The NFL Draft occurred over the past few days, and I was watching pretty contently through the first four rounds. Generally speaking, I really liked what I saw.
Things started with a bang on the first night. We used the Browns' fear that another team would trade up and take Trent Richardson to move back a single slot and pick up 3 additional late round picks. Then we grabbed Matt Kalil as we had intended to for months, no matter what Rick Spielman wanted everybody to think. Kalil is the top left tackle prospect in years, and while he's not Jake Long or Joe Thomas, he's immeasurably better than what we had (Charlie Johnson) or even what we have had for ages (Bryant McKinney). He's an athletic blind side protector who is intent on doing things the right way -- whether it's technique on the field or building up power in the weight room to improve his run blocking. Almost as important, it lets us move Charlie Johnson inside to guard, where a lot of people suspect he's a better fit. Along with some off season moves we made, our O line is suddenly adequate if not legitimately strong instead of one of the top liabilities on the team.
Later, we used some of the ammunition we got from that early trade to move back into the first round to pick up Notre Dame safety Harrison Smith. Smith was the consensus number 2 safety in the draft, and last season made it incredibly clear that we had nothing at the position. Smith worked with our coaching staff extensively at the Senior Bowl, and they fell in love with him. Not only his talent and his positioning on the field, but his presence in meetings and his leadership. He should be a day one starter and provide a serious improvement in our secondary.
Our secondary saw further improvement with Josh Robinson, CB out of the University of Central Florida. Robinson set the fastest 40 time at the Combine, running it in 4.29 seconds. On top of that, he put up 17 reps of 225 lbs on the bench press, more than many larger, supposedly stronger backs. He should provide a powerful jam at the line of scrimmage, and he has the speed to recover if he gets burned and make plays on the ball from the other side of the field, and he's a willing tackler. He's an early entry from a mediocre program, so he may not be ready to jump in and start immediately is up to question, but he could develop into something special.
The fourth round saw a number of interesting picks. First being Arkansas wide receiver Jarius Wright. I watched a lot of Hogs games last fall with one of my roommates who comes from the state. Wright is small and best fit to line up in the slot, where we already have Percy Harvin, so a lot of fans may not like the pick. I've seen him play, though, and he's nothing like Harvin. He's possibly faster and more explosive, even if he doesn't have the strength or dynamic ability in the open field. Most important, though, he's a great route runner, which can't really be said about, really, anybody else on the roster. Combined with his speed, this makes him a great deep threat down the middle. I'm honestly excited about the potential to line Wright and Harvin both up on the slot or, better yet, Wright in the slot and Harvin in the backfield and play games with opposing defenses.
Later in the 4th, we picked up a second Arkansas receiver, Greg Childs. Childs is 6'3" and possesses ridiculous speed (clocked at 4.38 at his pro day). He produced extremely well while healthy, but he tore his patella tendon in 2010 and tried to come back too soon, hurting his 2011 performance. Because of this, I haven't seen as much of Childs, but he's a prototypical number 1 receiver in terms of size and ability. Friends who have watched him insist that he's a first or second round talent if not for the injury limiting his exposure last season, and scouts seem to agree. He was a steal who could pay dividends for years to come if he adapts well to the pros.
Between those picks, we made an incredibly un-glamorous but essential decision with USC FB/TE Rhett Ellison. With Jimmy Kleinsasser having retired, we were seriously lacking in supplementary blockers. Current top TEs Kyle Rudolph and John Carlson are great receivers but are only adequate at best in the blocking game. Ellison didn't have a lot of buzz in the media, but Spielman insists that there were other teams planning on grabbing him in the fourth round. Ellison is a hulking guy who was responsible for making holes nearly every time he was on the field last year, and he did it well, considering the high power of USCs offense. I'm sure the Vikings saw plenty of tape on him when they were doing their homework on Kalil, and this is a pick that should pay dividends with AP returning from knee injury and Toby Gerhart being a less dynamic runner in general.
In the top of the fifth, we made possibly our most questionable choice, drafting another DB from Notre Dame. I really haven't been able to find out much about Robert Blanton, other than the fact that nobody seems to see him as a CB in the NFL, meaning he may move over to Safety next to his past and present teammate. Considering the decisions made up to this point, though, I'm going to express faith in the pick. Time will tell, and everything is a crap shoot at this point in the draft, anyway.
We finally started the hunt for a successor to Ryan Longwell in the sixth, where we grabbed Georgia kicker Blair Walsh. Longwell had his worst season in ages last year, missing six kicks, and it's fully possible that he'll continue to regress as he pushes on towards 40. Blair might get knocked for inaccuracy after going 21/35 last season, but 10 of his 14 misses came from 40 or more yards as Georgia kicked more than any other team in the FBS. Kicks that long are always a crapshoot for college players, and he hit a long of 56 yards, so he's got the leg. NFL conditioning and coaching should help his accuracy. It could be an interesting camp for the old guard in special teams.
I honestly don't know much of anything about either of our seventh round picks (UNC linebacker Audie Cole and Cal DE/DT Trevor Guyton) except that several scouts had fourth round grades on the both of them and both play positions where we can always use depth. Along with the bevy of undrafted rookie free agents we've already reached agreements with, they'll fight for positions throughout training camp and provide perspective on our current crop of players.
In short, we've become a much better team over the past 48+ hours. I'm not holding out that we'll be truly competitive, but climbing back up as 6-10 is certainly possible. We've got potentially strong pieces in place at positions where we had nothing. We won't have nothing to work with coming into the draft next year, meaning we can focus on depth and a much smaller number of holes.
I feel good about being a Vikings fan right now. Much better, certainly, than I was after that dark, dark Packers game in November.
Showing posts with label ramblings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ramblings. Show all posts
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Games and Art
Most videogames are not art. I don't just mean "most videogames suck". I don't mean Madden or Call of Duty or other series that rehash the same principles under an annual release lack soul. I don't mean repackaged upgrades/expansions like Super Street Fighter 4: Ultimate Championship Edition are just cheap cash-in attempts. I mean legitimately good games that I love -- games like Final Fantasy VI, Ocarina of Time, or Mass Effect 2 -- aren't inherently art.
That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.
Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.
In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.
I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.
For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.
Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".
As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.
As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.
Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.
It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.
The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.
It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.
But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.
At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.
It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.
Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.
One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).
Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.
There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.
For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.
The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..
What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.
Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.
That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.
Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.
In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.
I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.
For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.
Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".
As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.
As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.
Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.
It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.
The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.
It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.
But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.
At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.
It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.
Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.
One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).
Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.
There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.
For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.
The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..
What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.
Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Vikings!
I'm going take an extended brain dump about the current state of the Minnesota Vikings. I'll be doing another one later about the Timberwolves. Sorry to those of you who don't give a crap.
The Vikings are coming off a terrible season. Their 3-13 campaign has landed them the third pick in the draft, and we have far too many needs to be competitive in a year's time. Many of my thoughts hold true with what I wrote after their incredibly depressing loss to the Packers last November. The chief exception is that I no longer value Lorenzo Booker higher than Toby Gerhart (a handful of well executed trick plays do not make up for an awful fumbling habit).
We're in a rough place right now, waiting to see how AP can recover from torn A/MCLs and if Ponder can watch enough tape and get enough time in with Musgrave to take a serious step forward after an increasingly worrisome debut. Personally, I'm optimistic on both counts, but, hey, you've got to be optimistic about something.
In terms of legitimate good news, we've actually made some savvy decisions this off season that should give us flexibility moving forward, and the draft is strong in the places we need it to be.
First up, Chris Cook was acquitted. Is it very possible that he beat his girlfriend and quietly paid her to recant? Yes. Does he need to be a perfect citizen to be an ascending cornerback, perhaps our position of greatest need? Nope. Sad, but true. I mean, Ray Lewis killed a man, and the city of Baltimore still loves him. Our secondary is a mess, but at least we have one of the positions set with a viable talent who will hopefully be committed to reaching his potential and staying out of trouble after this scare.
Second, we smartly re-signed Erin Henderson to a one-year "show me" contract and moved Fred Pugac back to linebackers coach. Pugac is, by all accounts, one of the better position coaches in the league. It's unfortunate that his stint as defensive coordinator didn't pan out, but we should be glad to have him back where he belongs. Chad Greenway took a step back last season under Mike Singletary, and Erin Henderson is a young player with very high upside if he can get a good teacher. If, under Pugac's tutelage, he can take the step forward everybody seems to think he can, we should lock him up longer term after the season and really solidify our LB corps moving forward.
Third, we've resisted the urge to make splashy moves that will cost us in the long run. There was some legitimate receiving talent available in free agency, but we refused to play ball with the inflated contracts that the young talent was demanding. 8 million a year for Pierre Garcon? No thanks. Similarly for defensive backs. 10 million a year for Brandon Carr and Cortland Finnegan? More tempting, but still too much. The draft is, by ll accounts, deep at DB -- especially since we play a scheme dominated by cover 2, where elite talent isn't as necessary as patience and good reads.
Instead, we've been trying to find value: players who flashed for a period but then regressed briefly or suffered injuries that deflated their marketability. Lots of one year and minimum contracts. Fill the camp with bodies, motivate people with a legitimate chance to win a starting job, and cut the ones who don't look the part. We've also been looking outside the NFL for players, including a pair of intriguing players from the Canadian and Arena football leagues.
Solomon Elimimian is slightly undersized as a Linebacker, but the kid's got wheels (4.6 40) and was named the CFL's defensive player of the year in his rookie season, and players voted him the hardest hitter in the league last year. That highlight video suggests he doesn't give up on a play, and in Tampa 2, where the MLB is responsible for the deep middle of the field, we need a guy who is a bit more athletic to cover the slot and, especially, the new breed of Tight Ends that are tearing up the game right now. Worst case, he's an effective contributor on special teams. Best case, he finishes rounding out the second level of our defense.
As much as an unknown as Elimimian is, even stranger is Nicholas Taylor. Taylor is a former Florida International point guard whom the Vikings grabbed on a minimum futures contract purely as an athletic prospect. Dude is 5'10" and runs a 4.27 40 and spent time last year playing defensive back in Arena Football. Zero risk, amazing upside if he can put that athleticism to use anywhere on the field (especially at corner or returner).
Neither of these are flashy acquisitions, but both of them show a front office that is serious about looking at all the angles while we start rebuilding. We should have money on the books next season once we've filled some of our holes and know where we need to focus our final effort before being truly competitive again.
What we spend this money on next year will be determined by this year's draft.
I'm assuming that we'll take Matt Kalil, an incredibly highly rated Left Tackle out of USC, with our first round pick. This one pick will do worlds for our offensive line. John Sullivan took an enormous step forward at Center last season (pro football focus listed him as one of the top centers in the league), Phil Loadholt still has all the tools to succeed at right tackle with the proper motivation. With Kalil in place at left tackle, we've suddenly got a competition between Charlie Johnson, Joe Berger, Brandon Fusco, and free agency pickup Geoff Schwartz at the two guard positions. Any pair of those guys would be a step up from the Herrera-Hutchinson combination from the last couple of years -- Hutch is an all-time great, but he's old and only just above average these days.
From there, we need to worry about finding starters at wide receiver and defensive back and insurance at linebacker and defensive tackle. In my dream world, Georgia Tech wide receiver Stephen Hill is still available at the top of the second round. This is made more likely by the Bears trade for Brandon Marshall and the cornucopia of receivers that San Francisco grabbed in free agency. I'm still not certain it will happen. Despite being relatively unknown 6 weeks ago, Hill is 6'4", ran a 4.37 at the combine, is an experienced and talented run blocker, and showed better hands and route knowledge than anybody expected at his pro day. The mock draft gurus have him ranked as the number three or four wide receiver available right now, depending on their opinion of Kendall Wright. The Broncos, Browns, and Texans are all possibly landing spots in the bottom third of round one.
