Ideas

Things to remember, things to work on.

Tedium at the Core

  • Reading time:1 mins read

How many Doctor Who stories have at the heart of them a Problem Bureaucracy? I’m talking about a horrible central power, usually run by a paranoid and irrational old man who won’t listen to anyone, that serves mostly to string out the story’s run time or give it a reason to exist at all, by creating unnecessary and often unnatural conflict?

Often in these scenarios, everyone else in the story’s world seems more or less reasonable; it’s just this one bad apple, with a few of his puppets, who causes all the problems that allow the story to wheeze along.

Spamaray

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I wish everything came in amaray DVD cases. Except for those things that come in digipaks.

I’d want sandwiches to come in amaray cases. So I could neatly stack them in the fridge.

Orthogonal Pareidolia

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve a horrible record at remembering labels. Proper names especially, and nouns more generally. Most broadly, classifiers of any sort. Which is part of why I’m so bad at languages, despite learning the grammar and pronunciation almost immediately. When it comes to vocabulary, it’s like I’m tacking weak post-its over everything, and every time I turn they blow away. This probably also feeds into my trouble with mathematics (despite again understanding the concepts), and my inability to remember my phone number.

It always trips me up; I expect the words to be there, and then am unprepared when they’re not. I search for synonyms, and find that whole part of my lexicon misplaced. When this happens for every third word, conversations with me can become rather tiresome. I suppose I should just start coining my own words; it would save me such anxiety.

To assuage some of the botherment, I keep a file on my desktop of words that I keep forgetting. (The filename is “words you keep forgetting.txt”.) Many of them are absurdly common, and I use them almost every day to describe some of my favorite concepts — but when I reach for them, they’re just not there. Words like catharsis, exposition, disregard, catalyst, and paraphrase. Others — prosopopeia, dysphemism, moiety, breviloquence — are a bit more specialized. I can probably get away with not remembering those when I need them.

Why, therefore, it has taken me until today to start a file on fantastic names, I don’t know. Potential titles, character names, and band names — the sorts of things that come up all the time, then disappear into the vapor. At the moment all I’ve got is a phrase I found nestled in my head when I woke today: Airtight Harem. The actual words were Airtight Harlem, which is also good, but I meant the former.

(Airtight Heirloom isn’t quite as good. Too obvious.)

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.

Purple Clothes

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On that note, I have recently begun to dress myself. That is to say, as I near twenty-first century adulthood (at thirty) I have begun to actively seek clothing that I think will flatter me — compared with wearing whatever may fall into my possession. This has mostly come out of the sudden realization that I am an attractive individual. Or as someone recently described me, “tall, dark, and very handsome”. Not at all photogenic, to be certain. It’s like a rock concert; you have to be there. Just add a dash of the confidence of ownership, and bingo. Instant sexpot.

I’m calling my new look “glam fop”. I hope it doesn’t catch on, as I don’t often get this creative anymore.*

These days, half my mind is taken up with angst about things I can’t possibly change and another quarter with hope that I can change them anyway. It seems the only way around that is to say to hell with everyone. If I’ve only got so much energy, I might as well focus on bringing myself as much joy as I can. I’m so unused to paying active attention to what I want, and what I need. For me, life is like standing up after several hours of frustrating work and realizing you’ve had to pee since two o’clock, and that’s what’s been making you so cranky. Then finding the toilet is backed up.

At least now I look gorgeous while I’m doing it.

*: I’m strongly in the market for a pocket watch with a built-in mp3 player. I’d call it an “iFob”.

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.

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.

Well, I was half right.

While we’re jumping the gun…

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I hope for Dragon Quest X, for the Wii, to filter players’ Mii data though a library of stock Akira Toriyama face and body features, such as to produce customized Dragon Quest styled approximations of the players.

That would seem like something Yuji Horii would have on his “to do” list.

Hey, Tim. Any way you can suggest it to him next time you’re in the same room?

“I feel like I’m in a John Hughes rite du passage movie”

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Something curious about Wayne’s World is that, whereas most movies expanded from TV shows or skits throw the main characters into a situation where the goofy yet courageous heroes have to preserve [x] from the sleazy [corporate/bureaucratic/criminal something], in this case most of Wayne’s problems are entirely his own fault. They come out of the same character traits that put him in an endless string of food service jobs, living out of his parents’ house, wishing he could make something out of his life. These in turn simply the downside of the same traits that make him so charming and fun to be around in the short term.

Which, come to think of it, is a similar situation to the one in The Big Lebowski. And collectively (both as a unit and within that unit), to the main characters in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And even, yes, to Charlie Kaufman’s protagonists (despite the existential crisis in Adaptation). The qualities that make the characters distinctive and interesting to watch are also those that make them vulnerable; a strong character-based plot (and every plot is to some extent character-based) explores the positive and negative qualities of those traits, first by ingratiating the characters then by showing how those qualities we admire allow them to screw up, then showing how, when applied correctly, those traits can in some way redeem the characters. It’s pretty much scriptwriting 101, of course; the nature of a character arc. Still, there you go.

