The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has announced its nominees for this year’s Interactive Achievement Awards. Oddly not available on the organization’s own site, you’ll have to check Kotaku to get the whole deal for now.

First thought that occurred to me was surprise that Call of Duty 2 was the only PC game nominated for Game of the Year. Then I realized that they are talking about the console version – it’s not nominated for computer game of the year – so the biggest category has no PC games at all. Thanks guys.

There are three strategy type games in the computer game of the year category – Civ IV, The Movies and Age of Empires III – fighting it out with two shooters (FEAR and Battlefield 2). In the strategy genre category, Civ and AoE are nominated along with Empire Earth 2. Yeah, I know. They consider The Movies to be a simulation game, though its tycoon component makes it more of a strategy game to me.

The predictability of the nominees is disturbing. Were none of the jurors familiar with the dozen strategy games from this year better than Age of Empires? I can only guess that its name recognition earned it votes. Empire Earth 2 is one of the most shocking entries I’ve ever seen.

Then again, We Love Katamari is in the children’s category with Chicken Little and Madagascar.

Mostly, the AIAS does a better job than anyone else who passes out game awards at a show. Of course, that’s only SpikeTV. But the domination of the large studios and predictable nominees in every category (except for King Kong in Outstanding Game Design…) means that either the jurors aren’t doing their jobs in pushing for titles that are beyond the foreground or they just have no knowledge beyond the best sellers. No Act of War in the genre award, but they find a place for AoE III in Best Online Game Play. And it’s not like they don’t have room. Five action games get nominations in that genre. Five children’s games. But only three strategy games and only three simulation games.

Mind you, the major magazine and website awards mean more to me as a reader/gamer. When Gamespot or CGW calls something its “Game of the Year”, that means something to me. I’ve read their reviews so I can compare title to title and opinion to opinion. But I’ve heard the AIAS called gaming’s version of the Oscars.

Except the biggest budget always wins.

Though all of the praise for Civ IV is well-deserved, little of it is as merited as the kind words directed at Soren Johnson’s afterword in the manual. It is a beautiful little essay that gives some insight into the game design process, specifically how to adapt a classic game and make it better. Potential pitfalls are mentioned, justifications for design decisions are made and the whole thing is written in a familiar style.

It made me wonder why more games don’t have a “designer’s note” or “afterword” in their manuals. It’s certainly not new for Meier and co. Brian Reynolds wrote two excellent concluding essays for Civilization II and Alpha Centauri. Of the latter, Reynolds writes:

“…in spite of the industry’s headlong rush to get on the real time bandwagon, [we believed] a strong market still existed for turn-based strategy games. Gamers wanted a new sweeping, epic of a turn based game, and they wanted us to design it.“

He goes on to talk about the challenge of sci-fi settings, the important role of Bing Gordon and how the entire Firaxis team made the game come to pass. Curiously, Civ 3 had no such commentary from Jeff Briggs.

Back in 1990, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley wrote an afterword for the Railroad Tycoon manual that paid homage to the classic board game 1830. They go into how the design changed as the game developed and what had to be done to keep the whole thing accessible.

As I rifled through my shelf, though, I found few other designer’s notes in strategy manuals to compare to the Meier-esque oeuvre. Caesar III has a note from David Lester that reveals that C3 was originally going to be city building in space. (Maybe someone should try that…) None of the Paradox games have great notes, though Hearts of Iron II has a great one from the manual author. Imperialism‘s manual has one of the great first pages in game history, but nothing from the Frog City developers. Many wargames have designer notes, but they are rarely very insightful into game design or development. None of the Age of Empires games have notes at all.

Why so few? The growth of design by committee could have something to do with it. There is little sense of “authorship” in many games, though I suspect this would change if we gamers got a little more of a feeling for the developers. Good designer notes also let us look a little at how the design process moves in fits and starts.

The decline of manuals in general is an issue. In-game help and interfaces have evolved to the point where thick manuals are mostly unnecessary and this is a good thing. Whatever manual there is will tend to be short, full of pictures, and with no room for “fluff.”

Still, I like designers’ notes and want to see more of them. Even a bad note lets us understand something about the anonymous people who make our fun. There are lots of great things to imitate in Civ IV. I ask developers to imitate the afterword first.

The inaugural issue of Games and Culture is available online.

As a survivor of the academic world (and still a hanger on), part of me rejoices to see an academic journal devoted to game studies – ludology if you prefer the fancy word.

As a gamer, I am confident that none of this university provided criticism will have any impact on the range of game opportunities provided for me. How much has film criticism affected Hollywood? How often has literary criticism pushed novelists in new directions?

None of this is meant to suggest that ludology is not important. All human activity is probably worthy of study, and for a select audience this type of analysis will help make sense (or ascribe artificial meaning) to a major form of entertainment.

