The Graveyard is a postmodern video game that the creators liken to interactive poetry. It only lasts five minutes. It only requires one hand to play. It feels very much like the introspective musical interludes in late-1930s films.
The mechanic is based on what I call the “zen bullshit” aspect of games like Shenmue and GTA, where you have to slog through some utterly mindless segment in order to advance the story (read: pad out the game.) The task can be something like washing a floor, loading shipping pallets, or graffitti-tagging a wall. There is absolutely no thought or skill involved. It is always a complete waste of the gamer’s time, because it is not fun. Shenmue was full of this garbage. GTA 3 made the Shenmue shell actually fun (by adding cartoon mayhem sprinkles) but later iterations were tainted by everyone trying to be all Serious Gangsta. People might play through a GTA game to see the story, but I don’t know anyone who loves the story.
So: The Graveyard.Your task in the game (as an old woman) is to walk through a graveyard, sit down on the bench in the middle, and think about/listen to a song about death. After the song ends, you may continue to sit and reflect. When you are ready, you rise, walk out of the graveyard, and the game is over.
It isn’t quite the “swing scene” in IKIRU, but it worked for me. Watching a video won’t quite work — part of the point is the immersion and self-direction a game allows — but I’ll link it anyway.
That the only additional feature in the registered version is “the possibility of your character’s death” is both hilarious and sensible.
Some time ago, Nintendo set up an awesome YouTube page to promote their new Wario game, “Shake It!” As a total freaking nerd, my first reaction upon completion was to View Source and see how they’d managed to do that with JavaScript. Alas, it was just Flash.
Several months later, Google has announced the Chrome Experiments site, and someone has been kind enough to actually make that effect happen for real. It even works when you search (though it did not work well in Firefox 3.)
William Gibson’s blog today features a guest post by Jack Womack on The Blacklist, published during the Red Scare to prevent “communist sympathizers” from furthering their pinko ways.
One line by this “old” writer stood out in particular:
When I was young my mother told me to never sign a petition, because you could never know where your name would wind up.
Petitions: the original social networking websites!
Tonight, on a very special finding-the-thread edition of Webspotting:
Books That Make You Dumb correlates and does not causate favorite books with SAT scores (via Facebook, which is the only way to do anything worthy of media attention these days if you’re not using Twitter.)
Mastodon – Leviathan is a metal record based on Moby Dick. They fill the void in my life — for nerdy-topic thrash — created when Voivod took a dive in their later years. You have to give props to a drummer who will admit on camera that he was the one who approached a bunch of sweaty headbangers and used the phrase, “we should do an album based on Moby Dick.” Also, they do a practically note-for-note version of “The Call of Ktulu” which is not actually “The Call of Ktulu”.
Connecting the “dumb” and “drummer” themes nicely: Metallica Shreds. Well, they used to.
Finally, tonight: Moby Dick is my favorite book, and, by delightful co-incidence, is likewise Barack Obama’s favorite book. However, no one has yet done a bad painting of me, and many people have made bad paintings of Barack Obama.
It’s still hard to get too many pictures of Pripyat, abandoned city of the Chernobyl disaster.
This is one of the few events of the 1980s that can pull me in for hours any time it’s brought up. Probably because it’s so close to what a scenery-gobbling sci-fi disaster movie would be like. Having seen several of these photojournals, finally playing STALKER should be eerie beyond belief.
A distant runner-up event is the Challenger asplosion, which I watched happen while home sick from school. I had a really great cowboy costume (red rayon outfit with cheetah-print chaps—classy!) and a cap gun. I was lying on the couch in this outfit, watching game shows, and absently firing the gun into the air. One of the sparks from the cap gun landed on my adorable chaps, which immediately became adorable flaming chaps. With reaction time that would have impressed they who made Duck & Cover, I remembered to “Stop, Drop, and Roll” and dove to the floor to commence rolling. Rolling took place for about forty seconds, even though the fire was obviously out within ten.
About an hour later, I was wearing sweat pants when the space shuttle exploded without warning. It was a memorable day.
The 80s marketing term “user friendly” begat one of the classic Unix quips: “Unix is user-hostile” (or: “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”) Web portals, everyone’s favorite 90s busybox, very quickly became user hostile as distractions were, well, kind of their whole purpose.
Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:
Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)
I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.
AIG will take another $30 billion from the government after losing over $61 billion in only three months. Please do not attempt to do the obvious math.
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