The AV Club has started covering classic Sopranos episodes, which has finally given me the motivation to start watching. Some thoughts on the first season:
The Sopranos is built around tension, but it's a formal tension more than a narrative tension. There is a narrative tension, certainly, involving Tony Soprano attempting to navigate his life as a mob leader with his family life, amongst other things. The formal tension comes from the show's framing device and initial pitch: "a mob boss goes to see a psychologist...." The show walks a fine line between the psychological aspect of the story, which is metaphorical, and the actuality of Tony's life, which is literal.
Most art is, in some ways, metaphorical. It's designed to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. On television, for example, Buffy and her friends don't start out in high school, they start the series in "high school." Though nominally sophomores, they're played by actors and actresses in their late teens or even early 20's. Then again, the show is based on metaphor, using supernatural horrors to stand in for the horrors of high school and later, young adult life. The dialogue goes along with this. Xander, who is supposed to be the geekiest of geeks, is consistently clever and witty, but he does so in a way that represents social awkwardness.
On the other hand, a show like Freaks and Geeks takes a more literal approach. The "geeks" of the title are supposed to be only a year younger than Buffy's group, but the actors are obviously closer to their nominal age. Their social awkwardness actually manifests as awkwardness on-screen. There's still a great deal of metaphor - it's network television, after all - but the stammering and fear actually manifest as a somewhat authentic high school experience, instead of "high school." I'm not saying that a literal approach to television is necessarily better than a metaphorical one - that would be foolish for science fiction fan! - just that it's there.
The Sopranos uses both, though. Tony's interactions with his shrink, Dr. Melfi, are almost entirely metaphorical. They're "therapy" more than therapy. Everything has a direct one-to-one correlation: Tony hallucinates an ideal mother figure when his conflicts with his real mother reach their peak, for example. Tony's interactions with Melfi are generally entertaining, and the idea of 90's therapy, when random drug prescriptions were at their peak is certainly good story fodder (why is Tony on lithium? Why not!). However, the rest of the series is at its best when it's understated and literal. Tony's interactions with his family, for example, or him hanging out with his crew talking about The Godfather.
As the season progressed, I found myself more and more frustrated by this tension. The best episode of the season, "College," was totally therapy-free, and was riveting television. A couple eps later saw "Boca," which took the metaphor outside of the shrink's office, and suddenly had a soccer team, soccer coach, new friends, and a sexual abuse plotline that were all vaguely surreal - and it was easily the worst episode of the season.
The therapy sequences made sense in the pilot. The entire show was a simple pitch: "mob leader sees shrink." For a pilot, this makes sense, as it's like a movie that's asking for sequels. But over time, it becomes a device or worse, a gimmick.
Yet by the end of the series, I found myself less frustrated with the therapy conceit. The Sopranos is a show about its metaphors as well as the literal. It's going to have goofy dream sequences, ham-handed metaphors, and blatant TV-style artificiality. These things don't lessen the show, they force the viewer to watch it critically instead of simply for artificiality, and that way the viewer can see the intentional cynicism and darkness that the characters and setting exude. To put it simply, without the layers of metaphor and formal tension, it would be easy to simply declare Tony Soprano a hero or a villain, someone to root for or against. He is the reason to watch, and the artificiality makes me, as the viewer, say "Why am I watching this? What makes it good and interesting?" And usually, the show has answers to those questions.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Why Can't I Play The Seven Samurai?
Thanks to the Kurosawa Centennial going on at UC-Berkeley this summer, I had the exciting opportunity to see Seven Samurai on film, in a crowded theater. It was an excellent experience - the big screen helped bring out the best of the cinematography and sound, the audience was quite inclined to enjoy Toshiro Mifune's antics, and the film is as always eminently rewatchable despite its length.
As I was watching it, however, I kept thinking "this could be an excellent video game!" There is a distinct - and somewhat surprising - lack of Kurosawa-inspired samurai games. There's the oddity of Seven Samurai 20XX and a Diablo-esque PC RPG Throne of Darkness, neither of which I've played. I have played the 20-year-old classic Sword of the Samurai, which allows for a recreation of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, but not much else.
Kurosawa's focus on ronin and their relationships with society would make fertile ground for a game. In Seven Samurai, it's a group hired by peasants to defend the village against bandits. What makes the peasants better than the bandits, or the samurai different from the those brigands? Yojimbo and Sanjuro utilize the classic plot of a dangerous stranger coming into a town with problems, and he - despite apparently mercenary motivations and disdain for straightforward morality - ends up doing the right thing. This is pure RPG gold! Rashomon's puzzle and ambiguity regarding the truth is a good model for video games, albeit not one which is often followed. Epics like Ran, Throne of Blood, and to some degree The Hidden Fortress do deal with fallen dynasties and pitched battles, but they still focus on the humanity of individual characters.
I could see a Baldur's Gate-style RPG build about Kurosawa's samurai films. A Rashomon-like story could operate as a tutorial, and by the time the player character has skills and strengths, they could move onto villages with problems - like Yojimbo. Gather a party, and defend a village like in Seven Samurai, and more strength and followers leads to epic confrontations like Ran. It could be done, I think, but it would be quite ambitious.
I could see Seven Samurai done as a much less ambitious, fast-playing strategy RPG. Perhaps even as a board game. The player has the ability to customize or randomize the starting position - size of the village to defend, amount of food and money to hire samurai with, size of bandit force, and number of days before the attack. The game starts with the peasants in the town looking for samurai. Once they get one, they have an easier time getting more, but have the tension of time to return and train. Each samurai would be rated for leadership, charisma, sword skill, bow skill, and stealth.
Once back at the village, the player prepares by training the peasants, keeping their morale high, building defenses with fences and floods, and raiding the enemy camp. The tensions of the film could pop up in the game. Maybe the player finds a cache of defeated samurai armor. Use it on the peasants and their combat skills improve, but the samurai morale plummets.
The battle, once it begins, would have difficult-to-control peasant troops fighting the raiders in real time, but with samurai under more direct control. The wonderful graphical representation of the circles with 'x's through them from the film would be easy to transpose to a simple game. I think it could be done in Flash, and playtime would be 20-60 minutes. This is my vision - although it's not one I can make reality anytime soon. I think it could be a lot of fun to play, though.
As I was watching it, however, I kept thinking "this could be an excellent video game!" There is a distinct - and somewhat surprising - lack of Kurosawa-inspired samurai games. There's the oddity of Seven Samurai 20XX and a Diablo-esque PC RPG Throne of Darkness, neither of which I've played. I have played the 20-year-old classic Sword of the Samurai, which allows for a recreation of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, but not much else.
Kurosawa's focus on ronin and their relationships with society would make fertile ground for a game. In Seven Samurai, it's a group hired by peasants to defend the village against bandits. What makes the peasants better than the bandits, or the samurai different from the those brigands? Yojimbo and Sanjuro utilize the classic plot of a dangerous stranger coming into a town with problems, and he - despite apparently mercenary motivations and disdain for straightforward morality - ends up doing the right thing. This is pure RPG gold! Rashomon's puzzle and ambiguity regarding the truth is a good model for video games, albeit not one which is often followed. Epics like Ran, Throne of Blood, and to some degree The Hidden Fortress do deal with fallen dynasties and pitched battles, but they still focus on the humanity of individual characters.
I could see a Baldur's Gate-style RPG build about Kurosawa's samurai films. A Rashomon-like story could operate as a tutorial, and by the time the player character has skills and strengths, they could move onto villages with problems - like Yojimbo. Gather a party, and defend a village like in Seven Samurai, and more strength and followers leads to epic confrontations like Ran. It could be done, I think, but it would be quite ambitious.
I could see Seven Samurai done as a much less ambitious, fast-playing strategy RPG. Perhaps even as a board game. The player has the ability to customize or randomize the starting position - size of the village to defend, amount of food and money to hire samurai with, size of bandit force, and number of days before the attack. The game starts with the peasants in the town looking for samurai. Once they get one, they have an easier time getting more, but have the tension of time to return and train. Each samurai would be rated for leadership, charisma, sword skill, bow skill, and stealth.
Once back at the village, the player prepares by training the peasants, keeping their morale high, building defenses with fences and floods, and raiding the enemy camp. The tensions of the film could pop up in the game. Maybe the player finds a cache of defeated samurai armor. Use it on the peasants and their combat skills improve, but the samurai morale plummets.
The battle, once it begins, would have difficult-to-control peasant troops fighting the raiders in real time, but with samurai under more direct control. The wonderful graphical representation of the circles with 'x's through them from the film would be easy to transpose to a simple game. I think it could be done in Flash, and playtime would be 20-60 minutes. This is my vision - although it's not one I can make reality anytime soon. I think it could be a lot of fun to play, though.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Militarization and War in Video Games
Leigh Alexander has an interesting meditation on the discomfort she feels about war in video games, which is certainly worth reading. I feel similarly, but I think there's a point in the history of gaming which made some of these war-and-violence-based games more disturbing to me. As Alexander says, war-inspired games are nothing new:
If you look at the evolution of first-person shooters specifically, they've been violent, yes, but the focus has changed dramatically. In Wolfenstein and Doom, the main character was nominally in the military, but in the game world, they were totally cut off from their nation and command structure. Duke Nukem was an unattached action hero stereotype, while Half-Life's Gordon Freeman had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (and a M.S. in KICKING ASS). These characters, whether they were in the military or not, fulfilled the role of the Lone Hero Winning Against Impossible Odds.
Starting in the late 1990's, most notably with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998), games became more overtly militarized. The solitary hero became a part of the machine. Halo is a kind of bridge between the solitary hero model of earlier first-person shooters and the soldier of later shooters. The Master Chief exists within the military, and to some degree interacts with it, but he's also very much a solitary hero. They're human, he's not, really. As the Halo series continues and its mythology becomes more complex, the Master Chief also becomes more normalized within the human military.
The militarization of the first-person shooter ramped up significantly in the start of the 2000's. In addition to games like Rainbow Six and SOCOM, which used real-world or near-real-world militaries, the real United States Armed Forces started directly creating and releasing video games like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.
