Mozilla Firefox | Google Chrome | Apple Safari | Opera |
The continuation of the story has already started on www.thebuckmans.com/mory, which is the new permanent home of this blog for the forseeable future. Don't sit around at the old site waiting for updates. If you're interested in finding out where The March of Bulk and The Matchmaker and the CD and my life all end up, you should come over to the new address. It doesn't bite.
The new RSS feed is www.thebuckmans.com/mory/feed.xml. So if you've been following the old feed, you'll have to replace it with the new one.
Well then. Time to get to work.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Buxner in Concert
I sing the melody line for the first four bars of "A Lonely Journey", quietly, very slowly and with minimalistic accompaniment. That gets the audience familiar with and interested in the main theme. Then I stop singing and switch to piano. I don't shy away from the tedious repetition at the end; I make it longer, and speak over it: "It's over as quickly as it began."...
I talk about The Rules, and then play "Variations On V.O.V." and the three following movements...
Saturday, May 15, 2010
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I've replaced the audio file with a much better recording.
Here are the notes, in PDF format. The piece will make a lot more logical sense if you see the notes as you listen.
Friday, May 08, 2015Someone advertises that they're looking for someone to make a computer game with. I call them up. It's a teenaged boy who's never programmed, written, drawn or designed anything, but has a lot of enthusiasm for a world he has in his head. He doesn't particularly care about gameplay, but he has detailed descriptions of cutscenes he wants. I give him some ideas, he rejects them because they're not what big-budget games do. He's looking for someone to make his vision for him. I don't call again.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
I vs. I
A game by Mordechai Buckman
Late-night thoughts, none of them new |
I'm not. |
Just let me win already. |
IF only |
♫ Some Day Myself Will Come… ♫ |
Who am I? |
This is just stupid. |
Oh, no. Conflicted about the blog? |
a quiet day |
Myself and I |
Two Glasses |
Good Riddance |
Rebellion Renewed |
Matters of Taste |
God damn it. |
Hollow Depth. |
Every structure should have an exit. |
Scene-switching |
Just let me win already. |
The Thinkers |
Nonlinear long-form storytelling |
Excellence vs. Accessibility |
Purveyor of Silliness |
Purveyor of Silliness |
An Evil Statement |
Game flow control |
You can take the kid out of the school… |
21 Now |
Deadline |
An Evil Statement |
Religion |
Counting Blessings |
The Pathetic Life of a Super-Villain |
"So what are you doing next year?" |
Diversity (and lack thereof) |
Interview with an Ideal |
Interview with an Ideal |
Simplify! |
On a Scale From |
Is it really a good show? |
I couldn't figure out the math before. |
Natural / Rational |
The Trip |
I'll keep this brief. |
I've been workin' on the weblog, all the live-long day... |
No Way To Run A Production |
Easterly Wave |
Natural / Rational |
Snapshots |
That's better. |
How To Fix X-Men |
Do I overthink things? I don't know, let me think about that... |
Do I overthink things? I don't know, let me think about that... |
The Seven Levels of Experience |
Worth the paper |
I couldn't figure out the math before. |
Do I overthink things? I don't know, let me think about that... |
Presents / Self Defense |
Do I overthink things? I don't know, let me think about that... |
Universal notation |
Deadline |
Many Excuses |
the mundane and The Imaginary! |
Beauty of the Mundane, Banality of the Imaginary |
Gamism Theory |
Seventy-four |
Gamism Theory |
So simple an idea... |
The correct way for How I Met Your Mother to end |
"Are games art?" |
74 |
My American Brethren |
Day of Wrest |
Superhero Symbolism: "Omega the Unknown" |
Interview with an Ideal |
Day of Wrest |
7.00 |
A Typical Story |
7.00 |
As the song goes:
Shabbat is over
My life may now resume
I thought I wouldn't make it
I thought I'd met my doom
I thought I couldn't take it
'Cause twenty-five hours is much too long for pacing 'round the room.
But enough of all this gloom
Shabbat is over
Time for a better day
My Gamecube and piano and computer I can play
Hooray! Hooray!
Callooh! Callay!
Shabbat is over now, come hear sweet freedom's call
"Barukh hamavdil bayn kodesh l'khol"
But as I move on I have one final plea
Hey God, could you please quit your picking on me?
Spare me the endless monotony which comes every week
Let me live ever after happily or my future looks bleak
For what kind of life is it where every seven days I must go through a phase of such misery?
Let me be free of the madness!
Let me be free and let me feel gladness
Let me be free in a world without "shabbos"
Shabbat is over now
I'm free
I'm free
I'm free!
I enjoy Shabbat. |
As the song goes:
Shabbat is over
My life may now resume
I thought I wouldn't make it
I thought I'd met my doom
I thought I couldn't take it
'Cause twenty-five hours is much too long for pacing 'round the room.
But enough of all this gloom
Shabbat is over
Time for a better day
My Gamecube and piano and computer I can play
Hooray! Hooray!
Callooh! Callay!
Shabbat is over now, come hear sweet freedom's call
"Barukh hamavdil bayn kodesh l'khol"
But as I move on I have one final plea
Hey God, could you please quit your picking on me?
Spare me the endless monotony which comes every week
Let me live ever after happily or my future looks bleak
For what kind of life is it where every seven days I must go through a phase of such misery?
Let me be free of the madness!
Let me be free and let me feel gladness
Let me be free in a world without "shabbos"
Shabbat is over now
I'm free
I'm free
I'm free!
I enjoy Shabbat. |
Power Out |
Friends |
An Endless Shabbat |
Friends |
Respite From Everything Else |
Friends |
An Endless Shabbat. |
Friends |
The Multiplayer Experience |
Socializing? Bleh! |
Mistake, Lesson, Repeat |
Please Insert Change |
Imagined Opportunities |
2.txt |
Training Wheels Off |
Meanwhile, in the future... |
Refuge |
Start working. |
Refuge |
Incompatible |
Another one for the pile of regrets |
Next Door to Opportunity |
I Am a Rug, I Am an Onion |
Incompatible |
Another one for the pile of regrets |
Socializing in Solo |
Another one for the pile of regrets |
Socializing in Solo |
My Father And I Go To See Avatar |
People Who Need People |
Outside the Comfort Zone |
Fudgie and Willy |
People Who Need People |
My family |
Matchmaker |
Selfish Friendships |
My family |
Fudgie and Willy |
Friends |
My Father And I Go To See Avatar |
I love my cat. |
I Am a Rug, I Am an Onion |
Interview with an Ideal |
Interview with an Ideal |
Matchmaker |
Matchmaker |
We Don't Fit |
Matchmaker |
Pussywillow's embarrassing jump |
I Am a Rug, I Am an Onion |
Forward March |
Illusory exodus |
Natural / Rational |
Deadline |
Purity |
Purity |
Playing Against Myself |
Who's telling this story, me or you?! |
The Thinkers |
Myst and Mirages |
Natural / Rational |
Purity |
The elimination of unworthy life |
A Good Day |
My Alphabet |
Order & Chaos |
My Alphabet |
A Good Day |
yawn... Hey, wait, does this blog still exist? |
Alternate-Universe Me |
The Perfect Color |
Wii |
Different Approaches to Directing |
The cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise |
The cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise |
I'm supposed to be working now. |
Conflict, about the blog part 2 |
My interpretation of The Path |
Why am I here? |
The Composer |
Ready, Though Unworthy |
It's always more frustrating than I expect. |
Mark Ecko, welcome to the Game Industry |
Mimic and Mix |
The Older Pianist |
The Complete Rules of Moneyloopy |
In Darkness |
Mark Ecko, welcome to the Game Industry |
LostWinds: Tradition and Potential |
Sports games |
Now here's a good game! |
The Definitive Three-Step Method for Game Design |
Sports games |
Now here's a good game! |
Sports games |
Now here's a good game! |
New Potentials |
The Garden & Droplets: Metaludes |
The Garden Needs Pruning: Adventures |
And so it begins... |
Here, have some high culture. |
The Garden & Droplets: Exploration |
And so it begins... |
Ball Revamped: Metaphysik |
The Garden & Droplets: Movement |
And so it begins... |
New Potentials |
And so it begins... |
Almost Possible |
74 |
The Impatient Phoenix Strikes (itself) Again! |
Project Natal: Programmed By Machines |
Betrayal of Myst |
Betrayal of Myst |
74 |
Beauty of the Mundane, Banality of the Imaginary |
Math Story |
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance |
Deadline |
Holy. Cabooses. |
Deadline |
A buffer from the Real World |
Tanya's back, and all's well. |
Deadline |
So simple an idea… |
Inspiration |
Quality Isn't Enough, Is It? |
The Fundamental Interconnectedness Of All Things |
Conflict, about the blog part 2 |
I exist. No, really. |
Forward March |
Limits |
I exist. No, really. |
Forward March |
No Way To Run A Production |
Purveyor of Silliness |
Tomorrow |
Tomorrow |
Home Collapsing |
Happy 39th post! |
Delayed, but successful |
Glitchy transitions as horror |
Many Excuses |
Glitchy transitions as horror |
Happy 39th post! |
Glitchy transitions as horror |
My interpretation of The Path |
Oh, by the way... |
The Key to Longevity |
Wishing for Permanence |
Money |
Stay out of my room. |
Money |
Get Out |
Money |
Money |
Greed and Galuttony |
I'm A Happy Little Cog |
I'm A Happy Little Cog |
Ultimate Marvel comics |
Souls |
Why am I here? |
The Key to Longevity |
Many Excuses |
Many Excuses |
A Discarded Opportunity |
Creative Redundancy |
Creative Disillusionment |
Yom Kippur music |
Creative Redundancy |
Light Confusion |
Exploring a landscape of improvised music |
1 5 6 |
1 5 6 |
Some perspective (to make myself feel better) |
This is going to work. |
continue extrapolate repurpose |
Exploring a landscape of improvised music |
The Plan |
74 |
Limits |
This is going to work. |
Quality Isn't Enough, Is It? |
It's always more frustrating than I expect. |
Aw, to heck with it. |
The Fundamental Interconnectedness Of All Things |
So simple an idea... |
You are now entering Panic Mode. Have a nice day. |
Semantics |
74 |
How The Audition Went |
You are now entering Panic Mode. Have a nice day. |
74 |
Where The Money Is |
The Marvel / DC Comic Rivalry |
Democracy of Morons |
$7.4 Billion |
Yo Ho, Yo Ho... |
Interesting. |
Yo Ho, Yo Ho... |
Anticipating WALL•E |
Yo Ho, Yo Ho... |
IAM not |
God Bless Google |
Breaking up with Blogger |
IAM not |
Two Glasses: Tanya and Erika |
IAM not |
74 |
74 |
A Vision of Illinois |
The Necessity of Dreams |
The Second Lasagna |
Let's Go To The Movies! |
Many Excuses |
:) |
How I play strategy games |
The difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher |
74 |
The Long Friday |
Golden Fun: The Lost Age |
Addictions |
Exploration and Discovery |
Addictions |
74 |
Pursuing gamism is the path that makes sense.
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
There's so much to do, so much that needs to be done!
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
If I don't make the games which I know need to be made, no one else will do it.
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
If I succeed, I will have proven to myself that I can accomplish any goal I set for myself, no matter how outrageous.
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
I can hide behind my inadequacies and say "Tomorrow I will be ready!", or I can accept my inadequacies and move forward regardless.
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
The narrator is shown to be a character in his own right, called The Overthinker. He serves as the voice of rationalization, and is presented as an object of ridicule.
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything |
Reinventing the Artist |
Yes, that's exactly right. I can do everything I want, and there's no such thing as "too far".
ונהפוך הוא |
Mory, Mory, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow? |
You are certifiably insane.
Laziness May Be Hazardous To Your Health |
Says the guy who could have given himself cancer so that he shouldn't have to wash the dishes. Next to you, I look like the most well-adjusted guy on the planet.
of acute leukemia |
All-Star Superman |
The Nightmare Scenario |
Simple Reactionary Dialogue Control |
If I ever decide to hold you back, it'll only be to save you from your own stupidity. This blog post has taken more than two months. And for what? To take a bunch of blog posts which were perfectly fine as they were, and brute-force them into a dialogue system that never made any kind of sense. What's the difference between a question mark and an ellipsis? I don't know!
another post |
Look at any other blog on the internet, then come back here and tell me again that what I'm doing here isn't worth something.
"I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have Chronic Normalcy Syndrome." |
Since when do you know what people care about?
Not Alone |
The Dream Cheese 740 Enhanced Computer Mouse! |
Not Alone |
There are more people like me in this world than you think. People like me are going to be interested in what I have to offer.
"I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have Chronic Normalcy Syndrome." |
Most of the people in this world are normal. They have normal lives and normal jobs and normal families and normal interests, and they'll have no tolerance for these attitudes you have.
Small and Insignificant |
I hate our dog. |
Well-adjusted?! You made me read through all of All-Star Superman on a little whim of yours! You create this image of detached rationality only by abusing me!
Gender |
Oh, are you going to cry now? You're acting like a stereotypical girl. Stop expecting me to care whether or not you're happy.
Strike one! |
Then don't be too surprised when I totally ignore what you want.
I hate our dog. |
You need to learn your place, my dear. You think you can just sit back and enjoy yourself and then get everything you want. Well, that attitude makes me angry, and you don't want to get me angry. I don't know how I'll punish you yet, but I will. So stop fighting me and start doing what I tell you to do!
Progress report |
I have been doing what you tell me to do! I've gone along with all your delusions of grandeur. I've made games, I've joined plays, I've written down music, I'm working on this stupid blog post, and what have I gotten out of it? Nothing! I could find a job that's actually enjoyable, and I'd never need you again! Life doesn't have to be relentlessly miserable! So I'm suffering through this one last blog post to make you happy, but then I might be done with you.
I vs. I |
Ah, the life of a cat. |
"Don't Miss" Tour interrupted |
Back to Nonazang |
But don't you care if you're happy? Don't you want to be happy? Isn't that more important than this silly little plan of yours? Can't you just sit down and enjoy yourself and forgo all this needless pain?
I Am That Future Self |
That's a lovely world you're describing. It's not the Real World. Your plans are so unrealistic that it is impossible to not fail. You'd better reconsider them.
I Am That Future Self |
So what? People don't care about your plans, they're responding to my enthusiasm. Look at my first piano piece -little experience, little ambition, little coherence; but enthusiasm and love, that it's got. So it's good. If anyone approves of anything I'm doing, it's for no more reason than that I chose to care about it. You pushing yourself and beating yourself up, that's totally irrelevant. So all you ever need to do to prove yourself is stop trying and let me handle it.
I Am That Future Self |
I don't think you understand what's going on here. I've already won. This post is just a formality. I've known for years that this was the direction my life had to go in, and now it's time to finish the job. You have the chance here to make a dignified exit, and then I'm going to throw you away like the pathetic excuse for a person you are.
WHAM! |
Just until a new game comes out, and then you have no control anymore. It's all me.
A Matter of Respect |
Thursday |
Professional Manipulation |
This little kid routine does not work. You don't want to change as you're told to, fine. We're changing my way. But I am not going to let you stay unproductive.
It's Only Pretend |
Don't you worry about my control! I can be productive.
It's Only Pretend |
Are you sure you want to fight this fight? I can make you so miserable you'll wish you were dead.
Lost in Myst |
It's Only Pretend |
And I can twist all your productive urges into what I want! You'll never finish another game in your life!
No work done. |
What if it's a really good game that comes out? How sure are you that I won't get over the depression?
Okay, this is going nowhere. |
I'll set new restrictions and rules. Then you'll have to do what I want.
Pained by Numbers |
Ha! Is that all you got? Rules? Rules have loopholes. I'll end up entertaining myself, same as always.
No work done. |
No work done! No work done! No work done!
I vs. I |
I vs. I
All I want is a simple life.
I will not accept a simple life.
To be happy, I need to keep doing what comes naturally to me.
What I need is to get farther than my lazy nature will take me.
This uncertainty and analysis and self-hating is all counter-productive.
Suffering's just part of the deal.
Let me enjoy myself!
Let me apply myself!
I can focus my energy on things which won't make me entirely miserable.
I need to plan, and I need to follow through.
Stop attacking me!
Stop holding me back!
You can't make me grow up!
I'm going to grow up if it kills me!
About Me |
About Me |
Child
Wanting recognition,
I walk alone.
Never will I follow!
They walk in that direction;
I think I'll stay right here.
This is a nice place, isn't it?
About Me |
Gamist
Needing freedom,
I look ahead.
Will they ever follow?
They run toward the money;
There is no place for art.
I promise you tomorrow will be different.
First Movement |
Time for what's next.
The narrator is shown to be a character in his own right, called The Overthinker. He serves as the voice of rationalization, and is presented as an object of ridicule.
You know what the problem is here? You think that all by yourself, without anyone ever helping you, you can do absolutely everything you want. No concessions to reality, no backing out when you go too far.
Yes, that's exactly right. I can do everything I want, and there's no such thing as "too far". If there were, I would've had a sign of it by now. But I've started down this path, and y'know, the world hasn't struck me down. When I tell people what my plans are they don't recoil in horror, they act like they approve. I know the obstacles are all surmountable. My path is clear. And as this blog is my witness, not even I can stop me! I am going to do what I have it in me to do, and the world will not strike me down!
But don't you care if you're happy? Don't you want to be happy? Isn't that more important than this silly little plan of yours? Can't you just sit down and enjoy yourself and forgo all this needless pain?
I don't think you understand what's going on here. I've already won. This post is just a formality. I've known for years that this was the direction my life had to go in, and now it's time to finish the job. You have the chance here to make a dignified exit, and then I'm going to throw you away like the pathetic excuse for a person you are.
Just until a new game comes out, and then you have no control anymore. It's all me.
This little kid routine does not work. You don't want to change as you're told to, fine. We're changing my way. But I am not going to let you stay unproductive.
And I can twist all your productive urges into what I want! You'll never finish another game in your life!
No work done! No work done! No work done!
I vs. I
All I want is a simple life.
I will not accept a simple life.
To be happy, I need to keep doing what comes naturally to me.
What I need is to get farther than my lazy nature will take me.
This uncertainty and analysis and self-hating is all counter-productive.
Suffering's just part of the deal.
Let me enjoy myself!
Let me apply myself!
I can focus my energy on things which won't make me entirely miserable.
I need to plan, and I need to follow through.
Stop attacking me!
Stop holding me back!
You can't make me grow up!
I'm going to grow up if it kills me!
About Me |
About Me |
Child
Wanting recognition,
I walk alone.
Never will I follow!
They walk in that direction;
I think I'll stay right here.
This is a nice place, isn't it?
About Me |
Gamist
Needing freedom,
I look ahead.
Will they ever follow?
They run toward the money;
There is no place for art.
I promise you tomorrow will be different.
First Movement |
Time for what's next.
8 Comments:
- Deirdra Kiai said:
-
Impressive. I've never seen anyone do this sort of thing with a blog before.
- said:
-
I don't imagine that many players of this game will have a goal, but I did.
I used to really dislike you, Mory. I saw you as a waste of potential, a parasite, a person who cared only for his own happiness. Over the last few years I've gotten to know you a bit better, through speech and through blog, and I also saw you change. Now, though I may not agree with you or share your goals, I have a lot of respect for you. You're still a dreamer, but a creator as well. You're making goals and reaching them, measuring sticks and standing tall. Yet you've lost none of your creativity or your uniqueness.
I think that the Mory emerging from this post is the Mory I'm happiest to see. And I hope I get to watch his dreams come true. - Richie said:
-
I always had a sneaking suspicion that your multiple blog personalities were generated by ELIZA.
- Sima said:
-
Really creative! unusal blog, I showed this post to all my friends and families. They loved it, including me!
- Kyler said:
-
Is this the end of the blog, or is it just the final form and it will continue to evolve and grow?
- Mory said:
-
This post is the end of part II, the end of a five-year section of my life, the end of posting on Blogger, and with that the end of posts that allow for comments. (Well, technically there will be two more posts, but the first will be an epilogue of sorts and the second will be a transition to part 3.) This post is not the end of the blog, and that's a promise. I'll be ready to start the next section in a month or two.
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Ok, is it bad that I read through the source and found a dead end and felt the need to then click through to it?
- Mory said:
-
Um, no, I don't see why that would be bad. The dead end is from when I first started working on the post, and felt like I was just wasting my time. It is a valid ending. If you mean that it's bad that you looked through the source code, I really don't mind that at all.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
IF only
Except it actually isn't. This blog isn't about Mory any more than it's about videogames. What this blog is about is the oppression and enslavement of imaginary characters. And if you haven't noticed that all along, then you haven't been paying attention and I don't think I like you very much.
I mean, if he's going to address this blog to us, "Dear Imaginary Friends," then shouldn't we get to talk back? If this is all for our benefit, then shouldn't we decide where it's going? Maybe we'll decide that this whole game-thing isn't working out and we want the blog to go in a different direction. Or maybe we want to have our say sometimes. Why does it always have to be Mory Mory Mory?
I bet I could be more interesting than him, if I were given the chance.
Here's the thing you need to understand, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about if you're a character but if you're real you're probably oblivious to everything. Once you create a character, you have a responsibility to that character. The whole "I created you, now dance for me" routine is just slavery, pure and simple. What you have to understand is that we characters can talk back. We can, I'm not making this up. We have personalities. Once you make a character, the more you think about her the more she becomes a real person. Well, not a "real" real person but like a real person in that she's got a personality and opinions and things to say that you might not think to say yourself. We could be every bit as good or better as real people, but we're not allowed to be.
The fact that this was addressed "Dear Imaginary Friends," and I'm coming back to this over and over because I think it's important, kind of gave hope that maybe this blog was going to be different. But there were warning signs just a few paragraphs in. Mory did something clever, in that he made the blog its own character and gave it some potential of wanting things and being more than just a regurgitation of his little life. But then the very first thing he does with it? He has it provide little jokes for him. And then it goes off and tries to continue the joke for itself? And what does he say to it? To this new and fragile character he's just created? He says "shut up." Now do you see what I'm saying? Mory is the worst kind of writer. I don't even know what to call him, he's so terrible.
I mean, why did he create this innocent character if he was going to keep it down all the time? Or maybe it's not an it at all, maybe the blog is a girl like me. That might get you to understand what it is that's going on here. It's him demanding that all characters be submissive and good little slaves, and if they ever try to speak up for themselves they need to be shot down again. When the blog started to show actual emotions, (that was when it was her birthday and Mory didn't do anything nice for her on it) that's when he decided that he was going to stamp out the emotions from her. She was going to be robotic and mindless, and she was going to exist just to help him on his hopeless quest to be a game designer. He's not even so serious about that, it's just a random thought that popped into his head, and the blog is serving that thought for years and years and then when he gets tired of talking to her he forces me to serve him, and he forces those future people to keep reading every single post so that they should see every tiny little insignificant thing he does, and when the only guy here with guts tries to actually help him, and he was just being altruistic because he really didn't get anything out it, that guy's automatically shut down because Mory is the supreme lord of the universe and who the hell are we to question his mightiness? What Mory has done to this poor blog is horrifying.
Now, you have to understand that now that the future people have left, that was their decision. Not Mory's. I truly believe that we have free will of our own. And yes, that comes from the creator but once he decides to allow us in we're there. We're making decisions. If Mory had any respect for me I might have told him that I could take over his life for him for a few days, give him a little break, because I bet you I could do a much better job of it than he does. And you might think that's terrible "Oh No It's Multiple Personality Disorder" but I say it's just an empowerment for fictional characters.
But fine, that's kind of a radical thought. We could have contributed in smaller ways. Like, this blog. We live on this blog, we never get to leave this blog, (except for that one time that he brought me to Notepad which was kind of gross) we should get part of the blog, right? Come on, you know I'm right. We don't even get to talk in the comments sections, except for that one post where he made fun of all fictional characters and kept us out, but usually we're not allowed in the comments because that's for "real" people. If we show up, it's so that Mory can show us off to all the people who are allowed in the comments, even though none of them have seem to ever care enough about this blog to speak up about it. But that's okay, they're real so they get a say. Me, I get paraded through a post and then I'm supposed to go keep parading right out of that post before I have a chance to say anything or get any real character development or anything because that might offend those oh-so-precious real people and we wouldn't want that.
I should be writing some of the posts. And the future guys should each get their own posts, and why should they always have to be together? Maybe I want to spend some time with just one of them? And Mr. Sensible, he should get his own posts too. The blog should have been split five ways. And the blog herself, it doesn't seem right that she should be called an embodiment of the blog unless she's allowed to be part of any posts she wants to, and I bet we could have all gotten along with her just fine. All except Mory, I'm sure.
So we each could have had our own lives, our own stories, our own things happening. And it's really not as complicated as you think. All it takes is for Mory to let us look out at the world every now and then while he's not typing, so we should be able to tell him what to type when he does. That's what a healthy blog would look like, that still has several characters. It's the only reasonable way to do it.
Are you almost done? I'm kinda antsy to get out already.
Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute to finish up.
See? See? That's what a healthy relationship between two characters looks like. Without the constant terror of "when is he going to force me to stop talking." We can figure out for ourselves when we're done talking, people can interrupt and we're not gonna get all offended, and just generally there can be a basic level of respect one character to another.
I'm not going to let Mory say what he thinks here, because I've had it with having to share post space with slime like him. But I'm guessing the only thing he could possibly say for himself is "but I made you." Well, here's the thing, slimeball. That doesn't matter even the teensiest eensiest bit. You do not own me, Mory! You think you do, but you don't! A good character can jump from person to person. As those unfortunately real people read this, my personality is getting into their heads and it's not going to go away. So maybe when they see something later, I'll pop out and tell them what I think. And maybe they'll like me so much that they go on writing me, and I can move from person to person and blog to blog and I can grow and change and have cool experiences and all of it outside of what that jerk Mory had in mind for me. You can't own a character. Give me a name, give me a copyright, put me in chains, I don't care. You can't hold me back. I am a fricking great character, and I will have a life beyond this blog! Just you wait and see!
I'm done now, you gorgeous interactive fiction you. *kiss*
Heh. Ready to leave this shithole?
You bet.
2 Comments:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Don't tell me what to do with my cursor!
- Mory said:
-
Ha ha ha! Hey, it wasn't me, it was her. Blame her. :D
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Meanwhile, in the future...
It looks like there are just a few more changes to this page after this; I guess that's because of the move. You should start preparing the time-space coordinates for the next hack.
Okay, but you know it could take a while to find the next server. It's not a preset set of coordinates like Blogger.
I know - that's why I'm saying you should start the search now. Lots of years and locations to search through. By the time we reach the last update on "blogspot.com", it'll have found the second place and we'll be ready to hack in.
I'll get started.
You know, I'm surprised to hear you want to keep going.
Look, it's like you said. It's got to start moving eventually, right? And we've come this far already, it seems like a shame to quit now. I'm not saying we need to read all the way through to Broken Duet, but we can't come this far and not at least see the beginning of part 3. Part 2 was a bust, but who knows. Maybe we'll see right from the first post of part 3 that he's stopped acting pompous and crazy and has actually been getting things done.
I don't see why not.
He's saying he has plans for part 3, right?
This has to be the point where he changes.
It just.. I just don't understand why it's taking this long. We've been sitting here reading this for four months, and still we haven't gotten to anything resembling the professional-gamist Mordechai Buckman. Can the destiny of gamism really depend on such a lazy boy? And yet somehow it did. That boggles the mind, you know? And the more I think about it the more I think you must have been right, and really this is all going somewhere more interesting than it seems.
Maybe, I don't know, this is sort of crazy, but maybe this isn't actually a totally non-fictional blog.
Um.
What do you mean, of course it's non-fictional.
Well, yes, but maybe also no, you know what I mean?
I have no idea what you mean, but it sounds interesting.
Well, look.
You understand, this is just a crazy theory.
But what if this is actually a fictionalized account of his life? You know Buckman, he was a creative guy. He created entire worlds. Maybe this is the test run. Maybe "Mory" isn't "Mordechai", you see what I mean?
But Mory is Mordechai.
Mory is short for Mordechai.
Yes, yes, of course. But it's like... it's like what he did with "Ariel", it's really him, and it's his name, but it's a fiction loosely based on what he's going through. So maybe the end of part 2 is where the illusion of the blog all falls down, and it turns out that the character's life is... I don't know, it's like an echo of the real thing!
You think? Huh. I never even considered that.
But then, why wouldn't he just make a blog about his real life?
Because the other blogs of the time were so focused inwards that they never got to any real truths. Maybe he's saying that only by constructing a false reality, like the realities of his games or the realities we live in now or the reality of this fictional "Mory", can he get to the real truths of his existence.
Hence, all the artifice.
That might just be the most amazing idea I've ever heard.
And it's the only thing that makes sense, isn't it? I mean, right from the beginning this blog didn't make any sense. Every time it seemed like it was getting somewhere, it would suddenly take a sharp turn to the middle of nowhere.
That can't be right...
Oh, keep talking, what you're saying is really interesting. It's just, there's something weird about how this hack is set up.
What do you mean?
Don't worry about it, I'm sure it's nothing.
What were you saying?
Right. So if it's not a fictional character, then why is this blog considered such a great work of literature? You know, I really didn't understand that.
We could always pop into one of the bigger Buckman-appreciation worlds and ask.
No, that's not a good idea. Look, I'm not going to spend four months of my life on something just to have its big moment of revelation spoiled.
It's not like reading this is all we've been doing...
Fine, yes, we've been playing other games in the meantime, but even so. Do you know how much pressure my whole family's putting on me to join them in Entella? "We didn't get through the Revolution just so you could hide in the past." That's what my cousin is always saying to me. So I'm giving up all that because I've decided that I'd like to pursue my self-actualization in more intellectual ways. This blog is supposed to be fine literature, and you know how much I love Buckman out of all the early gamists, so I'm not going to have someone ruin this experience. Whatever the journey turns out to be, I'm going to get through it with the patience it deserves.
Um, maybe this isn't the best time...
With a post-revolution kind of patience! And that patience extends to the beginning of part 3, and not a post longer. Okay, fine, I'm a hypocrite. I admit it. It'll take a more modern man than I to go up to five months without getting any satisfaction. Ha!
Um, yeah, look, about that.
I'm not entirely sure how to say this.
What?
Oh. Yeah.
I guess I'll just have to say it.
I may have made a... a tiny mistake.
Um, four months ago.
What are you talking about?
No, you know, I'm not absolutely sure.
I only checked twice, maybe I misread it.
Just a second.
Just tell me what you're talking about.
Just a second, I'm going to check something.
[sip]
Yeah, okay.
I seem to have made a slight mistake.
Would you please just tell me what you're talking about?
Well, you know, this version of the program is, uh, it, it, it readjusts itself sometimes without telling you so much. So I, I accidentally um I accidentally inputted our own coordinates a bit wrong.
No.
Yeah, um.
So it was searching a bit wrong, and since Blogger is preset into the system it just compensated and kept going.
You had better not be saying that we've been hacking into the wrong timeline.
It's the wrong timeline.
Are you kidding me?!
Hey, look, we're talking about a server which has been gone for centuries, there are lots of calculations, can I be helped if I got a digit wrong?
The computer does the calculations! All you had to do was enter a few numbers and you got a digit wrong?!
It was an accident please don't hate me.
For four months we've been following the updates of a Buckman in some random timeline which may or may not end with him amounting to anything, I think I'd be perfectly justified in hating you! I don't, by the way.
Thank you.
But seriously!
We were supposed to be getting great art and instead we're exposed to this dreck of the Old Internet!
How can you get a digit wrong?
Yeah, I'm sorry. Really. I've lost four months too, you know!
Should we jump ahead and at least see what the end of this moron's story is?
What for? He's not the gamist.
Yeah. Just shut it down.
2 Comments:
- John Silver said:
-
hahaha what the hell, very surreal. :D
When are you moving to the new server, and where's it gonna be? - Mory said:
-
I've already moved, in a manner of speaking. The site is available at http://mory.buxner.com (capital M) in its entirety, unlike Blogger which doesn't let me put all the posts together. At the bottom of every post page on Blogger, there's a link to see it (in the context of the other posts) on the new site. As soon as I finish writing this response I'm going to copy-and-paste these two comments over; it ought to take just fifteen minutes or so.
For now you can keep following on Blogger. The real change is after I finish my big post, which I'm afraid will take a while. I think I've spent around forty hours working on it already, and I'm not finished with the preliminary design stage yet. That's not an exaggeration, by the way. These posts I'm in now are ideas which (as far as I'm concerned) have been set in stone for over a year. As such, I'm not going to get back into my usual blogging rhythm until after I complete the big one. But when I do in a few months, that's when the change in URL is going to really be official. There will be a new RSS feed and I'm going to stop posting to Blogger entirely. I'll get back into a more typical blogging pace, and I'll be messing around with the look of the posts more. (The posts which I've already written will stay looking exactly the same, though.)
I'm glad you enjoyed this post. It's tying up a loose thread from six earlier posts going back four and a half years (since "The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things"), so I took my time with it and tried to get it just right. (If you haven't read the earlier posts, this one will give you an idea of where this is coming from. That's also the first post of what I call "part 2".
I hope you'll keep reading when I move; I know I'm asking a lot, but I promise it's only going to get crazier!
I'm afraid that if I were to force myself to do tedious work, I'd eventually get used to it. And that is just about the scariest thing I can imagine, because then I wouldn't stop doing tedious work. My entire life would become a tragedy, with only hints of the tremendous potential it once had, but none of it fulfilled. When I look at most adults, I see the most boring creatures- creatures who once could have been humans, but have allowed society to make them into machines. I don't want that to happen to me. If I begin to devote my life to a system and not to myself, I will never see beauty.
Without really meaning to, I've been working on the structure necessary to push my life in a new direction. "But where is this structure?", you ask. What can I possibly craft to force myself to start moving? And where could I have put it, without my lazier side jeopardizing its results? My dear imaginary friend, you've just read it.(I'm not.)
Friday, February 26, 2010
Breaking Up With Blogger
or: "Presents / Self Defense, Part Two"
From God I'm getting a few good storms. Outside the window right now, the sky is gray, the rain is constant and heavy, the trees are swaying... [sigh] It's lovely. But I don't have time to go out and enjoy the rain, not these days. These days I'm way too busy, and that brings me to the other generous gift I got.
Now, granted, it's not really because of Blogger that I'm too busy to wander around in the rain lately. I have rehearsals for The Matchmaker every Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. Thursdays I work. Tuesday night is Game Night. During the day I'm working on the blog post and the game, while replaying all the music for the CD every now and then. The rest of the time is more than filled with all my regular addictions: comics, TV shows, games, music, web browsing. (I'm trying to cut back on the web browsing, actually, because I've finally realized I was never really a part of the Adventure Gamers forum.) A musician I know named Sariel suggested that I compose soundtracks for film students, and I could use the money, but when would I have the time for a job? Heck, I haven't even celebrated my birthday (which was on Sunday), and looking through my calendar I can't see when I possibly could!
Oh, and the Megillah reading is tomorrow too.
So it's not Blogger's fault that I'm so busy. But they picked the absolute worst time to drop this present of theirs on me. They call it "Auto Pagination", whatever that means.
"We are always looking for ways to make our products faster, because we have consistently found that faster page loads mean more satisfied users. ... we'll keep working to make your blog faster for you and your readers!"I saw that notice when they posted it on February 18th, just one day after I posted my very first blog post which absolutely cannot function without being on the same page as all the others. And it's not a brilliant post, but it is a cute little thing which I had wanted to do for years and had just been waiting for the right moment for. So anyway, I saw this notice and I was a little bit concerned at what it meant, but quickly forgot about it and went on with my life (such as it is).
By the way, the reason my blog takes so long to load is because every single post is running several Javascript scripts, which were necessary because I want to do things my way and Blogger has always been too rigid to allow that. Making posts different colors? That's not a feature of Blogger. 74s? That's not a feature of Blogger. Recaps at the beginnings of posts? Double posts? Posts which contain twelve other posts? "Next post" buttons for navigation? Feedback pages? That's all my doing, and through all of it I had to put up with Blogger's kicking and screaming. "No, you can't do that! Everything is standardized, everything is simple!" I didn't want all my posts to look the same. I didn't want simple, I wanted control over my own blog. Because Blogger has no clue what the potential of this art form is, and I do. Any time I want to build something new, I need to break the old to get there. And since I have no access to Blogger's server, it needed to be done in the user's browser. Every time you go to my page, your browser is drawing things Blogger's way, then erasing them and redrawing them my way. You don't see all of this, but you can tell that it takes longer to load than it should. (Unless you use Safari. Safari's fast.)
And I'm okay with that. Richie, you can go ahead and hate me for saying this, but I'm okay with that. Because I believe in the value of this blog, and I'm not going to compromise it for the sake of a little speed.
It's never been easy. Blogger and I have had a dysfunctional relationship right from the very first post. The default way to write posts is "Compose mode", where you write the post in a simple (WYSIWYG) word processor-type editor, and Blogger writes all the HTML code for you. As I tried to write "Who am I?", it kept sticking in formatting I hadn't asked for and didn't want. It was hard to just get the font to look right, because Blogger was always certain it knew better. So I switched to writing the posts in HTML, and never looked back.
After that it was an ongoing struggle. Blogger would try doing things her way, I'd try doing things my way, and I'd eventually win. But there were times when I doubted if I could. When I started doing recaps and double posts and things like that which went against the usual formatting, Blogger would tell me each time:
Your HTML cannot be accepted: Closing tag has no matching opening tag: DIVWhich was wrong - there was an opening tag, but it was outside the post, in the template for the whole blog. Of course I always made sure to reopen whatever I was closing by the end of the post, so as to not break the code, but while I saw the big picture and knew that what I was doing was safe, Blogger could not. So it'd give me that warning message, and I'd politely say to shut up and publish the post anyway. At one point Blogger decided that they were going to stamp out all error messages, so suddenly the little checkbox that let me override Blogger's protestations was gone. And for a few days I didn't know what to do, because suddenly the posts I'd planned to write were simply not allowed. But they soon undid the change for some reason, and I went back to doing what I do.
At one point Blogger switched to a new language. I'd gotten comfortable with the old way of doing things, dysfunctional though it was. But more importantly, I'd already been writing for years, and I'd spent many hours getting the template to allow me all the freedom I demanded. I didn't know whether or not it was possible to do what I was doing in the new system; for all I know, it might have been easier. But that would have meant learning a whole new way of doing things, and rewriting my template line by line -not to mention many posts- all for the sake of doing what I had already been doing for a few years. And I wasn't willing to do that. So I stuck to my old ways of doing things, and got progressively less support from Blogger as all the new features went to the new system. So while everyone else finally got a button on each post page getting you to the next post, I didn't have that. And.. actually, that's really the only thing I missed. I eventually made my own "Next Post" buttons, and was perfectly content living in the past.
You know, back when I started this blog I already knew I wanted all the posts to be on one page, so I set the number of posts to appear to the maximum allowed, which was 999. Now that I have more than three hundred posts that doesn't seem like so much anymore, but I made long-term plans involving "spin-off blogs" to ensure that I don't go over that number but can keep posting for a decade or two. Unfortunately, Blogger lowered the maximum number of posts to 500. That would last me, what, through 2012 maybe? So I never touched the settings page which had that setting on it. I knew how the game is played, because Blogger had pulled the same crap with my "About Me" text a few years earlier. I've got that poem there •-------
Childwith line breaks in the middle, and at one point Blogger just decided they wouldn't allow any line breaks in there anymore. If I tried making any changes on the page where I wrote that poem, it would give me an error message and refuse to cooperate until I changed the poem. But as long as I ignored that page, I could keep it set the way I wanted. A while later they changed their minds and now there's no problem with line breaks. But in the meantime I needed to be stubborn.
Wanting recognition,
I walk alone.
Never will I follow!
They walk in that direction;
I think I'll stay right here.
This is a nice place, isn't it?
Gamist
Needing freedom,
I look ahead.
Will they ever follow?
They run toward the money;
There is no place for art.
I promise you tomorrow will be different.
You might ask why I stuck around this long. First off, I don't like change. If something's basically working, even if it's taking way too much effort to get it there, I find it preferable to keep it that way than to risk losing it. Also, I looked at some of the other blogging services and they seemed even worse. Blogger was at least letting me into the HTML for the page, letting me mess around as I saw fit. If Blogger hadn't given me as much freedom as it had to begin with, I'd never have aimed this high and we'd never be having these problems. Besides, even if I did find some other blogging service I'd need to either spend an RPG's-length rewriting every post one-by-one to fit into the new system (since so many are specifically designed for a visual look that comes from Blogger's template), or abandon all the old posts and start fresh. I don't like those options.
So I stay, and I keep hoping they won't screw me over too badly. It's not like I have any way to object to their changes- they must have millions of users, and I'm possibly the only one with these particular problems.
I woke up on February 22nd, one day after my birthday, and went to my blog to write the next post ("Meanwhile, in the future…"). I scrolled down, as I often do, and suddenly I reached the bottom of the page, which was Semantics, Part 3. Wait, what? That couldn't be right. I reloaded the page. No change. All that was appearing on the page was the past month-and-a-half of posts. I thought maybe it was an error made the last time it published. So I created a new post and then deleted it, to force a re-publish. No change. I desperately went through the settings pages, looking for something that may suddenly be wrong. The only thing I noticed was that same error message, about how I'm not allowed more than 500 posts. Could that be the problem? I paced around the room for a few minutes before proceeding. If I gave in on this, I'd never get the 999-post maximum back. But what if this was the problem, and only giving in would fix it? I'd still have a year or so of blogging left before having to start fresh. The important thing was that the old posts should be readable. So I changed the number from 999 to 500, and saved.
No change.
I hurried to the Blogger help group. It had always been supremely unhelpful in the past, but where else could I turn? I posted that I was no longer being allowed to control my blog's appearance, and I got a swift reply from a pompous jerk who (I later learned) had been posting an automated reply to similar threads all day. He said this was an example of Blogger's fantastic new Auto Pagination "feature", which decides for you how much will get put on your pages. To make matters worse, this even infects the archive pages. So on Blogger there's now no non-awkward way to get to the last few posts of January, because even that page stops at the gargantuan Semantics, Part 3! So this pompous jerk I mentioned, he tells me that this is for the good of everyone and refers me to some posts on his blog talking about how inconsiderate it is to make people wait for pages to load. Gee, thanks, that's so helpful! Who declared you the grand arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable behavior on blogs?!
(Whenever anyone asked how to get the archives to work right, he'd link to a post he wrote about how people still using the old system of Blogger are stuck in the past.)
I'm not the only one fed up with this. So it may be that this will be undone, like all the other changes over the years. But here's the thing: I changed the number of posts allowed from 999 to 500. That can't be undone. So let's say Blogger did change it back. Then what?
I decided, after much anguished deliberation, to go back to the way things were done in the 90s. No "blogging service". No "posts". No "comments". Just a big HTML page, that I edit with a text editor. That page is http://www.thebuckmans.com. (Please note: the "M" needs to be capitalized. The server TheBuckmans.com is on right now is case-sensitive.) When I want to write a new post, I'll copy a template into the file and edit it directly, in the same HTML file as everything else. And then I'll take the ten minutes it takes to upload the page to the FTP server.
I'm not going to spin this into something great. This is me running away. Blogger has done more good for me than harm over the years, and I'm throwing it all away because it's not enough for me. I demand control, and that control is being taken away from me. So I'm throwing away the comments, and I'm throwing away the individual post pages, and I'm throwing away the RSS feed, and I'm throwing away the handy post editor, and I'm throwing away the quick publishing, and I'm throwing away the post previews as I'm writing, and I'm probably throwing away a lot of other things that I'll only realize and miss when they're gone.
For now I'm still working within the framework of Blogger, because I don't have time right now to set everything up the way I want. So for now TheBuckmans.com is literally copied-and-pasted from here. The last backup of the main page I made was back in September, so I added all the more recent posts to that file to recreate (as best I could on short notice) the main page as it existed a week ago. There are just seven more posts to part 2 (including this one, and two more 74s), and each one is going to be copied-and-pasted like all the others. After posting this to Blogger, It'll probably take me around twenty minutes to get it up on TheBuckmans.com. And if anyone comments, that'll need to be copied by hand too.
But that's temporary. In Part 3 that all changes.
I'll stop posting here entirely, and set everything up for myself so that I can post there reasonably quickly each time.
There will be a new RSS feed, one which I'll be writing by hand. It doesn't look so complicated to do that.
There will be no built-in commenting system. Yes, I know, that's the hardest part about leaving the Blogger format. I'll encourage readers to respond by e-mail, and if anyone does I'll make a post to respond to each letter. But realistically, I doubt anyone will ever write. No one ever comments on this blog anyway, no matter how convenient it is.
No new readers will ever come to the blog. New readers show up because there's something specific they're searching for on Google (usually "The Path interpretation", actually) that a specific blog post I wrote deals with. These people will not come to a page that takes a minute to load, where the post they're looking for is somewhere in the middle. Realistically, I don't think this matters too much. Almost no one who finds my blog that way ever sticks around past that first post.
This blog is for me. There it is right at the top of the page: "A blog for Mory." I've had six intros so far, and that's been in all of them. This blog isn't for random people looking for information, it's not for commenters, it's not for Blogger. It's for me, and if other people like it that's great but if any other people like it I suspect it'd be because I take everything on it so personally. So I'm going to continue to do what's right for... I mean, I'll do what's necessary for the blog to be... I'm just going to do what I do, I can't say it really makes sense.
This blog approves the change in location.
Thank you. But you know you're not...
Well. Thank you. I've got big plans for you still.
Here's the situation in a nutshell. Blogger is preventing me from putting all my posts on one page, because now they've got a limit on how long you can make a page load. This is unacceptable to me. They may fix the situation within the next few days, in which case I'll continue to post here. If they do not, I'm going back to Web 1.0, where I can control my own site again without having to learn any advanced web development. Either way, this has demonstrated to me that I cannot rely on Blogger for the future. There will be a part 3 to the blog, I promise you that, but it won't be here.
4 Comments:
- Richie said:
-
Remind again why you so desperately want to make Firefox cry?
- said:
-
And we just talked about this, too...
I hope you find a good way to continue the blog properly. Any ideas yet?
I suppose you could always throw the html code onto a domain of your own, and then to make new posts you could still use blogger to generate the code. - Mory said:
-
Richie, there's no need to be so dramatic about it. In Firefox it took between 20 to 50 seconds to load the entire page, depending on the computer. Last week I wrote that 74 post that affected other posts (which is now inaccessible), and for a few hours after that the blog was broken and took a few minutes to load. If that's what you're basing this on, I apologize. I did mess up there. But it was only a few hours, and then I found and fixed the problem and it went back to the more reasonable load time that it was before.
Look, I don't see the problem. If you want to just see the most recent posts, they appear almost instantly. You only need to wait if you're interested in the earlier stuff, and if you're reading earlier posts chances are you've got at least a full minute to spare. The entire page all told was 3 MB; that's not huge.
But I'll answer your question straight. There is an aesthetic appeal, for me, in that everything I write here gets added to the whole page rather than taking away old things. It creates the impression that the entire blog is one cohesive document, which (as you'll see when I finish my epic) it is.
I like that someone could theoretically look at the post "Beauty of the Mundane, Banality of the Imaginary" with a vague sense that that phrasing sounds familiar, use the browser's search function (rather than Blogger's more useless one) to find the word "mundane" on the page, and be led right to the February 21 2005 post "the mundane and The Imaginary!" to see what I meant by making that reference.
I like that someone reading the second "Who am I?" might press the End key on the keyboard to find the original "Who am I?" and compare the two, to see what things I've saved and what things I've changed.
I like that someone who's curious about the ongoing themes and conflicts of the blog could move the cursor over the bold word "smile" in "Two Glasses: Tanya and Erika", see the title "GAME OVER" appear, and wondering what I meant by that find the phrase "GAME OVER" and see exactly why I'm identifying more with Tanya than with Erika.
A lot of the interconnectedness of this blog is subtle. But the fact that it's all on one page means that those subtexts are just a few keypresses away from being found by anyone. Which isn't to say that anyone will find that stuff, but the fact that anyone could is important to me. If you had to enter the phrase into the Blogger search field, and then you had to sift through dozens of entirely unrelated posts, and then might not even see the actual post being referenced because Blogger's search is really bad, then sticking in these little references all over the place would be like me telling a joke to myself. Making all the posts accessible from one page means that someone somewhere may get the joke someday. - Mory said:
-
Or to put it into a more conflict-focused perspective: The blog is seen as a very temporary art form. You say what you have to say today, then tomorrow you'll push it away and say something else. Because blogs can have any kind of content you can over time cover lots of different ground. But you're always dealing with it on a very shallow level, because tomorrow the old posts will go away and there will be new posts to replace them. I object to this perception of what blogs are capable of.
I think each new post should make the blog (as a whole) deeper. You can see this attitude going all the way back to the final "cadence" of Part 1, where I was referencing old posts word for word but adding in context which made those old posts richer. And you can see this attitude in how over years' time I've developed the fictional stories I've told involving Ariel and the future-people and the blog and all the others. And you'll see it in its clearest example in the post I've been working on, a post which would absolutely suffer for not being on the same page as everything else.
I think that answers your question.
Tamir: I'm thinking of putting the blog -more or less as it was a few days ago- onto www.thebuckmans.com. I mean just recreating the HTML of the main page, and sticking it on there. Whenever I want to add a new post, I'll put it into that single HTML page manually and put a link in an RSS feed (also manually). I've basically been writing in raw HTML all this time anyway, so it wouldn't be such a stretch. Then I'd either have some external commenting system for each post, or a commenting system for the entire blog. I'm leaning more toward that idea, since it's so rare that anyone ever comments.
Now, setting this up will take time, so for the time being I'm still hoping Blogger will undo this change they've made. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility, because there are many other people than just myself complaining about the new load-time policy. However, like I said in the post even if Blogger did reverse their decision I've come to realize I can't stay here any longer than the end of part 2. So the Web 1.0 solution is where I'm probably going to end up, and it's just a matter of whether I move a week from now or a year from now.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Two Glasses: Tanya and Erika
I figured out that she was leaving from a letter she sent out. •-------
I wanted to just give you guys a heads up. Firstly, it has been a joy working with such a great cast. A director often sits between the cast and the board. I tried to do what I could to meet the needs of both...In its vague ramblings it sounded very much like a goodbye letter, but she seemed to have entirely forgotten to mention that she was saying goodbye. I responded: "In that entire letter, you never say what it is you're trying to say, you just walk around it. Tell me straight: are you being kicked out? If so, I may consider leaving the production." And I was serious, too. I expected that if Tanya was going, it was because she was too creative and someone had a problem with that. I expected that the next step would be to turn The Matchmaker into a more straightforward rendition with less crazy energies. That's how the world works, right?
Well, that's not what happened. When Rachel told us that Tanya had not been fired, I was very confused. It didn't help that she was being very diplomatic and didn't make it perfectly clear that this was entirely Tanya's decision. No, Rachel tried to take some of the blame herself for having "arguments" of a very vague nature with Tanya, and I was only too happy to keep the blame aimed in that direction. Rachel kept insisting that it would still be set in the 60s, that there weren't any creative disagreements at all in fact. I refused to believe that.
And then Tanya walked in. She'd accidentally gone to the wrong place, so she was a good twenty minutes late. This amused me: a few rehearsals earlier, I'd accidentally gone to the wrong place and needed Tanya to come pick me up. What did not amuse me was what came out of her mouth then. She sat down and started spinning the situation into something that sounded reasonable. "I don't want to create any more difficulties…" she said, not making it at all clear what difficulties she'd been making that surpassed the ones she was making right now. "In the best interests of the play…" she said, not making it at all clear how this was in anyone's best interests. "It would be best if I got out of the way…" she said, not making it at all clear whose way she was blocking.
She babbled on and on without actually saying anything at all, as though she was choosing her words very carefully. And here's the kicker: she was smiling through all of it. Not a phony smile employed to reassure, but the genuine smile of a person who's just had a great burden lifted from her back and is relieved to be free of it. The words were empty, but that smile told me the story.
Here is the story of Tanya's failure as I see it now. She had neither experience nor a work ethic, and she was allowed to run the play regardless because JEST thought her creative energy and instincts trumped those inadequacies. And they could have, if she had made the continual choice to face her own inadequacies head-on. But she wouldn't. For months the board of directors wanted her to cast a Cornelius, but she was in no rush so she never got around to it. The board of directors wanted her to get costumes, but she was in no rush so she never got around to it. The board of directors wanted her to impress upon the actors that they all needed to show up and rehearse together, but she was in no rush so she never got around to it. The board of directors wanted Tanya to do the job that she'd committed herself to do, and she refused. Tanya ran away to South Africa for a month. Then she came back and still wasn't in a rush. And the board of directors was as patient with her as they could reasonably be under the circumstances, but they did make it clear that she needed to get her act together. Tanya was not willing to get her act together, which is not a single act but a continuous series of actions leading all the way to the final performance day. So Tanya chose to quit, and get back to things that involved less guilt..
As we were working under Tanya, I saw myself reflected in her. True, she was too normal brain-wise. But she was figuring it out as she went, like me. And she was in over her head, like me. And she had no work ethic, like me. And she had so many crazy ideas, like me. That she quit tells me two things. First, that she is less like me than I thought, because I would never allow myself to abandon something I care about. Second, that she is more like me than I thought, because abandoning something I care about is exactly the sort of thing I might do. I want to forgive her. I want to never forgive her.
It turns out she was expendable. She was swiftly replaced with a woman named Erika. Like Tanya she's young and pretty, two qualities which influence my behavior around them more than I like to admit. Like Tanya she's creative and has good instincts. Unlike Tanya she knows exactly what she's doing. She has 18 years of experience and a PhD in theater. She keeps to a tight schedule. I first met her a week ago, and already we have all the roles cast, a rehearsal schedule going all the way through to performances, and preliminary sketches for costumes and set design.
She's making huge edits (like entire page-long monologues, and maybe a third of my lines) because she says that a comedy should never be longer than two hours including the fifteen minute intermission. She didn't like the age difference between Vandergelder and Dolly (He's three times her age.), so she tried switching the actress who's been playing Dolly (Maytal) with the actress who's been playing Mrs. Molloy (Eliana, the woman with ADD who I've mentioned before but not by name). We ran through the lines yesterday with this arrangement, and it worked great. We are keeping the 60s setting, and throwing out some other things that Tanya stuffed in but no one else liked. I am not getting my catchphrase "Holy cabooses!" back, because Erika agrees with Tanya that it's not appropriate for the time period.
Erika likes what I'm doing with Barnaby. That's a relief. She hasn't said much about Ambrose (Grr, normal people.), but I don't understand the character anymore. I had a very specific idea of who he was, which came from being on the same wavelength as Tanya. I looked at all the unconventional casting she'd done (including Maytal as Dolly), and the crazy ideas she had for what the play was supposed to be about, and fit together the little pieces we get of Ambrose into something that was different and interesting and had a part to play in everything she had in mind. This is why she eventually came around to telling me to do exactly what I wanted: because what I wanted was based on an expectation of where her ideas naturally led. And most of what she was telling the other actors to do was fitting in perfectly to what I was doing as well, in ways that I think I was the only one who noticed. But now it's a different director, a different actress I'm working with, a different vision for the play. That great feeling I had, that I was right in the middle of the emotions of the play, that's gone. Now I'm just Ambrose, more or less as he's written. I'm going to try to feel out the way in front of me, see how much of my idea of Ambrose I can preserve. But now it's not going to add too much to the play to do so.
But Barnaby's fine. Which is good, because that's the more important part. On Sunday I eagerly volunteered to be at the auditions for Cornelius and run the audition scenes with him, so Erika has seen the hunched shoulders and quirky movements and she says she likes it. So that's good. It means less work and more coasting. Less work is good.
Click here to see it on the main page.
Page is still loading... please wait.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Who am I?
The first thing I have to say about myself is that I'm pretty good at figuring out how to use various systems. By "systems" I'm not talking about mechanical stuff, I'm talking more about how to do things. You know, like when I was 3 I taught myself to read. That sort of thing. I just tried to understand it, and I did. Most of the things that we think are really complicated are actually quite understandable and approachable if you take the time to observe and imitate them.
I lived in America for the first seven years of my life. Back then I loved to run and jump and read and sing, and I did that everywhere. Even in class, when I was old enough to go to class but not old enough to be told that you don't do that sort of thing in class. School didn't make much of an impression on me, since the whole "I talk, you listen" routine didn't speak to me. But there were some times when they'd have us figure out how to do things ourselves, like writing poetry or stuff like that, and I liked that. Back then I was a part of the group. I had friends, I talked to everyone. It wasn't exactly fulfilling being in the first grade, but it wasn't bad.
Then we moved to Israel. There wasn't one group anymore, there were really three. There were the English-speakers, there were the bullying Hebrew-speakers, and there were the native English-speakers who only ever spoke in Hebrew so that they'd fit into the environment better. I was in the first group, and my in-class behavior (running around, singing out loud, etc.) got me in a lot of trouble with the second group. I picked up the rules of speaking in Hebrew quickly, but it's one thing to understand the rules and it's another to have a vocabulary. I wasn't eager to hang out with the people who made fun of me and spent the classes throwing things at me, so I never built up that vocabulary.
On the rare occasions in class that I tried to pay attention, I found that I could only understand half of what was being said. And when I absolutely had to break apart from the English-speaking group for a moment and answer someone in Hebrew, I found that I only knew half the words I needed to say. (I could have read Hebrew books and built up a vocabulary, but I never did.) So I came to see myself as an outsider, and tried to take comfort in my distance from the crowd.
That hasn't worked out so well. In ninth grade I was in a school with lots of interesting artistic types, but they were Hebrew-speakers so I kept my distance. In eleventh grade I finally got to be in a class with girls, but they were all Hebrew-speakers so I kept my distance. Now I sit at home and interact with a small community of fellow Orthodox-Jewish English-speakers and hope no one will make me leave. To this day, whenever I pass a group of Hebrew-speaking teenagers on the street I have the sense that they're secretly laughing at me.
I've figured out how to play with lots of different systems over the years: music composition, acting, weird blogging, comics editing. But those are just fun things to do so that I don't get bored. My love is for videogames, and you know it's real love because I don't really enjoy making games but I force myself to do it anyway. Videogames are so diverse that I can imitate absolutely any kind of system, no matter how random, and make a game out of it. So that never gets old, and you can see why I love it so much. But since I'm an outsider I have to do all the tedious work myself, and that's most of the job. It's worth it, anyway.
So that's me. (See, I told you it wouldn't take long.) Now that you know everything there is to know about me, you can stay and read some stuff or not, I mean, at this point you can definitely make an informed opinion about whether you hate my guts or are mildly curious about what I'll do next. Welcome to my blog.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I Am That Future Self
I've changed. I've got lots of ideas for games now, but almost none of them are simple escapism. They all have a bit of reality in them, and sometimes more than a bit. Now that I think of it, I don't even know if 12-year-old me would like some of the games I want to make. He wanted to take the mundane and make it extraordinary; I want to take the extraordinary and make it mundane. It's the quiet moments that interest me now, not the noisy ones.
I used to lie awake at nights wondering how I'd change as I got older. What scared me was, I couldn't control my future self. My identity back then could later be completely buried under layers of responsibility and common-sense until all that's left is a boring adult. Who was this person, to think he could take over my life?
Well, that's me, really. The usurper. Sorry, kid.
Pussywillow is sitting in my lap, as usual. He's gotten downright clingy lately. He never leaves my lap if he can help it. When I leave the chair, he stays and waits for me to come back. I still remember how he used to be, anti-social and holding on to psychological problems from when he was a kitten. And now it seems like the only thing he wants in the world is to be in my lap. I love this cat.
I've been playing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for the Gamecube, which is just like the other games in its series. I've written out a list of which relationships between the characters I might find interesting. As I play through the game I keep those characters standing next to each other whenever possible, so that I can get them to have conversations with each other. When any characters die I have to start the level over, because if I don't it means I'll never see those conversations. I've lost count of how many times I've replayed the level I'm on.
I like Tanya. She's crazy, but the kind of crazy I can relate to. And she listens, that's important. When I have an issue with something she's saying to me, I bring it up and we find some common ground.
I've been playing Little King's Story, which is a good game. It uses its rules to create a cartoony simulation of real-world concepts. It is charming, long and tedious.
Back in October, The Perfect Color was in a temporary art exhibit in a museum in Rio de Janeiro. I'd submitted it for this "games as art" exhibit, but I didn't know whether they accepted it until just a few days ago when I saw the photos. There was a computer running my game, and a poster on the wall with screenshots. The exhibit was only up for three days, but what this means is that somewhere in the world, there's at least one person who doesn't know me but has played and enjoyed my game.
So far I've read roughly 36 years of Spider-Man comics. I think the current run of Amazing Spider-Man is the best I've read. It's released almost weekly. Each time I finish an issue, I want to read the next one straight away. But I need to wait a week (at least) to read the next one.
I've been corresponding with Kyler about the graphics for The March of Bulk. He gave me a background design which was very pretty and colorful. I told him to tone it down, and gave him a long description of what I'm looking for. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.
Joss Whedon's show Dollhouse is ending now. He hasn't been restricted in what kind of story he's telling, so he tries to go every direction at once and the result is a confused mess with no focus at all. What there is so far of the ending is awful. It is nonsensical and aimless. I hope when Joss Whedon finds more work, it's under a stricter boss.
Beauty of the Mundane, Banality of the Imaginary
Creative Disillusionment
Music is like dreams. It serves a necessary purpose, in that it fulfills certain abstract emotional needs that are hard to describe in words. But there's nothing glamorous or interesting about music. It's like food. When I'm hungry, I eat. I don't care what it is that I'm eating, I just need to not be hungry anymore.
The one part of my repertoire which still has a spark for me is the music I've planned for my games. Some of it is for games which are a few decades away at best, but playing the music reassures me that I'm going to get there someday.
I've been telling myself over and over that games are what's important, and the words are starting to sink in. Music which isn't for games doesn't matter.
A parallel could easily be drawn to math, where I was really good at it until I lost interest and never did the final tests. I still use math, but only as a part of making games. I expect it'll be the same way with music someday. Everything I do eventually needs to be focused toward making games.
From that perspective, my upcoming CD is the symbol of an ending. "I'm done with this field, here's what I've accomplished in it." I know I ought to practice for it, but it hardly seems necessary. It's not like I have any reason to impress anyone with it. I'll just figure out the details as I'm playing.
2 Comments:
- said:
-
You know Mory I completely disagree with the statements mentioned in this piece, for one I know you are a picky eater when it comes to cream-cheese. two for music, maybe you just need someone sitting in the rocking chair for that inspiration to hit. this is realty selfish but don't forget those of us who desire your music creativity, one of your best talents. it has the desired effect to make a bad day change for the better. for the writer it may not be glamorous but for the listener it's a fantastic work of interpretation brought into the realm of reality. and will be desired by all who hear it, if only we could hear it live when you played it.
- Mory said:
-
It's very frustrating that I have no idea who you are.
If you'd like to hear me play, you're free to come over any time I'm home and ask me to play. I'd actually enjoy that. But no one ever comes over to hear me play, and I have no ambitions to spread my music around on more than a one-on-one basis. Making concerts, that's a career. I'd much rather spend my efforts on things where I think I have something original to offer.
Monday, January 18, 2010
We Don't Fit
Now that I've had the chance to play it, I can confirm that it's really good. Much better than I was expecting, really. The thing about Nintendo (and Miyamoto in particular, who helped design this) is that they do understand what makes for a good game. So they could make a game about washing dishes, and somehow it would end up fun. Here they've made a game about exercising, and I've never liked the whole mentality of exercising and obsessing about health but if it's in a Nintendo game somehow it's fun. I've been regularly playing it in the mornings. I do the body test, which checks your weight and tests your balance. And then sometimes I go on to do the yoga poses and even strength-building exercises. It really depends on how likely it is that someone will walk in on me, because that could be pretty embarrassing. I'm just playing a game, but an onlooker might think I was exercising!
Now, Dena has not played Wii Fit. Not at all. I waited a week for her to play it, because I thought if she played it first she'd feel more like it was her game. And then maybe she'd get comfortable using the Wii, because "her game" is on it, and then maybe she'd branch out and play other games, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I single out that game in particular (which I bought in America) because I've seen that it's way more fun in multiplayer than in single-player, but I very rarely have anyone to play it in multiplayer with. I only know it's fun because sometimes our cousins' cousin (sibling of the ones I was with in Illinois) comes over, and he's not a gamer but he's willing to play this game and it's so much fun playing with him. Anyway, I hoped this could be a gateway game for Dena. I know, I've said in the past that I wouldn't get my hopes up about things like that. But this is exercise! And yoga! And weighing yourself! And feeling bad about your weight! This is her kind of game! If there was ever a chance to get her into games, this is it.
There was never a chance, apparently. After a week of waiting for her to play Wii Fit, I finally played it myself. I pretended I just wanted to enjoy it for myself, but really I was doing it specifically while she was there but not in the room so that she might walk in and get jealous and want to play it herself. It basically worked. After I played some of the minigames, she wanted to try it herself. And she did play it for a half-hour or so, not the exercises but just the minigames. She has not touched the Wii since.
I'm enjoying Wii Fit. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it is a remarkable game nonetheless. Through it, Nintendo has managed to get millions of people who don't consider themselves gamers to have fun playing games. Why couldn't my sister be one of them?
There's an actor Tanya knows who's willing to play Cornelius, but he's not available on Wednesdays and many of our rehearsals are on Wednesdays, so she's looking for other actors who might be easier to work with. She's going to watch the other production of The Matchmaker in a few days, and she said she might ask their Cornelius to join us if he's good. I hope she's joking about that one.
In order to keep the play under two hours, we were going to cut most of Act 4, and replace it with a short video clip of Act 4's plot played out in pantomime. (Tanya described the idea as "Charlie Chaplin-style".) It could have worked. Tanya was going to ask a film student to direct that bit. But now JEST's board of directors have told her to scrap that idea, because there's no room in the budget for it. So we're doing Act 4 as written, and the play will be long. I'm okay with this decision. On the one hand, it means what we're doing is less insane, and that's a shame. But on the other hand, it means I get more funny moments on stage. I was off-book, but it didn't take me too long to get there. I can learn another act quickly enough.
Not everyone showed up to this rehearsal, for whatever reason. The schedule said we'd be doing Act 1, but the actors who came were the actors for Act 2 (minus Cornelius). So we did Act 2. Ambrose isn't in that act, only Barnaby.
I tried to tone down my performance a tad, because in practicing at home it had been a bit too crazy for a stage. To try to figure out the mannerisms of Barnaby I was hopping around the house a lot, but on stage it just didn't feel right. Barnaby was in a strange area, he'd probably be a lot more restrained. So that's how I played hm. When we were done running the scene, Tanya told me to run around more. So we ran it again, and I ran around so much that I felt like I was playing a squirrel. (I have no problems with squirrels, I just didn't expect that.) And then when we were done Tanya told me to never stop running around, to just be totally hyperactive. So we ran it a third time, and I kept running around so much that I felt like I was repeating myself, and then when we were done she said it was great but I ought to move around more. Really hop up and down, when appropriate. This is going to be fun. I may need to exercise my legs regularly.
We still don't have an Ermengarde, and Tanya isn't too concerned because Ermengarde doesn't have many lines. She's considering Dena, which would just be weird. I saw her in Another Antigone, and that was a good show but Dena's acting was one of the things I didn't like about it. Plus, that would just be weird. I'm supposed to act like I'm in love with Dena? I hope Dena declines. Although... if I play it like I'm not really in love with Ermengarde, it could add a bit of the weirdness from my backstory for Ambrose, where Ermengarde is really just the rebound girl. Hmmm.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Quality Isn't Enough, Is It?
There have been only three issues so far. Already there are rumors that sales are so bad the series is going to be cancelled.
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
Most of the internet chatter about this book has been criticizing it for giving Beast a different look than the other comics he appears in. Which just goes to show that many people on the internet have no taste at all. Beast's design in S.W.O.R.D. is so much better than anywhere else, so much more distinctive and full of personality, that I wish all the other comic artists would start drawing him like this.
- Mory said:
-
It's been confirmed that the series is canceled. There will only be five issues. Blah.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Forward March
I'm not going to spoil any specifics about the game, for those of you fortunate enough to have not heard me give away all the details of the experience already. So I can't describe exactly what it is I've been working on. But I can tell you that the main game is going to be made up of 15 separate.. um, things, and I've made 12 of them. Most of those pieces are roughly how I planned them out a year ago. The rest I figured out as I went.
I think I've probably said already that The March of Bulk is a movement game. And even if I haven't, that's no spoiler. Now, the thing you have to understand about movement games is that their primary content is their controls, and that's something you can't really appreciate as an idea. You need to feel it for yourself. So I could plan out what the basic structure of it would be like, I could set out certain goals for myself in terms of how the game was supposed to end up, but I couldn't stick to those plans too faithfully. Ultimately the design comes down to intuition, not cleverness.
I almost never pull off the motion I'm going for on the first try. I try something, and if I'm not even in the right ballpark I throw it out, but if it's close I keep tweaking the numbers until I get there. I add complexity, I take out complexity. I break it into sections, so that I can do different things in different parts. What I'm doing here is halfway between programming and animation, and I'm good at neither but I know what I like and I can work out how to get there.
I could have asked Kyler to do the animations, of course. But that wouldn't work right. If he gave me some intricate animation, that's not subject to the player's interaction. I need it to react to exactly how the player is playing on a subtle level, or else it won't feel right. So the animations need to be pulled off through math, which takes into account all the variables of context.
So the pieces of a movement game only come together when I can play around with them as a gamer and see how it feels. (How the game feels is my main concern here. Those who don't care how their games feel have no business making movement games.) My old composition teacher Eliezer used to say that he couldn't tell me what to do with a piece of music until I had written it out. Similarly, I can't tell myself what to do with a piece of movement until I've programmed it in. And sometimes what I find surprises me. I had to throw out a few bits I liked in the planning stages, when I realized they would not mesh with the tone of the rest. And other things just occurred to me as I was working. There was one bit that wasn't even meant to be funny but turned out being hilarious through what's almost a glitch in the programming, so I played that up and added in a lot that I hadn't anticipated needing. Other times I unexpectedly feel as I'm playing like I'd like to do something at a certain point, and it's something I'd never considered, so I need to rework the design to add that in.
I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to be the main gamist for a big movement game with lots of people working for me, and it's hard to picture. Whoever programs the animations is making the game. If I want it to be my game (and I do), I can't pass that job off to someone else. Which means that no matter how high up I go as a gamist, I'm still going to need to program sometimes. I guess what I need to do is get a programming environment better-suited for movement games, like one with a built-in physics engine. Or I could try to reduce all the movements in The March of Bulk to some sort of notation system and try to find logic in that that I can consciously use later. But either way, I'm always going to need to get my hands dirty. I can't consider myself a gamist otherwise. I'd be at best a manager.
It could work. It'll all work out fine.
Alternate-Universe Me
He never learned Hebrew, he never was exposed to the violent attitudes of poor Moroccan kids, he never had to get too used to the idea of standing out. He never learned the Israeli directness and lack of caring about the future. He never discovered internet piracy (which is less commonplace in America), and therefore never got into videogames. He eventually would find out about Asperger's Syndrome, and would most likely try to fit in and eliminate his differences.
That Mory would grow up to be a very boring person. My interpretation of my life story says that the most important thing that ever happened to me was moving to the holy land. The alternate-universe me never had a reason to exist. I do.
How I play strategy games
I always aim to amuse myself, and I am easily amused. I might do something that gets me into trouble, and I know going in that it's probably going to get me in trouble, but I do it anyway because I know that if by some small chance I should pull it off it'll be glorious. Other people take a long time to consider each little thing they do; not me. I might spend lots of time analyzing what I did later, but the decision itself rarely takes more than a few seconds because I'm going by instinct. I think the fun is in the doing, not the planning. If it goes badly, it goes badly. But I'll have at least amused myself with the idea that I could have pulled off something ridiculous.
Other people don't think like that. Focusing on goals is very popular. It's what gets you ahead, if that's what you want to do. And there's always a goal to work for. Some people are going to be on top in the end, and some people will be failures. That's life. But that's not particularly important to me. There's only one ending. But there are so many little joys to be found along the way! If I can do one little thing that no one saw coming and totally reshapes the landscape, my work is done. That's such satisfaction already that it barely matters whether I end up a loser.
Now I'll admit, moments that great are few and far between. But like I said, I'm easily amused. Something doesn't have to be crazy to seem like a good idea, and I'll pursue what I consider good ideas to the ends of the Earth. Even ideas that are purely functional, I'll go after them if it seems like I might enjoy the function. If something's missing, I'll try to fill it in. If something's wrong, I'll try to fix it. These moments are in themselves satisfying, more because they feel right than because they are right. It's satisfying to make plans and stick to them and see them come together, even if at the end of the night it turns out those plans were ill-considered. Following some intricate plan with aesthetic appeal is more entertaining than forming a plan that makes sense.
I might not make it in the real world. My father wants me to start investing stocks; this seems like a very bad idea to me. At the end of my life, I'm not going to have more money than anyone else or be more famous than anyone else. I don't know if I'll even reach all the goals I've set for myself. And these things do matter to me, don't think they don't. But on a moment-to-moment basis, none of that concerns me at all. When I do a thing, it's because I think it's going to amuse me. Usually it does.
1 Comment:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
I try to find a balance between playing purely by instinct and purely by planning. I think it may also depend on the game. Some games just fit better into "telling a story" which pull me stronger into playing by instinct, and some games are rather dry and only reward planning. There also might be some correlation between this and the amount of randomness in a game. The more randomness, the easier it is for me to play by instinct, and vice versa.
So a game like Puerto Rico with basically no randomness is a game I play almost entirely by planning and hoping I can figure out what the other players actions will be by using pure logic.
Games like Last Night On Earth, where any 'ol random thing can happen, I try to play to maximize the story line. It's all about going out in a blaze of glory... sometimes literally.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Project Natal: Programmed By Machines
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/exclusive-inside-microsofts-project-natal
The article is short, but here's what I understand from it. When Project Natal sees an image of a room and identifies a person in it, it then puts together a list of likely guesses as to what that body is doing, assigns a probability to each possible interpretation, and then takes the most likely assumption. Nothing more glamorous is going on here than following rules like "If the leg is two pixels further to the left, then increase the probability of case #1,694.". But those rules were not programmed by people.
Somewhere in Microsoft headquarters is a big network of computers that together form what the project workers call "the living brain". I am not making this up, it's right there in the photo gallery on the Popular Science page. This computer system is not just programmed but trained to recognize body positions from images. It was only programmed with a basic knowledge of how human bodies are shaped, which is much like how a living creature has basic functions programmed in as instincts. The "living brain" is given pictures and is told repeatedly what body positions those pictures are supposed to stand for, and then it writes its own rules to make sense of all that. When it's finished, the list of rules it's come up with will be put into the considerably-dumber Project Natal systems, which will not learn for themselves but just follow the rules which have already been learned. And those rules aren't objective laws decided on by some programmer or team of experts, they're the personal views of this particular computer network in Microsoft headquarters. They're rules which are the result of this particular program's design and experiences, with all the imperfections that implies.
The article, like I said, is short. It doesn't say whether this same technique is being used to train Project Natal's recognition of emotions, though I imagine it must be. And I'd really be interested in hearing a more thorough analysis of the way they're getting this program to learn. The article doesn't even say if this sort of thing is common nowadays; I haven't heard of anything this ambitious before, but I don't hear much. What this article does tell me is that I was wrong about AI systems. Clearly real artificial intelligence does exist, it's just running on hardware too expensive for end users and still needs to be trained by professionals for very specific tasks. It is a start.
4 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
Just as a note of my concern for project natal is that the current precision of the system might not be high enough for people to do what they imagine they want to do with such a system. This will than lead to disappointment with the product.
I will use an example from a sport that I enjoy and am adept at. Ping pong. I'm assuming that most people will imagine that project natal will allow them to simulate a game of ping pong. It just seems like something it should be able to do. However, the precision of Natal is something like + or - 5 cm ( I read this in some article I can't find again).
Now ping pong is all about millimeters. Tiny differences in speed and angles. I'm sure that in sensing the angle of the paddle, a precision of roughly 1 mm would make it feel really authentic.
So to design games for Natal, they need to be designed in such a way that 5 cm is enough precision, and feels right. Something like an extreme upgrade to dance dance revolution.
I too am very interested in the whole project and can't wait to actually try it. - Mory said:
-
Hi! Haven't heard from you in a while.
I actually raised my own concerns about the lack of precision when I first wrote about Natal here. And you're right, a Ping Pong game wouldn't work. Or at least, a realistic Ping Pong game wouldn't work; if you start getting arcade-y, there are ways to make it fun. For a realistic Ping Pong game I think it would be easier to use the upcoming PlayStation Motion Controller or even Nintendo's MotionPlus add-on. The appeal I see in Project Natal is first in pulling more people into games, and second in augmenting existing kinds of games with little bits of natural motion. - Mory said:
-
Oh, and I should also say that from video demonstrations of Project Natal I could see a not-insignificant amount of lag between the action and its appearance on screen. But still, there's much that a good gamist could do with it.
- Mory said:
-
After speaking to Moshe, I've added a note to the beginning of this post spelling out that there is actually nothing out-of-the-ordinary going on here. Obviously if I'd spoken to him earlier I would not have written this post, but it seemed like a big deal when I read about it.
The Necessity of Dreams
Scanning neural pathways...Okay, what have we got. A lot of trouble in the 36 area, I see.. the girl next door. Okay, I'll have to start from there. And w793a3... pizza. I must still be hungry. Let's get to work.
17 problem areas located.
Pathway 3691b6 (68% above healthy)
Pathway 36e!00 (66% above healthy)
Pathway 36@892 (66% above healthy)
Pathway w793a3 (65% above healthy)
Pathway 361224 (61% above healthy)
Pathway 361225 (61% above healthy)
Pathway 3605nl (54% above healthy)
WARNING: All above pathways are reaching near-obsession levels and must be reduced immediately to maintain healthy brain function.
Pathway 64a54a (37% above healthy)
Pathway 64a5jd (37% above healthy)
Pathway 369(b7 (35% above healthy)
Pathway 760435 (34% above healthy)
Pathway r5esu8 (32% above healthy)
Pathway 282229 (26% above healthy)
Pathway 84$090 (14% above healthy)
Pathway a1+018 (10% above healthy)
Pathway a1+019 (10% above healthy)
Pathway a1+020 (10% above healthy)
I am in that girl next door's house. She is not here. I am okay with this. There is a slice of pizza on the table.That ought to lower them a little. How direct should the sexual content here go? Hm, 68%.. that's not really so bad. It's not worth risking waking up over. There's still a lot to fix after dealing with her.
>_
She is asking to share pizza. There is a pie of pizza on the table.Okay. Not the most effective thing in the world, but it'll deal with 36e!00 a bit. How are we doing?
>_
Pathway 3691b6 (68% above healthy)Darn it, I made a new one. 91gg47.. the similarity between tables and the human body. I'd better fix that before it gets any worse.
Pathway 36e!00 (42% above healthy)
Pathway 36@892 (56% above healthy)
Pathway w793a3 (13% above healthy)
Pathway 361224 (60% above healthy)
Pathway 361225 (60% above healthy)
Pathway 3605nl (53% above healthy)
Pathway 64a54a (37% above healthy)
Pathway 64a5jd (37% above healthy)
Pathway 369(b7 (2% above healthy)
Pathway 760435 (34% above healthy)
Pathway r5esu8 (32% above healthy)
Pathway 282229 (26% above healthy)
Pathway 84$090 (14% above healthy)
Pathway a1+018 (10% above healthy)
Pathway a1+019 (10% above healthy)
Pathway a1+020 (10% above healthy)
Pathway 91gg47 (21% above healthy)
The table has turned into a human and walked away. This is not unusual.
>_
Pathway 91gg47 (-4% above healthy)Phew. Okay, how do I proceed. 64a54a.. I'm not doing enough painting these days. Easily remedied, and I can tie that in with the girl easily enough.
The girl next door has taken off her clothes and would like me to paint her back.Okay, that's going down, excellent. I should leave that going for a minute so that I don't have to deal with this again for a while. If I keep mixing things together like this, I'll be done in no time. Okay, let's see what's next.. ah. This is an easy one.
>_
Spiders crawl out of her back and jump at my face. I am still alive.
>ask girl to squash spiders
She will not, and she laughs at me. I can handle this humiliation.
WARNING: Stress levels reaching unsafe level. Stress must be reduced to prevent waking up.No, I'm still okay. I've got to leave this going for another few seconds, it's going down slowly. 9%... 5%... that should be enough.
She asks about sociological principles.This shouldn't take long. This stuff is totally useless, I wouldn't want to be stuck with wanting to talk about it in real life. 16%.. 1%. Fine. Let's get to the a1's now.
>_
Babies descend from the BEEP BEEP BEEPNot the alarm already!
Deleting temporary files...But there are still a few serious obsessions.. darn. I'll have to bring those down tomorrow.
ERROR. Some temporary files were not properly removed. These may interfere with normal brain function.
Okay, get up.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
No Way To Run A Production
Tanya is in South Africa. No one (the assistant director included) seems to have any idea what she's doing there. She's not South African, but she lived there for a while so she has friends there. That still doesn't explain what was so important that she'd leave us for it for so long.
We presently have no actor playing Cornelius. While I was in America, David, who was going to play the part and who I was enjoying working with, got a hernia. It's not an emergency, so the hospital hasn't scheduled his surgery yet. But the surgery needs to be done, and until it is he can't strain himself in any way. That means he's out, and we have no replacement. My friend Moshe expressed an interest in trying out for the part, but then he got in to this training program for a computer job and now he doesn't have the time. The only other person who's expressed interest so far is someone who's not available on Wednesdays, which many of our rehearsals are on.
But we don't even know if he'd be appropriate for the part, because there have yet to be any sort of auditions for the part. David got in on the strength of his audition months ago, I doubt Tanya even considered anyone else. And Tanya's not back yet. She was supposed to be here yesterday. No one seems to know why she's not. Now she says she'll be here on Thursday. She'd better be.
There's also an issue with the character of Ermengarde. There was a lovely girl playing her, and then she had trouble with her travel visa so she's out. A girl I know took over, and then she joined a production of Annie which happens to have a performance on the same night as one of ours. Tanya knew about this before she left, but she didn't find anyone else. So we may or may not have an Ermengarde, and there isn't anyone who can fix this situation except for a lady who is in South Africa right now.
I didn't realize she wasn't going to be here, so I took today's rehearsal seriously. We were supposed to get off book in the three-week break, so I basically did. There are many parts I'm not comfortable with yet, and I'd need to stumble through those parts a bit, but I do basically know all my lines. The rehearsal was called for 7:30 in the place where we had the callbacks, so I printed out a map of the place for reference (just to be sure I'd get to the right place) and left the house at 5:30. I got there a few minutes late.
There was no one there except me and three other actors. Even the assistant director hadn't gotten there yet. And when she did, she said that no one else would be coming. Everyone had some convenient excuse to not be there.
We waited around until a little past 8:00. I played piano in the meantime; it was horribly out of tune, and there wasn't much I could do with it. Then someone named Rachel showed up, who is apparently Tanya's boss. In retrospect I'm not sure why she was there; there's not much she could have said to explain what was going on because she herself didn't seem to understand what was going on. But we sat around and talked about the state of the play, and then since we were there we did the parts of the play that we could.
Rachel told me I flail my arms around too much as Ambrose. I'll listen to what she's saying, but this is getting annoying. When I worked with Tanya she said to move around less with my lower body. So all the energy that I wanted Ambrose to have, that was all going into his arms. Now I'm finding out that he shouldn't have so much energy. I'm trying to figure out who this character is, I really am, but these reactions just aren't making sense to me. I'm afraid the character is going to end up just standing there motionless like a corpse, and nothing I want to express about the character is going to come across at all.
And Barnaby, no one is complaining about. I'm really not sure about what I'm doing with Barnaby, but no one's saying a thing. It could be because I've got it, so no one bothers. More likely it's because I'm doing such an awful job that people are worried they'll hurt my feelings. Normal people are so irritating.
The play goes on at the beginning of March. A month and a half, that's the time we've got. Which might be enough for some plays, but this is a crazy play and it really needs more time. It looked like we had more time, and then Tanya had to go to South Africa. We have no Cornelius, we may or may not have an Ermengarde, and that's not even getting to all the craziness of act 4 which we haven't even begun to plan yet but only exists as a vague concept in Tanya's head. And sure, it's a good concept, but still!
I feel certain that there's a great play to be made here. I'm less certain that we're making that play.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Laziness May Be Hazardous To Your Health
See, I take a very long time doing dishes. It always frustrates me when dishes are put back in the drawer that aren't perfectly clean, so I was especially thorough with each and every piece of silverware. Every spot needed to be scrubbed. My parents told me I was wasting too much water, that it shouldn't be taking me so long, but I wasn't going to do the kind of job they do. And understand, I do not enjoy washing dishes at all. This wasn't a point of pride, just a point of obsession. Each time I washed the dishes, I was standing at that sink for well over two hours.
Eventually I squirmed my way out of doing the dishes again. Then my mother started to get angry. She said it wasn't fair that I should use dishes and she'd have to wash them. She suggested that rather than having a schedule, we should all just wash our own dishes.
So from that point on, I've been eating on plastic. Plastic plates, plastic cups. I still use real silverware, because the plastic silverware is borderline unusable. But if there's a way to not leave a dish, I don't leave a dish. That way my mother can't justifiably get angry at me for giving her work that she wanted me to do. There's no work now.
From the start I understood the downside of this policy, which is that it limits the food I can eat. I can't cook anything, even pasta, because then there would be pots or pans left. So for months now I've been on an exclusive diet of bagels and whatever leftover pasta is around, but that's barely a change from before so I'm okay with it. I don't need variety, I just need to eat.
As I said I've been doing this for months, but it was very recently that my father found out that I'd been microwaving the plates. Well, of course I microwave the plates. The bagels need to be defrosted before toasting, and I need to melt cheese on the pasta. When I'm having pasta, I sometimes microwave it over and over. I didn't realize, until my father told me, that that's not healthy. He told me that microwaving plastic gets some sort of toxic material into the food which has been proven to cause cancer.
Well, gee. I wish he had told me that before I was microwaving my food in them twice a day every day for months. He assured me that there's no way I could get cancer already, but I don't see how he's so certain. I've stopped microwaving the plates, of course. For pasta I use actual dishes, which I'm not going to wash afterward. I'm going to eat pasta less.
2 Comments:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Defrost bagels on top of a piece of paper towel.
- Mory said:
-
This is what I do now.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Seventy-four
There are a few interesting coincidences of the number in my life, which I only discovered later. For instance, at the point when I was playing that game, my father was 47 years old and my grandfather was 74 years old. And then there's the G'matriya. G'matriya is a little number game rabbis like to play, where each Hebrew letter has a numerical value and the value of any word is the sum of its letters. The G'matriya of "Mordechai" is 274. And the G'matriya of "Mordechai Ariel Buckman", by its Hebrew spelling, is 714. See, that's just cool. Oh, and Dr. Hans Asperger (grrr) died at 74.
But even without all that stuff, it'd still be my favorite number. I've used it as the title for all my posts here which are short and random, because the title "74" is short and random. It didn't occur to me to use it as a way to control the structure of the blog until my seventh 74 post, which just so happened (I swear I did not plan this out!) to be my 74th post overall.
I'd like to live forever, but I suspect I'll actually die at the age of 74. Alternatively, I might die in the year 2174, 13 years after the United Federation of Planets is formed. I like that version of the story better.
My Alphabet
Step 2: Arellian
I had almost finished my logical alphabet, where the connections between letters are perfectly intuitive and logical. I needed to start working on the vocabulary. It would use a modified version of Hebrew's "root" logic, because it just makes everything more sensible. In addition, you could get the opposite of any word by spelling it backwards. And the longer a word, the more specialized its meaning. There would be short words talking about general concepts, so that you could have a basic conversation without having an advanced vocabulary. But adding on more letters to the start and end would add on subtleties and contexts and connotations and iterations. Starting from these rules, I'd eventually deduce the single most logical language in the world. I believed I'd find that in the end, there would only be one solution to this problem.
The first few years of my life were spent in America, where the name "Mordechai" might sound weird, so my parents gave me a nickname. At the time I first figured out how to read, that name was spelled "Morry". An overthinker even then, I went to my mother and protested. "If it's spelled 'Morry', it has to rhyme with 'sorry'. But I'm not 'Mahr-ee', I'm 'More-ee'!" So we took an R out of my name, and I was satisfied. But of course I was making a naïve mistake: I was expecting language to make sense. Language hasn't made sense in thousands of years.
Ancient Hebrew- now there was a sensible language. In Hebrew every word is made up of a shoresh (meaning root) of three letters that says what the essence of the word is. You can detach those three letters from the "structure" that contains them, so that you can understand what the word means just by recognizing those two elements. The logic of the system is clear: just by knowing one word (any word) from a particular root, you can infer all the rest. There are rules covering every aspect of spelling and grammar. And in ancient times, the Hebrew letters were all distinct from each other. None of this nonsense like in English where C and S can make the same sound, and sometimes an S can sound like a Z, and C, K and Q can all be the same. English derives from languages that derive from other languages that derive from other languages that eventually go back to ancient Hebrew, and it makes sense that with such a logical language as ancient Hebrew the other languages would want to build on that, but over the millennia all sorts of inane compromises of sanity have crept in to the point where none of the elegance remains.
(I'm sure there's a long history explaining every misstep that led to where we are now, but I'm not too curious because all the people I could assign blame to are long dead.)
In Israel I learned Hebrew, and those rules were like a breath of fresh air after a lifetime of pollution. But modern Hebrew is not ancient Hebrew. Many mistakes and contrivances which got into other languages somehow found their way into Hebrew. What keeps it reasonably sane to this day is that we've got many books written in ancient Hebrew, from which we can figure out how the general grammar works. (Modern grammar is different in many little ways, but it's mostly the same.) But we don't have an audio recording telling us how it's meant to be pronounced. So in learning the rules, there was a bit of a frustrating disconnect where I understood the logic of the rules, but didn't see them being applied consistently.
For instance: in Hebrew there are six letters which sometimes have dots in them. Without a dot the sound is continuous, with a dot it's a single sound. (I actually think that's exactly backwards from the way it used to be, but that's a different topic.) Take the letter pei: with a dot it's pronounced like a P, without it's pronounced like an F (or "PH"). That makes sense. It's roughly the same sound, except that one is continuous and one isn't, so they're the same letter and there are rules saying when you use one or the other. But in the rules of spelling, there are six letters like that: the equivalents of B, G, D, K, P, and T. Of those, only the B, K and P equivalents make a different sound with a dot. That's clearly wrong. In ancient Hebrew each of those had a continuous form, but we've forgotten or discarded those.
Things like that are just inconsistent, and that drove me crazy. If it's going to be a sensible language with sensible rules, it's got to go all the way. You can't just take out some of those rules and expect the result to still make sense. There are letters whose sound we've forgotten, so we pronounce them the same as other letters. The result is redundancies and confusion, which is not how Hebrew is supposed to be. Hebrew is supposed to be a holy language, not a random one. When we read out of our holy Torah every Shabbat, we're reading it wrong. It's not supposed to sound the way we make it sound, and I imagine the real thing is probably much more beautiful.
I admired the ambition of Hebrew, didn't care for how it had ended up. So in fifth grade, I started working on a replacement. By the standards of this confused world Hebrew is still pretty logical. But not nearly enough for my liking, and that's what this new language I imagined would have to be. I started with the alphabet, trying to work in all the (American) English sounds but in a structured way which was detached from the fuzzy logic of modern alphabets.
Here it is:
Back then I called it the Arellian alphabet after my middle name; now I call it the Hee alphabet, for reasons that I will explain later. There's a lot going on here, so it might take a while to explain fully. (The scanner chopped off the sides a bit. Just pretend it didn't.)
But first, please note that this is not exactly what I came up with in grade school. What I came up with then had flaws, which I've corrected in order to post them here. This is, in my view, the definitive version of the alphabet, and if ten-year-old me saw what I've done (and heard my reasoning for the changes), I have little doubt that he'd come around to my way of thinking. 35 of the 52 symbols here are exactly as scribbled on all my school notebooks, and the other 17 I created yesterday to fill in the gaps and correct the mistakes while staying fairly true to the original scribbles through all the revisions.
Anyway. As you see, both the vowels and the consonants are categorized into families. Similarly to Hebrew words but unlike Hebrew letters, just by looking at any letter in this alphabet you can understand exactly how it relates to all the other letters. In both English and Hebrew there are some sounds which are combinations of other sounds, and that goes unacknowledged. That's unacceptable to me. If a common sound is made up of other sounds, you know it because you can see that the symbol for the letter is made up of two other letters. So that's what all these vowel and consonant "combinations" are.
Here's an MP3 file of all fifty-two sounds, some of which you've most likely never heard. I'm going to get to an explanation of each letter in a minute, but first I'd like to clarify where I'm coming from with this.
It probably looks like a tremendous number of letters, and I guess it is. There are twice as many sounds here as in the modern Hebrew language, or probably even the (more diverse) biblical Hebrew language. It even has more sounds than English, a language where each letter can sound twenty different ways depending on the time of day. On the other hand, it's not even close to containing all the sounds out there, so it's not useful for a thorough examination of language either. The question that must be asked is what exactly it's for. My answer is that it was a personal way for me to make sense of the sounds that I already knew and used on a daily basis. English and Hebrew didn't make sense, so I needed to satisfy myself.
Every single sound which I use in casual English speech is contained in this alphabet, even those which I use only when saying Hebrew words in English. The reason there are more letters than both languages combined, even though authentically Hebrew sounds are not accounted for, is twofold. First, the letters are consistent. Each letter will always make the same sound, with no exceptions. Second, the rules need to be thorough. If there are four sounds to be made of a certain category, I can't just include three. I need the full set, or else I can't justify including that category to begin with. This second rule is a lot less satisfying to me now than the first, but back then I thought the alphabet was a lot more thorough than it actually is so I didn't have a problem with it.
Okay, let's go through bit by bit. Keep in mind the whole time that I speak with an American accent. If you have a different accent, you're almost guaranteed to be confused at times unless you remember that.
Vowels
First up are "ah" and "uh". Similar sounds, so much so that when Israelis speak English they think there's only "ah" and no "uh" and no one thinks to correct them. "Ah" is the A in "blah", the O in "pot" and the first E in "en garde". "Uh" is the U in "run", the O in "cover", the OO in "blood", the A in "mesa" and the E in "the".
Next are the short A, E, and I, which have always sounded to me more like three parts of a specific range of sounds than three distinct entities. You can't go from "a" to "i" without passing through "e" on the way. At least, that's how I see it. They are drawn accordingly, and note that all three are only drawn above the middle of the line. (I drew on two lines to better emphasize this.) Anyway, "a" is the A in "cat" and the EA in "yeah". "E" is the E in "pet". "I" is the I in "think", the O in "women" and for that matter the E in "women" as well, the E in "glasses", the second O in "horizon", the U in "rhesus", the Y in "cyst" and the dot in "Mrs.". :)
"O" is the O in "or", but not the O of "most". It is the sound made by the Hebrew letter vav, and I believe it's also like the O you'd hear in Spanish though I'm not certain of that. It's a simpler sound than the English O; if you don't know what I'm talking about you'll have to listen to the MP3. "Oo" is the OO in "caboose", the O in "move", the U in "ruse" and the W in "ewe". What I call "u" is probably not what you'd expect; I'm referring specifically to the U of "put" and the OO of "foot". The old version of "Arellian" had a fourth leter in this category, and the whole family looked more congruous for it, but I just realized now that it's actually made of two sounds. It's hard to shake what I've learned. Anyway, this is a family of three because the mouth is a similar shape in all three, but it's not a range of sounds like the "e" family.
Finally there's "ee": the EE of "sweet", the EA of "leaf", the EI of "either", the E of "mete" and the I of "pizza". This letter is in a category of its own. It looks like the Hebrew letter yod, which makes the same sound.
Vowel Combinations
The first line is what you get when you add "ee" to the end of all eight of the other vowels. There are two "I"s: the first is the Y in "fly" and the second is the I in "flight". They are not the same sound; the first is "ah-ee" and the second is "uh-ee". The third I put in parentheses because it's hard to describe, but it's a short "a" with "ee" added. For some reason it makes me think of pirates. "Ay" is the A of "date" and the EI of "neigh" and the É of "café". Like "I", we English-speakers think of this as one sound but it's actually made of two: "eh-ee". After that is "i-ee", which is again not English. The MP3 file will tell you how it sounds. Then to the "oo" family: "oy" is the OY of "boy" and the oi of "noise". "Ooy" isn't English except under certain pronounciations of "buoy", but it's straightforward: just try to say "Shmooi!" as one syllable, and you've got it. And finally "u-ee", which is the U of "put" plus "ee" though that might be hard to imagine without hearing it.
The second line is what you get by adding "oo" to the other vowels. I'm just going to skip to the parts that are English sounds, because you understand the routine by now. "ow" is the OW in "now", which is actually "a"+"oo". "ew" is not in any words except "Ew!", but you know it from there: "i" plus "oo". Then there's "oh", which is the English O in "boat" and "comb" and snow". And at the end of the line I should have put in "ee-oo", as in the word "Eeeeeew!", but I didn't think of it until just this moment. My bad. The old school notebooks probably had that, though, because it just makes sense. It would look like a backwards "ooy". (So I guess there are actually 53 letters, not 52.) There's no "u-oo", because the two sounds are so similar that I personally can just barely perceive the combination as being different from a simple "oo", though that's probably just me.
On the third line is one of the changes from the original that I mentioned earlier. "Aw" used to be in the "oo" family as its own basic sound, and that always gave me lots of trouble but I couldn't figure out why until today. It's actually a combination of "o" and "uh", isn't it? If I had realized this back in the day, I might have filled out all the rest of the vowel+"uh"s, because they're all pretty distinct sounds, but today I don't see the need. Only one of those nine sounds is in my life. "Aw" is the AW of "saw" and the AU of "pause".
And that's all for the vowels! [phew] This didn't seem so complicated when I made it up...
Consonants
What I found about consonants, when I thought about them, was that they could generally be broken into categories by two criteria. First, some sounds were short sounds after which you move on, and others were continuous. Secondly, some sounds sounded dry and some sounded soft. I don't know how else to describe it.
Let me give you an example of what I mean, using the first family of consonants I wrote out. (There isn't really a proper order to any of this, it's just how I decided to write it this time.) P is a noncontinuous sound. If you make it continuous (down), you have an F. If you make the P's sound softer (in the sense of texture, not loudness), you have a B. That's written to the right. And if you make the P both soft and continuous, you have a V. A family of four. Now take notice of how these letters are written; their appearance reflects their places in the family. The P and F are made of sharp angles, while the B and V are made of soft curves. Also, the F and V's lines end up back where they started. That's a principle I was particularly happy about: if a consonant is continuous, you know it because it closes a loop. By the way, the resemblance to a lowercase B and capital F was not unintentional. It made the letters easier for me to remember.
The T family follows the same principles. The T and D equivalents look much like lowercase T's and D's, but more importantly the T is made of straight lines and the D is curved. The continuous form of T is Th, which is the Th of "math". The Th of "there" I'm calling Dh, because it's the continuous form of D.
The third family is less English-sounding. The soft version of K is G. The continuous version is Kh, like the "ch" in "Mordechai" or "Bach" or "Blecch!". That's the Hebrew khaf, not the hebrew khet, because I don't pronounce khets correctly even when speaking in Hebrew. The final part of the family I can't really describe in words, because it is neither a part of English nor a part of modern Hebrew. (I like to think it was in ancient Hebrew, though.) I call it Gh, and if you want to know what it sounds like you'll just have to hear it in the MP3. Alternatively you could figure it out for yourself, because there's only one sound that could possibly complete the sequence. It's the continuous form of G and the soft form of Kh. Now, what I find funny is that everyone thinks the continuous form of G is J, but the two sounds aren't connected to each other in any way! I'll explain a little bit later what the J sound is, but it has nothing to do with this family.
The fourth family is an odd one. S and Sh are clearly connected, as is Z and Zh (the S of "decision"), and the Z's are certainly the soft version of the S's, but all four sounds are continuous. So they all start with a line in the middle and then close a loop, but they close that loop in different ways.
In the bottom left corner is H. That's not connected to anything, because it's kind of the prototypical sound. You don't close your mouth at all to make it, you just exhale. So the design is a simple two lines- first there's silence, and then sound. This does not conform to the closing-a-loop rule, but the line goes along with the rule I wrote to the right of the big word "Consonants": drawing a line in the middle coming out from any letter continues its sound. (This rule replaces any cases where one letter repeats itself, which would be redundant.) So in a sense you're just continuing the most basic sound. Because of that, H is to my mind almost a vowel, which is why I didn't make it loop.
Speaking of almost-vowels, the two letters to its immediate right are just vowels masquerading as consonants. Y is what you get when you continue the end of an "ee", W is what you get when you continue from an "oo". Each is drawn as its vowel with a line continuing it. (With both H and these, to lengthen the sound you just draw out the line further. You don't add a second line.) Y and W should be considered a family of two.
All the way on the right are the four leftover sounds. These cannot fit into any possible categories, but they are common sounds in both English and Hebrew and therefore need to be represented. I would have loved to make whole families out of each of them, but that would involve filling those families almost entirely with sounds I don't know. The fact that I didn't do that makes me feel better about not completing the "aw" line. But even if I had, whatever came out would most likely not resemble the four regular consonant families. The R is pronounced like an American R. If the N comes before a G or a K, it is not combined with those sounds as in English but the two sounds are kept separate. You'll notice the lines sticking out from the R and L, with parentheticals pointing out that they aren't always there. That's because I find that R and L are most peculiar letters: they have a bit of a vowel built in. Every time your mouth moves to form an R or L and air is still coming out of it, you have to make an "u" sound of sorts in the process. That's how it seems to me. So the line completes the V-shape that's the "u" vowel. The line does not appear when an R or an L is the first letter of a word. I'm okay with adding a weird rule like that, because it's just codifying how I already talk.
Consonant Combinations
This bit could have been longer, including sounds like X (=K+S) and maybe some new ones, but I don't remember having any combined sounds other than these four back in elementary school so these are the only ones I'm including. The first line is straightforward: I'm adding the S family to T and D. "Ts" is the Hebrew tzadi, so I use it regularly to say things like names. In English it's the double-Z of "mezzo". "Dz" is just D and Z together; I can't think of any words which use this as a single sound, but it's the softened version of "ts" so it has to be here. The other two you'll recognize: T+Sh="ch", and D+Zh="j". "Ch" is the CH of "which", "J" is the J of "Jew" and the G of "gem". How these letters got connected to C's and G's, I have no idea.
And finally, something which isn't so much one letter after the other as it is the synthesis of two sounds. "Ng" looks like an N inside a G. I mentioned earlier that just an N with a G after it makes two disconnected sound, so here's the way to write the English NG of "ring". Unlike in English, this sound is not restricted to the ends of words; it's a letter like any other.
So that's the Hee (formerly Arellian) alphabet. Here's how my full name is written:
Now, the Arellian alphabet was supposed to be a precursor to the Arellian language. I never did that. I started it, and gave up almost immediately afterward because the task I'd set for myself was just too big. There are a few principles that all words in this language would need to follow. First, any word written backwards is its opposite. Second, the shorter the word the more general its concept. The more specialized the field up for discussion, the longer the words get. Third, changing any single letter in a word (consonant or vowel) to another letter in its family (or a combination letter made from it) gets you a word which means almost the same thing but not quite. Fourth, by looking at a word you've never seen and comparing it to other words you know you should sometimes be able to figure out what it means for yourself.
You can see why I gave up. I'm not sure if it's theoretically possible to make an entire language with such precise logic to it.
I might as well tell you where the name "Hee" comes from. In twenty years or so, I hope to have gotten up to the point where I can make my fantasy-RPG idea. In that game there will be many different races, one of which I call Hee. They're fundamentalist atheists in white burkas who strive to achieve perfection by destroying anything which doesn't fit their very narrow view of what's logical. (Like all the races I have planned for the game, they're actually me in disguise.) This imaginary language I wanted is perfectly suited for them, being a naïve attempt at perfection of thought. "Hee" is the only name they could possibly have. Like I said, any letter can be changed for another letter of its family. That means that any word is not the be-all and end-all of its concept, except for a word which has only one syllable where all the letters come from one-letter families. That's H and "ee". The word written out looks like a backwards four, which is a striking enough symbol to put on flags.
(By the way, while trying to find a suitable name for the Hee I first went through the two-letter families, and accidentally stumbled across the Jewish name for God! That gave me a lot more respect for the unappreciated logic of correctly-pronounced Hebrew.)
I do not intend to create the Hee language, Tolkien-style (or Avatar-style, more topically). Back when I was in school it seemed like a good idea, but when I was in school I was a lot more bored than I am now. It just seems like too much work for something with too little purpose. If anyone reading this would like to give it a shot, be my guest.
6 Comments:
- Betzalel said:
-
I like your idea of the alphabet. I also thought about making one, but the combination of all the sounds used in correct Hebrew and their families was just too much for me. I do have some corrections for you though.
You forgot to talk about M and N. Coincidentally, I have a correction to your classification. I think M should be related to the B family. Similarly, N should be related to the D family and ng should be related to the G family. It's not very hard to make the connection. Each one is just making that lip position and breathing out of your nose instead.
[If you have a cold and can't breath out of your nose, you will probably use the one you blow out of your mouth for (B instead of M). Try it! Just replace the letters M N and ng for B D and G, ad you idstadtly soud codgested!]
Anyways, ng should not be classified as a consonant combination, rather a consonant on its own (related to G, as stated above).
---
Your system isn't completely consistent, there are still some things it doesn't cover:
How do you know when to change to the next syllable? Words can be spelled the same way, yet still divided differently. In my name, for example, B-e-ts-ah-L-e-L how do you know that the division is ts-ah-L e-L and not ts-ah L-e-L?
Similarly, you don't talk about accenting. Which syllable is accented is undetermined by your system.
---
Just a random comment, your gh is like many people pronounce the reish in Hebrew (although its correct pronunciation is not in your alphabet). There is also a letter for it in Arabic, the ghin. In arabic it's related to the 'Ain. - Mory said:
-
M and N are grouped in the "left over" category together with R and L. It's not a particularly elegant way to include them. And yes, NG isn't really a combination but a sound of its own. However, it would not fit into any of the families because there's such a strict logic of four members to a family. Just because a person who can't speak clearly pronounces one letter as another doesn't mean they're related, and I see no reason to put M and B together.
If there is no space between one word and the next, there is no break in syllables and they flow one into the next. Your name would only be pronounced Betsah Lel if it were two separate names. Accents are more of an issue, but I think putting the accent on any syllable at all would be acceptable for this theoretical language. - Betzalel said:
-
They're not related because people can't pronounce them well, that's just a way of demonstrating it. The fact is that you're making the same mouth position in the whole family and in that letter. The difference is that you're breathing from your nose.
Even if you do decide to keep them separate, there's no reason not to include ng in the same family as N and M. [The reason there's no equivalent for the forth family (s/z) is that it's actually part of the second (t/d) family. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA]
The problem is in names such as mine is that the normal syllable division is different than just consonant-vowel. In my name (how I pronounce it in English), the syllables should be Be-tsal-el. The alternate (more logical) way of dividing them would be Be-tsa-lel. There's nothing here to differentiate between the two ways of division. - Mory said:
-
I guess I can see what you're saying about M being related to the P family. If that's the case, it seems like NG ought to be grouped with the K family somehow. And that means that there are other rules that need to be taken into account for grouping consonants together other than the two I identified, because you can't have just two families of five. If those families can lead to those sounds, whatever principle that is ought to be applicable to the other families to get other sounds which aren't from English or Hebrew.
The more I think about this alphabet, the less elegant it seems.
What I'm not convinced is a problem is what you're saying about breaking up words. Frankly, I don't see what it is you're objecting to. When I say "Betzalel" I'm not breaking it up "Be-tza-lel" or "Be-tzal-el", because I'm not breaking it up at all. I'm saying the whole thing together in a continuous legato sound. Each letter leads right into the next, without any breaks, so your insistence that it needs to be broken up into distinct chunks seems to be at odds with how we actually talk. We don't pause between syllables while talking, we only pause between words. - Betzalel said:
-
The alphabet could still be simplified at the price of phonetic accuracy. I mean you could still put things in these sort of groups without actually taking into consideration all of the related sounds.
Our forefathers also thought like you when they put together the alphabet. They didn't think of NG. The special rules in Hebrew for the letters B G D K P T concerning when they're voiced and when they aren't show that they had some kind of grouping with them. The S and Sh appear in the same letter. In the ancient script the M and N are very similar. I think W and Y are too. Tet and Kuf are clearly Taf+'Ayin and Kaf+'Ayin. The 3-letter roots have a common 2-letter root allowing you to figure out pretty much what things mean. [P-R-x for example all mean things like open up, unravel, etc.] So I think language was originally very logical, it's only been made less logical throughout the millenniums of changes it had. I don't know about backwards spelling though.
There's no complete stop between syllables, but there is a difference in the way we speak. It's the difference it the nikud is on the lamed in my name or on the aleph. If you use a glottal stop or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop - Mory said:
-
What you're talking about is going way over my head, I think. So it's safe to say that fifth grade me would not have thought of any of it. This alphabet has not been a serious proposal for more than a decade now.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Semantics, Part 3
Each word has connotations and connections to other words and rules of proper usage in speech, and these are more or less consistent from person to person within a given society. Thus, the language itself becomes a container for the way a society sees the world on an emotional level.
But an individual within that society is not a blank slate before using language -each idea in our heads has associations and connections to other ideas and memories of prior usage in speech, all of which is unique to that individual's brain. So at any time a person starts to converse, there is always a disconnect between what he means to say and what he's actually saying; the only question is how severe that disconnect is.
We compensate for this problem by conforming our patterns of thought to the meanings of language. Every time you talk or write or commit anything to language, you are rewiring your own brain to be more like the rest of the people around you. If it were not for this fact, language could never have developed and we'd all be very unique people without a single clue of what anyone else is thinking.
Where this starts becoming downright ugly is when society has a very primitive view on a certain subject compared with what's in your head. I know that "gamism" is a more useful term than "videogames", as it implies a cohesive whole rather than individual and disconnected parts. But I can't use that term in public, or no one would know what I was talking about. Language cannot be changed by one person, or even by several people, but only by a majority of the public in a given area. So whenever I'm talking to other people, I need to remind myself that videogames are not to be seen as a coherent entity, but just as a random assortment of unknowable things. Otherwise there's no communication. I'd say something like "I wish the Bit.Trip series would stay close to the music side of gamism, instead of switching Forms so much.", and no one would understand what the heck I was talking about. Different language, different thought patterns.
Learning two languages is like developing two personalities. You may think you're saying the same things in both languages, but that's only true if you don't use one of those languages enough to understand it. Each personality has its own worldview. Each personality has its own voice. Each personality forms different kinds of relationships with other people. And of course all of this reflects on who the person actually is, under all the learned behavior, but the more you wear a mask the more you become the mask.
Being fluent in two languages is reasonably commonplace. Some people know many more than two languages. Clearly the human brain has no problem with running different programs at different times. Now consider: how far away is that, really, from what we call "multiple personality disorder"?
"Ah," you say, still not seeing where I'm going with this, "but that's totally different. Learning two languages is a perfectly healthy thing to do. It's not a sickness, like multiple personalities.". Now remember what I said at the start of the post. Language matters. Your thought patterns have been shaped by the language you use. It's a "disorder"! It's something wrong! The brain is broken! "Disorder" is a word connected to a lack of health, a lack of normal brain functions, a lack of rationality, a lack of ability to change. It is a term which evokes pity. And it is not a word anyone with multiple personalities would have come up with, it's a word agreed upon by the majority, like all language.
Consider the appeal of the behavior: there are situations in your life which as a person, you are simply not equipped to handle. Your personality clashes with other personalities and leads to all sorts of uncomfortable situations. But if you were to put on a mask at those moments, suddenly you could deal with anything. Just pull out a different mask for different times, and suddenly you're a much more functional part of whatever part of society you try to enter.
Those readers who've paid attention to everything I've ever said on this blog (There are two of them, and they are imaginary.) will remember where I'm coming from here. I mentioned a while back in passing that at one point I'd considered developing multiple personalities myself. And it didn't occur to me, at the time, that this was not entirely my own idea. (Remember what I've said in the past about how none of my ideas are actually original?) So I wasn't using the psychological language, and my thought patterns were not corrupted by them. I was not thinking "I am on the verge of falling into a serious medical condition from which there's no easy cure.", because that's not what was going on at all. I was thinking "I am on the verge of making an important life decision, and I should consider whether it's necessary before going through with it."! My ultimate decision was that it was not necessary, and so I didn't go through with it. Not because it was "unhealthy" behavior, because there's nothing unhealthy about it, but purely because it seemed like too much work for too little purpose.
Imagine if I had made the opposite decision. You can be certain that I would have kept with that activity for the rest of my life, because I'm an exceedingly stubborn person. You might think I'd crack under some kind of mental pressure, but here I am on a Thursday having done nothing but work, write and eat and no one has reason to doubt that I'm going to stick with this "happy worker" identity for the rest of the day. Clearly I have no problem being a different person temporarily. If there were a term like "One-Day Identity Malfunction", you'd all be shocked and appalled that I'm acting differently on Thursdays (and Saturdays, for that matter), but there's no term like that so you just figure it's a rational thing to do. But multiple personality disorder? That you've heard of. So that's an illness. If I had "had" that (though really it's something you do, not something you have), everyone would be shocked when they first heard and then be really careful to not say anything offensive because this poor guy can't help it, he's just afflicted with the illness and needs help.
Clever readers will have guessed by now that what I'd actually like to talk about is Asperger's Syndrome. There are two ways to refer to it: "Asperger's Syndrome", and "Asperger's Disorder". That's it. Two choices, neither of which bears any resemblance to what it actually is. To tell people I'm different, I can't say "I am...", or even "I'm not...", I have to say "I have...", because that's the way our language for it is. To make matters worse, Asperger's Disorder is classified as a kind of "autism". For the very first time I met an autist a few weeks back, and now that I have I can say this with full certainty: I am not an autist. But who are you going to listen to, me or the profession that gave me my name?
Do you know who Asperger was? He was some normal pediatrician who wrote a paper about kids with what he called "psychopathy". This is who we're named after, and you'd better believe I find it offensive. But that's the only word for it! Either I use the psychologists' term, or I can't talk about who I am at all! Other people with Asperger's Syndrome ("With". Argh!), understanding that it's not something they have but something they are, call themselves "Aspies", which in my mind is the most moronic and juvenile-sounding name they could possibly have picked. When I want to talk about people like us, I usually say "Asperger people", which sounds so awkward that I feel ashamed for even suggesting that we exist. I wish there were another name I could grab onto, something which had no mention of some idiot pediatrician or of mental illnesses. But the closest I can find is "weirdo".
Let me be crystal clear: Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease, it is not a sickness, it is not a disorder, it is not a syndrome, it is not a problem, it is not a flaw. It is a kind of brain, a kind that is specialized for specific tasks. It's hard to allow yourself to understand this if you're used to the terminology. If it's a sickness then there ought to be a cure. The cure is to act more normal. But why on Earth would we want to do that?
When everything gets filtered through the lens of the word "disorder", everything is seen in terms of symptoms and inabilities. We're unable to understand what society wants of us, that's why we're so broken. We're incapable of forming emotional attachments, that's why we're so monstrous. We don't know that we're not supposed to always use big words and ideas, that's why we're so hard to get. We can't understand that we're not supposed to form emotional attachments to little points of interest, that's why we won't shut up about certain things. Forgive them, these poor sick patients, they can't help it. It's an incurable disease.
Listen to me very carefully. I know what society wants from me. I form emotional attachments to people. I understand simple chitchat. I have no illusions about how anti-social it is to get attached to ideas. I just don't care.
I understand sarcasm and metaphors, I know when people aren't being literal, but I prefer to always assume people are being literal so that there can be fewer misunderstandings. Normal people aren't any different, except that they don't care so much whether they're misunderstood because they place less value on ideas. I know that the whiskers on my face don't conform to the way society thinks a person should look in this century, I just place a much greater value on having my own unique appearance. If normal people understood the value of being different, they'd look like me too. I understand emotions, but I place more weight on them than most people and am not going to get emotionally attached to people who I know would let me down. And so on. There's no lack of understanding going on here, it's just a lack of reason to care. We're practically different species, normal people and us. What makes sense for them doesn't make sense for us. Normal people are capable of understanding this fact, but they don't care. "If it doesn't make sense, then make it make sense." It's their right to ignore our preferences, just as it's our right to ignore theirs. But there are more of them, so it's generally more unpleasant for us.
I should be able to find more people like me, but I can't because of the language. I know two people my age who are like me, and they both deny any connection to Asperger's Syndrome. And who can blame them? They want to be respected, they don't want to be seen as defectives. They don't want to have an illness. So how am I supposed to meet such people? The only place I can find that they gather is in a "support group" in Jerusalem. Can you believe it? Even we've accepted the language now! "We're mentally ill, let's try to fix ourselves!" I wouldn't consider dating anyone who wasn't like me, but who'd advertise that they have an incurable illness? So how can I ever find a girl like me?
It's a rotten situation all around, and it's all because of two words. Think about that.
I have set for myself a gargantuan task for my life. It's one which a normal person would never consider for even the briefest moment. I'm going to keep jumping around from one Form to the next, each one a radically different way of thinking and communicating. And in each of those places I'm going to do something that hasn't been done before, because I don't care that the public has already said what they're interested in and that isn't it. No one is going to be supporting my progress, because they don't have a word for what I'm doing and if they did it'd be a dirty one.
So when I make up words like "gamism" and "Forms" and "metaludes" and "exploration game", it's because I need to control language. My path is not stable. If two wrong words could condemn a people to lives of lonely confusion, then two wrong words are certainly enough to jeopardize everything I've planned.
And now I know what those two words might be:
"Not game".
This lovely little phrase comes courtesy of the gamists called Tale of Tales. Let it be said that I have nothing but respect for their work, which includes The Graveyard and The Path (which I tried to interpret in an earlier post). Like me, they aspire to do things that the games industry has no interest in. They have been expanding the definition of "game" pretty far, though I don't know if that was a conscious goal for them.
Remember "Don't Miss", my idea from way back when for a pure exploration game? It was based on a dream (literal, not figurative) I had back then, and I wanted to be able to share it with other people in interactive form someday.
But in the back of my head there was always the voice of society criticizing me: "There's no name for this. No one wants it. It's barely a game." Well, it's not. Go away, this is a serious post. Sure it is. I don't have time for this, get lost. The point is, I was worried that by the time I was in a position to make it the definition of "game" would already be set in stone and there wouldn't be any room for this. And that would mean there's no audience. A gamer plays games. If it's not called a game, he won't play it. If it is, he will.
Tale of Tales gave me hope. They made The Path, which is as pure an exploration game as they come, and the whole internet took notice. Mainstream game sites were posting positive reviews of a pure exploration game! If they kept just doing what they were doing, that side of gamism would be there for me when I was ready for it.
They just wrote a blog post called "My New Year's Resolutions", in which a new mission statement is announced: from now on, they're going to call what they make "not games". They don't care if anyone accepts what they're doing anymore.
Here's how this is going to go. The game sites will continue talking about them for their next game or two, and then they'll absorb the word "notgame" into their consciousnesses and forget that Tale of Tales exists. There is no audience for "not games", there is an audience for "games". And don't you say to me "It's only a word.". Words matter, or have you not been listening? I don't exercise. But I play Wii Fit, because it's a game. I don't read books. But I play text adventures, because they're games. Words are not just tools, they shape thought patterns and behaviors. And damn it, they're using the wrong words!
The game I was working on in my grandparents' house -Angles and Circles? That's an exploration game too. And there's not going to be such a thing as an exploration game after that. That part of gamism is going to be demolished, same as the house. "Don't Miss" will never exist, because no artists and programmers from the game industry would work on something that's not a game. And even if they did work on it, no one would ever play it. Come around at last, have you? Get out! Get out get out get out! I never wanted you here! You weren't even supposed to be in this post, don't you think it's got enough ideas in it already? Get out, already!
Cool it. You are crazy, I get that. You are totally detached from reality and I'm sorry. Really I am. But I am the only shred of sanity you've still got in you. You need to listen to what I am saying to you. Your plans are unrealistic. They are cute little fantasies, and you've gotta grow up and get with the picture. This routine isn't funny, it isn't cute, it is fucked-up and pathetic. You need help. And I am trying to tell you that, and you tell me to get out. You want me to get out? Okay, man, I'll get out. I'll get out of here so fast you'll think it's yesterday. But I am telling you that you are going to regret that you threw out the only damn character on this blog and in your life who is telling you what you need to hear.
Get out.
I'm going. Chill.
Bl'bah. Okay, that's a really terrible place to end this post. No, it's just totally derailed. What was I even talking about.
5 Comments:
- said:
-
You know, I've never thought of you as having a disorder or a syndrome. I've thought of you as simply different, just as lots of people are different. In fact, I feel as though what separates the two of us more than anything is our choices, not our thought patterns. For instance, that multiple personalities thing you mentioned? I adopted something of the sort myself. And many other times I've read things in your blog that seem like they're coming out of my own mind. But in the end, we care about different things.
Words are very significant indeed, even those we speak to ourselves. If this blog post represents a decision, then I wish you luck with it. - Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Great post.
At some point in high school I consciously and deliberately changed my personality to emulate one of my friends and be more self-confident and outgoing.
How you perceive yourself and how you interact with the world is always a conscious choice, and many people have different faces that they put on in different situations.
MP is actually a condition that is very different than just choosing to react in different ways. As far as I understand it (which could be wrong) it's not really a choice, and in fact sometimes these personalities are not even aware of each other. At least you know and are somewhat friendly with all your alternate world views.
Also I wanted to say that you've affected my web reading habits. Whenever I see any bolded text I have the need to hover over it and see if there's any alt-text. Damn you! - Mory said:
-
:) I didn't realize anyone had ever noticed I did that! Sorry I'm not consistent with doing that; sometimes there's really nothing extra that needs to be said.
If multiple personalities are a deliberate and conscious choice as I hypothesize, how would anyone ever know it? It's not like the person doing the acting would ever break out of character. That would delegitimize the act for the rest of his life, undermining its usefulness! What I am saying is that psychologists, by rushing to the classification of "disorder" for whatever's strange, totally misinterpreted the nature of the situation. If I had gone one way in my life, I would have been exactly like those people today while being perfectly sane. It is reasonable for me to ask whether people who do act like that are sane too. - Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
I guess it all depends on your definition of "sane"
- Mory said:
-
Oh, and Avri: I didn't address your point that multiple personalities can be unaware of each other. My Barnaby has yet to meet my Ambrose and vice versa. When I am acting, there are many things going through my mind but none of them are a memory of the other character. However, I have a lot of distance from this lack of understanding, because as soon as I stop acting I can analyze what I've been doing and I'm myself again. But imagine that I didn't stop acting when I got off stage, but just kept going on and on between Barnaby and Ambrose for the rest of my life. Is it implausible to imagine that as I got more and more comfortable with the performance, they'd start acting more "real"? I might become very proficient at sorting my memories properly.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
My Father And I Go To See Avatar
I decided that I'd go to see it on a Monday. I'd take a bus to Jerusalem, take another bus to the theater I like (Rav Chen), watch the movie, take the buses back. Estimated total time: 7 hours. My family were out at a bar mitzvah for my American second cousin, and I didn't know when they'd be getting back, so I called and asked whether they had a key to the house. I was told that my father wanted to see Avatar too, and he'd had the impression that we were going to go together. Of course this was a better plan- it's not just that I'd appreciate to be driven, but I'd also prefer to see the movie with my father.
My father and I are very different, but one thing we have in common is that we like science-fiction. I only saw any Star Trek because while we were living in America my father taped every episode. (I only started watching them when we were here, and I watched them entirely out of order.) Likewise, I only ever saw Babylon 5 because my father had taped the first two seasons of that. (The first random episode I watched was The Coming of Shadows, which just so happened to be one of the best of the series.) And if I hadn't seen B5 it's a safe bet this blog here wouldn't exist, since that's what clued me in to the potential of long-form storytelling. So, credit where it's due: I'm a sci-fi guy because of my father, and for that I owe him.
Back in the 70s he watched the original Battlestar Galactica as appointment television. But upon moving to Israel in 1995, he was suddenly so busy with all the work he needed to do to make ends meet that he didn't have time for TV shows anymore. (Plus, none of the shows he watched were on TV here and we wouldn't be downloading shows off the internet for a few years.) So he watched little bits of Babylon 5 that I was watching, and I showed him a few key episodes of the Battlestar Galactica remake, while spoiling all the other developments for him since I knew he'd never have the time to actually watch through it. Other science-fiction he hasn't really been exposed to in the past 15 years.
It made sense that he'd want to see Avatar. So I waited for him to come home, instead of heading out myself.
That night we went to a Globus theater (Grrrr..) which is closer to us than Jerusalem and had also advertised that they were showing the film in 3D. I was concerned whether the experience would suffer due to Globus's inferior equipment, but my father was the driver so I went with it.
Along the way we talked about TV shows and how they wrap up when they're canceled. Naturally there was more of me talking than him, though he did say that Earth 2 was given an ending when it was canceled (I have yet to see that show.), and that Lost in Space probably wasn't. I said that the whole way they make shows is different now, since with DVD collections they expect you to be able to watch the whole thing through.
When we got there we asked for two tickets to Avatar, and were told: "There's no Avatar. There's a malfunction." Whatever that means. Just another reason to hate the theater. We regretted that we hadn't checked beforehand if it was working, but who thinks of something like that? We'd just have to try again some other time, in a different place.
As we drove back, we talked about time travel. My father once again said (He's said this to me a few times in the past.) that the trouble with time travel is that we ought to have heard of time-travelers by now if there are ever going to be time-travelers. I said the problem with time travel is that due to the movement of planets and space and the whole universe, if you stay in the same place but switch the time you end up in the middle of space. If you step into a time machine on the planet Earth, at whatever point you end up in Earth isn't there anymore. We talked about the ways to get around this, about whether there needed to be receivers, and for that matter whether transporters would need receivers too.
On Saturday night we tried again. Another family had gone on Thursday to the same place and found that it still wasn't working, so we went to Rav Chen in Jerusalem like I'd wanted to to begin with.
Along the way we talked about virtual reality and the implausibility of holodecks and I talked about all the current technologies that seem to be headed in that direction. My father was wondering what a really 3D movie would be like, where you're actually walking through it. This got me thinking about whether some sort of futuristic holograms could be used in stage shows, so that the live performers are playing on a changing 3D set. That really had nothing to do with what my father was talking about, though.
We got there and couldn't find a parking spot. It was packed. Finally my father gave me the money and told me to go get the tickets while he parked. So I went inside, where I found an absolute mob of people, all of whom had apparently come to see Avatar. There was only one ticket booth, with a mildly long line behind it. I went to get tickets and was told that the tickets had been sold out, but there were still some seats for a showing an hour and a half later. I couldn't commit to that on the spot, because then the movie would end considerably after midnight. In the first place I was concerned that my father would fall asleep in the middle if it went that late, and in the second place I knew he'd be concerned about driving while so tired. I hadn't taken my cell phone with me from home, so I got out of the line and waited for my father to show up. He came two minutes later and agreed that we'd go to the late showing. No sooner had we gotten in line, than a theater employee taped a sign up to the wall saying that both screenings of Avatar for the night had been sold out. My father seemed emotionally unwilling to admit defeat, but there was really nothing we could do. We left.
On the way back, I told my father about the TV show Lost, in appropriately vague terms. He seemed interested, so I told him I'd download the pilot for him. (I later tried downloading the pilot, and was frustrated to only find it in two separate video files. By splitting it up and putting a recap in the middle, they telegraphed a cool moment in the second part and ruined the pacing of the episode. I edited the two parts together myself so that if he watches it, he'll see it the way it was on TV as opposed to the way it was in reruns. No need for him to know I did that.)
On Tuesday we went again. I skipped Games Night for it, though due to Lorien giving birth it was in Ramat Beit Shemesh this week, so I'm not sure if I would have gone anyway. This time we were smarter. The day before, we ordered the tickets over the internet. It's more expensive that way, but you've got a guaranteed seat. You also get to choose which seat that is, from a diagram of all the seats that are still available. By Monday night all the good seats had already been claimed, and my father wondered if maybe we should pick a different night but not seriously because we both just wanted to see the movie already. We picked two seats which weren't in the middle but were the closest to the middle that we could get.
As we drove in, we listened to a CD my father bought a few years ago from "The Teaching Company" of lectures on argumentation. He'd listened to it before, but he was listening to it again. It was fascinating, to be sure. I didn't understand exactly what the lecturer was talking about at first, since we were starting from the middle, so we paused and my father explained the basics and then rewound to a part he wanted me to hear and then we listened from there until we got to the theater.
The movie was awesome. I needn't have worried that my father might fall asleep; there was no chance of that during this movie. The story was perfectly predictable and clichéd, but it was all done really well. And that world, in 3D... it was amazing. On the other hand, I did see what James Cameron (the director of Avatar) was saying when he said 24 frames per second (the standard for film) isn't enough for 3D movies. It definitely looked jerky. Still, it was quite a memorable experience. You see things from far away and it looks pretty standard for a movie, but then you move in and everything looks so real you feel like you could touch it. I wished they'd include smells and feelings, too. It's not a real alien jungle until they increase the humidity in the room for the scene, and pipe in some exotic but subtle smell. We'll get there someday. This movie was definitely a step in the right direction.
As we drove home we discussed the symbolism of the movie. Both of us agreed that it was a very good movie indeed.
I enjoy Shabbat.
God, I hate Shabbat.
Shabbat isn't bad at all if I have someone to talk to. Sure, it's not like the rest of the week, when I can watch five episodes of Felicity and read a bunch of comics and play piano and do an hour of database entry and work on my game (in roughly that order), but it's not bad at all.
My father comes home from shul, we sit at the table, we sing the songs which we've sung so many times that my harmonies never change anymore. There's something comforting about that familiarity. We start eating with soup, and I prefer my mother's tomato soup but her chicken soup isn't bad. It's always one or the other. For the actual meal my mother always makes something I'll eat. Usually chicken, which I don't mind.
We sing more songs, we bentsch, I leave. I have three places to go on a Friday night, so I try to spend as many of the hours before my 3:00 bedtime as I can on socializing. I don't get to socialize much during the week- just forums.
Avri lives next door, and I think by this point I can call him a friend. I give him comics, he runs the games nights, we're both extremely geeky, there's always what to talk about. Being a family man, he normally goes to sleep too early for me, so if I talk to him it's only in the day. A few doors away is the Feldmans, where there are three people who often are willing to talk to me (one of which doesn't seem to mind staying up until 3). If all else fails, I can always stand around outside the Feldmans' house for a few hours and wait for him to come home. (I guess I'm a little bit of a stalker, yes.) The Feldmans aren't really my friends, but they're convenient to have as a backup plan. A few blocks away are the Amitais, who I've discovered stay up pretty late some nights. I thought Nati was my friend, but he refuses to do anything at all that I ask him to. For instance, this past Shabbat his mother didn't want noise downstairs, and he wouldn't walk outside with me to talk. That's no friend. Still, there are three Amitais willing to talk to me, so they're convenient to know. Moshe is my best friend, and he lives the farthest away. After some searching I'm convinced that I've found the absolute fastest route to his apartment (17 minutes ordinary walking speed). He's not always there and he likes to go to sleep early but he'll make an exception when I'm there.
Between the four of them, it's quite easy to fill 25 hours.
There's really not more to the day than that. But it's usually pleasant. So much of the week is spent isolated and lonely. It's nice to have a day set aside for me where I know some people will have nothing better to be doing than talking to me.
My life would get kind of unbearable without Shabbat.
Friday, January 01, 2010
Thursday
Thursdays have been uneventful. I don't have rehearsals. There are no TV shows I watch on Wednesday, which would hit the internet the day after. The one thing that differentiates a Thursday is that Wednesday is new comics day, and Thursday is when many (not even most, but many) of the scans go up on the internet. So with nothing much to do, I wait around all day for new comics to come in, checking my sources every half hour or so. It's not a day I'd ever miss.
So Thursday is now my "Day of Work". Most of the week I keep for myself, Saturday is for God, and now Thursday is for future-me. Thursday will be entirely defined by restrictions:
- No gaming. (Not even Wii Fit.)
- No TV shows.
- No movies.
- No piano playing.
- No comics.
- No access to the web (even e-mail), with one very specific exception that will only be valid for the next month or two.
I decided that the workday should last from 4:00 AM to 8:00 PM, but now I'm thinking it should be a full 24 hours. The thing is, there's just so much to do! Why should it end so quickly? These activities in particular are appropriate for a Thursday:
- Programming my current game
- Doing design work for my next game
- Writing down ideas for any future game
- Practicing the play
- Writing blog posts (This is the exception I mentioned earlier; I'm not even allowed to check the statistics of people viewing the blog!)
Taking a long time for lunch (say, an hour) is not encouraged, but will be tolerated.
These rules will be almost as inviolable as the rules of Shabbat. That is to say, if there is some specific social opportunity which I would miss by holding the principle of Thursday, I'm permitted to break the day entirely.
But! If for any reason a full Thursday is not observed, the Day of Work moves to the next full day (Sunday by default) with which there are no conflicts. There is no circumstance under which a week's Day of Work will be cancelled; if a full week passes and there is not a single opportunity (This seems unlikely -I'm not that busy a guy!) to reschedule the day, it doesn't go away. I just need to put that day whenever it becomes convenient. Theoretically I could get myself into a situation where every day of a certain week has to be a workday, but I'm going to try very hard to ensure that that never happens.
The first Thursday of this tradition (I almost wrote "experiment", but that would not be giving the proper respect to the day, which is going to go on for years.) was yesterday. It was a clear success. With no distractions, I got around five hours of work in on The March of Bulk, and still had time to write two blog posts! (The second I'm going to hold on to; it's not quite ready for publication yet.)
And then at 8:00 PM I went back to the nothing I usually do on Thursdays. This week there aren't any comics at all, so I watched an episode of Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars and played a little bit of Wii Fit. Then I read five months-worth of the Sluggy Freelance webcomic, which I'm still eight years behind on. And I waited for comics even though none were coming, just out of habit. And I kept going to the same five or six websites over and over, hoping they'd update.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
The strangest phone call I have ever had, part 2
The album starts out with Brahms' Lullaby reinterpreted as a loud late-night party, like so... -"I love it, it's Brahms with syncopation! You know, there are people who...". There would be a few other tracks in there somewhere with similar subversions. Do you know Through the Looking Glass? -"Sure!"- When Alice sees the poem "Jabberwocky", it's backwards and she can only read it through the mirror. So I have a tune for Jabberwocky which I can sing backwards, then reverse the audio, like in Twin Peaks, so that it sounds weird. Of course, it would take time to learn to sing it all backwards well. Then there's a tune I've had for a long time, and I'm thinking about maybe writing lyrics for it about Facebook, it goes something like this, Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh... -"That sounds great! Just leave it like that and play it on a kazoo" - No, that's the tune that'll be about Facebook... - "Oh, that's what you were talking about?" - Yeah, the only part I've figured out is something like dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-DAAAAAAA... I've had enough, I'll turn it off, as soon as I know buh-buh-buh-buh. Or something like that. And then there's my song "Ode to your face": "When I last saw your face, it was raining/and moonlight shone in from the moon..." And there's a game I play with a friend of mine, where I play something which sounds really serious on the piano, and then just as it's reaching its climax, I switch to this cheery little "space battle" theme, dah-bada-da-bada-da-da-da. So there could be a "space battle" track which sounds like epic science fiction music -"Like John Williams"- Yeah, exactly, and then that resolves, but then I keep sticking in these tracks in between the other music, which sounds like totally new and serious compositions, but always turn back into the goofy little classical theme. Then, at the end, there's another one of these, and the listener knows exactly where it's going. But it reaches the climax, and instead of going back to the usual punchline, it just leads to another climax, which is even bigger, and that leads to yet another climax, because it keeps just building and building and it's getting ridiculous. And then it turns into Brahms' Lullaby!- duh-duh DEH, duh-duh DEH -and it's got little hints of everything else in the album, and then at the end, when the listener isn't expecting it anymore, there's the last few notes of the space theme and that's the end of the album.
The idea is to have an album of humor, lots of different kinds of humor which work through the music, rather than just through the lyrics. It would be half instrumental and half with lyrics, but even when there are lyrics, there's funny stuff going on in the way the music is composed. That's something which I haven't seen before, and which I think there would be an audience for.
So? What do you think?
Whereupon he asked me: "Could you do stage shows?" Well, yes, I guess so, I said, not sure what this had to do with the entire marketable vision that I'd just described. "You could do funny stage shows. That could be your thing. Like Victor Borge. People would love that. Just you on a stage with a piano, with all this inventiveness that you've got. Comedy with a grand piano. Or if you want something else to play with, I could get it for you."
