Slacker Utopia

Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991)

It's Christmas day and I'm home for the weekend from New York. I think for most people, there's an air of emotion and nostalgia to coming home, seeing your old friends, getting away from your usual life. For me, it sets a reflective tone and by the second or third day here, I find myself engaging in more creative, inspired, maybe even spiritual ways of thinking.

Anyway, I was getting a cup of coffee at 7-11, the only store that seemed to be open. Christmas, like any holiday, bestows a certain feeling of calm to the streets. People move slower. There's less of them out. It's one of the rare times that there is quiet in a public space. Any conversation, whether with a store clerk or a person you know, can take on an intimate quality, even if the content of the conversation is casual or trivial.

So, as I was walking out of 7-11, there was a guy standing by the trashcan, maybe 35, balding but with long hair, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a giant pair of headphones around his neck. He was opening up sugar packets and putting them into a coffee. He looked a bit crazy, and as I walked by, he shouted out "Hey there!" with a big smile and an expectant look on his face. I responded back in kind and picked up the pace of my walk, a bit leery of a conversation with someone who seemed odd. I've had too many random, confrontational, or scary interactions in New York not to be timid about the chatterings of strangers.

I walked on and down the street, then doubled-back to go a different direction. I was wandering a bit, and as I crossed the parking lot diagonally he walked past me about 5 yards away. The way we moved reminded a bit of the camera movement in Slacker, Richard Linklater's 1991 experimental film in which the camera follows from person to person as dozens of characters conversations between friends and strangers flow with little to no tension. People pour out monologues and delve into intellectual topics with the same ease that they would discuss the weather.

And in thinking about Slacker, which admittedly, has been on my mind a lot lately, I realized that I had just had a bit of a Slacker moment. But a real Slacker moment, not a filmic one. An impoverished interaction, laden with hesitation, fear of the unknown, and a host of invisible social boundaries. There was no monologue. There was no intellect. There was only "Hello" and an unsaid goodbye. In the film, we would have walked for several blocks, with the man rambling on about some intriguing conspiracy theory. In reality we parted immediately.

And it got me to thinking more on just how utopian the film really is. It envisions a world in which the inner yearnings of our consciousness are expressible at almost any time and to any person, in which our isolation from each other is almost non-existent.

I picture myself waking early on a Sunday morning at age 19, brimming with excitement over some line of poetry or song lyric, bursting with thoughts and musings too broad to be articulated, and waiting for someone who I felt close enough to that they might understand to wake up so that I could at least attempt some expression. But even when they did wake up, and even when we try to express those inspired inner ramblings, a host of other walls are erected, immediately and invisibly, always already keeping us from communication. To exchange a greeting (which rarely happens in Slacker), to ask how someone is doing, what they've been up to, to engage in established social practices, is to move from an inner, personal world, into a social world that is always the same- at least at first. And in this movement, we are cut off from a communication so direct, so dream-like.

In that sense, Linklater's film, along with its companion, Waking Life, seem to present a sort of dream communication, a world, whether realist or fantastical, in which the words flow freely, in which the poesy of our thoughts is able to be articulated with immediacy.

***

I'm going to be writing my thesis on the idea of utopia in Richard Linklater's films this spring. I'll be using this blog as a platform to jumpstart  and explore my thinking on his movies and subjects related to them.

Studio Ghibli Retrospective In New York

For anyone with an interest, passion, or obsession with Studio Ghibli, GKids is holding a retrospective at the Independent Film Center in New York Dec 16 - Jan 12. Whether you've seen these films before or not, if you're in the area and have a chance, getting to check out some of the most visually impressive and thematically deep animated films of all time in 35mm on a big screen will surely be an excellent experience. Personally, the only Ghibli film I've seen on anything larger than a modest living room TV is Howl's Moving Castle. In addition to films that are easy to come by in the states on DVD, there will be screenings of Only Yesterday and The Ocean Waves. The full title list hasn't been announced, but I'm also keeping my fingers crossed for an advance screening of the upcoming The Secret World of Arrietty, set to be released Feb 17 by Disney in the US. To sweeten the deal even more, there will be both Japanese and English screenings. No word yet as to whether this will be for ALL films or only select screenings. Overall, this is great news to help tide over NYC-based Ghibli fans until the release of Ni No Kuni sometime in 2012.

If you're new to Ghibli, my recommendations are as follows:

1. Princess Mononoke

A fantastic piece of eco-criticism with unusually complex and morally ambiguous characters set during a fictional iron-age. IMO the best animated film ever.

2. My Neighbor Totoro

This one is really a classic. Totoro tells the story of two young girls move to the countryside with their father after their mother falls ill, only to discover that there is a wondrous world hidden there. Story isn't really the right word here. This film is more about experiencing a place and a mindset than it is plot-driven. Truly magical.

3. Grave of the Fireflies

Directed by Isao Takahata, Grave takes a more serious tone than most of Miyazaki's films. Set in WWII-era Japan, this tearjerking, heartstring-tugging film follows a boy and his young sister during and after an allied bombing campaign.

4. Porco Rosso

This one doesn't get as much attention, but it's one of my favorites. It's Miyazaki doing his best take on Hemingway, with some magical realism and fighter planes thrown in for good measure.

5. Spirited Away

By now, every one and their mother has seen or heard about this visual stunner. Still the only foreign film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Film.  If you haven't seen it, go do it. 

I Don't Know What Video Games Are

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the most common media to compare video games to was  film. At the time it seemed a bit strange to me that the easiest comparison was films and not other types of games, as one might expect given the title "video games." That games don't readily come to mind when talking about video games, to me refects a confusion about what the medium actually is. personally, architecture always seemed a fitting comparison. I can imagine looking with awe at a work of beautiful architecture from a distance. I can also image exploring it, walking through it, interacting with it, as I would with something like Mario 64. And as I think more and more about the question of what games are, I’m inclined to the position that most video games are not in fact games, but a new type of media entirely that contains aspects of games within it.


