Too... believable?

This is an ad for a video game.

It's pretty simple, and no video game actually makes an appearance therein. It uses a technique I love--taking something commonplace and understandable, such as a documentary or a museum, and applying it to a fantastic situation. In this case, that situation is a war against a "covenant" of alien races, driven by an opaque religious fervor.




So we see the desperation, the death, the fear, the pain, all reflected in the subject's face. It's like watching a veteran look over a diorama of Normandy, or the Ia Drang Valley, or the blood and dust of Baghdad.

It's powerful. But is that kind of intensity--and its echoes of real life--appropriate in an ad for a video game? You tell me.

Great moments in video game advertising

A couple of years ago, I wrote this.

That was an ad for a video game. Its live-action, documentary feel gave it a broader emotional appeal than you might expect. Now, with Halo 3: ODST hitting the market soon, Bungie has commissioned another live-action ad. And again, I'm impressed with the production values and use of something besides raw gameplay to get people interested.


Halo 3: ODST Live Action Extended Trailer - Watch more Game Trailers

Anyone agree? Or am I just thinking about this too hard?

Watershed years

The story of the Iranian revolution is a good one, regardless of what angle you're approaching it from. The most recent depiction I was exposed to was the excellent "Persepolis," which told at least part of that story through the eyes of a woman who grew up there.

The animated film was a novel approach and drew me in from the first frame. It captured the angst and ambiguity of someone who loved her country but was torn about the way it was developing.

That same ambiguity is what intrigues me so much about this project: A video game called "1979" that, according to its developers, aims to embrace the gray areas. They intend to tell the story through multiple viewpoints, handing off a narrative "baton" to a different character in a different part of the Iranian world at the end of each segment.

Moreover, it will use a "sandbox" approach to advancing the plot, in which players can use any means at their disposal to solve a problem. Sometimes you run, sometimes you negotiate, sometimes you shoot the hostage.

This, Khonsari explains, is where gameplay shifts to include some morally ambiguous elements of diplomacy, stealth and bartering. Each time the baton passes to a new character, the style of gameplay changes, too. Some characters will focus more on action, while others will feature vehicles and puzzle-solving.

"Not everyone you meet is going to be helpful," he said. "There are going to be aspects of bribery, making exchanges and turning a blind eye to really bad stuff so you can get the job done.

"Maybe, in order to get the group there, you need to sacrifice some stragglers and let them get captured so the others can get away. And then you'll have some extreme choices to make when you get to Tehran: Are you going to invade the embassy, guns blazing, to try to get the hostages back? Or are you going to try to protect the embassy from the Americans?

"People who might not be completely familiar with the game world look at fancy graphics and polished gameplay and say 'this is cutting edge,' " he continued. "But from what I've seen, it's still quite basic. Very much a checkers mentality -- red against black, good against evil. I'm interested in having good and evil within the same character, and for you to experience both. I think that's true to life, and I think you can design a game around that, too."

Interesting. It's possible that this caught my attention more than it would otherwise, simply because I live a few hundred miles from Tehran. But I'm curious to see whether the game's creator--who grew up during the Iranian Revolution--can pull it off. I love games with great stories, like "Mass Effect", and with a fascinating real-life story to build on, I'm curious to see whether "1979" can turn great history into a great, immersive experience.

It's all part/of my rock 'n' roll fantasy

OK. Those of you who made it past the Internet's only Bad Company reference so far in 2008, let me explain myself.

A benefactor who shall remain unnamed--we'll call them Terry and Helga for anonymity's sake--provided me with Guitar Hero II for Christmas. Yes. A video game in which I pretend to me a badass axe-slinger.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me sketch the electronic ridiculousness out for you. There's an XBox 360, right? And you put the game in it. Then you plug in the controller, which happens to be shaped like a guitar. On this guitar-shaped controller are five buttons, which represent frets. There's a little flange where you normally would strum, and just below and behind that, a whammy bar for really making that sustain wail.

The game puts you on tour with a band. The band has a set list. You are the guitar player. And instead of reading music, you kind of follow these notes scrolling down a guitar neck, strumming, fretting and whammying in sync with the guitar part. And since I'm doing a great job of making this sound boring, here's an example of what it looks like onscreen:



So anyway, having gotten that explanation out of the way, let me get to the point. Or the solo, as it were.

Guitar Hero is just. Plain. Fun. It's addictive. The temptation to do "just one more song" is as hard to fight off as a pack of star-stricken groupies. When the songs get more complex, if you squint your eyes just right you can imagine that you're actually playing the guitar.

