Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

So my kid and I were coming home tonight from a Portsmouth Halloween Parade fundraiser thing. And my kid asks:

“Are elves real?”

“No, elves aren’t real.”

“No! You’re kidding! They are real.”

“No, they’re not. Have you ever seen one?” (This isn’t fair logic – he’s never seen a kangaroo either. But whatever.)

“No. But they’re real. You’re kidding.”

“Nicky, I tell you when I’m kidding about stuff like zombies and the Zipper Factory and whatever. But elves aren’t real.”

“Then how can they work with Santa at the North Pole?”

Busted.

He used a classic lawyer’s trick to get me to confess there’s no Santa Clause. Now I know what he’ll be when he grows up.

(I tried to cover by saying that I thought he meant a different kind of elf, but, we’ll see if it’s too late.)

The other day I joked to Leigh Alexander that I really enjoy her “I’m busy” posts. It’s good to hear a full-time critic and writer talk about the fact doing all this work and playing all these games takes a lot of time.

I’ve been busy too. I’m working on a few projects and playing a hell of a lot of games, and I haven’t had much time for blogging, except sporadically. So let’s just acknowledge it. My pals keep this on their RSS readers, so they know when I have something to say. And I still get traffic from people searching for any of the stuff I’ve written about in the past year and a half. But right now, I can’t make the regular posts that I like to put on this blog – extensions of game reviews, short essays, random crap about my kid. I’m not stopping, so stuff will continue to appear here, but it’s not going to be that frequent.

In the meantime … here are links to some recent stuff I’ve done:

- I started freelancing for Variety, which has been a real boon – Ben Fritz (see him at The Cut Scene blog) has been great to work with, and it’s a great chance to write about games for a mainstream audience. My first review was Far Cry 2, and yes, I got to the ending (and then handily jumped back so I could see the other ending). I’m pretty pleased with this one, and look forward to helping out during the pre-holiday deluge this fall and beyond.

- I have a Fable II review coming out in the Onion next week, but I didn’t really figure out how to cover everything that really mattered to me in just 400 words – maybe I’ll work up something for the blog. I much preferred the write-ups by Gus Mastrapa and Rachael Webster – but only ’cause you had the word counts, guys. Don’t get cocky.

- I have a couple more reviews coming up for the ‘Fork this fall, two interviews in the can, a feature I’m working on for The Wire newspaper. I’ll be posting those, for yuks.

I also started using Twitter. I like the idea of reviewing games via Twitter – just posting thoughts and reactions as I go along, sort of the way Kyle Orland does his “Games at Lunch” feature. It kept me company during long car trips across Africa in Far Cry 2, or after my XBox got the red ring of death (agggg). So I’d like to use that more.

And hey – how about that election … ?

In a News post yesterday, Josh Modell blogged about the upcoming Pitchfork 500 book - order it now kids – and he let slip that The AV Club also has a book in the works. That’ll be book number two for the AV Club, following the fantastic interviews collection Tenacity of a Cockroach.

I had the chance to contribute a few things to it, and I’ll post again here when they release some more information about it. From what I can tell it should be a good read. Will it displace the Pitchfork book from the back of your toilet? Well hey – isn’t there room for both?

This week, Andy Battaglia at Pitchfork - or as Rock Band 2 would have it, Ditchspoon - reviewed the reissue of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Hilariously he scored it a 6.6, which makes sense: in my reissue or compilation reviews, I sometimes rate the packaging rather than the original, although not everybody gets that.

Battaglia was up against a special challenge here, because I can’t think of any album in any genre that’s more iconic than this one. It is the sound of jazz to the most casual and even the most serious listener: the horn stabs of “So What” are the pinnacle of a jazz brass statement, Bill Evans’ piano on “Blue in Green” is the sound of cleaning up glasses at the end of the night. “Flamenco Sketches” is pure peace and unabashed beauty, cranked too quiet to sound shlocky. Everything in the album is romantic, sentimental, fiery and hard – but all those emotions are tightly reigned in, because more than anything, the album sounds cool.

It also sounds lonely. If you knocked together a very traditional list of Top 10 Jazz Albums Everybody Should Buy, this would be the quietest one, the cerebral one in the corner. And that’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to it, whereas others might find it respectable but tired.

