Month: October 2008

Prestige


Click on David Bowie’s Mugshot or the play button for a link to “After All, my favorite Bowie song.

Leslie, I’m sorry Nolan is unbelievably wrong about Tesla…but you gotta enjoy yourself at the movies…pretend a little bit. “Wouldn’t it be cool if the world were like this…”

I Loved The Prestige…much more than The Illusionist; it seemed to be more focused on magic and illusions than Edward Norton’s film. I don’t mind the Hollywood trend of releasing two very similar films in quick succession (Deep Impact/Armageddon, A Bug’s Life/Ants, etc.). Having two films about the same subject gives an audience a binary choice to decide which is better and more successful.

As for the debate we were having last class concerning the use of “real magic” or “fringe science” as a deus ex machina or weak/unexpected plot device…I believe several things:

a) The cloning device isn’t really the most important part of the ending…I believe the Borden/Fallon switch is the film’s final prestige and true trick. Also, I like how Professor Mittell mentioned how the film condemns Angier’s need to resort to a machine or trick to pull off a magic trick…in the end, Borden is painted as the film’s true magician and I believe this answers the question of who is the real protagonist (more on that later).

b) I don’t think the use of the supernatural or fringe science is inconsistent with the atmosphere/aesthetic of the film nor does it come out of nowhere. I think the mad scientist living in solitude on a blustery mountaintop harnessing inexplicable natural phenomena or anomalies fits perfectly into the film’s 19th century illusionist atmosphere. I think something like an electrical cloning device would be believable if you put yourself in that sort of storyworld where so much was still unknown and science was more magical (I mean…electricity was considered a pretty magical thing initially). And, as we mentioned in class, clues such as the hats at the beginning of the film (and Bowie saying the machine worked when the hat just remained there), Cutter’s speech, Angier’s fear of the device, etc. all serve to foreshadow the “magical” and trick-free nature of the machine.

Anyone played Command and Conquer in a while?

So…who’s the protagonist? Angier seems an easy early pick, having lost a wife to Borden’s supposed negligence or insolence, quest to discover how Borden pulls off his impossible trick, and journey to find the ultimate trick. However, he definitely goes too far in his obsessions and comes across as both a weak magician (unwilling to get his hands dirty the same way Borden does), and a vengeful individual. You can definitely argue the film has two protagonists, ambiguous protagonists, or a switch in protagonist as the viewer slowly begins to ally themselves with Borden, but I think in the end, the Borden/Fallon duo are the film’s true protagonist(s?). The love interest (Scarlett Johansen) abandons Angier for him, he gets the upper hand in the end of the film, he’s wrongfully imprisoned and killed, and his talented magic trick and sacrifice is the film’s true prestige.

Interaction

First off, I stumbledupon this article today. I know most of us are seniors and possibly interested in the job market, and although I don’t believe it’s possible to completely eradicate negative information about oneself, it’s good to take steps to control it. So give it a shot…it’s got good preventive and damage control advice.

I went to the talk about the Labyrinth Project last Thursday and didn’t enjoy it much, but it brought up some interesting questions about the different ways people interact with objects (and presentations).

The presentation featured the interactive possibilities of these multimedia databases…basically virtual museums and memoirs that serve the standard archival, historical, and cultural purpose in the hopes of presenting a more interactive, visual, and accessible form of historical scholarship. Virtual spaces are very cool and an interesting topic for me, but this presentation fell a little short.

The project’s virtual, interactive memoirs with transmedia options give the participant (very?) limited control over what they choose to watch or in what order…but is this sense of choice any different than a patron’s decision in a museum, a DVD menu, or my interaction with Encarta 97 (deluxe)?

Content is king for the Labyrinth Project, and I respect their strides in incorporating multiple mediums and encourage cooperative, interactive, and applied scholarship…but their presentation doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me. Sure…multiple videofeeds and relaxing music of The Danube Exodus are a great way to present that particular memoir…but is it really that interactive? You can’t even stop videos once they start playing.

Some features of the database narratives were fairly interesting-if you take a step back, some options randomize, resort, or are omitted. This feature speaks to the arbitrary nature of both scholarship and sensory perceptions/memory. Some applied universal/meta-narratives and allowed the user to speculate and even explore rumored murder alternatives in the case of a specific memoir. And the pictures that had sliders so you could overlay a modern day photograph over a historic one were interesting…but nothing to write home about.

