Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

A couple months ago I wrote about XBox Live in my Complicated Games column, at Paste, and why it’s the perfect meritocracy. It’s not online yet, but here’s a copy. I’m going to expand on some of these ideas this summer, for my Pitchfork column; the idea of online “presence,” and using web 2.0 to track your every move, accomplishment, preference and urge, is pretty awesome. I wish MMOGs gave me a little gamercard like the one above for XBox Live, so that I could keep track of all of my avatars.

Here’s the column:

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Of all the gimmicks tried by the major game makers, Microsoft deserves a prize for thinking up the “Achievements” system. If you’ve played a game on the XBox 360, you’ll know what I’m talking about: every single game hands out “gamer points,” which you earn by meeting goals like going through the tutorial, finishing the main story, or scoring a hundred sniper shots. Connect to the Internet, and all of your achievements show up online for your fellow gamers to scope out. It’s a simple way to score bragging points with the worldwide gaming community. It’s also fantastically addictive.

According to a story in GameDaily, players regularly buy games they don’t even want and stick with them until they’ve wrung out every last achievement. And while the first achievements in any game are easy bait, the hardest border on ridiculous: in the cinematic shoot-em-up Gears of War, to earn the “Seriously … ” badge, you have to beat 10,000 other players in online matches. In four weeks, someone had done it.

Most people – and even some gamers – hear this and think, “That’s insane.” Why waste so much time going out of your way just to get points? Points that are worth nothing? Yet collection is one of the most addictive features you can add to a game – just like in real life. After all, whether it’s baseball cards, model trains, Hummels, or old 45s, most of us have felt the urge to acquire stuff. And Microsoft’s competitors agree: Sony has already announced a similar feature – a virtual 3-D trophy case – for the PlayStation 3.

But we don’t just earn points for our own satisfaction: other players get to see them. And here’s where I see real value in the Achievements system. Most social websites use a reputation system based purely on scores or honor badges. MySpace counts the number of friends you’ve racked up; Amazon flags its hardest-working amateur reviewers; and message boards tally up your posts. And the same applies for online games, where the players’ rank and title follow them everywhere. It’s true that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But they know if you’re a dog who’s reached Knight-Lieutenant in World of Warcraft.

And when you look at it that way, XBox Achievements are just the most trivial example of the meritocracy built into social networking applications—where who you are depends entirely on what you’ve done. And any fame you bring from the real world will only take you so far. Presidential contender John Edwards may have built a campaign site in Second Life, but until his avatar is hanging around in night clubs wearing twenty-foot-wide bat wings and a tail, why should anyone take him seriously?

With so many online communities, it’s refreshing to think that we have a choice about which ones we take part in, and what kind of virtual citizen we can become. And nobody cares whether you’re native or newcomer, young or old, a man or a man pretending to be a woman: you’re judged solely by the content of your made-up character. Or at least, by your aim.

So if you’re playing Gears of War, and some guy clocks you in the head to cross that 10,000 kill mark? It doesn’t matter if he’s a grandparent, a teenager, or a real-life serial killer. Just give him a pat on the back. He’s earned it.

So after swaggering around about my Sir Paul McCartney interview a week ago, I thought it would be fun to look at one of the worst interviews I ever conducted: with cartoonist Chris Ware.

Let me take you back to, oh, 1993. I read Chris Ware back when he was doing a weekly strip in NewCity newspaper (he’s now at the Reader). I don’t have any cartooning sixth sense that tipped me off to how big he would get: I liked him because his strips had the same kind of stifled sentimentality and noble craftsmanship that appealed to me in say, Hal Hartley movies or Bill Frisell albums. There was one “I’m so over you” strip about a girlfriend that convinced me to try to talk to him, and I met him at a book signing at Quimby’s – where he was selling self-printed copies of some of his old Daily Texan strips (he made 100 copies – I still have mine). He was really nice, and agreed to meet up sometime for an interview in the Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago college newspaper.

