Another cultural trend-spotting, behind the zeitgeist post here. Kind of in two parts, but there's enough crossover in context for me to not stretch it out to two posts.
I've watched exactly three films in the last... However many months. I think all the films I've watched have necessarily been at the cinema, because if we don't make time to go out and see a film, we don't watch one. I saw batman alone, dredd with bruv, and bond with the long-suffering. And what an interesting clutch of overlapping characters they are.
There's so much you could say about each one; Batman 3 was the first ever Christopher Nolan film you had to switch OFF your brain to enjoy; Dredd was great for the first act while it built the world, and was then just people shooting each other for 50 minutes; bond was just as heroically ludicrous and camp as Roger Moore at his banalist.
It's so weird how similar the three lead characters are. They're all orphan superheroes without a secret identity. I mean, technically batman is Bruce Wayne, but really he's just batman. 007 is James Bond, but who even is that? And as for dredd, well he's just a mask. Who knows what's underneath?
And all of them riff on being orphans. Dredd and Bond were targeted and raised in their roles from a young age, hence having such a deep loyalty and deep inhabitance of their role. Batman had a similar trauma but I think spent more time making himself than being molded.
I was worried about bond, you know. My overriding memory of the last brosnan film was of my absolute lack of desire at the prospect of watching it, met by the sheer joy of the crazy-stupid antics on screen. Oh, my heart bled at the idea of a 'dark and edgy reboot'. Why not just make a different spy story? Dark and edgy works with batman, another character with a similar flip-flopping between carry-on and po-faced pout. And yet in nu-bond 3, the po-facedness is done to a level that is itself camp. It has come full circle. Handing bond a gun (albeit a dredd-alike personalised one) and radio instead of a fancy secret gadget pack has become just as silly.
But by the end of the brosnan-era bond, they had rigid enough cliches to take risks in other areas. For instance, strong female characters. Dame Dench was M from the get-go of the 90s reboot of bond, but Die another day struck me because of the egalitarianism of the sex in it. Bond bedded exactly two women - both of whom were also spies. Halle Berry's character 'jinx' was so well received that a well-deserved spin off was planned (sadly junked by MGM in favour of the reboot). My point is bond was portrayed on a par with the ladies he was associated with, in opposition to the 'sexual conquest' style of previous iterations. And that's kind of gone.
Spoilers....
Roll on 2012 and, oh dear. Dench is killed off and replaced with Leonard Rossiter lookalike Fiennes, which wouldn't be a retrograde step if there wasn't a paucity of other females in the film. The only others were the Chinese girl, an utter victim who only exists in order to get shagged and then shot in cold blood, and miss moneypenny, who can't hack it in the field and takes a desk job. What a miserable bunch of characters.
There's not much to say about the other two films here, except that only dredd satisfyingly passes the bechdel test.
This is the death of pop-feminizm. This is what happens when people think that women were just something you needed to have around while people were actively complaining about representation of women, and then you can go back to business as usual and jobs for the boys.
Take CBBees, at the other end of the scale, a channel I have spent a lot more time with. Consider, CBBies shows where the only female role is a puppet:
Rhyme Rocket
Andy's Wild Adventures
Justin's House (on top of which, the puppet is mute. There used to be a minor live action female regular, who was ditched after the 1st series)
And consider the many other shows with a single male actor and several puppets/animations; Mr Bloom's Nursary, Kerwizz, Iconicles.
Other shows are just males: mostly Justin Fletcher's other two (one-man) shows, something special and Gigglebiz, but also Mr Maker.
Aside from the one-woman 'I Can Cook' (which suggests there'll soon be a 'I can do the household chores' aimed at girls too), all the other female-led or centric shows are SCOTCH. Nina and the Neurones, Wolly and Tig, Me Too, and Balamoray are all Scots shows. What a strange correlation.
I've missed out the pure cartoons here, but if you're not familiar with CBBies' output, this is pretty much it, these programmes on a loop every day forever. Women marginalised or substituted for puppets, children raised to see women around them but not on telly.
Anyway this has been sitting around for a couple of weeks and I'm done with it now.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
More thoughts about story telling in video games!
Yes! I asked for it: more of my thoughts on narrative structure in computer games!
