Video Games and Music

It wasn't too long ago that video games were all made using 8-bit technology and the main character's sprites were vaguely humanoid blocks of colour that were distinguished mostly by the fact that they moved in response to you pressing a button. Growing up with a Super Nintendo, some of my earliest memories of gaming involve a strangely orange and cuboid plumber stomping on the heads of things that looked like angry brown mushrooms.

Also strangely phallic.

If you have any experience with these antique games, you also likely remember the incredibly catchy songs played in different worlds in Super Mario or games like it. A lot of these songs are still used today, although technology has allowed for an orchestra to perform them and be recorded onto the game rather than the very...limited audio capabilities the 8-bit gaming systems offered. Although they were, like I said, quite stuck-in-head-for-days worthy even back then, not a lot of people were clamouring for the CD release of the game's soundtrack. Actually, music CDs didn't even exist back when the first Mario games came out.

It's hard to imagine anyone excited to obtain one of these when at present it would be extremely difficult to pay someone to take one.

These days, however, video game music has evolved to occupy an entirely different niche than it did before. Games will release OSTs (Original Sound Tracks) for purchase or free download not just because it's a marketing gimmick or an attempt to make a little more money; gamers actually want these CDs or virtual albums to listen to away from the game itself. For a guy who grew up listening to the same four chimes while my 2D protagonist struggled to mimic anything resembling human movement, this is mind-boggling. I'm guilty of having a fondness for OSTs myself, though, as I've gone through many a late night essay-writing experience accompanied by the soundtrack from Square Enix's Final Fantasy IX. These kinds of soundtracks were major breakthroughs, but they were still songs produced solely for the purpose of the video game. Would popular music ever become a staple in video games?

In short: yes.

From almost as annoying as that ringtone Frog to small market niche to pop music guest stars in less than twenty years? That's quite the progression for video games. I think the most evident thing from this evolution is that the respect for video games as a genre of art has grown significantly (if you want to read a bit more on that, check out my last blog post). Video game music is no longer looked down upon as entirely insignificant or just a strange fetish for audiophilic gamers. Now, popular music is being used in various trailers for virtually every game. It's not a relationship in which video games are solely leeching off of the bigger draw from their musical contributors, either; more and more musicians see video game launch trailers, cinematic videos and background music as a legitimate means for gaining more mainstream exposure and popularity. Even bands like the Rolling Stones have featured on some gaming franchise teaser trailers, in this instance Call of Duty's excellent trailer featuring "Gimme Shelter". The bond and relationship between music and video games has never been more fruitful, and it's an exciting prospect to wonder about just how long it will be until we see a video game (outside of the Rock Band-style genre) that features solely tracks from career musicians looking to gain exposure through them.

Or just to prove they're still, inexplicably, quite alive.

Memories of the Last-Gen Consoles: A Reflection

With the launch of the Xbox One imminent and the PS4 already out (albeit without any games to play), it seems as good a time as any to hold one last candlelight vigil in memory of the systems that came before these two new kids on the block. Nintendo's consoles have long since strayed off the typical beaten path that Sony and Microsoft are still rather fond of, and as such they've also fallen very quickly out of the race in the so-called "Console Wars". For those of you unfamiliar, the console wars were at their most prominent during the release of the PS2 and Xbox, where fans of both systems were so fervently devoted to their console of choice they would engage in long, drawn-out flame wars over internet forums that lasted longer than a university English class discussion about Shakespeare's strengths and weaknesses (for those inexperienced with the English thing, imagine a war being fought with only really flimsy sticks and neither side being quite sure what they're fighting for).

The battle lines, at least, were quite clearly drawn.

 

The next generation of consoles after the heated war were the PS3 and the Xbox 360, and all the young teenagers willing to spend hours typing angrily at each other had grown up into older teenagers that were really beginning to question whether their intense passion for games was going to translate into an appealing personality trait for whoever they had a crush on. There was very little time among all that soul-searching to decide that another human being was inherently flawed based on their console choice, and so the war had become more of a schoolyard rivalry between two kids that were pretty evenly matched.

