That’s Dan Tabar, one of the guys behind Cortex Command. You could talk about day one of the Indie Games Summit as a momentous day where a potentially revolutionary new way of funding games was explained, and where indies cemented their financial and artistic importance in the growing games market. And yet, to focus on any of that stuff is to miss the point entirely.

The point is, Dan Tabar wore a bitchin-ass tracksuit to GDC. During the Q&A section of his talk, Ron Carmel complimented Dan on this tracksuit. Dan stared at Carmel for a few moments, as if trying to find something to say.

“You didn’t even have a question, did you,” Carmel sort-of said (I’m paraphrasing). “You just wanted to show off your track suit.” Perhaps he did. I would not blame him.

Also, in the full picture you can see the outline of his weenis and that’s kind of funny.

[Via TIGSource.com]

If Ryan Kesler’s name sounds familiar to you, then you’re either a fan of hockey (perhaps specifically, of the Vancouver Canucks), or you watched the USA hockey team make their way to a silver medal in the 2010 Winter Olympics last month. (Or both!) Well, if you plan on picking up 2K Sports’ NHL 2K11 when it launches exclusively for the Wii this fall, then you’ll become very familiar with Kesler’s face as well as his name — he’s the cover athlete for the game.

Kesler is the alternate captain for the Canucks, and last year, the team’s fans voted him as the Canucks’ MVP. He’s a great two-way (i.e., defensive as well as offensive) forward; he was one of the finalists for the Selke Trophy in 2009. You can see a photo of him in the gallery that was taken during a motion capture session at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

[image via Canucks.com]

Yes! Irem has officially stated that the sequel to Bumpy Trot (known as Steambot Chronicles to western gamers) is in development for the PS3!

Well, still in development, at any rate. Y’see, Bumpy Trot 2 was first announced at the Tokyo Game Show…in 2006. After another quick trailer shown at TGS the following year (you can see it below), Irem went dark regarding the game until a magazine scan showed up in 2009 (also visible below).

Now, after some fevered prodding from ScrawlFX, Irem representative confirmed that Bumpy Trot 2 was still in development, and that they were working hard to get the game out in Japan ASAP.

They gave no word as to any western release plans, but given that Atlus USA has published both the original and Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament on the PSP, I’d wager that begging and pleading with talking to them once more details surface would be the way to go.

I think the chances of a release coming are good enough. Both other games made it over and met with decent reviews (all of which acknowledged its gee-whiz charm), and Irem seems to be on good terms with Sony, since an Irem-themed space in PlayStation Home went up recently, complete with Trotmobile statues and outfits for purchase.

If you’re looking for more information about the original, why not check out Anthony’s profile of the game? Strange though, that he noted Steambot’s release in 2006 came “at the end of the PS2’s lifespan.” Oh Anthony! You so crazy!

It’s an avalanche of art shows in San Francisco this week! On top of hosting the Into the Pixel exhibit this week, Hotel des Arts will also have an entire floor dedicated to the art of Dante’s Inferno. The art will be on display starting this Thursday and will be up until April.

The gallery below has a small taste of what to expect at the Dante’s Inferno art show this week. Some pretty disturbing stuff!

And as a friendly reminder, Giant Robot is hosting the Game Over III art exhibit this Friday too. See!? So much art!

Kevin Butler tells the truth in this ad, ladies. Once your boyfriend/husband/significant other gets a hold of God of War III, your relationship will be doomed. For like a week. At least. Seriously, you all are so not ready for God of War III. The first level alone makes God of War III an easy contender for 2010’s game of the year.

Our review went up this past week but words alone can’t really describe this experience. By the way, we’re giving away a PlayStation 3 and God of War III this week!

It Only Does Epic Trilogies [PlayStation.Blog]

It feels like only yesterday Infinity Ward was talking up the mysterious first Modern Warfare 2 downloadable map pa–oh, that totally was yesterday. Huh, that was quick! The marketing division has created an informative site about “mapathy,” an all-too-real medical condition affecting millions of gamers.

They say the cure is coming to Xbox LIVE on March 30, which would mean an April release for PlayStation 3 and PC since Microsoft acquired a full month of exclusivity for the add-on. The real question, at least in my mind, is whether or not we’ll see video/pictures of the maps during GDC.

