Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: TV and Movies (Page 1 of 5)

Anita and Mad Max

May 20, 2015 /

Anita Sarkeesian had an unpopular opinion today.

Gosh darn you, Sarkeesian, for being magnanimous and conceding that your opinion may not match the opinions of other people!  And gosh darn if the SJW-o-sphere hasn’t just broken out in civil and interesting conversations about the topic, as if we can have reasonable and interesting debates about these issues!

All joking aside, I came away from Mad Max: Fury Road with a vastly different impression of the film.  I went in pretty much expecting  this article to be a ridiculous mockery of this article.  I was also expecting to see a decent popcorn flick.  I walked away blown away, not just by the quality of the action film itself, but also by the sheer audacity and scope of the feminist themes running throughout it.

No, it is not an Andrea Dworkin biopic by any stretch of the imagination.  However, if  you imagine feminism as a slider from 1-10, I’d qualify this film as an easy eight.  It’s easily more feminist than, say, 99% of the action films out there, but also probably more so than 90% of the twaddle on the Lifetime Channel.  Places where I’d differ from Anita after the break because, you know, spoilers.
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Mad Max: Fury Road

May 18, 2015 /

There are those who think that you should not see Mad Max: Fury Road because it will turn you into a raving feminist.  Yes, these people are idiots.  Still, while MM:FR is clearly about tough women surviving, adapting, and excelling in a deeply, deeply misogynistic post-apocalyptic world, that’s not why you should go see it.

You should go see it because it is a wonderful, beautiful cacophony of destruction and violence.  Never before has a post-apocalyptic hellhole looked so beautiful. and the movie kept finding ways to surprise me in providing problems for our heroes to solve, and ingenius solutions they managed to juryrig along the way.

Even more importantly, the effects are clearly largely practical effects, as most of the carnage feels elaborately weighted and real.  If you love action films and practical effects, I predict you will want to buy this on DVD, in case it has a ‘making of’ featurette on it.

Also, you should read up on the making of the flamethrowing guitar player nicknamed the ‘Doof Warrior’.

If you love action movies and have no problem with a strong ‘R’ level of violence, you should see this movie.

Policing Your Own Pool: Netflix, Google and Reddit

January 8, 2014 /

Three articles that are not strictly game design related, but interesting nonetheless.  First off, here’s an article that discusses how Netflix has reverse-engineered Hollywood in order to categorize all of their films – an article that will surely interest anyone who works with massive amounts of data.

“What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. The genres that I scraped and that we caricature above are just the surface manifestation of this deeper database.”

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The Watchmen

March 9, 2009 /

Screw you all…. I liked the Watchmen. Certainly more than this guy.

My take: if you liked the Watchmen, but didn’t treat it as holy scripture, they did a good job. I’m sure some people have issues with what was changed and tweaked, but too be honest, I think too often the director was TOO deferential to the source material. I can’t help but think that someone who had no idea what the Watchmen was all about would have found the whole thing confusing as hell.

In the grand scheme of comic book movie adaptations, it’s probably a solid B. Not as good as, say, 300 or the Crow, but easily lightyears better than LXG.

Also, there’s this:

Original comments thread is here.

The TV Writer’s Strike, and How It Could Be Gaming’s Gain

November 9, 2007 /

The Scriptwriter’s strike kicked off this week, with the primary bone of contention being the Scriptwriters getting more money from DVD sales and/or Internet work (especially relevant, now that many television shows are shown for free on the Internet). By contract, show runners can only run scripts they have in the can, and in an interesting twist, may only shoot scripts as they are written (which terrifies everyone concerned).

So far, public opinion seems to lean in the scriptwriter’s direction, as they’ve done a better job at creating a grassroots campaign for their cause, as well as getting the stars to come to speak on their behalf to the press. The studios, in a response that can only be described as the stupidest possible response this side of the RIAA, appear to be considering responded by cancelling shows (mostly marginal, but some hits such as 24 are already reportedly being pushed off a year – if they come back at all). Continue reading

CSI in Second Life

October 23, 2007 /

Oh, hell yeah! You just KNOW I’m tivoing this shit: CSI: NY in their partner episode with Second Life.

“Log off!”
“I know what I’m doing!”
“Log off! Now!”
“I need an ambulance!”

Dear god, the trailer alone makes my brain numb. And I’m somewhat of an aficionado of idiotic media treatments of gaming.

This is already the second cop show with a Second Life twist to it – SVU earlier this year had an episode about a fictional game called “Another Youniverse”. The plot was (*spoilers*) a killer kidnaps a college girl who is also an ageplaying virtual hooker so he can lock her in his basement so she can… ageplay a 14 year old girl from him IN GAME all the time (being in college, she’s too old and busted for him IRL).

Fortunately, SVU used their cunning detective work to find her, since the kidnapper was foolish enough to shape his virtual land to have exactly the same geographic features as to where he had kidnapped another 14 year old years previously in real life. Which is good – you’d hate for the kidnap victim to have to resort to anything crazy like send a ‘tell’ command to another player. Apparently, he had never considered this possibility in his incredibly convoluted plan. Sadly, he killed her by accident before it occurred to her (and I suspect, shortly after it occurred to the writers).

Meanwhile, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but Second Life’s now typically counting 45K users simultaneously, which is roughly four times what it was about a year ago.

Original comments thread is here.

Random Linkage of the Week

September 18, 2007 /

The chairman of ITV says that games are evolving in a moral vacuum. Wait, the TELEVISION INDUSTRY is accusing anyone else of being morally bankrupt?

A Chinese gamer died from playing games 3 days straight. Tasteless comment overheard elsewhere: “”Shit, I hope that’s not the guy I hired to powerlevel my new character.” In all seriousness, there’s been about half a dozen of these in Asia over the years. Has there ever been one in the US? What, culturally, is the difference? Continue reading

Perspective

August 10, 2007 /

How important is graphics to the consumer? According to a story that Matt found, only 30% of XBox 360 owners are even aware that their product HAS HD. (40% PS3 owners know that their PS3 has a Blu-Ray, and only half of THEM even use it).

This doesn’t even count idiots like myself, who knew that my 360 had HD, but didn’t know about the super seekrit ‘HD’ switch on the video cord until my brother came over, and flipped it. For an extra bonus, he did this in front of a party full of people who ALSO didn’t realize the picture wasn’t HD. The sound afterwards was a very audible “ooooooh”. Continue reading

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