More than Meets the Eye
I just realized that you pull Shockwave’s willy to make him glow.
NOSFERATU!!
Oh man. Just after I resumed my ever-present musing on why nobody had released a proper, Metropolized version of Nosferatu, I learn that this just came out. Released, yes, by Kino again.
So. There we are. We’ve got it. My favorite silent film, presented as properly as it might be, for the first time in seventy-something years. And what a snazzy cover!
“All My Love to Long Ago”
Whoa, uh. Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer (and at the time the youngest, and first female, producer in the BBC’s history), just died. On the day before the show’s 44th anniversary — its first broadcast also being one day after JFK’s assassination. She wasn’t that old; seventy-one. I guess that’s old enough, though.
The show was such a strange force back then; all staffed and conceived by twentysomething women and minorities and foreigners, working under the auspices of a department that was ashamed of them all and what they were doing, in the face of another department that was deathly jealous of them and what they were doing, both mostly staffed with old white men, most of which did all they could to interfere. That the show was a success was all the more an embarassment, as it meant they had little excuse to sweep it under the carpet.
It was over four decades ago, though. I guess it’s surprising so many of the cast and crew have hung on this long. Ms. Lambert last appeared all over the special features and commentaries to the “Beginning” box set, in which she gushed her appreciation for the new series and all its nods back to her era — from which she felt the classic series had drifted away a bit much for her liking. This past spring, she was even name-checked as John Smith’s “mother” in Paul Cornell’s “Human Nature” two-parter.
I guess things turned out pretty well, in the end — at least so far as that business goes. And who knows how large it loomed in her life. She seemed grateful, though. And it seems she was creatively active up to her death. I understand she just produced a new series of a show I’ve never heard of. Looks like it’s a criical success, too.
Some interesting commentary from “superfan” Ian Levine.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, sort of, I just noticed that Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor), Sophie Aldred (his companion, Ace), and Anthony Ainley (the ’80s incarnation of the Master) all share the same birthday (August 20th). This show seems to attract bizarre coincidences both in birth and in death.
The New Generation – Part Three: Infrastructure
by [name redacted]
Originally published by Next Generation.
Videogames are finally finding their way. They’re moving in small steps, yet whether by need or inspiration change is in the air – a whole generational shift, an inevitable one. It’s the kind of shift that happened to film when the studio system broke down, or painting broke out of academia and… well, the studio again. In short, people are starting to get over videogames for their own sake and starting to look at them constructively – which first means breaking them down, apart from and within their cultural, historical, and personal context. When you strip out all the clutter and find a conceptual focus, you can put the pieces back together around that focus, to magnify it and take advantage of its expressive potential.
Over the previous two installments we discussed some of the voices heralding the change, and some of the works that exemplify it. In this third and final chapter, we will cast our net wider, and examine some of the cultural or circumstantial elements that either led to this shift, reflect it, help to sustain and promulgate it, or promise to, should all go well. This is, in short, the state of the world in which a generational shift can occur.
The New Generation – Part Two: Masterminds
by [name redacted]
Originally published by Next Generation.
Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.
First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.
In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.
The New Generation – Part One: Design
by [name redacted]
Originally published by Next Generation.
An idea is healthy only so long as people question it. All too often, what an idea seems to communicate – especially years and iterations down the line – was not its original intention. Context shifts; nuance is lost. To hear adherents espouse an idea, measureless years and Spackle later, is to understand less about the idea itself than about the people who profess it, and the cultural context in which they do so.
In 1985, an obscure Japanese illustrator slotted together a bunch of ideas that made sense to him that morning, and inadvertently steered the whole videogame industry out of the darkest pit in its history. Since that man’s ideas also seemed to solve everyone else’s problems, they became lasting, universal truths that it was eventually ridiculous – even heresy – to question.
So for twenty years, skilled artisans kept building on this foundation, not really curious what it meant; that it worked was enough. They were simply exercising their proven craft, in a successful industry. Result: even as technology allowed those designers to express more and more complex ideas, those ideas became no more eloquent. The resulting videogames became more and more entrenched in their gestures, and eventually spoke to few aside from the faithful – and not even them so well. Nobody new was playing, and the existing audience was finding better uses for its time. A term was coined: “gamer drift”.
HERE I YAM
The other day I was lounging around, half-expecting a call from someone. It kept getting later, and no call. I started to get tired. Finally the phone rang. Throwing caution to the wind, I picked it up and exclaimed, with a certain enthusiasm, “Yah!” In response I heard a very thick and silly accent blurt “IS YOU?!” “IS ME!” I replied. “IS YOUUU?” “ISS MEEE! HERE I YAM!”
Then there was a beat. And more quietly, with a twinge of frustration, still in the same accent: “Sorry. Wrong number.”
The Wii that Wasn’t
by [name redacted]
Originally published by Next Generation.
Market analysts call the Wii a return to form after the relative flop of the GameCube. Design analysts call it a potential return to form after the relative rut of the previous fifteen years. Whatever the spin, when people look at Nintendo’s recent misadventures, generally the Gamecube sits right on top, doe-eyed and chirping. Its failure to do more than turn a profit has made its dissection an industry-wide pastime. Everything comes under the microscope, from its dainty size and handle to its purpleness to the storage capacity of its mini-DVDs. The controller, though, has perplexed all from the start.