existenZ Response

The other day my friend asked me what I thought was "next for video games" and of course I had to bring up the movie "ExistenZ" that we watched in class last week. I believe the virtual concept of existenZ is something fairly close to what the future of video games might actually be like. Though I cannot see people having to be actually fitted with a so-called "bioport". At least, not in the manner that it happens in the movie. I understood how the concept was supposed to work for Existenze. Basically the game system, as an organic living module, connects with a hosts central nervous system, and feeds it the programming of the game world. The effect, ultimately, is a perfect simulation of reality achieved by replicating neural stimulus that would otherwise be coming from the "real" world that we live in. An alternative way to view it is a self-elected and activated "Matrix" reality...only no Keanu Reeves stilted acting.

I find the science behind existenZ most interesting because it really does seem like the ultimate destination for video games. Gamers like to be immersed in the world of the game, and presently game developers have many methods for facilitating this immersion. Companies such as Bioware use elaborately constructed plots that are directed based on a player's choices made during conversations with Non-Player-Characters in-game. In many ways the immersion factor works the same way as a book or a movie. The more entertaining and enjoyable, the more the player/consumer deepens their experience of the game. However, we still only use a limited range of our senses when playing modern video games. Sight and sound. ExistenZ brings about the concept of delivering entertainment along all the senses, simultaneously. Visa vi, seamless virtual reality.

Of course there are a vast range of problems that would arise from such a game construct. Game addiction for one, is already a very real condition. Then again, it has already been proven that one can become addicted to theoretically anything. Addiction in and of itself is only a person's over-centralization of their day to day functionality around a singular or narrow experiential range. So imagine in a game world that draws all of your senses in entirely, and the real world isn't just in your periphery, it has disappeared! In a world where you can completely escape the problems of reality by entering the perfect reality of a video game world, I think there would be way too many people giving up on reality and just living the rest of their lives in the game world, only leaving periodically to eat and sleep. Slowly but surely more people are drawn to the perfection of the game world until global focus drifts from the real world into that of the game. And then you have a population of utterly detached vegetables who are existing in real space only to further their existence in a virtual space.

It is because of the totality of the immersion of existenZ that I would deter anyone from playing or marketing it, and even trying to develope such technology.

To create and market a complete virtual reality platform for the masses would spell doom of all kinds for humans. And the scariest part is: someday if our science continues to develope, the technology of existenZ can be entirely realized. There should be no reason why we cannot trick our brains into receiving fabricated stimulus, uninterrupted, from the five senses simultaneously. We experience reality only by the way our brain tells it too, so why couldn't we learn at a certain point to design stimulus for our brain?

Reflection on Babel 17

After reading the first chapter of Samuel R. Delaney's Babel 17, I can say that he has done his job as an author of thoroughly enticing my interest into reading further. Above all else I enjoyed his writing style most of all. I, personally, am a sucker for authors whom wax poetic frequently, and who apply exensive and elaborate metaphor's to describe story details. When Rydra Wong is introduced, Delany describes her hair like "like fast water at night spilling over her shoulder". I find this kind of metaphor so much more tantalizing than "she had locks of dark, lustrous hair". When authors like Delaney use these kinds of metaphors, it provides readers with a broader experience of the story being told. When hair is being connected to a river, we get all the description that we need, and more. The sounds and textures of a river come into mind, and they augment our experience of her hair. This is what makes the art of writing so fantastic, it can make connections between similar elements in ways that no other art form can do so.

Rydra Wong does seem like a bit of an improbable character. She is too unstoppable, and has not very many apparent flaws. Not that there is anything wrong in that she is a superhuman of sorts, but characters need flaws to grow into. Without them, character development cannot occur, and the adventures of the story won't exhibit some sort of drastic effect upon the flaws of the character; causing them to either heal their wounds or correct their flaws.

