Brett's Footnotes¹

January 04, 2008

Of Herzog and Hercules

Jouko Ahola is not your typical actor. Ahola was a professional strongman in the late nineties, he's Finnish and holds world records in things like how far one can carry a car, which is something for which I didn't even know one could hold a world record¹. Needless to say, he's a bit on the built side, but not in a purely flashy sense. He looks strong, not merely toned or defined, but seriously strong. I gather he's retired from strongman competitions now and focusing more on his acting career, as far as that goes, but he still serves as a judge in strongest man competitions in Europe as well.

Hollywood knows exactly what to do with people like these, and I'd argue that so would the gaming industry, if we used live actors, but we'll get to that in a bit. Hollywood has had several folks like Ahola come along, but the most well-known is almost certainly Arnold Schwarzeneggar. As Arnold Strong, Schwarzeneggar played to type in his first film, Hercules in New York². He went off and did a few character roles in TV and in B movies, and also starred in a couple of bodybuilding-related movies, one a documentary. Beyond that, I suppose his English improved enough to give him an opportunity to be a star, so he returned five years later in Conan the Barbarian. You see the pattern. Lou Ferrigno was similar (though I gather a speech impediment limited his opportunities) and certainly since then there have been others.

Ahola's case was a bit different from the general Hollywood vein. He was cast in a movie by Werner Herzog, the iconoclastic German director of such famous films as Stroszek, Aguirre: Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo, amongst many others (e.g. the documentary Grizzly Man), this list primarily taken from those I've seen in the last couple of years. When Invincible turned up in my queue I remembered having added it primarily on the recommendation of Netflix, which suggests films for me based on patterns in the hundreds or thousands of films I've rated on their site. I knew pretty much nothing about it, except that it featured Tim Roth on the DVD cover art.

In the film, Ahola portrays a blacksmith's son who, by virtue of his immense strength, is recruited into the entertainment industry. This is all well and good except that Ahola lives in a Jewish shtetl in Poland and will be performing feats of strength disguised as an Aryan for Nazi party members early in their rise to power. The role is stunningly against type, and yet absolutely requires someone of immense build and strength to portray convincingly³. The character, Zishe Breitbart, goes on to attempt to unite the shtetls of Poland against the coming conflict based on a vision he has, and fails; how and why I won't reveal.

I'm certainly not going to claim that men of certain types should play against those types all of the time; indeed, if they did, I'd probably be writing a different article in which I ask if it wouldn't be refreshing for a strong man to occasionally play a barbarian or something. But it takes someone like Herzog to come along and take someone with huge physical gifts, such as Ahola, and find an entirely different kind of story to tell with him. Herzog is someone outside of the system, someone with a unique vision, and he is always telling stories about men like that.

I mention this in the blog because of course, we in the games industry more or less always play to type. Consider Kratos.

Let me say right off the bat that I loved the God of War games. Loved them both. I thought that the second improved on the first considerably, and that the storyline of each was wonderful⁴, though I also admit that the storyline of the second one is sticking with me less than the first. Great fun. A blast. Just like one of Schwarzeneggar's best movies -- packed with action, wall-to-wall fun. Kratos is clearly built from the ground up to be some kind of mythic superhero -- incomparably strong, muscles rippling as he moves, able to convincingly rip mythological beasts in half or limb from limb. It wouldn't work if he looked like Guybrush; form should follow function. Since our character-based games are primarily action games, our characters are built around that. This is certainly fair, and I'm not arguing against that. Kratos absolutely should look like the ultimate bad-ass, as the fiction which surrounds his game play requires it. Additionally, we are lucky in that we don't have to find actors to do these things; we get to build them and have them do whatever we want.

However, the tales we tell about characters as strong as Kratos are not the only tales we should be telling. I'd still like to see us have the potential to build games around physically strong characters that aren't simply there for the violence route. In Invincible, there's a kind of poignancy that develops because as physically strong as Zishe Breitbart is, dozens or hundreds of him couldn't have stopped the Nazi juggernaut that was to follow, and in fact, his greatest strengths originate in his love for his family, which is tenderly portrayed, and which ultimately leads to the downfall of Roth's character. In a way, Herzog is hinting that perhaps that kind of strength amongst the German population as a whole might have been enough to stop the horrors that were to follow, in a sort of cinematic echo of Martin Niemöller's famous poem, "First they came...". Zishe's strength is enough to open the door to get others to listen to him; his bulk is enough to make people take notice of him. His doomed heroism comes from the fact that he uses that notice to try to affect change, to mount a defense against what he sees is coming.

We build our characters to fill roles based on the stories we are trying to tell. It would be nice if, on occasion, we could find new functions for the forms we use again and again.

Here's hoping you'll soon see me in this space talking about Rod Humble's The Marriage.

¹If anyone can turn up information about what kind of car and such, I admit I'm curious. I can't find any pictures of him doing it, but it's listed on his official site. (back)

² Apparently, this is abysmal. I've never seen it, even knowing I was going to be writing this article, I didn't try and track it down. There are some lengths to which I will not go even for my blog :) (back)

³A little research turns up the fact that Ahola did all of his own lifts in the movie, which were prodigious. (back)

⁴Actually, I felt the first one had such great stuff in it that I even blogged about it. (back)

Additional thoughts

Several other thoughts occurred to me while I was writing this, and not all of them fit in cleanly (or diluted what I had to say). Here are a few of those thoughts:

• Characters are expensive. I realize that building and animating a character in this day and age is an expensive proposition. Modeling times are up, skeletons are more complex, and therefore building and animating takes longer and longer. Fewer people would play games that explored stories like that of Zishe Breitbart, just as fewer people have seen Invincible than have seen the Bourne movies. These are market facts. Any team looking to pursue something more fulfilling narratively would have to budget accordingly. As a player, I'm willing to let my mind fill in the gaps in the animation and modeling, if you give me a story which demands it of me, which could be a whole post all of its own.
• Narratology vs. ludology. I recently read over in Brenda Braithwaite's blog about her switch from narratology to ludology. And I've recently played Rod Humble's game, The Marriage, and will be posting about that separately. My feeling is that to get at deeper emotional issues through gameplay alone may be doomed for a long time to come; at the very least, some cultural signifiers may be required to put the player in the frame of mind to get your message. This is relevant to the discussion at hand because I remain primarily a "story guy" when it comes to games; I agree with Tadgh Kelly that fiction is important. I just want to see more fictions.
• An example of form. All of this above speaks particularly of one type of body; I'm working from a specific movie to talk about a particular type of body and how it's generally used or portrayed. That said, it's clear that developers have already taken this lesson to heart in one other area... Clearly the women in games are mainly designed as strippers, and yet fill any number of roles in our games.
• Herzog and Herakles. In thinking about this topic and digging into Herzog a little bit, I discovered that he made a short film at the very beginning of his career entitled Herakles. I point this out because I find it ironic; the title for this article was set long before I checked out all of Herzog's filmography. It's interesting too, in that the short film portrays bodybuilders alongside various shots of wreckage set in the modern day (with intertitles asking about the Herculean Labors). I haven't seen the film, so I can't comment on it directly, but I couldn't let that go unremarked.

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:49 PM | Comments (3)

August 13, 2007

Anecdotal Evidence Suggests Review Inflation Starts Young

So, yesterday I took the boys to see Underdog in the theater¹.

Afterwards, over dinner², we had a brief conversation about how the movies we've seen were. I asked them, on a scale of ten, what they thought of the movies we've seen this summer.

Film Scores By Child

Movie	Luc	Jordan
Simpsons	10	10
Underdog	9.5	9.75
Ratatouille	9.5	9.5

Wow. So, our three movies (that we've seen in the last few weeks) are averaging a staggering 9.71 on a ten point scale! Amazing! The quality of the Hollywood movie is apparently reaching new heights!

¹Underdog was obviously not my first choice for myself, it was for them, and appeared vastly superior to Daddy Day Camp, which I've refused. I didn't have any Bergman at home when I came back, so instead I watched a German movie with Franka Potente, reteamed with the director of Run Lola Run. (It's not as good as RLR, but better than Underdog, anyway.) (back)
²Sundays have sort of turned into our dinner and a movie day -- often we'll grab a bite to eat afterwards. This time, we went to the "Café Rio Grande" nearby and I had frog's legs for the first time. A little chewy, but not bad tasting! (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:59 PM | Comments (7)

July 31, 2007

The Blog is Black Today

For Ingmar Bergman is dead.

We can only hope he's off playing chess somewhere.

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:26 AM | Comments (2)

July 30, 2007

The Long View

It is 46 minutes into The Station Agent when Finbar McBride, the main character, finally smiles, really smiles, in a genuine and unguarded way. This is slightly more than halfway through the film, and it's nearly another 6 minutes before anyone laughs.

(A small note: Previously, I've tended to put spoiler announcements near the top of my posts. I'm going to stop doing so; caveat lector.)

That smile is sublime. The movie opens up like an egg cracking into a frying pan, and starts to sizzle, starts to cook; up until then, the egg has been cradled along, protected, brought up close to room temperature so that everything is just right when it hits the pan. Six minutes later, he laughs. Breakfast is served.

Finbar McBride is a bit of an enigma. He's a dwarf who works in a hobbyist railroad specialty shop, and he has built up a wall around himself due to the way people often treat him, even unintentionally and always unthinkingly¹. He leads a fairly narrow life: he apparently has exactly one friend, and he has his job, and his hobby, which is railroads and trains, but pretty much nothing else. And when that one friend dies and leaves him a small ticket station beside a railway line East of Nowhere, New Jersey, it looks almost certain that he'll withdraw as completely as possible from the world and become a full-time hermit².

