Yearly Archives: 2007

Master Ham

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Cartmel certainly had the same basic idea as RTD: dial the show back to where he thought it worked best — that being the first six years or so. Mysterious Doctor-as-MacGuffin, developed companion-as-protagonist, more experimental storylines.

The difference is that whereas RTD goes after all this from a populist perspective, by stripping things down and creating a new space, Cartmel was more… well, I wanted to say academic. I guess, that plus brute force. His whole idea was to twist and bend what was already there into a shape that he personally liked better. A relatively clumsy method to reach the same shape.

And yeah, the method seems to mostly be what’s at issue. RTD’s methods tend to engage and inspire, whereas Cartmel’s tend to disgust and confuse. And that is understandable.

Cartmel came to the show as an interested outsider, without much writing experience. Davies was an enormous fan, yet a disciplined (cue the snide remarks) popular dramatist. What Cartmel lacked was the affection for the material that softens Davies’ approach, and the experience to tailor his vision for mass consumption.

On the other hand, Cartmel’s insight is rather cutting and immediate, and it probably would have taken someone like Davies years to come to similar conclusions. Going by Davies’ earlier proposals, it seems to have!

Me, I don’t care so much about how either of them got there; I pretty much agree with their conclusions. I don’t have any investment in the material that they dismiss. I’m not so much interested in execution as the ideas at work, so both eras feel pretty darned similar to me — and hiccups aside, they do feel largely successful in what they set out to do. It’s almost like you could chop out seasons 7-23, and hey presto the show would be consistent.

Which of course is the portion of the show most fandom tends to put on a pedestal, so I can also understand why people would balk at this vision.

Still, hey. I’m with Cartmel. I don’t have the personal attachment. Or rather, what I do have is recent and entirely of my own creation. Whether that means it’s not “my” show or not, I don’t know. I’m just being analytical. It’s what I do. Luckily, I don’t have an army of fans to answer to.

As far as McCoy goes: the role (and the show) hardly calls for dramatic skill; what it demands is a certain off-kilter charisma and warmth. McCoy has more of a “Doctor” (read: professorial, avuncular) persona about him than anyone since Troughton. He’s also the first Doctor since the ’60s to take more of a back seat in the action, which is tremendously welcome after the previous decade and a half of ham.

An aside: Colin Baker is sort of neat in that he wears his bacon right on his sleeves. One can forgive his character his brashness, as he’s so upfront with it — whereas Pertwee and Tom Baker are more covert asses. Here, as with Sherlock Holmes, it’s portrayed as an actual character flaw. Unfortunately, not only did he never get much of a decent script; he never got a decent Watson (or Barbara) to round him off. Not until Big Finish, anyway. And now it seems like Catherine Tate will do something similar for Tennant. But back to the main discussion.

Again, frankly, with a show like classic Doctor Who, why should anyone give a shit about execution? It’s all rather low crap anyway, so it boggles my mind when people go on about the rat like it’s something tortuous and embarrassing in the middle of a piece of serious high drama, or about McCoy rolling his “R”s and garbling his lines as if Ian McKellen in his place would have transformed the show into high art.

There’s nothing objective about something like this. Watching the show is, in the first place, an exercise in transcending a charmingly tatty exterior in search of some warmth and inspiration. When you accept that, arguing about degrees of tattiness is absurd. The lighting and direction and prop and set design was often lousy in the late ’80s? Well, guess what? Twenty years on, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between a Cartmel-era set and one from the mid-’70s.

Once you’re past the superficialities, all you’re really left with is how interesting you find the things the production team is trying to do, and whether or not you’re fond of the characters.

As far as I’m concerned, anyway, Cartmel was the first period since the ’60s (with maybe exceptions for early Pertwee and the Bidmead season) where someone really tried to do something interesting with the show’s basic premise. Maybe it didn’t always work perfectly; still, the effort is neat to see. And it had the first really well-developed main characters played by likable leads since the ’60s.

And… I mean. I don’t think this is an unreasonable or especially bizarre perspective to take. It’s certainly not an unusual one in my circles. If anything, it strikes me as a result of my lack of long-term nose-to-the-grindstone investment in the show. Which… though not necessarily a superior position seems at least a somewhat more balanced one, compared to the acid or the faux superiority that gets slung about. For whatever that might be worth when making judgments on a tatty twenty-year-old TV show.

Murnau Edition

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’m watching the restored version of Nosferatu. It’s not quite as impressive as the Metropolis restoration, on a few fronts.

Though some of the source material is startlingly excellently great, other bits are really irreparably grungy.

The translation is a bit weird and literal, with a few grammatical errors for extra flavor.

The new English intertitles they generated based on the translation are cheap-looking and far from seamless; I could have done better in half an hour in Photoshop.

For some reason they chose not to motion-estimate missing frames, so the film still occasionally skips a bit.

There’s a really long written intro that babbles on about the restoration; it’s distracting and a bit wanky.

Though it’s fantastic that they located and recorded and overlaid the original score, the original music is often not really appropriate to the mood of the images. It’s weird. There’s a horrible, creepy thing on the screen, and the music is all majestic violins.

All of that said, this is the best version to date; these are small criticisms compared to every other version on DVD. And what’s more, just as with Metropolis, the new version makes it possible to follow and appreciate the story! Before, it was just a weird dreamlike drip of images. Now it feels like a finished, sophisticated film.

More than Meets the Eye

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just realized that you pull Shockwave’s willy to make him glow.

NOSFERATU!!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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”

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

  • Reading time:20 mins read

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

  • Reading time:23 mins read

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

  • Reading time:15 mins read

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

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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

  • Reading time:6 mins read

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.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

The Crowbar and the Trigger Finger

  • Reading time:10 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Phantom Fingers“; here is the article in full.

We make communication so darned difficult. We create languages, manners, rules, syntax, subtext, irony… We learn to love the language and its artifice – and the more we cherish our tools, the more signal that gets lost in transmission. Soon we get so caught up in what we’re saying that we no longer have any anchor in our surroundings, the foundations give way, and all our facades collapse around us.

The Cosmopolis

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I got some amazing strawberry jam the other day. It’s made with just strawberries and grape juice. And good junipers, I feel like eating it out of the jar.

It always weirds me out when people eat condiment or filling material on its own. Many women seem to just eat peanut butter, with a spoon; something about that just feels revolting. I’ve also known people to eat ketchup or mustard. Or to drink maple syrup. Even eating luncheon meat on its own strikes me as a little bizarre; it’s like eating a fetal sandwich. By eating it on its own, you are preventing a proper sandwich from being made down the line.

But this… this is beauty and love. Which makes everything gross desirable, and excuses all awkwardness.

There’s a big, normal mainstream grocery store on the other side of the lake. I’m gonna go there tomorrow if I get enough written, and see if they have some Ovaltine already. I don’t get this. In San Francisco you can find Ovaltine in any corner shop. In Oakland, zilch. Is it that cosmopolitan a beverage?

I pass the Turning Test

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just figured out how to flip stuff in a frying pan.

I feel like one of those sushi chefs.

Car-wash-ima

  • Reading time:1 mins read

It’s been over a year since I’ve played Brain Age — actually, more like sixteen months. I played it for two months straight, then got distracted. That, and I felt guilty for the days I had missed — so I as time went on, I grew all the more reluctant to return, lest Dr. Kawashima give me a digital scolding. Considering my vaporous mental state of late, I decided to give it another shot. Result: my head feels like it just did a successful round of sit-ups.

Though, curiously, I’m still getting something around my real age. It just feels like more work, getting there.

Dr. Kawashima claimed not to remember who I was.