Spinning, Susan Gibb’s, is a rich and energetic space. I particularly enjoy when she digs into the stuff on her shelf. She puts up a great quote from Garcia Marquez then goes after it.
This post here, in a different context, is serious writing. Better days, yes.
What ended this week is the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge. This was the last, spectacular failure of the internet bubble, the final burnout of paper businesses that had no business and paper politicians who had no cause and paper experts whose expertise lay in their bogus credentials or in the wealth of their pals.
We’ll know the details in time. We’ll have years of investigations. We already know the answer. We filled key roles at the top with lawyers and promoters and press agents and cronies, and when we needed them to do their job, they held press conferences instead.
And we filled key roles on the line — police and fire and public safety — with too many people who weren’t up to the job, or whose leaders weren’t up to the job. Frightened by snipers and rumors, they sacrificed the lives of men and women and children in danger, lives entrusted to them, to save their own. They turned in their badges or grounded their choppers. Their duty was hard; they did not do it.
From Mark Bernstein.
In this vein I’d been contemplating a sort of Plato’s Republic post on a character who, having heard many reports about Homeland Security and the billions “supposedly” spent on prep, readiness, and planning for multiple kinds of catastrophe, leaves his house and finds that it was all just a media job, that such a place really didn’t exist beyond a name. He returns home and clicks to CNN to hear more about “reality.” It was supposed to be a joke.
More here at Scientific American on what was known. It’s not just this area, either. There’s plenty of work to be done.
This is not about being perfect or understanding Mr. Hobbes. It’s about competence and honesty.
I’ve played through a few more rounds of Half-Life 2, Facade, Post Mortem, and Syberia II. The subject here isn’t genre, but story, narrative, and environment.
Where do these pieces excel? In their environments, where the user is placed into a fiction that invites the attention and motivates action. Half-Life 2’s power is in the environment, its “in-game” experience, and in its use of sound; it’s the first environment I’ve seen which gives a sense of a setting sun (but this is my own limited experience). It’s weaknessess are in everything else. Once in the world, you quickly get the sense that you can do lots of things: move objects, drive, and jump. You can barricade yourself again moaning creatures with crates. Unfortunately, as a FPS, the combat and conflict hardly make sense point A to point B. Creeping about does no good, the rebel forces are inept, and the enemy seems to know exactly where to aim when you exit a tunnel, enter a room, or set up a sniper position, which just seems dumb. The fog of battle is one thing, but an enemy that seems too competent feels like an overreach. So you run, shoot, and reload the sequence for a quicker route. The physics of the space is wonderful and frustrating as it should be and is a great achievement; the AI of the enemy, however, doesn’t promote a sense of strategy or outthinking or alternatives, as in Deus Ex. In this sense, I find the AI simply misconceived. And the story concept is loaded with questionable decisions. (At least provide a sequence where Freeman and Alyx make a life, walk the beautified canals, and make love, then Freeman can be taken away in that poigniant last scene–love stories and conflicts of reunification can work as major resolutions in shooters too; but this guy with the briefcase at the end is pure “been there done that.”)
The greatest weakness to Half-Life 2 is the point of view, though. Gordon Freeman is empty space, characterless, and silent to the point of absurdity. My greatest frustration is just not being able to connect to other characters through him. This makes no sense technically or in terms of design. Restoration as objective should come with some reminder of why the story is important to tell.
This last point, however, is where Facade and the Syberia sequences are more effective as environments and storyworlds. Facade, compared to Half-Life 2 in this regard, is much more sophisticated as an interactive, human-driven place to make decisions. You interact with Grace and Trip and their environment in important ways, ways that could have build the world of the Combines into a richer more engaging experience. You learn that you are a part of their history and this knowledge as you learn it serves as another way to contribute. In addition, the environments differ only in graphical design and presentation. Facade and HL2 are very similar in the way one moves about. Both are fluid and striking (not new). But the sense of penetrating the world is more pronounced in Facade, because you can respond to the world beyond single key strokes and through listening. You may drink the digital wine. You may make observations on objects. The ability to address the inhabitants, the principles, is part of going inside the fiction.
