I don’t make a habit out of agreeing with the Penny Arcade guys, but Tycho made a really good point on Monday. It’s something that’s bugged me ever since I moved out here and started working in videogames.

The problem is the weird dollar-to-hour value ratio people use when talking about games. You’ll frequently see a game review, or just public opinion of a game, focus on how the game is “too short.” Not that it was shallow, or ended too abruptly, just that it “only” took three-to-nine hours to finish it. (Yes, Half Life 2: Episode 1 took some reviewers nine hours to finish, and it was still “too short.”)

More often than not, this complaint will come immediately after the comment that the game was very well-written, had great dialogue, a great setting, and well-developed characters. But still, “too short.”

What I like about Tycho’s post is that he finally put into words what bugs me about this — it’s turning games from works of art into commodities. You pay x dollars for a game, you’re an American with an inflated sense of entitlement, therefore you sure as hell better get y hours of entertainment out of it.

What other art form does this? I’ve never read a book review that dinged the book because it was less than 300 pages long. I’ve never seen a movie that was only an hour and a half, and then demanded half my money back, because I got twice as much entertainment time out of The Lord of the Rings. Often you’ll see the exact same people who get all up in arms whenever Roger Ebert or somebody dismisses games as being incapable of being works of art, then go and complain that they paid $60 for Dead Reckoning: Vengeance of Kain 2 and only got 20 hours game time out of it.

There are three possible solutions, as I see it:

1. Introduce “standard” game lengths. Television is broken up into blocks of thirty-minute and hour-long programs, and people don’t seem baffled by that. Board games generally list play times on the box. Publishers can start releasing games of standard 4-hour, 12-hour, etc. lengths, and have QA report the “average” length of time it takes to play. If the people want filler, give them filler, and see how they like it.
2. Report the game length in reviews, but don’t make it qualitative. Game review sites love their decimal-accurate scores, so those aren’t going away. But a so-called “videogame journalist” should be embarrassed about writing good thing after good thing about a game, and then giving it a sub-par score just because it’s “too short.” Tell the readers it only took you x amount of time to play, and then review the game on its own merits.
3. Suck it up, people. We keep hearing how the average age of videogame players is going up; last I heard, it was around 23. People that age should have enough discretionary income that they don’t have to be such tightwads with their entertainment dollars. I can understand a twelve-year-old’s being disappointed that the game he spent his allowance on didn’t last him more than a couple of days. I’ve got a lot less sympathy for the dude who’s got a job and shouldn’t have that many hours to spend on a game in the first place. If you want videogames to be treated as art, then stop treating them as products.

I rented With a Friend Like Harry… (the other translation, Harry, He’s Here to Help is actually a better title) because I thought Sergi Lopez was a bad-ass in Pan’s Labyrinth, and I wanted to see what he could do as the bad guy in a flat-out horror/suspense thriller. Also, I just wanted to see what a contemporary (2000, close enough) French suspense thriller would be like.

Overall, the movie feels like something got lost in translation. Not from French to English, but from the pitch meeting to the production. Somewhere along the line, the idea “What if we remade What About Bob? as a suspense thriller?” turned into “What if we remade What About Bob? and labeled it as a suspense thriller?”

There are a lot of spine-tingling, flesh-crawling scenes in the movie, but they’re more like the kind you get from watching “The Office” or “Da Ali G Show:” people caught in really uncomfortable and awkward social situations. Now, my reaction to awkward social situations, even scripted ones, is indistinguishable from my reaction to a horror movie — shifting uncomfortably in my seat, covering my eyes with my hands, violent shuddering — but I thought that was just because I’m preternaturally sensitive. I kept waiting for the big pay-off, but it never came.

Of course, for all I know, that was the intent. The French are supposed to be so much more cultured than we are; maybe there really is nothing more horrifying to them than an acquaintance who won’t go away and buys you gas-guzzling cars and eats all your eggs and talks about orgasms at the dinner table. (Then again, I always thought that being given free rein to talk openly and effusively about your orgasms in mixed company was part of the je ne sais quoi of being French).