On an essential level, that’s what we’re there to experience: people who are redeemable fuckups, whose power for redemption comes from the same quality that makes them weak. The question, of course, is where to draw the line: how fatal, exactly, is that fatal flaw? It all depends on the character, and the traits in question — which is basically the point. As all stories are character-based (even if that character is nonliving or even nonphysical), a satisfying story comes entirely out of those characters’ characters. And there’s very little contrived about Wayne’s World; it’s a solid, honest, well-told story. For the movie’s origin and premise, this is pretty unusual! It comes through allowing the character to indeed be fuckups, rather than putting them on a pedestal where they can do no wrong and all the world’s ills befall them in spite of their best efforts.

Then Wayne’s World 2 finds the main cast again in a rut, basically relying on the same shortcuts that got them through life last time we saw them — only now they’re a little older, and the world is a little bigger, and none of their tricks are working anymore. If anything, they’re backfiring on a basic level. Taking the whole plot into account, they’re backfiring on a scale grander and deeper than is immediately obvious — which is sort of the whole point to the movie, and the reason for most of its awkward humor. Part of the reason the movie maybe isn’t so easy to like as the first one is that it portrays its characters as even less effectual than before. None of the character traits we’re there to see are doing the protagonists much good. The movie is basically chiding them for not learning their lesson last time, and giving them one last lesson by showing them the results of their lack of development. (Sort of an Ebenezer Scrooge thing.) It’s a really good coda, though — and an appropriate one, given the characters.

Draining Away

  • Reading time:1 mins read

What was the first game to implement a life bar (compared with hit points or other measures of non-one-hit kills)?

Desktop Graffiti

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Windows should have an option to “tag” every file (much like blog posts), to allow a person to immediately rifle through and find every related and relevant file on one’s hard drive, wherever it might be stored.

Boundary Scout

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I’ve been telling him that I figure it’s impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness — mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It’s that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system — of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you — as a free agent and very clever person — are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it’s just there for you to put together on your own — much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there’s Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through — poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what’s possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It’s working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes — just sometimes — there’s something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset — which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don’t feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player’s subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There’s a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn’t know immediately whether he’s supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he’s able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there’s a certain level of virtuosity required here.

…

Maybe I’m overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn’t follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it’s just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that’s entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it’s a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want “freedom” in their games.

…

I’ll get back to this. Will post what I’ve got now.

A completely unsaleable idea

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A vague concept came to me a couple of hours ago:

Take a game that, ostensibly is… this one thing; it’s of a particular genre, with certain goals — and it’s entertaining enough, if mired in its genre and a little buggy. If you’re so prone, you can poke away at the seams all over the place, and get effects that probably aren’t intended. The first model that came to me was something like a…

Side note: Wi-Fi DS or Wii Pictionary could be interesting. Not for this, necessarily; just had the thought.

Anyway. Something like a video board game; an adaptation of a very famous Game of Life clone that you’ve never heard of, or a Mario Kart or Mario Party clone. Something vapid and small in imagination and ambition, though diverting. The kind of trash that builds up on the store shelves and you never think about, though maybe with a little more personality and irony about itself.

Then if the player happens to be bored enough — happens to keep picking away at the discrepancies, at the bugs and exploits, happens to keep veering out of bounds, he’ll wind up… out-of-bounds. And then the real game will begin. If not, the dippy little game, with its goals and rules, is all you’ll ever see.

As for what’s out there, I don’t know. It could start off just seeming like an error — the Metroid Secret World sort of effect. Random garbage that it’s interesting to screw with. Then keep picking through the garbage, and eventually there’s something grander beneath that. Like you’ve just emerged from a dungeon into the blinding sunshine. And it just keeps getting more and more mysterious. There’s no explanation for any of this; you have to piece it together on your own, through exploring and continually picking away at the edges of what’s possible and observing and filing things away in your head.

What would be even better is if the initial part of the game had some kind of license — say, a videogame version of Jeopardy! or some other known quantity — to further cover up what’s really going on.

And then put the game out and say nothing. And see how long before someone finds the secret, and word begins to spread. Then see the noise grow and grow, and paranoia develop about the glitches in every other game under the sun, as people wonder if they lead to anything secret and special — the way we used to, twenty years ago when we didn’t know any better.

…

I don’t know. I think it would be kind of neat. If impractical. It would require a Kenji Eno or some other funster, to take charge then sit in the background and not be credited.

The Web of Change

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Yeah, still working on the column. I know it’s late. Sorry! It’s… complicated. Almost done, though.

Anyway. You know what I’d like to see? A utility that will allow a person to track… game evolution pathways, I suppose. It will accept data from a few input fields, and store it in a database. This could easily be online. The primary input would be a game’s title, the second set of inputs would be other games that were inspirations for that game; the third set would be games that the primary game helped to inspire. So on a linear path (which this wouldn’t necessarily trace), you’d get something like Pong -> Breakout -> Space Invaders -> Etcetera.

The utilty would have a few other facets; one would graphically illustrate a web of all games and links stored in the database. Simple illustration — just spheres with text connected by green and blue arrows, say. Another would trace the most popular “hubs” — your Pac-Men, your Ultimas. Maybe the latter would be somewhat incorporated into the former, showing more popular hubs larger or in a different color. Perhaps there could be a spectrum of hot to cold.

I’m sure this wouldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes for someone who knew a bit of the proper scripting. I, however, don’t, offhand!