Game On, Gray Lady, Game On

While it's always amusing to see the New York Times catch up with the more leading edge press -- What's this? People pay monthly fees for some sort of electronic game? Over the internets? What next, miniature phones you can put in your pocket? -- a front page story there is undeniably a benchmark that the subject has hit the mainstream.

This time, it's gold farmers (visit www.bugmenot.com if you don't have a nytimes.com account). Stale news to many of us, but surely a novel head-scratcher to those outside the dev or player community.

For a fictional take on this phenomenon, read Cory Doctorow's short story Anda's Game. It deals with gold farming in MMOGs, but also the medium's larger questions of identity, community, and achievement both true and illusory.

Extra Dry

I stumbled across Martini Shot, TV writer Rob Long's weekly commentary on Hollywood, while driving home the other night. For you Southland locals, it airs on KCRW 89.9, but is also available on Teh Intarweb in podcast format.

Entertaining insider stuff, from hosting stargazers in denial to a new take on Scientologists to more nifty TV show lingo. Though successful and experienced, Long's just as neurotic as the rest of us, be it calling up for the network overnights in a cold sweat or trying (and failing) to reassure a doubtful friend that he Really Is Happy for the friend's lush studio deal.

I think a debate is in the offing between Josh Friedman and Long, who in one piece calls us monkeys to task for our poor sartorial sense. Sweatpants deathmatch!

CSI: San Fernando Valley

What is up with that terrible Jeff Kent pornstar mustache lately sprouted on otherwise toothsome Nick Stokes (George Eads)?

Wacka-chicka-wacka-chicka...

Talking the Talk

Because I am lazy and still digging out from post-Turkey Day catchup on all fronts, here instead of a real post is a link to a real one, Craig Mazin's informative and entertaining on-set glossary. Be sure to scroll down and read the comments for more insidery goodness.

It's fascinating (if not exactly surprising) how much movie lingo derives from that of the theater, which naturally has its own nutty lexicon. Carps and LX, ghost light, par cans, all that left is right/in is out nonsense, twofers, teasers and tormentors... And no, the latter are neither agents nor recalcitrant subscribers.

Going back further, some terms like "flying in" date to the days of tall ships, when many early theater technicians were former sailors, employing their knowledge of lines (not ropes, you fool) and knots in theatrical rigging.

See, it all comes back to pirates. Arrr!

Slumming with Microsoft

Have you seen those vague, arty Xbox 360 ads? The ones with aggressively multiculti crowds having balloon fights and jumprope jams in what looks like the sets from CITY OF GOD?

I think they're supposed to convey inclusiveness, fun, and diversity, but I'm left cold by the disingenuous casting and the poverty-chic setting. I mean, the people who live in those tower block apartments, you think they have $400 to drop on a game console? Instead of on schoolbooks or a bike to get to a job? Or, say, food?

And while it's fun to think of folk playing together regardless of age, gender, race, or class, the truth is, Xbox Live is not diverse. Xbox Live is this kid.

More to the point, it'll always be that kid until the games for Xbox 360 stretch beyond the predictable likes of Madden NFL 2006, Call of Duty 2, and Rumble Roses XX.

Rumble Roses XX?

That's a title that, to paraphrase a Katrina-era rant, deserves to have its developers covered in iPods and left in an unpicturesque alley in Rio.

Hey! The Microsoft marketing bunnies squeal. What about Xbox Live Arcade? Yeah, the service features puzzle/parlor classics Zuma, Bejeweled 2, and Spades, but with the occasional exception like Wik: Fable of Souls, innovation's wheezing by the roadside, and you know that developers of these kinds of games aren't getting a thimble of love compared to Project Gotham Racing 3.

Kinda makes me want to take to the streets of Redmond and throw something. But it ain't a water balloon.

Ante Up, Boys and Ghouls

Activision has a new game out called Gun, which sounds like a serviceable if not spectacular shooter.

What makes this Western-themed FPS interesting is Last Call Poker, the elaborate promotional alternate reality game, or ARG, that was built to promote it. The folks behind LCP are 42 Entertainment, which did the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2.

The Last Call Poker site includes a real, free poker room but also a parallel puzzle game about unlocking the backstory of the Activision game. The notion is that everyone in LCP, including you, is dead.

