A Blog of Very Little Brain

John Scalzi of Whatever have added a more literary take on the whole Disney horsecrap.

“Christopher Robin found that every part of the Hundred Acre Wood looked like a new part he’d never seen before. He went left and found a new stream, filled with frogs who croaked their unconcern of Christopher Robin’s plight. He went right, back the way he came, but the trees seemed to have moved their places when he wasn’t looking.”

Then again, for me, and all those true believers, this will always be the right ending:

“So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

As addendum to my previous post about Roger Ebert’s comment about Video games, here is the exact quote from his letters column:

“I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.”

Kids, he doesn’t know his DOOM from his Space Invaders. Give it a break.

Found this atrocity through Neil Gaiman’s blog.
Disney will replace Christopher Robin with a 6-year-old girl.
Can someone please get the franchise away from those idiots before any more damage is done?
I assume it was obvious, after Disney constantly demolished the actual character of Pooh.
They are the ones who replaced this image of Pooh

with this one

and did the same to all the other characters, changing them from the “dolls come to life” look to a cartoony, cheerful look, just compare Shepherd’s Eyore to Disney’s. Disney also replaced Pooh’s growly, deep-humming voice with a high-pitched kiddy voice. This wasn’t made by error. Disney just couldn’t face the idea of presenting Pooh with an adult look and voice. Kids might think he’s retarded. Well, he is. Pooh is a grown-up animal/doll locked inside a child’s mind. Call it autistic if you wish. But that’s it. It doesn’t end with Pooh, naturally, as they systematically twisted every character to apply to their “view” of what kids like. Neutralising (and neutering) the origin of every “offensive” concept. And now they decided to remove Christopher Robin. Why?
“We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide” says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel. BullCrap, says I. Disney just can’t figure out how to market a 6 year old boy who plays with dolls. I mean, kids might think he’s gay or something. A girl, well, that’s more like it. Guess what? I played with dolls when I was six. I wasn’t ashamed of admitting it to my school-friends and was very proud of it. It was a way for me to express my imagination, and allowed me to realise dreams I had. It hadn’t made me retarded, or turned me gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Disney are killing the books and the world of A.A. Milne. They are raking one billion dollars a year from marketing a neutered image of Milne’s works, and they will not stop here. Removing Christopher Robin is removing the axis around this entire imaginary world exists. Removing the cause for its existence. They won’t stop there, I know it. I just wish there was any way to stop them.

Saw this one at Alice’s Wonderland about this weird wrestling game. The post commented something about the mask being creepy, but I had already clicked to go to the site thinking “a fighting game with a chick in some net-like suit” (I’m shallow, I know). To my surprise, the game has, apart from being occupied solely with scantly clad girls, a Panda.
One thing that has ultimate power over me (even more than scantly clad girls) is pandas in a game. In fact, it has been proven mathematically, that for me Panda in Game = Money out of Wallet. Thankfully there are’nt many games that do apply to this mathematically sound formula.
There was the infamous April 1st hoax (citing that Samurai Pandas are a new race of WarCraft III) over at Blizzard’s site, of which the common reaction was “OK, funny joke, but can you PLEEEEZE make a Panda a real unit in the game?”. The reaction was so phenomenal that Blizzard gave in (probably since their own developers couldn’t stand not having a panda as well) and added this character to the WarCraft III expansion pack.
I believe the natuarl course of actions will probably lead to Blizzard’s next game being made entirely of Pandas. I would be very happy to purchase the first copy (and probably every other copy I can find of it).

Still with Clickable Culture, kids design video game bosses. I think one shouldn’t mess with kids imaginations. I’m too scared to even go to that page and see what they designed. And it was made by a bunch of kids… designed by a kids commitee? Scary.

From The Website at the End of the Universe(Good thing I’m not a word count, that would’ve made the entire post): 9 people (3 of them actors) have been trained and “launched” in a fake shuttle. On the way back, I assume they’ll collide with the fake atmosphere and blow up.

Honorary friend of the bear, Mr. Richard Cobbett esq. have put on a post about some MMOG blog he’s working on. Reading the blog costs 15$ a month, and it will be published half-broken, with bug fixe… sorry, “Extra content” will be patched later.
So far there’s no indication whether you can go “Leeroy Jenkins” on the blog.

The Borowitz Report: WAR IN IRAQ GOING WELL ON EARTH II. Of course, on Earth-X, Saddam has already conquered all Earth but Antarctica (Those Damn Penguins!). Why do I have the feeling the Crisis on Infinite Earths will still leave us with our version of things?

Via SlashDot: The term “Podcast” has been added to the New Oxford American Dictionary. I assume pwned and w00T are next. Only way it can compete with the n3w l33T 4m3r1c4n Dictionary.
Neural cells made of rats have been able to fly planes. Warning: Suggesting that your plane is already flying on rat brain may cause an unscheduled landing. Parachute not guaranteed.

That’s it for this bunch. Whew. 600 to go.

Today I saw what is, apparently, the 25th article regarding Roger Ebert’s comments about “Games not being Art”. I’ve exhausted my metaphors on this one (all of them revolving around “Roger Eberts opinion about games is as relevant as Celebrity X’s opinion about something he doesn’t relate to” (Like, say, Madonna’s opinion about Windows API (i.e. not relevant))). So let me just make it clear:

Roger Ebert’s opinion about Video Games as art is as relevant as the Dalai Lama’s opinion about Cauliflowers as street decoration.

