Today, Valve will launch the beta of Big Picture mode, a version of Steam designed for your television. That's right. The de facto central hub of PC gaming is now designed to run while you're lounging in your living room—and with a controller, no less. I've tried out Big Picture. It's sleek, intuitive, and groundbreaking in several ways.

No, this new "Steam TV" isn't going to make our video game consoles go away. It's not going to turn your Xbox into a doorstop or obviate your PS3. But Big Picture could be a crucial first step toward making PC gaming more accessible, more convenient, and more suited for living rooms than ever before.

Here are the basics: this afternoon, when Big Picture goes live, you'll be able to push a button and turn Steam into an entirely new interface. It sort of looks like the dashboard on an Xbox 360, minus the advertisements and other clutter that can make that system so irritating to navigate. And it allows you to do almost everything you can do on vanilla Steam: you can buy games, browse the web, and even chat with your friends using the platform's standard in-game overlay.

The fonts, icons, and menus are all large enough to be comfortably viewed on a big-screen television, and the prompts are designed for a game controller. You can use Big Picture on your normal monitor with a mouse and keyboard, but that would defeat the purpose: this is an interface designed for your living room. Because the living room, Valve says, is where most people prefer playing video games.

And maybe, just maybe, if fans seem to want it, and if it makes financial sense, the people who make Half-Life will use Big Picture to create their own version of a video game console.

Steam Box 720

Valve isn't happy with today's gaming consoles. They made that quite clear to me as we sat in one of the back rooms of their Seattle office in late August, looking at Big Picture mode in action.

See, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are walled gardens. You can't open them up or modify their insides. Developers can't release new updates or patches to their games without going through a restrictive, bureaucractic certification process. Nothing about these systems is open at all, and Valve doesn't like that.

Still, consoles have some advantages over computers. They're cheaper. More accessible. And you can play them on your sofa, feet propped up, a comfy controller in your hands. It's not so easy to do that with a computer.

At least not yet.

"We're confident in some things that customers want," Valve's Greg Coomer, head of the small team that designed and developed Big Picture mode, told me in his office. "They want a full-screen experience. They want to be in the living room. They want to use a game controller. They wanna have a social gaming experience. And we have this platform that lets us ship a significant portion of that experience."

While Big Picture won't "connect all the dots," Coomer said, it will make it easier for gamers to play Valve's games—and the vast array of games that Valve supports on Steam—in the comfort of their living rooms.

I ask the obvious question: is this the first step toward Valve making a console of their own? Maybe the Steam Box that has been rumored (and repeatedly shot down) for months now?

"What we really want is to ship [Big Picture mode] and then learn," Coomer said. "So we want to find out what people value about that. How they make use of it. When they make use of it. Whether it's even a good idea for the broadest set of customers or not. And then decide what to do next.

"So it could be that the thing that really makes sense is to build the box that you're describing. But we really don't have a road map. And we think we're going to learn a tremendous amount through this first release."

No plans. But Steam's Big Picture mode is step #1 of an open-ended gameplan that could eventually lead to the company building—or stamping their name on—some sort of gaming console in the future.

What Valve really wants to know is what their users do with this new feature. Will people lug bulky computer towers back and forth between their desks and their living rooms? Will they use their televisions as second monitors? Will they buy dedicated gaming computers to sit next to the TV and run nothing but Steam? (You can toggle a setting that boots up Steam Big Picture as soon as you turn on your PC, effectively turning it into a Steam console.)

Or will fans ignore Big Picture entirely?

"Each individual gamer is going to have to decide in the short term whether the value that Big Picture brings is something they want to configure for themselves," Coomer said. "And for some users it's going to be quite easy. For some users it might not be worth it yet. But that's one of the things we're going to find out when we ship. And then over time, I think we're going to figure out which of those scenarios, or what ways do customers really want us to get involved in solving the rest of the problems that, say, our software can't solve for them.

"And if it's getting involved in shipping some kind of hardware, then we will get involved in doing that if we need to."