If Hill is off the board, I think we pass on a receiver in the second round. There will be very solid prospects available. Alshon Jeffrey was considered a first round prospect for much of the season, and I'm really high on Mohamed Sanu. Both big guys with good body control. I wouldn't even grab a receiver in the early third round, where we could grab similar guys like Marvin McNutt or Nick Toon. These are all big, reliable targets who serve well in the redzone, but they're largely possession guys who won't bring the vertical dimension we need. We've got Michael Jenkins if you're looking for good hands and deceptive speed.
We need somebody who can consistently take the top off of defenses. Early in the fourth round, we should be able to pick up Miami's Tommy Streeter. The guy is a physical specimen on par with Hill but even more raw. I can deal with raw in this case. Sub 4.4 speed at over 6'4" is worth taking a risk on when we've already got Rudolph, Jenkins, Harvin, and now Carlson around for the underneath stuff. We need to make their lives, and Peterson's and Gerhart's, easier, and a guy like Streeter (or, better yet, Hill) can do that for us better than Sanu or Jeffrey much less McNutt or Toon.
Assuming Hill is gone, I'd use our round two pick on somebody like CB Alfonzo Denard. He's not a top tier player at his position, but he's big and physical off the line and plays the zone well. Depending on how the front office feels about Christian Ballard and Letroy Guion, the other option here would be to take advantage of the draft's depth at DT. Devon Stills, Jerel Worthy, and Michael Bockers could all still be available at this point, and while I'd like to have faith in the guys we've got in place, our defense always thrives on a strong rotation up front.
Beyond these picks, try to find value at safety. It would be great if we could trade to pick up extra picks and put ourselves in positions to grab guys like George Iloka and Markelle Martin where they're worth it. Look for insurance at linebacker, potential at WR, and depth along the line while we're at it. This isn't going to be a one year rebuilding, but the pieces are available for us to be somewhere near .500 next season. Considering the conference we play in, that would be absolutely thrilling.
The Vikings are coming off a terrible season. Their 3-13 campaign has landed them the third pick in the draft, and we have far too many needs to be competitive in a year's time. Many of my thoughts hold true with what I wrote after their incredibly depressing loss to the Packers last November. The chief exception is that I no longer value Lorenzo Booker higher than Toby Gerhart (a handful of well executed trick plays do not make up for an awful fumbling habit).
We're in a rough place right now, waiting to see how AP can recover from torn A/MCLs and if Ponder can watch enough tape and get enough time in with Musgrave to take a serious step forward after an increasingly worrisome debut. Personally, I'm optimistic on both counts, but, hey, you've got to be optimistic about something.
In terms of legitimate good news, we've actually made some savvy decisions this off season that should give us flexibility moving forward, and the draft is strong in the places we need it to be.
First up, Chris Cook was acquitted. Is it very possible that he beat his girlfriend and quietly paid her to recant? Yes. Does he need to be a perfect citizen to be an ascending cornerback, perhaps our position of greatest need? Nope. Sad, but true. I mean, Ray Lewis killed a man, and the city of Baltimore still loves him. Our secondary is a mess, but at least we have one of the positions set with a viable talent who will hopefully be committed to reaching his potential and staying out of trouble after this scare.
Second, we smartly re-signed Erin Henderson to a one-year "show me" contract and moved Fred Pugac back to linebackers coach. Pugac is, by all accounts, one of the better position coaches in the league. It's unfortunate that his stint as defensive coordinator didn't pan out, but we should be glad to have him back where he belongs. Chad Greenway took a step back last season under Mike Singletary, and Erin Henderson is a young player with very high upside if he can get a good teacher. If, under Pugac's tutelage, he can take the step forward everybody seems to think he can, we should lock him up longer term after the season and really solidify our LB corps moving forward.
Third, we've resisted the urge to make splashy moves that will cost us in the long run. There was some legitimate receiving talent available in free agency, but we refused to play ball with the inflated contracts that the young talent was demanding. 8 million a year for Pierre Garcon? No thanks. Similarly for defensive backs. 10 million a year for Brandon Carr and Cortland Finnegan? More tempting, but still too much. The draft is, by ll accounts, deep at DB -- especially since we play a scheme dominated by cover 2, where elite talent isn't as necessary as patience and good reads.
Instead, we've been trying to find value: players who flashed for a period but then regressed briefly or suffered injuries that deflated their marketability. Lots of one year and minimum contracts. Fill the camp with bodies, motivate people with a legitimate chance to win a starting job, and cut the ones who don't look the part. We've also been looking outside the NFL for players, including a pair of intriguing players from the Canadian and Arena football leagues.
Solomon Elimimian is slightly undersized as a Linebacker, but the kid's got wheels (4.6 40) and was named the CFL's defensive player of the year in his rookie season, and players voted him the hardest hitter in the league last year. That highlight video suggests he doesn't give up on a play, and in Tampa 2, where the MLB is responsible for the deep middle of the field, we need a guy who is a bit more athletic to cover the slot and, especially, the new breed of Tight Ends that are tearing up the game right now. Worst case, he's an effective contributor on special teams. Best case, he finishes rounding out the second level of our defense.
As much as an unknown as Elimimian is, even stranger is Nicholas Taylor. Taylor is a former Florida International point guard whom the Vikings grabbed on a minimum futures contract purely as an athletic prospect. Dude is 5'10" and runs a 4.27 40 and spent time last year playing defensive back in Arena Football. Zero risk, amazing upside if he can put that athleticism to use anywhere on the field (especially at corner or returner).
Neither of these are flashy acquisitions, but both of them show a front office that is serious about looking at all the angles while we start rebuilding. We should have money on the books next season once we've filled some of our holes and know where we need to focus our final effort before being truly competitive again.
What we spend this money on next year will be determined by this year's draft.
I'm assuming that we'll take Matt Kalil, an incredibly highly rated Left Tackle out of USC, with our first round pick. This one pick will do worlds for our offensive line. John Sullivan took an enormous step forward at Center last season (pro football focus listed him as one of the top centers in the league), Phil Loadholt still has all the tools to succeed at right tackle with the proper motivation. With Kalil in place at left tackle, we've suddenly got a competition between Charlie Johnson, Joe Berger, Brandon Fusco, and free agency pickup Geoff Schwartz at the two guard positions. Any pair of those guys would be a step up from the Herrera-Hutchinson combination from the last couple of years -- Hutch is an all-time great, but he's old and only just above average these days.
From there, we need to worry about finding starters at wide receiver and defensive back and insurance at linebacker and defensive tackle. In my dream world, Georgia Tech wide receiver Stephen Hill is still available at the top of the second round. This is made more likely by the Bears trade for Brandon Marshall and the cornucopia of receivers that San Francisco grabbed in free agency. I'm still not certain it will happen. Despite being relatively unknown 6 weeks ago, Hill is 6'4", ran a 4.37 at the combine, is an experienced and talented run blocker, and showed better hands and route knowledge than anybody expected at his pro day. The mock draft gurus have him ranked as the number three or four wide receiver available right now, depending on their opinion of Kendall Wright. The Broncos, Browns, and Texans are all possibly landing spots in the bottom third of round one.
If Hill is off the board, I think we pass on a receiver in the second round. There will be very solid prospects available. Alshon Jeffrey was considered a first round prospect for much of the season, and I'm really high on Mohamed Sanu. Both big guys with good body control. I wouldn't even grab a receiver in the early third round, where we could grab similar guys like Marvin McNutt or Nick Toon. These are all big, reliable targets who serve well in the redzone, but they're largely possession guys who won't bring the vertical dimension we need. We've got Michael Jenkins if you're looking for good hands and deceptive speed.
We need somebody who can consistently take the top off of defenses. Early in the fourth round, we should be able to pick up Miami's Tommy Streeter. The guy is a physical specimen on par with Hill but even more raw. I can deal with raw in this case. Sub 4.4 speed at over 6'4" is worth taking a risk on when we've already got Rudolph, Jenkins, Harvin, and now Carlson around for the underneath stuff. We need to make their lives, and Peterson's and Gerhart's, easier, and a guy like Streeter (or, better yet, Hill) can do that for us better than Sanu or Jeffrey much less McNutt or Toon.
Assuming Hill is gone, I'd use our round two pick on somebody like CB Alfonzo Denard. He's not a top tier player at his position, but he's big and physical off the line and plays the zone well. Depending on how the front office feels about Christian Ballard and Letroy Guion, the other option here would be to take advantage of the draft's depth at DT. Devon Stills, Jerel Worthy, and Michael Bockers could all still be available at this point, and while I'd like to have faith in the guys we've got in place, our defense always thrives on a strong rotation up front.
Beyond these picks, try to find value at safety. It would be great if we could trade to pick up extra picks and put ourselves in positions to grab guys like George Iloka and Markelle Martin where they're worth it. Look for insurance at linebacker, potential at WR, and depth along the line while we're at it. This isn't going to be a one year rebuilding, but the pieces are available for us to be somewhere near .500 next season. Considering the conference we play in, that would be absolutely thrilling.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Creativity
Universally, Christians believe that we, human beings, are created in the image and likeness of God. In its simplest form, our highest calling to reflect that nature as truly and as fully as we are able. I would argue that, first and foremost, this means fulfilling the command to love, but it also has other implications. For one, we know that it is in God's nature, being a triune entity, to exist in community. For another, and most pertinent to what I say here, we know God to be a creative being and to delight in creation, whether that creation occurs by hand or by word. Moreover, our experience of both the physical universe and the inspired Scripture suggests that God creates not only for God's own enjoyment, but because God's creations provide us a window toward understanding who God is.
This, the act of creation, is perhaps the most instinctive manner in which we reflect our status as Image Bearers. It is our natural inclination to find ways to take the ideas that exist in the hazy ether of our minds' eyes and place them firmly in reality. We delight, from our earliest ages, in making things. We stack our blocks into towers and our LEGOs into spaceships. We form sounds and then words and then sentences and finally stories. In doing so, we marvel at our own authority while simultaneously sharing ourselves as directly as possible.
It's unfortunate, then, that as we age, we tend to give up on exercising our own creative talents. We satisfy ourselves with limited means of expression while seeking joy in the creative output of others. We listen to music instead of performing it. We buy our meals prefab or follow the same time-honored recipes instead of inventing our dinners. We consume culture instead of creating it, likely under the unfortunate notion that the value of creating exists more in the quality of the product and less in the act itself. I'm as guilty of this as anybody.
When we don't create, though, we abandon one of the most powerful tools we have for relating to God's creation. Making things exposes us to our own understanding of the world around us and proclaims that understanding to others. Creating gives us an outlet to share why our views are right while, at the same time, calling us to understand our limitations. It asks us to confront our values -- aesthetic, moral, or whatever else -- and to recognize that they are not perfect.
Certainly, there is a place for consuming and critiquing the output of others. Doing so broadens our appreciation for what is possible and helps us connect with other people. But living as so many of us do, simply grazing among the efforts of those bolder than ourselves, is a sad way to be. Go, tell a story, draw a picture, sing a song. Do something as only you can do it, even if that means doing it poorly, and grow from the act.
