Hello and welcome to the final day of Substitute Double Agent week. I'll be your host, Mr. McClendon. Now just because Mr. Jones has been gone all week doesn't mean you get a vacation too. He's left behind detailed lesson plans as well as a list of potential trouble makers, so don't think you'll be getting away with anything. For those of you with detention this weekend, you'll be happy to know the regular weekend DA Mr. Cosner will be on hand to make sure no wacky Breakfast Club-inspired shenanigans transpire.

Now, today is Free Topic Friday, so does anyone have something they'd like to share with the -- Hey! Was that a spitwad?

All right, Yendor. You caught us. Or me. Since its inception in 1998 the GIA has been run exclusively by one man. A man capable of producing the work of a full website staff and generating multiple prose styles to cover his tracks. He's been known by many names, but let's just call him Drew.

Drew may have lied to you all for many years, but his motives were pure. Posing as a "video game webiste" the GIA has managed to push tens of thousands of Public Service Announcement banners on its readers, causing a noticeable rise in the number of 18-24 year old males who have donated blood, adopted a little brother, or gotten breast exams.

You may have discovered our -- or my -- well-hidden secret, but could you keep quiet for just a bit longer? The summer months are coming and our nations blood reserves are dangerously low. It's for the greater good.

While your knee-jerk anti-American sentiments are appreciated, I wouldn't go so far as to equate "made in America" with crap, even in the realm of video games. Despite what most console advocates would like to the think, the PC is home to a number of innovative, interesting, and occasionally even stylish games -- they're just not in the genres that usually see success on a console.

As an American console based on PC architecture, the Xbox is incredibly attractive to PC developers who have been itching to make their way into the console market. And the initial band of first party games bear that out -- for the most part, they look like PC developers trying their darndest to make a "console style game" And, as we've seen in the past, the results of that aren't always pretty. Mircosoft's steadfast insistence that the Xbox is first and foremost a console machine, and their discouragement of PC ports could very well end up backfiring by denying them some of the best games the U.S. has to offer. American companies may have proven they can develop successful console games (at least for an American audience), but mimicking the style of a Japanese console RPG, for example, is something that, so far, has eluded them.

But to be fair, some Japanese companies are jumping on the Xbox bandwagon. Though the general response from the East has been negative, a few companies, such as Konami and Idea factory, have already announced original games for the system. We'll have a much better idea of the Xbox's chances in Japan after the end of this month, when Gates himself will deliver the keynote speech at the Tokyo Game Show.

An interesting hypothesis. Hopefully, Square is doing something to alleviate the tedium of random battles. After offering the salvation of Enc-None in FF VIII, many gamers, myself included, were less than happy with the return of everyone's least favorite RPG mechanic in FF IX.

If they do go for something deeper for FF X, as it sounds like they are, let's just hope it comes with an appropriate reduction in the encounter rate. A more strategic combat system in the series certainly sounds like a great idea now, but we'll be eating those words if we end up fighting ten minute long battles every five steps.

Identity Theft

Zak, I know you didn't post the column yesterday, but I just wanted to clear something up. I don't know who the hell Ken Scott is, but I'd like to know how his name got at the bottom of my letter. It's weird enough that it's there, but my name is still there, destroying any possibility of me trying to believe there's some sort of elaborate conspiracy trying to erase me from existence. I just want to know how that happened, that this single name got tacked on to the end of my letter, trying to destroy my entire sense of self and making my identity crumble away. -Kirk B. who isn't quite sure if he's himself anymore. Ken Scott

Sorry about that Kirk. I'm not sure what exactly happened with your letter, but rest assured it was most likely a minor HTML error. It certainly was not an attempt by the GIA to "erase you from existence" or to erode your identity to the point where we can bend you to our will and employ you as one of our army of GIA Sleeper Agents.

Rest assured, it will not happen again.

In the meantime, why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

Letter to Memphis

Did you know that the Pixies "Theme From Narc" was actually the theme song to an old NES game? It's the bizarre truth. So you see, video games and rock musicians CAN get along. But it always helps if the band in question is made up of nerds anyway. I mean, c'mon, Black Francis looks like he should be on the GIA staff. Not that that's a bad thing, of course. Negative Creep

ProTip: Mentioning The Pixies gives your letter a 90% greater chance of getting published in DA, at least while I'm at the helm.

