(Skip to the bottom of the post for free concert details.)

Besides the special "Renegade Edition" of DJ Hero, which carries Jay-Z and Eminem's bulletproof endorsement (among other cool bonuses), there are rumors that Jay-Z is entering the games business. He and Eminem even performed at E3 this year. Even if we don't end up controlling Hova in some kind of third-person shooter / empire-building sim, it's nice to think that his off-and-on rivalry with 50 Cent might take itself into the realm of pixels and power-ups. 

I don't think it's a coincidence that many of his most compelling singles sound like videogames. Listen to songs like "Sunshine" from Vol. 1, whose computerized vapor and analog bass pulses not only hark back to '80s electro, but whose total flatness in 1997 must have struck a chord with the Nintendo generation. Or "Jigga What, Jigga Who" from Vol. 2, an epochal Timbaland beat made of drum-machine pieces that shiver and interlock like Lumines blocks. Then there's the "Indian" flute of "Things That You Do" from Vol. 3, which might as well be taken straight from Zelda. 

So it's no surprise that Jigga sounds like a natural over actual Zelda music on the Ocarina of Rhyme remix album:

Jay's a celebrity who knows how to operate on the bleeding edge of pop culture, who rides beats in space like the Silver Surfer. You can even see it in his eyes in this video of the making of "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," the shock and awe of hearing something totally unreal and gravity-defying, like the best videogame. There's a real fantasy component to building an empire like Roc-A-Fella.

That's one aspect of Jay-Z's persona. His music's always contained a weird conflict between soulful authenticity and making hits. His latest album, The Blueprint 3, with its earthy production and railings against auto-tune artifice ("This is anti-autotune / death of the ringtone / This ain't for iTunes / This ain't for singalong / This is Sinatra at the opera...") is decidedly the former. And it's probably best to watch that paradox play out on stage. 

Jay's performing for free in Chicago on Sept. 8, as part of the Samsung Summer Krush Concert Tour. That's no small deal, since his Sept. 11 show in NYC will cost you $50 a ticket.

(If you want a shot at getting tickets, click here to register. Tickets will be made available and distributed at random times daily. You'll need to provide your email, phone, and this promo code: "Samsung." If you like free stuff but can't make the show, here's this: comment below and you'll enter a drawing for a free Samsung Jack phone at the end of the summer.)

BONUS LINK: Beanie Sigel's "Mac Man," whose beat is built out of Pac-Man samples and sounds right at home on Roc-A-Fella Records.

Previously:

• A Little Bit Country, A Little Less Rock and Roll
• Ten Questions: Offspring's Noodles
• Contests Galore: Free Tickets, Free Phones, Free Stardom!
• Get Jacked Up: Rock out with Daughtry in Seattle!

For the record, if I had to choose between living on the bleeding edge of gaming in 2010 and staring at this picture of a tricycle the whole year, I would probably choose the tricycle.

WARNING: Stuck-up rant ahead! I like a good story. Who doesn't? But I'm incredibly bored by this idea that a medium is "mature" when it can "tell a great story." I like a good character, and a provacative scenario, and an interesting past, and choices and consequences and choose your own adventure. Who doesn't? But when these subjects come up in interviews with creators, they usually come off like design problems just waiting to be solved, rather than artistic questions to be explored. It really, really bugs me when a rationalist designer's mentality stands in for creative inspiration as if they are one and the same. The darker implication is that the latter doesn't really need to exist in such a commercial medium as gaming.

For whatever reason, "story" (or its indie inverse, "meta-narrative") has achieved this Holy Grail status in your average gaming discourse simply by default. Let's all conveniently ignore all cases to the contrary -- Space Invaders, Tetris, Civilization -- because they're so much harder to talk about. Gaming is part of that postindustrial culture where "characters" are attached to "franchises" that are bought and sold so that endless iterations of our favorite "narratives" can be monetized. "Story" itself is some kind of valuable unit. I realize this may come across as very naive to the brutal realities of how cultural capital works in the 21st century. I would argue that the oft-repeated concept-catchphrase "when games can tell a truly great story that's when we'll know gaming has finally arrived & established its place in culture etc." seems (purposely) naive to much more important aspects of creativity. For example, a sense of pace, a sense of form, a sense of color, a sense of texture, a sense of atmosphere, a sense of timbre, you know, the senses.

