Originally Posted at New York Videogame Critics Circle

I am walking along one of two creeks that cut through the city of Austin, Texas. The grackle birds are cawing loudly, proudly singing. It is early morning, and some of the homeless people who live along the trail are sleeping or just rising. In the water, which has risen from a heavy rain, is a paperback book. I bend over to fish it out of the six inches of muddy creek water. It is a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, the self help book by evangelist Rick Warren.

Seeing the book makes me think about Warren Spector, the lauded game maker whose new offering I am in Austin to see. Spector is an evangelist for Mickey Mouse, particularly his Epic Mickey videogame franchise. It’s well known among gamers that this obsessive Disney fan has a separate house devoted to Disney memorabilia of all stripes. He loves Disney so much that Spector took a group of game journalists on a tour of Disneyland a couple of years ago. (I did not attend, but I hear it was both engaging and inspiring.)

There was much hope for the first Epic Mickey game, which appeared on the Wii console in 2010. Spector’s team had gone the extra mile with research and his enthusiasm for all things Disney, Mickey and Oswald was evident during interviews. He just seemed so happy to be making the game. That, too, was inspiring. Passion about just about any kind of art form is infectious. You can see it in people’s eyes; they seem uber-alive when they speak.

When Epic Mickey was released, however, the wound it had was a severe one: the so-called camera, the way you see the world Spector and his team led you to, was off – badly, so much so you’d get stuck behind something. Or you’d get downright dizzy.

It was not a failure for Spector. But it was indeed a setback, a mark on the career of a beloved game maker. Could Spector come back from some very negative press?

Flash forward to March, 2012. In Austin at an event at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in the Spirit Theater, the lights went down in an auditorium that is most often used to display a multimedia history documentary. During a trailer for Epic Mickey 2: The Power of 2, which includes a playable Oswald The Rabbit, the seats actually shook during an onscreen earthquake. The gathered members of the gaming media saw a rare cartoon from 1928 featuring Oswald as a hobo on a train, one that featured a darker, daring Disney who was less concerned with morality and more concerned with hilarity at any cost. It was said that only a dozen people had seen the newly unearthed animation. As more of the game was unveiled, Spector made it clear that 700 people worked on Epic Mickey 2, and the first issue they dealt with was fixing the camera. In fact, he said there were 1,000 improvements to the camera.

When I played the Wii game, it was evident that the game makers were still perfecting the camera. There were still issues, but the game played better than its predecessor. When I played the PlayStation 3 version, there was far less of a challenge with the camera. However, the game crashed toward the end of my 15 minutes of play. (This happens a fair amount of the time when an unfinished game is demoed.) Epic Mickey 2 won’t be released until the Thanksgiving holiday period, so there is nearly seven months for the developers to make the way you play the game closer to perfection.

What really resonated was the addition of songs to the unplayable scenes in the game. In Epic Mickey 2, there’s no rhythm game to play in these song-rife scenes. But the whole game certainly will be enhanced by these musical numbers.

Spector called Epic Mickey 2 the first videogame musical. Certainly there have been songs in games before this. You can even consider Parappa The Rapper a kind of musical, for instance. What Spector probably meant is that there may never have been original songs of this quality in a musical game, songs that really move the story along, songs that cause earworms by sheer virtue of catchy melodies, songs that warm the heart, songs that are as memorable as those included in a great Disney film.

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The rain was whipping horribly as darkness descended on lower Manhattan. On the face, the pelting rain felt like tornado-spewed hail, biting into the pores. The clothes were soaked within a minute.

Jorge Jimenez and I stood near the Williamsburg Bridge, waiting for the GameTruck, a party rental service that brings videogames to you. The vehicle, we were told, was filled with games, large monitors, consoles, and couches. It would be over 50 feet long. It was supposed to have arrived for our inspection and general merriment during the previous week. But the new truck was coming off the assembly line in Indiana. It didn’t make it to New York City in time.

But then through the maelstrom that was beginning to flood the streets, we could see the truck’s headlights in the distance. It had been delayed again due to tunnel traffic, so anticipation had risen. Jimenez had come from New Jerseyto view the wonder. I had only walked two blocks down to Delancey Street to witness the marvels inside.