Either way, the wait shouldn’t be too painful. As wrapped up in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as I am, I wouldn’t mind getting back into Modern Warfare 2, if only to play new content from time to time.

The prospect of free-to-play indie PC games being upgraded visually and in terms of features for digital distribution on consoles is something that excites me greatly. Super Meat Boy, Cave Story, and Spelunky are the three that immediately come to mind.

We recently got our first look at the shiny new Spelunky for Xbox LIVE Arcade: four screenshots, all viewable here. It’s difficult to say this, because I appreciate all the work Derek Yu is doing to HD-ify the game, but I absolutely adore his pixel artwork. So much so, that I dig the original look over the new style.

What do you think? Am I being unreasonable here or what? And yes, I realize there’s a little “work in progress” disclaimer attached to the images.

New screens for Spelunky XBLA released [Diverse's community blog]

Perhaps the exclamation point is overkill — the latest free add-on for Mass Effect 2 is simply a new heavy weapon. Nothing more, nothing less. The Arc Projector, as BioWare has so lovingly named it, can now be downloaded for anyone with access to the Cerberus Network storefront.

On the other hand, the gun sounds rather fun to use. You point it at things you want to electrocute to death, and splash damage plays a big role in its effectiveness. There’s a nice picture on BioWare’s site that shows the Arc Projector shocking some poor Husks in the most glorious of fashions.

Yeah, I get that you mostly just want the “Firewalker” DLC to come out already. So do we.

[Thanks, Steve]

_{[Editor's Note: We're not just a (rad) news site -- we also publish opinions/editorials from our community & employees like this one, though be aware that it may not jive with the opinions of Destructoid as a whole, or how our moms raised us. Want to post your own article in response? Publish it now on our community blogs.]}

Sex is a prevalent part of videogames, like it or not. Developers seem to have a firm grip (like … ah, too obvious) on the concept of “Sex sells” and have been packing it into every line of code or polygon they can. Every new batch of screenshots that comes out usually has a shot or two of a big-breasted woman or two or seven. Jiggle physics exist for the sole purpose of videogame Web sites mentioning that they exist when talking about the game. It’s like viral marketing, except this virus gives you a boner.

Let me tell ya, sexiness in videogames could not get any better, I’m sure (I personally wouldn’t know because, quite frankly, I prefer my woman to actually exist). You’ve got large breasts, a female lead, as well as secondary characters, who are pretty much bound by destiny to get it on with you. What’s not for a lonely nerd with no self-esteem to like?

Oh, there is the fact that the characters are wearing clothes. Isn’t that a shame.

WELL, WE CAN’T HAVE THAT NOW, CAN WE? 

There’s a simple mathematical explanation for why Nude Mod’s exist for videogames. The formula is:
Woman + Clothes = No Thanks

Developers gauge the success of their game on whether or not a nude mod has been made for it. For instance, Valve can rest assured knowing that they have made a very, very good game, as there are about as many nude mods for Alyx Vance as there are regular mods for the game.

Now, it may occur to someone “Why do I want to see a nude girl with bad hair talk about theoretical physics and how much she really likes that robot she made?” Well that’s another, completely different topic covered in my other Monthly Musing, 33 Reasons Why Gordon Freeman Should Have Sex With Alyx Vance. However, the real reason nude mods are made for Alyx Vance as well as pretty much every other character in Half-Life 2 rests on the existence of another mod: Garry’s Mod.

In case you haven’t heard of it, which I won’t make a sarcastic remark about because it’s actually somewhat possible, Garry’s Mod is a mod by a guy named Garry that lets you pose the characters of Half-Life 2. It also lets you pose props in the game, and even goes as far as to let you manipulate their faces and hands. If you haven’t figured out why people would want Alyx Vance naked for this, then I wish I had your naivety. I really do.

But, really, nude mods have never really affected the games they’ve been made for in any real way, they can’t be all that bad, right? Well, first, you should stop jumping to conclusions, dammit. You know nothing.

On May 3rd, 2006, Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was given a fresh new rating of “Mature”, from their previous rating of “Teen” after someone released a third-party mod for the game that apparently unlocked certain game files that let you see women in the game topless. Since this was after the infamous “Hot Coffee” scandal with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (this time I’m not telling you what it is, you’re on the Internet, go Google it), ESRB wanted to give things a look.

