Though one is obviously dwarfed by the comparison, both figures are impressive in their own right. And both speak to the health of their form of multiplayer gaming. For console games like Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer’s meteoric growth is commonly understood. But for LAN parties, still playing games like Counter-Strike, their resilience and persistence are most frequently seen among university-aged gamers on campus.

“If anything, I think it’s growing” says Nathan Etzell, a student at Oregon State University, whose 300-member OSU Gaming organisation has a prewired, 30-person LAN room at the bottom of a dormitory where at least two large parties are held per term. In January, his club will meet the University of Oregon in the second “Civil War LAN”, a gaming tournament named after the schools’ football rivalry.

But there is a sense that the PC LAN party — like all-nighters, streaking, whatever — are something whose time and place comes on a university campus. Out in the cold hard world, PC LAN and direct server support in new titles is dwindling in favour of console multiplayer and proprietary hosting services. Most notably, StarCraft II will not support LAN gaming as it shifts to Blizzard’s Battle.net. And dedicated servers are out under Modern Warfare 2, which is now running multiplayer with a combination of Steam and the recently created IW.net for Modern Warfare 2. Both sequels’ predecessors had a strong history in dedicated servers and LAN gaming, leaving some gamers feeling betrayed, and some LAN enthusiasts feeling marginalised.

LAN gaming is not gone from the off-campus civilian world. But annual convention hall events with big budgets, entry fees, prizes and sponsorships are different creatures from six people linking up to play Warcraft III. While the former will definitely still happen after you graduate, the latter is less likely. Those six-people sessions are most likely made among fellow gamers, who are likely to find each other in a class, or perusing a bulletin board in a student union.

“Their age group usually involves a lot of what PC gamers are,” says Keegan Gormley, whose Big City Gaming in downtown Eugene, Ore. offers constant system-linked gaming and monthly tournaments. “They’re mostly university students who, in their spare time, enjoy playing a game like Counter-Strike, or another game they’ve played for a long time.”

The players in his $US5-an-hour “stadium,” — eight consoles connected to high definition, Major League Gaming–standard panel monitors — are largely high-schoolers, Gormley said. Younger kids are less likely to LAN, he said, because of the accessibility of consoles and the desirability of their most current games.

“There’s much more deep-rooting in PC gaming,” Gormley said. “Someone who gets into a game on the PC can end up playing it for years,” he said. “On consoles, I’ve seen people drop Halo for Call of Duty, then drop Call of Duty for Flashpoint. For PC gamers, mostly, it’s whatever they originally clicked on and killed with.”

And that helps explain the persistence of LAN gaming. The standbys of a LAN party are usually real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, or WarCraft III, then shooters such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. TF2 is the most recent of these, releasing in 2007, with others having roots going back to the late 1990s. There’s a reason for this.

“It’s what people are good at,” said Patrick Chinn, one of the University of Oregon organisers for the Civil War LAN, which will be held January 22-23. “One reason people want to play an older game like Counter-Strike is because they’ve played it a long time and they’ve gotten good at it. We’ve done tournaments for games that are brand new, and there’ll be some attendance, but they’re not as well played.”

Plus, by this point, the support histories for the games have either controlled for or patched out of existence most means of cheating. “The tactics in a game like Counter-Strike have become so refined that there’s no real dick move you can pull,” says Dylan Leeds, a senior majoring in digital art at Oregon. And for whatever in-game legislation doesn’t cover, LAN gaming offers another control: being physically in the presence of your opponent. It cuts down on ragequits and unsporting behaviour.

“You’re more likely to respect someone if you know you’re going to see interact with them after the game,” he said.

And that speaks to another quality of LAN gaming that, unlike its numbers, can’t be replicated or really improved: the human contact of it all.

“If you’re playing online by yourself, the hype’s really not there,” said Josh Bothun, an Oregon student majoring in computer science and music technology. “It’s like you have to intentionally create it for yourself, but you get a completely different experience when people are around you.”

LAN parties have an anecdotal culture that just can’t be replicated by solitary multiplayer gaming. Often stretching 24 hours or more, they’re salted with tales of inside jokes and hyper-caffeination. At major tournaments in the civilian world, bragging about casemods and your rig are their own sideshow, similar to a custom-car show.

“It’s more about community,” says Gormley, the game store owner. “It’s being able to shoulder-shove the person you just killed. It’s less about yelling at someone over a mic, and more about actually giving that person the evil eye.

“It gets so elitist online, sometimes,” he continued. “It seems like a lot of people don’t want to play online console games because they don’t get the game in its first week, don’t level up their character in time, and then they feel like they can’t compete.”

It might be easy to assume that anything other than gaming over the Internet, as opposed to a LAN or WAN, is redundant, a relic, or headed for obscurity. But system-linked games bring something to the room that proprietary multiplayer services can’t: One’s friends.

To use an apt college metaphor: “It’s like drinking online versus drinking with friends,” Chinn said. “Drinking a couple of beers and IMing with friends is not nearly as much fun as actually drinking with your friends.”

Nowhere is the realisation of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment’s pause he said, “Kingdom Hearts.”

“Oh, because it has pirates?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s the flying.” The way the game introduces flying the player — about halfway through its storyline after you’ve been running and jumping on the ground the whole time — was like a revelation in game design for him. “Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it’s like you knew it was coming. It just felt right.”

There’s a fantasy fulfilment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it’s appealing to a part of your senses that you don’t use very much in everyday gameplay.

“We live in a very X, Y world,” Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn’t afraid to build his games around it. “If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis.”

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360-degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character’s (or aircraft’s) physics so that they don’t get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalise the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray’s flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager’s face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don’t realise that there’s more to flight than getting off the ground.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Gray. “[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation.”

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organise a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

“You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?’” said Gray. “If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It’s different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,’ because you don’t get blue keys in the air.”