So here are the mistakes I made:

- I didn’t prepare for the interview. At all. Sure, I’d read some of his strips, but I didn’t take notes or prepare any questions. I figured that we would sit down, the tape would roll and we’d have a conversation, and talk about all these great ideas and the whole thing would just flow. Isn’t that how Charlie Rose does it? Wait, I didn’t know who Charlie Rose was – but that was the idea. I still cringe when I think about that. We sat there and I haltingly went through a bunch of basic questions and kept forgetting what I wanted to talk about. Total disaster.

- I asked him if he could draw something for me, on the spot, to use in the story. You know, because that sounded like fun. Well, it wasn’t fun. He politely said no, but remember, this is a guy who would spend 30 hours on one of his strips. When the Chicago Tribune asked him to bring in a sample for a feature that they wrote about him that year, he drafted a strip and did the four-color separations by hand – and when he showed up at their office, they said, “Hey, you know, it would’ve been easier if we just scanned this in.” Whoops. But anyway, no, Chris Ware doesn’t just dash off little pictures of mice to run in newspapers. He’s a little bit of a perfectionist that way.

- I brought a girl! OMG! There’s a girl I had a crush on, which was not reciprocated, but we were buddies, and I thought she’d have fun and think this was pretty cool to see me and Chris Ware having this totally natural, insightful conversation about comics. The way it went, of course, she was less than impressed. She actually asked him better questions that I did; they had both read The Watchmen, for example, and I hadn’t. (Which is a whole ‘nother wtf.)

By the way – Chris Ware is a crazy-smart and erudite guy, with many interests and a great deal of perspective on his craft. I’ve read several long interviews with him, and they’re frighteningly good. So I can’t just say the guy was a stiff: I screwed up, and it was my loss. (And The Maroon’s.)

Okay, so what did I learn from this?

- Always prepare. I prepare like hell for interviews today, and I always bring a typed-out list of sequenced questions that I can ask in order or jump around in as the need strikes. I interviewed David Byrne last year, and I planned out my questions as if I was going to cross-examine a witness. If anything, I probably structure interviews too much and neglect follow-ups. (Note that some people, like Larry King, can pull this off without lining up his questions on a sheet of paper. But other people can’t – for example, Jon Stewart, which is why his interviews bug me to no end.)

- I never ask for anything – which is a shame, because pushing a little and asking some crazy favors never hurt anybody.

- I never bring anybody to interviews. Duh.

- The final piece that ran in the paper actually wasn’t too bad. It covered the basics, and the samples I took from his comics looked good in the paper. There was really nothing wrong with it. Almost any interview can be saved – especially if you’re just using quotes and not running the transcript.

- Plus, who cares. If I knew how to promote myself and I hadn’t posted this train wreck story, I could have just told you, “I discovered this guy early in his career and sat down with him for an interview. That’s how hip I am.” But you know, it’s more useful – and fun – as a lesson learned kinda thing.

Usually I’m a harsh grader when I cover games for the AV Club. But the past couple weeks my heart has softened: I’ve played two games in a row that, while not good, were fun. And I’ve come tantalizingly close to one of the laziest dodges a critic can make – saying that something would be better if it cost less. Shrek the Third on the Wii was surprisingly fun for a movie tie-in game, and they threw in a lot of extras that made you think someone at the studio actually gave a damn about what they were making: the musical sequence starring Captain Hook – where the fight scene action syncs up to, and advances you through Hook’s song, was nicely done. Nobody should pay $50 for this game, but if you had to keep some kids busy on a rainy Saturday afternoon? It’s a great rental.

I’m running into the same thing with this week’s game, Touch the Dead. It’s been reviewed poorly, and I’m not going to give it an A or anything – it’s cheap, crude and stupidly written, and the gameplay is extremely limited. But I’ve gotta admit, I love it. It’s a punishing game, and every time I beat another chapter I feel intensely rewarded. Because I’ve been doing each map so many times, I’ve grown to appreciate the pacing and the challenge, and – limited as it is – I think it does what it sets out to do. If it were $10, it would be an easy buy. But for $30, it feels kinda cheap, and I’m going to end up marking it down.