Maybe "great storytelling" is just the new suit-approved shorthand for "the transcendent and/or uncanny experience of being confronted by a piece of art whose pieces all seem to align perfectly and seemingly incidentally like the spines on a lionfish." But I doubt it. If something is being sold, then it's necessary to filter out all those complex, basically irrational machinations beneath creativity. Consumers will need something to hang onto, some quantifiable-on-a-scale-of-1-to-10 reason that ultimately isn't there.

So I think this easy notion of "great storytelling" is actually quite cynical in nature. In any case, it's completely incapable of providing any insight as to why this William Eggleston photograph of a tricycle is considered a masterpiece and why its corresponding body of work was instrumental in allowing photography to "mature" into the color era.

But this isn't an argument for fine art. Galleries are for selling stuff too. It's just that, instead of "great storytelling," they use phrases like "the artist has produced a multifaceted account which challenges acquired knowledge and truths, interrogating geo-political, art historical and gender issues related to given cultural contexts using a range of different media." You know, important-sounding B.S. that doesn't have anything to do with the actual work before you. I guess I am just saying that "great storytelling" is just a red herring; and that the things in games that affect me most, the things I remember most clearly, are the much smaller, seemingly incidental moments that might be accredited to an anonymous sound or texture artist or level designer. Like this room in Half-Life, a donutlike space where you play cat-and-mouse with a couple zombies that, for me, contains something of the whole queasy adventure that followed:

I've always hated the notion that one can somehow triangulate a game's quality by weighing price against hours spent. It reeks of consumer tunnel-vision.

But the incredibly low prices of games in the App Store have made me rethink parts of this. Games for the iPhone range from $0.99 to $9.99 (but rarely). I spend a little more than a dollar on vending machine sodas that I usually finish in less than 10 minutes. The same amount of money on the App Store buys me hours of entertainment. Both mobile games and vending machines trade coins for timely diversions. Both have a somewhat ominous, otherworldly glow. OK, I'm going too far at this point.

In a way, then, I do feel that I'm getting a lot of "value" from the App Store when I consider that I'm getting back a lot more than I'm putting in, much more than I'm used to. But the main point is this. We talk about how fast things are moving. The condition of technology is that it exists to be improved (and in return improve us, or so the utopian outlook goes). On an editorial Web site the turnaround for publishing is generally a day, and sometimes less than that. On the App Store the gratification is instant. I read about a promising new game or discount on a site like TouchArcade, and it's in my hands before a minute has passed. The distance between production and consumption feels closer than ever to zero.

But inversely, with games like Doodle Jump and Flight Control and Bookworm, your engagement with the thing before you is dramatically protracted, like a deep sleep that hits you in an instant and lasts just a little too long. It takes no time and then it takes all your time.

These games are great for waiting rooms and the New York City subways. They make time into nothing. We are at the point where we pay to zone out, pay to hallucinate and remove ourselves from the physical stress and bad energy of the city, or our flattened sense of life in the suburbs. With games in general, we're arguably spending money to black out our time and consciousness. It feels like waiting endlessly for a resolution, as if what we're actually looking for is completely unknowable. When you don't have knowledge you pay, instead, for the next best thing in the dime store: being able to sleep.

Hey! Here is a chance to win a free Xbox 360 Games on Demand download code for BioShock.

BioShock was the second game I installed on my work laptop, the first PC I've had in three years. But the frame rates were bad. The screen was too small for Big Daddy. Let's not even talk about the sound. By the time I'd reached Neptune's Bounty, the game had slowed to a crawl. I'd send in two sentry drones, run in after them, and at a blink find them in smoking ruins at my feet.

T_T 

BioShock was when I gave up PC gaming for good. I've had an Xbox 360 copy of BioShock "on loan" from the CG game room for a few months. (Sorry!) But I have never once gotten around to putting the disc in my Xbox 360 tray. Why? Because when I turn on my 360, it -- somehow -- feels exponentially easier and faster to instead open a downloadable game such as Pac-Man Championship Edition, Castle Crashers or Ikaruga.

