I've told this story before, in an angrier, more self-aware way, but it's probably useful to retell it now, in the way I'd tell it now. It may make it a cheat day for the blogging project, but it's something I can point to later.
This is how I started writing about video games for a living.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Sunday, July 27, 2014
another post about the apocalypse
There's a chapter about a third of the way through The Stand--I'm pretty sure it shows up in both the original and uncut versions, but I don't have a copy at hand to check--that talks about the survivors who didn't make it, for one reason or another: a five-year-old kid who falls down a hole, a junkie who finds his dealer's uncut stash and overdoses, a guy who runs himself to death out of grief over his dead family, and so on.
Whenever I reread that book, which I used to do every few years, I tend to linger over that chapter, and over the chapters that are little more than scenes from the breakdown of civilization. They're strong and memorable in a way that the rest of the book isn't, particularly once it gets into King's particular brand of 1980s coke-fueled messianic good vs. evil in the last half, and I'm reasonably sure that those chapters are what sparked my current, ongoing fascination with fictional apocalypses.
One of the things I like about video game storytelling, as dissonant as it can sometimes be, is that with the right design, the player can step into and out of the main plot almost at will. You can look around and see the stories that took place before you got there, and if the level design is strong enough, you don't need journal entries or notes scrawled in blood to do it.
The Last of Us is particularly good about this in a few areas, such as the college campus in Colorado or parts of Pittsburgh. It resorts to the old "survivor keeping a diary" dodge at times, yeah, but there are other areas where you have to figure out what happened by yourself, such as what happened to the kids in Ish's hideout, and it's a more effective moment for it.
I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time right now, and it's not quite as strong about that as I'd like. Vault 34, for example, might as well just be a cave full of zombies. This isn't to say that it's a bad game for it, but there's something I find appealing about the idea of the post-apocalyptic detective, sorting through a location to figure out what precisely happened there before you arrived. All you get in Fallout, typically, is that there was Something Bad in there and they stacked up a bunch of furniture to block the corridor.
This may be one of the things I revisit if I ever end up making an indie game: scenes from the apocalypse. Start from the short story, then work it backwards. Make the player construct the narrative for you.
Whenever I reread that book, which I used to do every few years, I tend to linger over that chapter, and over the chapters that are little more than scenes from the breakdown of civilization. They're strong and memorable in a way that the rest of the book isn't, particularly once it gets into King's particular brand of 1980s coke-fueled messianic good vs. evil in the last half, and I'm reasonably sure that those chapters are what sparked my current, ongoing fascination with fictional apocalypses.
One of the things I like about video game storytelling, as dissonant as it can sometimes be, is that with the right design, the player can step into and out of the main plot almost at will. You can look around and see the stories that took place before you got there, and if the level design is strong enough, you don't need journal entries or notes scrawled in blood to do it.
The Last of Us is particularly good about this in a few areas, such as the college campus in Colorado or parts of Pittsburgh. It resorts to the old "survivor keeping a diary" dodge at times, yeah, but there are other areas where you have to figure out what happened by yourself, such as what happened to the kids in Ish's hideout, and it's a more effective moment for it.
I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time right now, and it's not quite as strong about that as I'd like. Vault 34, for example, might as well just be a cave full of zombies. This isn't to say that it's a bad game for it, but there's something I find appealing about the idea of the post-apocalyptic detective, sorting through a location to figure out what precisely happened there before you arrived. All you get in Fallout, typically, is that there was Something Bad in there and they stacked up a bunch of furniture to block the corridor.
This may be one of the things I revisit if I ever end up making an indie game: scenes from the apocalypse. Start from the short story, then work it backwards. Make the player construct the narrative for you.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
six potions a day
After the quest is done, do heroes have to deal with an addiction to healing potions?
In most games I've played, by the end, I'm sucking down whatever restores my health by twos and threes. If it's a magic spell, it's long since become muscle memory; if it's a drug or potion, I'm probably rolling around the world in the rough equivalent of one of those party hats with a beer can on either side of my head.