Dead doesn't mean eternally resting, though. You and your colleagues in the hereafter have bones to pick and missions to solve.

One nifty element is how the LCP site's visual style -- front page, poker room background, your avatar's clothing -- changes as the narrative has moved back in time to Gun's setting, from present day to WWII Europe to Prohibition to Deadwood.

Part of Gun's backstory follows the bloody history of the antique Navy Colt in question as it slam-bangs into the lives of cross-dressing orphans, OSS agents, Ambrose Bierce, Calamity Jane, Al Capone, and more. A second thread is a Tarantino-y, LA-set action drama about Lucy, poker ace, sometime chauffeur, and rightful owner of the gun in the present day, and all the colorful and homicidal characters hot on her trail.

Pretty entertaining stuff, even if the performances and writing tend to be a bit over the top. You can catch up on the previous episodes at the site.

As the community solves the puzzles, bits of story are revealed through photos, text, fake recorded phone calls, comic book pages, video snippets, and even live events, the last of which is being held this Saturday in a Hollywood cemetery. The event will feature a tournament of "Tombstone Hold 'Em," a poker game using headstones as pocket cards.

Should be interesting...

Truthful Videogame Boxes

Does "Katamari Damacy" really translate to "Magically Adhesive Ball of Garbage"? Maybe it should -- at least you'd know what you're getting.

Imagine the tears and effort that would be spared if your local Gamestop carried games that truthfully declaimed their content, such as Fanboy Bullshit VII and Roster Update NFL 2006.

The Great Indoors

Part of the reason I write things set in the mountains or in space or backpacking around Europe or attending UFO conventions is to have my characters do these things so I don't have to.

As a kid, a Girl Scout no less (a pre-Jack Thompson Girl Scout, mind you. Me and my Atari-playing friends would have no part of that lunacy), I used to go camping, and enjoyed it.

I got older and paler and found that I liked books and movies and the theater and computers more than insect bites and sand in inconvenient places. Any camping trip I'd consider now would probably need to involve a bed with sheets and WiFi.

This December, The Boyfriend, Sis and Brother-in-Law, Mom and Dad, and I are off to Central America. Don't get me wrong, I am very excited to be going. Beautiful country, Mayan ruins, time with folks I love, rum drinks.

It's the preparation I hate. Trips like these involve planning like you're Shackleton tasked with provisioning the goddamn Endurance. You get shot full of vaccines and buy weird things you never thought you'd need that are only sold in weird places.

REI. I'm in an REI, God help me.

I'm a room full of kayaks staffed by people who look like they're made out of beef jerky.

These people terrify me. I know, and they know that I know, that should the apocalypse come, they can and will track me down, joint, bone, and fillet me. Me, I can and will get eaten.

REI sells enchiladas that come in a mylar bag. This is somehow more hair-raising to me than the cannibal scenario.

REI staffers are very nice and very helpful and very cheerful, because they are trying to get you to become an official member of their beef jerky cult, with its associated rituals involving carabiners and helmets and crampons.

Hee! Crampons!

And you can't leave REI without buying something, because the place is overwhelming (did I mention the astronaut enchiladas?) and because the staff will hunt you and skin you in your sleep if you don't, because, y'know, they can.

I now own some unspeakably ugly sandals and shirts that "wick," whatever the hell that means. Wish me luck.

Meet Market

For writerly types in the LA area, there's going to be a gathering at the Hotel Figueroa's Veranda Bar this Sunday, 11/13, at 6pm after the Screenwriting Expo next door. Warren over at The Screenwriting Life has the details.

I may not be able to be there, but a bunch of cools folks will be, so come by if you can! Because writers and booze go together like...well, writers and booze.

Slainte, prosit, and na vashe zdorovye!

The Triumph of Met Expectations Part II

Spotted on TV this weekend, although happily not back-to-back on the same channel:

SANDWICHES THAT YOU WILL LIKE

WHEN SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS GET LEFT

Tasty!

Hallowhine

One of the few episodes of the excellent FREAKS AND GEEKS that I actually caught on TV was their Halloween show. It captures the death of the classic version of the holiday, both for one family and for society at large.

Travel with me, back, back, back, before the giant Spirit stores that pop up in September and vanish November 1 like mushrooms, before the boom industry of pre-packaged Slutty Cinderella and Slutty Ninja and Slutty Napoleon Dynamite costumes.

