07.17.08 Tale of Tale of Tales
I just found out that The Endless Forest existed, and I'm greatly intrigued. I've been saying for a while now that an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) somewhere between World of Warcraft and Second Life could find the happy medium that would get me to play and enjoy it regularly, and I think that developers Tale of Tales are on the right track. A simple game geared around exploration and very basic communication, with just a touch of magic thrown in, is something online gaming is tailor-made for. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so.
07.14.08 On Not Chasing that Big Ending Chord
After a few recent discussions about life, personal fulfillment, and the fear of missing out on that fulfillment, I was glad to come across this little piece of Alan Watts wisdom, nicely illustrated by the South Park guys:
07.10.08 Grand Theft Arguments, Part II
In my previous post about Grand Theft Auto IV and the boy-this-looks-familiar controversy that accompanied its release, I spoke a bit about how difficult it can be for someone to understand the real themes and tone of a videogame when they've never played it. This gap in understanding, not just of individual games but of the medium as a whole, has led to a whole lot of controversies that might otherwise have been avoided.
But some controversies aren't simply a matter of misinformation or jumping to conclusions. There are plenty of legitimate concerns to be had about videogames that allow players to engage in disturbing acts. My question is, when someone performs an action in a video game, how do we delegate responsibility for that action? How does the player's complicity compare to that of the game designers, or even of the math-driven artificial intelligence controlling the in-game characters?
But some controversies aren't simply a matter of misinformation or jumping to conclusions. There are plenty of legitimate concerns to be had about videogames that allow players to engage in disturbing acts. My question is, when someone performs an action in a video game, how do we delegate responsibility for that action? How does the player's complicity compare to that of the game designers, or even of the math-driven artificial intelligence controlling the in-game characters?
06.30.08 2008, Part II
All right folks, tomorrow is the first day of July, which will put us halfway through Anno Domini two thousand and eight. I know you're all eagerly awaiting to hear a detailed list of my random goals for the rest of the year (who isn't?); never one to disappoint, I'm going to take this six-month mark as an opportunity to provide the World Wide Internet with just that. My Life Coach strongly supports this move, but my therapist is against it, and my other therapist is still on the fence, so rather than wait and hear back from my Psychotonomy sponsor I'm going to take a page out of the Eleven Strategies for Higher Living seminar series and use my own Power Initiative to make the decision myself. Without further ado...
"...thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won't have to die...I'll pass away. Or I'll expire like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital, they'll call it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient-care outcome. And if it's the result of malpractice, they'll say it was a therapeutic misadventure. I'm telling you, some of this language makes me want to vomit. Well, maybe not vomit. Makes me want to engage in an involuntary personal protein spill."
- George Carlin 1937-2008
- George Carlin 1937-2008
06.06.08 Garkov's Gun
I am way, way too entertained by this.
Is it poetry? A minimalist approach to humor? Or just a bunch of Dada noise?
Is it poetry? A minimalist approach to humor? Or just a bunch of Dada noise?
06.04.08 Grand Theft Arguments, Part I
A short while ago, gaming blog Kotaku featured a defense of Grand Theft Auto IV posted by Leigh Alexander in rebuttal of an earlier criticism of the game's alleged misogyny on Feministing.com. It's worth a read, as Alexander addresses a lot of the controversy surrounding the game beyond just the Feministing post and makes a compelling argument. I read both Kotaku and Feministing on a regular basis, which made this debate particularly interesting to me, and it got me thinking about the relationship between my political and social views and the entertainment I consume and enjoy. But more than that, it got me thinking about the problems that arise when people argue about videogames.
05.28.08 Beyond Superman
In Reinventing Comics, the second in Scott McCloud's highly recommended [Blank] Comics series of deconstructions of the medium, the author laments the fact that women have not traditionally had a large presence in the creation of comics. Much as film, television, and videogame production have a certain boy's-club stigma about them that makes it difficult for female writers and artists to break through (let alone achieve the high level of esteem someone like Martin Scorsese or the Coen Brothers enjoy), comics as an industry can seem impenetrably male-dominated, especially in the ever-visible superhero arena.
Maybe it's just me, but I think this has changed a great deal for the better in recent years, and I think this has a lot to do with webcomics. Somewhere around the time when we stopped having to wait two hours for our steam-powered dial-up modems to download a fuzzy, indistinct bitmaps of Internet artwork, the Web started looking simultaneously prettier and uglier as images flooded into its many straits and canals. It didn't take long for aspiring nobodies like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik to realize that there was great potential for self-promoted independent comics to find an audience on the Web, and to do so without having to deal with any traditional editorial or monetary constraints. A lot of people, myself included, have hoped ever since that point that the Internet would bring about a new democratization of creative ideas and content, a culture in which artists would try new and bold things without any nervous executives hovering behind them, worrying about their job security.
