Last night, Activision released the first teaser trailer for Modern Warfare 2. My first thought: That's some curious timing. Judging from the number of parties thrown each night over the course of GDC, the whole event seems geared to make sure every member of the industry is sauced up from 6pm on through to the following morning. Which means the trailer was likely received by a legion of unpaid interns left to keep an eye on the offices while everyone else was off having fun. So the fact that the trailer made it up onto the Internet is some small miracle. Here's the video, followed by a few thoughts of mine:

-- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was a strange title for a sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It made almost as much sense as Modern Duty: Call of Warfare 6 or Warfare Duty 8: Modern Calling. Or, to put it another way, it made no damn sense whatsoever. So how do you remedy that? Spin the series off into something else altogether. So now it's just Modern Warfare 2... free of any Call of Duty branding. It's an interesting step when you consider how many ancillary products Activision has stuck the Guitar Hero branding on. If you're a fan of reading too deep into things--like me!--you might see this as an example of how much pull Infinity Ward has within the umbrella of Activision's studios.

-- The trailer itself is less a videogame than a radio show, so you're automatically at a disadvantage when you try to interpret what's going on here. But that's not going to stop me from doing just that. We've got what sounds like a group of Russian terrorists in an American (or British?) airport, gearing up in an elevator before staging an all-out assault on the dozens of screaming civilians scurrying to and from their flights. That's... a pretty risky setting. It's recalls the Mumbai terrorist attacks when guerilla fighters arrived by boat and opened fire on anything that moved. When you consider what a conservative take on the series World at War was, introducing your game with a vignette that recalls such a powerful incident is a brave move. But you know what? I like it. My favorite scenes in CoD4 were the moments when the game completely caught you off guard by leaving you to die in a nuclear explosion or witnessing the anticlimactic deaths of your closest buddies when safety seemed like such a foregone conclusion.

-- The brief collection of still images shows tanks, helicopters, some sort of industrial facility and what appears to be an urban slum. That doesn't immediately suggest many new locations. But pause at the 1:25 mark and you'll see a teddy bear. That's right, a teddy bear. Did I mention it's a teddy bear? [Thanks, Tina!]

-- So there's not a whole lot going on here, of course, but what little there is to over-interpret from makes me as giddy as I could be. Excitement level: high.

I frequently get emails and private messages from students working on papers or essays to get my take on various issues within gaming. I can't always respond, but I do try when I can. One of the most common questions is my take on the "games as art" issue. A kind fellow named Jason recently sent me a message on Facebook asking for my thoughts on the subject, and I decided to post them here.

__________

By nature, games are collections of images, sounds and narrative. They purposefully elicit emotional or aesthetic reactions in those that experience them, and/or have emotional or aesthetic value to one or more persons. They are art by definition.

I have heard plenty of counterarguments. One such argument is that games are interactive and cannot then be classified as art. Yet plenty of modern art is created to be interactive; I have viewed and participated in multiple interactive works at the SF Museum of Modern Art, for example. The performing arts require the interaction of musicians, and as such, each performance of a piece of music is unique, meaning that the creation is affected by participants. In other words, art can be interactive, and often is. The player's ability to affect the sounds, sights, and narrative in a game has no bearing on the definition of a game as art.

Okami is an oft-cited example of an artistic game. Indeed, it's a collection of images, sounds, and narrative that elicits an emotional response. It's art, all right.

Another argument: games are created by large groups of people, not by a single artist. The falsehood of this statement aside (there are, of course, many games created by a single individual), this argument is pure vapor; symphonies are performed by large groups of musicians, film scores are often the result of collaborations, and films themselves are created by thousands of individuals. Yet few would argue that the medium of film cannot have artistic value.

Actually, almost every argument that games should not be considered art is arbitrary, created to be contrary and uninformed by the existing definition of art. These are the people that approach art as value judgment: they do not see the sensory or emotional value of games, and are therefore unwilling to admit to their artistic value. We hear similar arguments in music quite often; for example, some will tell you that rap is not music because it has no aesthetic value to them. However, one of the first things I learned in music theory class during my conservatory years was that music may consist of any sequence of sounds, regardless of their pitch and rhythm. Of course rap is music, by very nature. It may not hold aesthetic value to an individual listener, but that listener cannot affect the definition of rap as music simply by willing it not to be so. I could declare a blue jay to not be a bird, but no matter how steadfastly I may argue, the blue jay will still be a bird.

Then again, few would use 50 Cent's game to argue the point. Yet it's a collection of images, sounds, and narrative events as well. Should your own perception of this game's aesthetic value affect linguistic definition?

This is true across all the arts. The negative value judgment of an individual does not affect the definition. I reject the notion that the definition of art is subjective. A single work's lack of value to an individual is irrelevant to its status as a work of art. Games are art.

Coraline is an amazing film and a eye-popping visual spectacle. But it was not these aspects that held me rapt in the theater when I watched it. The same emotions the film evoked in me were the same as those I had not felt in over a decade. Fans of LucasFilm Games will resonate with this thought, that experiencing (not just watching) Coraline was akin to my first foray into classic adventure games.

Games like Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Zak McKracken, just to name a select few, cultivated my imagination and my senses as a young gamer. And while one could argue that point-and-click adventure games may be the most passive of all gaming genres, this allowed room for the game developers to prioritize specific game elements, most notably storytelling and art design. As gaming worlds began to expand into three dimensions, with that came the ability to get a close-up look at ugly textures and odd model clipping. But the graphic adventure games came to life atop painstakingly detailed environments, and the characters, while powered only by a finite set of emotive sprites, had a wider range of emotion than many of today's gaming greats.

Maybe Dom (right) just has more trouble expressing his feelings as well as Bernard (middle) and Other Father (left).