When I finished the movie, I dutifully went back to Netflix and rated it two stars. The internets needed to know that no, I didn’t like it. But then I realized that this movie is worse than a boring Frenchy non-suspense thriller non-black comedy. It’s one of those movies that makes you think.

Not too much, understand. Just enough to realize that it’s actually a good movie, once you look past the “suspense” label and just take it on its own merits. All the performances are perfect, and there are plenty of directorial touches that let you know it was artfully made — lots of references to Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, great sound design throughout, and a couple of stand-out scenes. (The opening in the car, and Michel’s dream at his parents’ house).

Thematically, it’s got enough just enough meat to it to be memorable. The idea of an average guy having to deal with an obsessive stranger isn’t a cliche, but it’s not exactly new, either. This movie adds some depth to that by showing how the obsession starts to go both ways.

And the ending that seemed unsatisfying to me when I watched the movie, has left kind of an aftertaste — it’s not a twist ending in the traditional sense, but it does change and become more profound the longer you think about it. What seems at first to be a happy ending, or at least an anticlimactic sputtering to a conclusion, becomes darker and darker as you think back on the events that led to it. What exactly was happening to the protagonist Michel for the last 15 minutes of the movie? At the time, his expression is impenetrable, and he just seems to be moving through everything in a daze. What kind of shift happened in his mind as he reached the ending? It seems like Harry helped a lot, in exactly the way he’d intended — so what does that mean to the man who received his help?

But still, it all feels like a simple thought exercise or character study, instead of being genuinely unsettling or thought-provoking. Despite its high points, there’s something missing from the movie that keeps it from reaching above average. It might be as simple as cutting half the movie out — the glacial pacing would be okay for building up suspense in a real thriller, but this just feels like stuttering moments of build-up with no release. Not a bad movie, but definitely tough to recommend.

But there is a flying monkey in it, so there you go.

I got a pleasant surprise when I logged in to delete today’s bunch of comment spam. There was a new incoming link to this blog!

It’s cool for two reasons: first, because I just got finished writing about my shallow epiphany about the wonders of the internets and hyperlinking and the glorious potential of sharing, aggregating, and re-interpreting information and creative works.

Second, because the incoming link comes from a site called “Milf Picture” (which I won’t link to, for obvious reasons), and it’s one of those spam blogs Wired has been warning us about so much lately. Apparently these sites have comically inefficient web search bots that just look for random phrases on other sites, and then automatically generate a blog entry linking back to the original. I’m still not sure exactly what the strategy is there; obviously it’s something to do with ads, but I don’t know if they’re just trying to bump up their Google rating, or how linking to random blogs helps with that.

In any case, this particular blog got pulled in by my headline “Mama don’t want to take her medicine.” And although I know that nobody actually reads spam blogs, I’m getting a real kick out of pretending that they do. And I love the idea of some frustrated guy going to a porn site and following a link and getting a dry-as-a-bone review of a boring Chinese action movie, complete with a big picture of a hairy Chow Yun Fat.

So I’m pledging a theme week here on the Spectre Collie: every post title this week will be meticulously and scientifically constructed so as to maximize the chances I get linked to more of these adult spam blogs. Where possible, I will include a photo hand-selected to confound anyone looking for porn. It’s the least I can do.

Sometimes I’m forced to look into the very heart of my whiteness, and it’s astounding.

It’s like walking down a long, white tunnel inexorably towards a blinding vanilla light. As I get closer I hear echoes of the Hellman’s Mayonnaise jingle and the white granny shouting “Where you at?” from cell phone commercials. Finally I reach the precipice and am forced to stare down into the abysshizzle.

Today I was reading an entry on the “Making Light” blog, which is about 30% sci-fi writers’ lounge, 95% repetition of leftist mantras and liberal outrage. They link to this video of 70s Danish pop star Tommy Seebach’s cover of “Apache.”

That sounds familiar, I thought, and not just because I’d already seen the video several months ago. The hook sounds a lot like “We Run This” by Missy Elliot, another song I got into about eight months after it was already old news. Apparently, it was used in the soundtrack of a movie about white high school gymnasts, and I probably heard it in a commercial.

