Loose Ends, etc.

Tying up some loose ends here with a lot of small things that don’t quite deserve entire posts of their own. This is all the miscellaneous stuff I’ve been doing in recent weeks, but haven’t really gotten around to posting about. So, without further ado…

Anime:

• Deadman Wonderland was alright, nothing spectacular though. The fights weren’t mindblowingly amazing, and the characters were pretty meh, so all in all it was your usual shonen stuff.
• Blue Exorcist lost my interest about halfway through, and I didn’t watch the rest. More averagey shonen stuff than Deadman Wonderland.
• The World God Only Knows season 2 kept the same level of quality as the first season - it was the kind of show that I’d start watching, and my brother would come over to watch it without knowing why. If you get the humour, you’ll really enjoy it.
• Steins;Gate is still running, and it’s some pretty sweet time-travel stuff. I recommended Chaos;Head last summer (that’s a really long post, I’m just reminding you it exists), and Steins;Gate is better overall, I think. Okabe, the mad scientist, is hilarious at all times (I AM MAD SCIENTIST, IS SO COOL. SUNUVABITCH.). There’s some heart-string-tugging, too. Definitely worth checking out.

        I also watched Summer Wars last week while waiting for EBGames to open and give me my copy of Catherine. It was kind of the anime equivalent of a Hollywood summer blockbuster - in other words, take the forgettable cash-grab junk and replace it with beautiful art and a fun little scrappy-kid-saves-the-world story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Also, they do some neat future-esque computer stuff that is actually possible, which makes it more awesome somehow. I was really happy when the gamer kid lends his laptop to a guy and switches to a different virtual desktop on his desktop-cube.

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        I watched American Beauty a few weeks ago, and I’d definitely recommend watching it. I’m not sure what to say about it, really, because it doesn’t have any one core thesis, but it’s got a ton of little ideas worth thinking about and it’s open to a lot of interpretation. I don’t know a whole lot about any of the parts of film, but I can tell there’s a lot of artistry in it. If you’re going to watch a movie, you may as well watch this one instead of some dumb romantic comedy or popcorn-munching action movie.

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        I’ve started and nearly finished Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter for the PS2, and I think it’s fantastic. I really think it’s one of the better jRPGs I’ve played in recent memory, though my backlog for those has tons of quality stuff waiting to be played. It takes a lot from roguelikes - you can restart the game and keep the equipment, money, and some of the experience you’ve gained, and the more restarts you’ve done, the more you unlock of the story. It’s a very quick, focused version of a jRPG - I’ll probably be pushing 30-40 hours by the time I finish my first time, but the game rates a “perfect” playthrough as 8 hours or less. It’s just really solid mechanics, all the time. There are a few little town areas, with basic utility NPCs, and one relatively short sidequest. Well, plus the Antz Colony passive sidequest.

        Now, allegedly FF XIII was an attempt to streamline the jRPG and cut out all the fat, but it felt very lacking. It felt empty, dull, pretty and flashy but with no substance. Dragon Quarter, on the other hand, is streamlined and constantly satisfying. To me, FF XIII felt like it gave me no reason to enjoy what I was doing - it never seemed like I was making any progress, or accomplishing anything useful. Dragon Quarter doesn’t have that problem, and for one reason or another it’s just an inherently more satisfying experience. It’s probably just a great combination of all the things it does well, against the things FF XIII did not. Anyway, I super enjoyed it.

        Also, I’m going to talk more about Catherine soon, but it’s going to get its own post. So wait for that.

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        I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods during my vacation to PEI, Robert Sawyer’s Wonder, and Patrick Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. All were excellent, and I recommend them wholeheartedly. I’m working on finishing Steven Erikson’s The Crippled God, and I started George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons and Frank Herbert’s Dune. I know I should finish one book before starting two new ones (at the same time!) but when I’ve got two houses and a car (where I’ve spent a lot of time lately) I need to have something to read all the time. Erikson is doing his thing, and I happen to love it. The HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - which I haven’t mentioned yet, so know this: I love it, go watch it! - has changed my view of Martin’s work, and it’s better for it. Peter Dinklage’s voice behind Tyrion’s lines is just great. As for Dune, I’m enjoying it so far, but I’ll get back to you when I finish it.

