June « 2007 « Spectre Collie

Friday June 29 2007 Apple

iSuck

Monolith of consumer excess Man, there’s been a nauseating level of hype around the iPhone today. (I didn’t include a link; if you want to read more about the iPhone, just check the entire internet). And all for what?

It’s version 1.0 of an Apple device, which means that in around six months there’ll be the next “next big thing” that makes the previous version look like Soviet-era technology. It uses last year’s cellular technology, and by even the most glowing accounts has painfully slow internet access.

There’s no support for third-party development on it; Apple wants to squeeze every last penny it can get out of customers via the iTunes store, and they chose to insult developers by calling their lack of development support “sweet.”

It doesn’t have GPS like other mobile devices do. The camera has no video and no zoom, both of which are supported on my years-old RAZR phone.

I use my phone maybe three times a week, max. Most days I even forget to bring it with me. I don’t have any need for a new one.

Plus Apple’s craftsmanship has been going downhill for a while; broken latches and recalled batteries on the laptops, scratches and battery problems on the iPods, and an OS that seems to be getting less stable as time goes by. My iPod, which is only a few years old (which means there’ve been at least 8 newer versions since I got it) is already giving up the ghost — the battery runs out quickly and at times it refuses to boot up.

Apple’s products are status symbols for a segment of society obsessed with excessive consumerism, a demographic that’s become more and more repulsive the farther we get from the late 1990s. It’s the territory of four-eyed, goateed dorks who think they’re hipsters, driving Volkswagens and listening to the Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson and Sheryl Crow on their iPods while still denying they’re yuppies.

All that, not to mention the fact that it’s ridiculous to pay six hundred dollars for a damn cell phone.

Which is why I got the 4GB version instead of the 8GB.

Seriously, you’ve got to see the screen on this thing. You know when they have demo models of PDAs and phones in electronics stores, how they have those printed mock-ups of the real display pasted on the front? The iPhone’s real screen looks like that. I picked one up in the store just to get an idea of the size of it, and was actually surprised when the image on the screen moved.

During my dinner break at work, I stopped by the nearest AT&T store in San Rafael, thinking that few people knew it was even there, so it wouldn’t be crowded. When I got there, there were already around 60 people in line. I joined in for about an hour, and the people were friendly, and the weather was perfect, and I could finally understand why there’s so much hype about waiting in line for the new cell phone or videogame console or Harry Potter book — it’s not even about the product so much about the “event.”

Anyway, that turned out to be a bust, as they sold out after I’d been in line for a little over an hour. I figured I’d had a small taste of the big Day 1 Excitement, so I went back to work and said I’d order one online.

I’m not sure who was driving to the Apple store after I left work; it sure wasn’t me. But the creepily friendly staff standing outside the doors welcomed me and assured me that there were still 4GB models left, and I jumped all over it like Michael Moore on a corndog. I don’t have kids, so it’s not like I need to carry a ton of pictures around with me. And I can’t even think of 1000 songs I’d want to listen to at a moment’s notice. So this, plus the fact that there’s going to be at least a dozen better models released before my contract even runs out, I actually saved money!

And the gadget bloodlust is finally quiet. But for how long?

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Wednesday June 27 2007 Personal

Thirty-Six

They say the only thing worse than having a thirty-sixth birthday is not having a thirty-sixth birthday. I say the only thing worse is having a thirty-sixth birthday on a Wednesday. Nothing like having the long, slow march towards death kick off on the most boring day of the week.

If I could comically throw my back out, or get asked if I want the AARP discount at a restaurant, that would at least make growing past middle age interesting. (I smoke, so 70 is likely my limit). Instead, the day just ticks over like any other one, showing how it’s all dull and inevitable. And at midnight I got a dozen happy birthday e-mail messages from message boards I signed up for years ago and forgot about, which is like hearing ghostly pre-recorded radio broadcasts after an apocalypse.

Because I’m a shameless Apple whore, I’ve been watching all the iPhone videos. They’re hosted by a vaguely eerie man in a black turtleneck on a black background, making awkward hand motions as if he were doing a grotesque impersonation of real human movement. Assuming he’s not an alien, I would have thought of him as my elder. The type of guy I’d instinctively call “sir.” If I were at a big company, he’d clearly be my boss — not the owner, but someone who’d been around long enough to be in middle management. He probably owns a house in the South Bay, drives his Passat to the Apple campus every day, comes home to a house with at least two iPhoto-ready children.

In the video about activation, he has to enter his birthdate to register his phone, and he claims he’s three years younger than me.

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Thursday June 21 2007 Apple, The Internet

A big-ass table

This video from SarcasticGamer.com has already made the rounds in the real blogs, but it’s just too well-done not to pass on:

You don’t have to have seen the original promotional video to be able to tell that they got the music and the intonation of the voice exactly right. Brilliant.

