2 posts tagged “musing”

This is one of those posts where I write because I feel like writing, not because I actually have something to say. I'm not quite sure why I bother to make these public; they're essentially a warm-up that I do, sort of like writing calisthenics, before I tackle my novel manuscript or a short story... just a way to get my fingers moving and my voice working and everything flowing especially since it's been a little while since I got any work done.

That still doesn't explain why I feel the need to share this utterly mundane and uninteresting rambling with you. I imagine if I thought about it long enough, I could ascribe some nonsensical reason to the behavior; off the top of my head, I'm going to go with pure narcissism, which is the fuel for about fifty percent of the Internet's content, anyway. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. Think about everything that you've placed on the Internet, all of the content that you've created. Not content that you've consumed, not things you've perused or enjoyed, but things that you've actually inserted into the greater series of tubes that is the Intertron. How much of it are pictures of you or the people around you? How much of your written material is dialogue about your life, shared with your friends? Perhaps I should ask this question a different; of everything that you've ever put up online, public or private, for whatever reason, how much of it is not about you?

This is not to imply that such a perspective is wrong. The reality is that this is a tool for facilitating communication between people. It's not a repository for artistic endeavor, any more than my phone is meant to be. But it never fails to amuse me (and I'm just as guilty of this as any individual) that so much of our social cyber-construction is built to carve little niches of ourselves, to put as much or as little of ourselves out there in the digital world. If you think about it, we're all vying for a little quasi-immortality (a phrase, incidentally, that amuses as much as "most unique"). Long after you've moved on, there are relics of your history floating around on the Internet, buried just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed with a little digging. These bits of data, these pieces left in the wake of your interest long after you've moved on will remain forever, as long as there exists a server to hold them. And it's always interesting to see how your little relics and artifacts can reappear, sometimes when you don't even expect it (and sometimes that's not a good thing).

For example, back when I was developing fledgling html skills, I made a series of websites on various free services, starting at a place called Express Pages before moving to Fortune City to Geocities and eventually, to Angelfire. At least one of those Angelfire pages is still up and active, because apparently, it's considered the primary resource for information on the drow god Vhaeraun on Wikipedia. Seriously, click the link and scroll down to the external links: "Citadel of the Mask Lord" was a website I put up years and years ago and then promptly forgot about. I'm not the one that found it and cited it for Wikipedia; I've actually never submitted anything to Wikipedia, ever, which rolls into the whole thing about all of my content online being about me.

Just something to think about.

I feeling like talking about myself today for a little while.

Been spending a lot of my gaming leisure time with that new Riddick game for the 360. It's surprisingly good (much as the previous one was,) although the difficulty level has made me call into question my abilities as a gamer, which led to an interesting late night discussion with Zach about the evolution of video games in general and the shift of focus from gameplay to narrative.

Now, let me be clear about one thing; this observation is tinted entirely by my particularly preference in games and seeing as how I have only a vague familiarity with certain genres (sports and racing are good examples), perhaps my thesis is flawed due to a small sample size.

Anyway, it seems to me that the general shift of what a video game "is" has moved from challenge to narrative, as in, the answer to the question of "what makes games fun" has evolved. Originally, the intent was "beat the game." I remember when beating a game, finishing a game, completing a game, all of those various was of describing one's triumph in the virtual space was, in and of itself the highest of achievements. That was because there was no narrative, no compelling story as we would identify with today to provoke advancement; the lure was to overcome the obstacle, move to the next level, defeat the next guy.

Compare that to Mass Effect, easily my favorite game of this generation, and what stands out now is not the fact that I "beat it." In fact, whether or not I would beat it was never even a question, and the completion of missions was largely inconsequential for the sake of the challenge itself. The driving force, the "fun factor," as it were, was invested wholly in the enjoyment of an interactive story, the act of partaking in the spectacle of the game's storyline, scenery and characterization.

Basically, what I'm saying is that when I was 10, I was playing games to them. At 22, I'm playing games to finish the story, to find out what happens. This, to me, is a clear and definitive answer to the question of whether or not games can be considered art, on the level of books or movies. The very fact that the reason I am playing them has changed should be answer enough.

Hmm. You know, I was going to talk about some other stuff, movies and books that have been on my mind, as well as my experience with sharing my writing, but I think I'll hold off on that for now. Although I guess I didn't really do a good job of tying in this whole monologue with "I was playing Dark Athena this week," amusingly enough. Basically, the game is hard, like, really hard, and it made me think about the last time I actually played a hard game that made me fight a boss 30 times before I figured out the "trick." So, there's that.