Earlier this year, the US Copyright Group filed a lawsuit against 4,577 people it accused of pirating the movie Far Cry, a big screen adaptation of a 2004 PC shooter. In December, things aren't going so well.

A District Court judge has ordered that the case can only apply to defendants who lived in the same district the suit was filed in. This leaves only 140 accused pirates left in the District of Columbia to face the music.

That's not only good news to the 4,437 people who are off the hook, but also thousands of other Americans currently facing similar action from other copyright organisations, as the same precedent will now apply to their cases as well.

As for the 140 still stuck on the case, hopefully they get off. Not because we advocate piracy here, but because surely watching Far Cry was punishment enough.

US Copyright Group Drops Cases Against Thousands of BitTorrent Users [TorrentFreak]

Hot off his work in high-profile action feature The Expendables, Nordic thespian Dolph Lundgren will be working with, that's right, Uwe Boll.

Uwe Boll is noted for adapting video games like Far Cry and Alone in the Dark into flicks, and his Lundgren vehicle is no exception. The two will be teaming up for In the Name of the King 2, a sequel to the game-based 2008 Dungeon Siege film Boll made with Jason Statham and Leelee Sobieski. It begins shooting early next year in Canada.

"I play an ex-middle ages war veteran who gets fucked up but he gets pulled into some sort of medieval power struggle, kind of gets a bit of a redemption for all his pains in service," Lundgren said in a recent radio interview. "It's a role I just wanted to play."

The performer, who rocketed to fame with his role in Rocky IV, said he enjoys flexing his "acting chops" and he's going to get ready for The Expendables 2.

According to Boll, Lundgren's character is attacked one night by ninjas in his house and falls through a vortex back in time. He finds himself in Ehb, where the first movie was set, fifty years after the events of the earlier film. "Jason Statham and everybody who was in the first part, got wiped out," the director added.

"They say he was basically sent into the future, he's the son of Jason Statham, and he was sent into the future, brought up in an orphanage, because the parents felt that they would all die," he said. "So he is basically the last survivor of the kingdom of Ehb so he should bring the kingdom back in charge."

Boll gets a lot of crap from folks for his flicks, but you got to hand it to him: he continues to make movie after movie that run the gamut of disturbing to just plain odd. And he keeps getting name talent to work with him, so he must be doing something right.

Dolph Lundgren signs for In The Name of the King 2 [Bloginity.com via Big Download via Joystiq] [Pic]

Uwe Boll, the German filmmaker best known for his film versions of video games, is helming two movies about World War II. Both films were shot back-to-back. One is based on a video game and features zombie Nazis. The other?

The other is based on history and features things far worse.

The first flick, BloodRayne: The Third Reich, sounds like typical Boll fare — a low budget cinematic adaptation of a video game. Boll has said from the beginning that he is planning to do the BloodRayne movies, based on the video games, as a trilogy and that the third one will end in the Second World War.

Previously, Boll has helmed movie versions of Alone in the Dark, Far Cry and Postal.

His second film is titled Auschwitz and is set against the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The recently released trailer shows Uwe Boll dressed as a Nazi as he leans against a gas chamber. Inside, men and women, young and old, perish.

The trailer is explicit and disturbing. It shows horrors like teeth being pulled from a dead body and a little boy being incinerated. In short, it festers in the nightmare that was the Holocaust. [Note: the trailer is not work safe.]

"I made the movie because there is not one movie made what shows the Holocaust really was — a killing factory," Boll says. "All the movies made showed us the special people...the heroes. But nobody has focused on the subject matter." Boll says he plans to include a documentary in the film as well.

The subject matter is most unpleasant. There have been numerous documentaries dealing with the Holocaust, but it seems Boll is referring to movies like Schindler's List. When Schindler's List was released in the early 1990s, there were critics, including Holocaust survivors, who derided Spielberg's portrayal of Oskar Schinder and its SS officer Amon Goth. According to Stanley Kubrick, the Holocaust is about 6 million Jews who died, and Schindler's List is about a couple of thousand who survived. Jean Luc-Godard said the movie was "Max Factor".

Criticism aside, Schindler's List was a critical and commercial success. Make no doubt, this is a landmark film. But we're not simply talking about film here, it's the Holocaust. And Uwe Boll — who doesn't quite have the technical wizardry, the sure hand or the heart of a Steven Spielberg — is making a movie about the Holocaust. There have been better directors who have approached the subject material, and, yes, there have even been far worse.

In an age in which some people continue to deny the Holocaust, he says, "I do not think that it is so bad to show that Auschwitz happened." Considering that the Jewish New Year has begun, the timing for reaching such an arresting trailer could have been better.

Uwe Boll is, if anything, a brilliant provocateur. He's made a name for himself. He gets his films made. Boll knows which buttons to push, and he pushes them well. In recent years, his films, however, have gotten increasingly political. He's taken on topics like 9-11 in Postal. That was dark comedy, though. Recent films like Darfur have shown that he has moved beyond parody. But have his films?

[Pic, Pic, Pic, Pic]]

I can't think of another game so destroyed by its dialogue as Splinter Cell: Conviction; not by bad lines alone (which are nothing novel in gaming) but by the way Ubisoft's designers and programmers used them.

It could live on, maybe, as a cautionary tale in design meetings: "your idea would poison our game, sure as secondary dialogue killed Conviction!" It struck me because secondary dialogue is a subject I know a little about.