And to prove this blog’s total lack of bias (in addition to its total lack of content), here’s my other favorite parody of the moment:

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Wednesday June 20 2007 Movies

Mickey Shrugged

Photo from Sprachcaffe International This week Mac got me into a preview screening of Ratatouille. It’s really an outstanding movie.

It’s gotten to where you just expect the highest level of quality from Pixar movies, and Ratatouille exceeds that. At the technical level, of course, it’s perfect — Pixar movies always have much, much more going on behind the scenes than is immediately apparent, and the effects always serve the story. There are hairy characters that don’t really need to have every hair individually simulated, and segments that don’t really have to be set underwater with accurate water caustics and bubbles and realistic movement, but they do it just because they can.

That’s the case here, but still the effects work stands out: in Ratatouille, I was most impressed with the 2D animation. There are several scenes where book illustrations and billboards come to life and begin speaking, and the movement and lighting and coloration are perfect; they really do look like paintings brought to life, and make the surrounding three-dimensional characters seem even more realistic.

The animation is perfect throughout, which is remarkable considering I don’t really like the character design for any of the non-rat characters. They’re all fairly off-putting, with grotesquely exaggerated features and a skin texture that makes them look like PVC figures. (But still nowhere near as unappealing as Dreamworks characters). But that’s just a personal preference, and even I quickly forgot it because the characters all move completely convincingly.

It’s full of laugh-out-loud moments, and like all the best animation, many of those come from small details. Just the shape of the food critic Anton Ego’s writing room, and the image of his typewriter, were enough to get a laugh.

And it’s got my single favorite scene in any Pixar movie to date. It would’ve been a great movie without it, but that one scene in particular — when Ego first tastes the ratatouille — was just so brilliantly done, it knocked it completely out of the park.

So Ratatouille gets my unqualified recommendation: go see it as soon as you’re able.

But…

I’ve got to mention the problem that kept distracting me throughout the movie. It was the same unsettling undertone that caused me to feel ultimately ambivalent about The Incredibles. (And for the record, I liked Ratatouille much more than The Incredibles, which is doubly surprising because the latter has superheroes and retro-future homes and a Bondian supervillians lair and fight scenes and explosions, while the former is about cartoon rats and French cooking).

What bugged me about The Incredibles was the sense of Objectivist preachiness that kept slipping in. The “Be true to yourself” message has been a staple of Disney movies for decades, but it’s usually of the innocuous (and vapid) “Follow your dream!” variety. I thought The Incredibles pounded home the darker variety, saying “I am an exceptional person and I deserve to be treated as such!”

The subtle aspects didn’t bother me — naming the characters “Parr,” setting Mr. Incredible up with a desk job — but when they veered into speeches — Mr. Incredible’s browbeating by his tiny middle-manager boss, and Dash’s browbeating by his nerdy teacher and the lecture about “just fitting in”, and especially the villain’s final speech — it just seemed like the screenwriter had some baggage he wanted to get rid of.

Ratatouille isn’t anywhere near as glaring — if you weren’t bothered by the parts I mentioned in The Incredibles, you probably won’t notice it at all in Ratatouille. But there are still a couple of moments of speechifying. Remy makes a speech to his dad about “moving forward” that seems more petulant than affirming. A book mentioned throughout the movie is called “Anyone Can Cook;” but ultimately, we’re reminded that anyone can try, but very few are going to be good at it. And even more blatant, the food critic begins his final review with a completely out-of-left-field dissertation about how critics are worthless and produce nothing of value, doing nothing but bringing down the ones truly capable of greatness.

Now, I’m willing to admit I’m sensitive when the topic of Objectivism comes up; it’s a completely alien and repugnant philosophy to me, and somehow I ended up with roommates all throughout college who were hard-line devotees of Ayn Rand. (Edited because that sounded overly harsh: they were perfectly fine people on every level; I just completely disagree with their philosophy.) So I could be reading more into it than what’s there.

But then I see stuff like this featurette about how Brad Bird is the Messiah, and I just feel kind of nauseated afterwards. One of the cardinal rules of filmmaking is supposed to be “show, don’t tell.” Bird has shown us three times over, with The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and now Ratatouille, that he’s an exceptionally talented filmmaker, capable of making astounding movies that genuinely raise the bar for everything that follows. So I’d just ask that he stop reminding us of that.

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Monday June 18 2007 Television

Schrödinger's Capo

Well, that didn’t last. One week and seven episodes after I started watching The Sopranos, I found out how it ended. The culprit was Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica” blog, of all things. Technically, it got ruined much earlier, several times over; I just hadn’t realized that when Yahoo News changed their big headline from “Will Tony Soprano get whacked?!?” to “Did Tony Soprano get whacked?!?”, they weren’t being coy.

Of course, I can’t really evaluate the finale, because I haven’t actually seen it. And even if I watched it right now, it wouldn’t count — I’ve only got seven episodes invested in the series, instead of seven seasons. But I was already going to make a comment about the ones I’d just watched, and it’s interesting how much of my opinion of those episodes seems to apply to the finale as well.

