The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
Looking at the comments on an excellent Destructoid piece about Final Fantasy IX, I came across someone who puts me to shame with his FF Nerd power level. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to blog my way through the games, but I’m even happier now that I chose not to do that, because I could never hope to do it better than this guy.
I spent a couple of hours last night just skimming through all of these, so take that as a warning about how much he wrote. Check out a couple, you’ll get a good idea of how dedicated he was to this. He’s got a good sense of humour, and the writing is solid too. He also chose to play the original versions of each of the games, in some cases requiring fan translations, which boggles the mind. I’ve been playing the GBA releases of FF I-VI (DS release for FF III), and they’re a whole lot nicer than what he had to deal with. The game I remember as FF II is radically different from the one he describes (in terms of gameplay), but then I haven’t played the game since I was twelve, so that might have something to do with it.
So yeah, this guy is my hero.
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The Final Fantasy V And Pitchfork-related Section Of This Post
It seems like everyone has the exact same reaction to FF V’s job system. Pitchfork captures what vael and I felt nicely:
Final Fantasy V’s two-dimensional characters get tossed around by an implausible scenario with more plot devices and contrision than you can shake a moogle at. This seems to be the main reason a lot of players aren’t too fond of the fifth installment. A week or so I was talking about this with Polly, who is not a Final Fantasy V fan. “So what if the plot is silly,” I told her. “It’s still a pretty fun game.”
“Pat,” she answered. “A little kid running around with a cereal bowl on his head is silly. Final Fantasy V’s story is just retarded.”
“WHAT?” I asked. “WHAT WAS THAT? I’M SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS JOB SYSTEM.”
I’d be really surprised if he didn’t know about it, considering how in-depth his knowledge of the games are, but FF V’s job system has a feature he doesn’t even mention. I don’t the game ever actually tells you what happens when you “master” a job, but something very important happens, and it’s probably the best part of the game’s design. Nevertheless, the “oh my god this is so well designed” reaction can only reach new heights when you find out about the connection between Freelancers and mastered jobs.
When you reach the maximum level of a job, it’s considered to be “mastered” by that character. At the start of the game, the Freelancer job is pretty lame: you can equip anything, but you don’t really have any abilities. Later on, you can mix and match any two abilities you like.
Now, by default, you can use all the passive abilities of a job when you’re using it, without taking up your second ability slot. A Monk can use Counter without equipping it, and a Thief can use Sprint the same way. But when you’ve mastered a job, this ability extends to the Freelancer job. If you master both the Monk and Thief jobs, as a Freelancer, you’ll have both Counter and Sprint innately. On top of that, you get the best of their innate stat boosts, too. So you get great strength, stamina, and agility.
So the Geomancer job may have a pretty lame ability (and some helpful passive abilities), but it only takes 175 ability points to master it, as opposed to something like 600 for the other magic jobs. That means a really easy boost to your magic stat towards the end of the game for your fighters. The other magic jobs, for obvious reasons, give better stat boosts than the Geomancer job, so your Summoner/White Mage won’t get much use out of mastering it.
Playing the end of the game as a dual-wielding Ninja with the Ranger’s Rapidfire skill is pretty awesome. But playing the end of the game as a Freelancer, with Rapidfire and Spellblade, and the best stats and skills of the Ninja, Ranger, Geomancer and Mystic Knight is amaaaaazing.
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The Final Fantasy V And Update-related Section Of This Post
Looking over yesterday’s post, I had a quick thought about the characters in Final Fantasy V, who are interchangeable from one another barring a few minor stat differences - they may be roughly identical in the gameplay, but they still have their own personalities and look (unlike in FF I or III, each character has their own “look” when using a certain job) and the player defines their own gameplay roles for the characters based on your progression through various jobs and customization of the characters.
By contrast, in FF I the party you choose in the beginning only has meaning to the gameplay, while choice of job in FF III is fluid and contributes nothing to the actual character. They may get names in the DS remake, but you can make your job level 99 Black Mage a Ninja and your job level 99 Thief a Magus, and it makes no difference.
On a final note, which will spoil a bit of FF V’s story, swapping a character for another wholesale is a difficult thing to pull off. In the beginning of FF V, you have Galuf as a party member - he’s a tough old man, well-suited to being a physical fighter. Later in the game, your progress with his character is transported to a character named Krile - a young girl, best used as a mage. If you’ve been training Galuf solely as a Monk up until this point, suddenly you need to change the role you’ve defined for the character. On the other hand, if you know it’s coming, you can train him as a more general character such as a Blue Mage or Mystic Knight.