Maybe I’m spoiled. Maybe I expect more when I hear the word “interactive,” but this is nowhere near the virtual space of video games. What is interesting is how different people- old, young, tech-savy, historians, would interact with these presentations…if you can imagine young people getting interested in something like this. I was pretty skeptical about how excited a middle-schooler would be about this project. My attention span has to be measured in tenths of seconds, so I cringe to think what the average is like now. However, it’s always good to ask questions like “how would my mom use this media?” Not mine, specifically (she can beat me at Soul Caliber IV), but in general.

Seigfried, my mom’s favorite Soul Caliber Character

On a related note, it’s always interesting to watch a presentation’s Tipping Point, in terms of how many people have to gingerly leave before a shameless mass exodus occurs. I feel like I’m coming across as mean, and maybe it was a Thursday night, but if a presentation can’t hold the interest of young people, it’s not innovative technology.

More paper ideas and comments to come.

Ideas for a Paper and Followup from Class

Alrighty – just some random followup from class today and some paper idea proposals.

I’m thinking about a few paper ideas here, but don’t really have anything super concrete yet… Initially, I’d like to do videogames…the most recent of which I’ve beaten are Soul Caliber IV, Peggle Nights, Psychonauts, Metal Gear Solid IV, and Grand Theft Auto IV.

Spore‘s narrative logic interests me in terms of its trademark Will Wright sandbox gameplay, but I’m not sure that type of narrative really applies to what we discuss in class. It’s not just games that tout infinite narrative options that will affect character and story (like Fable or Shinobi) that allow their users to create stories as they go. Any gameplay-based game without any significant plot (sports games, real-time strategies, massive-multiplayers games, or first-person shooters) afford their participants an opportunity to use their imagination and skill in order to create their own narratives, sometimes even cooperatively. These is just an extension of tabletop gaming. Also, I haven’t looked too far into Storytron, a communal, interactive storytelling program/website, but it looks pretty cool.

But I started thinking about focalization, slant, and filters in class today and what part of narratives are character-driven/subjective vs. the creator driven slants. Like The Sound and the Fury, in which the story of the failing Compson family is told three times over by three brothers; one who’s retarded, one suicidal , and one extremely cynical. Unreliable narrative techniques in film go back as far as Rashomon, an innovative Kurosawa film with unreliable narrators in which the audience acts as a sort of jury for a murder trial.

I’m trying to think about focalization in videogames and whether there exist games in which alignment and the idea of an unreliable narrator are important. In the stealth/espionage Metal Gear series (which span 50 years of political intrigue, combat, biology, and family opera), there are significant amounts of betrayals and twists, some of which come from intentionally deceitful narrators you’ve trusted for tens of hours of gameplay (Like Master Miller in MGS1 or Roy Campbell in MGS2). Were these betrayals portrayed in film, they’d simply be plot twists, but since they’re explicitly giving bad advice to the gamer for hours, I feel like the mechanism changes because if you fully immerse yourself in a game, you’re being expressly lied to, not watching a character getting lied to.

Final Fantasy Vii‘s main character and biggest twist (probably only in my opinion) is not Gamepro’s death of Aerith (and I disagree with most of their top 10, but try away from internet/blog lists as a general rule), but rather Cloud’s amnesia and inability to correctly remember the past…a serious game-changer 2/3’s through the game. The other thing that came to mind when I think Final Fantasy VII (which has remained my overall favorite game since I played it 12 years ago) is how the extended universe has been constantly expanded with cell phone games, a CG film, a few offshoot and follow-up games (of different genres on different consoles), and a short hand-drawn animated film. How the storyworld of media like FFVII and to a greater extent, something like Star Wars gets constantly added to in different mediums is pretty interesting.

The Cast of Final Fantasy VII, my favorite game.

Saying “favorite game” is also a complicated issue because the reasons for liking a game can be so diverse in terms of gameplay mechanics, story, replayability, multiplayer options, etc.

I also thought of the TV series My Super Sweet 16 (a show I have trouble turning off) as an example of filter and slant; with the filter being the spoiled teens’ skewed perceptions and expectations of the world and how they’re going to come across on TV, and the slant being MTV’s editing and extra writing, directing, etc. that makes shows like that not actually reality TV. The creator-driven slant seems really focused on making these teenagers a sideshow to be ridiculed, not admired or envied, but the teens don’t ever really seem to get this, seeing it as an opportunity to show everyone how privileged they are.

