Recently in Video Games Category

Over at the C3 blog, I've just posted a quick write-up (with photos!) of Bruce Sterling's excellent keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference. You can find the entry under the title Metafun for Metaplayers.

Someday, when I have an entry in the IMDB, it will include something like:

Oozerts (2008) (VG) (voice: English version) .... Scoop McGoop

Yes, it's true. I have made my voice acting debut as an irascible Irish monster with a jetpack. And it was awesome.

David Hayter, I'm coming for you.

For some reason, I have never been the sort to preorder games. No, let me start that again – for one of a number of possible reasons, I have never been the sort to preorder games. I blame my parents, and especially my Mom, for instilling in me two very fundamental psychology quirks. First is a deep-seated love of a good bargain, which Mom always blames on the Scottish blood coursing through the Alexander veins. Preordering a game galls me in some way, largely because it involves putting down money and walking away with no guarantee that when the games come in, I'll actually get one. Although you'd think that Gamestop would be required to honor all reservations on release day, you'd be wrong. Oho, would you be wrong. Asshats. It's the same reason that airlines overbooking flights gets me right in the breadbasket – although I understand the economics of air travel are tenuous at best, and I understand that overbooking flights permits the possibility of refunded tickets if one's plans suddenly change, the idea that I bought a ticket for this plane, at this time, and showing up and not having a seat after all pisses me off about as badly as if I went to the grocery store, bought a big box of cereal and then, when I went to pour myself a bowl the next morning, found that the box was empty. What!?

The second reason is an even deeper-seated love of the chase, which I blame both of my parents for. When I was a kid we'd spend hours scouring through antique shops or flea markets or car shows looking for the parts Dad needed for an old car he was fixing up, or for a piece of furniture that Mom needed to finish redecorating a room, and so on. With kid-me, that hunting pattern manifested itself in action figures; with adult-me, it manifests itself primarily in books, games, clothes, and, well, action figures. Unfortunately, the big difference between my collecting patterns and my parents' is that my parents' hunts usually wound up being worth more money than they sank into it, and mine usually lead to little more than a bigger U-Haul truck being required the next time I move. Still, the thrill of the chase is definitely there.

I should note that now that my folks are both retired, Dad tends to do most of his hunting on eBay and Mom gravitates towards garage sales. You wouldn't believe the roomfuls of knickknacks and tchotchkes that she's collected from hundreds of garage sales over the last couple of years, but I suspect that the real reason why she does it, and partly the reason why my Dad still frequents car shows, is the social aspect of things. This morning I was reminded that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I've been trying halfheartedly to track down a copy of Wii Fit ever since it was released. Being naturally heavyset is strike one, having settled into a happy domestic arrangement with Laura is strike two, and living a primarily sedentary existence working on computers both at home and at the office is strike three – I'm out, baby, especially my waistline, which is way, way out. Laura and I hit the mall to pick up some shorts for our upcoming Greece trip and damn, that was not a lot of fun. Ordinarily I enjoy clothes shopping, but seeing myself in those mirrors in my current rotund state was not pretty. While plenty of storytellers and academics are comfortably, um, well-rounded, I definitely need to start attempting to resemble Michael Chabon more than Warren Ellis. Hence the interest in Wii Fit.

Last weekend, I got snaked out of the very last copy at my local Best Buy, so this weekend I decided to wake up early and get in when the store opened. This was made notably easier by it being hotter than blazes in Boston last night, the humid, heavy kind of hot that turns a nice, pleasant night's sleep into eight sweaty, muggy hours of flopping about on the bed like an asphyxiating carp, and by our black cat Albus' deciding that 7:15 AM was a great time to start throwing up in the kitchen. Lately he's been yarfing on the floor a couple of times a week, which I blame on our recent acquisition of ferns for the sunroom (and his acquisition of a taste for devouring them), but a few months ago Albus had a nasty session when he was throwing up blood, so you can't blame me for being paranoid every time I hear him start making that bizarre oilcan-pumping noise that cats apparently make when they're about to toss their cookies. Up I got, and up I stayed, and a good thing I did, too – when I went to take my morning 'jog' around the Internet, I discovered that this morning's Best Buy flyer included not only promises of Wii Fit in stock at opening today, but also Wiis themselves. I tossed on some clothes and headed into the store a little early; the store opened at 10, so I arrived about 9:40, and was dismayed to find two things: that a line was already formed, and that it was already hotter than Satan's ass on a particularly fiery day.

