Take That, Roger Ebert!

Ten days ago I challenged Ebert a wee bit over his article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.”

Four days ago, I wrote a post about my…let’s call it, “distaste,” for 3D.

Yesterday, Roger Ebert decided to agree wholeheartedly with my opinion on 3D.  He did so in a reasonable, logical, and fully explicated way.

Now, the best response I’ve read to Ebert’s article on video games came from Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade fame.  In his response, Holkins says of Ebert’s article, “[Ebert's] arguing 1. in bad faith, 2. in an internally contradictory way, 3. with nebulously defined terms, so there’s nothing here to discuss.”

Ebert’s article on 3D, however, has a number of clearly developed points, and a number of conclusions he and I arrived at separately.  Movies are a media we have each engaged with and learned to appreciate in a number of ways.  I’d like to suggest that perhaps, had Ebert ever bothered to make the attempt to engage with video games in a similar way, he would be able to offer a well defined and good faith argument about their validity as art.

And maybe he would even agree with me.  After all, we clearly see blue-lens to red-lens.

Depth Perception – An Unnecessary Evil

I can’t for the life of me see how 3D can be made a necessary part of a movie.

I understand special effects – allowing a film maker to make manifest impossible things is important.  From the models of Blade Runner and puppetry of Alien to the CG of Jurassic Park or The Matrix, the special effects are part of the storytelling process.  Without special effects would be no future city, no fearsome alien, no pissed of dinosaurs, and no…well, no Matrix.

But 3D, so far, doesn’t impact the ability to tell a story at all.  Does it matter if that one plant really seems closer to you than that other plant?  Or that shrapnel looks like it just flew over your head?  The mere fact that the recent spate of 3D movies have all also been shown in 2D clearly indicates that the 3D is a bonus, an extra – the characters, the story, plot, themes, tension, and emotion, none of these things are created by a special camera and a pair of funny glasses.

Would you have cared more about Guido in Life is Beautiful if he’d ridden that bike right at you before crashing into Dora?  Would the opening scene of Inglorius Basterds have been any more tense had that glass of milk been popping out of the screen?

Science Fiction Vs. Literature

I think a lot about the troubled reltionship between science fiction and literature – at least in part because I consider myself a science fiction writer, and I’m getting my second creative writing degree.  I also know I’m not the only one.

So allow me to address the argument, on one side, that science fiction should be accepted as literature (or is better than literature due to the freedom the authors have with ideas), and, on the other side, the argument that science fiction can’t be literature.

Good Story Is Not Good Writing

I’m in a graduate screenwriting workshop right now, and every single workshop something happens which makes me cringe.

Invariably somebody will bring in a script packed with grammatical errors, passive voice, cliched similes, tense shifts and labored sentence structure.  But the workshop group teases out the story.  We discover a world where animals want so badly to be human they risk dangerous and horrifying surgeries.  We meet a boy who keeps the shriveled fetus – his conjoined twin brother that doctors surgically removed from his abdomen – in a jar under his bed…and talks to it.  We find we are entertained, involved. We generally understand the story as enjoyable.

Then, inescapably, inevitably, somebody will say, “This was really well written.”

And I want to scream.

But I only cringe.  Then I go home, curl up on the floor clutching a copy of Lolita, and cry myself into blissful unconsciousness.

In Which I Weigh In On Games As Art

So Roger Ebert’s stirred up a stink on the interwebs.  I want to offer my two cents.

IPA as Sentence Structure

I love beer that brings across the floral qualities of the hops.  I once had a six pack of Lagunitas IPA that was so floral that if I were Romeo I would have told Juliet, “An India Pale Ale, by any other name, would smell as sweet.”

But each batch of beer is different.  Real beer, I mean.  There are certain beverages that are not what I would call, “beer.”  The hops and barley will never grow quite the same, the billions of finicky little yeast will never act exactly the same way.

Chock Full of Bacony Goodness

So the pharmaceutical industry saw a growth in profits during the worst year of the recession (fingers crossed).  The AP reported that the top selling drugs are anti-psychotics, followed by, “Drugs to treat heart burn and high cholesterol.”

Really, America?  You’re shelling out billions for meds because you can’t be bothered not to eat shit?  And you’re so addicted to said feces that KFC (née Kentucky Fried Chicken) just unleashed a sandwich with fried meat for bread upon the world?

I totally understand why so many people need anti-psychotics.

My Body, My Choice!

So I know this is old news, but bear with me.  I have to catch up to myself on this blog, and I think this is worth a visit to 2006.

In 2006, you see, this article came out in Wired magazine talking about the practice of implanting a small magnet in a human fingertip.  The result of the implant isn’t just that a person can pick up small metal objects, the subject can actually feel magnetic fields in their environment.  The gain a new sense, one that seems both useful and beautiful in the electronic age.  Quinn describes it thus, “In time, bits of my laptop became familiar as tingles and buzzes. Every so often I would pass near something and get an unexpected vibration. Live phone pairs on the sides of houses sometimes startled me.”

Unfortunately, Quinn’s body rejected the magnet.

Resume vs. Accessibility

I attended a panel at AWP in Denver last week where the founding editors of Failbetter, Guernica, Blackbird, and Drunken Boat talked about their journals and the place and function of online literary journals in the wide world o’ writing.  They made the point that anything published online is available to anyone with an internet connection (and some of these websites see 50,000 hits a month), while a story or poem published in a print journal is available to subscribers (for many literary journals, well under 5,000 people) and anyone who cares to go to a library that holds a subscription.  Also, a website’s archives are persistent, while a magazine can sell out all its back issues.

Just for the sake of example: Matthew Derby published stories from his excellent collection Super Flat Times in both Failbetter and 3rd Bed.  You can read the story from Failbetter any time you want, while to read the 3rd Bed story you either have to buy the collection or shell out six bucks plus S&H for the back issue.  The closest I can get to an issue of 3rd Bed from the Utah library system is “The Andy Griffith Show, the 3rd season.”

Oh, and 3rd Bed folded in 2006; they lasted six years to Failbetter’s ten-and-counting.  Take that, people who call internet journals transient!

You Should Read This

If Chelada was made from video games and stories instead of Bud Light and Clamato, Adam Scott’s “Super Tom Tom” would be Chelada’s evil twin.  Making it amazingly good.

So go read “Super Tom Tom,” part 1 and part 2.