Music Boot Camp
This Friday, I get to see Jonathan Coulton opening for They Might Be Giants. As you can imagine, my socks are squishy with nerd-spooge.
But there’s also a level of stress here. Because I hate going to concerts unprepared – and JoCo has a new album, as to TMBG. What if they play a song and I can’t sing along? I’m supposed to be a fan. So I’m power-chugging each of their new CDs, inhaling the tracks so that I at least have a passing familiarity. (This is a pleasure for JoCo’s new album, which is entertaining and original except for the not-GladOS, not-JoCo version of “Still Alive”; it’s less of a pleasure for TMBG’s new album, which sounds like a computer learned how to produce efficiency yet uninspired tunes in the TMBG vein.)
I know, I should just sit back and enjoy. And I can. But I enjoy it more when I know everything they play, so I’m boning up on this like I was studying for a test. And I only have four days to be able to sing along properly!
Anyone else do this? I can’t be alone in this, can I? I know it’s freakish.
A Subtle Redirect
A long time ago, I moved the more explicit meanderings on my personal sexuality over to FetLife, the Facebook for kinksters, so that people who didn’t want to hear the in-depth travails on my personal sexual journeys didn’t have to see it. (Also, so my family could easily avoid it.) But I did promise to leave a link here whenever I wrote over at FetLife, and so I have today.
Today’s essay is called “A Different Kind of Domination,” and it asks a very personal question: “Who am I when I fuck?” (Aside from both Moose and Squirrel, of course.) If you want to go look, well, you know where it is.
(And if you’re going to friend me on FetLife, feel free – but as with all other social networks, tell me who the fuck you are. As usual, with differing usernames, how am I supposed to know that TheFlyingFelcher is actually CharityWhore on LJ? I don’t ask for much, just gimme a clue.)
The New And Never-Ending Cycle
You may think it’s too soon to reboot the Spider-Man series. You are wrong. It’s just right.
The cycle is speeding up. We’re going to see more remakes, at a faster clip than ever. And it’s all in the seven-year cycle.
If you look at wrestling, it has a seven-year rule – namely, that there’s enough of a turnover in the fan base that after seven years, 80% of the audience won’t have seen this plot before. So why not recycle the best plots? Sure, you could spend years trying to find the Hamlet of wrestling storylines – or you could have the ones you know went over gangbusters in past years, the ones that the fans loved and blogged about and ran again.
Put another way, you’re a theater owner. Why take a chance on a new play when you can actually run Hamlet, with newer, hotter actors?
So what happens in wrestling, and soap operas, and comics, is that hey, let’s do the Time Warp again. Peter Parker abandons his duty! The Undertaker gets buried! Matilda’s having another affair! This isn’t to say that new storylines don’t happen – the writers usually don’t have enough to completely recycle seven years’ worth of plot, and the old fans will walk away if it’s entirely salvaged plot – but a lot of the big storylines are a big “been there, seen that” production.
But the seven-year rule doesn’t quite apply to Hollywood, where people see movies forever… Or do they? TAs it turns out, welve to twenty-four year-olds buy a solid third of all tickets. Furthermore, you kind of need to rope them in young – teach them that going to the movies is a fun experience, going with a group of friends, and they’ll continue to do it until they’re at least forty.
In other words, your biggest audience and the audience you most need to reach to continue your existence? They’re largely outside the seven-year cycle. Everything you give to a teenager is new – or mostly new, anyway.
Which means that, again, as a Hollywood producer, you have a choice: try to make a new franchise, with potential for sequels, with all of the problems inherent in turning “Cowboys and Aliens” or “Green Lantern” or “Sucker Punch” into a huge franchise… Or go back and get a tried-and-true story that works?
I mean, come on – how badly can you fuck up “Transformers”? Or “The Smurfs”? Or, you know, “The Karate Kid”? It’s not like they’re elegantly-balanced masterpieces of characterization and plot to begin with. You put in a bunch of cool action sequences with some awesome CGI, and have a neat trailer, and the teenagers will go, “Oh, man, that’s cool. What do you mean it’s a remake?”
Don’t believe me? If Bin Laden taught us anything, it’s that kids who were six to eight when 9/11 happened largely had no clue who Bin Laden was when he got killed. Google searches for “who is ben laden” shot to the top of the search engines. And the movies of yore? They may remember something about Lord of the Rings, maybe they saw it on TV, but today’s teenager has no clue of the cinematic history of ten years ago, nor do most of them really care. So you can sell them endlessly.
What about the twentysomething kids, who don’t want to have all these damn remakes? Well, let me introduce you to what I call the Sue Effect.
My sister-in-law Sue, who is forty, continually bitches about how Hollywood has no originality. Every time I see her, she’s complaining. But I tell her, “Inception is really great. The King’s Speech was mind-blowing. Tangled is the best comfort watching.”
