Richard Dansky's Blog, page 8

Khan Job

The thing I disliked most about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it exemplified all the stuff people point to as bad game writing. We had a series of action sequences devoid of context (but with jumping puzzles), strung together by static expository speeches. We get profound logic gaps that demonstrate a disconnect between the world and the narrative. And we get, perhaps most obnoxious of all, the deliberate outsourcing of any character development to audience nostalgia. When it comes time for the audience to learn who Khan really is, the film literally phones it in, asking the viewer to remember all the stuff Khan did in Star Trek II. We never learn about the Eugenics Wars. We never learn a single thing Khan did, bad or otherwise, except for a throwaway comment from Admiral Robocop that the 300 year old guy he thawed out was a bad dude. And to be fair, Admiral Robocop isn't exactly the most reliable witness.

Consider, too, the reactor scene, an inversion of the one from Wrath of Khan. It's Kirk who "dies", Spock who shouts "Khaaaaan!" and the whole thing gets turned on its head so that the audience can nod along and get its nostalgia centers stimulated. Except when we first saw that scene, it was genuinely moving. Long before franchises took over the multiplexes, we witnessed the death of a beloved character, one that we honestly thought was going to stick. There was no context for Spock to come back, and so his sacrifice felt genuine. With Into Darkness, we know the cast is signed for a few more flicks. We know that there's no way they're killing off Kirk because this thing's a cash cow. We aren't moved, we're manipulated, and not well.

And then there's the lack of context. Other people have gone over the repercussions of the way in which Kirk gets resurrected, but it's symptomatic. In every scene, in every sequence, there's a profound disdain for what was done and said as recently as the last shot. Khan rides a spaceship into a many-times-9/11 destruction of San Francisco and people are calmly getting onto trolleys three blocks away. Two massive Starfleet ships duke it out inside lunar orbit and nobody bothers to check it out. Kirk's supposed to fire a bunch of torpedoes at the Klingon homeworld from the Neutral Zone, except, hey, we find out later that instead of fuel they'll full of frozen dudes and wouldn't have been able to go anywhere. Starfleet communicators that offer less functionality than my antique Blackberry. On and on and on. But hey, who cares when we can have an action sequence of Sherlock and Sylar jumping from oddly shaped flyer to oddly shaped flyer (and is it just me, or did those things look like they came out of someone's Warhammer 40K models box?) zipping around a should-have-been devastated San Francisco, or a Wow Moment of the Enterprise rising from the oceans of a planet that's about to blow the living shit out of itself in a way that would certainly take out the Enterprise, or a far-future government on the brink of war that doesn't bother with the sort of basic security measures (like helicopter no-fly zones near VIPs) that we've got now.

So I didn't like the film. I wanted to like the film. I wanted to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the carefully crafted fanservice of the first Abrams Star Trek. I wanted to enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch chewing scenery and possibly turning into a space otter. I wanted very much not to have to write this. But having shelled out IMAX prices to watch someone indulge in the supposed worst excesses of my industry - again, lack of context, lack of consequence, meaningless action sequences, offshoring character development to franchise history, and long expository speeches that fill in backstory, poorly.  And no, I don't think this is what game writing is - it's what we get accused of. And it's bad writing, and to see it in a film I had high hopes for was saddening.

JournalJabber

I'll be doing a live interview on JournalJabber tonight! Here's the link.

Free Samples! Free Samples!

Which is another way of saying there's an excerpt of VAPORWARE up over at Wag the Fox, along with a contest to win an e-pub version of the book. 

Random Thought On Community, Season 4

Basic law of physics - you can tell where a particle is, or what direction it's moving in. You don't get both. And the same holds for characters in sitcoms.

Most sitcoms are about who the characters are. They're static, they're comfortable, and the humor comes from those familiar personalities interacting with new situations or in new combinations. That's the baseline - we know who these people are. They may learn valuable lessons in their 22 minutes, ones which are often forgotten by the start of the next episode, but really, they don't change much. The newness from episode to episode comes from outside forces acting on the characters - a guest star arriving, a sudden windfall or debt, a job loss or a new love interest who won't stick around long enough to become a regular cast member. Not every sitcom does this for every episode, but by and large, that's the blueprint, and it's why you could pretty easily pull a plotline out of King of Queens and drop it into Married With Children, Everybody Loves Raymond or The Flintstones with minimal modifications necessary.

Community started out like this. The first few episodes were easily recognizable - quirky hottie teaches uptight, jerky guy how to be a better human. Recast Gillian Jacobs with Jenna Elfman, and we've seen it a dozen times before.

