Video Games Are Also Things

Ah, nothing like a ridiculous science article to wake me up in the morning.

I don't even know where to start with this one. Well, for starters, they cheat. Take a look at their methodology:

"Volunteer played a bicycling game on a laptop with two straws attached to their mouths.

If cyclists from their same team – as indicated by a jersey design – passed by, participants received a slurp of their favourite juice. However, if a cyclist from the rival team passed the participant, he or she got a swig of salty tea."

Note that the primary training is done not in the video game but with flavored drinks. The article later claims that they're aware of this issue but that increasingly realistic video games offer increasingly realistic sensations in line with good and bad drinks. Okay, I guess I buy that, but the use of drinks just brings the real issue with the study into sharper relief. I'm talking about the "DUH!" issue.

When you stop to think about it, is this study much different from Pavlov's dogs? That was in the 19th Century! Haven't we learned yet that we can train people to have responses. And just in case it wasn't obvious that this applies to video games, all you need to do is ask an airplane pilot or an astronaut. We've been training them using simulations (that's a big word that means "video games") for over a decade.

This has gotten me thinking about a larger issue. How is it that, with video games more mainstream than ever, society still has this weird notion that video games are some special sort of thing? Video games, awesome as they are, are just games, more sophisticated maybe but still cut from the same cloth as Monopoly.

Games are all about decision-making. In some games, such as Candy Land, the decisions are so simple that they really only exist on a meta-level--every decision boils down to "Do I want to follow this rule or do I want to stop playing this game?"--but other games, such as Chess or Grand Theft Auto, the decisions are a lot more difficult to make. Naturally, some options are better than others in certain situations and some are better almost all the time. Games always reward certain behaviors and punish others. Video games aren't special in this respect. Sure, they're often more realistic (killing a hooker is a different sort of option than moving a bishop) but does Grand Theft Auto really encourage certain real world behavior in a manner fundamentally different from The Game of Life? I don't think so.

Also, video. It's a part of the name. Television, like games, is about decision-making. Only with television, the decisions are out of the audience's hands and instead placed in the hands of characters. Still, we see certain decisions are rewarded while others are punished. With television, the arbiter is not the rules of the game but rather the writer, who decides which choices are good and which are bad. Watch enough of a show and its writer's beliefs will inevitably rub off.

Also, THE WORLD. Seriously. Everything that happens in life is training. If you get a ticket for parking near a fire hydrant, you might think it's a fluke. But if you do it again and get another ticket, you probably won't do it again. On the other hand, you may choose not to pay your tickets, but society has spent a long time training people to pay tickets.

My point is two-fold:

1. The idea that video games can affect a person's decision-making process is not news.
2. The idea that video games are some sort of scary special monster that is different from anything older generations grew up with is flat-out wrong. They're just a lot more fun than Chutes and Ladders.

Respecting Your Audience

There's a rule in TV writing that is often broken: Don't end an act (ie. cut to a commercial break) with your main character in a life or death situation. In this day and age, it's just not a plausible cliffhanger. If a main character were going to die, you'd hear about it in ads and on blogs, so you can safely expect that the character will be fine. Obviously, shows do this all the time, but it almost always feels a little bit condescending. How dumb does the writer think the audience is?

I was thinking about this rule while working on the outline for my new pilot project. It's a sci-fi show, and I was considering ending the first act by revealing the sci-fi element. For example, if it were a vampire show (it's not), ending the first act by showing vampires for the first time. Surprise!

I hope it's clear why I think this is a writing mistake. It shows a lack of respect for the audience. They've seen the ads for the show (or, if you're an aspiring writer, they've heard what the script's about from you or whoever they got the script from) so it's not shocking that vampires show up. It's a show about vampires! The real question is, why didn't the vampires show up sooner?