This all makes sense, I think, in that widespread internet play made team-based games more appealing. The "deathmatch" of early first-person shooters like Doom, in which every player was against every other player, was replaced by squad-based team games like Team Fortress and especially Counterstrike. As first-person shooters turned into first-and-foremost multiplayer experiences, the setting and storyline had to fit this. Duke Nukem and the Master Chief don't make as much sense if there's 20 of them - but opposing army squads work perfectly. There are also already existing tactics and terms used for such combat in the military, so it's a natural fit.
Nowadays, it seems like every major FPS involves players in some kind of military or paramilitary organization. Gears of War and Halo: ODST do it in the future, while Call of Duty did it in the past and now the present, with Modern Warfare.
Although this makes sense in historical context, it also has the effect of changing the perception of the military and war in video games. The events of Doom and Half-Life are extraordinary, with a lone person taking up a gun and using it to survive. They are the solitary hero because they have to be the solitary hero. In games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, the military forces of the state are the enemy. In more recent games, as members of the military, the player is now a representative of the state. And in order for their premises, settings, and storylines to work, video games have to justify the actions of those militaries. This necessarily means that the violence of the state - war - is now the focus of most first-person shooters, instead of survival. And those wars have to be justified and even glorified for the games to work.
For some people, including myself, and apparently Leigh Alexander, this is discomfiting. It should be.
Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn't mention September 11th, which helped engender a surge of militarism in the United States. I think it was important, and possibly even hastened the process, but I suspect that the move towards squad-based, military-style combat would have happened anyway.
The issue isn't necessarily shooting, in my view. It's the creeping advance of militarism into games.
"Projectiles have been part of gaming since forever," he says, and it's true – early arcades were all about shooting galleries. Think of old-school duels and kids playing cops and robbers; weapons have, in fact, been part of play for a long time. "When you get into the first-person view, shooting continues to be what feels most natural," he says.
If you look at the evolution of first-person shooters specifically, they've been violent, yes, but the focus has changed dramatically. In Wolfenstein and Doom, the main character was nominally in the military, but in the game world, they were totally cut off from their nation and command structure. Duke Nukem was an unattached action hero stereotype, while Half-Life's Gordon Freeman had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (and a M.S. in KICKING ASS). These characters, whether they were in the military or not, fulfilled the role of the Lone Hero Winning Against Impossible Odds.
Starting in the late 1990's, most notably with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998), games became more overtly militarized. The solitary hero became a part of the machine. Halo is a kind of bridge between the solitary hero model of earlier first-person shooters and the soldier of later shooters. The Master Chief exists within the military, and to some degree interacts with it, but he's also very much a solitary hero. They're human, he's not, really. As the Halo series continues and its mythology becomes more complex, the Master Chief also becomes more normalized within the human military.
The militarization of the first-person shooter ramped up significantly in the start of the 2000's. In addition to games like Rainbow Six and SOCOM, which used real-world or near-real-world militaries, the real United States Armed Forces started directly creating and releasing video games like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.
This all makes sense, I think, in that widespread internet play made team-based games more appealing. The "deathmatch" of early first-person shooters like Doom, in which every player was against every other player, was replaced by squad-based team games like Team Fortress and especially Counterstrike. As first-person shooters turned into first-and-foremost multiplayer experiences, the setting and storyline had to fit this. Duke Nukem and the Master Chief don't make as much sense if there's 20 of them - but opposing army squads work perfectly. There are also already existing tactics and terms used for such combat in the military, so it's a natural fit.
Nowadays, it seems like every major FPS involves players in some kind of military or paramilitary organization. Gears of War and Halo: ODST do it in the future, while Call of Duty did it in the past and now the present, with Modern Warfare.
Although this makes sense in historical context, it also has the effect of changing the perception of the military and war in video games. The events of Doom and Half-Life are extraordinary, with a lone person taking up a gun and using it to survive. They are the solitary hero because they have to be the solitary hero. In games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, the military forces of the state are the enemy. In more recent games, as members of the military, the player is now a representative of the state. And in order for their premises, settings, and storylines to work, video games have to justify the actions of those militaries. This necessarily means that the violence of the state - war - is now the focus of most first-person shooters, instead of survival. And those wars have to be justified and even glorified for the games to work.
For some people, including myself, and apparently Leigh Alexander, this is discomfiting. It should be.
Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn't mention September 11th, which helped engender a surge of militarism in the United States. I think it was important, and possibly even hastened the process, but I suspect that the move towards squad-based, military-style combat would have happened anyway.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Angel: Season Three
The first season of Angel was defined in large part its relationship with its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the second season by its increasing independence and development of its own voice. That trend continues in the third season. Part of that had to do with network politics, as Buffy switched from the WB to UPN, rendering direct crossovers impossible for Angel S3/Buffy S6. Angel's continuing independence isn't a bad thing, of course, but I can't help but feel that this season of television might have been stronger had Angel felt more connected to its predecessor.
I say this because two of Angel's biggest plot developments are things that Buffy (both the character and the show overall) would love to comment on. Angel goes through some big life changes in season three, including new family and a new flame. Since Buffy recently acquired some new family of her own, learning about Angel's addition would certainly be of interest to her, and Angel's romantic entanglement with her high school rival/friend Cordelia? Well, given how Buffy reacted to Angel giving Faith a hug back in the first season, this would likely drive her ballistic. Yet it's never mentioned.
But I get ahead of myself. Joss Whedon's shows are somewhat notorious for their slow starts, but Angel Season 3 puts the lie to that reputation with a strong set of episodes to begin the season. The third episode, "That Old Gang Of Mine," is particularly strong dramatically, as Gunn is forced to confront his, well, old gang, as they turn aggressively violent. The next episode, "Carpe Noctem," goes comedic as a horny old man switches bodies with Angel in order to score with chicks. The new addition to the team, Amy Acker's Fred, makes herself more and more useful to the team and essential to the show over the course of these episodes.
As all this happens, Angel's murderous progenitor Darla is pregnant with their child, and traveling to see him. This culminates in a strong set of episodes in which the human baby starts to infect Darla with a soul, causing her to become almost good, and Angel and Darla's old enemy, the vampire slayer Holtz, is sent through time to chase them both down. The ninth episode, "Lullaby," isn't just the confrontation between Holtz and Angel, but also Darla giving birth. This is dramatic enough, and well done, but it's a filled with some great - and surprising - laugh-out-loud moments. The combination of tension with comedy is the hallmark of Joss Whedon shows at their best, and "Lullaby" is the strongest of the season.
The middle part of the season, unfortunately, is not as strong as beginning, as life with the new baby, Connor, tends to take on either tired sitcom tropes or equally tired "Defend-the-baby!" storylines. The worst example of the former is "Provider," in which Angel suddenly decides that making money for Connor's future is the most important thing, and by the end of the episode has learned the valuable lesson that money isn't everything. The only Whedon-penned episode of the season, "Waiting in the Wings," sees the team go to the ballet only to discover - surprise! - that all is not as it seems. Angel and Cordelia are forced to confront their growing feelings for each other, and it features an always-welcome appearance by Whedon favorite Summer Glau as the cursed star ballerina.
This otherwise somewhat disappointing stretch of episodes is held together in large part by the superb portrayal of Holtz the vampire hunter by Keith Szarabajka. Holtz is played with a deep, growling malevolence, and the ambivalence of his motivation of vengeance against the vampire who slaughtered his family only adds to his magnetism. This proves important, as the previous antagonists at Wolfram & Hart are much less interesting after season 2, with Lindsay gone and Holland Manners dead. Lilah Morgan, the new embodiment of Wolfram & Hart, just isn't as interesting as Lindsay, and neither are her new rival or her new boss.
Unfortunately, the big plot twist towards the end of the season involves Wesley being deceived into thinking that Angel would kill Connor, and so he kidnaps the baby with Holtz's help. The former part makes sense, but there's no reason for Wesley's plan to involve Holtz, who unsurprisingly betrays Wes. This betrayal, and the total lack of forgiveness from his friends, leaves Wesley in a horribly dark place by the end of the season, and promises fascinating developments in his future. But that doesn't entirely excuse the incoherent kidnapping twist.
Still, Wesley's not the only character going interesting places at the end of the season. Lorne is, literally, as he leaves for Las Vegas. Cordelia is apparently recruited by the Powers That Be to become an angel, or something. Angel's at the bottom of the ocean, and the newly returned Connor has embraced the dark side. I'm looking forward to Season 4, although I know it has something of a mixed reputation.
I say this because two of Angel's biggest plot developments are things that Buffy (both the character and the show overall) would love to comment on. Angel goes through some big life changes in season three, including new family and a new flame. Since Buffy recently acquired some new family of her own, learning about Angel's addition would certainly be of interest to her, and Angel's romantic entanglement with her high school rival/friend Cordelia? Well, given how Buffy reacted to Angel giving Faith a hug back in the first season, this would likely drive her ballistic. Yet it's never mentioned.
But I get ahead of myself. Joss Whedon's shows are somewhat notorious for their slow starts, but Angel Season 3 puts the lie to that reputation with a strong set of episodes to begin the season. The third episode, "That Old Gang Of Mine," is particularly strong dramatically, as Gunn is forced to confront his, well, old gang, as they turn aggressively violent. The next episode, "Carpe Noctem," goes comedic as a horny old man switches bodies with Angel in order to score with chicks. The new addition to the team, Amy Acker's Fred, makes herself more and more useful to the team and essential to the show over the course of these episodes.
As all this happens, Angel's murderous progenitor Darla is pregnant with their child, and traveling to see him. This culminates in a strong set of episodes in which the human baby starts to infect Darla with a soul, causing her to become almost good, and Angel and Darla's old enemy, the vampire slayer Holtz, is sent through time to chase them both down. The ninth episode, "Lullaby," isn't just the confrontation between Holtz and Angel, but also Darla giving birth. This is dramatic enough, and well done, but it's a filled with some great - and surprising - laugh-out-loud moments. The combination of tension with comedy is the hallmark of Joss Whedon shows at their best, and "Lullaby" is the strongest of the season.
