www.James-Strocel.com

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near the video games industry, but I still like to keep up with it in an armchair capacity. One of my favorite sites by which to do this is a blog called gamesetwatch, a collection of essays and links to articles by many industry leaders. One article they had recently was a retrospective on “Time Gal”, one of those old laser disc arcade games that had animated cutscenes that you control via pressing the correct button or moving the joystick in the right way. The author, Todd Ciolek, (who also writes X-button, a fine column at the Anime News Network) pointed out that Time Gal was the first game to have a non-licensed character that players could recognize as human. He goes on to praise the game for having a heroine that was so cute and chirpy, but then there was one line that just made my head spin.

“Misogyny creeps in, of course: Time Gal’s already skimpy clothes get ripped away by T-Rexes and Fist of the North Star mutants alike, and she’ll scream about being struck on the chest or getting bitten on her partially exposed rear. Pioneers are not always proud.”

It wasn’t just what he said, it’s how he said it. Misogyny. You know, creeping in like that. Here you are, pushing through the glass ceiling, but let one of those things on your chest slip out and BOOM! There’s misogyny. The word here is written with such complacency, such blasé, that it’s almost as if the author was describing the sky as blue. To use such a powerful word as misogyny in that way tells me that he doesn’t even believe in what he says. And why should he have to? He’s only preaching the gospel truth. You can see it repeated all over the ‘net. To show women as sexual in any capacity is misogynist. That’s it. Finito. End of discussion.

When there’s an idea that becomes sacrosanct and, dare I say, unexamined, it bothers me. Untested truth is what keeps us from moving forward, making connections and seeing the greater scheme of things. This is part of a pattern I keep seeing again and again in video game criticism. Why is a scantily clad girl in a video game defined as misogyny? “How is that not misogyny!?” is not a valid answer.

Despite being male, I think I can put my liberal arts hat back on and take a crack at this one. Misogyny is the hatred of women. If a woman getting her clothes torn suggestively in a fight is misogyny, then there are a couple of assumptions at work here. The first is that this is sexual objectification, where a woman is judged by her physical attributes independent of her personality and intelligence. This is demeaning to women, and that makes it misogyny.

I have a problem with this. This also assumes that the way a woman looks and how she presents herself has nothing to do with her personal taste, her habits or the culture she comes from. It would seem that this imagery is only defined by how I see it. Big, white male me. Now this tells me that if I look at something and get a rise out of it, it immediately becomes misogynist. I am indirectly dictating what can and cannot be depicted in regards to women. It doesn’t matter if anyone else finds the game cute or funny. Is that feminist? Hell, is that even humanist?

So now that we’ve found out what misogyny is, what’s feminism? What images do game companies produce if they want to be forward-thinking and catch that ever-elusive female audience? Many would point to a game called Portal. It’s about a battle between a sarcastic computer and Chell, a barely seen female protagonist in a formless jumpsuit with no dialog, no expression, and no personality. She is seen as the perfect feminist archetype, as opposed to blond-haired traitors like Super Mario’s Princess Peach. Of course, this can’t explain why Peach herself has female fans all over the world and why her own game, Super Princess Peach, has sold over a million copies.

That, my friends, is why we can’t have compelling video game characters. This is why we live in a video game world populated by bald space marines and sullen amazonian axe-murderers. When we intentionally wall off a part of human nature, we blind ourselves to potential avenues of creativity. A specific, easily recognizable character can make the difference between millions of dollars in revenue and billions.

For the first few months of our marriage, my wife Sara would ask me how I could possibly spend so much time surfing on the internet. Recently I found out this wasn’t a complaint, but an actual question about how to find good stuff to read on the web. I told her that I frequent sites like Digg.com and Fark.com to receive the latest news about technology, video games and STAR WARS! In other words, sites that would not interest Sara in the slightest.

The state of affairs continued until I found an article on Digg called “Top Five Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls”. It basically outlined what I had thought when I had tried to introduce Sara to news aggregate sites. Most of them are sausage parties, populated by nerds who try to break the site for no other than a surplus of time on their hands. You’re unlikely to find articles about non-geeky arts and crafts, parenting or anything else relevant to women. Considering how much of the publishing sector is created by and for women, having web software like Digg and making it completely male oriented is like building a Saturn V Rocket and using it as a Christmas tree. It seemed like the author had pointed out ripe territory for revolution, but many commentors pointed out that the revolution had already happened at www.kirtsy.com.

