First of all, the necessary disclaimer: I actually rate Steven Moffat pretty highly as a writer. If the space-time continuum had flowed a little differently and I'd had the sufficient time/will/talent/desire to make my parents miserable that would have been required to allow me to write professionally, Moffat's Who output is likely to have been the sort of thing I would have aimed for.
Having said that, though, his latest Doctor Who two-parter has got me wondering to what extent he is a genuinely imaginative writer, and to what extent he is simply regurgitating the same basic ideas in different orders every time he sits in front of the type-writer. As justification for my fears, I present to you the Steven Moffat scary-ass Doctor Who episode checklist, which will allow you too to churn out stories that chubby-faced celebrity-whore RTD will declare genius every time a wide-angle lens allows his flabby face to hove into view.
1. Make something ordinary scary.
Moffat flirted with this in The Empty Child using telephones and tape recorders, and of course children themselves (although from what I remember of my early years, I reckon scary-ass children are considerably more scary-ass to adults), started sleeping with it in Girl In The Fireplace (ticking clocks) then married it in Blink with the statues (to the point where the episode contained a totally unnecessary and borderline fourth-wall breaking montage of various statues, the rapid-fire visual equivalent of having RTD appear at the bottom of the screen and shout "There you go, viewers! Statues are scary now! Your children's lives are ruined! WE DEMAND A BAFTA!"). As of last night Moffat has officially begun to beat his new bride with the attempt to scarify both shadows (hardly original) and dust (just bat-shit insane).
2. Take an innocuous phrase and make it soooooooo spooky!
Item: "Are you my Mummy?" Scare factor: extreme. Doctor Who often does quite well when it touches upon missing children/parents/family members (one of my all time favourite Who moments remains Kathleen Dudman in The Curse of Fenric asking the Seventh Doctor if he has any family himself; his response: "I don't know"). Note that this does not mean they should be basing an entire fucking season around it, but then RTD never had an idea he didn't love so much he would try to cram it into every damn thing he could [1].
Item: "We did not have the parts". Scare factor: None, really, but the moment it clicked what the robots meant I concluded it was the most creepy idea the new series had had to date.
Item: "Don't blink!" Scare factor: significant. Have you tried not blinking? Even attempting to keep winking with alternate eyes doesn't work, for reasons I don't understand. Plus, those statues were genuinely messed-up, even if when you watch the episode again you very quickly realise that there are plenty of times when Sally and co aren't watching the angels and they could've pounced and chose not to [2].
Item: "Who turned out the lights?" Scare factor: Zero. There's nothing scary about the idea behind the phrase. In fact, Moffat had to include the data ghost idea just so the repetition made any sense at all. This is exactly why I had a problem with this story, I could see the gears working as Moffat worked his way through this list.
3. Make sure no-one dies.
I flat-out adored the ending of The Doctor Dances, because as a child of the Eighties I remember when Doctor Who stories positively demanded body counts that would make John McClane blush. Tegan even gave up travelling with the Doctor because she was so disgusted with the constant massacring of all and sundry whenever they rolled up to visit. The idea that, just for once, the massive death tally could be reversed was wonderful (and Eccleston did wonders selling the Doctor's euphoria).
The problem was (and this can't be laid at Moffat's door, in fairness) was that it started a run of episodes in which some or all of the irksome events of the previous forty minutes were hurriedly erased in the final five. In the case of The Parting of the Ways, I was prepared to forgive since the re-ordering of time cost the Doctor a regeneration (and I was still so busy spitting feathers over the idiocy of the "Bad Wolf" resolution that I didn't have time to regenerate my bile), but then New Earth pulled the same trick. So did The Idiot's Lantern, Fear Her, Last of the Time Lords, etc. etc.
The next two Moffat stories avoided continuing the trend he started, but it's worth noting that in Girl in the Fireplace, no-one dies on-screen, although of course the freighter crew have already been killed and harvested, and in Blink the only person seen to die passes away quietly in their sleep having lived a full life. There's nothing wrong with eschewing carnage, of course, but it did mean that when it appeared a whole mess of people had disappeared from the universe's biggest library, the immediate thought I had was not "What happened to them?" but "How convincing will the hand-waving be when they're returned?" (The answer, by the way, was "Convincing enough", although I still don't see why the number was only 4022 given we're supposedly dealing with an entire planet here). Even those that got eaten alive by swarms of shadows merrily pop up in the virtual universe (those pesky data ghosts again) that a little girl from the far future has bafflingly decided to base upon the early twenty-first century.
4. Mock the fan-boys.
Not even fan-boys, necessarily, anyone with more than a passing interest in sci-fi. Maybe not so much in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, in which the nods to the genre were pretty gentle (something about getting “some Spock”, if I remember rightly) but by Blink we were faced with Larry, most one-notey of the one-note geek characters, whose entire character arc was basically the revelation that one could be a geek without being totally worthless. I won’t dwell too much on this one, mainly because Lawrence Miles described it so well last week (here, although because he hates you, yes you specifically, he removes his reviews after seven days), his basic thesis (or at least the relevant part) being that Moffat constantly trips over himself to reassure his audience that what he’s writing isn’t really SF because it has romance and funny lines in it too. Wasn’t it Margaret Atwood who insisted she didn’t write science-fiction because at no point in A Handmaid’s Tale was a space-ship attacked by an interstellar squid (and ain’t that a goddamn shame)? Miles is convinced Moffat is the TV writer equivalent, and I see the point [3]. This time round I guess we only had to live through them chucking the word spoilers around the whole time, forgetting that laughs of recognition are not subject to the rule of three, let alone the rule of three times three.