This, the act of creation, is perhaps the most instinctive manner in which we reflect our status as Image Bearers. It is our natural inclination to find ways to take the ideas that exist in the hazy ether of our minds' eyes and place them firmly in reality. We delight, from our earliest ages, in making things. We stack our blocks into towers and our LEGOs into spaceships. We form sounds and then words and then sentences and finally stories. In doing so, we marvel at our own authority while simultaneously sharing ourselves as directly as possible.
It's unfortunate, then, that as we age, we tend to give up on exercising our own creative talents. We satisfy ourselves with limited means of expression while seeking joy in the creative output of others. We listen to music instead of performing it. We buy our meals prefab or follow the same time-honored recipes instead of inventing our dinners. We consume culture instead of creating it, likely under the unfortunate notion that the value of creating exists more in the quality of the product and less in the act itself. I'm as guilty of this as anybody.
When we don't create, though, we abandon one of the most powerful tools we have for relating to God's creation. Making things exposes us to our own understanding of the world around us and proclaims that understanding to others. Creating gives us an outlet to share why our views are right while, at the same time, calling us to understand our limitations. It asks us to confront our values -- aesthetic, moral, or whatever else -- and to recognize that they are not perfect.
Certainly, there is a place for consuming and critiquing the output of others. Doing so broadens our appreciation for what is possible and helps us connect with other people. But living as so many of us do, simply grazing among the efforts of those bolder than ourselves, is a sad way to be. Go, tell a story, draw a picture, sing a song. Do something as only you can do it, even if that means doing it poorly, and grow from the act.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Brave New World
I've been meaning to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for ages. I picked up a cheap copy at a Borders' liquidation sale last March and just got around to reading it while I was traveling the past couple of weeks. All I can really say is: "meh". There are interesting things, but I described the book to a friend who had never read it as thus: The first two chapters, where we learn about the conditioning process that occurs from fertilization through adolescent development for all citizens is very fascinating. Chapters 17 and 18, where our would-be protagonists talk with the Controller about God, Science, Truth, and Beauty and their lack of place in a harmonious society are interesting. Everything else is whiny bitches.
Really, this is a problem with plenty of "dystopian" fiction. It's so concerned with portraying its authors personal take on why humanity is screwed that it feels it doesn't need to tell a compelling story or provide characters with realistic motivations. It's like reading a Platonic dialogue for the plot rather than the philosophy: you're just going to be irked by how much of a Mary Jane Socrates is. In Plato, though, this is tolerable because there really isn't any action beyond the discussion and the philosophy. In Brave New World and other books of its ilk, however, the plot is meant to be somehow meaningful, or at least illustrative, and it takes up a much more significant proportion of the proceedings.
So, the fact that our "savage" and Bernard and, to a lesser extent, Heimholtz are all complete idiots is consistently annoying. Beyond even that, Huxley shoots his entire thesis in the foot with the fate of Bernard and Heimholtz by telling us that failures in the conditioning process are more common than we've been led to believe and that there are effectively numerous colonies of "normal" humans continuing to advance the race on the fringes of Utopia in the form of the Islands. That we then finish the book with a long and completely pointless chapter following John's fate is pointless. We know damn well that, were he not a "savage" and a "social experiment" his grim end would be unneeded.
Furthermore, while Huxley does a good job in early chapters of seeming to take his society seriously and as the norm, the tone becomes increasingly tongue-in-cheek as he delves into the more ridiculous suppositions. The community sing culminating in the mass orgy, for instance, is just absurd. I get that real art is supposed to have disappeared, but that doesn't change the fact that the entire sequence is a chore to read through between the songs and the sudden, inexplicable sexual frenzy that sweeps through. Contrasted to the very well written early portions where Lenina is being scolded for her borderline monogamy (ridiculous, but believable), it's a sad failure. Further, the notion of "Ford" instead of god just became more and more painful as it entered into the character's vocabulary. As what I believed to be a tongue-in-cheek idea in the foreword, I could deal with it. As a foundational aspect of society, it just seemed utterly unbelievable -- though this has more to do with a problem I'll discuss at the end.
Finally, everything to do with the "reservation" is also just poorly executed. The notion that all world religions would have merged over hundreds of years just shows an unnecessary lack of respect for all of them. To be franks, an equally offensive (to a theist) and far more likely suggestion is that religious warfare would have wiped out the remaining "uncivilized" regions or left them with a handful of small factions fighting over scarce resources. Disease, poverty, and monogomy, not simple greed or other human instincts stamped out or tempered by the conditioning process, seem to be the reasons for the reservations to be in such disarray.
That said, Huxley has a lot of interesting ideas about what it would take in order for individuals to live as willing slaves of the government. Specifically, he focuses on the fairly obvious notion of control via the carrot. By keeping people content, you keep them from questioning you. The genetic selection, developmental behavioral training, and biological "surrogate" drugs provide the foundation for this contentment, which is then maintained throughout life by three societal pillars: Soma helps to manage those inevitable moments of disappointment and sadness. The elimination of the family in favor of government "hatcheries" and indoctrination centers reduces the odds of personal attachment and thus strong emotional reactions to overpower logic. Societally expected promiscuity works on both effects.
It's a fascinating approach, but one that time has shown to be absurd.
First of all, Huxley lived in a time where Freud was still taken somewhat seriously and where Psychology was synonymous with Behaviorism. This is no longer the case. We know so much more about the brain and how it operates now that it becomes trivial to question the basic premises upon which so much of the conditioning process is based. More important, though, is the fact that Huxley assumed a society that would continue in the wake of industrialization. He had no idea, even in his addenda and commentary, that the microcomputer, much less The Internet, was on the horizon. Mass, immediate access to information completely obliterates Huxley's future, and while a future where such technology is squashed away, the process to get there would be more violent -- and certainly more prolonged -- even than the war he suggests led to the founding of Utopia.
Of course, The Internet provides plenty of opportunity for a parallel road into a similar future. We have the sort of constant, superficial contact with people that Huxley predicted in the form of social networking. We can sit and anesthetize ourselves to our ills and those of the world by overloading on news to the point that we lose our capacity to care or by playing games or by watching cat videos. The important distinction, though, is that these problems are not government imposed or even sanctioned. They are self inflicted. Fortunately, we live in a society that has smart enough to recognize that Internet addiction and information overload are actual problems. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that continues to pursue ubiquitous computing and the social isolation it promotes before we've begun to solve the problems of the current generation of technology. I'm hopeful, but...we'll see.
Really, this is a problem with plenty of "dystopian" fiction. It's so concerned with portraying its authors personal take on why humanity is screwed that it feels it doesn't need to tell a compelling story or provide characters with realistic motivations. It's like reading a Platonic dialogue for the plot rather than the philosophy: you're just going to be irked by how much of a Mary Jane Socrates is. In Plato, though, this is tolerable because there really isn't any action beyond the discussion and the philosophy. In Brave New World and other books of its ilk, however, the plot is meant to be somehow meaningful, or at least illustrative, and it takes up a much more significant proportion of the proceedings.
So, the fact that our "savage" and Bernard and, to a lesser extent, Heimholtz are all complete idiots is consistently annoying. Beyond even that, Huxley shoots his entire thesis in the foot with the fate of Bernard and Heimholtz by telling us that failures in the conditioning process are more common than we've been led to believe and that there are effectively numerous colonies of "normal" humans continuing to advance the race on the fringes of Utopia in the form of the Islands. That we then finish the book with a long and completely pointless chapter following John's fate is pointless. We know damn well that, were he not a "savage" and a "social experiment" his grim end would be unneeded.
Furthermore, while Huxley does a good job in early chapters of seeming to take his society seriously and as the norm, the tone becomes increasingly tongue-in-cheek as he delves into the more ridiculous suppositions. The community sing culminating in the mass orgy, for instance, is just absurd. I get that real art is supposed to have disappeared, but that doesn't change the fact that the entire sequence is a chore to read through between the songs and the sudden, inexplicable sexual frenzy that sweeps through. Contrasted to the very well written early portions where Lenina is being scolded for her borderline monogamy (ridiculous, but believable), it's a sad failure. Further, the notion of "Ford" instead of god just became more and more painful as it entered into the character's vocabulary. As what I believed to be a tongue-in-cheek idea in the foreword, I could deal with it. As a foundational aspect of society, it just seemed utterly unbelievable -- though this has more to do with a problem I'll discuss at the end.
Finally, everything to do with the "reservation" is also just poorly executed. The notion that all world religions would have merged over hundreds of years just shows an unnecessary lack of respect for all of them. To be franks, an equally offensive (to a theist) and far more likely suggestion is that religious warfare would have wiped out the remaining "uncivilized" regions or left them with a handful of small factions fighting over scarce resources. Disease, poverty, and monogomy, not simple greed or other human instincts stamped out or tempered by the conditioning process, seem to be the reasons for the reservations to be in such disarray.
That said, Huxley has a lot of interesting ideas about what it would take in order for individuals to live as willing slaves of the government. Specifically, he focuses on the fairly obvious notion of control via the carrot. By keeping people content, you keep them from questioning you. The genetic selection, developmental behavioral training, and biological "surrogate" drugs provide the foundation for this contentment, which is then maintained throughout life by three societal pillars: Soma helps to manage those inevitable moments of disappointment and sadness. The elimination of the family in favor of government "hatcheries" and indoctrination centers reduces the odds of personal attachment and thus strong emotional reactions to overpower logic. Societally expected promiscuity works on both effects.
It's a fascinating approach, but one that time has shown to be absurd.
First of all, Huxley lived in a time where Freud was still taken somewhat seriously and where Psychology was synonymous with Behaviorism. This is no longer the case. We know so much more about the brain and how it operates now that it becomes trivial to question the basic premises upon which so much of the conditioning process is based. More important, though, is the fact that Huxley assumed a society that would continue in the wake of industrialization. He had no idea, even in his addenda and commentary, that the microcomputer, much less The Internet, was on the horizon. Mass, immediate access to information completely obliterates Huxley's future, and while a future where such technology is squashed away, the process to get there would be more violent -- and certainly more prolonged -- even than the war he suggests led to the founding of Utopia.
Of course, The Internet provides plenty of opportunity for a parallel road into a similar future. We have the sort of constant, superficial contact with people that Huxley predicted in the form of social networking. We can sit and anesthetize ourselves to our ills and those of the world by overloading on news to the point that we lose our capacity to care or by playing games or by watching cat videos. The important distinction, though, is that these problems are not government imposed or even sanctioned. They are self inflicted. Fortunately, we live in a society that has smart enough to recognize that Internet addiction and information overload are actual problems. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that continues to pursue ubiquitous computing and the social isolation it promotes before we've begun to solve the problems of the current generation of technology. I'm hopeful, but...we'll see.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Brief Thoughts on Kinect
Microsoft Research has finally released its free SDK for developing Windows applications that utilize Kinect -- the natural user interface device originally sold as an Xbox 360 peripheral.
I've never thought much of Kinect as a game controller. As much time as Microsoft has spent trying to sell it over the last couple of E3s, the only really great thing they managed to do was sell it as a means of interfacing with the main menu hub. The games have all been iffy, especially attempts to integrate it into the traditional genres with anything other than voice recognition. It's hard to make immersive game experiences without any sort of controller, even if only because of constraints on the camera and physical movement of your avatar around the game environment. The result is sports minigames, dance games, and an assortment of on rails experiences -- not bad intrinsically, but certainly more limited than Microsoft wants us to believe.
