Press Paws: Pondering the World's First Video Game for Cats

Every once in a while, ideas come down the pipe that are so crazy, they have to work.  Then there's the ideas that are too crazy to work, but at least are entertaining in their failure.  Then there's the ideas that are just crazy.  Hopefully, this one of the first two.

Many of us know by now the backstories given to us by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoshi Tajiri, about how as children, they went out adventuring in a wilder, more pristine world, and later, as that world became ever more pacified, paved, and pedestrian, decided that industry on the cutting edge owed it to the world to create a monument to the old adventurous world, and then some.  The result were video games, whose success proves that we really crave outlets for our old sense of strife.  So if this applies to humans, it stands to reason that it should be just as true; if not more, of more wild animals.

Cats certainly qualify as such.  Possessing the fine-tuned instincts of crafty predators beneath those cute faces and huggable fur coats, they have a way of getting into, batting, chasing and pouncing on anything that isn't fastened down, stowed away, braced, or considered boring as a result of it being familiar to them; especially if it moves.  We haven't bred these traits out of them (assuming we could) because face it; we love them.  We love that cats can help us get rid of annoying pests, and we love watching these adorable creatures beat up on yarn like it owes them money, charge after lasers, and other things that make for YouTube clickbait.  Still, sometimes we have conflicts of interest.  People in rural areas appreciate cats going out and chowing down on invading rodents, but I can't imagine city dwellers letting rodents loose in their apartments just so cats can satisfy their natural urges and litter the floor with blood and guts, and it can be irritating when cats decide that the mysterious lights in the magic box are there for them to play with.

Cute and funny, but irritating, and essentially ruinous to our ability to play with them.  My cat, Sunshine, has quite a fixation with TV, whether we're talking about actual channels, DVDs, and pictured above, video games.  I quickly decided that squirting him with a water pistol was too cruel, so for a point, I just waggled a feather toy for him every time he jumped up to the TV.  That got him off, but only briefly; once I went back to watching/playing, he jumped back right up, and I have some suspicion that he came to learn that if he jumped up there, he'd get the toy waggled as a reward.  So eventually, I just followed Jackson Galaxy's advice and put some double-sided tape on my TV table, and that has worked to keep him from going up there, somewhat.However, it got me thinking: What if, instead of punishing a cat for chasing things on TV, we could reward them?  Probably not with out own games, but with games designed for them.  The more I see cats go for such things, the more I think the idea is at least worth a try. 

Now, naturally, creating a video game for cats takes some doing; in at least some ways more than making just another for people does.  For example, because cats only are attracted to what's on the screen and not the controller--in the same way that they're interested in the projected laser beam, but not the pointer--a touch screen would need to control most of what happens in the game.  Furthermore, it would need to be the type that works with many objects; not just a specially designed stylus.  Finally, it would need to be considerably bigger than the touch screen on a 3DS, smartphone, or even an iPad, because cats need to move in their hunting-oriented style of play.

Another problem whose solution is probably more open-ended, but less obvious, is that cats can't think in terms of abstractions to the extent that we can.  Among other reasons, this is because cat eyes, though good at collecting light and sensing movement, don't perceive or distinguish as many colors as we do; recognition of things is thus a matter of them integrating sight with data provided by their other senses, such as smell and hearing, and vibrations sensed by their whiskers.  Up to a point, that isn't a problem, because as noted above, cats are flexible.  The question of whether they can recognize, say, a bird on TV, is less relevant when we remember cats will jump after things that aren't birds at all.  Still, for us to justify something being a game, as opposed to just a special cat-targeting video we play for their amusement, it must not only get cats' attention with interesting entities they can chase, but also provide rewarding feedback based on their input.  Exactly how this is to be done should be determined by some in-depth testing, but here are some ideas:

1) Nocturn.  This would be a scenario where much of the screen goes black.  Soon, though, a little light starts to blink.  The cat would go to it, and upon batting it, the light would shift a bit on the screen, prompting the cat to chase it.  As the cat hits the light more times, it expands, until light replaces the original black screen, at which point a level is complete.
2) Sparrow Hunt.  This would be a bird-hunting simulator, obviously similar to Duck Hunt, but with touch screen controls.
3) Wild Soundboard. This would be essentially a digital, feline version of those toys for young children that we see a lot of in doctors' waiting rooms.  Images of various animals known in the domestic cat's African homeland would flash across the screen, and upon being touched, sounds the animals make would play.

Because in many games, it's the journey that's fun, not the destination, it may be arbitrary, but an added option could be to give the cats rewards.  For example, food.  If a cat hits enough virtual sparrows, for example, maybe award it with some actually poultry.  With Wild Soundboard, it could various types of meat, based on what a cat hit.

Now, these are just suggestions.  I'm not a cat psychologist, and I don't have the mechanical know-how or money to rig up a big touch screen, or the software savvy to make a computer program run with a touch screen.  Yet I have observed what I think is the beginning of an innovative idea, so if you have something to add, by all means, speak up!  Meow!

Rainbow Brite Reboot Reviewed: Rewarding or Redundant?

