Bigger Is Not Better: On Videogame Maps.
I get lost going to the bathroom. So in general, I dislike huge games with terrible waypoints, as I just wind up unsure which way to go (I’m looking at you, Arkham City).
But gamers seem to love huge maps. If it’s huge, it must be awesome! Look at this Grand Theft Auto 5 map, it’s bigger than anything they’ve ever done! GTA is gonna be soooooo good!
Hold your horsepower there, chief.
Big maps are not automatically awesome. What’s important is what you can do with them. I found Grand Theft Auto IV to be a snooze because so much of the big, big map was actually just vaguely different scenery for a new swathe of no gameplay. Yes, I could drive past slightly browner buildings, but there still wasn’t anything to do. (Aside from the available-anywhere “murder civilians, get into a fight with the cops.”)
Whereas one of the reasons I liked Saints Row so much is that it had a big map, but I kept tripping over mini-missions. Wander for a while? Here’s a power-up hidden beneath a house! Here’s a race! Here’s an audio clip! The exploring meant something, providing plentiful rewards.
I think of Half-Life, which had teeny, constricted maps where exploring was nonexistent, but it was still a hell of a game because each cramped corner funnelled you into another semi-interactive experience. People remembered Half-Life because there was always something happening, and “something happening” is the core of a game experience. Give me a big map filled with emptiness, like a lot of sandbox games have these days, and all you’ve managed to do is shamelessly pad the game. Oh, now it’s three minutes to drive to the next mission instead of one! How. Awesome.
“A big map” is like “a big dick” – potentially exciting, sure, a technological breakthrough, but you still have to know how to use it.
The Agony of the Introvert
A month ago, they announced that Dale Avenue would be holding a block party. Everyone would get together to meet, eat, and greet.
I have been in anguish ever since.
Dale, it must be said, is a cordial but not particularly cohesive neighborhood. I know the names of the neighbors on one side of me. When there are parties at other houses, they too seem to consist entirely of non-neighbor people. We nod as folks go by, but that’s about the end of it.
So with this block party, all I can think is: Shit. Strangers.
Gini will be out of town that weekend, so I’ll be on my own. I’m patently, blatantly, awful at introducing myself. The concept of being among people I don’t know fills me with guttural terror, a sort of mumbling awfulness where I know I’ll just stand there, smiling numbly at people, hoping someone says something to me, terrified to introduce myself. Attending places alone brings me the heightened paranoia of pot, where every action I might take seems utterly foolish, crazy, the kind of thing they’ll laugh at you for weeks afterwards.
Do I have to go? I could stay inside. Oh, but then they’ll think of me as rude, I don’t want to be rude. Plus, the dog, I walk the dog, they all see me, they’ll note my absence, they’ll mark me as one of Those People and hate me. What if I just stay inside and pretend it’s not happening? No, the damn dog! She’ll bark. She might as well broadcast that I’m home. She’ll want to go for a walk during this damn thing. I can’t just walk past them and not say anything, right?
What if I take the dog with me? Dogs are icebreakers. Except Shasta growls a lot and jumps on people. She’s good, but she scares people sometimes. If I bring the dog, then maybe she’ll nip someone in all the fury and they’ll think I’m a monster. What if she poops outside? They’ll think I’m some crazy dog person, the nails, oh God, they’re going to hate me.
Okay, I’ll go without the dog. Then I’ll just stand there. What would I say to them? What do normal people say to each other? They have kids, I don’t, I’ll probably be awkward. What’s safe to say? Do they know I have bees? How much do these people talk with each other? Would they have told each other about my bees? Oh, God, what if I’m wrong and this whole neighborhood is cohesive and chats with each other daily and Gini and I are the only ones who are left out, just this pocket of sad isolation in the middle of some cheerful neighborhood, and this block party is actually a secret test to see what it takes to get us out and socializing?
What’s safe? I’ve got these crazy nails, maybe this neighborhood’s more conservative, they might hate me, what politics could I utter, how does this work, I can’t eat the hamburgers maybe they’ll think I’m rude for that I should just stay inside.
But the dog.
The damn dog.
How We Declared War On Syria (Or Didn't)
I think no current issue showcases the absolute dysfunction of American politics than Syria.
Before we continue, let us just admit that Syria’s a shit sandwich. Each side appears to be happy to slaughter thousands of Syrians, and neither side appears to love America. If we invade unilaterally, our best hope of war seems to be some kind of Iraq-style situation where we commit enough troops to basically sit on a powderkeg and hope we starve the fire of oxygen: expensive, bloodier than we’d like, and probably causing a lot of festering resentment at the US of A. If we don’t go in, then we send the message that hey, maybe chemical weapons are back on the table, and every war from now on becomes even more horrific. Plus, we basically say, “Hey, if you guys wanna commit atrocities on each other, that’s none of our business!”