What do we know about video games though? We know what they are not. We know video games are not films...or books or plays for that matter. And for a moment, I’d like to assume they aren’t games either. So what are they? In the article linked above, Most computer games aren't games at all... Mike Jones examines the nature of games, comparing various definitions of "game" to four popular video games (Tetris, Bioshock, WoW and The Sims), ultimately concluding that, of the four, only Tetris truly constitutes a game. In looking for the proper term, Jones suggests a fragmenting of our concept of video games, implying that there is no one category for all of them to fit under. In doing so, he suggests the terms puzzle, simulation, interactive story and virtual world, before eventually using the term “screen-based media entertainment and art,” a few times to refer to our broader cultural category for video games. This term seems overly broad though, applying to television shows, films, the Wii news feed, and any number of the diverse forms of entertainment that now inhabit our screens. It also applies to many games in the strict sense of the word like Solitaire or Snake. But I don’t think Jones sees it as a true definition either.  


Like Jones, I don’t endeavor to provide a successful definition of video games in this post. As Rick Altman writes in Silent Film Sound, "New technologies are always born nameless. Assimilated to multiple possible models, new technologies always begin life with multiple monikers rather than a single stable name." Maybe, as video games become widely accepted enough to demand more attention and increased variety, we will get to the point where multiple names become more appropriate than a singular name. And so I’m not going to try to re-name “video games,” but only to add some thoughts to help better understand what they are. I believe the concept of “crisis historiography” will be helpful here. First developed by Altman in a work that focuses mainly on the development of the cinema in relation to a host of other mediums- radio, vaudeville, photography, theater and others, crisis historiography provides a helpful twentieth century paralell to our twenty-first century dilemma. 


Altman uses cinema as his main example, but broadens his scope to highlight the ways that we conceptualize and define all new technologies and the resultant art that comes out of them. He argues that all representational technologies are socially and historically contingent. Moreover, they are defined specifically in relation to previously dominant modes of representation. For our purposes in looking at video games, literature, film, theatre and painting are the culprits. He writes,

Successful representation has always depended on the ability of new media to disguise themselves as old media, to meet the requirements established in existing media. Because new representational modes are perceived and appraised according to in-depth training received in the school of previous modes, proper understanding of representational technologies must always start with analysis of one medium’s attempt to do the job of another. (17)

In highlighting the ways in which we, perhaps by necessity, use standards established by previous media to explore the newer mediums, Altman defines nearly to a tee our current discussions about games. Consider the following quotes from Roger Ebert, G. Christopher Williams and myself:

– Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art”

No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets. 

We appreciate the design of the narrative circumstances in Hamlet because we are not involved in any way in the action…It’s a bit more difficult to make such an argument about the player’s experience in Catherine…
– G. Christopher Williams, "Why Video Games Might Never Be Art" 

When my game experience felt so much like my literary one, and not at all like my experience with the film, it brought to mind the overlaps between games, films and movies. 
–Myself, "Final Fantasty VI For the First Time: Why (Some) Video Games Might Be More Like Novels Than Films"

In each quote, we see the inability to escape from notions about how art and artistic mediums do and should function...notions that are based on our experience with previous forms. There are established standards that develop in large part from the previous media available to us and from the previous thinking about art through these media. And by assimilating our new experiences with newer media to our old standards from old media, we are able to make sense of what is undefined and novel. But are we accurate? And if we are not accurate, what elements of meaning, representation, truth, exploration and understanding do we miss out on by applying standards for what constitutes good theater or literature to a video game or internet video?

Given the blossoming nature of the medium in discussion, it seems like a safe bet to say that we don’t totally understand video games. Bur do we even understand the old standards and values that we use to evaluate art? If, like Altman argues, our understanding of media and art is socially constructed, then how can the theories and artistic standards that surround these artistic texts not be socially and historically contingent as well? Writing about the changing attitudes towards Shakespeare in America over several centuries, Scott Juster touches on this issue in an eloquent peice arguing that definitions of art are inherently mutable:

Herein lies the most insidious aspect of our historically-relative cultural hierarchy: we are compelled to position specific games and the entire medium along some theoretical, fallacious grand chain of artistic merit.  The chain is powerful and restrictive.  It brings order to a chaotic world by telling us what pieces of art are higher than others.  The chain feels like it has existed forever and is immutable, but we know that this is not true.  As is demonstrated by Shakespeare’s history in America, the boundary between mass entertainment and high art is composed of little more than social beliefs.

In our discussions of the validity of video games, we use definitions and terms as if they are settled and absolute, occasionally paying lip service to their ultimate subjectivity without really believing those disclaimers. However, the limitations of our own experience prevent us from knowing either the nature of art or of video games themselves. From Plato to Nietzsche to Barthes, there are innumerable theorists to back up whatever position we want to take about art as we attempt to define constructed and abstract concepts in ways that suit us. But the question is never settled. Both the mediums and the standards are in constant flux. And it seems at this point, we don't even have settled terms to discuss either.