Secondary dialogue, or situational dialogue, means lines shouted by the doomed, samefaced individuals who jump boldly in front of the player's gun; lines like "You just fucked with the wrong Russian!" or "You shot me right in my Russian knees!" or "I die, so far from my homeland, Russia!" (I'm not making fun of the nice Russian dude who commented on my last post; a lot of shooter villains are Russian.) The lines will stay more like 5-7 words long, because the gamer is in the shooting-people business, not the listening-to-monologues business. (The casting business?) Sandbox games offer more flexibility for the writer, but feature more NPC personas and many more lines to write. Basically, this is the low-rent dialogue, the writing done in bulk by interns, assistant writers, and whoever else steps in when the overworked lead writer doesn't have time to stare at an Excel spreadsheet that demands 5 different lines for 40 different actions for 50 different personas. And I was one of those interns*!

Two-Fisted Tales of Internship

This marginal dialogue is rarely done well. Before outlining my reasons for thinking so, a disclaimer: because the stories in this post come from my own experience, they offer an undoubtedly distorted view of games like The Punisher, which I worked on for a few months, but others worked on for years. I'm not trying to color anyone's impressions of these games by discussing their development, I'm only using them to talk about dialogue in general terms. My impression is that all people are terrible at judging the quality of their own work, or the quality of projects they've been involved in, so I'll try to avoid that.

Secondary dialogue signals AI state changes, like the transition from suspicion ("That noise...like the fascist footsteps of Frank Castle!") to aggression ("Enjoy my aimless spray of bullets, Castle!"). Strangely, these lines are thought to add atmosphere. I have no theory about the origins of this common belief; secondary dialogue is more likely to kill immersion than enhance it.

It makes no sense for your opponents to crow about how unafraid they are, when the player character is the most terrifying murder machine these poor bastards will ever encounter. Often the NPCs seem weirdly familiar with the protagonist — many sentences look better on paper if they address someone else, so you tag a name on the end of them, like "Fisher" or "Castle." (Whether these lines sound right when spoken out loud is up for debate.) It's hard to imagine the personality that would keep up a stream of wisecracks and threats while being hunted down by a remorseless, silent being, but, somehow, that personality is everywhere. In games, it's the very definition of a criminal mind.

Resource limitations, not writers, create the framework for these lines, and that's most of the problem. You've probably heard that action creates character. And, obviously, context shapes dialogue. You can't tell a joke without context; you need a setup and a payoff. Even a non sequitur requires context, an established topic to be irrelevant to. But situational lines are defined too loosely to give you any of that. You don't know the specifics of what the player might be doing, or what exactly the persona is reacting to. (It's not doable to stream a ton of very specific conditions and separate line pools off the disc.) The persona's behavior is generic, so their character must also be generic. That's why these lines usually suck.

Picture this: you come up with one of the 5 lines that Russian #3 might say when the player gives him a non-fatal wound. He shouts defiantly: "It'll grow back!" That's not ha-ha funny, but it might work in-game. Of course, it depends on how the voice actor delivers it, which will happen months from now at a voice acting session you won't attend (unless we assume you are the lead writer). You just wrote five variations on "I'm reloading like a champ!", so this reptile joke seems like a step up. (There are far fewer ways to say "cover me while I reload" than there are to say "I love you." Besides, most of the alternate ways people list to say "I love you" either involve more than 7 words or some specific action, and we don't have the resources for that.)

But does the line really make sense? Limbs don't fly off in this game, so there's no visual to counterpoint Russian 3's bravado. If the player just shot Russian 3 in the dick, this line could be a home run, but you're not working with that level of specificity. The only lines you can imagine that would make sense in every situation where the dialogue could be triggered bore you to tears.

There's so much material, you're bound to find some redundancy. Steve Jaros, writer of the Saints Row games, once found that while working separately we had each written, virtually word-for-word, the same combat line for different Rich Guy personas: "It's come down to fisticuffs, has it?" I don't know how many lines were written for Saints Row, but there were at least, as Marcus Fenix would say, "ten shitloads." Steve showed me the master audio spreadsheet once, and it had so many columns in it that Excel had stopped letting them create more columns. Like Bubble Bobble, Excel does have an ending, but almost nobody sees it.

A lack of specificity in trigger descriptions can also muck things up: maybe when a programmer and writer hashed out the conditions for lines to play, they recorded these conditions imprecisely, there was some misunderstanding, or the AI behavior was changed later on in the project. In Saints Row, there's one line that plays for a cop persona if you shoot his partner: "He was just two days from retirement!" (Or something very like that.) At least, I think the written description said it would play when you shoot his partner. In the finished game it plays if you shoot anyone within a generous radius of the cop. If you shoot an investment banker crossing the street, the cop will yell at you about his retirement. This might be hilarious — what the hell, why did the cop know so much about that random dude? It doesn't work as intended, though.

Possible ESRB reactions are a delightful source of speculation for creators of games like The Punisher and Saints Row. The ESRB's rating committees supposedly come from a pool of individuals in different professions (no word on whether they do a better job of this than the MPAA), so maybe you'll draw a fireman, lawyer, schoolteacher, whatever. But it was pretty clear that unless The Punisher rolled a committee of 3 state executioners, it was skirting an AO rating — and of course, Wal-Mart won't sell an AO title. So I got a couple of instructions to retailor dialogue to suit anticipated demands from the ESRB. These were not explicit orders from the organization (unlike applying a black-and-white filter and changing the camera during environmental kills, which was necessary to avoid AO), but they stemmed from accumulated industry wisdom about dealing with the ESRB, so I believe there's truth to them. I also think similar concerns inform writing at other companies.