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centrepiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson, and he wasn’t shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360-degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you’re up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there’s not much fantasy fulfilment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it’s a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don’t mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn’t last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfil the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: “I don’t know where I’m at, but I’m having fun.”

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

In British Columbia, a college student flips open his laptop and fires up his PS3.

In San Antonio, a guy picks up another three memory cards on the way home from working at JC Penney.

These are the peculiar markers of the GameFAQ author, whose pursuit and completion of a video game guide—dozens of hours of uncompensated labour—seems to walk the fine line between video game obsession and expertise. It’s a world in which 20,000 words can be considered small for a full walkthrough, and committing to write one means at least a week, and more likely two or three, devoting all of your spare time to playing, pausing and taking notes. And it’s a labour that, with rare exceptions, provides zero material reward.

“I’ve gotten one bounty, for The Lost and the Damned,” Robert Allen Rusk says, almost with pride. He’s talking about the gift cards that GameFAQs offers for being the first to produce a complete guide to a new game. Rusk picked up a $US60 gift card for his work on Lost & Damned, which weighed in at 58,216 words — roughly 200 pages if it were a paperback novel. His work on Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were each more than twice as long.

“I haven’t done anything with that gift card,” Rusk said. “I may save that one for Christmas.”

I talked to Rusk and others among the more accomplished writers — authors who have handled very large games, who have published sizeable guides or sizeable numbers of them, and authors who have been the first to produce walkthroughs for current, high-demand games. As someone who’s reviewed video games, I’ve felt that the demand to produce credible, authoritative work definitely interferes with, and in some cases crowds out altogether, one’s normal enjoyment of a game. But at least I get paid for that.

Not so with these writers. They get to pick their games, of course. They stop and start and battle procrastination and hustle against deadlines, often ones internally set. But in the end, they definitely started doing it because they loved a game, and they keep doing it because playing a game this comprehensively seems to wring every last atom of enjoyment out of the disc.

“It might not seem that fun because it takes a long time,” concedes Tony, a 20 year-old at the University of British Columbia who asked to be quoted by his pen name, ChaosDemon. “But these [developers] put years and years into making the game — and you got more out of it, because you had to break it down, and know everything about it.”

More Impressive Than Achievements
Among a gaming completionists’ many badges of honour is the 100 per cent achievement. No matter how many hours of your life you lost to the game, that gold (or platinum) trophy, that 1000 Gamerscore achievement, it’s definitely respected as the mark of a serious gamer.

But they aren’t the ones pausing a game to take notes on a laptop at every checkpoint, or draw out maps on doodle paper and then figure out how to get their point across in ASCII text. And then they aren’t sitting down to write dozens of pages about it. There aren’t any achievements for this sort of thing, and it’s hard to get across why you’re going for it.

“I’ve been embarrassed to tell people about it, to tell you the truth,” says Paul Williams, 23, of Brisbane, Australia. “Telling someone I write 20-page strategy guides on how to beat these games is not the greatest thing for my ego. But my parents and my girlfriend know about it, and they’re all very supportive. They know it’s a hobby and it’s not the most important thing in my life.”

Williams was the first (and so far, only) writer to produce a walkthrough for Halo 3: ODST for GameFAQs, not that he’s bragging about it. He found it to be almost a fluke experience, owed in part to ODST’s notoriously short campaign mode that’s drawn some complaints.

“I was surprised at how fast I was able to get something up,” Williams told me. He’s written guides for Fable II, Resident Evil 5 and a partially completed one for Gears of War 2. ODST was atypical, compared with his other efforts.

“When you start, you at first don’t realise how much work it is,” Williams said. “Halfway through, when you feel yourself getting close to just having had enough of it, you realise you’ve done all this work and you might as well stick to it.”

No matter how passionate they were for a game, the writers I talked to admitted that burnout inevitably becomes an issue. “The first time through is always fun,” said Barry Scott Will, 43, of Richmond, Va., an IT director for a church who just finished a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 guide. “When I’m writing for a game, I play through it at least twice or sometimes three or four times. By that third or fourth time, it’s just work.”

Rusk, the Grand Theft Auto guru, was a game tester in the late 1980s for Broderbund Software, LucasArts, and later a studio in Colorado Springs. Guide writing offers flashbacks to those days, he says, and not necessarily in a good way. “Being forced to play constantly, you start hating the game,” Rusk said. “There’s a natural burnout writing a guide, you just want to get it out the door.

“But I don’t lose my sense of enjoyment,” he insisted. “The thing here is I love the games I work on. I love the Grand Theft Auto games. I love getting my hooks in and working on it.”

Writing Walkthroughs For Minor Profit
ChaosDemon—aka Tony, the 20-year-old in British Columbia—wrote his first guide as an 11-year-old: It was for Pokémon Stadium 2 on the Nintendo 64. “Some days I wasted a whole day when I wasn’t at school, just working on a guide,” he says.

It didn’t kill his grades, actually. “My English teacher didn’t like me that much,” he says, “but she commented ‘Your writing is better than what I expected.’ And it was probably because of the guide. You have to be very organised in your writing.”

To say there’s no benefit to the FAQ writer beyond a sense of satisfaction is false, of course. Some have found a writing voice, others a readership, and a few have turned their work into paying freelance gigs. Rusk collected $US500 when his Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay guide was published in a 2004 strategy guide-compilation drawing on material from GameFAQs contributors. Williams, the Australian, was offered (and accepted) a gig writing an exclusive guide on Call of Duty: World at War for the Web site CheatPlanet.

Will, the father in Richmond, Va., has monetised his GameFAQs efforts further, building a site called papagamer.com where eBooks employing the text of his GameFAQs guides are uploaded with graphics and other enhancements and sold for $US5. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which took him 10 days to complete, is the latest offering. Will sees his GameFAQs work as a kind of loss leader, providing free and comprehensive advice on a game with an upsell to a more robust, premium guide elsewhere. He says he’s never made more than “a few hundred bucks a month” at what he does.