Rating a game by its cost may not seem fair. But how else can I pit indie games that are over in a couple hours (like The Shivah) against triple-A titles that hold up over months and months of online play? At the end of the day, the way you rate a game is whether it lives up to the goals it sets for itself. And in weighing those goals, price is a factor – is this a game that thinks it’s worth $50 of your money, or a game that had a smaller studio, took less work, includes less content and has less to offer – and so costs only $10? I feel like a hack for buying into this logic, but then again, film, music and TV don’t have to worry about this stuff. In gaming, it makes sense.

Today’s NYT talks about Intimate Exchanges, “a 750-page epic by Alan Ayckbourn that asks 2 actors to play 10 characters in 8 interconnected plays.” The two actors’ decisions at the beginning lead to different middles and ends. If the actress lights a cigarette in the first scene, it sets them down one path; if not, they go down another. Theatergoers have gone multiple times to catch the different permutations. (Here’s a map of all of them.)

Anyone who’s a gamer or under 30 will immediately recognize what this sounds like: Choose Your Own Adventure, that popular form of interactive storytelling where decisions during the story could lead to different plots and endings. Of course, the choices come from the actors, not from the audience – and it sounds like every decision leads to a “win state.” Taking the failure out of those books could have made them more interesting: you would have focused on where you wanted to go, rather than worrying about being punished for making the wrong call. (Some of the books, and especially the knock-offs, could get really frustrating; they sure didn’t merit repeated readings.)

But the other thing they get right is that the form fits the play’s themes. “The structure of Intimate Exchanges, which tracks a group of people falling in and out of various romances, is the key to its purpose. The cause-and-effect storytelling highlights how small choices can radically alter our futures.” I can’t vouch for whether it works, but I like it when the form of a game fits the story it’s trying to tell – and Planescape: Torment is one of the only games I can think of that does it well. Imagine if there were a really good, thematic reason for the Adventure books to tell a branching narrative, and it wasn’t just a gimmick? I’m sure there’s a pomo novelist out there who’s tried something similar.

It would also be good if the NYT had recognized a kinship with games – and if games could pick up some artistic tips from this kind of exercise.

While I’m talking about Choose Your Own Adventure: an indie band called Morningbell made a choose-your-own-adventure album, Through the Belly of the Sea, where you read the liner notes and then sequence the tracks based on where you want to go next (“To run away from the squid, go to track 4″ etc.). I meant to write something about it, but I didn’t really like it – so I’ll just link to Eric Harvey’s review (he gave it a 4.4).

I’ve been playing the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, and naturally the thing that fascinates me most about it aren’t the new controls or the grav lift or the high-def graphics, but the fact that every statistic from every match I’ve ever played can be found at the Bungie site. Some of the details are missing right now, but you can see that in ten matches I haven’t placed higher than third, and my kill/death ratio is a meh 0.5313. But hey, I have ’til June 7 to do better.

UPDATE: Check out the page for an individual match – dig all the detail, especially with the medals.

I find that YouTube clips are great if you’re browsing but easy to put on the shelf and procrastinate about if someone just recommends them to you. So I’ll go the extra mile and embed this thing in the blog, in the hopes that y’all will watch it and say, “Oh hey, that’s really funny.”

Dig the crawl, too.

I have a two-and-a-half to three hour commute every day. That means I listen to a lot of podcasts. It’s also gotten me back into sci-fi, sorta. I made the rounds of Clarke, Asimov and Bradbury as a kid, plus Piers Anthony, which could get scary – dude had a few kinks, you know what I mean? (He wrote one story graphically describing a guy getting tortured on a diplomatic mission in space; I still remember every thing they did to his fingers, his organs, and most of all, his testicles. Anthony also wrote a lot about sex, and luckily I’ve blocked that out.)

