New Game Plus

Donnie Darko is my favorite American movie, so I was excited for Richard Kelly’s next movie, Southland Tales, for years before its production. Then I forgot all about it and realized the movie was release two years ago and recently came out on DVD. I picked up a copy at my university library today and watched it in one sitting. Here’s my initial impressions, probably to be revised once I read the graphic novel. (The film is parts 4-6, the graphic novel parts 1-3.)

I’ll try to avoid major spoilers, but I do hint at what happens in this post.

The Rock, Buffy, Justin Timberlake. Cool. Republicans and Neo-Marxists fighting over the election, ubiquitous surveillance, the draft, brain-washing an actor and a cop to make black-mail footage, World War III, mad science teleporting the ocean’s energy to fuel perpetual machines. Wow, that’s a lot going on. Justin Timberlake describes his world as being on the verge of anarchy to describe an increasingly repressive government and its resistance.

I found the first chunk of the film pretty overwhelming. I was lost in an overly complex plot that failed to convince me of it’s epic importance or justify the violence. I was introduced to a radically alternate 2008, and wasn’t convinced of such cultural and technological changes in the three years since the fictional nuclear attack in Texas that split off Southland Tales’s timeline from mine.

This movie is explicitly leftist, and I love it when science fiction features politically radical characters. But the radicals in Southland Tales were superficial. As much as I like seeing women with guns yelling, “facist pigs” at the police, I found the Neo-Marxists unbelievable because both the men and women used sexist language and mostly just accused people of being facists without any analysis or clear political objectives. What was their goal? To help the democrats win the election? That doesn’t really make sense to me.

By the second half of Southland Tales–once I started to follow the plot (probably because some of the convoluting side-plots narrowed with killed-off characters) I actually was getting into the plot. It was like my old school games: you start off thinking the fate of a city or nation is at stake, which is a pretty big deal, but it’s actually literally the whole frickin’ universe.

In addition to themes of time travel and dimensional rips, Southland Tales visually cites Donnie Darko. There’s a poster of Frank’s rabbit mask on a wall. Near the end of the movie, a character is shot in the eye and channeling Gyllenhaal’s cute/whiney/mumbling/dreaming Donnie. There are probably a few other references I overlooked.

Southland Tales did turn out to be a bit like Donnie Darko in some of its themes and music sequences, but also with an explicit political theme and engagement with radical politics. I think neither goal really turned out especially well.

I finally fixed my blog! I somehow broke it in August and then left on a road trip to go to the DNC and RNC protests. Woohoo! But now I’m back and ready to blog again. I may even try to figure out how to do a new layout that isn’t so 2004.

My gaming and academic work have lined up rather nicely. I started this blog in a women’s studies class when I was a junior. At the time, I was in an interdisciplinary program studying science fiction and gender, and that eventually opened up to include race and cyborg theory. All of that provided plenty of blogger fodder for videogame discussions, although looking back I could have written more accessibly in my old posts since for theory to really mean something, it needs to speak folks in the real lives we actually live. I just got so excited when I learned those smarty-pants words, I was giddy to use them.

I study English now, already less than a year away from finishing my master’s degree, and although I’ve written on videogames in some of my classes English studies lacks that personal is political drive that prompts me to blog on media. If anything, I feel like blogging takes time away from my studies. Fuck that! If I can write about videogames in school, what I study can come back around and make an appearance here.

BomberGirl of Girl in the Machine writes an accessible post Musing Over Method in which she uses the theory of new criticism (or perhaps more accurately new historicism) to debunk the “authorial intent” defense of an art. She writes in response to defenses of Resident Evil 5:

Which brings us back to my initial question: What’s a writer / artist / video game designer to do when a critique reveals some important theme in her work that she neither foresaw nor intended? Getting defensive about it definitely won’t help; it’s out there, it’s what it is. Absolutely everyone is prejudiced to some degree, including when it comes to race and sex. It’s my firm belief that a lot of racism and sexism is actually subconscious, molded by our experiences of social conventions throughout our lives, and the first step to overcoming these prejudices is to recognize that they exist. You are not a Horrible, Awful, Terrible person for admitting you’ve done something prejudiced. The point is to see that it’s there, and to do something about it; to fix it, to change how you think; to spread awareness to others.