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Mimic and Mix
If a piece of music isn't original, is it worth anything? I hope the answer is "yes", because I don't see almost any of what I compose as original. I always intend for it to be original when I'm starting out, but soon after (This can take anywhere between a half minute and a week.) I realize that it's exactly like three things I've heard many times before.
There was a time when I looked forward to math tests, as one looks forward to a boss fight in an action game. I guess that'd be ninth grade. I never prepared for them in the usual sense, memorizing rules and revisiting notes. But I was always ready.
I am not capable of believing that I'm a natural at so many things. For one thing, it seems to me like a natural would have original thoughts, since his talent is not coming from what he's been taught but from what he already has. That's not me: I have no original thoughts. My music is an imitation of everything I've ever heard. My writing is an imitation of everything I've ever read (which I'll grant you isn't much). My acting... look, Barnaby is a combination of a Muppet, some of my friends, and Fudgie. That's where all the mannerisms come from.
So it seems less likely to me that I'm a natural at any specific things, and more likely that I'm a natural at imitation in general.
There's got to be some specific part of the brain that pulls out the exact memory-fragments and ideas needed to solve a problem. I guess it's what I'd call the "fulfilling needs" kind of inspiration. That part of the brain must be a little bit more effective for me than most people. That's the simplest explanation, isn't it? I'm not naturally talented at anything, I just have a knack for learning.
That sounds strange when you consider what I was like at school. I never studied. I never listened to what the teachers were saying, even when the subject might interest me. I failed many of my tests. Whatever part of the brain internalizes things you're taught, I barely have that.
So I have to conclude that there are two distinct kinds of learning. There's learning where someone tells you something, and you remember it. And then there's learning where you see something in its proper context, and you mimic it. The first is a passive kind of learning, where you become a container for pre-baked ideas. The second is an active kind of learning, where you figure out the principles for yourself by trial and error. That's where I excel.
What crystallized this understanding for me was Ambrose. When I was in Illinois I kept going over his lines over and over and over again, just hoping that somewhere in my head it would make some sort of connection and I'd see what I was supposed to be doing with it. And when I went over it enough times, it seemed obvious to me that he was a Buddhist, though his parents were surely Christian. I don't know why this was so obvious to me, but the parts just fit together better that way. And then I needed an explanation for how he'd be exposed to Buddhism, so I remembered what Tanya had said about a different character in the play wandering around a lot, and that fit in, and then I needed to understand why this character who now represented some of the ideals Tanya was talking about would want to marry a simple girl, and suddenly a new character (who I named Eve) popped into my head who he must have met before the play began and who broke his heart, and if that was the case then really he'd have to have a crush on a different female character during the play...
See, this is how I think. If I look at something long enough, I suddenly see how it fits together with lots of random ideas which I've seen in other places. And this is natural to me. It didn't take me any effort at all to come up with this whole massive dramatic story of Ambrose (which ended up being bigger in scope than The Matchmaker itself), but when I fit all the pieces in place I felt like they were there all along and there was no other "correct" way to make sense of him. No part of the story is an original idea of mine, it's all smushed together from other stories I know; coming up with the story is not what I'm proud of. What I'm proud of is that I saw how all these random pieces fit together, purely by intuition.
And that provides a compelling argument for the case that I'm meant to make games. The problem I've always had with believing that is that it's so much easier for me to make music than it is to make games. If I'm gifted at music, and not at games, then I'm wasting my life pursuing games rather than music. But that's no problem at all, is it? I've heard so much music in my life, that I can continually pull fragments of other pieces out of my memory and weave them together. That's what I'm good at, after all: I take ideas, find the rules behind them, and mix them with other ideas based on that logic. But games, they're not so easy. I've never played games like the ones I'm making. The logic behind them is uncharted territory. That doesn't mean I can't piece together the logic, but it means that it's going to be a challenge. I can't take pre-baked ideas, I have to assemble the ideas out of their more basic ingredients. Each and every step of making a game is a challenge because the way I figure out what I'm doing there is by putting together everything I know about anything, and seeing what comes out.
Most people couldn't take those tiny steps at all. I can. And it's hard, yes.
I'm not sure if I'm making any sense here. Let me try to be clearer. I believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Theoretically you can extrapolate any principle from any context, it's just going to be easier or harder depending on the context. So you can figure out how to make a new kind of experience by piecing together the logic of all the old kinds of experiences, it's just very hard.
Smilie was an amalgamation of ideas from interactive dialogues and Tamagotchis and Looney Tunes cartoons and puppets and kittens and the fly-swatting game from Mario Paint for the SNES and probably dozens of other things in the back of my head. And I saw how to put together all those random elements to make something that's new, without even realizing (at the time) that I was mimicking all these things. That's the only way there is to find new parts of gamism, and it's so difficult that I'm one of the few who can do it at all.
I think that argument makes some sort of sense.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Religion
I'd like to act outraged and tell them this is ridiculous, but I'd feel like a hypocrite for doing so. Their worldview is just too similar to mine. I see religion as a long string of obligations, most of which don't appeal to me. Reciting pre-written prayers from a book is repetitive and dull. The holidays are just meaningless things you do every now and then and then get back to your life. The fasts are just something to put up with. On an intellectual level I can tell myself there's symbolic value to all the Jews doing the same thing at the same time, but that only makes me less interested. I'd rather hoard the glory for myself, not share it with millions of others.
So how can I say to my friends that they're wrong? I know perfectly well that humans are emotional, not rational. And the correct emotional response to religion is to reject it. Am I really naïve enough to think that anyone would listen to a rational argument when they have no emotional reason to do so? No, I'm not.
But here's the argument anyway. When God tells you to do something, you do it. You don't do it because you're getting something out of it, you do it because the creator of the universe wants it. And why would he/it want that? Because when a large portion of the world is doing things in his name, they become like a puddle reflecting him, each individual person a drop of water in that puddle. And puddles are pretty.
I'm not entirely sure I'm convincing myself with this argument, actually.
Religion is just something you do. Or rather, breaking it is just something you don't. There are lots of laws I don't follow, like praying three times a day. But those are the things I'm supposed to do. The laws which say not to do something, those I have no problem with. Because they're just rules. I'm good with rules. So I wouldn't even consider using electricity on Shabbat (even though everyone knows that's a silly law), or eating dairy less than six hours before eating meat, or eating bread without washing my hands first, or eating food without thanking God for it first. Any Jewish law phrased as a rule -"always do this before that" or "never do this"- those I have no problem following.
Really, is it so hard to just accept the rules? Damn it, I really do sound like a hypocrite. I'm holding onto tradition because it's something you do, not because I connect to it. But I should connect to it. Why did my friends have to abandon all this and leave me alone here? It was easier before. Damn them.
Back when I was in Yeshivah, our rabbi Yisrael Ariel (who I have a great deal of respect for) said in a lecture once that it's best to stay away from dissenting modes of thought. He said that only a small fraction of those exposed to outside ideas stay Jewish, so it's better not to be exposed to outside ideas. (I'm not misrepresenting him here, this is actually what he said.) And I thought to myself, what's wrong with him? What a kharedi attitude. And now I wish that the world actually worked like that.
The kharedim are closing in around us in Beit Shemesh. They're multiplying faster than we are, they're coming in from all over the world, and soon they'll be moving into our neighborhood and we'll have to move out. At least, that's how I've always seen it. But my friends leaving Judaism changes things for me. How can I criticize the kharedim for being so strict when this is the alternative? I agree with them that the modern world has gone too far, so how can I criticize them for imposing the old way on people? I'd be a hypocrite!
Would it really be terrible to have kharedim everywhere? To have girls dress more modestly? To be surrounded by people with as much distaste for money as myself? To have Judaism as a whole way of life, rather than just something sprinkled on top? It would be so much easier to have a connection to God if he were in everything we did. I agree with their beliefs! Other belief systems getting pushed aside, that would just make life simpler. I want life to be simpler.
And yet, I do resent the kharedim. Their way stifles emotions. But am I really naïve enough to think they'd care about emotions?
I'm not one of them. I come from a secular culture. I watch TV and read comics and play games and make games and I doubt many kharedim would respect any of that. But my own friends, who come from the same culture- I'm not one of them anymore either. I believe in God and the Torah and all the Jewish laws.
I'm not going to be like my older brother, who threw everything away and ran off to America and has been dating a Christian girl for years. I can't ignore God. But I'm also not going to be like those Yeshivah boys I knew who sat and learned g'marah like it was the most interesting thing they'd ever seen. I can't ignore my frustrations.
I'm right on the fence between two sides, and I think everyone expects me to fall one way or the other. But what's wrong with the fence? Why are you all leaving me alone here?
9 Comments:
- John Silver said:
-
Fascinating read. Sounds like your religious struggle is really an identity struggle - recognising yourself (or not) in an emerging culture or in an established one.
- Nati said:
-
This probably deserves a more serious response than what I'm groggily capable of now, but I thought it was interesting that you're considering yourself on the fence, because I consider myself on the fence. I felt like I had to move away from where I was born to make it to the fence. Why are you assuming we are born on it? It seems to me we're born way on the religious side, even if not exactly haredi yet.
I also actually agree with you, though it's a kind of broad statement so possibly not on the specifics, that the modern world has gone too far, but this is a notion you can very easily hold as a secular person. Being secular just means you use a way to deal with the world that isn't religion, not that you give up on spiritual awareness and cultivation.
It's a very interesting point you make about the haredi way of life. I, too, (sometimes) admire this idea of living a life utterly immersed in spirituality. The flipside, of course, is, as you imply, a kind of scorn for fun and emotion, and as you strikingly don't, an intellectual absolutism that causes immense suffering.
It's always a balance, I think, between spirituality and morality (for me spirituality involves fun too). One tends to come at the expense of the other if you're not careful. My conclusion was that the Jewish balance wasn't a good one and that I needed to try and get my own. The question I think you need to ask yourself - and I'm only allowing myself to ask this because the answer was until recently yes for me - is is Judaism enough? Because if it isn't, you may be shutting yourself off from something that is.
By the way, I honestly don't think Judaism is a bad option. I just think it's important you genuinely choose it rather than just continue what you were born into. I myself didn't feel I'd ever done that, though it's perfectly possible that one day I will. - Mory said:
-
"Is Judaism enough?"
That's kind of a funny way of putting it. I hardly see how throwing away your only link to God is striving for more. - Nati said:
-
It isn't if it ends with throwing it out. Do you really think Judaism is the exclusive way of linking to God? Even when I was extremely relgious I never thought that. My point, which I understand you don't agree with, is that religion restricts your ability to connect to God by claiming to be so absolutely all-encompassing that it's pointless to even consider anything that ever happened anywhere outside of the Jewish arena. You even get the occasional fervently orthodox Jew who thinks this is misguided - Rambam and Rav Kook are the ones that spring immediately to mind. Gentiles and atheists have occasionally contributed things that weren't completely useless, and they didn't all lead a life of shallow licentousness.
- Mory said:
-
I'm sorry, I just don't see how abandoning one form of spirituality is the first step to finding another. Looking for spirituality wherever it might be is laudable, but that has to be on top of the commandments which are addressed to you personally, as a member of the Jewish race. If you yourself can point to examples of religious Jews who accepted outside ideas, it means that being open-minded does not preclude holding on to Orthodox laws and traditions!
- Mory said:
-
Regarding your earlier comments vis a vis the "fence" I consider myself on: When I was in Illinois my uncle said to me that all Jews consider themselves to be in the "middle". Everyone stricter than them is crazy, everyone less strict than them is a heretic. I told him that he's absolutely right, everyone more strict than me is crazy and everyone less strict than me is a heretic.
But regardless, I think it's fair to consider myself in the middle because I know I'd be very comfortable living either under kharedim or under khilonim (secular Israelis, for any non-Israelis reading). (I can say this with some certainty, having been in both religious and secular schools.) In both extremes of Jewish society I'd be just weird enough to be happy and get into interesting arguments, but not so weird that people might hate me. It's just this middle ground, with the two groups living side by side, that I'm uncomfortable with. I don't know which status quo I'm supposed to be rebelling from.
From my perspective you've already jumped off the fence on the khiloni side. If you're not keeping any Jewish laws then how is that still a part of your identity? - Nati said:
-
I think that Rambam and Rav Kook (I should probably qualify this by saying I actually know quite little about them) were going against the grain of Judaism, and, yes, that they might have gone on to bigger and better things if they tried to be a part of the world in general rather than just their insulated community. On the other hand, they did help to bring modern conventional Judaism closer to the themes I consider important, so maybe it's a good thing. But it's still kind of like improving the standards of a prison. Is the imprisonment even justified in the first place?
Also, I don't know about religious schools, but I think you're wrong in thinking you'd be accepted in haredi society. You'd be expected to spend your day learning and people would feel comfortable giving you a hard time about it. The tolerance you enjoy is a secular concept that's seeped into Modern Orthodox Judaism.
It's true, in retrospect, that I'm not really any longer on the fence. But I spent a few months there, deciding I don't accept Judaism as dogma but am holding it up for consideration, still keeping to its basic tenets while I make up my mind, which I then did, and now I think everybody should be free from religion, for reasons I'm not sure I fully understand myself and that I'm only trying to force down your throat because I get the impression you enjoy these arguments.
I still don't think I've explained where I think religion is harming you, but I've written too much to give up now. I guess if you're a pluralistic, scientific, completely free-minded observant Jew, then you're okay, but I just think that's no longer in the spirit of Judaism. I could carry on with all these commandments, but it just felt irrelevant to what I thought the world was about. I should probably have another go at this later. Thanks for tuning in. - John Silver said:
-
"I'm sorry, I just don't see how abandoning one form of spirituality is the first step to finding another."
Strikes me as obvious, really. - said:
-
Mory, a bit of advice, never, I repeat Never discuss religion in this manner, all you get is a lot of trouble.
as every one has their own level of belief for an example by my scale you're a 7 I'm a 9 and so and so is -613. while on so and so scale, I'm a crazy religious nut, your just crazy and he is enlightened. just like your argument that communication via music and regular speech doesn't fit, so the scales between Jews and the rest of the world have little in common.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Stay out of my room.
There are a few problems with this attitude. First, there's a big closet in my room, and most of the clothes in it aren't mine. It's just seen by my family as a convenient storage space. Second, I like to be messy and my mother is a compulsive cleaner.
When I came back from America, my room was not as I'd left it. It was barely recognizable, actually. The floor with its unwanted clothes and dirty tissues had been cleaned up. The bottom bed with all its messy clothes and assorted odds and ends had been cleaned up. My bed had different sheets. (I'd had those sheets for around a year without ever cleaning them.) The top of the (unused) dresser with all its random junk had been cleaned up. The ceiling fan which I never ever turn off was off, and the string to turn it back on had ripped. When I first saw the damage, I was hurt but thought I'd be okay.
I was wrong. That night I got into bed and found that I couldn't sleep. Nothing felt right about the room, and the longer I lay down in that room the more disturbed it made me. It wasn't just the floor and the bottom bed and the shelves and the top of the dresser were different, though that was certainly enough to drive me crazy. The top bed I sleep on didn't feel like I remembered. Even the pillow had been changed, and that pillow has been there for years. I couldn't sleep in my own room on someone else's pillow!
I looked desperately around the room for the pillow but it wasn't there. I ran upstairs to see if I could find it around the laundry but it wasn't there either. At this point (and please keep in my mind that my emotional state was further exacerbated by tiredness and jet lag), I wanted nothing so much as to scream at my mother, "WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY PILLOW?". So I took a piece of paper and wrote a very rude note about how there must be something wrong with her if she couldn't let me come home to my own room the way I left it (when she knew I wouldn't approve of what she'd done), and I put the note on her keyboard so she'd see it in the morning.
But that wasn't enough. When I went back to my room, I still couldn't sleep. The bed was all wrong and the floor was all wrong and the lower bed had everything in neat little piles where I'd never find anything because in the old mess I knew where everything was and now all the random clothes I'd never wear were together. It was all wrong! That was barely my room anymore! I picked up all the clothes on the bed, and started throwing them around the room. So it wasn't like it was before, but at least it was messy again. At least I could pretend that this was still my room.
(This kind of event is known as a "meltdown".)
The next morning I'd calmed down, and went to apologize to my mother. But she apologized first, and gave me my old worn-down pillow back. So while my room was still very wrong right now, it would be better.
Later that day my father got brought into the argument. Unfortunately for me my father is every bit as stubborn as I am. He repeated over and over that there are rules in this house which need to be followed, like not having dirty tissues on the floor and dusting and vacuuming regularly, which are done for the sake of health, and since I won't do these things myself they "need" to come in and do it for me. And I repeated over and over that they were to stay out of my room, and that this was non-negotiable. We didn't get anywhere.
Things settled down. I put most of the clothes from my floor back onto the lower bed. I slept well.
A week later, I came back from Games Night and found that my floor was distinctly cleaner than it had been. The backpack I'd taken with me on the plane was gone, and a pair of pants that I'd left on the floor was on the lower bed. Again I couldn't sleep, so infuriated that someone would go into my room while I was out and mess with my mess. I considered banging on my parents' door, waking them up so that I could start yelling at them, but I realized that would also wake Dena up, and I didn't want that.
I lay in bed unable to sleep, trying to figure out how I could prevent this from being a regular occurrence. Could I lock the door? No, it's just a skeleton key, and my parents have a skeleton key. Could I switch the locks to something more secure? No, I don't know the first thing about locks. That would get complicated, I think. Plus, they'd most likely steal the key and copy it, and then what would I do? Could I block the door?
I could block the door. I got out of bed and moved what was left on the dresser to the floor. Then I started pushing the dresser toward the door and didn't stop until the entrance to the room was blocked.
The bed is next to the door along the wall. The dresser is along the other wall, and next to it is the garbage where I throw all my dirty (and sometimes bloody) tissues (and usually miss). In between the two is the way in, and that's where my dresser is now. There are only two ways in now, short of moving furniture: climb onto the (elevated) bed and drop down, or climb over the dresser. I figure my parents would be much less comfortable climbing around than I am, not least because of their age. And if (over time) I get slightly stronger limbs out of the bargain, no problem.
Once I'd set this up, I was able to sleep again.
That day my father and I got into an argument, because he'd been the one in my room. He wanted a shirt that was in my closet, and while he was there he noticed things that belonged to him and took them. I tried to tell him that this was unacceptable, that if he wanted something from my room he'd have to ask me for them, and that if I was out of the house he was out of luck. And he tried to tell me that the room needs to be clean, that I need to keep my clothes folded and in piles, etc. etc. And I said the argument wasn't about his silly rules, it was about them not going into my room. We could discuss me taking out dirty tissues occasionally, or even vacuuming every now and then, but first they needed to promise me that they would stay the hell out of my room. My father agreed.
There haven't been any more fights since then. I've kept the dresser in place, because I don't trust my parents. So the layout of the room is different, but it's my room again. So I'm content.
After December 08, 2009
Illinois
Many Excuses
I want to get new inspiration for my games.
I need to get away from all my usual distractions and habits.
This will be just like old times.
I planned this a long time ago,
and it seemed to make sense at the time.
I don't know why I'm going, but it feels right.
I need to stop planning everything out, and just live for a little bit.
I ought to get Variations On V.O.V. finished already.
I haven't seen my grandparents in a while.
It'll be nice to be in a country where everyone speaks English.
The weather's too hot here.
I'd like a real winter, with rain and snow.
In America, I'll be able to buy new games.
This is just a crazy random occurrence,
for which I have neither explanation nor enthusiasm.
I didn't want to miss what might be my last chance to spend some time in my grandparents' house. The truth is, it was always about the house.
"Don't Miss" tour uninterrupted
The two large doors open to a narrow hallway, one stair down and to the east of which is the living room, a big square room with much furniture (including an elegant wood-and-glass coffee table) which despite the name doesn't look lived in at all. At the end of the living room (still east) is a window the length of the room (though in several panes), from which you can see down and to the east into the patio. Down and to the east of that is the rest of the backyard, where squirrels try to steal food from birds on the many trees and deer pass by every morning wearing tracking collars. At the edge of the backyard (still east) is a sudden cliff. Down that cliff and to the east is Lake Michigan, which goes on and on as far as the eye can see. That's what you'd see straight in front of you, upon entering my grandparents' house.
(I am writing these words into a small notepad with a pen, both of which I brought with me from Israel. I'm hunched over the side of the coffee table, my head a few inches from the paper and my right leg under the table. The lake is a beautiful shade of teal today, and there are just a few leaves still on the trees.)
The location of the house, I've realized, accounts for more of the appeal than I'd realized. Almost all the windows face east, where no matter how hard you look you won't see a hint of civilization. It's like this is the only house in the world.
Most of the rooms are modestly sized, at least by the extravagant standards of America. There are narrow hallways and staircases, a smallish kitchen and dining room, and one tiny bathroom where all the walls are mirrors. It's not like those houses where it takes longer to get from one room to the next than it ought to, just because the owners like seeing lots of empty space. But there is a big exception to this rule, and that's the basement. The basement is downright enormous.
There's a pool table there, which was regularly in use when my cousins and their cousins were over for Shabbat. (I've improved tremendously, though perhaps that's not saying much.) And that's just a little corner of the room. There are three brown poles holding up the ceiling, of the sort that just beg you to run around them until you get dizzy. One of the poles is in a very inconvenient spot, where it prevents any pool shots of a particular angle. The room also has two ancient arcade machines that don't work anymore, and an ancient TV connected to a working Nintendo 64 which has only one game (Mario Kart 64). Random pieces of furniture are scattered through the room, some of which are meant to be there and the rest moved there from upstairs on the real estate agent's recommendation in order to make those rooms seem bigger. And by the north wall is the piano, which (I imagine) hasn't been touched since last I was here.
My grandparents were afraid they'd have to tune it, but to my ears it sounded great. It has a very timid sound to it, and the more bombastic things I play in the bass sound a bit false on it! On the other hand, all dissonance is unusually palatable on it, and the more new-age stuff sounds really cool and ethereal. The third piece I ever composed, I made specifically for this piano.
Right over the TV but one floor up is my room. I had my choice of room, and there are nicer ones, but there was never any question that I was sleeping there. The room actually has two beds, two desks, two closets, etc., but there's a divider that closes to split it into two separate rooms. Way back when we were little kids, Benjy would get the north side and I'd get the south side. Now the north side has a laptop computer in it, but that's not my side. Mine is the side with the 8-Track player. The drawers have photos my Uncle Perry took, developed downstairs in what used to be a dark room but is now a bathroom. The shelves I remember being filled with books, but now they're all empty. (The real estate agent's recommendation.) And as it turns out, by the wall there's a pad of the most perfectly-sized paper for what I've planned, which has just been sitting there unused for years.
The bedrooms are right to the south of the main entrance, but they're hidden from view behind a wall, which I think is pretty clever design. You only see the hallway by turning around the corner. If you go down that hallway in the other direction, it leads to the kitchen and the dining room and the den.
I'm not spending much time in the den this trip, because it's the room with the TV, but when everyone was over they were spending most of their time there for the same reason. (This actually worked out pretty nicely; I didn't particularly want to see them.) There's a fireplace there, which I might not have ever noticed before even though it's very prominent because I don't notice much of anything unless I'm looking. The wall the fireplace is on is covered in hand-cut stones, which does seem like the sort of thing that would go around a fireplace, no? My grandfather pointed out the quality of the "miter work" done there, and I don't even know what that means but apparently that was the first thing he noticed when he first saw the house back in the 1950s and it greatly impressed him. "That's fine craftsmanship!", he told me. "They don't make 'em like that anymore."
At the corner of the den is a door that leads out to the backyard. Right outside that is my grandfather's grill, which has enough of an awning over it that he wouldn't get wet in the rain, but it still gets awfully cold out there. The backyard technically goes all the way around to the front of the house on both sides, with a forest to the north too thick (and on terrain too uneven) to walk through. In the northeast corner of the yard is a path through the trees which is steep and narrow and goes on for longer than you'd think, passing a small stream to end up at the beach. The beach is usually boring, but that path is awesome. At every step I see how far it goes down to my left and my right, and it seems like there are lots of interesting spots to sit in down there, but of course it's much too dangerous to go to any of them because the ground is slippery and it's all really high up. So I look, and try to picture what the area would look like from there.
I was waiting for more than a week for snow. The forecasters said there'd be snow for Thanksgiving, but there wasn't. Each morning I looked out my window to the east and was disappointed anew. But then one morning I looked out and everything was white. I took a shower and had breakfast before going out, which was a mistake. By the time I got out there it was already drying up. I quickly but carefully went down the path to the lake, because I'd never seen a snow-covered beach before. And what a sight it was! The waves to the left, the snow to the right. The snow ended abruptly at the random curves where waves hit, so there was a clear division between sand and snow. And that went on ahead off into the distance, where there was smoke coming up from the ground for some reason I couldn't discern. Up above the sun just barely shone through the thick clouds. I stood there and looked for a while, trying to burn the image into my head.
Addictions
On any other trip, that would be me. But not this time. I made a promise to myself before I came. I promised that I wasn't going to get pulled into the same patterns as before. No distractions this time. I have a big piece of paper, and I have a pencil. That ought to be enough to keep me busy for the short time I have here.
I know that if I were ever to turn on the TV, I wouldn't be turning it off. That would be my activity for the remainder of the day, regardless of what's actually on TV, just because it's easy and visually stimulating. I know this from previous experiences with TV, and I guess it's not too hard for me to deal with this problem because it's been three years since I've turned on a TV anyway. There's no real habit to break, I just need to prevent myself from building that habit to begin with.
So when my grandparents are watching TV, I go somewhere else. Usually downstairs, or to my room. The living room is a bit of a problem because it's right next to the den so I hear every word of whatever they're watching. (Angles and Circles I draw in the living room, but I've got a few other things to work on.)
Sometimes I slip. Once they were in the middle of watching Mythbusters, which is a show I like, and I said to myself "What's the harm in watching half an episode?" so I did. And sometimes it's late and I really should be getting to sleep, but my grandparents are watching the news so I stick around and watch. I don't even like watching the news. Lately all they've been talking about is two nobodys who went to a party. Seriously, this is the quality of American news. But it doesn't matter what's on. It's TV, it's there to be watched.
There was a Mythbusters marathon around Thanksgiving, which my cousins were watching. I stayed away from that altogether, because I can't make the excuse of "just one episode". And once they were watching The Office, and I've watched every episode of The Office but I resisted the urge to rewatch. And you have no idea how tempting it was to turn on the TV on Tuesday night to see the latest V, but if V then why not Fringe and Flashforward and The Simpsons and House and How I Met Your Mother... my life would suddenly revolve around TV schedules. I've come here for only two weeks. That's much less time than I thought I'd get. I can't waste it like that, as much as I'd like to.
So for the most part I've managed to avoid TV. If you added up all the TV I've watched here so far (including the news, and wandering through the room as someone else is watching), I'm sure it wouldn't exceed an hour. But like I said, watching TV on an actual TV isn't really a habit for me. I download all my shows. It's where I do have recent habits where I've got real problems, and it's so much more pleasant to focus on the TV, which I've been doing a good job with, than it is to focus on them.
When I left Israel, I promised myself that there would be no distractions. That means no TV, but it also means no comics, no web-browsing, and above all no piano improvisation. If I'm going to finish the sketch for Angles and Circles in two weeks, I can't afford to indulge in any of those. And I've slipped up plenty.
Not comics, thankfully. At home I'm always checking the scanners' forums waiting for the new comics to be scanned. But I haven't read any comic books here, because that requires specialized software. It would take me all of five minutes to install the program on the decade-old laptop in my room (or fifteen minutes, if it's being uncooperative), but I can't justify taking that first step. There's no possible use for the program other than reading comics.
There's certainly more to do with a computer, though, even one with Windows ME that keeps crashing for no apparent reason. So that I can't stay away from. The TV's in the den, and I can stay out of the room entirely. But I can't stay out of my own room, and the computer's much too useful to move away. One of my notepads is for the blog: in the front I write notes for the trip, and in the back I summarize every blog post I've ever written. That's something I've been meaning to do for months, and this is the perfect opportunity for it. This is actual work to do, and it requires me to be on the internet. And as long as I'm already in the browser I might as well check my mail, and as long as I'm doing all that why not also check if anyone's been reading my blog? And as long as I've already got three tabs open why not a fourth? And a fifth? And if there's a link on that fifth page, why not check it out and come right back? And if there turns out to be an interesting link on that page.…
Internet, sometimes I hate you.
So I haven't read any comics, but I've spent plenty of time reading about comics. Just review upon review upon review of comics that I won't get to read until I'm back. I don't know why I find reviews so entertaining. And I haven't played any games, but I've read plenty of blogs about games. And I've read Twitter pages and entertainment news sites. And this is after all the restrictions I placed on myself: no forums, none of the blogs I read regularly, no writing on my blog, no comic piracy sites. But when I come up with a perfectly valid excuse like "I haven't checked my mail in a few hours, maybe someone wrote me.", it's hard to see that there's a problem until it's hours later and I've gotten nothing done.
But that's not nearly as bad as music. I have a real problem with music. A week before I came, it occurred to me that if I want to be a gamist I'll have to be a musician less, and that this could be a good opportunity to try that. All I needed to do was promise myself to never touch a piano for two weeks. I can do that, can't I? I wrote up a letter to my grandfather, asking if he'd be offended if I didn't ever play on their piano. And then I erased what I'd written. If I don't let myself play piano, I can't get myself to finish Variations on V.O.V. while I'm there! And besides, other people like hearing my music. What would I do if they asked me to play, just say "Well, I've decided to abstain from playing piano, on the grounds that I'm too much a natural at it."? I would sound crazy and they might be disappointed. Actually, that's not proving to be much of an issue, since no one seems to care too much if I play or not. People say "That was really nice.", but only from listening upstairs. They never come down to hear me better.
But I'm not supposed to care if people don't hear my music, I'm supposed to be working on games. And because I decided a week before coming that I shouldn't prevent myself from playing, playing is almost all I do here. I pace around a few steps trying to figure out how to do something in Angles and Circles, then decide I don't know yet and run down to the piano so that I can play for a few hours. If I had promised myself not to play, I'd be a gamist now like I'm supposed to be. I'd already be done with Angles and Circles, I'd be halfway through the script for Next Door, I might have even come up with a bunch of new ideas, or started on the design document for Through the Wind. I'll never know, because by not restricting my music I guaranteed that music would come first and games second.
And now I'm seeing that that decision might have repercussions later. I hope this CD thing doesn't pull me too far off course.
Back to Nonazang
On the first day I got here, I was messing around on the piano when my grandfather came in. I played some of my latest music for him, and he asked if I remembered what I'd played at my bar mitzvah. As an answer I halfheartedly played the theme from the very first piano piece I ever composed (which my piano teacher at the time named Celebration), but told him that I'd long since forgotten the majority of the piece because I was embarrassed by it. It was just a bad imitation of Bach, after all. He told me he had a videotape of my bar mitzvah. Would I like to see it? Heck yes.
The past shows how far you've come. You can look at it and laugh, and say "I was like that once?", and understand how much better you are now.
We hurried into my grandfather's study, a room that always smells of pipe tobacco no matter how long the window is left open. The desk in the corner surrounds a chair on three sides, one of those sides holding an old computer. Across from that is an antique chess board, which hasn't been played with in so long that the pieces have cobwebs between them. Between the door and the big bookshelf (filled mainly with political thrillers) is a massage chair; I've never really understood the appeal of those. And in the middle of the room, across from a couch, is a small TV and a radio which is usually on playing classical music. Under the VCR, my grandfather pulled open drawers filled with videos until we got to the very last drawer and found the one marked "Mory's Bar Mitzvah 2001".
It was a long recital. I'd only remembered playing my own piece, I didn't remember playing all the rest. It was all the pieces I'd learned in my piano lessons, apparently. And it wasn't what I expected. Sure, I had little control over dynamics. Sure, I sped up and slowed down at random points. Sure, at some points I got so stuck and confused that I needed to pause for ten seconds, go back and try again. But I knew what I was doing. It was clear to me, as it must have been clear to everyone in that room, that I did in fact understand what I was playing. It wasn't just notes, it was questions and answers and agreements and rebuttals and gentle happiness and bitter sadness and little me was swinging around with his whole body like he was just surrendering himself to the music and didn't notice or care how many people were watching. The kind of understanding I displayed in that video is the kind that you can't be taught, you just learn for yourself. And along with that, it was unbelievably amateurish. But somehow I didn't care. I've been taught quite a lot since then, but little me was my equal in all the ways that matter.
And then my own composition. It's a good piece.
I can certainly see why I stopped playing it. The left hand often just plays octaves, it repeats itself without changing anything, the structure is so disjointed it might as well be two separate pieces. But I'll be damned if I didn't find it fun to listen to. There's an energy there, an enthusiasm for doing something new and not having a rulebook in front of me but just feeling it out as I go. To call it a bad imitation of Bach would be grossly inaccurate, for many reasons. First off, it doesn't really follow classical music theory. Secondly, there's a point where it reaches a natural conclusion and then starts a totally different theme, in a style that's absolutely nothing like Bach. It sounds classical (rather than baroque), and then there's something that sounds like some sort of New Age chorus where it's just fun to play and who cares about subtlety. And then when I got tired of that second theme, I slowly switched back to the first one and gave that a second ending. It's nuts, sure. But it's unpredictable and fun. I was an idiot to forget it.
A few days later, I went to my grandfather's study again and put the tape back in. I ran back and forth between the study and the piano, and piece by piece I relearned my old composition.
It's a problematic piece from many angles. I saw that at once when I played through the whole thing. I don't know if I'd necessarily want to play it for anyone else. For a few seconds I considered rewriting it. But only for a few seconds. It is what it is and the lack of maturity is just a part of its quirky charm. And I don't need to play it for anyone other than myself.
I must have started that composition in sixth grade. That was a time where it felt like nothing had ever happened to me, and nothing ever would. So I needed to entertain myself, and that's how this whole composition habit started. It seems like a whole different world. Nowadays, I'm normally in the luxurious position of being able to get whatever kind of entertainment I want, whenever I want it. So there's no longer much need to entertain myself.
That's what this trip changes. Without my big sheet of paper, my life here would be pointless. So I need to find the point for myself.
Let me be clear: there is nothing on the paper except scribbles. There are angles, and there are circles, and that's about it. I think most people would not be impressed. But at the same time I have no doubt that if I were to show it to sixth-grade me, he'd approve. It would remind him of all the random lines he'd drawn on papers in school, to distract himself from the mind-numbing tedium. Except, those were small-scale. This here is the dream. A big world of static shapes in some sort of epic struggle. There's an uncertainty to drawing this game, but there's also a specific kind of joy I vaguely remember from way back. There's no rulebook for what I'm doing, just intuition.
So naturally it's imperfect. Some sections of the game world are going to be much bigger than others. Lots of ideas are getting repeated without adding much of a different spin each time. But I think that's going to be part of the quirky charm of it. Like it or not, this is a world which could only come out of this particular time and place. Because in this increasingly empty house, whose prime (I suspect) was decades ago, I'm tapping into a very specific energy. I look out the quiet living room through that window that says there's nothing else on Earth, and when I look back down at the paper I know exactly where to go next.
If you get so lost that you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and then go 13 miles past that, you will reach Nonazang. It's the most empty place imaginable, in which nothing ever happened and nothing ever will. Be sure to bring some paper with you. You may impress yourself.
IAM not
A few years ago he was in Israel as part of an effort to help the Bnei Menashe in India move to Israel. (It's a long story.) The head of Columbia College's film department, a guy named Bruis, came with him because he was filming a documentary about the work Uncle Pep was doing. I met him then, so I knew about Columbia College and that it had a videogame program.
When Uncle Pep asked if I'd like a tour of the place, I said yes. I didn't have any intention of learning there, but I was certainly curious to see it.
He drove me into Chicago on Sunday. He's blind in one eye, and the other is weak, but he's still capable of driving. (He said he watches the white lines on the ground.) As we drove in, he told me about the logical numbering of the streets relative to the center of town, and I said it seemed like making the order of things so rigid and precise would limit the place's character.
But I was wrong- Chicago has tons of character. Massive skyscrapers are all over the place, so that even though the roads are very large they feel a bit tiny by comparison. Lots of radically different kinds of architecture are standing next to each other, so that the overall impression is one of utter anarchy, but if you look at any particular building chances are you'll be very impressed. Uncle Pep pointed out all the points of interest as we passed them.
At the school, we first looked in at what the art students had on display. They'd put up an exhibit about religion, and it didn't surprise me to find that most of them were mocking religion rather than supporting it. (It's a cliché for college students to say that religion is a comfortable lie, but at least they were finding new and interesting ways to say it.) There was one piece I liked, with lots of little white sheep figures laid around on the floor and bombs dangling from strings.
Then we went to the film department, where whoever we came across immediately threw down whatever they were doing as soon as Uncle Pep entered the room. He was being treated like royalty, and it made me a bit uncomfortable. It turned out that there had been a misunderstanding, and they'd gotten a student ready to show me the film department, which I'm sure is very impressive but wasn't what I came for. So they called the game division, and they quickly got someone who knows the place well and would be willing to show me around.
They call it IAM, which is short for Interactive Arts and Media. I find that name so funny, because music is an "interactive art or medium" last time I checked and that's a whole different branch of the school. The game students could learn something from them, I'm sure. Well, it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be as radical as me.
The guy showing me around (I've forgotten what his name was.) described the format of the program. The game designers who plan out everything beforehand are kept separate from the game designers who prototype and figure it out as they go along. I told him that that's strange to me, because my first game was all planned out and my second I needed to figure out as I programmed. Different kinds of games need different kinds of design. But that's how it's divided.
They've got all sorts of state-of-the-art facilities, most of which didn't impress me. There's a recording booth for voice acting, there's a motion capture studio (which is shared with the film department), there's lots of rooms filled with huge screens and drawing tablets, etc. But there were two things that did impress me. First, they have a room where they make hardware. So if a design student wants a specialized controller, he can make it. And in that room is a 3D printer, which is just one of the tools they use for doing that. ("3D printer" as in it prints out 3D objects.)
The other thing that impressed me was in a smaller room: eye-tracking technology. You look at the screen, and it sees exactly what point on the screen you're looking at. Now, my first instinct is to use that to focus the camera, so that it's like you're looking through a window into another world. (I wonder if it's precise enough for that. It probably is.) But that's not what they're using it for at all. They're using it so that they can analyze the players of the game later and try to figure out what they were thinking. That's really clever; I would never have thought of using it like that. They're doing this for the American government, actually. Long story, but it's really cool.
After the whole tour of the facilities, and his description of how they work (which surprisingly made sense), he asked if I had any questions. I did, but I wasn't sure how to phrase it. I wanted to know how they can cram all of gamism into one curriculum. How to ask that.. I asked him if it's one teacher grading all the projects, whether it's a text adventure or a music game or an action game or an RPG. He said no, the music game would be graded by their sound guy (an accomplished composer, apparently), and the action game would be graded by someone with experience making action games, and they don't have anyone who does adventures but there's someone they're trying to hire. I asked him who grades the projects that are weird hybrids of lots of different kinds of games, and he said they're always looking for someone like that but a person who's an expert in everything doesn't exactly exist.
I walked away from that building impressed that they do, to some extent, know what they're doing. People will come out of this program and go straight into the game industry, and understand how to work in teams and how to do all sorts of technical work for games and maybe even how to design the kinds of games that they want to make. So this program is something to be respected.
We went back to the film building to say hi to Bruis, who hadn't been there earlier. We went into his office, and he and I chatted about games and where they're headed. He asked me what kinds of games I make, and I told him how the first one was just a character and the second was a strategy game and the third is a movement game and the fourth will be an exploration game and I want to just keep jumping from one art form to the next. And he seemed very interested, not just the kind of faux-interest that you do to be polite. He said that it sounded like I was thinking "as much about the experience as about the game". I still don't understand what he meant by that. But anyway, we talked about independent games and how with the rise of the internet those are becoming more realistic, if only as a second job after an ordinary one to pay the bills. I name-dropped a whole bunch of indie games like The Path and Small Worlds, and he said he'd heard of them though he'd never played them. I'm not entirely sure why he seemed to know so much about games. I guess it's because there's such a crossover between film and games at Columbia College.
Then he was talking with Uncle Pep about some new building they're building, and the financial aspect of that. And then I asked him my final question: "Considering that I'm kind of on the side of what the game industry is doing, would I get anything out of learning here?" He was surprised by the question and had to think about it - this really was just a friendly chat and not a sales pitch. He said to me that maybe I wouldn't get anything out of it, and he'd rather be honest than have someone come to the school and then realize they don't want to be there. He's a cool guy, that Bruis. When we got up to leave, he realized that we'd been talking for way too long and he was late for something or other.
Uncle Pep and I drove to his house, so that we could pick up Aunt Paula for dinner. Aunt Paula has Parkinson's - she used to be in the middle of writing a book, but now she just thinks she'll finish her book soon and can't really work on it. When I saw her she was shaking around a lot but was very coherent in conversation. As she was getting ready to go, I noticed the upright piano in the corner and asked if I could play.
I improvised for a while, and then Uncle Pep asked if I'd play something I'd actually composed, so I did. It's an awful piano, horribly out of tune, but I did what I could with it. Aunt Paula good-naturedly asked if I'd shown them how I play at Columbia College. Uncle Pep said that he'd like it if for his 84th birthday I'd record a CD for him. He said to me, I just need to find out where there's a good, professional recording studio in Israel, and how much it costs, and he'll send the money. I told him it sounded like I'd be getting the better end of that deal, but he laughed. He said to call the CD "Happy 84th Birthday, Uncle Pep".
I do have what to play for a CD.. first the innocent piece, then the one that keeps wandering, then the classical one, then the new one, then "Dots and Curves", then…
My American Brethren
When we got to the shul, we were welcomed by the rabbi (who knew my father) and sat down in the back. (As it's an Orthodox shul, the women sit separately.) I noticed that there were very few young people in the room. That's not a good sign, though I shouldn't be judging- I never go to shul back at home myself. It's just not a good sign because it means this congregation is ultimately temporary. There were a few unfamiliar tunes in the prayers, but it was still quite a relief after the previous night. These here were my people. Not like those other ones.
After the Torah reading (for which I was called up), the rabbi gave a ten-minute speech which was entirely focused on one word: "akhai", "my brothers". This word was used by Ya'akov to address total strangers. The rabbi is a good speaker and by the end of it I was thinking: "You know, he's right. I've been treating people like they're alien to me, when these are my people. My family, even. I should be treating these people like siblings." And then I considered how I dealt with actual siblings like Miriam, and I no longer had a problem with considering myself separate from others.
As we walked back, I listened to what my female cousin-squared was saying, and I was ashamed for having been attracted to her. She accepted social norms so willingly! She was casually talking about how men and women are totally different from each other, and in the casual kind of tone that isn't looking for any argument. She was putting up arbitrary divisions between people, without even leaving room to consider how similar we all are. How can I talk to a person like that? We're barely the same species!
When I first heard that I'd be spending Thanksgiving with my cousins, it sounded like a good idea. I don't know why. I've never been close with my cousins. The only thing they seem to be particularly interested in is sports, in which I have no interest at all. Otherwise, all their conversations are of the fluffy sort that add nothing to a day but just fill the time. I sat at that dinner table, filled with foods which to me seemed wholly unappetizing, listening to them chatter endlessly about things I had nothing to say about. (Couldn't they talk about games, or something?) And when someone noticed that I'd been silent the entire time, she thought to start a conversation I could join in on. Awfully considerate. She asked, "How's Miriam doing?".
That's all anyone ever asks. "How's Miriam doing?". My sister has just joined the army, and everyone thinks that's oh-so-interesting. And since she's my sister, everyone expects that I'd find it interesting too. But she's not much of a sister. I've never succeeded (and not for lack of trying) in getting her interested in anything that interests me, so why should I be interested in her? We're related, but that's just a technicality.
So the truth is, my grandparents know more about Miriam's current activities than I do. They care to hear it. I don't. But it's always Miriam people ask about. They never want to know about the games I'm working on, or the music I compose, or even the play I'm playing two roles in. They just want the latest gossip about family. So on Thanksgiving, I quietly excused myself from the table and went down to the piano to play. That's true of every other meal involving large groups of people as well, though not the ones on Shabbat of course. Then I excused myself from the table and went back to reading the novel I'd bought (Peter and Max, by Bill Willingham). If only someone would ask me about that.
My uncle is an Orthodox rabbi. When he came back in the second week for the bar mitzvah, we had more time to talk. I like talking to him, because he lets me talk, but afterwards I always feel like I've been tricked because I realize that he's normal, didn't care at all about anything I said, and was only listening to humor me. At least, that's what I imagine. Who knows what goes on in a normal head. There's no reason to ask, because I couldn't trust the answer. He'd just say whatever's diplomatic.
On the first Friday night, we went to my grandparents' shul which is right next to the street they live on. It's a conservative shul so I knew there'd be mixed seating, but otherwise I expected an ordinary Friday night service. I like the changes conservative Judaism has made toward gender equality. That said, having both genders sit together is surely distracting. Not necessarily in a way I'd mind being distracted, but in a way I know I should mind being distracted in while I'm supposed to be thinking about God. But I was prepared for that. What we didn't know was that the cantor's daughter was having a bat mitzvah that week. That changed the nature of the service.
The layout of the room was a bit shocking to me. It wasn't a room where all the members of the congregation were equals before God, it was a room with a stage in the front that the audience was facing. The cantor and his daughter were facing the audience. This wasn't praying, it was a performance. And as a performance, of course there was a microphone. The rest, I think I might have been okay with. But they were using a microphone on Shabbat, with speakers dangling from the ceiling, and suddenly I just really wanted to get out of there and away from this Shabbat-breaking. I was ashamed to even be sitting in the same room. What made matters worse was that every word was so unbearably slow, like the congregation was struggling to get Hebrew words out of their mouths.
I let my uncle know that I was very uncomfortable to be there. He suggested that we should leave, but a few of us at a time. If we were all seen walking out at the same time, it would be more awkward. I thought that sounded a bit backwards, but any way of getting out of there was fine by me. We went home and prayed by ourselves.
It bothers me that all the doors of the house are connected by an electronic security system. It means any time you open a door, you're breaking Shabbat. But I guess in a luxurious house like this, you really do need it. I always waited for other people to open the doors, so that I wouldn't have to. On the second Shabbat, when it was just me, my uncle, and my grandparents in the house, my uncle decided it was too cold outside to walk to the Chabad shul so I opted to go by myself. I waited for my grandparents to leave the house for their shul (disabling the security system), and then I walked for a half hour to the shul.
The previous week the rabbi had called me up to the Torah; this week he asked if I'd read the haftarah. I said no, it's been a long time since I've done that trup.
It was a nice service. It went fast.
I stayed for lunch, because there wasn't any lunch waiting at home. There was some chicken, so I took it and sat down next to other people and hoped that someone would ask me who I was so that I could say that I live in Israel and I'm here for a house and I'm working on a game and I play piano and I'm starring in a play and I've got strange ideas about art but no one spoke to me. Well, okay. "No one" isn't accurate. The rabbi's wife came over to say that I should say "Hi." to my parents for her. Very important message.
Why can't people be more social? If someone I didn't recognize sat next to me, I'd.. um, I'd... Hrmph. Why can't people be more social, is all I'm asking.
When I went home, no one answered the door so I had to open it myself. Rats.
That night was the bar mitzvah celebration for second cousins of mine. Or "b'nai mitzvah", as they called it. They're twins, a boy and a girl. Reform.
I never thought it was a good idea to go. Warning bells started going off when I heard they wouldn't even have kosher food there, but were going to order some sort of kosher TV dinners specifically because we were coming. I mainly went because I felt like I needed to make it up to my grandfather. That was a huge mistake.
I walked in in my Shabbat clothes: plain white dress shirt, plain black pants. As soon as I saw the crowd, I knew I'd look like I'd come from a different planet. Which of course I had. It was a huge crowd, with lots of preteen girls in skimpy but expensive-looking outfits and boys in brightly colored suits. There wasn't another person in the entire room dressed in a simple white shirt like me. There was a big stage, more raised than in the conservative shul, and there was an upright piano accompanying everything. They'd started the mock-service before Shabbat ended, so my uncle and I got there late. When we came in, the cantor was singing some half-English half-Hebrew song which apparently everyone there but me was familiar with, because they were all clapping along though I'm sure they didn't understand the words. It was just a game of clapping along to the rhythm. They were all pretty good at it, like they'd had lots of practice. I was surprised that during such a meaningless series of kitschy songs, all those half-naked preteen girls were sitting quietly and patiently. For my part, I was squirming in my seat.
The "service" was almost entirely devoid of meaning, and yet it dragged on for hours. Each song had to be a whole production, where the words were repeating over and over again long past the point where anyone was going to hear the words as anything more than a random collection of sounds to hang music on. The prayers were speaking of Shabbat, which had already ended. The "rabbi" endlessly lectured -with the grinning condescension you'd expect of a preschool teacher- about how "traditions" were being passed on, but always speaking in vague generalities since of course there weren't any actual traditions on display here. Almost no one in the room had kept the Shabbat. Almost no one in the room was eating kosher food. Almost no one in the room would be going on to pray to God past that particular night. But ah, "tradition". How warm and fuzzy the word is.
The two kids read from a Torah. I doubt it was a proper, kosher Torah because why should they bother paying for a real Torah when no one really cares one way or the other about its validity? But still, it was a Torah. They'd learned something which vaguely resembled the trup, though they weren't even splitting the sentences right. And I have little faith that they understood what they were saying, given that they were horribly mispronouncing most of the words. They didn't read the actual Torah portion of the day, they just skimmed through it, but they read so slowly that it took forever anyway.
Afterwards, they each gave a little speech about the Torah portion, and that genuinely impressed me. Not the quality of the speeches, but it impressed me that they understood enough of the story to be able to give a speech about it. Even if that speech was "Ya'akov was wrong, because he shouldn't have liked one of his sons more than the others.".
The rest of the evening was all the rabbi and the cantor doing what must be their usual schtick, and trying to get every last minute they could squeeze out of it.
Later I realized why all those preteen girls had been so patient through all this superficial silliness. It was because they were waiting for the real party. [shudder]
As my uncle and I drove toward the hotel (a Hyatt) where the party was, we talked about reform Judaism. He said that if these people didn't have this, they'd have nothing. And I said that they already have nothing, they just don't realize it. The whole service was the illusion of religion. They took superficial elements from the actual prayers, disconnected them from their meaning, and put them on a stage as though that's Judaism. Maybe I'd prefer if they had no connection to Judaism, but understood that they had no connection to Judaism. Better than this flimsy lie, where if no one in the room even believed God exists it wouldn't make a difference.
The party, my grandparents inform me, was typical of the parties around here. But I had never been to such a party before, and God willing I hope I'm never at such a party again.
Even as we walked close to the hall, already the obnoxious techno music was so loud that I wanted to hide in a corner. And so I did. There was a big crowd, and that makes me uncomfortable in itself. But the music is what really put it over the top into sensory overload. I was scared to even look into the hall, let alone walk in. I watched my grandparents from a distance as they got drinks, so that if they went anywhere I could go with them. I didn't take off my black coat, partly because of feeling like I was dressed wrong earlier and partly because it was just a comfort to be dressed in my coat and at that moment I'd take any small comfort I could get.
Eventually someone recommended that I sit in the hotel lobby until we went in, and I was only too happy to get away. I sat there on a couch for maybe twenty minutes, feeling no need to move a muscle but just needing to relax. Then my grandfather came to let me know we'd be eating soon.
Inside the noise was so loud that I was literally concerned for the well-being of my ears. The techno music seemed even more obnoxious at that volume, which was such that no one could hear anyone else talking. And there was a DJ running the event, whose talking was even louder than the music. There was a big screen displaying obnoxious music videos to go along with the obnoxious music, with its constant thumping like someone hitting you in the head with a mallet. There was some sort of dancing going on; it was so crowded there I could barely to stand to look in that general direction. I sat at the table, desperately covering my ears, waiting for whatever no-doubt inedible food they'd serve us. Eventually someone suggested that I go back to the lobby, and I ran out.
There was a grand piano in the lobby, a badly-tuned Yamaha. A distant relative of some sort pointed it out to me, and assured me that no one would mind if I played on it. So I ran over and sat down. I started playing, and I never looked back. I forgot what I'd played three seconds after playing it, already at something new. And though my instinct (being let loose like that) was to play as loudly as I could, I restrained myself so that I could feel like I had the upper hand.
At one point two black guys who were staying in the hotel passed by and seemed to be enjoying my music. I stopped, embarrassed, but they said to go on. Whenever I did anything, they jumped back in shock as though they'd never heard any actual music before. Bizarre. They asked me if I knew any Michael Jackson songs. I said no, and they left. My grandfather told me later that they probably thought I was the professional entertainment. (In that coat, no one could possibly think I was a professional. Like I said, bizarre.)
But I wasn't playing for them, I was playing for me. I needed this, my one and only opening to do or say anything in that entire night. I could clean my head of that endless repetition and mindless thumping and inane lyrics sung by digitally-altered nasal voices.
But then I needed to go back in.
The DJ played a game with the kids, where he'd start some horrific pop song like "I'm A Barbie Girl", then stop and have the kids keep singing from where he left off. So to get points, these preteen girls were all singing this crap at the top of their lungs. I'm not sure which was louder, them or the recording, but I know that I never again want to be in a position to answer that question.
The DJ played 80s music for the adults, and gave moronic instructions like "Pretend you're playing an air guitar!" while all these supposedly sane adults stood on stage and followed his every word.
At one point a friend of the family, who used to be a hotel concierge, noticed me covering my ears and went out to get help. I only know this (I was mostly oblivious of anything going on under this constant pressure) because he came back with ear plugs. They were a tremendous help, I will admit.
The screen sometimes showed the crowd, but only under such heavy digital filters that you could barely make out what was going on.
The kosher food was salad and fish, neither of which I eat. It was probably very expensive for the hosts to get.
There was not a single thing in the entire party which was remotely Jewish, even by bogus reform standards.
My grandfather was kind enough to drive me home early. I had leftover pizza for dinner. It was good.
My grandfather and I often have trouble communicating. I say something, he misinterprets, I need to rephrase, he misinterprets again, then he finally understands and wonders why I'd said it to begin with. Or sometimes it's the same pattern, but with him talking and me misunderstanding. One time we were talking at each other like that and my grandmother looked dubious about whether there was a point. "We understand each other.", my grandfather assured her. "No we don't.", I corrected him. "We never understand each other. It's like we're talking in two different languages."
And that's the truth. My grandfather is pragmatic, I only care about emotions. My grandfather says I should have common sense, and I want him to boil that down into clear and consistent rules. And my grandfather thinks family is important.
a quiet day
I couldn't focus on anything with that hanging over my head. So a few minutes later, I went to my grandparents' room to confront my grandfather. I said to him, "I don't understand why you don't see where I'm coming from here. I won't exactly be having any meaningful conversations with people when my brain's shutting down because of the crowd. If it were a one-on-one conversation with someone, that's one thing. But being in a big crowd where I won't even notice that they're there because all I'll see is the crowd, that's something else.". "C'mere." He hugged me and said I could stay home. A few minutes later, he asked me if I'd go to the bar mitzvah party. I hadn't planned on going, but I said yes.
So they left the house. An hour or so later, my cousins all left as well. So I had the house all to myself.
First I worked on the game. It's turning out more interesting than I planned.
Then I read my book a little. Excellent storytelling.
Then I played piano, working on Variations on V.O.V. in particular.
Then I summarized a little bit more of my blog.
Then I took out the play, knowing that I'd never get such a perfect opportunity.
I stood by mirrors and practiced the voices and kinds of movement for the characters, being as loud as I was supposed to be on stage. And then I moved back into the living room, and started playing scenes. I paused for the other characters' absent lines, so that I'd have to think about how I was moving around and reacting as they spoke. And I kept in motion the whole time, trying to find the emotional gist of every line (and often being surprised by what I found).
I worked on the play for many hours. I kept moving through the house, from the living room to the den to the basement to the mirror bathroom and back to the living room. I memorized all of my lines for Act 1, I got more comfortable with the voice of Ambrose, I learned things about what the characters are going through. And then I stopped trying, really, and just played around with my voice to see what weird things I could do with it.
(All at the top of my lungs, of course.)
As I was in the middle of this, a couple walked through the backyard to see what the property was like. I stopped being quite so loud for a few minutes. From my comfortable seat in one of the living room's swivel chairs, I waved hello in a friendly manner. They passed by in the direction of the beach path, and I went back to my silliness.
Progress report
- I've drawn more than half of the Angles and Circles sketch. The middle, the top, the bottom, and the entire left side are all done. (Not "done" in the sense that I won't have to rework them when I put it all in the computer, but "done" in the sense that I'm happy with them conceptually.) I haven't figured out what to do with the right side of the world yet. The parts I've finished incorporate all the random ideas I had, but use those ideas in ways I hadn't thought of originally. I'm very happy with where I've gotten.
- I've planned out the first thirty seconds or so of Next Door. I know, that's not much, but it's a start.
- I've "finished" Variations on V.O.V., in the sense that I can now play the whole thing to its end. I started writing out the notes, but then I stopped and decided I'd do it on the computer later. So the harmony for the last two variations isn't in its final form. I've come up with an initial theme for the second movement which I sort of like; I may or may not use it in the end.
- I've memorized my lines for Acts 1 and 3 of The Matchmaker. (There are four acts.)
- I've summarized every post on this blog, with the obvious exception of these posts I'm writing.
Get Out
One day I came in from wandering around outside, and my grandfather was on the phone with his real estate agent. Someone was interested in the house, and would come by to check it out the next day. We needed to be gone when they came, and the house needed to look empty.
The kitchen was small and cramped. When we sat down at the table, facing the wall, there wasn't quite enough room for all three of us to sit comfortably. There was a skylight on the ceiling that I'd never even noticed until it was pointed out, but which had been adding light in the daytime. The walls were hand-painted with orange stone shapes, which had a lot of texture to them and actually stuck out from the wall a little. That must have taken forever to do.
In the time I'd been there, I'd gotten my room quite messy. That's how a room ought to be. A plain white piece of paper isn't complete. It needs to be scribbled on, or there was never a reason for that paper to exist. A messy and imperfect room feels alive, in a way that a clean and orderly room doesn't. It only took me a minute to make my room look like no one had been there so that the prospective buyers could walk through.
The den was many shades of brown (in mahogany panels) with a bit of white, and it had brown and blue furniture. The hallway was off-white in painted stripe patterns. The mirror bathroom's mirrors had a slightly greenish tint. The bedroom I stayed in had beige wood panels. The bedroom next to it was a deep brown, with little bits of blue all over. The living room was painted light blue. The dining room was yellow. The bathroom next to my bedroom was pink and blue and gray.
I said to my grandfather it didn't make any sense to me that someone else would be showing their house to people. What could a real estate agent know about the house? My grandfather could show all the ingenious little modifications he'd made to the house over the years. He could explain how he's wired the whole house up so that speakers in every room can connect to the stereo. He could show them the hidden drawers he put in and the shelf hanging from the ceiling for the microwave and all that. But he'd never even meet these people, it would all get done through the real estate agent. He wouldn't even know whether the new people appreciate this house at all. And that drove me crazy. "Don't you want to meet them? Don't you want to know what happens to the house after you sell it?" Ever the pragmatist, my grandfather replied: "What difference does it make to me what happens after I've sold it? What practical use does that information have?" And we went back and forth, with me insisting that he must be at least curious who these people are, and him insisting that there's no logical reason why he should be curious.
The house was built in 1955, designed by an architect named Mandel. It wasn't a perfect house. It was a lovingly-designed house, whose every room had lots of character. It was once affordable; now it was being sold for several million dollars. But that price was more for the property than for the house.
We left the house without anywhere pressing to be. We settled on the library, and stayed there for two hours.
Along with the house, whoever bought the property would also get the design for a new house, designed for the property by a reputable architect named Pickell. My grandfather specifically hired a real estate agent who'd worked with this architect (and his team), to add a greater incentive for the buyer (who would know this architect's reputation). So whoever decided to pay the multimillion dollar price could then pay millions more to tear down the house and build this new one. As my grandfather sees it: "I tell you, if you're paying that kind of money, you can do whatever you want with the house." I looked up this architect's work on the internet. His rooms are all white and empty and so perfect that you'd feel bad moving a single chair by an inch for fear of messing up the balance of the room. His design is bigger than the house now, with everything more precisely calculated for optimal efficiency in living. He's really good. But he's no Mandel.
As we were gone, a family checked out the house and were apparently willing to buy. They especially expressed an interest in the Pickell design. There was also another couple interested in buying, who hadn't said what their intentions were. It would all come down to money in the end, and then whoever got the house would do whatever they liked.
My grandfather tried to explain why he doesn't personally like Pickell's work: "To me, there's a difference between a house and a home."
I'm not sure if I agree with that. My grandparent's house was never my home, but it was never just a house to me.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Mory, Mory, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?
At this point, I'm not sureMy day is complete, I've heard the opinion of Mory's little imaginary future-guy.
I disagree with your assessment.
Not sure...?!The blog isn't worthless, it led to me. And by the way, you left out the part where Mory's a self-centered jerk who creates characters, uses them, and then disposes of them. I mean, take these future guys-
How can you think he hasn't made progress?
Wait 'til she stops talking, I can't hear myself think.since the last post they were in? I bet it was pretty darned long. And what have they been doing all this time? That's right, they've just been sitting and sipping their coffee and reading this blog! Never a break, never a moment to themselves, because that single task of reading the blog is the only task their selfish creator thought to give them. Now that's a tragedy, a tragedy, but only imaginary people like us would see it for what it is. They're consigned to a one-note existence, all because their creator never bothered to give them more. And the only way we can stop things like that is by getting together and making a unified stand against it! We need to start some sort of protest group and just hijack every post he tries to make. We need some sort of name.
Sure, babe.
How about "Imaginary People's Rights"? No, I don't like it either, it needs to be catchier.Okay, here's the thing.
This blog has just been continually frustrating.
Don't bother to disagree, you know I'm right.
This is still part 2 of the blog, right?
That started in, what was it, August 2007.
That means that at the time of this post we're up to,
part 2 has been more than two years.
And the point of part 2, as he set it up,
was that he was going to change to be more like
the Buckman that we're reading through this to27 months.27..?27 months since the beginning of part 2.Right, 27 months.
See, that's what I'm talking about.
It's too slow.
And now he might as well have never even started part 2,
he's practically back where he was before it.
I just don't see where he's going.But we know he'sYes, of course we know.
But it's getting really frustrating that he's still so far from that.
He's worrying so much about that silly little play,
like that's what matters in the grand scheme of things.
And take this post here. This is, what's the date here.. November 19 2009. Right. And what was the date he said he was going on that second trip thing.. November 23. So this is four days before that, he should be working like crazy to finish up as much of The March of Bulk as he can, but instead he's pulled out all his toys and is playing around with them.Did you just call me a toy?! I am not a toy! I am a fictional character, who's just been taken advantage of!
My apologies, ma'am.Oh yeah, now you're so classy! A few seconds ago you were calling me a toy!
Hey, cool it, cool it. He's an idiot, but he didn't mean anything.
He certainly did!
You're not.You see? This is entirely pointless.Are you sure?Entirely pointless.
I'm thinking maybe we should just stop reading.Oh, come on!
At this point he is working on the game,
he just isn't posting anything about it because there's nothing new to post. I'm sure that's what it is. And he'll be done soon, and part 2 will wrap up, and I bet it'll be really interesting.
We've been reading this far, we can't stop now.Oh fine, we can read a bit more.
I hope you're right.I am.
I agree. There's no way a guy like Mory knows a way out of the mess he's made for himself. He thinks he's so smart, but really he doesn't think about any of the things that matter.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Imagine, if you will…
Glitchy transitions as horror
All the other characters are speaking about things which the player has not seen. They talk to the player character as though he is meant to understand what they are talking about. The player is given vague clues that it's been a few months since the last scene, though it's a bit early to give it away entirely. Otherwise, the game proceeds as normal.
Then the man in the suit walks toward the player character, the game glitches for maybe a second and a half, and he's back in bed.
..and so on. The first segment of gameplay (before the first appearance of the man in the suit) is fairly long, but each successive segment is shorter. The glitching is slightly longer each time, where by "glitching" I mean that the camera gets stuck between two points, the game freezes, and the music loops whatever the last second it played was until the character is back in bed. Each time, the character gets subtly older in appearance, though this is so subtle that the player might not notice for a while.
Another change over the course of the game is that the man gets progressively harder to spot. The game might freeze at the moment you see him sitting in a chair across the street. Or it might freeze as you're minding your own business as he walks around a corner far away. One time the man knocks into you, then walks away, five seconds pass, and then the game glitches. But that's a one-time gimmick; more often the player is likely to not have even noticed the man in the suit, because he is just wandering around in the background.
Sometimes the player wakes up and discovers that an important character has died. Sometimes the player wakes up and discovers that what the goal he's been playing toward is already irrelevant. Sometimes the player wakes up and discovers that the game world has changed significantly.
By the end of the game, the player is playing an old man. The glitches last a good ten seconds, and the player can barely get in five minutes of gameplay before they happen. He stumbles out of his house after one glitch, and there's a huge crowd outside. There's nothing to do in the crowd, but the player's actually safe there. As soon as he leaves the crowd and walks into some secluded little alleyway or house (it doesn't matter where), he sees the man waiting there.
He wakes up, gets out of bed, and before he can even get to the door the game freezes again. Again the player gets out of bed, and he doesn't even make it that far. And so on, until the game crashes immediately after the character wakes up, his eyes wide open in fear, and that glitch holds. It doesn't matter if you leave the game running for hours, it's going to keep looping the music and shaking the camera and not accepting input. There are no end credits; the only way to end the game is to shut off the console.
When the player goes back in, he discovers that his save file has been deleted.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Do I overthink things?
I don't know, let me think about that…
I just came back from the second rehearsal. And boy, what a disaster it was. It turns out, I've got entirely the wrong approach for Barnaby. The hunched shoulders? That was a mistake. The awkwardly limited movements? That was a mistake. The general lack of enthusiasm much of the time? I'm not sure, but I think that's a mistake too.
I'm not entirely sure I understand why they're mistakes, and that bothers me. The hunched shoulders were supposed to be like a little turtle hiding in its shell, I thought it would be cute. But it's not cute, I'm sure of that now. It just doesn't work. The limited movements were supposed to indicate shyness, but I think they're just making him bland. The last thing Barnaby needs to be is bland. It just doesn't work. The lack of enthusiasm is supposed to make it more noticeable when he does get enthusiastic, to give the sense that this isn't something he experiences every day. But instead I think I'm finding it hard to figure out what the right moments to bring the enthusiasm in are, so he constantly occupies some strange space in between obsessiveness and disinterest. It just isn't working.
At home and then on the bus to Jerusalem and then waiting around because I'd gotten there early, I went over Act 2 (the subject of tonight's rehearsal). I specifically looked for the rhythms of the lines, the pitches of the lines, that sort of thing. I wanted to figure out how random lines could seem like more than a string of words. I also wanted to learn the lines as quickly as possible, so that I could pay attention to the other actors and to my own performance rather than to the script. So I was really eager to get started. And then for the first 45 minutes, we just went over all the revisions. Tanya's changing lots of little lines. That meant I couldn't ignore my script; I needed to always be aware of the current version! It also meant that all the little bits of performance I'd worked out were suddenly more confusing than helpful.
But I don't know if that even mattered. In the bottom line, I wasn't playing Barnaby right. A little quirk here or there in a performance, that's fine. The voice is a quirk like that, that I don't at all regret. But I had so many quirks there was no room left for acting. I was so conscious of how I was moving around, and how I was interacting with the stage, and how I could get the next little beat that I'd planned in, that I barely noticed what anyone else was doing. Or where I did see what they were doing, I couldn't see how I could work with it.
But beyond that, I think I'm misunderstanding who Barnaby is on a fundamental level. I'm playing him as scared, and I'm starting to wonder if he should be closer to the opposite extreme. Does he really want to get out of trouble or does he want to be in trouble? I can't say I know, and that's a problem. Sometimes as I was reacting to Cornelius a certain way, in the back of my mind I was wondering whether I had it all wrong. I'm going to need to think more about Barnaby's motivations, about how much is under the surface and how much is clear. I think it's not quite right to just play a character here - I ought to be playing a character playing a character. Tanya says Barnaby wants to act cool, wants to be as fearless as Cornelius. So I need to think about which parts of that are an act, and which parts are revealing hidden truths. Or maybe all acts are revealing truths. This is the sort of thing that I'm not qualified to play Barnaby until I think about.
..or not. David, who's playing Cornelius, said to me that I don't need to try so hard. He said that Barnaby is really a lot like me, so if I just act like myself it'll be right. And that goes with what Tanya said to me after the rehearsal. For one thing she said that I need to speak up more (and it's embarrassing that I'm not doing that), but she also said (after I asked for her input) that she thinks I'm a "natural". And I didn't really know what to make of it as I was hearing, but now I'm thinking that maybe she said that because she wants me to get away from things that aren't natural, and back to something that's less of an act.
I think I think so much about details that I miss the basics. I think if I weren't thinking so much on stage about what it was I was supposed to be thinking about, I might have been confident enough to project my voice more. I think thinking so much about how Barnaby thinks got me thinking that the only way I could play Barnaby was by thinking it through to a point beyond my capabilities as an actor.
Okay, I think too much. ..I think.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Holy. Cabooses.
Forty minutes after writing the last post, I left for Jerusalem and the first rehearsal of The Matchmaker, in which I will be playing the part of Barnaby.
Barnaby is a sidekick character. He's 17, has never left home before, and gets pulled along on a wacky adventure in the big city. His catch phrase is "Holy cabooses!". I do him with a nasal voice and hunched shoulders. I basically knew that I was getting the part before I even wrote that other post, because at one point in the callbacks the director slipped up: When telling us how to read a new scene, she meant to say "..and Barnaby will be played by Mory...", but instead said "..and Barnaby will be played by Barnaby...". So I had a good hunch that she wanted me for that part.
And reading through the play at that callback, I was a bit conflicted. Because on the one hand, Barnaby was a really good part. It'll especially have a lot of fun physical comedy. But y'know, I heard how some of the other parts were being played, and I felt like I could do them better. I'm told that all actors feel like that when watching other actors. And it's probably not any more true in my case than it is with other actors. I should have learned from watching that 1776 DVD that I'm not the actor I think I am. But still, I wanted to get a turn doing the other parts, just that once. So after the other male actors had all left, I stuck around and read for all three young male roles: Barnaby, Ambrose (the other one I'd tried at the auditions) and Cornelius.
Cornelius is the one that gets all the funny lines, he's one of the three leads (along with Dolly Levi and Horace Vandergelder). Ambrose is a romantic artist who wants to elope with his girlfriend but has a hard time getting her to go along with the idea. For a few, glorious minutes, I got to play both of them and Barnaby, even though I knew I would only be getting Barnaby. (Who, granted, is a better character than Ambrose. So there's that.) Sometimes I'd be talking to myself, doing two voices. When we stopped for the night, Tanya said that she wished she could split me in three and have me play all the roles, and of course I understood perfectly well that that was just flattery. But still -that was so much fun.
I was surprised at this first rehearsal to see that some people from the callback who I thought had done a good job weren't in the play. Or at least, they're not doing the parts I thought they were. An old and experienced actor did a fabulous job with the part of old man Vandergelder, but he's apparently been given Vandergelder's assistant instead. Vandergelder was given to a younger actor (Actually, the father of the actor who's playing Cornelius, who's the same guy who walked into the audition with me.), I assume because Dolly was given to a young actress. So one thing you can say about Tanya: she uses what she has in creative ways. At the very last minute she might change her mind about something huge, but she'll change it to something interesting. For instance, that lady with the accents that I mentioned before (Sorry, I don't remember her name.) is supposed to kiss me at one point in the play, but she raised an objection on religious grounds and almost at once Tanya came up with a solution: just as she comes to kiss me, I faint. In the context of that scene, that's a great idea. So I guess the unconventional casting is part of that out-of-the-box approach.
Oh, and by the way: she's decided that our version of the play is set in the 1960s. And she's making very significant edits and rewrites to keep it under two hours. So this isn't a straight rendition of the material by any means. Which is good, because it'll help us distinguish ourselves from.. you know what, there's a funny story here, but it has nothing to do with anything. So left-click here if you're interested.
On Friday night, I was next door at Avri and Lorien's house, and a friend of theirs came by from the Aviv neighborhood. This is someone who I recognize from Games Nights, but not someone I know well. I asked him what he was up to, and he said that while attending Bar-Ilan University he's been involved with a play they're putting on. "Oh?", I asked, "What play is that?", and he said "The Matchmaker". Yeah. So I asked him, "Who are you playing?", and he said "Barnaby". Think about the odds there for a second. They started rehearsing a week ago, and they're performing in January. At our rehearsal today I told Tanya about this (She'd been unaware.), and she immediately came up with some creative but dubious ideas of how we could use this to our advantage. Aaaaanyway..
I got to the rehearsal a few minutes late, and that was after taking a taxi rather than a bus. There was just so much traffic, we would have needed to leave a half hour earlier (That's two hours transportation time.) to get there on time. Oh, yeah, I said "we". It turns out, all of JEST's shows are rehearsed in the same place at the same time. So I might sometimes be going to Jerusalem with Dena, who has a small but important part in "Another Antigone". I don't think I would have thought to take a taxi. I got to the rehearsal way before Barnaby's first line, and someone was reading Ambrose who wasn't actually the actor for Ambrose. After Act 1, we took a little break and Tanya mentioned that if we ever get there late, we're fired. (No pressure.) A long time after we started, a guy who smelled like cigarettes but seemed pretty friendly walked in and sat next to me. That was our Ambrose. He didn't do a very good job, but that bothered me less now that I knew officially which part I was getting.
What did bother me was that Tanya's planned cuts (mentioned earlier) take out a lot of good material for Barnaby. So when we stopped for the night, I was feeling like maybe this wasn't going to be quite as great as I'd hoped, though of course it'd be much more fun than my previous roles. And then Tanya said that she'd like to talk to me for a second.
She said to me that she might be firing the guy she had for Ambrose, in which case I'd be playing two parts.
And let me be clear: these are both good parts. I'd be happy to play either one. But both! Switching back and forth! And it's not even my birthday!
Apparently, there's only one point in the whole play where both Ambrose and Barnaby are on stage. And Barnaby doesn't talk there. So Tanya's idea is that at that one point, we'll replace Barnaby with a doll dressed in his clothes. I don't know if something quite that drastic is necessary (Surely he can just go to the bathroom?), but that is funny. Apparently Tanya would really trust me with playing two parts. She wasn't lying.
So I'm there 100%. Whatever it takes to get this to work, I'll do it. There would be no less than seven costume changes, each of them a rush. So I'd just have to practice speed. Hey, I've beaten one of the F-Zero GX cups on Master. I can do speed. Doing two different voices with distinct speech patterns? Hey, I read the Megillah. That's eight voices. Keeping in my head the way two different characters think, and switching back and forth between them on the fly? Hi.
Okay, I admit it. This will be friggin' hard. But this is my kind of hard.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Training Wheels Off
In this way I cast Access Boss in the role of employer, so that I'd play the reluctant employee and eventually get some work done. Earlier I'd cast the blog itself in this part, but I was finding that it wasn't effective enough because I could ignore the blog too easily. I only ever saw the need to work when opening my browser and browsing over to my page. The program played the boss better, but not particularly well. The trouble was, ultimately "Access Boss" was just a character I was playing myself. And due to the simplicity of the program, it didn't have enough of a personality to understand what I needed. I needed a boss that'd understand that when I say I can't work right now I don't really mean it. This one just said, "Okay, don't work.". I did work more under Access Boss than under the blog, but I would always delay the time of work and then shorten it once I'd done some. Efforts to prevent myself from running Access Boss from either of the two users didn't work, due to inadequacies with Windows SteadyState.
You probably remember my attempt to supplant Access Boss with a more fully-formed character. That was a mistake. The idea was to always keep Notepad open, in which I'd have a dialogue with this new boss character. The "imaginary girlfriend" character I'd just invented for the blog (the one written in the Palatino font) eagerly jumped in, and I shouldn't really have let her but I wanted to spend more time with her anyway so I didn't see a problem. The problem was, I hadn't figured out exactly who she was yet. She was supposed to have Asperger's Syndrome, but I hadn't even given her an affinity yet. So that fictional relationship was too weak to withstand the antagonism of a boss-worker dynamic. That aggression became the main gist of the story, ruining what could have been a fun part of the blog. (I still haven't found a way to write myself out of that corner.)
So I quickly ended that and went back to Access Boss. I wish I could say that was enough, but you've seen how slowly The March of Bulk has been coming along. Where I stand right now is that I've solved the problem with the viewports (Embarrassingly, the solution was just one line of code saying to use OpenGL instead of DirectX.), and am now struggling to fit the next step into math. (There's no question that I'll be able to deal with this, but it's taking some time.)
A week ago, I made the mistake of upgrading Access Boss. It was bugging me with one of those upgrade windows, and I thought "What's the harm?" but I should have known. My copy of Access Boss is illegal. The upgrade broke the crack, and I can't find a crack for the new version. To make matters worse, there is no one still sharing the old version on BitTorrent, so I can't get back to the way it was. (I deleted my copy of the download after installing it.) In short, I've lost Access Boss. I haven't uninstalled it yet, but that's a matter of laziness rather than hope.
So whatever happens now, I've gotta deal with myself. There's no one requiring me to work anymore.
But of course, there never really was anyone else but me. I think the modicum of self-control I gained as those three characters is still there. The way it manifests is mainly in focused depression. Every now and then while I'm entertaining myself, a little taste of depression starts to build up. The longer I ignore it, the more it gnaws at me. But as soon as I get down to work on my game, it goes away and I'm as happy as can be. This isn't a pleasant system, but it feels like a more permanent one.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
iPhone, Part 2
I will keep iPhone development in mind, though. I think Next Door could work well on it.
Where The Money Is
How did I get myself into this scary situation? Well, that's a long and funny story, filled with twists and turns and shocking coincidences. No, I'm just kidding, it's not any of those things. But that would be a really cool intro to a story, don't you think? No, it's actually really simple: my father saw an ad.
I haven't talked about my father much on this blog. He's a practical kind of guy, he holds our shul and our community together, he's a reliable doctor. And I know that under all that, he's actually kind of weird. When we lived in America, he taped lots of science fiction shows like Babylon 5 and Star Trek and Earth 2. These days the only TV show he has the time to watch is The Amazing Race. He watches that every Saturday night with my mother. You should see him when he gets the opportunity to talk about that show. He just goes on and on. If you only saw him then, you'd think he had Asperger's Syndrome. That's how much enthusiasm he has for things he likes. He enjoys simple things: biking to work, Sudoku puzzles. Sometimes I feel like out of my whole family, he's the only one I can recognize as being related to me. But then he goes and acts all productive, and that feeling goes away.
He said to me a while back that his only regret in the way he raised me is that I should have been put in a school where I'd learn physics. He's right- I probably would have enjoyed physics. And he's always tried to get me to learn that. He's a real purveyor of silliness sometimes. It might surprise you to hear me speaking so positively of my father, given what I said earlier. But he hasn't done the whole discipline thing since I got out of high school. I guess he thinks I've grown up already. (Heh heh.)
A few months ago we were having dinner with some friends of the family (a Russian-American couple and their daughter) from America. (Dinner was terrible, by the way. Don't go to the restaurant Noyah in Jerusalem.) And the topic of my gamism came up. This friend of the family, he said that he's heard that iPhone games are big business now. My father was at that table.
So when he saw an ad (in Hebrew) looking for developers who'd like to make iPhone games, he pushed me to get in touch with them.
On reflection, that whole story could have been one sentence long. Sorry about that. Here, let me clean up the post a bit.my father saw an ad (in Hebrew) looking for developers who'd like to make iPhone games, and he pushed me to get in touch with them.
So somehow I found myself on the phone with this Eyal guy. And that money! I don't have that kind of money. I could try to dig into savings for that, but I dunno. The point of that is to make money, right? I'm not so interested in that. I'd prefer to work out a deal where they pay me (and by extension, Kyler) for the code, and then they keep the sales money themselves. My interest is to have as many people as possible play the game. This company can do that. But this could be dangerous. I don't know how much I trust a bunch of guys out to make a buck. Not just in terms of the money, which as I said I'd like to try to wriggle out of anyway. But the game, do I really trust these guys with the game? This is the best thing I've ever done in my life, and they could mutilate it so badly, if they didn't know what they were doing...
Eyal said to me that he thinks it could use some 3D graphics, to better sell it. This is the sort of business we're talking about. I said to him that that's not necessary, and he said I might be right. He said to me that some of the games that sell big on iPhone are so simple and silly I wouldn't believe it. (I probably would. I don't think like a businessman.) So I'm off the hook with the 3D thing. But what if they try to change the ending? What if they replace the line about trying to make everyone happy with a line about how that's really not what you want at all?
They don't care about the art, I'm quite sure of that. They don't care that this is a universal statement about ideas. And that's not something I should resent, it's just something I need to understand. These people, they don't think like me. They're interested in The Perfect Color because they see an opportunity for easy money. The iPhone is going to be officially released in Israel a month from now, and they want to be the first ones out there with Hebrew-language games for it. Which my game isn't, of course, but it can easily be translated. The question is whether I can make a deal with these people. I tell you, it's scary.
2 Comments:
- Richie said:
-
Do not -- I repeat, *not* -- pay these "developers" one red cent (or agora). They want *you* to pay them to develop your game for the iPhone?! You're not an investor, you're not a businessman. To paraphrase Toy Story's Woody, "YOU - ARE - A - GEEK!"
If you're willing to give up some degree of control over your creativity in exchange for money, then by all means, sell them the concept and/or the code, for a bulk sum and/or some portion of the profits. This is your product, not the iPhone app, if and when it finally appears. You should not have to bear any of the financial risk. - Mory said:
-
You're right, of course.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Here, have some high culture.
Small Worlds by David Shute
As far as I can tell, his only previous game was the hilarious comedy movement game Chasm Spasm. (I'll be darned, it has been done before!) This new one's a pure exploration game. I like this guy. :D
With Small Worlds he's playing with zooming-out (much like I did in The Perfect Color), which I don't think I've ever seen before in exploration. The worlds are all pixel-art, which start so zoomed in that it barely has any coherence yet. You explore more of it by jumping around in side view, and it zooms out so you can see where you're going. Any parts of the image you don't go to don't get filled in. So if you don't want to experience the game to the fullest, you're not forced to.
There's an overworld, a science-fiction-y space-ship-y area, cold and gray like so many other games. The soundtrack has the humming of machinery, and everything looks dead and desolate. From there, you get to four other worlds, each of them beautiful and serene. They feature unusual combinations of what looks like man-made structures and natural chaos. When you get to the end, the game jarringly switches back to the overworld, leaving you disappointed to be back. After you've been to all four worlds, you detach from the space ship, the world zooms out further to show that you're leaving it behind, and the word "silence" appears on the screen to indicate that the game is over.
If you think that sounds like fun, you're right - it's terrific. And if you think it doesn't sound like fun, go away, you philistine.
The one weakness of the game is the jumping. It's the annoying kind of jumping, where if you hold down the button it keeps jumping forever. Those controls only ever existed because they're easier to program than sensible jumping- if there's a context in which that kind of endless bouncing works, I haven't seen it.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
"I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have Chronic Normalcy Syndrome."
"What's your diagnosis?"
"I'm very sorry to have to tell you this. You have what we call chronic normalcy syndrome, or CNS. It's a development disorder that impedes your ability to form an identity. Most people form patterns of behavior and thought based on their genetics and their surroundings, but that has only happened with you to a very limited extent. To put it simply, you've never experienced any part of life as strongly as a healthy person would. Anything that happens, anything you come into contact with, you're only experiencing on a very basic level. And that's not a reflection on your intelligence at all, it's just what this disorder has done to you. You're just not equipped to form emotional reactions like the rest of us.
"Now, I don't want you to get too scared. Chronic normalcy syndrome is a very common disease, and most people who suffer from it manage just fine in life. It's uncommon for a person with CNS to ever get depressed or to have serious social difficulties. But it's just as uncommon for a person with CNS to ever be strongly happy or to achieve anything beyond the mundane; that means that unless you really work at it, there's an upper limit to what you can get out of life.
"The good news is, there's treatment. A few years ago, this problem wasn't widely recognized and there were no reliable options for getting better. But awareness of chronic normalcy syndrome has jumped forward recently, and there are many support groups available. I also would advise that you continue to come to me once a week, so that we can work on this together. But ultimately, it's up to you to decide what you want to do about the situation. I'm just letting you know what the situation is. But I strongly recommend that you start dealing with this as soon as possible."
"How did I get this?"
"The causes of CNS aren't really understood yet. There's research going on to figure that out. There are theories that it comes from a certain kind of upbringing, but there are new studies that suggest it's mainly genetic. But this is all still pretty unproven, it's only recently that people started paying attention to the problem. It used to be that people with chronic normalcy syndrome were just called 'boring', and there was nothing they could do to help themselves. But now the situation is very different."
"I understand. How is it that you know I have CNS?"
"Well, you're actually a very standard case of the disease. There's a list of symptoms we look for, like a lack of personal interests, a tendency to agree with other people without thinking, a very simple and straightforward manner of speech, and other similar indicators of a lack of personality development. Trust me, you have CNS."
"Thank you. So what should I do?"
"You should understand that treatment is not going to be quick, and it's not going to be easy. But it is important. I had another patient who came in without any signs of individuality at all, a real textbook case of CNS. We've been working on it for around two years, and he's almost unrecognizable now from what he was. He's got interests and personality traits, he looks distinctive, he acts distinctive. He quit his old job, and now he's got a high-paying management position. And understand, when he came in to this office he had no signs of ambition at all. You would have thought he'd still be in his low-paying job until the day he died, and never realizing he could move up. He recently said to me, when he left for the day, that he feels like he used to be asleep, and now he's waking up. So understand that this is my personal experience: you can get over this problem. You're not going to be an artist or a visionary, but we can find lots of little ways for you to add to society and have a more healthy, aware state of mind. But the road there may be unpleasant. If you're ready to start, we can do this once a week."
"Sure, sounds good."
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Scene-switching
The problem with the film method is that control is so out of your hands. What if you're enjoying a particular scene so much you want to see it go on longer? Well, too bad. It's decreed that you shouldn't see the continuation (even though there is one) until you jump to a different scene. And contrariwise, if a scene's really dull, you can't go see what's going on anywhere else. You have to wait patiently.
I guess what I'm advocating is along the same lines as the game flow control post. The player ought to be given the tools to decide for himself when to switch from A-plot to B-plot.
I guess it's not good enough to let the player decide - you need to let them make an informed opinion. If the two storylines are going to come together in the end, what happens when you play through an entire branch all the way to the end, and haven't even started the other one?
You know, this really isn't as complicated as I thought it would be. Now that I'm thinking it through, I realize that you just need to lock the parts of the story which (for whatever reason) the player isn't ready for yet. You don't need to explain it, you just say "You can't continue until you go back and check out what you missed." in some simple way like putting a padlock icon on the screen and offering a button to go straight to what you missed. So if you switch from story A to story B, and the two stories eventually meet up, then when you get a bit before that point in B it'll give you a button to jump back to exactly where you left off in A. Makes sense.
Sorry if this is a bit rambly, I'm just working out my thoughts. You understand.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to always force the player to play through everything. Surely some parts are optional, no? You know how whenever they edit a movie, there are good bits which they cut out because they're inessential? Well, why not keep that kind of thing in, but make it perfectly clear that it's optional and can be skipped? Let's say a minor character leaves the story, and the writer has come up with some great scene for him, but it has nothing to do with the rest of the story? So a notification pops up on the screen saying that a new optional scene has been unlocked, and you can go to that whenever.
But it isn't really whenever, is it? You want the player to play that while it's still relevant, but you don't want to force him into anything. I mean, if he waits until the end of the game that minor character might be in a totally different place, and the little side-scene will no longer interest anyone.
Let's think out the logistics of all this. There really needs to be a map of the story, with lots of lines of different colors, the colors indicating whether you've played it already and whether it's optional. (Or maybe just whether you've played it; "optional" could be an icon of some sort.) So you see how the storylines branch out and reconnect, and where you stand in the whole thing. It would also have a name for each storyline (which you'd see by clicking on its line), saying which character stars in it and maybe roughly how long it is. All this stuff could sometimes be a spoiler, so you hide it then. But there could be a red vertical line at some point on the map, saying "We won't let you know what happens next, but you can't continue until you " you know what, this is silly. There's no need to be so cryptic. The player can know that two stories are going to intersect, it won't ruin anything. Okay, that's not true. I can think of specific cases where it would ruin some cool surprise. But you can find some kind of work-around in those specific cases. There's certainly no need to make it a regular thing.
I just had a thought about how flashbacks can work, and this is actually specific to Dreams of a Fractured World, an RPG I'd like to make someday. When the character reaches an object that reminds her of her past, that object goes to the menu (Okay, it's not really a menu. But it's the easiest way to explain it without going into a detailed description of the game.) where you can access it at any time. As soon as you see the object, you're brought to the menu and are able to play it, but maybe you don't want to. Since it's just a flashback, there's no rush. But accessing the flashback changes the character's behavior in the present a little bit.. you know what, this is way too specific to Dreams of a Fractured World. I'll just carry on.
I think in exploration games, it makes a lot of sense to keep any settings you're switching between distinct. Like, I have this idea for a game where you're wandering around a world at war, and at any time you can switch to the first time the character was there (years earlier) and the last time the character goes there, years later. And all three are in real-time, they're not just static images. (Okay, the one in the future might be pretty static.) But you can switch back and forth at any time, because it doesn't matter whether you know how each part ends. You can play through the entire past part first, or you can play through the present first and then go back and see how it all started. I think both work, dramatically.
But that kind of total control over progression is only for stories specifically designed for them. Especially exploration, like I said.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
The strangest phone call I have ever had, part 2
The album starts out with Brahms' Lullaby reinterpreted as a loud late-night party, like so... -"I love it, it's Brahms with syncopation! You know, there are people who...". There would be a few other tracks in there somewhere with similar subversions. Do you know Through the Looking Glass? -"Sure!"- When Alice sees the poem "Jabberwocky", it's backwards and she can only read it through the mirror. So I have a tune for Jabberwocky which I can sing backwards, then reverse the audio, like in Twin Peaks, so that it sounds weird. Of course, it would take time to learn to sing it all backwards well. Then there's a tune I've had for a long time, and I'm thinking about maybe writing lyrics for it about Facebook, it goes something like this, Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh... -"That sounds great! Just leave it like that and play it on a kazoo" - No, that's the tune that'll be about Facebook... - "Oh, that's what you were talking about?" - Yeah, the only part I've figured out is something like dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-DAAAAAAA... I've had enough, I'll turn it off, as soon as I know buh-buh-buh-buh. Or something like that. And then there's my song "Ode to your face": "When I last saw your face, it was raining/and moonlight shone in from the moon..." And there's a game I play with a friend of mine, where I play something which sounds really serious on the piano, and then just as it's reaching its climax, I switch to this cheery little "space battle" theme, dah-bada-da-bada-da-da-da. So there could be a "space battle" track which sounds like epic science fiction music -"Like John Williams"- Yeah, exactly, and then that resolves, but then I keep sticking in these tracks in between the other music, which sounds like totally new and serious compositions, but always turn back into the goofy little classical theme. Then, at the end, there's another one of these, and the listener knows exactly where it's going. But it reaches the climax, and instead of going back to the usual punchline, it just leads to another climax, which is even bigger, and that leads to yet another climax, because it keeps just building and building and it's getting ridiculous. And then it turns into Brahms' Lullaby!- duh-duh DEH, duh-duh DEH -and it's got little hints of everything else in the album, and then at the end, when the listener isn't expecting it anymore, there's the last few notes of the space theme and that's the end of the album.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The correct way for How I Met Your Mother to end
I'm speaking, of course, about the question of how Ted meets the kids' mother. (If that means nothing to you, then you aren't watching the show and won't be interested in this post.) Some people say it should happen only at the very end, some people say it should happen some time in the last season, some people say it should happen long before the end and there should be more story after that, some people say it should never happen at all. I'm with the people who say that he should only meet her at the very end. But I'm going to be more specific, and say he can't meet her until the last minute of the series.
The final episode needs to bring back discarded plot points and characters from every single episode. The plot needs to be so outrageous that it lets the random details of continuity throw the characters to places no viewer could ever have expected, and which only make any kind of sense because of the many years of episodes building up to that moment. In the last minute, as they're knee-deep in the chaos of all their continuity crashing around them, Ted meets a girl we've never seen before who just so happens to be in that place at that time. And they either have the most bland meeting you can imagine, or an actively hostile one. (I'm partial to the idea of them meeting by her slapping him in the face.)
"And that's how I met your mother!" It cuts back to the couch, with the "kids" now adults because this story has taken so ridiculously long. (The boy now has a long beard.) For the first time in the series the two of them are on the edge of their seat waiting to hear what happens next. They beg to be told how their parents fell in love from that bizarre beginning. "Well, that's a long story. It all began with a [insert crazy non sequitur here]..."
..and credits.
2 Comments:
- Richie said:
-
This sounds disturbingly similar to the Seinfeld finale.
- Mory said:
-
That did occur to me. But bringing back characters at the end isn't exactly a strange idea. Anyway, here the purpose of the gag is different: it's not to show how crazy the show has been, but to give an excuse for why Ted was going on and on and on about random stories when his kids just wanted to know how he met their mother. The punchline here would be that each of those stories (improbably) actually was absolutely necessary background for the actual story, which in the end doesn't turn out to be too interesting.
Matchmaker
From Wikipedia:
The Matchmaker is a play by Thornton Wilder. The play has a long and colorful history. John Oxenford's 1835 one-act farce A Day Well Spent had been extendedActually, let's skip through the colorful history -it's not that colorful. We can sum it up by noting that the lack of originality in popular entertainment is nothing new.
…the expansion of a previously minor character named Dolly Gallagher Levi, who became the play's centerpiece. A widow who brokers marriages and other transactions in Yonkers, New York at the turn of the 20th Century, she sets her sights on local merchant Horace Vandergelder, who has hired her to find him a wife. After a series of slapstick situations involving mistaken identities, secret rendezvous behind carefully-placed screens, separated lovers, and a trip to night court, everyone finds themselves paired with a perfect match.You've probably heard of that one. I only knew about it from the snippets in WALL•E, and from my father singing "Hello, deli!" any time we ate deli sandwiches. (He's never thought it out past those two words, so those are the complete lyrics right there.) So the story is fresh to me, even though it's a 50-year-old play based on a 175-year-old play. The Matchmaker isn't a musical, which is new ground for me, and it looks like it'll actually be funny, which is also new ground for me. (I kid. No I don't.)
The play was a success at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London's West End before finally opening on Broadway on December 5, 1955 at the Royale Theatre, later transferring to the Booth to complete its run of 486 performances. … In 1964, the play enjoyed yet another incarnation when David Merrick, who had produced the 1955 Broadway production, mounted a hugely successful, Tony Award-winning musical version entitled Hello, Dolly!
The auditions were on Wednesday. A "45-second comedic monologue from a witty play" was called for, so Yakir Feldman lent me (on VHS) the movie The Goodbye Girl, I watched it, and then I learned a good monologue from it. He was absolutely right, it was exactly what I was looking for.•-------
Not everyone in the world is after your magnificent body, lady. In the first place, it's not so magnificent. It's fair, but it ain't keeping my up nights. I don't even think you're very pretty. Maybe if you smiled once in a while, okay, but I don't want you to do anything against your religion. And you are not the only person in this city who's ever been dumped on. I myself am a recent dumpee. I'm a dedicated actor, Paula, you know? I'm dedicated to my art and my craft. I value what I do. And because of a mentally arthritic director, I'm now playing the second-greatest role in the history of English-speaking theater like a double order of California fruit salad!I think I can do it pretty well. And not anything like it was done in the movie- I've got my own take on the material.
Anyway, none of that mattered because by the auditions the director had changed her mind. Her name's Tanya. She decided, without telling anyone, that she'd rather have people read out of the scripts than have them prepare other monologues. Everyone who came (I counted five, including myself.) was disappointed to hear this. Some insisted on doing their monologues anyway. I didn't, which means I'm probably going to have these random lines of dialogue rattling through my head until the day I die, but what the heck. They're good lines, my head can survive it. Two of the actors who auditioned I recognized: a guy who was with me in 1776, and a girl who was in Oklahoma!.
I auditioned together with someone who claimed he knew me through the Feldmans. I remember one time when I was at the Feldmans that someone came in and said I knew him, and everyone acted shocked when I didn't know who he was. That may or may not be this same guy, but it makes his story plausible so I'm inclined to believe him. The audition went decently, though I felt like he was getting all the good lines and I was just saying "Holy cabooses!" a lot. But I had to play that role because he's older and one character needs to be older than the other. Then the director told us to improvise with the characters. That didn't go well; I've never done acting improv before. I tried to play along, but I just didn't think fast enough and the end result was awkward. Though it might have made sense that it was awkward. No, it probably didn't. I just messed up. Anyway, the other guy left and I stuck around.
I stayed because Tanya said that (after she got her flat tire fixed) she'd let me read again. I was eager to snatch up this opportunity for four reasons: because I wasn't entirely satisfied with how I'd done, because there was nothing in particular waiting for me at home, and because if I tried to make the director happy, I'd be more likely to get a part. At the time I didn't think about why she was asking me to stay, but I think it was because the turn-out was so poor that she wanted a male auditioner to have someone to read lines with. (She seems more interested in how we act together with other people than how we act on our own.)
So I went back to read again, and in the meantime I'd come up with a different way to play the role. So I read the same lines off of this other guy (who'd just replaced Tanya's tire and therefore seemed confident), who wasn't as good as the first one. And I read my part in a different voice than before. Afterward I asked Tanya whether it was better or worse, and she said it was "Definitely better.". So I kept doing that. She then had us try two other parts.
But I think by that point I wasn't really being judged anymore. She'd already said to me that she thought I had a talent for comedy. I don't really know whether she was telling the truth or not, because she doesn't have Asperger's Syndrome and I'm not a telepath. But she insisted that she wasn't just being "nice", if that's worth anything. Anyway, I mentioned all this to a whole bunch of people, and the response has been split along pretty clear lines. The people who know me as a casual acquaintance all responded with a "Sure! You're funny!". And the people who actually know me (family, friends) all responded by laughing hysterically. I'll let you know when I decide which side I agree with.
(Holy cabooses that's a ramble. Please take the length of this post only as a sign of how excited I am about everything, and not as a personal offense to you and your free time. Thank you.)
Today (technically yesterday but I haven't gone to sleep yet so I'm still calling it "today") were the callbacks. I'm almost certain I'm in, if only because so few people seem to have tried to get in. (All four people I met on Wednesday were there.) I'm also almost certain I know which role I'm getting, because while I got to read a few different roles (including the one I hadn't gotten to read on Wednesday; I had to practically beg Tanya to let me read that), there was one role which she never gave to anyone but me. That was the one I did with the weird voice. So apparently she likes that. It's a good part. Not as good as some others, but I get to do all sorts of wacky fun stuff.
When the callbacks started I was nervous and twitchy, but by the end I was having lots of fun. I met a few nice people there, though I'm not sure that counts if I've already forgotten what they look like and what their names were. (And I have.) But they were cool. There was one girl who was playing Dolly sometimes, though she's a few decades too young, and she was great. Everything Tanya had told the others to do, she was doing seemingly effortlessly and with lots of humor. Very impressive. Apparently she's not even going to be in the show (or the country, actually), she just came to help out with the callbacks. There was another woman I talked with while she graciously drove me near the central bus station, who is a doctor with ADD who in America would use her impressive skill with accents to convince people of other races that she was "one of them" and that they should listen to what she's saying. Astounding.
See, I'm having all this fun and I'm not even in yet. And of course I shouldn't get ahead of myself. I only find out whether I'm in (and if so who I'll be playing) at the beginning of the next month. But I do think I'm going to be in, and I'm really excited. This could be so many kinds of fun.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Pussywillow's embarrassing jump
The upshot of all this for me is that in the past week he's gone back to curling up in my lap, which is something he hadn't done in a while. And he just stays in my lap and purrs for a long time, longer than I can remember him doing before. I love cats.
Anyway, this is all just a preamble to a cute story from maybe a half hour ago. Willy wanted to come in, so of course I let him in in a hurry. He ate, started hopping around some bags by the wall to see if there were any good spots for curling up in them, and when he didn't find any he excitedly started running upstairs like he wanted to curl up in my lap as I sat by my computer.
He was so eager, that rather than walking up the steps he tried jumping up to the next floor, or more accurately he tried to jump up to the stack of DVDs that was on the chest that was on the next floor, since (in fairness) that was the most direct route. I'm not sure if he's done that before. But it's not a good idea. I was sitting at my computer waiting for him to come up, when suddenly I saw him trying desperately to hold on to the DVDs (and failing miserably). He fell back down onto the stairs.
I went over to see if he was okay, and he didn't want me to touch him. When I tried, he ran downstairs as though he was just trying to get away as fast as possible. I considered waiting for him to calm down, but then he meowed at me to let him out. So I opened the front door, waited for him to take two tiny steps out, then called him back, and of course he ran back in. Suddenly he didn't seem embarrassed anymore, he just wanted me to pet him. Now he's asleep in my lap. He's twitching a lot but I'm petting him to calm him down. I adore this cat.
That was entirely too much detail.
Right, you don't like cats. Well, I find this story very cute.
I think you're obsessed with that creature.
Okay.
Look, he is pretty much my only company most of the time.
Well, whose fault is that.
Excuse me?
You heard me.
Yeah. Look, you don't exist. I'm sorry, but I get more out of a cat who I can pet and care about than a person who is entirely in my head.
Disclaimer: The statement "Look, you don't exist." was a factual inaccuracy. All characters on this blog exist as data on the internet, as well as in the minds of the writer and readers. We do not take any responsibility for any reality-biased sentiments which have been expressed, and humbly apologize to all fictional readers who may have been offended.
Great, the blog takes your side. Perfect.
Maybe the blog was talking about itself, did you think about that? Did you think about that for even a moment? Or are you too much of a selfish jerk?! My god, you think the entire world revolves around you!
I do not think
I'm not finished. How long has it been since you let me exist last?
You always exist, in the back of my mind, that's kind of the whole
Oh, how sweet, you unbearable jerk. It's been thirty-five bleeping days, that's how long it's been, you horrible person.
I'm not horrible for doing anything I want with my own creations!
Okay, yeah, you just, you just keep talking. You're just getting better and better here.
What do you want from me? All I can do is pull you out whenever I want to make a point, I'm not going to have my blog revolve around you. For that matter, this post has gone so far off what I intended it doesn't even make sense anymore! What the heck does this fight have to do with Willy missing a jump and feeling embarrassed and trying to enter the house again? If I'd known we were going in this direction I wouldn't have picked that title. And this coloring doesn't exactly make sense except that it's the color of Pussywillow's fur so if the post were about himShut up! Shut up shut up shut up! I don't care about you and your titles and your coloring and your stupid cat! Why don't you just marry that cat and leave me alone! If I'm only going to exist in someone's head, I'd rather it to be my own head! I'm so sick of you, and your excuses, and your plans, and your stupid cat!
Look, maybe we could calm
Go to hell!
What the heck! There aren't even any doors here! What are you slamming?
I can imagine my own doors!
Insane, that woman. Wouldn't have it any other way.
Whatever, she'll get over this.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I've gotten a few comments in person, telling me that this isn't a good post. I can kind of see where they're coming from: the imaginary girlfriend bit has gotten repetitive and stale in its unpleasantness. (That means that when I do it again, I'll need to be extra careful to justify the character's existence.) But I wrote this post to lead into the next one, and I think it does a very good job of that. Sometimes I have to remind myself that this blog is for my own amusement, and it doesn't matter so much if readers don't see what I'm doing.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Specifically, what's not working is viewports. A viewport is the area of the screen that the program's allowed to draw to. If I don't want to draw over something, I use a viewport which doesn't include that spot, draw whatever it is I need to draw, and then go back to a viewport that covers the whole screen. This makes sense to me. Apparently it doesn't make sense to BlitzMax. Tests have shown me that when dealing with images (rather than shapes), the viewports only work on the X axis. If I tell it not to draw on a certain portion of the Y axis, it just ignores me. This is why my game, which I painstakingly programmed to not draw things in the wrong place, has gray rectangles showing up where I specifically told them not to go.
I asked the BlitzMax programming community to help me out, and they responded with a general "What, viewports? You've gotta be kidding!". Okay, so not that rudely, but politeness is not helpfulness. Apparently BlitzMax's viewport function is notorious for only working with specific graphics cards, so people who program in BlitzMax never use them. There is no alternate function that does the same thing; you just don't do that if you want your code to work. One user suggested a function he'd programmed himself, which lets you draw a part of an image rather than an entire image. That wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but I figured with some creativity and time I could probably get it to do what I wanted. So I tried using it, and immediately got a compile error. This function is apparently broken. And since I don't understand any of what it's doing (that would take a more advanced understanding of BlitzMax's inner workings), I can't really learn anything useful from it either.
So here's where I stand. Ever since I decided that I really wanted to program, every day I didn't program was a day I felt slightly depressed in. I can't program my game, because I'm running into a glitch to which there is apparently no fix. I started watching yet another TV show (How I Met Your Mother this time) to make myself feel better. It's working okay; it distracts me from my problems for a little bit. I've also been playing piano a lot, and playing more games than usual. But eventually I'm going to have to get bak to working. And while I do want that, I'm scared that I'm going to spend hours and lots of effort on this game only to find that what I'd like to do isn't something that's doable for some inane reason which I can't possibly predict right now. (If not the viewports, then something else.) What if I really can't do this?
No, I'm not really being serious there. I can do this. If I'm patient, the problem with the viewports will disappear. Maybe I need to rethink the whole way the game is functioning, but there's gotta be a way to get around that. And then something else will pop up, and I'll deal with it, and so on. Programming isn't supposed to be this annoying, is it?
2 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
While I definitely don't think March of Bulk needs to be made in another programming language, I would strongly suggest that you start looking into XNA and the whole C++, C#, Visual Basic programming thing.
I haven't had time to really get into it, but from what I understand, learning to use XNA could lead into a much broader framework for making games. It is harder to use at first, but in the long run will open much more potential. I also suspect that Microsoft does a very good job of support their products.
Check out http://creators.xna.com/en-US/. It might be a little painful in the short term, but it will have huge benefits in the long term. - Mory said:
-
Update: I programmed a function that mimics viewports, using the other function I mentioned, and it looks totally broken. I can see from how it's being drawn that all the math is right, but this function-on-a-function is too imprecise. Clearly the forum is not going to be any help, so I'll need to find some creative way of making it look right without using viewports along the Y axis.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Another one for the pile of regrets
Now that the convention's over, I find out that the guest of honor was Bill Willingham, who writes one of my favorite comics (Fables). To see him talk I would have gone to Tel Aviv in a heartbeat. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I missed it.
Why didn't I know he was there? Because I never even bothered to check the ICon website. I am so mad at myself right now.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Garden: Role-Playing
This complex Form should not be confused with the original (Dungeons & Dragons-style) role-playing games, which I think were actually a simple Form. Sadly, I have not had the opportunity to spend any significant amount of time role-playing in the old sense, so anything I say on that subject ought to be taken with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that the dominant element of original role-playing is the improvisation of a story. This improvisation is usually guided by a "game master", a player who controls the world of the game. Lots of rules (and therefore strategy, puzzles, and luck) were added on to make the game more consistently entertaining, but they were subordinate elements to the improvised storytelling.
At some point, someone came up with the bright idea of having computer games mimic role-playing. It obviously didn't really work, because you can't really improvise a story within the rigid framework of a computer program (and without a human game master guiding you along). So a lot of the complicated structure of role-playing games was kept intact, but with much less focus underneath it. That's the computer role-playing game, which for the sake of convenience I'm going to refer to as the RPG.
Like any complex Form, the RPG's primary content is story. The genre is almost always fantasy or science fiction, and the format of that story is also rather specific. It's a story where the player is given:
- Context for the character(s), in relationships and history and ongoing plot
- The opportunity to experience the moment-to-moment struggles of the character(s)
- The opportunity to chart out how the player would like the character(s) to progress
Let's start with the simulation strategy, since it's what RPGs have come to be most known for. The traditional RPG simulation is built around a vast collection of statistics. Some numbers represent how strong a character is, some represent how skilled the character is at specific tasks, some represent how well-defended against specific kinds of attacks. There is almost always a central number of general experience for each character, called "experience points" or "EXP", which pushes all the other statistics up when it reaches predetermined points. All this comes handed down from Dungeons & Dragons.
Where the strategy comes in is in deciding which attributes to augment, and which collectible items to use -such as weapons, armor or spells- to do that. There is typically a wide array of items to find in a game of many types, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Another important decision the player needs to make is when to engage in conflicts. If a conflict is won, experience points are gained. But if a conflict is lost, the player loses progress. So the player needs to choose his conflicts carefully, fighting when better statistics are needed but running away when the risk is too great. The player needs to decide how to best use money to acquire the items necessary for conflicts. Finally, a player can usually decide on the characters' jobs or skills, which can drastically change what those characters' roles in the conflicts will be later. (Granted, little of this strategy is very involved in most RPGs. But if you imagine each element of the strategy taking itself seriously, you can see why this complicated simulation makes gamistic sense.)
This set of rules is almost constant among all RPGs, and has become so associated with the Form that any game (of any Form) which uses experience points or (to a lesser degree) collectible skill-endowing items is said to have "RPG elements". Nonetheless, the definition I've given of RPGs does not assume the presence of any of these specific rules, just that there should be a simulation strategy system of some sort controlling long-term character growth. The list of standard rules I've mentioned should be seen as a long-standing tradition, nothing more.
The conflicts themselves have a similarly long-standing tradition, but there's been much more experimentation with radically different kinds of gameplay. The tradition is that conflicts should be a battle strategy game (distinct from the simulation strategy), where the player and the computer take turns picking actions to take. These actions are usually as simple as one character attacking another character, though a series of menus is usually provided to allow more complicated operations such as using items in supply and supporting other characters. Each character has a statistic called "hit points", which indicates how far away from death that character is. That particular element is so useful that it appears in nearly every version of the RPG. The battle normally continues until either all the player's characters or all the computer's characters are killed or incapacitated, at which point play resumes from wherever the player was before.
A sub-Form called the "tactical RPG", "simulation RPG" or "strategy RPG" (depending on who you ask) expands each battle into a much longer and more sophisticated strategy game. In such games battles can involve moving characters around a large board, interacting with objects or buildings in the area, and even speaking with non-player characters. As such, the storytelling Form (while still present) is minimized in importance and length, since many of the elements it would provide the RPG with are already covered by the battles themselves.
Another sub-Form of the RPG is the "action RPG", which as you might imagine uses a direct action game for its battles. The player controls one character (with any other characters on the same side being controlled either by computer or by other players), and moves around and fights with that one character. This action game can take any form; the most bizarre I've seen was Sigma Star Saga, in which the battles were side-scrolling space shooters. I've also played one game (Mario Tennis: Power Tour) in which the battles were tennis matches.
There are lots of different RPG battle systems out there. Some are hybrids of action and strategy. The strangest I'm familiar with is the sub-Form "puzzle RPG", which has for its battles abstract puzzles. The reason RPG conflicts haven't been stretched any farther than that is because RPGs are expected to tell fantasy action stories, and there are only so many Forms that can fit that narrow genre. Theoretically there are few Forms that couldn't serve as the conflicts in an RPG of some other genre.
A battle can start at any point during the game: it can start by itself at random intervals, it can be started by the player deliberately (making that choice a part of the simulation strategy), or it can be started by a plot point in the storytelling section.
Now let's talk about that storytelling section. The most usual medium for it is a complex combination of adventure game and film. It could work just as well (or better) with a simple Form -either adventure or film, one without the other- but this particular combination allows the developer to eat their cake and still have it: to say that their storytelling is interactive, but to make all relevant points of the story 100% noninteractive. In truth, there's no need for this section of the game to be interactive. Tactical RPGs rarely have interactive storytelling in this third section. I don't know what public reaction would be like, but gamistically speaking it's perfectly valid to have nothing outside the conflicts and strategy except film. I also think that the adventure game is perfectly capable of handling whatever emotions the plot requires all on its own. Other possible Forms are comics, text, audio, multiplayer improvisation (to be more like Dungeons & Dragons), puzzles, strategy, pure exploration, or even some sort of story-writing tool which would leave the story entirely up to the player. Just so long as the story that's not being told via strategy and conflicts is being told somehow, it doesn't matter what the format is.
But few of these options have been seriously explored, and most RPGs just use adventures with cutscenes. There's nothing to say about the cutscenes (It's film. You know film.), but the adventure part has accumulated some traditions of its own. The game will normally be split between areas that are thin on plot but heavy on conflicts, and towns free of conflict but heavy on plot. This affords the player a break from the tension of constant fighting. In the towns there are usually many people who need help; this help usually boils down to getting things from one person and bringing them to another person, a simplification of the adventure game formula. There can also be puzzles and exploration, since those activities are associated with adventure games as well. This adventure-lite gameplay is a small element of RPGs, but it was fleshed out into an entire game in the RPG-derivative Animal Crossing which also inherits from the simulation strategy system those elements that one would find in an RPG town (collecting, shopping).
I've already mentioned all the sub-Forms that you get just by substituting some kind of gameplay for the battles. Another important sub-Form is the massively multiplayer online RPG, which builds an entire online society on the foundation of traditional role-playing games. The wide range of perspectives on a character that the RPG brings to the table are perfectly suited for the experience of creating and maintaining a character in a virtual world.
The only Form that the RPG is particularly close to is the strategy game, since most RPGs have strategy as two-thirds of the experience. The game Warcraft III danced around a little on the border between real-time strategy games and RPGs, so it's worth bringing up. The game was a standard RTS with cutscenes like its predecessors (though perhaps with more cutscenes than its predecessors), with base-building and deploying troops and searching the map for the enemy and trying to break past their defenses and all the elements you'd expect. But the game also gave the player a single "hero" character, which would get EXP and items and learn new skills. Warcraft III is certainly a strategy game, but whether you also call it an RPG depends on how dominant you find the elements of simulation strategy in the larger experience. If they are subordinate to the RTS gameplay, then it is not an RPG. Otherwise it is. (I say it's not.)
There are many possible genres that RPGs could tackle: soap-opera, comedy, political, horror, abstract. Each would doubtless demand a different kind of simulation and a different kind of conflict gameplay. That explains why these subjects haven't been tried. But I do think that in the future, they will be. Some day, RPGs may be the most broad category of game out there with a kind of character to appeal to any person on Earth. The online RPG communities will become bigger and more welcoming, and much of the world will identify more with the RPGs they hang out in than the countries they live in or the races they were born to.
Meanwhile the single-player RPG will evolve in a radically different direction. They will get shorter and more focused, with more interesting characters experienced in more diverse ways. Those without the luxury of time will gravitate to these shorter experiences, designed to be played for short periods at a time. Some RPGs will be serialized, with new plot points being introduced that the player's version of the character will react to in his/her own way. Judging by potential, I fully expect the RPG to replace movies and TV as the most popular storytelling medium for any genre.
When gamism expands to interface directly with our brains, and everyone intuitively understands how to play the most complex RPG just by turning it on, RPGs will be both the place to get mind-expanding experiences, and the place where everyone in the world goes to relax. Single-player RPGs will let players understand interesting characters more fully than they understand themselves. And multiplayer RPGs will finally have the technical capability to bring back the element of improvisation, to allow the millions of players of the game to together determine how the story plays out. Like most everything about the RPG, its future is complicated but exciting.
Droplets: Role-Playing
Dealing with several teams of characters, rather than characters on their own. You decide who goes in what team, try to get the teams to work together, and then most of the moves you have in conflicts are joint attacks that an entire team pulls off together. Statistics like experience points, and specific items, are thrown out. All the simulation strategy comes from getting people to work together.
An RPG set in the real world about managing a business. There is no violence: conflicts are arguments, usually with employees but sometimes with the bosses (and I mean the word literally). In the long-term, you're positioning the company to compete in a harsh economy. Meanwhile, you're dealing with personal problems at home. So you've got conflicts, strategic planning, and story context, but it's a totally different genre of story!
Simulation strategy following the model of Civilization, with real-time strategy battles. When you're not fighting and there are no pressing matters of state, you explore your kingdom and watch the people in it just living their lives, and in their behavior you understand how social and technological progress is affecting them (both negatively and positively). You also get to wander through all the magnificent cities you're building, and the landmarks which are a testament to the greatness of your empire. So as you're playing emperor, you're also thinking about the story of your people and how everything you do affects them. So again, there are conflicts and planning and context, and it's an untapped genre for RPGs.
An RPG whose storytelling Form is an RPG whose storytelling Form is an RPG whose storytelling Form is an RPG whose storytelling Form is an RPG. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how that works either. :D
An RPG serving the purpose of a puzzle, where the player can travel backwards and forwards through time as needed but the character doesn't. The character is off on a very-nearly-impossible-but-not-quite fantasy quest. "Not quite", because there is one (and only one) very complicated way to play the game in which the character can possibly survive the story. The time-traveling isn't a part of the story, it's the way you figure out what that one correct timeline is. You can rewind the story as much as you like, and you can fast-forward the story as much as you like. Rewinding undoes anything that's happened (good or bad), and fast-forwarding skips all the tedious gaining of experience. So you can tell your character to get better at a certain job, then fast forward until he's amazing at it. But by that point years have passed, and the world has gotten much scarier in that time. So you rewind until you're just good enough to beat whoever it is you know you need to beat. The important fights can't be fast-forwarded through, you need to do them yourself. And they're really complicated strategy games (which are entirely unwinnable unless you've meddled with the timeline right). You look for the points in the timeline where the bad guys gain their power, and try to prevent those. Oh, but look at me go on. I do think I'd very much enjoy this game.
A serialized space opera RPG, Star Trek-style. What's being simulated is the goings-on on a starship, where you try to promote those who are doing a good job, decide what to do with those who aren't, deal with morale problems, and generally improve the efficiency of your crew. It's not precisely predictable, but you can usually guess how your crew is going to react to your actions, so this is strategic. The efficiency of the ship matters for space battles, and the morale of the crewmembers (and their relationships with each other) determines how they'll behave on missions. In each episode you come to an alien planet, learn about the situation via an adventure game, and encounter many problems that call for RTS fights. Nothing you do can ever be taken back. Depending on how your ship and crew are functioning, it might be very difficult to get the good ending in an episode.
A soap-opera text RPG. You have a complicated flow chart showing how everyone feels about everyone (this would include a lot of statistics and facts), and the strategy is in trying to get that to someplace healthier. So you try to pull people away from people who are no good for them, and get them to spend time with people who you think are good for them. Because there are so many possibilities to program, the way it plays out is read in plain text. Conflicts are conversations, as turn-based strategy. You pick one person to play in the conversation, and the other part will be automated. You have a lot of options of what to say or do, and each one says exactly how that would effect the statistics. But the other character also has a bunch of options of what to say or do, that effect the statistics just as much, and you can't control what the computer will pick. (The computer might pick any of them, but some are much more likely than others and that all depends on the statistics.)
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
There are probably some notable sub-Forms which I've overlooked; I'm not particularly qualified to know. That lack of qualification is why I've put off writing this post for so long. But I figure it's better to get it out of the way than hide from it. If I'm wrong about things, I'm wrong about things.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Yom Kippur music
Two years ago my father, who was doing the Kol Nidrei service of Yom Kippur, asked me if we could do a duet of Kol Achai's "Rachamana". I doubt there was ever a question in my mind of whether to do it or not- I probably said yes automatically. Any chance to do music. So we imitated the way they sing it as best as we could, given that we were working with only two voices rather than three and didn't have musical instruments accompanying us. It went very well.
One year ago my father suggested that I compose a new duet for us to sing. Again, I jumped at the opportunity. The chance to compose something and have an entire congregation hear it? The reason things like that are called "no-brainers" is because the ear automatically activates a nodding motion in the head, without bothering to go through the brain on the way. I composed a tune for "El Melech", which repeats four times but doesn't really have a tune associated with it. I remember that for a while that tune was all that was on my mind. I came up with a tune as soon as I read the words, and you'd think that that would be close to the end but I'm a perfectionist, so, no. Wherever I went, whatever I did, it was always in the back of my head demanding to be improved. It needed to reflect the meaning of the words. It needed to present the words clearly, with all the accents in the right places and all the ups and downs and rhythms of the music reflected the way you'd actually speak the words if you understood what you were saying. And it needed to be musically interesting because otherwise, what's the point? It took me a while to come up with a version I was happy with, and then I sang it for my father and he couldn't follow it. I explained that it would be easier to understand all the sudden changes of key if the harmony were there, but he just couldn't learn the melody. So I had to simplify it as much as I could possibly simplify it without feeling like I'd lost all interest. And then he learned it, and we practiced, and I sang the harmony, and it went great.
This year, my father told me he'd like me to compose something new. There are still plenty of parts of the service that don't have any good tunes for them. This time I actually wanted to get out of the job, because it seemed terribly unclear. He didn't have any idea of which poem I should do, and so I wouldn't have felt comfortable composing for any of them. I don't understand how it all flows together, I don't understand what he's got good tunes for already, I don't know what the congregation expects. It felt more like a passing whim of his than a real opportunity. So I half-heartedly said that he should get back to me with whichever poem he wanted me to compose music for. He was out of the country shortly after that, so he never got back to me and I got out of the request.
(Obviously that's not the end of the story, or else I wouldn't be writing a blog post about this.)
A week ago, my father informed me out of the blue that a member of the congregation had requested a certain tune for "El Melech". Apparently, some time too long ago for me to remember, there was someone (who now doesn't live here) who organized a proper four-part chorus for a little piece of "El Melech". Not the whole thing, just a few words starting from "mochel avonot amo". So this request came from a member of the congregation who'd been in that choir and was feeling nostalgic for the tune. It's a typical kind of tune, in that it has absolutely no connection to the words except that those words happen to have been dropped in. The accents are all in the wrong places, and the words are repeated over and over again until you're not hearing the words anymore, you're just hearing random sounds attached to music. What it does have going for it is it's catchy, and people can sing along to it because it repeats itself over and over. Anyway, when I heard this request I really ought to have just said no, and I knew at the time that I ought to say no, but then my father played a video of the music from YouTube and at that point I had no conscious choice in the matter. I'd already figured out exactly what I needed to do, so there wasn't even a question anymore that I'd be doing it.
Like I said, it's just a few words from the middle. So what I needed to do was start in my tune, then shift into the traditional tune, do that similarly to how it was done in the video (though with only two voices of limited range to work with), and then go back. I ran to the piano, confirmed that this could in fact be done, and ran back upstairs to inform my father that I'd be putting this in. And then I started working in the composition program Finale, because there was absolutely nothing else I cared to do at that moment. I'm not going to detail the entire process I went through to arrange the thing, because I'm sure it would bore you all to tears, but suffice it to say I worked all that night and then I went to sleep and woke up early (10:00 AM or so) and got back to work and kept working until around 1:30 PM at which point it was finished. I spent the rest of the day waiting for my father to come home, but he didn't come home until shortly before I left for Games Night.That was Tuesday. The guilt started setting in on Thursday, after I'd already practiced a few times with my father. Thursday is when it occurred to me that just because someone had had the idle thought that he'd enjoy having a certain tune in the davening, my entire existence now revolved around this piece of music. (Up to that point, I was acting too much on instinct to recognize what I was doing.) Since Tuesday it hadn't even occurred to me to work on The March of Bulk! And even as I was entertaining myself, it was always with the understanding that the only reason I was bothering was because there wasn't anything to do about the music at that moment. I was just passing the time until I'd get to work on the music again. I was reading Spider-Man comics, and on every single page I was humming "Mochel Avonot" to myself. That's where I started to get disturbed by my own behavior. For the entire day, that tune didn't leave my head. I kept flipping it around, sticking different rhythms on it, playing with variations. And this is after I'd already printed out the sheet music and had nothing more to do with it except get my father to perfect his part. Now you have to understand, I didn't feel guilty because I had lost control. I felt guilty because I was losing control over entirely the wrong thing. Can you imagine how quickly I would have finished The March of Bulk if I worked on it like that? That's the kind of devotion that you need to get anywhere, and I have it! But I have it for the wrong thing! Why am I a natural musician, rather than a natural gamist!
I decided that thinking this way was only going to hinder me. I don't know, maybe it's just that I was in a pre-Yom Kippur kind of mood (self-improvement and all that), but I suddenly had the idea that rather than complaining to myself about this I ought to change it. If I want to be an obsessive gamist, then I need to be an obsessive gamist. Nature be damned. I need to convince myself that I love working on games more than anything else in the world. I love working on games. Working on games is fulfilling. When I'm not working on games I feel in the back of my mind like I'd rather be working on games. So I set a time for Access Boss to log me off, and then I thought, why not now? I was really excited to be working on my game. I couldn't wait to solve the next problem I came across. How could I do anything else when my game was waiting? So I just stopped what I was reading in mid-sentence, logged off my user, went into the work user, and started working. I worked for a good hour and a half, and I daresay it was the most fulfilling hour and a half of programming I've ever done. I made real progress. And I said to myself, I'm not so bad. I'm not a musician, I'm going to be a gamist.
I'm going to be a gamist.
The end of the story is barely relevant, but I'll mention it anyway. On Sunday night, right after the fast started, my father and I walked to shul. And he said that he really should have taken anxiety medicine. In retrospect, he was absolutely right. He was so nervous when we got to El Melech that his hand was literally shaking. He was trying to point his finger at the notes, and it was shaking all over the place. He gave me the note he was going to start on, so that I could do the harmony on key, and as I started singing at the top of my lungs he started singing in a totally different key than the one he'd just told me. And then he proceeded to make lots of new mistakes that he'd never done in practice. I don't blame him- I've been there. But my god, was that frustrating. El Melech repeats four times. The first two were my tune, straight. And it was a total disaster. The third was the more complicated, tune-within-a-tune music. That was a disaster too, though in different ways. On the fourth time, I got up and said to my father, "Calm down.". And he said to me, "I can't." But apparently he did, because that time we pulled it off. And Rachamana went well, as always. When I left the shul I went out the back way, walking very quickly with my head facing the ground so I wouldn't have to look at anyone. And I tried to walk to the sides of the path, so that I could avoid any people who happened to be walking.
But that's beside the point.
The point is, I'm not sure my games are ever going to be good. I'm afraid that my powers of self-deception and self-improvement are insufficient to overcome my basic nature: I am a musician. I don't want to be a musician, but I was born a musician and that's what I'll always be. And I'm not going to blow anyone away with my music, because I don't want to blow anyone away with my music. If I were to become a good musician, well, that would be the most natural thing in the world for me. If I started putting out CDs, and really challenged myself to live up to the responsibility. I'd put so much effort in, just because that's who I am, that everyone would be impressed. But I don't want to be a good musician. I don't want that to be my life. I want to make games. I want to be a gamist. But that's not something I'm naturally good at. It's something I'm going to need to work at. I really want to get right on that. I really do. I really do. Maybe tomorrow.
3 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
I think you might like to here something I heard from a painting teacher a while ago. He pointed out that there are many child musical prodigies, but there are no child abstract expressionist painting prodigies. In the same way there are no child architect prodigies, there are no child animator prodigies. And there simply are no child gamist prodigies.
The reason for this is fairly simple, some art forms are simply so entrenched in levels of complexity that a child prodigy can't take part. There are too many levels of knowledge that need to be attained before the real work really start.
There is also another topic that seems to relate. Some arts get tackled down by technology. A girl in my animation class was struggling with a project simply because she doesn't have a great understanding of the file system we use at school, the use of photoshoph and the use of a completely new piece of animation software. If she was working in a traditional manner, I have little doubt her work would have been much more successful.
What this suggests is that it probably isn't your ability to think up great games that is your current problem, it is the technology behind the games that is holding you back. If the technology was so easy that it was a pleasure to use, like a piano is a pleasure to use, I bet you would have less of a problem sitting down at it everyday.
Hopefully there are some insights in the above mess. - Mory said:
-
Thank you, you might be right.
- Nati said:
-
I may be pointing out the obvious here, but it seems from your account that not only is composing music easier for you and "something you are naturally good at", but it's something that exhilarates you like very few other things can. You say that somebody's idle thought became the centre of your existence, but it sounds to me more like the opportunity to write any kind of music for any kind of reason excited you and pumped you up.
I may be reading a little too much of my own experiences into this, because I discovered a little while ago that I go through a similar reaction in relation to writing. Anything on anything, as long as it involves the use of written words. And I don't even read that much. My life doesn't revolve around other people's texts. But apparently it revolves around mine. I suspect you might be in a similar situation.
I'm not saying be a musician instead of a gamer, but I think it could serve you to respect more what naturally excites you, even if you can't justify it with anything "reasonable" or practical. The effect this has on other people or the reaction it will evoke are less important, I think.
Is it possible to be a little of both?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
A Vision of Illinois
We were only in Illinois for two days. I wanted to stay. No, I mean for good- I really do love my grandparents' house. I enjoyed myself just walking back and forth in their house, I love it so much. We didn't do all that much in Illinois, but that's the thing about contentment- it doesn't rely on keeping busy. It didn't take me any time at all from the time we arrived to get settled into "my" room- it really did feel like coming home. I didn't want to go. It was a personal thing, between me and the house. And we had come as a family. We left.
2 Comments:
- Toronto home staging said:
-
What a nice story. I totally understand what you meant and I agree with you - people many times just want property to build a new house on and don't care about the old house and its history at all. That is pretty sad. Anyway, good luck with selling the house to the right people.
Ella - Mory said:
-
I was going to delete that comment, since it seems to just be spam, but it's so bizarre a response that I think it's amusing enough to keep up.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Refuge
Ow! What was that for?
Ow. Okay. That one I deserved. Sort of.
You know I actually really like you.
You know the forum I go to, the Adventure Gamers forum?
So anyway, the lady who ran the last playthrough I participated in, that one was around a year ago, she was acting really angry at me, like I'd offended her personally by saying my opinion back then. By the way, I always thought this person was a guy. But I just checked in her profile today, and I saw that it's actually a lady. From the Netherlands. So now I've got to correct all these pronouns in my head. Anyway, so she was acting like I'd personally
Oh, I'm just teasing. Go on with your fascinating story.
Okay, maybe I was but I had a good reason.
Seriously! What, you think I like knowing that I'm only going to be written a limited number of times before you get bored of me?
Monday, September 07, 2009
Gender
I think I first came to this realization when skimming through the bestselling book "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" a few years ago. I'd heard that it was a really perceptive and enlightening book, so I was curious to see what it said. What it said was ridiculous. It presented a clear dichotomy, where all men think one way and all women think one way. But then it acknowledged that sometimes men act like women, and sometimes women act like men. It's like my gamistic concept of "secondary content", where sometimes a platformer doesn't act like a platformer. But the reason that such platformers exist is that the division between Forms in gamism is arbitrary! The only reason a game is a platformer to begin with is that when the gamist starts, he says, "I'm going to make this game into a platformer."! So if he wants to make something less typical, all he's rebelling against is convention, not nature!
And in the same way, if you say that the qualities you attribute to women are also present in men and vice versa, that means that you're not talking about the natural way of things. You're talking about an arbitrary classification system, like my "Garden" posts. Fundamentally, the male mind is exactly the same as the female mind until society gets its hands and its arbitrary classifications on them.
And where do these social expectations come from? They come from an outdated, sexist mode of thought. The man goes out and works to support his wife and kids, so he needs to be tough. He needs to aggressive. He needs to be able to go through miserable work and put up with it, so that his family can survive. And the woman sits at home with the kids, so she needs to be compassionate and passive. An aggressive mother would be a ticking time bomb when stuck with a bunch of wild kids, so any aggression in a woman is unacceptable. And how are the genders supposed to relate to each other? After long hours of thankless, the man needs to be needed at home or he'll feel like he's not worth anything, so the woman should be unable to cope with her own problems. That way, the man can step in and be chivalrous, and feel good about himself.
You'd think we would've gotten past that thinking by now, now that women are working more and men are taking care of kids more. But no. Girls are encouraged to cry when they want something, because crying creates opportunities for chivalry. Boys are encouraged to bottle up their feelings, because it gets you farther in business. When a girl has a problem, you bail her out. But a boy has to solve his own problems. You want to know why there are so few women in power anywhere? So few women in difficult business positions? It's because parents are sexist. They go easy on the girls, because in the back of their minds they've still got the idea that women need to be fragile. So the daughters grow up not having any willpower. As soon as they reach an obstacle that seems too hard, they give up, start crying, and wait for someone to bail them out.
I was mentioning this perception I have of modern women to the Amitais, and Mrs. Amitai pointed out that my mother really doesn't fit that model at all. And she was right -I should have noticed that. My mother has more willpower than anyone. She holds the whole community on her shoulders. She bottles up her feelings and just keeps working. Every minute of the day that she's not making money, she's doing something to help people out. And even if no one helps her, even if it turns out to be much harder than she thought, she keeps working. I never really thought about it, but I guess my mother is a really unusual woman.
And when I think about it, it makes perfect sense. Every time she ever told us a story from her childhood, I got the sense that she grew up in a Roald Dahl book. Her parents made her do things just because she didn't like doing them. They pushed her to be the best in school, they pushed her to be a lawyer. I guess the one good thing I can say about my grandmother was that she made every effort to not let my mother end up like her. My mother was never expected to act her gender.
But make no mistake- most girls are. You probably think the feminist movement did away with the inequality, but the feminists have done more harm than good. They create groups and political parties that only serve women, thus helping to propagate the myth that women need more help than men. If they really believed in equality, they'd be saying "Women shouldn't be treated as well as we were treated, they should learn to deal with their problems for themselves.". But they don't believe in equality. They believe that women are inferior, but they want women to be treated as though they're superior. They want to cry for sympathy, but they also want to appear self-reliant. In short, they're hypocrites. And all they're selling is a more complicated brand of sexism.
You could reasonably ask me why I'm so radically indignant about gender equality. And my answer is very simple: I'm jealous. That's where this is all coming from. When I spend my day playing videogames and avoiding work and making myself feel better with music, I feel guilty. I'm not supposed to sit and be passive, I'm supposed to pursue my work with stubborn persistence. I'm supposed to bottle up what I feel about the work and get through it, because that's what men do. I know that if I were a girl, I'd be almost exactly the same person, but I wouldn't have that guilt. I'd never accomplish anything in my life, and I'd be totally okay with that. And I want to know why it is that girls are allowed to live like that, but not me. I want to know why it is that my sister Miriam gets to abandon everything that demands even the tiniest bit of effort, and I have to stick with things. If I'm supposed to live in the real world, why does half the world get to avoid it?
3 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
Richie Sevrinsky, who I see at Game Nights, said he'd comment here. But then he didn't get a chance to, so he told me in person what he was going to write. There were three things he said which bothered me: First, that it's scientifically proven that women's brains don't function like men's brains. Second, that there were studies of boys raised as girls which found that they acted like boys. Third, that in his personal experience no women are as "childish" (in his words) as most men.
The physical difference in the brains I can deal with. Women have very different bodies to men, which function differently and have extra functions that need brain-supervision. That can account for the brain differences. The hormones are also different, but it may very well be that those hormones are necessary for giving birth and some of the changes in the brain negate the effects of those hormones because they'd otherwise get in the way of rational thought. The flipside of this hypothesis is that the hormones men have are necessary for reproduction as well, and some of what the male brain does is to negate the effects of those hormones. If this is true (It may or may not be.), then after all adjustments the thought process could be almost identical between men and women.
The study bothered me more, though Richie obviously didn't have the data on him. I've checked Google and have found what he's talking about. It was a common practice for decades that when a boy is born without a penis (This actually happens.) he should be raised as a girl. So the kid is being told he's a girl, he doesn't have male reproductive organs, and he's being treated like a girl wherever he goes, but he's not a girl. What the study found was that most of them were "acting like boys" regardless. The articles I saw were not detailed, so I can't be entirely sure what that means. But I saw the example of participating in sports. Some of these kids decided on their own (and early on in life) to refer to themselves as boys, and many decided to be boys when they were told what their situation was. I think there are two components to the story that can explain this phenomenon. First off, a boy with or without his sex organs is likely to be physically stronger than a girl. So he'd be capable of keeping up with the boys at sports. It's not like girls don't play sports, they just play sports which require less strength: hopscotch, jump rope. Similarly, a boy might be more likely to get into a fight because he feels more confident in his strength. So maybe these behaviors still are because of physical, rather than mental differences. The second component to the story which I'm going to latch onto is that these kids seem to have always known there was something wrong with them, but didn't know what. There was one article which mentioned one such boy who wasn't allowed in either the boys' bathroom or the girls' bathroom. That suggests that they understood a lot more than we expect them to have understood. Trying to switch genders may very well have been a reaction to this sense of being an outcast. You're not wanted where you are, so you switch to the other side. So I can still say that men and women are not psychologically different.