I have been loving rogue-likes for some time now. I was all set to write up glorious praise for the purest game mechanics I have come across. Doom RL, FTL, desktop dungeons, even trying my hand at Nethack; these are games that keep plot minimal and give you the time to explore them fully. Their randomised levels, perma-death, and lack of quick save, mean you can't learn a route through them or play them by muscle memory; you've go to play them as games, accept you'll probably die somewhere along the short playthrough, but along the way you might unlock something else about the game on the way.
But something happened the other night; I was looking at the ftl wiki page, and I just got a bit bored of the ludicrously unlikely unlockables, as rewarding and enjoyable as they are. I've enjoyed ftl, in the casual way, but in order to really play it, I'd need to invest hours in it, same as a more serious game; rogue-likes are like casual games for hardcore gamers. And I can't claim to be that, anymore.
So instead i fired up Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the World. A complete avant-face which has done me wonders. I have utterly refound my love of narrative.
But before Cthulhu, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I finished playing it a bit of time ago having racked up far more hours playing it than necessary. It is a game, in many ways. A very simple mechanic ('hide') gets you from the start to the end of what is basically a three-act story.
When i finished Amnesia: The Dark Descent, my biggest thought at the end was "does that castle make physical sense?" It's more than a moot point. There's a lift that seems to plunge floor after floor, then in the dungeon you find yourself in, the sun streams in through from what looks like only two floors above. There are guest rooms which clearly occupy the same space. And in the depths of the castle there appears to be a cathedral, with infinitely deep floors and ceilings. Maybe it's meant to be a magic castle like the sword level in thief. But while these things break you out of the game, like grammatical errors in a novel, they don't affect the plot. I might explore these ideas later in another piece on architecture in video games.
The story is shuffled up, as the game begins at the start of act three: Daniel decides to kill Alexander and erases his memory as to why (this is not a spoiler, it's the setup). During the course of the game, the first two acts are related to us through the random notes and the pages of Daniel's diary he has for some reason scattered throughout the castle in chronological order. Plot aside, the game forgoes almost all interaction; it's really a variation of a first person adventure game, with very simple puzzles separated by intense fear. It, and Dark Corners... are both what I have come to think of as 'unteractive' games.
Unteractive games, like Dear Esther and Thirty Flights of Loving, are like promenade theatre. The action happens around you, envelopes you, although you don't do anything yourself to further it. In fact, a huge amount of games are already like this, they just hide the fact with fake interaction.
By fake interaction, I mean that you're not really physically engaging with the game. Your Portals and your Half-Lifes, just to stick to first person games, are interactive. Unless you do something, the game doesn't go anywhere. Thirty Flights and Esther are games that you don't do anything in, not that that's a criticism. But all you control is the pace the information is relaid to you at. It's a style of storytelling that has only previously existed in promenade theatre, as I say, in that that involves a journey, and a feeling of involvement for the audience that is really an illusion. Most games dress their lack of interaction by asking you to do something repetitive and meaningless while they feed you narrative. I'm glad some games have had the bravery to do away with that, and just present the narrative more directly, and calmly.
That said, I think more games could do with stripping out the interactive elements and going unteractive. That underwater shock game (whatever it was called) would have been much better if it had removed all the sleepwalking combat with the crazed survivors and just left you to explore a totally dead city, with the occasional and surprisingly violent encounter with a big daddy and little sister.
Amnesia and Dark Corners have a smattering of interaction, of the puzzle solving, graphic adventure type. But the puzzles virtually solve themselves and what really you have is a story that is being presented like a second person text; the puzzles just give you the impetus to explore the world more fully.
Thief was the first game I remember that presented stories as fragments scattered around an area, that you piece together in your mind. Actually that's not true, Looking Glass games used the technique throughout their career, and from the deserted magic school in Ultimate Underworld 2, to the logs left behind in System Shock, it is an excellent way to tell a tragedy. Most memorably, the live logs you receive as you rush to save some survivors, only to find a cortex reaver looming over their fresh corpses. So the part in Amnesia where you enter the wine cellar, to find the diaries of poisoned militia, is nothing new in style. It's part of a grand tradition of games that are like looking glass games.
So I'd consider an unteractive game to be one where your actions have no consequence to the plot, and the game is honest about that. Compare with interactive fiction, where the story actually changes depending on your decisions. Games like Torment and Deus Ex are about halfway between, because even if the overarching plot is the same, characters have different arcs and the details of the plot are different in different playthroughs.