When it comes to respecting its audience, there's no show better than Battlestar Galactica. (VAGUE REFERENCES TO MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!) Towards the end of last season, they killed off a main character. In interviews, the cast and crew insisted she was really dead, but the fans didn't believe it. Her name was removed from the opening credits. Everyone finally accepted that fact that holy shit, they'd actually killed off one of their biggest stars. AND THEN SHE CAME BACK IN THE FINALE. And it was great, because the people behind the show knew that everyone would expect her to come back and they went out of their way to make it convincing. The credits aren't part of the script, but they're definitely part of the show. So is the title. So are the ad campaigns, your logline, etc. If you expect that people are aware of your show, you're bound to write a better script, even if the audience isn't aware of it. After all, you'll be forced to find stronger act outs and get to the point of the show faster. If you accept the fact that people already know your show has vampires, then you are free to spend less time explaining the vampires and more time having them do all the cool things that makes the show worth watching every week.

Obviously, this is all my opinion, and I'm sure some writers (and many execs) will disagree with me. But I'll definitely be restructuring my script and you can bet the vampires will show up on page one.

(But seriously. I'm not writing a show about vampires. Although I do have this really cool idea for feature...)

THE RETURN

I am back! Sorta! This is a bit lame for a return post, but I just wanted to remind you all that I am alive and, with midterms over and the script for the first episode of my Columbia soap opera finished, I can get back to my true passion: PROCRASTINATING! BLOGGING!

I'm gonna ease back into it with a pair of unrelated links:

-An Opinion Piece on the Writer's Guild strike by Damon Lindelof, co-creator and head writer of Lost. I'm posting it for two reasons. First, I think the writer's guild deserves our support. Second, I think it's one of the best, most well-structured opinion pieces I've ever read. Read, study, take notes. You'll thank me later.

-Zakk Snyder's Watchmen Blog. So what if there's not much on it yet. There should be cool stuff soon. And there's a release date!

Culturebloggin' again

I realized I've been very bad about the cultureblogging lately, but lemme see what I remember.

TV:

Don't know if I've mentioned it but I've been watching Flight of the Conchords on HBO. It's about these two guys from New Zealand who are in a band and living in New York. They go about their lives trying to make it and mostly failing. Every now and then they break into absurd parody songs in various styles. The season starts off a bit slow, but the episodes have gotten progressively funnier. The newest one had Jake and me almost falling out of our chairs. TV-links it... trust me.

COMICS:

-The Astonishing X-men #1-18 - This is the X-men series Joss Whedon has been writing. Basically, it makes you acutely aware of the fact that Joss Whedon was born to write X-men comics. I've generally found X-men comics these days unreadable as there are too many characters and the plots are too convoluted. Whedon brings it back to only a few core X-men: Beast, Wolverine, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Shadowcat, and a character whose entrance is too great for me to ruin in this silly blog. Whedon reminds us that ultimately, X-men is about a bunch of people struggling with everything that people struggle with plus strange mutant powers that sometimes seem more like curses. I would argue that even people who don't like comics will like this one.

-52 Volume 1 - I've been saying how terrible I find a lot of DC stuff lately, but this one is great. And not just because one of the guys I work for was the editor before he left DC. It's a mystery story, with four or five mysteries going on at once, and the pacing is flawless. I can't wait for volume 2, even knowing that it'll eventually all lead to Countdown, which I can't stand.

-Batman: Year 100 - Batman + Blade Runner + 1984 = Awesome. It's totally sci-fi, but also one of the most realistic takes on Batman that I've seen. Paul Pope just nails it from the totally realistic batsuit to the "huff" speech bubbles he gives Batman after he beats up the badguys. Bonus points for making the whole thing about how Batman's real power is his myth rather than anything he actually does.

MOVIES:

Well, I just saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I liked it. None of the Harry Potter movies are really completely self-sufficient, but I thought the acting was fantastic and it was directed with a certain artistry. The plot was streamlined not just to get all the key plot points in but with an eye toward thematic cohesion, and that counts for something in my book.

