Movies Suck.

movies-suckMovies suck. That’s the big headline today. It’s not exactly banner news for you guys, but still, it’s something that can be forgotten in the heat of the moment.

I love movies; everybody loves movies. But it’s a grievous error to assume that all stories can be told in a movie format, or that movies are our species’ greatest cultural asset.

A lot of my favorite stories will never make it to film because they’re not marketable enough, they’re too long, or they’re headtrips that would be difficult to visualize.

Visual Storytelling

There’s a genius to visual storytelling, and not every director has it. How many times have you been in a theatre watching a closeup of or a slow push in on an actor’s thoughtful face and wondered, What the hell is that person thinking?

In my opinion, some of those moments are failures in visual storytelling. We should be able to know that this is the final straw that leads him to leave the country, or momentary indecision, or terrible indigestion, but we haven’t been given enough information. On the other hand, perhaps the director wants us to be unsure of the character’s thought process. And of course, some of these moments are merely our failures to read the cues that the director is sending. It’s a fine line. Without the often ham-handed aid of voiceover narration, the inherent limitations of the visual medium make filmic storytelling a challenge.

Film Is Shallow

Complex storylines simply can’t be told compellingly in film. Imagine if you sat a capable screenwriter or novel writer down with the three Lord of the Rings movies and had him novelize them. How do you think they’d compare against the Tolkien originals? The idea is laughable — all the nuance, history, grandeur, and poetry of the originals would be stripped out. Still, most agree that these movies are remarkable works of art.

It’s my opinion that movies typically can convey the depth and complexity of a good short story. The average novel must shed a significant fraction of its heft when transcribed for the silver screen.

And the Odds Are Against Us

Also, as a collaborative medium, movies are often destroyed from the inside by flawed implementation. The teams are so big, the stakes are so high, and the points of failure so varied that sometimes I marvel when a good movie is completed, not when a bad one is made.

Even when a good movie is wrapped, it’s often sabotaged by half-hearted marketing, or even shelved by the same studio that made it because of fears that it isn’t worth the expense of distribution and promotion. The system is structured so that it tends to create stinkers. Great stories that don’t seem to have mass-market appeal generally don’t stand a chance.

Anyhow, some random thoughts as we head into the holiday season. Go out there and love you some wintertime movies, but do it with both eyes open.

Want a PS3?

want a ps3

PS3 Photo

Tower of Sony Playstation 3 computing power, anyone?

Suggested Use

I hear that Kim Jong-il has networked five thousand of these together to plot trajectories for a new Earth-to-Jupiter interplanetary expedition. They are looking for mutant ladies of the night.

Now Really

And no, commenting on this post will NOT win you a free PS3. I just thought you folks might enjoy seeing this excess. My old roomie bought them as prizes for long-term participants in a University of Texas Austin research study. She says it caused a few raised eyebrows at the checkout at Fry’s Electronics.

Can You Be-Gleeve It?

The Gleeve: Frog’s New Power Glove

So Frog Design has a new unstructured-play concept called the Gleeve. Cool concept that lends itself to horrible blog puns and nightmares of Nintendo’s abortive power glove.

I think it has potential, although the description does seem a little light on details. I’m not about to criticize a simple introductory post for lack of structure, but I do want to plant a suggestion in the Froggies’ heads — a little structure can be a good thing.

It might be premature to proclaim the complete death of imagination. I’m sure there are kids right now, sitting in an empty lot or on a baseball diamond, making up their own games as I type with nothing but enthusiasm and body language. However, attention spans are short and a blank canvas can be as intimidating as prison bars.

If I were in the Frog’s shoes, I’d package that product with a few addictive, premade games that have prominent tunable characteristics or several radically different rulesets that invite experimentation.

Or better yet, I’d hire a game writer/game designer to make those games. :)

I also found this diagram in the Fast Company announcement quite thought-provoking, although I don’t know if I’d rank the Sims as more open than a mod. Click to see the full size image.

LOTR Conquest: Tolkien-Flavored Cheese

Rapidfire Review: Lord of the Rings Conquest

Some quick game designer’s observations about this PS3 game. This thing is hilarious. Yes, unintentionally hilarious, but I give Pandemic points for making the formula easily digestible.

Admittedly, I’m kind of fond of Pandemic because they’re kind of scrappy and they did a solid job with Star Wars Battlefront and Army Men RTS, the latter of which was published by 3DO, one of my previous employers.

He Has Infiltrated Their Lines with Scout Invisibility! Yes!!!

If you yell this with a British accent and buckets of false enthusiasm, you will approach the humor quotient of the demo. Or you can simply watch this video:

That’s pretty choice. Maybe you don’t remember masked, invisible scouts chucking satchel bombs when you read Tolkien, but you probably weren’t reading closely enough. They were all over in The Silmarillion. No, seriously!

Similarly, the wizard class can heal and cast chain lightning, fire wall, and earthquake at the press of a button. A bit of a contrast with Gandalf, whose strongest magicks were providing therapy to Theoden to get him out from under Wormtongue’s control, and +5 chaperoning of stupid Hobbits.

But of course, providing gravitas and guidance is not really what the kids want to do when they’re fantasizing. So Pandemic has taken a few rather generous liberties with the source material.

Gameplay

All would be forgiven if Conquest provided a luxurious gameplay experience, but sadly that’s not the case. Conquest is a lowbrow experience built for simple orc-bashing fun and the exploitation of a license, and it really shows in the brain-dead camera, the simplistic combos, the lack of a “lock-on” control, and the unresponsive controls.