Despite the dwindling in intensity, it was still clearly a race between these two companies for best system. Looking back on it now, it's very difficult to tell which one won "overall", but there were usually clear winners each year based on sales and different game launches. Instead of trying to decide which console was the clear favourite in the last generation, I've decided to focus on some of my favourite memories of the past generation in terms of games and historic moments. So here's my brief list:

1. Somewhere Along The Way, Video Games Became Art

 

I can't pinpoint exactly when this happened, mind you, but at some point in the last generation of games developers and reviewers alike both accepted the fact that video games could, in fact, be works of art. Studios went out of their way to create beautiful character design and art direction:

From the game "Journey" on PS3.

 

But more than that, reviewers and fans were more willing to think of video game qualities in terms more familiar with the worlds of painting or literature. Story, aesthetics, atmosphere; these all became buzzwords at one point or another and some games that would have scored 4s or 5s out of 10 only five years ago were suddenly being praised as pseudo-cinematic masterpieces, movies that encouraged viewer interaction throughout. If I remember nothing else about this generation, I will remember that it forever changed the seriousness and depth with which people were willing to view video games.

 

2. "The Last Of Us" Captures Everything Great About The Generation In One Game

 

Naughty Dog was already well-reputed as a studio that was able to combine a stellar narrative with solid gameplay and good graphics before they even considered making The Last Of Us. In fact, a lot of people criticized them for choosing to make this game during development, as it meant postponing a fourth installment in their popular "Uncharted" series. By the time the game was released, however, nobody was blaming Naughty Dog for anything but the amount of time the studio caused everyone to allot themselves to play "The Last Of Us" as quickly as possible. The narrative was incredible, following the questionable but likeable relationship between a man and a girl around the same age as the daughter he lost in the zombie apocalypse. It even completely revamped the tired zombie rhetoric by making it a kind of fungal disease that largely kept the rest of the world intact and allowed for some breath-taking imagery of cities over-run with plant and animal life. The graphics pushed the processing power of the PS3 to the limit, and looked as real as any game has ever managed to achieve. And the gameplay...the game contained some puzzles, some gunfights, and a lot of stealth, combining nuanced and fun controls with a realistic approach to the characters skill-sets. Joel, the protagonist, must improve his weapons control over the course of the game, beginning with only a civillian's understanding of guns. Ellie, the other protagonist and Joel's child ward, can't swim, and Joel has to come up with various ways to get her across bodies of water that would otherwise be no problem. If you haven't played this game yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. This is gaming at its finest, and although it's not without its flaws, "The Last Of Us" is one of the greatest games ever made in the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation.

 

The apocalypse has never looked this pretty.

 

3. Final Fantasy Finally Hits The Next-Gen

 

File this one under the hype being better than the actual product. As a dedicated fan to Final Fantasy, I was as excited as everyone else who loved the series when it was announced that Final Fantasy XIII was going to be hitting next-gen consoles in late 2011. I had it on my Christmas Wishlist and my parents, grateful that twenty year old me was much more considerate about their finances, had no problem delivering on Christmas Day. I had read reviews that had renounced the game as a failed entry into the storied and highly-respected franchise, but I didn't believe it until I played it for myself. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt for ten hours of gameplay before I finally decided it just wasn't meant to be. Despite the disappointment of the actual product in terms of gameplay, I still remember the excitement building over the entire month of December and the many hours spent scouring the internet for more pictures or videos of gameplay footage. Despite being an immensely flawed game, Final Fantasy XIII and the child-like excitement it gave me will still be a fond memory looking back. Maybe I'll even finish the game eventually, although that might be a test of my patience.

 

How can anything that looks this good be so bad...