There’s something I’ve been working on for a few years now, but I’ve never actually mentioned to anyone. A personal quest of mine, I guess. It’s not really a secret, I’ve just never bothered to explain it. I told someone yesterday, though, and I think he was impressed, so I feel like posting about it now.
My goal is this: play every game in the main Final Fantasy series to completion. A dozen games right now, thirteen if you include FF X-2. I’ve finished some of the earlier NES titles in 20-30 hours, but the newer games are easily twice as long. More if you run around doing sidequests and finding secrets, which I tend to do. I’ll post my final times when I’m all done, but let’s just say I’ve put hundreds of hours into this series.
At the moment, I have three games left to finish: Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy VIII. I’ve put a few hours into FF V already, but I haven’t started the other two at all. At a wild guess, I’d say 40 hours each for FF V and VI, but VIII could take a while longer than that depending on how much extra stuff I do. It’s looking good, though - I think I can finish before the end of the year, even if I get a job for the summer.
I don’t know for sure when I started doing this. I think it was a little over a year ago that I told myself I’d actually finish them all, but it was a few years before that when I decided to collect all of the games. I still remember when I got each of the games, but the thing is - I rarely ever finished them. I actually did complete II, VII and IX before dedicating myself to it. But since last spring, I’ve finished FF I, III, IV, X, X-2, XII, and XIII. Most of those games only took 10-20 more hours to finish from when I’d stopped playing, which may sound ridiculous if you don’t play RPGs, but it means I was pretty close to the end.
Here are a few things I’ve learned so far:
There’s probably a lot more to be said than that, but I haven’t thought of it yet. You really need to compare individual games in order to notice this stuff, because the strong points of one game can shed light on the problems of another. So even though I’m almost done playing the games, I’m nowhere near finished thinking about them. I could easily write this much about Dissidia Final Fantasy, the fighting game that pits characters from across the series against each other. I intend to write a whole lot more about the stories and characters of FF XII and XIII.
I mean, someone’s gotta do it.
For my 300th post, I thought I’d go a little high-brow and talk about a book I’ve been reading called Beyond the Profits System by economist Harry Shutt. The subtitle is “Possibilities For a Post-Capitalist Era,” so that should give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about. I’m really not interested in economics and things like that, but I picked up the book for five bucks when I was buying a textbook, and it was certainly worth the price. It’s a pretty rough read, though - the writing is very academic, and I think it might actually be intended for use as a textbook. Considering I’ll never take the class it was used for, I can’t really verify any of what was in it. A cursory search reveals pretty much no information on it or the author, but that’s normal for a textbook.
With all that being said, I’m going to assume the book is credible until proven otherwise. The basic idea is that the current model of capitalism, focusing solely on growth and profits, is doomed to fail and needs to be replaced for the sake of public good. First of all, there’s the matter of absurd inequality - not only do we have countries that are far more prosperous than others, but within individual countries, there are people starving to death and others making money faster than they can spend it. Second of all, there’s something called “the business cycle” inherent in capitalism: eventually profits bottom out, and in order to get back the huge growth rates of the past, there needs to be a huge recession. I won’t get into it too much, but from what I understand, the idea is that capitalism revolves around investing excess capital in order to continuously get more. But eventually profitable investment opportunities run out, because there’s too much excess capital. So then you have crashes like the Great Depression, followed by comparatively amazing recovery.
The part that I found most interesting was a section on how companies could survive without pursuing maximum profit. Ideally, in whatever new system would replace capitalism, non-profit ownership of enterprises would be encouraged. Privately owned companies like we have now would be encouraged in different ways to not accumulate profit, such as tax breaks for distributing the money to their shareholders or employees. New companies could be publicly owned (nationally, or even locally) or owned cooperatively (for example, social enterprises). It’s hard to say which is more interesting - the problems this shows with capitalism, or the good that could be done by the alternatives.
The way things are currently, the shareholders and so on who create companies basically receive all the profits the company makes. I.e. the people who have lots of money, get to make more money. Employees get more or less the same salary regardless of how profitable their work has become for the company. Meanwhile, the goal of the company is to do one thing: maximize profits. Doing the “right” thing doesn’t matter, unless it happens to be the most profitable thing.
