So I finished my second semester at college, woohoo. I did pretty well, and even pulled my D in math up to a B. I… don’t have much to say about being back in school strangely enough. It’s a fantastic opportunity that I’m thankful to have, but when I think about what to say about my experience I don’t have much to offer.

Anyways, since I’m not taking any summer classes I’ve decided to get myself prepped for next semester with some study. There are two classes I plan to study for specifically for next semester: Philosophy and Japanese. Philosophy is really something I’ve looked forward to for a while now. Last semester I picked up Aristotle’s Poetics, and while I started to read it I haven’t had much spare time to finish it. I’m not worried that I’m going to do poorly in this class or anything, but I have had this university-level-course-in-a-box thing called The Birth of Western Philosophy: Plato and Aristotle, and I kind of feel like if I don’t use it now I won’t have a need to after next semseter. I broke down the lecture and reading schedule for it and if I do two a week I should be able to get the “course” done in seven weeks, at which point I plan to finish reading Poetics.

Japanese, on the other hand, is freaking me the hell out. It took me five years of Latin classes to finish up Latin 2 in high school (6th grade through my Junior year). I’m terrible with foreign languages. My degree program for UIC requires four semesters of a foreign language. Japanese is the foreign language I’m most familiar with, and also the one that would help me in my career the most. So, for lack of another language option that interested me (French was my back-up) I’ve bit the bullet and registered for Japanese. So that I feel as comfortable as I can going into next semester I picked up that crappy looking My Japanese Coach DS game app. Hopefully it will prepare me enough to get the edge I’ll need to pass the class. As a long term goal for my Japanese study, I hope to be able to watch a Kurosawa film without subtitles. If I do well enough that will be my treat in about two years.

I also plan on doing a bit of reading I have backed up:

Beneath the Wheel - Hermann Hesse (Mostly done, but I ran out of time before finals to finish it)
The Waste Land Prufrock and Other Observations - T.S. Eliot
Poetics - Aristotle
Trigger Happy - Steven Poole (read it a few years ago, but want to read it again)
At least one play by - Shakespeare (I’ve read a few, but have been meaning to read more)

I also will hopefully get Issue 9 of The Gamer’s Quarter finished so that I can be done with that project. Not that I’m eager to kill it, just that I feel like I’ve let a lot of people down taking this long to release it. I also want to make some  progress on a writing project I’ve been mulling over for about a year now that goes back even further. I’ll talk about that more if anything happens with it.

In the 1950’s French magazine Cahiers du Cinema famously coined the theory of the auteur director by pointing out that they are in control of the mise en scene (the medium of the story). This is most easily explained by looking at the rolls of all the other members of a production.

In theatre no matter what the director tells the actors, when the curtain opens he is powerless to change the action. At the same time the actors are powerless to change the events of the screenplay. Hence the playwright is considered the author of the play: Shakespeare, Goethe, and Williams are the names we know in theatre, not the actors or directors. In film the director is the person in control of everything: the action, the camera, the script. All these elements are his to put together in any way they see fit. After the images are imprinted in celluloid there’s nothing anyone can do to change it, even if they try.

The auteur of a videogame is the player. No matter what the director, animator, texture sampler, programmer, or publisher does to a game, after it ships the player is the ultimate author of the game. Every experience is unique. Every playthrough different. This is why speed runs and super plays are so entertaining: we can watch how someone else decided to play out the events, how they authored the sequences and actions.

This is precisely the reason that games don’t evolve. Designers are still trying to deliver the same experience to every player that purchases their game. Sterilized to the point of ubiquity, many games feel like the player’s role is diminished, or even worse unnecessary. The best films are tied to the director, even ones with weak stories or poor writing: that’s not what the medium is as concerned with. Theatre is the realm of writers: even when a poor performance of Hamlet is premiered the writing isn’t what’s criticized. If a player is allowed to turn a game’s world into their own then the writing, acting, and mechanics can be excused.