At the end of it, though, does the hero end up blowing through that massive stockpile of nearly-useless currency on a lifetime supply of Megalixirs that he somehow used up in a year? Is he jonesing for a hit of the good stuff whenever he stubs his toe or cuts himself shaving? After a long adventure full of being set on fire and hit with swords and thrown off cliffs and hit with meteorites, where there were probably non-trivial parts of his day where he was technically more healing potion than person, his brain perched awkwardly atop a rickety stack of flesh being knitted together yet again by another hearty dose of whatever crap is in these things, does he react to even mild injury with a massively overpowered burst of six-digit healing magic that could bring a man back and walking from a smear of charcoal across the floor of a cave?
If I were Terry Pratchett, the old campaigner with a serious healing problem would already have been in my work somewhere. Might still show up.
(This post, and how late and only technically adherent to the terms of my self-imposed challenge it is, is brought to you by my rampant stimpack addiction in Fallout: New Vegas, which was sitting on top of my games backlog for about a year and a half. Taunting me.)
In most games I've played, by the end, I'm sucking down whatever restores my health by twos and threes. If it's a magic spell, it's long since become muscle memory; if it's a drug or potion, I'm probably rolling around the world in the rough equivalent of one of those party hats with a beer can on either side of my head.
At the end of it, though, does the hero end up blowing through that massive stockpile of nearly-useless currency on a lifetime supply of Megalixirs that he somehow used up in a year? Is he jonesing for a hit of the good stuff whenever he stubs his toe or cuts himself shaving? After a long adventure full of being set on fire and hit with swords and thrown off cliffs and hit with meteorites, where there were probably non-trivial parts of his day where he was technically more healing potion than person, his brain perched awkwardly atop a rickety stack of flesh being knitted together yet again by another hearty dose of whatever crap is in these things, does he react to even mild injury with a massively overpowered burst of six-digit healing magic that could bring a man back and walking from a smear of charcoal across the floor of a cave?
If I were Terry Pratchett, the old campaigner with a serious healing problem would already have been in my work somewhere. Might still show up.
(This post, and how late and only technically adherent to the terms of my self-imposed challenge it is, is brought to you by my rampant stimpack addiction in Fallout: New Vegas, which was sitting on top of my games backlog for about a year and a half. Taunting me.)
Thursday, July 24, 2014
confessions of a part-time game critic
I was walking around Everett, Washington today, on my way to a job interview, and thinking about games criticism.
(You've been to Everett before, even if you think you haven't. There are a fair few towns scattered around the United States that are clone-stamped Suburbs, chunks cut straight off the block of some larger ur-town. Nobody who works there lives there, and vice versa. They feed a nearby city and eschew an individual identity. I've seen worse than Everett, like Council Bluffs outside Omaha, but being there still feels like you could be anywhere.)
As far as I can tell, there are three things holding video game criticism back at this point in time.
1) There's no money in it.
2) There's no audience for it.
3) It's one of the only forms of criticism that I'm immediately aware of that requires an additional level of acquired, exclusive skill before it can be practiced.
The third point's the mildest, but it's significant. To practice film criticism, you first must be able to sit still for two hours. To be a food critic, you first must be capable of digestion. To be a games critic, you must have a reasonable facility with the operation of a single particular software program, the skills from which will not necessarily transfer from one program to another, and after that you have to be a passable writer.
The first's probably the biggest. Virtually everyone I've known who works in games criticism uses it as a side project, a resume-builder, or as a springboard towards a job in public relations, marketing, or games development. It isn't a life position, nor should it be at this point in time. There isn't someone at, say, the New York Times whose entire job is long-form, thoughtful, but most importantly highly visible games criticism; there's no common influence, no big name in the field.