When ESRB did give Oblivion a second look, things went tits up (har har). Not only did they find boobs, they also apparently found more violent content in the game than was disclosed in the video originally sent to ESRB for rating. Apparently the hanging bodies they originally saw were really dark and far away or something like that.

Nowadays, we don’t even need to download anything to see female characters nude. In the short three months of 2010 alone, glitches in No More Heroes 2 and Heavy Rain have been discovered. Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I’m pretty sure these were unintended. The conspiracy is that people still got boners.

A half a decade ago I would have never predicted that we would have nude mods for games. I also would have never been able to predict that nude mods would be made outdated by their own games. Probably because half-decade-ago me wasn’t even able to predict the existence of nude mods. Also because it’s surprising.

In the end, even if sex is not used to sell a game, just in the act of putting a woman in a game developers are using sex to sell by proxy, because someone who bought that game bought that game to make a nude mod for that character. So, whether the developers intended it or not, that plucky female lead is showing some skin. Isn’t technology grand?

_{This promoted blog was written for our March Monthly Musing assignment, “Write something about sex.” You too could get promoted if you write something about sex in videogames over on the Community Blogs.}

Soren Johnson spent five years working on the Civilization series for Firaxis, eventually landing the job of lead designer for Civilization IV. He also did work on Spore, amongst many other things. He also gave the keynote address of the 2010 Serious Games Summit.

Johnson’s talk, “Theme is Not Meaning,” opened with a simple question: who decides the meaning of a game? The designer, or the player?

Hit the jump for the answer to that question, and a summary of Johnson’s keynote.

It’s the player.

The designer might want a mechanic or a story to mean one thing, but the player is the one intimately dealing with that game, and so his decision as to what the overall theme is will always be the correct one.

When comparing a game’s theme versus a game’s mechanics, though, what defines that game’s ultimate meaning? The theme is, in Johnson’s words, “essentially the skin of the game.” You can buy Star Wars Risk or Lord of the Rings Risk, but it’s still Risk from a mechanical standpoint no matter what the game tokens look like. But to the player, theme is important: you buy Star Wars Risk because you really like Star Wars.

So, thinking about theme, which is the true successor to Warcraft: World of Warcraft, or Starcraft? One takes place int he same fictional universe but with drastically different gameplay, while the other is basically “Warcraft in space.” Depending on whether you value theme over mechanic or vice-versa, your answer may differ.

Johnson moved on and talked about Ticket to Ride, which he called “one of the greatest board games to come out of the last decade.” Over the course of the game, you draw cards and create routes, and you get more points based on how long your route is. It’s a typical railroad management game.

The problem is that the manual thematically frames the game as a sort of Around the World in 80 Days-esque adventure, where the objective is to see which of the game’s characters can travel by rail to the most US cities in just 7 days. According to the manual and the designer-authored theme, the game isn’t about management and building an empire, it’s about travelling.

The actual mechanics, however, don’t jibe with this. If you’re just a traveler, why can you claim routes in any order? Why do claimed routes close for other players? Why does your physical presence on the game board not matter?

So, who decides what Ticket to Ride is about? The player will say they’re playing as a rail baron, and they’re not wrong just because the manual says otherwise – it’s their experience, and they’re the ones playing.

Going back to Risk, Johnson compared it against a similar board game called Diplomacy. Both games involve conquering territories and using army tokens, except for two seemingly minor distances: Risk has sequel turns while Diplomacy has simultaneous turns, and the combat in Diplomacy doesn’t involve any die-rolling.

Though these may seem like small changes, they completely change the experience of playing each game. Diplomacy is about mystery, and trying to read your opponents and imagine what they’ll do, and Risk is about everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, and potentially taking risks to go reach their objectives. There is a great coupling between the the thematic and the mechanical: “Risk is about risk,” Johnson said, “and Diplomacy is about diplomacy.”

Having worked on Spore, Johnson brought it up as a thematically contentious game. It was pitched as a game about evolution, but the creature creator was more about encouraging and exploring the player’s creativity. The theme and the mechanics didn’t sync up.

But are there any games that are truly, mechanically about evolution? Johnson argued for World of Warcraft as a possible contender, due to the community-created idea of builds. Whatever type of character you wanna create, there is an optimum series of upgrades and things you need to do. Johnson referred to this as “Paladin Natural Selection,” as the idea of optimizing your own specialized character shares a lot in common with Darwin’s finches, even though the authored theme is about orcs and war.

