The Division Should Have Been More

We have a lot of loot-driven games in the gaming medium, and they are often fun ways to kill some time and baddies. For the uninitiated, loot-based games are centered around a gameplay loop of killing baddies for new items and equipment, using the loot that's better than your own equipment, then using that new equipment to go kill bigger and badder baddies. It's a simple yet satisfying progression system that provides a steady influx of tangible rewards that can be used to earn even greater rewards. Game franchises like Diablo and Borderlands have used this system to great effect. Diablo starts the player with weak weapons and very little armor, and has them finding better weapons and armor as the game progresses. Borderlands is all about the guns, grenades, and passive buffs. You start with a simple pistol that does nothing more than shoot bullets, then find bigger guns that add elemental damage to their bullets or just explode. Both series feature simple premises, that make the loot-driven system the focus of the game. Diablo pits the player against the denizens of hell, and Borderlands drops the player on at lawless planet full of colorful people who let their humanity fall by the wayside in favor of madness and anarchy. Both games use violence at the main way to interact with their worlds and the people/ creatures in them, and they make it work by distancing the gameworlds from reality enough that the violence as main interaction passes without much attention. Tom Clancy's The Division does not have that luxury. The Division is undoubtedly a slick game with an engaging gameplay loop. As a loot-driven game it's great, but it's missions and premise cry out for The Division to be more than looting and shooting.

My Minimap Problem

Hey folks, I’m back to writing blog things. I’m sure you were heartbroken while I was off writing in other places (my attempt to start a website), but no need to fret. So, how about them video games, huh?

By their very nature, video games of every stripe have to communicate volumes of information to the player. In most games, elements like health and equipment are placed around the borders of the screen in an handy dandy heads up display (or HUD as I’m going to continue calling it. Handy dandy heads up display is just too much to type more than once.) In many open games, with larger worlds for players to explore, the designers will add a small map to the HUD. This minimap shows where the player is in the world around them. The main functions of the minimap are exploration, enemy placement, and GPS directions. Each of these functions is helpful but they all lead to the same issue, which is the focus of this article. Every function of the minimap, where useful, creates the potential to distract the player (namely me) from the gameworld that the level designers and artists worked so hard to create.

Note: In this piece I will be detailing my own problems with the minimaps used in video games. First, I will explain the minimap function then I will go into the issue this creates for me. I am not a game designer. I am writing this because it’s on my mind, and I believe we should be constantly analyzing and discussing all facets of game design. I am coming from the direction of an academic fascinated by the narrative forms and mechanical devices of video games.

They Are Not Harmless: Commercials

  Hello, folks. I would like to address a problem concerning television but first things first. I have alluded in a few posts to writing about metaphors in current American pop music and I said that my next post would be about this problem but something strange happened. Before I write any post I like to put at least a little effort into researching the topic. I am a lit student after all and research is kind of a compulsory habit for me at this point but while I was doing research I came across a music critic who specializes in pop music known as Todd in the Shadows. I made his name a link to his work. In the name of research and fascination I watched all of his videos and in so doing I made a discovery. I am woefully under-qualified to talk about the tropes and practices on pop music and Todd hit every point that I was going to make anyway. What I'm trying to say is, Go watch his reviews. They are awesome as well as being a solid blend of insightful and entertaining. Now, on to the new problem. TV commercials.

  Anyone who knows me could tell you that I hate most television commercials, especially ones made in the past few years. Some abuse electronic music or promote stupid music, while others lazily attempt and utterly fail at making jokes. But the absolutely worst of the worst commercials are the ones that sell their products for the wrong reasons. That is what this post is about.

  Commercials exist to sell product and I have no problem with that, their invasive nature aside. But I do often take issue with the way in which some commercials promote their products. Take this -> commercial for instance.

  This commercial is for cough syrup which by itself is not hard to sell. Cough syrup is pretty simple. It helps you stop coughing (in theory because sometimes it won't depending on why you're coughing). You don't want to be coughing and you don't wish it on your loved ones either. But the commercial is not just selling cough syrup, it's selling a brand of cough syrup and based on the fact that cough syrup is simply cough syrup each company has to come up with reasons for consumers to buy their cough syrup over another brand. Again, because cough syrup is just cough syrup the options are limited for creating selling points, so it seems to have come down to who has the most appealing commercials.

