"Go West Young Man"

Hello everyone, been a while right.

Like I said in my last post, I should be able to post something on here every week or so, depending on how crazy things go at university. With preparations for my master coming very soon, it looks like I will be one busy writer.

That being said, I was able to cook something up for the first week of January. I decided to stay away from the myriad of "Top [X]" lists that have been spawning all over the internet for the last few weeks in favour of a themed retrospective. I looked at four games from 2010 (Civilization 5, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout: New Vegas and Minecraft) and how they touch upon the concept of the frontier. Just go take a look at it.

In other news, it looks like I will be writing about games for school weekly once more the semester. I'm taking a psy class about emotions and motivations, and the work for the semester is to write one to two pages per week about anything in relation to what we are seeing in class that week. It's basically like the myspace business from last semester but without myspace, meaning it's a hundred times less annoying. Let's just hope writing about games weekly in french won't stop me from writing weekly in english.

Also, I went at the Mount Royal Game Society yesterday evening. It was pretty great. I met cool people, saw a live demo of Fract, got my ass kicked by a retro game (damn those monkeys!) and saw a girl wearing a sombrero in the middle of winter on my way back home. Pretty great evening indeed!

Babycastles and the Indie Arcades: Getting Social

Something is afoot in Manhattan. A bunch of indie game designers and game enthusiasts are creating an indie arcade named Babycastles. Let’s not imagine that it is an arcade in the traditional sense of the word. It’s not rows of quarter munching machines where you can play your favorite fighting game or SHMUPS with a roaring crowd behind you. Well, not that there is any crowds in most arcades nowadays.

If their Kickstarter page and the articles game journalist and Babycastles promoter Leigh Alexander wrote are to be believed, this indie arcade will be closer to an art-house cinema or an indie music show than the arcades of the old days. Babycastles seams to be about two things really: creating an ambiance and bringing the indie games out of your home computer and into the streets.

I’m not really into the New York indie music scene (probably because I’m neither in NY or an indie music fan) but from what I know, once again through Alexander, Babycastles is pretty much growing out from this particular world. While they are raising money to move in a new location near Time Square, the arcade is currently located at Silent Barn, “a hub within Brooklyn's DIY music scene”. If anything, this is a pretty good indication that they are aiming to create an indie arcade with the similar ambiance of an indie music jam.

Just like indie music or indie cinema, indie games main channel of distribution is not through any of the big guys, but through the web. The Internet is a great way to get known, but the social aspect, that special touch you can have when you are playing in front of a live audience or showing your movie for the first time in an half-full theater is something that cannot be emulated. It’s also something most games and gamers lost over time.

Arcades died when consoles and PCs gained in popularity. Still, people would go to each other’s basement to play a friendly match of Goldeneye, or bring their computers and play Starcraft over LAN. The growth of online gaming killed that too. Seriously, how many games nowadays come with a split-screen multiplayer mode? Not many. Gaming used to be something social; you played games with other people, other gamers, in the same room. I think gamers are longing for the real life presence. This is why there is a growing movement for the return and survival of arcades.

Babycastles and other indie arcades like it (Is there even any?) are doing something new. They are bringing a type of game that rarely leaves the comfort of your computer to the social scene. It’s also about cutting the middleman that is the Internet. You play the game and you get to talk about it around a good beer with other people who just played the game. Some games can create interesting discussions about a variety of subjects, while others are all about the bragging rights of beating the high score. Just like the old days.

I wish a long life to those arcades, the future amazing hangouts for the social gamer; the gamer that wants to hang out with his gamers and non-gamers friend, grab a drink and listen to music, and then kick some ass at this new amazing bullets hell game some dude in Europe just made in a day. Hopefully Manhattan is just the beginning.