The first instruction was superficial — I was told to reduce the number of times I used "fuck" in the dialogue. Apparently, my writing had led to line pools containing an unacceptable probability that when the player entered a room, everyone in it might scream the word "fuck" at the same time. One guy might shout "Holy fucking shit, it's the Punisher!", another "Oh God, he'll fuck our eyes right out of our skulls!" and a third, "We're double fucked this time, chaps!" I happen to think this is a pretty realistic reaction if confronted by the Punisher, but I was told that it's really a problem to have so many fucks flying around at the same time. The unthinkable concentration of profanity in this possible fuck-event could send the dainty fingers of the ESRB panel straight to the big red AO buzzer. In retrospect I'm sure that trimming the fuck-count was the right call — better than Kingpin levels of cursing at least — but the reasoning behind it stayed with me.

The second directive is vastly more important, and I often remember it when I play games like Conviction. This will go a bit broader than secondary dialogue, but that's where it starts. Concern arose after I had written some of the many, many "interrogation" lines in The Punisher that play as your torture people. I would sometimes write personas who really couldn't handle the outlandish shit they were being subjected to — I'm a human being too, look into your heart, who will feed my cat when I'm gone, etc. etc. It was something that came up in the comics all the time. Bad guys beg for their lives, Castle don't care. These interrogation lines were meant to be darkly humorous, as the player would kill everyone no matter what they said.

I was told to rewrite the lines where anyone expressed a strong desire not to die. It was "sadistic" to kill people who directly asked you not to kill them. This sort of sadism is exactly the stuff that gets us a red flag from the ESRB. I felt pretty bad about this — I had written sadistic material! — before I thought about it. The thinking was, it wasn't sadistic to create elaborate torture sequences as a heavily marketed feature; it was sadistic for the people being tortured to death to raise objections. It was sadistic to suggest that the individuals you killed had resembled human beings, that they were afraid to die.

I thought I was just following through with the concept, but I learned that in games (unlike film or literature), a torture scene must be handled with care. My poorly-conceived dialogue had inadvertently crossed a line developers don't like to go near in their presentation of death. It's all fun and games even after somebody loses an eye; but if a character gets really upset about losing that eye, that might put players on edge. There are plenty of games that claim to be disturbing, but I've seen few willing to take gamers outside their comfort zone.

Don't believe me? So, how many kids did you kill during the "No Russian" mission in MW2? From what I can see, there were no kids in that entire airport...which is a little unlikely, from what I know of airports. Of course, it would be in terribly bad taste if MW2 let you to kill children; that would be awfully disturbing. And Infinity Ward didn't really want to give you pause, not like that, oh no. If they actually wanted to guilt-trip you, they would have broken the long-standing kid-killing taboo in modern games (only kinda sorta broken bloodlessly in Bioshock).

Including kids in cinematic massacres is a cheap trick dating back to that baby carriage on the Odessa steps in 1925. But games don't, or can't, take that risk. People begging for their lives, or kids being killed, likely means a straight-up AO from the ESRB no matter what the context. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo might not even allow you to publish a game for their systems if it contains that sort of material (console manufacturers have testing departments that approve or reject every game submitted by developers for said console, and they provide a list of things to fix, organized by priority, after a game is "bounced" from this process). The "No Russian" mission is bullshit for a lot of reasons, but most amazing to me was the uproar over such a sanitized presentation.

After my original less-than-immortal prose was revised out, The Punisher replaced the sadistic suggestion in its dialogue with a masochistic element. You enter a world where people were almost eager to be killed, just waiting to be fed into wood chippers and have their hearts cut out with a jagged Aztec knife. (They do tend to hang out conveniently around these kill-zones, and they don't put up much resistance once you start feeding them in.) The bad guys sometimes dare you to do it.

Sample scenes from The Punisher**:

"Fuck you, fish! I ate a million of you, and you'll only get one of me! Drop me in, Castle, send me straight to the big Red Lobster downstairs!"

[laughs good-naturedly as pirahnas consume his face] 

"You think I don't love bashing my forehead against glass, Castle? I eat glass for breakfast! I chew it with my eyelids!"

"You think I'm gonna miss those legs, Castle? I hated them! I was about to get rid of 'em myself, and now you saved me the trouble!"

I'm not suggesting that this was anything but the right decision for the game Volition wanted to make. They weren't aiming to disturb players who fed characters into wood chippers; they wanted them to have a good time (the players, that is). It was not in the interest of Volition or THQ to tempt the wrath of the ESRB by making a game where the bad guy dialogue urged the player to reconsider their actions. The Punisher

is about killing people in funny ways, and the humor gets a little too black if the people being killed are less cooperative.

I don't mean any of this as criticism of Volition, which as a studio takes writing and voice acting seriously. They do most writing in-house (unlike some AAA developers who use disastrous scripts by outside writers to fill the gaps between missions). Their writers attend design meetings (believe it or not, some game companies that tout integrated writing and design do not do this). They record a huge amount of voiceover, then scrutinize it. But my short time there showed me that game narratives are unexpectedly limited by what ratings boards will accept.