Though I've never been a big fan of Eugene Jarvis' Regan-era druggie-shooter, The Pixies cover of the theme song almost justifies the existence of a game that tasks the player with the summary execution of minor drug offenders. Which brings us to our next letter...

Coming soon: Trainspotting The Game

Greetings Zak. Well, while we're talking about our favorite topics getting slighted in games (or were five days ago), how about drugs? In the words of an unnamed source on the Dirtchamber Sessions, "I think it's time we discuss the philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavor." They surely get a worse treatment than either religion or science, as it will likely be a number of years before developers will touch this one. Think how giddy people got when Mr. Snake came equipped with a pack of smokes in MGS, even though this happened in the original, ten years previous. It wouldn't have to be blatant, there are plenty of ways to address the topic subtly enough that gamers would catch it and the ESRB wouldn't. I can't even think of an example of a developer throwing a hallucination sequence our way, ala the desert scene in the Beavis and Butthead movie (don't smirk, I know you've seen it). How often does an RPG party walk through a desert? How hard is it to have them stumble across some Peyote? Maybe with the trend towards more 'mature' games, we'll see an attempt before the end of whatever console generation we're heading into. To quote the late comedian Bill Hicks, "I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do. And if you don't believe that, you know what, go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians who made all that great music that enhanced your lives throughout the year.... real fucking high on drugs." Maybe this applies to game developers too. Probably not. Ok, I'm going back to the corner. -Mar, has a suggestion to keep you all occupied

The easy answer to this is, of course, that games still reflect the norms and morals of the society that produces them. And all the counterculture rhetoric in the world hasn't done a lot to change the general consensus that drugs are a Bad Thing. I wouldn't blame the ESRB either -- they just rate the games, and as Rare has recently shown, you can get a lot of leeway out of an M rating. It's much more likely that no publisher would be caught dead putting out a game that would be seen as pro-drug, so we're probably quite a ways off from a zany peyote trip in the desert.

Then again, I'm not exactly sure how much this sort of Cheech 'n' Chong humor would "address the topic" of drug use. I do think the medium is more than capable of supporting such subjects, but what you're describing is as close to an interesting take on drug use as Conker's Bad Fur Day is a balanced, insightful look at a squirrel's struggle with alcoholism. I don't think more types of low humor in video games is really what we need to be worrying about.

As to your other point: I won't argue with the well-documented fact that many talented artists have also been heavy drug users, but the simplistic equation of drugs / madness / general personality disorders = talent has never carried much weight for me. Nevermind what my personal attitude about drug use is, the simple fact of the matter is that, once inspiration, from whatever source, has come and gone, actually creating something "artistic" out of it is a whole of a lot of hard work. One quick example: Jack Kerouac may have written On the Road in a period of three weeks on a single roll of paper while hopped up on Benzedrine, but, contrary to the legend, he also spent considerable time editing and rewriting the raw text dump before it became anything near a publishable novel.

My point is, whether or not the originator of a work was on drugs or not becomes pretty irrelevant in the final product. As for the developers of games actually being of drugs themselves, have you ever tried to code? It's hard enough sober. I can't imagine what sort of games would be the result...

Maybe something like this

"And yeah, I could pretty much go for any game starring Abraham Lincoln as an action hero, especially if he wore his top hat. I like top hats." You're in luck, my friend. My cousin has already made a game called Abraham Lincoln Land. Need I say more? You can get a information and a demo and stuff at http://www.lincolnsoft.com You have to see it to believe it. It's amazing. It's really... amazing. -Beej PS And yes, he DOES wear his top hat.

Once again, the Internet proves itself to be the virtual equivalent of one million monkeys at one million typewriters. I don't mean to belittle your cousin's, um, accomplishment here, it's just the every time someone comes up with a kooky "wouldn't it be funny if..." idea, it inevitably turns out that someone, somewhere is already hard at work on it.

I am disappointed the end boss is Jefferson Davis and not John Wilkes Booth, though. Oops, I should have marked my Abraham Lincoln Land spoilers.

