noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

It's been another long stint since my last post, but after watching Christopher Nolan's excellent Inception[/I] this week, I felt a review/analysis comin', so here it is, with the ending of this movie fully explained!

As usual, I like to start my analysis with some notes on names, so let's start with the name of the movie. "Inception" comes from the literal latin translation of "in" + "seize" ("-ception" is related to "carpe" in carpe diem). Figuratively, it means "seize in hand". In English, the word means the start of a new idea or venture. Why is this important? Because in the film, seeded ideas come from "physical" things that must be held in hand. We'll come back to this later.

While I'm not sure of all the name origins, I can take a guess at a couple. Cobb, the main character, shares his name with the protagonist from Nolan's first film The Following, who was also a thief and interpreter. Eames the forger is named after the famous architects / designers Charles and Ray Eames. Yusuf the chemist is named for the Islamic version of the Biblical character Joseph (and his technicolor dreamcoat), a man taught by God to interpret dreams.


SPOILERS BELOW

And finally, Ariadne the architect's name is a direct reference to the daughter of the King of Minos in the Greek myth. I find that name especially important because in the myth, Ariadne helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur at the center of the maze. In the movie, she creates the mazes, but also helps Cobb defeat his minotaur as well (his ex-wife Mal) at the center of his own maze (limbo). Even her plan to have them jump into limbo together is a metaphorical handing of mythical Ariadne's ball of string to Theseus, allowing him to come back from the labyrinth.

Since some people were confused about why Mal is in Cobb's head, let me explain. Mal and Cobb went so far into limbo that they didn't want to return to reality. Over dream time, as Cobb realized the dream wasn't real, he had to convince Mal to leave. Taking her totem, he spun it into perpetual motion to remind her it was dream. Convinced by this inception, Mal went along with the escape, laying on train tracks reciting words she would later recall before committing suicide:

"You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You can't be sure where it will take you. But it doesn't matter - because we'll be together."

This idea that your current reality could be a dream is an idea-virus, as it has no final answer and leads to self-destruction. Cobb escapes this virus when Mal tells him to choose her reality. He chooses the real world even when you can never know if it's really a dream or not. If you were keeping track, this happens all in Fischer's mind, although when they reach limbo, Fischer is no longer in control and it is Cobb's subconscious, triggered by entering Fischer's limbo, that has taken over.

It's this choice, picking which dream you want as your reality; that is the crucial question. And the final, most revealing shot in the film answers this. Did the top fall over? The movie answer is yes. While we can't say that any layer of the movie is definitively dream or reality, the final shot happens in the layer where Cobb knows his top topples.

But this is not important to him. In fact, Cobb walks away from the top to tell us that he doesn't care if it will topple because he's chosen his reality already. The only one watching that top is us, the audience. The camera dollying non-diegetically towards the spinning top implies we’re the ones asking the question.

So the reality answer is no, where the cut to credits happens leaves us with only the image of the spinning top for as long as we can remember his movie. The movie, then, is itself a “dream”, it’s mere cinematic smoke and mirrors, and therefore if we were using Cobb’s rules it shouldn't stop spinning. Nolan has done to us what Cobb did to Mal: plant a parasitic idea in our mind. The movie Inception is Nolan's inception in us, and just like Cobb, it was done with what Eames described as the most subtle idea, a mere emotion.

For Fischer and Sakai, this simple token was a written will or document in a safe, for us (and Mal) it was the spinning top that became Cobb’s totem. These are things we can believe are "in hand", the literal meaning of "inception". The trick is the top in the last shot is not real, but we all choose at the end whether the top spins forever or topples, it's humanly impossible to not pick one of these results. Therefore what we ultimately believe in means a conscious choice of dream or reality. We will “carry” the image of that last shot with us as proof, it becomes our totem.

And so the true answer is we choose what we want from the movie because just watching it is a form of lucid dreaming. While we're watching the movie, it is our reality to interpret as we wish. And there is nothing wrong with that, nor any other reality we choose, cinematic or otherwise, spin or topple. I'll leave you with the seminal words spoken in the opium den:

“They come here to be woken up. Their dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?”

And that is the definition of the entertainment experience.