Mercifully the line was only about 12 people or so; while the article I'd read said that they were only guaranteed to have about 10 copies per store in stock, I decided to stick around anyway. Less than a minute after I joined the line, my parents' genes kicked in and I struck up a conversation with the nice Asian couple ahead of me in line. We chatted amiably in somewhat simplified English for a couple of minutes, and then came the next wave of people. Immediately behind me came another nice couple, 2-year old in arms, and the father was wearing an Ohio State t-shirt. "Go Bucks," I said to him, and we were off to the races.

We were joined by a guy about my age from Connecticut, who was really just in line for a Wii – the couple with the kid had bought their Wii at Costco just a few days ago and now the mother was keenly seeking out a copy of Wii Fit. I'm happy to report that all of us got what we came for – despite the line swelling up to probably over a hundred people (!) before the doors opened, the Best Buy people handled things with remarkable aplomb; instead of having us tear through the store like madmen, they funneled the entire line into the registers, and each of the four to six registers they had open had a stack of Wiis and Wii Fit behind the counter. A customer got the head of the line, was directed to a register, forked over their credit cards, were handed their merchandise, and were happily shooed out the door. A cart of the most popular Wii games and accessories was set up nearby so people could be handed whatever else they might want in an exponentially more expensive version of the candy bars and magazines impulse racks at the front of your local Target, and they had blue-shirted runners at the ready to scurry off and snag anything else you might want for your new system as well. They even graciously handled the one poor soul who had stood in the line with the rest of us not for a video game but just to buy an air conditioner – he brought his A/C unit up to the front and one of the guys there quickly ushered him to either an otherwise closed register or off to customer service, depending on what payment method he wanted to use. Given my previously on-the-fence impression of Best Buy, I was impressed.

I stopped off at the Target next door before heading home to pick up some drinks, and then rushed home with my prize in the trunk. The game sets up quickly enough and even includes its own batteries, which was a nice touch. I chose which avatar I wanted to represent myself, and then took a deep breath and went through the orientation progress, which includes weighing myself and getting a report on both my BMI and what it calls my 'Wii Fit age'.

Ouch.

To be fair, I was pleasantly surprised by one thing – although I definitely tipped the scales (yes, my fat ass was classified as 'obese') my Wii Fit age was actually better than I thought – although I'm now about 30.5, the game pegged me at 31. Which is to say that although I may be heavy, I'm definitely not alone for my age. I brightened at that, and then proceeded to spend half an hour doing aerobics and balancing exercises before deciding that the combination of hot weather (it's currently 88 with a predicted high of 94) and my total couch potatohood meant that I oughta take a break for a while. Sweating more than I'd like to admit, I trundled off to the office to write up this essay, but I did so with a smile – although it hurt to watch my Mii plump up like the Michelin Man after it took my readings, I'm also happy to see that the game somewhat restricts the feasibility of the goals it allows you to set. I myself am hoping to drop a sizable amount of weight and get back down to at least my undergrad weight by next year, which the game wouldn't allow me to set as my goal, but it would allow me to enter in something it deemed more reasonable. I expect it will allow me to revisit that goal in three months and move the target further down then, but knowing that the game wouldn't let me say "OMG I'M GOING TO DROP FIFTY POUNDS IN THREE MONTHS" made me feel like it had my back, somehow. The games it offers are fun and breezy, the jogging game offers some pretty scenery (although I desperately hope Nintendo will pony up some additional landscapes via downloadable content updates) and its tracking system seems like it will be encouraging to use. We'll see how it goes – I'll use it for about a week and then post another update with my progress.

One final note – I'm just waiting for someone to hack the Wii Balance Board to work with my computer. Some clever souls have already figured out how to use the Board to surf Google Earth, but I'd love to see it used as a simple web-connected scale. Given the massive numbers of weight loss journal-keeping applications out there, you'd think that being able to hook up a Wii Balance Board to a simple database would be child's play. Maybe I'll see if anyone around the lab has any ideas. For now, I'm going to go hammer on some projects for a couple of hours and then maybe take another long jog around the island. I can see how this game might be addictive. Wish me luck!