One thing I thought was interesting is the way they choose to portray wand combat. It's not a very easy thing to make visually stimulating, so the big battle scene at the end alternates between all sorts of influences. One moment Sirius and Harry are fighting Deatheaters and the camera moves back for a wide shot; it's suddenly a fencing battle with the characters moving like they're thrusting and parrying. Next thing you know Voldemort and Dumbledore are facing off in a room full of columns, which are chipped by stray blasts just like those columns from the Matrix. The wands have become machine guns. It seems a little bit all over the place, but I think it works. Magic should be a mishmash of all different sorts of combat, so the scene feels right, at least in my opinion.

Culture Blogging again

Um, this is bad news. I'm starting to lose track of the culture I'm ingesting. Wow, that sounds really snobby when I actually put it into words that way. But it's easier than listing everything that I'm looking at. I mean, it just started as "I'm gonna make a list of all the books I read for a year. And also the movies I see. And also the comics I read. And I guess I might as well throw in concerts too. And TV shows... is that even reasonable?" And, well, here we are. Let's see what I can remember.

MOVIES:

I finally saw one! Woo!
-Ocean's Thirteen. While not at all life-changing, this was exactly what I wanted it to be. Fun, funny, pretty.. but I'm sure you know all that. What I'd like to mention is the music. David Holmes has been providing music for the Ocean's movies since the first one--wait, lemme check and make sure he did this one too... okay, he did. So yeah, I think he's one of the poster children for composers that really add a lot to movies without anyone knowing. I bought a copy of the Ocean's Twelve soundtrack and still listen to it a lot. His music is a really brilliant combination of effortless cool and complicated rhythms. He blends jazz and electronic into a music that feels simultaneously retro and futuristic. My point is, he really captures the feel of the films. I think a more traditional score would really ruin the whole thing.
Conclusion: If you haven't seen the movie or are planning on seeing it again, pay a little attention to the music. Trust me, it's worth.

COMICS:

Wow, let me see what I can remember...
-Ed Brubaker's complete run of Captain America up to and past the infamous death issue. It's really fantastic. Brubaker eschews the superhero feel for something a bit grittier, but not in a Punisher sort of way. Brubaker reimagines the Captain America comic as more akin to a supr-hero version of 24. It's less "There's a robot rampaging through Manhattan!" and more "A mysterious bad guy has gotten a hold of the Cosmic Cube. We have to get it back before he levels Manhattan!" There are twists within twists, super cliffhangers, and they manage to break one of the cardinal rules of the Marvel Universe without really offending any of the die-hard fans. Not that it means much to most of my readers, presumably, but that's a pretty big deal. Good stuff.

-The New Avengers. There's a reason Brian Michael Bendis is the most famous comic book writer who isn't Joss Whedon or Stephen King: His dialogue and characterization is just brilliant. His New Avengers really revitalizes the whole idea of the Avengers. The team, which some people have seen as absurd (What? Luke Cage?), works so much better than you'd expect it to and the interactions between the teammates really drive the series. Plus, he writes perfect Spider-man dialogue. They just took a radical direction, in which any of the heroes could be a shape-shifting alien spy. It's like The Thing only with super-heroes!
(Full Disclosure: I <3 The Thing, as a concept even more than the actual movie, even though the movie is excellent. In high school I really wanted to play a full-immersion game based on The Thing where people just carried on with their normal lives. You know... I have a lot of time on my hands today so I think I'll post about it later.)

-Thor: Blood Oath. This was cool, don't have much to say though.

-The Thing: Idol of Millions. Ditto.

-Iron Man: Hypervelocity. Get this: Iron Man builds a new suit capable of uploading his personality in case he should die. He promptly gets attacked and winds up in a coma. The newly sentient Iron Man suit freaks out, goes on the run, and starts upgrading itself to process things at computer speed rather than human speed, while simultaneously fighting off an entire SHIELD helicarrier and a sexy virus that's implanted herself in his consciousness. Its six issues are absolutely crazy, fast-paced (thus the title), and bizarre. Cyberpunk is most certainly not dead.

