writer thoughts on a game-crazy world
My friend Nicol and I were watching TV half-heartedly and we saw one of those Grande commercials go by, advertising some accelerated internet service in Austin called “Cheetah with Bolt.” I’m not sure what Cheetah with Bolt is. Sounds like a new costumed crimefighting team.
Anyhow, Nicol admitted that she thought it was a badly-planned new snack product. Specifically, Cheetos with Jolt. Now that, my friends, would be one hellish cheesy puff.
An ACL TV taping is a once-in-a-lifetime experienceYou ever been to an ACL TV show taping? If you live in Austin, or visit Austin occasionally, you owe it to yourself to go to an Austin City Limits taping. It’s like a backyard concert with 320 of your closest friends, listening to an amped-up performance from a musical act of national or international stature.
My friends Kevin, Katya, Centerfield Dave, and Mike and I were lucky enough to get into the Okkervil River ACL TV taping last Thursday. Lucky is definitely an operative word; five people after us, the ACL staff cut off the line of hopefuls and sent those people home empty-handed. For your reference, my ACL numbered ticket was #185.
I’m not very pleased with my success as a music reviewer; I’ve done it several times and I’m never entirely satisfied with the results. Still, for your sake, dear reader, I’ll try and sum up the experience. This was Okkervil’s first ACL TV taping, but as you’d expect from an act with their pedigree, they were entirely up for the experience and showed no signs of nervousness.
They hit the stage with about ten or 12 musicians, including a string quartet (quintet?) and a few pieces of brass. Frontman Will Sheff, initially sporting a bookish pair of black-framed glasses, had the air of an affable, gawky friend amongst friends, sometimes rattling on about surviving the TV taping, always singing with passion and without visible effort. His aw-shucks demeanor was nowhere to be seen, though, in the times when it was most important, in the crucial peaks of songs and in urging the crowd for energy.
The band showcased both fresh arrangements — most notably a delicate piano-and-vocals intro to Black Sheep Boy‘s dire and delicious “For Real” — and its patented propulsive paens like “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe,” which are vibrant on headphones but deliver a visceral, full-howl punch in person, building slowly until every bandmember on stage is seemingly deconstructing their instrument in a frenzy of passion.
I was personally hoping to hear them play the tragically delicate “Savannah Smiles” off Stage Names, but there never seemed to be an appropriate time to yell out suggestions. “The President’s Dead” would’ve been nice too. Was happy to hear the lyrical “Starry Stairs” and its horn-driven lope, though. I’m not sure requests are even allowed at an ACL TV taping; the TV crew probably has to plot out all the camera moves for each song. Often the bulky cameras were gliding around at the front of the stage, inches from colliding with one another.
Was also happy to see Jonathan Meiberg of the sublime band Shearwater make an appearance for “Lost Coastlines.” Sadly they failed to mike his guitar on the first go-round, though, so Sheff announced a do-over which was gamely received.
This was my third ACL TV taping experience (the other bands were Guided by Voices and Ben Kweller). I’m a lucky boy. I remember they miscalculated for GBV and were trying to hand out tickets on the corner of Dean Keaton and Guadalupe to get butts in the seats. Pretty sad for one of the best shows I’ve ever seen (not just at ACL TV).
Anyhow, back to Okkervil. As you’d expect with such a small crowd, instrument changes and personnel rearrangements caused mildly uncomfortable silences, during which we could hear a pronounced equipment hum. The ACL TV crew do this gig on a regular basis so I doubt any of that is going to be audible in the master signal. At any ordinary venue, I expect crowd noise and sheer size would probably overwhelm the hum to the point of inaudibility. On the plus side, I’ve seen Okkervil before at the Carousel Lounge, and I can promise you that I could hear the lyrics a heckuva lot better at the ACL TV taping.
Thumbs down, though, to Budweiser Select, the ACL sponsor who failed to provide enough beer. I didn’t expect or even want seconds, but the keg was floated well before we entered the building.
I give Sheff all the credit in the world for amping the crowd and garnering our support. Okkervil songs are hardly dance numbers, but people were up, involved. clapping, hollering, and even soul clapping when requested. The ACL TV studio is essentially a sterile environment, like a kiddie pool stage surrounded by junior-high-school risers, and it’s easy for a band to die miserably in the silence.
If you want a slice of some ACL TV deliciousness:
Try the Pez gun. Great for parents who encourage their kids to engage in suicide- and execution-themed play. Click the gun for the full story at TopCultured.