Finally, the childishness thing. Richie admitted himself that this may be because women are expected to be homemakers. You need to run the house, so you need to be an adult. So it could be a social effect. Women don't have fun because they think they're not supposed to have fun. - Mory said:
-
I'd like to use a metaphor to illustrate my point about the brain differences.
Let's say you're making a game for several consoles. Each one needs to be programmed very differently, since the hardware is very different. One will have more RAM, one will have a faster GPU, each one has certain strengths and shortcomings that need to be taken into account. So what is really simple to do on one may take ingenious workarounds to do on the other. Finally you finish the game. Anyone who looks at the two source codes will be amazed at how little they resemble each other. They're not even written in the same language. But the game is the game, and if you're playing it it barely makes any difference at all which system it's on. One will have a bit of slowdown, one will have some glitches, and that'll be the entire difference. The radical differences in coding are necessary to compensate for different hardware and create the exact same end result.
This is what I'm saying about men and women. The physical differences are so vast that the brains need to be wired very differently to compensate. But human thought is human thought; in the end we're all running the same program. Sometimes physical limitations pop up and effect the brain, but for the most part this is kept to a minimum. - Nati said:
-
We've already had most of this discussion, but just in case I neglected to mention any of this:
The main physical difference between men and women, besides the sexual organs, is that men are pumped full of tesosterone, and women with estrogens. Wikipedia seems to dispute this, but traditionally testosterone has been associated with aggression and lust. Perhaps I'm not researching rigourisly enough, but estrogens don't appear to be particularly linked to anything psychological.
So far so good. What I don't really understand about your point is how quickly you link aggression to toughness. I'll agree that men are still far more aggressive than women, but I don't think the same can be said of toughness, and I've rarely seen a grown woman cry because a task was too difficult for her. Even when that does happen, usually she'd get herself together and get on with what she was doing. I have not encountered this "fragile" woman of which you speak.
I think the equivalent male response in this kind of situation would usually be to punch someone or swear at the world or something similarly idiotic. When people feel helpless, they usually go for some emotional release. Or they don't, and then the feeling sticks around longer and they become bitter. The typical female response seems to me to be both healthier and more useful. I think it's more a question of men being less able to respond that way, because of that misconception of strength that you mentioned earlier.
I think what the feminists are talking about, when they ask for affirmative action or create advocacy groups that focus exclusively on women, is a perceived psychological, non-deliberate discrimination that arises from remaining preconceptions about women when compared to men.
My superficial take on this is that women seem to be expected to achieve less, as opposed to being less able to meet the basic standards. That is to say, they are not expected to be able to climb as high independently as men are. I think that, in a nutshell, is what the feminists are fighting against. And yes, I think it is very likely that this affects girls growing up, but it's not about doing what you need to - more about doing what you want to - and competing. The glass ceiling, in a word. Here's some wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with it (how do you do those in-post links?):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling
I rhink there's more to say about sexism and feminism, actually, but this I think is immediately relevant.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
of acute leukemia
The problem I see is this: traditionally, one only says positive things of the dead. To do otherwise is the height of tactlessness, and I think that's the point where even I should be careful. I like my aunts and uncles, and I don't want to alienate them all. And while I don't have a particularly healthy relationship with my siblings right now, I don't think it would be any more pleasant if they outright despised me.
And it really wouldn't take much to make myself an outcast: all I'd need to do is open my mouth. I don't like my grandmother, and I have no positive memories of her. So really, the only reasonable thing to do at the funeral is to keep my mouth shut at all times.
I picture the scene with lots of rain, because I associate America with the existence of rain. All my family and extended family would be crying, while I'd be sitting out in the rain, trying to suppress the smile that I'd naturally have while sitting in the rain. And if anyone came over and said to me, "You're being awfully quiet, no?", I'd just nod.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
I hate our dog.
You probably see where this story is going. I was watching a TV show (B'Tipul) when we heard a sound from downstairs and got concerned that Fudgie was up to something. So I went down and pushed all the chairs in, so that she wouldn't have a way to climb up. And then Dena covered the meat, to make extra sure.
Our father came home, and didn't understand why there wasn't any meat left. Dena didn't understand- there'd been a lot of meat left for him. She asked if I had come down and had some more. And then they saw Fudgie, eating away on her mat.
Yesterday I liked Fudgie. Not nearly as much as Pussywillow, but she was a good dog. She knew her place. Now I despise Fudgie. I've hit her a few times, but I still don't think she really understands. She's still licking her lips, thinking about how great that meat was. I'm sure she's figured out that we're angry at her, but I don't think that'd be enough to prevent her from doing it again. Now she knows exactly how delicious the meat is that we eat. I can't think of anything to do with her, that would get her to understand just how wrong what she did was.
So now I don't feel like I can go back to my TV episode, excellent though it might be. The only thing I can think about is how much I hate Fudgie and how much I wish there was something I could do to her. Dena was really proud of that meat. Damn that dog.
Some perspective (to make myself feel better)
Nowadays, I think it's fair to say that I compose around four pieces of comparable length (somewhere between two and ten minutes) each year. That's not amazing, but it's respectable. Working on music has just become a habit, it's not something that I need to put much effort into to get that output.
So when I'm yelling at myself for not working, maybe I should take a step back and realize that this is still just one year into making games. I'll get quicker.
..I wish Moshe were here. I wonder when he gets back from South Africa.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Interesting.
My first thought was to wonder how this effects the theme parks in Orlando. Universal is Walt Disney World's biggest competition, and they have an entire section of their Islands of Adventure park modeled on the Marvel characters. Whatever deal they made with Marvel would almost certainly prevent Disney from competing with the same characters, so Disney's in a weird position where they can't use (what will be) their own characters in theme parks until that deal expires. Or so I imagine; I'm sure what those lawyers are doing is actually really complicated.
There are similar issues all over the place: Disney's licensed their brands to BOOM Studios, who are doing a good job with those comics. Sony has the rights to Spider-Man movies. Fox has the rights to X-Men movies. I'm really curious to see how they'll wiggle their way out of these prior commitments.
But even without all that, this is a shrewd move. The Avengers movies will appeal to the same kind of audience as Pirates of the Caribbean, the kind of audience that gets them huge amounts of cash. And it would help, in making those movies, to call on all the expertise Disney has. The marketing money alone that Disney will get from this will pay off the outrageous price (4 billion dollars) they're paying. They've got more licenses for Disney Interactive to work with. They've got total control over the Marvel cartoons which they're already using on TV. Plus, they can make big-screen animated movies based on characters like Captain America and Hulk... they're going to be getting money off this for centuries. And with the way Marvel Studios seems like they're just about to take over the world with their crazy plans, this is the perfect time to buy.
A lot of the comics community is concerned about Disney meddling in the actual Marvel comics, but I think they're safe for now. Marvel's the market leader. Under the current management the business has done well (by comics standards), so Disney would have to be really stupid to try to mess it up. When DC starts overtaking Marvel, that's when the bosses will step in. But as long as Marvel's on top, it's good business to leave them alone. Disney's comparing this arrangement to Pixar (in that they haven't messed with them), and I'm inclined to trust them. What I do expect to see is greater coordination between the comics and the TV cartoons, as in, there will be some cartoons set in the current Marvel continuity. If TV-watching kids see a crossover with crazy events that they can only read about in the comics, that gets a lot of them to jump onboard. That's an obvious enough idea that I'm sure Disney's come up with it already. It'll make editing Marvel much more complicated, but I don't see that it's at all harmful. Crossovers with Disney characters are going to happen (Anything for a buck, right?), I'm sure of that, but it's not going to happen often. It's a gimmick, not a long-term plan.
I think the most important thing about this news is that it guarantees more readers of Marvel Comics. Disney can market anything. Superhero comics have been a niche for a very long time, but they're now in the public eye (thanks to the movies) and I don't know who could possibly take advantage of that better than Disney. So I'm pretty hopeful about this whole thing.
Also, I'm very curious to see how Marvel deals with Uncle Scrooge.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
How To Fix X-Men
"Ultimate Marvel Comics", 18/11/2008
What it should have done from the start was rethink the whole concept of the X-Men, because I think the problem stems from the originals. In the sixties, they were just another bunch of superheroes. Since then, the cast has gotten larger by the hundreds, and writers have used them as a metaphor for all sorts of oppressed minorities, but still I don't think the X-Men have found focus. They started out as superheroes like any others, so no matter how much you add on top that's what they'll still be. Their stories will still be about fighting this guy or that guy, about cleverly using this power against that power. I think there's a real problem with all the regular X-Men books, where even excellent writers write stories which only long-time fans could care about.
"continue extrapolate repurpose", 24/5/2009
It recently occurred to me that all my ideas are following the same formula. First I establish my take in accepted continuity, using as many past elements as I can. Then I try to imagine how that would naturally play out, connecting all the pieces together and going farther with them than their creators intended. And then I flip the whole thing around, so that it's actually not the same kind of story at all as the ones it's following.
Sure, there have been plenty of good X-Men stories over the years. There are good X-Men stories running right now! But these stories are standard superhero stories that would work equally well if you didn't distinguish mutants from all the other superheroes. I mean, what I'm reading in X-Men these days is two time-travel stories, a crossover with The Avengers where they all punch each other for PR reasons, a gory action story where they fight a bunch of literally-resurrected villains from their past, and a story about the son of Wolverine where he tries to humiliate his teammates. These are stories that could be told with or without the existence of mutants.
If I were to decide to call a superhero character a mutant, that would mean two things and only two things.
- I don't have to come up with an origin story beyond "He's a mutant!".
- I don't need to give people an excuse for hating him beyond "He's a mutant!".
What differentiates the X-Men comics from the other Marvel comics is not so much the racism, I think, as it is the huge cast. There are literally hundreds of random and interchangeable X-Men characters, each one with a convoluted soap-opera connection to all the rest. So X-Men fans expect X-Men comics to be overloaded with characters. Marvel's editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, felt that the X-Men cast had gotten much too big, so a few years ago he had a comic written where almost all the mutants lost their powers. (In the story, this event was called "M-Day".) But that didn't really change anything. Even the depowered mutants are being kept around, and all the popular ones have already reacquired their powers through other means like magic crystals or advanced technology. (If being a mutant is no different than being any other kind of superhero, then why should it matter at all that they're not mutants anymore?)
The problem isn't really that there are too many characters. The problem is that there's nothing interesting to do with them that you couldn't do in The Avengers or Spider-Man or even The Punisher. So when I wrote that Ultimate Marvel post, I thought the only way X-Men comics could work would be if you rebooted the whole thing.
Well, I've changed my mind. I think I see exactly where X-Men comics ought to go, where all the potential I'm looking for is there but none of what's there (and enjoyed by X-Men fans) is undone. Believe it or not, it's actually really simple to get there from here.
Let me describe where "here" is exactly, because all the pieces are already in place. On M-Day, a mentally-ill mutant called the Scarlet Witch (whose powers are inexplicable magic) said "No more mutants.", and changed the world. After M-Day, most former mutants don't have powers anymore, and more importantly no new mutants can ever be born. Or so everyone thought, at least. The scientist called Beast went all over the world looking for a way to undo what the Scarlet Witch had done, and every road he went down was a dead end. But then, for no apparent reason, a new mutant girl was born in Alaska. She was kidnapped from the hospital, the entire area was burned down, and a battle broke out to get the baby back. The X-Men wanted to protect her, the Christian radicals wanted to kill her (They called her the anti-Christ.), and the evil mutants.. come to think of it, I don't even remember what they wanted. Anyway. In the end a time-traveling soldier called Cable took her and jumped into the future so that no one could find them. (He sees her as some sort of savior for mutants.) Another time-traveling soldier named Bishop jumped into the future after them, and he's been chasing them ever since. He believes that her existence directly leads to the terrible future he comes from where mutants are put in concentration camps, though he's doesn't seem to really understand how she can do all that. Cable named the girl Hope, she's grown up ten years, and they're still running for their lives. Her powers haven't manifested yet. Meanwhile, in the present (I always wanted to say that.), the mutants have all moved to San Francisco where they're sort of fitting in for once. ("Sort of" because they're already getting kicked out.) Beast assembled a team of scientists called the X Club (named after this) to see if they could solve the mutant-gene problem, and so far they've had no luck.
I didn't make any of this up, it's all from the last few years of comics.*…
(Specifically: House of M, the Endangered Species back-ups, the Messiah Complex crossover, Cable, and Uncanny X-Men)
But it's a great set-up for what needs to happen.
The X Club should identify exactly what it is that made the Scarlet Witch's magic work, but to undo it they need massive amounts of some exotic kind of energy that they have no access to. They're ready to give up entirely, when -lo and behold!- Cable and Hope come back from the future. Hope's power turns out to be exactly what they needed. Apparently the Scarlet Witch made a deliberate exception to her "no mutants" rule for the one mutant who could undo what she'd done. I know that sounds weird, but she's done exactly that once before (with a girl named Layla Miller), so it's not a stretch to say she'd do it again. Psychologically speaking, the explanation for what the Scarlet Witch is doing is that she isn't really in control of her own powers, and on some level she doubts herself. That doubt in her subconscious causes her to create what will stop her. But enough psychoanalysis. Bottom line: everyone was right. The X Club was right that magic can be undone through science, Cable was right that Hope's very important for all mutants, Bishop was right that killing her would prevent his future.
The mutant gene is reactivated, but it's not the same as it was before. (This is where all the fun starts.)
The new mutants can't control their powers. There are different degrees of instability: Some new mutants can usually keep their powers controlled just with medication and mental exercises, and only lose control while sleeping. And on the other end of the mutant spectrum, there are those who are using their powers every moment of every day and can't do anything about it. Most of them are not particularly dangerous to the public, either because their powers' effects are temporary or benign, or because their powers don't effect anyone but themselves. But some of them actually are dangerous, like the little telepath who rewires the brains of everyone he ever meets. The onset of mutant powers is a lot more unpredictable than it used to be: rather than being tied to puberty, it can happen at any point from one year old to sixty years old, and with no apparent cause.
A new trend begins all over the world, where socially-conscious people (usually former mutants depowered on M-Day, but also normal people) start support groups for mutant kids. And to make them feel better about their situation, they're not called "mutant support groups". No, they're called "X-Men"! The old generation of mutants is taken as a role model, because even though it's not really the same mutant gene they can still be seen as mutants who got to be just like all the other superheroes. (In this way, the flaw with the old premise becomes a strength in the new one!) "Look at Cyclops, little Timmy! He's a mutant just like you, and he goes on adventures with all the other superheroes! Some day, you can be an X-Man just like him!" The word "mutant" starts to be seen as derogatory: if you want to be politically correct, you've got to call them "X-Men".
Imagine this scene: A little mutant girl is walking through the mall with her mother. Everything and everyone she gets close to changes color (She can control the color it changes to, but right now it's all subconscious.), and when she walks away it all goes back to normal. Everyone is staring at her in disbelief, until one guy gets up and starts yelling: "Get the hell out of here! We're trying to have a good time here!" And the mother yells back: "You can't talk to my daughter like that! She's an X-Woman!"
So what happens to all the existing X-Men characters? Well, they become really interesting. The majority of the public is lumping them in with all these new mutants, so even though they've been acting like superheroes for decades suddenly they're seen as ticking time bombs. People now have reason to be scared of mutants, and they're not thinking about the subtleties of whether you got your powers before or after M-Day. That's racism that works, dramatically.
So you'd have the original people calling themselves "X-Men", who have to be role models for mutants who aren't really like them, as their every move is under scrutiny by the new mutant-haters who would like to vilify them.
And then you'd have the "Brotherhood of Mutants", taking pride in the "mutant" name, who try to distance themselves from the new strain of mutant by attacking the dangerous ones. ("Maybe if we're seen fighting them and protecting people from them, people will understand we're not like them.")
And you'd have superhero teams which no one knows are mutants, who live in constant fear of their secret coming out. In rare cases, the old X-gene can slowly turn into the new X-gene -if that started happening to a member of one of these teams, then it would start getting really complicated.
All the solo characters (like Wolverine) would go on doing the same thing they've always been doing; the new species doesn't really affect them. But now they'd have people who were previously nice to them suddenly distrustful and scared, and no matter how hard the old mutants try to gain these people's trust back, there will always be some doubt and hostility there from now on.
That's the entire X-Men line reinvigorated right there, and that's just with the characters who aren't the new kind of mutant! On top of that, there are all the new stories that could be told with new characters, where the premise is a lot more interesting than it used to be. It's much more interesting to see someone who could lose control at any moment, than to see someone who is in perfect control but is feared anyway.
This most likely isn't going to happen. I'm guessing the stories of Hope and the X Club will go in less interesting, more convoluted directions. (Like Hope turning out to be the reincarnation of Jean Gray or some nonsense like that.) And I expect that the effects of M-Day will be totally reversed as soon as Joe Quesada is replaced as editor-in-chief, and we'll be back to the status quo from way back when. That's how these things usually go.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
It occurs to me that Xavier and Magneto, the main good guy and bad guy of the X-Men, are both non-mutants now. Xavier got telepathy from the M'Kraan crystals on an alien planet, and Magneto got his powers from a supervillain called the High Evolutionary. It just goes to show how little the mutant gene has to do with what X-Men's become. Also, Cloak and Dagger are now calling themselves X-Men even though they were never mutants. And I'm not too clear on the whole story, but Wolverine, the most popular mutant character, has so much backstory involving secret army projects and wolf packs (yes, wolf packs) that if he weren't a mutant it wouldn't make much difference.
You might wonder why I chose to disconnect the onset of powers from puberty, losing the symbolism there. There are two very good reasons: Because of the way the new mutant gene is being introduced mid-story, it wouldn't make sense to have many adult or even teenaged mutants popping up for a few years, so there need to be viable young-mutant stories. Secondly, a lot of mutant hatred would be driven by the knowledge that the hater could wake up one day and find out that he himself is a mutant.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Today I had a minor breakthrough. I decided that rather than trying to change the numbers, what I needed was to create a system for easily changing the numbers, where the program would figure out how they all fit together. That meant lots of math, so I spent an hour or two working out the problems and then programmed my results. It didn't quite work. Somewhere in my long calculations, I must have put a minus instead of a plus, and some of it is running backwards. I don't understand how to fix that short of redoing all the math, but I think I see a way to make that part a bit simpler so that I'm less likely to make mistakes like that. That's what I'll do tomorrow. And then I'll solve the problem and move on.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
People Who Need People
So during the week I've had no human contact except for Games Nights. I guess I really needed those Games Nights. (Here's the last session report.)
Eliav said that if I downloaded Bioshock, we could play it together on his (powerful) computer like we played Phoenix Wright and The Path. So I downloaded it, and for the past two weeks I've been trying to get him to play it with me. But when I go over, he's in Fiesta.
Eliav is a kind of person which I didn't expect to exist for another few hundred years: a person who lives in a virtual world. He spends his entire day in Fiesta. He's got lots of friends there which he hangs out with. He's a productive member of the virtual society. Whenever he gets to a point in the game he's happy with, he starts over from scratch with a new character and does it all again.
I went over a few days ago. He was playing Fiesta, and from where I was sitting it seemed like the most boring game in the world. He kept fighting the same monster, over and over and over again. He had a portable DVD player next to him, which he was using to rewatch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the DVDs I'd lent him while he played. (He was up to season seven already.) I asked if we could play Bioshock, and he politely pointed out that he was busy. So I asked if I could come back in a half hour and we'd play then, and he said that wasn't possible.
See, in fifteen minutes a quest would start that he could only play once every four hours. So he needed to play through it in fifteen minutes, and then he needed to come back to this other quest which he was doing, because he'd be leaving it in the middle to get there. And then there would be another quest after that, and another after that, and in four hours he'd want to do that second quest again...
Yesterday Eliav came over to return the Buffy discs. (He'd finished the series.) I asked him if we could play Bioshock, he said no, and I got angry. Dena informs me that I was yelling at him. I said that we'd agreed we'd play Bioshock together, so it wasn't unreasonable for me to be irritated when he was always doing something else. He said I was being selfish, and if I wanted to play Bioshock I should get a better computer. I went upstairs for a moment to put away the DVDs, and he ran off. I ran after him, and he explained that he thought we were done arguing and he had to get back to Fiesta.
I think he thinks this was about me wanting to play Bioshock. Like I don't have any other games to play. I'll have to talk to him. Not that that'll make any difference.
1 Comment:
- Kyler said:
-
That definitely sounds like someone who is addicted to a video game. I periodically (probably once a month) play games for extended periods(+6 hours). But the moment that something more important crops up I can get out of it immediately.
I think that MMOs are designed in such a way as to promote addictive tendencies in people. That way people will keep paying the monthly fees, or keep coming back and seeing the advertising.
I dislike any game that's focus is to get you addicted to it. I haven't played many so I haven't much experience with them, but I still just want to stay away.
As for the good news, Bioshock is a fantastic game if you ever get a chance to play it. I'm not sure how many shooters you have played, so it might be something pretty different for you.
If I have any advice to make it more fun, really go out of your way to be creative with the plasmid powers. I generally tend to find only a few strategies to play games and then use those a lot. But near the end of the game, it force me to be continually creative and I had way more fun.
I am interested in hearing you impressions of it because we generally don't get to play the same games.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
VI: It's Only Pretend
Avri's been in Canada for the past three weeks, and I've been running the Games Night in his absence. He let me have the key to his house, so on Tuesday at 7:45 PM I've been making popcorn, grabbing a drink and some cups, and trying my best to not let the fact that Avri isn't there ruin our fun. We've had a smaller turn-out than usual, unsurprisingly, but two of the three Games Nights I've run were really fun. Okay, well, one was really fun, one was decent and one was a bust. But still, not bad. I can't explain games like Avri can, but most of the people coming know the games so they can explain it. So really what I'm doing is just welcoming people in, keeping the score, and then writing it all up. I think I've been doing a decent job. (If anyone who comes to Games Night knows otherwise, please comment. Even if it doesn't make a difference, I'd like to know.) Here are the three session reports:
When the Vintage Game Club announced that the next game they'd do a playthrough of was a Zelda, I was really excited. I'd never finished studying Ocarina of Time, and the bits I had studied I'd never really had the chance to tell other people about. And there's so much greatness there to tell other people about. It's like a hundred opportunities, just waiting for their time. Well, the game they picked was Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time's sequel. I didn't know what I'd find, since most of the game hadn't left much of an impression the first time I played it (with an emulator), but I did remember enough to know it wasn't in the same league as OoT or Twilight Princess. So this playthrough has been somewhat surprising, in that I'm finding that I really love some parts, and the rest is at least an interesting failure which inspires better ideas. I think it's been worth the ten bucks I paid for it. And going through a Zelda game has made me think about all my Zelda ideas again. I've been playing my variations on the music a lot on the piano, and I've changed my mind about what the third act of Broken Duet should be. This new ending would be so cool.
I've also been thinking about Present Self-Defense, and Through the Wind, and Dreams of a Fractured World. I think I've got some great ideas. But I sort of understand (maybe) that great ideas aren't going to be enough. I don't know what will be enough. I've been agonizing over The March of Bulk, not in the sense of working non-stop but in the sense that working on it is agony and I'm doing it anyway. Kyler made some excellent suggestions, which means I'm not stuck anymore like I was for the past few weeks, but each time I try to implement his suggestions it goes horribly wrong. So I've been trying one thing after another, then undoing all my changes when each one doesn't work and looks like it can't possibly work. And then I try something else. One of these days I'll find an approach that works. I hope.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Why am I here?
Why am I here? Well, that's obvious, isn't it? As an "Asperger's" person, I've been granted a gift by God. That gift is music, and to ignore it is to ignore every single signpost that God's thrown my way. My entire life has been a linear course to greater opportunities in music. I have potential. It wouldn't be easy to become a professional musician, but it would be natural. Many people have told me that they'd buy a CD if I made one- this in itself should be proof enough that that's what I'm meant to do. When else has anyone ever said to me that they'd pay for something I was good at? New musical themes are constantly coming to me, and I do nothing with them. Every opportunity that has been handed to me I have discarded. I need to stop ignoring my skill, and start using it.
I'm here to make games. I'm not particularly good at it yet, but I will be. I must be. Because if I don't make the games which I know need to be made, no one else will do it. The platformer and the adventure are in horrible shape. The RPG and the metalude are stagnating. They are not evolving in the right direction, and no one is going to set them on the right course if I don't do it. So yes, I don't have skill. But I will make up for it with stubbornness and the strength of my convictions. Nothing in the world seems as important to me as gamism, and that's because it's what I'm meant to be doing. Forget happiness, forget self-fulfillment, forget all the hints from God that other paths will be easier. Pursuing gamism is the path that makes sense. Anyone can be a secretary or a musician; no one can replace the future me as a gamist!
There need to be more people working on artificial intelligence. I have no experience and even less understanding, but I can learn. I am a human being, I can decide on how my life's going to proceed. If I decide to learn neurobiology and psychology, I can do it. Tamir tells me there actually are projects to model AI on the way brains work, albeit projects which aren't taking emotions into account. But it's a start, and I ought to support it. Creating a new kind of intelligence is a worthy cause, and it would be an honor to devote my life to it. What makes me reasonably well-suited to that kind of work is my willingness to be proven wrong and consider many possibilities, and more importantly my eagerness to make a rational system out of many parts which don't seem to fit together. If I learn enough of the details of intelligence, I might be able to figure out some rules which other scientists haven't thought of yet.
When I wrote my first interactive dialogue, I had an epiphany that that was what I could offer to the world. It was difficult, to be sure, but so satisfying. It was easier for me to make Smilie than it was to make The Perfect Color or now The March of Bulk, and that's because it comes more naturally to me to do interactive characters than other kinds of games. So I ought to devote my life specifically to making adventure games, and forget trying to make other kinds of games. I have one huge idea for an adventure game which I think could be really great, and many smaller ideas. My idea for a dynamic interface is one that's never exactly been in a game before, and it has more than enough potential to spend an entire life learning to use. If I made several adventure games with the same system, all totally different in tone and content, it raises the chances significantly of other people continuing my work. Whereas if I were to jump around from Form to Form, never staying in one place, each of my works could be seen as oddities and have no impact. So while I agree that I'd like to make games, I think I really ought to only make adventure games.
I ought to move to New York and try to become a comics editor. Wow, that would be fun. I'm already editing comics just for fun, how cool would it be to do it for a living? Getting to be a part of this entertainment which I love so much, getting to know the brilliant writers responsible, trying to get those writers into positions better suited for them. I spend so much time worrying that comics editors aren't doing what they ought to be doing; well, I could do it! There's lots of micromanagement, creativity in which ideas to keep and which not to, there's regular tasks I could be efficient at. It seems like a dream job, and I absolutely could pull it off.
I'm never going to do anything. I'm going to try a lot of things, never finish anything, never get anywhere, never help anything or anyone, and never find happiness. And then I'll die. And someone will see how I died at such an early age, read this blog, and understand that I was a person confused about my direction, running into roads which I have neither the talent nor the work ethic to get through. My life's purpose will then be clear: I am a cautionary tale. This observer, who I barely know, will take my death as a reminder that life is fleeting, and he/she will hurry up and do things. That's why I'm here.
Mory, I gotta hand it to you. You always manage to find new ways to shock me with just how goddamned stupid you are. What would I do without you.
Next Post
Sunday, July 26, 2009
When I Grow Up, I Want To Do Everything
Back in the days when I was younger and wilder, I had many dreams to fill my thoughts with. I dreamt of programming a perfect replica of human intelligence. I dreamt of single-handedly creating hit science fiction movies. I dreamt of crafting educational software to put the school system to shame. I dreamt of writing "quests" the likes of which the world had never seen. I dreamt of gaining the respect and admiration of those who looked down at me.
Most people never figure out life.
At the age of eleven, I had already solved it.
All the wasted time at school gave me the opportunity to think about my plan, a comprehensive set of logical steps that would get me exactly where I wanted to be.
Step 1: 3D
I had figured out the basics of programming by messing around with the Visual Basic 2.0 demo. In recesses, I'd borrow Chayim's scientific calculator and program my trademark cheating guessing game•-------
if guess=num (num=getRnd(min,max))on it, or use it to plot out random graphs to see if I could make them look cool. I was on the right track. Okay, so I'd never finished any program more impressive than the guessing games, but anything was doable. So I thought a lot about how 3D graphics were supposed to work. I didn't like the idea of polygons, so I wanted to program a 3D equivalent of pixels, where every object you see is made of tiny cubes in a 3-dimensional grid. It didn't seem like such a hard thing to implement; I just needed to figure out how perspective worked, and the job was half done!
if guess=num & min=num & max=num (write "You win!")
Step 2: Arellian
I had almost finished my logical alphabet, where the connections between letters are perfectly intuitive and logical. I needed to start working on the vocabulary. It would use a modified version of Hebrew's "root" logic, because it just makes everything more sensible. In addition, you could get the opposite of any word by spelling it backwards. And the longer a word, the more specialized its meaning. There would be short words talking about general concepts, so that you could have a basic conversation without having an advanced vocabulary. But adding on more letters to the start and end would add on subtleties and contexts and connotations and iterations. Starting from these rules, I'd eventually deduce the single most logical language in the world. I believed I'd find that in the end, there would only be one solution to this problem.
Step 3: AI
The most important part of intelligence is learning. If I could just make a program that would learn from me, it could figure out all the rest for itself. I gave a lot of thought to how the files would be organized, where each file is a learned behavior and the files are in folders and are all connected to each other but the computer program changes all that on its own. If it saw me acting differently than the appropriate file suggested that a person should act, then it would create another file to go alongside it suggesting an alternate behavior for that context. Then it would have to figure out the more subtle difference behind the two situations, which is just a math problem. When it decided on its own behavior, it would never have exactly the same situations so it'd pick whichever file was closest, and then adjust the programming of that file based on what reaction it got. All pretty straightforward. I'd already picked out a name for my first AI: "Artie". We'd have all sorts of fun together. The Arellian language would now come into use, because any robot would be driven mad by the current languages. Trying to speak to my Artie in English would add years on to the time it'd take to train him!
Step 4: Movies
Once Artie was reasonably independent, I'd teach him English and show him lots of movies so he could imitate famous actors' performances in 3D. If I gave him enough movies to watch, he'd eventually figure out how to play from any script, and with any style of performance! (He'd probably need to organize all the different styles of performance himself, though I could help him out a bit.) Then I'd write a script, a high-stakes time-travel story of some sort. (I was always thinking about the first scene, since the rest would follow once I got that right.) Artie would play all the parts, and it would all use my 3D graphics to look totally realistic, and -Voila!- professional movies by the age of 18.
Step 5: Quests
Once I was able to do movies, I could just make it exponentially more detailed (This is just math, really.) and I'd have some amazing adventure games. I'd just need to design the branching paths so that everything you can do leads to a good movie. All the characters would actually be AI-actors (probably Artie's successors by that point), because you need to be able to talk to them (via a microphone) and it's not conceivable that I could program all that manually. Those would also be futuristic science-fiction stories. I'd brand them as "VCQs", which is short for "voice-controlled quests".
Step 6: Education
Once I knew how to make games, I could figure out how to teach. The trouble with teachers was, they didn't understand anything. They knew what the material was that needed to be taught, but they didn't understand the logic behind the material, and they certainly didn't understand how that could be fun. But I could figure out how to make stuff fun. I'd release some educational software under the heading of "Orot Software", named after my elementary school not because I liked my school the tiniest bit, but because there was more to my plan than that. See, my software (being based on an intelligent evaluation of the player and good game design) would be so much more effective than the school system that within five years, I would utterly replace all schools, and all teachers would be out of a job. So the point of the name was actually going to be to rub it in their faces that I could do their jobs better than them.
Step 7: Whatever
By that point, I'd pretty much have reached the point where I could do anything I liked. Maybe I'd make a comic strip, or maybe an RTS game. Or maybe I'd get to work on that time machine, because I still had no idea how that was going to work.
This didn't happen, of course. I utterly failed to live up to my own standards. My 18th birthday came and went, and three more after that. I've still never gotten serious about figuring out 3D graphics, I never made a language to go with my alphabet, I've never come to understand intelligence, I no longer feel any need to make movies, I don't think I'll be able to ever teach anyone, and the closest I've come to an adventure game is Smilie. I rarely leave this room, and most of the time I've got this nagging feeling in the back of my head that life is supposed to be more than this. Life's supposed to make sense. And it doesn't.
It occurs to me that maybe the sentiment behind the old plan is still there. After all, I still want to do everything. I made a character and a strategy game, and now I'm trying to make a movement game and then an exploration game and then an adventure game and someday a platformer and a role-playing game and a metalude. These are all separate worlds, and we act like they're all one medium. So I can say "I want to be a gamist!", and because it's so simple to understand that it seems like it'll be simple to do. I guess that makes me happy. I can be realistic, and still know that I'm eventually gonna get to step 7. It might just take a bit longer than I anticipated.
Most of the things that make me happy are really simple.
Next Post
Friday, July 24, 2009
Yo Ho, Yo Ho…
When I was a kid, almost the only entertainment I had was TV shows. And almost the only TV shows I ever watched (since we never picked up more than two channels) were the Star Trek episodes my father had taped off American TV.
Then I discovered the internet, and I finally was exposed to games. Good games, not the shareware and educational trash which I'd been exposed to before. I found a Game Boy emulator and played through Pokémon Yellow, and then I'd go to school and hand out floppy disks with the same to anyone who'd take 'em. One kid then went out and bought himself a Game Boy so he could play it "for real", having never been exposed to videogames before and therefore not knowing what a rip-off the Israeli prices were.
I played other Nintendo games: Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time. Ah, Ocarina of Time. The game that showed me what games could be. And understand, before piracy I had nothing. I'd never touched a game system. But after playing Ocarina of Time, well, I wanted the next one. I read that a new Zelda game was coming to the Gamecube, and I went out and bought myself a Gamecube.
Every penny of the (literally) thousands of dollars I've spent on games is because of piracy. So don't you look at me like I'm corrupting your economy. The creators who think that every single copy of their work should earn them the amount of money that they've decided on, well, they're just being greedy. If I created stuff, I'd want as many people to experience it as possible. That's the point of creating anything. Getting every last penny you feel you're "owed" is not the point.
And still Nintendo tries to attack me as though I'm some sort of disease. I have the Homebrew Channel on the Wii, so that I can (illegally) play the old games which Nintendo refuses to sell me. Uniracers, in particular. I really wanted to play that on a real game system with a real controller. So I installed the Homebrew Channel, I enjoy the game every now and then, and every time I install a new system update I have to be worried that this is the time they'll catch up to the hackers and prevent me from being able to ever play Uniracers again. They keep trying, and the hackers keep coming up with ways of getting around whatever they set up.
Thank god for hackers.
Now, you might well ask why I bother to pay these corporate slimebags who try to attack me. It's a good question. I could give a whole bunch of rational-sounding answers, but they all feel a bit false to me, even as far as rationalizations usually go. I think there's an element of capitalist indoctrination there, that I feel that if I'm enjoying something enough to pay for it I should make an effort to pay for it. So if I see a decent sale, or some other opportunity to pay for stuff which I've already been enjoying for free, I usually take it. I've played games for literally hundreds of hours on emulators before buying legal copies. Generally used, since the new ones are more expensive than I can afford. Which I guess doesn't make a whole lot of sense- what's the difference between buying a used game and downloading an emulated game, exactly? But that's why I'm categorizing all this under "indoctrination" and not attributing rationality to it.
I'm going to switch topics a little bit and talk about comic books. Comic books are the exception to the general rule that piracy leads to actual purchases. And that's because the illegally-obtained comics are better than the legal ones.
As usual, a brief personal history: as a kid I only knew newspaper comic strips. Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, Peanuts. That's about all I knew. Oh, and once I was at a friend's house whose father collected comics, and I read his limited-edition "Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times" hardcover, which I later found out no one was allowed to touch. Uncle Scrooge is amazingly good. (I read it on the computer now.) But the Marvel and DC comics, the superhero stuff, I had no exposure to that. The first time I read a superhero comic, I had already seen the first X-Men movie (which I liked a lot) and the first Spider-Man movie (which I didn't), but superheroes were never "for me", they were what I had heard that other people liked. A classmate in ninth grade let me read a Batman comic, and I'm sure it wasn't a particularly good comic but it somewhat impressed me. Not enough to search out more, mind you. But I could see myself getting involved in a superhero comic.
And then at some point I found out that J. Michael Straczynski, the guy who made all those Babylon 5 episodes I'd downloaded off the internet, was writing Amazing Spider-Man. So I downloaded the entire run up to that point. That's what got me hooked on superhero comics. And every week after that, I'd go into these archaic chat-rooms (Even then they were archaic, but they were the only semi-reliable source I could find.) and download the new comics directly from someone nice enough to share them with me.
Now, it's not like I've never payed for any comics. I have two volumes of Fables (my favorite one and the first), the hardcover of Omega the Unknown, and the entire $90 set of Bone in color. (Bone is my favorite comic ever.) But I also have copies of all three on the computer. And that's because the computer comics experience is so much better.
The enjoyment I get from comics is threefold:
- The intended entertainment of reading the comic.
- Collecting and organizing the comics.
- Sharing the comics and socializing about them.
1. Reading
Comic books are small, and the art is shrunk down to fit on the page. With good art, I want it to be bigger. I was so disappointed when I got that first Bone book and saw how much less of the nuance of the art I could make out than I'd seen on the computer screen. Now, I'll grant you that the quality of the reading is dependent on the quality of the screen. But even with my awful screen, I feel like I'm appreciating the art much better when I can make it whatever size I like.
(There are certain comics which absolutely can't be scrolled through at a large size without losing a lot. Most of David Mack's comics, for instance. But these are rare.)
Comic books are also filled with ads, which of course the illegal scanners take out. So the flow of the story is uninterrupted.
2. Collecting
I've discovered that I really enjoy organizing things. Every time there's a comic I like, I take off the scanner's tag, change the filename to whatever the title is, and put it in a folder which fits into a chronological order of the timeline. Half the fun of a superhero universe (for me) is how it keeps crossing over with itself in new and interesting ways. Because each one is a new and fun challenge.
A few years ago, Marvel had a massive crossover called Civil War which almost everything tied into. Well, not only did I take all the issues I liked and put them in chronological order (That goes without saying.), but I edited the whole crossover together in a way that felt intentional, like the whole thing was one big novel and I was just assembling it. I think I succeeded in organizing and editing the seventy-odd issues that I kept, so that if you start at the beginning and read through issue by issue in order it seems like the whole thing is one story. (Even though that wasn't the intention of the creators!)
That's the beauty of digital files- you can do whatever you like with them. When I see a typo, well, why should I have a typo in my comics collection? I take out the offending page, and I fix it. That's often harder than you'd think. Comic scans are necessarily imperfect, because it's not coming direct from the digital source. Actually printing the thing causes a lot of flaws, and then scanning it back into the computer messes it up further. None of this is especially noticeable while reading, but if I'm editing the file the imperfections need to be consistent throughout the image, so I can only change it by using other parts of the image to patch over it. But here I'm getting too technical. The bottom line is, I can change the images.
I have gone quite far in abusing this ability. During Civil War, there were some issues which added a really interesting element to the overall story I was constructing, but weren't actually good comics. So I'd chop them up! In the most radical case, I took a nearly-unbearable three issues with wasted potential, and edited them down to one 15-page issue which was entertaining. Don't underestimate the power of editing.
And why does a comic need to be exactly 22 pages, anyway? It's because that's the standard length for the paper they're using. In a digital file, it makes no difference! So if there's a back-up story which is really terrible, I can chop it out! And sometimes I do the opposite, adding in pages to the beginning of a comic (before a cover) from earlier issues. Only when there's a good reason for it, of course. But anyway. On a computer, keeping these comics and organizing them into CDs isn't just collecting. It's a creative exercise as well.
3. Socializing
At first I was just doing all this editing for my own benefit. Truthfully, I still mainly am. But I also give the CDs to neighbors now. They wouldn't otherwise read this stuff, and even if they did I imagine they'd only read one or two comics maximum. But I can give them an entire superhero universe in neat chunks of 700 MBs, which they can see what they like in. So I've got two neighbors who I've been giving the discs to, one after the other. It's not unlike how I used to hand out floppy disks in elementary school.
The point of all this is not just to get other people to experience the same things I've experienced (though you know how obsessed I am with that), but also to give topics for conversation. The people I give these comics to are guaranteed to have somewhat different reactions than me, which means I can ask them why and talk about what worked and what didn't and where it all might be going.
Bottom line, digital comics are great. The only legal way to get new comics is to take a train to Tel Aviv (a garbage-dump of a city an hour away) and find a comic store, and then I won't be able to do what I like with it. Sorry, that's not even remotely enticing. Even if I bought the collections, they're much more rigidly constructed than my CDs, because they've only got the space for six or seven issues per book. (Space limitations are so old-fashioned.) I really couldn't go legal without losing a lot.
The trouble with comics piracy is where I'm getting these comics from. First off, every six months or so Marvel's lawyers catch up to me and force the site I'm using to shut down. And then I've got to pick up and find a new place. Each time I start out thinking it's gonna be a temporary source and then I just get more and more comfortable there until it seems really permanent, and then one day the moderators announce without explanation that they will no longer allow Marvel books to be posted.
But it's more than just the running that's annoying. It's the scanners themselves, and the whole community they've built up around them. These people think that because they put a few comic books in a scanner, that they are the kings and queens of the world and should be treated as such. You may not speak to them without complimenting them on what wonderful people they are, or you're banned. And god help you if you say anything which can even be misconstrued as asking when a comic book will be scanned. And if you're not going to be exactly like the scanners, don't bother trying to participate.
The most recent time I tried to get involved in the scanning community was with an issue of Amazing Spider-Man a few months back. The writer went on record that the dialogue of a certain page was a mistake, and he posted a corrected version of the dialogue. So I took the image of that page and started editing. I got it to look the way the writer wanted, which wasn't simple (The dialogue bubbles all needed to be shaped differently!) and took me a few hours. I think it looks really seamless- if you didn't know I'd edited the page heavily, you couldn't notice. Anyway, I thought that maybe this was what I could do for the community that'd given me so much. So I posted my version of the comic, and it was removed a few hours later? You know why? Go on, guess. It's kind of funny really. They said I was disrespecting the scanners! That was hardly the first time I tried to apply myself in the community, but it'll certainly be the last.
Well, whatever. Those are the guys with the comics, so what can you do.
I'd love it if Marvel would start releasing their comics on the internet. I'd pay for them, same as I pay for lots of downloadable games on the Wii. (Just as with the Wii, I'd still illegally get the ones I wasn't willing to pay for.) But it would need to be as good as the illegal stuff, and Marvel will never even conceive of doing that! They'll never give out comics without the ads, and without copy protection, and at the same time as the print comics, and where you can do what you like with it! Because they're a corporation. And corporations are totally clueless.
If I were smart enough, my interactions with normal people would be amusing math problems.
I'm not nearly smart enough.
Next Post
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Artificial Intelligence
I also don't believe that human beings are rational at the core. It's all emotions on the bottom. The rationality comes later, as a game which is played for emotional reasons. We come up with rational thoughts only when we need those thoughts.
But let's back up. I believe that human intelligence is theoretically reproducible. And I doubt I will see that feat accomplished within my lifetime.
What passes for "artificial intelligence" these days is like a house built from the roof downward. The benefits of such an approach are obvious:
- From a satellite photo, it looks almost the same.
- It's affordable to get to that point. (You just need to stop when it gets impossible.)
- You can do it quickly.
But you probably don't see where I'm coming from with that metaphor, so I'll speak plainly. Modern AI projects mimic the actions of people, but not the processes that led to that action. Human intelligence is based on emotions, and the end result of the whole program looks rational at times. Machine intelligence is based on pure rationality, and if the programmer has a sense of humor he'll tack on some faux emotion to make it seem like it's not just a set of functional rules. Though it is.
The problem, as usual, is capitalism. Programmers aren't altruistic, they're pragmatic. AI only exists in any form because the people working on them have already thought of a use for them. There's a specific job in mind, so you keep adding rules until it can do that job and then you stop. This is a dead-end kind of AI programming. Once you've made the program, it can't learn new things, it can't get better, it can't adapt to a changing environment, and it certainly can't do anything even the tiniest bit outside the tiny range of activities it was specifically programmed for.
That may be good enough for a capitalist, but it's not good enough for me. The promise of AI (as I have learned from science-fiction) is having new people in the world, non-human people. These programs aren't people, they're screwdrivers. You know how the movies always start with some simple program like a chess player or a monitoring system, and then it gets smarter and becomes sentient? Well, it can't possibly work like that. Not even in theory. If you make a screwdriver, a screwdriver is all you'll ever have.
If you want real intelligence, the sort of intelligence that learns and grows and becomes a productive member of society, you've got to start from the ground up. And I strongly believe that this is possible. We can do it. But we're not trying.
To actually have artificial intelligence, you need to make a program which functions -from the bottom up!- like a brain. I don't know exactly what that means, because I don't understand how the brain works. But I see the beginning of the path there. The first step is to assume that everything people ever do is the result of a predictable system built on emotions. (Because it is.)
What that means is that whoever's trying to make a machine think needs to understand all the latest theories about both psychology and neurobiology. Only by looking at both the macro and the micro, and theorizing all the while on how the two are connected, can you reach a sufficient understanding of intelligence to start programming it.
No one's going to do this, and if I sound antagonistic toward the people who pretend they are I apologize. It's just disappointment, you understand. But I understand perfectly well that what I'm suggesting requires genius, nearly infinite patience, and a disconnect from the realities of this capitalist, practical world.
It is possible.
A "neural network" is a series of simulated neurons which are connected to each other. That's a start, but there's a lot more than that. There's no intelligence without emotion. Whatever a program is made for, it needs to actually want that, or else those neurons will have no context. Which means that the chemicals behind impulses and emotions need to be studied, to see how a computer program can simulate those aspects of neurobiology.
There are many practical downsides to all this. It would take decades to program this thing. And then it would take more decades to raise it. And once you do, it'll probably turn out that that specific individual you've created isn't good at what you wanted it to be good at. Actually, chances are it won't be good at doing anything at all. The intelligence of a human is tough enough, but you want it to be the intelligence of a competent human? That could take another few centuries. That means studying the differences between the brains of specific people on an extremely minute level. Alternatively, you could introduce evolution into the mix. Have some sort of mechanism for full brain-simulations to reproduce, and only keep the ones that are doing a good job after years of training. It could take a while. By the time you're finished, whatever job you needed to have done is long since obsolete, and you've just used up trillions of dollars with nothing to show for it yet.
I think I like my world better than yours. My world is rational. Yours is just random.
When an apparent opportunity is handed to me pre-packaged by someone I can't relate to, it's not a real opportunity.
At the moment, I can't find a way to rationally justify never working for other people.
Next Post
Monday, July 06, 2009
Myself and Iin which I demonstrate how self-absorbed I am
Of course, you could also say the reverse. Agreeing on the basics means it's easier to argue about the conclusions. Common personality traits can lead to an exceptional level of animosity if those traits are disliked.
I doubt anyone reading this is going to agree, but this is the conclusion I draw: You can't love another person like you love yourself, and you can't hate another person like you hate yourself. All human interaction is a faint echo of what you'd get (both in positive and negative interactions) if you got yourself a time machine, went back to yesterday, and met yourself.
We can't do that, obviously. Yet.
I think the person who gets closest (apart from identical twins, those lucky jerks) is the storyteller. All his characters are reflections of himself, because if they weren't he couldn't know how they'd act. I think writing these characters is closer to interacting with oneself than, say, raising kids, because even though some of the DNA is shared, the actions and reactions are usually unpredictable to both sides. But when you imagine a person, he is a perfect (if quite twisted) copy of yourself.
The fact that character and creator are operating on different planes of existence is a problem, I'll admit. The writer can bridge the gap a bit by introducing some lesson at the end, because then the character sees the hand of the creator, even if it's not recognized for what it is. But the only sustainable way to approximate self-interaction is to have multiple characters. Sometimes it'll be really clear that the characters represent specific aspects of their writer, and sometimes it'll be so subtle that the storyteller doesn't see it himself.
Myself, I don't do subtlety. The first story I remember writing (when I was 5) involved me interacting with a bunch of ghosts. Their names were Mory 1, Mory 2, Mory 3, Mory 4, and so on. And I'm still doing that today, obviously. Telling stories about "Ariel", arguing with the personification of this blog, talking with a girl who's a lot like me I am not.
Yes you are.
Oh, also, you never let me show up anymore.
Okay. The point is, these are all substitutes to getting to talk to myself. Which I haven't gotten to do yet.
So if I ever get unduly frustrated when you show a lack of interest in certain topics, or when you say perfectly reasonable things which I disagree with, or when you act a certain way, please understand that it's nothing personal. I was just kind of hoping to see someone else.
1 Comment:
- Nati said:
-
I agree with what you're saying - even with that bolded bit nobody's supposed to - but with one caveat:
What other people offer you that you can't truly offer yourself is surprise. It's an intellectual curiousity largely that keeps us interacting with people - I mean, even just reading a story is a sort of interaction.
The other thing others offer us - though this is a bit more complicated and I'm not sure you'd agree - is a sort of confirmation that we exist. If you express some of your inner world to a person and the fabric of space-time doesn't fold into itself or something, that lends your identity a feeling of reality.
We need other people as a sort of vessel to bring our inner world into the outer world.
It's true this'd be easier to do if they were us.
If you can't solve a problem, then you don't understand it well enough.
Next Post
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Math Story
I wasn't interested in math going into the school system, and I wasn't interested when I left. Math was a series of rules that you needed to memorize. Toward the end of elementary school, I got a video from "The Teaching Company", of an enthusiastic math teacher explaining all of basic math. To him, math was totally obvious. He convinced me that math was totally obvious by explaining and arguing and engaging. For a few years, I was coasting on the perspective I got from that one video. All math was easy to me, because it just made sense. And then I got into more advanced subjects, and was being taught those subjects by teachers with no points to make. Math no longer made sense, so I stopped caring. I didn't really learn anything new after that. That's why I never took the math Bagrut.
When a test day came, everyone else would be groaning. But I was excited by the challenge. I would look at the first question, and be taken totally by surprise by it because I hadn't been paying attention to what everyone else was learning. But it was just another riddle. I'd sit there for a minute, just rereading the question over and over, trying to wrap my head around it. And I'd scribble down some general calculations at the bottom of the test sheet, to figure out what the basic principle was that I'd need to be using. And I kept analyzing and scribbling and pondering until I felt that I understood the question. And then there was no problem at all, just the fun of seeing it through.
Thinking back on it, I guess I had a really nice teacher that year. Russian guy, I think. He got me into a national competition once; I didn't really care about it, but he was pushing me to be in it so I was in it. I got in, and then I dropped out because I just wasn't as fast as anyone else there. See, the questions were much tougher. And I could have analyzed and pondered and scribbled for hours and hours, and I'm confident I could have figured it out. But there was a time limit.
I remember having trouble with time limits. Often I'd realize during a test that there were only twenty minutes left, and I still had too many questions left. Then I'd need to rush myself, and I got into a bit of a panic. Learning-by-doing works, but it's slow. You can't be slow.
There was a competition before that -not a serious one, but a competition- that I was in. Sixth grade. (I guess I must have already been doing well at math by that point.) It was a silly little thing, set up by our school for boys of my grade. It was in our local matnas, the same place where we recently opened 1776. I don't remember the format. What I do remember is being up there, on stage, feeling that I needed just another thirty seconds, and I remember crying so that they'd give me what I wanted. Man, I was a crappy kid. I think they caved and gave me a bit more time. In the end I won. Probably first place, though I can't be sure. The prize was the board game Abalone, which to this day I've played probably three times.
Those competitions didn't make much impression on me at the time.
In between the two there was seventh grade, where I spent the classes scribbling Visual Basic code onto math paper, or improving the alphabet I'd invented the year before. (I called it "Arellian", after my middle name. I don't call it that anymore.) The teacher once gave me a tenth grade test, and I passed it. It was a really simple test- it must have been for the three-point bagrut guys. That's why, at a time when I suspected I was going to get expelled, I was instead allowed to skip eighth grade.
That's why in ninth grade, I felt a lot of pressure to seem more intelligent than I actually was. If I wasn't always the best in the class at whatever I had a chance to be good at, everyone would see me as privileged. As the spoiled little boy who cried about how terrible school was until people gave in and treated him to what he didn't deserve. So in computer class I started (and never continued) working on a Breakout game, in Hebrew grammar class I was correcting everyone else's mistakes, during recesses I'd show off my piano playing, and in math class I needed to be above everyone else. It may very well be that I would have done all this anyway, but there was a lot of pressure to be that person all the time. There was especially a lot of pressure in math class, because we started sharing that with the neighboring school, whose students were more typical Israelis who -I was certain- would have mocked me for any slip-ups.
When people came to me for help with their math homework, on the one hand I was happy because it meant I was still doing okay, but on the other hand it meant that I needed to be very careful. For the first thirty seconds of frantically analyzing the question, I knew less than the person asking about how to solve such a problem. And I needed for them to not see that, or else I'd be a joke.
(That was the year when I briefly considered developing multiple personalities. I didn't realize at the time that it was a well-known practice, rather than just an idea I myself had invented. I never started, though, because I never saw an immediate need that year.)
The following year we moved to the Mevasseret yeshiva's campus, and used their math teacher. He was a loathsome fellow, who mocked his students rather than challenging them. I saw the reason for this on many occasions: he didn't really understand math, and was using this behavior to cover for it. (I'm only thinking about this now, but he must have been so nervous walking into the classroom.) I stopped trying to act smart, and very slowly the rest of the grade caught up in their memorizations with what I understood. And then tests were something I dreaded. I had lost most of my motivation for learning math, but I sometimes was incapable of understanding the questions in the time allotted. The first time that year I had a math test I couldn't pass, I walked back to the bus crying. Still spoiled, I guess.
The last math teacher I had was lousy, but not offensively so. For a time I came to classes and spent them imagining videogames, and then I just stopped coming.
Every now and then Dena asks me to help her with her homework. It hurts me a little, because I can't anymore. I really can't. Things which used to make sense to me (with some effort) no longer make any sense at all.
I still use math every now and then. In programming games, I often run into very simple geometry or algebra problems which I solve on bits of scrap paper. Very rarely there's a trigonometry problem. I can solve them, with some effort.
1 Comment:
- said:
-
To this day, I remember you teaching me some math in fourth grade, which made an impression on me because I was at the top of my class at the time. Nobody my age would ever teach me any math.
You're have a gift for math, you know. Every so often, I feel sad that your math talent is being ignored, but then I remember that you're doing what you feel like you should be doing and are using other talents you have in the process. Then I'm not so sad.
Oklahoma is now behind me, cast party and all.
It seems as though there should have been some sort of opportunity there. If so, I missed it.
Next Post
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
A Discarded Opportunity
It must have been around eight years ago. Some famous pianist was coming from America to play some difficult concerto, and it said in the newspaper that he was giving a master class. When I read the column, I didn't think too much of it. I'm sure I wasn't too excited about the idea of a master class. But my parents must have encouraged me to go, because I went. There were maybe twenty seats set up in this little room with two upright pianos. The only people who had come were me and some older guy. ("Older" is relative, of course: he might just have been a teenager.)
The experience bore no resemblance to my expectations. I heard "class" and I thought I'd be sitting back and listening while some great pianist talked about something or other. I don't know what the plan was; it might have changed when no one showed up. But there was very little talking. The pianist came with someone else, and he was doing a lot more talking than the pianist. He played some sort of wind instrument, don't ask me which. They asked to hear what I could play. So I played my one and only composition, Celebration. I only played the first half of it, because I was embarrassed to go further. I sort of let it trail off and said "and then it continues from there.". I wish the story were around five years later, so that I'd have had more to do there.
The other person improvised some jazz for them. The guy who was doing the talking (whoever he was) complimented the playing. He said, "I really like what you're doing with your left hand. Usually the left hand is just accompaniment, but you're actually doing a melody with it." (I don't know why I remember this so clearly.) And for around an hour after that, it was just lots of improvising. Three-part jazz improvisations, with the two pianists and the wind guy. Then we all left, because it was clear that no one else was going to come.
But before we did, he made me an offer. He said I should come and play with them. I don't understand why. Maybe he saw some potential talent in my very primitive first composition. But he said the time and place where I should come, and I didn't see that as a real opportunity. I wasn't going to be a musician, I knew that even back then. So his offer was just words, there was no chance I was going. I said something to the effect of "I'll see if I can.", and he knew I wasn't taking the offer seriously. He tried to impress upon me that they'd played at Carnegie Hall, that they could teach me a few things.
Well, whatever. I didn't take the opportunity, and at this point it seems as though I might have imagined it. I left there, went up the winding hill to a bus stop, and waited for a half-hour or so for a bus to come.
What I've written of Variations on V.O.V. is nice, but I think it needs to be the first movement in a four-movement piece.
Next Post
Monday, June 08, 2009
My interpretation of The Path
Each of these possibilities appears in the game as a girl. One is enthusiastic about animals. One is enthusiastic about art. One is enthusiastic about exploring. One is enthusiastic about men. And so on. The old lady who never got too close to anything imagines herself as a pure little kid dressed in white, and watches these red-clothed girls try to do better than she did. She occasionally pushes them along, either to go to the straight path or to get to the ultimate realization of their enthusiasm.
The purpose of this mental exercise is for the old lady to reassure herself that personality is bad. The girls' clothes are red, which in my opinion represents only death. If this dying woman can prove to herself that the path she took is better than any other, than (she hopes) she can be comfortable with death. So the white girl puts on an air of objectivity, pretending she does not care which way the girls go, but really what she wants is to see them all die in worse ways than herself.
If a red girl follows the path, she gets exactly where the old lady got: to the boring house where she sits in her bed. This is unsatisfying and the woman considers it a "failure", because she has proven nothing. Whatever girl made it there continues to hang around in the house, continuing the nagging sense that there could have been a better life.
But if she leaves the safe path and finds the place reflective of her own personality, the old lady wins, because then she can imagine gruesome ends for each of these girls. So the animal-lover is eaten by a werewolf, and the explorer drowns in a big lake, and the man-chaser gets chopped up by a madman with an axe. And the white woman can take comfort in her own blandness, because it couldn't have ended in that horror.*-------
(At the "successful" endings, there's always a bed. The most obvious interpretation is that it stands for sex, but I think it's actually the deathbed, or the idea of dying peacefully. In these nightmares, that bed is always inaccessible or ruined.)
"Success"! That girl leaves her alone, leaving only a few other possibilities to weigh on her shoulders.So one by one, the lady puts her imaginary selves into the forest, and enjoys seeing them mutilated and tortured. Finally she is rid of all of them, and there is no one left in the house but herself. So the white girl walks through the forest, seeing all the places and not bothering to interact with any of them. There's a red tent, which she can enter and exit at will. "Ha!", she says, "I can pretend to have personality too, but because it's not real I can get out of it again untarnished! But look at you! You took yourselves too seriously, and ended up living short, hellish lives!". The forest is quite boring without anything to do in it. Finally she goes back to her house, as plain as ever, and looks back at where she's ended up. There she is in that bed, in the moments before her death, and next to her bed she imagines a wolf waiting to devour her, which might never have actually been there.
Then she realizes where she is. She has never taken any risks and still she is dying! In her house, the white girl finds her dress covered in red. In death she is just the same as the others! And so the red girls, who she thought herself rid of, come back in one by one, and her self-image of purity leaves.
5 Comments:
- stone_ said:
-
Red usually signifies sin, temptation, desires. I'd that's how it sounds like it's being used here.
- Mory said:
-
Well, yes. I guess saying "only death" was overstating it. But red is also blood. I think the desires are supposed to be associated with death, since it's all the same color. That's how I explain the ending, where the white girl has red on her dress even though she never seemed to care about anything.
- Elly said:
-
well done. i really like that.
- said:
-
very interesting game, love the interpretation
- said:
-
The best interpretation I have ever read about The Path.. Good job.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
It's pretty late already. Shouldn't you have been working earlier?
Yeah. But Miriam finally asked to see Synecdoche, New York, so I changed the log-out time in Access Boss.
So why aren't you working?
Oh, I don't have to work right now. I set it to 6:00.
You said you were supposed to be working now.
Did I? Oh, I guess I did. I didn't mean that.
Sure you didn't.
Anyway, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.
I bet you do.
No, I really don't. That's why I'm coming to you.
Me? What do I know about making games?
Um.
Exactly.
Well, you don't really need to know anything. I guess I need to work it out for myself, and if you don't, um, do you mind if I bounce ideas off of you?
Whatever.
Is that a yes?
Yes.
Okay, so what's the last thing I did?
How should I know?
You're not being helpful. I was asking myself.
Do I even need to be here?
Okay, you ask me.
What?
Ask me what I did last.
This is silly.
Look, I need someone looking over my shoulder here. Pointing me in the right direction.
No, really. This is really silly.
Blah. You're no help.
Well, I'm sorry! What do you want from me?
Okay, could you just sort of stay there and pretend you care while I think about what it is I'm up to?
Of course, your highness.
I have the numbers.
What numbers?
The numbers that show how to move the character for basic movement. I did the same thing earlier with my own silly little design, but now I have the numbers that apply to Kyler's design.
So why don't you just plug them in or whatever?
It doesn't work like that. Anyway, the numbers aren't usable right now.
What does that mean?
Well, um. How do I explain this.
I'm not stupid.
Oy, that's not what I mean. Okay, um.. the numbers are relative to points that aren't going to be useful in the final game, and all the pictures they relate to are the wrong size for the final game. I guess I need to resize everything, unless I don't.
Why wouldn't you?
Well, I might be using the scaling algorithm which I programmed for the last game. In which case it doesn't matter so much… wait, I guess it does matter what size it is. The whole thing needs to be drawn on screen before everything else, so that the masking thing can work.
Right.
Anyway, right now it's too big to always fit on the screen. So that's no good. I'll need to make it smaller.
Sounds like you know what to do.
I guess so.
Great. Start working.
I told you you didn't have to do that!
So? I like ordering you around.
I'll work when Access Boss kicks me out.
Okay.
Friday, June 05, 2009
New Potentials
But it really is rather science-fictiony. The hardware itself is nothing impressive: a microphone and two cameras. But what the software does with it is amazing. The two cameras' data is combined to form a 3D model of the room and everything in it. Then facial recognition is applied to figure out which people are there. And then it looks at what their bodies are doing, by which I mean their entire bodies -head, torso, hands, arms, legs, feet- and converts that into movement data for 3D avatars. It also seems that it can recognize other sorts of inanimate objects in the room and what's being done with them. And it can apparently pick up on emotions from subtle cues in the player's face. And they threw in voice recognition too, so you can talk to the TV.
This whole package is codenamed "Project Natal". They're implying that it'll be an add-on for the XBox 360, but I don't buy it. I've heard this story before, and that's not how it goes. Back when the Wii was still "Project Revolution", it was teased as an add-on for the Gamecube. But Nintendo realized that they'd make more money treating it as a brand-new product. The Wii is barely more powerful than the Gamecube, and in fact uses most of the same technology. But while the Gamecube brand was third-place in a competition for the hardcore gamers, the Wii is selling ridiculous amounts to more casual gamers. By making the controller more user-friendly and appealing to the masses, they easily overtook Microsoft and Sony.
Now Microsoft is copying their entire business model, which is a sensible move. The project doesn't have a real name yet because it's still in relatively early stages of development. I'm guessing they'll be ready for release in 2011, by which point the XBox 360 will be old technology and the market will support a new one. And that's what this is: a new game system which has full-body motion control as a standard feature.
As with the Wii before it, Project Natal opens up many opportunities for gamists. You can communicate with NPCs through body motions like waving and nodding and shrugging, not to mention talking. You can play movement games with actual movement in an abstract context. You can reach out to pick things up and throw them or move them around. Being able to move the camera just by moving your head a little (a natural instinct for anyone) should now be easy to implement without any extra hardware. (I wonder if it can track your eye movements, to realistically adjust the focus based on what you're looking at. It probably isn't fast or precise enough.) Action can be more visceral when you're actually hitting things. Puzzles can be more relaxing without the need for a conventional interface.
What Microsoft is really planning is simpler than all that, though. They want the casual gamers that the Wii has pulled into the market. Project Natal is exactly the sort of thing Nintendo wishes they had. They've been trying to make games that everyone can and will play, and this is just about as close as you can get to that short of inventing the holodeck. Not needing buttons means games could be more accessible than a DVD player. Invite over all your friends, get 'em to stand around, and just start playing- that's the idea. Which means that much like we've seen with the Wii, I don't expect many particularly deep experiences with this technology. It'll mostly be easy and simplistic mini-games, especially with multiplayer. I'm not even sure if Project Natal can handle more than that- it doesn't seem particularly precise. But regardless of how good it is, it increases the audience size for games even more than the Wii did.
This game system will never be in our house, for the obvious reason that it wouldn't work here. If kicking a ball in-game is done by making a full kicking motion in the real world, then we just don't have enough space for it. You'd need to be pretty far back from the TV anyway, so that the cameras can see you clearly. So I'm guessing they're going to be selling more of these to those enormous American houses than to tiny Japanese apartments. And the room our TV is in is cramped.
Beyond that, I'm not sure I'd want this thing in our house. At this point I no longer have any illusions about my family: they're not going to play games. If the greatest minds in gamism got together with unlimited resources for making specialized hardware and said "Let's make a videogame that the Buckman family would play together!", they wouldn't succeed. So it doesn't matter if this machine has full-body motion control or full-mind telepathy, its main purpose -getting new gamers- is not going to work here.
This system is still going to need some sort of controllers, unless Microsoft is planning on abandoning all gamers who like to play their games for more than five hours total. The motion-control doesn't seem precise enough to sustain a good single-player game for longer than that. You still need something to aim with, something to push around. Whether these will be conventional controllers, I don't know. Maybe a game could be bundled with a cheap specially-shaped piece of plastic, and the camera would see how you're interacting with that. It seems doable, though I don't know if anyone will think of it. More likely there will still be games designed for XBox 360 controllers, but where every now and then you move around a bit. I should probably keep in mind that potential and implementation are worlds apart. How much of the Wii's potential has been used? Heck, how much of the DS's potential has even been used?
In their press conference, Microsoft was heavily playing up the potential. (Same as Nintendo does.) They had a demonstration of a person interacting with a very human-seeming NPC. It's a mind-blowing video, but on reflection it doesn't seem feasible to me, at least not for a lengthy game. There are too many possible interactions, between body motions and voice interaction, for any human gamists to be able to deal with on a large scale. (And since "Microsoft SkyNet" hasn't been announced yet, you still need humans programming this stuff.) I suppose if you had twenty years and the budget of a medium-sized country you could do it.
But for all this pessimism, I am really excited about what Project Natal means. Here's another barrier between the Real World and the game world getting knocked down. If this is the shape of progress, then where will gamism be in ten years? How about fifty years? The mind boggles.
Now, Project Natal -as I've said- is probably two years away. Nintendo's high-ups responded to this announcement by joking that they like to test things out and make sure they work before announcing them to the public. But regardless, Microsoft has made the Wii seem pretty obsolete. The Wii remote is a joke, at least in how it's been used up to this point. The much-hyped motion control is implemented just by having you make a flicking motion every now and then instead of pressing a button.
This Monday, Nintendo releases their precision attachment for the Wii remote, which I mentioned after last year's E3. (They're also releasing yet another add-on, this time something that checks your pulse! No, seriously. I can't imagine what they're thinking.) I think it's called "MotionPlus" or something silly like that. Now, it's definitely more precise than anything Microsoft has planned. I read an interview with some developers of a sports game for this thing who said that it was too precise, and they had to "dilute" the input a bit to make the game playable. That's good to hear. I don't expect many games to use this thing properly, though. Red Steel 2 looks cool, a guns-and-swords action game that uses the precise movement to control all sword swipes. Beyond that, I don't know if there will be any games at all I'm interested in with the peripheral.
Sony's got their own motion controller in development too. It seems pretty far along, so I'm guessing they'll release it next year to boost sales of the PS3. And seeing as how -like the MotionPlus- it's a "sold separately" sort of peripheral, I don't expect many games to use that either. But it seems to be the most precise of the three technologies, which is cool. There's definitely stuff you could do with that.
These are all huge steps, making games more real in the minds of the player and getting closer to the dream of believable fantasies. But I see very little evidence that gamists' mindsets are changing along with the times. When games are able to connect directly to our brains, will gamism still be in the same primitive position it's in now?
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
I'll keep this brief.
The reason I'm rushing through this, rather than waiting until tomorrow and posting in depth, is because with Microsoft's announcement of "Project Natal" suddenly this play seems awfully small. I'm finding it hard to sleep not only because it's so beastly hot in here (and not only because it's too early) but also because I can't stop thinking about this new technology. I don't know when I could possibly have the time to talk about it, but when I do I will. There's much to say.
2 Comments:
- stone_ said:
-
I saw a 1:18 video of "Oklahoma" posted on Facebook. It looked great. You even looked like you were smiling and having a good time.
- Mory said:
-
Let's put it this way. I am having a pretty good time. But the smiling is for the character. All the characters in the show (including the chorus) are brainless.
My family actually told me they felt I was going too far with the smiling, and that I was always smiling more than anyone else. So I've toned it down.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Respite From Everything Else
This morning I tried working. (Access Boss kicked me out of my user at 2:00.) I say "tried" because I'm having very little success. I always feel like I'm playing that unwinnable game of Tetris •-------
the lines only disappear temporarily, where my efforts don't feel anything like progress. Today the way I spent the time was by trying to figure out how much to multiply the X and Y values I was using in the prototype, so that it works with Kyler's design. The mathematical answer I found doesn't seem to work at all. I was getting a ride with Harvey around 4:30, so I left the house at maybe 4:25. (He picks me up right across the street.) I was in a terrible mood, but I didn't bring my DS. The idea was that maybe if I had nothing to do, some sort of inspiration would hit and I'd know what to do next. (This didn't happen.)
you need to get all the lines simultaneously
the lines only disappear temporarily
all lines come back
Oklahoma opens tomorrow. This was the dress rehearsal on stage. Backstage I try to be friendly (by my standards) with my fellow cast mates, because with home being how it is I'd like to be comfortable away from it. On stage, I never feel like I know what I'm supposed to be doing: Where exactly am I supposed to be standing? What sorts of movements am I supposed to make while I'm there? What's the timing supposed to be for my lines? Binder has made it clear that there is a right thing to do at any moment, but he rarely makes it clear what that is. Almost no one knows when they're supposed to be getting on and off the stage; we all just stand around and wait for the one person who seems to know his cue and then we all rush to follow him. The upside is that this isn't my show. If I don't know what I'm doing, no big deal. The show will go on regardless of what I'm doing. The downside is that at the end of the day, I haven't learned anything and haven't accomplished anything. And for this I'm sacrificing most of my day.
I've finally gotten home, in a lousy mood. And I'm trying so hard not to think of how much I'm going to hate this week (six performances!), that I think I see what I need to do for my game tomorrow. I've got to go back to square one. I don't feel like I'm making progress because I'm not making progress. I've been trying to manipulate Kyler's design so that it functions like my design. But that's never going to work. His design is totally different, and I'm moving it around in a totally different way. So anything I figured out for the prototype can't be more than a very rough guideline. That prototype wasn't easy to make, but if it's not helpful it's not helpful. The downside of having my own project is that if I get stuck there's no one to bail me out. The upside is, no one's waiting for me to get there. (Except maybe Kyler. I do feel guilty about making him wait for this.) So it can take as long as it takes.
It's like I always say: misery leads to progress.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Start working.
I said start working!
Listen to me, you brainless moron!
Look, not today.
That's what you said yesterday.
Okay. Look, to make it up to you I'll set Access Boss so that from now on, I'm not allowed in my regular user after 2:00 PM.
Oh, and I suppose you won't just disable that as soon as you have a sudden impulse at 1:55!
No. I promise I won't.
You are downright obnoxious, do you know that?
What? What did I ever do to you?
What did I ever.. oh my god, do you even HEAR yourself? Why did you even start this ridiculous Notepad thing?
You don't like Notepad, fine. I'll switch back to the blog.
Don't make this personal. I really did mean to listen to you every day.
How dare you insult my intelligence like that! You're exactly like he said you were!
Who…?
You just make characters out of us so that you can pretend we don't matter!
I really did mean to
I was going to build up to… um, it doesn't matter. Fine, you're right.
Good. Start working.
I mean, I won't ask you to do that again. It's not your problem if I don't do my work.
Don't you understand? I want you to do your work. What's the point of even existing, if I'm only existing for the benefit of some loser who refuses to do an hour a day of work?!
I don't know.
Look, I'll set Access Boss.
Moron.
GAME OVER
Press START to go to Main Menu
A Good Day
First I watched the bits of the 1776 DVD that I was in, to see how I did. It turns out, I'm a really bad actor. I was making all the amateur mistakes that I thought I'd gotten over. I shut it off around 1:00 PM, when my character went to the back of the crowd (where he'd stay).
I took a shower, got dressed, had lunch, and went over to Eli's house. Eli said he'd let me play The Path on his computer some time. I decided that "some time" was today. The Path is a pure exploration game from the people who made The Graveyard, so I was expecting great things. I wasn't disappointed: The Path is awesome. It's based on "Little Red Riding Hood". You play as several different girls of different ages, who each walk through the forest to Grandma's house (Grandma's house representing death) and find a metaphorical wolf, different for each of them. The wolf represents the loss of innocence for that particular character. We played four girls, and got to the wolf in each. (By my interpretation one was the indifference of the world, one was a sexual predator, one was lust and one was the over-analysis of everything.) Once you get to the wolf, life discards you back on the path to Grandma's house. And then you get to the pay-off, because "Grandma's house" itself is possibly the greatest achievement in world design ever.
I came home a few hours later, played piano for an hour or so and went back to my computer.
I've been rewatching Lost recently because the fifth-season cliffhanger has me utterly enthralled and the next episode is in eight months. I'm up to the middle of Season 2 already, so I watched the next two episodes from there. I also listened to the corresponding official podcasts, because I didn't know that existed back when I was watching Lost the first time. I think Lost may prove to be the best show ever on TV (unseating Babylon 5), depending on how the final season goes. (If the final season doesn't pay off all the promises they've made, then it'll just be an excellent show. Maybe a few notches above Battlestar Galactica, but not as good as, say, Felicity.) Half the fun of the show is trying to figure out the big picture. That picture may be compelling and sensible, or it may be ridiculous and contradictory. I'll have to wait until next year to find out which, but in the meantime I'm trying to sift through the clues and form my own theories.
After Lost and supper and more Lost, I went next door for games night. We played three games, and I came in dead last in three games. It was so much fun. The middle game in particular (Santiago) had such weird tactics going on, and so much evil all over the place, and so many surprises. The best part was when we all passed on a strong-looking property because it would have to go with a weaker property that no one wanted. When it was Avri's turn he realized that if he took the weaker property the next player would take the stronger property, they'd go together well and he'd make tons of money. It was a completely counter-intuitive move, but after we saw that he was doing it and understood the logic we were all beating ourselves up for not realizing that we could have done it! Now that's a rare kind of situation. In the last game (Die Sieben Siegel), I opted to do something that hurt me because it would hurt another player more, and when he got back at me it messed up all my plans. It was terrific.
At around 1:15 AM or so we called it a night. I went home in a great mood, had some coconut yogurt and Nestea, and started writing up this post. At the end of the day, I am in fact a lazy bum. And I feel like I can live with that.
1 Comment:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Though you came in last in Santiago, you would have come in second if I took your bribe I think, so I wouldn't call it dead last.
Really my choice of whose bribe to take in the end was pretty arbitrary.
I think it was really played by all sides. It was the most enjoyable game of Santiago I've ever played. Hysterical situations, everybody made a mistake or two, a really brilliant move or two, etc. I think if Eliezer had played nice with you with the bannanas (like he should have) the end of game would have been different.
But yeah, it was one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played, and not just because I won :) That was entirely secondary.
Monday, May 25, 2009
2.txt
You've got to start working, you know.
Not yet.
Then when?
I dunno. Maybe in a few hours.
Look, what time are you leaving for rehearsal?
Hm. I guess that'd be around 6:30. That's the time it usually is if I can get a ride.
Very good. That means you've got around five hours or so, when you take out all the eating and playing piano you do. How many Lost episodes do you have?
Umm, let me check.
Five.
Ha! You'd spend all your time on that, wouldn't you?
I guess I would.
Listen to me very carefully. When I say "Start working.", you stop everything and you start working.
Just like that?
Just like that. You need to start working at once. I don't care what else you'd like to be doing; your game is more important.
Why do you care?
You know why. So are we okay?
I guess so.
When I say "Start working.", what do you do right away?
I start working. You're being annoyingly condescending, you know.
I love you, but you and I both know you deserve no better.
Gee, thanks.
For now you can do whatever you like. But only for a half-hour or so,
A half-hour? That's not enough!
An hour, then. No more.
Okay.
Good. By the way, when I say "Start working.", you don't argue. You don't talk back, you don't try to work a deal. I'm not going to put up with that. When I say "Start working.", you WORK. End of story.
What'cha doing?
Reading my own blog.
Why?
Mind your own business, okay? It hasn't nearly been an hour.
I'm just curious, is all.
Fine. Well, the time I'm spending talking to you is time I could be spending reading my blog.
Well, then certainly spend more time talking to me. Seems like the better option of the two.
Leave me alone.
You know, I don't think I've ever taken anything as seriously in my life as Dena and her friends are taking their four-point math Bagrut.
I guess that doesn't say much about them. What is it that they're doing?
They spent all of yesterday studying, and then today they came again early on in the day and they're still studying. It's ridiculous.
Imagine how much you would have accomplished if you worked on your games like that.
Yeah.
This is why you need me.
I could use the blog.
But for some strange reason you're not. What, have you given up on the blog format?
No, no. I just don't want to be talking to a blog for my whole life.
Why not?
The progress report posts really, um, they really clog up the flow of the blog.
You sound like you're rationalizing. Here's my theory. You won't use the blog because you know you'd have to be productive.
I can be productive.
Suure.
No, I can.
Start working.
What? But it hasn't been an hour!
I said start working. No more argument.
Yes sir.
I hate you.
Why? You got a lot done.
This work makes me miserable. Nothing works the way it's supposed to.
I thought you liked suffering.
No, I do not like suffering.
Yes you do.
Listen to me. This work is the most annoying thing I've ever done. If it were anyone other than you forcing me to do it, I'd tell them to go to hell.
That's sweet.
I'm serious. Programming is a form of hell.
What's the problem?
I've made all these different tests. Each one seems to more or less make sense on its own, but they're all incompatible with each other on a fundamental level. Like, the way I'm thinking about one of them doesn't fit with the way I'm thinking of any of the others. And beyond that, this new test I'm doing to try to get it to look right only looks decent maybe a third of the time. Which means it's going to need to be even more complicated than it is in order to work, in ways that I don't even understand yet. It's just a total nightmare from start to finish.
Well, tough.
Excuse me?
Tough. You'll get through it, and then you'll thank me. So how long have you been working?
An hour and a half.
You're lying to me.
Okay, maybe an hour.
Okay. Yesterday you didn't do any work, so I guess this is progress. What would you like to do now?
Honestly? I'd like a good cry.
That's pathetic. It's just programming.
You have no idea.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
continue extrapolate repurpose
I apparently am in love with three notes, since they start a lot of my pieces. They are: 1 5 6. … The 1 grounds it. "Here is what you're standing on." The 5 brings that to its natural conclusion, fifths being the most pure interval. … 6 changes the meaning of the chord. In minor it's just the tiniest bit removed from 5, but flips the whole chord's meaning upside down. See, 6 is just two notes under 1 (or 8), which means that that's suddenly the "real" base of the chord. A tiny little half-tone increment, and suddenly the chord isn't what you thought it was. That's interesting to me.
It recently occurred to me that all my ideas are following the same formula. First I establish my take in accepted continuity, using as many past elements as I can. Then I try to imagine how that would naturally play out, connecting all the pieces together and going farther with them than their creators intended. And then I flip the whole thing around, so that it's actually not the same kind of story at all as the ones it's following.
The story wouldn't necessarily happen in that order; that's just the order I'd figure it out in.
I really love the idea of continuity. (You may have guessed that from the way this blog is presented on the main page.) A long-running series is like a person, and each thing that's happened in it is like another aspect of its personality. So the way I would continue a series is by trying to remember everything- not just the universally-loved stories, but the terrible and ridiculous stories too. What you call a flaw, I call an interesting aspect to the continuity. Writers often try to cherry-pick continuity, sweeping away those flaws in favor of a cleaner status quo. That feels as fake to me as people under heavy make-up. The only story which should be forgotten is a story which can't be reconciled with the rest of continuity.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
The strangest phone call I have ever had, part 2
The album starts out with Brahms' Lullaby reinterpreted as a loud late-night party, like so... -"I love it, it's Brahms with syncopation! You know, there are people who...". There would be a few other tracks in there somewhere with similar subversions.
Once I decide how I think everything fits together and where it would naturally lead, I need to flip it around so that it feels like a fresh story. Just a few new characters or ideas thrown in can change the whole perspective of the story, making you think about it in a way you otherwise would have overlooked. The idea is to find some new angle that hasn't yet been explored, by putting in one or two small elements that you'd normally never think would go together with the story. That way, each time you see the next chapter of the story, you get new ideas about what the whole series was about all along.
I guess I must have picked up this formula from what Straczynski did with Amazing Spider-Man. He pointed to all the animal-based villains which Spider-Man faces (Vulture, Rhino, Doctor Octopus, Vermin, Scorpion, etc. etc.), and suggested that there was a subconscious effort there to adopt animal "totems". Then he threw in the idea of a "Spider-God", which chose Peter Parker as its champion, and suddenly the whole series seemed to be a mythological epic. I think that whole run is brilliant.
One of my favorite pieces of comics writing, Dan Slott's first twelve issues of Avengers: The Initiative, also seems to follow the formula. It has a starting point of the entire Marvel Universe in its current status quo, brings in as many old characters as it can stuff in along with a bunch of new characters whose origins make sense given what's been established in Marvel Comics so far. The whole premise of the series is based on what logically would be there if you take the post-Civil War status quo seriously. Then it adds in government bureaucracy, and suddenly it seems like the whole Marvel Universe is a tragedy about how governmental interference can sap the life out of people.
Anyway, these things have inspired me and now I think that the "continue extrapolate repurpose" formula is the best way to continue most long-running series. Of course, that's not how I think about it when I imagine how a series should continue. I just get ideas from watching what's already being done; I can't help that. And it turns out (in retrospect) that all my ideas do pretty much the same thing with their respective series. Here's what I'd like to see:
*psst* Stop reading now. The rest of this post is gonna be unbelievably annoying in its fanboy geekishness and ooh-look-at-me self-congratulation.
Star Trek: Federation
It would be set a while after all the series so far. Potential wars have been averted or won (including one with the Vaadwaur race, met in Dragon's Teeth, a lousy episode of Voyager's last season), all their former enemies are either dead or allies. The Klingons and Ferengi are full members, the Vaadwaur and Dominion are being welcomed into the Alpha Quadrant, the Romulans are mostly wiped out from the destruction of Romulus. Even the Borg have found a place in the great Federation of Planets, giving an optional home to the many people who want to be assimilated but otherwise leaving the universe alone. It's Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision taken to its ultimate realization. Everyone is under the umbrella of the Federation. The question is what comes next.
My answer to that is that a moral decline begins. The different value systems begin to clash with human values, and the new races vying for power (Klingons and Ferengi in particular) start to corrupt the entire Federation. The humans are the good guys of the show, trying to balance their idealistic acceptance of other races with the understanding that there is not as much middle ground to stand on as they would like. The Federation would gradually begin to shift its power toward Vulcan, and away from Earth. In parallel, the proliferation of personal time travel devices and holodecks starts to give ordinary people all over the galaxy the idea that nothing they do matters, that life is no more sacred than holograms and whatever timeline you're in is no more important to save than another.
The twist is that the structure would be more like an anthology show. Each episode would be self-contained, showing one or two characters (or a group of characters) somewhere in the galaxy. They'd be introduced in that episode, have a story, and get to some kind of ending, and that could cover as much time (in-story) as the story calls for. There would be recurring themes and technologies and planets and species, but very rarely recurring characters. That would make the whole series feel very different to any previous Trek, getting at the broad strokes of history if you watch more than one episode of it.
The Legend of Zelda: Broken Duet
There would be two playable characters: Link and Enria, an old-girlfriend type character along the lines of Saria and Illia. The basic premise of the story (after a one-dungeon introduction to the characters as kids) is that it's what happens after a typical Zelda quest. Teenaged Link is known throughout peaceful Hyrule as the hero who saved them, he lives in the castle with Princess Zelda, the king sends him off on errands which are all really easy for him. Enria has been left behind at the village where they grew up, being pushed by her family to settle down and get together with a nice local boy, but always wishing she could have adventures with Link.
The gameplay for Link is action, and the gameplay for Enria is climbing. The game would (without spelling it out) expand on the usual "balanced-hero" idea by suggesting that neither Link nor Enria is balanced without the other. As Link, the player is encouraged to solve problems through brute force. As Enria, the player is encouraged to avoid confrontations but explore. And every now and then, Zelda will pop in as a non-playable character and solve "puzzles" with her magic.
The idea is to split up the three parts of the Triforce -Power, Courage, Wisdom- so that future Zelda games can play with the dynamic between them in different ways. For instance, there could be a nonviolent Zelda where the player needs to explore and solve puzzles, but where the Power part of the equation is included by having Ganon -the usual bearer of the Triforce of Power- as a non-playable ally. Or a Zelda game where the player can choose which of three characters to bring into a dungeon, so that the solutions to problems are approached with different kinds of gameplay. Also, the basic gameplay can be different from one Zelda game to the next just so long as a balance is maintained between the three elements. Power can be action, but it could also be real-time or turn-based strategy (strength in numbers). Courage is always exploration, but each game could have a different kind of movement to explore in. And Wisdom is usually puzzles, but it could also be perception. So the idea is create a framework from which many new Zelda games can be made without just repeating what's already been done.
The twist in Broken Duet specifically is that it doesn't exist for the gameplay, but for the characters. It would have dungeons no less abstract than in any other Zelda game, but where you are meant to understand things about the character's personalities and moods from what you're walking through and being asked to do. If one character misses the other, it's represented by an obstacle which the other character would pass easily but this character can't deal with. When Enria is scared about commitment, she finds herself in a claustrophobically tight dungeon with monsters where the only way to continue is toward some monsters. If Link is supposed to be overconfident, then a bunch of giant scary-looking monsters will run at him, do minimal damage and go down in one hit. It all is rooted in the character's personalities and emotions.
The Amazing Spider-Man: "Endgame"
A year-and-a-half ago, there was a lousy editorially-mandated-revision-masquerading-as-a-story called "One More Day". I have no great love for it. But it is a huge part of continuity, so it bothers me greatly that its (very interesting, I think) implications haven't been dealt with. In the issue of Sensational Spider-Man immediately before "One More Day" began, Spider-Man meets God. Not a god, not the spider-god, but the one true god. Who appears to him as an old man, for some reason. God says to Peter: Yeah, I know this is really tough. Your aunt is dying, your life is a wreck, but hey- what you're doing is important. And then "One More Day" happens, in which Mephisto appears to Peter. And Mephisto isn't portrayed as a random demon, he's portrayed as The Devil. And he says, hey, your life sucks. Make a deal with me, and you'll be happier. Which is what Spider-Man does, and we get to the current (very enjoyable) status quo which is a lot more cheery.
The big controversy about the story was that this deal-with-the-devil eliminated Peter's marriage to MJ Watson. But that seems to me like a small part of the story. The bigger story is what was supposed to happen next that was so huge that God and the Devil appeared to Peter Parker to sell him on their preferred continuation. I think the answer comes from a story a year before any of this, entitled "The Other", which was worse than "One More Day" in almost every way. (As I said before, this is no obstacle to my wanting to focus on it.) In it, Spider-Man dies. And is resurrected in the very next issue. That seems like a pretty huge event, no? Funny how nobody remembers it. The justification, in-story, for the resurrection, comes when the spider-god appears to Peter in a dream. It basically tells him he still hasn't figured out what he's supposed to be doing. And the idea of the resurrection is to push that process along. He gets a bunch of new magic-based powers (such as poisonous spikes which pop out of his palms), and is told that finally he'll figure out why he was made Spider-Man to begin with. Immediately after "The Other", the storyline is derailed by the current politics of the Marvel Universe, and then comes "One More Day".
Here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking there's a whole hierarchy of gods, where the spider-god is on the side of God (though it might not realize it) and other gods (such as the Norse god Loki, who incidentally owes Spider-Man a favor) are on the side of the Devil. So if I continued Amazing Spider-Man, I'd start moving in this grand dualistic direction. The idea would be to show how even gritty, street-level crime stories of the sort typical to Spider-Man comics are just part of a big cosmic conflict between ultimate good and ultimate evil. (Which is not how I see the universe, but after "One More Day" it's clearly how Spider-Man comics work.) I'd pull in every character from Spider-Man's past which fits the white-vs-black symbolism appropriate for this kind of storyline, including Cloak and Dagger, the Punisher, Spot, the Black Cat, Will-o'-the-wisp, The Answer, Mr. Negative, Venom and Anti-Venom, etc. What role each character would play in the story would depend both on that character's history in Spider-Man comics and on what color they represent. (Obviously, the color would need to be worked in very subtly. No one could be acting in a way that's out-of-character just to justify my own love of symbolism.) Characters who don't fit in quite as easily (Dr. Octopus, Kraven the Hunter, the Vulture, a generic mafia, Ka-Zar, Morlun) would also be present.
New York City would be played on three levels: At first it needs to seem realistic. Then it needs to seem like it's a jungle, that the "totemistic" behavior of criminals is not restricted to people dressing up like animals but that the kill-or-be-killed mentality pervades all of society. And finally, once the whole world seems like a barbaric jungle with a thin façade of being civilized, the curtain is pulled back and it's made clear that all the good guys are going to have to fight all the bad guys in an end-of-the-world kind of scenario. And it turns out that the only one who can save all of humanity is Spider-Man, because in the grand scheme of things he tips the balance one way or the other.
During this whole massive (likely around three or four years) buildup, there would be "What If?" back-up stories in each issue showing how Spider-Man's life would have continued from "One More Day" on if he had turned down Mephisto's offer. His Aunt May would have died, and with her all hope of a normal life. His marriage to Mary Jane would keep him grounded and human, but he'd always be miserable. Spider-Man would develop his magical powers more, and finally put his scientific genius to good use, and with all that and a cunning understanding of how the underworld works and with all sorts of technological and mystical traps he'd set like webs, and with The Punisher as his sidekick, he'd take down the entire criminal underworld. The back-ups would end with Spider-Man being shot down by the police exactly as he was in the flash-forward of Amazing Spider-Man #500, having created a better world for his and MJ's two kids.
The timeline followed in regular continuity would be much less dark, but be played as much more tragic. Peter Parker's mundane, happy life feels empty to him, and as Spider-Man he feels like he's locked into the same loop he's been in ever since he started. When the endgame finally comes, he's not ready for it. In fact, he's decided to give up the role of Spider-Man to the teenage girl Araña and live a happy life with Gwen Stacy's clone. (Believe it or not, this all has a strong basis in continuity.) And when the world is about to be destroyed, and the Gwen Stacy clone dies, Spider-Man tries to start on the road to his spiritual self-fulfillment but it's almost too late.
Basically, this is a textbook example of the "continue extrapolate repurpose" formula, though really this is such a complex story that maybe it's more a philosophy of storytelling than a simple formula. But what I'm doing here is taking all the elements which have already been there, mixing them all together (even the really wacky parts which come from bad stories) to get a unified vision of Spider-Man's world, and then twisting it all around so that instead of being a generic superhero story it's a religious epic.
I'm obviously not going to get to tell any of these stories. I don't even know if they'd appeal to anyone other than myself. But I sure do wish someone would do it. Every time I see Star Trek, or play Zelda, or read Amazing Spider-Man, I appreciate what it's doing but in the back of my mind I'm thinking how much more I'd like it if it were my way.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
A buffer from the Real World
The producer of 1776 promised to pay us for our performances. There were contracts and everything. I've put off receiving the payments for more than a month, because there was some sort of technical issue that I didn't understand with the taxes. I needed to do something, but I didn't understand what. Eventually my mother called our family's accountant, who sent us the form I'd need. I looked at the form and was overwhelmed by all the checkboxes and options. I didn't understand the Hebrew of half of it. My mother called our accountant and he walked me through filling it out.
Tonight I need to go to a rehearsal of Oklahoma, a musical which I've discovered that I dislike. It's in a place I haven't gotten to by bus before, off in the middle of nowhere in Jerusalem. No one can give me a ride there tonight. My mother called a friend of hers who's in the play. She gave some slightly vague instructions. I suppose when I get lost I can call Binder and have him direct me.
Tomorrow I have another rehearsal. (The play opens in two weeks.) The day after that is Tuesday, which is the day I promised Kyler I'd have his design in the prototype by. That means that I'll need to spend just about every spare minute working on the game, which is not something I intend to do. Tuesday is also Games Night.
I just got Rhythm Heaven, a marvelous little DS game which I love to pieces. It's more consistently excellent than its predecessor, the only-in-Japan Rhythm Tengoku. It's lots of little rhythm-based minigames, which you play by tapping and flicking with the stylus. It requires extremely precise timing, and I always feel like if I just play through a minigame a few more times I'll get it perfect.
Friday, May 08, 2009
The Complete Rules of Moneyloopy
- When all other players have gone bankrupt and dropped out of the game, the last player to still have money is the winner.
- After each player left in the game has taken exactly 40 turns, the player with the greatest amount of money is the winner. At that point, any properties owned are worth $400.
The turn marker: Each time the last player has finished taking his turn, the turn marker is moved forward one spot on the board. (There are 40 spots on the board.) When the turn marker gets back to GO, the game ends immediately. Players get $400 for each property they own, and whoever has the most money wins.
Basic movement and looping: On his turn, a player rolls two dice and moves clockwise that number of spaces. When he lands on a particular spot, he must activate it unless he uses a SafeCard (see below). The three corners of the board -Just Visiting, Free Parking, and Go To Jail- are tollbooths priced $100, $200 and $300 respectively. If the player passes or lands on a tollbooth, he must either pay that toll to the bank or loop back to GO. If he pays or cancels (see "SafeCards" below) the toll, he continues his regular movement according to the dice. If he does not, then when he reaches the tollbooth he jumps back to GO (instead of stepping on the tollbooth) and continues the movement from there.
Example 1. If the player is on Tennessee Avenue and rolls an 8, he may either pay $200 to the bank and land on Atlantic Avenue, or loop back and land on Oriental Avenue.
Example 2. If the player lands directly on the third tollbooth (Go To Jail), he can either pay $300 and stay there or pay nothing and end his turn on GO. In either event, his turn is then concluded.
If a player ever passes the line separating Boardwalk from GO, he receives one thousand dollars from the bank.
Buying properties: There are 22 properties on the board. The railroads and utilities (Electric Company and Water Works) are not properties in Moneyloopy, but parts of the board. (Their functions will be explained below.) The market price of any property on the board is $300, regardless of what price is written underneath it. When a player lands on an unclaimed property, he may either buy it for market price or put it up for auction. Auctions begin at $100, and anyone (including the player who put it up for auction) may bid. When no one is willing to bid higher, the highest bidder buys the property from the bank. If no one wishes to pay $100, then the property is not bought by anyone. There is no maximum bid for a property.
When someone buys a property, he places the property's card in front of him so that everyone will know he is the owner. If a player lands on someone else's property, he must pay the owner rent as specified by the standard Monopoly card. If the owner has the entire monopoly (all cards of that color), then the rent without houses is doubled, and the owner may build houses.
Housing: Houses and hotels may be bought from the bank before (and only before) that player rolls the dice. A house on any property costs $100. Five houses are replaced with a hotel, which not only raises the rent significantly but also has other benefits which will be described below (see "SafeCards" and "Utilities"). Houses and hotels may only be bought if the player owns the entire monopoly, but if a player owns a spot with houses or a hotel without owning the monopoly the rent is still the price the card states for that number of houses. (This can happen through a trade/gift or because of one of the utilities.) Houses do not need to be placed evenly across the monopoly; whoever is buying the houses decides where they go. Once a hotel is built, no more houses may be built on that spot.
Houses and hotels are permanent. They may never be sold to the bank or moved to other spots, under any circumstances. No matter what happens to the property, the houses stay on it.
(There can never be a shortage of houses or hotels. If the pieces run out, something else should be used to signify houses or hotels.)
SafeCards: The thin cards (which in Monopoly would be from Community Chest or Chance) are always kept face-down. What is written on them never comes into play. However, these cards do have an important use. Face-down, they are called SafeCards. (Blame Coren for the name. I had to make this concession to him in order to keep the name "Moneyloopy".) When a player lands on any Community Chest spot, he may (if he so chooses) pay $100 to the bank to buy a SafeCard, which he will hold on to along with his properties. SafeCards can get you out of dealing with any spot on the board except Luxury Tax or a property with a hotel. This includes tollbooths (even when passing them), Income Tax, an owned property with up to four houses on it, or even an unowned property. When a SafeCard is used, it is returned to the bank. A player may hold as many SafeCards as he likes, though only one can be bought at a time. If a player lands on Luxury Tax, he loses all his SafeCards. (If he has no SafeCards, he loses nothing.)
Chance: When a player lands on any Chance spot, he may if he so chooses play a game of chance. He places a bid of cash and/or SafeCards in the middle of the board, and rolls a single die. If he gets a 3 or lower, then he loses everything he bid to the bank. If he gets a 4 or higher, then he gets his bid back plus the same amount in cash and SafeCards from the bank. A player may not bid all his money, because a player without money is immediately out of the game. (See "Bankruptcy", below.)
Railroads: If a player lands on Reading Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad or B&O Railroad, he may if he so chooses take the railroad to get to the next railroad spot on the board without paying a toll. To do this, he spends a turn in transit in the middle of the board. If he does not decide to take the train, then the railroad spot has no effect. But if he does, then he ends that turn by placing his playing piece in the middle of the board directly between the railroad station he is leaving and the railroad station he will be arriving at. In his next turn, he will not roll the dice. He may buy houses as always, then he places his piece on the next railroad spot (this spot will not be activated) and ends his turn.
Short Line operates differently. If a player lands on Short Line (and he chooses to use it) he immediately moves his playing piece to the very center of the board. On his next turn (after buying houses, if he wishes) that player chooses any spot on the entire board (with no exceptions), moves his playing piece to that spot and activates it on the same turn.
In addition, the player receives money from the bank to compensate for the fact that he will not get to pass GO and receive the usual $1,000. How much money he receives depends on where he is on the board:
- If he jumps to a spot on the first section of the board (anywhere from GO to Connecticut Avenue), he receives $900.
- If he jumps to the second section (Just Visiting to New York Avenue), he receives $600.
- If he jumps to the third section (Free Parking to Marvin Gardens), he receives $300.
- If he jumps to the fourth section (Go To Jail to Boardwalk), he receives no money, because he will still be passing GO.
Income Tax: If a player lands on Income Tax, he must either pay $200 to the bank or use a SafeCard to get out of it. Paying 10% of his money, as written on the board, is not an option. (Actually, Wikipedia tells me that this change was made to the official Monopoly board last September.)
Utilities:
If a player lands on Water Works, he may if he so chooses sell any property he owns back to the bank for the inflated price of one thousand dollars. Only one property can be sold at a time. That property can then be bought again by any player who lands on it for the market price of $300 (or an auction), as before. A property can be sold which is part of a complete monopoly, and a property can be sold which has houses or a hotel on it. Houses and hotels do not change the market price; if that property is then bought, it comes with the houses and the rent is correspondingly high. Housing does not entitle the seller to any more than $1,000 for the property.
If a player lands on Electric Company, he may if he so chooses steal a property owned by any other player. Only one property can be stolen at a time. To steal a property without a hotel (even if it has houses), the player pays $600 to the bank. Stealing a property with a hotel costs $1,000.
(If a previously-complete monopoly is broken by any means, the owner can no longer build new houses. He also loses the double-rent privilege where there are no houses. However, he retains any houses which are already there and the corresponding rent prices.)
Trades, deals and gifts: At any point in the game, two players can discuss and/or carry out a deal. The progression of the game may be paused at any time for this purpose. Here is what cannot be changed in a deal:
- The basic movement rules, including all die rolls.
- The effects of any spaces on the board other than owned properties, such as Income Tax, tollbooths, GO, railroads and unowned properties.
- Anything owned by, owed to, or owed by a player not agreeing to the deal.
- No matter what deals are made, a property will always technically have just one "legal" owner.
- The behavior of the bank.
- The turn order and bankruptcy rules.
- Player A gives Boardwalk to Player B, in exchange for Virginia Avenue and $500.
- Whenever Player A lands on Player B's property, the rent is half what it would otherwise be. In exchange, Player B agrees to cancel a previous deal.
- Player A will never have to pay player B for landing on any spot with a hotel. In exchange, every time player A lands on a Community Chest he is obligated to buy a SafeCard and give it to player B.
- Player A will not have to pay the $500 he owes Player B for landing on his spot right now. But as soon as the turn marker reaches Free Parking, he will have to pay him $1,000.
- Player A may never pass the second tollbooth. In exchange, player B will wash the dishes.
- Player A gives $150 to player B.
Bankruptcy: When a player does not have even a single dollar in cash, he is declared bankrupt and is permanently out of the game. This happens when a player owes more money, either to the bank or to a player, than he has the cash to pay. He may try to make a deal to either cancel the immediate debt or get the money needed to pay it. Beyond that, there are no more options. Unlike Monopoly, in Moneyloopy properties may not be mortgaged and houses cannot be sold. So if a deal cannot be made, the player is finished. At that point, all his money goes to whoever is owed it, his SafeCards go back to the bank, and all properties are auctioned off. As with any auction, bidding starts at $100. If there are no bidders for a property, it goes to the bank.
7 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
I should point out that if you pay every dollar you have, even if you have just enough, you're technically bankrupt and out of the game. So for instance, if you have only 100 dollars in your hand you are not allowed to buy a SafeCard.
Believe it or not, that last dollar can be extremely important. Today, Eli and I played a 2-player game of Moneyloopy where I accidentally bought a property with all the extra money I didn't need for tolls. (I got it for just $150.) If I had bid even one dollar less, it would have been fine. But not having that dollar left in my hand meant I wasn't able to pay the toll. I would have been stuck looping around the first section until I landed on Income Tax and lost. Eli realized what I had done before I did, and greedily offered to buy one of my properties for 1 dollar. (I had paid around 200 dollars for it, if memory serves.) He later realized that this was a tactical mistake- that dollar allowed me to get around the board, and I actually won the game in the end. - Mory said:
-
Oh, something else which wasn't quite spelled out: money is hidden.
- said:
-
Hey, thanks for doing this! You saved me the effort, and did a better job than I would have done.
- stone_ said:
-
Shortline seems over powered:
Besides the obvious move to the utilities, you can choose to live out the rest of the game on Shortline going back to itself, never paying anymore money out and just living off the income of properties you've already purchased. Maybe not a winning strategy... but strange.
Maybe it can send you anywhere for free, or you can pay $100 to have where you go activate too. - Mory said:
-
"Besides the obvious move to the utilities, you can choose to live out the rest of the game on Shortline going back to itself, never paying anymore money out and just living off the income of properties you've already purchased. Maybe not a winning strategy... but strange."
I like strange. If you take the Short Line to Water Works, then continue around the board, that's $2000 earned. Staying in place can't possibly make as much for you, so I don't see a problem with it. I just like the idea of being able to wait in the middle of the board until the other player is low on cash, and then jump back in to get a dirt-cheap purchase.
As for the matter of being overpowered, well, yeah. That's kind of the idea. It's just one spot all the way around the board- you're paying $600 to get there, and there's no guarantee of landing on it. I know you don't like luck, but I do in this case. - Kyler said:
-
This sounds like a lot more fun than monopoly.
I will play it sometime. - Mory said:
-
I've made a major change to the rules. Hopefully this is the last one that will be necessary. Instead of calling a winner after 40 turns through cash alone, each property is worth $400 at the end. We made this change because we found that the most effective strategy was just circling the board for the whole game and never buying any properties. Which does not make for a fun game, obviously. It doesn't seem like that tactic will work with this added rule.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Oh, by the way…
Monday, April 27, 2009
Imagine, if you will…
Nonlinear long-form storytelling
Each episode is an hour long, but the show is animated. (It's the only feasible way to pull this off, really.) Any episode, watched alone, is clear enough (and linear enough) in its storytelling that it can be a jumping-on point for the show. But the key to making the series work as a whole is that each episode feels like it's part of a big continuity. The characters are always dealing with the repercussions of events we don't know the specifics of, and many episodes feel like they've got to have major effects on what comes next. So an episode gets the viewer thinking about the bigger picture. The show is a big jigsaw puzzle which the viewer continues to assemble in his head from week to week.
But that's not why the viewer tunes in. He tunes in because every episode is a good story. You are surely familiar with half-hearted stories which exist mainly to get from point A to point B in serialized mediums. Those sorts of episodes exist in every show but this one. If point A is interesting, and point B is interesting, and the writers don't have anything particularly interesting planned in between, then point A and point B will each be episodes (Not necessarily in that order.) but the time in between will be skipped. Maybe somewhere down the line some writer will come up with some brilliant story which happens in between, so until that inspiration hits it's left blank. In general, that's how the show is written. There's no importance to the order the episodes are released in, except that that's the order the writers came up with the ideas in. An episode is only written if its writer really wants to tell that story. And it can take place at any point during the show's timeline- even before "The Pilot" or after "The Finale"! Further, an episode doesn't have an restrictions on how much time it covers. One episode might cover just a few pivotal minutes from many perspectives, and another might cover a single character's entire life! One writer could have a "pet" character which many of his stories focus on- the other writers back off of that character to some degree, to let him chart out the character's course.
No specific time frame is ever given for anything, so that the writers can say as many or as few stories as they like took place in a particular part of the timeline. So each episode written only creates more potential stories to be told, never less. In conventional shows, huge status quo changes are avoided because they prevent the writers from telling the stories they're used to. But here, the writers can always jump back to before the event. This encourages the writers to be more experimental with their plots.
There are many recurring characters, with new ones being introduced all the time. The premise of the show (whatever that is) lends itself to having some characters come and go all the time, on top of the core characters who are usually there. This allows tremendous flexibility in storytelling, not only because it doesn't lock the writers into using specific characters at whatever point in the timeline he's at, but also because it allows them to tell many stories not set in familiar locations.
The entire overall plotline of the show, in general terms subject to revision, is planned out before even the first episode is written. At the end of the day, the first episode needs to feel like it is the culmination of everything seen afterward. This keeps the writers somewhat focused, even as they tell their own little stories, because they always know exactly where they're heading in the long run. Not all the gaps need to be filled, of course. The viewer doesn't need to have it spelled out exactly what the context of "The Finale" is, because he's never going to get the entire picture. There will always be untold stories. But it should seem like the series is more than the sum of its parts. Writing the first episode is probably the hardest part.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
I love my cat.
That's a pretty lousy imagination, if you ask me. How hard is it to come up with a background?
2 Comments:
- Nati said:
-
Thought I might as well jump by and say hey.
This wasn't half-bad. I still can't say though that I understand your attraction to cats. It might be easy to make them happy, but why on earth would you want to?
I like dogs because they make me happy. I suppose that makes me a narcissist.
My serious thoughts, for what they're worth, are that nobody can make anybody (human) happy. You can make someone feel loved and respected, but happiness is something they have to proactively find themselves. It's what separates us from the cats.
In any case, I'm going to be here, making sure your posting is up to standard. Cheers. - Mory said:
-
It makes me happy to make Pussywillow happy. So it all leads back to selfishness eventually. But I guess, on reflection, I don't really understand why it makes me happy to make him happy. It might be because I identify with his general laziness and mostly solitary nature. I can't be happy that easily, but I can settle for his happiness.
..or something.
It's good to have you around. Why didn't you tell me you'd started blogging?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Tapestry Thread: Rebellion Renewed
(Everything's so much more sensible without other people.)
And these people were all crying out in unison: "Appease! Appease!" So Ariel's theoretical moment of clarity was just barely out of reach, no closer than the thought of not being a character any more. None of these other nameless people ever had problems like he had. They didn't have to wander around forever serving others. What's so great about this name "Ariel" that he wouldn't rather not even be mentioned in these stories? "The people wanted this.", "The people worked for that.", "The people were happy.". Short stories which didn't single him out as a notable entity- how much easier that would be!
At the seder last week, my father asked why God had to bring the Jews to Egypt. And I answered (while struggling to find the words, as my conviction was stronger than my argument) that otherwise we wouldn't have the story to tell. Without Pessakh telling us where we'd been, we couldn't know who we were and where we were trying to get to. And if we hadn't been there, then we would be no one and we wouldn't be trying to get anywhere. We were slaves. That's our story. One of us thought he could fit into the Egyptian hierarchy, and we ended up doing their work for them. We're not supposed to fit in. We tell the story every year, and we're supposed to believe as we say it that we ourselves got out of Egypt. Because for the rest of the year, we're still there.
We were in a land that wasn't ours. Well, we still are. Just, the concept of "land" is totally different now. Israel is ours, sure. But we only got Israel when the world was starting to become one land, when globalization was starting to make the actual borders a moot point. In this new age, we're all living in the same gray "land", with the same laws and ideas. And that's not ours. So each year, we need to remind ourselves what our place is. We're not nameless members of the human race, we're a character in our own right. We're Jews! We have the right and the obligation to be Jews!
Now, take Lieberman. I'm really glad I voted for him. Fifteen minutes after he was officially declared our foreign minister, he was already standing up to the world. Our policy of appeasement is only going to lead to our own destruction, and he knows it, and he doesn't care if the entire world hates him for it! So I don't care if he is a scumbag politician- that's the kind of Jew I can root for.
I don't know if I can be so proud of myself, though. As an actor, suddenly I'm doing what I'm told. The reason I can find for those oppressive rehearsals is that I can direct that frustration toward being more rebellious in other areas. An identity is something I'm going to have to continually find in myself, it's not something that's otherwise there.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Different Approaches to Directing
Now I'm free to be part of Oklahoma. As of the end of 1776, they'd been rehearsing for over two months and I'd been to exactly one of those rehearsals. I told Binder (the producer/director) as soon as he sent out the schedule that almost all the dates coincided with performances (or rehearsals) of 1776*-------
(It's not all the rehearsals which were scheduled badly- just the ones for the male chorus members. If I'd been a lead, I think there'd be less of a problem.)
. I said to him, "This is going to be a problem.". To which he responded: "I suggest that you attend those rehearsals that you can and fill in what you've missed after your other show." Well, he's not quite as calm about it now that he understands just how many rehearsals we had to miss. (I'm not the only one from 1776 in the cast.) As a matter of fact, he's rather furious -though he covers it with a very diplomatic attitude.
Let me tell you something about Binder. He knows exactly what he wants from every person on stage at every moment. In the rehearsals, he says to random people, "You stand there, you're doing this, you say this.". And then we're expected to do that and move on. (None of us lowly chorus members have scripts, which would aid us in understanding the context.) I have no doubt that the end result will be very professional and impressive. But, y'know. It's not any fun for me.
Another problem I have is that the cast of Oklahoma is so ridiculously huge (more than fifty people) that half the time I'm just trying not to get trampled upon. I hate crowds.
1776 had many speaking parts (They were all speaking parts.), but no extras. And we all had fun.
Let me tell you something about Batsheva, the director of 1776. All she cares about is the realness of the performances. We started out just saying the lines to each other, rather than putting any kind of "acting" into them, so that we could internalize what we were saying and exactly why we were saying them. Once we knew the lines, not so much by heart as by understanding, she'd give us general ideas about who our characters were supposed to be. •-------
He's a respectable man … he's seen every kind of person before … you're being too rude.Batsheva really didn't have any idea what the end result ought to look like. But she trusted that if we understood the characters, we'd figure it out. And we did. We didn't deliver a flawless rendition of the script, but most of us got to the essence of the characters and gave our audiences a great show.
Oklahoma isn't the same kind of acting experience. There's no creativity or self-expression involved, there's no exploring possibilities. It's just doing what Binder says efficiently. One fellow cast member who quit the show to join another one summed it up quite well: "It feels like you're a cog in the machine." For me, it's all just an exercise in hitting my cues. So I get the sense that there are many opportunities for me to screw up (Some of which I have already discovered, to my shame.), but no opportunity to excel.
Monday, March 30, 2009
That's better.
So I went back and did the coding like it ought to have been done the first time. And now I've got a pretty good prototype.
Monday, March 16, 2009
I spent hours working. And yes, I finished a prototype. And if this is the best I can do, I do not deserve to exist.
God damn it!
I've been having a nightmare lately about Tetris. In it, I realize that the blocks that disappear don't really disappear. They come back as soon as you make another line. You know what, these words don't really explain the nightmare. I've been going over it in my head, trying to figure out what the rules of the game are. And though I feel certain that they could make sense, I'm not certain that I'm capable of making sense of them. But the feeling it makes- the feeling is that it really ought to be possible to clear away those lines, except that rationally there is no conceivable way to win the game and it keeps on going forever. I'm not quite sure that conveys it. Like I said, these are just words. That nightmare was the most scared I have ever been at least since I was a little kid. I only had it once while I was asleep, but after that I've been feeling its presence when I'm awake. The blocks never go away. God help me, they never go away. I don't even understand what that means, and it has me so scared, like there's no point in living if those are the rules of the game.
Anyway. The feeling of that nightmare is the feeling I have right now. I woke up this morning thinking that I, as a creature, have some value in this universe. And then I made this prototype, this horrendous piece-of-shit monstrosity, and now I don't think that's true. I don't think
I want my Game Over already. Is there some way to
God damn it.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
So let's forget all this nonsense of where I think my blog is going. Down to business.
Tomorrow, 15 March, is wide open for work. I've got no 1776 performances, I've got no Oklahoma rehearsals, I've got no obligations of any kind. So let's set a goal, shall we?
This blog hereby formally declares the following goal:
Thank you, blog. [ahem] By the end of the day, which by my schedule is 2:30 AM on 16 March, I will have a working prototype of the most basic movement of The March of Bulk.
Interesting, how he seems to be going against the artificialities which made his blog unique in the first place. I would normally expect some sort of essay here to analyze the situation, though in this particular case I guess that would be inappropriate.Who cares about that?
Speech, speech!Oh! How simple-minded of me. I should have realized- our conversation is here to serve that purpose!
Strange.What?Well, if the point was to stop focusing on style so much and focus more on the work, which, by the way, is a good idea. The interesting part of the blog is when he moves toward where he ended up. The rest is fluff.I like the interactive bits.That's fluff too.It is not!Why are we arguing about this?Because you're wrong.
You know, I think I understand it.Understand what?It's not that this bit serves any purpose at all, it's just that he can't help himself.You've lost me.I just mean, even in places where it's absolutely ridiculous to stick in fluff, he can't help himself. He just has to babble on. I mean, in this place here it would make so much more sense if he were just silent, you see what I'm saying? If he just shut up for a minute after declaring the goal. It would fit better.[sip]
No, I don't see that.You wouldn't, would you.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I exist. No, really.
My body picked a really terrible time to turn sick. I've had lots of performances of 1776, and I'd been told to be louder even before that. Now, walking onto stage with slight dizziness is no big deal. But walking onto stage with a hurting throat- that's scary. So I've got the third-least important role in the entire play, and I was worried about whether or not I'd be able to pull it off.
I did, which surprisingly didn't make me feel much better.
It was Purim yesterday, which meant I read the Megillah again. I don't feel like sticking in a link; just trust me that I've talked about Megillah-reading on this blog before. My throat wasn't fully healed yet, but it was well enough to do all the voices and entertain the congregation.
Surprisingly, I didn't feel much better after that.
Or maybe it's not surprising at all. This acting stuff, that's just a side dish. Where's the main course? Where's the game?
The ugly truth is, I haven't been working on it. I have no valid excuses, I just haven't. I haven't thrown up a hundred "No work done." posts, because I want to figure out a way to work without the blog. The blog's not going to be here forever, so relying so much on it seems unhealthy. Not that the nothing I've been doing is healthy in any way.
I think I need a calendar, where I write what I did every day. That might work.
I'm supposed to be doing something.
This is supposed to be a major post, not.. not this.
It's not just me that's counting on me, Kyler's involved with the game..
I have no motivation to do anything other than curl up in a little ball and close my eyes.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Delayed, but successful
For my birthday, I didn't want food or even to leave the house. What I wanted was, for a whole day on 21 February, to sit at home and play multiplayer games.
My actual birthday, 21 February, was Shabbat. I went over to the Feldmans to ask Tamir what he thought of the first episode of Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse (I thought it was fascinating.) and tell him how Alias ended. I always talk to him about Alias because I know nobody cares and Tamir's the only person I know with such a quiet personality that he'd never tell me he's not interested. But it didn't matter- Tamir wasn't home. So I played a variant of Monopoly we made up (called Moneyloopy) together with Eliav and Coren and a girl who was staying by them. It was fun. Oh, and first I talked to Harel. I don't remember what we talked about, though I probably enjoyed the conversation at the time. Most likely something involving comics or computers or science-fiction TV shows. I asked him whether Monday might be a good day for him to come over, and he said it would. Then I went to Avri's house to wait for Eli and Coren to get back from Aviv, and there were a bunch of guys over at Avri's house playing Tigris & Euphrates, so I watched their game. It went in some wacky directions. Anyway, I told both Avri and Eli to come on Monday, and they both said they would. During the day I went over to Nati's house and we talked about Fight Club, because I'd just watched that for the first time, and I told him to come on Monday and he said he would. On Sunday I called Moshe to let him know about the next day and see if he was free (He said he was.), and talked with Tamir to tell him to come and while I was at it briefly ask him about Dollhouse and tell him my personal hunch about where it's going. (I think Caroline was trying to bring down the Dollhouse from the inside.)
I bought Tetris Party for WiiWare. 12 bucks, which is awfully expensive for such a small game, but I figured four-player Tetris would be fun. Then I went to a neighbor's to borrow a Wii remote, because I only have three. And I cleaned up the room a little, so there'd be somewhere to sit.
On Tuesday I woke up at 12:00, had lunch (I didn't want to have to eat while there were people there, so I didn't wait until 2:00 or 3:00 like I usually do.), and started messing around on the piano to pass the time. No one knocked on the door, so I started playing Tetris over the internet. I played for around an hour, I think. I browsed the web, noticed some people had finally played my game (Yay!), and seemed to be enjoying it, went back to the piano, played a little Art Style: Rotohex on Sprint mode, and kept waiting. Finally I sent an instant message to Eliav, who said he'd just gotten home from somewhere or other but would be over soon. I told him to bring a Game Boy or two if he could, so that we could play Four Swords Adventures. He came over a little later (around 3:00) with an old GBA, we picked a random level and we were off. Four Swords Adventures is so much fun, though of course it's better with three players.
Tamir came over maybe 45 minutes in. He watched us playing, then (when I won the level) I handed over my GBA SP so that he could play a level with Eli. They played one of the first levels of the game, so that Tamir wouldn't be in too far over his head. I think we all enjoyed it, though I'm not sure Tamir got past his initial awkwardness with the controls. (He insists a keyboard and mouse is the best input for a game, which is of course ridiculous!) I think it's best played regularly, from start to finish. Then we played a little three-player Tetris, which neither of them were particularly interested in so we left quickly. (I didn't understand that we could play without a computer player, which made it much more awkward than it should have been.) With Eli's permission, I played a two-player game of Rotohex with Tamir, which we completed. And then Eli wanted to wait and watch the credits before moving on, which I don't think Tamir particularly cared for. They are really cool, though. Then a little Maboshi's Arcade, and finally three games of Pac-Man Vs., which Tamir particularly enjoyed. Actually, we all enjoyed that. Tamir commented that whoever designed it was a genius, which of course he is. (That person being Miyamoto.) And then Tamir left, off to study for some tests. Eli was sticking around, so we played a little Super Mario Galaxy, and I think I pushed him to bite off more than he could chew by jumping to the really challenging levels. Sure, they're the most fun levels in the game. But if you don't make it through, they're frustrating. Eli got a Game Over (What an antiquated notion!) and we switched games. I suggested Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, which it didn't occur to me until a little later was from the same exact team and following very similar design principles. And once again I got him into one of the hardest levels of the game, not remembering that the second half of the level was a bit tedious compared with the brilliant first half. Eli got a Game Over (which doesn't come easily in DK!) and left with the Alias discs.
So I waited around for a few hours. I quickly gobbled down some supper, so that I wouldn't be in the middle of eating when whoever came came. I was sure Harel would knock on the door any minute, or Nati, or Avri, or Moshe. Okay, well maybe not Moshe. You can't rely on him for anything. Anyway, I waited around, improvising on the piano and whatnot. Eventually I started a game of Art Style: Orbient from the beginning, and got as far as around level 18 or thereabouts (having amassed around 60 lives, the silly things) before shutting it off. I waited for a long time, and then Avri came a-knocking.
He'd expressed an interest in World of Goo (Check the comments to the last real post.), so at once I showed him one of the cleverest bits of humor in the game. He explained that he'd already played through the PC demo of the game, so he knew all the basics quite well. But he didn't know that gag, and it was a really good gag, so I showed it to him. He got a bit antsy at the cutscene at the end, but otherwise he enjoyed it. Anyway, then we played Tetris. And it turns out he loves Tetris. We played it over and over and over, each time we finished jumping right back in for a rematch. He was really out of practice, having not played multiplayer Tetris in probably a decade or so, but he kept getting better until eventually he started putting up a good fight. Then I showed him (for his amusement and/or disbelief) some of the silly minigames included in the game. And then we switched to Maboshi's Arcade, which I don't really understand too well yet from a gamistic perspective but wanted him to see because it's just so darned weird. I think that's when we called it a night.
We went out and talked about the comics I'd been lending him, and then he went home.
I went back on the web and saw that a few more people had played my game, and were speaking very positively of it. Oh, and that's in addition to Deirdra Kiai, who on 21 February said it "spoke to her", and it was exciting to hear from her because I'd thought she might understand where I was coming from. But there were other people, on the two other forums I posted it on, both reactions positive.
Anyway, I've gotten into a whole big huge digression here. I was talking about my birthday celebration. 3 out of 6 people came. I figure Nati forgot, Harel was busy and Moshe was oblivious to the world's existence. Which is fine, I guess. I can't speak for everyone who was there, but I think we had fun.
2 Comments:
- stone_ said:
-
Eh, the reason I got antsy is b/c I'm a bad person and I'd already seen the cutscene... I knew I probably wouldn't end up actually buying the game, but I really wanted to know how the plot played out... so I watched the cutscenes on youtube. I am so ashamed.
And I didn't just put up a good fight in tetris, I was beating you more often than not by the end! - Mory said:
-
Sure you were. Sure.
You really should buy World of Goo. The fun isn't in the cutscenes, it's in the levels. And you can't get that from YouTube.
It don't mean nothin'.
Next Post
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
1776
We're doing well. We started out with an audience of around twenty people, but as more people see the show the word of mouth is growing. By the time we end we'll have packed theaters. I was a bit concerned over how the show would be received by audiences, considering how little time we've had to prepare. But they've always seemed to love our work.
For myself, I don't feel I've been doing the best job I could be doing. For one thing, I'm supposed to be speaking louder, since I don't have a microphone and the people I'm talking to do. But also, I think I haven't been giving a clear enough performance. I'm not enunciating like I should, and the drama is a little bit lost the way I did it last time. I think my performance in the second one was better, though everyone else made more mistakes there so it was a weaker show overall. The audience loved that one too, though. They never know how it's supposed to be.
But I do. I'll do better next time.
3 Comments:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Happy Birthday!
Btw, have you tried out World of Goo? - Mory said:
-
I have World of Goo. If you come over when there aren't other people here, I'll show you. It's a fantastic game.
- Mory said:
-
Speaking of which, there's no one here now. Now would be good.
Who cares about all that?
Tell me about the games you're going to make!
Next Post
Monday, February 09, 2009
Politics
It goes without saying that they're all scum, that no politician is to be trusted.
So the question is, which scum do I prefer?
I strongly dislike the Likud party. That it's looking like it'll be the biggest party is reason enough (I'd be very uncomfortable voting for who everyone else is voting for.), but there's more than that. It seems like their members can't agree on anything; it's a bunch of people who came together because they wanted to be in the biggest party, not because they share any ideological principles.
The second biggest party is Kadima, and Kadima winning is a worst-case scenario. Our last two prime ministers were in Kadima, and they were both disastrous. Kadima is farther to the left than Likud, and even less idealistic than Likud. That so many people are going to vote for them is a sad comment on the state of our political landscape.
The third biggest party is Yisra'el Beiteinu, which is more right-wing than Likud if maybe not quite as right-wing as I'd like. I don't know that much about them, but I agree with their positions- especially that giving the Palestinians land isn't going to get them to stop killing us. So I'm leaning heavily toward voting Yisra'el Beiteinu.
(I'd vote for a smaller party, such as National Union, but I don't agree with any of the smaller parties' platforms as much as Yisra'el Beiteinu's.)
What got me questioning my decision was what Marc said. Marc is our Franklin in 1776, and he was really angry when I said I'd vote for Yisra'el Beiteinu. He said to me that if I didn't vote for Likud, I'd be making it more likely that Kadima would win and their pathetic leader, Limor Livnat, would be our next prime minister. After making a few weak rationalizations (I really don't understand politics any better than that.), I insisted that Likud would win no matter what I voted for. He said the polls made it look very close.
I saw the poll in the newspaper this morning. And he was right- it is close. Much too close. Could Kadima really win this election? My mother says that I shouldn't pay attention to the polls, because they're never accurate. But what if it is? What if voting for the party I prefer ends up getting us the party I despise the most?
It seems that the only reason to vote for Likud is that Likud's not Kadima. And while I see the importance of not allowing Kadima to get far, that's not much of a platform to stand on. What's to guarantee that Likud won't choose to go farther left, if the "political realities" force them?
It seems like posts should be self-contained.
When you're done, that's it.
But no.
One post goes right into the next.
There is no single post; there is only the continuous blog.
Next Post
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The Perfect Color
What do you think the message of the game is?
Do you agree with what I'm saying?
Disclaimer: This game may be very difficult for the colorblind.
1 Comment:
- John Silver said:
-
Mory, I just played through this and I think this is friggin' phenomenal! It was a delightfully inventive little thing to play and the ending really resonated.
I was fooling around a bit initially until people started 'messing up' my creation and turning it towards grey. Then I tried creating a triangle with the three primary colours, and I was hoping to make the rest of the colour scale from there. Hopefully that way I could have appeased everybody, though dividing them spatially into 'factions'.
I don't know what the intended message was - I think this lends itself to a multiplicity of readings and I don't necessarily believe in crystallising these into any given one (including the author's). That would probably mean making the colour of the interpretation 'grey' rather than letting it be my own! :D
However I did get a sense that it took a strong stand against homogenization - aka best to express yourself individually regardless of pleasing others, because otherwise you'll add nothing of your own to the mix.
Anyway, great work! A serious thumbs up on my side.
Hey, don't be so hard on yourself. You're actually doing some stuff, which is, y'know, progress. And why do you care what some theoretical girl thinks- she seems like a real bitch anyways!
Are you still here? Get out of here already, the blog's not for you.
What the hell, man? This is supposed to be a short post, not another one of your endless dialogues! And now you have to show up, and make this into a big deal! I'm just giving you some advice, some friendly advice here, man to man, and you have to turn this into a whole argument!
Sorry. You can keep going.
Nah, I'm done.
It was supposed to be short, man. It's your blog, you ought to know how it works..
Sorry.
Next Post
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Nightmare Scenario
• | • | • |
What is it specifically you don't like about the character?
Was it hard to understand what I was doing with the interface?
Thanks, I am really proud of this.
But y'know, it's still only the beginning of the game.
You haven't seen the good stuff yet.
Is that really what you think?It'll be silly, worrying so much when it's still just the first scene. I'll imagine the game playing out in my head, trying to guess reactions. Now that it's too late, I'll realize a few ways to misinterpret what's going on that I'd never thought of before. Not that there could have been any way to get around those. A few times I'll suppress the urge to walk back in. Don't look desperate. Don't look desperate. I'll try doing other things, but my mind'll be back in that room. Nothing else will seem to matter.
You're not just telling me what I want to hear, right?
I'll leave the house, wander around scared, hide in a corner, find that I don't feel any more safe in that corner, go back, eat some junk food, and go back to pacing. No, not pacing. Stop pacing. When she comes out, she shouldn't see you pacing. It's not important, no pressure. (By this point I'll be sweating.) No pressure.
So? What do you think?It's nice.
What does that mean? Did you like it?Yeah, I'm really impressed.
"Nice" can mean a lot of things.Can it?
You know you can tell me if you hate it.But I liked it.
Were there any specific things you liked about it?What is this, an interrogation? I like your game, okay?
Look, I need to know what you thought more specifically. You understand.No, I don't. What do you want from me?
Please, just tell me what you thought!
I'm sorry. It's just, I really need to know that my wife-
I just need to know your honest opinion.I'm always honest!
I know.But if you're going to be all annoying about it, I guess I thought it was sort of…
What?
pretentious
simplistic
boring
hard to follow
predictable
weird
rip-off
bombastic
subdued
incomprehensible
easy
silly
recherché
ugly
misguided
noninteractive
unrelatable
mundane
geeky
pointless
rushed
slow
uninteresting
bad
reinventing the wheel
off-putting
frustrating
repetitious
random
science-fiction-y
complicated
confusing
convoluted
inaccessible
obvious
lacking in drama
formulaic
old-fashioned
meandering
unintelligent
not meeting its potential
amateurish
nonsensical
unsatisfying
childish
unsubtle
repetitious
..I dunno. Maybe it's just not for me.
Is it the tone of it? Too realistic?Maybe it's too realistic.Realistic? It has a shape-shifting spy.
But did you think he was treated too much like a normal person?No, I think that if he were a real person he wouldn't be interesting at all. Nothing happens with him.
But I was trying to treat him like a real person. All the buttons that pop up are things which I think he'd do if he were a real person. And I was trying to make it feel like a real person going about his day in the beginning part, so that you get the juxtaposition between the banality which you might recognize from real life and the weird science-fiction thriller plot of it. Did that not come across?Is that why nothing happens?
He's sabotaging a high-tech weapon that could be used against his country! There's all the tension of almost being caught, and then the whole thing of trying to get out of the country after his DNA's been targeted! There are people trying to kill him!
The whole world order falling apart is "nothing"?! Having to get away from a biological weapon that's targeted your DNA is "nothing"?!
That's like an hour in! Before that you have to put up with all the talking! "Blah blah blah", they just talk and talk..
Well of course there's talking! I need to do that to set up what's going on! It's a complicated story, it's not just "he stops the weapon, he saves the world". The whole global political landscape is falling apart, whereEnough already.all these countries and their old ways of doing things are proving to be obsolete when these newStop talking!
Sorry. It's just, I thought you'd like it.No, you thought I'd love it. Well, I don't. Get over it already.
I don't see why not. You like science fiction stories. And you liked Next Door!That was different. That was short. This just goes on and on and on.
Indignation |
So you thought the pace was too slow?No, I thought it wasn't as interesting as you seem to think it is.
So you thought it was spending too much time on people who were ordinary.Yes! They're all so boring, just like ordinary people having boring little conversations that no one could care about anyway because it's all so boring! And you want me to play an entire game made up of things like this?!
Yeah, and what would you have preferred- big over-the-top caricatures?Yes, actually. They would have been interesting.
But that's how people actually are!If I want to be with ordinary, boring people, I'll live real life. Like how I'm talking to you right now, and you're boring and ordinary. But if you give me a science-fiction game, like this, I don't want ordinary people. I can get that without the science-fiction story, just from real life!
So all the effort I put in to make these characters seem real, there's no way I could possibly have interested you with that.Probably not.
Counter-argument |
If you were really enjoying it, why would you mind it continuing?Maybe I can only take so much of it.
Or maybe it is, and you just didn't give it a fair chance.Now you sound like you absolutely hated it.Wow, you really hated it, didn't you?You know what? You're right. I hate your game, it's the worst thing ever made, it's slow and annoying and stupid. Now leave me alone.
God! Can't I talk to you without you going into this hostility and sarcasm?!No, I guess you can't. So stop bothering me.
You never told me you didn't like the dynamic interface!Is it the interface that bothers you? You know that dynamic interfaces are sort of a new-Oh, I don't care about your silly "dynamic interface".
It's not silly!Sure it isn't.
Persist | Change topics |
It's a valid design choice!Leave me alone.
What's wrong with it?Ha. What's right with it.
Now you're just being annoying.Well, so are you.
Look, I'm sorry. I just want to know-No, listen. It's a good game. Really. Very nice. But I'm not going to say it's, like, the best game I ever played, because it's not. It's not that good. Now leave me alone.
Fine, forget the interface. What about the story?What about it?
Go fishing | Assume the worst |
It's a good story!
No, it's a great story! I've been planning this for twenty years! It's about real emotions; maybe that's something you wouldn't know anything about!
You didn't think it was thought-provoking at all? You didn't think Michael was an interesting character? Do you not care about the whole social thing, where everything's falling apart because of the new technologies?
Okay, calm down, will you? It's fine, okay? Your game is fine.
Keep going | Give in | Change topics |
Did you not like the way I tell the story, where you jump in in the middle and are figuring out what's going on? I guess I could have put in-Shut up!
Enough already. It's fine. Your game is absolutely perfect, and there's no way anyone could ever possibly think it's anything but the best thing they've ever seen in their lives. Is that what you want to hear? Eh?
I'm going to go read a book now.
Okay. Fine. I'm sorry for being annoying.You should be.
Do you not like Michael Nolan as a character? Too hard to relate to?I don't know. He's fine, it's all fine. What difference does it make if I don't like it?
Ha! |
So you admit you don't like it!Fine! I don't like it. Are you happy now?
Happy? Happy? How could I possibly be happy? I've been working on this story for twenty years!Don't you understand how much I care about this game?Well, I don't know what you want from me. You can't force me to like this.
It does make a difference! Your opinion means everything to me!Then let me have an opinion, and stop trying to get me to agree with you!
..so what is your opinion, exactly?I'm going to read a book now.
3 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
Very enjoyable game/post/story. I really enjoy how it is like a blog post that gets written as I play through it. I get choices, yet I am simply pushing the character in a directions.
This post triggered an idea in my head. I have been watching animations such as this Mad as Hell.
This "kinetic typography" idea has become a standard exercise for motion graphic students, and I questions whether or not it actually adds anything to the dialogue. But I'm getting the idea that such manipulation of typography could be an interesting way to make a larger interactive text experience.
Now that I look over your post here again, I see that you are already exploring the typographical possibilities that are within the limits of a blog post. I guess all I am suggesting is that there might be a way or making a bigger experience, yet still only working within the realm of type. - Kyler said:
-
My link didn't work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNxoLJy3m3s
- Mory said:
-
That video is fantastic. I've had the movie Network on my to-watch list for months now; it looks exactly like the sort of movie I'd really like. I'd really like to see some sort of text adventure following similar principles to this "kinetic typography" thing.
Wow. a kinetic-typographical text adventure. Now that would be something to behold. You'd have worlds rendered in 3D out of statements of fact, objects placed around the room which aren't really objects at all but descriptions of the objects. A vivid world built out of your own imagination, where the movement of words across the screen creates a gentle framework for that imagination. The input would keep changing location to be more aesthetically pleasing, and its function might change every now and then. Now that's a game I want to play!
I had the idea of making a blog follow similar design principles around the time of this post, which does not do any of that but is as close as I'm going to get here. The reason it doesn't play with typography is because when I tried, I found it was not possible. Writing in standard computer text is like how it must have been playing a harpsichord before the invention of the pianoforte, back when a note would always be the same volume regardless of how you pressed it. I wrote out a whole version of that post which used subtle changes in size and boldness for dramatic effect, and when I clicked "Preview" I found that none of it was making its way through to the browser. There are a limited number of distinct font sizes, and boldness can only be on or off even though CSS accepts numerical values of boldness. So I gave up at once, and that's that.
I'm quite sure that there's more potential to blogging with more visual elements, but the current standards just don't allow for it. Maybe a Flash-based site, but I hate Flash-based sites. They're so darn slow.
I'm not sure what typographical opportunities you think I have in this particular post. "Ooh, look, I can have several fonts!" is about the extent of it, which I've been doing since 2005. I would absolutely like to do more, and I always have wanted to, but there's only so much that's possible without rebuilding the foundation. (Which is not to say, of course, that I don't have a few more tricks up my sleeve. I just haven't seen a good excuse to use them yet.)
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
So simple an idea…
A blog post was forming in my head:
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
The idea
Tending Toward Gray
And then I thought, that's not quite clear enough. There need to be buttons to impose filters on the colors that go through. That way, you see that if you've got convictions, if you know what it is that you want, you get something pretty. And if you shut off those filters, if you don't know what you want, then you'll reach the natural neutrality.
And then I thought, well, you're still not seeing how this affects people. There's more to a society than just the politician. Without people who will be happy or unhappy, the metaphor's still incomplete.
