- Playful – Anyone else going to this on Friday? With many of London’s technorati there, it promises to be a fun do.
27
Oct 09
Link roundup
25
Oct 09
Link roundup
- Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page – One of the things that delights me most about videogames are the little hacks that transform pixels into worlds, and in olden times, emulating 3D space was one, big, glorious hack. My favourite: background raster effects. Drool.
- Is the Magazine Dead? « Jimmy Wales – “The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster,” says Wales, touting Wikia’s new print-on-demand service. Better quality, eh? Really? Or do they just lap up fast and, most importantly, free information?
- Small Worlds – It’s a special game, Small Worlds. As much as I’m often annoyed by intentionally lo-fi pixel graphics like this (I find them retro-fetishistic and a put-off to people who don’t hungrily treasure games’ mythically wonderful past), here they’re gloriously expressive, as Mike Nowak says.
27
Aug 09
Comic horror
I’ve read a couple of wonderful comics lately, Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate (thanks, Aaron), and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha (thanks, Rich).
You’ll probably be aware of Tezuka already – he’s the man that helped to kickstart manga and anime in Japan in the 50s with Astro Boy and other such fusions of Disney and earlier Japanese visual arts, like kibyōshi. Blain’s not so familiar to British shores, but he’s a stalwart of the French comic scene, having worked on the Dungeon series.
Obviously, then, these two creators are utterly different, and these comics are too. Buddha is an eight-volume epic that explores Buddha’s life, from his birth as a prince to his enlightenment and death, and as it does so, tells various stories about the people around him, from reformed bandits to clairvoyant babies. Isaac The Pirate, meanwhile, is a dark two-volume tale about an artist that takes to the seas, joining a band of pirates and meeting master thieves and thugs while he wends his way back into the arms of his beloved wife in Paris.
What they absolutely share, however, is irresistibly heady combinations of lightness of touch and unflinching gazes upon life’s cruelties. Both feature as a natural part of their courses death, torture and suffering, with characters mercilessly despatched while others act in ways that you really wish they wouldn’t.
For example, there’s a scene in Isaac The Pirate’s first volume, To Exotic Lands, in which the pirates encounter in the frozen seas of the Arctic a drifting ship with starving Swedes on-board. The events that follow are harrowing and shocking, coming as they do after a long sequence in which you develop a respect and affection for many of the crew. Isaac’s love, meanwhile, is in constant threat of being extinguished – through his death, hers, temptation or the distraction of the waves – a sombre kind of tension, given that it’s one of the only purely good things any characters have.
And for all Tezuka’s Disney doe-eyed animals, exaggerated expressions and the way he often inserts characters from his previous comics into the stories – and himself – he doesn’t hesitate to depict the other side of his world. Genocide, fathers persecuting their children, bloody revenge: his Buddha is a man forged by violence and horror. Other characters go on terrible journeys of discovery, the brutality behind the things they do only mitigated by Buddha’s teachings of forgiveness and that behind everything lies a reason.
In both comics, the humour and levity all this is contrasted against seems utterly casual. Their balance of light and dark gives them a sense of consequence and truth that so many books, films – and other comics – lack. It’s got to have something to do with their visual style, I think. Both are brilliantly expressive, Tezuka in particular spanning from beautiful and detailed panoramas to goggle-eyed cartoon exaggeration.
So, yeah, I can’t recommend these two comics enough.
I’ve read a couple of wonderful comics lately, Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate (thanks, Aaron), and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha (thanks, Rich).
You’ll probably be aware of Tezuka already – he’s the man that helped to kickstart manga and anime in Japan in the 50s with Astro Boy and other such fusions of Disney and earlier Japanese visual arts, like kibyōshi. Blain’s not so familiar to British shores, but he’s a stalwart of the French comic scene, having worked on the Dungeon series.
Obviously, then, these two creators are utterly different, and these comics are too. Buddha is an eight-volume epic that explores Buddha’s life, from his birth as a prince to his enlightenment and death, and as it does so, tells various stories about the people around him, from reformed bandits to clairvoyant babies. Isaac The Pirate, meanwhile, is a dark two-volume tale about an artist that takes to the seas, joining a band of pirates and meeting master thieves and thugs while he wends his way back into the arms of his beloved wife in Paris.
