radio show is up!

Hi, everyone! A real quick note to let everyone know that the talks on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are live on the radio. They are on WLJR in Birmingham at 88.5 at 1.00, 5.15, and 10.45. On the ACC page, you can download the mp3s. There are 10 conversations so enjoy!!!

i’m on the radio!

C.S. Lewis

J.R.R. Tolkien

hello, all. haven’t been on here in a bit! working two or three jobs and being in a relationship will do that to you, i guess! but hopefully i’ll be on here more in the future. i may actually be starting a new blog in the near future having to do with an entirely different set of issues, but i’ll keep you posted on that front. this particular entry is to let you know that i’ll be on the radio soon! my dad, as many of you know, is the pastor at briarwood presbyterian church in birmingham, al. one of his radio programs is “conversations with harry.” it is available on the radio and in podcast form. they are short ten minute conversations which are designed to be informative about culture, christianity, and faith. on friday i am recording two weeks worth of conversations with him on j.r.r. tolkien and c.s lewis. for those who don’t know, my graduate work principally resides in that area, the early 20th century anglo-catholic renaissance (csl, jrrt, ts eliot, gk chesterton, etc.). i’ll keep the links updated and all, but let’s get a good number of downloads and listens and facebook likes for my dad and tom lamprecht (his producer). it’s a great show for followers of Christ and i highly recommend it! i’ll keep you posted!

front page of bitmob!

okay guys! somehow or another i ended up in the community spotlight over on bitmob on the front page! for those of you who don’t know, bitmob is a community driven website were people can post articles, reviews and other such stuff. each week, different articles are taken and highlighted. i just got home from work, pulled up bitmob to check the articles (not mine, just what was new), and what do i see? THIS! there i was in the community spotlight. post a comment over there or something and it may get onto the weekly podcast! i think i’d enjoy that! thanks for your support. in a few days the articles been hit over a hundred times!

if you’re interested….

if you’re interested, i’ve posted a slightly longer and relatively revised version of the previous blog on Alan Wake, art, and video games over on bitmob.com. you can find it here. thanks for checking it out. if i get enough hits or comments or something it goes to the front page. cool, huh?

Alan Wake, Heavy Rain, and the Art Debate

Its been a long, long time since I’ve written on here and for that I apologize. Going to try to get back more regularly from now on. This article, however, is what I’ve been thinking about lately. Its mostly about the whole video games and art thing, but from a comparative perspective. Hope you like it.

I am often left wondering why video games feel the need to be compared favorably to other art forms in the media space. How often do we read about the “are video games art” debate in popular media, in the enthusiast press, and on the blogs of the casual observer? Exhibit A is the recent flare up (again) of the Roger Ebert issue. There are, in my opinion, several problems with this question. The first is the validity of the question itself. Secondly, even if we excuse the illogical nature of the question and ask it anyway, is the comparative nature of the question. I’m going to comment only briefly on the first issue for the moment, however, in order to move on to the more relevant second point.

Mass Effect 2

If, briefly, we worry about whether or not video games are art or can contain art, we miss the boat entirely on what art can inherently be. Art has no straightforward definition. Art is subjective, to a degree indefinable, and, whatever definition we come up with, ultimately immanently deconstructable. Therefore, one or another definition and its consequences will change nothing concerning the true nature of this debate. From a logical and philosophical standpoint, inferring a broad definition from the particulars of a single viable art form out of which must come a paradigm that has parameters to encompass other media outside of the particular invites the skeptic to continuously refute the initial point. In other words, if we glean our definition of art from video games themselves, then the analysis of said definition will inevitably reveal a failure to encompass other art forms. Vis-à-vis, if we do so from, let us say, painting, then the same concept would also be true. The definition of art should, in fact, be amorphous; it should be broad enough to encompass new fields and new media forms. Art, despite what others may imply, should not be confined to either the high towers of academia, or to the gatekeepers of taste. Neither has, of necessity, demonstrated that their track record is all that grand.

The notion of art and video games, however, is both to broad and to narrow to be of much use to the practical debate concerning whether or not video games or good, hold merit, achieve goals, or provide entertainment. It is a notion that can be and should be championed, but to the common consumer, as well as the more discerning one, the issue is a by-product. I’m more interested, presently, in the comparative nature of video games.

