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You all have heard about how the NFL is trying to make the game of football safer. The talk about the trauma sustained by the players is everywhere. There is talk of banning the game in some circles. Even players are saying they don’t want their kids playing the game.

I think football is on its way out, frankly. Hockey and basketball, too. Even baseball’s days are numbered. Safety is only part of the reason. The other part can be seen by watching these two clips:

That’s a game from 1991. Now here is the first gameplay video for Madden 13, which will come out this August:

It’s a big difference. Meanwhile, real-world football is still the same as it was in 1991. Sure, the equipment is a little better, but it’s still pretty similar.

“But,” you object, “there’s a ceiling on how much the game can improve. The best it can do is look just like the real thing, and it doesn’t even do that yet. Besides, we need a real-life version game of football to provide a benchmark for what the video game should be like.”

I used to think that, too. But we have a benchmark, in the form of NFL films historical record. And the Madden games already include a mode in which you can play against virtual replicas of former football stars. People know who those guys are–and the thrill will be playing as your own team, with players named for you and your friends, going up against the ’72 Dolphins or the ’85 Bears.

More to the point, most fans don’t like all real football games. Sometimes, they are “boring”–that is, they are defensive struggles, as opposed to exciting, long-touchdown filled games. Most fans hate that. But video games can fix this problem–you can have 70-63 games if you like.

It goes without saying that you don’t get injured playing virtual football over the internet. Out of shape, maybe, but not “injured”. The  celebrities of football will no longer be the athletes, but people who are unbeatable at the virtual game. And the best part is, way more people can play a video game than can play actual, pro-level football.

We’re already most of the way there. This is where the safety concerns really come into play, because soon, no one will like the actual sport–too much danger. The video games will provide something for all the football experts to go into when the real game is too controversial. Imagine what it would be like to go up against some former player or coach in the video game–it will be incredibly popular.

The same thing will happen with all other sports, too. But I doubt anyone will miss them; they’re too much trouble. Video game sports are more accessible, safer, and can be played year-round.

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I can’t say I’m terribly excited about it. From the description, it sounds like “Gears of Star Wars”. Actually, more than anything, it sounds like Star Wars: Bounty Hunter. I think it even included a level that was set in the underbelly of Coruscant.

More than anything, though, it makes me uneasy how everyone is going “oooh, it’s Star Wars but with ‘darkness’. This has never been done!” Yes, it has. I know KotOR II was rated “T”, but the underlying story, as well as some of the stuff that’s hinted with characters like Visas Marr, is more mature than anything I’ve seen in a lot of “M” games. And while we’re at it, it’s not like Dark Forces and Shadows of the Empire were brimming with sunshine and joy.

Maybe it will be good. But so far, the reports don’t make me hopeful.

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Well, it’s kind of neat that Doom 3 is going to be re-released. It was one of my favorite FPS games on the Xbox. The article says there will be “enhanced graphics” too, which I’m hoping means everything won’t look quite so ugly and blocky. There are even new levels. That’s cool.

But what is so great about the inclusion of Doom and Doom II? My “limited collector’s edition” of Doom 3 comes with those also. As does the add-on Resurrection of Evil. And to be honest, they’re not much fun. They give me a headache if I play them very long, actually. I understand they are classics of the genre and all, but I think it actually cheapens them as “nostalgia” items when every Doom game comes with them.

But if they must include classic Doom games, why can’t they put Doom 64 on these things? It was a much better, more frightening game than than the first two were, and I can’t imagine it was so much more complex as to prevent it being put on disk easily enough. Is there some kind of rights issue with Midway?

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If the Defenders of High Culture didn’t have enough to worry about with the Harry Potter conference, there now comes an announcement that a new Harry Potter game will be coming out this fall. Perhaps the 2013 conference will feature an in-depth examination of Harry Potter for Kinect and what it means to our society.

If it’s anything like Star Wars Kinect, it might not be such a great thing, although I think Potter fans might be more receptive to that sort of thing than Star Wars fans. As long-time readers probably know, I think that J.K. Rowling’s series is fun, but deeply flawed. (Someday maybe I’ll write about that at length.) I’ve never played any of the games based on it, as they all seem to have about them the feel of something done just to cash in on the popularity of the name.

As far as I can tell, all Potter games have been based to a large degree on the books and movies. As a Star Wars fan, I know from experience that this usually means trouble. Star Wars games are either excellent or really bad. And the bad ones are often the ones that try to follow the movies, and have you playing as Luke or Anakin or someone. (The LEGO ones don’t count; they follow the movies, but with an original twist.)

The great Star Wars game series everyone thinks of are original stories like Rogue Squadron, Jedi Knight and Knights of the Old Republic. These take place in the Star Wars universe, and though in some cases they overlap with events or characters from the movies, for the most part they are their own stories. They don’t let the established stories dictate their course too much.

Are there any Harry Potter games that take place in the Potter universe, but don’t more or less follow the established story and timeframe? That would have the potential to be good, and to keep the franchise going. Now, for all I know, Rowling has forbidden this. Which she, as the creator of the series, is totally within her rights to do. But it would be the best thing for it as a franchise.