More organized/developed ideas to come as I scour my memory for games I’ve liked in the past.

also, does anyone need a partner for the remix project? I’m one of those guys that isn’t too experienced with video editing (especially final cut), but can rip and do other computer stuff pretty well.

Thoughts

I just read Brett’s blog and thought her idea for a research paper was quite good. I started writing this response on her page, but it got too long and I didn’t want to clutter it, but I’m pretty sure she’ll get an email because I just linked to her blog. The iconography, typography, and visual aesthetic of a film are all very important parts of a film’s poster and fame. Certain fonts are so iconic (Blade Runner, Spiderman, Back to the Future) you can just see a single letter to know what film they came from.

Here’s a game where you guess what film an individual letter comes from (I scored a 30). Anyways…

It would also be fun to analyzes changes in posters through the decades (from classical hollywood to summer blockbuster), or in different parts of the world (Japan, Russia, etc), or how posters get changed for different countries (differences in US posters vs international release). There’s significant variance in how products are depicted from country-to-country and videogames and films are no different. Check out the Japanese (Left) vs. American (Right) covers for Rachet and Clank or Kirby.

I am also a sucker for soviet posters and aesthetic.

Even more applicable to your post is the controversy and reason behind the Zack and Miri poster you presented. I’m not sure if you were aware of the reasoning behind such a simple poster, but the proposed original idea was banned for being too controversial:

and they were forced to compromise with this totally tongue-in-cheek striped-down version:

It speaks towards the dual-standard censors have concerning sex and violence.

Even less related is an article i read recently about team colors in group competitive games. A study that analyzed thousands of Unreal Tournament matches showed that the red team won 55% of all games, which is a significant margin over the blue team. Granted, this study doesn’t really prove any causation, but I assume this figure is because the color red is so often a signifier for stopping (stop signs, lights, warnings, etc.) that a milisecond of confusion on a blue players part is enough for the red player to get the jump on him.

The world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes

I really like Memento. I like how instead of tricking you, it teaches you how to watch it from the very first shot of a Polaroid in reverse, and the detective work is in the audience’s hands for every single scene. Leonard solves his problem at the same time the audience does, and even though his decision to stop the cycle is the beginning of the final iteration of his killing spree, it certainly provides enough closure to me as an ending, albeit not a conventionally temporal one.

The unusual choice of reverse-temporal narration allows the audience to really associate with Leonard’s anterograde amnesia…it’s a very powerful empathetic tool…the camerawork seemed very objective at most points…you really felt like you were following Leonard with a handheld camera at times, solving and inspecting as he does…witnessing his tattoos for the first time as he does daily.

The film is definitely a puzzle; it requires a certain level of concentration, even after multiple viewings…we’re just not wired to think of time in that fashion. It’s engaging, demanding, and interactive; even after multiple viewings I have to really concentrate on how the narrative tells the plot.

As Matt mentioned on his blog, this editing technique doesn’t feel gimmicky even though the DVD feature that allows you to watch the movie in conventional temporal order loses almost all of the effect. The genius is in the writing. I don’t think the technique is trendy or gimmicky-I think the script is really innovative.

The reverse-narration totally changes the way a story is told, with twists, teasers, suspense, and betrayals happening early in the plot (and late in the narrative). The style demands the audience to ask questions that they’ll soon know the answer to (why does he seem drunk? Why does she have a black eye?), and continuity techniques like the bookends on every scene or the scars, clothing, and broken windows are very helpful in keeping the whole thing together in your head.

“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if i don’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world is still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?”

Leonard’s inner monologue about the way he perceives the world is applicable to all sorts of media, narratives, and storyworlds. The most convincing films are the ones whose worlds seem to continue after we leave the theatre or take out the DVD…they’re the ones that have convincing set pieces and developed characters.

The same principle applies in videogames such as the grand theft auto or metal gear solid series…in a truly seamless world, we want to happen across a city block or guard as if he’s been doing this all day…not like we just loaded a new level. With higher-capacity hard drives and more advanced engines, this type of seamless gaming is becoming more and more possible and gamers are exploring entire worlds instead of a series of rooms and loading bars…it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

In unrelated news, Gametap has released Psychonauts, a game touted for its innovative and in-depth narrative, for free. It can be found here. I’m playing it and considering it for my essay, but I’m also considering the famous Metal Gear Series.