XCOM: A Love Story

I really am trying to write on this thing more regularly, so here we go: let's talk about one of my favorite games from the last couple of years: XCOM! Well, XCOM 2, really. I played both, and lots of this applies to both, but we’re mostly going to talk about the second one.

There's a lot to praise about XCOM 2, and I won't waste your time with a full breakdown, but in case you aren't familiar let me give you a quick summary: aliens have taken over earth, you control a guerrilla resistance trying to kick them off the planet, and you have full control over how the job gets done. You recruit soldiers, name them, customize them, equip them, deploy them on missions, level them up, and ultimately scream in anguish and smash your controller when they are killed in action—because here's the twist: when playing on Ironman mode (the only way to play XCOM, if you ask me) when a soldier dies, they are dead forever. Period. All the time and effort you spent on them is gone. You can salvage their equipment, but only if you extract their body at the end of the mission.

And this feature was instrumental to my love of the game. The stakes have never been higher for me as a player than when a seasoned and beloved soldier is lying critically injured on the battlefield and their survival depends on whether I can reach them in time to extract them. And you better believe I’m going to try, maybe even at cost of losing the mission or even the whole game. The intensity this adds, and the depth, cannot be overstated.

But beyond the pure mechanical aspect of permadeath, it also helps turn XCOM into a shining example of interactive storytelling.

Some of my designer friends have argued with me about this, saying that its wrong to describe this aspect of the game as being a story element, but I think it is. XCOM is not story-heavy in the traditional sense, or at least what most people think of as the traditional sense: your Final Fantasies or your Bioshocks—games with extensive voice acting, lengthy dramatic cutscenes, complex plots. XCOM has some of these things, and uses them sparingly, but gameplay is front-and-center, and to the naysayers that means that it’s not “story driven.”

And I disagree with that.

In XCOM, your soldiers are people. They have names, appearances, temperaments. Around the HQ you’ll find them drinking at the bar, or chatting in the lounge, or sleeping in the barracks. If they are injured on a mission, they need time in the infirmary to heal before they can be deployed again. And through the various customization mechanics they will gain experience, acquire new equipment, and rack up confirmed kills. Sure, they don’t engage in complex dialogue, or take part in cutscenes (though wouldn’t it be cool if they did?), but even so, attachment to them is inevitable, and that’s all you need for a story. Characters and conflict, both of which are found in abundance. And from that springs a variety of organic storytelling scenarios, ones with real consequences. Like my wounded soldier example earlier: any time one of your guys goes down, you’ve got a very important decision to make. Staging a rescue may throw the mission into jeopardy, which in turn can have dire consequences for the whole campaign. Sometimes you have to let a beloved soldier die for the greater good. Other times the mission is not vital, and immediate extraction is preferable to losing your star sharpshooter. Sometimes you can’t afford to lose either, and the remainder of the mission is spent trying to accomplish the objectives with a man down, your remaining squad members taking turns hauling around their wounded teammate on their backs. And not only are these decisions mechanically interesting but they’re emotionally impactful. I knew all my soldiers by name by the time I beat the game, and the ones I lost along the way stung. The major thrust of the story, plot wise, remains unchanged (assuming you successfully fend off the invasion), but the moment to moment drama for me came much more from these organic interactions with my soldiers than from any of the (sparse) scripted story moments seeded throughout the campaign.

Briefly indulging in a rant: I wish more games melded story and gameplay the way XCOM does. Too many games feel like story and gameplay are kept in separate boxes, and “gameplay” simply means shooting your way to the next cutscene. Modern games sometimes try to disguise this problem by letting the player be in control during vital story moments, but when this happens the game will often devolve into a game of Simon Says for the duration of the sequence, where the player is railroaded into taking the exact series of actions which the plot requires. To me, this isn’t interactive storytelling. It’s more like a movie, one which I’m only allowed to watch if I complete a lengthy series of quick-time events as it plays. And I’ll tell you right now: I’d rather just watch the damn movie. If it’s a game, I want my choices to matter.

Anyway, that’s more or less that. For anybody who likes strategy games, I highly recommend XCOM and XCOM2. Hell, even if you don’t. Might broaden your horizons.

-N

Infinite Jest, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Tennis

I've decided to try to limit myself to five hundred words or so for these posts in order to encourage myself to blog more frequently. We'll see how that works out.

So, Infinite Jest!

For those of you who don't know, Infinite Jest was the novel of the 90's as far as the literary world was concerned, a thousand-plus-page opus from David Foster Wallace, often called a masterpiece, often called pretentious academic garbage, often called a lot of things because it is often discussed, and maybe that's a good enough reason to check it out on it's own. That's certainly what spurred me.

Infinite Jest is dense, and hard to summarize, but most succinctly it concerns the titular film, mostly referred to as simply "the Entertainment," which is so mesmerizing that anyone who watches it loses the desire to do anything except watch it again and again until they inevitably die, no longer having any inclination to attend to even basic bodily needs. The plot involves Canadian terrorists searching for the master copy in order to make copies and for mass dissemination as a kind of weapon against the United States, who have absorbed Canada as part of a new Organization of North American Nations, a kind of semi-hostile takeover in the guise of an alliance. There are dozens of characters and much of the actions centers around an elite tennis academy and a sort of halfway house nearby. It all takes place in the near future where years are no longer numbered but named by various corporations after consumer products. If this all sounds very weird then you're absolutely right.

