A while ago, a guy who makes robots* wrote a thing. 

He followed up with another thing.

*well, not by himself.

Joe the Plumber is now Joe the Reporter, and he's covering the war in Israel.

He begins by advocating his own expulsion.

 

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

He follows up by taking reporters to task for inserting their own opinion.
 

 

JOE: They’re supposed to bring the news to you unbiased. They’re supposed to actually report it and then let you make your opinion.

ROGER L. SIMON: What do you think you can provide that a seasoned journalist can’t?

JOE: What I can provide are actual real questions and get real answers. I’m not talking manufactured answers, I’m not talking soundbites…And uh, not giving it any kind of slants.That’s how news is supposed to be reported. Somewhere along the line they forgot that. As opposed to a commentary from them. 

 

 

UGO bought the site from Ziff-Davis and laid off about 30 people.

The comments section is furious, but UGO didn't do themselves any favors by announcing the deal with "Please join us in celebrating this major news for 1UP."

Jeremy Parish made it through, but doesn't seem happy.

There's a Tristan Farnon quote I like to copy and paste every now and then.


I've been pretty content at work for a while, but there might be some good comics coming up.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/on-road-atlanta-georgia.html

Could be a big one, folks. I had what I thought was a very safe bet involving voter turnout, but I might lose that one yet.

They don't love you like I love you.



This is live, by the way, so it'll update all the way to the election.

It's appeasin' time.

There's a certain art of compromise to sharing a house with other people. Little agreements keep the whole enterprise running smoothly on a daily basis. For instance, Jess doesn't like the smell of fish. She'll put up with it for our sake, but we grill it outside when we can. Or for another example, I have a visceral dislike of monotonal former Nixon speechwriters, but will tolerate episodes of "The Fairly Oddparents" in which they do voicework.

There's some things I have to draw the line on, however. The good news is, if these scathing reviews of "Expelled" are any indication of the film's future success, I may not have to mute the commercials on Comedy Central for much longer.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/anti-emo-riots.html

MEXICAN EMO RIOTS.

We're trying out a new ad system with Adsdaq on 3PS.

I can't say I like the ads much. Flash banners are horrible, ugly things that chew up CPU resources like crazy.

But the money's good. The money's darn good, considering.

So I guess we'll see.

Anyway, here's some comics.

Shiga Books

We The Robots

Almost a year ago, Shaenon Garrity posted this article, Why I Hate Anthony, but I only just now found it. "Anthony" is the character from the newspaper comic strip "For Better or For Worse."

While the article is definitely worth reading on its own merits, I also bring it up because I'm going to tattoo the first paragraph of point 7 backwards on some of your fucking skulls so you can read it in the mirror every morning. You know who you are out there.

...except that the coconut crab is the world's largest land invertebrate.

Though most of Ian's work at Three Rings has been on unreleased projects, one piece that saw the light of day recently is his background for the new Atlantean swordfights, as seen on the upper right of the Puzzle Pirates page.

There is a Matt Boyd/R Stevens TEAMUP BEL GRANDE in the works. It's going to be epic.

That would have linked to Andy Helms's hong-kong action movie parody because he invented the phrase "teamup bel grande," except he seems to have removed it from his site. I think it was called "Kicky."

I've been thinking about video games as art lately.

I know, I know, it's a boring topic. Games don't need to be art to be good games. Just humor me.

Roger Ebert brought the topic up recently in an ongoing conversation with Clive Barker. In a nutshell, he said video games as a medium will never be art, because the experience can be changed by the player, whereas a movie or book is always the same. If the artist can't control the viewer's experience, it can't be art.

(There's also some fairly snide jabs in the article, but given he's likely been subjected to the hell of a million GameFaqs forum mouthbreathers cramming his inbox, I can forgive him for being a little pissy.)

Ebert makes it clear he's not taking the view that anything, even a bowel movement, is art. He's talking about capital-A Art. The kind of thing that, like pornography, you just recognize when you see. And that's fine with me, I'm comfortable discussing art in those terms.