I found the subject of the Babel-17 language reason enough to continue reading. Remnants in any form of ancient alien societies hit deeply within my imagination. Alien ruins are the kind of thing that will always give me chills. In Ridley Scott's "Alien" when the team is first on the planet exploring the wreckage of the alien space station and they encounter the skeleton of the space jockey, my mind was immediately taken back to however many hundreds of years ago that the space jockeys where all together up in orbit, and the alien must have broken out and killed everyone on board and it went crashing down to the planet to be left alone for centuries. Artifacts are the greatest story device to spark intrigue about the history of whats at stake. So in Babel 17 I immediately had to know, what sort of race created the Babel-17 language, and what makes the language so special. Well, now I have to read further in order to find out.

I'm not certain as to how much I enjoyed or empathized with the general as a character. I found him pretty typically cliche of male science fiction heroes. It felt like as soon as I knew he was a general, his character was ruined for me, because being a science fiction general meant his character was going to be pretty limited in terms of how they would be able to express themselves. Again this is just me assuming, but generals by their profession are people of conduct, order, and rules. Rules in stories tend to be boring, especially in the 21st century. Nowadays people want the loose cannon, they want the anti-hero, they want unpredictable, because most stories have become too predictable. The general status is limiting to his character, but it doesn't send the whole story crashing to the ground, it can still sail well as long as the rest of the characters and plot direction remain surprising and entertaining. I will discover if this is true once I read the rest of the story.

Matt

Heterotopias

After slogging through Michel Foucalt's Discourse on Heterotopias, my opinion on the article was very clear, and had been so since the first paragraph. I did not find that Foucalt effectively communicated his ideas to a wide audience. He gets extremely wordy, not just in various places, but everywhere throughout the entirety of the essay. The writing is also redundant in it's wordy-ness. Such words as 'fantasmatic' don't seem necessary, it almost sounds like the author is embellishing ordinary words to make himself sound more intelligent. It is extremely dense writing at that. I found it took several reads of the same sentence to decode what Foucalt was trying to tell me through all the vestigial words.

He does present some interesting concepts, if you connect all the scattered dots. But even then he complicates the whole matter to a very unnecessary degree, and this really fogs up the window through which we are trying to get a good view of his ideas. Here is a prime example:

" First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces."

My critique of this passage is as follows. First, there is no need for him to dictate the "space" of society or the "space" of anything. He can just simply say "society". It would be like me saying, "I'm going to eat the form of a banana right now". There is absolutely no need to express oneself in such a way. Again he does the same thing in sentence two. "Utopias are sites with no real place." Why can't he just say "Utopia's are by all standards, fundamentally impossible constructs." It still sounds smart, but avoids the vagaries of "no real place". No real place in what? Can't they just be said to be "not real" and leave it at that? This trend continues through this paragraph and through the rest of the discourse. Foucalt phrases concepts with unnecessary complications and mechanisms that skew the meaning of what he is trying to say. Like I said before, the entire passage in question could be summarized, "Utopias are fundamentally impossible, and here is why."

I do not double Foucalts intelligence of his understanding of the principles he trys to delineate, but his explanation is so unnecessarily complicated that said principles are lost and or unintentionally skewed.

Warbreaker - Prologue Response

I read the Prologue to this story by Brandon Sanderson, and I would have to say that he has done his job by enticing me altogether. The main character, or at least the main focus of the prologue, is a character called Vasher. Apart from having a very cool and fun name, Vasher is introduced as having a unique ability called Awakening. Right off the bat Sanderson establishes a world with some very unique concepts that will set the ground for the plot of the rest of the story.

From what we are given in the prologue, there is a phenomenon in universe of this story called BioChromatic Breath. I suppose this would be a substance analogous to what we refer to as 'soul'. BioChromatic Breath is visible outside of the body, and it can be transferred from person to person but only by verbal command. Not only that, but it can also be transferred into inanimate materia in a process referred to as 'Awakening' it requires a certain number of breaths as determined by the size and complexity of the material in order to animate it. In the prologue Vasher animates a small straw figure to steal the keys to the jail cell door.

