It is my natural inclination to treat all protests as something that I’m far far too cool to bother with. Pish-tosh all these hippies pretending they’re changing the world. I’ll change the world right when I get around to it thank you very much.

But man, the Occupy protests have at the least changed the conversation, and sometimes they’re just straight-up impressive. Like when Oakland staged a General Strike yesterday and had a pretty impressive turnout.

Though the guy in the video, Cenk Uygur from the Young Turks, is occasionally silly. “We might see a Malcom X before a Martin Luther King”, as though Malcom X was fucking Magneto. I get his point about this being a protest that is fundamentally angry about the state of the world, but man do I hate that silly wink wink nod nod maybe we’re violent shit. The Tea Party did that almost to the exclusion of all other conversation, and it annoys me because it blocks out real discussion. “Oh we’re so angry we might… wellllll you know *wiiiiink*” followed by hurried denials that anyone meant anything by it because oh no no that would be uncouth and obviously we wouldn’t we just wanted to you know create the impression but it was a joke!

Just, if you’re going to light shit on fire say so and if you aren’t don’t use the hint that you may as a bargaining chip. It does nothing for you to play let’s pretend and it muddies the waters when you do want to calmly discuss policy changes.

But anyway that’s just this one talkative dude, the protest is pretty amazing to watch. I especially like the bit with the bank security guards cheering on the protesters.

Briefly, Bastion is a beautifully rendered dungeon crawl/action-RPG. Less briefly, Bastion tells the story of a young man who wakes up to find the world has shattered around him in the night and sets out to put everything back together. He’s guided… well, you’re guided, by the voice of an old man telling the story of how he does it. The narrative conceit, added late in the development apparently, works amazingly well. You’re gently guided to the right paths, you get commentary on your actions that can be pithy or surprisingly touching. There are also some very well done bits where the old man can only tell you what he thinks may have happened, which is a nice way of turning the previously omniscient narrator into a portion of the story.

Bastion is a triumph of form over function. It’s a game type I’ve played dozens if not hundreds of times before. You walk, you smack, you gather, you build. But with an astoundingly deft touch, the writing and art direction manages to make you care so much more than you expect in a game like this. It comes, appropriately, in both big and little pieces. The beautiful painted landscapes that rise out of nothing to meet you as you run, the spare lines of text that hint at a society you wish you could have seen in full flower, the way the narrator seems ashamed of the fact that he needs to send a kid to do the dirty work, the distant music from a time you’re trying to bring back. All of these pieces of design lift what could have been a standard slogging kill-fest into something simultaeously melancholy and heartening.

This is one of the few games where the compulsion toward completionism that I tend to feel regardless carried some emotional weight. I wasn’t making sure I had all the upgrade structures, I was putting back the pieces of a shattered world so that a hard-working kid could finally rest. I wasn’t getting achievements, I was paying tribute to the people that would be forgotten without me. Its a game with few characters, but it makes you feel for all of them. Including the beasts you need to kill to make your way in the world. It’s not mawkish or sentimental, either. It just presents you with a situation that is unfortunate and too few options to fix it.

Through these touches Bastion achieves one of the best game narratives I’ve seen, using subtle strokes to tell a story bigger than the part you play in it.

The best recommendation I can give is that immediately upon finishing it, I wanted to wipe my memory and start again from the beginning. Hell, it’s got a newgame+, I may do just that.

Buy Bastion at Half Off!

Let’s cut to the chase.

Buy this fucking thing. It’s $anything. It’s $anything. Don’t think about it, don’t hem and haw about how maybe you can’t afford any amount of money greater than or equal to $0.01.

At first, it was just a copy of Frozen Synapse (an excellent game, retailing for over $20 right now).

They then added a copy of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, 5 more games. NOW IT HAS SPACECHEM. Do you understand? SpaceChem. The World’s Best Puzzle Game.

GEEEET THIS. Goddamn it I’m starting to hate you just because I can tell you’re reading this sentence instead of getting it. I hate you so much you agh I hate you. Buy it.

It’s free so I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but here’s a trailer!

But.

Well, I was watching Paw’s review of it the other day, and that inspired me to watch the movie again for the first time in years, and I noticed something that’s just completely shaken my entire concept of the Disney classic. It happens early on, and so fortunately doesn’t require me to summarize the entire film in order to get there. For the benefit of those of you who either have managed to live your entire lives without seeing the movie or, more likely, just don’t remember the specifics of a movie you haven’t seen since you were kids, I’ll let Wikipedia cover the necessary basics:

An enchantress disguised as an old beggar woman offers a young prince a rose in exchange for a night’s shelter. When he turns her away, she punishes him by transforming him into an uglyBeast and turning his servants into furniture and other household items. She gives him a magic mirror that will enable him to view faraway events, and she gives him the rose, which will bloom until his twenty-first birthday. He must love and be loved in return before all the rose’s petals have fallen off, or he will remain a Beast forever.