The middle part of the season, unfortunately, is not as strong as beginning, as life with the new baby, Connor, tends to take on either tired sitcom tropes or equally tired "Defend-the-baby!" storylines. The worst example of the former is "Provider," in which Angel suddenly decides that making money for Connor's future is the most important thing, and by the end of the episode has learned the valuable lesson that money isn't everything. The only Whedon-penned episode of the season, "Waiting in the Wings," sees the team go to the ballet only to discover - surprise! - that all is not as it seems. Angel and Cordelia are forced to confront their growing feelings for each other, and it features an always-welcome appearance by Whedon favorite Summer Glau as the cursed star ballerina.
This otherwise somewhat disappointing stretch of episodes is held together in large part by the superb portrayal of Holtz the vampire hunter by Keith Szarabajka. Holtz is played with a deep, growling malevolence, and the ambivalence of his motivation of vengeance against the vampire who slaughtered his family only adds to his magnetism. This proves important, as the previous antagonists at Wolfram & Hart are much less interesting after season 2, with Lindsay gone and Holland Manners dead. Lilah Morgan, the new embodiment of Wolfram & Hart, just isn't as interesting as Lindsay, and neither are her new rival or her new boss.
Unfortunately, the big plot twist towards the end of the season involves Wesley being deceived into thinking that Angel would kill Connor, and so he kidnaps the baby with Holtz's help. The former part makes sense, but there's no reason for Wesley's plan to involve Holtz, who unsurprisingly betrays Wes. This betrayal, and the total lack of forgiveness from his friends, leaves Wesley in a horribly dark place by the end of the season, and promises fascinating developments in his future. But that doesn't entirely excuse the incoherent kidnapping twist.
Still, Wesley's not the only character going interesting places at the end of the season. Lorne is, literally, as he leaves for Las Vegas. Cordelia is apparently recruited by the Powers That Be to become an angel, or something. Angel's at the bottom of the ocean, and the newly returned Connor has embraced the dark side. I'm looking forward to Season 4, although I know it has something of a mixed reputation.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Hardcore Maleness
I have an article on gender and marketing in the video game industry up at the Escapist this week! Check it out here.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Baldur's Gate
Dear Bioware, Infinity Engine, Baldur's Gate, and Dungeons & Dragons:
I have a message for you. I'm sorry,
I've talked a lot of crap about Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine in my day. I found it unplayable. I thought that Planescape Torment had many wonderful ideas, mostly rendered frustrating and unworthy of its reputation by the Infinity Engine. And Icewind Dale! Who could have been so entranced by the combat of the prior games that they'd want to play a game of nothing but? Only the most die-hard Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fans, desperate for a computerized version of their tabletop games, that's who.
This was pretty much my argument, though not always so sarcastically.
I like computer role-playing games. It's probably my favorite genre of game. The whole genre owes an obvious debt to Dungeons & Dragons. It was invented purely to simulate D&D. Naturally, I've played a bunch of games based on D&D rules: from Curse of the Azure Bonds and Heroes of the Lance to Dark Sun to Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. And I've never once said "well, that was a classic." There's always been something in the way, usually lack of plot, which makes sense, as the rules which the game is simulating are almost always combat rules. But there may be more to it than that. D&D is designed to be played on the tabletop, where the rules are simple enough that they can be accomplished through dice rolls. This isn't necessary on a computer, of course, which can process two, three, even ten dice rolls at a time! By focusing on modeling the AD&D rules, most of the games ignored the things which made video games good.
At least, this was my argument. And in many ways, it still is. But Baldur's Gate was the chief counter to this argument. Baldur's Gate saved CRPGs in the '90's, according to legend, and certainly put AD&D games back on the map after a lull that decade. It turned Bioware into one of the most respected developers in the industry. Its multiplayer options and even its single-player mode were considered the closest CRPGs had ever come to simulating the tabletop D&D experience.
Ah, but there's the rub, that last bit. I haven't played tabletop RPGs. In fact, it seemed to me that Baldur's Gate was critically acclaimed for being an accurate simulation of tabletop role-playing, something that I didn't really care about. I had no problem with people liking it, of course, but it wasn't me.
A couple weeks ago, however, I suddenly got the urge to play Baldur's Gate again. Maybe it was writing about late-90's JRPG for my book. Maybe it was the discussion I got into about whether Fallout was a direct inspiration for it or not. Maybe it was just time. But I felt the urge, and so I started playing.
I didn't hate it. Hell, I liked it. Rather a lot. Able to sit and play for hours at a time. What had been infuriating was now entirely playable and dare I say it, immersive. So. Bioware, Baldur's Gate, AD&D, and Infinity Engine: it looks like I was wrong. Sorry.
I'm not quite at the point where I'm going to declare Baldur's Gate an all-time classic. Its setting and plot are uninspiring, and it doesn't really do a good job of building and releasing tension over the course of the game. Most of fans don't put it on that pedestal either, saving their love for its sequel (all in good time, Bioware, all in good time). But now I grasp what it was trying to do. I respect it. And I even look forward to playing the other Infinity Engine games: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate II.
This normally doesn't happen. I did give the game a good honest try when it was released. My gut feelings usually stick with me. Sometimes I'll develop a more, ah, nuanced opinion, such as the case of Final Fantasy VII which left me with a bad taste in my mouth in terms of storytelling, but which I've come to love for its gameplay. So why is Baldur's Gate different? If I knew, this would probably be a more interesting blog post (yeah, read to the end for the kicker. Sorry folks!)
I have a message for you. I'm sorry,
I've talked a lot of crap about Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine in my day. I found it unplayable. I thought that Planescape Torment had many wonderful ideas, mostly rendered frustrating and unworthy of its reputation by the Infinity Engine. And Icewind Dale! Who could have been so entranced by the combat of the prior games that they'd want to play a game of nothing but? Only the most die-hard Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fans, desperate for a computerized version of their tabletop games, that's who.
This was pretty much my argument, though not always so sarcastically.
I like computer role-playing games. It's probably my favorite genre of game. The whole genre owes an obvious debt to Dungeons & Dragons. It was invented purely to simulate D&D. Naturally, I've played a bunch of games based on D&D rules: from Curse of the Azure Bonds and Heroes of the Lance to Dark Sun to Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. And I've never once said "well, that was a classic." There's always been something in the way, usually lack of plot, which makes sense, as the rules which the game is simulating are almost always combat rules. But there may be more to it than that. D&D is designed to be played on the tabletop, where the rules are simple enough that they can be accomplished through dice rolls. This isn't necessary on a computer, of course, which can process two, three, even ten dice rolls at a time! By focusing on modeling the AD&D rules, most of the games ignored the things which made video games good.
At least, this was my argument. And in many ways, it still is. But Baldur's Gate was the chief counter to this argument. Baldur's Gate saved CRPGs in the '90's, according to legend, and certainly put AD&D games back on the map after a lull that decade. It turned Bioware into one of the most respected developers in the industry. Its multiplayer options and even its single-player mode were considered the closest CRPGs had ever come to simulating the tabletop D&D experience.
Ah, but there's the rub, that last bit. I haven't played tabletop RPGs. In fact, it seemed to me that Baldur's Gate was critically acclaimed for being an accurate simulation of tabletop role-playing, something that I didn't really care about. I had no problem with people liking it, of course, but it wasn't me.
A couple weeks ago, however, I suddenly got the urge to play Baldur's Gate again. Maybe it was writing about late-90's JRPG for my book. Maybe it was the discussion I got into about whether Fallout was a direct inspiration for it or not. Maybe it was just time. But I felt the urge, and so I started playing.
I didn't hate it. Hell, I liked it. Rather a lot. Able to sit and play for hours at a time. What had been infuriating was now entirely playable and dare I say it, immersive. So. Bioware, Baldur's Gate, AD&D, and Infinity Engine: it looks like I was wrong. Sorry.
I'm not quite at the point where I'm going to declare Baldur's Gate an all-time classic. Its setting and plot are uninspiring, and it doesn't really do a good job of building and releasing tension over the course of the game. Most of fans don't put it on that pedestal either, saving their love for its sequel (all in good time, Bioware, all in good time). But now I grasp what it was trying to do. I respect it. And I even look forward to playing the other Infinity Engine games: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate II.
This normally doesn't happen. I did give the game a good honest try when it was released. My gut feelings usually stick with me. Sometimes I'll develop a more, ah, nuanced opinion, such as the case of Final Fantasy VII which left me with a bad taste in my mouth in terms of storytelling, but which I've come to love for its gameplay. So why is Baldur's Gate different? If I knew, this would probably be a more interesting blog post (yeah, read to the end for the kicker. Sorry folks!)
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Riddley Walker
Last month, the AV Club's "Wrapped Up In Books" group read Riddley Walker, a marvelous post-apocalyptic novel written in an apparently devolved form or English.
Whenever I've spoken with social historians of pre-modern culture, especially medievalists, one of the things they always stress is that the normal state of mind for ancient or medieval was more non-linear, metaphorical, mystical, and unified. Unified in this case means that the mind is constantly in a state of drawing connections between stories, religion, music, and life. In the modern mind, we divide these things up, into different, atomic categories, like television, songs, church, and so on. We logically can draw connections between the different segments of our life, but we know that they are different and treat them as such. I can conceive of how this might affect life, but I really could make no serious claim to understanding it - until I read Riddley Walker.
Riddley Walker accomplishes this not through description or analysis, but through a brilliant use of language. As a post-apocalyptic, far-future novel, it uses a variation on English which initially appears as a devolved kind of dialect. However, the language of Riddley Walker is not a simple 1-to-1 substitution of one word for another, but instead allows the reader to understand the characters and their world in the same way that the characters understand the world themselves. Because the words used by the characters are often a puzzle for the reader, they take on expanded meaning instead of lessened meaning.