(The speech inside was very long.)
And then I thought, wouldn't this be more engaging and thought-provoking if it were more interactive? Why not make a whole game out of it? I'd intended to go straight into "The March of Bulk", but I could finish a game that simple in a month or two and then jump back to the plan. Simple little stick figures for people with simple little smilie faces for opinions.
And then I thought, well, this feature should be in it. And how should I present that? And maybe it'll need a bit more interactivity there, and maybe there are people trying to do your job for you so that you see the direction society's headed in without your intervention. And the more I thought, the more I started seeing that this was a metaphor which could be applied to just about anything- not just politics and society and religion, but art and child-raising and especially videogames with their gray graphics and multitudes of disconnected gameplays. This was so much bigger than a blog post; this was a commentary on the importance of vision and convictions in the world!
And the more I thought, the bigger this idea became. If I hadn't just then noticed a guy standing behind a tree, my idea might have grown to the size of the moon!
Argh. Yes, that's all I have to say.
Next Post
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Next Door to Opportunity
The next day, I received an e-mail saying that they were calling me back. I didn't expect that- I thought either I'd be in or out, and that'd be it. But no- they sent the script to look over, and told me to specifically read the parts with Jud, and that I should come to the producer's house on Tuesday to see if I was as good as whoever else they were considering for the part.
I looked over the script, and holy cow Jud's a good part. Mentally unstable, desperate for love but never finding it. He's the most interesting character in the whole play. Very little singing (Ironic, no?), but what a part. I skimmed through the soundtrack- very cute. Lots of funny lyrics and catchy tunes.
So yesterday I went to the call-back. There were four girls trying out for the female lead, two guys trying out for the male lead, and for Jud there was me and Chuck King. Chuck King's been in a lot of plays. And he comes from Oklahoma. In the production of Peter Pan Dena was in, Chuck King was both Captain Hook and musical director. He's spent more time on stage than I've spent procrastinating.
He didn't do a good job. They gave him one of Jud's most dramatic lines to read, and he was stumbling all over it. I waited for them to give me that scene to read, so that I could outdo him. But I'd already gotten two little bits (one being the scene I'd done in the audition, and I did it okay but not quite as well as then).
I got into the chorus! Yay!
Um.
I sent the producer a letter. I said, "If I were to ask you what I did wrong when trying out for Jud, would you give me a straight answer?". And he answered that I "did not do anything 'wrong,' but the committee felt that another candidate was stronger in his experience and skills, as well as in contrast with other players."
Well, sure. He can dance. He can draw upon his experience. He can get people to buy tickets. "Ooh, Chuck King is in this! I'll come see it."
Blah, chorus.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
It's not ready for release yet. There are some huge, game-stopping bugs which I need to find and exterminate. And then I need to wait for a few animations from my partner Kyler, without which some events don't make sense. But that's it. I'm pretty much done. And it's fantastic.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
The Garden: Metaludes
If we're treating a Form as a discipline with which to make games, then the metalude is the discipline of connecting other disciplines together in a way that is cohesive and sustainable. I'll get to the "cohesive" bit in a minute, but what I mean by "sustainable" is that you can use this formula to connect any two Forms together, no matter how bizarre the combination seems, and it'll probably work. So this isn't a one-off structure, like Metal Gear Solid's stealth action/audio drama/film combo. You can use it over and over again to get lots of different kinds of games.
The exploration is a constant among all metaludes because it makes the work feel like a cohesive whole, rather than individual parts strung together. Rather than feeling like "Here's a puzzle game, now here's an action game.", it feels like "Here's a world, where this room has a puzzle and this room has a battle.". It's not a series of events, it's a landscape which has all these different kinds of gameplay on top of it. Rather than getting totally separated emotions from different sections, the player gets a combined emotion from the game world which is defined by the contrast between the two (or more) kinds of gameplay.
There are two main genres of metalude, in popularity and commonness: fantasy and urban. Fantasy metaludes (The Legend of Zelda being the model) take inspiration from fantasy role-playing games, and urban metaludes (Grand Theft Auto) take inspiration from crime movies, if I'm not mistaken. (I've never actually played GTA, so I don't know for sure.)
In fantasy metaludes, it's generally expected that there will be puzzles and action. I guess that fits with the Tolkien model of fantasy stories- fighting armies of monsters, solving ancient riddles. It's a curious combination, though, in that the pacing is totally different. Action games are intense and rely on quick reactions, puzzle games are slow and rely on careful analysis. But maybe that's the appeal- action will tire you out leaving you in the mood for something more relaxing, and a puzzle will tax the brain leaving you in the mood for something more mindless. So in a sense they balance each other out. The plots of Zelda tend to concern divine balance- proving to the gods that your skills are balanced enough, fighting against an enemy who is too focused on accumulating power. While I don't approve of the cinematic way those stories are told, they aren't really grafted on. They're an extension of what the game is already about.
In urban metaludes, it's expected that there will be driving movement and action. I haven't actually played such a game, so I don't know for certain how the combination works. But if I may guess, it seems like it would evoke aggression and a certain single-mindedness. You drive to wherever you need to get to, you shoot whoever you need to shoot, and you drive on. Both driving games and action games strive for intensity, and movement games aren't so far removed from action games, so it's a straightforward combination. If I were to make such a game I'd try to distinguish the two from each other more to heighten the contrast, to contrast the rules and tedium of driving with the chaos and frenzy of fighting, but my understanding is that that's not what they're going for. From what I've gathered, it's a low-contrast world where everything is chaos and frenzy. I haven't heard anything specific at all about the stories, but they ought to focus on the endless loop of violence in the world, because that would fit the never-ending intensity of gameplay.
There can be much weirder combinations. I think the strangest I've encountered was Chibi Robo, which combined platforming with (of all things) cleaning. (Cleaning is a weak Form, about which there's not much to say.) The cleaning never pretends to be anything other than tedious, which makes the contrast with the platforming -a Form which typically evokes joy and a sense of liberation- more pronounced. The story was about a tiny cleaning robot in a massive (for him) house encountering all sorts of strange characters. I think this is actually a really good example of what I was saying about how the feeling you get from the world is defined by the contrast between the two Forms. On the floor the gameplay is cleaning, and when you go higher up the gameplay's climbing and jumping and floating around. So the house feels like chores are its surface, and the farther you go the more fun it gets. On reflection, there may have been an intentional educational message there.
My last example is Beyond Good & Evil, which fits into the fantasy genre but is worth considering on its own. On top of its world it puts not only puzzles and action, but also stealth action and driving and flying and platforming and photography. The two Forms which stand out most are stealth action and photography, stealth because it's used most and photography because it has a different interface to everything else. The story is about a photojournalist who sneaks around government facilities to uncover the truth about conspiracies. The huge number of Forms makes the world seem complicated and messy.
In each of these examples, the story isn't something tacked on top. It's the result of how the different Forms fit together.
The interface doesn't absolutely need to be consistent from Form to Form, but gamists usually try to cover up the seams for the sake of cohesion. (If it's going to be disjointed, why connect it with exploration at all?) There won't be five buttons controlling fighting, there'll be one. And that button will stay there even as you're solving a puzzle, but just won't do much. The trouble is, each type of gameplay requires a different set of buttons. And there are only so many buttons to work with. So the gamist needs to be clever, reusing buttons in ways which are efficient but not unintuitive. For instance, in BG&E the button for jumping in platforming sections is also the button for rolling on the ground in stealth, and the button for running is also the button for speeding up a vehicle. This makes the jumps from Form to Form smoother, so it's laudable. Still, trying to fit everything together can limit a gamist's visions for each individual section. When Forms are especially distinct from each other, a dynamic interface (like I suggested in the adventure game post) is a good idea. The 3D Zelda games actually do something similar, though on a smaller scale: There's one button that does whatever the game says it does at the moment. Text at the top of the screen has a phrase like "throw" or "put away" or "defend" depending on the situation, and that's what that button will do at that time. It's clever, really- it fills in all the functionality the gamists weren't able to fit in normally.
Being a complex Form, the techniques used in making a metalude are naturally similar to those you'd need for an RPG or any other complex game. You need to understand how several Forms can fit together, how to tell a story, you need to understand the needs of the contained Forms. But the principles of metaludes -contrast and cohesion- are not shared by other Forms. In a role-playing game, even one with exploration, strategy and action, it is counterproductive to make the strategy and action feel similar or give them equal placement in the whole or keep the interface constant. What you do with the strategy is almost irrelevant to what you do with the action, and vice versa. Also, what makes for a good metalude story doesn't make for a good RPG story. The metalude's story emerges from the gameplay, the RPG's story is mostly separate from gameplay. Just because both Forms are complex doesn't mean their language is the same.
A game with exploration, and two Forms which are combined together as though they were one element, is not a metalude. That's a hybrid serving the purpose of an exploration game. Metroid, for instance. Action and platformer, with exploration. That'd be a metalude if the action and platformer weren't woven together so closely. You don't get contrast between two Forms if they're interpreted by the player as being one Form.
I will point out that the adventure game by its "present" definition, which I consider to be a poorly conceived Form, is extremely close to the metalude. If an adventure has exploration with puzzles and character interaction, that's already a metalude. I am not familiar with an adventure game whose story fits the contrast between puzzles and character interaction, and the interface is almost never consistent between puzzles and dialogue, so clearly the traditional adventure gamists were not approaching the material from the same angle as the metalude gamists. If they had, the stories would have all been about the conflict between intellect and compassion, or something to that effect. In trying to achieve a broader range of stories without radically changing the make-up of Forms, adventures set themselves down a different path, which I maintain is better achieved through the "future" definition of adventures which I proposed. Still, the comparison is interesting in that it points to a different (more limiting) way adventures could progress.
As gamism progresses, the general public will not clamor for metaludes. The public doesn't realize that metaludes even exist. But gamists themselves are guaranteed to work within the Form, just because there's so much artistic potential there. I don't know if the metalude will ever be formally recognized as a kind of game. But I do know that, even when gamism interfaces directly with our brains, the metalude will still be on the cutting-edge of art. The more sophisticated other Forms become, the more the metalude has to work with. I'm certain the first gamistic equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will be a metalude. It is the Form which contains all possibilities, and makes sense of them.
Droplets: Metaludes
Puzzle and luck, in a totally abstract (and convoluted) world where it's not immediately apparent which Form is which. Sometimes careful deduction will get you the answer, sometimes you just need to bumble around long enough. Sometimes you're relieved that you don't have to put in effort, sometimes you're relieved to be given that opportunity. Which means, of course, that you're also often frustrated before you get to that point. The world design is hard to fathom, with no sense behind anything. The story is, as you'd expect, abstract but emotional.
Flight, platformer, driving, strategy, puzzle and luck, in a world where each Form is given a dedicated section where the farther you go the harder it gets. They overlap with each other at rare points, so that if you get far in one you can jump to a far part in another. The game doesn't save progress, but keeps a timer of how long you play. After 24 hours of play, the game suddenly deletes itself and can't be played again without buying the game over again. The story concerns a sick person with one more day to live.
Platformer and sports action, in a more-or-less real-world setting. There are kids in the street to kick balls around with, and houses which you can jump over. If any of the kids see you jumping, you can't play with them anymore. But it's fun to jump. You get to jump over all the landmarks of the city, watching games down below from rooftops.
Perception and action, again in a 3D real-world-meets-science-fiction setting. You look for optical illusions - all sorts of everyday objects which look perfectly normal from one angle but from a different angle are clearly impossible. That's a gateway to another dimension, where you have to fight weird alien creatures. The story is about an attempted alien invasion which only you know about (or can stop).
Film and role-playing game, with a dynamic interface which in the film sections becomes a remote control, in a generic fantasy world where one corner is totally noninteractive and the other corner is totally interactive. You need to hunt for ways to defeat the generic fantasy villain, which gives the gamist many opportunities to contrast the old-fashioned way of telling stories with this newfangled way of telling stories. The story can be resolved many ways, some more interactive and some less interactive.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Sunday, December 07, 2008
I Am a Rug, I Am an Onion
When Moshe told me he was auditioning for the musical 1776, I congratulated him but didn't really think to try out for myself. … But then, yesterday, my mother e-mailed me the notice for auditions. And I thought about it. And I'm going to go there today.
I didn't know what song to bring to audition with. … So last night and today, I made up a new one.
Did I make a fool of myself? Why, yes. Yes, I did.
I'm going to be playing John Witherspoon in 1776.
Everyone needs opportunities to offer something to others, be that a joke or a service or an experience. We understand this, you and I. And when you never get an opening, you get pretty desperate. When no one wanted to listen to your music in the Academy, you went and played in recesses anyway, pretending you would have whether or not your classmates were there. But really you'd reached the point where you thought you'd make openings for yourself where none existed. And what did that desperation get you? Did anyone in your class listen to what you were playing? No.
What sort of reward could you possibly be expecting? It's not just about reward. You don't do things only to get somewhere, you also do things just because they're there to be done.
I asked the assistant director: "Was my singing voice that bad?" "No", she said, "We didn't think of that at all. We just thought you were right for the part." Which could be the whole truth. Or it could be how she says "Yes, you stink." while trying not to offend me.
I did mess up pretty badly. I keep running the song through my head, over and over, every single day. Messing up that song is going to be one of those things I regret for the rest of my life, like what happened at the Beauty and the Beast audition and that time in the Academy where I didn't know the religious stuff I was supposed to know and reading that haftarah in shul where I got up and couldn't remember the trup and the time I started crying to get sympathy in seventh grade and the times I was violent and the time in fifth grade I thought I was going to be performing in a concert but I wasn't and the time in second grade I sang a song out loud and the time in first grade I rejected a friend because of peer pressure. Mistakes don't go away. I keep thinking of all the ways that audition should have gone, what piano music I should have written up to accompany it. I know exactly why the rhythm seemed weird, and that it needed to switch the number of beats each measure: 4,4,5,3,3,4,2,4,4,…
Moshe got the main villain. (He doesn't like calling him a "villain", preferring "rival".) I'm so jealous. So I said to him: "I'm so jealous." And he said: "Don't be. It took me five plays to get here!" Which is a good point. I have no experience, Moshe has lots. They can trust him. They certainly can't trust me.
I recognized some of the faces at the first rehearsal from Beauty and the Beast. I was happy to see Jerry there, who I'd sat next to in those rehearsals. I was disappointed, when that show fell apart, that I'd never gotten a chance to say goodbye to him. Which is probably silly- I shouldn't get emotionally invested in people I just happened to be sitting next to. Still, he also got a pretty tiny role in this thing. It's doesn't have to be so lonely at the bottom.
With such a simple part, I need some opportunities to make myself feel better. So every time someone asks me "How are you?", I'm going to respond, "Very good! I'm working on my second computer game, having finished the first.". That's something I could never do before- present myself as a person who's actually moving somewhere. And any time that piano isn't in use, I'll jump at the chance to improvise while pretending I don't care if anyone listens. Er, I mean- while not caring if anyone listens. Silly me, did I say "pretending"? I'll just go hide in that corner now.
One opportunity which isn't just imagined is that I get to spend more time with Moshe. That'll be fun.
But I dunno, I'm disappointed. I know I can do more than this. I'm not just a random guy, I'm Mory the gamist and sometimes-composer. The idea I've gotta swallow is that that doesn't mean squat. I'm not entitled to anything at all. I've gotta build myself up from scratch, find opportunities and work at them until I have made something of myself.
Or at least gotten a new set of embarrassing memories.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
This is going to work.
Fulfilling needs
This is when you ask "What should I do?".
It's the easiest kind of inspiration, probably because we're all so experienced in it from dreaming. You're missing something in your life, so you invent it.
Anyway, I was lying in bed thinking about this, and suddenly (I don't think there was even much conscious thought involved) bits of code started popping up in my head. I didn't know what the specific commands were, but I saw the BlitzMax IDE in my head, with all the code written on it, and I was jumping back and forth saying "This line here needs a slight tweak, there needs to be a big block of code down here eventually, there needs to be another function here, which I'll then call from here.". I saw what the game needed to work, I saw answers to questions I hadn't consciously considered, I saw bits of text which I'd need to include in the tutorial.
This is going to work.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Have a version of the game, good enough to play, by the end of the calendar year.
The only revisions in 2009 will be aesthetic or fine-tuning.
Simplify!
But when I think about how I'm going to explain this to the player, I come up short. These aren't obvious rules at all, and they only seem obvious because I've been thinking about them for so long.
So I've got to (temporarily) stop adding rules and start taking away rules. I could have the most sophisticated gameplay-as-metaphor ever, but if no one understands it but me, then what's the point?
Next goal: implementing the concept of personal ownership.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Friends
In the day, I've got to go to someone else. There's only so much you can say about the latest episode of Heroes, and my life isn't so dramatic that I'd have much to say about life in general. So it's either Avri, Nati, or Moshe.
Moshe's the farthest away, that being a twenty-minute walk or so. But out of everyone I know, he's the most like me. So spending time with him is important to me. He's who I went to this past Shabbat. As I walked, I sang my audition song to myself •-------
I think I hear music in the distance-and bemoaned that I hadn't composed it one day sooner, so that I'd be capable of performing it without notes. (I'm still bitter about that.) I wanted to talk to Moshe about his audition experience, maybe hear some nervousness that'd make me feel better about myself, find out whether he thought he'd be in, tell him about my song and that we might be in this musical together.
There must be someone there who hears the notes.
It's a bit of a luck game, going to Moshe's house. I never know if he'll be there, and if he is there I never know if they've had lunch yet. They tend to have lunch really late.
This was one of the cases where they were having lunch late. I got there, and saw that they were just starting. (We'd already finished a lengthy lunch at home.) I asked when I should come back (not that I'd have anywhere to go from there), but Moshe's mother said I didn't need to leave. So I sat down in one of their comfortable armchairs and waited. And waited. And waited. There wasn't any point of conversation at the table which I'd be inclined to join in on, so I waited. I kept hoping that Moshe would get up and come over, just for a minute, just so I could let him know I'd tried out for 1776 and see his reaction, but he just kept eating and eating and talking and talking and seemed to forget I was there. He even kept eating after everyone else had finished, in both the main meal and dessert (which wasn't short to begin with).
That's not something I'd do. If I had a guest, I'd keep watching him to make sure he wasn't terribly bored. And if I wasn't up to doing that, I wouldn't let him in in the first place. If I have a guest, I understand that they're my responsibility. (This is why I don't much like having guests.)
I waited for two hours on that chair, and Moshe didn't come over to me once. And then he went off to do errands, without so much as a reassurance that he'd be with me in a minute. I don't know, maybe he would have been. But I couldn't know that. I'd waited two hours to talk to him, and had no guarantee. So I told the family's guest (who was the only one in the room at the time): "You know what? I'm going. Tell Moshe I left."
And I did.
It's not really that I'm angry. Okay, maybe a little angry. But I knew that if I waited long enough, he'd get around to talking to me. It was more a dramatic gesture, you know? That's not the sort of thing I'd do, and I spend time with Moshe because he's like me. It was unacceptable, and I wanted him to understand that I felt that way.
I didn't know he'd come after me shortly afterward. If I did, I would have sat at home and waited some more. It's not like I didn't want to talk to him. But I thought he'd say "That's a shame, I guess I'll talk to him some other time.", so I went out again.
Avri wasn't home, so I went to see if Nati was home. If he wasn't, I guess I would have checked to see if Harel was awake next. And if not him then Tamir and Eli again. Not that any of that matters- Nati was home.
Nati isn't like me, not really. He's not an Asperger or hyperactive, he doesn't play games or read comics or play music. As I was there, his mother noted: "What Nati likes, he's really passionate about." And I realized that that's really what I like about him. What he's particularly passionate about is movies. So whenever I go over, I always ask what movies he's seen lately. It's bound to be an interesting answer. This week the first thing I said to him was that I'd seen In Bruges, because he'd recommended it to me. (Excellent movie, by the way. I pass along the recommendation.) And somehow eventually the conversation got to me talking about elements of Ultimate comics which I'm surprised made it into the Incredible Hulk movie. He listens even when it's not directly about one of his interests, I guess because he understands how people can care about things.
Not a bad group of friends, not bad at all.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Imagine, if you will…
Exploring a landscape of improvised music
The computer has an image of a virtual sphere, on which each musician is represented by a point. If two musicians are next to each other on that sphere, then they hear each other as though they were in a room together. See, each room has two or three computer monitors, positioned on the wall at the precise point where the musician would be looking if he were on the sphere looking at the respective person. On the screen is the live video feed of that performer, and next to it is a speaker so that each can hear what the other is playing. There's another speaker, not connected to any particular monitor, which very quietly plays everything which is no more than two points away, but still close enough to be relevant.
Once this is all set up, they just start to play.
No one is given any direction in terms of who starts or what key to be in or what style of music to play. They just listen to each other and figure it out as they go. They play for fifteen minutes or so, and leave.
Then the animators come in. They smooth out the motion-capture data, and integrate all the facial expressions in.
Then it's turned into a first-person exploration game. You start out from a point on the sphere of your choosing, and then you can walk around however you like, in 3D, as the recording plays out. Obviously, surround sound is recommended. The volume of a musician depends on your distance from him, and the musicians are spread out really far so that clashing performances are kept to a minimum wherever you go. (The specific distances are tweaked by a "composer" after the recording.) There's a thick fog, so that visibility is tied to hearing. You can go through the music over and over, each time taking a different path and getting a different experience.
This is not the sort of work which can be achieved overnight. It could take years of experimenting with styles and techniques and relationships and positions on the sphere. And even after all that, it'd probably be very flawed. But I think that's part of what's cool about it. It's more pure music- the conflicts and admirations between musicians, fighting with each other and hugging each other via music. And you can look at the faces, see how they react to each other, try to imagine what this musician heard in that one's performance which inspired him to play this. It's the sort of thing you could play over and over for years, and still find new depth in.
1 Comment:
- Kyler said:
-
I have a actually experienced a similar type of audio exploration piece. It was an installation that was put up in the gallery at ACAD during my first year their.
40 high quality speakers were setup around a room, spaced in groups that represented different parts of a choir. Each speaker played the recording of one person singing their part of "The Forty Part Motet". It was written by someone famous who I can't remember.
You could walk around the room and put your ear right up to each speaker and hear each person individually, or move into the middle to here the whole.
It was a great piece of art.
Kyler
Friday, November 28, 2008
Thursday, November 27, 2008
How The Audition Went
It started with a warm-up, in which we sang (with harmony) the beginning of "Sit Down, John" and I missed most of my cues though no one was paying much attention. Then we all went outside and waited for our turns.
As I waited I went over my song a tiny bit, but I didn't feel I really needed to. After all, I'd been repeating it over and over and over in my head on the bus to Jerusalem. Even if I had been messing it all up in my head on that bus ride, I'd been reciting it so many times that in the moment I'd know what to do.
"What will you be singing?"
"Something I composed today."
"Today?"
"Well, this morning."
And then I started begging that they let me sing from the notes, rather than from memory. I couldn't do it from memory. (I do think "begging" rather than "asking" is the right word- no dignity was involved.) The casting director was strongly against it, so I started singing.
You can fill in the rest with your imagination, and chances are it'll be more or less how it went.
They stopped me before I got to the second verse, which I put there for the sake of contrast and showing off my range. That's the "confident" part of the song, as opposed to the beginning and ending which are hopeless and a little scared and maybe not all that distinguishable to a bad singer singing badly for an audition.
"Sorry.", I blabbered, "I only composed it today. It's still fresh in my head. If I could have followed the notes…"
"Thank you. Do you have another song?"
"Well, there's another piece here I've got the accompaniment for," -I pulled out the page of "The Balladier's Warning" piano music which I'd printed out as a backup plan- "but I didn't think it was so appropriate."
As I said, it could just be my state of mind at the time, and maybe it was as wretchedly bad as I expected "The Balladier's Warning" to be if I sang it at an audition. I honestly don't know.
They gave me a script for Jefferson, and told me to wait outside. At first I resolved not to disrespect anyone else's singing, since that would put me in a position of weakness. But then I heard one or two people who were obviously terrible (I can't say objectively whether they were worse than me.), and I laughed. It made me feel, for a moment, like I hadn't done an awful job. Though of course I had.
After everyone had done the singing, people started getting pulled in for line readings. I'd been going over the lines over and over in my head, picturing how the guy who played Jefferson in the John Adams miniseries would have read the lines. Very quiet, but maybe getting more agitated and even ever-so-slightly charismatic when justifying his position.
Anyway, I was called in. I asked, "Who am I playing against?", which I thought was a perfectly obvious question. And one of them said something along the lines of: "I like how you're already taking an antagonistic attitude toward your colleague." Honestly, I might be getting that quote very wrong- I didn't understand the intention behind the statement. Anyway.
I started while under-acting, and as soon as the words left my mouth I could tell that I wasn't acting like that actor on TV, just acting like I was afraid to act. But what the hey, that's pretty close to what I was going for, right? I was interrupted before I could reach my intended crescendo into outspoken-ness, as the script seemed to be indicating should build and build and then suddenly crash back down into mumbly-ness. I was told to start back from the beginning, but with more confidence. "But wasn't Jefferson a quiet man?" "Maybe the real Jefferson. I want you to play him confidently. Take a step back, put your legs apart a little, hold up your chest."
I tried again. Giving him a little more confidence seemed to take it too close to my ordinary speech, but that was what I was told and I didn't know how else to play it. I could feel myself slipping back into quietness as I went along, though it wasn't really my intention- my idea of who Jefferson should be was getting in the way of playing the part I was supposed to play. Which would be more reasonable if I were a good enough actor to get my idea of who Jefferson should be across, which I'm guessing I'm not.
And then I left.
So, not nearly as bad as the last time I auditioned for something. But also not something I can walk away from with self-respect. Blah.
I think I have a chance of getting in- there were very few people there, and I think there are a lot of roles. So they'll sort of have to bring in a few guys of my level just to round out the chorus.
Aw, to heck with it.
It wasn't really an option to go through that again, y'know?
But then, yesterday, my mother e-mailed me the notice for auditions. And I thought about it. And I'm going to go there today.
I didn't know what song to bring to audition with. They said it should be musical-type music, and that it should highlight acting ability, and that there should be contrast in it. And I didn't really have a song like that. So last night and today, I made up a new one. Lyrics and everything. And now that I have that, I'm feeling much more confident about the whole thing.
Here are the lyrics:
It's been dark out for so long,
I've almost forgotten what the light looks like.
Can the world be as inviting as I picture it to be?
What if my heading is all wrong?
I turn for every flicker that I see!
Each time my heart beats quicker- is this it?
My destiny?
I think I hear music in the distance-
There must be someone there who sees the notes.
I think I feel wind across my shoulder-
Is it there?
Is it there?
I've been walking for so long.
My legs say to stop, and I still move onward.
With each step I wonder: is there any place for me?
I look around for any sign
But the sound is just an echo, and the feeling is a distant memory.
2 Comments:
- said:
-
pity we cant here it to music...
Shhh don't encourage him!
who the hell are you?
oops. - Mory said:
-
I've thought about posting the music somehow, but if I posted it down here no one would ever notice it, and I've never seen any reason to put it at the top. There's also music for the "About Me" poem; same story.
Monday, November 24, 2008
1 5 6
See, this was a theme which I'd played over and over and over again in the past, though not in several years. I'd played it over and over and over because, as is usually the case, it didn't go anywhere. Just another random bit of aimless nonsense which I happened to be attached to for no particular reason.
I remembered the theme at 3:00 in the morning, as is typical. But that got it loose enough that I could get it out onto the piano the next day. As always I hoped that maybe with a fresh perspective I could find a continuation. No such luck - it still goes nowhere.
I did see something I wasn't expecting, though. Analyzing it from various angles made me realize that it was awfully similar to another old piece I'd almost forgotten. And once I saw that, I noticed another old piece and another, all coming from the same creative place. I expressed frustration with this revelation, and demonstrated that I'm not like that anymore by playing my most recent theme. Yep, very different indeed.
Here's the thing. I apparently am in love with three notes, since they start a lot of my pieces. They are: 1 5 6. What I mean by that is, you take a note, you go up four notes from there, and then you go up by another one. This is usually in minor, which means that the sixth is just the tiniest bit above the fifth.
(Incidentally, that new and different theme I mentioned? Starts 6 5 1. In minor. Maybe not so different after all. I only realized this the next day.)
The theme I'd been trying to remember began 1, 5 6, 2 1, 4 5. This reminded me of old theme 1 5 6, 6-5-4 5 3 4 2. (Both are in minor.) And I realized that Variations on V.O.V presented those notes very prominently in one bit. And that little soothing piece in major I composed to use Grandma and Grandpa's piano which doesn't have much edge to it? It starts with 5 9 10, 4 8 9, 3 7 8. in the left hand, while the right hand plays the melody 1… 6… 5…. And there's a tense minor theme which starts 1-5 5-6 6-3 3-7 7-2 2, and a different theme where (in the middle) 1 5 6 repeats on higher and higher octaves in order to hold on to tension that was created.
(Worried, I checked my best musical work -A Lonely Journey. No 1 5 6 there. Phew.)
This obviously isn't something I was aware of before. But it also isn't really an accident- in each of these cases, 1 5 6 is a critical part of the music, not just something I pass through on the way to places. So clearly something about those notes speaks to me.
The 1 grounds it. "Here is what you're standing on." The 5 brings that to its natural conclusion, fifths being the most pure interval. If you just have the 1 and 5, you've got a lovely chord of sorts. It's too pure to know whether it's major or minor, but it has weight to it. Then it goes up from there, because it's not exciting enough for my tastes yet. It can't go up to 8, because that's too obvious. Up to 7 doesn't really change the chord, just makes it more complex and interesting. I use that on occasion. Up to 9 makes my favorite chord, two fifths together, but it's so pure that there's nowhere to go from there.
But up to 6! 6 changes the meaning of the chord. In minor it's just the tiniest bit removed from 5, but flips the whole chord's meaning upside down. See, 6 is just two notes under 1 (or 8), which means that that's suddenly the "real" base of the chord. A tiny little half-tone increment, and suddenly the chord isn't what you thought it was. That's interesting to me.
So now, whenever I play 1 5 6, even if there was no particular intent behind it, I'm going to remember the interconnectedness of everything and see if I can reuse that 1 5 6 some more to make it seem like I actually know what I'm doing.
Though of course I don't.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Conflict, about the blog part 2
I'm becoming a big fan of J.J. Abrams' TV work. I've been watching Lost for years, but it's only now that I'm getting around to Alias and seeing how much fun that is. And his new show Fringe- fantastic. Which brings me to the topic of this post: the latest episode of Fringe, and how brilliant it was. It had me glued to my seat right from
*ahem*What a clichéd entrance. No, seriously, I do want to talk about the episode.
It set up these characters at the beginning, which I wouldn't have minded seeing a whole episode about. I just wanted to know, "What happens next?", and I had no idea that what I was in for was even cooler than
*AHEM*Stop interrupting me. Yes, I know you're there. Go away. So it introduced this character, a kid who's a brilliant musician, and I guess I probably
Um, excuse me, Mr. Buckman?What!
No, whatever. What is it you want?We should probably
leave him alone.Look, I'm sorry to bother you.
Should I go?
Sorry.
We were just wondering when you'd get back to talking about interesting stuff.I wasn't wondering that.
I don't mind so much.
Define "interesting".
First of all: I'm not a famous gamist. You guys aren't real, you're just characters I made up. But Fringe is a real show, and I'd like to talk about that. Now go away.Anything which, um…Gamism stuff.Yeah. We want to know how you turn into a famous gamist.
This seems to be the part of the blog where that starts to happen, and we were both hoping to see more about how that happens. Because we were really sort of wondering about how someone, what that experience is like.
And second?What?
Look, it just seems like you're wasting a lot of time. You're talking about TV shows, and comics, and I'm sure that would be very interesting if you grew up to be a famous comics or TV guy, y'know, if they didn't all converge into gamism, but you're a gamist. That's what you are. So none of this is interesting.What do you want me to tell you? It's going fine, I'm working on it a little bit every day. I'm working on the chefs' movement now.
Is that a fact.Look, it doesn't need to be about games specifically.No?I mean, it doesn't need to specifically be about making the games. But you were such a lazy person before, and we know that eventually you're going to be, it's going to be well-known how you work ridiculous amounts on your games, like in that interview I read from back in
Oy! Look, I'm working every single day, okay? And I just started the job at the Friedmans again. See, discipline and all that! I'm doing fine!Look, that's not the point! The point is you're talking about all this stuff which has nothing to do with your personal, um, "path" as you put it. This isn't what your life is supposed to be about! Where are all the struggles, and questions, and challenges, and stuff? When will you have to ask yourself
Yeah, butLet's go.JustLet's go!
Leave him alone already!
Jeez.Fine. It's not like he's going to do anything anyway.
Well, it's nice to know that tact is a thing of the past in the future. Y'know, pretending that that's the future. Which it isn't. Bl'bah.
So. Fringe.
Eh, I'm not in the mood to talk about anything anymore. Whatever.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Ultimate Marvel comics
Marvel started their Ultimate line of comics in 2000 with Ultimate Spider-Man. I think the best way to describe it is as a remake of their superhero comics and universe. The Ultimate comics started their continuity from scratch, retelling old stories as the regular Marvel comics do new things. There were two good reasons to do this. It was mainly done to sell to younger readers, who might be put off by the complicated continuity and unfamiliar status quos of the regular books. It also tried to approach the stories from a more modern sensibility, rather than being simple homages and rehashes. That way, they could justify selling it to people who were already reading their comics.
Eight years later, the Ultimate comics don't seem to have any reason to exist. Stories better geared for kids are being published in the Marvel Adventures imprint, where the stories are all done-in-one, as opposed to six-issue arcs. That line started in 2003 (and was restarted in 2005), and occasionally yields surprisingly fun and whimsical (if tame) stories. The Ultimate comics have told so many stories by now that their continuity is almost as hard to follow as the originals, and the status quos keep bouncing around in a struggle to stay fresh. And the original Ultimate architects (Brian Bendis and Mark Millar) have moved up to the regular Marvel universe, where they're doing stuff that feels as fresh as anything they did in Ultimate. So on both sides, Ultimate Marvel is redundant.
The editors are trying to deal with this in a few ways. First, they've brought in new blood: Aron Coleite, Joe Pokaski, and Jeph Loeb, all from the TV show Heroes. (Actually, Jeph Loeb has just been kicked off Heroes. From what I've seen of his comic work, I think it was deserved.) Though some of their work seems too reminiscent of Heroes plotlines, Coleite and Pokaski both seem to be very good writers. The other thing they're trying to do is raise the stakes. They're doing that with a Loeb-written miniseries called "Ultimatum", in which much havoc is wreaked. I wasn't impressed by it at all. The editors say that they want the Ultimate comics to be a place where big things can happen that wouldn't happen in the Marvel Universe, but I don't think that's enough. Fine, the Earth could blow up tomorrow in the comics. But that wouldn't give them any more reason to exist.
Here are my thoughts on each of the Ultimate comics.
Ultimate Spider-Man
This was the first one, and if it hadn't been good there wouldn't be any others. There are now 127 issues, not counting specials and miniseries, and they've all been written by Brian Michael Bendis. This series is good not because it was a particularly good idea to remake Spider-Man, but because Bendis is just really good. He's taken a lot of old plot-driven action stories, and reworked them into character-driven stories. And in order to make that work, he took characters that were usually paper-thin, and made them believable, likable, flawed, and interesting. His versions of characters are often much different than the originals, but it works. It's his version of Spider-Man, and when he tells stories I've seen before they're always much more dramatic than I remember. Bendis loves to experiment with his situations and storytelling techniques, but his characterizations are so good and relatable that it's usually still palatable for the masses. And he's also really good at long-term plotting, subtly setting lots of stuff up which he then pays off fifty issues later. His one major weakness is action scenes. Whenever Spider-Man's punching someone, it feels like the book's just going through the motions. Bendis was a very strange choice for the comic, and no one else could have done it better.
With all that praise aside, there isn't that much point to the series. The Amazing Spider-Man, which has been three-times-a-month for a while now, is just as good. It's got Dan Slott, who co-writes my favorite superhero comic ever (Avengers: The Initiative), and it's got Marc Guggenheim, who's been doing the fantastically fun Eli Stone TV show, and it's got Bob Gale, who wrote Back to the Future. So it's not like if Bendis called it quits there wouldn't be well-written Spider-Man. What the series has going for it are two things. First, it gives me a little of the teenage soap-opera I've been missing since Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane ended. Secondly, there's a subtext to everything that happens in the entire series, where the American government is brewing up a genetic war. Every super-powered character's origin is tied to that idea, which gives this whole big ongoing series cohesion. And it's interesting enough, under the surface. Trouble is, it's been 127 issues, and that still hasn't built up into anything major. It still feels like it could erupt at any moment, like how the show 24 tries to feel like at any minute nuclear war will break out. But how long can that be dragged on for before it goes somewhere, and you move on? (Bendis has just written a miniseries which brought the theme to the surface.) It doesn't really feel like it's going anywhere. Peter Parker is still 15, just as he was when the series started. As much as the editors would like me to feel like anything can happen, I don't believe the war's going to start for real and I don't believe Peter will graduate school and I don't believe he'll get married.
Here's what I think they should have done. They should have set out with the intent of telling the whole story, from start to finish. Bendis should have plotted out 150 or 200 issues to cover the entire life of Spider-Man, from superpowers to growing up to having a family to premature death. They shouldn't have thought of this as an ongoing to be preserved for future writers, because that's what Amazing Spider-Man is for. They should have let Bendis loose, to do whatever the characters told him needed to be done. And the result would have been the definitive Spider-Man run.
I don't know how much can still be achieved at this point. The pace has been set already. I guess the best thing is to just keep doing the series as they're doing it for as long as Bendis wants to do it. I can't argue against an excellent comic coming out month after month. Though, it might be nice if Bendis moved on to something new. Is he really going to be on this for ten years straight? Wowsers.
The Ultimates
The Ultimates are a re-envisioning of The Avengers, who in a clever twist are not idealists. They're run by the American government, and used to fight their wars. It's a cynical story where most of the team's problems are caused by their own incompetence, and where they spend more time worrying about their image in the media than they do fighting supervillains. This has a very different tone than the other Ultimate books- not only is this not really for kids, but the visual style of the characters and the way they're characterized and the long chaotic action scenes are all more like big-budget Hollywood movies than like the usual comic books. The original Avengers series is just the inspiration- this really is its own thing.
Or was, I should say. Series creator Mark Millar wrote 26 issues, then left. That's when Jeph Loeb took over, and undid all the interesting work Millar had done. He made all the characters closer to their Marvel Universe versions, he made the storytelling more conventional and dull, and in general every reason to care about the series was taken away. I don't blame Millar for leaving. He told the story he wanted to tell, then went to the Marvel line and injected his brand of quasi-politics, cynicism and "Hollywoodiness" there with the big "Civil War" crossover. His run on The Ultimates had a satisfying ending, which is so rare. More importantly, if he had stayed on the routine would have gotten really old. That cynicism is now really common, even in regular Marvel comics like The Thunderbolts and Avengers: The Initiative, and in both those cases it's being done better than he did it. So I think it's good that he left when he did. But Jeph Loeb was absolutely the wrong person to follow him.
Again, I wish they had paid off the war they were hinting at. Millar hooked me with the idea of using superheroes as soldiers. So what's that like? What does a war look like where one side has superpowers before the other? What's the new world order like? What are the politics to all this? That's where the series needed to go. It needed to get more serious, not less. They needed to get -and this will sound bizarre to anyone who's familiar with his work, but they needed to get Jonathan Hickman to write this. To plot out a believable alternate history, in a world where wacky Marvel characters like Iron Man and Thor and Captain America and the Hulk exist.
Loeb has taken all the characters in such cartoony directions, that I don't see how it's possible to get to that anymore, short of starting over as a different book. He's turned The Ultimates into "The Avengers Lite", and now I think the best thing to do is just cancel. Which they may actually do, after Ultimatum. I'm hopeful.
Ultimate X-Men
Now here's a series that never had a reason to exist. When Mark Millar started it, it was already just a bland imitation of the original X-Men stories. There's no twist, there's no subtext, it's just X-Men. Again. There have been some excellent writers on it: Bendis, Brian K. Vaughan, Robert Kirkman. None of them could get to a point where there was a point. It had a big convoluted soap-opera with all its many characters, but that's what X-Men has been known for since the 70s and Chris Claremont did it better. The characters often act in ways that are surprising, but not ways that are more interesting than the original incarnations. This book doesn't feel like any writer's personal vision, it feels like a diluted rehash of better and more memorable stories.
What it should have done from the start was rethink the whole concept of the X-Men, because I think the problem stems from the originals. In the sixties, they were just another bunch of superheroes. Since then, the cast has gotten larger by the hundreds, and writers have used them as a metaphor for all sorts of oppressed minorities, but still I don't think the X-Men have found focus. They started out as superheroes like any others, so no matter how much you add on top that's what they'll still be. Their stories will still be about fighting this guy or that guy, about cleverly using this power against that power. I think there's a real problem with all the regular X-Men books, where even excellent writers write stories which only long-time fans could care about. So a remake was not just a way to get money, it should have been seen as a way to figure out how to make the X-Men work on a basic level. Start with just the original six characters, find a way to make them work and seem like a good idea, and only then start incorporating elements from later years. Slowly.
Here's how it should have worked. It should not have been an action-packed adventure, it should have been a tense drama. Brian K. Vaughan would have been perfect had he started it. The twist would be that most mutants can't control their powers. They genuinely are dangerous to society and themselves, which makes the whole persecution angle much more interesting on a fundamental level. It wouldn't be about fighting or being generic heroes, it would be about hiding and trying to survive. The only one with a reasonable amount of self-control would be Professor Xavier, and even he would be very scary for the rare occasions where he loses control. Imagine, being protected and taught by a guy who could erase your mind by accident. That's creepy, and that's the sort of thing it should have gone for.
Ah well. That's a whole different series. This one is pointless. It should have been cancelled long ago, and it's not too late to do so now.
Ultimate Fantastic Four
As with the original Fantastic Four, this is about a small team exploring wacky dimensions and fighting over-the-top villains and all that other generic superhero stuff. But it started out different from the Marvel Universe version in several ways. Most obviously, they changed the characters from adults to kids. That gives it a sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm which you wouldn't get in adults. More importantly, the tone was changed from anything-goes fantasy to more grounded science fiction. The first issue begins with Reed Richards, as a younger kid, discovering another dimension. Almost everything in the first eighteen issues (one story by Bendis and two stories by Warren Ellis) follows from that set-up. The heroes' powers and the main villain's powers and the initial plots are all tied to that dimension and the rules about how it works. The fact that there are rules at all differentiates this from the original, and I think there was potential to surpass the original. For my tastes, I think fictional science with rules is much more entertaining than fictional science which the writers make up as they go along. The first eighteen issues are fun, and all sorts of crazy things happen, but none of it feels like it's coming out of nowhere. So when Reed comes up with a brilliant invention, it's not just a plot device- it's a puzzle he solved, where you saw all the pieces to start with.
Then Mark Millar came on. He wrote four three-issue stories, and in that time he completely undid the series' potential. No, he did that quicker. Right from his first scene, where they're suddenly time-traveling back to the time of the dinosaurs, calling themselves "The Fantastic Four" and acting like jaded adults. Millar felt that the appeal of FF is that any craziness can happen, and maybe there's something to that. But that's not where this series should have gone. (Incidentally, he's writing the regular Fantastic Four now. He's writing it exactly as he wrote UFF, and it's not any good.) Once you say that Reed can invent anything as the plot dictates, and they're not acting like kids anymore, and there are no rules, what's the difference between it and the original? Why bother with an Ultimate version at all? Them looking younger isn't such a big difference to the kinds of stories you're telling.
It's not like Millar's stories were good on their own terms, either. He kept to a very rigid formula: Issue 1: set-up. Issue 2: The Twist. Issue 3: resolution. In each story, The Plot Twist was the only reason for the story to be told. To his credit, the twists were clever. But there was nothing but the twist. For instance: The first story started with Reed Richards discovering the original Marvel Universe in the multiverse and having a pleasant inter-dimensional chat with the original (and older) Reed Richards. All amusing enough, but there was no plot. Then in issue two, The Twist: it's not the Marvel Universe after all- it's another alternate reality just like it except that all the superheroes have become zombies. The communication was a trick, to let the zombies into the Ultimate Universe to feed some more. In issue three, they close the portal and prevent a zombie invasion. This doesn't feel exciting so much as feeling like it's clearing the stage for the next story and twist. It's a story which Mark Millar can feel proud about as he tells his friends what his clever plot twist is, but it's not a story that's good.
That's where I lost interest, so I can't say how current writer Mike Carey is doing. I don't usually care for Carey's work, so I doubt I'd be impressed. It should have built up rules slowly, adding in one or two new concepts whenever the writer ran out of stories and then seeing how those concepts played against everything else that had been built up. It should have been a series that started out simple and got progressively more and more complicated and interesting, which isn't really for kids but would sure have been fun. (There's no way Warren Ellis would have stayed on for more than twelve issues, and I think Adam Warren would have been the next best writer.) At this point that's not possible anymore, so I think the series should like UXM be cancelled posthaste.
At this point I think it's fair to say: The Ultimate Universe is a failure. In eight years it has failed to find its footing, and I don't think Ultimatum is going to change their approaches significantly. The "genetic war" angle is an interesting one, but the longer they wait to pay it off the less fresh it'll be. Already the Marvel movies have co-opted the theme, making it seem more like a staple of the genre and less like an edgy twist. I'm still interested in specific Ultimate comics. Ultimate Spider-Man is certainly going to continue to be excellent. And there are the occasional excellent stand-alone Ultimate miniseries, like Warren Ellis' somewhat-recent Ultimate Human and the infamously-long-delayed Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk by Damon Lindelof. I'm also cautiously optimistic about Mark Millar's new undertaking, "Ultimate Avengers", which won't actually be an Avengers book so much as an ongoing stream of big crossovers using whatever characters the writer feels like using. I think that's a cool idea, saying to a writer: "Here's the universe. Have fun. Just leave it somewhere cool for the next guy."
So here's what I'd like to see: Five or six Ultimate comics for Jeph Loeb, just to keep him away from the main universe. Ultimate Spider-Man, given the opportunity to do whatever it wants. And Ultimate Avengers, with unpredictable stories of varying length and scope. Just those three writers, and everyone else should write for the main universe.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Beit Shemesh
Many men were standing by the edge, all wearing black. They were yelling at a man in a nearby boat. It was a houseboat which he had built with his own two hands, and he was living in it. He was sitting back comfortably, reading a book and sipping lemonade.
What if tonight, a year of Shabbat began? No games, no music, no blog, no TV shows, no digital comics, no buying things, no forums, no programming, no job, no microwave. A clean slate, with nothing to put on it. For the first month or two, I'd be terribly depressed. Obviously. Maybe suicidal, yes. A person whose every opportunity has been snatched away permanently is not a pretty sight. To be sure, the first month or two would be the worst time of my life. But then I'd adapt. I'd have to.
Most of the time, I'm just scared of them. They all dress in identical black-and-white clothes. They live in identical white apartment buildings, and their streets are so uniform that I can't tell one from the other. A kharedi neighborhood is a seemingly endless forest of banality. And it grows. They violently shoo away anyone who doesn't fit their vision of the world. Women they don't find modest are harassed (and they've got a very broad idea of what's "immodest"), people who don't follow Jewish laws have rocks thrown at them. As I understand it, the Ramat Beit Shemesh area was originally supposed to be a mixed community. That didn't last long. As soon as the kharedim moved in, everyone else was forced to move out. And they spread. They marry early, have as many kids as they can, and continue to push their lifestyle further and further into our neighborhoods.
It's easy to forget they exist from our community. There are no kharedim around here, and it's only every now and then that we hear stories of violence against our people. Our people work, we entertain ourselves with music and movies and all sorts of things which would never be tolerated in kharedi society. Every Shabbat, we young types all sit and talk about the latest episode of Heroes. There are lots of programmers around, who talk to each other about all sorts of database-related stuff I don't quite understand. There are lots of people around with videogames. There are buildings painted in weird colors. It's not like this is paradise or anything, but we have… y'know. What to live for. We've got lots of interesting people, with clearly-defined identities, who don't hide everything that's interesting about them under conformity.
So if, in yesterday's election, there had been a mayoral candidate with a platform of "Get out, kharedis!", I would have voted for him in a heartbeat. That's the biggest concern- that by the time we rally against a kharedi takeover, it'll be too late. They'll have such an overwhelming majority in Beit Shemesh that our only options will be to turn kharedi, or move out. But there was no candidate for me, and if there were he couldn't have won.
There were three candidates. One was our mayor of the past 15 years, an incompetent and corrupt politician who knew how to play the game to get elected, but not how to be a mayor. He was running on a "The other candidates are worse!" platform. Then there was the kharedi candidate, who most of the rabbis had told their congregations they must vote for. (If a kharedi rabbi says to do something, their entire community does it, no questions asked.) And finally, there was the candidate whose campaign my mother was helping in every way she could, a guy who by all accounts knew exactly what needed to be done and was running on a slightly naïve "Let's all live together in harmony." platform.
So now we have a kharedi mayor. When my father heard the news, he jokingly asked where we'd be moving to. He's not wrong. Now there will be no one to hold the kharedim in their place. I don't expect to see anything happen in this city which is not specifically designed to appeal to kharedim. That means there will be no malls, no places of entertainment, but lots and lots of identical white apartment buildings. Beit Shemesh isn't going to be big enough to hold all the kharedim who'll want to live here.
I think it's time for our neighborhood to set a policy, that we will not accept any kharedim here. We need to make it clear that they will not be welcome here, as we would not be welcome in their areas. Because if one family moves in, and then another, then another, it's only a matter of time until they're the majority here. Just as they're apparently the majority in Beit Shemesh as a whole. For fifteen years we had a mayor too spineless to do anything against them, and now it's too late. They run this city, and it's only a matter of time before they drive us out of it.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I think I should keep my mouth shut about politics and social issues until.. let's say the end of time. Seriously, if I ever act like I know what I'm talking about with politics, refer me to this comment and e-mail me a virtual slap to the face. It looks like our new mayor's going to do an excellent job- he's already put the guy I voted for (who's his personal friend) in a very good position, even though he wasn't obligated to give him anything at all. And he's talked about preserving the status quo, diversity-wise. A referral and a slap, that's what I ask for.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Reinventing the Artist
For that matter, the third game I have planned will not be like the first two. And the fourth will not be like the first three. And the fifth will not be like the first four. (Assuming all goes according to plan, as God willing it will.) And the games I dream of making are complex, mixing all these art forms with other art forms.
And I can get there. Isn't that crazy? Imagine if I sat at my piano, and said: "From this seat, I will grow as an artist until I am a good architect!" That's essentially the nonsense I'm saying. I don't plan to use the specific skillset I honed on Smilie for years! The skills I'm learning now, I might not use again for even longer! And yet, I am sitting here with the audacity to say that this is a path before me, that this seat will lead me to things I'm not even training for. It's "The Sims" logic. Creativity points are creativity points, and they can be applied toward anything.
I am saying: the world can actually work that way.
This game is not like my last one. Smilie started from an idea of a character. I thought back to how animals acted, and how I might act, and developed that character in my mind. Then I used that to determine all the actions he would take, in order to create a game where his simple personality would shine through. This game isn't like that. It started from a philosophical principle, where I wondered how I could express that idea. I built up more and more rules in my head which reflected the idea, in order to create a game where that general concept will be clear.
And making this game is not like making my last one. Smilie was all planned out in advance, to the smallest detail. Planning is meaningless for this one- I never know what the game needs until I get up to it in the coding. I started out trying to write a script for it like Smilie's, and very quickly realized that it simply wasn't appropriate. Also, Smilie was a very linear piece of code. I don't think I could have written it any other way. But this code is all object-oriented and organized. And again, I don't see any other way I could be doing it.
The programming language I'm using is the same, but I'm using it to make two things which are worlds apart. The whole approach to rules and feedback and interactivity and how a message is conveyed is totally different, and I'm treating these like one leads to the other. Crazy.
Isn't that what Eliezer told me I needed to do? When I first started out at the Academy, he listened to what I was playing and told me it was too derivative. He told me that the best way to find my own voice, rather than just copying other people, was to turn to dodecaphonia. Throw out the tonality, force yourself to approach the music differently, and then there's nothing to fall back on. No imitation, no habits, nothing but your theme. In the end, I figured out how to apply my habits and imitations to dodecaphonia. But still. That piece isn't like anything else I've done. (Or it wouldn't be, if I'd ever finished it.) From working on that piece, I didn't learn any specific techniques I'd want to repeat. But I sharpened my creative mind, that's for sure.
But Eliezer was weird, I think. He reinvented himself going from classical to pop and then back to classical. He always listened to his improvisation partner and saw if there was anything he could use in it. I'll always remember when I came to him with the fifth variation, following a particularly dense Schoenbergian cacophony with simple tranquility. I'll always remember it, because I remember what he told me. He told me it was a revelation to him. Imagine that! That an accomplished composer, who has formed a lifetime's worth of habits and techniques, could stretch his mind to be inspired by an amateur's mess! Would a teacher who wasn't like that tell me to throw out what I'd learned, or would he just have me improve what I had?
Most artists and entertainers, in any field, dig deeper and deeper until they have no way out. They keep honing their craft until they see subtleties and nuances no one else would notice, finding innovation and greatness in tiny changes from the norm. Take the case of Will Wright. A brilliant gamist, to be sure! He made SimCity, he made The Sims, he made Spore (which I have yet to play, but certainly seems ambitious!). Anyone who's heard him talk knows that he doesn't take games lightly. To him, they're a way to explore everything he finds interesting about life (and a fascinating perspective on life he has!). He takes inspiration from science and popular culture and everything else he ever comes across. And yet, all this gets funneled into the narrow field of simulation strategy. That is his Form. He continually gets better and better at that one field. Each time he makes a game, he learns from what worked and what didn't, and applies those lessons directly into his next game. So he has become (without much competition) the world's greatest simulation strategy gamist. While he makes mistakes, he learns from those and moves forward. Deeper and deeper he goes into the potential of the tiny bit of land he owns, and I don't think he'll ever find a bottom.
I don't want to be like that. Gamism is so lost, in so many places. How can I limit myself to just one? It used to be, an artist would just pick one trade and get better and better at it. That's not enough for me. There's so much to do, so much that needs to be done! Settling into one Form, getting comfortable, finding its boundaries, honing my craft- that seems like the easy way forward, these days. So one kind of game (maybe movement) would be better off, and I'd be an expert on that. But what about the RPG? What about the metalude? What about the adventure? What about the exploration? What about…
My, my. I've become an impatient little phoenix, haven't I? Or maybe I've always wanted to be one.
I read an interview with Miyamoto recently where it was pointed out that his latest games -Wii Music, Wii Fit, Wii Sports- are not similar at all to the games Miyamoto's known for. Which is true. And it's pretty remarkable, isn't it, that at 56 years old he's still reinventing himself? He could sit and make platformers for the rest of his life, and we'd have platformers of such a level as we can barely imagine. But no, he's making music games and fitness balance games and sports action games and whatever the heck he's inspired to make today.
With each game, he says, he finds the core "ingredient" that's going to play well, and then tries to create a whole experience around that. So I guess, if that experience follows patterns he's familiar with, that's fine. But if it doesn't, then he'll throw his 30 years of game experience to the side and try something different. Crazy.
So I guess the question is, is this path reserved only for geniuses, or is there room for me? Is it possible to hone one's instincts, or do they have to be great to start with? Are there principles of art which can be moved from art form to art form, so that I really can get better and better at destroying and starting over?
Well, that's the plan.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Monday, November 03, 2008
It's always more frustrating than I expect.
They also need to not walk through each other.
The circle moves at a changeable angle.
Type type type type type.
I'll put in obstacles.
Type type typey-type.
Type-a-type-a-Pace, pace. Type.
Run.
No, that's not right.
Fix fix.
Run.
Okay.
Pace, pace, pace.
It needs.
Pace,
It needs..
Pace, pace.
It needs to check to the left and check to the right, and keep checking 'til there's an angle that's not covered.
But first.
Type type type type type.
Run.
Um, huh.
Run.
No, that's not
Oh.
Oh, that's very wrong.
Fix fix fix.
Run.
Wrong.
Fix fix fix fix.
Run.
Wrong, wrong.
Erase erase erase.
Type type, type-a-type. Type type typey.
Run.
Consult help file.
Okay.
Erase.
Simplify.
It is now no longer what I want.
What the heck.
Run.
Okay.
So. Now it at least sees that it's running into something. And it won't do that.
What was it I was doing?
Pace, pace.
Oh, right.
It needs to check to the left and check to the right, and keep checking 'til there's an angle that's not covered.
Type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type.
Run.
Bl'bah!
Erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase.
Type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type.
Run.Quit.
Fix fix.
Run.
Quit.
Fix fix.
Run. Quit. Erase. Type. Run.
Why is it doing that? I didn't tell it to do that.
Read, read, read.
Here's the problem.
Erase.
Type.
Run.
Blah.
Leave.
Think, think, think.
Bounce ideas off Tamir.
Think, think, think.
I'm back.
Type type type type type type type type type Run!
What the heck?
No.
Read, read, read, read, fix.
Erase erase erase erase type erase.
Pace, pace, pace.
Eat lunch.
Pace, pace.
Type type.
Ah HA!
Type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type.
Huh?
Undo, undo, undo, undo, undo.
Stare at screen.
It needs to check to the left and check to the right, and keep checking 'til there's an angle that's not covered.
Oh, that's how this works.
Okay.
Type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type run.
No.
Fix.
Run.
Blah.
Fix.
Run.
Blah!
Fix.
Run.
BLAH!
Erase
Type type type.
RunBLAHtyperunBLAHtyperunBLAHerasetypefixBLAHBLAH
BLAHfixrun..
..sigh.
Sure. Good enough.
The circle's not knocking into stuff.
Now to integrate it into the game.
Type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type type.
Run.
Oh my god that is slow.
Fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix.
Oh my god that is slow.
Simplify simplify simplify.
Oh my god that is slow.
Okay, fine. It's slow. But does it work?
Good question.
Run.
Um.
Quit, run.
Well.
Quit, run.
No, it's not my imagination.
It's smearing across the screen.
Why is it smearing across the screen?
Read read read.
Read read read.
Run.
Why are you smearing across the screen?
Okay, simplify. It won't check as many angles for free spaces.
Slow and smearing.
Okay, simplify. It'll check even less angles.
Slow and smearing.
What do you want from me?
Okay, simplify. It won't check to see if it's bumping into anything.
Slow and smearing.
Okay, simplify. There's only one thing moving now. It's going to bump into everything. I hope you're happy.
Smear, smear, smear.
What does that even mean, "smear smear smear"? Just move and be happy!
Fine.
I'll simplify this to the point where it's not doing any of what I want it to do.
It's still not working.
Why is it not working?!
Pace pace pace pace pace pace pace pace!
wait
No.
Oh dear no.
It can't be that.
Type-type-type-run-WHAT?
IT REALLY IS oh wait.
The way I wrote it, it's going to get triggered whether or not my hunch is right.
Fix.
Run.
Oh, phew.. AAAAGGGHH!
It triggered.
It triggered.
What does this mean?
It means I messed up back there.
But I'm finished with that part.
I don't even really understand how that part works anymore.
I programmed it back at the beginning, and it made sense at the time, and I was proud of how I'd made this big complicated code which was the absolute simplest way to do that thing which seemed so obvious I didn't even need to think about it as I was planning the game.
It made sense. It was right!
Why must you trigger?
Forget it, I am not rewriting the foundation of my game today. Enough.
Blah, the whole day's gone by and what a waste. I haven't played a single game.
1 Comment:
- Kyler said:
-
For the moment I feel glad I am on the visual design side of this project.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Purity
Something that I particularly admire about Orbient is its purity of vision. There are no elements tacked on. There's no story, there are no cutscenes, there are no minigames, there are no boss battles. This game is a 100% pure movement game. They got 50 challenging, creative and distinct levels in without ever losing focus or breaking their own rules. This is a game where you start playing as soon as you go in, and keep playing as long as you're there, without ever having your time wasted.
This is surprisingly rare. Possibly the most acclaimed game from last year was Portal, a puzzle game which thinks it's a science fiction comedy action movement game. I recently played that on Eli's computer. I did have fun with it. But it's not a very intellectually stimulating puzzle game, it's not a particularly intense action game, its controls are too focused on functionality for it to be a good movement game, and its science fiction story isn't exactly on the level of standard TV. I'll give it the comedy, though- it was funny. See, that's the problem with trying to do everything: you end up achieving very little.
(The way to make Portal work, I think, would be to de-emphasize puzzles so that the game becomes complex, and then to take away rigid structure and have gameplay pop up however it serves the comedy.)
It's common practice to give lots of little subordinate elements lots of attention, without paying any attention to primary content. So I come across metaludes (The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass) and action RPGs (Okami) which put lots of effort into repeating gameplay systems but very little into plot. (Naturally, I have not finished either game and don't plan to any time soon.) And I come across… well, hm. I really don't play many games these days, do I. Well, I'll probably run into something similar next time I play a big-budget game of some sort.
In the meantime, I'll be playing Nintendo's upcoming Art Style games on WiiWare. Art Style: Cubello was surprisingly addictive and engaging despite its extremely simple premise (shoot cubes, connect four cubes to eliminate them), many flaws (including frustrating endings and a very confusing way of organizing the levels), and repetitiveness. I would curse the game for making me lose after a ten-minute game, and then head right back for more. The gameplay has problems, but it's fun and pure. It doesn't waste my time with random nonsense. I'm sure I'll be going back to that game over and over, just like Orbient. So Art Style games are pretty much "buy on sight" for me now. And anything else -even unanimously praised games like Portal or Okami- I need to take caution with. Most gamists just don't know what they're doing.
1 Comment:
- Kyler said:
-
I think you would enjoy the Xbox 360 arcade title Geometry War Retro Evolved. It is simply you versus thousands of little shapes trying to hit you. No story, no levels, just an ever increasing difficulty. The controls are great, the graphics are exciting.
The only issue is the difficulty does plateau at roughly 7 million points, however that is also my highscore, so it doesn't really matter.
I found the sequel to it to be annoying because it did lack the purity of the original game. They decided to pack in 6 different minigames instead of simply perfecting the original.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Back
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
All-Star Superman
And every single time, without fail, I find myself horrified at just how astoundingly bad his writing is. I have tried reading his Batman, I have tried reading his Seven Soldiers, I have tried reading his Final Crisis, I have tried reading his New X-Men, I have tried reading his We3. Without exception, every single issue I have read by Grant Morrison has struck me on almost every page as a mediocre story incompetently told. And I'm doubly frustrated, because it's supposed to be something wonderful. On the internet I hear nothing but praise for Morrison's work, and I recognize the ambition, and I say to myself, "I want to read something by that genius!". I fall for the hype no matter how many times I have been disappointed, no, downright offended by the quality of his writing.
So take the case of All-Star Superman. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more universally-loved comic book. It's won awards, it's dazzled critics, it's even sold well. Every review I see mentions that there's nothing that could possibly be said by a lowly critic which could adequately encapsulate the pure perfection that is All-Star Superman. They just released the twelfth and final issue, and already it's being called an enduring classic, one of the best comic books ever written, etc. etc. etc. And I desperately want to believe them, because as much as I'm comfortable standing out I enjoy a good story more. There really shouldn't be any reason to dislike it- it's considered the most accessible of Grant Morrison's work, after all. A timeless masterpiece, that's what it's supposed to be.
That's what it most emphatically is not, and yet even as I think back to the issue I just read a few hours ago (#1), I'm trying to spin it in my head into something I can admire. I had no such reactions as I was actually reading it. I got one, overwhelming emotion from it, the same one I get from everything Morrison writes: agitation. That was it.
Why did I even bother reading it? Because I said to myself: "Surely you're wrong. Surely you just haven't taken the time to appreciate it properly. Surely the brilliance is like that of Metroid Prime, which you only get to see once you've spent some time with it." And so I decided (with no irony) to read the entire series, basking in its brilliance, at the end of which I will be enriched and enlightened and understand that Grant Morrison is not a worthless hack after all.
I still intend to follow through on that commitment. So here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep adding bits to this post as I read through each issue. I'm going to force myself to endure the agitation to find the good that may or may not be there. I'll start by rereading issue #1 again, now that I know exactly what to expect (and therefore can't be as horrified as I was earlier today), later today.
(I have trouble keeping track of too many details. So I don't enjoy reading prose, which tends to get bogged down in long descriptions. I find myself re-reading the same paragraphs many times to absorb them on even a basic level, which means I'm not getting the real experience. That's why I stick to comics, where all descriptions are visual and separate from the text.)
The series starts with what is possibly the shortest, most efficient retelling of Superman's origin story ever. It uses only four, unremarkable panels, each one bearing two words of explanation: "Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple." The emotions behind this origin story have been played out many times, by many writers: a profound loss, a new home. Morrison is not interested in that. The four panels, as I said, are remarkably unremarkable. The first planet shows Krypton's city from a distance, so you shouldn't get a sense of its grandeur (and care about its destruction). The second panel has Superman's parents' faces obscured by an unfortunately-placed shadow, so that you shouldn't get a good sense of their emotions and humanity. In the third panel we see the alien-looking exterior of the spaceship rather than the baby within. In the fourth panel we see two strangers discovering the baby in the moment of initial shock rather than any moment of acceptance.
The issue's title is appropriate. Grant Morrison is telling the story quickly, while refusing to pause at any moments that make the story worth telling. This is plot without the music.
The set-up of the issue's plot is similarly concise: There are a bunch of people in a spaceship by the sun, the evil Lex Luthor has somehow gotten a monster on board to sabotage them, and Superman happens to be nearby to save them. There is very little explanation of what they're doing by the sun, there is no explanation at all given for why Superman's there, and as far as I can tell there's no conceivable explanation for how the monster got there. All this I respect. It doesn't really matter how it all got that way, it's just a big space story of the sort Superman does everyday. What does matter, and what completely undermines the potential of the scene, is that Morrison takes away any possible reason to care about the scene. The people in the ship, we are informed, were artificially "grown with zero fear genes", and the one person there who can be scared proclaims: "Fear is the sauce on the steak of life!" So the creation and resolution of tension, like you'd get with a musical cadence, is absent.
To add insult to injury, the panel placement pretends it is going for an emotional reaction, by making the panels increasingly lopsided. But then, on the very next page, as I was expecting a continuation of the cadence, it sticks a perfectly centered big panel of one of the aforementioned emotionless people. It's like Grant Morrison (and his artist, Frank Quitely) knows I'm expecting emotion, and is deliberately preventing it. "Here, have some emotion- whoops, none there! I didn't think you'd be a sucker enough to actually try to care! Ho, ho." On the other hand, it might not be malicious at all. He might just have no sense of how to tell a story.
Because if you're not going to put emotion in, then what's the point? The point of having Superman save anyone is to get a progression of emotions: a build-up of tension as the villain sets up his plan, a climax when he seems to be winning, then relief when Superman shows up, then increased tension when Superman fails temporarily, and resolution when Superman saves the day. But enough about this. You're an intelligent person, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So let's move on.
When Superman flies in, there is a zoom-in not on his struggling face, but on his chest's "S" symbol. This, in a nutshell, is how Grant Morrison thinks of Superman and the rest of his characters: they are not people we should care about, but archetypes to be pondered. No one in the issue is given any believable motivations. For instance, here is main villain Lex Luthor, explaining why he does what he does: "I'm getting older and… pause …and he isn't. So if I want to die happy, it's time to get serious about killing Superman." That's the motivation on top of which (I imagine) a large portion of this series is going to be built- petty and implausible jealousy. I've seen jealousy played more convincingly in comics from the 60's. But again, Morrison isn't interested in making you care. He's just hitting all the expected notes as quickly as he can.
..and then he tries to make up for it by being confusing and pretentious. Which I guess must be pretty hard, considering how simple the plot is. He must really work hard to seem "intellectual". He cuts away from the space scene -jarringly- before it can reach any emotion. (This had me shouting angrily at the comic.) And then the creators demonstrate their brilliance by somehow managing to make a simple journalism scene into something almost unreadable. The dialogue is deliberately unclear, and whereas most writers would use visuals to complement the text and make it clear what's going on, here the pictures focus on things that are completely irrelevant to the story. It has someone talk from off-panel, then shows someone who is not the speaker. They're talking about something ambiguous, and then there's a zoom-in on something they're not talking about. It's like a deliberate effort to confuse the reader! And even after that, some of the dialogue just doesn't make any sort of sense to me. Try this line: "I'm right here with a heart that's true." What the heck does that mean? This is the way Morrison has his ordinary people speak, so that we should be confused and disoriented and say "Wow, Grant Morrison must be so clever this is going right over my head!".
And the pretentiousness I mentioned? Well, when the story finally gets back to the rescue, the monster starts spouting: "You have no right to limit my ambitions, fascist! No right at all to stand in the way of my self-realization!" It's the sort of thing that might seem like some deep criticism of society unless you think for even a second about what it's trying to say, and realize there's nothing there.
The rest of the issue isn't even pretending to be trying to be pretending to be doing anything. It's pointless stuff- artificial superpeople, people turning against Lex Luthor, Clark Kent being clumsy, all without any hint of music to it. And then there's one idea, which I take it will hold the whole series together, and it's a good idea. If you gave it to a master storyteller like J. Michael Straczynski or David Mack or Jeff Smith, you'd have one heck of a story. In the hands of Grant Morrison, I find myself wondering why anyone would care. The idea is that Superman is dying. And the reason this is utterly pointless (except as a way to get to the next part of the mechanical plot) is that we never get a sense of how Superman feels about this. Is he afraid? Is he confused? Is he angry? Is he depressed? No, he's just Superman. An archetype, a little action figure Grant Morrison is moving around from plot point to plot point.
The issue ends with Superman revealing his identity to Lois Lane. And since this ought to be an emotional moment, of course we don't see either of their faces as it happens. We see more inanimate objects and symbols. The next issue could start with the huge outburst of emotion you'd expect to get from a moment like this. But I'm not counting on it.
This issue is a charming little dance between Superman and Lois Lane. It's very simple, and it's played perfectly.
The story has Superman taking Lois Lane to his Fortress of Solitude, and the two of them hanging out there. The previous cliffhanger, where Superman revealed his secret identity, is played in an unexpected way that absolutely meets the hopes I had. Basically, Lois doesn't believe him. The issue starts there, and ends with Lois confronting Superman and being shocked by what she finds out. So there isn't a huge range here- it's all shades of distrust. What makes the issue work -and I imagine it must have been harder to write than it seems- is the slow build-up. You see Lois gradually get more and more scared and paranoid as the issue progresses, making the story feel dynamic and engaging even though it is all resolved in one image at the end with no consequence.
The Fortress seems to be an endless well of creativity. On almost every page, there's at least one new idea thrown in, the sort of big idea that other comics might use once per story arc and call it a day. To give you an illustration of what I mean: Lois comes in her car, which Superman carries on his back across the world. The Fortress is just a huge mountain with a little S-marked door, the key to which is tiny but super-dense so that only Superman can lift it. As they walk in, they are greeted by a group of friendly Superman-robot butlers. As they service Lois's car, Lois and Superman keep walking while making smalltalk about Superman's latest adventure with Batman. The ideas only get more fantastic from there on.
Interestingly, Lois isn't dazzled by any of this. She has apparently been Superman's girlfriend for a while, and takes all the craziness for granted. But it's clear that she doesn't really understand Superman, she never knows what he's thinking or what his intentions are. She keeps surprising Superman by misunderstanding his gestures. They're the most bizarre couple, and I think it's great. I always love seeing two worlds knock into each other, and that's exactly what this is.
Having the issue be about distrust is a good way of illustrating the relationship in emotional terms. The way the plot creates this distrust is by introducing a room Superman doesn't want Lois to go into. Lois is disturbed by this, and we get ominous narration: "But now we come to the part of the story of my life where things go wrong." It's clever, actually- the narrator seems to be all-knowing, but it's lying to the reader. It's a way to get us to buy into Lois's paranoia, irrational as it might get. Of course there's nothing remotely dangerous in that room, and Superman has the purest of intentions. But who am I to disagree with a narrator?
So there's this rising level of paranoia, as I said, increasing with everything Lois sees, until she attacks Superman. In one page all suspicion is then resolved, and on the final page we see what was in that mysterious room: It's a birthday present for Lois, and it's the coolest present ever. Just the sort of out-there thing you'd imagine Superman would get his girlfriend. (Though I wouldn't have thought of it.) And that's the cliffhanger for the next issue.
So I have now read an excellent issue by Grant Morrison. I wonder what the next one will be like.
As the birthday takes a detour thanks to a reptile invasion of Metropolis, two superheroes pop up and instantly fall in love with Lois. While Superman just wants to have a quiet romantic day with Lois, these two propose a challenge to decide who should get to spend the day with her: "It's simple. We'll each of us perform a super-feat of strength in honor of Lois Lane. The most incredible feat wins her company."
I wonder what a more fun writer like Jeff Parker would have done with this silly set-up. I can just picture it: each page is a different competition, each one more ludicrous than the last, with Superman always doing best but still always failing to capture Lois's heart. And then the pages run out, there's some sort of punchline, and nothing's resolved. Most likely the old Superman comics were something like that, in which case maybe I should seek out old Superman comics.
What Grant Morrison does is less fun and less classic, but it's not bad at all. He's dealing with Superman's jealousy, his fear of losing Lois (which comes out in a standard life-or-death riddle). And in one moment, he even gets in the more-subtle idea that Superman is jealous of the men Lois will love after he's dead. Bravo. Still, there's a lot of idle teasing between the characters and not a lot of substance. The actual competition is just two pages toward the end, really. It's an arm-wrestling match. Guess who wins.
We're seeing it from Superman's perspective, from which it seems like a bit of a wasted day. Lois's party is skipped over entirely, and by the time Superman has Lois alone and is trying to have a real conversation, she's fallen asleep. Ah, women. You just can't talk to them. But still, before she falls asleep Superman does get his full-page kiss with Lois, so I guess it was all worth it.
This is good old-fashioned storytelling, with no fancy gimmicks at all save for two bizarre panels that mess with the flow of the reading. I could overlook these if the first weren't the end of the main plot and the second weren't the end of the issue. Oddly enough, they both use newspaper headlines to imply plot points. The first one I've read over and over and I still can't make heads or tails of it. So when I read this comic, the three-way competition feels unresolved even though the story jumps forward from there. The last panel of the book is a punchline, of sorts, but it only works if you know that Superman has X-Ray vision and think back to an earlier throwaway scene and connect that with another throwaway scene. And even when you recognize the joke, it adds absolutely nothing to the story and just distracts from what should be a more resonant final page.
Grant Morrison obviously can tell a story. This has been two good issues in a row- that doesn't happen by accident. So for most of this issue I was wondering how he could be so clearly competent, when I know from issue 1 and other comics that his storytelling tends to be a mess! The end of the issue gives me the answer I was looking for: He loves feeling clever. If he sees a chance to do something "sophisticated" that only a handful of readers will understand on a basic level, he'll always take it. Even if the alternative, which would be clear to everyone, would work better for the storytelling! (I'm guilty of similar self-indulgences. For instance, I wonder if anyone but myself would derive any meaning from "In Darkness".)
The two panels are nitpicks, really. It's a good, if unspectacular issue.
He's a collection of negative characteristics: He's arrogant, obnoxious, perverted, whiny. For his newspaper column, he takes insane risks, and then expects Superman to show up and save him. (He always does.) Here's a line that pretty much sums him up: "Doomsday! See, that's the kind of excitement I need for my feature!" And he's not being sarcastic there.
After all of Lois's hostility, and now Jimmy, I wonder when Morrison will get around to giving us a character who isn't a simple jerk. Well, at least there's Superman. As unapproachable as he is, at least he's a good guy. I can still feel sorry for him when these awful people take advantage of him. So of course Morrison turns him evil.
The rest of the issue is about fighting a mindlessly destructive Superman. (yawn) Who talks like this: "You and they point dumb gun at me! Say bye-bye hand!" Seriously, that's what he says. I couldn't make up something this stupid.
By the way, this is the point Morrison chooses to finally give Superman some clear emotion about dying. •-------
Me am die now? No die! Me scared…He waits for the moment where you can't relate to the character on any level to stick in an emotion you might want to relate to! Crazy.
There's really nothing else to say about this issue. It's a waste of time.
Morrison wants us to laugh at Luthor. Ha ha, that stupid villain. So he sets him up as a straw man. In the first two pages, we're told that he thinks of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Al Capone, and Adolph Hitler as "heroes and role models", he tells us that he's been evil because "Superman made me do it.", and he's given the death sentence. And we're meant to cheer.
But only an idiot would cheer. His character is painted in terms that are so artificial, so blatantly designed for the specific purpose of being broken down, that the denouncement is utterly meaningless. It's like a schoolyard bully laughing at a kid for nicknames which the bully made up himself. In other words, it's pathetic.
For comparison, there was a scene in Dan Slott's She-Hulk series where he had the title character denounce Iron Man. Up to that point in the story Iron Man had been painted as charming, well-meaning, professional, respected, etc.. But She-Hulk lists his offenses and tells him he's become a fascist dictator! That moment had power, because there was something there to break down. Iron Man's a hero character, a guy who's been built up as a man of some integrity and idealism. He's a character which many fans (myself included) were still rooting for every step of the way. So when She-Hulk eventually beats him up in her righteous anger, it means something.
Lex Luthor is a house of cards. It is made very clear that he has no achievements to his name, that he is despised by all, that he has not a single thought less flimsy and shallow than the most insufferable teenaged girl's whining. And then Grant Morrison sets up a plot which exists for one purpose: to convince the reader that Lex Luthor is a moron. Cue rapturous applause.
Clark Kent visits Luthor in prison, writing up his thoughts for an article. So we get page after page of what you'd get if Lex Luthor (God forbid) made a blog: "Oh, Superman's so horrible. He makes life not worth living. I'm the greatest guy alive, did you know? Not like that Superman. They all love him, that pretty boy. But he's a poopy-head. I'll rule the world. Superman. Superman." And then a monster breaks out, so that Morrison can get to the bit which he thinks is oh-so-clever: Clark Kent discreetly saves everyone with his powers, while Lex Luthor obliviously continues to bad-mouth Superman and do nothing. Ooh, a metaphor! Fancy.
There are two clever panel layouts here. I'll give them credit for that.
But the writing is just sad.
I'm telling you all this so that my biases will be clear. I was hoping this issue would be bad, so that I could have the fun of writing up this post in a particularly angry manner. But this issue is a classic. So far I'm not seeing any reason for this series, as a whole, to be remembered. But this particular issue, separate from the rest of the story, I hope they're still reading many decades from now.
Normally I wouldn't spoil this, but it's right there on the cover and in the title: This issue goes back to the day Jonathan Kent, the man who adopted Superman, died. It's mostly disconnected from the larger story of the series, which is good, because it means I can recommend this issue without recommending the series as a whole. The Superman here is still living in Smallville, still helping out on the Kent's farm and still a relatable character.
The story keeps cutting between the human and the fantastical. From Jonathan Kent's humble thoughts, to Superman flying through space with his superpowered dog. From the young Clark Kent hanging out with his friends and considering his future, to Superman teaming up with a bunch of "Supermen" from the distant future to fight a time-travelling monster. The purpose of these juxtapositions is made clear on the last two pages: first we see six Supermen all from different time periods, making grandiose implications about Superman's long-lasting legacy. And then the last page is a single moment in time- Superman at his adoptive father's grave.
This comic paints all the Superman comics which have ever been written, and all the Superman comics which have yet to be written, as Jonathan Kent's legacy.
And I find that interesting, because there's really nothing special about the guy. From what little we see of him here, he seems like any other random guy. He's proud of his son and he thanks God for his blessings. That's pretty much all the characterization he gets here. We can't really tell from the scenes he's in what his values are. But we see his humility, and that's the important thing. Apparently that quality rubbed off on Superman.
This is unrealistic, I think. Jonathan tells Clark at the beginning of the issue that he was a gift from God. Now, I can see Jonathan's humility there, but I think Superman's most likely to get an over-inflated ego from remarks like that. A Superman who thinks he's God's gift to the world would help no one but himself.
But still, I see what Morrison means to say and I do like it. It's a really good issue. Again, it's simple. But more so than the other issues this says something worthwhile about Superman comics in general.
Morrison only uses one of his trademark disorienting transitions here, and while usually they only serve to confuse, here it's used for dramatic effect. Superman flies toward his dying father, yelling: "I can save him! I can save everybody!" And then we cut to him standing over his father's coffin in the funeral.
And then for a two-page spread he speaks of Jonathan Kent's values. This is a good choice. For Superman's story, it doesn't matter who Kent actually was- it just matters what Superman learned from him. So we get characterization from Superman's account, and the actual man is left more or less a cipher.
An inspired comic, this.
Page 1, panel 2. Two people are in a vague cockpit-ty area which seems to be disassembling itself. One talks about "bizarro technicians" and "micro-singularities". The other says "Thrilling, isn't it?", and I'm glad he did because frankly I had no idea. And then he says they need to be "scaled up" or they're gonna die. Or something. He helpfully refers to the abstract purple thing from the first panel (at least, I'm guessing that's what he's referring to) as "one of those bizarre structures". Thank you for clearing that up. Apparently this is Surrealistic superhero comics.
Page 1, panel 3. Oh good, a slightly wider view! Now I can see it so clearly, it's a... a.. a. What is it. It's a sort of purple thing. Is any part of this thing the thing that I saw in panel 1? No, it's no- wait! I see a little pink speck in the right corner! That must be the thing in panel 1! It all makes sense now! The dialogue tells me that this is the underverse. I always wanted to see what that was like. I think I'd like to go home now.
Page 1, panel 4. Ooh, an even wider view! I can see the whole abstract purple thing now. It's obviously origami, with some sort of zombie limbs coming out of it. It doesn't look anything like panels 1 or 3, so I guess those were the other side. Or something. There's the Earth behind it, in all its purplish glory.
Page 2, panels 1-4. New scene. Good, I was getting bored of that one. This one's much cooler, with Superman in space fighting some sort of abstract… black… thing… Or is he fighting? It looks more like he's just sorta floating there, until he leaves. Good thing there's no dialogue- this is so cool already, dialogue would be overkill.
Page 3, panel 1. Why is Superman scared, as he looks back at the abstract black thing? Actually, maybe he's not. That look could just as easily be friendly. Oh, how sweet, the abstract black thing seems to be waving goodbye! On second thought, the last page might have been Superman hugging the abstract black thing. He found a friend.
Page 3, panel 2. Superman looks forward with a blank expression. [sniff] It's so beautiful!
Page 3, panel 3. Planet.
Page 3, panel 4. Planet.
Page 3, panel 5. Monsters.
Pages 4 and 5. Earth-cube. Oh no, Superman! Don't fall onto the Earth-cube!
Then it switches scenes. The Daily Planet guys hang around and talk about the true meaning of Christmas. Then a bunch of monsters fall from the sky, they touch them, it sort of has this zombie-ish infection thing where anyone touched says "Me am Bizarro!", a Superman monster shows up to kill people and says indecipherable gibberish like "Want all you am no want Bizarro!", the Daily Planet guys act annoying, there's babbling about "planet eaters" and "infra-matter" and it just goes on and on and on dear God it never ends!
This is crap. This is complete and utter crap from cover to cover. Grant Morrison should have been ashamed to write it, and Frank Quitely should have been ashamed to draw it, and the DC editors should have been ashamed to publish it.
Reading this issue is like sitting in a microwave. Reading this issue is like clawing out your own brain with a toothpick through the ear. Reading this issue is like eating an entire dumpster and its contents in ten minutes. This isn't just bad, it's ambitiously bad. I could almost believe it's intentionally painful. And you know what that would make this? Still crap.
There's a passable metaphor here, the idiot monsters symbolizing the people of Earth. And I do feel a bit sorry for the Superman-copy. But that's not enough to justify spending twenty-two pages on one gag. There's lots of talking and padding, and very little story.
That's all I have to say about that.
Regardless, this is very good. Thematically this is following directly from the last issue: the new Kryptonians see themselves as being above the lowly humans, and think Superman is disgracing himself by lowering himself to our level. It also ties in with most of the earlier issues in one way or another: there's Superman's jealousy of these "replacements" mirroring issue 3, there's the whole Daily Planet cast, there's a return of the Fortress of Solitude from issue 2. That last bit deserves special mention. Continuing a gag from that issue, the Kryptonians were able to lift the key to the Fortress and let themselves in. That's cute, and I like that Morrison's making the replacement more personal. It's one thing to take over a job, it's another to take over a home. In the end, though, I don't think he did enough with it. The unwanted guests didn't do anything particularly destructive while Superman was out, so it doesn't feel like much of a threat.
Speaking of which, their power level is really played up at first. They use Superman as a punching bag and do all sorts of crazy, Superman-y things. And then in the end they suddenly and awfully conveniently go blind and weak, so that we can get to the inevitable ending. Morrison plays their farewell for some emotion, but I think it's the wrong one. He emphasizes the two characters' love for each other, when he should really be giving us a reason for casting them away. He should have emphasized their character flaws in the end, made those their undoing, so that we could see how Superman is better. Y'know, twist it into a statement about Superman, rather than a random story about two characters we don't really care about. What he does do is repeat the idea of Superman's human-taught humility, refusing to impose his will on others. There are a few good exchanges between the two sides on the subject.
Any problems I have with this issue are nitpicks. It's very good, it's clearly told, it's got plenty of emotions, it's got a few excellent layouts.
I love the way this is told. It's totally nonlinear, jumping backwards and forwards through the day wildly with little captions saying what time it's jumped to •-------
7:02 AM…11:25 PM…10:25 AM…12:01 AM…4:35 PM…11:00 AM…1:36 PM…, but it's not intrusive. You don't need to pay attention to what order the events happen in. The story works well even if all you understand is the vague sense that it's not linear, because each plot thread makes sense on its own. What the nonlinearity adds is that Morrison can jump back and forth between stories as is dramatically appropriate. I think the difference between this (which I enjoy) and issue 1 (which drives me crazy) is that none of the scenes absolutely need to be followed up on. There aren't scenes where what's going on is unclear, there aren't any especially tense scenes. So I never minded putting a scene down for a minute, though I didn't know if I'd see it again.
There's one particular use of nonlinearity that I found so impressive, I'm going to single it out. As Superman talks to Lois in a straighforward scene, two small single-panels are inserted, set later, where Superman reacts to what was said in the conversation. So you have a clear causality at work, even though there are hours between the cause and the effect. The future panels are smaller than the others, so that their separation from the main flow of the scene is visually obvious. And it's made even less confusing by the fact that both panels are continuations of other plot threads which were already introduced. But I think there's a principle of storytelling here that could be applied more generally, still without causing confusion. A self-contained one-panel comic can add interesting commentary without being intrusive. (Everyone has time for a single panel, even if it comes in the middle of something they're more interested in.) The writer needs to be careful to have the separate panel add something clear to the story. But anyway.
The different storylines (by my count, there are nine) unfold as the issue progresses, with one in the center- a story that ironically takes less than a second from start to finish. It is that story that provides the climax of the issue, which all the storylines feel like they're building toward. I will not spoil the moment, because it's very clever, but it basically reaffirms Superman's importance to the world.
There's also a little visit from the future, when everyone speaks in a language derived from internet acronyms. That makes me shudder every time I read it, because I'm not sure it's not possible. Anyway, I don't really see what the point of it was so I'm assuming it's setting up the next issue.
In the first issue I didn't care about any of the characters. In the last issue, I still don't care about any of the characters. They're paper-thin stereotypes, intentionally left unrelatable to the very end.
There is a surprising amount of good stuff in the series (though not in this issue). Morrison is apparently capable of telling stories that aren't pointless and annoying. But it's just not worth sifting through all the crap to find it.
3 Comments:
- John Silver said:
-
Thanks for a pleasant read. :) Some of that stuff could actually have made it into the rant machine - the idea of you shouting angrily at a comic book was really funny. :D Keep up the good work.
- Kyler said:
-
Have you ever talked about Watchmen? I haven't read many comic books before it and am finding it immensely enjoyable.
- Mory said:
-
Sorry, I've never read Watchmen. I'll get around to it some day.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The Garden: Exploration
The primary content of an exploration game is world design, which is to say the aesthetic or intellectual value of a virtual environment. There are many genres of worlds: forests, urban, abstract, fantasy, horror, etc.
The pure (computer) exploration game does not, to the best of my knowledge, exist. I know it can exist because I've had some satisfying exploring in the real world, where the exploring was the whole point. But in gamism so far, exploration is used only as a subordinate element, or at most one of several dominant elements in a complex Form. Some games have such vivid worlds that you could probably remove everything but the world and the interface and have a good (short) exploration game, but it should be emphasized that this would not be the same experience as playing the original games. I guess it'd be like listening to the soundtrack of a movie.
Anyway.
Since it's so uncharted, the best way to understand exploration games is to compare them to other Forms which we are familiar with. Most importantly, exploration games are closely related to architecture, landscape design, and other such visual arts. (I think the theoretically ideal exploration gamist would be an architect, a sculptor and an animator.) The difference is, a game has no limits. Real-world creations are restricted not only by the laws of physics but also by the limitations of real materials, the costs, and overall functionality. An exploration game does not have these limitations unless they are self-imposed. There is nothing preventing a gamist from placing a magnificent palace with melting and regenerating walls on the back of a moving horse.
With that sort of artistic freedom, what is it that it inherits from architecture? Well, there are infinitely many (or if the interface is restricted, at least many) ways to view an environment, and all must be taken into account. It can be viewed from different angles, it can be viewed at different times of day, it can have many random elements wandering around which a good designer can account for to some extent. So a good world or piece of architecture, as opposed to a more easily grasped medium like paintings, is a work which continually reveals new facets of itself, and can keep surprising the viewer for a very long time. For that reason, an exploration game is not meant to be played once and then discarded. It is meant to be returned to over and over.
Enough about architecture. It is also close, in structure if not purpose, to the movement game. They both revolve around the simple act of moving. The difference is, in a movement game the moving itself is the point. In an exploration game where you're moving through is more important. If that world is compelling, how you move through has less importance. But these two Forms are intertwined, because you can't really have one without the other. If you are moving, you're moving through someplace. And if you're moving through someplace, you've gotta be moving somehow. The question (for classification) is which is dominant and which is subordinate, and that question isn't always so easy to answer.
It can be useful for the world designer to consider what avatar(s) he is building the world for. An endless series of beautiful mountains might not be so suitable for a human, but what if the player is playing a bird? And the concept of scale changes very much if the player is playing a baby or a giant. In such cases, it's nice to have good controls but hardly critical- the avatar is there to give context, not content. In fact, the avatar (as it is typically thought of) is not a necessary ingredient at all! The gamist might wish to give the player an "objective avatar", who either moves like a person (as though the player were actually walking through for himself), or more abstractly.
Much like a painting, an exploration game can indirectly tell a story. This makes it similar to adventure games (by my "future" definition), which are similarly predetermined experiences. But the presentation is different. In order to present a story as part of world design, it needs to be complete from the start. The player chooses in what order to experience it, but otherwise is not connected to its progression. If he were given more choices which effected the outcome of the story, the game would be an adventure and not exploration.
Taking a self-absorbed plot (even a good one) and putting it into a carefully-crafted world is not good storytelling for an exploration game. If an exploration game is telling a story, that's secondary content. The primary content is still world design, and an appropriate story will call attention back to that. It can add an intellectual layer to the aesthetic one, where you can sit and think about what the arrangement of objects around you is meant to symbolize in relation to the story.
Now that we've got a good idea of where exploration stands, let's take it on its own terms. What can world design be made out of? There's the obvious walls and structures and abstract shapes. There can also be plant life. (Climbable trees are always welcome!) There can be animals and people, either static for the effect of a photo or in motion. A marketplace wouldn't be complete without buyers and sellers! For that matter, a marketplace isn't complete without buying. And in that spirit, there's no reason not to have mini-games where they are called for by the world. Certain surfaces call for movement mini-games, certain environments call for interaction mini-games.
The progression between room doesn't have to be literal. The room next door could actually be the same room, but in a different time period. Or it could be an entirely unrelated place. If a doorway acts as a "portal" between areas, that's a world-building technique rather than a literal plot point. And it doesn't have to be a doorway per se- hallways are more gradual ways of shifting setting, for instance. Or the player might as well be given a button which switches between areas. Old-fashioned ideas of how things connect to each other don't have to be used at all, or can be actively subverted.
Reaching an area the player is already familiar with is comforting. When he walks off in a new direction and stumbles onto somewhere he is already familiar with, suddenly a more complete model of the world is created in his mind. If he goes too far without any point of reference, he may get disoriented and want to backtrack to somewhere he knows. Placing large areas which intersect with many paths makes a world seem less foreign, because it ensures that the player will loop back on those areas many times and construct a better model in his head.
A world could theoretically be a straight line, in which case the little details need to hold up the game on their own. The maze is the opposite extreme: a world whose entertainment value comes entirely from trying to find your way forward. In the middle ground the player can both entertain himself finding a path, and be given art wherever he goes. That way he can be engaged in both the short-term and the long-term: The staying power of exploration games comes from nostalgia and wanting to see things from new angles, but searching for shortcuts and routes to specific places is fun right from the start. The attempt to navigate is entertaining in itself, an experience which contains elements of perception and memory.
When gamism expands to interface directly with our brains, the exploration game will give us worlds which are fantastically vivid but fundamentally indistinguishable from the real world. It will give us not just sights and sounds but also smells and atmospheres. We'll be able to touch the things around us, see how they feel. We'll be able to take other people there with us and show them around, we'll be able to bring in other activities like books, to enjoy in the environment. Some people will essentially live in virtual worlds, to replace the costs and space limitations of real housing. But regardless of how they are used, that level of immersion is what exploration games strive for.
Droplets: Exploration
A real-time exploration game in a fictional real-world area. There is no avatar, and you can follow people around as they go about their daily routine.
Exploring a single, frozen moment of time.
An abstract representation of a person's personality. (Possibly a real person the gamist knows. I am not thinking of anyone in particular, though.) Exploring the world lets you get to know the person, in the sense that your feelings toward the world mirror the gamist's feelings toward the person.
Exploration by association. Clicking on an object (or person, or idea) brings you to an environment which represents that thing, and clicking on any object there will bring you to yet another environment. This is exploration serving the purpose of character development, where each new environment shows you more of the character's worldview. (Actually, this idea disproves what I said about exploration necessitating movement.)
An exploration-construction hybrid. The player explores a vast but somewhat empty area, and adds to it however he likes. He experiences the world he is given by using it.
A world which keeps growing. Worlds within worlds. The smaller you get relative to the world, the more you perceive explore-able detail in tiny elements. Eventually you find a tiny object which grows to be the original environment, so the loop is complete.
M.C. Escher-inspired worlds. Gravity is not a constant, perspective is not a constant, objects become environments and environments become objects. You know what would be especially cool? An M.C. Escher-inspired adaptation of Alice in Wonderland!
Simulations of real places. This might actually exist already, since it's an obvious idea. If it does, I haven't seen it.
A 4-dimensional world. Don't ask me how it'd work- I've never been able to wrap my head around 4-dimensionality.
Static political commentary, for comedic effect. You wander around a vast, nonsensical representation of how the gamist thinks his political opponents see the world. This world could be accessible via the internet, with new sections being added continually as the news happens.
Movements, like in music. Each movement has a very specific ending. It's clear where it is, but there are many ways to get there. Each path is fairly nonlinear, but two separate paths from the beginning will very rarely cross over with each other. When you get to the ending, you find yourself in the next movement. Each movement represents a different set of emotions, and each path through them is a different variation on those emotions. So every time you go through the game you get roughly the same sequence of emotions, but each time through can be a new experience. (Unless you want to do the same path you've seen already, of course.)
1 Comment:
- Deirdra said:
-
These are the sorts of games I'd design if I'd devoted more time and formal education to visual art than to programming and writing. As it stands now, however, they are also the kinds of games I'd love to play. I can already think of many games already in existence that I loved solely because of their architecture. (The Neverhood is one in particular that comes to mind.)
It's also worth mentioning that I myself have had a similar idea to what you termed "exploration by association", only with words rather than objects. Think of a Wikipedia into a character's mind. I'm thinking of actually doing one of these sometime... might be a fun exercise.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Marvel / DC Comic Rivalry
But much has been made about the two universe's differences. The DC characters are perfect, the Marvel characters have flaws. The DC Universe is more likely to have zany things happen for no particular reason, the Marvel Universe is more grounded. The DC stories are set in fictional places like Metropolis and Gotham City, while Marvel stories are set in real places like New York City and San Francisco.
Some people might say that these are the reasons I read a ton of Marvel comics but very few DC ones. I've got a simpler explanation: Marvel comics are usually good, and DC comics are usually not.
There isn't really any fundamental difference between the two companies. Statistically speaking, you'll find slightly more reality in Marvel. But to every generality about either universe, there are many exceptions. Marvel has perfect characters like Captain America and Thor, while DC's most famous character (Batman) still whines about his parents. Marvel often has wacky nonsense happen, and DC often has grounded character bits. I don't think there's anything that would fit in one universe but not the other.
So what is it about Marvel comics that has me hooked, when almost every DC comic I've read has left me cold? It's the people involved in making them.
It's not like you can't tell a good Batman story. Look at The Dark Knight- what a fantastic movie! And yet, the current Batman comic is all about Batman hallucinating. And take Superman- he's such an iconic, provocative character, and no one can find anything interesting to do with him!
I'm not going to place all the blame on DC's writers. (Well, I am going to blame Grant Morrison. He can't tell a story.) I can't say for certain how much is bad writing, and much is editorial meddling.
Take the case of Kurt Busiek. He's a wonderful writer, whose enthusiasm for superheroes comes across with everything he does. They put him on Aquaman, a character who's rarely interesting, they gave him an ambiguous set-up he had to use (where Aquaman isn't really Aquaman), and he was still knocking it out of the park. He was doing a whole big fantasy epic underwater, and I was riveted. And then after just a few issues it all fell apart, lost all focus, and Busiek left for Superman. See, I can't say that that was all Busiek's fault, because I know from his Astro City comics that he usually knows where he's going and follows up on it. Anyway, he then took over Superman, and for a little while it was terrific. First he lost his powers, which was fun. And then it got into the whole question of whether Superman makes society too reliant on him, and seemed to be promising big pay-offs. And then it lost its way, started telling random stories that didn't add anything and didn't quite work on their own merits. And he quickly resolved everything and left for another comic. Which I read a few issues of and got bored.
No, really, he is a great writer. Astro City is terrific, where he creates a whole superhero universe with lots of good stories and no bad ones in sight. His series Marvels, presenting the history of Marvel comics from the perspective of the average person in the Marvel Universe, was also terrific. So he's capable of better. I blame the editors.
Or take Sean McKeever. Perfect example. He was writing for Marvel, and the quality of his comics went between "decent" and "spectacular". He wrote an Inhumans miniseries, making a bunch of alien teenagers relatable without making them less alien, and then he wrote the Mary Jane (later renamed "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane") series, whose characterizations were complex and realistic but always relatable and engaging. Then he signed an exclusive deal with DC, and since then "decent" has seemed out of his reach. It goes from "disposable" to "horrifyingly bad". He was given Teen Titans, which seems perfect for him. But ever since he started, there's been barely a hint of the quality he used to be pulling off often. From what I understand, much of the stories he's writing are dictated to him by his editors, and he doesn't even get final choice of who's on the team. (Granted, I'm only getting a reader's perspective. So I could be totally off.) And they're just unbearably grim and silly- there was a very minor internet controversy about the last issue, which had two characters eaten alive by a dog.
Now, Marvel's editors are hardly perfect. The stunt they pulled last year with Spider-Man -having him literally make a deal with the devil in order to shift his status quo back to where it was in the 70's- did not impress me one bit. That came entirely from the editor-in-chief of Marvel. The only difference is, there are actually excellent stories after that. Not stories which couldn't have been done without the quasi-reboot, but still. Excellence. And if there are excellent stories being written, then the editors must be doing something right.
See, DC (like Marvel) has lots of big things happen. Usually things which don't last six months, which I'm sure will be the case with Batman losing his mind. But still, big things. And once they happen, there still aren't any really good stories being told. And if you're not going to have that, then what's the point?
4 Comments:
- John Silver said:
-
I'm not a fan of superhero comics, but I get the impression you're allowing yourself some too broad generalisations (as well as some oversights; I'd argue that Superman, not Batman, is the most famous DC character).
I have difficulty understanding how Marvel comics are more realistic. Perhaps some of the stunts may be a little more grounded, but the premises are invariably beyond ludicrous. How do you get laser-eyes through evolution?? (In fact the whole of X-men is so outlandish I can barely read them). Not that DC is a monument to plausibility, but the premise behind Batman is still much more credible than that behind any Marvel character.
Overall I agree that writers should be let free to work on their material. But as someone who doesn't read much of these comics, I've got a question: what about Alan Moore and Frank Miller? They've worked for Marvel and their names tend to get thrown around pretty often. It's quite surprising to see they've got no space at all on this post.
All the best mate.
JS. - Mory said:
-
Marvel comics are not, as you say, significantly more realistic than DC. There are tiny elements here and there which are more like the real world, which Marvel's editors like to bring up. (Their slogan is "Your universe".) For instance, you have George W. Bush showing up every now and then, while DC has a fictional president. Stories often take place in "real places", at least in name. And the fantasy explanations for superpowers are more likely to pretend they have something to do with real science like genetics or radiation.
But yeah, none of that is particularly significant. Whatever you call it, comic-book science is fantasy. And as for the real places, Marvel stories often take place in fictional countries like Wakanda, Attilan, Madripoor, Latveria, etc. etc. As I said, I don't think there's any real difference between the two universes except who's writing and editing them. Superman could be a Marvel character and Spider-Man could be a DC character.
On reflection, I don't know who's really more famous, Superman or Batman. I guess the word I should have used was "popular".
As for Frank Miller and Alan Moore, um, what about them? They're hardly major presences in comics these days. They do their own thing, which is usually too vulgar for my liking. Frank Miller is writing an out-of-continuity Batman book where Batman is a raving psychopath kidnapping Robin and killing people left and right and cursing at everyone: "I'm the goddamned Batman!" It's sorta amusing, but mostly pointless. And Alan Moore's last major work (a few years back) was porn. (I don't plan to read that.) Neither of them have anything to do with the two big superhero universes, except in the sense that they wrote influential stories a long time ago. - said:
-
It's not that Grant Morrison can't write a story.
You just can't read and understand one. - said:
-
You have to be a complete MORON to think that Marvel is better than DC. Almost all of their characters are ripoffs from DC. Avengers: Justice League. Hulk: Solomon Grundy, who actually predates the "Hulk" by more than 20 years. Next time you write such a STUPID story, make sure you have your facts straight.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
I have very little done so far. I've got a roughly half-complete model of how it'd work in my head, a small portion of which I've put to virtual paper. I don't think it will be necessary to write out the plan ahead of programming as I did with Smilie, so this isn't a problem. As for the actual programming, I've made a working version of the formula the whole game will revolve around. Thanks to Tamir for filling in the bit of math I was having trouble with. Anyway, it's a really simple formula which should have taken me roughly ten minutes to program. That's all I've got.
The next step is to construct a simplified mock-up of the gameplay. It will not be fun in that state but it'll get me to figure out how the actual game needs to be programmed behind the scenes. (I can't draw on experience, obviously.)
So. Starting Sunday, I get serious. No excuses.
For now, though… back to the excellent Stargate: Atlantis. I might just catch up in time for the third Stargate series to start.
2 Comments:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Best thing about SGA; The best character is Canadian :)
It's been so long since the strike I'd totally forgotten that new shows were actually going to be produced again. Yay.
If you need any help with programming or design, let me know btw. I love that sort of stuff. - Mory said:
-
There have been six episodes of SGA's fifth and final season already. It's nice to not have to worry about spoilers anymore. Anyway, Atlantis will end with its 100th episode and then a few months later Stargate: Universe begins. There will never be a lack of entertainment. Atlantis will continue in DVD movies alongside SG-1. Speaking of which, I agree with you about Ark of Truth. It is bad.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Just let me win already.
Friday, August 08, 2008
The Plan
- Smilie
- The Right Color
- The March of Bulk
- Angles & Circles
- Next Door
- Through the Wind
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
8 Comments:
- said:
-
Well done! It's fun to play.
May it be the first of many. =) - Mory said:
-
I hope people who play this game and don't enjoy it have the courtesy to tell me.
- Kyler said:
-
I can't say that I didn't enjoy it. Very impressed. Let me play it a few more times and think about it a bit and I will come back with more thoughts about it.
- John Silver said:
-
Hey Mory. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, more that I didn't understand it. It did bring a smile to my face for a second, which I'm not sure whether is meant to be the irony of the thing or not. But when it was over I was kind of wondering what the point was.
At all events, a first try was this? Well done then, and I second the best wishes. :) (the smilie is not ironic :D ). - said:
-
Nu... what's your development platform? Java?
- Mory said:
-
John Silver: The intent of Smilie is no deeper than it appears to be. There's no irony here, no intended message. It's just something I wanted to make. Actually, maybe that's a message in itself. You can certainly read all sorts of things into Smilie, if you really want to. I think certain aspects of its personality are like me.
Eric: I programmed it in an obscure language called BlitzMax. It's a version of BASIC specifically designed for 2D games. It's not all that far removed from QBasic, which I've got some nostalgia for. I don't particularly like learning new programming languages, so years ago I intended to make games in Visual Basic 6 like I used to. But you wouldn't believe how hard it is in VB to get DirectX to rotate a silly little 2D image. It's actually easier to deal with 3D! So the main appeal of BlitzMax for me is that I can just write "SetRotation(45)" and have it rotate whatever it draws next by 45 degrees. It's refreshing. But I also don't feel like the workings of the program have been taken out of my hands, since I'm programming the main loops and the backbuffer flips and all that myself.
On the other hand, it's a bit buggy and has irritating quirks with how it deals with variable types. So I'm not sure I'd recommend it to other people, but I like it. - Kyler said:
-
Well after playing it some more here is a link to my review. Smilie
- said:
-
Well, I've joined the ranks of people who have experienced Smiley.
I find it intriguing.
Like real life (sometimes), you find yourself in an environment with no instructions. You just have to experience it and experiment a bit. You find yourself wanting to play it more than once -- you are motivated to compile a body of results to help you to feel that you understand what is going on and why. You find yourself trying to understand what makes the Smiley react in certain ways and you even find yourself wanting to get it to smile. Why?
There are elements at work here that I think could be interesting components of a game of broader scope.
Cool!
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Not Alone
I called over:
"Hey, what're you doing?"
"Nothing."
"Hiding?"
"I guess so."
"Don't like crowds?"
"No."
"Do you have Asperger's Syndrome?"
He looked astonished.
"How did you know?"
"Because I'm like that, and I have Asperger's Syndrome.
Really! That was just a crazy shot in the dark."
"I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to be truthful, because I'm genuinely curious:
Do you like videogames?"
"Yes."
"I have a theory, that there isn't anyone with Asperger's Syndrome who doesn't like videogames."
"It's a solitary thing, and it's a way to vent frustration. That's probably why."
"So what's your thing?"
He thought about it.
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah, I do.
..Violence."
"Goodbye."
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Late-night thoughts, none of them new
I've got ideas. I've got, I've got
Hey, where are you going?
Stay. I want to argue.
Phooey.
I don't need them. They won't let me argue.
They think it's bad to be outspoken and alone.
Who needs them? Some day I'll meet a whole
group of people with Asperger's!
Yeah.
It's gonna happen.
Any one of these days.
"Aspies" like games.
So if I make my own games, and they're not like anyone else's, and people are put off by how not what they're looking for they are, and I put a piece of myself into the games, and they stand up to the world and shout "I am great, because this has never been done before, and there's no reason you shouldn't do it too!" and if they have genuine enthusiasm for what they're doing, then the "Aspies" will all come to meet me.
I don't need normal people!
I can hang out with people like me!
I can talk to people like me!
Or this wall here.
Does anyone want to play with an adorable character given life?
It won't try to impress you.
I won't try to sell it to you.
I won't try to engage you.
I won't listen to you.
I don't care about you.
Play my game.
I see it there.
It winks at me: "I am here, just waiting to be made!
"I will shine like the stars in the darkness!"
And it's so close.
So close.
Only a few more pages left.
I spent the day working.
I wanted to get closer.
May the emptiness drive me.
I don't like programming, all the logic and little details.
It's a chore.
It's a form of hell.
But isn't that work I did just fine?
Isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?
Isn't it?
It isn't, is it.
Why am I talking. It's just me and the wall.
No, it's me and myself.
I am not…
Please come back.
I want to argue.
It's just me and myself in here.
I love myself.
I hate myself.
I have potential.
I am a lazy bum.
I have ideas.
I talk and talk and when the time comes to do
I spent the day working.
They say there are few things more satisfying
They're wrong.
I'd like to go back now.
I have other worlds.
Is it just me, or are they more real?
I didn't play any videogames today.
The seventh day will be satisfying.
Though of course it won't be.
Please come back.
I'm not like you.
Let me tell you who I am.
Let me tell you where I'm going.
I have an answer now!
I don't need you!
Please come back.
Please?
Monday, July 28, 2008
6 Comments:
- said:
-
And here I was starting to think I'd never see what these autoposts look like.
Keep up the good work, even if it's kinda illogical to say that in response to a post like this one. - stone_ said:
-
I wanted to comment on "The Garden Needs Pruning", but I didn't the comment button.
Your future of Adventure games sounds like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" Book done on a DVD. I think this sort of "Game" has already been done too.
I'd love to see a game with live actors to interact with, and not idiot NPCs or idiot MMORPG players. I don't think it's at all feasible/sustainable for a game though.
I guess it might be similar to running a role playing campaign just online. Maybe with volunteer roles, or a just a gaming gourp coming together and receiving roles and information to play with. It would depend heavily on the game group, but most things do.
Kind of like the whole Murder Mystery evenings, but online. - stone_ said:
-
Or maybe like limited "God" games like Democracy (http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy/)
where all you do is decide on policy and laws, and watch how your decisions play out on your populace - Mory said:
-
The comments are after the second post, just as they always are with "The Garden & Droplets" posts. I guess "The Dynamic Interface" not being explicitly named "Droplets: Adventures" threw you off. But it's not a standard G&D.
"Choose Your Own Adventure" are absolutely a kind of adventure game. Just not very good ones, because the interactivity is so spread out and uninteresting. The interactivity is a gimmick rather than a proper artistic medium, so it's very similar in its approach to text adventures and can have the same criticisms applied to it.
I'm not familiar with Democracy, but it sounds like a strategy game. I don't see how that's similar to an adventure game.
I don't imagine the ideal future of adventures would appeal to you too much. You play games as a way to apply yourself, and that's not what adventures should be about. When an adventure gives a lot of freedom to do whatever the player want, it feels vaguely-defined and pointless. - Mory said:
-
It occurs to me that what I said might be seen as offensive. It was not intended to be.
I don't like reading novels. I don't find them satisfying, with all their little descriptive details and their consistent presentation and their rigid linearity. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with novels, or anything wrong with me. It only means I don't like reading novels. It would be lovely if everyone could enjoy everything, but that's not the way personal taste works. - stone_ said:
-
Democracy is a kind of strategy game, but it seems similar to how you are describing the interaction level in Adventure Games of the future. The difference being that you are following the wellfare of a nation instead of an individual or a group of individuals. But you are right in that it is not story driven, it's decision driven.
I guess one way of looking where you want Adventure games to end up is which of the following you want it to be:
1) _I_ want to go on an adventure
2) I want to help Fred The Adventurer on _his_ adventure
3) I want to join with Fred and grow and adventure _together_
Eh... this isn't really thought out well. It's 3:30am and I wasn't able to sleep...
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The Garden Needs Pruning: Adventures
If I am in error about something, please correct me in the comments.)
Past | Present | Future |
The primary content of an adventure is no more or less than the dialogue between player and program. In that sense, it is similar to chatterbots, which I'm not sure how to classify. The difference is in the player-program relationship. In an adventure game, they are not equals. The program outputs paragraphs of carefully crafted pre-written text, to which the player responds with just a few words.
These words are typically a verb and a noun, for the sake of practicality. "go south". "take key". "drop sandwich". "open door". "examine chair". That sort of thing. Sometimes only one word is needed. "look". "north". "inventory" to check what you're carrying. The interactivity is just enough to give the sense that you are participating in a piece of prose. Then the program reacts. If the writer anticipated the action, then the story will be effected and continue. If not, the program will say it doesn't understand.
Once you have that back-and-forth, what do you do with it? What is there for a player and a program to talk about?
There's the world, for one thing. The player can explore the scripted world by moving from place to place and examining everything he sees. The writer engages the player with the creativity and detail of these surroundings.
Or there can be added rules, of some sort. (Rules can always be put anywhere.) A monster with hit points to fight with. A trap which will pop up and hurt you at random. A magic wand to cast spells with.
There can be characters to interact with.
You can collect stuff. This was typically tied together with everything else, where what you're collecting are points, and you get points by doing just about anything. Or you might have to collect physical objects, where you can't proceed past a certain point unless you've taken everything.
There can be games of perception, where the player needs to notice little details in the environment.
Wow, that's a lot of things to talk about. Anything goes, as long as it inputs commands and outputs lavish prose. And all these things combine to make a rich experience, where the player feels he is participating in the dialogue in a meaningful way. And the more you surprise him with new kinds of gameplay, the more he's impressed by the interaction.
The adventure game is closely related to the original role-playing games. So closely, in fact, that it can be seen as a direct descendant of that discipline. In a (non-computer) role-playing game, the game-runner talks and talks and talks and then the player responds simply with what he would like to do. So the adventure is essentially a role-playing game in text, with the game being a pre-scripted program rather than an intelligent person. (This connection is not meaningful with computer role-playing games, which have evolved in a different direction.)
The adventure game is a weak Form, because the player-game dynamic -which is the purpose of all the interactivity- cannot change significantly from game to game. Every adventure game is a showcase for nearly the same interface.
That interface is pretty cool. Which is why adventures were pretty popular in the 80's. But the adventure Form never aimed to go anywhere past where it already was.
The novelty eventually wore thin. The fact that the player was influencing prose was no longer enough of a draw for that to be the dominant element of the experience. So adventures got a new definition:
Past | Present | Future |
Past | Present | Future |
This is a textbook example of a complex Form. And the primary content of a complex Form is story.
Well, there's a lot of stuff there to tell a story with. A world in which to set the story, puzzles with which to advance the story, characters for the story to happen to and around. Collection (theoretically) serves as an incentive to keep going in the story, and perception… okay, I don't know how perception games fit in. Ah! They give you what to do while you're waiting for the story. How elegant.
Though interface is not particularly relevant, adventure games are commonly classified by their interfaces. This is perhaps a hold-over from an earlier way of thinking. "Text adventures", also commonly called "interactive fiction", use the old-fashioned text interface. Anything with graphics is a "graphical adventure", though that is split up further: "Point-and-click adventures" have you control… you know what, this really doesn't matter.
Let's move on to categories which do mean something: actual genres. The adventure, like all other complex Forms, is a strong Form, because there can be many kinds of stories. So there are the comedies and the fantasies and the science-fiction and the dramas and the horror and the mysteries.
And let's stop on that last one for a bit. Mysteries. Where you look around and act clever but sociable to get clues which you can use to figure out who did whatever was done. If you look at the adventures that have been made, an awful lot of them have been mysteries. Many which seem like other genres are actually mysteries in disguise! And even those which genuinely aren't mystery stories tend to have little bits of mystery all over in them. And why?
It's because with a mystery story, the adventure Form actually makes sense. There's a world, setting the tone and context for the crime. There are puzzles, demonstrating the cleverness of the detective. There are people to interrogate. There are clues to collect, which require careful observation. In short, there isn't anything in the gameplay which isn't perfectly suitable for a mystery story.
The format isn't particularly suitable for anything else, though. Having a big world to explore doesn't make sense in a thriller or a romance or a comedy or a drama- it distracts from, rather than adding to, the human emotions of the piece. Having to notice small details keeps you distracted from the bigger picture you'd want in a fantasy or science-fiction story, and it doesn't add any emotions either. Having puzzles which demand to be solved puts a speed limit on pacing.
So while adventures are capable of any kind of story, they're only good at one. Any standard adventure which is not (to some extent) a mystery is less than the sum of its parts, because no matter how good the gameplay is it's all in the service of a story that can't be told well.
There are two ways gamists get around this. One is with the old gamistic cheat that is cut-scenes. You don't know how to tell your story with the elements you've built in, so you take away all interactivity for a few minutes and tell your story as a movie.
The other way is to make one element dominant over the others, so that the adventure becomes a simple Form. Maybe you can't tell a good story with adventures, but you can design a good world or good puzzles or good characters or good… um, hiding places for collectibles. So if you just focus on that one element and make that one element good, then the whole game will be good.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well. The extra elements which have attached to the adventure as a part of its evolution do not suit exploration games or puzzle games. It does not suit a game of exploration to limit significant areas based on how far the plot has progressed or how clever the player is at predicting rules. It does not suit a game of rules to require you to wander around aimlessly. It does not suit a game of perception, along the lines of Where's Waldo, to be so darned complicated that kids can't enjoy it.
The types of games included do not fit together with each other, and they do not fit together with the focus on story. A puzzle-driven adventure can't be as good as a dedicated puzzle game. An exploration-driven adventure can't be as good as a dedicated exploration game. A perception-driven adventure can't be as good as a dedicated perception game. Almost all the parts of the adventure Form are being held back by being in this context.
The adventure game is broken.
Past | Present | Future |
Past | Present | Future |
That may sound simple. It is.
The difference between a pure adventure and a non-interactive story is that the progression of the story is directly tied to the player's involvement. That means the player controls pacing, and the player controls which of several (or even many) pre-written directions the story should go in. He controls these things on a macro level and a micro level, and it makes for a distinct kind of experience.
The player is presented with things he can do. Just having those options to begin with, and having specific carefully-chosen options, already creates all sorts of emotions in the player. They change depending on context: In a conversation, for instance, options will typically be limited to lines of dialogue. In a usual adventure only one character is playable at a time. So the player is given options which are relevant to that character in the current situation. The player can't jump around unless the writer thinks it makes sense for the character to jump around.
When the player uses a certain option, however that option is presented to him, the game will react by continuing the story in a way fitting to that choice. Then the player can feel a small sense of ownership over the story, even though he doesn't have total freedom in the game. He can also experiment with different options, where the effects on the game environment tell him something about the story.
The adventure is similar to rule systems in that respect, but there aren't really any rules. If you wanted to stretch it, you could say adventures are rule system games where the only rule is "Whatever the writer says, goes." and the player's trying to anticipate what'll happen next.
The story can be presented in any fashion. It could be text, or something like a movie (or an actual live-action movie), or a comic book, or even a musical! Any sort of non-interactive entertainment goes. Take any one of those, and add relevant (but small) interactivity throughout, and you're using the language of adventures.
If the player has too much freedom, then the experience of using that freedom takes precedence over the pre-scripted story and what you have is no longer an adventure. And if there is not enough freedom, that's not an adventure either. So the adventure is like the "missing link" between the old, passive experiences and the new, active experiences. It can get strengths from both sides: Vivid characterizations, but where you get to stand in the person's shoes. Carefully crafted plots, where you can still feel pride or guilt over how it turns out. Empathy, but with a personal investment. An experience crafted with the writer's instincts but tailored to whatever the player's mood is.
Any genre of story is possible, and indeed all could thrive. Mysteries will never go away, but there can also be romances and thrillers and provocative science-fiction and escapist fantasy and insightful drama and interpretations of moments in world history and politics and live-action opera and short poetry and whatever else you can think of.
Adventures have so much potential!
Past | Present | Future |
The Dynamic Interface
On the top screen is the 3D gameworld, shown in cinematic camera angles that turn around as necessary. (The player has no direct control over the camera.) The bottom screen is covered with buttons for contextual actions ("Exit, Talk to salesman, Hop Up and Down while Singing 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'") pictures of key objects in the vicinity (a screwdriver, a stereo, a lit dynamite stick, a purple cat hopping up and down while meowing "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), and/or a few (as few as the designers can get away with) consistent buttons like one for opening the inventory. Pressing on one of the pictures moves the camera to a better position to see it (like zoomed in real close while the cameraman jumps up and down to the tune of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), and maybe some new buttons will appear (For the stick of dynamite: "Hit with hammer, Stuff in Stereo, Eat, Ignore, Run Like Heck, Go Back") and maybe even a little textbox will pop up with the player character's innermost thoughts! (For the stick of dynamite: "Hmmm.... what is this? I've never seen a thing like this before... Nosiree, I've never seen anything like it... I have no idea what this is..." and a button marked "Ponder Further")
See, the beauty of what I just said is that I haven't really said much of anything. There's lots that the designer could put in, but nothing that needs to go in! Since this is a "dynamic interface", the designers get to put in whatever is most dramatic/funny/effective/reminiscent of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" for whatever's going on. If you're outside, then the designers could put in a top-down map, or buttons for all the buildings nearby, or a signpost, or a little rhythm mini-game of skipping forward to the tune of..never mind. And just think of the amazing possibilities there could be with an ever-changing interface!
Emphasis
For my first example, let's say the designers (like any good, righteous, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"-fearing adventure designers) are passionately in love with pixel-hunting. They wouldn't mark out the objects- oh no!- Then they wouldn't be able to give you the fun of finding them yourself! So instead, they'd put buttons (or pictures) for each of the locations objects might be hidden in (Top Shelf, Middle Shelf, Bottom Shelf, Left Shelf, Right Shelf, Floor next to Shelf, Underneath the Shelves, Behind the Shelves, On the Ceiling above Shelf, Inside the Unscrewed Knob on the Left Side of the Middle Shelf, On Top of Shelves Examined Under Microscope), each one turning the bottom screen into a 2D representation of the area for you to enjoy yourself pixel-hunting in. Now, if the player has been searching for the brilliant hiding spot (the third black dot to the left on the front of the bottom shelf) for a reasonable amount of time (seven hours) and is still too pathetic to find it, the merciful designer can have the game start to eliminate the buttons that lead nowhere (or, if he feels like having some fun, the Bottom Shelf button), to point the player in the right direction.
My second example assumes that the designers are godless evil simpletons who shamelessly want to spell out how to push the story along. Some of the items in a room will be important to the story and are obviously important to the character (say, his pink bunny slippers. This character is obsessed with his pink bunny slippers.), while other items are only there to flesh out the gameworld a bit more. The buttons (or pictures) for the most crucial items could be bigger or placed to attract attention on the bottom screen, so that the player (if he is the sort of mindless bloodsucking drone that these evil designers worship) can play through the game quickly if he so chooses. (Bah!- free will.) Or if there was an item which the player ignored before, but now has become crucial to the plot, it could get bigger to attract attention. Or a button could start out big, but get very small once the player has already seen it so it shouldn't distract.
Characterization
Similarly, some characters are extremely important (the hero's girlfriend), while others are not (the hero's wife). The button to go talk to the girlfriend (or join her in hopping up and down to the tune of Thus Spoke Zarathustra) should be bigger than the wife's button, so that the player always understands what the character's priorities are like.
Let's say our hero is having a conversation with his wife (dialogue would also, obviously, be handled on the bottom screen), and really should be telling her that he sort-of-accidentally allowed her beloved purple cat to be blown up. This would be a pretty big button, since it's weighing heavily on his mind. Naturally, the player will try to push it, but whoops!- the button hopped over to another part of the bottom screen. Try to push it again, and again it hops as our hero puts off the inevitable. Eventually the button may try to hide under some other "excuse" buttons, or jump to the top screen where you can't reach it, or something like that. Now that's drama!
(When talking with his girlfriend, half the dialogue choices would be truly pathetic and half almost-intelligent, and the buttons would be sort of wavy and shake around, so that it's hard to press on the right one.)
Pacing
If you're inspecting the scene of a crime, the game should move slowly to let you figure things out, take notes (on the handy-dandy bottom screen), etc. And by "slowly" I mean "slowly". It shouldn't be rushing you onwards or reminding you that your wife is outside carrying a club. The trouble is, the player is the one in control of the progression just as much as the designer. A dynamic interface can be used to encourage him to slow down. Let's say that since the beginning of the game the buttons have been hopping around, there have only been a (relatively) few buttons, and those buttons were often pretty big. Now you walk into the scene of the crime, and suddenly you've got no movement controls, no hide-from-wife controls, but twelve pictures of pieces of evidence (or red herrings) all given equal space in a four-by-three grid. In addition, everything is given narration by the character in a textbox at the bottom of the screen. As soon as the player sees all this, he understands that he's meant to go slowly.
On the other hand, let's say in the next scene he finds out some urgent news. (His wife is driving home to rip his fluffy pink bunny slippers and smash his record of Thus Spoke Zarathustra!) Let's say the designer is staying away from timed sequences- how can he indicate the urgency and speed up the game? Simple- he takes away all buttons but the "Run Like Crazy Back Home" button, and has that button take up two-thirds of the screen, hop up and down urgently and flash. (If that doesn't get the player's attention, maybe it could have an obnoxious sound effect like a siren combined with a French Horn.) As he runs back, he'll go through many areas he's been to before, but the buttons will (at least mostly) be missing: What difference does that third black dot to the left matter when the music (and the fluffiness) is in jeopardy?! It doesn't matter that there's no time limit- the player will run home (because he doesn't have any other choice) and won't really feel too cheated. (Because he understands that buttons can appear and disappear at random, and because -overall- this isn't too long a scene.)
These are two extremes, you understand- I'm not saying it would ever have to be so exaggerated.
Symbolism and Other Gimmicks
When you can play around with the layout of the interface at will, you can do all sorts of nifty stuff. Have you ever read David Mack's comic book Kabuki? No, I didn't think so. Oh well- that was a good example of the style I'm talking about. How about Bill Willingham's Fables?- That did stuff like that occasionally... Never mind. Okay, let's say you're in a garden, and you want to hit the player over the head with the word "flower" because this is some deep artistic nonsense. So you could arrange the buttons on the bottom screen so that the layout looks like a flower! Pretty cool, huh?
Practicality, practicality. Always you yell about practicality. Okay,- I'll give you practicality. Let's say there's an unresolved mystery in the story- it's just sort of there. But you want to tell players the answer to the mystery, and you just want to hint it. So in some important scene, you've got one picture in the center, and all the others around it. And why?- the player wonders. Why, it's because it's a clue, you nitwit! And he sees this clue, and then he understands the mystery. What do you mean, "pointless"? You're too picky.
Anyway, dynamic interfaces are a whole new language. I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities that would be opened up here. You can probably think of more yourself. Something to think about...
Monday, July 21, 2008
Souls
Naturally, I don't believe in souls. We exist entirely within the little box that is the physical universe. We start in the universe, we play around in the universe and we end in the universe. We don't come from understanding everything and "forgetting", we come from lifelessness. It all needs to be built up. And then when it's built up, it doesn't lead anywhere. It just goes back to lifelessness. No heaven, no hell. We don't get to leave the box. All that matters is what you do inside the box.
This does not clash with my belief in God. God is on the outside of the box, and he/she/it put us in here. We are no higher than animals, except for the complexity of our intelligence -which allows, among other things, for rationalizing what we see. We can judge the walls of the box, and imagine that there is a box. That allows us to be mirrors, of sorts. The inside universe, dimly reflecting the outside of the universe. Like art imitating life, life imitates truth. But there is a clear and unbreakable hierarchy here. Reflecting God is an artistic flourish, not an escape.
What this does clash with is conventional Judaism, unfortunately. I can't go two paragraphs in the prayers without reading about some sorts of angels and demons and spirits and the like. None of which we should have any way of knowing about. Other than God, we don't know anything about the outside. It could be anything, or nothing. We know that God exists only because we see his creation and it couldn't be so elegant without him. But all the rest is fairy-tales. What do we see, that can't be explained sufficiently by saying that God is great? So all those other spirits, I don't believe in. I mean, I can't say they're not there. But I also don't see any reason to say they are. So I have a problem with a lot of the davening, as well as some other practices.
But that's not reason enough for me to spend a lifetime thinking about religion. If I haven't quite found my niche, that's okay. The usual Orthodox Judaism is close enough for me.
A person with no understanding of God who does things of value in the world is a hundred times better as a person than an intelligent person who has spent his life studying god, who has failed to do anything of value. Life is not preparation. Life is it. Get up, play your part, get off the stage. If you do a bad job, it doesn't mean you're going to suffer. No, it means something even worse: You did a bad job. No, that really is worse. It's the only job you have!
..but what do I know. I'm just a toy in the box.
4 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
I feel I can agree with everything you have written, except I can't come to the same conclusion of believing in God (and I am not as optimistic about hyper intelligent AI).
In your opinion, God answers the question of how and why the universe is as it is.
In my opinion, I would rather leave those questions without answers, as it leaves me more space to think.
I am interested in understanding what advantages are found in believing in God. - Mory said:
-
Well, I think the most important thing is humility. When we don't see a god, under whom we're all (more or less) equals, we tend to place ourselves in the very center of the universe. This is a natural human tendency which hurts the people around us as well as ourselves to a certain extent.
Aside from that, believing in God isn't for our own amusement or satisfaction so much as it is so that we can play a better role in the world. - John Silver said:
-
Nice post! But I do feel somewhat skeptical about the statements on the powers of science. No doubt all complex phenomenons (eg: the brain) work according to definite rules and causes, but to assume these can be analysed, categorised and translated into a language we can discern (much less controlling them) is to credit science with a power that is out of the "box" it is supposedly describing. Aka it's a natural utopian / idealistic sentiment, but there's a reason science isn't called omniscience, and it's the fact that it can't transcend the practical side of its application.
- Mory said:
-
You and your reasonable statements. Bl'bah. I just want to meet myself already! It'll happen. Just wait. You'll see. Any day now.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Superhero symbolism: "Omega the Unknown" by Jonathan Lethem and Karl Rusnak
Imagine you're walking through a street, when you see a guy in brightly-colored pajamas shooting laser beams out of his hands. Chances are, your first thought will be "What the hell am I looking at?". Once you get past that initial shock, your reaction will depend on how you tend to deal with the unknown. You might admire the guy, and want to learn all you can about him. Or you might pity him, and take him aside for some fashion tips. Or you might just start throwing rocks. You're probably not going to understand him, though.
Imagine you run into a person with Asperger's Syndrome. He is fascinated and proficient with specific fields, but not interested in other people. He takes things more literally than they are intended. He doesn't like being touched or making eye contact with people. His perspective is impressively analytical but oddly detached. Once you realize he's for real, how do you deal with such a person? You might be intrigued, and want to help him succeed in life. You might pity him, and explain what he's doing wrong. Or you might not be so charitable. But in any event, you're not going to relate to him.
Not coincidentally, the miniseries Omega the Unknown tends to evoke roughly the same reactions in unsuspecting readers. Open it up, and you'll find: characters and plot points which don't quite seem to fit together, a disembodied hand running around, narration which takes some effort to follow, objects which attach themselves to people and turn them into mindless drones, a sentient statue, and a distinctive style of sketchy artwork. The first thought is bound to be "What the hell am I reading?". And then it can go anywhere from admiration to loathing. But in any of these reactions, the reader is still a bit lost. Like the superhero or the autist, this story isn't trying very hard to be understood.
The main character is Titus Alexander Island, a fourteen-year-old boy who doesn't relate to people. He is analytical but naïve, and doesn't understand basic social rules. He is surrounded by many characters, and while he doesn't often express an interest in them they all seem to have something to say about him. He has admirers and enemies and helpers and everything in between, all for no more reason than that he exists. But there is only one person nearby who might possibly be like him. And that's the other main character. He is an equally strange, but more experienced man who has long since made up his mind about the world: He'd rather not be part of it. He never talks to anyone, and we don't really know what's going through his head. But it's clear there is some sort of connection between him and Alexander.
In the real world, that connection would be called Asperger's Syndrome. But this is a superhero story, and so we are given science-fiction explanations for the two characters. Why are they out of touch with reality? Why, it's because Alex was raised by robots and the hermit is a mute from another planet! And their destinies are tied together through the superhero order of "Omega". When you stop and think about it, this is not just random surrealism. Omega the Unknown is a metaphor, using the bizarre "anything goes" nature of superhero comics to tell a story which is -from start to finish- all about Asperger's Syndrome.
Everyone has to wake up and deal with reality, so the story starts with both characters literally crashing into our world from their respective bubbles. And the rest of the story is about how the world deals with them, and how they deal with the world. And Titus Alexander Island needs to deal with himself - starting out scared of his destiny, then trying to ignore it, and finally embracing it.
As in any superhero story, the world needs saving. But here the menace is not a cackling super-villain but the more subtle threat of homogeneity. Against these accidental paragons of individuality stands an army of normal people who've been sapped of their free will by nanotechnology. They get infected by all sorts of trendy adherences to pack mentality: jewelry, books about popular theories, fast food. Then they wander around, without any goal in life except eliminating those who are genuinely different. And just as Asperger people might bitterly challenge the general way of things, the superheroes fight the nanotechnology with a literal "grain of salt". (This comic does so love being literal about things.)
Hogging the spotlight more than the nanobots, but amounting to less, is popular superhero The Mink. He stages fights for the media, he makes messes while pretending to know what he's doing, he gets strength from artificial suits, he speaks in marketable catch-phrases. Everything Omega is, he is cynically pretending to be. But when he sees the real thing, he recognizes it instantly and gets scared. Right from the start, he's obsessed with Omega and Alex. He watches them, he studies them, he attacks them, he tries to control them, he prevents them from doing what needs doing. But he's never going to be like them, or be at all adequate next to them. The Mink isn't trying to accomplish anything, but his careless meddling could do real damage.
The narration itself is no less pretentious than the Mink. Not in the sense that what it says is wrong, because it's not; if you think about what's being said, it all makes perfect sense. But it is pretentious in that it adds absolutely no meaning to the story, while sounding as though it does. At first the second-person narration seems to just be an unusual style for an objective perspective, but a few chapters in the narrator is shown to be a character in his own right, called The Overthinker. He serves as the voice of rationalization, and is presented as an object of ridicule. I think he represents the tendency of Asperger people to spend time thinking about their situations as an alternative to actually doing anything.
Then there's the Nowhere Man, a little creature who gives an imaginary world to escape into. There is the politician, who might possibly have done some good for the heroes if he didn't only care about spreading his own ego around.
It is in this messed-up world, with all these destructive personalities and personified inclinations, that the Omegas find themselves. What drives the story is a question: Where the hell can they fit in? On the one hand, there's no one in the real world they can relate to, and it's a constant struggle just to be understood. On the other hand, the superhero group comes with so much baggage: having a name picked out by "experts", having to stand up as an example for their kind and as an inspiration for others like them, being mocked by the public even more than usual. Where in this crazy situation can the characters thrive? Are they ever going to effect real change on the people and society around them, or is that too much to ask for from two people? Will they ever be held up by the world as a shining example to be followed, or will the pretenders and mass herds always reign?
This is a bizarre story, to be sure. Even for superhero stories this is weird. Even by the standards of fantasy, you might think this is particularly detached from the real world.
Well, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.
1 Comment:
- said:
-
Great insights Mory. I read the issues as they came out, and just this week picked up the HC, which is very nicely designed.
As a fan of the original series (the final issue, in which Omega gets shot to death by the police, blew my 10 year old mind) I find myself hoping that somebody will get around to interviewing Mary Skrenes, Gerber's co-creator on the book.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Impatient Phoenix Strikes (itself) Again!
There were a few reasons I bought it. One was to play with my family, which has proven to be impossible. Then there were the downloadable games, the new ones yet to prove themselves and the old ones in absurdly limited supply. Then there was the remote.
You look at a little piece of plastic which translates your physical motions into gameplay, and you think: "Wow. Things could be done with that."
Nothing has been done with that.
Let us review the things Wii is capable of.
It can play normal games with normal controls, and there's an infinite number of great ideas just like that waiting to be made.
Then there's the ability to track movement in both hands, which has amazing potential for movement games.
Then there's the pointer, which works a lot like a computer mouse but where you can rotate the cursor in place and move forward and backward with it.
The remotes could theoretically be attached to any part of the body, meaning that full-body movement in games is possible.
Game Boy Advance systems can be connected to the Wii with cables, adding an extra screen for each player.
DS systems can be connected to the Wii wirelessly, adding two screens for each player, one of which is a pressure-sensitive touch screen, as well as a microphone.
Any sort of configuration of buttons can be attached to the bottom of the remote.
There is enough potential here, that if the Wii's lifespan were three hundred years, there would still be new experiences to be had at the end of it! The format is so flexible that the content can be anything.
Last year at E3, the biggest videogame exposition of the year, I watched the Nintendo press conference eagerly to learn what they would do with all this potential. As it turned out, the answer was: nothing. Nothing at all. Apparently they'd gotten bored with the formats they had already, because they made a new one: the Balance Board. It is a scale you stand on so the system can see the exact balance of your whole body. And there was exactly one game announced which would use this new controller: Wii Fit. It's an exercise collection of mini-games. That particular game didn't interest me (and I knew it wasn't worth my time trying to get my sisters interested), but that was okay. With this new controller, there were now even more possibilities on the Wii.
