Essays, Not Rants! 110: Of Ludonarrative Dissonance I say again and again on this blog that video games are a truly unique medium especially when it comes to storytelling. Thing is, storytelling in games is inherently weird. What you do in the game doesn’t always quite line up with the narrative it’s telling. Clint Hocking dubbed it ludonarrative dissonance, TV Tropes calls it Gameplay and Story Segregation. As narratives in gaming become more complex, this dissonance becomes steadily more p
Essays, Not Rants! 164: Let’s Talk About That Whole Black Widow Thing People are mad on the internet. As usual. The hubbub recently, though, is about choices made regarding Black Widow in Age of Ultron. Now, I’m a big fan of Black Widow. I’d really like her to get her own movie and Nathan Edmonson’s run on the comics has been fantastic (issue #13 is framed on my wall). And I’ll be the first to admit that a character beat in Age of Ultron did throw me off for a bit. But I didn’t realize the fur
Warning: More Grownup Cyprinidae Coming: It's not that being an artist assistant is bad, it's just that it's kinda taxing, and the pay-by-hours isn't enough. But if I get this other gig, do I want that even though the pay is less, it's harder work, but maybe more hours? Do I want to do both? Hold out for something better? Can I hold out for something better? Am I selling myself short? But I need work.
Essays, Not Rants! 068: Violence and Video Games Violent video games are a hot topic, or at least they really were six months ago. Well, here’s the thing: video games aren’t violent. Angry bears are violent. Video games aren’t. That said, there is violence in video games. The thing is, the portrayal of violence in video games is as varied as in books of film. Can video games glorify violence? Sure. Look at Army of Two: Devil’s Cartel. You play as two mercenary-commandos sent into a cartel-ru
Essays, Not Rants! 326: Social Experience This week, Pokémon Go finally added a friends system. You can now add people as friends and there are fun little bonuses for working together. You can also trade Pokémon back and forth, assuming you both are in close proximity. It’s a wonderful addition and I look forward to checking it out in depth. But it also raises a big question: Where was this when the game debuted two years ago? (Also: It’s been two years since Pokémon Go came out?) Think
Essays, Not Rants! 198: Diversity: It’s That Easy! Claire Temple, played by Rosario Dawson, shows up in the last episode of Jessica Jones, providing a quiet link between that show and Daredevil. She tends to a wounded Luke Cage, because it takes a special kind of doctor to treat an (incredibly hot) man with unbreakable skin. Malcolm, Jessica’s neighbor, shows up too and the three share a scene. And suddenly there are more (important) people of color interacting on screen than in any other M
Essays, Not Rants! 172: Pixel Problems I remember seeing Patrick Jean’s short film “Pixels” when it first hit the internet a few years ago. It’s a cool short film with a fun concept. It does what it does and is great for it. Then there was Freddie Wong’s “
” which took a similar idea and, though not quite as visually spectacular or narratively sound, was a great ode to nerd culture (Lara Croft from Tomb Raider gets in the lander from Lunar Lander!). Then along comes this new movie Pixels, b
If you've been reading Essays, Not Rants! you'll have realized that I was a huge fan of the movie Chef, in no small part to the food. I love cooking (and eating), so a movie about it was a pleasure. Having recently coming across the recipe for the Pasta That Seduced Scarlett Johansson, the girlfriend and I decided to make it for dinner. Dang. It was good.
Essays, Not Rants! 272: But What About The Men??? 2: Sexy Lamps Back at a con panel in 2013, Kelly Sue DeConnick (writer of Captain Marvel, etc) coined the Sexy Lamp Test. Its rubric is that if you can take a female character out of a story and replace her with a sexy lamp and your plot still works, then "you’re a [beeping] hack." Like all tests used to judge stories (ie: Bechdel), it’s not perfect – mostly because it’s a little too vague. But it still provides a good starting point to examine
Essays, Not Rants! 003: Why Science Fiction Is Not A Genre Walk into any book store and you’ll find them sorted into categories. You’ve got your Fiction, Children’s, Military History, Home and Garden, Romance, Young Adult, the odd shelf titled ‘Young Adult Paranormal Romance’, and, of course, Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s fairly obvious where books go, works of Fiction goes in fiction, kids’ books go in Children’s, non-fiction goes with its topic, and so on. Now, a work of fiction, whe
Essays, Not 195: Thoughts on The Holy Trilogy Doing something different this week. In advent of The Force Awakens, the club I run at NYU is marathoning the Original Trilogy. In lieu of an essay, what follows is something of a live blog. Star Wars (A New Hope) It’s remarkable how much of the first few minutes are told visually. The first proper dialogue isn’t until Vader interrogates Antilles. Once we get to Tatooine, we’re back to relying on the visuals for Artoo’s run in with the Jawas. The lac
Essays, Not Rants! 372: Here Comes The Ending In many ways, I’m super jealous of the writers behind the Game of Thrones tv show. Over the years, they’ve built up an array of excellently developed and flawed characters, well-rounded, conflicted people who are often their own worst enemy. It’s Jon Snow’s loyalty to his homeland that makes his relationship with the Free Folk so fraught, but it’s that relationship that ends up saving his life. Petyr Baelish is delightfully conniving – he’s someone
It's March. Sure, only a couple hours past midnight into the new month, but here we are. My movie's shoot date is in 22 days. Y'know, this one. The one where I'm the first non-film major to make a thesis film. I'm just about cast, which is good. Working on locations (I may be shooting in a location Jessica Jones used. Also, bars and diners are kinda hard to lock down for biggish productions). I'm still around $7,000 short of meeting my budget. Which, btw, is a friggin' fart load of money.
