In my first poetry course, I learned two valuable lessons about writing things that people are gonna read. Fair warning: if you continue to read this post, which may not seem to have anything to do with Mass Effect 3 for a while, you’ll need to be okay with reading an exceptionally mediocre poem.
Okay? Alright!
One of our first assignments was to write an observational poem. Easy, right? You find something interesting to observe, you observe it, and you write about your observations. It seemed pretty straightforward at the time. When we started the peer review process, things went south for me pretty immediately as people began to then interpret these observations, plundering them for additional meaning. My critiques were grounded in things like syntax and line breaks while some of the bolder students wanted to discuss “the soul” of the poem.
Particularly… aggressively jubilant, let’s say, was an outstandingly suburban white kid whose hat had always matched his t-shirts. He found some pretty dark shit in these otherwise totally mundane pieces, and more than once he read someone’s poem aloud in a slam style.
If you’ve never heard of poetry slams, think of someone reading a poem like it was a battle rap. So, say, “Ether” by Nas read by Bryant Gumble (or someone else who can master that whole “bottled up rage cadence”). He had a habit of pounding his fist on the desk to punctuate line breaks, but he never made a point of standing up or gesturing to really go all the way with it. Whether this meant we were lucky or he wasn’t especially committed to the slam, I’ll never know.
The point is that it was an observational poem. Regardless of what was going on behind the scenes, I was made to believe it was much simpler than some of these people were making it. Without further buildup or reassurances of its sucktitude, my totally superficial observational poem:
“Zom-bear”
Scruffy brown fur.
Red yarn-blood
dangling from your mouth.
An indented red patch
where your eye used to be.
Puffy, plush brain matter
protruding out the corresponding point
in the back.
Clearly a wound you suffered
pre-zombie-bear-ification.
Your place on my bookshelf
and in my heart, easily secured.
The location of your detachable leg, though,
can be much less certain.
In roundtable critiques like, such as this, they made it a rule that the author can’t speak until everyone’s opinions peter out. So as soon as I finished reading it, my job was to sit there and listen to whatever it was anyone had to say without emoting. The Average Homeboy quite passionately argued that it was a perspective piece where an adult was looking at his old teddy bear and projecting the deepest, rawest pains of his childhood onto it. It seemed he thought the “zombification process” came about by being imbued with these displaced feelings. He’d go on to add that the narrator was likely creating an effigy to purge himself of these traumas.
The remainder of the students who had anything to say at all were convinced it was somewhat less specific. They had it pegged as a perspective piece written by someone looking at a childhood relic and accounting for its state of disrepair more figuratively.
Instead of receiving any real feedback on language, structure, subject, breaks, length, order, or anything that might’ve been constructive, my entire session was spent listening to people bicker about the meaning. They actually argued. The only reason it could carry on this way is because the Real Slim Shady was also the loudmouth of the class who thought he was one the grand demigods of poetry. He wouldn’t be wrong. Disagreement was not an option. People needed to surrender. And eventually anyone who wasn’t busy fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube or scribbling on the white part of the printout stopped responding, and thus he won.
When our somewhat perplexed, still totally enthused teacher asked if I had anything to contribute or would like to discuss my true inspiration for the poem, I simply said no. The suburban Saul Williams seemed livid and spun his red cap around to face forward to convey who knows what. Then everyone passed their copies of the poem back to me.
Looking over the notes and “evidence” people had marked to explain why they thought what they thought, I decided the reality was so unimpressive and trite in comparison that keeping silent was the right thing to do. I mean, how would these people feel if they learned that they argued about the deeper meaning to a poem that had no deeper meaning? It was an observational poem! My literal subject was nothing more impressive or remarkable than it seemed to be on the surface. It was about a zombie teddy bear that S. made for me some years ago. The yarn-blood was exactly that. Red yarn dangling from the mouth made to look like blood!
One of the lessons I took from this was that if you create something that’s consumed by multiple people, each going in with their own experiences and expectations, they’re going to find what they want in it. In my case, these budding young poets wanted to believe they were in the company of other deeply talented Poets (with a capital ‘p’). It seemed unfathomable, even for an observation poem, that someone would write something so superficial. That the words were exactly what they were and nothing more.