I started reading Infinite Jest primed to hate it. Several authors and critics I respect had expressed negative opinions of it, and many of the things I knew about David Wallace and his writing style were turn-offs. The whole postmodern thing has always seemed kind of masturbatory to me, and my eyes generally start to roll when that certain breed of modern novelist starts "satirizing" advertising and consumer culture, portraying US citizens as mindless corporate pawns, which has always smacked false to me, like your out-of-touch dad turning on the TV to an episode of Beavis and Butthead and extrapolating from that his entire opinion of millennial society.

And to start with, my preconceptions seemed accurate. It took a few hundred pages for my opinion to start changing. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and I would agree, if not for the novel's reputation I doubt I would have had the drive to power through it, but let me put it this way: Infinite Jest is on its own wavelength, and it took me time to adjust to it's eccentricities: the fractal structure, the large cast, the way it sort of bounces off important conflicts and plot points rather than dealing with them directly--it's frustrating if you're not prepared for it, and I wasn't. But around maybe page 300 I was starting to get in the groove of things, and another two hundred pages later I was tearing through the book, finishing the second half in a couple weeks after slogging through the first half for a few months. Near the end of the book I was as eager to chew through fifty pages on the nuances of competitive tennis as anything else, and if that's not the product of some kind of genius I don't know what is.

I won't try to summarize themes, or analyze Wallace's writing style, or any of the other sorts of things I would be tempted to do with most other media that I am likely to blog about on here, because frankly I'm unqualified. What I will say is this: reading Infinite Jest fundamentally changed my understanding of writing as an art form, and gave me new lenses through which to examine myself as a person, and if that's not the mark of great fiction, I don't know what is. It's a difficult read, but worth it, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Damn, not quite under 500 words, I'll have to try harder next time.

-N

Long Time No See

Heyo. It's been a long time since the hate filled anger fueled rant against Arrival that spurred me to start blogging. Not that anyone minds, since readership here is zero. But writing movie rants is fun so what the hell.

Let's see...

Marvel has had a good year, knocked it out of the park three times while DC was busy making a mess of things. Same old same old. I think Spider-man: Homecoming was the best of the three. They couldn't have hoped for a much better reboot for their most popular character. Tom Holland is magnetic. I expect he'll be carrying the MCU torch after Robert Downey Jr's face finally wrinkles beyond the ability of Hollywood's finest to digitally de-age it.

I think I was most surprised by mother!, Darren Aronofsky's infamous box office bomb. I went into it with no idea what it was, which is the way I would recommend it. I hadn't had the mystery of it spoiled beforehand and didn't quite get the metaphor until near the end, which made the viewing experience absolutely spellbinding for me. Everything from the cinematography to the performances was top notch. I'm going to be a pretentious ass and suggest that the film was too smart for general audiences--not necessarily for the symbolism and the bible metaphor at it's core, but because it was essentially an art film, lacking most of the archetypal story elements a general audience clings to like a liferaft when things get weird. I suspect most of them just got confused and then bored and then pulled out their cell phones. Also there is a particularly grisly scene at the three-quarter mark that earns the film's R rating a few times over which probably alienated most of the audience members who'd made it that far. Boredom combined with disgust does not a blockbuster make. But if the aesthetics of good filmmaking and sheer strangeness are enough to keep you interested (and you don't mind gore) I would definitely recommend mother!.

In a similar vein I finally saw VVitch, which I would also recommend. Simplicity is it's strength, a tight little story shot for 4 million dollars with some unknown actors, and I hope the comparatively large box office return encourages it's director and writer to continue to make movies. It's a moody piece, good visual storytelling, and excellent performances all around. It's also the rare horror film that has hardly any jump-scares. The fear comes from the looming dread of it's atmosphere. 10/10.

I also caught up on all Taika Waititi's movies in preparation for Thor (which was very good, let us say no more about it), and found both Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do In The Shadows to be delightful. Taika knows what he's doing, and I hope he has a Tarantinian career in Hollywood. And Taika's self-cast roles are highlights of their respective films, a trait he does not share with Tarantino, and thank god for that. (No hard feelings Quentin.)

Other things, other things. Books.

Infinite Jest is a postmodern jerkoff, but we all knew that. Still ploughing through it anyways. It even manages to be pretty entertaining when it forgets its hostility toward its audience long enough to be coherent.

Finished Ulysses after a month long slog, the second of two big literary cinderblocks I committed to gnawing through this year, the experience of which was occasionally electrifying and often miserable, but I think I understand the hype now that all's said and done. It's expanded my idea of what can be done with prose considerably. Moreso even than Anthony Doerr's work in All The Light We Cannot See (also read it this year, loved it, Doerr is a poet) I get the sense that every word and sentence and punctuation point has been placed with surgical precision. I did not get that feeling from Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, which I also read this year. It had its moments but it didn't really stick with me. But the Ulysses void in my literary brain has been filled. I may even read it again once I can stuff my eyeballs back into their sockets.