To take one word as an example, I was most confused initially by the term "oansome." It is used fairly regularly throughout the book. It means something like "being alone" on the most superficial level, but actually means much more than that. It could be derived from a variety of different terms. "Oan" is used by itself and can mean "own" (as in, "my own self") or "one." "Some" turns it into a descriptor, a state of one-ness or alone-ness. Its apparent rhyme with "lonesome" continues along that thought. However, the southeastern England dialect and tendency to swallow consonants or even entire syllables means that "oansome" could also be derived from "winsome" or "handsome," which imply sexual attractiveness. In the rapacious world of Riddley Walker, sexuality is a danger, and a winsome lass or handsome lad, traveling alone, is a target for rape and possible death.
This would be merely clever if it weren't for the stories within the story that almost overshadow the main narrative. The very first chapter has "Hart of the Wood," an immediately gripping story of cannibalism and Faustian bargains, which makes the statement, I think, that the stories-within-the-story is a necessary and important part of the work. But it's the two stories where the language is different, the "Eusa Story" of chapter six and "The Legend of St. Eustace" of chapter fourteen which make the cleverness of the book's language obvious.
Eusa is the focus of religion and society in Riddley Walker. He's a metaphorical figure whose story is used to illustrate whatever the storyteller wants from the story. He's based on a foundational text - the "Eusa Story."
I was waiting for the "Eusa Story" for the first several chapters. I wanted to know how it happened. I wanted to know who started dropping the bombs and how society was reconstituted. The "Eusa Story" wasn't that. It was better. It established, through the nebulous Eusa. Like "oansome" Eusa doesn't have a straight translation. He's everyman. He's society before the collapse. He's arrogance personified. He's humility personified. Unlike "oansome," Eusa is a religion. The entire "Eusa Story" is an elaborate set of metaphors for nothing and everything, or in the Riddley-world, the 1ce and the 2ce.
I went into the "Eusa Story" expecting to logically understand the world of Riddley Walker in a historical sense. Nothing like that happened. Instead, I came out of it understanding Riddley Walker in a metaphorical sense. Or rather, I understood that metaphor was the only way to understand Riddley Walker.
This is hammered home in the fourteenth chapter, in which Riddley confronts Goodparley, the political leader of Riddley's culture. Goodparley attempts, as his name might indicate, to convert Riddley to his point of view. Goodparley does this first with "The Legend of St. Eustace," the first modern-day text which appears in the story. After reading it, Goodparley and Riddley try to translate it. This is partially hilarious, like when Goodparley translates "hamlets" as small pigs. But as the translation continues, something fascinating and brilliant happens: they stop translating the text to make sense to them, and instead, use the text to make sense of their own world. Via this completely irrelevant little text, Goodparley and Riddley start to figure out scientific truths! The idea of using metaphor to discover scientific truths isn't all that far-fetched, actually. The structure of the chemical compound benzene was supposedly theorized by chemist Friedrich Kekulé after a dream of a worm eating its own tale - the Ouroboros myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Ring_formula).
A fact, the life of St. Eustace, became a myth and a metaphor. That metaphor lived on, becoming a fact again in the nature of the myth, written down. That factual metaphor was discovered by the Ram, who treated it as a simple fact. Their interpretation of it relied on the metaphors inherent to their religion and their language, but those metaphors led them to discover scientific fact.
Here's the thing that makes Riddley Walker so excellent, though. The same thing that makes the "hamlets" pun so entertaining also makes "oansome" meaningful and also "The Legend of St. Eustace" so illuminating to Riddley and Goodparley: the language. By narrowing the English language to fewer words, and blurring the meaning of those words, Riddley Walker encourages us as readers to project our guesses at meaning onto the words. Along with the characters, we puzzle through new ideas and new concepts to try to make sense of the world. The metaphors of the characters are our metaphors as well. In order to understand the book of Riddley Walker, we have to understand the world and mindset of the character of Riddley Walker. We have to enter a world where language, metaphor, religion and science are all intertwined - unified.
It's only in thinking like this that I figure out what Riddley's (and his father's) job is! As "connexion man," Riddley is supposed to make the world make sense to the people of his village. His job is working within these metaphors to bring in external aspects of life. He's part priest, part storyteller, part translator. It's an important role, too, as the chief representatives of the theocratic Ram are the ones who invest the power of the job in him, by scarring his belly.
I think that, while the genius of the book is that it forces the reader to get into its mindset to read it, it also, in the end, rejects that mindset. Riddley Walker, over the course of the story, seems to discover or at least begin to uncover the idea of a goddess religion of sex, birth, and life. He also discovers a Punch doll, then the Punch story from Goodparley, and ends the book in a traveling troupe of storytellers. The stories that he's trying to tell are, at least in name, specifically non-religious. He has to make that disclaimer in order to try to tell the story, and he still starts a fight with his heresy!
But Riddley doesn't understand it as heresy. Hell, he doesn't even seem to understand it as new. He believes that he's acting against power, and in a sense, is undermining the hierarchical theocrats in the Ram. However, he may be building a different kind of power, which could be even more important than the gunpowder which drives the main plot. Riddley is building literature, and with it, he may be beginning the process of atomizing the metaphors which are the foundations of his world.
Whenever I've spoken with social historians of pre-modern culture, especially medievalists, one of the things they always stress is that the normal state of mind for ancient or medieval was more non-linear, metaphorical, mystical, and unified. Unified in this case means that the mind is constantly in a state of drawing connections between stories, religion, music, and life. In the modern mind, we divide these things up, into different, atomic categories, like television, songs, church, and so on. We logically can draw connections between the different segments of our life, but we know that they are different and treat them as such. I can conceive of how this might affect life, but I really could make no serious claim to understanding it - until I read Riddley Walker.
Riddley Walker accomplishes this not through description or analysis, but through a brilliant use of language. As a post-apocalyptic, far-future novel, it uses a variation on English which initially appears as a devolved kind of dialect. However, the language of Riddley Walker is not a simple 1-to-1 substitution of one word for another, but instead allows the reader to understand the characters and their world in the same way that the characters understand the world themselves. Because the words used by the characters are often a puzzle for the reader, they take on expanded meaning instead of lessened meaning.
To take one word as an example, I was most confused initially by the term "oansome." It is used fairly regularly throughout the book. It means something like "being alone" on the most superficial level, but actually means much more than that. It could be derived from a variety of different terms. "Oan" is used by itself and can mean "own" (as in, "my own self") or "one." "Some" turns it into a descriptor, a state of one-ness or alone-ness. Its apparent rhyme with "lonesome" continues along that thought. However, the southeastern England dialect and tendency to swallow consonants or even entire syllables means that "oansome" could also be derived from "winsome" or "handsome," which imply sexual attractiveness. In the rapacious world of Riddley Walker, sexuality is a danger, and a winsome lass or handsome lad, traveling alone, is a target for rape and possible death.
This would be merely clever if it weren't for the stories within the story that almost overshadow the main narrative. The very first chapter has "Hart of the Wood," an immediately gripping story of cannibalism and Faustian bargains, which makes the statement, I think, that the stories-within-the-story is a necessary and important part of the work. But it's the two stories where the language is different, the "Eusa Story" of chapter six and "The Legend of St. Eustace" of chapter fourteen which make the cleverness of the book's language obvious.
Eusa is the focus of religion and society in Riddley Walker. He's a metaphorical figure whose story is used to illustrate whatever the storyteller wants from the story. He's based on a foundational text - the "Eusa Story."
I was waiting for the "Eusa Story" for the first several chapters. I wanted to know how it happened. I wanted to know who started dropping the bombs and how society was reconstituted. The "Eusa Story" wasn't that. It was better. It established, through the nebulous Eusa. Like "oansome" Eusa doesn't have a straight translation. He's everyman. He's society before the collapse. He's arrogance personified. He's humility personified. Unlike "oansome," Eusa is a religion. The entire "Eusa Story" is an elaborate set of metaphors for nothing and everything, or in the Riddley-world, the 1ce and the 2ce.
I went into the "Eusa Story" expecting to logically understand the world of Riddley Walker in a historical sense. Nothing like that happened. Instead, I came out of it understanding Riddley Walker in a metaphorical sense. Or rather, I understood that metaphor was the only way to understand Riddley Walker.
This is hammered home in the fourteenth chapter, in which Riddley confronts Goodparley, the political leader of Riddley's culture. Goodparley attempts, as his name might indicate, to convert Riddley to his point of view. Goodparley does this first with "The Legend of St. Eustace," the first modern-day text which appears in the story. After reading it, Goodparley and Riddley try to translate it. This is partially hilarious, like when Goodparley translates "hamlets" as small pigs. But as the translation continues, something fascinating and brilliant happens: they stop translating the text to make sense to them, and instead, use the text to make sense of their own world. Via this completely irrelevant little text, Goodparley and Riddley start to figure out scientific truths! The idea of using metaphor to discover scientific truths isn't all that far-fetched, actually. The structure of the chemical compound benzene was supposedly theorized by chemist Friedrich Kekulé after a dream of a worm eating its own tale - the Ouroboros myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Ring_formula).
A fact, the life of St. Eustace, became a myth and a metaphor. That metaphor lived on, becoming a fact again in the nature of the myth, written down. That factual metaphor was discovered by the Ram, who treated it as a simple fact. Their interpretation of it relied on the metaphors inherent to their religion and their language, but those metaphors led them to discover scientific fact.
Here's the thing that makes Riddley Walker so excellent, though. The same thing that makes the "hamlets" pun so entertaining also makes "oansome" meaningful and also "The Legend of St. Eustace" so illuminating to Riddley and Goodparley: the language. By narrowing the English language to fewer words, and blurring the meaning of those words, Riddley Walker encourages us as readers to project our guesses at meaning onto the words. Along with the characters, we puzzle through new ideas and new concepts to try to make sense of the world. The metaphors of the characters are our metaphors as well. In order to understand the book of Riddley Walker, we have to understand the world and mindset of the character of Riddley Walker. We have to enter a world where language, metaphor, religion and science are all intertwined - unified.
It's only in thinking like this that I figure out what Riddley's (and his father's) job is! As "connexion man," Riddley is supposed to make the world make sense to the people of his village. His job is working within these metaphors to bring in external aspects of life. He's part priest, part storyteller, part translator. It's an important role, too, as the chief representatives of the theocratic Ram are the ones who invest the power of the job in him, by scarring his belly.
