Spectre Collie

Tuesday February 1 2011 Storytelling, Videogames

Closing the Loop

Another article for Gamasutra about videogame storytelling, more or less.

I wrote another article that went up on Gamasutra today, “Closing the Loop: Fostering Communication in Single Player Games”.

Like the last one, it’s kind of a continuation of a blog post on here, this time: “Saying Something”. The idea was to start with the most memorable storytelling moments from games I’ve played, try to figure out what it is about them that makes them more compelling than other media, try to figure out what they have in common, and then try to articulate that in terms of communication between player and game developer.

Did it work?

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Thursday January 27 2011 Arts & Entertainment

Initiative

Castle Ravenloft is Dungeons & Dragons for the rest of us. Assuming I count as “the rest of us.”

Until a couple of weeks ago, I’d never played Dungeons & Dragons. I’d done a couple one-time-only sessions of other role-playing games, and I’d played a couple of the computer games that use the “official” rule set, but I’d never played through the real thing. That kind of puts you at a disadvantage when you work in games, when you have to smile and nod and pretend to understand when somebody’s talking about THAC0.

Over New Year’s Eve and then later, I was in a local game store, and I found myself strangely drawn to the shelf with the Castle Ravenloft board game. It’s like a gateway to the real Dungeons & Dragons game: you can get a simplified and streamlined dungeon crawl without having to set up characters, do all the prep work for the campaign, and get a big group of friends together.

Plus it comes with a whole bunch of figures, including a huge skeleton dragon monster thing. And it’s got my first-ever 20-sided die. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t factor into my buying the game.

(Incidentally, as soon as the cat saw the 20-sided die, he just went apeshit. He knocked it off the table, chased it all around the living room, kept rolling it over and over. I’ll never know if the cat was already a nerd when I got him from the shelter, or if I turned him into one).

The way the game works is that you choose a (pre-generated) character, pick some starting powers, and then lay down randomly-drawn tiles as your characters explore the dungeon. With each new tile, you draw cards that spawn horrible monsters that try to kill you, or random events that try to kill you. Each move makes more and more terrible stuff happen to you, until you finish whatever adventure you’re playing or you die.

It’s pretty tough. I can’t tell if I just needed to get used to how the game worked, or if I’m just too used to videogames that are obsessively balanced, but I got slaughtered the first couple of times I tried it out. In theory, any character you choose in WoW or Diablo is equally capable of finishing the game; in Castle Ravenloft, you’re doomed if you don’t have the cleric. We were finally able to beat the game with a party of three characters, and eventually, tonight, I managed to win solo.

I do realize it’s nothing like a real game of D&D, but occasionally I just get the urge to go through a dungeon and lob some magic missiles at skeletons. And there’s something undeniably appealing about the board game version that you can’t get from Neverwinter Nights and the like. Sometimes laying the cards out, moving the little dudes around, and rolling a die are more appealing than any number of particle effects.

There’s another board game called Wrath of Ashardalon that’s due out next month. I’m not sure how it’s different except that it comes with a big red dragon and presumably different “stories.” Hmm, I wonder if I’ve just hit upon the entire Dungeons & Dragons business model….

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Wednesday January 26 2011 Politics

Chicken and Waffling

On Chick-fil-A and marriage equality

Over a year ago I wrote a post about a videogame being sold under the name of virulent homophobe Orson Scott Card, and why I thought an informal boycott of the game was justified. I thought it raised some pretty interesting questions, and a couple of interesting responses in addition to the predictable BS drive-by comments. In particular: where are the lines drawn? What constitutes making a stand, and what’s just a petty attempt to punish people for having different beliefs from you?

Lately, there’s been something of a campaign against Chick-fil-a restaurants because of the restaurant’s ties to groups that campaign against same-sex marriage. It’s been a question for years, how closely the restaurant and/or its founders are associated with the National Organization of Marriage and Focus on the Family, if they’re associated at all. Most recently, the issue was a contribution to an event by anti-gay marriage group called the Pennsylvania Family Institute, an association that Chick-fil-A finally responded to with a cover-your-ass PR video which, unfortunately, didn’t say much of anything.

But it’s always been a case of guilt by association. Providing free food for an event by this group, members of the board also being members of this other group, that sort of thing. The blog posts always start out with righteous fury, and then fizzle out once the link turns out to be tenuous at best.

