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Purloined Stories

By Andrew on May 18th, 2011

I didn’t intend to write anything for this particular issue. That was, of course, until I received a text message from my editor asking me to take this piece since it required a trip out to UTSC from the city, and this was the only instance in recent memory in which my suburban poverty has been convenient. So I sent out an email, made a quick trip to the gallery, hammered out an 850 word feature, and here we are.

This piece is running online here since the exhibit will have ended by the time it goes to print on Monday. It’ll still be published in the paper, mind you, just with slight changes so that I don’t compel people to visit an exhibit that no longer exists. Also, there’s a short interview included with the web version, so check that out if you’re so inclined.

Incidentally, the last paragraph of this article finds me writing against what I truly think of art. Whereas here I claim that “art should not be interpreted in a vacuum,” I’m actually of the opinion that art should not rely on context alone to be worthwhile. There’s more I could say about this, but I’m slightly drunk and would rather take a shower and go to sleep. Perhaps later…

Purloined Stories – The gain of art, the loss of truth

As far as many might be concerned, art is little more than pretty pictures of pretty things. People often lead themselves through galleries and museums, soaking up the colour and atmosphere and appreciating the intricacies and details of it all, but rarely are they concerned with the context and motives of what they’re looking at. As long as it’s pretty, isn’t that good enough?

The simple fact of the matter is that, far more often than not, art has an agenda. There’s more to the piece than a trite plaque, a fancy frame, and a meagre descriptive blurb. Those meticulously detailed portraits? Someone commissioned them and someone requested that the subject be depicted in a very specific and highly idealized way. Those heavily romanticized landscapes? Someone wants you to think that they’re claiming dominion over that territory. Those noble scenes of grand victory and conquest? Is war ever that simple and glamourous?

On display until May 21 at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in UTSC, Purloined Stories aims to have viewers look beyond the deceptive aesthetics of art and reexamine what any given work might be attempting to convey. Curated by Sandy Saad, a Masters of Visual Studies student at the St. George campus, each of the featured pieces adapts famous artworks as a statement meant to expose the hidden secrets of the original.

“Purloined Stories is an exhibition that revisits the idea of image theft with a group of artists who highlight the fabrication of narratives throughout history by recreating existing historical masterpieces,” says Saad. “[The pieces] emphasize the fiction of the original, and at times use the existing images for their own strategies, illustrating that the narrative is servile to power.”

Unlike many other art exhibits which are stodgy strolls through the classics of centuries passed,Purloined Stories is fairly unique in that there’s a distinct sense of urgency in its purpose. In fact one feature, Liberty Lost (G20 Toronto) by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, criticizes the repressive police presence in the city during the still fresh in the mind G20 summit by reworkingLiberty Leading the People, created in 1830 by Eugene Delacroix.

Not only is retooling older works for contemporary commentary common and ongoing, but practices of manipulating art and media for particular interests are also still happening to this day. On September 14 of last year, an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, was discovered to have published a photograph of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak preceding President Obama and other world leaders walking through the White House. As it turned out, the photograph was a fabrication of what originally showed President Obama in front, so manipulated by the Egyptian press to demonstrate Egypt’s leading role in the Mideast peace talks, as the editor-in-chief of the publishing paper later revealed.

Quite appropriately, then, brushes and paints can be viewed as the archaic form of Photoshop and all of the software’s various connotations. David Buchan’s Always inserts a box of feminine hygiene products into the famous Portrait of Josephine de Beauharnais, an 1805 painting by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. The immediate result is that the viewer is struck by femininity in both its glorious and unglamourous aspects simultaneously, with an amusing bit of historical irony just below the surface.

A riff on masculine naivety also seems to be played in Jakub Dolejš Tribune, which removes the male patrons from the 1770s original, The Tribuna of Uffizi by Johann Zoffany, and washes out certain details. Thus the gallery in which wealthy men received an art education turns into a space where accounts of history are made cloudy, spurious, and inconsistent.

The remaining still pieces, Adad Hannah’s The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) and Kent Monkman’s Sunday in the Park, both have their own fascinating statements and contexts worth exploring, namely the trials of a suffering British Columbia community in the former and the juxtaposition of one piece free of humans with another full of them in the latter.