In our recent slate of video game releases, all the major triple A titles have had one

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

principal thing in common (other than the fact that they have sold very well). What do Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Heavy Rain, and Alan Wake have in common? Principally this: they are all compared, favorably or unfavorably, to other forms of media. The single player campaign of Modern Warfare 2 is compared to a Jerry Bruckheimer film; Uncharted is compared to an old school pulp adventure flick, Mass Effect 2 (more on this issue in a moment) a sci-fi space opera novel, Heavy Rain to an interactive movie, and Alan Wake to a Stephen King opus. Other games could fall into this category, and other blockbusters eschew this comparison; but these at least, serve well to make the point. We need to stop comparing games to other forms of media in order to establish the validity of that game, either as an artifact with artistic merit, or in order to give the game some market validity outside of itself simply as itself, with its own particular defining parameters.

Let me put it this way: none of the games listed above could ever be described as a particularly bad game (outside of one or two of the more jaded critics). All of the games bring something new and interesting into the media form. Whether it is the massive amount of options in the Call of Duty series, the humor and character of Uncharted, the grandiosity of Mass Effect, the interactivity and emotionality of Heavy Rain, or the atmospheric qualities of Alan Wake, all of these video games has something worth playing, building on, or iterating on in further game development. However, we lessen the value of the game when we continuously attempt to draw favorable comparisons between these games and other forms of media. Several recent playthroughs, comments, and articles have brought this issue more closely to my attention in recent days.

First, it has been announced that Legendary Pictures has picked up the movie rights to Mass Effect (I’m not certain if it is for the series or for the first game). That, in and of itself, is no big surprise. Gamepro’s recent article on Hollywood and video games (“Hollywood Games”, Oscar Zagal, #261) makes it especially clear that the trend of video game to movie adaptations is not going away. Now that the movie industry has discovered that good comic book adaptations can make a lot of money (and that bad ones sometimes can too), this trend is unlikely to stop. And there are excellent adaptations of comic books in the film industry: Spider-Man, Nolan’s Batman series, and Kick-Ass are just a few. While there hasn’t been a video game adaption worthwhile yet, the entertainment industry is not going to pack its bags in that field and go home.

Uncharted 2

My issue, however, is not with video game or comic book to movie adaptations. The intertextual and interconnected nature of graphic art, film, written media, and playable media will be with us for as long as those forms of media exist. There is no escaping that. Either from enthusiasm at seeing how one form of visual or written media appears in another form, or simply from the desire to make money, there will always be crossover experiences. I remember when I first read The Road by Cormac McCarthy when it was released. The first thing I thought was not that “this would make a great movie.” Did it make a great movie? To a certain degree: yes, it did. No one in his or her right mind would fight the inevitable onward push of a movie version of Mass Effect or Heavy Rain. It probably will happen eventually. If not with those games, than with others.

No, what drew my attention when I saw the announcement for the Mass Effect movie were the comments drawn by users. “Finally,” I thought to myself, “I see some common sense.” For the users were, by and large, appalled by the idea of Mass Effect as a movie. When the writer asked for suggestions on casting, the majority of responses were not about casting ideas, but rather simply saying “they should not make this into a movie! It is a video game and no movie can do it justice!” This, I said, is a step in the right direction. Because it indicates that the receiver of the specified media (or art) form, the gamer, was finally beginning to stand up for the validity of their media form as having merit in its own right. Instead of saying: This is great, now people who don’t play games can experience the Mass Effect universe, they were essentially saying that in order to experience the Mass Effect universe you should play the game.

This is the principal issue that I have. Rather than allow our games to be co-opted by other media forms, we as gamers must stand up for our form of media. Not only to be proud of the media, but also to refuse to allow the comparisons with other media to ruin what is true and valid about the video game experience and the logic of video games themselves. To do so calls into question the very nature of video games as a medium of entertainment, interactivity, and art itself. When Charles Dickens was writing Great Expectations as a serial novel in newspapers in the nineteenth century, does any literary critic really believe he was writing and, at the same time, believing that he was creating art? No. He was writing as many chapters as he could to entertain the masses, prolong the story, and make more money. Did it turn out to be art? According to some, yes. Does that mean it is art? Not necessarily. Video games are inherently similar to this situation. We make video games and we play video games because we enjoy them. Do they sometimes ascend to the sublime? Yes. Do they sometimes, as C.S. Lewis says, make us see with a thousand eyes and yet remain ourselves? Absolutely. But it will be art as a video game—not art as a translation of some other media.