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“Reck·on·ing: an itemized bill or statement of a sum due.”

That is the second definition at The Free Dictionary for the word “reckoning”. A dark bit of irony, given the fate of the game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 

I’d been seeing ads for it on game sites and in stores for awhile, but I never paid any attention to them, because the whole fantasy/medieval setting has never done much for me. I’m still recovering from forcing myself through Neverwinter Nights 2.

But today, I saw that 38 Studios, the company that made it, is folding. It’s getting a lot of publicity because it was founded by Curt Schilling, a baseball player so famous that even I have heard of him. I’ll have more on the business aspects of this in a minute, but first a little more about the game itself.

Also of note to me was that the game’s lore was created by R.A. Salvatore. I’ve only read one book by him, the novelization of Attack of the Clones. I thought it was pretty bad, to be honest, but I know he’s a very widely-acclaimed fantasy author.

The plot of Kingdoms of Amalur sounded…. Well, let me show, not tell. From the Wikipedia page for Kingdoms:

“Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” follows the story of a mortal known as the “Fateless One”, who having died before the game’s outset, is revived in the experimental Well of Souls by the gnomish scientist Fomorous Hugues. The first and only success of the experiment, the Fateless One must escape the facility when it comes under attack… Having escaped the facility, the Fateless One – having no memory of his life before his death – learns of the intriacies [sic] of the world he has returned to by the Fateweaver Agarth…

For comparison, here’s a bit of the plot summary for Planescape: Torment a famous and almost universally beloved RPG from 1999:

“Planescape: Torment”‘s protagonist is “The Nameless One,” an immortal being who, if killed, will wake up later, sometimes with complete amnesia…

The game’s story begins when The Nameless One wakes up in a mortuary. He is immediately approached by a floating skull, Morte, who offers advice on how to escape…

Well, I guess it’s a nice tip of the hat to Torment… that’s good, I suppose. Not breaking a lot of new ground, though. Regardless, the general reception of the game was good, but not great.

Apparently, though, it needed to be great, because 38 Studios ran out of money and laid off all their employees. That’s sad. It’s always a shame when people lose their jobs.

And this is where the story gets really bad. Back in 2010, Rhode Island loaned the company $75 million dollars to move there, on the idea that it would generate “jobs” and “tax revenues”. The Governor of Rhode island is not at all happy about the situation, and Schilling has apparently run out of money to put into the company.

Another aspect to the whole thing is that Schilling is known for his support of Republican politicians. It seems, as Brian McGrory notes, rather hypocritical that a Republican should be taking money from the government to support his business. Doesn’t quite square with the whole “free market” thing, and all that. But then, I don’t know what kind of Republican Schilling is. Perhaps he has no deep philosophical or ideological ties to them; he merely recognizes–correctly–that as a wealthy person it is to his financial advantage for them to win.

What concerns me more is the black eye it gives to video gaming companies as business ventures–people will think twice before investing in a game company with the specter of it being “the next 38 Studios” hanging over it. I mean, if one that is backed by a wealthy celebrity and produces a reasonably well-liked game can’t succeed; that’s going to give everyone pause.

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You know, I remember a more innocent time when cheating at video games meant putting in a code to make your character immortal, or exploiting a bug in the AI that let you win every time. But now it seems that exploiting little glitches in a game has gotten more serious. Because there were a million real-world dollars at stake.

I don’t follow baseball or baseball video games, and I know so little about it that I can barely even follow what exactly people were allegedly doing that was shady here, but still, it’s a helluva thing. The good news is, it apparently didn’t affect the contest in the end. But my “favorite” part of the rather depressing article has less to do with baseball video games than with human nature and social media:

Young says Haff told him to stay quiet about the exploit. Young didn’t, though, telling another person over Xbox Live about it but demanding that he stay silent. That person didn’t, and then the conflict boiled over to Facebook and other social media.

I love it: “Here’s this big secret! I’m telling you, but for God’s sake don’t tell anyone else!” You go through a couple iterations of that, and soon everyone knows.

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I don’t think my computer will run Diablo III, and even if it could, I wouldn’t buy it. It doesn’t sound like my type of game. But even apart from that, it’s a great example of why I don’t like PC gaming.

I would think, after yet another Digital Rights Management Controversy, some PC gamers would start to re-think things. As this Forbes article says, consoles are more “consumer friendly”. (Though heaven knows they’re doing what they can to fix that.)

I have a couple PC games, but I completely prefer consoles. The reason is half for less DRM hassle and half for the fact that I don’t have to deal with compatibility issues. If it says it plays on an Xbox 360, then I know it does; I don’t have to worry about whether I have the right graphics card.

Yes, yes, I know you have more options for fixing stuff and getting mods with PCs, but it’s just not worth it to me to deal with nonsense like this for those things. I prefer the more stable, predictable world of consoles.

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So, Star Wars fans everywhere are outraged over this video:

The fact that it started getting publicity around April Fools’ Day makes me wonder, but it seems like it’s genuine.

Well, what else are you supposed to do with the Kinect? They already have some kind of lightsaber minigame in it, so they had to throw in something else for filler.

