Bloody Irony

My son is about to turn 13… become a teenager as it were.

His mother and I have been pretty careful about what he gets to watch on TV, see in the cinema, listen to on ipods, and play for video games. I think it is important, regardless of circumstances, for parents to stay on the same page and present a united front in family policies, and that includes what the kids take in for entertainment.

Up to now it has been pretty simple to clearly divide what is inappropriate content-wise from what is okay. Sex and violence, dubious morality, drug use, torture, and all that… pretty easy to say ‘no’ when your kid is grade-school age. But like the Harry Potter films’ and their gradual creep up in dark tone and violence, so one’s children gradually expand their sphere for what is appropriate for them to see. It is every parent’s judgment call just how much to let in the sphere.

The film rating PG-13 is pretty terrible. I mean the usefulness of it. I find myself paying a lot more attention to those little black and white words underneath the rating to get a better idea of content. PG-13 is so far-ranging that I find myself expending a shitload of effort trying to find out just where on the scale this or that particular film is falling. A film with this rating can be a family film with the word ‘damn’ in it or a few too many scat jokes. Or it could have the levels of violence, including the occasional decapitation, of an R-rated movie but without mature levels of cussing. More than once I’ve had to go to the movies a day or two ahead of my kids just to be able to make this call.

I’m no prude and I’m not easily shocked—certainly not by entertainment content. In fact my commitment to pushing my own boundaries in film viewing may make me the best filter on content that I know of. I’ve been determined to observe my children, their behavior and their reactions, and introduce various levels of onscreen mayhem if and when I think they can handle it. If I’ve gotten a bad reaction, then I dial it back. Unless I’m feeling mean on Halloween or something. Because my daughter is almost two years younger than my son, she has sort of set the bar for what I can allow, since keeping two separate standards going for the two is not really manageable. So she probably sees things a little too early (but she’s mature), and he sees things a little late (he isn’t mature) so it has been made to work out.

TV is simple. I can use the cable box to simply lock all programs above a certain rating, and look at individual programs on a case-by-case basis as they come up. With music, we’ve sort of gone with a looser policy altogether. Given the lack of visual component, the content seems less impacting. So I’m not going all ‘parental advisory’ on the kids about what they listen to. I just keep an eye on it, and if I see playlists that start to lean towards gangster rap or graphic deathgrind, I’ll bring the hammer of censorship down. Lady Gaga and Rhianna have me wincing a bit at times, but I’m letting it go for now.

Games are more complicated. In terms of keeping a different game standard for my younger kid… there’s no issue because she isn’t interested in the games that push that envelope. The worst I have to worry about here is a bit of cussing or some of the sexual content in her DDR games, the same as her music basically. But with my son there’s a whole different need for monitoring in place.

It has only been about two years since I loosened up the reins on violence in first person shooters and let him play Halo. The lack of violence to humans (little conventional ‘gore’) and the emphasis on the game world’s aesthetics and the music, made it more palatable. And this turned out to be a positive decision. He became enamored with the whos and the whats of the Halo universe, including getting toys and books… and not just focused on painting the walls in neon-bright Covenant blood.

BUT. Like his friends, the baseline favorite game genres are first and third-person shooters. So as he’s gotten older, and shown he has been levelheaded, I’ve moved him on up to more mature material. Not too long ago he was playing Serious Sam. This game is pretty violent, with tons of enemies to mow down in a sort of abstractedly gory manner. But the type of enemies, the stylized graphics and the whole over-the-top attitude of the game tempered it for me. When I was his age I was drawing big pictures of war scenes or underwater views of boatloads of people getting attacked by sharks. It had the adults around me rolling their eyes, but not calling for a straightjacket.

Later still, I let him play Wolfenstein. Now this game ups the ante, being by far the most realistic representation of violence he’d yet played. Along with seriously creepy or scary enemies and a sound effects aspect that will make you duck your head from incoming fire even days after you’ve started playing it. But Wolfenstein also has clear-cut, no-ambiguity enemies—Nazis. And their historically supported penchant for occult artifacts. So y’know? No drug dealers, no prostitutes, not much in the way of dubious moral choices, unless you count slaughtering Hitler’s minions a dubious choice. It’s still pretty clearly not in Grand Theft Auto territory. So at this point, the violence is becoming almost secondary, helped in large part by the fact that he isn’t showing an increasing tendency to punch his sister or talk about headshots at the dinner table.

So this brings us to the present. At the moment he is pressing his way through the various episodes of Half Life 2. Half Life is kind of on the order of Wolfenstein. Realistic human enemies mixed with otherworldly fiends. There are also no morally questionable paths through the game. Gordon Freeman is a standup guy whether the player wants to be or not, but the game does a good job of not making it feel too restrained. Half Life is also a cut above almost anything else in terms of drama, story, and overall quality and has seriously given Halo a run for its money in my son’s list of favorites. The world built by Valve has him thinking about a lot more than just the killing, and he really cares about the people populating the resistance against The Combine. By association he also likes the Portal games which emphasize puzzle-solving over blowing things away, though death for your avatar(s) is never far away.

Far and away the most extreme thing he’s played is the new Mortal Kombat. And I really had to think that one over. It is extremely violent, never mind the somewhat scantily clad sexed-up looking women. And it encourages matches to be finished in as violent a manner as possible. I kind of looked at it like some old monster drawings I might’ve done as a kid. Gory, yeah. But MK is also populated by otherworldly creatures and almost every human has superpowers and is dressed accordingly. It is pretty far removed from reality. I actually found The Krypt, where players buy the various unlockables, to be the most objectionable part of the game. You basically have to push a button to kill some hapless prisoner in order to ‘unlock’ his soul, which then flies off to provide you with your ‘reward’. These deaths are by torture device and creature infestation. They don’t provide the meat of the game, and actually get tiresome after a while owing to the amount of shit that’s in The Krypt. But it is still ‘push a button kill an innocent dude’. A didn’t stop my kid from playing MK because it IS just a sidebar to the game, but it was a moment of realization in how casual ‘murder’ has gotten to be even apart from the obvious ‘murder simulators’ that are the typical first person shooters.

But his friends are all about this graphic killing. And apparently have parents knowingly or unknowingly abetting the carnage. When his friends talk about their coolest games they are almost invariably talking about a Call of Duty game or something like it. The only real-world war FPS I’ve really let him play are the Battlefield Bad Company series for Dice. The first one actually didn’t even get up to a Mature rating and what I saw of it, emphasized tactical thinking with its destructible scenery and the comradery between you and your comrade NPCs more than it did running up to the enemy and capping them. So the Battlefield games got a pass. He’ll probably get to play the new one just coming out soon. His friends know these games and think they’re ‘okay’… I’m sure they don’t rate super-high for the very reasons I green lighted ‘em. They’re not in-your-face enough about the killing.

I have since put the nix on some other games, almost always coming up because some friend of his has recommended it. It makes you wonder if these parents really have no fucking idea what their kids are doing, or have just written them off because their ‘only games’. Remember in the old days of Dungeons and Dragons when some kids showed marked behavior changes from taking their characters too seriously? Yeah. Those were only games too.

This brings us to Fallout. Specifically Fallout 3. Fallout is the cat’s ass as far as my son’s buddies are concerned. I knew these games probably had objectionable material in them, because I knew enough about the Fallout game world. I hadn’t played any Fallout games since previously they’ve been PC titles. The Fallout titles I knew about were also role-playing games. So when my kid asked to get Fallout: New Vegas after seeing it briefly at a friend’s house, it was not too difficult to dissuade him since I knew FNV was also an RPG, albeit one with some real-time action aspects. I just knew he wasn’t into games to manage inventories and get into long conversations. He’s done a bit of RPG stuff on his handhelds and is currently stalled in Chrono Trigger on the VC, but it is amongst the least appealing genres to him.

