When talking about gaming, it is generally better to actually let people play the game themselves. Everyone repeat after me: “Watching is not the same as playing.”
If I ever get to teach my class on videogames, you can bet that the only time in class spent watching someone play a game will be if we are talking about ethnographic observation techniques.
You know that post I made about David Spade’s SHowbiz Show covering E3? Well, they didn’t. Even though they advertised it in the teaser immediately before the show aired!
Never fear, however, the clip is online at Comedy Central’s website.
You can view the Showbiz SHow’s clip of E3 at that link or if you don’t want to look at the ads you can watch the clip directly. It isn’t all that great, but I can’t leave my tens and tens of fans hanging!
They’ve been advertising it a lot, but soem people who care might not know yet. Just a heads up that tonight, May 18, 2006 David Spade’s Showbiz Show will airing a segment on E3. Make sure to set your recording device of choice!
Whle I said that I didn’t like Silent Hill, I have to join everyone else and say that Alone in the Dark is horrible. And not in a good way.
A couple months ago I was at the video store and saw Alone in the Dark sitting on the shelf and decided to rent it without looking at the back of the box. I get it home and pop it in and it turns out that it isn’t Uwe Boll’s film, but rather 1982’s Alone in the Dark. Let me tell you, the 82 film with the same title is a million times better than the 2005 version.
As I’m writing this I’m listening to Boll’s commentary and he keeps saying things that make me want to slap him.
First of all, he keeps explaining all the characters’ motivations. Call me crazy, but perhaps it would have been better to, you know, actually have that in the film or something.
Second, he keeps stating what is going on. “And then he goes over to her and then talk…” I suppose that blind people appreciate that, but the rest of us are watching the film, Uwe. We don’t need you to describe it for us.
Third, he keeps bragging about all the product placements he got for the films. He has no shame!
Fourth, he actually admitted that he gets to make movies because of German tax shelters. (OK, that’s actually pretty funny. He comes this close to actually admitting that he’s only in it to make money. Too bad for Boll that Germany has changed their tax laws)
Fifth, he blames videogame companies and fans for the film’s failure. He talks about how he doesn’t understand why the owners of Alone in the dark wouldn’t release an Alone in the Dark game when the film came out and says that it would have helped the film. He also says that videogame fans are too picky.
Sixth, he calls other horror films that have came out recently cootie-cutter and all the same and is mad because he doesn’t understand why people didn’t go see his super original film. He says it isn’t straight horror, or straight action, or whatever.
And that’s the problem with the film. Not only is it not just a single genre, but it is actually several of them put together. Now I said that Silent Hill was like Super Smash Brothers in that it mixed up elements from a bunch of other films. Well, Alone in the Dark does that too, but where Silent Hill uses the differnt elements like paint and mixes them together to create something that at lest hangs together, Alone in the Dark just smashes them together. The result is less like a painting made up of a bunch of different colors, but more like a kid trying to build something with a bunch of different colored legos. Sure you can put red, blue, green, white, and yellow legos together to make something, but you can still see all the individual elements because they don’t go together in any coherent way.
THe film throws todether pseudo-archeological adventure with zombies, with one random fight scene whose setting is an ice factory straight out of Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury (yes, it even takes place in a random Chinatown location for some reason!), with Starship Troopers complete with soldiers in black outfits and helmets and House of the Dead’s Ona Grauer with redish hair that makes her look like Dina Meyer of Starship Troopers, the end of Resident Evil (or a million other movies, for that matter)and finally fancy light bullets from such films as Blade and Underworld. (Oh crap, he just mentioned Body Snatchers and he said that the people who have these slug-like things in them were puppets!! He has no shame! And he just called the creatures Xenomorphs)
It does have a nice 80’s era Scorpions-esque euro-hair-metal theme though. It’s very European.
Anyway, if you are going to see a film called Alone in the Dark, go see the one starring Jack Palance and Martin Landau. It has a great twist towards the end.
Alone in the Dark
Uwe Boll does not have shame
Watch the other one.
While I am still ashamed to be a gamer, I am happy to report that I’m not ashamed of my fellow gamers. Yesterday, the first Sin episode was released. I’m not done with it yet, but the first scene causes quite an impression. Apparently, the programmers at Ritual and/or Valve have spent too much time playing games like Dead or Alive because the first thing you see is the Elexis Sinclaire character bending over you with her breasts sloshing around as if they were water in a glass that is being violently shaken. I mean,not only do breasts not move like that anyway, but look at her, she obviously has a bra on, so there is really no reason for them to move around like that.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who found that very odd. In the comments over at Bluesnews, at least two people had already posted about it. Now I don’t feel like the lone voice or reason or the crazy man standing on the street corner yelling at people as they go by.
On the downside, however, in writing this post I did a search for “boob physics” and found that not only were the creepy boobs available in Half-Life 2, but I also found one of the most disturbing videos ever. It isn’t pornographic or anything, but manages to simultaneously objectify a bunch of polygons, as well as ignore the effects of the violent actions performed in order to demonstrate that objectification. creepy. Call me crazy but I like my sexiness and literal violence as separate as possible…
I’ve decided that the answer to my quandry over how to set up my videogame syllabus is to begin with a couple days of ethnography stuff. I’m setting up the class is that each Friday will be a gaming day and that they will keep journals of their experiences and observations, therefore, it seems logical that they get some info on how to take good notes and what to think about before we actually start playing the games. I would share the calendar, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to just show it to people without making them sign into google’s calendar or use an rss reader. If anyone already does those or knows an easier way to let people see a google calendar, leave a message.
