Jaime C

In March of 2005, Satoru Iwata gave a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference. You probably remember it from seeing footage of the then still-untitled The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, where, “Dude, it's got da freakin' ghost army from Return of the King in it, I downloaded it in QuickTime, holy shit”; or maybe you remember the announcement that Mario Kart DS would be online. But the real thrust of Iwata's keynote was about how he wanted Nintendo to make games for every taste, especially software that didn't fit into the existing definitions and standards of a “video game.”

Let me try to explain it first with an image. In the universe of interactive entertainment, there is a planet we call videogames. It is the one we know best. But it is only one. Also in our [universe] are other planets which entertain, but in different ways from current games. It is this part of the universe that we are anxious to explore.

Internally, we're developing Animal Crossing Wi-Fi. We chose this property for a number of reasons. First, it is one of those non-game games I mentioned [emphasis added]; a form of entertainment that really doesn't have a winner, or even a real conclusion.

This term, “non-games,” set off a flurry of debate and mockery. Iwata's examples of “non-games” at this keynote had been fairly wide-ranging, from PictoChat, to Animal Crossing, to Nintendogs, to Electroplankton (shout-outs to the IGN transcript that repeatedly spells it “planktin,” by the way). And in the case of Animal Crossing, the revived debate of whether open-ended simulation titles truly counted as “games” felt like a half-healed scab being violently peeled back open. Only a few months prior people had been speculating about Nintendo going third-party so we could all play Metroid and Mario on a real system. Now the company president and CEO was talking about making non-games about puppies and math problems for your grandparents on this handheld with two screens and a stylus. “Non-games” became the ultimate scare word for people worried about Nintendo's new and lucrative direction. The term itself practically invites a level of dismissiveness.

And for some reason, this would make someone really, really angry about a scuba diving game.

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Electronic Gaming Monthly, the magazine that had been the de facto published authority on games in the 90s and early 2000s, would take a stand against this scourge... in 2008. In retrospect, that seems honestly rather late. It had been nearly 3 years since Nintendogs had shown the viability of the concept, the Wii was in full swing, and Animal Crossing was practically as much of a beloved gaming staple as it is now (though EGM's review(s) of Wild World was notably more negative than the average, complete with putting “game” in scare quotes).

The first sign that EGM was going to treat these games as a whole genus apart from “true” games was in the Coming Soon section of its January 2008 issue in a highlight for Endless Ocean, a scuba simulator for the Wii developed by Arika and published by Nintendo. The magazine would go out of its way over the next two issues to be inordinately offended by this game's very existence, to the extent of creating a new section of the magazine to drag these “non-games.”

February's issue saw the debut of “Electronic Nongaming Monthly,” a small writeup at the end of each review section in which a heretical “non-game” of the month would be the subject of righteous excoriation in lieu of a standard review. Okay, “each” review section is overselling it. EGM ran this for only a whopping four issues before unceremoniously dropping it — almost certainly because it was pointless, shortsighted, and mean spirited. They couldn't even really keep track of what a non-game even was or whether they were supposed to be mad at them or not.

What it doesn't give you is danger, conflict, enemies, a story, obstacles, a health bar, bosses...you know, game stuff.

Beyond just the strangely snotty grandstanding — putting out a non-review with a non-score for a “non-game,” the definition of games as requiring bosses with health bars that you have to defeat — this description of the game has blatant errors in it. There is, in fact, a story in Endless Ocean. There are “obstacles” in the form of missions that give you rewards for better performance (Boyer notes these missions but dismisses them as “work,” thus establishing a basic criterion that will never be mentioned again in the following three non-reviews). I'll also nitpick that there is an air gauge, and it is possible to run out of air; though, granted, it takes roughly an hour of diving to happen and simply returns you to your boat. There's a conspiratorial side of me that wonders if Boyer had even played the game, or was instead working off a half-remembered and half-interested conversation with someone who had. (i.e., “Hey, so can you drown in that stupid scuba game?” “Nah, you don't need to really worry about that.”)

Even stranger: that this was the third game in a diving series that Arika had developed since 2001, making it a bizarre choice to inaugurate a broadside against these newfangled “non-games.” In fact, in 2003 longtime EGM editor-in-chief Dan Hsu had even reviewed and scored Everblue 2, Endless Ocean's direct predecessor for the PS2! And while certainly not overly impressed, Hsu fairly understood the potential appeal of a game that didn't follow traditional game conventions of failure and conflict. The Endless Ocean snub also happened during the twilight era of EGM when the trade dress of the magazine had been overhauled to match with sister site 1UP.com, and links to 1UP and the affiliated GameVideos.com urging readers to consume more EGM content were practically on every page, including one barely inches away from the lambasting of Endless Ocean. If a curious reader had followed any of those links at the time, they would have encountered 1UP's own B+ (Metacritic counts it as 8/10) review of Endless Ocean, where reviewer Torrey Walker also commented that the game challenged the idea of what people considered a “game,” but was far more positive. All of this made it particularly odd that EGM, an outlet famous for championing the Weekly Famitsu model of multiple reviewers and opinions for games, was trying to make a big show out of declaring this rather contrarian take on a niche title to be their official editorial stance.