There are some pretty big parallels between the business of book publishing and video game publishing, so I’ll use those as examples. Some of the similarities are…
There are probably more similarities, and there are differences too (for example, authors are usually expected to promote their own books these days) but you should see the problems here. Economically, it makes perfect sense that only the most popular products actually turn a profit. It makes sense that writers/game developers wouldn’t get anything from the sale of their product until it actually turns a profit. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t make economic sense, right?
But it doesn’t make any logical sense, or emotional sense for that matter. Authors who don’t become massively successful with their first novels are basically forced to write until they can somehow pay off their initial advance. Game developers that don’t put out a huge success are shut down, and hundreds of jobs are lost. Publishers can gamble with people’s livelihoods by deciding what books and games are published. The vast majority of the time a game developer is closed down by a publisher, it’s really not their fault - see the Guitar Hero series, wait for the Call of Duty crash, and the closure of Pandemic Studios after the release of, arguably, their best game. Then we as consumers have to pay heavily inflated prices, mainly because of things like production costs that could be avoided through digital distribution.
This is why it’s so interesting to imagine how books and games could be funded in other ways, and in a way that puts the focus on the actual creators. I love holding a physical book, but I don’t like paying thirty dollars for a book - especially when the author gets, at best, a few dollars of that. Reading on my Kindle is wonderful, and paying ten bucks for a digital version of a book is lovely. I like to have a game’s case in my collection, too, but getting an indie game from Steam for ten bucks is almost absurdly convenient. Steam and Amazon probably take their cut from this, but otherwise, someone could create a game or a book and get actual money for it, right away. These services already exist! We don’t even need to change anything to take advantage of them!
As for funding, Kickstarter is pretty much the perfect example, although it could probably use some more accountability from the people getting the money. The Kickstarter for the PC version (and enhanced 360 version) of Cthulhu Saves the World is a perfect example of this. They only needed $3000, but they got twice that much. Now they’re going to sell the game, and a previous game they created, for $3 on Steam. Two games for three dollars. Development funded by the kind of people awesome enough to donate $750 dollars. If you look at the page, what amounts to a “pre-order” of the game was originally $24. They only needed 125 people to pitch in $25 in order to fund the game, and they got 110. The other fifteen people gave fifty dollars instead. And I’m going to get the game for three bucks! I really want to donate $25, but three bucks is a lot better for my budget :(
It’s probably a little bit harder with books, but I guess a great idea for a game could easily turn out badly, just as a great book idea could be poorly written. Even so, you create a Kickstarter or something, ask people to pay for the product in advance, and then you have enough money to survive while you’re creating it. Everyone wins in this situation. There are, literally, zero downsides. Except for publishers and retailers, who are no longer necessary in this system. Darn.
Just to wrap up, think of it this way: if you were a self-employed game developer or writer, you wouldn’t really need to “profit” from what you make. As long as there was enough money coming in, you could pretty much keep doing what you love forever. No need for a fragile salary based job, no need to worry about publishers, just a direct connection between the money and the creation of the game.
What a beautiful world such would be… - The World Ends With You
I’ve collected some links to post, but there’s something personal I’d much rather post so I’m doing that instead. It’s not the least bit interesting, but if I’m going to be selfish and talk about something uninteresting, I may as well give people the choice to hear it or not. I feel bad whining about stuff to people I know, anyway, so here’s me avoiding that… while also doing it in the most economic way possible. Hah!
Oh, and if you were terribly excited about me posting poetry, I don’t have my hands on it yet. You’ll see it when I do, though.
So anyway, I’m still unemployed. In theory, that should be great, because I “could” sit around all day and play video games and just enjoy life. Then when I magically get a job, I’ve already had my vacation in advance. Problem is, that job isn’t coming along, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep looking. There are no metaphors severe enough to describe my rapidly sinking standards, but still, no job. The odds get worse the more time goes on, really: January was probably prime time for applying, April was probably an ok shot given that I’d have four months of work, and the start of June is really pushing it.
It’s very easy to be pessimistic and say “nobody wants to hire me in a full time position for three months,” or “nobody is really hiring at this point anyway,” and things like that. It’s also easy to be a naive teenager and say things like “well, I might make two thousand bucks, but if I finish university with only two thousand bucks in debt, I’d be pretty happy.” Plus those things are a lot more fun than applying for jobs endlessly, either sending out e-mails or walking in and asking a manager if they’re hiring. That’s mainly just to make me feel better, though, and it feels a little bit false anyway.
