Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

This has been an extra-busy week with little time for posting, but I wanted to take a few minutes to warn you of a grave threat to your wallet and your dignity: The Simpsons Game comes out this week, and it is poor. Really poor.

My review doesn’t run until next week. But I had to get the word out there, because while the advance hype on the game said it would be smart, satirical, and very Simpsons, it’s a turkey on every level. The first reviews have excused the poor gameplay by saying that the gags are funny (some reviewers even said they’re “reall funny”). Y’know what? Unless you’re 10, or have never seen a classic Simpsons episode, they’re awful. Like, alien anal probe jokes. Or Lisa talking about how she likes to do homework. Or a movie marquee reusing on an old, and dated joke from the TV show, and announcing Siskel and Ebert: The Movie. Okay wiseguys, who plays Siskel?

When even Ralph Wiggum can’t get a good line – he walks in and announces, “I like to drink the blue juice under the sink!” – you know you’re in trouble. When you’ve got “actual Simpsons writers” involved, the hit rate should be better than 1 in 100. And that makes the awful, frustrating gameplay that much harder to bear. Don’t be fooled!

UPDATE: Review here. The commenters didn’t seem to believe the D.

Bassist and singer Nat Baldwin is one of my favorite new talents (though my gloomy review of his debut may mislead you). He records for Portsmouth’s Broken Sparrow label, and he played on the Dirty Projectors’ stupendous Rise Above. Dig these clips (the sound’s better than the video):

“De-Attached”

In this one, Baldwin’s with his string trio just hanging out on a front porch in Hamilton, Ontario, and they start playing. I love the spontanaeity – and it helps that they kill it.

“Enter the Lightout”

And the brighter side of licensing – this UK commercial makes a great music video:

“Only in My Dreams”

This past Thursday, here at Portsmouth’s Music Hall, we had a whole night of music talk. In addition to a screening of Before the Music Died, we had a performance by The Twinemen and a panel that included the Dropkick Murphy’s Al Barr, Say Zuzu’s Jon Nolan, local booker/radio guy/expert Bruce Pingree, Barsuk’s Jo Lenardi, and yours truly as the cynical, Internet-obsessed writer guy.

Before the Music Died is a good documentary. It deftly ties together all the arguments in the “Music Industry: Dead or What?” debate that’s raging right now; if you want to get caught up, or you just want to catch some great performances and a hella funny interview with Erykah Badu, I highly recommend it.

I did have a couple criticisms. Like many of the people who romanticize the music business’s plight, B4MD made contradictory arguments:

- It’s great that anyone can boot up their laptop, cut some tracks and put them on MySpace for the world to hear. Finally we have a true musical democracy.

- Still, we really wish the new Bob Dylan or the new Beatles would show up so we could rally around them.

- And by the way, could rock come back so we could stop pretending to like Kanye West?

One of the stories in the movie concerns Doyle Bramhall II, a talented roots rocker with a great voice and hot licks who could’ve done well in the ’70s. But this is the ’00s, so even with people like Eric Clapton patting his back, he’s struggling to sell records. On the one hand, I feel for the guy: if someone has talent, you want them to be able to stop worrying about the rent. But on the other hand, Jo Lenardi put it best on the panel when she said that Bramhall’s a “niche” artist. ’70s root rock is not necessarily what the kids are buying today. I want him to succeed, but I don’t see him as having any more right to success than say, Subtle and Doseone, or some bluegrass traditionalist wunderkind, or microtonal jazz violinist Mat Maneri, or the Dirty Projectors.

As a Pitchfork staffer, I have a more nihilistic view about this. The bands we cover – meaning, from the Arcade Fire on down – are generally neither big enough nor small enough to fit in a movie like B4MD. They don’t know where they fit right now. Sometimes they do well, sometimes not. The Fiery Furnaces looked like they were headed for big things – at least, Shins or Death Cab for Cutie-big, if they were lucky – but then they changed course and made a record with their grandmother. I love the grandmother album. But when they started making music for themselves, people stopped knowing what to do with them. Now they do … okay. Like a lot of bands. The narrative arc from struggle to superstardom doesn’t apply. The Internet gives them bazillions of opportunities, but following them just means more work on their plate. I want them to do well. I want every band to do well. But there’s nothing really romantic about it.

Keeping music alive means making sure that even the smallest bands, with the smallest audiences, have a chance to crack their chests open and do something special, and have people see value in it. On that front, I think B4MD would agree. I just think that waiting for Doyle Bramhall II to score a platinum album is beside the point.