By the time the end credits rolled on “College”, I was left thinking I’d just seen one of the best hours of television ever made. For those who don’t automatically remember TV episodes that aired eight years ago by title alone: it’s the one where Tony takes his daughter to Maine to look at colleges and happens to run into a mob informant; meanwhile back at home, Carmella spends the night with her friend the priest after they have a sexy, sexy communion. The things I liked best about this episode and the ones immediately following:

They’re not about plot. Stuff happens, but what happens isn’t as important as why it happens and how the characters react to it.

There are no sudden life-changing epiphanies. After Tony has his final meeting with the mob snitch, there’s a moment where he stands in a field, looking up as a flock of ducks — like the ones that started his anxiety attacks — fly overhead. Meanwhile, Carmella breaks down with guilt and has to confess her complicity in Tony’s crimes. Does Tony recognize the symbolism of the ducks? Not really; he just sees them. Does Carmella forsake her mob money and move out? Not yet; she wakes up and reads a newspaper.

But this isn’t the frustrating artificial gimmick typical of episodic TV, where everything resets back to the default state at the end of each hour. And it’s not the equally artificial gimmick of the current crop of story-arc-based series, where each hour has to have some life-changing event that keeps escalating the tension. Instead, it’s more like reality. Real people are resistant to change. They have moments that chip away at their world-view, leaving them subtly altered.

You never know what’s really happening. There’s a great dynamic going on throughout the series. We’re constantly led to believe we’ve got an omniscient view of Tony’s story, and then constantly jarred out of that, shown that we don’t have any idea what’s going on. We see Tony’s dreams, and his sessions at the therapist, which should be a direct insight into the character’s mind.

But dream sequences inherently put the audience on edge; after the first one, you’re never sure what you’re being shown is real. And his sessions with Dr. Melfi are filled with lies; the scene will start with him talking about something that directly contradicts what we saw in the previous scene. If he’s lying to the therapist about his mistress, what else is he lying about? Can you trust anything he says? It all works together to build the sense that no matter how much time you spend with somebody and how deeply you dig, there’s an impenetrable wall at the end of it. We can never really know what’s going on with Tony Soprano. We’re not even sure if he knows what’s really going on.

The series gets more mileage out of what’s left unsaid than what’s actually said. This is supposedly one of the prime directives of screenwriting, but you so rarely see it done well. In the “College” episode, they had the stones to attempt it on two fronts: Carmella and the priest (after watching The Remains of the Day one of the few movies that does do it well), and Tony and his daughter.

The scenes with Tony and Meadow in the car are just amazing, because so much happens with so little said. All through the episode, you’ve had the sense that they’re bonding, and it’s all felt genuine, and it’s all felt reassuring. It’s as if a great pressure that’s been building up over the past few episodes, has been suddenly released. But then, with just a few lines of dialogue and increasingly lengthy silences, she learns that there’s still a wall between them, some things that he’ll just never tell her.

And because of a couple of great performances, there’s more to that scene than the obvious. It’s not a simple case that he wants to tell her what he’s been doing, but can’t. It never even occurs to him to tell her; lying to his family has become so natural at this point, that it’s simply instinctual for him to keep his work and family completely separate. It’s not even the case that he feels guilty for what he’s done, or wants to keep her from feeling ashamed of him; if there is any of that, it’s all subconscious.

And as soon as he starts evading her questions, she starts responding to him with a simple “Nothing.” And again because of a great, subtle performance, you can detect what’s on the surface — she’s angry that he won’t come clean with her, so she keeps quiet as revenge — and also what’s underneath, her disappointment that the bonding they’ve had is over, and her realization that she’ll probably never be as close to her father as she wanted. It was a perfectly understated, realistic, and ultimately sad scene.

So, disregarding the irony of writing four paragraphs in praise of a show that works best when leaving things unsaid: at least based on the few episodes of the series I’ve seen so far, I’d say the finale sounds about right. The Sopranos doesn’t seem to be about resolutions, or realizations, or big life-changing events. It’s about normalcy, the realization that big finales and conclusions don’t typically happen in real life. It sounds like the best way for the series to end is simply not to.

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Saturday June 16 2007 Movies

Take the cannoli, mang

Guineas. I don't trust 'em.
Tonight’s entry in the Movies Everybody Has Already Seen Except Me Marathon was the Brian DePalma classic Scarface. Now, I realize the movie is 24 years old, but I’ve got to throw myself on the mercy of the internets here, because I just don’t get it.

I’ve been looking around for some kind of explanation, but people keep writing about it as if it were a real movie. Not just back then, but even now, after they’ve had time to reflect. I’m pretty sure I saw the same movie as everyone else, since they describe a lot of the same scenes. But the movie I saw is one that you walk away from with your head down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone involved. If it happens to come up in conversation, you acknowledge it and then quickly change the subject. You pretend it never happened. You sure as hell don’t celebrate it and make a videogame and a 20th Anniversary Edition.