Actually, I may be being unfair on this one, but then it’s getting increasingly hard not to watch Doctor Who on a hair-trigger for these things. I guess once the ruler of the fascist junta pumping out the caffeine-addled celebrity-enslaved shuffling vacant zombie (that used to be a TV programme rather than a loose collection of sketches, bloated CGI and scenes which are emotionally important because they have VERY LOUD FUCKING STRING MUSIC SO SHUT UP) that is Nu Who comes up with a faintly offensive nickname to describe a non-existent grouping of fans that you would unwillingly labelled as part of, you start to get a little paranoid.
5. Tug heartstrings.
I feel faintly bad about including this one, since it’s possibly just further evidence that I am dead inside, but there was an odd similarity between Donna comforting the data ghost of Ms. Evangelista and Sally Sparrow watching Billy Shipton breathe his last. The latter, though, made sense (well, not really, who the hell writes a list of instructions to a Time Lord she’s yet to meet and includes the line “Make sure you tell the detective the angels kick back in time that he’ll cark it just after the end of a brief spell of precipitation”, but it made some sense); the data ghost thing just seemed opportunistic, a way for people to die instantly but still need agonisingly long death scenes [4] to prove this show is about more than science-fiction (see earlier).
6. The sudden realisation.
The six people line wasn’t nearly as interesting as the first time Moffat did it with end of the tape, or when he did it with ticking in a room with a broken clock. He may have done a similar thing in Blink, although I don't remember it.
So there we are. An enemy scary in its mundane nature, a spooky playground-ready catchphrase, a body count of zero to the point where anyone who dies will automatically be reborn somehow in minute forty-one, needling at anyone who dares to suggest the show be treated as an ongoing narrative rather than a weekly conjuring show with bolted-on fireworks display, a frequently unnecessary attempt to reach for drama, rather than just allowing it to flow naturally from the characters, and a visual or audio clue presented in full view for the Doctor to point out so that he seems smarter than everyone else.
Have I missed anything?
[1] Still, at least it's a theme this year, and not just a word. A lot of people at one time or another have asked why people like me demand stories and plot threads that last for years rather than forty-five minutes. The only answers I can give are a) because they are better and shut up, that's why; and b) I could happily live with Doctor Who not embracing the Buffy model of stories that develop over the course of a year, the problem is RTD apparently thinks he is following that model, but is so cack-handed it took him three attempts to come up with anything that wasn't even a phrase (a totally nonsensical one in hindsight) or a year long advert for a spin-off so poor, it was like watching a thirteen episode long car crash punctuated by strangely sterile sex scenes.
[2] In fact, the only way Blink can even remotely work as an episode is if we as viewers affect the angels as well (observe them attacking the TARDIS at the end, who's watching them whilst Sally and her witless foil are cowering inside?), an idea about which the less said the better.
[3] Miles also makes the excellent point that Moffat's rep as a brilliant character writer may be significantly over-stated, comprising as it does mainly of the fact that the man knows his way around dialogue. Being funny is not the same as being well-rounded, as I have been told in the past several times, both regarding my writing and my daily life.
[4] That’s three out of four mini-rants that have the Data Ghost in them. Could this be the most useful nonsensical plot contrivance since the sonic screwdriver returned from its very, very deserved exile?
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Thursday, 5 June 2008
In Which I Dramatically Expand My Capacity For Damaging Humanity
I am worried that my volunteering for psychological experimentation earlier today may have drastically warped the averages for the poor researchers forced to analyse my brain-type functions.
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Update: Also, the preview feature of this blog creates a version of the post that looks nothing fucking like the actual post. What the hell is the point of a preview button that just shows you random shit that bears no resemblance to what you're eventually going to get?
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Having sat me down in front of a computer these foolish and unsuspecting head-shrinkers crowned me with a device designed to film my eyes (my very eyes! The windows to my soul! Although they did look pretty good through the camera feed; why am I still single again?). This done (through the slightly disturbing process of turning a screw to tighten the head-set until my skull started throbbing), I was presented with 144 human faces, each of them looking either left or right, and each looking either scared or happy. On one side, at random, was a picture of what my researcher referred to with an alarming degree of childish anthropomorphism as "happy animals", on the other side, the "scary animals" which we have all grown up being taught to fear.
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The idea was to look at the "happy" animal irrespective of whether the face was looking toward it or not, and whether it appeared scared or pleased by whatever animal it was facing. I'm sure no-one hear needs me to tell them what they were aiming to prove here, although just to be on the safe side, the girl running the experiment made sure to explain it to me (after I was finished, presumably to avoid the arcane knowledge ruining my performance; I refrained from pointing out that not only had I worked it out unaided but I had spotted a number of potential confounding variables. I didn't want to make her cry). After the 144 faces/animal pairs were finished, I was then instructed to repeat the process, this time glancing at the scary animals.
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The big problem with all of this is just how badly I understand the idea of "scary animals". Take this pairing, for example.
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Seriously: WTF? One of these is a bull. The other is a fucking bull elephant. Hundreds of people get crushed by these rampaging sharp-tusked killers every year. I'm supposed to feel happy to see one? I'm not saying a bull would necessarily be welcome at my birthday party either, just that anyone that breaks out into a grin as one of those lumbering grey murderers hove into view is, in fact, an idiot.
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And what about item 2?
Sure, the polar bear cub looks cute and cuddly. But does anyone really know at what age they become strong enough to rip out a human's throat? That gorgeous little ball of downy hair might already have massacred entire teams of nature show makers and do-gooder environmentalists. Look at the eyes! The cold dead eyes!