“It’s not much more than a hobby that pays for itself,” Will says. “In the past few months though, I’ve tried to boost my sales, so this is like a second job.”

Will started his guide writing on Knights of the Old Republic II (”still a big fan of that game”) to help gamers in BioWare’s forums who kept showing up with the same questions. But as a father himself, he came to understand the real service of free guide writing — to the parents of frustrated kids, who can’t be helped with a video game neither mum nor dad understands the way they would a bike or toy.

“I really get a feeling of accomplishment when I get emails from somebody who bought the game for their child, and the child gets frustrated, and that gets the parent frustrated, and they come online and get the help they need and everybody’s happy,” Will said. “And I’ve gotten emails from people in their seventies, playing games. I got one email from a man stationed on a ship in the US Navy. He had one game he’d brought with him, and he wanted me to email my guide (Dungeon Siege II) to him.”

Williams has seen this kind of gratitude, too: “I’ve gotten some seniors who wrote in to thank me for my Metal Gear Solid 4 guide. For my Wall-E guide, I get pretty frequent thank-yous from parents. It’s cool. It’s like, whoa, people actually appreciate this.”

Drawing The Line
Not everything they play gets reviewed FAQ written about it. ChaosDemon, who put out a Batman: Arkham Asylum FAQ between summer school and the fall semester, wants to take his time with Uncharted 2. Williams, down in Australia, adores Japanese RPGs but won’t touch them for FAQs. “I love those games, but I’ll never write a guide,” he said. “I hate to get interrupted when there’s a big epic story unfolding.” Plus, to comprehensively play a Final Fantasy or Star Ocean game — to anything close to 100 per cent “and write about it” would take “years and years,” he groans.

Rusk, the San Antonian who’s hoarding memory units for The Ballad of Gay Tony, enjoys but won’t review Lego Star Wars. Earlier this year he tried Watchmen: The End is Nigh and enjoyed it enough that the guide he wrote for it became “an intro to the Watchmen universe for newbies”.

But the solid bet is, by the end of the year, they’ll be writing something.

“I don’t watch TV,” Will said. “Instead of watching TV, I play video games. Some people watch a sitcom, a drama and the nightly news, I come home and play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

“When you get down to it,” he says, “we’re gonna play the video games anyway.”

During the course of my tenure at Kotaku I’ve referenced my days in EverQuest on many occasions, but I’ve never elaborated on what went down back then. Recent events in my life have brought that period to the fore, and I’ve decided to share my experience with our readers.

In November of 2000, my life was going well. I had a lovely girlfriend, a serviceable vehicle, and a job that paid more than enough for me to survive while catering to my increasingly expensive video game habit. Within four months, it would all be gone.

At the time I was sharing an apartment with a friend of mine named Dustin. Dustin was a great guy, but he spent his entire downtime sitting in front of his computer, playing a video game called EverQuest. I had encountered the game before, having participated in the beta for Sony Online Entertainment’s massively popular multiplayer game, but once the game went live I lost interest. I just couldn’t see myself paying a monthly fee just to play a computer game. Oh, how things have changed.

Having nothing much else to do at the time, I’d sit and watch Dustin play. He’d explain what his Monk character was doing in the game. I was a spectator as he progressed, learning to feign death, earning new weapons, and taking on greater challenges as he got closer and closer to the level cap.

So when I wasn’t spending time with my girlfriend, Emily, I would watch Dustin play. Or I would tool around on various text-based MUSHes and MOOs online, role-playing with people all over the world. I’d been into science fiction, fantasy, and comic books since I was very young, so slipping into an imaginary world came easy to me. Perhaps a little too easy.

Towards the end of 2000, Emily and I broke up. The reasoning behind this is far too stupid to delve into… let’s just say we were both young and a bit foolish.

I became depressed, and Dustin had just the thing to cheer me up.

The Scars of Velious expansion for EverQuest came out in December of 2000. My roommate, perhaps tired of my moping over my lost love, picked up a copy of the game for me as a Christmas present. I installed it, created a half-elven Bard, and soon our apartment had two guys in the living room at all hours of the day, faces bathed in the glow of monitors.

Within a week, the game that hadn’t affected me at all nearly two years previously had become an important part of my life. Soon, it would become my life.

If I wasn’t asleep or at work, I was playing EverQuest. The former was becoming a rarity. I would go into work, and I would still hear the sounds of EverQuest orcs in my head. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was speeding through the Greater Faydark zone, killing pixies and turning in quest items.

In January of 2001, a man with a tow truck came to my place of employment and took my car away. I had fallen behind on payments without realising it, and Nissan had decided they wanted my Sentra back. My first thought as I watched the tow truck drive away was how many hours walking to and from work would take from my EverQuest time.

I worked at a company called FranchiseOpportunities.com, maintaining and creating websites, but increasingly my time there was spent either communicating with my EverQuest friends or browsing websites for tips on the best equipment and techniques for grinding experience points and gold. It was impossible for my co-workers not to notice. In February of 2001, Joseph Lunsford, the owner of the company, called me into his office.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” Lunsford told me this month when I went to see him and talk to him about the person I used to be. “You were was amazingly bright. I was convinced there wasn’t anything you couldn’t do. You showed so much promise, but your interest in work just fell off. Projects started taking longer to get done, and it was obvious your head wasn’t in it. You left me no choice.”

I was in tears back then. I felt unbelievably pathetic. I had no car. I had no job. Joe had handed me my last paycheck and about $US120 he had in his wallet, and sent me on my way. I took a taxi home, broke the news to my roommates (we had moved into a three-bedroom to split the bills three ways), went into my bedroom, started up EverQuest, and forgot about everything.