You may find it hard to believe, but I, Thomas Fairfield, like Rainbow Brite.  I'm not the target demographic; I never have been.  It's something that I don't think I even knew existed until I saw Robot Chicken making fun of it; after which I decided to study up and watch much of the old series, along with the movie.  I was pleasantly surprised by at least some of it.  The pilot, which had Wisp (her real name) descending on a dark, apocalyptic land and going on a quest to save innocents and restore color, was pretentious in the way only the 1980s could manage, but it was still a compelling story.  The rest of the series was much more lighthearted, but still very pleasant and with a cast I could get behind.  Besides, the Star Stealer movie restored the sense of adventure missing since the pilot.  Through it all, I feel Rainbow Brite exuded a sense of genuine warmth in a way that heavily merchandized brands sometimes don't.  The Color Kids were an admirably multi-ethnic bunch, which lent a sense of progressive values to the incessant rainbow motif and prevented it from being just a fashion statement, Rainbow was a friendly girl, and the villain team of Murky and Lurky, though shallow, still managed to be funny.

You may think that here, I segue into how this reboot has ruined everything I held dear about this series.  Not really.  I always saw Rainbow Brite as a superheroine who could benefit from a somewhat more action-oriented take on her universe; especially since during her movie, it was her new male friend, Krys, doing much of the work.  The relaunches the series got up until this point, from what I've seen, had interesting designs but made it even tamer.  This reboot was a chance to instill some much needed vigor into the brand, and it actually succeeds in that...but does, in fact, lose some things in the process.

Before this goes any further, the way that Halmark chose to air this should be addressed.  Their reboot of Rainbow Brite debuted exclusively on their own video streaming site, Feeln.  This site, unlike some, which at least partially stream things paid by ads, requires a subscription to view things.  They heavily tout that they will give viewers a week free, but apparently this is at least slightly false advertizing, as credit card info is required in advance; the free week simply meaning no charges until it ends.  As children aren't generally known for their ability to provide credit card info, or, for that matter, pay for subscriptions by any means, it seems a very odd choice of venue.  Also, making this online means its promotion isn't necessarily reaching children where they can see it.  Hallmark has their own TV channel, so what's wrong with airing it there?  Finally, I know of no merchandizing tie-ins to this series, compared to plenty last few incarnations of the franchise. (Edit: I since discovered they've made some tie-in products, but I don't know what their distribution will be yet.)

All this might sound beside the point of the actual series, but it's a good bookend because, as it turns out, this reboot itself seems a bit confused as to whom it's targeting.  Though its content is of the sort appealing and appropriate to children, it almost never acts like it's a reboot, but rather assumes too much familiarity on behalf of what can only be adults who were fans of the original.  Brian, a boy from Earth who was only a bit part in the original, has been promoted to main character, and his meeting Rainbow Brite is one of the few things retold next to the original series.  Almost everything else is unexplained, and even his introduction is questionable at first.  Why exactly is this boy rocketing through a rainbow to meet this genki girl?  What's her story?  Who's this other girl attacking them?  Who does what here?

It should be mentioned: This show is short.  What counts as the first season was three thirteen-minute episodes.  Back when it was new, I considered reviewing them individually, but as I was busy and I usually review TV episodes individually longer than this whole series, I lumped these all together as one, and they're still highly questionable.  This short length means things are hyper-condensed into very busy, flashy affairs, which once again don't explain much.  The original Rainbow Brite cartoon's world may have been rather tame on average, but it was fleshed out.  We saw how the young heroine Wisp came in to become Rainbow Brite, saw how she established the land as her kingdom, how she battled to keep her kingdom, and saw the other denizens in detail. Here, no reason is given for why Rainbow Brite is here running Rainbowland, why the Dark Princess is trying to take her down, or why Murky, Lurky, and Stormy were helping her out.  Stormy was Rainbow Brite's friend in the original, and here, too, she was explained as being her friend once, before falling out; yet the show gives absolutely no explanation of why that falling out occurred.

Have you seen me?

Meanwhile, Rainbow Brite herself, instead of getting a backstory, is introduced to us (and Brian) in an aggressively passionate way.  From the get-go, she comes off as a mix between Unikitty from The Lego Movie, Deedee from Dexter's Laboratory, and even a little bit of Ducky from The Land Before Time (due to how many times and ways she restates Brian's name).  Somehow, Rainbow Brite instantly sees this strange boy as her new best friend; granted her old one betratyed her (maybe), but what about all the color kids, whom she knows better than him?  In truth, they don't play a lot of a role here.  The bottom line is that this new Rainbow Brite, though plenty friendly, is a bit annoying at the onset; insufficiently humorous to make her raving endearing--at least from an adult perspective; children may disagree.  However once again, how many of them actually were able to see this?

That all sounds very negative, but somehow, once the shock of the busy, confusing introduction wears off, the show does find a sense of fun that's both brimming with humor, and actually outdoes much of the widely-lauded My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in the action department--even if it's pretty tame by many other cartoons' standards.  Though jarring at first, Rainbow Brite does end up very appealing due to her genuinely kind nature and sense of humor kicking in somewhere along the line.  Starlight the stallion has, to put it in the way all of us adults are thinking, gone from seeming "fairy" gay to seeming "bear" gay, being now buffer and bassier, but aside from this change, he's still the narcisstic steed we all knew and loved.  Murky and Lurky, though redesigned to look a bit more menacing, haven't really changed much at all personality-wise, and their bumbling antics deliver perhaps the best overt humor the series has to offer.  It's genuinely funny to see dated 1980s icons try to get into each other's computer accounts, and see Rainbow and her friends prattle in general about the technological workings of their rainbow-producing city.