Where do you start? The casting? I made fun of the critics of Memoirs of a Geisha, who complained that Chinese actresses were cast to play Japanese women. I want to publicly retract my mockery now, because I think I can understand how it would be offensive at worst, just plain odd at best.

I mean, in Scarface you’ve got DePalma casting Al Pacino, and sure, that kind of makes sense. His part has to carry the whole movie, so you need a heavy-hitter, and it’s unlikely anyone other than Pacino would’ve been able to carry it off. So yeah, Pacino as a Cuban, why not? F. Murray Abraham: still too early to call; so far he’s just vaguely “ethnic.” I’m watching scenes with Robert Loggia for about 15 minutes before I realize he’s trying to do an accent — sure enough, I pause to go look it up on the IMDB, and he’s playing a guy named “Lopez.” By the time they had Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (complete with Roseanne Roseannadanna hair) as Montana’s Cuban sister — introduced alongside their mother, who is inexplicably played by a Latina actress — I just gave up. Apparently they’re all from the Little Sicily part of Havana.

Apologists keep acknowledging that Pacino’s performance was “over the top,” which I don’t get. He was pretty much the stable center of this ridiculous movie. He’s so committed to the part, I started to believe he was more authentic than his second in command, who was actually born in Cuba. When you’ve got a montage sequence set to a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, where immediately after the bride and groom kiss, the entire wedding party walks down to the stream to stand and look at the tiger they’ve got chained up to a tree on the other side — everything Pacino does seems understated in comparison.

It’s like everything I was ever told about the movie is wrong. Nobody mentioned it was almost three hours, for one thing. People said it was the story of the “rise and fall” of a drug dealer; it’s more like three hours of a drug dealer doing random things to piss people off. And people described it as ultra-violent; DePalma (and Oliver Stone) blew their entire wad with the chainsaw scene at the beginning, and everything from that point on was just a hair more graphic than what you’d see on “The A-Team.” (The scene where a guy gets thrown from a helicopter was my favorite; they watch it play out via binoculars, and you can not only hear the guy scream, but his neck snap. Those are good binoculars!)

It’s too long and boring to be a comedy. So I can only assume that while they were making it, they really thought it was a serious film. I don’t know; maybe I’m not giving them enough credit. The first scene shows Montana bluffing his way through a police interrogation — maybe they were bluffing everybody with this movie and have managed to get away with it for all these years.

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Wednesday June 13 2007 Storytelling, Videogames

You've unlocked… Rosebud!

But our childhood innocence is in another castle! When I started writing about storytelling in videogames almost a month ago, I’d intended to turn it into a series, with more arguments and maybe even some examples more concrete than “videogame stories should be good.” To keep things going, I’ll take some of the comments I’ve read about the topic online (in blogs, articles, and on message boards) in the past few weeks, and offer up a rebuttal to each.

Previously on Spectre Collie…

To recap: writing and storytelling in videogames has traditionally been weak at best. It’s common knowledge — whether it’s accurate or not — that videogame stories suck, and even the best don’t measure up to the level of the worst movies and books. And objection to cut-scenes and lengthy non-interactive segments has evolved into a whole school of thought saying that story has no place in videogames. According to this, games are defined by interactivity and their game mechanics, and that’s all that’s important. Trying to apply aspects of other media into videogames has not only failed in the past, but it’s always doomed to fail.

I say that not only can you tell a good story in a game, but that it’s important to games. In fact, it’s the only way that videogames are going to realize their true potential. Now, this requires a looser definition of “story” to make sense. It’s not just the narrative, or the premise, but everything that’s not purely the game mechanic: setting, characters, dialogue, narrative, and theme.

Myth 1: Videogames are Young

So the first myth about storytelling in videogames always comes in response to the whole “are videogames art?” debate, and you’ll see it repeated in this article from Wired. It usually goes something like this:

Somebody, like say Roger Ebert, asks why, if videogames are capable of art, hasn’t there been the great masterpiece worthy of comparison to the greatest works of film and literature? In other words, why is there no Citizen Kane of videogames?

Inevitably followed by the reply: Videogames and interactive entertainment are still a new medium, and developers are still figuring out how to use it. It took the movie industry decades to produce its definitive classics.

Which seems to me a pretty weak argument. A big deal was made on the internet about the recent 40-year anniversary of videogames, and this article by Kyle Orland in Joystiq compares other media at their 40-year mark (using a somewhat arbitrary start date for each, which I won’t argue with here). By the standard presented in that article, it would seem that we’re still in pretty good shape, and we’re due for our greatest achievement in just a few years now.

But there are problems with that. For starters, the development of a medium of art or entertainment doesn’t place in a vacuum. Looking back at the Joystiq article, compare the state of film after 40 years versus that of TV, and it’s clear that TV advanced a lot more quickly. They list “The Flintstones” as one of the most popular shows at the cut-off point, while movies had just released integrated soundtracks and introduced the Academy Awards.

