When you write fiction you form models of your characters in your head. Even if these characters are based on real people, you create an abstraction, a model that describes how you understand that person to function. You then run simulations on it, ask it questions: how would Fred react if asked about his parents? If Jane slapped him, how would he react?

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There is this attitude in film and television, completely antithetical to the general position of the blogosphere, that you do not talk about your ideas. A great deal of this is the fear of others stealing them. It’s easy to say that the important thing – and the hard part – is execution, but unfortunately in film and other industries with more money than ideas this is not the case. Someone can take your idea, pay people to execute it, and even if the end result is shoddy, prevent you from executing YOUR vision of it. “Oh, the film about the leper fashion show?” the financier will say as he thumbs his blackberry, “we already did that. It bombed.”

This partially explains how projects that are important to me, and take some substantial portion of my time, find no representation on this blog.

I will attempt to remedy this shortly.

Twilight of the American Newspaper

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

I don’t know if that’s true – I personally don’t feel less connected to Toronto now – it’s one of many neighbourhoods I live in. Then again, I read the newspaper every day in some form or another.

I wanted very much to like this book. I wanted to agree with everything in it. The general thesis is that the corporation’s influence has been so great that our entire society, our culture, our minds are now corporatized – we think like corporations without realizing there are other ways. The hook is almost irresistible, too: Rushkoff was robbed outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and when he posted about it on a neighbourhood mailing list, people wanted him to shut up about it lest he bring their property values down.

The book has many fascinating sections, especially the parts about the origins of corporations, the origin of branding (with Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, although some internetting has me questioning that passage), post-WWII home ownership and racism, and the bias inherent in central currency, to name a few. Unfortunately, all of these are awash in a sea of stream-of-consciousness ranting that makes it hard to discern the overall point at any given time. Certain ideas that need more room to kick their legs,like the bias of currency, simply drown.

Most disappointingly, Rushkoff reserves only a few pages at the end for suggestions of how to counteract corporatism. There’s only one real idea, about establishing local currencies, but as the problem with central currencies was so poorly argued earlier, it fails to impress. Likewise, it’s hard to tell whether his theory of corporatism is at all sound, since Rushkoff’s ranting distracts him from the legwork required to establish the theory’s subcomponents.

I bought my iPhone almost a year ago, shortly after it first became available in Canada. At first, ‘available’ was an exaggeration. I didn’t pre-order because at first I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to whether I could get an iPhone; I have a flat rate, legacy Fido plan called City Fido that Rogers hates, and at first it appeared I couldn’t have both City Fido and the iPhone. After the confusion passed, I was able to get the thing, but by then they were few and far between. Those of us who wanted them were calling random stores, getting on waiting lists, wandering around obscure malls. A friend at work got lucky in the basement mall of an office tower, but no joy for me. Eventually I did the boring thing and ordered over the phone. I got my phone some time in August.

The thrill of the brand new iPhone lasted quite a while. A smartphone virgin friend of mine just got an Android phone and emailed me to say “I feel like James Bond”. John Gruber called it “our flying car”. You can suddenly do things you couldn’t do before. Some of these are old things in a new context, like surfing the web on the streetcar, and some are simply radically improved old things, like texting without needing T9 input. But the most interesting things are things you have never done – following your moving location dot on a map, which I still find myself doing whenever I’m in a cab. Using Shazam to get the phone to identify songs. Google Voice Search. That shit blew people’s minds, mine included.

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Couple things. One was a discussion about GPS automated direction-giving, in-car and, in my case, on-phone. We talked about how everyone pretty much agree that GPS will get you there, it will just send you there in weird ways. It’s worth double-checking the directions, in other words. However, we concluded that in 10 years, it might be a different story. The ability to navigate will have become an obsolete skill.

The other thing was hearing on This Week in Photography that photographers are feeling pressure from computer generated images. That is to say, product shots that used to be done by whole teams of humans are now being made in CGI. Presumably the next step will be for human model shoots to be replaced as well – think of the poor unemployed models!

