Minus World

Nintendo hosted another one of their Nintendo Direct webcasts this week. In general, I really like the direction they’ve taken by moving to doing these; it’s like a mini-E3 every month or two and we don’t have to wait for a huge event for news on upcoming games. The previous Nintendo Direct actually had me really optimistic about what’s coming out of Nintendo this year. This week’s made me legitimately worried about the health of the company going forward. The reason why is simple: They’re sacrificing the experience in favor of short term cost cutting measures, and that’s the one sure way to hurt Nintendo long term, more than Sega or Sony or iOS ever could.

Before we go in to the current news, it’s important to understand Nintendo’s philosophy over the past couple of years, amid the increasingly loud cries for them to stop being stubborn and port their games over to smartphones. In May, among yet another one of these pleas from investors and the tech press, Iwata said, “Our games such as Mario and Zelda are designed for our game machines so if we transfer them into smartphones as they are, customers won’t be satisfied. If customers aren’t satisfied with the experience, it will decrease the value of our content.” For the record, I don’t disagree with him; I’ve been pretty vocal about saying that porting games to iOS would be the end of Nintendo as we know it. But that particular quote makes the news to come out of this week’s Nintendo Direct extremely perplexing, and frankly worrying.

First of all, Nintendo announced Mario Party 10, with support for Amiibo, as one would expect. I usually wouldn’t pay attention to a Mario Party announcement (good lord, there are ten of these games already?), except that it exposed one giant flaw with the Amiibo implementation. Those figures which are supposed to travel from game to game with you? Apparently, to do so, you need to delete all your data from the first game to make room for the second. Or you could just buy another one, if you want to take the cynical view. This is frustrating, but given that Nintendo has never really been able to articulate what Amiibo are supposed to do in the first place, it just provided one more reason to ignore their existence.

Then there came the announcement of the New 3DS itself, finally slated for release next month. The announcement itself wasn’t all that surprising (the release date and price had already been leaked, after all), but there were two major omissions that were various degrees of concerning.

The first is that the smaller (non-XL) New 3DS wouldn’t be coming to the US at all, despite being released in Europe and Asia. It wouldn’t have been surprising if they’d only made the XL size of the New 3DS; the XL is clearly the more popular model based on the fact that the original 3DS has been discontinued and the 2DS exists. That said, once they did announce it for Japan, it was a reasonable assumption that Nintendo would be selling it everywhere. It should be said that there are legitimate use cases for a non-XL 3DS; plenty of people have small hands, including the kids who are often the primary users of the 3DS. That model is also the only one with interchangeable faceplates, which was a big selling feature of the new model. So by announcing this for Japan months ago, Nintendo left some US consumers with the expectation that they’d be able to buy the smaller model; they were then disappointed to find out that was not the case, especially given that every other region can purchase them.

It goes without saying that there are a lot of factors that go into any business decision. I don’t doubt that Nintendo’s starting to run into a shelf space crunch, especially after their huge Amiibo push, and regions do differ in their sales. The XL is also the predominant seller between the two models in regions where they both launched together. But given that Nintendo is producing the smaller model at all, there were still better ways to handle this than punting on releasing the device entirely in the US. Even if they’d released the smaller model as a limited edition exclusively through their own web store, they at least could have hedged their bets and fulfilled that niche customer base who wanted it. Instead, they left those customers frustrated and confused, which is not ideal when asking them to spend $200 on a slightly updated version of a console they probably already have.

The real kicker, though, is the fact that the New 3DS’s charger is not included with the system. If you already own a 3DS, you can just use the one you already own, of course. If you don’t already own a 3DS (or don’t want to have to choose which of your 3DS units to charge at any given time), you can pay an extra $10 to Nintendo for one. (Oh, and don’t even think about buying a third party one, because that could void your warranty. Because of course it will.) If the chargers were standard micro USB plugs, maybe you could make the argument that everyone has plenty lying around and this is a prudent move. The 3DS charger, however, is proprietary. Even notwithstanding Nintendo’s fear mongering over the warranty, one still needs to buy a specific charger to get power into the 3DS.

It’s hard to put into words how much this offends me as a long time customer of Nintendo’s. This is a cost-cutting measure, pure and simple; there’s no other explanation for it. It’s true that Nintendo’s always cut corners on the hardware to make sure it at least breaks even on cost. This is why both the 3DS (including the new one) and the GamePad on the Wii U still feature resistive touch screens, even though capacitive touch screens have been the standard for years. The original iPhone made clear that capacitive screens were vastly better than resistive when it was released seven years ago, before the 3DS was even a twinkle in Nintendo’s eye. For crying out loud, even LeapFrog’s latest LeapPad has a capacitive screen, and LeapFrog is known for using components that are several years out of date to keep costs down.