But I moved on when I hit adolescence, mostly because the dudes in lab coats talking to aliens thing had worn thin, and the genre as a genre didn’t have much to offer. That’s why I still like Bradbury the best: he had atmosphere, characters, he really got under your skin and into your heart. Much of the other stuff is held back not just by bad writing, but by lazy style. I still can’t stand sci-fi stories with predictable structures – you know, the gimmick-exposition-twist formula, or stories where one guy spends half the story explaining the scenario to the other guy (“We have patented a ______ that does ______ to _____!” “But what if it goes wrong?”)

Escape Pod, a hit sci-fi podcast, runs a number of stories like that, but they also run excellent, engaging and original fiction that really floats my boat. Here are a few recent stories that caught my attention:

The Watching People – sharp speculative fiction; this is a gimmick-exposition-twist story that actually works

The Angle of My Dreams – Sweet, Bradbury-esque short story

Nightfall – The Asimov classic – better than I remembered it. The reading will make you tense.

Cinderella Suicide – A Clockwork Orange/steampunk trip, the language is tough at first but totally worth it

Of course, the best podcast I’ve heard in the last year was Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective” as read by Alex Wilson. I can’t recommend it enough: exhilirating, engrossing, puzzling, I’ve heard it at least ten times and I haven’t worked out what it all means in my head but I enjoy every word of it going by. If you’ve ever been puzzled by the fascination with spunky girls or mysterious women, if you like mash-ups of children’s fiction and old fairy tales, if you read Nancy Drew, if you just want something so out-of-the-mainstream and transportative that it’s just plain breaktaking, check it out.

The New Yorker has posted footage from its recent 2012 Conference, including this tape of Will Wright demoing Spore and doing a q & a with John Seabrook. It’s a great clip particularly for non-gamers (like say, New Yorker readers), and the game footage shows up well.

Seabrook wrote the stellar profile of Wright last year, a model to anyone who writes game features. (Seabrook himself covers the tech beat, among other subjects, but isn’t a regular games writer – which makes this piece an even better model to emulate.) I’m still working through one of the observations he made in the piece:

“Wright seems to be more interested in making games than he is in integrating his ideas into a coherent philosophy. After you have played The Sims long enough, for example, you begin to recognize all the ways in which the simulation is not like real life. (The Sims 2, which came out in 2004, added more refinements to the basic design; in addition to the motives and needs, there are four different aspirations.) The Sims is only as realistic as the social theories it’s based on, and these theories have been combined not according to scientific principles but for the purposes of entertainment. The Sims doesn’t really model human dynamics; it merely gives you a model for exploring your own idea about how families work (just as playing with dolls does). Wright is not a visionary, in the sense that he is not the author of a world view; he tailors his ideas according to the technical parameters of the simulation and the logic of games. Whether the game involves fighting intergalactic battles or modelling climate change, the simulation works according to a logic of its own. Wright may be the game industry’s greatest auteur, but to a large extent he has abdicated authorship of his own creation.“

Says a lot in a short space. Seabrook is aware of the people who are trying to fit games into the world of “art,” and he finds – at least in Wright’s case – that games fall short. As a form of “participatory culture,” they can’t be judged in the same way as a book or even a film. You can infer that he’s treating them as something less, but he doesn’t exactly say that; they’re just outside of the world of culture and “authorship,” and – at least the way I read it – judging games by those terms doesn’t get you far.

And for those of us who feel the need to “justify” games – say, because we edit the Games section for Paste Magazine – it means we have to get our readers to follow us into a whole different set of criteria, instead of resorting to the old “It’s like a film where ____ ” or “It’s like music, except _____.” You have to lay all that groundwork before the reader even grasps why something’s great.

Luckily for The New Yorker and its (mostly?) non-gaming readers, Seabrook’s quite good at it.

UPDATE: Credit where it’s due – I originally nicked this image thinking it was a press picture, but the creature in here was originally created by Gaming Steve, back at E3 ‘06. Sorry about that. (Can you believe we’ve been talking about that game this long … ?)