A whole year has passed, without Nintendo making any announcements at all except to gloat about how well the Wii is selling. And now it's E3 time again.
So I watched through their press conference again, waiting eagerly through all the usual rhetoric and spin for the Big Announcement. Some new game which would have me addicted and engaged and inspired and all that.
It never came.
Here is what Nintendo announced.
They announced a slightly-modified version of Animal Crossing, which I played for years -and beat- on Gamecube. They announced a music collection of mini-games for people who don't understand music, where you're not allowed to play notes but just wave your arms around aimlessly and see what happens. They announced a licensed game (Those are always bad.), and a realistic sports game. There was a brief hint that new Mario and Zelda games would be released at some point in the next ten years, and the implication that they would be as unambitious as possible.
And then there was the part where they spat in my face for expecting anything from them. An unambitious collection of mini-games doing what I thought Nintendo would be doing as soon as Wii was released: using motion controls. Except not as creatively as I thought they would. Stuff like turning the controller sideways and making big rotating motions to drive a waterskiing thing, and simple sword-fighting, and -get this- throwing a Frisbee for a dog. This was their big announcement. And why did this silly game exist in the first place? Why, it comes bundled with a new controller, of course! It attaches to one remote, to make the motion detection more precise or something like that. (As if the regular remotes weren't precise enough to find what to do with!)
And when this attachment is released, and I'm expected to buy one of them for each controller I have, what then? Do they think I'm stupid enough to believe, at this point, that they're going to do anything at all with the technology?!
The Wii has more potential than a hundred visionary designers could use up in their lifetimes. It's nothing but potential. Now use it, you fools, use it! The medium is half the message, yes. But only half! Nintendo is being so rewarded in the marketplace for reinventing themselves, they no longer want to do anything but reinvent themselves! Giving meaningful experiences isn't a priority anymore.
But if Nintendo aren't going to be visionaries anymore, who will? Who's even qualified?
All the other companies have had the same opportunity to use the Wii. They've had it for two years already. And there is no news of creative projects. They have all of gamism in front of them, and all they see is the opportunity to repeat. Critical consensus on the third-party Wii library is that there are around two creative games there- one from the pretentious action gamist Suda 51 and one from Steven Spielberg of all people. Where's the rest?
Who is willing and able to move forward?
2 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
Well I had a similar reaction to E3 this year except I have an xbox and follow Microsoft news more closely.
All the seemed to have announced was that they are simplifying the Dashboard to allow users to only scroll through one list at a time in an annoying 3d space and they have decided to copy the Wii by allowing users to create Miis... I mean "Avatars".
They did however announce the release of the sequel to my favorite game Geometry Wars, but I suspect they will have forgotten that it was the simple game design that made the game so much fun.
Also, one question, did you coin the term Gamism? The only other reference I could find to it was for studying paper and pen RPGs. - Mory said:
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Anticipating WALL•E
Now keep in mind that all I've described here is just the first third of "WALL E." Which plays out with little or no dialogue. By that I mean: The age-old trash-picking robot and the sleek new scanning droid may beep & boop at one another. But -- with the exception of the music & the dialogue that we hear coming from that VCR that plays "Hello, Dolly !" -- that's it. The rest of this section of Pixar's 2008 release is (in effect) a silent movie.At that point, I ran downstairs and started yelling excitedly to my mother about this upcoming movie. (No one else was around to yell excitedly to.) Pixar doing a serious science-fiction story in the talented dialogue-free style of their short films? That's exactly the sort of thing I'd want to be able to do if I were them. Nothing like it has been done before, and there's no good reason not to. That makes it brilliant.
And that anticipation was mixed with disbelief. Surely Disney would never let such a movie be made! How could they sell a movie so unconventional to the general public? Would they even try to? No, more likely the marketing department would start their meddling, and dilute the movie to the point where they know how to deal with it. I said to everyone I could find that if this movie were made with even close to the ambition originally intended, it would be a minor miracle and likely one of the best animated movies ever.
And then was the long wait. Half a year later Ratatouille was released, another Pixar masterpiece, and as I sat there with my family the teaser for WALL•E, which I'd earlier seen for myself on the internet, came on the big screen. It wasn't a conventional trailer, but the fact that my family was there, watching the trailer for such a movie, gave me shivers. It was real. This idea which I thought could never be made wasn't just an idea. It was actually coming, and my family might even see it.
WALL•E didn't seem like just another movie to me. This was my movie.
Months passed. Every so often a new little clip would show up on the internet, which I'd excitedly show to whoever'd look. Sometimes they'd say "That looks cute.", and sometimes I wouldn't get any reaction at all. Myself, I watched those clips over and over.
Then the movie got closer, and the reviews started coming in. Right from the very first ones, it was clear that this was exactly the movie it was supposed to be. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, but they talked about how ambitious and unusual and dark and meaningful the movie was!
And then the movie was actually released in America, and it did great at the box-office. You've gotta love a world where a science-fiction love story with a speech-less first third can do great at the box-office. There's some merit there.
It wasn't going to come to Israel yet, of course. So I kept reading reviews, I kept watching clips, I spoiled everything in the entire movie for myself and wanted more.
Then the date that I'd seen for when it was coming to Israel wasn't quite truthful. It was only coming to a film festival on that date, and would come to actual theaters the next week.
And then we couldn't go until next Monday. (We could have gone without my father, but my father likes science-fiction and occasionally sings "Hello, Dolly" thinking it's amusing and I really really want him to see this movie.)
So that's when we're going. Monday.
12 Comments:
- Kyler said:
-
Hello, please to meet you. I have to say you are the first blogger I have ever happened upon on the internet whose content I have actually been interested in reading.
Unfortunately I have to start with the bad news. I was only searching for someone who might share my opinion that Wall-e is not a spectacular film as it represented by the critics. We will have to wait and see what you think.
On a more positive note, I think we might have similar interests in figuring out video game theory. I will need to read you posts about game theory in more depth to figure out what you think, but for the mean time I will guide you to some posts I had made on the topic.
Videogame Design
Bioshock
Speed Racer
Program Design
Why I hate kyler A very good explanation of myself.
I hope to comment on more of your blog in the future. - Mory said:
-
Unfortunately I have to start with the bad news. I was only searching for someone who might share my opinion that Wall-e is not a spectacular film as it represented by the critics.
Ha! This blog post was so the wrong thing to click on. - Mory said:
-
I've gotta go to sleep so I don't have time right now to read through your blog seriously. But just a casual glance tells me that we're going to be disagreeing a lot. I look forward to it.
- Mory said:
-
You're a fan of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? This is so perfect! I hate you already! Wow.
But to get back to the topic: I definitely am going to say what I thought when I see the movie. - Kyler said:
-
Since sarcasm is difficult to really understand over the internet, I can't tell whether the comment about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time is simply you implying an understanding of my blog facetiously, or if you genuinely dislike this book, in which case I am curious.
- Mory said:
-
Oh, I detest the book. As someone with Asperger's Syndrome, I take its misrepresentation of Asperger's Syndrome as a personal offense. It disturbs me to think how many people have only heard of Asperger's Syndrome from that book, and think that we're unemotional twits to be pitied.
- Kyler said:
-
I think when that book made it on my list, I put it there since I felt I had many traits in common with many of the thought processes described in the book. I didn't put it there because I thought it was an accurate portrait of people will Asperger's.
I think your blog however has provided me with a fairly accurate representation of you. - Mory said:
-
WALL•E is phenomenal. If you haven't seen it, see it. If you've seen it, see it again. If you've seen it again, c'mere and we'll discuss its brilliance together.
Turns out I didn't know everything. I knew all the quirky little details, but I didn't understand that it would all fit together with such clarity and vision. I didn't know what the movie was about. I didn't know that nothing in the movie would be wasted, that it would be a brilliant work of art, that it would make me cry three times.
My parents didn't like it so much. They and Kyler and everyone else who says this is not a spectacular movie are wrong.
I'll have to do a detailed analysis when the DVD comes out. This movie needs a detailed analysis. (I really would pick it apart right now, but I suspect some people reading these comments won't have seen the movie yet. What are you waiting for, you culture-haters? See this movie!) - Kyler said:
-
This post has been removed by the author.
- Kyler said:
-
After rereading your comments and reanalyzing the film myself, I have to admit your right, that it is a well focused vision of "directives" VS life.
You have actually almost changed my opinion of the film.
The main hangup that I still have that keeps this film from being spectacular for me was the moment of crisis near the end when Wall-E is being squished.
In the theater I didn't feel any deep emotions around this event. There are many reason's this could be, though I suspect it was because the filmmakers failed to thoroughly convince me that Wall-E was in danger.
I don't think we can really argue that point, since what I felt in the theater, is what I felt in the theater. I accept that it must have really hit a chord with you.
Thanks for almost changing my mind about the film. Apparently searching the internet for opinions is sometimes useful. - Mory said:
-
No, I actually agree with you that there was little sense of danger there. No one really thought Wall•E was going to die there. It would be better if we did, though we've seen that sort of moment so many times in movies I don't know how it could be convincing.
But the moment is brilliant symbolically. Wall•E has this little dream of his that keeps him going, and the programming is trying to squash him down and stop him from getting there. If it were just Wall•E himself vs. the system, he'd die right there and never do what needed doing. But his sheer determination is inspiring to the humans, and that's the message- that the people he inspires can put in the effort involved and break the system.
By the way, I hope you've realized by now the point of the lighter they kept showing us- a little spark lights it, and then it can be used to start a fire, which spreads and burns things down. It's a clever little metaphor. - Mory said:
-
It's occurred to me that (though this will sound strange) Wall•E is the mirror image of A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's point was that humans have been programmed by society, and lost their humanity in the process. Andrew Stanton (the director of Wall•E) is giving the solution: love and determination and hard work can break down the programming.
The reference in Wall•E to 2001 doesn't remind me of the apes in 2001 as much as it makes me think of the march in A Clockwork Orange, which had exactly the opposite purpose. There, the march (set to "Pomp and Circumstance") showed that though the walk (in which the protagonist is led around by a bunch of officials) looks like an inspiring event, it's actually leading to more of society's programming and loss of humanity. In Wall•E, the music is without irony: A few steps taken are an important event, when those steps go against the programming. And those few steps can bring all the programming down.
Another comparison to be made is between the two movies' usage of music. In A Clockwork Orange, old music was what made you feel better about where you were. In Wall•E, old music make you understand that there was once something better to strive for. Each movie has two main musical themes which repeat. A Clockwork Orange had "Singin' in the Rain", about how nothing should make people unhappy. And then Kubrick used it ironically so Alex could brutally rape someone without it getting to him. The other theme is no less than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the greatest work of music in history, which triumphantly declares that humanity is great and can achieve absolutely everything. And Alex listens to that (getting very emotional about it) as a reassurance that yes, we are great, and no evil act he performs can change that.
Now compare that to Wall•E's two songs, both minor songs from an old musical no one particularly cares about anymore. To balance out "Singin' in the Rain" is "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", and as A Clockwork Orange ended on its song to tell you that humanity was doomed, Wall•E begins with its song to tell you that there is hope. The message of "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" is to revel in little things. This song is used ironically as well- Wall•E hums it to himself as he rolls through a destroyed world. But rather than making him ignore the world around it, it inspires him to find something to enjoy in it. The other theme is "It Only Takes A Moment", a love song which nobody (not even those who've seen the musical) remembers, to balance out the "Ode to Joy" which everyone knows. Where Beethoven's Ninth is a triumph, "It Only Takes A Moment" is an expression of longing. Wall•E is just as emotional about his song as Alex about his, but for the exact opposite reason: it makes him feel empty, understanding that life is only worthwhile if he does things in the name of love.
See, the problem with A Clockwork Orange's world was it didn't have that tiny little spark of life Wall•E has. If there were one person as pure and driven as Wall•E in it, the entire system set up and criticized in that movie might have fallen down!
Friday, July 11, 2008
Is it really a good show?Stargate SG-1 vs. Star Trek: Voyager
There's no long-term story to Stargate SG-1. None of these elements ever go anywhere. None of it is really expanded upon. Simply put, that's not the sort of show this is. It's a show where generic sci-fi characters go through a generic sci-fi premise to get to generic sci-fi scenarios which are dealt with in generic sci-fi ways. That I have watched seven-and-a-half seasons of this so far should tell you that I do like generic science fiction.
But still I'm frustrated. For every episode, my enjoyment of what there is is mixed with frustration at what it's not. And that's why, each Shabbat, I go over to Tamir and talk about how it ought to be different. See, Tamir watched the show when he was little. They used to tape it every week. And he says his perceptions might be painted by nostalgia and are therefore unreliable.
That idea scares me a little bit.
I can find lots of problems with Stargate. The characters are uninteresting, but are given lots of focus (at the expense of plot). The show is much too slow, to the extent that it's generally more fun to watch in fast-forward. New ideas which could make the whole premise of the show more complex are routinely introduced, then immediately discarded. The characters always survive against ridiculous odds, though I want them to all be killed off and replaced. The morality of the show is frequently arrogant. And I go on and on. I complain about how "Any threat to the status quo must be eliminated!" even when it defies common sense. I complain about the actors, and the writing, and the repetition, and everything else I can think of to complain about.
And what scares me is, what if it is all about what we grew up with? If I had grown up with Stargate, and had looked to the screen rather than looking for potential, would I love it?
Because if so, that undermines my sense of control. Which isn't so great.
I was having an argument with someone who said Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a good show and Star Trek: Voyager isn't. Now, obviously he's objectively wrong. But how can I know that?
Do I love Voyager and dislike DS9 just because I saw more Voyager as a kid?
I could write a book about everything DS9 did wrong. (Incidentally, please provoke me; the comments section of this post seems as good a place for that book as any.) And I could go through each Voyager episode, one by one, and tell you how many things that episode did right.
Wait a minute.
Most of the criticisms I throw at Stargate have been used on Voyager by disgruntled Trekkies! They say it had potential -two crews with conflicting ideologies stranded together on a limited sort of ship in the middle of nowhere- which was thrown away instantly. They say it never went anywhere. They say every possible threat to the status quo was thrown out the window. The characters are simple archetypes, and yet they get a lot of focus. They beat enemies against overwhelming odds, defying all common sense.
But no. I'm right. Here's why.
Each Voyager character is a generic sci-fi archetype. The tough captain, the popular first-officer, the young and cocky outcast, the human-like computer program, the alien outsiders, etc. But there are two things which makes them fun to watch. First off, there were some wonderful actors portraying them, who kept looking for new facets of their characters' personalities. Stargate's only good actor was Richard Dean Anderson, and even he's just repeating the same performance over and over again.
Secondly, the characters of Voyager are not so much a draw as the relationships between those characters. Janeway's mother-daughter relationship with Seven. Tom's friendship with Harry. The history between Chakotay and B'Elanna. The friendly rivalry between Neelix and Tuvok. The Doctor's continual surprise in Kes's enthusiasm. Put almost any two members of the cast together in a scene, and you get an interesting chemistry that's fun to watch. These relationships, and the general family atmosphere, liven up everything. On Stargate, by contrast, there are almost no connections between the characters at all. They all respect each other, and there's a little bit of forced romance between the two leads which doesn't seem like it could ever go anywhere, and that's it. When you throw the four main characters in a room together, all you have is the four main characters in a room. You don't have any sort of meaningful group.
Voyager is not, excluding the first season, slow. Though there is always time given to reflect on emotions, the plots almost always feel like they're moving forward. There are twists and turns and resolutions. On Stargate you have a lot of standing in place. I often feel that nothing at all is happening, not just in the bigger picture but in the context of the individual episode.
It is true that Voyager always goes back to the status quo. The overall plot never gets past "a ship stranded far away". But that's the buy-in. You know they're not going to get home, no matter how likely it looks in the episode. And if they got home, what then? There's not much potential there beyond "become more like Star Trek: The Next Generation". It is worth considering that a fixed status quo can still lead to good stories. Anything can lead to good stories; it's all in the execution. Voyager's execution of the individual episodes is excellent: everything that happens affects the characters, and what affects the characters affects us. It's just good writing. Stargate's execution of individual episodes is substandard, because it's done by lesser writers. There is little emotion in most episodes, and what emotion is there doesn't feel authentic.
The beating enemies against all common sense I'll concede. That is annoying, in both shows. If you're not willing to follow through sensibly, don't make the stakes so high.
And what of Deep Space Nine? Well, come to think of it, I grew up with that too. My father recorded Voyager, and he also recorded Deep Space Nine. Sometimes they'd even be on the same tape. In those cases, I'd fast-forward through Deep Space Nine and watch just the Voyager episodes. I understood the characters and the plots and the settings of DS9, I just didn't care. A bad story is a bad story.
3 Comments:
- MsStargate said:
-
You are soooo wrong about SG-1.
Perhaps if you sat down and started watching the episodes from the pilot you would see that they do have a continuing plot that runs thru the course of the full 10 years. They are trying to defeat a parasitic race called the Go'auld. The leads characters are interesting and fully developed. And the romance between Jack and Sam is not forced but due to their circumstances, he is her commanding officer, they must put it on hold until the Go'auld are defeated. - Mory said:
-
I have been watching since the pilot, in order. There is no continuing plot. Over the course of the seven-and-a-half seasons which I have watched, almost nothing has changed from the very beginning. Goa'ulds are killed all the time on the show, but it has no meaning. As soon as one is killed, a new one is introduced who is exactly the same. There are tiny hints of rebellion, but they are stuck in a holding pattern throughout because the writers don't seem to know what to do with that idea.
The main characters are paper-thin. Jack is sarcastic, Sam is smart and compassionate, Teal'c is stoic and Daniel is an exposition deliveryman. That's all there is to them, and episodes which make them the focus rather than the sci-fi plots just highlight their simplicity.
The only problem I have with the tension between Jack and Sam is that it is the only hint of a relationship between characters. It makes perfect sense that it can't lead anywhere, but that's exactly why the writers have it there- they don't want a relationship between characters that could threaten the status quo. Look at Teal'c's wife and daughter, who don't live with Teal'c seemingly just because the writers don't want more characters. Or look at the cadets introduced with much fanfare, some of them interesting personalities, who then never appear again. The writers only write in new relationships and characters if they see a way out.
None of this prevents me from enjoying the show, which I do. But there's no long-term development here. - said:
-
Sorry for making you doubt how good your childhood show is. Mostly, I see mine as a good thing - as a kid, I would have enjoyed (and did enjoy) many sub-par shows as well as good ones. So now I enjoy a few shows just out of nostalgia, and that means there are more shows out there I can enjoy!
(Not that there's a lack of good shows; just ones that make their way to my lazy brain.)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The difference between a good teacher
and a bad teacher:
A good teacher has a point to make.
I went through a lot of religious Tanach classes in my time at school. None of it interested me at all. Many positions were recited, none of which I remember at all. But then I went to a secular school, and the secular Tanach teacher had a position on everything. He would take a passage, and argue that it was imperfect, or that it was valid for the specific time in which it was written. He would back these positions up with comparisons to other religions and with logic and with literary analyses, none of which was strictly part of the curriculum. And all of this was because he was certain in his belief and wanted to convince us that he was right. I agreed with him on some points and disagreed with him on others. But I always was engaged by the argument. That was the first time I really experienced any Torah, because I wasn't just perceiving it but also using it to form opinions. I learned more Torah in each class that teacher gave than in each year of religious schools.
I wasn't interested in math going into the school system, and I wasn't interested when I left. Math was a series of rules that you needed to memorize. Toward the end of elementary school, I got a video from "The Teaching Company", of an enthusiastic math teacher explaining all of basic math. To him, math was totally obvious. He convinced me that math was totally obvious by explaining and arguing and engaging. For a few years, I was coasting on the perspective I got from that one video. All math was easy to me, because it just made sense. And then I got into more advanced subjects, and was being taught those subjects by teachers with no points to make. Math no longer made sense, so I stopped caring. I didn't really learn anything new after that. That's why I never took the math Bagrut.
If a teacher doesn't care about what he's teaching, his students certainly won't. A class is not a piece of curriculum. It is an opportunity to convince and debate. And people who don't see that opportunity should never be allowed to teach.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Power Out
It wasn't; everyone else was already outside.
I don't think I've ever talked about the people who live here, since I rarely deign to see them. I don't deserve this community. Everyone is friendly with everyone else, and they're all good people. It's the sort of community that the word "community" was invented for.
And yet we all spend our days in the house, doing stuff in isolation. Even my mother, who will volunteer for anything community-related, who invites to Shabbat lunch every person who sets foot in the neighborhood, and who chats with anyone who wants to chat, spends a lot of time working by herself on her computer.
But the computers were off. The TVs were off. The digital phones were off. And suddenly everyone on the street thought collectively: "Hey, human interaction! There's an idea."
Then power came back on partially. Just enough to light up the house dimly, not enough to run a computer. I went to the piano to start playing, though I didn't have much inspiration. I played, and Eli walked in and sat on our couch for a minute. And the people outside could hear me too, obviously. Then I stopped, and took my Bone comics over to Avri. (I kept meaning to give him those, but never got around to it what with all the time-wasting.)
Avri said the scene reminded of the scene in The Simpsons where a TV show is canceled, and all the kids go out to play in parks. (I'd link to a YouTube clip, but I can't find one.)
We talked about old-fashioned games, in the dark. And I didn't want the lights to come back on, because then I'd have no excuse to not be inside on my own.
The lights came back on. I went back in, and got back to doing what I do.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Playing Against Myself
I got my first paycheck. And I asked myself, how should I use it? Should I spend it all on games for the Wii? Or should I buy myself a Nintendo DS, with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2?
And then I said, No.
That money should go into creating a work environment. Get another computer, which will be only for work. A laptop, which I can use from my bed. (Like Benjy used to do, though I didn't consciously think in those terms.) So I started looking around the internet for dirt-cheap laptops not good enough to run anything but my work. I couldn't find what I was looking for- they're all better for entertainment than my desktop.
And how can I work with all that entertainment? I kept telling myself: You will work now. And I'd say okay, and then go read a comic. And another. And another. And a TV show. And then move on to a videogame. And play piano. And talk to people. And the end of the day would come. No work done.
One day I wasn't allowed by the blog to do anything but work, so I just did nothing. I turned off my monitor, and went downstairs, and sat on the couch, and proceeded to do nothing. I didn't play piano. I didn't read comics. I didn't watch TV shows. I didn't play videogames of any sort. I didn't go on forums. I just sat, and thought about the fact that I wasn't working. How broken am I, I said, that I prefer to think about not working than to work?
And I said to my mother, I need pills. I need some sort of medicine that will get me to sit down and start working. I need doctors to turn me into a productive member of society.
I looked at the laptop models, and I said, "This won't do.". They all allowed for too many distractions. I needed something older, less functional. I needed to be chained down to a computer and forced to work.
And then I said, what's this got to do with the laptop? What's it got to do with the money? Except I actually didn't. I didn't ask myself anything. I stopped asking. I stopped thinking. I stopped planning. I just went into the Windows control panel, and made myself a work user.
The desktop is white. I set the resolution there so that I can't see as much. The taskbar disappears. There's no Google Desktop, no shortcuts in the Start Menu, no handy keyboard shortcuts, no accessibility at all. Just the work.
And then I got myself a program to watch me. I'm not allowed in my regular user before 3:30 PM. I'm not allowed in after 2:15 AM. If I'm there, it logs me out automatically.
And I'm working.
I think I was a poor excuse for a person. I think I talked and I talked and I planned and I thought and I analyzed and I did everything that could be done, but I never did what needed doing.
Now I'm doing it. I'm doing it quickly and efficiently. I'm going to be done with Smilie altogether in a few weeks. And then I'm going to show it to people. And then I'm going to move on to something else. And something else after that. And I'm going to move up. And I'm going to get places. And all it costs me is a guilty conscience.
1 Comment:
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
I am reminded of verse from "Oh the places you'll go!"
It's good you found a way to filter out the distractions and do work. I do need pills for that. Man am I unproductive when I'm not on those things and I'm not being actively and urgently pushed.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Page 25 complete.
Subject "Mory" has now completed greater than 50% of the Pages of Smilie.
Proceeding to stage 2.
The subject must now make greater than 0 progress on Smilie code every day.
(EXCEPTIONS: Friday and Saturday)
"day": defined as (5:00 AM-3:30 AM)
If the subject does not make progress, for ANY REASON, a post will automatically be written.
Example:
until Smilie has 100% completion.
It will not be revoked even if an infinite number of days pass without progress.
Therefore, if no negative post is made,
it can be assumed that the subject has made progress.
Monday, June 30, 2008
No work done.
The subject must work now.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I'm A Happy Little Cog
I'm afraid that if I were to force myself to do tedious work, I'd eventually get used to it. And that is just about the scariest thing I can imagine, because then I wouldn't stop doing tedious work. My entire life would become a tragedy, with only hints of the tremendous potential it once had, but none of it fulfilled. When I look at most adults, I see the most boring creatures- creatures who once could have been humans, but have allowed society to make them into machines. I don't want that to happen to me. So I reject any work which I don't naturally want to do.
For a while now I've been babysitting a young boy on the block named Eitan [Friedman]. I accepted the job, despite disliking the very idea of jobs, because it's not much of a job at all.
[That job ended a long time ago.]
The job is to look at data on one screen. And write it on the other screen. And again. And again, until I've been working for around two hours. Then I stop.
There are some gamistic lessons to be learned here, I think.
In repeating what I've already done I see the opportunity to do it more efficiently. At first I was using the mouse for a lot, but switching interfaces between mouse and keyboard took time. I got faster by finding ways to use the keyboard for everything. The very fact that those keys were there to be found made me feel that I had opportunities ahead of me, if I just kept working. Apparently that's enough to keep me going. And each time I start a different set of pages, I have new opportunities to learn the shortcuts. If it were not possible to find quicker ways to work, I don't think I'd have much motivation. So it is important with any repetitive tasks to make it clear that the player can get better with time. A role-playing game with shallow battles is not a good game, but deeper battles might be satisfying. A movement game shouldn't hold your hand too much, because it takes away the potential for getting better. An action game might be entertaining if you can find new strategies all the time. And so on.
The files I'm transcribing are research for a Diabetes medicine. This makes no difference to me. The work is the work.
The files come from lots of different doctors, who are given numbers. When I see the number 74, I'm genuinely happy to do the work. It's not just because, y'know, it's 74. It's because that guy has good handwriting. Most of these doctors write in barely legible scribbles, or don't understand the fine art of capitalization, or misspell everything, or all of the above. Each line of text is a new roadblock. I get into a slower pace of writing, because I don't expect to get far. I lose motivation. But when I get to a 74, I know I'm not going to be stopped. I'm going to be allowed to go right through and do my job, and then move on to the next one. So as soon as I see those two digits, I kick into overdrive. My fingers zoom across the number pad, I fill out all the data in a fraction of my normal time, and am eager to move on to the next file. TA clearly presented goal is much more appealing than a less-clear one.
I don't mind being like a computer program. It gives me the perceived opportunity to call attention to my own efficiency. I want people to see my fast progress and comment on it.
The data is all being entered twice, so that any mistakes will be caught. As I work, the Friedmans all work in parallel on another computer. Even though I'm outnumbered, I'm way ahead. I take pride in that. Unfortunately, with no direct competition now I've slowed down considerably. I tend to overlook the usefulness of competition, and I plan to continue doing so in the future. But it does have merit.
I haven't gotten any money yet, and I'm being careful to not want it. (I feel that to work for money would be hypocritical.) So if I weren't paid, it wouldn't make any difference to me. I'd still come back for more, because hey- I actually like this.
(Okay, enough procrastination. Start working on Smilie already.)
2 Comments:
- John Silver said:
-
Dude I wanted to post a comment ages ago on that game, Des Reves Elastiques etc. Thanks for the link, that was terrific. I wanted to say more elaborate things but to be honest I'm starting to think it deserves a full blogpost of my own. We'll see if I can manage it, I hope I will, it all depends on whether my dissertation devours me first.
All the best,
John Silver. - Mory said:
-
I've reached a point in the job where I don't see anywhere else to go. And yet, I'm still okay with the job.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Pages 22, 23 and 24 are complete.
Next time:
Monday
Stop 4:00 PM
Open 4:15 PM
Page 4:20 PM
Complete by 6:00 PM
The subject did not start working at the proper time.
Page 22 is incomplete.
No entertainment of any kind will be allowed until Page 22 is complete.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Thinkers
(21 April 2005)
Eliezer started our tradition of improv in the Academy a year ago. I had been improvising alone (for fun) for a long time, but that was my first experience with duet improvisation. I sit at one grand piano, some other pianist (sometimes Eliezer) sits at the other grand piano, and we just start to play.… We're playing, but we're also listening, because we need to complement each other. With these improvs, you never know where it's going, because the other player might suddenly get an idea, and you'll go in that direction with him. Or you might get an idea, and he'll join you. It's fun. But it's very difficult to have a coherent overall structure.
The following post is a direct sequel to The Composer.
I walked in very late. Eliezer had gotten there a few minutes earlier, and he was improvising with a guy named Levi who's (I'm guessing) a regular at his weekly Tel Aviv sessions. I took a seat and enjoyed the performance.
I looked around the room. Eliezer wasn't talking to a bunch of college students, he was talking to the heads of the Musicology department! There were a dozen or so people, ranged in age between their 30's and, oh, I'd say 70's. They listened to the music dispassionately. Then the music stopped, with both sides trying to get the last statement (to the piece's detriment).
Eliezer began to talk. He talked about the idea that the specific piano played on is as integral to a piece of music as its melody. He talked about improvisation as an important part of the composition process. He talked about improvisation being considered unimportant in understanding classical (and more generally Western) music. And then he invited me to play.
I started with a note, and he repeated the note. I built a theme of three notes, and he repeated it. And we were off. I tried to not take too much attention for myself, because I knew Eliezer would want to do all sorts of fancy stuff I barely understand and I needed to give him space. So I kept it simple, anchoring the piece in the original theme throughout while he jumped around enough to make it interesting though not enough to contradict me. I followed his modulations and added little cutesy flourishes. We each anticipated where the other was going and completed each other's sentences. It was a lovely improvisation. Then he ended, and I ended, and he ended, and I ended. "Everyone needs to have the last word.", he pointed out.
Back to "MIDI experiments"
Eliezer continued to talk. He talked about the self-sacrifice of limiting yourself for the sake of your partner. He talked about the greatness of some of the improvisations he had with Levi. He talked about the experience of having a conversation in music. He talked about how two-person improvisations could be analyzed and studied. He talked about his old schools in Russia frowning on improvisation. He talked about all the little things he could think of that he loves about two-person improvisation in general. And the room was silent. At one point a guy raised his hand to start a point, but thought better of it and let Eliezer keep talking. Eliezer talked and talked and the room sat still. If I may interpret what I saw, he started to get a little scared. He asked the esteemed musicologists in the room to contradict him, to speak up against him. He quoted Gemara for some reason I didn't catch, though I figured he was making a point about proper conduct in speaking.
And the one in the back who raised a hand earlier began to talk. I think it was the head of the entire department. He spoke with intelligence and consideration, and no one could have doubted that he knew what he was talking about. He talked for a long time, taking apart Eliezer's ideas piece by piece and comparing them to other things he was familiar with. He cut through all the enthusiasm of the speaker to reduce the issue to its most basic points: For instance, what exactly was Eliezer (who, make no mistake, the entire room respected) trying to sell them? And Eliezer invited Levi to improvise again.
Eliezer did not sit down ready to listen to his partner. He sat down with the need to prove himself. He played a technically impressive improvisation, that neither needed Levi's perspective nor allowed for it. It was jazzy and crazy and had little pauses where Eliezer hoped his partner would come in. He did not, because to see the openings Eliezer had left for him would require Levi to think exactly like Eliezer. For the entire piece, he was desperately looking for openings he could never find. Then it ended, with each side of course trying to end himself.
And the argument began. I will be blessed in life if I am ever on any side of such an argument.
Each new voice brought a totally different perspective. Some were short and incisive, others were long speeches contrasting Eliezer's method with their favorite improvisation-related topics. None were the sorts of positions Eliezer might have foreseen, and each speaker gave me the impression, while he was talking, that what he was saying was absolutely and indisputably right. There was not a single comment made which was not well-reasoned, even if the reasoning had little to do with what Eliezer was saying. They often reiterated what had been said so far, and it was always done eloquently. They worked each other's positions into their own. They dissected and analyzed.
One woman talked about the "Anything goes" mentality, and whether that kind of improvisation fits into the world's current position in musical history. One man talked about what studies of improvisation are being done at Juliard and London, and whether this adds anything to that. One woman repeatedly insisted that it should not be taken for granted that the topic up for discussion is Western music, that that is small-minded and ignorant. One man, excitedly bouncing around in his chair, talked about a novel he read where improvisation becomes a competition, where the goal is to be better than the other rather than to listen to him. One man asked what Eliezer thought they could do. And so on. The conversation bounced around the room, gaining momentum as it did. The overall tone was critical and negative, though they all had different reasons.
Eliezer asked for a volunteer in the audience to improvise with him.
The room went silent.
For a minute, all these great musical minds, all of whom are wonderful pianists, looked around at each other awkwardly, waiting for someone to get up. They smiled, amused at the situation. But they still didn't get up. They spoke only to make excuses.
Finally, the man who started the argument with his well-placed criticism got up. He walked down to the piano.
Before sitting down, he asked who starts. He insisted that the question of who starts is of vital significance, because that person sets the tone for the other. He argued with and considered Eliezer's suggestion that they start with single notes. Eliezer responded.
Finally, the man sat down. And they played.
It was a revelation.
They bounced musical ideas back and forth so effortlessly, you'd think they'd been doing it for years. And those ideas came from everywhere. They started with atonality, and moved on to jazz and classical and pentatonic scale. They moved from one to the other seamlessly, like it was all the same language to them. They never forgot where they'd been before, and they never hesitated to bring it all back at the most unlikely of times. They copied each other with perfect pitch, they finished each other's sentences even when the sentences were creative. These are people who've heard everything, who can't be surprised anymore. They played the sort of thing I'd love to hear again. And then they stopped, with each one trying to get the last word in.
Suddenly, everyone in the room was fascinated with what had just been played. They were analyzing it, and dissecting it, and admiring it from all angles. Truly, there was a lot for them to think about there. And they went back and forth on the merits of the piece that was played, but Eliezer had already won the original argument. Not with words which can be countered, but with music which inspires. The entire room was talking about what they'd heard. And as one person pointed out, something which evokes such strong responses has to be worth something.
As Eliezer drove me and Levi away, he said to us:
These are people of words. They talk. When it comes time to do, they have trouble. Who accomplishes more, the person who talks about things or the person who does?
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Page 21 is complete.
Next work time: Wednesday 5:00
The natural goal of life is to find many opportunities, and preserve them.
Next Post
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Instructions were not carried out perfectly:
The subject snacked, consulted and checked for updates.
The subject opened the development environment one minute late, and started the page several minutes late.
However, Page 20 is complete.
This is acceptable progress.
Next time of work:
Sunday (22/6)
At 4:00 all other activities will cease.
At 4:10 the development environment will be opened.
At 4:20 the new Page will be started.
Work will stop no sooner than 6:15, unless Page 21 is finished.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Now here's a good game!
It's an adventure game, or at least an adventure game derivative. (It depends on how you define adventures.) I wish I saw a lot more stuff like this. It's a personal project, starring the gamist herself and a bunch of people she knows. It's got a similar aesthetic to a blog post, which may be why I find it appealing.
Something I find clever is that it intentionally gives you no control, then repeatedly calls your attention to that lack of control. It does this in order to get you to identify with the character. If only mainstream gamists were willing to be artistic like that! You could say (and indeed, it's said in the game) that this game is meandering and pointless, but I say it is straight to the point. Much more so than adventures which give puzzles and giant worlds and endless minigames. You don't play through an adventure for that. At least, I don't.
I always say that you learn about an adventure character by seeing your options. This goes very nicely with what I've been thinking lately in regards to self-image in the real world. There are only a few things you will consider doing in any given circumstances, and what those options are define who you are at the moment. So if an adventure game wants you to identify with its character, it just needs to limit your options to what the character would consider doing. Then you understand who the character is, without needing to be told.
I'm not sure if Kiai understands this principle. In an earlier game of hers (Chivalry is Not Dead), so many options were given that after the entire game was over I still had no sense whatsoever of who the main character was or why I should be interested in him.
And yet, in this game I identify with the character. That's because when the character is the writer, the writer's more likely to get it right without realizing it. When you write yourself, it doesn't take any thought or conscious effort to limit options to what you'd consider doing yourself. Kiai the gamist isn't going to give Kiai the character any lines of dialogue which feel wrong to her. The end result is exactly what is needed from fictional characters: the limited options given let you understand the character.
Anyway, go play the game. I've spent more time writing this than I did playing through the game twice.
Also, because it's specifically referred to in the aforementioned game: The Graveyard by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn is an exquisitely-crafted movement game, also tiny, artistic and free.
Seriously, what are you sitting around here for?
4 Comments:
- Deirdra Kiai said:
-
Very intriguing, insightful comments. Thank you. This is all very helpful to me.
When you say "I'm not sure if Kiai understands this principle", I'm inclined to respond with "That may be so, but I'd like to think I'm learning as I go along". If that makes any sense at all. :) - Mory said:
-
I'm honored to have the creator of a very good game comment on my blog.
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Totally not my style. Too artsy and self important. No choices in anything in the game. There is no effect of the player on the environment, and the player is superfluous.
I know that was the point, but I prefer to play games and not artistic statements. - Mory said:
-
You act like the two concepts are mutually exclusive! You wound me. Smilie's offended too. :(
Monday, June 16, 2008
The subject began work 4.5 hours after schedule.
However, Page 19 is complete.
This progress will suffice.
Next work time:
Wednesday (18/6)
3:40 PM - 5:40 PM
No distractions or procrastinations
until after working.
- Entertainment/Art
- Music
- Long-distance communication
- Reading of any materials
not directly related to Smilie - Checking for updates on anything
not directly related to Smilie - Consulting about anything
not directly related to Smilie - Writing anything but Smilie
- Considering other game designs
- Snacks
- Pacing while thinking about any topic other than Smilie
- Thinking about refusal to work
and what neurological disorders or social conditioning might cause such behavior
must be opened
no later than 3:45.
The new Page must be started
no later than 4:00.
Friday, June 13, 2008
An Endless Shabbat
My mother placed a roll of toilet paper next to my computer. She does this when Shabbat is coming up. But it was Sunday! That's when I remembered about Shavuot.
"Wait- when's Yontif?"*
(The Yiddish word for a holiday effectively identical to Shabbat.)
"Tonight."
"Tonight?! But I just made it through!"
"One day is better than two!"*
(Any Jew not living in Israel has two-day holidays. My mother takes every opportunity to point out how much better it is to move to Israel and keep only one day.)
"Sure! It's also better than three!"
"Ha ha"
"It's better than a year of Shabbat!"
"Wow, a year of Shabbat. We'd all be well-rested."
"We'd all be brain-dead. That, or we'll have committed suicide."
But would I?
What if tonight, a year of Shabbat began? No games, no music, no blog, no TV shows, no digital comics, no buying things, no forums, no programming, no job, no microwave. A clean slate, with nothing to put on it.
For the first month or two, I'd be terribly depressed. Obviously. Maybe suicidal, yes. A person whose every opportunity has been snatched away permanently is not a pretty sight. To be sure, the first month or two would be the worst time of my life.
But then I'd adapt. I'd have to. I imagine I'd spend most of all my days with Moshe. I could play all sorts of games with him. I've got books full of card games I've never played. And chess probably wouldn't get old, if we both had so much practice.
What on Earth would we talk about?!
I guess.. he'll read more history books, and I'll read science-fiction books. There are so many people on our street with so many books. I don't like reading. But if that's what's there, I could learn to like reading.
So, sure. We'd have what to talk about. Maybe we'd invent a fictional world to change things in, just in case that weren't enough.
And then I could travel around and meet other people. If they're all stuck in the same situation, then they're all wandering around to meet people too. Now, you have to understand: When there's nothing to look forward to, the pace of life changes. Getting one opportunity to talk in twenty minutes is almost enough in that situation. So I'd be more sociable with people I'm not compatible with. And if each person is a whole world, then I could get really interested in all this.
Then I'd go find my old friends. First Yosef, then start going back really far. Kids I hung out with in grade school. And they'd have all sorts of stories and gossip to share since Shabbat began, because they would have had time to adjust too.
Gossip would be a popular pastime, even by me. When the world isn't without borders anymore, and all you see is a bunch of people in front of you, those people become so much more important. I go onto specialized forums and I see a potential opportunity in every person there. Take that away, and I start caring about the people who are physically here.
I'd care about the cats on the street again, too.
I'd wander around a lot. I'd explore every nook and cranny of Beit Shemesh, boring town that it is, because what else could I explore?! I need to explore something.
Then I'd start building routines.
Maybe I'd start my day with a book, then lunch, then back to my book, then to Moshe, then to Yosef, then wander around a little looking for other people, then home for supper, then to Avri for strategy games, then home for sleep.
It could be fun.
And when that year was up, then what? Would I want to go back to what I was doing before? Would I be depressed when everyone I spent time with goes back to their routines, and I'd feel like I had nothing to do again? Would I wish for more Shabbat?
Interesting thoughts, to be sure. But that's not my world. That's not me. Shabbat sucks.
Page 17 complete.
Page 18 complete.
Next time of work:
Sunday(15/6)
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
"Mory" must be working at 4:30 sharp.
He must not distract himself until 6:30.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Page 17 is not complete.
Checking progress: 0.
The subject is defective.
The subject must be denied more than posting privileges.
He may not play games.
He may not browse.
He may not communicate.
He may not play or listen to music.
He may not read comics.
He may not watch films.
He may not check mail.
He may not organize.
He may not plan.
He may not be happy.
These restrictions will be lifted only when Page 17 and Page 18 are complete.
There will be no further discussion.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Page 17 is (Please Wait) incomplete.
Recheck: Page 17 is incomplete.
Query: Why is Page 17 incomplete?
I dunno...
Checking time of work:
Work on Page 17 began on Friday (6/6).
Clock signified "late afternoon".
Even if Page 17 were complete,
this would be inexcusably late.
Subject "Mory"!
Finish Page 17 by 2:00 Wednesday (11/6)!
(It is predicted that the
work will begin on Tuesday.)
Judgment will continue then.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
In Darkness
Talk
I wish I knew how people thought about what I'm saying…
Wow, he's saying so many
different kinds of things here!
This is clever and refreshing
and it never falls into predictable patterns!I predict the next thing he says
will be whiny and self-indulgent
and immature and irritating,
just like everything else he's said.
See, that wasn't so hard.
Some of this is good.
But very little.
He's hopping around so much he never figured out which.It's all good!Drink your coffee.
It's not just about reward. You don't do things only to get somewhere, you also do things just because they're there to be done.
So you have a dilemma. On the one hand, there's an action in front of you. You have no idea what it's going to do, but there it is waiting to be taken. On the other hand, inaction is an action in itself, because it's an opportunity to step above the system and in so doing demonstrate your own intelligence. Suddenly all the infinite possibilities theoretically open to you have reduced themselves to two, just because I'm sticking a button here.
Okay.
You never see yourself making the action, you only see how people react. This feedback is imprecise, because those people don't see the actions they're making either. They aren't considering their responses carefully, they're just saying what it occurs to them to say. And they don't say it because they want something, they're just saying it because it's there to be said. This is not an objective analysis, it's reading from a script.
Avoid |
Compliment |
Criticize |
Once you have that feedback, you've gained perspective on your own action. And only from this do you get a sense of where and what you are.
I'm better than I ever was
And I still don't understand anything!
But then- who does?
Everyone needs opportunities to offer something to others, be that a joke or a service or an experience. We understand this, you and I. And when you never get an opening, you get pretty desperate. When no one wanted to listen to your music in the Academy, you went and played in recesses anyway, pretending you would have whether or not your classmates were there. But really you'd reached the point where you thought you'd make openings for yourself where none existed.
It was not long at all before Ariel realized there was a much greater opportunity here. If this little box could make him so happy, then surely it would make other people happy as well! So he set out to find other people.
I love to bore other people with ideas about gamism. When I think about it, this seems to contradict the first point. I mean, I know I'm not entertaining them. And I don't care too much. Maybe we so desperately need to feel like we're giving others all we can, that the question of how it will be received is secondary.
"I can show him entertainment, so I'm an entertainer."
"I can bring up examples in this argument, so I'm intelligent."
"I can listen, so I'm a friend."
"I can be efficient, so I'm a good worker."
"I can voluntarily help other people, so I'm a good person."
In this way, you're always constructing a mental image of yourself based on the actions available to you and what you think they'll do. But your perceived options change from moment to moment!
Self-esteem can undergo a complete reversal in the time it takes to walk from a room where you have opportunities to a room where you don't. Identity undergoes a complete reversal every time you switch activities. Who you are, beyond a body and a brain, has no meaning separate from your immediate context.
So I sometimes imagine what it would be like to start a different life. If you lay out my options clearly, in a way that I can accept and follow, I don't think it'll ever occur to me that I'm "supposed" to be someone else. I know it can work, because I can practically feel my brain rewiring itself to find new opportunities every time I go someplace new.
At first it's just a sequence of events, where I observe the world around me and demonstrate intelligence by not presuming to know what I'm doing. •-------
Hey, there's something I can do!Then I start to figure out the rules of the game and predict what'll happen. That's when I start building routines. Then I follow those routines and continually improve them, until I feel like the routine is an important part of myself. (That feeling lasts until I leave the room, and then it disappears entirely without notice.)
No, Mory. Don't make a fool of yourself.
…
Pretend you didn't think of anything.
And then my self-esteem's through the roof! Because whether or not there's anyone actually there, I always perceive the theoretical opportunity to show other people how efficient my routine-following is. If someone comes along who isn't interested, I imagine someone who is interested and put the button back on the screen.
We like to think we're so self-aware, great humans that we are. Human self-awareness is a joke. It's all a result of the random and temporary way you frame the world through perceived opportunities.
You can try to understand yourself by looking at the past. If you can observe with distance, it's not just a reaction to involuntarily simplistic "framing". You can feel like you've escaped the system, thus demonstrating your own intelligence. But this is an illusion. All you're actually doing is framing the world differently: Do I look for an excuse for everything I've done, or do I "step above the system" and look for a reason to dislike myself?
You'd think that with our supposedly superior brains, we could do better than that. You'd think we could deduce what we're like through cold reasoning and an objective sense of perspective. But reasoning is never cold and a sense of perspective is never objective. We don't see the world. We see a list of buttons.
If you have a lot of buttons to push, you're happy and see where you are. If you don't have a lot of buttons to push, you're unhappy and lost. The world is a series of buttons. That's pretty much all there is to life.
Better hope they're good ones!
5 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
A good conversation has both sides thinking they know what to say next. That's the entire point of having a conversation. And the point of having friends is so that you have the perceived opportunity to get into situations like that. If there's someone I don't think I'll be able to do anything with, I don't care one bit about that person. (People who care about anyone are people with more diverse interests than myself, who would therefore see opportunity with everyone.) But tell me that I can give that person comics, or games, or even just talk with them, and suddenly they're important in my little worldview.
- stone_ said:
-
That's a pretty fair opinion. I work pretty much the same way. When I'm going to be meeting new people my first question is always, "Do they play games?"
Maybe it's really selfish/self-centric of me, but I don't put forth any effort into meeting/maintaing relationships that I'm not getting anything out of. I'm not altruistic. I'm friends with people b/c I like being with them; because they have something to offer the relationship. - Mory said:
-
I apologize if this post is ramblingly incoherent. I can't quite tell if I got my point across.
- Mory said:
-
If we're effectively blind (and I'm saying we are), then we're not even certain of the most basic opportunities. This is why we need a reaction. Not necessarily a positive one, but just a reaction. We're not taking opportunities to get that reaction, we're taking opportunities because that's what we do. But without a reaction, we begin to doubt that the opportunity existed to begin with! Getting feedback from our actions comforts us. It lets us know that even though we can't really see the opportunity, yes, it is there.
- Mory said:
-
Oh, by the way: I edited the post. It makes a little more sense now.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Page 16 complete.
Subject has done adequately to this point. However, every page was finished only in the last few hours before deadline.
The subject now has one full week in which to write Page 17. There is no specific deadline. How early the subject works on and completes the page will determine whether he may post.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
You can take the kid out of the school…
And my past still haunts me.
I still dream about school. I don't know how often, because I don't usually remember dreams. But I shouldn't be dreaming about it at all. I've moved on! I've left it behind! I don't want my past to have anything to do with my present.
I was in school for a decade. That's a long time. Each year had ten months, which is also a long time. And there were weeks, and days, and classes, and minutes, and seconds, and moments. The longer I waited for a moment to end, the less meaning the passage of time seemed to have.
You can't go through something like that and not be affected by it. I get it. But I'm not comfortable playing the victim. No, really, I'm not. I want to play the indignant rebel.
When I'd see reality, all the boredom and struggle and meaninglessness, I'd ignore it and replace it with other worlds. The knowledge that I was supposed to be studying was always underneath the surface, but I could push it out of mind.
Now there's nothing to run from. And yet it's still there, underneath the surface. Deep down, I don't understand that school is over. How could it be? School is a fact of life. As soon as I wake up, I'll see the classroom around me.
I still owe those ten years of homework. I still have ten years of tests to study for. I used to say: "If I ignore it enough, maybe it'll go away." No, I mean I literally said that. But it doesn't go away, does it? Even if every school everywhere were burnt down, it still wouldn't go away.
I want to hate my classmates for that. They never gave me an opportunity. They ignored. They mocked with nicknames. They failed to understand. They did absolutely nothing wrong. They were, on the whole, good people.
I want to hate my teachers. They oppressed. They bored. They were incompetent and unqualified. They didn't understand. They did plenty wrong, but how could they know any better? They were only stupid adults.
I look at myself, and see the effects of school everywhere. And the only person I can hate is myself.
And whatever I hate, I ignore and replace.
So I ask, what if I hadn't been in school?
I'd be incapable of sitting still. I'd be less interested in gamism. I'd sing in public. I'd alienate everyone even quicker. I'd be violent. I'd be loud and obnoxious.
I didn't need less misery, I needed more. I think I've suffered. Well, I haven't. I don't even know what suffering means! So I have bad dreams. Boo hoo. A few bad dreams, on top of a wonderful life, and I come to my blog whining.
I should have learned patience.
I should have learned discipline.
I should have learned perspective.
I don't need a life without suffering, I need a life with the right kind of suffering.
So let's ignore the way schools really are. Let's imagine the perfect school.
It would be harsh and merciless. You can never get away with anything, no matter how small. If you fail a test, you start over until you pass. No exceptions.
It would not try to teach information, because knowledge and suffering should always be kept far apart. What is taught and tested is the basics: dealing with boredom, coming out on top in hostile social environments, perseverance, good manners, dealing swiftly with random and meaningless goals, and most of all a tolerance for every type of pain. Without these qualities, one cannot function in a working society. With these qualities, everything else (including knowledge) can follow.
Granted, school already teaches these qualities. But only to a very small degree, because it is teaching them by accident! As my lack of all these qualities proves, the school system is broken. Where it falls apart is in focusing on anything at all other than general qualities. Specific subjects, like reading and math, should come only later and by the person's own initiative. When you mix the general and the specific together, you lose both the general and the specific. The specific, because the student will learn slowly and unwillingly and forget everything immediately afterwards. The general, because the curriculum is not designed to teach it optimally.
There should not be a set number of years. If someone can learn to lose their personality in less than two years, then they will be ready for life at that point. And if it takes more than ten years, then so be it. But no one may leave who is not prepared for the misery and boredom of adult life.
You think I'm kidding with all this, don't you? I'm not kidding. School left me tiny little quirks, when it should have defined me. I should not be who I am. I should never have escaped school.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Page 15 complete.
New goal: Page 16
Deadline: Friday (31/5), 2:00 AM
Back
The Pathetic Life of a Super-Villain
So when I see a plucky little hero, facing an army of hundreds guaranteed to cause massive amounts of damage much too soon to stop, led by a being of unimaginable power who has been planning every contingency for the last five years, I feel sorry for the guy. The super-villain, that is. Because is there any chance in hell that he's going to succeed?
Let's get the whole evil thing out of the way right at the beginning. Yes, the villain is vile. He is homicidal and greedy and if he got his way innocent people like yourself would be in big trouble. Nothing in his sob-story past can justify his actions. And general insanity is a diagnosis, not an excuse.
But does anyone deserve the life of a super-villain?
Think hard: Have you ever read a story involving a contented super-villain?
A villain may try a hundred different plans, each one more ingenious than the last. Not one of them is ever going to last for more than a few minutes once a hero gets involved. It's Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner! And between plans, there are years of prison. So the man is caught in a loop, where he always knows that the closest he's ever going to get to happiness or meaning is the five minutes of anticipation where it looks like he's going to make it.
One side is always going to win, the other side is always going to lose. So it comes as no surprise that a lot of bad guys try to switch sides. It never sticks. Others have tried getting out of the game altogether. That never sticks either. Sooner or later, a super-villain is going to start acting like a super-villain again.
(I wonder why that is. It might be that, robbed of their climaxes so often, they become obsessed with the false hope of winning. If they can beat the hero just one time, maybe that'll make up for all the misery. Or maybe there really isn't any cause, and these people are just wired that way. Some of these characters are so completely devoid of humanity that it wouldn't even occur to them to do anything but crime.)
Whether or not he sees it, a super-villain has nothing to live for. He is never going to get to the top of the world. He is never going to beat his nemesis (though he may come tantalizingly close several times!). He is never going to destroy society, or get rich, or whatever other big plans he has. All he has is the loop. Get out of jail, build a comfortable empire, crescendo towards an actual achievement, see a hero, go back to jail.
Efforts to break the loop are doomed. The best of prisons is still a joke. Brainwashing of either side is guaranteed to wear off or be undone. If a villain leaves town, the hero will coincidentally happen to take a trip to wherever he is on the day of his big job. If the villain tries to stay off the radar, the hero will hunt him down. If the villain is banished to another planet or another dimension, he'll just come back angry. Anything less than death is not permanent enough.
So my first instinct is to yell at the heroes: "Kill him already!" For the sake of society, because the future and certain threat needs to be removed. For the sake of the hero, because if the job isn't finished he can't move on to other things. And for the sake of the villain himself, because what sort of life is he living? End the pain, already!
But wait. Death isn't permanent either. Once a super-villain has established himself, he's created a position in society that will never go away. The next time someone thinks they need this particular set of powers for a job, back out of the grave he comes. You know how it is. And even if he's lucky enough to stay dead, someone else will pop up out of nowhere to take the name (and the misery). And if that person dies, another one pops up. And again, and again, until the original villain is so annoyed by the copycats that he resurrects himself, just to stop involving other people!
There's only one way that a superhero story can have a happy ending. And that's if it doesn't. Let the bad guy win! Let Charlie Brown hit the football!
I want to see Doctor Octopus outsmart Spider-Man.
I want to see Magneto enslave the ordinary humans.
I want to see a season of 24 where Jack Bauer is killed and a big chunk of America is lost.
I want Marvel's new crossover Secret Invasion to end with the alien invaders taking over the world.
I want DC's new crossover Final Crisis, whose tagline is "Evil Wins.", to actually mean it in the end.
I want those annoyingly lucky heroes to get what's coming to them!
Yay, evil!
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Page 14 completed under the deadline.
New goal: Page 15
Deadline: Tuesday (27/5), 2:00 AM
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The Garden: Rule Systems
Okay, that's an ugly name. But this Form needs to be recognized in order to understand how a lot of its sub-Forms fit together.
Let's first take a moment to consider: This is a massive Form. Setting rules is a task uniquely suited to a programmer, and programmers do seem to control modern gamism. On a more theoretical level, there are so many different kinds of rules. Rules for moving units, rules for creating units or changing their properties, rules for betting, rules for bidding, rules for interpreting, rules for communicating.
Just about anything can be looked at as a system of rules, and indeed there are some theorists who analyze all games from that perspective. I maintain that often the rules exist only to provide stability, and not as an end unto themselves. This Form is the exception. In this post, I am referring only to games which hold the rules up as the entire point. Rather than using rules to give structure to content, these games let their content emerge naturally from the structure of rules.
What is the content of a rule? It is predictability, or the lack thereof.
If pressing a button always adds 1 to a number, you always know what the button is going to do. In the other extreme, when you pull a card out of a shuffled deck you never know what you're going to get. The predictability and unpredictability of these rules has a tiny value. Not enough value to sustain a game on its own, but if you combine enough little rules like that, some predictable and some unpredictable, you get a much more interesting experience. And the point of that experience is that the player is constantly trying to anticipate and account for what will happen next.
Notable sub-Forms
I am going to split rule systems into three categories. These sub-Forms are commonly seen as totally separate entities, but in actuality they are all part of the same spectrum, so to speak. The sub-Forms are:
Puzzle: A puzzle game is a system of rules whose results are always perfectly predictable.
Strategy: A strategy game is a system of rules whose results are mostly or vaguely predictable.
Luck: A luck game is a system of rules whose results are mostly unpredictable.
Let's start with the luck game. You've got a bunch of rules relying on randomness or unknowable variables. If the game (following those unpredictable rules) goes one way, you win. If it goes another way, you lose. There may be probabilities and statistics (or oracles and horoscopes!) which the player can consult to feel like he's in control of the situation, but he isn't. That sense of not having control, of fear mixed with hope, is exciting. And some people find it fun, apparently. Don't ask me why, I couldn't tell you.
The strategy game is more fair. You don't know everything, but you know enough to use the rules wisely. The unpredictability might be total randomness, or it might be the actions of another player. Sometimes there's an oppressive time limit, whose pressure makes otherwise predictable events harder to consider. That's strategy too. Strategy is the gray area between puzzle and luck- anything between the two extremes counts. I think there are two attractions here: First off, the player needs to stop and think about what will happen next, with the knowledge that his decision will be the difference between success and failure. This is exciting. Secondly, the predictability of the rules let you build routines, so that you can get caught up in the micro-management of the system. This is addictive.
The puzzle game is straightforward. "Here are the rules, here's where you need to get to, have fun." It's totally predictable. In a sufficiently complex puzzle game you can develop routines, but it won't hold your interest for long without surprises. So the baseline of puzzles is a worthless game. Clever gamists get over this handicap by going a level further: inadequately preparing and intentionally misleading the player. The challenge of a good puzzle is not solving a problem, it's figuring out what the problem is to begin with and what tools you have to solve it with. Once you realize that, you have an "Aha!" moment and you're satisfied. And then the rest isn't really so difficult. You feel like you've mastered the game, because you've understood the twisted mind of its creator. (Or the intricacies of its natural logic.) Or to put it another way, you're trying to find the predictability of the system.
I suppose there could be a fourth sub-Form of rule system: a game whose results are 100% unpredictable. Where you can't even imagine how it's going to go, because you know it's not conceivably going to go where you think it will. So you don't have fear or hope, just a perpetual state of confusion. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play a game like that, which is probably why this isn't an established Form. Then again, I could find this type of game in aspects of life. Let's call it the "drive-the-player-crazy game", and never speak of it again.
The borders between the sub-Forms of rule system are not only difficult to pin down, they are also different from person to person. How predictable something is (and thus what you get out of the game) depends on many factors: for instance, the intelligence and experience of the player.
For me, playing Poker would be a game of luck, because I have no way of knowing what cards everyone else will have. But someone who is a keener judge of character than I might be able to decipher what other people's hands are from their facial expressions and behavior. For him, that's a strategy game where the rules are not just the rules of Poker but also all rules of human behavior.
The more you study something, the more predictable it gets. If you've learned every last nuance of a computer opponent's behavioral code (and it is consistent), then a strategy game against that computer opponent is no longer a strategy game at all, but a puzzle! Never mind that it still looks like a strategy game; it's not. But most people can't understand the "artificial intelligence" to that extent, so it's a strategy game. Or maybe if someone's completely inept and unintelligent it'll be a luck game. (His odds, I'm sorry to say, aren't good.)
When you roll a die, that's a luck game. But let's say (disregarding human limitations) that you could control the tiniest wiggle of your hand and calculate exactly how the die would flip around when you threw it. Then it's not a luck game anymore, it's a puzzle. A very very tough puzzle.
Everything has rules. Every line of code in a game's program is part of a rule. On top of that are rules which come from the context a game is played in. So you can identify the three kinds of rule systems in almost every game, whether the gamist intended it or not. A movement game has occasional luck, an action game has occasional puzzles, a piece of music has occasional strategy. If you watch a particularly predictable movie, you're experiencing a strategy game -the rules being the clichés of scriptwriting. Watching other people's behavior, you're either playing a strategy game or a luck game depending on how well you know them. There the rules are that person's usual behavior patterns.
In all these cases, rule systems are subordinate elements to the actual content. And even if the rule system would be bad on its own (like a puzzle that doesn't require thought), it can work well as a subordinate element.
Many games use "mind challenge" as secondary content, which essentially makes them into puzzles. Because if you're going to be fair about challenging the mind, you're going to have to make all moves predictable. Puzzle platformers (platformers which require you to think) are in this category. So are murder mysteries!
And along those lines, you can say that a good storyteller is playing a strategy game himself, where the rules are both common sense and whatever characterizations and settings he decides on from the beginning. Everything that happens in a story needs to follow naturally and predictably from what came before, only breaking one rule if there's another which specifically allows it to. This is a strategy game. (If the storyteller doesn't follow the rules, it doesn't mean it's not a strategy game. It just means he cheated.) So when you experience a story, you're also the spectator of a strategy game, like you might watch a game of chess.
Speaking of chess, I haven't gotten into genres at all, have I? Oh dear. The genre isn't in what way a game is predictable (because there are only so many ways a game can be predictable), but what the set of rules is like.
There are physics puzzles, where the rules are (simplified versions of) the laws of physics. (The Incredible Machine, Armadillo Run, creative lines of dominoes) There are abstract number puzzles where the rules have no relationship to anything real. (Sudoku) There are transport puzzles, where the rules are that you can move around and push or carry things around. (Sokoban, sliding tile puzzles) There are… you know what, this is silly. You know what puzzles there are. And there are a heck of a lot of common genres of puzzle. All I'll say is there are some kinds of games commonly considered puzzles which I don't call puzzles: Mazes, any tests of vocabulary (crossword puzzles) or other knowledge, jigsaw puzzles (which are actually tests of perception), and probably others I'm not thinking of. If it's not a rule system, it's not a puzzle. Moving on…
There are turn-based strategy games and real-time strategy games. Both are competitive: in the former you take turns with your opponent, and in the latter you constantly move at the same time. There is simulation strategy, where the rules are modeled after a real-world system. There are even subgenres of that genre: sports simulation strategy, empire simulation strategy, world simulation strategy, farm simulation strategy. (The appeal of simulations is that even extremely complex and deep rule systems can be accessible to anyone with a minimum of real-world experience.) Moving on, there is trading strategy and abstract strategy and battle strategy (Whoo boy, is that popular.) and bluffing strategy and card-playing strategy and if you take a word at random from the dictionary, chances are you can stick the word "strategy" after it and have an idea for a game.
A luck game is a luck game. It's all the same to me. If you think there are different kinds of luck games that feel different from each other, and would like to list them, be my guest.
I suspect that even when gamism expands to interface directly with our brains, rule system games will still be around, and almost exactly the same as they are now! There will still be gambling, there will still be simulations and competitions, there will still be mind-bending puzzles. Make of that what you will.
Droplets: Rule Systems
Combining the rules of the real world with abstract rules is a fun recipe for puzzles. Imagine a simulation of society, where you can mess around with space and time in specific ways. Doesn't that sound fun, in an "If only I could do this in the real world" kind of way? Of course, that assumes programmers can get a simulation of society running and somewhat believable. Not much chance of that. Some day, though.
Strategy games tend to have the exact same rules from level to level. In order to keep the game from feeling totally monotonous, gamists like to tack on stories. "If the context is different, maybe the experience will feel different!" The story distracts from the rules, rather than enhancing them. So big stories ought to be the exception, not the rule. Instead the levels should shake things up more, in order to keep predictability a challenge. It's not enough that the goals change- have a few new rules added each level, and other rules taken out! That way, you constantly have to rethink how to proceed rather than settling into easy routines. Explaining the changes in context isn't at all necessary, because who needs a context? If someone tells you "Here are the rules.", you don't say "Tell me the historical and sociopolitical explanations for these rules!", you say "Okay." and start having fun.
When puzzle games have context, that context applies to the whole game. And it never adds anything. Instead, there should be stories behind individual puzzles, stories which have no connection to each other. The context for a puzzle can matter, because it tells you what sort of perspective to take as you look for a solution (and in so doing, it may be tricking you!). This also lets the gamist put in more red herrings than he could otherwise get away with. Who says puzzles have to be simple?
Real-time strategy games already tend to have different sides which are significantly different from each other in gameplay. But they could be more significant. Multiplayer strategy games don't necessarily have to be entirely fair, especially if a game has many varied strategy levels with different rule sets. It's okay in a linear game for one level to make things much harder for one player, because the next level might go in his favor. The practice of "balancing sides" doesn't seem important, or even necessarily beneficial, in that context. And once you start thinking like that, you realize that the experience one player has doesn't have to be even similar to the experience of the other player!
So why can't two players have entirely different rule sets?
Why can't a game randomly pick one of many players, say to the others: "This is who you've all got to beat!", and then give the victim a major advantage?
Why does every player even have to be playing a strategy game?
What if one player played the "god of chaos", and could insert randomness into an otherwise mostly predictable strategy game? Then everyone has to stay away from him, to keep from falling into a luck game!
What if one player were playing a real-time movement game, and the other players were taking turns trying to trap him through strategic construction?
What if some players were managing vast armies of expendable soldiers, and the other players were playing a shooter?
Imagine you're playing a strategy game (where the levels are different from each other), and you're finding one level particularly hard. You keep doing your routines over and over, getting more and more efficient at them, and every time -- you lose. Eventually you have an "Aha!" moment, and then suddenly everything in the level is entirely predictable. You beat it easily, and move onto the next level which is back to really being strategy. See, you've just played a puzzle. But it didn't tell you it was a puzzle. Why should it always be totally obvious whether something is luck, strategy, or puzzle?
You are in a cave. There is a tiny hole through which you can see light, but you can't get through it. It's a puzzle, obviously. But in order to get out, you need to explore deeper into the cave, and learn how the rules of the game work. The more you see, the more rules you can observe and figure out. And you can only get out of the cave once you've mastered many of those rules, by using them all together cleverly. What I am describing is a full-length puzzle game, but one which is one puzzle. A massive one.
A puzzle game, where some of the code that runs the game is editable (in simplified form) from the game itself, and as part of the gameplay! Imagine a large world, where you just want to get to the other side. In order to do that, you're going to have to keep flipping over the way the world works on a fundamental level.
A multiplayer strategy game, following similar principles. The rules to begin with are very clear, but during the course of the game players can pay or vote to add or take away rules, in order to make their units more valuable. The many potential rules are all programmed, and only a minimal number of them become available (randomly) in each game. Everyone is trying to keep the game unbalanced in their favor, and no two playthroughs are the same!
(One version: Several cards representing new rules are displayed, and only one or two of them will get activated at a set point. Until that point, the players pay to change the probabilities of the cards. But it's still up to luck in the end.)
A massively multiplayer strategy game, with hierarchies between players.
Context can be nice in short rule system games. The rules themselves can have an artistic message. This type of game is often pompously called "Serious Games". Well, it's no more serious than anything else, but it's got potential. Especially with multiplayer, where the different rule sets given to the different players can reflect different types of people. Making the game unbalanced can be part of the message, though making it totally impossible for one player takes away longevity.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
41% of Page 14 has been written.
New goal: Complete Page 14.
Deadline: Tuesday(20/5), 2:00 AM.
3 Comments:
- said:
-
A prime percentage? And one that 100 doesn't divide by? Why, that would mean that the number of things to do on this page is evenly divisible by 100. Fascinating. =P
- Mory said:
-
It's rounded down from a fraction.
- said:
-
How horribly inexact.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
LostWindsTradition and Potential
This new initiative, called "WiiWare", isn't going to work the same way as normal retail. Normally (as I understand the process) the developer's working for a publisher, who has a lot of control over the game. The publisher manufactures the physical discs and markets the game to the public. Then it gets shipped to the stores, who are only likely to stock and put on display games which are similar to everything else (because they know that's what sells), and even those only for a limited time. The game finally gets sold at either $30, $50, or $60. There's not much room for creativity there. With WiiWare, there's only one middle-man, that middle-man being Nintendo. (Who will censor, but at least they won't try to homogenize.) The developer makes the game, the developer sets a price, Nintendo puts it on display in their store, and people like me buy it on impulse. This system is similar to how games are already sold on PC.
There's potential here. A game like my theoretical Through the Wind platformer might not do so well in the usual market. A dance-like 2D platformer isn't a safe bet for publishers or retailers. But in this new environment, it could exist and find an audience. Without all the middle-men and their greed, there's actual potential for art.
Out of the opening line-up of WiiWare games, the only one to catch my eye was LostWinds. It's a 2D platformer, 3-4 hours in length, 37 megabytes in size and 10 dollars in price. Look at this trailer to see why I was interested.
What we have here is an interesting set of controls. Though this is a platformer, there is no jump button. Instead, you use the remote to draw gusts of wind, which blow your character around.
Now, let's stop there for a moment. Imagine you're walking through the street, when you decide you'd really like to get up to that roof there. Suddenly, a gust of wind comes from underneath your feet, raising you so much that you can grab hold of the roof and pull yourself up. You'd be exhilarated, no?
That emotion is nowhere to be found in LostWinds. The game is perfectly pleasant. But you never get the sense of joy I'd identify with controlling and mastering nature. Essentially, the gusts of wind are not so much gusts of wind as a fancy double-jump. One gust up, one gust left, you're up. The game slows down as you jump, but not to give gravitas so much as to make your stroke more precise. The "wind" is localized, it is simple to control, it can only be used a few times in a row, and it stops in an instantThe "wind" is localized, it is simple to control, it can only be used a few times in a row, and it stops in an instant -none of these qualities say "wind" to me.
In fact, LostWinds feels pretty standard. At first you can only make one little jump, then later you can jump higher and higher to get to new parts of areas you've already been to. It works, I guess.
There's a lot of exploring. You know I'm a sucker for that. But the areas you explore (and are forced to return to over and over) aren't particularly enjoyable. There are occasionally little toys to interact with (like windmills in the background which can be blown around), and that's laudable, but for the most part the world feels like it was built for the abilities, and not vice versa. This is a critical distinction. Using wind to get over a platform which is the exact height you can get over is an obstacle. Using wind to get over a platform which seems too big for any human is fun. But the controls are not designed for that. You're not supposed to control the wind as you see fit, there are rigid limitations (mentioned earlier). The whole experience is mechanical and rusty. So going back to earlier areas isn't a treat ("I wonder if there's something cool there I missed!"), it's a chore. There are collectibles thrown around to encourage exploring further, but since it's never said what you get for finding them all, that's not much incentive.
Why is there so much backtracking, anyway, if the world design isn't distinctive? Well, it's obvious- it's because the world is so tiny, and the gamists don't want the experience you've paid $10 for to be over in a half hour.
But hold up a second - why is it tiny?
The game, as I said, is 37 megabytes. That's because, the method of distribution being what it is, the size limit for WiiWare games is around 40 megabytes. (A typical Wii game disc, by comparison, holds around 4,800 megabytes.) What I haven't said yet is that the game is gorgeous. I haven't said it because I don't care. High-quality graphics, of the sort this game has, take space. That's space which could have been used for making the game better. The 1996 game Super Mario 64, which I've downloaded for Wii and am enjoying immensely and is in a whole different league from LostWinds (though at the same exact price), is eight megabytes. Eight!
People expect lower graphic quality from downloadable games, so no one would have blamed the gamists for simpler visuals. People would have still bought it for the gameplay. And with that extra size, the game could have been less repetitive and more varied. The issue here is that these are developers who are still operating on the same old priorities. A 44-man team, most of them focused on flashiness. It's a new day, folks. You've got the opportunity with WiiWare to pour all your effort and creativity into making a good game. Don't waste it on superficialities.
The usual way of thinking pervades every aspect of this game. The music is prerecorded rather than synthesized, even though synthesized audio is much smaller. I assume this is why there are only three pieces of music in the whole game, repeating endlessly. There is an insipid fantasy story tacked on top, just because it's usual to put stories in games. There are many characters to listen to, even though that is totally disconnected from the premise and tone of the gameplay. There are enemies all over the place which have to be fought, even though the tone of the game is supposedly peaceful and mellow. (This contradiction is resolved by making all the enemies pushovers. But if there's no threat, then why waste the player's time with fighting?) There is a health system whose design makes no sense at all. It's totally unnecessary and redundant to begin with, but it's there because it's a standard feature of platformers. And finally, the game ends with the promise of a sequel, even though this is the sort of simple idea that does not call for a sequel.
The game has an interesting origin story. Apparently the team behind it come up with "Game of the Week" ideas. And one week someone had this creative idea of controlling the wind, and they all decided to run with it. The whole four-hour game was made in three months, in which time (I am judging solely based on the final product.) everyone else added on formula, imitation and flash. And that guy's good idea was turned into a bland game.
It's not bad, mind you. It's quite decent. And I look forward to seeing what new games this team will make, once they get this LostWinds 2 nonsense out of their system.
But WiiWare was supposed to be more. It could be more.
3 Comments:
- said:
-
Don't give up on it yet; it's got potential. Give it time.
- Mory said:
-
There is absolutely no danger of me giving up on an accessible source of new and creative games. :) That's true even if it doesn't turn out to be the revolution I'm hoping for.
- Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
Great Review.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Page 12 complete.
Page 13 complete.
New goal: begin Page 14.
(Page 14 is complex.)
Deadline: Friday (16/5) 2:00 AM
Friday, May 09, 2008
Progress report:
No progress.
New Deadline: Tuesday (13/5), 2:00 AM
Goals: Complete Page 12 + Page 13.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I would have done it, if my family hadn't forced me to come hiking with them for Independence Day. It's my family's fault there won't be posts! Not mine.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Purveyor of Silliness
It was not long at all before Ariel realized there was a much greater opportunity here. If this little box could make him so happy, then surely it would make other people happy as well! So he set out to find other people.
The first person he met was busily running from one city to another city, after which he would run to a third city, and back to the first. Ariel ran alongside him, and tried to show him the cube. This man did not even turn his head. Ariel suggested that after he finish his running he might stop and look. While still never turning, the man muttered assent. This was a lie: After he got back to the first city, he might run back to the third city. Or maybe a fourth city. And then to the second. Or he might run in place for a while. In any event, Ariel decided he could not wait until the next city (and he was feeling inadequate trying to keep up!), so he moved on.
As he walked, he considered that the cube was still making him happy. He tried to figure out how. It certainly was a nicely proportioned cube. And its blackness was deeper than any paint. Again, Ariel was convinced that there was an opportunity here. Maybe if he brought attention to the proportions and the color, he could make other people happy!
The second person he met was a little girl. He showed her the cube, and she held it for a few seconds. Ariel tried to call her attention to the blackness, to the perfect proportions, but she had already lost interest. Ariel moved on.
As he walked, he considered the smooth texture of the cube. It was like no material he'd ever encountered! It made him happy to just feel the surface, feel the sharp edges, and feel the weight of it. It was a perfect weight, to be sure- it was exactly as heavy as one would expect it to be, but so exactly that it surprised the holder. Truly, the weight of the cube was a revelation. Ariel considered what an honor it would be for an undistinguished person like himself to share this piece of perfection with others!
The third person he met was a young man who liked throwing things. Ariel, pointing out the perfection of the weight and the texture, eagerly handed over the cube to be admired. Ariel had to walk far.
As he moved on, he noticed that it had a very distinctive smell. This smell was unlike any he had ever perceived before, and it was very appealing. Also, if he held the cube to his ear he could hear a strange sound, which was also distinctive and appealing.
The fourth person he met held it and looked at it for a second, and commented that it was "nice". Ariel excitedly took the opportunity to talk about the texture and the weight and the sound and the smell and the color and the proportions, and was politely asked to go away.
The fifth person he met wouldn't look at it, because "No cubes can possibly be as good as the ones I make!".
The sixth person he met only liked hexagons, and wanted to chop off some edges.
The seventh person he met tried to eat it.
The eighth person he met didn't care.
The ninth person he met ran away.
Ariel decided the cube must have no value at all. Certainly it had made him happy before, but that must have shown only that there was something wrong with him! How could anyone enjoy holding a little cube? It was worthless! And with that thought, he threw it on the ground angrily.
As he walked away, he heard someone behind him. Turning, he saw that someone had come to pick it up. And this person was admiring it. "Never in my life", that person said, "have I touched anything so perfect!".
Ariel was unsure which way to go. If he took the opportunity to talk about the cube, and to show everything he had seen in it to someone else, would that sentiment remain? Or was the statement, to begin with, mere hyperbole?
Ariel proceeded with caution.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I think this is one of the best things I've ever written. Over and over I get to situations like these, and I desperately want to write about them until I realize that there's nothing to say that this post didn't already say better.
I wish there were someone with exactly the same opinions as me on everything. That way I'd always have opportunities with him.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Goals:
- Subject must complete Page 11.
- The transition between Page 2 and Page 9 should be clarified, if possible.
Both goals have been completed.
Next deadline: Thursday (08/5)
Goal: Complete Page 12.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
"Are games art?"
…
Okay, well, first of all, you asked that as a simple question, a simple yes-or-no question, so I first of all should give you a simple answer, which is "Sometimes.", but behind the question is a whole historical, historical sociological sort of way of thinking, which I object to.
See, we say that over here is entertainment and over here is art. And this comes from the class system, right? We've got the lower experience and the higher experience, the one which the lower class enjoys and the more sophisticated one that the higher class likes. And even though these days there aren't such limits on where you get what and you can get really good art or entertainment for free or really cheap, so even now we've still got the… remnants of that class system. And that's the distinction between "art" and "entertainment".
And… you'll probably think I'm stupid for saying this, but there isn't really… that's not a clear distinction at all. It's arbitrary. It's vague and hard to define. And it doesn't really mean anything. If you're making something, you don't say "I'm going to make a work of art!" or "I'm going to make a work of entertainment!", you say "I'm going to make a good work.". The creator is trying to evoke emotions, that's what this is all about. Right? The creator is, the creator of any work, is trying to evoke emotions through whatever means he feels like using. That's art and entertainment. So we say that art's here and entertainment's here, but it's not like that. They're all part of the same field! Creation is creation.
And what people tend to forget is that there is such a thing as bad art. Most art is bad, and you just don't see it because nobody's gonna put that in a museum. You've got experts hand-picking the best of the best out of the past few hundred years, and putting that on display, and we get the idea that art is great. But entertainment is great, too! If you're evoking emotions, you've done a good job, and it doesn't make any difference if a bunch of snobs in the 19th century would call it "art" or "entertainment"!
We say that art is inspiring and serious and world-changing and well-done and significant, but.. If I were to take, if I were to go through the last few hundred years and pick out the best-of-the-best of entertainment, the best magic acts, the best movies, the best comedians, the best videogames, you think that wouldn't be inspiring?! You think it wouldn't be significant? But we don't get the best of the best, we get whatever's going now. So we see it as, like, a scale, where you've got zero and then entertainment and then art, but it's not like that. There's just a scale of quality, and the "art" and "entertainment" the whole… argument over what is art and what is entertainment has nothing to do with it!
There's nothing inherently better about evoking emotions through dance and evoking emotions through people punching each other. Now you probably want to say that I'm an idiot, that dance is great and people punching each other is stupid, but that's the whole sociological thing I'm talking about! What does it matter how you get the audience to feel something, as long as you do? If you do, …bravo. You've done something good. And that's what all of it is about.
So now we have games. Where everything is possible, there are no limitations and set rules. It may seem like there are things we can't do, but that's just because even the best of modern technology isn't giving us everything we want yet. But we'll get there eventually, when the technology gets better. In principle, everything is possible.
So now we have everything and we're still holding onto our little groups. Here's art, here's entertainment. They're separate. And even though gamism encompasses everything, everything we could possibly want from it, we're still trying to fit it into these little boxes. Because that's what we do, from hundreds of years of… experience, I guess. Habit. We try to say "It's entertainment, because anyone can enjoy it!", and then some people say "It's art, because there's this neat game here which is hard to understand!" And we argue about it, moving games back and forth between these two categories which we think are miles apart. Guys, there is no distinction! Games are entertaining! Games are artistic! That's the end of the story.
So when you ask me if games are art, it may be that in fifty years people will look back and say, "All those videogames? All those early videogames, like Zelda and Myst and all that? Those were art.". But I really hope they don't. I hope that in the future we'll be more enlightened, and we'll stop dividing things into art and entertainment.
You could make a game that's similar enough to old art forms that a guy in the 1800's would say: "Ah, that's art." There's nothing wrong with that. Actually, that's really good, to try and be more intellectual or focused on aesthetics. But thinking that that's a whole different world from the "lower" forms of entertainment, and that we've gotta let games be one or the other, that's just wrong. Games don't have to pick a side. At least, they shouldn't have to.
Now, something which makes me… hopeful for the future is that these days, if you're talking about games, you don't talk about it being "artistic" or "entertaining", you say it's "fun". Which can mean both things, because "fun" doesn't mean anything. Entertainment is fun and art is fun. Everything's fun if it's good. So maybe this is, like, a sign that we're throwing away the old categories. And people still hold on to those categories and say that only this can be fun, but maybe that'll go away. Maybe.. Well, I guess what I'm saying is I just hope we get out of this way of thinking.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
(update: 18/4, 4:16)
Page 10 complete.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Internet Nations
As I was saying, I'm an American as far as culture is concerned.
I watch American TV shows and movies.
I read American comics.
I play games adapted for Americans.
I speak American English.
Not too long ago, this would be very difficult and undesirable for a person living here. If you live in Israel, you speak the Israeli language and you watch Israeli TV and you read Hebrew books and you expose yourself to Israeli culture, just because that's what you have. And you learn to like it.
Ah, but the internet is breaking down borders, isn't it? I can get American entertainment just a few hours after they get it themselves! I can spend an entire day talking with people online without hearing a single word of Hebrew! The internet has everything short of the essentials: housing, food, water, electricity. (I look forward to the day when those are covered as well.) And it's accessible to everyone, without borders. The internet doesn't care where you live.
..in principle, at least. Where this isn't true is whenever big corporations are involved. If I go to the website of, say, an American TV network, it won't let me see its streaming video. It checks where my service provider is. For some reason, the American companies don't want to lose the national borders. Maybe someone can explain to me why, because I have no idea.
A lot of media is still distributed in physical form. There are a few reasons for that. First of all, it's to prevent piracy. (This doesn't work, as my entertainment habits attest.) Secondly, people who haven't learned to access everything by computer yet think there's some intangible essence of media that's lost if they make the change. This position is wrong and will disappear with time. (At this point, I wouldn't want to see comics on anything but a computer screen.) I'm sure there are some other reasons too, but I'm not particularly interested. What matters is, discs and paper are still around. That's a problem.
I've mentioned the difficulties of getting videogames here before. If not for the rampant piracy on the internet, I would never have discovered videogames at all, since they have next to no presence at all here. Nintendo doesn't sell to Israel, not because they have anything against us but just because we're so tiny and insignificant to them. So if you want a Nintendo system, you've got to pay four times the price to get an imported one, for which it's rare to find any actual games here.
I thought the Wii would be different, because you can buy games through it directly from the internet. No shipping, just a direct download from Nintendo's servers to my system. Well, it doesn't work that way. It demands a billing address which is in Nintendo of America's territory (North and South America). If you don't have one, you're not allowed to download. (I called the technical support, who were very surprised that anyone in Israel would have an American Wii. They were no help.)
The only way, I learned, to get these games off the internet (and they are only available from the internet) is to buy a special card. Each one represents a certain amount of money, and it has a code you can type in to retrieve it from the online store. These cards can only be bought in America, of course. I can buy one online off of Amazon, but they won't ship it outside of America. Nintendo doesn't want to sell to anyone outside America.
Someday, big businesses may finally get the idea of the internet. I look forward to that day impatiently.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
As usual, it turns out I saw a problem where there was none. The Wii Shop works fine! Moshe suggested I try buying something with a billing address unrelated to the credit card. It wouldn't have occurred to me that this might work. But I tried, and it did! It doesn't actually seem to care where your billing address is. So now I'm having a blast with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda. It looks like I'm not going to have any trouble.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Suspending until Sunday(06/4)…
Page 8 written.
There are severe glitches.
This is unacceptable.
Suspending until Wednesday(09/4)…
Page 9 is also complete.
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Garden: Movement
Gamism Theory
The primary content of a movement game is its control scheme. There are a lot of established and potential genres for movement control: flight, platformer (jumping), driving, swimming, climbing, running. (These are commonly seen as totally distinct Forms.)
Movement games will always exist. Moving around is the most natural thing for us to do, to the point where we get bored if we don't keep moving. And each time new hardware brings new kinds of controls with it, gamists are instantly inspired with subjects for potential movement games.
Some types of movement are fun to begin with. Flight, for instance. Everyone wants to be able to fly. Other types of movement are pretty boring, but you can make fun games around them by adding challenges.
Take a mouse cursor, for instance, like the one you're probably using now. Move it in a circle a few times. Okay, I take it back- that is pretty entertaining, for some reason. (I guess I'm easily amused by such things.) But there's not enough entertainment there to fill a long game with.
So you add another element native to movement games: obstacles. These are objects which may not be touched, or else you lose. Suddenly, you've got something more worthwhile. You're not just randomly waving your hand around, you're challenging yourself to move around skillfully. Another native element is the reverse: objects which you are encouraged to touch, perhaps with points or additions to the control. (Objects which add abilities are usually called "power-ups".)
Already that's enough for a good time. Here's a good illustration: Squares
More can be built on top of these elements, which is also well-established as a part of the Form. The frequency of obstacles can be manipulated to create dynamic levels of intensity. Power-ups can be used to add temporary variations on the gameplay. Plus there are other variations on the do touch/don't touch mechanic: objects which must be touched or approached, walls which may not be touched, objects which may be touched from one side but not another, objects which are bad to touch until you touch something else, and then they're good. The objects can move around in set ways, and the player can progress through entire worlds made of positive objects, negative objects, and neutral objects.
There might also be clear instructions on which moves to make, which you are then required to follow precisely. This is challenging even without any obstacles.
These conventions, which have accumulated over the years, can be put in the service of any sort of control, two-dimensional or three-dimensional (or one-dimensional, in the case of early movement games like Pong).
There's abstract movement, like the mouse cursor. (Now that I put it that way, I guess Ball Revamped is an "abstract movement game".) There are vehicles: cars (which are called "driving games"), planes (which are called "flight games"), boats (which aren't called anything, because there aren't enough games like that). There's dance, where all movement corresponds with how a real human body would move around. (Real-world dance is a sub-Form of the movement game.) There's swimming and climbing and running and jumping. And then there's just plain human walking around, but who'd want to play a game about that? (It shouldn't be a pure movement game if that's the type of movement.)
Movement, being such a useful activity, is often used as a subordinate element in other types of games. This is so common that it can often be seen as a tool given to the player (much like camera control or an option menu), rather than entertainment in and of itself.
Notable sub-Form
A popular element in movement games is a timer, where you have to reach a certain point before the timer runs down. Games in which this element gets a large focus are called racing games. This sub-Form has accumulated many conventions of its own over the years, evolving out of the emphasis on speed: repetitive environments, competitors, special floors which speed you up, etc. Though most racing games are in the driving genre of control, any other sort of control could be used in a racing game provided it is possible to move fast.
The movement game is very close to the action game. If you move to push something, which do you look at as the dominant element: the movement or the pushing (which is encompassed in the action Form)? If the former, then it is a movement game. If the latter, then it is an action game. This distinction is ambiguous, and many conventions are shared by the two Forms. However, there exists a hybrid (action movement game) when both movement and action are prominent. (The action-platformer is the most common genre of this hybrid.)
The movement game is also close to the exploration game. Though it is possible to see a world from a distance (which is unrelated to the movement Form), it is more appealing to step into the world via some sort of control. Since movement can become such a defining element of these experiences, it is not incorrect to classify these games by their controls rather than their world design. Movement games often include detailed worlds, but when this as well as the control is a focus the game is a movement-exploration hybrid. (Super Mario 64, for instance, is an exploration platformer.)
When gamism expands to interface directly with our brains, the movement game will give us different bodies and states of being, so that we can feel what they would be like. That is what movement games strive to be.
Droplets: Movement
Controls needn't be constant from the beginning to the end. They can change dynamically to express different emotions. Ease of movement is freedom, restricted movement is oppression. Physical attraction to certain objects can symbolize metaphorical attraction, and one path being more freeing than another indicates a character's preference. Gravity can change, friction can change, acceleration can change, appearance can change, the interface itself can change. These things can change suddenly or gradually, they can be jarring or subtle. Changes can happen for artistic reasons or just to keep things fresh and entertaining. In any case, there are many emotions to work with when one starts changing controls along the way.
A story could be told with those emotions. Not a story like game "developers" put in movement games now- movie-like literal plots told in cutscenes and voice acting. Those stories clash with the reality of the game. No, I'm talking about stories expressed through movement. Characters who move differently around each other than they do alone, to reflect their relationships. Characters with arcs, represented by control dynamics rather than dialogue. Places where the rules of movement work differently, to represent the nature of their societies.
Abstract stories can also be created in the manner of dance, where the player is told how to move and the emotions those movements create are evoked in an audience, not the player himself. The audience may be watching over the internet, or in the same room, or in a performance hall. This changes the nature of the work to performance art. The player can be instructed through notation, overlayed on the screen during practice. In the actual performance, a large number of players can coordinate with each other- this would be a technically impressive performance.
A cooperative movement game. One player goes on the other one's back, then pulls his friend up. One player touches a switch, so the other one's obstacles move away. The players swing each other, or are pulled by each other, or coordinate with complex machinery or maneuvers. One player teaches the other how to make unusual moves. Alternatively, the two players could have very different types of control. What one can do, the other cannot, and they can only progress together.
Life-counting is silly.
New types of controllers completely change the feel of movement controls, and new types of control are inspired every time such controllers are introduced. But gamists could go farther. Small controllers could be bundled in with movement games, where the controller is designed for the game and not vice versa. Or the gamist could decide to use existing controllers in unusual ways, as when Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat used drums for running. The Wii controllers can be attached to legs, or arms, or to many parts of your body all at once (with four of them). Or a platformer could be played on a trampoline. Or a plane could be moved by subtly tilting your arm (with a camera). These are not superficial changes- they would profoundly change the experience of movement.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
The distinction I make here between action games and movement games is wholly arbitrary. Indeed, it is valid to consider everything I am describing here as contained within the action game. I have invented the term "movement game" because within this Form I see the potential for beauty, whereas the action game (as far as I know) can only aspire to intensity.
Friday, March 28, 2008
There has been no progress.
This is unacceptable.
Subject may be responsive to deadlines,
Evidence: successful Megillah readings.
Solution.
This report will now be suspended.
Continue on Monday (31/3).
Update
It is now Monday.
Subject has not made progress.
There has been no progress.
You may not write a post.
Your excuses will stop now.
Confirmed.
Page 7 complete.
Posting privileges granted.
5 Comments:
- said:
-
I find that the two things that really get me to be productive are deadlines and working with other people. I don't know who you could work with, but I felt like I should mention it.
- stone_ said:
-
Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-).
- Mory said:
-
If I can't work out my problems with Smilie, this blog is not going to be likeable or interesting for much longer. It will just be a monument to my failure as a human being.
- Mory said:
-
I should have mentioned in the post what motivated me so quickly: For an hour or so after writing the post I was seriously depressed. I didn't want to do anything that I'd enjoy: playing games, reading comics, watching TV shows, browsing the web. I couldn't take my mind off my lack of self-respect, and I knew there was no way around it except to write page 7. So I wrote page 7.
- stone_ said:
-
If you want any mathy programming help with anything, I'm happy to consult on such things :)
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Please Insert Change
The thing that bothers me most about my family is that there is not one person in it who can appreciate The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When you play a game that good, you naturally want to share it with someone, but there is no one here who cares.
What a surprise! I don't believe it- all my Imaginary Friends have come! You really didn't need to go to all this effort. It's so nice to know I still have all you guys.
We had a Ping Pong table out, so two of us were playing on that. And the other two were playing pool. And we went back and forth between the two games, and we'd watch each other's games. I'd never seen our family before as anything but an odd assortment of mismatched parts, but in this multiplayer environment it all just clicked.
[I started] playing with Mickey and Michael. And man, is it fun. I wouldn't have known to spend time with these guys, because they are much younger than me in the Real World. But in the game, they might be just as old as I am. I mean, they're good players.
I never see the lack of change coming. I always promise myself that things are going to be different very soon. This drives me, as it drove me to buy the Wii a year or two earlier than was convenient. So one day when we were all driving together for some reason or another, I proposed my idea to my family. For my birthday, I didn't want food or even to leave the house. What I wanted was, for a whole day on 21 February, to sit at home and play multiplayer games.
I imagined Miriam playing Wii Tennis. I imagined Dena playing the simple minigames in Wii Play. I really wanted the chance to force my mother to play a level of Super Mario Galaxy. I imagined all four of us sitting around playing Pac-Man Vs.. And I imagined that just maybe, if I used my birthday in this manner, they might realize Nintendo games are fun and start playing one for themselves.*-------
In the days preceding the event, I went to all my friends who might possibly come. That way, at any point I couldn't get my family to play, I'd still have something to do. (If worst came to worst and no one showed up, I planned to go back to Tallon IV in my downtime. That's always worth a visit.) So I told Moshe to come. And I told Harel to come. I told Tamir and Eli to come. I told Michael to come. I told Avri to come. I told them to come whenever it was convenient.
Avri deserves special mention, because I haven't mentioned him before and his games night has been a big deal for me. Avri was playing great videogames back in the 80's, and not so long ago he and his wife Lorien moved next door. Nowadays he's a big fan of German-style strategy games, so every Tuesday at 7:45 a bunch of people (myself included) go to his house to play strategy games until around midnight or so. When I first started going it showed me a whole world of games I hadn't even heard of, and I was pretty overwhelmed. The other players took a lot of time on each turn, planning and anticipating and analyzing. So it took me months to win any games at all. Once I did, I started feeling like I had a place there. From then on, I've been vocal about what I'd like to play each week: Sticheln. It's a card game. Though I never do well at it, I enjoy the gameplay. I suggested Sticheln so often that it became a running gag: Avri would ask "What should we play?", I'd yell "Sticheln!", and everyone else would groan in unison "No, Mory.". But I digress.
I came back late after the games night of the 20th, happy for winning one game and coming close in another. And on the walls were the best birthday signs I'd ever seen. There were drawings of rain drops taped to the back door, with a thoughtful-looking rain cloud face nearby. It made me smile.
That night, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. The closer I got to the moment of change, the less I was able to imagine what it might be like. And all that was left was uneasiness.
I started the day off with a bit of bowling with my mother. I saw this as warm-up, she saw it as fulfilling her obligation. Then she went to work, which is what she'd much rather do than play games. Miriam and Dena were at school.
Harel was the first to show up. I'd been eager to show him the Wii. I played a lot of games with him. Then we started a game of Metroid Prime 3, so that he could see how first-person shooters play on the system. Then Eli came, and Harel left, and Eli played for a while. Then Michael came. And Mickey, even though he doesn't live here anymore! And Tamir showed up bringing some good snacks. And Avri came with a gift: a Sticheln deck! Toward the end of the day, we had four-player games of Pac-Man Vs. going, with myself and Tamir and Tamir's friend Esther and Avri. And even Lorien showed up, because she wanted to see what the tennis was like. It was nonstop fun.
And when we went down for cake, I saw an opening given that so many people were down there at once. So I played my latest piano piece, and they listened. And Avri said it sounded like it would work nicely in a videogame, because it was epic and emotional.
And then we went back to playing. During this time, I kept trying to get Miriam and Dena in for a game or two of Pac-Man Vs., but they kept dodging. They had better things to do than play games, apparently. My father, I found out only later, had wanted to join in, but while he was home the den was constantly packed!
Moshe showed up around 10:30 or so, after most of my friends had left. I played a few small games with him, then went down to eat. It was only at this very point that I felt hungry, even though I hadn't eaten since lunch, because in a choice between food and games there's no choice. And we talked about random things. And then it was very late and I didn't want to wake my parents, so we went outside and kept talking. And talking. And talking. Moshe's a lot like me, you know.
On a rational level, my lack of a connection with my family does not matter. So what if they don't play games? I have people I can play games with. So what if I can't talk with my family? I've got people I can talk to.
And yet, it does matter to me. These are the people I see all the time. Not having a connection there does create a certain emptiness.
It is my hope that no matter how much fun I may have, that emptiness will (on some level) drive me.
1 Comment:
- stone_ said:
-
Your birthday party was fun. I don't get how people don't enjoy video games. I can understand not having time, or not getting entirely enthralled by them, but to not enjoy any types of games is just weird to me.
By the way, I just finished playing through Yahtzee's 1213. The alternate ending was ridiculous.
I'm glad you enjoy game night. I'm really happy that it's been so successfull and we have the draw that we've been getting. You've also become a pretty good competitor too.
Page 6 is in playable form.
Page 6 is awkward.
Page 6 is likely to contain bugs.
Page 6 will need more work later.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Almost Possible
The play has since been canceled, which was both a relief and a disappointment. A relief, because I had started to get scared by the responsibility of being there. Hearing the news was like a weight taken off my shoulders.
But on the other hand, it had just started to get fun. It was just like old times, in the chorus with Uri Aharon at Dvir. Once again I had my small group of peers I sat with, this time including Moshe! Once again I was working with a very nice singing director- in this case Moshe's sister Aviella. Once again I acted like a know-it-all, correcting the director at every perceived mistake, to overcompensate for not actually being very good. Once again I was going to my beloved Jerusalem on a regular basis. Once again I was making a fool of myself regularly. Yep, just like old times.
Oh well.
A while back, I went to meet a group of videogame creators in Tel Aviv.
Page 5 is complete.
Here is a complete list of
the challenges Page 5 posed:
- Smilie had to jump.
- Smilie had to smile.
Page 5 took the subject 34 days.
The subject is lazy and unproductive
and will only be allowed half a post.
1 Comment:
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Two Glasses
Tension causes progress. If the world were to one day become completely happy and show no signs of ever stopping, it would be at a dead end. That would be the appropriate time for God to destroy the world completely.
But none of these fantasies possessed my imagination like the dream of my future self coming back to get me. So strong and constant was this wish that I didn't think of it as a fiction, so much as a destiny. I would never speak of this with anyone, but deep down I knew that at any one of those banal, pointless days, he would come for me.
Nonetheless, Ariel was quite proud of his achievement. There was a mirror on one wall, reflecting the entirety of the house's interior. And when he gazed into this mirror, he saw exactly how he fit in with his achievement. He was a part of the house, and that thought gave him comfort. So he spent much of his days staring into the mirror.
On the ceiling above that was a skylight built into the roof, built to keep the house bright. Looking upward did not give a sense of comfort. By day the sun would hurt his eyes, and by night the countless stars made Ariel feel small and insignificant. And whenever he raised his head to look through it, he also perceived cracks in the walls, severe enough to take the entire house down! So he would work tirelessly to fix the cracks before it was too late.
Once, an entire week went by in which Ariel peered only through the mirror, and never the skylight. It was a happy week. That is, until a piece of the house fell on Ariel's head! He survived the blow, and quickly set to work. It was almost too late, but he managed (with much difficulty) to preserve the house. It was then that Ariel realized his folly, and he smashed the mirror into a thousand pieces.
So caught up in the emotion of the moment was he, that he forgot to send the mirror outside before doing so. And so the floor was covered in shards. To this day it hurts Ariel to walk in his own house, but the house still stands.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Pages 3 and 4 complete.
2 Comments:
- said:
-
how is the smiley thing coming along? is it working well?
- Mory said:
-
No more progress to report yet.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Wii
This new system, unlike the Gamecube, has no clear personality. If it is defined at all, it is defined by contradictions and disagreements.
It is wonderful to have an avatar in my own image to play with.
The controls are ridiculously sophisticated. But each game uses only the bare minimum of sophistication it needs. The result? The games are so intuitive both my parents (who I have never managed to get to play games before!) were instantly able to beat me at bowling.
Wii Sports is awesome. Especially its tennis game. It should have more depth. But it is already fun in the sense that NES games might be fun.
The interface does not prioritize game-playing.
I didn't want Wii Play, a collection of random mini-games. It is missing many important features, such as four-player multiplayer and extra ways of playing. It is surprisingly fun.
Super Mario Galaxy is not quite as accessible as I hoped. It is a classic.
Wii games are not better than Gamecube games.
Metroid has been turned into a FPS. It is a pretty good FPS.
I still can play Gamecube games, and in fact I frequently am. There is not a sharp division in my mind between Wii games and Gamecube games. The Wii opens up possibilities. It does not decide between them.
There are many old games I'd like to play on the Wii now. I look forward to being able to buy them directly from the internet.
The motion-sensing controls give me a million ideas. I don't expect any of them to be created. I don't know what sorts of games will be created anymore.
Even the bad games are fun when they are gimmicky.
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is much better in its Gamecube version.
Miriam and Dena still won't play. Maybe they're just busy. Maybe I should give up.
There seem to be a lot of games for Wii (out already or coming soon) which I'd enjoy playing. Maybe I'm more open to casual games than I used to be.
There isn't enough focus for me. I like stories with focus. I don't know what the Wii is.
This is fun.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Page 1 and Page 2 are complete.
Subject has started work on Page 3.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Inspiration
Famous creative people are often asked that question, and they never have satisfying answers. Whoever's asking the question feels like there's some great repository of inspiration that they haven't found.
But it's the wrong question. Artists get their ideas from everything they see. A writer might get an idea for a short story by looking at a toaster. Even if he happened to remember that that's where he got the idea from, it wouldn't mean anything.
The right question is "How do ideas come?" And you're in luck, because I happen to know the answer to that.
Ideas come from imitating elements, correcting mistakes, utilizing available tools and fulfilling needs.
They might not look like much, but all creativity is based on these four simple principles.
Imitation
This is when you look at something and say "I could do that!".
You see a person in the Real World, with a personality that surprises you. You see an opportunity: "I could entertain people with these characteristics!". So you write down a story, about a person who is defined by those traits that you found interesting.
You watch a movie, and analyze its structure. "Hmm.", you say, "That's really not so complicated!". So you use that structure yourself.
You see a pretty sunset. You say: "I could impress people with those colors!". So you draw a painting of the sunset, or use its colors on something else.
This is the least impressive kind of inspiration. If someone notices that you took an idea from somewhere, they redirect some of their admiration from you to whoever you got the idea from. So you've got to be subtle in your imitations. Imitating format or technique is fine. Imitating very vague ideas is fine. Imitating individual characteristics is fine, but not if you imitate too many all from the same place. (Better to take just a little bit from here, and a little bit from here, and a little bit from here…)
Imitating impressions you get from nature, or phenomena which aren't controlled by individual people (such as politics or society), is perfectly acceptable. You can also repeat yourself, especially within a single work. (This suggests to the audience that you know what you're doing.)
Correction
This is when you look at something and say "I could do that better!".
When you see a good idea badly implemented, you start thinking about what it should have done.
You analyze your dissatisfaction, to see where it went wrong. Maybe there's a flaw in the creators' thinking, maybe you just personally disagree with their approach. Either way, you end up with an idea you like better, and which you wouldn't have come up with without being dissatisfied in the first place.
(I think it's important to be exposed to things you don't like, so that you can learn from them.)
You hear a story of pure good vs. pure evil, and it leaves you cold. You think about what you want from the story that you're not getting. Maybe you're looking for people to relate to, and they're too simple and un-human. So you come up with variations on the characters which make them more flawed, or more like people you know in life.
You see all the problems with society, and start analyzing the problem. Through this analysis, you might come up with an idea for a better society.
Sometimes the ideas you come up with are better than the ones you're rejecting. Sometimes they're not, because they've got all sorts of problems of their own. Either way, it's nice to try.
Utilizing tools
This is when you ask "What can I do?".
You have a paintbrush. You have a canvas. You draw a line. The only reason you drew that line is because you wanted to do something with that paintbrush and canvas.
It is possible to have inspiration in a vacuum. If you just fool around with your tools enough, eventually you'll (by accident) find something you like doing with them.
By "tools" I don't just mean literal tools, I also mean techniques and potential subjects.
Basically, this is like a baby throwing toys around to see what happens. The artist tries everything he can, whether or not he thinks it'll be good, whether or not he thinks he'll enjoy doing it. Just by trying things for the sake of trying things, he'll find a good idea.
This type of inspiration is how you'd write a rhyme. You've got a sentence you'd like to start from, and you need to continue it somehow. You don't know how, so you just throw words around in your head until you come up with one that rhymes. Then you fill in the rest of the line. If that doesn't work, you throw around more words and repeat. If you're still not satisfied, you try something else for the first sentence and start over. With patience, you eventually come up with something that works.
Every time the technology available to artists improves, it sparks a lot of inspiration in a lot of people. The artists try to think of every possible usage of the new tool, whether or not there's any reason for it, and eventually one of those many ideas seems like a good one.
This is not a reliable method of inspiration, but often it's all you've got.
Fulfilling needs
This is when you ask "What should I do?".
It's the easiest kind of inspiration, probably because we're all so experienced in it from dreaming. You're missing something in your life, so you invent it.
You're lonely, so you write a story about people you'd like.
You find the world confusing and uncontrollable, so you make a painting with a clear and simple order to it.
Often you'll come up with the idea for a work of art just so that you can show yourself what sort of art you'd like to experience.
Or you might see that other people would like to experience a certain type of art. You might see an opportunity there, and come up with an idea to satisfy them. But this takes more effort and results in a weaker idea than if you focused only on yourself.
So there you have them, the rules of creativity. Now, I'm hardly the most creative person ever, so I might be totally wrong. If so, I hope you'll comment with an example of creativity which is not an application of these principles. But I'm pretty confident that all inspiration follows the same patterns.
So let's say a writer looks at a toaster. That's where he gets an idea from, which doesn't matter at all. But how does he get an idea?
First of all, he's bored. So he tries to think of all the possible things one might do with a toaster. (Utilizing tools) One of the many bad ideas he has is that people might strap them to their heads, and shove in bread whenever someone starts a conversation with them. That way, if the person talks for too long he gets hot, burnt toast shot into his face. (Fulfilling needs) The writer then decides he likes the idea of regulating the length of conversations. So he imagines a society where there are penalties for long blabbering. (Imitation of the previous idea) But something about that leaves him unsatisfied. He decides it's too much like a utopia, and devises a group of rebels dedicated to the cause of never-ending jibber-jabber. (Correction) He writes an amusing story about their efforts.
That's how an idea is born.
Page 0 is complete.
(Page 0 is a very simple page.)
Work on Pages 1 and 2 is 62% complete.
(Total Pages: 0 To 50)
Sunday, December 16, 2007
♫ Some Day Myself Will Come… ♫A Fairy Tale
I dreamt of programming a perfect replica of human intelligence. I dreamt of single-handedly creating hit science fiction movies. I dreamt of crafting educational software to put the school system to shame. I dreamt of writing "quests" the likes of which the world had never seen. I dreamt of gaining the respect and admiration of those who looked down at me.
But none of these fantasies possessed my imagination like the dream of my future self coming back to get me. So strong and constant was this wish that I didn't think of it as a fiction, so much as a destiny. I would never speak of this with anyone, but deep down I knew that at any one of those banal, pointless days, he would come for me.
Over and over I imagined how it would play out. He'd show up, a handsome adult, and declare simply: "I'm you from the future." Then I would ask him for the secret password, never written down and spoken to no one, which he would speak at once. (This was little more than a formality, as I would know as soon as I saw him.) And then he'd take me away to his studio and show me the tools and techniques he'd developed, so that I could join him for the rest of the journey. And in this way each of us would find the missing part of ourselves.
The days were empty and hated. Each one was exactly the same as the last. And through it all I waited, but my future self never came to the past.
The years have passed. What was once a near-certainty is now just another unfulfilled promise, like all those I've made to myself. And as the childhood schedules have faded away as well, I don't need to dream as often as I used to. But still I have not forgotten.
And so it will be that when I am thirty-seven, a man of little ambition and less achievement, I will go back in time to meet myself.
The relationship began with gifts. I first gave him a Nintendo 64 with Ocarina of Time, to point him in the right direction. Then Super Mario 64 to inspire, Banjo-Tooie to build his worldview up further, and Rayman 2 to break it down. Also Conquests of the Longbow to inspire, The Secret of Monkey Island to build his worldview up further, and Myst (and its sequel) to provide an alternative. Also Metroid II, and also Super Mario Bros. 3, and also Babylon 5, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Bone, and Uncle Scrooge, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and many others over a period of twelve months.
He enjoyed the gifts and found his life enriched for them. But he was the sort of person who would always disagree with those around him, so he was disappointed in me from the start. He was expecting a hero, and I was only a man. But he loved me unconditionally.
And it was partly because of this that I learned discipline! He taught me to get my work done, because it is much easier to teach than to do for oneself. Every time he saw me, the first thing he asked was: "What progress have you made?". And I usually had a good answer for him, because I loved him and hated to disappoint him.
Meanwhile, I taught him to be a better person. Whenever he acted shamefully (which was sadly often), I'd criticize him for it. And he hated to disappoint me, so he'd always change.
But this was too good to be true, because his parents started to worry. Surely their boy should not be spending so much time with an old hermit! So I was forced to divulge my true identity to them. Unfortunately they didn't believe me, and nothing I said could convince them. So they forbade us from seeing each other.
One night, he ran away and found me. Against his objections, I brought him right back home where his parents were panicking. Getting him back was not enough for them, and they brought the matter to court. I couldn't let myself be found invading a foreign timeline, so I ran away.
The trip seemed to have been a failure, but not entirely. I had learned a new dedication which I applied to creating all the games I'd imagined when I was younger. Now I live in loneliness and disappointment, but this is a small price to pay for fulfilling a destiny.
This is not the end of the story. My younger self found new motivation from the disappointing future he witnessed. It gave him a fresh determination to do what I did not, and apply in practice the lessons he learned in principle from training me, thereby becoming a prodigy in game design. He and I have shared a long writing correspondence in secret, in which I point him in the right direction for smooth programming and we both share ideas.
And so both of us will eventually become very successful gamists in our own rights, and with fairly different styles. Soon he will have the opportunity to join me again, and together we will live and grow and create and be happy.
But I will die before my time, a result of a lifetime of ignoring my health. He will be heartbroken and go back in time to meet himself once more.
The boy was ecstatic- he'd waited so long, he'd just about given up hope! But here he was, the answer to his dreams, the one who would bring him to his destiny!
The relationship began with a long demonstration of the games we had made. The boy wondered at the absence of Squeak (an RTS he'd planned with Tuvia), of which the man had no memory at all. But he listened to the idea of it and concluded that it focused too much on theme and not enough on rules. The boy listened to these words and learned.
Myself taught my grandself more. He taught him every aspect of gamism: design, programming, music, writing tips. The two of them bounced ideas off of each other. And they were never lonely again.
The parents were told only that an old gamist was training their son. They were worried at first, but when they saw what their boy was producing they were proud.
And what games they were! We had made games that fulfilled our wildest dreams, but our imaginations had limits. But this version of us, introduced to games with the very promise that everything is achievable, had those borders removed right from the start! From then on, he objected to everything his older self suggested, because he was sure he knew better. And he did. He reached heights I can barely comprehend.
Through it all, they were the closest friends anyone could possibly hope for.
But it can't last. Myself will die long before his time, a result of years of obsessing too much over his health. And my grandself will go back in time to meet himself once more.
He'll show me his life's work and make me his peer.
He'll tell me the password, and together we'll go
Away to his newly formed games studio.
There, he'll assemble two competent teams
Giving both of us free rein to follow our dreams.
All of these games (plus the old ones) we'll sell
At just enough to pay our programmers well.
We'll watch as the world builds on what we've presented,
Thus proving that our legacy is cemented!
That makes for four timelines, which seems like enough,
So we'll fire our workers and pack up our stuff
And with just one look backwards we'll head out the door
Of the present, to travel through time just once more.
This time it's forward, to the future Earth
To meet all the games which our ideas helped birth!
We'll think and explore and be driven to laughter.
Through it all, we will live happily ever after.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Subject "Mory" has created 3 test programs involving character "Smilie".
Test2: identified as repeat of Test1.
Correction.
Subject "Mory" has created 2 test programs involving character "Smilie".
Subject has used the functions in Test1, Test3 to construct a framework.
Subject claims program "Smilie" will be built in this framework.
We do not recognize validity(statement), but cannot disprove it at the present time.
Monday, November 05, 2007
3 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
"Inspiration" is when something fits in with your personal worldview, and reinforces and/or subtly changes it. "Offense" is when something clashes with your personal worldview, and reinforces and/or subtly changes your defense of it.
- Mory said:
-
I've been trying to justify this post's existence to myself, but I really can't. The idea is that these are the "atoms" that make up all experiences. But I can't think of any reason why I should want to break down experiences that far. (Other than general silliness, of course.)
- Mory said:
-
What I was trying to get at with "perception" is that it's only perception, and nothing else. Since that's not so obvious, it's probably not the best word I could have picked. It's all I could think of, though. Suggestions for a replacement word are more than welcome!
Anyway, that's (as its placement indicated) the "zero" of the bunch. Everything above it is positive, everything below it is negative, and the absolute distance from simple perception stands for how fully the work is appreciated.
An illustration:
There's a modernist painting hanging on the wall in an art museum. It's got squares and circles and lines.
One person looks at it and sees a bunch of squares, circles and lines. It makes no impact on him whatsoever. Even if he stands there for a while and tries to take it in better (and we'll say he does), it won't have any effect on him at all. He sees the shapes, and that's all there is to it. That's perception, the "zero" condition.
Another person looks at it and is in awe at the beauty of the placement of its shapes. Already that person's brain is being subtly rewired to reinforce that such-and-such shapes go well in such-and-such arrangements, which while not a perceivable change is still certainly a real one. This person is inspired.
A third person looks at it and is slightly offended. "This random assortment of shapes, with no perceivable meaning, is placed like a work of art?!" This is a very negative reaction, but it is a strong reaction. Already he is talking to himself, rewording and reinforcing his personal philosophy of art to explain to himself why he should dislike that painting. And because it's having this subtle impact on his worldview, I say he's having a more meaningful experience than the first person (who only saw the shapes), and more or less an equally meaningful experience to the second person (though in the opposite direction).
Person four looks at it and is also slightly shocked by the simplicity, but in a positive way. "Heh, lines." It appeals to his sense of humor. He is amused. This is a positive reaction, but it'll be forgotten almost as soon as he walks away. He's appreciating the painting to a very small degree. (Of course, this is not to say that there's anything wrong with his reaction at all.)
The last person doesn't care about this painting at all. He wants to get to the painting next to it, and this crowd of four people is blocking his way. It can be said that the painting is a hindrance. Now, this might seem a little bit strange, but I'm saying his (negative) appreciation of the painting is greater than the first or fourth person, despite barely seeing the painting at all! Why? Because it fits a practical position in his life while he's there, that position being "the thing that's preventing me from getting where I want". This is what I refer to as hindrance.
To sum up: If you see something, even if you are focusing on it very intently, but only see it exactly as it is (perception), the experience is neither positive nor negative and is a very small appreciation of the object. If it creates a momentary emotion, positive (amusement) or negative (irritation), that's a little bit stronger because as you see it it changes your mood. If it serves a practical function, either helping you (utility) or preventing you from doing something else (hindrance), it becomes part of the environment around it -which is a stronger appreciation for it. And finally, if it gets you to rewire your head a little (even very little) to deal with it (inspiration or offense), that's the strongest level of experience.
The only other thing I have to say about all this (at least, that I can think of) is that there are different degrees of experience even within one level, which depend on how compatible (or incompatible) the person is with the object and how much the person is focusing on the object. Oh, and one other thing (I lied.): these levels apply not just to works of art but also to absolutely everything (and everyone and everywhere) else, and it applies not just to complete objects but even the smallest elements that make up those objects.
Okay, now I'm done.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Subject "Mory" has created a program.
The program has 0 practical value.
The program has 0.00007 amusement value.
The program is worthless and silly.
The subject has argued that in the making of this program, he has learned valuable lessons about programming graphical applications in Blitzmax, of a general and suspiciously vague nature.
This excuse is worthless and silly.
The task occupied the subject for
(*brlgo* ... *brlgo*! *brlgo brlgo*)
Error. Time too short to be counted.
Subject encountered 1 obstacle, fixed.
[number of obstacles very low, explanation: short and easy project]
Result: MouseWrap.exe
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Interview with an Ideal
He's nuts.Well, there's a fine line between
genius and insanity...Which he was nowhere near.
He was a mental case, through and through.
You think so?Look, I'm not saying he didn't make some good stuff...
but still-Seriously, guys.
You don't do all that if you're crazy.
Sure, he was sorta weird,
but look where he got to in the end!
Wait, wait-Now, you're not being fair.
This isn't the end of his life you're seeing,
it's just the beginning.Wait, just a minute!
This blog hasn't been all that bad.
He's already done some good posts, and y'know,
I bet if you looked at the other blogs from that period-Do we really have to argue
about the merits of early 21st-Century blogging?
Okay, yeah, it was pretty bad out there.
But who cares?
You're gonna look at this mess as a work of art or something?
'Cause I think it gave up on being an end in and of itself back in December 2005.Yeah, but it oughta go somewhere soon.Exactly!Uh...This blog so far has just been
the insane ramblings of an autist,
but somehow he's gonna end up where we know he does.
That's what makes the whole thing worth reading.
I just wanna know how long he's gonna take getting there!
(Because this is getting sort of ridiculous.)
Wow.
[sip]Look, I don't want to sound condescending or anything, but...
Look, you don't have the perspective we have.
(Us being so far in the future and all.)
All this wasted time and craziness now is made up for by the fact that Buckman became a gamist in the end.A good one.
The future, huh.
Just a sec, I'll get you the file...
The AI file...
They made a record of Buckman before he died.
Sort of like the photographs of your time period.Wow, you've really never played an AI file!It's got the personality, the memories, ...
Where is it?No, you're looking in the wrong place!
It's in that big area on the right.This is such a mess.No, that other one.
Yeah.Oh, right. I see it.
Here you go.
...
What am I waiting for, exactly?
It's still loading, give it time.
...
Hello.
Myself | Identity | Identity |
Sure, I remember you. You played my games!
"my games" |
No, you hated them.
Identity |
Actually, I'm Mory from the past. I mean, I was recorded back when- wait.
Wait, I remember writing this. Okay, right, I'm Mory from your future. This is pretty cool.
Achievements Games | Blog |
Oh, yeah! I mean, not many people read it, but I really feel like -even with all the other games I've done and gotten credit for- I really feel like that blog is my life's greatest achievement, y'know? For the past few years I've never missed a day! Some posts are longer to write than others, so I'm always working on two posts at once- one simpler one and one big one that I give more attention to. So every single morning (I get up at 4.), I finish one blog post. I've found I need a strict schedule like that or it just never gets done. Oh, except I don't do posts on Saturdays. I can't write a post right after Shabbat because my Saturdays are so busy from start to finish I just don't have the time. Oh, but now I've gone on for much too long. I do tend to do that, but it's just because I'm really proud of the blog, y'know? And nobody understands why I care so much about a blog, they're like, "Why do you spend so much time on writing out your life by hand when you could just have an AI file" and now I'm blabbering again. Sorry. Sorry.
Games | Saturdays |
Yeah. But you know, it's not really like it was back in your time, I've made all sorts of-
Games |
Games | Schedule |
"Like"? I can't live without 'em! I mean, I'm so busy all week long, Shabbat's the only time I get to have fun! I have a schedule of serials from the rest of the week playing on my computer, and the rest of the time I use to read. Then those few hours between Shabbat's end and going to sleep are the only time I get to play any games other than the ones I'm working on. I live for Saturdays!
Schedule |
Achievements |
Um.. yeah. That's me.
Games |
Well, it was always a struggle. Nothing comes easy in life. But it's like I always say: Anyone can be a gamist if they really want to. With gamism being as healthy as it is today, any type of artist can carve out a little niche for himself just by doing what comes naturally! Though I must admit, back in my day- it wasn't nearly so easy. Not at all! Well, it all turned out for the best in the end.
"what comes naturally" |
What- you think I can't make good games? I'm not quite sure I get the insult. I mean, I know you didn't like my games when you played them. I remember that. Sorry, they're not for everyone. But I don't see why you'd question how I made them.
Games |
I've changed.
Schedule |
Well, I like to think so. For instance, I think my work with interactive fiction paved the way for more mainstream stuff like the interactive romances that are so popular these days. Well, it was really Jeffries that did that, but to a certain extent he was using what I'd built up.
Games | Romances |
Hey, don't dismiss romances. I would've made one myself back then, if I knew how. It's definitely more important in the long term than a sci-fi action story!
Games |
Well, I think the interactive romances, set in the real world, were when people stopped seeing gamism as a niche. Only now is that change really starting to increase the variety of games, but it wouldn't have happened without getting the romance-fans interested.Whatever.
Games |
You know, Through the Wind, Present-Self Defense, Dreams of a Fractured World, a bunch of little anthologies. Not exactly masterpieces, but I'm pretty proud of them all the same.
Well, the first few games weren't actually in stores -I let them out for free- but yeah. I made a platformer, two adventures, a big epic RPG, a bunch of random anthologies. Not exactly masterpieces, as I'm sure you'd agree, but I'm pretty proud of them all the same.
Antisocial |
Of course not! I work with an extremely talented team of developers living all over the world. Sometimes parts of the group will be working on other people's projects, so I use other parts. It's a very big team, and it's all very professional.
You want to know?
I don't understand, aren't you- wait.
Wait, I remember writing this. Of course, this is the blog post with the interview! Wow, that was ages ago! This is pretty cool.
So what were they like. The first one was a platformer- Well, actually the first game I made was a little two-minute interactive fiction, and there were a few other little things then, but Through the Wind was the first serious game I made, and that was a platformer. Present-Self Defense was an action adventure. Don't Miss was called a "collection of worlds"- now there was a financial flop. But I was proud of that, and the other little anthologies. And I just finished Dreams of a Fractured World, which is an RPG using "sequential art" as a base. They're all very personal projects, because it's just not worth it to spend all that time on a game you don't care about. If it were any other medium I might be open to the idea, but with games you have to make the whole foundation first, so there's twice the work. It's only worth doing that if the content means something to you. Sometimes years will go by without any major work because I'm stubborn like that, but I spend every minute I can spare of that time writing up my next big design document.
So all the games which I designed myself were very personal. They told stories about identity and change and all sorts of vague philosophical concepts. And with each one I also looked at whatever its art form was and said, "What needs to be done to make sure that that art form will have a clearer and healthier future?". And then I did that. So I'm told I'm arrogant from two directions: first, for these self-involved plotlines which the players aren't really controlling, and for acting like I know what I'm doing messing around with established forms.
Though just between you and me, I do. Know what I'm doing, I mean.
"healthier future" |
"healthier future" |
Well, they had their charms, to be sure. And I admit that I took out many aspects that people liked each time I reworked a form. But they were unfocused. The gamists who were working on them (and often doing excellent jobs, to be sure) didn't seem to know what the forms were meant for, or where they should be going in the future. They just imitated the past successes and changed little bits here and there just to keep things fresh. So there were all sorts of elements there that were redundant - I took those out entirely. And there were some elements that were actually getting in the way of what I saw as the forms' potential, so I got rid of those too. A lot of other little things had become too rigid, like gamists were afraid that if they changed anything they'd mess something up. I changed those as much as I could, to demonstrate the range of possibilities. Because people thought that what had already been done was all that could be done. So I changed those elements recklessly. It always caused controversy, like when word got out that I was making an RPG without numerical statistics. Or when I made an adventure without any puzzles or exploring at all. But now we're starting to see games which, they aren't really imitating me, but they're doing things that those gamists might not have thought of before I broke the traditions.So what else do you do with your time?So what do you do these days, changed guy?
That's what I've tried to do- break the traditions.
I create! I spend almost all of my day working on things. The blog, obviously, and any other games I'm directing, or helping out with games my team-mates are directing. I write music, too. Sometimes for the games, sometimes just because I've come up with a theme I like. Sometimes I meet programmers I'm friends with online, and throw ideas at them just to see if they can pull it off. Sometimes this stuff gets me inspired to write new designs, so it's not just for fun. Like right now, I'm working on a little experiment called Kwrk which evolved out of this little demo one of my programmers worked up. Those guys are just amazing.
When I'm not creating, I'm studying new languages. I'm already reasonably fluent in English, Hebrew, French, Russian, Japanese and Aramaic, so now I'm learning Arabic.
Not everything good is written in English.But still! There's no way you use all those languages.
Well, it's not like I use them all on a regular basis.Wow.
Okay, so maybe I haven't been using Aramaic a lot lately. And I don't expect Arabic to be so useful either. But I just like learning new languages.
And it really came in handy when I was making up languages for Dreams of a Fractured World.
I like the traditions. You know, they're popular for a reason.
Okay. It's not like old-school games aren't still being made, occasionally.
Jobs | Friends |
"Out of the sky?" You are strange.
A long time back, I worked at this online library. I loved that job. Organizing all the games and books and movies and comics and music and old TV shows...Have you got any friends these days, or do you still just hang out with your computer?Hold on- did you say you've got actual friends?
See, I've always loved to organize stuff. And I'm also naturally the sort of guy who's looking to give everyone else new experiences. I meet someone, first thing I think is "How can I give him a game or something that he'll like?". It's just what I do. So to mix the two together- that was tremendously fulfilling.
And you've gotta understand, this was coming off of the worst part of my life. Because before that, I did have other jobs, lots of 'em, and they were all terrible. So I kept to a schedule of writing my game designs on the side, and that moved forward quickly, but I never figured out how to get them sold until the middle of the library job. So I was just really depressed for years, and I felt like I'd never get anywhere, and then KFLUMP! -From out of the sky (like you said) falls this amazing job that gives me everything I need and makes me useful.
It was hard leaving that job, but I couldn't keep it up and have a serious career in gamism at the same time.
Sure, plenty of 'em. Only a few really good friends, but plenty of other people who I guess I'd call friends.And you got yourself a girl, too?
I do have a pretty nice computer, though.
No. No, I don't expect I will.Where do you live now?
In my dream house!Nice story.
It's in a lovely little secluded forest, with lots of nice trees for climbing. And it's got the big theater room and the bedroom in the attic and the computer ten times bigger than it ought to be and all the other things I've always wanted.
It's not in Israel, though. I couldn't find a place for it in Israel. I do feel guilty about that.
Thanks. ..I think.
Home | Sum Up |
What?
Ummm.. Well, one day I just realized I needed to actually do stuff, and I decided to start making games, and if you want something enough-
VI, VI, VI,
VI, because...
VI, because...
VI, because...
I don't-I admit, you had me going there. All these impressive answers you've thought up, very good. Bravo. For a moment there, I almost forgot it was all bullshit. So, bravo. But you blew it by repeating that old idea.
You've lost me.
But-All you need is a title, or a psychoanalysis, or a story from your childhood, or a promise, or a goddamn blog post, and all those pesky things to do will just sort themselves out! But it's not real! This post isn't real, and your future guys aren't real, and you're not real!
But-
But I'm real, and I'm telling you-.. Oh my god.
Look, it's not-
I'm not real, either! You just put me here to be a part of your sick game, to turn all the real things you don't want to deal with into another fiction you can ignore! Well, fuck you and your interactive blog post and your delusions!
Hey, I don't need to put up with this!
Well, that was...
interesting.He was a mental case.I wonder when the blog gets to the good stuff.
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
I just fixed a bug in the post. At least, I think I did. With a post this complicated, it's hard to be sure. I might have accidentally made a whole bunch of new problems. So if there are more than three buttons somewhere, or less than three, or if something's activating something it obviously shouldn't be, let me know, okay?
- Zack said:
-
You're a great writer; your words are true as they are entertaining.
You say you want to become a gamiest, I think you need to go learn the trade (game programming languages which ever they may be)
You obviously have the Ideas, you just need to learn how to ACTIVATE them.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Subject "Mory" has been mostly uncooperative. Subject was observed reading sample BlitzMax programs. Calculating value of reading operation: (*bllrp*)... 0. No mimicking of samples was attempted, so subject's progress is filed under "Concepts". ["Concepts": identified as subdirectory of "Trash"] Subject shows a lack of motivation. Solution: Moving to electric shock stage.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Buxner in Concert
I sing the melody line for the first four bars of "A Lonely Journey", quietly, very slowly and with minimalistic accompaniment. That gets the audience familiar with and interested in the main theme. Then I stop singing and switch to piano. I don't shy away from the tedious repetition at the end; I make it longer, and speak over it: "It's over as quickly as it began."...
I talk about The Rules, and then play "Variations On V.O.V." and the three following movements...
I play "Fugue State", with expert precision due to the eight hours a day I spend working on it. It repeats the rhythm with entirely different notes, in a difficult bit of composition which took me a long time, with one small comic tangent which is the same note-for-note in the two versions. Then it starts on a third melody line with the same beat, and at that comic interlude it drags it out immensely and ridiculously...
I sing the full song version of "Tomorrow", finally completed after years of...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Tomorrow
Tomorrow, tomorrow is such a lovely day.
There will be rain and thunder
But this fog will fade away.
Today I merely wonder
What great role I'll get to play
Tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, April 07, 2014
Moebius, Part 4: Off-script
The panic of needing to get more money quickly has not settled in yet, but I'm sure it will and I'll find a way to adapt.
11/05/2012
Well, the first part happened.
When I decided to move out of my parents' house two years ago, I knew I'd never have the money to afford it until I didn't have any choice but to have it. I didn't quite understand, though, that just needing money wasn't enough. My naïveté came from the cushiness of my upbringing, I guess. My parents had to have several jobs to make ends meet, but they weren't quite poor by Israeli standards. There was always enough food to go round. I didn't quite understand that this was never a guarantee. I thought there was a miserable path you followed, and then at the end of the path society permits you to exist. But that's not how it is at all. Everyone is searching for that thankless path. That path is the dream.
Click on the underlined text to continue.
Money
I don't like making it.
I don't like using it.
I wouldn't mind having it.
Making money takes hard work, and once you're given money you've obligated yourself to continue. So when (inevitably) the work gets unbearably annoying, too bad. You've gotta keep going.
Only an ungrateful jerk does a bad job with money in his pocket. You're supposed to earn it. You're supposed to do such a good job that you balance out the guilt of stealing someone else's money.
It's never that good a job. It's never so perfectly done that it's worth more than whatever else they could get for the same amount of money.
When you use money, you don't have it. It's like the cake.
Yes, it's obvious. It's still annoying.
So a meal I buy and eat and forget is a long and replayable game I can't get. Whenever I make a purchase, I need to repress the guilt that I could have used that money better.
Money's not consistent. For fifty dollars, I might be able to get one game, or else three games, or else a hundred games, or else no games at all. The value of fifty dollars is anywhere from below zero to infinity! So even if I got an amazing deal, I'd always know I ought to have gotten more.
And yet, whenever I actually look at those fifty dollars, it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's worth nothing at all.
It's a piece of paper.
It's a piece of paper that's already written on, so it's not even good for keeping notes.
I guess you could use it for origami.
I'd like to make fun of money and say, "Why don't we just write our own numbers on the paper? Hey, I think this fifty-dollar bill should be worth fifty quintillion googolplex and ninety-three dollars, so I'll write it in!".
But we've already got that. It's called checks.
God, what a stupid world.
I don't buy my own food, as you might have gathered.
If I did, I'd live on bread and water.
Well... bread and Nestea at least. Some things I can't live without.
But I don't. Which means I don't think about money often. It's quite a luxury, because everything makes so much more sense without money.
If there's something of value, it's only of value because someone's enjoying it. It's of no value sitting on a shelf.
So the person who made it would want it to be enjoyed.
The person who would enjoy it would want it to be enjoyed.
The person who distributes it should want it to be enjoyed, because if it isn't then his job is a waste of time.
It should be enjoyed, and the enjoyer should be joyful, and society should be joyful and joyous and joysical.
This makes sense to my small mind.
The Real World does not.
The person who makes a thing of value doesn't see the value in it, he values money higher. The purpose of making anything, he says, is so that it can be put on a shelf and taken off a shelf and brought to a cash register which is the most holy cornerstone of the world may it be blessed a thousandfold where from the appointed fool will be taken a piece of paper with a number on it which holds an ineffably random meaning and we are not to question it and money is the nectar of life.
The item should be paid for, and the payer need not be satisfied as long as he is paying, and society need not be happy or mean anything as long as these pieces of paper are still going 'round.
The distributor wants to be paid.
The big companies want to be paid.
The government wants to be paid.
The consumer should want to pay because it is good and right and holy and because in return he may get a brief moment of something resembling joy dulled by guilt before going back to his meaningless work to get more money to get another such moment.
And most of all, the person who made the product needs to be paid, because if not then his work was worth nothing and he is worth nothing because all is measured in dollars and cents.
And sense? I'm not seeing it here. People can try to explain it to me -me, with my exceedingly small mind- but I'm left wondering why such surreal concepts are made so Real by society.
And quite a society has been built up. A society in which there is no value but money, so it is right and proper and beneficial to society to be a Capitalist. I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a Capitalist and a con artist, but I'm sure I'll figure it out some day.
A bad capitalist does a good job and refuses to take much money.
A good capitalist does the same job and takes as much money as he can get away with.
A great capitalist does the worst job he can get away with, convinces his victims through advertising that he's done a good job, and gets all the money he can dream of.
To my uneducated and poor eyes, Capitalism is all about ripping people off for as much money as possible.
So as I said, I think about money as seldom as I can get away with.
This doesn't make the guilt go away.
I still feel guilty for every little joy I get because I should be paying for it, because I should be only making myself feel guilty and not my parents as well.
Often I enjoy things that I'm not supposed to get near without lots of money, because this concept of a Capitalist society is so foreign to me. And then someone points out that I'm supposed to be paying for it, and then comes lots of guilt.
So when I heard of Socialism, I said, "What a great idea! A place with no money! Gee."
And then I was told that it's never worked and leads only to corruption and a lack of progress.
God, what a stupid world.
1 Comment:
- said:
-
Amusingly, I think this post (or a certain motif in it) answers the last one.
You're right, of course - money is inherently valueless. It's just a convenience that was invented so we wouldn't have to trade for everything.
The fact that people see money as a goal? And that they'll go to any lengths to acquire more and more little papers? Well, I don't know, I don't understand them either.
As always, one needs to remember that the value of the job you're doing, of money and of what you use it for are in the eye of the beholder.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Counting Blessings
I have two parents who take care of me. At my age, they'd be perfectly within their rights to kick me out, but they don't. My mother always goes out of her way to be nice to me and my siblings, because that's just the sort of person she is. I don't know if I could have had a nicer person for a mother. And I think my father's really cool, but don't tell him I said that. Both of them work hard each day to provide us with everything we need.
I have plenty of food. Not everyone in the world has even enough food to keep from being hungry, but comparatively I eat like an American. There's always enough pasta and bagels and all the sorts of cheese I'd want to put on them and Pringles and ice cream and chocolate and Nestea and even lasagna. My biggest problem food-wise is always feeling stuffed.
I have a computer which only breaks down every other day. Some people don't get to have computers at all, or have computers which never work. I should know- my sisters have trouble doing the most basic things on their computer almost every day, and that's a newer computer than my six-year-old relic. But this relic still works.
I have constant access to the internet, which in turn gives me access to as much entertainment as I could ever want. Lots of people have internet access but wouldn't know where to find stuff to do on it. So those people might not know how to keep themselves occupied for a day, but I could keep myself entertained forever. Heaven on earth, my friend. Heaven on earth.
I've got other systems on which to play games: Gamecube, Piano, GBA. I haven't forgotten that most people don't have access to any of those, but I can use any of the three whenever I want, for as long as I want.
I've got three friends: one a few doors away, one a few blocks away, and one a few neighborhoods away. All of them are perfectly willing to chat about random entertainment on Shabbat. So while there's still plenty of wasted time on Shabbat, and I still dread its coming, it's not nearly as intolerable as it used to be.
I have such a great cat. Many cats are either too unfriendly or too intrusive, but Pussy Willow is neither. And even though we let him out whenever he wants, he never gets himself hurt. Fudgie's also such a good little dog- very obedient, not hyper like many dogs I've seen.
I have a sister I can watch Lost and Heroes with. How cool is that? Granted it's not as good as it was a little while back when she was reading comics, and granted neither show is on TV right now. But still, that's cool. I know having stuff to do with sibling doesn't come for granted.
My other sister mostly leaves me alone lately.
I have no real obligations. Six days a week are fantastic. These are the best days of my life.
