The Anxious Productivity of 'Temple Run'

My post on Temple Run and the productive logic of video games is now up on Popmatters. I chopped a section from it to include here below.

Certainly, collecting coins and points isn’t anything new in video games, and such practices are not limited to casual games. Achievements and trophies for console games seem to serve much the same purpose: providing a psychological sense of reward for playing, imbuing the player with the feeling that they are doing something useful, as if the games themselves were unworthy of our time. The accumulation of coins and achievements (or even the photographs in a game like Pokemon Snap) appears to function something like Susan Sontag’s notion of the tourist with a camera: he desperately desires to possess the world, to bring something back to his colleagues, to show to himself that “my time in leisure has not been wasted.”

That site is now the home for some of my video game writing, though I'll still be updating this page with stuff on books, education, movies, and other art, most imminently with a post on Waiting for Superman. Do hold breath.

Housekeeping, Conferences and the Significance of Journey

Howdy everyone,

Sorry for the long stretch with no posts. I've been working on a paper on Argentina- the one I posted about way way back in July- to present at a few conferences. The paper still isn't done, but I presented it once already and am headed off to do another presentation this weekend. In the mean time, I have a post on PopMatters about my favorite game of recent memory, Journey. Here's a clip below:

For some time, critics, myself included, have struggled to find ways to interpret games through artistic parameters that we are familiar with, to apply our understanding of what is meaningful in other art forms to a new and developing medium. Video games do not, at least not yet, do what literature or movies do. On the surface, they have little to offer in terms of cultural criticism and their stories are for the most part god awful. The heralding of Heavy Rain, with all of its absurd melodrama and B-movie plot twists, as a hallmark of storytelling should tell us all that we need to know about the current state of the medium in this respect. And yet, those of us who play video games know (and know with a passion) that there is something significant here, something more to playing a game than just… well, playing a game. 

Enjoy! I'm off to sunny Boston, MA!

Qualms About Mountain Lion

Like millions of other people, I've become a Mac user and fan over the course of the last 5 years. From about 2007 - 2011, it seemed like Windows couldn't touch a thing Apple was doing with its operating system (I'll try to stay away from phones and tablets for the moment). Leopard seemed to be almost perfect when it was announced, and Snow Leopard built on that core functionality. Whoever was designing these systems seemed to know how to build a program that got things done without a bunch of fancy crap that complicated the experience. But starting with OS X Lion last summer, the focus has seemed more on redirecting consumer spending back towards Apple than on improving the user experience.

Lion launched in the summer of 2011 with new features like Mission Control, the Mac App Store, Launchpad and inverted scrolling. All of them mimic or borrow from iOS software that was designed to function effectively with limited controls, small screens and direct hand gestures. And none of them really have a place in a desktop operating system. Writing for Gizmodo last summer, Jesus Diaz put it better than I can: "The OS X team has produced an incongruent user interface pastiche that won't satisfy the consumers seeking simplicity nor the professional users in search of OCD control." In the same editorial, Diaz's contends that Apple had gone askew by "attempting to appeal to everyone." With the announcement of Mountain Lion yesterday, I'm thinking that Apple isn't trying to appeal to anyone, but to create the type of simplified, restricted environment on Macs that already exists on iPhones and iPads.

The new "features" highlighted as part of Mountain Lion include Messages, a supercharged chat program, Notification Center, exactly what it sounds like translated directly from the iPhone, iCloud integration, Notes (this is a new feature?), Game Center, the most annoying of the forced apps in iOS, Twitter integration, and Gatekeeper, a program that forces you to buy all of your software from Apple provides upgraded security. Combined with the updates in Moutain Lion, OS X (the "Mac" moniker has been dropped) is now a powerful operating system with a ton of decorative iOS crap all over it. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is useful to some people, but in general, I'm not enticed. Where is the sleek, natural-feeling control, the machine that will do what it's told with smooth user control? If I wanted an idiot-proof Christmas tree of a system, I'd use AOL or surf the internet on a Wii. 