Now the blog Good As You is insisting there’s a clear link between the restaurant and anti-gay rights groups, and they have an e-mail exchange that will prove all of Chick-fil-A’s apologists have been wrong! A-ha! Finally, a smoking gun! Another blog, change.org, picked up the story with the headline Yes, Chick-fil-A Says, We Explicitly Do Not Like Same-Sex Couples.

Except they don’t say that.

The actual situation is this: the restaurant chain has a charitable arm called the WinShape Foundation. One focus of WinShape is WinShape Marriage, which sponsors retreats and “adventures” for “enrichment” of relationships. The writer of the blog (presumably) sent an e-mail to WinShape asking if its programs were open to homosexual couples. The answer was that they are not, because “WinShape Retreat defines marriage from the Biblical standard as being between one man and one woman.”

Granted, “The Charitable Arm of Chick-fil-A Admits It Does Not Admit Same-Sex Couples to Its Marriage Enrichment Retreats” isn’t quite as shocking a headline as “Chick-fil-A Says We Do Not Like Same-Sex Couples,” and it’d be less likely to get people clamoring to sign up for your facebook petition. But even on the internet, don’t we have some kind of obligation to accuracy?

I have little doubt that the Cathys (the family that founded and still runs Chick-fil-A) are in opposition to same-sex marriage. They’re publicly religious, the restaurant has been closed on Sunday since its founding, and thousands of religious people in Georgia still believe that Christianity and homosexuality are incompatible. It wouldn’t even surprise me to learn that they’ve made personal donations to NOM or other anti-gay rights groups, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they voted for the same-sex marriage ban in Georgia.

But isn’t that their right? When we campaign for marriage equality, aren’t we campaigning for the right to believe things that other people may find abhorrent? Isn’t the entire campaign based on the principle that we all deserve equal freedoms as long as we don’t infringe on the rights of other people? Isn’t the promise that individuals will be free to choose for themselves what to believe, but the government can’t make such a distinction? That churches will remain free to hold ceremonies only for couples who hold their beliefs, just as they are now?

I couldn’t get married in a synagogue, because I’m not Jewish. And I couldn’t get married in most southern Baptist churches, because I’m gay. I don’t see that as grounds for activism. It doesn’t infringe on my rights until they start actively campaigning to deny me the right to marry. Being closed to me is not the same thing as being against me. And the restaurants are still not closed to me.

WinShape’s e-mail response, and their policy, may be enough grounds for some people to stage a boycott of Chick-fil-A. And that, of course, is their right. But it’s definitely not enough for me. In the case of the video game, Card didn’t just say that he doesn’t like homosexuals — he actively campaigns against gay marriage and in support of homosexual “rehabilitation.” Ties between Chick-fil-A and anti-gay rights activist groups are still a lot more tenuous.

If Good As You can present a genuine link between Chick-fil-A’s revenue and a group that campaigns against same-sex marriage, then I’ll be glad to join in a boycott. Until then, I resent their implication that anybody who’s not outraged by their accusations is being in denial, or somehow complicit with marriage bans. And I resent their continued practice of guilt-by-association, which just gives more fodder to the “slippery slope” arguments. I’m tired of people giving bigots and homophobes the opportunity to go on the defensive — to institute bans on equal rights while insisting they’re the ones whose freedom is being threatened.

No doubt I’ll be accused of making an exception just because I’m an unabashed fan of Chick-fil-A’s food, but I’ll just point out that they’re still impossible to get here in the Bay Area.

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Monday January 10 2011 Spectre Collie

Hate and Nudity

Fun with search terms.

I started writing this blog almost seven years ago, with the goals of improving my writing, reducing my tendency to write dissertations on message boards, and making sure the internet was aware of my favorite movies and television shows. In my wildest dreams, though, I never imagined it’d become the go-to spot for hate and the prurient interest.

Based on my search term results (pictured here), this post about Return to the Blue Lagoon has been hands-down (well, one hand, anyway) the most viewed entry on the site. Fair enough. I wrote it before I understood the concept of search engine optimization — not that I understand it now, but I know enough to recognize that I unwittingly hit on a perfect storm of page-view bait terms.

Less fortunate is that a post about Mad Men and one about my home state have attracted so much attention. I’d thought I was being fairly reasonable about both topics, but apparently many people on the internet have a lot of rage to work out in regards to the south and dramas about infidelity and advertising.