Similarly, the Mario games are about timing, not plumbing. Peggle is about chaos theory, not unicorns. Even though Battlefield 2 and Left 4 Dead have different outward themes — “modern combat” and “zombies,” respectively — they are both actually about cooperation.

X-Com is about limited information, not aliens, thanks to the fog of war.

Gears of War is about cover, not aliens.

Starcraft is about asymmetry, not aliens. The three races are fundamentally different gameplay-wise. You can rush, you can boom, or turtle.

Galaga is about pattern matching, not aliens. The player has to predict where are the aliens gonna come from, where are they gonna end up.

After four consecutive examples in this vein, Johnson pointed out that “aliens” is a really common theme for games because it’s an easy theme to map your own mechanics onto.

Players come to certain games with expectations of what they should be, and sci-fi prevents you from relying on those sole expectations. When you play Civ IV, you feel that archers MUST do a particular thing based on what you know about archers — they’ve gotta be long-range attackers. Conversely, in Alpha Centauri, you have no idea what a “mind worm” is, so the designers can create totally new mechanics for that unit without worrying that they seem thematically wrong, in some way.

But what happens when a game’s mechanics don’t match its theme? Johnson brought up Jon Blow’s argument that BioShock claims to be about altruism and the difficulty of being a good person, but the fact that you get the same amount of Adam for either killing or harvesting all the little sisters makes this a thematic lie. “Players see right through this,” Johnson said.

So, who decides what a game like Spore is about?

Science magazine reviewed Spore’s basic depictions of biology, and found it a total failure.

That’s because they were sold on the idea that the game was specifically about evolution. Not only was Spore not giving you something meaningful about evolution – it was giving you WRONG information about evolution. If you bought into the whole “evolution” theme, that was a real problem.

Does that mean Spore, with its creature creator and focus on player creativity, is actually a game about intelligent design? The dev team joked about it, but that’s the reading most supported by the mechanics.

Johnson moved on to a concept he calls “the agency problem.” Civilization’s theme is ostensibly about world history. Its mechanics are about becoming an awesome, all-powerful god-king. But in order for Civ to work as a game, the player needs to have abilities that break this theme: you need to be able to know the consequences of your actions, and have top-down decision making, and even be allowed to decide when your nation will undergo a revolution.

The fan community called this the “Eternal China Syndrome”: at some point the game no longer looks like history because the states become very static. No breaking apart, no ups and downs. Everything is as it was. In Civ 3 the team experimented with a Dark Ages feature, but people hated it. In Civ 4, the team allowed players to choose government types in order to create bottom-up decision making, which just really wasn’t all that fun. Nobody ever used them, because people like making decisions.

Louis the sixteenth would ahve really loved a “revolution” button, Johnson said, but Civilization isn’t scholarship. It’s a game.

But can games be scholarship?

A while back, Johnson really wanted to make a game like the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which tries to explain why Eurasians were the ones to create guns and steel and conquer the entire world, rather than the Incans.

According to the book, the Incans were simply in a crap part of the world; early on, civilizations could easily share crops and agriculture to the east and west  of a continent because of basic climate uniformity. It’s not possible to share crops between the northernmost and southernmost parts of a continent, because the climate changes are too problematic. Additionally, the Americas only had one domestic animal (the llama) where the Eurasians had a bunch.

“The long and the short of it is, you know, the Incans are doomed,” Johnson said. “There’s no way they can win under these situations.” This sort of geographic determinism may be good scholarship, but it’s really bad game design — who would want to play as a game where your starting location decides everything about your future?

Can Civilization’s mechanics ever match its theme? Can you make a game that is engaging AND about world history in a meaningful way? Maybe not, Johnson argued, but other mediums are equally incapable of doing the same. Movies are more about stories than world history — if you want history, books are really your only choice.

Instead, why not let the player “play a life”? Why not put them in the shoes of a historical figure and force them to make difficult decisions, like what The Redistricting Game does? The game is about gerrymandering, and the actual gameplay is about drawing districts to further your own political goals. Considering this is exactly what real-life gerrymandering entails, the game has a great theme/mechanic marriage as well as teaching the player something valuable about real life.

Have there been any thematic/mechanic successes in mainstream games? Sure, Johnson argues: sports games, management games a la Sim City, and tactile games like Rock Band. Two of Dan Bunten’s games, MULE and Seven Cities of Gold, were also singled out as great examples.

