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Writing is over. now it is time to get defensive

So after two long weeks of writing my exams, I am finished. I turned the last two in yesterday. Now all that is left is my oral defense next Monday. I’ve never been through a defense before, so I’m not entirely sure what to expect. I’m trying not to worry about it because that isn’t going to do any good, is it? However, I think since it is called a defense I should be defensive, right? So I plan on saying lots of things like, “Well, that’s a stupid question” and “what do you think it means?” With an attitude like that I can’t help bud pass, right?
Invetween now and then I plan on sitting on my butt a lot and playing games. Oh, and apply to a couple conferences…

While writing my exams, I did play one game. After hearing so much about Planescape Torment, I decided to hunt down a copy and try it out. I’ve certainly got to respect a game so highly regarded that fans have made their own patch for it. I was a D&D nerd for a couple years back in the day (even though I could never really find anyone else who wanted to play), so I’ve had a fondness for the RPG genre, but last RPG I played was the cutscene-tastic Final Fantasy 7 and 8, and that prety much soured me on the genre for several years. FF7 was a novel experience for me since I’d never played any of the others, but I got half way through 8 and just got bored. The final straw was when I realized that I was really only playing in order to play the card game within the game.

The reason why I wanted to play Planescape was that it is quite often one of the games that are brought up when people talk about emotional impact in games. Indeed, the game is quite wordy. In fact fans have taken all the text from the game and made it into a book. However, I have to admit, about half way through the game I realized you could just hit enter and the numbers to go through the dialog and I just started skimming. Maybe it is because I’ve spent all summer reading around a book a day, but I didn’t have much patience for the dialog.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the game and I fully admit that the story was intersting. However, it was just a little much for me.

However, I still wonder, was it the story that was interesting for me or was it the motication for the tasks I had to perform? I know that once a character died before I had gotten around to completing two small missions involving a secret that character had I was irritated that I couldn’t complete those missions. I didn’t care that the character had died. Similarly, in the dialog trees that were mainly concerned with relationship stuff I would just pick the answers that I thought would give me the best result, not out of some sense of obligation or emotional attachment to the characters.

I often wonder what people mean when they say that games have a good story. I’ve got a paper about the fact that Half-Life had a rather simple plot, but it was well told. Years ago in an interview where I was asking a person what they liked about certain games and the person said that Unreal Tournament had a good story. I wish I would have asked him what he meant by that because certainly Unreal Tournament doesn’t have much of a story at all. I think for me the appeal of Planescape ended up being that mission screen and that there were always more things to do and not the story or the emotional impact. I don’t doubt for a minute that some people found the story of Plaenscape to be the most interesting thing about the game and found the missions to be simply getting in the way. I wonder, however, are there other people who say they liked the story but might be referring to the missions? Or if there can really be a distinction between the story and the mssions at all? For several years I’ve been thinking about the importance of the initial premice and the importance of the narrative itself. I suppose I will be thinking about it for several more years untill I get somewhere where I can make some sense of it.

I thought everything was on the internets???

The tubes, the tubes, won’t someone think of the tubes?
Back in 2001-2002 TBS used to show a latenight block of programming from the Burly Bear network that was apparently shown on college campuses. On that late night block there was a lot of crap, but there was also one of the best videogame-related shows I’ve seen: Dave and Steve’s Video Game Explosion.

Well, Burly Bear died (apparently it got acquired by National Lampoon) and Dave and Steve was lost to the sands of time.

I can’t believe that in this era of youtube and google video that I can’t find any episodes of this show online somewhere. All I can find is archive.org’s cache of the tbs page and two lonely images:
daveandsteve.jpgdavestevepic2.jpg

How am I supposed to satisy my lame urge to college every videogame related program I can find, if I can’t find it?

Realistically, however, it does illistrate the difficulties of being interested in studying this kind of ephemera. If you don’t record it and keep a copy of it when you see it, it might be gone. Recently, I was able to contact MSNBC and get a copy of the episode of when Henry Jenkins was on Donahue’s MSNBC show but in a case like Burly Bear where it has gone out of business, how likely is it that National Lampoon will even know what I’m talking about, let alone be willing to help me?

The moral of the story is, RECORD EVERYTHING!!!!