  I can't make it clear enough that the reason to sell cough syrup is pretty simple. Coughing is a signal that something is in your respiratory system that doesn't need to be there and your body want's to get rid of it but at the same time coughing can damage your lungs and throat, so buy cough syrup to alleviate the potentially painful process that is coughing. The commercial writes itself. "But cough syrup for you and your loved ones' health and well being." But that's not the message of this commercial is it?

  In fact this commercial doesn't want you to care about the health of yourself or those you care about and it doesn't want you  to buy cough syrup for that reason. The reason that you should buy this cough syrup is so you can hear the television because you wouldn't want to miss anything due to the sound of your spouse and child hacking their lungs out, especially the commercials.

  Now that last tid-bit is not in the commercial but that subtextual reading is there. It's obvious that the couple is watching television and not a DVD because the wife could have just hit the pause button instead of turning up the volume in an effort to drown out her husband's coughing (that act alone makes me sick with indignation). They're not watching on any form of DVR either because, again, they could pause and skip commercials later.

  Am I the only one who notices these things?

  I guess this commercial hits a big sore spot with me because about six years ago I had a severe and very memorable case of Walking Pneumonia which presented with a persistent cough and that lasted for about three maybe four months. And during that time I coughed practically nonstop and a cough like that for such a long time does things to your body. For those three to four months my chest hurt, my throat hurt, my head hurt, and my body ached because when a person coughs their body tenses every time. It was miserable. I'm still dealing with it to this day because it messed up my lungs and I cough every winter now. But according to this commercial none of that is as important as being able to hear the TV right?

  I'm not saying that you should buy or not buy this brand of cough syrup but I am saying that I don't like the heartless way that they chose to advertise their product. I'm not even sure what to call this rhetorical strategy because its not an emotional appeal (pathos), it doesn't rely on the brand's name as the selling point (ethos), and it promote the medical effect of the product (logos). The advertisement is just offensive and callous.

  I would like to thank you all for reading and I can't say when I'll be able to post again because the spring semester just started and I can neither say what I'll be writing about because... What ever happened to mystery? Seriously, people.

Back in Action

Hello, all. I’m back. I took a bit of a hiatus for many reasons. Sometimes life just gets in your way and makes demands of you and while fulfilling those demands its easy to lose sight of what you were doing and why. That idea kinda ties into what I want to talk about today. You, see while I was on my hiatus I lost sight of why I was writing so I began searching for some inspiration. I usually find creative inspiration in movies and video games because I am a visual learner. So, I watched a lot of movies and played through some video games. One of the video games that I experienced was Mass Effect 3 from developer BioWare. The game not only inspired me to write this post but one of the alien races in the game inspired a short story that I am now writing.

For those uninitiated, Mass Effect is a trilogy of games in the Space Opera sub-genre of Science Fiction. A simple definition for Space Opera is “a futuristic melodramatic fantasy involving space travelers and/or extraterrestrial beings.” I.E.- Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Futurama (parody/satire), and Space Odyssey. The Mass Effect series follows the exploits of Commander Shepard. Consider him kind of a Jack Bauer in space but instead of trying to save America he’s trying to save the galaxy. I played Mass Effect 3 (here on out referred to as ME3) and beat it just a few days ago and I’ve had some time to collect my thoughts on it. After its release ME3 saw some controversy with its ending. I didn’t read anything about it until after I beat the game because I didn’t want anything spoiled but now I've read up on it. The only thing that I knew going into the game is that several thousands of fans were unhappy with the ending. Today’s entry will be my take on the ending.

It was brilliant.

What could "Identity" have done better?

  Earlier this week we started talking about the movie Identity and I talked about the things that did not work about it. (If you have not read the previous post please do so now because I am just picking up where I left off with minimal recapping.) The movie had some major plot gaps and the identity of the one killer personality did not make sense. Despite the movie's failings I do like it. The movie was trying and I give it credit for that. Several movies, especially in the Horror genre, don't try anything new at all and just churn out the same tired crap that everyone has seen already. Identity wasn't very good but it had some interesting ideas and the potential for greatness was there. Today we'll talk about what could have been done to make the movie better.

  Before I go into the potential of the movie I need to address the question, is Identity scary? No. Not in the way it wants to be, at least. There are some hints at a larger issue that the movie never covered or dealt with that I believe would have made a far scarier movie.

