malvasia bianca

I have basically nothing to say about Puzzle Agent 2 HD. It’s like the first Puzzle Agent, which in turn is like a somewhat less charming and noticeably shorter Professor Layton: a strong lineage, and a pleasant way to have spent five hours or so, but not something which has shaped my thinking in any particular way.

I really liked the original Ascension, but I got tired of its first expansion a lot more quickly. I assumed the second thing would happen with its second expansion, Storm of Souls, but I think I may have played the new iteration almost as much as the original.

It introduces two new mechanics: certain monsters turn into cards you can play later for a one-time benefit, and most of the time there’s an active event which slightly modifies the current game and gives you a changing benefit for defeating a constantly available three-point monster. I won’t say that I wish either of these mechanisms had been in the original game—the original game’s purity is a real advantage—but they gave me something new to think about in the game, expanding my search space in an interesting way.

The new cards also worked well for me. At first, I was somewhat nonplussed by the new Mechana constructs—I found them hard to get to work together. I did figure out how to get them to work together eventually, though, and the increased difficulty of that is a good thing, because if you could load up on Mechana constructs in the earlier iterations, you were fairly unstoppable. The new Lifebound heroes worked well, enough so that I would at least consider whether I wanted to focus on a Lifebound strategy if I saw multiple Lifebound cards on the board (and, when you could pull it off, a Lifebound strategy would really dominate); and a couple of the new constructs turned into interesting strategies of their own if you could grab them early. The upshot was that I felt I had more choices both for my initial strategy and for my tactics as the game progressed; happiness all around.

I’ve been walking to work ever since I started working at Playdom three years ago. In fact, that’s part of why I took that job: I saw Steve Meretsky on a panel at GDC 2009, looked up the web page for the company he was working at, and found that it was located a little more than a mile away from my house. I wasn’t looking for a job right then, but when a recruiter gave me a call a few months later and mentioned Playdom, I thought I should give them a try.

Walking was a change for me: though I’d walked a fair amount when living in Cambridge/Somerville, I took the bus to work when I first moved to the Bay Area. (Generally reading books in the process.) When I left Stanford, though, that wasn’t an option, so I had to drive to work at Kealia; I switched my commute entertainment over to going through my CD collection. Sun bought Kealia, and eventually my group had to move to Sun’s Dumbarton Bridge campus; that wasn’t any easier to get to through public transportation, so I kept on driving.

At some point during my Sun years, I started jogging a few evenings a week: my doctor suggested I should take care of myself better, and I had to admit that sitting in a chair all day probably wasn’t the best idea. Which gave me still more time to listen to music; at some point, though, I made it through my CD collection (which was large but finite), and switched over to podcasts. Music podcasts, programming podcasts, literary podcasts, video game podcasts; the most important, though, was JapanesePod101, whose back episodes I steadily worked my way through. I didn’t listen to that one so much when I was driving—I needed to be able to stop to pay attention to it and to read through the notes—but it was my favorite when I was jogging, or when I was grocery shopping. (When we first moved out here, Liesl and I always shopped together, and then Miranda joined us when she came on the scene; these days, though, I do that myself, though the staff at the Milk Pail still regularly asks about Miranda.)

When I started working at Playdom, I could have continued driving, turning my commute from a 20-minute commute into a 5-minute one. But that would have cut down on my podcast listening time; I didn’t want that, and driving such a short distance didn’t feel right to me. So I walked instead. Though not all of my podcast time was so sacrosanct: I decided that forty minutes of walking five days a week was a reasonable amonut of exercise, and I’d never really enjoyed jogging, so I gradually let that slide. (It helped that I’d caught up with my backlog of JapanesePod101 episodes by then.)

Disney bought Playdom, I started looking for other jobs. Generally jobs that didn’t require driving, though several would have required taking the train: in fact, I came very close to accepting a job located near the Caltrain terminus in San Francisco. But I was very happy to find a job I liked that kept me in downtown Mountain View; the company moved a few months later, but that just turned a 20-minute walk into a 25-minute walk, which was perfectly fine.

About a year ago, two years after I started walking to work, something changed. Circumstances occasionally require me to drive to work, and one week I did that twice. The first day was fine; the second morning, though, I was bouncing off the walls. I ended up going for a 45-minute walk, and I was fine after that: my body had been telling my brain that it was missing something. This wasn’t an isolated experience; these days, I even worry a bit when driving to work one day a week.

It’s not just my body’s attitude to these walks that has changed. A few years ago, I paid a lot of attention to the podcasts I was listening to, in particular making sure that I was focusing on whatever point of Japanese grammar was the focus of that episode. These days, though, my mind wanders a lot more as I walk—sometimes, something I’m listening to will catch my fancy, but if nothing does, that’s perfectly fine.

Though saying that my mind is wandering isn’t quite right, either. I got into a rhythm where my subconscious would be thinking about something, then it would bubble up into my conscious brain while I was walking to and from work and I’d refine what I thought on the matter, then I’d type out and copy edit the results on my blog over the evening, then my subconscious would be free to think about something else. My blog had become an important, external part of my brain; walking had turned into a key tool in unlocking that. Really, while I’m glad that y’all are reading this, and I hope that you derive some amount of pleasure from doing so, my blog’s main purpose is to keep my subconscious from getting stuck.

Which makes situations where that cycle doesn’t work all the more frustrating. I’m fairly open in what I talk about on this blog: these days, if there’s something I’m thinking about that only affects me, I’ll just talk about it here. Great for games; social situations, though, I’m not always so comfortable talking about in public. Which is a pity, because those are often the most interesting situations to think about! And the thorniest to grapple with; I could use help from my external brain to deal with them. Maybe I should keep a private diary for stuff like that; as is, I get stuck thinking about them going to and from work for a week or two, and eventually my brain spins off a few tangentially-related blog posts, gives up, and starts thinking about something else.

This problem seems like it’s been getting worse over the last year. I don’t think that’s true, though: I would imagine that situations that I don’t feel comfortable blogging about have appeared fairly regularly since this blog began. Maybe the difference is that walking helps getting that out of my subconscious and into my conscious mind: so I know I could blog about it, I’m just choosing not to.

Stepping back a bit: my learning is getting interrupted, but it’s getting interrupted at a late enough state that the possibility of learning is at the forefront of my mind. That’s been happening in other contexts, too: situations where the potential for learning is clear, but where my plan for that learning gets blocked.

There, perhaps, my wounds are self-inflicted, and the answer is to go meta. Yes, I have an experiment I’d like to run, I’m just not able to build the consensus that I need to run that experiment. That doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from the situation, however: it’s only a problem if I’m too rigid about the path through which I want the learning to occur. Instead, the fact that I can’t build consensus is itself a learning opportunity; if I can switch my brain over to uncovering what happened there, then that’s great.

Interesting times.

Some articles I ran across while thinking about this:

• Your Desk Is Making You Stupid, by Jessica Stillman.
• The Virtues of Daydreaming, by Jonah Lehrer.
• Is Productivity Killing Your Creativity?, by Jay Fields.
• Keep the channel open, by Nicola Griffith.

I enjoyed Plague Inc., as did Liesl; nice concept (play a disease trying to exterminate the world), pleasant enough to figure out the underlying systems (which is good, since there’s not much else going on), and the different disease types are a good mechanic to let the designers vary the systems. I put several hours into it, a fact about which I have no complaints.

So, of course, I’m going to point out ways in which the game is amateurish. None of these make it a bad game, they’re just ways in which the game feels different from the sorts of console games I usually play.

• The map is just barely larger than the iPad screen: so you scroll around, but that scrolling is pointless.
• Except the scrolling is necessary: the map takes up the entire screen, so some parts of the map are under control objects. (E.g. the pause button.) So I started every game by scrolling to the side a bit so that, if I had to click on an event in Russia, I’d be able to do so.
• The control objects that interfere with interactions with game events are all at the top of the screen. So why not just make the map start half an inch down? Especially because the bottom inch of the map is taken up by the area surrounding the Antarctic, so it doesn’t actually have any countries to click on.
• The map is a real picture of the earth, with only the faintest of lines drawn on it to separate countries. Or rather, to separate groups of countries, because they (sensibly) frequently combined adjacent small countries. The faintness of these lines makes it very hard to tell how many countries there are in a region, or to reliably click on all of those countries to see which are infected.
• You have to click on events to gather DNA. Well, you don’t have to, but you won’t get as much DNA as you don’t. So they’re basically doobers, about which I have mixed feelings: they give you something to do, but they add no interesting decisions to the game, and occasionally you miss them if you turn up the speed of the game.
• I thought I missed them even more often than that, because it wasn’t clear to me if the doober expiration time paused while a popup was on screen. (And popups are typically triggered by events that also lead to doobers.) I think that, actually, the expiration time does pause in that situation, but clicks on doobers while a popup is on screen still register, it’s just that the doober doesn’t disappear until you’ve closed the popup. The result is that I would close the popup, see a doober disappear, and not know if I’d gotten it or not.
• There are seven (six? I don’t have the game open as I’m typing this) disease types available. By far the hardest is the third disease type (Fungus), and the second type is easier than the first; if I were a cynical type, I would think that unusual difficulty curve was a ploy to get people to pay for unlocking all the disease types (which I would actually be okay with, the price is entirely reasonable), but I think it’s more likely that they just didn’t spend much time worrying about balance that way.
• The different disease types don’t, unfortunately, vary the strategy in particularly interesting ways: I ended up adopting the same basic strategy on all of them, with only minor variants.