Then some friend let him borrow Fallout 3.

I don’t know if it is because of the way Bethesda actioned-up specifics of the game that were strictly RPG staples before, but the game appears to have changed enough things to where my son wants to get into the Fallout world. Or maybe he has matured enough to where the RPG aspects don’t hinder him. Either way, he took the game home along with Portal 2. I looked at it thinking ‘hm, I don’t know…’ but put it off because I figured burying himself in Portal would buy me some time to research just how bad Fallout 3 is. Nope. He apparently went straight to Fallout. I know this because I his Mom heard screams of agony coming from some NPC he was working over. So she pulled the game for his Xbox 360 until such time as I could render a verdict. I had some explaining to do on how he had a game where the rating box out shows ‘sexual situations and drug use’ right under the M rating.

Needless to say after doing a bit of poking around about what-all is in the game, he’s not going to get to play Fallout 3 for the foreseeable future. Drug use, prostitution, and the ability to murder innocents, are dodgy enough when seen in some RPG-typical isometric view, but Bethesda’s work to make the experience immersive and ‘cinematic’ pretty much shreds any rationalizing I might do. Oh, and hearing ‘fuck’ about five times in as many minutes kinda does that too. Fallout has a karma system where doing the civil thing clicks you towards a certain ending, and doing evil another. But that’s not enough for a kid still in formative years. If he CAN do the horrible thing, he’s going to do the horrible thing. Just to see how the game handles it. If he gets a shitty ending for it, he won’t be happy, but it’ll have been worth it just to see all the forbidden crap we’d never let him watch in a movie.

And I don’t blame him for doing it. I tried to see inappropriate sex and violence when I was kid. But my Mom went apoplectic catching me at it sometimes. Back in the day, the film Jaws (understandably) had a serious public rep for excessive violence. Based on everything she’d seen and read there was no way I was going to see it. So I snuck. And she caught me. Now there were worse things I’d seen and read. But THAT movie was the one she specifically had inside her blinders. I think parents today are doing the same thing. They all have their shields up for Grand Theft Auto, the scapegoat of today, but are missing the Fallouts getting by them. So my kid? Not happy. Not at all. He got caught watching Jaws. There won’t be any disciplinary action to speak of—I mean I looked right at the damn box and handed it back to him. But that’s another game his Dad cut off.

He’s found compensation though, and the irony is almost suffocating.

Yesterday we downloaded the demo for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The full game releases next week on September 6th. If you’ve read my previous post about Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, you know we played that little lead-in download to death and are eagerly awaiting this game, its big brother.

So the kid has started in on the demo, and it is one of the most violent games I’ve ever seen. And I've seen A LOT of video game violence.

Games Workshop’s 40K universe isn’t replete with sex or drugs or the exploitation of fuzzy kittens. Controversy around it mostly has to do with the fascist nature of the Imperium of Man (though all the ‘armies’ take a sort of kill-everyone-else stance since the species’ survival is frequently at stake), or the demonic imagery associated with the forces of Chaos. The Space Marines, though the most elite and haughty of human forces, are also frequently far enough above politics that they are shown taking something resembling moral high ground. That is, a Space Marine commander can follow what he believes is right and there’s precious little the more pragmatic human forces like the Imperial Guard or Inquisition can do about it. So playing a Marine captain as you do in this game, you will probably be taking as noble a road as possible given the context, that of protecting humanity and its resources against the invading Ork hordes. So, in terms of narrative choices, I’m not too worried that my kid will be complicit in holding some human victim’s testicles over an open flame. A Marine isn't going to do that.

But cripes. I love GW and 40K, but this is like Mortal Kombat with about a dozen combatants on the screen at the same time. Amongst the 'goodness' is performing ‘executions’ (of Orks mind you) that GAIN YOU BACK SOME HEALTH. I realize they need a healthup mechanic but turning the paragons of humanity into vampires? Actually, there is a precedent for that amongst the Blood Angels Chapter of the Space Marines.

But that’s a long, complicated story. The protagonist in WH40K: Space Marine is by default an Ultramarine—a chapter based in Greek imagery and who run their own empire of Ultramar about as close to 21st century standards of fairness and equality as you’re going to get. So the boy is using his Marine to hack about with a chainsword (chainsaw sword) throwing up clouds of blood and popping off the occasional Ork head with a bolt pistol. Of course he stops every now and then to EXECUTE an enemy which is usually shown as hoisting them in the air on the chainsword while the blade chews through their abdomen and bursts them apart in a shower of blood that then stains the Marine’s armor for the remainder of the combat. Yay!

When I get involved in 40K games or painting or drawing or whatever, yeah BLOOD is implicit or explicit in all of it. The novels are probably the place where the violence actually gets the strongest, particularly where anything has to do with Chaos (the really uber bad guys). But the video game is VISUAL. I’ve rarely seen a GW spinoff that so revels in carnage. And this is the ‘good guy’.

Now for me, this would be fine. I still look askance at the vampire health thing (what the fuck?)… it just seems like there’d be a canonical 'Ultramarine way' to make this happen instead of such a weird, macabre manner. But graphic gore doesn’t rattle me. The problem is that I set this up to my kid as, ‘yeah, you’re gonna love it!’ And boy does he ever! Right down to the smoking, headless, eviscerated Orks lying all over the landscape. He plays the 40K tabletop game, but the brutality is still totally abstract even if the body count was the same… which it isn’t. If the ten minutes I saw is any guide, before the game is completed this Marine is going to kill twenty times more enemies than a similar character would manage in a dozen tabletop matches.

I’m just dismayed looking at this as a parent. It IS over-the-top like Serious Sam. It IS about facing non-human alien enemies out to destroy humanity like Halo. And he isn’t being exposed to any attitudes or philosophy he doesn’t already see in the 40K wargame literature.

So I won’t put the brakes on for this. It might be difficult to explain to another parent the nuance here that makes Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine different from Fallout 3. But there’s a difference. I'll admit to bristling less at violence than the other objectionable sorts of content that Fallout has on display, along with its giving the player the ability to indulge in some of it. He's already been exposed to everything in Space Marine except the execution mechanic. So, though it is off-putting, I'm not lumping it in the same league as Fallout 3.
At least with this new Space Marine game, he’ll be on the hip side with his other blood ‘n’ guts buddies for a little while. He's just going to have to wait awhile longer to be allowed to be totally amoral.

Times of Excess

Video game players who've been around a long time, like old-timers in any culture, frequently pine for the good old days... frequently its those never-to-be-equaled times when 2D was the order of the day and your-choice-of-dead-system ruled the kingdom.

But honestly we've never had it so good. I've done my share of cranky old bitching with the rest of 'em, but we are living in a golden age game-wise. When I was a kid, I'd have let a pack of grimy gnomes pull half of my teeth out if I could've had access to all the amazing shit players have today. There are times like, uh NOW, when I think gamers, journalists and players both, are almost assholes for complaining.

Some things were the same then as they are now. There are still cheesy or cheating players. The companies ARE out to make a buck and sometimes they do things or make decisions that suck. Some design choices could've been implemented a lot better. Games with frustrating difficulty.

But we are such absolute spoiled little shits. I mean I look around at what I have... what my kids have. Maybe not everyone has the gaming setup my family does... some have more, some have less obviously. Currently I have a large plasma screen with multiple consoles hooked up (through nothing less sharp than s-video) to two switch boxes, including a Neo Geo AES which was an untouchably expensive system when it came out. My kids each have an LED flatscreen in their rooms with my daughter having a Wii attached to hers, and my son having an Xbox 360 and PS2 on his. Both of them also have DSi handhelds, and a box with most generations of Nintendo portables ready to hand. Currently they are enamored with iOS games because they've each gotten an iTouch this summer. All the games... and these number in the hundreds by now... are all readily available, neatly arranged on shelves organised by system and whether it has been 'beaten' or not. Compared to most 'civilian' households this is a bit deranged, but compared to many homes where video games are a big part of the landscape this is nothing. We don't even have any video game merch apart from some Sonic shirts my son owns.

