Board gaming has experienced somewhat of a renaissance amongst myself and my friends, if not globally.
To understand this, you need to understand two things.
Firstly, most of the childrens games you remember from your youth are bullshit. They in no way represent the quality of gaming that is available to an adult board gamer, circa 2011.
Secondly, most of the allegedly mature video games that are available are also bullshit. Video game publishers are currently experiencing a serious shortage of innovation and risk and gamers are suffering.
So I've led the charge amongst my gaming group towards the table, and the wonderful innovations available there. Currently my collection includes only a few choice selections. Carcassonne, Dominon, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Battlestar Galactica. These are all recent games in board terms, even though none of them are any older than 10 years. And yet these titles represent many many hours of quality social gaming the likes of which are seemingly impossible with controller in hand. The spread of theme and mechanic that those five boxes encompass simply doesn't exist in any five top tier games coming out for the game gadgets.
It seems to me like the video game publishers have painted themselves into a corner. They've promoted the top genres so heavily that were they to deviate they'd find themselves out of pocket. Meanwhile mid-level games have to follow the leader or find themselves losing out too. There's a hive of exciting activity at the small scale of the pool, but the production values can leave something to be desired. For the most part, innovation means rethinking RPG style progression or a different art style.
Whereas the board game ecosystem seems to be much more vibrant and interesting. Good mechanics come out of the blue, and are cross pollinated through other themes and genres to produce incredible results. Tile laying, card drafting, role selection, worker placement, so many new ways to play and new strategies and concepts to go with them.
I find the rarity of a good board game shop lends to the appeal as well. I can buy games online on a whim, and sadly often do, whereas I need to make a special effort to get to a store and buy a game box. And unboxing! What a joy to unwrap components and organise and examine them. Fantastic.
If you're reading this and you're sick of COD and Battlefield and haven't played anything new at a table since Monopoly or Battleship, you owe it to yourself to have a look around at what's available and play something of genuine quality.
We've come way beyond rolling and moving, my friend.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Look at this morose motherfucker right here...
I'm watching Chasing Amy for the first time in what seems like years. Once you make allowances for the inexperience of pretty much everyone involved, it still manages to be somewhat enjoyable. Until Dogma it was the best quality Smith production made. It's truthful in a way that Mallrats isn't and it's narrative driven in a way that Clerks isn't. If Smith has any strengths as a director, all of them were on show here.
But I'm not writing a review. Not of the movie.
I first saw this movie, I mean really watched it, at a fairly impressionable age, around 14 or 15. Before I had any serious experience with girls. It's fair to say it left an impression. It was the first thing I've ever seen that had any sort of discussion of gender politics at all. It was the first movie that could possibly be classed as a "romance" that I actually identified with. It was the first movie with a character that I could see some of myself in, in terms of what choices he made and what he wants.
A lot of Holden and Alyssa's relationship has echoes throughout relationships I've had with women over the years. Not so much in terms of the 'convert the lesbian' angle, but at the very least in the sense of someone unattainable or somehow or other misfit for the purpose of a relationship with the type of person that I am. Also in the fact that he falls hard and fast for a girl that shows no clear indication of reciprocating.
I mean I know this isn't unique to me. Fuck if there's ever anything universal about the human condition it's the desire to partake of forbidden fruit. What's interesting is how rare this trope is played out in as complex and intriguing a way as this movie does.
But my real point is that I might have been some sort of half proto-Holden when I first watched this movie, but watching it sealed my fate. What I guess I'm saying is that Kevin Smith has had an indelible influence in the type of man that I have become.
If I met him I don't know if I'd hug him or punch him.
But I'm not writing a review. Not of the movie.
I first saw this movie, I mean really watched it, at a fairly impressionable age, around 14 or 15. Before I had any serious experience with girls. It's fair to say it left an impression. It was the first thing I've ever seen that had any sort of discussion of gender politics at all. It was the first movie that could possibly be classed as a "romance" that I actually identified with. It was the first movie with a character that I could see some of myself in, in terms of what choices he made and what he wants.
A lot of Holden and Alyssa's relationship has echoes throughout relationships I've had with women over the years. Not so much in terms of the 'convert the lesbian' angle, but at the very least in the sense of someone unattainable or somehow or other misfit for the purpose of a relationship with the type of person that I am. Also in the fact that he falls hard and fast for a girl that shows no clear indication of reciprocating.
I mean I know this isn't unique to me. Fuck if there's ever anything universal about the human condition it's the desire to partake of forbidden fruit. What's interesting is how rare this trope is played out in as complex and intriguing a way as this movie does.
But my real point is that I might have been some sort of half proto-Holden when I first watched this movie, but watching it sealed my fate. What I guess I'm saying is that Kevin Smith has had an indelible influence in the type of man that I have become.