Morrowind is possibly the strongest example I can think of to prove this. I spent over 300 hours in the game over about 4 different characters. I made the world my own, I broke the systems just as a law could be broken. I explored when and where I wanted. Never was I demanded to follow the tracks of a roller coaster for entertainment. The many, many faults of the game are easily overlooked since I had such freedom. As the auteur of my own experience I owned Morrowind like no one else ever will–well not exactly like anyone else. Games with deep mechanics works the same way, look at any 2D fighter. Diago has dominated his opponents by making every character bend to his will on screen in ways no one else can. His name is possibly more synonymous with Street Fighter than any of the developer’s names.

There are different ways to give the player auteurship (uhh, sure, that word works), and until developers find ways of allowing players to auteur different emotions games can’t evolve. Just putting emotions into the writing, or through actions (Aeris), will never be enough.

More thoughts on this later.

Today marks the first day of my 28th year on earth. Exciting! You know what I did today? I went out and looked at guitars, hit up a Borders and bought a new copy of The Idiot, came home and made some tea, played a little guitar, then read the new intro to my book. Later tonight I’ll be watching the Criterion Collection’s new release of Mishima, a film I’ve been trying to get a copy of for the past 4 years or so.

As if that wasn’t boring enough, get this: when reading the new introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot I learned a new word and instantly thought of how to apply it to videogames. Sometimes I feel like slapping myself. So anyways, the context is that part of the book examines the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the cruxes of this sect of Christianity is kenosis, the Greek word for “emptying out” in relation to Christ.

The Kenostic character model: Any character in a game which has been already emptied out of emotion, family, memory, or some other very personal experience. This allows the player to nicely and comfortably fit inside their mentality. Frequently seen in RPGs.

There, happy birthday from me to you. A new term for videogames.

I’ve always hated bloggers (at least I think that’s the proper term for them) who try to act the part. The part for this story is about being “so avant-garde that I’m an authority on the subject.”

I’m not referring to myself, just someone I ran across while doing research on the internet. About a month ago I was working on a project for class about David Lynch. It was to be a retrospective on his career and life. While doing some research I ran across someone who claimed to be an authority on avant-garde because of all these individual things they’d heard/read/seen.

While I didn’t read the whole essay I came away with one little bit that stuck in my head when they said: “I even listened to Trout Mask Replica twice last year. On purpose!” It was written as though this was some grueling task that required nerves of reinforced steel beams to endeavor.

Why this particular comment stuck in my head I don’t know. I run across people like this on the internet quite a bit, ones who want some sort of award for being stranger than you. It irks me, but usually I just gloss over it. There was probably something about the name Trout Mask Replica that made it stick.

So I obtained the album without any prior knowledge of what it could possibly sound like just to see what a trout mask replica could possibly be. The album is fantastic. It is a bit difficult to listen to, yet nothing that someone who’s familiar with traditional jazz would have a problem with. It’s so bizarre that it paints some of the most vivid pictures with words that I’ve heard. At this point I’ve probably listened to the album a dozen times, every sequential listen is more rewarding than the last.

More recently I tried to figure out why, when I listen to Trout Mask Replica, it started to sound more and more familiar. Heading to the source of our instant collective knowledge—Wikipedia—I figured out why. Apparently in the early 1980’s Tom Waits was introduced to Captain Beefheart (the band behind Trout), which influenced his future work quite a bit. It all clicked together at that instant and I realized that I had heard the inspiration across Tom Waits’ albums.

Then I began looking into Tom Waits a bit in hopes of finding a new album of his that I may enjoy. One album I ran across was titled Night on Earth. Something about the title seemed familiar (probably from the similar named Night on the Sun, an EP by Modest Mouse) only to find out that it was the soundtrack for a film of the same name.

Looking into the film, it turns out that Night on Earth is a movie I’ve been trying to remember the name of for many years. The thing that made remembering the name difficult was that I only remembered one of the five stories that takes place in the movie. Because of this I thought I was trying to remember a TV show, something similar to Taxi Cab Confessions in the 90s. I saw the film with my parents somewhere after the movie was released in the mid-90s. I remember the one story in the film because it was hilarious and absolutely unique.

The vignette that I recall involved a taxi driver in Rome who picks up a priest of some sort. Even though it is night the driver is still wearing his sunglasses, which the priest asks him to take off to ensure his safety as a passenger. The driver, riddled with the weight of a disturbing sexual past, proceeds to confess to the priest as he drives him to the church.