She doesn’t see any of them. She has no time to go catch movies in the theaters.
But when I call her up, what has she gone to see? The remake of Halloween. Why? Because she knows the plot, and wants to see what twists they put on it. It reminds her of a younger time, when the future looked free and boundless, and she had her whole life ahead of her. She can round up her old high-school friends to go with her. There’s a certain bottom level of entertainment, because even if it totally sucks ass, she can complain to all of her friends how they fucked it up.
Everything about a remake is perfect for Sue, except that it’s cookie-cutter remake. But hey! She doesn’t have the time to find what the new, good films are! That involves a lot of paying attention. And she can wait for those on DVD, if they get enough good word.
So really, what Sue wants to see in the theaters is a film she’s seen before. Even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
The thing is, when you remake a film, there’s a built-in level of publicity. If Joe Schmoe is making his own space opera? Well, that’s good. Call us when you get some killer trailer material. And hey, your space opera’s probably too complicated to sell us on these crazy robots and armadas and whatnot.
What’s that? Joe Schmoe’s remaking STAR WARS? Well, suddenly, you have a hundred thousand inbound links. And a lot of them will be favorable.
The twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings claim they hate remakes, and they do… But “love” is not the opposite of “hate.” That’d be “indifference.” And hate can turn to love pretty quick if there’s a really cool trailer attached. As opposed to “indifference,” which leads to a fucking awesome film like “Moon,” perhaps the best sci-fi film in the past decade, which bombed at the box office with one quarter of a percent of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s take because it was a new thing that nobody quite knew how to sell to teenagers, and didn’t have a lot of shit blowing up.
This doesn’t really apply to more traditional dramatic films – I don’t think we’ll see the remake of “Shutter Island” any time soon – but for theater popcorn-munchers? When you can rope in a new generation of kids and have twenty-somethings going, “A Transformers movie? Fuck, I loved that as a kid! That’s gonna be awesome!” then you wind up with a cycle that’s only going to get worse.
Built-in PR. A minimum bottom line of failure. Easier to create, since all the work’s been done. And hey, if you want originality, why not just go to TV, where Mad Men and The Wire and Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire and all the other interesting dramas that used to win the Oscar have fled?
The cycle’s not going to be seven years, since movies have a slightly slower half-life thanks to being one-shot events. But ten to twelve? Oh yes. Long enough to make that even spread between teenagers and twentysomethings.
My take is that we’re going to see a cycle of Spider-Mans and Batmans and Transformers and Hangovers and Nightmare on Elm Streets and whatever else comes. It may even become encoded, like a new season of a TV series, or this year’s new model of car. The Spider-Man 2020 Edition. Tried and true. Bulletproof.
With just a few tweaks. And some awesome special effects.
A Letter To The Doctor After "The Girl Who Waited"
(No spoilers of consequence.)
Dear Doctor:
I’m not what you’d call a (makes air quotes with fingers) “Time Lord” kind of guy. More of a “sits on the couch and watches TV” kind of couch potato. And I certainly can’t claim to be a thousand year-old genius – I’ve just been watching synopses of your various adventures for fifteen years.
However, I should note that even with my limited knowledge of your technology, your history, and the multitudes of worlds you have to face, even I know that you don’t fucking walk through an electronic door when your companions are on one side and you are on the other. This door will lock shut, forcing you to spend the rest of your adventure rescuing companions. And if you walk through an electronic door and the TARDIS is on the other side of it, you do realize that you’re going to get separated from your trip home?
Look, I didn’t study at the feet of Rassilon or anything. I’m just saying: see a door? Wait a fucking second. Get all three of you in the same room. Don’t charge ahead.
I know what’s going to happen. G’wan, use that big ol’ brain of yours and make the conclusion.
Sincerely,
Ferrett Steinmetz
Deus Ex: The Final Review
Deus Ex is the first game where I’ve been disappointed due to the writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since Portal was the first game where I loved it almost entirely because of the writing, but you have to remember: I’m an Atari 2600 kid, back when videogames were just blocks and bleeps and bloops. It’s odd, to see how videogames have evolved to the point where the gameplay can be 80% satisfying and yet the experience falls critically flat because I just don’t care about the characters.
The problem with Deus Ex is that 90% of its story is told via hacked emails, which – as I’ve bitched about before – are in low-contrast fonts that are too small to read comfortably on my screen. So I wound up skimming them, even though I’m usually the guy who reads everything. And if you don’t do the homework, then the plot becomes a barrage of OMG PLOT TWISTS where characters you barely know interact with story arcs you really haven’t been introduced to.