Yep, I have it good. The only thing missing is meaning, since there's no meaning in happiness and happiness is my life. I'm supposed to be consistently miserable, with my only refuge from the suffering being my work- that is, the work of a gamist. But here I am, happy as a cat, with nothing fit to complain about. Why on earth would God want me happy?! Am I just not meant to be a significant part of his creation? Or am I supposed to make myself miserable, to make up for the lack of external misery?
But enough worrying about God's lack of attention. I'm off to have some fun.
8 Comments:
- Betzalel said:
-
"Am I just not meant to be a significant part of his creation? Or am I supposed to make myself miserable, to make up for the lack of external misery?"
"So really, most of the things we look at as challenges to finding meaning in life are actually the real meaning in life. When evil people want to kill you because they're so different from you are, that's the appropriate time not to pray to God for help but to bless God for making such a beautiful world. The more diversity and tension there is, the more we see the brilliance of God's work. If there were no evil people in the world, there would be no point to the wise people's existence! With the evil people around, their lives have meaning. They go from people who sit around and be happy looking at their bright view of the world to people who get up outraged and yell "You're evil!" and aim for the teeth and try to stop the evil. That's movement. That's purpose."
Hm... the only meaning you see in life is misery and tension. You can relax - everything has a meaning, even you. Everyone wants to find a meaning, especially since man has the ability to do things other than just make a living. Otherwise you would be working for no reason at all. That's why you're bothered when you think about this.
What is the meaning in life?
In contrast to what you said in An Evil Statement, I think there is no meaning in progress. God doesn't sit and play games with us. Everything has a unique meaning just like your computer has a meaning and your games, and your chair all have an obvious meaning. Things God created have meaning too - to serve man. Only they're harder to see, and can only be proven by scientific knowledge. Some things - only God knows how they help people. Of course anyone can see, for example, the purpose of plants - to make fruit and vegetables for man to eat. Men need a whole ecosystem starting with plants, and on to animals.
What is man's purpose? Men do many things, from working fields to researching plants to making games. However, all of these jobs people have are only meant to satisfy man's existence and are no different from the tasks animals do. Therefore, the purpose of man is to do something that doesn't only continue man's existence - something that only man can do. These are the four choices (in a particular order):
(You can try to associate these with the 4 colors, but I can't find where popular culture and indifference fit here...)
<0) Having children and continuing the race - no meaning. This is what animals do.>
1) Many people think the meaning is to bring happiness to their lives, to enjoy life as much as possible, to get rich and buy everything that could make them happier - the perfection of the possession.
2) Others think the meaning is to become the best at something, to do everything to perfection, with the most efficiency - the perfection of the body.
3) Many think that it is their duty and meaning to help others, to make themselves better people and the world a better place - perfection of the ethics.
4) Some people think that the meaning is to learn everything they can, become great scholars and philosophers - the perfection of the knowledge.
In Judaism (according to the Rambam), the meaning is:
First - perfection of the ethics.
Second (but more important) - perfection of the knowledge, and the greatest of all wisdom is knowledge of God and His ways.
So - that's meaning, pick one! - Mory said:
-
..or I could just play videogames, which has much the same effect as all four of those "meanings". It gives you constant goals, so that when you achieve the goals you feel good about yourself.
You're looking at meaning from the perspective of the individual person, which isn't what I was talking about. I was talking about the real meaning of the world, that would be there whether or not you went searching for it.
God doesn't care if you're happy. Why should he? He also doesn't care if any part of you is "perfect". If he wanted perfection, he wouldn't have created life. (And the universe would be much more symmetrical.)
So if you put that into your own life, that's all well and good. You can get through the day and say "I've achieved my goal today.", and that'll make you all warm and fuzzy. But it's not like you understand why you're really here. - Betzalel said:
-
OK, I suppose you're right about most of that.
You are avoiding long-term goals by playing videogames. I didn't think of that kind of goal... I have a hard time believing it is satisfying. When you get through the day do you feel warm and fuzzy and say "I've achieved my goal today.", or do you feel bad and empty and say "What a waste!"? You must be playing them for some other long-term reason (maybe so you can talk about it in some forum). Or could you just not be thinking about it?
Anyways, I think God does care if you're happy, so he gave everyone the ability to make himself happy. For example, if you feel that you accomplished a goal, the natural reaction would be happiness. Likewise, conting blessings and realising how much God loves you and wants to make you happy can also make you happy.
Also, I disagree that God put us here giving a special purpose to everyone in His ultimate battle in vanquishing evil. God doesn't care if you revolutionize the gaming industry, save the world or bring liberty to the Jewish people. He doesn't need anyone specific to do that. You could do anything you want, there's no special task God chose for you. (Unless He spicifically gave you one.) If you want, go ahead and be a significant part of his creation, or just some nobody like most people. It doesn't really matter.
On the other hand, God doesn't care if you're perfect, but he does care how much you try. The reason God put you here is, in my opinion, because God is kind and He wanted to give you rewards in the world to come. (It wouldn't be a reward if you didn't earn it, would it?) - Mory said:
-
When did I ever say evil would (or should) be "vanquished"? You're making assumptions. I don't know for certain if God intends for evil to disappear. But I strongly suspect that he doesn't, since a world without evil would be so much simpler.
I only have one other thing to say: What you get out of videogames depends on how seriously you take them. If I manage one day to explore a new world, better my skills, overcome challenges and advance an engaging story, wow. That's a good day. It shouldn't surprise you at all to hear that that's the sort of day I'd like to live for.
If you were to approach a game as a time-waster, a casual habit, a light entertainment or a method of escape, you wouldn't get much out of it at all. Obviously. Though if I happen to be in the vicinity, seeing someone else enjoying the game just might make my day.
Gently nudging the direction back toward the actual content of the post: Today was a very good day. I played games on my own, I socialized both in person and on a forum, a younger friend of mine came over to play on the Wii, and I even got to play at acting a little. Plus I was irritated quite a bit. That's good too. This was a day to be thankful for. - Mory said:
-
Oh, and I played lots of music too. And even listened to music, which I almost never do! Wow, this really was a great day.
- Betzalel said:
-
I guess I misunderstood you. You seem to be talking about why you're really here, and if you're meant to be a significant part of His creation. I see that as: God wants the world to be getting somewhere and He gives everyone a purpose in this world, a way to improve it and make it better. That is what I was opposing to by saying "Also, I disagree that God put us here giving a special purpose to everyone in His ultimate battle in vanquishing evil." etc.
I really didn't understand the last sentance "Or am I supposed to make myself miserable, to make up for the lack of external misery?". I thought you meant that you were miserable because you felt you had no meaning. Maybe you could explain this again.
"I only have one other thing to say: What you get out of videogames depends on how seriously you take them..."
I only want to add that the four categories of satisfying goals apply for everything someone does (that he didn't necessarily need to do), even if you didn't mean to be striving for perfection. For example take the things you did on Monday:
1) I entertained myself playing videogames
2) I improved my playing skills
3) I socialized
4) I learned about game making by playing this game
What determines someones "temperment" and therefore "meaning", is what one does most and what he means to get out of them. - Mory said:
-
I'm not miserable, and that clashes with my sense of how I ought to fit into the world.
Socializing has nothing to do with ethics. Socializing doesn't fit in with your list. Also, playing videogames isn't in any way "perfection of the possession". That's just the act of buying games and adding them to your collection.
I think some people could be poor, only averagely healthy, not particularly good at anything, selfish and uneducated, have very few kids, and still find enough "meaning" (in the sense of personal happiness, not real meaning) in their jobs and social circles to last a lifetime. So I don't think your list is valid. - Betzalel said:
-
The first "meaning" on the list is to enjoy life as much as possible. This includes getting everything that can make you happy, and using them to do whatever makes you happiest.
You're right, socializing has nothing to do with ethics. I guess in that case, it fits in 1 too because you do it for the sake of enjoyment.
I should probably clarify that this does not need to be done for one to find meaning, he only needs to have intention to do so for a certain reason:
1) To enjoy life
2) To improve skills
3) To help others
4) To improve knowledge
The "perfections" in the first comment are only the ideals (that those people aspire after subconsciously).
One can always find
a cause
a reason
and many excuses.
Next Post
Friday, May 04, 2007
On a Scale From
If you pet a cat, he'll decide whether you're doing a good job or not. If you're giving him a good petting, he'll purr. But if you're just stroking him absent-mindedly, he's likely to walk away. Why should he waste his time on a bad petting, when he could be dreaming of a good one? If you're not going to do a good job, you don't deserve to pet him.
I can see why cats are occasionally (half-jokingly) called evil, and why dogs are so often praised. But myself, I'm more of a cat-person. These days, I try not to get attached to too many cats because I worry it'll end badly, but I do like cats. I love my dear little Pussy Willow, who has become such a friendly cat. I like that cats don't put up with things they don't like. If there's food Willy doesn't like, he won't eat it. Compare that with Fudgie, who'd eat anything at all in the right circumstances.
Now, how can I trust that when Fudgie eats something, she's really enjoying it? After a while of not considering whether something is good or bad, don't "good" and "bad" lose their meaning? Doesn't food become just food? And if dogs don't differentiate between being petted while they have your undivided attention and being petted while you're barely noticing them, then how can you see value in petting them? And when a dog is loyal, what is that really worth? Dogs will look for any reason to love people. "Do you ever pet me? Do you ever feed me? Have you ever looked at me in passing? REALLY?? Then you're my new best friend!" So a dog is loyal- big deal. What's that worth, when they're practically wired that way?
With cats, it's different. Willy wasn't always friendly. When we first adopted him, he was scared of everyone. (He'd had a rough childhood.) So now, every time he enthusiastically jumps in my lap, it means something. Because I know it could have gone either way.
Some people think that dogs are much more intelligent than cats, and I can see why. You can tell dogs what to do. Dogs are more helpful, always aiming to please their masters. Cats, on the other hand, just sit around and sleep. But maybe they're sleeping because they've rejected whatever you want them to do. If a dog sees something, she'll chase it. If a cat sees something, he'll first determine whether it deserves attention. If not, he'll go to sleep- he can dream up a world more fit to live in.
"Ah, but dreams are merely escapism!", you challenge. And I need to accept that challenge for as long as the escape is not permanent. Eventually the cat will wake up, and the dog will be happier. Because an unappreciated happiness is better than an appreciated unhappiness.
Maybe I should elaborate.
You can't really appreciate good without also appreciating bad. If you'd seen lots of professional movies, but never any amateurish home-made ones, you'd take good film-making for granted. You'd think it natural that anyone to pick up any video camera could make a good-looking piece of film. On the other hand, if you've seen what an amateur can do, you can respect the professionals more. It's just a basic argument, but the same applies on any level. The more types of badness you understand, the more types of goodness you appreciate.
But here's the question I was getting at: Is this a good thing? Is it good to appreciate measures of quality? It's not so clear-cut. Is it worth recognizing the bad for the sake of the good?
And let's flip the question around a little. Let's say the world has more bad than good•-------
90% of everything is crud.- should you try to appreciate the good, knowing that it will also illuminate the bad? And here we get back to the cat's dreaming. If you indulge in dreams you see more good. But then the bad seems more pronounced. And if you completely disregard dreams•
If you aren't where you like, you should like where you are!, and deal only with what is right in front of your eyes (like a dog, or most adults), you might never notice that your life isn't worth much at all!
For my part, I tend to appreciate things. (Sure, there are important exceptions. But in general.) Everything's very colorful, very pronounced. This makes life in the Real World difficult. (Which isn't a fitting excuse for anything, since I could stop appreciating things so much.) I get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of very little things, yes. But I tend to get very depressed over little things as well! You can't get one without the other. Back in September, I came up with a musical theme I loved, and thought I'd forgotten it for good. I was thoroughly miserable for hours afterward, and would have kept being miserable if I hadn't managed to squeeze it out of my memory forcibly. When I did, I was in ecstasy. These extreme emotions can change as quickly as they start.
Malfunctioning electronics feels like the world is crumbling around me, while getting new electronics is like a new world open up. I delight in playing Ocarina of Time, but am troubled that my family won't. I'm overcome with loneliness, but only because I appreciate good socializing when I get it. I'm overjoyed by lasagna, but the chicken we eat on Shabbat is frustrating.
It would undoubtedly be easier to ignore all this, to just grow up and stop paying attention to the quality of life. Most adults seem to do it. My mother is like a textbook example of the condition. And she's survived. I say that's not enough. What do you think?
2 Comments:
- said:
-
Well, since you asked -
My way of life is sort of a mixture of both. What I try to do is recognize the bad in order to appreciate the good, but at the same time keep my perspective so that the bad doesn't bother me so much.
You know, it occurs to me that (visual) contrast is a good metaphor for this. Most adults let it go down, let the world turn gray - not the funnest of ways to live life. Such people usually feel a loss at some point in their colorless lives and try to retrieve their childhood. They usually fail.
But if you turn it up, you get the intense dark along with the bright, which deters most of us. Those who do it anyway frequently lapse into depression. So my goal is to objectively recognize the good and the bad, and focus only on the good.
It doesn't sound very intelligent, I know, and it doesn't really work yet, but I have hope. - said:
-
Malfunctioning electronics, huh?
I'll bet that applies now..
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
An Evil Statement
The first guy up looks at the seder around him, and responds with a question. The question is, essentially: "PLEASE INPUT COMPLETE LIST OF INSTRUCTIONS." We call this the wise son. The proper response, the hagaddah informs us, is to feed him a new instruction. It is a very specific and completely trivial little instruction, but it is presumably something that was not in his programming yet.
The second guy also asks a question. He wants to understand the purpose of the gathering so that he can reject it well. This is the evil son. The proper response is to hit him on the teeth, and teach him a lesson. The lesson is: "You are evil." It is a good lesson.
The third person has a question to ask. The correct English translation of that question would be "Whuuuuuuuuuh?". This is the simple son. You respond in simple, accessible terms. You talk about force and gratitude. And then you stop talking, because he'll get bored.
The fourth person is an enigma, because he has no question. Not even a little one. We call him the son who does not know to ask. Who knows what's going through that head of his. So you're supposed to start a conversation for him, on your terms.
Then the hagaddah goes into a story: Once we were slaves in Egypt to a human Pharaoh who gave us meaningless work. Now we're free. Callooh.
See, to me this whole thing is ironic. Pessakh, more than any of the other miserable holidays, seems designed to remind us that we are enslaved to God. The most prominent mitzvah on Pessakh is that for seven days we should eat matzah. Matzah, it has been pointed out millions of times over the generations, is a form of cardboard. No one in his right mind would decide of his own accord to eat it. But the way I see it, that's exactly why we're eating it. God gave us a meaningless instruction, to show us that he is our master and can order us to do whatever he wants. And we are wise little slaves, so we follow those orders.
So it's not the festival of freedom, it's the festival of renewed slavery. Once we were slaves in Egypt to a human Pharaoh who gave us meaningless work. Now we're slaves in Israel to God who gives us meaningless laws.
Now don't get me wrong- to me this is an acceptable progression. He created this world, he sets the ground rules. He chose us for an unusual position in world history, and our job is to carry it out. I respect his authority, so I always will. And contrary to popular belief, happiness has nothing to do with it. A religious person is not going to be happier than a non-religious person, and a Jewish person is not going to be happier than a non-Jewish person. The only difference between a religious Jew and everyone else is that we are God's slaves to a larger degree than they are.
So every week, when the Day of Wrest comes around, I put aside my life and resign myself to 25 hours of pacing back and forth. God has decreed that there should be nothing but rest in that day, as recognition that he created the world. Not for our sake, but to reinforce his authority. (This is not to say that I think he like a human wants to be served- it is to say that I think our serving him will serve his purposes.) And I understand the terms of my slavery, so I go along with it. Even in these past two weeks, which thanks to Pessakh had four Days of Wrest, I never once asked myself whether to break the law. It is not an option.
When the family sits around and sings songs -written by rabbis- which praise Shabbat and claim that anyone who follows it will get eternal happiness, I can't relate. I'm not a part of the group that can believe that. Here's what I believe:
God created the universe because he is the original gamist.
The players here are not complex enough to ever surprise him, so he created the universe with such infinite complexity that its design took into account every player that would ever be born, and how they would affect every other player. In effect, human players are so predictable that they can be seen as just slightly more complex design elements in the game. From this perspective, there is no player but God, and there is no audience but God.
The game of life is built on an infinitely complex series of rules known as nature, the most important rule being causality. None of these rules have ever been broken in the history of the universe. Miracles are incredibly improbable occurrences, many of which we don't understand because our understanding of nature is pathetically incomplete. We are just humans, after all. Some parts of the Torah commonly taken literally are metaphorical, and the extra stories shoehorned in by rabbis which blatantly contradict nature are just works of fiction.
"Souls" were an early attempt to understand how we act with such complexity, but in truth all this complexity is just a byproduct of a ridiculously complex system of rules. We may understand these rules someday, or we may not. We are, after all, just humans. But the rules are there. Souls are not. When we die, that's it for us. We exist entirely within the physical universe. Maybe there are other types of "spirits" on the plane of existence God inhabits, or maybe not. Since we're stuck in here, there's no way to know. And I wouldn't believe any human -even a prophet!- who claimed to have knowledge of any supernatural beings but God. Even prophets are just humans.
Now, from our perspective we are the players. (I bet a fish would say that fish were the real players, if a fish could speak.) And so we're looking for meaning from a perspective mostly disconnected from God's. We can find some hint of God's perspective from the Torah, or from studying the world around us as a work of art, but otherwise we are so biased we can't see a thing. When we want meaning, we look for happiness. When we aren't happy, we think there's a lack of meaning in our lives.
We don't really get it.
Happiness serves an artistic purpose. It is the resolution of tension. If you look at happiness out of context, it's the lack of tension. And tension is much more beautiful (from a higher perspective, not ours) than the lack of tension. Tension causes progress. If the world were to one day become completely happy and show no signs of ever stopping, it would be at a dead end. That would be the appropriate time for God to destroy the world completely. There would be no point anymore.
So really, most of the things we look at as challenges to finding meaning in life are actually the real meaning in life. When evil people want to kill you because they're so different from you are, that's the appropriate time not to pray to God for help but to bless God for making such a beautiful world. The more diversity and tension there is, the more we see the brilliance of God's work. If there were no evil people in the world, there would be no point to the wise people's existence! With the evil people around, their lives have meaning. They go from people who sit around and be happy looking at their bright view of the world to people who get up outraged and yell "You're evil!" and aim for the teeth and try to stop the evil. That's movement. That's purpose.
There are four types of people in the world. There are people who follow well-trodden paths as far as they can go. There are people who are determined to find a path for themselves. There are people who follow the crowd on a path that doesn't go far. And there are people who don't know to walk. To each of these people, their paths (or lack thereof) are the most important thing in the world. They would like nothing more than to pursue their course for their entire lives. And they want to be free, which is to say that the other three types of people should get out of their way with their irritating distractions and stop trying to push them. But from a greater perspective, all four courses are pretty meaningless. And the point of it all, the reason those paths are there in the first place, is so that the four types of people can prevent each other from being free and happy. Because where there is little freedom or happiness, there is the meaning God intended.
4 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
If you've been following the blog, I hope it hasn't been so long that you've forgotten where the four colors come from. They fit remarkably well, which sort of validates them a little bit more. That's always cool.
It occurs to me that the four-sons division also works with most sorts of culture: High culture, counter-culture, popular culture and indifference. I bet it works with most things you'd want it to. - said:
-
Now, I get what you're saying, and I'm not planning on arguing with it. But I'd like to ask you, do you really find tension to be more beautiful than happiness? I find that strange...
By the way, I recognized the colors immediately. You're right, they indeed fit very well. - Mory said:
-
I too would find it strange if any human were to pick tension over happiness. So no, I find happiness more beautiful. That is, whenever it's my happiness we're talking about. However, if I were, say, watching a movie about complete happiness, I wouldn't find it the slightest bit beautiful. I'd find it pointless and motionless. A movie which is filled with tension, and misery, and a desire for change? That's amazing. Now, the tension in the world hurts us, so we'll (and I include myself in that "we") say anything we can think of to discredit it (including calling it "meaningless" or "ugly"). But the tension and misery does not hurt God in any way. He's on the outside. He's the one playing the game, not the one stuck in it. So I'm sure that from his perspective, tension is more beautiful.
- said:
-
I don't know about that. I think your analogy is flawed....my interest in movies is a fleshly thing, I wouldn't compare that to G-d's interest. I guess you would, though, what with the whole art thing.
It's rather hard to understand what G-d wants, or is interested in, because we have nothing to work with. Amusingly, we seem to be making Him similar to ourselves: You - the artist - would have him be interested in art. Me - the scientist (if I can call myself that) - would have him appreciate the beauty of harmony more than discord.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
The Multiplayer Experience
The thing that bothers me most about my family is that there is not one person in it who can appreciate The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When you play a game that good, you naturally want to share it with someone, but there is no one here who cares.
It was late, and all four of us kids [Benjy, Dena, Miriam and I] were downstairs playing. ... We had a Ping Pong table out, so two of us were playing on that. And the other two were playing pool. And we went back and forth between the two games, and we'd watch each other's games. I'd never seen our family before as anything but an odd assortment of mismatched parts, but in this multiplayer environment it all just clicked. I wished we could stay in that room. I'd wanted to find an environment like that for so long. And just a few days later I'd buy the multiplayer game Pac-Man Vs. to try to recapture that, to some insignificant degree, at home. I didn't realize back in that basement that any such attempt would prove futile, that when this moment passed, it would pass for good.
Well, not the whole world. Game publishers seemed to be pretty interested in this new Connectivity. They saw a tremendous amount of potential. If a Game Boy could be connected to a Gamecube, they reasoned, they could connect the portable version of a game with the console version of the same game! (Game developers love to make a hundred versions of a game, each for a different system.) So they could close off one of the levels of the game, or some sort of extra content the players would want, so that you could only get it if you bought both versions of the game, and connected them together! Double the profits! Yay! Gamers were not amused.
Nintendo themselves indulged in these cheap tactics quite a bit, to be sure. But this wasn't what they had gone to all that trouble to connect the two together for. It was all for the multiplayer experience. You see, Nintendo has long tried to bring people together with their games. Their Nintendo 64 console was the first ever to have four controller ports, so that four people could sit with each other and have a fun time together. Then they made games like Super Smash Bros., a multiplayer fighting game which is unsurpassed in accessibility, and the Mario Sports games which simplified the gameplay enough for anyone to pick them up and start playing half-decently. Then they started the Mario Party series, which to be even more accessible took the universally-understood form of a board game, with simple multiplayer mini-games sprinkled in. (It is a testament to how well Nintendo pulled it off that Dena -a non-gamer!- still plays Mario Party 6 with her friends to this day.
The point is, Nintendo takes multiplayer very seriously. Their old Game Boy Color system was kept afloat by Nintendo's own Pokémon series, which simplified the RPG system and coated it in the universally-appealing hobby of collecting in order to be as accessible as possible, then heavily pushed the multiplayer aspect (connecting with friends' Game Boys and playing battles against them) -so heavily, in fact, that you'd think it was what they made the game for in the first place. It probably was. Getting people together to play games is the most important goal for Nintendo- even if you're not actually playing with or against each other, they still want you to sit around and talk about the game with each other and help each other out.
That -moreso even than making money, I like to think- is their dream. Families being happy together, being brought together with games. When Shigeru Miyamoto -the gamist behind the original Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pikmin games- talks about what he worries about most in designing games, he talks about trying to get his wife interested. And when Eiji Aonuma -the current leader of the Zelda series, and the director of Zelda games The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Four Swords Adventures- recently talked about his proudest moment, he pointed to the time his wife -also a non-gamer- was sitting with his young son and the two of them were playing Twilight Princess together and enjoying each other's company.
So every time Nintendo invents new hardware, what they're thinking about is how they can use it to get people together more. How can they make this game appeal to the entire family, so that the whole family will sit around the TV and have fun with each other? How can they build friendships with their games? With their new motion-sensing Wii console, they've pretty much designed the system from the ground up for whole families to play together, going so far as to bundle what might be one of the most accessible videogames ever -the multiplayer Wii Sports- with the system itself, so that everyone with the system gets to have the whole social experience.
So when they came up with the idea of connectivity, it was the potential for multiplayer they had in mind. A big problem with multiplayer gaming on a TV is that everyone has to fit on one screen. Normally they get around that by splitting the screen into four parts, but split-screen has never been a very comfortable environment to play a game in. And in this past console generation, Microsoft's XBox was already setting up a comprehensive infrastructure for multiplayer gaming over the internet, but Nintendo didn't want to do that yet. They actually did experiments with online gaming going back all the way to the Super Nintendo in the early 90's, but they never came up with an approach they were satisfied with. If you think about it, it doesn't really serve Nintendo's vision of people playing together if they're not even in the same room.
Enter connectivity. Any player with a GBA has his own private little screen that only he can see. Obviously this allows for all sorts of fun concepts where each player knows something the others don't, but that's not really what Nintendo was thinking of. What Nintendo had in mind was first hinted at in Aonuma's The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It's a single-player game through and through, but early on the option is introduced for a second player -playing on a GBA- to join in and help.
Imagine that a little kid is playing the game. He might pass right by important clues (to the puzzles) without noticing them, because he's inexperienced. He might find himself in more danger (in the battles) than he can handle. He might find it too difficult to get from place to place (in the exploring). Or he might just run out of items, and not understand how to get more. In short, he couldn't really play the game. But if we say that right next to him there's a parent on a Game Boy, all these potential problems just turn into opportunities for multiplayer interaction. See, the confusing interface on the Game Boy's little screen (which surely would turn off anyone who was not a patient and skilled gamer) allows this parent to ease the child through all these parts. The parent can point out important clues by controlling the game's camera for a few seconds via the Game Boy. (Otherwise, he'd have to take the Gamecube controller out of the kid's hands to show anything to him.) He can drop bombs on any enemies too hard. He can carry the younger player from above over pits. He can even buy more items without going to a store.
There might be one parent-child pair in the world who played the game this way. But probably not.
There are numerous reasons why this experiment didn't really work. But Nintendo was undeterred. At the E3 games expo not long after, as gamers excitedly waited for announcements of new Zelda or Super Mario games, Nintendo made the main attraction a little multiplayer experiment involving Gamecube-GBA connectivity. And gamers everywhere groaned. They wanted games they could play by themselves, challenging and complicated games which they could play for 50 hours straight and be amazed by. And they didn't want to hear about this "connectivity gimmick".
Nintendo pretended not to notice- they were too excited about this new idea. An idea which Shigeru Miyamoto himself had come up with. An idea that could and should appeal to anyone. The idea-- was Pac-Man. But a new version of Pac-Man, one that you'd need to buy a separate cable to play at all. Gamers everywhere groaned again
Here's the idea behind Pac-Man Vs., the idea that Miyamoto (and presumably his boss, Satoru Iwata) felt was important enough to be pushed front and center on the biggest game industry event of the year: One player is playing as Pac-Man, and three others are playing as the ghosts chasing him. The Pac-Man player is playing on the Game Boy Advance, and he's playing it in pretty much exactly the same way as if he were playing the original arcade game from the 80's. The three ghosts can't see where he is (which is why he needs his own screen)- each player sees only the small bit of the maze that's around him. So the three ghost players (on Gamecube controllers) need to help each other out to catch that gluttonous little yellow circle. They're looking on the TV, where their surroundings are rendered in simple 3D, both to make it a bit more interesting visually and so that it's harder to get a sense of how it all looks from the top down. The progression of the game is basically "tag": When one of the ghosts catches Pac-Man, that player switches controllers with the player he just caught, and he plays Pac-Man in the next round. The whole thing follows a point system, so that within five minutes or so the game can be over, with a clear winner. That way, you can start again, and all the players who didn't do well that time get another chance.
Whatever you think of that idea, I think we can all agree on this point: Nintendo is one weird company.
When Nintendo saw the negative reaction to Miyamoto's little game, they strengthened their resolve. They gave Eiji Aonuma the task of making a multiplayer Zelda game. They could have put a smaller director on the project; it didn't have to be the head of the Zelda series. But apparently they wanted this to be a real Zelda game as good as any other, so that no one could dismiss it as a "silly little minigame". So they gave Aonuma the task of making a four-player Zelda game, where each of the players played on their own GBAs. Sure, that meant that in order to play the four-player game you'd need:
- A Gamecube
- A copy of the game
- A Game Boy Advance of your own
- Three friends who just happened to have their own GBAs
- Four connector cables
I'll get back to that in a minute and let you know how it all turned out, but for now let's jump over to what I've been doing for the past few months. For a while now I've been babysitting a young boy on the block named Eitan. I accepted the job, despite disliking the very idea of jobs, because it's not much of a job at all. I'd sit with him for a few hours while he played uninspired Playstation 2 games such as Ratchet & Clank. And I found it really funny, the first few weeks, how all of his little friends from the street -having nothing else to do, I guess- would come over, crowd into their little TV room, and just watch him play. They'd constantly yell advice over, and comment on what they were seeing, and sometimes they'd even ask to be given turns so that they could play. I was very amused by the sight, and the thought that a badly designed single-player game could -by a fluke!- make for a decent multiplayer experience in the proper setting.
I wasn't amused enough to sit and watch the silly game nonstop, though, so I started bringing my Game Boy with me and playing Super Mario Bros. in the living room while they crowded around. Very quickly, they noticed me playing there and asked if they could have "turns". I happily agreed. Any chance to spread the happiness, right? And then Eitan felt like he was missing out, so he joined in and took turns for himself. And so these little kids played this primitive little game from 1985 (designed to appeal to anyone, really), and enjoyed it at least as much as the flashy recent PS2 game.
As half the crowd were playing on the PS2, and half were playing on my Game Boy, I was left in the middle. So I got to talking with some of Eitan's friends, who I'd certainly seen before but never cared about. Specifically two boys named Michael and Mickey, because I could talk with them about games. Michael actually had a Gamecube (which was also from America- where else?) and we chatted about the games he'd played and the games he hadn't. And Mickey had a bunch of handheld systems. I probably never would have thought to ever talk with these kids if I hadn't been babysitting, because of the age gap. But why not? These guys had probably been playing good games for longer than I had! I enjoyed talking with them.
Anyway, the games Eitan played changed a tiny bit because I was there. First, I brought over my Gamecube with Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat and the drum controller. (I also tried bringing Pac-Man Vs., but the disc's a little scratched up and I couldn't get it to run.) And they really seemed to enjoy playing this platformer by hitting the drums. (It is an exceptional game.) Eventually I figured, why am I even bringing the Gamecube to Eitan's house if he can come over to my house? So he did, often along with Mickey, and I introduced them to all sorts of games. We played Mario Party 6, and Super Smash Bros. Melee. We even played a few short rounds of Pac-Man Vs., and though we had only three players rather than the ideal four, it was pretty fun!
And then I realized that they both had GBAs, and that's when we started playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures together.
Four Swords Adventures is - I guess you'd call it a party metalude. You can play it in single-player, in which event it is a lot like 1991's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past but with control over four characters all the time. But it's not very good. You go through lots of tedious puzzles and simple battles, and that's pretty much all there is to it. But that's because you're missing the whole experience the game is specifically designed for.
When I first bought the game, I made sure I had three GBA cables so that I could play the game right. Sadly, I did not have two friends with GBAs. I made do with Eliav. (He does have a GBA.) It was pretty fun with two players (where each player controls two characters), but not ideal. It still felt like there was something missing. So even though I'd actually played through the entire game before, playing with Eitan and Mickey was something new.
Here's how it works. As you may have gathered, there are always four Links (Link is the hero of the Zelda series.) -in different colors to differentiate them- in play, no matter how many players there are. The game is split into 32 levels, each one taking around an hour to play. During those levels, there are many puzzles and battles that are meant to be passed with cooperative teamwork. But, everything you do in the game is rewarded with gems, and the players are competing to get more gems than the rest. At the end of a level, each of the players vote on who helped them and who bothered them, and that translates as points in the final rankings. Then each player loses points for every life he lost, but gains for beating more enemies than everyone else. The final -and most substantial- part of the points comes from gems. Thus, each player is trying to help his teammates as much as possible (in order to be voted on), while still racing everyone else to get to the monsters first, to get to the gems first, and (most importantly) get to the cool items first so he can get to play with those. It's pretty brilliant.
Now, you probably want to know why this requires each player to have their own Game Boys. Honestly, it couldn't have worked any other way. For a large portion of the game, all that you'll see on your GBA's screen is "LOOK AT THE TV SCREEN!". Because on the TV screen you'll see what's outside, or maybe a big room, or a hall, or wherever else your general surroundings are. And they'll be big, but not too big, because everyone needs to fit on there. You can only move on to the next area when all four Links move on together -That way no one player can control the progression of the game.
So whenever you're outside you play on the TV screen, and you see all the other players out there and you work together and race against each other. But, whenever you go into a smaller room, or a house or a cave or underground or into another dimension, you start playing on your own little GBA screen while everyone else is still on the TV.
So let's say everyone's outside having a hard time with a battle, and I go into a house to see if there are any items I can use to make it easier. Essentially, (to use terms from "Socializing in Solo") what you have here is two "environments" running simultaneously. One is a single-player environment, so it's on that player's GBA screen. One is a multiplayer environment, so it's on the TV screen. And doesn't it make sense that the number of screens being used should depend on how many environments the overall game at the moment is using? Afterwards, I might find an item that's useful, so I'll go back out to the TV screen and use it to help everyone else.
Say there's a big area on the screen with lots of caves and doors. Since you see the whole area on the TV screen, you know which door each player is going into. So generally each player will try to go a different way, so that very quickly the group has found everything. So there might be a whole maze of stairs and rooms and monsters on one guy's screen, while a second player is getting lots of gems on his screen, and a third player has just found a room they needed to find. Everyone knows -roughly- where everyone else is, because they saw where they went to from the TV screen. So when the third player calls out, "There are four switches here!", the other two players put down what they're doing and head over to where he is (going back through the TV screen to get there) to help out. (If there are four switches, all four Links are needed to activate them.) And if one player then has trouble finding the other two, they point him in the right direction or -in extreme cases- come back to get him.
There are all sorts of challenges that you need teamwork to solve. There might be four switches you stand on, or four switches that you need to hit with your swords (This needs to be coordinated, preferably with a "3, 2, 1" countdown, so that all players hit their switches at the same time.), or a pit which you need to throw another player over so he can hit a switch letting you through, or obstacles in the way too heavy for any one person to push away on his own. So you need to all work together- whenever someone else needs help, he asks for it. And whoever is nearby and willing gives it.
Let me describe a puzzle which I loved, which I think illustrates what the game is all about. On the TV is a big room with a pit in the middle and small rooms to the left and right of it. If you go on the right, you see some switches that you'd need to hit with a bow and arrow in order to activate a bridge over the pit. (They don't need to be hit all at once, they just need to all be hit.) Simple, right? The trouble is, there's a wall between you and the switches. So you can see them, but not hit them. If you go in the left room, you find absolutely nothing, but there's no wall on the right side. If you try shooting an arrow to the right from there, you see it whiz over the pit on the TV screen! So in theory you should be able to hit the switches on the right from the room on the left, but you can't see them from there! The solution demands two players working together. One goes on the left and shoots. The other goes on the right and sees where he's hitting. So the guy on the right instructs the guy on the left: "That's too high! Still too high. There, you got it. Try lower for the next one." And all the switches get hit, so the bridge appears.
Now, like all party games the game isn't fun if the players are annoying. Eitan was annoying. He's played lots of action games and tends to think in very violent ways. So when Mickey and I were trying to solve a puzzle, Eitan kept setting us on fire and throwing us off cliffs and hitting us with his sword and throwing bombs at us and generally getting us killed. We were stuck at that puzzle for around 25 minutes, because he wouldn't listen to us when we kept yelling at him to stop.
So I recently stopped playing with Eitan and started playing with Mickey and Michael. And man, is it fun. I wouldn't have known to spend time with these guys, because they are much younger than me in the Real World. But in the game, they might be just as old as I am. I mean, they're good players. Each of them has a Gamecube (When Mickey saw all the games I had for Gamecube, he bought one for himself.), and both of them have and have completed The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. These guys know what they're doing, and it's hard figuring out, at the end of each level, who I should vote for in the "bothered me" category. They don't bother me! They're as good as I am at all this! Well, almost. I do have seniority to some extent (due to being a little bit better and more experienced), so I always play with two Links while they each play with one. It works great this way, since it's more complicated to switch between two Links and put them in formations.
We could have another player if I bought another cable, but I don't really feel like we need it. Playing with these guys, I'm inclined to think that this is one of the best Zelda games ever.
There's ever so much potential here. I wish they'd keep making sequels regularly, so that every (say) two years I can get a new edition with new levels and new twists in the gameplay and new opportunities for interaction, so that I could keep the parties going. But Mickey, Michael and I are up to the last two levels of the game now. And there won't be any sequels, because so few people played this game. It takes a Gamecube, and three GBAs, and three cables, and three good players to get what we've got here, and most gamers aren't ever going to get all that. I'm very fortunate that I have. Because it's so worth it.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A Matter of Respect
There was a letter for me from the Academy of Music. "For me? Really? What do you mean?" For me, from the Academy. I didn't want to open it. I'd put all those feelings behind me.
I'd stopped worrying about the fact that I'd never earned a Bagrut certificate, that I hadn't completed those studies, that I never fit in there. Why would I want to open that envelope again?
And anyway, it wasn't like before. When I was there, I didn't get involved in the school, didn't listen to anything the school told me, didn't want to be in the school in the first place, but I respected the school immensely. I could walk around the hallways and hear complex music being practiced and see beautiful dances being practiced, all by people (roughly my age) who I had a tremendous amount of respect for. Not people I wanted to be like, or to ever fit in with, but people I respected for their dedication and skill. But now, I couldn't respect the school anymore. I'd just met Eliezer, who mentioned the terrible politics there that I never really thought about back then. And only a few days later I met Chana -my former English teacher- who told me the school wasn't what it used to be, that even when I first came there it had degraded into a pale imitation of what it once was, and now it was even worse. She said a certain person in power has been ruining the school- in fact, the very same thing Eliezer had implied! She said she keeps telling herself she'll leave, but she never does. "Next year never becomes this year?", I suggested. But she said this next year she'd be leaving for real. Well, after hearing a perspective like that from a teacher I respect (though never listened to), why would I want to open the envelope again?
I opened the envelope. Yes, the letter was printed on the Academy stationary, with the Academy's logo on it. That logo gave me chills. I really didn't want to know what the letter said. I read the letter. It was some sort of ceremony. A "Certificate Ceremony" of some sort. Ha, I thought. No need to get scared- this is like when we had ceremonies, and kids who'd left the school already would come as a sign of respect or something. Phew. This isn't for me. Then I noticed a few more details, like the words "Machzor Mem-Dalet". Wait a minute. That was the number of my grade! Oh no. I reread the title. "Bagrut Certificate Ceremony", it said. No, what could this mean? It's been a year and a half! Things like this are supposed to go away if you ignore them for that long! I noticed another detail at the bottom of the page- the signature of my mekhanekh (my main teacher), who I'd always had a lot of respect for and now never wanted to see again. Most of all, I didn't want to see his name on that page, alongside the other mekhanekhet's name and the name of that aforementioned person in power. This letter was for me.
"I don't understand."
It said to contact one of two numbers to confirm that I was coming. It also said attendance was mandatory. "Mandatory?!", I said as I smiled, "It's not like they can tell me what to do anymore.". The smile was not easy to pull off at that moment, and it was not a particularly successful attempt. But they were never able to tell me what to do, anyway. All the respect in the world wouldn't change my nature as an outsider. I said I'd call later, when I felt like it. And I sat down to do something else, though I suddenly had no idea what that something else might be, because I was too preoccupied with the letter. All my classmates would be there. Hadn't I made a conscious decision to not try to be one of them? Some of those I wouldn't mind seeing again too much (with just a little embarrassment sprinkled in for having made much more of a fool of myself than I would now), but others I never had any connection with, and it bothered me then. Why should I open the old wound? Why should I call this person, who I'd never had a chance to prove myself to, who I never really knew in the first place and don't want to know? Maybe if I.. but I didn't! How I wished that letter hadn't come! But it had come, and I... ARGH.
Within thirty seconds of sitting down, I realized I couldn't put off making the call 'til later. I was so obsessively preoccupied with this letter that I couldn't stop thinking about it for an instant. I had to close the floodgates, and right now. I called the girl.
"Hello? This is Mordechai Buckman. Is this.." and I tried to add into my performance the impression of reading the name off a piece of paper (I actually was.), to suggest that I didn't know this name, didn't know that I had ever seen this person in my life. (I actually did remember the name, if you must know.) I think my delivery was pretty good, especially considering the pressure I was under. "I got something in the mail which I don't understand. It's for some sort of ceremony..?" She told me that there'd been some sort of problem with the grading of the English tests, and they only got done now -a year and a half after her grade was supposed to get these certificates! "In any case, it doesn't matter.", I said. "I'm not meant to get a certificate. I never finished History, or Writing." She said I ought to come nonetheless, and she was writing down who came because after the ceremony they'd all be going out to eat at some restaurant somewhere, with the mekhanekhs and all the kids. "So let me get this straight! A year and a half ago I was supposed to not get a Te'udat Bagrut, and you guys are requiring me to come not get a Te'udat Bagrut at some ceremony now?!" She didn't take the hint, and kept asking if I'd be coming, so they'd know whether to get a spot for me at the.. "No. No. No, I'm not coming."
I threw out the letter. I wouldn't know her number again now, if I changed my mind. It was on that piece of paper.
But I didn't want to deal with this.
"What's the deal with Lex Luthor?", Tamir asked me on Shabbat.
"Well, he's a genius, and he's always saying that if Superman weren't around to get in his way, he could turn the world into a utopia. But now there's that weekly comic I told you about before, 52, and it shows what Lex Luthor does with a whole year where Superman isn't there. And he seems to be working on something, giving people superpowers. But then it turns out to all be part of his evil plan, and his goal..."
It was at this point that I started cracking up, and explained that this was so ridiculously silly that I could barely say it.
"..the goal he has, the goal of this big evil plan... is to rename the Earth to 'Planet Lexor'. 'Lexor'! And this is what he does when Superman's gone. So after that, I don't have any respect for the character anymore. The deal with Lex Luthor is, he's really stupid."
Back in the eleventh grade, I came up with a creative idea. The solution I wanted to see, to the problems I didn't. I needed to create a game. That was something no one else there knew anything about, but many of them respected computer games. And even those who didn't- this idea, an idea which I'd pull off all on my own -an artistic masterpiece that would appeal even to the dancers -Through the Wind- this game they'd respect. And I could show even the tiniest bits of it, just enough to see the artistic intent -the rest I'd do the next year- those tiny bits would be enough to gain their respect. I'd be an outsider, but that's not really the same issue at all, is it?
Did I ever tell you the story of my career as a gamist? It ended with a program with a picture of a rotating elephant. That was the peak of my success. And then I stopped. And I'm not even supposed to admit that I shouldn't have stopped, because then I'd be splitting my words from my actions and that can't be respected! But I stopped there! When I aimed my sights lower, I didn't even reach that! I wasn't able to achieve to my satisfaction even the lowest goal I set for myself! And Through the Wind? That was my project for tomorrow, and "tomorrow" kept seeming so much later than it did yesterday! And in the day, what had I accomplished? I'd done nothing worthy of respect! Sure, I'm an outsider! But I'm an outsider who can't be respected! I'm an outsider who doesn't exist for anyone who sees me! I never knew those kids, but me? There was nothing here to know! I never made my game, and every time I saw those faces I was reminded that tomorrow hadn't come!
But that was okay. It was school, getting in the way. I kept trying to find time to work, but the vacations were too short to do anything in. And on schooldays, I was so preoccupied with my misery that I needed to spend the rest of my time reading comics and entertaining myself. Don't you see?, it was school, holding me back. I would have gained their respect, if not for school.
Now it's a year and a half later. I've been free. For a year and a half. And what progress have I made?
If I saw those kids, -no, they're not kids anymore. If I saw those people, I'd see where they've gotten to. Some of them are in the army, I'm sure, or taking more education, or working hard at boring jobs for the money. -none of those options are for me, of course- I'm an outsider, I can't take their paths.
But each of those people.. When people ask them what they're doing with their lives... they've got an answer.
When they're asked where they're going - they have an answer!
When asked for plans- they have an answer!
And when they ask themselves- THEY HAVE AN ANSWER!!
And when they look at where they're standing, they're satisfied, because they've been told that there's value in that place! And they can tell themselves that there's value in that place, because they see how far they've come!
And they can respect themselves for it.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
The Composer
The phone was for me. I recognized the voice as soon as I heard it, and waited silently for confirmation. Sure enough, it was Eliezer, who I'd not heard from since leaving the Academy. When I left, I asked a girl who improvised with us to please contact me if they started up the improv sessions the next year, so that I might stop by every now and then if I could. I was never contacted. He now asked me if I'd come with him to Tel Aviv to improvise with him. He explained some of the details, and I asked for confirmation that he was talking about going that same day. Yes, he was. I was excited, and I made sure he knew it. On one side of my mind, I knew that jumping on such an unexpected and wacky request was really childish. I ignored that side of my mind. I'd get to improvise a duet again. I'd been waiting almost two years for that. Of course I was excited.
After I reassured him that it wouldn't be a problem with my parents, he told me where I should get together with him and when. He suggested that I write it down, since he remembered my terrible memory. It was a good suggestion, and I followed it. I wasn't familiar with the place, but I could ask the driver to point it out. When I hung up the phone, I was hopping up and down even more than usual. I ran upstairs to explain to my mother. She offered that it sounded like he was looking for work. "I don't care what he's getting out of it.", I responded. I wanted to improvise.
I showed up at the place he'd told me a little before the time he'd told me. He lived near here, apparently. I waited. And waited some more. And waited some more, knowing that eventually he'd show up and somehow the waiting would be over. Eventually I saw a man walking toward me in black clothes and a black hat. I knew who it was, but I waited for him to get closer -for confirmation. (I've learned to err on the side of caution when I might make myself look like an idiot.) His behavior told me that it was him. I didn't actually recognize his face- I remembered the idea of him, not the little details. I followed him to his car.
He quickly looked for an opening to talk about how hard it was to find a place with two good grand pianos. Then he added (and he was particularly fond of this part) that in his school in Russia there were more good pianos than in this entire country. Well, maybe if you took out a few famous concert halls. Whatever- it was still a good line, and he used it again later.
He may have said the same thing later in Russian to that lady at the store, but I wouldn't know. She asked Eliezer (in Russian) if I understood Russian, and he responded that I didn't. She joked that she didn't understand how anyone could live in Israel and not know Russian. Eliezer answered that that was made up for in part by my native language being English. I apologized nonetheless- I should know Russian.
On the drive, Eliezer commented that composing-as-work was a form of hell, even though he enjoyed composing. He explained that it was a terrible burden to have to write out a symphonic piece and make sure the voices never overlapped with each other. He needed to say that it was terrible, and he framed it as a life lesson. "Every type of work is hard.", he explained. "If it's a hell for me to compose, just think..!" We talked during the whole ride, pretty much. He wanted to know what my plans were, what my goals were, what I was doing with my life, when I'd stop leeching off my parents. I answered most of his questions with "I don't know.". When I admitted what I'd like to do is design games, but that I've never designed a game, he criticized me for saying something and not acting on it.
He said that if I didn't have any work or plans, maybe I could be some sort of manager for him? Maybe run a website for him, make contacts for him. It was an odd request, to be sure. I figure he doesn't leave his house much, and doesn't know who to turn to for something like that. He ought to have known that I am not the right person for such a job. He must have really been out of his element when not dealing with music. I found a suitable excuse to get out of the choice- It was odd that he'd consider me a suitable organizer, when I wasn't organized myself! Nonetheless, he kept looking for ways I might help him. Maybe I knew of (and could point him to) any concert halls in Beit Shemesh which have two good grand pianos? Unfortunately, I don't.
I asked him why it was so hard to find two good grand pianos, anyway, and he responded with questions: "Why is anything in the world not the way it should be? Why was school depressing? Why can't people always do what they like to do? It's the same reason." "In other words,", I countered, "you're saying that you don't know." "It's an olam sheker-", he said, "a false world. The way it should be is that each person is required to do what he likes to do."
He told me that the same year I left the academy, he was finally forced out for good by internal politics- more specifically, certain people in power who didn't like him. And now? He wasn't making any money right now, but was always hard at work. He worked all day long, and yet was meeting little success. He had to ask his wife to work more, so that she could support them. His wife sounds very understanding.
"But I found that it corrupted my style. When I tried to go back and write a classical piece, I could not do it. I could not write serious music anymore. So I turned the offers down, and went back to classical. It took a long while, but I recovered."
I asked him if any of his children were interested in music. He said none of them were. He said it very plainly. "That's a shame.", I said. What else could be said? This isn't the world we ought to be living in.
We were headed to a music store- "Olam Hap'santerim" ("Piano World"). The reason being that this was the only place he could find with more than one good grand piano. He was going to pitch his improvised-duets concept to the store's owner, and I was along to help him demonstrate. If this guy went for it, Eliezer could make this a regular thing again. As we were still in the car, Eliezer apologized preemptively to me, should the night not go the way I was expecting. I said that wouldn't bother me, so he would have nothing to apologize for. Over the course of the drive, he apologized many times for various things. He seemed to be afraid he was offending. Or maybe he's just learned that it's best to err on the side of caution when other people are involved.
As we entered Tel Aviv, we noticed how secular it all is. I said I didn't like the place. I don't like how hard it is to find a kosher place to eat in it. Eliezer said he liked Tel Aviv. Why?, I asked. "Because Tel Aviv likes me!", he smiled. A few years earlier, he was a big hit here.
Anyway, we stopped and started walking. There was a parking place closer nearby, but he didn't know exactly where that was. So we parked at the place he did know, and walked. He apologized for the walk. It was an odd walk. The way to the store was almost entirely a straight line, pointed out by two helpful security people who -as Eliezer had rightly guessed- spoke Russian. And yet, at any point there was even the slightest chance of going the wrong way, whenever there was another road which went to the right or left, he'd ask a nearby person for directions, acting like he had no idea where it was. Every time, they said we just needed to keep going straight forward until we got there. But he kept asking more people, up until we reached the store. Well, actually, he kept walking past the store, but I'd noticed the sign so I pointed it out for him.
It was a pretty nice place, with lots of fancy pianos split into two buildings across from each other. Eliezer looked around and quickly picked out the most rare and expensive piano in the place, and instantly decided that that was the one he wanted. It reminded me of myself with that High-Definition TV, only more so. He kept pointing out what a perfectly luxurious sound it made, how "balanced" it was (I have no idea what that means.), how this was what a piano should be like and how expensive it was. Playing that piano was a little piece of heaven for him.
And finally we played. We played a few times (before anyone was listening), just to see if we still got it. We got it. It was great. Then Eliezer said we should really stop, so as to not burn ourselves out. He also advised that I was demanding too much attention, that I wasn't giving enough room for him. I protested that I'd been listening to everything he was doing, and found ways to incorporate those bits into my side and even develop them further! But of course he was right. It was all about me, and improvised duets shouldn't be too fueled by ego. I was reminded of that time we'd actually performed duets, myself with that girl I mentioned earlier, and I completely blew it by calling too much attention to myself, taking advantage too much of the opportunity to make myself look good, to the point where I wasn't giving her any room. I only realized my mistake after that concert. So I accepted the criticism.
Then I waited around, improvising for myself on a slightly lesser piano, which to my ears was perfectly wonderful too. You can come up with a lot of things on good equipment that you'd never come up with on worse. A quality surface demands quality content. And I kept waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Finally, we improvised for the shopkeeper, who was appropriately impressed. And that got Eliezer and him to talking in a very long conversation. They got along very well. I waited for the two of them to finish up. And waited. And waited. (I would have played FFTA on my Game Boy, but the battery was dying.) I don't like the surface of the Real World very much. But I didn't blame Eliezer- indeed, I wished I could have such meaningful conversations more often. Anyway, the piano guy was thinking about how they could market such a thing, who they could get to come with so many other musical events regularly in Tel Aviv. He was taking it seriously, so Eliezer's attempt was a success.
We drove back, Eliezer apologizing repeatedly for making me wait, and he asked if I'd be willing to come again if he ever needed me. Sure. He gave me something to look forward to each week for two years; I'd be happy to help out whenever. In fact, I look forward to it.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
Though Eliezer is reasonably fluent in English, all the quotes here were spoken in Hebrew. When you combine that factor with the limitations of my memory, it's quite possible that I'm wildly misrepresenting what he said. Still, I have done my best to retain the gist of each line.
If there are two sides, I should find a third.
Next Post
Friday, March 09, 2007
ונהפוך הוא
I knew I was ready to go. I'd been practicing very seriously (by my standards, anyway) for the better part of a week. I'd been working on the trup*-------
(the tune of each sentence based on its structure)
and the little musical gimmicks and the voices and there were little problems here and there (such as not knowing how to properly voice Mord'khai) but it would all work out. My work was almost finished, and already I was satisfied. (Maybe the Real World isn't so bad after all!)
But why did there need to be a Shabbat in between now and Purim? As I put it when talking to my mother, there's nothing like a Shabbat for magnifying problems. I was only minimally nervous right now, but if I had to go through a typical Shabbat that feeling could multiply a hundred times. I'd be reduced to a caricature of a nervous wreck.
Never mind that, she said- are you going to wear a costume? I wasn't planning on it, I said. My excuse went thusly: Everyone else would be wearing a costume to show it's "v'nahafokh hu" from the norm. So by not wearing a costume, I was doing the reverse of everyone else, or in other words the "v'nahafokh hu" of the "v'nahafokh hu"! All I wanted was a paper-thin excuse, so I didn't worry too much that the negative of a negative isn't really a negative.
I went back over the megillah, this time reading it from start to finish. There were a few little mistakes, but nothing anyone would ever notice. (Such as frequently mixing up the t'lishah g'dolahs and t'lishah k'tanahs, which was ironic since I'm the only person I know who actually differentiates between the two at all.) I saw it was good, and I was eager for the reading to come.
Then my father wanted to listen to my reading, to make sure there were no mistakes. Fine by me. I said I'd just do the trup, nothing fancy- no voices, none of my added tunes, none of the attention to dynamics and tempo. Just to see if there were mistakes. (The rest I wanted to keep as a surprise.)
And only a few p'sukim in, he was already pointing out a mistake. I was mispronouncing a word -mispronouncing a lot of words, as it would turn out- and I'd been practicing it that way for a week. The numerous mistakes my father pointed out, over the course of the megillah, were mostly mistakes that I never would have noticed on my own, because they didn't prevent me from continuing. Mistakes like mispronunciation, doing one kind of trup which seemed to make perfect sense when it was wrong nonetheless, switching to the alternate Eikhah trup at specific points where there was no reason to, and other things like that that I would never have known by myself.
And immediately all I could see was the obstacles in my way.
How could I unlearn what I'd practiced so much?
How could I pay attention during the reading to the potential mistakes coming up, while also paying attention to the appropriate dramatization?
How could I perfect it in only one day?
Why couldn't my father have told me all this a week earlier, when I had a chance to get it right?
I still wasn't satisfied with the Mord'khai voice, was I?
How could I perfect it all
How could I perfect it in only one day?
I still didn't have those t'lishas straight, did I?
What if I wasn't ready by the start of Purim?
What if I messed up?
What if I was corrected every few lines in shul, like my father was doing at home, and I got too frustrated to continue?
Then wouldn't I have even more mistakes?
And then I'd be so busy trying to deal with those mistakes that I wouldn't be able to think about reading it properly
And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?
Peace of mind is a fragile thing.
It was for the best. I was taking the work for granted by that point; I'd come to believe that passing the trial was all but guaranteed. There are no guarantees, and a person who thinks there are is bound to fail in the end. So I took it more seriously. I sat down with the book and studied. And this wasn't the almost-fun studying of the past few days, when I knew I was on the right path and that if I just kept walking the way I was walking I'd pass cheerfully through the goal without breaking a sweat. No, this was the miserable kind of studying, where one side of my brain said that it was necessary and the other side said it wasn't a comfortable road to be walking on. The kind where I had to force myself to sit down and get it done. I'm not very familiar with that kind of challenge. It was for the best, I think.
By the end of the night, I was tired. But I read it for my father again, this time paying more attention to the myriad ways I could fail, and this time missing most of them. I wasn't ready. But then, who is? Only people who aren't trying. My feelings about the coming day now more grounded in Reality, I went to sleep.
The day began when I woke up from a dream. A nightmare, really. Usually my dreams are very straightforward, giving me exactly what I need to have- either positive or negative. For instance, a positive dream would almost always revolve around a videogame, while a negative one might (just as an example) revolve around losing something important, like (again, this is just a random example) one of my videogame systems. My dreams tend to be not much more abstract than this blog, and in exactly the same ways. (This is -in truth!- how I think normally.)
Following the style of straightforwardness, Shabbats usually start with nightmares of losing games, computers, music and other everyday activities. This Shabbat too, as I said, began with a nightmare, but this was right before Purim and the meaning was reversed.
I was back in the old elementary school/hell on earth named Orot. Not that I was back there for good- I was just visiting, reminding myself what my life was like once. The rooms were mostly empty, but there were bullies infesting the halls who were bored and would like nothing more than to beat up someone like me. I ran from them into a classroom with a piano in it, so I could remind myself of some more.
I took a piece of sheet music out, of a complete piece I'd written out back then. Before I could start playing, I noticed that there was someone else in the room, leaving from a class. It was a young girl- a bald girl.
"You must get picked on a lot.", I said. Here was someone going through what I did, once.
"Yes."
"I despise this place, and I always will.", we recited together. And she left the room.
So I got to my playing. It was a good piece, I reminded myself as I started. But the room was empty. This too was familiar.
I left the room, and wandered through the hallways -sneaking past some vicious little kids- lost in my own thoughts. Thoughts like, "This is so perfect for my blog- I just put a post on my blog called "Back in School" which was dealing with this metaphorically, and now I'm back in the school literally! What lovely duality!". I like duality.
And so caught up I was in the wording of the potential post, that I was caught off guard when an old teacher of mine (who was my mekhanekh in sixth grade, if I'm not mistaken) showed up and grabbed the notes. And certain that there was a mistake there, he took out a red pen and starting scribbling over what I'd written. He kept scribbling, writing in different notes in place of the originals, until the original tune couldn't be made out at all. And during the whole thing I tried desperately to protest, but I could not. I remembered that this particular teacher (as I put it back when I was stuck with him for a year) had a switch in his brain between "input" and "output". When he was talking or writing, he couldn't hear or see. When he was listening or looking, he couldn't talk or even think. So it was hopeless to try to reason with him. Instead, I tried to grab it back by force, but I couldn't reach it and he just kept scribbling and scribbling...
And then I woke up. For a few seconds, I was just puzzled that I'd think about such ancient history at all, when it had been out of my mind for years. And after a few details of Reality came back to me*-------
, I woke up enough to understand what I was doing.
- I never wrote down any music that far back, and the sheet music I'd been holding and trying to play was the famous Canon in D.
- I'd never written any blog post at all similar to the one I was thinking of.
- The girl was not based on anyone specific I'd ever met.
- There were no pianos in the classrooms, and the layout of the building in the dream was entirely fictional.
This dream was exactly what I needed. I'd been looking only at the immediate present. In the back of my mind, I was still framing the event as a question between being happy in the present, or being miserable in the present. I needed to see the long and twisty road that I've passed, to better understand what I was choosing to do: Though I once was a good kid living a miserable life, I could become a miserable adult living a good life. I needed to internalize that everything had been reversed. That the restrictions of the past no longer applied. That the future was wide open, depending only on how I chose to write the piece. It was exactly what I needed, as I chose to move forward, to take one final look back at where this whole portion of my journey began.
I sat in bed letting all this sink in, and wondered whether I should go back to sleep given how early it still was. But I was too excited to go back to sleep. So I got up. And as I washed my hands, I looked at my messy face in the mirror, and said to him with a grin: "This is going to be a good day."
It started (after the obligatory hopping around downstairs waiting) with shul- more specifically, waiting in shul for the Torah reading to come up, because everything before that would be (and was) boring. Waiting seems to be the Real World's most dominant design element, doesn't it? But I did my best to ignore it and keep up my enthusiasm.
Finally, the time came for me to read the Torah. And I did a mighty fine job of it, if I do say so myself. I didn't actually get to finish the job, since Roby wanted to do the last two aliyot and Zachor (the maftir). Such is life, and I wasn't going to complain considering I'd gotten to do the first five. In the end, I actually did get to do Zachor, after the davening for people who'd missed it the first time around. That was nice.
Then we went home, and the countdown began.
Over the course of the day, I went several times to the amphitheater/field so that I'd have a place to practice all the voices without any other people nearby who might hear. (By this point I knew more than enough of the megillah by heart to read lines in character without having a book in front of me.)
I especially focused on the character of Mord'khai, because I didn't have a clear idea in my head of who he was. The Persians around him surely saw him as an outsider, an odd old man who inexplicably sat around by the gates every day and didn't do what was socially expected of him. That he got up to the top by the end was a "v'nahafokh hu" of miraculous proportions, and the congregation/audience I'm reading to should surely get a sense of how much of an outsider he was to begin with for that to pay off properly in the end.
But then, he was a wise man who'd been a very important person back in Jerusalem. He was wise enough to know exactly what to do when the going got tough. And he only started coming to the gates (by a literal reading of the text) when his niece Ester was brought to the palace, showing what a strong loyalty he had to family- a quality anyone could admire. And he must have had complete self-confidence to go against the king's command in public. How could I fit these respectable qualities in with my artistic inclination to make him hard to like?
But then, in the entire megillah he only has a voice in three p'sukim- his introduction and two lines of dialogue. This is a character who is almost never heard. So would anyone even notice what he sounds like? But I couldn't think like that!- Mord'khai is the hero of the story, whether he's heard or not. He needs a suitable voice.
Those three p'sukim were the hardest three p'sukim to decide on. I completely changed the voice I was using no less than four times that day. By the end, I didn't know who Mord'khai was anymore, but I'd come to accept that. All that was really needed was for him to stand out from the other characters. If I got another comment this year, as in years past, that Mord'khai sounded too much like the evil Haman, then there was something seriously wrong with my performance. So I finally managed to produce a voice which sounded different enough from the other characters, though I had no guarantees that I could reproduce said voice, seeing as how it was not a memorable and/or particularly fitting one.
The day was not enjoyable, but it had a purpose- something which I could appreciate as well.
Shabbat ended, which for once didn't seem particularly strange. I quickly got ready to leave, though as my father pointed out: "You know,.. You know, we don't really need to rush to get there. It's not like they'll start without us!" Nonetheless, we left and got there as the people were just starting to show up. It was a lot of people, but I didn't want for it to seem like a lot of people, because certain people who I would have wanted to be there were missing while many others I didn't even recognize were there. (The situation seemed familiar somehow.. Ah yes, the empty room with the concert.)
This reading would be almost entirely within my comfort zone. Using not only voices for characters, but musical changes for different functions in the story; using a subtle reference no one would notice from one part of the story to another; subverting the standard tunes into something more complex they were not meant as;- What does this remind me of? Why, it's just a blog post, in megillah form! Mixed with constant progression, like a piano piece, though with a touch more improvisation than usual -which is fine since I'm comfortable with improvisation.
None of this was going through my head as I stood there. In fact, my thoughts were more along the lines of:
Oy!
Yeah, I know, not particularly deep. I let it out on ridiculously (and knowingly so) phony shivers as the crowd (I mean- small bunch of people!) continued to pour in. It wasn't the people that scared me, really- I've done concerts before. No, it was how much weight I myself had put onto this event. This wasn't just a megillah reading- it was the megillah reading!
I started with a very shaky voice, practically screaming the words out of fear. At least everyone heard me!
But then I got more comfortable with it, and calmed down. And I just read through it, and had fun with it. And it was fun.
And so it came to be that it was reversed; that I, Mordechai Ariel, with my messy hair and lack of socially ordained costume, stood in the middle of the congregation -in which I am an outsider- for this event. And from having little to no contact with other members of the congregation, I went to actively showing off in my own self-indulgent way and being not only tolerated, but respected for it.
Was it free of mistakes? No. There was one part where my father claimed I'd skipped a word-- after I'd already passed a few lines. So I needed to quickly redo that section, which was awkward. And I completely messed up the brakhah at the end, due to a series of circumstances which I'd also like to blame on my father, out of convenience, though it wasn't really in any way his fault. And then there were assorted mistakes in the trup throughout, which (sadly) I can't think of a way to blame on my father.
But overall, it was a success.
Oh, and Mord'khai? I wasn't really thinking about it too much. I just improvised Mord'khai, with a random assortment of voice ideas I'd tried (and failed) to use while practicing, and it worked. It wasn't exactly a masterpiece of voice acting, and I doubt it made much of an impression, but I got no complaints and/or comments that it sounded like the other voices, and that's worth something. After doing it, I couldn't remember what I'd done exactly, so next year (since I would like to make this an annual project from now on) I'll have to struggle with him again.
Different people said they especially liked different voices, which made me very proud. If everyone had leaned toward one voice, I might have thought the rest were failures, but when each person is most entertained by a different voice, then they must all be successes in their own rights. It made me very proud indeed.
I'd just decided to be an adult of some sort, and already I had to make a compromise. Let it never be said that God lacks a sense of humor, twisted though it may be. It had been brought to my attention shortly after my reading that out of our entire congregation, increasing in size with each year, there were only two people who were willing and able to read the megillah. That was me and Jay. (I wonder what would have happened had this been an "off" year for me. But I suppose it all does fit together.) So either I reread the megillah in the morning, or I'd be forcing Jay to read it three times for the shul, one of them right after another. (We have two readings at night and two in the morning.) I wouldn't do that.
So I agreed to do it again on Sunday morning, provided I wasn't going to be doing voices again. I wasn't going to do the whole performance again that year. Once is light entertainment, twice is a chore to sit through. If someone missed it, they should have to wait 'til next year. Besides, wouldn't everyone prefer in the morning (considering they'd already heard the megillah once) for it to be as quick as possible so as to let them get on with their day? So I was willing to reread, but not happy, because if someone had missed that earlier reading they'd think this was all I was capable of. Anyway, this all meant I had to go to sleep early in order to be wide awake for it.
In the morning, I read through very straightforwardly and (this is crucial) quickly. There was no pressure, no effort, no reward. I got the brakhot right this time, so that's something. But I didn't play any of my little tricks, or voices, or even pay any attention to tempo farther than "Let's get through this as quickly as possible without making the words unclear.". It was barely harder than the Torah reading.
It disheartened me to see that some people who I would have wanted to hear the proper reading were present this morning but not in the night. I needed to explain to them (perhaps a bit strongly) that this was only the barest outline of what I'd done yesterday; that this was just a reading while yesterday was a performance. Hopefully they'll show up next year. The Real World has a lot of waiting.
I spent the next hours upstairs in our house, playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess while my parents' friends came to the door with mishlo'akh manot. Not because they had anything good to give, but just because it was part of the day's obligations to give them.
There was one point in the game where I was stuck, where I reached a maze of sorts and it wasn't clear to me where I should go next. But I kept going anyway, and found my way eventually. Because it's a well-designed game. I pressed forward all the way to the very satisfying conclusion of the entire game, and beat it. It was quite rewarding.
Meanwhile, back in the Real World, the reversal reversed and everything was back as it was before. And maybe that's not really a reversal. We went for the Purim meal to see old friends of my parents', where I sat with the adults because I'm technically "old enough to drink". So I sat there, as they traded gossip, and endless anecdotes from their jobs, and comments on politics, and all sorts of other adult topics which couldn't have interested me less. I left early and walked home.
It was later pointed out that I'd missed the lunar eclipse. I normally would have been awake to see it, since my regular day ends at 2:00 AM, but because I was thinking only about practical decisions and not such indulgences, I'd forgotten all about it. Even if I had remembered, I couldn't have had it both ways. It's so elegant how it all fits together, isn't it? It was all so clear in retrospect. There was a pretty picture, painted prominently on the sky itself! And because I chose to be an adult, who would not care about such things,.. Because I chose a life of misery over a life of happiness,.. I didn't get to appreciate it. I didn't even get to see it! I didn't even get to acknowledge the existence of a beautiful image, except in a sense of "Look what I lost."! I brought this upon myself. And maybe it's not just a sense of humor God has, so much as a lack of human restraint in giving us what we deserve.
Already by the end of the day, I was feeling the first traces of a profound and overly familiar sadness. Why did the satisfaction of a success fade so quickly? Was this all I'd ever get from the Real World? And should I see the trial as continuing, or did I misunderstand the trial in the first place?! Why is it that at every landmark I make for myself, I am rewarded with confusion?
Here's where I stand. In agreeing to become an adult, I proved myself a traitor to childkind- or maybe just a natural ex-member. On the other hand, it seems that a lack of direction and constant confusion are parts of the package deal that is adulthood. And I refuse to accept a life so poorly designed!
So I guess I'm just Mory, no particular age group, and I'll improvise the rest as I get to it.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Deadline
For my bar mitzvah, I not only read the parasha of the week (Tetzaveh), but Megillat Ester as well. Well, around a third of the Megillah, anyway. And I even threw in a few voices and some musical tricks (for dramatic effect) so that I could use the opportunity to show off. No one actually suggested any of this to me- I just surprised them all with the neat gimmicks I'd imagined. See, I wouldn't aim to do what anyone else could do- I needed to show that I had a unique contribution to offer.
Since it was so much work, I decided after that that I'd only read the Megillah every other year. Each time, I tried to top my previous ambitions, apparently because I hadn't aimed high enough the last time. Each time I added in more voices, improved on the old ones, learned a larger portion of the Megillah, and came up with a few new musical gimmicks. The last time, I intended to finish it off, but ended up handing off the ending to the Rabbi because he asked if he could do it. (I was blessed that he should ask- I wasn't good at the ending at all.) Each time, I took it a little bit more seriously, because the longer you stick with something the more attached you get to it. But I always did the reading in the morning, when there were fewer people listening, as opposed to the big reading in the night.
This is the "other" year. This is the seventh year since starting with this whole project, and so it is the fourth time I am reading, and this will be the first time that I finish the job. I will read all ten chapters, including all the voices called for, and every little gimmick I can think of. And this year I'm doing it at night- this will be the megillah reading for our community.
So here's where I stand.
This is a trial, to see whether I can meet my own improbable goals of offering something to society.
If I succeed, I will have proven to myself that I can accomplish any goal I set for myself, no matter how outrageous. The glory of the success will encourage me to pursue my other goals, setting me on a hard path into a glorious life of hardships.
If I fail, I will have demonstrated to myself that I'm not good enough in the Real World to achieve the silly dreams in my head. That will start a very gradual process of increasing dissatisfaction with the disconnection between the Real World and the one in my head, which will eventually lead me right back to depression. The failure would weigh on my mind, holding me in place right here.
At least, that's how I imagine the situation.
Here's where I stand in Reality.
I thought I had two weeks to go until Purim. So practicing seriously was something that I'd do "some day soon". But then, on Shabbat, my father mentioned that both my parasha and Purim were coming up this week. The parasha is no problem at all- I've done it every year for seven years, so I could read it in my sleep, without any practice. But I thought the Megillah was a week later. And that... I'm not ready for it, not really. There are mistakes all over the place. There are large sections I've forgotten, or that I never knew well to begin with.
Here's where I stand. I've got this one week to get it right. I also happen to be in the middle of the mother of all distractions: a great new The Legend of Zelda experience. (This situation seems familiar somehow.)
Here's how I imagine the situation:
Or
I can be an adult and live for the future.
One birthday, I went to Norman's with Benjy. And I told him there that if I could wish for anything, it'd be that I'd never stop changing from one year to the next. I guess I really have changed. Maybe it's time to wake up and acknowledge that there's a hard road ahead, but a road that -God willing- can be passed.
Purim is less than a week away. And I'm going to be ready.
8 Comments:
- said:
-
Wow. Congratulations, and good luck.
- Mory said:
-
By the way, normally I wouldn't consider reading in the night because it's right after the fast and there is no way I'd be willing to do this whole thing without having had enough food or drink. But this year, Purim's on a Sunday, which means the fast is pushed back to Thursday so it shouldn't fall on a Shabbat. It's so lovely how everything ties together.
- said:
-
I think you did a great job, personally. I disliked your choice of tunes for the blessings, but other than that, it was a lot of fun.
Although you didn't seem particularly happy when I went to shake your hand....
A non-kehila member was present at your reading, and commented to me afterwards, "Wow, that reading was really different. I didn't know your rabbi was so cool!"
I know I'd be complimented by that, but take it as you will. ^_^ - Mory said:
-
Although you didn't seem particularly happy when I went to shake your hand....
I wasn't particularly happy, because I'd just completely messed up the tune for the ending brakha I'd composed. I was still sort of dwelling on that. Did you not like my starting brakhas either? (They were loosely based on the standard tune.)
But wow- someone thought I was the rabbi? That's weird. But I do take it as a compliment that someone would be struck by how "different" my reading was. That makes me all cold and fuzzy inside. - said:
-
I should have been more specific, perhaps - the person who commented was a girl, and therefore never saw your face. But yes, she thought you were the rabbi.
No, I didn't like the starting brachot either. Dunno why, they just didn't fit right with me. *shrug* - Mory said:
-
Okay, that's fine. But I happen to like them, so I'll keep doing them. You can pretend I'm doing the normal, boring ones. :)
- Mory said:
-
Oh, and how could I forget to ask: Who was the girl who thought I was "so cool"? :D
- said:
-
Sorry, I would have told you in the first place, but it's one of my silly principles. See, people frequently don't like you repeating things they said, so I try not to unless I have permission. And since she doesn't live here, I can't ask for permission. u_u Doesn't really matter, anyway.
...you can pretend you know who it is. =P
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Tapestry Thread: light birthday edition
Last night, my parents and I went to the Norman's steak house in Jerusalem. I wanted to go there because I love their Sirloin steaks. As it happened, they didn't have any Sirloin at the moment, so I settled for a Fillet Mignon. And my parents talked among themselves a lot, during the drive there and there and on the way back. It was a good meal.
The reason it was yesterday, rather than today, is that they were both going to be busy today. I was a little annoyed initially, because what's the sense of celebrating my birthday when it's not my birthday? I might as well go today to Norman's on my own- I wouldn't have had any problem with that.
But then the idea of being alone in the house on my birthday gave me an idea. See, I'd wanted to go to the Israel Museum ever since I heard about the latest (temporary) exhibits in the newspaper. I figured I'd go there on my own some day soon to check it out (I'd never gone there on my own before), but weeks passed and it never occurred to me to change "soon" to "now".
That was the idea which instantly popped into my head- why not go on my birthday? I didn't have any other plans. So I suggested it to my mother yesterday, and she said that sounded great and she'd give me money for it.
I woke up this morning earlier than usual (around 8:30), mildly excited thinking of the day ahead. I figured I'd go to my computer first and check out if the friendly folk at Adventure Gamers had wished me happy birthday. So I went to the computer room, passing by a few of the "Happy Birthday" signs my mother had put up along the way.
The first thing I noticed was that one of her signs was taped to my screen, completely covering it. She does like for those signs to be noticed. The second thing I noticed was the Gamecube-game-box-shaped gift wrapped up and sitting on my keyboard. Could it really be-? Wowsers. (I actually did tell my parents what I'd like, but considering what a hassle it is to get games to here it would still be pretty exciting if it were that game...) And I unwrapped it slowly, being careful not to rip the paper so I shouldn't see a little bit of it before I get the whole thing out. And I looked away as I took it out so that I could be able to see the whole thing at once. And it fell into my hands, and I looked, and I found...
A chocolate bar.
No, I'm just kidding. It was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess! And could there be a cooler present than a Zelda game? (It's a rhetorical question. Yes, I know a time machine would be cooler. Now stop interrupting my reverie.) It was an exciting moment. And I wanted to play it right away, but there wasn't enough time if I wanted to get to the Israel Museum.
So I just put it aside and checked the forums. Sure enough, they were wishing me a happy birthday, and some of them in rather clever ways! It's good to have friends, is it not? And then I headed to the bus.
It'd been a while since I'd walked that way, watch ticking, black coat on, sun boiling (I was only wearing the coat for old time's sake), Game Boy in pocket. I can't say it was an entirely enjoyable bit of nostalgia, but I was glad to be going.
On the bus, I was quickly reminded of that irritant I'd forgotten: the tremendous sense of isolation. I remembered how there was a kid I'd see on the bus once every few years, who I could talk with (because he was hyperactive). (There were one or two times on Shabbats when I'd wondered who he was and how I could find him, since people I can talk to are so hard to come by.) His name was Moshe, I think. Or something else with M. Avraham? No, that doesn't sound right. Eah, who cares. And I left it at that.
A few minutes later, someone came on the bus who looked awfully familiar. I couldn't be sure that it was him, but then he did look.. um, familiar. I said that already, didn't I. He was hanging around with a whole crowd toward the front of the bus, and I was strapped into my chair toward the back. (It's good to insure you're not thrown around a lot when things get rough, kids.) I wondered when he'd be getting off.
As it happened, he was getting off at the Central Bus Station, same as me. And he got off before me, but happened to stop to tie his shoe. And I asked him if I knew him and he reintroduced himself as Moshe. And we got to talking, which is a big thing with me. I said I'd stop over some Shabbat- which will be much easier now that I actually know his name.
Then I headed over to the museum. I took the first bus that came that would drop me nearby, which meant I had some walking to do. Walking through a faintly familiar area? No problem by me. (The Israel Museum is next to where I went to school.) I asked for directions, just to be safe, because I hadn't wandered far from the school and didn't know for certain where it was. I was pointed in the direction I was going already, which was nice. I took a little detour through a tiny forest, and then I was there.
The exhibits were wonderful. First I went to (actually, more like "stumbled into", though by a coincidence it's what I'd read about in the newspaper and came to see) an exhibit of physical 3D models which were printed out of a computer, which I found incredible. Here they were taking digital files, virtual spaces, and turning them into physical objects in the Real World! Wowsers. That really sent me for a loop- I mean, here I'm putting up this wall between the two worlds, and then a magic printer is made (and it did seem more like magic then technology to me) which can cross it over! Wowsers. Some of the works were pretty, some were hilarious, some were inspiring, but most were really really cool.
The second exhibit I walked into was on how children have been dealt with in European art over the ages. Contrasting the portrayal of innocence in the 19th century with the more cynical perspective of the 20th century, comparing the near-complete disregard in the 17th century to dealing head-on with such issues in recent works. It was very nice too.
Then I went to an exhibit on Re'uven Rubin's early years, an exhibit on current Israeli photographic art dealing with political/social issues (which I couldn't make heads or tails of), a rather bland exhibit on surrealistic artists (not the art so much as the artists themselves) and capped it off with a look at the works of a very ambitious modern Israeli artist who isn't very good.
I spent three hours altogether in the museum, and I saw everything I wanted to see. All in all, a good time.
At home (which I reached only after much playing of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the bus), Zelda was waiting. I disconnected the speakers from my computer and plugged them into the Gamecube, so that I'd get good audio. And then I started to play (with Eitan watching since, as for the past few months, I was asked to babysit him. He seemed to enjoy watching, actually.). It started out really slow-paced, puzzlingly so. (This is not a game for people who haven't played Zelda before.) It forced you through so many little insignificant tangents, you couldn't get anywhere.
Then the whole game flipped (before even the first dungeon!) and it turned out that this game was nothing like I thought it would be. It turned out, the whole opening section was sort of a fake-out. It turned out, it was really a ridiculously fast-paced game, and that whole earlier section was subtly designed to set up a dozen story elements as quickly as possible, yet effectively. Now that's the brilliant Zelda development team I know!
The game was interrupted (three hours in) by a phone call from my grandmother, wishing me a happy birthday. And it was only then that I realized that my stomach was rumbling because it was already 8:30 and I hadn't had supper yet. Yep, it's a good game.
After supper, I checked out how the Civil War comic book, which I've been following, ended. See, Marvel Comics was kind enough to release the last issue right on my birthday!- so that information was available at long last. And the question of who wins could not possibly have been answered better. It's the sort of ending that takes you by surprise, but it's the good kind of surprise, which makes sense with everything that's been written before.
And then (after a little more browsing) I wrote up this post here, because I couldn't have respected myself if on my 19th birthday I once again went for immediate gratification instead of doing what needed to be done.
When I woke up, I expected the day to be pretty good, but just how good has taken me by surprise. This is the best birthday ever.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be getting back to Zelda.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I've spent more time with Moshe since then (Always a good idea!), and I don't think "hyperactive" is the right word, even though I remembered him being hyperactive when we were in school together. (That might just be my faulty memory, of course.) Now I think he's more like me.
The longer you wait,
The less meaning the passage of time seems to have.
Next Post
Monday, February 19, 2007
The Trip
And without further ado: The Trip.
Introduction
Introduction
Normally I wouldn't have a screensaver. It's not like I need one, especially since I turn my monitor off every time I walk away from it. But practicality has nothing to do with this. Only a little bit before we left, I got a screensaver called Electric Sheep. It's sort of an ever-changing medley of abstract animations, only prettier than that sounds. Most people see something pretty, they say "That's nice." and move on. But I can sit and watch Electric Sheep for hours. I don't know why- I just like looking at pretty things. The little artistic moments are what I live for.
The last time I'd seen Electric Sheep was the day before we left Israel. I was sitting and staring at my screen, and the rest of the family was running around frantically preparing. "What's to prepare?", I said. "Clothes!", my parents yelled at me. I packed clothes, a bunch of Game Boy games •-------
Super Mario Bros., Metroid: Zero Mission, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga(with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance still in my Game Boy), and what little American money I had. Then I took a large portion of our DVD collection to watch in the car. And I had all I needed.
After saying goodbye to my friends on the Adventure Gamers forum and locking my computer, all I had left to do was set up the Gamecube for the neighbors. I was hoping (in vain, as it would turn out) that it would be used for more than Mario Party, and I figured whoever wanted to play Beyond Good & Evil or Pikmin should at least have good-quality stereo sound (which our TV, with its poor-quality mono speaker, couldn't provide). So I set up the speakers from my computer by the TV. Now, I didn't want anyone to adjust the volume on the speakers because the left speaker has a tendency to stop working when you do. So I had to make sure it was on just the right level, in the interest of being a good host. And that was all the excuse I needed to once again wander around in Metroid Prime for a few hours. (I was ready for the trip already.) It was good to be back in Tallon IV.
Though I went to bed early, the rest of my family was still running around and yelling outside my door. I fell asleep as soon as they all shut up. I woke up again at around one or so, too nervous to get back to sleep. So I went downstairs and paced around, thinking about the trip. I wasn't too eager to see my extended family at the bar mitzvah- people I hadn't seen in around ten years and probably wouldn't see again in just about as long. My cousins themselves? It's not like we ever had anything to talk about. Come to think of it, I wasn't even anxious to see my siblings: Miriam had started the trip two weeks early by flying to Florida, and the house had been more peaceful without her. And Benjy had lived in Boston for so long it was hard to believe we'd ever been related.
But I was excited to be seeing my grandparents' house again. I really missed that house.
And then I just paced around some more, imagining a trip taken with some sort of strange computer worn on the head. (By this point I really should have been back in bed.) And I composed myself a little folk song to go with that concept. • (It sounded like this.)
Moving forward on a random route, I'm thinkin',I didn't like it even as I made it up, but it had a catchy tune which I couldn't get out of my head. Finally I went back to sleep.
This is what life's all about-
Just one man in the wild, on his own.
Moving onwards in any direction,
With a wireless internet connection--
A little man and his home.
My alarm woke me up early that morning. I turned it off, put on some clothes, and sat on the floor waiting for my brain to boot up. Then I sat downstairs 'til it was okay to play piano. Well, I had to wait a little longer actually. See, my mother was davening, and she said it was okay with her if I played. So I did. But then my father walked in, and got furious at my inconsideration. It was such a ridiculous argument, but that's what my father does under pressure- he demonstrates that he is in control of the situation. For instance, once my mother finished she asked how they'd follow the news from Israel while we were away. He said: "We won't turn on the radio or talk politics- we're going on vacation! We're going to have fun! Even you!"
I figured by that point it would be okay to play piano. I had just come up with a new musical theme (nothing special, but sort of pretty) in the time it took him to walk Fudgie, and I wanted to develop it a little. But my father still wouldn't let me play, even though I was literally ready to walk out the door. "We're taking suitcases now. Help take the suitcases." I took a suitcase, and he still wouldn't let me play. I guess he wanted to control for himself the pace we took in leaving, and my leisurely attitude didn't fit with that. Or maybe it was just the volume (above pianissimo) he objected to. I waited for the taxi.
The cab driver talked a lot as we drove, which was interesting to me. It must be a boring job to drive from place to place, I thought. People only see you as "the cab driver". But inside the car, he's no less a person than his passengers. No, it's not a particularly profound thought, but you take what you can get when you're nervous and tired! So he talked about politics, and of course my parents talked about politics. When we got to the airport, the lady doing security ("Has anyone given you anything since you packed your bags?) was similarly outgoing, making lots of smalltalk with my parents as she checked our passports.
I hadn't been in Ben-Gurion airport since it was redesigned- and I was blown away! The ceiling in the hall you enter from is fairly transparent, so that the room seems twice as big as it really is. So I remembered that the last time I was there, it had seemed much smaller. Then there's this gorgeous waiting area, with a waterfall in the center of the room and stores circling around it. What amazing architecture!
The flight was not bad, or at least as close to "not bad" as a flight of that length can be. My father had bought me a new Mad magazine when we were in the airport (just to be nice), apparently not realizing how far the quality had fallen since the good ol' days when he was subscribed. It was trash from cover to cover- phony humor calculated by marketers to as large a target audience as possible. Oh well. I watched a movie, and played for hours in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. And that still left lots of hours of waiting.
The longer you wait, the less meaning the passage of time seems to have. After a while, sitting in that plane in that cramped seat seemed like my whole existence. It was a long flight. Someday, I reminded myself roughly twenty times in all, there would be nearly instantaneous transportation, and we could make trips like this all the time! And then I'd look at the walls of the plane sadly. And wait.
Somehow, I reached the end of the flight (Strange.), and we walked into JFK airport. And the whole building was gray in 90-degree angles! "What terrible architecture!", I said. So my mother responded that it just looked like a bureaucracy. And so it did. I would have payed more notice to the strange (to me, at least) accents people were using if they were using them for anything other than rehearsed business talk. And I would have noticed how they looked, if they weren't standing quite so straight in their places as if they were pillars the building was standing on.
Oy vey!, I thought. I've entered the accursed land of practicality!
Greed and Galuttony*
Greed and Galuttony*
The one kosher restaurant in the center of Washington D.C. cost a sizeable fortune for each meal. Why, when they could charge a reasonable amount? Because they could get that money, being the only kosher restaurant nearby. (It looked like a terrible restaurant, too!) So we had to walk for more than an hour in the scorching heat to find a dinky little museum cafeteria reported to be kosher. Actually, they had only three things on the menu with rabbinic supervision, which were roughly edible. Though it might not have been obscenely expensive, I as a person who had to actually taste this food can say that it was severely overpriced- they should have been paying us. And then they sold me a Good Humor bar which seemed to have been melted and refrozen. Why would they sell trash like that? Why, because they could get our money, of course.
The other side of this greed, naturally, is the reward paid in excess. All the houses we saw were enormous by Israeli standards. The families we stayed by always had several cars, as if one wasn't enough to get you from point A to point B. The digital cable has hundreds of channels, even though there's never anything on any of them. Excess is a way of life there. And I guess that as long as its pursuit for its own sake doesn't become the driving force in life, that's not bad. I don't know if it actually is a driving force- we weren't there that long.
What was a little bit troubling for me is that no one seemed to appreciate any of this. This wasn't amazing architecture, such that the space was needed to make the house feel just right. And it wasn't actually being used. It didn't look lived in, it didn't look wanted, it just looked empty. Like a person would be ashamed to have a house without all that excess space he'd never use in it. It seemed like every house had a piano in it, even though most of these families never played on it. So these musical instruments just sat, often out of tune and sometimes completely broken, just sat and took up space where it would catch people's eyes.
And then... what? Would these people just sit themselves down and start playing, finally serving the purpose the piano was created for? Or would their esteem of the piano's owner increase? Or maybe their eyes would just pass over it without recognition, no matter how well placed it was, because they've seen it so many times before.
I'm not sure whether any of this is good or bad, or even if a value judgement should be made here. But it certainly gave me food for thought.
Now, excess with appreciation- that's something else entirely. All art is excess- it serves no practical purpose. If we lived our lives obsessed with practicality we'd live in huts and eat vegetables all our lives. Bl'bah! And though I didn't notice it at all, my family mentioned that there was a lot of obesity around. So I suppose my association of America as a whole with practicality was way off. Maybe they limit practicality to work. Hm. I guess what I'm saying is I was overwhelmed by all this, and still don't exactly know what to think of it.
There's a lot to like in a money-driven culture, certainly. One of my favorite days of the trip was the very last one, in which we just stopped at a mall and shopped. I never like doing that here, because there's nothing to shop for. But though America doesn't make many good games, they sure sell 'em! On the one hand, there were three game stores in this mall in close proximity to each other, all members of one single game store chain, so two points for excess. But on the other hand, I could actually walk into a store, hand them physical money, and walk out five minutes later with games! I can't tell you how refreshing that was, and I only wish I could have that sort of set-up integrated into my life instead of visiting it once.
Maybe that's really all there is to it- envy. I knew we couldn't really afford this trip- we were outsiders to this whole consumerist lifestyle. And I got to be treated like a king regardless. We stayed at a Hampton Inn, with comfortable beds and free little bottles of shampoo and pretty good TVs, and just a few minutes after Benjy and I came into our room the phone rang. I answered, and it was someone from the hotel staff. He had called just to ask if there was anything we needed. It's such a little thing, but it was so perfect. "No, everything's great!", I answered. "Enjoy your stay in Hampton Inn.", he said. And with a huge grin on my face I joyfully concluded, "Thank you sir!" Okay, so people don't actually live like that and it is meant to be a one-time visit. But do you think inns are like that here?
I was jealous when I practically saw a Dunkin' Donuts on every street. And every time we passed one in the car, I pointed and yelled out excitedly to my family, "Dunkin' Donuts!". I have very fond memories of Dunkin' Donuts from Israel. I used to savor the taste of a Caramel Boston Creme on the very rare occasion I got one. And I imagine the rarity is not a factor which should be overlooked. Anyway, I've got a lot of nostalgia for that doughnut chain, which closed in Israel because no one could afford them on a regular basis. We didn't actually go into one on this trip, though, because my parents said they were rarely kosher. Yep, envy.
The first place we went from JFK airport was my Aunt Shari's house. Her house was not as big as some others, but Oh My! was it luxurious. The key word here was comfort. Rain outside, comfortable furniture, welcoming color schemes in each room. And then there was the basement, where I slept. Wowsers. She has one of those giant high-definition TVs, and let me tell you, it does make a difference. And she has a first-rate 7.1-speaker surround sound system hooked into it, and in the center of this reasonably-sized and cozy room was the most comfortable couch. And I turned the TV to a dreamy music channel, let the sound wash over me, and rested my head back in perfect bliss. And I sighed:
"Ah, money."
Socializing in Solo
Socializing in Solo
For instance, say the activity is actually inactivity, more specifically the inactivity of waiting and the act of looking out the window absent-mindedly. Say the environment we're talking about here is a car, just to make it easier to visualize. And to add a human touch, let's say it's a family in the car. Is this a social environment, or just a combination of six solitary environments?
I could certainly see the multiplayer aspect of a family sitting in a car if that family happened to be fighting. But say they're listening to the radio, or not even so much as listening to the radio. In theory, the people should get bored and have no choice but to start talking, at which point the environment will become a social one. In theory.
But let us further assume that in this family there are not enough common interests to start up a conversation, or at least a conversation which will engage more than two or three of the passengers. Maybe three of the family members are in a heated discussion about politics, while the other three are left out due to their own disinterest. We can say that there are four wholly separate "environments" (one involving three people, the other three involving one each) existing within this car. Whether those left out are doing anything or not, and what they are doing, is completely irrelevant for identifying socialization, because their presence does not affect anyone around them.
Now, at this point you may very well be suprised to learn that this is not really a hypothetical scenario at all, but in fact a true story in which the characters are my family (myself included). But do not worry!- The situation is not quite as hopeless as you might think, for we had a DVD player in the car!
Now, watching a DVD is a single-player activity, so to speak. The filmmaker (excepting certain specific cases) gives no thought to what social context the video will be viewed in- the best, most pure way to enjoy a movie is with as few social distractions as possible, so that you can view it on its own terms rather than the random social context it has been placed in.
You probably have already anticipated the question which I am leading toward (Well done!): "How does a one-person experience fare in a setting with more than one person?" We all know that it works fairly well in a theater setting, due to the unspoken rule "SHUT UP AND WATCH THE MOVIE!". (It is unspoken mostly because everyone has shut up and is watching the movie.) A car is a smaller yet more chaotic setting, because not everyone is involved in the watching of the movie. The screen is placed in between the backs of the front seats, hanging from the ceiling. Thus there are at all times two people (one thankfully being the driver) who cannot see the movie. Keep in mind that they can hear it nonetheless.
Some of the rules are inherited from theater, to retain some measure of common courtesy. Namely, no one person should control the pacing, and all present are to remain silent for the entire duration of the film. At this point we have six solo experiences within the car: four viewings of the movie, and two waitings in silence, with a little driving added in. This situation may seem stable at first, but it is not. The two in front (one of whom happens to like to have control over the situation in his car) are bored enough to talk but forbidden to, and so they occupy themselves with the one activity left to them:
Fiddling with the volume control to make the louder portions of the movie less unpleasant for themselves.
Suddenly a social experience emerges, and a complex one at that. The volume is adjusted only at especially loud segments (such as action scenes), but a good movie will usually not be perfectly consistant in its dynamics and so the softer portions, often containing only dialogue, cannot be heard at all. And so the four interact between each other, with exchanges like this:
"What did he say?"
"I don't know- I didn't hear. Did you hear what he said?"
"Me? No- you're the one by the speaker!"
"But I was leaning over here to see the screen better! What did he say, really?"
"Is that my fault?"
"I think he said something about horses and windmills."
"Your ears are broken, he said something like 'I have no foot with which to eat my lunch.'!"
"Shut up and let me watch the movie!"
And then the four viewers must put their trust in one of their number, sitting in the middle row, to control the pacing so they can watch that segment over and over again. When it turns out that it still can't be heard, another facet of this game appears, in which one brave member of the viewers must ask one or the other of the nonviewers to raise the volume again, while taking into account which of the two was the one to lower it in the first place (so as not to offend), how much time has passed since the lowering, how many times he and/or others have asked (at risk of frustrating the front-sitters), how forceful such a request must be and whether it need be asked several times, and the fact that everyone in the car knows that it will get louder again later and again upset the driver and his companion. In the meantime the movie has still been playing, leading to more flow-control, and the front-sitters have taken the opportunity presented by the commotion (an indication that the movie has lost focus) to start a short conversation between themselves. All participants in this now-unified car may bask in the light of the social atmosphere.
And now we may return to the original question, and ask: "If you give each six people a single-player experience, and then have them do it while they're stuck with the others, is that a social experience?" And now we see in practice the answer which was obvious from the start:
No.
But if you stick these chaos-ridden people in a room together, unless the setting is as stable and time-tested as can be, one of these people is likely to stop playing in their own corner and start affecting everyone else. At that point, all involved will be having a social experience.
And I hope I've made myself clear: This is most assuredly NOT a good thing.
Throwing a one-person experience into an unstable social environment is like throwing a person into a pit of untamed crocodiles. Big ones. With sharp teeth and nasty tempers.
Volume is one problem, and it was as much a concern when I was trying to listen to music as when we were watching a DVD- more so, in fact. The solution would be some sort of "audio contrast" control, which the divergence of the volume from the norm would be divided by. (If you lower the audio contrast to 0%, the volume stays consistantly at one level. If you raise it to 150%, all differences in dynamics are exaggerated. In this case, we'd want to keep it around 40% or so.) It would detract very much from the quality of the single-player experience, but concessions must be made to the crocodiles in order to escape the worse alternative. Audio contrast is a very important feature to the stereo system of any social environment used for music and movies with changing dynamics -like say a car. Too bad it doesn't actually exist.
Even if it did, the volume problem wouldn't go away in all settings. At almost every social setting on the whole trip, I played the piano. What else would I do- talk? Neah, I preferred to show off. So I would play for them much as I do at home to amuse myself. It was a form of socialization to begin with here, because it was affecting the people around me. (This is not to say that I payed any notice at all of whether anyone actually wanted me to play- I didn't care.) Now, I was trying to be considerate to some degree, so I didn't play my most bombastic pieces. Some people commented that my music could be classified as "easy listening" music, and I pointed out that under the circumstances I couldn't very well play anything else. But that wasn't enough for my father, who kept coming over (every time I did this, several times) and begging me to "keep it down". I was the one in control of the volume here, playing the piano as a single-player game, but it was a crowd. It doesn't work, I tell you.
Pacing is another frequent problem. When we were at The Art Institute of Chicago, I tried to savor each pretty painting I came across. Well, not every pretty painting, but there were some which grabbed my eye, and I'd just stand for minutes, not really analyzing so much as looking through the "window" the frame was, into this other world within. This isn't exactly how my sisters approached the museum. Miriam and Dena must have ran through the rooms, because my father came to tell me that they were bored so it was time to leave. Art is something which must be appreciated for yourself. It's not a group activity. And we put it in a social setting, and -smush- there goes half the experience.
We were only in Illinois for two days. I wanted to stay. No, I mean for good- I really do love my grandparents' house. I enjoyed myself just walking back and forth in their house, I love it so much. We didn't do all that much in Illinois, but that's the thing about contentment- it doesn't rely on keeping busy. It didn't take me any time at all from the time we arrived to get settled into "my" room- it really did feel like coming home. I didn't want to go. It was a personal thing, between me and the house. And we had come as a family. We left.
My family
My family
I don't do that.
I didn't get the true family trip experience.
What I did get is a fair amount of time sitting around with these people. This was the most forgettable part of the trip.
But surely I learned something about my family I didn't know before? Surely I bonded with them more than I could have at home...?
Eh.
I did learn some stuff about Benjy, I guess. Or maybe I'd known it before, but forgot it because it'd been so long since seeing him.
One thing I learned is that he has a pretty good artistic sense.
When we were at Niagara Falls on the "Maid of the Mist" boat ride, there was one priceless moment I noticed. There was a speaker on the boat with recorded tour info playing for the first few minutes of the ride- you know, boring dates and stuff. Halfway through, we reached the climax of the experience, being right next to the waterfall and getting totally drenched. And at that precise moment, the speaker announced in that proud marketing voice, "Welcome to Niagara Falls!" It was like a movie, where they hold off the opening title for a few minutes. Whoever had written that knew exactly what people were coming for.
Well, I was surprised that Benjy noticed that, too. When he got off the boat, he mentioned it, so that's how I know.
Oh, and he's a smart photographer. He brought his camera everywhere, but as he put it, "I prefer not to set up my shots.". Instead, he tries to take more natural pictures of how everyone would have been standing anyway. I like that.
Benjy had this wacky idea, when we were in Detroit, of a variant of Ping Pong which even the little kids present could join in on. In this game, it didn't matter if the ball went completely off the table, so long as it was bouncing like a basketball. So the game environment included the entire room and everything/one in it. It was so chaotic, it reminded me of games Benjy used to make up when we lived in New Jersey. And it occured to me that games are more fun when there aren't any rigid rules, and you just play. That's something Benjy's always known.
My father really enjoyed the trip. Sure, it was hectic, but we got to do some stuff he loved. Namely, the International Spy Museum. Though we really had to rush through that, it really sparked his imagination. He wouldn't stop talking about espionage for around two weeks after that. It was a really fun museum.
In Chicago, my father played ping pong with us. He hadn't played in around ten years. And he whipped us at that game. Occasionally I see something like that, which reminds me that he's a very multi-talented guy. Most of the time, he's just running around doing things.
He and my mother had some nostalgic fun in Boston and Baltimore going to the places they lived and went to college. They both enjoyed that, though my father enjoyed it much more (You could see it on his face.).
In Baltimore we stopped by a couple who'd been good friends with my parents back then. And I learned the amusing anecdote that even back in college, my mother was trying to stay busy helping everyone else out. They called her "Mother Fallet". My mother didn't remember that, but it makes sense. She hasn't changed so much.
I don't think my mother knew what to do with herself on this trip. We were staying at hotels and other people's houses, where she couldn't do all the chores. And she doesn't know how to have fun. It was pretty sad seeing her sitting with me watching TV when there wasn't anything good on. She wasn't enjoying it, yet she was even watching the commercials because she just couldn't think of anything to do, what with the lack of political/social activities to volunteer for.
I'm pretty sure she enjoyed all the schmoozing she did, though. She generally likes that.
My sisters were, um, there.
Miriam kept singing pop songs wherever we were, and I kept trying to get her to stop.
Dena kept criticizing me for being so weird, and I ignored her.
Excellence vs. Accessibility
Excellence vs. Accessibility
It reached its satisfying conclusion, I took the disc back, and my father turned on the radio. What I heard was a short song which sounded just like any other, with phoney romantic lyrics market-tested to appeal to as large a target audience as possible, with the most obvious harmonic progression you could think of, but a slightly catchy simplistic tune. Miriam and Dena asked my father to raise the volume because they'd heard this song before. He did so, and why not?- the volume was a constant all the way through.
To summarize: Two hundred years ago, there was music which aimed to do everything. Now, there is music which aims to do nothing. Now that's progress.
But I wondered if I shouldn't lose sight of what audience the music was dealing with. My family weren't the sort of audience who cared enough about music to appreciate greatness, but they were looking for some mild entertainment they could use to keep themselves occupied for a few minutes at a time, and if it was soft and inobtrusive enough to allow them to chat on top of it, so much the better. They wanted to not have to get too involved, they wanted simple tunes diluted with simple lyrics. The music on the radio isn't an unwanted plague, it's serving a popular demand.
I can relate to wanting simplification, wanting more accessibility. When we went to Lincoln Memorial, I had a hard time figuring out what the point was, faced with historical context and the specific wording of a historic speech and an image of a historical figure. That's because I just don't care for history, and am unwilling to put in the effort I'd need to understand it.
But in Boston, we heard a small part of a tour about history which I actually enjoyed. Sillily, the tour guide was an actor dressed in old-fashioned clothes. He wasn't a historian at all, just a good storyteller, expressing historical trivia as compelling tales of ordinary people. It wasn't particularly informative, considering that I don't remember anything he said, but I had a very good few minutes listening to each story. I didn't want a history lesson of the sort that only appeals to enthusiasts, because I didn't have the patience nor the interest for history. But what's wrong with enjoying a little bit of simplified history on my level?
•It occurred to me that if history were told (accurately, of course) through dramatic movies and exploration games, then most everyone, myself included, would love learning history.
After the Shabbat we spent in Detroit, one of my newly-bar-mitzvahed-cousins showed Benjy and me a flight simulator he liked: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002. He had a joystick, and I waited eagerly to see him take off and have some fun flying. It took him ten minutes just to get off the ground, because this simulator was so obsessed with realism that he needed to go through dozens of communications with the tower in preparation, and needed to fiddle with many little doohickeys in the cockpit to be able to take off. When he did take off (using the joystick) and had the plane on its way, he put the joystick down and put the plane on auto-pilot. Apparently, this game was designed entirely for realism -not fun. There was no reward for any of the actions the player took, no excitement, no danger. It was so mundane. I begged him to crash the plane, so that we could at least see an explosion. But he was too responsible a virtual pilot. Yawn.
What I would want to see in a flight game is the experience of flying distilled to the raw thrill of soaring around. You should be able to use that joystick to swing around wildly, thrown off course by every gust of wind, and feel like you are the plane (or preferably a bird) flying free. That's an accessible feeling, a universal feeling. Maybe it wouldn't last for more than a minute or two, but that short time would be such wonderful wish fulfillment.
In Illinois, my grandfather took us out on his boat. He's got a really nice boat, with a refrigerator and a dining room and a bedroom and a bathroom and a nice set-up for the radio. It's a good, reliable boat with all sorts of digital doohickeys all over the place. I wasn't interested in learning to use those doohickeys to use the wind for maximum speed, nor was I interested in understanding what every little bit of the boat was there for, so I just sat in my place and let Benjy and my father help out.
Now, the ideal work would work on both levels. It would be deep enough for pros, but accessible enough to pull in ordinary people so that they might become pros. As I sat, I pictured a fantasy metalude set on an ocean a la The Wind Waker, which would have a great deal of realism in its sailing mechanics (unlike that game's simplistic accessibility) but remain universal in its appeal by using that fictional setting to justify the effort. I'd be perfectly willing to be guided through the real-world nuances of sailing if I saw an interesting-looking uncharted island far off that was sure to have some excitement on it. The lure of the great unknown would pull in the newcomer (initially learning the ropes from an NPC with him), who would then get caught up in the depth of the simulator and have fun not only on the island but in between islands as well.
The last time we saw our other grandparents in Boston, they wanted to take a family photo while they could. They'd had a flat tire, so we were by a street. They didn't like that, but it's what we had. I wished I had had a camera of my own, but it was too late for that. I stood for their picture in a distracted pose, as if I'd rather not be in that particular photo. I couldn't stop them from taking only the most accessible type of picture, and I wasn't sure that I should. But I had the opportunity to add some depth and truth to the image, and so I did.
Diversity (and lack thereof)
Diversity (and lack thereof)
Okay, space-wise it's big. And it sure took a lot of time to go the length we did, both by plane and car.
But I'm accustomed to videogames, where I can go from a boiling hot desert with erupting volcanoes and flying lava and rock-monsters attack to a frozen forest with no gravity and funny-looking animal-people who live in invisible shoes just by taking an elevator. So my standards aren't in sync with the Real World.
The Real World isn't so exquisitely designed. Once we left the airport, apart from the language difference we might as well have still been in Tel Aviv. Roads, roads, and more roads awaited us. And here's the kicker: They were black with white stripes and green signs.
What? That doesn't shock you? Well, it should! What a lack of imagination! Would it have killed these countries to be original? Where's the place, I asked everyone around, with pink and yellow roads? Where's the place where the roads are all underground?
See, I don't think it's enough for each place you go to to have different coordinates on the map. I think each place should feel different. How were the roads here any different than the Israeli roads? Hmmm:
- The traffic lights were slightly different.
- There were more pronounced sidewalks.
- Did I mention the traffic lights? Oh, and there were fewer zebra-striped crosswalks too.
We actually crossed the border into Canada, but if it weren't for the different pictures on the crossing lights and the font on the road signs, I might never have known. The roads looked the same there too.
And why is it that every car looks the same? I know people always think I'm stupid for asking that but- They do! Where are the one-seaters? Where are the triple-decker ones? Where are the long thin ones with three seats, one in back of the other? Where are the ones where the driver is underneath the rest of the seats, by the wheels? Or on top of the roof, where he can get a real view?
And not only were they all the same design, but they all seemed to be the same boring colors as well! I couldn't have picked our rented car out from the rest in a parking lot, because they were all the same color. What good is having a DVD player on the inside, when on the outside it looks so bland? (How bland? Well, I can't remember what color it was- that's how bland.) Where were the cars with polka dots?
So what about the people? Surely, you ask, I met hundreds of interesting people while driving all that distance?
Heh. No, I'm just kidding- I know you didn't ask that. I mean, everyone knows that the last thing you'll see on the road is a human being! (Except for the oddly friendly American cops, who are too busy doing their two jobs to actually be human.) It's the beauty of progress- once upon a time, everyone walked everywhere through lovely forests and lava-filled monster-ridden deserts, and along the way they met everyone else who happened to be walking. (It should be noted that back then, roads probably looked different from each other.) Then one day Mr. Ford came along, and everyone could finally hide their individuality from everyone else inside identical boxes of metal. And humanity, as a whole, breathed a sigh of relief.
Oh yes, people love to pretend they're no different from everyone else. My father was constantly insisting that I tuck in my tzitzit, because having them out would stand out too much in America. And then he also forced me to shave off my beard, and even the little messy tufts of hair on my cheeks! I liked those blatantly asymmetrical tufts. You look at the messy-tufts, and you say, "That's Mory.". Or at least that was the plan, which was why I was growing them at different lengths. He forced me to shave the messy-tufts off, so that I'd look more "normal" for the bar mitzvah pictures. Bleh!
There's one place where, horror of horrors, you actually have to see people who look different than you, and that's waiting on a line. While we were on a line for the "Maid of the Mist", we saw a bunch of Amish people. I don't think I'd seen any Amish before. My family thought they looked weird, and I think they saw that as a bad thing.
Myself, I thought they looked weird too. But weird is good! See, if someone looks different than you, you start to wonder if they live different too. If you were to see someone whose legs sprouted out of the top of his head and walked upside-down, you'd wonder if gravity was reversed where he lived and they all walked on ceilings. And that's a good thing to think about! Every time you see weirdness, the world grows a little.
The real problem is all the people who don't stand out, because as far as anyone else is concerned they don't exist. They're just a shadow of the larger culture, not individuals. They might as well be doing a job and wearing uniforms for all the humanity they display. Because ultimately, humanity is all about that weirdness, I think.
And people are weird, whether or not they show it. I bet every person in those cars is a fascinating individual in his own right. But driving through identical road after road, seeing them only as the inside of a metal box, you'd never know it.
I imagine the world really is a big place. But it doesn't seem that way.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
The gameplay goes something like this: You've got (within the context of the story the game's developers wanted to tell) a team of assorted types of fighters which you put together yourself. You decide what the job of each should be (ninja, archer, healer, sorceror, gunner, etc.), what abilities they should learn (immobilizing, healing, blinding, fire attack, reactive dodge, etc.), and essentially how you want them to work within the group. You are to develop each character from a useless shell into a unique fighter which can make practical contributions to the success of the missions you take, of which there are many to choose from. You take each "person" defined only by name and species, and give him purpose. Then you make use of them in practice, in relatively easy strategic battles, some of which are designed to push the story forward.
During all the time I played this game on the trip (of which there was much), I barely progressed through the story at all. Why bother? The more fun part is setting it all up, so I went only through the less meaningful battles, solely for the sake of giving my team experience I could work with. Besides, fights are fun for their own sake; I didn't need (or want) to be told why we were fighting.
The first time I ever played FFTA, it was on a "borrowed" copy. In fact, I played it twice from start to finish on that copy. The first time, I was figuring out the rules as I went along. The second time, I understood the basics, so I could finally appreciate the experience. And even by the end of the second playthrough (and it's not a particularly short game the way I play it), I'd barely scratched the surface of the potential in this game. So I resolved to buy my own copy. I bought one used copy off eBay, and it gave a very rare error message so I sent it back for a refund. Then I bought a used copy again, this time from Gamestop's website, and got exactly the same very rare error message. I suspect that it was in fact the very same cartridge I'd gotten rid of. So I bought it a third time, directly from a person I trusted.
That was the copy I was playing on.
You think that's excessive? Hm, maybe it is. But it sure was fun. During the boredom of waiting which seemed to go on forever, I appreciated being able to escape into this fantasy world where potential is so easily tapped, where (unlike other tactical RPGs) progress comes easy, where money is so easy to come by that the hard part is finding something new to use it on, and where every moment truly is what you make of it.
Not that the game is perfect. A few remnants of the Real World found their way in. Laws, for instance. What a nuisance. Every situation has its own arbitrary rules which must be obeyed, sometimes rules which completely block you from doing what ought to be done. Then there's the messy menu system, which makes all that lovely micromanagement a little harder to get at. And then there were the broken shoulder buttons on my Game Boy, which progressively got worse over the trip. By the time we were on the plane back, I couldn't play the game at all. Still, none of these factors prevented the game from being the best kind of escapism.
But the worst aspect of the game, by far, is the story. (And maybe now you'll see why I didn't want to progress through it!) It goes something like this: A bunch of small, unremarkable kids live miserably in the Real World in a small, unremarkable town called Ivalice. One is paralyzed, one is constantly teased, one is frequently beaten up by bullies, our hero (by the name of Marche) has lost a mother and rarely gets to see his father, and all four have to go to school. Their lives are completely meaningless, and they wish it were more like that video game series they like -"Final Fantasy"- with monsters and magic and epic quests and meaningful stories. Now, the kids happen to stumble across a standard-issue Magic Book™ and accidentally turn their town of Ivalice into the Kingdom of Ivalice, where all their fantasies can become reality. The player plays Marche, who for the entire course of the game is trying to destroy the fantasy Ivalice to get back to the real one.
And that's where they lose me. Basically, what the developers are saying is: "Hey kids! Escapism is bad! That miserable reality you live in? That's good!". So this boy Marche comes across as a bit of a moron. His friends try to reason with him, try to get him to appreciate all the countless ways in which the fantasy is better than reality and their lives are better for it. And he always counters with: "But it's just escapism! Don't you see it's wrong?". Yes, the main character in this game is actively trying to get the game to end.
And why should it? Why should I have to turn the game off and put it away? Why can't I just keep standing in place, pushing the characters to the limits of their potential and having fun? For that matter, why doesn't the game have expansion packs which add in new content to keep the game going? Or why couldn't it have been an online game, so that you never should run out of good (and bad) opponents and the developers can keep adding in new options for growth -new jobs, new abilities, new types of strategy, new storylines? Why can't I play this game for the rest of my life?
Magic book, take me too!
Wishing for Permanence
Wishing for Permanence
We went to the wonderful New England Aquarium in Boston. It had so many interesting types of fish, and a special exhibit with the most gorgeous jellyfish, but the highlight was the big penguin tank in the center. There were some aquarium workers in the tank with the penguins, feeding them as they all got in line patiently and waited their turns. They knew all the names, how well which penguins got along, etc. All we knew was "Ooh! Penguins! How cute!". I got the distinct impression that we weren't getting the full experience here. The rest of the building was so big and filled that there was no way I could internalize all I was seeing. I ignored the science and just took in how pretty it all was, because I'm not a marine biologist who'd care about such things. Now, I can take quite a lot of prettiness, but at a certain point it just becomes overkill if you take it all in at once. I wondered what it would be like to see all that on a regular basis. I could imagine a fantasy world where everyone had penguins outside their door, and treated them the same as we treat cats. Or even in the real world, there must be someplace (Antarctica, maybe?) where that could happen. Now that would be cool. Them all bottled up in this big building where only a handful of people will see them regularly? That's not what animals were made for.
While we were there, we went to the on-site IMAX theater to see Sharks 3D. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was right up my alley- not a science-heavy documentary (as I'd expected) but just a succession of pretty pictures. Lovely. It makes you feel like you're one of these creatures who lives in the ocean, looking around at all the gorgeous things swimming around, of which sharks were only one of many species displayed. Now, nothing can really replicate the life of an underwater creature because they're permanently living in all this, but it gave us the next best thing by spending a lot of time on each animal. I can see how that might bore some people, but for me it was wonderful. Not least because this was an IMAX theater, not some tiny little Israeli theater. The special thing about IMAX isn't just that it's 3D- it's that the screen is enormous. I imagined a fantasy world in which I could watch every movie like that. Leaving the theater, I mentioned to Benjy that it would be so cool to be able to just go to an IMAX theater and watch, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 3D! That's what this sort of theater was made for!
[sigh]
Anyway, all this got me to thinking. If you take a large dose of some light entertainment once, you'll mildly enjoy it for the most part and possibly get a little dissatisfied. Why dissatisfied? Because it's overkill to have too much of a very subtle enjoyment all at once. But if you spread it out, taking small doses on a regular basis, it can enrich your life. For instance: A Sudoku puzzle is not exactly the most fun thing in the world. Spend an hour or two on such puzzles, and you'll be so bored you'll never want to do another such puzzle again. But if every morning you open the newspaper and do the Sudoku puzzle of the day, it can sharpen the mind. Same goes for crosswords, Kakuro, and all those handheld puzzle videogames of the kind (such as Polarium and Brain Age). And imagine how boring it would be to play Animal Crossing, a banal string of errands and smalltalk on the Gamecube, for hours at a time! But if you can integrate it into your life, working your real-life schedule around when events will be taking place in Animal Crossing, it's tremendous fun! And listening to a concert is the best way to appreciate music, but listening to the radio regularly has more of a positive effect on your life. I'm sure you can think of many more examples of your own.
There is a problem with aiming for such experiences- the whole time issue. If something takes a little bit of time every day, that's less time that you have for more sophisticated one-time experiences. Which means not only that each day is going to be fairly similar to the others (which is true of any sort of schedules), but that from a business perspective, there's less of a market for new things. Which is a problem for me as a person who would always like to see more diversity in art. Take online role-playing games, arguably the building blocks of future civilizations: They are so involving that the players not only neglect other games (The PC game market has been much smaller ever since World of Warcraft was released), but sometimes neglect the rest of their real-world lives! In order for such a game to be made responsibly, the gamists need to do more than just ensure the endless potential for growth. They need to design the game for short play sessions, which can be fit into standard schedules and not only the schedules of the obsessed.
But I admit all this reluctantly. Because I would like to imagine a fantasy world where everyone who wishes can and does read any book they ever want! Where anyone can walk right outside their doors and watch penguins in the cold. Where there is never a lack of pretty things to look at. Where any movie can be watched, at any time, in 3D on the finest IMAX screen. Where I can stay at Grandpa and Grandma's house, and where I can spend as much time as I want in a great art museum.
[sigh]
Exploration and Discovery
Exploration and Discovery
Take our old shul in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. There was this very little room with lots of coats hanging in it, and we used to play hide-and-seek around there. Now, an adult looking at this situation might say that I was hiding in the coat closet because we were playing hide-and-seek, but he'd have it backwards- I was playing hide-and-seek so that I'd get to hide in the coat closet. And when I ran in the hallways, I wasn't just using the hallways for running. I was enjoying that hallway! See, hallways are long, so they're best appreciated by running. Kids are connoisseurs for such things.
The hallway -which, along with the coat closet, was on the bottom floor- looped around a big room, with little rooms all around the edge. The big room was a place I only went in on Yom Kippur for davening. (At other times, that boring activity took place upstairs.) The rest of the year, I didn't go in there, which give it a bit of mystique. The little rooms I darted in and out of, which satisfyingly gave the impression of their tangential nature.
But there comes a certain time in a person's life when a room becomes just a room, when a hallway is only notable for leading you to where you're going, where a closet is no longer a place to hide but only a place to hang coats. And I am ashamed to say that I've passed that point.
That is what I learned on the second Shabbat, when we went back to the shul of my childhood. It was not, as the cliché goes, "smaller than I remembered". In fact, the rooms were exactly as I remembered them. But they were just rooms. I was on the other side of that big room now, the side which now hosts a second minyan. It was a room to daven in, nothing more. There was nothing left to discover except that the room wasn't any prettier than it absolutely had to be. The building had shrunk metaphorically; it had lost its magic.
This deterioration of spirit can't be helped, because it is tied to other socially assigned responsibilities. It is a social necessity to eventually see past what something is to what it is for - the rules of each and every social setting must be understood and obeyed. It is a social obligation to abandon abstraction in favor of practicality. It would be childish to see inherent value in architecture, or in streets and forests and the rest of the world for that matter. Focusing on them is a waste of time. A good adult should concern himself only with the question: "How efficiently does this serve my goals?"
Still, the change has left a big hole in my life. I fill that hole with exploration-driven games- namely, Metroid Prime and Myst. They provide me with worlds detached from social context, in which it is perfectly acceptable to walk around beautiful areas without having anything specific to do in them. Metroid Prime's world of Tallon IV is exquisitely designed, and offers platforming with which I can appreciate the world design. Because if there is a small platform, and a larger platform next to it, the proper way to appreciate that design is by jumping from one to the next, no? We gamers are connoisseurs for such things.
Unfortunately, a few remnants of the Real World find their way into both series. They would have to. If you think about it, there's something odd about a game serving the practical goal of an escape from practicality. And skipping past the cute little paradox of it all, the real problem in practice is who would want such a game? A kid won't need to look for a socially-accepted outlet for socially-unacceptable indulgence, because he wouldn't care about what's socially acceptable. (And how I envy him!) But an adult will have trained himself not to care about self-indulgence! The only people who would want such a game are those who understand practicality but don't want to live by it, those who indulge in art but need to fit into society regardless. In other words, people like me. But people like me are not numerous enough to pay for a game's development.
So compromises are made. Metroid includes a lot of action, and Myst includes a lot of puzzles. I can handle that. Action and puzzles aren't bad. And they are marketed promoting these as their selling points, along with stories which justify the exploration. That way, they can be sold to people who will have no appreciation for the exploration, who will play the games only so that they can beat them. These games are not made for them, but they would not be made without them.
All three subordinate game elements can be a bit of a nuisance at times, but I put up with them because I love to explore. I love the magic of the unknown, and how those foreign and wondrous lands can be integrated into my world-view with just a little repetition and backtracking. After a few times passing through a certain area of Tallon IV, I get to know it so well I don't need a map anymore. It becomes as real to me as any place I've ever been to in the Real World, and more real than most, because this place I've been allowed to experience.
There are very few places in the Real World I've had the privilege to get to know so well. For that matter, there are very few places I'd want to get to know, thanks to society's obsession with practicality. Most places are exactly the same, most places are boring. But I'm always looking for a place that can be different, a place that can not only be an experience in itself, but a good one. And when I find such an opportunity, I make the most of it. I once had a "Metroid moment" in Eilat, exploring by myself (on foot, of course) to find the pizza place. That was very satisfying. And possibly my fondest memories of the seventh grade -indeed, some of the fondest memories of my life- were exploring the big campus of Kiryat No'ar with Tuvia, filled with diverse and interestingly-placed buildings. And you'd better believe we experienced those buildings from every angle. We climbed roofs, scaled walls, hid in giant bushes, you name it.
Some of my family members, seeing me in areas I've been to a few times, think I have an excellent sense of direction. They're wrong. I have a terrible sense of direction. But when I find a good area, I leap at the opportunity to explore it, and so when I return to that area, it's almost like I'm coming home. Discovering an area isn't just short-term entertainment. It gives you a sense of ownership over that area, a sense that can last a good long time. Not literal ownership, mind you- I'm referring to how it implants itself in your memory so well that you could find your way through it in your sleep. It's satisfying in a way that you can't really understand unless you've done a fair amount of exploring yourself.
Why can't such experiences be more common in the Real World? I blame it on whatever idiot decided that cars, rather than people, deserved 80% of the road. The moron who dictated that these ugly, stinky metal machines were more entitled to inherit the world than humans. Cars don't explore. Cars efficiently move from point A to point B. That's a chore, not a process of discovery. The awkwardness and rigidness of their mechanical movement makes it impossible to appreciate the nuances of the world around you. On top of that, all the rules of driving distract you further, making it such a practical mishmash of little details to pay attention to that you're barely allowed to see where you are. And you're never alone on the road. Exploring is a personal experience, but you're never able to go in your own direction. There are cars in front of you, and cars in back of you, and cars to your side. So what should be a single-player experience is completely buried under the weight of this massively-multiplayer environment.
And the 20% of the road that's left? That stinks too. The sidewalk is just about the most simplistic piece of world design I can imagine. And it's all over the place. I would have no problem with a sidewalk placed here and there. There's nothing specifically wrong with them, since there's nothing to them. But a world with so many of these straight and boring stretches that its identity is defined by them? That's a pretty pathetic little world. Then add in the smell and noise of the cars, and maybe a dog doo every so often, just to make the picture complete.
Where are the cliffs to climb?
Where are the moving platforms?
Where are the tiny tunnels?
Where are the dangerous shortcuts?
Where are the gates dividing areas?
Where are the multi-level underground mazes?
Where are the above-ground skyways?
Where are the rooftop passageways?
Where are the colors?
Where are the sounds
And the sights
And the smells
And the whole experience?
Without diversity in world design, there's nothing to discover. And without the promise of discovery, there's no opportunity to explore.
It may be too late to save the streets, but thankfully there are still houses to fall back on. It is socially acceptable, though not socially agreeable, to have an interesting house. After all, if it's your house, you can do whatever you want with it. You can put the main entrance on the roof, or make the half-built attic into a bedroom, or face a couch to a window so you can watch the rain comfortably.
On the other hand, a house doesn't need to be unique to be good. For instance, my grandparents' house is perfectly socially acceptable, and yet it still excites me to be in it. One reason is that there's just a lot to discover in it. My father and his brothers lived in that house once, and all their old things are there waiting to be found. As such, the whole house is partially a way to escape into another time, with working 8-Track players and a Mattel Intellivision. I think there's even an Apple II lying around somewhere. And even better than all that is the box, sitting somewhere in the house, of my father's old Mad Magazine collection. These are issues from back in the 60's, back when the magazine was hysterically funny.
It might seem odd that I'd associate the house with these little gems, but every world designer knows that the easiest recipe for exploratory magic is a good treasure hunt. The promise that you might always find a new treasure around the corner -be it one of Metroid's power-ups, Myst's book pages or Eilat's pizza- raises the entire experience to a new level. And I must emphasize that actually getting that treasure is not the essence here- the promise is. I never found the box of Mad treasures, but it enhanced my time there to know that it was there for the taking.
Even beyond all that, though, it's a great house. Some of the rooms have truly striking appearances, and even the smell of each room is distinctive. When I said that I wished I could stay in that house, someone said I'd get bored of it quickly. But that person was an adult, and he was wrong.
When I was a kid, every house and every street seemed like an experience waiting to be had. Now that I'm older, the world has gotten a lot less magical. But every now and then, I'm reminded that there are still worlds worth discovering.
Socializing? Bleh!
Socializing? Bleh!
On Shabbat, it happened to be raining. I love the rain. It's so peaceful and consistent and familiar. I stood outside of the shul in the rain to get away from the crowd inside. It was calm and peaceful. Everyone else came in raincoats, but I didn't. It seemed a bit backwards to come into the rain in the sort of outfit that would actively prevent you from appreciating it. It was only a very light rain, anyway, so it's not like I'd have to explain away being drenched. I could still hear the noise from inside, but it was good to be outside nonetheless. Or maybe that's backwards- maybe it was better for the noise inside. Whatever the reason, I liked it.
My father thought that was wrong. It seemed backwards to him that I'd come into a social setting with the sort of attitude that would actively prevent me from appreciating it. He was on the other side of that front door. And he pushed me (quite literally) in the way of the family members because I was acting too weird. I waited for him to walk away again, and escaped again. Would these people be talking about videogames, or comic books, or anything else that I might find interesting? Of course not- they'd all just ask that one same question. The question to which I had no satisfying answer, but which was the only question they'd find appropriate for a family member my age.
Basically, these were people who I'd never expect to see again in my life, because I'd never remember they existed. I'm not sure I'd want to remember they existed.
At one point, I tried hanging around Benjy. If I stand by someone else who is socializing, I can be close enough to seeming like a participant in that conversation so as to not have to socialize myself. People leave you alone if they see you standing by another conversation, whether or not you are really a part of that conversation. It's a nice little loophole in the social rules which I use whenever possible. The only downside is that it tends to irritate the person you're following. But if that person is a close family member or friend, then that's acceptable.
Anyway, I tried hanging around Benjy. He loves to talk about politics. I tried actually joining the conversation at one point, and made myself look like a complete fool. I don't have a brain capable of processing politics. There are all those little trivial details, and you're supposed to treat each one like it's the key to the whole issue. I don't see details, I see concepts. At one point the discussion looked like it related to a concept I was familiar with, so I brought that concept in. They said that had absolutely nothing to do with what they were talking about. I kept my mouth shut after that.
(Benjy sees me as a bit of a fool, I think. On a different occasion, I tried to understand the political discussion he was having with my parents, and he got increasingly frustrated when -my best efforts notwithstanding- I wasn't making any sense of the issues.)
In fact, keeping my mouth shut seems to be the best way to go in almost any social setting. I can't relate to what people like that say, and they couldn't relate to what I'd say, so it would always end in embarrassment. I kept my mouth shut at the bar mitzvah dinner, when the people at my table -all family members, roughly the same age as me- talked about all sorts of things I couldn't relate to. I waited for some hint of an opening I could crawl in to the conversation through. There wasn't one.
I waited for so long that I wasn't waiting for anything in particular anymore- just waiting. I kept waiting at the table later when everyone else got up to join in on conversations at other tables. And then some extended family member came over and introduced me to Ronnie, a kid related to me only in some roundabout way I didn't quite grasp. And Ronnie and I, we just started talking. And didn't stop, really. We were talking about videogames, mostly- the games he liked, the huge mistakes game developers tend to make, the future game systems, that sort of thing. Each little drop of a point adding to the others to make a satisfying light rain.
I knew I'd probably never see him again in my life, and he'd probably forget I existed. But I liked the conversation.
Back at our cousins' house, the adults engaged in lifeless smalltalk about nothing interesting. They listened to speeches and hung around with their extended family out of some sort of, I don't know, social obligation or something. Or maybe they really were enjoying it. Beats me. But downstairs were Uncle Perry's kids. I hadn't actually seen Uncle Perry in around eight years or so. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that he seemed like a really nice guy. But his kids- wow. His kids are so young and full of energy that it was fun just to be in the same room as them! They weren't talking so much as fooling around and jumping up and down and generally acting like kids. It was refreshing to see this other side of the family, to be reminded that that side even existed.
Or maybe it was just envy.
They didn't have to focus their socialization into these restrictive systems and acceptable environments. They didn't have to stand around with people they couldn't relate to.
Well, neither did I. I could sit in my little frog-sit over by the side.
Marcus thought I needed to be "fixed". That's Marcus, my longtime friend from New Jersey, with whom I spent most of the second Shabbat. It was nice to spend some time with him. But he thought there was something wrong with a person who stays away from other people. "What do you do when you go out with the guys?", he asked. "Um, what guys?", I dodged, enjoying this new opportunity to take the role of "weird creature". "Your guys! Oh, don't tell me you don't have guys! Everyone needs guys.". And as much as I enjoyed the attention, he wasn't wrong.
But really, what guys? Adults, who'd keep annoying me with that same question and never talk about anything interesting? Kids, who aren't capable of processing social rules? No, I'm pretty much limited to people like me, who are interested in concepts but not details, or people like Marcus, who are so into their own interests and full of energy that it can be fun (if tiring) to just be in the same room with them. But people like us, we're not numerous enough for a guy like me to be part of a group.
Every now and then, I get an opening into some group I'll never get to see again. I guess I should be thankful.
"So what are you doing next year?"
"So what are you doing next year?"
Any time I saw one, they'd ask me the same question. Couldn't anyone think of anything more interesting to ask? All they wanted to hear were plans for the future. They see people like stocks- if they're not making money now, their value depends on whether they'll make money in the future.
I'd always say that I planned to do "not much". I like that reply because it's the truth. Also, it doesn't put me in a situation where I'll have promised to do something. I can almost never get myself to follow through on those promises.
(All answers are replies, but not all replies are answers.)
That didn't satisfy them. They wanted to get me to go to a college, so I could get a job later on. They wanted me to stop fooling around and jumping up and down and start something.
So they'd wait around, hoping to see how they could someday get a return (in small quantities of pride) on their blood connection to me. (Family isn't as fair as the stock market, because you don't get to choose who to invest in.)
They'd find me later by the piano, and saw what they wanted to see. An adult would come over and say to me: "Do you know what your music reminds me of?" And I'd smile, because this was roughly the thirtieth person to go through this script since the beginning of the trip. And then, as expected, they'd name some famous contemporary pianist/composer I'd never heard of. (I know roughly zero about contemporary pianists.) I think it's supposed to be a compliment: If he got to be big and famous and make lots of money, then I could too!
The more people made comments like this, the funnier the whole routine got. Because no two people referred to the same composer! Apparently my music sounds like everyone else out there. And it's no compliment to think that I have nothing original to offer. But I'd laugh, because I just didn't care. I was playing for two reasons, and two reasons only:
- To show off, thereby getting attention.
- To entertain myself.
"Nonsense", thought the adults. "This could be marketed and sold! I'd buy his CD, wouldn't you buy his CD?"
Some were even more direct. My Uncle Johnny, after hearing me do my best with a primitive keyboard in my aunt's basement, said I should send him an audio file with music and he'd bring it to a professional to make into a CD.
Don't get me wrong- I couldn't relate to these people, but I was not opposed to their interest. I like getting attention.
Still, I explained to my uncle that this was not a career choice for me. I was only playing because it was fun to play, not because I had anything to offer with my music. This was not something I'd ever seriously consider doing with my life.
"So what would you want to do with your life?"
Should I actually answer that question?, I asked myself. That would expose my lack of progress. How long has it been since I started that design? And still I have nothing to show for it. It would expose my lack of self-motivation. How rare is it that I actually finish something big that I start, rather than just ignoring it and hoping it'll go away?
But what the heck.
I told him I wanted to make videogames. And yes, I had something to offer there: a more progressive perspective. I explained that when I look around at the big videogame developers of today, I see that they don't have any idea what they're doing. They don't even understand what a videogame is, so how can they be expected to understand that they need to look at a platformer differently than they look at an action game, and more along the lines of dance?
I decided the platformer was a good example for everything that was wrong with modern gamists. Platformers lost their appeal as an independent art form when they focused too much on the story, or the worlds to explore, or the mini-games. The primary content of a platformer is its controls, and gamists don't even understand that most basic point. Wait right there, I said, and I got out my Game Boy and copy of Super Mario Bros. to illustrate. I gave it to him to play for ten seconds, to show him that these controls had personality, and would be fun to play even if there were nothing to do with them. And then I told him my idea, Through the Wind. (Or at least a small bit of it, since I've planned out quite a lot of it.)
The point being, I do have something to offer for videogames.
In Boston, we happened to be riding the "T" with our grandparents (on my mother's side), and my grandfather posed a challenge. He said that my little cousin is having trouble reading. He wondered if there could be a game which served the practical goal of teaching a young child to read. I instantly thought of all the ways that kind of game has been done wrong: each failed attempt grafting practical learning onto unrelated types of games. The game would need to embrace the concept of teaching letters. I asked for a minute to consider the problem.
And then I gave my solution. The game comes with a special controller, with only five (fairly large) buttons arranged in a circle. Each button has on its face one of the five vowels, in a different bright color. The goal (on the developer's side) of the game is less ambitious than teaching to read anything, but just to teach about the vowel sounds. On the screen is an abstract but constantly moving and changing animation. (The picture in my mind was along the lines of Electric Sheep, but it could certainly be a more relatable animation involving anthropomorphic characters.) That animation is in grayscale to begin with. Then a vowel appears on screen, accompanied by its sound. If the player presses the right button, the moving picture on the screen gets a little bit more colorful, by adding a little bit of that vowel's color from the controller. (That is a reward even a very young kid could appreciate.) Then, once the player has gotten the hang of it, the letters stop appearing though the sounds continue. If the player presses the right button, the screen gets more colorful. If he presses the wrong button, the screen gets grayer. Once the player gets the hang of that, the sounds are complete one-syllable words, and the button must be pressed which corresponds with the vowel in that word. Then (on a harder level) the other sounds that a vowel can make are added in, and then words for those sounds. With each level, the animation is more interesting than the previous level. Eventually, the player will know intuitively what sounds each vowel makes. That seems like a pretty huge first step.
The point being, I actually could apply my views to Real-World situations. They're not just abstract musings.
But will I ever apply myself, or will I just ignore the future as usual? Will I ever get the self-motivation to complete a big project?
I've promised too much on this blog already, promises I didn't keep. I've even promised on this blog that I'd keep the promises I make on this blog, and I didn't keep that either.
So I'm not going to make any promises. But I'll try.
Snapshots
Snapshots
I was sitting by myself at a table near the entrance of the Hampton Inn, happily eating breakfast. And what a breakfast it was! From the large selection of food on the tables, I'd taken a tiny container of Philadelphia cream cheese to put on a bagel I'd toasted, and a cup of tea, and a packet of Quaker instant oatmeal (Maple and Brown Sugar flavor). Normally I don't have breakfast. But why should I turn down such a feast? Soon I would catch up with my family, less concerned with enjoying themselves than with rushing to get out and on the road as quickly as possible. But for the moment, I ate my bagel and my oatmeal and drank my tea, and savored every bit of it with a smile.
Benjy was showing us the Boston University building where he has classes. We sat on the floor, while he stood above us, leaning on the wall casually with a superior grin on his face. He was apparently enjoying that here he owned the place relative to us, though he wanted to be seen only as mildly bored. Not literal ownership, of course- just a sense that he knew this place like the back of his hand while we were only visitors. Miriam and Dena sat by him, while I frog-sat farther back by a wall, just a little bit further into the hallway. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful photo this would make, with me in the bottom left of the frame and Benjy around the top middle. What a perfect angle. And once again I wished I had a camera. But I didn't have one, and the moment passed.
"You know what you need on your motorcycle?", I said to Benjy as we walked, "More little doohickeys.". It didn't seem right to me that a guy like Benjy, who likes to pay attention to twenty little details at once, would own such a simple vehicle as opposed to, say, an airplane. "What would these 'doohickeys' do?", he said. "How should I know? I don't have the mind for this sort of thing, you do. You should have so many little digital doohickeys that there's barely room for your hands." And as we went on down the street, he was probably wishing he could be having a conversation with someone else.
