For some reason, the god/goddess of media decided that a number of things would arrive today. I got three books in addition to a History Channel 360 game (which is probably not great, but I want to try when I’m not playing Bully: Scholarship Edition or Burnout Paradise) and an old Bauhaus album I finally replaced (…one I owned originally on cassette).
The books:
1) A collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett: I never read Krapp’s Last Tape and recently–during a conversation about the Graveyard–someone mentioned that it was moving.
2) Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton, comes highly recommend. I’m working on two projects with Arkane: One with a very short development cycle, and one that’ll be much longer term. For the short-term project, I just hit a milestone that will make the Fullerton book very useful in terms of iterating. (Being at an independent, passion-driven company again is fantastic…Arkane is very agile, social and fun.)
3) Universal Principles of Design, also highly recommended, is a great book that the title describes perfectly.
A couple of years back, as part of my minimalist trend, I got rid of (I’d say) 4/5ths of my books. I like having some on the shelf, but I’d be happier if I could get them all in digi format, on a multi-use device that wasn’t just for reading (like the iTouch).
A friend just sent me a link to a new indie game called the Graveyard.
Huge praise goes out to the creators of this interactive work that touches on the ways in which death moves us. This interests me in part because I’ve talked off and on about “a game about death.” Talking to MTV on a panel with Will Wright, Cliffy Blezinski and David Jaffe, I mentioned that I’d be fascinated for personal reasons with a game depicting a human character at successive stages of life, dealing at each stage with a death and with the ongoing ravages of physical deterioration (altering the player-character’s movement model). But while I was wanking about, the creators of the Graveyard created something interesting.
Today I played around with the trial version of the Graveyard, then bought the full version for $5. Hopefully, others will check it out.
The Graveyard has great presentation, in terms of graphics and audio (including the music). I did walk off screen once and couldn’t recover. And while I appreciate the approach of not over-informing the player, I’d have liked more info on the controls. (It took me a while to figure out how to exit even.) The biggest critique of this (brilliant) indie work is the lack of interactivity; it’s not quite “a series of interesting decisions.” But I find it completely heartening that the game industry is rapidly broadening to allow for creative works like this, along with Facade, the Marriage, Passage, Braid and the like.
In my dreamworld, there’d be an expanded version of the game, wherein the player’s goal was to die with contentment. Imagine a faintly saturate bubble around the main character, with a little color…the last shreds of her vitality. Full exploration of the graveyard would reveal similarly hued areas in an otherwise black and white world; each colored spot would mark the grave of someone lost to the old woman, with whom she had an unresolved conflict. Each of these graves would represent a pocket world, a window into her past that would allow her to try, in her mind, to resolve the conflict she had with someone now gone. Imagine a room in the 1920’s, where she argued with a lover for the final time. Imagine her sitting on a boardwalk bench, fighting with her best friend over someone they both wanted to date. In another spot, she remembers a bitter fight with her youngest child who was never happy. The core game loop would, of course, be a challenge, but I would love to see her success in her last hour on the planet be driven by how successfully she came to terms with these past conflicts. With the passage of time and the emotional exertion of dealing with each memory, she’d get closer to death; with the successful resolution of each past conflict, she’d get closer to contentment. The game could then end with a discontent or content death.
In any case, I love the Graveyard and wanted to pass this along. Kudos to the team.
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheGraveyard/index.html
I remember Roger Zelazny’s death poignantly because I always wanted the chance to tell him “thanks,” but never got the chance. So I am truly happy that I got the chance to interview Gary Gygax before his passing, as a way to highlight his influence and his contribution. I made it a point to seek out Michael Moorcock a few years ago to have lunch with him for the same purpose.
Gygax (and Arneson and many others) had such a huge effect on me as a gamer and as a person. It’s hard to execute great (or even good) video games. As someone who loves games and wants to see our medium spread to every person on the planet, I see this death as a significant event simply because it marks the end of a life that was full of significant influence over games (of many flavor), storytelling, film, books and even the way people socialize.
Gygax is gone. (As my friend Steve Powers lovingly put it: “Gygax is at -10 hit points.”) His influence, of course, is not gone. Same with Zelazny, the voice of my youth. Odd timing, but now my friend (and influential game designer) Erick Wujcik is sick.
All this makes me sad, but it also reminds me to tell people every chance I get when they’ve impacted my life in a positive way.
http://www.witchboy.net/articles/the-dungeon-master-an-interview-with-gary-gygax/
Coffee, fireplace, cats, music and toys.
Standing outside in my stairwell tonight, I can hear Mick Jagger’s voice coming from the park. My girlfriend and I carved jack-o’-lanterns tonight and now the seeds are baking in my oven.
Every five years or so, I get a speeding ticket. Yesterday, as I was trying to get around some trolls going 60 in the far left lane, I sped up to the high-80’s/low 90’s. Just as I passed the trolls, I spotted a motorcycle cop up ahead.
He was polite, and only wrote me up for 80. “I’m cutting you a break, downgrading this by a couple’a categories.” Thanks for the break, officer.
Time for comedy club defensive driving, at the advice of my g/f.
This morning I had to fight my way across four lanes of traffic at a difficult intersection. I was exiting the highway, running on empty, trying to make it to the nearest gas station. I slipped into the traffic and turned right, just ahead of a tan SUV. The light just ahead was red, so I coasted up to it slowly, with the SUV riding close behind.