In the less pretentious category I read Dan Brown's new book. I'd never admit it in public, but I enjoy them in the same way I enjoy Dwayne Johnson movies. Origin managed to hold my interest but that's about all I can say, the characters are their usual flat selves and if you can get past the halfway mark without having guessed the twist ending you might have fallen asleep. The best compliment I can pay Origin is that, like most of Dan Brown's work, it sent me off on more than it's fair share of trips to wikipedia, sometimes to fact check and sometimes because it brought up something that legitimately piqued my interest. With that in mind, there are worse things you could read.

I also read Slaughterhouse Five, which was a compelling waste of time. I get the feeling Vonnegut is not for me, but I'm glad I read it.

Lunar Park I liked a lot more, mostly because it was Bret Easton Ellis writing a crazed Bret Easton Ellis as the meta protagonist of his own horror novel. Masturbatory but in a fun way. The opening chapters of that novel may be some of my favorite out of any of his books.

Video games: not many. A brief XCOM binge while I was high on painkillers after snapping my ACL. I may do a writeup on that, XCOM is very much my jam. Horizon was a gorgeous disappointment which I stopped playing very quickly. Breath of the Wild was slightly better but it was spread too thin for me. I'm not much of a Zelda fan to begin with but this was the best I've played despite my getting bored and not finishing it. Cuphead was pretty fun. It's art style is the centerpiece moreso than it's generic run-and-gun gameplay and Darksoulsian difficulty, though I have to admit it's very tight.

Um um um.

I think that covers it. Hopefully more frequent updates in the future. I really am trying to make myself do this more often. I think it's good for me.

Til next time.

-N

Arrival is an Ugly Film

I had a bad reaction to Arrival, and I want to hedge my negativity with the caveat that my hate is probably not entirely deserved. Arrival was a victim of the hype machine, and by the time I got off my ass and hit the theater it was already being hailed as the Second Coming. Hard literary Sci-Fi! In a wide theater release! Well, sort of. The science isn't all that hard, and while it's an interesting subject which hasn't been explored a lot in cinema (alien linguistics! woo!) the film doesn't do justice to the one good idea it has. But I digress. The movie had buzz. Geek media was on its side, which is a powerful force for filling seats, but raising my hopes only made for a farther fall and a more painful landing.

Arrival was a dour, drab, toneless bore. The one redeeming quality was the one interesting idea the movie had: xenolinguistics. How do we learn to communicate with aliens? How do we safeguard against miscommunication when the consequence could be annihilation? Arrival provides it's few moments of genuine entertainment trying to answer these questions and fills the rest with sleepy underwhelming suspense. A single idea can't support a whole movie the way it can a short story (the basis of the film's script) and in the process of making this "idea movie" every other element of film making craft was thrown on the pyre.

Where to start. Arrival is ugly. It's shot with an astounding lack of interest, a few artsy frames trying to excuse the relentless stream of dead-eyed closeups. The only color on the pallet is gray, to the point where someone in the editing room must have been leaning on the desaturate button during coffee breaks and couldn't be bothered to CTRL + Z afterward. Even the alien ships are just smooth iron space lumps extraordinary only in their size, something which screams artificial mystique. I mean, come on, as if any sentient species would be able to resist slapping a flag decal or a half naked Xenomorph queen on the hull. Everything about the aliens, from the empty gray interiors of their ships to their unconvincing purpose on Earth is a karate kick to my sense of verisimilitude. But then, the aliens' lack of personality may be a deliberate stylistic choice to reflect the empty humans they interact with.

Banks is our primary protagonist, or so we're lead to believe. Her defining character moment is when the aliens first Arrive. Banks strolls past swarms of chattering students crowded around an enormous TV display, alien ships center-frame, and seeing all these she promptly ignores what might well be another 9/11 and proceeds to her classroom as if nothing were happening, where she obliviously begins her lesson in front of a mostly empty lecture hall. Her slack jawed incomprehension when she finally notices her classroom has like six people in it mirrors our own incredulity--how does someone so relentlessly airheaded become a professor, let alone ambassador to an alien race? Why is this movie about her?

And she's not the only one. Not a single character in this film has a single personality trait or displays a recognizable human emotion. The blank performances of the veteran cast are no doubt the fault of the director, Denis Villeneuve, who I suspect spent every take just out of frame with a pistol, threatening to shoot anyone who showed an ounce of emotion.

Arrival shouldn't be a movie. Movies are a visual medium. They're about dramatic performances, and spectacle, and cinematography. Moments big enough to fill a fifty foot silver screen. Whatever the merits of the original short story, they do not survive the adaptation to the big screen.  Film serves the story poorly, highlighting it's flaws and failing to showcase it's highlights.

Which isn't to say Arrival is bad, as hard as that may be to believe after this rant. It's not. Really. It's just mediocre, woefully undeserving of the massive hype and much more disappointing for the letdown.

-N