This struck me as odd. I have always had a problem with identifying meaningful character traits without chatting someone up but this man could simply tell generosity from a brief look.

He has had problems with me. I had always thought of him as particularly bad at his profession. I assumed he was just buckshoting to scrape out money to keep himself in tolerable above ground existence. It turns out that I was the problem in the relationship.

He zoomed passed me without much of a glance. Which was wise, considering I was in a very sour mood, but just past me there was a couple kissing and taking the occasional break for air and to gaze deeply into each others eyes. Neither of them were particularly well dressed to demarcate wealth but despite this the man went straight up to them and asked for some money for {insert reason}. Stranger still, the girl took a five out of her ridiculously small purse and gave it to him. He shuffled a little down the street and found a drunk man holding onto a wall for dear life. I think I saw the glint of silver and brass so he must have scored a twoonie out of the deal.

And this is how he went down the street. I counted and he managed to get 4 out of 5 people he asked. The odd man out may have wanted to give him something but ended up throwing up into the gutter and the homeless man moved away in disgust.

I watched what looked like a young professional wretch up about half a weeks paycheque into the storm drain. While the young turk type was checking the drain to make sure his shoes had not come out through his mouth, I began to think that homeless was clearly the wrong term for a man that could so easily navigate his way through the chaos of 3:30 am Halifax.

This man is merely, to steal from George Carlin, houseless. His home is Halifax circa final call.

Every drunk he picked clean responded in the same way a desk drawer responds to me in my office area. He knew total strangers the way I know furniture and the way some know family and pets.

This type of man is not some romantic vagrant. He is obviously suffering. His clothes never change. He always carries a bit of a smell and his eyes glint of something that could not possibly be natural.

He is like the grotesque, high atop gothic buildings, that offset the prim and proper of the south end. He is their opposite but still knows the culture of the land. Yet I still get the impression that he is more at home in Halifax than the Uncommon Grounds yogi set.

He fulfilled a niché in the city the same way that anyone would when an appropriate environment is available . That does not make him a freak or a mutant but it makes him a true Haligonian. Truer than most because at least he is in sync with the cultural tableau. Which is something that I will never achieve.

It started with a day off from the soul sucking fluorescent tubes – this is how they are powered right? – to attend the convocation of two friends. I wore my standard attire with a blazer draped over my unimpressive shoulders. They wore gowns.

The graduation ceremony was basically the same as my own. Families gathered, brimming with pride, and the students oscillating between happy, sad, and nervous. I thought it was not going to affect me. I really did. I was wrong.

When my eldest friend, who we will name Spock to preserve some of his anonymity, went to get his degree he ended up crying and hugged the dean of the university. I was taken aback. I barely reacted to getting my own slip of paper and have been lost, rudderless, in an ocean of confusion ever since. But here was a man that reacted to all this lead up to his calling. This confused me and I dwelled on it during the day as I spent in it my usual way. Reading philosophy in order to figure out a question I developed in my undergrad which still consumes what remains of my soul.

After dinner and a disco-nap I went out to meet Spock for coffee. We had scheduled dancing and drinking to celebrate his trot past the finish line.

Over coffee I asked outright “Why the breakdown?”

“I didn’t breakdown. I just did what felt right. You should try that occasionally.”

Usually the sage-like wisdom is flowing in the other direction in this relationship. The little train on the second track of my mind started visiting all the old stations of my path to this place while the train on the primary track did the usual talking about nothing.

We got kicked out of the café at closing time and proceeded to head downtown. Back to Tribeca. It was his choice this time.

This time, arriving later than I arrived last week, the club was already starting to upswing. There was some nervous dancing and people drifting like tumbleweeds between the bar and groups of friends.

After the first drink we both decided to hit the dance floor. Specifically because Abba’s Dancing Queen came on and he is the follower of the Great Religion of Abba.

I wish that was a clever euphemism but honestly it’s not. His patron saints include, Judy Garland, Cher, and Barbara Streisand.

Despite him being my closest friend I still won’t dance with him because I am pretty sure that would scorch any remote chance of having feminine company on the way home. On the plus side he did find some friends to dance with amongst the nervous dancers.

I was doing my usual thing of dancing in a reserved manner. The music was the same as usual and it was not very busy but then suddenly the Djs started to spin Bel Biv DeVoe’s Poison and the train on that second track of my mind derailed.

Before I went off to boarding school, and was completely stripped of privacy, I used to watch Much Music and do that type of bedroom dancing that you only do when you think no one is watching. This song may as well have been Alan Bates turning to me, in his white suit, and saying “Zorba, teach me to dance.”

The stick rattled down my spine and out of my butt. All those years of arrhythmia melted and I was dancing for fun. There was no object to the dance. This was just for fun. The fact that I didn’t care what other people thought of me was helping and I may have even been smiling.

What was stranger still was that even though I was not aiming at anyone I was gaining traction on the dance-floor. Girls were paying attention to me and were even dancing with me by their own manoeuvres and not mine.