 

That's my brief list of console memories for the Xbox 360 and PS3. I could've gone more in-depth, but these are the first three that immediately stuck out to me, and I wanted to capture those first. Do you have any memories about the PS3 or Xbox 360 that you'll never forget? Share them! Don't hesitate to comment below.  

 

 

Murder in Video Games: It's Gotta Mean Something, You Know, Man?

With the release of the kill-happy fourth standalone installment in the Assassin's Creed series, I thought it was a good time to bring up another debate in the video game world. This debate, however, is one that is not exactly all over the news; rather, it is an argument between fans of video games and their games' developers, between the hardcore video gamers who dissect every bit of a game's narrative and the writing team that worked countless hours crafting an interesting and, most importantly, marketable story.

When in doubt, throw some pirates or zombies into it.

The debate is rather simple at first glance: how much should killing be a factor in games? We've seen how successful the Grand Theft Auto franchise has been and it has quite a heavy emphasis on murder. However, that game has received an intense amount of backlash and criticism for its perceived "meaningless" killing. One game series that has somehow evaded a large amount of this kind of negative feedback is the Assassin's Creed games. Curiously, I would argue that Assassin's Creed has as much, if not more, wanton murder. The argument against that, however, is that the game offers you "alternatives" in which you do not need to murder hapless guards on your way to assassinating the main antagonists of the game, whom the narrative goes way out of its way to explain as horrible, heartless monsters who simply must be killed.

Yeah, that's a guy about to murder the pope. It's not so much a subtle criticism of religion as it is someone beating you over the head with a crucifix screaming at you about how institutionalized faith has become.

The thing that's problematic about this is how much more difficult the gameplay is if you actively try to avoid killing anyone you don't feel deserves it. I understand that it's probably at least a partial conscious choice of the developer; after all, it would be more difficult to infiltrate heavily guarded castles to get to an assassination target without murdering any of the various guards and such populating the castle. However, the discrepancy in difficulty is absurd. In my experience with the series, each assassination mission takes roughly four to five times the amount of time to complete when you choose the pacifist approach as opposed to the rampaging murder god one, ignoring any replays you might have to do due to the increase in difficulty. As much as the developer promotes the ability to choose how you want to play the game, it remains obvious how they really want you to play it.

You'd think after the first twenty or so guards died horribly the rest of them might re-consider their stance on attacking the strange hooded guy with swords.

So how do we reconcile this perceived imbalance in gameplay choices? I suggest we start putting an emphasis on meaningful kills. Murder as a narrative choice can have interesting and emotionally impactful consequences, even if it is a repeated concept. However, I think each kill should have some kind of meaning to it; it should impact both the player-character and the player themselves, and a game should actively try and place a player in scenarios that make them actively question the actions they are taking. Are they justified? Does this make me a bad person? The inner struggles of the character should be, in an expertly-written narrative and gameplay that is nuanced and controlled, shared with the player themselves.

Beta Testing and Gamer Hierarchy

There once was a time in the gaming industry wherein it was virtually impossible to play a game before it had been fully developed and released into the world by its parent company. Obviously, the games had testers - otherwise we'd have all been playing games with more bugs than an ant farm - but outside of them and those select few reporters that got early access interviews/reviews, nobody from the public had an inkling of what the game played like. Gamers really didn't care, either. It's not like they had any reason to complain about not getting a game early; few wanted to drudge through the mess of glitches that an early alpha or beta game would have.

Nobody needs to see this.

The introduction of MMORPGs as a more mainstream means of revenue in the video gaming industry changed this slightly. Creating a game that had to account for the interactions between thousands of players all competing with or against each other on the same server meant that the testing period would be excruciatingly prolonged. Mercifully, game developers took pity upon their poor, small team of testers and began to test beta versions of these MMOs by inviting a certain number of gamers. These choices were usually made after a bunch of people signed up to have the chance to beta test, along with sending out invites to prominent members of the gaming community, hoping that they'd enjoy the beta versions and give the game good publicity before it was even ready to go.