Image via Girl Gamer UK

The iPhone 5 is the Message

The announcement of the iPhone 5, or 4s or 4G, or whatever it's called, will occur in about 3 hours. With the pending revelation of the object that has inspired such hysteria and obsession from around the blogosphere and popular news media, I thought it apropos to reflect on how much the medium has truly become the message today. While I don't expect anything grand from this latest iteration- a better camera, quicker loading times, maybe some voice integration- I, along with a shitload of other people, have been thinking about how the iPhone has ushered in a new era of wiring our brains to communication technologies. I had an IPhone for about two years, but even without one, I've retained the habit of constantly looking down to my phone, checking my email ten times a day instead of one or two, of expecting to know the name of any catchy song I hear in an instant. When it is constantly accessible, information takes on the quality of a drug, altering the way we interact with the world around us. I don't believe this is limited to phones either. Steven Totilo, writing on Kotaku about the Wii U, reflects not only on the influence of technology on our lives, but how our lives and relations have changed to such a degree as to demand adaptations from future technoligies that wish to appeal to our new techno-social structure:

For all its faults, Nintendo is probably making the right gaming console for our times. Who sits on a couch with other people in order to all focus on the same thing anymore? Do people really gather to watch a TV show together or have dinner? Think about it. Is their attention undivided and on the same thing? Of course not. At least one person is checking their iPhone, logging onto Facebook, reading a text or sending an e-mail. The globally rich society that plays video games is the same globally rich society that in the year 2011 always already has a private screen in the palm of their hands. (emphasis mine)

Subtly drawing on Louis Althusser's "always already" concept, the gist of which is that all of us are subjects of our society's ideologies before we can really consciously think about whether we are or not, Totilo adds a new technological demention to Althusser, updating subjecthood for the twenty-first century. In the case of the do-everything-for you iPhone and its second-class bretheren, the Android phones, we are already in the grip of the machine, and it in ours, before the first questioning editorial about what might have been lost is even published.
And so, with today's announcement, it seems that quite literally, "medium is the message," or, more elaborately, "the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 8). We are not excited for the announcement of the phone for what its call-making potential, but for the imagined totality of increased access to communicative habits and the imagined, potentially impossible expectations of something that will revolutionize our lives and the way that we interact with our environment, something that will "shape and control the scale and form of human association and action" (9). Beyond my theoretical speculation, neuro-psychologists are starting to study these effects. The New York Times recently described a study that showed immense influence on emotions and reactions that we generally tend to think of as immensely personal, even spiritual:

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone. 

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia. 

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

If even a part of this is the case, no content or function of the phone has a chance of valuation at the level of the phone itself. Today, the phone is the message. From our vantage point in 2011, the reconfiguration of our minds and social relations hasn't yet begun. We are still living in a world shaped largely before the internet, before personal computers and before smart phones. Any one born in the last ten years will live in a world where these are ubiquitous and unquestioned, much as I can hardly imagine life without electricity. It's kind of exciting and maybe a little sad. I miss looking at the same screen as everyone else I know.

See also:
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Singularity
Image via iHackBlog

Pitchfork Jens

My love affair with Jens Lekman continues (not literally) with the release of his new EP on Tuesday. I was gonna write a review, but Brian Howe at Pitchfork did such a good job, I figured I'd just link his review. For all its faults, the site packs a cadre of damn good writers. Choice quote:

The modern lingua franca is an abstract slipstream of memories, slogans, admonitions, and impressions, as if emotional states were free-floating entities, unmoored from specific experiences. This mode is ideal for self-projection and introspection, both valuable quantities. But Lekman's music makes me think more about other people than myself. For all of their polished mannerisms, his songs are uncommonly free of pretenses-- they're about people, places, and things that happened or could happen in the world; about how we spend our time and how we talk to each other. Against a backdrop of enigmatic universalism, musicians who undertake the ticklish business of pinning down the minutiae of human affairs are very dear.

Well said. Well said.

Watch Lekman playing a song about Kirsten Dunst.

Final Fantasty VI For the First Time: Why (Some) Video Games Might Be More Like Novels Than Films

In the age of 3D graphics and professional voice actors, it goes without saying that the most common medium to compare video games to is film. There are probably two main reasons for this. First, on an experiential level, movies provide the easiest comparison: both are visual and auditory mediums that are commonly played/watched on a television and often follow a story through a narrative arc from beginning to end. Games such as Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted invite the comparison further by styling their aesthetics after action films. The other reason, I believe, has to do with the history of film as an artistic medium. Film started as a medium that had almost immediate mass appeal, yet still had to fight for its place in the artistic world. In the early part of the twentieth century, film theorists and filmmakers wailed about the possibilities of their new medium, elbowing and shoving their way to artistic legitimacy as politicians and moral watchdogs condemned the cinema as licentious and wild. For those of us looking at video games today, the parallels are wide and many. And, so, oftentimes we think of playing a game, especially a cinematic one like Final Fantasy VII or the increasingly filmic Rockstar games, as akin to watching a movie…a really long movie. However, as games get longer, and ironically, more cinematic, the experience of playing a game can have just as much similarity to reading a novel as to watching a film.

And this brings me to Final Fantasy VI (originally released as Final Fantasy III in the US for SNES). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing through this heralded classic for the first time. With a huge overworld and quest that supposedly lasts upwards of fifty hours, there’s a lot of game here. And it’s been consuming my time like almost no other activity (except for The Wire. Good lord what a show!). I get home from work, I play FFVI. I wake up on Saturday. I play FF VI. I eat mac ‘n’ cheese. I play FF VI. You get the idea. And what is so great about this game, you might ask. FFVI is unique in the sense that, while it is a sprite-based game in some ways limited by its format, its plot was A) fairly complex, both in its structure as well as its themes, and B) involved a lot of character development. Compared to traditional save the princess tales of sorcery, it had a literary quality. I wouldn’t call it Proust or Austen, but it certainly had some substance to it.