My mind, which was very sober, turned to the Origins of Inequality and the thought that maybe we started dancing just because we were innocent and bored. Then I quickly dismissed it because I really hate Rousseau and I am hardly innocent by this point.

I caught a look on Spock’s face and he was a little confused as to what was going on with me? To be fair so was I. Why would my childhood self attract more positive attention than what has survived to adulthood?

The night obviously didn’t end in some hook up but I was still happy if not a little bit sweaty. All the girls I was dancing with got dragged off by friends and each one left with an odd shy wave on their part. I have never actually seen this behaviour before and I have no idea what it means.

I found something deep within me that I had been ignoring during my darker years. It is odd that a man, who had just been called, knows more about how to be happy and how to listen to those old ontologies. These prison cells, that I have locked away a great deal of my past, seem to be holding wise people. These former selves seem to know what joy is. I am still learning.

The cell phone informed me that is was around eight in the evening and my stomach informed me that breakfast was twelve hours ago. Consuming a hastily cooked meal of ratatouille I fleetingly glanced at at the remnants of a once proud liqueur display and found myself making eye contact with Morgan. Could it be he that told me of my gaucheness? Despite that fate was in his ancestry I had my doubts but left my right eyebrow to remain suspicious.

Groping through desk drawers for matches I examined the status of my friends through the bled light of the ether. One was eating a muffin, another had not let out an ethereal vibration for at least a week and I am beginning to assume that he has either become involved with a woman or is dead, and the other go-to was doing not much of anything but suffers from occasional bouts of symposiaphobia and planned a nice night in with a book.

Contemplating this I stuck my match and allowed my face to be naturally lit before consumed by a cloud of smoke. It was only 10:30. Despite this I ventured towards the piers of Halifax where broken men belong. Am I broken? I can sense no break. They may.

Before dropping into the harbour I pushed my self through the cacophonic melody of Friday night. Is there live music? Decent D.J.? Available Women? Men? Men and Women? The leitmotif that I have observed in almost every edge of the western world.

My goal for the evening was to make it to Tribeca just before Sackville drops into the harbour. I am always fond of the mythological New York and this bar delivers a small sliver of that. One day I hope to meet a Dotty Parker and a have chat over exactly four martinis. Merely fantasy but I hope she keeps her glasses on. The real reason I keep returning is because of music. Which is not typical fanfare allows me to put on my red shoes and dance arrhythmically – after a few restoratives.

My chronic arrhythmia is deeply in tune with city. Tribeca was occupied by a full staff that were relaxed, one of the regulars, a few crickets too bored to even chirp. This is not woeful because I would be able to get a quiet drink in before the complete saturation tequila vapour and pheromones. Eye of the hurricane. After the Heineken fused with blood the wind will pick up and you can Marry Poppins with your umbrella. The only way to fly.

The wind began to howl.

On the third beer I needed to fumigate my lungs. The conversation outside had turned to that pesky Canadian habit of offering to buy cigarettes off people. There were divided opinions on the matter and kept to myself finding it be like an amusing but banal radio talk show. The cigarette began to fizzle out and I laced up the red shoes and moved on in.

Dance floors always shimmer like the surface of the sun. It seems chaotic but it is by which we can see each other. Beauty is not in the intense mass of limbic foam but in the movement of the eye.

My pulsing didn’t seem to attract much attention but I am used to this because I am unsure how to dance without a partner and my knee had some minor damage done to it recently. The beer had taken the pain away and saved it for about four in the morning – when I could really use it. This is when something happened that has not happened in a while. A girl gave me a come hither stare accompanied by a beckoning finger.

I was immensely flattered as the only female I would call a friend is deeply sapphic and in a very monogamous relationship. I started to dance with here and she seemed drunker than me but not completely out of it. The dance became increasingly intense. Suddenly there were lips upon mine and I was gently dragging my slight overbite over her lower-lip. There was strange sensation of Jägermiester. Pride’s sails at full bellows. I did not take the warning.

We slowly moved off to the side of the dance floor to make out in earnest while dancing. Two events made me realize things had turned to the strange. The first was that she licked the side of my cheek – this may be strange but I have known women that do this without severe intoxication and always found it a to make it me feel like some sort of lion cub almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Simba. Reality came down like a Hydrogen Bomb just before I could think about how to extract myself in polite way.

Free from imagined sexual repression she processed to dry hump my bad knee. The room got darker as my eyes focused to the bright light of the Valkyrie. The shrieking goddesses consumed every cubic inch of my headspace and lit my alcohol infused blood.

I was not very drunk or just a little tipsy but there was no way to think straight and quickly. Just a fusion of different sopranos shrieking in my ears and a thump of a second heart in my leg.

I managed to get her to switch legs but then she lent back and nearly tumbled over causing me to hug her just to keep her from taking an spill. She took this another way. Some grabbing and fumbling I managed to look into her eyes in way that my friends call the ‘soul stare’ and find uncomfortable.

This is just me looking into someone to see if the hamster is still running. The poor creature had died of alcohol poising or, as someone else has pointed out, bit of date rape at the bar. There was very little grey and white matter going with any earnest processing and what was left had a particular idea of how the evening should end despite physical impossibility.