That recording style fascinates me, because it crops up again and again on albums I love, particularly from European players. The ECM label – “the closest thing to silence” – is seemingly built on a foundation of Kind of Blue: check out the pristine and equally solitary sounds of early solo piano records by Paul Bley or Chick Corea, or even the warmer, more otherworldly stuff they tried out on records like Eberhard Weber’s Colours of Chloe.

The peculiar effect of listening to Kind of Blue is to hear a series of completely live, barely rehearsed and (so far as I know) unedited performances, the performers as living, breathing and isolated men, right as it was flash-frozen into a recording. You don’t hear the engineer, you don’t hear the producer, you don’t hear an audience, you don’t hear anyone out in the hallway. The performances are unadulterated because the performers are so alone.

I first started listening to this in high school, but my strongest memory of it dates back to freshman year of college. Miles Davis had just died, which meant all four soloists on the record were deceased. Yet listening to them, they were so perfectly preserved and resurrected it was frightening: they didn’t sound alive, but they didn’t sound gone. Every note tossed off in those moments sounded – and the cliche fits – eternal.

Two games have dominated my week, not counting Rock Band 2. For an upcoming review I’ve been playing Fracture, and not liking it so much. But last weekend I picked up a board game to play with my kid: Chutes and Ladders. Hey, it’s about time he outgrew Puppy Pals Bingo, right?

If you’ve never played Chutes and Ladders, or it’s been a good couple decades since your last session, I highly recommend it. I’m not a board game geek, so I can’t offer an in-depth analysis of what works in the game, how it’s evolved over countless iterations, etc. But I can offer this observation: It is way more fun than Fracture. And it’s $52 cheaper.

A few caveats. Chutes and Ladders is definitely a kids game, and a game that adults would not play with each other. The main reason is that it’s completely random. You can never make a choice about where to go next: you spin the spinner, move ahead on the board, and sometimes you hit a ladder – that sends you ahead – or a chute, which knocks you back a couple dozen spaces or more. The first to hit the last of 100 spaces wins. And in our version we scream “WARHAMMER,” because for some reason my kid thinks this is the Warhammer edition of Chutes and Ladders. It is not.

But essentially, the game could just play itself without having any players sitting around it. For a kid, it’s solely designed to teach you how to play a game – how to stick to the rules, how to focus all the way through a session, how to accept the sweet thrill of victory or the arbitrary hand of defeat.

That said, the design is clever. (The screenshot above is an older board, but it uses the exact same placement of chutes and ladders – I’m guessing that’s been canonical for a while.) The placement of the chutes and ladders maximizes excitement. If you land on the very first square, you end up on a ladder that shoots you almost halfway up the board. In the middle, you have a very long ladder and a very long chute that basically flip the game for you: if you land on that ladder, you jump up from near the bottom of the board to close to the top.

The other day my kid was close to winning when he landed on the gigantic chute, sending him all the way back to the bottom. The next spin, he wound up on the ladder, and came all the way back up to where he was. These dramatic reversals were way more exciting than anything in Fracture. They’re more exciting than most of the games I play.

When you’re close to the end, the game throws new obstacles at you: the last row of the board has three chutes, and any one of them will send you back to the eighth row – not a major setback, but annoying. The winning player can churn around through that system a couple times while the rest of the players catch up. At that point, you’re just counting on luck to get you past and put you on the final square. “WARHAMMER!”

And there’s also a little bit of content on the board. Per Wikipedia, the game originated in India as a game of morality, and they’ve kept the idea to the present day: on each chute or ladder, you see a little pair of pictures telling a story. A little girl tries to sneak a cookie out of the cookie jar, but she slips and smashes it open; that’s the story that accompanies the longest, most devastating chute in the game. A little boy is reading comic books instead of his History text; he loses twenty spaces.

The little stories take place in before and after pictures, one on each end of the ladder (if the kid did something good) or a chute (if the kid screws up). Okay, simple enough metaphor, although of course the idea that good choices help you in life has nothing to do with the gameplay, because there are no choices – but at least the game is consistent within itself, which is more than I can say about the plodding political allegories raised but not really resolved in Fracture. So again, point to Chutes and Ladders.

Truth be told, we’ve only played it twice, and haven’t finished either session. My kid’s still learning to enjoy structured play, and he’s more interested in the little stories on the board. The instinct to compete and win hasn’t caught on for him yet. I can’t wait to see how he acts when it does.