Archives for June 2012

The Zombie Problem

June 20, 2012 By Mark 3 Comments

When I was growing up there were two zombie variants. You had your Dungeons & Dragons zombies, and you had your Night of the Living Dead zombies. While I was too young to see that classic movie when it first came out, years later I watched it all alone, very late at night, on the Chanel 9 Creature Feature, which was sponsored by an aluminum siding company. No human being was ever more grateful for an aluminum siding sales pitch than yours truly that night.

At about the same time I was also binge-playing D&D, and in both contexts I still remember debating the moral and ethical issues surrounding the slaughter of zombies. It might seem that the only justification needed for hacking a zombie to pieces or shooting one in the face is the fact that they are intent on eating healthy non-zombie people alive, which is super creepy. But tigers and lions also display that same proclivity at times, yet except for a few low-brow, atavistic big-game hunters still wandering the world in search of their genitals humanity has generally moved away from the idea that every potential existential threat deserves to be turned into wall art or a throw rug. And besides — back in the day zombies moved so slowly you could always run away from them unless you were a total idiot, like, unfortunately, most of the characters in Night of the Living Dead.

If the mere threat of zombies wasn’t enough for me to justify their execution, then, there was the fact that zombies represented a desecration of the dead. Rather than allowing the deceased to rest in peace while politely decaying out of sight, zombification forced the dearly departed to get up and wander around in search of bloody meat, regardless of any physical injury or decomposition they may have previously suffered. Not only was this a cultural abomination, but it was super gross, and on that basis alone suggested a wide range of acceptable motives for zombie killing, from godly mercy to wholesome tidiness.

In the end, as young men often do, I settled on cheap contextual heroism as my ethical justification for hacking zombies to pieces or watching them get their brains blown all over the landscape, but even then, in the primal pre-narrative recesses of my mind, I knew I was getting away with something. I was killing without killing. Taking life without taking life. Murdering without murdering. [ Read more ]

Game Violence

June 12, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Nathan Grayson put up an interesting post on RPS last week while attending E3. If you’re not familiar with E3, it’s an often-lampooned convention where game-industry professionals get together to decide the fate of each other’s bank accounts, in cavernous spaces far too loud to facilitate intelligible conversation. But it’s not all fun and games. Not only are unintelligible deals routinely struck at E3 that determine the games you will and won’t see in the coming year, but E3 quite literally saves lives.

The impetus for Nathan’s post was a game demo he attended, during which the interactive industry expressed enthusiasm for hyper-realistic gore effects:

I sat in a jam-packed arena-sized auditorium and watched a game demo unfold on a screen bigger than my hometown. OK, that wasn’t the surprising part. I’d been doing that all day. This one, though, came to a rather abrupt halt when – mere inches away from the camera – a man’s head erupted into a volcano of hyper-detailed gore after a point-blank shotgun blast. And then: deafening applause from hundreds of people.

This was the blaring exclamation point on the end of a day of gleefully grotesque neck-shanking, leg-severing, and – of course – man-shooting. I can honestly think of maybe five games – in four multiple-hour press conferences – that didn’t feature some sort of lovingly rendered death-dealing mechanic. And oh how show-goers cheered.

Now, as shocking as this may be, it’s worth noting that this sort of thing is really the norm when you stand at the corner of Tech Street and Cash Avenue. Put a few techies in a room with some suits and sooner or later somebody’s going to come up with something truly disgusting, at which point the suits will run the numbers and see if it’s profitable. Only when the project gets to the marketing phase will anyone conduct a focus group to determine if there are moral, ethical or cultural impediments to launching that product or service. [ Read more ]

The Kindle as Medium

June 8, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

The gruff but lovable John Dvorak at PCMag, on his experience with the Kindle:

The Kindle is not an iPad, not a computer, and not really a book. When you get a book, it has heft and pages and you know what you are in for as you begin to read it. It can be daunting. The Kindle is one page that is refreshed to another page. That’s it. There is no physical reminder that you have a long way to go to finish the book. It eliminates all sorts of psychological aversions from the reading process.

Yet, as Dvorak also notes, the Kindle seems particularly friendly to shorter works, including novellas and short stories, rather than the ever-longer books publishers have been pushing for the past decade or two in an attempt to equate value with tonnage.

— Mark Barrett

One Million Characters

June 4, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Writing is a solitary pursuit often requiring long periods of self-imposed isolation in order to complete a given work. Whether the end product is a book, script or blood-scrawled scroll, many writers compensate for the inherent loneliness of authorship by leading bawdy social lives centered around chemical binges and chaotic if not ultimately destructive relationships. While I fully support any writer’s determination to find a healthy work-life balance, not all writers are constitutionally inclined to such interstitial exuberance.

If you live a fairly quiet life, as I do, the time you spend writing may not seem all that different from the time you spend staring at the wall, flipping channels, surfing the web, or leaning on the open door of the refrigerator for the fourth time in twenty minutes. Such mind-numbing activities may actually increase the appeal of the writing process, turning each typo and turn of phrase into the most galvanizing thing that has ever happened to you, but the banality of such an existence presents a problem. Where more outgoing writers survive secluded toil by subsisting on memories of social conquests and defeats, or even pending legal action, mild-mannered types are at serious risk of cerebral whiteout, where the isolation necessary for work merges indistinguishably with the vapidity of down time.

While it is possible for introverted writers to break up the monotony of their non-writing life by engaging in socially acceptable forms of self-abuse like exercise or watching the news, the real problem with being a low-key person in a low-key profession is that it’s often hard to find motivations that can withstand the darkest hours of the writing process. Where your more socially engaged writer always has an intellectual foe they’re determined to prove wrong or embarrass, or a object of fancy they aim to seduce with the words flowing from their fingertips, the loner writer (not to be confused with the antisocial writer) often struggles to remember why they’re subjecting themselves to torment when they could just as easily be staring at a crack in the ceiling. [ Read more ]