I know gamers are desperately dying to be accepted into the global media as a cultural phenomenon, and even more than that as a legitimate cultural phenomenon, and even MORE than that, as a legitimate media, like movies, TV etc. But it’s just not going to happen.
Why? First, not every popular media is recognised as such. Take Comic Books. Most video gamers see comic books as a legitimate media, which is far from the truth. Comics are still viewed as geeky, for kids, niche genre. They are not taken seriously, and are not considered to be mainstream media at all, not to mention “Art”. The gamers view comic books from their perspective, not from the outside. This makes them think that Video games might be also accepted as mainstream media form.
Second, many people confuse “legitimate, mainstream, media form” with “art”. That couldn’t be more wrong. This is, most likely, an misinterpretation of the “seven arts” concept. The seven arts (Poetry, Theatre, Dance, Painting, Sculpting, Literature and Music) are not a “definition”, but a collective name. The original term wasn’t even referred to entertainment arts, but to studies like geometry, medicine and linguistics.
Art as a definition is not a solid concept, and placing a certain media under the “arts” section doesn’t mean it collectively becomes an art-form. Movies like The Godfather and Citizen Kane may be art, but that doesn’t make Spy Kids 3D art, The Prisoner and Twin Peaks are art, but not America’s Next Top Model.
To summarise, being “Art” demands that the piece in question will attempt to pursue aesthetic values, rather than simply entertain. Being an Art form means that artists are able to present those aesthetic values through the media, but it doesn’t make a work “art” simply by belonging to that media.

This been said, are video games a cultural phenomenon? Yes.

Are they a legitimate one? Yes and no. Yes, since the scope of the culture has long gone caused it to rise above the small, “hardcore” niche, and no, since many games are still juvenile, provoking in the sake of provocation, and shallow. I had a long email correspondence with Cyril Lachel of Defunct Games about what makes a Mature theme, or a mature game, and while I agree with his opinions on the matter, I find that “do I shoot the cop in the head or do I run away” are not what I would consider “mature”.

Are video games an art form (i.e. can they be used to express and convey aesthetic ideas)? Technically yes. Practically no.
Technically yes, since it is possible to convey aesthetic ideas through visual means, TV, animation and movies are doing it for a century now. The interactive, immersion nature of games allows the player to experience them first hand, and therefore view them from an active POV, which is unique and different from other media.
Practically no, since video games are created over a long period of time, by a very large staff, and are combined from different, non-related elements. Movies, for example, are assembled as well, and involve a large crew, but they are, at the bottom of it, actors being filmed on celluloid, then edited into the movie. Games, are tiles, 3d models, network engine, scripting, textual script, collision code, textures, music, level editors, and probably another 20 elements I didn’t mention. They are run by one, or more “designers” or “producers” or whatever the current name is, but those are more concerned at assembling the pieces and making sure everything doesn’t collapse the moment someone moves the mouse. To complete the analogy, imagine that a movie was filmed this way: actors were filmed in a stop-motion manner, background was designed by one crew, then was created by another, based on the blueprint of a third crew, and filmed separately. The two films were later pasted together by taking pictures of the actors film in front of the background film. The voice was recorded by other actors, in a studio halfway across the country. Sounds atrocious, but it’s not even coming close to what really happen in game design. Games are designed, created, coded and assembled by committee, and over 2-3 years, it makes it very hard to get any means of artistic design float to the surface.

The other issue here is that games, by nature, should provide constant interest. Deciding whether to kill a dying cop, or allowing him to live, risking he’ll identify you is a concept that could carry a 2 hour movie with ease (Think of Reservoir Dogs, the scene where Mr. Orange shoots Mr. Blue to save the life of the mutilated cop). In a video game it wouldn’t last to the next cutscene. In the span of those 2 hours in games like Grand Theft Auto III, you’ve probably rammed the car into 2 blockade, shot about 5 cops and 8 civilians (not mentioning the 4 you drove over with your car), you broke into 3 cars, and blew up 4 more. The moral decision here is lost in the excessive. You may spared one of the wounded cops, but that decision was long drowned in the river of blood you generated in the city. It doesn’t help that video games cost millions to develop, and therefore are founded and moved by commercial goals rather than “artistic”. Those two are not separate, but it’s hard to think about aesthetic values when you’re 2 days short of your next milestone.

There’s nothing preventing video games from being art. It’s certainly holds all the key ingredients. It’s just that considering the nature of the medium, the creation process, and the powers behind it, it would take video games a long way before we can start consider them as art. Games are an art form. Like Comic books, like movies. It doesn’t a priori make them art.

I’ve just recently mentioned the Wikipedia issue about having to register to post/edit. This was obviously made to counter the “Wikipedia Vandalism” phenomenon, where articles were modified to represent opinions, enter disputable content or just to enter silly stuff.
Apparently there are worst things that won’t be resolved by such a method.
In a recent article in Clickable Culture, the author wrote about a full article being lifted verbatim from his site, not only without credit, but “they submitted an entire paragraph of my writing under the GNU Free Documentation License.” (in a nutshell, this means that any text found in the Wikipedia can be copied, used, modified, or be used as a base for another article with no fee).
The writer goes on mentioning that to delete the article, “I had to agree to license my “contribution” under the GFDL.” I don’t really see why he had to do this. I would just write to the Wikipedia admins and demand them to remove the article. I understood that he eventually decided to keep the text, but modified it. So now it’s under the GFDL, under his approval. Not nice, if you think about it.