It’s tempting to argue that some areas will never be taken over by the machines. For example, we’ll always need photography for the news, right? Well, I saw a CGI re-enactment on US news recently, in a story about the arrest of the suspects in the recent domestic terror incident. It was horribly done (and lampooned on the Daily Show), but nonetheless it was there – the prospect of news without the footage.

Everything seems normal, but in the background that exponential evolution keeps on tickin’.

Sometimes I wonder if life isn’t procedurally generated.

Konami cancels Six Days in Fallujah video game. “Despite the active involvement of dozens of Marines in creating the game, critics said that Konami was capitalizing on a war whose wounds were still fresh.” This is a big shame. People still see video games through the lens of escapist-exploitative-money-making, and not as a medium with a lot of potential to teach about the real world. I still remember playing Balance of Power) as a kid.

We need more documentary games!

“We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

- Frank Sobotka, The Wire

- from Detroit vacant house panorama

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

- John Maynard Keynes

There were a couple news pieces about Detroit and the $100 home, following the Toby Barlow piece in the Times. Here’s one from ABC, and one from CNN.

Short version: artists are moving into Detroit, attracted by the low prices on vacant and gutted houses ($100-$3,000). These are houses in Hamtramck, which is still partially inhabited; it neighbours Highland Park, which is where Gran Torino was set. There are neighbourhoods in Detroit that are much, much worse.

I’m no expert, but the Anderson Cooper piece especially feels naive. Of course Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope will one-sidedly promote the opportunities in their neighbourhood. But at least ABC draws out the arson threat they had received. Remember that Detroit police can take 24 hours to respond to a homicide call, and realize you would have to gun up pretty hard to defend your nice new pile of wreckage. That said, a $14/month mortgage sounds pretty good right now. (via detroit unreal estate agency)

Two things recently. #1 was EndWar, a console real-time strategy game by Ubisoft that allowed for voice control of your units. It worked near-perfectly, and made a hell of a lot of sense. There have always been issues getting RTSes working on consoles because they are complicated PC games that are mouse-and-keyboard centered, and they tend not to work well on console controllers. EndWar just routed the fuck around that. After all, RTSes are games about barking orders at soldiers, and a mouse is a pretty arbitrary substitute for actual barking.

The second thing is the Google Mobile app on the iPhone. Despite it being developed by Quicksilver master Alcor, the first version wasn’t all that thrilling. The next major revision added voice search – hold the phone up to your ear, wait for the beep, and speak. However, I put it aside after a few failed queries. I’ve tried it again, though, and I think they’ve improved things on the server side because it actually works. It even managed to get “CRTC” right, which surprised me. Like the Shazam audio recognition app, it’s one of those head-turner iPhone features, but unlike Shazam, I actually use it all the time.

Both of these things are examples of using voice instead of keyboards in contexts where a keyboard is pretty sucky. No one wants to have a keyboard lying on their lap when they’re sitting on the couch, and similarly why mash tiny fake buttons on your iPhone screen when you can use your face to say things. Obviously they are also hugely dependent on audio pattern recognition algorithms and AI having advanced to a sufficient state. But what they signal is that they have indeed advanced, and we can now talk to our computers, and more often than not, they will actually understand.

On the other side, computers have gotten better at talking to us. Take the new Shuffle, released yesterday, which will tell you the song you’re listening to. Or, the Kindle 2, which will read your book to you. Sure, text-to-speech has been around a while; ask any Mac owner. But the new voice in Leopard beats the hell out of all the old ones, and judging by how computer technology has been progressing, I’d wager the voices will only get better.

I’m convinced that this means big things. If something can easily be turned into text from voice, that means that it can easily be searched. The new Google Voice will allow transcription and then tagging and searching of voicemails. Now imagine recording everything you say, and everything anyone says to you, and being able to search it. It’s not so far off – borderline achievable today with an iPhone, a 3G connection and something like Jott (unfortunately, the way-cool Jott has gone pay-only).