And that blog post leads to “All Roads Lead to Apache”, a fascinating (seriously!) run-down of the evolutionary chart of the original song and how it stretched from surf music to disco onto the earliest hip hop and then dance, electronic, and back to rap and hip hop. James Burke would be proud.

Turns out Missy Elliot’s version is heavily sampled from the version by The Sugarhill Gang. Which is itself about four levels deep into the cover chain.

So the fact that I’d never heard the Sugarhill Gang’s version of the song before is a good indicator of my whiteness, but it’s also an account of how circuitous a route pop culture takes before it hits any kind of saturation. I’d heard of the band before, and “Rapper’s Delight,” but probably because of a soundtrack or a commercial. Same with Grandmaster Flash and Fab 5 Freddy, who I only know because they’re referenced in “Rapture” by Blondie. Which leads me to conclude: Deborah Harry was a hero to most, but she don’t mean shit to me.

Actually, I see it as a sign of just how extensively hyper-linked we are, and how it’s not a new phenomenon. We like to think that samples and mash-ups and remixes are relatively recent innovations, but people have been making covers and references and allusions and homages and outright intellectual property theft for centuries.

We’ve also been conditioned to think of it in terms of theft and culture rape, usually described as I do above — white people taking black people’s art and robbing it, watering the soul out of it, and making a fortune off it while the real artists toil away in obscurity. There’s plenty of that going on, and there always has been. But in the longer term, and if some measure of creativity is inserted along the way, it’s the way culture works and has always worked.

And we’re at the best point in history to be able to track how these things come about and see every step of the evolution and all the connections between the individual parts. Don’t like a remix? There’s easy access to the original, and to the tracks it samples from, and the track that inspired the original, and the four other covers of that track. Looking up the Ventures’ cover of “Apache” on iTunes, I found a bunch of other songs and artists I’d never heard of before, including some tracks that I’d never realized were themselves covers of earlier songs.

Before stumbling on this article, I’d been getting into a pretty jaded impression of our segment of the Information Age. The “If you like The Pixies, you’ll love Nelly Furtado” “features” on internet recommendation sites never work, because they just keep recommending crap or stuff you’ve already heard. And remixes are hardly ever as good as the original, and blog articles generally repeat the same stuff, are shallow, or just eventually lead to a Wikipedia entry. Occasionally you’ll stumble on some blogger’s all-time favorite obscure band, and you’ll listen and realize that they were obscure for a reason.

Back when I first saw HyperCard and then later, Mosaic, I got the sense that links and aggregating information were a novel concept, even if I couldn’t foresee exactly how they’d be revolutionary. Now, though, I’m back to feeling that there’s a ton of stuff out there left to see. More than even the most dedicated hipster could see in a lifetime.

I bought the World of Warcraft expansion pack, with about a billion other people, apparently, more out of obligation than anything else. I’ve kept my account open in the game for at least four months, without ever logging in, just to wait for the expansion pack, so I might as well buy it, right?

And since I installed it, I’ve played more out of a different sense of obligation — to validate spending money on the damn thing — than out of a desire to play it. Which makes a game that already feels like work, feel even more like work.

As far as I can tell, it’s a fine game. They’ve added a good bit of stuff, kept with their same winning formula with several improvements, and the kids seem to like it. They’ve even added some of the stuff — in particular, a PvP Domination-type game in the open environment — I wrote an overlong post about months ago, saying “wouldn’t it be awesome if they added this?” Turns out it’s not all that awesome.

So it’s a videogame that doesn’t really thrill me anymore and I’m not that inclined to play. As somebody with more money than free time, I’m buying, trying, and abandoning videogames all the time. So this would normally be too boring even for this blog’s low standards, and not worth writing about.

The problem is that with an online game, it’s not just a game failure but somehow a social failure. The meat of World of Warcraft is all about playing with other people. I’ve never had any luck at all with this, though. In the two years I’ve owned the thing, I’ve not once had a good experience finding random people to play with. I’ve got no doubt that they’re out there, I’d be that there are even more good people online than idiots, but hell if I can ever find them. Somehow the same goobers that yammer on sub-literately turn into game design experts who know how to play your character better than you do, as soon as you get into a group.