I’m starting to get

I’m starting to get worried that something might have happened to Jack Thompson.
First, in Louisiana a judge, refused to permit controversial Miami attorney Jack Thompson to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the case over the legality over the anti-violent videogame law Thompson co-authored. We all assumed that Jack would immediately respond with his normal flurry of press released claiming that the videogame industry was so afraid of him that they had to bribe the judge to keep him off the case.
Now, an Indiana teenager has shot at people and killed one person. A teenager kills someone? If anything calls out for Jack’s attention it is that. And still nothing!
Maybe he’s too busy working on that fancy new website to notice these events. If Jack won’t think of the children by sending out inflammatory press releases who will?

Duke Nukem to Use PhysX card?

Here’s my first ever bit of rumor mongering!
It has previously been reported that Duke Nukem Forever is going to use the Meqon physics engine. Well, last year, Meqon was purchased by AGEIA. Now AGEIA is the maker of the PhysX physics accelerator card. So putting 2 and 2 together seems to me to lead to the conclusion that Duke Nukem Forever will use the PhysX card.
Of course that all depends on whether or not Duke Nukem ever comes out and if AGEIA is still around when Duke Nukem Forever finally comes out…

Again I ask, “What does ‘Cinematic’ mean???”

With Valve’s supercargo announcement of Teem Fortress 2 not only still existing but coming out fairly soon, and with the rebirth and release of Prey, it seems that all we need to bring on the End Times is the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
One other thing was mentioned along with the Valve announcement that confused me. As is usually, Valve bragged about graphic upgrades for Episode 2, something I’ve previously speculated about. One of those features was “cinematic physics.” So what is so “cinematic” about explosions? People always say such and such is a very cinematic game and I have yet to know what they are talking about except when they are talking about a cut scene or lens flare. Especially since Half-life never breaks from the First-Person I don’t know what “cinematic explosions” could mean unless they are just talking about, “over the top.”
I’ve discussed my confusion over “cinematic” before and I”m still not clear on what people mean when they say that. THe only thing I’ve seen is this very interesting article about some of the explicitly cinematic effects in the Source engine which use things such as motion blur, film grain, and color correction. But I don’t think that is what people are thinking about when they normally say something is “cinematic” is it? Just like the answer to that eternal question, “Just how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” the answer to “What does ‘Cinematic’ mean?” may very well be, “The world may never know.”

Samouraïs Movie Review

Several months ago I was home at my parent’s home and on Showtime Beyond and I caught the end of a weird kung fu movie with some videogame elements. Curious I bought the dvd. Now, after sitting on my pile of films to watch I have finally watched that dvd. That movie is the French produced Samouraïs (i’m trying some fancy and yet shameless Amazon affiliate link thingy here. If you click on there and buy it I”ll get 8¢!).
Basically, like most French produced kung fu movies, of which this is the only one I’m aware, it is pretty weird. The reviews are not kind. Basically, there is a demon who was brought to Earth 500 years ago, which gives us a chance for some samurai action — hense the title — and then we go to the present day where the demon is going to be reborn into the ancestor of the person that brought the demon to Earth in the first place. That woman happens to be in France where she runs into our generic hero and his highly irritating sidekick. I’m sure that said sidekick will soo bee sued by Dustin Diamond for stealing his Screech character and demeaning it of all self-respect.
The videogame part comes in when the generic hero’s little brother plays a game based on the demon and takes control of the generic hero so that he can beat the demon. The game looks like original PlayStation-era graphics but, for once, videogames aren’t shown as evil or negative. In fact they are the only way that the demon is beaten.
Without the videogame content, the film is very forgettable. With it, it is only interesting as a footnote. I give it three thumbs up.
And now, my trademarked review haiku:
Samouraïs is bad
and it made me want to screech
poor Dustin Diamond

Lo Wang meet Tommy Hawk

LIke lots of people, I’ve recently played the Prey demo. Coincidentally, just a couple days before the Prey demo came out, I also started playing Shadow Warrior. While Shadow Warrior came out in the late 90s and Prey hasn’t came out yet (although it has quite a long history and was originally conceived around the same time as Shadow Warrior), there are a lot of interesting similarities besides the obvious fact that they were both spearheaded by 3D Realms (although Prey was produced by Human Head, it was 3D Realms that originated the project).
While going from the venerable Build Engine to the currently state-of-the-art Doom 3 Engine was quite a jolt, and Prey’s portals and gravity-flipping were quite fun, beyond the visuals, the other details haven’t changed that much. Shadow Warrior is over-the-top and full of intentionally stereotypical depictions of Asians. To give an indication of the humor included in the game, the main character’s name is Lo Wang and like his spiritual predecessor, Duke Nukem, he has lots of witty phrases. On some level it is pretty offensive, and mixes Japanese elements such as ninjas with Chinese elements, but it is so over the top and cartoony it is hard to get worked up about it. I mean it’s no Showdown in LIttle Tokyo or anything.
Prey stars a Cherokee man by the name of Tommy Hawk, which, not as bad as Lo Wang, is still a lame pun, who gets sucked up into a UFO along with his grandfather and girlfriend (who spends the whole demo screaming “Help me! Help me!” in a way that would make Princess Peach embarrassed. Although the elements in the demo try to play the Cherokee heritage straight and respectfully, they end up with something that has a lot more in common with Shadow Warrior’s level of accuracy than it has different from it. Metafuture has already covered it in their article, “Your Guide To The Cherokee People” so the only thing I will add is this: When Tommy dies he goes to his ancestral homeland. Who knew that The US South was a dessert full of buttes?