Intrigued I headed down there and was taken by surprise by how nice the interface is. It’s just 9 self-explanatory categories, and you don’t even have to join to give a “kirtsy” since the site measures the click-through count, not just votes from registered users. What’s more, the users don’t seem to use misleading headlines like “Bike Seat Cuts Off the Nose to Save the Penis!” in order to garner votes.

Now, I’m still going to use sites like Digg and Fark for most of my link hunting needs, but it’s really nice to know that a site like this exists. For one thing, it proves that lines of code and a server don’t make a software package any more than a truckload of hamburger meat and a suitcase full of money makes a McDonald’s. It’s amazing that you can create a news aggregate site that functions like Digg and have it come off as being completely different. It’s a tribute to the human element in software design. And what does Sara think of Kirtsy? Let’s just say she curses my name now that she knows how to waste time on the internet!

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.

A new Star Wars movie came out last weekend, and apparently nobody cares. Star Wars: Clone Wars opened 3rd at the box office with a gross of $14.6 million. That’s lower than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and people still reach for torches and pitchforks at the mere mention of that film. I’m still on the fence on whether to see it, but I don’t think I’ll enjoy watching Rip Taylor in Hutt form, or having a Jedi Padawan use words such as “Like, totally!” in normal conversation. I think it’s safe to say that what has kept us interested in Star Wars as a universe and franchise has gone for good. Recapturing the magic of the trilogy, or even building on it is going to be next to impossible with the way things are run right now. All that’s left is for fans like me to ask: What went wrong?

Was it the Flash Gordon clichés, with ships and lasers whooshing across space? Was it the Nietzschean interpretation of history? It doesn’t look like audiences had a problem with thing like that. Was it the Han shooting second? Jar-Jar? Close, but they’re only symptoms of a much larger problem. If you ask me, it all started when Lucas decided to make Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia brother and sister.

When Luke and Leia’s blood relationship was revealed, the love triangle between them and Han Solo was essentially frozen in carbonite and thrown into the deepest, darkest gas giant, never to return. Plus it made subsequent viewings of Empire Strikes Back a whole lot creepier. It makes perfect sense as a story decision, Luke desire to protect Leia almost made him turn to the dark side of the force at the climax of Return of the Jedi and it allowed Leia to get together with Han. However, it was kind of a cop-out. Before ROTJ came out people were still wondering if Leia was going to end up with Luke or Han. By the end of the movie Leia doesn’t go with Han because of anything specific about his personality or the way they relate, it was because she didn’t come out of the same womb that he did.

When you consider that the biggest character driven plot-line of the trilogy was resolved essentially by default, subsequent creative decisions about the films suddenly make sense. We could see through the prequel trilogy that Lucas abhors ambiguity about all things. There’s either a dark side or a light side of the force, people either love each other or they don’t. The lack of ambiguity works for Star Wars. When a bad guy dies, you want feel good about it. However, ambiguity shouldn’t be confused with facing a hard choice, which is what happened here.

The Han/Luke/Leia relationship was full of ambiguity because both Han and Luke were likable people, each with their own particular personality traits. If Leia chose either of them, it would be a hard choice to make and not everyone would be happy in the end. Lucas decided that Star Wars should be about choosing between Good and Evil, not Good and Good, so in came the deus ex machina of Leia being Luke’s sister, which left everyone happy even if they felt a little icky inside. From then on, Lucas’ films take on a deterministic feeling. It’s almost as if he feels that something like the Han/Luke/Leia triangle wouldn’t read well to audiences and we’ll all just tune out. He didn’t count on us sensing the insincerity behind that approach and just tuning out anyway.

The Han/Luke/Leia triangle gave us some of the funniest scenes in the trilogy (Han: So do you think a girl like her and a guy like me…? Luke: NO!). It turned Star Wars into less of technical demo and more of a date movie. Love triangles produce a lot of suspense, chemistry and character development. People are more themselves in a relationship than in any other situation. Creators who use this to their advantage can write their own ticket to stardom and fan fiction writers insane.

While the Angry Video Game Nerd banishes the gaming demons of the past, all is not well in the present day. Video Game companies have gotten larger than ever, with millions of dollars spent on advertising, processing power and celebrity talent to push out over-produced carbon copies of franchises that should have died back in the AVGN’s era. Ben Croshaw was just another freeware game designer/author when he decided to take his talent for MS Paint and droll witticisms to youtube and the video game industry at large. The result is Zero Punctuation.