The confession included many stories of sexual acts performed on fruit—large ones like melons with holes cut in them—and then how his friend introduced him to sheep. The sheep part gets more disturbing than the fruit. As he grows older he’s become ashamed of his past and finds a nice woman to marry. On the night of his own wedding there’s an earthquake (or some other natural catastrophe) during the reception, which causes one of the bride’s maids to become overturned on a piece of furniture, her rear unclothed, posterior in the air. After the initial shock of the event passes he looks over to the bride’s maid and instantly recalls his favorite sheep from adolescence and he proceeds to act as he did with the sheep.

Yeah, ok, here’s the weird part. I remember all of that even though it’s been about 15 years since I saw it. While this may be a slightly inaccurate recollection, I’d wager that it’s at least 90% correct. That’s how vividly I remember the movie. I’m going to try to track it down now; Netflix is the first stop.

And now I’ve come full circle. Two gifts have been presented to me through a series of strange events resulting from research. It’s funny how things end up sometimes.

As a few of you may know, I’ve been under employ by the Federal Govenment for nearly seven and a half years now. I’ve been under the thumb of the United States Coast Guard (a subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security) and their Uniform Code of Military Justice for far too long. I got into this gig so that I could save up money for college because I knew that I was horrible at doing it myself. I found out recently that I have the added benefit of being able to get a free ride to any Illinois public college on top of over $36,000 from the Montgomery G.I. bill. After all this time I’m coming out of the service with about 34 throw away college credits from the Coast Guard Institute, a free ride in college, and I’ll be paid to be a student.

Funny how some things work out. I mean, I’m pretty much set, the government is even moving me back to the Chicago-land area mid-November. I shouldn’t have to worry about anything, and most people would be more than willing to accept what I’ve been handed, so over seven years of my life in a job that I mostly hated shouldn’t be too great a sacrifice, should it? Nahh, probably not. I had a lot of spare time on my hands at work because my work load was designed for people far more remedial in their tasks than I am (on average, barring about 6 total months over the past 5 years, I was only working about 50% of the time I was at work and was one of the best employees who was constantly commended). Top off that nice career with 90 days of paid vacation (which I had to earn and save) you’d think nothing were wrong. Oh yeah, and I got a Coast Guard Achievement Medal.

That’s me in the middle, don’t I look pretty? With all these positive things you’d think it pretty strange that I’m generally in a bit of a funk, mildly depressed and fairly stressed out right now, but I am. I can’t put my finger on what it is either, which is really bothering me.

Anyways, so yes, I’ve never really liked talking about being in the military becuase it’s never something I’ve wanted to define me as a person, so let’s just move on. My last day was actually Friday the 2nd of November, but I hadn’t done much work at work for the past four weeks (well, technically I took one of those weeks off, so only three). So I decided what better way to celebrate than to do something I hadn’t done in about 10 years: go to Rocky Horror Picture show in a theatre. Apparently it’s only done four nights a year in St. Louis (though I haven’t seen it done anywhere else I’ve lived since I joined the military, so I can’t rightly complain) and I was lucky enough to get in on Friday night. I let my hair down (or up depending on your understanding) and decided to go all out. It was a fantastic evening and a great celebration. My wife Sara and I both got dressed up: her in grand vaudeville attire, and I as unconventional conventionest.

Fantastic night and a great show (although I wasn’t too big a fan of the actor who played Dr. Frank). Well, know I should be working on the magazine more, but, well, I just can’t do it. I’m in a rut. Sorry for anyone who’s waiting on it, hopefully it will be finished soon.

While browsing through the manual of Quake (I only have 9 days of work left, give me a break) I noticed one of the questions in the Commonly Asked Questions section is still that’s very high on the minds of many right now:

Q. Don’t you worry that Quake teaches people that all problems can be solved by the misuse of deadly force?

A. No.

Sure this topic has been beaten like a dead horse time and time again by both scholars and watercooler junkies. I don’t think it’s a stance that’s going to be declared official any time soon. When speaking with Matthew Weise at GDC he said to me that, in order for games to be taken as a serious medium we basically just have to wait for everyone born before a time with videogames to die. This isn’t malicious, or at least not intentionally. He compared it to film, and when it really became a recognized art form was after people who had grown up without films had all died out. [tangent: I was just reading an article yesterday about how film is still struggling to be a recognized art form. You could have fooled me!] I then countered with Comic Books, which still aren’t generally considered an art, yet have been around for well over 50 years now.