Being at the pinnacle of decades of stop-motion film making, Coraline still "suffered" from the typical artifacts of the medium. The frame-rate was just smooth enough that you wouldn't notice the hand-posed key frames the unless you trained your eye to notice it, but it was most assuredly there. It was most evident during the spectacular mouse circus scene, but the director himself said he chose not use CGI for the scene preserve that feel of stop-motion, a choice that made watching the film that much more memorable. And with adventure games, the method of animation was essentially the same. Capture the character in a few select poses, and squeeze as much emotion possible out of each and every frame. And rather than teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, graphic adventures ran with the idea that we as an audience would be able to better identify with the heroes if they looked nothing like we did.

But even more breathtaking than the animation itself were the environments. It was difficult to fathom that everything was hand-crafted when scenes like the garden tour and the climactic "boss battle" pushed the envelope into dream-like territory. And while it the artistic investment into the environments of Coraline reminded me of such locales as Melee Island, Rubacava, or the sunken city of Atlantis (Indiana Jones verison), it wasn't necessarily the sweeping nature of the settings that really hit me. While the narrative meandered along, we kept revisiting the same places over and over again. But given the parallel-world nature of the story, each place had different versions of itself, be it the drab and dusty real world versions, or their colorful and spatial-logic-defying fantasy counterparts. While this might immediately remind you of the common light-dark theme we've seen in a number of non-adventure games (i.e. Link to the Past), it instead reminded me of Dr. Fred Edison's Mansion from Day of the Tentacle, and how while we never left the mansion itself, Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne explored a world within a world with pockets of its own alternate dimensions. Likewise, in the film everything revolved around the Pink Palace. Not only did Coraline explore every nook and cranny in and around the house, but she returned to the same locations again and again, fantasy world and not, when she had new insights or questions regarding her current situation. Being that the story rarely left the house in the film, there was definitely a slight sense of "being on a budget" when it came to locations, but you wouldn't know it from seeing how far they stretched the sequences in the garden, circus, or theater.

Coraline, SCUMM-style.

(minor spoilers ahead) But with as much as there is to say about story and art design, a game isn't a game without gameplay, in the case of the film, the clincher was in Coraline's very own adventure. Glimpses of inventory management and puzzle solving hearkened back to that frame of mind I adopted when playing the classics. Elements like laying out the cheese for the button-mice, stacking the books to retrieve the key, the flashlight and the dog-bats, packing the garden shears for a purpose only to be realized later, and ultimately the final-level-like quality of the quest for the three hidden eyes, to be discovered with only the help of that trinket you received from your sagely allies, all added to the warm fuzzy feeling of being back in front of my old 386 with floppies in hand. And the quick thinking and resourcefulness Coraline demonstrated during the aforementioned "boss battle" was definitely more reminiscent of an ending sequence in an adventure game, light years more so than the typical boss fight that would be dependent on remembering a jumping pattern or shaving pixels off an elongated health bar.

To my disappointment, I found out that Coraline got the typical kids movie video game treatment, as a minigame-platformer for the Wii/PS2/DS. I would like to think that had adventure games continued to develop to the present day beyond their premature demise in the late 90's, they might have looked something like Coraline.

Just got some good news today. I had a few questions for Crave Entertainment yesterday after the company was acquired by Fillpoint. Here's one of the responses that didn't quite seem big enough to justify a news story but needs to be known nonetheless:

"Pinball Hall of Fame will be coming out on PS3 and Xbox 360, Q2 of this year. There will be new tables added from the Wii, PSP and PS2 version. I can't give you the full table lineup now, since the official release should be going out soon."

If you haven't played the original, you might want to hold out for the 360/PS3 version. I had already resigned myself to buying the game and spending months beating all the table goals again (the PSP edition consumed a significant portion of my 200, but new tables pushes this one well into the must-buy category for me. Assuming they overhauled the graphics to look good in 720p, I might have my Game of the Year 2009 frontrunner.

As for the new tables, I've got my fingers crossed for Medieval Madness and Arabian Nights. Anyone out there hoping for anything else?

Because of publisher-requested embargo, we won't be posting any new screens or video of F.E.A.R. 2's full single player campaign until Tuesday, along with the review. However, we are able to give you a taste of multiplayer, and I wanted to give you a few screens and video of that experience.The screens are of the PC version, while the video is of the Xbox 360 version.

Boom, and lots of blood. The modes are familiar--deathmatch, a capture the flag variant called blitz, variants on conquest/territories, and a few others. Sadly, there are no slo-motion variants as there were in the original F.E.A.R.

One of those conquest variants is Armored Front, in which each team gains access to a huge mech. I am not piloting it here, but you can surely see it in action!

I like the shotgun. It makes nice splatters of gooey entrails.

Additionally, I am hoping to show off some screens and video of Killzone 2 on Monday, and show off some of my favorite weapons in that game. In the meanwhile, I offer a few videos of this beautiful title in action!

I am a big fan of mech sequences, on-rails bits, and turret sections that break up the gameplay. Here is one such portion.

Multiplayer action. W00t!

One of many nail-biting sequences in the single-player campaign.

As promised, we are putting together more Killzone 2 stuff than you can shake a stick at. However, we won't have a review until close to the release date. Rather than ramble on about why that is here, head over to Under Review, our reviews blog, to check out the reasons.

In the meanwhile, I sat down with Chris Watters and Andre Segers to discuss our initial thoughts on this intriguing game. Andre, serving as yin to my yang, provides a more earthly approach, while Chris and I are obviously more enamored with the experience. Expect a crapload of gameplay video between now and then as well, along with screens and ongoing blog posts about the Killzone 2 experience.

But perhaps like me, you would rather stay on the page to see the good stuff. If so, check out our first impressions feature:

And here are some screens to make your eyes happy!