But what the fuck, yeah? I mean 'the good old days'? What is that really supposed to mean? If there's some old system you want, you just go buy it on ebay or emulate it on your laptop or play downloaded versions of that system's games on a newer console. Lamenting the passing of good old 2D gaming? Through these means you can relive all the old shit OR just take a look at the dowload or portable spaces and see where 2D platforming and fighting and shooting lives again.

It's endless. I can't even keep up with it anymore. If you want to talk about games, gamers, or gaming, communities small and large are never futher away than your mouse opening up a browser. I can have an online conversation with a buddy in Australia and then go see what he's playing on his Xbox 360 right then, live. My son frequently puts on his headset to chat with one friend who's playing Fallout, while he himself is fighting seven other guys in a Halo retread!

Recently my kids have taken to the so-called social gaming scene. These are retardedly casual games that require little more than patience and the ability to resist spending real money on virtual objects. Tap Zoo, Bakery Story, etc etc ad nauseum. It looks like most of the 'fun' is in making friends and looking in on what other people are doing with their versions of the game. Not my cup of tea. But the point is that it is a whole new form and venue that doesn't even have an analog in the 'old days' of video games.

Child of Eden is the first game I've seen that makes me think about buying a Kinect. Standing in your room and moving your body about to play a game is something out of Tron, kids. We could only imagine it. You can join a MMORPG and thousands of fellow adventurers are pushing around in the same sandbox as you are... at the same time. The closest thing to that in the really old days were MUD dungeons. Those almost aren't even recognisable as games by today's standards.

There ARE things that have gone away, and not for the better. Shit that I miss. As connected as we all are, none of it replaces the thrill and immediacy of arcade gaming. All the lights and sounds (particularly in GOOD arcades). The competition, particularly in fighting games. Even in shooting or platforming, getting your initials up on the high score screen, knowing the next person to come along might knock you off, that was something. Civilians frequently picture gamers as solitary loners, sweatily pawing their keyboards to slog through onscreen dungeons between visits to porn sites, but video gaming has always had hugely social aspects to it. The whole world is the arcade now, but fighting teabaglulz99 from Novia Scotia doesn't have quite the thrill, to me, of sending little Billy packing after he's beaten four previous players spamming Genan's spin move in Samurai Shodown.

A lot of the creativity SEEMS to have left. Favorite franchises get mired down in their same old mechanics. But then the fans shit noisy geese if the devs try to change anything. These are more contentious times. Everyone thinks they should have a say. Access to other gamers is so easy, the noise can be overwhelming. Print isn't really dead, but in terms of game magazines, the information mainstay of the old days, it might as well be. Getting all your gaming news, reviews, and opinions from the internet seems so very soulless. And how much work is it to separate out all the fucksticks at Kotaku, Destructoid or wherever, from worthy information. Developers often seem to operate like movie studios and their summer blockbusters. Big budget titles pandering to the lowest common denominator. Committees deciding what gamers want, and the creator/auteur aspect squeezed completely out of the equation.

Games these days are too easy. Or too hard. Or too short. Too long. Too expensive. Really?

I'm dabbling with Mushimesama Bug Panic on my kids iTouch. It is five 'worlds' long, with each world having five stages and a boss stage. It has hidden items and areas if you wish to look for them, and rewards you with pieces to a jigsaw puzzle mini game for each item you find. Each stage probably takes about five to ten minutes if you try to search out all the hidden items and manage not to die. Bosses take only a few minutes but you are not likely to get them on the first go. I'm currently stuck myself on one of the stages in the middle of the last world. So adding togther thirty stages at say ten minutes apiece, you could say you get three hours of game assuming you play perfectly AND don't replay anything for a better score or fiddle with the jigsaw puzzle bonus game. On an iTouch, it is a pretty small screen, but the graphics are colorful sprite-based objects typical of Cave. And of course loads of bullets on screen and a bazillion point items all being vacuumed up by your avatar, Reco. This would probably be the cat's ass on an iPad.

I paid five bucks for it. That's only one dollar an hour assuming I get ONLY five hours total out of it. Here's a game that answers all the complaints. It isn't too short, it is a few hours for a five dollar game. There's more with the replay value. It isn't too long, it is perfect pick up and play gaming, you can leave off wherever and get right back to it whenever. It isn't difficult to get pretty far in the game, but it isn't so easy that there's no challenge. As I said, I'm currently rather stuck near the end. Just as it should be.

Also? Five bucks. My biggest complaint is the controls, but I'm a big fat baby when it comes to touchscreens so my complaint about that should be taken with a grain.

In a world where video games are so common and available there IS a fuck-ton of dreck out there, no doubt. But a little looking around and a willingness to read up on shit and mess around with demo versions will do wonders. My kids will download and play with any piece of crap on their iTouches, but that's part of the fun too.

I guess this rant is a bit of a call for perspective. There are reasons to bitch. It's fun to bitch and vent. But to go back to the good old days? Time and memory paint those days rather rosy. It WAS more exciting to get a new game back in the Genesis days. Games weren't just falling around us like they are now. Every purchase or gift was an event. But the actual PLAYING... there's so much more to it now. AND you can have the games from the old days if you want to. I can jump and dash Sonic through his contest with Metal Sonic just as I did then. But I can also play a game where a single controller handles dodging, flying, slashing, and pointing into the screen to shoot (like a lightgun game) ALL AT THE SAME TIME. See Sin & Punishment: Star Successor for the Wii.

I'm grateful my kids get something good out of video games just like I did (and still do). They also have an appreciation for the older stuff, as I've gone on about before in this blog. I've been around, and playing, from the early early days of video gaming, and I need to appreciate the NOW. Games are still really fun. a player just might have more sifting to do now then I did back then. That seems like a small price to pay for all the choices.

Right On.

This.

As a regular movie-goer I can only dream of a world where every theater was like this.

Brutal Hybrid

Mommy

Daddy

Baby

As I knew they would, the Real Time Strategy aspects of Brutal Legend are giving me fits.


If you have been reading this blog for a while you may remember some ranting about my general lack of skill and/or patience with strategy-based pursuits (and some puzzles or puzzle games). I like the idea of being an armchair general, and in fact I have a decent track record with tabletop wargames like Warhammer. But Warhammer and 40K are turn-based. You take a turn, then I take a turn. You have time to think about what you are doing. The ‘real time’ aspect of RTS games kicks me in the nuts.

It shouldn’t. Emotionally I think an RTS is a good idea. If you were commanding a real battle, the enemy doesn’t pause while you consider your next move. Not that video games are really like actual war, but the continual unfolding of events whether you direct it or not, is a feature in warfare (and so many other things) that video games are uniquely able to duplicate or simulate.

But I’m terrible at it. It is the whole resources management and control facets that suck the fun out of it. Almost universally, there’s a ‘cost’ to building or acquiring units in RTS fames. Usually it is money, energy, fuel, or some other facsimile of a real-life resource. In Brutal Legend, the resources are the fans, as in concert fans. The more ‘fans’ you have pouring power into your ‘show’, the more frequently you can call up troops. RTS games also frequently have time delays to the arrival of your units (representing travel, build, or recruitment time), and depending on the technology represented, command and control limits… ie, your general can’t be everywhere at once.

