I look at those pictures of solar space ships and robots on Mars etc. It’s cool but imagine if we were all on earth so bored and satisfied that we all agree to work on those problems. They would be solved in a heartbeat. Now I would be excited as hell. In the present time, not so much. You know what? I think that’s why I love modern houses.
18.36.54 Connecticut, USA. Go visit it.
They’re like earthbound and timeless space ships.
Composed and produced March 2015.
I have been thinking about this article a lot lately, trying to grasp the impact of self-driving things. I drove a lot last week.
Shit. it’s going to be dramatic.
No one should be asking what we’re going to do if computers take our jobs.
We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them.
I freak out when I see that no one in power even acknowledge the massive incoming change. It’s going to be messy and ignorant. The near new paradigm just breaks people’s minds. Dissociating hard work and income is only new and “impossible” to process to privileged people others know, they’re already working hard just to survive and pay the bills. It is worth mentioning that there’s collectively enough money to take care of everything. Just one bank like HSBC makes 13 $billion in profit a year, just sitting on its ass, having computers making transactions. We can solve so many problems with that amount of money from just one bank, for one year. It’s mind-boggling.
Once I’m free from work because computers have taken over, I’ll work. I’ll build things. I’ll teach stuff. I’ll have dogs and we’ll work together and then nap. Starting a family feels way less scary in this setting.
There are tons of shit to do once we’re freed from work. Like work.
Wow. I hadn’t seen all those articles about Mad Max Fury Road (I like this one). I have already written about it and my point of view is that sexism is so potent in our society that that movie looks like freedom from it. Small step or not, I celebrate the move.
Now let’s imagine a really feminist and diverse Mad Max:
In a post-apocalyptic future desert wasteland like that most people would be black. Come on. Y’all white people would have been decimated by scorching temperatures, hiding in a couple caves and shit. You would be weak and retreated. Black people would be the ones running things outside.
Because women plan ahead quite often better than men, they would do well in this world. Because so many men are greedy, we wouldn’t be trusted and we would have our own tribes. Men and women tribes would definitely be gay or forced to.
Complex alliances would emerge from that. Survival from as far as we can look back, is violent. It’s always violent and brutal. High scarcity means rape would be a free weapon/power tool. Death by snu snu aka suffocating between thighs while having your pelvis crushed would be real and not something dudes would look for. Sex is already important in our opulent society I assume it would be even more so in a limited human lifestyle.
Green energy and biofuel would play a huge role. Poop would be an asset.
Just with that I could develop tons of characters and story arcs and tension. There’s enough material in those three paragraphs to upset our current society for years with a movie based on them but to me, it just looks plausible and interesting.
Well that was good entertainment for sure. I really recommend not watching trailers.
Mad Max Fury Road is efficient. Mad Max Fury Road just does what you don’t expect because we’ve been used to stupid characters and stupid situations. I kind of blame Marvel for that. Those action movies are wordy motherfuckers and kind of lame, let’s face it. I say this because having a woman with her own agency in a story shouldn’t be amazing. That she’s better than Max at most things shouldn’t be something fantastic it happens everyday in the real world, boo.
It’s not so much how Mad Max is good, it’s more like how other movies suck hard on this.
Mad Max 2015 conveys meaning with silence and hell I wish most action games were taking notes on that. Shut Up, stop trying to make characters deep by transforming them into motor mouths. I don’t care if it cuts the voice over budget in half, STFU and please let me sink into information scarcity, let me build the story in my mind, let me fill in the blanks. Expect that I’m smart. It feels good.
Visually well it’s perfectly crafted post-apocalyptic design. and I can see the Hokuto No Ken and Rage influences who have been influenced by 30 year old Mad Max movies. I love witnessing the aesthetic waltz between medium and years.
Rage, Id Software, 2011.
My argument with action movies and CGI is that those movies should be full 3D. Come on: there’s no acting in Mad Max Fury Road that we cannot do very beautifully in 3D. Looking at the horizon or looking determined is no acting skills. That’s acting.
Also we always detect the green screen on those medium shots. It kills my vibe. I am happy to read that George Miller thought of making this movie a 3D animated movie back in 2009 (he knows damn well that someone dying on set isn’t worth it and he got lucky as hell in the past stunt wise). I mean the movie was supposed to be shot in 2001 but couldn’t for various reasons. They had to wait, just to be able to shoot in Namibia for example.