A couple weeks ago my editor at Pitchfork called me and asked, “Hey, are you a Beatles fan?” I said hell yeah. So he asked me if I’d like to interview Sir Paul McCartney for Pitchfork. I said hell yeah.

The interview is now up. We had a half an hour on the phone, and I won’t pretend I got a deep insight into the man or his life in that time, but it was a lot of fun. It’s interesting to hear the things that nag at him or little tics that still bother him – and at the same time, he’s still a product of the ’60s, in a lot of commendable ways. (The section about trees and robots is a must-read.)

Once in a while I whip out my favorite four-letter word – “prog” to describe either a favorite band from adolescence, or some new indie band that hits me in a place that I’ve hidden away since, well, adolesence. It’s a misunderstood term – in spite of the excellent The Music’s All That Matters – and in any case, who knows if I’m using it the same way as the rest of the world? I find that the key to music criticism is not to follow the same classifications as all the other guys. You should make your reader figure out what you mean. So let me spell it out:

I don’t know music theory. I mean, I know what 7/4 time means or what a 32 bar blues or A-B-A-B- … however that one ends. I’ve brushed up against the stuff. But I’m not a musician and I don’t count time when I hear a song I like and I didn’t notice that Yes’ “Close to the Edge” was written in sonata form. Now that I know it, I still don’t care. Nobody loves prog because of its wonky academic credentials or super-duper-counting tricks, and that’s been proven by the math rock genre of the ’00s – that shit is NOT prog. Orthrelm is not prog. It’s for people who like to count.

The point of prog music is to be as fucking awesome as you can be in one piece of music. That means playing as long, soloing as indulgently, cramming in as many subsections and transitions and pushing your lyrics as far into fairy-acid-Tolkien dickishness as you can get. Prog should feel BIG.

And it’s not big like a rock song that takes off on a great lyric or a classic riff or a Neil Young-sized solo. Prog should feel big because there’s a lot of hardware supporting it. That’s where the “virtuousity” of a Yes or ELP comes in. Yes, a soloist like Young or a from-the-heart Jersey-youth will-you-be-there-for-me singer like Bruce Springsteen can pull it out from the gut. On a good night. When they’re “feeling” it. But with Yes, you feel like they’ve built an entire architecture to support that arc of awesomeness. Steve Howe doesn’t have to work as hard as Neil Young to rock the guitar solo at the end of “Starship Troopers”: he has two other movements and a keyboard solo setting him up for it! It’s kind of impossible for him to fuck up.

There’s not much spontaneaity in prog. In fact, there shouldn’t be. A good prog song is a song where everything contributes to the pursuit of awesomeness. Those elements don’t have to be smart or tasteful, they just have to share a trajectory. It doesn’t matter if you’re quoting Buddhist philosophy from a Chinese restaurant placemat or writing about space or hobbits or taking an electric violin solo – you just have to pursue the same absurd goal, with everything you’ve got.

Now, sometimes I get embarrassed by prog. A couple years ago when I discovered Soft Machine vol. 1 and 2, my first thought was, “What the hell was I doing listening to ELP when this was out there?” Soft Machine had the improv and the organ solos but they had a sense of humanity and self-awareness and oh yeah, humor (which admittedly ain’t so prog). Sometimes prog bands overindulge the wrong way: Keith Emerson goes on too long, or you get a band like U. K. where the solos are embarrassingly shoe-horned into (not very strong) songs and the music just falls flat. Those solos, no matter how proficient, are just dry humping. Good prog works because it can take all the overblown egos in the band and unite them around conquering a galaxy. The sum becomes greater than the parts – in spite of the parts.

I’ve pegged a few indie bands as “prog,” but not many of them have the album-length songs or the high-grade wanking. Deerhoof’s best musician is the drummer – and Aloha lost their vibraphonist! But it doesn’t matter. They’re big, they have dreams and passion and phat organs. Nothing can get in their way. And most of their fans are probably lonely guys. God bless you, prog. Gods bless you.