Ntuple Indemnity

It would be redundant of me to restate the truism that Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island for the Super Nintendo is one of the most seductively entertaining games of all time. In my opinion, it’s certainly one of the prettiest. Can’t say I’ve played it in a while, though. For the past few months, there’s been a save file sitting on my Yoshi’s Island cartridge like a festering parasite (with rather high scores, too, though it only got up to World 3). A record of better days, perhaps. No matter – I finally erased it tonight, and I suppose the game is playable once more. Not that I’ll have time for it anytime soon.

I kind of fancy doing another run through the original before I grab the DS-bound sequel, which is due for release on Tuesday, but I find that unlikely. I have very little time for video games as it is, and the only one in the immediate future I can see myself proactively making time to play is Twilight Princess. And that’s assuming that I can acquire a Wii and a copy of the game on launch day (Sunday the 19th, for those of you who don’t care enough to know). I have pre-ordered neither, so I suspect I’ll need a few warm coats and a lawn chair. Can anyone spare a lawn chair?

Tangent: For those of you keeping track, Blaine’s Theorem (which should be more accurately called Blaine’s Law) is still in effect. The Germans wore grey. She wore blue.

[Edit: I think I should make it perfectly clear that this is by no means a conciliatory remark. Let the relevant parties be aware of the following: if you’re ever on the run from marauding fascists and of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world you walk into mine and it just so happens you need my help, you’re not getting any.]

I can’t remember the last time I saw an undergraduate thesis make international news (if not necessarily headlines), but this week it was done by recent UBC Sociology grad Robert Parungao, whose study concerned the apparent dissemination of racist Asian stereotypes in video games. Here be the UBC press release, here be a GameSpot interview with Parungao, and here be everybody from CBC to The Middle East Times getting in on the action, thanks to the story hitting the AFP wire.

And here be dragons. Double dragons.

Nothing out of the ordinary so far. Someone of an academic bent decides to play video games for his honours thesis under the pretence that nobody’s thought to talk about race before. (I get the impression he honestly believes that, and I’m baffled.) Press box spectators who have never played a video game and don’t know what they’re talking about spread the Good News. The quasi-illiterate teenage kids who make up a self-defined “video game community” leap to the passionate defence of their favourite hobby, in spite of the fact that while they do play video games, they also don’t know what they’re talking about. All in a day’s work.

This is, as far as I can tell, no cause for indignation. This is an undergrad who made headlines because his study was topical. Now, I’ve done some searching around, and it seems that neither I nor anybody else has actually read the paper in question, but I can just about guarantee you that a big chunk of it is what you would usually expect: copious footnotes and name-drops from sociological theory, a few well-chosen citations to demonstrate the alleged double standard in the press coverage of video games in contrast with other media, and maybe – if we’re lucky – a brief defence of the methodology. Those are the elements that would be subject to academic scrutiny. I don’t think it’s an expectation that at this nascent stage of studies in interactive entertainment, the part of the paper that actually concerns video games is all that rigorous, or even good – though an idealist would say it should be, and an idealist would be correct.

In other words, it’s not that big a deal, and the press attention is completely out of proportion. The worst you can say about it at face value is that it reeks of a very bad case of fudging the data to fit the thesis, but this isn’t in the natural sciences, so nobody cares.

This isn’t saying that lowly undergrads can’t make an impact. I know at least one exceptionally gifted student, a recent Sociology grad herself, who found that curiously, nobody in the establishment had bothered to study something that you would think would be really obvious (in her case, Canadian internment camps). But I am saying – again, at face value – that this particular study has very little impact at all. It’s almost fiendishly inconsequential, and it’s just more ammo for the Hillary Clinton lobby.

For a global perspective on things, it might be helpful to look at the Japanese video game industry and marketing strategies that stereotype westerners, as in this Mario Kart DS commercial.

And while we’re on the subject of stereotypes, consider the jingoistic cartoons that my generation grew up on in the 1980s. Now consider Saddam and Osama, a cartoon that I lavished with praise two years ago. I finally thought to find it on YouTube, and it’s even better than I remembered.

(If you are at all baffled by the title of this post, it may be time to brush up on your Disney classics.)

The latest GameSpot Rumor Control takes on a post at The Movie Center suggesting that Tim Burton has, on his lap, the script to a film adaptation of Grim Fandango.

It’s a whisper of a rumour, with almost no ancillary evidence to back it up, but even if it turned out to be completely false, I would remain enheartened that somebody out there shares the same crazy fanboy fantasy.