A couple of chance encounters, though, and quite a lot more time, and he begins to come out of his shell. Those sudden and poignant moments -- an unguarded smile, a laugh -- and the events which follow, and the audience's emotional connection with the characters, are only possible because of the slow, slow build-up, the establishment of the emotional landscape that Fin McBride has built for himself.

Compare this with a game, where we are constantly told that we need to push the big experience in the first five or ten minutes of play³.

Now, I know that's an oversimplification. Certainly, we don't really expect every game to have a literal "big experience" in the first few minutes of play. But certainly we expect that from our action games, our role-playing games, even our platformers, and er... our shooters, and ... hmmm. Maybe it's not too big an oversimplification, at least not in the types of games I generally play.

To be fair, there are a couple of exceptions that spring to mind (both of the Half-Life games, but particularly the second, where the sense of atmosphere generated by that walk through the train station is simply amazing, and in the opening cutscene of Metal Gear Solid). But these are comparatively rare and exceptional.

Fair enough: I can't think of many significant action movies that don't start off with a bang, that don't try to get the adrenaline going in the first ten minutes (and that stand up as action movies)⁴. I really think this is an underlying issue with respect to games and the types of experiences they can pull off. And I'm not just talking about character studies, or deeper emotions, or making the player cry (even though I touch on those in the blog all the time).

How about laughter?

Comedy takes time to set up -- having just seen This is Spinal Tap on the big screen again, I was reminded that while there are lots of throw-away lines in that movie, the lines that get the big laughs, and that you remember, all take a long time to set up. "But these go to eleven" comes after a couple of minutes of set-up, and that's certainly not the only example. We have a hard time doing this in games, not just because we abdicate some authorial control to the player but because we don't have the patience to set-up for the big payoff. Most of our jokes are short, referential, and forgettable. We who played them remember adventure games so fondly not because of the puzzles (though certainly folks will have their favorites), but because of the comedy -- the slower pace made for better jokes⁵.

A good counterexample to this would probably be The Simpsons Movie, which I saw yesterday with my boys. I laughed a lot in that movie, but primarily at one-liners that a) soared over my sons' heads (particularly one about the Kennedy compound, which had me in stitches, but which I would be hard-pressed to recall even now), or b) I forgot more-or-less immediately after I laughed at them. The one sight gag I can remember finding pretty funny only worked for me because of how it was set up; it involved some hoof-marks on the ceiling.

In any case, I have no prescription for this, particularly given the rising cost of developing games, except to encourage folks to take a long view. Hire that writer to tie the whole story arc together and maybe even inject some humor into the story, to be able to set up the payoff two levels away because he's got the longer view. Or maybe your producer can be keeping his eye on that. But find a way. Your audience will thank you, and you'll find you have more tools in your toolbox than you realized.

You can even leave those first ten minutes just the way they are, if you just find ways to tie bits of those first ten minutes together with stuff that happens 20 minutes later. This might be a way to make games that much more memorable, and to reach emotional areas we haven't found it easy to touch on...

See you back in this space soon, when we talk about Herzog and Hercules.

¹Full disclosure: It should be noted that there's also an awful moment where a cashier at a grocery store quite literally overlooks poor Finbar. I had nearly this same very moment when I worked as a grocery clerk myself one summer. I was doing something with the register (putting in a new roll of receipt paper? or maybe cleaning the scale, which was up above? I don't recall) when I caught out of the corner of my eye a child-sized someone throw a pack of cigarettes up on the belt. As I turned, I started to say "Are you sure you're old enough to..." when I saw that she was a little person, and cut myself off, apologizing. I believe it was the most awkward moment I ever had in that grocery store with a customer; there were some other interesting encounters, but nothing so cringeworthy as that one. In my defense, I only saw her peripherally, and I don't know that I've ever encountered another person of short stature in my life -- they are relatively uncommon. Anyway; I think the collage of short scenes of alienation and unthinking offense probably are enough to make most people aware of a way in which they themselves once regrettably treated someone a bit different, which strengthens the film.(back)

²This first half in particular is a bit like a Jarmusch movie, I'd say, though the cinematography lacks his directorial touch. (back)

³I actually did a couple of searches on the 'tubes for a particular blog post I had read on this very issue, but I couldn't find it again due to the immense number of hits on actual videos of the first ten minutes of play of various games. Which may well substantiate my point. (back)

⁴One notable exception might be the heist genre, but that has a very specific formula all its own, if you can even call them action movies (sometimes you can, sometimes you can't). (back)

⁵Even a game I can remember laughing a lot in comparatively recently, Psychonauts, fails the memory test -- I can't really remember any specific funny lines in that game, even though I know I laughed out loud frequently. That's because none of them took long enough to set-up to lodge them in my brain. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 01:18 PM | Comments (5)

April 20, 2006

Industry in Crisis

Picture this industry in crisis. New technologies have driven costs higher -- and developing for these competing technologies can be very expensive. The new technology has required new means of production, new specialized expertise and skills, and expensive new equipment. At the same time, producers have lost touch with what will connect to the mainstream and sell enough to justify the increased costs, relying increasingly on selling through formula and spectacle as a way to reach more customers. Finally, government censorship is waiting in the wings, looking for an opening to clean out the industry of undesirable elements. It's a crucial time, and it could conceivably go either way.

The game industry? Hell, no. I'm talking about Hollywood in the late 50s and early 60s.

In a lot of ways, that was a critical time for the American film industry. I was listening to the Game Developers' Rant at GDC a few weeks ago, and Chris Hecker drew a possible connection between games and either film or comic books. Comic books, of course, took a fairly limited approach for a long, long time, doing the same thing again and again, and it's only in the last fifteen years or so that it's started to branch out further in the mainstream aspect of the business¹. Chris was saying that we have a lot more tools in the toolbox than simple adolescent power fantasy. I agree with him. More on that later, let's get back to the film industry.

I've been taking a class in the history of narrative film, primarily addressing the post-war years and largely focusing on world cinema, rather than Hollywood. As an exercise, however, the professor had us pick an American film from a short list representing what was going on in the 1950s here in Hollywood -- I chose How to Marry a Millionaire, with Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe², described as an exemplary comedy from the period.

Here's the crazy thing, though. It wasn't funny. Not really even a little bit.

Now, comedy is hard and maybe doesn't have a ton of longevity in a lot of cases as tastes change, but I was really struck by how singularly unfunny it was, with flat dialog and the sort of silly empty plot that makes Adam Sandler movies seem brilliant³
by comparison. Usually I can see what would have been funny, though, even if it's less funny now, and so I asked my professor about it. He said that what they were really selling was spectacle -- the idea of three single women sharing an apartment hunting for husbands, seeing Marilyn Monroe lying down on a bed, etc.

Selling spectacle over substance. That rings a little bit of a bell. So does taking a known quantity and trying to leverage it into some revenue with not a lot of extra work. Moving on.

The technology change I mentioned was really kind of two-fold: the move into color, but also the move into a wider format. There were several competing formats with their own strengths and weaknesses (most of which I can't remember off the top of my head), and each required different cameras for filming and different projectors in the theaters.

This certainly parallels the game industry quite a lot -- right now, we're looking at a transition for two systems going multicore, with greater storage capacities and a big push into HD display. Except now, it's not a couple of thousand theaters that need replacing, it's millions of TV sets that need to get the old heave-ho⁴, not to mention various new-wave DVD players and such. And the development costs grow substantially as well, trying to fill those new media, paralleling the similar increased camera costs and expertise required with the change to widescreen formats.

The other area where Hollywood was falling down was that it had no idea what was going to be a hit anymore. Sound of Music would be an enormous hit one year, and Dr. Dolittle a complete flop the next, despite a lot of similarities between those films in terms of form and genre. Even bankable stars weren't a guarantee -- Cleopatra nearly buried Twentieth Century Fox (much as New Line might have been buried if Peter Jackson's ship hadn't come in so well). Old formulas weren't guaranteed to work any more, lavish productions weren't enough to bring in the viewers, and Hollywood was stymied.

Folks who fail to note similarities with the game industry here should browse the bargain bins at their local game store a little more closely, or try to get their hands on the NPD stats every now and again.

I'm happy to note, however, that film survived all of this, even if Hollywood has been taking a bit of a hit in the last year or two, with ticket sales down⁵. One of the reasons film survived all of it, only to run into a crisis of another kind (maybe another post), was the growth of "non-Hollywood" films. There were two kinds of these.

The first were the films like Double Indemnity and other great noir films. These were originally shot as the B-reels -- the film you would stay and watch after the main feature was done -- and they often were written by embittered writers who had been blacklisted due to that government intervention I lightly touched upon above, HUAC and all that. These were groundbreaking films -- setting a visual look and almost auteurish feel in the sense of dealing grittily with particular themes (betrayal, lust, murder) that the mainstream pictures weren't touching with a ten foot pole.

The second were the international cinemas that were springing up all over after reconstruction from World War II, in Italy, France, Sweden, and Japan, to name a few. In some cases, these films were directly influenced by noir, particularly in France. It was the rise of the auteur, and of film's engagement with social (The Bicycle Thief) and philosophical (Rashomon, Bergman) questions.

What was great was that these films were successful, even finding an audience here in the States, an audience of literate filmgoers who were tired of feeling like they were being spoonfed movies by a committee somewhere. For example, France had an amazingly successful 1959, with The 400 Blows, Un Chien Andalou, and Breathless, which spawned an enormous investment of capital in France into filmmaking, since films in the New Wave style could be done much more cheaply than films in Hollywood. I won't say everything was a commercial success; but the French film industry wasn't a hit-driven business in the early 60s, it was a bastion of experimentation, lots of interesting films being made cheaply.

