Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 56

Then you get to eat shit, space cowboy (episode 4). #submissionsdontmatter

Analog passed on "Pony", surprising nobody.

Bicycle

Big Ride Today.  A good way to get back in after not doing anything all last week.

You Don't Belong to that Part of the Sea

roselemberg asked me to rewrite a poem and send it somewhere, and now "Ariel" has been accepted by Strange Horizons!  That is only what I hope is the first part of its journey.  The rest must be, for now, wrapped in mystery.  If not, well, it's still a saaaaaaaaaaale!  And as such, I will see if I can find you the song that first inspired it.


And the really embarrassingly cheesy one that is also partly to blame.

Don Coronado says "I Love Monsters"

The title is a reference to porn that someone slipped into my steamer trunk that I did not take with me overseas, and, lo, a year later, I discovered upon my return.  When you discover someone has given you porn, I find the best reaction to have is to call out loudly in a happy voice "Cool!  Someone gave me PORN!"

The person who snickers first is the person who gave you the porn.  Or your prosecutor in that obscenity trial.*

This has nothing to do with porn, actually.  If it had been monster-porn, I would have watched/kept it.** 

This is about monsters.  This is also, at least partly about giving the Disney his due.  Since last week's post about making monsters (short form: I intend to discover if there are elements from RPGs and other interacive media that make narrative stories better, as opposed to worse.  Monsters in interactive media have a different set of criteria that make them effective and a slightly different definition of what is effective than monsters in a narrative medium.  Effective interactive monsters make the audience dread interacting with them, but choose to interact with them anyway.  Narrative: tells you a story at a pace and in a sequence defined by the creator.  Interactive: tells you a story at a pace and in a way as defined by the audience).

First observation I realized was remembering a Nostalgia Chick episode (can't get to it to link at work, but look up Nostalgia Chick top 10 evil, and you'll get there), counting down the top 10 Nostalgic Evil characters.  Disney took that list home - Shan Yu, Scar, Rattigan, Judge Doom and Judge Frollo, in order from lowest to highest ranked on the list (Frollo made #3, between Emperor Palpitine and the Joker, IIRC).  Okay, that might make the astute observer ask two things:

1) How does a guy in one of Disney's also-ran films get to sit with the Emperor and the Joker?

2) WHERE IS MALEFICENT?  CHERNOBOG??? ANYONE?

The answer to that is 1) watch his villain song.  Or not, if TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE and/or BURNING PEOPLE and/or ENTIRE CITIES ALIVE dissaudes you from doing so.  I saw this one in the theater, and I remember all the adults in the place sort of creeping back into their seats as it dawned on them what this dude was singing about.  It was parental bonus in reverse.

The answer to 2) is slightly different and an interesting note to remember on this journey I am taking - NC's criteria for ranking villains was the things they did, and more specifically, things they did to protagonists (which is how the Stepmother from Sleepy Hollow got so high in the rankings).  Maleficent has a very cool and very scary design.  There's no denying, and I think that an iconic appearance is important to a good villain/monster, but she doesn't actually do that much, a poisoning, some thorns and turn into the not very effectual dragon (though, again, very cool looking).  And cuss.  A little.  Chernobog... well, there isn't even a protagonist in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia, unless you count the imps he creates.  Which... really?  Really?

I bring this up because I am not sure which is a better way to judge effectiveness in monstrosity in an interactive envrionment; looks or deeds.  Either one seems like a potentially useful thing to have, but a potential dead end.

Of the two, I think there is more room in an interactive medium (particularly one with a visual component) for effective looks.  Good character/monster design, lets face it, is a fundamental for video game design, and the reason why I still write about this shit (there have been years when I did not play RPGs, but still collected monster books because monsters are cool, and play came back for me because I liked the monsters).

Deeds is actually, now that I think about it, kind of not going to fly in interactive media for two reasons.  First is that any deed the monster or villain commits is going to be something that the audience fails to prevent.  A point for the other team.  Interactive media is never going to fight itself fully away from the principles of games, which, unlike game theory, is a lot more like zero-sum.  The monster doesn't win without the audience losing.  The audience loses enough and they are going to walk. 