I often bring up Pauline Kael when I discuss this with people, and while it's not a perfect comparison--a lot of film theory and terminology is still sneaking into games discussion when it arguably shouldn't, just because it's the closest and most influential medium--it reflects the absence, and the need, for some games critic to climb above the pack. Mainstream cultural acceptance isn't worth pursuing for its own right (it's been thirty years and most major newspapers still seem determined to ignore games out of existence), but the side benefit thereof is the development of common ground. There isn't a film critic alive who hasn't read Ebert, for example, and that shapes the genre of film criticism in an important way. There is no single games critic who inspires other game critics; it's all a bunch of often-underpaid nerds who are doing it to kill time or fill space.
The closest thing to Kael that games writing has yet produced is probably Kieron Gillen, but the writers he inspired flamed out and went away... and thankfully so, because those were the "new games journalism" guys and they took most of the wrong lessons away from pieces like "Journey into the Cradle." In good criticism, the author is a presence but the subject remains the work being criticized, and "new games journalism" mistook the author and his reaction for the subject. I still have a standing date, if Tim Rogers and I ever end up in the same building, to call him a douchebag and push him down a running escalator.
And finally, there's no audience for long-form, thoughtful games criticism, because we've gone twenty years without it. There are exceptions here and there, like Rock Paper Shotgun, but most of the gamers I know are actively suspicious of games journalism, and rightly so. I've done my time getting martinis poured down my neck until a C+ game turns into a B, and I'd be suspicious too. Most of the money that keeps a games site alive is coming from the companies that produce the products the site is reviewing, via advertising, and that gives marketers a club they don't mind wielding.
One of the projects I sometimes think about is crowdfunding a games site through Kickstarter and Patreon: no ads, no banners, just thoughtful critics who buy all the games themselves, send all the "swag" back, and can afford to make games writing their day jobs. I don't know if it would work, or who I'd hire, but it's an idea in the back of my head that never quite seems to go away.
(You've been to Everett before, even if you think you haven't. There are a fair few towns scattered around the United States that are clone-stamped Suburbs, chunks cut straight off the block of some larger ur-town. Nobody who works there lives there, and vice versa. They feed a nearby city and eschew an individual identity. I've seen worse than Everett, like Council Bluffs outside Omaha, but being there still feels like you could be anywhere.)
As far as I can tell, there are three things holding video game criticism back at this point in time.
1) There's no money in it.
2) There's no audience for it.
3) It's one of the only forms of criticism that I'm immediately aware of that requires an additional level of acquired, exclusive skill before it can be practiced.
The third point's the mildest, but it's significant. To practice film criticism, you first must be able to sit still for two hours. To be a food critic, you first must be capable of digestion. To be a games critic, you must have a reasonable facility with the operation of a single particular software program, the skills from which will not necessarily transfer from one program to another, and after that you have to be a passable writer.
The first's probably the biggest. Virtually everyone I've known who works in games criticism uses it as a side project, a resume-builder, or as a springboard towards a job in public relations, marketing, or games development. It isn't a life position, nor should it be at this point in time. There isn't someone at, say, the New York Times whose entire job is long-form, thoughtful, but most importantly highly visible games criticism; there's no common influence, no big name in the field.
I often bring up Pauline Kael when I discuss this with people, and while it's not a perfect comparison--a lot of film theory and terminology is still sneaking into games discussion when it arguably shouldn't, just because it's the closest and most influential medium--it reflects the absence, and the need, for some games critic to climb above the pack. Mainstream cultural acceptance isn't worth pursuing for its own right (it's been thirty years and most major newspapers still seem determined to ignore games out of existence), but the side benefit thereof is the development of common ground. There isn't a film critic alive who hasn't read Ebert, for example, and that shapes the genre of film criticism in an important way. There is no single games critic who inspires other game critics; it's all a bunch of often-underpaid nerds who are doing it to kill time or fill space.