The whole crux of the problem is that my mom is being overly rational and future-oriented about all of this. I wouldn’t really be stressed out about not having a job if I didn’t have someone breathing down my neck saying “well what are you going to do? take the summer off and play video games? go on a trip with the last of your money and not be able to afford to do anything while you’re there?” My mom is awesome, first of all, so I’m not about to say “yo screw off MOM, I’m an ADULT NOW RAAAH.” It’s not that she doesn’t have a point, either. Even so, this cycle of feeling-good-and-applying > not-getting-the-job > feeling-terrible-and-useless > not-applying-to-jobs is not that great.
Having money would be great, and jobs give you money, so in theory that would make having a job great. At what expense, though? Do I really want to flip burgers for three months?
Anyway, you’ve now been spared the trouble of thinking of something new to say about this whole topic. Not for the first time, probably, since I don’t have much else to talk about lately. There are more jobs to apply for, and I’m sure one of them is finally going to be the one I get, but I’m not really feelin’ it.
I’ll at least try to feel better about that, though. Makes life easier.
I watched Thor last night, and it was pretty good. Made my dad stay around so we could see the post-credits stuff, with the other nerds. I think they’re getting better with the whole comic book adaptation stuff - the first Iron Man, the Hulk movies from 2004 or whatever, most of those felt pretty incomplete. Iron Man 2 and Thor don’t really like an advertisement for the comics, or some kind of abridged version like novel adaptations. So that’s all good, and I would recommend seeing it for sure.
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Apparently my dad found a poem I wrote about the Halifax Explosion some years ago, and an unbiased third party told me that it was really good. He’s mentioned recently that I wrote such a thing, and I was slightly skeptical… But he told me enough about it that I accept it as a thing, so I’ll post it soon for you guys.
I actually wrote a number of other poems in junior high, mainly for/about Brittany. Perhaps luckily for you, they’ve all been lost. Eaten by my dog, actually. But I think a few of them were really, really good - to the point where I actively wish I could find them again. I remember a few lines, themes I used… It’s incredibly frustrating to know that I wrote these, but all that’s left is the little bits I remember.
I mean, if everything I’ve written on here were to disappear, I wouldn’t think years later “wow, that was some great stuff, I wish I could show it to people." I accept the possibility that if I were to find one of these poems, they wouldn’t be as good as I remember. Even so, I just feel like one of the best things I’ve ever written was eaten by my dog. That’s a crappy feeling, man! At least I’ve got the one, anyway.
I had told Cameron a while ago that I would make a post about my views on abortion. I’m finally doing that! First of all, I’m against abortion. There are many reasons to why I’m against it.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/trance12/abortion.html
All of those facts are true. I did a lot of research,…
Right, I’m in a pretty argumentative mood, so I’m going to call this website out on its bullshit with its stupid fucking shitty music in the background and the spam of god-damn christian propaganda.
- A fetus, at as little as ten weeks old, already has all major organs in place and functioning, has developed or is developing these major organs, and features such as fingers and toes. The fetus has also developed a brain AND a complex nervous system, thus respond to stimuli and even feel pain.
Right, this here is wrong wrong wrong.
At ten weeks the embryo becomes a fetus.
This ‘article’ has already shown that they’re going to play with their words and that they’re anti-choice.
[Most pro-choice articles don’t give you bullshit, they’re not pro-abortion, they want people to have a choice and they generally have no/less bias because of certain things like religion. ]Edit: I’ve found a back-up of the article: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/Facts_Speak_Louder_than_the_Silent_Scream_03-02.pdf
I’m so glad I wasn’t wrong about that website. I mean, it’s on angelfire. That alone was enough to keep me from looking at it, never mind my fairly solid belief that people should at least be able to make their own decisions on what’s right for them and their (potential) family.
Also I didn’t read any of the rest of what you posted from that article because the formatting was terrible. But it’s ok, really, because I don’t really want to argue about abortion. Realistically, most people aren’t ready for kids or will just be terrible parents. You could argue about the joys of being a parent and so on, but I don’t think bad parents feel that stuff. Kids know when they’re resented or unwanted, and it’s awful to raise a child in such an environment.
In short, if everyone had good parents, everyone would be awesome and life would be great.