So far, we've seen some hopeful glimpses of such a culture, and some discouragements, but I for one have come to closely follow a number of creators I might never have heard about if they were working two decades ago. And a number of them are women: in just the last six months I've found my way to Meredith Gran, Kate Beaton, and most recently, Rene Engstrom. It's quickly ceasing to be a novelty that female artists like these not only regularly produce comics but have gathered some substantial followings for them, despite or perhaps because of the fact that they are far more eclectic than anything you'll see in a newspaper these days.
It's not just on the Web, of course; Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel have been receiving some well-deserved attention in recent years for their work, which is reflective not just of womens' increasing presence in comics but of the increasing perceived legitimacy of comics as a meaningful art form (something we're beginning to see with videogames, another much-maligned new medium, slowly but surely). Oscar nominations and Best Book of the Year awards are encouraging, and I'd love to see more.
It may seem retrograde to treat it as impressive that women (gasp) can be talented and successful at such things as writing and drawing, especially nearly ten years after Dorothy Gambrell introduced the Internet to a cat and a girl, and three decades after Lynn Johnston started penning For Better or For Worse (not to mention about a million years since Mary Shelley more or less invented science fiction). But we still live in a troubling world in which diatribes about women not being funny are considered Vanity Fair material and Hillary Clinton's wardrobe is somehow even remotely significant in a race for the most powerful office in the world. Any movement away from this world into one that treats gender as something other than a system of handicaps for one party is a baby step I will happily support.
Maybe it's just me, but I think this has changed a great deal for the better in recent years, and I think this has a lot to do with webcomics. Somewhere around the time when we stopped having to wait two hours for our steam-powered dial-up modems to download a fuzzy, indistinct bitmaps of Internet artwork, the Web started looking simultaneously prettier and uglier as images flooded into its many straits and canals. It didn't take long for aspiring nobodies like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik to realize that there was great potential for self-promoted independent comics to find an audience on the Web, and to do so without having to deal with any traditional editorial or monetary constraints. A lot of people, myself included, have hoped ever since that point that the Internet would bring about a new democratization of creative ideas and content, a culture in which artists would try new and bold things without any nervous executives hovering behind them, worrying about their job security.
So far, we've seen some hopeful glimpses of such a culture, and some discouragements, but I for one have come to closely follow a number of creators I might never have heard about if they were working two decades ago. And a number of them are women: in just the last six months I've found my way to Meredith Gran, Kate Beaton, and most recently, Rene Engstrom. It's quickly ceasing to be a novelty that female artists like these not only regularly produce comics but have gathered some substantial followings for them, despite or perhaps because of the fact that they are far more eclectic than anything you'll see in a newspaper these days.
It's not just on the Web, of course; Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel have been receiving some well-deserved attention in recent years for their work, which is reflective not just of womens' increasing presence in comics but of the increasing perceived legitimacy of comics as a meaningful art form (something we're beginning to see with videogames, another much-maligned new medium, slowly but surely). Oscar nominations and Best Book of the Year awards are encouraging, and I'd love to see more.
It may seem retrograde to treat it as impressive that women (gasp) can be talented and successful at such things as writing and drawing, especially nearly ten years after Dorothy Gambrell introduced the Internet to a cat and a girl, and three decades after Lynn Johnston started penning For Better or For Worse (not to mention about a million years since Mary Shelley more or less invented science fiction). But we still live in a troubling world in which diatribes about women not being funny are considered Vanity Fair material and Hillary Clinton's wardrobe is somehow even remotely significant in a race for the most powerful office in the world. Any movement away from this world into one that treats gender as something other than a system of handicaps for one party is a baby step I will happily support.
04.07.08 You Maniacs
Somehow I missed this yesterday, but Charlton Heston has died at age 84.
Let the "from my cold dead hands" jokes proceed.
Let the "from my cold dead hands" jokes proceed.
02.14.08 The Punch that Might Have Been
Ever have an idea that you liked, but never acted upon, only to find one day that someone had already beat you to the punch? Here was mine.
To be fair, I never had the resources to do this myself, but I actually considered talking to a design school like the Art Institute and seeing if I could arrange for a class credit for 3D modelers and game designers if they helped on the project. Of course, in my mind the final product would be distributed via the Web, either as a free download, or better yet as an application that you could run directly in a web browser. This one major difference doesn't completely kill my idea, but all the same...
To be fair, I never had the resources to do this myself, but I actually considered talking to a design school like the Art Institute and seeing if I could arrange for a class credit for 3D modelers and game designers if they helped on the project. Of course, in my mind the final product would be distributed via the Web, either as a free download, or better yet as an application that you could run directly in a web browser. This one major difference doesn't completely kill my idea, but all the same...