Beta for vanilla WoW. You can almost make out her weird armor thong.

After World of Warcraft's beta became the standard for pre-releases, the world of beta testing changed. Previously, the games had been still very much in their infancy. When WoW was beta tested, the game was pretty close to done (by this, I'd mean I guess it was about 85% of the way finished, much further than most beta tests). Furthermore, WoW was beta tested by a significantly larger amount of players than was the norm in 2003/2004. This did two things: it created an expectation for betas to have an enormously larger amount of polish than they used to, and it also created a hierarchy of gamers among the dedicated community.

It works kind of like this, only with more fourteen year olds screaming at you and making vague, offensive references about your various family members.

The beta hierarchy kind of works like this: there is a new game that has a lot of hype behind it. The community as a whole is generally quite excited by it. Then, game developers announce that they are going to release it to the world for beta testing, and they will do this in waves as they test server strength. Then comes the frantic rush to sign up for a chance at an invitation, the calm before the storm while everyone waits with bated breath, and then...the first invites are sent out.

Suddenly, there are gamers in the community who are simply more privileged than others. "Oh, you haven't gotten into the beta yet? You're really missing out. I was going to share this story with you but you wouldn't understand...I'll have to wait to talk to my other friends in beta."

If it sounds like a really bad high school movie that deals predominately with cliques and how that system is Very Wrong, then you're not missing the similarities; unfortunately, though, there's no Breakfast Club in the community to unite all the differing hierarchical members. 

Beta testing used to be a thing that the entire community loved, as excited members rushed back to forum boards to post their findings and share as much as possible with their friends. Now, it's become over-commercialized, as more finished games come packaged with a special deal that allows players who pre-order it to play a different game that's currently in beta. Companies have found another way to exploit over-eager video game fans, and once again we are simply letting it happen. 

Grand Theft Auto V as Homage

Sometimes when we are interacting with a form of media, whether it be literature, a video game, or a film on a night out with friends, we can have a sudden realization about the content. Mostly this is caused by a lack of familiarity with the previews and buzz around the media product, and it can be quite a polarizing experience. Sometimes, we feel let down by the actual subject after all the hype has subsided and we are left to wade through the de-mystified narrative and production values. Other times we will enjoy a great pleasure in discovering the various nuances of a complex plot twist or a mechanically deep video game engine.

Not as good a plot twist as Die Hard 4, the definitive Bruce Willis masterpiece, but still. Not bad.

In my experience playing and then writing the skeleton for a review of Grand Theft Auto V, however, I spent hours of time delving into the media frenzy swirling around it; the articles denouncing its violent mannerisms, the excited reviews from video game fans and developers worldwide, the news reports of its record-breaking sales (literally being the fastest selling thing ever). I felt I had familiarized myself with the game very well before actually playing it, and as a result the psychological profiles and personality traits of the characters I played as were ingrained in me before I had ever actually picked up the controller to inhabit their personas. I knew the game was going to be about a gang of bank robbers that had run aground on their biggest heist and had went their separate ways; I also had concluded ahead of time that there would be a climactic bank heist once again to close out the game. I was prepared, then, for the usual Grand Theft Auto formula: solid gameplay, incredible open-world capabilities, steadily improving graphics and a storyline that followed the usual rise-to-power arc of a criminal and the pitfalls of such a lifestyle. 

Picture a utility belt like this, only instead of various weapons and incredibly specific and useful tools, there was a bag of Cheetos and several bottles of iced tea. That's what I went into GTA V with. I may or may not have been wearing a Batman Halloween costume as well, but that's not super relevant.

Imagine my surprise, then, when halfway through the game I was struck by the realization that it was functioning as an homage to all my favourite crime movies (and I've got a lot of them). Usually, the Grand Theft Auto series is good for a lot of pop culture references and easter eggs (hidden in-jokes buried within the content of a game left for players to find for no other reason than personal enjoyment). However, what it has not been good for is the character development of the main character; most of them feel flat, or otherwise incredibly stereotypical. While GTA V does have that still to some degree, it is balanced by the fact that it has not just dropped pop culture references randomly all over the narrative; the entire narrative is functioning as one giant love letter to heist films.

