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.

Pee-Ess-Pee

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.

Critical misunderstanding of video games

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.