This is different, though. As frustrating as the resistive screens are, or the lack of HD was in the Wii, or the last-gen processing power of the Wii U was at launch, you could understand those decisions in the context of when they were made. You get get by fine with a resistive screen, it was still a question of how quickly HD would be adopted in 2006, and developers still haven’t learned how to harness the power of the Xbox One or PS4 to make anything truly next-gen that would makes the Wii U feel old as of yet. A charger, though, is essential to the operation of a handheld gaming platform. You literally cannot operate the system without one. Even though there are undoubtedly plenty of 3DS chargers out in the wild, it’s still unreasonable for Nintendo to not include one in the box.

What this does is cheapen the experience for their customers, and for no good reason other than saving a couple of dollars per unit. Consider the parent who’s buying his daughter her first 3DS; they bring it home, set it up, and then go to look for the charger once the daughter runs the battery dow, only to find there isn’t one, and they have to go back to the store to spend more money. This isn’t a hypothetical situation; as much as plenty of parents grew up playing video games, there are still a good number who don’t, and they generally don’t research a product like this very much. After all, it’s a reasonable assumption that the system would come with everything it needs out of the box. A more common scenario will be people who are trading in their old 3DS to get a new one; most trade ins require the charger, so those people just got $10 less from their trade than they thought they would because now they have to buy a new charger to replace the one they just traded in.

Are either of these scenarios disastrous? No, of course not. $10 isn’t a lot of money when you’re in the position to buy a $200 handheld. It’s not really about the money, per se, but these scenarios are harmful to Nintendo’s reputation because they leave a bad first impression with the customer. It sends the message that Nintendo cares less about providing a great experience than with cutting costs as much as possible, and that’s not the sign of a healthy company. Remember Iwata’s quote above; customer satisfaction should be the most important thing to Nintendo right now. Satisfied customers will stay with them and come on board with their next ridiculous sounding idea because they trust that Nintendo knows what they’re doing in the long run. Making a choice that jeopardizes that for what can’t be more than $2 or $3 per console sold defies explanation.

It’s worth saying that none of these choices is a huge deal on their own, but all of them together are starting to paint a disturbing pattern of how Nintendo intends to act in its post-Wii reality. This is not a company that is intent on delighting their customers, or even really cares about their satisfaction. This is a short sighted company that may be more in survival mode than we realized. None of this changes that Nintendo still makes great games that are worth buying their hardware to play. What the last Nintendo Direct proved, however, is that they’re willing to make sacrifices to the product and to the Nintendo experience in favor of cutting costs here and there. The problem is that Nintendo is heavily dependent on the good will of its customers to stick with them during the bad times; that’s what kept them afloat during the slow start of the Wii U. It’s people with nostalgia for Nintendo and faith in the value that their systems provide that buy them before they ought to, and buy more for their kids to share with them.

So I’m finally worried about Nintendo, because it seems like they’ve lost sight of what’s really important, and their need to appease their investors has eclipsed their instincts to make the best product they can make. This is how Nintendo finally fails, not by taking a chance on a wild new idea, but by showing their customers that the respect that they have for Nintendo isn’t mutual. At the end of the day, the feelings that a lot of Nintendo’s customers have toward the company are often more emotional than rational. When Nintendo becomes just another game company to those customers, that’s the day that Nintendo is in serious jeopardy of turning into the next Sega.

Distracted

“I’d like to make an appointment to get myself evaluated for ADD.”

This is easily one of the hardest phone calls I’ve had to make in a long time, and I never thought I’d actually ever be making it. I’ve always been kind of all over the place, and a constant multitasker, but the thought of actually having ADD never occurred to me. I mean, hell, I was going to school in the 80s and 90s, back when it seemed like everyone was getting diagnosed for ADD, so why now? I’ve gotten by this way for 35 years, so how is it possible that I’ve managed for so long with something like this, and not even known that it was going on?

About two months ago, my wife and I were at the pediatric neurologist with one of the twins. We’d suspected that she might have ADD after her older sister was diagnosed a few months ago, and even though we don’t plan to intervene with medication at this point, it’s still good to know both for us and the school so we can recognize the ADD behavior and not hold it against her. As we sat in the neurologist’s office, though, and listened to him enumerate the behavior that contributed to her diagnosis, it started to dawn on me that I could see a lot of the same types of actions in myself. Add in that I’d just had two daughters diagnosed with ADD within three months, and it led to me starting to examine if it was something I’d been passing on to them.

