Story, what’s it all about?

by on October 4, 2005 at 1:42 pm
Posted In: Books

I just stumbled across this on Ruggles’ LJ. I did a direct response, but now I’m going to do my essay/rant on the underlying subject.

There are three elements that any story will have: Language (or cinematography for movies, or art & layout for comics), Character, and Plot. The literature majors I’ve encountered tend to look at them in that order, getting rhapsodic about the language used to tell the story, and then going on about the characters involved, and if they spend several years in love with one story, they might notice there’s a plot too.

I consider things in the opposite order. The most important thing to me about a story is its plot, and then the characters that are involved with it. My worries about language are confined to ‘do I understand what he is saying?’ Great prose is better, but it stops determining whether I’ll like the book.

This may be because I’ve always been a Science Fiction fan, and much of my tastes are determined thereby. It’s hardly a secret that SF is one of the few places where ‘characterless’ fiction can succeed. Likewise, SF is hardly known as a repository of deathless prose (along with any other genre of ‘popular fiction’ to be honest). Classic SF stories are largely exercises in demonstrating the consequences of trends, or showing what the effects of a new technology on people could be.

This is implicit in SF’s origin as an outgrowth of Hugo Gernsback’s ‘scientifiction’, which was meant to be no more than a vehicle to teach actual science wrapped in a pulp adventure wrapper. The better authors, who made the jump to John Campbell’s era, realized that the story had to demonstrate what they were talking about. Demonstrations are actions. Language describes actions, along with many other things. Characters take action, or not, as well as have emotions, needs, and desires, which may or may not produce action at any particular point. Plot is composed of actions. While there are plenty of SF books with thin plots, it is far easier to find books where the strongest element of the three is Plot in SF than in the more standard ‘fiction’ genre where you’re more likely to see the literature majors giving their respect.

In a way, the Language is the easiest thing in a story to analyze. All the words are right there, for you to look at and study at a moment’s notice. Characters are generally the most well-defined objects in a story. They are ‘real’ things with a list of attributes that are associated with them. Plot, put simplistically, is a collection of events. But so, in a general way, is the story itself, and not all of the events necessarily mean anything to the plot, and not all of those that do have the same amount of meaning.

Plot can be an evil little thing to track down and understand. I’d say it’s the toughest element of a story to really understand, and the other two aren’t exactly easy to begin with. I’m reminded very forcefully of one of the later sections of Understanding Comics where Scott McCloud talks about the journey to understanding what’s going on behind the surface details.

So, is academia really that entranced by language, or are they just having problems passing on a real appreciation for every element, and just managing to pass on to freshly-minted literature majors a good appreciation for the surface elements?

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Why do I do this to myself…?

by on August 30, 2005 at 1:30 pm
Posted In: Gaming

I seem to be a sucker for pastimes that everyone else has thrown away. Wargaming is effectively dead. Comics as we know them are dying.

But I still play wargames. I still buy comics (as money allows). I still play turn-based computer games.

Things like Advance Wars show that that last one isn’t really in big trouble. But the vocal majority of gamers will barely slow down long enough to say ‘Huh, you play that?’ when confronted with a died-in-the-wool turned-based strategy gamer. Some of the most influential computer games ever made are turn-based, but it feels like they are passed over on a lot of ‘Top 10’ lists. (And if they are on there then there’s a chorus of complaints about it….)

So when someone posted a question of ‘All my friends only want to play RTS and FPS games, why do we still do this?’ I marshaled my thoughts, and tried to get at the issue:

‘Real-time’ games have been around as long as video games. Pong, and every other arcade game, is, if you think about it, ‘real-time’. Going back further, while Poker, Chess and all their ilk use turns, sports are games too, and they have all the same traits of real-time games.

If you consider the yearly earning power of a sports superstar versus, say, Parker Brothers (the company), the gap between these two sides is nothing new. Actually, what was new was that turn-based (as a category) could generally keep up with the arcade style games on the computer. That changed back to the standard when computers got powerful enough to support the creation of the real-time strategy and first-person shooter genres.

These days, of course, the complexity of all games is mind-bogglingly huge. FPS and RTS, the two big winners on the PC have several advantages over traditional TBS games. They’re generally very fast to get into, and the action gets going immediately. Both of these types are also typically short games. You can easily get in several rounds in an afternoon. Game not going well? You’ll get another chance.

In the console world, the big winners tend to move towards fighting games (which is really a distant cousin of FPS), and RPGs. RPGs are much longer (indeed on a scale with TBS, or longer). But once again, they tend to spend a lot of effort on immersing you into the world (through the graphics), and the action gets started pretty fast (some even dump you into combat straight off).

