Lose/Lose is about values and value. It’s about what happens if a “Game Over” screen destroys your copy of the game, as happens with Gage’s game. And it’s about what happens if every alien invader that you shoot down for points represents a file somewhere on your computer, a file that, if you blast that alien, is deleted forever.

As it says in red, all-caps letters on the official Lose/Lose homepage: “KILLING ALIENS IN LOSE/LOSE WILL DELETE FILES ON YOUR HARDDRIVE PERMANANTLY [sic]”

“I’m shocked anyone has played it at all,” Gage said in an interview with Kotaku. “It was never meant to be made, rather a catalyst for discussion.”

But Lose/Lose is being played. A list on Gage’s website reports high scores generated by gamers unafraid of the damage “Lose/Lose would do to their computers. The top scorer has “slaughtered 4912 aliens” and done who knows how much damage to their computer, if the data being pulled by the game’s website is accurate and real, which Gage says it is. “I think the people who’ve played it have added an important element to it,” he said “In demonstrating that they value their data differently.”

Or, perhaps, Lose/Lose players value other people’s data differently. Gage said he’s aware of the game being played on computers at retailers such as Best Buy or The Apple Store, an act he discourages. He equates the act with going to a store’s display computer and dragging important files into the trash.

Regardless of where people are playing the game and whose data they might be destroying, the themes of Lose/Lose are still relevant. To Gage, one of the game’s key attributes is that it gives the world a video game that has undisputed real-world consequence.

“I do think it’s worth questioning what this medium can convey,” he said. “Lose/Lose does this by taking the standpoint that killing in video games could have consequences in real life, and it supports this statement by having consequences.”

Gage isn’t taking an anti-video-game violence stance. He describes himself as a hardcore gamer who is excited about the release of Modern Warfare 2 and not at all an anti-video-game-violence guy. Instead, he hopes that the Lose/Lose’s real-world consequences for player aggression against virtual aliens will provoke conversations about the worth of virtual things.

He sees the game as part of the dialogue about how important the virtual parts of our lives are, a topic he believes is relevant to everything from MySpace-related suicide to grieving in video games, that touches on everything from social interactions online to banking.

“Lose/Lose is out there to try and engage us in this conversation,” he said. “What does it mean that we value property differently? How can we interact with each-other successfully in an environment where my hard drive is my artistic livelihood, but yours might only contain links to YouTube? Or in which some have their primary social interactions, and others only use a place to unwind and de-stress. This isn’t a situation that can be solved with rules or laws, but one that we have to grow into socially, and yet, it’s growing ever faster than we’re understanding what that means. How do we catch up?

“Personally, I’ve always been really interested in how the internet abstracts us from what we do or say by way of anonymity. This is the same mechanic that Lose/Lose employs. You are the entire time aware of what you’re doing, but you are abstracted from it by the video game layer. This mirrors a lot of these aggressive situations on the internet.

“It also mirrors a lot of situations in real life. Situations like war, cheating, or drugs, are all Lose/Lose, and yet people do them anyway. That aspect of the project serves as a subtle way to justify the reality of the virtual world.”

Last week, as reported in PC World, the PC security firm Symantec deemed his game a Trojan that could be used to damage computers. It’s damage level, as indicated by Symantec is “low”. Nevertheless, the company’s site warns: “OSX.Loosemaque is a Trojan that appears to be a video game, but deletes files from the home folder when a user plays it.”

Gage believes he’s made the risks involved with the game, which are spelled out on his website, clear enough and bristles at any attempt to label his game as malware or malicious software. “I would rather call it dangerous software. Unfortunately,” he said, distinguishing it from programs maliciously designed to harm computers. “I think it’s important but sad that anti-virus companies need to protect us from projects like mine that are so up front about what they do, but I recognise that it’s their business, and unfortunately many people rely on anti-virus companies as their only means of defence.”

Symantec’s action does demonstrate the power of Lose/Lose to suggest a game can have real-world consequences, and in that way it is a victory for Gage whose game will be presented as part of his thesis for a masters of fine arts at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

“I think it’s time we stop discussing whether or not video games and other media could be affecting us,” he said, “And start addressing what it means to be affected by something like this — and how we can use this effect to strengthen the medium.”

The Kotaku editorial database indicates that before Kamen Rider is released for the DS this year, Yie Ar Kung Fu may have been the only single-player fighting game ever made.

After all, why would anyone make a single-player fighting game? Isn’t that just a brawler?

Ah, but they do exist.

After I checked out the new Matt Hazard game last week, a rep from that game’s publisher, D3, let me try the company’s Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight fighting games. There’s one coming to the Wii, one to the DS, both based on a several-decades-old Japanese series that has a Power Rangers aesthetic.