Don’t get me wrong: I really did enjoy playing the game, I’m quite happy to have bought it. The above flaws are real, I think, but they’re all minor.

What to say about Child of Eden? It’s an awful lot like Rez, which I also had very little to say about. The graphics are better; mostly, that’s good, and leads to a bit more surface to attach thoughts to (e.g. in the game’s pairing of mechanical objects with passion). But there’s nothing like the mystical splendor of Rez‘s fifth level, and the realism in the movie at the start of Child of Eden was jarring. There’s one new gameplay mechanic (a non-lock-on shooting mechanism that’s largely used against projectiles); doesn’t add much, in my view.

The story is a bit more explicit than in Rez; I guess that’s a good thing, but only marginally? And I’m really not sure what to say about the game’s use of the euphemism “purification” for killing your enemies: surely they’re not unaware of the historical contexts in which those concepts have been linked, but if there’s some sort of commentary intended here, it’s buried more deeply than I can see it.

And then there’s the idea that it’s a music game. Which, I’m realizing, really doesn’t work for me. Part of what’s going on there is that the musical style isn’t one that I enjoy; but that’s not all of it. One symptom of the mismatch here are the bonuses you get by locking on to eight enemies and then timing your shot with the music: that’s not something I turned out to be likely to do unconsciously, the music is neither enough in the foreground nor providing enough guidance for me to be playing along with it without realizing. (And, when I do realize, I still don’t particularly want to play along with it!)

I’m still glad the game exists, I’m glad to have played it. But there’s something that I would like to be able to find in Child of Eden that I’m having a hard time seeing.

I’ve been going through the songs in Rock Band 3 on Expert Pro Guitar for seven months now; it’s been an interesting journey. At the start of that period, I could feel my way around a guitar and play basic chords, but I wasn’t nearly as comfortable as I’d like; to be honest, that’s arguably still a correct description, just from a position where my standards have raised significantly!

I wasn’t sure exactly how I would approach the songs on Expert—maybe I’d find a few to dive into, really mastering them, and skip the rest? The problem with that is that it’s hard to know which ones to dive into without giving them a try, so I’ve been going through all the songs in order of difficulty. And I actually bought Pro Guitar upgrades for a bunch of DLC, so I probably have a good thirty or forty songs that aren’t on disc: lots of songs to go through. (117, I find, as I turn on my console.)

The first phase of my Expert playthrough, going through Tier 0 and Tier 1, was solidifying my basic skills. I Love Rock and Roll and I Wanna Be Sedated were all about power chords. (Well, mostly about power chords: the former also was tremolo practice, and there’s a solo that I should sit down and work on at some point.) Yoshimi was about strumming and getting confident playing an F chord: a song that I had an embarrassing amount of difficulty with when I saw it on Hard, but which is much easier now. (From the DLC, Have You Ever Seen the Rain had the same benefits.) Outer Space was barre chord practice: my hand hurt a lot the first time I played it! There were other songs, but those ones stuck out to me as focusing on basic techniques that I really wanted to master; so I got into a pattern where I would start each session playing through those five before trying the next batch of new songs, and I’d frequently play through snippets of them (e.g. Yoshimi’s basic chord progression) outside of game when I got home from work.

After going through each new song muted a few times, I’d also try it plugged in. That was occasionally eye-opening, more frequently humbling, but almost always a lot of fun. And when returning to my old favorites at the start of each session, I’d always play them plugged in: much more important to hear what I’m doing than to get a good score in game.

I kept on expecting to run into a brick wall, but the game continued its remarkable streak of preparing me excellently for the next song through the previous songs that I’d learned, rarely forcing me to do too much new at once. So I made it from Tier 0 to Tier 1 to Tier 2; and, when I hit Tier 3, much to my surprise, I found that the songs were noticeably more complicated but I was keeping up and in fact enjoying them more than I’d enjoyed the easier songs. So my practice songs shifted: Working for the Weekend; More than a Feeling; Subdivisions; Viva La Resistance; Something Bigger, Something Brighter; Combat Baby; Good Girl. All Tier 3/4; all super fun to play (the Pro Guitar DLC really is great), and also all instructive. By now, I was working on picking out arpeggiated sequences and on slightly less basic chords and chord progressions; I have no idea how many times I’ve picked out the start of More Than a Feeling (I go through that all the time out of game as well), but it’s a lot.

When I hit Tier 4, finally the wall started to appear. I got three stars on all of the on-disc content at that level (though I failed to do that on one piece of Tier 4 DLC), but it was dicey at times. Last weekend was my first attempt at Tier 5, and I can already tell that that’s going to be a real challenge, that I’m not going to manage three stars everywhere there. Even the chordal bits are significantly harder, but the solos are also getting longer and more flamboyant, and I’m not prepared for that at all.

So I’m running up against my limits. But, as the game has made abundantly clear, one’s limits change with practice; the difference is that I no longer have an obvious next step handed to me by the game, so I have to think about what I should work on next. (What I need to learn, what I enjoy.) Some thoughts:

• My foundation is a lot more solid than it once was, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. So I don’t want to let up on those basic chords: I need my hand to just jump to the right place.
• My recent work on playing through arpeggiated bits has paid off: my right hand is significantly more agile than it was six months ago. But it’s still got a long, long way to go before I’m really comfortable skipping from string to string.
• Solos frighten me; I have to deal with that. My scales need to be rock solid, I need to be a lot better at translating from my ears to my fingers (I’m still much much better at both of those aspects of playing on a violin than on a guitar, even though my only violin experience was three years of middle-school orchestra almost three decades ago), and there’s lots of work for me to do on flips and trills.
• I need to increase my chord repertoire: the same basic set of ten or so chords stops being enough at some point.

That’s one set of skills that I need to work on: they’re all variants of putting my fingers in the places where the game wants them to be. But, of course, this is music that we’re talking about, so there’s a whole other set of skills: I don’t want to just be playing the right note, I want it to sound good. (Dan Apczynski gave me some very useful tips to that end a week and a half ago.) Most of that is being more nuanced in what I do with my hands, but I also need to learn the variety of sounds tat the instrument is capable of: I’ve spent almost no time trying out different settings on my amp, I don’t have any pedals. I was thinking that I might want to buy a better guitar soon, but now I’m planning to hold off: I’m not sure yet I can tell a good guitar apart from a bad guitar yet.

And then there are aspects of my background as somebody with classical training on keyboard instruments that Rock Band 3 reinforces but that make me a bad rock guitarist. I’m used to a basic expectation when approaching a piece of music that the desired set of keys to be playing at any given time is fixed; on a guitar, though, you have options for which string to play a given note on, and there are many chord variants to choose from in a given situation. So, while I still have a lot to learn from trying to follow the game’s orders, I need to start becoming open to options beyond that.

I’ll keep on going for a bit longer in Tier 5, but I’m not going to fight the brick wall when I hit it; and, when I hit that wall, I’m going to start over again on the easiest songs. This time, though, I’m really going to try to be selective about what songs I play; and my goal isn’t going to be to get three stars on them, my goal is going to be to really learn them. To get them sounding as good as possible when plugged in; to experiment with the different amp settings to see which works best for which song (or for which parts of each song, I should get a pedal or two to let me change sounds mid-song); to learn some basic solos and work up from there; to memorize full songs (and probably to sing along with them more once I get comfortable with them); and to start experimenting with how to perform songs once I’ve memorized them.

That’s a lot to work on; probably too much for me to work on at once, and, honestly, I like playing through lots of different songs, I’m not sure how well I’ll maintain my resolve to focus on individual songs. I’ll do a better job, though; maybe a more realistic match to my temperament is one new song a week plus a fair amount of review? I can easily imagine spending a year going through songs that way; hopefully, by the end of that year, I’ll be a lot better at guitar and be a lot more comfortable at learning without the game’s crutch.

Fun times; rewarding times. I continue to be grateful to Harmonix both for having created the game and for continuing to support it through DLC.

In the media I interact with, there’s a lot of killing. In games, it’s especially prominent, because killing is frequently used as a core mechanic for non-narrative reasons. (That’s not the only reason for the prominence of killing in games, of course: the desire of many games to appeal to an extremely skewed view of adolescent males feeds into this as well.) But it’s there in movies, in books, in television as well: sometimes with real narrative impact, more often just as part of the scenery.

The main television show that I’m watching now is the second Avatar series, Legend of Korra. I’m not sure, but I don’t think there’s been a single death so far in the series; of course, it’s designed to include children in its audience, so it’s not surprising that death isn’t a particularly prominent event, but in the original series, deaths certainly occurred, albeit generally presented in an antiseptic fashion.

