I mentioned Manilla Road to Mark recently, as an aside to me revisiting Rush, who have been mentioned in interviews as being a big influence on these guys.

…love when the whammy mimics the vocals. Plus, one for Mark’s “masquerade” project:

If you have the patience to sit through this, I think this talk by Jonathan Blow on video game design is the definitive answer to the ‘games as art’ discussion we had a month or two back. Blow is the kind of guy that has enough hipster cred that I’d go into anything he was involved with already hostile, but he kind of won me over here. Great talk.

Holy Shit! Where do I begin?

I finished reading through the first two books of the ‘Hunger Games’ earlier this week. Honestly, I was drawn in by the first chapter of the first book and thought that it ended on a pretty engaging cliffhanger. Now at the end of book 2 though I’m not sure I need to read any more. Guess I felt that that was a satisfying enough conclusion. Before you read any further though I want to take time to note that this commentary will be somewhere between spoiler-lite and spoiler-heavy. So don’t ever complain to me that you haven’t been warned!

Anyway, this isn’t really a review, just a kind of casual commentary about hunger games and also 2011. It comes at an appropriate time too because 2011 was such a strange year, both for me personally and for the world as well. My thoughts have been changing on a variety of topics, one of which is how I value or don’t value reviews (of games, movies, books, etc.) I don’t want to come off like I think this is some important topic, but it is a telling wrinkle in my outlook that’s part of a larger sea change.

Call it what you will, facing the music, facing the cold hard facts, dropping the pretense…however you like to refer to it, that’s sort of been my theme during 2011. So let’s say you are, in fact, facing the music, how does that influence your perception of a ‘review?’ I have to conclude that reviewing, at least as it is most commonly practiced, is largely pointless. And by commonly practiced I just mean to say that most reviews you’ll find online are some combination of summary, opinion, and personal anecdote. It’s easy to justify this if you believe or at least are willing to believe that artistic creation is sanctified in a universal way. In that case it’s clear that the more reviews you read with more variety the more you’ll have your fingers on the pulses of the zeitgeist and therefore you’ll be a more complete person and more engaged with the holy undercurrents of reality. But I don’t think that way, I guess I used to but not any more. For me it’s mostly about escapism now, and that all has to with the individual and how he or she feels. If it works it means it works for you and that’s all that matters, everyone else’s opinion is rendered moot. I guess it’s an obvious fact that most people would concede if pressed. But I think it’s out of sight out of mind for most because it so fundamentally conflicts with the idea of the noble artistic pioneer that our culture so teaches us to cherish.

I can only really imagine one scenario where reviewing would matter to someone who has already ‘faced the music.’ And that would be like if you were sitting in your car in the parking lot of a movie theater checking imdb on your phone and literally needed to decide within ten minutes what you were going to see…or any other situation where you’d need to make a decision really fast. But time usually isn’t a factor like that. People have all the time in the world. And could you imagine the fucking insane internal monologue of someone who took it to heart? “Less than 90% on the tomatometer? Try again junior, I don’t pay for B’s.” So if it’s not being ‘taken to heart’ then it’s something else, exactly a bulwark against having to ‘face the music.’

I probably wouldn’t talk about it at all if I didn’t think that if you could excise the dumb hipster influence that there’s a lot of potential for reviewing and art itself to impact lives in a meaningfully positive way. For example, think of all of the information that a novel could communicate beyond escapism: historical and organizational facts, how it ‘feels’ to live in a particular city or country, practical information just about how to get around in the world. Could be so useful but at the same at the same time so antithetical to the ‘great american novel’ style conception of literature. The same is true of reviewing. When I read a review I want to be in the hands of an expert. I don’t want to read about somebody’s opinions (unless maybe I know them personally or something like that). I don’t want to read a justification of an opinion I want to get some real insights from somebody that actually knows what they’re talking about. Like having a legal thriller reviewed by a lawyer, or having a master mechanic review a story about cars. In certain cases, expertise might be a deep familiarity with similar works of art, and that can be interesting too (more often it’s simply an excuse to bandy about a lot of pseudo-intellectual PoMo jargon).

So this commentary is kind of getting away from me, so what about the hunger games (HG). It’s hard not to point out the similarity to battle royale. But since I didn’t really care for BR and I don’t necessarily think that originality is a virtue it doesn’t bother me all that much. But if I have to pontificate, my main gripes with HG are, first of all, the geography not making a whole lot of sense; Katniss being a particular kind of cliche; and just the whole ‘revolutionary’ premise being something dumb for most people and particularly inappropriate for a YA book. So, I’ll try to talk about those points briefly. Geography: so district 12 is the energy backbone for all of panem, a country that geographically coincides with present day north america? How big is it and how many coal mines are there? It seems like it’s about as big as a reasonably large college campus, or did I miss something? Katniss: for fear of flaming I won’t get too into this except to say that if you can’t personally connect with a character that’s meant to be aspirational all it does is grate on you. ‘Revolutionary’ Premise: This is really my main problem with HG. What is a kid who really gets into this story going to make of the oppressive nature of the ‘Capitol’ and the need to rebel (depending on individual circumstances of course, I’m sure there are all kinds factors that might make that kind of oppression at least a metaphorical if not actual reality for some readers)? When you identify with someone it means you want to be like them. I don’t know, everybody’s different but it seems to me that how things like HG operate is that they want to try to make young people read in a lot of phantom discontent into their lives. That’s not good. And here I’m speaking from my own experience, wishing, as a kid, I had had more exposure to the kinds of stories would’ve ended up serving me better.

