Time to blow the dust off this sucker

Well, it's been a while....

Mostly, you can attribute the downturn in blog-posting activity due to the pile-up of schoolwork. Essays, final exams, etc. I wanted to do one of those blogs where I record my scattered thoughts while writing an essay, but the one time I did it my thoughts turned out to be disappointingly coherent. I blame the lack of children's cartoons.

A deficiency which will probably persist, since my general to-do list for the summer more or less looks like an HBO Greatest Hits series. Mostly, I want to watch The Wire, since anyone who's so much as seen half an episode has informed me that it's really, really good. Liking really, really good things as I do, I figured it was worth a shot. Also I might try and finish the Sopranos (I never did finish the series) and maybe Deadwood.

More to the point: Game of Thrones! I haven't been this excited about a new tv series since ... well, I can't actually think of a series that has excited me this much, ever. However, I pretty seldom watch TV series (this summer looking to be the exception), so I'll refrain from trying to post any comments on it since I don't really feel well-versed enough in the subject matter to talk about it. Chris Lockett's blog will, I'm betting, provide a pretty cool breakdown of the series: An Ontarian in Newfoundland.

Which brings me back to the whole point that I started writing this, if there was one to begin with. Over the past few months I've genuinely enjoyed this thing. It's provided a fun opportunity for me to smack my digits on my keyboard to produce something hopefully resembling an occasionally funny post, or at least one that's reasonably interesting. But insofar as now there's never really been a general direction for the thing. As I speak, I have reviewed, for example, exactly one videogame, talked about fantasy a bunch, mused a little on my life for no reason other than that it amused me a bit, and have posted more than a few bite-sized funny things (my favorite being this one).

This peregrine nonsense stops now, I say!

(Okay, to step aside for a second: peregrinate is a word which means, apparently, to travel or wander about, typically from place to place. Peregrine is the adjective, which can also delineate being outlandish, strange, imported from abroad, or extraneous to the bulk of what's being said, which makes this aside peregrine. How cool is that? I choose to believe it's tied in with peregrine falcons, though I have absolutely no proof to the positive on that.)

Uh, yeah. I like words. Anyhow, I'm not exactly about to "streamline" or "revolutionize" or similarly "bullshitinate" this blog, but I'm hoping to find a sort of general thrust for it, or at least a feature which I can return to semi-regularly.

That in mind, the one area which I do feel pretty sufficiently versed in to comment on regularly is videogames. I mean, I've been playing them most of my life, and I've played more than a couple. But the reason I don't often have any inclination to look at really popular games is that, honestly, most of them bore me, or if I do enjoy them, they're not stimulating enough to make me want to write on them (exceptions: Bioshock, Final Fantasy, Tales of Vesperia, Minecraft, which I suppose is sort of Indie, and anything Bioware makes). However, for the past few days, I've been on an Indie game binge, using the Xbox's pretty well-engineered Indie platform. I've been going through the big ones, if such a thing can exist in what is pretty generally a marginal category, and I've been enjoying myself. So I figure I might make it a bit of a project to start reviewing the Indie games on the XBL Arcade, separating the chaff from the wheat. The upshot of this is that, honestly, playing these things will cost me somewhere in the region of 80-240 MS points per purchase, so it's something I can do without bankrupting myself or limiting to myself to only games that I'd want to buy, anyway.

Right now I'm playing Cthulhu Saves the World, so hopefully I'll be able to post some thoughts about it when I'm done (which should be soon; the game's addictive as all hell and finals are nearly over).

The Monster in Videogames

In one of the courses I'm doing this term--The Gothic--we're assigned a group project, which can be on a subject of our choosing. Since I'm not likely going to be able to convince any sizable group of people to write on The Gothic and Videogames, I'm basically retooling the thoughts I had towards the argument and presenting them here. I'm actually completely serious, this is going to be one of those boring critical blog posts.