“The Flintstones” as Postmodernist Masterpiece

While it may be tough to recognize today, “The Flintstones” was pretty experimental: an animated series airing in prime time, that was itself a parody of an earlier series. Depending on how much credit you want to give Hanna Barbera, it was either a postmodernist reference back to “The Honeymooners;” or the character types created in “The Honeymooners” were so established at that point, that they were default for a family comedy. Either way, it took a lot of evolution (no pun intended) and maturity before you could have something like “The Flintstones” even air, much less be one of the top series.

By that standard, games should have been maturing twice as fast as television did. And at least monetarily, that’s the case: the industry is making mad money, and game budgets are already rivaling those of movies. Production values are plenty high, too — there are plenty of scenes in Gears of War and Half-Life 2 that were more convincing to me than the effects in Starship Troopers and the recent War of the Worlds. The videogame business clearly isn’t pacing itself by the same schedule as movies & TV.

My biggest objection to the “games are still new” defense, though, is that artistic media are improved not just by time, but by milestones. You can’t just say that in x number of years, you’re due for your Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or Citizen Kane. The medium doesn’t really grow by evolution, but by intelligent design — you’ve got to have somebody who recognizes the potential of the medium, and then makes something that exploits it, showing the next generation what’s possible.

So just saying “give it time” doesn’t really cut it. The industry has got to put up or shut up. A better rebuttal to the question, “What is the videogame equivalent of Citizen Kane?” is to ask, “What’s so great about Citizen Kane?” It’s universally considered a classic, one of the greatest achievements in film. So what did it accomplish for movies as a form of art?

Orson Welles May Be a Hero To Most…

It’d be easiest for all of us if I could just say, “It’s the story. The end.” But it’s clearly not. “A reporter looks back on the life of an ambitious and powerful man to discover what was his greatest desire” is definitely a solid premise, but on its own, isn’t enough to warrant universal praise.

It’s not even the way the narrative is structured (part of the storytelling as Hanford Lemoore described it in an earlier comment, and thanks to him for bringing up the distinction). Setting up the central mystery of “What is ‘Rosebud?’” was a brilliant way to drive the story, and it’s one of the best-known conventions in the history of movies. But it’s also one that could’ve happened in any other narrative medium; it’s not so novel that you couldn’t do the same thing in, well, a novel.

And that is why people are still pointing to Citizen Kane as one of the definitive medium-defining movies: it takes a good story, and then tells it in a way that only a movie can. There’s the composition of shots that clearly and instantly establish characters and the relationships between them (the iconic image of Kane in front of his campaign poster, and the careful placement of characters in the foreground or background to show Kane growing distant from the people close to him). There’s the breakfast table montage that shows Kane’s marriage deteriorating over time via the placement of the actors and the editing of the scenes. And there are all the match-on-action shots that give the movie the sense of jumping around in time. (And more than that, just served as Orson Welles’ showing off.)

You can use a lot of the same gimmicks in other media — in comic books, The Watchmen gets a lot of use out of symbols and icons to show character, and images that carry through from one scene to the next. But a comic adaptation of novelization of Citizen Kane would fail if it just attempted a direct recreation, just as the cinematic adaptation of The Watchmen will fail if it just tries to film the comic book. Unless you exploit the medium to its fullest, doing the things that only that medium can do, you’re going to fall short of the medium’s potential.

“Games are not movies!”

Obviously, what videogames add is interactivity. And that’s the source of the whole debate: games just aren’t yet exploiting that interactivity as well as they could. Because they have all the same storytelling elements as movies (or television, in the case of episodic games such as Telltale’s hilarious Sam and Max series available for the low low price of $34.95 for the entire first season), the tendency has been to make shambling Frankenstein’s Monster creations stitching together cinematic sequences and interactive sequences that never quite meld. You either get games that periodically stop being interactive to make you watch a movie, or interesting story sequences that are held together by a predictable and uninspired game. And sometimes the most fun, perfectly-designed, pure games-for-their-own-sake games feel obligated to throw in some token effort at story, putting in an opening cutscene explaining that you’re playing Breakout to rescue a space princess from some evil galactic mega-corporation.

That results in the “Games are not movies! Down with story!” backlash. “Stop with all the pretentious ‘are videogames art?’ talk and just get back to asking ‘are videogames fun?’” Which is pretty unambitious. We already know videogames have to the potential to be fun; the industry wouldn’t be making billions and billions of dollars and taking up hours and hours of our time if they weren’t.

But they’re capable of more than that. So why not try to achieve more than that? We can just keep on Unreal Tournament until we come up with flashier versions of a game that’s undeniably fun but ultimately without purpose. Or, we could try to make interactivity meaningful. I don’t like the Grand Theft Auto series, for example, but I can’t deny that it was hugely significant in showing what you can do with a truly interactive environment. Now, what if you had a GTA with something of more substance than shooting hookers?