So, I guess all of this just makes me glad to see people trying to make in-roads with an indie aesthetic, or asking folks to consider making games that touch on the human condition, or trying to figure out how to draw in new markets, or to open up games to more player authorship. All of these were themes I heard this year at the GDC, alongside the mainline business.

The good news, is that it's a crisis that can be survived. We can conceive of moving away from a very hit-driven business, where lack of a hit for long enough will bury a company (Atari being just one recent example), and instead one which can identify markets and bring great product to them, even if those products have the interactive feel of "shaky-cam" to them, with lower production costs and perhaps shorter length. We can conceive of more of an auteur-driven business, with individuals trying to explore themes not typically seen in videogames, perhaps even touching on the human condition just a bit, as Jon Blow mentioned in his rant, and perhaps those will help us reach new markets and grab the center a little bit.

I'm so looking forward to what this industry can be if we become more like what happened with film, and less like what happened with comics.

¹There was, of course, a healthy underground comics movement before that, investigating other sorts of stories and approaches that could be taken with the medium, including R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar and certainlly lots of others. (back)
²I admit, I partially chose this movie because of Monroe. It was a little weird to have seen as many movies as I have and yet never have seen her in anything. I've since also seen The Seven-Year Itch which I liked somewhat more. I've been on a bit of a Billy Wilder kick lately, since seeing The Apartment (which I got because I had seen Double Indemnity in class). Since then I've also seen Irma La Douce and Sabrina and I have Some Like It Hot now. After that I'm probably done with Wilder for a while -- that seems to cover the greatest hits. Anyway.
³Okay, not that bad. But pretty damned bad. (back)
⁴Actually, I kind of wonder if there's a business or charitable effort in that; take the last gen's tech and TVs and distribute them to places that could use them, like kids' hospitals and stuff like that. You could hook up PS2s with the linux kit and have a nice little computer and display. But I digress. (back)
⁵This will likely make an updated format for theaters, such as digital projection, even harder to swallow. Good sales and marketing ("Having digital projection will bring in the marks!" or "You'll save on film costs!", both of which are probably bunk) may help with that, but it'll be interesting. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:34 PM | Comments (3)

December 03, 2005

Comparative Media: Prostitution

Over the last months I've had the opportunity to examine prostitution in a movie, a book, and a game, and I'd like to contrast the three.

The first portrayal was in Klute, directed by Alan Pakula and released in 1971, which makes it just as old as I am. Like me, the film moves a little slower than I'd like, is showing some wear and tear around the edges, and could probably use some trimming down, but there still are some decent bits. Jane Fonda's performance as Bree, the prostitute at the center of the mysterious disappearance of a small-town businessman who went missing in a visit to the big city, swept the major film awards for Best Actress in the year it came out, and it's still what holds the film together. We see her with Donald Sutherland (the titular gumshoe) in scenes filled with sexual tension -- she is frank, he is polite and not entirely naive, but certainly has a midwestern innocence about him.

Film, of course, is a primarily visual medium. There are a couple of interesting things about the direction and cinematography of the film which seem to be making statements about prostitution. The first is that many scenes are shot through windows -- the killer, before we are shown his identity¹, is frequently separated from Bree and Klute via a skylight window, watching them interact. We hear his heavy breathing and are reminded that in watching the tension in the scene, we are similar to the voyeur. I mention this because the technique of becoming a voyeur is relevant to the next medium, not so much to what I have to say about this one.

Enough about voyeurism: the other thing I saw a lot of in watching the film was that frequently Fonda/Bree was filmed against shadows which parallel her own figure or face, as if one of those Victorian portraits² has been enlarged and used to stencil the scene. This is set apart from Fonda enough that a wedge of light can be interposed in between her and her shadow. Writing that phrase, I think of Peter Pan and wonder if what Pakula was going for was to intimate that prostitutes are cut off permanently from their innocence, though I didn't think of the connection at the time. It might also be that Pakula is suggesting that Bree is dogged by the shadows of her life thus far everywhere she goes, that she always has the shadow-self lurking in the background.

It's immensely cool, from a visual perspective, that at the end of the film, the killer gets thrown through a window -- his body shadowed in the front and backlit by the window, unifying visual themes we've been seeing throughout the experience.

Pakula uses the visual language of film to explore some themes in prostitution; in another way, Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White³ explores (among other things) the first theme I discuss above, that of the voyeur to prostitution.

In a move that is very unusual, Faber's book is often narrated in the second person -- the reader is directly addressed as "you", and instructed to follow different characters around directly by the author/3rd-person omniscient narrator in this way. To paraphrase sections in the book, since I don't have a written copy handy, it's not uncommon to have the author say things like, "You've come to a decision -- should you follow so-and-so or stay here with our-original-focus? Don't worry, we'll return to our-focus later, let's watch what so-and-so will do next."

It's an interesting technique, no less because for much of the novel we are following a particular prostitute, her client (who becomes her sole client shortly after the opening of the novel -- indeed we never hear of her being with other clients except in flashbacks), and the wife of her client. We are reminded that as readers, we are voyeurs in much the way we are voyeurs in Pakula's film -- we are seeing scenes that we would ordinarily have no access to whatsoever.

There's much here about prostitution, as well. The novel is set in the Victorian era, a time when men held all social power⁴; prostitutes, while often seen as women who have fallen from grace, are more accurately described as women who have fought for survival amongst the treacherous social conditions of the time. Women, in the absence of men, had few options: work for an incredibly low wage doing back-breaking labor in a factory or sell themselves. It's not as stark as all that, but it might as well be.

The novel uses prostitution as a way to examine the interplay of two conflicting masculine desires -- the madonna and the whore, the wife/mother and the prostitute. In bringing in the reader almost as a participant, and certainly as a voyeur, via the use of second person techniques and description, the novel also asks readers to consider their own views on these desires, whatever the reader's gender. Certainly, it's not all that cut-and-dried, since a novel nearly 850 pages in length needs to spend a lot of time examining several themes from a lot of angles, but this is part of what's going on. In the end, we are left knowing that Faber's prostitutes have both mother and whore in them by the novel's final passages, and in a way, we are encouraged to view the former as the more important part of their natures.

This is the point in the essay where I start talking about the most well-known representation of prostitution in games -- that of the latest games in the Grand Theft Auto series.

The thing is, I don't have a lot to say; nor do the games. I've played the game enough to know what roles they fill; prostitutes in GTA are sources of health, they're sources of money, and they're mission objectives (as in the early mission to deliver some number of prostitutes to the Policeman's Ball). In other words, they are mostly reduced to mere mechanics, just pieces on the board.

This is perhaps appropriate to the character -- like Richard Stark's character Parker, the nameless protagonist of GTA3 may well see the prostitutes and all other things as merely steps on his way to something greater, rather than people with their own motivations and needs. Like that nameless protagonist, we're invited to see them the same way.

I rebel against this -- while I appreciate the freedom of the series and the design innovation it represents, I had a hard time with the play itself, and the theme. In fact, long before I had any need to visit a prostitute in-game to regain health, I had done the early Policeman's Ball mission, and it left me feeling kind of cold. It's not that other games (nor, indeed, other media) haven't treated cops as being as steeped in crime as the criminals themselves; it's more that I don't want to believe that of policemen generally -- I want to see them as people in difficult situations who are doing the best they can.

I guess what happens here is that there's a fundamental disconnect between me and the character I control, unlike that of a novel. Although The Crimson Petal and the White seeks to implicate me via its use of second person narration, the tension serves to remind me of my role as reader. In GTA, I'm repulsed because I don't want to view other people, even prostitutes, merely as means to an end⁵.

I've mentioned before that there are times when this disconnect is okay with me, when I can use facts about the character to drive me forward. But there really isn't any character in GTA3 that I control -- he doesn't have a voice, his face contains no detail, I don't even think he has a name. In the end, this means a game like GTA3 has nothing to say about prostitution, only about my status as a gamer, and that's what made me put down the controller. Sure, there was lots of freedom to do as I chose -- but in a vacuum in which I could learn little about myself, or explore themes of some kind, or examine anything at all but a vast boardgame.

The medium lends itself to this kind of mechanical view of its subjects; because games are about what the player can do, it's hard to find ways to make interesting or even remotely nuanced statements about anything, to explore themes. As I said in my last post, I believe we'll have to find a way to do so, or else perish.