According to Dr. Hilarie Cash, the executive director of the reSTART internet and gaming addition recovery program and co-author of the book “Video Games & Your Kids: How Parents Stay in Control,” retreating inside a video game to avoid real world problems is a common cause of “video game addiction.”

“I would definitely call it video game addiction, which is a subset of internet addiction. Many of the things [you] described to me are typical of a video game addict, particularly the way that real life shrinks away for the addict, living more and more in the virtual world.”

And that’s exactly what I was doing. I had been a confident and outgoing young man who enjoyed hanging out with my friends, spending hours chatting about absolutely nothing while smoking cigarettes and drinking countless cups of Waffle House Coffee. Now my social dealings involved helping online friends camp a rare monster spawn, or discussing class balance on my guild’s chat channel.

Going outside was only necessary when I ran out of smokes or beverages. I lived off $.30 pot pies from Wal-Mart and cheap bags of rice. I was taking care of my most essential needs, but only barely. Often times I would fall asleep in my chair in front of my computer with EverQuest running, waking up hours later to start the cycle all over again.

Even now my memories of the period are a blur of Oasis runs, power leveling, and experience grinding. My mother remembers those days much more vividly.

“Mike was unavailable for most of that period,” she recalled recently. “There was no way to contact him, except to do a ‘drive by’ preferably with a bag of groceries in the back seat. I remember trying to talk to him. Such a fine mind and wild sense of humour; all covered up and hidden deep inside again. He listened half-heartedly and was easy to anger. He was going down fast, even to the point of telling how it really was and not just what you wanted to hear.”

Hearing her talk about it now, I can barely believe it had gotten so bad, but I tend to hold on to positive memories more than the negative ones. Like the day Emily came back.

It was three months after I was fired that Emily decided to give us another chance. I wasn’t the same man she had been with before. I was relatively skinny, and my hair had grown ridiculously long. As we lay curled up in bed one evening she commented on how my belly had disappeared, which tickled me to no end. It seems perverse to me now. It wasn’t as if I had been dieting or exercising; I was taking pride in my own malnourishment.

My existence slowly started gaining some semblance of a real life again. Emily went out one afternoon and brought me a stack of job applications, which motivated me to go out, get my hair cut, and go to my first job interview at a Fast Signs down the street. Looking slightly more human and feeling more alive than I had in months, I got the job on the spot. It was amazing how fast things had turned around. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.

In an odd twist, my EverQuest friends were now worried about me.

I hadn’t been around, and they missed my sense of humour and my enthusiasm. My ability to twist four Bard songs at a time didn’t hurt either. These people needed me. I was important to them, and I couldn’t let them down. Looking back, I can’t believe I missed the irony there.

So I started playing EverQuest again. At first it was only on the nights that Emily couldn’t make it over, but soon I was back to my regular play schedule – every waking hour. I was regularly late to work, and called in sick at least once every two weeks so I could stay home and play.

Then came that fateful night.

The woman I had once told was the love of my life was sitting undressed in my bed not a foot away from my computer desk, begging me to join her, and I kept putting it off. I was so close to level 40 I could taste it. I was in the Dreadlands, kiting large enemies back and forth, killing them slowly with my Bard songs. I still remember the urgency I felt, along with the annoyance that this woman was trying to keep me from reaching my goal. Couldn’t she understand how important this was to me?

She had certainly tried.

“Back then I just figured I was dating a gamer, and that’s how it was going to be,” she said to me recently. “I hadn’t dated many guys at that point, and my older brother was the same way. He worked, came home, and played video games.”

Eight years later it became obvious that my lack of attention toward her weighed far more heavily than either of us had suspected.

One morning in late September of 2001, I called my job and quit. Whatever justification I had for this at the time doesn’t matter. The reason I quit was because I was tired of making excuses for being late, and I just wanted to play EverQuest.

Emily and I had grown further apart. During my time at Fast Signs I purchased an old car from my sister, only to discover I couldn’t get insurance for it due to my driver’s licence being suspended over a previous ticket, ironically issued for driving without insurance. Rather than actively working to fix the problem, I slipped deeper into depression. I would let Emily take the car, driving it with a “TAG APPLIED FOR” plate on the back, but wouldn’t go anywhere with her for fear of being pulled over and sent to jail. Instead, I would stay home and play EverQuest.

The last time I would see her — until 2009 —was two days after her birthday in early October. I had let her take the car to her party, but refused to go with her. She reacted by keeping my car for two days without contacting me. I responded by telling her to return the car and the keys and get out of my life. She did just that.

And I kept playing.

December rolled around again, one year after I had taken my first steps into EverQuest’s world of Norrath, and I had completely changed. I went from being a strong independent person to a gaunt, unshaven, unshowered recluse, completely withdrawn from the outside world.

My roommate, once one of my greatest friends, was threatening to throw me out of the apartment if I didn’t find a job. But I had absolutely no motivation. The only time I left my dwelling was to scavenge for food at my parents’ house, or to grab a quick shower, as our apartment’s hot water had been turned off.

I remember feeling like a ghost, drifting through the waking world unnoticed. Luckily for me, my mother was looking out for me as best she could.

“He didn’t look like Mike anymore,” she remembers now. “He was scary and pitiful. I was afraid he was suicidal or dying of some mysterious disease. It broke my heart and I knew that coming home and taking the pressure off would be the best medicine for him.”

And so on January 1st, 2002, at the age of 28, I moved back in with my parents. It wasn’t an instant cure for my addiction – as soon as I convinced them to let me order DSL I was back online again – but something had changed. I started spending more time hanging out with my parents and less time sitting in my computer chair staring at little computer people doing little computer things. I had responsibilities. I had a support system. I had a stable platform to launch myself from instead of the quicksand I felt I had been standing in before.

