--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 029
+title: The Walking Dead
+date: September 8, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: gaming
+---
+
+<p style="text-align: right">
+*People will often go mad when they believe their life is over.*
+</p>
+
+Telltale Games is a so-called "indie" company formed about six years after the
+beginning of the downfall of adventure games, which [we've already
+discussed][gf], and about four years after the end of the same thing, which we
+haven't (yet)[^1]. Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, many of the guys who
+founded Telltale were former employees of LucasArts, which, y'know, says stuff.
+I prefer seeing them as people who went to set this whole computer adventure
+game stuff right, and so they did when they bought the rights to make Sam & Max
+games, and then Monkey Island games, and so on and so forth; and at some point
+they decided they want to make their own story, but that time hasn't arrived
+yet as far as I know, because this one's based on a [comic book][twd-comic].
+
+Now, if you haven't played the first season yet, then I'm really going to break
+this for you, so don't read if you're the kind who gets touchy about
+spoilers[^2]. It's today, I guess, and Lee Everett (controlled by the player)
+is in a police car, ready to be convicted of murder, or has been, or something
+along those lines; doesn't matter, because the world ends now. Yep, just like
+that.
+
+And not only it ends, but it ends through the most clichéistic turn of events
+ever: dead people start walking the streets and eating living people to death,
+turning them into more dead people walking the streets and eating... well, you
+get the idea. So Lee doesn't die just yet, otherwise this wouldn't be much of a
+game. Instead, he finds Clementine -- the main character of the series, just so
+we're clear about this -- and they head on somewhere, trying to survive;
+somewhere in Georgia, on the way to Macon and then hell-on-Earth knows where.
+
+<span class="imgleft"><a href="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-01.jpg"> <img
+class="thumb" src="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-01-thumb.jpg"
+title="The night, the cellar."/></a></span>
+This is the basic story, which the writers, directors and whatnot decided to
+structure into some kind of sitcom[^3] made up of „chapters”, „episodes” and
+„seasons”. So far Seasons One and Two are available, but I've decided to cover
+only the first one, although I might make this into a series if things get
+interesting along the way.
+
+Anyway, this whole structure leads me to see the crux of the game as "stuff
+happens": various characters come and then go, mostly by getting eaten or shot
+or what happens in the somehow believable universe of The Walking Dead. This,
+of course, makes nitpickers such as myself want to dig deeper for a meaning, or
+understanding where all the unholy flesh-eating disorder comes from.
+Unfortunately not even a clue is given by the end of the first season, which is
+quite believable given this rather peculiar universe, where actual food is a
+rare commodity, let alone stuff such as electricity. What I particularly liked
+about it is that this didn't make it horror or anything, only downright
+disturbing.
+
+<span class="imgright"><a href="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-02.jpg"> <img
+class="thumb" src="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-02-thumb.jpg"
+title="One of the game's many disturbing scenes."/></a></span>
+The story of the first season is, however, or at least I believe it is one of
+maintaining an ounce of sanity in the midst of chaos. At the end of the day
+it's Lee trying to educate a girl he becomes attached to pretty early on, while
+surviving along with a bunch of other people and making the tough decisions,
+but the normal decisions regarding the circumstances.
+
+The game implements a decision tree spanning I think from the first episode of
+the season to the last (and, from what the developers say, into the following
+seasons), where the player is faced with choosing between some evil or another,
+between saying something stupid or something stupider and so on. The weird part
+is that a large part of the dialogue choices are timed, which gives you the
+option to shut up, which I find to be a breath of fresh air, despite the
+possible frustration it might cause. These mechanics extend to other actions,
+such as deciding between what object you'll toss down the head of a "walker"
+next or trying desperately to avoid a fight with someone whose help you might
+need later. My feelings regarding this whole thing range from "wow, cool, take
+that bullet, put it into the shotgun, just like in real life! then shoot the
+goddamned zombie" to "fuck, I can't find the focus point for this object, welp,
+now I'm dead, gotta restart". In some ways that's just like in real life, but
+in others, spending too much time trying to select an object that's right in
+front of you can be frustrating.
+
+<span class="imgleft"><a href="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-03.jpg"> <img
+class="thumb" src="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-03-thumb.jpg"
+title="Dead people and a ray of hope."/></a></span>
+Overall, the game's mechanics tend to orient it towards an "interactive drama",
+less focused on combining this object with that and fitting it with the rubber
+ducky, and more on dialogue, even though The Walking Dead is no [Gabriel
+Knight][gk][^4]. Myself, I would have preferred the feeling of a good book
+instead of that of a good TV show, but I get it, Telltale are really good at
+making this kind of stuff.