I think that, while the genius of the book is that it forces the reader to get into its mindset to read it, it also, in the end, rejects that mindset. Riddley Walker, over the course of the story, seems to discover or at least begin to uncover the idea of a goddess religion of sex, birth, and life. He also discovers a Punch doll, then the Punch story from Goodparley, and ends the book in a traveling troupe of storytellers. The stories that he's trying to tell are, at least in name, specifically non-religious. He has to make that disclaimer in order to try to tell the story, and he still starts a fight with his heresy!
But Riddley doesn't understand it as heresy. Hell, he doesn't even seem to understand it as new. He believes that he's acting against power, and in a sense, is undermining the hierarchical theocrats in the Ram. However, he may be building a different kind of power, which could be even more important than the gunpowder which drives the main plot. Riddley is building literature, and with it, he may be beginning the process of atomizing the metaphors which are the foundations of his world.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Angel: Season Two
The second season of Angel is a bit of a mixed bag, but in it, the show begins to find its form outside of its origins as a Buffy spinoff. In the first season, Angel was still indebted to its parent enough that its most memorable episodes and most of its characters came from Buffy. In Season Two, the crossovers are rarer, and Buffy herself doesn't appear at all. Angel has its own story now, for better or worse.
The season also marks a departure from the Buffy form of "Big Bad," single-season based storytelling. Several different stories weave in and out of the season, with varying degrees of resolution. At times, it's almost a straight-up serial with very little of the Monster-of-the-Week storylines which drove the first season.
The first few episodes are marked by Angel's lethargy, as the newly resurrected Darla and Wolfram & Hart begin fiddling with his sleep schedule. He's able to go through the motions, but his mind, and often body, and elsewhere. When Darla finally makes her physical appearance, Angel becomes obsessed. It is somewhat frustrating in that the audience knows who's behind Angel's dreams of Darla and why, but he doesn't know for several episodes. The frustration, of course, is thanks to the inherent drama of the reappearance of Angel's sire and the knowledge of their inevitable confrontation, delayed until the fifth episode.
The confrontation is somewhat cathartic, but leads to Angel's Darla-obsession coming to the fore, further alienating his co-workers. The rest of the Angel cast is increasing in both complexity and charm through the second season. The addition of the vampire-fighting gang leader Gunn to the crew is an especially good touch, as he adds a good mix of comedy and drama. Wesley's character continues his improvement, particularly in the episode "Guise Will Be Guise" in which he impersonates Angel. Later developments cement him as a leader as well as simply an expert in demonology.
However, it is Cordelia who steadily becomes the show's strongest character. By the end of the season I was about ready to declare her the best character of the Buffyverse. Her transition from Homecoming Queen Bitch to a powerful character in her own right has been almost seamless, especially once she switched from Buffy to Angel. I've always liked the dynamic that Cordelia brings to the shows, but now she's becoming likable as well, without sacrificing the humor she began with.
Angel's confrontation with Darla and the law firm lead to some of the season's strongest moments. He fights Darla, as well as attempting to turn her to good, as Wolfram & Hart continue hoping to push him to evil through her. Angel's quest comes to a peak in the ninth episode, "The Trial," in which he finally through stubbornness and heroism manages to convince Darla to accept her mortality. Naturally, this is almost immediately followed by the shocking re-emergence of Drusilla, who turns Darla to a vampire again as Angel is forced to watch, helpless.
The entire season so far built to that point, and the remainder seemed to stumble, unsure of where it was going. Angel becomes obsessed with revenge against Drusilla and Darla, turning dark - if not evil - and firing Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley. In theory, this is a brilliant twist. In practice, it's awkward, forcing Angel to go all dark and the rest to turn almost entirely comic. Occasionally it works, like when Angel smokes a cigarette and then uses it to torch Darla and Drusilla, or when Wesley solves a crime a la Cluedo. But generally it's awkward (especially when Angel resorts to clumsy narration in lieu of talking to people), and a relief when Angel gets out of his funk and the gang gets back together.
Like its sibling, Buffy's Season Five, Angel improves in quality in its last third. In its best episode, "Dead End," the primary antagonist at Wolfram & Hard, Lindsay, receives a replacement hand for the one he lost in the first season finale. Lindsay quickly comes to realize the hand is evil and has a will of its own. This tips him over the edge, finally causing a break with Wolfram & Hart, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory - slapping Lilah's ass, shooting a security guard in the foot, threatening a board room, and explaining it all away with a gleeful declaration of "Evil hand!"
Towards the end of the season, the show breaks from formula and veers into a completely different direction, offering a four-part serialized string of episodes in a demonic dimension, more akin to a fantasy movie than the L.A. setting of the show. It's a quality run of episodes, with each character's development being highlighted: Cordelia's vanity is tempered by responsibility; Angel's heroism always threatened by the monster within; Wesley's leadership role forces him to make hard decisions with clarity; and Gunn tries to do the right thing while being pulled in multiple directions. Lorne, an empathic demon with a musical soul, who had been in and out of the series all season finally starts being treated like one of the main group, and the crew also rescues Fred, a mentally damaged supergenius played by the gorgeous Amy Acker, who officially joins the cast soon after.
It's a solid, if unspectacular, finish to a season with plenty of ups and downs. The second season of Angel doesn't quite put it on a level with Buffy the Vampire Slayer just yet, but much more than the first season, it says that it's possible.
The season also marks a departure from the Buffy form of "Big Bad," single-season based storytelling. Several different stories weave in and out of the season, with varying degrees of resolution. At times, it's almost a straight-up serial with very little of the Monster-of-the-Week storylines which drove the first season.
The first few episodes are marked by Angel's lethargy, as the newly resurrected Darla and Wolfram & Hart begin fiddling with his sleep schedule. He's able to go through the motions, but his mind, and often body, and elsewhere. When Darla finally makes her physical appearance, Angel becomes obsessed. It is somewhat frustrating in that the audience knows who's behind Angel's dreams of Darla and why, but he doesn't know for several episodes. The frustration, of course, is thanks to the inherent drama of the reappearance of Angel's sire and the knowledge of their inevitable confrontation, delayed until the fifth episode.
The confrontation is somewhat cathartic, but leads to Angel's Darla-obsession coming to the fore, further alienating his co-workers. The rest of the Angel cast is increasing in both complexity and charm through the second season. The addition of the vampire-fighting gang leader Gunn to the crew is an especially good touch, as he adds a good mix of comedy and drama. Wesley's character continues his improvement, particularly in the episode "Guise Will Be Guise" in which he impersonates Angel. Later developments cement him as a leader as well as simply an expert in demonology.
However, it is Cordelia who steadily becomes the show's strongest character. By the end of the season I was about ready to declare her the best character of the Buffyverse. Her transition from Homecoming Queen Bitch to a powerful character in her own right has been almost seamless, especially once she switched from Buffy to Angel. I've always liked the dynamic that Cordelia brings to the shows, but now she's becoming likable as well, without sacrificing the humor she began with.
Angel's confrontation with Darla and the law firm lead to some of the season's strongest moments. He fights Darla, as well as attempting to turn her to good, as Wolfram & Hart continue hoping to push him to evil through her. Angel's quest comes to a peak in the ninth episode, "The Trial," in which he finally through stubbornness and heroism manages to convince Darla to accept her mortality. Naturally, this is almost immediately followed by the shocking re-emergence of Drusilla, who turns Darla to a vampire again as Angel is forced to watch, helpless.
The entire season so far built to that point, and the remainder seemed to stumble, unsure of where it was going. Angel becomes obsessed with revenge against Drusilla and Darla, turning dark - if not evil - and firing Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley. In theory, this is a brilliant twist. In practice, it's awkward, forcing Angel to go all dark and the rest to turn almost entirely comic. Occasionally it works, like when Angel smokes a cigarette and then uses it to torch Darla and Drusilla, or when Wesley solves a crime a la Cluedo. But generally it's awkward (especially when Angel resorts to clumsy narration in lieu of talking to people), and a relief when Angel gets out of his funk and the gang gets back together.
Like its sibling, Buffy's Season Five, Angel improves in quality in its last third. In its best episode, "Dead End," the primary antagonist at Wolfram & Hard, Lindsay, receives a replacement hand for the one he lost in the first season finale. Lindsay quickly comes to realize the hand is evil and has a will of its own. This tips him over the edge, finally causing a break with Wolfram & Hart, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory - slapping Lilah's ass, shooting a security guard in the foot, threatening a board room, and explaining it all away with a gleeful declaration of "Evil hand!"
Towards the end of the season, the show breaks from formula and veers into a completely different direction, offering a four-part serialized string of episodes in a demonic dimension, more akin to a fantasy movie than the L.A. setting of the show. It's a quality run of episodes, with each character's development being highlighted: Cordelia's vanity is tempered by responsibility; Angel's heroism always threatened by the monster within; Wesley's leadership role forces him to make hard decisions with clarity; and Gunn tries to do the right thing while being pulled in multiple directions. Lorne, an empathic demon with a musical soul, who had been in and out of the series all season finally starts being treated like one of the main group, and the crew also rescues Fred, a mentally damaged supergenius played by the gorgeous Amy Acker, who officially joins the cast soon after.
It's a solid, if unspectacular, finish to a season with plenty of ups and downs. The second season of Angel doesn't quite put it on a level with Buffy the Vampire Slayer just yet, but much more than the first season, it says that it's possible.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five
The premiere of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire serves as something of a microcosm for the entire season. "Buffy vs. Dracula" is, for the vast majority of the episode, is an occasionally weird, occasionally funny episode with a few character quirks. Then, at the end, the show pulls the rug out from under the viewer's feet:
Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"
This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.
Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.
Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.
The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.
This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.
In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.
"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.
Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.
The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.
Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.
The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.
This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.
However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.
TOP 5:
1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.
2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.
3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.
4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.
5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.
Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"
This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.
Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.
Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.
The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.
This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.
In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.