Sanderson continues to flesh out the rules to this BioChromatic Breath very early on. Though it is important that he give us a little info about how it works, I would have liked for him to keep it a bit more mysterious, especially because it is only the prologue. When he mentioned "The First Heightening" I was extremely intrigued, and I wanted to know how many heightenings there were. I hoped that it would be revealed much later on in the story, at some important moment. However, not two pages later he goes on to talk about a fifth and finally a ninth heightening, which only one person Vasher knows has gotten to. For a spiritual person such as myself, this concept of heightening is very significant, as it ties very deeply to attaining higher levels of spiritual awareness. The way in which Sanderson describes how Vasher feels when he takes in Vahr's breaths is actually much akin to a psychedelic experience, but much more controlled. At the same time it really is heightened awareness in all respects, and this concept alone has sold me on the story. I can't wait to read the rest of it!

Response to Lev Grossman's "The Magicians"

When I initially read the brief synopsis for "The Magicians" I was excited, and entirely ready for a 'mature Harry Potter' tale of a magical world within our real world. From page one, it becomes entirely clear that this is a story on an entirely different wavelength than Harry Potter. The Potter series is a coming of age tale, a boy who becomes a hero and conquers his antithesis. It is about all of the positive and negative experiences that one encounters on the path of maturation within the context of the "wizarding world". Harry is a bright hero that we can easily sympathize with and admire. But in "The Magicians" the main hero, Quentin Coldwater, is wholly different than Harry Potter, and not exactly in a positive way. Quentin is the classic, estranged, lonely genius of his high school. He has made all the right moves in terms of getting his life in order, but he still feels out of place. There is a part of him that is fixated on a series of fantasy books he read as a child, and he holds within his deepest desires that the imaginary world Fillory of these novels could in fact be real.

And so the basic premise is established of a main character who dreams of escaping to a fantasy world. As the novel progresses, Quentin takes an unexpected turn away from Princeton towards "Breakbills", a so-called magic academy. There he discovers that the magic of his yearning is indeed real, but it is not in the form and brightness that he imagined. Quentin's classmates are mostly cynical, disengaged from the real world and take their magical gifts for granted. For me, this development was an immediate disappointment in the events of a novel. The whole reason Harry Potter 'works' is because there is a contrast between the gloominess of Harry's life with the Dursley's in the real world and the extreme brightness and adventure of Hogwarts. Not to mention J.K. Rowling picked FAR superior names for her fictional elements. On this note I'd like to take a detour: One thing many writers and readers underestimate is the vast importance of the names they bestow upon their creations. Appropriate and exciting names can do so very much for the entertainment value of a novel. Lets take for example, the names of the schools in each of the novels we are discussing. Hogwarts. Breakbills. Both are actually quite similar, two syllable words. Both call imagery to mind that is unpleasant, unlikely. However, "Breakbills" calls to mind to many different unpleasant things that we get stuck up upon the differing, conflicting imagery within it. We imagine birds crashing their beaks into stone surfaces, breaks screeching on a car, a bill getting torn in half, etcetera etcetera. There are too many different things conjured up by this name, and the experience of reading it more frequently than not is unpleasant. So then why does Hogwarts work? The simplicity of it, and the specificity of it. None of us can agree that hog-warts themselves are of a pleasant, inviting nature. However, we overlook that matter because of the beautiful contrast between hog-warts and a grand magical castle. Rowling picked a word for something small and unpleasant to describe something grand, magical and inviting. Again, contrast works, which Lev Grossman does not employ to make his novel "pop" for lack of a more appropriate word. Just as contrast makes artwork "pop out" so does it imbue the same effects upon works of literature. "Hogwarts" works additionally on a visual level in terms of the letter forms that we see. Some people will say this is of no importance and that I am over-analyzing. But everything is important, every square inch of a painting and every letter in a word is important to how an audience experiences it. The first letter, H, is grand, and out of the 26 roman characters in our alphabet, it is the letter most akin to two adjacent turrets on...yes...a castle. Fitting right? The appeal of the word continues in that there is good, fun, variation in the letterforms themselves, and unlikely variation at that. It's a fun word, and the 'fun-ness' of it lightens the gravity of the events in the story.

Returning to the point of our departure, Breakbills fails to be a fun word to read over and over, whereas Hogwarts is light, exciting, fun, and inventive all at once.