The biggest problem was that I had no idea whom this woman was or whom her friends may be. I could barely keep her standing and had lost any semblance of control of the situation – if I ever had it. Oddly, I kept up the facade of dance because I could not think of better plan. All that was in my mind was constant shrieking. I looked around shrugging a bit which everyone seemed to ignore.

Things were getting out of hand and fast. Suddenly, seemingly out of poof of smoke and a kazahn, another women appeared. She wore the type of disapproving look that you normally associate with some sort of judge and she seemed to stand there for a few minutes for my time dilated perspective.

After those few minutes of confusion and arm flailing she, the magical woman, leaned into my ear and said “I’m her friend and we are going to take her home.” Apparently she was one of the pride. The change in number without visual evidence confused me. She was standing alone. How could she become a we so fast? Had pentagrams been drawn? Ninjas from the roof? Was she Queen Victoria? Had time, space, and meaning collapsed?

Even with all those half thoughts swirling in my mind I responded “Thank God.” This seemed to leave a bit of quizzical expression on her – amongst the scorn of course. This is about when the dancer fell over again. I caught her for the last time and two of her other friends, the rest of the pride I assumed, filed out of the crowd and there was a transfer. Also I think her blouse may have fallen down a bit leaving her exposing her bra because I have this faint impression of someone correcting shirt straps. This woman had ceased to be sexual object a while a go and become a strange problem so I wasn’t really looking.

I backed against a wall a put all my weight on the right leg. The screaming shut up in my head and I could think again. The scene next to me was not pretty. The dancer wanted to keep dancing and there was strange malaise of an argument. The argument ended with her passing out on her feet. Her two friends started carrying her like one of the fresher corpses from no man’s land after a World War One battle.

I felt more than one dirty look upon me but I didn’t care. I through that little bit of vanity and pride on the dance floor to be trampled and returned to bar for a beer to get the taste of Jäger out of my mouth and to look for place to sit and let the beer clear out the pain in my leg so I could eventually walk up the Sackville drop home.

I started to finish this new beer quickly. Some new people appeared around me and one sorry-son-a-bitch looked a lot like me. This was noticed by the group and one quickly asked for my label. “Gui Raymond” I managed to croak out. Surprise crept over the crowd and I thought I may have said something else. Turns out that the sorry-son-of-a-bitch had the similar name and this was deeply interesting to the drunk but not to me.

What was interesting was that last call was about a quarter of an hour away. My beer finished and my second heart was still beating. I excused myself from the group and went to the bar to close out my tab with just one last restorative and sat down in one of the expatriated car seats nearer to the exit.

I found the woman that collects the cover charge there doing that thing you do when you are bored to tears. Fiddling with her blackberry. I chatted with her as a bit of distraction. The short version of the conversation was that she is off to med school and wondering about what the next few years had in store. I told her some of the more amusing stories from a group of doctors that I used to run around with and mused over the fact that self-circumcision is much more common in the ER than anyone expects.

Last call rang and I went outside to smoke and allow some time for the full effect of my medicine. Chatting with the more amusing came naturally. I wrote something in my notebook.

Looking at it now it is just an old joke.

Physicist: My paper is done unless it’s observed.

Why would I want to write that lame joke down at such a point? Mind my mind was trying to pull something from the darker corners but at this point I was no longer tipsy but drunk.

The pride of lionesses had reappeared and were giving me something that I perceived as a funny look while I was chatting with someone else.

The look reminded me a confused crow but I stopped reading passages of forgotten lore when I left classics.

Dragging my shambling corpse up that fucking hill is not my favourite activity even when I am in good condition. That night was no exception but there was something of idea bubbling around. ‘Nolle prosequi’ repeated over and over.

Being a bit of useless prat it should be of no surprise that upon stepping my bedroom I got sure footing on the dustcover of some hardcover I was reading and did a great backwards fall into the nothingness. I found that laughter had filled the room.

I was smiling. I didn’t and don’t know why. I just had the thought that this generation is somehow quantum in its constitution. Existing in strange probability fields that once observed you became static but how you got there was a mystery. The fear doesn’t seem to be about social standing but that one’s ontology may shift to what they think. That you would become what others saw. So many years the people cried that they were not an object but are they failing as a subject? Is this what has become of the world? To stop moving is to finally be.

Gen X was supposed to be apathetic and overeducated. Is this new generation just afraid to care or to show it? The dancer lioness had so much sexuality bottled up that it just came out as an explosion. A once unique man found his doppelgänger. The pride of lionesses found both a lecherous scumbag and chatty guy about pointless subjects. And a future med student got a peek into the crazy life of residency.

People seem to worry about how they will be judged by the jury of strangers except when dangerously drunk. And I have never met a person that did something completely surprising when tanked. Only something that was within them anyway which the old buffer was stopping. Has this generation of Canadians had its constitution drafted by those that know best? Who buys this shit? Who would want to encourage it by not acting out? Have the sixties protests been completely slaughtered by the Wall street yuppies of the eighties? Is everyone that worried about failure that no one even wants to try? And why aren’t the streets full of nauseous people except when then buffer is gone the gaze is goggled? I knew Sartre was full of shit.