"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.
Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.
The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.
Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.
The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.
This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.
However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.
TOP 5:
1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.
2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.
3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.
4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.
5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is a game with history. It has antecedents like Fallout 1 & 2 or Morrowind and Oblivion; it has a fully fleshed out game world; it has a full role-playing system. These are all valid, if entirely obvious, points to discuss for comparison. However, playing the game itself evokes a different kind of feeling. The slow uncovering of a game world filled with interesting nooks and crannies evokes the best aspects of the exploration-based Castlevania and Metroid games, while the role-playing system successfully melds Fallout with a first-person shooter.
Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.
This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.
That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.
Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.
This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.
That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
A New Project
I am writing a book. I've been working on it for about six weeks, and I've got over ten thousand words. This is significantly more than any other book project I've started, which includes a few novels in the past, and a brief poke at trying to write on the Antioch situation. This time, more successfully, I'm choosing to write about something I've already done much of the research on - the history of video games.
It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:
On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.
After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.
It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:
- The history of video games can be told in an interesting fashion using genre as a lens. It's how gamers perceive games, and it keeps the focus on the games, instead of on the designers, corporations, or technology.
- I've probably played enough games to be able to do this well. Whenever lists of "The All-Time Greatest" or "The Most Influential Games" come out, I've played most all of them.
- I think at this point, I have the writing ability and longevity to do it.
On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.
After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
A History of Histories
In A History of Histories, British historian John Burrow sets himself a nearly impossible task in the title of the book alone. Impressively, he succeeds, describing the general form of history in the west in a single volume, and even more impressive is the fact that he makes it entirely readable.
Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.
If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.
A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.
Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.
If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.
A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Obvious Influence: The Philip K. Dick Reader
American science fiction is generally divided into a Golden Age from the 1940's to the 1960's or so, when the giant names of Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, and more wrote. The transition between their short, pulp novels or entertaining short stories to today's modern science fiction isn't always easy to grasp, but reading a set of Philip K. Dick stories all at once, such as the collection in The Philip K. Dick Reader demonstrates where that transition may have taken place.
The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.
The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.
The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.
The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.
The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.
The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.
Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.
The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.
The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.
The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.
The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.
The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.
The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.
Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Fallout 3 - Antici...PAtion
I have Fallout 3 and I'm not playing it.
This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?
Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.
Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.
Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.
Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.
Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.
And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.
Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.
This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?
Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.
Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.
Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.
Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.
Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.
And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.
Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Promethea
My rave review of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III's Promethea is up, here. I'm not posting it in full here only because Lunch's picture capacity is much better, and some of it really should be seen.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Best Kind of Sequel
There are many ways to do sequels in the video game world, but the most common can be summed up as "More of the same, only better." Keep what was good about the original game, tweak the things that can be improved upon, and fix anything that was broken. By that logic, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is a resounding success.
The primary problem with the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a lack of easily accessible information. The GBA's screen was just too small and low-res to contain the large amounts of information a relatively complex RPG really needs, and the move to the DS fixes the problem as expected. It also adds more quests, more classes, more races, and a few other innovations that generally work to the game's benefit.
The worst of the new innovations are a set of quests called Clan Trials, which offer significant benefits, but can be excruciatingly repetitive. Also, the twenty new classes and two new races are somewhat weak, as many of the classes are redundant or even outright bad, although there are a few gems like Raptors and Tricksters.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also has some fun with traditional RPG tropes. The characters at one point talk about how, death is rare in the game world thanks to healing magic and resurrection items, winking and nodding at decades of RPG fans who've made the same point. Even better than that, FFTA2 fixes the age-old RPG problem of new-town/better-items by adapting Final Fantasy XII's "Bazaar" system, where defeating enemies gives the player random items which can be traded in to unlock new items. The plot, meanwhile, is trifling, and the game realizes this and happily spends virtually no time on it, recognizing that the player wants more questing, less talking.
Square Enix has their tactical RPG form honed to a science, and it shows with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Veterans of the form will find significant improvements and interesting new quests, while newcomers to the genre will discover a game that's fast and easy to play, but filled with action and complexity. Highly recommended.
The primary problem with the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a lack of easily accessible information. The GBA's screen was just too small and low-res to contain the large amounts of information a relatively complex RPG really needs, and the move to the DS fixes the problem as expected. It also adds more quests, more classes, more races, and a few other innovations that generally work to the game's benefit.
The worst of the new innovations are a set of quests called Clan Trials, which offer significant benefits, but can be excruciatingly repetitive. Also, the twenty new classes and two new races are somewhat weak, as many of the classes are redundant or even outright bad, although there are a few gems like Raptors and Tricksters.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also has some fun with traditional RPG tropes. The characters at one point talk about how, death is rare in the game world thanks to healing magic and resurrection items, winking and nodding at decades of RPG fans who've made the same point. Even better than that, FFTA2 fixes the age-old RPG problem of new-town/better-items by adapting Final Fantasy XII's "Bazaar" system, where defeating enemies gives the player random items which can be traded in to unlock new items. The plot, meanwhile, is trifling, and the game realizes this and happily spends virtually no time on it, recognizing that the player wants more questing, less talking.
Square Enix has their tactical RPG form honed to a science, and it shows with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Veterans of the form will find significant improvements and interesting new quests, while newcomers to the genre will discover a game that's fast and easy to play, but filled with action and complexity. Highly recommended.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Okami: This Is Not The End, My Wolfy Friend
Okami is a beautiful, interesting game and will get the full review it deserves soon enough, but for now, I'm interested by its beginning. Or middle. Possibly end. I'm not entirely sure. Either way, the first major section of the game is either a bizarre, poor game design decision, or a brilliant subversion of the heroic form.
The storyline of Okami is fairly similar to most other fantasy-based games - there's an ancient evil, a rebirth of an ancient hero, a quest to discover magical items to defeat the ancient evil, and so on. That's all fairly straightforward, but what's not is that that part of the game ends after 10-15 hours of play. The Big Bad, an ancient many-headed serpent named Orochi, is the focus of the game's intro and the entire plot of the game at first, complete with prophecies and quests to get items to weaken him. Then, all of the sudden, before the player has collected all of their powers, they are suddenly pushed into Orochi's sealed cave, a long, puzzle and combat-filled dungeon complete with heroic music implying that this is indeed the final confrontation with ultimate evil.
There are a few clues that it's not quite the ending that it seems to be. The game offers a wide range of collectibles, as most action/adventures do, and the player certainly won't have a complete collection of magic, items, or the various other tchotches involved in Okami. But it's still not quite so overwhelmingly obvious that I wasn't concerned that I'd missed out on half the game.
This is, generally, poor game design. If the player feels like they've completed the game, they're more likely to shelve it. If there were a Star Wars game which involved the destruction of the Death Star and death of the Emperor, a final level involving wandering around Endor picking up the garbage probably wouldn't go over terribly well.
On the other hand, Okami isn't a terribly serious game, and there's plenty of reason to believe that the heroic fantasy faux-ending isn't so much a game design failure as it is an elaborate joke. In the game world, the ancient evil was vanquished by a legendary hero and a wolf-god sidekick. The player becomes the wolf-god Amaterasu, and the ancient hero's descendant, Susano, works alongside Amaterasu in order to defeat the Big Bad. In most games, the player would be Susano, fulfilling his destiny and defeating all evil everywhere, then hooking up with his sweetheart at the end.
The subversion comes from Susano's character. He's an incompetent boob and drunken layabout who is basically guilt-tripped into trying anything at all, and once he does make any attempt at being a heroic warrior, it's only the efforts of the player, who uses magic to make Susano appear competent, which make him succeed.
If the first part of Okami is viewed as Susano's story, it's an amusing satire of fantasy game tropes. The hero is a shiftless dreamer who is forced into action, and then, based entirely on the help of his sidekick, succeeds in destroying evil and getting the girl (his village's sake brewer). Amaterasu may spend a good 15 minutes defeating the Big Bad, but Susano skates in and does his super-secret evil-destroying technique which finishes an already-completed job.
Unfortunately Okami doesn't make its satire explicit, which leads me to wonder if the scenario creators intended to satirize generic game plotting at all, or if they just stumbled into an interesting concept and stumbled right back out with a bit of genre-savvy winking at the audience.
The storyline of Okami is fairly similar to most other fantasy-based games - there's an ancient evil, a rebirth of an ancient hero, a quest to discover magical items to defeat the ancient evil, and so on. That's all fairly straightforward, but what's not is that that part of the game ends after 10-15 hours of play. The Big Bad, an ancient many-headed serpent named Orochi, is the focus of the game's intro and the entire plot of the game at first, complete with prophecies and quests to get items to weaken him. Then, all of the sudden, before the player has collected all of their powers, they are suddenly pushed into Orochi's sealed cave, a long, puzzle and combat-filled dungeon complete with heroic music implying that this is indeed the final confrontation with ultimate evil.
There are a few clues that it's not quite the ending that it seems to be. The game offers a wide range of collectibles, as most action/adventures do, and the player certainly won't have a complete collection of magic, items, or the various other tchotches involved in Okami. But it's still not quite so overwhelmingly obvious that I wasn't concerned that I'd missed out on half the game.
This is, generally, poor game design. If the player feels like they've completed the game, they're more likely to shelve it. If there were a Star Wars game which involved the destruction of the Death Star and death of the Emperor, a final level involving wandering around Endor picking up the garbage probably wouldn't go over terribly well.
On the other hand, Okami isn't a terribly serious game, and there's plenty of reason to believe that the heroic fantasy faux-ending isn't so much a game design failure as it is an elaborate joke. In the game world, the ancient evil was vanquished by a legendary hero and a wolf-god sidekick. The player becomes the wolf-god Amaterasu, and the ancient hero's descendant, Susano, works alongside Amaterasu in order to defeat the Big Bad. In most games, the player would be Susano, fulfilling his destiny and defeating all evil everywhere, then hooking up with his sweetheart at the end.
The subversion comes from Susano's character. He's an incompetent boob and drunken layabout who is basically guilt-tripped into trying anything at all, and once he does make any attempt at being a heroic warrior, it's only the efforts of the player, who uses magic to make Susano appear competent, which make him succeed.