Art-wise, this reboot tows the line on the basic requirement of a Rainbow Brite property--being colorful to a point that would embarrass most other shows.  Its deformed human character designs, with their big heads and comparably twiggy bodies, have been and will remain divisive.  They're much more expressive than the slightly Uncanny Valley designs of the originals, but still feel off at times; particularly when they crane their tiny necks forward.  Fortunately, when animation gets into the picture and lots of things start happening at once, this is fairly easy to overlook in favor of the spectacle.

The most notable thing about the show is that it actually delivers on the superhero/magical girl vibe many of us have envisioned a modernized Rainbow Brite having.  Predictably, Rainbow Brite fights by shooting out Rainbows to counter the villains' equally self-themed beams (Stormy's is lightning, for example), but it's far more interesting than the static, moral-powered dreck I keep ragging on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic for having--and also Care Bears, from what I've seen of it.  Rainbow Brite here doesn't win the battles of the beams just because her being in the right makes her stronger than opponents by some quixotic made-up logic based on wishful thinking; instead she dips, dodges and cartwheels to dodge their attacks and shoots in her own, and sometimes chases them through the air with her powers; in something of a Dragonball Z style dogfight I could do without, but at least fights don't drag on the way they infamously did in that show.  The bottom line is that this Rainbow Brite is impressive to see in action, and more sugary girls' shows could learn from her example.

She ain't playing around...outside of playtime..which is pretty much every time that's not battletime.

 Things get pretty cool, but the real question is whether they'll be gone too soon.  With the final episode of the season already wrapped up with no concrete info on more, there's a risk that this revival, as passionate as it obviously is, could be a fluke.  This is mostly because, once again, I don't know how well it will reach the young audience it hopes to reach, and they might not have the point of reference to appreciate it if they do...unless I'm wrong, and this whole thing is more for adults, but if so, I don't know how they plan to get a lot of money from us.  Still, despite reservations, I give it my blessing to go ahead if it can.  Things improved pretty rapidly within the short span of its introduction; hopefully they will be allowed to continue improving.

Throwback Thursday: Another Response to Video Game "Scholars"

I figured I'd post another response I have to what I consider to be unfair assessment of gaming from the eyes of cynical scholars.  Before going on, though, two things.  First, I link the article in question, which I warn you, is long. 

Second, I should note, my stance has changed a bit since writing the article.  I am now more vocally critical of the "gangsta" culture depicted in the games in question (mostly Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), and some of that criticism was present in the original article; however, I still maintain my assertion in my pasted essay, that video games in particular are being unfairly singled out for what has become the accepted cultural norm, even among the race the writers claim are unfairly treated.  So there's a legitimate conversation to be had as to whether this set of values has sold society a brand of romanticized, commodified racism, but it supersedes video games to the point that they shouldn't even be part of it.  I also admit to being in error about pre-San Andreas GTA protagonists being all white; in fact they were a variety of races, and some games let you choose between several avatars.  However, white GTA protagonists were common enough that I can stand by my original statement that contrary to the author's argument, GTA does not portray African Americans as any more prone to crime than other people.  Now, my response, for those who read the original article:

Challenging the claims made in this article feels somewhat halfhearted to me, because I agree, on some level, that there is a legitimate point to be made here, and I believe that the writers were legitimately trying to make it.  There are some seedy aspects of our culture that manifest themselves emphatically in games, and that is regrettable—but I do take issue with the way Everett and Watkins classify it as “racist,” and I feel that some obviously pertinent points against that conclusion are being left out.

            That the label “racist” gets thrown around far too liberally in today’s culture is no secret to many observers.  Centuries of true racism have engendered an understandable resentment among minorities, but resentment can make people behave rashly, in this case by being too quick to hit anyone they perceive as mistreating them with a label that has become taboo.  Literally-defined, racism is the belief that certain races are inferior to others; the presence of racial stereotypes is not necessarily unrelated but also not necessarily related, as stereotypes can be positive.  While every person is an individual, races, nationalities, and groups in general have long taken pride in certain notable characteristics typical of them, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.  Even so, the violent, thuggish nature depicted of black people in the “urban/street” games genre the article describes, would almost certainly qualify as negative, would it not?

            In fact, no it wouldn’t; not necessarily.  The article examines the aspects of these games on their own, compared to what they see as the white “norm” of video games, and from this angle, such games as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and NBA Ballers can seem to take a negative, reductive view of black culture, but the more important angle is being ignored: The chain of events that brought society to this point.