Anyways, we’re getting away from the point here. People like Jack Thompson will always say things like the Commonly Asked questions, and so will the mass of inexperienced outsiders. The thing is that creative intention goes a long way. Outside of possibly America’s Army, I don’t think that any violent or aggressive game is out there to teach people about how violence or murder solves a situation best. Until the creative intent behind the development of a game goes out of its way to support that claim I think the issue is a bit ridiculous. In order for this all to get resolved I guess I’ll just have to wait until everyone dies out.

First, the TIGSource B-Game Competition is over. If you recall, I was involved with one of the games, donating 5 games to the The 100-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart. We took 6th place (out of 29) so that’s pretty good! The winner was also one of the games I voted for because I have a soft spot for zombies. Unfortunately I don’t think that this actually resolves the issue that the competition set out to tackle: what is a B-Game. The winning game ended up being very polished, and sort-of straight forward. It was clichéd in many ways though, which is kind of always how I see B-Movies (clichéd and bombastic, which Cottage of Doom fits into). Also, of the two mentioned writeups on the games, my entries to the Pirate Cart were mention in each. Kick the Habit was mentioned in one, and Sad Old Man in the other (though just in image form).

~Over at High Dynamic Range Lying there was a new entry titled Telling stories and Realizing worlds. Since I’m replaying and still greatly enjoying Half-Life 2 again the image at the top made me read more carefully than usual to what Nayan was saying. He touched on some topics about HL2 which I think are both prominent and important not only to the game itself, but games in general. I recommend reading the article linked to above otherwise my comments may seem a bit disjointed (which, you know, they are):

HL2 is pretty much, the state of the medium as far as combining narrative and gameplay. The result is the emergent product. I honestly feel like this is what most reviews miss, or at least don’t realize is the point of the game. The product is not the disc sitting in the box. It’s not a list of bullet points and length. The product is the result of many months/years of hard work from the developers mixed with the player. Unlike most mediums, a game does not exist without a player. A game can not exist in a vacuum where graphics or writing alone actually mean something and can be graded. This is not to say that the graphics are irrelevant: flash-level graphics may get the job done as well as cell-processor level HDR bump-mapped graphics. The product is dependent on how well the creator gets their point across using an actor they’ve never met.

For the instance of a puzzle game, the actor is omniscient and molding the game around them. Without the developer to give them the items to mold there is no game, and graphics or story exist as spread sheets or movies. These items only exist as a result of the emergent narrative.

It’s interesting to think about, and the more that developers actually do think about it the better experiences we’re going to have. Valve goes through extensive play testing and QA stages (note that Bungie also did for Halo 3). In these play test sessions they make sure that the player is doing what they want them to do as an actor. As a result the player (generally) will follow a script they don’t even know exists for them, and experience something above and beyond what any other medium can offer. The best example of this is the very early chase sequence in Half-Life 2. As a result of so much play testing I ended up falling directly into the hands of the developer and was molded like putty into the actor I needed to be. It was brilliant, and probably one of my fondest game memories from the past 5 years.

Also, it’s pretty important to differentiate between Story and Narrative. Story is the easier side: it’s what’s told to the player, either in text or through video/cutscene. Narrative is a slightly different beast which is far more developed in earlier games than since the birth of the cutscene. For example: Strider. The narrative is the player killing wolves in the artic to break into a mechanical fort. As the player runs across the mine laden snow field the narrative of what’s happening unravels: you’re running down the side of a mountain and entering a base. When the sequence is over you, the player, know you have just done this but the game never states it, you don’t have your actions re-told or encompassed into a story. Many arcade games and early console games did this best, and as a result we have very fond memories of these games because we made their stories, they weren’t told to us. One of the most crushing days for me in gaming was finding out every little detail about Samus’ past via the anime storyboards in Zero Mission. Since the story of Metroid had previously been so much based on the narrative I created through playing, the illusion was shattered with “real” explanations. Narrative is very powerful, and often something that is lazily ignored in current game design.

Sorry, I’ve gotten way off topic and gone on long enough! I think the point I was getting to is that the games with the best stories are the ones incorporating it into the emergent narrative of the game rather than forcing it as an aside.