If I met him I don't know if I'd hug him or punch him.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
A theme arises...
Three posts are barely a corpus to base any type of analysis upon, but looking over what I've written so far, two out of three concern impossible or improbable challenges. I began this blog without a thematic plan, and I'll maintain my lack of plan for as long as it makes sense. But if something begins to recur in the blog, then perhaps it is something worth exploring, if not something in need of exploration.
So impossible tasks. How about putting on a show with five weeks of preparation time before house opening? This is raw stuff, the show only closed a week and a half ago, but it's something that I'm thinking about, and insofar as I have anything at all to write about it will be things that I'm thinking about.
I'll avoid mention of the title of the show and key players in this drama, for fear of Google uncovering this and revealing my location to anyone with any vested interest in the show. Because for all anyone involved knows, I was a devotee of this particular theatrical experience and it would be unprofessional to be seen as otherwise. For the purposes of the blog, I shall refer to the show itself as "The Lady in the Portal", but I doubt I'll need to.
I'll say firstly that on the whole, the show was a good one. The acting was uniformly of high standard, the production elements while not perfect certainly did their job and given the restricted time span it was an incredible feat just to get the thing up and running at all. If I were a paying audience member I doubt I would've been disappointed, especially if I had seen it at one of the showings that were well attended.
I wasn't a paying audience member. I was a stage manager and operator, and in this capacity I had the perhaps unenviable privilege of witnessing the performance some 18 times over three weeks.
If you partake of any cultural work 18 times in three weeks, you would be forgiven for noticing flaws. Especially if you had access to the text and other raw materials that contributed to the creation of said piece.
There were flaws.
It wouldn't be of much benefit to recount them here. As I said, the production was a victim of lack of time. Given several more hours of rehearsal and textual analysis, a bit more research and homework, perhaps the flaws might've been found and ironed out. Who can say? Ultimately, it wasn't possible and it didn't happen and that's just how it goes.
What may prove valuable to note is that the show was, for all it's other virtues and flaws, not very well attended. I doubt the flaws that I saw were seen by the audience. Perhaps they saw other flaws? Fact is, marketing and publicity did not open the door to crowds at the beginning of the season, and word of mouth did not build to an incredible snowball that saw full houses towards the end of the run.
My instinct was that it was the wrong show, in the wrong place, for the wrong people, at the wrong time of year. It was a talking head intellectual exploration of Stalinist Russia and poetry featuring a dystopian metaphorical future. In youthful and vibrant Greens-voting Brunswick at the beginning of a cold and dreary winter. Maybe an amazingly good rendition of the Lady in the Portal would've attracted numbers, but there was little to amaze in this production.
I could go on, but the lead character herself says it best herself in the show: "I need the clash of swords when I go to the theatre! Heroism, spectacle! If I want timidity I can walk down the street."
In this day and age, on Sydney Rd in Brunswick, there's less timidity on the street than in that show. Who can blame the paying audience for giving it a miss?
So impossible tasks. How about putting on a show with five weeks of preparation time before house opening? This is raw stuff, the show only closed a week and a half ago, but it's something that I'm thinking about, and insofar as I have anything at all to write about it will be things that I'm thinking about.
I'll avoid mention of the title of the show and key players in this drama, for fear of Google uncovering this and revealing my location to anyone with any vested interest in the show. Because for all anyone involved knows, I was a devotee of this particular theatrical experience and it would be unprofessional to be seen as otherwise. For the purposes of the blog, I shall refer to the show itself as "The Lady in the Portal", but I doubt I'll need to.
I'll say firstly that on the whole, the show was a good one. The acting was uniformly of high standard, the production elements while not perfect certainly did their job and given the restricted time span it was an incredible feat just to get the thing up and running at all. If I were a paying audience member I doubt I would've been disappointed, especially if I had seen it at one of the showings that were well attended.
I wasn't a paying audience member. I was a stage manager and operator, and in this capacity I had the perhaps unenviable privilege of witnessing the performance some 18 times over three weeks.
If you partake of any cultural work 18 times in three weeks, you would be forgiven for noticing flaws. Especially if you had access to the text and other raw materials that contributed to the creation of said piece.
There were flaws.
It wouldn't be of much benefit to recount them here. As I said, the production was a victim of lack of time. Given several more hours of rehearsal and textual analysis, a bit more research and homework, perhaps the flaws might've been found and ironed out. Who can say? Ultimately, it wasn't possible and it didn't happen and that's just how it goes.
What may prove valuable to note is that the show was, for all it's other virtues and flaws, not very well attended. I doubt the flaws that I saw were seen by the audience. Perhaps they saw other flaws? Fact is, marketing and publicity did not open the door to crowds at the beginning of the season, and word of mouth did not build to an incredible snowball that saw full houses towards the end of the run.
