Found on Gamasutra:

Conscience Is But A Word: Why videogames need better villains, by Xander Markham.

Great article. Plenty of valid points are also made in the comment, but I’ll specifically second Jeffrey Wilson’s opinion: bad guys who do evil stuff just for the sake of being bad guys are flat out uninteresting  (and I’ll add, those who do it simply for their own good can get boring pretty quickly).

The audience needs to know enough in order to connect with them: understand what they want and why they want it, and then reject it.

A friend of mine told me about a great analogy between grading movies and dives (please bear with me on this). In fancy diving, the process judges have to take into account the difficulty of the dive the athlete set out to do before grading it.

This is tightly linked to what I once said about under-delivery in business-related matters, and it very much applies to movies as well : as long as a movie delivers on what it set out to do, it’s a good movie, period. It means that it can be nothing more than an action-packed flick without a “message” and still be really good.

This does not mean that any meathead movie gets a pass, though; even action needs to be a bit original to be off the hook.

A lot of people have been asking about why they’d put the boring stuff in Heavy Rain. I think the goal is simply to lower the Emotional Baseline: most games are all about the shooting (or the action of some kind). Now there might be some more subtlety in the storyline, but it’s usually told through cinematics or non-interactive means, so every time the player does have the controller in hand, he’s always right there in the middle of the action, killing dozens, business as usual. By resetting the Emotional Baseline to a lower (mundane) level, the developers made it so that when something out of the ordinary happens, it does feel like something out of the ordinary to the player.

Or at least I think. Can somebody get me a PS3 over here ?!

It’s actually done only every single time in movies: rare are the ones that start with action right off the bat; it always begins with the hero living his ordinary, everyday life, right before the terrorists/aliens/bad guys show up.

Moving on as I’m catching up with everything I didn’t have the time to watch, I finally sat through the whole first season of Dollhouse. The first time I tried, I couldn’t get passed the first episode, steered away by a nasty combination of not-so-stellar acting, and a non-compelling story. Now that I have, I’m forced to get down to the most basic questions.

What’s the series’ synopsis again? There are dolls into which you can blow your darkest, most secret fantasies.

What kind of theme does that bring about? Identity. The separation of mind and body. What if the same mind ended in two different bodies? What if someone ran away with an active to try and live a second life? What would a long-term engagement look like?

There are enough stories to tell about our weaknesses and who we are to fill a couple of seasons right there. And yet the first 7 episodes are nothing but action tales of super-duper agents – hostage negotiator, kung-fu expert, high-end thief, etc; this looks like a string of unrelated episodes of The Pretender. You could strip the whole “dollhouse” concept out of the first 7 episodes and still retain 90% of the storyline; that’s how intricated the themes are to the episode writing.

I can’t believe the writers failed to identify the question of Identity as the main theme of the series. So why is it that the only way they found to express identity crisis was through a whole lot of action, global conspiracy or even apocalypse (in the feeble “Epitaph One” episode)?

That’s exactly what happened with True Blood, as well: supposedly a vampire story, it’s like the writers had so little to say about vampires and their society, they had to throw in a psychic protagonist and what? Shape-shifters? Damn. Whether it’s about designing a product, a service or writing stories, if you fail to identify what you’re about, you’re guaranteed to end up into a wall.

So I finally watched Hancock.

Following my newfound enthusiasm for alternate superheroes, I came around and watched it (among other things). The verdict is that it was kinda nice for the first two thirds, but obviously went downhill on the last part. So, what would I have done different?

I remember this pivotal scene where Hancock tries to kiss Mary Embrey (the wife of the PR consultant that helped him); she steps away from him, triggering a dispute of epic proportion. But why does she rebuff him? Because they were married and their kind lives and dies in pair? Please, no. Because she’s his mother? Now, that would work. That’s actually what I expected (wanted), partly because I read disgust and distance more than fear in Charlize Theron’s performance.

Now, why is that better? a) because it’s less conventional: Hollywood has trained us to see a couple in every on-screen pair of attractive actors. b) because it makes just as much sense, if not more: The whole ‘we die when we’re together’ bit doesn’t make much sense, and smells horribly like an artificial artifact, solely designed to bring Hancock into exile. Hancock could just leave because he can’t stand being in love with his mother (and I wouldn’t blame him). Of course, we’d need to rewrite their interaction a bit to squeeze more passion out of Hancock, but it would (additionally) shine some light on the predicament of people living that long.