Mass Effect, to me, is a positive example of this situation. It embraces its video game logic and does not hide the fact that it wants to be a video game. Uncharted 2 and, more recently, Red Dead Redemption do the same, in my opinion. While they both draw on other media, neither seems to succumb to the media that it uses as inspiration. Rather, they work the film and written forms into their own internal logic, making them subservient to the internal workings of the game instead of trying desperately to reproduce the experience of other media.

However, there are three negative examples that shed light on my second issue with the comparative nature of video games and other forms of media. This issue is, to some degree, a reverse form of my first point. Video games will always—I repeat, always—sell themselves short when their primary inspiration is to attempt to replicate some other form of media experience. The three most prominent examples in my mind are Modern Warfare 2, Heavy Rain, and Alan Wake. At the risk of over simplifying the assessment, Modern Warfare 2 strays away from the strides made in the first Modern Warfare and attempts to replicate the experience of a summer blockbuster movie; Heavy Rain attempts to be an interactive movie, and Alan Wake an interactive Stephen King or Dean Koontz novel. In their attempts to achieve these goals, these games sacrifice the nature of what makes them video games and thereby short-circuit the very attempt to obtain merit outside of the confines and parameters of what makes them valuable in the first place.

Alan Wake

The game that put this foremost in my mind was my recent playthrough of Alan Wake. As a published literary critic and a great admirer of Stephen King, it was not too difficult to make the correlation between novel and video game. The game, in fact, all but slaps you in the face with it from the very beginning. Not only is their the fact that the game begins with a quote from Stephen King, but the protagonist is a novelist (who starts the game off as a bit of a douche), his manuscript is coming to life, and he self-referentially talks to himself through TVs scattered throughout the environment. The game itself, while given some small degree of expansiveness, is largely linear in its construction. The voice over provides the unneeded (and mostly unwanted) narration, and the manuscript pages read like a high schooler’s creative writing attempt at imitating Stephen King.

These devices are drawn into the games narration and, combined with a combat system that is at first satisfying but grows rapidly stale, all work against any possibility of the game achieving that which it sets out to do: create, in a video game, the mood, tone, and feel of reading and playing a Stephen King novel. This occurs for one reason alone: rather than create a video game that is influenced by the form of a novel (or, secondarily, a television show), and incorporate those elements into gaming logic, the game creates a mishmash of other media elements that retains the logic of those forms. Thus the game never meshes into a cohesive whole. It remains a game of parts that never coalesce into an immersive environment. This was doubly disappointing as, first the game itself, and secondly being a game from Remedy, who managed to create the opposite effect with the Max Payne series. I have no doubt that the games troubled and long development cycle contributed to this to some degree or another. But such problems must be set aside when taken as a final product. The artifact created is the artifact that exists.

Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain, in a similar fashion, does the same thing with the film industry. As a game, the product has much to applaud: the emotionality of the characters, the interactive system that creates tension in some of the more emotionally or adrenaline charged scenes, and the obvious attempt to use realistic graphics to immerse the gamer into a world that is not their own. All of these things succeed to varying degrees (and depending on which reviewer you are partial to). The games downfall, however, is in the attempt to build tension in traditional visual fashion (i.e. film and television). In trying to imitate the film noir, or HBO TV series formula, the game succumbs to a massive amount of plot holes that are, to some, irredeemable. I believe that Heavy Rain goes further in its accomplishments than Alan Wake does; yet it ultimately fails because, unlike the Mass Effects, Uncharteds, and Rockstar games, it places the imitation above the game experience. In doing so, the game form suffers and the gamer suffers most.

