knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph.

I guess it's finally time for me to level up.

It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It was then that I made it my mission to put NEWSWEEK's coverage of this growing medium on the map. I did that in print, with cover stories on the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2 and the spread of online gaming. I did it online, with the debut of the blog N'Gai Croal's Level Up. I did it on television, with appearances on MSNBC and CNN. You all watched me push, prod, praise, scold, discuss and debate videogames across multiple media, both mainstream and enthusiast. That's because my editors were prescient enough to let me apply my talents and establish my reach beyond the magazine, from co-blogging with MTV News to writing a monthly column for Edge and more. For this, I say to them all, thank you.

Having achieved all of this, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've accomplished what I set out to do ten years ago. And now it's time for me to take that decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge and do something else with it. After Friday March 6th, my passions will take me beyond the world of journalism. I’ll be wearing many hats on this new journey: videogame design consultant, media strategist, consumer technology reporter, columnist, blogger and, as always, provocateur. You’ll be able to keep track of my various adventures at ngaicroal.com, and feel free to reach out to me via email at ncroalbiz@gmail.com. It’s been a pleasure conversing with all of you, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years to come.

Cheers,

 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision

We know, we know. We said that we wouldn't start posting again until next week. But as a full service blog, when our readers reach out with questions, we do our best to provide the answers. In the comments section of today's post titled "Goodbye To All That: Level Up Issues Its Brief Reflections On 2007 and Looks Ahead to 2008," BigDaddyDW asked:

On an unrelated note, N'Gai, maybe you can comment on the holiday software sales for the Xbox360 and the PS3. In particular, I have seen COD4 on sale for $38 no fewer than five different times between Thanksgiving and New Year's (Circuit City, Best Buy, Target included)...I thought this GOTY [Game of the Year] was selling well--if so, do you think that is related to the numerous sales? Or has it been holding its own at $60?

BigDaddyDW, you're going to have to wait until later this month for the December edition of Monday Morning Quarterback (no, really) for our holiday software sales analysis. But with 2.2 million units in sales in the month of November alone (1.57 million units on Xbox 360, 444,000 units on PS3 and 167,000 units on PC), we find it hard to believe that Call of Duty 4 was being price reduced by Activision because its sales fell off a cliff in December. Nevertheless, we turned to Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter for his thoughts. Here's what he had to say:

We were curious to see how Level Up's readership would respond to Darren Pai's November 5th guest post on the wants and needs of what we termed the 'hardcasual' gamer. As Pai put it in his original email to us:

It seems that games for "hardcore" gamers make the assumption that you have large blocks of time to sit in front of a console. So-called "casual" games can be entertaining for short periods of time, but that's not why I play video games. I want the presentation, the action, the experience of a "big" game. Gamers like myself don't want casual games, we want that hardcore gaming experience redesigned to reflect the way we live.

Pai then went on to offer a list of complaints and possible solutions. We obviously can't share any of our correspondence or conversations with industry figures on this topic, but we do know that at least two top executives at major publishers forwarded Pai's post to people they felt should consider his suggestions. As for our readership, the response was varied. Some, like full-time law student Jomolungma, were sympathetic, writing:

While I enjoy my DS games like Picross, and play Scrabble and WordJong on the PC, I really get the most enjoyment out of the hardcore FPS action games I fell in love with in and after college, games like Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake and Half-Life and Rainbow Six. In order to get that same kind of enjoyable gaming experience in small chunks of time I absolutely must play games that allow for unlimited quicksaves (not unlimited slots, just unlimited number of times you can hit save). Most recently I got a tremendous thrill out of Bioshock and the Orange Box. Those games allowed me to play at my pace and provided really short intense moments that I could enjoy at my own pace. I was also able to complete them in a relatively short time because the story line was not 40 hours long.

To read this installment of "It Came From the Comments" in its entirety, click on the link below.