¹About the killer: because this is a film from the 1970s, we who have been watching movies in the three decades since are well versed in the stories that they tell, and we can pretty much identify him as soon as he comes on screen. In this way, it reminds me a little bit of how trite a movie like Play Misty for Me would seem to someone who has seen Fatal Attraction, but of course, Eastwood's film appeared in the same year as Klute -- his directorial debut. Connections like these are why I could peruse the IMDB for hours, left to my own devices. It's also why I have a Netflix queue which is nearly 400 items long...(back)
²Here, I'm afraid, I must show my ignorance. I asked a friend about the term via IM, but he didn't respond in time to make print. Basically, you know, one of those portraits where it's a profile of a head all in black against a white background.(back)
³Okay, this one I know. The title comes from the introductory line of a poem from Tennyson; what I don't have any sense of whatsoever is how the poem relates to the book. The poem is beautiful, but I am no great reader of poetry, and it's meaning to me is unclear. There are probably essays somewhere about stuff like that, for those who are interested, but I haven't run any down. I suspect that the use of color are substitutes for the reality of life (the crimson of blood, for example) contrasted against the purity of the feminine ideal of the time (the purity of white). (back)
⁴Here I am only reflecting the facts portrayed in the novel, and making no representations about their veracity, nor making any claims for or against any changes the modern era has or hasn't brought to this balance of power. In writing this footnote, in case you were wondering, I feel entirely like an academician. ;)(back)
⁵There you go, a perfectly good gamer ruined by the Golden Rule.(back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

The Source of Inspiration

I'm always rather interested in the source of inspiration, whether it be for films, books, or games, or really any creative endeavor. Finding Neverland explores the relationship between author J. M. Barrie and a widow and her sons. The film excellently portrays the invention of Peter Pan, attempting to visually capture the genesis of an idea, directly overlaying fantasy and reality using techniques similar to Big Fish, or a Terry Gilliam film. We see Barrie enjoying himself amongst children and feeling uncomfortable around adults (most notably, his wife), and we come to feel someone who seems out of touch with society's mores, while at the same time knowing that this same man will produce a work that has touched the lives of millions and millions over the last hundred or so years. We watch him watching boys jump about on their beds having a pillow fight, and see him make the leap to them being transported in flight. He portrays a pirate and they defeat him. And in these things we see the birth of a story we all know and love.

Learning about such sources of inspiration is wonderfully compelling to me, whether dramatized as in Neverland or in reality. I was similarly touched by seeing a feature on the Spirited Away disk which revealed the origin of the cleansing of the river spirit as a real event in Miyazaki's life. Apparently, Miyazaki and some neighbors had spent a Saturday cleaning the river near where they lived, including removing a rusted old bicycle from the muck, an object which appears from the muck-encrusted body of the river spirit in the film. It's a tender moment which is even further enriched by our knowledge of how it came to be; we share, for a moment, the eyes and mind of Miyazaki. Watching this scene is now enriched for me by an understanding of how it came to be -- I suspect I won't soon see another production of Peter Pan, but you can be assured that when I next view it I will be thinking about how such scenes came to be.

I feel the same way on learning a little bit about the genesis of Mario¹. Simple idea -- how about a guy who jumps around, against a background like the sky? But he's too big, so how about we shrink him, oh, and what if he could get big again? Talk about your happy accidents. From a simple idea and a very few fundamental mechanics a great game is born, and an industry is relaunched.

Sometimes the source of inspiration is pretty damned obvious... and you wish you had thought of it first. I've been playing a fair amount of Guitar Hero the last week or so, and the inspiration is so clearly that moment where you first rocked out on your air guitar. They took that great feeling, made a simple game of skill, and suddenly, a game where you come away feeling like a performer is born². Terrific stuff.

More commonly, I suspect, other games are the sources of our inspiration. I know that was the case of the Star Wars games I worked on for years. With Starfighter, we started off wanting to create a sim along the lines of TIE Fighter, and having seen Rogue Squadron and decided to switch to consoles, we tried to steer a more middle ground. Republic Commando was born from a tense few hours of playing Ghost Recon cooperatively, and wanting to achieve that same feel from a single-player game. Most of what we see on the shelves falls into this paradigm. I think it's a persuasive argument for designers to get out and do things other than playing games.

Sometimes, though, it's still just a bolt from the blue, whether it's a story or a game or a movie. Keita Takahashi, the man behind Katamari Damacy and its recent sequel³, describes the moment of inspiration as something "I just basically came up with". Ah, well, sometimes inspiration is too great to be tracked down.

Anyone out there care to share the inspirations for what they've done, or perhaps point me in the direction of some other great quotes? I love this stuff.

Well, join me next time for some discussion of disease transmission, sparked by Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. It should be up around Friday.

¹Full disclosure: Super Mario Bros. is one of those games I see played again and again -- by my sons, so it's often on my mind though I rarely get a chance to play it any more. And, of course, I'm a self-admitted Nintendo fanboy. I'd say self-confessed, but that would suggest I feel some sort of shame... (back)
²I'll come back to Guitar Hero in the not too distant future. (back)
³Both soon to be on my playlist... (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 11:16 PM | Comments (4)

October 31, 2005

Homicide and Thoughts about Episodic Content

More than any other show, the Barry Levinson police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street made me wish I was a homicide detective, which is saying something. I've been watching cop shows nearly my whole life; the first one I can remember really getting into was Hill Street Blues, but that even postdates a fascination with earlier shows with a detective element, like Quincy, M.D. and The Rockford Files.

Now, the crazy thing is that I've no actual interest in most of the actual work having to do with being a Homicide detective, chasing down leads, investigating gory death scenes, seeing names in red and black on "the board". About the only thing I'd really like to know if I was any good at is putting suspects in "the box".

No, what really interested me about Homicide was the amount of time the detectives spent talking about what you could call "life issues": birth, death, love, hate, marriage, divorce, children, parents, justice, compassion, humility. Oh, and lots of murder, and the reasons why people murder, and the kinds of people who murder. It didn't treat crime romantically, it treated it frankly.

Ah, and the characters, paired off beautifully: the morally black-and-white Pembleton with the relativist Bayliss, conspiracy nut Munch with ordinary joe Bolander, soulful Lewis with "meatball" Crosetti, romantic Felton with pragmatist Howard.

Homicide, sweet Homicide. Over the last couple of years I've watched all seven seasons and the conclusive television movie that tied off the remaining loose ends. And when I finished it, I wanted to turn right around and start over.

I keep hearing about episodic content in games coming along the pike one of these days. In fact, putting "episodic content" and video games together into Google nets you around 13,000 hits, which isn't Halo numbers, but it's a start.

I used to think it was a little bit crazy, I admit; after all, a reasonable segment of our market largely won't bother with a game if they can rent it. On the other hand, every sale of a used game and every GameFly or Blockbuster rental is a lost bit of revenue to the industry; I hear that even Best Buy is getting into the act. With development costs for AAA titles skyrocketing, I think prices will rise a bit (as I've started to notice for next-gen), and these alternative channels will swell, leaving fewer consumers actually buying that first copy of the product that we actually make money on.

So it seems like a great way to go is episodic content through Steam-like services, where downloads and an active network connection work both ends of this problem. Download permits the developer to sell for less and make the same revenue (since the cost of goods is lower), and the active network connection limits the license to one user (or more accurately, one computer). There will be backlash, sure, but there were plenty of people signed up for Steam getting their Counterstrike: Source on before Half-Life 2 was available -- I think the right carrots will make it a viable approach.

There's a lot more involved in this issue, though. You can't really liken it to television, though that's the comparison I see every single time it's mentioned. It's not like television. Television is free; or at least, it was when episodic content arose on it. Even paying for it, you are paying for a staggering array of choices, something for everyone. Spend ten bucks a month on HBO and you're getting more than four episodes of The Sopranos, you're also getting Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and a bunch of movies, and probably some shows I'm not hip enough to know about but which are doubtless pretty decent. And it's pretty staggering to think about how many hours of content your fifty bucks for basic cable gets you -- granted, it has additional subsidies in the form of advertising, but if you use TiVo, you're basically getting far more than you could ever watch without commercial interruption.

MMOs are more like episodic content in this regard; at the very least, they are simply enormous amounts of content, which justifies to a degree their monthly fees. I think I could reasonably argue that my $15/month for WoW could go for at least four different characters who would rarely encounter the same content, at least up until a certain level.

Thus, MMOs are already very close to episodic content, though it's driven by my time alone. This is appealing, much as DVD collections of my favorite shows are appealing: I don't really see much point in watching television "live" anymore -- I'll just wait until the boxed set comes out. If the shows are good enough, they'll get put on DVD eventually, and I can watch them at my own pace, much like I'd play an MMO. These days, it seems like the last season gets put out a week or two before the next one starts. I imagine I could fill my Netflix queue just with those -- in fact, about 15% of my queue is shows right now, and that's before Deadwood Season Two or Six Feet Under Season Five is out.

Lately I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus, and playing it as if it were a series of episodes. Since I've been enjoying it tremendously (expect a blog post at some point), I've been attempting to stretch out the experience, slaying no more than a single Colossus per day.

I wonder if an episodic release for this game might have worked, if putting a couple of Colossi into each digital release might have generated more sales overall than whatever it's getting¹. While I certainly would have been interested in it, waiting impatiently for the next episode, it seems unlikely at this point that it would have been any more lucrative than the traditional channel. I can only hope that with more consoles connected to broadband in the next few years, there might be some channel to push this stuff through.

What's most appealing to me about episodic content, though, is the opportunity to find that new retail channel, which is where we differ so strongly from these other media. Television has syndication for its shows, and movies have DVD and video². Most games have a couple of weeks on the shelves and then their selling window is gone more or less forever. Episodic content, however, is a more persistent revenue stream that opens up the opportunity to deliver a premium package later on, with the first six or twelve episodes on a single CD or set of CDs. You can play it as it comes out now... or you can wait, pay a bit more for the nice collection, and play a whole bunch of them at once. There's a model which exactly parallels this and it's been kicked around the block for quite a while -- the serial novels such as Charles Dickens wrote³.

So, I guess it'll be pretty interesting to see what happens with the Steam channel, with the SiN episodes I've read a little bit about coming through there, and Aftermath and whatever other Half-Life 2 content they generate. It's not quite the same as HBO, since I'll be paying a fair penny for a relatively small amount of entertainment, but it's certainly a start.