In Syberia, Kate Walker’s character develops along a real and substantive story arc. Her decisions (which are your decisions) make sense; as the story proceeds, cut scenes and filmic visuals can be read as Kate’s imagination and inner experience visualized as further elements of the developing fiction, a narrative element which I find incredibly interesting aesthetically, which may be unique to new media. The flashbacks Kate experiences of Hans aren’t experienced by her in the same that they are viewed by the user but they may be an approximate vision of her mind at work, a visualization of her own development. Same goes with the arcs in Facade, although the weakness of the eventual stories has already been noted.
Again, this is not a question of genre; this is a question of the limits and potentials of any sort of digital environment where a user is expected to input information with meaningful intent and for meaningful outcome.
It’s a good time for big developers to consider adding teams of people who know about story and its difficulties to their rosters and to start taking independent initiatives seriously for their ability to contribute to future projects whose results aren’t “just” this sort of thing or that sort of thing with great graphics and intricate machine intelligence, but begin to take human complexity seriously, a sort of marriage of entertainment and serious games.
In this country, we have the capability to provide everyone with a basic living standard. People shouldn’t have to fight for that. They should have the opportunity to compete for things beyond a basic standard and they will. I’d argue that such a program would result in more creativity, more curiosity, and less general misery. I see this in small places, in comments students write when they see something they hadn’t noticed before, even the tough ones, who think they know everything. A line of poetry nudges one to remark on an alternative, and from then on it’s up to them. It goes beyond quantification.
Just a thought.
It turns out that I didn’t have to kill the queen of the antlions in the prison/assylum. The great John Timmons has already completed the work in a weekend and in comparing notes, we’re noting how things went differently, given choices within the environment and our different responses to the physics.
For me, learning the environment has a lot to do with understanding simple machines, such as the fulcrum.
A view of the bridge. The sense of distance and scale.
Same bridge. Freeman suspended, hoping not to fall. Vertigo.
Susan Gibb asks about roundabouts. Here’s an explanation from Alternative Street Design.
Toni Gold, an associate with the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, has an essay in the Sunday Courant on the matter of Route 44 in Avon, site of a recent mass dissaster involving a dump truck and numerous other cars and a bus. What to do is the subject of a lot of talk. Another article in the paper reported that authorities are seeking to push up measures to fix this strange passage between the hills and Hartford. They want to “expedite” widening the road and constructing escape ramps for trucks, from 7 years into the future to 3. This is what “expedite” means in Connecticut.
Gold, however, makes an argument against “widening” and suggest that “narrowing” is the better way to go, including doing away with stop lights and adding roundabouts. I agree. There was one particular highway in southern New Mexico, US 82, which climbs several thousand feet from Alamogordo, home of Holoman Airforce base, into the Sacramento Mountains. It was an alternative to travel by train on the wooden trestles of the time. The highway has numerous escape ramps and in some stretches is only two lanes wide. It works pretty well, despite the traffic.
Gold’s main point is to design for safety not speed, to design with counterintuitive principles for the goal of “mobility,” which, in conventional definitions, puts the premium on wide, straight, and speed as criteria of deisign. “A road diet,” Gold writes, “is in order for Route 44: fewer lanes, narrower lanes, a median strip planted with the biggest trees possible and roundabouts at the two death-trap intersections to replace the traffic signals that are part of the problem.”
This is an important idea. The job, of course, will be to convince administrators to think deeply about design as intimately tied to human space and human life.
You see, we all have a second life, and we bottle it up in our fantasies and stop time.
When a cute waitress brushes your hand as she hands you the check, when a glowing mom and dad walk by hand-in-hand with their children as precious as lambs or a Jaguar glides down the street, a glimmering metal beast, you slip into fantasy, into your second life.
These images of fantasy are powerful. And frozen. We collect them and collect them until our fantasy life is a junk drawer of unrelated things.
In Second Life (link mine), these bits and pieces come back to life, tangible and in motion. It’s like opening that junk drawer of experience and suddenly realizing you have all the pieces you need to build a moon rocket or make cheese.
From David Thomas’ Architecture and Vice in The Escapist.