Lots of hypothetical possibilities there. Valve could team up with some third-party manufacturer and start selling a Steam-branded bundle, for example, that ships with a controller and an affordable mid-tier computer that runs Big Picture right out of the box. Or maybe Valve could work with an open-source hardware platform like the recently-funded Ouya. (In case you're wondering: No, Coomer says they haven't had any conversations with the folks who make Ouya.)

What matters more is that Big Picture works as promised. And from what I've tried out so far, I don't think fans will be disappointed.

A Virtual Keyboard That Doesn't Suck

In some ways, Big Picture is just like an Xbox 360's dashboard. In others, it's not. And the system's biggest feature is one that I imagine will be copied quite a bit over the next few years: a total redesign of the virtual keyboard.

On most consoles, you're stuck with a QWERTY keyboard that you have to painstakingly
manipulate by dragging a cursor around the screen and selecting one letter or number at a time.

Steam Big Picture's keyboard looks more like a lotus flower (and you can see it in action right below this paragraph). In order to select keys, you move your left thumbstick in one of eight standard directions, then pick one of the buttons on the right side of your controller. When I looked at the mode, we were using a standard Xbox 360 controller, and each of the four colored buttons represented a different letter. So to press M, N, O, or P, for example, you just tilt the joystick diagonally right-down and hit the corresponding button.

Already this gives you instant access to every character in a way that a virtual QWERTY keyboard can't. And the cool thing about this lotus is that it's not awful. In fact, it's actually kind of great. It's intuitive and quick. Seconds after picking up the controller and playing around with the interface, I was writing sentences at a solid, if not perfect pace. It can't quite match a physical keyboard, but it's better than any other virtual typing I've ever tried. A Valve team member proudly noted that when people have tested it out, "they're almost instantly faster than [when using] QWERTY."

(When I ask the Valve staff sitting with me how the hell nobody has implemented something like this first, they have no answer. "We're surprised nobody has," one said.)

Navigating the interface is also rather easy. You can use a controller's trigger buttons to zoom around your game library, shop for new games (and take advantage of Steam's frequent discounts and sales), and interact with your Steam friends.

Fittingly, Big Picture's store will also highlight some of the games that are most suitable for your controller. You can even browse the internet, a function included, but not often used in today's gaming consoles. Coomer notes that the staff tried particularly hard to make a web browser that could actually be navigable with a controller, and they seem to have succeeded, although it's still not quite as pleasant as using a mouse.

Like on normal Steam, you can even multi-task within Big Picture, switching back and forth between a game and your browser without minimizing to the desktop at all.

Future plans for Big Picture mode include auto-correct, context awareness—"When you're in a web browser, it should know that you might want to put 'dot com' at the end of your address," Coomer said—and, in the distant future, some way to support cooperative split-screen mode, so multiple people can sit down in the same living room and simultaneously use their individual Steam accounts.

As for hardware? Some sort of game-changing, earth-shattering, open-source Steam Box that combines the power and flexibility of a computer with the affordability and accessibility of a console?

Let's not hold our breath. Valve still hasn't stopped running on Valve Time. But if Big Picture is the first step, it's a significant one. And after seeing Steam's TV mode in action, I'm tempted to go out and get a new desktop PC solely for my living room, just to play cheap, high-quality Steam games, to hook up and use alongside my Wii, Xbox, and PlayStation.

Five years from now, though? Maybe Steam will be the only console we need.

The New York Times has a great feature on Valve and some of the things they've been up to recently, including these crazy gaming goggles.

Here's how they describe the device:

Every way I look, the scene shifts, the battle unfolds. I have a crazy contraption strapped to my head: a boxy set of goggles that looks like a 22nd-century version of a View-Master. It immerses me in a virtual world. I whirl one way and see zombies preparing to snack on my flesh. I turn another and wonder what fresh hell awaits.

...