Finally, there is also a 42 minute film by Ho Tzu Nyen, Earth, on offer. Whereas the other artworks are appealing, idealized, and attractive products, Earth servers as an antithesis which makes no attempts to dress up the realities that inspired its creation. Even in drawing attention to the inherent ugliness of greed in the themes of conquest and colonialism in their originals, the other features are still pleasing and glamourized re-appropriations. Ho Tzu Nyen, however, demonstrates the deceptive, destructive and catastrophic results of such pursuits with no effort to mask its grimness.

“I hope that this exhibition speaks to our nature as humans,” says Saad. “All of the famous works referenced are about times of revolution, change, or conquest, and all of these moments were fictionalized in certain ways at the time. I think that says a lot about human nature and the desire to turn to fiction in times of change or turbulence.”

Much in the same way that art isn’t created in a vacuum, art shouldn’t be interpreted in a vacuum either. Visit Purloined Stories to discover how some familiar pictures may have been deceiving you all along.

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Thoughts on Games Writing #1

By Andrew on May 12th, 2011

Recently, I’ve found myself questioning the validity and quality (or lack thereof) of most games writing and journalism. It seems that I’m not alone as one Dan Cook (whom I’ll admit I had no idea even existed before a friend directed me to his work earlier today) seems to have kicked off a bit of an internet storm openly considering the problems a few days ago. Well perhaps I’m overstating the impact of his words, since these discussions only seem to be occurring in fairly tiny circles for the time being. Nevertheless, it’s something I want to talk about, and a few other people are currently talking about it, so I might as well get it out of my system while it’s still partially relevant, despite the fact that I don’t expect to contribute anything at all meaningful to the conversation. I just want to be perfectly clear that I’ve had these thoughts before I was aware of this external discussion and that this is a response only insofar as the current talk has prompted me to write about it sooner rather than later.
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Moving on…
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In his post “A blunt critique of game criticism,” Dan Cook asserts that the majority of games writing is useless because it’s trivial navel-gazing that doesn’t serve to “ratchet forward the creative conversation.” The core of the issue, as he sees it, is that most games writing is created by consumers and not producers. As a creator, this bothers him because he’s not seeing more of the critiques that he wants to see being written. I suppose I can sympathize with this.
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What I don’t agree with, however, is the fact that he dismisses all writing that doesn’t serve his purpose as being useless. He goes on to make outlandish claims that only people with experience making games can generate legitimate and worthwhile games writing, in much the same way that athletes should only listen to the criticisms of fellow sportsmen (or: “They are dance judges who have watched Dancing with the Stars, but who have never danced”). Bluntly, he wants to exclude vast swathes of the gaming community from the discussion simply because they lack professional experience on the technical side of the industry. More fairly, he has very specific ideas about what types of games writing are and are not worth anyone’s time.
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As an aspiring writer, I find this attitude troubling because it fosters the image of an industry of inclusion (“If you don’t have experience, then don’t apply.” “But how the hell am I supposed to get experience?”). When I’ve written articles about games, I’m accustomed to write about what exists and what I have in front of me, and I’ve never written for developers and designers, nor have I ever been bold enough to assume that anyone except myself has been paying attention to what I have to say. The reviews and articles I write are practice exercises. At this stage, I value quality more than content, although I strive to make sure I offer both in good measure. My beef with games writing is that the writing tends to be fairly poor (unique insights or otherwise) and not that it’s concerning itself with things I’d rather it didn’t or with things that have been said time and time again.
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Were the direction of games writing to be shifted from lifestyle pieces and humanities bred navel-gazing to technical and mechanical explorations, I think that the writing would suffer even more. Sure it may be more useful, but only to specific people to the detriment of the general population, of whom only select pockets would indulge it out of curiosity. If a person wants to learn about a science or certain social sciences, the easiest way to sour that interest is to hand them a book about it, because that particular style of writing is bland, boring, and disengaging. And this is me speaking as a person who has fled many science and social science courses just because I can’t bring myself to read such awful writing.
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To finish with Dan Cook, I ultimately think that the reason the type of writing he wants to see more of doesn’t exist is because the content he wants from it is best conveyed through other means, many of which the annual GDC and similar events provide. The right tool for the right job, as it were. If someone wants to learn about chemistry, use a lecture. If someone wants to learn about history, hand them a book. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write the things he wants to see being written more often, but rather that those energies and talents are best applied in other ways and through other avenues. Just because you’re more qualified than most to express something does not necessarily mean you’d be able to articulate it eloquently through any medium of your choosing. An engineer is not a writer (and vice versa). Thus, I think it’s unfair to ask that all games writing be expected to ratchet the creative conversation forward by focusing on aspects which are awful to read/write about because it’s something that games writing, while certainly able, isn’t necessarily meant to do.
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This will do for now, however I’m far from through with topic. I’m only addressing Dan Cook’s response, which admittedly has very little to do with my initial thoughts on the matter. Like I said, I’m only using it as a convenient prompt, and my questions are more concerned with the quality of the writing than the content. I’ll return to this in pieces over the coming days, since there’s quite a bit I want to consider.
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The Wonderful End of the World

