Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Please Sir, can I have some more? (plot...)

One thing that has begun to seriously bother me of late, to the point where it has actually influenced my buying decisions, is the quality of story writing in the computer gaming industry these days, or lack thereof in many cases.

Okay, so I shouldn't expect a great deal of plot and intrigue from "Boomstik McShooterGuy 6000," and honestly, I don't. If I've had a stressy day, and I need to blow off steam, well then, I load up one of the many mindless shooters I've got on hand, lock and load my trusty flak cannon or rocket launcher, and go to town, cackling like a mad, homicidal monkey.

However, when I want something a little slower-paced, a little more involved, and a bit less with the twitch-reflexes, there's a dearth of good entertainment, of late. Honestly. I think the last PC game I actually bought a copy of was the Gold Edition of F.E.A.R. and with that, I was still somewhat disappointed as what initially promised to be some good spooky-vision fun basically turned into this:

Oh, look. Another batch of mooks. *BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM*. And another. *BLAMBLAMBLAM* And yet another overwhelming batch of mooks. *BLAMBLAMBLAM* Oh, hey, the music's gone all eerie and shite, and I'm moving into a dark area. Yep, there's the little girl. And there's the super-soldier commander. And ooooh, Spooooooooooooooky HUD flicker, check.. Expositional dialogue, check. Next obscenely ridiculous wave of oncoming mooks, check. *BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM*

Gag me with the business end of an M4 Carbine. I mean, while the game does well setting up the atmosphere, and has a few nice moments where you feel like you've just been zapped with defibrillator paddles, I've yet to see anything that really resembles an o'erweening plotline. It's like they were trying to go for a mix between System Shock 2, X-Files, and Poltergeist with some thrilling military/police drama thrown in for seasoning. Throw in some contrivances like how the elevators always conveniently close behind the bad guys so you can't get out, and your character's ability to go into "Slo-Mo" which isn't "Bullet Time, HONEST," and, well...

The CD has sat on my desk for the past month, untouched save for when I had to go rummaging for some papers my wife needed.

It's a symptom of an overall problem in electronic and computer gaming these days. The field has gotten so competitive that there is a vast amount of pressure from investors to get the games out on schedule, damn the torpedos. Things like plot often get left by the wayside, or if they don't, then more often than not, the game suffers a shortening of duration as bits get cut out to make sure the street date is hit. In some cases, such as with KOTOR II, whole endings get scrapped, leaving the player feeling a bit unfulfilled and cheated. Of course, there's also the opposite problem: Games which are possessed of glorious, intricate plots, and gameplay so frustratingly broken that they might inspire pacifistic, enlightened societies to become revenant hordes, should they be loosed upon so innocent and unsuspecting a people.

It's rare that you find that proper balance between gameplay and plot. Half-Life 2 tried, and came close. System Shock 2 did a bang-up job, and was one of the best I've ever played in that respect. Independence War 2, while the plot was a little loose in a few areas, and the antagonist was more or less Snidely Whiplash in space, remains one of my favorites. There are a few up-and-coming ones that I'm looking forward to on a story perspective: Mass Effect looks promising, and Starcraft II seems like it's going to be another Blizzard megahit. Fallout 3, needless to say, makes me happy in pants.

The problem I see on the horizon for the gaming industry, having grown up alongside said industry, is this: When I was younger, I was a lot more into the twitch-games, where your primary objective was to just blow the everloving crap out of anything that moves and rack up points. As I grew older, I got into role-playing games, both online and tabletop, and my interests moved more toward diversions with some meat on their bones, so to speak. Granted, these days I'm as into MMOs like City of Heroes/Villains and World of Warcraft as your average casual gamer, but they at least try to have interesting story arcs in their multitudinous mission trees.

The current generation is faced with a range of choices several orders of magnitude more prolific than anything I had to deal with, and the competition for their dollars is by logical extension much more fierce. The publishers seem to me to be focusing on fancier graphics, more realistic visuals and physics, more "shock factor," and of course, getting the game out the door and into the waiting hands of the masses. Either that, or they're licensing the unholy everlovin' crap out of anything Hollywood decides to put out, especially if it has to do with superheroes (but that's another rant).