I like unteractive games now. Suddenly, more than rogue likes. I've rediscovered stories and I love them; and I love this style of being fed a story.
I have been loving rogue-likes for some time now. I was all set to write up glorious praise for the purest game mechanics I have come across. Doom RL, FTL, desktop dungeons, even trying my hand at Nethack; these are games that keep plot minimal and give you the time to explore them fully. Their randomised levels, perma-death, and lack of quick save, mean you can't learn a route through them or play them by muscle memory; you've go to play them as games, accept you'll probably die somewhere along the short playthrough, but along the way you might unlock something else about the game on the way.
But something happened the other night; I was looking at the ftl wiki page, and I just got a bit bored of the ludicrously unlikely unlockables, as rewarding and enjoyable as they are. I've enjoyed ftl, in the casual way, but in order to really play it, I'd need to invest hours in it, same as a more serious game; rogue-likes are like casual games for hardcore gamers. And I can't claim to be that, anymore.
So instead i fired up Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the World. A complete avant-face which has done me wonders. I have utterly refound my love of narrative.
But before Cthulhu, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I finished playing it a bit of time ago having racked up far more hours playing it than necessary. It is a game, in many ways. A very simple mechanic ('hide') gets you from the start to the end of what is basically a three-act story.
When i finished Amnesia: The Dark Descent, my biggest thought at the end was "does that castle make physical sense?" It's more than a moot point. There's a lift that seems to plunge floor after floor, then in the dungeon you find yourself in, the sun streams in through from what looks like only two floors above. There are guest rooms which clearly occupy the same space. And in the depths of the castle there appears to be a cathedral, with infinitely deep floors and ceilings. Maybe it's meant to be a magic castle like the sword level in thief. But while these things break you out of the game, like grammatical errors in a novel, they don't affect the plot. I might explore these ideas later in another piece on architecture in video games.
The story is shuffled up, as the game begins at the start of act three: Daniel decides to kill Alexander and erases his memory as to why (this is not a spoiler, it's the setup). During the course of the game, the first two acts are related to us through the random notes and the pages of Daniel's diary he has for some reason scattered throughout the castle in chronological order. Plot aside, the game forgoes almost all interaction; it's really a variation of a first person adventure game, with very simple puzzles separated by intense fear. It, and Dark Corners... are both what I have come to think of as 'unteractive' games.
Unteractive games, like Dear Esther and Thirty Flights of Loving, are like promenade theatre. The action happens around you, envelopes you, although you don't do anything yourself to further it. In fact, a huge amount of games are already like this, they just hide the fact with fake interaction.
By fake interaction, I mean that you're not really physically engaging with the game. Your Portals and your Half-Lifes, just to stick to first person games, are interactive. Unless you do something, the game doesn't go anywhere. Thirty Flights and Esther are games that you don't do anything in, not that that's a criticism. But all you control is the pace the information is relaid to you at. It's a style of storytelling that has only previously existed in promenade theatre, as I say, in that that involves a journey, and a feeling of involvement for the audience that is really an illusion. Most games dress their lack of interaction by asking you to do something repetitive and meaningless while they feed you narrative. I'm glad some games have had the bravery to do away with that, and just present the narrative more directly, and calmly.
That said, I think more games could do with stripping out the interactive elements and going unteractive. That underwater shock game (whatever it was called) would have been much better if it had removed all the sleepwalking combat with the crazed survivors and just left you to explore a totally dead city, with the occasional and surprisingly violent encounter with a big daddy and little sister.
Amnesia and Dark Corners have a smattering of interaction, of the puzzle solving, graphic adventure type. But the puzzles virtually solve themselves and what really you have is a story that is being presented like a second person text; the puzzles just give you the impetus to explore the world more fully.
Thief was the first game I remember that presented stories as fragments scattered around an area, that you piece together in your mind. Actually that's not true, Looking Glass games used the technique throughout their career, and from the deserted magic school in Ultimate Underworld 2, to the logs left behind in System Shock, it is an excellent way to tell a tragedy. Most memorably, the live logs you receive as you rush to save some survivors, only to find a cortex reaver looming over their fresh corpses. So the part in Amnesia where you enter the wine cellar, to find the diaries of poisoned militia, is nothing new in style. It's part of a grand tradition of games that are like looking glass games.