But then something funny happened. Maybe it was the Halloween episode, where they took the usual "old guy does dumb thing trying to be hip" trope and extended it beyond all rational comprehension, topped off with a side of Batman. Maybe it was the psych experiment episode, which in any other show would have ended with canned laughter and a round of hugs as Abed and Annie chuckled off their mutual misunderstandings. Instead, what we got in both cases was character change, the recognition on the part of one character that they had affected another, and visible growth.

And with that, Community's characters were in motion - we could see where they were going, but not who exactly they were at any given moment. Troy was in transition from self-absorbed jock to affable nerd to burgeoning adult. Britta went from true believer to self-doubt to finding a purpose. You get the idea. But there was never a sense of destination, only that these people were actually changing as a result of their time at Greendale and with each other.

Then Season 4 rolled around. New show runner, half-season mandate - not the best of circumstances. And the new guys looked at what they'd been given and they made the only choice they could. Faced with a potentially hostile, fanatical fanbase and ridiculously complex premise for a sitcom, they chose not to continue the characters on their arcs. Instead, they focused on who the characters were - Pierce the aging, lonely racist, Abed the weird guy who likes TV, Annie the type-A personality with a crush on Jeff - and they locked these personalities down so that weird situations could be thrown at them, instead of having their own trajectories lead them into weird situations. I mean, we even got an episode with a guest appearance from a fossilized pop singer, which felt like it was right out of the "Very Special Episode of Blossom" playbook.

That's not to say that these episodes were poorly written, or that the new showrunners are bad people. Season 4 was frequently funny and always well-acted. There were episodes where I laughed as hard as I ever did at classic Harmon stuff. But it wasn't the same show, and everyone watching knew it, even if they couldn't quite put their fingers on why.

And now Harmon's back. Maybe he's changed in his year's hiatus. Or maybe his approach to the material has. Maybe his plans for the characters have altered. I don't know. But if he gets the characters moving again, I'll be watching.

Extra Credits - Charnel Houses of Europe

This week's episode of Extra Credits over at Penny Arcade focuses in on some of my back pages, specifically Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. It's a very kind piece, and a humbling one, and it means a great deal to me that the book is still having an impact on people nearly two decades on.

Of course, there's the usual nonsense in the comments  - there's always nonsense in the comments - but that's sadly to be expected these days. I'll let you judge for yourselves instead.

Reading, Light and Otherwise, on a Serious Topic

It's public knowledge by now that both of my sisters have been diagnosed with cancer. They are, as one might expect, dealing with this in different ways. Marla, the elder of the two, has been interviewed by media outlets as diverse as the Raleigh News & Observer and NPR, and she has handled those interviews with grace and aplomb.
My youngest sibling, Becky, has taken a slightly different tack - a "cancer blog" called Becky Vs. Cancer. It deals with what she's going through. It's also shoot-milk-out-your-nose funny. So check it out.

Me, Talking About Things

As part of the launch hoopla for VAPORWARE, I did a bunch of guest posts and interviews at various sites. These include:

Chuck Wendig's TerribleMinds, which on any given day is required reading for any working writer
Suzanne Johnson's Preternatura, where I talk about being a multi-classed writer
Gnome Stew, where I talk a bit about what GMs can learn from gamedev
An interview by the fine folks over at The Qwillery
An extended interview by the Gentleman Gamer

And there are a few more coming...

As for VAPORWARE itself, you can find it at the JournalStone site, where getting the paperback gets you the ebook free as well.

Happy reading!

A few kind words...

...on VAPORWARE from some of the folks who've read it:

Vaporware is life in the world of games, raw and real from a writer who did his time in the trenches - with a supernatural twist that'll make you think twice about late night log-ons and who is really lurking behind the avatar on your screen...

-- New York Times bestselling author James Swallow

A meticulous image of the real games industry so detailed that you'll just assume the supernatural must be part of it. So immersive it makes you want to go check on that video game your spouse is spending so much time with...

-- Mur Lafferty, author of THE SHAMBLING GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY

Imagine you’re sitting at a bar, surrounded by videogame industry veterans. They’re telling war stories about their past projects, the kind of stories you’d never see repeated in interviews or online magazines, the kind that are insider legends. Everyone’s laughing out of shock or horror at some of the stuff we go through to release a game before Richard Dansky launches into his tale. That’s when everyone shuts up, because Rich is telling a story, and when Rich starts talking, you know it’s going to be a hell of a ride….

-- Lucien Soulban, writer, Far Cry: Blood Dragon

Richard Dansky uses his background in video games to breathe realism into his characters, concepts, and environments. The result is a 21st Century techno horror story that manages the near-impossible: to be both geektastic and incredibly cool.