Thus, the problem. There is no argument to the fact that all forms of entertainment and communicative media will continuously circle around each other in an endless chain of memes and signifiers, constantly and consequently self-referential. Since various forms of media have arisen, we, as creative beings, continuously strive to meld, synthesize, and create various experiences that will both separate and tie forms media together. Whether it is the visual and the written, the interactive and the visual, or the written and the interactive, we will constantly be holding media forms up against each other in attempts to defend or detract from our perceptions of art and value, artifice and consumablity. Video games, as the new kid on the block, are at a distinct disadvantage. Its older step-siblings (the word and the form) have a clear head start. The natural inclination for validation is nothing to scoff at, but the tendency to run around and claim, “our game is like this movie” will do nothing but continue to harm our industry and its attempts at validation. Validation will come; but it will only come when games embrace themselves for games, when we make other forms of media subservient to our logic. The hegemony of film and writing must be broken, but it will not be broken by finally gaining acquiescence from their critical community. It will only be broken when the apparatuses of film and writing are made to adhere to the logic of video games, for, by their very nature, video games will not adhere to the logic of film and writing. I see strides made in this direction and I believe that further strides are just around the corner. And someday, I know, video games will take their place in the pantheon of culture, not just as entertainment value, but also as true and valid signifiers of culture and those who embrace them, not just for titillation, but also as art.

in the intermission… flight of the conchords

i haven’t had a chance to write much the last couple of weeks, but i’m almost done with far cry 2 to and have some thoughts i’ll toss out soon. in the interim, i haven’t watched much of season 2 of flight of the conchords, but this video made me spit my coffee back out the other morning. so enjoy…

best. commercial. ever. period. and it was banned

in all the hype that surrounds the big game, the advertisements get almost as much press as the players and the play itself. the commercials have been, and now will always be, part of the pure ethos of the superbowl itself, inextricably linked from the spectacle of the event–a momentary cult of personality. over at gamedaily.com, the boys and girls have compiled a great collection of the greatest video game commericals of all time.  one vid in particular is an absolutely classic commercial from xbox, part of their “jump in” campaign from a little while ago. it was only shown in the uk because of being banned in the states for “perpetuating violence.” seriously people. we won’t show a huge train station where people are essentially playing cops and robbers, but we will show violent shoot-em ups and frag fests with real guns all the time. this ad is a great reminder that, in essence, vidoe games are still cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, king of the hill, racing through the jungle gym and slide. things we all loved to do on the playground as kids. game daily has a great (and better) write up on it at the above link. check it out. (especially the sniper at about 50 seconds. hil-ar-i-ous.)

the prince of irony: the prince of persia and the illusion of choice

There has been much ink spilt in the last several months over the new Prince of Persia (hereafter POP) from Ubisoft studios. Whether in defense of the game or in detracting from it, it has certainly raised the ire of the video game intelligentsia. On the one hand, the masterful artwork of the game, the gorgeous cell-shaded graphics, the simple intransigence of the archetypal story, or the simplistic control scheme have been lauded as on of the

the Prince

principal and most innovative games of the past year. On the other hand, the game mechanics (again), the story (again), the nature of the tale’s interactivity, the hidden linearity of its levels, the death mechanic, and, not least of all, the ending, have left may reviewers feeling slighted and/or jaded towards what Ubisoft was attempting with the game, which, other than simply reboot the series, has also been left in a sort of amorphous grey area of speculation.

As I have pointed out in the blog on numerous occasions, my intentions in writing about video games is not from a reviewer’s standpoint. I will happily tell you, faithful reader, whether or not I liked a game, but I will not mount a review worthy justification for a game’s score. To put it simply—I was entranced by the Prince and by Elika—both in their plight and in the manner in which they attempted to return the wasteland to its former glory. Each time I furiously mashed the “x” button on my PS3 controller (I think it was x:)), I waited to see how the verdant spread of life would transform a dark and sinister environment into a place of light and beauty. I then reveled in the exploration of that new environment in my attempts to find all the light seeds—for the record I found 948—close but not all of them! I was never bothered by my need to return to an area once a new power was unlocked; I always enjoyed the re-exploration of the area with new powers and the ability to see new vistas. I did not find the lowest point but it was not through lack of effort! I found the battle mechanic enjoyable and when I did finally string together the 14 hit combo I was overjoyed. In short, the game captured my imagination and my mind.

However, I found that there was a deep seated sense of irony in the game that I imagine was unintended by the developers. Someone once remarked in an article in Slate magazine that a distinct lack of an understanding of irony is the predominant characteristic of the American middle class. While I believe that statement might be a bit outdated (it can apply more directly to the 80s rather than the 00s), I have found that an understanding of the irony of the POP can go a great way to understanding both the shortcomings and the leaps forward in the narrative of the POP. From the long, standing conversations between the Prince and Elika, to much maligned but little discussed ending, irony seems to me to be the essential characteristic that carries the thread of a, dare I say, phenomenological creation of meaning throughout the game. The only way to understand this game is in the manner in which you interact with it. Meaning is created from the encounter between the reader and the text, or in this particular genre, between the player and the game—there is no essential difference between the two.