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        I’m probably forgetting plenty of stuff, but I can’t really call to mind everything I’ve done recently. Maybe I’ve already posted about the books I read, too? I didn’t think I said much about my vacation because it would be boring to tell you about how I hung out with my friends. I’ve been catching up on things in my bookmarks and Read It Later lists, which is nice, but many of them weren’t quite worth posting about. I haven’t been working on my Grand Quest To Finish All The Final Fantasies, but whatever. Although, I did read The Final Fantasy VII Letters and alongside the Final Fantasy Things tumblr, it’s got me feeling better about the vast amounts of time I’ve spent on this. There’s a certain sense of beautiful community behind these jokes, and I kind of don’t regret spending 50-100 hours on each of these games. Maybe it isn’t time perfectly spent, but spent well enough. I can live with that.

Love Should Be Selfless, and Thoughts on Cheating

Part 2 of my post from yesterday. If you haven’t read it, this won’t make as much sense. I said that I would write about “how I see love, why I say that Brittany "cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it.“ Read on if you’re interested, and if not, you probably hate me by now. Sorry!

        I think the ideal form of love is selfless. If you really, truly love someone, then you should want them to be as happy as possible. If being in love requires you to get something out of it, then you don’t love them as much as you think you do. If I had forced Brittany to stay away from this guy, because I really did think that being with her was the only way I could be happy, that wouldn’t have been love. Or, at least, it would have been showing that I loved myself the most, and cared more about my happiness than hers. I let her go because I knew that if it worked out, she would be happier with him than she ever would be with me. We might have been content together, but because she didn’t truly love me, it wouldn’t be a perfect, happily-ever-after kind of thing.

        This is mainly a romantic thing, because it’s not like you ever formally agree to spend the rest of your life with your closest friends. Still, when you care about someone a lot, you should be more interested in what you can do for them than what they can do for you. Since they (hopefully) care about you the same way, they’ll take care of you just as selflessly. And everyone wins.

        So, as for infidelity specifically, I should start by saying that I wouldn’t ever do something like that to begin with. The fact that I could accept it from my partner doesn’t mean that I condone it. To me, the worst thing about a one-night stand would be if it was kept a secret - that’s a betrayal of trust, which hurts. Who cares about the sex at that point? If they come clean right away and don’t make a habit of it, it’s forgivable. And could you really blame someone if they fell in love with someone else? It sucks, but sometimes people just click. Again, if they keep it a secret and start seeing someone else, that’s intentional and wrong. But it’s love, and if they’d be happier that way, let them go and move on. I do think that we can be monogamous with the right partners, and I’m willing to forgive a lot. And, yeah, I’m tough enough to let someone go so they can be happy. It’s hard to appreciate right away, but I think it’s the best decision to make.

        It never really bothered me that much that Brittany was with this other guy, that she had feelings for him, and so on. It was never a secret - she asked for my permission repeatedly, and I gave it every time, with the one condition being that she not do anything behind my back. If she’d done all of this and pretended our relationship was fine until the day that we broke up, I would have been infinitely more hurt. I would have no issues telling people that she cheated on me. If I were to say that now, it would make it seem like I was victimized - when in reality I personally encouraged her to go after this guy. Yeah, we were "officially” together while all of this was going on, but that really doesn’t matter. She didn’t want to hurt me, but at the same time, she was falling in love with this guy and going back to me would have been impossible. I can’t honestly say “no, you should stop yourself from falling in love, and also you should stay in a relationship where you are content rather than search for one where you are truly happy.” Even if someone could do that, why would they? And why would you want them to?

        Anyway, now you probably understand better why neither of us is honestly worried about old feelings coming back. The people who were worried about that, they don’t know this stuff - they just know that we dated in the past and now I’m offering her a place to stay. I’m still surprised that I’ve never posted about this before, but now I have and now you know! It’s probably not worth the effort to explain all of this to people so that they can understand why we could live together and not consider being more than friends. But the people who know we were together ought to know why we broke up, and not just that we did.

        I mean, man. How did I not write about this before? Still amazed by that.

Catherine, and Some Personal History

I’ve been thinking for the past week about what different people get from reading my tumblr. Random internet strangers probably just read the posts about things they’re interested in. People who know me well will get to know me better. But for people who don’t know me yet, it’s not a perfect window into my life - there are a lot of things that don’t come across all that well in text. I post about the things that interest me, and I post a lot of information about my life, but not so much about more abstract things - what I believe in, what kind of person I am, and so on. There’s not much point in simply telling you those things. because there would be nothing to back it up, and even if you accept that I’m nice because I said so, it wouldn’t really leave much of an impression on you. Trying to show you things like that with words is tough, but I’ll think about it and work on a few drafts to give the internet at large a better idea of who I am.