I had the nice pleasure of viewing Vicky Jensen’s oddly sensual short film Family Tree on Tuesday in the company of the great John Timmons.
The short film form, much like the short story, is intense and unforgiving. I can’t think of a portion of Jensen’s film that lagged, stumbled, or paused for something better to come along, such as a long car chase that “makes” the film worth it or that one dazzling shot that will make the audience go “wow, I’m glad I paid 8 bucks for this.” The film, which follows a couple’s family gathering and draws its energy from “those truths of family history and story” every “spouse” marries into and must learn to live with or understand, was consistently energetic and visually intense, every word, phrase, and transition necessary to the “whole.”
Photographic language or composition was important to the film’s sense of pace, scene, and narrative shape. One scene struck me in this context: the simple flow of water over vegetables from the tap in slow motion and the dance of “family” in the kitchen–the connection to flow (narrative), to watching for those things we often miss in the slightest human and phenomenological gesture–all this amassing more power than than motorcycles zooming through the canyons of a matrix.
What’s the point: the short form covers lots of ground in a short space. The form is not about “making it short”; it’s not about “attentions”; it’s about shaping narrative by shaping time.
I’ve basically given up in trying figure out why I like some books over others. I know that I’ve been influenced by lots of variables. I like the Gran Turismo series of simulations because I like to win races, money, and I love that heart-race when I just barely beat the oppenent. The hands shake and you go, “Yes, beat you, you bastard.” I like beating the machine and outsmarting it. It’s not a question of high mindedness or bettering myself. It’s a rollercoaster.
And why do I enjoy the stories of Alice Munro? In fiction I look for an interesting story, a fabulous sense of craft, and a dip into ideas. But those are vague criteria. Doesn’t Clive Cussler tell an interesting tale? In my mind, not at all. What about Stephen King? I don’t find Pet Cemetary interesting, no. I read Stephen King for how scary things could get (although I did find the metaphors I found in Misery appropriate). But then I found Kundera and figured that The Joke was a pretty scary tale if you looked at it through a particular lens. Kundera’s terror is a different kind of terror than King’s. The vision of The Joke is of a terrifying politics and society which resonantes with relevance, more so than Brave New World. Both novels signal possibility, but from my point of view Huxley is naive.
One of my top novels is Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are many reasons why I reread this novel. Stylistically (in translation), the writing is beautiful, energetic, risky, and because of this, I like to read passages outloud and to myself, just to hear the craft, the music, and the logic. Secondly, there’s the serious comedy here. Garcia Marquez draws incredibly huge characters who are also incredibly funny, serious, tragic, and honest. They’re pathetic, monstrous, masterful, crafty, hateful, and strange. You don’t want them to die or change, but they do; you don’t want them to make mistakes, but they do. Third, Marquez connects to significant human ideas such as time, memory, structure, hope, dignity, justice, history, love, sex, and want. Philosophical, political, social, and personal content is woven deeply into the work. When you talk about One Hundred Years of Solitude, you can find a lot of thing to talk about: the writing, the narrative, the sequence, the culture, history, gender, religion and a lot more. I believe also that I’ve seen a lot of what the author gets down in the novel, having traveled through Mexico and the Southwest US, an issue that is more subjective and true to my own experience of landscape, color, and light. It’s possible to say when I hear a politician say something dumb I could say I’ve already seen that in Kundera and Marquez, just as when we see the leader talk like a machine, we can say, “Oh, that’s what Orwell was referring to.” Lastly, of the many books I’ve read, One Hundred Years of Solitude has one of the best closers I’ve ever encountered. The end draws you back to the beginning with such a punch, you race through the novel just to feel its totality. Just the thought of Pico de Gallo or of Jalapenos makes my mouth water. Mention Marquez, and the same thing happens.
But, in my mind, Borges is still bigger. Why? No reason other than I enjoy his mind more than I do Marquez’. But, it’s unfair to compare them. Borges wasn’t necessarily concerned with the fictional story as he was with the very idea of “fiction.” Borges provides me with a language with which to struggle through ideas and one of those terms is “fiction.” I like the idea of an aleph as a metaphor for “reality” and “sight” and human experience.