At about 8:15 in this recent Eurogamer TV episode, a BBFC policy advisor mentions "dwelling on the infliction of pain and injury" as a ratings concern, then a few seconds later repeats "sadistic dwelling on pain and injury" as if that was exactly the same. As if showing the consequences of violence was more objectionable than simple gore and killing. If you're really worried about these things, isn't it worse that games present incredible scenes of slaughter without ever reminding you of the humanity of the people dying?

I have no moral objections to pretty much anything done in media, which is an imagined space. I don't care about subject matter in games, whether in Manhunt or Cunt or Six Days in Fallujah, if the game works. (But controversial games usually trumpet their own edginess, and are almost never good.) The objection I raise here isn't really about The Punisher (which I loved working on) but about the ways action games sacrifice the credibility of their worlds to keep the player comfortable.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

Enemies in Conviction are not interested in self-preservation. This is more of an issue, in my view, than many reviews considered. Yeah, a comment about bad dialogue was usually stuffed in somewhere. (Though Yahtzee did ream the game for this in his review, and Simon Parkin spends a paragraph on it.) But the bullet-point framework of criticism used by the general Metacritic review pool doesn't take into account the way different elements of a work interact with each other. In Conviction's case, enemy dialogue interacts with the rest of the game by fucking ruining it.

Whoever decided how often lines should play in this game (either programmers, writers, audio guys, or everyone together) wanted no dead air. They filled every period of silence with noise, as if they worked in radio. They weren't thinking about how to tell a story or build atmosphere. They were thinking "how can we ensure that sound plays at the times when there might not otherwise be sound?" And maybe also thinking "how can we ensure that the player knows exactly what his enemies are doing at every moment?" Their answer was to trigger dialogue constantly, so that the AI broadcasts its every inane thought at all times. It's a great example of how to approach this kind of writing backwards, allowing it to be driven by technology instead of narrative sense.

They do have a nice little trick of using dialogue unique to the current level; this probably isn't too hard, as long as the same enemy personas don't appear in different levels. Unfortunately, the implementation is blunt, and your enemies' preoccupation with setting is just strange. "You're gonna die here in this museum!" they shout, as if museums were the worst place to die. "This isn't going to be like the airfield!" someone yells, a few levels after the airfield. Why do you think it's different? Because I'm about to kill a noisy jackass at the Washington Monument rather than an airfield?

Conviction is supposedly a stealth game. It's traditional in stealth games for players to move more slowly and pay more attention to their surroundings than in a run-and-gun shooter; accordingly, those surroundings need to be crafted with great attention to detail. Stealth games need complex levels for players to sneak through and AI with sensible patrolling and searching behavior for players to observe. But even if Conviction had these things, players could hardly fail to notice that the enemy behavior made no sense.

How could bad dialogue be a minor issue, when it undermines every situation in the game? The plot loses credibility when your enemies act like morons. The combat/stealthing scenarios you find yourself in stop making sense when your opponents are eager to tell you where they are. They're all but asking you to kill them, like the guys in The Punisher. (It doesn't help that Conviction is easy — I can't remember what the Game Over screen looks like.)

I suspect that this dialogue is the result of a terrible decision rather than a terrible oversight. During development, secondary dialogue is often temp-recorded (either by high-larious office volunteers or local actors) and stuck into the game so that the team can hear it and comment on what an awful job the writer is doing. There's no chance that Conviction made it all the way through its 10 years of development (or whatever) without somebody pointing out "hey, all of our enemies are saying stupid shit and they're saying it all the time." The problem, I would guess, is that the designers had concluded it was better to provide the player with a few extra scraps of information than build environments that made sense. So they threw out  credibility and narrative coherence to make an easy game a little easier.

A few games that did it right

I don't think all secondary dialogue is bad. It's necessary in sandbox games, and can be helpful in action games if designers take time to do it right. The games that do dialogue best, predictably, tend to be those that pay the most attention to every aspect of their presentation. Here's a short list of games that did interesting things:

1. GTA:SA, GTAIV, and especially RDR. Rockstar's skill at dreaming up clever pedestrian lines is unmatched, but in my opinion they really hit their stride with SA. If you look at the credits for RDR, you'll see that like 20 people are credited with "Additional Dialogue"; having a bunch of people work part-time on dialogue works better than a few full-timers, who will run out of ideas.  

RDR appears to have separate line pools for individual characters, whose names are visible during duels and card games (like the racist conspiracy theorist who kept warning about "the Jews" as I played poker in Armadillo). The downside to this cool idea is that the line pools remain fairly small, so you get the same lines over and over: hearing "that old-timer done shit himself agin" over and over as I played Liars' Dice drove me nuts***.

2. Bioshock. The Splicer dialogue is creepy as hell, and benefits from being hard to understand.

3. The Uncharted series. Naughty Dog seems to script tons of lines for the protagonist(s) to shift focus away from what enemies are saying. The writer then has a very clear situation to work in, and maybe fewer lines to write in total, if they don't have to write as much random enemy chatter. This (along with the talent of their writers and actors) works to great effect in Uncharted 2, where the script is polished and well-timed. As I understand it, most developers don't do as much of this because scripters will scream bloody murder about it, as the scripting for all levels in development changes constantly and fixing every line is a time-consuming chore.

If you remember other games that did a nice job with secondary dialogue (again, fully-voiced dialogue drawn from a pool of interchangeable lines) mention it in the comments; I'm sure I missed many good examples. 