Technology keeps moving faster and faster, and soon game discs will be to downloadable games as vinyl (well, CD) is to the MP3. Downloading games from the App Store is half the fun of gaming on the iPhone. With that in mind, the updated Xbox Live's new "Games on Demand" service, which allows you to download entire big-budget games like BioShock, Mass Effect and Viva Piñata straight to your Xbox 360 hard drive, marks another small step toward an instant-gratification planet. Download times aside. It took me a little under an hour for me to download BioShock, which is a surprisingly quaint 4.66 GB. I could have sworn the game weighed at least 5,642,054 GB.

So that's another cool thing about downloading games. You can enumerate your collection, much more objectively than Metacritic. And with the click of a button you can immerse yourself like so:

There's a lot of talk about free-running lately. Perhaps it's because the usage of the buzzword in Brink previews has made references to Mirror's Edge materialize seemingly all over. I love the mechanic, as it plays out in Mirror's Edge, because it takes the first-person conceit so literally. You see through this virtual person's eyes; therefore your view of the game world should emulate a physical set of eyes. You can look everywhere, you can look down at yourself, you'll see the world heave up and down when you run, and see it spiral nearly out of control as you roll underneath some piping or fall off a building. (Need for Speed SHIFT seems to be doing something similar, making the virtual race as paradoxically physical as it can be.)

It's a thrilling feeling. And it speaks to what, for me, is the most profound thing about modern-era games: the way they use technology to give you an experience that's equally emotional and physical, some weird fusion of the two that makes you finally believe the dichotomy between mind and body is false. The way they use controller and image to make you one with the world, the things that happen in it, and the things in it that matter, as if human meaning could be generated by a machine and injected through fiber-optic needles into your eyes and fingertips. In the movie eXistenZ, which is about a virtual reality game in the future, the game controller connects directly into your spinal cord. That's a pretty apt metaphor for how uncanny these games can feel. Only music comes close to connecting the physical and the emotional like this.

But, anyway, that's just a theoretical preamble for a funny thing I noticed on our site today. In Evan Narcisse's excellent Father's Day list, there's an image of the protagonist from BioShock using the Incinerate plasmid.

My girlfriend says it's sad that Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are here at E3 presenting The Beatles: Rock Band. They've gone from being stars to being star presenters of a game in which they're featured. Note the name: "The Beatles" come before "Rock Band," an acknowledgment that they are the bigger franchise. What I've heard about the game is that the Beatles essence isn't only in the music and the avatars; it's also in the myriad period locales that blossom in the background as you play each song. Extending the Beatles from music and image to environment would be the logical conclusion of music and karaoke games.

Idol worship now takes the form of embodiment -- aided by technology, you're able to inhabit and reanimate the bodies of

[This blog interrupted to observe the fat guy with a crew cut rolling languorously through the expo floor on a Segway.]

your heroes, fictional or real. The Beatles always had an almost sacred image and mythology; now, these are all food for play-acting, through three-part harmonies with your friends if you have the mics.

So it isn't just that the aging Beatles are "featured" in this game. They've become sublimated into the game, into data designed to elicit a Beatles-themed physical and perhaps emotional feedback from the masses. You'll play and sing the right notes at the right times, directed painstakingly by the color cues. Everyone playing this game will become a sort of echo of one of the Beatles, as they were known in public. It's such a videogame way of creating memory -- forcefully, through spectacle and technology. 

Our series of the World's Greatest Videogame Toilets has finally drawn to a close with today's Bonus Flush, 3D Realms' highly dubious Shadow Warrior. What I've learned from this series is that videogame toilet humor died out a long time ago. Today's virtual toilets are photorealistic but not a whole lot of fun. Then again, breaking toilets in real life is kind of a drag. See above.

(Check out the toilet archive here.)

You truly beat the life out of your enemies in Zeno Clash. An uppercut to the jaw sends them flying across a grassy field. It takes them a moment to get back up. While they're dazed, you can run up and kick them a few times for good measure. More than in other games, you can watch yourself doing this: Like an anarchic version of Mirror's Edge, your field of vision swings with your body as you reach back for an uppercut, and your view of a downed opponent heaves forcefully as your leg thrusts outward to kick him in the side. 