Anyway, guns up, let's do this. Leeeeeeeeerooooooooooooooooooooooy....

The first thing that must be considered, naturally, when examining the interaction of video game media with any particular genre or group is the precise nature of the video game itself: it is, essentially, a medium which offers direct interface with "the text", putting the player directly into the narrative present. The depth, complexity, and quality of said narrative is not, precisely, important: at this juncture I am not evaluating whether or not video games are good or even qualify as valid forms of literature, simply that they are a form of media with which a great number of people interact, and that their narrative structures do possess certain relevant tendencies which merit attention. The answer to why they merit such attention is, I think, clear, and based in that direct interface that videogames offer: if videogames do possess certain recurrent themes, particularly certain gothic elements, why is that the case, and to what does it speak?

I'm fairly certain I've lost . . . well, just about everyone by this point, but screw it, I'm having fun.

The first issue I'd like to address, and likely the only one within this blog post since I'm already getting pretty ranty, is the presence of the monster in videogames, the themes of transhumanism, and their relation with the player (hereafter referred to as "the subject", quite plainly because sooner or later I will fall prey to jokes about playas and playa haters).

Anyone with even a passing relationship with videogames can easily observe that there is a preoccupation with not only monsters, but with the destruction of monsters, in several senses. Firstly, they are an obstacle to be overcome and defeated, but secondly, they themselves are almost universally portrayed in a state of maddening decay that while simultaneously stripping themselves of their humanity provides them with a brutal ability to inflict harm upon not only the player, but the supposed other aspects of the game universe. These monsters often begin as ordinary human beings, who through application of technology or magic--the two being interchangeable and exclusive only by way of genre, rather than function--suffer a prolonged transformation and subversion of their human natures, often towards some new racial impetus at an utter disconnect from the human. There are typically two types of monsters which emerge from this process, who I will loosely term as the boss-type and the minion-type.

If I ever try and do this in some serious academic environment, I'll just use German words that essentially mean the same thing.

As the more common iteration, I'll focus on the minion-type first, its connotations, implications, et cetera. The examples of such creatures are easily available for reference: zombies in Left 4 Dead and the broad swath of zombie videogames in general, the Chimera in the Resistance series, Super Mutants and those zombie-cousins, Ghouls, in the Fallout Series, and to pick a less modern and likely more surprising source: the Goomba in Super Mario (Goomba are, technically, denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom transformed into monsters as consequence of their service to Bowser).

These creatures share in common the traits I have already discussed: they are modified by way of magic or technology--which are, again, essentially the same thing and carry out the same function--are originally human, and in most cases, retain some gross perversion of the human shape, while utterly lacking any method of communication, articulation, or expression. These enemies are often thrown at the human player in waves, and there is never any suggestion that the murdering of these creatures is unjust--even in the children's game Super Mario. They represent, essentially, perversions of the human form, brought about by an ill-advised intimacy with either technological or magical forces that seek to advance beyond social norms in some sense. At first glance this theory mightn't hold up when presented with the straightforward zombies of Left 4 Dead and its like, but consider precisely who the survivors are: often, humans who had the good sense and wherewithal to find a safe place to avoid the majority of the infections, who avoided temptation such as going to key points like hospitals or police stations, where other humans succumbed rapidly to infection.

This, I think, shines an interesting life on the position of the player/subject. Their character is, most often, a survivor of the great tragedy who is removed from social norms, and set against the waves of monstrous transhumans. Nathan Hale, of Resistance fame, is a soldier often set apart from his squad, and certainly the vast majority of the normal human military, the Vault Dweller (and his/her later counterparts in sequel games) in Fallout is a member of a society which has rejected him/her to face dangers and stand alone in an unforgiving world, and so on. The subject, then, takes the role of the recluse, but the recluse who finds justification in destroying elements of society which have mutated into something undesirable, like cancers which need to be removed. The justification for this destruction is simple, and furthermore the process of destruction justifies the subject's own deficient characteristics: certainly, videogame heroes are far more often than not individuals who would not function properly if they were not given violent, wartime circumstances in which to thrive.