So basically I just wanted to capture that here and talk about Half-Life 2 a little more.

~ As a final note, I was linked to a really excellent blog recently titled The Criterion Contraption written by Matthew Dessem. As an aspiring script writer he’s currently going through ever Criterion film in order of release on DVD to get a better understanding of foreign film, and film in general. He does a lot of research into each film with a self established average of fifteen hours work put into each entry. After about three years of steady work on the blog even Criterion has officially recognized it and linked to it from their main site. He’s only up to #77 (Criterion is currently up to #401) but there are still some really amazing films up to that point. This also reminded me that I need to invest in some of those new Eclipse series box sets Criterion is releasing. Specifically the Ozu and Kurosawa box sets.

It appears that my pre-ordered copy of The Orange Box won’t be arriving until Wed. at the earliest. This is exceptionally unfortunate for me because of how much I’ve been looking forward to it. I was thinking earlier today how there’s never midnight releases for games that I’m honestly excited to get and would love to spend a couple extra hours with. But no, it hardy ever works out that way for me.

In case you’re reading this and cocking your head slightly wondering why I can’t just pre-load the game and at midnight launch it (or even play the beta for that matter). Well, that’s simple: there’s no way in hell I could run the game on my computer. So I have to settle for the next best (and most comfortable) thing, my Xbox 360. Hoping that I’m not alone in my lament I’ve collected a list of articles relating to Team Fortress 2 which are all good reads and will keep you busy when your hands aren’t doodling analogue sticks:

The Complete Go Team Fortress
Part 1: The Heavy.
Part 2: The Medic.
Part 3: The Demoman.
Part 4: The Pyro.
Part 5: The Sniper.
Part 6: The Engineer.
Part 7: The Soldier.
Part 8: The Scout.
Part 9: The Spy.

The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Team Fortress 2 Interview
The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Team Fortress 2 Interview - Part 2

In case you didn’t notice, all this writing came from the exceptional (newish) website: Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I highly recommend the rest of the site as well, but this should keep you reading when you’d rather be killing tomorrow night.

So, incase no one knew, I’ve had this webspace for a really long time honestly. If you want you can check out my old front page with awful articles included Nothing will be deleted!

Anyways, I’m going to work on backing up my LiveJournal and then seeing if I can make easy use of crossposting on my LJ and here at the same time so that I can keep my friends there.

So, like, welcome aboard. I guess I should set up what my goal is with this blog: I don’t have one. I’ll spend some time catching up on my work items and it may take me a while to get _everything_ from that on here, but I’d like to get it in one place for easy access when I need it.

Also, give me some input on the image/color/text scheme here. I mean, I’m not too artistically inclined and honestly the red may be a bit too much, but I couldn’t think of anything much better. I may go with a smaller image.

But yeah, input people, input!

EDIT: I have sucessfully dumped all of my LiveJournal entries into this blog. Warning: some are embarrassingly poor in quality and for nearly a year I was obsessed with Bemani games.  I have no idea how to go about pulling my Gaming Journal entries, but you can go to the first post from my LJ to get the link to that if you demand to read them. Unfortunately the comments were not pulled in with my LJ entries, which were sometimes better than the entries themselves. My LJ was pulled for historical posterity only.

Well here it is. My avatar of myself has been floating around the net for a while. Since about 1999 I have been wandering digitally around - snooping for more info on video games usually - and have had a Gaming Journal for about a year and will probably keep it. It seems very mechanical there. I will mainly use this to mirror my gaming thoughts from there when necessary. I will use this for a more personal touch.

I am usually in a good mood, yet today I will just state that I am interested to find out if this Live Journal thing is for me.

A bit about me. I read a fair amount and I play a lot of video games. Lately I have been playing lots of Pop’n Music. I am decent, but nothing great. I also play a fair amount of shmups (Shoot ‘em Ups). Part of my gaming hobby includes building arcade sticks and the like.

I am also just becoming spiritual. I have startted to read the Bible [capitalized because these types have a thing for that]. It may come up every once in a while.

So here I am. Not quite sure how this thing works, but it feels like it may be like a community. Feel free to post what you want while I try to figure out how things work for a bit.