In Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anna Anthropy wrests gaming out of the hands of the mainstream

The internet revolution has changed the way we create and showcase work. Amateur videos recorded on cellphones are getting more eyes than the latest ABC midseason replacement. The blog has brought democracy to the written word. Cheap technology and digital distribution make it easier than ever before for your little brother’s band to be heard around the world. Why hasn’t this populist revolution happened to video games?

In her new book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, Anna Anthropy looks at the daunting technological barrier to the medium’s growth, and presents a solution.

Because serious programming has been a prerequisite of game development, the people who put in the effort to make games are predominantly the people who have been playing them, and they make games like the ones they play. Coupled with the rising cost of making a blockbuster game, you have an industry that is allergic to risk. It’s a feedback loop that’s threatened to make the medium creatively stagnant.

The picture is less bleak outside of the mainstream. Indie game developers have more channels than ever to distribute their work. Every console has its own online market place, and breakout successes like Angry Birds and Draw Something are changing the way we think about the viability of mobile gaming. This digital revolution is already happening. It’s allowed somebody like Anthropy, a transgendered game design school dropout, to buck the system and gain critical acclaim outside the mainstream, with her own brand of games that mash up ’80s arcade hits and transgressive gender politics. She released her first game, Calamity Annie, a lesbian western shooter, in 2008, the year that Grand Theft Auto IV shattered sales records by giving the audience more of the same old thing. Anthropy has always stayed comfortably at the fringes of the indie scene, a position nearly impossible before the internet age. As somebody who created her own niche in the industry and has never censored herself to make herself commercial, she is an excellent guide into the world of game design as a form of self-expression. Her latest game, Dys4ia, is a short collection of autobiographical mini-games, playable for free online, chronicling her hormone replacement therapy. Meanwhile, mainstream games wouldn’t know what to do with a transgendered character if it hit them in the face.

“Every game that you and I make right now — every weird experimentation, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog — makes our art form larger.”But even the growth of the indie scene isn’t enough for Anthropy. “What I want from videogames,” she writes, “is for creation to be open to everybody, not just to publishers and programmers.” Will every game be worth playing? Of course not. Some garage bands should stay in the garage. Then what is the point? Zinesters isn’t about creating game for other people: for most of the medium’s life, its been packaged and sold for other people to enjoy. Indie games are now gaining attention because of their financial success. There has been no equivalent to home movies or personal journals. The subliminal message in the book is to remove commerce from the equation completely.

The technological hurdles can now be overcome – the programming language Scratch, for example, is specifically made for children to create their own games – but there is still the perception that making a game is the domain of programmers. Zinesters aims to demystify the digital wizardry.

Before even starting Anthropy excuses the reader. “Your first game will be rough and derivative.” Quality is not the aim here: Anthropy wants more games by more people. What she offers here isn’t the normal racket that artist-targeted how-to books tend to peddle. This is not How to be a Successful Game Developer in 5 Easy Steps or Make a Blockbuster Videogame! “Nor is she writing for the designer who is hoping to hone their skills. Zinesters sets itself apart from excellent game design tomes like Steve Swink’s Game Feel and Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun and Game Design, by not assuming a familiarity with game design. Because there are so many tools available to the would-be developer, all of which she gets into, the advice in Zinesters is creative and not technical. The advice sounds rudimentary (“Task #3: Teach Your Character to do Something”), but it acts more as a catalyst for ideas and brainstorming. Anthropy, herself a lecturer of game design and a meticulous designer, does not demand formal proficiency here. Zinesters advocates self-expression before all else. The point is not to make a good game, but to make a game, itself a radical notion in a medium that has long been an oligarchy.

Rise of the Zinesters is about education. It is a how-to, indie history lesson, design theory 101, a manifesto, and, surprisingly, as memoir. It serves as an entry into the importance of games and how to make them. But it also is about why making them for ourselves is important.

“Every game that you and I make right now — every five-minute story, every weird experimentation, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog — makes the boundaries of our art form (and it is yours) larger.”

Like a skilled developer, Anthropy, who has been at the vanguard of this movement for years, does not explicitly point the way, but, instead, gently guides.

How do you possibly condense twelve years’ worth of anticipation into a single game? Such is the question that plagues Blizzard’s Diablo III – if you can get in to play, that is.

I was one of the (likely) hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people slamming the servers on launch day, 12:01 a.m., with reckless abandon. What did it get me? Not very many “first impressions” write about.

By the time two a.m. or so rolled around (Pacific time), my group of more than ten Redditors (and friends of Redditors) had just barely gotten into their games. While starting a big gaming marathon with two hours of Diablo III excitement could have probably kept me going until the sun came up, having to delay any and all fun until the servers let us all in got pretty tiring pretty quickly.

It’s since been a bit of an up and down with Blizzard, but I’ve somehow managed to find enough windows of time between my personal life and the life of Blizzard’s servers (currently on fire) to beat the game on normal difficulty. In addition to some fun screenshots below, here are a few quick impressions from someone who’s been punching Prime Evils in the face since 1997.

It’s hard.

Playing Diablo III makes me nostalgic for Diablo II. You know what I’m talking about. You’d save all of your skill points for the first 15 levels of your character’s existence, and then start dumping them into two or three skills and synergies to create The Unstoppable Character. Save for the random, annoying immunities you’d find in Hell difficulty, steam-rolling Diablo’s minions (Baal’s too) was more a question of how fast you could click your mouse than how tough these foes really were.

Diablo III – not so much. If you’re not paying attention, conventional packs of mobs have the capacity to put a good bit of hurt on your bottom. This isn’t the kind of game where you can just walk right behind a Frozen Orb while watching YouTube videos on the side.  Should you find yourself in a four-player slugfest, well, don’t expect to just leave your party members behind while you head on out solo.  Yeowch.

