supernormal

Consider this a prelude to the Fight Scene essay currently… somewhere on the horizon. I’m still figuring out Supernormal, while also trying to maintain any kind of social life. So let’s take it one bite at a time: specifically, I’m thinking about the difference between a slasher chase scene and a Western shootout.

The case study here: No Country’s shootout.

(By the way, if all this slasher/No Country talk is making you long for a return to the days where I just talked about Marvel a bunch, imagine having to think about this stuff all the time. I put a bucket out front of my valet trash door because I’m half expecting a guy in a welder’s mask to bust through a butcher me.)

But, okay, watch the scene. Or don’t. I’ll give a quick shot-for-shot: Moss gets into a pickup truck (this is after jumping from a hotel window to escape Anton Chigurh), and tries talking to the driver; a bullet comes through the window and tears through the driver’s throat; Moss drives a short distance through gunfire, then dives out and hides behind a car; Chigurh notices a blood trail, and dives to avoid a shotgun blast from Moss. Chigurh disappears, end scene.

Compare that to the shootout with Angel’s guys in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I won’t embed any more videos, but that link does open on Clint Eastwood doing his best cowboy thing) and part of Alice’s fight with Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th.

Hey, quick intermission, did you know there’s a Wikipedia page on the “Political life of Clint Eastwood“? He legalized eating ice cream in California. Anyway.

Some immediate differences spring to mind. Let’s start in favor of the Western.

No Country’s scene is a shootout. It’s about guns. I mean, there is a gun in the Friday fight, but it never goes off. Slasher fights are way more environmental. They’re desperate struggles.

Point to slasher, No Country’s is a desperate fight. Tons of blood loss. No one really “hides” in a Western shootout. Sometimes they take cover, but you can see in the TGBU scene it’s mostly just a lot of men standing still and shooting at each other, and then one of them dies.

Speaking of, Western shootouts are pretty much men. Slasher fights are pretty much boy versus girl. (Friday notwitshtanding.)

That is, “men” plural — the spaghetti Western is typically a lone cowboy versus a band of outlaws, though it’s not a hard and fast rule — and “boy”/”girl” singular. It’s rare that multiples are alive to take on the slasher.

Chigurh actually does take a big hit, though he doesn’t show it in this scene. That’s not actually inline with either genre. Westerns are one-hit affairs, whereas the Final Girl takes all sorts of damage before dealing a surprise blow on the killer. But since they always come back for the next scene or next movie, like Anton, I’d give this one on balance to the slasher.

So that’s what, three, three and a half points to slasher? Plus a dead bystander at the outset of the scene, which is huge slashe? I’ll admit to confirmation bias here, but I’m lying if I say this is a purely scientific endeavor. When I saw the No Country scene, I felt real tension rather than a cool power trip. This is me trying to explain why this shootout was so brutal, not me trying to persuade you. Although by now you should be persuaded. (If not, you’ve got a Supernormal post to look forward to.)

 

 

Repetition eventually leads to boredom. Sometimes one repeat is enough to make something interesting, less interesting. That means that novelty, that surprise, is somehow core to our experience of fun.

We’ve all had that “if only I could experience it for the first time again” wish. Usually, though, the star that wish gets wished upon is some front-of-the-brain emotional experience. I’ve never really agreed with it. The ways in which stories affect us are indelible with the context in which we experience them. They don’t just impact us, they inpact who we are at a moment in time.  Watching or reading or hearing or playing a moment for the first time again doesn’t guarantee it’ll hit the same notes again. I’m not saying that experience is fragile — it probably would still move you. But what you treasure isn’t the thing, it’s that experience you had with the thing.

The same is less true of fun (as distinct from “front-of-the-brain”). I think contextlessness is a core component of fun, though I might refine or change my mind on that later. But fun is sort of an aesthetic experience more than an emotional one. What I mean is, fun matches with an emotional experience but doesn’t constitute one on its own. Fun, a light moment of distraction, in your darkest moment will probably create a moving memory of joy when you needed it most. Or maybe the thrill of winning your first chess tournament, of having everything click, will stay with you. I don’t think it’s the fun causing that experience to crystallize though.

Does that make any sense? I feel like I’m hitting onto something, but it’s actually not the point I wanted to make.

I’m thinking of a phenomenon that anyone who plays lots of video games will recognize, but one that I’m not sure has a name. I loved Dishonored. I wanted to love Dishonored 2. In trying to fall in love with it, I’ve started the game a half a dozen times and never gotten very far. Each time I restart, I diminish the chances I’ll ever love the game, because starting means playing through the same level I’ve played six times now. I’m working through a part of the game that bores me in an attempt to discover a part of the game that doesn’t. Until someone corrects me that this does have a name, I’m calling it the “level one wormhole”: when, in playing a game partway through many times, you will have seen the first level exhaustingly more times than the later ones.

I played Undead Burg in Dark Souls so many times, I don’t know if I’ll ever see Anor Londo again. My friends tell me Mount & Blade is great, but if I have to look at my raggedy band of green fighters on the overland map one more time, I’ll become exactly the kind of void-eyed beserker I always descend to out of boredom with those early fights.

What’s the solution? Can fun escape the level one wormhole?

A concept in game design that I really love, one that Halo designer Jaime Griesemer put really well:

In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.

You can describe so much of a game’s identity by identifying the length of its game loop. Is it a 10-second loop, 30 seconds, two minutes?

Griesemer goes on to say that you have to express those 30 seconds in many different environments — why is a firefight across the top of a moving train diferent from a firefight on an arctic mountainside — but I really don’t know that that’s necessary. What’s the loop length of chess? Would it be fair to say it’s the time between making your move and your opponent responding? Chess takes place on just the one 64-square environment, but that it’s competetive means your opponent will always present novel outcomes.

