Whoa! What happened to your blog, man?

You may have noticed I redesigned the blog a bit. Don't panic. The old design was drab and cramped into tiny margins, and this new one finally lets the text have some breathing room. I'm definitely happier with it.

Mostly, the thing that annoyed me about the original template was that the text was always squeezed into this narrow margin that reminded me of the text on the inside flap of a book jacket. It always looks so bereft of space. I finally have the wide margins I desire. This will also make the posting of images and YouTube videos much easier, as I won't have to fuss about reducing their width so much.

I hope you like the new template, and feel free to suggest any new changes you'd like to see. Your regularly scheduled video game posting will resume forthwith.

Cakes can never be art

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool’s errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to eat this cake or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, cakes cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no pastry chef now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader to consider a video of an interview of Margaret Braun, a designer and baker of cakes. I did so. I warmed to Braun immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken. 
I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It’s only six minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.




She begins by saying her cakes "definitely are" art. Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a cake worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Then she shows an example of one of her cakes, calling it "Islamic or 18th Century." Braun concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she’s found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.




Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Cake is a form of food, typically a sweet, baked dessert... Cake decorating is one of the sugar arts that uses icing or frosting and other edible decorative elements to make otherwise plain cakes more visually interesting. Alternatively, cakes can be molded and sculpted to resemble three-dimensional persons, places and things."

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn’t start dancing all at once.




One obvious difference between art and cakes is that you can eat a cake. It has sugar, flour, eggs and frosting. Braun might show an elaborate cake in the shape of Chewbacca, but I would say then it ceases to be a cake and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot eat; you can only experience them.

She quotes a definition of good baking as "being motivated by a desire to make the audience hungry." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad food is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the cakes of Nancy Silverton are so motivated, and Jacquy Pfeiffer would argue that his cakes are so motivated. But when I say Silverton is "better" than Pfeiffer and that her cakes are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my appetite (which I would argue is better than the appetite of anyone who prefers Pfeiffer).

These days, she says, "grown-up eaters" hope for cakes that reach higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These cakes (which she believes are already being baked) "are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The cakes she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a cake that will deserve my attention long enough to eat it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a cake worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."


Why are pastry chefs so intensely concerned, anyway, that cakes be defined as art? Ray Kroc, Carl Karcher, and Tommy Koulax never said they thought their foods were an art form. Why aren’t pastry chefs content to bake their cakes and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their baking against dieticians, nutritionists, personal trainers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the mixing bowl and explain, "I’m studying a great form of art?" Let them have their cake and eat it, too, if it makes them happy.


This blog post is a parody/response to Roger Ebert's post, "Videogames can never be art." No offense or plagiarism is intended. All images taken from Cake Wrecks.

I'm only 9 years late on this, but...

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

Seriously, fuck you, IGN.

Moving towards real games journalism

Comic via Penny Arcade.

I think people sometimes get the mistaken impression that "videogame journalism" is nothing more than reviews of games, previews of games, top 10 lists that compare various aspects of games to each other, and so on. In reality, there's much more to being a journalist than just playing a game and doling out an arbitrary score from 1 to 10.

If you read publications in any other area of arts, entertainment or culture, be it Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly or The New Yorker, undoubtedly what you'll find are not just articles about films, or CDs or what have you. What you'll find are articles about people. These are usually the most important and most interesting stories in any given magazine. Rolling Stone even has what it calls "The Rolling Stone Interview," detailed profile pieces on notable figures within popular culture.

I point this out because I can not find anything like this within the world of videogame journalism. Yes, there are interviews, but they are almost universally about some new game that's coming out. The interviews in essence turn into free commercials for the game company.

Luckily I'm not alone in identifying this problem. Leigh Alexander, author of the blog Sexy Videogameland, recently posted a piece bemoaning this exact issue. She linked to a New York Times article on M.I.A. and compares that to the state of videogame journalism. She writes,

Let's pretend I was skilled enough a writer to do a piece like Hirschberg's. I couldn't in this business. Because game developers aren't vocal enough about who they are. If they have creative identities (many don't), they don't express them. But even if I could grasp at a couple people who would be nuanced enough "personalities" worth covering -- the Housers, Infinity Ward, Bobby Kotick -- there's no way in hell I could get close enough to them to do a piece like this. The PR machine wouldn't let me.

Essentially, the problem is twofold. Many game companies seal themselves off and only want to talk about their product, and I believe there's a lack of real games journalists who are willing to pursue personalities in the industry. The one notable exception I've come across is the 2005 book Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby. The book contains candid interviews and profiles with such noted videogame figures like Cliff Bleszinski, Nolan Bushnell and Will Wright. Read it not just because it's a good book, but because it's practically an anomaly in the world of games journalism.

So far, I don't see a real resolution. Alexander notes that games need to be more culturally relevant, and that's certainly true. I think the pursuit of serious games journalism goes hand-in-hand with making serious games. Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism, and he was the first person to do so. Can you imagine anyone winning a Pulitzer for writing about games? I sincerely hope that the answer will one day be emphatically yes.