            With regards to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the writers try to prove a point about how blacks are stereotyped as brutal and violent in games, by comparing it to the subsequently released Bully (Also by Rockstar Games), which stars an upper-class white character in a private school, and is comparatively tame.  In the process, the writers make some ridiculously unprofessional errors when pointing to visual figures spliced into their text, but although such mistakes are blatant and laughable, the real problem is that only Bully is being compared to GTA:SA; all of the GTA titles released up to that point are being completely ignored, and should not be.  Even a cursory look at the prior titles in the GTA series would demonstrate that they starred white protagonists, and were just as criminal and violent as San Andreas would become (although they did become more graphically-so with the jump to close third-person 3-D in Grand Theft Auto III), giving lie to the notion that the series portrays blacks as especially vicious.  In fact (and here I recall Soraya Murray’s article), the white protagonists had the more sinister motives; those of crime for either its own sake or for the sake of mere profit; whereas San Andreas’s C.J. is driven to crime based on his desperate poverty and alienation by a corrupt society.  The black protagonist is one of the more sympathetic characters; yes, his minority society is awash in crime and grunge, but it isn’t through any fault of their own.  To be sure, all of the GTA games are stereotypical, hyperbolic, and satirical, but to call them racist for this is missing the point they’re actually trying to get across: Black society isn’t inherently criminal; it has become that way out of mistreatment by white racist institutions.  San Andreas is an anti-racist game.

            Further indicative of the writers’ “born yesterday” outlook is the way they ignore the cultural evolution that precipitated many of the tropes that they now see in urban/street games.  Black culture has, over the past (roughly forty) decades it has played a distinctive role in the media, become very ironic.  Long shunned and looked down upon by the white majority, it is a culture that has come to embrace what white culture has derided.  The word, “bad” has long served as slang roughly interchangeable with “cool,” the “n word” has become acceptable; even endearing when used by one black man to describe another, and now the whole hard-knock life in the ghettos has become romanticized as a quintessential part of African-American culture.  Now, such originally-negative terms as “gangster” (or “gangsta”), “thug,” “pimp,” and “dope” (as in, the detractor name for drugs) are looked upon with affection, and not just by the African-American community but by society as a whole.  The whole criminal lifestyle associated with such key words, too, has become fetishized.  We see it in movies, in TV shows, and in rap music videos, and when we aren’t seeing it we are hearing about it in lyrics and even in modern lexicon.  This is not racist stereotyping, as Everett and Watkins accuse it of being; it is the identity that a large part of black culture has chosen for itself.

            Does such a choice of identity come with its own problems?  Of course it does.  Romanticizing crime is always a controversial and potentially-detrimental practice.  The gripe with this article’s commentary on the situation, however, lies with its failure to consider such romanticism in its actual context.  Not for the first time, video games are getting singled out for containing controversial elements, when the reason the games contain said elements is because they are reflecting our own society, a society that objects less when such motifs are being piped in via older forms of media. 

That is not to say that there isn’t a problem with the representation of race in video games, but the limited representation actually doesn’t have much to do with racism, because games do not hate African-Americans or their culture; on a certain level, they love both.  Rather, the problem is, as with many things relating to popular culture, the pressure to conform to what is “cool,” and right now, it is apparent that “gangsta” culture is cool.  Time will tell if games stay in this mode, but I doubt they will ever lapse into actual racism at this point.

 

Review of My Little Pony Equestia Girls: Rainbow Rocks

Sometimes, I have a hard time deciding how to start documents.  Sometimes, there are just too many things that seem like a good hook to choose just one.  This seems like one of those times when so many things could set the tone of a review that it's best just to be blunt to start: Rainbow Rocks isn't very good at all.  Speaking as someone who thought the first Equestria Girls was fun enough to forgive it partially as a totally pointless extended toy commercial, I can say this sequel actually disappointed even those low expectations.

The first problem with this film is the one many people expect it to be: Rainbow Rocks really doesn't.  I once had a VHS where Barney played a song teaching manners that rocked harder than this.  Musicals often lean hard on the leg of being musicals for their appeal; this being no exception, and that means when the music is bad, the musical tends to be, too.  While this movie's score isn't painful at all, in a big way, that's the problem.  Writers of media intended for kids (girls especially; it's worth noting) frequently don't seem to understand, even as they put on the airs of rock and roll to be cool, that this genre is supposed to be offputting to some extent.  It's supposed to have "blue" notes; that is, ones that don't fall into the standard major scales a song is based on, it's supposed to have a heavy bass and drum part, and its lyrics are supposed to range from somewhat to extremely unwholesome.  Obviously, this is a generalization, and not all three of those are always needed, but the songs in this film are so frequently, mind-numbingly devoid of all three that I felt like washing my ears out with Limp Bizkit and The Millionaires. 

Now, Daniel Ingram is a good songwriter, and I don't feel good pinning all of this on him, but this is a case wherein his hand was probably tied.  My Little Pony does okay musically when it's just trying for the Disney fairy tale vibe, but Rainbow Rocks has forced the brand into alien territory it wasn't ready to inhabit, and with the exception of one punk song by Rainbow Dash (which tellingly, the judges don't seem to like, and the band isn't allowed to finish), it doesn't even seem like they were trying and tripping over themselves; it's just white noise of the sort you'd hear in a supermarket.  It's bad enough that this movie is almost empty of the supposed rock its title alludes to, but what's even worse is that there's hardly any diversity of other musical styles.  The exceptions are the aforementioned punk song, other songs you only hear snippets of and a villain song that is at first somewhat interesting, but loses its luster after several more villain songs that sound very similar.  There's a musical duel between the villains and the heroes in the finale, which does provide for some impressive syncopation, but it also made me wonder if I was rooting for the wrong side.

