October, 2009

Culture — 3 Comments
6
Oct 09

Eminence 2009: A Photoessay

You may have heard of Eminence.  Or, you may not have, in which case you’re missing out on one of the most interesting things happening in symphonic game music.

I wrote about them quite a few years ago when I still lived in Melbourne; unlike many other things in my life, I think I actually got it right at the time.  It’s about the music, sure, but it’s also about the importance of what Hiroaki Yura was trying to do by refreshing what is largely a dying market (in a very literal sense – have you been to a symphony recently?) through challenging what ‘classical’ music really means.

Classical symphonies have been stagnating for decades now; attendance rates are falling and the perceived relevance to your average person is at an all time low.  Put it this way – how many symphonies have you or people you know been to over the last year?  Now, to put it in context, how many people do you know have gone to see Wicked, anything by Cirque de Soleil, or generic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical #52?  Classical music has an image problem, and it’s a big one. Continue reading →

Culture — No Comments
2
Oct 09

Loaded Images #1

The visuals in our games are more than the sum of their pixels.

The tightrope that must be walked when producing global media such as games may as well be a multinational one strung up between the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. Crossing it is a treacherous balancing act indeed. Aimed at various groups from a multitude of cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, these digital creations have to appeal to the senses and sensibilities of an incredibly vast and continuously expanding audience, especially as the industry grows and borders continue to dissolve.

It was more clearly brought to my attention when a feminist gaming blog, with the very utilitarian title of ‘Feminist Gamers’, were made privy of their own accord to a roundtable I organised on PALGN. While the topic of the original discussion had been on sexism in games, somehow amid the chatter about gender representations, the issue of games containing controversial symbolism in general was brought up. One example that stood out to me immediately – probably because I was spending far too much time in Azeroth at the time – was that of some NPCs strung up by nooses from the trees of World of Warcraft’s Tirisfal Glades. A US based commenter with the username ‘Moira’ made the point that, for her, this was an incredibly confrontational sight. Continue reading →

Culture / Experience — 7 Comments
2
Oct 09

Primed, but never ready

“Hi, my name is Joe Gamer, and I have a problem. I can’t finish what I start … actually, I can’t start, full stop.”

Five years later, she still sits there. Taunting me. Reminding me of my eternal inability to commit.

You can’t blame her. I’ve had every chance to make a move, but there’s always been a distraction, a far more important obligation in my life. At least, those are the excuses today: university degrees to endure, professional careers to chase. There’s no time for fleeting indulgences when my future is persistently on the line, right? But she doesn’t understand … how could she?

‘She’ is an inanimate object, after all. Continue reading →

Academic / Culture — 12 Comments
2
Oct 09

Boring Art, Boring Debates

The ‘videogames as art’ debate has gone around and come around. Sure, we’re all bored with it, but is that a good enough reason to drop it permanently?

It’s no secret that videogames struggle for legitimacy. Every gamer has their own personal memory of their hobby scorned, buried deep in their unconscious, waiting for the right moment to erupt and turn them into a blubbering mess of Freudian analysis.

Personally, my own was born of a games journalist. Three years ago, Chris Buffa rightly took apart games journalism. It was inspiring stuff, but the most devastating quote encouraged videogame journalists to “keep in mind that no matter how successful you may think that you are, there’s a very hot person in a bar that’s going to laugh in your face when you inform them what you do for a living (they’ll be sober, by the way).”

Oh. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 3 Comments
2
Oct 09

Play Ball, Sports Fans!

Embarking on a voyage of discovery needn’t involve travelling to foreign countries, although it may sometimes feel like it.

I’m not much of a sportsman.  As far as revelations go, that ranks up there somewhere between MTV’s sudden realisation that Kanye West is a general jackass and that Cliffy B has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with too many burly men packed into too small a space too far away from their wives.  Who, apparently, are ‘unfortunately’ no longer in the picture, so to speak.

But, I digress.

I’m not much of a sportsman; on some level, I never really got sports.  Basketball I understood, but then again, I was tall.   And, when you’re tall and speak with an American accent in Australia, it’s a given that you can shoot a hoop, trash talk, and dunk.  Still, performance on the court aside, on some level I could at least get the attraction to sports.  If not physically then intellectually – the rules offered interesting dynamics, even if I frequently couldn’t play worth squat. While I didn’t have close to the requiste knowledge to understand A-list team dynamics, the attraction constantly floated just beyond my realm of comprehension, much like most of the deconstructionism we covered in English lit.  There was something there, even if I couldn’t touch it, explain it, or fully understand it. Continue reading →

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