What does happen in Legend of Korra is that characters have their power to bend removed from them. This only happened once (I believe) in the original series; if you want, you could see that as a response to the need to focus on the defeat of the key enemy in the series without wanting to focus on death, but you could also see it as a statement that killing is wrong, as a humane alternative to the death penalty even in response to the most serious of crimes.

In Korra, however, removal of bending takes on a rather different nature. It’s much more frequent, and it’s done by a character who is marked as evil instead of a character who is marked as good. So it’s not a sign of compassion: it’s a desire to terrorize.

But what’s interesting to me is the way that I experience removal of bending differently from death. Considered in the abstract, removing bending is not nearly as bad: the victim still lives on, and unlike a character who is physically maimed, the victim is a priori no worse off than most of the people who live in that world. (As the show makes a point of saying!) But I shuddered when I saw it happen to side characters whom I’d never seen before and will never see again, I was afraid whenever Korra and her companions were threatened with it, and when it happened to somebody I cared about in the episode I watched most recently (the next-to-last episode of season one), I, well, wow.

What’s going on there? Part of it is the lack of finality. Killing somebody is horrible, no question, and I would be devastated if to somebody dear to me were killed. But if I were killed, I wouldn’t be around to be devastated, and if it happened to somebody more distant to me, their absence would mean that I wasn’t regularly confronted by the reality of the situation. Whereas if somebody suffers a horror and are still present, then they’re a constant reminder of that horror, forcing you to empathize not just with their loved ones but with them.

And empathy plays at the situation in another way. If I were to list aspects of myself that I care about, that make me me, there wouldn’t be a single physical characteristic on that list, they’d all be mental characteristics. I can’t hurl fireballs at you with the powers of my mind, but I’m pretty damn good at math and am a much better programmer than most. I won’t say that those abilities are particularly important or good in any moral sense, and I don’t think they’re why, for example, Liesl loves me, but still: if they went away, I would have quite a bit of readjustment to do.

Maybe I like the wrong sort of art, but I don’t see nearly as many examples of this sort of empathy for the loss suffered by survivors of violence in that art. It’s there sometimes (the threat is certainly present in Among Others), but too often when it shows up, it turns out in a way that I don’t find as effective. In games, loss of powers occasionally shows up as a mechanic, but it’s always in a context where that loss is marked as temporary: see Metroid Prime, for example. In many art forms, rape is one canonical form of violence that leaves survivors; that’s tied up with so many other aspects of our society that it’s not going to have the same sort of abstract power that removing bending in Korra does. Of course, in the strongest art, that leads to it being significantly more powerful, but, a lot of the time, it seems to me to be used in ways that are rather less respectful of the reality of that violence towards its victims.

I do wonder if the verbal association between bending and being bent is intentional. Is Korra a parable against the evils of the gay cure charlatans? A statement of how fundamental our sexuality is to us? A celebration of how fabulous humanity can be? A covert conservative statement of fear against gay power? Probably not…

I’m curious where Korra will go with this. Will it decide that it’s gone too far, and end up restoring everybody’s bending power? Will it refuse to compromise, and dwell on the horrors of having a key part of your self taken away, turning that into a parable of the evils of absolute power, even if those powers are ones we associate with the avatar? Will it take a middle route, turning it into a narrative of strength and redemption without restoring powers? (I can’t imagine the character whose bending was removed in that most recent episode responding by wallowing in self-pity, or indeed not remaining a force of power.)

And yeah, the abstract nature of the violence committed does remove some of the potential power of the artistic statement here. But still: it’s a children’s television show, there’s only so far it can go in confronting you with horror! (Hmm, though Grave of the Fireflies gives lie to that.) And, given that constraint, I’m very impressed with what they’ve done: making you face real issues, react with real feelings, and doing that not just in this context but in many others.

I was really excited to play Ni No Kuni DS for three reasons: 1) Studio Ghibli; 2) the book; 3) to improve my Japanese. And, when I started, I was happy for all reasons: the packaging was better than anything I’ve seen in decades, the Japanese in the manual and the game was at a level where I could figure out most of it without having to pull out a dictionary too often, and the visuals in the opening scenes were pure Ghibli.

They weren’t the only Ghibli touches, either: the initial music, while no where near as good as the best Ghibli music, did have that feel at times, as did the initial setup in the plot. Though the plot was a warning sign: one specific way in which the game reminded me of Ghibli was getting parents out of the way right in the start. And they did that in a particularly callous way: the father wasn’t there to begin with, and the mother died saving her son (the main character) right at the start. (With the hope of resurrection, giving her an extra utilitarian role as a motivator.) And I’m not comfortable with that instrumental use of women solely to provide motivation for the hero; Ghibli has more than enough of my respect (and more than enough fondness for female characters, the fact that the hero is male instead of female is unusual) for that not to be a deal breaker, but I also think that Ghibli at its best would have handled that plot aspect better.

Still: the visuals were pure Ghibli. And I was in love with the game for the first couple of hours: I felt like I was exploring the inside of a Ghibli movie. It wasn’t just the Ghibli aspects that I liked, either: I liked pulling out the book to figure out how to cast a spell, the dual world conceit worked well, and I hoped that the need to cast magic outside of battle was a sign that the game might have a Golden Sun feel.

After a couple of hours, I hit my first dungeon and started having to fight. It wasn’t too bad, though; standard JRPG stuff, but the battles were over quickly. Or rather, standard JRPG stuff with a bit of Pokemon influence: there are creatures called Imagines that help you, and while I’d only seen one or two at that point, the book made it clear that there were dozens more to come.

Then I hit the first city. (Or rather, the first city in the second world, the magical world.) That I enjoyed as well: another well-done world to explore, a requirement to go back to the first world to accomplish a task, a mechanic about restoring parts of people’s psyche. All good stuff. Yes, there were also people with random tasks to accomplish, and another dungeon to go to, but still, on the balance I was quite enjoying myself.

Unfortunately, the balance shifted. I spent less time in cities, more time in dungeons, and more time in the overworld; the latter two had respawning wandering monsters, which I do not enjoy at all. (Fortunately, they are visible, at least as long as you’re not traveling by ship.) The dungeons were okay, but not great; the cities started to be more routine, with more time spent on routine quests and less time traveling back to the first world or meeting new characters. (Some of that was probably my fault, too: I wasn’t spending as much time puzzling out the language by this point as I had been at the start of the game. But I’m fairly confident that the game’s plot isn’t deathless.)

We got a few more mechanics, but they weren’t ones I enjoyed: one mechanic was a way to capture wandering monsters (because what I really want out of RPGs is not to have to choose three of my eight party members to be active, I instead want to choose three out of a hundred?), and another was an item crafting mechanism. Great if you’re a completionist; not great if you’re, well, a Ghibli fan. Also, my hopes of a Golden Sun influence were dashed: you very rarely had opportunities to use magic outside of battle/healing, and in fact those opportunities were rare enough that I didn’t think of using magic when it might have been helpful.

I stuck with the game for more than twenty-five hours. But stopping was absolutely the right move: that session lasted for about an hour and a half, I’d only spent a couple of minutes of it reading Japanese, maybe five minutes enjoying thinking about a dungeon, and the rest either fighting battles that I didn’t enjoy or trying to avoid those same battles. Not good.

I’m sure that, if the game had been in English, I would have enjoyed it somewhat more; my guess is that I would have finished it, though I could be wrong about that, and I wouldn’t have felt great about finishing it. But for those of you looking for a Ghibli movie in game form: this is not that game, though it will seem like it at the start. And, to the extent that it’s like a Ghibli movie, it’s not like a good one: the movie that it reminds me most of is The Cat Returns, except without the wonderful theme song. I’m glad I bought it; I’m glad I stopped playing it; and I’m not planning to play the PS3 version when it comes out in the U.S.

I don’t think my blogging norms really require me to blog about Rez HD: it’s a remake of a game I’ve played before, and a remake that doesn’t stray from the original as far as I can remember. So I’m really replaying a game, not playing a game for the first time, and as such it doesn’t inherently require comment. Still, it’s been a while since I played the original, long enough ago that I didn’t blog about it here, so a post wouldn’t be out of place.

Though it would be nice if I had something to say about the game! And the truth is: I don’t. I enjoyed playing it, I’m glad to have replayed it, and I’m glad that it exists purely because of how different it is from almost every other game out there. If I were trying to write a review, I would find something descriptive to say, but that’s not my goal in blogging; and the game’s distinctive qualities don’t fit into analytical categories that I’m at all comfortable with.

Should I talk about the fifth level, perhaps? The evolutionary narrative that it brings out? The way that evolutionary narrative positions the imagery from the first four levels as the culmination of a transhumanist narrative? (Or perhaps rather: flags that transhumanist imagery as explicitly posthumanist.) How does the repeated Dune quote fit into that viewpoint, if at all? (I would be tempted to reread that book to see, but I think I’ve read it enough times that doing so again wouldn’t make anything about the game particularly obvious.) Are the enemies in the last level more likely to be modeled on organic shapes than enemies in the previous levels? Are there worms in the previous levels? I don’t think there’s anything non-superficial going on with the worms, but I could be wrong.