FIlms are inherently inferior to videogames!

The title of this post is meant as hyperbole. While there are exceptions where such comparisons are useful, I honestly believe that most comparisons between film and games are pointless. A great number of comparisons are simply people who don’t play or understand games saying little more than, “These damn kids today! Why back in my day…” or people who do play games wanting to feel as if their pastime was valid in the eyes of those who don’t play games. Personally, when it comes to entertainment, I don’t really care what people think about the things I like. I mean, I’m basing my graduate school career on videogames and the last conference paper I presented was titled, “If You Don’t Respect the Verbal Artistry of Professional Wrestling, I’ll Kick Your Ass!” so it isn’t as if I”m banging on the door of the gates of Art with a capital A begging to be let in.
However, a post on Shacknews with the title, “Steven Spielberg to Make Us Cry?” got me thinking about just how unfair such comparisons are. The article includes the Spielberg quote, “I think the real indicator [that games have become a storytelling art form] will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17. In light of the reposting of this quote and the fairly recent pontificating by Roger Ebert on how much films suck, I thought it might be fun to turn things around and see how well films come out when criticized using videogame standards…

I think that the real indicator that films have become a viceral art form is when someone feels a sense of accomplishment and pride for having finished watching a film. While it is true one may feel a sense of pride for having endured a film that is particularly bad or painful, until films can give viewers a sense of pride not from that enduring, but from the triumphant conclusion of the film, they simply will not be as good as videogames.
While films are quire successful in economic term — although people often claim that videogames are a bigger business than the Hollywood film industry, that only discusses domestic box office sales. When one takes in international box office sales, DVD sales, and revenue from cable and the various licencing deals, Hollywood dwarfs the gaming industry — films are simply not as viceral or as captivating as videogames. WHile there are films that can cause people to cry, to laugh, to be scared or other emotions, that sense of pride and accomplishment is lacking. Moreover, while there are films that people watch again and again, not even the most well loved film is watched as much or for as long a time as the most loved videogame. Online games from Counter-Strike, to Everquest were first released years ago and although they have both received subsequent upgrades, the core game remains and there are still thousands of people who play them hours a day on an almost daily basis. While devoting the equivalent of a 40+ hour workweek to a game may be a form of addiction, if one were to devote 40+ hours a week to watching the same film, it would surely be a sign of a much much deeper problem than any non-physical addiction such as gaming playing.
The fact that these games are online raises another point in which films are simply inferior entertainments to videogames. Such games, whether they are online or played via LAN or with consoles, are inherently social. The same cannot be said of films. While people often go to the theater and watch films in groups of friends or even strangers, in the vast majority of cases, the actual watching is done on an individual basis. ONe may not be alone but, at least in most western contexts, any sustantive communications with other people in the same room are minimal. In multiplayer games, communication is the key to success. These games build the kind of efficient and meaningful communication that films can only dream of. Numerous relationships in these games have resulted in marriage. It is difficult to imagine how two people that have never met before watching a film and had no contact outside of the time the film was being watched could fall in love.
Moreover, the fact that there are professional game playing teams indicates that playing these games could easily be said to develop teamwork. Again, I find it hard to imagine how watching films could be said to either require or develop teamwork if watched in the typical fashion. SImilarly, if one could imagine competitive film watching where people were paid simply on the basis of their film watching skills — and not on how well they could write about having watched films — then that person has a more creative imagination than I.
This is just a brief overview, but from this is should be clear why films are inherently inferior to videogames.

See how easy it is to totally ignore the merits of one medium when comparing it to another? I”m not attempting to say that such comparisons are entirely meritless because of this. I am attempting to say that while it is good to occasionally point out the failings or deficiencies of current videogames, it is not good to focus on those weakness to such an extent that we forget the things that current games are good at and that films are not the final word in entertainment.