What’s funny (or maybe sad) is that I’ve joked about having ADD for as long as I can remember. One of the jokes I’ve made at work was that I suffer at times from “externally imposed ADD”, where I don’t have time to finish a task because I’m constantly being interrupted by other tasks that need attention. Even when I recognized my lack of focus, there were a million different explanations for it: Stress (not unheard of with a demanding job and two autistic children), not enough sleep (thank you, 5 AM wake-up), at times I’ve blamed it on my sleep apnea, or just the normal demands of being an adult.

When I started really looking at where I am, though, it’s incredibly obvious how much my lack of attention span is affecting my quality of life. For starters, I can’t remember the last time I read a printed book; I’ve started listening to audiobooks in the car where I’m a captive audience, but even those are only sinking in about half the time. I have to actively think about maintaining eye contact during a conversation, which usually leaves me unable to listen to what’s actually being said. My now infamous “hatred” of movies is probably at least in part that I find the idea of focusing on a screen for two (or, perish the thought, three) hours thoroughly exhausting instead of something to enjoy. I fidget constantly and can’t have a phone conversation without pacing all over the place.

And even when playing video games, which I love and have always loved, I’m finding that even there, where they’re accused of causing ADD or at least catering to it, I’m not enjoying them as much as I used to. Just thinking about how many games we’ve discussed on Isometric that I’ve dismissed with the phrase, “I don’t have the attention span for that” is saddening. I used to spend hours upon hours playing the Civilization games, but I’ve never been able to stick with Civ V long enough for it to grab me, despite it being just as addictive as its predecessors, by my co-hosts’ account. Even the games that I have enjoyed lately are very clearly feeding into my need for constant and frequent payoff: Diablo 3 is basically a virtual slot machine with fireballs when you think about it; any of the roguelike games that I’ve spent time with (Rogue Legacy, FTL, Crypt of the Necrodancer) are short with quick resolution that I can drop out of easily if I get bored; and my recent obsessions with Desert Golfing and Crossy Road fit that same cycle. So I’m enjoying fewer and fewer games because there are a ton of games I should enjoy “in theory” given my tastes, but my attention span cuts that off at the knees when I actually sit down to play them.

But worst of all, this has affected my relationship with my family in ways I’m just starting to comprehend. For as long as my wife and I have been together I’ve forgotten things because of distractions that were important to her and inadvertently sent the message that they aren’t also important to me, even though they *are*, but I can’t keep focus on them through the noise. And even just when spending time together, I fiddle with my phone constantly, refreshing Twitter every fifteen seconds even though I know logically that nothing’s changed (and even if it has it can’t possibly be important); knowing that *something is happening* and needing to know about it is such a powerful distraction that I can’t stop myself even when we’re walking through a store together and she’s just stopped to look at something for half a minute. It keeps me from enjoying my family because there’s always something else stealing my focus.

That’s the worst part of this process: It’s like watching The Sixth Sense and discovering that Bruce Willis was dead all along (sorry, spoiler alert) and then going back and rewatching every scene in that movie to understand what it really meant knowing that. Except it’s not a two hour movie that I spend my time analyzing, but every potential opportunity in my life that ADD had a part in torpedoing, or at least making more difficult. I could have gotten a full scholarship to college if I’d been able to focus on schoolwork instead of doing all my homework in a panic during the period before it was due. I could have been a better worker and be making more money now. I could have been a better father and a more attentive husband. It’s impossible to not start looking at all these moments that led up to where I am today and wonder how many of them could have had a different outcome if I’d known that I had this and were managing it appropriately.

That’s not healthy, of course. I’m extremely lucky to be where I am today, with three awesome kids and a wife who is honestly way more amazing and supportive than I deserve, a stable, well paying job that I enjoy, and a successful podcast. The glass half full perspective is that I’ve achieved everything I have despite the ADD, not that I’ve achieved less than my full potential because of it, and that’s what I try to remind myself when I go to that dark place. That I really should be proud of accomplishing everything I have with one hand tied behind my back, as it were. And I am, truly. But the process of coming to grips with my new reality is not a smooth one, and it involves fighting against the darker voices in my head that call me stupid for taking so long to realize this and do something about it.

The good news, though, is that I *am* doing something about it. Today. I’m accepting my new reality and starting to take steps to manage it. As much as I may regret things I’ve missed out on because of ADD, that stops now. It’s cliché, but I really do feel like today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’m excited to not feel like this anymore. I’m excited to be a better husband and father. Knowing what I’ve been able to do up to now, I’m excited to see what I can accomplish with nothing holding me back.