To begin with, let us take into account the word “illusion.” POP presents the player with the illusion of choice. Player choice in a game is obviously a relatively hot topic in game theory at the moment, with games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, Far Cry 2, Fable II, and Fallout 3 exploring the possibility of choice in an open game world. Of the games listed above, and many more that can be added to that list from 2008, probably GTA IV is the most similar to POP in providing the illusion of choice. While the side quests and missions you accept in GTA IV can be selected or discarded at will, there is still a driving central narrative that forces you along the game play path. In Fable II and Fallout 3, there truly are no limits as to how you choose to embark upon entering the world of the game. You can follow the main quest or not. Both of these games provide ample and varied side quests that allow the player to, in a sense, construct their own decolage of narrative. You can, in some ways, create your own story. Far Cry 2, while allowing an unlimited interaction with the open world, does not provide enough variety in its missions to truly offer a narrative outside of the text of the Jackal.

POP, on the other hand, presents the illusion of that choice. The choices offered to you in POP—which of the arenas to enter first, which of the powers to acquire, how long it takes you to complete the game, how often you return to certain areas—are, in essence, an illusion of choice. None of these options remotely affects the outcome of the game or even the narrative to any significant degree. I am not specifically arguing that POP was marketed as a game full of open world options and choices, although in working at Gamestop I will say that this is one of the opinions I heard most often from the consumer about the game—that it was in fact a game of choice. But when you stand in the desert with those

I like your shirt, he said

options arrayed around you, it is impossible not to be at least partially seduced by the idea that narrative options abound. In reality, you have little choice. You can choose to move forward in the game, or to turn around and talk to Elika. One could argue that you could endlessly explore the different hubs of POP, but that is akin to saying I could drive my warthog around the bases in the opening levels (on Halo) of Halo: Combat Evolved. I could do it, but it would be inane.

Rather, the only real option one has in POP is how much one wishes to converse with Elika. This is ironic, given the fact that game presents such an illusion of choice. The irony of this choice is not fully realized until the end of the game. (Beware, spoilers abound from this point onward!) While there has not been a significant amount of comment on the end of the game from the journalistic press–the reviewers and so forth–the small community of intelligentsia around the gaming field has found something to latch onto with the ending. Allow me to detour for a moment into an industry wide observation.

It is ineffably to the credit of the story designers and the scribes at Ubisoft Montreal that the narrative ending to the game has aroused commentary from such a community. Like myself, there is a small faction of gamers who have, aside from their “real” jobs, taken to discussing video games from a much more academic position than from a specifically review/preview stance. The principal participants in this field, to me, reside in places like Michael Abbott’s blog, The Brainy Gamer and others (First Wall Rebate, etc.). Abbott himself pointed out recently that the gaming sphere has an astounding number of intelligent blogs being written about video games and their cultural, geographic, economic, creative, and artistic significance. The fact that POP was the topic of a rather wide ranging round table discussion in reference to its ending is a testament to its innovation. So kudos definitely go out to the designers and scribes for this achievement.

The individuals discussing these issues are not gamers who have decided to give their hands a whirl at academic discourse. They are writers, academics, and thinkers who are also gamers—hopefully that’s a bit like myself. There is a burgeoning field of study in the humanities realm of games that asks questions of game narrative from the theoretical positions of narratology and ludology (the study of game as a story and the study of game as “game”, respectively). In this sense, my post is concerned to some degree with narratology, but more in line with how the mechanics relate the story—with a ludoloigcal approach to the game. I am here indebted to Clint Hocking’s reflections on ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock.

In this sense, to return to the point at hand, that the perceptibility of the game and the mechanic of the game both lend themselves to the irony of the story. In its illusions of choice, the player is left to explore or not explore the only real choosable option—diving deeper into his relationship with Elika. If you choose to explore this relationship fully (with hardly an achievement or trophy on hand) then you–despite the fact that such a choice pulls the player outside of the game world by forcing you to stop, turn, ask, listen, ask again, and listen until there is no longer an option to hear responses from Elika–will at least hear some of the more personal dialogue that occurs between the two. To be sure, the dialogue is interesting and despite numerous repeat performances it increases the depth and humor of the game itself. This essential act, however, removes the player from the immersion of the game world. I use the word immersion loosely, here, knowing that it is a debatable term. The mechanic both at once engages and disengages the player and thus the irony of choice and narrative.