Before there was the mess that was Ocean's Twelve, and Thirteen, and presumably Ocean's Eleven and a Half at some point: there was this masterful remake, which re-ignited a lot of people's passion for good heist films. Guy Ritchie proceeded to cash in for the next decade.

It's very interesting how this functions throughout the game. Previously, I had a static list of expectations I believe the game would meet based on its history in the video game world. Halfway through, however, I had to shift those expectations from one of a stagnant gangster narrative to one of a playful adaptation of several popular crime movies. A big chunk of the narrative owes a lot to Guy Ritchie films - the fast-paced action scenes combined with the snappy, witty dialogue remind me a lot of the movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". The sudden shift of my expectations left me disoriented, but in a good way. I was no longer inhabiting the world of Grand Theft Auto for the fifth or sixth time (if you count expansions). I was inhabiting the world of Grand Theft Auto as seen through the lens of a Hollywood crime film, and although that might seem incredibly similar, it could not have made this game any more different from its predecessors short of making it a seadoo-racing game.

The main cast: a big change from the usual solo-protagonist presentation of the past games.

The biggest change this homage brings is the use of three protagonists instead of the usual one. Much like heist movies will frequently switch perspectives between the various characters who operate inside specific roles in the narrative, GTA V has you inhabit the three main characters at key moments in their own personal narratives. This has two effects: first, the plot can be much more complex than it usually is in the series, as the shift in perspectives allows for the creation of layers of significance in each action. Secondly, it gives the game three distinct "flavours": each character is very different, with Michael the wealthy but despondent success story, Frank the hesitant gangster struggling with his life choices, and Trevor, an absolute psychopath. There are some very uncomfortable moments when you are forced to be these characters, and I am by no means claiming them to be successful characters in comparison to most other narratives; but here, in the vacuum of the GTA series, this is a large step forward.

GTA V is a game with a lot of flaws. It has been rightly criticized as being a misogynistic interpretation of our current society. The dialogue goes through peaks and valleys, at times seeming taut and super-charged with biting cynicism while at others seeming to be written by a rich middle-school child with very little real world experience (or interaction). As an artistic piece, an addition to the gaming literature as it were, GTA V is probably a failure. However, in the scope of its own history, and the public perception and expectation from publishing studio Rockstar, this game does something the series, and most video games recently, have been extremely hesitant to do. It feels no shame about ripping off successful tropes in popular genres, and because it executes them at a level that is at least passable, it becomes better for it.

Perhaps the next step will be writing and execution on par with Uncharted, the only other series that has been shameless in its homage to what inevitably spawned its creation (in this case, Indiana Jones). As it stands now, though, given the commercial success of GTA V, some other big name studios might be at least tempted to try.

Nostalgia and Pokemon: How Much Is Too Much?

For anyone who was a child or young adult in the late 90s, Pokemon should require little to no explanation. For those unfamiliar, Pokemon is the wildly successful Japanese video game that took the rest of the world by storm. It involves capturing small creatures and raising them as partners, then battling them against other people who have raised their own Pokemon. It is much more complex than that, preying on the human love of collection as well as growth, but that is a basic working summary and probably all you'll need to understand this blog post.

Believe it or not, this is a Pokemon. It's not what most of them look like, but it's my favourite example of just how odd they can look.

Needless to say, the 1990s were a long time ago. By all rights, the Pokemon craze should have died out, or at the very least have nestled into a nice, niche market that was no longer ridiculously profitable. Sort of like Tamagotchis.

If you ever managed to keep one of these alive for longer than a few hours, you probably have a calling in nursing.