In today's Game Set Watch, movie and screenwriter Justin Marks takes the game industry to task for calling the story in Grand Theft Auto IV "Oscar-worthy" and wonders if gameplay as narrative is the answer:

The adventure of Niko Bellic, complete with its comic assortment of ethnic cliches, is pretty much on par with the rest of the franchise's self-conscious worship of movie archetypes and genre tropes. And there's nothing wrong with that. Rockstar has made clear that's all they've ever wanted to do, and they've done a damn fine job at that (although I do miss some of that charming humor from Vice City and San Andreas).

The problem here is not the quality of the story, but the manner in which it is incorporated into the gameplay. After skipping over countless cut scenes so I could get to the action, I slowly began to regard plot in GTA IV as being something akin to the Clinton marriage: why do they bother with the charade? Is there anyone in this country who honestly thinks these two people still sleep in the same bed?

After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory -- a needless, comparatively inferior element? More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?

I found myself nodding in agreement at the start, but then wincing at some old, overworn ideas as his essay continues. By the time the essay starts to near the end, Marks is returning to the same old obvious claims that many game writers wind up making:

We need to stop thinking about story as a device to make us care about the gameplay (it doesn't), and start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself (thus, making us care). Now that the technology has finally reached a breaking point, a place where we can genuinely craft sophisticated worlds, we have to understand that plot is not forced upon those worlds artificially, but grown from our interactions within their environments.

Story design needs to be less checkpoint-focused and more focused on implementing a meta structure that makes us believe we are shaping events with our choices, even if these choices have already been made for us.

The "story on rails" has now been exposed. Game engines are strong enough that we can see the seams in the narrative fabric. It's no longer acceptable that we can take our girlfriend on a date and never once have her mention the fact that we're carrying a missile launcher by our side. We need to believe our actions have consequences within the virtual universe and that the experiences we are living are wholly unique, even if they aren't.

This is all very, very old news. His assertions and observations are fair enough, except that like all generalizations, when extended out to encompass everything it falters and fails. The truth of the matter is that in some games, having the interactive bits lead to stories on rails works very well. His timing for this assertion is especially unfortunate given the relatively recent rumors that Metal Gear Solid 4 will have 90-minute cutscenes. I'd be willing to bet that the people who have stuck by Hideo Kojima so far are more than happy to sit back and watch as his "story on rails" unfolds – which illustrates my contention that the issue isn't with stories on rails, it's with bad stories on rails.

I for one love a great story on rails, as evidenced by the number of Final Fantasy games on my shelf, but I have little to no patience with bad stories on rails, which is why after playing Lost Odyssey for a couple of hours I flatly lost interest. The game had some interesting premises, to be sure, but it squandered them way too quickly. Lately I've been anxiously awaiting MGS4 even though I haven't played through the first three, opting instead to catch up through the excellent video retrospective series being offered up by GameTrailers. It's cheaper, sure, but more to the point it takes up much less time – although I never use Cliffs Notes for books and still largely resist using hintbooks for games, when presented with the option to get caught up on the Meta Gear story through these summaries instead of playing through 100-plus hours of gameplay, the decision was an unfortunate no-brainer. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have that kind of time.

I still think that the best way to handle interactive narrative in games is to treat it like a series of rubber bands strung between nails – the key plot points are fixed (what Marks refers to as 'checkpoints') but the manner by which you arrive at those points is flexible. This is the philosophy you often find deployed in games with lots of side quests or mini games – they improve the quality and the duration of the game, but they still remain optional. I'm not a big fan of sandbox games for many of the same reasons cited by Marks, but I remain skeptical that the Crawfordesque, Holodeck-esque model that he's wishing for will ever be a realistic scenario.

What I want is the opposite of Marks' prescription: I think game writers should write better stories and work with the game designers to develop better game mechanics to mesh with the narratives. Despite the frequent claim (that Marks himself makes near the end) that "the game industry is not the interactive little brother of cinema", I still kind myself marveling at how easily these types of claims map onto criticisms of film. People that claim that narratives in games should take a backseat to gameplay strike me as characters that claim that narratives in film should take a backseat to cinematography. It's a short-sighted, tunnel-vision type of claim – because X is what media form Y does uniquely and independently, then all instances of media form Y should focus almost exclusively on X. It's a bad model and a rotten philosophy: many films do okay with an iffy story and spectacular cinematography, and many films do okay with an amazing story and mediocre cinematography. It's the ones that do both brilliantly that truly prove themselves memorable.