Yes. I'm a huge dork.

I used a few of the stickers that came with the guitar to decorate it. One of them is an ace of spades.

Did I mention the part about me being a huge dork?

Anyway, I had to get this off my chest. Think of this as an electronic AA confession, except my "problem" doesn't hurt anyone. And I can quit anytime I want. Honest.

W@yn3 N3wt0n pwns

I have, on occasion, written about impressive video game commercials. Those examples struck me as more subtle, interesting and ultimately attractive than most of what you see on TV--most of which revolve around an overly simplistic "buy this and be cool" message.

Well, here's another one.

Poppin' space caps.

Funny, right? And it sort of plays up the idea that people playing video games online aren't dorks--they're rap stars. (and nerdy movie stars) I don't have this game yet--thanks, PAL formatting in the Middle East!--but when I do I'll be expecting a marching band on my doorstep the first time I jump online.

Trust me: it's not that exciting

I have written about video games a bit here, mostly in terms of how nowadays the best games are the ones that tell a good story. Well, today I read an article that makes me wonder if gamemakers might be trying a bit too hard. Now they're writing stories about storytellers... specifically, journalists.

In my world, journalism is grit and shoe leather. Most of the time it's a methodical business of tracking information, finding out who can tell you what and making sure it's all solid and clear. It can be exciting--like solving a mystery--as you're piecing together something over the long term and watching its impact. Some guys wrote a book about that once. Breaking news is a different beast, as you enter a story in media res, soaking it up as it happens, mixing in context and letting your readers know ASAP. There is more adrenalin involved.

But enough adrenalin to base a video game on? Er....

Oh, right, of course: war reporting (also the subject of a great book). I haven't done any myself, but from everything I have been told there are fewer better ways to feel alive than surviving a firefight. Surviving a firefight is the subject of quite a few games already. So it should work, right?

Maybe. Not being able to actually shoot anything in a first-person shooter might be a drawback for a lot of players. Which brings us back to the idea of a story. A tale about telling a tale can work as a movie. But when you're playing the central character, shooting video while everyone around you actually drives the plot forward could be about as exciting as calling a school board member.

Prepare to mock

At E3 today (yesterday?) two things were announced that make me more excited than I, as a 32-year-old, should be.

First, a new Halo game called Halo: Reach. Following the trend of pretty much every major Hollywood franchise these days, the game is evidently a prequel to the massively popular (and well-written, in my opinion) Halo games. So that's cool. And second, there was a trailer for Mass Effect 2, a sequel to, you guessed it, Mass Effect, the beautifully written science fiction epic. That game was great because it essentially played out like an interactive movie; unlike most video games, the story arcs were clever enough to get the player invested in the fates of the characters. And the dazzling art and art direction helped too.

Anyway, there you go. Fire away.

Fun with meteorology

When I was a kid I had this idea that if you encircled a city with giant upward-facing flamethrowers, you could dissipate tornados as they approached.

Fortunately, no one ever put this innovation into practice.

But aiming weapons at the sky is not, apparently, just the purview of imaginative second-graders. According to this bit I found on CNN, a bunch of folks feel that shooting a (projectile-less) cannon into a storm prevents hail. As you can imagine, it also prevents their neighbors from liking them much.

"It sounds like artillery fire," said Gregory Connors, a 38-year-old software designer whose children have been woken up by the booms. "I'm up for everybody's right to farm. We support local farmers. But the technology and the way it's being utilized is not acceptable."

Personally, I don't think this goes far enough. Think of the additional applications of fighting weather with firepower. Stop earthquakes with lasers! Defuse hurricanes with nuclear blasts! Evaporate tsunamis with machinegun fire!

Wait, we could make it into a video game....

That wasn't so bad

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is FINALLY over, and Barack Obama won in a relative snoozefest. No big surprises, unless you count the repudiation of all the anti-intellectual (and, really, counterfactual) backlash that sprung up against election data analysts like Nate Silver.

And then there's Florida. Oh, Florida, how you yearn to be at the center of electoral controversy. In my very first wet-behind-the-ears job out of college, I was an editor at the St. Petersburg Times. The year was 2000. The election was... complicated. Let's just say spending months trying to reframe the issue of "no one has any idea what is going on in Florida" in a story every day was taxing.