Once we were within, the door was shut and for a moment, we were in darkness. White lights came on, and then, a cool, red neon piping that ran like molding along the wall near the ceiling. The innards were huge, like a vast tunnel of gaming. Nearby was a wall of games from which to choose. Most of these were Nintendo offerings for kids: we were told the primary demographic for these party trucks is between 8 and 12. But there were a few M-rated games displayed, and there can be more when the truck is rented by adults.

The GameTruck company has various franchisees around the country. There is no franchise in New York City or on Long Island. The closest is in New Jersey and in Connecticut. Owner/operator Ken Levy had driven the vehicle in especially for us to peruse. Jorge and I sat down on the black couch to play a couple of games of NHL 12, both of which were defensive battles, both of which I lost by one goal, one of which where the goal was disputed, but then allowed. It was all great fun, and I imagined it would have been much greater fun with the hoots and howls of 16 or more adults having a LAN party with Halo or Call of Duty. We wanted to stay longer and indulge for hours. But the GameTruck had to return toNew Jerseyall too quickly.

And there we were again, smacked by the merciless rain and wind. But as we ran to shelter, we still kept the feelings of good-time-induced adrenaline, even as the wind sweeping off the East River picked up to gale force.

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Back in April, I was scheduled to speak on a radio station located in a small town in the Midwest. Crown, the publishers of All Your Base Are Belong to Us, had arranged the interview, one of about 60 I did during that month. One of the questioners who called in asked about violence in videogames.

But that was merely a preface to what he really wanted to pose.

He queried, “Don’t you think that violence in videogames is a horrible thing?” And he went on for a minute, ending with “It’s because the government funds games like ‘Call of Duty.’ They’re responsible, too.”

I answered the first part of the man’s question with my ‘games are not too violent and when they are, they’re labeled as such’ theory. I ignored the rant about the government. About 15 minutes later, he called back and asked again. I said that, to the best of my knowledge, Call of Duty is not sponsored by the Army or by any government entity.

I’ve been writing about games for a very long time, and each time I meet with other journalists in the Critics Circle, we talk about a great variety of things. Some of it relates to our take on the news. Some of it surrounds gossip among journalists. Much of it is simple but passionate expression of our love for games.

But the government supporting a huge videogame company like Activision for Call of Duty? That has never come up. If it had happened, it would have been a topic of discussion on numerous occasions.  I daresay that it would be a great story for The New York Times or The New Yorker if it were true. But it’s not.

That’s not to say Activision doesn’t have paid consultants. Hank Kiersey is a retired Lt. Colonel who helps to make this series of games more realistic.

I mention this because the rumors popped up again, this time after I was interviewed about the best holiday games by one of my favorite shows, NPR’s Morning Edition. I wrote an accompanying piece for very literate NPR’s Monkey See blog. And there it was again – in the comments section. “Aren’t the Call of Duty games put out by the Army?” “Since this slick new military recruiting tool has just come on the market, does that mean we have a new war coming up?”

This time, I second guessed myself. I tried an internet search and, after that, I looked at Snopes.com as well. I still found nothing.

Some years ago, the government did fund a game called America’s Army. And that was indeed a recruiting tool. It was given out for free. One of the people who made that game is now an executive at Epic Games, the people who make the Gears of War games.

America’s Army, to my surprise, is still published and updated. It must be the vague knowledge of this free game that is part of the reason for the lingering paranoia, the panicky hand-wringing, about the military funding Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is not like real war. It’s a pseudo-real game that, in its single player portion, makes you feel as though you’re in an action movie. It’s certainly not for kids. But it never seems very real to me.

After all, in a real battle, when you’re shot, you die. In a real battle, what you see and do can affect you for life. In games, you live to shoot again. You might dream about a battle. You might think hard and consider strategies for winning in online multiplayer games.

But in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, one thing is certain. For the player, there will be no post-traumatic stress that spills over into his or her post-battle existence, no horrible plague of infinite nightmares that can end a marriage or make you want to end your life.

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I’m taking this time to write about a newly launched project that’s been in the pipeline for quite some time. It has little to do with our Critics Circle, except to say that I always urge our members to be creative and independent-minded and outspoken. Plus, I need to explain to you why this space hasn’t been updated for a bit.