Turn-based strategy tends towards a high level of abstraction, and a lot of the action is removed from any sense of immediacy. They proceed slowly at first, and never really produce the ‘now, now, now’ adrenaline rush of most other game types. This eliminates the vicarious thrill and removes the action to the higher thought processes. Not good when all you want to do is kill your frustrations by proxy….

Okay, now that I’ve shown why I’m in the minority… let’s see if I can grope my way towards an answer to the original question.

All games deal with resource management in one form or another. RTS often do this overtly, with Tiberium/gold/metal or whatever. Your units, and their ability to control/damage/influence is another form of resource. Also, your attention is a resource that must be managed. I admit that one of the things I don’t like about RTS is that constant knowledge that there are other things I should also be doing and paying attention to. I like my intelligence to be the resource, not my attention or physical skills (I have a sucky Dex score).

I’m not the kind to ponder over a chess board for hours, but I do like the fact when I’m done with a turn I’m DONE. I’ve thought about everything there is to think about it (and if not, it’s my fault, not the game’s), and all my plans are going forward because I paid attention to them all. In the long run, they aren’t necessarily good frustration killers either, as I’m likely to get frustrated with my problems with the game.

TBS also has the broadest range of subjects. I’m not always in the mood to fight a skirmish. With all the base building and action in the world, RTS games cannot show anything past about the level of a company on each side. [Well, technically they could, but they’d have to break out of the ‘1 man = 1 man’ mold. But Europa Universalis is far from what anyone thinks of as an RTS….] TBS can range from this scale (Fantasy General) to star spanning empires (Master of Orion, et al). Also the time issues allow for more complex interactions like economics, trade and diplomacy that the time-starved RTS doesn’t dare provide.

Maybe, my interests are just too broad to be contained within the narrow compass of the existing RTS genre. I want to conquer the world, not some little map. (Hmm… or maybe just my megalomania is too broad….)

I really think the time required is a bigger culprit than most people give credit for. Games have continuously gotten larger, and in the TBS realm, this means longer. Many current TBS games are well past what wargaming would have called a ‘monster game’. If I just want to blow an afternoon, I either have to go back to the mid-’80s, or pull out an RTS.

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Three news items…

by on August 5, 2005 at 10:19 am
Posted In: News

A few things I’ve found worthy of pondering in the last couple of days:

Apple has a new two-button (or really more) mouse. I can only say it’s about time. One problem I have with Macs in general, is that while Apple is happy to innovate and do new things, they are loathe to imitate the successes of other companies. It’s very nice to be cool and different, but a computer is a machine, and practicalities must be paid attention to.

Of course, Apple does do its best to do everyone one better with the scroll ball and the touch-sensor buttons. The last seems technically interesting, as I’d think you could technically split up the area into any number of ‘buttons’ you wanted. The former probably won’t matter much to a lot of users, but should be very handy in graphics applications.

Unfortunately, they stuck with the bar-o-soap design. This is slightly more ergonomic than sticking your hand in a blender….

Apple has sent out developer boxes for the new Intel-based Macs. Apple originally promised that while they would not be trying to keep people from installing Windows or Linux on the machines they produced, they would keep people from running OS X on machines other than their’s. I thought that would be a pretty tall order….

However, it turns out that Apple is using a new style of security chip on the motherboard. The OS will refuse to install if it is not detected. Chips like this have been popular with manufacturers like Intel for some years, but are constantly rejected by informed users (i.e., the fanatics who follow the release of every new chipset and motherboard…) who don’t like the possibilities for tracing particular machines. So now Apple has them pissed off about going along with Intel. I can’t say I blame them.

It should be noted that this chip is not unique to Apple; Intel is already using it. I might presume there is some difference enabled so that the Intel-OS X won’t install on just any machine with a TPM chip. But I wonder if would be possible for someone to hack around that, or otherwise work around it (like how a $20 I/O card could be turned into a $100 RAID-controller by soldering on a 5¢ resistor). This would be far too much work to actually effect the market in any real way, but might still raise the hackles of the hardware-jealous god of Apple.

SquareEnix is considering going multi-platform. They have traditionally stuck with whatever console has the majority of the market (although, one could accuse them of a certain amount of king-making). The president of the company started by pointing out that the Xbox has been a lot more successful in the US than in Japan, and then pointed out that the numbers look like the Xbox and PlayStation2 are currently selling in equal numbers here.

He then hypothesized that the next generation consoles could easily: a) split the world into different regions of who is on top, or b) split into a dominant ‘high-end console’ and a dominant ‘low-end console’.

