So I just discovered a fun little title on Steam called Papers, Please. In it you are an inspections officer at the border of an oppressive socialist state. Your job is to check the papers of those trying to enter the glorious country of Arstotzka by passing from West Grestin to East Gresting (SUBTLETY!). This may sound boring, but the real fun comes from the scripted events when criminals, spies, assassins, and celebrities with improper documentation try to sneak past. We've all seen this moment in movies: as recently as Argo we have a scene where the heroes have almost escaped Iran, but their fate rests in the hands of some bureaucrat with a rubber stamp. Papers, Please does an interesting thing by giving you that stamp.
But you don't just have the stamp: at the end of the day you must go back to your tiny apartment and decide if you will spend your meager savings on food or heating (you have no choice about paying rent). You feel genuinely stressed out when a family member gets sick and you must decide whether to starve or freeze to purchase medicine. The beauty of the game is that you get paid based on the number of people you process, not on how many get in or get turned away, and you get fined for making mistakes. So maybe to eat tonight, you have to let the husband in and turn away his wife, who has lost her entry form. Maybe to afford heat, you have to arrest someone you would otherwise simply turn away because the guards are bribing you. Maybe to buy medicine, you have to turn away freedom fighters. Freedom fighters you start to hate, actually, when their terrorist attacks force your checkpoint to close early, meaning you lose the five or ten dollars you could have squeezed out in the last hour of the day.
And this is why I love Papers, Please: it's one of the first games with moral choices that actually are moral. The game doesn't pull the bullcrap so many moral choice systems do, where if you make the right choice you still get the reward (or an even bigger reward). If you save the old man, somehow he has just as much money as the mob boss who hired you to rough him up; if you spare the villain's life, he thanks you and gives you a powerful item. Not in Papers, Please. If you make the right choice, sometimes the only reward you get is the good feeling. Deciding to keep the married couple together got me a citation and nothing more. Letting freedom fighters through on my first playthrough got me noticed by the Ministry of Information and eventually led to my arrest. If you want to do the right thing, you do it only because it is the right thing, and you do it at your own risk.
The game is beautifully atmospheric, and it puts you in a different mindset. I love that I was able to help the revolution with one button press while detaining innocent people for bribe money with the next. It's a fun thought experiment tied to a surprisingly engaging puzzle game, and I would recommend highly recommend it. As long as you're willing to have the Arstotzka National Anthem stuck in your head all day.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Gravity Didn't Pull Me In
Puns!
So, I had problems with Gravity. Maybe I'm just super-anal retentive about how stuff works in zero-g, and maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy the saccharine tones of triumph as Sandra Bullock quotes George Clooney at the end (Seriously, can we be done with that trope? We get it, the person has changed to become more like their mentor. Do you have to have them quote the person directly, movies?), but the movie just didn't sell me. It seems like the movie took the easy way out: instead of trying to be something new and great, it took the old and easy path.
Picking on the inaccurate portrayal of space seems picky, and it is a bit. But I dislike the inaccuracies for a different reason than you may think. The problem, at least for me, is that they seemed to try for realism most of the time, but they broke the rules when it was convenient for the writers. There is a critical scene between Bullock and Clooney that would make anyone who understands relative motion balk, but allows us to have one of the most important moments in the movie. In real life radio communication is one-way, but ignoring that lets us have a poignant scene where Bullock has an interesting conversation with a stranger. The inconsistency in realism makes the above scenes, and others throughout the film, feel really contrived.
Sometimes even the scenes that could happen are marred by symbolism so obvious it makes you want to say "I get it" to the screen. Sandra Bullock curling up like a little fetus seems like film-school level symbolism. When she did the aforementioned Clooney quoting, I groaned audibly in the theater. There's a moment where she and Clooney talk a bit about her not giving up, and his speech is so over the top he feels like the coach in a 90s sports movie.
And how did Bullock get into space? She's sick in zero-g (for, like, the first ten minutes of the movie, then it is never mentioned again), she apparently crashed every time she performed a simulated landing (and NASA was still cool with sending her up without correcting that), and she seems entirely unfamiliar with everything around her (I guess she just missed all the briefings). Good thing she's got a competent man to save her. Side note, giving your female character a doctorate does not make her any stronger when she has to be repeatedly saved, physically and emotionally, by a man.
Alright, now it just feels like I'm attacking it, and I don't want to do that. It was an okay movie. It was well put together (though a few of the continuous shots just didn't work and really broke my suspension of disbelief) and was a beauty to see. It made some interesting decisions and told a compelling story, but it did it in a really paint-by-numbers, spoon-feeding sort of way. It didn't want me to have to think very hard. But I wanted to think hard. If I was thinking a bit harder, I would have had less time to nit-pick the space stuff.
Seriously, though, that teardrop floating through space was dumb. Plus, that's not how tears work in space.
So, I had problems with Gravity. Maybe I'm just super-anal retentive about how stuff works in zero-g, and maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy the saccharine tones of triumph as Sandra Bullock quotes George Clooney at the end (Seriously, can we be done with that trope? We get it, the person has changed to become more like their mentor. Do you have to have them quote the person directly, movies?), but the movie just didn't sell me. It seems like the movie took the easy way out: instead of trying to be something new and great, it took the old and easy path.