So I'd consider an unteractive game to be one where your actions have no consequence to the plot, and the game is honest about that. Compare with interactive fiction, where the story actually changes depending on your decisions. Games like Torment and Deus Ex are about halfway between, because even if the overarching plot is the same, characters have different arcs and the details of the plot are different in different playthroughs.
I like unteractive games now. Suddenly, more than rogue likes. I've rediscovered stories and I love them; and I love this style of being fed a story.
Return to the Fulfillment Centre
I've been very quiet on here since... before summer. Which is weird, because school hols are usually the only time i get to blog. i haven't even started many unfinished posts recently. I'm quite active on twitter over on the right hand side though, so while i'm not writing anything here you can catch up with anything less thought through.
In other news, I'd like to announce that I'm currently building up tracks for 'Return to the Fulfilment Centre', my 2nd collection of remixes, follow up to 2010's 'The Page You Made'.
It might never happen, but I've currently got a list of 5 remixes to complete, some of which are currently part-baked. But 5 remixes does not an album make. So it begs the question: have you got any songs you'd like me to work on? I'm open to suggestions although I can't guarantee that any song in particular will grab me and make me want to paste drum loops over an 8 second sample of it.
In other news, I'd like to announce that I'm currently building up tracks for 'Return to the Fulfilment Centre', my 2nd collection of remixes, follow up to 2010's 'The Page You Made'.
It might never happen, but I've currently got a list of 5 remixes to complete, some of which are currently part-baked. But 5 remixes does not an album make. So it begs the question: have you got any songs you'd like me to work on? I'm open to suggestions although I can't guarantee that any song in particular will grab me and make me want to paste drum loops over an 8 second sample of it.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Boil a Kettle, Chop an Onion: Smoked Halloumi
Previously on BAK,CAO:
http://grilly.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/boil-kettle-chop-onion-veggie-carbonara.html
http://grilly.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/boil-kettle-chop-onion-melinzana-and.html
Halloumi is often considered a veggie treat, akin to bacon. So I've been playing around with my (birthday present) smoker on and off this year
So I've been a bit experimental this morning; I've tried to smoke halloumi a few times, and it's just not been as delicious as it was in my head. So today I thought I'd try a couple of variations to see if i could get the balance right.
Usually, I would dry fry halloumi in a pre-heated pan until browned, to get it just so tasty and chewy. When I've smoked halloumi in the past, the smoking cooks it, but hasn't got the texture right. So this time, I took a large piece of halloumi (225g cypressa), and cut it in half. One half went in the (stove-top) smoker sliced and the other went in whole. I smoked it for about 10 minutes with 2 spoonfuls of hickory chips.
When it came out it looked like this:
The large piece seemed to have a different look to the sliced pieces.
At this point, I tried the pre-sliced halloumi, and I don't know what I did differently, but it was already very nice. Maybe I'd just got the timing right for the quantity of material in the smoker; the guidelines seem to suggest about 25 minutes for 500g, so perhaps I'd just overdone it in the past.
Slicing open the large block of H, I was delighted to find it as I expected: a lovely coating of smokyness, which permeated the flavour, edible, but still really uncooked in the middle. So I got a frying pan going, and threw a couple of slices in. I also put in the pre-sliced H, just for comparison.
They both cooked nicely, the coated H gaining it's usual patchy brown pattern, and the pre-sliced H going an even darker colour.
The end result is that briefly smoking the whole block of H and then pan frying it as per usual just adds the lovely delicate smokiness without being overpowering or too different to how it should be. But actually, I think I've finally got the balance right for smoking it pre-sliced too, because that was very nice in it's own way.
So in future I think I'll more readily throw whole foods into the smoker, then slice them up and cook them as normal. An extra stage to add for special occasions. I guess experimentation is key. I've probably been over-smoking everything, leading to tough food that tastes like bonfire night.
http://grilly.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/boil-kettle-chop-onion-veggie-carbonara.html
http://grilly.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/boil-kettle-chop-onion-melinzana-and.html
Halloumi is often considered a veggie treat, akin to bacon. So I've been playing around with my (birthday present) smoker on and off this year
So I've been a bit experimental this morning; I've tried to smoke halloumi a few times, and it's just not been as delicious as it was in my head. So today I thought I'd try a couple of variations to see if i could get the balance right.