But it’s all worth it to check out my site stats today and see that somebody found my site just by opening up a browser and typing “I hate.” I really like the thought of Sinistar or Dr. Doom going on the web for his daily browsing ritual and indirectly learning a little bit more about Lost and videogames.

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Sunday January 9 2011 Personal

Collective Chocolateness

I’m genuinely impressed by the global, decades-long lie that is Nutella

Tonight out of curiosity I bought my first jar of Nutella. I’m sure I’ve had it before in pastries or some such, but never had my own supply. It was never in the house while I was growing up, and I’m not sure I’d even heard of it before I visited San Francisco and its baffling abundance of crepe restaurants.

So let me see if I’ve got this right: at some point during World War II, some Italian guy decided to put cake frosting in a jar and sell it as something a reasonable person would eat for breakfast. And everybody in Europe said, “What the crap how come we didn’t think of this earlier?” All they had to do was take the picture of a big-ass chocolate cake off the jar, replace it with a picture of a sandwich, call it a “spread,” and then move it a couple of aisles over, next to the peanut butter.

They can even claim it’s part of a “balanced breakfast,” as long as everybody plays it cool and doesn’t ruin it for everyone by pointing out you’re giving kids chocolate cake icing for breakfast. They don’t even have to jump through the marketing hoops that Cookie Crisp had to go through.

My favorite concept from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and plenty of games inspired by them, is the idea that gods are actually created and powered by faith. I love the idea that if enough believe in something hard enough, it will actually become reality. And I love the idea that if you say “a hint of cocoa” enough times and talk about breakfast, people all over the world will smile and nod and absolve themselves of any guilt over eating the stuff.

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Thursday January 6 2011 Movies

Two Dental Mirrors and a Bottle of Expectorant

True Grit does for westerns what Miller’s Crossing did for gangster movies: make me begrudgingly like them.

I don’t have a lot to say about True Grit other than that it’s more evidence that Joel and Ethan Coen are the greatest living filmmakers.

I don’t like it quite as much as Miller’s Crossing — I doubt that’d even be possible, since Miller’s Crossing was as close to a transformative experience I’ve ever had watching a movie — but the two films have a good bit in common.

They’re both filled with a love of dialogue: not just language, and not even the interplay of two interesting characters, but the energy that the heightened unreality of film dialogue makes as the words bounce around a scene. They both have moments of inexplicable eccentricity that spin the story out of complacent realism and back into fantasy.

They both have scenes that seem like the Coens are just showing off with their ability to handle drastic changes in tone — a straightforward bit of plot development, or even comedy, that quickly becomes absolutely horrific. And they both have images so striking it’s as if they’ve been seared into your mind, like an implanted memory — the most notable for me in True Grit was a patch of trees arched like the crumbling walls of a cathedral, with a dead body hanging from the highest branch.

The performances are all excellent to outstanding, even for the Coen Brothers, who routinely have everyone giving the best performances of their careers. The standout is Hailee Steinfeld who’s the real co-star of the film along with Jeff Bridges. She repeatedly tells characters that she’s fourteen years old, and I would’ve naturally assumed she was an actress in her mid-20s playing younger until I got back to IMDB and learned that she was thirteen when the movie was filmed.

I’ve got to confess that, much like my reaction to Miller’s Crossing, I’m not sure that I entirely get True Grit, assuming that there’s something to get in the first place. I’d seen a small bit of discussion about the epilogue online — some people complaining that it served no purpose, other people saying that it made the whole film. I can’t say I agree with either. Unless I’m missing some deeper meaning, the epilogue doesn’t really establish anything that isn’t already adequately said by the rest of the film. Of course I’m glad that no one says anything like, “It’s been you all along, Mattie Ross, who has True Grit,” but I still kind of wish I’d been able to reach some kind of epiphany that tied it all together.

I like Andrew O’Hehir’s review on Salon.com, even though I don’t entirely agree with it. He says that the Coens are formalists above all else, essentially that the Coens aren’t “saying” anything with True Grit other than “We’ve made a Western.” All the meaning is encapsulated by the genre itself.