Picking on the inaccurate portrayal of space seems picky, and it is a bit. But I dislike the inaccuracies for a different reason than you may think. The problem, at least for me, is that they seemed to try for realism most of the time, but they broke the rules when it was convenient for the writers. There is a critical scene between Bullock and Clooney that would make anyone who understands relative motion balk, but allows us to have one of the most important moments in the movie. In real life radio communication is one-way, but ignoring that lets us have a poignant scene where Bullock has an interesting conversation with a stranger. The inconsistency in realism makes the above scenes, and others throughout the film, feel really contrived.
Sometimes even the scenes that could happen are marred by symbolism so obvious it makes you want to say "I get it" to the screen. Sandra Bullock curling up like a little fetus seems like film-school level symbolism. When she did the aforementioned Clooney quoting, I groaned audibly in the theater. There's a moment where she and Clooney talk a bit about her not giving up, and his speech is so over the top he feels like the coach in a 90s sports movie.
And how did Bullock get into space? She's sick in zero-g (for, like, the first ten minutes of the movie, then it is never mentioned again), she apparently crashed every time she performed a simulated landing (and NASA was still cool with sending her up without correcting that), and she seems entirely unfamiliar with everything around her (I guess she just missed all the briefings). Good thing she's got a competent man to save her. Side note, giving your female character a doctorate does not make her any stronger when she has to be repeatedly saved, physically and emotionally, by a man.
Alright, now it just feels like I'm attacking it, and I don't want to do that. It was an okay movie. It was well put together (though a few of the continuous shots just didn't work and really broke my suspension of disbelief) and was a beauty to see. It made some interesting decisions and told a compelling story, but it did it in a really paint-by-numbers, spoon-feeding sort of way. It didn't want me to have to think very hard. But I wanted to think hard. If I was thinking a bit harder, I would have had less time to nit-pick the space stuff.
Seriously, though, that teardrop floating through space was dumb. Plus, that's not how tears work in space.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Comediennes: Are Women Funny?
The answer is yes. Of course it's yes. How could a whole section of the population just lack the ability to make people laugh? Does the uterus leech jokes out of the surrounding atmosphere, saving them to be deposited in the zygotes of male children? That's ridiculous. And while women are grossly underrepresented in comedy, I can point to a bunch that I love.
That being said, when someone says "Hey, have you heard [female name here]? They're hilarious!" I'm more hesitant to look them up than when someone says "Hey, have you heard [male name here]? They're hilarious!" I blame this entirely on that question in the title.
So let me start by listing the two types of female comedians I don't like: 1. Comedians who write material based on the fact that they're female and 2. Comedians who try to prove that they're not your typical "female comedian." You'll notice that both of these types come about as a reaction to the "Are women funny?" question; they either answer no (Yeah, I have a vagina and tell jokes. What, you want to fight about it?) or yes (Yeah, chicks aren't funny. But I'm a bro in the body of a chick! Wacka-wacka!).
The problem comes in because these types of comedians are usually so chained down by pushing their answer that they don't tell jokes. Or at least not funny ones. My favorite female comedians are the ones who reject the question as absurd and are just funny. I love Tina Fey as a comedy writer because she writes funny stuff. I love Lisa Lampanelli because she's a really good insult comic. Not a really good female insult comic, but a really good insult comic.
The real bummer is it's not the fault of the comedians I don't like. The industry has been telling them for years that they can't make it because of their sex, and it can easily force them into one of the two paths listed above. If a female comedian isn't funny, it's more than likely men's fault, not theirs.
I know there's so much more important stuff going on like the government shutdown and the Syria stuff (Yes, I do glance at newspapers when I walk past newsstands, why do you ask?), but I think it's important for us to look at something as trivial as our comedy and see that, on a fundamental level, there are some very unfunny things going on that make the world a little less bright. I can only wonder how many great comedians haven't brightened my day because some schmuck at some point in time decided they weren't funny.
That being said, when someone says "Hey, have you heard [female name here]? They're hilarious!" I'm more hesitant to look them up than when someone says "Hey, have you heard [male name here]? They're hilarious!" I blame this entirely on that question in the title.
So let me start by listing the two types of female comedians I don't like: 1. Comedians who write material based on the fact that they're female and 2. Comedians who try to prove that they're not your typical "female comedian." You'll notice that both of these types come about as a reaction to the "Are women funny?" question; they either answer no (Yeah, I have a vagina and tell jokes. What, you want to fight about it?) or yes (Yeah, chicks aren't funny. But I'm a bro in the body of a chick! Wacka-wacka!).
The problem comes in because these types of comedians are usually so chained down by pushing their answer that they don't tell jokes. Or at least not funny ones. My favorite female comedians are the ones who reject the question as absurd and are just funny. I love Tina Fey as a comedy writer because she writes funny stuff. I love Lisa Lampanelli because she's a really good insult comic. Not a really good female insult comic, but a really good insult comic.
The real bummer is it's not the fault of the comedians I don't like. The industry has been telling them for years that they can't make it because of their sex, and it can easily force them into one of the two paths listed above. If a female comedian isn't funny, it's more than likely men's fault, not theirs.
I know there's so much more important stuff going on like the government shutdown and the Syria stuff (Yes, I do glance at newspapers when I walk past newsstands, why do you ask?), but I think it's important for us to look at something as trivial as our comedy and see that, on a fundamental level, there are some very unfunny things going on that make the world a little less bright. I can only wonder how many great comedians haven't brightened my day because some schmuck at some point in time decided they weren't funny.
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