The Do Not Call List Is BrokenThe Do Not Call List is another new feature on our modern communications landscape, and it’s one I’m not particularly fond of. You see, the Do Not Call List does exactly what you don’t want it to do — it makes your phone number readily available to telemarketers.
To put it in game writer terms, telemarketers are playing a game that the U.S. government and FTC are trying to impose rules upon. Unfortunately, that ruleset has only weak enforcement in the country, and zero weight outside it.
The Do Not Call List does function in a remedial, 1970s fashion. I’m not talking bell-bottoms, but close. The List tells telemarketers “don’t call any of these numbers!” and that’s effective for the 1970s-style telemarketers. The ones who follow the rules and are afraid of government enforcement.
Modern telemarketers are, unsurprisingly, a lot like vermin. They scurry around, looking for any kind of quick-hit profit so they can survive to live another day. Bash them once, and they’ll pop up in another spot under another guise, and they don’t give a crap about FTC rules because they’re gone before any slow-footed G-man can get a bead on the source of their stench.
Yep. You’d think it was some piece of bad conspiracy game writing, but no, just go to the Do Not Call List telemarketer service site and look at the menu on the left side. Item #6 is “DOWNLOAD PHONE NUMBERS.” That’s an eye-opener all right — the farmer throwing the henhouse door wide open for the foxes.
It’s actually not that bad, because they require telemarketers to register and pay for the information. And how can they tell telemarketers “don’t call these people!” if the telemarketers don’t know which people not to call?
On the other hand, what’s to stop a telemarketer from using the Do Not Call List as their hotsheet for suckers? Or from selling the list to another firm?
If the FTC has any smarts, they’ve seeded the list with phony names and numbers that they use to monitor abuse just like I mentioned. Unfortunately, for the modern telemarketer, or any overseas operation, I don’t see how they can make anything stick. Have you ever heard of the FTC extraditing telemarketers? I don’t think so.
Removing yourself from the list is easy, but you have to look hard to find it. From the FTC website:
7. What if I change my mind? Can I take my number off the National Do Not Call Registry?
You can de-register your phone number from NDNC by calling or sending SMS to toll-free 1909 saying ‘STOP DND‘. It will be removed from the National Do Not Call Registry within next 45 days.
The NDNC number is 1-888-382-1222. This game writer was getting two regular calls every morning, and I finally had myself removed. The calls went away. However, I still get the occasional call, and that’s where I experience the downside.
While you’re on the list, you have a legal foot to stand on. You can hit the Do Not Call List website or the more elaborate and detailed FCC telemarketing complaint page and get the law on your side. No guarantees on what they’ll do, and I’ve certainly never heard a peep from the gov when I’ve reported violators, but it’s theraputic.
Now that I’m off the list, I really can’t do anything about telemarketers except curse them. Or you can do what we used to do at the office, which is waste their time. You said, “Sure, I’m interested in that product! Hold on a minute!” and then put the phone down for about 5. Then pick it up and apologize and see how long you can string ’em along. It’s good fun and hits them where it hurts. Too bad it doesn’t work on machines.
Lastly, here’s a little tidbit for your amusement. It’s a document describing the Do Not Call List — for India. That’s right. Americans aren’t the only ones being telemarketed to, so you can relax and stop feeling so special.
YouTube video quality is a mysterious thing, especially since they run their own compression on (most? all?) video that’s been uploaded to the site.
Even more mysterious is how to get YouTube videos to default to high quality when you embed them on your own website.
Recently we were facing the YouTube quality conundrum for some new South by Southwest music videography that we posted up at the main Sparkleworks site. How do we get YouTube to default the video playback to high quality? We’d encoded the video to the perfect H.264 settings, so we were generally pleased with the high quality YouTube performance, but getting it to default to that quality setting was another issue.
Blogosphere to the rescue. This is excerpted from Jason Kottke’s excellent Kottke.org. Visit the original post to find out what Jason says about linking to high quality YouTube videos, defaulting your YouTube prefs to high quality, and saving high quality YouTube videos to your local digital smarmitude.
Embedding high quality YouTube videos:
The &fmt=18 trick doesn’t work here, but a similar trick does. For each of the URLs in the embeddable code that you get from YouTube, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto the end, like so:<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/MuqiGrWBRqE&hl=en&fs=1 &ap=%2526fmt%3D18“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/MuqiGrWBRqE&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
If you want some high quality YouTube video, this is the sacred path. Tread lightly.