“I don’t know but I need to find out.” I said aloud to the apartment. It creaked with approval. Striking a match the room took on a nice amber hue for the few seconds but with a wave of the hand it returned to darkness except for a floating bright red bulb.

My hiatus from the world had been too long. This thing I was returning to is new and different. I wasn’t throwing back in with the thing but I was walking like drunk over cigarette packets around the place. Freaking out because someone may find me attractive. Like some gecko who spies a cat but with a particular brain condition that makes him run towards the cat. I float through the present with a strange surreal zeal. Maybe I am broken but maybe at least, hopefully, interestingly so.

I closed the night by exhaling a long column of vaporized coffin nail straight up into the air. Butted out and lay down – knowing full well that my knee alarm would go off in a couple of hours. I slid my eyelids gently over the old corneas and was about to sleep when I heard “You’re doing it wrong”. I threw a pillow in no particular direction and yelled “Fuck off.”

The production values are insanely good and by production values I do not exactly mean just the technical aspect of the graphics but a great deal more. I could call it mise en scène but that is an overused term in cinema that is to vague for my purposes. So I will explain the elements that I mean beyond the technical graphical detail.

The first paradoxical thing I would like to address is that the monsters in this game are less monstrous. In every previous game all your encounters with the monstrous are either random or you always got the impression that everything in world was just waiting to kill you or be killed by you. This is a convention that most video games have and can work in certain cases, like in Beyond Good and Evil but in Final Fantasy it has always been part of the suspension of disbelief. This time around, at least as soon as you get to Gran Pulse – for those that have not played the game it is the large openish world – the monsters or more like animals. Mind you they all seem to be stuck on an loop of a daily routine – possibly confronted by the same Demon/Angle that torments me – but you do get a sense of them fighting for territory, running around in state of play, worshipping treasure chests – okay that was a bit odd, or just searching for food. Even one of the hunt quests says that your quarry, which happens to a large dinosaur like creature – is probably just a lost child looking for its mother – I have yet to complete this quest. A lot of care went into making these creatures animals rather than just obligatory obstacles in your path. Every robot in the game, however, is exactly that. So you take a bit of good with the bad.

The art direction is also well done and for the first time in the series I got a sense of Amano’s art style inside the game rather than just between the covers of the manual. It is not omnipresent but around the Cie’th stones, some of the designs of creatures and building. This style was both beautiful and colourful, which to be perfectly honest, most games today look like the inside of the toilet from Trainspotting out of fear of being considered too childish. It is a nice break to see beautiful sights with the graphical competence of large company like Square-Enix.

The soundtrack is good and far more memorable than the work in Final Fantasy XII but at the same time I find the series has yet to top the work in Final Fantasy VI. In that game each leitmotif is associated with a character and each combination of these to make a song had some purpose to the plot. The soundtrack to Final Fantasy XIII is bit more like a Hollywood movie. Most of the songs are memorable and some are very beautiful but they do not mesh into a coherent whole and are there to act more tone for a part of a narrative rather than helping the narrative along. I feel this is important for video games as an art form because there will always be long stretches of the experience which the music is the primary auditory queue for the narrative. Still it is very well done despite the fact that I did not like the Leona Lewis song which the story seem to want to be hinged on.

And of course the technical aspects of the gameplay elements are fairly well done and do manage to cut down on some tedium and micromanagement which would have been great to allow us to enjoy the story without worrying which of the characters was missing their packed lunch. I will get to why I am using a subjunctive voice in a bit.

Everything isn’t roses and sunshine with the game and a lot of it has to do with the acting and the plot.

The voice acting in the game is variable. It is not fair to say that is is horrible. It is just some of the written lines are so weird that I am not sure any voice actor could have convinced me of sincerity. Also the choice of making the Gran Pulse accent Australian, Gran Puls being a world that is literally under the world which you start on, has led me to make far to many down under jokes.

The other problem with the acting is the motion capture kind of oscillates between Kabuki play, or really any type of play, and film acting. The larger gestures just seem odd when the camera is so close to the character. I thought Square-Enix used to do this because they used to keep the camera far back in non-prerendered scenes to hide problems with the textures which would make larger sweeping gesture more necessary. Now this isn’t a problem, which is an achievement in itself, but they still have this strange bad habit. It is also important to note this happens a great deal less in the prerendered cinematic.

And finally the plot… it’s silly. I’m sorry I don’t have much more to say. Group of young people although not as young as usual – Lighting is 21 and just about to take the officers exams before she is dragged into this mess whereas in earlier games she would have probably made the rank of general by then is famous on the field- save the world. Essentially it is just like every other JRPG in existence. Which annoys me becasue the plot has base components similar to Babylon 5 and with a little bit of work and care the plot could have been really good and may have even had some surprises. Alas, it is not meant to be.