I just hope that along the way, story doesn't totally get discarded. I hope that plot doesn't get pruned away, because to me, without something to tie all the action together, the games of the future are just not going to be worth playing.



Monday, August 20, 2007

Papers, please...

So, this morning I sat down at my desk at $COMPANY_NAME and decided to wake up a little by reading some news on Slashdot.org, and they linked to this article over at CNN, regarding the REAL ID Act.

Needless to say... I was neither amused nor heartened by what I read.

For those who've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, the REAL ID Act is a piece of legislation that was snuck under the rug in 2005, as part of a military spending and tsunami relief bill. In essence, it mandates (even though DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff says it's not a mandate. Honest.) that all states bring their ID and driver's licenses into compliance with a single standardized format, and furthermore that they all maintain and "be willing to" share informational databases between themselves.

According to this act, Joe Citizen has until 2013 to get with the program. That means you and I, dear reader, are going to be put into a database, and we're going to have to fork over at least four forms of ID to get the damnable thing.

But it's not a mandate. Honest.

This ID will be required at all Federal facilities. This includes: airports, government buildings, federal facilities of any kind, and national parks and monuments. If you're from one of the states opposing this, and you only have your state driver's license on you when you go to see any federally funded park, monument, or recreational facility, you will be refused entry unless you also have your passport with you.

But it's not a mandate. Honest.

The estimated costs for this program range over $21 billion. So far, only about $40 million has been set aside. The states are apparently expected to shoulder the rest of the burden, which is in turn going to fall back on the citizens in the form of taxation and/or higher service fees for obtaining the ID than was normal. For example, here in Texas, it currently costs $25.00 to get your driver's license, by far the most common form of identification. Unless the Feds fund this more, it could cost your average Texas citizen over $100.00 to obtain their REAL ID.

DHS Secretary Chertoff was recently quoted in the CNN article as saying that this is not a mandate, but if a state doesn't comply, there would be repercussions, and that the citizens of that state would not have their state-issued IDs accepted for federal purposes. Bill Walsh of the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank that supports this idea, apparently seems to think that if say, a terrorist uses a New Hampshire ID to go and do naughty things, then New Hampshire -- and by logical extension in my mind, its citizens -- should be held responsible.

Oh, right. It's not a mandate. It's coercion.

Your average Tango isn't going to be quite so dumb as to try and enter the country with bad papers, standardized ID or not. This plan also completely disregards the fact that if there are sleeper cells here, they'll already have the proper documentation. Sure, we'll be able to point a finger at the guy's smoking corpse and say, "We know who that pile of steaming giblets is! We know who done blowed up our chill'uns real gud! We should revile him, dig up all his friends and family history, and trot them out on the tee-vee to be humiliated and scorned in front of billions!"

And that'll be great and all, y'know? Media circus, I'm sure. Ted Koppel will be able to afford a new head, finally... but it won't prevent it from happening. Which is what Our Political Heroes say it's going to do.

And trust me, I use the word "Heroes" in only the most ironic sense, dripping with enough sarcasm that you could irrigate fields with it... but I wouldn't want to eat anything grown in that tainted earth, nor reaped from its dark harvest -- I'd be afraid the corn would bite me.

But I digress. This whole setup reminds me of certain Eastern European principalities not too long ago, or at least an initial step toward that. It also stands to disenfranchise a large number of people -- For example, in many cases, you cannot get a passport if you owe child support. This makes sense, as you don't want deadbeat moms and dads whisking away to Acapulco. Many states also disbar you from your driver's license if you're picked up on a drug charge, whether it's deserved or not, or at least slap you with ridiculous surcharges to get it renewed afterward.