The second thing I feel I learned is that you never want to tell these people they’re wrong. You absolutely cannot betray that the reality of the situation is much less flowery and artistic than what they’ve created for you. Least of all when people appear to enjoy this lovely fabrication so much. Enough to argue about it, even.
Having beaten Mass Effect 3 twice now, seen all of the “different” endings through, read the eight page Indoctrination Theory, and watched the accompanying videos, it feels like some crazy fanfic from dedicated, sincere fans hoping to fashion an undesirable experience into something more. They don’t want to believe that everything they invested in the series ended in a flash of blue, green, or red light.
They want more, and that’s totally fair.
Now that it’s been announced that BioWare intends to release new content for the ending, it seems natural enough to wonder how they’ll respond to people arguing about what their stupid little poem meant. Will they use elements of this crowdsourced alternative to satisfy those sheep who were so pissed they strayed from the Mass Effect flock instead of attempting to make sense of whatever original vision was lost in the brevity of it all?
Personally, and spoilers, I just wanna know how synthesis, control, and destruction are different. Or why every choice results the Crucible’s energy downing the Normandy. Was every ship destroyed that was in space or what, because that means a whole lot of dead aliens who only wanted to help. Which, of course, would be an intergalactic bummer.
Anyone who knows me in the context of what I understand the kids these days are calling “IRL” is likely to know of my deep, deep love for a little cartoon called Adventure Time. Aside from an allusion here or a reference there, I’ve yet to really write about it, and thus anyone who knows me exclusively through what they read here is likely to register this as news.
If you aren’t familiar with this animated tidal wave of excellence, it all started as a short that ran on Nickelodeon some time ago. Due to how densely packed the hilarity is and the creativity on display it became an instant classic on the interwebs and managed to succeed in a viral sense, thus leading to a full-length series on Cartoon Network.
If you’re reading this then odds are good you already know what’s up, but to those who don’t, the show is layered like Inception but benefits from the absence of any confusing science. At a glance, it’s the story about a human boy named Finn and his magical dog Jake. These two are the most totally mathematical adventurers you’re likely to find, and the Land of Ooo is one rife with dungeons, legends, and princesses in need. The layers come into play in a way I’d regret spoiling, so I’ll just say that over the handful of seasons you’re treated to insights about how their world ties into our own. They’re subtle, but they provide depth and intrigue to a series that isn’t above a well-timed fart joke.
So good is this show that I’ve made a point of purchasing their piecemeal DVD offerings that continue to be released as they “test the waters” for a seasonal DVD treatment. I decided this was gonna be one of those show and tell posts where I take pictures, so I took pictures of Adventure Time: My Two Favorite People and Adventure Time: It Came From the Nightosphere in all their glory.
We’ll get those seasons someday, but given the revenue Cartoon Network likely derives from advertising during the reruns, it’s understandable that they’d want to take their time releasing ‘em on DVD. (The first season ended in the Fall of 2010.)
But what kind of radcore, addictively magical webs has Adventure Time begun to spin outside of their standard realm of television? Since these outings are relevant to my interests, it should be obvious that video games and comic books both bound to enter into this conversation.
If you’re one of the many Adventure Time super fans, the comic iteration is gonna be right up your alley. You’ll find tons of fan service with references to minor and major moments in the series, the iconic art style perfectly mirrored in the main arcs, vignettes featuring some of your favorite supporting characters (Tree Trunks, LSP), sharp, clever writing, and all kinds of talented people behind the scenes. Anyone familiar with Dinosaur Comics might preemptively lawl when I throw out that Ryan North is the lead writer.
In addition to all of this, they have vibrant, rich covers as you’ll see below.
Don’t like any of those? Good news! They release some crazy number of variant covers for each issue, and the reprints rock new art, as well. (Of which there have been many.) So you can basically customize your own little Adventure Time comic collection if you’re one of those obsessive types who haven’t yet discovered the joys of the bonsai tree.
So KaBOOM! Studios has a cash cow and we all have access to more of what we love. Win-win. Hopefully the same is true about the much more mysterious Adventure Time game Joystiq is reporting will be coming to the DS and 3DS in the Fall.