We're at around 1980 now. You with me?

The show's mom loves Halloween. Dresses up, decorates the house, makes homemade treats for the goblins that ring the doorbell.

This year, though, the younger kid decides he's too old to go trick or treating. The older girl doesn't want to stay home with mom, but wants to hang with her friends. The goblins throw away the treats because their parents fear that they could be poisoned.

The look of sadness and loss on the mom's face is heartbreaking, because not only are her children growing up too fast for her, she can see the end of something fanciful and connecting, mysterious, silly, to be shared with your family.

Flash forward to now, where surely in some neighborhoods the goblins still appear on the front stoop, going home to carefully sort through the candy to avoid the razor blades and syringes and anthrax powder, but not in mine.

The kids trick or treat at school, in the mall, at their parents' offices. Places well lit and clinical and utterly free of that wonderful frisson of being out after dark and talking to strangers! It was scary-but-not-really, because mom or dad was always behind you, curbside, with the flashlight.

This year, we got a grand total of two goblins the whole night, a very shy fairy and her bolder pirate sister, bless her little pillaging heart.

Leftover candy isn't worth it.

Hasselhoffed

I'm huge in Germany!

A quick check of my site referrer stats and a confirmation on the internets shows that a search for "maslow pyramid" on Google Deutschland returns Fresh Hell on the first page.

Next up, Google Sudetenland and maybe Google Austria.

Yeehaw

My ol' blog may hit a lull again this week, as I'm off to Texas today through Friday at the Austin Game Conference for online gaming tastiness.

I like the AGC. It's smaller than Game Developers Conference and cheaper, but with the same caliber of speakers and attendees and wholly focused on online.

Austin's also a fun town, or so I'm told by people who get invited to the parties.

I do not get invited to the parties.

While others are at the parties to which they have been invited, I am back in my hotel trying to get the in-room internets to work. Screw parties, there are games to be played, man!

A Quiet Drink

When I lived in New York, among the noisy scene clubs there were always a handful of places where you could go for a cocktail with friends and actually, y'know, be able to walk right in, sit down, and carry on an intelligible conversation.

In LA, not so much.

There must be places that aren't packed to standing-room capacity, that don't have that little rope outside going on, where the music isn't turned up so loud you get nodules on your larynx debating whether or not LOST has jumped the shark.

I suppose there are a couple such places. They're called "hotel bars."

And I don't mean the hotspots like the Standard or the Roosevelt. I'm talking old school, like Shutters on the Beach and the Fairmont. These, I love. Nice surroundings, sometimes a vocalist or jazz combo, usually decent pours, the occasional famous person ("Hey, isn't that Sean Penn over there ranting about the WHO and pandemics?").

Hipster bars at unfashionable hours also work, provided you bail before the crowd moves in and the volume goes up.

Any place else like that anyone knows of?

MMOG Mailbag Misfires

Got a couple of email missives this morning that really jarred my apricots.

First up, Blizzard sent World of Warcraft players a lengthy screed about an uptick in account theft and related fraud. Included in the letter was a dire warning about the dangers of downloading cheat programs, since they can include viruses and other nasties.

Funny, since this comes shortly after the revelation on Blue's News and elsewhere that WoW itself contains spyware.

That's right, the game you spent 40 bucks on plus your monthly fee regularly sniffs out the titles of open windows on your computer -- programs, email addresses, URLs, document titles -- and happily ships them off to Blizzard, who I'm sure has your best interests at heart.

Everyone got that?

Spyware that comes from the various internets: bad.

Spyware that comes from Blizzard: good!

Next up, City of Heroes sent players a note informing us of a character name policy change. Characters below level 35 who haven't been logged in in 90 days will have their names up for grabs for any active player.

What the fuck?

Is there anything more fundamental to identity than your name? In an online game, your avatar's name is your touchstone for relationships, networks, community, reputation. Is there any faster way to shred a player's connection to a game than to rip that away?

It's not like names take up any significant database space. I cannot understand why these games make it anything other than easy, seamless, and painless to restart a moribund account.

Back in our Star Wars Galaxies days, The Boyfriend logged back in after a long absence to discover that his house, factories, and all stored goods had vanished. No way to get them back. Pure restart for his character, in effect. Think he kept his account?

