Liberty City. Not the specifics, of course, seeing how Liberty City is modeled on New York and not San Francisco, but in the general feel of the place. I was enjoying the spring sunshine and lacework of shadows cast by local buildings and other structures, and it was very similar to the feeling I have in Grand Theft Auto IV when I just cruise around admiring the handiwork of the creators.

That led to the realization that this was just the latest example of game experiences closely paralleling real-world ones. Here are two other examples:

Game: Oblivion. One of my favorite things to do in Oblivion was just to head off into the wilderness and wander around the empire, exploring for ruins, castles and temples marked on no map. I particularly liked the glow of the early evening sun on the forests and foliage.

Real world: I live in Albany, a little burb just north of Berkeley whose main geographic feature is a hill called, appropriately enough, Albany Hill. The southern and eastern flanks of Albany Hill were built up many years ago, but at some point the city turned the rest of the hill into a park. Our apartment building is at the western foot of Albany Hill, and after a solid session with Oblivion, I would emerge, blinking, into the sun, which turned the hill’s blanket of eucalyptus trees into the exact same shade of greenish-gold seen throughout the game. I almost felt that if I charged into the brush, I would be sure to stumble across some ancient ruins and perhaps a dungeon to explore. Alas, the closest thing I have to a broadsword is a decent set of four steakknives I bought at Target a while back.

Game: Crackdown. Like everyone else, I loved how this crime-fighting game took an open-world setting and went vertical. I thrilled with vertiginous wonder as my genetically enhanced character put Spider-man to shame with his gravity-defying climbing and Matrix-style rooftop leaps.

Real world: I vividly recall going into work the day after playing the game for the first time. Downtown San Francisco looked totally different, the buildings imbued with new significance. I now found myself automatically picking out handholds and ledges that would allow me to ascend to the ceiling of the city. It really was a powerful sensation and had become second nature overnight.

My initial thought is that this sense of changing or enhancing perception of the real world is something that is seen more in games than movies. It’s not exclusive: The Matrixbascially altered my perception of the world for three or four days, a sensation that was only enhanced by listening to the soundtrack as I wandered around downtown Los Angeles. I’m trying to think of other movie examples but can’t. Certainly movies can leave deep impressions. There Will Be Blood and The Darjeeling Limited are two films I saw recently whose imagery and atmosphere lingered with me for days.

I’m guessing that any special evocativeness that games possess would stem from the fact that games (the good ones anyway) tend to engage you for longer and require conscious effort to carry out tasks. After all, you play games, whereas you watch movies.

Vacation

I’ve been taking my first vacation of the year and my folks are in town, so posting has been light lately.

Yesterday we did a 4-mile hike through Muir Woods and then followed it up with some refreshing surf and sun at Muir Beach. Today we went to Haight-Ashbury. Did the dirty hippie thing. Went to Amoeba Music, which is so edgy, even the clerk who took my money was complaining about the weird stuff piped over their music system. Bought a CD.

Having my parents in town means, of course,  that we get free babysitting for the duration. We’ve finally saw a couple movies we’ve been dying to see: There Will Be Blood and Juno. Both were excellent. Blood was a lot more subtle than I’d expected. I was figuring on an in-your-face, over-the-top, Bill the Butcher-style role, but there were a lot of interesting and even admirable aspects to Daniel Plainview’s character. I may write more about it later.

Why Metacritic is the Roger Ebert of video games

Yesterday I posted my recent article about Metacritic, the entertainment scoring Web site. It’s just so interesting how it very quickly evolved into such an important metric for the video game industry, far more so than it has for movies and music.

A major reason for that has to be that the game review business has no equivalent to a Roger Ebert. There’s no single authoritative name — or handful of names — that people turn to when they want to see how a game rates.

This is due to the nature of the medium. It’s possible for one guy, be he Roger Ebert or Gene Shalit or whoever, to watch several movies a week and then tape a half hour show or write a couple thousand words on them. A movie is watched in two hours yet many games can take 20 hours or more to complete. That makes it tough to comprehensively review even just one game a week, whereas you could (theoretically) review 10 movies in that time.

Also, a movie reviewer isn’t as beholden to the subject matter of the movie to render a competent opinion. Ebert can review “The Natural”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “300″ and “The Fast and the Furious” and the same critical techniques generally apply. It would be weird if Ebert was known as the “war movie reviewer” while Leonard Maltin was the “sports movie guy” and Gene Shalit was the “comedy movie guy”.

But you kind of have to have that specialization that with games. Yes, there’s always the standard of “Is this fun?” but you can’t take what makes a good first-person shooter and use that to judge a role-playing game, or judge a driving title based on mechanics found in a football simulation. The experiences are just too different. In that way, video games seem more like real-world sports where commentators focus narrowly on baseball or football but rarely are able to have encyclopedic knowledge of every sport. Game reviewers definitely gravitate towards their couple of favorite genres in a way movie reviewers don’t.

The sheer number of gamesreleased, and the variety of platforms, also comes into play. An Xbox 360 experience is going to be different from a Wii experience, which is in turn different from a PSP experience. It’s as if Ebert not only had to review movies but also TV shows and comic books.

I think that naturally led to gaming sites and magazinestaking the role that individual reviewers have played in the movie industry. Readers end up feeling that GameSpy, or GameSpot, or EGM, or whatever, generally has reviews that match most closely with their experiences. Yes, some of the more devoted readers may latch on to individual reviewers. For instance, GameSpy’s Sal “Sluggo” Accardo is one of the top “Guitar Hero” players in the world and he used to be a professional musician. Therefore, I always seek out his reviews on music-themed games. But in general you say, “Oh, this game got 4 stars from GameSpy“.

A final thought is simply that it somehow became an established part of game reviewing to use a fine-grained scale such as 10 points, 20 points or even 100 points. That compares to the 4- or 5-star scales, or letter grades assigned by most movie reviewers. I’m not sure how that evolved, but I’m guessing it might be an outgrowth of gamers’ tendency to break down criticism of titles into categories such as “graphics”, “sound”, “story”, “multiplayer”, etc and then adding up the various sub-scores to reach a final number.

In the end, the urge for the quick take from an authoritative source is still present and powerful. Sometimes you just want a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” take on a movie without delving into details of the cinematography or whatever. It can be the same for games, and Metacritic steps into that role with a nutshell number that delivers that instant gratification.