Wednesday, November 12, 2008

OMG Mirror's Edge is coming out tomorrow!

I'm gonna get it I'm gonna get it. I AM GOING TO GET IT!



MY LITTLE MCM HEAD WILL EXPLODE FULL OF JOY AND GENDER THEORIZING GOODNESS!

So between my fever dream hallucinations, my split attention between various online convos, and my rushing to get this post in ASAP so I can meet the sweet warm embrace of sleep I just want to lay out what I'm expecting from Mirror's Edge in terms of thought food.

So to start with one interesting excerpt from a reviewer:

We see Faith in the third-person during the animated cut-scenes, and she always seems slightly unhappy and worried, weighed down by the sheer fact of being in her skin. Hers isn't the easiest life, and, while stationary, she has time to wonder about these things. When she's running, however, when we look at the world through her eyes, it all makes sense. As long as she can make the next jump, she'll be fine. If she can lose the police by sliding under a series of pipes and crashing through a door, she has fixed a very immediate problem. It's easy to live when your existence is counted a rooftop at a time; everything else falls away.
So the premise is that all the worlds information media is being tapped, regulated, and controlled etc. by an Evil totalitarian government, so it takes an organic human message carrier, free from the constraints of technology, to pass private messages across the city that would otherwise be intercepted by the police-state. I haven't gotten around to playing or seeing it yet, so this is all being gleaned from reviews and such I've read. Still, this much heavily intruiges me in that we've got a narrative contrast set up between technology, order, patriarchical society, and progress against the organic female body. An organic female body that serves as a space where the player's identity is projected onto, which is something that again resonates with a lot of writing about Cyborg theory and degendering (or transgendering) possibilities via technological extension. So does it make sense that Faith, in being presented in the 3rd person, feels uncomfortable as an object of the gaze, as an objectified fetish of pleasure in a cinematic cutscene? Only when the game jumps back into the "gamic" 1st person does everything make sense again, does she suddenly spring into action not as a cinematic object but as a gamic subject, one that is constantly moving and bounding through gamic space.

Here's a short quote from a 1-up review:
Mirror's Edge is ultimately a game about love, not violence -- and considering how refreshing it was to play from a first-person vantage point without the barrel of a gun bobbing along, I wanted to keep it that way as often as possible.
Again, just like Portal Mirror's Edge is a 1st person female game not about killing but space manipulation, reinforcing a trend that's happening in "feminized" hardcore 1st-person games. And I want to call Mirror's Edge a feminized game because that's what it seems to be, and I really hope it is because if it is as exciting and influential and innovative and ground breaking as I'm hoping it is, it'll push the industry into creating more thoughtful and sophisticated games in general. In the past 5-10 years in gaming it was the "casual games" that were marked as distinctly feminine, and both Mirror's Edge and Portal definitely fall in the "hardcore" realm. Does this mean that these games are encouraging more gender crossover into serious gaming, trying to unlabel itself off of being a "boys only" zone?

On another note, I'm troubled by the advertising of this game, with Faith being made into a sexual selling point. Portal didn't have Chell plastered across Orange Boxes everywhere, and the above image of Faith knocking out a stormtrooper is certainly not jumping away from all the typical male fantasy imagery floating around Lara Croft, Bloodrayne, or most 3rd-person action games with female protagonists. This seems to work against the work the actual game is doing in expanding on gender portrayals in games. Well, anything to sell it though, right?

More on when I actually get some game time with this little wonder.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Sorry Nobody

Hello Imaginary Audience!

For anyone looking at the blog and noticing the lack of updates, I'm just letting you all know it's not dead, just sad and neglected. I'm still involved, but grad school apps and work in general have been distracting me from posting about things. And oh boy, are there things to post about. A brief rundown of my ideas so I don't forget:

-Movement vs. Genre Part II: how modes of address (that define genre) entail certain . Pretty much I want to see if there's a sort of "male gaze" equivalent or analog from Mulvey's film theory in something like a FPS in the way it addresses the player, and how a game like Portal might subvert the "classic male gaze" of a game.

-Park Chan Wook's JSA has a few things going on I wanted to discuss, primarily . These are two different ideas (and possibly two different posts)

-Was going to upload a revised and "bloggy" version of one of my papers for class analyzing the scene from Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin dances, make it less academic-y and more tied to cyber-digital age stuff I want to talk about.

-Finally, I've had this idea for a long time, and I haven't really been going out of my way to do this but I want to put up some beer recommendations and some reviews of what I find to be good brews.

There, that's a lot on my plate but a load off my mind.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Genre vs. Movement (Part I)

I'll open this post with two definitions pulled from Janey Place's essay "Women in Film Noir"*:

"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times, and are uniquely able to express the homogeneous hopes (Soviet Socialist Realism and Italian Neo-Realism) and fears (German Expressionism and film noir) brought to the fore by, for example, the upheaval of war."

"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time: we have had Westerns since the early 1900s and, in spite of rise and falls in their popularity, Westerns are with us today. Genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."