For years, I’ve thought about doing an online screenplay serial. I’m utterly intrigued by games (which almost goes without saying), and horror-based games in particular. In fact, on the occasions that I have Rockstar Games’ Sam Houser’s ear, I suggest that the company make an open world horror game that goes beyond what was done with Undead Nightmare.

At the same time, I often think about why Hollywood screws up movies about games. There’s a complete chapter on their middling-to-horrible film endeavors in my book about games, All Your Base Are Belong to Us. Often, I feel that videogames are their own movies. In fact, because of the hours upon hours we spend with them, they can be more affecting than movies.

As I wrote and re-wrote Playing With Fire, this horror screenplay about games, monsters and disaffected teens, I wanted to see if any other creative types shared my feelings about Hollywood and their failure with game-oriented movies.

It turned out that three talented people cared enough about the script to help me make it into a media-rich online event for the Halloween season. Bill Plympton, the twice Oscar-nominated animator, drew the first monster and got the ball rolling. If you haven’t seen Bill’s Idiots and Angels, it is, in my opinion, his magnum opus.

Dave Lowery, the brilliant long-time storyboard artist who collaborates with Steven Spielberg and Sam Raimi, did a number of really scary pieces. Dave did this while working on the set of a brand new blockbuster movie. I literally yelled and fist-pumped when I saw how spot-on his work is. He really got the essence of the script. Dave Lowery really is Hollywood’s best storyboard artist.

Anton Sanko, the thoughtful musician who scored the sometimes terror-filled Big Love for HBO and more recently took on Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman, created a number of dark songs for Playing With Fire. This year, Anton was nominated for an Emmy for landmark work he did on a National Geographic special. Anton reads constantly. Perhaps that’s one reason his music is so compelling.

Playing With Fire launched last night at the perfect time, the witching hour. Each day until the screenplay is finished, I’ll put up five scenes for your perusal. I invite you to check it out daily. I hope you find it scary, a little satirical and somehow worthwhile of your time. I also invite you to participate with storyboards and art and comments of your own. Your thoughful participation can only make Playing With Fire better than it is.

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It’s a bit of a horror story, an American horror story, and I’m not talking about the new television show about to premiere on the FX network. In the past week, what can only be described as terror has struck fear in the hearts and minds of many videogame journalists. Here’s why.

*Yesterday, Future Public Limited Company, a U.K.-based publisher of many of the U.S. enthusiast magazines like Nintendo Power and the Official Xbox Magazine, rocked the investor world by suggesting that it may sell off its U.S. division entirely. Or, the magazines might go digital instead. Or the magazines could go digital and then be offered for sale. Future will explain more on November 24.

*Word is that another lauded but struggling game magazine is about to go bi-monthly, and it may go belly-up before June of next year.

*Russ Frushtick, one of our early members and the witty writer/editor for Multiplayer, the MTV game blog, was let go last week in a round of poor-economy-related layoffs that hit employees across Viacom. Russ’ smart freelancers were hurt by the decision as well.

*Some game magazines and web sites are not paying freelancers in a timely fashion. I spoke with a Critics Circle member who is fed up with payments that come months late. That member, a terrific writer and a knowledgeable gamer, is readying to leave the industry entirely.

*The cutbacks are harming the reputations of well-known videogame websites as well. At GameSpy, which recently went through a slew of firings, new editor Bennett Ring was taken to the woodshed by readers for writing a clueless preview of Blizzard’s latest entry in the lauded Diablo series. He made things worse by lashing back at the onslaught on Twitter. I actually sent him list of videogame books to read. Perhaps this was a move that bordered on the obnoxious. Nonetheless, he chose not to reply, not with vehemence, not with a thank you.

During one of the previous recessions, I wrote an opinion piece for Mediaweek magazine. I said I was glad to see a spate of consumer magazines bite the dust because they were either redundant in the market, poorly written, oddly conceived or just plain twee. And I said recessions end, and when they end, they give rise to new ideas for great new magazines. There was hope then, and there’s hope now.

Yet this particular recession feels different. This isn’t the end of print, as the nervous nellies are proclaiming. But what’s happening is indeed troubling. Smart media observers realize that the publishers and editors of print magazines devoted to the world of gaming have to kick things up many notches in order to stay in business as they vie against competition from websites and blogs. The editing and assigning has to be more thoughtful and more courageous and the stories have to engage readers in ways that they haven’t before. Marketing and sales departments have to be push harder to garner a mix of ads that isn’t videogame related.