Oh, almost forgot – the panel was a hoot. Al Barr and Jon Nolan, as the musicians, had beautiful things to say. Barr made a great point that the key to his success was “luck.” Obviously, he had the luck that you have to make – the Murphys tour hard, play great and write terrific music. They know their fans and work hard for them. But it takes more than that to become an official song of the Red Sox the year they win the World Series, and – well, just read that again. They got a boost because the Red Sox won the World Series. The Beatles didn’t have luck like that.

Personally, I just sat there and threw out crazy ‘Net ideas. For example, I mentioned my idea about how Wilco should go on the payroll at some giant corporation like Apple or Volkswagen, and Lenardi looked at me and said, “That’s horrible!” I took it as a compliment.

EDIT: To the original question – is the music industry dying? Is music worse today than it’s ever been? – anyone who has those fears should look back at the last few droughts. For example, recently I browsed through an issue of Pulse (the old Tower Records magazine) from 1990, right before grunge hit. There was some weak-ass shit in there.

Saw this weekend in the NYT Magazine – aka, Slate Static – that Virginia Heffernan, who I believe was the NYT TV critic, has started a transmedia column blog called The Medium. But she doesn’t call it “transmedia.” She doesn’t start by wheeling out Henry Jenkins. She doesn’t talk about web comics or MMORPG. And she never mentions The Matrix. In other words, it’s a transmedia column for non-geeks – and I think it’ll work really well.

The first column tackles the issue of “absorption,” which is at the heart of transmedia storytelling and media convergence: why do we spend so much time getting so sucked into these rabbit holes? There’s a heartwarming story about her mom in the column, and the whole thing is very relatable – which is the whole point. Heffernen has found a way to explain new media convergence to people like her mom. I’m jealous.

I don’t have time to keep up with many games. Between reviewing about one a week for the Onion and occasionally playing one for the sake of curiosity, there’s no time to work through the new Zelda or Metroid Prime just for the fun of it. I have friends who are getting back into World of Warcraft - getting into it hard - and I can’t join them. Or keep up with Halo 3. Or anything else.

So imagine my excitement when I started playing Skyrates, which I discovered courtesy of the inimitable Rock Paper Shotgun. You’re a cute, furry animal who flies planes between a series of islands floating in the sky. You have two main jobs: trading goods from cities where supply is high to other cities where it’s scarce; and fighting pirates, in frustrating two-dimensional dogfights. The longer you play, the more you can upgrade your ship, extend your flights and master the entire world map. Like any other online game.

Except in Skyrates, all the action happens while you’re offline. The game’s designed for “sporadic play.” When you start flying from one city to another, it takes a couple hours in real time to reach your destination – and while you can spend the time chatting with other players or maybe looking for pirates, you’re really supposed to log in for a few minutes, set up your next flights and trades, and leave. The game supports multiple platforms, so for example, you can play via the Flash client and get updates via AIM whenever you’re attacked by pirates. A mobile version wouldn’t be hard to set up: the game’s still in Beta, so the sky’s the limit.

Sure, it’s a simple game. But it raises two questions:

- Why should hours spent in the game grant you experience – and as a result, unlock new parts of the game for you? Why doesn’t World of Warcraft have a mode where you can send your avatar into the woods to kill stuff all day, while you go off and live your life?

- And the corrolary: What the hell is your World of Warcraft avatar doing when you’re not logged in?

Sitting on their fat ass, that’s what. It seems like the ability to level and make progress without actually sitting at a computer mindlessly grinding through the same damn kills for hours, would appeal to people like me, who are actually glad that Portal didn’t take 30 hours to finish.

And yet at the same time, the experience is more persuasive. In Warcraft, when you’re not logged in, the world forgets all about you. Maybe your friends and guildmates are running around, but you have no contact with the world; you literally cease to exist. By contrast, in Skyrates, my avatar (a bear named Pungent McGillicuddy) is working all day, whether I’m watching him or not. Sometimes he even checks in with me. The world keeps turning, the cash keeps rolling in, whether I’m paying attention or not. This may not be as compelling as a run through the Scarlet Monestary – but in my mind? It’s far more “immersive.”

(Note to self: try out some more of these “passively-multiplayer online games,” such as Jessica Price’s beloved Travian, or the ingenious Chore Wars.)

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the Skyrates developers blog for insight into the game.

Let me make an obvious point about the new Radiohead album: it sounds like Radiohead. Even more than Hail to the Thief, and far more than the “let’s bugger expectations, tick off the fans and along the way, write three or four great new songs” experiences of Kid A and Amnesiac, it sounds exactly like what you’d expect from a Radiohead album: urgent, a bit paranoid, compellingly produced, sort of melodic. Every guitar tone, every bass part, every time the drummer even looks at his kit – they’re all exquisite. It sounds like a dream. It’s exactly what you’d expect.