There's been a lot of discussion in new media academics and thoughtful gamers on the topic of genre and categorization (him, her, and this other dude come to mind) and I thought I'd try to attempt to create some definitions and also point out some of the problems involved with genre and gaming. Because if we are going to talk about genre across the internet, we better define it as Janey Place so eloquently did when she discussed film noir.
First of all, games are not film. They are a completely different medium. I almost feel like a fool for using an essay on film to structure any argument on games. Except that games can't seem to escape cinematic portrayals, cutscene, narrative, and pretty much this specter of the medium haunting it from it's inception**. I'd also argue that like cinema games are going through a "classical cinema" phase where the market is primarily industry and commodity driven, where people are trying to sell (virtual) stars and "the next big FPS" or "the next big RTS". Still, there's something even more disruptive about video games as a medium than say, television was to film. So my discussion of genre in terms of video games must be understood as something not INHERENT TO the medium (the medium is not the genre, even if it is the message), but rather it is something adopted from it's influence from other (mostly narrative) forms.***

GAMIC GENRE

Let's go back to Janey's comment on genre:

"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time...genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."

What is it in games that remains consistent, that once established defines the game yet is not tied to any sort of ideology? Certainly not the same cinematic genre's categorizations of horror, action, western, etc. But if we look at how people talk about games, how they label and categorize them, we first see that this categorization works along the lines of a consistent mode of address in any given genre. Note that I did not say "gameplay", since within a genre gameplay can be tinkered, bent, and politicized within a genre. Rather, it is the way in the almost McLuhan-esque level where we look at what message is being sent by this culmination of digital multimedia. The FPS will always consistently address the player as collapsed within the viewpoint of the heroic subject, an ultra exaggerated instance of "taking up the male gaze" (or female if you're playing Portal), while the Strategy game will address the player from a top to bottom bird's-eye camera angle. An FPS that addresses the player from the POV of Starcraft is an impossibility. However, gameplay changes within any given mode of address drastically over the (short) history of gaming, and as Ian Bogost explains (albeit I think his arguement has a few holes) gameplay has politicizing and social ideas backing them, and in fact do change when ideologies change.

I'm going to use FPS as the case study to solidify my definition, because I think it's precisely because it's the genre that's been bent and played with so extensively by the industry while still being recognized as "FPS" it works so well at cementing what I really mean by genre. The two shooters that established the genre, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, presented games with a new mode of address, a totally new innovation.**** That genre creation paved the way for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, Half Life, Deus Ex...and so forth. Yet as that genre expanded, new gameplay possibilities emerged, people suddenly thought "within this mode of address, we don't have to have people running around shooting each other, we can create alternative modes of gameplay". Thief is also part of the FPS genre, but doesn't encompass the same . The same mode address is used (self positioned and identified at Garret, seeing one's "own arms" holding the weapon), the gameplay encompasses different ideologies (suddenly, killing is not only unnecessary but undesirable). Deus Ex again changed gameplay (added 'RPG elements', which were essentially gameplay elements), but the mode of address is consistent again with all other FPS games. Even Activision's 1998 Battlezone that claimed to "merge" two genres of FPS and RTS merely merged two gameplays that were heavily associated with the two genre's, but ultimately had to resort to the FPS mode of address.

With that said, genre follows a drastically different criteria than film does. While cinema cuts its genres through specific subjects (horror, western, comedy, action, drama), the game cuts its genres through what is specific to games, which is the mode of address (FPS, RTS, RPG, JRPG, Simulation, Sports, Adventure, other acronyms and non-acronyms). Still, the purpose of genre fulfills the same role, to (mostly inadequately) outline what the consumer can expect from the media text. So when we label Thief as a "stealth based FPS", there's a very clear expectation of what we can get out of that game (where "stealth based" is merely a description of gameplay). So far so good, right?

Onwards to movement!

GAMIC MOVEMENT

"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times..."

If the genre is a-historical and the movement historical, then movements are certainly tied not just to gameplay, but iconography, ideology, and depiction (graphics, sounds, portrayal). Consider FPS games again, and in particular the "military simulation FPS". America's Army, The Call of Duty series, the Battlefield games, even Counterstrike all are part of the same movement that are tied to a technological, social, and political setting. All these military simulation FPS games are tied by "thematic and formal elements" located primarily in their gameplay that "make them particularly expressive of [their] time." Each of these games stress "realism" in their use of localized damage, lethal bullet system, "real guns", and more recently "hyper-realistic graphics". These games are coming out of a context of a much more militarized America, part of what I consider to be part of the conservative national discourse that is (or in the case of the World War 2 simulators, a reaction to a time where war was in fact patriotic and necessary). When America's war climate changes, so will the production of these games. But these games are first influence by society/politics, and then also by technology; that we are at a current point in time where we can create localized bullet damage, algorithms for recoil, and also a level of texture realism that "resembles" the Middle East
(Or rather a portrayal of the Middle East we all experience as citizens through our exposure to TV, film, print, and images). The reason this movement didn't exist back in 1993 was not just because of the social/political setting, but also because that technology just could not enable that.