The easiest way for me to put it is that it’s Dune except no one tries to play out their roles to absurdly. The entire game is done is somewhat a deadpan serious tone with comic relief sections which seems a little silly given that the plot is just so silly to start with. A for instance in this case is the charter of Dysely. To reference my Dune example, no body wants to play a subtle floating fat man so go for broke. Dysley should have been overplayed just for amusements sake and it is not like Final Fantasy has not done this before. Kefka, from Final Fantasy VI and Seymour from Final Fantasy X were both of this genre of villain.

That is all I can think of that has not been said ad nauseam by every other human on earth. I would still recommend this game if just to look at and considering how many of you have seen Avatar there is something to be said to experience something merely for an outstanding visual effects and other incidental achievements.

In Reference to:

• Gametrailers’ Review
• Spoony’s Review
• Zero Punction’s Review

You may ask yourself what Citizen Kane is and the answer is simple. It is a story that could only have been shown. Just try to explain the plot of Citizen Kane. You will become bored about halfway through. It’s basically a version of Faust – Orson may have been trying to prove Wilde right – without the devil and a bit of popular Freudism. I believe Orson himself said that the whole Rosebud thing was a dollar book Freudian technique. A video game to reach this level must have to be a story, which could easily be a Jesus tale to fill out the Wilde quote with the added benefit that most video games are about saving the world, that could only be played and as of my now – April 22nd 2010 – this story has not happened but there has been some signs that some of the key pieces of theory about it have been laid down.

I feel that there is a need for a bit of house keeping. I obviously need to define what is meant by play. Play tends to have a sense of amusement or enjoyment but I enjoy books and can be amused at the theatre but no one would assume I was playing – hopefully not at least. The reason for this is that play is the a verb that puts me in the action inside the suspension of disbelief. You can think of actors inside of play being the players and you will get the gist of my meaning.

Since video games are called games I guess it would be useful to establish how game like they are. Ebert quite rightly points out, in a recent blog entry, that very concept of game suggests that you can win or lose for that matter. We do not say we won the play or book but we still reach the intended climax of the work. So what we may ask what is particularly different between games and most cases of art is that you are intimately involved in the outcome. You win not you watch others win.

To expand a little bit further with the more classic games let me provide an example. If you play a game of chess, I am stretching a bit here because I prefer go over chess for the reason I am about to describe, you meet the other person in a unique way. You see how they think. You can see how the mind is operating and due to the general telos of chess you are forced in a combative position. That is merely the rules of the game shaping the way the story plays out – I grant it would be a particular boring story even with a great amount of adjectives used in the description of such a match but still you meet the mind of the player on the board given these limitations. If we think back to one of the more famous chess games as of late we can all remember what happened when Kasparov saw something he assumed was a person and his reaction to it. He thought he has met a mind and accused IBM of cheating by allowing a human to interfere. In this sense he met deep blue. I do not think that deep blue is a subjective thing but when something happens that takes us off guard we assume a modi operator behind it. I feel this is much the case behind people unversed in evolutionary theory and are vocal about it.

Now, these more classic games always require a second person to play against. Much to the chargin‘ of misanthropic intellectuals that need to have a bit of fun. Which is what made video games a rather unique thing when they started being large set pieces as apposed to earlier sets like pong. If I had to pin down the first major step at presenting a world I would have to say the first Super Mario Bros. game was the first to do something odd. It showed us a world with its own set of physics and sense of timing. This is also true of Pac-Man and Asteroids but those games didn’t have much of telos to them and are more about high scores. This is not much different than chess but it is without the other player and instead you are just against a certain amount of fixed problems in the world and you don’t have to live there but get to the end which honestly gives the whole concept of game a bit of a misnomer since this would be more like a puzzle with multiple solutions rather than a game. Yet they are still games because we are interacting with a modi operator but in a different sense.

This is where narrative should step in but at the same time I have only seen hints towards this in Bioware games and any other game with a moral choice system – although I have to say that in Dragon Age there is less of a moral choice system than in Knights of the Old Republic and more of choice system where plot elements hinge around a bit of the morality that each of your companion characters has picked up in their biographies. Ideally a video game’s narrative structure should be built into the idea of a conditional universe. Computer code is built on conditional statements so why not? Some have attempted to do this with the moral choice system which leads to the supposed good ending and supposed bad ending to each game but there is certainly more that can be done with the concept. My current pet theories for a truly conditional narrative involve either a branching storyline that would lead to many different endings or the more clever version which based on what you have done in game the final ending before the credits role would allow for a different meaning of experiencing the game as whole. The only reason I think this has not been done is because it is a writer’s nightmare to be forced to have to write all those storylines or thinking in so many conditional statements to lead to a different emotional meaning to each cutscene. This is how the player should be interacting with the telos of the game to come to satisfactory emotional depth to a video games narrative but I have not seen the full potential of this idea in any game that currently exists.

