So for the past week I’ve been dabbling with the new MMO Warhammer Online (very polished and fun, I must sa–especially the Public Quests). When I finally got my Magus Moppet to the Inevitable City, who should I find hanging out in the Apex but lovable Skub! He seems to have undergone a bit of a face lift, though, and I was disappointed that not only is he sided with the forces of Destruction, but he’s a gambler! For shame, Skub. For shame!
I’m no stranger to fan fiction and even slash fiction, but after seeing the pairings in this article, even I winced. Lance Bass and the Weasley twins? Surely the Weasley Prankster need a firmer male hand to break them. Someone like Iggy Pop, who also happens to be a dead ringer for Filch, and would make for much better sparks!
With that in mind, here are three Labyrinth fan fic pairings which, to the best of my knowledge, remain untapped. Why?! These scenarios practically write themselves! (Were it not for certain disapproving glances, I’d write the first one right now!)
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A few posts back I wrote about my frustration with the games industry for encouraging a monoculture where niche titles have a hard time finding an audience. I mentioned how music and movies have done a much better job with bringing niche content to the right audience, but even in those categories, things aren’t perfect.
Last week Apple released the latest version of iTunes with the new “Genius” feature. Basically, you select a song and click the Genius icon and iTunes will generate a playlist from your library around that song. It will also recommend songs that you don’t own that you might want to buy. As someone who has found the recommendations systems built into the iTunes store to be a valuable tool for discovering new music, I was excited to give Genius a whirl. With over 5000 songs in my library, there are doubtless plenty of songs I’ve overlooked.
First impressions boded well for the feature. Testing out a few songs from different genres, Genius generated playlists that meshed featuring songs that I uniformly liked. But the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that what seemed like its strength is Genius’ greatest flaw—namely, Genius generates the obvious.
Genius is powered by the same recommendation systems that can be so useful when browsing the store. By tracking the buying habits of millions of users, Apple does an amazing job at capturing the trends of the moment and can make very effective recommendations of obscure albums for those who take the time to follow the “Listeners also bought” trail. Because its consumer base is so large, Apple’s recommendation tools are strong, no matter how deep you go down the “long tail” of niche music. The iTunes recommendation system has two major flaws—1) it is heavily skewed towards new releases as that’s where the biggest sales and most active reviewers are; 2) it prefers strong quantitative associations over qualitative.
To illustrate these problems, let’s look at the album Neon Bible by the Arcade Fire (one of my favorite albums, BTW). It’s the latest album by a contemporary Canadian indy rock band, but by no means obscure. For fans of this album, iTunes recommends the latest albums by the Shins, LCD Soundystem, the National, Spoon and Wilco. On the song and Artist level, you’ll find Wolf Parade, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs added to the list. Basically, you have a bunch of the standards of mainstream Alt/Indy rock for the past couple years. Are these good recommendations? Well, they’re certainly safe in that all of these bands are approximately equal in popularity. There’s nothing obscure, nothing from a jarringly different genre. A much better recommendation than any of those would be Bruce Springsteen, who is the most influential artist on the Arcade Fire, and whose music would actually mix better side-by-side with theirs. Similarly, older listeners who don’t follow up-and-coming indy bands but who like the Boss might be very fond of the Arcade Fire. Sadly, iTunes doesn’t help in that direction either, with Springsteen leading to recommendations of U2, John Mellencamp, the Who and other institutions.
There are plenty of other tools out there to find the music associations that iTunes can’t, from music blogs to services like Rhapsody and Pandora—I just had hopes that with Genius, Apple might have found a way to make their service, well, smarter. On the contrary, it only serves to make iTunes shortcomings even more frustrating by making playlists that seem culled from singles and greatest hits. New songs yield nothing but other new acts on the Genius playlist, and genres seldom intermingle. I like some hip hop and some girl bands, and I am probably someone unusual but hardly unique in that I like to mix the two in my custom playslists – Genius would never create a playlist like that.
The sidebar, which recommends items not on your playlist is probably the biggest missed opportunity here. Apple leaves them as passive recommendations with the option to play a 30 second preview. As implemented, this feature is only useful if I’m in active shopping mode, as playing the recommendations interrupts my regular listening, and I’m only getting a 30 second preview. Once again, Apple plays it far too safe here. A smarter way to handle this would be to automatically slip new songs into your playlist for 1 time use, then reminding you in the sidebar which songs played you don’t own.