¹Naturally, I hope it's getting quite a lot. Unfortunately, I suspect it's closer to Psychonauts numbers than, say, Halo numbers. Which is a shame, because I've experienced emotions playing this game that I've never experienced playing other games.(back)
²It's interesting to note, however, that television shows generally only hit syndication after they've passed something akin to a quality bar -- 150 or 200 shows -- whereas even Little Nicky got a DVD release. (back)
³And of course, Dickens wasn't the only one. But Dickens is a good place to take a look if you're interested in what sorts of tricks need to be employed to make episodic content work. One of them is, of course, the cliffhanger. Dickens didn't write the stories where someone was left literally hanging from a cliff, but he did have a good sense of where to end a chapter so that his audience would visit the newstand the following Saturday. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:20 PM | Comments (2)

September 22, 2005

New Wave

In France in the early 1950s, film theorists founded a journal called Cahiers du Cinema¹; in it, they decried the current state of cinema and called for new types of film-making. Interestingly enough, many of the great films in the movement, which came to be known as Le Nouvelle Vague or "The New Wave", were film noirs. But they were different from Hollywood's version of the genre -- these were often moody, extremely character-driven pieces. They had the atmosphere in spades, but the stories they told and the characters they contained were extraordinary, and the film-making was a breath of fresh air.

Take Bob le Flambeur². Here you have a film about a small-time gambler and one-time crook who did a stretch in prison over a heist; but now he's well-known in certain circles (amongst criminals and policemen) because of his consummate style. He's old-school; there's a way you dress and comport yourself even when you're losing your last franc.

The key feature of the movement I want to take away at the moment is not, however, the films noir of the period nor the character-driven stories. What I want to examine a little further is the extraordinary devotion of the New Wave to mise-en-scene, which basically boils down to filming on location for every shot, no studios, no sound stages, using natural light and capturing long takes. Characters are placed in the very real locations that surround them, and events play out in these real locations.³

Jules Dassin's⁵ Night and the City is filled with such scenes, where Richard Widmark (playing an unsavory character we can't really like but nonetheless must see something of ourselves in) dashes through the streets of London, trying to save himself from his certain fate. Although both the movies I'm talking about are not classified as New Wave by the sites I read on the topic, I think they contain enough of the elements to be indicative, if not perfect examples of the form. I've also recently watched Jules and Jim, a classic of the movement, and much of what I have to say here could be extended to that film as well. And I also think that The Third Man has something to offer -- filmed on location in London, even though it was a Hollywood film, it also favored mise-en-scene and had a lot of resemblances to a film like Night and the City; I guess since The Third Man came out first, we have to assume that Dassin stole a little bit, but I suspect not given the short difference in time between the releases and the fact that Dassin was French, etc.

So, now that I've inundated you all with a bit of New Wave talk, I want to talk about another New Wave coming our way, this one rather literal.

In the last week or so, Nintendo unveiled its new controller -- finally, we get a look at something that really feels next gen to me, feels like a console I absolutely need to own. This is a New Wave I feel I can get behind.

No question, they could have shipped a controller like that as a peripheral for this generation, but then, of course, not everyone would have one (EyeToy, Jungle Beat bongos, PS2 network adapter...). They are essentially launching a new console entirely so that they can have an install base for their innovative control scheme. Remarkable.

What really encourages me about this is how, watching their promo videos, I felt that they were encouraging a new type of mise-en-scene. Watching a couple play tennis on the couch, hearing the Zelda sword swings and shield clangs as a guy swung his arm around, seeing the families playing party games and fishing together, reading about how intuitive Metroid Prime 2 felt with the new controls, I was just entranced. I must have watched that promo video 8 times in a row.

I felt like here was a great step forward in making me feel like I was part of the game, by making some of my physical movements replicated in the game -- call it me-en-scene. It's a new form of interaction. And while I'm sure some of the critics are right in that most of the games will be largely the same, I really don't even care; it's not like the other systems are offering anything radically different in terms of gameplay. Watching that teaser, I could see myself newly immersed in games like Eternal Darkness or Resident Evil n, imagine myself aiming the grappling hook in some new Zelda, swinging a virtual club in Toadstool Tour. All in one handy device.

I'm always reading about how Nintendo is for kids and all that, but honestly, it took quite a while for my kids to be able to play Mario Kart with me, and mostly because the controls were just a little too complex for them. We probably played six months before they could drive the karts all that well -- and they're still not really even close. I think this will be easier for them, and we'll be playing that many more games.

I'm completely looking forward to gaming's New Wave. It's the only console I can see picking up on the first day. I know that it won't have the library or the realism of the other consoles -- but it's the one that's going to offer me something really new on that first day, even if it's in the context of traditional genres. And that's just really great.

¹I am indebted to a very excellent article on GreenCine which helped me to collect some information about the French New Wave. Although I've picked up this information in bits and pieces over the years from film reviews and DVD commentaries, this two page article covered the subject in great detail.
²Although usually translated as Bob the Gambler, I think a more literal translation would be something like Bob the Flamboyant One -- and this better captures the essence of his character, in a way. Bob gambles, to be sure, and it's an essential element of his character, but he manages to preserve an ever-present style at the same time, and this is lost when you merely consider him as a gambler. Note that Nick Nolte's version of the character doesn't carry nearly the same flair (nor carry the gambling to its natural conclusion) in the recent Hollywood remake "The Good Thief". Neil Jordan's remake is somewhat limited by its need for a happy ending; I'd rather a single Bob le Flambeur to a hundred Good Thieves.
³There are at least a couple of things to remark upon here: one is that the long take is still being practiced, almost effortlessly, by Quentin Tarantino -- the dialog between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction about foot massages in the hallway before they encounter Brett and his hapless posse stretches out beyond belief, but feels completely unforced. There's a similar long take following Sofie Fatale in Kill Bill vol 1 down to the ladies' room where Beatrice lies in wait -- it doesn't feel quite as smooth but it really sets up the following moment well, when Beatrice calls out O-ren. (I've seen that movie four times now and writing this I'd love to watch that scene again.) Anyway, the other thing is that a similar practice made it into the manifesto of the Dogma 95 gang, though they took it even further to require that ambient audio be similarly recorded. I can recommend The Celebration, one of the early Dogma 95 films -- I was completely surprised by that movie, which is so remarkably rare as to be treasured. Strong stuff, though, be warned -- not graphic in terms of imagery, just strong themes.^4
4It's probably worth noting at this point that in my text editor, the footnotes already are longer than the text at this point in the post. Ugh. My thinking on this topic isn't probably as clear as I'd like. But get me talking about Quentin Tarantino and I'm bound to go on for a while.
⁵At the time that I watched Topkapi, I had no idea that Dassin had made it -- nor should I have -- but I really loved the movie, and had known even that it included an homage to Rififi, which Dassin had also made (hrm, is it homage if you are making homage to yourself?). In any case, I searched it out on IMDB and it appears that there may be a Topkapi update in the form of a Thomas Crown sequel featuring Pierce Brosnan. For those of you who can read my more-than-latent snobbery into the films I watch, yes, I am in fact appalled.

Posted by Brett Douville at 07:25 PM | Comments (3)

August 25, 2005

Discussion: Two Plus One

Jules et Jim is a great little movie about the complications of friendship and romance, of the duties we owe one another and to our own happiness. The titular pair are great friends who meet in Paris, Jules an Austrian and Jim a Frenchman. They grow to be great friends, thoroughly understanding one another.

Soon, a woman enters the picture, Catherine, and her amazing resemblance to a statue they both admired in Greece strikes them both, and makes them realize that she is somehow different than their other girlfriends, which they have sometimes shared. Catherine is a free spirit, and as portrayed by Jeanne Moreau, she crackles with a frantic, radiant energy that must be seen to be understood. Both men fall for her, Jim perhaps the hardest, but Catherine chooses Jules, and Jim respects her choice and does not try to interfere.

It is at this point that the film gets a little strange, or perhaps, a little stranger; war intervenes, and Jules returns to Austria with Catherine now his wife. Time and the war pass quickly; each man worries for his friend and hopes that he will not meet him on the battlefield¹. They do not, both survive, and time marches on until one day Jim pays them a visit.

Jim encounters the couple, very unhappily married, with Jules still caring only for Catherine's happiness so long as she can be made to stay near to him, to still share in his life if she will not share his bed. She has had lovers, and soon takes Jim as a lover, with Jules' blessing, as they will live in the house, and no harm will come to Sabine, Jules' and Catherine's daughter, thereby.

There are other wrinkles, but by this point in the story I've told you enough to impart the film's strange flavor. At the time that I watched it, I was a little stymied, but like most great films, it sticks with you and grows a little bit in your mind; you recall its images and its subject, and it ends up making you think a bit about what two people who love each other owe to each other, and what concessions they should make for the other's happiness. In the case of Jules and Jim, there are three pairings -- the two men clearly love each other, and each of them loves Catherine. Where it gets interesting is when that third wheel is added to the mix².

It's funny, but I kind of feel the same way about Façade, the research project everyone's been talking about³. What's interesting about Façade, at least in theory, is that it does exactly what Jules and Jim does, but it puts the player in charge of exploring his relationships with these other characters.

It's not properly a game, unless you'd call it a role-playing game, with a heavy emphasis on the role. Players⁴ arrive at the home of Trip and Grace, a married couple who are clearly having a domestic dispute which is interrupted by the ringing of the bell (at a point of your choosing).

The simulation takes input through typing, as anything you type is something you say. This is, unfortunately, a rather clumsy interface, and even with my very high word-per-minute rate, I continually find myself just a beat behind in conversation, often cutting off one of the participants mid-sentence as I furiously pound out my words. That aspect is quite frustrating.