To move this pattern to the end of the game. The Prince, after much exploration and combat, many wise-cracks and quips, finally, with the help of Elika, or more accurately in helping Elika, defeats Ahrmin—the dark god of chaos that has been slipping from his prison since the beginning of the game. Well and good. But in true pulp fashion, Elika must sacrifice her life in order to contain him. This is not a twist that was un-deducible from previous events in the game. Any player worth his salt could probably see it coming. What was sprung upon the player, however, was the choice of the Prince. Elika dies and the Prince, in a slow funereal walk, carries her body out to the front of the temple and lays her on the dais, surrounded by the beauty and magnificence of a realm freed from Ahrmin’s control. The credits have rolled and the Prince … stands there. No black screen comes up. And clearly, through whispers bourn upon the wind, the Prince is given a choice; the same choice the King had when Elika died before. Ahrmin will raise her up if the Prince will free him. You can choose to leave, or you can choose to act.

Jackie

Here again is a form of irony. Game play itself dictates that a player act. One of the most memorable scenes in gaming in 2007 was in The Darkness when you were given the choice to just—sit and watch a movie with Jenny, your girlfriend. For most gamers (the few who actually took the time to play that fascinating game) sitting was the hardest choice they could have made. But sit you did and you were rewarded with a small achievement and a large emotional involvement in her eventual death. In a similar fashion, the player who is the most involved in the Prince and Elika’s relationship is the inveterate button pusher, the player who has mashed L2 every time he stopped to hear what Elika and the Prince discussed. The option now, to leave Elika dead and walk off to find your donkey, is almost insensible. In pressing every button throughout the game you are now told to press no buttons except “off.” To press on will resurrect Elika, but will also defeat everything you fought for throughout the game, to raise and defeat Elika in the same breath.

I had thought, in some ways, about writing this post and comparing this to the old “choose your own adventures” books we all read when we were kids (I particularly loved the Indiana Jones ones when I was a boy), but eventually decided that it wasn’t the corollary I was looking for. I think the best corollary in literature is in the concluding novel to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. In the seventh and final novel of the series, The Dark Tower, the Gunslinger final arrives at his intended destination. He stops before the door and walks in. And the novel ends. After seven books of trying to get there, of

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came

discussion and speculation, when the Roland arrives the reader is excluded. King has overtly and interestingly, if sometimes distractingly, experimented heavily in meta-narrative and dissonic story telling. At the end of the series the reader is given a choice—to continue with Roland and find out what is inside the Dark Tower or to leave the novel alone, to put it down and walk away, recognizing, as King has, that the journey was the thing. Once read, the reader can never go back. It is an impossible choice, a sort of pyrrhic conclusion—to read is to discover but to be inevitably dissatisfied. To place the book on the ground and walk away is to admit a sort of defeat, and yet hold honor in your hands like water—forever slipping away. Whether it was satisfying or not I will leave up to you to decide, if you ever choose to read his work (which I highly recommend, by the way!).

In relationship to the POP, the illusion of choice has created the only choice possible which turns the game completely on its head. In a manner similar to Metal Gear Solid 4, after fighting with guns and gadgets, stealth and cunning, you are finally reduced to a hand to hand fight on the top of a rig with a completely different control scheme and the ultimate objective of killing, not just stopping, Liquid Ocelot. It throws the whole experience into a necessary tailspin. In POP you must continue to do that which you have done throughout the game, or you must choose the opposite, to do that which veers significantly from the expectation created throughout the narrative. Thus the illusion brings the irony and the irony adds depth to an otherwise simplistic experience.