As it stands, Genius is better than “shuffle” at creating a pleasing playlist, but it’s hardly revolutionary. With other places offering digital music cheaper and offering more sophisticated recommendation systems, Apple really needs to step up their game here if they hope to retain the appearance of mavericks.
On the movie front, one of the biggest success stories in separating the good from the bad is rottentomatoes.com. Films are rated “fresh” or “rotten” based on a meta-critic rating. The reasoning here is that the average score of 100 reviewers will lead to a more useful and objective score than that of any one critic. It’s a fun reference, and a handy starting point for reading more detailed reviews, but as a recommendation tool, it is hugely flawed. Certainly it does an effective job of recognizing the very best and very worst of movies, but stuff in the middle… the ratings are pretty much worthless. A movie that 70% of critics thought was just OK is ranked fresh, whereas a decisive film that 50% love and 50% hate is rotten. It disturbs me that the Tomato-ometer ratings get as much weight as they do, and that the idea of a critical bias is looked down on. You want biased critics! Understanding how your tastes measure up to an individual critics is a more useful tool for finding films you’ll like than following the averages of all critics.
Case in point, three new releases on DVD/Blu-Ray that were all rated rotten but that I would put on my top 10 list for the year: Youth Without Youth, Speed Racer and The Fall (23%, 31%, 44% respectively according to top critics. Going beyond the numbers, each of these films has one thing in common—they are highly decisive. These aren’t movies that fell off the radar – they were each subject to some very harsh critical lashings. Each, however, had a minority voice that praised the film in the most glowing of terms. Clearly they’re not for everybody, but they are far more likely to illicit a real reaction from the viewer than “fresh” movies like Kung-Fu Panda and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Originally this post was just going to be mini-reviews of those three films. Now I’ve got a dinner party to prepare for and some Force Unleashed to play, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out why I think those three rotton movies are worth your time.
Also, expect some new Labyrinth preview art this week–certified fresh, I assure you.
I don’t remember learning much from the two years I spent at community college. If I try hard enough, I can vaguely recall testing for mineral hardness, or learning that most archaeologists make a living by inspecting construction sites, not excavating jungle tombs (way to crush my Indiana Jones dreams, Mr. whateveryournamewas!) , but the truth is, I wasn’t that motivated by school anymore. Having sort of sabotaged my academic momentum by not bothering to really apply to universities, I found myself without any real goals or real hope for change.
I found inspiration in the summer of 1996, ironically enough, in astronomy, sociology, geology, anthropology, ecology (and plenty other -ologies)…just not in the classroom. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars 
and its sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, opened my eyes to a new kind of optimism. His scientist heroes weren’t trying to take us to “The Future!”—they were trying to build a present that didn’t trip over the mistakes of the past. His books are packed with scientific detail, but they are never about science—they are about people who think scientifically. The Mars trilogy reawakened my pre-teen optimism for a glorious tomorrow, where men and women from around the world could put aside their differences and really change the world for the better! I still didn’t know what my place would be in this glorious utopian revolution, but at least I’d found hope again, and I’d discovered a damn good writer in the process.
Shortly thereafter, when I transferred to USC for film school, I read and enjoyed Robinson’s next novel, Antarctica (I even tried to persuade the development company I was interning with to option it!), but after that, fell out of touch with old KSR. By the time I checked up on him again, he was already 2 books in to his next trilogy, one about global warming. Blue Mars deals with the repercussions of global warming—does my erstwhile favorite writer really need to stoop to Roland Emmerich material now, I thought as I looked at the sensationalist covers that seemed far too Tom Clancy for my tastes. It wasn’t until last month that I finally caved.
Here we were, in the heat of election season, with my now officially confirmed guy talking about change, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe it’s silly, but when I was struggling to get excited about our real world heroes, I looked again to Robinsons’ science heroes for inspiration.
Forty Signs of Rain
, the first of the “Science in the Capital” trilogy starts off slowly to be sure, and chapters dedicated to daddy day care and grant endorsements weren’t exactly reigniting the old flames. It wasn’t until about half way through that you really even have a sense of what this series is really about. And it wasn’t until the second volume, 50 Degrees Below, that I realized how invested I was in the main character, Frank. The more I read, the more impressed I became with how Robinson weaves together threads of bio-engineering, politics, Buddhism, privacy, terraforming, Emerson, homelessness and neuropsychology—he forces you to question what it means to be responsible modern human. In his world, there are no pat answers, yet he isn’t afraid to take a stand. Robinson is, as always, an optimist and an idealist, and while that might at times come of as hokey, I am glad to share in it. Especially now. Welcome back into my heat, Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m sorry I ever took off your friendship bracelet.