My instinct was that it was the wrong show, in the wrong place, for the wrong people, at the wrong time of year. It was a talking head intellectual exploration of Stalinist Russia and poetry featuring a dystopian metaphorical future. In youthful and vibrant Greens-voting Brunswick at the beginning of a cold and dreary winter. Maybe an amazingly good rendition of the Lady in the Portal would've attracted numbers, but there was little to amaze in this production.
I could go on, but the lead character herself says it best herself in the show: "I need the clash of swords when I go to the theatre! Heroism, spectacle! If I want timidity I can walk down the street."
In this day and age, on Sydney Rd in Brunswick, there's less timidity on the street than in that show. Who can blame the paying audience for giving it a miss?
Monday, July 4, 2011
2K's Folly / 2K's Glory
Game development studio 2K Maren were handed a dream job and an impossible task. To revitalise a much loved franchise that has laid dormant for almost 10 years.
I have absolutely no doubt that the initial approach and design documents had every intention of honouring the title of X-COM in every possible respect. For the record, the original X-COM, also known as UFO: Enemy Unknown, was a turn-based tactical squad shooter that also featured a strategic layer that saw you building bases, researching technologies, defeating enemy craft and initiating the tactical field missions on a global scale.
If you can't see the multiple difficulties of recreating that game for an early 2010's market, allow me to break it down for you.
Tactical turn-based games are almost unheard of. Heck, "turn-based" games of any stripe are a dying breed, and considered quite niche even by their fans. I say that as someone who loves the genre, and has sunk many an hour hitting the "End Turn" button on various Sid Meier labelled games. The possibility of an XCOM game with any degree of budget being released as a PC exclusive affair is a dream, and the fact is turn-based games don't sell on the home consoles. Nobody wants to watch units plod about one at a time on their glorious high definition 1080p screens.
Squad shooters are less of a problem. The problem here is assets. The original X-COM saw entire squadrons obliterated before superior forces as a matter of course. Even a successful player was tasked with constantly hiring a rotating roster of units to throw at the alien force to their doom. By the end of the game you'd have sentenced dozens of virtual men to death in lopsided conflicts. In 2011, the expectation would be that every man would look and sound unique. Dozens of them? Good luck with that.
X-COM was a cunningly designed piece of software engineering. The strategic layer was built into an entirely different engine, complete with an entirely different executable. In 2011, consistency is king. Games that break the experience into discrete sections are a dime a dozen, sure. They're mostly shovelware Wii minigame packages. The closest we get are unit loadouts before missions, and that's what XCOM will provide.
Finally the global scale. Missions everywhere in the world. This is another art issue. I guarantee that if any location looks anything like any other location in 2011, there will be hell to pay from critics and gamers alike. If the forests of Borneo look anything like the Amazon, heads will roll. Technology has advanced, and expectations have advanced in accordance with it. But the expectations have an astronomically high cost. The fans are essentially asking for every square inch of the globe to be mapped in excruciating detail. It's not going to happen.
It's clear to me that while 2K Maren may have initiated this project with the best of intentions, they would have seen the task laid out before them and found it impossible to achieve with their resources. Indeed, with any resources. So they chip away at the behemoth rock, to find the crucial pieces, invent a few new pieces of their own, and emerge with something looking almost like an X-COM statue.
For the fans, never enough like it. Never. But I watch with interest, because they may just turn out something very good instead.
I have absolutely no doubt that the initial approach and design documents had every intention of honouring the title of X-COM in every possible respect. For the record, the original X-COM, also known as UFO: Enemy Unknown, was a turn-based tactical squad shooter that also featured a strategic layer that saw you building bases, researching technologies, defeating enemy craft and initiating the tactical field missions on a global scale.
If you can't see the multiple difficulties of recreating that game for an early 2010's market, allow me to break it down for you.
Tactical turn-based games are almost unheard of. Heck, "turn-based" games of any stripe are a dying breed, and considered quite niche even by their fans. I say that as someone who loves the genre, and has sunk many an hour hitting the "End Turn" button on various Sid Meier labelled games. The possibility of an XCOM game with any degree of budget being released as a PC exclusive affair is a dream, and the fact is turn-based games don't sell on the home consoles. Nobody wants to watch units plod about one at a time on their glorious high definition 1080p screens.
Squad shooters are less of a problem. The problem here is assets. The original X-COM saw entire squadrons obliterated before superior forces as a matter of course. Even a successful player was tasked with constantly hiring a rotating roster of units to throw at the alien force to their doom. By the end of the game you'd have sentenced dozens of virtual men to death in lopsided conflicts. In 2011, the expectation would be that every man would look and sound unique. Dozens of them? Good luck with that.