Second is the Joker Principle.  The Joker is an effective villain at least in part (a large part) because Batman refuses to kill.  Try to set up a villain that effective in that way in an interactive medium and it morphs into the Strahd Von Zarovich Principle.

Strahd Von Zarovich, for those of you who don't know him is Christopher Lee's Dracula in the D&D setting Ravenloft, which consistently fails to be Gothic horror because the rules really don't support the conventions of Gothic literature at all.  Not even a little.  The best you can get is Castlevania, which is not bad, except that you can't get Castlevania, either because there is NEVER ANY BUY IN.  Everyone who sits down to a Ravenloft game knows who Strahd is, knows he is the highest profile target.  They will aim to kill him.  They won't really pay attention to anything else until they get their shot at him. 

Or to put it another way, one of the coolest things about Batman is that when you get into an interactive environment, only Batman can be Batman, anyone else who tries ends up being Owlman. 

In an interactive environment, villains are hard, and often not worth it.  This is why it has been monsters and not villains.  Villains tend to lead to supposed-to-lose and supposed-to-escape (see supposed-to-lose) situations which DO NOT GO OVER with an audience, at least, not more than once.

The only way I have found to get a villain to work in an interactive environment is to make it a hunt.  And for a hunt to work, I think you need to make it clear that there are a number of clues or things the audience needs to experience before they find the villain.  When I did my gothic horror focus, I figured that these things you needed to experience/know were Identity, Lairs, Victims, Powers, Weaknesses.  You can pad that out a little with multiple lairs and victims, but I don't think that more than five things total to start.

Hmm.  That, I think, is as far as I am getting for now.

*Today's batch of notices of litigation includes a flurry of legal activity in which Porn studios are suing one another over patent infringement.  Thus the subject is on my mind.

**Not generally a fan of porn, unless its vintage nekkid people or the occasional racy comic or drawing.  The exploitation inherent in porn that involves real people makes my skin crawl.  I have seen monster porn and it is generally not to my taste, either, again, for exploitation reasons and/or violence.  I'm sure you were all dying to know.

Submission Blues (in the key of Goddammit for three Writers and Guitar)

AAAH!  Every time I look at it it throws the lj user tags around and misattributes everything.  WHAT THE FUCK LIVEJOURNAL?


The LJ user tags do not reflect any kind of reality.
The original here.  Come and sing the blues.




csecooney
You send it off to Venus
You send it off to Mars
They pay for poems with peanuts
And your books with candy bars
You got them
Old submission blues


(And that's if they pay at all
Yeah, those old submission blues)


/> asakiyume
You fine-tune it with a tweaking
You nip and tuck and tighten
You take the spanner to it
And you say, now this is writin'
You lube it up and lob it out
But homeward it comes flyin'
It's the old submission blues my friend
That's what you get for tryin'


csecooney
It starts with inspiration
Divine or otherwise
Your fingers on the keyboard
And your mind walkin' the skies
You type into the midnight
Forgetting sleep or feed
You type until you're dizzy
And your fingers start to bleed


Stuff it in manilla
Slap it with a stamp
Wait six weeks with knocking knees
And cry your pillow damp
You've got those old submission blues...


What are we, luddites?
Email that shit out, man
Those old submission blues...



cucumberseed
You write your head meats ragged
you know you didn't fake it
just to holler at old Duotrope
"Now who the fuck'll take it?"


(Bet you it's a Token Payment market.
Doutrope calls them TP*.)
Those old submission blues...



csecooney :
"Now we need a gee-tar, a harmonica, whiskey and cigars."



cucumberseed :
"I hope we're not planning to pay for those through writing proceeds."



csecooney :
"No. We can start a kickstarter campaign.  'Writers Seeking To Make Their Fortune As Blues Singers.'  AKA 'WHAT ARE THE ODDS?'"



cucumberseed :
"Couldn't possibly be worse..."