Movements also cut across genres, and in today's modern times movements are heavily driven by capitalism. Deus Ex took the FPS genre and 'introduced' (like System Shock 2 before it) RPG gameplay elements of levelling up and increasing skills. Now we're caught in the middle of a movement where we see 'RPG gamplay elements' everywhere in all genres of games, from puzzle games (Puzzle Quest) to RTS (Warcraft III) to the platformer (Iji) to whatever. The levelling system is a gameplay movement that's being imitated off of a canonical success and has worked into the minds of many that a good game must have levelling and 'RPG elements'.

CONCLUSION

There's a real amorphousness to the way we categorize games, and I think any discussion of genre requires to some degree how we approach the terms we use. For example, the way I've defined the terms and how they are used in industry, journalism, marketing, and everyday conversation are conflicting; Tony Hawk Pro Skater is labeled as a "sports game", yet that genre labeling is inadequate. It's mode of address, for example, is not the same as Winning Eleven or Madden. The player is positioned in the latter two in a simulation standpoint, shifting identity/control from player to player and at the same time being 'team manager'. Tony Hawk you are positioned into one virtual body, your camera position set apart so you can both simultaneously spectate and inhabit that twirling skateboarder pulling 180 Beihana's (is that what they are called?) and addressed very differently. Should we call the genre "skateboard sports game"?

There's also certainly more to discuss on this topic, but I think it's enough for now that people interrogate the definitions that I've set up. I want to make sure that I'm building a sound basis to catagorize and criticize game division, because hopefully later this month I'll continue these thoughts along in a more interesting way. For ultimately, Janey Place's essay goes on to discuss how this distinction she made between genre and movement ultimately informs how the woman is placed within film noir, and I'd like to tie a parallel arguement into my discussion of games; that is, there are certain game genre's that enable special modes of identification, and different movements complicate or problematize those modes of identification. Also, I plan to delve a little deeper into the complications that arise between different genres creating drastically different relations of interaction with the media/machine, such that the extension of the senses is fundamentally different for each different genre of game. Perhaps differing modes of address in a genre send different messages (the medium is the message), perhaps not (the medium is not the message).

So until then, I'll just leave it to: What do you think?

---FOOTNOTES---

*Janey Place, "Women in Film Noir" in Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.),
Women in Film Noir, New Edition (London: The British Film Institute, 1998)

**Why is Mario considered the paradigm shift in gaming history? How did it "revolutionize" game design? Because what it essentially did was introduce level iteration, narrative, classic cinema conventions down to the artificially plastered on "damsel-in-distress" MacGuffin. Essentially, it tied it back down to several already familiar media forms, that of the novel, the film, the play, etc.

***Keep in mind that the very first video games, the arcade machine games, had no narrative arc of beginning, middle, or end. Rather, it was merely a beginning, and then a struggle of survival where the ending was written by the machine's eventual conquer of the user (or perhaps the user's own inscribed ending).

****And this is part of the reason why I think no new innovation occurs now. Because people want to change GAMEPLAY, but gameplay isn't what creates the medium of the video game; it only makes the medium "enjoyable" (or not). The Medium is the Message; change the medium, change it's mode of reception, and that is how you create a paradigm shift.

Also, innovation is overrated.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Holy Snapples! Free games!

Not just any free games, but free games of the smartsy academic or socially aware type I really like!

http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/prototypes.php


Plus a smart guy talks about them!

http://henryjenkins.org/2008/10/marching_to_a_different_gumbea.html

Enjoy!

Thursday, October 2, 2008

My thoughts on the Biden/Palin Debate

Her


Me


Edit: It's like a female Dubuya Bush.

Edit edit: Actually that's a little harsh. At least we don't have any 30 second pauses of staring into the camera. Remember that guys?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Cyber Drag

Here is a picture of my latest rocker for Rock Band:



And here is my avatar for Kingdom Of Loathing currently:




It's not just these games too. In Deus Ex 2 I chose the female Alex, in my various playthroughs of Fallout and Fallout 2 I'd be female, and I spend more time with my female sim communities of women than my male ones. If I had a WoW character, it would most definitely be female*. I realize that usually whenever presented to choose a gender in a game, I split about 50/50 in deciding between male and female, depending on my mood, but I get a lot of fun of tramping around with digital boobs and dresses.

Now consider this statement that I ran across from Leigh Alexander's blog Sexy VideogameLand:

"And, speaking of genre evolution, my colleague Stephen Totilo is re-evaluating the word "RPG," looking at the games we have today and which ones literally let you "play a role" -- what do you think of the idea of LittleBigPlanet, which lets you feel like a game designer, and Guitar Hero, which lets you feel like a rock star, as "role-playing games?" Either way, he and I both seem to agree that our traditional genre labels are becoming pretty useless."***

If I am playing role, then I'm certainly playing a female role. And just so y'all know, I am biologically a male; I have a penis and an y-chromosome accompanying my X. Also in terms of gender I certainly identify as male, even going so far as to slam down some beers with my bra's on a Saturday night (not really). But from time to time, when I play a video game I choose consciously to have a female be my digital stand in, or play a game where that decision is made for me. Even more revealing, sometimes I am peeved when I can't choose to have a female avatar stand in as myself within a digital game world (goddammit, Halo).

