Friday Freenis: Zombie Capping

As a Lovecraft fan and all-around supporter of putting bullets in zombie dome, I can't resist pointing out Deanimator, a flash game based on Lovecraft's story "Herbert West: Reanimator" (the game site includes a very nice compilation of the serialized story, available here). Put down the never-ending zombie onslaught with some well-placed blasts. This is definitely a short-play kinda game; you'll likely see most there is to see in a few minutes. But it is stylish and clearly aligned with the Axis of Good in the never-ending War on Zombies.

[Thanks to creator Bum Lee and the indispensable games site Jay is Games.]

CONTINUE READING...

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Modern-Day Book Burners Ban Blankets

The modern-day equivalent of book burners have struck again in the heart of conservative and ignorant America (a previous attack here). As reported at the Comics Reporter, and then picked up in local and blogospheric media, a library in Missouri has pulled from its shelves two graphic novels, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson. I haven't read Fun Home, but Blankets is probably the most emotionally resonant graphic novel I have ever read. Of course readers will find drawings of boobies, a couple penises, teenage sexuality, sexual abuse, and a community of closed-minded religious conservatives in the book. They will also find a very moving and honest portrait of a young man growing up, and a thoughtful analysis of the way we make meaning in our lives through art.

Defenders of comic books and free expression generally have written to the library board in Marshall, Missouri, asking them to protect First Amendment rights. The letter also points out what seems like a no-brainer in this case: Blankets, at least, is not pornographic as the one complaining moron in Marshall claimed. Why closed-minded and conservative types will forever seek to deny aspects of the world around them is beyond me. To deal with difficult things that young adults face in their lives is noble, and literature that does this should be embraced by honest people everywhere.

The library has only temporarily removed the books from its shelves. I'm hoping they wisely decide to replace them. Stay tuned, as more meetings are expected this week.

[Thanks Marc!]

CONTINUE READING...

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Getting Serious About Games

All games are supposed to be fun. But some games are also designed to teach something, whether it's how to kill and be killed for Uncle Sam in America's Army, or how to be a good capitalist and get paid in Lemonade Stand. These so-called serious games get a good overview in the form of a roundtable discussion in the September 2006 issue of Harper's. In an article called "Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games," some teachers, writers, and game-world luminaries like Raph Koster and Steven Johnson discuss how games might teach reading and writing. It's got it's crazy bits, but over all it is a good introduction to a more intellectual side of gaming.

Take your medicine after the jump.

The article is not online yet, so I'll just pull out a few of the more interesting bits. The panelists start talking about the easy stuff: how games can teach grammar, spelling, and the like. As Harper's editor and discussion moderator Bill Wasik notes, "Rote learning is where video games would naturally excell." I was glad to see Koster, game designer and author of A Theory of Fun, give a nod to Typing of the Dead, the most ill typing tutor ever.

Koster says one thing games can bring to pedagogy is the concept of a "magic circle," a space in which play and experiment is encouraged and the pressure to succeed is reduced. The goal would be to make it clear that failure was okay, because learners would be working in a game world, not the real world.

Yet all participants acknowledge that games have a harder time teaching things like argument and plot. Koster and Johnson suggest that writing game FAQs and guides is one way games can teach logical, sequential thinking, but obviously this is somewhat outside of games proper.

Games also suffer compared to literature in teaching things like plot construction. Yet I was suprised and happy to see a very keyed-in teacher named Jane Avrich from St. Ann's School in Brooklyn bring up Indigo Prophecy as a game that might teach narrative structures in terms of a writer's (and story character's) choices.

But, as Koster points out, many "games aren't trying to teach you to assemble stories; they're trying to give you the story experience." He adds that games have trouble with complex story elements. "All nuance is lost in games," he says, because games depend so much on plot over something like rich characterization. Fair enough point. But Johnson throws out the baby when he states, "I doubt that video games are capable of dealing with psychological depth at all." What? Check out my recent post on stories in games for my feelings about this.

The discussion wraps up with the age-old are-games-art? discussion. If you've followed this debate elsewhere, you'll know it will probably go nowhere and get really frustrating along the way. Moderator Wasik drops some weird statements that no one follows up on ("insofar as video games might soon rise to a kind of art, they will do so by changing the nature of art itself"; "It seems then, as if video games might serve ideas better than they will serve art").

