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 ;_;
Monday, June 30, 2008
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.
*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.
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/
***
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/
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