Tonight I joined a random group for a place I’d never been before, after not playing the game for about four months. Somehow I became The Weakest Link (even though I never caused the whole party to die, when everybody else did). I was being pretty gracious about it, and thought the rest of the gang was being pretty cool, and said I’d have to leave in a few minutes. Then all of a sudden I found myself booted from the team, with no warning.

On the grand scale of internet assholitude, that incident doesn’t even register. Still, it annoyed me. It’s just a little bit too like a date gone wrong. Both parties know it’s not working out, and aren’t even that interested in keeping the date going, but you still get dumped. I always thought videogames were supposed to be a substitute for dating. Where’s the escapism in that?

And of course, now more and more games are getting online. I haven’t had any success with the Xbox Live thing either, and there’s a lot less time investment required there. So there’s another venue to have people judging me and even getting a big visible star rating to show me how popular I’m not. I think I like the antisocial games better.

So if anybody wants a good deal on the World of Warcraft expansion, let me know. I think I’m done with the massively multiplayer thing for a while.

After 35 years and I don’t know how many film classes, I finally got around to seeing The Killers. What a completely bad-ass movie this is. It’s already one of my favorites, and I’ve already decided I’m probably never going to see it again, because nothing could be as cool as watching it all unfold on screen for the first time.

Everything about the movie just somehow oozes cool, even more than other film noir that just comes across as trying too hard. Even though all the guys wear ties that don’t go down further than their nipples and pants pulled up to their navels, and the fact that the entire movie comes across as a long promotional spot for the insurance industry, that somehow inexplicably reverses on itself and makes the movie even cooler.

The cinematography’s the highlight. From the first shot of a mysterious car pulling into a dark gas station in Brentwood, to a rooftop interview with the police lieutenant, to a shot of the Swede jumping down from a farmhouse loft, to my favorite, the funeral against a fantastic cloudy background where every shot is composed perfectly. When people go on about the look of movies in black and white as being impossible to reproduce in color, this is exactly what they’re talking about.

And the “lesser” performances stand out, too — Edmond O’Brien is a great, always clever and always likable protagonist, even though Burt Lancaster gets top billing. And the screenwriters manage to extrapolate a really engaging double-cross out of the short story. Even though the movie really just boils down to a standard detective story told through flashbacks, I always felt like something fantastic was just about to happen, and I was never disappointed.

My favorite news story in recent memory is the repeated inept attempts at a smear campaign against Barack Obama. I didn’t make a big deal about it, because I assumed everybody would get a good laugh and then move on. Apparently I was once again being naive, giving the state of American politics too much credit.

Google’s current tv gives a decent run-down (warning: that link plays video). The comedy started when conservative genius think-tank Insight magazine (warning: that link is moronic) dropped the bomb that Obama attended a terrorist-training madrassa while growing up in Indonesia. The “article” couches the shocking allegation as political infighting between Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Obama’s. It’s still up there, even though CNN shows how ridiculous the claim is.

Unfortunately, while that CNN article does debunk the claim, it doesn’t go far enough to show how ridiculous and irresponsible it is. Madrassa is the Arabic word for “school.” You might be inclined to say, “oh well, it’s an unfortunate but understandable mistake, no harm, no foul,” except for the fact that this is old news.

A couple of years ago, my friend Moe was complaining that “news” sites kept trying to link people with terrorism by pointing out that they attended a madrassa. Growing up in Egypt, he went to a secular madrassa, where he was taught terrorist activities such as reading and writing. (Moe would often then put a knife up to my neck and attempt to decapitate me, after which we’d just laugh and laugh. Good times.) Trying to forge a link there would be like saying that since George W. Bush attended a college, and there are known colleges of cosmetology, then Bush has a clear link with ladies’ and men’s hair sculpting. Ergo, Bush is a homosexual. You read it here first.

That tack having failed, the cheesy sleazemeisters at Fox News decided to expose Obama’s shameful secret: the man is a smoker! Don’t try to tell John Gibson it’s a non-issue; he raises the tough questions: why does Obama insist on keeping this scandal a dirty little secret? (The answer: he doesn’t. At all. Everyone knows, nobody cares, and like every other g-damn smoker in the US, he’s trying to quit).