We apologize for our absence from the comments section last week. Rest assured, we do read each and every one of your remarks, but time simply got away from us over the past several days. In today's edition of "It Came From the Comments," we ponder what StolenName said last week in response to our post titled "The Clive Barker Interview, Part III." He wrote:

I'm 22 at the moment and when I read these interviews I actually feel younger than I am, call it lack of experience, but from what I can glean from your interviews with Barker and the media at large, it seems like critics, whether of art, film or novel, are close minded or myopic. Couldn't their rejection of media like games and music be partly because they have no way of understanding the mixed media, as games are a marriage of visual, audio, writing and player interaction, and actually finding a way to understand that within their on learned discourse?

And also, N'Gai, do you believe that as younger gamers grow older and begin to move into the industry (as I'm trying!) and the older critics move on, that the perception of games as art / not art or for adults (as well as children) will shift? Or is there something about games in particular that forces them to remain an under-appreciated artistic medium by the general public?

To which we replied:

StolenName, every critic has assumptions, biases, prejudices, dogmas and blind spots, all of which add up to what some might call myopia and others might call personal taste. The challenge is for we critics to recognize the baggage that we bring to the table and to constantly engage it--publicly, whenever possible--so that our readers can see us working through our thought processes.

As you correctly point out, games present a particular challenge to older critics because while many older media only require the intended audience to have eyes and/or ears, videogames add a mechanical component that necessitates varying degrees of skill. I'm fond of saying that we "see" games with our hands; unfortunately, this means that a number of people who sit in positions of influence and authority over videogames--parents, politicians, protesters, even some publishers--are for all intents and purposes blind to the medium.

As for whether or not demographics alone can solve the art/not art conundrum surrounding videogames, I don't believe that that alone will be sufficient. First, there are many people who make videogames who don't believe that games are art--Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and Konami's Hideo Kojima among them--and the same is true of a lot of people who play games. Second, those of us who do believe that videogames are art are still struggling to understand and articulate the nature of that artistry. If I had to predict, I would say that the process by which videogames may become widely accepted as art will be both long and incremental, and its success is not guaranteed.

We're pleased as punch to have comments finally working here on Level Up, and we intend to dip into the boards occasionally to mix it up with our vocal minority. But sometimes, as you'll see in a moment, a poster's statement or our response may warrant being elevated to post status so that it can be shared with a broader audience. This we will do under the new rubric "It Came From the Comments."

In response to yesterday's post titled "Objection! A Look at Far Cry 2 Creative Director Clint Hocking's Critique of BioShock," poster harrison25 praised BioShock for its graphics and its style, but decried its linearity and lack of meaningful challenge, saying in part:

it's hard to be immersed in a world when you constantly feel forced in different directions... ultimately no matter what the player wants to do, the player is forced to continue killing every living creature in every environment with the possible exceptions of the little sisters.

And:

I realize the goal was to create a living, breathing ecosystem that kept on existing even if you died, (fantastic) without some kind of penalty the entire game becomes trivial...

To which we replied:

harrison25, I hear your complaints. I think 2K Boston/Australia did a fairly convincing job of establishing the reasons why Rapture is so hostile. But you're correct to question why fight or flight is still our only option in such a well-realized world. As disappointing as it may be, the fact is that 3-D action-adventure games remain, for the most part, not very good at providing a broad array of options besides fight or flight. Like you, I found myself wondering what it would have been like to play a citizen of Rapture as it was on the brink of collapse, rather than an outsider who comes in after it's already fallen apart. We'll never know, but I see BioShock's enemy ecosystem and its handling of the Little Sister Dilemma as a pretty big baby step towards the kind of complexity that you're looking for.

As for the way that the game handled player death, I too had mixed feelings about it, but I ultimately backed the developers' decision because it made it possible for me to finish the game without devoting another 10+ hours to getting past any particularly tough spots. That said, I think they should have offered the option to turn off the Vita-Chambers and switch to checkpoint saves for gamers like you who wanted a tougher experience. Halo 3, with its Easter egg "skulls" that allow you to adjust the difficulty in interesting ways beyond its four standard settings (Easy, Normal, Heroic and Legendary), points the way towards a future in which players will be able to tailor any videogame to deliver precisely the kind of challenge they're looking to experience.

How do other readers feel about game difficulty and save systems? Are videogames becoming too easy? Or do you welcome developers who structure their games in such a way that you're more likely to complete them rather than get irrevocably stuck? Let us know what you think in the comments below.