And then there’s the final boss fight. A fight that I don’t feel at all comfortable with at the start, when I’m told by somebody afraid that I shouldn’t come closer. But soon enough I’m being asked to help her; and I think I am, but at the end of the credits I learn that she’s still trapped within. If the game were less abstract, I might try to unpack the gender politics there; it’s abstract, enough, though, that I’ll give that a miss beyond acknowledging my discomfort at a couple of different levels. (The way that it ties in to the evolutionary theme also contributes to my willingness to give it a pass, I suppose.)

I don’t want to say that the game is all about the last level; and I like the architectural imagery of all the bosses, I like the vehicular imagery of various of the enemies. Is that the Tron fan in me, or are both pulling on some sort of deeper reservoir? Or maybe it’s not very deep, it’s just that vehicles are a natural way to represent something that’s both artificial and active, buildings are a natural way to represent artificial space.

I dunno. Child of Eden is up next, maybe that game will illuminate this one in retrospect. And I fully support the existence of games that are short, mysterious, and enjoyable.

For a game that impressed me as much as Journey did, I’ve had a surprisingly hard time getting around to writing my wrap-up post for the game. Most of this is because of my Orsay Games post: it said so much that I wanted to say about Journey that I wasn’t sure for a while if there was anything left about the game in my brain. Still, I have my traditions to uphold, so here we are.

Though, before talking about Journey: could I have written that Orsay Games post if I hadn’t just played Journey? And to what extent do I think the ideas there are broadly applicable to a wide spectrum of games? I’m honestly not sure what the answer is to either of those questions. Looking at other games I’ve played recently: Mass Effect 3 gets some of its strength from its episodic nature; but I have a hard time locating the wandering around within either the ship or the Citadel within that analytic framework, and I also have a hard time convincing myself that the game would be stronger with that wandering pruned. Though, comparing it to the other RPG I’ve been going through recently, its pruning is a big part of the reason why I like Mass Effect 3 so much more than Ni No Kuni DS. Rock Band 3 and Ascension strike me as simply different kinds of games that aren’t profitably viewed through that lens. I was going to say the same thing about Jetpack Joyride, but upon reflection maybe it’s a rather good example: a single sufficiently chaotic screenshot of that game gives a rather good idea of what the experience is. And then there’s Rez HD: I would like to say that it’s also a rather good example, but I’m not sure I’m convinced of that—in particular, how do I unify the main part of each level with the boss in that level within the context of a single painting? Hard to say. (Hmm, I guess the answer there is: don’t, just use two paintings for each level instead.)

Maybe I’m being too literal with the idea from that post, though. Is it important that we be able to crystallize each section of a game in the form of a picture, or would a more general form of snapshotting be equally acceptable? My first reaction is that there’s nothing sacred about pictures in that regard; and, while games’ visual nature gives pictures certain advantages, I can imagine a song or a poem capturing the essence of a section of a game. It does bother me, though, that those examples don’t capture the interactive nature of what makes games special. I was going to say that they’re not dynamic in the way that games are, but that’s not the issue: what made the best painting examples work so well is that they were snapshots of a scene that contained dynamics, that contained unfolding of events, within them. But that’s only a certain kind of dynamics, a kind of dynamics most common in narrative games: it’s no coincidence that I’m having a particularly hard time mapping this concept to Ascension, because I can’t imagine a picture that would represent the implicit possibility space in a game that I’ve played a thousand times.

So: Journey. Did I mention yet that I’m having a hard time writing about Journey? Taking another tangential approach to the game, I’ve been playing through all of thatgamecompany‘s games, prompted by a recent VGHVI podcast. (We also did a podcast devoted to Journey.) Journey and Flower have a lot in common: the space of the visual aesthetic choices (though not the details), the episodic nature, the depths of the next-to-last episode followed by the heights of the final episode, the hints at a cyclic structure, the hints at meaning while leaving a fair amount for the player to put together, the inter-episode scenes that leave additional framing questions for the player, the way in which they avoid most aspects of gaminess while leaving one or two traditional game elements in place. Journey feels more composed to me, more precise; in many ways, it feels more powerful to me, but replaying both of them, there’s something about Flower that I’m fonder of. Maybe it’s just that the organic nature of the environment pulls at me in ways that the desert, while beautiful, doesn’t; and while Journey‘s interstitial tapestries give me more to puzzle about, in their own way Flower‘s interstitial city scenes are as beautiful (and perhaps more alive?) than anything else in either game. They’re quite the pair; flOw I don’t have as much to say about, and while lovely in its own way, it doesn’t have a tenth the ambition of the other two.

What certainly does set Journey apart from Flower is its multiplayer. Just considered in isolation, I’m not convinced that I prefer my multiplayer moments in Journey to my single-player moments: I had some truly wonderful shared experiences, but the introvert in me just wanted to be left alone at times to explore. Hmm, though, thinking back on it: wonderful really is the word, in particular the feeling of being mentored I got in my second playthrough and the worries that I had about the pressures of mentoring in my third playthrough. So, to me, what’s important about Journey‘s multiplayer is not so much how it made me feel compared to the single-player experience in Flower: it’s how it made me feel compared to the multiplayer in every other game I’ve ever played. (C.f. Scott Juster’s take on seeing the best in other gamers.) I don’t think I’m up for thinking too hard about exactly what lessons to take from Journey‘s multiplayer; but if I were designing a multiplayer game of my own, I would be taking copious notes, and I hope (though I’m not particularly optimistic) that some bits of the interaction model here will make their presence known in other games in upcoming years.

I bought my PS3 to play Flower; three years later, I have another game to play on the console. Which seems like a bit of a waste of money when I write it like that; but those games are quite the pair.

With the release of Journey, we decided to have a VGHVI conversation about all of thatgamecompany‘s games. I’d never played the PS3 version of flOw (though I did play the Flash version when it came out), so I figured I’d take this as an opportunity to remedy that gap.

And it certainly wasn’t what I expected. I had a vague memory of what the Flash version was like, but my most recent thatgamecompany memory was of Journey, and I’d played Flower as well a few years back. The later two games have a lot in common; I’d remembered flOw‘s graphics as being quite a bit more simple (in a rather lovely way), but I was expecting the feel of the game to be somewhat similar to its successors.

It really wasn’t, though. In fact my first reaction was that the game didn’t make me feel very good playing it, and in particular didn’t make me feel very good about myself. The former was because of the sense of fear that I had after getting a bit into the game: I ran into a couple of levels in a row that were full of creatures that I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I ended up skirting around the edges, hoping that I’d find the red “descend a level” creature before those big creatures attacked me. And the latter was caused by the aggressive playstyle that the game allows: you can choose to be a sort of vegetarian, only eating relatively sedentary creatures that don’t seem to be eating anything else (and in particular won’t attack back), but you can also try to eat the creatures that are trying to eat you. Which, on its own, wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s also a cannibalism subtext where you can try to eat the same kinds of creatures as yourself.

Which I dutifully did: a large part of the game seems to be about exploring systems, and how to eat what (and what the effects of that consumption are) is the big system to explore. And the game’s major philosophical theme seems to be the circle of life (c.f. the capitalized ‘O’ in the game’s name); in general, that circle is a bit larger (the game is divided up into large stages where you play different life forms, and frequently you’ll be threatened by a life form in one stage and get to play that life form in the next stage), but the mathematician in me appreciates the degenerate case of a very tight circle of life where you’re eating yourself, or at least somebody that looks just like you. So yes, I explored those themes by having one playthrough where I tried to eat everything else that was available; at first, it felt creepy, then I became numb, then my numbness felt creepy.

I really wonder what I would have felt about flOw if I’d played before Flower. Because I play many other games that are filled with killing, including killing people of the same species as yourself; I’m starting to question that a little bit more, but in general I’m content enough with that, and I don’t think that flOw is asking me to do anything worse than what other games ask me to do? My guess is that I wouldn’t have noticed anything odd about flOw if I’d played it when the PS3 version first came out: maybe the feeling of fear would still have been there (I dimly recall that being present in the Flash version), but I wouldn’t have found that as surprising, and I expect I wouldn’t have thought that the omnipresence of death in the game was anything worth remarking about. Compared to its successors, though, it’s much more of distinction. (And not the only one: I mentioned the art style above, and in general the game’s style is quite a bit more abstract; it’s also quite a bit gamier than either Flower or Journey, with systems much more on the surface.)

I’m glad to have played flOw: the art style is lovely, the systems have enough to them to be worth a couple of hours of my time, and I’m finding my disquiet at the game to be interesting in its own right. But I’m glad thatgamecompany went in a different direction with their later releases, and I’m finding more to think about in their later games than in their first offering.

The first two Mass Effect games were among my favorites of this console generation. Despite that, I’d been rather ambivalent about the approaching third installment in the series for the last year, ever since Mass Effect 2‘s Arrival DLC. Arrival took a series that had always allowed me to express optimism about doing the right thing, that had always allowed me to behave in a way where I could look at myself in the mirror, and removed that choice from me: it turned me into the angel of death for millions, leading me to a position where my character in game would have had the option to decide otherwise and then taking that option away from me.