Now, what is the downside of having Hancock and Mary as a mother and son instead of a husband and wife? The only impact I see is that we’ll miss the explanation of their kind’s disappearance. Except I honestly don’t care, at least not in a first chapter. As a bonus, their separation would be more of a human-rooted reaction, instead of being a non-sense response to an alien condition the viewer cannot empathize with.

Finally, and because I love me some drama, I’d also alter the following (although it’s purely a matter of personal taste):

• What are the odds that Ray’s wife just so happens to be related to Hancock? That kind of coincidence is fine for a comedy, but doesn’t work well in a drama. So Mary Embrey probably would have initiated this, maybe simply because she missed her son.

• Ray’s public relation career makes him a prime candidate for some shady intentions. He’d have to have some ulterior motives, once he realizes he can manipulate Hancock. This would generate conflicts with his wife Mary further down the road.

• Finally, I’m missing a couple of scenes showing the reaction of the LA/NYC population following Hancock’s departure/arrival at the end of the movie. A superhero, even a controversial one like Hancock, leaving a city for another, well, that really must create some ruckus, one way or another. Hell, he’s the only official superhero!

Oh, and because some coincidences are just too hard to swallow, I really can’t believe that the fight between Hancock and Mary leads them right below her unsuspecting husband’s window; let’s just have him discover the truth via the news, okay? He wouldn’t be the first celebrity spouse to get the surprise, after all.

Anyway, I think this version of Hancock would have been better (meaning I would have liked it more), but I can only admit that a drunkard superhero was a damn good idea in the first place.

Back from Terminator Salvation, with lots of things to say.

I’ll mainly talk about Information Technology however, as its nerve-racking lack of credibility made me uneasy  through the whole movie. Credible science / IT is something that mostly doesn’t exist in today’s entertainment, and even if it was alright at some point, it just doesn’t cut it.

At the beginning of the movie, Connor and a squad of soldier enter a Skynet R&D Camp - btw, briefing soldiers on their mission when they’ve already hit the ground running is just bad exposition. Soldiers search the compound for intel, and one of them spots a laptop; he starts browsing the files, uploading them to a secured location and…

Wait, what?

So the terminators use laptop. Did they launch Judgment Day from a windows desktop shortcut as well?
2 reasons for which this is stupid:

• Efficiency and convenience: the emergence of Skynet as a sentient being can only be seen as the aftermath of a Technological Singularity: machines breeding faster, better machines. With their exponential knowledge, would these keep on using hardware designed by pre-singularity technology? Of course not. Would they use graphical representations for their data? Of course not. I’d like to believe they’d just plug to a port and go, or simply use some kind of wireless technology.

• Security: as soon as you connect a secured network to the Internet, it is potentially vulnerable: computers are computers, and their operators are humans on both side of the fence. They have the same tools, the same capabilities. On the other hand, Skynet doesn’t have a world wide web to maintain. It would be extremely easy for it to secure their IT: develop user interfaces that are simply impossible for humans to use. Having laptops and interoperable networks is like having Matrix phone booths in the ruins of the real world, powered by the Matrix itself and with a big sign on top “hey, come hack us”

HOWEVER.

Even though the telling of a story must remain coherent enough to be credible, it might change things entirely: locking humans completely out of the information network means they’d have to fight completely in the dark, which could be an interesting story to tell, but rest assured a very different story. I can accept that.

Let’s just not have it so obviously flawed. The resistance could have, for instance, taped into an optic fiber backbone. Or they could have intercepted encrypted wireless communication and decrypted them with an enslaved AI. Or a non-sentient AI. There are plenty of solutions around that don’t jump out of the screen and punch you in the face.

One word to describe the Caprica pilot: dense. So much potential for drama, I don’t even feel sorry Battlestar Galactica is over anymore. Beware of SPOILERS.