Ebert, some time ago, tweeted a article saying that Metroid Prime is not the Citizen Kane of gaming. I agree so let’s just knock off for coffee – but while we have that coffee let us have a bit of meditation on why someone would ever dare to claim that. Michael Thomsen goes on at some length about integration and of character and player. The chief problem with this idea is that Samus Aran is less of a character than she is an avatar – I do not mean she is ten feet tall and blue. For those of us that spent some of our time playing the Original Metroid will remember the moment when we finally made it through the world of Zebes to discover that Samus was a girl. Or to put it more accurately we were a girl. This is an important idea which seems to be lost and I think Metroid is on of the earlier examples of how this particular function of video game psychology works.

If you talk to a a person playing a video game with a life system you will notice that they usually say “I have so many lives” as opposed to “I have x number of attempts to get through this particular puzzle.” The same goes for health metres and ammunition. The character never has these items – you do. This is just one of the types of suspension of disbelief that is assumed of video games. The forth wall is not the screen or the edge of theatre. It is the controller and you become somewhat intergrated with the avatar. Despite the fact that I have never been to planet Zebes to fight the metroids and space pirates when referencing the story to someone else, I still have destroyed a few metroids in my time when I think about the personal experience of playing the game. Or to return to chess I have never taken a castle in my life but at the same time I have taken many.

The reason I am referencing Metroid so much here is because this is the Metroid Prime series strong point. The only time you see Samus is in cut scenes and reflections. The problem with a Metroid Prime series is that, despite being fun, the entire story of three games spanning about 40 hours of my life fit on the back of about 6 postcards. I am not estimating here. Nintendo has published a story primer in the recent trilogy set.

Camera control has become important since Mario 64 but I can think of only one game that used it exceptionally well. This game is Michel Ancel’s Beyond Good and Evil. It’s it not entirely Camera Control but a combination of camera control and set design. One particular moment I can think of is that when crawling around the run off sewers attempting to hide from the Alpha Sections the only way to check on their status is to tilt the camera angle at a rather steep angle. Not only this but the holes which you can get of are nearly completely taken up by one Alpha Section soldier passing by. I always found this to be a good idea taken from 12 Angry Men to intensify claustrophobia and stress. Camera and level design should meld in this way to help with emotional identification. And to be fair many video games have taken good ideas about camera angles from cinema despite the fact very few outside cinematic cut scenes have any sort of emotional rationale which is annoying.

The final bit I would like to address is music. Which is by far the most under utilized thing in video games. There have been some great songs floating about video game land for quite some time and my iTunes library can attest to that but it is rarely used as part of the narrative flow except in a few cases like Final Fantasy VI and Persona 3. Music in video games needs to be more operatic than cinema because of the shear amount of time that you must listen to it. To put it another way. Both Final Fantasy VI and Persona 3 take around 60 hours a piece to finish. Meaning you could listen the entire Ring of Nibelung 4 times given the same amount of time. Now I grant that a video game is not entirely about music but anyone that has played a video game should realize that music is always playing in the background and if have an artistic goal in mind really the music should have some more resonance beyond tone especially given there are long stretches where no one talks. It should, in some way, be helping the narrative along or have some meaning at the ending that it didn’t have when each element of it was introduced. My example here would be to take each leitmotif of each character – including the antagonist – when you first encounter them and that what do the songs mean to you when the accumulated in Dancing Mad and the Final March of Final Fantasy VI.

I started writing this because I wanted to concentrate my ideas the more artistic side of video games which in itself was prompted by Ebert’s proclamation that video games will never be art . Although I disagree with the never, which he admits to would be silly, but I also disagree, mind this is just those last remenants of hope that I have managed to manintain, that it is not going to happen in this generation. I am willing to say that it will happen within this generation of people just because of there are enough people interested in advancing video games as an art form. Someone may be able to shuffle past the current corporate paradigm. Much like how Orson Welles by passed the usual Hollywood crap.

Right now almost every game that is released is more like an experiment than a work of art. The Metroid Prime series can be considered like Eisenstien’s early experiments in montage but not Battleship Potemkin and so on. There are some games that are pretty good but to me they seem more like moustachioed villains tying women to railroad tracks rather than some statement of the human condition. Beyond Good and Evil, although it is one of my favourite games, broke the mould slightly with its story being more about the choice of who you are by your actions and relationships over genetic meaning to life; it didn’t quite go far enough and it really did not take full advantage of medium. I do look forward to the day that the artist appears and makes a culturally significant game where I will learn something new about myself and world around me in such a way that it could only have been played but that game does not exist — yet.

So anyway, out I went. I got the huge popcorn, which no longer comes in a tub, a comically large candy thing, and a bucket of diet coke(I am watching my figure) and readied myself for a storm out as soon as my supplies ran out. I was surprised that although my supplies did run out, and yes before you ask I did end up with a rather sore stomach in the morning, I did not leave the theatre in an outright refusal to waste anymore of my time. I am not declaring this is a good movie but it is a very good turn your brain of and watch things go boom movie and since every reviewer on the seemingly doomed earth, if I am to believe Emmerich filmography, has decided to defend their belief that its pretty good I to am going to defend my recommendation that its not a complete waste of time.