Well, after I recover from my impending devastating Civ V addiction, that is. It’s been a long time coming, after all.

Some Games I Liked in 2014

So it’s that time of year, and it’s been kind of an amazing one, both good and bad. But since it’s December and I’m now, inexplicably, someone with opinions about video games that people are interested in, I decided I might as well do what everyone does this time of year and recap games that came out in 2014 that I enjoyed. This isn’t a Game of the Year list, per se. I’m not ranking them, nor am I judging on any technical or critical merit or anything like that. This is just a list of games, in more or less random order. The only requirements are that the game was released in 2014 and spoke to me in one way or another. So, without further preamble, here are some games I liked. Maybe you’ll like them too.

Desert Golfing

Given that I’m more or less notorious for foisting this game upon the Internet, Desert Golfing seems like as good of a place to start as any. If by some miracle you haven’t seen my tweets or listened to my swooning about it, Desert Golfing is about as minimal of a game experience as you can get. There’s a four color desert landscape with a ball and a hole, and you pull back to launch the former toward the latter. Again and again. And again. And again.

The hook with this game is mainly that it’s simple enough that you can pick it up in two minutes and it has seemingly endless content. One hole will take anywhere from 15 seconds to 15 minutes to complete based on complexity, but there are literally thousands of them; the developer recently released a patch for content beyond hole 3000. It’s also a throwback in that it keeps a running count of your score, and it is what it is; there are no mulligans, or save/restore points, or really any way to restart the game beyond deleting and reinstalling.

I initially wasn’t sure what I thought of this game; when I first talked about it on Isometric I had only gotten through maybe a couple of dozen holes and wasn’t sold on it. I’m creeping up to 2000 and still pick it up from time to time, so I suppose I decided I liked it ok. I ultimately appreciate this game for stripping down to the barest of mechanics and ending up with a fantastically addictive game that’s easy to pick up and put down. It’s not for everyone, surely; if graphics or story or any sort of congratulations from the game are important to you, you’re not going to find them here. The lack of those things, in this instance, is almost refreshing, though, and it’s worth trying, with the caveat that you may lose a couple of consecutive hours here and there in the process.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

I’ve already written a fair amount about this game, so I’ll send you to that post for my full thoughts about Wolfenstein. That’s all to say that I loved this game for my own reasons that are very personal, but your mileage may vary.

As far as my opinion of the game beyond the non-personal aspects, though, I’ll say that I found Wolfenstein very entertaining as a person who doesn’t normally enjoy first person shooters. The developers made what’s now, sadly, a bold choice by scrapping any multiplayer functionality and focusing on making a great single player experience, and it worked for them. In a lot of these types of games, the story is typically an afterthought, but Wolfenstein put forward a compelling story with characters who weren’t just cardboard cutouts holding guns, and did so despite a setting that’s basically the definition of a cliche for this genre. Given that I had zero expectations of this game going in, this was easily one of my biggest surprises of 2014.

This War of Mine

Confession time: I’ve never finished The Last of Us. I put a good chunk of time into that game but it never grabbed me like it did so many others. Maybe the hype had been built up too high by the time I played the remastered version, or maybe the mechanics of the gameplay got in the way of me being able to experience the story fully. Maybe it’s a combination of those things. In any event, I’ve been looking for a game that evokes that reaction I was supposed to have but couldn’t feel from The Last of Us, and I think This War of Mine may be it.

To put it as simply as possible, This War of Mine plays a lot like a Sims game, except that your characters are civilians caught in a besieged city during an unnamed war. (The developers have stated that they took inspiration from the war in Bosnia but the actual location is never divulged.) By day, you tend to your characters’ well being: They need to eat, to sleep, to take advantage of any small comforts you can cobble together, and you need to pay attention to their emotional well being as well. By night, you send out one of your survivors to scavenge for additional supplies.

This is where the game gets interesting, and harrowing. Your survivors are not trained killers; they’re just normal people trying to survive to the next day in the hope that the war will end and normality will resume. So when you break into someone’s house, and there are people still there, you’re left with the decision of how much to take, if anything, and what to do if they confront you. After all, your survivors need food and supplies, but so do these people; can your survivor live with herself if she needs to raid their fridge? What if she needs to defend herself and kills someone, or is wounded and then becomes a burden on the group? Or worse, if she dies, both leaving one less person to help and leaving the group without any supplies from that night’s run? The effect of every decision is harrowing in a way I’ve rarely seen, even in games like Mass Effect where that’s the series’ calling card.