By Andrew on May 6th, 2011

The Wonderful End of the World

In 2004, a very unique and very eclectic game was released that was in equal parts a biting commentary on egregious capitalism and an immensely enjoyable experience previously unseen. The Wonderful End of the World is not that game. No, that 2004 gem was none other than Katamari Damacy for the PlayStation 2, a game which at the time no one could ever have predicted would become the North American phenomenon it eventually became. The Wonderful End of the World does, however, brazenly clone nearly everything that made Katamari Damacy intriguing and successful. Sure, you may be stomping around the world with no pretence whatsoever instead of rolling it up into a giant ball to sort out your alcoholic father’s constellation shattering night on the town, but the gameplay is identical, as are more than a few aesthetic cues. Make of this what you will.

If you’ve played Katamari Damacy or are even vaguely aware of the game’s premise, there isn’t all that much for me to tell you about The Wonderful End of the World. You’re cast as a collection of little white balls arranged into the figure of something resembling a human. Your goal is to run around levels picking up little things in order to pick up more and bigger things until either the timer runs out or you’ve collected enough items to end the level. That’s pretty much it.

The Wonderful End of the World 1

So what, if anything, separates the two games? Or failing that, what makes The Wonderful End of the World stand out enough to make it worth someone’s time and money, as opposed to merely recommending they just go and play Katamari Damacy again? To be honest, not much. About the only thing The Wonderful End of the World does that Katamari Damacy does not do is play on the PC, which might just be enough for some if they’ve either never playedKatamari Damacy before, or just wish they could get that experience for that particular platform. In all other regards, Katamari Damacy is, without question, the superior game of the two. It’s bigger, better, packs more content, and is bursting with colour, vibrancy, charm, and ideas. The Wonderful End of the World has all these things too, but just doesn’t offer them in nearly the same supply.

Yet there’s still a bit of a dilemma here. Up until this point in the review, I’ve assumed that you are aware of, have played, and adored Katamari Damacy, and this isn’t a particularly fair position. Katamari Damacy is, after all, 7 years old, and as a franchise it hasn’t captivated the world in recent iterations in quite the same way as the first game has. So let’s approach The Wonderful End of the World from the opposite perspective, namely that of a person who has been completely ignorant of Katamari Damacy and its quirks and peculiar sensibilities, and is curious as to what The Wonderful End of the World is all about. Is it worth their time and money? The answer is, without a doubt, yes.

The beauty of The Wonderful End of the World lies in its fantastic gameplay. As an experience, there’s nothing quite like that of starting off as an amorphous humanoid blob the size of a beer can and then gradually nursing your avatar to something capable of uprooting entire houses from their foundations after only a couple of minutes. The aesthetic is also colourful and cheery with bouncy upbeat tunes enhancing the spectacle, and the levels are for the most part very distinct from each other.

The only real shame is that the game is quite lacking in content. There are only 12 levels (with an additional two later added courtesy of The Potato Sack ARG) and each only lasts for about four minutes on average. This means that the entire game can be completed end to end within an hour, with the only additional incentive being found in a handful of unlockable trophies and whatever urge exists to earn A+ rankings in them all.