Instead, Pokemon is still going strong, releasing Pokemon X and Pokemon Y on October 12. This is the sixth generation of Pokemon they've made, a generation in this context meaning a set of 150 unique Pokemon in a game. This means there are roughly 900 Pokemon in existence now. 

The Pokemon series has received criticism before for simply rehasing the exact same formula that existed in the first game, and to some extent this is a very valid stance to take. The series will always feature a young protagonist leaving home for the first time to begin a journey to capture as many different Pokemon as they can, and the end goal is always to defeat both an evil though oddly civil organization attempting to take over the world in a vague way using Pokemon, and the Pokemon Champion, eschewing the title to the protagonist.

So why do people continue to buy Pokemon games? For me, having bought every generation and planning to purchase the next one as well, it has to be the nostalgia factor. Pokemon remains one of the few links to my early childhood that is still interesting to me today. Whereas the collection aspect of Pokemon was so intriguing to me when I was a child, and still remains an interest today, now there is the science behind building the best 6 Pokemon team for in game and online battling. The nuances are as varied as they are subtle, and it is a difficult thing to do well. 

I can't read the same books that I read when I was six because I find them too simple. The same goes for the television shows I enjoyed and the games I played in the park with friends. Pokemon offers the unique ability to inhabit the same feeling I had when I was so young, the feeling that there is an entire unfamiliar world for me to explore and countless creatures to find and befriend. I can still remember sitting in the car while my parents went to get groceries in the rain and playing my game contently. I think the memories are so fresh because I'm able to remind myself every few years what it felt like.

Maybe Pokemon is no longer innovative, although the newest series promises to bring the most new concepts since the series began. Maybe Pokemon is no longer the most popular gaming franchise, and maybe it isn't being played by all my friends. The one thing no other game has ever done for me, though, is offer me a gateway directly back into my childhood...and for that, I'm incredibly thankful.

I'll see you soon, old friend.

The Viability of E-Sports: Part 2

It is difficult to overstate the impact that players like Grubby and Day[9] have had on the North American and European e-sports communities. Grubby's arrival in the Warcraft 3 scene was as sudden as it was revolutionary, becoming the one player from anywhere outside of China or South Korea who could consistently challenge the best players in the game. Grubby began what would become one of the most storyed rivalries in Warcraft 3 with South Korean player "Moon" and Chinese legend "sKy", and he was able to win the World Cyber Games Warcraft 3 tournament (essentially the e-sports equivalent of the olympics) three different times for the Netherlands. Grubby's massive popularity in the scene lead to the development of a documentary called "Beyond the Game", which was released in cinemas throughout the Netherlands.

We'll assume that all of the budget went into the actual filming and nothing was left for the poster.

The impact of this documentary has been massive - Europe, and especially countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland, has become an absolute power house in the world of e-sports, with Sweden in particular being nicknamed the "Korea of Europe".

So if Grubby was the impact player in the European scene, Day[9] was the same for North America. The difference between the two is that Day[9], real name Sean Plott, only ever won the World Cyber Games American Qualifier once, and then flopped on the grand stage of the World Cyber Games themselves. His play in Starcraft: Brood War was never comparable to the level Grubby achieved in WC3. Instead, Day[9] made his biggest impact when Starcraft 2 was released and he began an online stream called the Day[9] Daily.

If this makes Day[9] look like a presidential candidate, it's because he's essentially the most important man in North American e-sports. 

The Day[9] Daily is a webcast that airs every Monday through Friday (with select breaks taken around holidays or various other events). It's aim is simple: to improve the play of Starcraft 2 fans around the world. There are segments for beginners as well as for pros, and the most popular one, Funday Monday, is beloved in the e-sports community in general, attracting people who don't play Starcraft 2 frequently to participate each week. 

If this all sounds kind of cutesy, and simplistic, that's because it is. There's some quality of Day[9] that is absolutely infectious, and his charisma has made him an ambassador of e-sports around the world, but predominately in North America. He has accrued partnerships with companies like Red Bull and has been featured in Forbes magazine as one of the 30 Under 30 in 2012.  Thanks to Day[9], big media companies are beginning to realize that e-sports is viable in North America.