If the first part of Okami is viewed as Susano's story, it's an amusing satire of fantasy game tropes. The hero is a shiftless dreamer who is forced into action, and then, based entirely on the help of his sidekick, succeeds in destroying evil and getting the girl (his village's sake brewer). Amaterasu may spend a good 15 minutes defeating the Big Bad, but Susano skates in and does his super-secret evil-destroying technique which finishes an already-completed job.
Unfortunately Okami doesn't make its satire explicit, which leads me to wonder if the scenario creators intended to satirize generic game plotting at all, or if they just stumbled into an interesting concept and stumbled right back out with a bit of genre-savvy winking at the audience.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Genres Aren't Going Anywhere
I've been running a little roughshod over the comments on this post at the Brainy Gamer, when it's really well worth a post of my own.
The post is mostly about Mass Effect 2, but makes more dramatic statements about the nature of game genres at the moment:
I tend to disagree with this, and it might be in part because I'm not "in the now" in game industry terms. In general I try to step back thanks to my history-based lens, but it's even more apparent in that I really haven't played very many new games or been immersed in the gaming press for the past five years or so. It all kind of looks the same to me - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that I'm very hesitant to say that any new game will be so important that it breaks down genre boundaries.
There are a few reasons for this. First, I tend to think that genres are a necessary part of human existence. We categorize information. They're shortcuts, or hacks, which allow us to judge new info quickly, and act on it accordingly. Sometimes this doesn't work perfectly, of course, and more often it requires major caveats along the lines of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic movie that's funny, but there's no way in hell that it's a romantic comedy" sort. But these caveats, which critics like myself may focus on, don't negate the inherent use of classification. There will always be a use for if-you-like-x-you-may-like-y.
Second, as long as genres have existed, genre-bending has existed. As I mentioned in the comments, Deus Ex was a first-person shooter role-playing game, and Quest for Glory was a role-playing adventure game, and modern action sports games like Madden have long-term strategic "franchise" modes. A single example of a game isn't enough to indicate that genre-bending is bigger now than it was then. Sometimes great games which fit between-genres redefine their genres, like franchise modes in Madden, whereas in the case of Quest for Glory, they might just be interesting experiments. If you'd asked me in the late '90's which game was more likely to redefine the computer role-playing game, Fallout or Diablo, I'd have said Diablo in a heartbeat. It had the critical and commercial consensus, and was immediately accessible. Yet Diablo has barely spawned clones, let alone a genre, whereas the Fallout style of gameplay, through Bioware, has become the default for CRPGs.
Even if does demonstrate a pattern where FPS/RPGs become common, then that's not going to eliminate the concept of genres: it'll create a new genre. Way back in the '80's, there were adventure games based around using items to solve puzzles, and there were action games which were often real-time reflex-based games. When games like The Legend of Zelda started combining puzzles with reflexes, the previous genres didn't disappear, instead they created the Action/Adventure genre!
The post is mostly about Mass Effect 2, but makes more dramatic statements about the nature of game genres at the moment:
More than ever, genre categories seem like arbitrary labels we apply to games so they can be properly shelved.
I tend to disagree with this, and it might be in part because I'm not "in the now" in game industry terms. In general I try to step back thanks to my history-based lens, but it's even more apparent in that I really haven't played very many new games or been immersed in the gaming press for the past five years or so. It all kind of looks the same to me - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that I'm very hesitant to say that any new game will be so important that it breaks down genre boundaries.
There are a few reasons for this. First, I tend to think that genres are a necessary part of human existence. We categorize information. They're shortcuts, or hacks, which allow us to judge new info quickly, and act on it accordingly. Sometimes this doesn't work perfectly, of course, and more often it requires major caveats along the lines of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic movie that's funny, but there's no way in hell that it's a romantic comedy" sort. But these caveats, which critics like myself may focus on, don't negate the inherent use of classification. There will always be a use for if-you-like-x-you-may-like-y.
Second, as long as genres have existed, genre-bending has existed. As I mentioned in the comments, Deus Ex was a first-person shooter role-playing game, and Quest for Glory was a role-playing adventure game, and modern action sports games like Madden have long-term strategic "franchise" modes. A single example of a game isn't enough to indicate that genre-bending is bigger now than it was then. Sometimes great games which fit between-genres redefine their genres, like franchise modes in Madden, whereas in the case of Quest for Glory, they might just be interesting experiments. If you'd asked me in the late '90's which game was more likely to redefine the computer role-playing game, Fallout or Diablo, I'd have said Diablo in a heartbeat. It had the critical and commercial consensus, and was immediately accessible. Yet Diablo has barely spawned clones, let alone a genre, whereas the Fallout style of gameplay, through Bioware, has become the default for CRPGs.
Even if does demonstrate a pattern where FPS/RPGs become common, then that's not going to eliminate the concept of genres: it'll create a new genre. Way back in the '80's, there were adventure games based around using items to solve puzzles, and there were action games which were often real-time reflex-based games. When games like The Legend of Zelda started combining puzzles with reflexes, the previous genres didn't disappear, instead they created the Action/Adventure genre!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Bamboozled, or, Blackface is Bad The Movie
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Southland Tales, calling it the most bizarre major studio movie of our era. Bamboozled is the only film I've seen that can really be considered competition. But while Southland Tales is an incoherent mess, it's still a single incoherent mess. Bamboozled, on the other hand, suffers from severe Multiple Personality Disorder.
The main part of Bamboozled acts as a kind of race-tinged Network with a dash of The Producers. Damon Wayans stars as the only black writer for a major network, who gets called out by his boss (Michael Rapaport) for his tame, Cosby-like show pitches. Wayans decides to prove...something or another by pitching a show so hideously racist that his boss will understand...I really don't know. One of the major problems with the film is that both the characters and the film itself appear to have no real concept of cause-and-effect. At any rate, Wayans' pitch is Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Because the film takes place in something that only superficially resembles reality, the hideously racist variety show somehow becomes a massive hit. Hilarity fails to ensue.
Network took a similarly absurd premise and generally made it work, based on superb over-the-top performances from its cast, thanks to dramatic monologue after dramatic monologue. Bamboozled's cast can't hold its own. Wayans' annoying affectation of an accent helps bring most scenes around him to a screeching halt, and Jada Pinkett Smith is merely competent in a film that demands insanity. The smaller characters are often better, such as Mos Def's inane radical rapper, who demands to not be called by his slave name, instead as his revolutionary chosen name: Big Black African. (note: most clips are rather not safe for work if you don't have headphones.)
When Mos Def and Michael Rapaport's characters are on-screen, the film starts to work as a satire or parody filled with outsized characters, absurd situations, and a devastating critique of the kind of institutional racism which masquerades as multiculturalism and tolerance. The high point of the film occurs when, once the New Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a hit, the network brings in a PR guru to counter claims that the show might be racist. Wayans is still operating under the impression that he's making the show to prove the point that the show is bad (or whatever), and skillfully eviscerate the consultant's defense of racism:
(consultant scene begins at roughly 8:12 and continues into Part 8)
These scenes are from a movie I'd love to see. They just happen to collide with another movie I'd also be interested in seeing, and the collision turns out terribly for all involved. It often feels like, during the creation of the film, Spike Lee came across so much intense historical footage of blackface, sambos, and minstrel shows that he wanted to make a documentary about just how ghastly this stuff was, and how it still pervades our culture. Several montages of these historical artifacts, as well as a collection of Sambo dolls Wayans begins to collect, and some beautifully tragic scenes where the actors put on their blackface in the traditional fashion show Lee's unsuppressed rage and sadness. They also never mesh with the Network-like satire or the disposable relationship drama of the rest of the film. More than anything, most of Bamboozled feels like several unrelated scripts thrown together, with actors playing the same characters while the tone, style, and plot change from scene to scene, almost totally inexplicably - it's often downright amateurish.
The end of the film, which follows Network's lead into over-the-top violence and tragedy, just makes things worse. Wayans, at some point, inexplicably changes from hating his show to being its staunch defender, and everything just falls apart from there. It ends with Wayans repudiating the entire minstrel show concept, destroying his entire collection of Sambos, and closes on a montage of minstrely and sambos. The montage is shocking and powerful, and includes thingslike tiny Shirley Temple dancing in a minstrel show, but it ends the film on a simplistic, unsatirical note: blackface is bad!
The main part of Bamboozled acts as a kind of race-tinged Network with a dash of The Producers. Damon Wayans stars as the only black writer for a major network, who gets called out by his boss (Michael Rapaport) for his tame, Cosby-like show pitches. Wayans decides to prove...something or another by pitching a show so hideously racist that his boss will understand...I really don't know. One of the major problems with the film is that both the characters and the film itself appear to have no real concept of cause-and-effect. At any rate, Wayans' pitch is Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Because the film takes place in something that only superficially resembles reality, the hideously racist variety show somehow becomes a massive hit. Hilarity fails to ensue.
Network took a similarly absurd premise and generally made it work, based on superb over-the-top performances from its cast, thanks to dramatic monologue after dramatic monologue. Bamboozled's cast can't hold its own. Wayans' annoying affectation of an accent helps bring most scenes around him to a screeching halt, and Jada Pinkett Smith is merely competent in a film that demands insanity. The smaller characters are often better, such as Mos Def's inane radical rapper, who demands to not be called by his slave name, instead as his revolutionary chosen name: Big Black African. (note: most clips are rather not safe for work if you don't have headphones.)