Now Valve executives think they may be onto the next big thing in games: wearable computing. The goggles I'm wearing - reminiscent of the ones Google recently unveiled to much hoopla - could unlock new game-playing opportunities. This technology could let players lose themselves inside a virtual reality and, eventually, blend games with their views of the physical world.

The Times also mentions that Valve's Big Picture mode, a new interface that adapts Steam for use on televisions, will enter beta this Monday. We'll have more details on Steam's new television mode Monday morning.

Game Maker Without a Rule Book [NY Times]

Steam Greenlight, the voter-determined submission system created by Valve, isn't free anymore. The point was to decrease the number of illegitimate submissions, which was neccesary after the insane influx of games that Greenlight saw just days after release. Some weren't happy with Valve's decision, given that other methods could have solved the submission problem without requiring such a high fee.

Many developers have sounded off on this in the last few days. The voice that I've seen that best encapsulates everything wrong with the $100 fee has to be from Jonas Kyratzes. Jonas is a developer veteran that's been making games for the last decade. His most recent creation is The Sea Will Claim Everything, an adventure game with a ton of heart. Over at his blog, he's posted something that walks us through the problem as he sees it.

At first, the way Greenlight was initially set up didn't seem right:

My first thought after I filled out the Greenlight submission form for The Sea Will Claim Everything and clicked "publish" was wait, there's no approval queue? That struck me as very peculiar. This is the internet. Any submissions system is likely to be abused within seconds. It's entirely normal for blogs to keep comments for moderator approval to make sure they're legit. Why was Greenlight allowing any submission to go through?

Moderation might've helped, but Greenlight didn't have it. Nor did it make sense to have downvotes, since they didn't really serve a purpose—isn't the question "how many people DO want to buy this game?"

But nevermind the voting aspect, just about everything about Greenlight wasn't set up very well. It was a nightmare to try to find a game, especially when Greenlight would repeat games you'd already looked at, and the sorting options weren't very good either.

Then came the fee, which seems like the worst way to try to mitigate the problems Greenlight was seeing.

The $100 fee does not cut out the nonsense (at least judging from our experience with other platforms), but it does exclude many of us indies who come from economic backgrounds that simply do not allow them to spend $100 on the mere possibility of being judged by a subset of the Steam community that is generally not very friendly to indie games.

$100 may not seem like much money to some. That's great, those for who $100 isn't a big deal are fortunate. But the sad reality is that the indie game scene spans beyond what most major gaming websites cover. Most indie developers I know are starving artists for who $100 dollars is a month's worth of food. And maybe they have a game that could catch the public's attention, but they don't have the money to be considered for that chance. Steam can be a curator for content if it wants, and nobody is entitled to its virtual shelf space. But everyone deserves the chance to at least be considered, no?

But in the last few days, some of the responses from people have been highly classist. I've watched critics and developers alike on Twitter making it clear that they couldn't even fathom how it was possible that people couldn't have the money, or find a way to come up with it. It was common to read something along the lines of "maybe you shouldn't be making games if you can't even raise $100 for the submission fee."

A disappointingly large number of developers and journalists could not even imagine that some people don't have this amount of money. I found this genuinely shocking. It's not that they hadn't experienced it themselves, but that they could not even conceive of it. That's a disconnection from reality so fundamental that it is quite frightening. Ever wonder why there aren't more political games? This is why. Not only are the majority of developers (those who have a voice, anyway) white heterosexual middle-class males from the US or the UK, but a scary amount of them have absolutely no understanding of the existence of anything outside their own experience, and are in fact offended by the very suggestion that anything else exists.

Some of us are poor, Jonas goes on to say. But maybe for most of us, that's not something we have to see or deal with most of the time. Gaming is not a cheap hobby, and it's a luxury to have the money to participate in it. And when the developers you hear about tend to be the high profile ones, I'm afraid that cognizance or care about the lower class in this space doesn't exist.

So maybe a game is good enough to sell enough on its own to raise the money. But that money then needs to go to actual living costs. The fact that people can be so snide about this is cause for concern, especially with the current state of the economy.

