We All Fall Down

Myths and symbols

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It occurs to me how well the Angels, as iconic monsters in the way that we haven’t had iconic monsters or villains since the early ’70s, integrate with the show’s current format. We’ve got a showrunner who, to an extent not professed by previous producers or script editors, is making a point of highlighting both the time travel aspect of the show and its built-in fairy tale qualities (magical door in a junkyard that can open to anywhere you can imagine; ageless, cranky man who leads you into trouble; an individual monster to represent each of your primal fears). And so here we’ve got supremely memorable, carefully crafted baddies who are intimately entwined with time and whose power largely comes out of their overt fairy tale visage — to the extent that if they’re weathered, worn down, they lose their power. And there’s a certain fairy tale logic to dealing with them — face your demons, but don’t look them in the eye. The Angels basically are an icon of Moffat’s vision for the show.

What they remind me of is the way the Master was created to reflect and enhance Pertwee’s Earthbound super spy adventures. He was the iconic foe of the era, as Letts and Dicks weren’t fond of the Cybermen and the Daleks were slow and slim coming after their ’60s overexposure and Terry Nation running home with all his toys. And the Master was basically a summation of that era: a suave Bond villain to set up schemes for our suave Bondish hero to foil, week after week. Basically, if you’re stuck on Earth in one time period you might as well have a meddling Time Lord to provide an excuse for all the action.

It also strikes me how since the early ’70s no one has really put that much thought into creating a menace that really establishes the contemporary tone and concept and stakes of the show. And yet since the start it’s the baddies that have stuck in people’s minds, and brought them back. For a reason! They establish what the heroes are fighting against, what the nature of the struggle is. They provide the show a certain emotional context.

I guess with that in mind, the Earth Reptiles do a pretty good job of establishing some of the other stakes and themes of the Pertwee era — even though they’re not a consistent threat, or even inherently monsters or villains. It’s almost a shame they didn’t get a final appearance in his last season, to wrap up the ongoing threads in the way that they meant to do with the Master.

Review: Uin

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

There was a point toward the end of Uin where I became stuck. I had navigated a water level and a forced-scrolling shooting segment, and was now faced with a sort of a boss battle. My character stood in a bubbling pool of water. To the right floated an enormous child, orbited by a handful of large five-pointed stars. Occasionally the stars would shoot out, then boomerang back, causing my character damage. For the life of me I couldn’t beat this boss, and I had started to despair of ever finishing the game.

To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.

And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.

My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Messhof goes PVP with Raging Hadron

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Last Wednesday night, You Found the Grappling Hook! author Mark Essen unleashed the trailer for his upcoming No Quarter exhibition piece, Raging Hadron. Described as “a two player competitive game… that combines swashbuckling swordplay with 8-bit psychedelia”, the game comes off a bit like Jordan Mechner on an angry acid trip. Or to phrase it a little differently, Versus Prince of Karateka in Fractal Land.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The shooter is one of the most fundamental design templates, and so one of the most fruitful to dissect. On the analytical end, see Kenta Cho, Treasure, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and the Geometry Wars games.

Theta Games’ Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem, released about a month ago and slowly gaining attention, similarly takes advantage of the form.

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The Original Game-Maker

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Long before Mark Overmars’ popular design tool, Recreational Software Designs‘ Game-Maker (note the hyphen) opened the horizons of Shareware-era PC gamers, forged friendships and dial-up communities, and cluttered the upload directories of bulletin boards as far flung as Russia and South America. There were several dedicated BBSes, including the official RSD board in Kennebunkport, Maine. For those outside of calling range, there was always the USPS and 3-1/2″ floppies. And then development ceased, and slowly Game-Maker faded.

Game Maker was first released around 1992, as a set of VGA mode DOS utilities tied together with a text mode selection menu. For every game produced, the main program file, containing all of the important code, was the same. To distinguish one game from the next, the program file would call on a .gam file, in which the user would compile all of his content through a rather elegant system of brainstorming lines and form fields. The rest of the tools — tile editors, character and monster editors, a map editor, a sound editor, and so on — served to develop that content.