Anyway, kind of running out of steam here, so I’ll try continue this commentary later, talk about 2012 and all that stuff. Just wanted to get RS moving again. But yeah, feel free to take issue with anything I’ve said about HG in the comments, discussion is usually more interesting anyway.

Took this off Ross’s twitter. Does look kind of cool, but I was pretty disappointed with Rise of Cobra. I realize that the movie can be it’s own thing, but a huge part of the characters in gi joe are the designs. I just hate how generic looking everything is. Looks like one of those underarmor commercials.

Storm shadow was my favorite part of this first movie and he looks pretty badass here too. It’s heartening in a way to know that the actor was born in 1970, a full ten years before me. But I’ll never have that kind of hair, :[

Also, I love that trailer sound, sort of the synthesized helicopter winding down. so badass…NOT!

here’s the final thing i wanted to add to our art discussion:

bonus essential music:

Everyone probably already caught this on Lim’s twitter. But I wanted to bring back the ‘essential music’ posts.

Feels good to be posting on RS again. I hope I can keep up some kind of posting schedule this time. I was thinking of trying to write one or two posts per weeks on specific days, but we’ll see how it goes!!

Ross sent me this article: Film Crit Hulk Smash: Hulk vs. The Bat-Shit Evolution of the Modern Warfare Series. The column is ostensibly a review or commentary on the most recent Modern Warfare game (review: it sucked), but spends at least half of the time discussing the perennially flame-inducing topic: “Are Video Games Art?”

At first I was like: “What is this bullshit?” Going back to lots of discussion we’ve had here on RS and IRL, I think you can guess that I’m of the opinion that an objective definition of art is basically a fools errand. But Film Crit Hulk (FCH) makes a stab at a definition anyway:

HULK DEFINES ART AS SOMETHING WHERE THE THEMATIC MESSAGES (EVEN IF THOSE MESSAGES ARE AMBIVALENT) ARE THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THE PRODUCTS INCEPTION AND IDENTITY

I actually don’t think that’s a bad attempt. I think if I were to seriously try and define what (to me) is art, I would come up with something similar, with the difference being I would replace “the single most” with a substantially weaker “an.” However, even going with FCH’s definition, in the column he applies it so spottily and one-sidedly as to really sabotage his argument. By the author’s definition, I would say that very very very few works qualify as art. FCH cherry picks a few directors who have strong auterist qualities, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Kubrick, and a case could be made that films by these directors satisfy the “artist” criterion quoted above. But consider many many other directors generally considered “artists,” such as Hitchcock and Preminger. Those directors had money and box-office success at least on par with thematic concerns. Then FCH tosses in a classic game-as-art contender, Shadow of the Colossus, and, at first, admits that Shadow has a lot of interesting thematic concepts, is really reaching to SAY something, and thus may be trying to be art. But then FCH pulls back the football like Lucy taunting Charlie Brown. It’s not art because you still have to play a game, or there is still button pushing…or something. FCH then categorically states that any successful game-as-art has to be some kind of ungame. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what that means because FCH sure doesn’t lay it out.

I think this really gets to the heart of these sorts of debates. Comparisons between games and movies are fairly facile, because they are both primarily visual, contain moving story arcs, have voice acting, etc. etc. But really games are no more similar to movies than movies are to plays, or plays are to books. When movies were being first considered as works of art they were constantly being compared to the theater, and how cinema fell short, and didn’t measure up when judged by the metrics and rubrics defined by that earlier artform. But consider FCH’s art definition against non-cinema art forms. Dickens’ work, as I understand it, was primarily writing-for-hire, where he was being paid by the word and had an incentive to draw a story out and provide countless cliffhangers, rather than being driven by some “pure” devotion to theme or plot. Norman Rockwell is primarily known for his commercial art, which doesn’t have a particularly compelling thematic thrust besides being pretty. But I think it’s undeniable that it’s considered art by at least many museums if not by FCH. Throughout the column you really get the sense that FCH is really arguing that games aren’t movies. And it’s telling that when FCH is reaching for examples of art, he reaches only for cinematic examples and discusses everything in purely cinematic terms.