What they absolutely share, however, is irresistibly heady combinations of lightness of touch and unflinching gazes upon life’s cruelties. Both feature as a natural part of their courses death, torture and suffering, with characters mercilessly despatched while others act in ways that you really wish they wouldn’t.
For example, there’s a scene in Isaac The Pirate’s first volume, To Exotic Lands, in which the pirates encounter in the frozen seas of the Arctic a drifting ship of starving Swedes. The events that follow are harrowing and shocking, coming as they do after a long sequence in which you develop a respect and affection for many of the crew. Isaac’s love is in constant threat of being extinguished – through his death, hers, temptation or distraction of the waves – a sombre kind of tension, given that it’s one of the only purely good things going.
And for all Tezuka’s Disney touches of doe-eyed animals, exaggerated expressions and the way he often inserts himself and characters from his previous comics into the stories, he doesn’t hesitate to depict the other side of the times he depicts. Casual genocide, fathers persecuting their children, bloody revenge: his Buddha is forged in violence and horror. Other characters go on terrible journeys of discovery, the brutality behind the things they do only mitigated by Buddha’s teachings of forgiveness and that behind everything lies a reason.
All this is contrasted with humour and levity that seems utterly casual. These comics’ balance of light and dark gives them a heady sense of consequence and truth that so many books, films – and other comics – lack. It’s got to have something to do with their visual style, I think. Both are brilliantly expressive, Tezuka in particular spanning from beautiful and detailed panoramas to goggle-eyed cartoon exaggeration.
As such, I can’t recommend these two comics enough.
02
Aug 09
Shooting Wipeout
Every game should have a photo mode. Not just the ability to grab a screenshot but to be able to manipulate it and add effects. Wipeout HD’s photo mode is great. Instantly available from the pause screen, it only allows three simple camera types – trackside, cockpit and rotating around the ship – but has a suite of motion blur, exposure and depth of field effects that are lovely to play with.
Of course, these pictures, taken during runs in Wipeout Rage’s Detonator play mode, far from show precisely what you see when you’re playing the game. They omit the HUD, they’re not from the perspective you play from, they amplify the visual effects and the game has rendered each one with greater quality than it does in play. But I don’t care about such apparent artifice.
A battle rages between the desire to present a game truthfully, exactly as it appears when you’re playing, and presenting it interestingly in order to galvanise attention and provide entertainment for those reading it. But what the hell is truth?
A static screenshot can never express the moving image from which it was snatched. And, in fact, as games feature more post-processing effects such as motion blur, it’s becoming harder and harder to grab screenshots that come anywhere close to representing what you experienced when you were playing.
It all comes down to making a balance, of course. People need to understand what kind of image they’d be staring at through a game’s course. But there’s nothing wrong with capturing a bit of the drama, too. Videogames are glorious expressions of our fantasies, right?
24
Jul 09
Rope
You can smell films that are based on plays a mile off. It must be difficult to take a story made for the stage and perform it in front of a camera without theatre’s static nature and wordiness making itself obvious. It’s certainly a clear part of Rope, Hitchcock’s 1948 flick about Nietzschean Ivy League gays attempting to commit the perfect murder. The film is great fun, mixing high tension with a sharp sense of humour, and as such comes highly recommended.
Rope was heavily adapted from its original, a play by Patrick Hamilton based on the Leopold and Loeb murder, in order to transplant the story from its roots in the British upper classes to the flatter class system of the US. But despite all the work, Hitchcock decided to film it in single takes of around 10 minutes, with the cast navigating a set that had to be at least as cleverly designed as any for the stage and the camera sporting an unflinching gaze like that of a theatre audience.
It’s ironic that the film that’s been called Hitchcock’s most experimental has the air of something as ancient as theatre. But Hitchcock brings in one or two little tricks that only film can achieve. In a couple of places, he has conversation go on as the camera remains fixed on a certain element for dramatic effect – for instance, the box in which the victim’s body lies, which is being fussed around by the housekeeper even as the dinner party guests discuss where the victim could be.
As with many Hitchcock films, Rope wears its cinematic technique heavily, with takes spliced awkwardly into each other by zooming into a character’s back, fading to black and then brightening out again into the next, but, heck, we’re talking about 1948. And its staginess feels quite exotic now, a relief from today’s unrelenting action and movement.