The Wii one is two-player. Nothing too weird there. It’s made by Eighting, developers of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. It’s well-documented that I shouldn’t try to sound knowledgeable about fighting games, and it’s doubly sketchy that I actually beat the other reporter in attendance when we played the Wii version. What I can tell you authoritatively is that Dragon Knight uses a card-system for its fighting. You can strike, block, doge and jump with standard presses and waggles. But you also go into battle with a hand of cards that are associated with powers, including some Dragon Knight-specific summons attacks. The cards drain a meter that is refilled as you fight well. So.. the flow involves you using the card moves, then fighting enough to activate them again, with the added strategy of picking which card to play when.

I was about to skip the DS version, figuring it was more of the same. But then the D3 rep said it had this unusual quality, not that he suggested it was a selling point.

The DS game is made by Natsume. Both games have a single-player mode comprised of challenges that the player against one or more fighters from the show. But… the DS game only has single-player.

I was befuddled as to why they’d leave out a second-player option. I was told it’s because the design of the game is more focused on leveling up your own character. The more you fight, the more powerful your character gets, in stat-progression ways that supposedly would make it hard to balance for multiplayer gaming. So the DS game may look like it’s simply another fighting game with another twist.

But you’ll be playing this fighting game alone, if you play it.

Which is kind of how I played Street Fighter II.

Which is why I stank at Street Fighter II.

This is different, yes?

Back on Monday I described my opportunity to try New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii and my hands-off observations of the game’s innovative Super Guide helper mode. As I reported, the Super Guide could only be activated if the player got their Mario killed eight times on a given board. Because the game starts the player with only five lives, the Nintendo rep showing me the game had to lose the five lives, then select “Continue” to get another batch of five and lose more.

The Continue screen flashed by quickly and I thought I saw a number on it. This wouldn’t have been strange in the old days, when games offered a finite number of Continues, limiting the number times players could replenish their lives. On an old Nintendo Entertainment System, maybe you’d have three Continues, offering four lives each. Losing lives would usually revert you back to the beginning of a level. Using a Continue could knock you back to the beginning of a series of levels. Losing all Continues might bounce you back to the beginning of a game.

I asked the Nintendo rep who was showing me Super Guide: If New Super Mario Bros. was going to be progressive and kind to its worse players, why would it offer limited continues?

The Continues don’t count down, she told me. Not in this pre-release version of the game. The player can keep using Continues. If they are counted at all—and that’s what I’m not clear on as of the writing of this post—they’ll count up. She implied they would, that they’d show in some way that gamers needed to rely on them.

I left the demo wondering how a system that counts Continues would be regarded by gamers. Would people mind if the game exposed how many Continues they used? Would it expose Continues as an unneeded metric that complicates the calculation of the number of Lives the player used?

We’ll find out in about a month exactly how the Continues system works in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. But for now, let us ponder the possible innovation of video game Continues that will tally the groups of lives you’ve lost.

It’s something that’s been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I’m glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It’s open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn’t get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven’t crafted a level, they’ve built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can’t imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don’t call them truly “next gen” games. Why? Because they fail my “next gen” test, that’s why.

Here’s the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it’s not what I’m calling for the purposes of this piece a “next gen” game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it’s a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they’re nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn’t do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true “next gen” games.

So why do we have so few this time around? What’s the problem? There’s refinement under the hood. There’s games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued most games from the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can’t help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you’d have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn’t feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90’s – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can’t be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today’s games beyond the superficial. It’s just, we can’t see it. Chatting with Bethesda’s Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

“I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it’s also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you,” he says. “So it’s just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they’re there. I’d guess there’s just as much pure ‘design innovation’ with this generation as there has been in the last few.”

“Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they’re the worst part of a game. I’m interested in how games simply start.”

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. “There’s been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards,” Howard adds. “The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that’s not an innovation, that’s simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

“My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply ‘work,’ that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else.”

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we’ll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

LittleBigPlanet is an innovation award machine, so it stands to reason that it would be on the list. We knew that before we even looked at it. Sure enough, there it was, nestled comfortably among other surefire innovators like Flower and Noby Noby Boy, though I suspect the latter only made it mainly for the confusion factor and the tiny frogs. The only unfamiliar game on the list is MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade, a WiiWare title from Mindware that I don’t recall ever seeing in action.

Rounding out the list are two bigger titles, Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead. I’m not exactly sure where the innovation is in Far Cry 2, other than perhaps the map editing tools (Oh boy, do you really want me to start? – AU Ed). Left 4 Dead, on the other severed zombie hand, pretty much created its own sub-genre, so I can definitely see where Edge is coming from.