That's as good a time as any to segue into the storyline of this film, which, while better than the music, is entirely too predictable; especially for fans of the series.  The antagonist of the first film, Sunset Shimmer, is trying to turn over a new leaf, gaining the sympathy of the other Equestria Girls--minus Twilight Sparkle--but not necessarily their respect, and it gets worse for her from there.  This makes for quite a problem when new villains from Equestria show up, and decide to brainwash the majority of the school to do some vague task they intend to command.  In one of the most pretentious bits of peddling a theme in this series' history, and reminiscent of the canonization of bad rock music in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out of Their Shells, the heroines find that somehow, playing music together in their band, the Rainbooms activates their magical powers to resist evil and generally shine and sparkle, which in last film required the presence of Twilight Sparkle; their "Keeper of the Heart", so to speak.  In other words, this film is about horses that became humans, who in turn form a band that allows them to turn into magical-girls that look more like horses.

The most absurd thing is it might still make more sense than that series where ponies could play instruments while still completely in fingerless pony form.

 

 

The girls realize this gives them the ability to combat the new villains, whom they, unlike others, actually trust Sunset Shimmer about, but they need more expertise, so they contact Twilight Sparkle over in the actual Equestria (This series has yet to explain why it's called "Equestria Girls" despite the fact that the human versions of the characters don't live in Equestria), and she deduces that the three villains attacking the school are sirens from her world, who roughly tow the mythological line about sirens being creatures who bend others to their will by singing; except I don't remember sirens being horses.  Twilight rigs up a machine with a cringe-worthily unfunny technobabble joke, and warps on over to the human world.  Here, the three sirens have realized that the heroines are immune to their charms, so they convince the principal to hold a Battle of the Bands, wherein they enter their own band, the Dazzlings, and intend to defeat the Rainbooms and also ruin their friendship.

The villain team in this movie is actually mildly entertaining.  Their designs, somewhere between the fashion senses of Jem and the Holograms and The Misfits, are awash in detail and almost seem like a parody of girl toy aesthetics, but what probably makes it work is actually that they were designed specifically for the human world of EG, as opposed to being adapted questionably from characters never originally intended to be humanoids.  Moreover, their alliance is shaky and humorous at times, and what's even better is that for once, there's an example about the power of friendship (or here, lack thereof) that actually translates into a real-world lesson about teamwork...or could have, if the writers made any use of that distinction in the finale.  The most notable thing about the villains, though, is the unintentionally(?) humorous way their evil manifests itself.  As people fall under their spell and start acting jerky, they secrete green vapors, which the sirens inhale.  Maybe this is just the perspective of an adult male viewer more familiar with cartoon tropes than the young demographic, but given that the animators are also in that boat, and they could have chosen any way to represent this evil magic, it's simply bizarre that they chose that.  If it isn't clear what I'm talking about yet, they can call themselves The Dazzlings all they want, but I can't stop thinking of them as "The Fart-Sniffers".

Seriously; have green vapors ever represented anything else in cartoons?

!

The Fart-Sniffers mobilize the student body against the Mane 6+1, which mostly takes the form of multiple students pursuing their own musical ambitions in some thin fanservice along the lines of "Hey look; it's that character, and they're singing" but occasionally they sabotage the Rainbooms' own attempts.  In a downright bizarre blooper, Rarity, who is the pianist of the group, gets her keytar stolen during a song, yet the synth track keeps playing.  The conspiracy gets to them and there's a predictable argument, and just as predictably, it falls on Sunset Shimmer to save them, thus completing her redemption.

From there, it's just a matter of The Rainbooms going off to defeat The Fart-Sniffers, in the umpteenth variation we've seen on the literal friendship is magic tripe we've had to put up with for four seasons.  I pull no punches on this subject; My Little Pony is, and has been since its inception decades ago, terribly equipped to tell compelling stories of good vs evil, because of the stigma against showing any real violence or combat-strategizing; such as one would find in a show for boys of the same age.  Instead, battles take the form of good feelings and wholesome sentiments manifesting as magical lasers; always summoned and always victorious in roughly the same way.  The moment a villain shows up, there is never any suspense as to what will happen at the end.  Beyond that it just doesn't appeal to adult male fantasy-adventure sensibilities, it truly doesn't teach a real lesson about real-world friendship and teamwork to its target demographic of young girls.  Indeed, this season ended with a downright disgusting climax where this "right makes might" guff was used to justify negotiating with terrorists.  There is a serious discussion to be had here about sexist mental-conditioning, but for another post.

Ultimately, Rainbow Rocks just doesn't work on almost any level.  The music is boring and even insulting to hear in a film about rock music, the plot is predictable, and it lacks the "stranger in a strange human body in a strange land" running joke that made the first film watchable.  Completionists may want to give it a watch, but it's possible to ignore this one completely and still call yourself a fan.  To play us out, here's RainbowCrash88, the artist who truly rocked the rainbow:

And whose fangame you tried to kill, Hasbro.  Screw you.