(There would be a harmonica solo here if we didn't already spend our money on whisky and cigars)



asakiyume :
You been waiting for an answer
You been chewing your nails raw
Till you check the nonresponse rate
And see it's ten percent
And then you're really fuming
And you feel you have to vent
You got them old submission blues



cucumberseed :
You get that devil's message back,
form rejection nothing fancy,
midnight finds you at the crossroads
with that old rejectomancy



asakiyume :
Did they say they hate first person
Is it retellings they mistrust
How come I send 'em stainless steel
And they tell me it's all rust?
Gonna break my soul on this one
Gonna have to go for bust--
Or else just sing my heart out
with the old rejection blues



asakiyume :
"Hey, this form letter seems slightly less dismissive than the one I recall getting last time I submitted--DOES THAT MEAN THEY'RE ENCOURAGING ME??"



csecooney :
"No. dude. it means they edited their form letter."



asakiyume :
"Shut up."


(Guitar?  We couldn't even afford the harmonica.  You want a guitar?)



cucumberseed :
You stack them bricks together
you build it high and tall,
you double check each letter
then you wonder if you read
those damned guidelines
at all


(cause there's two or three that sink your story that you swear they put in after you checked it the first time)


And if you win that lottery
they'll give you your thin dime,
but lord they haven't changed their rates
since back in Lovecraft's time!



csecooney take it home!
Yad-Thaddag, we beg you
Ulthar and Vorvadoss
We'll burn every rejection
To wake the Elder Gods


Just as we make a pro-sale
And start to feel secure
Submission blues start lookin' good
When Cthulhu starts to stir


Come back, you old submission blues
Go to sleep Cthulhu!
We want our old submission blues...




*The unfortunate naming convention at Duotrope does not reflect the opinions of any of the Submissions Blues Singers' feelings towards hard working and quality publications that can pay only token rates.  We actually love you guys.  Please don't reject us on sight because of the song, keep rejecting us for the usual reasons you reject us instead.

Well. #submissionsdontmatter

King of Pine is back.  On to the people for which I actually wrote it, I guess.
Still.  Pooh.

New Anthology: Skew

benlehman sez:

Skew is a forthcoming anthology of science fiction games, stories, microfics, poems, and other weird shit. The genre is not just science fiction, but the sort of science fiction where modern reality goes all awry, where the basic building blocks of self, sense, and reason are threatened or destroyed, where life as we know it is under scrutiny. Think Burroughs, Robert Charles Wilson, Rucker at his best or Dick at his worst.

We’re looking for pieces ideally under 2000 words, although if you want to push it you’re welcome to try. We’ll pay 5c a word, with a $10 minimum for poetry and microfic. Repubs are fine, simultaneous submissions are fine. Basically we don’t give a fuck as long as it’s good. Please send all submissions in a decent, readable format to taogames[at]gmail[dot]com Deadline is November 30th, 2011.

I Love Monsters Part n of n +1

Okay, the lead in to this one is bound to be a teal deer, but I'll see what I can do to keep it brief.

Creepers are scarier than Pyramid Head.

Okay, that takes a little explanation.  Mostly about Pyramid Head, becuase if the only time you ever saw him was in Silent Hill 2, where he was, after you thought about it for a little while, the manifest id of the protagonist which you were controlling, then the big guy would be equal to the Creeper in every way, and superior in some.  Taken outside that context, he is a big dude with a big sword and a funny hat.  Creepers exist to hide around corners and the moment you are not paying attention, to hiss and then wreck all your shit.  That's the only context in which they exist.  You could argue that they are also the manifestation of the Minecraft player's id, the little child inside us all that would still build a tower of blocks for the pleasure of knocking that fucker down, but I don't think a) that's what anyone thought about the Creeper at Mojang until after the fact, and b) unlike with P-Head, that realization is not necessary to make Creepers scary.  They are stealthy.  They are implacable.  They are a physical threat to you in a way that precludes revenge, and they can seriously derail your careful plans and arduous progress.  Pyramid head just puts his sword into you when he's not trying to TRIGGER WARNING TRIGGER WARNING TRIGGER WARNING.  Actually, that is a bit fucked up, but in later games and the film, he mostly just chases you (or the protagonist) around.   Still, P-Head is an effective monster in an interactive environment. 