The closest thing to Kael that games writing has yet produced is probably Kieron Gillen, but the writers he inspired flamed out and went away... and thankfully so, because those were the "new games journalism" guys and they took most of the wrong lessons away from pieces like "Journey into the Cradle." In good criticism, the author is a presence but the subject remains the work being criticized, and "new games journalism" mistook the author and his reaction for the subject. I still have a standing date, if Tim Rogers and I ever end up in the same building, to call him a douchebag and push him down a running escalator.
And finally, there's no audience for long-form, thoughtful games criticism, because we've gone twenty years without it. There are exceptions here and there, like Rock Paper Shotgun, but most of the gamers I know are actively suspicious of games journalism, and rightly so. I've done my time getting martinis poured down my neck until a C+ game turns into a B, and I'd be suspicious too. Most of the money that keeps a games site alive is coming from the companies that produce the products the site is reviewing, via advertising, and that gives marketers a club they don't mind wielding.
One of the projects I sometimes think about is crowdfunding a games site through Kickstarter and Patreon: no ads, no banners, just thoughtful critics who buy all the games themselves, send all the "swag" back, and can afford to make games writing their day jobs. I don't know if it would work, or who I'd hire, but it's an idea in the back of my head that never quite seems to go away.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
pretense 'n' pretension, part one
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
There's a scene in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, somewhere in the first couple of volumes, about a cell of anarchist/conspiracist magicians in the '20s. One has chosen to call himself "Tom o' Bedlam," and we see his flashback where his father calls him out on it: as a "magical name," it's a dare launched against the universe. Sure enough, the character ends up one of the most accomplished magicians in the history of the species, but he dies alone and insane in a gutter in London.
I used to read a lot about the occult, but could never muster up the belief to go full-blown Alan Moore "I worship myself as a snake god" with it. The weird thing about a lot of it, however, is that once you know a little, you start seeing it pop up in daily life, like how Robert Anton Wilson saw the number 23 everywhere.
(Or how there's a far-right political party in modern Greece called the Golden Dawn, which sounds so much like a blatant Illuminati power-grab that I'm surprised it didn't get laughed to death on general principle. Apparently the One True Conspiracy That Controls Everything has a camp of young-turk fuck-ups who are tired of being secretive and subtle and think it would do them all some good to hit each other with tire irons for a while.)
So I wonder about how magicians adopt new names, and how the concept of the "magical name" relates to Internet handles, and how your handle reflects you and ultimately begins to shape you. It probably doesn't always work, nor should it; some handles are kid stuff, thoughtless nonsense put in to fill a text field, and rightly so.
(Can you imagine a world where GokuSephirothXXX is somebody's magical name? I'm sure it's happened, and I'm sure it's why the Western occult tradition virtually died in the '70s. It committed retroactive suicide to save us all from the concept of brown-robed magicians lurking in basements with bright yellow saiyan wigs. Ritual magic that involves standing in one place and screaming like you're about to prolapse for three days. A six-foot-long ceremonial "katana.")
If I was writing urban fantasy or New Age shovel-lit, I'd probably go from there into the concept of Internet identity magic: choosing a new name to forge a new identity, and thus a new self. A handle as personal reinvention/transformation, in its way.
This is what I think about whenever I see somebody on YouTube or an MMO or whatever who's chosen to represent himself as something like "Shithead666." As onscreen, so off.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
There's a scene in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, somewhere in the first couple of volumes, about a cell of anarchist/conspiracist magicians in the '20s. One has chosen to call himself "Tom o' Bedlam," and we see his flashback where his father calls him out on it: as a "magical name," it's a dare launched against the universe. Sure enough, the character ends up one of the most accomplished magicians in the history of the species, but he dies alone and insane in a gutter in London.
I used to read a lot about the occult, but could never muster up the belief to go full-blown Alan Moore "I worship myself as a snake god" with it. The weird thing about a lot of it, however, is that once you know a little, you start seeing it pop up in daily life, like how Robert Anton Wilson saw the number 23 everywhere.