I think that the proper first step is to determine what kind of experience you're trying to produce when everything is said and done. This will allow you to start deciding what type of narrative experience or gameplay experience is best for what you're trying to create, and then to develop an appropriately matching narrative or gameplay right along with it in an organic, intelligent fashion. Let the ratio of gameplay to narrative – and the ratio of interactivity to 'rails' – be determined not by your media type but by the type of experience you're trying to create. Just like with narrative and cinematography in films, an ideal blend of gameplay and narrative is the holy grail – but what that ideal blend happens to be depends wholly on what your desired end experience happens to be. There's room enough in an entire media type for a wide range of experiences and ratios. Just because you don't happen to like games with stories on rails doesn't mean that they shouldn't exist. I think that to assert, as Marks does, that we should "stop writing high-minded stories. Start writing games. And let the stories grow from them", is way too one-sided and, frankly, way too simple-minded.

(Update: Kojima Productions has since issued a correction to the rumors, stating that there are no 90-minute cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. Still, I think my original argument stands – MGS is a solid (no pun intended) example of a linear story that unfolds through interactions with the player, and since it has enough fans to bring Amazon.com crashing to its knees when it goes on presale, well, then, I still say Marks' insistence on Western-style nonlinear narratives is overreaching at best.)

Perhaps it's cheating to watch the closing credits to a game before I've beaten it myself, but when Uncle Warren links to it, I consider it fair game. The song is indeed quite cool, with traces of The Murmurs to it. Anybody out there remember The Murmurs? 90s girl rockers? "You Suck"? Anybody?

Oh what the hey, if we're gonna blog, let's blog – especially since this is, at least sorta, work-related: game academic Ian Bogost was last night's guest on The Colbert Report. Not only that, but Bogost did a damn fine job of it too, presenting an intelligent, well-phrased description of the Serious Games movement while not making them sound too boring, which, as Colbert himself picked up on, is all too often the case. Nicely done, sir.

Lately I've been thinking a great deal about game design, although in a different style than some of my game designer friends. I now have a number friends working in the games industry – Alec Austin, a friend of mine from C3, is going to be a game designer for Activision this fall; Chris Casiano is graduating from MIT as a CMS major and is heading to Austin to work for Midway; Kristina Drzaic, one of my cohorts, is heading to Australia to work in the games industry this fall; David Edery, a cofounder of the C3 group, is now working for the Xbox Live Arcade group in Seattle; Nick Hunter, who graduated from MIT last year, is now working as a producer at EA; Kent Quirk is the founder of Cognitoy here in Boston and is working on games for change; Dan Roy, one of my cohorts at CMS, is heading to San Francisco to work on an edutainment game after graduation; Chris Weaver is a cofounder of Bethesda Softworks and served on my thesis committee. This list doesn't even include Philip Tan, Peter Rausch, Scot Osterweil, Alice Robison, Doris Rusch, Ravi Puroshotma, Ben Decker, or a bunch of other folks. Tons of gamemakers, tons of game players, and tons of people thinking about games. I am proud to be one of them, although my own interests are a little different from these guys.

Each of these folks have noted strengths and interests – Dan's huge on edutainment games, Alice and Doris are looking at games in academia, Peter's looking at games and philosophy, and Alec's fascinated by the rule systems that make up the underlying architecture of game mechanics themselves. Me, I'm thinking about interactive narratives and how to emphasize design in game design.

I'm fascinated by the aesthetics and story of games. I'm fascinated by the moods created by games like Shadow of the Colossus and some parts of World of WarCraft. I'm wondering where the high design games are, about where the sense of style in games will come from, where the sense of auteurship comes from and, all too often, goes. I'm interested in the Shigeru Miyamotos, the Fumito Uedas, and so on. I'm interested in using the systems for alternative uses, such as digital poetry. I'm interested in the rise of indie gaming on widespread console systems with new initiatives like XNA. I want to know what happens when you make a game that feels like an issue of Vanity Fair, or what happens when you shift the emphasis in the game away from the interactivity and more towards immersion in a sensual experience.

I have a theory that says that all of these people who hoot and holler about how interactivity is the be-all and end-all of these new media forms need to go back and re-examine their media history. When television first appeared, its primary use was 'remote viewing', and it was only later that innovators began using it to broadcast pre-recorded narrative entertainment. The Internet was first developed as a military application for communications and backups; look at how far it's grown past those initial models. I suspect that the games industry is headed for a similar course of development, if the infrastructure can be ironed out. The current market system for games is so ludicrously broken that I think only the digital download path can really offer the degree of continued commercial accessibility that the game industry requires to continue to grow.