No matter what we do, it sucks. Can we just acknowledge this as adults? That literally no matter what Obama or the Republicans chose to do, it would have ugly costs that nobody wanted?
Thank you.
But the thing that strikes me about Syria is that we don’t even know what our own politicians want. I’ve heard Obama being called another bloodthirsty warmonger and a man with secret hopes of peace. He went to Congress to get authorization to go to war, but we all know Congress couldn’t zip its fly after dribbling pee down its pants.
Was that the act of a man hoping to hand his war plans to a Congress he fully expected to bobble it, so he could tell the world, “Well, I wanted to go to war but they said no?” Was it a man who was hoping to call Republicans out, forcing them to see the gravity of the situation so they’d have to stop dicking around for FOX news and vote rationally? Was it a man who, unable to carry out his war-crazed agenda on a war-weary public, reluctantly shuffled off to Congress in a last-ditch effort to get the missiles flying?
We have hit the point in American politics where we can tell you precisely what our politicians are doing, but can’t even formulate a consistent theory as to why. Motivations have ceased to exist in the ridiculous Crossfire wind where existing biases and relentless 24/7 coverage has obscured any hope of understanding why anyone did anything.
And then Syria caved? Or did they? Is it a delaying tactic inspired by Russia? What the hell.
I’m not saying politics is simple: it’s always been hard discerning someone’s true motivations. But this is the first time I can recall a President has asked for authorization to go to war and there’s a very reasonable case to be made that he does not in fact want to go to war, that he’s counting on a dysfunctional Congress to fuck it up so he doesn’t have to. This could well be the moral equivalent of the husband who hates doing laundry, so he does a load where the whites all emerge pink and the wife sighs, “Oh, for God’s sake, forget it.”
How much does Obama want war? Fuck if I know. And I don’t think anyone has a clear opinion on that except for Obama, and maybe not even him.
Comments That Bother Me, Part 1.
So I head to a personal essay that’s been widely linked around the ‘net – the heartfelt discussion of a problem someone has with a culture. It has hundreds of comments from people going, “Oh God yes, I know exactly how that feels” and “Thanks for putting this into words” and linkbacks saying “She says it for me.”
Then you drill down and you find this:
“I don’t get this. I’ve never met anyone who complained about this before. Who would feel this way?”
Maybe the hundreds of other people who already left comments, you dope.
Look, I get being surprised when someone violently hates something that doesn’t bother you. That happens to me all the time. And many times, I think what they’re complaining about is overblown, their griping sans merit.
But if I see an essay that has five hundred likes on Facebook, I don’t deny the feeling exists. The fact that I have never encountered it before does not mean that, quantum-style, it failed to be before I clapped my googly little eyes on it. It means I never ran into anyone with this opinion, which is an entirely different thing.
And when someone leaves a comment like this, I wonder: no wonder you didn’t meet anyone like this before. You just met one right now, along with a battalion of cheering admirers, and you just fucking erased them. Can you halt for a moment to note your own blithering, Magoo-like blindness?
The evidence is literally before your eyes. You may not agree with these people, but for fuck’s sake, at least acknowledge them.
Oscarbait: Some Ramblings, With Bonus "The Butler" Musings
So we saw The Butler this weekend, a movie that’s tailor-made Oscarbait. And after some Twitter-discussions with Monty Ashley, who thought “Oscarbait” was a negative term, I wanted to discuss what I think Oscarbait is. Because it’s a weird little topic, the studios making a certain type of film in the hopes of getting Oscars (and hence more cash).
Because here’s the deal: Monty said that “Oscarbait” was a “noun, used to describe a movie of high quality that the speaker nevertheless wants to describe in a derogatory fashion.” The problem is that most Oscarbait movies aren’t of high quality. It’s said that the failure mode of “sarcasm” is “asshole,” and the failure mode of “Oscarbait” is “tedious drama.” Few people would argue that “Radio” (starring Cuba Gooding) or “The Lovely Bones” were quality films beyond the obvious definition of “made by professionals without any Plan 9-style errors,” but damn if someone in the production company wasn’t hoping for Oscar gold.
The problem is that not all Oscarbait movies are bad, either. I loved “The King’s Speech,” but it was pretty goddamned blatant. Likewise, I loved “The Pianist” when I rewatched it the other day. You can be Oscarbait and not Oscar-worthy, but the two are not inextricably linked in either direction.
