My copy of Act of War: Direct Action arrived yesterday. In a rush to get to the gaming goodness, I cracked the seal and turned to the technical specifications to see how much space I had to find on my hard drive.

Six gigabytes. On a forty gig hard drive, that’s a lot of real estate.

Why such a small hard drive, you are obviously thinking. A real gamer should have hundreds of gigs at his disposal. Certainly a game reviewer should. And you are absolutely right.

My primary gaming machine is my laptop – it’s plenty fast, has a decent video card and has a nice screen for gaming. But, like many laptops, there is little space. So I have to pick and choose what stays and what goes.

But why should *any game* take six gigabytes? I suspect that most of Act of War’s byte hogging is a result of the elaborate cutscenes. It can’t be the standard game graphics, because Half Life 2 was only a little over four gigs, if I recall, and it is certainly the height of prettiness.

Even recently installed Knights of Honor, a rather old schoolish grand strategy game, takes a full 1.2 gigabytes that I can’t fully account for.

I can see Rome taking up 2 gigs. And Pirates! has earned its one-plus gigs. In fact, a gigabyte footprint is pretty standard these days. I was actually relieved when Children of the Nile took up a meagre 800 MB.

Some of it is certainly the improvement in graphics and a greater emphasis on the music, voices and sounds that draw many gamers into the virtual world they are in. There is also a growing resistance among gamers to CD/DVD reading in the middle of a game. They want play to be smooth and uninterrupted and accessing the CD/DVD drive for the sound, movie or map takes up valuable seconds.

In the gaming arms race, beauty and brains and hi-tech imagery has led to a space race as I try to decide which games will be less painful for me to reinstall in the next two months. Because you know that in six weeks time I will likely remove one of these recent purchases to make room for the next box to show up.

For all the chat in gaming circles about the perceived lack of female gamers out there, there is an even more glaring gender imbalance in who covers games. I was going to do a statistical study of gaming sites and print publications to see how many women were writing game reviews – especially on sites that don’t specifically advertise themselves as sites for women – but I ran into some trouble when I found only three on the first two dozen websites I checked.

Now, I am talking about writers here, not PR directors or Marketing specialists. There is a chance that the video game journalism scene is the new sports beat; it’s a journalistic subculture that focuses on stereotypically male things and is perpetuated by the males that write about it. Fortunately, almost every major sports page in the country has at least one significant female sportswriter (and they aren’t all covering ice skating.)

I’m not going to pretend that women game in equal numbers as men do, at least not in the sense that gamers usually mean. (I don’t want to belittle Bejewled or Solitaire, but when we speak of the gaming industry, these aren’t the products we have in mind.) There are woman gamers out there, and I know many of them personally. The proprietor of old games haven Home of the Underdogs is a woman of high intelligence and excellent taste in games. (And a killer at Literati.) But, Sims 2 aside, most games skew heavily male. And, even more shocking, game forums are almost exclusively the preserve of males.

Do woman gamers in general not think about the games they play, and therefore have no interest in writing about them? Highly unlikely. Female gamers are just as judgmental and cranky and prone to disillusionment after anticipation as males are. Women write about film, women write horror and sci-fi; in other words, women can be nerds too, since the nerd stamp on gaming is just too indelible to be removed quickly.

But the heavily male world of gaming journalism fits naturally with the male world of gaming. Most developers are male, game magazines and websites run game heroine pinup shots, games celebrate your typical male fantasies of conquest and sporting triumph, Sims 2 is derided in chat rooms and forums and 2 kewl 4U editorials that can’t appreciate a game where none of the repetitiveness involves disemboweling. Mind you, I know plenty of women who would enjoy a good disemboweling.

What is the effect of having fewer female gamers on the staffs of major (and minor) gaming publications? It could be huge, it could be small. There is no clear way of knowing until it is done. I’m not a big fan of standpoint theorists who argue that it is prima facie impossible for me (as a white male) to understand the perspective of someone different from me. But I must concede that there is a distinct possibility that games are not offering half of the world what they want. I have no way of knowing for sure, though, since there aren’t enough women on publishing staffs for me to see if there is, in fact, a difference.

If gaming ever intends to become a mainstream hobby (though I am sure there are plenty of journalists and gamers who relish the nerd chic of a niche pastime), it needs to not just attract more women, it needs to get the opinions of more women. The gaming journalism world is an incestuous one, of course. Most of my writing opportunities have come from being the right place at the right time – my smidgen of talent just keeps me there. The almost total absence of female gaming journalists can’t be a coincidence.

Look at the big three American computer game print publication. None of PC Gamer’s writing staff is female, though a behind the scenes staffer is occasionally asked for a comment. Computer Gaming World rarely runs a review or preview article by a female writer.

Computer Games Magazine has a tiny permanent staff, but the Features Editor, Cindy Yans, has a regular column, a couple of previews and the occasional review article. This sounds great – and Yans is a good writer with good insights in MMOGaming – but it’s a lot from a single female voice.

As an establishment, we should certainly do more to encourage female gamers to write their opinions; to let them know that their opinions are taken seriously. It would certainly help, of course, if every female on a gaming message board wasn’t swarmed by A/S/L messages…

I’ll confess to not doing as much as I can. I have referred male friends to editors, but no female friends. Because, naturally, they had written nothing I could base my opinions on.

Bit by bit, tempting chunks of information about Age of Empires 3 is being released by Ensemble Studios. This month’s Computer Games Magazine has a lengthy preview and news sites around the ‘net are doing stories on what is probably the most eagerly awaited RTS for 2005.

Once again, each civilization will have unique units and attributes. Six have been announced so far (Britain, Holland, France, Germany/Austria, Portugal and Spain) with intimations that a Native American nation will be playable, largely because focus groups wanted to play Indians. (There are no United States Americans.)

For the most part, natives will be a resource that the player can use to improve their armies through alliance with the aboriginal populations. As in almost all of these Age of Discovery games, the French will have an advantage in sucking up to the residents of the New World.

The home country of your settlers seems to play a larger role in this game than in other strategy games of this type. Your home city will “level up” as you progress through the “Ages”, giving you access to more power and tech, and, through the factory upgrade, a steady flow of certain resources.

Most RTS games with military formations see combat devolve into a messy melee situation, making the formations pointless. Cossacks II will ascribe serious penalties to troops not in formation, but Age of Empires III will almost insist on formations for combat to be meaningful. Some formations will give the units in it special defensive bonuses or resistance to certain types of attack.

There’s a January preview at Gamespot that is worth checking out and the aforementioned seven page preview in May’s Computer Games Magazine.

A CNN survey of experts has concluded that video games are the 15th greatest technological breakthrough of the last 25 years. This tops remote controls (21), biometrics (16) and cloning (22).

Nice to see that I’m not the only person who takes this hobby way too seriously.

Today’s New York Times catches up to two months ago with a brief story about New Games Journalism. (registration required.)

There is not much new in the article. It rehashes the argument made by Kieron Gillen that NGJ is a new way to write about games, implies that it is a superior way, etc.

What surprised me though, was the reference to Tom Chick as “one of the field’s rare American practitioners.” I think Chick would be surprised to find himself considered a New Games Journalist, especially since he’s been writing stuff like Shoot Club for years before the term was coined. I think he would be more surprised to find himself considered a rarity in American gaming journalism based on how he writes. (The really rare thing about Chick is that he makes a living doing this as a freelancer.) He’s one of my favorite writers (and a killer in War: Age of Imperialism) but what he writes about isn’t as distinctive as the craft with which he writes about it.

In fact, his half of the “Bruce (Geryk) versus Tom” articles in Computer Gaming World is an excellent example of NGJ, which means that Geryk is a new games journalist, too. After all, these action reports are all about the experience of multiplayer games between friends. And Geryk always loses, it seems.

If you look the “unmissable examples” list, one is by Gillen and another by Shanahan – the coiner of the term and one of the seminal authors. It looks like NGJ is rare enough on the other side of the pond, too, if they had to include examples from these two fine authors. In fact, of the ten examples, three are from members of the jury (Gillen, Shanahan and Jim Rossignol.)

As I said in an earlier post on this subject, I don’t see the big break between NGJ and old games journalism. There have always been articles in gaming magazines that were not reviews/previews and interviews. A lot of columns and editorials could qualify as NGJ if they wrote about the experience of gaming.

What the Times mention means, though, is that we haven’t seen the last of this meme.

Supremacy: Four Paths to Power review
Act of War: Direct Action review
Empire Earth II review
Laser Squad Nemesis review
Cossacks 2: Napoleonic Wars review