I got a PSP recently, and I just finished FF VII: Crisis Core today (great game, a lot of its features and aesthetic were carried on to FF XIII, but even Sephiroth is more likable than everyone from the latter). I’ve been playing a lot of Dissida 012, too, which is also great and probably the only fighting game I’ve ever loved. Mainly because it’s pretty much 100% an RPG.
The third game I own, which I bought in order to snag a $50 discount on the cost of the PSP, is Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. Let me tell you about this game. It’s going to be a lot less funny to read about, but I’m going to write it anyway so I never forget.
When you select “new game” from the main menu, you’re given the choice between three dynasties. There’s a green guy (benevolent), a blue guy (likes talent?) and a red guy (noble, possibly evil). The nice guy sounded like an ok dude, so I picked him.
Then I had to select from one of ten other guys. Wait, what? There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense until you start playing the game, so you just pick a guy that looks cool. I picked a guy with a big sword and maybe a spear hidden somewhere. Apparently, his name is Mu Chao.
For choosing the green guy, I got to watch a little cinematic about how he wants to help people and some warriors united under his banner. Then the narrator tells you “they gathered together and rose up like a dragon.”
Ten seconds later, they start glowing, turn into a dragon, and fly away.
A clear sign that this game is going to be well worth the negative ten bucks I paid for it. The ancient Chinese art of “turning oneself and companions into a dragon.” A lost art, obviously.
Some general tells you to go check the notice board, so you do, and there’s a mission to go beat up some bandits. Great, tutorial mission!
Or not, because the game doesn’t tell you the controls. In fact, it doesn’t tell you anything. You just press buttons and people die. You get points the more people you slaughter, and at the end of a mission, your points are converted into something else and you get experience points. I levelled up, and either because of that or from the mission, I gained proficiency points in a few weapons and ability points (defense, attack, life, etc.) and I still don’t know what any of that means.
Will I play this game for more than an hour? Who knows! As long as it’s easy and silly, it could be worth firing it up every once in a while.
Speaking of the creator of AVALANCHE, he’s got a long (but very interesting) article about the consumption-based nature of the gaming industry and the problems it’s causing. It’s called Of Games and Swine, for some reason, and I do recommend you read it. The crux of the issue is that not only are most gamers critically unaware of the medium (like the kind of people who only watch summer blockbuster films), nearly all the critics are, as well. I think this sentence about sums up the problem:
Our standards for professional videogame reviewers in this industry end right after “do you really like playing videogames and do you know how to write?”
Either most people don’t look at games as something with the same critical depth (not a great term, but hopefully you get the idea) as other mediums, or the people who do understand these things aren’t sharing their knowledge with enough people. It’s pretty easy to learn how to critically analyze a film or a book, but that’s not the case with games. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to analyze. The people who understand these things are going to have to explain it to the rest of us, so we can all get past the basic, literal understanding of the games we’re playing.
For the most part, any time someone tries to critically analyze a game, they limit themselves to tools available from other mediums. It’s easy to analyze the music in a game, or its art, or its writing. But few people seem to understand how to analyze the gameplay, or the level design. Or they just aren’t doing it in public. I’ll admit that there are probably plenty of games designed simply based on how player feedback - “oh, they tend to run out of ammo here, we’ll have to add a supply station” - but that doesn’t mean every game is designed without any deeper meaning.
One final note on this, Clint Hocking (known for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, and being a super smart guy) is one of those people with the knowledge to critically analyze a game. I actually don’t know where I read or heard this, but it’s probably somewhere on his blog… Anyway, he mentioned somewhere an encounter he’d put in one of the Splinter Cell games where the enemy soldier begged for his life and mentioned his family. From what I understand, you can either kill enemies or simply knock them out, and the idea was to make the enemy more than just a tough, anonymous grunt. Then he said “if one single person even understood the reason I put that there, I’d be happy.” Out of hundreds of thousands of people who likely played the game, he figures not a single one will understand what he was getting at.
Turns out that a number of people did get it, and have spoken about it in various places, but I can’t decide which is more tragic: the fact that we don’t truly understand the games we play, or the fact that the brilliant minds behind them don’t take the time to share their knowledge. If they would collaborate, create a place to share knowledge and spread the kind of critical understanding that allows them to make great games… If such a thing were to happen, I’d say it would only take ten years to establish the kind of widespread critical understanding found in other mediums.