The question is, how? The answer must come from the brightest minds at these magazines as they conceive and plan beyond the norm. The stakes are higher than ever before. If they don’t implement groundbreaking new ideas, they won’t survive. And both game journalists and game enthusiasts will be the worse for it. Those magazines themselves? They are, in some inexplicable way, transmogrified in our minds to become our pals. And as Flaubert cautioned, “A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.”

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On 9/11, there were no more videogames. On that morning with its molten-steel-bright sun, I stood with two neighbors, director John Waters and actor Tim Guinee, on 6th Avenue and 12th Street. It was just before the towers came down, and the NY1 report, still chilling, was that a small plane, perhaps a Cessna, had hit. So we stood there in awe, talking about movies. After all, it looked like a movie. It couldn’t be real. Then, a pretty rollerblader stopped near us. She stared at the towers and the smoke, and then at us, and then at the towers, and then again at us. “Maybe now the rents will come down,” she said. And she bladed away.

There were no games that day. And as we watched the towers turn to dust, as we watched the shell-shocked by the thousands parade up 6th Avenue, their clothes stippled in white dust, I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about games anymore – or movies, or music, or books. What good could entertainment do? What good at all?

At Rockstar games, as I detailed in All Your Base Are Belong to Us, Sam Houser told me that he and his brother Dan were feeling somewhat the same.

There were no games that day:

But just as (Sam) began readying his fiery personality for (Grand Theft Auto III’s) launch, he and Dan watched the terrorism attacks from a Thompson Street apartment on September 11, 2001. In the early moments of the disaster, he feared the buildings might tip and cause a domino effect right into Soho and further up into Greenwich Village. For an intensely nervewracking two weeks during which the country as a whole was on edge, the Housers talked about bagging the game altogether. Like everyone in Manhattan at the time, they didn’t know if terrorism would strike again. Manhattan constantly smelled noxious, like chemicals were burning, and there were posters of the missing plastered everywhere. Sam told Dan, “This beautiful city has been attacked and now we’re making a violent crime drama set in a city that’s not unlike New York City. My God, I’m terrorized where I live and on top of that, we’ve got this fucking crazy game that is not exactly where people’s heads are at right now.”

Rockstar worked to change the game to make it work for gamers and society in a post-9/11 world. Many gamemakers did the same. At Entertainment Weekly, Noah Robischon and I were given the daunting task of writing about the effect of 9/11 on games for a special issue of the magazine. All the games that dealt with New York City were changing. Even Microsoft removed the Twin Towers from their popular Flight Simulator game.

It was weeks and weeks before I played another game. I moved away from entertainment for a while, writing a book about the science of serial killing with psychiatrist Dr. Helen Morrison. But, of course, I came back to games. I came back to entertainment. Because people need to play.

There had been so many court jesters writing about games. There still are. But something did change after 9/11. The better writers helped videogame criticism to come into its own as a potent form of journalism. The essays became more thoughtful. Writers went deeper.

There were no games that day. But games came back and many played better than ever. And the writers came back with a power and force that continues to grow to this day. That is evolution, and perhaps it has nothing to do with 9/11 at all. I happen to think it has more than a bit to do with that horribly shocking morning. And each time I put a finger to the keyboard or a pen to paper, I try to kick it up a notch. Because life is fragile. Because people died.

And I’m still here. You’re still here. You have to go on — better, if not tougher. You honor those who died that day. You honor those who didn’t get a chance to write or to express themselves in any way. You keep going; you keep playing; you keep winning, or at the very least, you keep trying.

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It woke me up. In the distance, the evacuation horn was sounding that dull, forlorn foghorn sound of danger. Stumbling around in the morning darkness, I noted that the power was still out. I threw on my one good raincoat and a fishing hat. Outside, the rain was pouring like it had taken a fistful of Adderall. It had been doing so since the evening before.

Slipping but not falling, I ran out down the muddy road about 500 feet to see the creek about to rise above our bridge. On the other side stood a tall, thin man with a grey mustache. He was lifting the car onto his flatbed truck, about to tow it. “Sheriff’s Department saw it and called me,” he explained. “They say it’s going to wash away in the flood. Move it to higher ground. You go, too!”

