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Can games ever reach a cultural impact on par with other media like books or film? Steve Gaynor believes they won’t. On his blog he wagers that games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse and, like comic books, will forever “stay marginalized and juvenile”.

I think I’ll take that bet. I believe gaming will break out of its niche and into mainstream cultural consciousness.

Although Steve’s view is pretty bleak and pessimistic, I do see where he is coming from. I can strongly relate to his sentiments about the overwhelming majority of “adolescent male fantasy or cheap cash-ins” in gaming. I just don’t think those kinds of games are likely to stay dominant forever. Let me give some arguments in support of a more positive outlook. (Now is probably a good idea to read Steve’s post, if you haven’t already.)

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If you buy games online a lot it’s possible to forget all the horrors of retail. Last weekend I went downtown on a game buying binge but was sadly reminded how depressing actual stores can be, not to mention their customers.

I set out to buy Zack & Wiki and Singstar (with microphones). You’d think that would be an easy mission, but after visiting five different stores I was still empty-handed. To my huge surprise I couldn’t even find a Singstar microphone bundle at any Free Record Shop (the main DVD/CD/game chain store in The Netherlands; think HMV or Virgin Megastore). I did find two stand-alone editions of SingStar in a bargain bin, but that was all.

I will accept that Zack & Wiki can be hard to find, but if I can’t find FREAKIN’ SINGSTAR at a Free Record Shop, there’s something terribly wrong. Isn’t Singstar just about the most mainstream game you can think of? Of course, I had forgotten that you should never go to any of these stores for a pre-meditated purchase. These stores expect you to go there and impulse buy whatever they happen to have in stock.

I overheard three teenage kids trying to decide whether to buy Super Mario Galaxy or Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. They were going for the latter because one of them said “it looks like a sports game, and I like sports games!”. I should have pointed my finger in the air and said “I’ll take the case!” and told these kids about the huge mistake they were about to make, but of course I didn’t.

Later I overheard two customers trying to decide whether to buy The Orange Box. One guy said he’d heard some good things about it. Then the other one said he “already owned Half-Life 2″ and “didn’t want to pay for it again”. Sigh. Who will teach them?

I’m not at all grumpy, by the way. No grumpiness…

Fortunately I remembered a small independent game store, so I went there and was greeted by the store owner, a happy middle-aged guy. I found what I wanted and also picked up a copy of ICO for good measure, as I never actually completed that game. While I was browsing, a man asked the store owner to advise him on what to buy for his two sons. The store owner happily guided him away from licensed crap and recommended him three really good games, The Orange Box among them.

Meanwhile, a kid was standing hunched over the counter with a PS2 controller in his hands playing Bully on a monitor behind the counter. He was trying to decide whether to buy it, and talked to his dad and the store owner about the controls and how the game had some “typical Rockstar” elements. I have no idea what he meant, but it somehow sounded a lot better than “I like sports games so I’ll buy Mario & Sonic”.

The only mic bundle for Singstar is apparently the Disney High-School Musical edition which… umm… yeah. Fortunately, the store owner took the microphone box, cut it open with a knife and switched out the cd case with Singstar Rocks. I’m not sure if he’s supposed to do that, but nice service. We chatted briefly about ICO and then I was on my way with a smile on my face and my faith in retail and humanity slightly restored.

If you’re in Amsterdam and you’re going to buy games, go to Powerplay in the Van Woustraat.

Update: picked a new template and did some housecleaning! This is so exciting!

Yes, Gameslol was down for… probably a few weeks. Sorry about that. One of my WordPress plugins got some kind of spasm attack, but I killed it and got a new one so no worries. I hope you like horses though, because upgrading WordPress caused my template to revert back to its default header picture of a horse race. Woo.

Hopefully I’ll have the time to write something here again soon and restore some of the template customizations I had made. Happy new year!

Just wanted to quickly point out that AdventureGamers.com now runs a partnership with Lezard Electronic to offer digital downloads of many popular adventure games. It’s called Adventure Shop and it launched with a catalog of 23 titles. New games will be added regularly going forward.

I worked on this partnership over the past two months (in conjunction with Jack Allin and various people at Lezard Electronic). The response from the adventure community has been enormously positive, which definitely feels very rewarding after all the work we put into it.

If you follow the adventure genre you might want to check out the Adventure Shop once in a while. It already has some titles that are hard to find elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin won’t be in stores until sometime in 2008, but it can already be downloaded from the Adventure Shop.

Idle Thumbs (gaming site, age 3, presumed dead since February), unexpectedly spasmed itself back into activity last week as Ben Andac and Alex Ashby posted three new articles that are much worth reading:

Getting The Short End
Alex observes that while Portal was greeted with universal praise this year, almost every media outlet commented on its shortness as a bad thing. And that, he says, is a bad thing. A great rant against people who complain about games that aren’t a billion hours long.
She Blinded Me with Aperture Science
Speaking of Portal, Alex wrote a whole article about it, taking a note on its Huge Success. Why did the world fall in love with this sleeper hit almost overnight in ways not seen since Katamari Damacy?