All these restrictions are a fundamental part of the genre, simulating the limitations that might be imposed on real commanders, and composing much of the challenge. You have to learn to make do with what you have, and learn to adjust on-the-fly as the situation changes and your resources wax and wane. But for me, that shit just isn’t fun. It is too much like real work! I don’t think the genre should change for me, but I usually steer well clear of these games. My video game enjoyment is almost entirely predicated on immediate feedback, physical coordination skills, and memorization. That’s why the preponderance of my game collection comprises 2D shooting games, racers, fighting games, and platformers. With a few first person shooters and third person action games thrown in. I have a mere sprinkling of RPGs because I don’t cotton to the lack of immediate, direct control. So for real-time video wargames I think I have three… and that’s including Brutal Legend. My gaming background springs from the arcades, ‘twitch gaming’ as it were, and on home consoles I’m happiest near my roots.

So I’m running around BL, enjoying the utterly spectacular and badass scenery, getting in the occasional small fight, and finding the hidden items. The game makes finding stuff really rewarding because they aren’t just items collected for some long-term goal, you frequently get new abilities and entire new music tracks. The game keeps throwing something cool or interesting at me. My kid is just blowing through the story mode and it's a shame because a lot of work went into making this world. A player really needs to slow down and look around in it.

Then it comes time to fight one of the major battles. The RTS battles. I don’t feel like they are just shoehorned into the game like some reviewers have opined. The designers did an okay job justifying the mechanics and integrating them into the story. BUT. I hate this kind of battle nonetheless. They shove me all the way from having the time of my life to getting apoplectic with frustration. It isn’t that I can’t learn how to play the RTS battles… but I really don’t want to. Like I said before, it is too much like work. Everyday life is an exercise in resource management. Balancing a checkbook or juggling priorities at my job might not be as cool-sounding as ordering a unit of Razorgirls to annihilate enemy Grave Diggers, but it comes off even more of a hassle because its landing square in the middle of my fun. I’d feel the same way if someone handed me that checkbook to balance just as I was climbing aboard a rollercoaster.

So I’m being a total lame-ass and using the guide to help me. I just don’t have personal ‘resources’ to get good at this on my own. And using the book isn’t sailing me through these parts either, because it is terrible… one of the worst game guides I’ve ever seen. The map poster is useful. Everything else about it, the organization, descriptions, everything is jank. In effect, even making the book useful (during the battles) is WORK.

This isn’t killing my enjoyment of the game as a whole. The rest of the game is just too much fun for that. This game could’ve easily just been a total joke. A game about heavy metal? How did that even get greenlit, much less turn out to be fucking awesome?

From the point where I am in the game I think I have three more of these ‘stage battles’ to go. I’d rather they’d made the RTS stuff a separate mode, but its obvious a shitload of work went into that part of the game too, so that might be more than I could reasonably expect. Hopefully I can shut up about it now, get through the RTS battles as they come up, and remember the game for its strong points after its over!

Down With The Iron Warriors

Walking in to my local comic (and game) shop last Sunday, I escorted my son back to the wargame tables at the rear. Every Sunday Games Workshop wargames, mostly WH40K, are played in an informal ‘bring and battle’ format. Usually it is pretty well-attended and the previous week my kid had met other players his own age, and that got him all fired up to bring in some of the Tau squads on which he’s been working so hard to paint.


He’s been working so hard on them because I’ve insisted that he do so, and not just show up with a bunch of drab plastic and metal guys.

In common with a lot of players (and the immediate gratification mentality they have) he doesn’t really want to get much painting done before he plays. Truth be told, he’d probably just as soon do NO painting. But having built several Gundam models he at least understands the positive aspects of a modeling hobby and putting something of your own creativity into it. We discussed this at length before the first dollar was spent: ‘Son, your Dad is a beardy old gaming git and you’re going to have to do this right if you want me to throw in with you’…or something to that effect. But he’s only twelve. Eagerness to get to the fun part and ‘aw geez’ the work part is to be expected.

We’ve gone to watch the games played a few times before he even bought his first models, and the example set by the other players is NOT helping my cause. While he does vaguely remember the ‘old days’ when he was around tons of amazing miniatures, intricately designed scenery and enthusiastic GW staff, seeing what goes on at this local shop it’s understandable (even if he wasn’t a kid) why he’d think the non-playing side of things could or should be neglected.

Because The Iron Warriors dominate.

This references an old joke when I was employed at GW. At that time when our staff were going around to game stores trying to promote the hobby, they were constantly confronted with players using armies of unpainted or barely-painted figures. And in those days almost all the models were made out of so-called ‘white metal’, which is a silvery alloy consisting largely of tin. In Warhammer 40,000 there is a chapter of Chaos Space Marines called the Iron Warriors whose predominant color is, as their name suggests, iron or steel. So the preponderance of bare steel-colored models eventually generated a running gag about how all these different players had all these loads of models but at the end of the day they were all using ‘The Iron Warriors’. So everywhere we’d go there they’d be… more Iron Warriors. Progeny of lazy or ignorant players everywhere. They might be shaped like Eldar or Orks or Tyranids but still…

Iron Warriors.

I think the joke is outdated now. Since that educational crusade by GW it has become common opinion that you at least need to get a basic coat of color on ‘em. While the overall effort is still pretty lackluster, in general it seems most players do at least the minimum so that the won’t look totally lazy if they wind up against someone who did a good job. And so many of the models are plastic, the whole ‘iron’ descriptor doesn’t really fit as well.

As Jervis Johnson is always going on about in White Dwarf magazine, immersion is a huge part of this hobby. Like books, films and video games, with any of our diversions we want to be drawn in to a created world, even if that world is largely the same as our own. We want to experience the drama or the humor as closely as possible and the more effective the break from the real world around us the better. Tabletop wargaming is no different. Immersion in the battle is important to the experience. But with gaming of this type, there are so many rules to follow, so many discussions that need to take place, and so much potential distraction (if you’re gaming away from home especially) that it isn’t an unbroken entertainment experience like reading a book in your favorite chair or watching a film in the theater. Wargaming has to generate its atmosphere and color, its ‘hooks’, from the models, the scenery, the narrative behind the battle and the personalities of the players because it is a competitive pastime. It requires a lot of communication that isn’t WITHIN the game’s world.

If you think it’s okay to just throw the unpainted models out there on a flat surface, then why don’t you just play chess? Or one of the tabletop wargames that doesn’t require figures (think Avalon Hill style cardboard chits)? Or in this generation, play a strategy-based video game? They even got ‘em based on the WH40K universe, the Dawn of War series.

Why not pursue other strategy pastimes that don’t have so much manual work involved? Because those pursuits don’t have little toy soldiers you get to push around miniature battlefields. That’s why.

The tactile aspect is a huge part of the attraction. At GW, as much as it was believed that the painting is important, it was also understood that the actual doing of it is a lot of labor—daunting in fact. But no one expected every soldier to be a masterpiece and no one expected the whole thing to be done before you start playing or even to have been done quickly. At the actual GW stores, staff insisted that you get started on painting your models before playing with them in the shop, and that every time you brought them in they showed a bit more progress.

My town, as removed as it is from civilization, appears to have a population of wargamers who have no idea what paints and brushes are for. At least not why they are sold in that very shop right next to the figures. Watching them play presents a laundry list modeling yuck I thought had been driven out back in the 90s. They’ve got unpainted or primer-only model. Models not glued to bases or vehicles (constantly falling over or off). Wrong weapons on models. No weapons on models, including vehicles. Substitutions galore, that is ‘my marine seargeant model here is actually a chaplain’.

That doesn’t even touch on all the wackiness play-wise like not having a list prepared (flipping constantly through the books) or not using counters so the players can’t remember wounds taken on big models or weapons lost on vehicles.