        I started playing Catherine last night, and aside from being a pretty satisfying puzzle game (as long as you don’t get really stuck on a hard part), it’s an absolutely wonderful thing to experience. I’d be surprised if I got more than ten hours out of it, but the value of playing it can’t be measured in time spent playing. The basic gist is that you guide Vincent, a 32 year old underachiever, through the worst week of his life. First, his girlfriend of five years, Katherine, starts talking about marriage. Then he drinks a bit too much and has a one-night stand with a girl named Catherine. What happens from there depends on the player’s decisions, but it’s a really well-crafted experience.

        If you absolutely love puzzle games, there’s probably $60 worth of gameplay in there, but everyone else should play the game on easy and act as honestly as possible. It’ll get you thinking about what you would do in a given situation, and about relationships in general. Which is absolutely fantastic, and I’m so glad that this is a “mainstream” video game. I mean, ok, it’s not a AAA blockbuster release, but it’s not some budgetless, vague indie game either. It’s a game that deals with marriage, cheating, responsibility, the nature of relationships… It’s a work of art in every definition of the word.

        So I’ve been thinking a lot since I started playing it, and naturally one of the things I’ve been thinking about is infidelity. Apparently, I’ve actually never written about this before, which is surprising because of what happened between Brittany and I. It’s kind of an important detail, which makes it strange that I’ve never mentioned it. It also means I have to write about it now, in order to get into the stuff I want to say. Alright, so, here’s the quick and dirty version. When we were in 9th grade, Brittany got involved with a guy a year younger than her, and she was really serious about him. It ended badly, she did her best to get over it, and then in November of 10th grade we started dating again. In PEI, high school doesn’t start until 10th grade, so when we moved onto high school she didn’t really see the guy until the fall of 11th grade.  Before too long, despite having a girlfriend, he started flirting with her. She was wary of him because he proved to be a supreme asshole the first time, but I knew she was drawn to him in a way she’d never been drawn to me, and so I gave her permission to talk to him and braced for impact. Fast forward a few months, and by November things are very serious between them and we finally break up ten days before our anniversary.

        I don’t think I need to get into what happened between them after that, but suffice to say that he was actually worse than a supreme asshole. An uber asshole, if you will, the horrible embodiment of all the terrible things women expect from men. Meanwhile, I had encouraged my girlfriend - who I loved dearly, and who was at the time my one source of happiness - to leave me. In the end, her relationship with him made her reevaluate her feelings for me, and there ended the possibility of us getting back together. Understandably, our relationship became strained as things went on, and we spoke less and less often. Eventually it seemed like we couldn’t even manage to carry on a conversation. Considering she was my only close friend, the only person I thought I could share my secrets, doubts, and fears with, this was hard for me. I was incredibly lonely, and of course I spoke occasionally with my friends and family about this stuff, but it was this loneliness that led me to meet Vael and open up to him.

        What I realized, over time, was that I missed Brittany as my best friend far more than I missed her as my girlfriend. We went from speaking all day, every day to never speaking at all, and that alone was hard. Not having anyone to talk to about personal stuff was worse. I don’t remember the exact details of what happened, but at some point I must have told her this and asked if we could “just be friends.” Yeah, I said that, and I said it after we’d broken up. Delicious irony, if you can ignore my crying, desperately lonely 16-year-old-self long enough to laugh about it. Of course there were issues to work through, and of course I struggled with my feelings for her. After all that time, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and only think of her as a friend. But in the end, it all worked out, and now we’re friends and she’s living in my mom’s house. It’s been almost a week now, and it hasn’t been at all awkward for me (although I’ve been at my dad’s house this whole time). She doesn’t find it weird being there, and I assume being around me is no different than it was a month ago. Which is to say I haven’t asked about that, but maybe I should.

        SO OK NOW WE’RE BACK TO CATHERINE AND THE THINGS IT MADE ME THINK ABOUT. Now I can tell you how I see love, why I say that Brittany “cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it. Except that when I say now, I actually mean tomorrow, because this is really long. And the chances of people reading it all probably increase when it’s split up. So, that post will go up tomorrow morning, and I hope you all enjoy it!