There is no such thing as waiting for a country to allow you to shoot when you’re doing CGI. No stunt injury or death. There’s no convoluted editing because you have to mix green screen, CGI and stunts. There are shots that probably would have been better if the camera had been free to fly around a scene where you can do whatever you want.
Nonetheless, George nails it as close to the metal as possible.
I’m the player who smiles at your story and attempt to make it serious-like-movie-serious. I’m the player who presses whatever key to skip anything that is not gameplay. I’m the player who doesn’t read/listen to any existential shout outs between characters.
I so do not want to run that errand for that generic, lifeless NPC who’s talking and who I don’t listen to. Having said that, there’s someone who makes me want to follow the story and read everything:
I mean, I’m not the only one and Ron got me when I was a kid so I guess he’s like that uncle who tells stories better than anyone in the family and I’m looking forward to the time when he’ll tell a new one. I think there’s a formula:
Mysterious agency and unexpectedness
I think Ron is like the Coen brothers: the basic plot is always simple but the way it will be treated will be good. You know it’s going to feel different. You know Ron treats you like an adult. Thimbleweed Park, his last game: Thimbleweed Park is the curious story of two washed up detectives called in to investigate a dead body found in the river just outside of town. […] Meanwhile, on the 13th floor of the Edmund hotel, Franklin wakes up with no idea how he got there. But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is that he’s dead. Spoiler: He’s not the body found just outside of Thimbleweed Park. Wow! That’s confusing. Don’t panic, we’re just as confused as you are. All about the journey and not the destination kind of design. I’m sold already.
Humor
Probably the hardest part. Ron uses that “90s Simpsons” style that always has been extremely efficient, regardless of where you’re from: The Simpsons probably aired there and you probably liked it. You know, the stupid puns and funny little phrases and regular pop culture jabs. The English non-sense, satire all the way… Very efficient stuff and I insist on the international traction at least for my generation. And what is great and that most people miss with humor and story based games is that it functions as a mechanic/reward: you explore dialogue and it’s going to end with a something funny, you smile next time you’ll try another branch.
In serious games with serious scenarios, you just go for the obvious and move on. It’s anti-exploratory. Humor solves that in a very elegant way. It is however really hard not to have a patchwork of different humor that works more or less like in most games.
I think those two marks are also parts of why Kentucky Route Zero is fantastic or how Oxenfree sounds pretty awesome though both are darker in tone.
This is the puzzle dependency/story chart for Thimbleweed, still in development. Ron says it’s the most complex he’s ever done. The development blog shows once again how making games is hard, even with a “simple”, old school adventure game. $0.6M is not much to build everything around that chart and make it come true.
Adventure games have a lot more to share with us. We need more awesome authors like Ron.
That’s the word describing what most of the tech world –devices, apps, services- leans to, a bit too much. It annoys me.
Let’s take the example of Uber. I use their service a lot, over 100 rides in a year. Love the diversity of drivers, always nice people and great experiences I could be an ambassador for that service right? No. They use deceptiveness as a business model: drivers are made to believe that they make money when it’s becoming harder and harder, and users are made to believe that prices are cheap when Uber is using that surge BS as often as they can: they know that people order their rides right before leaving so if they push a surge, there’s a huge chance that people will pay more. There is no such thing as supply/demand through the invisible hand, Uber tricks everyone for their own valuation’s sake. They have all the data. Uber’s valuation is about to hit $50 billion. It was $330 million four years ago.
And that’s what is so fucking wrong. So much of that new technology could empower people and make them live better lives but so much is done by design to milk the shit out of our credit cards, very quickly. F2P comes to mind. Phone carriers and smartphones. And you know where that control-freak worship-me attitude, make insane profits culture comes from?
Apple. 2003. iPod/iTunes.
All tech companies in the world are copying that model, that vertical model. They want those trillions or whatever. Twitter exploded thanks to its openness towards developers and once they went public, they screwed them all and still do. Google with Android has been deceptive, open source bla bla but it quickly moved to third gear and locked everything down once their mobile system was big enough for them to impose policies. Facebook’s algorithm, talk about bullshit. Microsoft has been the least deceptive (services available on all platforms, opening up .NET etc.) which is why Wall Street blasts them, why people think they’re weaker and why they’re fine by me.
It comes down to this: you don’t have to use deceptiveness to make a nice profit. You do that to make insane money via valuation, by locking people down and sucking as much as possible from them by sort of lying to them.