Most guys partake in Cyber Drag in video games; much more, it seems, then they do in chatrooms, social networks, or other digital realms**. Perhaps because its because that because this is an imagined or fantasy space that we simply "play" is such a thing permissive. Or perhaps we aren't putting ourselves into drag at all, but giving us some T&A to look at while we kill some dragons, rock out, or whatever. In any case, I want to spend this day looking into the question of Cyber Drag.



Uses of the avatar differ from game to game, and it would be a major lie if I said that every time I made a new female Sim or rocker I was projecting my own identity and (un)gender into the character. Rather, it's more of a form of ultra-spectacle: for the Sims the female is literally put on a rotating display where she remains completely complacent (even smiling happily) as we (the male gamer in my case) make her into the physically (or rather digitally) perfect woman. I would be lying if I didn't try with careful precision to make my Rock Band chicks look smokin' hot, or my Sims unreasonably thin and pretty. There is potential in these spaces for identification, sure, but really we are distanced in identification; especially in the Sims because that woman on screen is more of a puppet we issue commands to than a woman we place our own identity into. She's like a perfect wife, she'll do anything we command her to.



Mary Flanagan talks about the failure of the computer game to break down that wall of objectification/identification in her essay "Hyperbodies/Hyperknowledge". She uses Lara Croft from Tomb Raider as her example on how identification occurs in five different ways with the 3rd person character instead of one. In summary (and probably not doing her whole argument true justice) these positions are (1) a godlike omniscient position of control and "puppeting" Lara Croft, (2) viewing Lara Croft as an autonomos female entity seperate from the player, (3) identifying oneself as a sidekick/companion to Lara, (4) being a vouyeristic spectator to Lara Croft, and finally (5) identifying the self as Lara Croft. To give a few banal examples to demonstrate, over the course of playing Tomb Raider I may view the Lara-Avatar falling into a pit of spikes and saying "shit, I died". In this case, I collapse my own identity with that of Lara Croft, embodying the position of (5). Another point I might (hypothetically) say "Lara Croft would be so hot if she weren't so damn pixely"****. In this case, I'm taking vouyeristic pleasure out of looking at Lara Croft as something seperate to me, taking up position (4). Also, leave Tomb Raider running, don't touch anything, and just watch Lara; she'll do the occaisional autonomos hair flick or ambient action. This is what Flanagan means by point (2), because even though we control Lara through keystrokes there are certain actions that are uncontrolled by us that are carried out by the avatar, demonstrating that this person on screen is no quite us, that we don't control everything she does because we are not her. Flanagan goes outlining the rest of these points but her main issue is that these 5 points of viewing Lara happen simultaniously during the play of the game. Therefore, if a male gamer were to play as Lara, that moment of possibly placing and identifying oneself as a female body is simultaniously negated by the fact that we are also distancing herself from her in multiple ways. Instead, Lara Croft is a willing puppet of male control, and we are given the privilidged invisible camera viewpoint of seeing her dodge traps, shoot bad guys, and fall to her doom (several times) in the comfort of our own chairs in front of a computer monitor. We don't really end up being in cyber drag at all, because we don't occupy the female space.



However, I don't want to be so bleak and end right there. Because while I do find that Flanagan's arguement is true not for just Tomb Raider but almost every 3rd person platformer/shooter game, it's not true for every game. For example, Portal does some incredibly interesting things with identification and gender that breaks down those "5 areas of identification" that Flanagan talked about in her essay. I've argued in the classroom that Portal is a game where gender-bending/fucking/obliteration occurs quite thoroughly and I'll try to summarize some of my points right here*****. For example, within the game the control of the character never breaks, there are no moments where the female avatar acts of her own volition. Also, the 1st person perspective. The female avatar also certainly isn't a looker, the sight of looking at her through a portal isn't that of necessarily of vouyeristic pleasure but reflection; you aren't looking through a portal at a woman, but looking through a portal at yourself. So Portal, I've argued in the past, collapses the identification of player with it's avatar completely, inserting the player's identity into a digital female body. That doesn't mean it happens in other places to a lesser degree.



Now take some of the old Black Isle Role Playing Games: in Fallout or Baldur's Gate we certainly are distanced from the player avatar, taking on the classic RTS point of view of omniscience and control. However, this distance is so far (and the graphics technology so inadequate) that the avatar almost has no sexual definition, and is certainly not titilating, vouyeristic, or sexual. There is still that sensation of control, of puppetry at a distance, but I describe my own experience of playing from this perspective as still much more "role-playing" as a Baldur's Gate female than playing as Lara Croft or one of my Sims. Because the main difference is that the actions I undertake in the game serve as placeholders of the actions I would otherwise undertake if I were really in that digital world. Sure, Fallout has (limited) dialogue options but each possible point of dialogue represents a different attitude or question I would ask. I would use different words than my character, but they would (ideally) mean the same things. Again, the "class", "skills", "techniques", "role", or whatever are a reflection of the player's identity, and every action becomes a reflection of what how the player wants to define himself. So in character creation, choosing a gender doesn't change the game mechanics or gameplay drastically, but its a choice that is given for the player to take up, being asked to identify as the opposite sex as opposed to a male or female identity being forced on the player. This mechanic is perhaps what is at the core of cyber drag.