Johnson pressed that realism wasn’t the key to thematic harmony, however. It can help, but it’s not necessary. Which is a more effective statement about the bombing of Guernica — a photograph of the wreckage, or Picasso’s famous painting? Which feels more right?

Which conveys the feeling of what it’s like to be in a race — Gran Turismo, which focuses on car design and realism, or Mario Kart, which is about unpredictability and constantly shifting player standings?

Theme still matters, though. GTA3 and Crackdown are both fundamentally about open-world stuff, but they have different themes. People look at GTA and complain that it’s indicative of everything that’s wrong with games, and maybe that doesn’t matter, but it’s still true that GTA didn’t HAVE to be about crime. Crackdown wasn’t.

Johnson briefly quoted from Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, where Koster postulates that a Holocaust-skinned version of Tetris could have great mechanics, but also suffer from a repugnant and distancing theme.

But what about Brenda Brathwaite’s Train? It’s another board game about trains where you wanna delvier the most cargo and defeat your opponents, but at the end you find out that your ultimate destination was Auschwitz — that you’re a Nazi trying to get the most Jews to their deaths. And that’s a powerful moment, but does that mean the game is really about the Holocaust if most of its mechanics are still about trains and winning?

If not, can we actually make a true game about the Holocaust, or about evil? If we force players to “play a life,” as Johnson suggested, can we get them to play an evil life?

Going back to The Redistricting Game, Johnson argued that, yes, we can. Gerrymandering is evil — not on a Holocaust scale, but still pretty evil — and the mechanics encourage players to explore and further that evil. The Holocaust itself was actually kind of ironic and self-destructive in that Hitler got the exact opposite of what he wanted in nearly every way, but it might not work to have all of a player’s actions in a game massively backfire just to prove a thematic point.

You may have to do the “Star Trek solution,” where you put everything in the future and then you can talk about it freely — the show couldn’t deal with interractial romance, but it could create green alien women and have Captain Kirk make out with them. 

The Ultima series tackled these sorts of ideas (er, evil and irony, not hot green chicks). In Ultima V, part of the goal of the game is to destroy the underworld, which is full of typical demon Gargoyle dudes. But when you get to Ultima VI, some of the gargoyles appear in your world and start causing problems for humanity. But as the game goes on, you realize that they’re not fundamentally evil characters: they’re just creatures who lived in the underworld who lost everything at the end of Ultima V. The thematic and mechanical answer isn’t to kill the gargoyles, it’s to find a peaceful solution.

So can games actually be about something? Johnson argued that they could, but only if the mechanics deliver on the promise of the theme. Furthermore, the theme only matters if the mechanics enlighten us about it.

At this point, Johnson took audience questions.

One audience member asked why Johnson accused Train thematic disharmony if Train is, in fact, supposed to be about the banality of evil and the fact that the player, even if unthinkingly, is an administrative Nazi who just doesn’t care about anything but his bottom line?

How are those mechanics not enlightening you about the theme?

Soren agreed that those mechanics do sort of enhance the theme, but that he was trying to make a larger point about what a Holocaust game would actually entail. There’s a bit of a problem with a game like Train where the mechanics make you do one thing and then someone arbitrarily says, oh, you’re not really doing that thing. It’s a one-off game. Train is, in Johnson’s words,  “one of those pieces of art like 3 ½ minutes of silence.” Somebody had to make it, but we can’t keep making stuff in that direction.

The next audience member asked, who are you designing the mechanical meaning for? Are you narrowing the subset of players who want to play your game if you want it to be “about” something? Not everyone’s gonna wanna play The Redistricting Game. Johnson said that he’d think of it as a designer with a target audience in mind, though he’d still hope that everyone could play it because it was fun in some way. Johnson was quick to point out that while every game needs to be a little fun to compel people, “compel” shouldn’t just mean “entertain.”

The final audience question concerned game type and formula, and how much things like the number of players or the length of a game impact the theme.

In Civ 4, Johnson said, they needed to add an option to extend the length of the game. Average playthroughs felt too fast, and didn’t feel like you were building epic civilizations. The basic game scenario is an important issue to Johnson, and also leads into the question of singleplayer vs multiplayer. Certain things you can only explore in singleplayer. Multiplayer games are all about beating other people, and singleplayer games aren’t so limited.