The surprisingly ambidextrous Gibson attempts to back-pedal, cover his ass, and point fingers in this self-serving column. He claims the arguments are coming from Clinton’s campaign, and he once again brings up what? Obama’s terrorism training.

But instead of just pointing and laughing, people are treating this as if it were serious enough to warrant defending. Even normally sane pundits are trying to add perspective.

This isn’t just garden-variety ignorance, or Crooks and Liars‘ awesome term, “Fox stupid.” These guys know what they’re doing, to a degree — even though anyone with intelligence can tell that they’re grasping at straws in a desperate smear campaign, they’re planting seeds of doubt that the more susceptible will remember. Image manipulation, and teaching ignorance.

But what’s most amusing about the whole thing is the conservatives’ desperation at trying to smear a guy who on the surface, has so much going against him. I can imagine a roomful of Michael Moore’s prototypical angry white men just sputtering with rage that they’ve got a black man, who was raised Muslim, and is named Barack Hussein Obama, and the best they can come up with to discredit him is that he went to school and he smokes.

They’re trapped in their own minefield of spin and image, they never really understood the “political correctness” that they’ve tried so hard to vilify, to the point they don’t know what they’re allowed to criticize. (Of course, calling somebody a “liberal” is still fair game, and they’re doing all they can to make that word rank just below “baby-eater” in terms of acceptability). You get the sense that Obama could legally change his name to Barack Stalin Benedict Arnold Clinton Gaymarriage Hitler, and Fox would be scrambling in the archives trying to find video footage of him littering.

I already confessed to how I broke up the Pixies and made the Pogues split. I don’t know how I do it; it just happens. I got into “Alias,” right before it went downhill and got cancelled. I waited until the last minute to start liking “Lost,” and then look what happened there. So it pains me to announce that I really, really like “Battlestar Galactica” an awful lot.

Don’t despair, though; I liked “X-Files” so much I even went to a convention, and that lasted a good four seasons before it went south. Same with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” So considering I just got into “Galactica” this season, and bought the DVDs last weekend, there’s probably at least a couple good years left. I would just hold off on getting that tattoo of Apollo & Starbuck 4-Ever, if I were you.

Tonight was the half-season opener, “Rapture,” and it was pretty damn cool. I haven’t been keeping track of the fan rumblings, and I still haven’t seen all of the miniseries or the first season, but it seems like these episodes are moving a lot faster than the early ones. I’m still amazed that they have the stones and talent to set up huge, story-changing events and cliffhangers, and then quickly resolve them. It’s just plain exciting to see people who aren’t so afraid to mess with their prize-winning formula that they’re frozen into inaction and navel-gazing. They’re eager to keep mixing things up, putting their characters through hell and then pulling them out. Making huge, sweeping changes and then tying everything together all in the span of a few episodes.

I could see how some people would complain that it doesn’t linger on the real implications and ramifications of what happens long enough for them to have any weight, but I think that’s just traditional TV lulling everyone into complacency. This series credits the viewer with enough intelligence to follow everything that’s happening and fill in the details on his own — if something big is happening, you’ll know it, without having to make the cast and soundtrack reiterate how important this is a dozen times. The drama takes precedence even over the plot, and that’s just a great change. It feels like the creators of the show are eager to mess around with the story and the characters, just to see what happens.

Of course, it looks like this episode permanently wrote off my second-favorite cast member. (Grace Park’s my favorite). That’s a huge disappointment, but then I guess that’s what happens when you’ve got a series that isn’t afraid to change.

I just read a rumor online that there will be at least one ore major cast member to go before the season ends. Normally I’d dismiss that as a cheap ratings gimmick — whenever you hear a show creator mention the need to remind viewers that every cast member is expendable, that’s a sure sign the show is creatively rotten, and depends on cheap gimmicks to keep it interesting and “edgy.” Character death just for the sake of character death is as weak as the cat jumping suddenly from a dark place in a horror movie. It has to extend naturally from a storyline, or it’s just a cheap thrill. But I’ve got faith in “Battlestar Galactica,” from what I’ve seen so far. If they do kill somebody else off, it’ll be given a good setup, it’ll probably be bleak as hell, and it’ll almost definitely be good television.