Nothing ends a column quite like a controversial rant

Zak, Do you think it's possible videogames will never break into the mainstream, like movies, television, and music? After all, games are work -- they don't play themselves (well, most don't) -- and not everyone likes being active with their interactive media. The revenue numbers lie about gaming's popularity -- the dollar numbers are high, but those are on $50 games instead of $7 movie tickets and $15 CDs. Moreover, most gamers tend to buy several of these $50 games a year, easily outpacing your average citizen's expenditures on a few movies or CDs a year. To spend $500 (or more) a year on games is not at all uncommon for a gamer -- but the thought of your average movie fan spending $500 on movies in a single year is almost laughable. See a few flicks during the summer, buy your three or four favorite on DVD -- that's the status quo. So what if games aren't ever going to break out? What if they're doomed to be a more expensive version of comic books: a marginalized, socially outcast medium, where 5% of the output is creative, artistic content that couldn't be done in any other medium -- and the other 95% is juvenile dreck at best and prurient pandering to sex and violence at worst? There was a time when comics were going to be the next big thing and break free of their superhero origins to become a mainstream phenomenon. Remember Maus? Of course you do, because NOTHING AS GOOD CAME OUT FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS. Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth is the most recent book to threaten to break out of the comic store ghetto, but even it seems doomed to marginalization. Point being: I like games, you like games, whoever's reading this like games. But not everyone may like games. I'd like to end with a quote from Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi: "We produce entertainment -- and there's a million other kinds of entertainment out there. If the game industry went away, it's not like people would keel over and die on the street. If it came to pass that people started saying "These games are all stupid, I gotta stop playing them all the time", then what do you think would happen? You don't need games to live, after all, so the market could fall right out. It could even shrink to a tenth of what it was." Maybe the crazy ol' coot is onto something here. - Andrew

It's something I'm sure a lot of the readers of this column forget. Despite being a multi-billion dollar industry and a part of most of our daily lives (at least for our readers), video games are still nowhere close to being accepted by the mainstream in the same way that film, books, or television are. They've made huge strides over the last few years -- I don't think they're quite as marginalized now as comic books still are -- but there's still the general feeling that a night of game playing is somehow less 'valid' than popping a movie in your VCR.

Though the nightmare scenario you describe is of course a possible one, (especially considering the economic state of the industry) I, for one have high hopes. Why? Because video games are, in a very obvious way, still evolving -- technically and aesthetically. If you want to make the comparison to comic books, I'd say we're closer to the backlash that occurred against them in the 1940s, when congress and the general populace lashed out at a kiddie medium that was overstepping its bounds into more mature territory. The comic industry responded with a restrictive ratings system and a couple of decades of unabashed wholesomeness. The game industry may be in danger of this as well, but even after the establishment of the ESRB, developers are still attempting to make games that are 'mature' in the best sense of the word.

My other major reason for thinking games will indeed 'go mainstream' someday is based on the medium itself. Simply put, with the widespread use of computers in all areas of our lives, I really don't see how some form of interactive entertainment could not become mainstream. It's easy to forget that film, television, and even the novel were, in their early days, also seen as mindless diversions for the uneducated masses. It's not hard to extrapolate the same path these mediums have followed, from a new technology to a mainstream medium, and see video games making the jump as well.

On the other hand, I don't think games have come close to producing something like Maus. We're not anywhere near that point yet. Heck, we don't have much that falls into the category of "creative, artistic content that couldn't be done in any other medium." Even the best RPG or adventure games still have a glaring dichotomy between the story they tell and the gameplay they offer. But I still think we have cause for hope, as long as developers keep striving for something beyond mere entertainment. All that Yamauchi's comments do for me is signal that I shouldn't be looking to Nintendo to accomplish this.

Closing comments:

Well, that makes a nice segue into your topic for tomorrow. Your regular weekend letter's host Drew will be back tomorrow, and his continued threats to "become a non-gamer" are partially what inspired the topic for Saturday: How important are games to you, really? Obviously, anyone who's reading this plays them on a fairly regular basis, but are they a priority for you? Do you get something from them that you can't find anywhere else, or are they just another form of escapism? If in ten years games are just ultra-realistic versions of the games we have now, will you still be interested, or will they fall by the wayside? I'm sure Drew wants to know!

- Zak McClendon, who would go out tonight, but he hasn't got a stitch to wear