Throwback Thursday: Rebutting a "Professional" Video Game Scholar's Attack on Narrative

For any readers who think studying video games in college sounds cool--well; maybe it is.  I haven't had a very wide exposure to the subject.  Still, I would advise people who love games to avoid UC Santa Cruz at least, based on my experiences of how they approached, and I will postulate that, because this is a fairly new area of studies, quality-control could be in short supply everywhere.  Perhaps any person who can boast that they majored in video games; there not being many of them, can write just about anything and have it be treated as serious scholarly analysis.  The ivory tower seems to have miscalculated, however, that while there may be only a few people who went and studied video games deliberately for two-to-four years, there's by contrast a large amount of us who have essentially studied them for decades, because we played them our whole life.  This contrast leads to inevitable conflicts between us, the fans, and the occasional academic who dissects things with a cynical outsider's mind--or attempts to, because as you will see, it's often very easy to debunk these "scholars". 

Here is one particularly poignant example of professional fallacy: Back in 2001, Jesper Juul wrote an essay explaining why video games are not narratives.  I had a field day smashing it to bits a decade later (but it should have been booed into oblivion the moment it was released):

          I pride myself on my intellectual capacities, and as such, I often seek to display them by not falling to the level of rash speech, regardless of whether or not I am rebutting it.  However, this essay by Jesper Juul has proved so foolhardy that I cannot help but say, “What biased shit!”  With that exclamation out of the way, Juul pretentiously wrote a large, multifaceted essay on the issue of whether games are narratives that goes through the motions of entertaining opposing viewpoints, and hence, I will write my own essay in rebuttal, sparing harsh insults in favor of pointing out key holes in Juul’s logic.

            First of all, I am unfamiliar with what Juul’s experience of video games is, but he gives the impression that he might be ignorant of a few rather basic issues—Juul describes Mortal Kombat as “a fighting game (beat’em’up) where different opponents (human or computer players) battle in an arena.”  Not only does Juul misuse a term from gaming lexicon, but he also draws attention to his misuse by providing a description of the term afterward.  “Beat’em’up” does not refer to the style of fighting games featuring symmetrical battles between opponents in arenas; it refers to the sort in which the protagonist moves through a scrolling level fighting multiple opponents on the way to the end.  

This may seem like an arbitrary bit of snobbishness coming from an obsessive, nitpicky gamer, but I maintain that it is not: By demonstrating ignorance of the subject at hand, Juul decreases the sense of validity in any argument he attempts to make about it, implying he is an observer (perhaps even a hostile one) rather than a participant; more learned about the subject than average scholars from past generations, but probably not the ideal person to write essays attacking games.  The real reason that point is not arbitrary, however, is because throughout the whole article, Juul only reinforces the notion that his indifference to the subject mars his ability to produce a solid point about it, and in fact, seems like he is selectively perceiving and disregarding factors as suits his own, preconceived opinion. 

For example, Juul attempts to consider whether games feature a narrative by looking at game-movie adaptations, undoubtedly a relevant factor, but not the only ones to be considered to answer this question, and in fact, probably not the primary one.  Further problematic are the specific games he has chosen to examine, in attempting to validate his claim that games do not actually further the narrative of the movies they are based upon: The first one, a simple, pseudo-3-D arcade game based on Star Wars with vector graphics, is based entirely around the events leading up to, and during, the destruction of the Death Star; Juul also points out how in the game, unlike in the movie, a new Death Star spawns to allow players to keep playing until they die and their scores are tallied.  The problem here is that Juul is picking on a specific and not necessarily typical game to make his point; this is a very old-fashioned game, produced in an era where games often had no ending because they were not long enough to make them seem meaningful, and lacked the technological capacity to duplicate the narrative of a whole movie.  Juul totally ignores the presence of trilogies of games produced by Lucasarts, both on the NES and the SNES, which mirror the Star Wars movie trilogy, with multiple gameplay styles being used to recreate multiple scenes.

            He continues his unfair picking on the game by writing,

“The primary thing that encourages the player to connect game and movie is the title ‘Star Wars’ on the machine and on the screen. If we imagine the title removed from the game, the connection would not be at all obvious. It would be a game where one should hit an ‘exhaust port’ (or simply a square), and the player could note a similarity with a scene in Star Wars, but you would not be able to reconstruct the events in the movie from the game.”

Once more, this issue is due to technological limits, and no longer can be claimed of Star Wars games.  So ingrained in the popular imagination is the imagery of Star Wars, that indeed, the connection can be made without the title.  For example, the Turkish B-Movie, The Man Who Saves The World actually has a plot very different from Star Wars, but Westerners almost always refer to it as “Turkish Star Wars” because it utilizes footage stolen from that movie.