I’ve wondered for some time if Microsoft might manage ‘a’ for a while. It’s obvious they’ve targeted themselves at the market they know, and are more-or-less showing the flag in Japan. I can’t see Sony or Microsoft settling for a (b) result, they’ll battle each other for total marketshare with prices, features and games all the way down. Maybe Wata knows more about Nintendo’s plans for the Revolution than he can tell…

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Comics, Entertainment, and Something Between a Rant and an Essay

by on July 22, 2005 at 8:50 pm
Posted In: Comics

ComicCon naturally spurred a few thoughts, and then when looking through the archives of people I know, I came across this entry.

Willworks isn’t completely wrong, but he’s not completely right either, from my point of view.

Right now, I’d say pretty much the entire American Entertainment Establishment is in big big trouble. The exact nature of the trouble, and scale of the problem varies by the exact media you’re looking at, but most of it boils down to one thing, the times are a changin’ and the people running the show are deathly afraid of change.

TV viewership is declining. Newspaper circulation is declining. Music sales are declining. Movie attendance is declining. I’ll bet overall magazine circulation is declining, but I haven’t seen anyone specifically mention that.

Sound bite from the animation state of the industry panel at ComicCon:
Q: Do you think that Anime in any way threatens American animation?
A: It’s just a niche market.

Go down to your local video store and look at the Anime section. Then go look for the Animation/Cartoon aisle. That’s one hell of a niche.

This is the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming really loud. There is a demonstrable demand for a type of product, and an entire potential money-spending market is just being written off by those words. Pathetic.

The comics industry has at least moved beyond pure denial. Marvel has taken the most cursory look at the surface of the problem and attempted to look like it. DC has decided to import some actual manga titles of their own. Neither approach does the American comics industry a lick of good.

The current burst of popularity of anime/manga is a fad. It’s getting pushed on teenagers completely as a ‘this is so cool’ thing. The day after tomorrow something else will get branded as ‘cool’ and a fair number of people are going to suddenly wake up with hangovers and wonder where their consumers went. This has nothing to do with the merits of anything being brought over here, it is just a consequence of the approach TokyoPop et. al. have taken towards promoting their product.

It’s possible that the current situation can be extended indefinitely by continually finding a new anime/manga series to promote as the new ‘cool thing’. But not everyone’s going to be able to keep up, and frankly the current market is oversaturated.

Central Park Media has stopped publishing manga. They’ve cut back their DVD releases. Studio Ironcat is out of business. Anyone want to bet money that it’ll stop there?

Meanwhile the American comics industry continues to dwindle, and isn’t showing any signs of stopping much short of the death of the direct market comics store.

Will talks about needing new and different comics. The industry’s been there, been doing that since 1977. Frankly, every single thing he talks about exists in that nebulous space called ‘Independent Comics’. Not all of it is good, not all of it is different, but those things do exist there. And even the big boys have understood this one. DC’s Vertigo imprint is aimed right at providing this type of content. In the ’80s, Marvel’s Epic imprint did the same.

So after 27 years, after making a pretty big splash in the early ’80s, why is the blah superhero rut being run ever deeper? Why can’t a perfectly good series like (for example) Castle Waiting pay its own bills? Who failed? The creators? The publishers? The stores? The buyers?

The inevitable answer is a combination of all of the above, with the possible exception of the creators. The right comics exist, so there are creators upholding their end of the deal. The sad fact is that most of the truly good comics get self-published. This makes it harder to really get noticed. The comics industry will never change without good examples leading the way to show what will work – so the lemmings can imitate the hell out of it. But, hey, if it revitalizes comics storytelling at all….

But can the industry change with a good example? ElfQuest, Bone, and numerous others have come and gone and the industry is still the same. Bone is being published by Scholastic for cry’n out loud, (you know, the same company that’s publishing the Harry Potter books over here) and the industry doesn’t seem to notice. Well, at least Bone’s fate isn’t tied to the rest of the industry any more.

Buried in all this is the axiom that entertainment has value, and good entertainment is more valuable. This makes sense, and is what the entertainment industry is built on, but is in no fashion provable.

I mention this because of the growth of web comics. It’s a hell of a way to tell a story. The web is notoriously bad at generating money (information wants to be free!), and while publishing on the web is a lot cheaper than traditional print, the effort of doing the art is a lot more valuable work than needs to go into a similar-scope text story. (Not to deride prose or poetry in any way, but with comics the writing’s just as hard, and then you have to do the art.) Not only that, but text is infinitely flexible, whereas every web comic artist has to struggle with some deep issues of format for which no really good solutions have yet been found.

But people keep doing web comics. Why? Because not doing them is worse. For some people it’s not a choice. They have to do this. And personally, I think they add a lot to life, and I’d like to see them get something for what they provide to the rest of us.

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