So bad it's good

Have you ever seen the movie Hard Rock Zombies? Chances are you haven't, as it's not very popular. But given pop culture's current fetish for zombies, debating how to best prepare for zombie attacks, and inserting zombies into classic literature, I'm surprised it hasn't become more popular. Nevertheless, Hard Rock Zombies remains my favorite so-bad-it's-good movie of all time.

The concept of a movie being "so bad it's good" is at the heart of TV shows like "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and purposefully ludicrous films like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. No one goes into a film with a title like that expecting greatness. On the contrary, we enjoy it because it's so bad. My personal favorite musician Frank Zappa even paid homage to the genre in a song called "Cheepnis."



When it comes to games, though, the genre of "so-bad-it's-good" is practically nonexistent. Sure I've played plenty of bad games, even really bad games, but they almost never cross that boundary into being so bad that they're enjoyable in a perverted sort of way. More often then not, they're so bad they're terrible. Even when it comes to games being purposefully made bad (a sort of videogame version of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus), I can name practically none.

I've often wondered why this is. It's not enough to make a game with a ridiculous plot and laughable voice acting. Such games abound, and such traits surrounded by solid gameplay would still be called a good game (like Dynasty Warriors 4, just to throw out an example). But more importantly, bad special effects, bad acting, etc. are the hallmarks of films. If we're talking games, the "so-bad-it's-good" part of it would have to be an inherent part of that medium. The actual game part has to be so-bad-it's-good. And therein lies the rub.

If you, for example, make a racing game and design the car so that it's near impossible to drive without swerving off the road, then certainly you've succeeded in making a bad game. But how do you get from there to making it so-bad-it's-good? As I'm not a videogame designer, I'll leave it up to the men and women of that noble profession to definitively answer the question.

But I do have some good news. I was inspired to write this post by a game I started playing recently, a game that I believe deserves the title of the first ever true so-bad-it's-good game. And that game is Deadly Premonition for the Xbox 360.

Oooh, scary.

The first thing you notice is the graphics. They're truly terrible. Trees are lined with two-dimensional branches. The ground is lined with ugly, blurry textures that are supposed to be grass. Squirrels sound like monkeys. When characters try to emote, it looks like invisible hooks are pulling the corners of their mouths. People do not walk, run, or even move. They contort.

The plot, such as it is, was clearly ripped off of the show "Twin Peaks." A woman in a small town is murdered under mysterious circumstances, and a snarky FBI agent is sent in to crack the case. You play the FBI agent Francis York Morgan, who spends as much time investigating the crime as he does ruminating on cheesy 80s movies. (Perhaps the game hinting that it knows how bad it is?)

Virtually every part of this game reeks of incompetence. You can shoot, but the aiming is haphazard. You can drive, but the car will inexplicably veer off the road at random times. You can talk to the townspeople, but conversations are slow-paced, stilted and . The soundtrack will frequently cue up inappropriate music, such as a folksy ballad during a tense moment, and the same five or six tracks repeat over and over throughout the game.

There are so many small gameplay touches that amount to a thoroughly uniquely bad experience. Every time you pick up an item, you're taken to a separate black screen that says, "You picked up [whatever]" before being dropped back into the action. The game is mainly played from an over-the-shoulder perspective a la Gears of War or Silent Hill, except for certain instances where the camera zooms out to a third-person perspective where suddenly it's like you're playing the original Resident Evil. You earn money for killing enemies, but you also earn money for completely random things like changing your clothes, driving through gates, and peeking in windows.

And yet, despite all this, the game is fucking hilarious. It's bad, to be sure, but it somehow compels you to keep playing so you can see just how bad it gets. I'm only 5 hours in, and I think I've already seen enough to make a comprehensive guide on how not to make a game.

What makes Deadly Premonition truly stand out, though, isn't just that it's bad. It's that no other game I can think of descends to such a level of badness. And I don't mean to say it's the worst game I've ever played, either. Deadly Premonition has somehow managed to reach that golden equilibrium where it's so bad, it becomes good again. I think all Xbox 360 owners should go out and buy it simply because of its uniqueness.

What other games are there that accomplish what Deadly Premonition does? If you think of any, please leave a comment or email me because I'm dying to know. I own over 100 so-bad-they're-good films. I own only one so-bad-it's-good game. This inequality must be addressed.

Unfair Comparisons, Vol. II

ON STRONG FEMALE PROTAGONISTS

Film:


Games:



ON TRUE LOVE

Film:


Games:



ON MEANINGFUL INSIGHT INTO THE HUMAN CONDITION

Film:


Games:

(VIDEO NOT FOUND)


See Vol. I here

Virtua Fighter 5 announced!

The Virtua Fighter series has always been awesome, and this Japanese trailer for Virtua Fighter 5 looks spectacular. Check it out:



Hopefully this will make its way to America pretty soon.