Last weekend I attended the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle. What started as a small centered on a popular webcomic has become the single biggest video gaming convention in the US and the place for publishers to go to generate buzz. Right now I’m working for a new games startup (working on stuff that’ll be ready to talk about in… 2010?), so I was very excited to get a hand-on look at what’s in the video games pipeline for the next year. What I saw, though… not too exciting.
Penny Arcade the site, I really enjoy. Sure, not every comic strip’s a winner, but once or twice a week I get a good laugh. More importantly, though – I enjoy Tycho’s maximum verbosity discourses and I trust his tastes in games. It’s thanks to him that I first ordered Puzzle Quest and Bookworm Adventures and more recently, CorspeCraft. I know that Tycho will stand up for a good game even if it’s too kid-friendly or casual for gamingdom’s target demo, and he’ll call bad games out in the face of hype. Reading Penny Arcade, I feel a contented connection to gamer culture.
After reading Tycho’s utopian descriptions of PAX over the years, with the beanbag lounges of gender-equality and Wil Wheaton’s life-changing speeches, I expected more of that gamer optimism to come through in the show. What was on display, however, was thoroughly uninspiring. Penny Arcade the website might succeed at creating a voice slightly to the left of mainstream gaming, but at PAX, the games on display mapped perfectly to the hype meter on IGN. Zombies, tactical shooters and sequels ruled, with only a scant few booths displaying anything not engineered to pander to the 16-30 male demographic.
Spending a weekend around these games and watching people queue up to play them (myself included), made me a little depressed about being a gamer. Is yet another game about lining up headshots with your futuristic rifle worthy of such excitement? Sometimes I wish someone would just stand up, like in the old 1984 Mac ad, and throw a chair at the big brother face of gaming and really shake things up. Then I realize, that’s just what Nintendo did with the Wii… and it fell cold on me. I appreciate the appeal it has for groups and families, but as someone who mostly plays alone, I seldom touch it. It’s not so much a revolution that I want, but better guides to what’s already here.
In film and books and music, I have no problem seeking out the titles I want, whether I learn about them from mass media sources, word-of-mouth or recommendations from Netflix/itunes, etc. With games, however, the mainstream hegemony is too loud and omnipresent to ignore. Games for “gamers”—as defined by young males who love some combination of Mega Man, Sepiroth and Master Chief—are easy to discover, follow and discuss because the culture of reading and writing about games grew up with that “mainstream” and still talk about little else. Against my better judgment, I continue to buy sequels to games I never really enjoyed the first time because that’s what “the conversation” is about (I’m looking at you, Metal Gear Solid & GTA!). The rest of the video game industry, including Free-2-Play MMOs and hidden object casual games are raking in dough, but aside from articles about their success, they never get a fair shake in the gamer press. I know there have to be better sources for finding games than IGN and kotaku. Are there any game fans among my readers who can recommend a better way to find the gems among the countless games that fall off the gamer radar?
My PAX experience wasn’t a complete bust, however. I did discover one game that pressed all my nerd buttons and tickled some I didn’t know existed –BattleForge! It’s a RTS (real time strategy) and CCG (collectible card game) mash-up that plays like a dream. As someone who sunk more than he’d care to admit on Magic cards back in the day (and even dabbled with the well-designed Lord of the Rings game from Decipher a few years back), I am quite susceptible to the appeal of deck building strategy and tournament premiums. Throw in controls that feel like Warcraft 2 and units reminiscent of all those ornately-painted Warhammer miniatures that I was never patient enough to recreate, and this game is an uber-nerd’s dream come true. Whereas most games in the RTS genre have been getting progressively more complex with tech trees to rival Civilization and headache-inducing micro-management, BattleForge opts for a minimalist approach to real-time complexity. There are no resources to gather, no half dozen special powers on a single unit. It’s closer to Tower Defense games, only with 200+ cards to build an army from.
So after all my complaining about more of the same, my game of show is possibly the nerdiest of all. I guess it’s not so much the lack of ideas that bothers me about my PAX trip, but the insistence on a common culture that gamers seem to have. Perhaps I shouldn’t protest too much, though, as my geek obsessions are all that keeps my tastes from mapping 1-to-1 with stuff white people like.