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The bat, though, is just a mouse with wings, however old it gets. Since I'm neither a screaming child nor a vampire hunter, seeing one of these flying pseudo-rodents flapping past my window at dusk presents no response other than "Fuck me, I'd assumed those were extinct by now".
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And observe two more allegedly "scary" animals.
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Eagles are not scary: they are full-on awesome, and anyone who argues is a Commie. Sharks are scary, fair enough, but their hideous grins seem to say "Yeah, I'm terrifying, but does not my perfect evolutionary heritage as a souless killer command respect, you pathetic squawking monkey?". Which makes it hard to avoid looking at them. There's a reason why Eagle vs Shark has the title it has, it's because watching a golden eagle try to fuck up a great white would be the most bone-shatteringly amazing spectacle ever witnessed by humanity, albeit somewhat difficult to set up fairly.
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Also, you can't scare someone who owns dogs the size of donkeys by showing them alsatians with their teeth bared. We just don't give a shit.
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I guess what I'm saying is this: if you read in the paper that researchers in Durham (as oppose to research in Durham, which apparently can incorporate bollocks up to and including cod liver oil making children do better in their SATS) have discovered people of the 21st century are now totally gay for eagles and sharks, and apparently have never seen Cujo, you'll know who to blame.
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(A shiny penny for anyone who can tell me why this post decided that once pictures were inserted, line breaks are suddenly impossible to create. I had to take the line breaks from above the pictures out too, just so that I at last seemed consistent with my total inability to understand the concept of paragraphs).
Update: Also, the preview feature of this blog creates a version of the post that looks nothing fucking like the actual post. What the hell is the point of a preview button that just shows you random shit that bears no resemblance to what you're eventually going to get?
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Update II: Oh, that fucking line break works, no problem. Sheesh...
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Update III: Have solved problem by embarrassingly low-tech solution of inserting invisible letters. I shall now slink off to bed. I hope you people appreciate the effort I'm putting in here.
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Update IV: AARRGGHHH!!! The post now looks fine in preview, and looks fine (albeit somewhat different) on my PC at home. I get into work today to find it's completely mangled on my computer here! I am so sick of these non-deterministic hell boxes I could vomit.
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Update IV: AARRGGHHH!!! The post now looks fine in preview, and looks fine (albeit somewhat different) on my PC at home. I get into work today to find it's completely mangled on my computer here! I am so sick of these non-deterministic hell boxes I could vomit.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
A Pretty Good Indication As To Why We Never Get Anything Done
Nero's Coffee Shop has begun selling a new flavour smoothy, pineapple, banana and orange. This fact must be discussed at length!
Danny: Christ, that sounds awful.
SS: Actually, I think it sounds like some form of pseudo Um-Bongo.
Danny: Um Bongo! Um Bongo!
SS: They drink it, I believe, in the Congo.
Danny: Do you think that's true? Are there tribes deep in the rainforests around Kinshasa hunting for prey with stone-tipped spears who periodically whip Um Bongo cartons from their loincloths?
SS: You do know that the song is almost entirely ficticious, right?
Danny: You take that back!
SS: The jingle says that parrots paint the packets!
Danny: They could hold the paintbrushes in their claws!
SS: Danny, if anyone paints the packets manually, it'll be blind Congolese children trying not to smudge the pictures of cartoon animals with their hot salty tears. Where the Hell are all these amazingly artistic macaws hiding out, huh? Wouldn't someone stumble across their operation sooner or later?
Danny: They wouldn't do it on the ground, obviously.
SS: What, they paint it on the wing?
Danny: Don't be ridiculous. They'd just take all the relevant materials up into the treetops.
SS: Well, makes sense, I guess. They'd be safe from predators.
Danny: Absolutely. How annoying would it be if you were in the final stages of colouring in the mandarins when a lion lopes up and bites your head off.
SS: How the hell has a lion ended up in the jungles of a Congo?
Danny: Fine; a tiger then.
SS: A tiger? Fine, forget it, let's just say it's a lion.
Danny: And then it bounds up to this poor parrot, swallows him whole, and then drinks the Um Bongo.
SS: Why would a lion want to drink Um Bongo? Plus, how will its mighty paws manage to remove the straw from its plastic wrapper?
Danny: Think about it, Squid; it would just use one razor-sharp tooth to puncture the foil circle, and then suck out the innards with its massive lion chops.
SS: It is the ultimate insult, isn't it? Some big cat, presumably lost after being separated from its tour guide, eats your frail, feathery body, and then drinks your delicious fruit drink. Unless...
Danny: What?
SS: Maybe the parrots could bribe these horribly misplaced lions to allow them to live in exchange for a percentage of the weekly Um Bongo supply.
Danny: Dude! That's completely unacceptable!
SS: Yeah, you're right. The pythons would be furious over how many of the passion fruits they'd picked were being used to buy off lions that should all just fuck off back to the Serengetti anyway.
Danny: Isn't this getting pretty close to the Congolese wildlife equivalent of a BNP rally?
SS: Yeah, maybe.
Danny: I really do want to know whether they drink Um Bongo in the Congo, now.
SS: Well, we should find out. Hire a plane, assemble a crack team, and get ourselves over there. Obviously the very first thing we'll have to tell the locals is that we're in no way going to help them overthrow the tyrannical regime that rules their brutish lives with an iron fist. "Nuts to the local despot, Johnny Foreigner, do you by any chance drink a tropical fruit blend popular in the nineteen nineties?"
Danny: This is a strangely attractive plan.
SS: And why stop there? We could travel the entire world, seeking out the most troubled and miserable of countries to ask irrelevant questions about products that entered the cultural zeitgeist over a decade ago.
Danny: We could go to Mexico and quiz them about Kia-Ora!