And AOL is the apt comparison here. A few weeks ago, Adam Pash artfully decried the attempts of Facebook and Google to be what AOL once was: the be-all end-all of the internet, closed architectures whose design is meant to keep you within their system and only their system. As they've grown up, the services offered by Google and Facebook have only gotten bloated and creepy in a corporate-totalitarian sort of way. And the same thing seems to be happening to OS X.

Gatekeeper is perhaps the most telling feature of the new OS. By default, any program that you attempt to install that has not emanated from the Mac App Store or been registered by the developer with Apple is labeled as dangerous. A window pops up warning the user and suggesting that the offending program be deleted. These settings can be changed to become more flexible, but for many users, all software not approved by Apple will now be considered off limits. Gatekeeper is being touted as a security feature, one that coincidentally happens to direct users to Apple's own software (or software it profits off of). The direction this is going isn't hard to see: a computer architecture in which all software must go through the actual gatekeeper: the App store. And with every other feature seemingly designed to integrate iOS and OS X, Apple is moving towards full integration of all aspects of tech life into its own software and hardware, with all of the money going one way. Apple doesn't yet have the market power to do this, but it seems to be what they're gunnin' for. They are following the path that made Windows a progressively shittier product for a good 10 years: focusing on monetary domination more than user experience.

I'm also not writing to harp on Apple in particular. In "old media" as well as new, and across brands and products, this type of control is becoming more and more common. What worries me as much as the devolution of Mac OS X is the degree to which the internet and computer experience are slowly congealing around several huge companies, all of them working to make their products worse through a focus on control and commerce. We have a Google search enginge that redirects you to its own products, a Mac that tells you non-Apple software is dangerous, a phone that tracks everything you do on it, a social networking site which slowly removes its own privacy controls and sells your information all over the internet. I'm not saying that using Google, Facebook, a Macbook or an iPhone is currently going to stomp your freedom in some horrible way or that any of them are horrible products you shouldn't use (I use all of them); it's because I thought they were all so fantastic for a few years that it bums me out so much that they've all gone in the direction of gimmicks and control. I'm saying that as these things progress, there's a creeping feeling in my mind that all is not right, that the democratic aspects of the internet and the "tech revolution" are being increasingly rolled back by traffic directed to a few sources. Just as 90% of the media is the United States is owned by 6 companies, I guess the internet, and the programs we use to access it, are now the spaces being colonized.

In the Realm of Greatness: Notes on Norwegian Wood

Last night I went for a second time to see Norwegian Wood, a fever dream of a love story, written and directed by Vietnamese/French film maker Tran Anh Hung and adapted from Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel of the same name. It follows Watanabe, a college student living in Tokyo in 1967. He has moved there after the suicide of his best friend, Kizuki. In Tokyo, he runs into Kizuki's old girlfriend-since-the-age-of-three, Naoko. Things get a bit crazy after their relationship develops and she takes a turn for the worse psychologically. Also in the picture are Midori, a cute, enigmatic fellow student with a crush on Watanabe, Nagasawa, a suave womanizer and friend of Watanabe, and Hatsumi, Nagasawa's mistreated girlfriend.

I don't want to do a review of the film; my opinion isn't clear enough for me to make a judgment or evaluation yet; even after two viewings, I feel ambivalent about the film, unsure exactly what to make of it. It's certainly gorgeous, easily one of the most visually stunning films of the year, but I couldn't quite penetrate it. Perhaps it's the foreigness of the culture, both in time and geography, or maybe it's that it's an adaptation, not only of a fairly long novel, but of a Murakami novel- which often means quiet, tricky characters and dark mystery. A tough project for any film maker. Or maybe the film is just puzzling and enigmatic, to its credit or from lacking some greater vision. Regardless, I've compiled my thoughts and questions in the notes below, hoping that writing about them will illuminate some issues in the film.