The crux of this issue, in a way, doesn't lie with Greenlight—not exactly. It's with who we allow to be legible within a series of gatekeepers who tend to favor a very specific type of developer. One in the right socioeconomic bracket who would be able to afford costs like licenses, development kids and submission fees. Some might go as far as to suggest that it also favors those who make specific types of games (how many puzzle platformers will the indie scene most of us know spew?)

For now, Valve says that Greenlight will continue to evolve. Fantastic. But it's not just Greenlight that needs to change. So, too, does the attitude surrounding who should be making games. Some people do it for the love, and so yes, they're going to keep going at it even though they might not make much of any money. So to tell a developer that they might want to reconsider their passion just because they're not rolling in cash is heartbreaking. They deserve to be here just as much as anyone else, and there's no shortage of things trying to keep them out.

The One Hundred Dollar Question Jonas Kyratzes

I enjoyed getting my hands on XCOM: Enemy Unknown last month. I even liked the multiplayer. One omission, though, kept leaping out to me: there I sat, playing a remake of one of the most widely beloved PC games I could think of, and I had only seen the Xbox 360 version.

Well, no more. Firaxis has sent along a bunch of screenshots showing off how the PC interface looks, to go along with their announcement that PC digital pre-orders are now available. $49.99 gets you the game and the "Elite Soldier Pack," which includes a modern recreation of the default soldier from the original game, soldier armor kits, and armor dyes. The $59.99 physical special edition, for PC, also includes an art book, a fold-out poster, an insignia patch, and various digital bonuses like the soundtrack and desktop wallpapers.

The major difference in look between the PC and console versions is that the PC version has a grid overlay on the world. Lead designer Jake Solomon explained, "It was surprising to us how much the interfaces ended up diverging. It feels different, one of the funny things is that... on the PC, we actually ended up going back and adding a grid on top of the world because in the PC version it was just so irritating not to have the grid in a tactics game." Solomon also reiterated how carefully Firaxis had worked on both the PC and console versions of XCOM natively from the start, rather than creating a port from one to the other at the end. Players will also be able to plug in a controller and switch easily between interface types should they wish.

PC versions of XCOM will indeed connect through Steam and support Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, and other Steamworks features. At the moment, players can't mod XCOM but Solomon mentioned that the team would like to be able to make that happen in the future if possible, through they have not yet explored the options.

While discussing Steam achievements, Solomon also gleefully described himself as patient zero for the "Bubonic" achievement that will be transmitted through multiplayer play, tracing the complex world of who has played with whom through a model of contagion. For XCOM, being a plague on players will apparently be a good thing.

With over 700 games already submitted to Steam's new Greenlight service, it's getting hard keeping track of things. It's also getting tough having to sift through the joke submissions to find the actual games.

In an effort to cut down on this, Valve today announced it will be introducing a $100 fee for developers to get access to post their games on Greenlight. The good news is that this should cut down on the number of crude platformers with the word GABEN in the title.

The better news is that Valve won't even pocket the money; the proceeds will be donated to the Child's Play charity, as they "have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down the noise in the system".

It's not often you come across a perfect plan, but this sure looks pretty close.

What We're Doing About Discoverability in Steam Greenlight [Steam]

In theory, Steam Greenlight will let any aspiring game developer get their game onto PC gaming's hottest online marketplace as long as enough gamers vote for it. But that promise doesn't appear to apply to the makers of the erotic game Seduce Me. The game's listing was pulled from Steam's new Greenlight service last Thursday, the same day it was posted there.

The game's developers are crying foul, saying the removal of Seduce Me affirms the view of gaming as a childish pursuit.

Valve, the architects of Steam and the new Greenlight service have yet to comment.

UPDATE: "Steam has never been a leading destination for erotic material," Valve's chief spokesperson Doug Lombardi told Kotaku. "Greenlight doesn't aim to change that."