In retrospect it was kind of brilliant; from the program’s perspective all of the important information that made a game unique — visuals, sound, controls, rules, design, structure — was simple window dressing, to call in and process like so many documents. And design was nearly that easy.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Alt-Play: Jason Rohrer Anthology announced for DSiWare

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So continues the slow drift of indie games to the mainstream download channels. Following the high-profile Wii ports of indie heavyweights such as Cave Story and La Mulana (and indeed the announcement of Diamond Trust of London for DS, several of Jason Rohrer’s early opuses will soon be bundled for play on the Nintendo DSi.

To editorialize a bit, anthology releases like this, rather like a collection of short stories or short subject films, may soon be an important consumer model for showcasing unusual design concepts. Witness the success of Valve’s Portal, a critical darling (itself based on an indie game project) that many would have overlooked if not for its inclusion in Valve’s Orange Box. With the strict pricing models and content expectations of the commercial market, it’s hard for a small, original title to hold its own. But arrange several games around a theme, or an individual voice such as Jason Rohrer, and you’ve got the basics of an intriguing package.

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Verisimilitude

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whereas David Tennant often seemed to be giving a performance, sketching the Doctor out like a comic book character, and Eccleston — well, he performed in a different way; a more classical dramatic performance, where he tried to depict the script as written — Matt Smith plays the role as if he isn’t at all aware there’s an audience. When he speaks, he actually seems to be talking to someone. When he walks and gestures, he does so with a certain apparent obliviousness beyond his own motivation. And when other actors are talking, he listens. He processes what they’re saying. You can see him thinking it over, weighing possible responses.

Basically, he plays it for real. And it is play; it’s just so completely method. It goes beyond his physically hitting his head, hard, and biting his co-star — hard — and all the food acting in episode one. He seems to inhabit every scene he’s in. The verisimilitude to his performance — it hasn’t been present since the 1960s, when every episode was shot more or less as-live, and everyone was in fact reacting to his or her environment in real time.

It’s so real that the heightened performances of the guest actors — which would have seemed perfectly normal in the last few series — seem like they’re coming from a different universe, and Murray Gold’s music — which I have always enjoyed — seems as out-of-place and bombastic as people have often complained in the past. The rest of the show just isn’t geared to his level, as yet.

I’m really curious where he’ll take this once the writers stop writing him as David Tennant.

Craft Service

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Over the years, game design has calcified. If I were to pick a turning point, I might point at the SNES — a system of broadly appealing games that delivered exactly what people expected of a videogame, challenged few perceptions, and established the status quo for 2D console-style game design. Since then it’s been hard to get past the old standards — the prettied-up enhancements of Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid that added little new in terms of expression or design language, yet that refined the hell out of some proven favorites.

You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.

The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.

Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Small Worlds, by David Shute

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I’d missed this the first time around; it’s a contemplative exploration-based game where the avatar is a mere three pixels high, and the rather gorgeous levels are built pixel by pixel, with every dot significant from a design standpoint — and then when the map pulls out, you appreciate the beauty of the big picture formed from all these individually important dots. Combined with a lovely “lonely game” score, which brings to mind that old Timeless demo/screensaver from the early 1990s, or maybe some old Future Crew demos, it’s a pretty rewarding ten or fifteen minutes. No real challenge; just wandering and pondering.

Matt Aldridge’s Uin Released

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Having gained some renown, or perhaps infamy, with his dadaist La La Land series, Matt Aldridge (aka biggt) has unleashed a significantly more ambitious follow-up.

Compared to the La La Land series, Uin is rather more conventionally structured, if no less evocative. There is an inventory, and exploration, and in place of the sheer dream dump of La La Land, play involves a certain amount of skill or problem solving. There are even a couple of forced-scrolling shooter stages. Yet Aldridge still wraps it up in his typically baffling logic and atmosphere.

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Second Impressions

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I love how the Angels are extrapolated here. I had actually wondered before about what happened if an Angel were, say, under video surveillance. And what happened if the Angels got weathered or broken while in stone form. And I had wondered about the logistics of the Angel who puts out the light in the basement.

Now we know that they just absorb all kinds of energy — electricity, radiation, potential energy of life forms. We know about the image business — including, apparently, a mental image. Which is amazingly freaky. Just for the kids, the concept that the Angel can now come out of the TV and get them — yeah. And then this clarifies that cheesy tag to “Blink”, where we saw all these statues that clearly weren’t Weeping Angels. Turns out, hey… any statue could actually be one of them.