NCSoft says this policy change is due to player feedback. Yeah.

It's spelled "player feedback" but is pronounced, "Oh God oh God please please come back and play our game! World of Warcraft ate our lunch and soon DC Online and Marvel Online will launch and pick our bones clean. Please PLEASE oh God come back and play our game!!"

And since when are players so lacking in creativity and individualism that they demand a community-wrecking policy so that they can finally get that coveted name Sp1ddorzMan335?

Jeez. It's like, if Frank fails to call his Mom for a few weeks, his brother gets to be Frank.

It's okay, there's always Frank01.

Show Me the Way to Go Home/I'm Tired and I Wanna Go to Bed

For those who came here looking for the lyrics to this song, check out this link.

There may be other sites out there with this info, but this one has the lyrics along with the chording, plus some silly alternate lyrics.

Enjoy, and check out the rest of my blog if you're so inclined...

---

The posting here's been light of late due to busy weeks and weekends, sorry! Recently I went to an event in Hollywood for alumni from my university, which was a fun mix of reunion, networking, opinion (yours truly spoke on one panel), and stories.

Veteran producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, who brought us such classics as JAWS, THE VERDICT, and DRIVING MISS DAISY, were presented with an award to add to their already groaning shelves, and following the presentation engaged in a casual chat moderated by Todd McCarthy of Variety.

Good stuff. Zanuck and Brown decried the corporatization of the movie industry, and talked at length about the golden age studio heads. These were men who may never have gone to college but were far from uneducated, with a eye for story be it classic or contemporary. And, as Zanuck said, "They were showmen."

One of Zanuck and Brown's own anecdotes involved filming the underwater scenes for JAWS in Australia. The sharks were too small. They put a little person in a scuba suit inside a scaled-down shark cage, and voila! Big sharks.

Now, while I've since found this story in IMDb, I hadn't heard it before then (neither had McCarthy, which makes me feel better) and I wasn't sure if these two guys were putting us on (they also made THE STING, after all). But did it make me want to go watch JAWS again? You bet. Showmen indeed.

At this event, I also observed the sartorial taxonomy of Hollywood as described in Josh Friedman's latest hilarious post.

The actresses were amazingly easy to spot. They clustered together like gazelles, perhaps fearful that a predatory casting director would weed stragglers from the herd. All were pretty, about 10% thinner than the thin women found elsewhere in the US, every single one in a dress or skirt, and studiedly casual. They looked fabulous.

Me and my peeps, not so much. No one was in sweat pants, but more than one of us hid behind chunky glasses in an effort to look interesting and I give you one guess at the group who spent the evening hovering rather too near the open bar.

WGA: Older, Female, Minorities All Still Fighting for Their Share

The 2005 Hollywood Writers Report is out, summarizing earnings and employment trends in film and TV.

"Catching Up with a Changing America?" questions the report's title.

No, comes the answer in the following pages.

$12,000 pay gaps between female and male TV writers. Single digit employment percentages for minority feature writers. Earnings remaining steady for older writers while employment rates drop -- these cats are earning more but working less.

The reading's both grim and galvanizing.

I'm talking to you, women, writers of color, of all ages. Write well. Get hired. Change those damn charts.

The Kindest Cut

The recut "trailer" of THE SHINING as goopy family dramedy SHINING shows the power of music and voiceover in selling emotion, but even with the sound off, the juxtapositions zing, thanks to clever editing.

Jack Nicholson's hilarious look of comic frustration? Brilliant! Especially since it was homicidal rage the first time around.

The documentary THE CUTTING EDGE: THE MAGIC OF MOVIE EDITING (forgive them the obvious/dorky title) goes into fascinating detail about this invisible art, starting with film's birth and seminal films such as THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY to the Kuleshov experiment right up to the present with the impact of videogames and MTV on how -- and how quickly -- we process visual information.

In between, the documentary explores different schools of editing (the seamless style of D. W. Griffith as opposed to the media-aware jump cuts of Eisenstein), the role of editing in crafting stars out of actors (Sharon Stone's BASIC INSTINCT flash of naughty bits, anyone?), and the amazing care and detail required, as shown in scenes where Walter Murch constructs a sequence of COLD MOUNTAIN like a mosaic-maker placing tiles.

Should writers care about editing?