Within two months I had found myself a job at a local gas station. Later that year I started speaking with Joe Lunsford again, proving myself through contract work until he decided to hire me on again in 2003. So I once again had a job, a girlfriend, and eventually my own apartment, sans roommates. That’s where I was in 2006, when Brian Crecente contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write for Kotaku. That’s where I am now.

It would be easy for me to pin my problems on EverQuest, and society in general would accept it without question. I could say I fell prey to an addictive video game that nearly ruined my life, but I would know that wasn’t the case.

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place. It was my responsibility to control how much I played, and the SOE spokesperson I contacted regarding my story agrees.

“EverQuest is a game,” the Sony Online rep told me. “The majority of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers play the game in moderation enjoying the gameplay as well as the community interaction the game provides. As with any form of entertainment, it is the responsibility of each individual player to monitor his or her own playing habits and prioritize his or her time as necessary. It is not our place to monitor or limit how individuals spend their free time.”

Dr. Hilarie Cash agrees as well, though she suspects that game developers are actively engaged in trying to make their games more addictive.

“Some blame can be laid at the feet of developers, making a conscious effort to make their games more addictive. It’s analogous to the tobacco industry, trying to make tobacco more addictive. It works to their benefit. That having been said, it’s up to the individual to take responsibility for how they play.”

During our conversation, Dr. Cash also likened gaming to gambling. Some people can walk into a casino, lose $US5, and call it quits. You have to know your own limits, and be conscious enough of them to know when you are in danger of going too far.

My own solution to my potential for MMO addiction is rather simple. I’ve managed to turn a habit that once interrupted my work into something I actively have to do for work. It’s no longer escapism if I am doing my job. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but if I am going to be that gullible I might as well take advantage.

As for Emily, she’s sitting behind me as I type this, playing Peggle. I’d ask her to come to bed, but I know how important getting to that next level can be.

Some of the scariest experiences I’ve had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you’re supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theatre could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don’t distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can’t predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you’re experiencing instead of rationalising it away as “just a game.”

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here’s how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you’re a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it’s no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. “In a horror game, when you’re walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game,” he says. “You look at the world a lot more intently because you don’t know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there’s a lot for the light to play across.”

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You’re walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the grey steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man’s torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don’t realise what’s happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the grey wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It’s beyond scary to me — it’s flat-out disturbing.

“Scary is the result of lot of things,” Milham says. “The first thing you’ve got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game].”

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character — even though you’re able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. “One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,’” says Milham. “If you’re too fantastic with something, you don’t really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away.”

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here’s another game that can freak you out, even though it’s not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you’re following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. OK, fine, that’s canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn’t just playing with Batman’s head. It’s playing with yours.

“During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they’re constantly just inches from the Scarecrow’s grasp,” explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. “We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety.”

But unlike a slasher flick where you’re yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call police, you’re the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he’s been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you’re walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can’t be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

“[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn’t have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context,” says Whitworth. “The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player’s confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up.”

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that’s similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player…like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That’s probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

“A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what’s coming next, that sort of endless tension,” Milham says. “You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don’t [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn’t.’ And then… OH MY GOD!”

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

The buzz grew as fans, and Hollywood, questioned Jackson’s choice of first-time director Neill Blomkamp to helm the big-budget project. But that ultimately became a moot point. As the movie budget escalated and the demands by Microsoft increased, not even a pair of giant Hollywood studios could afford to foot the bill for the big screen version of Halo. But fate stepped in and Jackson ended up creating an original sci-fi film with District 9.

Gamers will get to see a sci-fi collaboration between producer Jackson and co-writer/director Blomkamp this summer with Tristar Pictures’ District 9. Rather than basing the film on a hit game, the duo created an original alien story and filmed it documentary-style. Jackson was on hand at Comic-Con to screen the film and talk about how Halo begat District 9.

Jackson and Blomkamp were going to bring Microsoft’s Halo videogame franchise to the big screen, but when Hollywood bailed on Microsoft’s demands, the duo ended up creating District 9, which opens August 14.

“Well, I believe in fate. And a lot of times in my career I’ve just let fate decide what happens,” said Jackson. “I don’t try to influence things too much. ‘Cause I kind of believe in some weird force that’s out there, sort of deciding what happens in your life. And I just look back on it and think, well fate made a decision that it wasn’t gonna be Halo that we made, it was gonna be District 9. ‘Cause it literally happened within 24 hours. I mean, we woke up one morning thinking we were making Halo. That day we got the news that the studios, Fox and Universal, didn’t want to make the film anymore.”

When asked exactly what happened with the Halo film, Jackson replied, “It wasn’t like the studios didn’t want to make it with us, they just didn’t want to make Halo anymore because they were arguing amongst themselves and with Microsoft and the rights and the deals and everything else. It was all these little politics that were kicking in.”

District 9 is set in South Africa and focuses on a quarantined area where aliens have been kept for 30 years. The film literally took shape the same day that Jackson’s Halo was scrapped.

“During the course of that day, ’cause we were all in New Zealand together… Neill had been working on Halo for five or six months, we decided to take control of our own lives a little bit and we thought, ‘Well, let’s make an original movie. Let’s keep it low budget. Let’s try to finance it independently so we don’t have to get involved with studio politics,’” explained Jackson. “It’s sort of, do something that we can control without putting ourselves into a Halo situation again. And that’s what happened. And so by the end of that day, we had lost Halo but we had started District 9.”

Jackson is best known to fans for adapting the Lord of the Rings trilogy to films. He’s currently producing Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit film adaptations. Jackson, who is an avid gamer, equates books and videogame adaptations on the same level.

“If it’s a book or a videogame, even though you’ve had the experience of reading or playing that story, it’s affected you, and now you can imagine it as a film,” said Jackson. “I also see the role of video games as one that will continue to command respect and attention due to the improved graphics, forms of narrative, interactive capabilities, and ways of immersion.”