It’s Sunday, and I have Some Things for you! First, some good news: PSN is back up in the US and Canada, coming with a firmware update that does nothing but inform you that you should change your password.
Next up is FromWhereToWhere, a firefox extension that “threads” your history, showing you how you got to a specific page. As in, if you were on your dashboard and click on the link for the extension, then go to wikipedia, then go through a bunch of articles, it would show each of the steps along the way. I used to use TreeStyleTabs in a similar way, but this is far more useful. I highly recommend it. If you’re worried about security, they say it just uses firefox’s existing history tracking. Theoretically, you should be able to use it on older history as soon as you install it.
On a much more niche note is AVALANCHE, a fan-made brawler based on Final Fantasy VII and starring Tifa for no real reason. This game actually introduced me to OCRemix, as it uses music from the stellar FF VII remix album, Voices of the Lifestream. It’s a decent game, and if you actually want to try it out, there’s a recent beta available on the creator’s website. You may also want to download the font changing mod here.
Back to general interests, I’d like you to watch the Extra Credits video from last week, Gamifying Education. If there are any teachers you particularly like, you should share it with them. If there are any teachers you dislike, you should definitely share it with them! I doubt one video on the internet is enough to reform the education system. However, it’s more than enough to help individual teachers, and that’s better than no progress at all.
Also on The Escapist is an older Extra Considerations article about console gaming. Extra Considerations has Yahtzee, the writer(?) behind Extra Credits, and another smart guy called Movie Bob discussing various topics in gaming. Guest writers come in sometimes, too. Anyway, this particular article is all about how little innovation there is in the industry, and how the Wii came and went without many games actually using its controller for anything interesting. Also, how video games shouldn’t be limited by what the player can physically do in real life. Could you play Final Fantasy VII with Kinect? Of course not, because you can’t jump fifty feet in the air or use a sword as tall as your body.
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Wrapping things up, I’ve got an anime recommendation: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, aka Madoka Magica. I don’t want to say a lot about it, because it’s best left as a surprise, but check it out and don’t be fooled by the cute and cuddly exterior. It’s not on crunchyroll, sadly, so you’ll have to find it yourself. This tiny paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I liked it a lot and I think it’s worth your time.
It’s been a looooong time… since I’ve done a music post, that is. I’d kind of forgotten about doing them, until I started going through my archive last week. So today I bring you The Attic And The World Of Emotions by death metal band Sadist!
The first songs I listened to by Sadist were from their latest album, Season in Silence, and I liked them immediately. Off the top of my head, their other albums haven’t grabbed me as much, considering I don’t remember them much. But I really like Season in Silence, and the rest is at least good enough. Or I haven’t listened to them enough.
Lyrics here, because I still like DarkLyrics and viewing an entire album at once is awesome. How am I supposed to read a concept album’s lyrics, or notice some recurring theme, if it isn’t all on one page? Come on, internet.
So instead of being productive last night and this morning, I went through all my old posts and tagged them. Then with the help of my lovely assistant, Vael Victus, I edited my theme a bit to add a link to my ask page (which has always existed, but never been used, because I never mentioned it and didn’t know how to create a link in HTML) and a tag cloud on the left to make use of those wonderful tags.
I wish I could embed the cloud in a post, as a way to show you all the tags, but I can’t think of any way to do that. So go here and wait for them to load, over on the left. Then click the tag you’re interested in!
I just need to remember to tag all my future posts, so that the tags continue to be useful. If you don’t share every single one of my interests, it’ll save you from having to read through absolutely everything I’ve ever posted. My only regret is that by trying to avoid making multiple posts per day, I’ve made a lot of posts that cover multiple subjects. So you’ve got posts that are tagged with anime, books, links, and gaming. If you’re looking at the books tag, you’ve got this giant post and only the last paragraph really matters to you. Sucks for you, I guess.
I still need to fix up the colours, and then I’ll be marginally happy with the design. Actually, I’d be happy with the design if the colours weren’t atrocious. FINISHED! Still, now I’ve got tags and you can see them and use them maybe!
This post is going to be really short to make up for the last one being really long. I didn’t realize how long it was D: But that’s ok, nobody was forcing you to read it.