Still, the basic interface manipulation powers -- both based on physical, three dimensional gesturing and voice recognition -- is potentially revelatory. Looking through the hacks that have been popping up since the initial release of the device, you can see so many applications for recognition of three dimensional movement of the hands and arms alone -- and this sort of tracking makes full body identification essential so as to not get distracted by other noise. I'm greatly hopeful for the sorts of applications that will result from heavier use of Kinect and other NUI devices in traditional computing.
Still, Microsoft was brilliant in releasing this as a toy first. Even if that isn't ever going to be the best use of the technology, we needed a phase where people were excited about the sheer novelty of this thing in order to develop a proper vocabulary for developing with it. Had this originally shipped as some much vaunted peripheral (a la the Magic Mouse), it would have been laughed at for its lack of support and non-existent consistency of use between applications. Instead, we had a period where that was expected because its primary purpose was as a fun diversion -- a way to sucker people out of their money instead of as a meaningful productivity tool. Months later now, we have experience determining current best practices for recognizing and translating certain behaviors and a proper set of verbs for describing interaction with this thing and an API for productivity development that supports these verbs out of the box.
Kudos, Microsoft. Here's hoping that you can pioneer NUI support in Windows 8 as you continue your positive trend of starting to give a damn about your customers.
I've never thought much of Kinect as a game controller. As much time as Microsoft has spent trying to sell it over the last couple of E3s, the only really great thing they managed to do was sell it as a means of interfacing with the main menu hub. The games have all been iffy, especially attempts to integrate it into the traditional genres with anything other than voice recognition. It's hard to make immersive game experiences without any sort of controller, even if only because of constraints on the camera and physical movement of your avatar around the game environment. The result is sports minigames, dance games, and an assortment of on rails experiences -- not bad intrinsically, but certainly more limited than Microsoft wants us to believe.
Still, the basic interface manipulation powers -- both based on physical, three dimensional gesturing and voice recognition -- is potentially revelatory. Looking through the hacks that have been popping up since the initial release of the device, you can see so many applications for recognition of three dimensional movement of the hands and arms alone -- and this sort of tracking makes full body identification essential so as to not get distracted by other noise. I'm greatly hopeful for the sorts of applications that will result from heavier use of Kinect and other NUI devices in traditional computing.
Still, Microsoft was brilliant in releasing this as a toy first. Even if that isn't ever going to be the best use of the technology, we needed a phase where people were excited about the sheer novelty of this thing in order to develop a proper vocabulary for developing with it. Had this originally shipped as some much vaunted peripheral (a la the Magic Mouse), it would have been laughed at for its lack of support and non-existent consistency of use between applications. Instead, we had a period where that was expected because its primary purpose was as a fun diversion -- a way to sucker people out of their money instead of as a meaningful productivity tool. Months later now, we have experience determining current best practices for recognizing and translating certain behaviors and a proper set of verbs for describing interaction with this thing and an API for productivity development that supports these verbs out of the box.
Kudos, Microsoft. Here's hoping that you can pioneer NUI support in Windows 8 as you continue your positive trend of starting to give a damn about your customers.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Videogames Storytelling and the Problem with Plot Twists
This has been brewing for awhile, but I'm still not quite sure how to say anything on the topic coherently. Let me start by saying I don't require the games I play to be narrative driven. I've sunk more time than I care to think about into Borderlands since it came out last October, and the biggest drive in that game is to gain levels and pick up loot. It's good clean fun built around the random positive reenforcement that we love so much. When games do try and compel progression through narrative, though, I like that narrative to be able to stand on its own merits, preferably with writing that doesn't make me cringe. Unfortunately, this seems to be too tall an order for many game creators. This is largely because videogame writers don't seem to know terribly well how to handle what I will generically call "twists" for now -- i.e. those plot elements that shift the immediate focus of the action or the meaning of those actions that have already occurred.
Prime example: towards the end of April, I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 -- nearly universally lauded as one of the best games of 2009 -- on the cheap and started playing through it. The first half of the game is quite enjoyable. I didn't even mind the "ancestral memory" conceit used to link the games in the series. The story (technically the story-within-the-story, but the main plot for all intents and purposes) is a simple but relatively compelling one of revenge against those who have unjustly wronged your family. It felt good saving the city of Florence from these corrupt men. Moving on from there, things start to get a little bit less enjoyable plot-wise as you move on to unravel the larger conspiracy that said men were pawns in, but the city of Venice is even more fun to explore than Florence, so it works out alright for the most part. All the while, there are opportunities to unlock secrets about the larger story surrounding the game -- the historical and modern activities of the Assassins (proper noun) and the Templars in which Ezio, the effective protagonist, is not a part.
This background information is generally pretty ridiculous. It involves elaborate plots and partnerships, not to mention ancient aliens (and alien-human hybrids!). One of the major failings is an attempt to assign roles in this conflict, particularly among the Templar, to far too many historical figures. If a historical figure has ever been vilified in any medium, whether it's Hitler or Edison, they were secretly a Templar. Anybody whom the game creators thought was a Pretty Cool Dude, be it Dante or Tesla or Machiavelli, was secretly a friend of the Assassins. It's unnecessary, distracting, and ridiculous; but it's also entirely optional and thus tolerable...until the last hour or so of the game.
Suddenly, in a major "twist", the alien relics show up within the main plot of the game. And then you have to kill the (evil, Templar-colluding) Pope, who bears another of these relics. And then you find a message recorded and left by the super-powerful-but-now-extinct aliens (whom ancient man thought to be gods) about how the sun is going to blow up someday, so screw your petty conflicts. It's ridiculous, it comes out of nowhere, and it leaves you saying, just like it does the sub-protagonist, "What the ****!?". I have no use for twists of this sort in any sort of story. If it doesn't make sense within the context of what we've been told or shown. If there have been no details to suggest that something is happening other than what we've been led to believe. If the mechanism that instigates the revelation requires supernatural origins. If the entire point is to cause surprise or speculation rather than concern or curiosity...leave it be.
Unfortunately, this is mighty common in videogames, including those that have story as a primary component and not just a generic motivator. I've been slowly working my way through Tales of Vesperia the last several months; and I can't help dropping it for awhile every few weeks because of the absurdity of its plot. The character interactions are mostly pretty great, and the first large story arc -- setting out to retrieve a stolen artifact necessary for the survival of your hometown -- is, again, straightforward and effective, even if I ran into plenty of problems with annoyingly "creative" words made up for the game (as always, xkcd proves right). After that first arc concluded, though, I realized that they were intentionally keeping everything about the workings of the setting as nebulously defined as possible so that they could make up as much crap as they wanted to to prolong the story. Pretty much every single major shift in the plot for the last 20-30 hours has begun/ended with the "genius mage" character going "oh snap! these magical crystal thingamabobs we've all relied on for basic survival for centuries are reacting in some weird way that nobody has ever documented before or thought to be a remote possibility! But now that I've observed it once I understand it completely and can say conclusively that we need to go do X next!" Either that, or some ancient, wizened creature says "puny mortals. you cannot comprehend what's really happening...unless you go do Z, in which case, yeah, you can comprehend it just fine. So...yeah, go do Z." It's ridiculous and makes it legitimately hard to play the game at times.
Even games from the same series or writer can use plot twists exceedingly well in one entry an quite poorly in the next. I complain about its popularity a lot, but Final Fantasy VII is a great game that has a handful of twists, all of which work. None of them seem too far-fetched (even if at least one is borderline traumatic in its surprise), and all work to make the eventual revelation about Cloud's real past and his relationship with Sephiroth make sense. Final Fantasy IX, on the other hand, doesn't handle its twists nearly so well. Whether it's Zidane's origin or the final boss, once you get past the second disk, the big twists all come out of thin air. Hell, as much as I love it, Mass Effect 2 even slips a little bit with the final encounter. I'm willing to overlook that as it makes a certain (if small) amount of sense based on what we know at that point, not to mention the fact that nobody makes any real claim to understanding beyond conjecture what was happening.
That really touches on the key thing. If a twist happens after it has been telegraphed, whether it's through subtle hints that take on greater meaning after the event or more obvious foreshadowing, that's good use of a twist. If a twist happens and there is no prior evidence to explain what happened or to make us think that such an event might happen, but the next portion of the plot is (at least in part) dedicated to illuminating the twist -- to seeing the characters come to understand why their world has suddenly changed and what that means, then that's a good use of the twist. However, if a twist occurs out of nowhere and somebody, instead, immediately comprehends the significance and cause of the event based entirely on knowledge which the audience didn't even know might exist, that's poor use of a twist.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't something that just happens in videogames. I'm still upset with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for this sort of sloppy story telling. It just seems to be more readily accepted in videogames, and it shouldn't be. People have been using games to tell legitimate stories for 20 years or more now. We shouldn't allow the overly-frilly drivel that passes for plot in most of our games today. I'm not demanding narratives that are going to blow my mind. I'm not even demanding narratives that are universally complex and multi-faceted. I'm asking for one simple thing: If you're not willing to take the time to make sure everything makes sense, keep it simple. Moreover, realize that if the characters are ever spending less time in a state of shock or confusion than the audience, you're probably doing something wrong.
Prime example: towards the end of April, I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 -- nearly universally lauded as one of the best games of 2009 -- on the cheap and started playing through it. The first half of the game is quite enjoyable. I didn't even mind the "ancestral memory" conceit used to link the games in the series. The story (technically the story-within-the-story, but the main plot for all intents and purposes) is a simple but relatively compelling one of revenge against those who have unjustly wronged your family. It felt good saving the city of Florence from these corrupt men. Moving on from there, things start to get a little bit less enjoyable plot-wise as you move on to unravel the larger conspiracy that said men were pawns in, but the city of Venice is even more fun to explore than Florence, so it works out alright for the most part. All the while, there are opportunities to unlock secrets about the larger story surrounding the game -- the historical and modern activities of the Assassins (proper noun) and the Templars in which Ezio, the effective protagonist, is not a part.
This background information is generally pretty ridiculous. It involves elaborate plots and partnerships, not to mention ancient aliens (and alien-human hybrids!). One of the major failings is an attempt to assign roles in this conflict, particularly among the Templar, to far too many historical figures. If a historical figure has ever been vilified in any medium, whether it's Hitler or Edison, they were secretly a Templar. Anybody whom the game creators thought was a Pretty Cool Dude, be it Dante or Tesla or Machiavelli, was secretly a friend of the Assassins. It's unnecessary, distracting, and ridiculous; but it's also entirely optional and thus tolerable...until the last hour or so of the game.
Suddenly, in a major "twist", the alien relics show up within the main plot of the game. And then you have to kill the (evil, Templar-colluding) Pope, who bears another of these relics. And then you find a message recorded and left by the super-powerful-but-now-extinct aliens (whom ancient man thought to be gods) about how the sun is going to blow up someday, so screw your petty conflicts. It's ridiculous, it comes out of nowhere, and it leaves you saying, just like it does the sub-protagonist, "What the ****!?". I have no use for twists of this sort in any sort of story. If it doesn't make sense within the context of what we've been told or shown. If there have been no details to suggest that something is happening other than what we've been led to believe. If the mechanism that instigates the revelation requires supernatural origins. If the entire point is to cause surprise or speculation rather than concern or curiosity...leave it be.
