Lunch posting

In order save money and get a more consistent diet I'm going to start eating lunch at my desk. This would be a great time for me to make more consistent updates to our family website. There's only so many times I can read reason, Andrew Sullivan, and levelup while waiting to see the latest fearmongering article from CNN. I used to frequent the New York Times, but everytime I look at the site all I see is a snake on the right hand corner ready to attack. Like some venemous serpent waiting to oppose common sense and thought while combining the worst of all possible schools of political thought. Yes, I'm talking about you mister William Kristol. He and Orson Scott Card should go make man-babies (I only mention Card because I used to frequent his column and blog sites). I really have to concentrate now or I'll get distracted and start shouting into the wind.

It looks like Heather has been inspired by her sister's consistency in updating their family blog/site, so we'll be hearing from her much more frequently.

On the way to work today, as I do every Monday, I listened to parts of the 1up yours podcast. This week featured a new line-up with some of my favorite personalities. Namely Shawn Elliot, who usually contributes to GFW radio, and N'Gai Croal of the aforementioned Newsweek levelup blog. I mention this because The podcast from Feb 15th is particularly good. It retreats from the empowered gaming enthusiast/fanboy and jumps into a rather lengthy discussion of videogames as an expressive medium. Shawn pretty much mirrors my thoughts on the subject at hand with a few good rants on the nature of the medium being wholly different from any other medium. Gaming is at home as an expressive storytelling medium when it strays from mimicking cinema and begins to regard story as only an ambient notion of location in the playground you happen to be participating in. This doesn't mean it's impossible to have good story or narrative, it just means the experience is most powerful when it complements the gameplay rather than just being an excuse to go from point A to point B in any given videogame.

For those wondering up until now my favorite Gaming podcast was probably GFW radio, not because its gaming related content but the fact that the line-up manages to be both intelligent and puerile at the same time. Warriors of the Web and Shawn's consistently hilarious tales of griefing were highlights for me. I'm a little despondent and worried since Shawn is now doing 1up yours rather than GFW radio, but we'll see how it plays out.

Time to get back to work.

Edit: Apparently Shawn will still be with GFW radio WOOHOO. They were just trolling for responses when they announced he was leaving last week.

And here's some comments from Shawn Elliot taken from neogaf.

In my mind, the best storytelling in various mediums uniquely leverages the possibilities of those mediums. You do not read a great comic and say, 'this might have been a book had the artist/writer felt differently on the day he decided to start drawing'; do not watch a movie and think, 'this would have worked as well on stage'; do not look at a great painting and assume it might have been a photograph.

Think of the worst comics--so loaded with text balloons and narrative boxes that bury disconnected images beneath them, that you ask why they are comics at all and not composed entirely in text. While I do think that it is better to err the other way--where we can ask if the comic isn't really just a storyboard in need of a Hollywood deal--great comic stories, such as Chris Ware's (check out this week's GFW Radio), can exist only as comics. Mediums mature when the artists who work in them develop methods unique to the mode of expression. I'm not going to give you abridged art-, cinema-, and literature-history courses here, however, I do encourage you to do some research on your own.

I'm not arguing that games can't tell stories, but that the people who produce them are still looking for a native language to tell them with. To throw extended cutscenes in games is to acknowledge your inability to arrive at a less clumsy solution and to reveal what little faith you have in the power of games to tell stories on their own terms. When N'Gai said that games may never match the storytelling capacity of film or literature, I nodded along, assuming he was alluding to the fact that maybe interactive media aren't suited to telling stories. In other words, you don't tell a story to someone even as you invite them to write their own destiny. Narrative in games is a collabortive act between player and programmer, so to speak.

As for examples of various devs attempting to develop a language native to gaming--they're all around you. When you come across the Aperature slide projector in Portal, the epiphany that results is your own. You haven't been "told" (as in the "it's better to show than to tell" axiom) or even really "shown". Instead you look and discover. Same goes for when you get your first glimpse beyond the clinical test chamber walls. Imagine instead if Valve paused the game, then played a movie of you walking through a test chamber, noticing a malfunctioning platform, and then peeking inside to see what those of us who have played Portal know is there.