Usually, I would dry fry halloumi in a pre-heated pan until browned, to get it just so tasty and chewy. When I've smoked halloumi in the past, the smoking cooks it, but hasn't got the texture right. So this time, I took a large piece of halloumi (225g cypressa), and cut it in half. One half went in the (stove-top) smoker sliced and the other went in whole. I smoked it for about 10 minutes with 2 spoonfuls of hickory chips.
When it came out it looked like this:
The large piece seemed to have a different look to the sliced pieces.
At this point, I tried the pre-sliced halloumi, and I don't know what I did differently, but it was already very nice. Maybe I'd just got the timing right for the quantity of material in the smoker; the guidelines seem to suggest about 25 minutes for 500g, so perhaps I'd just overdone it in the past.
Slicing open the large block of H, I was delighted to find it as I expected: a lovely coating of smokyness, which permeated the flavour, edible, but still really uncooked in the middle. So I got a frying pan going, and threw a couple of slices in. I also put in the pre-sliced H, just for comparison.
They both cooked nicely, the coated H gaining it's usual patchy brown pattern, and the pre-sliced H going an even darker colour.
The end result is that briefly smoking the whole block of H and then pan frying it as per usual just adds the lovely delicate smokiness without being overpowering or too different to how it should be. But actually, I think I've finally got the balance right for smoking it pre-sliced too, because that was very nice in it's own way.
So in future I think I'll more readily throw whole foods into the smoker, then slice them up and cook them as normal. An extra stage to add for special occasions. I guess experimentation is key. I've probably been over-smoking everything, leading to tough food that tastes like bonfire night.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Idea for a game: The Terminator
I know there have been terminator games in the past. Loads of different attempts to bring the films to life, mostly where you play someone fighting a terminator (if it's faithful) or lots of terminators (if it's taking liberties). The best games, like Future Shock, don't try to adept the film literally and are set in spin-off universes. The worst, like the Virgin Sega game, have you being Kyle Reese, repeatedly and futilely trying to stop the machine.
The problem is that having one indestructible foe for a whole game does not work as a fun game mechanic. What would be good, IMHO, is a rogue-like sand-box cityscape, with you as the terminator, tele-porting back to 1984 and being charged with the assination of: [insert name here].
That's pretty much it. All you know is a name, and you've got a whole city to explore. You could just kill everyone, you're bound to get the right person eventually. Track down your target - unlike Hitman, they'll probably be entirely unguarded - and kill them with one shot. A lot of rogue-likes aim for spectacular failure. What about one where you're almost guaranteed to win, but the time loop paradox succeeding generates means you just get sent back to the start? See, it even makes sense.
The City and its inhabitants are randomised, as are the stats of the soldier sent back from the future to stop you. He'll fail of course; he's only human. But he might give you a run for your money, provoking you into epic car chases, fire-fights with increasingly desperate authorities, fun, emergent gameplay that's all ripped off GTA. The Kyle Reese character exists only to put the challenge in, to be the spanner in your works, that leads to all sorts of madcap schemes. And if he gets the target on the back of a motorbike and rides off into the night, how will you find him? With detective skills and by any means necessary.
I think this has got legs. Anyone fancy making it?
The problem is that having one indestructible foe for a whole game does not work as a fun game mechanic. What would be good, IMHO, is a rogue-like sand-box cityscape, with you as the terminator, tele-porting back to 1984 and being charged with the assination of: [insert name here].
That's pretty much it. All you know is a name, and you've got a whole city to explore. You could just kill everyone, you're bound to get the right person eventually. Track down your target - unlike Hitman, they'll probably be entirely unguarded - and kill them with one shot. A lot of rogue-likes aim for spectacular failure. What about one where you're almost guaranteed to win, but the time loop paradox succeeding generates means you just get sent back to the start? See, it even makes sense.
The City and its inhabitants are randomised, as are the stats of the soldier sent back from the future to stop you. He'll fail of course; he's only human. But he might give you a run for your money, provoking you into epic car chases, fire-fights with increasingly desperate authorities, fun, emergent gameplay that's all ripped off GTA. The Kyle Reese character exists only to put the challenge in, to be the spanner in your works, that leads to all sorts of madcap schemes. And if he gets the target on the back of a motorbike and rides off into the night, how will you find him? With detective skills and by any means necessary.
I think this has got legs. Anyone fancy making it?
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