Unfortunately, this is mighty common in videogames, including those that have story as a primary component and not just a generic motivator. I've been slowly working my way through Tales of Vesperia the last several months; and I can't help dropping it for awhile every few weeks because of the absurdity of its plot. The character interactions are mostly pretty great, and the first large story arc -- setting out to retrieve a stolen artifact necessary for the survival of your hometown -- is, again, straightforward and effective, even if I ran into plenty of problems with annoyingly "creative" words made up for the game (as always, xkcd proves right). After that first arc concluded, though, I realized that they were intentionally keeping everything about the workings of the setting as nebulously defined as possible so that they could make up as much crap as they wanted to to prolong the story. Pretty much every single major shift in the plot for the last 20-30 hours has begun/ended with the "genius mage" character going "oh snap! these magical crystal thingamabobs we've all relied on for basic survival for centuries are reacting in some weird way that nobody has ever documented before or thought to be a remote possibility! But now that I've observed it once I understand it completely and can say conclusively that we need to go do X next!" Either that, or some ancient, wizened creature says "puny mortals. you cannot comprehend what's really happening...unless you go do Z, in which case, yeah, you can comprehend it just fine. So...yeah, go do Z." It's ridiculous and makes it legitimately hard to play the game at times.
Even games from the same series or writer can use plot twists exceedingly well in one entry an quite poorly in the next. I complain about its popularity a lot, but Final Fantasy VII is a great game that has a handful of twists, all of which work. None of them seem too far-fetched (even if at least one is borderline traumatic in its surprise), and all work to make the eventual revelation about Cloud's real past and his relationship with Sephiroth make sense. Final Fantasy IX, on the other hand, doesn't handle its twists nearly so well. Whether it's Zidane's origin or the final boss, once you get past the second disk, the big twists all come out of thin air. Hell, as much as I love it, Mass Effect 2 even slips a little bit with the final encounter. I'm willing to overlook that as it makes a certain (if small) amount of sense based on what we know at that point, not to mention the fact that nobody makes any real claim to understanding beyond conjecture what was happening.
That really touches on the key thing. If a twist happens after it has been telegraphed, whether it's through subtle hints that take on greater meaning after the event or more obvious foreshadowing, that's good use of a twist. If a twist happens and there is no prior evidence to explain what happened or to make us think that such an event might happen, but the next portion of the plot is (at least in part) dedicated to illuminating the twist -- to seeing the characters come to understand why their world has suddenly changed and what that means, then that's a good use of the twist. However, if a twist occurs out of nowhere and somebody, instead, immediately comprehends the significance and cause of the event based entirely on knowledge which the audience didn't even know might exist, that's poor use of a twist.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't something that just happens in videogames. I'm still upset with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for this sort of sloppy story telling. It just seems to be more readily accepted in videogames, and it shouldn't be. People have been using games to tell legitimate stories for 20 years or more now. We shouldn't allow the overly-frilly drivel that passes for plot in most of our games today. I'm not demanding narratives that are going to blow my mind. I'm not even demanding narratives that are universally complex and multi-faceted. I'm asking for one simple thing: If you're not willing to take the time to make sure everything makes sense, keep it simple. Moreover, realize that if the characters are ever spending less time in a state of shock or confusion than the audience, you're probably doing something wrong.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Significance of Statistics in RPGs
Mass Effect 2 just came out, and it is incredible. It's not without fault -- if I wanted to, I could pick out plenty of gripes both minor and less than -- but these faults are only apparent to me when I analyze it from outside the experience. At any time that I have actually been playing the game (and that's nearly 40 hours at this point), I have been absolutely enthralled by the characters, the story, and the gameplay.
One thing that the developers did in an effort to make the game more accessible was to streamline the combat and the bookkeeping. There's much less equipment to deal with and fewer abilities for each character to sink experience into. Looking at reviews on Amazon, I see that this has caused a furor among many shut-in genre snobs complaining about how this somehow diminishes the game as an RPG. To these folks, I have one word: bullshit.
In the days of pen and paper role playing, stats were assigned to player characters to allow the game master some way of determining what was feasible for the players to do in the game world. It's that simple. In the modern era of videogames, no human being needs to determine what players are or are not capable of doing. We can write elaborate rules that determine that for us and hid them away behind the scenes in physics engines and other computations. Even if hit points and damage modifiers are in effect, the player only needs to be made aware of their existence and general impact, not every specific facet of how they work. This allows us to have rules governing player behavior that are infinitely more complex, which allows for scenarios that are more consistent and more elaborate, and the players' blindness to the exact functioning allows for an experience that is more engrossing.
In the early days of videogames, it wasn't possible for players to have any control over the plot or the game world. For the most part, if there was any sort of significant plot, everything ran on rails with the player being the vehicle for advancing the plot, not an agent actively participating in its progression. Combat, then, was the only thing that the player had any sort of say in. So, in order to give a sense of individuality, games gave players more control over how they were to engage in it. Statistics and customization, tools that formerly existed to provide regulation of the game world, turned into mechanisms by which players were allowed a sense of personal identity in their character. Certainly, pen and paper games had player controlled proficiency development of this nature before the era of videogames; but they weren't essential to the genre. Unfortunately, the proliferation games allowing player directed character growth and boasting that they have "RPG elements" has apparently made it the defining aspect of the genre.
Truth be told, these sorts of customization options only lead to min-maxing and metagaming, the eternal enemies of immersion. Agonizing decisions about what's best instead of what's fitting; elaborate plotting of intended builds and ideal combinations; overwrought mappings of stimulus to optimal response. How can an interactive story survive when the player is more concerned with how he or she intends to play it than with how it will unfold? How can you effectively extend yourself into a character when you are entirely preoccupied with controlling him or her?
Statistics and customization are not the defining characteristics of the ideal role playing game. They are a cancer. What was once a healthy, functioning component of the genre has swollen and now threatens its very livelihood. They are a parasite, slowly killing the host on which they rode into popularity while simultaneously attempting to assume its identity. The folks at Bioware recognized this and have made an attempt to put them back in their proper place, and the result is hatred.
Statistics do not make an RPG. Role playing makes an RPG, and the Mass Effect series, taken as a whole, allows for deeper role playing than any computer game I've ever seen. I never could have predicted the way that certain decisions I made in Mass Effect 1 could have impacted the game world in Mass Effect 2; and I've spent the last couple of days consumed with questions about what the final effects of choices I made in this middle chapter will turn out to be. I am very nearly as curious about what this universe would look like for characters with other tendencies (as anybody who has heard me discuss a hypothetical "violent space lesbian" is aware). I am more attached to the character of Commander Shepard as I have brought him to life than I have been to any other character I have ever played.
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with player control over statistics or ability development. They allow you to impart some notion of who you feel your character is and how they interact with the reality around them. When they become the focus, though, something has gone terrible wrong, at least if you're trying to create a pure Role Playing Game. Anybody who discounts Mass Effect 2 not as a game, but as an RPG because they tried to relegate character growth to its proper place is missing the point and shutting themselves out of one of the best gaming experiences of all time.
One thing that the developers did in an effort to make the game more accessible was to streamline the combat and the bookkeeping. There's much less equipment to deal with and fewer abilities for each character to sink experience into. Looking at reviews on Amazon, I see that this has caused a furor among many shut-in genre snobs complaining about how this somehow diminishes the game as an RPG. To these folks, I have one word: bullshit.
In the days of pen and paper role playing, stats were assigned to player characters to allow the game master some way of determining what was feasible for the players to do in the game world. It's that simple. In the modern era of videogames, no human being needs to determine what players are or are not capable of doing. We can write elaborate rules that determine that for us and hid them away behind the scenes in physics engines and other computations. Even if hit points and damage modifiers are in effect, the player only needs to be made aware of their existence and general impact, not every specific facet of how they work. This allows us to have rules governing player behavior that are infinitely more complex, which allows for scenarios that are more consistent and more elaborate, and the players' blindness to the exact functioning allows for an experience that is more engrossing.
In the early days of videogames, it wasn't possible for players to have any control over the plot or the game world. For the most part, if there was any sort of significant plot, everything ran on rails with the player being the vehicle for advancing the plot, not an agent actively participating in its progression. Combat, then, was the only thing that the player had any sort of say in. So, in order to give a sense of individuality, games gave players more control over how they were to engage in it. Statistics and customization, tools that formerly existed to provide regulation of the game world, turned into mechanisms by which players were allowed a sense of personal identity in their character. Certainly, pen and paper games had player controlled proficiency development of this nature before the era of videogames; but they weren't essential to the genre. Unfortunately, the proliferation games allowing player directed character growth and boasting that they have "RPG elements" has apparently made it the defining aspect of the genre.
Truth be told, these sorts of customization options only lead to min-maxing and metagaming, the eternal enemies of immersion. Agonizing decisions about what's best instead of what's fitting; elaborate plotting of intended builds and ideal combinations; overwrought mappings of stimulus to optimal response. How can an interactive story survive when the player is more concerned with how he or she intends to play it than with how it will unfold? How can you effectively extend yourself into a character when you are entirely preoccupied with controlling him or her?
Statistics and customization are not the defining characteristics of the ideal role playing game. They are a cancer. What was once a healthy, functioning component of the genre has swollen and now threatens its very livelihood. They are a parasite, slowly killing the host on which they rode into popularity while simultaneously attempting to assume its identity. The folks at Bioware recognized this and have made an attempt to put them back in their proper place, and the result is hatred.
Statistics do not make an RPG. Role playing makes an RPG, and the Mass Effect series, taken as a whole, allows for deeper role playing than any computer game I've ever seen. I never could have predicted the way that certain decisions I made in Mass Effect 1 could have impacted the game world in Mass Effect 2; and I've spent the last couple of days consumed with questions about what the final effects of choices I made in this middle chapter will turn out to be. I am very nearly as curious about what this universe would look like for characters with other tendencies (as anybody who has heard me discuss a hypothetical "violent space lesbian" is aware). I am more attached to the character of Commander Shepard as I have brought him to life than I have been to any other character I have ever played.
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with player control over statistics or ability development. They allow you to impart some notion of who you feel your character is and how they interact with the reality around them. When they become the focus, though, something has gone terrible wrong, at least if you're trying to create a pure Role Playing Game. Anybody who discounts Mass Effect 2 not as a game, but as an RPG because they tried to relegate character growth to its proper place is missing the point and shutting themselves out of one of the best gaming experiences of all time.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Ripped from today's headlines!
So, those of you who follow the news know that one of the recurring fluff stories right now involves a Philadelphia day care and a local country club swimming pool. The short version is this:
Due to the closings of a number of city pools, the day care center contracted with said country club to use their pool once a week.
At the first visit, some of the members of the country club made derogatory remarks about the kids, many of which were racial in nature.
Shortly thereafter, the country club cancelled the contract and returned the full check to the day care center.
The slant that the day care center and liberal activists are taking is that this turnabout on the contract was racially motivated. After all, if a handful of the members of this club are bigoted, then obviously the entire organization must be.
The story according to the country club is that participation was unexpectedly high and they couldn't legally support having that many people using the pool. They cancelled similar contracts with other, predominantly white day care centers, too.
I don't really care at the moment which side is right. What I care about is that the obvious slant from the media is that the day care center is. The day care center is insisting that the entire board of the country club resign and that members who are identified as having made racist comments be expelled from the organization. What gives them this authority? Nothing, at least not until actual wrongdoing is proven. Until then, this is blackmail, plain and simple, and it's disgusting; and yet, it's not going to be seen as that in the press. It's going to be seen as a justified crusade against the ghosts of systemic racism.
I hate that, as soon as racism or homosexuality enters the picture, innocent until proven guilty flies out the window. Any time these issues arises, we start confusing correlation with causation; and not just in the lack of evidence, but often times (such as in this case) in the face of evidence to the contrary. I understand why we do it. We want to make sure that the system can't be abused to protect bigots. To borrow a phrase from the Green Lantern Corps, we want to ensure that no evil escapes our sight. I'm not sure that we go about it the right way, though, when we give our entire sympathy to the "defendant", particularly when they abuse their supposed weakness in this fashion.