The players spend so much time backtracking, looking shit up, and reminding each other just what the hell they are using on the table… I couldn’t see how it was fun. These games are complicated enough as it is. Further crap that takes you out of the spirit of the game is something to be avoided. Having a painted, correctly assembled and modeled army doesn’t just help with the atmosphere and coolness… it helps the game move along more smoothly. There’s no question what the guns are on the tank. No argument about which model was the hero or heavy weapons trooper in the squad. No struggle to remember that this group of shuriken catapult armed guys are actually carrying shuriken pistols and power swords…. THIS time around. For all that these players (and others like them) seem to think the PLAY is the thing, they sure don’t do a lot of the shit necessary to keep the focus on the play and not on all the exceptions and goofiness spread around their rag-tag ‘army’.

And assuming someone DOES show up with an army with a decent paint job, the Iron Warriors player is doing that guy a disservice by being pathetic about the hobby end of things. THAT guy made an effort and he wants a cool, immersive, atmospheric game. He wants to fight a ‘believable’ force. And you bring the equivalent of an expanded Civil War Chess Set.

Nice.

What happened to making it look cool? People think the art looks cool. The sculpting of the models is cool. This is entertainment in which the consumer gets to participate. What happened to their contribution?

I know a lot of these players like the background. They discuss the troop types and name their forces (I’ve heard ‘em). They must be buying the novels and art books because I frequently need the next one in some series and it is sold out. So why shouldn’t a player do their best to capture this color?

Trying to convey this to my kid is difficult but seems to be working. He showed up with two fully painted squads and third halfway done. And everything was as depicted on his models (and he had some little unit cards with him so he didn’t have to flip through rulebooks!). He knew the game less well than his opponent but his own turns went much smoother and faster.

I don’t actually want to be a snob about it…. But I am. And I want him to be a snob about it too within reason. We can’t make our local shop do what GW does with their must-be-painted policy. But we can try to encourage and be an example. My son should still play against unpainted armies and be a gracious player, but I really hope his work rubs off vis a vis the painting aspect.

I have seen some regular Warhammer (fantasy) players in there too. And they seem more resolved to do the work correctly. While I saw a lot of unpainted or primer-only models, the ranked up nature of Warhammer units kind of forces the players to be more organized, and get those weapons correct and get everything glued down.

I find it staggering that it takes ‘convincing’ to get players on board with this. I see them over in the miniatures racks picking up boxes or flipping through books with ‘wicked’ or ‘those look badass’ spouted all the time. So don’t you want your shit to look badass? I mean you spent all that money (things are NOT cheap) and you’re just going to leave it an Iron Warrior instead of trying to make it look like what attracted you in the first place? And these players have the internet. There are kajillions of online examples at all skill levels that this shit is done and, in fact, MUST be done. You don’t get a fucking bye just because you live in the sticks.

I need to take the word to the heathen.

A Little True Life Story

So a couple of weeks back I’m in my local Gamestop. I went to put a copy of Halo: Reach Legendary Edition on pre-order for my son’s birthday. I go in, make my request, plunk down the deposit and then do a little looking around the store. I have some time to kill and I might turn up some hitherto unneeded video game gem in the used racks.
I’m at the bottom of the Xbox 360 section having to pick through the unalphabetized titles when I overhear this snippet of conversation between a recently-arrived customer and one of the pale, paunchy salespeople… and NOT paraphrased either:

GS Emp: So how about E3, huh? Excited about anything coming out?

Cust: Not so much. A few things maybe.

GS Emp: What about that Sony move? That’s going to be amazing!

Cust: It looks just like what the Wii already does.

GS Emp: But the Wii is a failed system.

Cue customer shrug.

So I stand up from where I’m shopping, turn to face Lord Dork of Gamestop and say:
‘On which planet of idiots is the Wii a failed system?’
Then THIS snippet of conversation took place:

GS Emp: Well… it just isn’t doing, uh, good.

Me: By whose standards? Where are you getting your information?

GS Emp: Well, if you go on the internet you can see it is failing.

Me: Where can you read that? Every ‘official’ source, online or in magazines, will tell you that the Wii is the runaway bestselling console. As a gaming unit, its sales are only exceeded by OTHER Nintendo products. The top selling spots for software are routinely occupied by Wii games. What the hell are you talking about? I’d really like to know.

GS Emp: Well, uh, in THIS store the Wii doesn’t do, um, good. We sell more Call of Duty.

Me: And you sold NO copies of Mario Galaxy 2? And you expect to sell no copies of Metroid: Other M? This single store in this podunk town is the yardstick by which Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo measure success?

GS Emp: Well, no, but customers I’ve talked to don’t like Wii games.

Me: Then if the Wii has FAILED at anything, it is catering enough to some specific gamer tastes like yours. And THAT my friend is what you will read on the internet when you read fanboys bashing the Wii, if you’ve got an ounce of discernment. That THEIR tastes in games don’t seem to be well-represented on that console. And maybe yours aren’t either.

GS Emp:…

Me: You can like what you like and you can hold your opinions. But just blanket badmouthing makes you look stupid and it certainly isn’t what the suits up at Gamestop Nazi Central want you to be saying, is it? IS IT? The biggest segment of your customer base… and you’re badmouthing the system they plunked money down for? Whether you like it or not, what kind salesman does that make you?

GS Emp:…

Me: It makes you a shitty salesman. It makes you a great frothing fanboy, but a shitty salesperson. It’d make my day if this guy (pointing to original customer) was a secret shopper for Gamestop Nazi Central. Dude, turn in your gamer card and go back to nerd school.

Cue me walking out of store with the other staffer, the one who took my deposit, just staring slack-jawed.

Jiminy Christmas people. It is the games that make the systems. Even for the hardcore, the Wii has great games on it. But if you don’t think so, keep yourself from sounding the fool by acknowledging your bullshit is opinion and not fact.

If there’d been some Mom with her kid in there, shopping for a Wii game, when this dork had spouted off, then I probably would’ve gotten mean.

Holding It Correctly

Wanna know something that drives me nuts? All the American comics and movies and stuff that I see where 'samurai swords' are being used, but the user holds 'em like a baseball bat.

You'd think if all the creative people involved were such fans of the jidaigeki or chambara genres they'd have noticed this glaring detail. Ever since I started watching Kurosawa films or reading manga (and I was a kid at that point) I've noticed this error and it is just embarrassing. Like the oafish American who upon meeting someone from the UK has to blather on about 'saving your ass in WWII'. I'm embarrassed that the loud cocksucker can't be bothered to get the facts straight before shooting off his mouth. Same thing.

I've just gotten done re-watching The Hidden Fortress and am partway through a rewatch of Yojimbo. Toshiro Mifune pictured above is not the greatest swordsman technique-wise in samurai films... he was an actor foremost. He gets the job done through attitude and dedication to the role more than anything else. But as you can see in the pic above, he is NOT holding the weapon like a bat. Practicing iaido as I do, the correct grip on the sword is second nature to me, but this has NEVER appeared as a subtle detail even when I was a kid jumping around with plastic blades in the back yard. I always held my 'ninja sword' with a palm-width distance (approximately) between my hands (unless holding it one-handed).

I always have some kind of jidaigeki film in my rotation. Hideo Gosha's Bandits Vs. Samurai Squadron is up soon. But for some reason watching these two Kurosawa films recently, made me think back to some Marvel graphic novel of recent vintage. Now I love me some Avengers of course, but this was a story set partly in Japan and full of ninjas. Lone Wolf and Cub has been published over here in the USA for years now, along with a good deal of other samurai period manga. And LW&C is not obscure. It is a major influence and inspiration for comic writers and artists today. So there was no excuse for the Avengers book to be full of katanas being held like baseball bats.

