VIDEOGAMES
KICKMARKETING
Larian, makers of the Divinity series, have decided to return to the Kickstarter well to “fund” their next entry in the series.
I put fund in quotation marks because it’s dubious whether they really need to use the platform for the money it would generate. Even if they match the amount gathered by the Original Sin campaign, it’s nothing in the face of the estimated 20M USD they’ve earned from Steam sales alone. It’s also interesting to note that the original campaign was done to help complete a game that had already been in development for a while, essentially funding the polishing phase (and, ostensibly, to gather “community input”, though why anyone would claim that was enhanced by pre-paying for a game versus just using an online forum is beyond me). Also important is that the next game won’t be a completely new project per se, but fresh content built on their existing framework, which has already been paid for. I don’t illustrate these facts to shed a negative light on the game, just to reinforce the idea that the crowdfunding campaign isn’t necessarily for the funding so much as it is for the crowd.
What Larian will end up with from the new campaign is (if they manage to set a funding threshold that can be reached*) a bunch of free, grassroots marketing, and gobs of obligation-free cash. Is this a bad thing? That depends on who you ask. I think that if someone sees crowdfunding platforms as expressly means-to-money that should only be used by folks who have no other way of getting dollars into their projects, then sure, it looks a little heinous. I can’t remember if Kickstarter’s early vision statements were anything along those lines, and they certainly aren’t now. The more money Kickstarter can gather off of the backs of other people’s projects, the better. Patreon seems to have a similar set of arguments that go along with it, after all you have folks on there who almost certainly don’t need to use the platform to gather ducats, yet do and do so in spectacular fashion.
In the end it’s a “capitalism of charity” scenario. I’m kind of surprised that more large game studios and publishers haven’t turned to crowdfunding to bolster their marketing efforts and grab that knock-on cash flow, but I expect to see more doing so in the future. I wonder if my own basic ethics would allow me to leverage those platforms, as I’ve always felt that they were unnecessary when there were products on the shelves, much in the same way I’ve never had a donation button. But if the money and interest are there, isn’t it silly to ignore them? From my standpoint, it’s a very difficult decision.
*At the time of writing the campaign hadn’t picked up steam, since then it’s blown past the set 500K.
TRINE TIME
According to reports, Trine 3 is short. Like, 6-7 hours short. At this stage in my life, I think that’s fantastic: a videogame that doesn’t demand much of my vital life essence is welcome. They should be listing short playthrough times as a feature on the product pages.
WAR GOD
Watched the credits roll on God of War 3 and God of War: Ascension. One of the most satisfying violence-action videogame franchises gets better with every entry. As an experienced developer, it’s rare for me to have a “how did they do that” moment while playing a game, and I’m sure I had no less than a dozen during these playthroughs. Sony Santa Monica pushes the envelope, and the result is a breathtaking romp through their version of Greek mythology.
SOCIAL MEDIA
FURTHER FACEBOOKERY
I don’t post much on Facebook. I was “Facebook abstinent” from May to September, only returning once I’d published all the books I had to publish. When I left in May, I went through great pains to clear the Feed (the endlessly-scrollable front page of the site that’s supposed to show you everything your Friends and Likes have been up to) by Unfollowing anyone or anything that posted over the course of two weeks.
That was when one of my worst fears about Facebook was confirmed: the volume of “news” that appears in the Feed isn’t a function of how many people you’re linked to. I can’t figure out how it works, but I know one thing for certain: it’s not displaying every post.
I’d assumed that once I Unfollowed the most active members of the Feed that I’d start seeing more stuff from people who weren’t fully addicted to the site. No such luck. When I came back at the start of this month I was shocked to discover a still-empty Feed, even though I was certain that people had been posting. Sure enough, when I went direct to someone’s Page I could see posts ranging back years, none of which had ever made it into my Feed.
It’s a shame, really, considering that Facebook is essentially a data-mine that we, the users, voluntarily contribute to. I’d think that it would at least let us see everything we’re interested in without much work, since that’s their fundamental modus operandi. The only way to guarantee seeing a post is by enabling “Get Notifications” from the Friends or Liked button on their Page, something Facebook does not do by default.
It was a little heartbreaking to discover true real-world friends had been posting for years and I’d never once seen any of their news. Marriages, breakups, pets, deaths, graduations, career successes and failures, and all the other minutia that a social network is supposed to facilitate, just disappearing into the void. It made me wonder how many of my own posts had gone unread by people who would have cared to read them.