In FFVI, much of the gameplay not devoted to the plot is spent wandering around towns, exploring deserts or crevices in mountains and talking to the quaint characters that you meet along the way. I love how, in traditional JRPGs, when you walk into a town and talk to someone, the character has some totally random fact to tell you. It gives the small sprite characters not only a personality, but an endearing sense of innocence and humor. There’s something about the way the dialogue works, without standard introductions or other markers of conversation. You press A and whalla, “A strange rabbit has been eating all my crops.” Oh, good to know. Everywhere you go in the game, there’s some new side quest or non-essential person to speak to. They’re not required, but they add a lot of depth and charm. And they give you a chance to sink into the world, to really get to know the space and place in which your game experience is taking place.

In thinking about my experience with the game, the complex, lengthy plot melds together with the ability to wander and explore to form a holistically immersive experience. As I’ve played, I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly how to describe and how to think about that experience. The closest parallel for me was the last novel I read, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. This may seem like a strange comparison at first: steampunk fantasy world and gritty, nihilistic Texas thriller. The link between them was in the way that, while experiencing either game or novel, you get a chance to live in the world they’re set, to really spend time with the characters. Of course this can be said of many novels, but this one stuck out not only because I had just finished it, but because its film adaptation is such a fantastic and faithful one. When my game experience felt so much like my literary one, and not at all like my experience with the film, it brought to mind the overlaps between games, films and movies. The Coen brothers’ film based on No Country was great, but it had more of an immediate, aesthetic impact. In the novel, which is strikingly similar, you get more time to really know who you’re dealing with, to feel the landscape and enter into another world. To me, this type of experience is the core of the appeal for so many adventure games.

And so I wonder if playing Final Fantasy VI, or other long story-based games, is not in fact more akin to reading a novel than watching a film. It’s hard to really draw your own mind into a film in only a few hours. Novels and games take weeks, months, sometimes even years. The time between playing is spent thinking about the media object in the question. Sessions last hours at a time and you leave them feeling like you’ve just woken up into some other universe. You live for days on end with characters, learning about them slowly and through smaller, more drawn out interactions. In terms of what matters, the experience of the art and what you can take from it, perhaps our metric of film comparison is not only lacking in its relation to interactivity, but also to its accuracy as a comparison for more weighty games. Of course there are a whole host of issues outside of this one, but right now, I’m thinking, all other complications aside, the experience of playing games just might be more like the experience of reading novels than watching films.

Top image via DesktopMadness

Reader Response Theory and Video Games: Thoughts on G. Christopher Williams's "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art"

I’m a little late to the game on this one (no pun intended), but I’d like to offer a few thoughts on Christopher Williams’s piece for PopMatters, "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art." Giving his article a read before this one will probably elucidate many points here and is also worth reading for its own merits. The main thrust of my thinking in this post begins with something Dr Williams says early on, commenting on a quote from Roger Ebert’s famed “Video Games Can Never Be Art” article:

The really crucial observation to me exists in that last sentence, in which Ebert is suggesting that the player is doing something in playing a game, whereas normally an audience’s relationship to art (be that a painting, novel, film, etc.) is merely “experiencing” (in some passive sense of the word) the object before them, allowing meaning to “wash over them”, rather than actively participating with the artwork.

My problem is not with Williams's assessment of video games (even though I take issue with this aspect of Ebert’s original article) but in his later assessment of where value arises in other art forms. Williams discusses the history of aesthetics, citing Aristotle and Eliot in his discussion and gives some credence to the notion of personal interactivity in the field of rhetoric, but mainly examines Art with a capital A through the assumption that it is something you watch from the outside, not experience as a participant. In discussing Joyce, Willams does discuss the ways in which a person brings something to a text, but he only allows for true meaning to arise when the participant has stepped away from the art work, after the interaction is completed. I would like to discuss this focus on looking at a text from the outside in opposition to a view that sees meaning as arising from an interaction with a text. The reader-response theorists of the twentieth century probably provide the most helpful analysis in this area.

Reader-response theorists, incudling Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Louise Rosenblatt, Roland Barthes and others, have argued that the act of “reading,” both literally and broadly speaking, is an interactive process. Perhaps more importantly, the act of making meaning occurs not after, but through a "transaction" or interaction between the reader and the text. In Literature as Exploration (1938), Louise Rosenblatt takes perhaps the first stab at this type of thought:

The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text (30-31).

To Rosenblatt, meaning arises, not when one looks at the text from the outside, appreciating from an intellectual and emotional distance its various impressive and brilliant efforts, but through an intellectual and emotional connection made through an understanding of its elements as they connect to your own life. This doesn't mean that a book needs to be about someone like you or relate to your life in some concrete and literal fashion, only that the ideas, emotions, characters and words need to resonate and relate on some level. I don't need to live in 19th century Russia to appreciate Notes from Underground, but I do need to have some idea of what existential angst is like, what it feels like to be an outsider, and how "rational society" can create a sort of insanity. Or, I could read the book on any number of levels, with any number of interpretations, and the meaning that would arise would depend on which aspects of the book resonated with my experiences. Here, I am not taking up the banner of extreme subjectivity. I can't decide that Notes from Underground is about loving puppies or the war in Iraq. However, I will not understand it and I will not take meaning from it except on the level that I can connect it to something outside of itself. And so I must interact with the text.

It may help to discuss this sort of meaning-making in relation to a video game. When I was playing through “Flower” on PS3 a few years ago, I was initially floored by the dreamy, transcendent quality of it. Here I was in New York City, in front of a TV in my 8th floor walk-up, drifting off into some green wonderland where, as far as I could figure at first, my only goal was to make flower petals fly around and spin them into dizzying wondrous patterns. As the game progressed, I started to see that the ways in which my experience of flying around and making flowers bloom was altered as the landscape became darker and gloomier.