Ten years later, a young, beautiful woman known as Belle comes along …

And the story continues, la la la. Poor inventor’s father gets in trouble, Belle rescues him, Stockholm Syndrome sets in and is in turn replaced by the afore-required true love. We have conflict, and pouffy gold dresses, and the Mob Song which remains one of my favourite Disney songs of all time, and we all go home happy.

There’s just one little problem, and it mostly has to do with math.

The Beast, we get told right away, has until his 21st birthday to learn to love and get love in return. Well, all right, that’s actually already a bit of a big ask. I’m 24, and I’ve never known true love — at least nothing I think would satisfy some pissed-off Enchantress. And this is coming from a reasonably-cute girl with decent people skills, who spent the last seven years on university campuses. What exactly is a Beast supposed to be able to do that I couldn’t, even if he wasn’t locked in a castle with only his furniturized servants for company? Yes, yes, I get that this is supposed to be punishment, but you’d think she’d give him a bit of a chance! Why bother to offer an escape clause, if it’s just flat-out impossible? And in an era where everyone is either having arranged marriages or ends up wedding the neighbour because you’re both still single and hey, those kids won’t have themselves … it’s not like Love is a common thing to be quested for.

So, okay, maybe I ended up discovering a couple of problems – but, we’ll try to get back on track now.

Which has us with …Prince, cursed, has until his 21′st birthday to find love, or he stays a beast forever. Unfortunate, but there you have it. Since the falling of the last petal occurs within the film, I’m assuming that his 21st birthday does as well. So our poor unfortunate Belle wanders into his life when the guy is 20.

That’s right. The deep, thoughtful, twisted creature we follow (voiced by a then-35 year old actor) is 20. Which for me suddenly makes it hard to take anything he says, does, or feels seriously. Suddenly his erruptions of temper stop being about years of solitude, a clash between his self-identification as a hideous monster and the personification of civility and humanity he sees in Belle, and turn into the grumpy poutings of an adolescent male who doesn’t get his way. Of course he’s not very good at dealing with women, most guys his age aren’t — he’s not special, he’s just home-schooled. And a bit hairy. I’m surprised he doesn’t try to seduce her by suggesting that his junk is proportionally large and muscular!

"What do you mean, 'look like a dweeb'? The guys all said this look was hot right now!"

Maybe I’m just odd, but I always took his lack of maturity mostly as a factor of his mental growth. Surely the things he didn’t know or understand, his lack of social grace, were meant to be poignent testaments to his isolation, not an accurate reflection of a frat-boy trying to hit on the nerd. Weren’t they?

I don’t know, maybe I’m just insane.

But even if I am, we run into another problem if you keep walking the clock backwards. First of all, the movie is peppered with hints that the status quo has been the way it is for quite some time. Little phrases like ‘years went by’, ‘it’s been so long since’, ‘years of sadness and tears’ remind us all that yes, a full decade went by since the Enchantress stopped by at the castle, asked for room and board in exchange for a flower. (Which, by the way, just sounds cheap. Is her giant moral here that everyone should assume that everyone’s an enchantress, and never try to charge full price or anything? Why does having magic mean she shouldn’t have to pay for something? Freeloading bitch!) The prince, stuck-up brat that he was, didn’t think she was awesome enough to share his castle, and she punished him for his heartlessness.

Except that if one does a bit of math … the prince was eleven.

No, no, of course this child has not yet entered puberty! Why would you even suggest such a thing?

Yes, the animators seemed to have done the best they could to hide that fact. They drew the prince as some burly broad-shouldered thug who seems to be somewhere between the ages of 17 and 35. And the briefly-seen portrait a few seconds later makes it even clearer: he looks exactly the same as he does at the end of the movie, just a little bit more paintery.

Left: The Prince, age 11. Right, The Prince, Age 21. Or, wait, do I have that backwards?

But as noble as their efforts are, as hard as they try to fool us into thinking that he was old enough to have a clue, the story says ‘no’. When you get down to the story, the ruling is that the Enchantress worked all of her mayhem – cursed hundreds upon hundreds of innocent servants, quite possibly forever - because some snot-nosed kid decided he didn’t want to let the strange old lady and her flower into his castle while his parents weren’t home.

