All the games I finished this year
All thirty! Twenty-nine! A really good year for indie narrative games, gotta say. Roadwarden in particular has me churning about making a text RPG of my own in Ren’py ...
Year End Wrap-ups
Why not. Here’s the first list. Games I played a lot of, but absolutely will not finish in the next week. Because they’re huge games.
Old city builders
doing the thing where I’m playing some old games for a little bit to see how usable their UIs are. Got into some of the classic city builders. I will be playing more Emperor even if it likes to put its tutorials in multi-page pop-ups. I probably won’t be playing more Pharaoh because every time I move the mouse, the map jumps to one corner or the other. Emperor feels very much like a game that’s superseded it (same company and all).
I did enjoy that your residential buildings cannot level up if they are too close to fire stations, bazaars, granaries, essentially any functional building, OR a house of lower quality. The fastest way to get stalling residentials leveled up is to run about bulldozing crude huts and moving anything unsightly, like, apparently, fire stations. Something about people objecting this much to seeing a crude hut from their sturdy hut is kinda sadly amusing to me.
Monster Hunter!!
Been messing around with Rise and started messing around again with World. I am no Monster Hunter expert. I played, like, 30 hours of Generations Ultimate and now like 40 hours of Rise. Novice numbers!! But enough hours to know World feels very different. Honestly, I don’t like a lot of those differences. The village feels too large; it’s a chore to explore. Turning in research and subquests is on one floor, your weaponry and armor on a different, and your canteen on yet another. I can’t even remember where the palicos hang, but that’s my fault on resuming an old game. I much prefer the classic layout of quests - “village” or solo here, and “hub” or multiplayer (but in my case, still solo) here. I don’t like having to “post” quests and set the participants down to one when I’m just hanging. But when I actually get out in the field, although I miss all the quality of life bits from Rise, the differences aren’t just irritating. The world is gorgeous. I don’t even mind that I have no idea where the creatures I’m hunting are. I love using vines to climb and swing. When a Great Jagras comes out of the undergrowth, it feels spectacular and sudden. There’s some wonder involved created by the environment, not just the monster design, and that is missing in Rise. The emergence! The long slow hunt. Rise still feels like the Monster Hunter game I’ll grab for a quick run at a monster, but the distinctness of World means it doesn’t just feel like an older, clumsier iteration
WHELP, I guess I’m back then
Wanted to get back into slightly less half-assed reviewing anyway.
At the moment, I have a steam curator page at https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31516831/, but the character limit is quite strict, my dudes.
Okay.
Putting aside whether or not James Gunn is deserving or not, or even putting aside the fascinating person who provoked the resurgence of this old tweet controversy, I think we need to start asking ourselves some hard questions.
1. What speech should you be fired for?
2. What speech should prevent you from being hired, and for what jobs?
3. Counting that the Internet preserves everything, is there a statute of limitations on how long a bit of speech will affect you? (No.)
4. What atonement is sufficient to cancel out ill-advised speech? It is not illegal to make a controversial tweet, but it can have profound ramifications (corporations often dislike controversy). What should be expected of a person before society can forgive a mistake? I know often the answer is “Never.” And often it is “immediately”. The difference between the two can be arbitrary.
5. Lastly, a warning. James Gunn will absolutely be fine. But a fireable tweet doesn’t have to be something in unusually bad taste. It can be a harsh reaction. See the ArenaNet firings. You can be fired for, say, being a loud activist. Or for being photographed wearing a work shirt at a party with alcohol. Or, say, for initially expressing bias against white people in agricultural work and have only that part of the video go viral (somehow, the part where you talk about overcoming that bias gets cut). We have no protections. We are exposed and this is scary. This has been scary. Remember that the tools that can take down figures you dislike can and are being used against people you do like.
So where do we go from here?
criticism
What are movies for? What is art for?
I been following Film Crit Hulk for a long old time and I enjoy his columns, but I’m feeling an increasing gulf w/him as far as what art is for.
Dude thinks, and a lot of folk think, that art needs to be essentially instructive. That you must walk away from a movie in some way enriched. That the story logic/character logic must be the kind of well-crafted where you can point out an arc and point out motivations and map a point of change. Classic stuff, for sure, and we’ve been having this argument forever.
I got no beef with fine classic storytelling, but I do have a beef with a few paragraphs in this article: http://observer.com/2018/05/the-two-crucial-filmmaking-elements-causing-all-your-movie-feuds/
Movies of 2017
Alien: Covenant - For this fine, vicious sci-fi slasher film to work, you have to enjoy the journey of David the android and his goals of bloody perfection, ‘cause the humans aren’t written for empathy. I found it mostly a slog.
