It's been a long time since the last update (what happened to October?), so this post is extra long in an attempt to catch up.
In
a world in which interplanetary conflicts play out on screens, the
government needs commanders who will never shrug off their campaigns as
merely “virtual.” These same commanders must feel the stakes of their
simulated battles to be as high as actual warfare (because, of course,
they are). Card’s book makes the nostalgic claim that children are
useful because they are innocent. Hood’s movie leaves nostalgia by the
roadside, making the more complex assertion that they are useful because
of their unique socialization to be intimately involved with, rather
than detached from, simulations.
- In the ongoing discourse about games criticism and its relation to film reviews, Bob Chipman's latest Big Picture post uses his own review of the Ender's Game
film as an entry point for a breathless treatise on criticism. The
video presents a concise and nuanced overview of arts criticism, from
the classical era through film reviews as consumer reports up to the
very much in-flux conceptions of games criticism. Personally I find
this video sub-genre (where spoken content is crammed into a Tommy gun
barrage of word bullets so that the narrator can convey a lot of
information in a short running time) irritating and mostly worthless,
since the verbal information is being presented faster than the listener
can really process it. It reminds me of Film Crit Hulk,
someone who writes excellent essays with obvious insight into
filmmaking, but whose aesthetic choice (or "gimmick") to write in all
caps is often a distraction from the content and a deterrent to readers.
Film Crit Hulk has of course addressed this issue and explained the rationale for this choice,
but considering that his more recent articles have dropped the
third-person "Hulk speak" writing style the all caps seems to be played
out. Nevertheless, I'm sharing the video because Mr. Chipman makes a
lot of interesting points, particularly regarding the cultural contexts
for the various forms of criticism. Just remember to breathe deeply and
monitor your heart rate while watching.
- This video from Satchbag's Goods is ostensibly a review ofHotline Miami, but develops into a discussion of art movements and Kanye West:
- This short interview with Slavoj Žižek in New York magazine continues a trend I've noticed since Pervert's Guide to Ideology
has been releasing, wherein writers interviewing Žižek feel compelled
to include themselves and their reactions to/interactions with Žižek
into their article. Something about a Žižek encounter brings out the
gonzo in journalists. The NY mag piece is also notable for this succinct
positioning of Žižek's contribution to critical theory:
Žižek,
after all, the Yugoslav-born, Ljubljana-based academic and Hegelian;
mascot of the Occupy movement, critic of the Occupy movement; and former
Slovenian presidential candidate, whose most infamous contribution to
intellectual history remains his redefinition of ideology from a Marxist
false consciousness to a Freudian-Lacanian projection of the
unconscious. Translation: To Žižek, all politics—from communist to
social-democratic—are formed not by deliberate principles of freedom, or
equality, but by expressions of repressed desires—shame, guilt, sexual
insecurity. We’re convinced we’re drawing conclusions from an
interpretable world when we’re actually just suffering involuntary
psychic fantasies.
Following the development of the environment on the team's blog
you can see some of the gaps between what data was deemed noteworthy or
worth recording in the seventeenth century and the level of detail we
now expect in maps and other infographics. For example, the team
struggled to pinpoint the exact location on Pudding Lane of the bakery
where the Great Fire of London is thought to have originated and so just
ended up placing it halfway along.
- Stephen Totilo reviewed the new pirate-themed Assassin's Creed game
for the New York Times. I haven't played the game, but I love that the
sections of the game set in the present day have shifted from the
standard global conspiracy tropes seen in the earlier installments to
postmodern self-referential and meta-fictional framing:
Curiously,
a new character is emerging in the series: Ubisoft itself, presented
mostly in the form of self-parody in the guise of a fictional video game
company, Abstergo Entertainment. We can play small sections as a
developer in Abstergo’s Montreal headquarters. Our job is to help turn
Kenway’s life — mined through DNA-sniffing gadgetry — into a mass-market
video game adventure. We can also read management’s emails. The team
debates whether games of this type could sell well if they focused more
on peaceful, uplifting moments of humanity. Conflict is needed, someone
argues. Violence sells.