And now, finally, in perhaps the longest route I could have taken us to get there, we arrive at the big question: are e-sports a viable means of both entertainment and profit in the world today?

Well, given all the information I've spewed out and you've very kindly sifted through, I think the answer should be that e-sports are not only viable, they are highly sustainable and profitable. If single players like Grubby and Day[9] can expedite the growths of communities as wholes, then I think it stands to reason that growth is relatively easy in this field and people are willing to accept e-sports as serious. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Riot, and Valve, all giants of the gaming industry (and Riot only a giant because of it's e-sports game League of Legends) have invested millions into the scene with the profits they've made on their games. Athletes can be signed by companies to contracts that are in six figures (as long as they are high profile enough), and gamers from ages fourteen to forty can have significant impacts on the scene and their own life. 

If you are still wondering about the viability of pro-gaming and e-sports for the athletes who participate them? I'll leave you with this: two months ago, Valve hosted a tournament called The International 3 for a game called DotA 2. Teams of five competed against each other after months of qualifying for a life-changing prize pool: the winning team took home 1.4 million US dollars.

Not bad for a gamer, no?

A sample of the crowd at TI3, and the lucky winners, Swedish team The [A]lliance.

The Viability of E-Sports: Part I

During the rise of video gaming in the late 1990s, a strange phenomenon began to occur. Certain games that placed a heightened sense of importance on both strategy and human reflex began to emerge at the forefront of "competitive" gaming. These games were played in LAN settings - short for Local Area Network - where gamers could hook up a multitude of computers together in order to participate in the same game while operating on different screens (done so opponents could not see what they were doing). Certain gamers began to develop into celebrities within their respective scenes, but they went largely unnoticed by anyone not directly and very intensely involved with that specific game.

Then games that used entirely separate servers were developed, gamers could play against opponents miles or even oceans away, and the gaming world changed forever.

It was decidedly less cataclysmic than this, but the metaphorical effect was just as large.

Games like Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Halo became early contenders in the race to the biggest online game. Slowly, the players began to be referred to as "athletes", mostly because of the dexterity and mental discipline required to hone the skills required to be good as these games. Although North America had a slowly burgeoning scene, the same could not be said for China and South Korea. Here, E-Sports took shape much quicker, and on a scale that nobody would have predicted.

This is the crowd to watch the finals of a tournament in Starcraft: Brood War, a game that was soon considered South Korea's national sport. This is one of my favourite facts ever.

While Starcraft became an incredible success in South Korea, Warcraft 3 became just as popular in China. Here, these two games were analyzed with a precision that rivaled the kind of focus it takes to make a scientific breakthrough. Strategies were created, refined, and then countered. Players rose and fell swiftly, first those with good mechanics (essentially flawless play), then those with great in-game knowledge (the ability to make decisions on the fly and adapt), and then finally those who combined both of those into something dominant. Around 2001, Starcraft had its first hero. Lim Yo-Hwan, better known as BoxeR to his fans, became the undisputed best Starcraft player in the world, dominating tournaments and earning the nickname "The Emperor" in Korea.

This guy is in a long-term relationship with South Korea's most popular supermodel and has earned over $500,000 during his ten year career. He did it by playing video games. You can see why he's a bit of a hero to some gamers.

Although BoxeR was the first, soon there would be others. iloveoov, NaDa, saviOr, and then later Jaedong and Flash...all of these gamers would go on to become heroes in their home country and be signed to six-figure salaries to play for various gaming teams. Over in China, players like Moon became Warcraft 3 legends. E-Sports was officially viable, but the market was still very restricted. In North America and Europe, these games were also popular, but had nowhere near the same following and lacked in strategic development of the players. Although Quake garnered a rather large European following, it paled in comparison to what was happening in the Asian countries. That was until the introduction of the foreigner; a term originally used derogatorily but now used simply because it makes sense in the context of games like Starcraft and Warcraft. A foreigner was simply someone who wasn't from South Korea. That is how dominant the country was in these games; in the top tournaments, it was so rare to see someone who wasn't from South Korea or China competing that they were immediately labelled foreigner for their novelty, as well as their inevitable early exit at the hands of the superior country.

