Well, I reckon it’s official - I’m hooked on Borderlands.

I only started on the weekend and it already feels like it’s consumed a small portion of my soul. I haven’t felt this kind of hit in a long time. It’s been this long since I’ve felt this kind of dizzying high. I’m chasing the dragon here, coming back time and time again to try and top that last weapon I’ve found, to see those tiny little green arrows on the weapon stats boxes.

It’s worrying that I played so much during that time. Normally I can exercise some self-restraint. I play for a few hours and usually call it a day. But this game…it made me lose track of time. What I thought to be an hour rapidly degenerated into 6. Day turned to night without me noticing. Meals were left uneaten.

And then I played co-op.

I understand now why addicts tend to congregate together. They feel comfortable in each other’s company, subconsciously accepting what they’re collectively going through.

We trudged mindlessly through the levels, swapping weapons, sharing health, saving ammunition for others, giving out small squeals of joy as we dinged. Minutes became hours. We didn’t care. Even when they left I continued on alone, lost in my addiction, blindly moving forward.

I’m a little concerned. Perhaps some cold turkey is in order.

I’ve been playing some Gears of War 2 Horde co-op with jaytee. We haven’t revisited it since several months ago, and ever since I’ve upgraded my Xbox LIVE subscription (a whole two days ago) we’ve been giving Horde a bash.

I used to go through a couple of rounds by myself or locally whenever I had a mate over, and it was good fun for a while, but ultimately it fell into that weird grey area between casual (”I don’t normally do this”) and mediocre (”This gun is shit, the designers had no fucking idea”).

Now that the whole experience thing has been implemented and we’ve both got a bit of experience, I can say that co-ordinated co-op gameplay is where it’s at.

You know what I’m talking about. Starting up that third or fourth session of Left 4 Dead with some friends, barking out alerts when you see major zombies, and standing in a room for several minutes planning how you’re going to take on the incoming horde. It’s beyond just a casual session where everyone shoots what they want, when they want. There’s cohesion and a symbiosis. It’s as if we’d transcended all those group mentality phases and jumped straight into the Performing stage.

Our latest Gears of War 2 session felt like it clicked. We were pulling off flanks with devastating effect. We were baiting and switching, covering and co-supplying. We were instinctively informing each other using Mumble (which, by the way, is fantastic and free).

It’s nice when things just…work.

So, a couple of months ago, according to the folks at the University of Adelaide, teenagers who play video games regularly are more likely to develop anti-social habits that lead to problem gambling.

I guess it’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard.

I mean, if you take it in a literal context, there are plenty of examples of gambling in games. There are interactive scratchies in GTA: Chinatown Wars. There are the pub games in Fable 2. There are slot machines, blackjack sessions, variations on blackjack sessions…you can even contribute ante to a pot in some racing mechanics. Hell, some games just cut to the chase and are purely on casino table games. The online poker phenomenon has been around for years, with pundits playing several games at once, using bots to suck fish dry, and even getting promoted to real poker championships to boot.

But wait a minute - let’s step back for a second.

If we look at a definition:

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods.

“An uncertain outcome”. That would imply the concept of chance. You are betting on the fact that the laws of gravity and friction will have the dice facing up in a particular way. You are betting on the fact that the single jackpot winning lottery ticket you are buying is one amongst several hundred thousand.

Most games nowadays reward players with skill, rather than by some random chance. Hopefully, it wasn’t luck that had your railgun slug punch through the skull of your opponent across the map. You didn’t just wall run through a gauntlet of spinning knives and do a double somersault pike while snatching that golden idol by chance. You earned that shit, goddamnit.

However…there is an element of luck in games.

I believe that as we progress through games and we start getting comfortable with the controls and the abilities we have, we become cocky. We take chances, trying to push the envelope of what is possible and what we can or cannot do. We try to leap onto higher buildings. We start aiming for the head instead of the body. We try to pull off trickier combos. Risk for reward - it’s the oldest trick in the game design handbook.