What’s more is that the game provides a tension I’ve never felt even in survival horror games. Even if your survivor is armed, she may only have one or two bullets, or a knife. So the threat of someone with a gun behind every closed door is ever-present and almost overwhelming. The atmosphere in this game is intense, to say the least.

This War of Mine isn’t for everyone. It can be really, really overwhelming emotionally to play, and I usually could only go through a couple of day/night cycles at a time before having to put it down. As far as demonstrating the realities of a civilian in war, though, this game excels brilliantly, and it’s important to play if you think you’re up to it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Super Smash Bros (Wii U)

We play games for a lot of reasons, but we all started (and most of us continue to) because they should be fun. I love being able to play a game and experience something from a different point of view, or learn something new about someone else, or about myself. But sometimes, I just want to put my feet up, grab a controller, and beat the crap out of Mario for a while.

The Wii U version of Super Smash Bros is easily one of the best party games I’ve played in a long, long time. For years, Rock Band was my go-to for that, but after playing 8-player Smash with my Isometric co-hosts over Thanksgiving, Super Smash Bros takes that crown. It’s endlessly fun for players of any skill level; my kids would be happy if the game was just a blooper reel of characters flying into the screen, really. There’s a deeper game there too, if you want it. But if you don’t, you can just mash buttons and still have a great time.

I’m hard on Nintendo a lot, because I know they’re capable of making amazing things and sometimes they get away from what they’re good at. Super Smash Bros for Wii U is Nintendo at the top of their game. It’s lovingly crafted, expertly balanced for all skill levels, and a pure delight. I’ve gone through periods where I regretted buying a Wii U at this time last year, but this game in particular has pushed all those reservations aside.

Revolution 60

Full disclosure: I host a podcast with Brianna Wu, the head of Giant Spacekat, called Isometric. But if you’re reading this you probably know that already.

I first saw Revolution 60 way back at PAX in 2013, after getting to know Bri on app.net. It immediately struck me, even in that really early state, that Bri had something special on her hands, and that held true all the way through to the final release.

Rev60 is a cinematic space adventure with a really unique combat system that plays almost more like a rhythm game than a traditional combat engine. It’s super easy to pick up (and I should know; I was included in the play testing of the early builds and probably played through the tutorial level a hundred times), and really difficult to put down thanks to the fantastic story that unfolds as you traverse the space station. The presentation is phenomenal, as well, from the graphics, to the score, to the full voice acting.

I don’t think it’s any secret that mobile gaming, on the whole, took a turn for the worse in 2014. But Revolution 60 was easily one of the exceptions to that rule. It’s an ambitious game that delivers on its promise, even more so due to the fact that it was a first effort put together by a team of four people. And hell, it’s free to try so you really have no excuse.

Shadow of Mordor

I’ll be honest: For the first two hours that I played Shadow of Mordor, I hated it. I generally don’t like stealth games; I’ve tried multiple Assassin’s Creed games and given up on all of them fairly early on, and I ragequit Dishonored about halfway through. But once I got past the initial difficulty curve, there’s a really good game waiting, and it’s something that I don’t feel like I’ve played before.

This game is open world in the true sense of the word; there are some story missions, but they eventually give way to just hunting down these war chiefs however you want. I initially thought the nemesis system and the fact that the orcs remember how they dispatched you the last time around was a gimmick, too, but I’ll admit that after Krimp the Devourer showed up after I thought I’d killed him for the third time, I had an unexpectedly angry reaction and kind of wanted to make it my life’s mission to wipe him off the face of the Earth. Or of Mordor. Whatever.

So this is a good game. I’ll point out that it’s extremely violent; the way orcs are executed by the dozen is almost casual once you gain enough power, and that may be disturbing to some people. But if you can deal with that, Shadow of Mordor is really compelling in a way I haven’t really seen before. It’s been the game I keep coming back to lately, even though I have other games waiting for me on the PS4.

Shovel Knight

It’s no secret that I have an overwhelming amount of nostalgia for the NES. I didn’t get that system until 1990, after five years of near constant begging. (In retrospect, having kids of my own now, my parents’ conviction was impressive; I would have caved after a year or so of constant asking, probably.) That was also the last non-handheld system I got until I had enough money to buy my own in college (and even that handheld was a Game Gear so that barely counts). So while everyone else had moved on to the SNES and Genesis, and later the PSOne, I was playing through Mega Man 2, Super Mario Bros 3, and Battletoads for the eightieth time, because that was what I had.