I'm sure my attitude is aggravated by the fact that I have personal involvement in this archaic weapon art, but its a real wince-inducer. Even the barely-past-teen girls in Japanese movies like Princess Blade or Azumi get this grip correct-ish, so it seems almost like blinkered American superiority at times that we keep choking up on the tsuka, the sword's handle.

Okay. I'll be quiet now and go back to watching my little movies and stroking my weapon.

(pic taken from FilmWeb)

Where's My Gun?

I just washed my car.

I didn't know we had condors where I live.

From One Who Should Know

This is a list of 'life rules' Bill Gates apparently laid out in a fairly recent High School speech. Sent to me by a friend whose political views on paper wouldn't seem to line up with mine, but in practical terms she and I find a lot to agree upon. Frankly most men would be willing to overlook a lot of differences in opinion given how attractive this girl is. Ahem.

Anyway, the list:

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now.. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Confession Time

The Devil's Own Box of Colors

Several weeks ago I was on an online gaming forum and confessed a secret shame.

I play Bejeweled 2. On my Xbox 360. And not just a little bit.

If you are not in the video game know, this is shameful because I will now have to go before the Grand Vidyageam Tribyoonal and tender my Hardcore Card.

Normally, I don’t put much stock in labels in general… casual/newb versus hardcore/true doesn’t mean much to me in ANY of the fangeek shit I’m involved in. This includes video games. BUT. In gaming at least most of my tastes tend to fall naturally into the various hardcore-centric genres, with the occasional foray into mainstream games and then, once in a blue moon, a so-called casual game. It is just how my tastes run, being as old as I am, and given the fact that oldschool game genres have acquired the patina of hardcoreness over time… as in, you’d HAVE to be hardcore to still be playing that old/simplistic/difficult shit.

But Bejeweled 2, as a game, dips into a rarely experienced level of casual-ness for me. Let’s put it this way; It is always on those bargain spin racks of jewel-cased PC software that are omnipresent at every electronics store or electronics departments in catch-alls like Target or Walmart. This game is displayed there like gum or mints would be racked up in the checkout aisle at the grocery store. So this thing is an ‘ooh puzzle game, pretty colors’ impulse buy for any grannie or schlub that might have a PC.

I bought it from the Xbox Live Arcade service because I just wanted something to fall back on that wasn’t too difficult, had simple controls, and wouldn’t mean much to me. Sort of video game meditation, in a way. For those times I wanted brightly-colored entertainment that didn’t require any sort of exertion or investment on my part.

The simple and meditative part was (somewhat) correct. Otherwise, my assumptions about the game were a huge error in judgment. Because you see, the other part of the Bejeweled problem is:

I totally suck at it.

There it is. An uber-casual game (but that shouldn’t matter I tell myself) kicking my ass. As an added affront to all things that make me ME, this game is subverting my indifference to the achievements that are part of the current game generation.

Normally I think achievements (or trophies on the PS3) are okay, not something I’d go out of my way to obtain unless they were adjacent to my own personal goals in a game, ie in Bayonetta I really want to explore the game world, so the achievement for finding all the Alfheim Portals lines up with that. I’ll make the effort to backtrack and do what is necessary to get that achievement. It isn’t much extra effort. Many achievements are tied to finishing the game or beating a boss or whatever. That’s all good, but really no big deal since that stuff is usually part of successfully playing most games.

Bejeweled is giving me such a hard time that the basic achievements for each game mode (but particularly the standard Classic mode) are now looking like badges of honor that I really need to claim to justify the time I’ve spent. And I have been blown away by how utterly I fail to even get close.

This has made me re-assess a few things about myself, puzzles, and puzzle games in general. Trying to discover what made this game so difficult for me is leading, inexorably it seems, to the conclusion:

I may be shitty at all sorts of strategic/thinking person’s pursuits.

Now this particular revelation may not seem like much of a big deal. So what, yeah?

The big deal is that I always kind of assumed… for all of my not-inconsiderable years… that I was smart enough or clever enough to just be ‘naturally good’ at puzzle games or strategic thinking stuff all around. The full assumption is like this; puzzles and strategic pursuits (chess, RTS video games, etc) are in the ‘realm of the intelligent’ and that one’s ability to ‘solve’ these sorts of things is directly proportionate to one’s intelligence. The smarter you are, the easier puzzles and brainy pursuits as a whole should be.

Now objectively that may not actually be true. I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent people who are shite at puzzles or certain strategy/cerebral pastimes. But for me, and the type of intelligence I’ve prided myself on having, this correlation has always been assumed… even if mostly subconsciously.

While I don’t think I lord it over people and I do TRY to be well-rounded and well-grounded enough not to come off as some elite intellectual tit, I still take a certain pride in my education, my desire to continue to learn, my ability rapidly assimilate and retain information and my logical approach to problem solving. It is what has allowed me to do well most any place I’ve been employed of course, and it is what allows me to traverse a lot of different fanboy arenas, material from which frequently surfaces here on this ‘blog.

So it might not be accurate, but it has always SEEMED, that with that sort of brain thinky type games should be (generally) a snap, or at least a modicum of ability would be natural. Now that I’ve discovered I may be crap at this sort of pursuit, it is making me call into question just how smart I am REALLY.

Have I overestimated myself? Am I guilty of pride and arrogance over my own smarts? For years and years?

There wouldn’t be quite this deep a personal examination over just the one casual puzzle game, Bejeweled 2. But in asking myself the question ‘why is this so hard?’ after a particularly grueling session of having my ass handed to me, I was trying to think up similar instances where I DID perform to expectations, I started to realize there may not be any. Or very few.

Through my kid and teen years I tried my hand at go, shogi, chess, on-paper puzzle games (crosswords, word searches, etc). Remembering back, I think I’m realizing I was never good at any of it. I have always played, losing or failing to finish most of the time, but always moving on with the dismissive thought ‘well, I could win if I really put my mind to it’. I have since that time just assumed I didn’t make time to practice that stuff because there were so many things to be interested, but that if I HAD practiced, it would’ve been almost record time that I would’ve gotten proficient or competitive. Shit, I LEARN everything else in short order, why would this brainy game stuff be any different?

I don’t think I believe this anymore. I think that on some level, I realized that it was going to be a lot of work to get good at ANY of it, and I justified not putting the effort in by labeling it ‘easily do-able for my big brain’ and moving on. It may not be important in a real sense, but it is rather disturbing to find something you’ve taken for granted about yourself to be fundamentally untrue. Cripes, its taken this long to figure this out? Or rather be honest about it?

In my early adult years, I had a friend who really liked chess. I thought I did too. But looking back on all the times I played and lost (usually badly), and all the many more times I put off having a game with him, I think I liked the IDEA of chess… what it is, a strategy game about a stylized battle with medieval trappings… but I was not keen on how I sucked at it (understandable) but was in denial about how much work I’d have to do to overcome the suckage because obviously if you’re smart there shouldn’t be that much work.

Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe I’m sort of stuck recalling only the incidents in which I failed or ducked, and not remembering times when I did fine. Maybe even performed as expected. I CAN come up with a few successes.

For every success however, it appears there are two or more failures. I got through World of Goo in record time. Portal, no problem either. No hints, no guides, no walkthroughs. But let me boot up Braid, and I’m totally lost. I can’t believe how incredibly obscure this game is to me. And looking about on the internet it seems I’m just about the only one! I’m also working on a color matching puzzle mode on the DS game Magnetica. I’m appalling at it. This game should’ve clued me in that I’d suck at Bejeweled, but I just didn’t ‘get it’ back when I started it. I’ve tried a few Sudoku puzzles. I can do the easy ones no problem, but once I start getting into middle difficulty (of course what constitutes what difficulty is probably widely variable) I get stuck like a dingleberry on a sheepdog.

