Month: February 2013

Categories
Audio&Games

FrankenStoriesandgamesstein

Stories are making a strong come back these days. The Walking Dead, Double FIne’s projects, Dreamfall, Kentucky Route Zero, Twine games, Valve and JJ there’s a lot going on.

I think it reinsures the industry. It’s been a good business in the past, stories are as old as humans and if we can dig more games around them, it should stick on the wall, right? In some extent, yes.

But I have a hard time believing it simply because stories demand you to be passive. That’s when they strike the strongest, your entire self is absorbing it, situations characters what’s going on and what is going to happen. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the best delivery possible is through a passive mode. Interactivity doesn’t bring anything but breaks the flow.

On the game side, games are about decisions, interactions. Stories never really add anything. I’m always a bit sad at all the work I skipped in games because honestly, fuck your stupid story I’m playing Angry Birds there’s no story come on now.

The most complex game stories are all diminished by power fantasy phantasms that I can’t connect to: there’s nothing captivating for people who saw/read a lot of classics, except with games like Dys4ia, personal, talking about an unspoken side of human life. Coen brothers just kill me with their movies, all their stories hooked me up in seconds, all so simple and dumb on the paper. But the delivery, man. The sound design. The depth.

Kentucky Route Zero seems to be the closest to that maturity and honesty, as well as Ron Gilbert’s work so special for growing up in the 90s kids like me. But it just creates some kind of dull games with great stories. Or great stories with tedious delivery. Twine games make me feel it this way too. If your story is great, I don’t care about choosing I want to listen. Write it, direct it with multiple angles if you want to get away from the single lonely, traditional story path. Me inputting? Unnecessary.

So I kind of want to buy KRZ and at the same time, I don’t.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Living dead

That’s what my grandma called her husband today, calmly after looking at him. She’s right. I kind of hope that he’ll pass away peacefully this year because it is just unsustainable. I’m sorry.

The dissonance with this crazy ass L.A. story with a black ex-cop killing white people because of their presumed roles in physical abuse and racism in the LAPD -who knew? Oh wait- which in return shot two Asian ladies in a van thinking it was the said ex-cop. Police brutality, race issues, L.A. me playing dozens of songs from Los Angeles based black bands and bam 40 mn an hour of train later my white family, an old man to maneuver around in his wheel chair, my dad and his broken leg, my mom freaking out over stupid little dramas. Me, helping as much as I can. I even tried to fix my mom’s unsupported, old accountant software by hijacking its Access database. It didn’t work. Too old. Terrible software design. Nonchalance: casual lack of concern. I hate when you slap me with that, France.

It’s brutal. I have two house music tracks ready to ship and I can’t even do it, I’m so not in the mood. My brain is filled in. If only there was only that. It’s too much but I can’t look away.

I think I am kind of a zombie too today. Oh shit I forgot, my cooking tops died. Things suck sometimes.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Dreams and green entrepreneurship

Last weekend at my parents. The usual except for one thing, my dad telling me about his business plan for his passivehaus company he just founded. We talked for hours about everything about it. I might do some marketing for him, he’s so bad at that (dad, you don’t sell with specs you need a story). I’m born in it they say.

It’s great to see him excited, taking risks. It’s a great idea and I can’t help but dream of doing the same in L.A. re-building entire blocks using the most of nature and technology. Damn, I wish I could especially for black people for whom social mobility is being refused. At least have a home that doesn’t make you want to go anywhere else and frankly, that is all  what is missing in beautiful Watts or South L.A.

Anyway.

I’m kind of jealous of him. Sometimes I wish I was a 6’ 2 blonde dude with blue eyes born in the 50s. It’s not even confidence at this point, it’s another world. Like for him mine. I was telling him about Zynga and Notch, how nothing makes sense today from a company born in 2007 valued at $billions and already kind of dead to a dude releasing a non-finished game that made him last year $270 million. It’s scary as fuck. Not the risk taken or the amount of efforts you put into something, but the fact that the outcome is highly unpredictable and rarely positive today. Add corporations agendas and lobbies, governments doing the same and your company dies you barely understood how or why. It’s brutal.

He doesn’t feel that. He never experienced that. He just hears about it, looks at me not knowing what the fuck to think about. I know right? So when I see that he’s investing all his money in his new venture, I’m excited and I try not to delve into the negative aspect of the economic global world today. Right on dad!

He’s already getting enough negative energy in France where an entrepreneur starting something passed 60 is asked “why would you do that? Just chill with your miserable retirement checks until you die in front of your TV”.

I’m proud of him.