X-COM was a cunningly designed piece of software engineering. The strategic layer was built into an entirely different engine, complete with an entirely different executable. In 2011, consistency is king. Games that break the experience into discrete sections are a dime a dozen, sure. They're mostly shovelware Wii minigame packages. The closest we get are unit loadouts before missions, and that's what XCOM will provide.
Finally the global scale. Missions everywhere in the world. This is another art issue. I guarantee that if any location looks anything like any other location in 2011, there will be hell to pay from critics and gamers alike. If the forests of Borneo look anything like the Amazon, heads will roll. Technology has advanced, and expectations have advanced in accordance with it. But the expectations have an astronomically high cost. The fans are essentially asking for every square inch of the globe to be mapped in excruciating detail. It's not going to happen.
It's clear to me that while 2K Maren may have initiated this project with the best of intentions, they would have seen the task laid out before them and found it impossible to achieve with their resources. Indeed, with any resources. So they chip away at the behemoth rock, to find the crucial pieces, invent a few new pieces of their own, and emerge with something looking almost like an X-COM statue.
For the fans, never enough like it. Never. But I watch with interest, because they may just turn out something very good instead.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Wack Data
A friend posted this image on Facebook http://i.imgur.com/JWYXr.png
It's an infographic, source unknown, purportedly showing a correlation between the "religiousness" of the states of the U.S.A. and various other vectors associated with standard of living, intelligence etc.
He posted it with the tag "The results are unsurprising". Well, sure. It looks to me like the graphic's creator has used various techniques to manipulate perception of the data. The use of colour is the most obvious. You can barely look at the table without the colour screaming at you. I have no doubt that the colour scheme is consistent, but it does have a tendency to draw the eye in directions that it wouldn't go if it were pure text data.
It's obvious that religion is on the agenda for the creator. For one, the left most column is the religion column (entirely undefined, of course), and the whole table is sorted from highest to lowest according to that column. With this in mind, it's difficult to take anything about the data at face value.
I am not a religious person. I was raised Catholic, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that it doesn't inform my morality or decision making. But that's as far as it goes. I don't allow it to define my existence the way modern Christians do, is what I'm saying. I don't feel the need to defend it or attack it. It simply is.
But I do have issue with using data and alleged science to attack any institution, when the data has been manipulated to such a degree that you can't even garnish anything useful from it. This data in particular seems to have been put together specifically to correlate religion and crime rates. It's notably lacking several vectors which I believe would have a greater influence on crime and intelligence quotient. Population density, schools per capita, law enforcement officials per capita, even state spending on crime and education would all be more interesting data points to look at than "religiousness".
As it is, this is fit for tabloids, but it's frankly embarrassing to use to prove a point about religion.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
The Gordian Knot was an impossible challenge...
That was solved neatly and decisively on the blade of a sword. Hopefully my brain won't require such a savage treatment.
There is, thankfully, a version of the story in which Alexander detached the knot from the post on which it was tied and carefully unraveled the thing. So it is here, with my mind. I think deeply about things on occasion, finding logic where there doesn't seem to be any. Following the rabbit hole to logical conclusions that are far removed from the instinctive, intuitive solution. Tugging away at knots in my mind until something like a thread comes through, clear and distinct.
If you are here, you are here by accident. I'll make no apologies for lack of updates or lack of participation in the greater blogosphere. I am not a journalist, my conclusions will be my own from evidence that I collect on the internet. My topics will be wide reaching and disparate and may seem a bit mad. I'm doing this for lack of anything else to do, which is the worst reason to start a blog, and I would know because this is something like the fourth or fifth blog I've created. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad, maybe it'll be interesting, maybe it'll be boring. Whatever it is, it's my mind.
Let's see where it takes us.
There is, thankfully, a version of the story in which Alexander detached the knot from the post on which it was tied and carefully unraveled the thing. So it is here, with my mind. I think deeply about things on occasion, finding logic where there doesn't seem to be any. Following the rabbit hole to logical conclusions that are far removed from the instinctive, intuitive solution. Tugging away at knots in my mind until something like a thread comes through, clear and distinct.
If you are here, you are here by accident. I'll make no apologies for lack of updates or lack of participation in the greater blogosphere. I am not a journalist, my conclusions will be my own from evidence that I collect on the internet. My topics will be wide reaching and disparate and may seem a bit mad. I'm doing this for lack of anything else to do, which is the worst reason to start a blog, and I would know because this is something like the fourth or fifth blog I've created. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad, maybe it'll be interesting, maybe it'll be boring. Whatever it is, it's my mind.
Let's see where it takes us.
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