Update: At the risk of making this post even more sprawling, here's a partial run-down of other games with well-done secondary dialogue that have been suggested in reddit comments and personal emails, but haven't shown up in the comments below:

4. Half-Life 2: Commenters unchow, polpi, and my friend Zack Kimble thought of the radio communications between Combine soldiers. unchow writes: "The Combine situational dialogue isn't directed at Gordon, it's radio chatter spoken to other Combine, and that female voice giving orders and information to the Combine in the field. And that's the only thing that makes sense in that context."

5. Psychonauts and Brutal Legend: Commenter watercup suggests these for "terrific" random lines, and also mentions Telltale's recent Tales of Monkey Island and The Devil's Playhouse.

6. Far Cry: On reddit, avatar00 writes that "the mercenaries would have side conversations about their lives that made them feel like they weren't actually replaceable. Also, the secondary dialogue changed from them not giving a second thought about killing the random guy to actively fearing your presence as the game progressed."

7. TF2 and L4D: Forbizzle suggests these, as does Brady in the comments below. I hadn't thought much about multiplayer games in writing this post, as I usually imagine secondary dialogue coming from NPCs and enemies. But these games' "contextual dialogue," as Forbizzle puts it, is amazing and deserves mention. In L4D, the writing works so deftly that I never mind the characters talking so much. Valve kept the contextual lines brief and functional ("Reloading!" or "Pills here!") and balanced them out with the witty scripted conversations that reveal the survivors' personalities.

*I was an assistant writer on The Punisher, Saints Row, and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Don't ask about the punctuation of "Saints Row," I had nothing to do with that. Disclosure: my father was a writer at Volition at the time, which certainly helped get my foot in the door.

**Not actual dialogue. I'm sure in trying to come up with intentionally bad lines as examples for this post, I've replicated things I once wrote with a straight face. But I'm exaggerating, obviously: not every persona will egg you on, and they will often say things like "Alright, I'll tell you whatever you want!" But they won't say "Oh God, please please don't kill me!"

***Liars' Dice wasn't really a big thing in Texas saloons in 1911, was it? Kind of expected they'd be playing faro or some other impenetrable game.

Update: Reddit commenter Forbizzle points out Idle Thumbs' hilarious improvisation on the same airfield lines in Conviction, about 3/4 of the way through their podcast "Remember The Airfield."

Republished with permission from Post Hype.

Chris Breault is a gamer and freelance writer. He writes about games at http://post-hype.blogspot.com, and replies to emails sent to post.hype@gmail.com.

Journalists in video games are as diverse and wide ranging as journalists in the real world.

Some are action reporters, others prefer to sit down with their subjects and chat. The common thread that ties them all together is their search for the truth. This truth depends on their skills as an observer and actions as a reporter. Good journalism in video games is about how a character develop a story. And there are a few characters here who have epic stories to tell.

1. Jade – Beyond Good and Evil: GC, PC, PS2, Xbox: 2003

With a laundry list of good deeds, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil is a real action reporter. With the IRIS Network and under the pen name "Shauni", Jade infiltrates and exposes the Alpha Section–the so called protectors of Hillys–as a corrupt military organization bent on world domination. Now that's a scoop. What distinguishes Jade is the diversity in which she uses journalism to help save Hillys. Altruism comes in many forms. You can promote the preservation of ecological zones, support a local orphanage or defend the planet from alien invasion. With her camera, Jade exposes lies told by a corrupt military regime and reveals the hidden plot to take over the world.
 

It helps to be able to kick a little ass when you're a journalist. Though her interviewees might be a little more intimidated than cooperative, Jade isn't looking for a peaceful solution to save Hillys from its fate. She uses revolutionary journalism as a weapon to fight the Alpha Section. Jade is an action reporter who constantly throws herself into dangerous and life threatening situations. Sometimes you might even forget that she's actually a journalist. With her camera she categorizes the planet's wildlife for future preservation, she finds evidence of the Alpha Section's involvement with extraterrestrial life, the DomZ, and she exposes the truth to the people of Hillys. Journalists in video games often strive towards finding a definite truth in their reality. Through her investigation, Jade finds out the truth of her existence and why she kicks so much ass.

Without spoiling her secret it involves a prophecy, her pen name and the color green. Jade finds a larger than life story for IRIS Network, and in the process she finds a personal truth. Journalism isn't always about making headlines or getting onto the front page, for some video game journalists and real life journalists it's about exploring the self. There always has to be a motivation for a journalist. Jade's past is obscured and we only know so much about her character. There's always an exploratory impetus for good journalism and in-depth stories. Jade is a damn fine journalist, and she'll go to any lengths to find the truth even if it takes her into space and beyond. And back here on Earth another journalist is looking for his true identity.

2. Rex Chance – Impossible Creatures: PC: 2002

Rex Chance has what is, possibly, the best name of all video game journalists. He's a former wartime correspondent who worked during the Spanish Civil War. And in 1936, when fascists attacked a local village, he tried to save a child only to see him die. Disgruntled and disillusioned, he returned home only to be fired from the news agency. A few years later, Rex received a letter from his estranged father Dr. Eric Chanicov. His father had gone missing several years earlier, and in the letter he revealed that his reasearch was being used in the development of Sigma technology. Rex puts on his protagonist boots and war reporter gear and heads out to Isla Variatas, a remote set of islands in the South Pacific.