That was until players like Grubby and Day[9] came along. 

Tune in next week to see the second part of this article, where I trace the remaining history behind e-sports and delve into its current status and the questions that arise from it.

Violence in Video Games, Scapegoating, and Accountability

With the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto V, slated to hit shelves on September 17, 2013, it was inevitable that people from all walks of life would notice. Few games have been as successful and polarizing as the GTA series, which deals with pretty much every mature theme you can think of. Gameplay elements range from mass shooting sprees to quiet, introspective drives along the beachfront before picking up a prostitute to shake your (potentially stolen) car back and forth a few times. Whether these elements are done tastefully is a debate for another time, although I will say that The Ballad of Gay Tony was perhaps the best expansion to a console game I've ever played and one of the few that really made me feel like I got my money's worth.

I wasn't kidding about the title.

The notoriety of the series has reached such a peak that you can almost feel news outlets growing anxious in anticipation for the newest installment's release. After all, it seems that almost every time youth violence is reported nationwide it is with the explicit intent to scandalize video games and other forms of entertainment. Never mind the fact that the games have a rating of "M" for Mature, which means it would be completely illegal for a child under the age of adulthood to purchase it, meaning the parents of the child had to consent; beyond that debate, there seems to be an underlying acceptance that violence in video games is a legitimate means of scapegoating.

I don't see anyone blaming this for youth violence.

The violence in video games debate seems to work two ways: one, an important and widely-read media outlet asserts a connection between avid game-playing in a youth and a violent action that particular youth has taken recently. Two, alternative media outlets, including gaming websites and blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq, offer up studies that suggest the contrary. Usually these studies are accompanied by an authority figure that indicates the news story in question really didn't have that much to do with video games anyways. After this, the debate seems to just...stagnate. 

I understand that for this generation, timely news stories are even more important than they have ever been before. To dwell on a subject that is no longer a hot topic, or interesting to a specific section of the target audience, is to lose potentially thousands of pageviews and word-of-mouth advertising. However, it's curious that the news networks that report on these perceived links between violence and video games are never held accountable for errant reporting when an article, or multiple articles, surface that contradict or downright disprove the media outlet's original stance. If a news network erroneously reported that a Florida man ran screaming into the night about alien abductions while wearing a trash can on his head, when in fact he was wearing tin foil so the radio waves wouldn't get him, it would be fair to expect a correction. Sometimes, even an apology is warranted, like in the case of The Essex Chronicle, which ran an article dealing with a drug dealer's arrest using a picture of an entirely different person.

So why is the media not held accountable for their misconceptions about video game violence? Because that violence serves a purpose in media coverage that is a difficult niche to fill. It offers an easy go-to explanation about youth violence that avoids the bigger questions, like potential flaws in the way parents go about raising their children, or imperfections in society that would require serious work to fix. Mass media reporting isn't about exploring the darkest corners of the stories they're reporting, not when it touches on elements that make people uneasy. It is simple to point at the case of the 8 year old boy shooting his caretaker and say, "surely he did this because of his exposure to violence in his free time, something we could not have controlled". It is far harder to examine the case and state "perhaps his access to firearms in the presence of an elderly woman is troubling, or perhaps him needing a caretaker in the first place means he is neglected by his parents whether intentionally or unintentionally".

As uncomfortable as the topic seems to make people, violence in video games is a scapegoat to avoid further levels of discomfort. Until that changes, we'd better get used to the same cycle: mass controversy over a popular violent video game, backlash from the gamer community, and then silence until the next one.