I always thought the audiovisual landscape lacked some “Social Scifi” programs; even though it’s a genre that allows powerful parallels with our own life experiences, science-fiction is still for the most part confined to the realm of either war and spaceships or fantasy in popular media. I believe it’s William Gibson who said that (and I might paraphrase a bit here), what’s interesting about science fiction is not science itself, but how science and what it allows changes and affects people.  Caprica looks like it’s going to drive us along this idea.

To elaborate a bit more on the pilot itself, it’s interesting to see each of the main characters having pieces of the puzzle. As they don’t communicate on these, the moment of truth of each situation is left hanging until later: for instance, Graystone sees the infinity symbol and discovers the technology that makes Cylons possible, but doesn’t know what the sign implies. His wife knows nothing about what her daughter has accomplished, but knows of her involvement with the terrorist group named “Soldier of the One”. Finally, Adama knows about the technology, but doesn’t know about Zoe’s involvement in the death of his wife and daughter. All of these threads are left open by the end of the pilot, but not in the way a juggler would throw too many props in the air: everything remains connected, logical and I can’t wait to see what will happen when all these threads will join. The impact of these revelations even seems to be more of  a driver than the larger questions (namely the emergence of Cylon technology).

Another important thread is the misunderstanding revolving around Zoe’s intentions and reason to be present on the bombed train: she just wanted to leave Caprica for Gemenon, while Ben wanted to leave Caprica as a martyr. From the outside, it all looks the same, which sends a horrible message to Zoe’s mother: her baby child is indeed a terrorist. This will probably haunt her for some times and have important developments.

Lastly, the Battlestar Galactica franchise was firmly set in my mind as a daring franchise from the moment they portrayed a “justifiable” suicide bombing on New Caprica right when the war in Irak was at its worse. Similarly, Caprica pilot writer and supposedly showrunner Remi Aubuchon delighted me with a scene on religion. Very interested by the fact that the colonists from Battlestar Galactica were polytheists, I had my illusions quickly shattered, as very little additional information was disclosed about this. With the emergence of religious movements at its center, Caprica doesn’t seem to be so shy on the subject. In this scene, Global Defense Department investigator Duram is quizzing Sister Clarice on monotheism in her  school:

- Where does the Athenian Academy stand on the question of monotheism, Sister?

[...]

- The Academy is dedicated to following the path of the Gods, the Goddess Athena being our patroness. We are, however, open to all forms of worship, including belief in a singular God.

- That’s very tolerant. And how many of your students are practicing monotheists?

- You know I can’t answer that.

- It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutism view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

Overlooking the very last minute that felt a little bit like cheap drama (the little girl trapped in a killing machine, calling on her girlfriend), Caprica is a very rich and promising series that will probably complement BSG very well. Long live Caprica!

First off, let me state clearly that I really loved the show. If it looks like I’m covering my ass, though, it’s because I am: this post mostly rambles about what I didn’t like about the finale, and I didn’t want to sound like a hater. I’ll just issue a WARNING about SPOILERS, and we’ll get right to it.

what I’ll remember

Without a doubt, the face-off as a mid-act climax was beautiful. I had actually forgotten everything about the death of Cally, which made Tory’s reminder that “No matter what we learn about each other, we’re all Cylons and we’re all capable of making mistakes” extremely intriguing. During a magical few seconds, I found myself clumsily browsing my memories in high speed and in reverse, trying to figure out what she meant, all the while wishing for the episode to slow down, as I didn’t dare pause it during this obviously climactic event. For the best! The punch line came to me as strongly as it did to Galen (well, almost). The consequences sent me collecting my jaw off the floor:  everlasting peace between Cylons and Humans was at hand, only to be swept away by the emotional, impulsive reaction of an individual that’s not even human! I reckon this will remain one of the highlight of the series, as well a classic of scifi.

Good call killing Starbucks, too. This will humble up all the people that thought the writers wouldn’t have the guts to kill Starbucks (OKAY! Including me, what’s your point?). I’m sure many writers would like to be able to kill a character while keeping her on-screen and get away with it.

Kudos as well for that scene where Cavil / Number 1 / John blasts the Final Five for the miserable body they’ve imprisoned him into. Seriously, if I was an artificial person, I’d be just as pissed as he is.

what I’ll gladly overlook

Roughly, the second half of the last episode.