Ultimately, what I think everything above illustrates is both a movement that is emerging and at the same time being resisted, one that has been accurately predicted by us smarmy intellectual academic types for a while now. Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, discussed how technology was slowly merging (wo)man to machine, doing away with Freudian and phallocentric/patriarchical understandings of sexuality and society. I feel the same thing is being done in video games. With the word "immersion" being thrown around 100 times a second in the gaming sphere, we forget that such immersion involves us extending ourselves as a digital entity into a game, that we need an avatar and digital placeholder to represent ourselves into that world. This digital extension inherently has no gender, and it is only some game designer's decision that this extension be "coded" (both ) as male or female. But a man in woman's clothing is (genderly) neither man nor male, as is my malicious serial killing Fallout character who is coded as female but played by a man.

So now that nobody is listening, I want to ask: Do you cyber drag? Why? As you might have guessed in your reading, I'm myself am not too informed on Drag culture or theory, so perhaps I'm using the word "drag" inappropriately to describe this phenomenon. Is there something that I'm missing that would disrupt or support this train of thought? Really, what do you think?

To read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, click here.
To read Flanagan's article on the idea of the Hyperbody, click here.

---footnotes---

*WoW, however, ends relationships and destroys lives, so I will never have a WoW character.

** It would be interesting however, to see how often males playing females/females playing males occur over erotic chat channels or just in random non-game digital spaces. How many people listed under "female" on facebook are what (the white hetero patriarchical) majority would call male? This is a train of thought for another time, but really: "On the internet, no one knows you are dog".

***"Oh Survival Horror, Where art Thou?" Alexander, Leigh. http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2008/09/o-survival-horror-where-art-thou.html

**** I mean, she's really not that hot. Angelina Jolie is, but Lara Croft...eh.

***** I plan on posting the original paper onto the blog eventually. My summary doesn't really do justice to the wealth of things going on in Portal concerning gender and identification, and if I posted everything I wanted to say about it now this post would be about 3 times longer.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Privacy in Obscurity (Resisting Facebook)

So... Long time guys.

Let me begin in just saying there's something extremely creepy about Facebook. Like, really creepy, as if when we crucify our identities for the privilidge of poking the crucified with pointed sticks and crowning them with thorns. To display oneself reminds me a bit of Barthe's discussion of the Strip Tease, something tantalizing that you don't get every little detail of someone's life, but every friend's wall post, or lack of relationship status, or event update is like the removal of another peice of clothing, more scintillating, more eroticizing, yet you just don't want to know EVERYTHING that's going on; nakedness after all is the destination we never want to reach. Tich Nhat Than said that to understand someone else fully and completely (nakedly) is to truly love them, there is no other option if we have full complete (transcended) understanding of one's being. If that is so, everyone wants striptease, that never ending unveilling of discovering "just one more secret" (just one more hit), our addictions never satiated. Surveillance is television, reading, books, video games, all the same kind of (un)enjoyment of wasting (non)time that we're becoming obsessed with. Either we're going to have too many people wanting to be policemen, or no policemen on the streets. In either case national security will be better than it ever was.

I have 800+ "friends" on facebook. That's 800+ pages of gender, sexual, religious, political, social, photographic identites, scattered lives and personalities constructed out of pre-made building blocks. 800+ desperate attempts to link myself to the real world in some futile, gasping, drowning way (god forbid I sat myself down with a red plastic cup of piss-shit beer and sat in the corner of darkness where waves of sound would replace my words with "what?" "I can't Hear You" "Want to go somewhere more quiet?").

My friend was contemplating suicide after a Sigur Ros concert (________wants to know: is there life after a Sigur Ros concert?). I perscribed her some medication (Album Leaf, Mum, The Notwist) but in going through my 5226 song medicine cabinet I found a little bottle named "Esmerine".

Suddenly facebook is not a weird socialist panopticon game, but a memory floating back to a girl who got hit by a car instead of meeting me for tea. The song sounded of old age, of a time fresh out of high school, of not knowing how to take girls out on dates and throwing up in dorm toilets. I cut out a little piece of the sound-thought patterns in my head and put them on a little plate and handed them to the girl who smiled and gave me a 6 song CD of a cello drifting in a post-apocolyptic sea four years ago. Maybe she'll be confused at the offering, and proceed to inject secrets from the spider's weave of friends, events, groups, secrets. But for me, maybe 800+ pages of room keys and syringes isn't really a bag of keys and needles, but something lurking in this strange world of potentiality, where jokes are still funny and songs are still unfamiliar.

