So as far as open-world AAA vidya goes, Rockstar’s brand is now “naturalistic American nostalgia” and Ubisoft’s is “hyperreal international realism” and that’s interesting
(changed that “transnational” to “international” because I just thought about it and realized that Ubisoft’s recent stuff is actually kind of set in and fixated on particular nations as settings for recurring themes [extra credit: compare Far Cry 3’s “Ambiguous Indonesia” with Just Cause 2’s “Ambiguous Indonesia”, remember, there’s a lot of Indonesia] while Rockstar, with RDR’s Texas/Mexico thing, actually made a thing of border crossing)
Hey now people are talking about vidya-as-art and AAA games.
Remember Dawson Leery?
That’s not even a hypothetical question, do you remember Dawson Leery, the half-titled character of “Dawson’s Creek”, the 1998 show that was key to the WB’s efforts to rebrand themselves from the black network to the teen network? 1 year after Buffy, same year as Felicity, 5 years before The OC, 8 years after Beverly Hills 90210? Everyone talked fast and thesaurical, in a way that middlebrow pophist now accords to Gilmore Girls (female div.) or Sports Night (male div.)? Dude wanted to make movies, dude’s hero was Spielberg?
And how the ‘70s were the fruition of New Hollywood but they were also the dawn of the blockbuster and Spielberg and George Lucas and the franchise and marketing and man remember Dawson Leery? If Dawson’s Creek was a thing now would it have a fandom and who would you ship him with first caller?
Yeah I mostly buy it, and the whole g thing, because I have on very very many occasions encountered people and then later heard what they got tested as and (with two exceptions) my intuitive ranking and their formal numerical ranking have lined up perfectly
(my intuition I think depends a lot on how many levels of nested clauses and counterfactuals they use in casual communication)
The two exceptions were monetizeyourcat (PBUH) and this guy Bryan I knew in college, who were both working class kids who got initially read as sub-normal (and also AD[H]D) even though I’d intuitively rank them equal or higher than myself
In a cold February dawn in 2010, two small SUVs and a
four-door pickup truck headed down a dirt road in the mountains of
southern Afghanistan. They had set out soon after midnight, traveling
cross-country to reach Highway 1, the country’s principal paved road,
which would lead them to Kandahar and north to Kabul. Crammed inside
were more than thirty men, women, and children, four of them younger
than six. Everyone knew one another, for they all came from the same
cluster of mountain villages roughly two hundred miles southwest of
Kabul. Many of the men, unemployed and destitute, were on their way to
Iran in hopes of work. Others were shopkeepers heading to the capital to
buy supplies, or students returning to school. The women carried
turkeys, gifts for the relatives they would stay with in Kabul. A number
were Hazaras, an ethnic minority of Shia Muslims whom the Taliban
treated with unremitting cruelty whenever they had the opportunity. Now
they were in western Uruzgan Province, Taliban country and therefore
very dangerous for them, but they risked the shortcut because they were
short on gas.
They met no other cars and little foot traffic; the world around them
must have seemed empty. But it was not. Unbeknownst to them, they were
being watched and their every movement—even the warmth from their
bodies—transmitted across the globe. As the ramshackle vehicles—one of
them kept breaking down and another blew a tire—clattered along, people
they would never meet conferred across oceans and continents as to who
they were, where they were going, what they were carrying, and whether
they should live or die.
Unwittingly, the little group was driving toward an Operational
Detachment Alpha, a U.S. Special Forces patrol dropped in with a
supporting force of Afghan soldiers soon after midnight to attack the
nearby village of Khod. Such raids were routine in Afghanistan, planned
and executed by the semimythic Special Operations Command that
specializes in the pursuit and elimination of “high-value targets.”
Someone thought this operation important enough to give it the code name
Operation Noble Justice.
Definitely the best writing I’ve read all week. A visceral tale of how a kill order is determined, made, carried out, and goes wrong along the technological chain of command.
The foundation of Australia and New Zealand’s nationalist mythos is a failed attempt to seize Constantinople from the Ottoman Empire, and every year Aussies and Kiwis gather together to pretend that that’s not fundamentally ridiculous.
I’m at a low point on my emotional/energetic cycle, and on top of that my laptop caught some battery issues and keeps restarting during startup, leaving me with this iffy reblog-as-link mobile app.
Soooo, not much posting lately. I’ve got ideas kicking around for two American history effortposts though, drop a note if there’s one you’d like me to prioritize.
They are:
1) “Holy Shit You Guys The Post Office Was Important”
(When people say the federal government used to be just the post office and the military that’s close enough to true, but it’s one of those “all you have is a hammer” situations - the Post Office was why we have vertically integrated political parties [on several accounts], it was key to creating a coherent American literature and culture, it was the first domestic spy agency, it was long a battlefield of cultural subversion and countersubversion, it was how the government first started to establish control over railroads, with Rural Free Delivery and parcel post, Sears & Roebuck became the Amazon of its day. Actually, a better title might be “The Post Office: the Internet of its Day.”)
2) “Okay Seriously Who *Did* Build Roads When The State Didn’t?”
(Local roads developed organically [under government-enforced common law] but were inevitably placed under government control when maintenance ran into free-rider issues. Medium distance point-to-point roads could be built privately [though often with use of eminent domain or other state support] but the owners often actively resisted connecting them to any useful network, and in any case they tended to degrade for lack of maintenance and fall into state hands. [Even with tolls such roads usually lost money on operations, their profitability coming by way of increasing the value their builders’ newly accessible landholdings.] Long-distance roads have always been state projects, but that’s kinda minor since roads as a method of long-distance travel and transport are actually a pretty recent innovation in America.)
I’m playing DA:I and realizing that the notions of aggro and tanking might be the MMORPG’s most distinctive contribution to gaming. You got it showing up in 1p here, you had it in that one edition of D&D. (The grid miniatures one, I think. After the open source one, before the one that gave everyone per-encounter spells.)
Game’s fun. The autopilot MMORPG-style battle is sorta like FFXII. There’s actually a lot - the music, the costume design, the environment design - that somehow comes awfully close to Square house style without ever actually evoking it, can’t quite put my finger on it.
The obvious comparison would be to Skyrim but I noticed more the difference, and the way that lined up with their maker’s house styles, each one playing to their narrative strengths - BioWare in dialogue, with thoroughly branched conversations and memorable party members riffing off each other; Bethesda in scene-setting, rigging up little tableaux that told tales by implication.
And suffering from their mechanical weaknesses - the fact that Bethesda doesn’t so much have a game engine as a stats engine on speaking terms with a 3d animator, while 6 games into its console era BioWare still can’t craft a reasonable equipment menu.