Reading the article you’ll find as good of an analysis of the tentative cover art as any. I mean, dude’s probably right. Ice King likely steals their garbage, creates a garbage princess, and then it’s up to our heroes to save her from that sloppy milkshake.
It’s been made clear in the past that Pendleton Ward has spent some time ruminating on the idea of an Adventure Time game. Perhaps extensively so. With the general ideas he’s pitched and as competent a developer as WayForward (of Aliens: Infestation fame) working to make this game a thing that exists, it seems likely that fans of the show are gonna get the kind of handheld awesome they deserve.
So long as that kind of speculation holds true, the answer to the question in the subject line appears to be an emphatic “nothing!”
Given the tone and content of the last write-up, this one’s gonna feel a little bit odd. For the three people who’ve either followed this blog since its inception or gone back and read from the beginning, you’re gonna recognize the random pieces of chaff like this one. The sizzle sans steak.
What kind of sizzle can you expect today? Why, fanboy sizzle, of course!
Despite my own efforts discouraging blind adoration, I’m usually pretty onboard with whatever project Suda51 takes on. Supporting his general madness and tomfoolery doesn’t necessarily bleed into my overall opinion of the product, as evidenced by my refusal to continue further into No More Heroes 2 than a handful of hours before sealing that disc away like the villains in Superman II. Only instead of being trapped in a tiny mirror-like prison hurtling through space, it just went back to one of GameFly’s fulfillment centers to go constipate someone else’s Wii.
Aside from the Neon Genesis Evangelion rhythm game coming out for the PSP (Evangelion Sound Impact), Lollipop Chainsaw is the most promising title he’s got comin’ down the ol’ creativity chute. I’ve written about it before, so I’ll only go into the high-end concept of Buffy the Vampire Zombie Slayer. Instead of wooden stakes, swords, or axe-stake hybrids, this heroin wields a chainsaw. She’s also way more upbeat than Buffy, and I’m pretty sure there won’t be any scenes where we have to cringe as one of the things she hunts attempts to rape her. (Spike really was kind of an unrepentant fuckwad, wasn’t he?)
Recently the good folks at WB Games put together a little number to promote the game. You can watch it directly below this sentence.
Now, this really doesn’t tell you anything about the game. These types of videos used to perplex me and even piss me off a little. I had concrete ideas about what publishers should spend money on, and it was usually a short list mostly resembling a list of the same idea. Over and over again. With slight syntactical or vocabularic variances. “Make sure the game is good.”
However, working in a more corporate setting has taught me one equivocal truth. For businesses attempting to get your money and succeed in the 21st century, it’s a constant hearts and minds campaign. They want to win you over by making you love the idea of the experience. Loving an idea has very little to do with the tangible product itself, and everything to do with spewing randomness out into the void in such a way that you, the audience, find that whatever they’re selling is relevant to your interests. Here we have a cheesy video with a fake product that tells you three things. One, it’s campy. Two, it’s vaguely Japanese. Three, “hawt gurls.” Those things tell you everything about the consumer they’re coveting, and who they think will likely throw sweaty fistfuls of cash at this thing.
Personally, I’m excited to see a Grasshopper Manufacture title with some kind of marketing budget after EA kind of left Shadows of the Damned out there to flop and flail around by its lonesome. Because here we are, almost a year later, and the poor title seems to remain trapped in that mode of being. Flopping. Flailing. Maybe crying a little.
Here’s hoping Lollipop Chainsaw is as charming and technically sound as Bayonetta! (If it is, I assume success will rain down from the heavens and let Suda have a nice drink once more.)
**Zomgz, not to put anyone on the spot, but if you’re interested in picking up this title, Amazon has the price discounted by 25% for your choice of either the X-Box 360 or the PS3. RIGHT NOW. You won’t get the sweet Evil Dead-themed skin through Amazon, but money saved is money earned (for DLC).**
If you’ve been following along here, not only did I buy Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at some crazy midnight launch event, but I’m a staunch advocate of playing the latest, greatest thing in the world of vidya games. Typically. I mean, there have been the occasional dry spells when the simple act of picking up a controller feels like too much. Those feelings always have less to do with video games as objects or art, and more to do with the tectonic plates of passion and ambition shifting around in an effort to make me someone who invests in more tangible realities than those offered on a disc.