Theory is a pretty useful approach to analyzing games, and defending critical thinking and debunking passive absorption of media. Especially since gaming is especially not passive in comparison to television/movies or even reading.

I’m finally living my childhood dream of playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m playing with some folks in my English department and my friend Abby (the retro review writer for Cerise). We’re a big group, eight total, and half of us are ladies. We just made characters tonight. All of the numbers are kind of confusing, but the world-building and races and roles each class has in the party is pretty familiar from playing RPG videogames.

I’m a middle-aged dwarf named Olshar, which means fat moon. She has a beard and is politically radical with a martyr complex. I’m a paladin since I like tanking in MMORPGs.

I’ll post more updates with how my first D&D campaign goes! If I like it well enough, I’d eventually like to DM for an all ladies group.

My blogging hiatus does not mean I’m going to give up blogging! On the contrary, I am finally getting the internet at home this September, so I ought to have more time online to post. I’m planning on opening my topic of discussion in New Game Plus to include more on my life than gaming and tangental geeky stuff. I intend to blog more on activism, radical politics, and academia. And of course, write about being a nerd with game and film and nerd culture criticism. I plan on figuring out how to put a new layout on my blog, too.

Games are for kids, right? That’s a popular perception, or one gamers like myself seem to have about how nongamers see games.

But I’ve been playing Pokémon and Twilight Princess with my friend’s six year old son, and I find it amazing how much supposed “kids” games or kid friendly games rely on intensive reading skills. And Pokémon is a game I don’t find especially intellectually challenging, yet there is still a huge barrier dependent on reading to not only to intake the story but even navigate playing.

I appreciate games that are smart and well written and challenging. I don’t mind reading in my games. But I do want to note the high level of literacy necessary to comprehend and play games limits accessibility, even in supposed kids games. And kids aren’t the only folks around who aren’t great readers, especially with classism and racism in the U$ educational system that particularly unprepares poor folks and people of color to have the same reading skills as middle class white folks bred for college.

Hello! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been pretty busy with grad school and cycling. But I’m still gaming! I’ve finally gotten on the Puzzle Quest bandwagon. Wow, there’s a lot of mindless hours! I don’t even read the story because I’m so anxious to get to my next puzzle battle. The game doesn’t really question the classist feudalism in the fantasy genre, and everyone who is human I’ve met so far is white. But if I’m just looking through a gender lens, I’ve got a lot to be happy about. I play a lady, serve a queen, save a girl from being forced into a political marriage, and frequently quest for a lady dwarf with a beard!

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out today. I’m actually planning on buying it new, which I haven’t done with a game since Pokemon Pearl. (That I can think of!) I’ll let you all know how I like it. I’m pretty pumped about all the controller options–looks like another way that Nintendo is making its games more accessible. Over all, I haven’t heard much about brawl, but I’m sure I’ll have something to say about Zero Suit Samus.

I really liked playing Mewtwo on the last Smash Bros. game. There’s something really macho about being a telepathic, god-like Pocket Monster. But I never really had the chance to get good because I used to play in the dorms with some guys who were so hardcore they always p0wned me in five seconds (although a few did try to occasionally teach me how to get better). Plus they’d say, “You just got raped up the ass.” Wow, I’ve changed a lot in the last four or five years! Nowadays, any Smashing that goes on under my watch will be smashing with love.

February’s issue of Cerise is up, and it’s on princesses.

Hey all. I want to pick your brains.

I’m taking a class on intermedia theory, and I’m deciding what to write my final paper on. I’d like to focus on remediation, the theory that new media mimics old form (like ebooks mimicking the printed page). I’m curious if there are any texts out there that mimic videogames. I was thinking about writing about how one could play the novel House of Leaves, and then bring in the DS game Hotel Dusk to discuss a game mimicking the presentation of a book (holding the DS sideways) and genre conventions of a mystery novel. (I haven’t played Hotel Dusk, but it would give me an excuse to check out a new game.)

My question for you all: any other texts (books, movies, games, otherwise) I should check out for my project? PC games are harder for me to play since I’m a Mac user, but I have access to pretty much any DS game, and am willing to rent or buy Wii and PS2 games.