Grim Fandango is my dream film adaptation. I have devoted a lot of thought as to how I might film it myself, should I ever acquire the skill or the budget to do so, never mind the rights, and it was long ago that I came to the conclusion that it must be done in stop-motion. There is no other way. And – as I have alluded to before – when I saw the designs for the underworld in Corpse Bride, the same convergence of a smoky jazz-beat atmosphere and the calavera figures of the Mexican Day of the Dead as in Tim Schafer’s seminal masterpiece, it was clear to the point of total conviction: a Grim Fandango film should look like that.

For those of you not in the know (as I have realized that those unfamiliar with PC games are really unfamiliar with the recesses of its history, given the short shelf-life of anything that isn’t a blockbuster), Grim Fandango is, in my professional opinion, the greatest masterwork of interactive entertainment in the domains of script, story and artistic concept. If you look at the camp that continues to insist that the nondeterminism of the medium precludes it from being considered “art” (here’s looking at you, Roger Ebert – and do get well soon), I am willing to bet you that none of them have even heard of it. This is the one game I can name that is, beyond any doubt, literature.

Released in 1998, it was the last hurrah of the LucasArts adventure (cf. the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road), the paragon of the genre and at the same time its epitaph. This was the same year that the PC first-person shooter reached maturity with Half-Life, and real-time strategy hit its stride with its own instant classic, StarCraft, so it’s no wonder that linear storytelling driven by dialogue branches and item-based puzzles fell out of vogue.

For all the attention to craftsmanship that branching dialogue is receiving again – consider Bioware’s experiments in using conversation as a concrete, outcome-affecting form of action in games such as Knights of the Old Republic – nothing comes close to the narrative design in Fandango.

In one sequence, a woman rambles on about her sordid childhood while it is your task to pretend to listen, and try to get a word in edgewise and convince her to hand over a tool you require to progress. In another, you improvise beat poetry at a club on open mic night. The range of responses available to you in a conversation is often itself the punch line.

A few months ago, I played through the whole adventure again over the course of a weekend. Thanks to its painterly pre-rendered backgrounds, the graphics have not suffered from too much aging. In the game’s final sequence, there is a haunting shot of a vintage automobile parked at the foot of a flowery meadow, a greenhouse in the distance. See, in the Land of the Dead, plants are a symbol of the final death in the afterlife.

Whenever I start talking about this game, I can’t help but get carried away. I should stop. Find it and play it, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Some home entertainment stores sell old PC games in jewel cases for ten-dollar bargains. I also have a copy.

I had a point in there somewhere, and I hadn’t even mentioned the flaming beavers. If a decent Grim Fandango script has indeed found its way to Tim Burton, and it is being given serious consideration, something is going right. I would be tempted to get Tim Schafer aboard the project, much like how Rodriguez got Frank Miller on the set of Sin City.

Speaking of Frank Miller, you may have heard that one Zack Snyder is currently working on 300, Miller’s graphic novel about Thermopylae. He’d better be worth his salt, because he is now the director attached to Watchmen, which got off the ground again after the modest success of V for Vendetta. Since reading Watchmen a few years ago, I have seen the film project elude Darren Aronofsky, David Hayter and Paul Greengrass, and that’s saying nothing of Terry Gilliam’s aborted concept of doing a twelve-hour twelve-parter from a decade ago. Hopefully Snyder makes it worth the wait; this is another one that needs to be done right.

Several people have asked me about my novel, the first draft of which was supposed to be completed tonight, as per the regulations of the inaugural U of A Novel Writing Month. It didn’t happen. Congratulations are due to Jake Troughton, Dan Kaszor and Steve Smith, who hit the 50,000-word mark on schedule and matched the expected 14.3% survival rate exactly. Congratulations are not due to yours truly, whose most significant contribution of the month was defeating the three of them in a rousing game of RoboRally.

What have I learned?

I learned that writing fiction is an impossible career because of its persistent nondeterminism, not unlike software development. In both cases, it astounds me that anything ever gets done anywhere.

I learned that although November is a terrible month to commit to this sort of project, May is not a whole lot better, with its new jobs, new commitments, new married couples, and no new ideas. E3 (or was it Wii3?) was terribly interesting this year, and left me wondering not about how to develop the second act of a spurious plot involving space colonization projects and British secret agents, but how the Wii edition of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will incorporate the free-roaming camera presumably handled by the yellow C-stick in the GameCube version, which was the primary reason I found The Wind Waker more playable than The Ocarina of Time, if not as robust.

I learned that dousing oneself in the pop narratology of Robert McKee is a great way to get started, but not a great way to get going. To finish something of this scale in a month, you need the mindset of a Donald Kaufman, and after the first week and a half I was locked into Charlie mode. (Speaking of which, for all the lampoonery of McKee’s Story in Jonze/Kaufman’s Adaptation, the principles in the book fit the film like a glove.)