When Mos Def and Michael Rapaport's characters are on-screen, the film starts to work as a satire or parody filled with outsized characters, absurd situations, and a devastating critique of the kind of institutional racism which masquerades as multiculturalism and tolerance. The high point of the film occurs when, once the New Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a hit, the network brings in a PR guru to counter claims that the show might be racist. Wayans is still operating under the impression that he's making the show to prove the point that the show is bad (or whatever), and skillfully eviscerate the consultant's defense of racism:
(consultant scene begins at roughly 8:12 and continues into Part 8)
These scenes are from a movie I'd love to see. They just happen to collide with another movie I'd also be interested in seeing, and the collision turns out terribly for all involved. It often feels like, during the creation of the film, Spike Lee came across so much intense historical footage of blackface, sambos, and minstrel shows that he wanted to make a documentary about just how ghastly this stuff was, and how it still pervades our culture. Several montages of these historical artifacts, as well as a collection of Sambo dolls Wayans begins to collect, and some beautifully tragic scenes where the actors put on their blackface in the traditional fashion show Lee's unsuppressed rage and sadness. They also never mesh with the Network-like satire or the disposable relationship drama of the rest of the film. More than anything, most of Bamboozled feels like several unrelated scripts thrown together, with actors playing the same characters while the tone, style, and plot change from scene to scene, almost totally inexplicably - it's often downright amateurish.
The end of the film, which follows Network's lead into over-the-top violence and tragedy, just makes things worse. Wayans, at some point, inexplicably changes from hating his show to being its staunch defender, and everything just falls apart from there. It ends with Wayans repudiating the entire minstrel show concept, destroying his entire collection of Sambos, and closes on a montage of minstrely and sambos. The montage is shocking and powerful, and includes thingslike tiny Shirley Temple dancing in a minstrel show, but it ends the film on a simplistic, unsatirical note: blackface is bad!
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Gateway to Geekery: Babylon 5
Babylon 5 is perhaps the only television show ever to have a multi-year plot structured in advance of its creation, and the follow-through for that is entirely effective. However, the plotting is so far-sighting, that it can be initially imposing - particularly given that the pilot movie and first season of the show are occasionally less-than-competent.
I was a fan when it aired, and, with some trepidation, I decided to rewatch it again recently. Happily, the show was still good, and easily held its own against other 90's SF, like Buffy or The X-Files. The Renaissance Poet watched it as well for the first time, and since she didn't have a nostalgia cushion, so I decided to blast through the crap and get to the good stuff. By and large, it worked.
There's another minor complication - particularly in the first and second seasons, episodes aired out of order. I don't know if this was fixed for DVD releases. I do know that seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu are in airing order, not proper order. Generally this isn't terrible (it wasn't gutted like Firefly) but occasionally watching in the proper order makes the show make much more sense, especially in season 2. A master chronological list is available here. Bookmark it!
Season 1
Season 1 is the most iffy of all the Babylon 5 seasons. First of all, as a television show, B5 was struggling to find its footing, especially given that no science fiction show other than Star Trek had ever aired successfully on American TV. Second, the plot of B5 unfolds slowly, and it's hard to see it as anything other than a procedural/monster-of-the-week show most of the time.
It's easiest to sort the episodes into three categories - those critical for the main story (which are also generally the best episodes), watchable episodes which bring up somewhat important character or universe background, and those which are just plain bad.
The best way to go about watching the season is to watch the first two episodes, in my view. If you think "Hey, this is fantastic!" then watch 'em all. If you think it's moderately interesting, then watch the first two categories. If your patience is tested...well, sorry about that, but it does get good. I swear. Watch the critical episodes and get to Season 2 as quickly as you can.
Critical Episodes
1-01 - "Midnight on the Firing Line"
1-02 - "Soul Hunter"
1-05 - "Parliament of Dreams" *
1-06 - "Mind War"
1-08 - "And The Sky Full of Stars"
1-13 - "Signs and Portents"
1-16/17 - "A Voice in the Wilderness" pt. 1/2 **
1-18 - "Babylon Squared"
1-21 - "Legacies" *
1-22 - "Chrysalis"
* In terms of plot, these aren't absolutely necessary. However, they both introduce important characters, and are better-quality than others.
** If you're really, really disliking the show after the first couple of episodes, skip to this one. It's early B5 at its best - good character development, interesting storyline, and for the first time, it has a successful sense of humor! If this doesn't grab you, it may be that nothing will.
Watchable Episodes
1-03 "Born to the Purple" *
1-09 "Deathwalker"
1-10 "Believers"
1-12 "By Any Means Necessary"
1-15 "Eyes"
1-19 "The Quality of Mercy" *
* These episodes are directly referenced later on, more than once in certain cases, so they're somewhat important. On the other hand, they're not terribly good, particularly "Born to the Purple." A plot summary may be the best way to go.
Eminently Skippable
1-04 "Infection" (this is pretty clearly the single worst episode of the entire five seasons)
1-07 "The War Prayer"
1-11 "Survivors"
1-14 "Grail"
1-20 "TKO"
Season 2
Most of the second season is a step above the first in quality and importance. One episode, though, just kind of raises a stink: 2-04 "A Distant Star"
The Movies
Babylon 5 had one pilot movie, and five other made-for-TV movies.
"The Gathering" - This is the pilot movie, and has several problems. First of all, it's kind of bad. Second, it was scored by a totally different composer than the rest of the series, and B5's music is one of its most distinctive and good qualities. It was later re-edited for TNT with proper music and some of the crap eliminated, but it's still not terribly good. I advise skipping it, or watching the edited version after you're sure you like the series.
"In the Beginning" - A prequel movie made for TNT. It's a little contrived, but has some occasional moments of excellence. I would recommend watching it, at one of three points: as the entry into B5; after the two-parter in season 3; or when it was produced, between seasons 4 and 5.
"Thirdspace" - Made at the same time as "In the Beginning," it's kind of a reimagining of Babylon 5 as a big dumb action movie, and reasonably successful at that. Watch after its chronology at any time (around the middle of Season 4).
"River of Souls" - Set after the end of the last normal episode, but before the grand finale. It's pretty good. Watch anytime in the second half of the fifth season.
"A Call to Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers" - Two pseudo-pilots for spinoffs, one of which came to be, the second of which didn't. I didn't like "A Call to Arms" and I heard "Legend of the Rangers" was worse. I'd skip 'em.
In conclusion, I am a geek.
I was a fan when it aired, and, with some trepidation, I decided to rewatch it again recently. Happily, the show was still good, and easily held its own against other 90's SF, like Buffy or The X-Files. The Renaissance Poet watched it as well for the first time, and since she didn't have a nostalgia cushion, so I decided to blast through the crap and get to the good stuff. By and large, it worked.
There's another minor complication - particularly in the first and second seasons, episodes aired out of order. I don't know if this was fixed for DVD releases. I do know that seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu are in airing order, not proper order. Generally this isn't terrible (it wasn't gutted like Firefly) but occasionally watching in the proper order makes the show make much more sense, especially in season 2. A master chronological list is available here. Bookmark it!
Season 1
Season 1 is the most iffy of all the Babylon 5 seasons. First of all, as a television show, B5 was struggling to find its footing, especially given that no science fiction show other than Star Trek had ever aired successfully on American TV. Second, the plot of B5 unfolds slowly, and it's hard to see it as anything other than a procedural/monster-of-the-week show most of the time.
It's easiest to sort the episodes into three categories - those critical for the main story (which are also generally the best episodes), watchable episodes which bring up somewhat important character or universe background, and those which are just plain bad.
The best way to go about watching the season is to watch the first two episodes, in my view. If you think "Hey, this is fantastic!" then watch 'em all. If you think it's moderately interesting, then watch the first two categories. If your patience is tested...well, sorry about that, but it does get good. I swear. Watch the critical episodes and get to Season 2 as quickly as you can.
Critical Episodes
1-01 - "Midnight on the Firing Line"
1-02 - "Soul Hunter"
1-05 - "Parliament of Dreams" *
1-06 - "Mind War"
1-08 - "And The Sky Full of Stars"
1-13 - "Signs and Portents"
1-16/17 - "A Voice in the Wilderness" pt. 1/2 **
1-18 - "Babylon Squared"
1-21 - "Legacies" *
1-22 - "Chrysalis"
* In terms of plot, these aren't absolutely necessary. However, they both introduce important characters, and are better-quality than others.
** If you're really, really disliking the show after the first couple of episodes, skip to this one. It's early B5 at its best - good character development, interesting storyline, and for the first time, it has a successful sense of humor! If this doesn't grab you, it may be that nothing will.
Watchable Episodes
1-03 "Born to the Purple" *
1-09 "Deathwalker"
1-10 "Believers"
1-12 "By Any Means Necessary"
1-15 "Eyes"
1-19 "The Quality of Mercy" *
* These episodes are directly referenced later on, more than once in certain cases, so they're somewhat important. On the other hand, they're not terribly good, particularly "Born to the Purple." A plot summary may be the best way to go.
Eminently Skippable
1-04 "Infection" (this is pretty clearly the single worst episode of the entire five seasons)
1-07 "The War Prayer"
1-11 "Survivors"
1-14 "Grail"
1-20 "TKO"
Season 2
Most of the second season is a step above the first in quality and importance. One episode, though, just kind of raises a stink: 2-04 "A Distant Star"
The Movies
Babylon 5 had one pilot movie, and five other made-for-TV movies.
"The Gathering" - This is the pilot movie, and has several problems. First of all, it's kind of bad. Second, it was scored by a totally different composer than the rest of the series, and B5's music is one of its most distinctive and good qualities. It was later re-edited for TNT with proper music and some of the crap eliminated, but it's still not terribly good. I advise skipping it, or watching the edited version after you're sure you like the series.
"In the Beginning" - A prequel movie made for TNT. It's a little contrived, but has some occasional moments of excellence. I would recommend watching it, at one of three points: as the entry into B5; after the two-parter in season 3; or when it was produced, between seasons 4 and 5.
"Thirdspace" - Made at the same time as "In the Beginning," it's kind of a reimagining of Babylon 5 as a big dumb action movie, and reasonably successful at that. Watch after its chronology at any time (around the middle of Season 4).
"River of Souls" - Set after the end of the last normal episode, but before the grand finale. It's pretty good. Watch anytime in the second half of the fifth season.
"A Call to Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers" - Two pseudo-pilots for spinoffs, one of which came to be, the second of which didn't. I didn't like "A Call to Arms" and I heard "Legend of the Rangers" was worse. I'd skip 'em.
In conclusion, I am a geek.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)