SS: Well, we'd need a time machine rather than a plane, since I think you've confused Mexico with pre Civil War America, but I'm fine with it in principle. "Put down that cotton, boy, and tell me: is this drink too orangey for crows?"
Danny: Sold!
Our heroes leave, arguing the cost of chartering a plane versus the difficulty of lashing together a functioning time machine.
Danny: Christ, that sounds awful.
SS: Actually, I think it sounds like some form of pseudo Um-Bongo.
Danny: Um Bongo! Um Bongo!
SS: They drink it, I believe, in the Congo.
Danny: Do you think that's true? Are there tribes deep in the rainforests around Kinshasa hunting for prey with stone-tipped spears who periodically whip Um Bongo cartons from their loincloths?
SS: You do know that the song is almost entirely ficticious, right?
Danny: You take that back!
SS: The jingle says that parrots paint the packets!
Danny: They could hold the paintbrushes in their claws!
SS: Danny, if anyone paints the packets manually, it'll be blind Congolese children trying not to smudge the pictures of cartoon animals with their hot salty tears. Where the Hell are all these amazingly artistic macaws hiding out, huh? Wouldn't someone stumble across their operation sooner or later?
Danny: They wouldn't do it on the ground, obviously.
SS: What, they paint it on the wing?
Danny: Don't be ridiculous. They'd just take all the relevant materials up into the treetops.
SS: Well, makes sense, I guess. They'd be safe from predators.
Danny: Absolutely. How annoying would it be if you were in the final stages of colouring in the mandarins when a lion lopes up and bites your head off.
SS: How the hell has a lion ended up in the jungles of a Congo?
Danny: Fine; a tiger then.
SS: A tiger? Fine, forget it, let's just say it's a lion.
Danny: And then it bounds up to this poor parrot, swallows him whole, and then drinks the Um Bongo.
SS: Why would a lion want to drink Um Bongo? Plus, how will its mighty paws manage to remove the straw from its plastic wrapper?
Danny: Think about it, Squid; it would just use one razor-sharp tooth to puncture the foil circle, and then suck out the innards with its massive lion chops.
SS: It is the ultimate insult, isn't it? Some big cat, presumably lost after being separated from its tour guide, eats your frail, feathery body, and then drinks your delicious fruit drink. Unless...
Danny: What?
SS: Maybe the parrots could bribe these horribly misplaced lions to allow them to live in exchange for a percentage of the weekly Um Bongo supply.
Danny: Dude! That's completely unacceptable!
SS: Yeah, you're right. The pythons would be furious over how many of the passion fruits they'd picked were being used to buy off lions that should all just fuck off back to the Serengetti anyway.
Danny: Isn't this getting pretty close to the Congolese wildlife equivalent of a BNP rally?
SS: Yeah, maybe.
Danny: I really do want to know whether they drink Um Bongo in the Congo, now.
SS: Well, we should find out. Hire a plane, assemble a crack team, and get ourselves over there. Obviously the very first thing we'll have to tell the locals is that we're in no way going to help them overthrow the tyrannical regime that rules their brutish lives with an iron fist. "Nuts to the local despot, Johnny Foreigner, do you by any chance drink a tropical fruit blend popular in the nineteen nineties?"
Danny: This is a strangely attractive plan.
SS: And why stop there? We could travel the entire world, seeking out the most troubled and miserable of countries to ask irrelevant questions about products that entered the cultural zeitgeist over a decade ago.
Danny: We could go to Mexico and quiz them about Kia-Ora!
SS: Well, we'd need a time machine rather than a plane, since I think you've confused Mexico with pre Civil War America, but I'm fine with it in principle. "Put down that cotton, boy, and tell me: is this drink too orangey for crows?"
Danny: Sold!
Our heroes leave, arguing the cost of chartering a plane versus the difficulty of lashing together a functioning time machine.
A Brand New Warhammer
This morning I read Jervis Johnson's article in White Dwarf 342 (at least I think it's 342, I haven't got it in the office and White Dwarf's "Next Issue" link brings up an issue that's at least two months old, the dossers) which attempts to explain why we needed a new edition of 40K a mere four years after the last one (six years being the previous average).
The article is both interesting, and potentially deeply disturbing. Obviously, until I can get my caffeine-stained hands on a rulebook I'm shooting in the dark somewhat, but what Jervis said was sufficiently pregnant with implications that I decided it was worth commenting on straight away.
The basic thrust of his argument is really worth discussing, and I think I agree with it. Basically, he's sick to the back teeth (although he doesn't quite come out and say it) with the fact that every rule has to be written whilst considering the number of ways some hyper-competitive tournament player could twist it to breaking point in order to create an unstoppable army. Each successive iteration of the game contains more attempts to plug the gaps through which Christian Byrne (who not only completely embodies the type of player I hate, but has an article in the same issue reminding us all of how good he is at slapping together armies that are invulnerable as they are joyless) can drive a Rhino rush through. What Jervis wanted was to re-jig the game to bring some of the fun back in, rather than just making sure all bases were covered regarding the beardies having tantrums as to whether or not their grotesquely unfair practices just about stay this side of legal.
Which, as an idea, I'm entirely happy about. In a perfect world, the game should be as fun and evocative as possible. The trouble is that it's transparently obvious we don't live in the perfect world. If we did, we wouldn't need traffic lights, or law courts, or microwave-meals-for-one, either. The whole reason the game ended up with so much beard-deflection is that there are too many beards out there. And the easier it is to be a member of that shadowy cult, the more people are going to head over to the dark side, tempted by the prospect of eight Hammerheads, or an army made entirely of Carnifexes, or whatever other idea enters their twisted heads. Relaxing the rules and hoping everyone sticks to the spirit of them isn't just naive, it's insanely forgetful.