I’ve been “relaxing” a lot recently, which is to say “doing anything except working.” At the moment, the work I need to do is:
1) Get a job
2) Work on the experiment I’ll be running in the fall (write 62 more sentences, work on ethics proposal)
So this is me admitting that I’ve been screwing around for a few weeks and need to stop for a little while. Sadly, these two things are more important than writing beautiful tumblr posts, playing video games, and watching anime.
I’ve set up LeechBlock to keep me in line again, and now that I’ve publicly stated my responsibilities, I’m hoping for some help in sticking to them. So my job is 1) and 2), and your job is 3) abuse me if I tell you I’m not working.
I’ll be back in a week!
I’m calling this Bad Writing Showcase 1 because I can’t think of a better name, even though I hope there won’t be a Bad Writing Showcase 2. Still, I could screw up another post, and I could also showcase writing that isn’t mine. Bad Writing Showcase 1 just gives a better sense of closure than “Bad Writing Showcase.”
Moving on. Below is a post I wrote a little over a week ago, which I never published because I felt pretty bad about it. I spent a lot of time writing it and trying to make it good, but as it is now, it can’t be what I want it to be. I’d have to do a complete re-write of it (my old Persona post is in a similar situation) and I just don’t really feel like doing that. When I say it isn’t good, what I really mean is that it isn’t good by my standards - I know I can write better than this. I’ve made these same mistakes before, and learned how to fix them. In fact, it’s eerily similar to the MacBeth essay I wrote. I’ve also made the same mistakes a ton of times in other blog posts, but it’s getting to the point where I need to do better.
Much like my MacBeth essay, if it’s taken paragraph by paragraph, the writing is pretty solid. But much like my MacBeth essay, it was written without a thesis or an outline. It’s just a bunch of slightly related thoughts strung together, with a sloppy introduction and conclusion that try desperately to make some cohesive point out of all the individual paragraphs. It’s ok to sit down and throw out a big rant, because I can post whatever I want and who cares if anyone likes it or thinks it’s good? But I kind of want to take things I’ve written and say “hey, look at this, it’s really damn good and incredibly smart.” Also I fantasize about being paid to write smart things for video game blogs but that’s a risky proposition. So, in short, if I wanted to do those things, I would need to apply all my knowledge about writing to at least a few posts.
That means taking the time to plan out my thoughts in advance, starting with a clear thesis and making sure everything I write serves to support it, and revising to fix the messy spots. I’ve been working on that for a while, and I’ve got a couple sheets of paper covered in notes for when I sit down to write one of these wonderful posts. It’s getting to the point where the individual paragraphs I had planned are becoming essays in their own right. I need to get other things straightened out first before I can start writing seriously, though.
Anyway. I’m not going to go through this and point out everything that’s wrong with it, because I wrote it and I don’t want to tear my own work apart. Plus I don’t want to be tempted to improve it. I may start over at some point, but for now, it’s testament to the day I realized I can’t expect perfection to simply flow out of my fingertips. If you’re really bored, check out older posts and see how I couldn’t find a way to write a solid conclusion because they suffered the same problems.
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Inspired by a MovieBob episode I overheard my brother watching, in which he has the following to say about film critics and the general population:
It’s often said that the problem with film critics is that we’re out of touch with normal people, because we see hundreds of films a year and thus get tired of formula quicker, and bored more easily, than people who only see a dozen or less. As such, we tend to overpraise certain films for things like narrative abstractions, explicit sexuality, taboo subject matter, or creative violence, because we’re just desperate for anything that surprises us - and conversely that we’re overly dismissive of otherwise solid films because they aren’t different enough to keep us awake.
He mentions gaming, as well, to say that if every gamer were like Yahtzee or the Extra Credits crew, we wouldn’t get things like Halo: Reach (as he called it, just Halo 3 with a jetpack added). I don’t think that’s anywhere near as interesting as a subject, though - it’s just simple economics, and it applies to games, movies, books, television… If it sells, you make it, even if it’s derivative/unoriginal/starting to get stale after eleven iterations/not even that good/etc.
Gaming is in a worse position than other mediums, because it doesn’t have the long history of great examples that break the mold that other mediums have, and it’s still a commercial industry at its core. Most games today are made as merely average commodities, as opposed to the exceptional (Portal 2) or the intellectual (), and that’s just how the industry is right now. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with making your game based on mechanics or “fun,” but it’s not really enriching anyone’s life if you have nothing interesting to say beyond “look how realistic our explosions are!” If you don’t have any issues with that, by all means, make what sells.