(Or how there's a far-right political party in modern Greece called the Golden Dawn, which sounds so much like a blatant Illuminati power-grab that I'm surprised it didn't get laughed to death on general principle. Apparently the One True Conspiracy That Controls Everything has a camp of young-turk fuck-ups who are tired of being secretive and subtle and think it would do them all some good to hit each other with tire irons for a while.)
So I wonder about how magicians adopt new names, and how the concept of the "magical name" relates to Internet handles, and how your handle reflects you and ultimately begins to shape you. It probably doesn't always work, nor should it; some handles are kid stuff, thoughtless nonsense put in to fill a text field, and rightly so.
(Can you imagine a world where GokuSephirothXXX is somebody's magical name? I'm sure it's happened, and I'm sure it's why the Western occult tradition virtually died in the '70s. It committed retroactive suicide to save us all from the concept of brown-robed magicians lurking in basements with bright yellow saiyan wigs. Ritual magic that involves standing in one place and screaming like you're about to prolapse for three days. A six-foot-long ceremonial "katana.")
If I was writing urban fantasy or New Age shovel-lit, I'd probably go from there into the concept of Internet identity magic: choosing a new name to forge a new identity, and thus a new self. A handle as personal reinvention/transformation, in its way.
This is what I think about whenever I see somebody on YouTube or an MMO or whatever who's chosen to represent himself as something like "Shithead666." As onscreen, so off.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
pay the writer
"I don't take a piss 'til I get paid."
I ran across Harlan Ellison's work indirectly, through the chapter he gets in King's Danse Macabre. He's not an easy writer to find in a bookstore, old and cantankerous and mainstream-unfriendly as he often is, and I ended up reading a lot of his non-fiction first, in the big hardcover '90s reprints through White Wolf, like Harlan Ellison's Hornbook.
Which probably explains a lot about me, honestly. Ellison is not something you want to read in your late teens unless you're trying to do a specific kind of damage, like how the moment you get your driver's license, some well-meaning soul should make sure you don't get the chance to read On the Road. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that my being a writer is because of Ellison, but it sure as hell didn't help.
And yeah, Ellison is often pretentious, and yeah, there's that Connie Willis thing, and yeah, it's hard not to call bullshit on a lot of what he has to say about himself and what he got up to in the sixties. These are irrelevant to the project. I don't go to your house and talk about the time your hero was picked up in Las Vegas for disorderly conduct and managed to punch one last nun before they got the cuffs on and yes that happened. Humans gonna human. Moving on.
The point is that Ellison, imperfect as he is, has had a big influence on me. I'm thinking about him today because I'm looking to expand my pool of clients, and I keep going back to the "pay the writer" speech from Dreams With Sharp Teeth.
There's always a temptation to undervalue yourself when you write, because at least you're writing; at least you're out in the world, doing something other than work for yourself, most of which will never be seen. The reward structure on writing is fucked, so naturally, an apparatus has evolved to take advantage of that. It's why I don't like to read the Huffington Post; it's a creaking slave ship full of smiling people, many of whom are just happy to have one hand on an oar.
I've had people with my resume in hand mention paying me in "valuable exposure"; people who are actively hiring, who want you to do actual work, but don't want to pay you for it. Some are well-meaning start-ups who spent all the initial money on the web hosting, but that just means they don't know how to budget and they'll be gone in six months. Some, I'm sure, know exactly what they're after.
Fuck 'em. Tao of Ellison: my work is valuable, my time is valuable, my skills are trained. Pay the writer.
I ran across Harlan Ellison's work indirectly, through the chapter he gets in King's Danse Macabre. He's not an easy writer to find in a bookstore, old and cantankerous and mainstream-unfriendly as he often is, and I ended up reading a lot of his non-fiction first, in the big hardcover '90s reprints through White Wolf, like Harlan Ellison's Hornbook.
Which probably explains a lot about me, honestly. Ellison is not something you want to read in your late teens unless you're trying to do a specific kind of damage, like how the moment you get your driver's license, some well-meaning soul should make sure you don't get the chance to read On the Road. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that my being a writer is because of Ellison, but it sure as hell didn't help.