Due to the closings of a number of city pools, the day care center contracted with said country club to use their pool once a week.
At the first visit, some of the members of the country club made derogatory remarks about the kids, many of which were racial in nature.
Shortly thereafter, the country club cancelled the contract and returned the full check to the day care center.
The slant that the day care center and liberal activists are taking is that this turnabout on the contract was racially motivated. After all, if a handful of the members of this club are bigoted, then obviously the entire organization must be.
The story according to the country club is that participation was unexpectedly high and they couldn't legally support having that many people using the pool. They cancelled similar contracts with other, predominantly white day care centers, too.
I don't really care at the moment which side is right. What I care about is that the obvious slant from the media is that the day care center is. The day care center is insisting that the entire board of the country club resign and that members who are identified as having made racist comments be expelled from the organization. What gives them this authority? Nothing, at least not until actual wrongdoing is proven. Until then, this is blackmail, plain and simple, and it's disgusting; and yet, it's not going to be seen as that in the press. It's going to be seen as a justified crusade against the ghosts of systemic racism.
I hate that, as soon as racism or homosexuality enters the picture, innocent until proven guilty flies out the window. Any time these issues arises, we start confusing correlation with causation; and not just in the lack of evidence, but often times (such as in this case) in the face of evidence to the contrary. I understand why we do it. We want to make sure that the system can't be abused to protect bigots. To borrow a phrase from the Green Lantern Corps, we want to ensure that no evil escapes our sight. I'm not sure that we go about it the right way, though, when we give our entire sympathy to the "defendant", particularly when they abuse their supposed weakness in this fashion.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
More Religious/Catholic talk!
I really don't get why so many religious people are so violently opposed to anything dealing with postmodernism. We actively talk about faith as being transformative, and I can't think of anything more postmodern than that - belief impacting behavior and perception. The basic idea is that, if you really truly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the eternal Son of God who came to live among us, then you're going to live your life differently. You're going to try to follow His example and His teachings more closely. You're going to have a new appreciation for the handiwork of creation in light of the revelation of God's love. The reality you live in will, in a real way, be altered from the reality you understood before believing.
Thinking about this finally helped me to understand the Catholic sacraments. The common definition of a sacrament is "An outward sign, initiated by Christ on Earth, to give us grace". The definition as I tend to remember (and prefer) it is "An outward sign of God's grace, initiated by Christ on Earth". The difference here is that the grace, in my definition, is pre-existing. It is something that the sacrament is a reminder of and not something conferred by participation in it.
Here's where I'm going with this. If I receive the Eucharist, and I firmly and truly believe that it is, metaphysically, the body and blood of Christ, who sacrificed himself that I may live more fully...then I'm going to respond to that presence. I am going to honor that sacrifice in my living. I am going to strive to be a better person. That's not to say that I couldn't do those things without having received the Eucharist, but participation in the sacrament, if I believe in it, heightens my sense of duty and my awareness of the abundant grace I have already been blessed with, grace I may not otherwise be aware of.
I've seen this in people. I had teachers throughout my Catholic education who tried to make it to Mass every morning, and you could tell when they hadn't. They were grumpier, they were less patient, they didn't teach as well. Daily Eucharist was a ritual by which they connected to God and their duty in the classroom as Christian educators, and without it, they were lost. For other people, myself included, Eucharist doesn't have nearly this big an impact...but that's because we don't believe in it, or at least not to the same extent.
Some people would look at what I'm saying and construe it as another way of saying "oh, religion is for the weak, the people who don't have the will to lead the lives they know they should without it". Maybe that's a valid interpretation. Maybe it's all a bunch of psychosematic crap we would be better off without. I disagree, though. I think that any way we have of pushing and encouraging ourselves to be better is of value; and I happen to believe very strongly that Jesus was right in His teachings of what it means to be better.
That is all.
Thinking about this finally helped me to understand the Catholic sacraments. The common definition of a sacrament is "An outward sign, initiated by Christ on Earth, to give us grace". The definition as I tend to remember (and prefer) it is "An outward sign of God's grace, initiated by Christ on Earth". The difference here is that the grace, in my definition, is pre-existing. It is something that the sacrament is a reminder of and not something conferred by participation in it.
Here's where I'm going with this. If I receive the Eucharist, and I firmly and truly believe that it is, metaphysically, the body and blood of Christ, who sacrificed himself that I may live more fully...then I'm going to respond to that presence. I am going to honor that sacrifice in my living. I am going to strive to be a better person. That's not to say that I couldn't do those things without having received the Eucharist, but participation in the sacrament, if I believe in it, heightens my sense of duty and my awareness of the abundant grace I have already been blessed with, grace I may not otherwise be aware of.
I've seen this in people. I had teachers throughout my Catholic education who tried to make it to Mass every morning, and you could tell when they hadn't. They were grumpier, they were less patient, they didn't teach as well. Daily Eucharist was a ritual by which they connected to God and their duty in the classroom as Christian educators, and without it, they were lost. For other people, myself included, Eucharist doesn't have nearly this big an impact...but that's because we don't believe in it, or at least not to the same extent.
Some people would look at what I'm saying and construe it as another way of saying "oh, religion is for the weak, the people who don't have the will to lead the lives they know they should without it". Maybe that's a valid interpretation. Maybe it's all a bunch of psychosematic crap we would be better off without. I disagree, though. I think that any way we have of pushing and encouraging ourselves to be better is of value; and I happen to believe very strongly that Jesus was right in His teachings of what it means to be better.
That is all.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Everyone's a Little Bit Horny (Sometimes)
Most of the people who read this should recognize that title as an obvious rip-off from Avenue Q's "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist". The reason I love that song isn't because it's especially funny, but because it's entirely true. We all do make judgments and decisions based on things, like race, that we don't want to admit factor into our decision making process. The problem with this is that, when we don't acknowledge all of the aspects of our reasoning, we become blind to our own biases and incapable of accurately assessing our choices. Our sexuality (by which I mean our nature as physical, sexual beings, not sexual orientation) is something that has an incredibly impact on the decisions we make, but we tend to do a pretty terrible job of being healthy about it.
I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment, but It will relate.
We're a society obsessed with self-stimulation, and this exhibits itself in a large part of the population through masturbation. Moreover, pornography is everywhere in our society; and virtually every adult male alive has intentionally sampled pornography at least once. I obviously don't discount myself from this group. I'm not trying to defend pornography. In fact, I'm doing just the opposite. Pornography distorts the intended nature of sex, ignoring the importance of intimacy and instead focusing on individual pleasure and achievement, frequently at the expense of the other member in some way. But that doesn't change the universality of the experience of pornography, and the fact that it isn't something we address openly and bluntly only gives it more power over our development.
The way we talk about pornography in different microcosms of society is a really good indicator of how we let our sexuality interact with our decision making process. In groups where pornography and/or masturbation habits are openly discussed without shame, most of the people I know are also more willing to admit to the impacts of sexual desire on their decision making...but the sexual desires are also generally greeted too enthusiastically, and sex is pursued as something good simply for the pleasure it brings. Instead of a focus on sexual health, there's a focus on "safety" in the active pursuit of sex.
On the other hand, you have groups where pornography is still taboo. They recognize the flaws with pornography, but because they are secretly aware of the universal nature of the pornographic experience, in an effort to dissuade it, they've become puritanical and any talk of sexual urges is associated with the pornographic rather than the expression of natural, healthy desires; so it is shunned and unhealthy attitudes towards sex fester. Here, instead of trying to develop a healthy understanding of sex, the focus is one of abstinence from this unseemly act.
Obviously, the unnatural nature in which sex is represented in pornography is the uniting factor in what's wrong with both of these approaches...but somewhere along the line, our entire understanding of sex, on both sides of the aisle, began to conform with the reality postured by pornography and not the nature of sex as created. As such, its becoming increasingly difficult to talk about sex in an open and constructive manner that actually relates to what sex is meant to be.
I wish I had something useful or new to say about where to go from here. I see no virtue in puritanism. As I inferred earlier, I see this as being largely responsible for losing sight of the one thing of value that those who rejected pornography had - an understanding of the real value of sex. I think that we need to work to rediscover this as a society, which will involve addressing the failings of pornography in a non-condescending fashion. From there, I think we need to be comfortable talking about and recognizing our urges as not unhealthy, but not to be dwelt on.
...there's a lot more I wish I could express, but I don't have the words right now. Maybe its better this way. If I want this to be a dialogue, then I can't have all of the answers up-front. Hopefully this is enough to get some sort of response from those of you who read it, and we can figure out what needs to be done together and start trying to reform where we can...It's a tricky issue, but an important one, especially when it comes to mending the secular-religious rift (I'm not certain, but I bet I could blame the attitudes of condemnation towards sex for most of my friends leaving the Church)...
thanks for your time, and hopefully this made sense
I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment, but It will relate.
We're a society obsessed with self-stimulation, and this exhibits itself in a large part of the population through masturbation. Moreover, pornography is everywhere in our society; and virtually every adult male alive has intentionally sampled pornography at least once. I obviously don't discount myself from this group. I'm not trying to defend pornography. In fact, I'm doing just the opposite. Pornography distorts the intended nature of sex, ignoring the importance of intimacy and instead focusing on individual pleasure and achievement, frequently at the expense of the other member in some way. But that doesn't change the universality of the experience of pornography, and the fact that it isn't something we address openly and bluntly only gives it more power over our development.
The way we talk about pornography in different microcosms of society is a really good indicator of how we let our sexuality interact with our decision making process. In groups where pornography and/or masturbation habits are openly discussed without shame, most of the people I know are also more willing to admit to the impacts of sexual desire on their decision making...but the sexual desires are also generally greeted too enthusiastically, and sex is pursued as something good simply for the pleasure it brings. Instead of a focus on sexual health, there's a focus on "safety" in the active pursuit of sex.
On the other hand, you have groups where pornography is still taboo. They recognize the flaws with pornography, but because they are secretly aware of the universal nature of the pornographic experience, in an effort to dissuade it, they've become puritanical and any talk of sexual urges is associated with the pornographic rather than the expression of natural, healthy desires; so it is shunned and unhealthy attitudes towards sex fester. Here, instead of trying to develop a healthy understanding of sex, the focus is one of abstinence from this unseemly act.
Obviously, the unnatural nature in which sex is represented in pornography is the uniting factor in what's wrong with both of these approaches...but somewhere along the line, our entire understanding of sex, on both sides of the aisle, began to conform with the reality postured by pornography and not the nature of sex as created. As such, its becoming increasingly difficult to talk about sex in an open and constructive manner that actually relates to what sex is meant to be.
I wish I had something useful or new to say about where to go from here. I see no virtue in puritanism. As I inferred earlier, I see this as being largely responsible for losing sight of the one thing of value that those who rejected pornography had - an understanding of the real value of sex. I think that we need to work to rediscover this as a society, which will involve addressing the failings of pornography in a non-condescending fashion. From there, I think we need to be comfortable talking about and recognizing our urges as not unhealthy, but not to be dwelt on.