But what I’m really here to talk about is the gaming public (your parents, perhaps your children, your co-workers who don’t know what a ‘source engine’ is) and the way they’re different from gamers. It’s not just the gaming media that have completely different ideas and expectations about games from everyone else - the gaming media is for gamers, by gamers, and we share their ideas and expectations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they share ours. But to be accepted as a medium and an art form, games are going to have to deal with the radical differences in its audience. Things are better than they used to be - smartphones and the Wii have brought gaming to the general public, but compared to books and film, it’s still a niche.
People like your parents and your “non-gamer” co-workers and friends probably play as many video games per year as I watch movies: a handful at best. “Gamers” either play or keep up with more games per year than so-called “non-gamers” have played in their entire lives. We may scoff at minigame collections for the Wii, or cry that “Angry Birds is just a reskinned version of a flash game I played years ago,” but for the average person, these are totally new to them. We may have played similar games in the past, perhaps even better games, to the ones “non-gamers” buy in droves. But there are only a few million “gamers.” Meanwhile, there are billions of “non-gamers.” Very few developers can afford to cater to the gamers now, because the audience isn’t big enough to sustain the costs of development for modern systems. Of the few million gamers out there, how many only buy strategy games? How many only buy shooters? Each genre has its own niche audience among the greater gamer population, while “non-gamers” don’t even know what those terms mean - they just buy the fun games.
Hollywood makes films for people who only watch a few movies per year, and film critics complain about it. But film is accepted as a medium because the average person still watches some movies, and they’ve probably even watched a few really good ones. The absolute gems of film are just as accessible to them as the summer action films - all they have to do is buy a ticket (or DVD) and sit down to watch. Video games still aren’t accepted as a medium because they’re foreign and strange to most people, who only play those few accessible titles. The difference is that games made for people who have been gaming for years are NOT as accessible as Wii Sports Resort, and the average person can’t get over that hurdle. My dad will occasionally take our Wii and Wii Sports Resort with him when he goes out, and play it with people who have never even seen it before. Could you do the same with Starcraft 2 or The Witcher? Of course not, because they rely on you knowing a lot of other things that you’ve learned from previous games.
(Side note: among the people who play games on their computers at all, I would guess that the proportion of “gamers” to “non-gamers” is far more skewed than that for dedicated gaming consoles and handhelds, making core games and complication the rule rather than the exception)
MovieBob said that film critics are “out of touch” with normal people, but he went on to justify that in the context of a film critic. To him, being out of touch and having higher standards for films is no problem, because it leads to a greater appreciation of the medium that “normal people” don’t get when they only watch movies like Transformers 2. But that justification only works if you care about film as a medium, and aren’t one of the people who just want to see something fun or interesting. Hopefully something fun and interesting that blows up. The average person will still see the film critic as out of touch, because to them, Transformers 2 was still fun to watch, and the film critic is just too jaded to enjoy it.
So what happens to video games? A medium built on us, the gamers, all of us out of touch with what normal people can handle? If you tell someone who hasn’t been gaming for years to “press the L3 button” on a PlayStation controller, they’ll just glare at you. Using a piece of plastic that has four directional buttons, four face buttons, four shoulder triggers, two analog sticks (which press down to provide two more buttons) and now three “control” buttons (start, select, and the PS/X button in the middle of 360 and PS3 controllers) is not a skill most people have. Swinging your arm to swing a sword is much easier to understand, with the next best thing being a button that says “kick” used to make your character kick. Why is it any wonder that normal people like my father can play games on the Wii or in an arcade (granted, not very common these days, but they can handle it), yet he can’t figure out how to watch a movie on my PS3… or how to turn it off afterwards?
And now, I realize the solution is incredibly simple. Just wait. In another decade or two, everyone will have grown up playing video games. Problem solved. When most people were illiterate, books didn’t have much widespread acceptance as a medium. “Moving pictures” were probably incredibly frightening to people who didn’t grow up with them. Now that video games are in the hands of an audience at least ten times the size of what it used to be, it’s only a matter of time. Yes, video games are complicated. Yes, most people don’t understand them. But that’s changing, as more and more games fall somewhere between “dead simple” and “requires fifteen different buttons to play.” Before long, there will be plenty of games for people of every skill level, and then the medium will be accepted by the general public.
On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.
Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.
Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.
They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.
After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.
They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.
The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.
Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.
If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.
Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…
All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.
Everything about it was great.