I learned that you can write a novel with much greater expediency if you adopt the Kaavya Viswanathan Method, though if you try to make money off it, you will be punished. Synopsis: 19-year-old Harvard sophomore scores a six-figure advance, New York Times story and DreamWorks film deal for her debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life – you know, a celebration of the kind of good-girl-goes-bad trope that made Grease such a reprehensible movie. She’s caught for plagiarism so incredibly egregious and professionally suicidal that one can hardly believe a well-to-do undergrad would do it all of her own free will; indeed, theories have sprung up in the poor girl’s defence, implicating a book-packaging company and an Ivy League admissions consultancy firm. (As usual, my favourite blog has the best coverage.)

I learned that between Viswanathan and Dan Brown, whose stock protagonist is a professor in a discipline that is both intellectually bankrupt and wholly nonexistent, Harvard University really knows how to take a hardcover punch square in the reputation.

I learned that the city I work in over a given summer will: a) beat Detroit in six, b) beat San Jose in six, and 3) advance to the Stanley Cup finals. So next summer, I’m going back to Calgary.

I learned that New Super Mario Bros. is an outstanding adventure. I’ve completed every level, but not every exit (and certainly not every set of three collectible coins per level, since the later ones are quite tricky). It’s in many ways comparable to Super Mario World, though the stages feel a lot smaller, perhaps due to the lack of flight. The level design, however, is well up to the gold standard of the series. If I had any complaints, it would be that the new enemies aren’t all that compelling, and they go unnamed in the end credits. And as in the original SMB, the Fire Flower is overpowered. The game also neglects to track your progress by the number of exits opened and total coins collected, and I’m sure not going to count them myself.

I learned that the great Koji Kondo himself played the overworld theme at the Chicago premiere of PLAY!, the touring game music symphony programme. The music is credited to his protégés Asuka Ota and Hajime Wakai. It didn’t take me long to discover what felt so odd about the oh-so-catchy main theme: it’s organized into 20-bar sections in 4/4 time, as opposed to the typical 16. I plan to sketch a leadsheet and record it sometime.

I learned that if I wrote a post of this length two or three times a day, I would produce well over 50,000 words in the span of a month.

Live and learn.

If you thought waiting three weeks for a new post here was bad, you only know a fraction of my pain. You also need a new hobby.

Revised ETA for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Autumn 2006. I realize Nintendo wants to make the greatest game ever made and all, but to insist on pushing the title onto the GameCube is now getting really silly. I once adamantly supported the idea of releasing Zelda as the Cube’s swan song, a last hurrah of sorts, but I think it’s time to jump on the put-it-on-the-Revolution bandwagon.

It would make sense for Nintendo to move Zelda to the new system even if they retain the GameCube-style controls and design (which are too integral to change by now, and probably have been for some time). Two immediate reasons: four times the storage on the DVD format (because I highly doubt that a game ballooning to its alleged size, a year past its deadline, is going to fit on one GameCube disc), and the next-generation graphics hardware, which the game could really put to use given these few extra months of polishing time. The first is probably the more critical benefit, since a defining characteristic of the Zelda series is its free-roaming exploration, and I would hate to see it partitioned.

They’re obviously trying to duplicate the Minish Cap phenomenon – one of the latest and greatest games for the Game Boy Advance released after the launch of the DS, which early adopters used their DS to play during the launch-period software drought. But it makes no sense to apply the same strategy here. For one, the GBA still had a near monopoly on the portable market prior to the launch of the DS. Unlike the DS, the Revolution is not an incremental layer over Nintendo’s existing home console business, which has been travelling on inertia alone since its last significant title, Resident Evil 4, came out over a year ago.

People won’t buy Cubes just to play Zelda, even at bargain-bin prices, because at this point the GameCube is basically a dead system (albeit the one with the best games to rediscover over the years to come). If the expectation is that a traditional console game will sell Revolution units while developers figure out how to take advantage of the Revolution controller, then the only thing stopping Nintendo from pushing Zelda to the new system is that they would be going back on months of assurances that it is still a GameCube title. But breaking this promise isn’t going to lose them any customers.

As for delays that are even more egregious, let’s just say Air Canada owes me a lot more than the $100 voucher and apology letter I was offered. I would elaborate, but your time would be better spent sitting through The Terminal; the stories are basically the same, but Spielberg tells it with more charm.

In the intervening time that went to waste, I could have watched Gone with the Wind. I could have watched it twice.

Anyhow, if I were not so busy, here are some other topics I probably would have written something about earlier in the month: Kurt Elling, Michelle Grégoire, The Marriage of Figaro, Bluebeard’s Castle, Erwartung, and how Freedomland isn’t an outright terrible movie in spite of the impression that might emanate from my review in Vue Weekly, but it sure makes an easy target for merciless lampoonery. In other words, three things the world couldn’t do without: jazz, opera, and Samuel L. Jackson.