some news about hal hartley

For a long time now, I've mentally grouped Hal Hartley's output into two phases, with Trust, The Unbelievable Truth, and Simple Men constituting the "Long Island" phase, and with Amateur and the films that follow it constituting the "New York" phase.

Carrying on with this conceit, we could say that phase three is now underway, as Hal Hartley announced last summer that he would be moving to Berlin and continuing his work as a filmmaker there.

And why?:

"I just can't make films anymore in America. It's too expensive. It's too expensive in New York. If you want to make films that are based on your interests or the people around you, you can't necessarily be tied to being a commercial success. And that's all that happens here."

...

My very definition of a flawed society may be one which Hal Hartley needs to flee in order to continue making films.

PS: New Hal Hartley film, Fay Grim, expected later this year.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006
12:24 PM
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two postscripts

1. A little more poking around revealed that the sentence I posted here yesterday ("I spent a demimonth working as an oretracer in the monopole mines through the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni") is a Larry Niven sentence, and it's one that's discussed by Samuel Delany in one of the Starboard Wine essays. Whereas our friend from rec.arts.sf.written extracts sociological, technological, economic, and physical information from this sentence, Delany writes that the sentence foremostly serves as "a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their objects, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change." Similar, but different enough that I thought it was worth posting.

2. This nice overview of some of Delany's points about "reading protocols" in science-fiction is worth a read, but I was struck by this passage: "Most SF movies, because, as John Baxter suggests, they come out of another tradition than SF, or they derive their inspiration from earlier generations of literature or film (with the possible exception of Wells's Things to Come and Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) may best be viewed with other than SF protocols: Star Wars as fairy tale or E.T. as Lassie, Come Home."

I haven't read the book where John Baxter suggests this (I'm presuming it's the 1970 volume Science Fiction in the Cinema) but it strikes me, at least initially, as questionable... although it struck a certain note with me yesterday since I had just started screening Blade Runner in conjunction with a unit on film noir, and I in fact came upon Baxter's claim not long after I had asked my students to address the question of whether Blade Runner owes more to the noir or more to the tradition of science-fiction. So now I feel less sure. Anyone want to nominate something as the most "science-fictiony" science-fiction film?

Critique of Baxter here, as part of a review of Vivian Sobchack's The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film (from 1982).

Tuesday, September 19, 2006
11:28 AM
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the aesthetics of frustration II

Ever since I wrote that post last Monday, I've been thinking about cultural products other than videogames / "interactive fiction" that utilize frustration as part of their aesthetic.

Worthy of consideration in this regard might be Lost, which Henry Jenkins rightly considers to be part fiction and part puzzle, not unlike Twin Peaks or The X-Files before it. Part of the pleasure of these sorts of shows comes from the pleasurable frustration of having "the answers" deferred week after week, although the way that these shows tend to famously implode would indicate that they're basically navigating Scylla and Charybdis: if there's not enough frustration the puzzles won't be engaging, and if there's too much people will shut it off.

Videogame manufactures face this same dilemma, as I was saying here, although they at least have the advantage that most videogames of the modern era have a built-in end-point: it can't be easy to produce a chain of puzzles in an open-ended serial narrative format. (My gut wants to say that it might not even be possible to do satisfingly, although I've played some long-form Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that suggest otherwise, and if we count "the mystery" as a genre similarly situated at the intersection of fiction and puzzle, then there's the whole genre of "series mysteries" to reckon with.)

I've also been thinking about ways to interpret science fiction as another literary genre that traffics in frustration. Consider the opening lines of WIlliam Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome":

"It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the 'Cyberspace Seven,' but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon."

This passage violates John Gardner's Art of Fiction rule, namely, to try to avoid including things that are going to snap your reader out of the "dream" of the narrative: at least once per sentence there's a term or phrase that isn't going to make immediate sense to the reader, and thus is going to function as a stumbling block of sorts. But readers of SF enjoy the way that the initial frustration of these sorts of stumbling blocks are exactly the component that provides the meta-pleasure of world building.

Some cat on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup takes the sentence "I spent a demimonth working as an oretracer in the monopole mines through the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni" and, from it, identifies four major components of an imagined model that this sentence yields up, specifically "the sociological (it is a world where a person can spend a demimonth as an oretracer), technological (it is a world in which asteroid belts are mined), economic (it is a world in which monopole ores are in sufficient demand to be worth mining), and physical (it is a world in which Delta Cygni has at least two asteroid belts)".

It may be possible to say that there's an analogy here: as SF frustrates readers at the level of the individual word or phrase only to yield the pleasure of imagining the vaster model that contains those stumbling-block words and phrases, so do video games frustrate their players by variously constraining their actions, only to yield the pleasure of learning how to "play" the model.

The rec.arts.sf.written dude is drawing on Samuel Delany's notion of "reading protocols"—which, as I understand it, is an idea that readers of any literature bring with them a set of unspoken assumptions about "how to read it," and that the protocols of SF are different from the protocols of mimetic fiction, so that as people learn to read SF they learn to tolerate certain kinds of ambiguity and frustration (as a part of the model-building process). These ideas are written about at greater length in Delany's collection Starboard Wine, which I haven't read and which appears to be out of print. But I'll track it down.

Labels: narrative

Monday, September 18, 2006
1:32 PM
2 comments

benign masochism III: the aesthetics of frustration

Continuing on in the same vein as before, I came upon an interesting set of posts over at Writer Response Theory dealing with the notion of "frustration" in interactive fiction.