It’s easy.

Remember what I just said? Okay, now ignore it for a number of boss fights within the game, because Diablo III has this odd tendency to waver between frustratingly difficult and absurdly easy. Your first trip to Belial will be unpleasant for you. Other bosses in the game are tank-and-spanks, up to and including some baddies you find in Act IV itself.

In other words, Diablo III doesn’t scale all that well. Heaven help the hardcore player who started out on his or her quest to glory immediately after hitting level 10 with an normal character – you’re setting yourself up for a bit of sadness.

It’s fast.

For whatever reason, Diablo III just feels like a flurry of activity compared to Diablo II. Maybe there’s something about the way Blizzard now handles random mobs and elite monsters; maybe it’s a result of the ease at which players can warp in and out of levels to meet up with their friends; maybe it’s because of all the in-game cutscenes that become an exercise in spacebar mechanics for those more eager to kill than learn.

It could also be the story itself. I won’t spoil the goods for those of you who are still chugging through, but the significant plot elements that happen in each act – including the big “sigh, really?” moment toward the late-game – seem hurried. So quickly do we meet new people, learn the barest amount about them, learn a little bit more about the act boss, before blammo – next act. Blizzard’s through-line is a river rapid, not a lazy inner tube ride. And I confess, I don’t feel like I really understand who some characters are, why they act the way they do, or how in the heck we got to where we are.

And I like the Diablo universe.

It’s missing.

Diablo III has a lot going on. You have the game itself, your characters, your friends, the auction house… I don’t want to spoil a review and say that Blizzard, perhaps, bit off more than it could chew on this one – on an 11-year development cycle, no less.

For example: It would have been nice to be able to sit in a queue for the game on launch day instead of dealing with all the server meltdowns (a minor gripe for an occurrence that Blizzard really should have foreseen). Moving on, why is there no option to queue for public games of specific sizes? While I appreciate the ability to quickly jump into someone else’s game and help them out, these frequently become pairings. I want to play with the full, four-person experience, and I want to join or queue for a game that allows this to happen intentionally, not just by chance.

For that matter, why can I add Battle.net friends via Facebook within Starcraft II… but not Diablo III? Nothing says “ball of fun” like having to write your friends’ Battletags down in a notebook so you can input them into the game later.

And, in the largest, lazy sin to date, why is Blizzard showing me a cutscene to end a major act that they already released as a trailer for the game. First off, spoilers: Much of what was predicted by Diablo fans based upon the peculiarities of that trailer happens. Second: It’s a bit of a letdown to find out that we’ve all already watched one of the game’s few extended, fully-rendered cinematics. With but a handful of these beautiful mini-movies to view in the game, it’s a real bummer to find out that the total amount of new CG content drops by one when chugging through the acts.

Nitpicky? Yes. When a company has spent 11 years working on a single title, I think nitpicking is completely fair game.

It’s fun.

Criticisms aside, Diablo III remains a fun stompy-stomp through all things evil. You’ll enjoy your (rushed) time throughout the four acts… the real question is whether Blizzard’s built enough to keep players jamming on new characters and new difficulties over the long-term.

And why, oh why, won’t they find competent writers for the plot and in-game dialogue.  I officially volunteer.

Tecnobits’s resident Diablo nut and former editor, David Murphy, looks forward to getting pummeled left and right on Inferno difficulty.

Cooler Master has spread its wings into a lot of different product lines, but it’s still best known for its namesake: stuff that keeps your PC running cool. To that effect, today the company announced an update to the design of its Hyper 412 Slim CPU cooler as well as three new thermal pastes.

The Hyper 412 Slim redesign introduces a pair of appropriately slim fans on either side of the heatsink. Why slim fans, you ask? Cooler Master says the new look will increase cooling performance while still allowing you to plop memory down around the cooler. The Hyper 412 Slim works best with LGA 2011 sockets and should be available next month for around $50.

Check out more about the Hyper 412 Slim on the Cooler Master website.

Of course, you need thermal paste to install a CPU cooler, so Cooler Master announced three new compounds to go with the redesigned Hyper 412 Slim: the gold-colored, IC Essential E1, the grey-colored IC Essential E2, and the white-colored IC Value V1, which offer varying levels of conductivity. All three will join the new-look Hyper 412 Slim on store shelves in June.

http://lifehacker.com/5910788/why-d…ow-can-i-fix-it

“My router sucks. My connection goes wonky once every few days, and I have to unplug the router and reboot it (I believe this is called a hard reset) to fix the problem. Obviously, this is incredibly annoying. What can I do to just make the darn thing work properly?”

I imagine many people do not give their routers a second thought. Either bought by themselves, or provided to them by their ISP, the router is the most critical aspect of your home network. I have not seen the demands on routers significantly change over the years, with many people I know having routers that are easily 8-10 years of age. I personally suggest friends use custom firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT, the stock firmware available with many routers usually tend to perform quite well. Our demands on routers are fairly modest, yet, like any electronic device, it can eventually die out. That is why if the Internet is absolutely critical to your existence as a human being, aside from any troubleshooting of your router, I also think it a good idea to have a backup router. Its a proven fact that most electronics die when stores are closed and no one is available to help.

The Synergy aircraft, propelled by a fan in back and buoyed by a boxy tail, promises to be cheaper, safer, quieter, and vastly more efficient than a jet airplane. The hitch is that it doesn’t quite exist yet, but it’s nearly halfway to its goal on Kickstarter, so now is your chance to invest.

The shape is not unlike the jets of the future we looked at in our May issue, but the technology is very different. A quarter-scale flying prototype was unveiled a year ago, demonstrating the unique “induced drag reduction” method developed by inventor John McGinnis.

I’m very curious to see the full-size prototype in action.