I was gonna write a post lamenting pending (f)unemployment and the frustrating nature of job hunting, but I will instead talk about the PC's in an Edge of The Empire RPG session I've been running most of the summer. This whole time I've been expecting them to pull an Avengers and come together for the greater good, but really, they're more like the Guardians of The Galaxy who'll screw up and spend more time talking about money (and not being paid by the Rebel Alliance) than doing the right thi
I mentioned in my last entry that I've been running a Star Wars: Edge of The Empire RPG with some friends over the summer. Which is great, 'cuz I love tabletop and I've got a good group. So I'm gonna be rambling about those games on here. Let's start with the players; the crew of the Flying Flask. Character creation was a lot of fun back in June. First up, we have Tengen'benwen'henfen, a Chiss Pilot/Commando who, uh, pilots the Flying Flask. Ten's ex-Imperial too and, as such, has an anti-es
Essays, Not Rants! 177: Importance of Different Narratives Narratives are important. They don’t just affect how we interpret events happening around us, but influence the way we see the world. Stories tell us what to expect. The question then is what narrative do we hear? Chances are, there’s an ‘accepted’ version of it all. Y’know the saying about history being written by the victors? That’s the thing about narratives: they tend to be established by whoever’s in power (usually meaning whit
Essays, Not Rants! 383: 21 Minutes I’ve made no secret my anticipation for Death Stranding, the latest project from Hideo Kojima, the gaming industry’s undisputed resident auteur-genius-lunatic. This is the guy who brought us all the lunacy of the Metal Gear Solid series that somehow managed to merge questions of linguistic existentialism, mutually assured (nuclear) destruction, and giant robots into a cohesive narrative about the role of a soldier. I wanna see what this guy does. The lates
Essays, Not Rants! 152: Not Another Peter Parker I’ve had a relatively busy couple weeks, which means less time to see movies and play new games, so more yammering on about recent events (either that or wax on about Agent Carter again, but I’m waiting on that one. So let’s talk about new news, comic book news. Namely, Spider-Man’s going to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as opposed to standing alone. Which is cool, because we’ll finally get to see Spidey swinging on the big screen w
Essays, Not Rants! 370: Of Places Good I’m not great at watching tv. The act of putting aside everything to sit in front of the television (or, let’s be honest: my laptop) makes me antsy. Watching it with someone’s better, since then I feel like I’m spending time with a friend and so not just sitting around. Point is, all this means binge watching shows isn’t something I’m good at – it notoriously took me four years to ‘binge’ Breaking Bad. However, building with LEGO makes me feel like I’m
Essays, Not Rants! 261: On Visibility and Character Creators I spent well over an hour creating my character in Mass Effect: Andromeda. Not stats and stuff, no, just the aesthetics of his/my face. I love character creators. Maybe it’s an early exposure to The Sims, maybe it’s the simple joy of getting to play god and make people who look like whatever you want. In a game like Mass Effect where half the fun is making choices and carving your own narrative through the galaxy, I find that chara
Only one I can afford in good conscious at the moment. Doing Mechanical Turk work and signing up for psych studies here at university so I can buy more. LEGO®: So Addictive You'll Let People Science On You To Buy More
Essays, Not Rants! 306: Rey and Luke I liked a lot of things about the The Force Awakens, but easily my favorite addition was Rey, who is undeniably the best. Sure, she's basically Luke Skywalker in the original, except she's someone who's grown up with those same stories and now gets to live them out. It's cool, and she gets a lightsaber and that's awesome. But The Last Jedi doesn't give Rey some grand adventure. Rey doesn't actually do a whole lot over the course of the film. While Poe’s
Essays, Not Rants! 231: You Should Be Reading Mockingbird There’s a lot to like about the new Mockingbird ongoing title from Marvel. For starters, it’s the next step in a really spiffy new direction Marvel’s been taking with their comics lately: diversity. In the past year-or-so, Marvel’s really stepped up their game with who’s in their comics. You’ve got Asian characters headlining their own series (Totally Awesome Hulk, and the fantastic-and-severely-under-appreciated Silk), and Spider-Man a
Essays, Not Rants! 303: Personal History Exposition is, by nature, a weird thing. In fiction, it is effectively the author, whether through prose, dialogue, or (in video games) incidental environmental encounters telling you stuff about The World you’re visiting. It could be something as mundane as Ted and Jack used to be dating but now Jack’s into Sheila and that’s when Ted decided to quit his job or something as subtly major as "Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. [need better ex
I got a bar! As in, a bar to shoot in. An affordable one. Also, Mr. Robot was just shooting there recently. Go figure. Also got a diner. And it's the diner I go to almost weekly. Woo! And a stunt coordinator has signed on. He's worked on Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Zombieland, and a buttload of other stuff. Paperwork is almost done. Woo! Also totally cast. And I have a Facebook page. Which you should like.