Where are they going? Find out next week when the winner is announced at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival over in England somewhere..

Well we can pretty much guess where Nintendo ranks on the list, can’t we? While Fast Company does note the fact that Nintendo hasn’t done well by the hardcore, it couldn’t ignore the mass-market appeal of the Wii and DS, granting them the number one spot in their countdown. Microsoft makes the list at number 8, with Xbox Live’s Netflix integration cited as a major point in their favour. And Sony? *looks list up and down* Oh poor Sony.

The sad thing here is I believe there definitely is room for Sony on this list, but Fast Company seems to define innovative as successful, instead of simply rewarding innovation. Blizzard is a highly successful company, but innovative? I’d never have put them on this list. Media Molecule and Harmonix, sure, but Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Take-Two don’t seem to be a good fit.

The rest of the list consists of GarageGames of InstantAction.com fame, mobile game maker Greystripe, and RealNetworks, two of which I’ve heard of, with only the first one seeming like a good choice. All in all, not a very innovative list of the top innovators in the industry.

Ghostwire is a ‘casual collection’ game that uses your phone’s camera to create a kind of Augmented Reality effect. You roam around the real world and use your phone to ’see’ ghosts that you can then collect in a sort of Ghostbusters-meets-Pokémon affair. Some ghosts will set riddles, others will provide clues and have elaborate back stories that must be unraveled.

Swedish developer A Different Game receives €40,000 in prize money. The runners up were Rhythm/Action game Jadestone and conspiracy ARG Eclipse.

Scary ghost game wins Nokia innovation award [The Guardian]

There are decent games out there, but there is a lot of dross – derivative, badly designed and poorly implemented.

Nokia want to change all that. They have been running the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge – a competition that asks developers to submit their most innovative game designs for – running under Symbian or Java on N-Gage or standard Nokia handsets

Being Nokia, they have a certain amount of hard cash to throw at the problem and have put up prize money worth €70,000 – that’s €40,000 for the winner, €20,000 for second place and €10,000 for the third runner up.

The ten finalists up for the big money are:

* Active Tecnologia e Consultoria Ltda. (Brazil) with Cinemarena – set in a movie theatre, controlling avatars on the big screen
* CreatePlayShare (India) with Ball – play any ball game on your mobile or even create your own new game
* Different Game (Sweden) with Ghost Wire – use your mobile device to communicate with ghosts
* Eclipse Interactive (UK) with Watchers – conspiracy adventure game that uses Nokia Maps and other real world tools to find locations
* Int13 (France) with Kweekies – augmented reality virtual pet game
* Jadestone (Sweden) and C4M (France) with Melokey – a music game for mobile devices where you learn to master songs and play them against other in-game characters to win the hearts of your fans
* LemonQuest (Spain) with Wave Pirates – turn into a pirate navigating the seven seas, looking for gold and glory
* Onur Yazilim (Turkey) with Comet Hunter – a 2-D shooting game which combines the excitement of shooting with natural sound effects made by players themselves
* Simlife (China) with XDancery – a music game where players can touch the screen, draw patterns on screen, shake the device or sing into it to hit the music tempo notes
* TechnoBubble (Spain) with Fun Cam – a mixed reality game that connects your camera on your mobile device to the TV

The winners will be announced at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome on 29 October.

Who will win one of the most prestigious mobile gaming prizes of 2008? [Game Challenge via NokNok.tv]

Found among this list of just eight machines is the advent of holographic play fields, the tilt mechanism, flippers, and player mods.

The full list includes Brokers Tip, Humpty Dumpty, Wizard, Hot Tip, Checkpoint, The Twilight Zone, Revenge From Mars and my personal favourite, The Addams Family.

Found among these games is not just a collection of new pinball technology, but a short history of the game that blends so well the mechanical with the virtual.

Top 8 Most Innovative Pinball Machines of All Time [Popular Mechanics]

Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialogue and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall.

I’ll pause while aspiring comic book writers all over the world apply a moist towelette to their nether regions.

What Positron so nonchalantly tosses out in a forum post could be one of the most significant advances in the history of the MMO. While games like Asheron’s Call 2 toyed around with giving players some degree of control over the game, full-on user-generated content is completely new to the genre. Back at GDC 2007 when Phil Harrison talked about Gaming 3.0, where the experience was driven by user-created content and community interaction, I never thought I would see the concept applied to a game like City of Heroes. I don’t like to bandy about the term ‘revolutionary’, but damn if it doesn’t apply here. As Leigh put it, this could very well be the beginning of MMO 2.0.

A Message From Positron – 4 Year Anniversary! [City of Heroes Forums via Eurogamer]