“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It’s a bit past due but I’ve been meaning to write something on the Oculus Rift since I first got to experience it at PAX Australia this year. It was nothing short of magical, and the implications are mind blowing.
Ian Bogost opens up his presentation here with a fantastic anecdote about his son playing Animal Crossing. The part that stuck with me was when he says his son asks for more money because he has too many items to fit in his small virtual house. It can be argued that Animal Crossing does promote materialistic ideas. I thought this was a great way to open his presentation because with that I realised that video games aren’t simply novels to be read, but can shape or reflect ourselves as players. Another example he uses is a game that was designed to help teach employees at an ice cream store how to properly serve customers and what effects their work has on the business.
On the eve of the mid-semester break I was given a very magical gift. From the good folks at Blizzard Entertainment I was bestowed beta access to their new free-to-play card game Hearthstone. Boy was my break productive after that.
For clarification I have never invested a lot of time into card games – bar my old Pokemon card collection, and an old deck of Yu-Gi-Oh cards I used to own and only ever use with my neighbour – so Hearthstone is the first time I’ve really explored the true multiplayer aspect of the genre. Even before I started playing it last week I was already hooked watching the numerous live streams and coverage of the game everywhere.
Right off the bat the thing that impressed me the most is the simplicity of the game. It revolves around a basic “Beat up your opponent before he beats you up” objective. Apart from that the mechanics of the cards are very simple, intuitive even. You have Taunt cards that force the opponent to remove them from the field before being able to target anything else, cards that heal you or your own minions, cards that allow you to draw extra cards from your own deck; all very simple.
The best thing about this simplicity is that it allows the developers a lot of room for aesthetic polish and that is where Hearthstone really shines. The use of sound and movement makes for a lot of visceral actions including anything from stomping on an opponent with a powerful minion, shaking the board and throwing shrapnel everywhere, to opening up your Collection which has a large tome swing open to reveal your cards. After playing the game for hours over the break I realised it’s been a very long time since I’ve had that ‘just one more game’ feeling. It was beautiful, in it’s own procrastinatory way.
There’s a lot more to talk about the game which I hope to cover in a ‘First Impressions’ video sometime soon, which I will definitely share when I get to do it.
Something of a stream of consciousness post; sitting down on a Saturday night to do a bit of catch up as it were for Uni, and I decided to start off with Networked Media. Here’s what I’m listening to while writing (a 30 minute EDM mix by Knife Party, some ripper tracks in there).
So I started by catching up on the subject blog, and as per mentioning in my blog assessment I stated I wanted to do more of the networking thing, so I endeavoured to engage with somebody else’s blog and right off the bat I found something wonderful! Something I hadn’t thought about before either, as the network is best as revealing.
This post by Alois Wittwer responded to the question put to us last week, “What would it be like to read a story that changed it’s shape every time you read it?” with some observations on the “toxic notions” of a portion of society that like to ‘get something’ out of their lives. I’d agree that this is a rampant desire for pretty much everyone; it can be boiled down to the Meaning of Life thing. No, it isn’t 42 – 42 was the computational error by the Earth of 6 multiplied by 9 and not the answer to the ultimate question – I fancy Douglas Adams was making fun of arbitrary end goals we set ourselves in life when, and as is my main point; the concept of nihilism. Continue reading
Yes, I know, I’m back on YouTube Poop again. DON’T GO I LOVE YOU.
What I want to do was share with you a particularly characteristic Pooper: ricesnot. The name betrays anything he makes. His themes include low fidelity stock images – watermark included – video, music, and graphics mainly from the 90’s and early 2000’s. There’s something awfully nostalgic in this way; the masterfully orchestrated music using only those fragments of media. The poorly photoshopped images layered in the most disgustingly haphazard way. The cheap stock music that undercuts everything. The simple minded dialogue. The horrid jpeg artifacts that distort several frames at a time, randomly. The utter disregard for continuity in media quality.
And lets not forget the incessant, relentless references and images of skeletons. Of all the objects in the world: skeletons. In it’s own way these videos create and maintain a demented story world that demands absolutely no prior knowledge or investment into anything to be humourous. If anything, they get funnier the more you watch them and the less coherent the videos as a series appear.