If we treat interactive fiction as narrative, which I've been arguing that we shouldn't, then frustration is disruptive: it snaps us out of the narrative, John Gardner gets cranky at us because we've broken the vivid and continuous dream of fiction, etc. But if we treat interactive fiction as a game, then the frustration is a necessary component of the game, and can be developed as an aesthetic. Jeremy Douglass's posts start us off there, asking: "What would it mean for a piece or a medium to be 'better at frustration?'"

Here's the full series: "Frustration in Interactive Media," "Frustration by Experience, Outcome, and Design," "Frustration, Expectation, and Inconsistency," and finally "Frustration, Irony, and Sanity."

There's a lot to digest here, but a quick glance-through brought me to this line, which I think sums things up nicely: "The art is the error message, and the error message is the art."

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Monday, September 11, 2006
3:07 PM
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benign masochism vs. "fun that is bad"

More questions stemming out of yesterday's question. Are games that are hard more fun? My initial feeling is that there's maybe a "sweet spot" between a game that is so easy that it quickly becomes boring and one that is so hard that the player decides that progress is either impossible or not worth the time investment (I quit the otherwise adorable Un Jammer Lammy because the learning curve was too fucking steep for me to play the second level one more time).

Raph Koster's lecture / series of doodles Theory of Fun for Game Design (largish PDF) puts this in terms of pattern recognition: playing a game involves puzzling out its rule or behavior patterns, which is fun as long as steady, non-redundant progress is being made on the task.

Tom Coates' Plasticbag weblog has a post on "things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad," in which he asks a whole series of interesting related questions (specifically on World of Warcraft):

"I've started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can't put it down[?] Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it 'fun'? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good?"

Long, interesting comments thread follows.

Labels: game_commentary, pleasure

Thursday, September 07, 2006
2:48 PM
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benign masochism

My sole accomplishment over the long weekend was beating the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus. If you're not familiar with this game, you might want to read this lengthy review, a splendid piece of game journalism from Insert Credit's Tim Rogers. (The discussion at the end of Zonbi tai kyuukyuusha, a game whose title translates to Zombie Vs. Ambulance, is an added plus.)

Shadow of the Colossus is only the second game for the PS2 that I've managed to defeat, the first being the hyperchromatic confection Katamari Damacy (also nicely reviewed by Tim Rogers). The differences between the two games will be evident to even the most casual observer, but I should also mention that Shadow is a lot harder, and took me probably four times as long to complete.

This experience, which required an enormous amount of trial and error, wasn't always pleasurable: after the thirtieth time that I fell off that final colossus I think it's safe to describe my mood as "frustrated."

In any case, now that that game is defeated and returned to its spot on the shelf, and now that my clarity of mind is gradually returning, I have time to consider more theoretical questions, like: do games have to be hard? And, if so, why? Those of you interested in delving into such questions might enjoy the fourth Ludus Novus podcast, "Hurt Me Plenty," which discusses exactly this topic.

As for me, I'm going to turn my attention now to beating We Love Katamari (the sequel to Damacy) and then I'm thinking about picking up a horror game, probably Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Too bad I don't have an XBox 360, because Dead Rising ("not developed, approved, or licensed by the owners or creators of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead") looks like it's a hoot...

Labels: game_commentary

Wednesday, September 06, 2006
12:47 PM
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still more on games and narratives

I know, being awake before noon on a Saturday and mad about narrative is probably about the geekiest thing ever.

But one more thing that unnerves me about the drive to have games tell better stories is the way it overlooks one important fact: playing, or even watching, a game already has an inherent narrative dimension to it. Namely, the sequence of events that constitutes the experience of playing (or of spectating). A game of football, for instance, doesn't require additional plot to be grafted onto it, and it doesn't require the players to adopt characters or avatars or anything like that.

This type of narrative is defined as "experiential" by Celia Pearce in her piece "Story as Play Space," which appears in Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames, and is probably the single most intelligent thing I have ever read on the topic of the relationship between narrative and play. She defines "experiential" narrative as "The emergent narrative that arises out of the game 'conflict' as it is played out, as experienced by the players themselves."

Related are "performative" narrative ("The emergent narrative as seen by spectators watching and/or interpreting the game underway") and "descriptive" narrative ("The retelling of game events to third parties, and the culture that emerges out of that. In terms of sports, an entire section of the newspaper is devoted to this.").

I couldn't agree more strongly that these are important narrative elements of any game, and I feel like any discussion of "how to make games better narratives" should focus on these things first, and only then focus on how to make a game more traditionally "storylike" (in terms of making them more closely resemble fiction).

I think this approach is exemplified by the following comments from ARG designer Jane McGonigal (from her interview in the New Media Writing issue of Iowa Review Web), in which she seems to be discussing her attempts to script something that will yield a blend of "experiential" and "descriptive" narrative:

"The story I help write and tell is the story of the players. My relationship to story and games is in giving players stories to tell about their experiences, creating narratives of their interaction in particular spaces and with each other... Those stories about the ingenious, impassioned action and interactions of the players--that's the narrative."

It's this kind of thinking that makes McGonigal one of the most exciting game designers working today. Interested parties might want to dig around on her site, Avant Game, or check out her blog.

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Saturday, September 02, 2006
9:33 AM
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