This is where we're going to go long, but there is something here.  Creepers scare me more than P-Head because I can tell you about MY BAD EXPERIENCES with Creepers, while I'm more likely to think about James Sunderland's bad experiences with P-Head (or the film character's).  Pyramid Head has never done anything bad to Erik, but those fucking Creepers...

Still, I can see where, in a narrative, Creepers are not that effective.  In a non-interactive story, they are sneaky critters that blow up.  They would be challenging to use in a story and even more challenging to make effectively scary in a story.  Telling someone who has never had their glass tower shattered and carefully transported lava strewn all over the tracks of their roller-coaster is not going to find what is, by most counts a four-legged, scowling shrub more frightening than a hulking, sword wielding, rapist projection of someone's psyche.  A monster in a narrative is as effective as its place in the narrative, how it relates to protagonist, to story, to theme.  In an interactive environment, you may have variable influence over story (and I find that the less you have the better), a variable degree of influence over theme (but this is almost always hard-coded into the rules that define the interactive space, so it's usually either build it, hack it  or have none), and you have almost no influence over the protagonists.  This makes creating effective, emotionally effective, satisfying monsters a very different art.

And again, I am going to argue that interactivity is not simply for game designing dorks like myself, and I am going to do it by asking you what house did the sorting hat put your eleven-year-old wizard alter ego into?  Interactivity makes Potter.  Putting interactive elements into narrative was Jo Rowling's genius, and those who can, those who will, and those who pull it off, I think these are going to be the people who save our shit when it comes to reading, to literature as a whole and our genre in particular (not that everyone should try, has to try, but I think it's both interesting and potentially important, and I would like to give it a go).  This is not to say I have the first clue about how to make creepers truly effective monsters in a narrative setting, beyond, I suppose the writer's skill.

And that's another Teal Deer in the herd - skill level.  With a narrative, you're concerned with the audience's skill level, but not all that much.  If they can read the words, they can probably get something out of it, and if they hit it too soon or in the wrong frame, they can come back, and they will if you were skilled enough in making it in the first place.  It's your skill that is on the line here.

With an interactive thing, you are teaching your readers how to read and, worse, you are teaching an intermediary (or everyone, if like benlehman , you want ALL THE INTERMEDIARIES) to read and compose narratives in an interactive setting all at the same time.  You are VERY CONCERNED with the skill level of every motherfucker who so much as glances at your work.

So, the point, the thesis statement, my goal in making my monsters, which, actually should be a goal in narrative as well as interactive is this:

I WANT TO MAKE MONSTERS THAT THE AUDIENCE, PLAYER OR READER, DREADS INTERACTING WITH, BUT DARES THEMSELVES TO INTERACT WITH IT ANYWAY.
Actually, with a narrative, I want everything to be like that.  There are people who design interactive things with everything to be like that, but audience-skill and technical hurdles are high and plentiful, and I am lazy and lack a lot of technical skill.  But I think I have enough brain to prove this idea out, one way or another.  Well, okay, I can write quite well, I can paint a little and I have a fair grasp on tabletop rpg mechanics.  I can't code video games, so this is all going to be on paper and in brain meats.  Still.

Going back to the purely interactive for a moment, because sewing interactivity into a narrative without showing seams is going to require a lot more planning and a lot of skill to pull off, and bringing this back to monsters because they are a good handle on the larger idea and I LOVE MONSTERS, let's try to figure out what is effective and what is not.

I warned you this one was going to go long.