But no matter how incoherent, nonsensical the videos get the barebones (oh good god stop me now) narrative keeps them afloat, just enough to deliver their excellently timed, poorly constructed punchlines. It’s simply brilliant, the kind of stuff that became available on the internet.
I won’t lie, I love this guy, his business (he’s got some fantastic people working with him), and a lot of his content and opinions. What I respect about the way he conducts himself though is how pragmatic he is with his approach to critique and discussion. Continue reading
I went and watched this film again the other day and my god do I still love it. The humour is as dark as you’ll find and dry to boot. It must have been the 8th time I’ve seen it now but every time I get something new out of it.
I found this particular scene very amusing after having studied Cinema further in another subject over the course of this year. Unfortunately I could not find a video of the scene on YouTube (use your imagination) but the beginning of the scene we, very briefly, see that Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is watching Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and in particular the famous car bomb scene: a long take that displays night life before the climactic explosion.
We see only a few seconds however before the camera tracks up to Ken, who answers the ringing phone, proceeding to have a rather mundane conversation about Bruges.
The phone call consists of purely mundane chatter about Bruges and how pretty it is, how it’s a lovely place to holiday, which directly mimics the frivolous shots of the night life in Orson Welles’ original shot. Then the finale for the several minute take in Touch of Evil is the car bomb going off, directly compared to the request that Ken kill his accomplice.
It’s a very small detail but I love the film so much and seeing this very clever adaptation of film history in this modern film made me a little giddy, and deepen my respect for In Bruges’ cinematography.
I have limited time this week, but I can’t get this off my mind so I’ll put this here as a placeholder for now with some preliminary thoughts. The game Gone Home is a wonderful piece of media.
Developed by The Fullbright Company, Gone Home is a coming of age story explored through the medium of a adventure exploration game. You – the player – have basic controls such as walking, picking up, and inspecting objects, and the story expresses itself through this interaction. Some claim it would have worked just as well if not better as a film, or a novel. But there’s something special about the video game experience that few other mediums can claim to do. Continue reading
…but I have an excuse this time! Work attachment stuff with a competitive gaming organisation based in Sydney – formerly known as Australian Pro League, now known as Oceanic eSports – got me making a brief promotional video as well as a press release for any media! The video is embedded below, and I would love any feedback on it. I worked on a very tight deadline (claimed I could put one together for the sake of publicity over the weekend) of 2 days plus part of Monday where I tweaked the font.
The real kicker for this announcement was that a world famous Starcraft 2 player (Jung Jong Hyun, from Korea) will be going head to head with 3 of Australia’s top players, which should make for some really fun viewing. I’ll be heading up to Sydney’s UNSW for 4 days in September to help film material before and during the event (which should ideally cover the 50 hours of required work attachment!) so I’m super pumped about that too! I’ll get to meet a legend of Starcraft 2 and film him!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xHZM0XoJPk
So yeah that’s the main reason my week has been so quiet, not realising an essay was due this Friday plus working on said stuff I have had very little time to do much else this week. Come the weekend I’ll have to reconcile this.
I’ve been on a bit – and by a bit I mean a lot – of an EDM/DnB binge lately. I have my phases; acoustic folk, indie rock, glitch/IDM, dubstep, yet I always return to those 2 most electrifying genres. Most (broad generalisation here) of those who are passionate about these styles of music generally enjoy it in it’s most pure form; the rave. I don’t mind the odd mosh myself (yeah bet you didn’t guess, I can party hardy any day of the week) but for the most part this sort of music is an intensely mental experience for me.
That right there is a mix by Jon Gooch under his alias Feed Me, with a few other artists mixed in to spice it up. It’s very heavy on the bass and primed for dancing to; the four to the floor beat is easy enough to engage with – one, two, three, four, a simple count to maintain. These are the foundations, and I find the better an artist builds on these foundations the more fun the song becomes. Feed Me as a particular example is very creative. His taste in sounds is eclectic, to say the least, unlike a lot of popular dance music that relies on extremely repetitive rhythms and sounds. Listen closely to a Feed Me track and you’ll find bits and pieces you missed the first – or twentieth – listen. The soundscapes are harsh, sure, but in a masochistic way – there’s no other way to put it. Continue reading