1. Quests are difficult. Any quest that isn’t difficult should not be in a narrative, without exception. And no mission can ever be easier than the missions that came before it.

2. Wide is good only if it is deep. Fallout 3 is a sprawling post-apocalyptic universe that you explore and engage with in thousands of different ways. This is good.

2a. Fallout 3 has one of the most striking sequences i’ve ever seen — when you are creating your character, the first shot of the game is you, as an infant, rising up from between your mother’s legs. It’s not graphic (as in, they don’t show any blood or any biological details) but it is a really unsettling position to be in, when you realize that you are literally a baby. Your parents name you, and you are prompted to type in the name for your character. Your father, holding you, wonders what kind of man you’ll be — and that prompts a series of dialogs about your character traits (physical appearance, various skills, etc., all very much within RPG conventions.) The first few “chapters” of the game, your perspective literally rises from baby to young man (or woman, you could pick either gender.) This approach introduces the gamer to the world and the characters in an organic, visually striking way.

3. I haven’t been overly impressed with the actual written dialog in FALLOUT, and the voice acting has been of various quality — but there is a shit ton of dialog in the game, with deep menus full of responses — each response working from different basic character traits. And how you treat people and interact with them dramatically affects who tells who which bit of information and how. You can also get yourself shot at. As I learned today. So, I’m really impressed with this mechanic — not just that you can pick what answer to say, but that the ramifications seem real. The gamer actually has to make choices of emotion and attitude.

4. The worlds in both games are beautifully rendered, and they serve the gameplay. The East Coast, post-nuke wastelands of FALLOUT are harsh and stark and washed-out. My character has just stopped in a town called Megaton — a place where the town plaza is an undetonated nuclear friggin bomb! My geiger counter device starting buzzing as i approached the town square! SO. cool. Now, I can try to deactivate the bomb, and maybe make new allies, or I can leave them to fend for themselves. Who knows how that will affect the overall arc of the game?

4a. The BIOSHOCK world… what can I say? It’s like a Tarkofsky film with the visceral intensity of ALIEN and the production design of BLADE RUNNER. It’s like an art deco, intellectual sci-fi horror noir, that, oh yeah, takes place at the bottom of the freaking Atlantic Ocean. So you look to the left, and you’re looking at schools of fish floating by as you use this giant drill to carve up drug-addled mutant bad guys. The more I play of this game (and the first), the more convinced I become of its genius.

4b. The world of BIOSHOCK 2 — the literal buildings and levels — look better than any sci-fi movie i have seen recently, period. The character designs are a terrifying blend of human and monster — the common “splicers” look like souped-up meth junkies.Really frightening.

4c. Sound design. Critical. Video games are audiovisual, like movies. It’s not just about the ambiguous word “atmosphere.” It’s about building a world that hooks the gamer (viewer) and refuses to let go.

5. In games, if the control scheme sucks, the gameplay isn’t fun, so the story will go unplayed. But, on the other hand, if the world of the action is uninteresting and uninspired — boring, visually unattractive, with poorly thought out levels and quests — then a great control scheme has limited value. Why would a gamer play a game that doesn’t engage their interests? So, you need the world and the control scheme to work together to build on each other. In BIOSHOCK, the whole idea of being able to change genetic plasmids is 1) an easily playable concept, 2) that forces the player to make difficult tactical observations and decisions in the heat of battle (interactivity) mid-game and 3) is completely embedded in every element of the story, the world, the characters, every villain from the boss battles to the lowest of the low. Simple, beautiful design.

(Obviously, if you’re making a racing game, this stuff doesn’t apply at all. A racing game needs a control scheme, amazing visuals, great sound, and pitch-perfect multiplayer.)

6. As far as the BIOSHOCK strategy guide goes, well, first, I’ll probably need it to help me win the game. I like playing games, but I am not necessarily that great at them. But, that aside, it’s worth reading because it goes into explicit detail about all the levels, weapons, the fiction and rules of the world — it’s like an X-ray view of the game’s blueprints. It’s sort of a development document or a “bible,” I guess. Anyway, it’s also got some cool graphic designs/art in it.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of these two titles, but I am reminded of another uninformed quote from screenwriting “guru” Robert McKee — he said that video games cannot be art.

Fail, fail, fail.

1) A one-eyed, omnipotent computer malfunctions and kills all crew members but one during a mission to Jupiter to explore the origins of aBig Dumb Object. The surviving astronaut must unplug the omnipotent machine — or he, too, will die! (monster movie)

2) An aging gang of brutal bandits winds up for one last score before riding into a blood-soaked sunset. (hardboiled crime fiction/westerns)

3) A man wakes up in bed and finds that he has been transformed into a cockroach! (monster movie/horror)

4) A down-on-his luck Vietnam vet stumbles on a million dollars — and an omnipotent hitman. (noir/crime)

The films are: 1) 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY; 2) THE WILD BUNCH; 3) THE METAMORPHOSIS (ok, not a movie, whoops); and 4) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I haven’t counted how many awards and critical plaudits they’ve won between them, but this list is pretty solid when it comes to a list of films that snobs and elitists love. (I am a snob and an elitist, so I know. And they’re also amazing movies that everyone should see before they die.)

