noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

Yesterday's cover story on Gamasutra was an article I wrote called Designing Happiness, about combining happiness research and game design. Please check it out!

I'm very happy to see design mature from throwing opinionated spitwads at glass to see what sticks to the discipline that it is becoming. It seems like after the Silver Age of gaming in this country, the dedicated designer role disappeared for a while. It wasn't a bad thing, as it forced designers to master other disciplines, to become more technical or more artistic, to gain a more tangible role than the kind that hackers and table-top dungeon masters had. And now, armed with some dangerous knowledge, game design is seizing it's own role again. I think some practices in the past gave pure game design a bad name, but that will change.

In this evolution, I see the next step of it as attuning the plentiful principles of game design into both a science in itself, and a substrate for other sciences. Philosophical taxonomists like Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen did the former in Rules of Play, finding the core features of what games unique systems. Their book helped game designer know ourselves. My article was a small step towards knowing others. With the science of game design defined, I think we should apply them in context, find our motives and our audiences, and cross-reference the vast knowledge of other fields. As long as games are designed for a player, and that player is human, then all the other realms of science that actively seek to improve human life are relevant.

After reading many reviews of P.T. Anderson's seminal new film There Will Be Blood, I am disappointed to see how much misinterpretation there is. Where the themes of greed, godlessness, capitalism, hatred, and revenge are certainly present, they are peripheral, and recent oil politics have led critics to miss a central theme that ties all those issues together: the loneliness of godhood. I will explain the four different meanings of the film's title to show that that loneliness is what drove anti-hero Daniel Plainview to his tragic end.

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Having never seen his other movies, I still should have realized Robert DeNiro was going to be a perfectionist as a director, as he is as an actor. It's been so long that I had almost forgotten the pleasure of watching a film as nuanced and rich as The Good Shepherd. There wasn't a wasted sequence in the three hours it ran, and the irony didn't escape me that half the theater walked out on a movie whose title implied the blissful masses were the CIA's sheep.

DeNiro's character, based on Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan, once said that conservatives were those who believed people were flawed, and liberals were those who believed people could be changed. DeNiro's film, particularly in this war, is a daring discussion about the motives, good or wrong, for sacrificing liberties (and how much!) at wartime. Wild Bill, who ruthlessly hired socialists, liberals, and even communists in his intelligence battle, was a viciously pragmatic man, and he defended his men to the end when the OSS was investigated by the McCarthyists. He said "We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is that none but he will employ terror. But we will turn terror against him..."

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

Understanding that man goes a long way towards understanding that the movie is about anti-hero Edward Wilson's misunderstanding of the word "truth" in his passage into the intelligence underworld. There is the patriotic truth, where one's country's ideals take precedence and all harm unknown by its defenders are lies, unknowns, and untruths the CIA needs to unearth. And then there is the truth he found after opening his father's letter, the personal truth upon which families, friends, and ultimately all foundational values, America is built upon. When a man decides, as Edward did, that as a citizen the truth you pursue is predetermined, you "ascend" your family and friends, immediate and national, and cannot trust anyone.

Joseph Palmi: You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have their homeland, the Jews their tradition, even the n*****s have their music. What do you guys have?

Edward Wilson: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

For the movie as debate of our times, I don't think I need to wax more on the subject. But the film itself, however you may feel about the polemic, was crafted exquisitely. We didn't see characters make decisions, we saw the consequences. We saw the emotional aftermath. We saw them make the same mistakes, fighting their character arc, and suffering for it. We saw his son walk in his steps, believing and not knowing. We saw the anger as Edward's man Ray Brocco, unable to accept the real truth, unable to admit they were all fooled, bludgeon a man with forced confessions, only to fail. And at the end, we saw how the subtle passing of a dollar could be the surface of another world of deceit and misdirection, and the underworld continues stir.

Moviegoers who walk in expecting a thriller will walk out expecting a refund. The rest will be drawn into the irrevocably frightening backstage that James Jesus Angleton, the original good shepherd that Edward Wilson was based on, called the "wilderness of mirrors."

I was so excited thinking to myself how Julie Taymor is the greatest female director (directress?) when the gut-punch came... she was the ONLY female director I could name. Sure I knew a few others, but no one that fell in my snobby who's who list. It's just that she has such a distinctive style that what she brings to film transcends the question of her gender, making her simply a great director.

An incredibly VISUAL director, may I add. She was the director/costume/set designer for the Lion King musical, but I'd say that barely scraped the surface of her eye. Titus, still one of my favorite movies, shook the breath out of me when I saw Caesar's, Mussolini's, and Ciampi's Rome all forced onto one vulgar stage. Trojans accompanying a bulletproof bubble car into a palace filled with orgies and video games... what was incredible about it wasn't so much the design itself, but the audacity. She had captured the malevolently charming Shakespeare at youth, when Titus, his first play, was both biblical and Kill Bill-ish at the same time, a wry play of spaghetti for the Elizabeathens' grindhouse.

It's funny we've been subconsciously choosing character pieces. The unwatchable must-see Irréversible, the disappointing and pedestrian Kinsey, and a second viewing (Xstine's first) of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Luc Besson, I realize, appeals to me on the same level as Julie Taymor, as they are theatrical rock-stars who take visual cliches and, recklessly, polish them with timing and tone into moments you can't believe were so stirring in retrospect. I love that mix of embarrassment and teenage glee their shots excite.

This whole line of thought came after watching Frida, which I had mild expectations for. Boy was I slapped into this aside. Mia Maestro's perfect ass, wrenching effects and forced perspectives, top-notch set design, a Brothers Quay animation of a hospital on Días de los Muertos (Grim Fandango fans will love their tongues in cheeks), and my big fave Alfred Molina whose performance was not ruined (as I had expected) by a distractingly attractive Salma Hayek. In fact, Salma wasn't bad at all. At her worst, we saw a little too much of her real self, and at her best, it was a deep homage to her personal heroine.

I will agree with every bad review I read of it at RottenTomatoes. Frida is fairly textbook in the telling, possibly even boring to some, and it doesn't dwell much on the effect of her physical pain on her art. But IMO, Frida Kahlo would have wanted it that way. As she said to her adulterous husband, co-artist comrade Diego Riviera, "I had two big accidents in my life Diego, the trolley and You... You are by far the worst." For someone who had shattered half the bones in her body and had a metal pole piercing her vagina, I think we can infer that the film's focus on their relationship was in the right. Regardless of the inspiration that was borne from her physical pain, it was her creativity, borne from her emotional anguish, that gave her work the delicate touch balancing the comfortingly common and the outrageously perverse.

Perhaps that's why Kill Bill didn't shock so much as bemuse. It was more homage than directing, and when you design a story in which the upper limit of gore has already been done away with, it just isn't challenging. What Taymor has done is as challenging as Titus, whose rape and mutilation scene is still one of the most disturbing I've ever seen. This from someone who had to cover Xstine's eyes through the first half of Irréversible. Tone is infinitely more multiplicative of violence than quantity. Frida understood that.