I’ve been performing little tests since returning to the site. The first involved trying to get every active Facebooker who’s my Friend to Like the Dark Acre Digital Facebook Page. From when the page was founded in ‘10 until prior to this month, I’d let the numbers grow “organically”. That meant never using the Invite function to draw people to the page, and instead linking it to my personal account when sharing news from it or posting it as the “location” with regular status updates (a function that only became available in recent years). In all that time I’d managed to draw around 400 likes, and most of those from my “indie heyday” when I was very active on the Internet, making and posting a lot of games and contributing to the scene as best I could. Out of those 400, 127 came from an existing 1336 Facebook Friends.
I took a more aggressive approach this month, and directly invited everyone who hadn’t liked the page. I gained 25 likes (thank you very much if you were one of them) and lost 5 Friends. Though I suppose if being asked to support a Friend’s livelihood is that offensive, perhaps we shouldn’t have been connected in the first place.
All in all, the growth of the Page is a very minor consideration for myself and Dark Acre. As I’ve said before: the ultimate goal is having all interested parties subscribed to the mailing list. Still, having a healthy audience on Facebook can’t hurt, and trying to figure out how the site manages who-sees-what-data is an interesting and ongoing concern.
TELEVISION
TRUE DISAPPOINTMENT
True Detective’s second season was a massive let-down. Todd VanDerWerff over at Vox has written a great list of reasons why, so I’ll add my main reason for disliking what went down: it didn’t feel at all like a part of the world that Pizzolatto set up in the first. There was some press prior to season two’s opener claiming that it would be, and I was excited to explore the potential that had been opened up by the activity in Florida, but there was almost none of it. I held on, dumbly, like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a piece of flotsam and praying to be rescued by the glimmering light of hope on the horizon but… I wasn’t. I was drowned, along with the rest of the loyal fans, by the unmitigated disaster and waste of resources of the sophomore outing.
BREAK AGAIN, LIKE WE DID LAST SUMMER
When I finished my first viewing of Breaking Bad in ‘13, I was sure I’d never have to watch it again. I loved it, felt it was a rare series of perfect televised storytelling, but the climax had relied so much on not knowing what was happening with the protagonist (similar to Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense) that I figured it would be a waste of time to tread that ground once more. How wrong I was. My wife had never seen it, and as it was summer break and we were looking for something to fill the evening hours, the show came up as an option.
If anything, the experience of a second viewing was enhanced by knowing how everything went down. It freed me up to pay closer attention to all the details, foreshadowing, and depth of characterization that Vince Gilligan and company put into the show.
IN THE KNICK OF TIME
The first season Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick is a masterpiece. Finally got around to watching it straight through, and it only reinforced my love for the period and Clive Owen’s abilities. Cliff Martinez’s score has been a mainstay of my writing/gamedev working BGM for months. Yes it’s dark, depressing, and brutal, but that’s just how I like my television.
The dark realities of life are most often the most illuminating. You can’t have shadow without light.
The fragility of life in the vacuum is not to be taken lightly. If a seabound freighter or transport truck overshoots its mooring, you may get a bent plate or strut. If an interplanetary trade vessel does this, thousands die.
There are certain questions that are important to ask: whenever information is incomplete, or absent from presentation, it’s critical that the recipient clear any fog that obscures total understanding. Likewise, where there is ambiguity that could lead to misinformation, questions that solidify the intended meaning are essential.
The trouble begins when people ask questions simply for the sake of asking them, to reinforce the appearance of paying attention, somehow raise their social standing, or feign an interest that devolves into a detour. A question of “how do I do this?” when all the tools have been adequately provided is one example. People employ this diversionary strategy because they are too afraid to try something for themselves. It is not unusual for such people to never make use of any reinforcement that may be granted by such odious time-wasting. Yet this destructive behavior occurs ad infinitum in classrooms throughout history.
Fault also lies with instructors and lecturers, for rather than direct the students to experiment for themselves, they answer the queries at great ego-stroking lengths to fill their salaried time or to otherwise provide content where none was needed but now exists and imparts the illusion of meaning.
I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s trying to remember the appeal of a place like this. I’m listening to the obnoxious laughter of strangers. A man is showing a woman something on his mobile phone, and it’s louder than the background noise of the place. The floor is atrociously dirty, and the grime becomes more and more apparent the longer I sit here. The coffee isn’t good at all and came served in double-cupped paper even though I explicitly said it was “for here”. Again, I wonder what I’m even doing sitting here. I had the idea of what coming here would mean, some fragment of a forgotten comfort that this place once provided, or still did, somewhere on the other side of the planet.
In a cleaner culture, with quieter people, this was an oasis. Here, it’s a rutting place for pigs.
I can’t help but wonder if this is a reflection, but nothing I’ve been doing lately has led me to this place. My being here is complete happenstance—the product of boredom and stir-craziness—and the discovery of a handful of cash in a battered wallet. And now that’s all added up to produce an hour of regret spent in a public space for a public I’ve come to despise.
2015.09.24 – 2015.09.27