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

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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.