I'm curious to see where all of this takes us, and where it's all going for the next couple of years. Suffice it to say that I'm in the right place at the right time for this whole thing – I'll post more about this once the ink dries, but I'll have something to announce here soon enough. Stay tuned!

I'm sure that this is going to be just the first part of a long-runnng series of ruminations on the art of interactive narrative, hence the tacked on 'part I' above. Still, this is something I've been thinking about for a long time, now more than ever.

In recent years, there's been a quite heated debate going on – in academic cricles, at least – between narratologists and ludologists. Narratology in this sense is different from the Barthes-Genette-Kristeva type of structuralist narratology; here it simply means that story is of the utmost importance. Ludologists, on the other hand, argue that the play's the thing, so to speak. I've spoken to die-hard zealots in each camp and I've found both sides to be equally myopic. I think that when we say "video games," we need to have in mind something as general as "books" or "films". A narratologist might assert that story is a critical component to video games, but how silly is it to assert that story is a critical component to books? How, then, to explain economics textbooks, or books of poetry, or books of photographs? A ludologist might argue that it's the interactivity that takes point of pride, because that is what video games do that no other medium can, but saying so would be like chastising intimate character-driven cinematic dramas because they don't take full advantage of the giant screen and surround sound environment that only movies can offer. (Well, fine – home theaters can now afford the same luxuries to standard TV fare, but I digress.)

Chris Bateman recently posted a piece to his blog called "The Nine Basic Players (Maybe)", in which he describes – surprise, surprise – nine basic classes into which players might fall. I applaud the exercise, but if we were to attempt to classify all readers into nine categories, or all filmgoers into nine categories, I would find myself equally skeptical. In truth, people pick up books or watch movies for a myriad of different reasons, and trying to whittle those reasons down into narrow categories feels overly constrictive. Academia is especially guilty of trying to slap these kinds of restrictions onto the games universe because as a media, games are new. Games are sexy. We want to map out games with our labels and terms, drive flags into the field and claim new models and concepts for our own, make names for ourselves and mark our territories. That's what academics do; it's a side effect of the whole "publish or perish" phenomenon. We have to make names for ourselves. Come to think of it, maybe this isn't something that just academics do... But again, I digress.

I feel that story is extremely important to games as a form in general, and especially so to the subset of games that I myself find particularly interesting. Of Bateman's nine classes, I'm a definition Wanderer. Story's my thing, as is purely exploring the wide world. I get annoyed when games like World of Warcraft place artificial constraints on my ability to see what's over the next hill, and I thoroughly enjoy little things like the way the stars come out at night in Azeroth. I'm impressed by design, by character, by narrative, by plot. I am also utterly willling to concede the ability to shape the direction of a plot if I'm assured that the person to whom I'm surrendering that control will tell me a good story. Interactivity is important, yes, but I also feel that the industry is in danger of swinging too far into the sandbox camp, swinging too far away from providing storytellers with the control to carefully plot out and develop their stories.

Similarly, I feel that the recent rash of gamemakers bemoaning the full-motion video clip between gameplay 'chapters' is equally overblown; dogmatically insisting that the verbal exchanges take place using the game's own engine seems to me to unnecesarily concede the gamemaker's right to cinematography. And yes, I know many of these same characters will rant and roar about using cinematic terminology to discuss something that is not, in fact, cinema – but I also subscribe to the McLuhanian concept that each new media contains that which came before; text contains speech, drama contains text, radio contains drama, and so on. We should not willfully ignore the volumes of learning that we've acquired while developing film, but pick and choose from the wealth of information they provide. I think we should use cinematography in games, making as many frames and sprites into art as possible.

I'll return to this topic soon, but I'd like to leave with a quick rumination on Bioshock and Lost Planet – there's something in me that reacts brilliantly to both of these games, even though my experience with each has been limited. The worlds in which they're set appear to be rich and robust, with a look all their own. What is it that excites me about them, then? Is it the thrill of exploration and discovery? Is it the hope for a fantastic story? Is it the desire to see more of the stunning artwork that's previewed in the blogs or zines?

My answer is 'yes' to all three of these things. I just haven't fully fleshed out why.

Anyway, I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. There's tons yet to say on this topic, so stay tuned for part II.