And honestly, I’m not sure what the moral of that is supposed to be. Kids are taught to be wary of strangers, especially when they’re inexplicably left alone with the staff. So really, his unwillingness to let a stranger into the house seems sort of an admirable trait, rather than a negative one. And even if he wasn’t being smart about it, and just didn’t want to be nice to her, is he really the only bratty kid she’s ever met? Really? ‘Cause I find myself left wondering whether this might not just be one in a long chain if inappropriately severe punishments she’s decided to dish out over the years – over there, a man forgot to hold the door for her, got turned into a door himself; here, two children were playing in the street and didn’t get out of the way, turned into clouds so that they’d never be in anyone’s way ever again; &c. &c.

Oh, sure, it’s all well and good to say that she looked into his heart, or whatever, but isn’t it just possible that with no parents raising him, he was never taught compassion? Were there really no other options that she could think of, other than turning him into a member of a different species, and then telling him that he had only his teenage years to find true love? In a world where, hey, most people are just probably going to try to kill you on sight. I really hope that for their honeymoon, Belle and Phillip (or whatever his name was, funny how I stop caring about him at all once he transforms back into Prince Blandness) go on a cross-country trip to track her down and bring her to some kind of justice.

On a more practical level, I’m just going to assume that the animators were trying to do us all a favour by ignoring that part of the script, and quietly pretend to myself that the prince was 15 or 16 at the beginning, and had until his 25th birthday, by which time he might possibly have come out of puberty and started to have a brain.

But on the off-chance that I’m wrong … Dear future animation teams. If you don’t want to confuse us? This is what kids look like:

Above: The latest members of the Septuagenarian Society.

]]> http://troublethinking.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/la-belle-et-le-petit-prince/feed/ 0 persekore peer pressure sux the prince the prince2 boys http://troublethinking.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/addictiveness-will-kill-games/ http://troublethinking.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/addictiveness-will-kill-games/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:30:44 +0000 Durandal http://troublethinking.wordpress.com/?p=1655 ]]> So hey! Gaming! Oh man, isn’t it cool how everyone basically plays games now? Even Grandma knows the Book of a Thousand Faces has some jingly-jangly things on it you can entertain yourself with. It’s like your hobby has “gone viral” or “mainstream” or “maybe now people will listen to my Starcraft stories”.

And it’s really a good thing. I’m a fan of it! It’s a form of entertainment with a lot to give and not enough people treated it seriously. If only 5% of the population watched films, we’d be poorer for it. So yes! Everyone should get their hands on a game and give it a shot. And, also, I’d love it if each and every game they tried playing weren’t a payload specifically designed to destroy their life and finances, finally leeching the calcium from their bones and rolling back, bloated with the life-force of what used to be a human being, to sinister men who make their beds in the acute angles of reality.

There is a focus, unambiguous and unashamed, on making games “addictive”. It’s used as metaphor, a buzzword because hahaha games aren’t a real drug wiiiiink get it we just mean make it like it’s a horrible destructive worthless thing designed to promote self-harm. And to an extent, that’s true. Chemical addiction hits harder and more often. But that doesn’t mean that non-physical addictions don’t exist. Ask someone who lost their kid’s college fund gambling if they felt fully cognizant at the time. The point is, as terribly fearmongering as “mom leaves kid in car to play WoW” and the like are, it’s fundamentally a bad thing to be focused more on exploiting customers via addiction than producing a fine product.

And that’s where we are. Zynga is a success. It’s not the devil, no. Their shitty facebook games aren’t hurting people. But then, they aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to exploit well-studied psychological triggers in order to transfer money from people to Zynga.

Other people have followed eagerly, including major established developers. The actual game has been identified as a barely-necessary middleman, something to be created in as spare a manner as possible, in order that people get hooked on the transference of money out of their pockets. Many modern game developers have stated implicitly that they would be delighted if they could simply avoid the messy business of actually crafting a game, and get on with tapping into the spines of unwary consumers. If “Dragon Age Legends” sold more copies than Dragon Age 2, you’d never see a full game from EA again.

Yes, it’s nice that people are playing games, and it’s nice that games are breaking into previously untapped demographics. Yay for a broader culture, maybe we’ll all learn something.

But for fucks sake, people playing Farmville shouldn’t be playing that when something like Anno 1404 is on the market. I know I know, it isn’t browser based, it’s not free, there’s a learning curve… all valid issues. But the thing is they shouldn’t be playing something more substantial in order to receive some sort of cultural cachet from me. They should be playing something more substantial because at least the people who created that tried to give them something. It’s not the difference between seeing Rashomon and seeing Transformers so much as it is the difference between seeing Rashomon and getting shanked in the ankle.