I can’t help but think about the storytelling potential for such technology, namely games. It’s not just bossing units around. Imagine no more dialogue trees and menus and simply engaging in natural language coversations with AI characters. It wouldn’t just be for RPGs; suddenly a game could exist where the central ‘gameplay’ is just conversation. Conversation is obviously central to human life and is something film, TV, novels, every other sequential art form can render in a manner befitting its medium, which is not true of games right now.

Finally, the shift is ultimately about the disembodiment of computers, paralleling the rise of cloud computing. Sure, we interact with plenty of disembodied computers already, like when we get up in the internets. But we do that through our desktops and laptops. As our computers get smaller – phones, pens, etc. and more ubiquitous, it’s increasingly archaic to interact with them only through screens and keyboards. They will become magic ghost butlers, like HAL (except hopefully less killy).

Next: a smell-based operating system.

Hell yeah

We already build incredible, vivid places, but feel the compulsion to pave over them with our attempts at compulsory pre-authored story structures. In embracing the immersion model of meaning, one’s approach would shift away from building games around a core of Hollywood-style narrative, and toward building unique, convincing, open, integrally full gameworlds, populated by intriguing people to meet and things to do, and providing the player with tools of meaningful self-expression within that context that he might return changed by his experiences.

In my view, this is not to say that narrative does not exist – far from it. Narrative would be tied to places and people and dispersed about a map. It is also far from an abdication of authorial control – it’s less controlled, but the author still creates the architecture that the player explores.

“Meaningful displacement” is another excellent turn of phrase.

I’ve been struggling with Fable 2 – struggling with a dying Xbox and some frustrating bugs – but enjoying it greatly. I was originally going to compare it to Fallout 3, but it seems somewhat unfair. Suffice it to say that even as someone who vastly preferred Oblivion to Fable 1, I feel Fallout 3 – as the belle of the 4th quarter Western RPG ball, earning review 9s and positions on “Best of the Year” lists – is tremendously overrated, and poor Fable 2 is fabulously under-.

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Via the funk comes a link that led to some interesting shit – this thread on Ask MeFi, in which the existence of houses for sale for the low four figures in Detroit and elsewhere, and the merits of purchasing same, are discussed. Up here in Canada the average house price is $300,000, so this was a jaw-dropper. Various points against such properties are discussed in the thread, but none says it as effectively as the keen eye of the lonely satellite:

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These properties are in abandoned neighbourhoods, where most of the houses have been razed by the city, and those that remain have been stripped of their guts by scavengers. Your $3,000 buys a plot of land in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This related thread on BoingBoing brings up a nugget of hope, which is “this house in an apparently decent, still-peopled area of Detroit”: – a five bedroom mansion for $57,900. That’s not to say it will actually gain value, which is an assumption we Canadians are used to making about pretty much all property. But it did spur a decent daydream, in which I purchase four mansions for the price of one tiny condo in Toronto.

If you really want to understand what’s going on in Detroit, you have to read this article from Harpers. Fortunately or un-, where Detroit has gone, may other North American cities will go, as we wade into the bleak seas of the post-industrial, post-car economy (post-economy?). The article ends optimistically, with farms sprouting from the slums. You could imagine that in a possible future, where the 50s flight of white people to the suburbs has been eclipsed by the flight of all people to the internet, and one’s physical place of work and residence has been rendered insignificant, these rubbly fields could again see houses built. Why pay big money downtown when you can do that work from a dirt-cheap dirt field in Detroit. But in the meantime, there are better things for the thousandaire to spend their money on.

I’m struggling to understand why I’ve replunged into Etrian Odyssey 2, the roguelike-ish DS game from Atlus that I dismissed as “too grindy and random-monstery for me” the last time around.

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I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how one medium is going to influence another. Right now, there are so many media spilling into the same pot that it’s hard to imagine how the stew will taste. But in this AV Club year-in-movies retrospective, Tasha Robinson makes an apt observation:

To me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme iconoclast, who in this industry doesn’t?—and more about people filtering the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way Scorsese’s cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger’s cavorting on their phones. He’s making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic, polished production—and they’re making their low-fi versions in the middle of it. Or looked at another way, they’re in the front row at a Stones concert… and they’re watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than living it.

That attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008 movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey escapist fare, I’m suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope it continues.

One of many interesting ideas here is that with so many cameras out there capturing footage, there’s a potential for a new kind of cinema that is both theatrical and collectivist. Imagine a room full of people at an event; you stage something going on in the room, and count on the people there to record it for you. You then sort through the footage from the event and assemble it. Or, you could post all the collective footage for anyone to assemble their own edit. It’s the sort of production that would have been completely inconceivable 15 – 20 years ago.

It’s also the sort of production perpetrated by none other than The Beastie Boys, with their awesomely titled Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That in 2006, the year Google bought YouTube, and conceived well before YouTube opened for business.

I don’t know the moral of this story – it’s ongoing, as they say. Perhaps it’s that the Beasties are awesome.

I’m torn between two commitments this month: National Novel Writing Month and Fallout 3. I thought it would be a bigger problem than it is. I love getting lost in immersive worlds, so I imagined Fallout would swallow me whole, sabotaging my attempt to force myself to write more through gimmicky contests. However, I’ve realized that whatever electro-chemical cocktail that makes me like exporing worlds is the same formula that makes me like writing. When I’m writing, I’m creating a world, with only myself to blame if it gets boring.

The challenges of writing come from the vagueness of it all. You lay out a huge goal, yet there are many smaller steps that are unclear. Also, there is no one to tell you what to do next, or to even to do anything at all. It makes you wish you just had to chop wood all day. That’s the great thing about NaNoWriMo: it makes writing more like chopping wood. You need to hit 1667 words per day, and if you don’t, you didn’t do your job. No matter if the words suck, just keep blasting away.

So if you even see me up in this robot, I’m totally procrastinating and you shouldn’t encourage me. Bad readers! Look away!

Only a Game examines the psychology of curiosity as it applies to games. “Curiosity is the motivation to learn, independent of any goal-seeking or fantasy-fulfillment.” We were discussing related ideas on the last sounds the desire to explore is what leads me to play more often than not.

In the article Are all video games doomed to irrelevance in the Globe, Chad Saphieha argues that, well, title of article because unlike films and novels which are valued for their stories and characters, videogames are valued for “elements that are constantly evolving within the medium, such as game design, play mechanics, and, to a lesser degree, graphics”:

In order to be considered timeless, a work of art must necessarily affect its audience in a similar way and to a similar degree, regardless of when it happens to be viewed. Super Mario Bros. fails this test because those who play it for the first time today have experienced more modern games that significantly expand upon and outdo Nintendo’s archetypal platformer. Everything Super Mario Bros. does well—its run-and-jump action, its hidden levels, its rewarding coin collection system—has since been improved upon by countless other games. We rightfully acknowledge and respect that it served as inspiration for later games, but we also understand that many of these games have inarguably surpassed their original muse.

On the other hand, “If The Godfather had debuted in 2008 rather than 1972, it almost certainly would have received reviews that were just as rave as those it earned 35 years ago. Ditto for a classic novel like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Let’s imagine the Godfather comes out right now – after Goodfellas, after The Sopranos, hell, after Analyze This. After countless mob stories of every variety, let alone after the aesthetics of music videos and commercials have had massive influences on the style and pace of film storytelling. It would be shrugged off as a well-acted but nonetheless stodgily-paced and derivative mob drama.

I should know. I recently lent my Godfather box set to a friend who had never actually seen the films. He was less than impressed, but understood a key point: the sheer influence the film has had on subsequent films lessens its impact. I’ve felt similarly watching Breathless and Rashomon: the feats of technique and storytelling that made them remarkable upon release – and indeed won their entry into the canon – now seem commonplace by virtue of widespread imitation.