However, this experience alone, interactive as it was, was not enough to see a particular meaning in the game as meaning is traditionally understood in art and literature circles. I had to go beyond the game and beyond my direct physical interaction with it to make sense of my experience. I needed to interact mentally with the game as I played, to think about what I was doing on something other than a tactical level, as I would with any other artistic text. And as I played, I thought about pollution and the destruction of the environment, the disappearing green space in urban communities and the inattention that all of this receives from our political leaders. And most importantly, I thought about how this was mostly understood as an abstract concept. Environmental change occurs so slowly that it is difficult to understand experientially. We need Al Gore and millions of scientists in order to make sense of our gloomy prospects. And I thought about how this game gave an experiential way to understand the destruction of the environment by allowing me to play in a wonderland only to watch it degrade before my eyes. Without both my physical interaction with the game as game and my mental interaction with the game as text, I would not have been able to derive the same meaning. And the same type of mental interaction that I had with this game occurrs with a book, a film, or a painting. As you read or watch, you think about what you're experiencing and you combine it and connect it with your own thoughts on the world and you make an interpretation.

This account is an almost disrespectfully simplified example to illustrate reader-response theory and one that ignores many other strands of the field. As well, I don’t mean to imply that my process for making meaning was as conscious and direct as it may seem. Understanding texts is not an easy and simple process, it occurs through various interactions, through literal and metaphorical re-readings and re-examinations. Just as you can "get it" as you do a re-reading of a book, experiencing the story anew and seeing new aspects, the act of playing a game can facilitate the process of understanding and making meaning.

In arguing for an interactive theory of meaning-making, I also don't intend to propose that reader-response theorists should be taken as gospel and swallowed whole-heartedly. However, a crucial component in most discussions of video games as art is the fact that previous aesthetic theory and previous thinking on art in general has ignored or shunned interactivity. And so, where do we turn to examine this new medium? The reader-response theory provides an examination of a crucial aspect of video games, interactivity, but does so with a more time-tested medium, literature.

I think meaning is possible in video games, or maybe more accurately, meaning is possible through electronic media commonly referred to as video games. Perhaps it just exists in ways that are not obvious when you look through critical lenses designed for different formats. And perhaps the interactivity that seems so strange and bewildering to us as we try to understand exactly what this medium is and does has been with us all along.

Sans Analysis 3

A short and random collection this time. Enjoy.

Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace, Maud Newton, NY Times

Beck: 15 Years (Interview), Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork

Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, Jonathan Vanderslice playing together (video), The Walrus Speaks

Apple still pushing for $1.5 trillion US overseas profit tax holiday, AppleInsider

Nirvana, Grunge & Collective Cultural Longing

Did everyone feel the earthquake yesterday? I felt it here in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Not knowing how earthquakes work or what to do when they come, our supervisors quickly evacuated the building and I walked onto Flatbush Avenue to see thousands of people milling around in the street, excited and chatting about what had just taken place. I was a little shaken up by the experience (da-dum-chh!), but I couldn't help but feel happy about the immediate result. Strangers were talking. And maybe more importantly, they had something to talk about. Like when Obama won the presidency, like being in Hartford after UConn won the national championship, like the few times when everyone seems to have something in common. It's rare now and I was happy to see it taking place. But it also made me think about how our experience of the world now is so shaped by a lack of shared experience. Life without a cultural touchstone is to me one that lacks a wholeness, that is isolating and lonely. And this brings nostalgia for a time when, even if we weren't all holding hands singing Kumbaya, there was at least a greater ability for shared experience through shared cultural focus.

Posted yesterday on Slate, Simon Reynolds has a fantastic peice discussing the psychology around nostalgia, specifically for the grunge period of the early 1990s. As someone weaned on the music of the time, including grunge, its later, softer and mostly more annoying iterations, as well as the disparate popular movements that followed (ska comes to mind), I took a particular interest in its themes. I am, admittedly, a 90s nostalgiac. Reynolds discusses the longing for a defined culture, the feeling of living in "an era," and for the 90s in particular, an era of rebellious authenticity. Thom York sang on The Bends in 1995, "I wish it was the sixties," a line that seems, in a way, to define the 90s. Youthful earnestness, but with a tinge of depression and hopelessness, yearning for a more authentic, powerful life, believing that things should change, but lacking the belief that anything could. This at least, is one analysis, not exactly of the 90s as a whole, but for how early-mid 90s culture was and is conceived. For more, google "Metamodernism." Reynolds moves from the specifics of the 1990s into a discussion of how we define this time in a particular way through a particular lens, deconstructing the concept of "era" itself and the ways in which central, mainstream cultural media are necessary for the creation of our definition of not only this era, but any era, be it the 1990s, the 1920s, or the middle ages. He writes,

When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.

The nostalgia here is not for the 90s per se, but for the escape from cultural isolation. In the age of the internet, of a million new stories from a million sources that register barely beyond the feeling of momentary sensation, I wonder where such cohesive perceptions of the world can arise. What can define us together? We're all staring at different screens...quite literally. Collective viewership, collective listenership (is that a word?) and collective cultural understanding have been dissipating for years now, with nothing to fill the void. The best we can do to define our time, to give identity to our culture in this collection of years, is to point to its infinite divergences; we define it mainly by its lack of a defining feature. And while in many ways this can be good, I wonder if the five thousand or so MP3s on my computer are worth all the cultural loneliness and isolation. I wish it was the 90s.

Image from Taringa.net

New Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself



The man of eternal whimsy, Jens Lekman, is releasing a new EP on September 21 and a new LP sometime later in the year. I fully recommend everything he's done to every one I know. Despite wit, intelligence and a seeming awareness about the shitty state of the world, Jens's music is somehow instilled with an eternal sweetness and optimism. Over the past few years, he's strayed from his indie-pop beginnings sound into amazing sound kaleidescopes that take the whistful yearnings of young love and adventure and deftly move them into the realm where Daft Punk meets Otis Redding.