But although the article ends on a very positive note by writer and teacher Thomas De Zengotita, he mixes it with a silly dig at games.

Everyone in the overdeveloped world will have the tools they need to create this amazing stuff, whether it be blogs or films or games. None of it will rise to the peaks that we associate with names like Joyce or Proust, but a great deal of it will be fantastic ... Everyone will be an artist, but the price is that no one will be a great artist.

Wait, this has been a really interesting discussion about games that takes them seriously and gets deep without getting too obnoxious, so why is it ending with this obnoxious statement? Does Joyce need defending against games? Give me Koster again.

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It's Yours To Do With What You Like!

This past weekend I spent more than an hour paralyzed in a book store. I had a $50 gift certificate to spend. I had in hand just one book that I knew I wanted. Otherwise, I spent time holding and replacing three others that I just kinda wanted. I ended up leaving with nothing.

I’ll be back, of course. This time with a plan, knowing what I’ll get. And I’ll definitely get that one book I knew I wanted: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders.

I discovered Saunders a few years ago after one of his stories, “Jon,” was published in the New Yorker. It is the best story I have ever read in the New Yorker, and one of the most exciting short stories that I have read in years. I’ll paste an introductory section after the jump, and link to a full version.

The New Yorker used to have a link to the story up, but it no longer works. Unfortunately, the only online version I could find is in a terrible format for reading. If you’re interested, I’d recommend copying the text and pasting it into a word processor for easier reading. Here’s the teaser:

Jon
By George Saunders

Back in the time of which I am speaking, due to our Coördinators had mandated us, we had all seen that educational video of "It's Yours to Do With What You Like!" in which teens like ourselfs speak on the healthy benefits of getting off by oneself and doing what one feels like in terms of self-touching, which what we learned from that video was, there is nothing wrong with self-touching, because love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be, so go off alone, see what is up, with you and your relation to your own gonads, and the main thing is, just have fun, feeling no shame!

And then nightfall would fall and our facility would fill with the sounds of quiet fast breathing from inside our Privacy Tarps as we all experimented per the techniques taught us in "It's Yours to Do With What You Like!" and what do you suspect, you had better make sure that that little gap between the main wall and the sliding wall that slides out to make your Gender Areas is like really really small. Which guess what, it wasn't.

That is all what I am saying.

Also all what I am saying is, who could blame Josh for noting that gap and squeezing through it snakelike in just his Old Navy boxers that Old Navy gave us to wear for gratis, plus who could blame Ruthie for leaving her Velcro knowingly un-Velcroed? Which soon all the rest of us heard them doing what the rest of us so badly wanted to be doing, only we, being more mindful of the rules than them, just laid there doing the self-stuff from the video, listening to Ruth and Josh really doing it for real, which believe me, even that was pretty fun.

And when Josh came back next morning so happy he was crying, that was a further blow to our morality, because why did our Coördinators not catch him on their supposedly nighttime monitors? In all of our hearts was the thought of, O.K., we thought you said no boy-and-girl stuff, and yet here is Josh, with his Old Navy boxers and a hickey on his waist, and none of you guys is even saying boo?

Because I for one wanted to do right, I did not want to sneak through that gap, I wanted to wed someone when old enough (I will soon tell who) and relocate to the appropriate facility in terms of demographics, namely Young Marrieds, such as Scranton, PA, or Mobile, AL, and then along comes Josh doing Ruthie with imperity, and no one is punished, and soon the miracle of birth results and all our Coördinators, even Mr. Delacourt, are bringing Baby Amber stuffed animals? At which point every cell or chromosome or whatever it was in my gonads that had been holding their breaths was suddenly like, Dude, slide through that gap no matter how bad it hurts, squat outside Carolyn's Privacy Tarp whispering, Carolyn, it's me, please un-Velcro your Privacy opening!

Then came the final straw that broke the back of my saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV's "Hot and Spicy Christmas" (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot 'n' Nasty Positions before the end of "We Three Kings," only then, sadly, during Her on Top, Thumb in Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me, saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

And then she kissed me with a kiss I can only describe as melting.

