NoWhere on the Ohio River

I’ve tried to put myself into a routine of jogging/walking every year for the past few years.  Obesity and heart disease are a plague to the men in my family.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to stick with it.  I suppose the same is true of blogging.  I’ve read of the “tyranny of blogs” at other sites.  It’s something of a nagging sense of duty to maintain posts on the thing on a regular basis.  Yet, I’ve found it difficult to balance what to post on here versus what to reserve for submission to other media.  The same is true of The Hog’s Head, too.  I’ve just never been able to maintain a regular schedule.  The limits of my creativity, imagination, and critical acumen have been polished into a nice sheen over the last couple of months, too. 

And, of course, I’ve been squirreled away inside a few major obsessions over the last couple of months.  I’ve beaten Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4; I’m also reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and Falling Man with great attention to detail, as well.  I’m kicking around longer article ideas for both games and for Falling Man.  And I’m thoroughly psyched about The Dark Knight — nearly every advanced review I’ve seen has given the film extremely high praise purely on its merits as a film, whether a “comic book movie” or not. 

The recent good news is that my article on rethinking narrative structure in light of games will be published in The CEA Critic later this year — my first major publication.  Putting the first one behind me is a real confidence boost, especially because I’ve been sitting on one draft or another of that article for a couple of years, now.  Once I revise it for the journal, I’ll need to revise a few references that were current during the drafting, but are now outdated.  But I have some confidence that I can write for an audience other than my friends and family. 

Plans for the future include posts on these games, books, and recent movies I’ve watched, including Atonement — which might be one of the most heartbreaking and stunning films I’ve ever seen. 

In looking at the blog’s stats, the number of hits per day has stayed surprisingly steady.  This is a shock to me considering it’s really had one new post in the last month and a half.  If you’ve stuck around, thank you. 

Here’s to hoping both the blog and my career continue to grow.

Most importantly, today marks my fourth anniversary with my beautiful and amazing wife, Jamie.  Happy Anniversary, my dear!

This article from Gamasutra is a bit old, now, by Internet standards (last Tuesday), but the question is still relevant:  will videogames bite into the summer movie market?  I’ll grant you that I’m not the average gamer, but I am a bit of a nerd — and I managed to see both Iron Man and Indy 4 (on opening night, no less) while I have GTA IV in my PS3.  And I will see The Dark Knight, unless I’m dead.  I’m also reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at the moment, too.

I’m sure the market profits generated by the gaming industry over the last couple of years has raised plenty of eyebrows in Hollywood.  But, it seems to me that the summer blockbuster movie machine over the last four or five years has targeted the same market the gaming industry does.  Between comic book adaptations and 80s retro revivals in cinema, alongside the launch of next gen gaming, the last couple of years have been a geek’s dream come true.

I saw this article on Yahoo! this afternoon discussing Gears of War 2 and its violent content:

Whereas Gears 1 included an up-close attack that used a chainsaw blade on the lead character’s main weapon to dismember a foe, Gears 2 adds a reverse attack that actually slices an enemy in half — from the groin upwards. Elsewhere in the demo, presenter Cliff Bleszinski, the celebrated lead designer behind the Gears and Unreal series, showed off a new ability that let him use the corpse of a fallen enemy as a “meat shield”, soaking up bullets while he returned fire around its head. (para 3)

Interestingly enough, the details of this “complaint” aren’t exactly new.  The chainsaw kill move was present in the first game, and using enemy NPCs as shields is a comparatively old mechanic for videogames.  Why this now?  For one thing, GTA IV has opened up the door to this discussion (…again…).  Playing through the game, I do think Rockstar North is essentially giving a big middle finger to many of their social critics over the last five or six years.  Many little details take at least some of the objections stemming from Hot Coffee and poke at the audience with them, particularly the strip club sequences.  Keep reading →

One of my fellow Blogengamot members, Johnny from Behold a Phoenix, managed to score an interview with Dr. Michael Ward.  The interview discusses Ward’s book Planet Narnia (200 and his thesis concerning the narrative structures of Lewis’s Narnia series.  None of us in the Blogengamot had any clue Johnny had this up his sleeve.  So, to see it on the blog this morning, the morning Prince Caspian releases to theaters, was a very nice surprise!

A short column by Ian Bogost at WaterCooler Games addresses a question concerning just how satirical the GTA franchise actually is: 

Lazlow Jones is a writer, and he points out all the terrific textual and graphical materials that have always graced the storefronts, billboards, and airwaves of the series (sure to catch the NPR segment about GTA’s NPR radio station parody). But playing a couple hours of GTAIV tonight, I couldn’t help but wonder if the bite of the gameplay will ever catch up. As an advocate for the power of the procedural representation of social and political positions in games, I can still appreciate the clever signage and speech in the series. I have a long way to go before I’ll know if GTAIV cashes out its social critique in its model of the world rather than just in the skin it puts around it, but part of me wonders why, if it does, I haven’t yet felt that sensation two hours in. (para 2)

In some sense, Bogost is right, that the crux of the satirical content in these games has always been the “clever signage” and lateral details of the game, particularly the radio content.  Keep reading →

I’m suprised, looking at my stat tracker, that so many have continued visiting the site over the last week and a half or so.  It’s not like the blog gets a ton of hits or anything, but the stats have remained fairly steady, even creeping upward ever so slightly.  To those of you who have RSS’d the site or simply bookmarked it, thank you.

The family emergency I mentioned in the earlier post has been largely resolved.  My father-in-law suffered a severe heart attack.  Thankfully, he is recoving and doing quite well.  Many friends emailed me and spoke to me privately and offered support and prayers.  I thank all of you who did so. 

In other good news, I was recently admitted into Old Dominion University’s doctoral program in Rhetoric and Textual Studies to begin coursework this fall!  Wish me luck; I’ll need it.

I have Grand Theft Auto IV, but I’ve only played for about three and a half hours.  Between my father-in-law and grading finals for eight sections of writing and composition classes, leisure time has been an elusive commodity.  I will post some more coherent thoughts concerning the game and its story (the more serious tone is an interesting shift for the series).  I’ll also begin posting some material concerning other things I’m playing and reading this summer while I have some time (between summer session classes). 

I want to apologize for the inactivity here for the last week and a half or so.  I’ve been extremely busy with student work.  Unfortunately, the inactivity will continue for a few more days due to a family emergency. 

In the meantime, check out the review of GTA IV from IGN.  You should do yourself the favor of watching the video review, as well, if for no other reason than the gameplay footage — most of Rockstar’s released video has been primarily cutscene footage.  Frankly, the gameplay visuals look better. 

Thanks for your patience.

~Dave