I’ve been busy lately with end of semester stuff. Then the last couple days when I’ve had more time to post my internet has been down.
Using my free time, I took one for the team and went to see Silent Hill. Despite the lukewarm reviews and videogame expert Roger Ebert’s review, I have to offer my own thoughts:
The Silent Hill movie sucks. It is, however, a fairly accurate recreation of the experience of videogames. Not that the film is in any way like the game. I wouldn’t know because I’ve not played any of the games. However, while watching the movie I found myself lapsing between being interested and terribly bored. Of course, the parts that I found interesting were when all the weird stuff was going on. The parts that I was bored with were when there was lots of talking. That’s when I realized why the Silent Hill movie is like a videogame. The dull parts where we learn about the stupid story are the cut scenes while the parts where things actually happen are the game itself. Think about it, while people may talk about the weird and confusing stuff in the storyline of the game, the selling point of the game is really the weird creepy stuff, not the storyline. The same thing applies for the movie. I don’t’ really care why this weird shit is going on, I just want to see the weird shit!
The film is like a videogame in another way as well, but not the actual game it was based on. No, the Silent Hill movie is actually Super Smash Brothers. In SUper Smash Brothers, Nintendo takes all their characters and throws them together into a fighting games. In the Silent Hill movie, the creators took a bunch of elements from other horror movies and threw them together. Call it collage, call it bricolage, I call it Super Smash Brothers. Take one part mom and creepy girl from the Ring, one part stereotypical rural people, one part star of Lord of the Rings, one part Wicker Man, one part Children of the Corn and one part the Village. Stir and bake until golden brown.
The most irritating thing for me was, as the title of my post suggests, is that the main couple in the movie are apparently some super rich yuppies complete with all white living room with fancy all white furniture. Great, another film about the plight of the rich and beautiful and how evil and inbred rural people are. Don’t even get me started on the fact that the people that made the movie apparently have never set foot outside of a city in the first place…
Unfortunately, the creepiest part of the film was not the scary monsters, but the weird objectification of the mom. I can’t decide if I’m a prude or a pervert but I found it quite unsettling that this woman who spends the entire film being so motherly (and let’s not forget that the mom goes from lying on the floor shaking and screaming for anyone to help her to a little Linda Hamilton who will stop at nothing to save her child…) and yet we have lots of shots of her leaning over to reveal her cleavage and millions of shots of her running toward the camera without wearing a sports bra.
To wrap up, another review haiku:
I saw Silent Hill
I didn’t like it too much
It was blandtastic.
To wrap up this epic length post, our friend Roger Ebert pontificates about videogames lack of merit one again in his April 30, 2006 answerman column:
Q. I was surprised by “Silent Hill” director Christophe Gans’ incendiary comments about you in this month’s issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, especially considering your positive review of his earlier work, “Brotherhood of the Wolf.” Gans phrased his comments to indicate he wanted you to read them.
David Seelig, Philadelphia
A. In the article, Gans praises video games as a form of art and says “The Legend of Zelda” was “a beautiful, poetic moment for me.” Asked about my opinion that video games are not art, he said “F— him. I will say to this guy that he only has to read the critiques against cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. It was seen as a degenerate version of live stage musicals. And this was a time when visionary directors like Griffith were working. That means that Ebert is wrong. It’s simple. Most people who despise a new medium are simply afraid to die, so they express their arrogance and fear like this. He will realize that he is wrong on his deathbed. Human beings are stupid, and we often become a–holes when we get old. Each time a new medium appears, I feel that it’s important to respect it, even if it appears primitive or naive at first, simply because some people are finding value in it. If you have one guy in the world who thinks that ‘Silent Hill’ or ‘Zelda’ is a beautiful, poetic work, then that game means something.”
Ebert again. I am willing to agree that a video game could also be a serious work of art. It would become so by avoiding most of the things that make it a game, such as scoring, pointing and shooting, winning and losing, shallow characterizations, and action that is valued above motivation and ethical considerations. Oddly enough, when video games evolve far enough in that direction, they will not only be an art form, they will be the cinema.
A tip on the early cinema: No wonder it was seen as “a degenerate version of live stage musicals,” since the talkies hadn’t been invented yet, and there is nothing more degenerate than a musical without sound.
Your comments on age and the fear of death are thought-provoking. You know, Christophe, the older I get, the more prudent I become in how I spend my time. As David Bordwell has pointed out, it can take at least 100 hours to complete a video game. Do you really feel you have mastered the mature arts to such an extent that you have that kind of time to burn on a medium you think is primitive and naive?
On my deathbed, I doubt that I will spend any time realizing that I was wrong about video games. Your theory reminds me of my friend Gene Siskel, who observed that nobody on his deathbed ever thinks: “I’m glad I always flew tourist.”
So the moral of the story is be an elitist asshole. Well, at least not everyone in the mainstream media is a hypocrite… So his justification for not giving videogames a fair chance is that he’s old??? That’s just ponderous man,
I working on a syllabus for a course on videogames and I’m messing around with some new tools. I am working on the syllabus using google’s online calendar and I”m writing this using writely. I just noticed that writely has a thing to post to blogs, so I figured I would try it out.
syllabus sections
the problem is where does ethnography fit in within this? It must be taught early so to give the students a chance to get used to the notion. However, to alternate between the two will make the course seem less cohesive. So how to do it?
Perhaps there will be a way to insert a little bit of reading every day. but i don’t want to overdo the reading load. So how to do that?