The water had already risen a couple of inches in the minutes it took to place the car elsewhere. At the bridge, it was a maelstrom of mud and water, roiling. I stood at the railing as hard-flowing waves crashed against it. The brown red water looked like earth rolling to the rhythm of a major earthquake. The sound was like M-80 firecrackers piped through speakers at an arena rock show. Yet it was hypnotizing. It called me to jump in and dance with it.

I turned around. Water was rushing down the mountain, carving out new streams as it cut out huge parts of the road. Back near the house, three new waterfalls began to spew where there were none before. They met to make the sitting area near the pond into a new lake. Trees bent as even heavier rain made me wonder if I should evacuate.

But I couldn’t. The water was now pouring over the bridge. It wasn’t merely beckoning. It was ready to grab and steal anything in its path. I didn’t know it as I stood there, but throughout the Catskills, the water was taking cars and tossing them into boulders and trees. It was taking houses, too. As the last bit of power left the battery-operated radio, I heard that Margaretville and Fleischmann’s were under water. People on their roofs were being evacuated by helicopters.

The sound of a branch. It cracked with a sickening din and fell with a splashy thump 50 feet behind the house in the woods. Again, I put on waders and the raincoat to check the bridge. It was raining so hard that Ralph Lauren’s coat couldn’t take it. I was drenched as I watched the bridge become submerged.

My life has been full of writing about popular culture and my thoughts are informed by what I’ve seen and written. Just before the towers came down, I watched the World Trade Center attack from 6th Avenue and 12th Street with director John Waters and actor Tim Guinee, We talked about how the disaster looked somewhat like various movies we’d seen, and then, when the disaster became one of epic proportions, I wondered why our talk wasn’t deeper, more serious, more salient.

In the case of this horrible and historic flood, all I could think of when I wasn’t outside in the muck was videogames. Before Irene came, I had been playing From Dust, the Xbox Live game made by one of the designers of the brilliant, landmark 1990s failure, Heart of Darkness. Both games have drama, momentous water drama. But “From Dust” features mammoth tsunamis that rush in to take away the tribe to which you’ve just given birth. They scream pitifully for help as they are washed away into the foaming ocean rages.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve felt that the best of videogames can mirror life even as they enhance fantasy. Game developers have always done well in imagining both fire and water. But From Dust is too clean to feel real. The surging water and the aftermath isn’t as dirty and muddy and haphazard what I saw in real life. And, with the way the waters of Irene surged and kidnapped all in its path, I don’t think I’d have had time to scream like the tribesmen of “From Dust.” Yet “From Dust” felt real, as real as escapist fiction, which induces thrills and not fear, can be.

Yet the way Irene’s waters moved, almost as they were alive, reminded me of another videogame, Ken Levine’s BioShock. As I describe in All Your Base Are Belong to Us, the water was a character, deep black as you swam through it in the opening moments. And when it crashed through to your creepy but dry environs below the sea, I worried about drowning, an immediate panic. To me, BioShock was a closer approximation to what I saw when dealing with Irene.

But, again, in real life, the panicked feeling of perhaps injury or even death slowly crept in and then grew. In games, I’m aware enough of being a player even when I’m absorbed in my surroundings. But I’m never “in shock.” With a real life disaster, the idea of “being in shock” is paralyzing and sickening. In games, I can walk away to do an errand to clear my head. There may be dreams or nightmares inspired by games. But there’s never that feeling of being unable to move or think.

Then, I thought about the chaos of the winter water levels in Killzone 3. Hermen Hulst and his teams created a seemingly maddened ocean water that was full of danger. It even seemed hateful. But in that case, the water was too big, the John Henry meets Paul Bunyan of a perfect storm, to feel real.

And the rain, the hard rain that fell, reminded me of Red Dead Redemption. That pelting rain in Red Dead was a lot like the hurricane rain in the Catskills. The rain seen while walking or riding through the woods as rebel cowboy John Marston also sounded real, and the look of it as it came down in sheets was a very close approximation to what I felt as I tread the water-soaked property and the mountain road that ultimately became a waterfall.

In any game, I feel angrier about dying than fearful of dying, angry that I screwed up, angry that I wasn’t aware enough, angry that I didn’t have the reflexes to survive. But you respawn or get up the gumption start again. You have the opportunity to turn your failures into successes. But in the Catskills, there were moments when I wondered if I would make it, if the mountain road would rush with a tsunami-like gusher and take me, or if the falling ancient trees would drop thousands of pounds of living wood onto my body as I slept.