...there's a lot more I wish I could express, but I don't have the words right now. Maybe its better this way. If I want this to be a dialogue, then I can't have all of the answers up-front. Hopefully this is enough to get some sort of response from those of you who read it, and we can figure out what needs to be done together and start trying to reform where we can...It's a tricky issue, but an important one, especially when it comes to mending the secular-religious rift (I'm not certain, but I bet I could blame the attitudes of condemnation towards sex for most of my friends leaving the Church)...
thanks for your time, and hopefully this made sense
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Dissecting Dr. Horrible
As of right now, you have just under 24 hours to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog for free at www.drhorrible.com. If you missed it, fret not, it should be available on DVD soon (we'll know how soon within a week, I'm sure). I, for one, will be picking up a copy as soon as humanly possible.
What I am going to talk about are certain elements of the characters that I found interesting and their relevance to the nature of the project as a whole.
Here's the proposition I'm going to make:
Dr. Horrible is the emerging culture of the internet (and online broadcasting). Captain Hammer is the traditional media. Penny is the consumer, being asked to choose between the two. The analogy is far from perfect, but here's my explanation.
Dr. Horrible has two distinct faces. There's, well, Dr. Horrible, who is trying to disrupt the status quo, rule the world, and enter the Evil League of Evil. And there's Billy, the quiet, lonely guy just looking for somebody willing to take the time to know him; but too shy to take the first step. At the end, we see that Dr. Horrible is mostly Billy. He's not misunderstood - he honestly does want to upset the status quo, simply because it's broken. Instead, he's misguided; turning towards the problem outside himself - the one he can "fix" in any number of ways - instead of the one inside - the one he needs to find a solution for. This leads him into emptiness and despair.
Captain Hammer is the definition of superficial. Beyond this, his only goal is his own glorification. He does what is "good" and says what people want to hear (even if sometimes poorly) because he knows that these are the things that will earn him the most praise. The response of the masses to his action is one that says the ends justify not only the means, but also the intent. He picks on Dr. Horrible because he upsets the status quo that honors him, and because most people are comfortable with the status quo and will perceive its defense as right.
Penny is superficially attracted to Captain Hammer because of his ability to do and say what she wants. She's utterly unaware that his entire motivation is his own gain. At the same time, while somewhat wary of Dr. Horrible - even without knowing him as such - she sees the value in him and connects with him on a more human level...she's just not willing to pursue a relationship - something she does with Captain Hammer because, on the surface, he is immediately able to meet her up front needs.
The internet has two faces. There's the internet: home of obsessed with piracy, who sit and work to disrupt the status quo because it doesn't agree with what they feel the world should be (free). And then there's the internet: medium for mass communication and shared expression that, despite its technological nature, is human and connecting. This medium allows artists the ability to genuinely be themselves and connect with fans at a strong, personal level and to derive support from the dedication this relationship instills. This is contrary to the traditional model of being as generally "acceptable" as possible so as to gain a larger, less attached fan base, whom you reach, for a price, through the media at large. As people better understand the way the internet works, this second face becomes more obviously the true one, but that first face still lurks, patently visible to anybody, its motivations threatening to ruin the more personal nature of the internet for everybody.
Big Media exists chiefly to promote its own existence and create profits for those whom are a apart of it. The programming it provides is intended to distract us - be it through despair or amusement - from our other options so that the money keeps rolling in. is constantly trying to manipulate the general public into seeing that first face of the internet as its true identity, make people understand it as an aberration that seeks to destroy this construct with which they are so comfortable, which brings them so much joy. They do this because the internet, by allowing people to form stronger bonds with those from whom they consume, threatens to damage the way they do business if it is used as anything other than a new means of the distribution of their traditional message and programming.
Consumers still love the traditional, Big Media, because it meets their needs at the most basic level. They are beginning to be attracted to the personal level at which internet based content providers can meet their needs, but, by and large, they aren't willing to fully invest themselves in the endeavor because things aren't as reliable, or as cut and dry.
Just as Captain Hammer's continued advances on Penny drive Dr. Horrible towards plots of increased violence against him, the Big Media's ever stronger advances towards the hearts and attention of the typical consumer - and their vilification of the (non-corporate) internet, drives the acts of piracy to greater desperation. And yet, if this piracy succeeds entirely - resulting in the fall of Big Media, it is at the expense of everybody. Without Big Media around, there's nothing new for the pirates to "liberate" except for the independent content creators, whom the pirates will then attack, preventing them from creating anything new; this kills the creative spirit of the internet, leaving it entirely devoid of its second, more powerful character; consumers are left with nobody to consume from; and the pirates, having completed their task, are left with nothing new to do beyond reinventing what they've already done. It's a dire situation for creators and consumers alike, one which leads to the fall of culture.
Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is, as much as anything else, a warning of what happens if we, the internet culture, allow our love of piracy and "freedom" overcome our desire for stronger, human connections and bold, new, exploits of creative energy. Doing so will certainly hurt Big Media, but at the expense of what truly makes the internet what it is. Joss Whedon and friends are helping to pioneer new ground in the use of the internet AS the internet - not merely a new means of distribution - in a new way of making a profit for creative effort. Please, support Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog; not only because everybody involved deserves to earn something, but because the internet is becoming more than we've let it be in the past, and we need to nurture that.
What I am going to talk about are certain elements of the characters that I found interesting and their relevance to the nature of the project as a whole.
Here's the proposition I'm going to make:
Dr. Horrible is the emerging culture of the internet (and online broadcasting). Captain Hammer is the traditional media. Penny is the consumer, being asked to choose between the two. The analogy is far from perfect, but here's my explanation.
Dr. Horrible has two distinct faces. There's, well, Dr. Horrible, who is trying to disrupt the status quo, rule the world, and enter the Evil League of Evil. And there's Billy, the quiet, lonely guy just looking for somebody willing to take the time to know him; but too shy to take the first step. At the end, we see that Dr. Horrible is mostly Billy. He's not misunderstood - he honestly does want to upset the status quo, simply because it's broken. Instead, he's misguided; turning towards the problem outside himself - the one he can "fix" in any number of ways - instead of the one inside - the one he needs to find a solution for. This leads him into emptiness and despair.
Captain Hammer is the definition of superficial. Beyond this, his only goal is his own glorification. He does what is "good" and says what people want to hear (even if sometimes poorly) because he knows that these are the things that will earn him the most praise. The response of the masses to his action is one that says the ends justify not only the means, but also the intent. He picks on Dr. Horrible because he upsets the status quo that honors him, and because most people are comfortable with the status quo and will perceive its defense as right.
Penny is superficially attracted to Captain Hammer because of his ability to do and say what she wants. She's utterly unaware that his entire motivation is his own gain. At the same time, while somewhat wary of Dr. Horrible - even without knowing him as such - she sees the value in him and connects with him on a more human level...she's just not willing to pursue a relationship - something she does with Captain Hammer because, on the surface, he is immediately able to meet her up front needs.
The internet has two faces. There's the internet: home of obsessed with piracy, who sit and work to disrupt the status quo because it doesn't agree with what they feel the world should be (free). And then there's the internet: medium for mass communication and shared expression that, despite its technological nature, is human and connecting. This medium allows artists the ability to genuinely be themselves and connect with fans at a strong, personal level and to derive support from the dedication this relationship instills. This is contrary to the traditional model of being as generally "acceptable" as possible so as to gain a larger, less attached fan base, whom you reach, for a price, through the media at large. As people better understand the way the internet works, this second face becomes more obviously the true one, but that first face still lurks, patently visible to anybody, its motivations threatening to ruin the more personal nature of the internet for everybody.
Big Media exists chiefly to promote its own existence and create profits for those whom are a apart of it. The programming it provides is intended to distract us - be it through despair or amusement - from our other options so that the money keeps rolling in. is constantly trying to manipulate the general public into seeing that first face of the internet as its true identity, make people understand it as an aberration that seeks to destroy this construct with which they are so comfortable, which brings them so much joy. They do this because the internet, by allowing people to form stronger bonds with those from whom they consume, threatens to damage the way they do business if it is used as anything other than a new means of the distribution of their traditional message and programming.
Consumers still love the traditional, Big Media, because it meets their needs at the most basic level. They are beginning to be attracted to the personal level at which internet based content providers can meet their needs, but, by and large, they aren't willing to fully invest themselves in the endeavor because things aren't as reliable, or as cut and dry.
Just as Captain Hammer's continued advances on Penny drive Dr. Horrible towards plots of increased violence against him, the Big Media's ever stronger advances towards the hearts and attention of the typical consumer - and their vilification of the (non-corporate) internet, drives the acts of piracy to greater desperation. And yet, if this piracy succeeds entirely - resulting in the fall of Big Media, it is at the expense of everybody. Without Big Media around, there's nothing new for the pirates to "liberate" except for the independent content creators, whom the pirates will then attack, preventing them from creating anything new; this kills the creative spirit of the internet, leaving it entirely devoid of its second, more powerful character; consumers are left with nobody to consume from; and the pirates, having completed their task, are left with nothing new to do beyond reinventing what they've already done. It's a dire situation for creators and consumers alike, one which leads to the fall of culture.
Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is, as much as anything else, a warning of what happens if we, the internet culture, allow our love of piracy and "freedom" overcome our desire for stronger, human connections and bold, new, exploits of creative energy. Doing so will certainly hurt Big Media, but at the expense of what truly makes the internet what it is. Joss Whedon and friends are helping to pioneer new ground in the use of the internet AS the internet - not merely a new means of distribution - in a new way of making a profit for creative effort. Please, support Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog; not only because everybody involved deserves to earn something, but because the internet is becoming more than we've let it be in the past, and we need to nurture that.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Blame This on Juno
So, I've done this with a few of my movie commentaries before, but it's going to be standard now, so I'm gonna give you a heads up. I'm pretty much done "reviewing" movies. When I talk about movies from this point on, I'll give you a quick summary of what I thought and then I'm going to proceed to delve into whatever issues it got me thinking about and how they are pertinent. So, here goes this one:
Simple introduction: Juno rocks. I'm glad I saw it today so that I can legitimately put it on my top 5 for the year. It's sharply written and features stellar performances by a few of my favorite actors (Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, and Allison Janney). People seem to like comparing it to Little Miss Sunshine, but that's just because people like making comparisons. The two have little in common beyond being incredibly well written independent comedies that like to ignore most of the standard formulas. Juno is more accessible in style...but Little Miss Sunshine was very dark and more than a bit absurd, and as such, certainly not everybody's cup of tea. I'd say I like Little Miss Sunshine more (I don't think Juno will quite make its way onto my Top 10), but that's because I the subtext of Little Miss Sunshine (the frailty of humanity; the hollowness of being a "winner" and leading a self-seeking life; and the necessity and healing power of love) is a little bit more important to me.
That said, the subtext of Juno deals with another issue that has become incredibly important and intriguing to me in recent months: relationships. What we build them on; what we expect from them; what they mean to us...we live in a backwards society in a lot of ways, not the least of these is the way we look at relationships of all sorts. We're so obsessed with this idea of "falling in love" that we forget what love really is. We get so caught up in the ideas of romance and passion that we don't remember that the cliché of your spouse being your best friend is supposed to be true.
Relationships in any sense, whether it's a normal friendship or a marriage/dating relationship, should be rooted in the same basic principle: love. Caring for the needs, desires, and dreams of another individual as much as for our own is what creates the sense of security and comfort that allows us to feel close to one another. As such, common sense says that the chief difference between close friends and a spouse, fiancé, or committed boy/girlfriend shouldn't be the physical relationship or the observance of other societal norms so much as the devotion and openness of the love between the participants. A truly devoted couple can't just hope for the dreams of their partner to come true; they need to incorporate their partner's dream into their own.