I was a bit surprised that, after 4 seasons of hanging to survival by the skin of their teeth, the last humans decided in blissful unison to settle and let themselves wither and die. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with that if the tone of the ending was pessimistic, but somehow, an upbeat Lee Adama manages to make giving away every last bit of comfort sound pretty attractive, so be it. I’m aware that it’s to start anew without leaving their ill-fated legacy to the new world, but how much do individuals care about that? I mean, look around.

More importantly, the series failed to deliver a surprising ending: the revelation that those humans we’ve been following around are not our descendants, but that we’re actually theirs doesn’t come as much of a surprise  (although the use of the name “Earth” to mislead the audience across the series was pretty good). An explanation as too what Starbucks really is remains nowhere to be found, as well as more information as to who exactly pulls the strings of this flock. In the same vein, the vision of Caprica 6 and Baltar taking Hera away from Athena and Roselyn holds no profound meaning whatsoever, given that there is no form of antagonism between those two groups, so what was the point?

The credits roll, and no breaking news came to startle the audience and explain everything. Just a neat ending with a bow on top.

As Ron D. Moore did mention that the finale was about the fate of the characters more than it was about wrapping up the plot, what’s wrong with that, you may ask? Just that I don’t think it fits this type of series so well. If you take a series such as, say, The Shield, you see the seasons  follow each others quite naturally: like a chunk of life, there are always open threads and no real closure. A series such as Battlestar Galactica, however, has this epic feel about it that has the audience sit in Fate’s Roller Coaster, expecting everything will eventually climax in an overwhelming revelation.

Indeed, we’ve seen glimpses of a mind-blowing endgame since the second season, with recurrent visions (Roselyn and Athena coursing through the opera house) and themes (Starbuck being advertised as the Harbinger of Death)… that ultimately don’t hold anything. The bulk of the series registered to me as one constant buildup, ramping up to one big fat ending; so naturally, by the time the writers ended their run, expectations were bound to be ridiculously high and disappointment to come accordingly easily.

A reasonable thing to do in such a situation (expectations growing beyond the writer’s control), is to gently terminate them, without letting the audience down. This can be achieved by deflecting the audience’s attention to something else: you make this new thing you just introduced DWARF this other seed you planted a long time ago. Which doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time growing it up, au contraire! It helps measure how important and life-altering this new thing is!

This actually has been used earlier in the season: from the moment we’ve heard about the Final 5, there’s been a buildup to find out who they were, and 4 of them were delivered to the audience at the end of the 3d season. Halfway through the 4th season, the identity of the 5th Cylon looks a lot like the key to unraveling all mysteries, so you expect another escalation. The writers defused the situation by revealing the identity of the 5th Cylon, and not making a big deal out of it. Because what came afterward was even bigger.

what bore me on the long run

Closing the final lid on it all left me with a mild sentiment of repetition and immutability:

Gallen is the top example: I see him helping Sharon escape the Galactica (and stabbing everybody in their collective backs in doing so) and I seem to remember him in and out of the brig, each time betraying the Admiral, and each time getting out. I can’t help but wonder when the Adama will put a stop to this. He won’t.

Another example is the arc some (important) characters lack:

Baltar is basically a really constant character who first and foremost looks for himself. There was this one time in the middle where he looked really lost and ready for redemption, but snap! he was back to business as usual before anything came out of it.

Tom Zarek, however, is the Most Frustrating Character Award recipient, for the 4rth year in a row. So much potential thrown out the airlock! From beginning to end, Zarek is the guy that a) Always starts some shit b) Is always wrong. C’mon! Flip a coin for every decision he makes in the series, what are the odds of him being wrong about every single one of them?

On the contrary, Admiral Adama and Roselyn are systematically right: they are reluctant to change their minds at first, but when they do, they always manage to do so and look like the heroes. When a decision comes up, not much work is required from the audience: side with them, they’ll be right eventually!