That ignores the consistency and uniqueness of their body of work, not quite reducing them to parodists but implying that there’s nothing inherent to their films other than their references to other films. But apart from The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and parts of O Brother Where Art Thou?, their movies aren’t just homages or even interpretations. True Grit is a western only so much as Miller’s Crossing is a gangster movie: they’re primarily Coen Brothers movies, and they have more to say about the characters and the Coens’ individual outlook than they do about a genre or some self-reflexive ode to cinema. Even towards the end of the Western’s popularity, when all the films got more navel-gazing, it was rare to see one in which the most exciting moments weren’t shoot-outs or scenes on horseback, but two characters arguing with each other in a bedroom.

I have yet to read the original novel, so I can’t tell exactly how much of the dialogue and how many of the situations were invented in the Coens’ adaptation and how much were part of the original. If the new film is as faithful as the reports I’ve read make it sound, then I’m amazed that it’s taken the Coens this long to make an adaptation. Because it never feels like an adaptation, but a story written specifically for them to interpret. Seeing “an old one-eyed fat man” and a young girl confronted in the snow by a man in a bear suit offering to trade them a dead body from which he’d already removed the teeth — that seems perfectly “Coenesque.”

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Thursday January 6 2011 Videogames

Twee’s Company

A little charm goes a long way, and I think Ilomilo lapped me.

No doubt I’ll get accused of having a cold, cold heart by the end of this post, so let me get this out of the way up front: ilomilo is a very well-made game, it’s clever and engaging, and it’s totally worth the ten bucks it costs on Xbox Live Arcade.

You play as a couple of plushy guys who have to navigate a world made up of fabric cubes in order to meet up with each other, at which point you both do a little dance and the level’s over. The level design and puzzles are very clever and imaginative, the art’s nice, the music’s catchy, there’s even an achievement where you have to play the game’s theme by selecting items in the main menu, and it’s all cute and polished (there are occasional typos, perfectly understandable from a Swedish development studio). A completely non-violent, cooperative game that doesn’t insult your intelligence and shows a high level of attention to detail? That’s exactly what the industry needs.

Except I came to a point where the whole illusion was shattered and the game suddenly and violently stopped being charming. It was around the level that’s an homage to World of Goo — a very nice touch, since the inspirations from that game are clear. Not in the gameplay mechanics, but in presentation: there are obvious things like the big collector device that comes down to pick up your collected leaves, and also the overall tone of the presentation, with its random goofy “character background” descriptions during level loads. The whole game feels like a mash-up of World of Goo with LittleBigPlanet and Super Mario Galaxy and Machinarium and probably others I’m either forgetting or have never seen.

But it creates a cuteness overflow error, where trying to add one more to the cuteness level turns the whole thing negative and makes it repulsive. Okay, “repulsive” is too strong — maybe “forced” is more accurate. It no longer feels genuine, but more like an endearing quirk that’s mutated into an insufferable affectation.

It doesn’t keep the game from being fun or imaginative, and it doesn’t keep it from getting a recommendation from me. But I’m bringing it up not just to be curmudgeonly, but to request that it doesn’t become a trend among the indie game community. I’d hate to see “like LittleBigPlanet” become a thing just like the clones of Diablo, StarCraft (which borrowed everything it had from Aliens), Battlefield, and so on. A huge part of the appeal of these games is that they break through the norm and exist as celebrations of pure originality.

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Tuesday January 4 2011 Videogames

This is why I can’t finish nice things

My favorite game so far in 2011 has surprised me. (Spoiler: It’s called A World of Keflings)

My biggest pseudo-resolution this year has been to get better organized — get a better division between “working,” “researching,” and “just goofing off,” which can be a nebulous distinction when you’re ostensibly a freelance videogame developer. Part of that was a sub-clause resolution to finally make progress with the backlog and finish many of the games I started in 2010: Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Epic Mickey….

So of course the game I’ve spent the most time playing this year is an Xbox Live Arcade game called A World of Keflings by developer NinjaBee.

I actually wasn’t all that impressed with their first game in the series, A Kingdom for Keflings. Its gimmick was that it was one of the first Avatar games, so there was still the novelty of seeing your Xbox self in giant form walking around a simple city-building game populated with Liliputian polygonal characters. But for whatever reason, it never hooked me.