-- Rio Youers, author of WESTLAKE SOUL.

Richard Dansky writes about passionate, complex, flawed, and completely believable people in this absorbing novel about the toll of caring so deeply about your art. Very highly recommended!

-- Jeff Strand, author of DWELLER

Nobody knows the messy collision of writing and game development better than Richard Dansky.  And for anyone who's ever poured heart and soul into a creative project only to watch it die, Vaporware is hauntingly, and almost uncomfortably, familiar.

-- Jay Posey, Writer, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

VAPORWARE

Friday, the fine folks at JournalStone will release my novel VAPORWARE. It has been described as a "video game ghost story", a sort of Fatal Attraction for the digital age where being "married to the job" means something a little different and a lot more dangerous. You can find it at the JournalStone site, or at amazon, or any number of other fine purveyors of reading material.

So why write a book about making video games? It's not just a case of "write what you know". I know a lot of things, entirely too many of them relating to who's playing shortstop for various minor league baseball teams. It's a question of "write the stories that you can tell because you know them well."
And I know making video games well. I've been doing it for fourteen years, working on big games and small ones, smooth projects and rocky ones, best-selling titles that won Game of the Year awards and projects that got canceled and dropped by the wayside. I've got stories, and I've heard stories - from friends, from professional peers, from long-term industry veterans and people who left the industry after one product cycle. And I've heard the stories people outside the industry try to tell - yet another "video game monster escapes!" or "get zapped into a video game and fight monsters!" story that leaves behind the most interesting thing about video games.
No, not interactivity. That's the most interesting thing about the games themselves. But the really interesting thing about games is the people who make them, and what they do to make something go from notes on a whiteboard to fully realized experience. It is not, contrary to the commercials you might see, as simple as "tightening up the graphics on level three". It's long work and it's hard work and it asks as much of you as you are willing to give it. Sometimes that's a late night. Sometimes that's a weekend. Sometimes that's 80 hours a week for months on end. And why we do it, and why we keep on doing it - that's the interesting thing, and sometimes it's the scary thing.
At least to me.
And that's a little of why I wrote VAPORWARE.

Snowbird Gothic Stories 14 - "The Deep End of the Shallow Water"

Tuesday night, I’ll be appearing at NC Speculative Fiction Night at Atomic Empire in Durham, NC with fine folks like Justin Achilli, Matt Forbeck, Steve Long and many others to celebrate, among other things, the launch of the new issue of Bull Spec. And I will of course have copies of Snowbird Gothic available for purchase, if you’re in the area and want to swing by.

****

“The Deep End of the Shallow Water” is another Halloween tale from Storytellers Unplugged. Now, as noted previously, I am a big fan of all things monster-huntery and Sasquatchy and ghost-investigatory and you name it. Do I believe in it? Not so much, but I love the concept, the trappings of this bootstrap pseudoscience. I mean, who exactly decided that EMF meters detected ghosts? And yet, here we are with the idea as gospel, at least in certain circles.

And so thestory is about a couple of those monster hunter type guys, setting up shop in a spot where a monster is clearly an impossibility even if you believe whole-heartedly in that sort of thing. You don’t get lake monsters in lakes that you can walk around in an hour. You don’t get lake monsters in man-made lakes next to airports that aren’t technically old enough to drink. You don’t get monsters in tame places, Loren Coleman’s famous account of the cryptid kangaroo that beat up a Chicago cop in the early 1970s aside.

But that’s not what the story’s about. Really, it’s a tip of the hat to the whole notion of horror itself, of being afraid of the dark even though we know there’s nothing scarier in there than last year’s fashions. We know there are no monsters out there, but we keep looking anyway because we want them to be there, and that desire overrides our common sense when the lights are low and hour is late.

There are no monsters in the reservoir near RDU, which is what I based the lake in the story on. There are heron, and cranes, and ducks and geese and cormorants, and there’s an eagle who commutes between there and Lake Crabtree. There are fish, I presume - all those birds have to be eatingsomething - and frogs and salamanders and most likely freshwater mussels or something of that ilk, too. I don’t think it gets much deeper than six feet at any point, and I certainly don’t think there are any monsters.

But on a day when the skies are dark and the wind’s whipping along, when something is agitating the herons and they take off with their great GRONK-GRONK-GRONK cries echoing off the trees, when the water washes a little closer to the road than maybe it ought, well, that’s when you look at the water and you wonder, did you actually see something moving underneath the waves? Something fast? Something big?

Probably not.

But you’re going to look back again anyway.