Theatre’s need to concentrate on character, dialogue and plot can remind film of some of basic tenets that many recent releases seem to have forgotten. Yes, films should always be built using technique and artistry specific to film, but Rope reminds that other narrative arts, such as theatre, still have a lot to teach them, too.
22
Jul 09
On boredom
This is a post from my old blog, circa early 2006. It was probably its most successful in terms of readers (a modest claim, to be honest) and how pleased I was with it, and it also generated some angry responses, accusing me of petty, bourgeois narrow mindedness. That wasn’t my intention at all, of course – I just kinda thought that there was a a new generation of people that had forgotten, or had never experienced, true boredom in a world increasingly tuned to providing continuous partial attention. Self-indulgent it may be, but here it is again – now with footnotes!
We took our son to our book club yesterday evening. We all met at a bar restaurant place under the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, and we spent a glorious three hours talking about Rodinsky’s Room and uproariously deciding what book to read next1.
And all the time, little eight month old Jack2 was there, playing with bits of paper, being bounced about, smiling at people and (eventually) sleeping in his pushchair, but, naturally, marginalised from the main activity. And I got to thinking about how bored I used to get as a child, how I remember the hours of being dragged to places by my parents, made to wait as they had mystifyingly entertaining conversations with friends, or watched stuff on telly or went round National Trust properties3. In fact, an abiding memory of being a kid with my parents is of boredom4.
And I realised that I can’t really remember the last time I was truly bored. Whenever people tell me that they’re bored, I often find myself telling them that I love being bored. I’m wrong, of course. I mean that I love being aimless – fiddling about with whatever’s at hand. I don’t really know what it is to be bored any more. There’s so much to do – play a videogame, watch one of our backed up Lovefilm DVDs, read a one of my many backed up books, flick through one of my many backed up Edges5, read my backed up Bloglines feeds, write a review for Pixelsurgeon6, write a post, like now, for Rotational…
And these are just the things I like doing. Then there’s cleaning the flat7, sorting through all that paperwork that I keep putting into great, horrifying untidy piles, wash some clothes, get some bloody milk we can’t keep spooning baby milk powder into coffee8.
And before all that there’s looking after the boy.
Even on long journeys I don’t get bored – there’s DS and reading and watching Sin City on PSP and listening to music…9 Bored just doesn’t come into it any more.
I guess that’s good, but I’m not sure. Could I cope without being endlessly stimulated by something or other? What if the electricity runs out?
- It was Flowers For Algernon – lovely stuff, too. The book club days remain treasured memories. ↩
- Now four and about to start at school. Jeepers. ↩
- Here’s the rub: making our final descent into middle age, last year we became members. ↩
- Though the kids often get frustrated that things don’t always revolve around them, they haven’t yet experienced the drawn-out horror of a long afternoon with nothing to do. Aside from the evergreen delights of Lego and felt-tip pens, now there’s the modern impositions of all-day Cbeebies and YouTube. ↩
- Oh, the irony. ↩
- Now up on blocks, it was a good illustrator/web design community. ↩
- Now a house and with one extra kid, so even more cleaning. ↩
- Yup. Still do that. ↩
- I love going on trains because they impose on you time you can’t do anything other than the things you have with you. With the advent of iPhone (or iPod Touch, in my case), though, continual distraction invades even the sanctity of First Great Western. ↩
21
Jul 09
Architecture and videogames panel
For those interested, we made an mp3 of the panel discussion I chaired last week at Develop about the relationship between videogames and architecture available on Edge’s website. You can pick it up here – sound quality and the fact I only remembered to switch on my dictaphone a minute or so into my intro aside, I’m pretty pleased with the way it went.
By the way, you can find a couple of write-ups of the session at Gamasutra and Pixel-Lab.
13
Jul 09
Games = extreme architecture
I’m doing a panel session at Develop on Wednesday about the relationship between architecture and videogames with Viktor Antonov, the art director behind Half-Life 2 and (the unfortunately on-hold) The Crossing, Rob Watkins, an architect-trained artist on Fable 2, and Rory Olcayto, features editor from The Architect’s Journal and an artist at developer Inner Workings in the late 90s.
Following are my introductory thoughts on the theme to get my head properly working on it all.
