Chris Hardwick, he who founded The Nerdist empire (or, if not empire, then duchy) and hosts the likes of the Nerdist podcast and The Talking Dead, has a book coming out called, fittingly, The Nerdist Way. Hardwick’s also an occasional contributor to Wired (a magazine I like very much) and this month that magazine sports an excerpt from Hardwick’s book. Right now, right here, this website features an excerpt of that excerpt:

Videogames make you feel like you’re actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you’re actually accomplishing stuff. But unless you get paid to play videogames, you’re kind of not accomplishing stuff.

I sometimes do get paid to play video games, when I need to learn them to write about them (if they exist in a playable state when I’m brought on the project), and I agree with Hardwick here. Sort of. A little.

The thing is, what are “real-life achievements” exactly? Is it a real-life achievement when you earn your friend some bauble or doodad in a Facebook game that makes them happy? Is it a real-life achievement when your tournament win is grounds for a celebratory fling?

Whenever I think about the boundary on the idea of “real-life achievements” now, I think of that exchange from the Pirate Bay trial:

“When did you meet [fellow defendant Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor.
“We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “we use AFK.”
“IRL?” questioned the judge.
“In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.
“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK—Away From Keyboard.”
“Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”

Everything is in real life.

So, what’s the boundary on the notion of “get paid?” Does it have to lead to money? Things that are worth money that you get for free, that’s payment, right? Can I continue this line of questioning without using the word gamification? (Shit.)

Now I’m thinking about Jane McGonigal, of course, who argues that doses of gameplay are good. Games build confidence, alertness, awareness, and more, right? They can empower. They can hone. They can do good.

Of course, Hardwick’s writing not about a bit of healthy game-playing, he’s warning against obsessive tendencies that lead us nerds to overindulge, to submerge, to become devoted to things without leveraging them for enhancing our whole lives instead of our fleeting feelings.

And even that obsession can be turned to good, Hardwick writes:

If you’ve been obsessed with a game, you have already proven to yourself that you have the ability to focus. You know how lion cubs play around and it’s all cute ‘n’ stuff? They’re not playing for the fuck of it. They’re training to eviscerate things professionally later in life. If you’re a gamer, this is what you have been doing.

What real-life achievements have you earned thanks to games?

Rich Sommer (Mad Men) is a board game fan. Now he’s taking his fandom to the airwaves with this (hopefully recurring) segment about board games for G4′s Attack of the Show. In this first installment, Sommer looks at a game I still haven’t played (co-created by one of my favorite designers, Eric Lang), a game that I love right now, and an online phenom that I’m always hearing about. Which games am I talking about? Watch for yourself:

Enjoy!

Here’s another thing that’s been open in my browser for a while: Mike Birkhead, via Gamasutra, asking “What makes combat fun?”

I love reading this kind of article. Birkhead gets into details in this piece, breaking down what combat actually is in a game and how we engage it. It’s tricky to capture and define fun, but Birkhead gives it a good go:

Combat is at its best when you provide the player with multiple valid Intentions and Action Sequences, and then constrain them through the situational context of their Goals, their Environment, and their Opponents. It sounds simple, when you read it, but we both know that it is not.

It seems to me that threads pop up at RPGnet and Story Games with some frequency asking about RPGs that rely on things other than outright combat to derive their thrills. Lots of games are about non-violent conflicts like racing, exploration, bidding, and so on, but violence seems to be the stock activity in so many games, from RPGs to (duh) shooters.

(I have a nascent RPG in some stage of development that’s about what happens after combat, as a response to this idea.)

Why is something so dreadful and frightening in real life the crux of so much of our fun? What makes it fun? When does it stop being fun?

What do you think?

This has been open in a tab in my browser for weeks. I think I found this through Gamasutra. I keep meaning to ask you about it.

The link is this: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Most Suprisingly Feminist Game of the Year Contender. An excerpt:

[2nd Lieutenant Mira is] the one person keeping the army of men on this world besieged by an alien force functioning and fighting, and she isn’t oversexualized, treated as weak, nor needing a man, fuck no[,] good readers. Mira doesn’t have time for this motherfucking conventional treatment of motherfucking women in motherfucking videogames.

Compare with the discussions of feminism and female characters, say, in the commentary after The Escapist‘s review of the game. (Beware, yes, it is an Internet comment thread.) Or consider Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s commentary on Warhammer 40k in general, in which he writes:

At one point the boy’s club happens upon an outpost commander who has been talked up by other characters for a while and discovers that she’s an attractive young lady. “Oh god, you chunky fucks are going to be taken aback by this, aren’t you,” I predicted. And sure enough, they were, in the least emotional possible way.

If Yahtzee is right, that the Space Marines are taken aback by Lt. Mira, does that make the game (or the whole setting) sexist? Or is that part of the game’s feminism—presuming that the Space Marines are institutionally sexist as a result of their particular regimented and ritualized existence and then purposefully matching them with a not-genetically-engineered human character who is highly capable, tough, serious, and female. The Space Marines may have some lousy preconceptions and biases but does that mean Space Marine the game does?

I have barely scratched the surface of Space Marine, so far, so I don’t have a fully informed opinion on this yet. Do you?

We’re back from Gen Con. Until I (Will) get caught up on email on deliverables, I’ll just leave this here for you to see, if you haven’t seen it already. The exclamation point at the end of any convention is, of late, Jason Morningstar’s “One Cool Thing” video project.

Here’s the newest video in the series: One Cool Thing I Saw At Gen Con 2011.

What was one cool thing that you saw at (or from!) Gen Con, even if you saw it via blog, Twitter, or podcast because you couldn’t make it out to Indy this year?