I've noticed that for some reason things in my life tend to conclude in waves, which I call "finishing seasons". I'm definitely in a big one right now, what with nearing the completion of my master's in CMS at MIT, but what has me jazzed this morning is my final victory in a fight I've been waging since last December – how to get an Xbox 360 and its DVD-HD drive to play nicely with an Apple Cinema Display. It's been a long, hard battle, but friends, it was worth it.

The Backstory

As some of you may know, I've been doing some research into storytelling in games. When Microsoft announced their XNA initiative, I got all excited because lowering the bar for game development and market entry increases the likelihood that new types of games will be created by new types of gamemakers. For guys like me who prefer games with really solid stories, XNA theoretically opens the door to storytellers that might not otherwise get into game development. Like, well, me.

So, last December I went out and bought myself an Xbox 360, and while I was at it I splurged and bought the DVD-HD drive. I have a massive Apple-based workstation in my office with a 23" Apple Cinema Display, so I figured I'd hook it up to that and start messing with XNA when I found some time. (I also live with three other people, with our TiVo, PS2, original Xbox and Wii hooked up to one non-HD TV, so I wanted to decrease the amount of fighting over the living room.)

My first plan was to just buy the Xbox VGA cable, hook it up to a Belkin VGA-to-DVI adapter and be done with it. I picked up the parts, brought them home, put 'em together and fired it up. No picture. At first I thought I might have a dead Xbox, but no – it turns out that the core and premium Xboxes both output analog signals, even over their HD cables. An Apple Cinema Display, however, requires a digital signal. So, even if you used the aforementioned VGA-to-DVI adapter, like I did, it doesn't work because it doesn't convert the signal from analog to digital. (For more information, Google 'DVI-I' and 'DVI-D'. An Apple Cinema Display only accepts DVI-D.)

My second plan, then, was to use an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. The EyeTV Hybrid is a fairly humble device, but it's also elegant in its own way. Don't be confused by its list of features – while the EyeTV Hybrid does support both video game consoles and digital signals, it only accepts over-the-air HD television broadcasts and input from consoles via a coaxial cable or an S-Video cable. Its elegance comes from managing its input purely in software: to play the Xbox, I just fired up the Elgato TV application, turned on the Xbox, set the Elgato software to play in full-screen and both games and DVD-HD playback worked fairly well. As advertised, the Elgato system has virtually no latency making games definitely playable, and it also works fairly well for watching TV on your Mac. For the price, it's a decent solution.

The trouble with this system is the 'weakest link' flaw. In this case, it was the cabling. There's no way to get a HD signal out of the Xbox and into the Mac through an EyeTV Hybrid, and the SD signal displayed on a Cinema Display is less than pristine. Some games are dark and murky (Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a seriously brooding, almost Gothic experience when played this way) and while they're playable and fun, it's not an optimal experience. A DVD-HD movie watched in this fashion offers very little improvement over a regular DVD played in Apple's own movie player, if any at all. The additional interface widgets are nice, but what I really wanted was to be able to watch movies in HD on my HD monitor. I often work on my laptop while playing a movie in the background, and despite the divided-attention factor I'm enough of a media snob to really notice the quality drop when watching standard DVDs on an HD display. I was also irked by Apple's advertising the 23" as a 'Cinema Display HD', when Apple's lack of hardware support for commercial DVD-HD or Blu-Ray movie playback, coupled with the lack of HDCP support in this model and the lack of alternative video-in ports like those offered in comparable (and cheaper) DELL displays, meant that I couldn't actually display any HD cinema. This was definitely a case of 'the early Christians get the best lions', since I bought my rig in 2004, but I was still reluctant to replace my display to make this work.

Plan three, then, revolved around a specialty company from Woodland Hills, California. At MacWorld San Francisco in January of 2006, Gefen demoed their HDMate Scaler, a gadget about the size of a Mac mini that would serve as a combination upscaler and switch. An upscaler does precisely what the Apple Cinema Display needs – takes an analog signal and converts it to digital. The switch function enables users to plug in two component sources and one DVI source, output them all to one DVI display, and switch between them using an included remote control. The HDMate was stuck in development hell for over a year – in a burst of frustration, I even called the product 'vaporware' on their forums once, an accusation I now sheepishly retract – but they finally began shipping the devices this month.

The verdict? It was worth the wait, and the third time's the charm.

