Old neologisms are still new to you
derogatype: an unflattering photograph
Song structure was still ahead of me, however.
The day that I figured out how to use scissors, I remember wavering around the activity room in nursery school, singing to myself “I can cut / I can cut / I can cut…”, until I snipped an awkward gash in a medium stack of construction paper. A teacher admonished me, and presented me the paper. WELL IT’S YOURS NOW, she said. I was devastated. I didn’t want the paper, but… it was mine now.
The Exposition Tyrant
That tutorial in Mirror’s Edge… good grief. After a month with the game, I figured out something that is absolutely basic, yet I never clicked on before.
It’s the leg-tuck maneuver, which I knew was there, but I was led to think its use was limited to getting over really close call leaps, for instance if you’re jumping over barbed wire. It turns out it’s useful for everything. It lets you jump onto platforms more easily: lift up your legs to get more clearance. Places where I kept getting randomly snagged when clamboring around, now I can get past without slowing down.
The tutorial, again, made no effort to explain why this move is important or how it works. It just went, PRESS THIS NOW. NO! DO IT AGAIN! (But first watch this cutscene.) NO, DO IT AGAIN! (But first watch this cutscene.) It was like playing Call of Duty 4.
Ideally you’d be following that girl without any real break in the flow, and you’d have Valve-like “Press LT to tuck your legs” prompts passively pop up in the corner. Then you’d get subtly graded. If you did it wrong, it would say “You’re doing it wrong,” and the girl would explain the theory. “Lift your legs, girl! You gonna get tripped up!” Then she’d keep going. If you felt you needed more practice, you could just replay the tutorial. They could give the option at the end.
If you executed it very well, you’d get some kind of affirmation. Maybe just a “hell yeah!” from the girl. If you did all right, it would be something less exuberent. Or just nothing.
And heck, maybe they could string safety nets between the buildings, for the tutorial? Again, just to keep the flow?
Pippenjane
Time and the Rani doesn’t particularly try to be realistic. To start with, it’s clearly written as a farce. Beyond that, several times it deliberately breaks the reality of the situation to (not to make it sound more sophisticated than it is) make some kind of meta-commentary about the show and the way it’s perceived. There’s the business about the Doctor being horrified at a vision of Mel’s face, and whatnot. If that’s not the 1987 equivalent of “the windows are the wrong size”, I’ll eat my left shoe.
The unreality of the thing has always struck me as rather the point. All the awful things in it aren’t so much awful in their own right as they are, on some level, a commentary on the lazy way the show is often put together. And in that, I think it’s mostly pretty on-target and hilarious.
I realize that the script was already sitting there and that Cartmel was less than thrilled with it, but the subversive, postmodern sense of humor strikes me as all him — rebelling against a by-the-numbers script that served no purpose and had nothing to say by turning those qualities on their heads. It calls to mind the “fanboy” in Greatest Show and the philosophical guard in Dragonfire, if a bit broader and less informed. More of an outsider’s perspective — which he was, at the time.
Davies does this all the time now — Love & Monsters, for instance. Which I realize isn’t everyone’s thing, but… well. Major difference is, he does it better.