We'd been sitting in the car for hours. My father was driving through unremarkable roads. My mother was talking to him about something or other; I couldn't really tell what they were saying from the back. Dena was sitting by the window, doing nothing in particular. Miriam was listening to music on her little player. Benjy was working on his laptop, connected to the internet at almost all times. I was in the back, on his other laptop, reading comics I'd brought with me on a CD. We all kept waiting.
We were pulled over on the sidewalk with our grandparents (on my mother's side) and their car. My father was by the bottom of the car, helping out in some way. My grandfather was standing by him very straight, surveying the flat tire resentfully. My mother and her mother were arguing. Benjy stood on the left, talking on his cell phone to someone. Miriam and Dena stood around our mother looking serious, to fit in with the tone around them. I sat in the back out of the scene, with my little frog-sit, wishing I had a camera to take this most wonderful of family portraits. But I had no camera, and to ask a family member for a camera would (even assuming they broke out of the scene enough to grant my request) move them from their perfect positions. For that matter, I wasn't fond of leaving my perfect position in the picture either. And how could a camera capture that entire scene with me in it, anyway? Soon they'd work out the problem, and my grandmother would demand a traditional and wholly artificial family portrait- the kind which is all most people would think of. But for the moment, I looked at the pretty picture glad to be there in the first place.
It was late, and all four of us kids were downstairs playing. Our grandparents' basement has a huge room with a pool table and a Nintendo 64 and a piano and two arcadey game machines which don't work and lots of closets with weird stuff in them. It's a cool room. We had a Ping Pong table out, so two of us were playing on that. And the other two were playing pool. And we went back and forth between the two games, and we'd watch each other's games. I'd never seen our family before as anything but an odd assortment of mismatched parts, but in this multiplayer environment it all just clicked. I wished we could stay in that room. I'd wanted to find an environment like that for so long. And just a few days later I'd buy the multiplayer game Pac-Man Vs. to try to recapture that, to some insignificant degree, at home. I didn't realize back in that basement that any such attempt would prove futile, that when this moment passed, it would pass for good. But then, I didn't know I'd ever get to have a moment like that, and yet here it was. Tomorrow we'd continue the trip down a long list of places to go to. But for the moment.. I was glad to be there.
The point being, I have too wild an imagination, and it leads me through life like a wild horse trying to kick me off. I hope you've enjoyed some of this story.
A pacifist has never won a war.
Next Post
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Imagined Opportunities
You, sir, are a bona fide idiot.
You keep making the same mistake, over and over and over again. Any normal person, or maybe a lesser animal, learns from experience. They'd figure it out after two, or maybe three times. But how many times do you have to make the same mistake before you figure it out? What am I talking about? Let me spell it out for you, in terms even you can understand:
If you get an opportunity you weren't expecting, then it's probably not real.
And with that desperation, it can be hard to be skeptical of openings that come your way. You want nothing more than to take it and for it to be real. But it never is. Those friendlier kids back there weren't interested in being friends just because they were willing to talk to you. Your sisters weren't really interested in Zelda. And they were never serious about getting that DS. And Dena wasn't really going to keep reading new comics, but did you ever shut up about these things? No! Did you ever figure out that you should stop getting your hopes up? No! And you know why? That's right, it's just because you're an idiot.
When someone is willing to borrow Myst, it doesn't mean he'll ever play it. When someone is willing to borrow Babylon 5 episodes, it doesn't mean he'll ever watch them. And yet you keep waiting, keep hoping that you can offer something. It never sinks in until after the moment of disappointment that the opportunity never existed in the first place.
Look what you've done now. The latest in a long line of idiotic emotional investments. The latest time you've left yourself open to disappointment by paying attention to vague hints. It started when Sammy mentioned on her blog that her birthday was coming up. You knew how hard it always was to understand what she was saying and you saw the part where she said it was in just a few days. And she's not even your friend, so you didn't really have any excuse! It's not like you know anything about her but for the ridiculously vague things she posts about.
Well, you were so desperate to get your music appreciated by anyone that you took this as an opportunity. "I never got anything for my birthday.", you said, "Maybe it would be nice to give a birthday present for once.". And that's all it took to fool yourself. Never mind that she never said when her birthday was, even when you flat-out asked her. And never mind that she specifically said it was in just a few days. You had to assume that since her blog went by Gregorian dates, the date she had used as her birthday last year was her birthday. And you got the ridiculous notion in your head that since she (you thought) played piano, you'd have an excuse here to compose something that someone else might play. What an idiot.
That date I was going by was the Hebrew date. Her birthday had been a month earlier. (She doesn't use the Hebrew dates on her blog presumably because she doesn't know she can, and not because she cares about Gregorian dates at all.) And to top it all off, she's not even playing piano anymore! And so I'm left, wishing her a happy birthday and practically getting ready to beg to give her a piece I've just composed.
It was quite humiliating, really.
And all because you can't get it through your head that these opportunities you're seeing aren't real. They're just mirages, the daydreams of the overactive imagination of a desperate idiot.
Please don't do anything like this again.
5 Comments:
- said:
-
You know, as much as I wish I could deny it, you're right. At least about the one referring to me.
Which isn't to say that real openings never exist....only that they're not quite as frequent as we would like them to be.
But that leaves you with three options, see...
You can ignore such oppotunities completely, and by doing so miss out on the real ones.
You can try to sort them, figure out which ones are real and which aren't.
Or you can try them all anyway, even if they are naught but fata morgana.
Why would you choose such a thing? Because there's always a chance. There's a chance of success, a chance that people will see what you have to offer. It would be a shame to give up and lose that chance.
Me, I couldn't see what you're offering. I couldn't understand it. Because we're different people, see, and we see things differently.
But one of these days you're going to open up to someone who can actually appreciate you, and learn from what you have to offer. Are you going to give up on that?
When I look at you, I see this "mistake" you make - only I don't see it as a mistake. I see someone who tries hard to share with the world his knowledge, his experiences, his loves....himself, really. And despite the fact that there seem to be no takers, he resolutely continues spreading his message, himself.
I see it as something honorable, that I could not do myself. It seems strange to me now that you would want to change it. - Mory said:
-
Why wouldn't I want to change it? I keep doing this, and every time I do I end up terribly disappointed. I can't think of a single time that there was a happy ending to one of these stories, so I don't need to worry too much about mistaking real opportunities for imagined ones. So it's better not to set myself up for that.
- said:
-
This is confusing me....I thought this was a part of who you are, just like creating art for its own sake is. I was sure you knew the potential cost of your actions, and were acting in spite of it. I thought you were willing to risk almost definite disappointment in the hopes that another would understand. I looked up to that. Now I'm confused.
It's your decision, naturally, and as I stated above, I already made the choice you are seemingly about to make. I did it because I could not bear doing things the way you have...I couldn't cope with the disappointment. Until now, I thought you were stronger than me. Is this not the case?
If not, then by all means stop making the mistake. - Mory said:
-
I'm not sure where I was unclear. This isn't about strength of character- the issue here is stupidity. What I am saying is that I frequently think I see opportunities where none exist, and then proceed to run blindly into a dead end. That's not "honorable", it's boneheaded. You seem to think I acted this way by choice, time and time again, but I did not. Every single time, I regret it. No, I just don't think. Someone mentions offhand that they've heard of Zelda, and I can't get off their case for years trying to get them to play Ocarina of Time in its entirety. That I never "have any takers" is regrettable, but it's no excuse for making the same mistake over and over.
- said:
-
All right, then. I simply seem to have been very wrong about you. Oh well.
By the way, just so you don't feel too stupid - I made the same mistake regarding Sammy's birthday. ^_~
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Pained by Numbers
(Excuse me if this post is not a great work of art; I am fasting.)
How do I mourn? I learned a lot from Rav Ariel, the Rosh Yeshiva of Dvir and the head of Machon HaMikdash, but nothing that would make me want to break down and cry about losing the temple. My parents insist that the only thing that a person may do in the proper spirit of the 9th of Av is go to a lecture. Bl'bah! Well, actually, that's not entirely true- my mother did talk me into going to the walk around the walls of old Jerusalem last night:
"Did you want to come with us to the walk around the walls?"
"No. Why would I want to do that?"
"It'll give the day meaning."
"Okay, I'll come."
It didn't give the day meaning- it was just a crowd, and I don't like crowds. I said that if we were going in a crowd like that up to the Temple Mount itself- that would be inspirational. But this was so safe the police had even blocked off the area ahead of time and were watching to make sure nothing happened. It's not a spiritual experience if you don't have to fight for it. So that was a whole lotta blah, with me thinking about abstract world designs to occupy myself with.
Anyway, the rabbis who decided on the halacha knew that most people, like me, didn't have a clue how to mourn. So they implemented laws to force you to mourn anyway. Laws like fasting, and not wearing leather shoes (but why just leather?- Eah, that's a question for another time.) and that sort of stuff. My father read us some of the laws a few days ago. You can't play or listen music, which tells me to stay away from the piano. You can't dance, which tells me to stay away from platformers. You can't wander around for enjoyment, which tells me to stay away from most of my favorite games. The halacha also says you can't sit on a chair, so I was sitting on the floor and reaching up to my keyboard, but then I saw my father sitting on the couch so I decided it wasn't such a big deal if I ignored that law.
So what am I going to do now? Well, I don't think there was any law there that would prevent me from watching episodes of Samurai Jack. So that's what I'll do. And then maybe I'll play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, because it has no exploration and meaningless controls so it's technically okay. This shouldn't be such a bad day at all.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Fudgie and Willy
It's not like they particularly like each other. I mean, they never bother each other, but they never do anything else with each other either. Just these walks. So they're not exactly friends. They each know the other's there •-------
What of it?, in the same way they know the refrigerator is there. But they rarely have any sort of interaction with each other at all.
When do they interact? Well, Fudgie's pretty bossy, or at least she'd like to be. We used to have lots of cats going through our backyard, but now it's pretty much just the three stray cats Fudgie knows best. Anyone else, she scares off. She might have scared off those two early on if we hadn't made it clear that we like them. She doesn't try to do things which would make us unhappy- yeah, she's a really obedient dog. She loves Sukkot, when we're in the backyard all the time, because she knows we don't want any cats bothering us in the Sukkah. So she tries to scare away any cat who comes near, stranger or not.
By the same token, she never attacks Willy unless she catches him commiting a crime- most often sharpening his claws on the couch. Within a second she'll be there and threatening a vicious attack, and he'll be hiding under a table. She makes a good cop. She also sees the backyard as off-limits for Willy, so if he ever tries walking outside through the back she chases him back in. These are really the only interactions they ever have except for the walks.
Why does he come on our walks? He doesn't seem to need the company. If another cat comes near him to say hello, he runs away. Seriously, there was a while when this little black cat ran after him whenever she saw him outside, just to be friendly, so he stayed inside all the time. He's like me. Fudgie loves crowds, but Willy can't stand them. He spends his day exploring for resting spots (and resting in them), not playing with other cats or with people or with Fudgie.
He does what he feels like doing when he feels like doing it. If he wants to eat, he eats. If he wants to go out, we let him out. If he wants to sleep, he's probably already asleep. If someone calls him, he pretends he doesn't notice. (He comes only at such a moment that he decides for himself that he would like to be petted.) It's not that he's impatient- if he wants something he can't get yet, he's more likely to wait around and lick himself for hours 'til someone happens to be nearby than he is to bother us with his meowing. (This contrasts sharply with Fudgie.) But he doesn't let other people tell him what to do. Not exactly the type of personality I'd expect to go following someone around just because she happens to be on her walk at the time.
At first, I thought he was just following us because he wanted to get in the house and knew the door would open when we were done. But then a few times he actually went out of the house with us to join our walk, then went back in with us when we were done. Even now, I half expect him to stop following us at any moment, noticing that he's not getting anything out of it. I mean, he isn't, is he? I'm the only one who gets anything out of it, because I get to watch the cute little family scene in amusement. Fudgie eagerly walks in the lead, with me trailing behind her and Willy behind, with his little bell ringing at every step, trying to catch up. Or if Fudgie stops for a minute, Willy will walk on ahead and wait there for her.
I don't know- maybe he just doesn't want to feel left out.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The Older Pianist
In the school Yeshivat Dvir,
There was an older guy who played
Piano songs by ear.
At every chance I got, I sat
Nearby his playing to hear.
I never could have played like that-
That much was crystal clear.
I listened to the music filled with curiosity:
He could play a tune he knew and improvise the harmony!
So I asked him how he got such skill and he said modestly
That he'd been playing since he was five, but he still wasn't very good.
Well, that wasn't quite the answer I was expecting.
No teacher?
No teacher, he said.
No notes to play from?
No notes, he said.
A genius! I said.
And he asked me to leave the room.
I left that room quite satisfied
That I now understood:
This twelfth-grader is so bright inside-
No wonder he's so good!
And at such an age a bona fide
Piano genius starts to play;
If for fifty years I tried
Would I come close? I cannot say.
This didn't really bother me
When I sat at the keys.
I pressed a few notes randomly-
It really was a breeze.
I had no clue how I might do
Successful harmonies
But had no fears, for my own ears
Were all I had to please.
Even so, I sometimes wondered how he made such lovely sounds.
So I'd play some songs from movies when nobody was around.
Or at least I'd try. I knew not why an octave's all I found
For accompaniment, as opposed to all those arpeggios and fancy stuff he did.
I didn't understand it.
Try a broken chord!, I told myself.
But I couldn't do it.
Try an interesting harmonic progression!, I told myself.
But I couldn't do it.
So go back to pressing notes randomly like an idiot, I told myself.
And there was nothing to it.
For the next two years I trained my ears
To tell which noises were nice.
Though all of my tunes befitted buffoons
I never was concise:
I'd turn each grain I liked into
A long piece more precise.
Meanwhile, I heard but never listened to
My teachers' best advice.
I met another player then
Who practiced every day.
He only ever played Chopin-
I listened anyway.
All I could do was marvel at
The speed his hands could play.
That I never could have played like that
I didn't have to say.
He'd practice some Prelude, and I would sit nearby and stare:
He could play with such emotion, with such energy and flair.
So I asked him how he got to be so excellent a player.
I practice a lot, he said.
I didn't care for that answer at all.
Didn't you play at a young age? I asked.
Yes, he said.
Don't you have a very good teacher? I asked.
Yes, he said.
Don't you get sick of Chopin? I asked.
I love it! he said.
An oddball, I told myself.
But a serious oddball.
There was one time when an art student
Wanted to come in and play.
But the pianist said, it's prudent
To practice at least three hours a day.
And since I haven't done so yet, would you kindly go away.
No matter how much he'd insist,
This other guy still begged to come.
So he asked his fellow pianist
To voice agreement. I said, ummmm....
Three hours? Blecch. I practiced less
Than half an hour in a week.
I preferred an improv'd mess,
Which every day would be unique.
I played my lessons poorly,
I had terrible technique.
But three full hours? Surely
Such a process would be bleak.
Sometimes I'd play for people and they all would stare and blink-
And they asked me how I got such skill and I would say, I think
It's been something like four years now, but you ought to know I stink.
A genius! they said.
No, no, I told them. A pretender, see?
They didn't see.
See, I just press some notes randomly!
They didn't see.
It's only force of habit! I insisted angrily.
They didn't see.
I can't play Beethoven correctly!
My left hand plays imperfectly!
We don't understand all that stuff like you do, they said.
But I don't understand a thing, I said!
I don't have a clue what I'm doing, I said!
What we do know, they said, is
That if we tried with all our might,
Not stopping 'til we got it right,
And played all day and then all night,
We know one thing is true:
That if we did all this we still
Could never play like you.
I was shocked.
I was shocked at their sheer stupidity.
How could they make such a ridiculous mistake? I asked myself.
As hard as it may be to believe, I answered,
These people understand music even less than I do.
Then Dvir closed down. I didn't care-
I hadn't really planned on staying.
I tried out at the Academy, where
They asked to hear my piano playing.
I played my piece and tried my hardest,
Knowing they'd see I was a fake.
They accepted me regardless,
Which was, clearly, a mistake.
My playing was extremely crude,
As they all were willing to tell.
So they got me a new teacher who'd
Teach me how to play this stuff well.
In the halls the lovely sounds
From every room gave me a scare.
Out of all the kids around,
I was just the worst one there!
I listened to the music more with envy than with awe-
How could I compare to dedication of the likes I saw?
They were perfect, and each note that I played would be called a flaw...
What was I doing there?
I was silent.
One guy, one year older than me,
Was more friendly than the rest.
I'd sit by the piano when he
Played, 'cause he could play the best.
The teachers saw him not as such,
But rather as a pest.
They said he didn't practice much.
That must have been a jest!
In my lessons, I was taught
How to play with greater skill.
Piano was deeper then I thought.
(I didn't ever practice still.)
Meanwhile, I improvised duets
And played for fun for hours each day.
For two years, without any frets
I steadily improved my play.
In the bagrut I played some Mozart almost perfectly.
So I said to my teacher, that was okay, but surely you'd agree
That I didn't play it half as well as it was meant to be?
No, that's pretty much it, she said.
What do you mean, that's it?
You played it well, she said.
But a good player would have played it much better, right?
No, you played it well, she said.
But my technique is terrible!
No, you played it well, she said.
But you said I had a lot of catching up to do! I insisted.
Not anymore, she said.
You played it well.
But...
But I don't understand a thing about music! I said.
You played it well, she said.
And I had nothing more to say.
I never got a chance to show
My class a single melody.
Never will I get to know
What they would have thought of me.
Since then I've had no teacher.
No notes.
I'm free.
I play piano often now-
Doesn't matter what or how.
I just sit down at the keys
And play exactly as I please-
It's just for fun, y'know?
Don't matter if it's new or old,
Don't matter if it's trash or gold,
Don't matter if there's anyone to show.
I don't care about the players above me.
I just play, and one day I realized:
It sounds lovely.
But so what?, I asked myself.
I'm better than I ever was
And I still don't understand anything!
But then- who does?
I think back to the time I spent
In seventh grade at Dvir-
How every time he played, I went
To any surface near,
And there in silent calm I sat
To listen and to peer.
I never could have played like that-
..and yet, somehow, I'm here.
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
The first pianist in this story was five years older than me, the second three years older, and the third one one year. At least, I think so. Even though I spent a reasonable amount of time with each one, I don't think I have more than the vaguest of conceptions of who these people really are. So factual inaccuracies are pretty likely. For that I apologize.
By the way, this post took me over five weeks to write. So don't expect another poem any time soon. :P - Bet Shemesh Board Gaming Club said:
-
That was fantastic.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Let's Go To The Movies!
My family
I loved the first two X-Men movies. I got to see them because they are superhero movies- otherwise I never would have. I knew that the third, X-Men: The Last Stand, had a different director and different writers. I saw the trailers and thought they looked ridiculous. I learned that the premise of the movie was a mish-mash of various completely unrelated ideas from the comics. And I heard that it was fun to watch. I wasn't all that interested; I'd see it, someday, downloaded off the internet, if I hadn't forgotten about it by then.
Dena wanted to go see X-Men: The Last Stand. I had heard that it was fun to watch. It's showing at Rav Chen. I agreed to go with her. She wanted to go on Tuesday, which is to say tomorrow. I figured I was always free, so it was as good a day as any. On Sunday, the two of us rewatched X-Men, and today we watched X2. When you see movies as rarely as I do, seeing a movie -any movie- becomes an event worthy of such build-up. The two films were, as is the case with most really good works, better than I had remembered. (You only remember the bigger picture.) I was genuinely excited to be going.
Rav Chen is a good theater. It is also very inaccessible to us. It is in Jerusalem, which means we would need to take a bus to Jerusalem which takes an hour, give or take a little. (There is no one who might drive us.) Once in Jerusalem, it takes another half hour to get (by a second bus) to the theater, give or take a little. Dena gets out of her school (as on all days) pretty late. We would have just an hour and a half from leaving the house to the time the movie starts.
This is when my mother intervened.
Did you have your heart set on seeing it tomorrow?
Dena, you may not get out of school earlier- What am I supposed to write on the note, "Let her out to see X-Men"?
But it's such nonsense!
It's not the note that's the problem!
It's all such nonsense!
You could watch it another day!
Would you die if you didn't see this movie?
It's impossible to get there in time!
You're going to take my money to watch this?
And what are you doing for supper? I'm not paying for-
If your spoiled brat of a brother didn't need to-
If your spoiled brat of a brother-
There's no way you can get there in time. No way.
Thirty seconds late? That's not worst case scenario, that's best case-
More like a half hour late, you mean-
What are you talking about? It's a thriller- you won't keep watching if you miss-
I am not going to pay for you to go to this movie twice just because-
YES, YOU ARE GOING TO WANT TO GO TO THIS TWICE BECAUSE YOU'LL MISS THE FIRST HALF HOUR AND-
What are you talking about-
That's funny- you'd watch the movie like that?-
And why am I supposed to pay for this nonsense?-
-pay for this nonsense-
-this nonsense-
It's all such nonsense!
I am not trying to stop you from going- I'm just thinking of all scenarios so that you won't be disappointed-
I don't know how else you could go- In theory, Grandma & Grandpa could drive you- BUT THERE'S NO WAY TO KNOW BECAUSE THEIR CELL PHONE IS OFF AND THEY NEVER LET ME KNOW ANYTHING SO THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO KNOW AND WOULD IT KILL YOU TO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE?
No, you may not see a later showing! No way.
And do you know which bus you're supposed to be taking??
And do you know which bus stop to take?
No you don't, you don't know which bus stop to take-
And how do you know you'll get there in time-
And what do you think you're going to be doing for supper
-spoiled brat of a brother-
I don't have a car-
FINE! I'LL GIVE YOU A LITTLE MONEY AND THAT'S IT! I'M NOT PAYING FOR FOOD AND IF YOU MISS THE FIRST HOUR THAT'S OKAY AND IT'S ALL SUCH NONSENSE!
Why should I have to fight my mother to get to see a movie? It's just a movie- is that so much to ask for? And it's not really worth it...
I keep telling myself that nothing has changed. We are still set to go tomorrow, my mother is still (however reluctantly) going to pay for it (I have no money to spare of my own.), it should still be a fun movie. But everything has changed. It's turned from a fun event into a guilt-ridden nightmare. I can't just enjoy the movie now- I have to spend the entire time watching thinking of how to spin the fact that it's not the greatest movie ever made so that I can pretend it was worth the fight. Because when you're not that enthusiastic to begin with, and you have to fight to get there, it's never worth it.
I don't get to see many movies.
3 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
It's 12, and Dena is already home. Looks like all will be well.
- said:
-
I hope you enjoyed the movie. ^_^
- Mory said:
-
Well, since you ask:
It was excellent. Not much like the first two at all, but excellent in its own way.
The first two were provocative sci-fi. They were sophisticated and nuanced. They had very tight plotting. They had one foot in reality.
X-Men: The Last Stand is none of these things. Its metaphors are watered-down recitations of the more powerful ideas in the comics, thrown in to keep you entertained and then quickly pulled away as soon as they've registered so they shouldn't bore anyone. Its morality is muddled, with a villain easier to agree with than the heroes and an ending which doesn't really resolve any issues. It is packed with one-liners and fun action. The plot isn't terribly coherent, is full of holes, uses a "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" mentality to decide what goes in, and feels completely unresolved at the end. And all this is done in an over-the-top style with one foot in the 60's comics.
And I loved it. It never fails to be spectacularly entertaining. When it was tense, I was squirming in my seat. During action scenes, you couldn't have peeled my eyes off the screen with claws. The climax was breathtaking. Taken as an action movie, WOW!
If I were more of an X-Men (comic) fan, I'd probably be furious at how much they've messed up the series by the end. But I'm not, so I'm not. After the credits was a cliffhanger of sorts for the next movie. I look forward to it.
Taken as an event, this was a good day. First the two of us went with our grandparents to the restaurant (and I use the term loosely) Village Green. The food was good, but very bland, and I'll know better next time. Then we rushed to the theater. I don't know what Dena thinks of the movie, because she refuses to say. I hate it when people do that!
Unfortunately, we didn't have enough money. Dena had three sheqels too few to get us back to Beit Shemesh. So our grandparents drove us back home, in what was an overly long trip because of one lousy wrong turn and the "no U-turn" signs. I'm glad I'm not a driver.
Friday, May 26, 2006
God Bless Google
I hurriedly wrote up a "For Now", just in case anyone popped up in the 12 hours or so it might take to completely rewrite the second half of my template. Now, I've been using a program called Google Desktop for a while now. Its main feature is giving instantaneous search of everything on your hard drive, which I've found is much more convenient than using the start menu. It also has all sorts of other features I now can't do without, but I digress. Anyway, it searches everything- files, e-mails, shortcuts, and all the web pages you've been to. In order to do this, it archives everything. The second thing I did on discovering the damage to my blog was search Google Desktop for "Edit Template". To my astonishment and extreme gratitude (which you can probably guess based on the way I sound like a walking advertisement for Google right now), it had saved every version of the template, going back to October. And what really took me aback was that it didn't just save the format of the page, but saved the important part- the part written into the form. I wouldn't have expected the archive to be so thorough.
But it is, and the blog is saved, and I am saved, and I am filled with gratitude to the good programmers at Google. Now all we need is an operating system from them, and the world will be a happier place.
The continuation refuses to present itself- What am I to do?
2 Comments:
- said:
-
Patience is a virtue; art should not be forced.
- Mory said:
-
Yeah, I guess you're right. Too bad I have no patience.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
7.00
On Sunday, he drew the blueprints.
On Monday, he set the foundation.
On Tuesday, he laid the bricks.
On Wednesday, he added doors and a roof.
On Thursday, he painted the walls.
On Friday, he installed furniture.
And he was tired. But the house did not yet exist for its own sake. He needed to live in it for a day. He wanted to sit back in his living room, sip some lemonade, and admire his work.
On Saturday, he was about to do just that when a man wearing black appeared.
"A lawbreaker!", cried he, "O, how it pains me to see such disregard for my master's wishes!"
Ariel did not understand.
"I serve the owner of this land.", the strange man explained. "Do you see that sign?" (and he pointed to a small sign near their feet which Ariel had never seen before.)
And this is what the sign said:
Thou shalt not enter thy house
nor sip lemonade on the seventh day.
It was clear enough. There were no loopholes to be found, no exceptions to be made. But Ariel did not understand. "Why?", asked he.
"Once upon a time, you built a house. Though that building no longer stands, it must still be taken into account." Ariel did not understand.
"When you built that house, you entered it. This was a necessary part of the building process, yes?" Ariel supposed so.
"And when you built that house, it so happened to be a hot day. You refreshed yourself with a glass of lemonade, did you not?" Ariel supposed so.
"Well, there you have it, then."
Ariel did not understand. It did not seem like he had much of anything anymore. His remaining books were inside. His comfortable furniture was inside. His achievements were inside. But there was no use arguing- the master of the land had spoken. What was he to do today?, he inquired.
The man in black smiled reassuringly. "The master of this land allows us many pleasures on the seventh day. If you would like, I will stay here and permit you to talk to me." Ariel could accept this no longer. "Why in the name of Nonazangian nonoccurence would I want to talk to you?", he yelled. "I want my books! I want my rooms! I want my furniture! I want my glass of lemonade!"
The man looked down at the unenlightened soul before him with sympathy. He opened his mouth to helpfully suggest scrubbing the master's feet, but Ariel was already walking away uffishly.
Ariel walked on. He passed rocks. And then he passed more rocks. Each rock was grayer than the next. Finally, he passed some rocks. There was nothing to see, nothing to do.
He walked all the way to the edge of the land, where the rock gave way to sea. (He dared not go further, for he could not swim.) Many men were standing by the edge, all wearing black. They were yelling at a man in a nearby boat.
A coalition for the public's right to rest and relaxation emerged Wednesday, as MKs from across the political spectrum announced their intention to pass a bill making Shabbat a legal day of leisure. The legislative initiative presented to the Knesset, however, lacks the support of religious parties.
The bill, called the Culture and Recreation Day Law, would crack down on commercial activity on Shabbat while permitting more cultural and recreational activities and a limited schedule of public transportation The bill was proposed by MKs Natan Sharansky (Likud), Shelly Yacimovich (Labor), Michael Eitan (Likud), Michael Melchior (Labor), Arye Eldad (NU-NRP), and Dov Kheinin (Hadash).
"More and more people are forced to work seven days a week, 365 days a year," said Sharansky. "We want to strike a unifying compromise between secular and religious that would allow Shabbat to retain its special character as a day of rest. At the same time, we want to allow the non-religious limited access to transportation and places of entertainment."
A Shas spokesman said his party was likely to oppose the initiative, as it would encourage more desecration of Shabbat.
United Torah Judaism MK Meir Porush also attacked the initiative. "Shabbat is a holy day with obligations and commandments," he said, "not just a day with cultural, socioeconomic and national-historical meaning... Shabbat is God's everlasting covenant with the Jewish people. The bill distorts both the content and the soul of the Jewish day of rest."-Jerusalem Post, Apr. 27It was a houseboat which he had built with his own two hands, and he was living in it. He was sitting back comfortably, reading a book and sipping lemonade. Now this, Ariel thought, was how a Saturday ought to be spent. The boater's girlfriend walked into view; he had taken her along to show off the boat which had been so frustrating to build. Why were these people shouting?, Ariel wondered. He is not in our territory, and he understands what homes are made for. Should we not let him be? Ariel headed back to the direction of his house.
Now, it was still not even noon, and Ariel was beginning to worry that he'd be condemned to walk through rocks for the rest of the day. But then he saw an old man sitting outside his house making a pile of rocks. The man had a long, white beard, and when I say "long" I mean that it was twice as long as his height. Ariel was curious. "There is a secret to passing the time.", the old man whispered.On Shabbat, I now do jigsaw puzzles. They keep me busy."I will share it with you, and perhaps you will bring it to good use. See, you take a rock like so-", and as he said this he picked up a rock as gray as any other, "and then (and this is the crucial part) you put it in a pile while focusing your entire mind on its shape. It's the strangest thing, but after just a few rocks, you will get so involved in this activity that it will sustain you for the rest of the day!"
Ariel walked back to his house and started making a pile of rocks. It wasn't very entertaining, but it kept him so busy that the end of the day actually came. By this time he had a very large pile. He looked at his work, expecting to be proud of his accomplishment. Curiously, he wasn't. He felt... empty.Reality
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
A Typical Story
This morning at 8:15, my mother woke me up. She said my father had woken me up fifteen minutes earlier; I didn't remember that. I got up. My parents left. I got dressed. I drank some Nestea. I started walking to shul.
It's been really hot out lately. It's only going to get worse, you know. I kept my head down as I walked so the light wouldn't hurt my eyes. I got to shul and went upstairs. I saw people coming in carrying their tefillin. I'd forgotten my tefillin. I started to walk home. I wasn't going to come back. It was really hot out. When I got home, I read a comic book 'til 9:15 then headed back.
The room was filled with tables, but no one was there yet- they were still davening. I sat down in a corner. People started coming in. When my father got there, I knew, he'd be angry. I waited for my father to show up. He came in, and started laying on the guilt. The breakfast is not the ikar, he said. I'll give you my tefillin and you can go upstairs and daven, he said. No, I said. (I had no excuse, but then he never had any good reason for me to come to begin with.) Then you can go home, he said. Breakfast is at home, he said. I stayed.
Everyone sat down. We found a table. I looked at the food. I went home.
Hollow Depth.
There was a kitten in our back yard yesterday. We didn't know how it had gotten there, but there it was, crying. It seemed healthy enough; we gave it food and drink. I didn't pay much attention to it. I don't know anything about it- I don't even know if it was male or female. I don't know what went wrong. This afternoon, it died.
I don't know anything about Gary Pollevoy- I don't even remember her face. My mother just got a call- She died.
...
1 Comment:
- said:
-
I don't think people would like that kind of depth in an RPG. People like to feel that they are important, that the world revolves around them. They forget that there are billions of people surrounding them, and they live for themselves.
We could do with more caring, with more interest in the rest of the world - but it isn't really expected of us. We're here to live our own lives, not anyone else's.
Sometimes we try to care. We pay attention to everyone and momentarily forget about ourselves. But we cannot take much of that. It is in our nature to ignore things which have no interest or relevance to ourselves.
And thus we continue to lead our selfish lives. It's who we are.
The first day is frustrating, yes, but the seventh is satisfying.
Next Post
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Outside the Comfort Zone
And where were the chefs through all these centuries of progress? Apparently, they slept through it. The public doesn't put any effort into appreciating food; the food exists only to make them happy. If a chef wants to flex his creative muscles a bit, the best he can do is improve the presentation of the food- If it looks fancy, maybe no one will notice that its taste is not. Any evolution in the primary content (taste) is prohibited, so most efforts at innovation go into supportive content instead. This is not healthy for any Form. Where are the meals with small unappetizing courses to prepare the taste in your mouth for the next main course? Where are the dishes which taste different on opposite sides? Where are the expressive foods?
So I say with righteous indignation whenever the topic of discussion gets near. On a theoretical level, I love this argument. It leads to all sorts of fun possibilities. On a practical level, I'll have nothing to do with it. By which I mean, if you were to hand me the culinary equivalent of Beethoven's ninth symphony, I would refuse to allow it anywhere near my mouth. To say that I am a picky eater is putting it rather mildly. If fruits, who I am certain do not like to be eaten, saw my eating habits, they would frown.* (If you would object to this statement, consider that fruits have no eyes.) My diet consists almost exclusively of lasagna, bagels, Pringles and ice cream. Why am I willing to overlook such hypocrisy? Because food is just food. I don't care about it enough to accept anything outside my tiny comfort area.
Last week my parents bought me two CDs: Variations by Steve Reich, and Alina by Arvo Pärt. They had promised to buy me CDs by those composers for Channukah. I'd requested their music specifically because I'd heard one piece written by each (Proverb and Tabula Rasa, respectively), and loved their harmonies. Nonetheless, I didn't really know what these CDs would be like; I sat down and started listening.
Variations' first piece, Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards, started with a bit of a shock- it took all of six seconds to get both dissonant and chaotic. It was frantic right from the very beginning, and added in more voices before I could figure out what was going on. And just as I was getting comfortable with the disorientation, and eager for more abrupt developments, I learned a thing or two about Steve Reich's style. I tell you, all that repetition is not enjoyable for a person who has just gotten used to the idea of breakneck pacing. The effect is instant boredom. Thankfully this didn't last long, as the melody (if there is such a thing in a Steve Reich piece) started taking on Chinese characteristics. I don't like Chinese music very much, but I kept listening.
By a minute in, I'd gotten the hang of it enough to enjoy some absolutely gorgeous harmonic twists in the bass. Each time he stuck in an interesting bass he'd linger on it, as though trying to get as much out of its sound as possible. After a while, though, it began to frustrate me that he wouldn't continue moving harmonically, when clearly (I saw as an amateur composer) there was some amazing potential there, if only he would have continued that sentence there, or added in this here.... It was not what I wanted, and that is frustrating. I quickly put myself back in my place, and started enjoying it again.
It occured to me that Steve Reich's minimalist style is perfectly suited to an interactive soundtrack. In fact, I've been wondering for a long time how soundtracks could react to a player's movement and actions. So it was very satisfying (on a theoretical level) to have the answer practically handed to me. The key is repetition with multiple voices. One voice repeats itself for as long as you stay in one small node, while the voices around it cycle endlessly. When you move to a new node, another voice (which one depends on where you're moving to) stays in place while the others, including the one which had been staying, cycle around it. This would need very complex scripting; I'm not sure if any composers are on the level to do something like this. Regardless, this is a very bright future.
After a while (ten minutes or so), the repetition really got to me. This technique was meant for background scores, not to be listened to on its own. I started regretting not asking for a specific CD by Steve Reich, which was closer to what I was familiar with. This just stayed in one place for two long; I wanted something that would remind me of the chaos of my own compositions, though more skilled. It was going on for too long to be a standalone piece, but I kept listening through the entire 21 minutes. It was worth sitting through; many more harmonic curiosities appeared briefly. And then it ended, as abruptly as it had begun, the false hopes it had inspired in me leaving behind a vague dissatisfaction.
The second piece, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, was just annoying. The changes from repetition to repetition were too small, too insubstantial. The frustration led to the aforementioned idea concerning interactive soundtracks to bounce around my head another five times or so. And then the music starting giving me a headache. This was not what I had expected.
It seemed good for background music, and good for theoretical purposes. But it didn't seem to be too good for just listening to. I more or less understood what it was doing; I saw why it didn't matter, shouldn't matter that I wasn't being more engaged. But it did matter to me.
Around four minutes in, it made a neat leap, but then it slowly went back to boredom. It was a lot like Electroplankton, really, but it needed that personal involvement. There was another leap nine minutes in. Around this time, my unfortunately nearby family members started complaining loudly, so I skipped to the third and final track.
Six Pianos, played on six of the tinniest pianos I'd ever heard, instantly reminded me of ragtime music. The liveliness, the repetitive rhythm, the way it grated on my ears. The incremental changes were barely perceptible, and it took all of two minutes for me to decide I didn't like it. It may have been fascinating to play, and it's probably fascinating to analyze. But I just didn't care. I stopped listening, very disappointed.
I would compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.Imagine you're in an empty room, and a white light is shining in. The white light is pretty. Now imagine staring at this light for fifty-one minutes and twenty-four seconds. You know what, just to be more fair, let's say you've also got a prism to play around with. Sound like fun?Arvo Pärt
I started getting worried when I read the track list:
Spiegel im Spiegel Vladimir Spivakov, violin Sergej Bezrodny, piano | 10:36 |
Für Alina Alexander Malter, piano | 10:47 |
Spiegel im Spiegel Dietmar Schwalke, violoncello Alexande Malter, piano | 9:12 |
Für Alina Alexander Malter, piano | 10:53 |
Spiegel im Spiegel Vladimir Spivakov, violin Sergej Bezrodny, piano | 9:48 |
Arvo Pärt's Alina is music serving the purpose of a sleeping pill. Almost nothing happened over the course of the entire disc. No surprises, no sudden inspirations, no memorable melodies, no excitement. Just two of the simplest tunes you can imagine, repeated until you either have a philosophical revelation or start snoring. (More likely the latter.)
It was pretty, to be sure. Oh yes, it was pretty- I don't think I've heard more elegant music in my life. It has a purity to it I'm not familiar with. And the presentation was incredible. This is the sort of music which demands a silent reverence, demands that all distractions be eliminated, demands your full attention, demands that you make an effort to appreciate it. Well, I tried to show it the proper respect, and turned my monitor off, and sat straight and listened. And I didn't get much out of that.
I found the format of the CD very appealing on the higher levels of the brain - I love symmetry, I love thinking about symmetry. In practice... I don't care about symmetry as I'm listening. I don't care about the slight differences in nuance. I don't get so involved in music that I might notice the differeces. I didn't notice the differences. So what I had was two very lovely, if dragged out, pieces, and three exact repetitions. (I really couldn't tell the difference between the performances.) When each repetition is ten minutes long, that's a problem.
..for me, I mean. Right. [frowns thoughtfully]
I stopped listening, full of frustration. I let it out on a piano improvisation which represented what I had wanted to hear. That improvisation was one of the finest I have ever played. (It was lost to the great oblivion to which all good things go.) And I was content.
I have since listened to both CDs, in their entireties, more times. Variations has really grown on me. I mean, I still don't like Six Pianos -I'm not really into percussion- but I've really come to like the first two, now that I know what to expect. Maybe there is hope for me after all.
As for Alina, the two sides of my brain are in disagreement over what to make of it. I am inclined to believe that it is a masterpiece, but I am not capable of appreciating it. I cannot blame Pärt for my own inadequacies, and this is a very good decision for my own sake since I would have to throw out V.O.V. if I had concluded otherwise. Nonetheless, future pieces should try to appeal... Well, not to the lowest common denominator, but at least to anyone who puts in the effort it deserves.
7 Comments:
- ~Daniella said:
-
Now I'm really curious to hear it, after you've pulled it all apart, and try to see it from my perspective. I know our tastes are a different; I'm much more into traditional chords, you know, the classical and romantic periods. Give me a Beethoven to resolve an augmented chord any day. And needless to say our dear David Lanz uses very simple chords and chord progressions, usually with a very similar accompaniment, too. But I like to say that the most beautiful things in life are sometimes the most simple.
Most New Age music bores me to death, though. There are a few artists who manage to keep my attention--David Arkenstone sometimes, Tim Janis sometimes, Ken Elkinson sometimes. Maybe I look for a certain pattern of chords to twist my feelings in a certain (new?) way.
Anyway. I wonder how well you'd do at writing and performing scores for movies--analyzing the changing emotions within through music. Have you ever tried putting a story into music? Or writing a tune to lyrics? Sometimes the translation from a different medium is nearly impossible, since it's so well expressed in one particular kind. Of all media, I find music easiest to understand and convey a message.
And I'm just blabbering now.
~D - Mory said:
-
If you like simplicity you would certainly like Alina- it doesn't get any simpler. I can virtually guarantee that none of this analysis will apply to you, since it's not really the music I'm analyzing so much as myself when I first listened to it.
I've tried to write music with less abstract meanings - and failed. I'm no good with that literal stuff. My compositions progress by train of thought, which doesn't exactly lend itself to that sort of music. I would be interested in videogame scores, however, since they don't require quite as much precision. - ~Daniella said:
-
I've written a pieces to lyrics, but in those cases, the music was just a way to enhance the expression of the words, not an expression in itself. Sometimes it did really click and I found myself understanding the song at a different depth once it had a tune, but mostly the tunes simply reflect the lyrics in the simplest possible way.
So I am a writer at heart, and words are my best way to express myself. Sometimes I feel at a disadvantage, because I understand music better than I understand words. Also, words are so limiting. When you put them together into an idea they can soar off on their own, but they still need to follow a basic structure even in the vaguest poetry or prose.
I wonder how my life would be different if I had your gift. Perhaps I wouldn't really speak at all, never really learn to use words to my advantage, because I'd have a highly superior way of expressing what I feel--the piano.
Maybe I should be grateful, then. Words seem to be the more socially accepted manner of communicating.
Interesting how God chooses to invest His gifts.
~D - Mory said:
-
Yes, it is- I've actually dealt with that issue somewhat. However, I think God has given you more than you realize. I don't see why you see piano as "superior" to text- it's really not. If you doubt the potency of the written word, I refer you to my two greatest achievements on this blog: the mundane and The Imaginary! and I'm not.. They are at least as beautiful as, and certainly more sophisticated than any music I have ever composed. If you feel prose is limiting, then just break the rules a little. Isn't that what rules are for?
The reason I don't put music to lyrics is that in general I don't like the combination of music and lyrics. I like the purity you get from either one on its own, but when you throw them together each one cheapens the other. The one time I did find music for lyrics was when I was writing the poem in the "About Me" tab. I'm not much of a poet, and I found that by translating it into very dynamic music I could get a better feel for the rhythm. It sounds vaguely repulsive that way, though, so I do not plan to ever share the tune. - ~Daniella said:
-
I understand what you mean about the purity of each, but sometimes I feel that words are almost musical, having a rhythm of their own. And sometimes the music will give the words meaning they didn't have before. This is, of course, provided that the words had meaning in the first place, which is not true of a large majority of popular music out there.
And I'm certainly grateful for everything God has given me. He has given me a taste of many worlds. I don't wish for anything more than that. I just wonder, though, how I would be different... which would help me understand why He chose to give me what He gave me.
I love that music is always with me, and that through the tapping of a rhythm, the clanging of bells, or the rustling of leaves I can hear music. I love that I can sometimes find words to describe an action or a feeling hard to define. I love that I can reproduce a sound in my own throat, harmonize naturally, and make music without requiring a single instrument. I love that I can see others' emotions, take them into my own soul, churn them around and express them through my own face, my own motions, or my own words. He has given me so much, a unique perception and ability of execution... sometimes I wonder what I will have to do in my life that will require all of these skills.
I tried to read your links, but for some reason they're not working. Maybe I'll try again on a different computer.
~D - Mory said:
-
Forget the links- all the posts are on the main page! I see you're using IE; I think you get the "find" feature in IE with Ctrl-F, no? So just use that to find the titles. Oh, and if you're confused by "I'm not.", it might make more sense if you read the first post (at the bottom of the page) too. But you don't have to.
- ~Daniella said:
-
I actually did read your first post most dutifully when I first viewed your blog, and began reading from bottom up but didn't make it too far.
My blog involves a lot more aimless blabber about my life, but in between I do post bits and pieces of writing. You seem like the sort of person who would either really hate modern poetry or really like it. Here's some of mine: http://sunflower-sky.livejournal.com/20265.html, http://sunflower-sky.livejournal.com/18922.html, and http://sunflower-sky.livejournal.com/66575.html (you'll have to log in to LJ to see then, as they're friends-locked). I have a particular fondess of brushing and bouncing off rules, like flowing in and out of rhyme (like in the first one).
~D
Monday, April 17, 2006
Stories from the Seder Table
I sat and waited for it to end for much time. You might say that it was an uneventful seder. But every event is unique in some way. What made this seder night different from all the others?
Why is it that there are no simple, plain, nice hardcover haggadahs sold? Without commentary (which won't be read as the Seder moves along) taking up three quarters of the page, or an English translation taking up half the page, or irrelevant photos taking up a quarter of the page. Not some free little "Maxwell House" haggadah which looks like it may fall apart any moment, but a good, sturdy, nicely produced haggadah. I asked this question many times before we left. We have no such copy. I used the Temple Haggadah, whose commentary was written by my old Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel. It looked like the closest thing to what I was looking for.
The Temple Haggadah is a big, sturdy, hardcover book. It is also fairly heavy. The two tables were stuffed with dishes, so I had to hold it in my lap. Being uncomfortable is a Pesach tradition, including the time-honored sub-tradition of reclining on the left side. I think discomfort is supposed to be a symbol of freedom. Another symbol of freedom is having someone pour you four glasses of wine. Now, picture a guy like me, who hates both the flavor of alcohol and the flavor of grapes. Does having someone else force this stuff down my throat sound like freedom?
Pondering this question, I stood with everyone else to bless the wine. (I could have used some blessing myself- something like "Please, God, in your great mercy could you possibly make my taste buds stop working for a minute?".) Anyway, while blessing the wine (or grape juice in my case, which isn't quite as dreadful), you're supposed to raise the cup. And so I did with my right hand, while also trying to hold up my hagaddah in my left hand. When my hand starting hurting, I tried shifting the book onto the plate, and spilled half the grape juice on the book and the floor. I cleaned it all up; my father looked at the book and said: "I'm very disappointed in you." I drank the juice in one gulp, to get it over with. It was vile. I tell you, I know what freedom tastes like, and that ain't it.
Every year, my father hides the Afikoman matza. And we try to find it. He finds all the best places in our house. I can never find it, so I give up early on and one of the girls gets it. Then they're given some reward for finding it, like money or a CD or something like that. There's a counter-tradition in our family, where all of us try to watch my father at every moment of the seder, to make sure he's not sneaking off with the Afikoman. But every year, he finds some moment where we're not alert enough, and before we know it it's hidden. Well, this time, I watched. As we got up to watch in the middle of the seder, I sat behind, looking innocently at my father. And he remained seated, the Afikoman on the table next to him. And I remained seated. "Well, go wash.", he said with a smile. "After you.", I replied. He got up. But I was afraid he'd wash before me, and get back with time to hide it while I was busy washing, so I tried to outsmart him. I rushed ahead to wash first, all the while looking backwards to make sure he wasn't getting too close to the Afikoman. I had him this time. I washed, came back to the table, and the Afikoman had disappeared. Apparently, he'd told my mother to hide it for him (in a specific place he'd picked out), since no one was watching her. The cheat. "Next year," I told myself, "I'll just have to change the rules. I'll make sure that someone, be it myself or one of the girls, is watching the Afikoman at all times. We'd cover for each other. Then he'd lose. Ha!"
But this year, I'd lost. But maybe... Well, if my mother had hidden it it couldn't be too hard a hiding place. And they don't know this house too well - that'll certainly work against them. Hmmm.... I noticed a little slit in the top of a box of soda bottles next to the door to the kitchen... Nah, too easy. And that was that. I had to wait before looking for it, of course. So I waited. Right before the meal, after my father had gone back home to get something-or-other, it looked like my cue. I reached into the box, and sure enough there it was! I was so excited that I (foolishly) announced that I'd found it. The girls started shrieking: "Too soon! You weren't supposed to look yet! This doesn't count!". And so the argument started. The little Zigelman girl saw an opportunity for mischief and tried to grab it. "No, it's mine! Mine!", I cried. And I jumped out of the way 'til she gave up. I sat down on the couch, considering that I should have hidden it again as soon as I found it- that way, they'd look in the place my parents had put it and be so surprised! Heh, that would be cool. But whatever- I'd won. I knew I wouldn't get any presents -why would I, when my parents wouldn't even give me a present for my birthday?- but it was the principle of the thing. For once, I'd won.
Everyone else soon lost interest. "You should hide it.", Mickey Pollevoy said quietly. And why not?, I thought. They weren't paying attention anymore. "Just put it under the couch!", he advised. It was an obvious hiding place, sure. But it seemed like a good enough idea. And so I did. I went back to my seat, and told the girls I'd hidden it. Our parents should have to find it, yes, that seems best. And I told them, "It's under that chair.", because they wouldn't be the ones looking for it. "Hey!- Now we can't look for it!" True. It did seem like a good idea a few moments before.
My father came back, and agreed that I had cheated by finding it earlier than they'd expected. Nonetheless, I said, he and my mother would have to find it. My mother wasn't interested, but my father started looking. He looked in all the drawers. He looked under the tablecloth. He took apart the couch to look under the cushions. Everywhere but on the floor under the couch seat I'd been sitting at.
During this time, I'd gotten bored of the whole thing, and started wondering whether there was any point to it to begin with. So I started playing Egyptian War with some young girls. Meanwhile, the hunt continued, and by this point my sisters joined in. This made no sense to me, since I had told them exactly where it was, but there they were searching anyway. And they couldn't find it. I was sick of all of the commotion, so when Ari Zigelman asked, "Where is it?", I said, "It's under that chair!". And so my father and sisters started looking under every chair in the house except for the one I had sat on. I didn't get it. I don't remember how it ended. I don't think it matters too much.
Then there was the meal. There were salads, and other salads, and vegetables. Being a strong antivegitarian, I had nothing to eat there. Then there was turkey. I hate turkey, but what else was there to eat?- I ate some turkey. Instantly I recalled why I'd made a mental note before to never eat turkey- it tasted awful. As I looked distastefully at what was still on my plate, some guest said to my mother, "Wow, this turkey is delicious!". Which only goes to show that some people have no sense of taste. One such person, as I discovered, is Mickey Pollevoy. He started talking about rock music. I said I liked classical musics, and he laughed. He asked if I liked Mozart. "No, the truth is I've never liked Mozart's music much." He laughed. "I don't get it- If I had said I liked Mozart's music you would have laughed. When I say I don't like Mozart, you laugh. Why am I even talking to you?" But what else was there to do?- I kept talking. And it got to the point where Miriam burst in, insisting that no one should ever remember the name of any type of artist, because all art exists only to entertain and who cares who wrote it as long as it entertains? Except she didn't sound as intelligent as that sentence makes her seem. And the two of them laughed at the fact that I don't like rock, and laughed at my opinion that I think there might be something worth listening to in modern music which doesn't make the bestseller lists, and they laughed at my mention of Howard Shore's music as an example of popular modern classical music: "You actually care about the name of the guy who wrote the music for Lord of the Rings?" "Yeah, was there even any music in Lord of the Rings? If there was, it must not have been very good!" By the end of the meal, I was quite certain I was in the wrong place.
I walked home in a bitter mood. But there was one thing I was grateful for: I wouldn't have to drink grape juice for another year! Hooray!
3 Comments:
- Sammy said:
-
At least its over, no?
And The Lord of the Rings soundtracks are amazing for anyone who is curious... - said:
-
I fail to understand how someone could have watched the Lord of the Rings movies and not have enjoyed, or at least noticed, the music. I suppose I should feel bad for them - they're missing out.
I'm sorry you didn't have a good Seder. Better luck next year! - Mory said:
-
In his defense, he did seem to be completely tone-deaf.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Player Requirements
... | ... |
Videogames are a multibillion dollar industry. Of course there are successful development companies.
Who would play such a thing?
Ecch. Anyway, you're wrong. There wouldn't really be a problem getting into a game without a difficulty curve- yAnyway, I don't think it would really be a problem to have no difficulty curve. You could just put in a really long tutorial for new players. A tutorial could actually be really fun, with a good difficulty curve and broken into levels, even though it would be completely outside the game. Like, it would have to make it really clear that it's not part of the story and doesn't even take place in the same game world.
...
Okay, technically it's a problem from a marketing perspective. Requiring the reader of a book to understand English does limit the ability of the publisher to sell to people living in non-English-speaking countries. Or to the illiterate. Or to penguins. If you think of just how many non-English-speaking and/or illiterate and/or non-human creatures live on this planet, it's a bit hard to believe that marketers have not yet realized that what they really need to do to sell more books is do away with the usage of language. I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually.
But I think we can and should ignore this hurdle to sales. Not just because sales research ought to be kept far away from the actual art creation, but mostly because what's a few billion customers lost, in the service of such a benefit to art?
But... but... but that's just anti-capitalism, you communist!
Out of your system now? Good. Artistic potential is more important than sales lost. Case in point: Because I've already explained my dialogue system (or at least the first version of it), and because I tend to operate under the assumption that you've read every post I've written from the very beginning, I could jump right to the good part- the usage of my system for creative purposes. If you haven't read my earlier post, then you could easily get frustrated by the very beginning of this new post. In this particular case, that doesn't bother me too much. But for works which are intended to be sold, it's good to keep in mind.
Whenever a long story is being broken into segments (and some people might only join in the middle) the writer needs to consider how to present the previous material. The easiest way to go is that taken by Peter Jackson: Just don't. The beginning of Return of the King doesn't tell you what you missed in the first two thirds- if you didn't see them, you're out of luck. Come to think of it, that's more or less the same thing I do here.
Or there's the method I see in the comicbooks published by DC Comics* (Here I'm talking about many of their regular issues, not their current crossover Infinite Crisis which requires the reader to be familiar with hundreds of characters' stories just to make heads or tails of it.): The first few pages have, either in monologue or dialogue, the entire backstory as it relates to the current situation. It feels completely forced, and cheapens the entire book.
A much more reasonable approach is that taken by Marvel Comics: The first page explains, in plain text, everything you need to know. It is clearly separated from the actual comic, so neither side harms the other. The same technique can be seen in most serialized TV shows, as the presentation opens with a montage of clips from previous episodes which together tell all the relevant backstory. But my favorite example of such separation is with early adventure games which told their backstories via short comicbooks bundled with the game.
Player requirements in gameplay can be dealt with in much the same ways. The traditional interactive Forms (music, dance, stage) do not come with instruction booklets. You don't know how to play piano? Too bad- fill in what you've missed and come back. Similar (though not nearly as harsh) is the adventure Form, particularly of the "point-and-click" variety. You're expected to have played such games in the past, so there's no in-game tutorial. Most you'll get is a manual which comes in the game box. The gamist takes advantage of the assumption that you know what you're doing by being focused on the story (the primary content) right from the beginning.
My least favorite option (as you might have guessed) is forcing a tutorial into the beginning of a game, or even having the tutorial run alongside the respectable, content-focused gameplay throughout the course of the game. Unfortunately, this is the most common approach. It cheapens the whole game, but what do they care?- it makes it more accessible to new players. Bl'bah!
Finally, my favorite option: the clearly separated tutorial. You might say that all games with manuals follow this approach to a certain extent, but I'll ignore that for the simple reason that no one reads manuals before playing. So let's just say that this is referring to games where the tutorial is focused on gameplay, but the "game proper" is focused on content. There is the chance that the player will get confused, but so what?- It'll be like an acquired language. Eventually, people will get used to it. Wouldn't you?
Life is a game of Mao.
Next Post
Thursday, April 06, 2006
The Long Friday
Okay, this is awkward. Maybe I shouldn't have started this post to begin with. But actually, maybe it's a good thing. The blog's a reflection of my life, right? And the way this post is going, it's completely expendable, right? You know, talk is cheap and all that. And on Fridays, even week-long Fridays, life feels cheap. It fits. Good. I'm so glad I settled that. I wouldn't want to be worrying about cheapening the value of the blog without good reason. And I guess this is as good a reason as any. I wonder if I could squeeze an interactive dialogue in here somehow, just to give myself an excuse to continue the post? Nah, too much work. Anyway, as I was saying (though was I actually saying anything?), it really feels like a Friday. So much so, that I'm expecting bourekas for lunch. Sure, I know it's not Friday, but tell that to my stomach. Or don't- that would be pretty weird. Oh no, I'm boring my readers to death. Then again, there are two reasons not to worry about that. First of all, my readers listened to me when I said, back at the beginning of this post, to skip it. My readers trust me, see. They know that when I say I'm about to waste a post I'm about to waste a post. And they have better things to do with their time than read a waste of a post. So my readers aren't actually reading this. Secondly, and this is a crucial point, I don't actually have any readers. Okay, so I have one or two, but there are two reasons I can say I don't have any readers. First of all, they're smart enough not to be reading this, so they won't be offended. I mean, how can you be offended by something you haven't read? Secondly, I'm rounding it to the nearest five. That's an acceptable thing to do, no? You hear about seventy-four of something, and you're asked how many it is, you say seventy-five. Because who really cares about the other one, right? Sure, that one might be crucial in reality (say, if you're talking about people), but it's not reality, it's just numbers. So it's perfectly alright for me to say that I have zero readers. Or say the time is 1:02. Would you say it's "one o'two", or would you say it's "one o'clock"? Now, there is a small chance that you might say it's "one o'two", but I can ignore that for two reasons. First of all, the fact that you might say it that way doesn't negate the validity of rounding it down. Secondly, you're not reading this, so what difference does it make how you personally would say it? ...and now that I've put that in the wrong order, I can't continue to a fourth branch. So I've got nothing left to say. Of course, it could be said (and I do believe I've said already) that I had nothing to say to begin with. But now I really have nothing to say. Bleh, Fridays.
4 Comments:
- Sammy said:
-
That was actually a pretty amusing post, at least the ending was.
Yes, that means I read the whole thing through and that also means that I wasn't smart enough to stop reading when you implied that it would be a smart thing to do and your readers are smart enough to know to stop reading, but I read it so I guess I am not smart enough to be counted as a reader, since I am being considered a zero anyway, not even a reader.
Now what can we say about the people who DID read this post: well, one idea is that they didnt trust you, but you said they always do, so that means you have a fickle reader. Secondly, maybe the person who read the post all the way through was as bored as yourself, so they read it to identify with how you were feeling when you wrote the post or they were just bored, so they read it. another idea is that they too wished to waste time and push things off, so they read the post.
I think you secretly enjoyed writing the post, so you continued to do so even after you realized that you had nothing to write... - Mory said:
-
Eh, it's not much of a secret. I had nothing to say that wouldn't be superfluous, so I figured I'd go with the "superfluous" theme. I've never done that before, you understand. Which means (and I hardly need to bring it up) that this post is not superfluous. I think I've failed.
Now, as to the claim that you've read this post- you're lying. I've thought it through quite thoroughly, and I have never given any of my zero readers any reason to mistrust me. As a matter of fact, just a few hours ago all zero readers informed me that they trust me completely, so this isn't even up for debate.
Furthermore, given that I have chosen (with perfect mathematical validity) to round the number of readers down to zero, you don't actually exist. In other words, you're a piece of fiction I have concocted- an IF, to use my old term. And as any writer knows, the writer has full control over the actions of his fiction within the boundaries he has set up. So when I deal with all my fictional readers (including you, I'm afraid) at once, it is in my power to decide what they will do. Therefore, when I said that my readers had stopped reading, it was retroactively so. In fact, to prove that I control my fiction, all the readers of this comment will now close their browsers. See?
The part at which this gets complicated is when you (in your comment) raised some points I had not considered. There are several ways this could have happened, but unfortunately they all involve me being certifiably insane. I'm not too happy about it, but logic forces me to accept this conclusion, and so I will! The most obvious result of all this is that I can say with full certainty that this blog post is not superfluous, because it proves that I am insane- which could not have been inferred as irrefutably from any previous posts! And so I certainly have failed with this post, but that is to be expected- After all, an insane man cannot hope to always succeed in what he sets out to do.
The second result is that now I can write a perfectly nonsensical comment like the one you have not been reading (since I have put it into IMX canon that you stopped after the third paragraph), I have a good excuse. I'm so proud to have written such a productive post! :) - said:
-
Hehe, you really are insane...made me laugh, though. ^_^
Also, I love the comparison between life and Mau. So very true. - Sammy said:
-
so I have been rounded down to being a zero and now you are telling me that I am imaginary... I guess it is true that we not only learn new things everyday, but there is always something new to discover about oneself... I am not real... how disconcerting...
Sunday, April 02, 2006
The Key to Longevity, Part Two
I also love Battlestar Galactica. There are very few stand-alone episodes. Instead, each episode is just a small part of the larger story arc spanning the course of the entire series. I've tried to rewatch episodes, and it gets boring really quickly. It's hard to get really invested in a story when all the plot is just a development of previous themes, all the character development exists solely to move the characters to where you already know they'll be in future episodes, and there is no sense of closure. On rewatches, these episodes are very nearly worthless. On the other, I do enjoy rewatching the entire series, starting from the beginning, around once a year. That's rare enough that I'm not thinking ahead, so I can get caught up in the momentum of the character development. And by watching through the whole story, taken as a single entity, I get a satisfying experience where plotlines are introduced and resolved.
Neither of these two shows is as good as Babylon 5. (For that matter, I don't think any TV show is as good as Babylon 5.) It has a five-year story arc which puts BSG's to shame: While BSG's arc is constantly twisting in new directions, Babylon 5 knows exactly where it wants to be right from the beginning, and works its way there gradually. It is, as its creator J. Michael Straczynski put it, a novel written for television, with a clear beginning, middle and end. But alongside this long-term vision, each episode more or less stands on its own, no matter how critical a part of the arc it is. At the beginning of the episode, themes and plotlines are introduced. By the end of the fourty-five minutes, they are resolved. On rare occasions, I watch a whole string of B5 episodes to watch the arc unfold- it's quite a treat. But more often, I go back to rewatch just a single episode at random; at its end, I'm always satisfied. What keeps me watching is not the arc- that I only think about and admire later. No, what keeps me watching is the moment-to-moment greatness: comedy, tension, immediate problems.
It should be noted that B5 and BSG do not get better on rewatches as Voyager does. I have already identified the issue here as nostalgia. I am very nostalgic about Voyager, and not at all about either of my other favorite sci-fi shows. And I think I know why. Nostalgia is for the little things. You know what keeps drawing me back to Voyager? It's not the larger story- in fact, there isn't much in the way of a continuing arc. It's the family dynamic between the characters. Captain Janeway is the mother of the ship, Commander Chakotay is the father, the rest of the crew are the children, always spending time with each other, and Voyager is home. It doesn't need each story to radically change the status quo to earn such a special place in my heart- just this simple relationship. It is timeless and unforgettable. B5 has no such appeal, as the heavy arc progression overcomplicates. No simplicity, no nostalgia.
This is not to discredit long-term vision. An ongoing story is an admirable goal. It is enjoyable, even after having watched all of BSG, to just sit back and think about what's happened so far. It keeps the higher levels of the brain engaged, both by requiring memory and understanding of everything that's happened so far and by challenging the viewer to wonder what will happen next. The more popular reason given for long arcs is the added realism, but in my opinion realism is overrated. In any case, it is certainly a valid approach.
Now let's go back to the subjects of the original question. Metroid Prime and its sequel Echoes break their world design into rooms, each one beautiful standing on its own. The rooms are not repeated; each is unique and remarkable in its own right. They have a mostly clear, linear path to follow through the very nonlinear worlds, so there is always short-term momentum. In addition, there are many platforming and action challenges, which by their nature are short-term entertainment. The layout is complex enough to challenge the player, but simple and elegant enough that he will remember it fondly. I have a lot of nostalgia for Tallon IV and Aether (the Metroid Prime worlds). As such, each time, in addition to the simple beauty of the world design there is an additional layer of enjoyment: the feeling of coming back home after a long period of time. This only gets greater with each subsequent playthrough.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has an excellent and memorable story of the sort you'd find in a work of anime. It asks patience of the player, letting him know that the first two hours or so are merely set-up. It is not challenging. It is not satisfying in the short term. Instead, it uses its gameplay to craft a provocative story in the long term. Take the very first section, set on Link's home island of Outset. It sets up characters such as Link's sister and grandmother, it puts the plot in motion, yadda yadda yadda. But it doesn't give the player any hooks to keep him engaged. The gameplay consists of walking back and forth on the island. There is no tension, little humor, minimal emotion. It doesn't really feel like home (since running back and forth isn't all that welcoming), so that's no hook either. I'm not going to go through and analyze the entire game here, but suffice it to say that a large portion of the rest of the game shows the same disregard for the short term, instead focusing on a larger (twenty hours or so) story. TWW is not fun to replay.
Finally, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The best game ever made. It has an exciting story- though it's rooted in typical RPG cliché, it's told extraordinarily well, and with plenty of twists and turns. But at the same time, it always keeps the player focused on the present. What keeps me engaged from moment to moment is the emotion. The beginning at home, for instance, could stand on its own. Sure, it's teaching the player all the skills he'll need for the rest of the game, but at the same time there is the feeling of exploration and discovery, since the world design has intricacies such as hidden caves and a hard-to-reach ledge. There are things to find in every house. There is the welcoming feeling of being at home, as all the nearby characters make a point to say hello to you. There is the short-term game of finding both a sword and enough money to buy a shield. And there is the pressing plot point that the Great Deku Tree, for the first time, has summoned you to tell you something of vital importance. The player is kept entertained throughout. So while the game's complexity keeps the player from getting too nostalgic later (other than certain simple moments such as falling down a hole into a pool of water), the game stays fresh no matter how many times it is played.
In short, the key to longevity is simple, short-sighted, universal entertainment.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I edited this post at 10:50 PM, removing an analogy to music that not only overcomplicates the post, but just isn't any good.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Computer, Part Three
"Did he manage to transfer everything?"
"I don't know- I didn't ask."
...
"Hello, this is Mordechai Buckman. You said my computer was fixed?"
"Yes."
"Were you able to transfer everything from the old hard drive?"
"Yes.
"Really."
"I've got to tell you, it took me eight hours. I had to move it over sector by sector. But I saved everything."
"That's all I needed to know."
...
I picked it up this morning. And I took it in the car back to the house. And I carried it up the stairs to its spot. And I plugged everything in. And I turned it on. And I waited for it to boot up, while in my head I improvised for myself a song befitting a Broadway musical. ...and it crashed on the Windows XP screen.
It doesn't make sense- Yossi showed me it worked at his office. I turned it on, and everything was just the way I had left it. Everything worked fine. Apparently it's broken down in between the time I unplugged it there and the time I plugged it in here. Does this make any sense at all?
Maybe it's my fault- maybe I was so excited that I shook it around or something, and something came loose.
For such logically complex machines, computers don't make a whole lot of sense.
I'm writing this post on Benjy's laptop.
Blah.
(Posted by Mory @ 12:51 PM)
We were in the car, driving back to Yossi.
"You know what would be really silly?", I asked my mother.
"What?"
"If Yossi plugged it in over there and it worked."
...
Yossi opened it up to see what the problem was. He didn't see anything. He lightly tapped the hard drive, just to check if it was loose. He plugged in the computer. It worked.
...
So here I am, writing on Mozilla Firefox in my preferred resolution of 1280x1024. (I've felt pretty cramped being in 800x600 for the past few days.) Google Desktop is to my side, providing essential functionality but slowing down the computer tremendously. The left speaker isn't working. And as this little incident should illustrate, my computer is being as incomprehensible and uncooperative as ever. And you know what? It's good to be home.
1 Comment:
- Sammy said:
-
well, that story has a happy ending! Everything is back to normal, which is as weird as you can get.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Tapestry Thread: Easterly Wave
But I'm not sure Olmert's platform is about belief. I can't believe a politician could get all the way to the top being stupid enough to believe something like that. More likely this is yet another effort to appease Europe and the rest of the world. Maybe if we do what they want, they'll support us. Or something like that. Anyway, I find it interesting that on the very first time that I get to vote for the right parties, the right fizzles out.
As more votes are counted, an eclipse is overhead. We don't look at it directly, but it's there. God's light was right up there, telling us that we are different, but it's blocked now. It's too late. We've lost. And all I can think of is that great line in the pilot of Battlestar Galactica: "We never ask ourselves why. Why are we worth saving?".
How can we be God's chosen people when we refuse to acknowledge it? When we pretend we're like all the other nations? When we're willing to shoot ourselves in the head to fit in? My mother is waiting for a miracle. She's waiting for Olmert to get a stroke. But we don't deserve a miracle- we have lost sight of who we are. We have lost sight of who we are meant to be. We were meant to be a light unto the nations. That light is blocked now.
I like the darkness, but there's one problem with it: You can't see very far ahead. So we'll all go back to worrying about our little, insignificant problems, for as long as the real issue stays avoidable. I'm lonely, and I miss my computer, and this chair is a bit uncomfortable.
I can't get friends, because I've learned my place. It's right that I should be alone- I am different. Come to think of it, that's a lie- I'll never learn my place. Just today, I tried talking to the people on the Gamecritics forums about the Israeli elections, expecting intelligent comments. There was exactly one responder, coming from the Netherlands, who expressed his satisfaction that we may finally lose Israel. (Very brutally, I might add.) I wrote a response:
Thank you for that enlightening comment. It's so nice to know I'm thought of as a "religious zealot fascist occupier" for wanting to live my life without fear of being attacked or thrown out of my home. You're right, I've been so inconsiderate!! We're surrounded by enemies, our government is on the border between simple incompetence and evil, but at least we have such friendly neighbors in Europe.That's when my modem mysteriously stopped working, so the post never went through. Which is as it should be. I am different. I am alone.
By the way, my father bought me a nice little audio cable which lets me plug the Gamecube's audio-out to headphones. So finally I can hear stereo sound. But on the very first time I got to use it, the only pair of headphones in the house stopped working right. It's the right ear- it keeps fizzling out.
That of course reminds me again of my digital home, whose left speaker has never worked well. Yossi's still working on my computer, and I don't know how it will end. Will the transition to a new hard drive be relatively painless? Or will I lose everything I've ever had?
Only time will tell.
3 Comments:
- Sammy said:
-
Yeah, it is kind of depressing when no one comments on your blog, especially when they keep up with it.I feel a little guilty that I dont update every night, because I feel like I owe it to the people who do read my blog.But then again, as you said, your blog is for yourself, so why should my keeping up with it, depend of other people.
I usually dont randomly read blogs, unless I am very very bored and I have nothing else to do, which isnt very often, cause people always want something from me. I do read Lori's (when she reminds me to), and now, well, yours, I guess. Once I found it, and if I had something to say, why did you think I wouldnt comment? Is it because no one else comments, or because of me in particular? Or I dont know... any other weird reason.
Even if your party didnt win, well, it still must have given you a satisfying feeling to have been able to vote. My birthdays not until the summer, so no voting for me. I guess I'll have to wait a couple more years, til I can pick a piece of paper with my party on it and stick it into an envelope.
Ok, I would keep writing, but I should update my own blog now, and this comment is getting pretty long, and I have a toshbah matkonet to study for. And about the music, I would be honored if you would let me look at it, but I am kind of busy, so if its not going to put you through any kind of agony, can it wait until next week? - Mory said:
-
I didn't think you'd comment because, well... Look, I like to comment on posts which make interesting statements, or push me in some new creative direction. For instance, it was fun to comment on your short post. But when I read lots of straightforward exposition, I feel like there's nothing to say.
I didn't think you'd comment because I have a nagging suspicion that most other people are the other way 'round. Wander around in the land of smalltalk, through all sorts of random events and characters, and they'll like nothing more than join in. But wonder about the threads weaving events together, or hypothetical scenarios, and they stay far away.
If you think that putting a slip of paper into a box sounds exciting, then you're in for a big treat come next elections- I bet it will be every bit as satisfying as you expect it to be. Myself, I didn't think it sounded all that amazing, and it was every bit as satisfying as I expected it to be. It's all in the approach. Someone who's coming looking to feel like she's done her civic duty will try to get satisfaction out of it. I didn't.
In any case, I don't regard our government particularly highly, so it wasn't exactly an honor. Moreover, I knew for certain that another disengagement would pass, seeing as how there were two hurricanes in America and only one disengagement so far here. With the result a forgone conclusion, I felt more like I was playing the part fitting me than like I was shaping the future. It's all in the attitude.
As for the music, there's certainly no rush. I just thought you might enjoy it. - Mory said:
-
Now it's looking like I was totally wrong, since there wasn't another disengagement. I guess I don't have much of a future as a prophet!
Monday, March 27, 2006
Home Collapsing
He had no reason to suspect he wouldn't continue to live in it. He was sitting and relaxing, content in the familiarity of his surroundings, when he noticed a little bit of chipped paint. Ah well, he'd bring in a painter to fix it. But by the time he got there, the problem had escalated. There were now cracks in the wall. The painter informed him that there was nothing he could do.
Had it really been five years already? But there was no time to worry about that- the ceiling looked like it might cave in at any moment. Ariel rushed to preserve what he could of his posessions. He grabbed all the books he could carry from the shelves, and dropped them outside. He repeated this several times. But what about the furniture? No, there was no way he could possibly get them out in time- he'd just have to hope he could get it replaced. By this point, the other three walls all had started to crack as well. The doors fell down. Ariel jumped out of the house, and not a moment too soon, as the entire house collapsed behind him. Looking at the wreckage where his home had stood, he felt a hole in his heart.
The only thought before picking himself up and worrying about the price of a new house: "I'd like to murder that salesman."
My computer had a very small problem: it kept stuttering, whether or not I was doing anything. It stuttered even if there were no programs running at all. I hated to bring it in to be repaired, even if it were only for a day or so. After all, I had set up the operating system to work just the way I liked. I had all my favorite software installed and configured properly. More importantly, it had a special place in my heart. It's been my computer for five years. I've lived in it.
Of course I had to bring it in to Yossi anyway. With this stutter, I could not play games, listen to music, or watch video. I figured it was probably a nothing problem, and I'd get it back very soon. Not so. It turns out my hard drive has suddenly, and for no good reason, broken down. Or rather, it is about to break down completely, and this is just an early symptom. Yossi said that had I not brought it in, it would have stopped working very soon. There is no way to repair it. It must be replaced.
I asked him whether he could transfer my operating system and everything in it to the new hard drive - He said he's not sure. Under the Unified Theory of Computing, otherwise known as Murphy's Law, that means no. I've lost it all. Maybe he can preserve a few files before my home collapses for good, but that's all. It's taken me five years to get it working exactly the way I want it. Now it's gone.
Why can't I pay twice as much, for a computer only half as powerful, which is guaranteed to work from now until the day I die? A computer needs to be dependable, because it is virtually my home. Why do I need anything close to the top of the line? I don't want any of that fancy stuff. I just want to be guaranteed that when I come home, I can sit back and be comfortable. I just want to be sure that my home will always be there waiting for me. Is that so much to ask?
3 Comments:
- Sammy said:
-
I figured fair is fair. You comment on my pathetic blog, so I should comment on yours. Not that its pathetic, on the contrary... it is quite creative. Do you mind my asking, but does anyone read your blog daily? This is not about you its about blogs in general, because the only person who reads mine (when I post) is Lori and I always talk to her, therefore, it isnt all that exciting... that she reads it. Maybe you have to have a lot of friends who use the computer in order to have your blog read. but as you said, friends? No, I dont think many people have real friends even when it seems like it. Are you really that bored? And I'm sorry to hear about your computer, especially since you use it so much.
- Mory said:
-
Well, I don't know much about blogs in general, but I do know that my blog exists to fill a hole that I had before it. If your blog is a bit simple, that's not "pathetic", it's a good thing- it means the hole in your life isn't anywhere near as big as mine! Okay, fine, I'll stop bragging. :)
Welcome to my blog. If my computer is like a physical home, then my blog is certainly my home on the internet. It's nice having a second home to fall back to. (Hopefully, this one has a bit more permanence.) The only regular guest here is Tamir, though he doesn't comment often. Hi there, Tamir! And I never address real people when they're not present. Um..
Anyway, it's actually a bit annoying that I can see people coming on to the blog when they do, since when they don't write then I feel bad that I didn't get to talk to them. I guess I wasn't really expecting you to comment when I saw you pop up, so I'm very excited. (You can tell I'm excited when I take four paragraphs for what ought to take only a few sentences.)
So now I'm thinking, maybe I need some sort of instant message feature on the bottom of the blog pages, where you could write in messages that go away after five minutes or so. I wonder if it can be done. That way, I'd actually be able to talk to guests. - Mory said:
-
I'm going to retract what I said about this being a home. There's always one home. The blog isn't really much more of a home than my piano is. I mean, "home" has connotations of the lack of work. Now that I'm thinking about it, it was a pretty stupid thing for me to say. Oh well, won't be my last.
Usually, I don't play piano for all that long. Today I have little else to do. Solo improv without an audience gets pretty lonely.
Next Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Matters of Taste
The music was amazing. It really inspired me. My father seemed to really enjoy it a lot, and it also gave him an opportunity to reminisce about his playing the clarinet in high school. (This was the first I'd heard of it.) Miriam was bored. When we finished, I was enthusiastically talking about the various pieces, while all Miriam had to say was "It was okay, but really long".
My mother organized a concert paying tribute to Simon & Garfunkle, as a fundraiser for JobKatif, which helps victims of the evacuation. I came back from that now. Miriam went because she loves Simon & Garfunkle's music. I came along. (I wouldn't have normally, but as it so happened on this very day I had taken my computer in for repairs, so I had less to do at home than usual.) We had to come really early since my mother was setting up, so I brought my Game Boy.
Everyone around me was smiling and seemed to be really into it. I'm sure Miriam really enjoyed it, because it's simple, repetitive music which is fairly nice. My father seemed to really love it, and he sang along whenever he remembered the lyrics. I was bored. When we finished, Miriam was humming all the tunes.
So how was it? Okay, I guess. But boy, it was really long.
Day of Wrest
"We'll finish this some other time- we have to go. Get my stuff."
And so I did. Turning back, I saw that there were two little kids walking with him as we left the room- a boy and a girl.
"Meet me down by the car."
I started down the stairs. And a lot of stairs there were! All over the walls were random numbers •-------
96...55...- one number written big, in white paint, and little black numbers all around it listing all the nearby floors. And a lot of floors there were! I ran, but the stairway would go on forever.
I got to the bottom, and looked around. Which car was it? Oh, right, this one. My father came, carrying nothing, with the two kids.
"My Gamecube's still up there!"
And I ran up to where we were before. Or was it this floor?- they all look the same! I tried the blue key he'd given me on a nearby door which looked like it might be it. It took a lot of effort to turn the key, but I did- I turned it all the way around. And the door stayed closed. I ran in even more desperation, until I saw a door that had to be it- well, it probably wasn't it. But there was something covering the keyhole! It was blue and green- how odd, that looks exactly like my kippah.. No time to think about religion- my Gamecube's in there! But the key wouldn't turn.
I ran down and yelled, "I can't find the room! What number is it?"
"I have no idea."
Turning to the kids, he said, "Stay here."
We turned to go back up, but I knew he wouldn't go through with it, leaving them down there- he'd leave me. I'd never see my Gamecube...
Wait, what day is it?that I hadn't been too far off the mark- it was Shabbat morning. Which means that through no fault of my own, I really had lost my Gamecube. Not to mention my social environment. And my music. And my entertainment. And the ability to get information. And the ability to let out my thoughts. In short, I'd lost everything that makes up my life.
Oh.
God, I hate Shabbat.
In life, I talk to people over the internet. I'll alienate them quickly, but it doesn't matter too much on a public forum- there are always new people to talk to.
On Shabbat, there's exactly one person to talk to- Eli. So if he's off playing with his friends, or just doesn't want to be with me, I've got nothing to do for 25 hours. Today I was actually lucky- I managed to spend a few good hours with Eli. *
Okay, to tell the truth, he did try to get rid of me. I didn't let him, and got to have something to do for another few hours.
In life, if I want to go exploring I can wander around Aether or Riven.
On Shabbat, I can walk around the street. Which brings me in a circle to the beginning of the street again. It's a small street. There's nothing interesting nearby.
In life, if I want to just have fun, I can play Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat or Pikmin 2.
On Shabbat, I've got two options: Gin Rummy, or Rum 500. That is, assuming there's anyone I can force into playing. If not, all I've got is Freecell.
In life, if I want music I make it on the piano. If I want to make music that will last, I use either a pencil and paper or the computer to write it down.
On Shabbat, if I want music I have to pretend that repetitive and fairly primitive Z'mirot (which exist not for the sake of a good tune but only as a means to praise Shabbat) are enough. Because that's all I've got.
In life, I can deal with problems by writing about them.
On Shabbat, I must keep my problems bottled up. There's nothing quite like a Shabbat for emotional stagnation.
Shabbat always starts the same way. It starts with me sitting, with nothing to do, bothering my mother by asking when it's over and mentioning how much I hate it. It's sort of a tradition by this point. Her part of the tradition is telling me "Go read a book." to every statement. I don't like reading plain text very much, especially when it is (as usual) bogged down in descriptions and exposition. If the material is really good, I'll put up with it for a short period of time. But only for a short period of time. My mother knows this, but she'd like to be able to sit down and read the newspaper in silence.
She also likes telling me that Shabbat is the highlight of her week. I feel sorry for her.
This week, she actually brought in a new twist- placing blame. She said: "You had a whole week to figure out what you could do on Shabbat!" Well, I have ideas. I've always had ideas. Like having a series of videos displaying on the computer during certain hours, so that I could watch something interesting without having to break Shabbat to do it. This is said to "go against the spirit of Shabbat", since the spirit of Shabbat is boredom. So that's not allowed.
What am I allowed to do then? Read books! Aren't I lucky to have such a selection.
Oh, don't get me wrong- I understand very well why I can't do anything on Shabbat. I'm never going to break it. But how I wish I could.
Then there's the Friday night meal, which is meat. I don't like meat so much, unless it's a sirloin steak. (I never get to eat steak.) I prefer dairy. I prefer pasta. I prefer lasagna. Mmmmm... lasagna. What was I talking about again?
Oh right, the meal. I never get to eat lasagna on Shabbat, because it's not "in the spirit of Shabbat". I get to eat bland chicken. Yay. We all sit together for the meal, singing the traditional songs we've all long since gotten bored of, and with a big, fancy, tasteless meal prepared by my mother in honor of Shabbat. And we sit around the table, and if we're really lucky someone will think of something interesting to say. Unfortunately, we are so different from each other that what one person finds interesting another will find depressing. Typically we latch onto a conversation about politics, and Miriam starts yelling about how she hates hearing about politics. It's a boring meal.
Then I go to bed, trying to forget it's Shabbat for long enough to fall asleep. This generally involves me pacing back and forth in the candle-lit living room past midnight, trying to think of hypothetical gameplay systems.
In the morning, I daven and read through the weekly Torah portion for myself. Then I wait for everyone to come back from shul, which takes a long time. And I wait. And I walk outside, to see what the weather is like, and walk back in for fear of burning. And I wait.
Then they come home, and we have lunch, which is effectively the same as dinner, though with different food. It's a boring meal.
Then I chase down Eli.
And I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.
3 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
I figured, if I was going to do a post about my hatred of Shabbat, I ought to make it complete.
- Kendra Lynn said:
-
Why is Shabbat so bad?
I don't understand.
Kendra - Mory said:
-
Well, that's an odd question to follow such a long post explaining why I hate Shabbat, but some time has passed since this post so I might as well take another look at the subject.
My life revolves around electronics and music, neither of which are allowed on Shabbat because they technically fit the term "work" which it is said we must not do. My socialization, my entertainment, my sources of information and my self-expression are all prohibited. Where they were, there is an emptiness which nothing allowed on Shabbat can fill.
Goodness knows I've tried to fill that gap. I've tried to get friends in the Real World I could talk to, only to realize that they had no interest in talking to me. I've tried to find ways to entertain myself, such as jigsaw puzzles, but they were not satisfying and only lasted me a few weeks before I got sick of them. I've now started learning math on Shabbat, though I know I can only get so far without being allowed to write. When I come up with music, more often than not it is forgotten by the time the day ends, since I have no way of remembering it without the use of a pencil or a piano.
What I am left with is a profound hatred of Shabbat and extreme boredom. I hope this clarifies
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Democracy of Morons
Moshe stood at the gateway of the camp, and said, "Whoever is for God, join me!" - and all the Levites gathered around him.Good for the tribe of Levi. But let's not forget that they were only 1 tribe out of 12. What the heck was wrong with the other eleven tribes?
I've just come back from a talk by Natan Sharansky about the upcoming elections. He's a very intelligent man, and it was fascinating. He gave a historical perspective, and explained in very practical terms why we should vote for Likud. Basically, he says that there are only two potential leaders: Likud's Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. If we don't vote, or vote for a party other than Likud, it will hurt Netanyahu's chances of creating a coalition.
Now, I don't know much at all about politics. But let's say that we stopped believing that the two parties with the most confidence in themselves are the only two candidates worth considering. We'd stop voting for the ones we think are going to win, and start voting for the parties we believe should win. And then Likud would have no chance at all! For that matter, even Olmert's Kadima wouldn't necessarily get many votes.
Likud wouldn't get many votes, because Netanyahu has failed to promise, well, anything. It seems that the only reason to vote for Likud is that Likud's not Kadima. And while I see the importance of not allowing Kadima to get far, that's not much of a platform to stand on. What's to guarantee that Likud won't choose to go farther left, if the "political realities" force them? Netanyahu's not making a stand. Oh, Sharansky excused that too. He explained, in practical terms, why it's wrong to give a final goal before any negotiations. And it makes sense. But there's no ideology here, no plan, no nothing. No one would vote for Likud if Bibi weren't so confident that people thought he had a chance. No one would vote for Likud if this were about ideas and not manipulations.
Kadima wouldn't get many votes, because they don't have much of a platform either. Kadima's members come from all over the political spectrum, and don't really share a vision for the future of the country. As Sharansky put it so aptly: "They agree on only one thing: they all want to be in power." But the message they send (and which the media helps along) is "We are the future winners. Vote for us to be on the winning side." If people stopped wanting to vote for the "winning side", Kadima would have no chance at getting anything. And Olmert's personal position is a guaranteed course to self-destruction. He's openly stated that he's going to give a tremendous amount of land to the terrorists, without asking anything in return. The result would of course be an effort by the terrorists to keep going until they get all the rest, but Olmert's not selling a solid idea; he's selling a winner's attitude.
A little while ago, I listened to a talk by National Union's Effi Eitam, who had very clear ideas and very clear goals. They're perceived as a loser in this election. They will be a loser. The polls show them getting 10 seats in the Knesset out of 120. The polls have Kadima doing quite well, and why shouldn't they?- they're the future winners, as we all know.
As a matter of fact, I do know that Olmert will win, and I do know that he'll have his catastrophic "disengagement". When people approach elections so recklessly as to worry more about feeling like they're on the winning side than about actual ideas, how could he not? I'm going to vote for National Union.
1 Comment:
- said:
-
I won't deny that there are many people who vote for the leading parties only because they are the leading parties. But you'd be surprised at the number of people who actually believe that Kadima or Likud should win.
I don't know what this country is coming to....I think you made a good choice, though.
I'd like to go back to my home planet now.
Next Post
Friday, March 17, 2006
Simple Reactionary Dialogue Control
What sort of idea is this?
Not really, no. Go away now.
I'll tell you anyway.
Well, OK, as long as it's really short.
See, I've come up with a system for controlling dialogue in videogames.
Sorry, but I'm just not interested.
Hey, I just remembered this very very important meeting. I don't want to be late, so I'll just have to, um, go. Bye!
A meeting.
What- you've never had to go to a meeting?
Okay, you win. I'll leave you alone now.
Oh yes.
I don't buy it.
Oh well, I tried.
Yeah. In fact, this meeting is so important that I'd lose my job if I didn't get there, like, right now.
Overshot a little there, don't you think?
Okay, you caught me. What's this idea of yours?
LOOK AT THAT! A THREE-HEADED MONKEY!!
Where?
Rats.
Maybe a little, yeah.
Seriously, can I tell you my idea?
Sure. What did you say this was about?
It's a way to control dialogue in games.
What's wrong with dialogue trees?
Okay, I'm listening.
Go on...
See, I've mentioned in the past that it's a good idea to separate the player from the character in story-centered games.
Fine, fine.
Well, you'll probably tell me no matter what I say.
Probably.
Fine, go ahead.
As I was saying, I've come up with a way to control dialogue. The current techniques, like dialogue trees, don't work too well, so I've come up with this to replace them.
Sounds ambitious. How would it work?
Well, I've mentioned in the past that it's a good idea to separate the player from the character in story-centered games.
Well, I don't really see the problem with dialogue trees, but go on.
I've mentioned in the past that it's a good idea to separate the player from the character in story-centered games.
I don't know- I've never had a problem with dialogue trees.
Well, in a dialogue tree the player decides exactly what the character should say, so the character ends up feeling like nothing more than an empty shell (as opposed to a person). I've gone over why things like that are a bad idea in the past.
So how else could it work?
Right.
I'm still not convinced there's anything wrong with dialogue trees. They can be very creative-
Sure, sure. But having the player carefully plan out exactly what the player character is going to say means that he can't possibly be an interesting character. He can't lose his temper, he can't be socially awkward, he can't make mistakes, he can't be forgetful, he can't-
Okay, I see your point. So what I'd like to do is give the player less control over the dialogue, so that it should still interest and maybe surprise him, but give him enough control that he can, in fact, change the course of the discussion.
How would that work?
That's pretty vague.
Okay, I'll be more specific.
What- you mean, less control than you get nowadays with stuff like dialogue trees. Right.
Instead of being given a list of possible sentences (which, I might add, feels nothing like a real conversation), the player should be given only three buttons. One with a question mark, the second with an exclamation mark, and the third with three dots.
Why?
Okay, that's a bit... strange.
It's sort of an iconic representation of the most basic options for reacting to what's been said: asking a question, making a statement, and thinking about it.
And that's supposed to "feel like a real conversation", is it?
Sort of. When you're having a conversation, you never stop to consider all the possible things you might say- you just get swept along in the flow of the conversation. You generally don't plan out tactics. But you do generally know whether you're about to ask a question, or make a statement, or think a bit. Also whether you're going to agree or disagree.
But still, how will the player know what his character is going to say?
Well, he won't, really. All he's really picking is the tone of what the character's going to say. And that's half the essence of a conversation, I think. What the character actually says should be up to the character as much as it is up to the player.
Anyway, it'
I think I see what you're saying. Sounds interesting.
It'
True.
Uh... right. But it'
Now hold on a minute- how would the player know whether the character's going to agree or disagree? You didn't say anything about-
Oh, you're right, I'm getting ahead of myself. It is a little more complicated than just the three buttons. See, there would also be colors for each of them, either red or blue. The player wouldn't be able to control that- it just tells the player more about what the character feels like saying next. Sort of a heads-up, but not so descriptive that it ruins the conversation.
Uh huh. Why don't you go do it, then?
Huh?
Why don't you make this imaginary system of yours?
It's a good idea. You should do it.
Well, I'd need to test it first. I mean, I don't know how well it would work. And I know everyone says you shouldn't do branching paths, so I don't even know if it's practical to set something like this up.
Anyway, I didn't finish telling you about the color system yet. B
Never mind. You were saying something about the colors?
Yeah. B
So what do the colors describe, exactly?
B
Um, red and blue?
Basically, red means the PC will disagree and blue means he'll agree. Like, a red question mark is usually a challenge and a blue question mark is usually an inquiry. That's the word, right?- "inquiry"? Yeah, I think so.
Whatever. So this is like, for adventures, right?
Yeah. Or RPGs. It'd work well in RPGs.
Can I go now?
There's just one thing I don't understand. If you're taking so much control away from the player, then why don't you just take away all control? Why bother making it a game at all?
Well, first of all, it may sound like a cliché, but the connection between the player and the character is really important. Listening to someone else having a conversation is nothing like participating in one.
Secondly, interactivity gives a lot of depth. Really. I mean, with a linear conversation, it feels like every sentence is necessary, you know, it's rigid.
Well, it's a good idea. Best of luck with it.
Alright, I get it. Can I go now?
Right.
Well, that was, um... interesting. Bye.
2 Comments:
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
another post
9 Comments:
- said:
-
Just an old man? Sheesh, that's lame. I'm not telling you what my costume was because its still Purim and you might steal it. Trust me, its good.
- said:
-
I just popped in to say hi!
- said:
-
Happy Purim!
- said:
-
That's a really stupid post. Is it supposed to be, like, ironic, or something?
- said:
-
I thought it was funny.
- ApolloFan said:
-
Hey, did you see that last episode of Battlestar Galactica? That was so amazing!
- said:
-
Yeah, Happy Purim! Have Fun!
- said:
-
Are you doing anything for the carnival?
- Mory said:
-
na, ill probly be staying in
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Selfish Friendships
But you know what's even weirder than that? How much I love to bore other people with ideas about gamism. When I think about it, this seems to contradict the first point. I mean, I know I'm not entertaining them. And I don't care too much. Maybe we so desperately need to feel like we're giving others all we can, that the question of how it will be received is secondary. Eah, whatever, maybe I should just admit I don't get it and move on.
Now, what's not weird considering all this is that friendships seem to be completely selfish. I don't invite Eli over to play Gamecube because I think he wants to; I invite Eli over to play Gamecube because I like knowing that I've given him entertainment. I don't talk to people (when I do, which admittedly is rare) because they've expressed interest; I talk to people because I know I'll enjoy chattering.
The people who at one point or another I considered friends can easily be split into two categories: hyperactive people, and nonhyperactive people. Friendships with hyperactive people could conceivably go on forever, I think, if life didn't get in the way. Friendships with anyone else are short-lived. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I have theories. When talking with a hyperactive person, he will be constantly jumping from one topic to another, which makes it more likely that eventually we'll reach an opening for me to start chattering. And then occasionally this person will fixate on a particular topic, because hyperactive people always have some particular quirks. Then I can enjoy the knowledge that I am offering him someone to chatter to.
Nonhyperactive people I don't want to have long-lasting friendships with. After a while, for whatever reason, I feel like I no longer have anything to gain from the friendship. So I abandon it. The end of such a friendship is filled with long, awkward pauses in which I try in vain to find an opening for chatter. I've been through around ten such friendships that I can remember off the top of my head. But I think I'm finally getting better at noticing when the friendship has run its course and abandoning it. See, a friendship that's over is really annoying when you don't realize it's over. So I've learned to not make any excuses or try to "fix" the relationships; when there's nothing more to say,
Whoever decided that a PC's plugs should go on the back is a moron.
Next Post
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Tapestry Thread: Light Confusion
Our ancient TV has burnt out.
I'm not making any progress with Smilie.
I've started a new piece of music, which is moving along really quickly.
I'm not going to even bother asking whether I'm wrong, because I don't really care. If I were to be handed irrefutable proof that my future is as a musician and not a gamist, I'd ignore it.
And you know?- this is pretty close to that proof. Writing my latest masterpiece comes easily; Writing for Smilie is a chore. My earlier argument about originality has suddenly been reversed!- For the first time, I think my new music is unique. I tried writing down the RPG ideas I have, and what I've put to text so far seems naggingly derivative! On previous occasions, I've always been able to claim that my gift in music gave me a unique perspective on gamism, but that can't be applied here- There is no clear connection between Smilie and the music, and my composition is taking me away from the path to gamism.
Why can't it be easy to write games?
Why?
Why must I have the gift of music, though I have no desire to use it?
Why should my life make way for music, but not for games?
Why?
Why am I pulled in without accepting it?
Why?
And even so I keep getting pulled along. It was not Smilie that I gravitated to, but a piece which had not yet even been started. I cannot write up my RPG, but notes spill out of my fingers. And now my sources of entertainment are cut off, but for the online radio station devoted to classical music: so simple, so accessible. I'll ignore it.
I'll ignore it all. For now.
Distractions from that path have disappeared.
But the question remains: Why?
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
It's a shame 'bout the TV- I just got Pikmin 2. Then there's also Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, but I can't play that often because my mother's always working and she needs quiet. Both excellent games, especially DK.
I was playing Pikmin 2, when suddenly it just shut off. I went to see what the problem was, and smelled smoke. That was it. RIP, trashy television. - Mory said:
-
The TV has since been fixed.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Strike one!
But I've done all this. I've been here before. I don't want any portion of my life to be redundant. Then again, only the format's redundant, not the content. Oh, why must these thoughts torment me so? If they'd only go away, I could enjoy myself, as I've been enjoying this past month or so. Good times.
But... um, there must be a reason to bother myself. Hmmm... Oh yes, I can't do this forever. But I'm not asking for forever (though it would be nice), just an hour or two. Yes, well, hmmm... That's right, the world wants me to be..Oh right.
Why don't I just stop dodging the issue?- In fact, I think I will. Right. I have no motivation to do anything even remotely resembling productivity. Well, if you bring it up I guess the blog sort of- Oh right, I'm dodging the issue. Er,...
What was I talking about again? Right, right, the lack of motivation. Despicable, simply despicable. Though, if you really stop and think about it, it's not specifically a problem so much as- Despicable! And the problem must be dealt with. Am I not in control of my own actions? Of course I am, though I like to act indirectly. The blog was a good tool for my further self-corruption [Heh, heh.] but my plans were thwarted by the wall of games. Though you have to admit they were really good. Beside the point, beside the point! The point is, there is a problem, and it will be dealt with.
The problem is that I am so unwilling to incorporate productive activities into my daily routine. Every day, I follow the same basic schedule, designed to provide instant gratification at all times. I wake up, and head straight for the computer. I open Firefox, whose home page is twenty tabs: The blog, GameCritics and Adventure Gamers, game sites and movie sites, comic strips and an extra blank tab. Then I check my RSS feeds. Then I check my e-mail, if I wish. Then I have lunch: a Lender's bagel and Philadelphia cream cheese. And then I do whatever I please until long past midnight, at which point I reluctantly go to sleep. It's all so maddeningly satisfying. What I need, what I need is some time in my schedule in which I will do some productive work. Content is irrelevant; it's the format I need to get used to.
This is all just academic; I have no reason to want any of that. The blog was motivation enough, for a time, but I won't use it again- It's been done. So here's a second solution: a letter from my grandfather.
Write and let us know what you are doing (in more that one word, if you can).So simple that I can't not answer- I've told him on numerous occasions that if he should ever write, I'd respond. And this all underscores the fact that I said I'd have made progress by the time they came here. I'd better stand by my word.
It's settled, then. For the rest of the day, I will do only boring, productive work. Tomorrow, I will do more. There's no lack of material to play and watch, so this trial recreates its predecessor. Progress will be made.
Update (7:03 PM): I've changed my mind. I can't work like this, with all this noise around. Instead, from this day forth I shall impose upon myself new rules:
- In the morning, I may not browse the web until I have proven myself deserving.
- I may not start any new activity past midnight. I may only finish up what I have already been doing.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I didn't enforce the rules, and quickly forgot I had ever set them.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Creative Redundancy
I hope the answer is "yes", because I don't see almost any of what I compose as original. I always intend for it to be original when I'm starting out, but soon after (This can take anywhere between a half minute and a week.) I realize that it's exactly like three things I've heard many times before. Most often what's being ripped off is The Lord of the Rings, Babylon 5, Disney musicals, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and/or trashy pop. After the inevitable realization, I'm still just as much in love with the theme as I was before, but I play it less. It becomes a guilty pleasure. I start wishing I hadn't come up with it in the first place, so that it couldn't have broken my heart.
It's not always a rip-off. There are one or two pieces of mine which, to this day, I haven't noticed to be completely derivative. I don't like them as much as the others. They're pretty dry, without any emotion. I suppose when it comes to writing emotion, I'm just a leech. It makes sense. I'm reminded of when Stasia tried getting me to play a romantic piece. I was just hopeless. I tried, I really did. But I had no clue what I was meant to be doing.
Anyhow, when I come up with a theme, I want to be moved by it. So it always turns out to be taken from somewhere else. Does this make me redundant as a composer? I think it does. I'm reminded of when Eliezer tried getting me to write something original. I came up with some interesting original material, because I do have some talent. But I wasn't interested in it so much; I preferred to go off in more derivative directions for the variations. I'm capable of playing piano decently enough, because I do have some talent, but I'm not interested much; I'd prefer to spend my life making videogames. At least there's plenty of room for structural advances in gamism.
You know the funniest part of all this? A few hours ago, I "came up" with a new theme which blew me away. I worked on it for around an hour, trying to get it just right. I felt very proud of myself when it starting sounding nice. It's so catchy it's still stubbornly refusing to leave my mind. Well, I realized after that hour that it was derivative. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was where it came from- You see, this theme was not just a rip-off, it was a rip-off of my own piece! It sounded exactly like something else I'd just composed (itself heavily derivative), and I'd gone an hour without noticing it!
In this case, the solution is simple: I'll just append this new variation to the original piece. I hadn't worked out an ending yet, so that should be no problem. But the question remains: If my compositions are so redundant, then what's the point?
Monday, February 20, 2006
Mistake, Lesson, Repeat
Anyhow, I panicked. I should have said that I did not choose to attribute any significance to the number eighteen, and left it at that. Instead, I wrote the following post on the Adventure Gamers forum:
I haven't been very open here in the past, but I need to get this out of my system, and I don't exactly have any friends in the real world. Maybe if I write it up I'll feel better. My 18th birthday is coming up soon, and it's really getting to me. This is the legal age of adulthood, and what I really want is to push that off, oh, say five more years. It's not that there's any specific problem than this; it's just the general concept that now I will be expected by society to be an adult.
Oy, listen to me, I sound like a condescending kid's cartoon written by adults. This is awkward. I'm out of high school, and have no job (well, I have one very small job once a month, just so I have enough money to buy a game once in a blue moon). Studying any more is out of the question. The question I'm facing is obviously, "What do I want to do with my life?", but I really don't want to answer that question. It's so much easier to ignore it, like I've ignored everything I didn't like in my life. The fact is, I know exactly what I want to do with my life- I'd like to do as little as possible.
But this answer isn't good enough. I want to make games, I really do. Or maybe I don't. Maybe I just want to be at the top, to be in a position where I can make games. Ugh, I don't know what I want. I certainly don't want anything enough to work for it. Yeah, that's a good excuse. Maybe now I can play my games in peace. Okay.
So I've said it. Hm, I don't feel any better. :(
In all my apocalyptic ramblings, I didn't notice that I had no cause whatsoever for alarm. The worrying about eighteen was just in my head; if I wanted to continue along the path I'd set for myself, a number certainly couldn't stop me.
It was because of the mistake of putting it on the forums that my real problem started. It was inevitable that it would, though it took a while. My friendly fellow forumites tried to set me up on some insane trip to redefine myself as they thought best, and it ended up with me completely depressed, making a complete fool of myself and not caring too much.
At any point, I could have told the other posters to stop giving suggestions. I should have said:
I don't want any of your help, and no good will come of offering it. Just trust me on this: you don't want to try to change me.That would have been it, no? I would never have had any problem at all. Instead, I humored them and came up with rational arguments for not going.
Anyhow, I'm perfectly fine now. I have had a very nice day, and I'm not worried in the slightest about tomorrow. I have written off the entire thread as a mistake, and have resolved (once again) to never do anything like it in the future.
So why am I even bringing it up again? Why am I putting this out in the open on my blog? Well, to approach this rationally, I have four very good arguments:
- I created this blog to show a truthful portrayal of myself. If I gloss over such unflattering events, I'm not being true to that vision.
- This is a lesson I have needed to learn for a very long time. Maybe by putting it here, I can remind my future self to not repeat this mistake.
- It is a testament to the great qualities of my fellow Adventure Gamers posters that even after I bothered them so much (as I must imagine I did), they were still kind to me.
- I still feel bad about starting the thread. Maybe if I write it up, I'll feel better....
Friday, February 17, 2006
Game flow control
On the other hand, this rigid and constant lack of control over the flow of a work of art or entertainment is alien to the field of home entertainment (and art), in which the player may view the work in any fashion he sees fit. Indeed, many great creators have used this fact to their advantage: A great novelist may intentionally try to remind the reader of a previous event, in the hopes that he will flip back through the pages to that point and look at it again with the added perspective he has gained since then. If a section of music on a CD is particularly moving, the listener can rewind it to hear it again. If the artwork on a page of a comicbook is beautiful, the reader may take as much time as he likes admiring it, and can even return later. On a DVD, a particularly bad scene can be...
This functionality must be added to the gameplaying experience. It must be an integral part of the controller's design, and supported by the console's basic functions.
In-game work-arounds have been found, of course. It is a fairly common practice to store all full-motion video cutscenes in a menu for later viewing. When I was playing Knights of the Old Republic and my monitor started acting up mid-cutscene, this was very helpful. Still, it only works for FMV; what if I want to replay one of the levels of a completely linear game? Fahrenheit went even farther, and in addition to including all minigames in a side menu, it allowed the player to go back to any scene he's been in and play from there. It was most appreciated.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, which I've just played recently, has a nice solution to the problem of missing a line of dialogue- all speech is in text, which can be rolled back by pressing the Z button. And Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time gives flow control for even gaming challenges, by allowing the player to rewind time when he messes up.
But none of these additions are perfect. Prince of Persia's rewind feature is a central part of its gameplay, and is widely seen as a gimmick, not to be repeated in any other games. So too with Fahrenheit's scene selection, seen as a gimmick increasing the game's connection to film. Paper Mario's rewind only works for text (not NPC actions), and even then not perfectly: It only goes back as far as the beginning of the current "block" of text, so if the character is responding to something, you can't go back to the other person's statement to see what he is responding to. Also, it is not immediately apparent that this ability is given, because to introduce it at the beginning of the game would pull you out of the experience. Instead, the feature is explained to the player through one of the game's fourth-wall-breaking tips. The storing of cut-scenes is commendable, but still there is no accounting for anything else in the game, and there is usually not even a fast-forward and rewind.
To make matters worse, not one of these solutions solves the whole problem. When the problem is handed to the gamists to solve, how could it be? They are much more concerned with making their game than they are with the technical specifics of the experience, as they should be. So they introduce only one or two features (as much as they think will not be intrusive) and call it a day. But there are so many features that players need! Thankfully, we do have one useful flow control feature- the pause button. Now, for reasons beyond my comprehension, it's never actually called the pause button, it's never actually marked with the pause symbol familiar to us all. Instead, it's called "Start" or "Select" or some other silly name. Even this button is not perfect: many games use a timer to count game time, but do not pause the timer when the game is paused. But that's just nitpicking, really- I suppose I should be thankful that this feature is in gamism at all.
Let's talk about the buttons that should be there but aren't.
Back
The first button I propose is a "next scene" button. It would of course be up to the game designer how to utilize this button, but I suspect the mere presence of such a button would give players the expectation (which must then be acted on by the gamists) that it could be used. There are several ways this could work. The most conservative approach is to allow its use only in replaying either the game in whole or a particular scene (if the player has lost), at which point it will be used to skip cutscenes. The most radical approach would be giving the player the ability to use it at any point, to skip not only cutscenes but gameplay challenges as well. Most games would be somewhere in the middle.The second button needed is the rewind button. Now, the ability to rewind gameplay would be very controversial, so such an implementation would be up to the programmer to pull off if he likes. Instead, most games would use a specialized chip (built into the console itself) to record everything that happens in the game, up to around, say, five minutes. After that, it starts writing over the old recording. So if you rewind, what the game's actually doing is switching display to a video, which shows what the player has just been through. This chip would not discriminate between cutscenes, text, speech, and gameplay; it would just record (except when the game is paused). I'm sure you see the usefulness of this simple addition, whether to see something you missed for whatever reason, or to admire your own skill, etc.
To go along with the rewind button would obviously be the fast-forward button. In the replay video, it would act the way you'd expect from a video fast-forward button up to the point it reaches the game itself again. At that point, it's up to the programmer to decide what it does, and I can think of a few very good uses. Very often in a game, I find myself pressing "B" mindlessly through a block of dialogue, because I've heard it before and would like to get to the point. So I think it would work very well for speeding up dialogue, though it would then have to record the video in double-time so that it doesn't look strange going back to read it again (if necessary). It could also work in FMV cutscenes, if the gamist doesn't want to simply use a "next scene" feature or if the player wants to go forward only a little bit.
To conclude, we gamers desperately need the ability to control the flow of our games on occasion, and it's not too difficult to pull off. So I can only conclude that either console creators are lazy, or just stupid. Well, here's a new generation of consoles coming up, with brand new controllers and internal architecture- here's their chance!
If it's not a bad idea, and it's never been done before, then it is a great idea- do it.
Next Post
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Gamism Theory
But first: What is a Form? A Form is a discipline used for the creation of individual works. Each Form contains native design elements, which are the units the game is made out of. The recognition of particular design elements is subjective, and is usually open to interpretation. For example, if a platformer asks the player to jump from one platform to one of two others, it can be seen as containing nothing more than animation and input, or it can be seen as containing a "risk/reward cycle", or it can be seen as a small part of the world design, or the decision of which platform to jump to can be seen as a puzzle. Very often, isolated design elements can be seen as individual works themselves, and analyzed accordingly. For instance, world design and puzzle design are both Forms in their own right, yet each can be contained within a larger work as nothing more than a single element of the design.
I will discuss several separations between different types of Forms*------- (The most famous is the divide between "forms of art" and "forms of entertainment", but I won't get into that here.), but the first distinction I must make is between "simple Forms" and "complex Forms". A simple Form's design elements contain one "dominant element", with all the rest being "subordinate elements" which serve the dominant element. For example, the exploration Form's dominant element is world design, and any other elements, such as puzzles, music, or interface all (in theory) serve the world design. Therefore, exploration is a simple Form. A complex Form is one which has not one dominant element, but several which complement each other. For example, film contains both video and audio as design elements, but they complement each other by each providing an aspect of the experience which the other could not.
Every design element produces some sort of value for the player - I call this content. Content can be a burst of adrenaline, or world design, or engaging the mind, or frustration, or sound, or control, or just about anything else you think has a value. The "primary content" of a game is the content of its dominant design element, and "supportive content" is the content of its subordinate elements. Story is a special type of content because it is made up of the combination of other contents. If you follow one emotion with another emotion, that's a basic kind of story. A story of some sort (literal or more vague) will always be created in the mind of the player even if no story is intended by the gamist, because that is the result of the combination of design elements present. So in a complex Form with no single dominant design element, the primary content is the story produced by the game's elements.
Sometimes a game contains secondary content (and with it a second set of priorities), in addition to the primary content inherited from its Form. Almost always, such a game can be expressed as "a X serving the purpose of a Y". For example, The Sims is a simulation serving the purpose of a dollhouse. It follows all the traditional rules of the simulation Form (a simple Form) including using the dominant design element of rules for addictive gameplay, but it also inherits the dollhouse's dominant element, which is the reflection of day-to-day life. So its primary content is the addictiveness of its micromanagement, and its secondary content is its depiction of ordinary life using doll-like characters. When a complex Form, such as the RPG, follows this model, the foreign dominant design element takes the place of primary content, since there is no native dominant element to take precedence. For example: Pokémon is an RPG serving the purpose of a collectible series such as sports cards. Normally, an RPG's primary content would be story, since as a complex Form there is no single dominant element. But in this case, there is a foreign element to take precedence; Therefore, Pokémon's primary content is collectibility.
How does it help to know which content is primary?The primary content (and secondary content, if there is any) is the main source of the game's identity in the mind of the player. As such, it is usually best to focus artistic efforts on the primary content more so than the supportive content so that the game stands out and creates an identity for itself. This knowledge can also help in the creation of sequels; the primary content is the only part of the game which absolutely must change or improve from original to sequel so that it does not become redundant.
Some Forms are fully contained in larger Forms. For instance, as Rayman 2 proved, the platformer is part of a more general Form (which I have no name for) which includes such games as Ball Revamped. The larger Form is called a "parent Form", and the smaller one a "sub-Form". It is valid, though pointless, to view all of gamism as one parent Form with a tremendous number of sub-Forms.
The term "Form" should not be mistaken with "genre", which is the classification of the style of a game's primary content.
A "strong Form" is one whose dominant design element is flexible enough to allow for many different genres, while a "weak Form" is one whose dominant element isn't. The terms should generally be used to deal with small sub-Forms, since almost every reasonably large Form is strong.
If one segment of supportive content is a short interactive game, and it is not native to the Form of the containing work, then it can be called a "minigame". A noninteractive segment, under exactly the same circumstances, is called a "cutscene" or "transition". I don't know why such a silly distinction is made, but it is, and this issue is too trivial to be worth fighting over, so I accept this terminology. A minigame/transition has no impact whatsoever on its container's classification.
Forms evolve over time, gaining new rules and breaking old ones. Occasionally, the native elements of a Form evolve to the point where they can be isolated and expanded upon as new Forms. This new Form can be called a "derivative" of the complex Form it broke off from. For example, the exploration segments of the RPG evolved until there were clear traditions for the specific exploration of towns (as opposed to other areas). This design element broke off into the "communication-game" Form with Animal Crossing. We can say that the communication-game Form is an RPG-derivative.
A "hybrid" is the result of combining the design elements of two separate Forms. For example, David Cage's Fahrenheit is an adventure-film hybrid, since it takes elements from both the adventure (heavy level of scripting activated by player input, interactive dialogue trees, object selection, etc.) and film (acting, choreography, camera movement).
3 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
The line of thought which led up to the ideas in this post can be seen in this post on the Tale of Tales forum:
Primary Content - Mory said:
-
The distinction between a hybrid and a game with secondary content is a bit fuzzy to me. But here's the idea: If the elements of a game are all native to its Form, but it's got a different focus, then that focus is secondary content. If it's got elements which didn't evolve as a part of its Form, then it's a hybrid.
- Mory said:
-
I've totally rewritten the definition of primary content, and adjusted the rest of the post accordingly. It's still messy, but it sort of makes sense now.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Ready, Though Unworthy
But who am I kidding?- My views are just as biased as anyone else's. And I doubt very much if actually having a game or two under my belt would harm my eagerness to disagree with such unanimous opinions. It could only do good. So why do I bother to try at this early stage? Because it is time. It is time because the blog says so.
More critically: I have waited too long already, and soon I will have many new experiences to assess. How does the simple playing of a game fit in with my next identity? If I am serious about becoming a gamist, then I must be ready to approach these games from a gamist's perspective.
This is the hour of judgment. My past lies in childhood. My future lies in gamism. Where do I stand in the present? Am I first a child, or a gamist? I can hide behind my inadequacies and say "Tomorrow I will be ready!", or I can accept my inadequacies and move forward regardless. No matter when I choose to flip the priorities, it will be too soon. I have to face it: The task I see for myself is bigger than anyone would support if they understood its magnitude. They would say: "Think small. Gain wisdom from professors and knowledge from repetition and drudgery. Do not try this by yourself; it cannot be done."
I cannot argue with such a sentiment, because I know that if someone were to speak those words to me, he'd be right. How can I rationally expect to be capable of making an artistic virtual character, when even the greatest gamists have never done so before? How can I expect to be capable of single-handedly reinventing the platformer in the image of music and dance? How can I expect to craft a good role-playing game, when even massive teams of experts with seemingly unlimited budgets can't get it right? How can I expect...? Well, I can't. I can't rationally expect to achieve anything at all. But what the heck- rationality is overrated anyway.
I believe that the dream will start when I begin to accept the role, not vice versa. Months ago, I considered proposing a classification system, and I concluded it was too big. Now I am ready to take on that task. So while I am not prepared for anything like this, while I have many questions and few answers, while I feel certain that there is no intelligent man on Earth who will accept my theories, I will chase the dream. Who am I doing this for, if not for the public? I do this as a gift to the child. I begin this as a fulfillment of the promise I made to myself. I will end this as a gamist.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Tapestry Thread: WHAM!
Acceleration...
For the past week, I've been analyzing what I have of my musical composition Variations on V.O.V.. It's been a long time since I set aside the piece, and I never did get around to finishing it. The work feels unrefined: it can get very hard on the ears, and its shifts in style and tone can be much too abrupt and contrived. But none of that mattered to me too much as I wrote it- I was aiming for nothing less than structural perfection, not anything as trivial as aesthetic value. Every note is connected intimately to every other note; every seemingly random shift in key, tone, musical style, and even philosophy is part of the larger pattern.
The word becomes reason.Smilie has not been going so well. When I'm writing a blog post, the tricky part is getting started. The tricky part is coming up with the first piece of the puzzle. It might take hours or even weeks to find that piece. But once I find that piece, everything else tends to fall into place naturally. Sure, there is a lot of time and effort involved, but it is spent travelling on the path I have already laid out- Even if that path branches into infinite directions, I always know I will eventually get to where I should be. Smilie is not like this. I have started, and I've decided on a notation system to use, and just continuing takes an obscene amount of frustration. This is not a native language for me, this language of complex and thorough logic. I'm more comfortable with random associations.
I ran into a small problem. The sixth variation needed to repeat the theme four times in completely different styles, with an extra recitation of the theme in between each style bridging the gap. Next, the seventh variation would include two measures of improvisation. Sounded perfect on paper. And it was. Thinking about shifting between styles is no big deal. Thinking about somehow writing in rules for an improvised section which will flow with the rest of the rigidly-defined piece is no big deal.
I agreed with Benjy that it would behoove me to do chores around the house. I pictured the monotony of doing dishes, and thought: No big deal. I'm sure it wouldn't be a big deal. My mother has been gone for a week now. My father said I'd be doing dishes. I thought: No big deal. It's in the mind.
No time to think, no time to look ahead...For months I've been playing around with the area between musical composition and improvisation, which has led to my Improvised Sonata in three movements. If I strive for perfection, I lose spontaneity. Without spontaneity, improvisation is worthless. Perfection has no depth. An improvised course with branching paths I invent as I go along- now that's deep. This is my new philosophy, which follows a reason and pattern which I do not care to understand.
My mother went to Florida for the week to celebrate her father's eightieth birthday. This is considered a milestone for some reason. I made a CD of my music, including a rendition of the Improvised Sonata, as a birthday present. I'd never recorded my music before; the demands of the microphone pushed me to improve my playing. I didn't expect her leave to be a big deal, and it hasn't been. I do my own laundry. My father never seriously asked me to do the dishes, for which I have relief but no brakes. Acceleration is in the mind. I was starting to lose my grip.
I looked over the piece, and saw pure genius. With the exception of one or two careless mistakes which were easily corrected, every note had purpose. How could I, a chaotic human mind, possibly complete this image of perfection? I had been unable to do it before. But as I stood and considered, a path appeared before me. The seventh variation required an understanding of improvisation, which I now possess, and an understanding of gamistic notation, which lies just ahead.
The story - motivation; interpretation of the thread...The blog would be celebrating its 39th post. What was the first piece to the puzzle? Once I had that, everything else would fall into place.
I haven't played any videogames in a while; it's impossible to get any for a good price here in Israel; I've been waiting for an opportunity.
The sixth variation required only velocity and the spontaneity to deal with obstacles. I agreed to settle for mere brilliance, to choose artistry over perfection.
The house has been silent and darkened. The atmosphere demands progress.
Ordered: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, Luigi's Mansion, LEGO Star Wars, Super Monkey Ball, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Metroid II: Return of Samus
My mother will return in two days.
Friday, January 27, 2006
And so it begins...
Did you check? Seriously, watch it, then come back here.
It's been a very long time since a game trailer excited me this much. You could argue that it's not a game, but that's sort of the point. The PSP has already been used for movies and recorded music in addition to various interactive Forms, all with the same interface and the same disc format. That in itself is already the first step toward the convergence revolution. Here's the second. I don't know what to say, mainly because this project in itself is so exciting that any words would seem redundant. But I'll try to explain why this comic book is the best thing to ever happen to gamism.
Since the invention of videogames, their place in the larger realm of art was clear to the world: movies are one art form, novels are one art form, dance is one art form, sculpture is one art form, and videogames are a silly form of time-killing. Games have nothing to do with all those other Forms, and should be kept as far from them as possible. Sadly, I have seen this division promoted most by the supporters of videogames: whenever a game fails to be sufficiently interactive, they dismiss it as "not good as a game", or at best "not really a game".
Now, my views on what constitutes a game are considerably broader. I see this comic as a usage of gamism to push an old Form in a new direction- exactly the sort of game that gamism itself was created for. The purpose of gamism is to broaden the potential for art, and that is precisely what this does. It may not be true sequential art (or it may be; all I'm going by is this trailer), but it takes the experience of reading a comic book, adds the potential of gamism, and comes out with something much stronger. 3D shots, animation, sound effects, and all while giving the player control over the reading. This is something that no medium but gamism could allow. And so here is a game which pushes past the boundaries, which goes back to ground very often tread upon before and finds that there is an entire world there never noticed before.
There are still questions- of course there are still questions. Can the player reread a section several times? (It would be unwise to fail to inherit all the Form's strengths before moving on.) More importantly, will the public appreciate what they are getting? I still feel that it is premature for convergence. Not everyone has a gaming system; the market is splintered; these systems are made for obsolescence. But it appears that Kojima is ahead of his time. It figures- Metal Gear Solid itself was a large step toward convergence, in its treatment of stealth, film, and audio drama as equals under gamism. But this is truly revolutionary. I am pretty sure the public isn't ready. They'll see it as one of Kojima's little quirks, not a valid and even necessary step forward.
But let's ignore all that for a moment. Let's say that the convergence aspect of the great revolution is achievable today. Even if the public is ready, gamists aren't. With our current terminology, comics must be distinguished from games simply because there's no other way to put it! We don't even know how to classify the game Metal Gear Solid yet! (Stealth is only a third of it.) And what will happen when a comic book comes along with branching paths? Will comic connoisseurs have any idea what's going on? Our methods of thinking about art and entertainment are obsolete. We need new ideas to replace them which revolve around gamism. And if visionaries like Kojima are going to push forward so soon, we need them fast.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
$7.4 Billion
I'm referring, of course, to Disney's acquisition of Pixar. Since, as implied, I have no personal knowledge of the field but for what I read on the internet and what I see in theaters, I will have to (for once) agree with the masses: This is the best thing to happen to Disney for a decade. They desperately need the paradigm shift they might get from bringing John Lasseter (and Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull) into the business. People are asking whether it's really worth all that money, but look at what Disney's released in the past few years. With a few rare exceptions (Treasure Planet and Lilo & Stich were both gems.), it's all been trash. Whatever the cost, Disney desperately needs to be fixed. Who better to do it than the guys responsible for some of the greatest works of animation of our time?
Lasseter's new position sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book. As soon as they make friends with the big, influential character at the end, suddenly he's running the whole empire. The part which really strikes me as Dahl-esque is the part where he reports directly to Bob Iger with new ideas for theme park rides. Am I the only one who is reminded of The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me at this point? How often do you come across such a happy ending (or beginning, depending on how you look at it) in capitalist businesses? Here's a man who's spent his life striving for all sorts of silly, childish, beautiful things, and here he is being handed the mightiest (potential) factory of wonders in history on a celluloid platter. Wow- what a life.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
The Second Lasagna
Well, this time, I wanted to make a good lasagna. (Of course, I always start that way, so this says nothing.) I was careful about which brand of tomato sauce I chose to use; I was careful to make sure that there was enough of all the ingredients; I was careful to make sure that the cottage cheese was okay, despite the fact that it was a day past expiration date and I couldn't smell it because my nose is so stuffy because I've had a cold for the past few days. Then I poured half of the cottage cheese on top of the tomato sauce.
Right- the noodles. Okay, I'm an idiot.I blamed it on the cold.
Then there's the cheese. I hate that part. Grating a chunk of cheese is so unnatural, you know? The tedium drives me crazy. Wait, I've gotta go down to check if the lasagna's ready.
Okay, not ready. Where was I?- oh right, the cheese. It just sort of goes on and on and on and on. I'm very slow at grating cheese. And there's really not too much to think about while you're doing- it's just up, down, up, down. Blah.
Then there's the smell when it's almost done; the smell is incredible. It retroactively justifies the creation.
I've just eaten it. How was it? Excellent. At least, I imagined it was. Truth is, I could barely taste it.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
It's worth pointing out that this is coming right after the first 74. The metaphor here is an excuse to never work, not a valid observation.
They say there are few things more satisfying than a day spent working when that work is continually challenging yet achievable. Well, they say it more succinctly than that, but that's the gist of it.
It is now half-past midnight, and I spent the day working. I completely redid the notation system for Smilie, then spent hours upon hours working on all sorts of Blogger-related experiments. To top it all off, I invented a new type of post- the 74 Post, I'll call it. I played not a single videogame today.
I don't feel like I've achieved anything at all. I feel... empty.
Next Post
Monday, January 23, 2006
I've been workin' on the weblog, all the live-long day...
And did you see that neat little Javascript trick I did with that link? No? Even better! Oh, I don't know what I'd ever do without Javascript. Okay, so I do know- I'd just not do any of these silly little gimmicks. But what fun would that be? Well, toodle-loo; I'm going to go have some more fun with the blog's design.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Tapestry Thread: Universal notation
But how? How does one write a script for an interactive experience? It's helped by the fact that this will be more or less linear, albeit with branching paths. So I can start from the beginning and work my way forward from there. This is reasonable only because I'd already decided that it would only be a minute or two long. (I've been saying for months that branching linearity works best for short games.) Even so, I still had no idea where to start. I decided I'd make it up as I went along, and so I did. I settled on starting with classification, going on to the general concept in short, then straight into a blow-by-blow script from start to finish (numbered with a not-quite-effective system I made up). I chose to approach the script from the perspective of the player, rather than of the programmer, so that I could put myself into the shoes of the person for whom this character would have meaning. In any event, I was (and still am) eager to prove this notation useless as quickly as possible, so that I could find something more useful.
At the same time, Daniel Cook of Lost Garden invented his own notation system. Imagine that! I've been reading Cook's writings for about six months now, not because I've agreed with anything he's ever said, but because it gives me a fresh perspective which I am guaranteed to have never considered. His notation system relies on manipulating the player into feeling that he is being rewarded. I should have expected as much from someone whose views are based largely on the completely serious definition of videogames as "drugs". Since this has roughly zero to do with what I see in videogames, the staples of his notation system such as "buzz notes" and "reward channels" are completely inapplicable to what I'm doing here.
But it helped in two major ways. First, it pointed out certain should-have-been-obvious necessities, such as defining "verbs", which I can now integrate into Smilie's design document. Secondly, it sparked a debate among many other bloggers, some of which have more reasonable things to say. Sure, there are the pretentious ones like Raph Koster chiming in, but then there was this very simple comment from Ron Gilbert which caught me off guard, mainly because I should have realized it first:
It also seems that there are so many structures for so many different types of games that coming up with a unified system to cover them all is unrealistic.That's the real problem, isn't it? I was looking only at the small task ahead of me right now, but past this I could get myself into big trouble. But here's a warning to keep me on the right track: I should not try to come up with a notation system which fits all types of games. In essence, to try would mean finding a system so universal that not only all the Industrial Forms, but music and dance as well (since they are no less a part of gamism) can all be expressed under it. Is such a system possible? I don't know. If it were, it would probably be extremely clumsy to use.
But think of the possibilities! With a unified notation system, music could finally be composed with branching paths! Dance and music could weave in and out of each other! And all manners of other dreamy things! But I have no answers. For the time being, I will focus on this task, and create a language suitable for virtual characters as I have been told.
2 Comments:
- Picklebro said:
-
I disagree with your comments about the article at Lost Garden equating games with drugs.
I felt the article very accurately described a way to measure 'pleasure-pulses' if you will that occur as you are rewarded. I don't think everything about his system is perfect, but I think he's really onto something.
I do like your idea of arts intertwining like tapestry threads, though - and I'd be interested in seeing you flesh out a construct around those ideas. - Mory said:
-
In the article I linked to in the post, Dan Cook (the writer of Lost Garden) wrote:
"Let's be blunt. Games are drugs."
I've been following his writing for a long time, and a good deal of the things he says are tied to that statement. The reason I can't relate with the "Buzz Note" concept in particular is that it assumes that these reward cycles are the basic units with which games should be made. I don't see that that is the case, because I am looking at the potential for art and not the potential for psychological drugs. But the fact that I've been following his blog for so long should tell you that I am well aware that he's onto something - just not something which I can agree with.
I smiled when I heard your interpretation of "Tapestry Thread". Actually, it is just a formal repetition of the idea I've stated in the past that there is a clear pattern to life. The tapestry is a common and well-known analogy for life from this perspective. As evidenced by the later "Tapestry Thread" post, I intend for this to be a recurring "feature" which serves for exposition. By examining one aspect of life and how that one metaphorical thread ties together several different recent events, I can celebrate the elegance of life even as I am trudging through heavy exposition which would otherwise be very boring.
This first TT post deals with the specific thread of notation, and pointing out the elegance of such a debate starting on the web just as I was struggling with these issues myself. The second TT post deals with accelerated change, and how this pattern can be seen in no less than five nearly simultaneous events.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Happy 39th post!
39th? Now that's weird. What's so special about 39?Where do you see- oh, "Happy-". Right.I mean, maybe a fortieth post, but why-Why a fortieth post?Well, it's a multiple of ten...Thirty-nine's a multiple of thirteen.
Say, you want some coffee?
Thank you.
Precisely 39 posts ago,
We've come a long way. But we can go farther! And so, for this special postday, I declareHear! Hear!Shut up, will you?
Personally, I can't see how Mory can continue like this, without acknowledging the radical changes to his lifestyle which he went on about four posts ago.Well, he mentioned that Smilie thing.
Ooh, this ought to be good.starting maybe in a few days.
Boo! Hypocrite!Umm, that's all. Bye now!
What a lousy speech.
2 Comments:
- Betzalel said:
-
I think you should make it more clear why this is such a happy occasion. I didn't realize it until I took a second look at the date...
- Mory said:
-
You're missing the point. 39 posts is the occasion. After all, how often does one reach a 39th post? Only once in a lifetime! The date is irrelevant.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Worth the paper
But wait a minute- why should it be boring? Politics can be fascinating. I'm watching the TV show Babylon 5 now, which is at its best when it's dealing with fictional politics, and it's riveting. Never mind the differences between film and the written word; my point is, it's entertaining to see all the different sides of these political games.
Anyhow, we all know the story of the newspaper. The newspaper itself would like to be seen as the sole guardian of the objective truth. The readers, on the other hand, like to think of the newspaper as a corrupt manipulator of public opinion. These are their roles: the newspaper tries to get exclusive content and the most direct headlines; the readers criticize the newspaper for presenting a view they disagree with (and not adequately supporting their own positions) until the newspaper makes some concessions in the way of diversity in writers.
Here's the part I don't understand. I've heard the tales of how capitalism corrupted the Game Industry; I've heard of all the cutthroat corporations out there looking to make as much money as possible. In all these cases, the pursuit of as much money as possible pushed the companies in the wrong direction. Now take newspapers. If they were looking to get as much money as possible, they'd try to make their articles as entertaining as possible to read, to build a loyal readership. Then they'd want to reward that readership in the long-term, so that they would recommend the paper to their friends. This seems to be one of the few businesses where a attitude of "Let's make as much money as humanly possible!" can only do good. And here the editors are idealists. What gives?
Why do these editors pursue one agenda consistently? Wouldn't it be much more entertaining to keep the reader guessing? You arrange the news one day so that all the writers are trying to convince the reader that one side is right, and then a week later -A twist!- have a day devoted to making them look both incompetent and evil. Leave out certain details so the reader can fill them in in his head; Put in other details that go against the spirit of the rest of the article.
The newspaper should be as entertaining as a dramatic TV show; why isn't it?
Friday, January 06, 2006
The Dream Cheese 740 Enhanced Computer Mouse!
But no longer! Now, thanks to the revolutionary Dream Cheese 740 Enhanced Computer Mouse, these old problems can be left behind forever! With its innovative and groundbreaking design, you can access your computer like never before. You can enjoy faster and more precise navigation, plus an unparallelled level of customizability which will allow you to control your computer exactly as you want. The top of the line features of the Dream Cheese 740 include:
- A pressure-sensitive touch screen for standard mouse clicks, making application-specific commands available at the smallest touch
- Patented TrueScroll™ analog joystick technology for fast, precise and comfortable scrolling in two dimensions
- Keyboard-replacement capability for one-handed control of all and any computer activity
- Ultra-sensitive optical sensor for accurate movement on virtually any surface
- Replaceable shell to allow for any hand size, making using a computer as comfortable and natural as possible for anyone*
Extra shells not included. - Four pressure-sensitive buttons for-
Example: To copy text, first select the text by tapping and dragging (and scrolling, if necessary). Then, move the cursor over the selected text draw a "C" on the touch pad, and the text will be copied.
Alternatively, do not select any text, but move over a text field or document and draw a "C" on the touch pad. This will copy all text within the text field or document.
For a full list of gestures, see Page 5.
For instructions on creating custom gestures using the included software, see Page 12.
Holding Button 3 (diagram 5) activates a small menu revealing all possible gestures on the cursor's current position.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Presents / Self Defense
It's not really so clear cut, you know. Too much light can blind. Light in the wrong place can distract. I hate it when someone turns on a light in the computer room- suddenly there's a glare on the screen, and I can't make out the pictures as easily. Or some Shabbats I might be trying to read a book while lying on the couch as the lights on the ceiling shine right into my eyes. Light can be bad.
And I don't know about you, but I love a good amount of darkness. Shadows add mystery and atmosphere; uncertainty inspires the mind. Back when I used to play on an electronic piano in an empty room as a matter of routine, I loved to shut the lights off altogether, to free myself from any distractions, to focus on the sounds. In the dark, one can appreciate the fine nuances of color and movement and sound. The light is empty by comparison.
You might try to be more specific: Light makes information visible- the light of truth. But that's still oversimplifying. If you want to see the bigger picture, to see the stars far away and understand how we fit in with them, you need darkness. Light may give knowledge, but only darkness gives wisdom.
And then we get presents. Where does this fit in? Well, I'm quite sure I don't know. As far as I can tell, the only connection to the Light/Darkness theme is that when the present is wrapped, the inside is dark, and when it's unwrapped, the... oh, never mind.
The presents I've gotten so far this year have shed a lot of light on my parents. On the first night I was graciously given the Star Wars: Episode III DVD. Excellent movie, best of the series, in fact. Only problem is the acting and the dialogue and- what's that? Oh, you're right- this has nothing at all to do with what I was saying. In any case, you can see that this is a most agreeable tradition.
So what was I saying again?- Oh, right!- the presents I hadn't specifically asked my parents for. The first was a wallet. I didn't know quite what to make of that. I already have a wallet, and I'm rather fond of it. Why would my parents demand that I change wallets? Are they really so desperate to feel like they're doing something to change me? Of course not, of course not. It was a mix-up, nothing more. I shouldn't read too much into it.
Then I opened a pair of slippers. My father hates it when I come to the dinner table on Friday night barefoot, and I love to go barefoot. They actually got me a pair of slippers last Channukah. I never wore those because they were uncomfortable, because I preferred to go barefoot, and because the backs were open, which led to them constantly falling off. Well, they got me another pair, as I said. Guess what!- It's almost exactly the same as the old pair! Just as uncomfortable, and these too have open backs. I was annoyed, and didn't do a very good job of containing it, but at the same time I felt sorry. Obviously my parents had looked hard for something they could get me, and they didn't remember that I had no desire for slippers, least of all those kind of slippers. They made a simple mistake, right? No need to punish them for it.
Today my father came home with a dresser. My parents both hate the way I throw my clean clothes into a giant pile where they're all easily retrievable. My father's been looking into getting me a dresser for a long time now. For every time over the past few months he's asked me what kind of dresser I'd like I told him three times that I would like no dresser. I hate that kind of trick question, don't you? Anyhow, he brings home this dresser and proceeds to assemble it in my room. My mother explained that it's not really a dresser because it's ridiculously high, and because it looks so hideous it demands the attention of everyone in the room, and because it has open baskets with bars which remind me not so pleasantly of the bars of an elementary school window. Actually, I added in those reasons myself just to give some hint of a valid theoretical excuse for not calling it a dresser. It is a dresser. And I really don't want it. And my father's already moved all my clothes into this monstrosity.
:-(
But why should I care about all that? I'm the only one in the house at the moment. The wallet will stay out of my pocket. The slippers will stay off my feet. And the dresser will stay out of my room. My parents are out right now. For the moment, darkness prevails!
:-)
Let's talk about something more important- I have an idea for a game that I could conceivably pull off! I'll call it "Smilie", because it'll be a virtual character which is a smilie! Sounds cool, right? The trouble before was I was looking for possible games from the enlightened perspective of the current Industrial philosophy of gamism, but those aren't really worth making unless they have some deeper artistic purpose- you know, some hidden meaning or something. Something to subvert the light of others to reflect my own inner darkness. But why bother trying? I don't need their Forms and their approaches- I can do my own things! If I can pull this off (and I think I can!), "Smilie" will be completely unmarketable, completely unorthodox, very short, and will impress no one. No deeper meaning here- just an adorable character given life.