The Pictures

It's true that the Gefen HDMate is over twice as expensive as the EyeTV Hybrid, but the value difference becomes apparent when you compare the resulting images. The following pictures were all taken indoors with a Canon Digital Rebel, but they're a fairly accurate representation. Click each photo for a high-res version. (And yes, my gamertag is Dreamsbay – it's the name of my consulting company from my pre-MIT days. Say hello if you see me online.)

Xbox Live Logo – EyeTV Hybrid

Xbox Live Logo – Gefen HDMate

Gamertag – EyeTV Hybrid

Gamertag – Gefen HDMate

Marvel Ultimate Alliance – EyeTV Hybrid

Marvel Ultimate Alliance – Gefen HDMate

Marvel Ultimate Alliance Detail – EyeTV Hybrid

Marvel Ultimate Alliance Detail – Gefen HDMate

Where the difference really becomes apparent, however, is in the details on DVD-HD. As far as I know, the combination of an Xbox 360, an Xbox 360 DVD-HD drive and a Gefen HDMate is currently the only way to play commercial DVD-HD movies in high quality on an Apple Cinema Display. The Gefen HDMate is HDCP compliant, but the HDCP signal is only sent over digital cables, like the HDMI cable on the Xbox 360 Elite. I don't know what the HDCP status will be on the Elite, but early reports are that PS3s hooked up via HDMI to an HDMate (using an HDMI-to-DVI adapter) downsample Blu-Ray signals to 1080i – the real high-end signal you're looking for on this kind of a display is 1080p. I expect the Elite may do something similar.

That said, when an Xbox 360 and Xbox DVD-HD drive are hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display via component cables through the HDMate, the quality is jaw-dropping:

Serenity DVD-HD Logo – EyeTV Hybrid

Serenity DVD-HD Logo – Gefen HDMate

DVD-HD Logo – EyeTV Hybrid

DVD-HD Logo – Gefen HDMate

The Conclusion

Obviously, the quality of the display differs from disc to disc, but last night I watched Sahara in HD on my Apple Cinema Display and it was simply breathtaking. After four months of research, several false starts and way too much money thrown at the problem, I finally have the setup I set out to build. I can also finally understand why the cinema chains are running scared – for the first time I really honestly might prefer watching movies at home rather than in the cineplex. Mac fans, Xbox fans, HD fans – while this setup doesn't come cheap, and there's always the chance that something might yet screw it up, it is certainly something to behold.

And now, if you'll excuse me, my Xbox is calling.

(Note: I've closed comments on this entry to avoid the flood of spambots and more die-hard enthusiasts pointing out how lame I am. To discuss this post, please visit its home on the Gefen forums at http://forum.gefen.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2418. Thanks!)

The eagle-eyed among you my have noticed a couple of strange inclusions on my links list from a few days ago. "Why would Geoff suddenly be interested in conflict diamonds?" No, I'm not on a DiCaprio kick. About two weeks ago I was chatting with Philip Tan in the CMS office, and he mentioned the 2007 Boston Game Jam, an upcoming event that was sort of like the 48 Hour Film Challenge, only for video games. As it turned out, my friend Dan Roy was participating in it, and he had an idea for a game that was all about conflict diamonds.

Last weekend Dan and I joined forces – Dan doing the programming and game design and me doing the art – and the output was Conflict Diamond, a 'games for change' project that demonstrates that while it may be easier to sell genuiune diamonds, synthetic diamonds have a whole lot less blood on them. Genuine diamonds are often mined by the victims of wars and sold to support the regimes of their oppressors, hence the name 'conflict diamonds'. In our game, you choose one of two salesmen in a jewelry shop ('Carbontown Jewelers', in a throwaway joke). The elderly George is ethical and will only sell synthetic diamonds, while the diabolical Damien will happily sells only genuine diamonds. We didn't get as far into the development of the game as we would have liked, but it's definitely playable, and so now we're trying to figure out what we want to do next with it. I'm tickled with the avatars (mostly), but if we do anything else with it the background art still needs a lot of work. It's easy to improve the hand-drawn look of avatars by shrinking them down (which smoothes out the rough lines), but hand-drawn background art looks worse because it's displayed at more of a 1:1 ratio. Ah, well – not too shabby for only 36 hours or so.

In the meantime, the event picked up some coverage in Gamasutra, and the games themselves can be seen on the official event site at bostongamejam.com.

One way or the other, I've got another game under my belt – and one for a good cause, no less. Very cool.