You'll find the title track of the EP, An Argument with Myself, here.

The photo is by Erlend Öye, taken from Jens Lekman's Smalltalk blog.

Sans Analysis 2

Apologies. My attention has been diverted most of the week by the debt ceiling madness, America's fiery waltz into a middling power and the plutocratic takeover of the government. All the hooplah has kept me from anything more artistic in nature. Here's a few peices of writing and media from the week that stood out to me.

Last Tuesday: How to Make an Art House Video Game Jonathan McCalmont on Futurismic

Winehouse, Breivik and Deadly Ideals Andy Martin in the New York Times

Boom Clap Bachelors - Løb Stop Stå Beautiful song and video

Ezra Klein's entire blog in The Washington Post

Iwata taking 50% pay cut over 3DS performance on Joystiq. Would this ever happen in the US?

Other "representative directors," including Senior Managing Directors Shigeru Miyamoto and Shinji Hatano, will take 30 percent pay cuts, and other execs will lose 20 percent off their salaries.

Apple Now Has More Cash Than the U.S. Government in The Atlantic; a sign of the times

Sans Analysis

•  Miranda July is Totally Not Kidding from The New York Times Magazine

• The new Washed Out album that I've been listening to all week.

• This quote was sent to me by my girlfriend, grabbed off of someone's Facebook page. I can't confirm the authenticity of its attribution to Huxley, but I like it nonetheless.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Aldous Huxley

• A Crazy Postmodern Schizophrenic-ish Video Game

• Sociological Images is a fantastic site, constantly updated with novel examinations of culture from a sociological/feminist perspective. Here's one on SAT score bias: SATs, GPAs, AND BIAS

• I've been reading the novel form of No Country for Old Men. Stumbled upon this New Yorker piece on Cormac McCarthy.

Disclaimer: I borrowed the idea of this style of posting without comment from Ben Abraham's old website.

Vile Bodies and Bad Bitches in Brooklyn

If you're in New York City on Friday night, you might be interested in checking out what's going on at 285 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. It's the party with the coolest mix of arcade games and alternative, punk, dance, etc. music in the city. Vile Bodies, as the show is called, includes a lineup of indie garage rock bands and DJs. There's also a lineup of sexually-themed videogames called Bad Bitches from Babycastles, curated by Leigh Alexander. I'll be there, but don't take it from me. You can read about it on MyOpenBar, Kotaku, Motherboard and Facebook. $10. 1/2 price before 7pm. Open vodka bar.

Hulu, Sitcoms and Collective Experience

Splitsider ran an interesting piece today examining how DVR, Hulu and other technologies are potentially improving the quality of television sitcoms. The argument runs that new means of delivering television programming make it easier to catch up on plot-lines, give more time for viewers take in shows, and provide the means for dedicated fans to follow a show without having to be at the right place at the right time. As the act of choosing to watch the show becomes a more active process, the demand for complex narratives and more sophisticated humor increases:

As more and more television viewing is done on DVRs and streaming video, the entire experience of absorbing a given comedy show will change. They will be packaged less as single, cohesive episodic pieces and more as installments, which will give writers a degree of freedom that they have not always had. Whereas many sitcoms may have previously stretched themselves thin in search of a set-up, climax, and resolution within less than a half-hour, new viewing methods will continue to encourage writers to situate their comedies in more realistic human spaces. As television comedy writing becomes less shackled by the impossibly canned 23-minute plot model, perhaps laugh tracks will be replaced by real laughs.

In addition to my interest in the ways that new technologies can change the art we consume and the way we consume it, I'm curious about the potential for technology to reinvigorate the collective experience of television watching. In an earlier era, a show came on at a specific time on a specific channel. There was one screen to watch it on and everyone watched it at the same time. As access to television shows has multiplied to include a variety of viewing means and formats, this collective experience has somewhat fallen by the wayside. As much as we might lament the disconnection of a family hunched around a glowing box, it's certainly better than a group of isolated individuals hunched over their own personal screens.

If the analysis on Splitsider is correct and narrative arcs become longer and more involved, I wonder if these technologies can also return some of the sense of shared experience associated with television. While we might not all watch the shows at the same time, it could be that, with increased complexity, increased involvement, and maybe most importantly, increased access to an entire series, television will spark the same type of discussion that a shared viewing would.

Splitsider via Gizmodo

Has The Zelda Series Become Stagnant?

Disclaimer: This article ignores all portable Zelda games, as I have never put much time into them.

I have a professor who is hopelessly addicted to superhero movies, anticipating translations of comic book vigilantes to on-screen juggernauts with glee and obsession. He reads previews. He watches trailers. He counts the days on his calendar. He buys tickets for opening night.

“I’ve got my popcorn" he says, "I’ve got the big soda, I’m all ready. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, Daredevil sucked, but man, Green Lantern is gonna be great’…and then it always sucks. But you know what, they always get me the next time. I think, ‘man, this next one will be the one that does it. I just know this one is gonna be awesome.'"

This is how I’ve felt about the Zelda franchise for the past ten years and this is what scares me as I look toward Skyward Sword, the latest installment in Nintendo’s fabled franchise. I can't wait for it, but I can't help but feel like it's going to be disappointing.

