Monthly Archives: February 2009

Who Tackles the Untackleable?

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The opening credits of the “Watchmen” movie were shown at WonderCon, and they’re amazing. If the rest of the movie can live up to the first 10 minutes, I’m sold.

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I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Watchmen, which makes me something of a pariah among My People. I can appreciate how well it’s put together, and I appreciate all the layers of symbolism and the literary and musical allusions and the way the storylines weave in and out of each other and its influence on a couple of decades’ worth of comics and TV series like “Lost.” But there’s no “spark” to it. Nothing to grab hold of me and make me really invested in what’s happening, like there is with many less impressively constructed stories. I’ve been re-reading it, to see if I were just too young to appreciate it in 1988, but it still strikes me as cold and self-consciously literary. Kubrickian, even.

So I haven’t been all that excited about the movie [warning: that site takes over your browser]. At least, until this morning.

This is WonderCon weekend, and the first panel of the morning was about the Watchmen movie, with director Zack Snyder, artist of the original comic Dave Gibbons, and most of the cast. Midway through, they showed about 20 minutes of the movie, including the opening credits and scenes with The Comedian and Nite Owl II. It was extremely well done, and now I’m anxious to get in line opening weekend with all the other comic book geeks.

There is an excessive amount of the sudden-slow-motion during fight sequences, which will date this movie firmly circa 2006. But as friend Jeff H points out, it has the effect of freezing the action into individual comic panels. And seeing as how the comic is so firmly dated in the mid-80s (but eerily relevant to the Bush administration), placing it as a “product of its time” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The people on the panel didn’t get a lot of time to talk this morning, but Dave Gibbons had a good quote: he said that as he was drawing the comic, he would imagine a movie in his head and pull out individual static scenes to draw. The movie that’s going to be released, he claims, is the movie that was in his head.

And I believe it. It’s clear that everyone involved in the making of this movie reveres the comic book and wanted to do it justice. And whatever your opinion of 300 and the Dawn of the Dead remake, you certainly couldn’t fault them for the visuals. And Solid Snake gets a ton of credit from me for working on the screenplay of my favorite comic book movie and understanding what makes comic book movies cool. So take that mindset plus those visuals plus very intelligent and literary source material, remove some of the prolonged manifestos from the comic and replace them with slo-mo fight scenes, and the outlook is very promising. It’s still possible the whole thing falls apart after the opening credits, but worst case you get to watch something really pretty for two and a half hours.

One thing that I did find alarming: people in the convention hall didn’t seem to understand that the character of Rorschach is not a hero. Any time there was even a hint he was about to be on screen, and the crowd went apeshit, clapping and cheering. It’s entirely possible I’m just over-reacting, and it’s as harmless as college kids hanging posters of Travis Bickle up in their dorm rooms, or for that matter, dressing as The Joker instead of Batman at conventions. But I always assumed that a big part of Alan Moore’s satire in the comic book was in forcing the reader to identify with one of the most loathsome characters in the story. It’s a parody of late 70s anti-heroes like The Punisher, I always assumed, taken to extremes to show just how dangerously unstable these guys are. Hurm.

So I can’t wait. Legendary Terminator: Salvation director McG claimed that Snyder has “tackled something everybody thought was untackleable.” In his own barely-literate way, he might just be right.

Myths of Videogame Storytelling

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A recap of all my posts so far on the subject of storytelling in videogames.

storytellinggiant.jpgAbout a year and a half ago, I started writing a series of posts on here about “myths of videogame storytelling.” The idea was to take some claim I’d found on the internet about the role of stories in games, and explain why it was hopelessly, incontrovertibly wrong. Here they are, in chronological order for your convenience and protection:

  1. Is there anybody going to listen to my story?
    My justification for writing about the topic in the first place.
  2. You’ve unlocked… Rosebud!
    Stop rationalizing the failures of videogames as a medium with “games are still young.” Also, stop assuming that games have nothing to learn from movies.
  3. Pro Choice
    Player control of the narrative isn’t as important as player agency.
  4. Ready… Be fought against!
    “Activity” in storytelling games is more than just pressing buttons, it’s becoming actively engaged in the storytelling.
  5. The Old Man and the Realistically Rendered Water Volume
    (A diversion to make fun of a guy I don’t know). If you want to improve the state of videogame writing, stop setting such miserably low expectations of it from the onset.
  6. There’s no second chance to make a first impression
    No matter how open-ended and non-linear you try make your game, the player is going to experience it in a line from start to finish.
  7. The Calls Are Coming From Within the Ice Level!
    How horror movies often do a better job of interacting with the audience than ostensibly “interactive entertainment.”
  8. Who’s in control here?
    Player narrative and developer narrative are equally important.
  9. I’m thinking of a number between 1 and You’re Dumb
    A defense of adventure games, and why action games haven’t yet rendered them obsolete.
  10. Back off, man. I’m a scientist.
    Good storytelling in games requires a collaboration between the developer and the player.
  11. tl;dr;fu
    A brief recap of everything I’d written up to that point.
  12. Resident Evil, But They’re in Space!
    (Another diversion). Why Dead Space was a fine game, but games like it will drag down the entire medium until we start demanding more from the storytelling.
  13. Feedback’s a bitch
    We can make games demand more of the player without frustrating the player, as long as we treat the game as an ongoing communication instead of a static presentation.
  14. Feedback loop
    More about treating games as ongoing communication, this time in regards to scaling difficulty.
  15. On Brevity
    Videogames need to remain aware of how discrete pieces of writing will fit together in the final context of the game. Rhythm and flow are more important than length.

And that’s the last of them. They’re generally too dense to encourage any long-term discussion, even if I had time to keep up with the comments. Plus, I’ve now said everything I could possibly say about Portal, BioShock, and Half-Life 2 (at least until Episode 3 comes out).

Most significantly: they take too long to write, and any time spent writing about videogames would be better spent making videogames. These days, there are just too many tools available and too much great inspiration from the independent game developers for anyone to be content just writing hypothetically about how games should work. There’s no excuse not to put the theories into practice.

Oh, stop thinking how ridiculous it is!

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My opinions of “Lost” episode “316″

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I suppose it’s pretty hypocritical of me to say so, but I get annoyed really quickly when series go overboard on the meta-commentary. Just a little bit, and you’ve got a clever callback. A little more, and you’ve got a nice “see, we get how silly this is” repartee going with the audience. But too much, and it just comes across as lazy or a fey “look how clever we are!”

This week’s episode of “Lost” (“316″) didn’t plunge completely over the abyss, but it was just barely hanging on with the back wheels, all the cast members and plot points desperately huddled in the back seat waiting for a bird to land comically on the hood and send them over.

Of course there was the shot of Jack’s eye as he lies in the jungle at the beginning of the episode, a callback to the pilot (and several other episodes following), but that was probably the most innocuous of them. Ms Faraday delivers the “Oh, stop thinking how ridiculous it is!” line at the end of 20 minutes worth of exposition. Jack looks back on the plane and asks about all the people in the tail section; Ben replies, “who cares?” Plus dozens of smaller moments: Dharma logos, number boards flipping over, binders full of print outs, dead Dad anguish, people reading books whose titles are just a little bit too visible.

And it’s not just that so much of this stuff has been done earlier in the series, it’s that it was done so much better. As far as poking-fun-at-ourselves meta-commentary goes, I don’t think the series will ever be able to top the episode called “Expose”. Back in season 1, they made each character’s story getting on Flight 815 compelling on its own; here’s it’s just “oh, you’re here.” And wouldn’t the big cliffhanger reveal have worked better if we hadn’t already seen that he’s still alive, two episodes ago?

I think the biggest problem I had with the whole episode is the big information dump at the beginning. It’s probably unfair that I’ll stick with “Lost” through its tedious exposition, but fault “Battlestar Galactica” for the same thing, but there’s no denying: you can make any amount of dialogue more compelling by putting a giant pendulum in the middle of the room and making every shot look like someone is just about to get whacked by it. And it’s probably unfair that I’ve been complaining that the stories of the people in L.A. are uninteresting, but am now complaining that they shuttled them all out of L.A. too quickly and undramatically.

But it all felt to me as if they had a bunch of burgeoning plot lines that they had to abandon quickly, and then somewhat clumsily introduce new intrigue instead of tying those up satisfactorily: what happened to Aaron? How’d Hurley get out of jail? Who’s the woman with Sayid? Did Lapidus just happen to be on the same flight? The show tends to be reluctant to give out information, but the answer to that isn’t just to give out any information. Of all the questions I’d like to be answered explicitly, “why does Locke need to be on the plane?” wasn’t one of them.

Still, they’ve got everything set up to have everybody back on the island, traveling through time and also with flashbacks to explain the loose ends left over from L.A. They’re in a fine position for the rest of the season; I just wish they’d gotten there a little bit less goofily.