The fatal flaw here is that you don’t really interact with the main characters – or, rather, you have one or two conversations, but they’re not characters so much as transparent mouthpieces for the three core philosophies of the game (ZOMG MECHANICAL AUGMENTATION IS BAD!!! vs TECHNOLOGY IS THE LULZ!!!! vs CHOICE! CHOICE! CHOICE!). It’s like a live-action Matrix: Reloaded game where you don’t talk, you just exchange diatribes.
To make things worse, you never encounter the lead characters doing anything interesting: they’re always off on the side between missions, talking to you about what they didn’t do. It’s like if James Bond encountered Goldfinger in between action sequences and Goldfinger just stood there, helplessly, denying everything he did and never actually tying you up or killing all his competitors on-screen or even showing off his spiffy new chapeau-wielding henchman.
That’s not a cool villain. It’s a shadowy manipulator, sure, but it’s not satisfying.
So I knew nothing about them except what they represented. And the guys I was actually supposed to beat up, the boss villains? I knew less than nothing about, so I didn’t care when I beat them. A particularly egregious example: From Wikipedia, I learn that one of the main villains is supposedly paranoid, since “being one of few women in a male-dominated profession has strongly influenced her worldview, making her cautious of everything around her.”
That would have been interesting to see. Too bad Deus Ex didn’t bother to tell me.
As such, I didn’t have any real stake in the plot. This is a game where the cut-scenes annoyed me, because the characters were all like, “OH MY GOD, YOU REALIZE THIS MEANS – ” and I was all like “Yes, yes, can you just drop me in the next room of crates so I can kick some ass?”
This “Philosophy over action” applies to, sadly, the end credits. You have four choices you can make at the end, and they all seem cool…. except you don’t actually find out what happened. Instead, you get a big windy speech justifying why it was so great you pushed the RAH TECHNOLOGY button, and never see whether pushing humanity towards cyborgization had any effect, positive or negative. Look, fuckers, I don’t care about proposing augmentation, I care about knowing whether I made a difference. Like, you know, happened in the first Deus Ex.
(Also, the speech makes a big deal about how you’re a moral man who cares about people. That makes sense for me, since I spent much of the game going out of my way to knock people out and not kill anyone. Those who went through the game as a buzz saw through guard-skulls, however, will find a monologue that is laughably and provably wrong.)
Furthermore, the philosophical choices are weighted so ridiculously that it’s imbalanced. On the one hand, you have the anti-augmentation side, who wants to beat you up and steal your lunch money and kill anyone who has contact lenses. On the pro-augmentation side, you have every power-up that ever existed, giving you all the cool features that allow you to super-soldier your way to goodness. Why would anyone be anti-augmentation by the end of the game? There’s absolutely zero attempt to show us any disadvantages to having these augs (aside from the vulnerabilities that the antis exploit, and that’s not what they’re concerned about).
It’s like having an entire faction in the game be anti-puppy. IF WE RELY ON MERE CANINES TO PROVIDE US WITH LOVE, WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO HUMANITY?
It’s not all a wasteland – I did care about my pilot, and they were smart enough to put her in danger – but in the end, no matter what good choices or bad choices you make, you get the same damn ending. So why did I make choices, then, if it has no real consequence? Shoot the whores, man, save them, they’re all ultimately worthless.
The gameplay is pretty good, too, except that the augmentation tree is a distinct disappointment. Some of the tech trees are flat-out useless. I played a stealth player, and literally left the whole “stealth” tree behind because all it did was show cones of vision on tiny sub-screen I wasn’t watching. Likewise, the invisibility cloak burned up so much energy that I never bought it. I finished the game with five upgrade slots completely unused just because I didn’t want them. That’s the sign of one stunted tech-tree.
You want to know what breaks the game? You put all your points into hacking. That’s it. Once you hack, you get bonus experience every twenty feet, you take over turrets, you shut down cameras. Hacking is so superior to everything else that there’s literally no reason not to master it, even if you’re a psycho killborg.
Part of the problem is that you have batteries that fuel your powers… But that battery, while it recharges slowly on its own, never recharges beyond one bar. You can buy extra bars with augmentations, but if you want to fill those bars, you need to use power-up items. Which is dumb. It means that the items that use energy become a liability, unless you can get usage out of them with one bar – otherwise, you’re burning precious power-up items. This nerfs the cloak, nerfs the special sight requirements, and everything else. Why spent slots on augmentations that are hard to use and consume resources when you can just HAXX0R?
Don’t get me wrong – Deus Ex is a fun game. Near the end, you feel like a complete badass. In terms of gameplay, it completely absorbed me.
But I shouldn’t be irritated by a cutscene. I was. STOP INTERRUPTING MY GUARD-CHOKINGS WITH YOUR STUPID STORY, DEUS EX.