Greenlight launched last Thursday on Steam. It allows, in theory, anyone to publish a listing for a game they are making, complete with a text description, screenshots and videos. Steam users can then vote on which games seem to be the best. The winners get their games listed on Steam. Anyone who submits their game must affirm that they own it and check off which of the following categories their game is in: action, adventure, strategy, RPG, massively multiplayer, casual, simulation, free to play, racing and sports. (They must also agree to the Steam subscriber agreement.)

Valve's official Greenlight guidelines indicate that not every game can be submitted to Greenlight. The game has to be yours, and...

Are there any restrictions on what can be posted?
Your game must not contain offensive material or violate copyright or intellectual property rights.

Perhaps Seduce Me was considered "offensive." It's hard to say, but it's easy to leap to that conclusion. The game lets players chat with virtual women, including the characters Cecelia (... "an older divorcee. Sexually aggressive, confident, and on the look out for her next meal ticket...") and Esper ("Officially she's the barmaid and waitress. Unofficially her job is as eye candy and to keep guests entertained."). Chatting with them successfully unlocks "erotic" scenes involving the women.

This video shows gameplay and, while pixelated, is probably NSFW.

Seduce Me's Steam Greenlight listing was pulled on Thursday. In its place is this notice:

The game may have been pulled for those vague reasons on Thursday, but Seduce Me developers believe they've narrowed down their violation. It's that good old sex-is-worse-than-violence double-standard, they say. They said it in a press release:

AMSTERDAM, Sept 02, 2012. No Reply Games announced today that their erotic indie game 'Seduce Me' has been kicked off Steam Greenlight.

"We submitted the game on Thursday, when Steam Greenlight launched," explained Miriam Bellard, co-founder No Reply Games, "but they took it down almost straight away."

"Many people still view games as 'for children' in spite of the fact that the average gamer is 30 years old." said Miriam. "The gaming establishment is fine with violence and gore but is uncomfortable with sexual themes." continued Andrejs [Skuja].

I've checked with Seduce Me designer Miriam Bellard to learn more about how her team was notified of the game's removal and will update this story if I hear back. I figure other developers might want to know which games of theirs might be too offensive for Greenlight.

UPDATE 2: Bellard told me that her team had received an e-mail saying the game was pulled for violating Steam or Greenlight's terms. They have not complained about it to Valve. "We haven't heard from Valve, but then we haven't contacted them. The email we received said to contact Steam Support if 'you believe your item has been banned mistakenly.' The take down was obviously not a mistake so we interpreted the situation as a non-negotiable one.

It looks like Steam will continue to be, like Apple's popular App Store, a no-eroticism zone.

Seduce Me will be released in November, according to its creators, with or without Steam Greenlight.

UPDATE 3: Valve's Lombardi tells me that Greenlight's terms of service will be updated to more clearly reflect content restrictions.

I don't know if Oprah Winfrey plays video games. For all I know she plays Angry Birds while commuting from her estate in California to her apartment in Chicago. Facebook games, at least, seem to be on her radar.

When I was playing Splice, an indie puzzle game born on Steam and now brought to the iPad, I couldn't help but let the game reaffirm how much I love puzzles. And how much I appreciate elegant UI and subtle, soft music. It's probably one of my favorite things. So it stands to reason it should be on the most official list of favorite things I know of: Oprah's.

Splice is all these things. It's also a pretty complicated puzzle game.

You enter a micro-organism of sorts, and splice and mutate the microbes to form a cohesive part. Successfully pulling this off requires a certain level of understanding of the entire structure of the microbe, as well as the parts that form it.

Dragging stems of microbes off to be placed in empty placeholders grows to be increasingly difficult. You'll have to splice off legs of the micro-organism in a certain number of strokes to complete each level.

It's a simple game. It starts off easy enough, letting you learn the nature of how splicing works and when it doesn't. It's not fast-paced or actiony. It's calm and even soothing. I feel like I've given my brain a good work out by the end of a set of levels. And, really, we should all keep our brains active. So why not do so with an elegant video game?

Splice [$3.99, iTunes]