The people making these shit little money-sinks do not like you. Yes, you can still find their products fun. But that is an accident, one they hope to correct in the future.

God damn I hope no one paid $99 for that fucking Dragon Age Facebook game.

Here’s an interesting piece from an industry insider that spurred this post to a large extent. He does get a little bit wanky and verbose, so feel free to skip everything after the first page.

But, no it’s actually a pretty good bit of a thing, have a listen to it.

I am going to check out his other stuff. Won’t you?

More silly than terrifying. Especially the 40th time.

Horror games are pretty tense right? You’re sprinting through the ruin pursued by Elder Things that are nipping at your heels  if the portal closes the world will be plunged into a dark only the Old Things survive, and they will sup on our souls for eternity! Super freaky.

Until…

Until you die. Or get stuck. The moment you hit “escape”, load a previous save, or are thrown back to a checkpoint. Even games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which recommend special care be taken to enjoy them in the proper spooky environment (lights dimmed, headphones, etc.) are palpably straining not to kill the player. Because the moment you die that atmospheric scramble through the ancient ruin becomes an exercise in getting from A to B.

Scary games have a unique advantage: interactivity. Other media has to collapse possibility into a single event quickly. The chase scene begins, and with each second it becomes more definite that this will not be the death of the protagonist. A game allows you to shoulder that burden and removes the feeling of certainty. Maybe this is how it ends.

Games also come with a unique disadvantage: gameplay. The fact is, there’s nothing inherently terrifying about interacting with a computer. No matter how effective the setting, you’re still interacting in an understandable, even comforting manner. Death loses the power to frighten when you consider something “a game”. You die dozens of times in Mario and manage to soldier on without wetting your pants. As a gamer, your inclination is to figure out what’s best and do it. Games, even bleak ones, still offer you this comforting goal. Kill the zombies, escape the city.

So how do we maximize the terror that comes from interactivity while minimizing the comfort factor? Focus less on scary settings and more on scary, unfamiliar gameplay elements. Failure needs to be more than a quick trip across the Styx. And yet, only a few games explore the idea of drawing terror out of gameplay.

The Void is a scary game not because of how difficult it is to survive, but because of how impossible it is to do right. What’s brilliant about Void  is instead of placing you in a comfortably deadly situation with simple goals, it threatens you with being unable to ever understand the world well enough to make things better. You watch as every decision you make ruins another corner of the world because you are simply unable to put a puzzle together correctly.

Eversion takes a different tack. The gameplay is simple sidescrolling. But it introduces slipping into different dimensions or “Everting” to solve puzzles. As you progress through the game, “Everting” takes you to more discomfiting places. It uses your drive to finish the game as a way of forcing you to open that creepy door to the basement, so to speak.

Games shouldn’t scare us by aping movies. They should scare us in ways that only they can, because they can do it better.

This is how it always is. I leave for a minute or two weeks and you start forgetting about the things that Matter. Things like an awesome independent developer Unreal Development Kit game that looks amazingly, almost rudely great. It’s a multiplayer-focused first person shooter that puts you in the seat of a giant man-shaped robot bristling with weaponry.

From what I’ve been able to gather from trailers and the website, it’s looking to be less of a stolid, engineering-focused MechWarrior, and more like something out of the Japanese quick-jumping mech variety, just from a first person perspective. Which is great! Because I loved the unfortunately named S.L.A.I for the PS2, a game to which Hawken is looking pretty intensely similar. Quick matches of simple but interesting mechs composed of a moderately varied pool of parts.

On display in the video are a few very neat weapon layouts, with the standard many-missles, one-missle, strong-gun, weak-fast-gun, and so on. It also shows what looks like a call-in/kill-streak mechanic of some sort, with a massive flying fortress dropping some pain on a few players. If you’ve got a quick eye, you may notice the “cloak” mechanic, when the video’s protagonist shuts down all inessential systems and drops off the map in order to confuse another player as well as avoid some heat-seeking missiles.

So far, almost nothing is know about this game except that they are using dark rituals to make fucking amazing environment detail with nothing but two people working on the game. Check out the video and begin salivating procedures!

But really, mostly you can make the same tired fucking gay jokes the internet loves to make about everything. Hahaha [fictional character] and [fictional character] getting together would be soooo cute hahaha gay people woah.

Anyways! That shouldn’t detract that the artist is amazing and the pictures tend to be pretty witty while maintaining the character fiction. Really, I’m amazed there aren’t official Marvel/DC things like this.