Another factor is the sound of your punches and kicks landing -- it's nice, loud and slappy, like a Shaw Bros. martial arts film experienced from the first-person. Blow to blow, you're situated squarely in the moment -- as the aggressor. There's little of the numbness that I've come to associate with first-person shooters, which feel more like hyperreal, demented shooting galleries than the truly violent spaces they depict.

It's easy to forget that hand-to-hand combat in Zeno Clash is a lot like playing Punch-Out!! -- your enemies aren't just targets; they struggle and fight back. As such, you're able to block and dodge left and right. There's an intimacy to one-on-one fighting built this way; you have to pay attention to your opponent's movement and vice versa. But where a boxing game like Punch-Out!! frames and legitimizes your fight within the confines of the ring -- elevating conflict into a sport -- there's a sense of desperate abandon in Zeno Clash, whose outdoor terrain is sprawling in comparison. As you fight, you'll circle around trees and huts, face adversaries that come running at you from the other edge of a field, and flee as you're outnumbered by a group of two or three (a small pack by FPS standards). Because there aren't any clear boundaries to the violence here, the sense of danger is heightened dramatically. Any satisfaction you get from beating the crap out of a bird-headed creep is accompanied by the sudden fear of being slammed from behind by his troll-like crony.

You have to watch your back at all times in Zeno Clash, or else you'll become victim to the same aggression and anger you've been dealing out all along. As much physical power as the game gives you, that feeling is amplified by a sense of your own vulnerability in its open spaces. I'm thinking of Far Cry 2 in contrast, whose open terrain is designed for you to hide and scope out enemy forces before systematically demolishing them with your own long-range vision and weaponry. It's too bad Zeno Clash relies so heavily on unplayable, unskippable cut scenes, because your sense of displacement into its playable environments is so vivid and raw -- a surreal feeling that's easily the equal of the game's future-primitive art of bones and hair.

Here's one. Take old Sierra adventure games -- the first Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry games -- and make them playable on the Web. Then allow you to see everyone else who's playing the game along with you, and to overhear what they are saying to the game.

"Look body," one player says. "Take rose," says another.

"Use retrieval device," I say. "Use retrieval device," echoes someone in the room who thinks I have the right idea.

"LOL HOW DID U GET THE GIRL SKIN," asks one player to another who has changed avatars.

"Suicide," says a depressed soul at Lefty's Bar in Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.

These old point-and-click adventure games were rich environments built to be explored. You always used to explore them alone. In each scene and situation, you intervened in the world and brought about a cascade of events (for example, by finding a piece of gum and giving it to a handyman, who gives you a screwdriver, which you can use to mess with a control panel, which allows you to create a distraction that draws a guard away from a cell ... and so on) -- thus creating your story. But there was also your larger story about uncovering the world's secrets and unraveling its order. It was a slow and intimate process of discovery between you and the game.

Not that anyone asked for it, but Sarien.net has created the point-and-click multiplayer adventure -- opening the doors to these craggly old maps like floodgates and letting us all in at once. At best, this lets us play the games cooperatively, running ideas by each other until we hit upon the one that works. This is a hell of a lot more fun than looking up the solution in a FAQ. But at times, it's like those pristine streets and chambers that were meant for just one pair of eyes have become Second Life-like lounges wearing old makeup. There's a fitting new subtext to the sight of eight Larry Laffers all crowding around one girl at a bar. (Or a dozen of them packed into a very small bathroom. Some with pants down.)

But the game isn't as docile as you might think. Wandering around the halls of Space Quest I's beleaguered spaceship, I spied the occasional body. These were props -- wall dressing for the story of your escape as the only survivor from the ship, I thought. Then a roving alien suddenly shot me in the chest, and I fell alongside them. They were real bodies, belonging to players that didn't last very long. The game's rejected visitors were accumulating all around me. You can still live or die in this world, and nobody here can save you from dying. These games weren't designed for that.

