“Man, when is this guy gonna stop bitching about work?” is probably what you’re likely to say at the end of this post. But I bitch because I need a place to vent, and this is as good a place as any.

I’m sure it’s something that’s common in any job, in any field, under any circumstances. But having good ideas, and then getting them shot down, I don’t think, ever becomes any less disappointing to anyone. Particularly when you see someone who you think is … well, incompetent might be too strong a word. Let’s just say, “useless” instead, having their ideas promoted by the person in charge. Why? I can’t say. I simply don’t understand it.

Thing is, a friend of mine is on the design team this year, and there’s at least one major sort of system-idea that he liked, and promoted to the team. It apparently got killed because it was “too complex.” From a design standpoint? It requires tuning basically one more variable per interaction, which is one *less* variable per interaction than there were two years ago. From an implementation standpoint, given that I’m the person who deals with implementing stuff like this, *I* could implement it *by myself* in less than a month. Probably get the basic workings up in less than two weeks.

I think the thing that’s really frustrating is getting the idea tanked on the notion of complexity, by people who have no FUCKING CLUE how complex it is to implement something like this. Similarly, the designers are talking about dealing with music in the game, and they’re *not talking to the audio people* and proposing what I think are really pretty idiotic, stripped down versions of what’s possible, because again, of some notion of complexity that they’re NOT WILLING TO TALK TO EXPERTS ABOUT.

Argh. This is literally about as frustrating as work has ever been. The hardest problems we had to deal with in the code were *nothing* compared to how irritated I’m getting by people talking about certain aspects of the design even remotely within earshot. It’s like listening to a bunch of people with bags over their heads, talking about how fucking great the view is.

Yes, I realize there are probably aspects to the design of these things I’m not understanding. Maybe. I dunno – I was in a meeting the other day to vet the complexity of a given idea (which was really fucking weird, because that particular concept fell totally out of anything I ever deal with), and it really just seemed like it was an issue of, “Well… that *seems* difficult…” and not, “Hey, you know what you’re talking about. Can we do this?”

If you’re a designer, maybe I’m just fucking crazy, but part of your job is to get expert opinions. Understand what can and can’t be done, and fucking *push the envelope* given the resources you have. Can you do something interesting that might be a touch risky, but have a backup plan as well? Or should we just scrap the whole goddamn idea and do the trivially easy thing which is boring as fuck?

Maybe it’s the 10 month dev cycle, maybe it’s just a lack of vision that’s driving the “let’s be lameasses” approach, but it’s fucking frustrating, given that the *potential* for some really good, really systematic tweaks that are possible only now, that the designers are letting slip by for good.

Driving me fucking bonkers.

Is www.google.com the new Library of Alexandria? I wonder what the volume of raw content on the internet is, and whether, when properly filtered to be accessible, how it compares with other repositories of knowledge? Without Google, or a similar resource, the internet would essentially be unmitigated, unusable chaos. But with something like this, the accessibility to the common person skyrockets, and it’s like everyone has access to the most vast store of knowledge ever. But then again, it’s also the biggest volume of pointless, useless crap ever assembled throughout all of history. So… yeah. I wonder if there’s some manner by which future societies will find the remains of the content that we have access to now, and wonder what our civilization was like?

Apologies for the first paragraph of the last post. I realize that yeah, that’s exactly how I argue as well – the problem is that the blog/counterblog means of discussion really isn’t condusive *to* discussion, because it’s really not. Frankly, I find it extremely frustrating, because there’s no ability to clarify tone in “real time” or even clarify meaning. As a result, you get someone formulating entire arguments on points that are taken the wrong way, and then you’ve gotta respond to them, which is a pain, because now rather than responding to a “blurb” you’re responding to a whole goddamn post. It’s frustrating, and I got frustrated. Apologies.

*sigh*

The style of “no, YOU’re wrong,” argument can get kind of irritating. Particularly when you’re nominally arguing with someone you’re talking to as a friend, a sense of condescension can quickly sour one’s desire to continue a conversation. Not that I’m not guilty of it myself, but that was my immediate reaction after reading the last post.

