One of the strange things about the stupid Internet outcry over some remarks that BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler made a few years back — which does a good job of illustrating exactly what’s wrong with both Internet culture and gamer culture — is that the games Hepler’s worked on, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, are pretty good examples of why she has a point.
I really liked Dragon Age II. I liked the way they streamlined the combat, I liked that Hawke had a voice, and the dialogue wheel won me over pretty quickly. I could forgive the way they recycled dungeons because they seemed to have learned not to make them so monotonously huge, in the way that had destroyed Origins‘ replay value. Right up to the final battle, I was sure the game was head and shoulders better than its predecessor.
Then the game ended. There was like a three-minute cutscene, Cassandra says something cryptic, and it fades to black. There’s no denouement, no epilogue, the credits don’t even have music. It’s like they just stopped making it.
I got to thinking about this after I came across Kirk Hamilton’s reflections on the game in Kotaku. Because I’ve learned not to pay much attention to what people say about games on the Internet, I’d largely missed the backlash against the game while I was playing it.
While I understand some of the other complaints about DA II, but I think they’re overblown. But for all the work the team did to overhaul the gameplay, the best element of Origins — its story — is where the sequel fell down.
Sometimes, the easiest way to understand why we have some particular status quo — for example, our insanely convoluted electoral system — is to find a bunch of people who agree the status quo is a mess and get them talking about what would work better. Committees are the force that turns great ideas into okay laws, and okay ideas into travesties.
I got reminded of this when I was reading this article on i09 about ranked choice, or instant-runoff voting, an electoral system that would let voters rank candidates in order of preference. This helps give a clearer idea of the voters’ preferences in an election where no candidate gets a majority of the vote, and therefore could encourage third-party candidates by getting rid of the spoiler effect.
The weird thing about the article is that it seems to view this feature as a problem.
I’ve made kind of a game out of trying to figure out how much useful information the “Previously on…” recaps can actually tell you.
This impromptu social experiment came to me thanks to a job that had me watching a whole slew of shows that I previously hadn’t cared about, like the CW’s reboot of 90210. After watching twenty seconds of the characters’ anguished yelling, I still had no clue who anybody was, just some vague sense that some people were mad at each other and some other people slept with each other. Which I had already assumed going in.
At their best, this random series of events from yesterweek just tells you what the episode you’re about to watch will be about. At worst, they leave you trying to figure out why everyone was so worked up instead of actually watching the show.
Sometime around the end of Clarion West last year, I took a drive up to the Barnes & Noble because I was tired of poking through the awesome University of Washington bookstore and really missed the big box experience. I hadn’t actually planned to buy anything, but then I came across two books that were so awesome just in principle that I couldn’t resist.
The first was a compilation of two novellas by Karl Schroeder titled Virga: Cities of the Air, which everyone reading this blog should find and read immediately. The second is the book I’m actually reviewing right now, thanks to the review feature on Goodreads.com. It’s an unauthorized 1898 sequel to The War of the Worlds in which Thomas Edison conquers Mars, cleverly titled Edison’s Conquest of Mars.
Fascinated yet? I was!
I just realized something. First I’m reading this from Matthew Yglasias about why Congress and the White House can’t work anything out:
Note that if Obama were a hereditary monarch, this would be something like the historical process through which the United Kingdom became a parliamentary system with a symbolic head of state. Parliament started with a relatively bounded authority over granting new tax revenue to the king. But the king would, in practice, need new tax revenue periodically in order to fight wars. This fact, combined with parliament’s greater democratic legitimacy, victory in the English Civil War, and successful perpetration of a kind of coup in 1688 allowed it—and specifically the House of Commons within parliament—to over time seize control of the entire policy agenda. But of course Obama’s not a hereditary monarch, and both the House and the White House have independent claims to democratic legitimacy.
Probably the most sensible resolution to this is the original British one — establish a single center of power by systematically destroying the influence of the others, in their case the monarchy and the House of Lords. In a parliamentary system, there’s one head of government who’s indisputably in charge, so people know who to reward when things are going well and who to blame when they’re not.
But that was way too straightforward for our founders.
One of the unfortunate aftereffects of being a reporter is that I’m actually interested by journalistic ethics flaps. Actually, I’ve kind of gone beyond interested, because the journalistic ethics code is one of those bizarre things that makes less sense the more you think about it. Still, I can get dragged in on occasion, particularly when the issue involves news outlets I use.
So when, during the course of driving to get some lunch today, I caught this report about KUOW (Puget Sound’s public radio service!) dumping Cliff Mass from his regular gig forecasting the weather on Weekday, I ended up sitting in my car with the engine off waiting for the story to finish. It was a nice callback to my days in public-service journalism — that rare profession held in high regard by the people who actually do it and by virtually no one else.
My final Norwescon panel was kind of an odd one. It was a late addition to the schedule, so the only way for people to find out about it was from word of mouth or just walking by the room and poking your head in. (In retrospect I could have tweeted about it or something. I should have checked to see if there was a panel on self-promotion.) It also took a look at fantasy — interesting ground for me, as I haven’t been primarily a fantasy reader since I was a kid getting bedtime stories from my mom. (My mom was reading The Lord of the Rings to me in preschool. I had kind of an awesome childhood.)
One of the unsettling things about The Lord of the Rings and other fantasies of this type is that the Orcs and Dark Lords are flat, 2-dimensional evil characters with no hope of redemption. Is there an argument for making things at least somewhat black and white? If we reject the 100% evil creatures, what do we use for the all-encompassing threat?
My short answer was to say I think The Lord of the Rings is a problem only insofar as people take the wrong lessons from it.
That’s not actually the title of my next Norwescon panel, and the difference is an important one. In fact, I’ll be answering the question, “Can You Write Hard SF Without a Science Background?” And the description complicates the issue even more.
Is it easier to write a hard science fiction story if you have the technical or science background, or does it get in the way? How do you fold in the science without making it an info dump?
My simple answer is that yes, you can write hard SF without a science background, and I don’t have a frame of reference to say whether it’s easier if you have one. But — allowing for differences between individuals — I’d guess not.
Well, I didn’t get run out of town last night, so Norwesconers (that’s a word now) can find me at yet another panel tonight. This one’s on Supernatural versus science fiction, the epic struggle of our times:
More and more, the entertainment industry is producing television shows and films that are supernatural in nature, but are calling them science fiction. Are they really? Or is the industry “copping out” and trying to get around having to come up with legitimate science fiction shows? Why are the directors and writers skirting around the science issues instead of addressing them?
What do I think? Well, it’s complicated.