Admittedly, that sounds like a bit of a melodramatic description of someone making fun of a scuba game. Except a month later in March 2008, in response to a letter complaining about EGM's dismissive tone (oddly enough toward their January blurb, not their February “review”), the editorial openly affirmed that yes, it was Electronic Gaming Monthly's position that all games where you couldn't get into a knife fight with the sharks could go to hell and die:

While the Everblue titles had been rather obscure, Endless Ocean was a first-party release from Nintendo. It had eyes on it, so the news that one of the premiere English-speaking outlets had outright declared it beneath them set off a minor wave of vitriol online in forums and comments sections, from those offended by this slight by those dastardly anti-Nintendo journalists, to those cheering that Nintendo's baby toy was finally getting taken down a peg by real man gamers.

But you could already tell that this stunt had no gas in the tank. That same issue's installment of Electronic Nongaming Monthly was... My Horse and Me, a random shovelware horse-raising simulator from Atari. The train of logic is there: they'd already made fun of one Wii game where you pet animals and called it creepy, so maybe another? Is that what non-games were? Animal games?

You can see how quickly this premise was falling apart. While Boyer had only implicitly made the case that a game became a non-game if you thought it was bad, Suttner practically outright said it. Guys, we're only two supposed non-games into this venture and you're already admitting that these have “plenty of gamey elements” and calling them games! If this is just a bespoke way of dunking on shovelware without bothering to give it a score, then legendary EGM writer Seanbaby had had a beloved column for that in the back of the magazine for the better part of a decade. C'mon fellas, it's called redundancy!

Even the pretense that this was about bad games was dropped next:

But honestly? If the section had just been this sort of thing the whole time, it would have made a lot more sense. It's about software that actually aren't “games,” it doesn't feel condescending about that judgment, and all the while giving a level-headed assessment of what they are and if they were worth your money. Although, again, at that point it raises the question of why you're not just normally reviewing these. These are reviews! But at the very least we've moved away from covering titles you have to admit are actually gam-

Yeah. EGM's final “nongame” review in May 2008 contained the words, “Why isn't it a game? It is, actually,” before recommending this game from thatgamecompany as a good game to buy. Time to stick a fork in this section. Kind of funny that it started and ended with games about aquatic animals.

Nongaming Monthly never appeared again in the last few months of EGM's life — Ziff Davis shuttered the magazine suddenly in January 2009 ending a legendary 20 year long run, leaving a final February issue unreleased, and selling off 1UP to UGO (most of the site's staff was either laid off or quit in response). Between May '08 and January '09 nobody seemed to mourn or even notice Nongaming Monthly's absence; I couldn't find any letters to the editors bemoaning its disappearance, or any printed acknowledgment that they dropped it. The July 2008 issue would contain a two-page positive review of Wii Fit from three critics, along with a short article about Shigeru Miyamoto's career by Jeremy Parish in which he defended Wii Fit's status as a game by noting that RPG fans had been staring at spreadsheets of numbers going up for years.

So why on earth did this even exist? It almost comes across as if the entire idea was solely pitched for the purpose of raking Endless Ocean over the coals for months; then three subsequent writers were forced to take turns trying to think of any new release that could remotely be described as a “non-game” to extend this gag and justify its raison d'être. Did EGM staff just run out of games they could care enough to disqualify? Did someone speak up and say that the whole thing felt a little snobby? Was there a realization that the criteria for what counted as a “non-game” was completely arbitrary to the point that they couldn't keep it even a little consistent after only four tries? And, as mentioned, Wii Fit came out right at this time. That was much less of a traditional “game” than Endless Ocean — but it was such a big title that it simply couldn't be snubbed, unlike some minor budget dolphin thing from Arika. For whatever reason, it was time to shelve this weirdly spiteful joke spawned from a guy being spitting mad that you couldn't blow up an eel with a bazooka in a photography game.

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Endless Ocean would receive a sequel, Endless Ocean: Blue World, in North America in 2010. Beyond features such as larger and more varied environments and fauna, the sequel would add a far stricter air limit, a much more involved story, and, prominently, boasted hostile animals that could attack your diver. Players could fend off the beasts by stunning them with a electromagnetic pistol. Finally, a true game at last. It's just a shame that Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Electronic Nongaming Monthly, did not live to see that glorious day.