The choice I wanted to make, had it been allowed, would arguably have had horrific consequences within the game’s world. Showing those consequences could have been something very powerful in its own way, which in turn points at a weakness in the series’s storytelling: the good choices never hurt you. They don’t hurt you in the short term, they don’t hurt you in the long term. (Hardly a unique problem in video games, c.f. BioShock.) So perhaps the game’s developers had painted themselves into a corner here: the Reapers’ arrival was too important to be treated as anything other than an immediate existential threat, but without allowing real consequences, they in turn couldn’t allow the player a choice at all. And they resolved that conflict by taking a sharp tonal shift.

There’s also the political statement that’s implicit in Arrival: that when matters get serious, the only solution is to go macho and little the ground with corpses. And I’m not going to argue that solutions like that are never necessary, and indeed the hypothetical situation the game presents us with might be one. But I am a citizen of the United States in the beginning of the twenty-first century: it’s been two thirds of a century since my country (which is, of course, not BioWare’s country) has faced a threat to which such a response has been appropriate, and during those 65 years the United States has brought the capacity (and very real threat) of annihilation of human life to the world, we’ve invaded country after country after country, we’ve propped up dictatorships. And we’ve responded to a horrible attack that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents by invading countries and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands (at the very least, much more likely millions), by attacking our civil liberties at home, by removing any pretense of judicial review of our government’s actions in that war. In that context, if a work of art uncritically suggests that our problem is that we’re not acting macho enough in our foreign policy, then that artwork is part of the problem, is abdicating its responsibility.

Still: until Arrival, I’d been quite impressed by the series. Especially when it wasn’t acting so grand and macho: it wasn’t until I wrote specifically about my Mass Effect 2 romance that I realized how strongly that part of the game had affected me. Also, the DLC raised the possibility that Shepard was going back to earth to be tried as a war criminal: perhaps the game wasn’t going to uncritically accept the necessity, the virtue of such slaughter? The series’s developers have done a lot of good, they’ve earned some goodwill. While Arrival made me a lot less excited about Mass Effect 3 than I had been, there wasn’t any realistic chance that I wasn’t going to play it, and indeed play it soon after release.

Those hopes were, of course, dashed as soon as I started playing the game. No directly addressing how to treat Shepard after her actions in Batarian space: instead, we jump to the Reapers’ arrival on Earth, lamenting only that not enough attention was paid to Shepard’s warning. And this machismo carried over to other aspects of the third game: in particular, the character models were significantly different, significantly more sexualized. (Jumping ahead a bit, I was quite unimpressed by EDI’s new sexy robot body as well.) Character models weren’t an area where the series needed change, needed improvement; and the changes they made definitely weren’t an improvement.

But even at the beginning of the game, there were touches that impressed me rather more. Even since I realized I wouldn’t be able to be with Liara in Mass Effect 2, I’d assumed that the game would set up some sort of soap opera choice between my Mass Effect 1 lover and my Mass Effect 2 lover, making me re-romance one of them while setting up some sort of showdown with the other. And I wasn’t looking forward to that at all: Liara was clearly my character’s love, but I certainly didn’t want to treat Thane badly.

To my surprise, however, the game got this out of the way right up front: Liara
appeared in the first mission, we talked after that, and got things squared up. Surprisingly cleanly; a little odd considering my behavior, but then again it’s not like she’d been pining for me over the last four years herself. So we’d both considered other options, we both came to the same conclusion: we were there for each other.

In a funny way, I actually missed the romance on the ship: I stopped by her office every time I wandered around the ship, and she was surprisingly distant then. Not that I wanted a full-blown romance, and I certainly preferred how it unfolded to going through a second courtship. But I wish that the game had allowed the underlying, unconditional affection that I felt to come out in our words, our greetings. Still, it let me believe that that affection was there, which is ultimately what was most important.

And, as it turned out, a real showdown with Thane was never in the cards: he was stuck on the Citadel, close to death. My first encounter with him was the only time in the series where I can remember intentionally not choosing a paragon interrupt: I didn’t quite trust the game’s designers to not have me somehow fall into his arms if I went that direction, and I definitely didn’t want that. So we got matters settled with no drama: not quite what I would have chosen, it felt like a cop-out (on my part? on the game’s part?), but much better than the soap-opera drama that I was expecting.

But again I was underestimating the game. Because, while Thane isn’t in any shape to travel with you, he shows up again in a sequence on the Citadel halfway through the game, helping you save the council from assassination. Shortly after which he dies, with Shepard and his son at his side, reading him a prayer that turns out to be a prayer of forgiveness for Shepard. It choked me up when I watched it; and Thane aside, I love the power of the compassion in that scene, forcing you to even be compassionate to yourself. (To acknowledge the need of acting compassionate towards yourself, of the stresses that are lurking behind she shell that you have to maintain! Much more so than in the prior two games, I frequently found it easy to make renegade choices: shit is going down, and despite my laments about the machismo at the start of the game, my Shepard has no patience with people who don’t recognize that. I won’t say that those renegade choices were an act, because that’s definitely how she would have behaved in such a situation: but behind that surface, there’s a part of her that would have been appalled at some of the actions she had to take. But there’s a still deeper core within Shepard behind that, one which is able to acknowledge that buried pain, to regard the person forced/choosing to take those actions with compassion.)

In many ways, the Citadel was the emotional core of the game for me. The scene with Thane was an outlier in that regard, because of the way in which it tied directly to the larger events of the game; but the Citadel was full of side conversations for you to eavesdrop upon, progressing as you returned to those areas of the Citadel again and again. At first they were mostly a sideshow to me—I was amused by how an early one tweaked my heterosexist assumptions in my misidentifying who in a triangle had two lovers—but they got rather more serious as the game went on. A half-dozen variations of families being torn apart by war, tragedies unfolding in slow motion, tragedies that were inconsequential in the grand scheme of the war but that were everything to those involved in them: bringing home the evils, the horrors of war in a way that statistics never do. And showing individuals making choices over and over again: in the face of war, how are they willing to act, what kind of people are they willing to be, what’s the bedrock that their morals rest upon?

Choices that you have to make, too: in particular, after the council attack, the Citadel is full of micro-missions where Shepard is asked to come down on one side or another of an argument. The first time I ran into these missions, I refused to do them: who am I to choose between a shopkeeper and a customer, between two cops? Ridiculous reluctance, considering the relative equanimity with which I decided the fate of species, the fate of an entire galaxy. But still: it felt wrong, those weren’t my choices to make, and even if I wanted to cast myself as a teacher, it’s the wrong way to approach the situation, part of teaching is letting other people make choices, even mistaken ones. I eventually gave in, though I’m not sure if that was the right choice or not: my justification is that, as a leader, I was helping other people find what was best in themselves, and if that was the clumsy way in which the game allowed me to express that, so be it. Still, questions I’m not used to asking about my actions within a game.

Those are the small-scale choices that the game confronts you with, but of course the ones that get the press are the big ones. And while, in the small and medium scale choices, I was frequently happy to make renegade choices, when it came to the large ones, I never did: I always made the “good” choices, the optimistic choices, the ones that expressed the way I wanted the universe to be. No throwing the Krogans under the bus, either overtly or behind their back: the Salarias can attempt to use the fate of the galaxy as blackmail, but I won’t go along. (Patricia Hernandez makes the case that I should have been at least as uncomfortable with that choice as with those choices on the Citadel.) No going along with the Quarians’ attack on the Geth, even though the latter were one of our main enemies at the start of the series and the Quarians are only attempting to regain their homeworld: there’s something going on there that doesn’t feel right, and it’s not just that it’s a distraction from fighting the Reapers.

Which is where I felt a shift in the game’s tone: it wasn’t a game about a species-threatening, galaxy-threatening war, it was a game about multiple perspectives on conflict, about the possibility of reconciliation, about a belief in the fundamental good within us. And Mass Effect 3 brought this home by attacking the conflict that leads off the series, namely the conflicts between organic and artificial form of life. It does this on the medium scale, by revisiting the roots of the Geth/Quarian conflict; it does this on the small scale of human relationships with artificial intelligence by EDI’s and Joker’s relationship. (There’s a lot more to EDI than I expected when I first saw her sexy robot body.)

And, of course, it does this on the grandest of scales, by reconsidering the Reapers’ conflict with all of organic life. The recordings of the start of the Geth/Quarian conflict make the Quarians look a lot less like blameless victims than they’d appeared; Javik teaches us that the Protheans are a lot less noble than we’d believed. (Than Liara had believed, certainly!)

Of course, it’s one thing to bring the Protheans down to earth (to Earth?), it’s another thing to make the Reapers look sympathetic. But the game accomplishes that, showing them as necessary to allow new species to flourish in the face of the Protheans and their ilk. The compassion that Thane and his son taught us returns in full force here.

This isn’t just a redirection of the game’s theme: the mysticism that’s always been present in the game (in the name Shepard!) erupts. It’s always been a series about salvation, but one that involved heroism of a fairly banal adolescent game nature. But the recurring nature of the Reapers harkens back to the eternal recurrence of another one of my favorite adolescent game series, namely Zelda; to Nietzsche, that favorite author among a certain type of adolescents (of people who haven’t yet escaped from adolescence, no matter their age; and yes, part of me is in this group); but also to Buddhist notions of recurrence of ages.