Rex is also a hybrid semi-creature half-human who has the power to control animals. The game is old, so I can spoil some of the plot on this one. Sigma technology has allowed scientists, like Dr. Chanicov and Upton Julius, to combine creatures and creature more powerful hybrid specimens. Rex just so happens to be the first cross between an animal and a human being. He represents a newer and stronger form of the human species. His awesome name is just an added bonus. Now he has to fight for his life and find out the secret behind his existence.

Rex takes to his leadership role pretty quick. As an international journalist; he's seen his fair share of war, blood and fighting. Most couldn't go from taking a cruise to commanding a legion of half-wolverine half-crocodile mutants in one day. However, the intensity of warfare can really affect a journalist's outlook on life. Ernest Hemingway was a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. After he returned, he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, a powerful story about an American demo man sent to destroy a bridge. Now, Hemingway wasn't a genetically created human being. He was just a journalist, but his retelling of the Spanish Civil War provides some insight into the intensity of warfare and how it can change you as a person. When it comes down to it, Rex is pretty hardened and he brings that to his journalism.

Throughout the game we learn about Rex's past from his journal. He is constantly writing and detailing his journey with Dr. Lucy Willing. He shows his skills as a leader, a technician and a fighter. You have to wonder, why did Rex get into journalism? It could just be that he has good instincts for danger and his dormant animalistic traits make him more aware of his surroundings. Or it could be that he is obsessed with finding the true nature of his existence. Journalism in video games is often used as a means of finding personal truths. Investigations are used as a vehicle to drive a journalist towards the truth. Rex receives a letter from his father and investigates the true nature of his existence. Impossible Creatures left players on a huge cliff hanger and I think this game definitely needs a revisit. And speaking of sequels.

3. Reuben Oluwagembi  – Far Cry 2: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360: 2008

Far Cry 2 was a huge departure in the series. Jack Carver disappeared and the player was given the choice of 12 unique, yet silent, characters. The game's plot can be surmised in just one statement: Find and kill The Jackal. This notorious arms dealer has armed the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR) and the United Front for Liberation (UFL), and it's your job to track him down and eliminate him. It's a real virtual adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. The problem for you is that the Jackal is like Nietzsche spouting ghost or a spectre, and there are others looking for him.

Reuben Oluwagembi is a journalist looking for the Jackal. Your interaction with Reuben  in Far Cry 2 is limited as your character doesn't really have a voice. He wants to expose the illegal arms trade in the small nation and he asks you at the beginning of the game to look for the Jackal's tapes-small bite-sized recordings that have been spread all over the country. The Jackal touts his overman philosophy and believes he has gone beyond the bounds of morality, but that doesn't mean he condones the brutal level of violence in the small nation. The player kills a lot of people. Essentially, we become apart of the bloody cycle of this trade and you go up against mercenaries who are armed to the teeth. It's easy enough for you to dole back the punishment, but Reuben is just a journalist and he isn't the protagonist.

A majority of the journalists on this list can either defend themselves or have the miraculous ability to dodge bullets with ease. Reuben is only human and he's looking to write a story. The Jackal, is inaccessible to anyone else other than another mercenary. He can't go out by himself and go looking because he'll get killed. In one mission, Reuben asks you to rescue a number of journalists that had been captured. They were to be executed or deported from the country, and if you did everything right that won't happen. It's important to him that this story is told and that the world is made aware of the chaos the arms dealing trade has created in this small country. As an observer, Reuben becomes an objective voice on this conflict that you are trapped within. His observations as a journalist form an empathic bridge for the player exposing the true nature of the game's violence. The saddest part of all of this is that Reuben's story was ignored by the international press. He plans to publish his story on his blog.

4. Frank West – Dead Rising: Xbox 360: 2006

Looking for a scoop on what he thought was a riot, Frank West goes to Willamette, Colorado and finds himself in the middle of a zombie infestation. With no other journalists in sight he has an inside scoop on a story the government is trying to cover up. He has the ultimate exclusive. Unlike Rex above, Frank's intervention and interference in the situation goes beyond his role as a journalist. In order to survive, he has to wait 72 hours until Ed Deluca, his chartered helicopter pilot, returns to save him and his scoop. Frank initially goes into this situation looking for a story, but it evolves into something much deadlier. Frank is really more of an action hero than a photo journalist, and zombie smashing has to go against some part of the journalism code of ethics. Hell with it this game is about causing undead mayhem and saving lives. Frank is one of the toughest video game journalists ever, he knows how to knock out a zombie and take a fantastic photograph.

Frank has reported on wars and shows his skills as a natural leader. And in a time of crisis, like a zombie infestation, having someone who knows what to do and where to go-the roof in this case-is essential to survival. Think of Dead Rising as George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead simply with a journalist instead of two cops, a flyboy and a lady. The fun and the danger are both there, but the atmosphere changes with the character's vocations. Journalists don't get in the way of their stories. They aren't supposed to get involved and start bashing heads at a riot. In a video game, where's the fun in just being an observer. Sometimes you just want to be involved in what is going on around you. Yet, Frank finds himself up against a greater opponent.

He's going up against the zombie invasion and a mass government conspiracy to cover up this incident. Dead Rising has six endings. Some end with Frank escaping to tell his tale of zombies, victims and survival. One ends with him being kidnapped by government forces leaving his fate unknown. Another has the zombie infestation going nationwide affecting the whole of the United States. In Tatsunoko versus Capcom we see Frank standing by some lockers with his co-workers. So maybe his story was told, but as we've seen in the trailers for Dead Rising 2 the zombie infestation has spread. And he isn't the only journalist who's had to deal with the undead.

