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.

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.

E3 2011: The Top Five PS3 Games for Artistically-Inclined Gamers to Anticipate: Part 1: Papo & Yo

E3 2011 has come and gone, and with it a whirlwind of information on upcoming video games and consumer electronics, all of it filtered through the corporate mouthpeices of game companies, with snippets from the nerds whose work keeps them talking. The main focus of E3 is on huge commercial productions like Call of Duty 37, Halo 16, 3D Playstations and novelty consoles from Nintendo. Along with these chest-thumping endeavors, though, is the feeling of the new, the novel, the changing, The Future. Even for ideas and promises that won't see fruition or that will clearly bomb, E3 has a largesse for optimism, freely imbuing anyone who follows it with an excitement for what is to come. It is with this mind to seeing how gaming is changing and how it can be changed that I begin this list. I wanted to highlight a few games, some big, most small, that I'm most looking forward to.

Papo & Yo

In Braid, Jonathan Blow sought to create a game whose mechanics directly related to and deepened its themes. The game garnered heavy praise and I personally enjoyed it thoroughly; it was also  one of the few that my girlfriend got hooked on. However, serious critics gave Blow a good deal of flack, claiming that it failed to properly achieve its aim, that the connection was lacking between thematics and gameplay. I tend to agree with them. The poetic level introductions set up a decently mature storyline and we were told, both in-game and through promotion, that the gameplay mechanism of time manipulation was meant to serve as a philosophical correlary to the story. Press square. Reverse character motion. Induce reflective moment. When I actually played the game though, it felt like a very clever platformer/puzzler with a beautiful aesthetic that was enhanced by the story set-up. The reflective part never really came into the equation for me.

In hearing about Minority Media’s first full game, the upcoming PSN download Papo & Yo, I’m wondering if we have a new shot at Blow’s dream, a game that does emotional depth through its gameplay. I’m guessing it won’t turn the gaming world on its head, but the possibility is still exciting. Despite its shortcomings, Braid was still a fantastic game head and shoulders above most, and if Papo & Yo feels even half as fresh, it’ll be worth the price of admission.

The game’s title is a thinly vield Spanportuglish mishmash that translates as Father and Me, a reference to creator Vaner Caballero’s experiences growing up with an alcoholic father in Colombia. The metaphorical stand-ins for father and son are a boy named Quico and his pet monster, Monster. I’m already endeared. The game’s adventures occur in Quico’s imagination as he attempts to escape the harshness of life in an unnamed South American favela. Monster tags along to help out on the puzzles and challenges that arise in Quico’s mind quest. Monster, however, is not as sweet as he seems at first: he is rabidly addicted to eating frogs and will sometimes  act so impulsively in his pursuit of more frogs that he screws up Quico’s pursuits. I’m not much for summary (and I’m summarizing from what I’ve read anyway), so I’ll leave the rest of the description to a quote from IGN:

In his mind Quico can adventure in a surreal world where he can move houses simply by pushing around cardboard boxes, or where he can tug magical ropes to make stairs raise out of the ground. It's semi-realistic looking in its presentation, but mixes in enough strange scenery and bizarre looking environments that playing it is akin to moving through a waking dream. It's striking.

Video games tend to be an insular, thematically slight medium in which much of the meaning that is explicit often refers back to other games themselves (I’m still looking at you Braid). Whoever observed that there are more books written about other books than any other topic would have something to say about the nostalgia binge of the last five years. In this light, it’s exciting to hear about an atmospheric, thematically ambitious game that not only takes on the typical, if excellent, triumverant of nostalgia, coming of age and fantasy, but does so with a clear consciousness of weighter issues, namely global poverty and the harm it wreaks on families. I’m not going to get into the possibility of game published on Playstation Network potentially implying methods of resistence to the neo-liberal order (a guy can dream can’t he), but I’m already seeing monstrous potential for this game to mix fantasy, personal emotion and political reality in stunning ways (pun intended). All it needs to do is be touching though, and I’ll love it just the same.

Why I Didn't Like The Tree of Life

WARNING: Spoilers Ahead

Period setting with overt Americana imagery. Check. Meta-cosmic themes that imply the transcendence of suffering through gratitude. Check. Beautiful cinemetography. Check. Famed director (and actors) whose previous movies I've loved. Check.

Terrence Malick's Tree of Life is a movie that I should love. To list its elements is to describe exactly what I would want out of a movie, a dream project to anticipate with adolescent, fanboy suspense. I should leave the theater feeling invigorated, alive, yet reflective and perhaps bitersweet, ready to both take on the world and find acceptance in its failings, to Appreciate my own existence in such a way that adds a skip to my step and a bit more compassion to my heart. So after having seen Tree of Life last night, I'm left wondering, what went wrong? Why didn't I like this movie?

I'll begin with the ending. The last twenty minutes, after the close of the main plot line, show a seemingly endless parade of loosely connected mini-segments filled with lush beaches, deserts, skyscrapers and the same edge-lit trees that fill the rest of the film. Each shot is beautiful. Each shot is a bit confusing. At first, I probed around in corners of my mind, trying to make sense of it. "What does the beach symbolize? Why are his older self and his child self both there? Isn't that the guy from his hometown?"  As three minutes extended into ten, I began to wonder if Mallick's "newest masterpiece" could go on forever, each fade-to-black followed by yet another image of some awe-inspiring landscape, another shot of Sean Penn seeming tired and nostalgiac, another nervous leaf again proclaiming the grandeur of existence. It was visually beautiful. It also felt like fluff. All I wanted was for it to end.

My problem with the ending mirrors my problem with the film as a whole: it is so thoroughly saturated with a sense of self-importance that it fails to realize the need to grab the audience and make them feel why it is so important. Twenty minutes in, during the dancing planets sequence, we hear a mother's heartfelt voice whisper over a shot of an ocean, "Light of my light" to her dead son. It could be powerful, but we've barely seen either of them yet, and so it feels like you're being sold on it. You are so beaten over the head with depth and importance, your attention made to focus so much on what a great film this is, that you can't properly think about the content of the film itself.  Between the (admittidely gorgeous) visuals, the in-your-face opera score that plays over much of the film, and the constant snippets of voiceover, much of it spoken in whispers, it often feels like you're watching a 138-minute advertisement for the film, rather than watching the film itself. I'm reminded of an episode from season two of the Simpsons, where Smithers takes a job as the announcer at a greasy racetrack ("Get ready for Action! Action! Action!"). Feeling awkward at the constant enthusiasm required by the position, he complains, "The people are already here, we don't need to keep hustling them like this, do we?"

To be fair, Tree of Life does have a lot going for it. The performaces are amazing, as are the shots (nearly every single moment is gorgeous), and it does have some genuinely touching and disturbing moments. I expected these things. But I also expected to be drawn in, moved, made to think- about the subjects that the film is about: the universe, our place in it, the connection between the personal and universal, the unarticulable power of life. Instead, I felt like the film wanted me to think about how awesome the film was for being about those subjects.

I could be wrong though. And the next thing I'm doing is seeing it again.