Placing some of the “good guys” on the wrong side of Choice would be a nice way to force significant change. One event I’d have spinned differently is the uprising: it would have been nice - and very credible - if Adama and Roselyn had been on Gaeta’s side. After all, they’ve been pretty conservative since the beginning, on top of being the ones living with comfort (however relative it may be), so why would they change anything? The civilians, on the other hand, are living in dreadful conditions and are likely to have grown weary of the fight. As imperfect as Zarek may be (like, huh, bombing people to make a point?), he is a man of the people in his heart and should want nothing more than a quick resolution. An extended hand from Cylons is exactly that, so why would he slap it away? Having Adama and Roselyn hell-bent on the old ways, only to be proven wrong by a convicted terrorist. Quite a sight this would have been!

In the end, Battlestar Galactica’s plot suffers many loose ends, but managed to carry the audience (flying) to the finale.  If the story is all about characters, then okay, getting us to the finish line is enough. But if it is, I can’t help but wonder why someone would make such a convoluted story, given that characters can very well go through hell and back to the audience’s pleasure without it: it only get people like begging for more!

Game developer Infinity Ward has got to be running out of storage space for all the awards Call of Duty 4 has brought home! More than a year after its release, the game has just been awarded in  3 different categories at the UK-based BAFTA video-game ceremony, including Story and Character. Even though some might find surprising to reward a FPS with this distinction, I think it is some well-deserved recognition: writing in video games is still at its infancy and people are debating back and forth on what influence storytelling should have on the development of a game.

And in comes COD4, first and foremost a competitive shooter targeted at hardcore gamers; 10 years from now, most people will remember it for the dozens (or hundreds) of hours they spent playing online, and all those war stories they used to tell their buddies.

And yet , the solo campaign was a note-taking exercise for me, as it is a reference of what storytelling should be in shooters: it strikes a perfect balance between gameplay and story. Indeed, the later is remarkably non-intrusive: most of the story is unveiled either through briefings during load times or with in-game dialogs during combat downtimes; at no time is the player pulled out of the action to be briefed on something he might not care about - the Holy Grail of videogame storytelling.

When it comes to characters, a lot of work has been done on each member of the ensemble cast (5+ recurring characters): each of them has a tone, a personality and some quality voice acting to support them; with their destiny tied to the larger events at play, tension and drama remains very present until the end. I’ll take for example the chopper pilot that gets shot down at some point: I barely know her (in game space), but the urgency in her voice urges me to haul ass to the crash site.

Congratulation to writer Jesse Stern, as well as to the Infinity Ward team!

“Managing people is hard. More often than not, you’ll be asked to make decisions. These decisions will have to be passed onto the team. Your job is to make them acceptable by the team.

If you have a decision to make, set up one-one-one meetings with every person involved. If no decision is to be made, relax, nobody is expecting anything from you. Instead of just slacking during these downtimes, however, I advise you try and motivated the troops: set up a team meeting.

• Team Meeting

The goal here is not to actually make any kind of decision, but to create the illusion of progress being made. Stand at the door, be real friendly to everyone and shake all hands.

A few PowerPoint slides into the presentation, The Enquirer will have a question.  Answering it will probably put you in an awkward position, so don’t. While he’s exposing his beef, scan the audience for another person talking. If there are more than 3 or 4 people in the room, you can expect a pair to be chatting: that’s your Involuntary Attention Deflector. If they’re taking too long, make non-committal sounds to buy some time. When they’re done, laugh loudly and crack a joke: it need not be witty or funny, its sole purpose is to signal The Enquirer he’s lost your attention. By now, chances are a colleague cut off the bewildered Enquirer with a question of his own.

Repeat the process and slide from question to question until the meeting is over. Either be the first one to leave or find yourself extremely busy with your laptop or projector. If you’ve done your job and confused them enough, they might just go away.

• One-on-one Meeting(s)

The bewitching upside of one-on-one meetings is that you can tell one person one thing, turn around, tell the opposite to the next and get away with it. When perfectly executed, this “Divide and Conquer” tactic will have everyone back to their desks promptly. Hearing what they wish to hear is what they really want; the situation itself can then silently drag on for some time.

Beware: every now and then, those two might actually know each other. If you weren’t paying too much attention, they might even be on the same team; in this case, applying this technique won’t buy you much time. Hopefully, it’ll still be enough for you to just happen to be on vacation when the shit hits the fan.”