Linger on the street outside Lefty's Bar, and you'll get plastered by a passing car. Thinking that I was safe in a crowd, I joined three other flattened Larry Laffers as roadkill. When I restarted the game, I stepped quickly past the rabble into the safety of the bar, afraid that the others might drag me down.

Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation is a chaotic experience, as you can see from the screenshot. You're a bear preparing for hibernation. As you crash through the woods in your camper, things like pinecones, fish, berries, and unruly animals end up inside the car. Some of these you can eat; others get in your way and it would probably behoove you to toss them out the passenger-side window. The catch is that your interactions with this physics-based game occur with only your right paw, which means that efforts to exert any kind of control over the bear, his car and the environment are pretty much futile. You can't quite steer while driving (unless you use an object to weigh down the pedal, which seems beside the point, since something else will inevitably go wrong); you have to deal with each of the many distractions in your car before you can really map out your trip; and your path is rife with obstacles. Eventually you'll probably give up, floor it, and see where chance takes you. In doing so, I crashed through a bush in reverse and ended up with two very belligerent skunk/hedgehogs crawling all over my windshield and face. It's a fun diversion that also speaks to the absurdity of rational, goal-oriented thinking. Your attempts to perform well are rarely as interesting as when you yield to the mess of the wild.

The game, designed for TIGSource's Cockpit Compo, reminded me of another rough-edged game: Mark Essen's Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist. Unlike Enviro-Bear, Essen's games screen in white-walled galleries. Says Essen, "You can play World of Warcraft for days, and you don't leave with anything. Play mine, and you'll leave with horrible memories, maybe." The controls in Randy Balma are purposely challenging -- for example, in the game's first segment, you have to drive a school bus in the correct direction on a freeway for a time, but your steering mechanisms change on you randomly and you constantly end up in multi-car pile-ups from which you have to extricate yourself (using luck, mainly). This trick is called "cunningly frustrating." What makes Essen's games appeal to the art world while Enviro-Bear is disposable? Is it Essen's knowledge of avant-garde cinema? For me, the frustration in Randy Balma and Enviro-Bear feels pretty alike -- it's an illusion of directive that is constantly disrupted by your own incompetence in the world. 

My guess is that the art-world cred is really about Essen's visual themes. Unlike Enviro-Bear's crude, furious but still fuzzy and lovable bear, Randy Balma is full of painful, potentially seizure-inducing hues, disembodied baby's heads, allusions to insemination and psychosis, and an ominous soundtrack that culminates in a full-out breakcore freakout. It's a "brutal" experience, which might be considered transgressive in relation to normal, wish-fulfilling games. The art world loves perceived transgression. But I'd argue that the repetitious, heartless likes of Mega Man have been offering videogame brutality for decades. With a game like Randy Balma we have colorful flashing and atonal sounds that function as cues toward an avant-garde practice; we have provocative imagery and writing that function as signifiers of Content. See, there's content here -- nourishing, culturally valuable content -- in Randy Balma, where Enviro-Bear only has sticks and stones (and pinecones, and flopping fish).

(This isn't intended as a knock against Essen, who is a gamer and also draws a line between games he makes for galleries and those he makes for the outside world.)

Content -- here, situated as meaningful antagonism -- is supposed to give you something valuable to take away from a game. Unlike WoW players, Essen says, Randy Balma players are given a gift. I think this is misguided. A meaningful encounter with a piece of art work occurs while you're engaged with it; standing in front of a painting, or sitting in the cinema. Playing the game. And as Gus puts it, there's a "power of aesthetic" that makes things resonate. Yet both these games have a sort of anti-aesthetic -- Enviro-Bear's MS Paint tableau; Randy Balma's primitivist pixel art -- and neither is more important than the corresponding anti-gameplay. Which actively works to make your encounter with the game a difficult one.

For me, lack of control is good for a laugh, and good for philosophy. It's most effective when, as in Enviro-Bear, it's taken as is, rather than passing for something more meaningful. But I'm past the outright-antagonism technique in film and video art, and I'd like for games to avoid that phase. Games, of all mediums, should seduce -- that is, appeal to your senses and instincts on a level that intensifies and surpasses, rather than shies away from, WoW-esque compulsion. That's making the experience last, the hard way.