The problem is that it's so easy to let the social/physical aspect - the "romantic" aspect - of an intimate relationship become its defining portion that forgetting the depth of the love that a successful relationship requires is easy. Not to mention that the popular semantics of "falling" or "being in love" has so much more to do with physical arousal and passion than with actual love that we, as humans, constantly attempt to enter into relationships with people with whom we have no basis for a normal friendship, and you've got a recipe for the cultural disaster we live in.
I'm going to try and relate this back to Juno now as I finish. Spoiler warning and all that.
Vanessa and Mark's relationship failed for one simple reason. They were committed to the idea of a relationship and not to each other. Vanessa was ready to be a mother, not a wife; but in order to be a mother, she felt that being a wife was necessary. She didn't appreciate her husband's dreams and did her best to try and replace them with her hopes for a picture perfect family. Mark was resentful of his wife's treatment of his goals and couldn't bring himself to appreciate hers as completion of her dreams would do nothing to restore his. Neither was willing to embrace and commit themselves to the dreams of the other; they were unwilling to love each other for who they were, so they failed.
Juno and Bleeker will succeed because they understand the truth behind the opening lyric of the song they sing right before the credits roll. "You're a part-time lover and a full time friend". It worries me a lot that so many people I know tend to forget the order of importance of those things...but there are a few of you in my life who seem to have it right, which is a cause of regular celebration for me, so thank you.
Simple introduction: Juno rocks. I'm glad I saw it today so that I can legitimately put it on my top 5 for the year. It's sharply written and features stellar performances by a few of my favorite actors (Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, and Allison Janney). People seem to like comparing it to Little Miss Sunshine, but that's just because people like making comparisons. The two have little in common beyond being incredibly well written independent comedies that like to ignore most of the standard formulas. Juno is more accessible in style...but Little Miss Sunshine was very dark and more than a bit absurd, and as such, certainly not everybody's cup of tea. I'd say I like Little Miss Sunshine more (I don't think Juno will quite make its way onto my Top 10), but that's because I the subtext of Little Miss Sunshine (the frailty of humanity; the hollowness of being a "winner" and leading a self-seeking life; and the necessity and healing power of love) is a little bit more important to me.
That said, the subtext of Juno deals with another issue that has become incredibly important and intriguing to me in recent months: relationships. What we build them on; what we expect from them; what they mean to us...we live in a backwards society in a lot of ways, not the least of these is the way we look at relationships of all sorts. We're so obsessed with this idea of "falling in love" that we forget what love really is. We get so caught up in the ideas of romance and passion that we don't remember that the cliché of your spouse being your best friend is supposed to be true.
Relationships in any sense, whether it's a normal friendship or a marriage/dating relationship, should be rooted in the same basic principle: love. Caring for the needs, desires, and dreams of another individual as much as for our own is what creates the sense of security and comfort that allows us to feel close to one another. As such, common sense says that the chief difference between close friends and a spouse, fiancé, or committed boy/girlfriend shouldn't be the physical relationship or the observance of other societal norms so much as the devotion and openness of the love between the participants. A truly devoted couple can't just hope for the dreams of their partner to come true; they need to incorporate their partner's dream into their own.
The problem is that it's so easy to let the social/physical aspect - the "romantic" aspect - of an intimate relationship become its defining portion that forgetting the depth of the love that a successful relationship requires is easy. Not to mention that the popular semantics of "falling" or "being in love" has so much more to do with physical arousal and passion than with actual love that we, as humans, constantly attempt to enter into relationships with people with whom we have no basis for a normal friendship, and you've got a recipe for the cultural disaster we live in.
I'm going to try and relate this back to Juno now as I finish. Spoiler warning and all that.
Vanessa and Mark's relationship failed for one simple reason. They were committed to the idea of a relationship and not to each other. Vanessa was ready to be a mother, not a wife; but in order to be a mother, she felt that being a wife was necessary. She didn't appreciate her husband's dreams and did her best to try and replace them with her hopes for a picture perfect family. Mark was resentful of his wife's treatment of his goals and couldn't bring himself to appreciate hers as completion of her dreams would do nothing to restore his. Neither was willing to embrace and commit themselves to the dreams of the other; they were unwilling to love each other for who they were, so they failed.
Juno and Bleeker will succeed because they understand the truth behind the opening lyric of the song they sing right before the credits roll. "You're a part-time lover and a full time friend". It worries me a lot that so many people I know tend to forget the order of importance of those things...but there are a few of you in my life who seem to have it right, which is a cause of regular celebration for me, so thank you.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Something new.
I'm in Winona, which is unexpected and awesome, but it's 2:30 and I'm not quite what could be called tired. There are issues running through my head that I've been wanting to try to explain to somebody for the last God-knows-how-long, and I feel like I should start to get them out. I don't know if I'll actually post this, but if I do, those few people who I know occasionally read this tend to be among the group I trust to know me this well, as well as to think and talk with me about these things. Also, I generally trust you to not think I'm crazy.
First thing first:
What's up with the traditional view of heroism in our society? With a few exceptions from actual history, it seems like the notion of heroism (at least of the more adventurous variety) is inexorably linked with violence. Call me crazy, but this strikes me as a bad thing for a few reasons.
For one, when you spend so much time being told that problems can be solved through direct confrontation, improper expectations are built; expectations in which helping people becomes less important than solving their problems. I don't think I've fallen completely into that trap (or, at least, I like to think I recognize it when I do), but it's there, and I know I'm not the only one.
The second worry is more personal. Maybe it's just the fact that so much of my worldview is wrapped so strongly in the escapist media that's been such an important part of my upbringing...but every time I think of adventure - which, due to said overexposure, I occasionally look at as a necessity for happiness as opposed to contentment - it always winds up being linked with physical conflict. Even though my own experience shows elation in mere exploration and great sorrow in causing pain; there's this part of me in which longs for some sense of physical confrontation; that longs for a palpable, tangible source of evil that can actually be stopped by humanities oldest and least effective method of problem solving. The sheer number of people I know who "joke" about anxiously awaiting a zombie apocalypse makes me feel like I'm not alone here, either.
I think that this is the real allure, and the real danger, here. The path of Cain comes so naturally to us that we'd all love to think that, ultimately, it will at some point be the right one, even though we all know that deep down it never will be. History shows us time and time again that the only way to really bring about change is by adherence to the great commandments given us by Christ: to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. It's a damnable shame that it's such a hard calling to adhere to (pseudo-pun pseudo-intended).
Second mini-rant picks up near where that left off:
The Golden Rule seriously needs to be rephrased. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is meant to embody the basic tenets of "Love your neighbor as yourself"...but it seems to me that it fails miserably. I started having this conversation with a couple of my roommates the other day, but one of them wouldn't hear it, simply because he was so used to relating the first as being equivalent to the second. I think the linguists and semantic nuts among you will agree with me that it's not.
The Golden Rule is, by its very phrasing, self centered. It asks you to think of how you feel, or believe you would feel given a certain circumstance. Well, guess what, that other person isn't you, and at least 50 percent of the time, what makes you feel better probably isn't gonna do the trick for another person. The great commandment is, by its nature, focused on the other person. We are to love them to the same extent we love ourselves. It says nothing of the manner, just the amount because Christ, being, you know, omniscient, understands that the manner must vary. By its nature, Love has to be expressed differently between different people; certainly there are universal acts that can be used to express it, but if I'm truly trying to show my love to my mother and my father, I can't treat them identically. That would be not only inconsiderate, but it would be dehumanizing them by ignoring their individuality. How then, in choosing to treat everybody as we would like to be treated, can we follow the Golden Rule as traditionally told, and retain a respect for the humanity and individuality of all? We can't.
My initial response is to say that the Golden Rule should read "Treat others as they would have you treat them"...but that leaves elephant-sized gaps for people who are disturbed or depressed to justify or encourage mistreatment. So, I don't know what we can really use as an entirely secular rephrasing of the Golden Rule, but we seriously need one, or else we'll never advance beyond this cultural overemphasis on "how I feel". Any ideas, fellow postmodern linguists in the audience?
I had one more thing to rant on, but I seem to have forgotten it, so I'll leave it at this for now. If this generates some discussion, either just with me or through comments, or whatever, maybe I'll make writing out these sorts of rants and ramblings a greater priority.
First thing first:
What's up with the traditional view of heroism in our society? With a few exceptions from actual history, it seems like the notion of heroism (at least of the more adventurous variety) is inexorably linked with violence. Call me crazy, but this strikes me as a bad thing for a few reasons.
For one, when you spend so much time being told that problems can be solved through direct confrontation, improper expectations are built; expectations in which helping people becomes less important than solving their problems. I don't think I've fallen completely into that trap (or, at least, I like to think I recognize it when I do), but it's there, and I know I'm not the only one.
The second worry is more personal. Maybe it's just the fact that so much of my worldview is wrapped so strongly in the escapist media that's been such an important part of my upbringing...but every time I think of adventure - which, due to said overexposure, I occasionally look at as a necessity for happiness as opposed to contentment - it always winds up being linked with physical conflict. Even though my own experience shows elation in mere exploration and great sorrow in causing pain; there's this part of me in which longs for some sense of physical confrontation; that longs for a palpable, tangible source of evil that can actually be stopped by humanities oldest and least effective method of problem solving. The sheer number of people I know who "joke" about anxiously awaiting a zombie apocalypse makes me feel like I'm not alone here, either.
I think that this is the real allure, and the real danger, here. The path of Cain comes so naturally to us that we'd all love to think that, ultimately, it will at some point be the right one, even though we all know that deep down it never will be. History shows us time and time again that the only way to really bring about change is by adherence to the great commandments given us by Christ: to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. It's a damnable shame that it's such a hard calling to adhere to (pseudo-pun pseudo-intended).
Second mini-rant picks up near where that left off:
The Golden Rule seriously needs to be rephrased. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is meant to embody the basic tenets of "Love your neighbor as yourself"...but it seems to me that it fails miserably. I started having this conversation with a couple of my roommates the other day, but one of them wouldn't hear it, simply because he was so used to relating the first as being equivalent to the second. I think the linguists and semantic nuts among you will agree with me that it's not.
The Golden Rule is, by its very phrasing, self centered. It asks you to think of how you feel, or believe you would feel given a certain circumstance. Well, guess what, that other person isn't you, and at least 50 percent of the time, what makes you feel better probably isn't gonna do the trick for another person. The great commandment is, by its nature, focused on the other person. We are to love them to the same extent we love ourselves. It says nothing of the manner, just the amount because Christ, being, you know, omniscient, understands that the manner must vary. By its nature, Love has to be expressed differently between different people; certainly there are universal acts that can be used to express it, but if I'm truly trying to show my love to my mother and my father, I can't treat them identically. That would be not only inconsiderate, but it would be dehumanizing them by ignoring their individuality. How then, in choosing to treat everybody as we would like to be treated, can we follow the Golden Rule as traditionally told, and retain a respect for the humanity and individuality of all? We can't.
My initial response is to say that the Golden Rule should read "Treat others as they would have you treat them"...but that leaves elephant-sized gaps for people who are disturbed or depressed to justify or encourage mistreatment. So, I don't know what we can really use as an entirely secular rephrasing of the Golden Rule, but we seriously need one, or else we'll never advance beyond this cultural overemphasis on "how I feel". Any ideas, fellow postmodern linguists in the audience?
I had one more thing to rant on, but I seem to have forgotten it, so I'll leave it at this for now. If this generates some discussion, either just with me or through comments, or whatever, maybe I'll make writing out these sorts of rants and ramblings a greater priority.
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