Oh, the Horror!: Identity

  Hello again. Last week I brought up a problem that I have been noticing. Horror movies have no element of fear to them. Last time I established that Horror involves three elements: shock, disgust, and fear. The Horror genre has plenty of shock and disgust but very little in the way of fear. I set up that I am going to be looking at different movies of the genre that have had any effect on me. This week I am looking at the film "Identity" which involves a group of people getting picked off one by one. But none of them are uninspired teenagers, so its okay.

  Before I get into the movie I will tell you what I find scary. Its not monsters, slashers, aliens, ghosts, zombies, demons, and general supernatural spookiness. The thing that scares me the most is what one seemingly normal person can do to another seemingly normal person and still be seemingly normal. "Identity" is not necessarily a good movie because it has many failings in its story. The direction by James Mangold is solid and the rest of the film serves as a good example of how to make a low budget film but elements of the story hold it back from being a great film about the nature of people, how fragile life is and how easily one person can take that fragile life away from another. Instead the movie is a who-done-it? in a single location with an eye-rolling reveal at the end. The movie is in an odd state of almost good. Meaning that it had plenty of potential and it was trying to do something interesting but it just didn't get there. I'm going to talk about the movie in more detail now. So... spoilers.

 

Oh, the Horror

  Hello again. It has been a long time but I've been busy then enjoying not being busy. I just finished a semester of school and took a week off to sleep and be bored. But have no fear I'm back now and ready for summer. An additional note- I have dropped the moniker of Musing Matt because I learned that I'm not the first and only one to discover the alliterative fun of that particular word paring. Until further notice I will just be Matt. This week's topic will have multiple parts because I am trying to figure out the answer to a question that has been bothering me for quite some time now. Why aren't horror movies scary?

  This question is one that I have been obsessing over for years and I mean obsessing. You see, the reason that I started this blog is because I have an obsessive mind and when an idea gets into my head I can't stop thinking about it to the point where I can't think about anything else. As is obvious this can be a problem. I started this blog as an experiment to get out my obsessions and this far its working. Horror movies and their lack of horror are near constant obsessions for me because I would think fear is an easy concept to grasp. Either I'm wrong or the people making the movies don't understand fear.


  First, I think it's important to define horror and fear to establish a base line with which the movies can be measured. I will also establish why the horror genre is important enough for study in the first place. My definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary (here on out referred to as the OED). The OED definition of horror is sweet and simple: "an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust." This definition provides a solid basis for what the horror genre to offer and it seems that horror movies have covered shock and disgust fairly well, what with jump scares and gore fests. But the genre seems to have missed the mark on the third part of the definition. Fear has a very expansive and quite loaded definition(s): "an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm/ a feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety of someone"(OED). I can't think of any movies in the genre that fully capture that definition. I've seen movies that try but none of the movies that I have seem have made it.

  I am not a horror movie buff and the fact that horror movies have little effect on me is the reason. For the next few weeks I will be looking at the concepts of horror, itself, and revisiting some of the horror movies that I have seen that did manage to stir something in me. I won't be giving reviews of these movies in the traditional sense of a review but I will be looking them in terms of what they say about the genre and the elements of fear. I will also try to reach outside my own collection for movies I have not seen before but bear in mind that I'm college student who works part time. Also, there are a few types of horror movies that I don't even give the time of day. Slashers, monsters, torture, gross-out, and pretty much anything with uninspired teenage stereotypes being picked off one by one. I'm looking for fear not irritation and hastily thrown together cash-grabs.

  It is my belief that the horror genre is one of the most important genres of film and its also the one that the film industry puts the least amount of thought into. The genre is important because experiencing fear is important. Horror movies can make you feel fear and through experiencing fear we can learn thing about ourselves. Horror movies can also make you face your fears so that you can deal with them and come out on the other side alive and stronger. Horror and fear are fundamental experiences that we need to experience and learn from. Cinema has the potential to provide important learning experiences. Through cinema and other forms of literature we can learn from experiences without having to face them ourselves.

  I will start my look into the films in the genre this weekend with "Identity." I will be looking at how the movie represents the horror genre. What works. What doesn't work. And how it could have been improved to actually instill fear.