As to whether or not this is “good” or “bad” I cannot say. I think that type of decision is immanently relative and must be left up to the individual player. To return to a type of game play phenomenology, the meaning depends up on your encounter. I however, found it fascinating and one of the most unique and refreshing endings I have ever encountered. Hopefully this is a trend—and one I will happily engage more of.

a requiem for a podcast; the fall of 1up

mea culpa, mea culpa! its been way too long but things have been pretty crazy over the christmas break. i have been absent from these pages for far too long. i want to jump right into the post by giving a brief personal update for those of you who haven’t heard how things are going for me just at the present. first, i had to move back down to birmingham, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because i lost my classes i was teaching at university of alaska anchorage for the spring semester. enrollment has dropped because of the economy and adjunct faculty are the first to go in those situations. so i dropped the hammer and popped back to bham where i was more likely to pick up a teaching gig because of the abundance of universities and colleges. well, that didn’t happen either, but i am filling a couple of classes for a local high school and working nights at gamestop (the one on 280 next to best buy — stop in and say “hi!”). and that’s cool because it gives me plenty of time to chill, play games, write, and recover from surgery…

yup, you read that right, cowboys, ol’ uncle ike has to go under the knife again for the second time in one year. i have a “massively distended abdominal hernia” that is one of the biggest my doctor has ever seen (i bet he says that to all his cute guy patients, ha ha) that will require relatively immediate attention. which, as i am uninsured, will cost a pretty penny. ergo, i am going to have to postpone my phd for a year in oreder to avoid going into a degree in the uk with massive amounts of debt hanging over my head. so in a couple of weeks i head back into the hospital to deal with a problem that was the result of my previous surgery.

one way or another, i’m glad we caught it and i can get it fixed relatively easily, even if it does require wire mesh in my abdomen for the rest of my life. but in the meantime, there are much more important things, both in news and in what i’ve been playing.

first a really sad piece of news that most of my readers will not know about (if you’ve stumbled onto my blog and you are not my friend on facebook or twitter than you probably already know this info). if you’ve ridden in the car with me anytime during the last year or if we’ve hung out for any extended period of time, then you’ve probably heard me talk about the 1up radio network. the 1up radio network was run by ziff davis media in conjunction with egm (electronic gaming monthly), which was, shy of one month, the longest running rag in the video game/pc gaming community. unfortunately, in our relatively poor economy (compared only to our own economy) and in the era of free media on the internet, a non-industry supported franchise was fighting an uphill battle.

on monday of last week, ugo entertainment (and i have to honestly tell you, i still have no idea what “ugo” stands for. i know it stands for something because its written in capital letters — except for in my blog — and i’m sure there’s a universal in there somewhere. if anyone knows please share it with me) a subsidiary of hearst media and entertainment, bought out egm and 1up, promptly shuttered egm the print mag and fired 30 employees of 1up. they lost there jobs, found out about it, and had a day to clean out there offices. there are plenty of blogs and recounting from insiders and mavens that discuss the issue so i won’t go into details here, but i do want to make two observations.

first, i am constantly amazed and the organic interconnectedness of the global marketplace in our preset times. although one could argue that the downfall of print media, and even the fall of the paid enthusiast press at a website like 1up (where content was essentially free) hinges on this very same principal, it is truly amazing that i, not even an industry insider, knew that this had happened via my friends at 1up on facebook and twitter, before the news hit the stands (or the internet billboards if you will). the immediate and compassionate outpouring of support was truly something amazing to watch, and as jay fresh, one of the laid of 1upers said in response to the outpouring in those first few days for the 1up crew: “i just want to give the internet a big hug.” that might be the tag line for the past decade.

and, as tragic as it is, in an industry sense, it is a blessing in many ways as well. no more than a day after the team at 1up was laid off, seven of the more prominent and outspoken podcasters had a two hour podcast up and running at eat-sleep-game.com, newly christened “rebel.fm”. within two days of that posting, rebel.fm’s inaugural podcast had become the number one podcast on itunes, as of sat night, it was still in the top ten. their bandwidth was brutalized. ryan scott starting a new show, and others have already found their feet. sometime in the next couple of days is the next rebel.fm podcast and rumour has it that shane “the mangod” bettenhausen will be announcing his intentions (for those of you who don’t know, that’s a scope in this industry) on the podcast. out of the ashes, as it were.