I am extremely aware that no one reads this blog, which is comforting in its own right. But someone could, and I have links leading here in various little crossroads of the internet (facebook included). So I'll stash my little secrets here, leave a little plate of them out with a little sign that says "help yourself" in the middle of a prarie of ghosts and obscurity. These secrets have nougat though, so if you are allergic or do not like nougat I propose you try some of the chocolate covered rants. They are a little old however.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Short Post on Music

What I've been listening to recently:

Tegan and Sara, The Con
I feel most albums have their single, which is usually pretty good but sometimes a less adventurous "throwaway song" that's only solid, and then some sort of hidden gem which really comes together which makes me listen to the album over and over again. In the case of The Con though, I can't stop listening to the title track which is fantastic. The rest of the album is good, but not amazing (except for possibly the song "Nineteen"), and there are a few songs that irk me a little, making me pull out my iPod and hit the next track button; overall, I feel like I have to listen to more Tegan and Sara because to me it feels like Tegan and Sara are a great band, but maybe really shined a few albums ago.

YMCK, Family Genesis
Well really, I've been listening to all three albums of theirs, but Family Genesis the most. And I have to say I pretty much love every non-filler song (and hell, even the 1 minute interludes are actually pretty damn cool). I feel if Katamari Damacy was made for Nintendo, then this band would be the soundtrack for the game. And well, since 8-bit electronica is pretty cool, and Katamari music is amazing I have to say I'm enjoying the whole experience. Their earlier stuff certainly has the "Scat Jazz" influence that many Katamari tracks have, and while that's present in Family Genesis that album also is a bit richer than just 8-bit noises and : the sound is more layered, there's more going on, and it's overall the most sophisticated of their albums. "Starlight" is one of my personal favorites on there, although "Major Swing", "Pleiades", and "Rain" are also great.

Hunter Valentine, The Impatient Romantic
This band is off to a solid start; it's energetic, catchy, and just a lot of fun. I don't care if they don't have huge crazy walls of noise like Broken Social Scene, the country twang of Rilo Kiley, the sweeping orchestral beauty of The Delgados, or the electronic dance influence of Shiny Toy Guns because what they are doing now they are doing extremely well, which is making Canadian Indie Music that rocks. And if you ever see them in concert in a seedy little New York Bar for $10 (like I did), then you're in for a treat: they are tight, energetic, and are already a great live band; I can't wait until they get big in the States so I can see them at Lupo's or some large venue in Boston. "Staten Island Dream Tour" and "Van City" are my picks from this album.

What I want to listen to now:
Urbangarde. But I don't wanna put down $20+ to order the CD from Japan ;_;

Friday, June 27, 2008

I am a Sad Panda, as opposed to a Happy Snake

So everyone's on a rant about Metal Gear Solid 4's status as a work of art or not, which is making me sad because I'M MISSING OUT! AND I CAN'T PLAY IT! And by the time I DO get to it, the discussion will be old news, and anything important I'll have to say at that point will probably be either already said or just ignored because of the lateness of it all.

*sigh*

Way to miss the bandwagon man.

Friday, June 13, 2008

1st Impressions

Crap, I haven't updated this in FOREVER. With my internship starting and still having to scrounge for a job I've been too exhausted or too busy to give this blog the proper attention it needs. In any case, it's time I talked a little bit about games seriously. Unfortunately, I haven't actually beaten - much less thoroughly played through - anything that I feel is really worth talking about, but at least I can post some 1st impressions of what I've been thinking about.

DREAMFALL

Dreamfall is what I would call a successful cinematic game, one where the gameplay procedure and algorithm has a narrative meaning attached to it. What do I mean by that? Well, in a game like FF7, which most ppl do play for "the story" and "the world", stats, menus, and combat exist in a sort of non-diegetic space apart from the game world of Cloud running around, talking to people, and moving through the story. the "Allies on one side and monster on the other" turned base combat is a algorithm of the game that is inconsistent with the battle narrative: battles in that "world" don't actually occur like that, but the combat space rather exists in a "gamic space". Dreamfall is another game where story and world is the main focus of gameplay, but there is a correspondence of gamic action and narrative action: interfaces still exist, but they trigger actions such that when you hit the command "pick up ticket" the narrative of the game follows that action. I wouldn't say that the game's action is purely like that, but it is to a much larger degree than FF7, Warcraft III... even Doom.

If I were to do a full post on this game, it'd definitely be about the game's "cinema-ness", and how it's really trying in some ways to imitate a previous medium but also does things that are unusual to both cinema and games. In a typical fantasy/adventure movie, minor actions hold no interest to the spectator, but in a game like Dreamfall it is the minor actions of picking up objects, picking locks, and flippant conversation that actually create the game, challenge, and delight of playing. In some way, it is the avoidance of combat and action, the fact that you are not a superhero going around beating everyone up, that is more fun about Dreamfall. Listening to a Japanese man's sob story and looting garbage for a torn ticket isn't good cinema, but it is good adventure gaming because of the involvement, control, and effort involved.

What this makes me think of though is how it relates to Mary Flanagan's idea of the Hyperbody in Tomb Raider. Dreamfall seems to exaggerate the Male Gaze even more than Tomb Raider does, in the sense we control Zoey like we control Lara Croft, we've also got a less of an association of "ourselves" as Zoey; when a player "commands" Zoey to examine an object, she tells us what she is thinking, as though we occupy the inside of her head. There's a lot I want to discuss about this, but I don't think Dreamfall is really as troubling as Tomb Raider is, and is in it's own way a sort of feminist game...