-Bullet Points. In an alternate universe, an assassin kills the scientist behind Captain America's super-serum a day earlier, as well as his body guard, a certain Ben Parker. This results in a totally backwards Marvel Universe in which Steve Rogers is Iron Man, Reed Richards is the grizzled head of SHIELD, and Peter Parker turns into the Hulk and saves the world from Galactus through sheer anger (and of course, his love of Aunt May). Pretty cool stuff, and I really enjoyed the art by Tommy Lee Edwards (I say that like I know who he is, other than that he did the art to Bullet Points).

Um, I think that might be it, besides random new issues of series I've been following and stuff. I'll add anything else I can think of.

(real) BOOKS:

I finally finished The Children of Hurin, the new Tolkien book. It definitely isn't as good The Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, but it has a elegant simplicity to it. That's not to say it isn't simple, but it's not epic and complex in the same way that Lord of the Rings is. It's more character-centric. I do think it would make an excellent movie though. Hmm, now who would play Turin?

TV:

-Last week's episode of Entourage was simply amazing. That's all.

Okay, that's it for now. I didn't do music, cause I'm going to do a seperate Bonnaroo post... well, with any luck I'll do a Bonnaroo post, especially since the New York Times did a blog about it that I Found thoroughly underwhelming despite the nice pictures of the bands that are far better than most of mine.

Adieu for now!

Weekend Update

It's hard to keep a steady blog when you've got a roughly 60 hour work-week, but I'm gonna try. So I present you with two random thoughts:

-If I ever make a Silver Surfer movie, I'd like to have the band M83 do the music.

-The Fuse channel has a show called "Pants Off Dance Off", which is exactly what you'd think it is... and no, that link is not exactly safe for work. This is why flipping through digital cable's channels at 1:00am is kind of dangerous.

And continuing with my culture blog, I'm back home and have started work at Marvel, which means lots of movies and comics.

TV:
Just the newest Entourage and Heroes. Need to catch up on Scrubs.

MOVIES:
-The Descent (Which still freaks me out, even if its scares were occasionally a bit cheap.)
-Brick (which I found somewhat overrated and kind of pretentious.)
-Executive Decision (which still kicks just as much ass as it did when I was 12.)

COMICS (I know these titles won't mean anything to most people besides Max, but this is partially for me):
-Everything related to Marvel's recent Civil War story arc and what's happened since then.
-The House of M.
-Thor: The Ballad of Beta Ray Bill.
-Marvels (Which I'd actually recommend even to non-comic book fans because the art is beautiful and the story is decidedly non-standard super-hero stuff.)
-Spider-Woman: The Origin.
-Doctor Strange: The Oath.
I'm sure they're more but I can't really remember right now. I read a lot of comics at work, y'know.

BOOKS:
Still just trudging though The Children of Húrin.

Well, that's all for now.

Well, There's Always Next Year...

I haven't mentioned this before, which is ironic since I got involved solely because I thought it would make for a good blog entry, but I spent a bunch of time this past school year working on the infamous CTV Soap Opera, The Gates. The first episode was pretty terrible, even with my glorious acting as the sleazy frat boy.

We submitted a shortened version of the second episode to the SoapU contest that SoapNet (the Soap Opera channel owned by ABC) was running. I can tell you objectively that it was better than the first, because we made it to the finals in the contest. We found ourselves shooting a five minute promo for a new show about celebrities and pop culture called The Insiders. I got on board again, mainly to do music, but ended up doing a bit of acting and some oscar-winning boom mic holding.

Anyway, turns out we didn't win, but I still think it's pretty damn impressive. I wrote most of the music without even seeing the scenes I was writing for (or with less than a day left before the final copy was due) so I think that turned out alright and my acting was, well, I'll let you judge for yourself. You can see our promo here or you can watch the goofy 2 minute documentary they made about us. Also take a look at the other entries if you've got some time; I actually think the one that came out on top was really well done.