That recurrence is, I think, more of a Hīnayāna Buddhist theme; I see Mass Effect 3 as putting a Mahāyāna spin on it, with its insistence on the possibility of breaking the cycle of recurrence for all sentient beings. Which leads to the ending; though I enjoyed reading and respect both points of view, I’ll side with Kate Cox over Sparky Clarkson and end up satisfied, pleased, impressed by the ending.

That starts with the sequence on Earth. I came in wondering how I would feel about the final battle, wondering whether I’d be afraid of losing a companion in that sequence the same way I’d been afraid of that prospect in Mass Effect 2. As it turns out, though, I was at peace during that battle: too much was at stake there, any of us could die, I could die, it would be worth it. I can’t think of another game that had me facing death (my own and others’) with such equanimity.

And I also can’t think of a recent game that treated the final boss battle so courageously. My only comparison in that regard is Shenmue II glorious third act; that game went considerably farther than Mass Effect 3, and did so to great effect, but I don’t think the final game of a trilogy would have been able to carry off the same solution. Certainly the vast majority of games would have ended with a big battle against a monster; the final battles on Earth were difficult, but not in a boss monster style, and the final scenes on the Citadel were nerve-wracking, emphasizing your fragility, your vulnerability, the contingency of all of your actions while studiously avoiding undercutting that vulnerability with a boss battle that would have brought your martial powers back to the fore. As Roger said in this month’s School of Athens podcast, the Mass Effect thematizes gamespaces and the choices underpinning them in ways that few other games do; that’s the final fight the game ends with.

Which, perhaps, turns into a bit of a mess in the execution; and the adolescent grandeur in any game about a hero comes out full blast here, indeed levels up to reach new heights. But it’s a scene about transcendence in a series that has, in retrospect, focusing all of its powers for years towards that end; transcendence is impossible to represent faithfully, and (as with my feelings about Catherine‘s asking of questions), in a situation like that, perhaps missing the mark broadly is better than aiming more closely and having your failings leave less room for productive tension of interpretation.

It’s been four and a half years since the first game came out; I have the utmost respect to BioWare for bringing the trilogy to a conclusion in such a short amount of time and with such power and coherence. To all who worked on this series: I salute you, I thank you, I am in your debt.

From Thomas Cleary’s introduction to his translation of Zen Lessons:

In contrast to the relatively plain and straightforward Zen literature of the Tang dynasty, Song dynasty Zen literature is convoluted and artful. This is not regarded, in Zen terms, as a development in Zen, but as a response to a more complex and pressured society and individual. The Zen adepts of Song times did not regard the reality of Zen as any different in its essence from that of classical times, but considered the function of Zen to have become complicated by the complexity of the contemporary mind and the rampant spread of artificial Zen based on imitations of a few Zen practices.

The proliferation of false Zen was stimulated by the enormous impact of real Zen on Asian civilization. After the Tang dynasty, there is hardly anywhere one can turn in Chinese culture without seeing the influence of the Zen charisma.

The ill effects of the resulting influx of insincere followers into public Zen institutions are already noted in the works of great masters of the latter Tang dynasty, and these Zen Lessons contain top-level notices of an even greater decline in quality of Zen institutions and followers in the Song dynasty, in spite of Zen’s unparalleled prestige in cultural terms.

There is even reason to believe that the creation of new Confucian and Taoist schools using Zen methods was especially encouraged by Zen adepts because of their awareness that the original Zen Buddhist order had become seriously enervated through the attachment of worldly feelings to its forms and personalities.

From the point of Buddhist historiography, this sort of involvement is predictable: a period of true teaching is eventually obscured by imitations, and even these break down into remnants with time. The Mahāparinirvānasūtra, or “Scripture of the Great Decrease,” among the classical scriptures traditionally most studied by Zen adepts, outlines these phenomena very clearly.

The false ideas about Zen and Buddhism that scandals at Zen centers have both arisen from and in turn re-created in many minds within and without these centers are also predictable and have existed ever since “Zen” became consciously articulated. Almost the entire literature of Zen, in all of its astonishing variety of forms, deals with nothing but misconceptions about the reality of Zen, which is said to be extremely simple in essence though complex in function or manifestation. The apparent complexity of Zen teaching and function is due to the complexity of the human mentality, as Zen perforce acted in more intricate ways to unify the threads of the contemporary mind.

Replace Zen with your favorite learning that you feel is widely misinterpreted; I’ll go with ‘agile’.

I’ve always been an unconventional video games blogger, because of the low volume of games that I find time to play, but that’s become much more the case over the last year. I was surprised to look at my recently played games list and realize that I didn’t finish any games for five months solid (November 13, 2011 to April 12, 2012); but I was aware that my game-playing time had been dominated by Rock Band 3 and Ni No Kuni DS for quite some time now, and neither of those is a game I was ever going to finish quickly. (I have no idea when I’ll finish either of them, though I may give up on Ni No Kuni soon.) And, in fact, neither of them is a game that I’m playing for strictly video game reasons: I’m mostly playing Rock Band these days to learn how to play guitar, and Ni No Kuni is Japanese practice. Given that, I wondered: is this is a sign that I’m currently not a video game blogger, that I’m barely a video game player?

This would not be a tragedy if it occurred. Video games have been important to me since we got our first computer back in 1982, but their importance has waxed and waned. Certainly books have been much more important to me than games over the years, I think on balance music has probably also been more important to me, and in school (undergrad and grad) I spent more time watching movies than playing games, though that was somewhat of an anomaly. (That’s what happens when you’re dating, I guess.) So perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from games; and, indeed, I’ve explicitly been making more time to read books, to make and listen to music, and ever since we got our new TV, I’ve been watching more movies. (And they look fabulous on it!) Given that, maybe I just don’t have time to play games other than Rock Band, and maybe I’m completely okay with that.

That was my tentative hypothesis earlier this year: I felt disconnected at GDC this March, and suspected that I wouldn’t be going back next year. (I now realize that this year’s GDC has had huge, unexpected benefits, so I’ll certainly be going back next year, but most of those benefits aren’t directly game related.) Thinking about it more, though, and in light of subsequent experiences, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

In retrospect, the main change may be that I freed up time to read books in part by cutting down on my web browsing, and in particular I stopped reading any daily video game news sites. For almost half a year, I’ve been quite out of touch with current video game releases, not reading reviews of the vast majority of games or even being aware that they’ve been released at all. I still hear about some new games through non-news blogs and through people on Twitter, but the volume is less; and those fora almost never expose me to preview coverage, and people talk about old games quite a bit as well on them. I’d thought of myself as abnormally good at avoiding the pull of the new, but in retrospect I underestimated how much I’d been affected by the novelty-driven news cycle.

Cutting down on browsing has freed up time to spend on other art forms when I want to; but the removal of that news cycle surface current has allowed deeper currents to manifest themselves, and some of those deeper currents are unquestionably video game focused. I recently played Mass Effect 3 and Journey; they’re both wonderful, wonderful games, and they are both very much what I wanted to do at that time, I wanted to play them more than read any book or watch any movie. (Though not, as it turns out, look at any painting.)

They’re also both new games; so I’m not as free from the lure of the release cycle as I’d like to pretend. I suspect, however, that they’ll largely be an aberration in that respect in my game playing over the summer. The games that I want to play next are Rez, Child of Eden, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, probably Jet Grind Radio, maybe Dragon Age 2, maybe even Shenmue or Shenmue II or Space Channel 5. Some newish games, and nothing ancient in there, but generally older games, generally games I’ve played before and want (need!) to experience again.

And they’re generally games that have something in common. (Besides the obvious link, namely the Dreamcast!) I wish I had a better analytical category to put them in, but in the absence of one, I’ll just say it: most of those games are games that speak to something deep in my soul. They’re not just games I enjoy, games that I’ve learned something from, games that I will learn something from the next time I play them. They’re games that have their hooks deep inside of me, games where replaying them will feel like returning to home. But more than that: most of them are games where I suspect playing them will make me feel like a better person, and also feel more like me, letting me learn more who I am and giving me hope that the real me is a pretty good person.

So yeah, games are still important to me. That’s not exclusive to games: I can think of plenty of books, plenty of pieces of music that I feel the same way about, and I hope I’ll spend a lot of time oven the next year or two immersed in those art forms. But games aren’t going anywhere; I’m just going to do a better job of listening to the voices of games that are quietly calling me.

There’s a fine line between keeping in close touch with how your subordinates are doing and micromanaging them. Some team leaders in our study stepped way over the wrong side of that line. Operating under a misguided notion of what management involves, they held themselves aloof from their teams. Rather than working collaboratively with the team and checking in with team members regularly, as Graham did, these team leaders spent much of their time checking up on people. Subordinates can tell the difference, and the consequences for inner work life are not good.

Managers who get it wrong make four kinds of mistakes. First, they fail to allow autonomy in carrying out the work. Unlike Graham, who gave the NewPoly team a clear strategic goal but respected members’ ideas on how they could meet that goal, micromanagers dictate every move. Second, they frequently ask subordinates about their work without providing any real help when problems arise. Micromanaging leaders come across as judges and dictators, rather than as coaches and colleagues.