I mention chess because it’s maybe the premier example of a game that doesn’t get old. For most of us chess gets boring after a while, but for a substantial community repetition is part of the game’s charm. That’s the paradox I think I’ve been grappling worth: novelty is fun, but so is mastery. And it’s boring to relive the same five minutes over and over, but it’s really fun to relive the same 30 seconds. It accelerates mastery.

All of these are concepts I’ll be revisiting — I didn’t predict the layers that would present themselves until I started writing. Which is good! That’s what writing is for!

What it’s got me wanting to do, is apply this abstract thinking to the practical issue of getting myself to enjoy Dishonored 2. Take myself to fun boot camp.

Add it to the list of projects, along with action and the aesthetics of creativity. In case you thought I’d forgotten.

 

I’m reading Flicker, a book by psychologist Jeffrey Zacks about what happens in our brains when we watch movies. Haven’t finished yet, so what I have to say is half-baked — suffice it to say I like the book, although I always surprise myself by not liking psychology very much — but it makes an argument that shows itself everywhere around the psychology of movies. Namely, it makes a case that films will sooner or later be usurped by, or otherwise incorporate elements of, video games.

Usually, the bones of this argument are something like:

1. For a very long time, movies and video games didn’t exist.
2. Then, movies did exist and video games didn’t. Movies became very popular, though they are sometimes criticized as a passive medium.
3. Video games revealed new frontiers of interactivity in media, thereby solving the fatal flaw of movie watching.

C. Thi Nguyen, discoverer of the “stupid game” and archpriest of whatever it is I’m doing here, devotes the length of his book Games: Agency as Art (which came in the mail just before Flicker, and which I’m so excited to read) to defining the art form of games. He writes:

Games… are a distinct art form. They offer us access to a unique artistic horizon and a distinctive set of social goods. They are special as an art because they engage with human practicality — with our ability to decide and to do.

What irks me about the “movies will eventually become games” argument is that it assumes either that all art will converge into one perfected art form, or it denies that games are unique as a medium, instead supposing that they exist as some benign growth waiting to be reabsorbed into the body of other media.

Movies are new, but passive forms of engagement are not. Books, plays, operas, ballads, folk songs, water cooler conversations, murals, histories, oral tradition. Video games are new, but our ability to interfere with narratives is hardly new. At a campfire, you could always shout over the storyteller. Games in general are ancient.

Both forms need to exist. One emerges from our trust that other people have stories to tell, and that those stories are functionally or aesthetically useful; the other comes from our need for cognitive enrichment, for fun. Both inscribe some kind of information for posterity. Movies — and books, too, though in different specifics — write down narratives. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games inscribe mindsets, forms of agency, certain methods of engagement. His argument is really persuasive, from what all I’ve read so far.

Anyway, thank you letting me share my befuddlement with this problem. Not all art is either narrative or practical. A lot is neither. A lot is both. None would dominate the culture if they weren’t emerging naturally and, to some extent or another, necessesarily. Which makes it especially funny that, as far as I know, no interactive movie experiment (like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) ever captured prolonged interest.

Four of Japan’s top five literary best sellers in 2007 were written on cell phones.

The authors of cell phone novels — associated mostly with women aged 10-29, the Twilight set — were limited by the technology of early smartphones, but that was fine. Limitations create art. Cell phone novels read line-by-line, rarely in paragraphs, and use white space to lend their narratives poetic luster. Here’s an example from takatsu’s Move:

Narrative precedes concerns like rhyme and meter. If you’re familiar with prose poems, you can think of cell phone novels like poem prose, optimized for a mobile screen. Fans read cell phone novels how they were written, i.e. over long commutes.

They weren’t light reading, though. Stories were “dark, sensational, and sexual.” The first cell phone novel, Deep Love, follows a young woman, Ayu, who turns to sex work to save her dying boyfriend. She dies of HIV. Ayu conveys this all in confidence, so that the line blurs between character, hurriedly outlining her story, and author, pouring themselves into their phone with little filter. Authors describe a personal connection to the content of their narratives — the word we’d use now is “self-insert” — although Deep Love itself was written by a man in his thirties.

(By the way, I had a ton of trouble accessing the classic cell phone novels — Deep Love; I, Girlfriend — because the genre lived and died in Japanese. It originated in 2002, the year of “Hot in Herre” and Die Another Day. I read mostly excerpts from the second-wave Western cell phone novels of 2008, the year of ghost peppers, Bitcoin, Quantum of Solace. Maho iLand, the usual haunt for cell phone novels, remains active and free to read.)

As the cell phone novel climbed in reputation, three basic viewpoints emerged.

1. I sure do enjoy reading cell phone novels. (This was mostly the claim of young women, although by 2007 everyone from major publishers to literary critics had gotten a hand on the ball.)
2. Cell phone novels will destroy the author and the novel. They’re poisoning the minds of young people ew icky gross.
3. Aw, these are so precious. They’re almost like real literature!

The breezy style of cell phone novels, the sort of Notes app tone with no extensive editing, didn’t help their purchase with the literati. I see “substandard grammar.” I see “sudsy” and “cutesy.”

Even praises of the genre focused on its utility. Publishers reached out to cell phone novelists, offering them the chance to publish their work as a “proper book.” At least the girls are reading; maybe this whole cell phone fad will do some good; next they might read actual fiction.

It wasn’t all pretentious. National competitions recognized and uplifted talented young writers, outpourings of gratitude from fans flooded the often anonymous authors’ inboxes. And despite their grousing, traditional publishers did capitalize on popular cell phone novels, transmuting them into manga, anime, and “proper books.”

Keep reading.