#AltDev Design links

Just a couple of links to share today as I try to clean out my bookmarks a bit. They’re #AltDevBlog posts about the practical parts of actually being a game designer, and not just a programmer who kind of designs or a designer who just throws things together. They also have a number of great comments by industry folk; Mike Birkhead in particular has some great comments, so at least read his if you choose to ignore the rest of the comments.

Respecting Design tackles the issue of everyone thinking they know how to design a game. You don’t know how to design a game just because you’ve played a few games. “No one in their right mind opens up the code depot, alters files at random, and then, when rightfully questioned on their sanity, say in defense, "Hey, everyone’s code is valid man”. So why is it ok for game design?“ Reading this made me realize that, yeah, I don’t know shit about being a game designer. I can read all the blog posts I want, but that doesn’t mean I know anything useful. Not that I thought I was a game designer, mind you, just that I thought I was learning about it. It would probably be more accurate to say that I was learning around it, if that makes any sense. Circling the perimeter without ever entering it.

Design Docs Debate is less of a debate and more a collection of interesting links in the comment thread and a few good comments - specifically, Slone’s and Mike Birkhead’s. It sounds to me like the original poster is in a program where they got really anal about the requirements - but then I remember hating essay outlines in tenth grade, too. From the sounds of things, it seems like a good design document is pretty similar to a good outline (for an essay, or a short story, or even a novel) - you can go without to a certain degree, if you’re ok ending up with a lesser result because of it. Being able to create a good one is one of the things you just end up doing when you want to produce better results, because if you sit down without a plan, your final product will be nothing like what you envisioned.

Random thought - ever notice how the "blog post” has supplanted the essay? Two hundred years ago you could be an “essayist,” someone who writes essays. Now you’re just a blogger, and your wonderful essays are just “posts” like any other. I’m going to use the term essay, so there. Lead by example, right?

Further thoughts about game reviews

A while back I posted about game review scores, and in the mean time, Extra Credits has done an episode about game reviews and one of Metacritic’s co-founders had stuff to say. Then I wrote a lengthy post that was mainly about how I rented inFamous 2 and was disappointed enough in its sameness to stop playing after only a few hours and never want to touch it again. I knew it was terrible and chose not to post it, and then the article about Metacritic was posted, so now I’m starting over and actually being relevant.

        While it makes sense that most of the games we play are pretty damn awesome and could rightfully be given an 8 or 9 out of 10, I almost think it’s unfair to compare them to games nobody in their right mind will review. Compared to Carnival Extravangaza Mini-Game-Collection-for-the-Wii DX, inFamous 2 is probably the greatest game ever created. So, fine, there are games that are absolutely terrible and deserve low scores and others that are “average”, somewhere in between shit and gold, that deserve middle scores. But why shouldn’t games be reviewed in relation to each other? Why shouldn’t you give an 8/10 game like inFamous 2 a score of 6/10 as an action-adventure title (or whatever you want to call it)? Why does Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood - which I’ll admit I enjoyed the tiniest bit more than AC II, and it does have the benefit of its actually worthwhile multiplayer mode - get a high score despite being almost the same as last year’s game?

        I know that people’s jobs depend on review scores, and I know that tons of people (hopefully) worked really hard on these games. But a reviewer has every right to say that it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and you may as well go pick up last year’s Game X for half the price because it was marginally better. That’s something I’ve seen before in film and novel reviews, though it’s not like I read a huge amount of them. It makes more sense for more knowledgeable readers, who will know exactly what you mean if you say “it’s like X, if they took out the interesting characters” because they’ve played/watched/read X already. Meanwhile, less knowledgeable readers get a good recommendation and a better idea of what they’re getting into.

        I know it’s uncouth to compare games to… well, anything else, because we’re all tired of being in the shadow of other mediums. But criticism for other mediums is very well established, and most game reviewers don’t deserve the title of “game critic.” They can be useful in their own ways, but I feel that reviews (with an occasional splash of critique) are naturally inferior to critiques (with an occasional splash of review). How many war films have been released recently that have nothing new or interesting to offer? Not many, because there’s more to film making than making an easy profit.

        And how many military shooters have been released that have nothing new or interesting to offer? Too many, because there’s little more influential in mainstream game development than the need to make a profit.

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