This year, of course, the sun is about to come up in Miami the day after the election and no one has figured which candidate carried the state. That came after days' worth of complaints about inaccessible polling sites and ridiculous lines for early voting. That's right, even when the election's outcome is not in doubt, Florida insists on being in the spotlight. What, LeBron James and Disney World aren't enough attention? Sheesh.

But like I said, aside from that this seemed to be a relatively painless deal. The same cannot be said, however, for what remains the best way of interpreting modern politics: the violent video game.




Let's do it again in 2016!

The good news is, we have a couch

I realize that this has been an exceptionally long dry spell of posting, even for a guy who has been known to skip town for a few weeks at a time.

The thing is, life has been busy. Busier than it has been in a long time.

For one thing, Mrs. Blog and I are in the midst of the biggest nesting endeavor ever. In Abu Dhabi, a place that always felt oddly temporary to us--and the millions of other imported workers--we were content to furnish out place in the yellow-and-blue wonderland that is Ikea. It was cheap, smartly designed and gave us an L-shaped sofa that turned into a guest bed. Hooray for Swedish innovation.

But everyone else in the country had roughly the same idea, remember. So inevitably, no matter whose house we were visiting, we inevitably encountered some of the same Ikea influences that shaped our own living space. (Our orange living room, blue bedroom and pink office, however, were singular and awesome. Have I ever told you about how we picked out the colors over Skype, with me in the 'Dhabs and Mrs. Blog in the Windy City?)

Hong Kong, whatever your intentions are when you arrive, feels like a much more permanent place. It has a reason to be. For thousands of years before the British showed up to colonize, the islands were dotted with fishing villages; the sea and a safe harbor made it a good place to live. Much later, after China decided it did not want much to do with the rest of the world, Hong Kong became an obvious and successful conduit for trade. As a place that was "almost" China, it had a foot in both worlds.

Which brings us to our apartment. It is fairly large by Hong Kong standards. It was also mostly devoid of furniture by any standard. But we made a decision, a pact--we would not use Ikea furniture. Sure, it was one-tenth the price of other stuff and you could see every bit of it in a showroom. But if you go there for anything other than meatballs (or hot dogs--enormously popular at the Hong Kong Ikea), you can't miss the fact that a pulsating throng of other people are attracted to those same qualities.

Hong Kong has permanence. So should our furniture.

That has led to treks all around Hong Kong trying to track down an elusive couch or coffee table. Mrs. Blog has deployed her considerable design instincts and invested even more time on her own in the hunt. It has been a slow process, but it has brought us interesting pieces like these rearrangeable shelves, which may or may not remind you of a certain Slavic video game:

Try as I might, though, I can't remember the theme music.

So that has been a big part of our life, eating not just time for blogging--sorry, Dear Reader--but other stuff like seeing giant Buddhas on mountaintops. Don't worry, though, that's on our agenda.

I also have a job here. It's a good job, editing for a big, international media organization whose stories are read by millions worldwide. It has given me a face-to-face introduction to the global news cycle, which went something like this:

ME

Hi, I'm Gerry.

GLOBAL NEWS CYCLE

Hi, I'm the global news cycle.

ME

Nice to meet you. So tell me a little bit about yourself--

GNC

It's always overnight someplace. Which means the readers there are asleep. Which means they will wake up and see the news that someone else sees before they go to bed. Big election in California? Los Angelenos will see the preliminary results on the evening news and maybe the full story in the next day's paper. Hong Kongers--if they care about California elections at all--will get the full story online during their work day and get analysis in the morning paper. A story that starts in Hong Kong will be read last in California; a story that starts in New York will be read last in Hong Kong.

Hey, I didn't say it was a gripping conversation. But it's tough to wrap your head around, at least at first.

The job also meant at least dipping my toe into a lot of different skill sets. I have been editor of the sports section, editor of the business section, early news guy, late news guy, copy editor, deputy this and that... pretty much everything but Chief Coffeemaker, a title currently held by the office Nespresso machine.

Now I'm settling into a more steady role as a business editor. And this is a new thing for me. I filled my notebooks with hard news as a reporter, and as an editor I seldom came across a story with arcane terms like "basis points," "three-year money" and "Sachinidis" in close proximity. Or at all. But Hong Kong has changed all that, and I am enjoying it immensely.

This is the center of the financial universe at the moment, at least in terms of news. Everything that happens in China affects the rest of the world; there are too many people buying and manufacturing things there for their actions to go ignored. A tiny change in a key interest rate affects how many people borrow money, and how much money they borrow affects how much they spend, and that affects how many iPhones Apple sells. I am helping tell stories with nuts-and-bolts cores, and draping them with flesh that anyone, anywhere, can consume and appreciate.