And I can literally remember thinking ‘enh, I don’t have time for this kid stuff, but I could totally dominate if’n I wanted to.’.

I’ve always wanted to learn shogi. I’ve owned a set for years. But it is so much like chess that deep down I’ve probably avoided it like I have chess. When an XBLA version came up, here was a chance to play this game and learn it without embarrassing myself with real players. Not that there is a surfeit of shogi players where I live. There’s even awesome, detailed tutorials, and CPU players to practice with.

I can’t even get close to beating the level one rube CPU guy.

This discovery about myself isn’t life-changing. Really, it isn’t even as big an event as the existence of this ‘blog entry is making it out to be. Mostly it’s humorous to me. But there is still a mild level of shock, bewilderment, and disappointment at this. There shouldn’t be a lot of stock put in ‘puzzle skills’… but to find out you’ve got nothing where you always assumed there was something… man. Especially if, like me, you were so sure… you had so totally assumed. Its like finding out a bank account doesn’t really have any money in it, and what’s more the firm you assumed was paying a dividend into it really wasn’t!

I think it fair in the cosmic sense that I have to work to be good at these things. There isn’t truly some law or logic to thinking that because one is reasonably intelligent, or educated, or intuitive that you should just naturally be good at anything. I’m certainly not entitled to a natural skill. If asked directly I wouldn’t have said a smart person ‘HAS to’ be good at puzzles. At most I’d say ‘it wouldn’t surprise me’ if a smart person tended to be good at puzzles. But at heart, I’d say I believed the first quote. It isn’t so easy to shake that conviction, if you’ve held it all your life, no matter how untrue.

Failure to stop believing it also leads me to believe maybe I ain’t so damn smart. I don’t think I ever was. Huh.

Postscript:

After my forum confession I was pointed to a site dedicated to acquiring achievements. The site tells you how to win by any means necessary including various forms of cheating or subverting the designers’ intentions.

Now some achievements and the methods expected to get them are stupid. Stupider than stupid. So some fiddling with fairness might be justified. But for someone like me… who cares? I don’t care about right and wrong in getting achievements because I’m not in it to collect the damn things anyway! I think my online buddy’s point was to just let me acquire the damned thing and put Bejeweled 2 behind me, but doing that just isn’t my way. Using underhanded means would just rankle and eat at me. Like I hadn't really gotten the better of the game, and that is the whole point of frustration in the first place. I’d be far more likely to get satisfaction out of taking a game disc outside, breaking it, then setting it on fire. I may not be smarter than the game, but I can still kill it. Who has the power now you little plastic fuck?

I looked at the site anyway. I’m not averse to getting strategy tips and advice on how to be a better player and I knew that for some achievements you just need to be good. Lo and behold, the achievements I wanted were exactly like that. You can’t really fake your way to them.

There was a perversely comforting aspect to the site's comments about the game. They rated the game 9 out of 10 for difficulty in acquiring the achievements in Bejeweled 2. Not only can you not cheat, but the goals set by the designers require a ton of practice, time, and luck to get! Quote: ‘If you are looking for a quick set of points to boost your Gamerscore, look elsewhere.’.

Now I don’t feel quite so much like the grannies and schlubs can do it but I can’t.

THIS

From an article on Yahoo! News this morning:

"In some respects, GenMe seems to want to have their cake and eat it too. That is they want high pay and status but aren't as interested in burning the midnight oil. "Given that GenMe values extrinsic rewards more than Boomers did, the combination of not wanting to work hard but still wanting more money and status verifies the sense of entitlement many have identified among GenMe," researchers write in an article published online this month by the Journal of Management.

The fact that GenMe individuals tend to dislike working overtime while also expecting higher status and compensation at work shows a disconnect between their expectations and reality, one that indicates a sense of overconfidence and even narcissism, said Twenge, who is also an author of "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement" (Free Press, 2009) and "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before" (Free Press, 2007)."


So now there's hard data being collected on young peoples' laziness. Awesome. Whole article here:http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100310/sc_livescience/biggenerationgapsinworkattitudesrevealed

Calling kids these days GenMe is lame though. I'm not sure I like 'millenials' very much, but its better than GenMe. Blech. But the topic is relevant given this 'blogs previous mentions (okay, rants) about entitlement.

Drag Me To Crapville

Wow. Color me amazed at how wrong 'the critics' are about the film Drag Me To Hell.

I rented this thing after reading up and down the 'net about how great this thing was. 'A return to form for Raimi', 'scariest film of the year', 'funny and shocking'... blah blah blah. Almost all the majors, Ebert, Travers, etc lined up with positive things to say about this movie.

A big thumbs down to all of them I say.

After doing the Halloween thing with the kids I was hoping to settle down with a good horror movie for the later part of the evening since I didn't have any plans to go out. I had missed seeing Drag Me To Hell in the theater, and was not happy about that. So for several months it has been my plan to make up for that miss by watching this movie over Halloween. Raimi has been an okay director in my book. I like the Spiderman films just fine, but this was looking to be a return to form of the Evil Dead variety. I should have known this would be more Evil Dead 2, my least favorite, than Evil Dead 1, my most-est favorite.

I went with the unrated version thinking THAT would be Raimi's Evil Dead 1 self really unleashed as opposed to the PG-13 rating that I thought he'd been saddled with to justify the budget that probably went into Drag Me To Hell.

As it turns out the budget was pretty big for a horror film, but small time for Raimi after doing shit like the Spiderman trilogy. He also wasn't reigned in by the PG-13 rating apparently, since he's quoted as not wanting gore to be the draw. That's fine. Gore shouldn't have to be the draw in (all) horror films. Having seen only the unrated version, I can't imagine what was cut since NOTHING about Drag Me To Hell rises to an R level. In fact, apart from a few very cartoony gross-out effects I'm not sure much of this gets to a PG-13 level.

This film has nothing to recommend it. I can't believe it was the horror darling of the critics. The characters are likable but boring apart the different and awful cursing gyspy woman. She was great (and disgusting). Not enough to make a great scream flick. Not one bit of this movie's plot was a surprise. Not one scene was scary. The only thing shocking was how many different ways Raimi could force foreign objects into the heroine's mouth. It went beyond oral fixation. She's eating drool, worms, embalming fluid, a fly, a shawl, everything except, presumably, Raimi's cock since it wouldn't require any auditioning 'extras' to land the lead part. I take that back. It DID take some sort of bravery and fortitude to eat everything Raimi required on film.

What the fuck? What did I miss? I feel like Will Ferrel's character Mugatu in Zoolander. Mugatu laments at the climax that he 'must be taking crazy pills' if everyone else sees talent in Derek Zoolander where he doesn't. 'I invented the piano necktie, Derek! What have you ever done!'

I felt like that watching this movie. I sat there just waiting for the part that everyone found so great. And it never happened. The movie started out fine. Complete with a child, A CHILD, getting pulled down to hell. That made me think 'wow, this movie might pull very few punches'. The first encounter with the gyspy woman is fine too. But the movie never really tries to be anything but sort of blackly humored fantasy movie. Everything is too brightly lit to be atmospheric. Everything is shown right out in the open. There are a few jump-at-you bits, but they are pretty weak since they are boldly foreshadowed. And nothing in the movie is as grim as the very first bit where the kid is pulled down by demons... until the heroine herself is pulled down by demons.

What? Did I just post a spoiler? No. I just saved you the rental fee. Even if everyone else in the world likes this movie, I'm considering this the opening (and likely only) volley in my personal campaign against the film.

Blech.