The new one works exactly as intended, though. I’m a complete sucker for farming and city-building games — get me in front of SimCity or any of the Harvest Moon games and I’m in a fiddling trance for at least the next two hours. Part of the reason I keep thinking I like RTS games is that I get excited at the prospect of setting up a base and seeing all the buildings pop up. And walking around as a giant version of myself, putting buildings together, having the tiny characters following me around delivering stuff to me, is all inexplicably charming.

I suspect that the NinjaBee guys like exactly the same type of games that I do; Band of Bugs was a noble attempt to give new character to tactical strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics. I’m sure there’s some type of psychological profile that perfectly explains the type of person who’s fascinated by building, harvesting, and fiddling, but all I know is that I was up until 4 AM this morning.

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Monday December 27 2010 Arts & Entertainment, Disney, Television, The Internet

Shameless

More insomnia means a curiously revealing and yet still dull year-end list.

~~Tonight’s~~ ~~this morning’s~~ hell I don’t even know anymore’s list topic: things I should technically be embarrassed to like as much as I do, but I’m on this new “there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure” kick.

The New Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated series
Except for maybe “The Powerpuff Girls,” any animated series aimed at kids has failed the second they make it smart enough for adults to like, too. I really like that the new series is for fans of the old series — they’ve got all kinds of callbacks to the original monsters, cameos from “New Scooby Doo Mysteries” celebrities like Don Knotts, and clever bits like casting Casey Kasem as Shaggy’s dad. And they have a season-wide story arc hinting at the original bunch of crime-solving teens in the same city, with their talking parrot. I hope it lasts.

Aquaman on the new “Brave and the Bold” series
The series isn’t quite as charming as it used to be, but Aquaman (voiced by John DiMaggio, who does Bender from Futurama and Jake from Adventure Time) is still the best character. Nice to see the guy finally getting a little respect, since he’s had a hard few decades.

Man vs Food
Everything about this show is just wrong. It’s a testament to gross American excess and waste, the host is plenty likeable but he talks through his nose, and they referred to Walnut Creek as “just outside of San Francisco.” But still, if it comes on, my ass is fixed to the couch and my eyes to the TV for hours, or until creepy Anthony Bourdain comes on, whichever comes first. I’m not proud of it, but it happens.

The Daily Puppy
is my favorite blog, hands down. Don’t tell my cat.

The “Walt Disney World Ephemera” group on Flickr
and the “Disney Printed Matter” group
There are billions and billions of groups for Disney fans on Flickr, but these two are specifically for maps, magazine ads, FastPasses, ride tickets, parking tickets, and old shopping bags. When I was younger, I used to sneak into my brother’s room and rummage through the bottom drawer of his dresser, because that’s where he kept the bags full of souvenirs from our previous trip to Disney World. (Other families hid porn, my family hid Disney souvenirs). To this day, the EPCOT Future World icons and original Walt Disney World logo and even this photo still trigger a glee response at the base of my spine. Also this.

More evidence that no matter what you’re into, there are at least fifty other people somewhere on the internet who are even more into it than you are. And yes, I mean the naughty stuff too.

And unrelated, but just because I love it a lot: “Whiners Can Be Losers” from the Cartoon Network’s golden days.

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Sunday December 26 2010 Music

Joyful Noise

Alternate post topics: favorite colors, this wacky dream I had, how I really need to get a Tumblr blog for this kind of stuff.

It’s getting near the end of the year, I’m bored at my parents’ house, and I can’t sleep, so you know what that means: a pointless list!

Tonight’s topic: ten songs that are so happy it’s impossible to be down while hearing them.

Katamari on the Rocks (Main Theme) from the Katamari Damacy soundtrack
Get It Together by The Go! Team (the defacto theme of Little Big Planet)
Baroque Hoedown by Jean-Jacques Perrey (used in the Disney Main Street Electrical Parade)
Blue Skies by Bobby Darin
Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry (inspired the “Futurama” theme music)
Reading Rainbow Theme
Sweet Soul Brother by Hideki Naganuma from the “Jet Set Radio” soundtrack
I Hear the Bells by Mike Doughty from Haughty Melodic
All About the Music by Z-Trip featuring Whipper Whip (but only when played along with that video)
Dream Island Obsessional park by Susumu Hirasawa, from the soundtrack to “Paranoia Agent.” (It’s happy assuming you don’t actually watch the video, connect it with the series, or understand the lyrics, of course)