Games also promise rewards. Armour sets, higher levels, better mounts, mo’ money. Gamers want these rewards, so we chase them (work and social life be damned). We grind and we crawl and we reload our subscriptions. Just so, hopefully, we get a lucky drop.

So the more I look at games in this mindset, the more I realise that they all have a hook of some sort. And why shouldn’t they? The stakes are high, the bar has been raised over the years. Games need to capture us and hold us so that we’ll keep playing, buying subscription recharges and DLC, and hopefully even the next instalment. Encouraging us to take risks in the hopes for a big payout? Yeah, I’d say that’s some kind of correlation there.

Or, y’know, it’s more likely that these kids need a better parenting model.

I’m just going to go ahead and say that we gamers are big, fat targets. (Apologies if you’re actually fat, don’t take it personally.)

Marketers love us. They’re as young, eager and wide-eyed as most of us gamers. Chances are, they’re gamers themselves. And they know what we want.

The problem is that gamers want it all. We want everything - the highest definition, the clearest sound, the most engrossing storyline, and the most powerful hardware.

So what do marketers do? They throw everything at us.

For instance, take a look at game retailers.

Look at the colours and the pretty lights. Look at the flash deck that’s churning out offer after offer. I see at least 7 different genres of games on the home page, and that’s before the fold.

Everything is trying to get my attention. My eyes don’t have a chance to focus on something in particular, because another little animation of Forza 3 is looping away at the top of the screen.

Gaming news sites are much the same. The content itself on IGN is drowned out by the deafening roar of the iPod Touch flash ad. An ad for the movie The Final Destination gets more space than the handful of headlines that Gamespot has to offer.

There’s no thought given to the content that’s presented to us. There’s no Information Architecture going on here. It’s just a mind dump, a stomach upheaval of content that is loosely grouped together. It’s a page full of animations, filled with links that have no obvious destination and that take you to single landing pages with little to no flow.

So what should game site designers do?

Nothing, most likely. We’ve all been programmed to work in that way. We’re gamers - we want it all, and marketers know that, so they throw the proverbial kitchen sink at us. Even if we don’t, we scan for what interests us, and anything that doesn’t catch our fancy gets cast aside. No biggie - someone else will pick up on it. There are a lot of gamers out there, after all.

And once we get our information, whether it be the score on a review, or the price for the latest and greatest title to hit the shelves, we move on. We close the tab and search for other reviews, or we click “Buy Now”, submit our CC details and get on with our lives.

Some may consider it evil; I see it as a necessary evil.

I’ve been thinking about this and on the state of our current web site at sogc.com.au. Comparatively speaking, there’s not a lot going on there. We used to have some nice big title graphics, sponsor logos, the lot. Now it’s a lot more…austere.

As much as I hate it, I think we need to start acting more like everyone else. Minimalist design belongs in the design studio. Let’s add some flash up in this motherfucker.

If I had to make a list of things in Prototype to whinge about, the ridiculous title styling would make the top five. Because it’s not Prototype - it’s [PROTOTYPE]. Square brackets are back in vogue, baby.

Other than that, I experienced a complete about-face on this game. My first impressions after the linear “tutorial” level and the first few minutes of “parkour” (which…isn’t, as I’ll explain later) were that this game was half-finished. The graphics were disappointingly sub-par; the AI was awkward; and the controls were initially cumbersome. The so-called street running kicks in whenever you hold down the right trigger, which sends your character sprinting up the sides of buildings, tumbling over obstacles, hopping on cars and flying around corners. It’s not the same kind of parkour as you’d see in, say, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge or Prince of Persia. Alex Mercer is simply too powerful and too wild compared to the graceful elegance of Altair.

Instead, Mercer looks like he’d be better placed in Crackdown. He can jump several stories, propel himself through the air, and glide between buildings. And if he’s equipped armour, he simply barges through obstacles instead of jumping over them.

But once I got over the initial expectation that he was supposed to be this precise acrobat, I quickly warmed to the idea that he was an untamed animal, summoning weapons at will and dismembering both innocent and guilty alike. I relished in the free falls from skyscrapers that ended in meaty impacts, sending cars flying (although I would have loved to get the same impression of falling as in Mirror’s Edge).