Hardcore Means You Show Penetration

In any fandom these days it seems like there is some sort of demarcation that separates the ‘true’ fans from the johnny-come-latelys. Y’know that thing that lets old-timers say ‘back when things were good’ or lets fans of any seniority claim elite knowledge because they know about super-obscure such-and-such.

In Japan, the root definition of ‘otaku’ before the West prettied it up was ‘maniac’… as in ‘detail obsessor that needs to get a life’. The Japanese can pursue an area of interest with a single-minded zeal that inhabitants in few other countries can approach. I suspect fat, middle-aged British and American military history collectors can come pretty damn close.

But it you follow discussions and articles on the internet or in periodicals, you can sure find a lot of fans acting like maniacs about their chosen interest (read: passion). There’s a lot of foaming at the mouth about how things ain’t like they used to be, the big companies only put out crap that’s sinking the industry, competition and innovation is being stifled, if you don’t listen to/play/buy X then you are a tasteless fuck and fuck those tasteless fucks anyway.

Here’s what I have to say to all of that: ‘Don’t fall in love with anything that can’t love you back.’.

I have an awful lot of stuff I’m into. Some of it I’m ‘passionate’ about. But y’know what? If they were to stop making, updating, or continuing ANY of it… I might not like it, but I’d survive.

NONE of the issues we have with our interests is worth rising emotionally to a level beyond annoyance. Really. And fans that disagree with you, or heaven forbid contribute money to something you don’t like? Disagree with their choice sure… but why slag on 'em?

‘They aren’t members of MY community motherfucker!’

Right.

The original motivation for this post was for me to get some thoughts out on the whole 'hardcore versus casual' debate in video games. But I realized this argumentative tendency is not exclusive to the gaming community and in fact is typical of any organized fandom. And for what? Is any of this shit really that important? I was going to get into some crap about how we should be open-minded, or people’s definition of good, quality, or fun is different, or how the voices of minority jerks tend to drown out the majority of level-headed people. True as all of that might be, it ultimately doesn’t matter.

Music is fun. Video games are fun. Movies, and books, and anime, and militaria, and all that stuff is fun. Or it should be. I think we get so heated or obsessive as fans that we lose sight of the fun part. But I guess bitching about tasteless fucks is fun too. Or it must be to a lot of people anyway. When you find that little corner of interest you feel you can call your own you get pretty defensive… or offensive. Even if no one is really attacking you. Even if the companies really don’t have it in for you.

Music might be a little different. Because music reaches a little deeper and can affect outlook, dress, attitudes, and a host of other things on a more fundamental level than other interests. It is possible for other pastimes to have that effect, literature and manga/anime come to mind, but with music it is common for one’s lifestyle to be thematically tied. This has also led to very real persecution. If you wear another music-influenced lifestyle openly into a deeply redneck bar you could have a few problems before you find your way out again. A music fan might get a pass on feeling bent towards certain other subcultures… but they still have no excuse for assholery towards fellow genre citizens. Not known for their subtlety most of the time, metalheads (my most closely-identified musical affiliation) are a real collision of solidarity and ‘you listen to those faggots?’.

I often find myself getting really interested in something only to find it go mainstream soon after. It is kind of a joke among friends of mine actually. Like I’m a barometer for the next big thing. But I’m also a supporter of stuff that flares up into popularity and then dies out. And I’m okay with that. Whatever happens with video games, or kaiju films, or manga, and all that stuff, I STILL have the things that made me a fan in the first place. In the case of some things like music or video games I’ll never own it all. Never ‘complete’ the collection. Even if these things stopped getting made this very second. And no one can take my interest away from me. I might grow out of something… or give up on it. That’s up to me. Arguably, Sony ‘fanboys’ may have helped kill of my beloved Sega consoles, but I can still play those consoles. I can buy more games for them. Nothing changes the fact that, for me, they are great machines.

On a gaming forum, I asked for some definitions of ‘hardcore’ versus ‘casual’. The battle between these two extremes has permeated message boards, magazines, conversation… all levels of video game discourse. I can’t pick up a gaming periodical that doesn’t have some mention of this issue. It seems to mostly center around the Nintendo wii and DSi and the manufacturer’s strategy of really reaching beyond the dependable core game audience. The fear is that all this catering to the so-called casual gamer is diluting the resources needed for companies to continue to produce the games ‘true’ gamers really want. There was some good points made about how the definition of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ have probably changed in common usage, and whether people on said forum actually self-identify as ‘hardcore’ themselves. Ironically, as I’ve found in discussions on music or lifestyle or tabletop wargaming, or any fandom, most discussers eschew labels’themselves or FOR themselves, but don’t actually have too much of a problem applying them to other people… usually toward the negative if their ire has been raised.

And that brings me around to my real main point again. I guess I’m at a loss as to why our ire does get raised most of the time. I mean, if someone personally insults you, fair enough. But whether Sony is out to screw you with the PSPgo and its new software system… what does it matter? Don’t buy it! Your world won’t end!

I remember reading on some Nintendo site a while back: ‘its like I’ve always said, Nintendo just wants your money, and they’ll do what they have to to screw you’.

Like you’ve ALWAYS said? How much fucking mind time do you spend contemplating Nintendo and its corporate ways? Newsflash! Nintendo and all other companies that SELL something are out to make money. Sometimes they do it in a ‘good way’ and sometimes the do it in a ‘bad way’. It is subjective at any give time when a marketing move is good or bad. The beauty of our consumer society is that you can vote with your dollar. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. Particularly on these elective entertainment ‘fanboy’ pursuits. If your geek object fades away into obscurity because it just isn’t marketable to the legion of tasteless fucks, you will live. I'd like to assume that 'like I've always said' is hyperbole on the part of the writer, but you still have to wonder just how many times they have actually come 'round to that topic, and if it is just as cathartic now as the first time they typed it?

I spent a lot of years working for Games Workshop, a magnet for nerds and fanboys feeling betrayed by marketing decisions. My time there really gave me an appreciation for what company staff really feel and go through when they have to deal with rabid fandom. I will never say a bad word about my time with GW. I loved it there, and I still love the company and the people I worked with. How often will you read THAT on the internet, GW gamers? You don’t really know what the hell is going on inside a company to bring it to the decisions in makes. While I worked there you wouldn't believe the 'truth' I heard from gamers supposedly in-the-know about what my own company was doing. They'd walk up to me at conventions and say 'is the reason you changed the models for blah-blah army because the sculptor has a heroin habit? That's what GW staffer 'X' told me!'. WTF NERD?!

Not all the decisions will be good ones, but seeing a place have to pay its employees, provide insurance, ensure safety, stay in budget, satisfy customer service, etc etc. can really open your eyes.

I don’t actually think there is anything wrong with geeking out over stuff. Or making your pastimes important. If you don’t let it rule your whole life, obsessing over the ephemera of such-and-such can be fun. And a real social rallying point… or a social disaster depending on how you handle it. Context people. Not everyone wants to know the details of your 42nd level monk/thief. But these things don’t REALLY matter. Not next to the loss of life in a terrorist bombing, or a child being diagnosed with cancer. Now if someone goes on a message board for supporting cancer victims and says ‘fuck malignant lymphoma’ I am not going to say a word.

This whole ‘blog is about being hardcore about this thing or that. I’ve spewed out a lot of words here. But I’m the last person in the world who’d say any of it is actually important. My perspective isn’t the last word, but gaining some kind of realistic perspective should probably be the goal of anyone who has spent time in a flame war over a video game or feels betrayed by a faceless corporation.

Uh, assuming you didn’t just get fired from there that is. THAT'S important and you might have a case for slagging then.

If whatever you love sells out and gets all shitty. Move on. Make note of it wherever you have to, to whomever you feel, but try not to waste a lot of energy on it. You might need that energy for when your Mom dies in a car accident tomorrow.