News

Before we get to the fun and games, there is some serious business to attend to. (Or, as I heard one parent put it recently, "Press pause and do your homework; you can save the princess later.")

The fourth Montreal International Game Summit took place this week, full of seminars and business luncheons focused on the video game industry in Quebec and beyond. There was also, for the first time, a two-day event dedicated to serious games, a catch-all category for interactive works that are built to educate as well as entertain.

Over the past few years, there has been sustained growth in the production of and interest in these games, which are being used for everything from helping young burn patients deal with their pain to training employees on oil rigs and educating strategy players about disaster preparation.

Serious games are now beginning to find their way into stores and onto the bestseller lists. One timely example is the recently released My Word Coach from Ubisoft, a game publisher and developer with a large studio operation in Montreal. The Nintendo Wii and DS game is based on the work of a University of Quebec linguistics professor, Thomas Cobb, and helps players learn up to 16,000 words in three languages (French, English and Spanish) using addictive mini-games.

In Montreal, My Word Coach and other "edutainment" titles were discussed at length during the Serious Games Symposium, which attracted 20 speakers from across the country and from a broad range of backgrounds. The event led to the formation of a federally chartered workgroup, Serious Games Canada, to promote research and development in the field.

One of the leaders of that group will be Jim Parker, a University of Calgary professor who is in the process of moving video games from the computer-science curriculum into the hallowed halls of fine-arts studies. He's bullish about the possibilities for serious games, but says first many people need to get past seeing games as simply violent escapism.

"Video games are another medium, like movies, and movies have their documentaries," Parker told me on the eve of the Montreal meeting. He sees Serious Games Canada as a vehicle to connect the large number of Canadian firms and individuals involved in game creation with groups and organizations with messages.

"The people with the messages aren't aware that they can use games to get them out," he said.

As it happens, shortly after speaking with Parker, I heard a person with a message talking about a game project that should be high up on the new work group's to-do list. It was on Tuesday's live broadcast of CBC Radio's Sounds Like Canada, a show that was dedicated to sustainability and the environment. John Robinson, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore), answered a question about media reform with a hopeful response about harnessing a virtual world like that of World of Warcraft and its millions of players/occupants. It could be, he said, an "interactive simulation of alternative future choices."

Robinson's fellow panel member, David Suzuki, was not impressed — "We are hooked on getting so many jolts per minute, but there is no profundity," he said of the current media landscape, interactive and otherwise — but that is still a game I would love to see and play.

Robinson and others with ideas for games with a message should surf to http://seriousgames.ca, and I'll be checking back in with Parker and the new workgroup in the months to come.

WHAT'S THE STORY ON CRYSIS?

When it comes to the craft of making interactive entertainment, many of the tools that Parker and others would like to see used in serious games have been invented and perfected by the commercial sector. It's a bit like the ancillary, positive benefits of military research in that way.

Crysis, a first-person shooter for Windows PCs from the German studio Crytek, is perhaps this year's most scientifically outstanding video game — it greatly expands the game maker's toolset. On a powerful computer, the Mature-rate game brings to life a photorealistic tropical island, a hero in a nanosuit who can jump three storeys or cloak himself in a shimmering haze, and visceral gun battles with aliens and North Koreans.

Sadly, these technical merits are mostly drowned out by its ham-fisted presentation. The story is awful or non-existent, it has pacing issues — the final batch of missions seem to be from a different game — and worse of all, those North Koreans get no better treatment than Native Americans did in movie westerns 70 years ago. They are stereotypes with guns, shouting obscenities in broken English even in the multiplayer portions of the game.

For a such a beautiful-looking title, Crysis can be ugly indeed, but let's look on the bright side: Sooner or later, creators with a story worth telling will have the building blocks for a great game.

SUPER MARIO GALAXY

 The Nintendo Wii's showcase game this year is an interplanetary romp featuring the Japanese company's ageless mascot, the squat plumber Mario. As he has been for decades now, Mario's out to find the kidnapped Princess Peach, who really needs to take a self-defence course or two. He rockets from planet to planet, each of which offer different challenges: gravity that changes directions, dexterity and brain testers in the form of tiny orbs with lurking black holes, and one set of celestial bodies where he has to dress up in a bee suit and fly toward an itchy queen. It is a wacky, hugely imaginative trip that reminds me of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, except with talking mushrooms instead of roses.

It also has a control feature that led to one of the more surreal experiences I have had playing games: While I controlled Mario, my mother, who became a fan of Super Mario on the Nintendo DS, was able to ride shotgun using a second remote. Her cursor collected star bits, the game's colourful currency, and momentarily stunned any nasties that I couldn't avoid. That second remote is a wonderful way to include viewers in the experience, especially parents — regardless, I like to think, of the age of their offspring