The gritty graphics simply allowed for excessive amounts of chaos to fill the screen. Strike Teams of attack choppers filled the sky unloading payloads into the street, supporting tanks that focused their fire on Hive Buildings. Jarheads rush onto the field of battle, firing at infected civilians that have choked the streets. Hunters emerge from Hives, rushing towards the soldiers as they cut blindly at the air in front of them. Explosions surround you, barely stifling the screams and the radio chatter. And you’re in the middle of it all, with the game hardly skipping a beat.

There is a surprising amount of variety in the side missions to keep you distracted, and there are plenty of upgrades that unlock some vicious attacks. Mercer’s takedowns are brutal and violent, and the game doesn’t let up on action, pace or sweet sweet blood.

The story was standard “Gubmint-conspiracy” fare, bogged down by the bizarre emotional delivery of Mercer’s lines, but it’s good for some mindless enjoyment.

And that’s the aim of the game, here. Other than the upgrades, there is nothing to truly aspire to in this title. There is no high learning curve, nor reward for time invested. (Those “stealth” missions would be a dead giveaway.) It’s to fulfil your dreams of being both ridiculously agile and near omnipotent. It’s the reason why media producers make things with big explosions and bad-ass characters - to appeal to the baser emotions in us.

Playing [PROTOTYPE] (sigh) is like eating copious amounts of average quality chocolate. It’s not good for you, and it’s not even the best stuff out there…but it tastes damn good. Not bad for a sandbox title.

In my eyes, it’s one thing to be a gamer and another to be a LANner.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that broadband would have all but trampled the LAN scene into dust. Better gaming services and big, fat trunks have helped gamers all over the hood/country/world to connect to others and blow giblets out of each other in the comfort of their lounge rooms. There hardly seemed to be any incentive to pack up one’s rig and peripherals, lug it over to the local community hall and connect with other pale, sweaty nerds in order to share Linux ISOs and overrun bases with Zerglings.

But the scene was still there. It became this culture where gamers could convene and admire other people’s hardware, meet online personalities face to face and build new friendships. Sure, broadband might have taken away the need to leech files off other LANners, but that was never the point of LANning. It was, and always will be, about the games - the sick, perverse joy you can only get from knifing the last terrorist on the map and hearing a cry of anguish from the other side of the room.

Just recently, a prominent LAN in the Sydney metro area was up for sale. Its admins had been retrenched. After being around for 10+ years, it became clear that it was no longer operating as a profitable venture to the media company that owned it.

The noise surrounding its departure was fairly muted, with some of the old guard reminiscing about the “good ol’ days”. I noticed that hardly any current gamers made any comment, and I had a feeling it was because the current attendees had turned a gaming LAN into a leeching ground. Given that sponsors were advertising games at the very events where they were being illegally distributed, it was bound to end badly.

But that couldn’t have been the only reason. My theory is that the gamers, the truly hardcore gamers…they are a dying breed. Where I said in my earlier post that the entry barrier to gaming was greatly lowered, the quality of opponent has dwindled. Masters of the trade became complacent. They grew up, they took jobs, they found wives, they had kids. The number of people that actually want to play games fell, and the number of people that attended simply to P2P took their place. LANs turned into places were DC++ gets more bandwidth than the latest FPS.

What can be done? Bring the focus back to gaming. It’d be folly to try and eliminate file-sharing entirely; rather, give the gamers a reason to keep forking over money per visit. Hold worthwhile competitions; get decent prizes in; hardware tech demos; game beta sessions…gamers can play with other players from their living rooms. They need incentive to get them out of the house and into the scene.

LANners are those that take their gaming seriously. It’s evident that LAN events need to follow suit and give them a reason to keep coming back, as well as encouraging their friends to join in.

Facilitator: Well, gentlemen, thank you all very much for deciding to present at our seminar. I’m sure you all have your, uh, own unique experiences to share with our clients in regards to the melee weapons you use. Perhaps if we go around the room and introduce ourselves, so we can get a feel of what we do and how we can present our material? Gordon, let’s start with you.
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