The various aspects of Citizen Kane — montages, staging, different types of editing — aren’t interesting on their own. They only stand out because they serve the story and its characters. Plenty of lesser movies use the same techniques, and they remain lesser movies. The cinematic elements alone don’t make it a great movie, just as a great game mechanic by itself doesn’t guarantee a great game. Even if you say that Kane is a case of form over function, that it’s only regarded a classic because of the way it mastered the cinematic elements in service of a fairly simple story: what’s wrong with that? Why not apply that to games? Having that kind of filter during game development would be a great improvement to what we have now: imagine how many hours of frustration we could’ve avoided if developers had simply asked themselves, “Does this jumping puzzle actually serve any purpose in the overall story?”

It All Has Purpose

That doesn’t mean that every game has to mean something, any more than the existence of “important” movies means we can no longer have movies like Big Trouble in Little China. And I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have Guitar Hero.

It just means that we start rewarding the developers who try to move things forward. It’s not just going to happen naturally over time. You’ve got to have people who are willing to step up and experiment with how interactivity and narrative feed off each other, instead of being mutually exclusive. And they’ve got to be able to do it without hearing the old story about how it won’t sell as well as Quake or Madden. Half-Life 2 is experimenting with things from the linear, cinematic perspective, and it seems to be selling all right. And The Sims went at it from the pure game-mechanic/sandbox angle, but it still managed to make a subtle commentary on consumerism and the nature of storytelling, and I believe it made a few dollars for Electronic Arts. I wouldn’t call either of those the Citizen Kane of videogames, but they’re on the right track.

At present, videogames aren’t like the fresh-faced young high-school graduate finding out how to make his way in the world, just years away from his first greatest achievement. They’re like the 40-year-old stoner who maybe will get around to accomplishing something, eventually. But for now it’s just easier and more cost-effective to just sit on the couch and watch shit blow up.

(While I was doing Google searches, I found this article from CBS News from last year, about the “Citizen Kane of videogames.” It gets perspective from a few people and then comes to many of the same conclusions. None of this is particularly new ground.)

Previously:
Is there anybody going to listen to my story?

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Monday June 11 2007 Television

Got myself a gun… about seven years late.

Update: Hey, this post was rambling and non-sensical even for me. I’ll leave it as an example of what happens when you put stuff on the internets while tired. But here’s what I would’ve written had I been typing coherently last night:

“The Sopranos” aired its series finale this week. In the seven years the show ran on HBO, and the year or so it’s been in syndication on A&E, I’ve never seen a single episode. And because I’ve heard so much hype about it, I’ve avoided reading any spoilers about the series, knowing that at some point, I’d get around to watching it.

Still, the show is such a cultural phenomenon that just by doing what I normally do, I’ve managed to have some pretty significant points ruined for me. I know of three characters who died or were killed off, one of them involving pool cues. Just [today], I read no less than five blog posts that hinted at what went on in the finale, without really revealing anything.

So here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment: I started watching the series this week, and I’m three episodes in. I’m going to see how long I can go without being completely spoiled for the finale. Not looking for recaps or spoilers, just going on as I normally have been — I want to see if the show is significant enough that its finale will just leak into common knowledge, “Rosebud” style.

As for the series itself: So far, I’m liking it. There’ve been several of these series that have been highly recommended, ~~usually by my friend Cory~~, but when I’ve finally seen them, they just don’t live up to the hype. My reaction to “The Sopranos” pilot was “hell yes, I’d keep watching that.” And the other episodes have me intrigued. Which is actually kind of surprising — except for Miller’s Crossing, I don’t like mob movies, and Goodfellas bores me so much I’ve never seen it all the way through.

Original:

Here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment:

I started watching The Sopranos this week; I’m three episodes in. The series finale just aired last night, I believe, and I’ve already read five blog posts that mention the finale but don’t reveal anything about what happened.

I want to see how much of the series I can watch before the series and its ending are completely spoiled for me. All I know so far is the identities of three characters who’ve died or been killed over the course of the show, one of them involving pool cues.

And yeah, it’s a pretty good show. It’s been hyped a ton, and at least three episodes in, it lives up to it. Unlike some of the other HBO and Showtime series that I’ve heard about and then finally watched and been completely disappointed, this one looks like it deserves its initial hype.

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Monday June 11 2007 Apple

Boom

Stacks and spin Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is going on this week, with Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning. Nothing particularly earth-shattering was announced, but the stuff they did show was cool enough.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the new desktop demo. There’s nothing particularly compelling there, and the transparent menubar is unpleasantly Vista-like, but seeing the demo of the new “Stacks” inexplicably filled me with glee. I’ve been looking for something that does exactly that, and the Apple version is plenty slick. Buying OS X upgrades is mandatory in the Spectre Collie household, so I wasn’t looking for anything to convince me to buy Leopard; I was only looking for stuff that made me look forward to it slightly more.

