Borut
From Ron Moore, on the serious themes in Battlestar Galactica (such as main characters on the show condoning suicide bombing):
“We get a pass on a lot of things because it’s science fiction. The religious stuff on the show, the political stuff on the show—a lot of people just don’t want to take it seriously, because it’s people in spaceships and robots running around. So a lot of the mainstream media just isn’t going to really take anything in the show seriously. Which gives us a lot of freedom to do what we want.”
Interesting how the game industry’s limitation is another man’s freedom.
So I’m gonna do what Jon Stewart did last Monday night with respect to the Virginia Tech shooting. Acknowledge that it was horrible and fucked up. Pause. And try to continue to function.
And bring the comedy. Or, more specifically, some analysis of the structure of comedy in games.
Wow, ok, I hope this is more interesting than that sounds. Fingers crossed, folks.
Where school shootings occur at semi-regular intervals. One thing that struck me watching interviews of students that night that it happened was how calmly they described what had happened, kicking over desks to take cover, climbing out of windows (although maybe only the calm ones got on TV). We live in a world where this sort of thing happens enough that FBI has profiles for the sort of student who might do this type of thing. Where teachers have to wonder if a disturbed student is likely to go on a killing spree.
We live in a crazy world.
Where Rush Limbaugh is the voice of reason.
I wanted to rant about Sharon Sloane’s opinion piece on Gamasutra this morning, but I couldn’t find it (turns out it was under news and not features). Never mind that I could have searched for it – but I hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet.
Man, wanting to rant about something without having coffee available… That’s just not a good place to be, emotionally.
Thankfully Ian Bogost blogged about it as well. While I share his problem with it, I think there’s a another (albeit related) issue here…
For the love of god, can we please stop calling them “Serious Games”?
Vonnegut had a fascination for characters who had outlived their literary lifespan.
Take Rudy Waltz from Deadeye Dick, who shot someone accidentally as a kid, and is pretty fucked up about it as an adult. If he was a character in one of those crappy books they make you read in high school English (A Separate Peace? Wtf-ever), he would have shot himself, naturally.
Or Rabo Karabekian, the narrator from Bluebeard. He was a popular abstract expressionist painter until the paint he used turned out to flake off eventually destroying his works over time. He retires and serves as what he refers to as a museum guard to the paintings of others he was able to buy and collect during his success.
See also Cash, Johnny (songs of).
Using that same line of thinking has always seemed to me to be a really great basis for a game character. I mean, c’mon – it’s all backstory! Easy enough. Much like Vonnegut’s books, the interesting part becomes exploring who you (or the narrator) are now in the light of that life changing event.
Depressing? Maybe. So’s life. It’s also happy, funny, crazy, surprising… You get the idea.