And incidentally, if you’re like me and it was driving you crazy wondering who was the (stunning!) woman with Sayid in this episode, it was Zuleikha Robinson, who played Gaia in “Rome.”

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Hulu.com is going to great lengths to block boxee from accessing its “service,” and its self-serving justifications aren’t helping.

Yesterday The Unofficial Apple Weblog and other sites spread the news that web video provider Hulu.com forced the developers of the media player boxee to remove Hulu’s content from their app. Hulu’s CEO gives his version of the story on the hulu blog, and boxee’s developers explain it on the boxee blog.

In case that means nothing to you: Hulu.com is a website owned by NBC Universal and Fox that streams TV clips and full episodes, as well as some movies, from those two companies and its subsidiary studios (and a few outside affiliates). Boxee is an application that aggregates local video, music, and picture files along with sources from internet sites like CBS.com, ABC.com, Netflix streaming, and (formerly) Hulu. There is some social networking stuff added (you can see/mock what your friends have been watching), but it’s a safe assumption that the main draw of boxee for most of its users has been access to various web-based video sites under a consistent interface. And most importantly: the interface doesn’t require a mouse and keyboard, so it’s good for watching video on a television; and it’s an open platform, so it’s been ported to various devices that can easily be connected to a television. It’s pretty painless to install it on an Apple TV, which means you can watch recent episodes of TV shows in full screen on your home theater with minimal ads.

Everybody — including, ostensibly, Hulu’s CEO himself — is dismayed by the development, but of all the comments I’ve seen, only Christopher Breen at MacWorld seems to see through the self-serving nature of that Hulu blog post. The CEO talks about “hard decisions,” and how it all comes down to pleasing “the content providers.” But Hulu is owned by NBC Universal and Fox, who are the providers of all of the content, with very few exceptions (e.g. Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog). For him to refer to them “content providers” is like a high school kid referring to his parents as “the couple I live with.” It’s just an attempt to deflect the blame at some mysterious, unreachable Tight-Ass Suits Up In Corporate, without having to acknowledge that no, your bosses told you to do something and you did it.

boxee still includes ads just as if you’d watched via a web browser, so it’s not a question of removing a revenue stream. What it suggests is that somebody at NBC Universal or News Corp has seen the licensing deals for Netflix boxes, Netflix streaming over Xbox 360, rumors of TVs with iTunes pre-installed, and the like, and are wanting to keep pushing their vertical integration. They want you watching their content on equipment they sell (or from a manufacturer who pays them plenty to license their content). That completely violates the idea of starting a website with all your content in the first place — and spending millions to advertise that website during the Super Bowl — but nobody’s ever accused “content providers” of understanding what customers want. Which is exactly what that Hulu blog tries to take advantage of.

So what everybody must be wondering is: how does this affect Chuck? As it turns out, not as much as I’d initially thought. Hulu support on boxee has always been pretty weak, to be frank. Stuff would show up on the hulu site without showing up in boxee’s main interface unless you did a search (and doing searches with a remote control is painful). Pausing, rewinding, and fast-forwarding has been unpredictable at best on the main site, and is even worse in boxee. Support for other sites — Comedy Central, CBS.com, and ABC.com — has been more solid; Hulu was a weak wrapper around the website’s interface, with the only advantage being that it had tons of content.

And what’s that content? “Heroes,” which has gone past enjoyably bad to just bad. “Saturday Night Live,” which would only include about 15 minutes’ worth of clips. “Monk,” which is ending soon. “Psych,” which is a genuinely good show, but not necessarily anything I couldn’t wait to see on its eventual DVD release. “30 Rock,” which I’m already getting on iTunes because I want to “vote with my dollar” instead of watching it for free. And “Battlestar Galactica,” which is ending soon, has kind of gone downhill, and is pretty near unwatchable streaming because the space scenes and all the dark gray corridors all become a jumble of pixels.

So the internet can rest assured that I’ll be okay. What’s clear is that whoever at Hulu/NBC Universal/Fox made this decision just don’t understand how new media works, and — even worse — are convinced that they do. What’s interesting is how users will react: this can easily be interpreted as the usual “we used to get it for free” whining, and some people will undoubtedly threaten piracy. Which is a shame, because this is exactly the kind of use scenario the whole valid side of the DRM argument hangs on: emphasizing the value of content, instead of the manner in which that content is distributed. This isn’t the case of stealing something I’d normally have to pay for. If I can watch something for free full screen on a web browser, then the studios aren’t adding any value by “letting” me watch it on a television.