Baby Driver - A toe-tapping musical heist written to a beat. Terrific fun.
Beauty and the Beast - I found the CGI ugly and the songs thin, but Le Fou’s storyline was a sweet addition.
Blade Runner 2049 - Mesmerizingly beautiful.
Coco - There you are, Pixar. A soft-hearted weeper with good songs and lovely design.
The Dark Tower - How did you get Idris Elba as the gunslinger, and then foreground some kid as protagonist? Like King’s epic got chopped up and embedded in a bad knockoff of Neverending Story.
Dunkirk - A tense snapshot of a terrifying retreat. Does the job of trapping the audience, then letting them go.
Get Out - Social horror. For a couple of hours, you’re ‘that black guy’, a suburban alien among alien suburbanites. That is, unless you’re already that black guy.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 - Shaggier and sadder than the first, uneven, but with some stunning sequences and some very good jokes.
Happy Death Day - The most adorable slasher movie. If you can repeat the day over and over again, you only really need one victim!
Remember what you can control.
You cannot ensure victory, but you can choose not to surrender. You can choose not to cede the field.
I was thinking of Anita Sarkeesian today. I’ve had my criticisms of her work - this and that strikes me as a little gender essentialist, this and that may be reducing the complexity of what’s under critique. But I have to admire her immensely because she keeps going and keeps producing under immense scrutiny and torrents of abuse. And while one can quibble about the details, her thesis was proven hugely correct by the very reaction to it.
And, see, I’ve also been thinking about Dragon’s Lair. You come to it as an adult (and, uh, as a Don Bluth fan) and the princess is a harmless bit of cheesecake, but this was a game played by kids, kids who fervently wanted that princess, who were playing for that princess. Did Bluth mean any harm? Nah. Should we regulate cheesecake (or beefcake)? Nah. The trouble is when everything, just about everything, is screaming the same stuff at you. When you look on every game box (or even most game boxes) and it’s all selling the same kind of fantasies in triplicate, and you eat it and you drink it and in sufficient quantities, it turns into poison.
The insidious thing is you may not even know you’ve been poisoned.
Different stories are worth fighting for, tooth and nail and scream, if only to dilute what’s in the water, what’s in the air. There’s nothing wrong with a fine, exposed id - I love Devilman, but it’s also too strained and strange to fit one old, iterated fantasy, one old certainty that you are owed and you will own. We need to see each other clearly. And that takes a world of stories. A wild world of stories.
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: fardest from him is best Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then he Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
“Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page.”
—Joseph Rios, in “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2018), read the complete profile at pw.org!
Of the Devil’s Party - Belladonna of Sadness
La la! Every attempt at using social media is furtive and quickly aborted. But like a new year’s resolution disconnected from any particular date, one shivers to increase this or that ledger, only to as swiftly fall off. it’s like exercising, but for internet exposure.
Even so, some scattered media highlights from the last year+.
- Sunless Sea, while best played with cheats, has an especially luminous and interesting ending that requires burning everything within and without you. I imagine it’s similar to the Eater of Names storyline in Fallen London, which I covet but will never have the grinding patience for. (I in fact wholly abandoned Fallen London)
- Your Name is an awfully lovely body-swap romance.
- The Red Strings Club is delicate and sad and made me think hard about free will. So did a couple of books by Sapolsky. I’m glad I read Le Guin’s last book of essays this year.
- Devilman is grungy, vicious, wicked, and sad, but only ten episodes, which mitigates the cruelty to a degree. I found myself a bit obsessed with it. One day, I will be able to quite pinpoint what horrific violence makes me nope and which horrific violence sort of works for me metaphorically. But I wouldn’t want to live there.
- Doki Doki Literature Club is also vicious and fascinating. This seems to have been the year of vicious and fascinating.
- I thought The Last Jedi was pretty fantastic and maybe the closest thing I’m gonna get to a Star Wars tone poem.
- Also enjoyed (deep breath) Thor Ragnarok, Dunkirk, Coco, Get Out, The Shape of Water, Logan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and the Lego Batman Movie.
- Got into Robin Hobb’s big series, which may take me another six months, but is weirdly compulsive.
- Other obsessions: petrification, dogs and dog-likes, animal intelligence, kill six billion demons (webcomic), pelgrane press tabletop campaigns (just for the reading), exalted, the good place
