Aesthetics: December 2007 Archive Page

1up:

Ten years ago, Westwood released its point-and-click adventure game adaptation of Blade Runner. Blade Runner was, if nothing else, a towering achievement in terms of evoking the original film's memorable aesthetic. The game's mo-cap sprites moved against dim, smoky noir backdrops; every exterior shot felt exhilaratingly accurate, while interior locations were ominous and claustrophobic. In 1997, Louis Castle -- then the executive vice president of Westwood Studios -- told PC Gamer, "This is not a game about the movie; it is a game about the movie's environment. It's about the tension and emotion of the movie."

A good overview, though it's not nearly as detailed or rigorous as if this topic were the subject of an academic study. Still, I'd rather see the glass as half full -- I'm glad to see such a weighty topic being considered by a mainstream gamer publication.  It's yet another sign of the critical sophistication of gamers who want to read about more than walkthroughs and cheat codes.

Video games didn't start with Pac-Man (1980), Space Invaders (1978), or Pong (1972).

Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That's the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer.

I know what you're thinking, but my story is that I'm gathering information for a research project on gender in science fiction. Yeah, that's it.

Doris Lessing doesn't like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica:

Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

Because, of course, to know about computers is to know nothing of value.

I just read a paper from a college senior who, when writing a paper on a canonically validated text, initially cited more sources from a DVD documentary than from scholarly books and articles, so I, too, lament the decline of literacy. Yet I'm not exactly comfortable with Lessing's take on the value of a liberal-arts education, or her assessment of the causes of the decay of literacy. Like the printing press, blogging puts the power of literacy in the hands of the populace. If the unwashed masses have the tools in their hands, they're going to use them to produce texts about what matters to them, not what matters to the ones who were already in power before the tools escaped into the wild.

It is rather amazing that educated people who don't have time to read a book have the time to make Lego stop-motion animated versions of viral dance videos, but I'd much rather that people create and share their own works -- which means the processing of a few diamonds along with a lot of roughage -- than limit themselves to silently swallowing what big-business wants them to consume.

Adam Parrish:

The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player's path through the game. A Frotzophone "performance" looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you're also playing music. Here's a sample of the Frotzophone's audio output. This sample was generated from playing the first part of Zork I--up until I got killed by the troll. Download the full track here (2'12", 192kbps MP3).

ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon's new e-book reader.

I don't usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I'd come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit the peak of popularity and the only way for it to go was down.

But then I realized that the Kindle had a cult.

Times Online:

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial. No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott's masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott's film is, the seventh and "final" cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It's visually enhanced and, says Scott, "tweaked". It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy - Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman - is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it's downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children's books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.