Every Extend Extra Extreme: It’s in the Game
When I tried Every Extend Extra Extreme on XBLA, the magic didn’t really happen for me. That made it all the more fascinating to read Ben’s analysis of EEEE. That’s because Ben loves it. He really loves it, and dives deep into what makes this game tick. At the end, it makes me want to go back to the game with a different eye.

Anyway, all that and more on the Zombie Thumb.

While you are at it, be sure to visit the blogs of former Thumb writers Bob, Steve, Spaff and Duncan. They all have great new posts. A recent favorite blog of mine is also Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It has nothing at all to do with Idle Thumbs (it is in fact by Kieron Gillen, John Walker and other prestigious UK game journalists) but it is excellent and deserves a shout-out.

Do you play games on FaceBook? It turns out quite a lot of people do. The current most popular game, Vampires, has almost 440,000 daily active users. I’ve tried a couple of these widget games and although as a gamer I don’t find them particularly compelling, the size of their player-bases is certainly noteworthy. What interests me even more are the game design possibilities that exist within social networks.

In 2005 I worked on Mobstar, an asynchronous multiplayer browser game that’s still fairly popular particularly in the UK and The Netherlands. It’s a typical example of the “walled garden” approach used by most non-casual web games. Everything is locked away behind a login, meaning there’s no way to play or even preview the game without signing up. Once you are a registered player, you still need to remember to check back regularly to see your progress.

It’s pretty tough to get people to sign up and commit themselves to a game like that. It hasn’t stopped companies like BigPoint from becoming successful in this genre, but it still seems like an awkward and decidedly ‘web 1.0′ way of making games. In later projects that I worked or consulted on we always had a lot of discussion about how to make MMO style web games more open and distributed.

With that in mind, recent developments in social networks are worth following. Because if most web games are walled gardens, then social network games are more like public parks. You can easily see someone is participating in a widget game simply by checking their profile page. Inviting others to join is also easy. And you don’t have to remember to check the status of your game, because you’re regularly logging into the network anyway. Because widget games can piggy-back a network’s existing logins, profile information and contacts, it takes away a lot of barriers. Widget games also tend to spread around really fast thanks to the ease at which you can invite your friends.

Integrating an app (or indeed a game) into a social network is only possible on FaceBook and Ning at the moment, as far as I’m aware. But the OpenSocial API announced by Google last week will soon enable integrated apps on virtually all major networks, creating an estimated combined audience of over 100 million people. More importantly, OpenSocial will allow developers to write their social app once without having to tailor different versions to different APIs.

I’m sure someone out there is already working on an Urban Dead style game for FaceBook, or at least something that’s a bit more fleshed out than those silly vampire bite or pirates vs. ninjas recruitment spam games that people will inevitably get sick of soon. But conventional maffia/pirates/zombie/ninja web games are definitely not the best you can do in this context. Sure, it would be cool to create a game like that, but I imagine the killer app game on social networks to be something else.

What if you put a social game on a social network? Let’s say, Animal Crossing. If you could, would you want to play Animal Crossing with friends who don’t have a console but who do have a PC with internet connection? Of course you would. Social networks can be pretty boring after a while, but they’d be a whole lot more interesting if you could could use them to explore environments, or to go fishing together or maybe go beat up Tom Nook and rob his store. Animal Crossing is just an example. Imagine a socially-oriented visual game in a similar vein that uses your MySpace or FaceBook contacts. It seems like a winning combination to me.

So, do you happen to have a large bag of money laying around? I could make you that game… ¬¬

How is it that Valve can imbue a game with more personality than other games could ever hope to dream of USING ONLY A COMPUTER VOICE AND A STEEL BOX WITH A LITTLE HEART ON IT?! Does that mean Valve is amazing, or just that everything else is depressingly bad? Maybe both.

It’s ironic and awesome that the guy who once wrote this went on to work on the game that would have the most incredible crate ever, worthy of official merchandising.

The Orange Box is delicious. And Portal is the best part. It’s funny, it’s smart, and it’s just the right length. I think it took a lot of people by surprise.

It’s interesting how Portal is piggy-backing Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in more or less the same way Counter-Strike did with Half-Life. It’s clever marketing. Would as much people have now been clamoring for a sequel to Portal if it had been released separately?

It works kind of like vinyl records, where the B-side may contain remixes of the A-side, or material by other artists from the same label. Sometimes the B-side contains crap, but sometimes it leads to great discoveries. I like how The Orange Box has given the Portal IP a flying start. (I’m also somewhat reminded of Geometry Wars, which wasn’t exactly bundled with Project Gotham Racing 2, but it did rise to popularity from its humble beginnings as easter egg bonus content.)

Here’s hoping Valve with bundle another brand new property with Portal 2 and Episode 3…