1. I said it above, but, Holy Lord is this movie beautiful. Certain scenes, such as the one in which Watanabe is caught between two groups of student protesters running through a corridor, are so well constructed and well shot that they give me the chills. Cinematographer Ping Bin Lee does a beautiful job. I'm eager to take a look at his or at director Tran Anh Hung's other films...or whatever either one has coming in the future.

2. Speaking of those protesters, though, what the hell ever happened to them? There are 3 scenes involving student protests at the beginning of the film (all of them wonderful) and then...nothing. I wonder if they play a larger role in the novel or what, but there was a whole other dimension here that was teased and then...poof. Nothing.

3. This leads to one of the central issues I have with the movie- there are so many intruiging elements to the way it's filmed- the beautiful protests, the endlessly lingering, Terrence Malick-esque shots of nature, the long, uncomfortable sex scenes, the opium-den apartments that every character seems to live in- all of this wonderful stuff, but much of it never really seems to play into the plot in a more meaningful way. I was so adoring of the film the first time I saw it, especially for the first half, because there is so much potential here, but the only thing the film seems to care about are the particular relationships between the characters. Perhaps that's the point, that all of the world is opaque and unimportant in the face of this love, or at least this imagined version of love, but...well, maybe I just wanted a different film than the one actually on offer.

4. On the other hand, one of my favorite things about it is the way it unfolds slowly like some sort of fantastical dream. Nothing other-worldly happens, and yet, the mood of dark enchantment, of power and emotion, is present in every second of the film. It's slow-paced as all hell, and yet, EVERYTHING IS INTENSE. As Naoko and Watanabe walk through the park, the leaves shiver and, if you're in the right mood, so do you. Perhaps the atmosphere of the film is meant solely as an expression of their desires and emotional states, but none of the characters command enough sympathy to roll with them the entire film, and so such skillful construction of mood seems a bit wasted.

5. Adding to the visual element here is the music. Damn! What a job, Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead and There Will Be Blood fame). Half of the move is accompanied by period songs that are employed effectively and at times, are even meta-textually wound into the plot (on several occasions the music stops abruptly, as if controlled by the characters' actions). The other half is soaring violins and orchestral peices that slowly move into warped, demented Kubrick/Walter Carlos territory along with the direction (Watanabe's greiving scene is straight out of The Shining). Even the sound editing is wonderful. The woods, the city, the scenes that are strangely silent. Like above, really a dream of a film they put together.

6. Why does EVERYONE want to have sex with Watanabe? Every fucking female in the film wants him bad and wants to talk, constantly, about how much sex they want to have with him. This struck me as a bit mysogonistic and male fantasy-esque. Kind of killed some of the vibe.

7. The character development is truly stunning here. Their paths in the film are not a straight trajectories. Apropos for a bunch of 19-20 year olds, and strangely lacking from many films about this age group, is the degree to which all of them are genuinely confused. Characters frequently contradict themselves and seem to switch off between different types of emotions for each other, without necessarily being aware that they are doing so, and without making it so obvious to the audience. Their paths are wandering. Just as conversations are often set while walking and pacing and shaking in torrents of emotion, so too are the paths of the characters semi-dialectical and wandering.

8. The moving is very Wuthering Heights. Think Catherine and Heathcliffe crying and moaning on the moors. There is a lot of crying, some screaming to the heavens, a lot of emotional torment set amidst wild scenes of harsh nature.

9. At the same time as the characters develop fluidly and in unsettled ways, there is an air of fate about the film, reinforced by the repeated violin track that plays over dramatic scenes as well as the way that the characters discuss their lives in such absolute terms: love, responsibility, forever. Of course, part of this is the intensity of nineteen-year-old love. But part, I think, is the direction. The film, through some of the visual and musical aspects mentioned above, has the feeling of a dark fantasy playing out, as if these young lovers are Shakespearean mind-giants. Several 19th century European works come to mind most heavily- of course Wuthering Heights, but there's also a lot of Madame Bovary and Great Expectations going on here. We're certainly in the land of high fiction. But perhaps that is the fiction in which the characters are living and we are mere guests on their emotional journey.