Then again, The Wonderful End of the World is only $10 regular price, and was recently bundled in the excellent Potato Sack package where it was on sale separately for a mere $5. I know I’ve spent much more money for far less, so perhaps that price tag can be justified. After all, what the game lacks in content is more than made up for in charming design and gameplay that is, with the exception of a particular franchise, quite innovative.

This brings us back to where we started: in light of the existence of Katamari Damacy, is there a reason for The Wonderful End of the World? All things considered, the former is without a doubt the better. But a paltry amount of content notwithstanding, I’d wager the latter does enough to be worth a look as well. I have to remember that not everyone has played Katamari Damacy and that for many their PlayStation 2′s have long since been packed away, in which case accessibility would be the only critical area in which The Wonderful End of the World has Katamari Damacy beat. So if you want the Katamari fix with the ease of a few quick clicks and a small file download on Steam, The Wonderful End of the World is the way to go. Why should the two games compete when it feels as if this homage might just be intended as a compliment?

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Minecraft

By Andrew on May 5th, 2011

Minecraft

Creativity games are nothing new. In fact certain individuals made considerably cushy livings off the likes of The Sims, Sim City, Spore, and various Tycoon games, most of which cast players in the role of an omnipotent power micromanaging the details of nuclear families or amusement parks, and everything in between. However the one thing these games never had was that sense of genuine accomplishment. When you built a house in The Sims, you didn’t actually “build” the house – you just traced out walls and selected the trimmings. When you built a city in Sim City, you just marked off the various zones and districts while the passage of time took care of everything for you. All things considered, in theses games that sense of accomplishment is a very superficial and fleeting sensation.

Minecraft changes everything. What is done in that game can be fairly attributed to the efforts of the player. When you built a house in Minecraft, you actually had to fashion the tools and gather the materials. You had to mark out the land and you had to build it brick by brick. It took a lot of work and a lot of man hours, but goddamn was it well worth it.

For the uninitiated, Minecraft is an indie game created by the enigmatic Swedish developer Markus “Notch” Persson and both sold and played through www.Minecraft.net for roughly $30CND. It has no objectives, no rules, and aside from the limits of ceiling and bedrock, no restrictions. All you have is your imagination and a wide open world full of mountains, fields, oceans, deserts, and tundra, in which to build pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Essentially, it’s digital Lego in infinite supply. It’s also damn well brilliant.

My first instinct it usually to tunnel as far down as I can go.

When you first crack open Minecraft, you’re plopped into a sea of possibility. Endless swathes of land roll out in every direction begging to be explored; gentle hills littered with trees to the east, jagged mountains to the west, snowy expanses to the north, and barren deserts to the south (to illustrate a quick example). Maps are randomly generated and I’m quite confident that you can walk for hours in a straight line in any given direction and never run out of things to see. And should you ever tire of the surface, there’s an exciting world to be discovered underground as cave networks twist and turn through the earth, skirting along bedrock and winding around flows of water and lava.

Of course it’s one wonderful thing to have a massive world to explore, but it’s something else entirely to have that very world at the mercy of your imagination. Except for air and bedrock, everything in Minecraft can be harvested and rearranged, allowing for incredible feats of amateur engineering. With a little industry, the world can be manipulated as you see fit, one block at a time.

Yet while Minecraft’s biggest strength is arguably its minimal amount of interference with the desires of the player, such lack of input and direction may also prove to be a bit discouraging. Minecraft has no tutorial or instructions beyond disclosing its inputs under the “options” menu, which makes the first steps into the world far more challenging than is rightly reasonable. It doesn’t tell you how to go about doing anything at all, gambling that the player will be patient enough to either work things out on their own, or seek necessary assistance from outside sources. Neither of these expectations strike me as being entirely acceptable. I spent the first hour or so trying to figure things out for my self, and the furthest I got was turning wood I chopped with my bare hands into multiple wooden planks and tunneling into crude hidey-holes to survive the night (more on this later).

Minecraft is better with friends.