In summary of the above points, Juul, despite writing his essay in 2001, chose a specific, badly-outdated example of a game to make a general point addressing modern gaming sensibilities, in the process appearing to be, at best, ignorant, and at worst, conniving.  As to his second example, Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, it is indeed more modern, and quite recent at the time he wrote the essay, but Juul ignores one key point: Unlike the first game he described, this game has a title that makes no possible pretense of being based on the entire plot.  It bills itself as being far more specific than the average Star Wars game, and yet Juul once more chooses it, of all games, to make a generalization.

As to the section, “Time, game, and narrative,” its reasoning seems so contrived and peripheral that I scarcely think it needs rebutting, but I will do it anyway: Juul attempts to relate how games cannot be narratives because narratives, as they are “classically” defined, are understood by the audience as having taken place in the past, whereas games are seen as taking place in the present.  First of all, being classical does not make a theory correct.  The theories of the ancients, though at one point venerated by societies emerging from a dark age that forgot them, were still based on an understanding of the world more limited than that of today, and have often needed amending as new knowledge became available.  Similarly, the ancients would have no strong need for philosophy about whether games were also narratives, because technology was not such as to allow them to emulate other media.  Second, as a testament to the ancient origins of this theory, books, and before them, oral stories are the operating medium for proving (presumably through the past tense) that stories have already happened, that films also convey a sense of past tense is claimed, but not really explained; Juul goes as far as quoting Albert Einstein on the matter, but that still does not make it correct.  I argue that a film definitely portrays itself as though it is happening immediately; even when it claims, through a narrator or a speaking character, that an event happened in the past, it often uses a flashback to show it happening in real time.  For example, Saving Private Ryan, a movie about a war that occurred in the past, begins in with a man reminiscing about the past in Arlington National Cemetery, but then, cuts back to the events of the war as though they are actually occurring; in fact, its flashback begins earlier than the events, building suspense with a relatively calm boat scene, and a gradually-opening hatch on the boat ticking down to the gun fight.  Unsurprisingly, Juul also conveniently ignores the existence of films and books set in the future when making his assessment of narrative.

The section of the essay entitled “The Player and the Game” marks Juul’s return to the same old fallacious logic of using the specific to classify the general.  In an attempt to prove that games have no clear, identifiable protagonist, Juul again chooses to speak of atypical games, Missile Command and Tetris.  Although his claims of no clear (or at least, no well-defined) protagonists are true enough in these games, the problem again lies with the fact that these do not represent nearly all games.  They also are decidedly primitive; existing prior to most of the games that would prompt the question of whether games are stories.  Using these atypical video games to answer that question is hardly fairer than using older abstract games like Poker.

In closing, Juul’s argument feels either foolish or biased, and possibly both.  Though in the language of a scholar, it is in fact very reminiscent of the typical ravings of most bigots, replete with hasty generalizations and strawman versions of issues standing in for the actual ones.

 In case I didn't make it clear enough, or you're not familiar enough with video games to judge who won yourself, refer back to this long-held principle: Selectively interpreting a few bits of data and portraying them as representative of the standard is widely reviled as the epitome of bad, if not outright duplicitous, research.  So why do Jesper Juul and unfortunately, others, get away with doing this to video games?  Because they're (relatively) new, prone to skepticism, and although played by many younger people, still alien to a lot of the old mainstream academia.  If Juul were to make a claim that, say, books don't tell stories, and cite car operations manuals as proof, the whole literary world would have raked it over the coals.  It's up to us real experts on video games to keep fighting in hopes that one day our medium, too, gets that sort of dignity.

Malcolm and Me

Two rather coincidental things happened yesterday.  One, I finally finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, and two, I got suspended from a forum for posting a picture I drew that was arguably racist for cruelly mocking rapper dialogue.  I originally drew the picture (it's the fourth panel) in a Drawception game (note that despite the warning, there's no nudity or porn in that link, only language and racial humor), and if you don't know what Drawception is, the front page should give you a good idea. (Edit: It has now occurred to me that you need to log into the site to see NSFW games; fortunately simple Facebook or Google accounts work.)

I'm not going to say I did nothing wrong, when clearly this offended people.  Insofar as that game goes, I was just following the prompt, and in fact, my panel affected a change from a game that started as racist to one mocking wiggers, but it was, indeed, stupid of me to post that image on a forum thread devoid of context that explained it.  Nevertheless, I feel obligated to provide the context I conceived of it in, to explain why I don't believe this is truly racist at all.

The most immediately racist implication comes from the notion that I'm making fun of how black people talk.  Well, that would be a valid criticism, except absolutely no black person I've ever known actually talked like that.  In college, I had a good friend who was not only black, but from South Central Los Angeles, and he talked like an intellectual addressing other intellectuals; quite ahead of some white people I've heard.  The actual people I've heard spewing the sort of thing depicted in that drawing are of other races, trying to imitate a commodified version of black culture in order to be "cool".

This is how some High School students actually addressed me/the teacher, and none of us were black.

This is, in the words of someone who actually used such lingo (and wasn't black), all part of "the hip-hop subculture".  The image I drew isn't meant to be a stereotypical black man, but (as the prompt called for) a stereotypical rapper; the common perception of a rapper being both black, and using that sort of jargon.