From 2000 to 2005, all that tech –feeds, location-based, miniaturization- was being created and true, most people had no idea how to monetize that. But it first empowered people and made them dream of a not so distant future where it would simply make our lives better, not transform us into brainless “fans” of a brand.
About 10 years of signup login and FOMO and Fear Of Not Being Able To through deceptive designs and companies abusing us by saying that they are changing the world with their services while they are mostly making us weak, dependent. And people play the game, get mad when a platform gets an app they had “exclusively” on theirs.
This all vibe needs to stop.
Sure this is a lot of text but here’s Barack Obama on Baltimore. He didn’t look amused:
“This is not new. This has been going on for decades. And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, we also know if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty, they’ve got parents, often because of substance abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education, and themselves can’t do right by their kids, if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead than that they go to college. And communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men, communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing’s been stripped away, and drugs have flooded the community and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a lot of folks. In those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without, as a nation, and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through this same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities, and the occasional riots in the streets and everybody will feign concern until it goes away and we just go about our business as usual.”
Housing is the start. Good housing => stability => wealth => wealth transfer. This is how white people have been able to mechanically triple their wealth in the past thirty years.
Housing is even more essential to future wealth now because jobs simply disappear and that’s a trend that is not going to slow down. That’s the massive difference with the 60s and civil rights movements. As Paul Coates remembers:
“What was the environment like back then? Black folks were suffering. But conditions were a lot different then. I don’t think, for example, many people had a problem finding jobs. Maryland had a strong industrial base. Baltimore was a port city. There were active shipyards here. There were major industries in Baltimore—steel mills, clothing factories, tire companies.”
Exactly. You could work at a gas station and be home owner I mean I’m gen X and it makes me salivating to think about something like that.
So even if in those times things were hard people had something to sustain themselves, build/buy their house, aim for something bigger, which is part of happiness. Having plans, son. That feels great.
Today even with the best of luck and financial support and good start in life, shit is tight. Everything can change real quick.
So housing is the start of everything good, still today, even more tomorrow. You have your crib, you can take care of your children and the rest is history, they’ll do fine and will overcome. Or at least, they have the best starter kit.
I feel like sustainable and affordable housing is far, far more important than any mandatory body camera on cops or college courses ever will in the long term. Fair housing policies would massively change the social landscape in two generations.
The good news is we can do that now, cheap. We can build nice homes for the price of a SUV.
The bad news is, no one connects the dots. The bad news is that there’s little to no profit to make. I know right?
Just read that article on Why the Comic Book Store Just Won’t Die. I kind of extrapolated to computer games stores. Both thrive on niches and fandom. Computer games culture is 90% online now and there are many reasons to make that culture more of a local, real life thing.
So we had arcades back in the day. They were cool but dirty and exclusive, the business model doesn’t work with today’s world.
Bros and sticks
There has been a resurrection of arcades as barcades, which are pretty fun. I went a couple times to the one downtown LA and it’s great but in a way it doesn’t cover all computer game activities. It’s not centered around game culture, it’s using it.
What’s so great with comic book stores it’s their diversity in content. Anything for anyone, curated by unique humans. I think we need to make computer games something we can discuss and try outside our devices in our living rooms, browsing the internet while machines stupidly try to understand what game we would like to play.
Computer games shouldn’t be only played drinking beers in the evening. We play anytime. We should have computer game stores where we can chill and try out games with headphones on, really enjoying the process of trying something new, sharing impressions with other players directly and not through a text box and threads.
It shouldn’t be about finishing games so much than it is about enjoying playing games and ultimately buying them. Tons of comics and books are read and not finished by people all the time. Some games are way better once you’re invincible. What I’m saying is, to get a “better” computer game culture we need to focus on play more than win, hardcore punishment, twitch reflexes, etc.
If I could have a computer game store here in LA… The main floor would be dedicated to discuss and play games casually in bean chairs and classic desktop settings. Downstairs would be the action room: a 10 seat LAN setup (CS:GO), a big console setup for AAAs and a couple of MAME arcade machines meant to be brutalized like in the good old days (standing up and mashing those buttons is part of computer games DNA to me), maybe a couple pinballs because those are the shit.
This way I could talk Minecraft mods with a son, install that Contraption Maker game on a mom’s laptop, recommend Snakebirds or Gunpoint to a daughter, talk LAN games strategy with teenagers or what it takes to make that AAA game look like that or how the demoscene in Europe influenced tons of developers in the 1990s hey come back, I’m not done!
Now that’s culture. We need real, non-digital stores like this.
Composed and produced October 2014.