Releasing Safari for Windows was a really welcome announcement. I tried it on my work machine and was amazed that it renders pages exactly the same as it does in OS X. I’d always just assumed ugly font handling was built into Windows and there was no escaping it, but there it is, running in XP and actually looking like I’m using a computer in 2007. The biggest selling point, of course, is that now the entire internet can see Spectre Collie exactly how it was intended to be seen, and the computer world’s long waking nightmare is at last over.

(And yeah, it’s petty, but his whole “Standard Version,” “Ultimate Version” spiel was pretty damn funny. Especially for those of us who’ve been spending time in the Vista trenches).

What’s not cool, though, is the unprecedented level of spin when it comes to the damn iPhone. Sure, Jobs is known across the internets for his “reality distortion field,” but it’s always been in the realm of good-natured criticism. Apple traditionally does a pretty good job with slick new releases that perform pretty well, and then Jobs comes in and then oversells them just a notch. A feature that would’ve just earned a “huh, that’s kind of cool” suddenly gets upgraded to “OMG THAT’S AWESOME WE LOVE YOU STEVE!!!!!!”

But even the reality distortion field can’t turn a turd into a diamond. It’s pretty insulting that they’d even try to. They’ve been roundly criticized for making the iPhone a closed system; it’s simply not a complete smart phone unless third parties can develop applications for it. Jobs held off mentioning the iPhone until the climax of his keynote, and then made the big dramatic announcement: the iPhone has a web browser!

They would’ve been a lot better off not mentioning it at all, because the end result just makes them look silly at best, intentionally deceptive at worst. “No SDK Required” the slide says. “Sweet.” “You can start building your apps today.” “You can run your applications on Safari until the hardware is released.” “An awesome way to write apps for iPhone.” Bull.

Requiring apps to run on a remote server makes distribution simple, they claim. What it does is makes it so you can’t run third-party apps without a network connection. So you’d better be near a WiFi hotspot, or be ready to pay AT&T’s likely exhorbitant data rates (which haven’t been announced yet, as far as I’ve seen). And forget running anything useful while you’re stuck on a plane flight.

Having no access to the local data store gives excellent security, they claim. What it means is that your apps can’t access anything that would be useful to have on a mobile device, like your To-Do list, calendar, notes, tracks on your iPod, or photos. Unless you want to keep them on a remote server and only have access to them when you’re connected to the internet.

They’ve been struggling to figure out how to support outside development without compromising security or network integrity, they claim. Which is total bullshit; they’ve been struggling to figure out how to avoid giving up any of Apple’s opportunities to sell stuff through the iTunes Store, and AT&T’s opportunities to charge users for as much data access as possible.

All for a device that’s already six hundred dollars plus a two-year contract.

I always thought Apple and I had an agreement. I would keep giving them more and more of my money, and they would provide me with fancy stuff that worked well, and not lie about it. That keynote really hurt. Now I just have to see if I can survive my birthday at the end of the month, two days before the release of the iPhone. When they release a new gadget that every rational part of my brain finds repulsive and a ludicrous waste of money, while the rest of me is drawn like a Visa card-carrying moth to flame. Hopefully there’ll be a run on them, and it’ll be impossible to get one, or else I’m going to enter July feeling really, really stupid.

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Wednesday June 6 2007 Apple, Whining

Please wait while Windows calculates how it can suck even more.

The Ultimate in Suck It should come as no surprise to anyone that I lasted about a nanosecond before I broke down and bought a new computer (cat does not come standard). (Actually, cat does not come, period). It’s way more computer than I need — it’s way more computer than most shuttle launches need — and it was way too expensive, but somehow those facts don’t make it any less awesome. Just looking at it, I get a tingling in my extremity.

Keeping up the theme of needless excess, I bought a copy of Windows Vista to install on it. Mac OS X, Vista under Boot Camp, with a Parallels installation to get access without rebooting — it was going to be sheer operating system perfection. Remember that this was before I knew I was going to be working full time at a videogame company, back when I was actually going to have the time and desire to play videogames.

The thing about Vista is that it kinda sucks. I kept hearing how it was supposedly a rip-off of OS X, but I don’t really see it. It’s more like if Donald Trump got a hold of Windows XP. “We’re gonna make it very classy. Get a load of those transparent window borders and tell me that doesn’t make for the finest computing experience there is.”

Back when I was working on an Xbox game, the joke was that Microsoft kept demanding more flair: gameplay was secondary; what mattered was just cramming as many visual effects as you could into the game. It looks like Microsoft extended that same philosophy to their new OS. The fact that you can’t even tell which is the active window is irrelevant; it’s far more important that it looks like glass!

