ipso's blog

I wrote this on Kotaku:

Pitchfork Media, it would appear, has never heard of Discount.

My top discs for 2008 are:

Only this year, when I've been in the coffee house, I've played LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver, Envy's Abyssal, the World/Inferno Friendship Society's Red-Eyed Soul and Pure Trance 4.

Dear Dan Yemin:

SWEET FANCY MOSES, quit dropping random FUCKS in your FUCKING songs, so I can play them on the motherFUCKing radio and have those songs blast the rest of the Pitchfork approved garbage my station plays out of the water and into sub-lunar FUCKING orbit.

FUCK.

Oh, yeah, New Lexicon is pretty awesome.

So, I read another story on Kotaku about the near constant stream of racial and homophobic slurs on Xbox Live. The majority of the comments ended up being "just use the mute button on your headset, and that solves the problem". Which, as a couple people pointed out, is, not the problem.

What did Barack Obama learn from Nintendo?

He effectively used the "blue ocean strategy" that Nintendo used when they designed the Wii. Blue ocean means moving away from the traditional, where there is already blood in the water, thus, a blue ocean. Both Microsoft and Sony were upgrading hardware and promising to shove more technology into their next generation boxes. Nintendo, on the other hand, decided what they were doing new was that they were going to use motion control in their system rather than a normal controller. Professional skeptics said it was crazy, that Nintendo was aiming for a fickle casual audience that might not respond to the system.

History has proven the skeptics wrong. The Nintendo Wii is the most popular console, by far. the 360, plagued by hardware issues, and the PS3 plagued by a high price, have yet to catch up.

Barack Obama, bet his money on undecided and new voters in Iowa. Young voters, were the key, he said. Nevermind that for the Democrats in Iowa, a young voter is under 60. But. These too, were fickle voters. Better to steer your star by traditional, older voters, the skeptics in both parties said. You couldn't trust the kids. They were an unknown quantity. Undecideds couldn't make up their mind, or be trusted to vote your way. They usually made up their minds in the polling booth, for God's sake! It is a risk, and a huge one.

As you have probably heard, Obama won Iowa soundly, 8% away from his biggest competitor.

Sometimes I wonder if there is something to these videogames...

The way that games are designed, you can't have a replayable experience if the game forces you to be analytical. A fun, replayable game, is wild, absurd, and empty of any respectability. A novel-esque game is concerned with getting a point across. And you can't get a point across with a controller without it becoming a movie. The two inherently oppose one another.

Sure, there are games like Bioshock, which have novel-worthy stories ad pretty fun gameplay. But here, the issue of replayability comes across hard. How many people actually want to replay Bioshock? It was a great game the first time around, but why go back to it?

A game has two elements: a controller and a screen. To make the controller part relevant, you need something spontaneous that caters to our wild side. And the screen will have to project something that naturally follows that. So how do you make a novel out of spontaneity?

I saw this comment on Kotaku and now feel it's worth a longer response than no, you're wrong, multiplayer gives you the replay value, single player gets you the story.

But then again, there's games like Chrono Trigger or Oblivion, or any game where more story or space opens up after the main story is completed.

Bioshock is used as an example of a game that doesn't have replay value, but it's got a great story. Still, with Bioshock, there's two ways of going through the game, there's the "good" way and the "bad" way. (Ie: Don't kill 12 year old girls and killing 12 year old girls.) While the story doesn't change, the experience does, so we're led to believe. It might be a little bit harder, it might be a little bit easier, depending on what upgrades you get.

Chrono Cross (which people seem to loathe for reasons that don't hold water with me) is another great example of a game that has replay value even if the story sticks with you, even years afterwards. There are characters that when you go in one direction unlock, and by choosing that path, you lock up other characters. Also, with the new game+ feature, you can go back and see the different endings you can view at different points in the game.

You can't get a point across in a game without it being a movie.

Half-Life, the sequel, and the episodic content based on Half-Life 2 beg to differ. (Also Portal, so I hear.)

Haze, the new shooter from the people that made Time Splitters, has at least a good shot of putting together ideas without using cut scenes, though we'll see how if that works in practice.

I suppose I simply have trouble believing that because there aren't a lot of shining examples of narrative in gameplay means that it's impossible. To quote Henry Rollins, I just can't forget what I know.

My work has been elsewhere, and after a Heidegger induced hiatus about art and it's place and so on and so forth, I return with one of the most liberating exchanges I have ever witnessed.

It is between MTV's Gideon Yago and Cliffy B of Epic Games.

Mr. Yago says something to the effect of "well, if you put a kid behind a guitar, he looks cool. If you put a kid behind a turntable, he looks cool. But if you put a controller in that kid's hand, not so much."
Cliffy B's response? "Does it have to look cool"?

It is that spirit that I want to send to everyone in my social group, everyone in high school who plays video games and is ostracized for it. That fuck you spirit. We're going to do what we do regardless of how it looks.

It is part of a larger conversation, well, well worth your time below, at MTV's Overdrive.

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1532074&vid=87591

That last video is one of the things that speaks about the future of video games, and I can't (as David Jaffe would say) fucking wait to see it.

It is unclear to me why "The Reasons" was not an mp3 from the Weakerthans' Reconstruction Site. If you can explain to me how in the fuck "Plea From a Cat Named Virtue" is better than "the Reasons", it would be enlightening. Thanks.