So when I tell you that Shovel Knight is up there with the best of the NES classics, I don’t say that lightly. Though it borrows heavily from the classics of that era, mainly Mega Man 2 and Zelda II (with some Super Mario Bros 3 and DuckTales thrown in for good measure), the resulting game is something completely new and fresh, and it takes me right back to sitting in my childhood bedroom, sitting a foot away from my 13” TV. The problem with playing older games sometimes is that they were written in a time when we didn’t know as much about what makes a game convenient for the player. While Shovel Knight isn’t an easy game, it has modern conveniences like frequent checkpoints, as well as a way to disable those things if you want a true old-school experience.

If you grew up in the 80s and played any games at all, you need to check out Shovel Knight to bring yourself back to those days. The developer truly gets what made those games special, and the game oozes enough style and charm to keep you coming back for more even when the going gets tough. Maybe try to track down some Ecto Cooler and put on some New Order for the full experience.

Rollers of the Realm

I like pinball. A lot. I also like RPG mechanics. So this game is basically a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of a game for me. (And I love me some peanut butter cups.)

Rollers of the Realm is a pinball RPG. You acquire a party of different classes of pinballs, and have to clear a series of increasingly difficult enemies across a set of fantasy themed pinball tables; you switch between them by trapping the ball against a flipper. Instead of attacking your character, the enemies attack your flippers; the more damage they take, the more they start to degrade and wear away. If your pinball character falls out, they die and need to be revived by using up mana that you accumulate by hitting targets.

The pinball mechanics are really well executed, and the story is campy but enough to keep you entertained while you’re resting your trigger fingers in between tables. This isn’t the first time this concept has been tried (Pinball Quest on the NES immediately comes to mind), but it’s a rare enough subgenre that Rollers of the Realm really surprised and delighted me as a fan of both pinball and video games, and it’s worth checking out if that describes you also.

Crypt of the Necrodancer

Speaking of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crypt of the Necrodancer is another game that’s two great tastes that taste great together. I debated whether I should even put this game on the list, given that it’s still in an Early Access state, but I’ve gotten enough enjoyment out of it in its current form that I’d be ok even if it never got another update.

Necrodancer is a rhythm based roguelike dungeon crawler. Each dungeon is randomly generated, and your goal is simply to survive as long as you can before the monsters overwhelm you. The catch is that each level of the dungeon has its own soundtrack, and you can only move along with the beats of the song. This takes what’s become well worn territory and creates something completely fresh and new. When you get into it, you actually start to feel like your character is dancing around the stage rather than moving, and you quickly learn that the game is less about attack and surviving the counterattack, like most of these games, but rather maneuvering around the monsters’ movements to avoid getting hit in the first place.

It’s easy to get jaded after playing games for as long as I have, but Crypt of the Necrodancer really took me by surprise in the best way. Even in this early access stage, there are a ton of little touches that show how much the developer is committing to the concept, like how the shopkeeper in each level gets a vocal part but only when you’re near the shop. You can even import your own music, or plug in a dance pad and use that to control the game if you have one. If you like rhythm games or dungeon crawlers at all (and especially if you like both) you shouldn’t wait for the full version to get into this game.

Chosen

I’ve been spending some time this week trying to put together a list of my favorite games of the year, both for Isometric and just for my own purposes. As I’m doing that, I’m realizing that I’m kind of putting off what I really need to talk about, which is what has been my game of the year for most of the year, and may still be, which is Wolfenstein: The New Order. I go back-and-forth with this, because I realize that as far as the gameplay is concerned, Wolfenstein is nothing special. It’s a standard first person shooter, which is actually kind of bucking a trend by going back to the old school first person shooter mechanics, with a numerical health bar that doesn’t regenerate when you let your shields charge up after not taking it for a period of time. In fact, I felt like some of the boss battles were even borderline unfair at times, and the difficulty curve spiked a little bit too much for my liking. But my reasons for feeling so strongly about Wolfenstein really have nothing to do with the mechanics, and are almost in spite of them to some degree, because I don’t really like first person shooter games as a rule. In fact, I love this game despite the fact that it’s a first person shooter, not because of it.

No, the reason I decided to take a chance on Wolfenstein was an article that I had read right before the game came out that had implied that the main character, BJ Blazkowicz, was Jewish. It turns out that if that is the case, it was only hinted at in the design documents, and that detail never actually made it into the game. However, what actually did make it into the team was a far better depiction of Judaism than I have ever seen in the 30 years that I have been playing video games, and, as a Jew, this game touched me in a way that no other game I can think of.