No game has ever given me that feeling of impending death, eight of nine of the dictionary meanings of doom, yes.

But not ruin and not death.

For that, I’m really quite thankful.

This morning, there is new flooding and new evacuations in the Catskills, this time from tropical storm Lee. I might just stay away from games with wild water features for a while, if not for a good long time. It all hits a little too close to home.

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Originally posted at NY Videogame Critics Circle

Despite a deep love for breakthrough technology and videogames, I’m still old school. If I spot a magazine I’ve never before seen, I’ll check it out with an enthusiastic curiosity. So it was as I approached a table far away from the concert at Summerstage in Central Park. I was flying from the visceral excitement of seeing Cults (A new band! One I actually like!). In a giddy almost-Austan-Goolsby-on-Jon-Stewart mood, I saw Moves magazine on the lower left corner on that table. (A new magazine! Maybe the rare one I’ll actually like enough to want to write for!) It turns out that Moves is a New York-based magazine that’s taken inspiration from Complex in that it’s split into two sections. Half is for women and half is for men.

But as I flipped through the glossy pages, I stumbled upon Hannah Simone’s ugly rant on videogames. My heart sank. It was decidedly the rankest, rudest takedown of videogames I had seen from someone without a vested political or corporate interest in slamming the complete industry.

In a nutshell, this very angry woman has been in a three-year relationship with a man who must surely be an addict. He seems not only to play games constantly, according to Simone, he also smokes pot…while he plays games. Simone was livid as she wrote. The vitriol. The cursing. The game playing (and I don’t mean bits and bytes). These partners are immersed in a regrettable cycle from which they can’t break free. She can’t quit him and he can’t quit games. It’s the stuff of which D-grade reality shows are made. She thinks the problem is him, not her. The reader, judging from the many responses from both sexes after I posted a link on Twitter, thinks it’s both of them.

Why do these seemingly dysfunctional folk stay with each other to continue this supposedly videogame-induced, Jersey Shore-type soap opera? Opposites attract, but in this case, opposites detract. Unfortunately, since the argument presented isn’t of the highest quality, we don’t know much about either woman or man, except for a couple of scenes. Simone makes blanket statement after blanket statement about videogames, but she only mentions a couple. She seems to firmly believe that Mature-rated console games are the only kinds of games available. She suggests that all women hide the power cord and threatens to throw the console out the window. “I don’t want to be his mother,” she says. “I want to fuck.”

Simone says that all games are wastes of time. But she hasn’t taken the time to educate herself because she wants to hold onto her beliefs. She just wants and needs to wail and moan, as if she had no choice but to stay with this addicted gamer. So she lets it all out in words, as if writing it out of her body can somehow help her mend this relationship.

Why get so down about this? It’s just one person in a small, quarterly that few have heard of. I guess my problem is less with Simone than with the editors who published the oddly crafted story in a fashion magazine that hits, according to their press kit, 250,000 people each quarter, each with supposedly an average household income of more than $150,000.

If their magazine is geared to both men and women, shouldn’t some guy have responded with his counterpoint? Shouldn’t Simone’s editor have asked her to address the idea that Simone is stereotyping everyone who plays games, men and women, old and young, alike? And who really has the grudge against gaming? Simone? Simone’s editor? The editor in chief who saw fit to make this the magazine’s first story? The publisher? All of them?

Part of the reason I wrote All Your Base Are Belong to Us was to explain to gamers and non-gamers alike how wonderfully artful games can be, how they fit, sometimes perfectly, into our American culture of entrepreneurs and artists. Then comes Simone, yelling from the balcony like a Juliet/banshee that all games are horrible wastes of time. One could utter the same things about fashion and celebrity lust, the stories that make up the bulk of Moves magazine. But I wouldn’t. Because everything written can have a useful purpose, everything can inform – if it’s well crafted and well conceived.

Yet though it’s not written about very much, addiction to games attacks a minority of gamers, and it attacks them as relentlessly as Zeus in God of War 2. If someone I cared about loved games or pot too much to the point of addiction, I wouldn’t embarrass them in print with haranguing. Instead, I’d suggest and then push for a doctor or a counselor. I’d suggest that I come along, too, if that’s what the significant other wanted.