I also seem to remember that in the intro to one of the Rogue Squadron games (I forget which one) there was a brief sequence of the Star wars characters dancing a disco. Nobody complained about that. And for my money, the elaborate dance sequences in Return of the Jedi pose a far bigger threat to the integrity of Star Wars as a space opera than this does.

Look: Star Wars is a whole mythos. It’s a fantasy universe, and as such it is only to be expected that laughable and ridiculous ideas occur in that universe as well as serious and powerful ones. It’s that way in the real universe, and so it might as well be in any fake universe. It doesn’t ruin the movies to have a video game where Han Solo dances, anymore than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ruins Hamlet.

Also, it’s only a movie series, after all. If it were ruined, the sun would still come up tomorrow.

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I keep hearing the words “Hunger Games” being bandied about. I see signs with the words “Hunger Games” plastered on them. People keep making references to “the Hunger Games”. I believe there is even a blog on the front page of WordPress that has something to do with the “Hunger Games” on it. I never really paid enough attention to figure out what they were about or why I should care.

And then I read Thingy talking about “The Hunger Games” on her blog, and so I decided it was time to find out about them. I whisked myself to Wikipedia forthwith, and commenced to read. So, The Hunger Games is a series of books for young adults, which, like all YA books nowadays, has been adapted into a movie, which comes out tomorrow.

I have to admit, just reading the synopsis made me a little bored. “Post-apocalyptic America…dystopian totalitarian government… sacrifices by lottery…” It all seemed tired to me. As Thingy noted, the “deadly lottery” aspect of the story sounds a lot like “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. (Full disclosure: I only know about that story because it’s the model for Vault 11 in Fallout: New Vegas… another post-apocalyptic tale.)

But then,as Zaphodb2002 commented on this post: “It is more about how the story is told, not necessarily what the story is about.” So, just because it’s got a lot of familiar trappings doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting book. I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I wonder why the post-apocalyptic idea is so popular. I guess because it gives the author a “clean slate” to build the kind of world s/he wants. And maybe because it lets you show familiar settings in a state of destruction, and that’s pretty dramatic. But it certainly seems like the post-apocalyptic genre is popular with audiences these days. I wonder why.

I’m not an expert on the genre, but I don’t think it was always thus. It seems to me that fiction that dealt with “the end of the world as we know it” used to be just plain apocalyptic–e.g. Dr. Strangelove, where the end of the movie is the nuclear annihilation. I wonder what the change signifies.

And another thing: is it true that one of two things almost always happens with the post-apocalypse: either there is no government, no law and order, and humanity is reduced to fighting gang-warfare style, or else there is a tyrannical, all-powerful government controlling the wasteland. Or is that just my impression?

As long as we’re on the subject, how is this related to another phenomenon both Thingy and Ferrerman have addressed lately: “preppers”? That is, people preparing for what they believe to be the imminent apocalypse. Are they fans of post-apocalyptic fiction? If so, since they all seem to be going the “gang warfare” camp, where’s the sign-up sheet for the “tyrannical government” camp? I bet the first 50 people in get cushy positions in the Thought Police or something.

Anyway… how depressing. Perhaps Tom Lehrer can make us feel better:

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I was thinking of watching the movie Ryan’s Daughter, since it’s St. Patrick’s Day and the movie is set in Ireland. And I usually like David Lean films. But I was reading some reviews of it, and it seems like a lot of people feel it has beautiful cinematography and a gorgeous location, but the story itself is weak. I don’t know if I’ll see it or not, but it did set me thinking about something, especially with this post still on my mind.

To me, for a movie or video game to be art, it has to do more than just look good; it has to have a good story and good characters. I’ve always taken this for granted in my posts on the subject, but I’ve lately realized that some people may not feel the same way. I mean, some people will argue that games like Rage or BioShock are art based on their settings alone. And I can’t argue that both Rage‘s wasteland and BioShock‘s art deco undersea city are beautiful creations.

It’s just that, those game aren’t just about looking at the pretty setting. They also have stories and characters, and I found both lacking in these games. Especially Rage. BioShock definitely had some interesting ideas, but ultimately it just felt forced and too self-consciously weird to me. (That said, I’d still qualify BioShock as art for at least trying, just not great art. Rage is right out.) If you make a game whose art lies solely in its visuals, make a game about going around and looking at all the pretty stuff. Kind of like Pilotwings 64.

Talking of David Lean, consider his movie Lawrence of Arabia. Does it have awesome visuals? Yes, it certainly does. However, without Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s script, and the powerful performances by all the actors, it wouldn’t be a great movie. Cool to watch for the “match/sunrise” scene and the scene where Omar Sharif rides up out of the desert, but not a great movie. I’m not passing judgement until I see it, but some reviews make it sound like that’s exactly what happened with Ryan’s Daughter.

Now, of course, Lawrence would also be a lesser film if it had the same script and acting, but shot in black-and-white on one of those laughable “desert” sets that you sometimes see in old Westerns. But still, I think that people sometimes overstress the superficial qualities. Obviously, just having better visuals doesn’t make a film better. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not superior to Casablanca, even though the former is in color and the latter in black-and-white.