A lot is said about videogames’ closeness to film. But I’d like to suggest that another art form is much closer to videogames than that: architecture.
Just as games do, architecture influences behaviour and emotion, provides for certain needs and can be used to tell stories. It’s non-linear, too – unlike film. An architect I know once told me that he saw videogames as an extreme form of architecture, and I think he was right.
Look at the Natural History Museum, for instance. It’s a superbly practical place to show off huge skeletons and glass cases filled with stuffed animals to thousands of people a day. But it also subtly steers its visitors through its spaces, is suitably grand for a national museum and is a physical representation of Darwinian principles – with terracotta tiling that’s banded to look like stratified rock and featuring carved animals crawling up its columns.
Now think about a multiplayer map in Team Fortress 2 or Halo 3. Their forms are engineered to be fun killing grounds, designed for specific game types and to facilitate players to flow through their spaces in general patterns. Their decoration, meanwhile, is designed to extend their host games’ fictions or, in TF2’s case, tell their own.
And think about Super Mario 64, whose world is the game. Or Grand Theft Auto, in which a game is placed on top of an entire, credible city. Or Red Faction: Guerrilla, whose buildings have to have structural integrity because of the game’s physics system.
Think also about the way both videogames and architecture are germinated with a grand idea and a sprinkle of available technology before the practicalities take over – of working window seals and regulatory balustrade heights, graphics optimisation techniques and platform certification.
It’s time to stop thinking so much about the cosmetic similarities between games and film and look to architecture instead. [Insert panellists going into more depth with incredible insight and sparkling examples here.]
More themes:
- The effect of the grim futures depicted in games on the imaginations.
- Players becoming architects through The Sims and Far Cry 2’s map editor.
- How to create dread though spatial design.
- Architects’ jealousy of Halo 3’s heatmaps.
- How architects can teach game designers how to design a fun game in an open world.
12
Jul 09
Synthetic drama #1: Battlefield 1943
I spawn on board my team’s aircraft carrier on the Iwo Jima map and board a landing craft which a team member steers for Mount Suribachi. With a commanding position on the top of the hill that overlooks the whole island and strong defences, Mount Suribachi’s a key point to hold, and the enemy has it.
We speed to the beach the runs around the bottom of the cliff beneath the position. It’s so sheer that you can barely see the sandbag fortifications at the top when you look up, but some steep paths zigzag up. Our hope is that the enemy hasn’t bothered to cover their base’s back so we can pop up and take the flag for our own.
We inch up, aware of machine gun placements and snipers, but we remain unsullied – though quite what lies in wait at the summit is another matter. And then, as we near the top, bits of tree begin to fall down from above. From an explosion? Gunfire? What’s seen us? The branches roll past us and I stop still, training my sights on the crest of the hill with my heart in my mouth.
Suddenly, an enemy plane bursts over the remaining vegetation at the top with an incredible roar. I nearly trip backward as I crane around to see where it’s going, only to see it explode behind us. My breath catches and I zip my view back to the crest of the hill and see a second plane, one of ours, howl over it in victory.
It’s enough to bolster us for taking the flag, and we do – if only because there’s barely anyone there to defend it.
06
Jul 09
Aging Watchmen
All sorts doesn’t quite feel right about the Watchmen film. It’s certainly respectful – deferential, even – to its source, and probably to a fault. But the niggling feeling I had while watching it was that at least some of the film’s problems are probably directly due to issues with the original comic.
Whatever the case is in a broader sense, the comic is a compelling document of the time in which it was written. With its inking style and thin, cheap paper, the comic remains an artefact whether you bought it yesterday or in 1987, lending it context and significance that distracts from its problems as a piece of storytelling.
One of the troubles with the film could be, then, that it’s exposing them. It does a good job of setting the action in the comic’s version of that mid-80s period, with window-sized glasses and long haircuts, dingy streets and round-cornered TVs. But the style-conscious film-making itself, with its fixation with slowing time at dramatic moments, long camera fly-throughs of huge CGI sets and the glossy suits of its costumed heroes, feels distinctly modern.
Taking a story that was built so specifically to be told through the medium of the comic was always going to be hard to translate to film. But the effect of time on Watchmen has had its own insidious effect on the project’s success.