Third, micromanaging leaders are quick to affix personal blame when problems arise, rather than guiding subordinates in an open exploration of causes and possible solutions. Those subordinates end up striving to look good rather than honestly discussing obstacles and how to surmount them. They live in fear, and their perceptions of the manager settle into a permanent trough.

Fourth, the team leaders in our study who got it wrong rarely shared information with team members about their own work. Graham and other effective team leaders realized that, by virtue of their special roles, they were privy to vital information about many issues relevant to the team’s work. These issues included upper management’s views of the project, customers’ views and needs, and possible sources of assistance or resistance within and outside the organization. Some team leaders jealously guarded such knowledge as a marker of their status, doling it out as a favor according to their whims. When subordinates realize that a manager withholds potentially useful information like an overcontrolling parent, they feel infantilized, their motivation stalls, and their work is handicapped.

The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, pp. 166–167.

I don’t have a lot to say about the Return of the Fallen expansion to Ascension. I enjoyed playing it (both alone and in combination with the original set of cards), and I’m sure I went through a couple hundred games, but it didn’t have the same effect on me as the original game had. The extra Mechana Constructs got a bit mind-numbing, the other new constructs were generally quite valuable (not as much as Mechana Constructs, but almost, e.g. 4 victory points for a 5 cost construct) which reduced that difference between construct types, the new mechanism of cards that had an effect when appearing on the board didn’t do much for me, and I wasn’t impressed by the new 8-point hero and monster.

I guess the one mechanism that I realized (a hundred games in) that I should be paying more attention to is churn. E.g. there’s a one-point card called the Hectic Scribe that has you draw two cards and then discard two cards. In general, I avoided playing it, because you ultimately end up only playing four useful cards instead of five, which means that there’s a good chance that playing the card is a loss instead of a gain. What that doesn’t take into account, though, is that even if you don’t improve your current hand by playing that card, you’ll make it through your deck faster, so your discards will come back into play. And that’s presumably good, because with your purchases, your discards are on average more valuable than the current cards remaining to be drawn. Still not a great card, but it’s more valuable (or less actively harmful!) than I initially pegged it as.

Anyways: pleasant expansion, and I’m looking forward to the third expansion showing up next month. But, for better or for worse, Ascension seems not to be trying to do something as different with its expansions as Dominion does, so there’s not a huge amount of new material to grapple with here.

While I was on vacation, I decided to give Jetpack Joyride a try: the GDC talk on it was interesting enough, Miranda liked it, several people on my Twitter feed liked it, and the iPad was the main device I had with me to play games on.

And: it was all right. I rather enjoyed it for a few hours, kept it up for a few hours after that, and then put it down. The basic gameplay is solid: a well-done one-button design, with some potential to get into a groove, and the vehicles are a good idea that is well executed.

The aspects surrounding that core gameplay, though, I’m not so sure about. It comes with a series of Tiny Wings-style challenges, and that was really useful for a while: it gave me different techniques to experiment with, different metrics to try to optimize for. That kind of mixing things up I generally approve of; I was happy to play through the game through the fifteen levels of challenges that it gave me.

And then I finished those fifteen levels, I got a badge, and the challenges started over again. I don’t think the new set of challenges were identical—there seems to be some randomness involved—but they had the same flavor, and I took that as a sign that I’d seen a good range of the challenges, that I wasn’t going to get more novelty there. This isn’t to say that restarting the challenges was a bad idea—better to do that than to have no more challenges available at all—but if the novelty of the challenges had been the main draw so far, then I’d need to look elsewhere for a draw.

I’d been hoping that the badge system would be a draw, a more advanced set of challenges once I’d proven myself to no longer need training wheels. That turned into an active disappointment, though: maybe I’m missing something, but as far as I can tell, you get a random badge every time you complete 15 levels. And I have zero interest in trying to get to level 1875 in the game: if that’s what I’m supposed to be going for, then I might as well stop after level 15.

But that isn’t necessarily what I have to be going for: like I said, the core gameplay is good. The problem, though, is that the core gameplay isn’t pure, and isn’t pure in a specific way. The distance you travel isn’t simply a function of how well you react to the random set of challenges the game throws at you: it’s that plus how well you do in the slot machine at the end of the game plus how many in-game coins you’d spent on power-ups to give you extra chances for advancement at the end of the game. So if I want to optimize my score, I don’t just have to hone my skills, I don’t just have to hope for a combination of honing my skills and being in a groove, and I don’t just have to hope for a combination of honing my skills, being in a groove, and being given a random level design that is particularly palatable to my strengths and weaknesses: I have to also hope that I get lucky draws on the slot machine. And if I really want to optimize, I should purchase some powerups and pick judicious times to use them. These last two aspects are something I have no interest in, and they reduce the draw of the core gameplay for me.

So: decent game, I’m happy to have put a few hours into it, and I’ll probably even pick it up when I have a few minutes to kill at random times in the future. But it’s not providing what I want out of games (out of art!) these days, I’m glad I stopped when I did.

Horace Dediu’s blog Asymco is absolutely one of my favorite blogs, with its insightful mix of data and theory, and Critical Path, its associated podcast, is always fascinating as well. So when Horace announced his conference Asymconf, and when the date turned out to be a time when I was already planning to be in Europe, I took that as a sign that I should take the train over to Amsterdam to attend: too much of a coincidence to pass up.

Having said that, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to get out of the conference. The blog and podcast focus on a Christensen-style disruption analysis; that’s something I’ve been interested in for a while, maybe I’d learn something about how to apply that analysis in practice? Also, Dediu thinks a lot about how the strengths, weaknesses, and historical baggage of various forms of presentation, I’d be curious to see him rethink how to best use and rework the conference format, learning something about the case study method if possible.

The conference was designed as a series of four case studies, on the mobile industry, Hollywood, finance, and learning; I like active learning instead of just listening and reading and thinking by myself (all of which I can do with his blog and podcast, so I fully support a conference format that takes advantage of the fact that there are 150 people together in person), and those are all topics that I’m interested in. Though that’s also pretty ambitious: are we really going to figure out something about four topics in a single day, with only 75 minutes per topic? Dediu seemed to genuinely think so; he’s a smart guy with a lot of vision, maybe he’ll design a structure that will allow us to carry it off.

That’s what I had in mind coming in; how was it in practice? I had some interesting conversations with other attendees while waiting for it to start; and Dediu led off with a rather interesting history of Amsterdam through the lens of disruption. And then we started the first case study, on the mobile industry; each participant got to actively participate in one of the case studies, I was assigned the first case study, and I actually ended up being the first person from the audience to chime in.

So: yay! The thing is, though, it was an interesting conversation, with smart people, but we didn’t figure out anything. A pleasant way to spend an hour and a bit, I like talking to and listening to smart people, but that’s all it was for me.

And the conference continued that way: interesting conversations (I particularly enjoyed a lunchtime discussion about the link between Christensen’s notion of “jobs to be done” and interaction design), interesting bits happening on stage, but nothing that made me sit up and take notice. I’d hoped to learn more about applying disruption analysis techniques concretely; the only specific new technique that I noticed was picking a couple of axes in which to analyze a space, plotting existing participants along the resulting graph, and looking for blank spaces. Which is certainly useful, but I was hoping for a little more along those lines, or figuring out something surprising about one of the domains, or something.

(Also, one strange thing: the gender balance was really far off, and I say that as somebody who is used to going to programming conferences and video game conferences. I counted 6 women out of 120 participants; maybe there were more women that I missed in my survey, but I’d be shocked if the percentage was as high as 10%. No idea what was going on there, and I certainly don’t want to draw any conclusions from it, but it surprised me.)

So: I’m not going to second-guess going, it was a reasonable use of time and money, it was a pleasant and interesting way to spend a day. But I’m certainly not going to go attend the next Asymconf unless it’s in the Bay Area (which is a possibility, they’re planning to hold it on the west coast of the United States), and probably not even then unless I can understand the vision better, get a better idea of what I’d like to get out of it.

On which topic: I don’t have experience with the case study method, but I do have experience teaching using active, group-based classroom methods. And, when doing that, I would try to help bring students partway into a topic, then give them something fairly large to struggle with and enough room to work at understanding it better, and be available to help provide a bit more context/support if necessary but not get in the way otherwise.

Dediu did a great job with the last point there: he spoke up when appropriate, repeating and amplifying points, without inserting himself inappropriately. The middle point, though, I’m a lot more dubious about. I was a math professor; an hour and fifteen minutes is enough time for a class that has been together for a few weeks to get their hands dirty with a specific mathematical technique, but it’s not nearly enough time for a group of people that have never met each other before to figure out anything about a huge topic. E.g. looking at Tuckman’s group development model, maybe it’s enough to get through forming and into storming, but we didn’t get to where we were seriously chewing on specific ideas, let alone make it into any sort of performing groove. So, from that point of view, spending the whole day in a single group looking at a single topic would have been a much better use of the time than four groups working on four topics; though the number of participants would have made that extremely unwieldy, I have no idea how to reconcile that tension.

