Jared's blog

I guess I may fall into the ludology camp, which may amount to heresy in a class studying video games as narratives. Certainly many games have varying degrees of "narrativity", but at some point the definitions fall out of place with me. Case in point would be SpaceBass' essay on the virtues of the term "Chaotic Fiction" as an umbrella term for ARGs and almost-ARGs.

I think for awhile SpaceBass makes a good argument for the term, and Chaotic Fiction seems to serve well enough as a definition for the narrative left over once an ARG is all said and done. Any linear beginning and end of an ARG, as it moves from kernel to kernel, is largely populated by satellites of the players' design rather than the author. Points A, B, and C move the story along the author's vision of the game, but getting from one point to another by a collaborative solving of puzzles within the ARG community is an unpredictable story within the story.  read more »

Since our discussion Wednesday, I've been thinking about the relative strength of plausibility in storytelling, like how "I found a camera in the woods" really wouldn't work if the reader knew immediately that it was a hoax.

It reminded me of tabloids and their popularity. They're filled with stories about alien abductions, mutants, and religious signs of armageddon. This isn't all that far from the kind of stuff that goes into comic books, so why is the effect so different if the subject material is the same? The tabloids have the power of suggestion. Even if a story is clearly not true, there's still power in the unflinching insistence that these are actual events documented by actual journalists. And though 90% (hopefully higher) of the population knows it's bogus, there are plenty of people who actually believe them, and more that don't care about the facts because they get a kick out of the whole experience.  read more »

I remember watching The Twilight Zone as a kid, and there was this one episode where a criminal was exiled to live alone on a distant planet rather than jailed. Eventually, after living alone for awhile, the powers that be sent him an android woman to keep him company. At first he raged against her attempt to befriend him, but eventually (after her crying softens him up and sufficiently convinces him of her realness) he accepts her as a partner and eventually grows affectionate for her. Later, he's found innocent or something, and a spaceship comes back to get him. Maybe the planet was exploding or something. In any event, they were in a hurry and can only take him, not the android woman. He refuses to leave without her, believing her to be real, so they shoot her in the face or something and all you see are gears and a robotic voice winding down. And he has this moment where he has to realize that everything he had with this friend was just an illusion made by a machine.  read more »

I saw Sally Cruikshank present today at the Imagesext conference, which I guess was lucky because I just showed up randomly and I have no idea how much time she was scheduled to speak for. I'm glad I went, and got a little better understanding and appreciation of her work. Watching "Face Like a Frog" in class just made me wonder how much acid Sally'd dropped during her career. And remembering that I'm the only person I know who doesn't like Danny Elfman's lyrical music.

Sidenote: After I left, I felt for some reason like hearing Pink Floyd's "The Trial" in the car. I started playing it, and my girlfriend realized that it was probably because "The Trial" sounds amazingly like a Danny Elfman song. She thinks he ripped off Pink Floyd. I guess listen for yourself? Back to Cruikshank.  read more »

Has anyone heard of the Wii game No More Heroes? It's an action game by SUDA51, which is a pretty meaningless statement if you haven't played Killer7 (GameCube/PS2). Killer7 is an ultra-violent, ultra-profane on-rails shooter with a distinctively garish cel-shading style and a near-incomprehensible plot involving terrorism, black market orphan organ trading, and death (mostly death). Is that sentence too clustered on hyphens? Sometimes I let hyphens get out of control.

By contrast, No More Heroes is an ultra-violent, ultra-profane button-masher action game with a cel-shaded style that looks deceptively like shitty PS2 graphics and a nearly non-existent plot. It's a little disappointing when cast in Killer7's shadow but it's worth playing just to be back in the wild world created by SUDA. I just finished playing it last night, and just like Killer7, the ending came complete with an out-of-nowhere plot twist. I'd worry that SUDA's writing himself into a Shyamalan-type corner where his work is ruined by an audience expectation of a twist ending, but I realized after playing that each twist brought something unique to each game.  read more »

"It is forbidden to commit seppuku," the computer responds. Kill self is an invalid command.

Zork is horrible. It's literally as fun as navigating an automated phone system. The lack of physical space actually makes it feel claustrophobic, if that makes sense. You're free floating, and directions like north, south, east and west have little meaning. I can go east, and then go south, and end up right where I started. Or I can go east from the white house, and finding myself in a forest I go west to return to the house, but I'm still in a forest. The house is gone, and if I ever want to get back it just means crossing my fingers and hoping I eventually get back. Every once in awhile I find myself back at the canyon, which seems very exciting because "it is possible to climb down into the canyon from here." But only, not by typing "climb down" or "climb down into canyon" or "enter canyon" or any other command I can think of.  read more »

Somehow in class Friday we managed to avoid the greater debate of video game violence, where the line is drawn, and how much video game violence affects youth violence. If you spend enough time talking about video games the topic eventually comes up, and maybe at some point we'll discuss it, but I worried about the recent shooting in Illinois affecting that kind of talk.

It seems kind of quaint that not so long ago Space Invaders had to be tailored specifically to avoid human vs. human combat. I remember spending a lot of time in middle school (around the N64/PSX generation) just dying waiting for the day when graphics were realistic enough to be on par with blockbuster Hollywood violence. I guess we're pretty close now, with games like Gears of War letting you take a chainsaw to your enemy and watch the blood spray all over the camera.  read more »

From the looks of it outside, I'd say spring is on its way, but I can't really be sure. Groundhog Day came and went earlier this month and I didn't take notice of the end result. I even forgot to watch the Bill Murray movie, which would have been interesting to watch in the context of our discussions on discourse time and story time, and the story-NOW. For everyone but Phil Connors, the story time would just be Groundhog Day and the following morning. For Phil, the story time would be (depending who you ask and whether you go by the book or the movie) anywhere between 10 and 1,000 years. But all the same, it would still only span a single day.

The only mainstream use of the Groundhog Day concept was in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, one of my favorite games from the before-last generation. The whole idea behind it was that the moon was going to crash into the world in three days, and the player would have to play the same three days over and over again until you'd finally prepared yourself to face the final day and save the world from the moon. Basically it was Groundhog Day in the Zelda universe.  read more »

To be fair, I didn't actually cry when playing Passage either, but that's as catchy a blog title as I've got. Still, it's odd to be emotionally affected by a video game and not be a 12 year-old.

I first played Passage alone after checking the definition of "Alternate Reality Game" on Wiki to make sure I wasn't in store for rousing matches of Dungeons & Dragons or WoW or anything, at which point I decided I wouldn't drop the class after all. I probably had the same experience as anyone else who played the game (is this broken? why is there nothing to kill? huh, this game is kind of sad) and after sitting in thought for a minute or twelve I called my girlfriend in to share the experience. I'll just call her "Sophie" to make this all less impersonal.  read more »