My concern is that ludology will fall into the trap of analyzing the easy. Human interactions within MMO worlds, race/gender in games, narrative structures, etc. All these subtexts of gaming have established parallels in the academic community. Moving sociology, race/gender studies and literary theory to the gaming world doesn’t create new tools for analysis or a new way of understanding gaming. Just as you cannot simply take the language of book criticism and apply it to film, shifting the subject matter without changing the language could lead to a lot of dead ends in ludology.

From the articles I have read, it is not easy to determine if the authors are “gamers” or not. There is clearly some familiarity with the form, but whether this familarity is in fact a deep passion for the media is another matter altogether. Not that I know how many hours qualifies one to speak intelligently about gaming.

I will bookmark the journal and maybe print out a few of the articles. Since this blog is really the only place I get to pretend that I am still a scholar, maybe I’ll even wax philosophical about an article or two.

The independent games column/insert Alt.Games returns in February’s Computer Games Magazine under new authorship – mine.

Appended to the “Mods and Ends” section, alt.games is no more than a few hundred word reviews/blurbs on free or inexpensive indie products. There’s no opinion column attached, like there was when DIYGames’ Greg Micek wrote this thing. You can trust that CGM will still give proper reviews to those indie games that deserve greater recognition than a small notice in a small bit.

My first alt.games contribution looks at Facade, Trash and DoomRL. All old news, but worth another mention – especially since Facade and DoomRL are free.

If you have any suggestions for the column, feel free to drop me a line. There’s a lot out there I don’t know about.

If you read gaming blogs, you’ve already been pointed to Something Awful’s “Five Worst Gaming Articles of 2005.” And you’ve probably already read some commentary on this commentary. Kotaku writes that the article is both obnoxious and correct while both Game Girl Advance and Mile Zero point out that game articles are actually not journalism – something that Something Awful never actually claims, though GGA notes that the whole “New Game Journalism” thing is what Tim Roger and Kieron Gillen (two of the winners/losers) are a part of. Or something.

The thing is, there are much worse examples out there. Take anything that Jessica Chobot wrote for IGN in 2005. Or a random review from Digital Entertainment News? It gives us this gem of an opening paragraph:

“The Age of Empires (AoE) series feels like it’s been around for years, almost a constitution to be associated with PC gaming. Yet the series has only graced our computer screens for 8 years; with the original specimen being released in 1997. The original is still utterly playable even after nearly a decade, but how does its latest predecessor do?”

The thing is, pointing out bad game writing is like shooting fish in a barrel. Even on the biggest sites and in the biggest magazines. Some of the bad writing is born out of pretension, some out of trying too hard, most of it from just plain lack of skill. People forget, I think, that even writing about something as ultimately trivial like electronic games is writing and requires an understanding of grammar, context, and the difference between “predecessor” and “sequel”.

But why pretend that the landscape is all barren? There are many good (and a very few great) writers out there. Point them out.

I’d like to hear some nominees of the best gaming writing out there. I have personal favorites (in both print and online) but am more interested in what you, gentle readers, find interesting and good. Best written review, best turn of phrase, best insight, best interview question, what have you. Maybe then I’ll share my picks.

The thing with gaming blogs is that there is always more criticism than joy. This is probably inherent in the form itself. Blogs are very personal and driven by a small number of motivations. It is easier to make a gripe interesting than a celebration. Plus, criticism more easily provokes discussion than praise.

Bruce Geryk has posted a couple of interesting posts on the limits of strategy games in the last couple of weeks. He has written that strategy games aren’t really able to create new and original worlds. He has also written that strategy games are generally poor tools for education. Considering that these are counter-intuitive for the great mass of strategy gamers out there, it could be seen as undercutting the Positives of Gaming camp that seeks to defend a media form that probably doesn’t need all that much defending.

I agree with much of what Bruce says in his posts. I quibble with his argument on the inability of games to communicate new geographies (milieus de novo he calls them in all his academic splendor), but his case is well reasoned and eminently defensible if not precisely correct. I’ve been making the same education argument he does for some time now. But in spite of these limitations, strategy games remain my genre of choice with only sports management games competing, and it’s not a close competition.

So here is a celebration of what strategy games do for me.

1) FPS and RPG games let me be a hero, but strategy games let me be a god.
2) Even if they fail to truly educate, strategy games allow me to appreciate what I know on a deeper level.
3) Random maps – there really is no comparison in any other genre to the thrill of pushing back a black shroud and finding something new every time you play.
4) Replayability and setup options means that a single strategy game can satisfy me much longer than a game with a beginning or end.
5) In RPGs, evil means insulting a merchant, usually with little cost. In strategy games, evil is a way of moving your country further ahead faster – and there is almost always a cost.
6) Every multiplayer game is different since so many players have different play styles. Admittedly, this is less true at the highest level of MP RTS competition, but I’m not good enough to play at that level.

There are probably more.

As time goes on, I will return to my regular bitching about clumsy interfaces, stupid patches and Cossacks. But for today, I will revel in my good fortune at the range of strategy games available to me.