This is perfectly natural. Appreciating these past artworks requires not only a sort of aesthetic suspension of disbelief but also a certain knowledge of the work’s history and context. Really, there is no ‘timelessness’ in art; every work has its time and place. A work may speak beyond its own, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. This is true of videogames just as it is of any other art form. Videogames may change more rapidly than other forms, but hey, what doesn’t these days? And really, despite the advances in graphics, AI and online play and suchlike, we’re still clearing levels and beating bosses like we were in the 80s.

People do still play Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. The classics live on in emulation and on Live Arcade and the Virtual Console and even in their original physical incarnation. (To say nothing of the many current releases, including many art games, making use of “dated” technology like 2D graphics.) Our classics – as young as they are yet – are still alive and well, thank you very much.

So this site just started a up a while ago and already has a bunch of reengineered classic games up and running.

From the creators:
By “sabotaging” classic hits weekly, Retro Sabotage aims to entertain gamers but also to shed a different light on commonly accepted gaming patterns.

I have to say the results so far are quite satisfying!

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Now I know why we get beat on Live so often when we play Halo 3 – there are actual soldiers playing that shit. It’s an interesting article, not really because it talks about soldiers playing games, which we know they do, but because it places it in the therapy context. It’s really only one quote: “video games are a way of calibrating and managing the overwhelming pulses of stress that comes with combat zone living.” Normally that sort of statement gets lost in the noise of the videogames-and-violence debate, but that obviously doesn’t apply to soldiers – or maybe if they didn’t play so many violent games, we wouldn’t have war in Iraq? Yeah.

So are games good for regular people? Do we calibrate and manage our stress by playing them? I think so. Shooters like Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4 are indeed stressful situations, requiring situational awareness, lightning-quick perception, and tranquility in the face of multiple stressors, not just motor skills. They’re almost training for multitasking. And then there’s the quick communication and group coordination required to advance in their multiplayer modes.

What starts as a discussion of why wrock (wizard rock aka Harry Potter bands) has more of a community than nerdcore hiphop winds up as a distinction between culture and community, and how some geeks may want the former without the latter. It’s a long and sinewy thread woven between several sites, so I’ll just point you to Geek Studies for a good summary, all the relevant links, and some interesting points.

Here’s an account of Project Horseshoe, where “the unicorns of the game development profession” got together for a weekend to discuss the problem of story in games. There’s a lot of good shit in here, including consideration of things outside the game industry such as ARGs, Disneyland, social networks and even the ol’ Stanford Prison Experiment. The thesis:

We believe that game designers are in the business of experience creation rather than that of storytelling. The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems.

Can’t you see it now? Apple, the purveyors of the Reality Distortion Field, starting their own Alternate Reality Game? Clues are seeded early on, and truth is revealed at a Macworld keynote. It would totally work, wouldn’t it?

Well, people are playing it already, as we do every year in the lead up to the Stevenote (which is tomorrow). But wouldn’t it benefit Apple to actually design that experience, instead of leaving it up to the players? Or maybe they do … (cue creepy music)

I was thinking about which games I have played the most of this year, and number one has to be a tie between Oblivion and my hockey pool.

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There’s an interesting but flawed Gamasutra article here called Persuasive Games: Video Game Zen. Interesting because it examines some games that emphasize “leaning back” or relaxed play, as opposed to the usual “leaning forward” experience we associate with twitch gaming. Flawed because it cannot distinguish between relaxation and meditation, and criticizes some games according to standards they were not aiming for. It also mischaracterizes fl0w which was a flash game before coming to the PS3. Be sure to read the comments – the ones from Thomas and Celia are illuminating.

The article hits on a couple things that ring true, though. One is Solitaire. I agree it’s relaxing, or rather non-twitch, and I think that’s because it’s turn-based and not real time. One can play the game at one’s own pace, taking however long one needs to make moves. I like many a turn-based game, and it’s for this reason. What’s the rush? Life does present many a situation in which one’s quick reactions are of the essence. However, just as often it presents opportunities for reflection, where one should not make a move until one has thought it through. The former experience is well simulated by games, the latter should be moreso.