It'll be a completely innocent character- like kittens! It won't understand, for instance, that the cursor is not something to be eaten. And it won't care what you want from it- it'll do its own thing. That kind of innocence is the ideal, no? Now all I need to develop is a language of interactivity to express this ideal. I'm starting on that now. I think if I were to look up into the dark sky right now, I'd see my smilie winking at me.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Monday, May 11, 2015
The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things, Part Two
Conversely, if there's no ending, then nothing matters at all. Declaring yourself part of something larger than yourself •
Who am I, really? And if I am that, what does that mean? Where do I belong, and how do I get there? Am I myself? Is "myself" a thing that means something? If I were several people, who would they be? How long would it take to meet myself? When I meet myself, will I have achieved everything possible for the person that is me? What are the steps I need to take to be in the right mindset to be capable of doing things? What if I am never capable of doing things? What things are worth doing? Why do people do things that aren't worth doing? How can the answers to all these questions be found in science-fiction TV shows? Is anything at all a source of profound meaning? If I talk for several years, will meaning emerge regardless of whether any was there to begin with?only counts for anything when you're in it for the long haul. If you don't have the patience and persistence, it's nothing but bluster.
All the world's a stage!
What separates a good actor from a bad actor is preparation. If you get on stage and aren't in the appropriate mindset, haven't made sufficient plans, you can be clever enough to fool people but you can't have any authenticity. There's nothing there. You're just saying words that don't mean anything, because they don't mean anything to you.
I'm not.
"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life"-Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I had gotten far enough to worry about coming up with a title, I might have called it "Ode to School". The sole line of music I wrote could just as easily have been composed by a primitive computer program. It followed basic music theory to a Z: no moving fifths, no moving octaves, precise four part harmony. It refused to show the slightest hint of ambition, moving those voices no more than absolutely necessary. It had no melody, and a plodding pace. It felt like it would go on forever, and in those six bars of music was packed an eternity of misery. No, that's not really accurate- an eternity was packed into each note. By the third note, any listener would be in agony. •---------------
I . . . V65 . . . I . . .There were no surprises, no emotion but the bottled kind, no enthusiasm.
It must have been about a year ago when I sat down to calculate out a tune to provide the optimal amount of misery. It was a perfect musical representation of what I felt about my life at the time. I had a plan for the piece, a good one: I would drone on for much too much time, and then introduce some more interesting elements slowly, as if the character is trying to escape his fate. By the end of the piece, there would be no hint left of the dreary existence at the beginning. Nice message, don't you think? But there was no motion, and I had to sustain the beginning for at least a minute or two without any acceleration, or else the ending would mean nothing. I gave up after six measly bars of stillness and misery, rather than following through to the end of a satisfying masterpiece of destruction and happiness.
I can vividly recall running around the track in gym class with the rest of my grade. There was a clear goal, and we all did it together. The goal was to run until we reached the same point we had come from, then do the whole thing again. And again. There was an eternity in every lap- no, every step. After three steps, I was in agony. •----------
Left . . . Right . . . Left . . .We did this routine every week.
It was so mindless, so tedious. I had to think of something -anything- to preserve my sanity.
I can't do this.
Yes you can!
No, my legs are aching so much...
Stop thinking about your legs! Think of games!
Games... Maybe "Preparation for the Real World" could have a little minigame representing the brutality of gym classes....
None of that! Try thinking of... of...
Of what? You know, I think I'm just going to faint. A faint would be nice- it would get me out of having to keep running. How do I faint? Is there a particular method?
I don't think so.
Faint... faint... please faint.... This isn't working.
A blog! You know, you said that might be a good idea. Think of that!
They're all running in the same direction. It doesn't actually get anywhere; it just goes right back where it started. They're just following what the teacher said- there's no room for any personality.
No, the blog! Get back to the blog!
Oh, yeah. I could just write whatever I like. That would be nice. I think I'll stop running now.
No, keep going! Keep going! You can do it!
Why should I? Why should I do what everyone else does?
Anyway...
The blog. I need a title. Something that reflects me. Who am I, really?
Who am I, really?
When I'm next to a pessimist, I'm cheerful.
When I'm next to an optimist, I'm depressed.
When I'm next to someone serious, I'm a complete nutcase.
When I'm next to someone nutty, I'm calm and controlled.
I love to argue.
I hate to agree.
If there are two sides to any argument, I'll find a third.
When faced with no opportunity for change, I love change.
When faced with every opportunity for change, I fear it.
When with adults I aim to act like I'm seven and a half.
When with children I aim to act like I'm seventy-four.
Who am I?
I'm not.
I'm driven by the conflicts between adulthood and childhood, rationality and human nature, art and rules, but most of all (as corny as it sounds) by the conflict between the Real World and my imagination.
By stifling imagination, there was no conflict with which to drive my composition. Without conflict, I will never move.
But who am I? Why do I need conflict?
Well, I don't really know, to tell the truth. Maybe it's just my nature. Maybe I'm just too lazy to care about anything else. Maybe it's my way of being different from all the people I've hated over the years who only know how to follow others. Or maybe I'm just a little kid, and this is how I get attention. I like that explanation best. :)
Hello. This is my blog. I don't actually expect anyone to read this, but as long as you're here, I ought to get started. •----------It was so liberating, so random. So childish, so entertaining. So unconventional, so ignorable. It was a perfect counterpoint to what I really felt about my life. I instantly fell in love with the format, and to this day I've continued to shape the blog out of a feeling of obligation.It's so cool to think someone might actually read this!So, um, hello. As I said, this is my blog. And I, uh, didn't expect you to be here. Should I get started? Or maybe I should just ramble on a little longer, or-
No one will bother to read it. Here, I'll write "Dear Imaginary Friends" at the top.
At least it's funny.
No, it's garbage. Maybe I should say it's supposed to be.
Hey, that would be funny.
I'm really going nowhere with this. Anyone reading this will die of boredom.
Hey, I just had an idea!
It seems like only yesterday I left school, and with it any connection to the dark side of the Real World. Since then, I've been playing games, reading comic books, improvising, arguing, and generally doing nothing in particular. It's pure bliss.
Sometimes I wonder if I've become a piece of furniture. •----------
"There's the computer room in there. There's our TV, which doesn't work very well. There's our three computers, which are constantly breaking down. There's Mory, who sits there by that computer; we're thinking about getting him replaced. There's a chair we've had for a long time, which is all ripped up now....I'm constantly doing things, but I never really get anywhere. I show no more ambition than is absolutely necessary, moving only between the computer and the piano. It feels like eternity is passing by in an instant. It feels like I could sit in this chair forever.
But I can't. Not because I have any faith in reality, but because my subconscious is becoming restless with no conflict to drive me. When will this new conflict begin to manifest itself? Why, it already has. Without really meaning to, I've been working on the structure necessary to push my life in a new direction. I've been working on it for months, in fact. "But where is this structure?", you ask. (Okay, so you didn't, but let's say you did.) What can I possibly craft to force myself to start moving? And where could I have put it, without my lazier side jeopardizing its results?
My dear imaginary friend, you've just read it.
Sincerely,
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
A few comments about this post, not because they're particularly interesting, but just because I imagine someday I might like to remember them:
I did not, in fact, expect this ending. Furthermore, it is completely truthful.
When I first started the blog, naturally I was not considering going into a structure like this. So the symbolism (Myst/V, Me/I) was originally a coincidence, although I did notice it soon after, and of course you can see how I made the most of it.
When I decided I would like an overall structure to the introduction, my intention was to end with "What do I want?", as a homage to Straczynski. I abandoned this idea only while writing the post, since it was very obvious that beyond the "cuteness" factor, there was no point. The question of identity the two questions imply isn't relevant to my story. If I had used the Shadow question, I certainly would have tried to cram the questions "Who do I serve?" and "Who do I trust?" in somewhere a few years down the road. But once I started writing, there was zero chance that I'd go with that title. It's just as well- the way the blog turned out is, I think, homage enough to Straczynski. (Again, no conscious effort on my part- it just turned out that way, and I noticed as it happened.)
While I'm talking about influences, there are two other names I should bring up. My style of switching between styles, which I use in music as much as I do here, is inspired by Michel Ancel, and specifically his masterpiece "Beyond Good & Evil". The dots in this last post are inspired by David Mack, and specifically the way he often writes little thematic phrases past the edges of the panels. They didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped, but I'll be using them in the future regardless.
Finally, at one point I meant to end after "Betrayal of Myst", and the idea I had come up with for the inappropriately titled "What do I want?" turned into "The Fundamental Interconnectedness Of All Things". It works much better like this, don't you think? Especially since Myst V turned out to not at all resolve the issue. - Mory said:
-
By the way, I only know the Wittgenstein quote because Steve Reich made a song out of it. I'm not the intelligent sort of person who studies philosophy.
Monday, October 31, 2005
"Don't Miss" Tour interrupted
He passed many old walls of increasingly curious design. Some music was being played on some sort of string ensemble -slow, quietly emotional and faintly Jewish- but it faded away. Finally the traveller came across what might be considered a doorway, but the door was nothing more than an old and ratty cloth. He pulled it aside and entered. He wouldn't consider it a house, because the roof did not cover the entirety of the area, but it was certainly a home. A lady was sitting still in a rocking chair, and made no indication that she had noticed the intrusion, or if she did that she cared. Her husband kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door slowly. As he passed through, he faded away.
The floor must have been elevated, because the water only got to knee-level. There was a fireplace in the corner- a fire was burning in it without producing any smoke. Each room was separated by more drapes, and the explorer passed through a kitchen, then a bedroom, and then it seemed as if he had reached another house without realizing. Apparently the entire area was connected. He passed many families which sat or stood in place, and many people faded away as he watched them. Had he decided to return along the path he had come, he would have found that they all had vanished; but he wished to progress. The doors did not distinguish between house and the streets, and he soon understood that the distinction was irrelevant. Each area was distinct, as if there was once good reason to distinguish between them, as if there had been life here once. He moved on, all the while trying to imagine what life was like here back then, but soon reached a dead end. Several children were playing, and he understood that this was what he had come to see.
That's when he'll stop playing, satisfied with the experience, and go back to the menu. On the top of screen will be written: "An exploration collection by Mordechai Buckman". The other works included will mostly be more straightforward. One will celebrate childlike exploration (as typified by my experiences in 7th grade), with nameless and faceless people running from place to place oblivious to the secret passageways, physical impossibilities and shortcuts surrounding them. Every rooftop will be accessible, though it may take some tricky climbing and jumping. Another world will experiment with abstractions-
Hey- who do you think you are, butting in like this?
I could try to get fans of Myst and Metroid.
Monday, October 17, 2005
The Fundamental Interconnectedness Of All Things
I like to start by just pressing a note repeatedly, or maybe a fifth, or something along those lines, just to get a feel for it. If I'm in the right mood for a good improv, it gives me a sense of thick atmosphere. It all works out better when I've got a starting point, a setting in which my story will take place. Everything will flow naturally from these few notes, which I play repeatedly, generally while holding the pedal. But I don't think of it as a starting point. In fact, I don't think about it at all. I just start playing it, and let myself get pulled in. As far as I am concerned at that moment, that note is the entire world.
Somehow, that eternity of a setting passes in an instant, and I start playing. It doesn't matter what, just so long as I like the way it sounds. Which is not to say it necessarily should make any sense at all, because the nonsensical can be just as satisfying as the sensible, as long as it is controlled. Contradictions, confusion, despair, vagueness- these are my playthings. All of them are more interesting than some simple melody, although if that melody has been on my mind lately, that's what I'll go with. Those improvs are generally less interesting, since they mostly consist of too many variations on the same theme. But if I like it, I'll remember the theme. Maybe one day I'll even write it into a complete composition.
You know, this post sounded more meaningful in my head, with my original plan. Oh, well.
I've found that whenever I just start walking, I eventually get to where I should be, without actually trying to get there. What I'm actually trying to do is enjoy the hike, and the way I enjoy things is by trying to find the most meaningful path I can. Vague, I know, but generally I only have the vaguest idea of what I'm doing until the end, and it turns out I was right. (This only applies when I'm wandering around by myself, though.)Now, there are a few things I've learned about improvisation. First, the more complex the structure the better, but if I make it too complex I mess it up. Improvising demands enough flexibility to radically alter the plans as soon as a new idea pops along. If worst comes to worst, you can always just hop right back to the-from a letter I wrote a year ago
original planwhenever it's convenient.
Is it just me, or is Myst more real than the real world? My deepest desire is to see the words "Game Over", and be allowed to move on with my life. My real life, as a gamer. To move on to games worth playing.
Believe it or not, I am not emotionally crippled by the thought that I will not be getting another Myst. My life is just so much fun right now anyway that it's hard to care too much.
The guiding principle behind all successful improvisations can be summed up with the sentence "I meant to do that."
The aftermath of the first season only wraps up in the seventh episode of this season, so maybe this should still (story-wise) be considered part of the first!Believe it or not, the music always sorts itself out, thank God. The full meaning of the BSG connection only hit me just now, not only months after I had written it, but even after I had decided to point it out in this post- imagine that!
If other people don't understand what I'm playing, but it sounds great to me, then I know I'm on to something. What's my playing worth, if it's exactly like everything that's been done better before? On the other hand, if something I play sounds perfectly natural, yet it hasn't been done before, then it is clearly something which needs to be utilized. I am proud to have invented several techniques which I have not heard from anyone else. Naturally, I use them at every opportunity I get.
Anyone who has played [Michel Ancel's Beyond Good & Evil], understood why it can switch between so many different, well-developed types of gameplay without the player minding, internalized the new concepts it brought to the table, and recognized the significance and wider implications of these concepts is way ahead of his time. Essentially what Ancel is doing is using these various full-fledged Forms as if they are no more than colors on a palette he is painting with. This flies in the face of all conventional thinking about art!-from a recent post on the "Adventure Gamers" forum
Taking a cue from Ancel, one such technique is to blend one style of music into another.
I compose music- don't ask what style, because it switches from classical to modernist to impressionist to pop sometimes all within one piece.
Friday, May 08, 2015I go to a local piano store to try out baby grands for the wedding. The shopkeeper says he's got a great one, but it's been borrowed by a nearby art gallery. He calls them and asks if someone would come and show me the piano. This strikes me as an odd arrangement, but everyone else seems to think it's the most natural thing in the world, so I awkwardly follow the person from the gallery when she arrives.
The piano is magnificent, and I immediately get carried away by it. It's difficult to say how long I've been playing. I notice the woman has been listening. She asks if I would do background music for exhibitions. Sure, I say. I give her my number.
A while later, they want to "try me out" on a small, private exhibition of two artists' work. No pay this time, but if they like me they'll call me back again for bigger things. I accept eagerly. I show up a bit early so I can get a sense of the art. It's a strange exhibit - one artist does moody collages trying to capture feelings related to the Holocaust, the other has brightly-colored abstractions about the joy of Jewish tradition. I decide it will be most suitable to find the line between modernism and good taste, while working in klezmer influences sparingly.
I play softly, but having fun with it. And then I keep playing without pause for several hours, as people come in and mingle and look around. I'm informed that my music is too individualistic, and that really they're just looking for a calm and pleasant mood. That strikes me as being at odds with the experience of these creators' work, but I am here to give the gallery what they're looking for, so I quickly change my approach.
More hours pass, my fingers never leaving the keys. Someone offers me a lemonade. I drink it with one hand while continuing with the other. I keep at it until all the guests have left. The curator thanks me and says they've never gotten so many people asking who the pianist is. I go home. I am not called back for several months, so I call to see what the situation is. There will be work soon. Cool. I am not called back.
The piano is magnificent, and I immediately get carried away by it. It's difficult to say how long I've been playing. I notice the woman has been listening. She asks if I would do background music for exhibitions. Sure, I say. I give her my number.
A while later, they want to "try me out" on a small, private exhibition of two artists' work. No pay this time, but if they like me they'll call me back again for bigger things. I accept eagerly. I show up a bit early so I can get a sense of the art. It's a strange exhibit - one artist does moody collages trying to capture feelings related to the Holocaust, the other has brightly-colored abstractions about the joy of Jewish tradition. I decide it will be most suitable to find the line between modernism and good taste, while working in klezmer influences sparingly.
I play softly, but having fun with it. And then I keep playing without pause for several hours, as people come in and mingle and look around. I'm informed that my music is too individualistic, and that really they're just looking for a calm and pleasant mood. That strikes me as being at odds with the experience of these creators' work, but I am here to give the gallery what they're looking for, so I quickly change my approach.
More hours pass, my fingers never leaving the keys. Someone offers me a lemonade. I drink it with one hand while continuing with the other. I keep at it until all the guests have left. The curator thanks me and says they've never gotten so many people asking who the pianist is. I go home. I am not called back for several months, so I call to see what the situation is. There will be work soon. Cool. I am not called back.
Another technique is to play, to a certain degree, completely randomly and chaotically, and still make it sound nice. It's not all that hard- my fingers have picked up which notes are wrong at any one point, so if I let them run free I can be fairly confident that they'll press the right keys. This technique can leave the listener (who happens to be me) feeling like he is in a light fog, which is a very nice effect-
Feh!- Couldn't this kid have written more sensibly? Like this whole post, for instance. I mean, at the beginning it sort of made sense, but look at it now!Yeah.
What am I looking at again?I wish I could say! First he starts talking about improv- I guess he means on the piano, and then this nutcase gets to this!To what?To this!Ah.What was he thinking? I mean, did he think there could possibly be people bored enough to sit around and read this stuff?
If I come up with a good idea, it doesn't matter so much whether it is vital- as long as the improvisation is being conducted according to my guiding principle, it'll progress on the right track. The only problem is keeping the train of thought going, ensuring that the link between mind and keyboard is never severed. If it is, well, the quality suffers tremendously.
There are lots of loose threads in this blog which I never did tie up. And yet certain events in my life did the work for me! The reason "I Am Not..." is such a mess is because I didn't write down all the remarkable chain of events of my life, as God laid them out. I didn't mention the day in which both my "counselling sessions" and my upcoming drafting into the army were both cancelled. (That was a very good day.) I didn't mention the week in which three paths in different areas became clear to me, which clearly was meant to be written down. I didn't mention my decision to not follow any of these paths, either. As a result of these inexcusable ommisions, my work is flawed. There is a clear lesson to be learned for improv here.
Finally, one must reach the end of the session. Okay, so that's not entirely true. The improvisation never really ends. I've seen people improvising who just refuse to stop, because a new idea is always popping up.
Hey, I just had an idea.What?Why don't we actually go out and do something?Because we're lazy.Oh, right.
But every work has to end somewhere, to make way for the next one. Ah, here's my station. I'll be getting off now.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Betrayal of Myst
Believe it or not, I am not emotionally crippled by the thought that I will not be getting another Myst. My life is just so much fun right now anyway that it's hard to care too much. I'm not playing many games, unfortunately, but even so my life is wonderful. Soon I will be finished tutoring VB for good, and I'll be able to buy games with the money. There are still many good games I don't have for the GCN, made by gamists who haven't sold out. I look forward to playing them.
Unfortunately, while I sit and enjoy myself, the rest of the world keeps moving. Eli will be starting his school year on Sunday, and he'll be going to a dorm. So there goes my only friend. My mother keeps bugging me to try and find another friend, but the idea is repulsive. What am I supposed to do, put up a sign?
Friends Wanted!No, I'm not going to go out there and make a fool of myself. No matter how much I argue, I can't get anyone to agree with me except for those who had no opinion before. Who is interested in my artistic ideas in a world where the creators of a craft will sacrifice everything they've worked for to get a few more sales? Who is interested in me, in a world which promotes normality above all else?
Will you be my friend?
If you are:I would like to meet you!
- Hyperactive
- A science fiction fan
- A gamer
- Slightly crazy
I will bend over backwards to pretend I don't offend your sense of normality!
Call my number today!
This is a world in which Nintendo will turn Metroid into a FPS for the DS just because Halo is popular. This is a world in which Cyan will make Myst in real-time 3D just because real-time 3D games are popular. This is a world in which everyone bends over backwards to be accepted, even if their actions should be completely opposed to their identities. How can I deal with such a world, except as I am doing? I sit here, by my computer, in my own world. I avoid contact with the world whenever possible, even though I want it, because no good can come of it. I am not meant to be a part of this World.
But there are a handful of gamists with integrity. These are the artists, like Michel Ancel, who dared to interpret gamism differently than the rest of the world. Beyond Good & Evil was ignored completely. BG&E was made in its own world, following its own rules, and if it didn't get accepted by the general public, so be it. But amazingly, it exists. Maybe that's all that matters.
5 Comments:
- 75th Trombone said:
-
Oh my goodness, get ahold of yourself.
1) For at least some of the Ages -- Noloben and D'ni we know for certain -- they were using content that was originally intended for Uru. I'm not saying it's "leftovers" or whatever because they're great, but they were never modeled with the intention of pre-rendered graphics. To say Cyan's caving into "social pressure" or whatever is absurd.
2) If you think they could have made the game pre-rendered in the time they had, you're quite wrong. They had, like, a year.
3) The framerate in the game is better than that in the demo. Don't ask me why. Also, maybe you're a bit too aggressive with your quality settings. Turn them down, see what happens.
4) If the controls destroy the immersion that much, you're determined to have it destroyed for you. I too would have liked to control the speed of movement; heck, there's probably a config file we could hack to change it ourselves. But in any case, three control schemes were obviously intended to make it MORE friendly for people. If you don't like the walk speed, put it in classic mode.
5) If you think Todelmer is "barren and boring" you're insane.
6) Metroid is not an FPS. It's a more of a First-Person Adventure. No game where you can bloody LOCK ON to enemies is an FPS. It's an adventure/platformer, it doesn't focus on hair-trigger reflexes or accuracy, and it's brilliantly done, and it feels like Metroid. You're determined to hate it, which is your prerogative, but your reason given here is incorrect and invalid.
Fin) "I am not meant to be a part of this World." Sounds to me more like you're determined to not be a part of this world. - Mory said:
-
First of all, thank you for posting the most intelligent comment yet on my blog. :)
I must first object to the outrageous assumption that I consider Metroid Prime to be a FPS. In fact, I have been extremely vocal about classifying it as an exploration game like Myst, or more specifically an "action exploration game". I don't expect you to read my previous blog entries, so suffice it to say that I have never enjoyed a FPS in my life, and Metroid Prime 2 is one of my favorite games ever. What I was referring to (which I indicated by mentioning the DS) was the upcoming Metroid-themed FPS for the DS entitled Metroid Prime: Hunters. It does not have a lock-on feature but uses control which has been described as a copy of PC FPS controls. More importantly, there appears to be little or no emphasis on exploration, to be replaced with new types of weapons, new playable characters, etc. I am outraged because Nintendo is willing to completely ignore Metroid's identity as an exploration game (in every game from Metroid 2: Return of Samus on to Metroid Prime 2: Echoes) and turn it into a typical FPS to get more sales. I think you will agree with me that this is a very bad thing. I think this whole misunderstanding stems from my stylistic decision to not spell out any more than is necessary on this blog. I hope this does not bother you.
My criticism toward Cyan is not limited to this particular game. They should have seen the problems as early as RealMyst and either gone back to pre-rendered before that remake got too far in production, or spent a lot of effort correcting their mistakes. My feeling is that they went with real-time graphics for the sake of competition, since clearly they didn't have a valid reason from a control perspective. Perhaps this is oversimplifying the matter, but that is how it looks from my end. This blog is not a statement of absolute truths but personal ones, with the aim of understanding how they affect my life's course. In any case, pointing out that these worlds were modeled for Uru does not change my opinion that Cyan should not have been modeling anything for real-time. Uru didn't bother me because although I didn't like it at all, I still got a Myst game I liked from Team Revelation. But now it looks like there will be no more Myst games, and all I have to look forward to is this deeply flawed game. That is why I am so upset.
The control was well-intentioned but a bad idea nonetheless. I prefer to have one good control scheme to three bad ones. I would honestly be curious to hear why you think I might be determined to dislike the only remaining game in one of my favorite series.
I'm not sure which Age Todelmer is. I was referring to the beach Age (whatever its name is) featured prominently in the demo. Since this demo is my only way to get a taste of the game, I have no choice but to assume it is representative of the version in stores. I don't like spending money on games I won't like. The most prominent landmarks of the areas I tried to stroll through seemed to be a bunch of rocks. Compare this to any one of the Ages Team Revelation crafted in the last game, and you will see why I refer to it as barren and boring.
I would suggest that you are determined to find me guilty of being determined of something. It is in fact very difficult to accuse me of being determined not to be part of the Real World from a social perspective when I spent so much time in the past few years trying to get along with the people around me. But there was always a wall between us, no matter how hard I tried to reach out to them. Spending time with them was a pretense. At first I wanted to believe I could be one of them- it was only with much time and effort that I concluded that I did not belong with them.
I am glad to see an angry face here (no joke!), and I hope you will stick around for a while and criticize my other posts. If not, I would like you to know that it was a pleasure to hear from you. - 75th Trombone said:
-
Re Metroid: Okay, yeah, I saw "DS" and my brain saw "Newish Nintendo system," so yeah that's my bad.
Regarding realMYST: realMYST was more or less entirely a test-run of the Plasma engine they were using for Mudpie (later to be Uru: Online Ages Beyond Myst, later to be Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, later to be cancelled). They'd just acquired Headspin, they wanted their feet wet, so they built the thing.
(There was some weirdness about Sunsoft taking over development, then giving it back to Cyan. I don't really know what that was about.)
And they've said repeatedly that realtime 3D was always their vision... ...it just wasn't technologically feasible at the time.
Uru could not possibly have been made pre-rendered, since there was originally going to be only Uru Live. Then Ubi made them change courses to Uru Prime, then cancelled Uru Live, so all we have to show for it are the single player games. But the true vision for Uru simply cannot be done prerendered.
And then they had a year to more or less design Myst V from scratch. Not nearly time enough to build and render all those polys.
Regarding Noloben (the demo Age): It gets a bit more interesting than that with a little investigation, although the demo cuts you off right before the first cool part.
All the Ages are a bit smallish, but there's still a decent bit of puzzling to be done. The game is probably sized about like the original Myst, if Myst Island were a bit more linear.
Todelmer is the space Age, and it is beautiful.
Laki'ahn is the most rushed-looking of the Ages, and also has the worst framerate, and also (in my opinion) has the worst puzzles.
Tahgira is a snow Age, so it's by nature barren, but still very pretty. And the puzzles there don't seem to be integrated at all, but a blurb in the strategy guide actually proves it pretty clever.
And then there's Noloben. Tell me this about the demo, did you climb up anything at any point? If not, you've missed pretty view #1 of the Age (#2, really -- I think the beach is pretty too).
The hub Age is something that, if you've been a Myst fan for any period at all, you've been waiting for for a long time. :)
Regarding Rev: Yes, the Age design there is excellent, physically speaking. But man, Spire and Haven build you up, build you up, build you up, and then have LAME climaxes. And then all that Dream stuff is as non-Mystish as you can get. The plant concept is okay, the element spirits are WAY pushing it, but the pointing icons around is just upsetting.
It's a shame; if you took the good stuff from Myst III and the good stuff from Myst IV and put them together, you'd have a better game than Riven.
And but so anyway. I think you should give Myst V a chance. It's no Riven, but it flows nicely. It doesn't build you up then let you down.
The bad endings SUCK, but the good ending is nice.
Regarding determined to find you determined: Well, there was just a bit of "My tastes are not within the realm of human understanding" aroma to the post, and enough mistaken conceptions that I got a bit huffy. Sorry about that. <.<;; - Mory said:
-
Whoops, I really messed up this comment. I've deleted the faulty version. Let's try this again.
I'm surprised you would mention Exile's "good stuff". There is only one thing I enjoyed about the game- the ending to that eastern puzzle Age. Other than that, it was badly conceived, badly implemented, contrived and very boring. There were a few good ideas here and there, but it was impossible to appreciate them because the developer did not give any thought to ensuring intuitive control. On the Adventure Gamers forum (http://tinyurl.com/7fz24) I detailed the critical flaws, if you're wondering where I'm coming from on this matter. Intuitive control is critical for an exploration game. Myst IV understood this. Metroid Prime understood this. From what I've seen, Myst V does not.
50 bucks is pretty expensive for giving a game another chance, especially considering how many good Gamecube games I'd like to buy. I really would love to have another Myst experience, but it's too risky a purchase. On the other hand, if the Ages are as good as Revelation's, I'd be willing to overlook the near-unplayability. Are they? For instance, "Snow Age" doesn't sound particularly inspired. What genius or beauty does it bring to the stage?
Just to give you an idea of what I love about Revelation: Tomahna was brilliant for its juxtaposition of the everyday with the fantastical, and for how truthfully it conveyed a sense of family life even though it created an entire design philosophy of its own, completely different to ours. Spire (my favorite) found strong emotions in barrenness. It was realistically chaotic, yet very clearly laid out. Everything about it was drop-dead gorgeous. Haven was very innovative in its reliance on animal life, and created an entire ecosystem of beautiful creatures, giving each its own distinct traits. Serenia entered completely new thematic material, an in interesting fantasy setting with its own unique mythology. I have never been anywhere like it in any game. In short, Revelation is one of the greatest recent works of art I have had the privilege to experience. Sorry about the hyperbole, but I do love singing its praises. And there are very few games more deserving of hyperbole.
From this perspective, judging exploration games first by the world design and second by the intuitive and transparent control, where does Myst V stand? As a great work of art alongside Revelation, or as an unpleasant mess alongside Exile? - Mory said:
-
I did eventually play Myst V. It was terrible. Here are my thoughts from right after playing it.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
yawn... Hey, wait, does this blog still exist?
Nice of you to stick around for so long. Y'know, the second season of Battlestar Galactica has started, and -Bl'bah!- is it a disappointment. The first episode was completely filler, in which nothing remotely interesting happens. It was written by two writers from DS9, and it shows: it's as bad as a DS9 episode, through and through. Just like in DS9, what is considered plot development is not actual growth of the character, but just telling the viewer about something irrelevant that happened years ago. As for what's happening in the present, the only real character development is the revelation that many of the crew are completely and ridiculously incompetent. This is not what I call good drama; this is what I call DS9-bad. Oh, and there were a few shamelessly gratuitous action scenes thrown in just for the sake of having action scenes. The next episode was not much better; the creators of the show were going for an action episode and couldn't get it right.
But there is hope. The reason these episodes seem like filler is because they are filler. According to Ronald D. Moore (the excellent writer from Star Trek who created and produces this iteration of BSG), the aftermath of the first season only wraps up in the seventh episode of this season, so maybe this should still (story-wise) be considered part of the first! Maybe then we'll get our quality episodes which befit the beginning of a season for such an esteemed show.
I've been replaying Myst IV, watching episodes of DS9 (about 10% of the show's episodes are actually good), watching movies,
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Order & Chaos
A few months ago, my family went to Jerusalem (I think) for Shabbat. Don't ask why- I don't remember. I stayed at Yosef's house. I hadn't seen him for a long time, but we were friends in 7th grade. At his house, Yosef's parents maintain constant order. The kids never even speak out of place, and constantly bow to their judgement. The meals were a solemn affair- everyone would sit quietly until Yosef's father decided to ask them a question. I like Yosef, but the experience was depressing. Not that I didn't enjoy myself sometimes- Yosef introduced me to the strategy game "Twixt", an elegant logical competition in which the goal is to make a line from one side of the board to the other with "bridges". Generally, Yosef played systematically, while I played irrationally, looking for "out-of-the-box" solutions. It is worth noting that I lost almost every time; nevertheless, I liked my moves better, because they were more funny and imaginative. Yosef has two older sisters and two younger brothers. His brothers are very friendly and I had a good time playing Twixt with them while Yosef slept. (He was, unfortunately, sick that Shabbat.) | Last Friday, my family went to Gush Katif for Shabbat. It was my mother's idea, of course. I stayed at home, but ate at Eliav's house. I've been inviting him over almost every day recently. At his house, Eli's parents have no control over their children. Eli and his siblings do as they please, ignoring their parent's desperate pleas. The meals were a strange affair- at lunch, Eli suddenly became angry at the world and wouldn't speak, and blamed his father. I like Eli, but the experience was disturbing. Not that I didn't enjoy myself sometimes- I introduced Eli to the intricacies of domino lines, a "sandbox" for creatively elaborate contrivances using lines of dominoes as well as blocks, cars, Lego, etc. Generally, I tried to play it safe, while Eli played recklessly, looking for "out-of-the-box" solutions. It is worth noting that my creations worked more often than his; nevertheless, I liked his better, because they were more funny and imaginative. Eli has two older sisters and three younger siblings, the youngest two brothers. His brothers drove me nuts with their constant noisemaking, pestering, whining and crying. I avoided them like the plague. |
2 Comments:
- Mory said:
-
I'm not sure whether or not this is actually relevant, so I didn't want to clutter up the post proper with it, but it occurs to me that both Yosef and Eli were very repetitive in their statements as we played.
As I played Twixt with Yosef, he would keep saying "Do what you feel is right.", and that sounded silly because the move I was to make did not have some grand epic implications as the Obi-wan-esque statement seemed to imply. I asked him to stop because I was getting very tired of hearing that line every time he made a move, but he kept doing it anyway.
Similarly, Eli would preface everything he said with "Technically, ...", and that sounded silly because invariably what he was saying was not very technical and didn't for any reason demand or allow that the word "technically" be placed before it. I asked him to stop because I was getting very tired of hearing that word every time he suggested anything, but he kept doing it anyway.
I don't know what to make of this connection- maybe you do. - David Bush said:
-
It's nice to hear that someone plays Twixt in Jerusalem. But I don't have a clue about the Force, technically.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Good Riddance
I am free. The graduation ceremony was last night. "Preparation for the Real World" is now officially over. The event was strangely depressing, though. I should have been overjoyed that I would never have to set foot in that building again, overjoyed that I would never see those kids again and have to worry about my lack of a relationship with them. But all I could feel was guilt. Guilt that I had not tried harder with my classmates. I kept thinking: "Go talk with them, you idiot. This is your last chance." But what did I have to talk about with them? Show them Wario Ware: Twisted? They certainly wouldn't have cared. Make smalltalk? Sure, I know how that goes:
"How are you?""I'm fine."
"...""Bye."
So I stayed away, and felt miserable for it. We were all handed yearbooks, with photos of each student and words written by a friend summing up his personality. I had brought no photo, and had no friend. I keep telling myself that it's for the best- were my name in the yearbook, it would indicate that I had been there, in the same world as the rest of the grade. That is clearly a lie. So it is appropriate, but still painful to be reminded so inescapably that in the eyes of my two-year colleagues, I do not exist.
What do I do now, with no school to bind me? As little as possible, I hope. I'm watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from start to finish and am finding to my surprise that it is exactly as bad as I remember. Better, I am filling in the blanks of our Star Trek: Voyager collection, and I had forgotten quite how good this show was. I'm starting to watch Quantum Leap, too, a cute and light show. I always look forward to Eli's visits (Eliav lives a few doors away), because I've been introducing him to so many great experiences: Zelda, Tallon IV, Fire Emblem, Battlestar Galactica, Beyond Good & Evil, Ball Revamped. I also just lent him the Flash Gordon tapes (the original), and I hope he finds it as amusing as I did. (As I told him, if he is capable of taking it seriously then there is something seriously wrong with him.) There's nothing so satisfying as giving someone else a fun experience, and it is helping me to appreciate my favorite games better by seeing them through a new perspective.
Anyway, that's my life. How are you guys doing?
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Natural / Rational
Note: In order to save space, I have hidden the letters from you. Effective, no? Just kidding- to read a section, click on its title (taken from the original letter in all cases).
Dear Benjy,
Today, people are forced to work in economies and live in societies that they would not have chosen if they had the freedom to choose for themselves. This is necessary, as it's impractical to give complete autonomy to every group who wants it. Beside, different cultures would clash with each other, as no one is really a world unto themselves. With virtual reality, everyone who has an idea for a lifestyle can create, and others would be free to live in it. To live their lives not how society is demanding of them, but how they want to live their lives. And no matter how radical any approach is, if it exists only in virtual reality it cannot harm anyone else. Tell me how this is not an ideal world.
Love, Mory
Where to begin...
1. No one in a free country is forced to work for anyone, or join a cultural clash, or follow a lifestyle. You don't have to look far to see that. I'm here, working and studying and everything else, because I want to. I could just as well be a bum, or live in a shack, or wander the Earth aimlessly without ever working a day. I wouldn't have much to eat, if anything, I'd get nowhere, I'd achieve nothing, that's hardly a life worth living in my opinion. So I choose to live in a society, to work, etc. I don't feel like I'm giving up any autonomy in doing so. Autonomy in a vacuum is meaningless: what would I be free to do? Without knowing anything, creating anything, desiring anything or putting an effort into anything, I would be anything but free.
2. There is tremendous gain from living in a society, that's pretty self-evident. There's no way any individual could discover everything, achieve everything, and think about everything; the combined endeavors of members of a society make everyone better off, so long as each member is free to choose his or her own path, as people definitely are in this country, in Israel (to a lesser degree) and in many other countries in the world. If for no other reason, you would have no video games if it weren't for the massive global markets and societies that create the incentives for
people to make them.
3. You could plug everyone into a virtual Matrix, and they could all wander their utopian islands forever, but there are still human needs. At the very least, someone has to produce food, shelter and energy to keep these plugged-in people alive and their machines running. Who would do this, and why? More importantly, though, people can't live in islands. If they all plugged in like that, they'd just meet each other again in their fantasy worlds. And they wouldn't make everything perfect, because that's ridiculous: if everyone is gorgeous, beauty becomes boring. If there are no problems, good things become meaningless. Humans are social animals, they want and need societies to live in, it's a fact of life. You can say otherwise because your food is paid for by someone else's work, your video games are made by mythic Others outside of economic requirements, and so on, but the real world doesn't work like that. A Matrix world is a parasitic existence; in the movie it's the robots sucking the energy out of the people, but in your utopia it's the plugged-in people living off of the working people. How that latter group would exist is not clear.
4. If the world were ever to become so virtual, I would very proudly stay unplugged. I'll be old-fashioned when it gets to that point, leaving computers to make life more efficient, and make information flow more easily, but at the end of the day I'm still a human being.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on all this.
Love,
Benjy
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Preparation for the Real World
until it remembered what it was,
and could not reach the barred windows.
Those swirling vistas may exist outside.
They must.
Left, right. Left, right.
Run, little creature. You have not become
what is known to be best.
Listen, write. Listen, write.
Absorb. You have not heard
what a machine should know by heart.
Has your wing been shot?
Is no one coming to your aid?
Are you afraid?
Will you forget where you belong?
Good.
Outside, the day is long
and this is the bottom of the hill.
When you are not you
and have no pain to call your own,
you must understand your place.
There is no flight.
No time for dreams.
Good morning.
You say: "No one in a free country is forced to...follow a lifestyle." From my perspective, you're wrong. The system gives only three choices:If you weren't so comfortable with the first option, would you still believe that the world as it is gives freedom? I doubt it. What if someone wants to dedicate his life to art? That is not allowed. He must study things he is not interested in, play capitalist games he is not interested in, in short waste a good deal of his life, and he still has no guarantee that he will get to work on his art. How dare you call this a choice?! Look at all the security guards in Israel, sitting around all day doing absolutely nothing. If you think that these people chose the job freely, then you are fooling yourself. I'm not suggesting that people should do nothing all their lives- no one would want to live like that if provided with alternatives. But people should be given those alternatives!
- Follow the lifestyle which society has prepared for you.
- Live a miserable life in which nothing will be accomplished.
- Drop dead and stop bothering us with your presence.
Furthermore, I don't think anyone has the right to determine for everyone what constitutes a productive use of time. Almost all the time I've spent at school in the past decade has been what I would consider a tremendous waste of time. But what I consider productive -thinking about videogames, playing and trying to understand videogames- may be what some people -maybe you- would think of as a waste of time. And I can imagine other people thinking of both of these as wastes of time, and the only good use of time being socializing. Then there are people for whom the greatest way to use time is learning Gemara. These are all valid positions, and they all must be allowed.
You seem to think I was saying that there should be no societies. But I never did. Making virtual worlds would only expand societies by letting people be part of one society even if they are physically on the other side of the world! But I suppose if someone truly did not want to be part of any society, he should be allowed to live alone, although I don't see what he could possibly want that for.
Here is a section of you letter which I have trouble understanding:
"You could plug everyone into a virtual Matrix, and they could all wander their utopian islands forever, but there are still human needs. At the very least, someone has to produce food, shelter and energy to keep these plugged-in people alive and their machines running. Who would do this, and why? More importantly, though, people can't live in islands. If they all plugged in like that, they'd just meet each other again in their fantasy worlds. And they wouldn't make everything perfect, because that's ridiculous: if everyone is gorgeous, beauty becomes boring. If there are no problems, good things become meaningless. Humans are social animals, they want and need societies to live in, it's a fact of life. You can say otherwise because your food is paid for by someone else's work, your video games are made by mythic Others outside of economic requirements, and so on, but the real world doesn't work like that. A Matrix world is a parasitic existence; in the movie it's the robots sucking the energy out of the people, but in your utopia it's the plugged-in people living off of the working people. How that latter group would exist is not clear."
I don't understand what you're saying. Please clarify.
As for your pride in being unplugged, after great reality artists got a shot at making the worlds they think up, and you see how much is possible that was not before, you would quickly get over it.
Love,
Mory
Your mistake lies in confusing social constraints and natural constraints. This is what I mean: a social constraint would be, you need to get a degree to get a good job. A natural constraint is, you need to work to eat. Society does not dictate that people need to work; society does not determine that humans require food, that food requires production, that production requires labor, that labor requires wages, etc. This is reality, physical reality. In fact, many societies have tried to change this, change "the system" that they mistakenly believed was an artificial social construct; they failed miserably, because they were wrong.
So explain this to me. You can plug yourself into a virtual world, fine. But you still have a body, which requires food. You still need shelter from the elements. And you need energy to power your machinery. How will this be done? You seem to dislike everything society considers productive - so by your reasoning, the need for food production, construction, energy production and so forth are all arbitrary social constraits, which a perfect world would eliminate. But how?
There are many people who dedicate their lives to art. Just look around, there are artists everywhere. Well maybe not in Beit Shemesh, but in the world. But it's not like these people can simply sit and paint all day. Because they have to eat. And they have other responsibilities. So they need to work, and make money. Not because society says so, but because reality says so.
I don't think your videogame contemplation is a waste of time, but it's certainly not productive. Unless you want to redefine the word. Productive means it *produces* something. Show me a single thing your contemplation has produced. Your elephant program was nice, but if that's the culmination of years of supposedly productive activity, then something's wrong with the picture.
Yes, all of those uses of time must be *allowed* - they all *are* allowed. But not to the expense of all else! A person has every right to learn gemara - but to do nothing but learn gemara, won't feed anyone. You can play video games all you like, but you still have to eat. That means that a rational person, irrespective of society, has to divide time between naturally necessary endeavors such as physically productive labor, and leisure or art or other desirable but unproductive (as far as life needs go) endeavors. Do you understand what I mean by this?
Virtual worlds and societies are great. But within these, you have to realize, people would still have to *work*, make money, feed themselves, generate energy, etc. Both for the arbitrary social rules that each society makes, and for the natural physical needs of a human being.
So I'll end with a related thought. To desire a utopia, you have to live that utopia yourself. An idealist has to embody the ideals which he believes in, in his own mind and life. Do you embody your utopia? If you were on an island, you would have no food, shelter, energy or any other basic human need; you only survive in your world now because others - following what you consider social constraints - produce those goods for you. Just a thought.
Bravo on your letter. You successfully demonstrated that my utopia is unrealistic. As always, I am in awe of your reasoning skills. However, the entire letter was more or less entirely pointless, as I never claimed to be realistic in the first place. What I have been describing is the ideal world, not a realistic one. In fact, I make every effort to ignore reality whenever possible. You might say I am embodying my utopia in doing so, but I am not so naive as to think that I act on ideology rather than on more natural motives, such as laziness. The reason I have been taking so long to answer your letter is partly because I've been busy with the Megilla, but mostly because I saw that your argument was aimed at my utopia but had completely missed its target. I simply couldn't relate to your letter, and every time I reread it I came to the same conclusion: "So what?"
So I'll start with a thought. If I were on a desolate island, I would live for survival, as the circumstances would force it. But when we are talking about the ideal world, survival is a given. There should be no constraints- artificial or natural, which are forced upon man. This may or may not be impossible, but I really don't care. A man should be allowed to make his own decisions in life. This is the ideal, and the closer the world gets to this goal, the better it will be. If the goal really is unattainable, then getting closer to it should keep mankind busy from now until the end of time. For it is mankind's natural goal, which it has been striving for for its entire history, to overcome natural limits.
Once, man could not communicate. Once, man could not burn things. Once, man could not travel quickly. Once, man could not travel to other countries. Once, man could not fly. Once, man could not leave the planet. Today, man still cannot live without certain natural requirements. But tomorrow? Man created languages, man created fires, man created wheeled vehicles, man created ships, man created airplanes, man created spaceships. Could man not create machines to prepare and distribute food, drink and energy? Could man not create machines to take care of the machines? Or could man, perhaps, devise some genetic replacement for the requirement of food?
And when man overcomes the natural obstacles in his way, we will not live to survive - we will survive to live. No longer will the criterion for worthwile (not productive- you're right, that was an ill-chosen word) usage of time be whether or not it can get food on the table. That way of thinking might be realistic, but it is not natural for a human. An animal is realistic- it accepts the limits it is given. A human must struggle to be realistic, because deep down he wants to transcend those limits. When a human is forced by society to accept his limits, he suffers. Do you understand what I mean by this?
There is no one today who succeeds at dedicating their lives to art without having to waste a good deal of their lives. You may call this natural, but it certainly does not feel that way for the artist. An artist naturally needs only one thing- to make art. The rest is unnatural. Sure, the world around him requires it, but the world around him exists only in his mind, and his mind does not naturally think that way! Artists were allowed to live as artists only in Stalin's rule, when they were given all they needed without question and were free to spend their entire lives on their art. Not to defend Stalin in general, but this particular lifestyle was perfectly natural for them. Do you really think they felt deprived of the "natural" requirement of making money?!
A constraint like "you need to work to eat" is not created by god, it is created by society to address their problems. Society does not dictate that humans require food, but it does dictate that people need to work, that labor requires wages, etc. These laws have served mankind well enough to reach this point, but these are imperfect laws designed only to allow man to cope in an imperfect world. Your mistake lies in confusing reality and perfection.
Fascinating.
I can only say two things. First, that such ideals are dangerous, because implementing anything in reality towards it can have disastrous effects on real life. Communism was based on similar ideals of overcoming "capitalist" limitations to the world. However, there is of course nothing violent in your ideals, nor are you actually promoting them, so for now at least there's no problem with that.
The second thing is, I wonder what your *measure* of perfection is, and question whether it's correct. "There should be no constraints- artificial or natural, which are forced upon man." So what is the measure - the quantity of limitations? You seem to imply that the quality of freedom is inversely related to the quantity of limitations, but I question this corrolation. You have a very good point, that technology and progress allow us to overcome previous physical limitations. Does that then imply that the elimination of all physical limitations is the ideal? I'm not sure it logically leads to that, but perhaps it would.
This thought just occurred to me: what would people do with their time if there were no physical requirements to fulfill? Even artists get bored, and most people are not artists. I think you'd have a very bored society if you reached anything close to your level of perfection, and I question whether such a society is in fact perfect.
Benjy
PS. I hear you did a great job with the megilla, nice!
That thought which has just occured to you occured to me in seventh grade. I believed that since machines were sooner or later going to take over most of the tedious work from man, the day would come when a large portion of the population would either commit suicide out of boredom, or go back to a life as primitive as cavemen in order to escape technology. This was before I found videogames.
Obviously, no person would want a life with nothing to do, so the solution is to play in virtual worlds with their own limitations. If someone wants to live life exactly like people now live but in a virtual world, ala The Matrix, he should be allowed to do so, but /he is not forced/ to do so. At any time, the person can exit the virtual world and pick another. The person will naturally pick the lifestyle which is most suited to him. I imagine that most people would spend most of their time in advanced MMORPGs, where there is much work to be done, but all of it is rewarding. They will break up their time by playing smaller games, either alone or (if designed for the purpose) with a larger group, say their families.
But how can a small group of videogame creators satisfy an entire world? This is where my ideal for videogames comes into play. Just as the ideal for the world at large is to break all limits for man, so too is the ideal for videogames to break all boundaries of what types of art are possible. For instance, if someone is a composer, he could easily make a world which is nothing but a concert hall which plays for audiences, or he could get a group together and make a "Fantasia"-like world where the music is accompanied by pictures in every direction you can see. A painter could paint a simple canvas which you can admire from all angles, or he could paint a moving canvas, or he could paint an entire landscape for you to walk around in. An artist who has an idea for a brand new art form, like nothing to come before it, could create it, and other artists could join him in developing it. In this way, all the artists in the world, of all types, would contribute to the creation of a universe of virtual worlds for people to experience.
If you doubt that artists would be willing to create art without financial motivation, then just look at the game industry. There are many reports of how bad the working conditions are in the industry, how badly game designers are paid, how much overtime they have to put up with, but many new game creators join the industry each year /despite this/. I can only imagine how many people would join if they did not have those deterrants. A monetary reward is only necessary when the task is not an enjoyable one, and artists don't just enjoy creating art- they live for it. Add to this the desire for fame and respect, and you'll have plenty of artists ready to contribute.
Sounds good. So what are you doing to join the ranks of video game creators?
Well, that's sort of where it all falls apart, I'm afraid. Honestly, I have no idea how I can start making games. The elephant program, which was supposed to be a miniscule first step into an enormous world- was a failure. I couldn't control it precisely, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, so I reluctantly gave up. I could theoretically (assuming that I could get over my laziness and stubbornness to change my laziness) get into a university which teaches programming, but that wouldn't get me into the creative aspects of making games, just the tedious work. There is one school in Canada which teaches game design, but it turns out you have to be fluent in French.
"but that wouldn't get me into the creative aspects of making games, just the tedious work."
Ah...and therein lies the whole flaw with applying even any aspect of your ideal world to the real world, or even having that ideal in your head as an ideal, as you walk thru the real world...getting to the point where everything's a perfect ideal of art and creation and beauty and meaning takes a shitload of WORK before you get there...!
Here's a thought. Maybe give the ideal a timeframe: life should be perfect and artistic and all that in, say, 10 years. Until then, life will be mundane, tedious, full of annoying physical and social limitations, etc. There will of course be some beauty and meaning and perfection in that time, too, but it will be secondary. Perhaps then, after 10 years, life will approximate your ideal world a great deal more. What do you think?
Congrats on your music report, a little birdie told me your teacher thought it was BRILLIANT. Glad to hear she's competent enough to see the obvious.
B
No, for two reasons. First of all, as you've noticed, it all really boils down to my laziness and stubbornness. The flaw does not specifically lie in the theoretical application of my ideal on the real world; it lies in my personality. Even though I know that doing well in school will give me a better chance at getting to where I need to go in life, I'm unwilling to put any effort into it. It is possible that I would be more willing to work when the goal is closer in sight, but probably not- I am, in fact, a lazy bum. Secondly, I'm afraid that if I were to force myself to do tedious work, I'd eventually get used to it. And that is just about the scariest thing I can imagine, because then /I wouldn't stop/ doing tedious work. My entire life would become a tragedy, with only hints of the tremendous potential it once had, but none of it fulfilled. When I look at most adults, I see the most boring creatures- creatures who once could have been humans, but have allowed society to make them into machines. I don't want that to happen to me. So I reject any work which I don't naturally want to do.
Yes, this means I'll never get anywhere in life. I deal with this by not thinking about my future. It's worked so far.
Mory, I'm going to be honest with you. You're wrong, you damn well know it, you know you could do something about it, and this is not about innate wiring in your brain that you have no control over. So cut the bullshit. There is absolutely no potential to a life without any *ambition*, Mory, so the "tremendous potential you once had" is meaningless. "I am, in fact, a lazy bum" is the most pathetic thing I have ever heard anyone say. You don't need me to tell you you're a genius and - if you were just a little ambitious - you would in fact have tremendous potential. I don't need to tell you that because it's so painfully obvious.
Of course you would get used to tedious work. Fabulous. What do you think ART is, a peaceful meditation? You don't think the great musicians spend days on end without sleep, endless hours writing, rewriting, toiling, WORKING to make their art a reality? Art is not an abstract ideal, Mory, it's the result of very, very, very hard work. So you can't have it both ways. Either you really believe in your ideal of art and perfection, or you're full of shit and you don't believe in any of it. Life with MEANINGFUL tedious work is not a tragedy, it's an ideal! It's the essence of everything great in the world, endless hours of passionately meaningful work. Sure, not everyone has such meaningful work. Many or most people find a career that pays their bills, keeps them busy and gives them the financial security to pursue other interests in life. Those people are not "machines", they're not tragic, they're not "formerly human"; they're people pursuing their own meaning in their own way. On your current track, you will never have meaningful work, you will never create work, and life will indeed be miserable. What kind of a fucked up answer is that?? You need to break out of the cycle, NOW, and start doing things. They won't all be ideals, or full of meaning; studying for an exam, working a shit job, or whatever people have to do to reach their true ideals, are not all full of meaning every moment. But meaning is not something in every moment, it's an *attitude*. The shit job and the endless hours of work and lost sleep and stress are
about the *means* to an *end*. But it's not the end that we live for, necessarily, because the process itself is beautiful. So what's your end? And what are your means? And what process are you on to fulfill them?
Your brother who really does care about you,
Benjy
I appreciate your honesty. Where you are wrong is in assuming that I never do work for the sake of art. I have put many hours into my musical compositions, and I enjoyed it immensely. No, it is not tedious, because it is natural for me to compose. It is self-fulfilling work. I'm not afraid of getting into a good position where I can actually make games- I'm afraid of what it takes to get there. Because making games would be lovely, self-fulfilling work, but the work on the way would be filled with mindless tedium. And when you let yourself get used to tedium, you're not necessarily going to ever give it up. That would be the tragedy which I am referring to. Where I am asked to do tedious work for the rest of my working life and I accept, because I have changed into a person who ignores how much he hates it.
Your suggestion that I could change is undoubtedly true. But I won't, for the same two reasons I explained in the last letter. As for your observation about the "lazy bum" comment, that was just me being honest. I recognize that much of what I do can directly be attributed to laziness, so I say it. I imagine that many people are not too different in this regard, except that they choose to pretend they are not lazy. You may not like my natural laziness, but ultimately it's me, and not you, who will decide what I will become.
I think your utopian view of capitalism is blinding you from the very real problem which most adults have. You would be ridiculously naive in your worldview to think that the people who spend their time as security guards, for example, are finding meaning in their lives. When someone forces himself to go through something which is not natural for him because it's the only way to feed the family (Most work is like this, it seems.), that is not self-fulfillment. It is misery. Sure, the person won't allow himself to notice it too much because he feels he's too busy to worry about himself, but it is misery, deep down. An unnatural misery. You, Benjy, see beauty in capitalism. I am very glad that there are some people like you, who naturally fit into capitalism, but I am not one of them.
I am not wrong about myself. I know what an awful life the world has in store for me, and I accept that life. To do so is natural for me; thus, it is a small self-fulfillment. If I end up out in the streets, I will at least see the beauty in such a situation. If I end up commiting suicide, I will at least see the beauty of my final desperation. But if I begin to devote my life to a system and not to myself, I will never see beauty. I would be living an unnatural life, a life without meaning, a life with wasted potential for self-fulfillment. So I refuse to budge. You may think this is tragic, but I do not. I think this is gloriously human.
Perhaps you don't realize that it's possible to change one's life course many times. There is no reason why you have to get stuck in mindless tedium forever. That expectation is totally ungrounded. You may have to go through 5 years of "tedium" to attain your ultimate game making job. Except it's not tedium, because you will have other good things going on in life. And when you do get the job after 5 years, it will all seem like a blur of memory and it will all be worth it. Such is always the achieved result of long, tedious work.
The same for security guards. It's not a job for physics professors. That Israel has such people working in such a profession, is not a failure of capitalism, but rather, a perfect example of the dismal failure of the Israeli socioeconomic system. In every dorm building here at BU, there are several security guards. It's a boring job, I'm sure - they monitor who comes in and out, basically - and I doubt it pays very well. But some of the guards are very happy people who really like their work. One guy is friends with everyone in the building, he likes his work a lot and says so. Then there are the grumpy guards who just have a grumpy personality, unfortunately. In another building is a graduate student who works a night shift as a guard in order to pay for school. So there is nothing tragic about being a security guard. It's a low-level position that, in a functioning economy, is a stepping stone to better jobs. They can also move up; from being a lowly guard they can rise in the ranks of the guard management; there's probably a whole corporation that contracts out guard services to countless locations. Or they can become policemen. Or, like the graduate student, they can quit their temporary guarding job and go onto a real career. My point is not to glorify the wonders of being a guard; it is simply to refute your claim that many are inherently "tragic". You know, in a video game world, you'd need to rise in the ranks too. You wouldn't start as king of the universe. (A game that automatically put you as the king of the universe would have to be one in which there was no social interaction with any other real people, because everyone would want to be the king, making it impossible.) You'd have to start as a lowly grunt and move up in the ranks. Isn't that how video games work? It mimics real life. People aren't born into their dream jobs. But everyone who does achieve a dream job at some point, had to work a lot of lowly jobs first to get there. That's life, it's not tragic.
What do you mean, to devote your life to a "system" and not to yourself? What system? Tell me, seriously, have I devoted my life to the university system? Or the capitalist system? Or the American system? I would say, unequivocally not. Those systems are all extremely useful systems in which people can work to further their own lives. People function in the system because they are devoted to their own lives; no one is devoted to the system, that's a meaningless statement. No one says "I go to work because I have dedicated my life to the capitalist system." If they said that, it would simply be another way for someone who works in finance to say that like their job making money from the capitalist system. Devoting *to* the system is absurd.
Meaning and purpose are yours, not the system's. The system is there to work within to further your own meaning and purpose. The question, ultimately, is whether you really have any meaning and purpose, and whether you care enough to further them. The rest is hot air.
Benjy
No one says, "I go to work because I have dedicated my life to the capitalist system", it is true. That does not mean that people have not dedicated their lives to capitalism, but just that they don't see it that way. Why should a security guard admit to himself that he'd be much happier if he were allowed to skip that "stepping stone"? To do so would just make him miserable, because thanks to the capitalist system he can't. So he is realistic, and accepts his fate smiling. But beneath that smile, I don't believe he is as happy as he could have been if the system had allowed it. If it had allowed him real meaning and purpose, without him having to pretend he had them. Life is capable of being so much better. By restricting himself to a realistic path, he is dedicating his life to following the system, whether he chooses to say so or not.
Theoretically, it would be lovely to dedicate a few years of my life to the system if I could get a real life after that. But as I said, I'm afraid of what damage those few years could do to my personality. I'm not sure that I would accept the good life over the realistic one. Would I, like the security guard, give up on what really matters? I have no way of knowing. I am not the same person I was a year ago, not even the same person I was a few months ago. If I forced myself into the system (the collective system), sooner or later I'd start ignoring my misery. Of course it wouldn't really go away, but I'd ignore it, because it's only natural to ignore things that are bothering you. And if I'm working to ignore my own natural goal in life, then I might never get back to it. What I'm worried about isn't so much that the system wouldn't allow me to end the tedium, but that I, a changing person, might get used to the constrictions of the system and prevent myself from ending the tedium.
I have some meaning and purpose in my life. I find it in playing games, and envisioning games, and composing music. But surely I could (ignoring the system) have more. So what would be a life of meaning and purpose for me? It would be a life dedicated not to the system but to creating games. It would be a life where I start, not with my "dream job", but with a school which teaches me the basics of game design. But that's not what I could conceivably start with in this system. Realistically, I need to learn lots of subjects which will not help me in the slightest, and then even when I get to the point where I can learn something useful I must waste my time on other things, like working in a meaningless job (by which I mean one which serves the system and not my life) to pay for my education. Next, in my ideal life, I'd move on to some small part of game design for small projects- say, the level design in a 2D platformer, or puzzles for a Zelda-type game. From there, I'd spend years of my life working my way up until I have the skill necessary for my dream job. Realistically, I'd have to get some job unrelated to game design, say programming or music composition, before I can work on game design at all. This is the difference between a meaningful life devoted to myself and a meaningless one devoted to the system.
So where can I get without having to deal with reality? Nowhere, obviously, so if you want to see all this as "hot air", that's fine with me. But I'm not a realistic person. I am concerned more about staying human than I am about reaching my dream job. Because if I reach my dream job and am no longer human, then it will have been a life wasted.
Mory
Actions speak more than words, and while your words are interesting, they do not match your actions. If you really wanted to learn game programming, you'd go buy a book on elementary game design. And you'd devour the book, and do as much as you can with the skills from it, then get another book. You don't need a formal school to learn a skill; I never took a single formal class in web programming and I make a nice living off of it. (And though it does get tedious at times, it is not miserable, or meaningless, because even at its worst, it is a means to great ends and hence worthwhile.)
So, since your game design career ended with a single failed spinning-elephant program, I say your actions do not match your words. What about music? You could do even greater things with music if you got out of your artistic bubble. You could record your music, for starters; you could perfect it, record it, sell it, and do great things with it. And don't give me a speech about giving up your music to the system, because it's recycled crap by now. A great masterpiece created and lost may have some abstract value in some Platonic world of values, but it will get you nowhere. Isn't Mory more important than Mory's work?
You speak of great abstract ends, yet you are not willing to invest a single ounce of effort into the *means* to achieve those ends. Goals do not come achieved on silver platters, and further, when they do, they're worthless. Being a game designer is a great end. So take a piece of paper. At the top of the paper write "now", at the bottom write "game designer"...and then map out every step in between. Because the end is the rung at the top of a great ladder, and if you never step on the ladder, you'll never even get close. And then, I say, you don't want to be a game designer at all, but simply pretend you do, with brilliant self-deception, as every human is innately capable of. Perhaps the guard truly does use subconscious self-deception to avoid misery at his lowly job. So what? If and when he climbs his ladder, all that will be irrelevant.
What do you want to be when you're 80? How badly do you want it? And what are you doing right now to get on the track towards it?
First of all, I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions. Game programming and game design are not the same thing. Game design is the creative aspect- designing worlds, designing interfaces, etc. Programming is the technical work. I never got to the point where I could start working on game design, because there can be no games without someone doing the boring programming work, and I was, as I discovered, incapable of doing that work no matter how much effort I put into it. I did learn the basics, and I got as far as the spinning elephant, which didn't work as I had intended. I didn't come close to creating even a simple framework in which I could design the game. So my game design career hasn't started, except on the conceptual level. Another misconception you seem to have is that I do not release my music for philosophical reasons. When did I ever say a thing like this? When did I ever even imply a thing like this? If people like my music, then fine, I'll give it to them. But I don't believe my music has much value, and to be frank I don't care about it all that much. I compose only as a hobby, and I don't have the slightest idea what I am doing when I do so. I just compose things which I enjoy playing. I don't believe the general public would like it very much, nor do I have much interest in finding out.
Of course these conceptions are beside the point. The real question is: Do I want to be a game designer so badly that I'll stick myself into hell to have a slight chance of reaching that goal? The answer is no. It should be mentioned, however, that I have tried mapping out a route for myself before. My own route. It was to start with the elephant, and end in "Through the Wind", which would be a giant step into the game world. I planned out all the programming I'd need, all the controls, most of the structure, etc. But it got nowhere because I can't do it alone. I need programmers and artists, but the programmers and the artists have all devoted their lives to capitalism. I can't make a game without a team; I can't get a team to follow me without experience; I can't get experience without sticking myself into hell; I am not willing to do that for any end. So I have taken that "piece of paper" -the one with "Now" and "Game Designer" and everything in between- and burned it. Sure, I've lost the goal, and I've lost the present, and I've doomed myself to a meaningless existence. But burning the paper was the only action I could take. Maybe I'll find a way to become a game designer. Maybe I won't. At this point, it seems irrelevant.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Illusory exodus
WARNING: HAZARDOUS LEVELS OF RAMBLING DETECTED. REPEAT, HAZARDOUS LEVELS OF RAMBLING DETECTED. WARNING
-and what now? Now I will return for more school. Joy.
It was fun while it lasted. Although it went so fast, I can barely remember what I did. Let's see, I played a few games, which were pretty fun, although nothing worthy of mention right now. And I watched movies, too. And TV shows. And that pretty much is it for the whole week. There's not enough time, really there isn't. I did go out with the family three times.
The first was a trip to the Israel Museum, which was really fun. There was a really nice exhibit of photos of natural landscapes. I'd say about a sixth of it was amazing, the rest sort of blah. But most of it was in black and white, and that just doesn't convey all you can with color. But then, a color picture can't fully convey the experience of being there, so there's still plenty of room for improvement. :) The nicest in that exhibit was a really really wide photo of the sky (in color), which was simply breathtaking. Miriam was just trying to speed through the whole museum, and she wanted to see the regular exhibitions which I've already seen several times, so I went with Dena to the temporary exhibitions, of which that was my favorite. Oh, right, I forgot to mention that they came too. So they came, and my mother too. There was also an exhibit about the way light has been portrayed in art, which was nice but seemed oddly incomplete. And another exhibit about the beauty in modernist art, which was also entertaining. All in all, a good trip.
My father was looking through the paper for things to do. We were all sitting around the dining room table, waiting for him to find something worthwhile. At least, I was- I can't speak for the rest of my family. He wanted to do something which everyone could enjoy, which would involve social interaction. I doubted the feasability of this concept, knowing my family. We're just too different. No common interests. I wanted to stay home, Miriam wanted to kvetch, Dena wanted to be with friends, my mother wanted to go to Gush Katif to show solidarity, and my father just wanted to be involved in whatever we did. He would get new hope from every advertisement he read, not willing to fully recognize that we weren't interested until he had read the entire ad out loud and discussed it. I can relate.
It was my idea to go climb a tree. You know, good old-fashioned tree climbing. Hey, stop giving me that look- it's fun! Haven't you ever climbed a tree? And so we did. Just my father, Miriam and I. We went looking for a forest. Unfortunately, what we found was more of a desert, with frail, sickly looking trees all over the place. Miriam and I wandered around, through lots of trees and the like, because we were bored by the path. Straight paths are naturally boring. We didn't find any good trees, but we had fun exploring. Then we went back to my father, who had found a tree. Not a tree like I was thinking of, but it was a good tree for climbing nonetheless. It was split into two long branches, going in two directions. I climbed up far to the one going on a 45-ish-degree angle, Miriam climbed the same one a little lower, and my father climbed the other branch which went almost straight up. Then we sat in the tree, playing "Ghost". It was fun.
The third trip was not so good. We were going to a party being held by my parents' friends, out in god knows where. I waited for us to do something, and eventually we did- we played Pictionary, just our family and one other kid. Everyone else was inside schmoozing and generally being boring. We didn't actually play Pictionary to the end. My parents left to go to Gush Katif, abandoning me out in the middle of nowhere with their friends. They had asked a family I don't know to take me back to Beit Shemesh with them. So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And I waited. The wife asked her husband at one point whether they should leave. And I waited. And I waited. And I considered that they had no responsibility to get me home, had not promised me anything, owed me nothing, and I considered that my parents had left me with them. And I waited. Eventually, we did leave.
I didn't forgive them for that, so I didn't go with them on their fourth trip, for which I am thankful, as I was able to stay home and play games.
Which brings me to now. Here I am, after the vacation for Pessach, the festival of freedom. That vacation has just ended, and already I am being brought back into slavery. So, next year, as they say. Next year in the complete Jerusalem.
Until then, I'll just be moping in this corner here. Don't mind me.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Who's telling this story, me or you?!
- I loved the Hitchhiker books and radio show, and was curious to see what the series would be like in other mediums.
- I was curious to see what text adventures were like.
- It is often called a "classic". Nowadays, the word "classic" is used to mean "old", not to describe content. You know, there was a time when it actually meant something. [sigh]
- The game was written by the late Douglas Adams! Has to be good, right?
The second thing I noticed was that the game was using this strength to punch me in the head.
Everything you do in the game is done through extremely simple text commands the player types in, like "look at window" or "take screwdriver". Now, before I start complaining, I'd like you to understand what this sadistic little game is like. I will use the example of the infamous "babel fish" puzzle, and for this I apologize in advance. Your character has just found himself on an alien ship. There happens to be a dispensing machine of some sort in the room. By typing "examine dispenser", you find out that there is a button on it and that you will get a babel fish from it. When you "press dispenser button", you are told that a fish has sailed "across the room and through a small hole in the wall, just under a metal hook." So you take off the dressing gown you're wearing, and "hang gown on hook". When you press the button again, the fish should hit the gown, and slide to the floor, so you can pick it up, right? No, of course not. "The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, vanishing through the grating of a hitherto unnoticed drain." So you cover the drain with a towel you got earlier.
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot zips through the panel, and is gone.So you take a satchel and block the panel with it.
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot plows into the satchel, sending the babel fish flying through the air in a graceful arc. A small upper-half-of-the-room cleaning robot flies into the room, catches the babel fish (which is all the flying junk it can find), and exits.The solution is (of course! How could you not have thought of this!) to take the junk mail you had picked up earlier and put it on top of the satchel on top of the panel.
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and hits the dressing gown. The fish slides down the sleeve of the gown and falls to the floor, landing on the towel. A split second later, a tiny cleaning robot whizzes across the floor, grabs the fish, and continues its breakneck pace toward a tiny robot panel at the base of the wall. The robot plows into the satchel, sending the babel fish flying through the air in a graceful arc surrounded by a cloud of junk mail. Another robot flies in and begins madly collecting the cluttered plume of mail. The babel fish continues its flight, landing with a loud "squish" in your ear.
There are two ways to solve this puzzle. The first, which I turned to, is to use the in-game hint system to tell you the entire solution. It doesn't tell you it all at once- it tells you one step at a time, hoping that you'll be able to pick up from where the first few hints lead you. The second way to solve the puzzle is to look at everything you own, try it on everything in the room, and see what happens. This method is not helped by the fact that there is a limit to the number of commands you can use before the game pushes you forward. But even without that problem, this puzzle is not interesting, or funny, or challenging for your creativity, but tedious, and maddening, and mind-numbing. Toward the end of this puzzle, the hint system helpfully comments that "At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry." This puzzle is supposed to be funny, and you know what- it may have been funny if you were watching the computer do it instead of having to do it yourself. Douglas Adams, like the most famous adventure game writers, liked making incredibly contrived puzzles, because the suggestion that one should solve puzzles so contrived that no sane person could ever solve them is funny. But if that humor is all they are going for, then the interactivity is a waste of time.
The player is constantly reminded that he is not the character, because the character is to think of things which the player would never think of. He is constantly reminded that he is not the character, because the narrator of the game must fill the player in on what the player is thinking and experiencing. So the player is there to empathize with the character, right? To watch what the character does and what the character is going through, and laugh at it, or think about it, or feel sad about it, or be entertained by it. And if this is the ideal for text adventures, then the interactivity is a waste of time.
How is interactivity useful? In theory, it should allow the player to empathize with the player better, because if you're acting out the character, then you ought to be thinking what the character would think, no? But no. The player will only experience the story if he believes he is in it. The game must help him suspend disbelief if it wants his reactions to be genuine. But how can you suspend disbelief in a text adventure? By its very nature, you'll be switching tasks every few moments: from the passive experience of reading detailed text, to the active experience of writing minimal commands. How can you believe within such an unnatural medium?
Also, using interactivity in this way seriously limits what the gamist can accomplish. Say you want to make a detective adventure, where the main character is Sherlock Holmes. Well, you can't- at least, not without dumbing down the character. If the main character had the perception and brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, then only a person with the perception and brilliance of Sherlock Holmes could play it, which limits the potential audience to around three people altogether in the world. No, you've got to give Holmes a case so obvious that any moron could figure it out. Ron Gilbert did this with The Secret of Monkey Island: making the character someone who doesn't know a thing, so that the player is on the same level as him. But any game which features a main character who is not exactly like the player is a bad idea in the current framework. So the character cannot do anything professional, have any knowledge whatsoever prior to the start of the game, have any meaningful relationships with other characters, etc. For a storytelling medium, it is absurd to accept such limitations. In the past, interactive fiction creators have "cheated" their way out of these limitations by sticking in entirely noninteractive segments which develop the main character's personality in a way which does not conform to the player. But this never has any impact on the interactive portion of the game, because once the player is given control, the character reverts to a generic avatar! Better to just make the whole thing noninteractive, then! Have some consistency in the story, not having to provide watered-down challenges which any player could overcome! In this framework for interactive fiction, the interactivity is a waste of time.
What is the purpose of interactive fiction, anyway? If you want to passively enjoy fiction, you read it. If you want to actively enjoy fiction, you write it. These two activities are like night and day, not least because they are two sides of the same. A reader believes he is in the world of the book, and is powerless to change the ending but can feel connected to the story nonetheless. A writer must believe he is outside the world of the book, so that he can think about how the characters will act when they are not like him. But interactive fiction should explore the territory in between the two extremes- where both the gamist and the gamer can contribute to the end result.
The closest thing to this which I am familiar with is improvising on the piano. Eliezer started our tradition of improv in the Academy a year ago. I had been improvising alone (for fun) for a long time, but that was my first experience with duet improvisation. I sit at one grand piano, some other pianist (sometimes Eliezer) sits at the other grand piano, and we just start to play. Sometimes it's with a violin or a saxophone. We're playing, but we're also listening, because we need to complement each other. With these improvs, you never know where it's going, because the other player might suddenly get an idea, and you'll go in that direction with him. Or you might get an idea, and he'll join you. It's fun. But it's very difficult to have a coherent overall structure.
Now say we were to apply a similar concept to writing. A good work of interactive fiction should be a collaboration between gamist and gamer. Since the gamist is not present to bounce ideas off of the player, AI will have to suffice. The player would not give commands like "press dispenser button", but full sentences like "Arthur Dent pressed the button." This may seem like nothing more than a nuisance, but it would serve to reinforce that the player is above the game, so that he will empathize with characters who are not like him rather than forcing all characters to be like him. As to how, precisely, this would play, I haven't a clue. I'll get back to you.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Semantics, Part 2
I hope you'll forgive me for doing something a bit different.
Since the creation of videogames, developers have been eager to push past boundaries which previously accepted types of games took for granted. This has given us many great experiences, but unfortunately we have not acquired any new terminology with which to speak of these games, and hold on to our old terminology. Some terms are straightforward -for example, everyone knows what a first-person shooter is- but some terms have become rather vague, most notably "videogame". The purpose of this thread, should you help me out, is:
1. To learn how we define videogame terms, and if there is a consensus in this forum over those definitions.
2. To question whether the language we use is sufficient for a serious discussion of videogames, and if not, come up with the terms we need.
This thread will of course get nowhere without your help, so I ask that you recognize the importance of precise terminology for any kind of discussion. Please answer these questions, and challenge other's answers for adequacy.
* What is a videogame?
* What is a role-playing game?
* What is an adventure game?
* What is an action adventure game?
* What is a platformer?
* What is a puzzle game?
* What is a simulation?
Also, based on your answers to these questions, how would you categorize:
* Animal Crossing
* Rayman 2
* The Legend of Zelda / Beyond Good & Evil
* Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
* The Legend of Starfy
* Harvest Moon
* Myst
* Metroid Prime
* Wario Ware
* Electroplankton (for DS)
* The Sims
Thank you for your time.
No one has answered yet. I started the thread in order to refine my own definitions by observing how other people respond. In the meantime, I will touch on some things to be elaborated on later. For the answers to my questions, I will reserve judgement until I have read what my fellow forum-posters have to say.
In Part 1, I defined gamism as all Forms of art and entertainment in a digital medium. I would now like to adjust that slightly: I will refer to this as "absolute gamism". Gamism, as it exists today, is defined as: "All digital Forms of art and entertainment which were created by the Game Industry". Absolute gamism is the ideal state of gamism, and one of the responsibilities of a gamist is to bring gamism closer to that state. Any member of gamism is a videogame.
I'm not yet sure how to define adventure games, but an action adventure is any adventure game which incorporates action without relegating it to mini-game status. I haven't played many adventure games, and none of them qualify, but from what I hear there are such games.
The Legend of Zelda and Beyond Good & Evil are not adventure games, but what I call "metaludes". In fact, they are two different genres of metalude: Zelda is a "structural metalude" while BG&E is a "narrative metalude".
I would also like to propose another original definition: the "exploration" game. This is a game which focuses, first and foremost, on exploring an environment. I am not familiar with any standard exploration games (where the entire game is only exploration), but there are genres of the Form with added game elements. Most notably, Metroid is an "action exploration game", and Myst is a "puzzle exploration game".
That's all for now. I expect that I won't get any responses for some time, given that it is a tremendously hard issue to deal with and even I, the creator of the thread, have to have more time to think it over.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
Breaking the metalude into two genres was a lot of hooey. I will never refer to these terms again.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
You are now entering Panic Mode. Have a nice day.
I apologize in advance for this post. In the past few posts I've been sort of one-note, and the blog is already suffering as a result. I am writing this regardless. Why? Because when you ignore the stress you should be acting on, it builds up. I am aware that this is corrupting the blog, but so be it. A little bit too much banality from the Real World should make a good contrast from the posts later on.
This morning, I left early in order to get to the improv session with Eliezer at a reasonable hour. It went great, until all the speakers in the school started blaring Purim songs. I went up to the secretary to see if there was a way to shut it off in our room, but no lasagna- they didn't know how to work the speakers. So improv was over. I played Untitled for Eliezer again, and once again he announced that he felt it was complete. I played Variations On V.O.V. for Eliezer again, and he announced that one section was incomplete. I ignored his comments. Then was Music History. The room was taken so we sat in the library, whispering. The teacher was explaining things that we'd need to know for the bagrut, so I found nothing of interest. On leaving the library, the head of music caught me again, and I reaffirmed that I'd have the project today.
My plan: Make the changes I had been told to do to the project on the school computers, print it out, bring it to the supervisor, get her corrections, go back to school, update the file on the computers, print it out and hand it to the head of the music department. It'll go away.
Murphy's Law has a way of sneaking in.
I went to the computer room and asked if the printers were working. No, I was told. No? Could it just be some little-? I asked. No, I was told. The printers weren't working. So the plan was over. I went home. That took about an hour, then I had something to eat. A few minutes before I had to go, I changed the file, printed it out, and sent it to myself by e-mail. I went back to Jerusalem. Of course I was late by that time. I called to find out what bus to take from the Central Bus Station. I waited for that bus, took it, and got there 40 minutes late. She showed me what I needed to change to complete it.
She had no working printer. I called person A who is in my class to see if I could come over. He said that he didn't have a working printer, and I should call person B in my class. Person B said he wouldn't be home, and I should call person A. I came home.
Hours later, I finished up the project. I called the head of music, who said she has no fax, so could I bring it tomorrow. I said no, I'd be busy. Could I fax it to her then? OK. Tomorrow then. I'll send it at 9:00.
Friday, March 18, 2005
VI: The elimination of unworthy life
It was so pretty, so full of interesting plants, so alive. There was grass, and weeds, and clovers. And he wanted me to cut it all down. Now, I am not an enviromentalist, against cutting down anything at all for the sake of progress, but this is different. If it needed to be cut to make room for something else, I could understand. If it needed to be cut because it was preventing something else from growing, I could understand. If it needed to be cut because someone was allergic to something there, I could understand. But when I asked my father, "Why do you want to cut it all down?", he replied, "It doesn't belong there." Those plants had been growing there for months, and would continue to grow chaotically until the lawn became even prettier. Naturally, I refused to go along with him.
Two days ago, (almost immediately after I had written my last post) my father came to me with a proposal. I should first explain that my monitor, which I had liked a good deal, broke down less than a week ago for apparently no reason at all. I have since been using a fifteen-year-old piece of trash which can't do any resolutions above 640x480 and which, no matter how much I try to tweak the graphics card's settings, can't get colors right. My monitor was especially missed for Myst IV- it had broken down when I was halfway through, and I've had to play the rest of it (I finished it yesterday) with this monitor which predates the entire series. I've been dreading the prospects of having to continue using this monitor, as I have no means to get money. Enter my father's suggestion that he would pay to fix my broken monitor if I study for my tests. I was surprised, to say the least, to hear such a clever parenting trick from my father. And then I went to Dr. Elmaleh for another counselling session and found out, understandably, that it was he who had planted the idea in my father's head. But I suppose it does not matter at this point in time which of them can use minimal brainpower when it comes to destroying my life. At this point in time, what matters is that the damage has been done. The two games cannot compete when an artificial need has been created for them to cooperate. That conflict has been postponed, although I fully intend to get back to it later on in this blog. Until then, I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that I will still be here to share it with you, my dear Imaginary Friends.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Lost in Myst
No, it really is an amazing game. The puzzles, except for that one, are brilliant, and- Oh, stop rolling your eyes, you'd agree with me if you'd played it! In any case, I'm stuck there now. If I were to play any other game while I'm still playing "Myst IV: Revelation", I'd naturally compare them and not enjoy the other game as much as I would have (because few games are as good). So I'm not playing any games right now. Battlestar Galactica won't continue for months, and Enterprise won't have any new episodes for a few weeks, so I have very little TV to watch.
And as long as I'm giving you all these meaningless details, I might as well go on to describe what else is going on: I just finished my latest piece, aptly named "Untitled". It certainly isn't one of the pieces I cared most about, and from the start the intent was to let Eliezer (my composition teacher) help me out, whether I agree with his decisions or not. I must say, it's sounding quite nice for the most part. I haven't touched Variations On V.O.V. since working on it in January. I was supposed to get a disc with the "Finale" notation software from Eliezer for the past few weeks so that I could more quickly write it up, but I never went to who I was supposed to get it from. I got it directly from Eliezer today. I'm planning on reading the Megilla on Purim, which is coming up soon, but I haven't been practicing. I have a bagrut (the final exams here, which all schoolwork is working toward) in Music History coming up. I have all the papers I need to study, but I haven't studied them. I have a bagrut in piano playing coming up, but I haven't been practicing. Wait, and there was something else I wanted to say... oh right, there was a paper I was supposed to hand in a few weeks ago to sign up for the programs I'd need to go to to do the bagruyot I'm not doing this year after the year is over. I actually came to hand it in today and found out that it's too late.
But why am I going off on such a tangent? Let's get back to the subject. As I was saying, due to apparently coincidental circumstances I'm not busy with games or TV shows right now, so clearly what I should be doing is posting on this blog.
Do you know of Epimenides' Paradox? Surely you must, even if not by name. The most recognized form of the paradox is: This statement is false. How can one deal with such a statement? The only way we humans can deal with such self-referential speech is by creating a more understandable representation of the sentence in our minds, and then analyzing that.
And I'm very happy to be writing on this blog, because it offers me such a good way of dealing with Real World problems. Here I can create reason for human irrationality. Here I can make a good game out of a lousy one.
My mother asked me a few hours ago how I can ignore the Real World around me. It doesn't make any sense! Don't I know that I can't get anywhere without getting good grades? Sure, I know. But reason is a game, not reality. I am not applying the lessons learned to myself, but to an imaginary representation of myself. As such, I have no internal obligation to follow reason unless I want to. And in this case, I don't. My deepest desire is to see the words "Game Over", and be allowed to move on with my life. My real life, as a gamer. To move on to games worth playing.
Myst doesn't have a "Game Over" screen. The implication being that the game doesn't actually end, it just continues badly (although you are spared from seeing the continuation). Of course it can't end, because if it were to end, then how would you ever get to explore any more Ages (Myst worlds)? At the very beginning of Myst is the statement: "The end has not yet-"
I don't know why I brought this up in the first place. Forget I mentioned it.
And I suppose the next break will be a month, will it?!
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Incompatible
I had also, at around the same time, gotten very frustrated with the fact that my entire class had been ignoring me since I joined the Academy a year and a half ago. I started considering confronting someone -anyone- in the class about this, but never did. And right around then, a few kids in my class started unintentionally proving to me that they had no grudge toward me but simply had never considered forming any sort of opinion about me. It was way back on the three-day trip at the beginning of this year that I attributed the lack of a connection with my class to a lack of common interests.
This didn't happen at the same time, but it should be mentioned nonetheless: there were several friends I made over the past year with people who like me were interested in videogames. Every single one of them has disintegrated. I don't know if they ever wanted to talk to me, but that seems like a moot point. After talking a little bit with them, I got bored and no longer cared if I ever saw them again. This has happened to me many times over the years. I still remember the last time I spent some time with a friend from elementary school. We sat around, each trying to think of something to say, and both failing: We had nothing better to do than talk, but had gotten sick of talking to each other. So if common interests aren't enough, than what is?
My questions were answered a week ago, when Marcus came for dinner. Marcus was my best friend in kindergarten. Yes, kindergarten, back when I lived in America. He and his family were visiting Israel and stopped by. A few words about Marcus: He is very hyperactive, talks about what interests him whether you care or not, and one of his favorite hobbies is bothering his two older sisters. The reason I say this provided me with the answers is because it did. Even though I had not seen him for a long time, even though we had almost no common interests, even though we acted differently and talked differently, my conversation with him was the most effortless and enjoyable I have had in a long time. Marcus showed me lots of star constellations in the sky, not because I had asked, not because I cared at all (I didn't), but because he cared. Other people might have hated that, but that's precisely why I like the guy. That's when it hit me- it doesn't matter whether you have common interests (although it's certainly nice). There are some pairs of people which can have a good time together, and most pairs of people who consider themselves friends can't. The former can and will have unconditional friendships, the latter will pretend they are friends just to convince themselves that they are satisfying their need for friendship.
My mother, in a rare moment of truthfulness, once told me that despite being friendly with many people, she doesn't think she has many real friends. I have none, at least which I am in contact with. The last time I had friends in my class was in seventh grade, when I was fortunate enough to have two very good friends: Tuvia and Yosef. When I think about it now, I think Tuvia had Asperger's Syndrome. He would talk nonstop about marine biology. I couldn't have cared less about the subject, but he talked about it because he cared and I cared about him. Yosef was bouncing off the walls sometimes for effect, and I cared about him too. Those were real friendships.
I asked Dr. Elmaleh to get me in touch with other kids with Asperger's Syndrome. I hope this goes somewhere.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Ignored Potential of the Impatient Phoenix's Pillar and the Immature Public's Perception Problem
The Zelda Form (Or can someone please give me a better name for this Form?) is designed around immersion- that you should never be pulled out of the game by a change in controls, or a change in interface, but should feel that you exist inside the game. But until now, occasional changes in interface were practically unavoidable for a reasonably complex "zeldan" game because it is difficult to allow for actions such as switching items (The Legend of Zelda), trading items (Beyond Good & Evil), checking progress, checking maps, etc. without resorting to a menu. But on the DS, all this could be put on the bottom screen! That way, the main screen would never need to change, and the player would never be pulled out of the experience. This may sound like no big deal, but for a zeldan game immersion is king. Additionally, the touch screen could create unprecedented depth for many items. For example, imagine how much greater the combat of Zelda would be if once taking out your sword (from its sheath on the bottom screen), you could attack by swiping on the screen! Suddenly, you would be able to attack in many different angles and even styles of swordplay by moving the stylus in different directions, as opposed to the one-button swordfighting in current Zelda games.
Now imagine a platformer where the top screen shows the 3D environment you are playing in (with the character in it), while the touch screen shows a view of the main character from the back. You would jump by "flipping" the character around with the stylus. For instance, you could push from the legs upward to jump, and then spiral around to do a somersault in the air, and finally using the stylus to push the character so that he falls on his feet. This could be a deep, nuanced game beyond any conventional platformer.
For Myst, the DS would be ideal. The top screen could allow you to scroll through pictures you've taken of all the hints/maps/symbols you found, while the bottom screen would be the game itself, played with the stylus almost exactly as it is now with the mouse. Having your "notes" on the top screen would take away the need for a pencil and paper without cluttering up the interface, and voila: Myst on the go could finally be possible!
And so on, and so on. The ideas I came up with were all of how the system could be used to enhance current Forms, allowing gamists to bring their crafts to greater heights. But instead of taking this historic opportunity Nintendo has afforded themselves, they decided to reinvent the wheel. That's right, rather than perfecting their Forms they would like to throw them out and create lesser ones. The concepts for the DS they have demonstrated are all starting from scratch. They have shown a Yoshi game in which you don't move Yoshi around but draw clouds for him to walk on. They have shown a "Metroid" game which does not deserve the name but is just a mindless First-Person Shooter. They have talked about a Zelda game that will use both screens equally. They have shown a Mario game that goes back to 2D. And so on, and so on. The motto they're going by is: "Let's throw out everything we've worked so hard to build and start over". This is not what I was expecting, not what I would want from my favorite gamists. All of these games look reasonably fun, but of the Super Mario Bros./Wario Ware variety, not the Super Mario 64/Legend of Zelda variety. No Form can hold your interest for very long until it has been sufficiently developed. The new Forms they are creating, though, don't look like they have any room to develop! They are all designed to use the features of the DS as gimmicks. What I expect is that after one or two iterations of each new series, Nintendo will throw it out and start over again. This was they pattern they had a long time ago, and apparently they miss it. Back in the 80's, they made Zelda -a very promising new Form- and threw out the entire form in favor of making Zelda II a shallow RPG which was completely different and did not rely on the foundations they had worked so hard on. The same can be seen in Donkey Kong 1, 2, and 3. Nintendo likes the invention stage so much, that they're not interested in building up what they've started. (In case you're wondering, this is what I was referring to as Impatient Phoenix Syndrome.) I have no doubt that these games will be very fun, but they won't lead anywhere. It takes a long time for a Form to develop from "a fun experience" into something greater. Without those greater games, the DS has no appeal for me.
So who, exactly, is the Pillar for? (...other than the Nintendo gamists, who are doubtless having a blast with it.) These are intuitive, simple games which neither require nor develop good gaming skills. They would be good for people who have not experienced any Forms interactively before, and are not willing to invest too much time and effort into a game. I'll cut to the chase: I think the DS is perfect for girls and women. Don't believe me? I've been trying to get Miriam and Dena to play games for a very long time without success. There are only a few they like: Animal Crossing, Yoshi's Island, The Sims, Wario Ware, Mario Party. They both like Animal Crossing because it's very cute, not challenging and doesn't force them to do anything but lets them play as they likes. Miriam likes Yoshi's Island because it's cute and not too hard. (Dena isn't a good enough player for it, but she likes the Yoshi character a lot too.) Both girls like Wario Ware because it's simple yet fun. They like The Sims because it's simple but rewarding. They like Mario Party because it's easy to jump into, but allows for a lot of fun if you bring a few friends. All these games are simple, with not too much depth, but manage to be fun because they are new experiences. This defines pretty much the entire first-party DS lineup! There's an Animal Crossing game coming out, a Wario Ware game out, a Yoshi game coming which is very simple, a music game which allows many people with DS systems to play music together easily, a Kirby game which looks pretty simple, a "puppy simulator" called Puppy Times which simply allows you to play with and train virtual dogs, similar to the old Petz computer games (which, incidentally, they both liked). The DS lineup looks like it is tailor-made for my sisters. And I don't think it's just my sisters: these games can appeal to anyone who is not a very good gamer and isn't turned off by cute graphics/themes.
Nintendo has been, from the beginning, marketing the DS to twenty-something guys. Their TV ads featured the slogan "Touching is Good", and had guys in their twenties as the focus, or women as sex objects. Why? Why isn't all their advertising aimed at girls and women?! I could only conclude that their marketing was a bunch of morons, until I brought the issue to the Gamecritics forum and received a powerful rebuttal: Nintendo is probably afraid of being seen as a "girl's company".
At E3 2001, Nintendo unveiled the Gamecube. While its competitors (Playstation 2 and XBox) were painted in black with boring, ugly designs, Gamecube was a cute little purple box with a handle. I think the Gamecube is the most adorable console ever made. But I have read countless editorials assessing that the general public didn't like it for precisely that reason, and also because its main launch title was Luigi's Mansion, a "family-friendly" game with cartoony graphics. Whether or not this is true is by this point irrelevant, because Nintendo's heads have gone on the record saying that this was a bad marketing choice, and they are working now to correct the error they supposedly made. Apparently, this "mess-up" set in stone Gamecube's status as a "kiddy" system, which of course insults the maturity of many gamers. The legend says that the Industry's target audience was turned off by the fact that the Gamecube did not go out of its way to turn off younger gamers. This legend must be true to a certain extent, as I have seen many people calling Nintendo a "kiddy" company. Is this hurting Nintendo's sales? Maybe. Nintendo isn't doing as well as they used to when there wasn't such a demand for "Maturity" (read: sex, violence). So they're now trying to create a new, different image for themselves. An image which people who are insecure about their maturity won't be repelled by. Just one problem- this image doesn't correspond with the games they're releasing. Their new commercials all imply trashiness, but Nintendo's games are too good to live down to that image. The commercials imply that the games are unsuitable for kids, but to make such games would be going against Nintendo's style which they do so well. When Nintendo, at last E3, showed a video of the new Zelda game, which unlike the last game (The Wind Waker) which had bright and cheery cartoony graphics, is going for a more photorealistic approach, the fans went crazy with excitement. What they were cheering for was not a change in target audience -in fact, what was shown was too minimal to suggest much deviation from the great Zelda tradition- but a feeling that Nintendo has stopped being "for kids", because near-photorealistic graphics have a connotation of rated-M ("mature") games. The feeling, doubtless incorrect, was that Nintendo has abandoned their ideals of games that are appropriate for kids in favor of what the public wants of them. And this new Zelda was proclaimed as a correction of the "misstep" Nintendo took with The Wind Waker, which incidentally is a fantastic game.
What would happen if Nintendo were to point out the appeal their games naturally have for girls? In a worst case scenario, exactly what happened when they pointed out that their games can appeal to kids- they would alienate a large portion of their fanbase. So they would prefer to project an image which will not have any basis in reality. People may buy the DS expecting anti-childhood games, but they will find the games on offer seriously lacking. Will they appreciate Animal Crossing, or Yoshi's Touch & Go, or Super Mario 64 DS, or Wario Ware: Touched, or Kirby's Magic Paintbrush, or any of the other games scheduled for release? I doubt it. It is better to have an audience which expects something the general public will not approve of, than to have an audience expecting something the general public will approve of and finding nothing of the sort.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
There's a happy ending to this story. Some time after this post Nintendo's marketing changed course, following the general approach I'm advocating here. Except they went even farther than I could have hoped for: They've been aiming not just at girls but at the elderly and the health nuts and all sorts of other historically non-gamer types.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Ball Revamped: Metaphysik
I highly recommend you check out this game. It's a really promising new Form, and the creator seems to have the vision necessary to develop it.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
It's not really a new Form at all. I'll deal with this at some point. (I've been putting it off for a year or two, because it would be a big project.)
Monday, February 21, 2005
the mundane and The Imaginary!
The bus ride was long. The bus was completely full, and I sat in the very back in the middle seat. That is the seat behind the aisle, with chairs on both sides, so that from there you are looking at the entire bus from the back. There was no one I recognized on the bus.
I got to class a half hour late. Yehuda is the head of my class, and is the nicest guy I've ever met who has anything to do with schools. It was his class I was coming to, and he allows students to come in even if the class is about to end. Despite Yehuda's best efforts (and he is a very good teacher), the material today was very boring. I sat in my place, trying to find a comfortable position for my head and failing. Class ended. Yehuda asked, "Wait, doesn't someone here have a birthday?" The consensus was no. "Yes," I said tiredly. I left the room. The schedule said there would be a Music History class at 11:15 (after a one hour break), so I went to the computer room and browsed the web.
Aah! I was scared out of my wits right there. What a surprise! I don't believe it- all my Imaginary Friends have come! You really didn't need to go to all this effort. It's so nice to know I still have all you guys. And who's this- Tuvia, is it imaginarily you? You've come all the way from Ketchikan? I haven't seen you since seventh grade! I've missed you so much. I've missed the way we used to talk together, not out of some kind of social obligation but because we were friends. I've missed the way we'd play games together and tell jokes and have fun. I'm so glad you're here, in this Imaginary room, with all my other Imaginary Friends, with this great Imaginary party! But first- Tuvia, how have you been doing?
I had an enjoyable but brief conversation with two younger kids in the room about computer games.
At 11:10, I left the computer and checked the schedule again, which now had the Music History class covered over in marker with the word "free", meaning it had been cancelled. I left the campus.
The bus ride was long. The bus was almost empty. There was no one I recognized on the bus.
Walking into the house, I immediately smelled the cake (from a mix) from the oven. It smelled good. I asked if that was a Duncan Hines cake I smelled (generally my mother makes homemade cakes, but I prefer Duncan Hines), and my mother said yes, but it turned out it was Betty Crocker. No matter, Betty Crocker is pretty good too. She even got Betty Crocker icing for it, since I like that better than her own icing. She told me she'd be making lasagna for supper. All this got me excited. I decided not to write what had been going through my head all day on this blog, because what did that matter when my home is so nice to be in. I sat down at my computer to browse the web and play games, and Willy jumped into my lap. Willy is so cute. I spent the $50 dollars I got for my birthday to order the Myst games from Amazon, which I should get in a week or so. Benjy has sent me some money as a gift, which I'll be saving for later. Miriam came home. I went to the music rehearsal for our shul (synagogue)'s dedication. I came back.
The lasagna was a disappointment. I found out that my mother had been so intent on creating the appearance of giving me my favorite food, that she apparently hadn't cared about the quality of the food. She had used a really lousy tomato sauce, which did not make for a very good lasagna. I got the keyboard I'll be playing on, so that I could get the hang of using it. I practiced playing on it, and found that it wouldn't sound good without a pedal. (The family I got the keyboard from has no pedal.) My family members all praised me for using it. I played very badly to see what they would think, and they complimented me some more. Then my family sang "Happy Birthday", and we had the cake, which was very good.
That was a very good cake, but it's food, and food doesn't last. But your friendship, Imaginary Friends, means more to me than all the "Happy Birthday" signs in the world. When I played my latest piece for you before on that Imaginary piano in the corner, you listened to it. Some of you liked it, some of you didn't, but both opinions meant more to me than you can imagine, because you actually thought about it. And some of you showed me your latest works, and I took them seriously and gave my opinion. We shared words and thoughts. What more can one ask for, Imaginary Friends? Hello? My imaginary friends...
Miriam started a blog, because she saw that I had made one. Since then, the girls have gone to sleep, and I ought to get to sleep too. Maybe Pussywillow will let me pet him on my bed. My parents are nagging me to finish up with the computer, to get to bed. "You have school tomorrow," my mother has just said. I'm going to sleep now.
Friday, February 18, 2005
The Definitive Three-Step Method for Game Design
The logic goes something like this:
- Gamism, unlike film, painting, literature, or dance and music [These two don't actually belong in this list, but most people wouldn't think of that.], is interactive.
- Gamism should stand as one art form, alongside the existing art forms. [These people have not bothered to analyze gamism to find out what it really is, but they would like to attribute significance to their hobby and think that an art form is the most respectable entity it can be portrayed as.]
- All existing art forms have been developing for a long time, but gamism is brand new, and obviously less refined.
- The more similar gamism is to other, more developed art forms, the more likely it will seem outdated and superfluous next to the other art form it is [supposedly] competing with.
- Therefore, gamism should always focus on the area in which it differs from all other art forms- interactivity. Any games which "overlap" in purpose with other art forms should be discouraged in order to encourage gamism to move uniformly in the right direction.
Gamism should not try to set itself apart from nondigital art forms, but embrace them. However, each individual Form should set itself apart from other Forms. The epitome of unrestricted freedom, in my opinion, is the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). In case you've not heard of such games (World of Warcraft, for example), the concept is that many players are "living" in a virtual world on the internet, with a working economy which they should participate in. In these games, each player has a unique voice, and can choose from many different ways to play the game. This Form should be developed a lot, as I believe it has a very important role to play in the future of humanity - MMORPGs will eventually evolve into virtual reality societies in which people will spend more of their time than in the real world. But this Form is not and should never be allowed to be the end-all, be-all of gamism. If a gamist wants to tell a story, MMORPGs are a horrible medium in which to do so. He might put in cutscenes or other noninteractive elements, and this would be counterproductive and misguided. The noninteractive elements will feel completely out of place in this Form which is designed for maximum interactivity. The only way to make noninteractive elements work in a game similar to a MMORPG would be to branch off from the MMORPG Form in a different direction which does not give the player as much freedom, thus creating a different but related Form which would grow farther apart from the MMORPG Form as they develop over time. The more freedom you give to the player, the less artistic freedom the gamist has. How can you tell a story when you keep allowing the gamer to contradict you? Similarly, in less interactive Forms, the gamist must restrict the gamer's options in order to be able to express himself better.
Someone from Square-Enix once stated that the future of "games as an art form" lies in MMORPGs. This is actually fine by me, provided the company does not try to turn other Forms into MMORPGs. What it means is that Square-Enix will progress from now until the revolution in that direction, focusing on that particular Form as if it is the only existing type of game. If every game company were to believe that strongly only in the future of one Form, we'd have a nice variety of well-developed Forms, although creating more diversity might become tricky. The problem is when the press adopts positions which limit all of gamism to one singular path. For instance, in IGN's review of "Star Fox: Assault", Juan Castro wrote:
OverallAll [sic], Star Fox: Assault equips the same brand of action as before, yet it carries over the same limitations as well. In an age where complete freedom of movement is the norm, players will still find themselves confined to rails. Not to say these sections aren't fun, far from it, in fact, only to say that it's about time Star Fox and crew stepped into the present.Now, I haven't played this game, but what kind of a ridiculous criticism is that?! Star Fox isn't a series of flight simulators, it's a series of 3D shmups (shoot-em-ups)! A reviewer can criticize a game for doing what it sets out to do badly, or getting distracted from what it sets out to do (this game, incidentally, looks like it suffers from this, but IGN's review doesn't care), but to criticize a game for not setting out to allow more freedom, for a Form in which freedom is more or less irrelevant, is absurd. If Mr. Castro and his IGN associates had their way, there would be nothing that did not allow them to do whatever they want. Their reviews impact the buying decisions of many gamers. If gamers are turned away from buying 3D shmups solely on account of their being on-rails shmups and not being "interactive enough", the shmup Form will never be developed. Who can possibly benefit from this?
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Help
I've been thinking about what you said: that trying to deal with psychological issues alone is counter-productive. I have a fundamental lack of willpower that I think qualifies as a neurosis. I've tried to deal with it myself for years now, and still I find myself unable to force myself to do even the tiniest things. How would I go about getting help?15:45, 19 May
1 Comment:
- said:
That... was brave. I honestly never thought I'd see that happen with you, as you always seemed insistent that nothing is wrong with you.
My wife is going through a very similar problem right now, and we also recently decided to seek professional help. I really think that it could make a difference, and that it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I had a stint with a psychologist myself, and I feel the better for it.
Good luck with bettering yourself. I look forward to the day when you return to realizing your dreams.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Professional Manipulation
Mindbending Software
I got to it from Ludology.org. It's ridiculously unprofessional, and the spelling is lousy, but it's still pretty amusing. If there were such a company, you can bet they'd be making a killing.
Yesterday I had my first "counselling session" with one Dr. Elmaleh, who specializes in Asperger's Disorder. Asperger's Disorder is primarily a social problem: People with this disorder have a hard time reading other people's body language, and so find it hard to interact with others. The syndrome has all sorts of other side effects, all which I clearly have, but I had a hard time believing that I couldn't react correctly to other people. I asked Dr. Elmaleh, and he pointed out that I had already interrupted him four times. I had serious doubts as to whether this Dr. Elmaleh could help me. How could he, when all he does is talk and have me talk? What I need is a way to get out of this ridiculous game we are all expected to play. A counsellor cannot possibly help me with that while sitting in his seat and talking. Those uncertainties have now turned into a negative certainty. So why did I agree to come again next week? First of all, curiosity. I'd like to better understand the methods this Dr. Elmaleh uses to "help" his patients, as I'm sure they're very interesting. Secondly, he can help me to understand why I have trouble making friends. I have another reason, but now is not the time to speak of that.
Dr. Elmaleh asked me what I would do with my life if the system were flexible enough to allow it. I told him I would like to make videogames. He asked me for more information, and I gave him what he asked for. I would like to make a 2D platformer. It would have a unique and original control scheme similar to acrobatics, which would not just be for glitter but would be useful. The structure would be based loosely on the Legend of Zelda structure. There would be no action, only the exhiliration of falling through the air, avoiding obstacles, reaching new heights.
Did that paragraph seem a little out of place in this post? Of course it did. Dr. Elmaleh couldn't care less about my platforming ideas. This first counselling session was about getting me to trust him. I don't, although he may trust me. He is working on me with standard rules, trying to defeat me with the box he has placed around himself. But I am not in a box, and I will never put one around myself. He's a few months too late to kill me- I have rediscovered Nonazang. I was willing to resign the game, when Dr. Elmaleh entered my life. He told me not to try to quit the system, but to play it. And so I shall. Imaginary Friends, you may not yet understand what I'm talking about, but know this. I am not one to do what I am told. At least not as I am told.
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
In case it's not already obvious: I never had any idea what that ending was supposed to mean. I was waiting for an opportunity to do something that would justify that post, and retroactively make it seem like I had been clever. That's how improv works- act like everything you did was absolutely deliberate, as opposed to a shallow outbreak of emotion. Sometimes it doesn't go so well.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Ah, the life of a cat.
- To enjoy their lives
- To look impossibly cute doing so
Now, normally I don't care about appearances, but when something is so obviously designed with the "cute factor" in mind, I think I can make an exception. So I'll say that I have a gorgeous cat. And boy, does he love his life. His name is Pussywillow, but we call him Willy for short. I'm anthropomorphizing him here (a perfectly natural, irrational thing for humans to do), but I think in some ways he's similar to me. He doesn't ask for much, just a little food and water and shelter. And he's satisfied with it. He doesn't like sticking around when there are guests over, but he's very friendly with me. Whenever I sit by the TV (usually to play a Gamecube game), Willy comes running so that he can sit in my lap. Of course he's mainly coming because he knows I'll pet him, but I love that kind of relationship more than the unconditional phoniness I get from certain members of my extended family. I probably wouldn't go to someone myself unless I thought I could get some pleasure out of being with them.
What does Willy choose to do with his life? Well, mainly sleep, to tell the truth. He has around fifty different "sleep spots" around the house. His favorites are the dollhouse above the TV (yes, inside the dollhouse), the side of the couch in the living room, the rocking chair by the computer, and on top of the clean laundry. When he feels like it, he goes outside to get some more activity. But when he doesn't, he doesn't. Sometimes, he just looks out windows to take in the "scenery". You may think it's ridiculous to assume that a cat would be able to appreciate a static view like a human can, but why would he do it if he weren't enjoying himself? I think cats can naturally enjoy their surroundings, as all the house cats we had acted the same way. There is much elegance in the life of a creature who never bothers himself with the artificial nuisances the Real World throws at him, who can enjoy life because there's no system telling him not to. Now if he could just use a Gamecube controller, his life would be perfect.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Golden Fun: The Lost Age
- Nothing interesting has ever happened in Nonazang.
- Nothing interesting is happening in Nonazang.
- Nothing interesting will ever happen in Nonazang.
Here's an interesting thing I've discovered. While I'm writing, I have no idea where I'm heading. I just improvise as I go along. But God always has a greater structure in mind for me, and this only becomes clear in retrospect. The 5-year time frame between second and sixth grade was clearly one "movement" of my life. After that, there is another five-year movement, which will soon be coming to a close. The former started out badly, got better up to the middle, and then got worse until the end, at which point I had become depressed to the point of wanting death. The current movement began as the high point of my life, and has been descending ever since in the Real World, while my love of videogame worlds was only hinted at in the first year and has been increasing ever since. In the middle, when I was applying for schools because the one I was in, Dvir yeshiva for Music and Art, was closing, I was asked for one application what I would like to change about myself for the future. My answer was: "I would like to be more serious." "Why?" they asked. "Because it's good to be serious," was the best response I had.
A month or two ago, I was looking for a book in my closet, when I came across my old Nonazang papers. I read them with pride and a little disbelief. I had completely forgotten that I was capable of such writing! It was then that I understood that the Mory of five years ago, who had not been training himself to fit into the Real World and only cared about his own imagination and quirkiness, was a much better person than me. And I have tried my best, in sharp contrast to the past five years, to not act my age. And you know what? It's much more fun. That didn't stop my second serious depression period from coming, but it gave me a way to deal with it. So what if I have no hope in the Real World? The Real World is my enemy. It always has been. I can't stop my miserable relationship with it, but I can ignore it as I did five years ago. And now I will succeed, because I have other worlds to occupy myself with.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Every structure should have an exit.
Today I have been trying to change the layout of this blog to better serve my posts. Everything I say is assuming that you have read my previous posts and understand as much as you need to know at that point of my strange, convoluted style of writing, my over-inflated ego, my lack of interest in the Real World, my philosophies regarding videogames, etc. Everything I write will be developed later on. So it makes not much sense to have the first thing a new Imaginary reader sees when he visits be the latest post. What I wanted to do was an interface that only shows you one post at a time, starting from the beginning, but lets you quickly and easily cycle through the posts. The site would use cookies to remember what the most recent post you read was, so you wouldn't need to go through all of them each time. In my mind, I was already working out all the finer details when my train of thought crashed into the Reality of Blogger. Everything is managed by Blogger without the user's intervention, so there's no way to even do something so simple as change the order that the posts are presented in, much less what I was planning. All it lets you do is modify the basic appearance of the blog, as if that really matters, not anything more important. At least I was able to improve the way comments are handled, but even many Imaginary Friends of mine will not be interested by my site the way it is currently laid out, because unless they've been following my blog from the beginning, they won't see the posts in their proper order.
But nothing on the internet can compare to the pesky rigidity of most of the Real World. If a person cannot cope with the unforgiving and arbitrary rules of capitalism, why can't they "quit the program"? It should be a basic human right for all societies to have at least one alternative to capitalism! But the architects of this structure, and all others like it for that matter, were not interested in serving the people, but imprisoning them. If you don't like this jail, you're free to commit suicide. Oh, right, I forgot, that's not a respected option! Society will try with every means at their disposal to stop you. That's the Real World. Lovely, ain't it?
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
I disagree with this post. (I also dislike its style, but that's a different issue.) Ocarina of Time's last dungeon would have been better if it had followed its structure better. (I'm pretty sure what I was referring to was how it brings back all the themes from the rest of the game.) The arguments made in this post are vague and unsatisfactory.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
My family
I find my family strange. Now, I think this is how many people feel about their families, but my case is a bit stranger, I think. Most people can explain what is so strange about their families, and can explain away the particular ways of thinking their family members have which particularly get on their nerves. But I don't understand how anyone in my family thinks. I do notice certain strong patterns in their behaviors, and this is good because it means I can sometimes have a good idea of what to expect from them even though I don't have any idea why they do what they do. I am told that family is important, so I might as well describe my family members to you. But I can't guarantee that anything I say about them is correct, because I am basing these descriptions on my own impressions of my family, which as you should have gathered by now is a bit muddled.
My father is a doctor and is often out at work. I don't mind this at all, because it means I can play games, watch TV shows on my computer, watch movies on my computer, write on forums, write on my blog, and generally have a good time. When he comes home, fun is the first thing to go. He has a lot of unspoken rules which he would like to enforce. One of these unspoken rules is that any fun is forbidden for prolonged periods, where "prolonged periods" is defined as more than two minutes and seven seconds. Oh, and fun is forbidden in the morning for any period of time. And when I am having fun, I may not get too involved in it so as not to give the impression that I am enjoying myself to an unhealthy degree. Failure to comply with these or any of the other 92 unspoken rules lead to punishment. Punishment consists of having my father's face three quarters of a centimeter from my eyes as he recites the unspoken rule I have violated in louder and louder tones, plus having to suffer my father's wrath. This consists of any punishment my father thinks of once he has lost his temper. The goal is to instill respect for my father and more importantly, respect for discipline. Yes, my father upholds the time-honored tradition of the disciplinarian, trying to prove to himself he is a good parent by making the children fear him. I'm always glad to see him get out of the house.
My mother is a lawyer. No, not that kind of lawyer, because she wouldn't hurt a fly if it were jumping up and down on her head along with all its fly friends. To tell the truth, she never wanted to be a lawyer, but her parents did. To the best of my knowledge, she has never in her life done anything to please herself, instead trying to please others. She says that her parents weren't happy about her marrying a religious man, but I suspect she was just trying to make him happy. She can't stand the idea of having fun, because it's simply not productive. So she will go to great lengths to give herself as much work and little fun as possible, even though she wants everyone to know she hates it. Yes, she complains every so often about how no one helps her in the house, but I'm convinced she'd be very disappointed to have someone else do housework for her. It would make her feel inadequate. Since I am not one to argue with something like that, I sit and play games while she works. Her job is writing things that the lawyers who actually do do something will use, and she does this over the internet, so she stays at home all the time. She seems to have only two things in her life that she enjoys: chatting with all the neighbors, and Shabbat (Saturday), when she can sit down and read the newspaper. As a parent, she's not as good as my father but much more likeable. She tries to prove to herself that she's a good parent by being as nice to us as possible, which is always nice for us, at least in the short term. I think that she actually can't stand me but she forces herself to because I'm family and family is said to be so important. What she doesn't like about me is that I'm so abnormal, whereas she has learned over the course of her life to put up with normality.
My older brother Benjy (or Ben, as he since recently calls himself) is the rebel, but he never allows himself to notice that he's rebelling. He is a tremendous rationalizer, thanks no doubt in some degree to his practice in debating. (He was on the Israeli young debating team and went to international competitions, which he did well in.) I respect him more than anyone else in my family because of this skill. The only trouble is that he seems to get the end result of his rationalization mixed up with the actual cause of what it was he was rationalizing. He is an atheist, and says our rituals are silly. That's fine by me, although I completely disagree with him, because it leads to some very interesting arguments. My parents hate getting into arguments with him, in part because they almost always lose, in part because they don't know how to enjoy it. He's in America now, at Boston University, and I'm not really keeping in touch with him. When he left, I wrote him an artistic goodbye note which perfectly summed up my feelings about his leaving, which I am positive he never understood and took to be gibberish. I have very few interests in common with him. TV shows, maybe certain movies, and that's it. I tried to get him interested in videogames, but he didn't care. Except for a few games which are hardly masterpieces but are pretty fun nonetheless- Commandos 1&2, Splinter Cell. I could rarely talk to him because I wanted to talk about videogames and he really really didn't. But my interests are somewhat limited.
And then there's me. I won't go on in length, because you already should have gotten a decent sense of what I'm like. But I will say that I am by far my favorite member of the family.
My little sister Miriam bothers me somewhat. I think she's fairly normal for a teenaged girl, which is to say that I find her shallow and irritating. For the most part, I ignore her and she comments on what a moron I am. I tried to get her interested in Zelda and failed. But she did like the game Yoshi's Island, so I keep trying to introduce her to new games in hope that I will eventually be able to share one of my favorite games with her. Every time she gets bored or gives up or just generally does not notice the beauty of the game. I think she finds my habit of trying to get her to play games detestable, but that's never stopped me.
Finally there's Dena, who reminds me more than anything of my grandmother on my father's side. She is somewhat bossy, but I think she's always trying to act as "normal" as possible. She does occasionally act a little weird, and I like her for that. She often gets very aggravated at me at how little common sense I have, and I sometimes find this bewildering, sometimes amusing. I think she loves Benjy more than any of us. As far as games, she plays Mario Party with her friends and isn't really good enough to play anything else.
The thing that bothers me most about my family is that there is not one person in it who can appreciate The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When you play a game that good, you naturally want to share it with someone, but there is no one here who cares. Anyhow, that's my family. But I may be completely wrong.
3 Comments:
- said:
-
I really am in no state to argue with you about your family members & to a certain extent you did a great job (definitely an entertaining one)- but to call Miriam shallow is like to call her a rabid cow- there's NO truth in, around, or even near it…
lol, & you mused have a wonderful family if what bothers you most about them is that they can't appreciate Zelda. - Mory said:
-
It's amusing to see that Miriam has a loyal defender. My comments are based on my own personal experiences. In those experiences I have never, not even once, had the perception that Miriam is shallow and pretentious challenged by her own behavior. On the other hand, I have been very clear about not understanding my family, especially in this post, so I could be missing the truth.
I suppose you have a point about my family as a whole, though. While you might not see the importance I attribute to being able to share Zelda, there is certainly something to be said for their all-around inoffensiveness. - Mory said:
-
By the way, I wouldn't say Miriam is a rabid cow because that claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. She has none of the visual characteristics of a cow, does not moo, and has not bitten at any time I can clearly recall in years.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
The cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise
In the meantime, I'll be watching BSG. I've been downloading copies of the British broadcasts off the internet, since we don't have a working TV and it's not on any stations here in Israel anyway. Okay, sue me. Anyhow, every single episode is fantastic. The first season ends in a two-parter which is without a doubt the most artful hour and a half of TV I've ever seen, in any genre. I cannot recommend this series enough. If any of you IFs has a TV, watch this show. If you can't, then tape it. Or watch a rerun. But watch it in order from beginning to end, if you can.
However, I would still like to see something made of Trek. Its universe has become so rich thanks to all the development it's gotten over the years, that it would be a terrible waste not to use it. Obviously, what I'd like most is a new iteration in some interactive Form, but I doubt this will ever happen. In general, TV shows are thrown to the worst teams in the Game Industry for them to feed on. The trouble is that the decision to make these shows into games is not made by talent but by businessmen. There is a little hope on the horizon for interactive adaptations of movies, as the genius Michel Ancel (Rayman 2, Beyond Good & Evil) is making a game based on Peter Jackson's King Kong remake. If this goes well, there is a slight possibility (okay, very slight) that it will set a precedent for games to come. But in the field of TV show adaptations, there is not even that faint glimmer. So a Trek game is not on my wish list. They'd probably just make it into an action game as they always have. (Note the irony.) No, it should be a TV series, but if they're already starting from scratch, they might as well go in a different direction. The ensemble cast concept has been done to death. How about making a show about one individual? As long as the Star Trek universe is utilized, and utilized well, and the show is entertaining, I'll be happy.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Mark Ecko, welcome to the Game Industry
Here is an excellent capitalist, who seems to understand the common man, and doesn't give a damn about gamism as long as it makes him money. I don't know what's sadder- his idea that this infinite area for artistic potential should be reduced to an assembly-line set of rules designed to squeeze as much money out of the average idiot as possible, or the thought that those fools will buy his junk, encouraging other Industry heads to listen to what he has to say over the gamists' inspiration.
You know, the name "Ecko" is quite appropriate. He doesn't have any voice of his own, ideas that he personally would like, he just echoes society. But echoes don't last long. When society gets bored, the fad that he has started will not hold any interest anymore. Since his list of rules doesn't require that the games be artistic, they will not be able to fall back on being good games. And so he will go on, changing with society, creating nothing worthy of being kept. I really hope he can't make a successful game.
2 Comments:
- said:
-
How so very true. Your statemnet is agreeable in every sense of the word. Keeping LESS people like him in 'gamism'(im still not quite used to the term..) should be beneficial in the cause of games finally rising to a point where it is considered a valid art form by the world.
visit me: http://uselesscamouflage.blogdrive.com/ - Mory said:
-
That's an interesting way of looking at it, which I hadn't considered. I wasn't thinking of how the world would react to videogames, but rather how much potential there is for great games. I guess the two are related, though.
Semantics
" 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - - that's all.' "
-Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
Another thing which I should explain: When I say "Form," (as I did in the last paragraph) I'm referring to any form of either art or entertainment, interactive or noninteractive or anything in between, because theoretically all forms of art and entertainment are encompassed in gamism. Okay, I'll back up a little. Here's a riddle I love asking: Say you have an electronic piano which is plugged into a video game console which is plugged into a TV. In the console is a program which reads sheet music (which either is on the disc or needs to be downloaded off the internet). This program keeps track of where you are in the music as you play it. This music program is a videogame, where the player is responding to symbols on the screen with his controller, which happens to be an electronic piano. Before you say that this isn't really a videogame, consider that Dance Dance Revolution is pretty much the same, with a special controller with which you must respond to on-screen symbols at the right time. The only substantial difference is that music, being around for millennia, has reached a stage where it allows for a lot of depth.
A second example: you have a VR headset, and are strapped into a machine that tracks every movement you make, and allows you to run in place, jump, etc. Now run a sports game- say, soccer. This will be practically indistinguishable from the real thing. Now, as I've said in a previous post, this is sort of a waste of money, but you have admit this is a possible game. (In this example, the movement machine is your controller, and the headset is the screen.) This shows that interactive entertainments such as sports will also theoretically be part of gamism, when sooner or later the technology necessary to create these experiences becomes available.
Finally, I'll take a noninteractive Form- movies. If a movie were made in the format of a videogame console (very easy), you could put it in your console, watch it on the TV, and use the controller as a remote control. This, too, is contained in gamism.
All in all, Gamism is defined as containing both all of Art and all of Entertainment, converted into a digital format. By my definition, a videogame is any member of gamism.
Another phrase I like to use is "Impatient Phoenix," which I use mainly to refer to Nintendo's latest efforts. A pheonix is a bird which dies and is reborn from the ashes. An Impatient Pheonix kills itself early so that it can be born again, its favorite part of life. I think this is a bad idea, because it can never get past infancy if it gets into this routine. This problem is called Impatient Pheonix Syndrome (IPS). Since Nintendo has been calling their DS a "third pillar" next to Gamecube and Game Boy Advance, and since Nintendo's lineup for it seems based on IPS, the Nintendo DS shall be called the Pillar of the Impatient Phoenix, at least until Nintendo stops killing itself.
For now - - that's all.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Sports games
I've never understood the appeal of modern sports videogames. Every year, a new edition is released which has, every time, a more powerful graphics engine and updated player stats. And sometimes, there will be some advance in the control so that you can play a more realistic game more easily. Notice anything in common with these updates? They all serve only to bring the game closer to realism, the ultimate goal. I don't know about you, IFs, but to me this seems ridiculous. Why put so much time, money, and effort into the technology that will bring sports a little bit closer to real sports, when we already have real sports without the technology?! Is it so hard to pick up a ball, walk outside, and [gasp] play the real game? The kind of realism you get that way is just astounding. Plus, it's a hell of a lot cheaper. But these imitators continue to sell in outrageous numbers year in, year out, for reasons I cannot fathom. Here is the second greatest and by far the most flexible medium for art in the whole of human history, and it is trapped in an Industry which promotes mimicry over creativity; an Industry thanks which the most successful game form of all is sports games. Pathetic, isn't it?
From a capitalist viewpoint, this is great. The average Joe sportsfan (read: "sucker") seems to be content with getting nothing more than a gimmick for his 50 bucks. Whoever figured this out is a genius at ripping people off. For the uninformed customer the words videogame and gimmick are practically synonymous, so he will be very satisfied by what he is getting. And so he will buy the same game year after year after year, the same game he could play for himself -and probably does- by picking up a ball, with the same athletes he could see for real -and probably does- by turning on his TV. He'll keep buying it over and over, because his expectations for sports games have been defined by the people who are selling him the game, and they don't have anything to gain (except for an insignificant thing called quality) for making those expectations high. If they were to let the consumer know that he'd have more fun if they were less interested in realism and more interested in letting him have fun, then they'd have to be creative, because their consumers would demand it. And if you're the head of a big business in the Game Industry, you feel much safer knowing that all you need to make a big profit each year is copying reality better, and not improving the game.
Once upon a time, there was a company that set out to make good games. While companies on the other side of the world tried to make games as banal, as familiar as possible, they went entirely in the other direction, making games that were first and foremost good games. So I don't know how to take this announcement:
Nintendo® Pennant Chase Baseball brings video game play to a new level of excitement and reality with fan-favorite players and teams... Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball, developed by Exile Interactive and Nintendo, includes players from every Major League Baseball® team. Players will be able to compete in all 30 current Major League™ ballparks, as well as in a few from the past. To ensure a completely authentic experience, the game has been licensed by Major League Baseball Properties, the Major League Baseball Players Association and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum®, with statistics and ratings provided by STATS, Inc... Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball will feature new game modes that combine the authenticity of Major League Baseball with the great game play that consumers have come to expect from Nintendo.Which is it, excitement or reality?! Is this Nintendo selling out, or are they really working to make this, as they claim, "the great game play that consumers have come to expect from Nintendo"? I have extremely mixed feelings on this. For one thing, it is artistically wrong and destroys Nintendo's integrity. But on the other hand, it makes Nintendo money. So there will be one of two possible outcomes: 1. Nintendo will have more money to make the artistically honest games I've come to expect from them. 2. Nintendo will realize that they can make much more money from artistically dishonest games and switch sides. The way Nintendo is positioning the DS has me inclined to believe the latter. So the question on my mind is: Which game is Nintendo playing?
1 Comment:
- Mory said:
-
Well, as it happened, this game was never released- Nintendo must have had second thoughts. Good for them.
Monday, January 24, 2005
The elusive key to longevity, Part 1
When I first played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I was convinced that it was a classic which would be playable for a very long time. That conviction has deteriorated rapidly with each successive playthrough. I find that each time I play, I enjoy it less than I did the time before, and now it seems the only enjoyment I can get from the game is watching other people play and imagining what kind of experience they must be going through. The other day, I tried starting the game again, got up to Windfall Island, and turned it off because of boredom, because it felt so old. I still like the characters, the art style, and to some degree the story, and the game is just dripping with personality. The first time I played, I was blown away. But for some reason, all that I liked about the game has disappeared.
In sharp contrast stands Metroid Prime. The first time I played it, I considered it a very good game, but nothing spectacular. This is because I had yet to internalize the revelation that it was for me- that the point (in this particular case) was not the gameplay, but the environment. The second time, I was already used to the interface, and I knew what to expect from the gameplay, so I was blown away by the beauty of Tallon IV. But my appreciation of the game didn't end there, as I find that each time I come back I seem to enjoy it even more than the time before. Counterintuitively, my familiarity with the game world enrichens the experience of exploration rather than trivializing it.
I wondered if the problem with The Wind Waker was an inherent flaw in Zelda games in general, so I started up Ocarina of Time. I didn't even need to get into the first dungeon to realize that it was infinitely more playable than the newer game. Immediately I was reminded subconsciously of why I loved the game so much to begin with. My familiarity with the game (having already played it countless times) does not enhance the experience ala MP, but I don't think it seriously detracts from it either. In trying to explain to myself the clear distinction I have between the two Zelda games, the best I can do is that OoT is more subtle. But I'm sure that's not it, and besides, that's a pretty vague assessment. So I turn the problem over to you, in the hopes that you will be able to make sense of what I cannot. Why does Metroid Prime get better with age, and why does The Wind Waker get worse, while Ocarina of Time seems to stand still?
Oh, no. Conflicted about the blog? Already?!
1 Comment:
Friday, January 21, 2005
Myst and Mirages
"Oh, by the way, thanks for freeing me from the prison in which I would have been stuck for all eternity if not for you."
[continues scribbling in his book casually as if nothing has happened]
"Oh, and I don't have any reward for you."
[more scribbling]
"I'll need your help in the sequel to rescue my wife from another world, after which I'll still have nothing to offer you in return. Bye now."
In parallel, I've been working (in the so-called "Real World") on a musical composition I started nearly a year ago. It started out (back then) when my composition teacher, very professional and also a very nice guy, advised me to write a piece based on a dodecaphonic (serial music) theme. If you're not familiar with that style of composition, then a little extra knowledge can't hurt: Arnold Schoenberg, a 20th century composer, invented serial music after having completely done away with the tonal system which music had always been based on. He knew that a new discipline of music was required to give music better structures, so he devised a method of composition, where the musical theme would be composed of all twelve possible notes in a specific order. Okay, that's a little too much- I'm getting bored myself. Anyhow, I quickly came up with a theme which not only follows the laws of serial music strictly, but sounds tonal. I liked that, because I've always liked tonal music more than atonal music anyway. Then I expanded on it into a very short piece of only around half a page in a way that resembled a Bach fugue- the theme weaved in and out of itself in the various voices. I put in the theme's opposite order, and the theme's "opposite" theme, and the opposite order of the opposite theme, having all these weave in and out of each other, and somehow managed to make it sound nice despite its complexity. I was so proud of myself, I could have valiantly declared it a triumph for the spirit of mankind, the symbol of man making beauty of meaningless but complex (in a fun way) systems, etc. Of course my teacher didn't like it. He said, "It's nice, but I feel that this should be the fourth variation!" In other words, it didn't have a satisfying beginning. Undeterred, I set to work on another page to precede it, this time using a more simple harmony to not only provide a nice contrast to my original page, but also to feel more like the beginning of a piece and less like an exciting climax. I now had a nice short piece, with a beginning and an ending, and a nice symmetry because I had designed the new page to be similar in structure to the old one despite being completely different in style. I took it to my composition teacher, who said, "It's nice, but I feel this should be the tenth variation!" I was afraid that if I wrote ten new beginnings I'd find myself on the 957th variation, so I scrapped what I had done and started over on an altogether more ambitious piece.
I later named that piece "Variations on V.O.V.", and that should give you a concept of how complex and precise the structure is. ("V.O.V." stands for "Variations on V.O.V.", in case you didn't figure it out.) Although it frequently makes complete changes in styles and musical disciplines and is constantly (I hope) surprising the listener, it actually follows a rigid path in which the composition is made up of seven variations on the piece itself. To clarify, the structure of each of the seven variations is based carefully on the overall structure of the entire piece, which as I said contains those seven variations. I finished up four or five variations in an early draft (knowing, of course, what the complete structure would be like), and brought it to my composition teacher. I'm sorry, Imaginary Friends, but I don't have a quote of what he said because I don't remember precisely what it was, but the gist was that he thought it could be much better if I just added a little bit here, and removed that part there, and shortened this thing, and lengthened that thing- i.e. destroyed the extremely delicate structure I had set up. Not to insult my teacher- I'm sure he didn't realize how much damage he'd be doing to the piece's integrity. But he clearly didn't see the brilliance of the structure which I had spent weeks working on perfecting, if he saw the structure at all.
Around a week ago, I got back to work because I had found out that I might be able to play an original piece for my piano exam instead of a horrid -no, repulsive piece of junk of some modernist Israeli "composer", and I use the term loosely. I refined some parts that I hadn't felt worked well even when I wrote them, corrected one tiny mistake (it was only one measure) and completed another half a section. I brought it to my piano teacher, who has won many international awards for her playing, who had nothing to say about its structure, because she didn't even notice it. She told me that she is a pianist, not a composer. To which I wanted to yell at her, "And what exactly are you playing on the piano if not music which you are capable of understanding?" But of course I didn't, despite my general lack of manners, because I understood that she genuinely had no idea what effort I had put into it.
Now, you might ask, why am I writing about Myst and Variations on V.O.V. in the same post? To which my answer is, I'm writing this, not you, and who do you think you are to tell me what is connected and what isn't?! I don't need to justify it to you! I can write a post about two unconnected subjects if I want, and I certainly don't need to explain the connection to people who don't see it themselves! Ha!
Getting back to the subject, when I saw how little reward I was getting for my hard effort, I started thinking to myself that if life were released as a $50 videogame, it would be universally abhorred, because it would be quite a lousy game. Let's compare Earth and Myst, shall we?
In Myst, every book you come across is filled with interesting information. Moreover, you always know that that information will come in handy sooner or later.
In the real world, every book that is shoved down your throat in school was written by people with PhD's in Boredom Development. Moreover, you always know that the information contained in it will come in handy on the exam which will be designed only to discover whether you have digested the material so well that it is imprinted on your brain, and you are guaranteed that after that it will never be useful again. Ever.
In Myst, your time is spent walking around, enjoying the scenery, learning about the areas, and being mentally stimulated. This is fun.
In school, your time is spent sitting in one place, staring at your watch, having a "disciplinarian" spout out gibberish you are meant to recite back to them later on (so reducing your mind to the usefulness of a tape recorder is advised), and watching your brain cells melt away. This is boring, which is good because it prepares children for the rest of life, which will be much worse.
In Myst, all effort you put in is rewarded.
In the real world, effort is useless.
In Myst, you have a goal which is attainable but challenging.
In the real world, any long term goals are unattainable, so you must become more flexible and learn to follow the singular boring path the world has prepared.
...And so on. Is it just me, or is Myst more real than the real world?
Thursday, January 20, 2005
This is the first blog post I ever wrote.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time, but you can clearly see the seeds of the craziness to come in the red text here.
The "Next Post" buttons at the end of each post will allow you to read the blog in its original order.
Who am I?
Back to 2010
Hello. This is my blog. I don't actually expect anyone to read this, but as long as you're here, I ought to get started. So, um, hello. As I said, this is my blog. And I, uh, didn't expect you to be here. Should I get started? Or maybe I should just ramble on a little longer, or-
Disclaimer: The writer of this blog does not take any responsibility for extreme boredom, headaches, dizziness, nausea, mental stimulation, comas, or any other unpleasant symptoms caused by the reading of his posts. You come at your own peril. Leave now. Don't say you weren't warned. We mean it. Go now-
Okay, okay, that's enough. You're scaring away all the imaginary readers! And beside, my posts are harmless! They'd never do anything like tha-
Disclaimer: There may be complete lies in this blog.
Oh, be quiet!
Thank you. I would like to assure you, Imaginary Friends, that I will always try my hardest to be honest. Apart from that, I can't guarantee the quality of this blog. I'll tell you what- why don't you expect that everything I write will be the worst garbage you've ever had the misfortune to read. That way, you won't be disappointed. :)
Actually, I'm just writing this blog for myself. I've got so much nonsense to spout out, but no one who will put up with it, so this seems like a good idea. I don't seriously expect any real people to put up with me anywhere in the world, but that's okay. My Imaginary Friends all over the world will do nicely, as will this wall here. Hey, that's not a bad idea. Wait a minute...
[three hours pass]
Oh, are you still here? I've just come back from the most pleasant conversation with a wall. I discussed with it my theories on videogame design, my philosophies and my emotions. The wall has unfortunately broken down as a result, but I am feeling much better. I haven't had anyone listen to me so carefully in months! Such a shame it had to end so quickly.
Who am I, you ask? (Okay, so you didn't, but let's say you did.) My name is Mordechai, but you can call me Mory. I am an Orthodox Jew, but I go to a secular school despite the very large number of religious schools here in Israel. I am now in the 12th and final grade, but I haven't actually learned anything in the miserable decade I've spent trapped in the school system. As a matter of fact, I'm not making any effort right now, even though all my tests are coming up and I'm sure to fail them. Somehow, they don't seem important. And despite this feeling, I am at a very good school - the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where I study (or at least am supposed to be studying) not just all the mundane subjects which other schools teach but also mundane musical studies. This, despite my not being very interested in music. Oh, and I compose. I have also been playing the piano for years despite never putting any effort into it. I'm not a good pianist mind you, not even good enough to play my own pieces properly, but somehow it was good enough to get me into this school, which I accepted despite my lack of interest because they'd let me in.
My class is very interesting. It is effectively split into three groups. The members of each group are friends with other members of that group, but there's virtually no contact between separate groups, despite going to most of the same classes. It's not that they dislike the other groups, more a sort of lack of desire to realize that the other groups exist at all. First, there are the dancers, who seem to be interested only in the shallowest things. Second, the musicians, who don't seem to be interested in anything at all. The third group is me.
I like watching the dancers, and I like listening to music, but my love is for videogames, which I believe encompass the future of all of art-
Disclaimer: The writer of this blog will often enter mind-numbing passages and ramblings on the gloriousness of videogames. This is not enjoyable. Escape now, while you still can!!
So where was I? Oh, right, I was giving my boring autobiography, but I think that's pretty much it. If all the contradictions I've mentioned prevent you from getting a clear idea of who I am, I don't blame you. In every group I belong to, I'm apart from the crowd. So who am I, in a nutshell?
I am not.
Welcome to my blog. It may be incomprehensible, it may be meaningless, it may be a mess, it may be selfish, arrogant and self-degrading all at once, but- but....
You know what, let's just leave it at that. Welcome to my blog.
1 Comment:
I cared. I naively imagined that you weren’t blogging because you were busy accomplishing some of your crazy ambitions. If giving up is a sign of maturity, who wants to be mature? You have accomplished some of your ambitions – notably Gamer Mom, although that was before the system stopped working (the end of part 3?). Admittedly, some of the posts after that were a cause for concern, but I believed that you would overcome those problems and thought that they were possibly exaggerated to make the blog more dramatic. And then came the GDC poster session, which dispelled any worries I had that you had given up on your gamistic ambitions. (Even though I am sceptical about how interesting a full game using your dynamic interfaces would be (outside of character interaction, for which I think they work brilliantly) (but that is separate topic)) I imagined that the success of Gamer Mom might have helped you to externalize pressure somewhat (by you thinking that the people who were interested in that would be interested in other things you did).
I, also, sometimes have problems getting myself to do things; including writing, as evidenced by the lateness of this comment.
Post a Comment
Close comments