So imagine that is you, you are a healthy young dude who has been self-practicing all those months, and you wake from that dream of a hot chick giving you a melting kiss, and that same hot chick is laying or lying just on the other side of the sliding wall, and meanwhile in the very next Privacy Tarp is that sleeping dude Josh, who a few weeks before a baby was born to the girl he had recently did it with, and nothing bad happened to them, except now Mr. Slippen sometimes let them sleep in.

What would you do?

Seriously. Read more here.

CONTINUE READING...

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Absurdist Poetry, Web Zen Style

This is the best poem I've ever read about bees:

The Bee Larva is a bee growth
growth to arrive
some at that time period (the period of Larva),
be placed in the period of Larva,
the bee nourishment in material is very abundant.
Merchandise Bee Larva is male bee
each nourishment of larva vegetable
that male Bee Larva,
very plentifulness in nourishment,
from its at 10 day hour contain the deal
tallest.
Under the normal feeding condition,
each bee inside male Bee Larva is not much,
the agriculture of bee also does not
let excessive male bee larva,
such as excessive male bee larva, etc.
goes to heaven as a fairy
the building changes into the adulthood drone empress,
in addition to having minority and virgin king hands over the tail,
the superfluous drone light eat to do not fuck live,
consumed the bee the animal feed in the cluster unnecessarily.

If you're wondering who just used a verbal machete to flay and eviscerate your whole concept of bees, check out the copy in its original form. I didn't change anything but the linebreaks.

Okay, the "poem" is obviously a poorly translated bit of copy from a Chinese company that is trying to sell bee larvae, presumably for some alternative medicine-y reason (wanna love your wife bigger?). The text was probably sensible in the original language, but rendered surreal by running it through a computer translator.

Still, as I found it, it is poetry. My brain seeks meaning.

Behind the logomania, I detect some things I know about the life of honey bees.

Under the normal feeding condition,
each bee inside male Bee Larva is not much,
the agriculture of bee also does not
let excessive male bee larva,

I know that! I think... Male bees, called drones, are a distinct minority in the hive. They are vastly outnumbered by their sisters, the worker bees. And drones will get the boot if food supplies run short.

But the text has some turns of phrase which only make partial sense.

in addition to having minority and virgin king hands over the tail,
the superfluous drone light eat to do not fuck live,

Um, I know that when drones mate with a queen it is a life-and-death affair. As the drone gives up the sperm, his reproductive organs are ripped out (king hands over tail?) and he dies soon after.

But I love the dreamy quality behind it all, the pieces that only seem intelligible on the edges of reason and that blur into a haze when I really stop to think about it.

goes to heaven as a fairy
the building changes into the adulthood drone empress,

Something about the metamorphosis from larvae to adult? The necessity of moving out of one hive so that a new queen can create a new hive?

And the pathos of the last line!

consumed the bee the animal feed in the cluster unnecessarily.

which I choose to read like a sort-of haiku:

consumed,
the bee,
the animal,
feed in the cluster unnecessarily.

The passions that drive biological cycles are so strong, but in the end, so pointless.

Or am I reading too much into it?

CONTINUE READING...

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Watching the Watchmen Watchers

Slate has an essay up about the 20th anniversary edition of the Watchmen. Overall the review is positive (it calls the book a masterpiece). It also gives props to Judge Dredd, the number-one, most super-awesome superhero comic of all time. But the essay wraps up with this incredibly insulting, anti-intellectual tone that ruins any good that went before because it ultimately reveals a disdain for the comic book form. Here's the quote:

But did the comic book have to "grow up"? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

Most of the essay before this was fine. I'm 100% down with a critical view of the Watchmen, especially considering the lame hagiography seen in other reviews. It drives me crazy when media like the New York Times or the New Yorker get hip to comic books like 20 years after the fact (Peter Schjeldahl's recent essay in the New Yorker was particularly annoying).

But the end of this Slate piece is retarded. Frankly, Mr. Shone, I would much rather read a challenging work than curl up next to a pack of commercialized sweet nothings. Life is too short for challenging yourself with art? It sounds like you have to grow up and learn that taking risks can help you grow intellectually. The idea that you don't have time for that is a pretty weak defense.

CONTINUE READING...

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