Right, so let's talk about Survival-Horror games for a moment.  For narratives, I do try to toe Aunt Beast's line that genre conventions and discussions can just fuck right off.  But with interactive media, there's a greater justification for their existence.  Or, at least, I think there is, because I interact with narrative more as art and interactive more as experience.  Art provokes an experience, and that experience, I think, should be idiosyncratic, whereas even the most avant-garde sort of interactive experience is going to be reined in somewhat by the method by which you interact.  No, that's kind of a weak argument.  I will look for a stronger one as I seek to justify my feelings.  It could just be that I think of genre as being more useful to understanding interactive media than narrative media because 1) more narrative media violates genre conventions, 2) my own view of interactive media as a product, a consumable thing.  Anyway, survival horror is a genre which has a lot of visual cues of horror narratives and the interactivity of action games, tweaked somewhat.  The differences I have noticed are the following:

1) Greater reliance on puzzle solving or exploration.  Action games usually have doors you need to get through and places you need to discover, but survival horror uses these more, simply to take some emphasis off of combat and to give the player greater access to the atmosphere and, hopefully, to build tension between combat sequences.

2) Lower level of protagonist combat effectiveness.  You can get this a lot of ways, whether it is frustrating combat controls (Silent Hill, Resident Evil), special vulnerabilities (Kuon, Eternal Darkness), or just the inability to fight at all (Amnesia: Dark Descent).  Sometimes, there is an extra something that you are required to do in order to effectively fight (Fragile Dreams, Alan Wake or Fatal Frame).  Guan Yu and Kratos are not impressed by zombies, nor, do I think would Ezio Auditore.  There is a fine line to walk with this, though.  On one side is the game ragequit and flung across the room and on the other side is a really gory action title, which is the way survival horror, at least in video games has gone.

3) Resource Management.  Weapon degradation is a particular bugaboo in this one.  Some games do better than that, like Kuon, where you have effective, but limited Ofuda to use on monsters, or Eternal Darkness, where you are forever trading life for sanity for mana for life.  There is always going to be something with this, as scarcity is a good source of tension.

And you want to know what is the best survival horror game I have ever played?  Pre 2nd Edition D&D with a high-skill DM who is not a douche.  Puzzle solving, resource management, harrowing fights and a lot of uncertainty.  Here's the problem with it, though.  1) games tend to creep by very slowly.  Actions require meticulous planning and a lot of player skill.  2) A high-skill, oldschool Dungeon Master who is also not a douche is something I saw once at a table.  And it could have just been an on night for him.  3) Resource management can be really not fun unless said high-skill, non-douche DM has a tried and true method of keeping that stuff moving, and that is a skill not found in any ruleset.

Shit.  This is going longer than I thought.

Okay, so, what makes a monster, in an interactive environment, that an audience dreads but will choose to interact with of their own will?

What are the habits of highly effective monsters?

I'm going to walk on this one a bit and put the nitty-gritty in another post.

Just so I can step on everybody's feet...

So we finally got around to watching The Social Network (2010) last night, as I was poking at a game design problem, and it's left me with a bunch of thoughts.  First of all, the movie was very good.  Sorkin writes some very good dialogue and Fincher's a really great director.  The cast was good (Justin Timberlake as the *armchair diagnosis* possibly bipolar founder of Napster was particularly entertaining).

Anyway, here are some thoughts.

1) First of all that Marx isn't any less wrong about the tools of production when it comes to intellectual property.  You could have told me this about 10000 times before last night and I would have agreed with you, but, apparently, it would not have soaked in.  If anything capital gets even more insidious, because, technically, no one should own your brain or your time but you, except... 

There's a great deal buried in here.  This is as far as we go on this one.