5. Joseph Schriber – Silent Hill 4: The Room: PC, PS2, Xbox: 2004

An in-depth investigation into a serial killer and the occult sounds interesting. Who wouldn't want an interesting subject like Walter Sullivan? Joseph Schriber is an investigative reporter who led an exposé into The Order, a cult running the Wish House, an orphanage in Silent Hill. As a fan of the survival horror genre, you know when "Silent Hill", "orphanage" and "cult" are all in the same sentence that you might just want to stay home. As a journalist, well that's another story.

Joseph Schriber lived in room 302 in South Ashfield Heights, an apartment complex in a small town not too far from Silent Hill.  We learn of his fate from a small diary that's passed under Henry Townshend's door. His diary reveals that Walter Sullivan is more than just an ordinary killer. His investigation revealed that Walter had committed suicide in prison and his body disappeared. Joseph went one step further and dug up Walter's grave only to find his body gone and the numbers 11/21 marked in the empty coffin. Those numbers represent the 21 murders Walter has to commit in order to revive his mother who has been manifested in his psyche. It's a long story. The interesting part of all this is Joseph was able to decipher all of this and The Order's influence over Walter. His diary's red pages help Henry defeat Walter and return some order to Ashfield Heights.

Going overseas for a story is a typical endeavor for a journalist. International reporters travel to every end of the Earth looking for stories. Joseph Schreiber traveled into Walter Sullivan's psyche to find his story. He literally went into Walter's "Other Worlds".  Joseph even returns from the afterlife as a spirit to help guide Henry, now that's dedication to your craft. What's more none of the analysis of the game or the development of the mythos could have occurred without his investigation. Joseph Schriber found himself an amazing subject for an unprecedented investigative report. Yet there are other serial killers out there terrorizing the media with their myths.

6. Nolan Campbell – Clock Tower: PS 1996

What's up with video game journalists and serial killers? It's like they have a death wish. Nolan Campbell is a relatively young reporter for the Oslo Week Newspaper and he's embroiled in the murderous plot of the Scissor Man. Unlike some of the other journalists here, Nolan is a little bit of a bad one. I can respect that he's looking for a scoop and the Scissor Man, but it's more than a little strange to romantically hound Jennifer, a 15-year-old and clearly disturbed individual. Still with his cameraman Tim, the two make a formidable team and manage-if you play your cards right-to help defeat the Scissor Man. Finding images of Nolan is next to impossible, so here's a photo of director Christopher Nolan and B movie star Bruce Campbell.

What distinguishes Nolan from the other journalists-so far-is that he's just a third-rate writer looking for a story. He has no grand altruistic vision driving him towards protecting Jennifer and defeating the Scissor Man. He's just in the wrong place at the journalistically right time. He's just a little more unscrupulous than some of the other characters on this list. There are certain boundaries that you have to abide by when writing a story. No making up names, avoid misquotes like the Scissor Man and use the utmost discretion when approaching a subject. Nolan and Tim investigate the Scissor Man myth and find themselves in the middle of a tense situation. In a few scenarios they survive and in others they end up either roasted in a fireplace or shoved into a wine barrel. That's a morbid fate for two reporters looking a big scoop. However, like most of the journalists on this list Nolan and Tim have ultimately redeemable characteristics and traits.

In a few of the game's scenarios, Nolan actually helps Jennifer defeat the Scissor Man. In one ending, he distracts the large-fulcrum wielding maniac until she casts a sealing spell. He redeems himself a little and managed to make himself out as a good journalist. As far as I know, Nolan never actually published his story about the Scissor Man and his ordeal. Well, he's more than just a sleazebag asking Jennifer out on a date just to derive some "truth" out of his investigation. He is searching for the truth and though he may have some odd mannerisms and off putting characteristics, he is a journalist in search of a story. He finds it, but there are things worse than serial killers out there.

7. Rick Henderson – Hitman: Blood Money: PC, PS2, Xbox 360: 2006

A journalist can work his or her entire life towards getting one good story, and that scoop of the century seldom comes looking for us. Rick Henderson is a journalist with the First Edition, a newspaper dealing with both international and national affairs. In Hitman: Blood Money, he's lured to Alexander Leland Cayne's estate assuming the former Pentagon director wants to talk about the attack on the White House or his plans for retirement. What Rick found was the story of a lifetime. Alex had the Hitman.

The Hitman is like a myth, a ghoul or goblin made up to scare politicians and the world's corrupt into being good. He's really the result of a cloning experiment designed around creating the perfect human being. He was made from the genes of four of his previous targets (Lee Hong, Pablo Ochoa, Franz Fuchs, and Arkadij Jegorov) and some from his creator Professor Ort-Meyer. The nature over nurture problem comes into existence, he kills the Professor, ending the production of Hitman 48's, and Hitman 47 mystifies himself as the International Contract Agency's deadliest assassin. Rick stares, mouth open as Alex tells him all this. In journalism this is called a "Get". Fortunately and the unfortunately for Rick, this "Get" gets him killed.