And I just love the weathered, decayed Angels — all the creepier. This is basically Tomb of the Cybermen for the Angels — solidifying them as an ongoing threat, illustrating their background and a bit more of how they work and what their actual threat is. It makes them feel well-rounded in a way I didn’t imagine they could be from their earlier appearance. Before, yeah, they were clever. Now they feel rather brilliant and dangerous. More than just a gimmick, as it were.

I hadn’t quite hit on it, or hadn’t thought of it in ages, but the perfectly sculpted design was always a problem for me. Everything about the Angels, the first time around, was a little too cleanly designed, from their appearance to their abilities. This story roughens things up a bit, gets under the surface, without undermining them at the height of their presentation. There’s something more unnerving about an organic, imperfect thing — especially if its imperfections make it all the more desperate.

It’s the imperfect, organic element to the Cybermen that makes them fascinating. Not necessarily seeing a rotting chin, but the knowledge of what they are and what their motivation is. Nothing is creepier than the rather pathetic mantra “We muzzzzst surviiiiiiive…” and then knowing what that entails. There’s almost a certain sympathy for them, which is all the scarier because you know that won’t be reciprocated. You’re being played on several levels.

Likewise, what makes the Daleks fascinating is their intense, blinding emotion and the way it manifests itself — in their schemes, in their voices, in their mannerisms. It’s an imperfection that they refuse to admit, as it defines their being. Again, you can kind of understand their way of thinking. What makes it scary is that, like an angry parent, there’s no arguing with it.

For a monster to get under the skin, I feel like one needs to be able to get under theirs — just enough to understand what you’re up against, and why. It’s the futility of reason that leaves us stranded.

And I think that’s why, after this episode, the Weeping Angels feel to me like the first proper, classic Who monster to come around since the early ’70s.

After Pertwee’s era, we got a few interesting one-offs and a few so-so recurring characters or monsters. In the new series we got some decent stuff like the Ood and Judoon. But no really powerful recurring monsters or villains, with their own mythology. The kind of thing where you watch just because they’re going to be in this episode. Never mind Dalek/Cyberman/Master level; I’m talking about the second tier — the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, Yeti, Silurians, Autons.

Right now, I think the Angels may hover just a little below that first tier. They’re not Daleks or Cybermen, but they’re more memorable, more fleshed-out, and have more draw than Sontarans or the Yeti. If they appear again over Matt Smith’s era, I think they may be permanently associated as his antagonists, the way that we associate the Cybermen with Troughton or the Master with Pertwee.

That’s how well Moffat has extrapolated them. And likewise, many of Moffat’s other monsters remind me of all the attempts in the 1960s to find a follow-up to or replacement for the Daleks — the War Machines, the Quarks, the Krotons; the Vashta Nerada, Prisoner Zero, the Smilers. Two of them call on the same everyday edge-of-perception quality that makes the Angels so interesting; the other just stands there and stares at you, apparently inanimate but creepy.

Tunnels and Wings

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Yes, all right.

You will notice, in place of any real measured analysis or criticism I have been reacting in a fairly facile, judgmental tone to the new series and incarnation of Doctor Who.

I’m not sure how much I want to analyze the show, right now, as it is and as I am and as my world is arranged. Maybe that will change. At this point I’m letting it wash over me. Rather than stopping the flow and picking over points and dwelling as I do and have and no doubt will, I’m letting it exist as a contemporary, writhing thing and I’m letting my emotions guide me to what scattered path that may be.

This is the first incarnation of the show which has organically ambled along and presented itself to me in its natural state as a cultural entity and an ongoing piece of fiction. The old series, it was a sort of archaeology for me. Davies’ series, it was a lesson in reinvention and postmodernism. I was more fascinated with it, in the fact that it existed at all, than I was engaged with it as a fact.

I’ve never been good with facts. I tend to brush them aside, as clutter to the fundamental point at stake. With me, there’s always some grand point at stake. Why it’s at stake, I haven’t the foggiest. I don’t know why I get so wound up in this pursuit of feeble strands of the grand Truth of Being. I never really enjoy things, or accept them at face value; it’s all puzzlework for some game I’ve yet to completely work out. If the facts are illustrative, then great — more pieces on the board. But it’s the rules that matter.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting around to living my life now. I’ll never avoid that puzzle; it’s the shape of my being. But maybe I don’t have to take it always so seriously. Maybe, to take a leaf from wiser and older philosophies than my own, that ability to let go and actively experience and enjoy the objects and events and details I’m handed — it seems likely that’s another whole level to the game that I’ve yet to master. I’m reminded of Ikaruga.