Jackson, who has worked with Ubisoft on the King Kong videogame and currently has a deal with Microsoft to create original games through WETA Interactive, believes that intrinsically, most videogames, and virtually all movies, do one basic thing: tell stories.

As game technology improves, Jackson believes games will become even more cinematic experiences. One result of HD graphics and advances in sound will be the sharing of digital assets between game developers and filmmakers, which will create more authentic representations of movie-based games.

One of the big themes at Comic-Con this year was the explosion of 3-D films, including the new TRON Avatar movie. Jackson is interested in embarking in the third dimension with future projects.

“I personally love 3-D,” said Jackson. “I love the fact that it’s become a much more gentle experience than it used to be. It always had this kind of eye strain and lack of quality associated with it. It was sort of gimmicky and difficult. But now it’s technically become easier and it’s also much more…it doesn’t give you bad headaches anymore. And I think 3-D is just another really great tool to help an audience step into the movie.”

“When I’m a filmmaker, I try to make movies that invite the audience to step into the film and to become part of the world of the film, if I can,” added Jackson. “Rather than be an audience, I try to take that barrier away so you’re not just sitting watching something like a sports event on a TV screen. You’re actually participating. I try to shoot my scenes in a way and move the camera around in a way that sort of invites you into the movie to some degree. And 3-D is just a tool that makes that easier. It makes it more vibrant. I haven’t shot a feature in 3-D yet, but I’m certainly looking forward to doing that.”

Fans can see Jackson’s latest directing venture, The Lovely Bones starring Mark Wahlberg, on the big screen December 11.

Half a dozen comics and two new cartoons based on video games were announced at the show and plenty of comic books were unveiled as video games. The convention itself was host to more than 40 panels about video games.

Often these crossovers serve as a sort of table setter for an upcoming game, helping to set the stage, build up the characters and explore the world of a video game before it gets into the hands of gamers.

Before the original sci-fi role-playing game Mass Effect hit two years ago, Del Rey published the novel Mass Effect: Revelation. The prequel, penned by the game developer’s head writer, took place 35 years before the game.

This time around, the next Mass Effect game will be heralded by a comic book, not a novel. Mass Effect: Redemption is being written by Mac Walters, the person responsible for Mass Effect 2 script, and Walters promises it will change the way gamers look at the upcoming Xbox 360 sequel.

Upcoming Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 game Singularity is also getting a prequel in the form of a graphic novel. And long-lived franchise Prince of Persia is getting a graphic novel prequel for the upcoming movie based on the video games.

The shift from books to comic books to tell a story set in a video game universe shouldn’t be that surprising. Comic books, like video games, use both narrative art and dialog to tell a story. The two also have a very similar audience which could explain the virtual explosion of crossover titles in recent months.

While Dead Space Extraction will explore the world of the upcoming Wii-exclusive, it won’t be a prequel, according to Steve Papoutsis, executive producer of Dead Space Extraction.

“There is so much more to the Dead Space universe than we could ever fit into one game and we’re excited to be working with Image Comics again to extend the story in Dead Space Extraction,” he said. “(Illustrator) Ben (Templesmith) and (writer) Antony (Johnston) did such a tremendous job with the original comic, we can’t wait for fans to get their hands on this special issue.”

Other comic crossovers seem to be more about marketing than expanding the story. For instance, at last week’s convention Capcom gave away copies of a Spyborgs comic to promote the upcoming Wii game. And Sony Computer Entertainment announced a comic based on their popular God of War franchise.

The six-issues series, set to be released on a monthly schedule leading into the release of God of War III, was announced alongside a novel based on the game and a collectible copy of the anti-hero’s weapon: The Blades of Chaos.

Crossovers aren’t relegated to the pages of comics either, there were also two new cartoons announced at the show.

Halo Legends will be a set of animated shorts based on Microsoft and Bungie’s popular first-person shooter for the Xbox 360. The seven shorts will explore some of the fictional history of the game’s universe.

Dante’s Inferno, an action game based on the epic Italian poem, is also getting the cartoon treatment. The collection of six shorts, each created by a different studio and director, will show some of the untold moments of the video game on a DVD set to ship around the same time as the game.

Comic books and animated movies based on video games aren’t a new phenomenon. Gears of War, Resident Evil, World of Warcraft, even Sonic, all have their own comic books. But the past 18 months or so has seen a surge of interest in the pop-culture crossovers.

Perhaps that’s because of the increasingly mainstream role that comics and their offshoots are taking in pop culture. Once relegated to children, comics are now recognised as an important form of expression, something that can deal with big issues and reach a broad audience.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Toy Story Mania! is being developed for the Wii with the help of Disney’s imagineers and designed to replicate the experience of the 4D ride of the same name.

Toy Story Mania! the ride opened in Disney’s California Adventure and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2008. On the ride, park-goers board a carnival tram and ride along a track that whips them in front of large screens featuring steroscopic 3D animation. The ride also features blasts of air and water and four plastic pop guns that are used to shoot virtual pies, darts, balls and hoops at the screen to score points.

The attraction is broken up into a practice round and five games, including a balloon pop and plate break levels and a Woody-themed pop-gun shoot-out on a faux western set.

To shoot the virtual ammo, people on the ride pull back on a string attached to the over-sized guns and let go to fire, simulating a pop gun. Disney Interactive show producer Stephanie Pickens, one of the imagineers who worked on the ride, said the gun can register up to ten shots a second.

The ride also tracks each players scores, showing the scores at the end of each run and also listing the park’s high scores for the day and month.

The ride cost an estimated $US80 million to create and requires more than 150 computers to run. It is, Pickens said, the first true video game ride in a Disney park.

The team behind the ride faced a lot of challenges, said Sue Bryan, Walt Disney senior show producer.