And then there’s the first point, helping bringing students partway into a topic. If the topic that we’re trying to learn about is disruption, then everybody there has seen Dediu’s disruption-based analysis, so we’re coming from some sort of common understanding. But I could have used some more specific support in that regard, more of a helping hand in the transition between seeing others apply disruption analysis to applying it yourself.

As I said above, I don’t know much about the case study method; this article, though, says that one aspect of it is that “Unlike lecture-based teaching, the case method requires intensive preparation by the students, before each class.” And that’s something that was almost completely lacking in the conference: techniques aside, we need to know about the data of the case! (Maybe the most striking aspect of Dediu’s blog is the wonderfully data-driven nature of its analysis.) He wrote one short blog post on each of the first three topics, and nothing about the fourth. Admittedly, the blog talks so much about the mobile space that we had a lot of data to work with there; the other topics, though, are only touched on much more irregularly. If I’m remembering correctly from what he said on his podcast, this lack of prior background for participants was a conscious strategy on his part, but it’s not a strategy I would have adopted.

Still, I don’t want to end on a down note. I was going to say that Asymconf was a conference unlike any other I’ve attended, but actually there are hints of the AYE Conference in the approach that Asymconf took. And AYE was one of my favorite conferences that I’ve ever attended! Asymconf isn’t nearly there yet, but this is only the first iteration, and one the most notable aspects of Asymco is its focus on learning and iteration. So if I had to bet, my guess is that Asymconf is going to be a lot better in a couple of years (quite possibly even in six months!), and I still think it’s got a real chance at figuring out something about how to learn.

On entering the Musée d’Orsay, you are confronted almost immediately with a sight that is familiar to anybody who plays video games, namely a textbook example of male gaze:

This is Femme piquée par un serpent, by Auguste Clésinger; because, of course, we all know that, when a woman is bitten by a snake, her immediate reaction is to contort her body in a way as to make herself look as stereotypically fuckable as possible. You can see the snake in this view of the statue, which also demonstrates another classic male gaze aspect of the statue, namely the way she twists her body so the viewer can simultaneously get a good view of one of her breasts and her ass. (And we all love the way the snake harkens back to the Garden of Eden mythos, where women are simultaneously patsies and the source of the fall of humanity!) Admittedly, it could be worse: the artist has a rather better grasp on female anatomy than many video game modelers, and I suppose one advantage of nudity in this context is that it makes various clothing fails impossible. Still: not awesome.

This is, fortunately, in stark contrast to the rest of the museum, which is one of my favorite places on the planet. Not a contrast because of the nudity—there’s that everywhere you look in the museum—but much of that nudity is rather more interesting, and for that matter rather more foreign to the video game experience. Lots of straightforward, less problematic nudes; lots of nudes that are more interesting, too. Or more confusing; I still don’t know how to analyze Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, for example:

At least it’s something I don’t get from video games, for better or for worse.

I have rather fewer misgivings about Manet, whose Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe are two of my favorite paintings in the museum:

I’m not entirely comfortable with the politics of either of those paintings, but there’s a lot more going on there than in Clésinger’s statue. And while I’m not going to claim that male gaze considerations are absent here, in both examples the gazes that the women present are fascinating:

Which isn’t to say that I spent all my time in the museum looking at female nudes. Sticking with Manet, we have his portrait of Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes, and there are male nudes as well! (The one below being Antonin Mercié’s David.)

Though the most surprising nude of the day was this Académie d’homme âgé nu from a special exhibit of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s work. (Or Axel Gallén, as he was known at the time that he painted this picture.)

Anyways: enough nudes, on to video games. The nudes, of course, remind me of character models in video games, and there are plenty of good non-nude character models in the museum: Corot’s La jeune femme à la robe rose, Amaury-Duval’s Madame de Loynes, Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (also known as Grande danseuse habillée), Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s La Sorcière. (Certainly that last one would be very much at home in a video game!)

But games don’t just model people, they model buildings, they model spaces, they model everything that appears within them. Here are some models of buildings, both by Monet, namely his Gare Saint-Lazare and Rouen Cathedral:

In that last example, Monet shows the cathedral in various different lighting scenarios, and that sort of dynamic behavior is a very video-gamey thing to do. Some of the building models had an implicit dynamism of a different nature, however; my favorite example of that was Corot’s, Le moulin de Saint-Nicola-lez-Arras:

When looking at this picture, it’s impossible not to imagine yourself standing in the woods in the front, walking through them to the building in the back, walking still further to cross the bridge. This isn’t a static model in a video game, it’s a level that demands exploration. (And, of course, I’m doing this within the Musée d’Orsay, which is itself a space that demands exploration every bit as much as any video game I’ve ever played!)

So we’ve moved from models of people to models of buildings to locations to be explored. And, if we combine those, we get paintings with implicit narratives: Henri Regnault’s Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (which, as a bonus, returns us to our video game theme of politically problematic positioning that we led off with, this time with Orientalism instead of male gaze!); Paul Huet’s Le gouffre, paysage; George Desvaillières’s L’Ascension du Poilu; Gustave Moreau’s Galatée. (Male gaze so strong that our lustful onlooker has three eyes! Male gaze was everywhere in this trip: even the Lion King posters in the subways were full of it.)

I’m sure Roger Travis will say it’s no coincidence that the paintings that I saw that gave me the strongest video game vibe were illustrations from epics: Adolphe William Bouguereau, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers and two Kalevala scenes from the aforementioned Akseli Gallen-Kallela exhibit, namely La Défense du Sampo and La Forgeage du Sampo. That last pair brings us closer to video games in another way: just as games are rarely about a single event, instead presenting a linked chain, here too we have linked scenes.

A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals and proposed that narrative video games should present themselves as a sequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, with just enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to set piece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Musée d’Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of those set pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. There should be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each set piece with the rest unfolding from it.

I’ve been playing Journey recently; it’s a beautiful game, a powerful game, and that power comes in large part from this focus. Imagine a sequence of paintings: your first jump after receiving the scarf, looking up at the broken bridge with a companion, investigating a ruin in a desert, surfing the sand together with your companion through a sequence of gates, going through a blue tunnel and trying to hide from the searchlight of an overhead terror, looking up at a tower to climb, huddling with your companion for warmth against the cold and wind, soaring gloriously through the sky. That’s what each level is, and each level does nothing more than what is necessary to bring life to those visions, ending just as you’re feeling satisfied with that experience. The levels never drag on; energy that might be devoted to extending the levels or connecting the levels more broadly is instead devoted to making each level more beautiful, to make each level speak to something surprisingly deep inside of you. (Not that they neglect the connective tissue between levels: as with the musical example, connection is necessary, and the tapestries do a beautiful job of that.) Scene after scene in that game emanates from a vision that would absolutely not be out of place in my favorite museum in the world.

The converse is not, however, true: there were several pictures in that museum that are showing me something that I’m not yet getting from video games. I’ll close with Millet’s Gleaners and Strindberg’s Vague VII, in hopes that one of these years I’ll encounter games that hit those parts of my soul.

John Fairbairn and Mark Hall have been doing a series of books on single go games or a small series of games, and they’re really good: a great combination of historical context paired with detailed commentary on the moves of the games themselves. The one I just finished reading was The Go Consultants, devoted to a single game that I’d never heard of before: a pair game with Suzuki Tamejiro and Segoe Kensaku (both 7 dan) versus Kitani Minoru and Go Seigen (both 6 dan). It took place in 1934–1935, a transitional time in the go world: it was four years before Honinbo Shusai’s retirement game, so the old world was starting to crumble, without any clear view of what was going to happen next. The players involved in this game had a huge impact on the up-and-coming world: Kitani and Go are two of the twentieth century’s most famous go players, but they were the junior pair in this match, and Segoe had a lot to do with helping the go community navigate this transition. (He’d brought Go to Japan, and was instrumental in arranging the match that included the Atomic Bomb Game.)

So: lots of experimentation; I hadn’t been aware that that experimentation had included such a pair go match, however. The format meant that the considerations involved were expressed through discussion instead of being locked in the players’ heads or only emerging after the fact, and the newspaper sponsoring it arranged for observers to report on those discussions. This meant a lot more real-time reporting of thoughts than I’m used to.

Which, I’m sure, helped in generating material for a book length single-game commentary; and I enjoyed reading the give-and-take within each pair, seeing where they agreed, where they disagreed, how they resolved those differences. But what was more striking was seeing the situations where the two pairs disagreed: where one pair would work out a series of variations, play their move, and then the other pair would respond with something that the first pair hadn’t considered at all!

This, of course, happens to me all the time; I wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or disturbed to see it happen to top professionals. But after seeing several such instances, I realized just how different their missteps are from mine: they’re working from such a solid feel for the general weight of each move that, even when their opponents responded in a different area of the board than one of the pairs expected, that didn’t turn what I would consider a good move into what I would consider a bad move, it made a difference of a point or two, or maybe even (once they’d gotten over their shock) no points at all. Which doesn’t mean that their surprise at the move wasn’t deserved or important, just that they’re playing a game with a much subtler texture than I can see.

Sigh. I don’t regret turning away from go, but I’ve given up something by doing so.