So what is Oscarbait? Having thought about it, the usual Oscarbait traits are:
1) A Sweeping Historical Drama, or:
2) A Biopic About A Serious Historical Figure And/Or Artist, or;
3) A Story About Ordinary People Facing Serious Challenges, Like Drug Addiction or Retardation or Attention Deficit Disorder;
4) Starring and/or directed by many more than one previous Oscar nominee;
5) That is Very Serious.
Obviously, you don’t need to have all of them to qualify: “The Lovely Bones” was #4 and #5, but obviously not #1 or #2. But as I said to Monty, the Oscars have a distinct preference for dramatic, humorless tearjerkers. “Best Picture” is almost invariably defined as “Best Drama” in Oscar terms (although thankfully, the Drama definition is fluid enough to overlap with also-funny movies like “Silver Linings Playbook” and with action-tinged films like “The Departed” and “Argo.”).
Yet the fact is, there were many good movies that would never get an Oscar nomination. I think we can all agree that “Die Hard” is perhaps one of the greatest action movies ever, but can you imagine it getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture? “The Dark Knight Rises” was a tense action thriller that also happened to star Batman, but would it get nominated? Nope. “The Hangover” and “Galaxy Quest” and “Shaun of the Dead” and “21 Jump Street” were all great comedies, but do comedies get nominated?
…when was the last time a horror movie got nominated? Are we saying there have been no high-quality horror movies since “Silence of the Lambs”?
As Monty correctly points out, your best way of guaranteeing an Oscar nomination is to make a great fucking film. But nobody knows how to make those – and even if you did, you could make the greatest teenaged road trip fart comedy in history and still not glimpse the gold. So instead, studios angle their Oscary cash towards making films the Oscar people are biased towards, spending big dollars on Serious Films that are often misfires. I mean, I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman put in a brilliant performance in “Capote,” but the rest of the film kind of sucked.
It also should be noted that you do not have to win to be successful Oscarbait. A nomination in one of the Big Five will boost your box office gross considerably, and get you back in the theaters if you were released in fall and bombed, so just having the Academy acknowledge you is key. (And besides, some great Oscar performances have been robbed – hellooooo, Viola Davis – so sometimes the nomination is worthy in and of itself.)
But the point is that studios don’t know how to make great films. So instead, if they’re feeling Oscary, they greenlight the big sweepy films packed with previous winners and also-rans in an attempt to get in there. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, because often – or at least “often” in the sense of “most films fail” – you wind up with something that’s actually very awesome. Les Miserables is Oscarbait, just as Phantom of the Opera was before it, but only one really hit it out of the park.
Tl;dr: Oscarbait is a strategy, not a judgment.
As it is, I’m gonna get slammed for this, but despite the Oscar-baityness of it all, I don’t think “The Butler” is a particularly good movie. It hits a lot of emotional notes, but those notes were often not generated by the film but by the knowledge this tragedy actually happened to people. It’s what I think of as a “Your Dead Dog” movie – it doesn’t take much to make you tear up by evincing emotions of your beloved pet. But that doesn’t mean that slapping the words “I Love You Sparky” over a photo of your dog is high art. It means someone took something that’s deeply personal to you and dug it up, which is a) really effective, and b) kind of a cheap shot.
“The Butler” felt like Civil Rights 101 to me – a worthy goal, and I’m glad people are seeing it for the education, but as a film I’m not sure it holds up. I know the point is the generation gap between black families back then, but the film spent a lot of time focusing in on the guy who literally did nothing to affect the flow of history. That’s a great point, African-Americans totally had to sublimate everything to fit in back then, and I’m really glad that’s brought up… but in terms of interesting decision-making, Cecil doesn’t actually make many. And the movie knows this. Cecil’s job is to watch history from the sidelines, being almost passive as Kennedy and Truman do their thing, and when the civil rights movement calms down the film has zero issues literally fast-forwarding past fifteen years of Cecil’s life in a quick montage, because it knows Cecil is the least interesting thing in it.
The son is the active character, the one who fights, and I find myself wishing there had been more of a balance between the activist son and the surviving dad, which would have really contrasted both of their experiences more. As it is, “The Butler” was pretty good Oscar-bait, and it’ll almost certainly get nominated, and hell, it may even be Oscar-worthy. But I don’t think it’ll wear well.
But hey. I could be wrong about the quality of “The Butler.” But as a Sweeping Historical Drama Starring and/or Directed by many more than one previous Oscar Nominee, that is Very Serious, it’s definite Oscarbait. Now let’s see whether it’s the kind of film that we’re still watching thirty years from now, which is something Oscar has nothing to do with.