Normally I wouldn’t bitch about gratuitous visual effects; OS X basically pioneered that field (and I still spend minutes dropping widgets onto the dashboard just to see the ripple effect). But even when they’re not actually getting in the way of UI usability — like the active window thing — they’re really all that’s apparent to the user in the upgrade. It just feels like you’ve broken compatibility with most of your existing apps just for the sake of a billion new notification messages and windows that you can see through.

And they still can’t make a standards-compliant web browser. Seriously, how long is it going to take for them to just give up and go with every other browser available?

So it’s kind of garish and ugly, but mostly usable, so it shouldn’t matter all that much since I only use it for games and the occasional work-related task, right? Well, as it turns out, I completely missed the news that you need to buy the most expensive version of Vista in order to run it under virtualization software like Parallels. XP has no such limitation. And, Parallels doesn’t let you boot from your Vista boot camp partition, so if you want to have Boot Camp and Parallels, you have to do another install, which requires another Windows activation. Which I can’t do, because it violates the EULA.

Luckily, Microsoft is there for me: thanks to their innovative Windows BendOverAnywhere program, I can upgrade my copy of Vista to the ULTIMATE MEGAWEAPON version for the low, low price of $158. Which means the secondary just-for-games OS would end up adding over 200 bucks to the cost of the computer. But at least I’d be able to run it under Parallels… or would I? Paying that cost just gets you a download, because you’re only allowed to do it on one machine. And the Parallels VM counts as a separate machine. So installing it there gets me my virtualization-unfriendly version of Vista. Which won’t activate, because it thinks I’m trying to install it on a new computer. (Who knows what would happen if I needed to do a clean re-install of the OS. I’m guessing I’d need another $150 every time I wipe my hard drive?)

(Meanwhile, Parallels is sending me e-mails asking me to send them 40 bucks to upgrade to their newest version, which may or may not solve my problem. Does it let you run off the Boot Camp partition instead of requiring a separate install? No one will say definitively. You can try asking them for support… if you can find their secret forum that isn’t linked from their main page, only from Google searches. And no representatives are on hand there to answer questions. But at least I know that the new version can indeed run Quake 4, so that’s a relief.)

It’d be nice to ask somebody at Microsoft whether the software they’re charging me a couple hundred bucks for will actually run on my machine in the configuration I want. After going through ten pages on their customer support site, I finally get to a page that says it will let me e-mail somebody. As long as I enter my product key, and they determine that the key is valid for support; otherwise it’s $60 per “incident.” I enter the product key, out of pure optimism, and it takes me to a Microsoft SQL Server error page.

So as it stands now, I’m somewhat screwed. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I can determine exactly how much money I’ve wasted. It’s either going to be the cost of Parallels and its upgrade, or the cost of Vista and its upgrade. Until then, it means rebooting the machine every time I want to play a game, at which point it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe I’m supposed to be spending even more money on the Mac-native versions of these games? Or maybe finding a cheaper and more worthwhile hobby?

I should make it clear that I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to say that they don’t suck. They do, but in a slightly different way. I’ve complained about the $125 they charge for every yearly OS upgrade, but at this point, all of that seems quaint. As Jon Gruber pointed out in an insightful post on his Daring Fireball blog, Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. And as such, where they truly suck is in the hardware.

It’s all beautifully designed, of course, even the cheese grater. But there’s that deviously-planned obsolescence built right into every one, from the iPod batteries with the lifespans of mayflies, to the exploding laptop batteries, to the laptop latches.

Almost one month to the day after the warranty on my Mac laptop ran out, the latch broke (from what I read on the internet, it’s a very common problem, partly because the latch is ridiculously over-engineered). I put off getting it repaired until now, because I knew that phone support would be useless — the second you connect with a real human, they ask for your credit card number or try to sell you AppleCare. So I finally made an appointment to talk to a Genius. Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, said genius looked at my machine’s serial number, typed it into a database, and told me that it’d be $326 to get fixed. She referred me to a place across town that could probably do it for cheaper. When I got there, they said that they usually ship those repairs directly to Apple and that it’d cost me $426 including parts and labor.

And still, the Apple aura is so persuasive that I sit here typing on a ridiculously over-priced machine that could very well explode at any moment (or more likely, will explode exactly on April 19, 2008), and the only thing I can think of is bitching about Windows.

Update: Man, what’s the computer world coming to when a guy can’t make an over-long, whiny post bitching about cost and incompatiblities anymore? The day after I wrote this, Parallels released the new version of their software. Hidden among the new features is what I think is the most valuable one — being able to use your BootCamp Vista partition. Meaning no additional activation, no copying software over, just the ability to use your Vista stuff within OSX without rebooting. I’ve installed it with no problems, and so far it works mostly like I wanted. (Direct3D isn’t working for me at the moment, but it could very well just be a configuration thing I missed).

Having a piece of software work as advertised, and provide greater compatibility between rival operating systems with a minimum of hassle (if not a minimum of cost)? That sets a very bad precedent for the industry.

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