The other shoutout I could relate to was the practise of wandering in Grand Theft Auto and other open-ended games. Oh to unlock a new area in San Andreas and simply drive through it, listening to music, checking out the sights. I’d agree that a good roamabout is primo relaxation time, both in games and in life.

Gamasutra has an excellent interview with Yoshiaki Koizumi. It touches on the development of various Mario and Zelda games, and even includes consideration of motion sickness. He’s clearly a very thoughtful designer.

Is this the “Golden Age of Gaming”? Discuss. We did, with reference to Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Zelda, GTA III, Oblivion and our usual share of griping about games media. Cast: Mags, Nadine, D.

Angry Robot Sounds 7 (17MB mp3, 37mins)

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Go over here and grab a free PDF copy of Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games, “a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.” Cause hey, free book!

Are first person games bound for extinction?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Halo fan, and a Marathon fan, and a Bioshock fan, hell, even a Doom fan. I like Oblivion, and Deus Ex was pretty rad too.

And I’m writing this in the first person. (He writes something like this in the third person, he sounds like a serial killer.)

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Nadine was fired from the show and replaced by the much more Harvest Moon-friendly Mark. Kidding, Nadine will be back next time. In a perfect world, it will be all three of us!

Anyway, Mark and I do go on, about: first person shooters (incl. Halo of course), post-Oblivion RPGs, “you got your narrative chocolate in my nonlinear sandbox experience”, the lack of a good giant robot game, and retired pipefitters playing Wii games. And yes, Mark defends Harvest Moon’s honour.

Angry Robot Sounds 6 (16MB mp3, 49mins)

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At Lost Garden, an idea for a combination music creation / strategy game, based on a dream.

I love ideas like this. I like any music game, especially ones that don’t involve mindless “click when I tell you” gameplay, and I love games that combine genres, a la Puzzle Quest. There is beauty in the combination of things.

So, when Bioshock came out everyone went gaga happy crazy yay and I’m so there, like, seriously it’s one of the best times ever on the 360. Then came the “Hey wait…I’ve played this before…” from the older generation of gamers that played a game called System Shock II a few years ago. That lovely and witty Brit Yahtzee really hammered it home in last Wednesday’s Zero Punctuation over at The Escapist. It brought up a point that I think needs to be addressed: Game designers repeating the past – is it so wrong? I for one don’t think so at all. The best example of going back to fix things you’d rather have done better in the first place is what I like to call the Lucasing Process.

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After Angry Robot Sounds #2 I gave more thought to the things I had said about young gamers and gaming history. I began to look at my own view of gamers and how I judged them and myself into hardcore vs. casual, young vs. old and how that negatively affects how I view gamers in general. I’ve attached siginficance to those who have played more and given honour to what they played and knocked those who played things I deemed unplayable for myself. I began to realize that I ridicule different sections of gamers and I wanted to figure out why that happened. It was through looking at gimmick gameplay in Sony’s new game The Eye of Judgement that I began to see my old thought patterns returning and how I could challenge them and myself to see gaming in a new way.

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Remember when Ebert said video games aren’t art, and then Clive Barker disagreed? Well, Ebert has responded. It’s pointless to argue with Ebert, but then pointless is what we do best over here.

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Two related items came to my attention today: this article about the growing importance of game trailers, and Narcogen’s shot-by-shot analysis of the E3 Halo 3 trailer – the latter clearly an example of the ‘forensic approach’ detailed in the former.

It is worth noting that the two examples the article gives of trailers backfiring were Halo 2’s 2004 E3 trailer, and Killzone’s 2005 trailer. The article implies that gamers’ expectations can be raised too high, and thus trailers can backfire. Sure, that can happen. But the reason for the backfire is clear, in both cases: the trailers were deceptive. The Halo trailer contained gameplay footage of levels that didn’t appear in the game. The Killzone trailer was pre-rendered, so it had no relation whatsoever to what the game itself would look like. Small deceptions abound in film trailers (different music, sound effects, severe dialogue editing), but if you made a trailer that different from the actual film, you’d likely run afoul of fraudulent advertising laws.