Now, I want to pause and say I like rap music.  It varies in quality like every music variety, but it has am appeal to me musically that it doesn't for many people. (Though it is becoming increasingly more accepted, which, as I will note later, is a problem.)  Yet I've heard enough of it to deduce that something stinks, too.  I'm not getting fed up with people using bad grammar and a slang terms just in and of themselves.  I'm getting fed up with them for doing so because it's showing contempt for education in the most banal way popular, and because the slang terms are very often, something negative turned into a positive, and they aren't used facetiously, either.  I made certain to include in that drawing a lot of the terms for things I find particularly troublesome.  I do not like living in an era where "gangster", "pimp", and "dope" denote high quality and/or charisma, and furthermore, some relation to black people; had we only the latter connotation, everyone would see this association as blatantly racist, but somewhere along the line, hip-hop made vice look cool.  Which does not mean it isn't a huge problem for the race it's supposed to represent.

Usually, when people consume period literature, they remark on how different popular culture was back then.  Upon reading Malcolm X's autobiography, one of the most shocking things I discovered was that black popular culture actually wasn't very different.  Already in the World War II era, the ghettos were filled with black people using bad grammar and slang to be cool, and dealing in gambling, drugs, and prostitution to make themselves wealthy; many of them falling victim to the same temptations, or to rival gangsters, or the cops.  Malcolm X fell to all three, and during a long stint in prison, when he had a chance to meditate on all of it, came to the exact same conclusion I would decades later: The "gangsta" culture is degenerating the black race, and now it hasn't stopped at them, either.

In Malcolm's opinion, and especially that of the Nation of Islam, who were his mentors at the time, these things were largely set in motion by devious white members of society with the specific goal of keeping blacks down, and this could be true, as America was still quite a racist nation at the time. (Which is not to be taken as a wholesale endorsement of the NOI's beliefs, but sometimes it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing.)  It could also be Nietzschean resentiment; that is, people who find their lives in the low levels of society inescapable, identify aspects of their life in the low levels of society, and reinterpret them as positive parts of their identity that, in fact, make them above others; sinking into nihilism and becoming their own worst enemy.  It could be both.  What caused it, though, is not important.  The fact is that was the state of black popular culture then, and that it still is now proves that something in the Civil Rights movement didn't go quite right.

I've certainly had people suspect me of being a racist for my myriad attacks on what hip-hop values, and I actually wondered about my own negative views when I first started listening to such music, but now that I've found respected black sources that share my criticism, I feel no more reservations in stating it.  Listen to what these men (and now, women, too) are spouting and ask yourself what it says to listeners about their race.  What does it say when black people revel in subverting grammar standards taught in school?  What does that say about intelligence?  What does it say when black people brag about killing other black people (whom they frequently call by the N word) for being competing criminals?  Whom does that really help?  What does it say when they brag about their diamonds, which were quite possibly mined in Africa by other black people enslaved by terrorists?  What does it say when they brag about their price-gouged designer clothes, made by companies run by white people?  What does it say when they boast about subjugating women to be their "bitches" and "hoes", and their hatred of homosexuals, when the trod-upon members of society should be helping each other out?  Who's the racist here; us people who criticize this shit, or the people who endorse it and actually buy it as a quintessential part of being black?

If a white person drew this picture, how would your reaction change?  Should it matter?

Now, some will say things are improving.  That we don't have many lyrics about killing other black people anymore (though it took two hugely influential and respected rappers dying in a feud to stop it), or about violent crime in general.  Now, it's just people bragging about their obscene wealth; partially squandered on status symbols that are only worth so much because people are stupid enough to pay that much for them, and their virtual sex slaves, and their drugs.  So whereas before, hip-hop sold an image of black people as tough and immoral, now it just makes them look immoral.  Is that an improvement?  It certainly isn't a fix to the damage that this culture has done.

Things aren't looking to stop, either.  Nietzsche said something else about resentiment; he said that, while it's born among those at the low end of society who have the most impetus to make it the most hypnotic, it can spread upward, as the forced valuation of the trappings of being at the low end of society sweeps people higher up in its spell.  That's what's happening now, when non-black people imitate what they mistakenly believe is black culture and think is cool.  It's happening in the casual, positive use of "gangsta" and "pimp" and "dope", it's happening in the Far East Movement's ridiculously pretentious claims of being awesome for getting high off cough syrup, it's happening in myriad young people, of every race, who view success as doing immoral things for money, all so they can buy Gucci and Louis and ice and dope and SUVs with decorated hubcaps.  If this cancer ever spreads to the point that society breaks down from being too immoral and stupid to function, whom do you think they're going to turn around and blame?  The black people, whom hip-hop convinced them started this all.

This is why I feel absolutely justified in mocking the stupidity and one-dimensionality of many rappers, because they don't represent their race or what's good for their race; they represent a lifestyle that gives hollow, short-term gain to a few people while being worse in the long run for them, and worse immediately for many others.  Now if you enjoy this music, as I do, go on back and enjoy it some more; the same as you might enjoy hearing Scarr sing about how he plans to kill Mufasa and crush the remaining opposition.  But think about how things could be better; how rap could be turned into something that retains its appeal and edge without being stupid and immoral, and consider drawing the line more thickly sometime in the very near future.