Plus, insinuations of zombieism aside, check out the view from my office window:

A little of everything: sailboat racing, barges and tugboats, with a cruise ship watching.

And that brings us back to one of the major effects of all this nesting, learning and exploring. I haven't had much time to blog. Or, on some days, even take a deep breath. But here's the thing, the silver lining in this storm of activity: It means when I do sit down to write--and I have an office to write in now--my brain is nearly overflowing with new experiences that, whether I know it or not, are begging to be let onto the page.

Which is just a long-winded way of saying, "Don't worry, I'm going to blog more. Sorry about that." 

Politics is a bloodsport

As I have mentioned before, it is kind of a blessing living overseas during a presidential election year: not only is voting easier but we are spared the barrage of campaign commercials.

I'm sure politics has actually always been like this, but to my eye it has become much more polarized--a sport rather than a discussion of competing ideas--and vitriolic. That makes it less interesting and more annoying. It is often juvenile and easy to ignore.

So let's talk about juvenile behavior for a minute. Way back in the day, I spent four summers taking some classes in North Carolina. We were a bunch of junior high and high school students basically living like college students: on our own except for showing up to class and meals. And after lunch, there would invariably be a crowd of people gathered around the cafeteria's Mortal Kombat machine. Oh, how we would drop quarters into its bottomless maw.

I was terrible at it, of course. I could barely make the characters punch and kick, let alone pull off the complicated combination of button pushes and joystick tugs that would trigger a signature move. It was fun (and oddly social) to watch, but not very interesting to play.

But today, I was introduced to a project that made both the video game and politics seem... well... awesome. Behold:




Paul's "church and state" move and "red vest straitjacket" seem unbeatable, honestly. But Romney was able to easily fight off him and Herman Cain's "creepy ad" power move. Impressive! And round 2:



There are a lot of cheap shots, but hey--art imitates life, right? And the Republican primary was indeed pretty brutal, rhetorically speaking. How will the rest of the battles shape up? We have less than five weeks to find out. Here's hoping the actual campaign has an exciting finishing move... except, of course, with a lot less blood.

There are no bathroom breaks in basketball!

Wait, actually, there are. They're called timeouts.

And yet, on national TV last night, viewers witnessed a different way of dealing with... uh... bladder issues. Don't worry, the video's not graphic or anything. But watch the bench at the lower left-hand corner and you can pretty much figure out what's going on.



Now, I'm not a fan of K-State, although I am a fan of several K-State graduates. But even if we leave out that natural enimity, I have to wonder: What the hell was he (KSU player Bill Walker) thinking? I've played sports my entire life, and I can't think of a single instance of having to "go" so badly that I "went" in front of the entire stadium.

So, yeah. Not really sure what else to add here. Except that I hope Walker never decides to eat Mexican before a game.

Beijing, the Jade Rabbit has landed

It's been a while since Earthlings have sent something to the Moon that hasn't had a hard landing. But over the weekend, China's Yutu rover (Yutu meaning "Jade Rabbit" in Mandarin) set down in the Bay of Rainbows, and did so without making a crater. Here's a CCTV video of it rolling onto the moonscape:

This is, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, a fairly significant step for the Chinese space program. It takes a lot of technical know-how and organization to pull something like this off. You need a reliable booster--something that China hasn't always had--to go with all the components on top, which need to work nearly perfectly in a harsh environment. And that's not even counting all the calculations needed to get the thing to hit the Moon from the Earth, both of which are moving in relation to each other and to the Sun. (The more cynical, and I mean possessing weapons-grade cynicism, might suggest a Chinese remake of "Capricorn One.")

It appears that the Yutu can do some legitimate science; among other things, it carries ground-penetrating radar that could offer useful insights into the moon's composition. And that's something that everyone should be happy about.

But there are also some concerns about the end game for China. For one thing, the official announcement said "We finally have the right to share the resources on the moon with developed countries." Which isn't exactly starting a war, but it's not coming in peace for all mankind either. For another, the space program closely is intertwined with the military--something that is true in many countries, but especially so in China.

I don't think China has nefarious plans for the Moon, or, at this point, the ability to pull them off. It just sent its first astronaut into space in 2003. But this achievement clearly shows that the China's technical abilities are making strides even as--and perhaps because--space is more accessible now than at any point in history.

How it all shakes out remains to be seen. But perhaps if nothing else it will remind the world that space exploration is, and should be, inspiring.