While it seems I keep dipping in and out of that end of the pool, it’s seeming like I’m in a different pool altogether now. Instead of wanting to go all Vegas buffet with the intent to slop a little bit of everything on my plate to see how it tastes, my preferences are getting a little more fixed. It seems impossible now for me to invest time and energy playing something for the sake of playing it alone.
It actually makes me think of this comic I’ve been following lately called Prophet. This dude suddenly emerges from a pod underground, vomits up a silver thing, and is attacked by a new and horrifying breed of starving predator. It turns out he was in a cryogenic sleep for quite some time, and awakens immediately aware of a mission. While I haven’t vomited up anything metal and predators are something of a rarity in my region, I feel like I get it. Waking up suddenly and perusing lands that were once familiar and have suddenly become colonized with newness. The core of what I’m getting at is the direction video games as an industry are going. (Probably an equal amount of where I’m going, too.)
We’re living in a world of online multiplayer, padded single-player experiences (fetch quests, ughhh), sequelitis, bugs bugs bugs, price gouging, and reliable formulas. This isn’t a totally fair summary, of course. There are and will always be releases that don’t register with any of these criticisms, but it seems there’s a dick-punching trend making each a much more commonplace feature. It feels like we’ve already reached a point where the majority of people don’t bat an eyelash when portions of the game are locked on the disc or there are gameplay crippling bugs that literally punish you for playing the game.
I’m being super general here and straying away from actually talking about Skyrim, but this is as good of a place as any to bring it back home. The fact that Skyrim can contain so many game crashing bugs, develop lag that can make it unplayable if you dare explore their sandbox on consoles, and still win Game of the Year awards feels like validation that there’s a disconnect between gaming journalism or perhaps the industry culture, and the consumer. It isn’t so much an issue of so-called “money hats,” but the increasingly acute reality that gaming journalism is third party marketing for the gaming industry.
The problem with many gaming sites is that there’s a kind of inbreeding taking place. Each site seems to have its own point of genesis that makes it distinct from the other sites out there. Destructoid, for example, was founded by the highly opinionated Yanier Gonzalez, and is now where gaming’s most inflammatory mouthpiece, Jim Sterling, hangs his figurative hat. This is nowhere near a bad thing. The problem comes into play with some of the more mainstream sites that write in an attempt to hit a mark that appeals to absolutely everyone. In my opinion, this more or less means they’re either looking to castrate new hires or, better yet, hire milquetoast types who’ve already had their figurative nuts stored somewhere behind the dishwashing detergent under the figurative sink. We’re verging on a dick moment here, but I’m just gonna say it: weak personalities have no place in journalism. I’m tempted to say they have no place in writing period, but then there’s always technical writing or certain vanilla corners of marketing that welcome people who wish to write but possess no distinct spine of their own.
The job of a journalist is to champion the righteous and give tough talk to the false idols. Unfortunately, it feels like gaming journalism around the webs is currently defined by the expectations of the audience, and one’s ability to hit all the right marks before successfully delivering a review that approximately speaks to them. It’s kind of like the literal version of “the safety dance.” Only instead of having the benefit of being fairly critiqued, these practices encourage the next crop of completely indistinct writers to come out and talk about how great the latest Madden or Call of Duty is, formulaic though they may be.
This is how we wind up with Skyrim taking GoTY over games that were released in complete, playable form. Though I didn’t enjoy Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, it was more or less a bug free experience. The aiming lag tried to keep you from enjoying the overall package too much, but it was a game that wasn’t wholly resistant to your attempts to play it. Batman: Arkham City was absolutely mind-alteringly rad, as was Portal 2, and yet both were also bested by the latest project from the folks who delivered Fallout 3.
Now, while most gaming news outlets actually gave the top award to Portal 2, what’s troubling is that the conglomeration of the editors-in-chiefs and gaming personalities that were compiled for the most public, grandiose presentation of Game of the Year somehow went to the duct-taped Pinto that is Skyrim. Before you dismiss this as nerd rage directed at one stupid award ceremony, remember that if you’ve read this far, you might as well see where I’m going. We’re in the final moments here.