My first problem with the film was that stupid long count myth which apparently some people believe. My assumption has always been that the world will be destroyed just like it was in the 4th millennia B.C.. You know, when the long count started. Then again it is an Emmerich and I should just be glad that aliens did not either found civilization or want to destroy. So the convenient mythology around this date is half decent for his purposes but I did not think I would forgive this annoyance. Little did I know that research the lowest priority for the writers on this film.

It is easier for me to explain how I came to enjoy the movie and disregard my more geek socializing nitpicking activities by telling you how the movie opens and whom I was with. This will not spoil anything because it is actually is not important to the movie.

I was actually invited to the midnight showing by a friend on mine who has some training in Astrophysics. So much so that when the movie opened with some dramatic shots of the solar system he kept saying in that it was not to scale with that type of scoff that scientists get in their voice. My thoughts on that were simple. That cat and a lot of Astrophysicists I have met like Star Trek and they pull the same visual effect. Why do they do it? Simple space is dull and boring. By reducing the scale you can paint a prettier picture and correct me if I am wrong but one of the Star Trek series opening credits had a spaceship’s reflection on the rings of a planet. So if you complain about that you are just looking for something to complain about. So that opening section of the film does not throw science out the window.

Science is thrown out the window a few more minutes in. Basically it sums down to “Neutrinos have mutated”. Yeah — particles do not mutated all that often. The two people talking are ‘scientists’ so basically this is the point I decided that science was not involved but just provided a silly excuse to destroy the world in the spectacular fashion. In fact I would like to thank Emmerich for that simply because this scene allowed me to enjoy the film.

The movie then proceeds to populate with a few one dimensional characters, which are well played within the limits of such a film, that can be found throughout Emmerich films. The movie, however, is not boring it is just going through the motions but the motions are large a grandiose each method of killing an unimaginable number of people in large and fun to look at(In fact through out most of the movie I could almost hear Emmerich yelling “BIGGER”(sic) at the C.G.I. animators). In music terms its a really good cover of a silly song. You can enjoy it without it being good.

A couple of good laughs (the two best being Oliver Platt in general and something with a timer that actually got a giggle out of me), decent to good performances, and spectacular specials effects. Really that is all this movie is. I am not a huge fan of disaster movies(I think the only one I really liked is On the Beach and I am not sure if that is really a disaster movie).If you want to nitpick the science, the drama, or the film technics you are really watching the wrong film. If you want to learn something then the only thing you can really learn is the in the event of oncoming apocalypse you then speed and location of the disaster is dependent on the location of Joan Cusak with a plus and minus of 3 metres. Otherwise check your brain at the door and have some fun.

Window’s main problem is that it was never designed to be exceptional. It is designed to work and that’s about it. Those of us that can remember Windows 3.1 will remember a kind of sub-standard System 7 (Macintosh). The revolution came with Windows 95 and the fact that computer prices plummeted around the same time. Again, I would like to remind all Microsoft fans that I am not discussing things that the user does not see like the NT kernel. So although there were pretty amazing advancements at Microsoft at the time it is outside my current scope. The revolution that I am referring to is the Start menu and task bar. This was completely different than anything else in existence. All of your programs were placed in one convenient location and you would always know where new programs went. This idea is found today in both KDE and Gnome and it is arguable that the Leopard stacks is a more versatile version of the same idea (Just try putting your application folder in a stack and it is more or less the same) Microsoft then made a lot of money on this idea and has simply sat on the side lines for many years in the User Experience (UE) field for many years. There has been some minor changes , i.e. the ribbons in Microsoft office I find to be much more appropriate given how Windows treats programs but there has been no major changes to UE for many years. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious one is that Microsoft is afraid of completely alienating their user base so they are stuck with the ideas which came with their popularity. The second is that Microsoft has around 90 percent of the desktop market so they do not need to be exceptional. This saddens me because given the sheer girth of the company you think they could be on the forefront of UE but then again keeping the monopoly is more of concern. They do this by less than savory methods which I am sure is distracting. It is now time to move on and to stop ragging on Windows.