But while Ebert may know more than me about capital-A Art, I'm comfortable saying I know more than him about video games, and he's making some incorrect assumptions.

For the most part, he's overstating the amount of control the player has in video games. Players actually work within highly limited parameters defined by the developer, no matter what game.

Of course, this isn't usually something developers advertise or strive for. "Sandbox games" are seen as a positive thing, letting the player have as much freedom as possible. But even in the GTA games, the progenitors of the go-anywhere-do-anything concept, the player can do nearly nothing that hasn't been anticipated by the makers. When they do discover a way to escape the watchful eye of the developers, it's telling that we refer to that as "breaking the game."

Even if we could make an unlimited self-generating world, and there's people hard at work on that, it doesn't mean linear games would become unpopular. Final Fantasy VII is one of the best-selling games of all time, and it's on more rails than a San Francisco streetcar. And it certainly doesn't mean video game narratives would become impossible.

Let's use Shadow of the Colossus as an example.

It's a beautiful game. That's something nobody disputes when they see it, gamers and non-gamers alike. The colossi are awe-inspiring, and the empty landscape is hauntingly beautiful. But, Ebert says, just because something is moving doesn't make it automatically Art.

Me, I think a beautiful virtual landscape can be as much Art as a beautiful painting of one. Being able to experience it in different ways doesn't detract from its beauty any more than being able to walk in a circle around a sculpture makes it not art. Both creators have designed with that capability in mind.

But Ebert is a movie guy, and I assume he's more concerned with narratives, so I'll talk about that aspect.

That means there's spoilers ahead. You've been warned.

Shadow of the Colossus is the story of a boy out to save the life of the woman he loves. To do this, he makes a figurative deal with the devil. At the command of a voice in an empty temple, he sets out to kill 16 colossi in exchange for her life.

The story is sparsely told, but the developers do a lot with a little. As he progresses, the boy's appearance gradually changes. He becomes haggard and scarred. His skin takes on an unhealthy pallor. Whenever he kills a colossus, an evil black smoke pours into his body, rendering him unconscious.

The player doesn't have the choice to reconsider and stop the quest. He can get up and turn off the console just as he could close a book, but if he wants to see what happens next, there's only one way forward.

In the end, it turns out the boy's figurative deal with the devil was quite literal, and he's possessed by an ancient god who was sealed away in the temple.

Now, why does the character do it? Why does he keep moving forward even though it seems obvious he's dooming himself? Because he's young and in love, which automatically qualifies him as a fool, but that's my interpretation.

So, does this narrative make the player "become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on)" by experiencing it, making it Art by Ebert's standard?

Well, as with any artistic work, your experience may vary.

I think at the very least it points the way to the possibility of such a thing.

I'd like to talk a little about something else the developers do, once the player has sealed his character's fate.

Once the character is possessed, he is transformed into a hulking demonic figure. He can move slowly about, and smash at the priests who have come to try to stop him from doing exactly what he just did.

But this freedom is an illusion. No matter what you do, the priests are going to escape and reseal you.

The character's demonic form drains away, leaving his human shape shrouded in the black smoke. The player is drawn inexorably towards a pool of light at the end of the temple.

The player here keeps full control over his character. You can move any direction you want, though you will still be pulled backwards. You can even grab onto the steps and hang on until the gale-force winds make you lose your grip and you fall in.

This could have been done in a simple cutscene, but the developers are playing with the player's expectation of control to alter his experience.

It hints at a complexity, and a potential for Art, that goes far beyond the simple idea that video games are a malleable lump of clay that only the player can manipulate.

I see nothing inherent in the medium of video games that would keep art from being done within it, least of all a degree of viewer control that is ultimately an illusion anyway.

Do we really have to do this with every new medium that comes along? At least now if someone says that a mashup of pictures and words is inherently worthless, the critical acclaim of Maus has made it acceptable to call them a dumbass without the need for further discussion. The Maus of video games can't come soon enough.

Meredith Gran, formerly of several other webcomics, is doing new ones.

A rough mockup:



So far we've gotten one "Boring!" and one "I don't wear black shirts anymore" but we're running with it anyway.