The one example he gives of how this change has been employed is somewhat concerning too; Jervis focuses upon the new line of sight rules. Gone, he proudly tells us, are the days in which LOS and cover issues were decided abstractly: from now on, if your model can see a target, he can shoot at it. Automatic blocking of LOS through area terrain is apparently so 2004, as are height values, which have been replaced by the literal size of the terrain being used. This way, we are assured, the game becomes much more exciting, since you no longer say "This Marine shoots at your squad, which count as in cover because less than half of them are positioned within that area terrain", and instead can say "This Marine shoots at that guy, since he's stuck his head above the parapet like a ***ing noob". I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that's pretty much what was said.
There are three reasons why this is worrying, which I shall give in reverse order of importance:
1) Anyone who can only find a table-top war game thrilling if he can draw imaginary straight lines between the tiny painted faces of his own men and the tiny painted bodies of his opponent's is not really someone GW should be catering for. This is a game that simulates battles in which your troops employ ludicrously cool futuristic technology against genetically modified super-humans or hideous creatures from other worlds, galaxies or even realities. If you can't get behind that, then getting to play a table-top form of hide-and-seek on top of everything else is unlikely to sway you.
2) The new rules as presented in the article are just bat-shit insane. Games like this absolutely require some kind of abstraction when considering battlefield views. Forests, for example, have to be sufficiently sparse to allow you to place miniatures inside them, which means they are necessarily easier to see through than a real forest should be. No-one making terrain should have to strike a balance between how easy it is to fit models in a model forest, and how tactically advantageous it would be to do so. Hills, too, are always less tall than they would be in real life, for two excellent reasons: no-one could afford a hill if it was created according to the scale of the miniatures, and even if they could, knocking their exquisitely painted Venerable Dreadnought off a five foot high polystyrene hill to shatter on the battle-mat below is liable to be a seriously de-motivating experience. Applying WYSIWYG to terrain is an obvious non-starter, just from a practical standpoint; we still have to go back to worrying about how the tournament players are going to piss around with it, too. Also, does this mean enemy troops will start blocking lines of sight again, too? Because there were some really good reasons they did away with that idea, as anyone who ended up on the crappy end of my Tyranid army back in the mid nineties can attest.
3) The games developers at GWHQ want me to fork out another £30 for a new rule book, and potentially one or more codices, too, and then make me re-learn everything (or at least check everything to discover whether or not I need to re-learn it), and the best advert they can give me for doing all of that is that the LOS rules are different ? That's the brave new dawn of 40K they've been promising me? I believe the standard phrase under these circumstances is "Fuck that shit".
Still, I suppose a rules shake-up might mean I get a couple of months in which C doesn't completely dominate me on the gaming table. I still won't win, obviously, but my defeats may stay clear of the massacre line, at least.
I won't hold my breath, though.
The article is both interesting, and potentially deeply disturbing. Obviously, until I can get my caffeine-stained hands on a rulebook I'm shooting in the dark somewhat, but what Jervis said was sufficiently pregnant with implications that I decided it was worth commenting on straight away.
The basic thrust of his argument is really worth discussing, and I think I agree with it. Basically, he's sick to the back teeth (although he doesn't quite come out and say it) with the fact that every rule has to be written whilst considering the number of ways some hyper-competitive tournament player could twist it to breaking point in order to create an unstoppable army. Each successive iteration of the game contains more attempts to plug the gaps through which Christian Byrne (who not only completely embodies the type of player I hate, but has an article in the same issue reminding us all of how good he is at slapping together armies that are invulnerable as they are joyless) can drive a Rhino rush through. What Jervis wanted was to re-jig the game to bring some of the fun back in, rather than just making sure all bases were covered regarding the beardies having tantrums as to whether or not their grotesquely unfair practices just about stay this side of legal.
Which, as an idea, I'm entirely happy about. In a perfect world, the game should be as fun and evocative as possible. The trouble is that it's transparently obvious we don't live in the perfect world. If we did, we wouldn't need traffic lights, or law courts, or microwave-meals-for-one, either. The whole reason the game ended up with so much beard-deflection is that there are too many beards out there. And the easier it is to be a member of that shadowy cult, the more people are going to head over to the dark side, tempted by the prospect of eight Hammerheads, or an army made entirely of Carnifexes, or whatever other idea enters their twisted heads. Relaxing the rules and hoping everyone sticks to the spirit of them isn't just naive, it's insanely forgetful.
The one example he gives of how this change has been employed is somewhat concerning too; Jervis focuses upon the new line of sight rules. Gone, he proudly tells us, are the days in which LOS and cover issues were decided abstractly: from now on, if your model can see a target, he can shoot at it. Automatic blocking of LOS through area terrain is apparently so 2004, as are height values, which have been replaced by the literal size of the terrain being used. This way, we are assured, the game becomes much more exciting, since you no longer say "This Marine shoots at your squad, which count as in cover because less than half of them are positioned within that area terrain", and instead can say "This Marine shoots at that guy, since he's stuck his head above the parapet like a ***ing noob". I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that's pretty much what was said.
There are three reasons why this is worrying, which I shall give in reverse order of importance:
1) Anyone who can only find a table-top war game thrilling if he can draw imaginary straight lines between the tiny painted faces of his own men and the tiny painted bodies of his opponent's is not really someone GW should be catering for. This is a game that simulates battles in which your troops employ ludicrously cool futuristic technology against genetically modified super-humans or hideous creatures from other worlds, galaxies or even realities. If you can't get behind that, then getting to play a table-top form of hide-and-seek on top of everything else is unlikely to sway you.