See what I did there? I can’t ever turn it off completely. The game is always in play. So maybe that’s the point. I don’t really have to think about it so actively, do I? It will present itself when it’s relevant, and everything will add up when it needs to.

So the last couple of episodes… well, they kind of sucked, in one way or another. That’s okay, though, because “The Time of Angels”? Well. There we are, then. If this is a sign of the future direction of the series, then… that’s nice. As much as this borrowed from Moffat’s earlier work, it significantly built on that work and took it to a level of internal complexity and broadness of implication that you only really get rarely. There’s a certain breathless virtuosity in the way the ideas seem to stack up and suggest a bigger, more active universe than we usually see working in this show — the kind of canvas that I have always liked to imagine.

I love captions like that — One Thousand Years Later, and whatnot. It’s simple and a bit silly, and almost a bit of a piss-take, yet it’s effective. Just implicitly, the suggestion that things can be relevant and connected by huge spans of time and space, from one scene to the next — why have a show about time travel, if you don’t do this stuff? It would be like watching an episode of Connections where James Burke wanders around a village and talks to people about Gordon Brown. I suppose that could be interesting, but you’re missing a few tricks with the format.

The thing that attracts me to Doctor Who, the thing that attracts me to any system, is the sense of scope and implication. Most of that has been left implied. Historically, before 2005 I think the show actually dealt with time travel about half a dozen times. And… sure, okay. That just leaves space to read in the margins. Davies occasionally played with the concept, as did Moffat under Davies’ supervision. Probably the most eventful use of time was that first series, with Eccleston — everything was important, and toward the end, yes, we even get those title cards. 100,000 Years Later; Six Months Later. It starts jumping forward, in large and small intervals, breathless to show the grander consequences of what we already know.

So we’ve got this new concept for the show. Sort of. And we’ve got this new Doctor, who is also my first active Doctor (by the above logic), who I do quite enjoy in the role. And I’m not just obsessing about this show in my own bubble; it’s something to watch on a Saturday, with my fiancée. That on its own brings a different perspective and tone to the show.

So on other topics — okay, maybe I’ll be my familiar, mental meat grinder. On this topic, though, I wouldn’t expect anything profound. I don’t need to do that anymore. Probably. Here, in this expansion of my mental space, I’m just going to let go.

So.

That episode was totally rad, wasn’t it.

Mark of Excellence

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Last week I found myself commenting that, on the basis of the last couple of scripts, I was looking forward to a Mark Gatiss one for a change. I was rather surprised to find myself in that position.

As it turns out, my better judgment… was the better judge. This certainly is a Gatiss script here. Mind you, I hate it less than his previous scripts. Though it has gained a certain incoherence present in the previous Moffat script. How much of that is down to the direction, which is some of the worst since the series has returned, and how much the script, I can’t say and I’m not really bothered to sort out. There’s just something so generic about everything Gatiss writes. He doesn’t seem to know anything but pastiche.

I have never been impressed when people merely channel the thoughts and ideas of others and wear them as a badge to brand themselves or lend their own words legitimacy. It feels intellectually lazy, and as such it tends to bore me. Which is one reason I’m not all that impressed with Neil Gaiman, as well as he tends to choose his words. He doesn’t so much create his own worlds as he cherry picks references that he figures his audience will appreciate, or perhaps rather that fit into the distinct cultural trope that he means to evoke, and then rather than breaking them down or analyzing them or undermining them in some way as to create a new argument or perspective, he kind of lets them sit there and speak for themselves. “You like these elements?” he asks. “Well, you’ll really love my work, because it contains all of these features!”

To get back to Who, that’s what I get out of much of Robert Holmes’s writing. A few stories from that era sidestep the problem, and come off to me as a little less obvious. I like The Hand of Fear, and The Android Invasion, and The Sontaran Experiment. Each of those is a little weird, and doesn’t quite do everything as it is supposed to. The Deadly Assassin is also rather a startling divergence from form. It’s got something of its own to say. By and large, though, I feel like the era is trying to impress and placate me simply by evoking things that I don’t care about. At least, not in their own right.