+
+As hinted before, I've only played Season One so far. I don't know where this
+is going: the authors seem to want to stick it to a five-parter, which means
+that the story is supposed to have a well thought out beginning and an end
+right at this moment. The feeling I've been given so far, and I hope I'm wrong,
+is that this has the potential of going in the direction of Lost or some other
+TV series I haven't seen[^5], ending stuck in a rut, or maybe worse. Well, I
+never thought I'd say this, but the whole zombie apocalypse thing has great
+potential to be exploited in exactly the right way. And I'm looking forward to
+playing, and hopefully enjoying, the whole thing.
+
+**Post Scriptum**: I get that the American public is sensitized to the
+emotionally wrecking thing, but it hasn't quite gotten to me. The final scene
+almost got a tear out of me, but I still made the right decision, which was to
+tell Clementine to blow Lee's brains out. Hey, sorry, that's one fucked up
+world, it'd be stupid to judge it by any "normal" standards.
+
+<span><a href="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-04.jpg"><img class="thumb"
+src="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-04-thumb.jpg"
+title="More dead people."/></a></span>
+<span><a href="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-05.jpg"><img class="thumb"
+src="/uploads/2014/09/the-walking-dead-05-thumb.jpg"
+title="Another one of the emotionally wrecking scenes."/></a></span>
+
+[^1]: I promise I'll write about the beginning of the 2000s, when some of the
+best (and last) adventure games ever spurted out of the middle of Nor... I
+mean, nowhere. I am looking forward to it, oh, with so many deep feelings and
+so much nostalgia.
+
+[^2]: That's because I like to think that I prefer writing analyses and not
+reviews. I've tried to shed my thoughts on some good games without a good
+story, but I eventually found out it wasn't worth it. So, there you go.
+
+[^3]: Actually, a walkdram?
+
+[^4]: Gabriel Knight is more of an "interactive narrative" if you ask me.
+
+[^5]: Actually, there are a few I've seen: Star Trek and spin-offs? Stargate
+SG-1 and spin-offs? The Simpsons? Maybe Twin Peaks, but this one was really
+great and ruined by whoever decided to mess up Lynch's brilliant idea. Oh,
+which reminds me: Seinfeld, but that was a show about nothing in the first
+place.
+
+[gf]: /posts/y00/01a-grim-fandango.html
+[twd-comic]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(comic_book)
+[gk]: posts/y00/005-gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers.html
--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 02a
+title: Online media is feeding on your tears
+excerpt: In which I publicly shame the rubbish that is new media.
+date: September 20, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+I don't usually bash things or people on the great superhighway of the
+Internets, and not because I find it degrading or anything of the sort; on the
+contrary, I think of it as a very useful tool, especially in those particularly
+nasty times when sorting humans from animals[^1]. No, I avoid doing this
+because it doesn't give me any pleasure, while this blog, like the one before
+it, was created solely for my pleasure and your struggling to comprehend it.
+
+However, there are times when I must, and here and now is one of those times.
+The target is, as you have most probably already guessed, the so-called "online
+media" or "social media" or whatever it is they buzzword it nowadays.
+
+The story is, of course, much older than that. "Traditional" forms of media,
+mainly radio, TV and paper journalism, were conceived in the previous century
+as a means to convey information more efficiently to the masses, hence the
+buzzword "mass media". Now, if we look beyond the naïve definition, we will
+find that "mass media" had been used for more perverse reasons as early as the
+days before World War II, if not earlier; I am not referring to
+pornography[^2]. The more "efficient" means of communication were also more
+efficient at spreading lies among the masses, going as far as providing the
+means for mass brainwashing, or -- is that how they call it? -- collective
+psychosis[^3]. Lies, however, are just false information, while mass media
+channels can transmit much more than that, i.e. strength, anger, violence, etc.
+
+Given this whole mass media mess, the Internet, particularly the World Wide
+Web, had been a breath of fresh air in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Things
+were a lot more simpler before Yahoo and Google and Twitter; oh, also,
+Facebook, how in the world could I forget that one? All these services aren't
+in any way evolutionary steps "in the right way". Yes, they help people become
+"more connected"[^4] and they provide better "user experience" and other such
+non-qualities; yes, they were made to be accessible, maybe the most accessible
+stuff on the Internet, browsable while you sit on the couch holding your tablet
+or your phone in your hands, but it also happens that all this stuff doesn't
+matter at the end of the day, because they never actually brought any
+significant improvements to your life in the first place. In all fairness
+though, these so-called "social networks" are useful in a few limited
+circumstances; otherwise, they're places where everyone talks and no one
+listens to anybody, where users are divided into "content providers" and
+"content consumers", because fuck it, they just had to make new "mass media",
+also known as "online media", that looks just like the old one and inherits all
+of its flaws.