2)  Something that angers me in fiction and in life is the characterization of any person who can sell a narrative to others as totally lacking respect in their fellow human being.  I follow how this goes.  A narrative is like wall-hacking people's minds, and most people, I would say, all people lack the skills and savvy to defend themselves when their enemy is coming out of the goddamned walls.  Okay, back up and be clear - near the end of the movie, one of Zuckerberg's legal team is explaining to him why he's going to have to settle - she's an expert on voire dire and jury selection, so she knows quite well that the narrative is dead against him in trial.  Someone who got rich on selling a narrative (which, actually did originate with the aristo-twins - funny that I should be talking about Marx in one paragraph and sympathizing with silver spoon bearing eaters in another) is now the victim of a narrative.  Once the lawyer makes this clear to Zuckerberg, he makes the remark "Barnyard animals," to which the lawyer makes a sympathetic face.  Really, fuck these people.  Humans are humans, and there are dead simple, sentiment-shattering ways to manipulate humans (tribal creatures who require one another's support and approval at all times, always looking for a step up in the social order).  On the one hand, it shows Zuckerberg (in all cases I am talking about the fictional character in the movie, not the actual CEO of Facebook) as incapable of understanding the power of narrative, (or like Dread Cthulhu to the Elder Gods, knowing it only dimly), and illustrates, I guess, Sean whateverhisnameis' contribution to Facebook as the guy who really understood narrative.

Anyway, if you get someone to believe a story - and it's painfully simple; it doesn't even need to be a good story and it can be totally counterfactual and spurious with damning evidence close to hand - you just need to repeat it often and loud enough - you can exploit their emotional reactions and only those who reject your story on its face and build a counter-narrative to protect themselves.  I won't give you examples, but I think if you look everyone here can find an instance of an action that was subcnsciously guided by some stupid shit you don't believe, just because the narrative is so very pervasive. 

I don't understand why so many people react to this vulnerability with contempt.  No, I do, it's self-delusion, and the kind that annoys me the most.  It's a protective incantation "I won't be fooled, I am wiser, I am stronger, I am better," well, you're not.  I am not, and I fell kind of fucking bad for us that we are so both vulnerable and so willing to exploit one anothers' vulnerabilities with such cruelty and contempt.

3) I thought about the first consumer narrative I remember having, and I'm sure I had others (if I get this action figure, I will have more fun, frex), but this one strikes me because it was my first consumer impulse based on an aspirational image of myself.  I wanted to get saddle bags for my bike, so I could put my copy of The Two Towers into it and ride somewhere, and read outside.  This act of riding somewhere with a book and reading was going to make me cool, but it was not possible in my mind without these international orange saddlebags.  This, of course, would not have made me cool.  But it would have made me a little better exercised and better read, and if it lead to more biking and more reading, that might have helped.  Cool, like any other kind of success, is either a gift from the Gods that comes with no regard to your prayers or from willful effort over time.  What comes from the Gods is nice to have, but it's totally irrelevant.

4) Strategic thinkers really need to be quite good at strategy.  They also need to shut the fuck up about the importance of strategy around people whose technical skills they need.  This goes double for me.  On my better days I am a fair strategic thinker.  And nothing gets the backs of people with technical expertise up faster than dismissing their skills because the strategy is awesome.  Also, if you're going to talk with technical experts, be a technical journeyman.  Otherwise, you are going to be like the executives at Pratt & Whitney talking to the engineers, and you are going to hear nothing and sound like a douche.

It is sometimes incumbent on someone who is looking at strategy to get someone who is looking at technical to see beyond the series of technical problems that need to be solved.  I've got no prescription on how to do this; it probably has a lot to do with the person in question, but I am thinking that leading questions that show some level of technical savvy would work pretty well on me when I am thinking of the technical.

5) Something that I am learning to do in game design, visual art and in wiritng, and probably will still be learning on my dying day: looking at the success and failures of others and really trying to analyze why something successful works (in this case I was trying to dream up effectively scary monsters and figuring why the Creeper is more frightening to me than Pyramid Head), and trying to figure out what people who failed were trying to envision as success. 

None of these are world chattering insights.  To a certain extent, I am probably just catching up with some of you and just catching up with places you were a long time ago, but I wanted to get all this down before it sieved out of my head for good.

Bicycle

A 6 mile ride in a liesurely hour, though I did go to the top of Gleeson, which was no joke of a hill.