I can’t see how the forensic approach to video is anything but an exciting development. Perhaps it’s only coming now because the technologies required – the pause button and the internet – are relatively recent phenomena. (I think of those poor structuralist film students in the 70s and before, having to watch repeated showings of the same film before they could perpetrate a shot-by-shot analysis). Anyway, it seems of a kind with ARGs, and signifies that techniques previously only practised in ivory towers can now be done by anyone, for entertainment even. The motivation is clear, too; it’s not that “these internet losers have too much time on their hands” but rather that – as the Traxus reference indicates – the material is layered with meaning in such a way that rewards close viewing. Sure, it’s hyped-up graphics porn for the mainstream, but it’s rich with detail for the story nerds, too.

This is a rather good list of existential risks facing humanity, including the usual suspects, but also the unusual “we’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down” risk:

A case can be made that the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation should be given a significant probability. The basic idea behind this so-called “Simulation argument” is that vast amounts of computing power may become available in the future, and that it could be used, among other things, to run large numbers of fine-grained simulations of past human civilizations. Under some not-too-implausible assumptions, the result can be that almost all minds like ours are simulated minds, and that we should therefore assign a significant probability to being such computer-emulated minds rather than the (subjectively indistinguishable) minds of originally evolved creatures. And if we are, we suffer the risk that the simulation may be shut down at any time.

While that may seem ludicrously sci-fi, the argument to consider it a distinct possibility is strong (there’s a good summary here). The happy ending? Even if we are all simulated, it makes no difference – you might as well go on living your life as if you were real. OK then.

Male pattern baldness and convertible automobiles are correlated. I don’t know that baldness causes convertibles; it could be that convertibles cause baldness. Nor do I mean, “ha-ha, that balding dude is having a midlife crisis and therefore he bought a corvette. Look, he thinks he’s teens.” If anything, driving a roofless vehicle is an expression of the acceptance and celebration of one’s own cranial rooflessness. Why, after all, do we celebrate the cool rush of wind and sleek aerodynamics in cars, but not on male heads?

So what kind of computer does the balding man buy? Computers, like cars, are sold on speed and power. (I suppose there are some of each which are sold on safety and reliability, but that’s not our concern here.) Sports cars – and I know of no convertible minivans – are performance vehicles first and foremost. They are often ludicrously impractical (bad gas mileage, no space, thief magnet¹). While they tell you they are this way for sports purposes, they are this way to attract attention – like the peacock, or the weightlifter. Their rooflessness, though, signifies a very real appreciation for the art of driving, a willingness to embrace rather than block out the whip of wind, the roar of the engine, to agree with Vanishing Point that “speed means freedom of the soul”.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 20-inch laptop. In all its back-breaking, battery-eating glory.

¹ Spoken from the point of view of someone who seriously considered purchasing a 1983 Pontiac Trans Am V8.

Reading the Globe last week, I discovered that Toronto is the largest network on Facebook. Which is crazy since the cities of London and New York are obviously much larger in meatspace, but TO’s Facebook population dwarfs theirs. It’s crazy but it’s entirely believable to a Toronto resident: over the past couple months, Facebook has come up in conversation more often than even the weather. It’s spread quicker than a zombie plague. And in fact, to those who refuse to sign up (I’m on Facebook myself, but I know a few holdouts), it’s like your friends are one by one succumbing to the virus. Instead of asking for your brains, they ask if you’re on Facebook, and if not, why not?

That Torontonians would get all wrapped up in relentless, privacy-invading bulletins of friend-related minutiae flies in the face of our reputation as a quiet, withdrawn people. I suppose you could explain it by saying we are indeed withdrawn, and that Facebook appeals because it is the form of socializing that involves the least amount of actual socializing. Or, you could just call bullshit on the “quiet Toronto” myth. Either one works for me.