What really thrills me about it, though, is that I can approach it with my own role in mind. Am I to be the cad, who has always had the hots for Grace and now can make my move? Am I supportive of one character or the other? Am I uncomfortable? Interface issues aside, it aims to let me make these choices, and despite those flaws, it's still really interesting. Jules and Jim explored the interactions of two people and one other, and so does Façade.

I wondered over in Jamie's blog whether the implementors had done any filmed tests to see what worked for the experience and what didn't. Often in academics, you look to see what explanatory power your model has, and sometimes you take what you have and measure it against what people actually do⁵. I think it'd be really interesting to take some blind subjects and run this scenario with real people -- actually walk these blind subjects up to the door with exactly the information they get when playing the game, and let it unfold with a couple of actors.

I'd love to know how they might have changed their simulation in response. Would people ask "Well, wait a minute -- did I meet Trip first, or Grace first? How long have I known them?" How much more information would people want before they felt comfortable? In what ways would they connect with the characters that weren't reflected in their simulation -- longer hugs? Back rubbing? Peering attentively? Making faces? There's so much richness there, and I'm curious about how much of it you'd have to add in to feel like you had enough interface to emote properly?

Would speaking directly to it be enough, through a microphone? I don't know. But it'd be a start. I don't want to push more hard problems on them, but given the simulation, that kind of real-time interface is pretty desirable. Had they simply presented it as a text "adventure", the typing interface might have worked much better, though the results wouldn't have had the immediacy. Maybe playing it out as a text adventure and then playing it back as film might work.

So, I guess I think Façade is pretty important too. Like Jules and Jim, the more I think about it the more questions it makes me ask, the more it makes me think. That's a significant contribution.

¹Talk about your pronomial binding problems. Anyway, Jim worries for Jules, Jules for Jim, and neither wishes to meet the other in battle.
²Note: Wildly diverging metaphors!
³See site for links and quotes. I learned of it through Ernest Adams' write-up on GamaSutra.
⁴Interactors? Consumers? Experiencers? Participants? Since it's not really a game, it's not really proper to call us players. An experience which drives me to seek new terminology is often a good thing.
⁵Years ago when I worked in graphics research, I was co-author of a paper about generating speech and gesture for animated conversations, which still shows up in searches on my name. Anyway, one of the things I found interesting about the project was some of the errors we would get, and the ways it would fall into the uncanny valley (behaviorally speaking; visually speaking, the poly models were far below what we have today). The chief researcher, Justine Cassell, had done her graduate work in gesture, and behind her theories were some good indications of why we actually can mis-gesture. Fun stuff. While academia is really not for me, some of the intellectual questions it poses are still really interesting to me.

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2005

Gunslingers and Samurai

¹

It's certainly been remarked before that there are a lot of similarities between samurai films and Westerns; indeed, some of the greatest Westerns were inspired by films by Kurosawa, including A Fistful of Dollars by Yojimbo and The Magnificent Seven by The Seven Samurai. (Sanjuro, which I recently watched, is itself a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo; another parallel can be drawn with the spiritual successor For A Few Dollars More.)

It's fairly obvious with even a little bit of thought why there should be such a close correspondence. After all, both genres deal with violent historical periods where life was fairly cheap. Both deal with time periods that are distant enough to be romanticized and yet not so distant as to be forgotten or undocumented. Both eras came to a close at about the same time, with the Meiji era in Japan beginning at roughly the same time as the West becoming more civilized². Both times deal with questions of honor and moral ambiguity, with hired guns and ronin facing off across moral lines. Both genres also point a bit to the souls of their cultures -- with Westerns portraying the lone individual surviving by his wit and skill, and samurai films portraying men bound by honor and code and tradition.

Both genres are also highly malleable; periods of great violence at an individual scale³ lend themselves to all sorts of investigations. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a single murder causes one man to lose his grip and become a bum, while another rides the coattails of the fame it grants him to become a Senator. This is similar to Twilight Samurai, where a single event causes a man to overcome his concerns about a marriage he would make for love. Both are capable of morality plays (for example, The Ox-Bow Incident⁴). Both have enjoyed cycles of popularity, with periods of reinvention and rejuvenation; in getting a television series in Deadwood, it's my hope that Westerns may get another here in the States.

But enough about similarities.

One of the things I find interesting as a gamer are the differences between the Japanese market and the American market, and one notable difference is that these two genres are reflected differently in the games made in their native countries. In short, while there are several games reflecting samurai culture in a given year (Dynasty Warriors, the Onimusha series, games like Way of the Samurai or Musashi Samurai Legend), Western videogames are comparatively rare. I can only think of a few, and even then, I need to stretch a ways back (Outlaws, Red Dead Revolver, er...).

Why is this? I'm not certain, but I think it's probably about the guns. Why play an action game with guns where the pistol only carries six shots and the machine gun has to be left in a fixed position? Also, a hip young friend of mine tells me that Westerns just aren't cool anymore. I certainly hope the film genre doesn't die out altogether, though Clint's gotten a little old to get out there riding horses, and I'm not aware of any other stars who could even revive the genre anymore.

Whereas gracefully wielding a katana is eternally cool, as Kill Bill points out.

In the end, I'm not even sure I want to know why. What I really want is a few more Western games, though preferably not ones that drag in other genres to try and make them cool. I have high hopes for NeverSoft's Gun, which comes out this fall.

¹I suppose I should change my category names to DVDs rather than Movies, since I don't want to add something about television. I'm not going to, even though I suppose I should. But for anyone who regularly reads it, read Movies as a broad category. :)
²The Meiji era (beginning 1867) was a time at which Japan began to modernize; by 1876, samurai were forbidden to carry their blades in public. By the early 1890s, most of the Western territories such as Montana or the Dakotas had gained statehood, and with it legitimacy and the rule of law.
³As opposed to the scale of warfare, I mean.
⁴There's another interesting point to be made about The Ox-Bow Incident, and that's that it was adapted from a play. I actually think there may be another interesting blog post about adapting films from plays and the problems that that caused film and television early on -- since we face some of the same problems with videogames. But that's for another time.

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:03 PM | Comments (12)

July 26, 2005

Discussion: Strangely Tender

I've seen a few movies about mental illness (or something like mental illness) lately, and then not long afterwards, I played Tim Schafer's most excellent game, Psychonauts. The reason why I'm blogging about the three titles you see above together¹ is because of the touching, almost sweet, way that they treat mental illness².

Originally I put these three pieces together with Jules and Jim, a French movie about two great friends who both fall in love with the same woman, who turns out to be the very definition of a femme fatale. But that movie treats its madness frankly, without pity or sentimentality, not even really passing judgement, just relating a tale. But that didn't fit, because these other three treat mental illness and disability in such a sensitive way, so I threw it out.

Elling is an odd little Norwegian movie that presents a pair of mentally disabled men who have been furloughed from institutional life and placed in an apartment together; the film shows their gradual adjustment to life outside of an institution. Neither of them are so debilitated that they require constant supervision, but on the other hand, neither of them could probably live entirely alone either. It's a quaint little film which tenderly and honestly portrays these strange characters, and we come to laugh with them in a way that doesn't feel exploitative. When Elling narrates about his unlikely success as a poet, he speaks in tones that come off as Romantic, and it's funny and it works because he's real, up there on the screen, and not some caricature.

In a similar vein, in Harvey, Jimmy Stewart portrays Elwood P. Dowd, a gentle man with a taste for drink and an invisible six foot rabbit for a friend. I relate this to the two others here because of the treatment of Dowd, who is sympathethic even while we wonder if he's completely crazy. We find humor in the situations here precisely because we've come to like Elwood, and because we similarly find his sister compelling, in her bewildered concern for her brother.

A lot of the reason I don't find movies like Me, Myself, and Irene or Dumb and Dumber⁴ all that funny is because they don't take any time to develop any empathy with their characters. They aren't, in fact, portrayals of characters at all -- but portrayals which put an illness forward as character, and then play that illness for laughs. I know it works for a lot of people; it just doesn't work for me.

Which brings me, at last, to the storytelling genius that is contained in Psychonauts. In the game, various characters are mentally ill, and part of your job as Raz is to attempt to heal them. From the inside.

This wouldn't have worked for me as well as it did were it not for the fact that the characters are presented in such a compelling way -- they, like Elling or Elwood, are not merely the sum of their ailments, but are instead believable characters who are afflicted. Treating the characters and the audience in this mature way leads to better and more memorable humor, in my opinion.

The conceit underlying the game's mechanics is that many of the characters in the game are damaged people, and that we can help them in some small way, help them to overcome the worst of their ailments and attempt to enter life again. They won't come out perfect, they'll still be decidedly odd, but they'll at least be able to function. And so, it's rewarding to finish the levels, because we've come to understand the characters through their neuroses.

Take Boyd as an example. When we first meet him, it's abundantly clear that there's something quite wrong with him. He's paranoid, but he has a job to do, and he's prepared to do it to the best of his ability, even if he doesn't entirely make sense. He's the watchman at the Asylum where Raz' friends have been taken (well, where their brains are... it's complicated).

When we enter his mind, we're inside a psychosis that is both rife with humor and tinged with sadness, like most of the minds we encounter in Psychonauts. There are men in trenchcoats everywhere, performing the jobs in the world, like repairing the roads or fixing telephone wiring. Cameras pop out of mailboxes. Objects in the world move closer. Every building is alike, inside and out, but viewed through a camera that is just slightly fish-eyed. For a while, we have an understanding of just how paralyzing it must be to exist this way, to see conspiracies everywhere. At the same time, the trenchcoat characters say the most outrageous things, all in monotone, and they make you laugh -- juxtaposed against this bizarre world, you have spy-like characters saying things like "Although I smell of excrement, you should respect me, because I provide a valuable service." And the trenchcoat men who stand-in for suburban housewives speak lines which are positively subversive ("My husband may not find me attractive sexually, but he still loves my pies.").