Anyway:

Chaplin is widely credited as bringing a sense of narrative convention to film. I’m talking about the birth of film, around 1894, with “The Sneeze.” Then, we’ve got Chaplin, let’s just take The Gold Rush, at 1925. Or, let’s say Birth of a Nation, in 1915. These movies basically defined the “vocabulary” of film. Chaplin, in particular, essentially defined *how* to tell a story in film. Prior to Chaplin, most movies were simply perceived differently. They weren’t considered “high art,” and even Chaplin wasn’t considered “high art” until much later. The point is that the perception of film was purely as lowbrow entertainment well after twenty years after its conception as a medium.

For games, we’re past the 20 year mark, but at the same time, we’re still creating the technology that’s used to actually make games, so it’s a little trickier. I agree that most *content* is, by and large, unworthy of critical consideration. But the problem is that the content isn’t the be-all end-all of what we can talk about, in terms of gaming. There is potential area for legitimate, “highbrow” discussion of the medium in both the content, and the mechanism of the medium.

The point being, the *perception* of film in its first 20 years, and the perception of games, in their first 20 years, has been pretty similar. Same with comic books. The mass media *still* doesn’t believe that comics are a viable medium for high art, despite obvious examples like Maus, Astro City, The Watchmen, and the like.

In terms of the “academia” statement, the point was simply that no one talks about how The Sneeze influenced the history of film except academics, whose field of expertise is solely film. There’s nobody talking about even something like City Lights, which has some of the first close-up shot-reverse-shots used as narrative tools, except people who analyze film for a living. It doesn’t matter to most people, and no one’s discussing it outside academics. Similarly, there’s a lot of stuff that’s being discussed at places like MIT’s Film and Media Studies program as it relates to videogames in a similar fashion. But I guess this is all a digression anyway.

Doesn’t matter, though – your notion is that games attract the criticism and discussion they supposedly deserve, because by and large, what’s generated is garbage. I would suggest that games are an immature medium, and due to its potential, deserves *better* criticism and discussion than they currently receive. Clearly, we’re not going to agree, and moreover, there’s no *point* in even really discussing in in this format, which is really disjointed and irritating.

Now you’re just being ridiculous. Of *course* the relative newness of games as a medium matters. Was “The Sneeze” an involving emotional experience? No. Were the Keystone Kops? No. Was *anything* in film worth discussing outside academia for the first thirty years of the medium? No.

How ’bout books? Well, it’s hard to say, because Shakespeare had thousands of years of written word to lean on before he came along.

Games are a totally new paradigm. Throughout their history so far, they’ve been like books, they’ve been like movies, and they’ve even been like comic books. And it’s not until Half Life came along that really showed what games could be like if they took their storytelling, and made it game-specific. And like Chaplin, very few people have been able to wrap their heads around what Valve is doing that makes their storytelling fundamental better than anyone else in the medium, currently.

But the issue here is one of maturity, and perception. Early on in the life of movies, the perception was that they were entertainment, not art. Something to keep the masses entertained for cheap. People didn’t believe they could convey emotional content, they didn’t believe that they could be involving and thoughtful. They thought that movies were a means of keeping the laborers from realizing how crap their lives were by providing a funny moving picture show.

The point is that games as a medium are so different, and have such vast potential, that very few people have even started to scratch the surface of what kinds of involvement a player can have with a game. The fact that most games are commercial exercises in finding the lowest common denominator doesn’t make the *medium* lesser.

I think the notion that most videogames are “pretty fucking stupid” is probably true, if I have to sit there and think about it. Though a game like GTA or Knights of the Old Republic may spawn discussions about morality, or the Sims might make you question what you value in life, and what makes you happy, or Rez might be a captivating and immersive experience, yeah, most games, most of the time, are pretty insipid. I’m not going to say that Doom 3 is highbrow, nor am I going to say that say, Rogue Ops is the pinnacle of the medium.