2) The new rules as presented in the article are just bat-shit insane. Games like this absolutely require some kind of abstraction when considering battlefield views. Forests, for example, have to be sufficiently sparse to allow you to place miniatures inside them, which means they are necessarily easier to see through than a real forest should be. No-one making terrain should have to strike a balance between how easy it is to fit models in a model forest, and how tactically advantageous it would be to do so. Hills, too, are always less tall than they would be in real life, for two excellent reasons: no-one could afford a hill if it was created according to the scale of the miniatures, and even if they could, knocking their exquisitely painted Venerable Dreadnought off a five foot high polystyrene hill to shatter on the battle-mat below is liable to be a seriously de-motivating experience. Applying WYSIWYG to terrain is an obvious non-starter, just from a practical standpoint; we still have to go back to worrying about how the tournament players are going to piss around with it, too. Also, does this mean enemy troops will start blocking lines of sight again, too? Because there were some really good reasons they did away with that idea, as anyone who ended up on the crappy end of my Tyranid army back in the mid nineties can attest.
3) The games developers at GWHQ want me to fork out another £30 for a new rule book, and potentially one or more codices, too, and then make me re-learn everything (or at least check everything to discover whether or not I need to re-learn it), and the best advert they can give me for doing all of that is that the LOS rules are different ? That's the brave new dawn of 40K they've been promising me? I believe the standard phrase under these circumstances is "Fuck that shit".
Still, I suppose a rules shake-up might mean I get a couple of months in which C doesn't completely dominate me on the gaming table. I still won't win, obviously, but my defeats may stay clear of the massacre line, at least.
I won't hold my breath, though.
Rewarded
Hurrah! My free book (earned for slapping down SFX's News Editor) arrived today. Obviously the fact it arrived with a knock at the door at the ungodly time of seven-twenty was quite irritating, and the fact it arrived in a Games Workshop box somewhat confusing, but what matters is that I now have my reward for being mean to someone.
The only problem I can see is that the blurb both mentions "dragons" (which is usually, although not always, a bad sign) and, far more worryingly, "harmony". Is this SFX's attempt to rob me of my hate by deploying a novel featuring talking, genial dragons skipping gaily through marigold fields?
If so, then it was a bad move. I declare WAR!
Also, going back to the subject of dream interpretation, what does it say about me that last night's dream (OK, fine, the dream I had between picking up my new book and waking up at half nine thinking "SHIT!") involved me finding out that I'd written so much on my blog, Blogspot had decided to charge me. And not. weirdly, per post, but per tag? Is my subconscious telling me I need to focus more? Or just that I should use this blog as a procrastination enabler a little less?
The only problem I can see is that the blurb both mentions "dragons" (which is usually, although not always, a bad sign) and, far more worryingly, "harmony". Is this SFX's attempt to rob me of my hate by deploying a novel featuring talking, genial dragons skipping gaily through marigold fields?
If so, then it was a bad move. I declare WAR!
Also, going back to the subject of dream interpretation, what does it say about me that last night's dream (OK, fine, the dream I had between picking up my new book and waking up at half nine thinking "SHIT!") involved me finding out that I'd written so much on my blog, Blogspot had decided to charge me. And not. weirdly, per post, but per tag? Is my subconscious telling me I need to focus more? Or just that I should use this blog as a procrastination enabler a little less?
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
Denied Once More
I was tremendously happy to discover a spare copy of Mario Kart Wii in Sainsbury's today. I've been wanting a copy ever since discovering the joys of dirtbiking dinosaurs back in Oxford.
Of course, this being me, it turned out they didn't have a copy after all, they'd just put an empty box out to, I don't know, perform some kind of psychological experiment, or something.
I mention this incident as a perfect example of the First Rule of SpaceSquid's Universe: it is not enough to simply deny me what I want, every effort has to be put into making me believe what I want is within my grasp, so that it can be whisked away at the last minute to the sound of the laughter of the cosmos.
Not that I'm bitter, obviously.
Of course, this being me, it turned out they didn't have a copy after all, they'd just put an empty box out to, I don't know, perform some kind of psychological experiment, or something.
I mention this incident as a perfect example of the First Rule of SpaceSquid's Universe: it is not enough to simply deny me what I want, every effort has to be put into making me believe what I want is within my grasp, so that it can be whisked away at the last minute to the sound of the laughter of the cosmos.
Not that I'm bitter, obviously.
Monday, 2 June 2008
In Which I Am Presumably Person 1,000,000 To Use The Hilarious Phrase: Lost Has Lost It
OK, fair enough, “lost it” is a fairly major exaggeration, but the Season 4 finale left me distinctly cold. Sure, there was action, and drama, and killings, and self-sacrifice, and most importantly of all, flower-identification, but whereas last season concluded with a bat-shit crazy expectation-detonating cluster-fuck of a cluster-fuck, parts two and three of “There’s No Place Like Home” felt like nothing so much as an exercise in dot-joining.
Consider the latter half of the third season, when the show was spooling up from the mother of all lulls. Amongst the many methods the writers employed to keep me awake was the revelation that the group’s resident heroin addict/Gallagher rip-off Charlie Pace was headed for that difficult-second-album launch in the sky. Which as a Eastenders drum-roll episode closer, works really well.
For about four seconds.