Rick's last words are, "Your secret is safe with me! I swear to God, I won't tell a soul!" Now, he knows, Hitman knows and I know that any journalist worth his salt would go right to printers with this kind of story. With the overwhelming evidence at the scene and the evidence produced by Alex, Rick could easily account for the hundreds of unaccounted murders and assassinations that have taken place over the last twenty years! Now this-as Alex comments early in the game-is the type of "good journalism" Rick is known for. Unfortunately for him, his story is left unpublished and he ends up as another casualty of the Hitman. Hmm… but he did have his recorder with him and even the best clean up teams can be sloppy sometimes. This is truly the mark of a good journalist.

8. Lotta Hart – Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney: GBA 2001, Ace Attorney Series

How does one describe Lotta Hart? Born in the Heart of the Heartland, Lotta is a hot blooded, Osaka accented-akin to a Southern accent in the United States- photographer whose first claim to fame involved a UFO and a wedding. She's steeped in the paranormal and has been heavily involved in Pheonix Wright's case file. She's kind of annoying and has a penchant for getting into "a lotta" trouble, but she's a damn fine photographer and she has a huge fro to boot.

As a journalist, Lotta leaves a lotta to be desired. Okay enough with the puns. She's a photographic journalist who lives by a strict journalistic ideology. If she has a source, evidence or an insight into a case; she'll protect it no matter what. That's professional, but it makes things difficult for Pheonix. In Justice for All, she becomes a key witness in two different murders. In the first case, Maya Fey had been accused of murder after she had channeled a dead spirit. In the second case Juan Corrida, a television superstar, had been murdered and Lotta's photographs become key pieces of evidence in the case. The problem is she needs to be coaxed into giving testimony.

Journalism is about helping people, defeating tyranny and finding the truth. That's the ideal. Sometimes journalism can be just about finding that scoop or that claim to fame. Lotta is a good journalist and photographer, but when someone's life is in danger c'mon, just C'MON! Especially when it's a friend like Maya. Still, any journalist can respect the protection of sources and information. Just when it's a life or death situation you might want to rethink your ideology, especially when Franchizka von Karma pops out the whip.

9. Frederick Lancaster – Front Misson: SNES 1995, Wonder Swan Colour 2002 and DS 2007

How many journalists can claim to be an accomplished Wanzer pilot? Frederick Lancaster is an Oceania Community Union war reporter who joins the Carrion Crows, a crack team of mercenaries hired to combat the United States of the New Continent. Huffman Island becomes the focal point of the OCU and the USN's conflict, and he's right in the thick of it. Lancaster's really not much of a fighter, but he's quite a journalist and he has a giant mech! Imagine the interview you could get. You could literally pull people into interview and meetings. But he's just there as a reporter and as an observer, and the only pulling Frederick does is info out of the Carrion Crows, and he has quite a beat.

War reporting and video game journalism make a good combination. It means that a character like Frederick can fight for his life and keep his wits about him. Combat in Front Mission is visceral. Wanzers, derived from German "Wanzer Panzer" meaning "walking tank", are giant dueling mechs that can battle over any terrain. Fredick isn't an accomplished pilot, but traveling with the Crows means that he has to know how to defend himself, properly pilot a giant mechanical tank, travel light with a constantly moving caravan of soldiers and learn how to maintain his machine. Most journalists I know have trouble waking up in the morning. Frederick Lancaster is tough stuff.

Admittedly, Frederick is one of the worst pilots you can have on your team. He's weak and the only skill he excels at is the "Evade" skill, which is kind of funny and rather apt. Journalists in war zones have a tendency dodge bullets, but not always. Journalism is a dangerous career choice, especially during times of war. Frederick is quite a journalist and he makes an appearance in Front Mission 4, seasoned and still reporting. One thing about his character that can be deceiving is his stance with the OCU. He fought with the Carrion Crows, not because he wanted to defeat the USN, but because he saw a story in the mercenaries. Journalists are supposed to objectively observe their surroundings and write stories. The change they create comes after and from the reactions of his or her audience.

***

Journalism in video games is used as a tool to help characters develop their stories. Whether it's Frank West beating down some zombies or Jade revealing a large extraterrestrial conspiracy, journalists seek the truth so audiences can get a bigger picture of the world around them. That's really what journalism is all about. Each of these characters has a story and we become their audience.

There are a few more video game journalists out there still. Heavy Rain's Madison Paige and Uncharted's Elena Fisher are two, and the crews from Siren: Blood Curse and Michigan: Report From Hell. Leave a comment and let me know if there are any that I missed.

Republished from Level Forty-Two with permission.

Matthew O'Mara is a journalist, feature writer, and game enthusiast living in Toronto, ON. He started writing about video games after seeing Geoff Keighley defend Mass Effect on live television. He was inspired to help end the stigma that has been placed on this emerging art form. He currently writes for LevelFortyTwo.com.

Does size matter? Compare the size of these seven video game words to the amount of enjoyment you got out of playing the game. Found via Digg.

In a heartfelt letter on his blog, Clint Hocking, the main man behind Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, explained yesterday why he's leaving the studio he's worked at for a decade, Ubisoft Montreal.

The full letter to fans and peers is a must-read, but if you're short on time, here is part of creative director Hocking's powerful sign-off:

I am too comfortable. I am too content. And I know where that can lead for me.

Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;

I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010.

Hocking's most recent game, Far Cry 2, was released in the fall of 2008. He's had no announced projects since then. No word on what that work might have entailed nor what he will be doing next.

Read the whole letter at Hocking's blog:

451 Weeks [Click Nothing blog]