Before I get into the specifics of Wolfenstein, I think a little bit of background of what it’s like to be a consumer of games in particular, and of media in general, as a Jew, is in order. The general caricature of a Jew in media is the nerd, or the nebbishy guy who is socially awkward, and is generally not portrayed in a great life. There are some exceptions, of course; Seinfeld is a big one that did a really great job of depicting what it’s like to actually be a modern Jew in America, which is to say that it’s just like being anybody else in American society most of the time, with a few differences here and there. Typically, though, when there’s a Jewish person in media, it’s as the butt of the joke or the wimpy, helpless guy, and not someone who’s a strong character or strong because of their Judaism. (A perfect example right now is the character of Howard on The Big Bang Theory; even among the four main characters he’s the only one who lives with his mother, and anything Jewish is typically just pointed out as one more reason why he’s weird. In fact, in the early seasons he was portrayed as outright creepy, as opposed to just goofy and socially awkward like the other three main characters.)

However bad this is in media in general, it’s way, way worse in games. You can literally count the number of Jewish characters included across the history of video games on two hands, and they almost always are cast as negative stereotypes. Grand Theft Auto has the Jewish Mafia, for instance. South Park: The Stick of Truth has a playable class called simply “Jew”, with powers like the Sling of David, an attack dreidel and something called the Circum-scythe, just to give an idea of the level of sophistication that you’d expect from a South Park game. Some Jewish people can play that game and find it empowering, but I’m not one of them. This is, of course, not including some really terrible ideas that thankfully never saw the light of day.

And even when games try to do it right they tend to fall flat. The canonical “Jewish game” is called The Shivah. It’s a point and click murder mystery from 2006, and the main character is a rabbi. But it ultimately tries too hard; the cursor is literally a Jewish star, for crying out loud. I’ve tried to play it, but it didn’t speak to me, and I doubt I could give it to one of my non-Jewish friends and have it say something to them because that really isn’t my experience as a reform/secular Jew. In fact, when my wife saw the interface as I tried to play it, all she could say was, “Really?!” as she rolled her eyes.

So really, I’d given up on having a Jewish character in a game that I could relate to. I figured it just wasn’t going to happen, and I just kind of made my peace with that. Religion tends not to come up in games to begin with for good reason, so I just kind of accepted that it was something that was going to be a joke at best and leave it to the domain of the white whale. In any event, games have had a hard enough time with female characters, especially protagonists, and women make up more than 50% of population; what chance does a group with a tiny fraction of that level of representation in society have?

Warning: major spoilers for Wolfenstein: The New Order lie ahead. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to see those before you play the game, go ahead and do that and then come back to this post when you’re done.

Then came Wolfenstein: The New Order. As some background, the game takes place in an alternate history circa 1960, after the Allies lost World War II to the Nazis. Blazkowicz was part of a raid on a Nazi stronghold, but was captured and tortured to the point where he was mentally incapacitated and placed into an asylum where he lives out the next fifteen years in a vegetative state. He wakes up as the Nazis are shutting down the asylum despite his doctors’ resistance, and escapes with the nurse who was caring for him. He eventually links up with the tiny remains of the anti-Nazi resistance within Germany and starts working to get revenge. From that perspective it’s a fairly standard bro shooter, though they do a good job of making the characters feel like real people and not just vessels for guns.

Where things get interesting, though, is about halfway through the game where they find a flaw in the concrete-like material that the Nazis have used to build up all of their fortresses since winning the war. They track down an engineer named Set Roth who has the knowledge to be able to exploit the flaws in the Nazis’ technology and hopefully bring the regime down with it. However, Roth is Jewish, which means that Blazkowicz will need to infiltrate a concentration camp in order to rescue him.

This is the point where I got really nervous. First person shooters are not typically known for their sensitive treatment of material like the Holocaust in general and concentration camps in particular. That said, Wolfenstein actually did a good job of being respectful of the location and what it means, and it showed the terrible conditions within without going overboard for the sake of going overboard. (There are scenes with furnaces used to incinerate bodies elsewhere in the game, I should note, but never within the concentration camp scene.) In fact, I welled up a bit as Blazkowicz, upon entering the camp, was subjected to receiving the infamous tattoo that all Jews were branded with during the Holocaust. [Update: It’s been pointed out to me that tattooing only happened at Auschwitz, and this concentration camp was located in Croatia. The scene was still powerful despite the historical inaccuracy, though.]

What was even more impressive than the treatment of the concentration camp was the character of Roth himself, though. Rather than being the shy and nebbishy character I’ve come to expect, Roth is whip smart and tough as nails. This is also the first time I can remember ever hearing Hebrew or Yiddush spoken, and spoken correctly, in a video game. Roth welcomes Blazkowicz back from one of his missions to take down the camp with “Yasher Koach”, which is a traditional Hebrew phrase of congratulations that’s usually used after someone receives an honor during services at the synagogue.