James Cameron is a visionary director, which is not to say Avatar was a flawless movie as much as I loved it. We use the word "visionary" because it's not "sight"- "vision" was defined in the old days to mean a "sense of sight", or the ability to see into the supernatural. To see the supernatural, one must see and understand the meaning behind the sight; the word "vision" may come from the Sanskrit veda- meaning "I know."

POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!

Cameron does two things that are visionary. First, he foresees the future trend in movies, inspired by the VFX of his time, and risks over $300M on this vision inspired from what Peter Jackson's Gollum hinted at- a complete replacement of the human actor's physical self, yet a vessel for magnifying its performance, crafted into a movie where the virtual characters are more real than the real ones.

Secondly, in doing so, Cameron is not just having us see his vision, but teaching us moral lessons in seeing our world in a whole new way through the filter of his creation. Now, I grant you that the execution was a bit ham-handed, with villains more cartoony than the virtual actors, plot clichés by the pound, and eye-rolling predictability. But in the same way I love Luc Besson's work, that's the charm, that bravado of motion picture, not film. We're here to see a moving picture of something real, not a medium called film. This is entertainment, not art.

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Wow it's been quite some time, since I've posted, my every day propelled in an endless orbit around the dense cluster of wonder-eyed cartoon pets and treacherous travails of game development that was my universe for the past year. Today our MMO-lite star was borne (not born) to the public, and in some ways the work has only begun. If I'm being overdramatic it's because this project has really felt just that cosmic.

Littlest Pet Shop Online officially launches today although it's been online for the past month in various beta phases. I firmly believe that while there is so much more I know this game can be, it has the best production values of any Light Persistent World out there, and certainly has the foundation for us to build upon it all our production dreams. That is the great game changer about an online game. I remember mulling about how MMOs were services not games before, but now I'm really face-to-face with just how much the capacity for dev-to-customer responsiveness ends up requiring more responsiveness from all.

My personal involvement has ran the gamut from game design to production to mentorship to padawanship to press monkey to DARPA think tank... too much to define. Sometimes I felt like I was part of everything, sometimes like a part of nothing anyone else could recognize. Towards the end of the project my Sr. Producer was removed from the project and that made it even more nebulous for me. It's quite a realization to accept that your project is really a living organism, not the vision of any one (or few) creators but a sentient mass of decisions, tweaks, features, design, and code that you must constantly redefine the vision of for yourself and your customers.

I can't talk about the lessons learned from this project because the lesson is only at the semester midterm exam, you know that one you wake up just before, in a cold sweat, fearful that all the preparation you did was lost in a previous dream? But no, regardless of much dream stuff there is, when I log into the website and see our client waiting there for real kids to make real accounts and meet real friends as we push real content out in real patches... certainly something wonderful was achieved. It sits on a bed, not of passive dreams, but clever threads, being weaved by hands that disregard real or not real, because the endless space of kids out there demand their days fulfilled.

It took the past year to get here. Now, we entertain.

Yeah, it's been a while since I've had a chance to post. And boy have there been so many things I've wanted to talk about, but now at the cusp of what should be a bright new year, I can't bring myself to carol about all the devastation our economy is experiencing... it's just too negative. While Xstine and I have consoled ourselves with the idea that our industry is recession proof, is it really? The official unemployment rate is 7.1% in Silicon Valley, above the national average, but if you used metrics from before the Clinton administration retooled CPI to their pleasure, national unemployment is over 16%.

But like I said, let's stop talking about it. There will be plenty to decry next month, when the market loses faith in the mythical year-end bounce. Let's talk fun things, like my new favorite site: www.mymomisafob.com It captures the charming, annoying irrational love of the asian mother, steeped in impromptu paranoias and Engrished superstitions.

Ignore the fact that the picture I posted comes from the now defunct Timesplitters developer Free Radical, who sadly along with Factor 5, Midway, EA, et al. are among the many with career casualties this last month. You know what's fun? RoboKill is darn fun for a simple flash game! Reminds me of shareware classics like Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Zone 66, remember those goodies?

Also, I know this is a bit old, but I finally got to check out Wario Land: Shake It at the store, and it really leverages every bit of the Wii's potential into a solid, novel platformer... and it has an awesome "trailer" so check this out!

Anyways, it's tough mustering up much season's spirit this year, but things are darkest before the light, right? And with so much dark coming, preparing to take advantage of the light is the best way to position ourselves for festive years to come.