And now that they’re not on a label, that’s the problem. I’ve long had a suspicion that artists who skip the labels, the biz, the radio and all that crap and just make music for the fans, will become painfully predictable. To make a hit song or build a career, you have to cross boundaries, interest new listeners and take chances; you wind up getting pushed and pulled by stakeholders you don’t trust and moguls who don’t know arse from elbow, but somehow, sometimes a moment of genius comes out, and sometimes it’s one you couldn’t think of yourself. But let’s say you don’t care about the hits: it starts to get easy to give the fans what they want, instead of what they don’t know they want. Everybody makes fun of focus-tested music: what’s a worse focus group than the audience that’s paying all your bills?

“One-hit wonder” is usually an insult – it implies that a crappy band managed to write one good song and ride it onto the charts. But a one-hit wonder could also be a great band that, for one song, doesn’t sound like itself – and that’s the song that takes over. Believe me, the people who pushed “Crazy” up the charts aren’t the ones who sat around downloading Dangermouse’s Grey Album. I can think of a lot of earth-shaking talents who only had one or two hits. Sometimes it’s a relief to stop worrying about the next one. But that doesn’t always help the music.

Just appeared on WNYC’s Soundcheck yesterday, talking about my recent column on what music could learn from the gaming business about sparking participation and social experiences around music. We had a fun chat – I’m getting better at doing these things, and staying succinct.

As I turn around this whole “people will pay $60 for Halo 3 but not $15 for a CD” issue, one argument that people have raised keeps sticking in my head. Xbox Live is a closed system. To play Halo 3, you have to buy the game and subscribe to the service. (I haven’t studied console game piracy numbers, but I have to guess they’re much smaller than in the music biz, where people will steal music even when it’s free.) By contrast, music is wide-open, and people want to keep it that way. Talk about DRM, or a closed music player, or any effort to tell people how to use music on their computers and gadgets, and they resist.

Here’s a question: if you invented a perfect music player, would people mind not being able to crack it open? If somebody built a true “Celestial Jukebox” – a music player that had every song in the world, and worked on any computer – would people rush to adopt it, or would it bug them that they don’t own/control/swap/steal/retag the songs they’re listening to? I suspect they’d resist – or at least they’d insist on keeping a stash of their favorite albums, just in case the apocalypse comes and they have no other way to listen to Dexy’s Midnight Runners. After all, those bomb shelters can be reaallll quiet.

One other difference in mindset: I mentioned on the program the Bandlink software published by CDIntelligence. This is a piece of software that comes with audio CDs: you install it, it pulls down news and media from a server, and it adds the kind of value I was talking about in the column. However, some people have criticized it as spyware, because it phones home to report on which songs you listen to and how often. Music fans resent being tracked this way – unless they volunteer for it (say, with Last.FM’s AudioScrobbler).

Yet TiVO has spied on its users since day one, and Valve collects data on everything you’re doing in their Steam games, and all those Halo matches on XBox Live are collected – and nobody minds. I guess the obvious argument is that music fans are sensitive because they started out, circa ‘99-’00, with total control over how they use their mp3s, and ever since then the industry has struggled to take that control away. In the games industry – which, of course, has its own struggles between users and manufacturers - we still never had that much control. Going online meant giving up privacy; for music fans, giving up privacy means opening yourself up to a hassle. Or a lawsuit.

Just got a press release stating that the Halo 3 official soundtrack is coming soon – and you, yes you, can enter a contest to get your song on the disc. Nice way to include the fans on something that only the fans would buy anyway.

You may be struggling with a good title for your hard-pounding guitar-driven math rock war anthem. Here are my suggestions:

“You Stole My Kill”
“MC Master Chief”
“Fuck”
“Oh FUCK”
“Cortana/Arbiter Slash Ballad”
“Fuck you fuck it FUCK”
“You’re A Bunch of Goddamn Poletouchers”
“GAAAAYYYYY”
“Fuck You”
“U Ded (Oh Noes)”

and a safe bet:

“Halo Theme Song (Remix)”

What’s your song?

Major spoilers ahead.

And I say that more strongly than usual, ’cause in the same way that watching Pulp Fiction opening night let me enjoy it as a blank slate before years of references, quotations, criticism and other junk colored the experience for me, I have to rank playing Portal this week as one of my all-time great gaming experiences – because from the beginning to the end, I had no clue where it was going. So if you haven’t played it yet, skip this post.