Now, before the tomatoes and beer bottles start flying, let me say, I don’t think the Zelda games suck. Far from it. The series has always been fantastically produced and unquestionably one of the best in the history of gaming. But the recent entries, while well-constructed and clearly crafted with a lot of care, seem to lack something. Some intangible magic. After each one, I am left feeling like the game was merely good, not wondrous, not other-worldly, not, if you’ll excuse the extreme arrogance in assuming my own opinion applies ubiquitously to a company enjoyed by millions, what is great about Nintendo.

What is it exactly? What is missing? To be honest, I don’t know, but I do have a few inklings. It’s my hope that in this post I can explore the question, and that maybe some readers (there must be at least a few of you) can chime in with their thoughts as well (Please no flaming, I ♥ Nintendo too!).

Hypothesis 1: It’s Just Me: I’m Old and the Magic is Gone From My Life. I Should Just Don the Suit, Have Kids, Drop the Controller and Die.


My first thought is that perhaps the sensation that I'm looking for in Zelda games is more a symptom of youth than of the games themselves. I can’t help but wonder what experience a twelve-year old gets from playing Twilight Princess or Wind Waker today. These games provide the same type of gameplay as Ocarina did, the same dungeon-crawling, town-wandering, forest-exploring and boss-fighting that made the series so famous. Perhaps nothing has changed and I’m just at a point in my life where the type of belief required to make these game worlds come alive is just not in me. Should I expect it to be? Of course the old woman who spoke one sentence and lived on the outskirts of the town in Zelda II seemed mysterious when I was seven, but what would I think now? But here's the thing: that old woman still seems mysterious. At this juncture, it’s hard to separate nostalgia from the genuine feeling of wonderment. I don’t remember playing the game, so I’m not pining for some specific sense of family or youth, yet hearing the music from an old game or seeing images like the one to the left, the feeling is there. The question seems to be, was there something particularly wondrous in the old NES and Super-NES games or is it just nostalgia?

Hypothesis 2: Zelda Was New, Now It’s Old

What gives me pause on the whole nostalgia explanation is the progression of Zelda games. From the original up until Ocarina of Time, nearly every game was a new experience. The first essentially invented a genre in itself. The sequel was a sidescroller mash-up that, even though it wasn’t the best game in the world, had its own charm and diverged greatly from the original. Link to the Past provided perhaps the most fully-articulated, living game world in a console game up until that point, and Ocarina created the same type of new experience in 3D, showing all games after it How To Get Shit Done.

The entries since then, try as they might to introduce new elements (and you have to respect them for trying), have still felt like variations on the experience established in Ocarina. Masks, cell-shading, realism. It was all cool. It was all enjoyable. But none of it felt new and none of it felt like magic, at least not to me. Frankly, Twilight Princess was boring for long stretches. And like I said before, it could just be me. I’m working with a very intangible concept here and it's hard to make clear lines in the sand. Still, I’ve been able to muster the same type of emotion for other games- Fallout, Okami, Flower. These games, however, are all intended for a slightly older, more mature audience. But they also all include some element that feels new, novel, strange. Maybe it’s just that a game, without feeling new in some way, has a hard time creating the sense of wonder that I’m pining for so much. And for a video game franchise, Zelda is more or less as old as stone on Death Mountain.

I also can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with Miyamoto’s involvement. I’ve been reading about Miyamoto’s games and philosophy since I was in elementary school, and in all that time, it’s become clear that Nintendo’s innovative, experience-driven philosophy stems from him. He has been the heart and soul of the company for the last twenty-five years. And as the years have passed, he has been required to oversee more projects and has subsequently become less involved in the Zelda series. Maybe the reason that the later Zeldas feel like great games that lack that Miyamoto magic is because, well…they lack that Miyamoto magic. And maybe there's a new type of magic that I'm missing.

Nintendo: Stagnant and Innovative?

The question of Miyamoto’s involvement brings me to the question of Nintendo at large. You certainly can’t accuse them of not trying new things, and I believe, exciting new things. The first introduction of the Wii reinvigorated in me a spirit of newness and novelty that felt lost during the previous console generation. But, Nintendo’s attention and, more importantly, its inspiration, has seemed focused on other areas. The traditional, exploratory, world-creating games have fallen to the wayside in all the hullabaloo (what a fantastic word!) of fitness, fencing and party madness.

Of course, Metroid Prime and Mario Galaxy were great, with the original Prime being probably my favorite game of the last two generations combined, but what we’ve mainly seen from Nintendo the last few years is a privileging of other experiences, ones that shoot for communal fun and only fun. I love Wii Bowling as much as the next guy (literally the next guy- the guy right next to me having a blast playing it too), but it's a different beast from the Nintendo that captured everyone's heart in the 15 years between 1985 and 2000. And yes, I realize that their new console is supposedly more targeted at "hardcore" gamers, but here it seems more like they're going for the Halo market than the Costume Quest one.

So, what does this have to do with Miyamoto? Well, it seems like Nintendo tends to follow the sparks of his inspiration. Even though there are many wonderfully talented and creative people there, he seems to be the head honcho in terms of new thinking. In terms of Mario and Zelda, they were created in the eighties based on experiences he had playing as a child. Now nearly sixty, how can Miyamoto be expected to be inspired by the same types of thoughts and experiences now as he was way back when?

I’ll always respect Nintendo for their insistence on going against the tide, on going it alone with at least some semblance of philosophical conviction. No matter how corporate and annoying many of their practices may be, in comparison to most mega-companies, they ooze originality. As Michael Abbot of Brainy Gamer put it in a post about Wii U, “Nintendo will bet the farm on another big idea. That's what they do, and it's why I always root for them a little more than the others.” However, I can’t help but feel that maybe Nintendo’s consoles are no longer the place for the types of experiences that I’m most excited about: ones that are other-worldy, exploratory, mysterious and, dare I say, magical.

With all that said, I'm still psyched about Skyward Sword. I just know this one is gonna be awesome.