But I’d also say, then, that by that criteria, most books, most of the time, are “pretty fucking stupid,” and most movies, most of the time, are “pretty fucking stupid.” And if you’re going to apply the criteria equally, for every Memento, or In the Mood for Love, there’s a zillion Erasers, or Riding in Cars With Boys. For every Anna Karenina, there’s a hundred thousand Danielle Steele novels. For every White Album, there’s a million Oops… I Did It Agains. Most content that people generate, most of the time, is pretty fucking stupid. It’s business, or it’s hack art, or it’s failed art, or whatever. Most people aren’t capable of creating things that aren’t “pretty fucking stupid” by some people’s criteria.

For me, I find that for a medium that was created less than thirty years ago, games provide a unique and novel experience that other media fails to do. And movies, even, took until Chaplin came along before there was even a serious concept that dramatic narrative was a possibility in film. In comic strips, maybe Charles Schultz really dramatically illustrated what could be done with the medium, opening the way for someone like Bill Watterson. In comic books, Will Eisner paved the road for Frank Miller. But for every Watterson, there’s a hundred shitheads like Bil Keane. For every Eisner, there’s a thousand talentless hacks like Rob Liefeld.

But I’m finding that the statement that videogames are “pretty fucking stupid” to be extremely shortsighted. It’s not the medium is incapable of being more than “pretty fucking stupid,” it’s that every medium is full of dreck, and particularly, a medium like games, that was really heavily commercialized before it ever matured, and is by nature at this point, and extremely collaborative, expensive process… well, I was tempted to say that there might be a higher proportion of dreck than in other media right now. But look on the bookshelves. Look in the movie theaters, and on the DVD racks. Are games *really* any lower quality than either of what you’ll find in a generic Barnes and Noble?

Different, sure. Marketed differently, sure. But labelling the genre is a mistake – in my opinion, a tremendously shortsighted, limiting mistake.

http://anonymousblogger.blogspot.com/

This post is a “discussion” based on his Dec. 10th post on videogames. The comments section renders discussion so positively irritating that what would be a “comment” on his site will be a post here instead, to avoid me putting my fist through the monitor when it tells me a comment can only be 1000 characters long.

There was a review on IGN the other day, or some column, or some crap – written by the editor, that was wistful about the ’80’s – back then, you didn’t have to worry about graphics, so the discs were “packed with actual content.” I almost wrote him a really nasty letter explaining than in a medium as *visual* as videogames, that graphics *were* content. I think that that’s patently obvious these days. Yesterday, I was playing “Shadowman” on the Dreamcast. The gameplay was by and large, standard modern 3-D platform fare. At the time, the graphics were immersive, atmospheric, and creepy. Now, compared to games like Riddick and Halo 2, they look *awful*. As a result, the game is almost unplayable for me. The experience is essentially ruined, or it would take such a larger suspension of disbelief, that it fundamentally alters the experience. A similar argument could be made for all sorts of technical “non-gameplay” issues, like V-sync tearing, texture pop, bad MIP-mapping, jaggies, lag, poor frame rates, etc. – at some point, it becomes totally irrelevant what the core gameplay is. If a car as a 300 HP engine, and suspension tuned by Lotus, it doesn’t matter at all, if the wheels have been pulled from a horse-and-buggy cart.

I totally agree with your “hire non-idiots” perspective. The difference between the reviewers I like to read, and trust, isn’t that they write in an “immersive” fashion – it’s that they’re thoughtful and detailed about their reviews. Greg Kasavin believes games are worth higher discourse, and he makes an effort to bring it there. In contrast, the jackasses at IGN can barely string a sentence together without talking about polygonal breasts, and think that a 6 page review filled with crap writing is more relevant than a tight, well thought out 3 page review. Not all of Gamespot is as good as Greg Kasavin, but other writers, like Wagner James Au (who I often disagree with, but writes extremely thoughtful, well-written articles), or Stephen Kent (MSNBC’s game guy) are definitely in the same group.