Tackling Kafka first.

What to make of  THE METAMORPHOSIS? It’s written as a nightmare of alienation and very existential, intellectual problems. This is a very European thing to do, and I would not say the novel is written in a “monster movie” vein. That said, I think there are a number of similarities between that work and, say, David Cronenberg’s THE FLY, which is, unashamedly, a genre film (and By God is it a great one.) What does this mean? I don’t know. I’ve been wrestling with this.

**And continuing with Kafka– have a look at THE TRIAL, which is another of my favorite books (and is a nearly pitch-perfect film by Orson Welles.) Lo and behold — this surrealist, cerebral, intellectual, Dada-like absurdist nightmare is, in fact, a run-of-the-mill courtroom procedural, where the lawyers and the law are the antagonist, and the guilty party is trying desperately to prove his innocence. We’ve seen this story before.

Again, I’m not going to claim, for either TRIAL or METAMORPHOSIS, that Kafka was trying to produce genre fiction — I don’t know either way. But it must mean something that his very dense, heady, intellectual, critically acclaimed work can be described in very simple, straightforward terms.

Turning to SPACE ODYSSEY.

Now this is a film that draws a wide variety of reactions. I’ve heard “nothing happens, this sucks, it’s boring”; I’ve heard “Kubrick is cold and hates people and there is no God”; I’ve heard “this is a life-changing religious experience”; and I’ve heard “look at all the pretty colors whoaaaa.” SPACE ODYSSEY seems to defy any easy explanation of its themes and symbols and metaphors.

Yet when expressed as premise No. 1, it could just as easily be a B-grade horror film or sci-fi genre nothing. But it’s not– it is high art at its highest.

Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH is one of a handful of films that basically transformed how Hollywood puts violence on screen. The story is one of the most relentlessly cynical and bleak plots I have ever personally come across. I’ve heard it’s a metaphor for America and Vietnam and the death of the Myth of the West. I mean, I’ve seen a wide variety of very intellectual analyses of this film.

As it happens, THE WILD BUNCH is born out of the blood-and-thunder tradition of adventure stories that were around for boys and were printed on cheap paper and bought for coins. In fact, *all* Westerns are born out of that tradition, especially the revisionist westerns which inverted mythology so well because they knew the mythology so well. So, while THE WILD BUNCH was a radical, revolutionary film, there is a pulp “genre” novel at its heart.

I heard the Coen brothers say something similar about NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN — that one of their favorite things about the book was the realization that Cormac McCarthy was both lulling you into  a genre while ripping those conventions out from under you. I’ll have to track down that YouTube video.

There must be some reason that a great piece of art can also be expressed as a “B” or “genre” premise. There is a clear story. There is an obvious central conflict without an obvious solution. There is an antagonist that is powerful. The stakes are high. This makes for good drama.

So, here is what I have concluded:

1) Rules produce great art. Genre produces great art.

2) There is no such thing as genre fiction because all fiction is genre fiction and great writers know this and know genres and use that knowledge to produce work that, in fact, transcends the negative stereotypes of genre work.

3) Apparently, I like horror films a lot more than I thought I did.

4) “B” movies might be “bad,” but the difference between a “B” movie and an “A” movie is, often, very slim. Mock with caution.

It looks like this:

A fuzz box is a little square device that goes between a guitar and the amp. On this device, there is a button. You tap it with your foot. Tap! On. Tap! Off. When it’s on, it warps the guitar signal in a, well, radical way: By cutting off the top and bottom of the “waveform,” the fuzz box + guitar combination produces a violently distorted, buzzsaw-like tone.

This sound captured me from first listen.

Sixth grade, 1994: I’m introduced to Nirvana’s Nevermind. “Territorial Pissings” scares the hell out of me. I’m totally unprepared for the volcanic rawness that explodes out of my Walkman.

Summer camp, same year — it’s In Utero, it’s Green Day’s Dookie, it’s Smashing Pumpkins and Siamese Dream; it’s Core and Purple from the Stone Temple Pilots, it’s Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam and Ten;  it’s Alice in Chains’ Dirt, it’s Superunknown, Soundgarden, and this bizarre song called “Black Hole Sun.”

Seventh grade, 1995. I’m sitting in a music class and there’s this cool guy who’s got all the girls wanting to make out with him and stuff, and he’s sitting there playing “Come As You Are.” I think to myself — man, that should be me, that could be me. So I pick up the guitar and learn how to play.

Girls don’t follow. I end up in love with the guitar instead.

(I have four! Inserting shameless plug for Reverend Guitars, the greatest instruments I’ve ever played, especially the Charger 290.)

Beck, Clapton, Hendrix, Iommi, Gilmour, Corgan; The Yardbirds, Cream, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Pearl Jam– hours spent in a trance, being awe-struck by technique and tone and waves of amplified noise, condensed into one word–

Fuzz.

My mission for this blog is to keep a running commentary on things that strike me as interesting. Philosophy, film, music, photography, art generally speaking… anything that catches my interest.