It turns out that Abstergo is also a front
for the villainous Templars, who search for history’s secrets when not
creating entertainment to numb the population. In these sections,
Ubisoft almost too cheekily aligns itself with the bad guys and
justifies its inevitable 2015 Assassin’s Creed, set during yet another
violent moment in world history.
- Speaking of
postmodern, self-referential, meta-fictional video games: The Stanley
Parable was released late last month. There has already been a bevy of
analysis written about the game, but I am waiting for the Mac release to
play the game and doing my best to avoid spoilers in the meantime.
Brenna Hillier's post at VG24/7 is spoiler free (assuming you are at
least familiar with the games premise, or its original incarnation as a
Half Life mod), and calls The Stanley parable "a reaction against, commentary upon, critique and celebration of narrative-driven game design":
The
Stanley Parable wants you to think about it. The Stanley Parable,
despite its very limited inputs (you can’t even jump, and very few
objects are interactive) looks at those parts of first-person gaming
that are least easy to design for – exploration and messing with the
game’s engine – and foregrounds them. It takes the very limitations of
traditional gaming narratives and uses them to ruthlessly expose their
own flaws.
Roy’s
research focus prior to founding Bluefin, and continued interest while
running the company, has to do with how both artificial and human
intelligences learn language. In studying this process, he determined
that the most important factor in meaning making was the interaction
between human beings: non one learns language in a vacuum, after all.
That lesson helped inform his work at Twitter, which started with
mapping the connection between social network activity and live
broadcast television.
Aspiring
to cinematic qualities is not bad in an of itself, nor do I mean to
shame fellow game writers, but developers and their attendant press tend
to be myopic in their point of view, both figuratively and literally.
If we continually view videogames through a monocular lens, we miss much
of their potential. And moreover, we begin to use ‘cinematic’
reflexively without taking the time to explain what the hell that word
means.
Metaphor is a powerful tool. Thinking videogames through
other media can reframe our expectations of what games can do, challenge
our design habits, and reconfigure our critical vocabularies. To crib a
quote from Andy Warhol, we get ‘a new idea, a new look, a new sex, a
new pair of underwear.’ And as I hinted before, it turns out that
fashion and videogames have some uncanny similarities.
Zombies
started their life in the Hollywood of the 1930s and ‘40s as simplistic
stand-ins for racist xenophobia. Post-millennial zombies have been
hot-rodded by Danny Boyle and made into a subversive form of utopia.
That grim utopianism was globalized by Max Brooks, and now Brad Pitt and
his partners are working to transform it into a global franchise. But
if zombies are to stay relevant, it will rely on the shambling monsters'
ability to stay subversive – and real subversive shocks and terror are
not dystopian. They are utopian.
Ironically,
our bodies now must make physical contact with devices dictating access
to the real; Apple’s Touch ID sensor can discern for the most part if
we are actually alive. This way, we don’t end up trying to find our
stolen fingers on the black market, or prevent others from 3D scanning
them to gain access to our lives.
This is a monumental shift from
when Apple released its first iPhone just six years ago. It’s a touchy
subject: fingerprinting authentication means we confer our trust in an
inanimate object to manage our animate selves - our biology is verified,
digitised, encrypted, as they are handed over to our devices.
Can
you really buy heroin on the Web as easily as you might purchase the
latest best-seller from Amazon? Not exactly, but as the FBI explained in
its complaint, it wasn't exactly rocket science, thanks to Tor and some
bitcoins. Here's a rundown of how Silk Road worked before the feds
swooped in.
- Henry Jenkins posted the transcript of an interview with Mark J.P. Wolf. The theme of the discussion is "imaginary worlds," and they touch upon the narratology vs. ludology conflict in gaming:
The
interactivity vs. storytelling debate is really a question of the
author saying either “You choose” (interaction) or “I choose”
(storytelling) regarding the events experienced; it can be all of one or
all of the other, or some of each to varying degrees; and even when the
author says “You choose”, you are still choosing from a set of options
chosen by the author. So it’s not just a question of how many choices
you make, but how many options there are per choice. Immersion,
however, is a different issue, I think, which does not always rely on
choice (such as immersive novels), unless you want to count “Continue
reading” and “Stop reading” as two options you are constantly asked to
choose between.