It’s corny; it’s cliché. But it’s ultimately true: Life is a balance. Everything in moderation can make for an extraordinary compelling life. There’s little logic in Simone’s story and no balance, just the boom-goes-the-dynamite beginning of what appears to be the end. That’s sad, and it has very little to do with videogames.

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Originally posted at NY Videogame Critics Circle

In a stunningly revealing announcement last week, Nintendo stated that on August 12 it will reduce the price of its 3DS from $250 to $170. Though it was spun as an event as important as the Royal Wedding in a press release, the news reverberated throughout the game industry in a decidedly different way. The price drop was seen as a failure on the part of the Japanese company to sell what originally had been seen by some journalists as the most major of steps forward for video gaming: 3D without glasses.

The reasons for the poor sales of the device are many. Soon after the machine was released in Japan, the terrible earthquake and tsunami hit the country. While I pointed out on NPR’s Morning Edition that manufacture of the 3DS didn’t occur in Japan, people working at Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ were certainly hit by the sad situation, if not directly, then, emotionally.

More, sagging sales of the 3DS had to do with an unreasonably high price. Nintendo had succumbed to the same kind of rampant hubris that had hit many game companies over the years, from the 3DO company in 1993 to, more recently, Sony in 2006 with its overpriced PlayStation 3. Especially in a sluggish world economy with a possible new recession looming in the United States, $250 for a new DS was an outrageous price – even though the 3D on the handheld gaming device was spectacular.

When you could see it. The 3DS has an extraordinarily limited viewing angle. If you don’t look at it straight on, you can’t see depth. Instead, you see a double image. And if you play without moving your neck, your reward is stinging neck pain or a pounding headache. Sony itself had contemplated making a 3D version of its PlayStation Portable, but, according to Sony insiders, decided against it because the technology wasn’t quite there yet. It’s not. That viewing angle is the bugaboo.

And how can you hold to that precise viewing angle when playing shooting games or even platformer games like Mario? Most games are made to be exciting, visceral experiences that take you from the real-life mundanity to a world where everything moves like rides at an amusement park. So holding steady is very difficult, to put it mildly.

The 3DS is best suited to a role playing game like the recently released The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time 3D. In that terrific, artful game, you move at your own pace and talk to townspeople as you level up – until you need to kill an enemy. That’s the time when you turn down the 3D with a small lever and shoot away in more traditional 2D.

Nintendo executives were taken aback by the poor sales of the DS (and the Wii as well) to the point of awed shock. In fact, they agreed to cuts in pay. In addition to getting the 3DS on track, they have a long, hard slog ahead in proselytizing to the world’s gamers that they need the new version of the Wii (which will be coming next year). WiiU is influenced by the iPad. In fact, it looks like an iPad with a console addition. Marketing this will be won’t be as easy as selling the Wii and its wireless, motion controller.

But there’s a zeal for WiiU to succeed because Nintendo’s worldwide president, Satoru Iwata, told audiences at the March Game Developers Conference that games for the iPad and iPhone were being sold too cheaply. Iwata would prefer to keep his $39.99 price for the 3DS games (and $49.99 (or more) for the upcoming version of the Wii).

The 3DS is generally a fine device beyond the 3D aspect. Among other features, it sports wireless functionality and a store in which you can purchase old school Nintendo games. Yet the success of Infinity Blade and Angry Birds for the iPad proves that many games (certainly not all) for the DS are overpriced. If that’s true, and if the 3DS doesn’t sell well at $170, Nintendo executives will be taking more than a pay cut. They’ll be shown the door. After all, it’s one thing to ride the wave of sales for a device like the Wii, which was so easy to play and understand that it sold itself. It’s another thing entirely to take a company on the downswing and make it the next big thing again.

Nintendo isn’t going anywhere. It’s not dying. Yet it’s wounded. Now’s the time for Sony and Microsoft to make their moves in the ever-evolving console wars. And even if one company does win, the winner may no longer take as much as 80 percent of the market as Atari, Nintendo and Sony have in the past. That’s because Apple is so successful with its little downloadable games. Apple’s not going to put the big three out of business. But they are taking a very healthy slice of the pie.

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