Monthly Archives: November 2008

New cafe

  • Reading time:2 mins read

the hardest part of writing isn’t finding what to say, or working out how to say it. Once you’re on that level, unless you’ve already written your thing and you’re just going back through with an editor’s hand, you’re stuck.

The hardest thing is finding the mood. In preparing yourself to pour into the template that you’ve built for yourself. Actual writing — actual expression — can’t be constructed, intellectually. It’s a flow of the unconscious — of all one’s training, working out of instinct. And either it happens or it doesn’t.

In a sense, every creative process is a performance. The play is perhaps the most fundamental expressive form. Every other medium is just some sort of an adaptation. Prose is effectively a depersonalized script. Film, a cemented performance. Music, an abstracted performance. Videogames — well, they’re just theater again.

In their particapatory qualities, they are — ironically considering the gestalt nature of their literal makeup — one of the more primal, more basic forms. Or, no. I suppose that reversal — the improvisational, active interpretation element being the audience’s purview — is what makes the form postmodern.

Which is interesting. If play is the most basic form, then videogames are post-play, or play 2.0. They’re the post-structuralist theater — which may explain some of the difficulty in illustrating with them. It’s the difference between following a car from the front, as compared to the back.

I am not a natural performer. My skills of improvisation are weak, unpracticed. Yet as uncomfortable as I am, going off-script, I have very little patience for scripts. I recall in my few acting lessons, every performance became an impromptu improvisation, if for noting more than boredom. What’s been written has already been done, and probably done poorly. It”s more interesting to take the script as a thematic starting place and whittle out my own story. In retrospect, considering how hard I find it just to talk to people on the phone, I don’t know where I found that energy.

I need to get over this intellectualism.

Free fall freefall

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Going by the demo, which may be a dangerous thing to go by, Mirror’s Edge is pretty good. Not perfect; the tutorial segment leads you by the nose, without telling you how to do what it wants you to do, or what you did wrong when you don’t, then screams at you and forces you to start all over. As if the game weren’t hard enough.

Beyond that, I can see the difficulty they had in winnowing down the controls and clarifying what the player is able to do. The business with marking everything important in red is hackneyed, but clever in a desperate sort of way. It is intuitive, especially in how the color mirrors Faith’s gloves, and I suppose that’s all that matters in the short term. You can feel the band aids bulging, though. And it does make it just a touch more gamey. Still, I know how hard it is to illustrate these things, and how late the solutions tend to come.

I’m also impressed how they manage to continue the recent trend of strong woman protagonists without radiating that creepy Josh Lesnick aura or feeling like they’re pandering. Faith is a pretty good, no-nonsense lead, not unlike Alyx in Half-Life 2 or a Chell with a smidge of personality. Actually, now that I’m on the subject — I seem to say this about any comptently-designed Western game, and I’m not sure how I feel about that — it feels pretty Valveish. So does Bad Company, the other DICE game I’ve been playing, so maybe it’s just them. Those Swedes do tend to know what they’re doing.

…

And, yeah. Okay. I’m sold on this. The slight Gibson storyline is okay. Not sure they need the enemies; more videogame nonsense, and I don’t see what they have to do with the game’s themes. I wonder if those were at EA’s suggestion. Combined with the stunts, they give it a bit of a Jet Set Radio vibe. Except with free vertigo.

I had been noticing how, in other first-person games — like Bad Company, for instance — whenever I fall off a high ledge, my stomach quickly rises to my throat, the way it does when you watch a projection of a roller coaster. Except in this case, I feel like I’m legitimately about to die. So… I’ve been having an experience here.

EDIT:

Amandeep: the thing with the enemies in mirror’s edge –
i think up until pretty recently the game wasn’t going to have a gun or anything.
now i think there…is one, right?
and you do have to shoot shit.
i’m pretty much dead convinced that that came as some kind of order from on high at ea.
Me: Yeah, you have to shoot things.
It doesn’t fit at all.
Being able to punch guys and run away from them… okay, that… sort of makes sense, I guess.
Though it’s stll a bit awkward.
I mean, I don’t see the point of enemies. Your enemy (and friend) is the environment.
Amandeep: yeah, as recently as a couple months ago they were saying: no enemies, it’s going to be basically like portal.
Me: But if you’re going to have random bad guys after you, then a passive solution feels most natural.
Yes!
It feels like Portal.
Well. Jet Set Portal.
The Legend of Jet Set Portal.
Amandeep: the red stuff is fairly new too, i think.
before they were going on about how there’d be no hud elements whatsoever except a tiny little reticule pointing up in the center of the screen to keep you from getting dizzy.
Me: Oh. Well.
I guess I’m pretty observant, then.
These are the only things about it that I don’t like.
The red stuff… okay. It feels a bit Ubisoft, you know?
It’s not offensive. It’s just… a bit… duh.

The Humanism of Verfremdungseffect

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Objectively, most Doctor Who is pretty crap. So it seems silly to get particular about what’s more crap than what, when you can just be watching and enjoying it for what it is, and reading in what you want to read in.

It’s the spirit and the ideas behind any given serial that grab me. The execution is never even close to adequate in the best cases, so who cares if it’s a shade shabbier or shinier. You just have to be affectionate. It’s the only sane way to go.

Personally, I find the McCoy era warmer than any era since Troughton and more rich with ideas than just about any period since Hartnell. So it’s a winner in that regard.

Thing is, in the end objectivity is an absurd thing to take into account.

Rarely is Doctor Who directed well. Rarely is it acted particularly well. Rarely are the costumes or sets or effects close to convincing. When they are, the lighting gets in the way or the staging makes a mockery of any sense of verisimilitude. Only occasionally is it written with more than passable skill and the faintest inspiration to color outside the lines. Rarely does any story actually take advantage of the format.

Yet the show has heart, and sometimes it’s got some real ambition. Usually it’s in those moments that the practical elements all conspire to ensure failure. But so what?

You just have to watch the show as if you’re watching your local theater troupe. You know these people. You believe in them. You know the odds they’re up against, in portraying what they want to portray. So what if the lighting was a smidge more professional last week; it’ll never be Kubrick, and you’re only making an ass of yourself by expecting it. What you should be paying attention to is the humanity behind it all. And that’s where this show excels.

That’s also why I tend to find any flaws more hilarious than distracting. I’m not working under the bizarre notion that this show needs to meet any kind of objective standard to be worthwhile. All it has to do is engage my humanity — and there’s nothing more human than failure, or more funny than failure at something as unimportant as showmanship. Hell, Kurt Weill would be thrilled. Not all the praise for B-movies is ironic. See the affection in Burton’s Ed Wood.

The show’s abject failure at convincing showmanship is almost universal. It’s a bit more prominent in the late ’80s, but draw your own silly metaphor about degrees of gray. Again, I also find the same period warmer and more inspired than most. However poorly executed it is, it’s patently obvious that the show is being made with sincerity. And that’s the most important thing ever. That, there, is what life is all about.