So Portal. I’m very gullible. Ask anyone. I’m gullible in the same way as a lot of toddlers, or New Yorkers: I want to believe everything. I want to let my guard down. And when an experience is as complete and as satisfying as Portal, when every detail of the world and the story hang together and there’s are no cheese-outs, laugh tracks or cop-outs to break the illusion – well, it makes me happy.

I can honestly say that for most of Portal, I had no idea what would happen next. I didn’t even know it had a story. For the first part of the game, you have to run through a series of 19 “tests” – each of them a puzzle, or set of puzzles, designed to test how well you can think with portals. You start the game as a blank slate: you don’t know who or where you are, and you also know nothing about the erratic but musically robotic voice that guides you through the labs. I expected the robotic voice to be a running gag. I thought the game would end after puzzle 19 – whether with a happy ending or a tragic one, I had no idea. The robotic voice was equally funny and sinister: the script walked a very fine line between the two, and the tension she brings to the game never lifts.

She promised cake. But come the end of puzzle 19, and it turned out she was going to throw me into an incinerator. I thought this was such a good idea for an ending that it took me a minute to realize, hey, I could actually escape before the fire killed me. Talk about forgetting you have free will: you’re a puppet for so much of the game that you almost forget to preserve your own life. BioShock explored the same problem of free will – how can you say you’re an intelligent, self-directed free agent person when you’re doing every damn thing anyone tells you? But Portal handles it a little more elegantly: the moment you realize you’re free is the moment you save your own life. And from that point on, you’re on the run.

So, the antagonist: GlaDOS. This screenshot explains a lot of facts about GlaDOS, including the terrifically Douglas Adams-esque fact that she was supposed to be nothing more than a fuel system ice inhibitor, but some genius gave her a will of her own.

Is she better than HAL in 2001? Well, let me put it this way: did HAL sing you a song at the end of the movie? I didn’t expect to confront GlaDOS head-on. I thought I’d just escape. Instead, you destroy her, and then she comes back to sing you a song. Just when things have gotten as crazy and climactic as they possibly can, this is the extra cherry on the sundae, and how much farther out of left field can it come?

I still don’t know if GlaDOS is a “villain.” Okay, she tried to kill me. But I tried to kill her. Portal gave a bunch of reveals, but also left a lot of mysteries: is the world outside a wreck? What happened to the other test subjects, who left the trail that you follow through the last part of the game? Why are both the protagonist and GlaDOS female? (Yeah, I know: why wouldn’t they be? But still.) I’m also curious about how this’ll tie into the Half-Life 2 world, but that’s a mundane, fanboyish curiousity (similar to my fanboyish theory that the protagonist of Portal is actually Alyx Vance’s supposedly dead mother. Five bucks says I’m right!).

The whole thing runs two hours (okay, for me, six), which turned off a lot of hardcore gamers – and call me a snob, but I don’t care what the hardcore gamers think. The people who plow through a couple games a week and skip the story for the twitching probably don’t react to the tension, the foreshadowing, and the implications of a game like this. I’m not saying they’re stupid. They just aren’t interested.

But I am. I want a game that’s sophisticated, that never feels cheap or silly, that touches as many nerves as this one. I don’t want big, cheap mindfucks: I want subtle little unnervings. I don’t want to know that the end credits come with one of the best songs ever written for a video game. I don’t want to know anything, and I don’t want to skip a detail. I want to be surprised.

Additional Portal links:

Want to see the end credits again?

Want that with cake?

Hmm, what does this site do?

This guy finished level 18 about two hours faster than I did.

Ever wondered who the voice of GlaDOS is?

And by the way, who does this remind you of?

UPDATE: My review for the Onion is now live. I wish we could give an A+.

I haven’t seen much of this year’s New Hampshire Film Festival, but this morning my kid and I went to a special children’s program over at the Portsmouth Library. The flick above – Alex Weil’s “One Rat Short” – is the first film we saw, an animated short about a rat, a mouse, and an animal testing lab. I don’t think it was really intended as a “kid’s” cartoon – I didn’t mind that my kid saw it, but he missed the subtext. His favorite character was the robot.

(As an aside, this was the first time he had ever watched a movie – as in, sat in a dark room in front of a screen and asked me “What’s going to happen?” a dozen times before it started, and then “What happened?” a hundred times while it was on. We both had a great time.)

Posting entire short films here is addictive. When I interviewed Keith Bearden about Raftman’s Razor, we talked about how hard it is to distribute a short film – how few markets there are, aside from a spot late at night on IFC or possibly an opening slot before a feature film at a festival. Now, I can just post a film like “One Rat Short” right on my blog (which will make it instantly famous). So the fact that it came all the way to New Hampshire, just to screen for a room full of toddlers, doesn’t seem so bad!