for me, 1up sparked a bit of an academic spark in my own trunk that maybe my love of games and my professional life could be mixed a bit, somehow. and there was one simple reason for why this was the case: the people behind 1up, everyone of them (except for tina, ha ha) were bright, dedicated and passionate individuals. and mostly geeks, too. but that was totally cool. and i don’t just mean bright in a sort of amorphous manner. i mean some of these guys had chops. they could really write well and idiomatically. they had their own individual styles and perceptions, but were professional about it. too many game mags and sites (professionally run) think its about just slapping something down on the paper and posting it up there. but when you listened to the 1upers, especially the writing staff, they would always talk about how it was more important for you to be a writer first and a gamer second. that is not the norm in this industry. they had personality, style, and a bit of panache. sure there were lots of times when they sounded of a big fu to the world, both in the gaming arena and outside, but that was mostly because they believed in their product.

the 1up podcasts, particularly garnett, shane, luke, john, shawn, david, jeff, skip, and the others who participated in the 1up yours show, are indelibly imprinted in my gaming consciousness. my ipod will miss them. my car rides will miss them. and although player one, giant bomb, idle thumbs, first wall rebate, the brainy gamer, and yes, even rebel.fm are great and i look forward to exploring the world of gaming with them, i will miss the classics. this is, in many ways, the end of an era in games journalism. while the industry will grow and change in many other ways, probably many off them better, there won’t ever be another crew like those folks. garnett, tina, ryan and the others who were left behind at 1up hae a hard job ahead of them, rebuilding with much smaller resources, and i have faith in them and look forward to what they accomplish. rebel.fm, talking orange, ryan scott and the others will do some awesome things, i know. but the king is dead. long live the other guy.

i didn’t quite mean to go on so long about 1up, but they meant a lot to me. tomorrow i’ll hop back on here and write up some thoughts on narrative interactivity in prince of persia and talk a bit about all the other stuff i’ve been playing over the holidays, but until then, keep your books out beside your games (which at this time is a history of the special forces). i’m out.

masters….confirmed; final fantasy iii….confirmed

for those of you who actually check this thing out, i have clearly been absent for the last three or so weeks. and with good reason. i had to defend my master’s thesis two days ago and, having been out of the loop of graduate studies for a little while, i was a little bit nervous all around. thankfully, though, i am done. i passed my oral defense and have one more grammatical pass to make on the thesis, but over all its done! my thesis was on c.s. lewis and his critical paradigm, specifically focusing on a close reading of his book, an experiment in criticism, and identifying the principle hermeneutic that he practices. i identify the modality as a hermeneutical phenomenology, with more in common with decentralized post-structural mechanic as opposed to more modernist, enlightenment practice. ultimately, i drew comparisons between lewis and paul ricoeur, a phenomenologist who was also a christian and passed away in 2002. the whole thing was a lot of fun and was over a 100 pages long. i will be expanding it out into a doctoral dissertation beginning next fall. so i know there were a lot of folks out there praying for me and i really appreciate it and the thoughts and wishes of all of you. so thanks very much and i can now imitate garnett lee and say, “masters…confirmed.”

job system

as to what i’ve been playing recently, at least since mirror’s edge a few weeks ago, i have recently ventured into the handheld world with an acquisition of a nintendo ds lite. one of the lads at work was trading one in so i gave him a 10% mark-up and bought it from him. we both came out ahead in that deal! i picked up final fantasy iii to give it a whirl as i remembered seeing all the different ads for the job system a few years ago when it was finally ported up to the ds from the (i believe) famicom days of 1990. i have to tell you that i really like this game. it isn’t perfect and there is a lot of grinding, and i mean a lot. i don’t really like the save system that much (although the quicksave is nice), but not being able to save in a dungeon is a real pain in the ass. overall, the game looks a lot better than it ever did in 1990 (duh) and there are definetly games that look better, but the story is  a real blast and they do a very good job of pacing out the discovery of the world. i’m going to pick of final fantasy iv soon and give that a whirl and then final fantasy vii: crisis core for the psp soon as well. final fantasy iii, to be clear, is not an intellectual game. the job system is interesting but relatively inconsequential, the story is very straight-forward, the exploration interesting but your hand is held for the entire time, and the boss battles are dominated by physical attacks. for all of that it has a charm that superseeds many, many games on the market today that certainly makes it worth playing. the ported chrono trigger is my next purchase so i’m hoping to make that comparison also.

chrono trigger portraits

i’ve also got trace memory and hotel dusk in the queue for the trip back to bham on friday. both of those are interactive mystery novels and have recieved fairly good reviews overall. neither are action oriented, but they have a good puzzle base with a lot of decent dialogue. i’ll weigh in soon on my impressions. until then, keep the books beside the games.