If it weren't for the extended time spent setting up these situations so that they are compelling and consistent, the payoff simply wouldn't be there.

I don't have anything surprising to say, I guess, but just need to remark that games are no different from other storytelling media when it comes to humor. Humor in each of these experiences grows out of character, and the humor is richer because the characters are.

¹Though it is likely that Psychonauts will get another detailed entry... when I get off my duff.
²In the case of Harvey it's not mental illness, properly, but some otherworldly thing. But it amounts to the same thing, in this case, because everyone around him believes him to be well, if not insane, surely eccentric.
³As it turns out, he's not, Harvey is a Pookah. It seems clear to me that Harvey is a predecessor of the rabbit in Donnie Darko, though that film doesn't adhere to any particular myth to pin this down precisely. I should probably listen to the audiotrack on the Director's Cut, but I admit I probably won't :)
⁴Dumb and Dumber isn't really all that different from Elling; it's a buddy picture of a pair of misfits. I probably would have walked out of D&D in the theater, though, I found it so... unfunny. More boring, really.

Posted by Brett Douville at 06:18 PM | Comments (5)

June 12, 2005

Discussion: Network

When I watched William Holden walk out on Faye Dunaway, dismissing her character in Network as being raised by television and therefore like television, both in attractiveness and in faults, I had to stop and think a little bit about what it might mean to be raised by videogames¹.

Other than pundits calling our entertainment murder simulators, and politicians using it for a hot-button topic of interest to parents, I don't hear a lot of folks entering into reasonable discussions on the topic².

Games have been with us for a long time; videogames, obviously, less so. I read recently that baseball may be a lot older than we think it to be (indeed, dating back to 14th century France), and I'm aware of reading some evolutionary theory research years ago that suggests that play was part of what enabled our evolutionary ancestors to improve their chances of survival.

In other words, play might just have helped make us human.

Television and books and movies and other forms of entertainment (and yes, even enrichment) lack direct interactivity. Absolutely, we bring something to the experience -- our own experiences mash up together with the author/actors/director/what-have-you, and we make judgements and interpret the material based on all of that. But only games allow us to engage in "do-this, that-happens, do-that, this-other-happens" in a way that allows us to take part in directing the experience.

I've questioned before whether we can match in depth what other media can provide, based on the need for our audience to bring that to us. But aside from that concern, I start to wonder if playing more games could actually make us more human, not less, not more cut-off from others, but actually learning better skills and socialization.

Socialization? In a videogame? Absolutely. I watch my sons play Mario Kart, and I see them learning how to have fun even when the contest is unbalanced -- Jordan, who has not had nearly as much success in contests since the first time, nonetheless seems to have a blast playing. In the bomb battles, he often races to see how fast he can pile up 5 bombs; in the balloon battles, he's still having fun, even trash-talking his brother. (This is a kid who is four, and yet the other night told me over a rollicking game of Trouble that "Daddy, you're going to pay, my friend." That "my friend" just cracked me up.)

Another area that I see a lot of socialization between them is in negotiation and persuasion. Each has the modes and characters he prefers; naturally, these don't always intersect. Luc will try to use persuasion to get the mode he wants to play, often making concessions -- "okay, let's play bomb battle for three games and then we can switch to balloon battle for three" -- and this is really great to see. When it becomes intractable, as it will with the under-7 set, there's an external authority who can be called on to help arbitrate a settlement that's fair to both parties.

Finally, though Kart promotes competition, it can also promote teamwork. Recently I got a third controller so the three of us could battle together, and naturally, it was easy for me to defeat the kids. They could tell if I was letting them win, so instead, I opted for another tactic: I drove like crazy, and only throttled back my game a little bit, and told them that the only way to take me down was to work together. Pretty soon, they were working together and cheering one another on whenever they could take a piece of me -- enough so that I could throttle my game back even further and let them think they were beating me hands-down³, just by working together.

Internet play gets tricky -- I don't currently connect my consoles to the Internet, and even if I did, I wouldn't let the kids play online. Anonymous play tends to bring out the worst in people -- the language you hear in these games is extraordinarily vulgar, and it'll be a long time before I'm interested in letting my kids play in that environment; indeed, it's a significant turn-off for me, too. That said, I'd also love to see more negotiation in the hands of the players; one thing that was great about the sandlot baseball games was that kids who couldn't get along with others could be easily and effectively shunned out of play. There's a fair amount of that available in the PC shooters I've played online, with the ability to vote off players and automatically rebalance teams and things like that, but not all that much in the console world as yet. These are the sorts of things that should make the transition from the couch to the online world.

Finally, part of what makes games great is that games are a safe arena in which we can make meaningful choices and fail, seeing the results. We can experiment in a way that can be difficult or dangerous in life. We can experience things that we couldn't otherwise experience. In doing these things, I think we open up for ourselves the possibility that we can make meaningful choices in life -- after all, we've trained ourselves to do so.

A pastime that teaches our kids socialization and helps them feel freer to make meaningful choices? Sign me up.

¹It's a good movie, by the way, and not at all dated. I expected it to be, and was pleasantly surprised. It's still quite funny and really topical, especially with the recent development of "reality TV".
²Though I was heartened by my father's response, after I wrote an email out to my family about how I felt about my profession. (It was after Columbine, and I wanted to talk a little bit about my feelings about the issue after much was made in the national media about the Doom "connection.") He said that in his view, "if it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, it's probably a duck" -- i.e. that ascribing some sort of causal power to something that walked and talked like a game was probably a little off-base.
³A note to friends with whom I've played Mario Kart before, don't think I've lost my edge. I can still blow the doors off of you. Often I give the kids a better shot at me by playing one-handed :)

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2005

Discussion: Robert Mitchum

Robert Mitchum carried with him to every picture he ever made his own iconography; Mitchum was practically short-hand for every noir character you ever saw. He had one of those perfect voices which carry with it all the expectations you might have of its subject matter, the sort of voice you hear when you read Chandler or Hammett. He had the haunted look, with his hooded heavy eyelids, and his slightly unruly hair. His face could bespeak nonchalance, or explode suddenly in rage.

Looking over his filmography, I'm amazed; no wonder this guy was an icon, he had a film career spanning more than 50 years leading right up to the year he died. Admittedly, I've only seen a few of them, and I know a lot of them aren't particularly good, and The Big Sleep falls into both categories. But you can see in the list, year after year, those pictures which kept up the image, usually two or three pictures to a year.

Which brings us to Astro City, which has been going about enlarging the context of superheroes for years. I started reading the Astro City graphic novel compilations a few years ago when a friend at LucasArts pointed them out to me, and I own a few of them. Originally, I was attracted due to the great covers by Alex Ross, whose Marvels I had read years before.

That's all just a preamble though to telling you that Robert Mitchum's iconic role is brought once more to live by Busiek & co. in The Tarnished Angel, which presents the evolution of the character in the end-notes. Looking at the cover, I thought, "Hey, that guy looks like Robert Mitchum, but in chrome" and sure enough, that's more or less what he is. The character of Mitchum¹ is reimagined as Steeljack, a recently released convict who just wants to get out of sight for his remaining years, but can't. It's worth reading.

One of the interesting things about games these days is just how much they cost and, of course, the next generation is going to make that even worse. One of the things Hollywood has going for it is that casting agents take direction from producers and directors to fill a particular role -- in the 40s, 50s and 60s, if you were looking for someone to fill a film noir lead, you'd probably get someone like Mitchum².

With the next generation costing so much, and the visual differences in console generations probably slimming in the coming years, I wonder if there isn't going to start to be room for independent contractors who build digital actors to be our main characters, our heroes, our villains, whatever. The most cost-efficient way to do this would be to build characters who could be leveraged across several titles, and maybe even customized a bit to fill particular roles. It doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me to have "Far Cry guy" also be "Bond villain henchman #1" or "True Crime" guy or maybe even dress him up in clothes with no apparent gravitational constraints to fit into a Final Fantasy. It wouldn't take many titles to have enough animation for the digital actor to fill a number of roles, with custom animations added by the house who know him best, and can keep the characterization stable.

I could see this sort of service covering even a little more ground. Obviously, in the digital realm we can apply "make-up" a little faster and easier -- the digital equivalent of Mickey Rourke wouldn't be sitting for an hour in a make-up artist's chair every morning for Sin City. And an independent contractor could even consider establishing long-term contracts with voice actors to keep the character consistent as well. It could become one-stop shopping for your character needs, and help keep costs down.

Granted, there'll still be lots of games, I hope, that come up with wacky characters that can't really see frequent use. There aren't too many characters from Psychonauts who would look right in anything but the game-equivalent of a David Lynch film. That said, I could imagine characters from Tim's earlier games getting another day in the sun, even if not in a sequel. Ben Throttle as the wheelman in a heist game? I could buy that.

¹If you don't feel like you have a handle on the sort of guy Mitchum was, I can thoroughly recommend Ebert's interviews with him. They're terrific, and the sort of interview you just can't find anymore in Hollywood, which has gone and packaged up all of its stars into neat little packages. Also, I enjoyed Mitchum in Out of the Past a few years back, which was a noir film I got to see on the big screen courtesy of the now-vanished Lark Theater in Larkspur, CA.
²With the rare exception of getting Fred MacMurray. If you've never seen Double Indemnity, you should.