“It was harder than you might have thought,” she said. “We have 3-year-olds, grand parents, teenagers, avid gamers, people who swear they never want to play a video game who might be riding this.”

And because the ride is relatively short, people need to feel successful instantly to have fun.

“Traditional carnival games are fun, but are not necessarily out to make people feel successful,” she said.

So the team started by creating a mock-up of the ride, building the set with foam core, the car out of plywood and the guns out of PVC pipe.

“Our big goal was immersion,” she said.

After deciding on the ride’s design, the team of imagineers started mocking up guns for the attraction.

“We tested levers, buttons, but we ended up with a pull string because it feels like a pop gun, viscerally, when you use it,” she said.

When Walt Disney Imagineering started working on the virtual portion of the ride, it became a lot like making a game, Pickens said.

The giant screens and the graphics needed to have accurate physics and had to be able to know exactly where the shooter was located and pointing at all times.

“We needed to render projectiles precisely to make sure it feels like it comes out of your gun,” Pickens said.

Both Pixar, the people behind the Toy Story movies, and Disney animators worked on the animations for the ride’s games. The games, while relatively simple on their surface, also have a surprising amount of complexity built into them.

Some of the animations have two stages, like a hen house that when shot sprouts chickens. There are also Easter eggs, or secrets built into the games, like clouds that shower high point targets when shot.

When Disney decided to create a video game based on their ride they turned to Papaya Studios.

“We spent a lot of time with the video game development team,” Pickens said. “It’s crazy, crazy detailed.”

While the Wii game doesn’t have air or water effects, some of the games levels will include steroscopic 3D graphics. Where the ride features 56 game screens, the Wii version has 30 mini games.

Because the game relies on the motion controls of the Wii remote, it does manage to capture much of the same feel of the ride and Disney hopes that spells increased sales. In fact, the game will be sold at the two parks right outside of the ride.

If successful, it sounds like Disney may explore bringing other forms of video game interactivity to some of their parks and with those new rides will likely come new video game ports of theme park reality.

“Interactive play is really popular at our parks,” Bryan said.

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Games are no stranger to schools, of course. Think back to the 80s when at least 30 minutes of every school day was given over to drowning your wagon in Oregon Trail in the name of History class, or letting your SimCity fall to ruin through crime and tornadoes on behalf of Social Studies. From the first school-sanctioned games like these to the full-blown edutainment of today, it’s safe to say educators are aware of the learning potential in video games.

But taking a step further and actually developing a curriculum around the Nintendo DS takes innovation – and money. After all, there’s only so far math drills can really take you whether you’re on a PC or DS and money for education systems still doesn’t grow on trees.

Leading the charge toward a Nintenducation in the UK is Scotland. Their Centre for Games and Learning (aka The Consolarium) is an extension of the Scottish Government Schools Directorate that presents teachers and education administrators with ideas for implementing all kinds of gaming consoles into schools.

Derek Robertson, National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning and administrator of the Consolarium, says that the use of the DS in schools is now commonplace, compared to when he first introduced the consoles to schools in 2006. “Initially I purchased 30 [Nintendo DS consoles] and carried out my first Dr. Kawashima [aka Brain Age] trial. The extended trial saw us handing out over 450 consoles to support our project.”

The Consolarium encourages schools to the use the DS for more than just math drills and brain training puzzles. “We suggest that schools follow [the Brain Age] methodology although they are free to trial other approaches,” said Robertson. “Our main approach is not to prescribe a series of lesson plans but to suggest how the game, be it Nintendogs or Hotel Dusk, can be used as the contextual hub about which learning in a variety of curricular links can grow from.”

Translation: students get to play Hotel Dusk. In class.

This application of the DS to schools marks a paradigm shift in the relationship between games and education. In the old days (by which I mean the 80s and early 90s), Oregon Trail and SimCity were phased out in favour of more learning-specific software like Math Blaster. There’s nothing wrong with dressing up multiplication tables in interactive software, of course. But it did limit learning opportunities to whatever the game was programmed to do and it put teachers in a hands-off role.

With games like Nintendogs, teachers get to be creative, designing lesson plans around what happens in the game. For example, teachers in two Scottish schools used the virtual pet sim back in 2008 as a way to tempt kids into reading up on the first dog in space. Students also wrote stories about their Nintendog and competed with their classmates in the in-game competitions for real life prizes from the teacher. This year, another Scottish teacher has used the Nintendogs initiative to launch an art project where students tried to use what they saw in the game to influence the dogs that they drew or painted in real life.

Although the success of these programs is hard to measure (aside from teacher, parent and student testimony), something clearly seems to be working for Nintenducation. Robertson said Scottish schools are starting to shell out for their own consoles because they’ve seen results from the Consolarium’s initiative. One school even received a donation offer within the last two months for 2500 DS consoles.

Meanwhile, in England, the Consolarium’s ideas are starting to catch on. Dawn Hollybone is a teacher at Oakdale Junior School in London where students aged 7-11 are getting their hands on both Brain Age and Professor Layton to further their education.

We use the consoles for 20 minutes a day,” she said. “Each year group has a session timetable per day and then I ask that they use it at least three times a week. The use of these is planned into each individual lesson, [so if it's] part of a maths session, then it may be used as a mental starter to warm up… or as part of a Literacy lesson, the class may use the reading aloud programme or syllable counter.”

Additionally, Hollybone also uses PictoChat as a way to bulk up writing exercises by having students write to one another and collaborate on projects.

“In this way they are not merely ‘just’ playing the games they are used as a way into a lesson or as a plenary,” Hollybone said.

It all looks incredibly awesome (or maybe we’re blinded by jealousy); but there are some concerns that critics have raised over DS usage in schools. There’s the obvious “games don’t teach kids” arguments we’re used to hearing from the Oregon Trail days; but there’s also a valid concern about the cost of putting a DS in the hands of every school child. Not all school systems are as small Scotland’s or Japan’s – and here in the US, the cost of public education through taxes barely covers school lunches, never mind a $US100+ console plus $US30 games.