The title Zero Punctuation refers to Croshaw’s rapid-fire delivery of his video game reviews. After the first two reviews hit youtube, the show was picked up as a series by the Escapist, an internet based video game magazine. The deal resulted in 400 percent increase in the site’s traffic. While the British-born-Australian-based wit of the reviewer offers a certain sense of class to the show, it’s no the only reason Zero Punctuation works. Croshaw achieves the holy grail of criticism in any media. He assails the unassailable, and he makes it work. Take for instance the Smash Brothers Brawl review embedded in the post. Personally, I own the game and love it, but the two characters that generated the most hype, Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake, are only available after slogging through a single player story mode. You will have put in so many hours to unlock those characters that you’ll win every time against your friends who don’t have the game. Your dream of having weekly Smash Brothers parties is effectively dashed. Even if you love the game, the logic behind that observation is impeccable

The only gripe I could have with Zero Punctuation is that Croshaw has a few biases against certain types of games, like Japanese-style Role Playing Games. He admits this, and he’s very fair about it, but he’s never going to be able to do a proper take-down of games like the Disgaea or Suikoden series. He doesn’t understand why those games are crack cocaine in binary code for some people. He tried to comprehend this in his review of “The World Ends With You” with amusing results, but I think we’ll have to be satisfied that he mostly focuses on the hubris of larger, more popular game genres. Lord knows the industry keeps giving him material.

Warning: The video in this entry contains NSFW language.

It’s a scene familiar to anyone who has owned an NES. You’ve worked hard doing your homework, mowing the lawn, and cleaning the kitchen. Your $5 worth of allowance isn’t much, but a trip down to the local video store to rent a new Nintendo game makes the past week’s indignities all worth it. You change to channel 3, blow off the connectors and press power. Suddenly, it all goes horribly wrong.

What was hoped to be a break from our workaday world becomes a personal hell of poor graphics, annoying sound and sisyphean controls. You wish you could put it down, but you don’t want your $5 to be spent in vain. You have entered the world of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

James D. Rolfe created the character of The Angry Video Game Nerd as a joke for his friends. Today the series is nothing short of a phenomenon. It’s the 5th most subscribed series on youtube and 5th most viewed overall. For years companies have looked to make a quick buck off video game fans by pushing out substandard games to make the Christmas rush or to coincide with a movie release. Usually we have game magazines to help us sort out the good games from the bad but some stinkers always make it through. The Angry Video Game Nerd is zeitgeist, an avenging spirit to all of us who at one time or another got shafted to make the bottom line of of companies like Acclaim, Bandai, or LJN.

Sometimes the games are so horrible that they conjure up evil spirits in the form of special guest stars. The Nerd has fought Bugs Bunny, Freddy Kreuger, the Joker and Hallowe’en’s Michael Myers among others in his quest to defeat the malformed games of days gone by. The episodes usually end with a crescendo of profanity and a usually creative and hilarious way of destroying the offending game cartridge.

Some people might criticize the nerd for his use of profanity and scatological references. However, most of us who are old enough to remember the humiliation of renting or buying these game are quickly passing the age of 30. The makers of these games made a living fleecing kids out of their allowances. We need an adult response to provide closure for the consumer scars of the past. We need to see our rage blaze across the screen like a righteous fire. We need the Nerd.

It’s hard to have common culture with anyone these days. I am told there was a time when people of all walks of life could meet up at the “water cooler” to discuss shows named “Seinfeld”. Now, even if a show is popular enough for everyone to watch, they’re most likely story arc shows like 24 and Lost. Any attempt to discuss said shows are met with screams of “NO SPOILERS!” followed by a dive behind the nearest desk. This is why I enjoy internet shows. They’re short, contain no interconnecting plot lines, and they usually have a comments section where you can discuss the show with other fans. However, I don’t want to discuss these shows with people on the internet. As much time as I spend on the computer, I’d rather find out what people I actually know personally (and I think that would you out there, reading this) think about these shows. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite internet shows, Wayne Gladstone’s Hate By Numbers.