I would suggest, then, that this points to the key fantasy of videogames, that socially inadequate individuals can win favor and affection by dint of their heroic actions against devastating dangers, which are often presented as mutilations of humanity. By shaving away undesirable elements of humanity, the subject is justified in their own bizarre traits. But by this point, I'm getting off-topic.

The minion-type is a massed enemy, a set of creatures which appear in large groups and have no individual distinction, thereby stripping them of any remaining humanity even further: this offers a simple morality wherein their destruction presents no conflicting choice to the subject, and killing them is undoubtedly the correct action. Therefore they function as an "easy out" to justify the character's actions, which in any other circumstance involving excessive violence, would necessitate a great deal of self-examination (that is to say, one does not gun down hundreds of actual people without serious doubt and consequence; or at least, they shouldn't).

This is getting far longer than I originally intended, so I think I'll stop there and continue next Thursday, when I have another two-hour break in which I can freely ramble about utterly irrelevant nonsense.

Getting Ahead of Ourselves

Every now and again, I get an idea for a novel, or a short story, or a Something, and I think to myself, "Matt, you are a genius. Now stop talking to yourself and write, dammit." For a span of time that can last anywhere from an hour to a week all I can think about is how awesome the awesome thing I'm going to write will be.

Then, too often, it never gets written. There are always little reasons, of course: needed to work on this essay, play this game, go out with friends or something of the sort. As you're probably guessing by now, those aren't the real reasons.

The real reason is that I, as I'm sure a lot of other writers do, have a tendency to look back on where I was only a year ago, or six months, or even just a few weeks ago, and think "Damn, I was stupid. I'm a way better writer now! Imagine how great I'll be once I've learned more!" And so the thing doesn't get written. Problem is, writing is, like most things, a practiced skill. You need to keep at it to stay good at it and get better, no matter how much knowledge about it you might've acquired. Some things need to be encountered in honest-to-goodness writing and nothing but.

For example, blog-writing. I like to think my blog-writing has improved since I started this thing, though I'm still fairly convinced that the inaugural rib-eating/t-shirt-staining post was my best one in a weird way. And now I'm getting off-topic. Yeah, I've become a veritable champion at this crap.

Back to the point, though I'm not entirely convinced there actually is one. The thing that gets in the way of my own writing--and the writing of a very large percentage of would-be writers out there, if I had to guess--is a sort of self-defeating perfectionism that inhibits one's ability to actually get anything done from the fear that when it is done, there might be a mistake or inadequacy. When put like that, it seems really stupid, but in those moments where you're thinking "Holy crap I can't write at all WHAT THE HELL AM I", I find the brain tends to ignore logic.

If anyone reading this suffers from a similar problem, I can offer only one remedy: write. Even if it's crap, write it anyway. It doesn't matter if you write utter garbage, each piece of garbage you churn out will teach you inventive new ways to avoid the mistakes you made the last time (note: don't make the mistake of assuming that positive reviews from a peer-based site like fictionpress is any indication of real quality, though they sometimes can be. I've seen too many authors of fanfic or unimaginative original fiction think they're literary geniuses when they're basically just undercutting any talent they have by churning out fandom-appeal).

So here's to writing. I've got a couple of short story ideas I've been toying around with, the skeletal beginnings of them might make it on here. To err, after all, is not only human, but it is our greatest gift.

'Till next time, May the Force be with you.

(I wanted to use a Mass Effect parting remark, then realized there really aren't any. What the hell, Bioware? How will people show off their nerd cred now?)

OBVIOUS ANALYSIS

SARAH PALIN TWEETS A LOT AND LOOKS DUMB DOING IT.

HAHAHAHAHA.

WHY CAN'T WE STOP TALKING ABOUT HER OH GOD.