10. Oh, the travails of adapting a book. In some ways, it works for this film. You can't include everything from a 400 page novel in a two hour movie, and so some of the clarity is gone. Sometimes, this adds to the mysterious logic that plays with your mind. It works some of the time. Events happen with ambigious cause and effect- to us and to the characters. One short scene opens with Watanabe in a record store, his hand covered in blood. Store patrons stare at him aghast. He stares down at his hand, as shocked as they are. The manager runs up with paper towells to cover his hand. The scene ends. What the fuck just happened? But it works. Events unexplained can work. And doesn't this happen in real life anyway, and especially when there is intense love and longing? Maybe not bloody hands, but there is certainly more  feeling than there is understanding, more confusion about events and actions, even your own. This is rarely so well represented as in the dream-logic of this film. On the other hand, the mystery detracts from the film's overall impact. I left the second screening with little to think about but atmosphere and vibe. For a film that presents so many enigmas, that seems to push you to unwrap its meaning, there didn't seem to be a whole lot to unwrap. Some vague statement about living life to the fullest, perhaps? But still, no one ever seemed to enjoy life very much in this story. By the end, the film felt both too long and too short. It could've used another three hours and it also could've cut about 40 minutes. A shorter cut may have been more effective in slow-building the emotional landscape without becoming cumbersome, or a longer cut could have really given us a fuller sense of the world of these characters and some more of the substance of their thoughts.

11. In the end, I'm left agreeing with the quote on the film's poster: this movie seems to be "in the realm of greatness." But I'm not quite sure it ever makes it all the way there.

Notes from The Ghibli Retrospective Part 1: Ocean Waves

Studio Ghibli's Ocean Waves (1993)

Set in a small town outside of Kyoto(I think, it was hard to keep up with the Japanese geography, which features heavily in the film's plot), Tomomi Mochizuki's Ocean Waves ("Umi ga kikoeru")  follows the developing relationship between two high school friends, Taku and Yatuka, and a mischevious and beautiful newcomer from Toyko, Rikako. Their story is set at a private high school in a small seaside town. The rhythm of adolescent life there really comes alive in the film: the slowness, the cloistered feeling, the closeness and at-times oppressiveness of going to a small school in a small town. All of these feelings are encased by the narrative device of Taku's reminiscing. The film begins and ends with him heading home for a high school reunion one year after leaving for college. This bookending serves well as an means to enhance the springtime-of-youth vibe that Waves seems to go for.

Saeko Himuro's story manages to avoid cliches or the tendancy of teen stories (at least western ones) to devolve into unrealistic adventures. Because we care about the characters, there is no need to send them to the moon or to have them crash a car. Fitting for a movie about high school, small events becomes big ones in the lives of the young protaganists. Although there is some action, the story doesn't really go anywhere. An illicit trip to Tokyo between Taku and Rikako doesn't result in sex or even a little smooching- just Taku sleeping in the bathtub of the hotel and Rikako having a rum and Coke. The films unfolds more through the characters and their relationships with each other than through external events, which figure here mostly to allow the teenagers to learn more about each other.

The retrospective at IFC was my first chance to see Ocean Waves and I was pleasently surprised. Some of the lesser-known Ghibli films, The Cat Returns for example, can seem childish and derivative, overdoing the melodrama that all of the studio's films contain on some level. Ocean Waves mostly avoids this trap through underplayed action, slow pacing, and a character-driven script. On first viewing, I enjoyed it more than the more promoted, more popular, Miyazaki-directed Ponyo. If you get a chance to see it (and I didn't in the 18 years since it's release), it's definitely worth a look.

*image from omohide.com