A tiny detail that really showed me that the developers cared about portraying Roth correctly as a Jew was that he speaks Hebrew with an Ashkenazi (Eastern European) accent. This is something I grew up hearing from older people in the synagogues I belong to but which isn’t taught anymore; when I learned Hebrew I was taught with the modern accent that Israeli Hebrew is spoken in. For someone who lived in Eastern Europe at that time, though, it was completely appropriate for Roth to speak with that accent and it actually surprised me that they paid attention to the degree that they picked up the correct accent for that character.

The kicker, though, is the revelation in the last third of the game that all the technology that the Nazis have used to win the war and subsequently rule the world was stolen from an ancient Jewish mystical society called Da’at Yichud, of which Roth is one of the last surviving members. This society has cracked the code of science and gotten access to technology hundreds of years ahead of its time; while stealing this technology is what gave the Nazis the edge, it’s Roth and Da’at Yichud’s remaining technology that is instrumental in turning the tide and winning the war. This simple plot decision takes the Jews in this story from being the victim and lets them be the hero, albeit indirectly. It let me be the hero in a way I’ve never felt before. And it did it all without ever addressing Blazkowicz’s background.

Ultimately, my issue isn’t a lack of Jewish representation in games; I may be Jewish, but I’m also a straight white male, so it’s not like I can’t find representation in gaming easily enough. My issue is that when games attempt to include Jewish characters they often do it so poorly that I end up wishing they hadn’t tried in the first place. Wolfenstein: The New Order is one of the first (possibly the only) game I’ve played that took the time to include a Jewish character and elements of Judiasm as a whole without devolving into lazy, offensive stereotypes, and that’s something that I truly appreciate. Wolfenstein: The New Order may not be the best game to come out this year, but it will always have a special place in my heart for taking my religion and treating it with respect where it so often is either ignored or outright ridiculed.

That’s something to say yasher koach to.

Sticks and Stones

So I got into a Twitter fight last night. The details aren’t important but what’s behind the thing that started it is. And even though it’s resolved now (which is why I’m being vague, because I don’t want to start things up again), I’m still upset about what led to it.

I’ve been noticing a trend lately where people are starting to use autism as the easy target for jokes. Autism (and Asperger’s, more often) are common enough now that people think they know what it is, and it’s something different for them to be able to poke fun of. That sucks, and it needs to stop.

I live with autism every day, raising my two daughters who are on the spectrum. Every day I think about how I’m going to help them learn to work with what makes them different, to adapt despite it when they need to, and to take advantage of the benefits it gives them whenever they’re able to. But I recognize that this is going to be a hard road for them. I’m dreading high school for them in particular, because I remember how hard it was for me just as a neurotypical standard nerd, let alone having a neurological condition complicating any efforts to navigate that particular social minefield.

And this is small potatoes compared to what lower functioning kids and their parents are up against. I’ve read enough stories in the last couple of months about autistic kids who are no longer with us for no other reason than having the misfortune of being born to parents who made terrible decisions they can’t take back, and that routinely scares the crap out of me. So when I see people actively making the world a harder place to exist in for my kids, be it from thoughtlessness or for a cheap laugh, it makes me extremely angry.

Autism is not a slur. It’s a fact of life for a growing number of people, and it’s not something that can be changed. Just because someone processes the world differently than you do doesn’t make them fair game. When you treat them as a sideshow to be mocked, you actively make the world a more difficult place for my kids to exist in. And I’m going to call that out, because that’s not OK under any circumstances.

Basically, if you’re thinking of using a word like “autistic” or “Aspergy” (blech) or any variation of those in a derogatory way, I’d ask you to reconsider what it is you’re trying to say. Pretty much, if you could use “retarded” in that sentence and have it have the same effect, stop and think for a minute. You wouldn’t use that word, right? It’s the same thing, and it has the same effect, only for a different group of people.

It’s important for me to say that if you’ve used one of those words in that context before, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. Everyone has their blind spots; I’ve certainly said my fair share of things that were unintentionally offensive without realizing. (Just recently, I made an offhand comment about having PTSD about video game Kickstarters that I needed to have pointed out to me why that was offensive; I immediately apologized and haven’t used the term in that way since.) The difference is continuing to use the words that way once you know, or to let it slide when others use it.

I’m done staying quiet about this. If we’re ever going to get to a place where autistic people can exist in society just as well as neurotypical typical people can, we can’t be allowing the simple fact that they are autistic to be used to remind them that they don’t belong. So I’m going to call that out when I see that from now on. I hope you will too.