Then the inevitable questions start rolling in from the Ocean of the Damp Squibs. Once we know someone is going to shuffle off the mortal coil, then a number of dramatic possibilities immediately vanish into the ether. You can’t kill him like you did Boone, for example, which entirely relied on the fact that everyone expected him to live. Same with the sudden accident that killed Shannon (though that may be just as well, as Shannon’s death was one of the worst things to happen in Lost since it began, execution-wise; and this from someone who hated the character with an almost indescribable passion). You have to make the death mean something, and you have to ensure that something about the demise of one of your main-iest of main characters still surprises people.
Did it work with Charlie? I’d argue yes, but just barely. The fact that his last act before he died was to warn Desmond as to the identify of the boat (well, as to what its identify wasn’t, what with this being Lost and all) did at least mean he died for something, even if that something thus far has gotten at four people killed (five including Naomi, who as far as we know was as “innocent” of Widmore’s master-plan as Daniel is) and led his precious Claire into Jacob’s cabin, getting up to who knows what kind of weird-ass shit. But much of those (already qualified) kudos are immediately rescinded because a) finding out the freighter wasn’t Penny’s didn’t really require a fatal sacrifice (I know jamie is liable to read this so I won‘t point out the Babylon 5 plot development for which the sacrifice of a main character really was necessary, but suffice it to say it didn‘t happen because someone needed to know who owned a fucking freighter), and b) the only reason Charlie did end up trapped in the saltwater Jacuzzi of death is because no-one in Lost World takes even the most basic of corpse-checking precautions (it was especially frustrating since Mikhail had “died“ twice already that season). We can tick the touching box, and the plot-developing box, but as something remotely sensible or particularly relevant at the time (finding out a character’s death may have been arguably important in retrospect is also not a development for the writers to be particularly proud of), not so much.
The reason why I bring all this up is that last night’s season closer felt like Charlie all over again, only multiple times. Just consider the various plot developments that raised their heads. We find out how the Oceanic Six escape, the reveal being that it was simply because they happened to be on a helicopter. Hardly breathtaking. Ben moves the island, which we’ve already known was on the cards for a fortnight (and of course we already know where he ends up courtesy of “The Shape Of Things To Come”). Jin takes an explosion to the face, but we already knew Sun believed her husband was dead, and presumably for a better reason than a vanishing magical island. Obviously I don’t for a moment believe Jin is dead, Mikhail and (in this very episode) Keamy prove that in this show, you don’t bet on characters being dead even if you do see a body, and certainly not when you don’t. The point is, if it is a bluff, then it’s still a bluff we saw coming (the most interesting question is, if Jin (and various Lostie red-shirts) did survive the blast, did they end up being caught up in the Island shift, or not?). Michael, too, was clearly living on borrowed time ever since “Meet Kevin Johnson”. The only genuine twist was the reveal of Locke in the coffin, which whilst hardly unpredictable, was at least not spoon-fed to us in advance (and was viscerally pleasing into the bargain [1]).
And then you get the other problem the Charlie storyline hinted at. Yes, I’m assuming Jin isn’t dead (and I’d better be right, too, otherwise it was a shitty, pointless death, without even the cold comfort that it gave depth and/or added viciousness to his killer, who is also dead, murdered whilst wearing a dead-man’s switch that, gosh darn it, we already knew was there), but, as I've said, given it was obvious that Michael’s time was running out, it’s pretty crappy for his death to involve nothing but fractionally extending the time limit of a bomb. Sure, that saved the helicopter, but the whirlybird had only ran into trouble a few moments beforehand, and that because of a fuel leak, which hardly qualifies as particularly dramatically satisfying. Aside from allowing Desmond to get to Penny’s boat instead of jumping into the water (one wonders why Ms Widmore‘s boat didn‘t head for the big plume of smoke to check for other survivors); nice and all but hardly worth killing one of your original characters for, exactly what good did it do? Other than to apparently piss Harold Perrineau off a lot, I mean. It was a massively crappy ending to a storyline that originally seemed so promising.
There is nothing wrong per se with presenting a journey when we already know the destination. Again, B5 had a tendency to throw us visions of the future from time to time, some of which involved some fairly important people graduating from not dead to dead (Christ, Londo tells Sheridan that he and G’Kar will kill each other twenty years into the future in the first episode), but the specifics were both vague and fascinating enough to keep us wanting more. But Lost seems intent on using the same trick again, and again, and again. It reminds me of the second half of BSG’s second season, when every goddamn week we got a teaser that the rest of the episode then spent three quarters of its run time working back to. It’s a neat narrative conceit once in a while, but pull it (something like) five times in seven episodes, and it just gets lazy. It just closes down too many narrative roads, and demands a certain type of writing to make events we already know are coming still feel like a surprise, but not feel like a cheat. The Lost writers only just pulled it off the first time with one plotline, so I’m baffled as to why they based pretty much an entire season on it. Perhaps people’s responses to the flash-forward idea made them think more of the same was a good idea, but people thought making Angel evil was a good idea, too, and it didn’t lead to Season 3 of Buffy featuring every character growing an Mirror Universe goatee and attempting to destroy humanity. This stuff is hard, it's limiting, it's of questionable dramatic pay-off, and this year it was ubiquitous into the bargaining.
Here’s hoping this shit gets sorted for next time around.
[1] There’s a whole article to be had out of how much Locke pisses me off. Suffice it to say that the fact that he apparently screws up leading the Others, comes begging for help, and ends up really, really killed, is exactly what the bug eyed mentalist bastard had coming after three years of always being wrong and getting a wide variety of people dead in the process.
Consider the latter half of the third season, when the show was spooling up from the mother of all lulls. Amongst the many methods the writers employed to keep me awake was the revelation that the group’s resident heroin addict/Gallagher rip-off Charlie Pace was headed for that difficult-second-album launch in the sky. Which as a Eastenders drum-roll episode closer, works really well.