And yeah, Ellison is often pretentious, and yeah, there's that Connie Willis thing, and yeah, it's hard not to call bullshit on a lot of what he has to say about himself and what he got up to in the sixties. These are irrelevant to the project. I don't go to your house and talk about the time your hero was picked up in Las Vegas for disorderly conduct and managed to punch one last nun before they got the cuffs on and yes that happened. Humans gonna human. Moving on.
The point is that Ellison, imperfect as he is, has had a big influence on me. I'm thinking about him today because I'm looking to expand my pool of clients, and I keep going back to the "pay the writer" speech from Dreams With Sharp Teeth.
There's always a temptation to undervalue yourself when you write, because at least you're writing; at least you're out in the world, doing something other than work for yourself, most of which will never be seen. The reward structure on writing is fucked, so naturally, an apparatus has evolved to take advantage of that. It's why I don't like to read the Huffington Post; it's a creaking slave ship full of smiling people, many of whom are just happy to have one hand on an oar.
I've had people with my resume in hand mention paying me in "valuable exposure"; people who are actively hiring, who want you to do actual work, but don't want to pay you for it. Some are well-meaning start-ups who spent all the initial money on the web hosting, but that just means they don't know how to budget and they'll be gone in six months. Some, I'm sure, know exactly what they're after.
Fuck 'em. Tao of Ellison: my work is valuable, my time is valuable, my skills are trained. Pay the writer.
Monday, July 21, 2014
old wine in new bottles
What happens after Tolkien?
My big idea lately has been the modern state of the sf/fantasy genre as fundamentally regressive: a hole to hide in, not an escape hatch. We're still talking about Lord of the Rings a hundred years later, still mining it for ideas; any comic book character that wants to keep their own book solvent had better be at least sixty years old, and even Deadpool, the exception that proves the rule, just past his twentieth anniversary.
The problem with even having this thought is that it immediately engenders a cynical reaction: of course you want something new to show up, you are new, this is a cry for attention, blah blah blabbity boo. Always makes me think of a guy I knew who was clearly using a similar argument as viral marketing, and as far as I'm concerned, one of the fastest ways to torpedo your own argument is to make it obvious that you're using it to sell something.
That's fantasy, though: stuck in Tolkien for over a century. There have been people worth talking about; Martin, Jordan, arguably Eddings, certainly Bradley and LeGuin, but Tolkien's the boomerang influence. It keeps coming back to him, if only through his bastard son Dungeons & Dragons.
So here's the question, inspired a bit by Warren Ellis's comics work in the Apparat Singles Group: what comes next after Tolkien? Do you just mine a different mythology, the way he was self-consciously rewriting English folklore, or do you go off somewhere else? And if you do, who notices?
My big idea lately has been the modern state of the sf/fantasy genre as fundamentally regressive: a hole to hide in, not an escape hatch. We're still talking about Lord of the Rings a hundred years later, still mining it for ideas; any comic book character that wants to keep their own book solvent had better be at least sixty years old, and even Deadpool, the exception that proves the rule, just past his twentieth anniversary.
The problem with even having this thought is that it immediately engenders a cynical reaction: of course you want something new to show up, you are new, this is a cry for attention, blah blah blabbity boo. Always makes me think of a guy I knew who was clearly using a similar argument as viral marketing, and as far as I'm concerned, one of the fastest ways to torpedo your own argument is to make it obvious that you're using it to sell something.
That's fantasy, though: stuck in Tolkien for over a century. There have been people worth talking about; Martin, Jordan, arguably Eddings, certainly Bradley and LeGuin, but Tolkien's the boomerang influence. It keeps coming back to him, if only through his bastard son Dungeons & Dragons.
So here's the question, inspired a bit by Warren Ellis's comics work in the Apparat Singles Group: what comes next after Tolkien? Do you just mine a different mythology, the way he was self-consciously rewriting English folklore, or do you go off somewhere else? And if you do, who notices?
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