So where does that leave the whole “games-as-art” debate? Ultimately I think it’s a stupid debate to have in the first place because OF COURSE GAMES ARE ART. Anything creative has the potential to be artistic. People get all hung up on auteur theory, that art has to have a single creator. This is essentially a fiction, at least for film, and in many cases writing, music, and the visual arts. If we step back slightly, just look at early Mega Man games. Is the MM music art? What about the character designs? What about the themes of freedom (and the ambiguity of the Robot Masters being evil in the first game) present in the game? Is the fact that you still have to press A and B so important? Or, as one commenter in the threads suggests, can’t that interface mechanism ALSO be part of the art. The game designer or lead programmer came up with a certain interface that we use to connect to the game. Can that have any art to it? Certainly it can be subverted or commented on, as has been done in many indie meta games – which suggests that it can be art. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not out here suggesting that Marble Madness is some pinnacle of human achievement. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that – to date – there are probably very few games that have really achieved the kind of pure art we associate with, say, Michael Snow. But I do think that video games have achieved a great deal of artistry, and that even big budget blockbusters like Uncharted have a lot of art IN them, even if they as a whole product may not be art in a high-brow sense. I also think that Video Game is young medium that only now is being taken seriously. Very analogous to film in the 20s and 30s. And I think that in 20 or 30 years we will have the perspective to understand WHAT in video games is artistic and what a true piece of video game art looks like. With that perspective we’ll be able to look back at the video games being made today and in the past 20 years, and see a lot of art that we might be blind to now.

Anyway I’m glad Ross is digging Active Child so much. Here’s another artist — okay digression. Isn’t that sort of a giveaway right there that the generic term for a musician is an “artist.” Can’t we extend that presumption of artistry to other creative media as well? Okay back to the palette cleanser, here’s another guy who, like Active Child, has the kind of modern R&B vibe going on. You might remember I posted his song “The City” a few years ago. Here’s one off a more recent album:

thought i’d bring back Mark’s commentary type posts.
Mark and i have been bouncing around ideas for a Final Fantasy 7 fan-comic and with each new email i get more excited about it, i think we’re really onto something. i just hope i can make some kind of schedule work amidst my other comics. i’ve been thinking about a Ninja Turtles comic over the past year or two so i’ve dabbled with the idea of doing a fan-comic but i never thought i’d be rarin’ to go on a Final Fantasy 7 one. TIFA 4EVER

in my recent Final Fantasy excitement i picked up Final Fantasy 12 for 7 bucks. back in 2000 or whenever, i originally bought the PS2 just for Final Fantasy 10 which i ended up not really liking and after that i gave up on the series and on video games in general since my schedule was getting more and more hectic post-college. other than being busy i just got bored with them, i guess, especially modern 3D type games, with a few exceptions of course. anyway i’ve been playing FF12 for a few days now and it’s okay, i still feel kind of uncomfortable sitting and playing a video game, regardless of the game’s quality, just the act itself is weird unless it’s Mega Man or Super Metroid. or Nifflas games.

FF12 is okay, i like the characters and the story’s starting to pick up, but i hate the character skill development system, which is that every character can do everything, get every skill, equip every weapon, if you give them the right abilities. which is boring. even Final Fantasy 7 was like this with its materia system, every character could have any skill or spell if you equipped them with the right materia item, the only thing that would differentiate them in battle would be their negligible stats and their limit breaks (which is something). but i always liked how it was in FF4, 6, and 9, where each character had their own special skill(s), like the thief character would have Steal and nobody else could get that, or Mog in FF6 had Dance, and Terra had Trance/Morph, Amarant in FF9 had his monk skills, etc. and those unique abilities could also gain in strength or they’d learn or buy new aspects of them, so they weren’t totally static. but in FF12 and FF10 and to an extent 7 (can’t remember what FF8′s system was), it makes every character potentially the same in battle, and it just seems boring and homogeneous to me. also makes the equipment and skills themselves meaningless, because if every character can equip anything, what’s the real difference between swords and spears and staves?

the fighting system is also kind of confusing. it’s still turn-based but instead of taking their turns one by one the characters will often receive their turn simultaneously and you’ll get 3 characters attacking at the same time and it can make it difficult to see who’s doing what or who’s dealing which amount of damage since the numbers all come out on top of each other. the camera is also weird and, like when i played Okami, the camera will do weird things like be too far away from the action so the characters are too small and i can’t tell what’s happening, or when i try to shift it it’ll suddenly swivel on top of my party leader character and look straight down on their head so i can’t see anything. blah.

the problems i have with the various Final Fantasy games always seem like such obvious issues to me, i wish i could be in charge of an RPG, it would probably be the best ever.

anyway, i finished Wet Moon 6 earlier this week so that’s also why i got FF12 since i have a little bit of downtime here before i have to bust my ass and focus on Glory. pretty nice to be done with WM6, i guess it still hasn’t really sunk in yet even days later, and i thought finishing it would be some big catharsis but i guess i’ve been working on the book for so long that it just hasn’t hit me yet. usually when i finish a big book i crash mentally and physically, i get super tired and kind of depressed, like i’ve been sustained in work mode throughout the book and i collapse when the project is done. i’ve felt a little tired and the morning after i finished the book i could barely get out of bed and felt like i was getting sick, but i felt fine after that, usually the crash lasts for a couple weeks. i haven’t decided which book i’m going to work on next, Wet Moon 7 or Shadoweyes 3…

right now i’m super into Active Child, thanks to Zach who brought him to my attention. all the songs on the album are awesome but i think this is my favorite: