Dark Heresy - Live!

Tonight, Monday on TokenGamer, we try an experiment. At 8PM, eastern standard time - otherwise known as 'now', we'll be recording the first in a series of live RPG sessions, set in the Warhammer 40K universe, using the Dark Heresy gaming system. Together with a rag-tag group of friends from the D2 Brigade and the wider TokenGamer Armada, we'll attempt to conquer mutants and heretics in the emperor's name, avoid horrific mutilating death, and generally embarrass ourselves terribly while telling bad jokes. LIVE! To be a part of this first ever event, join us at the official TokenGamer ustream channel, and speak up in our chat room!

And for those of you unfortunate enough to have missed our live broadcast, a full recording of the evening is now available, and can be found right here, in the extensive archives of our stream. Please note, the stream is NSFW due to some harsh language and many bad jokes. Terrible, horrible jokes.

PAX Recap 2: Future (Imperfect) Tech

Completely apart from debuting and previewing games at PAX, the expo hall is an opportunity for publishers to show off their new tech. You'll see cutting-edge video cards, processors, and of course a new and more detailed look at the console peripherals that Microsoft and Sony announced at this year’s E3. Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move were both on display just about everywhere, but neither Microsoft nor Sony were able to change my mind on the inherent irrelevance of their new products.

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s going to be really difficult for Sony and Microsoft to change the existing narrative about their entrance into the motion control field: Nintendo got there first and Nintendo does it better. After seeing what the Move and the Kinect can do at PAX, that narrative strikes me as being even more true. The release dates for Move and Kinect fast approach, but even with ostensibly completed and fully-tested hardware, there was very little about either offering that impressed me.

Microsoft demoed Kinect Sports, which is a fairly shameless carbon-copy of the now four-year-old Wii Sports. Tennis, boxing, and bowling are in, as well as soccer, volleyball, and track and field. I had the opportunity to play with the boxing controls, and I walked away thinking “that’s it?” The controls were clunky and unresponsive, even by the current standards, and it simply wasn’t as fun as its Wii counterpart. The Kinect seemed to have a hard time differentiating between opponents at times, and subtle movements are completely lost on the hardware, which inevitably leads to a piping-hot mug of shame and embarrassment as both competitors are required to move in comically over-exaggerated ways. The game’s visual aesthetic seems to be focused on cramming as much onto your screen as possible, perhaps to distract players from the significant input lag.

TokenGamer Manifesto

Welcome, old friends and new readers alike, to Token Gamer. TokenGamer.net is staffed by an assortment of people, from jaded industry veterans to newly minted writers, all of us linked by the same desire. A desire to create a home, a pulpit and a loudspeaker, to provide a voice for the issues that have plagued gaming, as an industry and a hobby, for far too long. This site is the realization of that desire, the culmination of more than a decade of experience in, around, and covering the gaming industry. In that time, we’ve seen some things change for the better, but too many issues - issues of access, of representation, of equality - have been ignored or shouted down. Gaming has grown from a niche hobby, from one man studios and basement development, into a billion dollar industry that rivals Hollywood. The high-definition era has brought us heretofore undreamt of visual fidelity and dramatic vistas, while the revolution of the Nintendo Wii and the casual game explosion has challenged our very idea of what it means to be a gamer. 

Of course, when we talk about gaming, we're not just talking about a hobby, or an industry - we're talking about a culture of our own, with games as our touchstone and shared language. Though you may live a thousand miles away from the friends in your guild, clan, or team, you are all united by a commonality of experience, of purpose - a shared language of trial, tragedy, and triumph. Through the empowering tools the internet provides, people who frequently felt alienated and rejected in mainstream culture have been able to create a global culture entirely our own. And yet, for all the ways in which this culture has empowered and connected us, for many people - too many people - it can still feel like a provincial clubhouse, a locker-room with a ‘keep out’ sign stuck across the door.

This fledgling community has allowed people from all walks of life, from every nationality, gender and race to come together, defined by the one thing that unites us all - that we are gamers. And that simple fact - the fact that we, all of us, are brought together by this shared passion and these shared experiences, should be enough. Unfortunately, things often aren‘t the way they ‘should‘ be. For years, a sore has been festering beneath the surface of gaming culture. It doesn’t take much effort to find it erupting to the surface as a sickness - homophobic slurs and racial epithets in online console gaming, women treated like second class citizens or circus attractions in their own communities, companies insisting that protagonists have to be straight, white, and male, if they’re going to sell. And far too often, this sickness passes without comment - or, worse, is accepted as ‘just the way things are’. Far too often, those voices struggling against ‘the way things are’ get shouted down, told ‘it’s just a game.‘

At Token Gamer, we believe that when we passively accept a culture that tolerates prejudice and privilege, we are all lessened. We believe that we all share a struggle for simple human dignity and equality, in the face of the sometimes pervasive injustice that demeans us all, as gamers, and as humans. As gamers, we created this culture, and no one is going to police it for us. No one is going to fix it for us. For better or worse, it's all up to us. For better or worse, this is our struggle, and this site is meant to be an ally in that struggle.

We are not just tokens - we are gamers, united.

Rock Band Pedagogy

“Why don't you learn to play a real instrument?”

If you play Rock Band or Guitar Hero you have almost certainly heard these words before. What's worse is that, if you're like me, you probably bought into the idea. The fact that the games are fun as hell should be enough to neuter accusations that they're wastes of time, but it's hard not to wonder whether I could have learned how to play guitar in the time it took to master Green Grass and High Tides on Expert. The drums and vocals in Rock Bands 1 & 2 and more recent Guitar Heroes do a little to ameliorate this, translating at least some of the player's time into real world skill, but what if even more could be done?

This might actually be the case very soon. Harmonix and Mad Catz have pulled out all the stops with the peripherals for Rock Band 3. The two most exciting offerings are an actual midi keyboard and a guitar with 102 fret buttons and six nylon strings in place of the old plastic paddle. The new Pro Mode makes full use of both controllers, as well as improved cymbal attachments for the drum kit, in four new difficulty tiers added above expert that will require the same skills used to play instruments outside the game. You won't be able to pick up a guitar and thrash from day one, but the skills you'll pick up in Pro Mode should be enough to get you past the frustrating plateau which drives so many people to give up learning a real instrument.

Harmonix's mission statement from the beginning has been as much about celebrating rock music as creating a game, and despite the scorn of certain Artists-Formerly-Known-As they've already exposed huge swathes of gamers to music they might never have encountered. Rock Band 3 is poised to take it a step further, enriching not just the audience of rock music but the participants as well. Even more exciting, however, is what this might mean for the place of video games in our culture; if Harmonix is successful it could be a watershed moment in both gaming and pedagogy.