Now, in regards to your comment about videogames being pretty stupid themselves, I’d disagree. I agree that by and large, there’s not a lot of really substantive writing in the majority of games, that there’s not a whole lot of “art” in the medium, when viewed from a holistic level. But (and I know you’ve heard this a zillion times), take something like Ico, take something like Rez, or even something like Prince of Persia.Are they uniformly “serious”? No. But to me, Rez is almost the apex of the “videogame experience” – it takes the interactivity of games, and applies it to stimulate almost every sense you have, and produces an experience that elicits some emotional reaction. Yes, I know there’s a huge argument to be made about the “emotional reaction” bit, but Rez, to me, is an *experience* that deserves higher discourse. It’s something that’s simply impossible to do in any other medium as yet.

Similarly, take Knights of the Old Republic. The plot twist in that game is so game-centric, and based around the sense of interactivity, that a similar plot twist in a movie would have lost most of its impact. There are things that games can do that no other medium can. There are games that push the boundries of the medium, and I think that those games deserve critical attention on par with the best that movie or book criticism has to offer. I’m not saying “film” or “literature” – I don’t intend to tie the level of discourse to the perceived “quality” of the examples of the medium. There are many intelligent, thoughtful discussions on “lowbrow” examples of the various mediums – I only hope the same will be said about games, and soon.

What the fuck is up with system fanboys? Why do I keep forgetting they exist? I haven’t thought about whether the GC is better than the xbox, or the PS2 in MONTHS, and I’d figured by now it was so patently obvious what the game system hierarchy was that the strengths and weaknesses of each were just obvious, and taken for granted.

But then they rear their ugly goddamned heads again.

I was looking up reviews on a game called “Pathway to Glory” for the N-Gage. Sure, the N-Gage is a pretty reviled piece of hardware, but Pathway to Glory is an extraordinary little game for it. Genuinely one of the better turn-based strategy games I’ve played, and tons of fun, to boot. So I’m wondering why the user reviews has only a 6.1/10, when I’d give it a 9.5/10, and figure average, it’d probably be around 8.5/10 at the worst. Well, one look at the voting breakdown and it’s obvious – a bunch of people – people who clearly can’t have played the game – gave it a 1/10. Why? Undoubtedly because it’s an N-Gage game, and no other reason. Absoulutely fucking stupid. But it reminds me why we have a President Bush nonetheless.

Cruel, cruel fate.

So, I’m being tapped as the OE in charge of one of the fundamental, new systems that’s being proposed for the next game. I’m flattered, and I think it’ll be a good opportunity. But of course, one of the people I’m forced to work with now is the person I mentioned in an earlier post, and every goddamn time I hear her voice, I want to stab my ears out with knives. It’s like listening to broken glass, if that makes any sense, and it makes me absolutely fucking miserable, every god damned second that passes.

Argh.

Suck it up, act professional, kick ass, and I suppose we see where things go from there. But good fucking grief. Fuck you, irony.

*sigh*

Windows leaking again tonight, which means I can basically kiss a good night’s sleep goodbye.

The dripping sound, even though I know there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it puts my stomach in knots, and keeps me miserable and at least marginally awake all night. This problem’s been present in the house since the beginning of the downstairs remodel, but sadly, went unnoticed until things started to get close to finished, when it became a tremendous pain in the ass to fix anything. It also came at a point when the original contractor and I had a falling out, because his work was incompetant bullshit, and he was overcharging me for substandard work. I cut him acres of slack, and he fucked me. [name removed] still owes me $700, and the fact that the windows are leaking is his fault. I wonder, sometimes, if I could sue him for damages – the $4K I’ve spent trying to get this problem fixed since, and the misery that it’s caused me every goddamned rainy night over the last year and a half. I know I probably can’t, because I did a really craptastic job documenting the work he did, and when and how he got paid for what. Still, I’d just like to see that fucker out of a job.

*sigh*

Not that it’ll fix anything. Two separate groups of people since have looked at the problem, and nominally, they’ve “guaranteed” their work, so it should end up ok, in theory, but I genuinely doubt either of them will go the distance. I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow, when Rod, the last guy to look at it, shows up. I’d been unable to get in touch with Jose, the other guy, but strangely, he showed up at my place the other day, and gave me his new phone number. So I’ll call him tomorrow, too, and see if that’ll sort things out somewhat.

Just fucking sucks. 2am, on a Wednesday morning, and I’m really tired, but totally unable to get to sleep.