Posted by Brett Douville at 07:50 AM | Comments (5)

May 31, 2005

Discussion: Classics You Love and Classics You... Appreciate

Watching them, I felt that Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are two films that film buffs really should see, but in this case, my reactions were totally different. With the former, I found a lot to like; I was entranced by the spectacle, I was caught up in the story, I found myself really following what was going on in the emotions that the actors portrayed physically and with their expressions. With Caligari, however, I found myself cut off a bit -- partly because of some of the film-making techniques (especially the close-ups that illuminate only a circle in the center of the screen, Victorian portrait style), partially because of the pacing (which has the glacial pace also found in Lang's M), but largely because the characters seem mere caricatures¹ not enough to carry a whole film but only a short story. That said, the scenery is excellent, the set design is really wild and great and helped to set the tone in an incredible way.

While I was watching each of these, I was trying to think of games that I would recommend people play either to appreciate or to still enjoy. Having recently replayed through most of The Fool's Errand, I can agree with Tea Leaves' assessment -- this is a game that you can still really enjoy, that can still really grab you. That is, if you enjoy puzzles. I feel this way a bit about many of the old LucasArts' titles as well -- I think it's important for developers today to understand that part of our history, and with those games in particular it's not just eating your vegetables. In a lot of cases, the humor still holds up, even though the gameplay seems thin by today's standards.

One of the games that I think is hard to do more than simply appreciate in this day and age is actually Resident Evil, which I played in remake form on the Gamecube. Knowing as a I do how much people appreciate save anywhere these days, I nonetheless think it's worthwhile to know what you sacrifice when players can save anywhere -- and not only does RE have checkpoint saves, but it has resource-based checkpoint saves, meaning you can't even save at checkpoints as often as you'd like. What gives the game its sense of terror, though, is exactly created by lengthy play sessions, which is reinforced by the lack of the ability to save frequently. Playing the game, I set aside time to really experience it, and thus really enjoyed it, but I would have a hard time recommending that to people. It's an enjoyable experience, if you can spare the time; it's something you can appreciate as a game designer if you can put in that time.

After watching Metropolis and thinking a little bit about the games that are still lovable and those that are to be appreciated, I was reminded of a pair of EGM articles in which they focus-tested classics like the original Zelda or Pac-Man. Really funny reading; but they've clearly taken kids with a lot of exposure to games already².

So, what are the games out there you'd have a hard time recommending, except to gain an appreciation? MAME stuff? Maybe one of the games I've mentioned here? Let's hear 'em.

¹As I write that last bit, I realize that they should be caricatures, given the end of the film. Hrm. Maybe I'm judging it too harshly, but while watching it, I just didn't feel engaged. It actually feels like a much better film now that I reflect upon it, but I couldn't get that while I was actually in the midst of it.
²I sometimes wonder whether my own kids are missing out on something coming to gaming in our era of beautiful graphics. I started out with text adventures played over a 200 baud connection -- the modem was two foam cups into which the phone fitted. It unlocked my imagination and arguably made me a game developer. But all this is a subject for another post.

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:29 PM | Comments (2)

May 20, 2005

Discussion: Bottle Rocket

Lately, everything is coming up Psychonauts. I've already started thinking about what I want to write about the game, which will probably fill several posts. Before I get started on that, though, let me touch briefly on this early Wes Anderson movie.

I'm actually a fan of Wes Anderson, having seen everything he's done except for his most recent movie, which I think has just recently come out on DVD. Although I wasn't a huge fan of Tenenbaums, I'm generally a fan of his work and Bottle Rocket was no exception.

Bottle Rocket described the interaction between a few slightly off-kilter characters in their quest to become genuine heist-pullers¹. Their leader is Dignan, a young man with a dream and no sense of reality. Like many of Anderson's movies, it's a difficult movie to describe and in some ways hard to recommend to anyone but your equally off-kilter friends. I really liked it.

I guess what I'm noticing at the moment is that I'm drawn to the quirky these days. While I can appreciate the fun of a lot of different games, the ones that really draw me in are the ones that aren't necessarily the big sellers (though to be fair, some of them are).

The latest and greatest case in point is Psychonauts. As I mentioned, I'm going to be writing this up quite a bit more, but I want to go ahead and say to everyone: Get out there and buy this game! It deserves your support, not only because it's different, but because it's great!

This isn't like one of those quirky movies that I think would be good for more people to see -- it's a great game that people claim they've been crying for. "Oh, it's all licenses and sequels, yawn", and yet, the sequel to the execrable Champions of Norrath sold about as many copies last month, and that was a game that ranked more than 10% lower than the 90%-ranked Psychonauts and came out four months ago².

I've been playing Tim Schafer's games for as long as he's been making them. I can only hope that, like Wes Anderson, he'll get to keep doing them. You can help! Please help!

¹Side note: this is exactly the sort of fake hyphenated word which you can create in English and makes sense, but which I expect has an actual term in German.
²Yes, I have used nearly every form of emphasis in this post.

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:58 PM | Comments (4)

May 04, 2005

Discussion: Sin City

I was actually pretty excited about Sin City, but when I actually sat down to watch it, I found it insipid and weak. Basically, my thoughts about this movie were similar to my thoughts on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was so stylized that any bit of interesting content had more or less been polished away. It was entirely about image.

I've read that Rodriguez borrowed so heavily from Frank Miller's comic books in terms of framing and shot selection that he gave Miller attribution as co-director (and even left the Director's Guild over their refusal to recognize Miller as co-director). For me, most of what really annoyed me about the movie was how much it looked like the director had taken a panel by panel approach to directing a comic book -- but the intervening film frames didn't work cohesively with that. It was a little bit like watching the first Spiderman movie in that respect, where he would be fighting and you'd have these great iconic poses, and then a bunch of what looked like backyard wrestling¹.

What's interesting to me about this is how I feel like I can respond, internally, to Roger Ebert's remarks about the movie, which he gave four stars. When he says, "This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids," I feel like I can respond, "Yes, it's so pumped with steroids it hardly feels like it can move at all. The movie feels like it's about to have a heart attack."

I rarely feel this way about game criticism; at least, not the mainstream game criticism that would be akin to Roger Ebert, with his television show and his large weekly readership. Take Grand Theft Auto III, a game which I didn't particularly enjoy. Then read the reviews; I took Gamespot as an example, which gave the game an equivalent of four stars, 9.6 out of 10².

I'm not going to quote line after line, but basically the format is this; I re-read the review before posting to make sure my recollections were correct. There are two types of paragraph in the review.

• "Feature X is really fun." Facts about Feature X.
• Facts about Feature Y or Outline of Story Element Z (really just facts in a different form, yet without the cursory topic sentence).

There's so little to work with here. You can say, "I didn't find that fun" but other than that, there's no dialog at all.

There's been a bit of talk lately about the New Game Journalism. The problem I find with New Game Journalism is that we don't really have any old-fashioned criticism to stack it up against. I rather like reading some of this new stuff, but without the good old-fashioned sort of criticism it falls a little flat for me. It's like a conversation between an avant-gardist and a bicycle pump; entertaining for a little while, but a bit one-sided.

One thing that I found really positive about Sin City is the look, which for the most part I found very captivating³, and almost enough to carry the movie on its own terms. It reminded me a lot of Sky Captain in its attention to a certain type of aesthetic, this time inspired by the two-color comic books from which it came.

I had been beginning to get a little disappointed with the "realistic look" games are having all around us these days. After a superbly charming Wind Waker aesthetic, the fine folks at Zelda HQ are turning around and giving us their realistic look. Prince of Persia took a wonderfully fantastic look and then drenched it in black and brown, making it look more like Quake and at the same time draining out a lot of the visual life I loved so much in The Sands of Time.

But then, just when I'm getting all disappointed in how games seem to be visually normalizing to a bleak, boring universe, along comes Psychonauts!, which breathes new life into character and level aesthetics. There are some folks who aren't afraid to have asymmetric characters nor to use the whole color palette!

I'd love to see more of this. In an industry which can bring to life our wildest dreams, why do we limit ourselves increasingly to nightmares?

¹For the perfect example, watch the scene where he fights the Goblin on the balcony. Note too, of course, that the scenes in which he actually is more or less acting as a backyard wrestler are more or less exempt from this criticism.
²Which, don't get me started. Film criticism's 7 or 8 distinctions about how good a movie is are more than enough. Can the average player distinguish between a 9.6 game and a 9.7 game? If not, what's the value in that? I've always preferred OPM's five discs. It's great, it's good, or it's not really worth your trouble.
³One thing I didn't care for was the portrayal of blood spatters, which looked a lot like paintball paint to me, or perhaps latex paint. It was everywhere, in great globs that just didn't look right. It may be accurate to the comic book, but it felt really jarring with the rest of the hard-boiled visual style.

Posted by Brett Douville at 06:39 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2005

Discussion: Porco Rosso

Although I think it's no where near as good as Spirited Away or Totoro or even Kiki, I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed Porco Rosso, which is one of Miyazaki's earlier films. It has that same slightly askew look on life of all Miyazaki's work -- ensconced in marvelously beautiful scenes and settings. This time, we are in a sun-drenched Mediterranean, in the 1930s, and we're in a sort of parallel universe where there are a huge number of barnstorming planes flying around the sea, with air pirates and a huge Italian air police force.

Did I mention the main character is a humanoid pig? Ah, only from the mind of Miyazaki.

The thing I most thought of while watching this was how much I'd like to go back and play Crimson Skies, probably on the Xbox¹. The PC version had a ton of charm, and since I did a couple of space/flight action games for LucasArts a few years back, I've played a few of these. I played only a few missions on the PC², and loved the atmosphere, the alternate universe... the swashbuckling feel of the game.