Shadow of the Colossus

I really want to compare this game to You Have to Burn The Rope, I just feel that academically and thematically they bring up the same commentary about gaming. Not only are there the superficial similarities, like being put up against a giant boss where the only way to defeat them is through a sort of puzzle-like weak-spot manner, but both game I feel are making the same sort of criticism. You Have to Burn The Rope is less subtle than Shadow, but there's a dialog in both games that's established between the players: In YHTBTR it's the text in the tunnel proceeding the Grinning Colossus (hey!) but in Shadow there are similar "hints" about killing the bosses, such as the glowing weak spots in the second colossus, or Nimrod's omnipotent voice telling you "You must scale the Colossus to reach his weak point" if you take too long trying to figure things out. Shadow is especially interesting because the omnipotent, all-powerful being is not only addressing the player avatar, but also to a degree you, the player sitting on the couch with the controller in hand. And again, the moments of peace and silence where you move through the empty landscape (which parallels to the tunnel in YHTBTR) is again a sort of dialogue with the player, stripping away things such as challenge, plot, enemies, and questioning: are these things really necessary in a game? What about just good ol' aesthetic beauty? Also both games have a useless attack that accomplishes nothing, but in most "typical" games act as the bread and butter of your character. Why would the Wanderer in Shadow have a sword swinging move if all you really do in the game is use arrows and stab the weak spot?

Open Source Games

I've got LinCity installed and plan to play a bit of LinCiv, but LinCity crashes in like a couple seconds every time I boot it up so really the only Open Source Gaming I've been doing has been Battle for Wesnoth. Still, Open Source Games have the potential, but really haven't gone out and innovated but instead try to imitate other games, which seems really contrary to the way Open Source culture has worked with Operating Systems and such.

Hopefully, I'll expand on all of these topics as I play through all these game entirely. Gnite!

EDIT: Fixed some spelling errors, etc.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

A response I made on the blagosphere

This is a very long response I posted on the latest entry of the www.game-ism.com blog. You can see the original here. Anyways, with something so long that I wrote on the internet, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about here.

***

What I’m personally afraid of is not the ignorance of people like Glenn Beck, but that even in their ignorance that they may be onto something that video game players have not fully explored. This isn’t to say that the guy is right, or that he’s justified at all in criticizing something he doesn’t understand, but I want to stop and slow down a bit about what you’d actually say if you did get to sit down and play some video games with this man. Now to be fair, I haven’t gotten my own hands on GTA4 yet, but I have played San Andreas and Vice City, so I’ll be using those as my main examples here.

I wouldn’t say that a game lacks any sort of rhetoric or ideology that carries a certain social message across; I think this is what people like Glenn Beck and ignorant parents are afraid of, but unfortunately they don’t have their head on right, so this whole issue gets dismissed prematurely. And it is incorrect to say that the medium (Video Games) triggers the behavior (violence). Television came under the same criticism, but both TV and VG critics miss something important: that these two media are polysemic, and WHAT is watched/played and HOW it is watched/played reveals the behavior of the individual. A video game like any of the new GTAs can be played “differently” for each person: one may rampage through the streets and create random mayhem, another may meticulously speed through each and every mission and follow the game’s story, and another may simply even cruise the streets taking the time to obey all traffic laws and be an obedient citizen for an hour or two, then shut off the game and throw a tea party afterwards. What is important though, is the algorithms that run the game structure each of these types of play. For example, Ian Bogost in his book “Persuasive Games” talks about GTA San Andreas’s food system and how it functions as social critique: As a poor black man, you need to eat but the only food available to you is fast food, which keeps knocking up your fat score. There is no alternative of “better food” offered, because (Ian Bogost feels) that this algorithmic representation actually is a statement about the reality of poor black people in LA. Now what I’d say is that the GTA games don’t cause violence like Glenn Beck says, because really it’s just in tune with all the other violence that’s already in our culture. The game ultimately is something of a “cinematic” game, and although you control Tommy, CJ, or whomever, you’re ultimately watching someone else create the carnage and deal the drugs (especially during the cutscenes). The effect is less of “you” killing people, but more like watching a Stallone movie where we spectate Tommy Vercetti killing people, and us both involved in the gameplay but also sitting back and enjoying the show to a degree. So yes, at least GTA Vice City (and probably also GTA 4) is as innocous as your usual rated R fare of action flick.