And now, in honor of Jason’s technical helping hand, I present you with some Bang Camaro from South by Southwest 2009, live from Lovejoy’s in Austin, Texas. Those Guitar Hero II fans out there will recognize this tune. The rest of you will probably still enjoy the sight of forty-seven amped-up lead singers on stage simultaneously:
God, I hate Twitter.
They say you either hate it or love it. I suppose it has its uses for deal-seekers (like myself) who enjoy the thrill of the hunt, in a Woot-Off kind of sense.
It’s South by Southwest here in Austin, TX, and the streets are filled with the usual LA transplants, here to share with their friends the social status they have from being backstage at the hottest shows. Too bad they’re so busy pushing little chiclet buttons on their phones that they can’t be bothered to pay attention to the music.
One of my clients is search engine optimization company Get Page One, where I do project management and content development. We often kick Twitter around as a topic of conversation. I understand that it lowers social barriers and allows you to keep tabs on celebs and powerful people. It’s Voyeurism 2.0. It’s public exhibitionism in 50 words or less. But in a pop-culture climate where I’m struggling to filter out the urgent from the important, Twitter is really the last kind of input that I want or need. I don’t care how many people are following you. Popularity contests sucked in high school; now they mean even less.
Twitter is blog-lite when I was already irritated by the frequent frothiness of blogs. Videogame writers are expected to be pretty froth-friendly, but ideally their work is closer to literature than to reality TV. If the medium is ever to aspire to being an art form, it needs to eschew froth. So far, comic books (Maus, Sandman, and yes, even the Watchmen movie) are a lot closer to reaching that status than videogames.
Boxing games are back. Fight Night Round 4 has been announced with a ship date – actually, a ship season – of “Summer 2009.”
It’s good to see this boxing franchise making another run. There’s also leaked video on Youtube of an EA representative comparing FN4 and FN3, which I also found encouraging. I loved FN3 but it still had plenty of room for improvement. I think we still haven’t seen a true next-gen arcade-simulation of boxing, just very tantalizing and visually appealing boxing imitations.
Part of the problem is that boxing really involves the whole human body, like dancing. (Seen any good dancing videogames? EA, want to use the FN4 engine to make one?) Obviously, it’s a different scale than controlling a running back in a football game. The biggest disappointment is that the game is destined for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Of all the next gen platforms, you’d think the most natural fit for a boxing game would be on the Wii. However, motion detection on the Wii isn’t as precise as Nintendo would like you to think.
I think what we’d all like to see is a boxing game that captures true body movement- a lean of the shoulders, a flick of the hips, a tilt of the head – rather than a string of rote offensive and defensive boxing moves. Whether it comes in a boxing game, a brawler like Tekken or Street Fighter, or in the aforementioned dancing game, we all want more control and simpler controls.
One analog stick for punching was a cool idea, and revolutionary in its way (kudos to you, Kudo), but ultimately untenable. After all, that little stick had to do all the work of two arms. Being lefthanded, I found it especially perverse, and eventually joined my human boxing compadre in using the face buttons, a la Punch Out and time immemorial.
Good to see Tyson in there, too. I definitely wished for his presence in FN3.
This game industry cartoon is written for the UK, but I think it translates pretty well. Sadly, it’s also pretty true. Acclaim had a studio in Austin that imploded. I almost took a job there.
The cartoon is “Crashlander,” and it’s worth a look. Click on the teaser below to visit the site and see the full cartoon.
Rely on EDGE Magazine to throw out some interesting memes. Today I stumbled upon this thought – that some of the hot new television writing is actually becoming more like videogame writing. And not in a good way:
TV is yet another medium struggling to compete against interactive entertainment…. Even TV shows are becoming more like videogames, with a flat palette of two-dimensional characters moving progressively through random objectives, the odd big boss and perplexing, pointless plot twists. Heroes, Lost, Family Guy. Shit, shit, shit.
So those cocky Brits just compared your favorite TV show with human offal. But you have to admit that some of these modern ensemble television dramas aren’t TV shows in the classic mode.
Instead, they’re giant productions that will continue to throw out new characters, obstacles, and plot threads in a desperate and calculated effort to survive. It’s fully possible that, like the great red herring generator, Twin Peaks, there’s no overarching meta-narrative. I fear that they exist only to exist. When the concept wears thin and viewers turn elsewhere, these shows might just crumble and crash into the rocks without ever attempting to answer the questions that they raised in the first place.
Sure, the videogame movie is a Hollywood staple as movie studios reveal again and again their timid business strategies. But it’s not every day that you see someone postulate that game writing is bleeding stylistically into other media, instead of vice versa. Some food for thought the next time you’re zoning out in front of the idiot box.