I’ll accept that Moffat was just settling in with his first couple of scripts, and that the second was partially damaged by an unfortunate choice of director. And I’ll accept that Gatiss wrote this episode early on, before he had a character for either of the leads — which is one of the larger problems. I am a little unsettled, though. I wonder how much control Moffat really has over the show. Maybe he’s not a big-decisions guy. We’ll see how the next few episodes present themselves.

The next two episodes are directed by the guy from “The Eleventh Hour” — which, if nothing else, was directed with skill and a bit of bravado. Aside from young Amelia, I’d say the direction was the highlight that week. So for the near future I remain optimistic. Mostly.

The Pier

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Jake hadn’t been to the pier in ages. It still smelled of fish and of rot. Maybe the wood was a little more decayed than it had been. Jake was always so aware of the wood. It was comforting, in the abstract — the fact of it. It had once been alive, and that energy remained, seeped out of it into his being. Yet as it aged, that life continued to ebb. And it had not aged with dignity. The neglect poured through the cracks and splinters and the squishy bits of pylon, filled with bacteria Jake could hardly stand to imagine. It was such a balance for Jake — the uncleanliness of the place, the sense of death, which on a bad day sat with him like a bad roommate. It was that or the softness, the nature of the place, reassuring him that he was still alive, that the world remained in some small corners real, for all the manufacture imposed upon it. Stop paying attention, and eventually everything returns to its intended state. There’s only so long we can impose our control on the world, on any one thing. For all our vanity, our attempt at codification, nothing can be permanent. It’s that struggle against the inevitable — that’s where we get all our stress. It’s the same stress you get from carrying a lie with you, never knowing when you’ll have to compound it, expand your effort just to maintain your stasis, your artificial construct.

The truth tends to be disgusting on one level or another. On the days when Jake could stand the smell of it, or when the stifling lie of modernity clogged his head — that’s when he came here.

Jake blinked at the screen on his Blackberry, finally processing the text of the email he was reading. How long had he been staring at it? How had the phone climbed out of his pocket and into his hand? Jake tensed his arm as if to pitch the phone off the pier, skip it across the surface of the bay. A shudder flowed across his chest, and with some method Jake slipped the phone into his shoulder bag, zipping the compartment lest the phone claw its way out again.

Winding down

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So I have mulched a bit on “The Beast Below”. On first viewing I was just perplexed with it. I didn’t think I liked it much, despite many neat elements. Second viewing, the problems were still there but they didn’t bother me so much and I was better able to appreciate the good stuff.

The episode doesn’t hang together very well; it’s got all of these elements that it doesn’t bother to stitch together, or even use properly. So the Smilers… I sort of get why they’re there, even if they never do much, but what are the Winders for? I get that they’re basically the Queen’s secret service, but… what do they wind? The Smilers? What purpose do they serve in the story, besides a bit of exposition toward the end? What purpose does it serve to reveal that they’re also Smilers, when we don’t have much of a clue about either of them?

And that’s just to start with.

I also wasn’t convinced by the tragedy and shame of the society built on the whale. I mean, yeah. It’s unfortunate. But really? Why does this fact freak people out so much? And the whole reason the whale is there in the first place is because he can’t stand to hear children cry? Okay. And then there’s the tenuous comparison with the Doctor, that the script drives home over and over again.

Davies’ episodes were often sentimental, and sometimes that went too far, but it always felt honest. I’m not sure that Moffat really has the knack for this stuff.

The ideas and images, though — yeah. Some really good stuff in here. The political and social allegory, I’m not really in a place to weed out on my own. I’ve read some eloquent breakdowns of that aspect, and it seems that the episode is ripe with meaning. That’s nice. I don’t know if it’s as interesting as people make out, but I’ll process it eventually.

It doesn’t help the weird pacing and structure and lack of cohesion, but maybe I’ll grow to appreciate the other levels more as time goes on. Problems with structure and execution — sure; so long as they’re honest mistakes, who cares.

I think it’s the false emotion that blindsided me the first time through, and I think that’s what I’m still working to get past. Moffat is fine with his intellectual puzzles — more than fine. Yet when he tries to ground any of his games on a human level, he almost offends me.

We’ll see where he goes with this over the next eleven episodes.