If you want to talk about violence in video games, then lets look at all those flag-waving patriotic military games that Glenn and others fail to let off the hook. The thing is that games like “America’s Army” are specifically designed to recruit and train soldiers for the army: it is a propaganda tool. Certainly many people who play the game realize this and still play because they think they are “safe” from the ideology once they realize this, but to these game players violence has in fact become “gamic” and “unreal”, such that when they enlist and are released on the field, the battlefield invokes the memory of the video game, not the other way around. Think about it: every military FPS advertises a new level of “realism”, either in graphics or physics or AI behavior. And to top it all off, these games are FIRST PERSON: You are not a player watching a soldier in war, but your perception is collapsed into that soldier’s - you are that soldier. At a certain point, the effect to the human being becomes reality mimicking the game. GTA games, on the other hand, have a certain level of “unrealism”, of playgroundness: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas do not behave like the real world, nor are they literally meant to. GTA 4 may be advertised as “more realistic” (this is my own ignorance here, so please excuse me if I’m wrong about GTA4 specifically), but the GTA3 series as I understand it never really set out to “mimic” the real world, but create a fictional simulacrum of it, like an action movie. Hence the cinematic sequences, the 3rd person perspective where we “watch” Tommy Vercetti blow up cars and run over people, and this confusion between spectating and participating.

Check out Ian Bogost’s writings on Persuasive Gaming when you get the chance. You can find his blog here: http://www.bogost.com/ Also, another vital read you should consider is Mckenzie Wark’s writings on Gamer Theory, especially his chapter on gamespace entitled “Agony”. You can find the constantly updated book/text here: http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

Friday, May 30, 2008

IRON MAN: And the Moral of Today's Story is...

Little rant: Almost a week into New York and I get a craving for Ice Cream. However, every place I hit up only sells HAAGEN DAAZ for $5 a pop. Where's my freakin' Ben and Jerry's? I guess it's more of a craving for Vermont Ice Cream rather than phony wanna-be-German "high class" Ice Cream.

Anyways,


I AM IRON MAN!

So I finally dragged my ass to see the movie, and I've noticed there are two primary camps when it comes to this year's Iron Man: Either the "I love it!" crowd or the "It was good" crowd. I'm personally a member of the latter, but mostly because all of the cool comic book coolness of Iron Man was only hinted at and not really brought into the spotlight - War Machine, S.H.I.E.L.D, any really cool arch-nemesis...

But I feel a movie isn't about just what you enjoy, but what greater messages about life you come away with, so without further ado (and a tongue in my cheek)...

WHAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM IRON MAN

1. America will kick your ass and is awesome! Also, war is bad.

So we US soldier shot down by terrorists, we see Afghani innocents being terrorized by terrorists, and we see Stark Industries selling weapons to terrorists, but it's Stane doing it and he's an unpatriotic evil bastard anyways. So in short, you've got Stark who stands for peace AND the American Way (by simultaneously blowing up bad guys, taking up a pacifist stance, and supporting American troops by killing wicked terrorists), which just leaves this weird muddled mess of flagwaving and really stupid idealistic simplified world views. I mean, the whole Iron Man saving civilians from terrorists scene? Shouldn't it be more like, saving civilians from collateral damage of American Bombs? I dunno.

2. Copyleft will lead to the death of innocent Afghani's (you torrenting bastard)

So in the movie, who's the guy trying to create the free flow of information? Who believes that "ideas shouldn't be owned", and all that liberal pirate ideology? You guessed it, Obadiah Stane, the malicious evil bad guy who "steals" information to make new weapons of destruction and create the evil, corrupt, bastardized Iron Monger machine that almost kicks Stark's ass. And by the way, Stark's revelation is that he must now protect all of his company's precious information, lest evil information pirates cause destruction and death to us all!

3. In future-now, computers will translate EVERYTHING PERFECTLY EVER.

Yeah, so Ms. Potts types "translate" and hits enter and perfectly dubbed English comes out. What the fuck guys?

4. Superheroes are allowed to be assholes. In fact, it's so much better that way.

No Peter, we don't give a shit about your emo problems hurry up and cut yourself already. And Bruce Wayne, you're just so damn serious. Tony, you're my man. He's I think one of the best acted superheroes, despite the movie's other flaws, since he's such an awkward asshole. I mean, just look:

He's just a wonderful little asshole. Kudos, Mr. Robert Downey Junior!

And that's it. I'm tired so gnite!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

f157 p0s7!!!!1111one

Hey! Welcome to Sunshine Zero Death Kittens (from Rainbow Hell)

This will be a blog about my personal experiences, new strange wonderful music, serious video game musings, food+cooking, and whatever else comes into mind. I'm a geek who goes to a pretty damn good school, and although I'm technically a New Media studies and Creative Writing major, I pretty much spend my school time talking about the intarweb, cult TV, and gaming in lofty academic terms while writing screenplay shorts and other things.

Right now I'm livin' in NYC (which is eating away at my cash reserves FAST) for the summer, looking for ways to support my unpaid summer internship with bartending or table waiting. That'll create some interesting stories I'm sure. As much as I want to play some games and talk about them academically though, that may be difficult seeing my current computer isn't quite the processing machine, and being TV-less for the summer has rendered my PS2 borked. That means a whole lot of free indie computer games, both art-related and not. Expect some posts soon about The Marriage, Battle for Wesnoth, Stuff by Tale of Tales, and other things.

Anyways, this is supposed to be a short intro so I'll keep it short. Let the Death Kittens begin their unearthly reign of terror!