I suppose costs are a barrier but if that’s all we have to worry about, then great,” said Robertson. He said he’s more concerned about getting the message out to critics of the methodology itself that games are good learning tools, not some subversive pop culture enemy. “There is still a worry over the media’s general propensity to perpetuate the moral panic argument or for the impact to be lost in an intellectual debate, but I feel as though we have managed to change attitudes… and are helping to change attitudes beyond our [borders].

Japan seems to have their back at least — in Kyoto Prefecture (Nintendo’s home base), Nintenducation is still going strong in Yawata City after being introduced about three years ago. Last month in neighbouring Osaka Prefecture, there were reports that the Osaka Board of Education approved a measure that would allow 10 middle and elementary schools in the area to incorporate the DS into the classroom experience.

So what can we expect for the US schools? Nintendo couldn’t be reached for comment on this feature, but we did get in touch a middle school history teach and a DS-fluent parent to get their take.

Caitlin Ferguson is a 9th Grade Geography teacher at Port of Los Angeles High School in California. She herself doesn’t own a DS, but having seen it in the hands of some of her friends, she’s vaguely aware of its educational potential. But in a school system where High School students already have regular access to computers, she thinks a Nintendo DS might be overkill.

“They’re lackadaisical as it is,” she said. “If they’re getting the work done… I could see using it as an enrichment tool, rather than a curriculum tool.” An example of that would be letting students play Brain Age only after they’d completed their regular math assignment – instead of before.

Ferguson did acknowledge that teachers could take Nintenducation a step further if the school passed out DS consoles to students. For example, she suggested that a Life Skills class could assign students an exercise where they compare Cooking Mama recipes with real-life cooking recipes and pick out all the differences.

Ultimately, though, Ferguson’s concern about putting the DS in schools is that it will be a barrier between teacher and student. “There’s so much interaction [that happens] between teacher and student,” she said. “It can’t be replaced by a DS. Neither can the work.”

Ferguson’s concerns about the line between work and play are echoed by parent Julia Temple. Her son is in 3rd grade at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in California and for the money she pays, she doesn’t want him playing games instead of traditional learning.

“I wouldn’t be happy if they gave [students] DSs at school,” Temple said. “I could see that maybe it would engage children… it could make for a positive experience.” But to her, the DS is a toy used for having fun, not for learning; she thinks the time a student spends gaming would be better spent with a book.

Temple said she was alright with students learning on computers, though, because she sees them as a part of everyday life that students have to learn eventually. “The DS is very limited,” she said. “You can do more on a computer.”

But, like the critics, Temple’s biggest concern is cost: “Ultimately, I don’t think they should have DSs in school because we have so many other things we could be spending money on.”

We may not see Nintenducation in Oz anytime soon because of the economy. But if Japan and the United Kingdom show consistent promise with their DS programs, it may be only a matter of money and not of principle that keeps the consoles out of school. Like they say, knowledge is power – and like Nintendo used to tell us back in the 80s: “Now you’re playing with power.”

Spore, Will Wright’s far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It’s also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright’s greatest achievement isn’t delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It’s his ability to touch a gamer’s imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

“In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms,” Wright says. “You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it.”

“Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that’s almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model .”

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

“Here aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright’s) games,” said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. “Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori’s work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

“To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within.”

Montessori’s first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

“The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy,” Wright said. “Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we’re going to learn about this.

“The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?”

And that’s not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

“I build more interesting toys than interesting games,” he said. “I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

“The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy.”

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

“Play is a toy version of problem solving that we’re going to encounter later in life,” he said. “Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

“It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively.”

An Elegant Tool
“Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world” — Maria Montessori

Wright’s first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

“I bring it up every now and the,” he said of his Montessori education. “It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. “

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

“They’re critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they’ve had the ability to do that from a very early age,” she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realise that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

“When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics,” he said. “It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

“When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out.”

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

“It’s about getting a player creatively engaged,” he said. “Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things.”

But Wright contends that Montessori isn’t as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn’t, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

“I pick themes, things I’ve been fascinated with, then it’s ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?’,” he said. “Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable.”

Instead, Montessori’s influence is more subtle.

“I don’t think it’s something you work into a game, I think it’s inherent in the structure itself,” he said. “It’s in the design premise.

“It’s an elegant tool. It’s not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job.”

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright’s games failing is almost as important as winning.

“Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality,” said Goodwin. “The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

“Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process.”

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

“One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success,” he said. “As long as it’s diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game.”

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

“In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and
hit a creature and you fail a different way.”

Wright’s games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

“It’s the failure that’s fun,” he said.

But what you won’t find in Spore is any form of direct completion with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

“Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense,” Goodwin said. “The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do.”

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

“Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills,” Goodwin said. “So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don’t see Wright with a lot of competition in his games.”

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn’t trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn’t designed to be “dead on accurate”.

“If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it’s meant to show a grand arch, the story of life,” her said. “The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L.”

“I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There’s a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren’t too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective.”

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

“A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity,” he said. “When you give them a tool to make things that they didn’t think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it.”

Goodwin says Spore “amplifies the imagination.”

“When I look at Spore, that’s what it seemed to say to me,” she said. “That it really uses the imagination.

“Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori’s work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover. It’s manipulative materials that go from something abstract to the concrete.”

After the game’s launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

“People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve,” he said. “It was really about ownership at some level.”

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori’s book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don’t inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

“Where Montessori is very child centered,” he says, “we are very gamer centered.”

But modern games aren’t as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

“If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear,” he said. “But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player.”

And it’s that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori’s methods.

“I’m not trying to evangelize Montessori,” he said. “I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they’ve doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose.”