I wasn’t having fun and I was certain that I wasn’t playing the game properly, so I sought out the infinitely helpful Minecraft Wiki. To get things started, here’s what I had to do: chop trees for wood, turn wood into panels, turn panels into a workbench and sticks, turn sticks and panels into wooden pickaxe with workbench, use wooden pickaxe to mine stone, fashion stone pickaxe on workbench, mine coal with stone pickaxe, create torches by combining coal and sticks, build a lit shelter, pray that I survive the night, repeat. This is, quite frankly, an inexcusable amount of information to be withheld. These aren’t obtuse or unnecessary ideas that are being cast aside for fear of over burdening the player with finicky details; these are core gameplay concepts that are crucial if the game is to have any measure of success.

At any rate, after the needlessly arcane and challenging first moments are endured and the player understands that they’ll be constantly referring back to the Minecraft Wiki in order to make any sort of progress, the fun of Minecraft can finally be had. Hours can be spent collecting and quarrying materials for the building of marvellous monuments, and hours more when it actually comes time to craft them. And, to be entirely honest, that’s all you’ll be doing. The adventure is in overturning the world and hazarding the risks for the good stuff, while the reward is that single sweet moment when you take a step back and gaze upon the fruits of your labour. It’s a very real sense of accomplishment to experience your brilliance and understand what it took to create it in the exact same moment. No other game achieves such a feat on the same scale as Minecraft. I hollowed out a mountain, drained a lake, levelled the land, and created my masterpiece block by meticulously placed block. And goddamn, does it ever feel good to see all that effort payoff.

Still, Minecraft wouldn’t be much of a game if there were no consequences beyond the havoc wreaked on the landscape. You have a character (made of blocks, naturally) with a health bar, and enemies come out at night to deter you from executing your blueprints. You can die, by being killed by the mobs, by falling into lava or from great heights, by drowning, or by suffocating. Far from being an omnipotent power with the natural world at your fingertips, you’re actually a rather fragile and vulnerable character being constantly reminded that just because it’s your world to change, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s your world. Think of it as the difference between watching a life being experienced and actually experiencing a life. Or to put it more simply, you have the benefits of a god in a god game without actually being a god.

My subterranean forest.

Of course perhaps the idea of living in an arcane world that’s also going to spend half of your time within it trying to kill you isn’t appealing, and you’d rather just tool around in a sandbox making neat things without the fear of some exploding monster coming to blow it up at night. Minecraft has that covered, since you can easily toggle the difficulty to a setting where there is no risk of dying and no enemies. I haven’t tried this mode because I like the risk and challenge, but it’s there nonetheless to cater to those who don’t.

Speaking of game modes, Minecraft also features multiplayer, which is excellent fun because it increases player involvement through both cooperative exploration and competitive crafting at the same time. In fact I’d argue that Minecraft is best played with others because it mitigates the feelings of isolation and ultimate futility that come with lonely old single player. Play by yourself and there’s no one around to admire your hard work and appreciate your efforts, whereas if you play with others, there’s no shortage of inspiration and applause. And besides that, a multiplayer server just feels alive with the energies of everyone working the land with you, and is infinitely more vibrant with the colour and ideas of your peers.

Yet having said all this, Minecraft will only go as far as the player’s imagination and investment allows. It rewards hard work and can be a massive time sink with the determination to see an exceptional build through to its completion. And this is exactly where I’m stuck: I’ve finished my grand project, and now I don’t know what I should to with myself. Do I embark on another build or just explore the world for goodies? Having spent a not at all insignificant time doing both things, neither option seems appealing. As a game, this is Minecraft’s fatal flaw. A game is supposed to give you something to do. In Minecraft this responsibility falls to you as well. So to say that your mileage will vary with Minecraft is a bit of an understatement – some will find no shortage of things to do, while others won’t even be bothered to try.