Vampires

Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire proved to be, in its entirety, a quite entertaining novel. The contrast between Louis and Lestat mirrored the larger contrast between vampires and humans. This larger contrast has many facets to it, each with different rules and traits. On one hand we can observe the strengths and weakensses of a vampire in regards to those of a human. Vampires, thought they do have immortality, are burdoned by an inability to experience the sun, the great provider of life itself. Vampires are forced to an eternal existance within darkness, which from a human perspective, we would assume to be rather dismal. They are only able to survive within this existance through parasitism upon the non-vampires; which is all-inclusive to humans and animals alike. So essentially vampires sacrifice the brightness and joy of life for immortality. In the end of Interview with a Vampire, the boy has learned nothing, and still yearns for Louis to turn him into a vampire so he can live forever. The boy had acquired no wisdom from Louis' story.

To discuss Vampires in the mainstream: we have seen a dramatic transformation and recontextualization of the vampire within modern media. Decades ago we were exposed to Nosferatu, who introduced us to all the quintessential traits of a classic vampire. At that point the lore of the vampire was fairly limited, and it had yet to develop into a phenomenon. As we observed previously with the zombie, vampires seemed to harmonize with a deep archetypical chord within people, and they have since flocked by the millions to consume vampire fiction. Once again we are approached with the question: what is it about vampires that people love?

In many cases it is the element of the forbidden love which draws people to vampires. To be more specific, a vampire would fear loving a human being because they fear themselves getting out of control and harming the human they are in a partnership. This scenario comes to light in the recent Twilight saga. But perhaps this is why Twilight works so well with young readers: it emphasizes the fear of love or attraction in the context of supernatural causes A vampire can also, in many cases symbolize an out of control sexual impulse; the desire to feast upon flesh. Why else do most vampire pictures include a woman as the prey rather than a male? Or in the case that the prey is a male, the predator is often a woman. Innately, the audience wants to observe a heterosexual interaction between a vampire and human. Of all fantastic human monsters, it can be said that the vampire is without a doubt the most sexual, on multiple levels. At the very least, it has been the most exploited as a vehicle for sexual emphasis and exploration.

On Zombies

January 12 2012

All about zombies...

I will begin by stating that my view on the icon of the zombie in contemporary literature and media has been drastically overplayed. This has become especially true in the past decade after the wake of new zombie-centric films, zombie-centric remake films and zombie-centric video games. Most of us are aware of the popular Xbox game "Left for Dead" and its recently released sequel. The game has been praised by zombie fans and casual gamers alike. The game itself features a small-ish range of zombie types. Most of which do not actually reflect the base characteristics of what one would commonly envision in the "classic" form of zombie. Such a zombie typically moves exhaustingly slow, owed to poor locomotive functioning within the reanimated corpse. Also, the classic zombie is much more of a walking corpse than a weird hybrid/mutated monster breed. Such hybrids seem apparent in Left for Dead, which I suppose in the end makes it a unique reinvention of the zombie in the first place. However, it is still branded a zombie game, thus fueling the ubiquitous zombie craze as of late. So what is it that makes zombies so awesome? Lets look further.

The zombie alone, as a mere creation, is so stimulating for the imagination for a few simple reasons. The zombie simultaneously animates our fantasies and our nightmares. On one hand, a zombie in its coming back from the grave, has cheated death. And don't many of us, on some level or another, fantasize about the potentiality of cheating death? The fact that the creature is cheating death by becoming something only half alive is irrelevant when posed adjacent to the fact that the zombie has indeed escaped death , ironically to serve as a minion thereof. Returning the the crossroads, the secondary allure of the zombie is that it very effectively inverts the benign nature of a stable, run of the mill human being. The "zombie-virus" transforms the ordinary into the nightmarish. When people engage their imaginations with the concept of a zombie or concurrent zombie outbreak, it is so terribly easy to re-contextualize within the order of ones own life. "What if my neighbor Bill was a zombie? Or my whole neighborhood?" A zombie is a very accessible icon, and perhaps more importantly, a very simple icon. And as much as zombies are overplayed within modern society, they are not going to cease there clawing on the doors and windows; they are not going to leave. A zombie is too archetypical, too ingrained within the psyche to be rendered into obsolescence.