So here is your advisory council. Top and middle dogs from top and middle sites, publications, and organizations. The guys from Penny Arcade are even on there. While there are always dissenting voices in the discussion of GoTY, it should be noted that most of the gaming sites represented on this council gave the title to Portal 2. Undoubtedly a phenomenal game, I was still surprised by that. Pleasantly so, but surprised nonetheless. But like those good things we’re told must come to an end, when these minds pooled their collective opinions, suddenly the more commercially successful, unbelievably hyped game swoops in to pluck what was rightly deserved elsewhere and claimed for its own.
The people voting are by no means stupid or what I would consider weak-minded. Hell, Brian Crecente was just about the only person willing to champion God Hand when it released. That alone makes me want to clip some of his luminescent locks and build a shrine in his name. But what happened? Really, I’m curious what you think. The only working theory I have is that when you pull this many people with their own specific likes and dislikes, people either congeal or become adversarial. Factions splinter. Key players change sides. Whispers in the shadows form dark pacts. And ultimately a kind of Stockholm syndrome induced uniformity yields an entirely safe consensus. It’s the only thing they’re all going to agree upon, so why not just go there.
This is a problem. When the many voices in gaming come together, especially when they’re as talented and passionate as those on this council, it should allow for the synthesis of some amazing mental work. They should become a less snarky Justice League or something, right? Championing all that is good?
Instead they championed a product released before it was finished because the studio knew there was money to be made. Who wants to invest in testing when you can patch the problems after the fact? More and more it seems that the simple promise of a game or the names attached to it dictate more and more of what sells, and thus dictates more and more what people wish to use their “juice” to endorse. Rewarding a more niche title with praise and awards can result in some alienation, but this post should prove that any decision at all can do that.
Ultimately, hearing about all the flaws, experiencing far too many first-hand on a friend’s save, and then reading “Skyrim Wins Game of the Year” on the site for Spike’s VGAs was too much for me. I sold it for a slight loss without ever breaking the factory seal. Being an English major, I’m all about symbols and metaphor. Four months later, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim remains the singular embodiment of the trend that concerns me the most in gaming today: blind acceptance.
Recently, I mentioned the elegant way Deus Ex: Human Revolution allowed you to make decisions that were relevant to your interests. It didn’t judge these or attempt to impose its own morality with clear-cut distinctions between a Snidely action and a Do-Right action. Well, what didn’t come up, even in passing, was the decision Eidos Montreal chose to make when they outsourced the boss fights to a different studio.
It was a tough decision, I’m sure, that was made out of necessity. Working with a publisher like Square-Enix, it’s easy to imagine that the deadline was a mandate rather than a tentative window of expectation. Instead of sacrificing what the developer saw as the fundamental elements to the game, they cut the strings on the boss fight kite and away it went. What they got back, while not terrible, was surely not what they would have put together given the direction they were taking with choice. The awkwardness seems compounded in the fact that there’s a trophy for completing the game without killing anyone that has to state in parentheses that bosses don’t count.
Totally winning, right Charlie Sheen?
Here’s some video plucked from the Augmented Edition. In it you’ll hear the president of GRIP Entertainment, Paul Kruszewski, talk about their aims and efforts on the boss battles.
It’s sad because you can hear both how excited and daunted he is. More over, he’s a shooter fan who really wasn’t familiar with the world of Deus Ex. He literally had to ask people about it to figure out what to expect. Unfortunately, as the video descriptions states, he’ll be known as the guy who forced players to kill in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Listening to what he has to say, I mean… he tried. It’s clear efforts were made to ensure quality, but it’s equally clear that there was a deep disconnect between his studio’s way of thinking and the game’s. It’s great that the folks at GRIP considered that players could be augmented in different ways and resolved to craft an enjoyable experience regardless of their upgrades. But as soon as this translates to “we tried each encounter with every type of weapon” you see the digital earth open up and disconnect these little islands from the figurative continent of the game forever.
While they didn’t do much to slow down my initial playthrough, it did make the decision to trade the title in last week an easier one. I wanted bosses I could trick with pheromones, hide from in vents, or sneak around altogether. The game and overall experience are still among the best you’ll find from 2011, which is saying something, but do I really want to replay any of those boss fights? Not really. And thus the game will hopefully find a nice home elsewhere. Ideally with someone more FPS-oriented.
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