Spielberg, Scorsese, Cameron, Tarantino, and the rest of the all-star interview subjects all agree that the editing room is where the final draft of the screenplay is born. The unforgettable opening sequence of APOCALYPSE NOW wasn't in the script.

Even the SHINING trailer was prefigured decades ago, when Charles Ridley recut TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Nazi propaganda piece, into a silly musical short, THE PANZER BALLET, a somewhat less infamous British propaganda piece.

THE CUTTING EDGE aired as a special on Starz a while back, but is out now on DVD. Give it a spin.

Coming Soon... to Your Desktop

The Movies, Peter Molyneux's insanely ambitious studio sim slash digital backlot, has gone gold on the PC, with a release date in early November.

It's been a-comin' for a while. Somewhere I still have a promotional film-can tin of ossified Tootsie Rolls from the game's E3 2004 booth.

The time to market is understandable, since a bigger game it'd be hard to imagine. The Movies is part Civ/Sim-type game where you build and manage a movie studio from the 1920s to the present, part The Sims where you groom and manage stars through their careers, and part ready-made machinima engine, letting you create digital movies and share them online with other players. Any one of these threads could be a honkin' huge game in and of itself.

The UI implications alone are daunting -- any non-animators out there ever tried to create anything in a 3D animation program? Fun, like sand in your eyes.

The Movies clearly has sophisticated AI, much flexibility in framing scenes and shots, and a grounding in both the contemporary lore and fantasy of Hollywood as well as its scrappy, technology-driven roots.

I'm definitely intrigued. If Lionhead can pull it off, this could be another advance for social media and the democratization of filmmaking.

Players are already filming amazing things in games not at all designed for this, albeit mostly shelvable under Funny, Lewd, or Music Video. The Movies seems poised to offer a sandbox for much more, although I'm betting that the first batch of player films will be overrepresented in the Kick to the Groin and Batman/Alien/Star Wars/Firefly Crossover genres.

Funny how gonad injury and backyard fanboidom have become the ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT for this new generation of amateur filmmakers. Those Lumiere brothers missed out on a goldmine. Chumps.

Stakes, Well Done

Spoilers for PRISON BREAK follow.

The show's about some guys trying to break out of prison.

Specifically busting loose are Michael, a canny structural engineer, his older brother, the convicted murderer Lincoln, and a motley crew of cons, from amiable short-timer Sucre to Mafia middle manager Abruzzi (Peter Stormare in fine, unhinged if unconvincingly Italian form).

While preposterous in the extreme, the show's proved to be consistently good, inventive television, thanks in part to rich characters and strong performances, but largely due to the risk-taking present in nearly every episode.

This is a show where the lead character loses toes to hedge shears in episode two. Michael callously cost Sucre his conjugal visits -- and very likely his girl -- in a test of trust. The stern but reasonable warden has a skeleton in his closet that prompts ethically gray decisions; one of the bad guys is a family man headed for a crisis of conscience.

The show's got, y'know, layers.

PRISON BREAK, which airs on Fox, is about to go underground for a few weeks until the World Series wraps, and presented this lollapalooza volley of parting shots:

Michael triggers a lockdown to buy time for a crucial step of his tunnel-creating plan.

Lockdown turns to riot.

Inmates breach the cellblock.

Nasty Dangerous White Supremacist discovers the tunnel.

Rookie corrections officer about to become a snack for NDWS discovers the tunnel too.

Prison doctor (and governor's daughter) barricades herself futilely in the infirmary.

Musclebound assassin corners Lincoln in a dark passageway.

Michael's forced to make life and death choices: include the evil NDWS in the plan or let Abruzzi kill him? Rescue the doctor and risk revealing the plan? Sacrifice the corrections officer to keep the tunnel a secret?

That was just part one.

Part two solved some of these issues but introduced yet more wrinkles involving the knotty conspiracy behind Lincoln's conviction, and further put into jeopardy everything all the characters hold dear. Even one placid old prisoner's cat has gone missing.

The story manages to convey real danger, rather than the rather chilly and remote stakes behind other new shows such as THRESHOLD and INVASION, which have so far failed to click with me.

On PRISON BREAK, I have no idea what's going to happen, but I know the writers will pull no punches. I love that.

Will I be back once baseball's over? Oh, yeah.