But then I remembered a past realization, that Toronto, city of SARS, filmic home of Resident Evil, Land of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead remake, is of course the capital of the zombie world. Which explains how infectious networking would especially catch hold here, but which also goes a little towards supporting another half-baked theory: that zombies in fiction symbolize P2P networked communications, and the fear of zombies reflects the fear that old, hierarchical, gatekeeper media have of a society that has no place for them.

That’s probably too cultural studies for a nice saturday afternoon, so let me clunkily segway into a mention of zombie-demon musical sensation Evil Dead: The Musical, which is back in Toronto. I saw it a couple of days ago for the first time, and it’s worth attending. It’s one of the only entertainment events that you can walk out of soaked in blood, and it contains some great writing such as one character’s dying words, “Death’s a bitch… a stupid bitch.”

To an absent-minded gentleman the feeling is familiar.

So I purchase an expansion pack for Oblivion. It’s 150 of Microsoft’s virtual currency, which works out as $2 or so. Once you load it up, you realize you have to spend in-game money on getting the tower working. To the tune of 2,000 septims per add-on… holy shit! I couldn’t care less about the real-life money, but the in-game money bothered the hell out of me.

The logical answer is that the amounts are in wild disparity, and that no matter how you slice it, earning 2,000 septims in Oblivion takes time, which is something of value no matter what world you find yourself in.

But the escapade inspired some contemplation of the concept of “multipresence” which is to say, being in more than one place at once. Which sounds exciting and exotic when considered as a condition of being in the metaverse, and given the growth in virtual worlds lately, could lead to a rash of articles in the near-future about its side effects: kids with alluring new ailments like multiple-avatar anxiety disorder, multipresence dissociative syndrome, acquired attention deficit disorder.

However, we’re already rather consistently multipresent. My working hours are spent almost entirely within a computer interface, to say nothing of what I do for fun. Hell, just being on the phone puts you in two different places at once. If you are watching a film, you are to some extent within the space constructed by the film.

As I mentioned off the top, when you’re thinking of one thing while doing something else, with “absent mind,” you are multipresent. So the experience is so much a part of daily life already that it is in fact banal. It’s quite the opposite than what you might at first think: the condition of being in only one place at once is the rare part.

Which, I suppose, explains how one can spend many hours in a simulated game world and have it feel natural. But it leads to some questions: outside of practical considerations (say, being able to communicate long-distance over the phone), what makes one virtual space more appealing than another? If there were criteria with which to judge that, would they apply to all virtual worlds? Computer UI, film, storytelling in general, games? Sports?

And where does this drive to inhabit new worlds come from? Is it the desire to dream, or to communicate? Are we reaching out, or reaching in? And why is it so hard to actually be here, right now?

This excellent post from Buzz who just left Apple (and describes it as a failed romance) contains an interesting tidbit about commuting, from this article:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections.”

While I doubt the accuracy of that formula there, it’s an interesting downside to car/suburb society that isn’t often brought up. Now I really do have every reason in the world for hating cars. (That last sentence for Speed Racer fans only)

Or, the continued, ultra-fascinating experimentation with tumblr.

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I did a quicklink of this article about the parasite that brainwashes rats into not being afraid of cats but I want to bring it up here because it’s thought-provoking and creepy as fuck.

Rats and mice normally flee if they smell cat urine, but not if they’re infected by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can only complete its life cycle if its rodent host is eaten by a cat, so it “brainwashes” the creature into apparently liking the scent.

This little bastard does this because it only reaches the sexual stage when inside a cat. Apparently the brain alteration is precise; no other parts or rats’ brains are affected.

“Language is a virus” is supposed to just be a theory, a colourful metaphor. But here we have an actual protozoan parasite that goes around changing one’s ideas of the world. The wikipedia article says, “several independent pieces of evidence point towards a role of Toxoplasma infection in cases of schizophrenia and paranoia.” Imagine a parasite that makes you believe the war in Iraq is a great idea?