E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 5: Journey

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

If I can describe the experience with words, then why are we even making the game? People like to ask us, and we would like to tell you, “Oh, we would like to make a sense of awe.” But what kind of awe is that?

-Jenova Chen, thatgamecompany, from 4colorrebellion

Read

Play

E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 4: Bioshock Infinite

Over the last few years, the original Bioshock has become a classic, a staple in the collections of both blast-em-all-to-hell shooter fans and gamers who wish to see the medium as something greater than a form in which you can blast em all to hell. Bioshock was set in an underwater Atlantis-in-ruins called Rapture. As the tale goes, the city was founded by the uber-capitalist, Ayn Rand-following Andrew Ryan (get it Ayn Rand/Andrew Ryan) in an attempt to create a society without the limitations imposed by anything that hinted at equality or morality. The protaganist, Jack, stumbles upon Rapture after a watery plane crash to discover a city teeming with violence and drug addiction. That's where the action starts.

With a kill-or-save stab at morality and a philosophically-inclined backstory, Bioshock became a favorite of Ethics 101 students round the globe. Plus, it was pretty exhilirating and creeped the shit out of everyone. Bioshock 2, developed not by Irrational Games, but by 2K Marin, was heralded by the casual game press, but didn't acheive the same sort of cult status or receive the same type of recognition from intellectual, snobby types like myself. It was heavier on the action, adding a multiplayer mode and tighter gun fights, and lighter on the philosophizing.

Bioshock Infinite, not so much a sequel as a similar game with a similar relationship between aesthetic content and philsophical backstory, seems like a return to form. Irrational and its leader Ken Levine are back at the helm, and their new project delivers a completely new story in a completely new game world, albeit one with clear structural similarities to Rapture. Infinite takes place in the floating city of Columbia, a place whose aesthetics mesh carnivale culture of 1930s America with the sense of futuristic decline that pervaded Rapture. Gone are the original's muddy tones of underway decay, replaced by a blazing sunshine and colors bright enough to slap on a flag. Something seems amiss though, as the contrast between the game's showcase of natural beauty and man-made crumminess illustrates.

How cool is this concept art?

In Infinite's game world, capitalist nut-job has been replaced by socialist distopia. An extreme version of a 1960s-style grand society/commune, Columbia was established by the American government and then quickly abandoned after a scuffle between city officials and Chinese nationals. The player takes on the role of Booker Dewitt, an ex-Pinkerton detective in search of a mysterious woman named Elizabeth. I won't go any further, so as to avoid any spoiling of the story.

This game has all the elements in the right place. The story sounds pretty cool, the floating city looks great and I'm glad to see the franchise again taking on a complex, imaginative story with political and philosophical undertones. Still, I can't help but feel a little disappointed by the repetition of the setup from Bioshock 1. I can picture it now: "Okay, guys we did capitalism, let's do socialism next." While I applaud the effort to move away from Rapture after two games, I wonder if there wasn't a more nuanced direction to take the thematics. It's like a new Starburst flavor rather than a new fully-fledged artistic project.  Still, when you see screenshots or videos from the thing, you'll be hard-pressed to bitch about the story, which isn't bad even if it does borrow elements from the original. It is a sequel after all.

Conclusion: with this new iteration it seems that Bioshock holds its place as the king of the blockbusters with intellectual tendencies, at least until Fallout 4 comes out (fingers crossed). Bioshock Infinite is set to be released on Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC sometime in 2012.

E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 2&3: Team Ico Games

I have to admit that I didn't play too much of either Ico or Shadow of the Colossus when they were released in 2001 and 2005, respectively. I can't quite say why, but I was playing fewer video games at the time and probably busy with things like college, Nietzsche and drinking. I did, however, read about them. Since their releases, the legends have grown about these two games and I've been itching to get my teeth into them ever since. In September, after a 5-month delay, Sony will be releasing an HD collection with both games in an effort to tide over fans until the release of Team Ico's next game, The Last Guardian.

The games each have a plot, but it is not the focus. Ico was meant to be a typical "boy meets girl" story, and in many ways, it is. Ico is a boy born with horns who becomes outcast from his small village (much like Oblio in The Point). He is locked away inside a castle where he attempts to free Yorda, a young girl in danger from an evil queen. Shadow takes the opposite tract, moving from imprisoned romance to wandering solitude. Translated literally from the Japanese as "Wanderer and the Colossus," the game follows a young man who must wander the world killing large "colossi" to save the life of the woman he loves. These games, however, are not about story.

Lead designer Fumito Ueda and Team Ico explicitly aimed for a minimalist, lonely and whistful atmosphere for their games, ones that leave story to the side and focus on emotion. The upcoming Last Guardian, which centers around the relationship between a mountain boy and a gigantic dog/bird hybrid, seems to continue this trend. Fans of Ueda's games describe them as dreamy and engrossing, and I can say that, even from an outsider's perspective, I can feel the spell. While I've read some fantastic peices on these games, I don't want to get too much into the mindset of interpreting them before I've even begun. I'm looking forward mostly to the feeling. The more I look at screenshots and videos, the more I feel the desire to spend a month or so in some dusty tundra in an unnamed foreign land, cooped up in small shack with a howling wind and only these games to keep me company. They seem to demand to be played with minimal distraction. I'll leave you with these images. I feel they are more fitting for a group of games that seem more to want to leave an impression, a felt sense, than to entertain or excite the intellect.

 

As a bonus, check out the Japanese box art for the re-releases of Ico and Shadow via VG247.com. Very cool. The Ico and Shadow of the Collosus Collection will be out in the United States on Playstation 3 September 27th. The Last Guardian is TBA 2012.