If these people cannot get a REAL ID, and cannot get a passport, then technically as far as the Feds are concerned, they are un-persons... and they get locked down, unable to travel by air (at first -- I suspect road checkpoints are going to come later), unable to enter a government building without invasive screening procedures, and I suspect...

...Unable to vote. It's a federal activity after all, and you have to show your driver's license. At the very least, this is another prime example of OPH regarding the Bill of Rights and the Constitution as Constitoilet Paper.

I leave you with this quote from a favorite movie of mine, The Hunt For Red October:

Vasily Borodin: Do you think they will let me live in Montana?

Capt. Ramius: I would think they'll let you live wherever you want.

Vasily Borodin: Good. Then I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman, and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pick-up truck, or umm... possibly even...a recreational vehicle, and drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?

Capt. Ramius: Oh yes.

Vasily Borodin: No papers?

Capt. Ramius: No papers. State-to-state.


More information at www.RealNightmare.org.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Oh, the irony...

After the grandiose speech I made earlier today regarding how I was going to write something here at least once per day, it occurred to me that there is a strong possibility that I am going to miss at least one, possibly two days over the weekend due to Big Family Reunion.


Wish us luck as Wifey and I drive through the rainsodden Texas landscape, tonight.

The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi

Might as well put my money where my mouth is and kick this at-least-one-post-a-day program off right...

So, I've been reading a lot of Keith Laumer's work of late, and I see a lot of similarities between his style and my own, nascent though mine might be thus far.

One problem I have seen with a lot of science-fiction writers over the past decade or two is that they all seem to take it all so very seriously. There have been one or two novels which shan't be named here that left me seriously wondering whether or not anyone has any fun in the future, whether fun is even legal. Perhaps it is some forbidden pleasure, best savored in the dark valleys between towering glass and durasteel monoliths, away from the ever-seeing eyes of the omni-cams and the probing thoughts of the government and corporate psyker legions.

Laumer's style was different, though. Much "pulpier" than your typical sci-fi, even among the sci-fi of the time, but he did it without being campy and hokey... and he wasn't afraid to use the odd literary device to keep things moving along when it looked like things were going to get dull. Time-honored things like having a female protagonist pull the hapless hero out of the fire, or "look what Widget X can do!" or the venerable, "If the story starts to slow down, have a man kick in the door with a gun in his hand," were favorite tools of his.

He also wasn't afraid to throw some of the absurd in, from time to time, and had a fine sense of irony, which showed in tales ranging from someone waiting in a government bureaucratic line for most of his life, to interstellar filmmakers whose idea of Academy Award-winning material is natural disasters to aliens stealing the brains of men and putting them into battle tanks.

Baen Books has a bunch of Laumer's works as part of their free library. You can find his stuff here, edited by Eric Flint. It's good stuff, from a time when science fiction didn't take itself so damn seriously.

Check it out.

The Evil Mastermind's New Blog

So. Here we are.

Come on in! I know, the place still looks a little unpolished and cluttered, but that's a hazard of moving, honestly. And really, this is more of a "summer home." Or more accurately, an office.

See, the LiveJournal page is going to remain in place. And it's going to remain locked. That's where I'm going to discuss the majority of my private affairs with my friends, etc. It's my private headspace. This space, though...

This is going to be where I bring my brain, sit down, and do some serious mulling over. It's been pointed out to me lately that I see a lot more than I let on, and than people give me credit for. I've also come to realize that if I am going to do this writer thing, then honestly, I need to get in the habit of writing.

Even if it's just a few paragraphs here, talking about something utterly inane, or writing up an excerpt from a story that may never get published, or perhaps even writing down the lyrics to keep in mind for the day that I open one of my seven mouths and destroy the earth. I need to write. Consistently. Persistently.

Every. Frakkin'. Day.

So, that's what this is about. This is where I'm gonna speak my mind, take it or leave it, double or nothing. Maybe one day, it'll get noticed. Maybe one day, I'll take the pseudonym off my tag here, and reveal the man behind the mass of pixels.

...Maybe one day, I'll sing that song.