+
+Thus, the "smart guys" are profiting from this one in exactly the same ways
+they were profiting from that one. For example it is a well-known practice in
+Romanian journalism, where a large part of the political fight[^5] has been
+moved online, where most so-called newspapers are controlled by political
+factions. In early August this year, one of the "media moguls", also a guy with
+lots of political power, Dan Voiculescu, was sentenced to ten years of prison
+for corruption, which led to a massive backlash from [Antena 3][plimbare], one
+of the stations he owns. Amusingly enough, a lot of the younger people on
+Facebook expressed their agreement with the sentence, while the Antena 3
+sympathizers, mostly in their 50s or 60s, went as far as to protest in front of
+the Cotroceni Palace[^6], which is a clear indicator of the social division in
+the country. "Amusingly enough" is not a very fitting description though, it
+would be funny if it weren't so sad.
+
+In the golden age of the World Wide Web, the phenomenon of tear-jerking[^7] is
+however global: you may have forgotten the death of Robin Williams, which also
+occured in early August this year[^8]. There's not much to be said of the
+actor[^9], but his death caused a slew of emotional reactions on all the
+"online media" channels. This is in itself understandable, since we often
+become attached to characters and in some odd way to the actors fitting in
+their roles. The bad news about this is that, well, how should I put it; some
+guys actually make money out of your likes.
+
+Is it cynical? Yeah, maybe. Is it in any way ethical? Hell if I know, you're
+free to debate this aspect. All I know is that some guys are mining these big
+data pools and using them to manipulate the users' emotions in order to, well,
+I don't really give a flying fuck why they do it. The good news, everyone! is
+that [they're succeeding][social-contagion], and they're quite possibly getting
+better at it in time.
+
+So there you have it, people, your Brave New Media, the junk food of the
+Internet.
+
+[^1]: Really, no. [You're not born a human, you become a human][mp].
+
+[^2]: Although that was also one of the more important uses, despite the
+Christians' cognitive dissonance that it wasn't. Also much to their
+desperation, in time it's become at least [as important as
+religion itself][post-religion].
+
+[^3]: It happened in the 1920s and '30s with fascism and then after World War
+II in more ways than we can imagine. Orwell has done such a good job of
+documenting it in 1984, while Huxley has done such a good job of documenting
+another side of it in Brave New World. They're both at least as valid in
+today's "mass media"/"online media" context.
+
+[^4]: Does anybody remember laughter?
+
+[^5]: Romanian democracy, or rather "democracy", is a peculiar beast. The vast
+majority of citizens, from common folk to educated people, love, no, they
+simply crave to discuss and fiercely debate politics, while few of them, about
+20 to 30% or so, actually participate in the actual political life by doing the
+usual stuff that a citizen would do in a functional democracy, such as voting.
+
+[^6]: The president's main residence. It's a well-known fact that Traian
+Băsescu, the almost-ex-president of Romania is a very hated figure amongst
+Antena fans. Hey, I'm running out of epithets here.
+
+[^7]: Tear-jerking, hate mongering, same crap. It's all "shocking this" and
+"mindblowing that". Seriously, cut us some slack now, will ya?
+
+[^8]: It was such a long time ago! I know, right?
+
+[^9]: I'm really lacking in cinematic education, so I find it hard to have a
+well thought out opinion about this. To me, Robin Williams is one of those
+really good actors having the bad luck of being cast in a series of utterly
+pointless films, such as Bicentennial Man. Oh, and the main character, potrayed
+by Williams, dies in that movie, and this just goes to show how cold and devoid
+of meaning death is, and how we're so very afraid of it. But that's nothing
+really new.
+
+[mp]: http://trilema.com/2013/why-i-am-not-a-white-nationalist/#comment-95838
+[post-religion]: /posts/y00/018-on-post-religion.html
+[plimbare]: http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-esential-17861732-antena-3-initiaza-protestele-plimbarea-contra-statului-jurul-palatului-cotroceni-ora-17-00.htm
+[social-contagion]: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
projects / thetarpit.git / commitdiff