‘That’s what she sa-’ *ahem*
A friend admires a slime on my house

Nevertheless, if I had to think of one word to describe Minecraft, it would be “addictive.” Not the sort of subconscious or benign sense of addictive, but rather addictive in the way that the average smoker is addicted to cigarettes: conscious of their vice and more than ready to admit it’s something they really shouldn’t do, but completely unable to do anything about it. Sure, the buzz may be a bit different. After all, when people finish a cigarette, they feel relaxed and at ease (presumably – I’m not a smoker). When I finish a brilliant monument to my own ego in Minecraft, I feel like I achieved a genuine accomplishment worth bragging about: behold my doom fortress resting on ancient impenetrable bedrock miles underground, with a moat of molten lava and bastard trees that grow without sunlight! It took 20 hours to excavate and an entire hollowed out mountain range to accommodate it, but so long as the other 11 people in the server praise it, then I suppose it was time well spent.

Now if only I could tear them away from their own floating superstructures and giant recreations of Pokemon to come and visit my humble abode in the centre of the earth…

In the end, Minecraft is worth a shot, if only just to see whether or not you’re the type of person that the game can sink its teeth into. Just make sure you set enough time aside for yourself just in case it does. You’ll be amazed at how much of your time can be lost to it.

Minecraft Tip: Aside from gentle short ambient tunes that occur sparingly and the auxiliary sounds of blocks being mined and placed (as well as rain and flowing water and the groans of mobs), Minecraft is a very empty game in the audio department. This makes it perfect for listening to podcasts and music in the background, since you can effectively devote enough attention to both to enjoy each simultaneously.

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That’s all for now

By Andrew on April 26th, 2011

With the publishing of the boozepaper last week, the newspaper is officially done for the 2010/2011 publishing season. There will be no more weekly issues until the next batch of fall/winter courses begin in September.

In the mean time, however, occasional summer issues are planned under what’s to be called the newsmagazine. These will occur roughly every three to four weeks, and (near as I can tell) focus more on campus/city culture than mere campus/city news and events. We did this last year as well, but I wasn’t involved because nobody tells me these things. Perhaps I’ll be contacted this year. After all, the well being of the website sort of depends on it.

As regards the boozepaper, apparently it was the largest issue we’ve ever published in the paper’s 32 year history. I actually haven’t seen the physical issue yet, since I’m no longer on campus these days, but most of the issue is in the PDF on the right sidebar. I say “most” because there’s actually two parts to the issue: the core newspaper itself, and a pull out which contains a poster and beer review. If you want to see the pullout, you’ll find it on the right sidebar of www.thenewspaper.ca under the PDF. Eventually, the two parts will be merged into one PDF file, but I can’t do that myself since I neither possess nor know how to use the correct software; someone at the office will have to take care of that. Hopefully that will be sorted out within a couple of days.

Sudsoku

I didn’t actually contribute anything out of the ordinary to the boozepaper; just the usual crossword (albeit a 21 x 21 this time) and a special beer bottle cap “sudsoku.” I also had the opportunity to contribute a brief short story about an alcohol fueled fun time I may have experienced, but I declined to be included when I was told that my photo had to be attached to it. You know, camera shyness and all that. Not to mention that my alcohol fueled escapades tend to be more ruinous than they are humourous.

Speaking of alcohol oriented opportunities I declined, I also decided not to attend not only the annual beer tastings, but also the special tequila, rum, whisky, vodka, and gin tastings as well. This choice was mainly because my alcohol tolerance is fairly abysmal, and not in the “I lose all basic decency after half of a single beer” way. Excessive alcohol makes me physically sick far sooner than it causes me to make poor choices. On average these days, after drinking any more than 2 pints, I begin to run the risk of spending the next day vomiting into strategically placed waste receptacles. High School me would be very disappointed in University me. At any rate, apparently I’m told that I lack what’s called the “alcoholic’s enzyme.” That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

That about covers it for now. If you want to see my spectacular crossword and “sudsoku,” you can find it on page 15. In fact, I have page 15 all to myself in this issue, so I’m quite pleased about that.

Oh, and after my last exam on Friday morning, I’m free until September to do pretty much whatever I damn well please. So look forward to more “Letters from an Editor” if you’re into that sort of thing. I also plan to give this whole “games/media culture journalism” a fighting chance, and have a very special piece about Gravity Bone lined up. Aside from that, it’s four whole months of brushing up on Ancient Greek, refining my knowledge of Latin, and learning either French of Italian.

Should be fun.