For about four seconds.
Then the inevitable questions start rolling in from the Ocean of the Damp Squibs. Once we know someone is going to shuffle off the mortal coil, then a number of dramatic possibilities immediately vanish into the ether. You can’t kill him like you did Boone, for example, which entirely relied on the fact that everyone expected him to live. Same with the sudden accident that killed Shannon (though that may be just as well, as Shannon’s death was one of the worst things to happen in Lost since it began, execution-wise; and this from someone who hated the character with an almost indescribable passion). You have to make the death mean something, and you have to ensure that something about the demise of one of your main-iest of main characters still surprises people.
Did it work with Charlie? I’d argue yes, but just barely. The fact that his last act before he died was to warn Desmond as to the identify of the boat (well, as to what its identify wasn’t, what with this being Lost and all) did at least mean he died for something, even if that something thus far has gotten at four people killed (five including Naomi, who as far as we know was as “innocent” of Widmore’s master-plan as Daniel is) and led his precious Claire into Jacob’s cabin, getting up to who knows what kind of weird-ass shit. But much of those (already qualified) kudos are immediately rescinded because a) finding out the freighter wasn’t Penny’s didn’t really require a fatal sacrifice (I know jamie is liable to read this so I won‘t point out the Babylon 5 plot development for which the sacrifice of a main character really was necessary, but suffice it to say it didn‘t happen because someone needed to know who owned a fucking freighter), and b) the only reason Charlie did end up trapped in the saltwater Jacuzzi of death is because no-one in Lost World takes even the most basic of corpse-checking precautions (it was especially frustrating since Mikhail had “died“ twice already that season). We can tick the touching box, and the plot-developing box, but as something remotely sensible or particularly relevant at the time (finding out a character’s death may have been arguably important in retrospect is also not a development for the writers to be particularly proud of), not so much.
The reason why I bring all this up is that last night’s season closer felt like Charlie all over again, only multiple times. Just consider the various plot developments that raised their heads. We find out how the Oceanic Six escape, the reveal being that it was simply because they happened to be on a helicopter. Hardly breathtaking. Ben moves the island, which we’ve already known was on the cards for a fortnight (and of course we already know where he ends up courtesy of “The Shape Of Things To Come”). Jin takes an explosion to the face, but we already knew Sun believed her husband was dead, and presumably for a better reason than a vanishing magical island. Obviously I don’t for a moment believe Jin is dead, Mikhail and (in this very episode) Keamy prove that in this show, you don’t bet on characters being dead even if you do see a body, and certainly not when you don’t. The point is, if it is a bluff, then it’s still a bluff we saw coming (the most interesting question is, if Jin (and various Lostie red-shirts) did survive the blast, did they end up being caught up in the Island shift, or not?). Michael, too, was clearly living on borrowed time ever since “Meet Kevin Johnson”. The only genuine twist was the reveal of Locke in the coffin, which whilst hardly unpredictable, was at least not spoon-fed to us in advance (and was viscerally pleasing into the bargain [1]).
And then you get the other problem the Charlie storyline hinted at. Yes, I’m assuming Jin isn’t dead (and I’d better be right, too, otherwise it was a shitty, pointless death, without even the cold comfort that it gave depth and/or added viciousness to his killer, who is also dead, murdered whilst wearing a dead-man’s switch that, gosh darn it, we already knew was there), but, as I've said, given it was obvious that Michael’s time was running out, it’s pretty crappy for his death to involve nothing but fractionally extending the time limit of a bomb. Sure, that saved the helicopter, but the whirlybird had only ran into trouble a few moments beforehand, and that because of a fuel leak, which hardly qualifies as particularly dramatically satisfying. Aside from allowing Desmond to get to Penny’s boat instead of jumping into the water (one wonders why Ms Widmore‘s boat didn‘t head for the big plume of smoke to check for other survivors); nice and all but hardly worth killing one of your original characters for, exactly what good did it do? Other than to apparently piss Harold Perrineau off a lot, I mean. It was a massively crappy ending to a storyline that originally seemed so promising.
There is nothing wrong per se with presenting a journey when we already know the destination. Again, B5 had a tendency to throw us visions of the future from time to time, some of which involved some fairly important people graduating from not dead to dead (Christ, Londo tells Sheridan that he and G’Kar will kill each other twenty years into the future in the first episode), but the specifics were both vague and fascinating enough to keep us wanting more. But Lost seems intent on using the same trick again, and again, and again. It reminds me of the second half of BSG’s second season, when every goddamn week we got a teaser that the rest of the episode then spent three quarters of its run time working back to. It’s a neat narrative conceit once in a while, but pull it (something like) five times in seven episodes, and it just gets lazy. It just closes down too many narrative roads, and demands a certain type of writing to make events we already know are coming still feel like a surprise, but not feel like a cheat. The Lost writers only just pulled it off the first time with one plotline, so I’m baffled as to why they based pretty much an entire season on it. Perhaps people’s responses to the flash-forward idea made them think more of the same was a good idea, but people thought making Angel evil was a good idea, too, and it didn’t lead to Season 3 of Buffy featuring every character growing an Mirror Universe goatee and attempting to destroy humanity. This stuff is hard, it's limiting, it's of questionable dramatic pay-off, and this year it was ubiquitous into the bargaining.
Here’s hoping this shit gets sorted for next time around.
[1] There’s a whole article to be had out of how much Locke pisses me off. Suffice it to say that the fact that he apparently screws up leading the Others, comes begging for help, and ends up really, really killed, is exactly what the bug eyed mentalist bastard had coming after three years of always being wrong and getting a wide variety of people dead in the process.
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