When I say “unresponsive controls,” I’m using a bit of shorthand, actually. Many reviewers use this phrase to describe the disease that afflicts many games, including Conquest. It’s not really the controls that are frustrating; it’s animation cycles and the granularity of the input that the game can accept. This is a topic that has to wait for another day, but let’s just say that sometimes it feels like an eternity to get your character to do what you want him to do.

Conquest does deliver a 16-player online experience which is reminiscent of Battlefront and another 3DO game, the long-forgotten Legends of Might and Magic. Online is good.

Endgame

I also got a good chuckle out of the end of the demo, which allows you to play as the hero Isildur in a crowded battlefield dominated by none other than Sauron himself. Talk about giving up the goods – Pandemic threw subtlety to the winds and trotted out the Dark Lord in the demo. Ol’ Sourpuss draws a beeline for Isildur at every opportunity and bounces him around like a superball, often incurring the wrath of the craptacular camera code (you can’t see Isildur after he gets whacked) and the clumsy object boundaries (Isildur gets popped up on top of environmental objects).

Not a problem — a few dozen good pokes with a standard-issue sword or arrow puts him in the grave. If only Frodo had known!

Making a Cardboard Camera

Dad, this one’s for you. This is what I call an extraordinary level of effort and precision. The thing actually works, but good luck on getting the film. You’d have to process it in a trash barrel or paint bucket.

Kiel Johnson’s Cardboard Twin Lens Reflex Camera Time Lapse from Theo Jemison.

Rapidfire Review: Sengoku Basara

Hi, videogame fans. Today we’ve got an update for you about the PS3 title Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, or SBSH. (It’s also been converted into an anime and a manga title.)

I’m still trying to recover from the discovery that this game was developed by Capcom, not Koei, because it smells, tastes, feels, and plays just like a “Dynasty Warriors” game, except with a squirlier camera.

Dynasty Warriors is an evergreen (or interminable, depending on your perspective) series out of Japan in which you play a hero on a vast battlefield, “leading” your army to take strategic camps as part of a larger battles. Each stage basically plays out like capture-the-flag as you try to hold camps and eventually win the battle. The scale of the battles can be invigorating, with dozens of AI characters on screen, but DW has been criticized for its relatively simplistic “button-mashing” gameplay. Frankly, I think the series would be fairly well-accepted if this same formula had a different IP behind it — a Marvel comic book, for example.

Anyhow, SBSH is very similar, even down to the sheeplike AI of the minor NPCs, who have a tendency to trot around the battlefield and stare numbly at their opponents, waiting ages before taking tentative stabs using their weapons. At first I thought the difficulty on SBSH was cranked down, because I got most of the way through the first level in the demo without ever taking damage. Then I encountered the first major boss, who immediately used his nijitsu skills to split into three devilishly nimble selves, none of which dissolved when first being hit. No, these chaps were definitely tangible. I passed them on the second try, but only after limping around the level and scarfing up all the healing and magic powerups I could find.

SBSH isn’t terribly impressive except for its slavish imitation of DW. Save your ducats for the real thing.

Scifi/Humor Rag Publishes on Clay Tablets

scifi humor rag on clayThe scifi/humor ‘zine Space Squid has just released a special edition of their latest issue on clay tablets. As trendy as clay tablets are these days, they don’t get enough cred. One of the editors created the tablets using a cuneiform stylus like an ancient Sumerian (Iraqi) scribe and then created a hard polyurethane plate to press the double-sided copies. The regular edition is also out, and at its core are images of the same two clay tablets, surrounded by pages of extra PDF goodness. Check it out at their Free Scifi page.

Everyone is going on about how “print is dead” these days, so it’s particularly amusing to see this publication pushing the idea the opposite way and “printing on the deadest media available.” The project got some great press at WIRED, on Bruce Sterling’s blog, and at various webby spots. You can see the blog on how to make your own clay tablet publication and the YouTube clay tablet guide.

Space Squid is based in Austin, but claims to contain “your puny planet’s finest scifi and hijinx.” The issue contains stories from several foreign contributors.

A Web Win-Win: We Win a Gig, You Win a Car

web-win-winCheck Out Our New Project and Win a Car

Yup, it’s a web win-win situation. I landed a web game writing project recently, and it’s now hit the inter-web-nets. I was a contributing writer on Toyota/Scion’s new web game, Unlock the tC, which highlights the Scion tC.

I can say, as objectively as I can, that the tC does seem like a sweet little ride. It’s the sporty car in the Scion line, and you can actually win trip to LA and a shot at a free tC in the web game if you crank on all of the objectives.

Hey, This Web Game Has Hardly Any Writing

The tC web game is fairly complex, containing multiple mini-games and a lengthy cross-country journey rife with decision points. But you might notice that… uh… there’s not a lot of game writing in it. And that’s intentional.

Instead of writing quantity, this web project was more of a challenge in terms of tone, style, functionality, and variety. Since it’s not a full RPG, there are certain points where we couldn’t assume the player has done action A, and other points where we couldn’t force the player to do action B. The writing always had to be performed with an inherent understanding of the web game’s underlying technical structure.

At the same time, we wanted to provide the player with lots of choices and capture the real flavor of a rip-roaring cross-country adventure. The player’s actions needed to be logical within the fictional framework. The visuals had to be fresh and the voice did too. We’re pretty pleased with the results. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Even If You Don’t Win the Web Game…

When creating the web game, we also tried to encourage gamers to visit the sister site scionav.com as much as possible. If you have a moment, take a peek, because it has a lot of cool art, music, and video, including several albums worth of free MP3 downloads from top DJs.

Many thanks to the client/production company, Haley Miranda Group, for the opportunity to work on this project.