At the light, the tan SUV driver changed lanes and pulled up next to me. He gestured from behind his window, mouthing words of agitation. I felt a rush of anger. I looked at the man, categorizing him without conscious thought: Older, clean-cut and conservative, and (at least according to my eyes) patriarchal and authoritarian. In the past, by reflex, I would have cursed him out; I would have reacted to his anger, letting his emotional state leap over and influence mine. Instead, I smiled.
“Does your car have a turn signal? Do you know how to use it? Next time, do it!” He shouted his words out and rolled up his window.
I managed to stay calm, maintained a friendly expression and called out, “Sorry.”
As the light changed, he sped off. And then–a block down the road–he changed lanes without using a turn signal…
I finally found a gas station and refuelled. I was working on my emotions, trying to experience them, acknowledge them, trying not to suppress them, but also trying to avoid allowing them to dominate me…I wanted to reflect and feel, rather than acting.
I let all the tension slip out and made several mental notes:
* I hadn’t used a turn signal and I should have. (I normally do.)
* Earlier in the morning, I myself had gotten angry at another driver. So I really couldn’t blame the driver of the tan SUV for getting angry with me…people in shared space often feel anger toward one another.
* I’ve yelled at people while sitting at a light, with my emotions running wild. So I couldn’t really blame the other man for yelling at me while angry. It happens.
* In the same way I had categorized him, making a gross generalization, he had probably done the same; my appearance might have irritated him, complicating the encounter between us.
* It’s possible that the man in the tan SUV had recently undergone some major stress, was in physical pain, has a shitty life, et al. In other words, according to my values, some compassion might be in order.
* Usually, I get pissed off because something scares me, implying a threat; events like this trigger a fight-or-flight response. It helps me to ask whether I am actually in jeopardy, or whether I am reacting to some false sense of danger. (Usually, in the modern world, it’s the latter.)
* In the past, I know I would literally have raced after the other driver, cursed him out, driven aggressively around him, and escalated the situation, emotionally. (Creating *actual* danger.)
This man was hypocritical in several ways. He acted rudely. He was the sole person in a gas-guzzling vehicle twice as large as mine. But I’ve done *all* of those same things. At some point in my life, I’ve shared those same behaviors, so what sense does it make for me to exaggerate his “guilt?”
Instead, I simply chose not to obsess over the situation. I chose to acknowledge that I was angry, then I let it go. You can’t live without anger; it’s part of the human state of being. And you can’t exist around other people without getting pissed off. However, we all have a choice about how we actually react.
This is me, throwing a temper tantrum at something like 2 or 3 years of age. And that’s my dad, watching.
This is me, assisting a random tourist downtown. Somehow she’d dropped her cell phone into a storm drain.
Today I heard that my brother had to put his old pug dog Beau to sleep. The playmate of my pug, Loki, Beau was originally my late grandfather’s dog and was just a perpetually-wired bundle of canine joy. But Beau was old and it was time; he was starting to suffer and my brother made the right decision.
Still, it makes me remember my cat…my ex-wife and I had him for years and finally had to put him to sleep. So amazingly sad, even if I accept that it’s right, even if years have passed.
I’m always curious about which links people follow religiously, so maybe you are too. I got rid of my tv in the middle of 2005, so the web (and word of mouth) are my exclusively sources for news.
Of course, I also check in with ThinkProgress.com and DailyKos.com, just to stir my liberal rage.
There’s a lot of other useful stuff I look at from time to time (like epicurious.com or boxofficemojo.com), but the following links I look at daily or weekly:
Exploding Dog
Exploding Dog is always charming, sometimes brutally funny.
The Onion
Of course, the classic humor site we’ve all loved for years.
Google News
The “news site” that I now use almost exclusively.
Perry Bible Fellowship
Awesome, slightly surrealist web comic.
Questionable Content
Indie music fan soap opera comic.
BoingBoing.net
Perpetually interesting source for ‘net culture related stories.
Common Times
A community edited news site.
What interesting sites do you use routinely?
This ‘morning’ I am drinking very strong coffee and right now Fairytale of New York is playing. “It was Christmas Eve, babe / In the drunk tank” is one of the most brilliantly comical lyrics ever penned.
Last night I had drinks and great conversation with a friend, alternating from indoors to out. We ate pizza, played guitar hero (the brilliant PS2 rhythm game), then watched a super cheesy 80’s movie…a fantasy flick with the standard Euro synth pop. (Guess the movie, win a prize.)
Since my early twenties, I’ve had trouble sleeping past 8-9AM. This morning, after waking up earlier to feed the dogs, I slept until 1PM. No idea why, but I had the best sleep I’ve had in years. Strange, but amazing.
As a deliberate move on my part, I have no plans for Thanksgiving, other than whatever happens on-the-fly. If nothing happens, I’ll catch up on writing. I love that post apocalyptic feeling that cities and towns have on holidays, so I might ride my bike downtown later, just to soak up that vibe.
On the last day of work, I went to lunch with another friend (Ricardo) and we ate at Whole Foods. I had some tofu with seasonal glaze, stuffing, wild mushroom gravy and cranberry sauce. There’s something deeply psychological about holiday-oriented foods; that was a really satisfying (if super casual) meal. And, as an aside, whenever someone goes the extra mile and makes vegetarian gravy, I *drink* that shit…it’s one of those things the vegetarians really miss. Or at least Southern vegetarians. (Now if someone would just make vegetarian beef ribs…)