Hate By Numbers is actually kind of a strong word for what Gladstone does on his show. He has a very calm and cool demeanor as he takes video clips from various sources and lists what bothers him about them. Here he describes how juxtaposing breast shots with video of animals being neutered might turn a news fluff piece into an odd form of aversion therapy. You may recognize this form of commentary from the Daily Show. This may be no coincidence, as Gladstone also writes for The Daily Show’s Indecision 2008 Blog. However, where the Daily Show focuses on the foibles of world leaders, Gladstone looks outside the news spotlight to find out just how bizarre television has gotten. Armies of production crews are assembled, millions of dollars are spent and this is what we, as a people, have come up with. With our civilization in this state, I am glad we have Hate By Numbers to remind us that “No, you aren’t going insane. Kid Rock really is a boil on the face of popular music.”

So the other day Sara and I were watching the encore presentation Olympic Opening ceremonies. As for the ceremonies themselves, they were fantastic. With over 15,000 performers, complex lighting effects and wire-fu to put the best action movies to shame, I doubt any country is going to top this kind of spectacle for long, long time.

The encore presentation on the CBC happened at about 3:00pm, but we were intrigued to find out how NBC handled their coverage. Rumor had it that ratings in the States depended on the victory of their athletes, and events that Americans did poorly in were simply ignored. We wondered how this way of thinking would carry over the coverage of the opening ceremonies and the parade of nations.

At first things were pretty similar to the Canadian coverage, although there was more explanation of the performance in the commentary. It took away some of the fun of interpreting the meaning of the performances, but it was interesting to hear some of the facts about what went into creating them. For example, the ceremonies involved creating images the coordinated movement of thousands of the performers. Amazingly, no markers were used to keep them in place as they created the fantastic designs on the stadium floor. However, as the parade of nations started, things started to get a little weird.

On the CBC, as the parade of nations went by, we heard the stories of the flag bearers, the athletes and how they got to be where they are. Stories such as how one of Japan’s equestrian athletes had been competing since the 1960s, or how the US flagbearer was a refugee from the Sudan.

Later on NBC, the first thing they mentioned about Canada was how we liked to pay people to compete for us and how we never won a medal during the Montreal or Calgary Olympics. Sara and I looked at each other and said: “Did Canada just get dissed?”

It turns out we weren’t alone in being talked about this way. For every nation that came around the track it was how many medals this country won, or how much they didn’t win, or how they’ve yet to win a medal. It wasn’t really offensive I guess, but it really shows off the priorities of the American coverage.

If the Olympics are a grand international society party, I guess the television coverage of these shows would be the impolite whispers spoken in hushed tones around the punch bowl. If only we could translate and consolidate all of the myriad interpretations of this event. We’d get some serious gossip and if we’re lucky spark a diplomatic incident.

On a related note, I hope Tokyo gets the bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. Just think of the events that can be inspired by Japanese game shows. Who would take the gold in an Olympic level competition of “Squishy-Squishy”?

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that more writing is going on today than at any point in human history. All it takes is 8 1’s and 0’s to make a byte, my 8GB flash drive contains well over 8 billion of those, multiply that by the billions of computers all over the world and combine that with fully industrialized printing processes, and you get the idea. Now with all this talking in stasis going on and if the Infinite Monkeys Typing Theorem is to be believed, we are going to be repeating ourselves a bit. I came across a few lists of internet writing clichés that I should try to avoid in the future.

For the Love of Blog Cheese from Lindsayism.com - A lot fun cliches but some of them are things the author can do nothing about, like having sycophantic commentators. Highlights include Calling Tivo/DVR “My new boyfriend.”, Participating in any blogging “meme” (”Write down the first three venereal diseases that pop into your head.”) and using the word “meme.”

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichs from Gawker.com - I know, they spelled Cliché wrong, but it is full of well-worn idioms from the internet age. It is frightening and shameful that I know which Simpsons episode [adjective]-y goodness came from.

Thirteen Blog Clichés from Codinghorror.com - It’s not so much a critique of internet writing as it is critique of blog design in general.

The 100 Lamest Game-Industry Clichés from GamesRadar.com - There is no greater temptation to use a Cliché when it’s 3:00 am, you’re out of coffeee, out of time, and most importantly out of money. While it mostly rails against games reviewers, I see this kind of language pop up on blogs and makes me start to lose my faith in humanity.

Looking at this computer setup, I can’t tell if I should be impressed or frightened for the person who built it. The Link goes to more pictures. What do you think?

Link

In case you were counting, this is my 100th post.