The Macintosh operating system is really the antithesis of Windows. It is designed to be the best thing since sliced bread(I am not sure why sliced bread is so innovative since I always seem to own a breadknife but that is besides the point). They do this by synthesizing hardware and software into one unique device and consider that to be their product. This caused by the infulence of the two founding members of Apple that are named Steve. Steve Wozniak (The Woz) is a man that makes stuff. He does interesting things while making stuff that makes it hard to be versatile. Anyone that has a Lisa with the Twiggy drives might be aware of his genus. Steve Jobs is to be honest an insane tyrant. Any glance at the stories on folklore.org will show this aspect of his personality. This is not to say that he doesn’t have good ideas but this rather to say that any idea he does have, or heard about somewhere, is pushed through to the system. One of my favorite stories is how rounded rectangles ended up on the first Mac when they didn’t hit Photoshop until 5.5 or 6. His way goes. The Macintosh product line is the object of his tyranny. The combination of hardware design that is not versatile and the lack of versatility of tyranny have yielded some interesting results. First the UE concept that is unique to Apple is that it extends beyond the screen. The command key (oh how I miss you Apple key{I know that it was always the command key but still:(}) is placed where the thumb can get at it. Since to a person that actually types, the thumb is useless linking the major keyboard shortcuts to the thumb is a great boon for efficiency and comfort. No emacs pinky here! Global Menus refuse to leave the system and are very useful so I always look at the same spot to get to special commands. Spatial browsing concepts attached to all windows is great even though that there has been some loss there over the years. This is just the old hat stuff but since OSX there have been some changes. The Dock sits in my neither good nor bad category. It is similar to the windows taskbar but the magnification feature annoys me and I usually have it turned off. Now that Spotlight launches programs quite well, it is, simply put, fantastic and has been ported by third party developers to both Windows and Linux. Smart folders are okay but more can be done with such a concept which I will discuss later. Finally the machines themselves are usually fairly good looking. All of this goes in the Apple good book but is impossible with large amount of first oppression and then indoctrination. This is Cocoa’s primary function. It is dead easy with Cocoa to make an application that looks good on Mac at the cost of breaking compatibility with other Operating Systems. That is the rewards for developers playing ball. Read Foucault to get at my meaning here. All of this said the tyranny here is not so much a bad thing in my case because I don’t care that much about freedom for my tools. I just need my stuff to work properly and quickly. If freedom is your thing, then we shall move on to Linux.

Linux for desktop users is the new kid on the block and talking about UE is difficult consider the large amount of choice with the various desktop environments and I do not find much innovation on that front except that the AWN dock has some animation features that are both impressive and less annoying than the magnification dock. Instead I want to talk about the problems that Linux is faced with. The first problem is the emulation issue. GNU and Linux was developed to emulate Unix. No one argues with this point and to be honest I can rarely tell the difference. This is not to say I can not tell the difference I occasionally use seq or something else in my scripts and forget that it is a gnu thing. While this is not much of problem on the command line, in fact it is very good thing on the command line, the concept has been magnified onto the GUI front which is a problem for innovation. Both Gnome and KDE emulate the start bar and there are various hacks to get each system closer to either Mac or Windows. Sure stuff can be more stable and have the occasional feature which is better than all the other counterparts but what about a whole new UE that will change the way I think about using my computer. I do not think this will happen in Linux for both this reason the next one. Linux is Free. Woohoo. It is a free system and allows for people to see how it is built and spread it around. This is great but there are various benefits lost from the other models which most Terminal Heads I meet tend to forget. I shall use a recent example from Gnome to make this point clear. In the newer version of Gnome you can shut down from the usual spot or from the user bar. My first response was why to which my Terminal Head friend responded some people want to do that and wrote the code. This is not good UE because it allows for the option even though only some people want it. Shut down is one process with a few options like restart and hibernate, yes Steve I am wondering why you let that one slip by you. In order for you to become efficient with this process there must be one and precisely von way to do it. Besides my own tyrannical ideals it is also conceptually confusing. The user menu should only have actions that are associated with what the user can do, like logout, but the shut down process is sending a signal to the hardware and not just the operating system. This should have a different menu all together. I know this is not a big problem but it still a problem that shows that the very freedom Linux advocates adhere to is slowing them down. It’s fine if you hack something to best set your needs, in fact that is great, but when that filters to the binaries of major distributions this is major problem. Linux needs a better tyrant than the GNU license. It needs it to innovate and quiet some of the voices screaming in its UE.

So where do we go from here. So where do we go from herrre Is Linux forever doomed to be cluttered with multiple personalities? Is Microsoft ever going to be innovative again? If Steve Jobs ever retires from his tyranny will Mac become mediocre? Well I do not know to be honest but there are some glimmers of hope. I believe that perfect mix of desktop users would be to split everything into thirds. One third using Windows, another using Mac, and the last third using Open Source and/or Free Software(I include BSD and OpenSolaris here). This would create a competitive environment for UE which would make want to design better systems to attract both users and developers to build good systems.It would also drop the idea that a computer is just like any other. They are not. You should pick the best that suits you but also the makers of UE should be competing to make the best UE for you. Google may be the forth column here. The Gmail interface, more than any other Google product, has shown me some hope. It stores everything in the unimaginable cloud but its UE allows me to type out my email and label it efficiently. Smart Folders are similar but tagging is more versatile. I can move some of the stuff around to suit my preferences, e.g. I have my labels on the right side, and never have to waste my time looking for things. This is not to say it is perfect. Far from it but I think this is the appropriate mix of tyranny and freedom for a release that has not be hacked by me. And who knows maybe Windows 7 or the upcoming newer kernel may be the best thing ever, maybe Mac with continue to make little addenda to their formula to and continue to be good, or maybe a new Desktop Environment will follow the Cathedral OpenSource model and create some new and better which will leave the rest of the systems in the dust. I have no idea what is on the horizon but one thing is for sure. I will probably end up using all of them.

(As a note I wrote this a long while ago and this no longer represents all of my views.)