Double Dose: Dealing With It and A Game Rant.

Journal of Clarity – 026 – March 31, 2013

You know what I think I miss most about being with Rose? When we were talking, and not arguing, it was always nice to wake up and see a text from her from our conversation the night before she sent after I had fallen asleep. It was nice to know there was someone I could message when I went to break at work rather than just sit there and do nothing. In short, it was nice to know there was someone out there who I could always just talk to about whatever and enjoy it. It’s a shame all that conversation devolved into arguments over little things that were somehow actually big things, which all managed to be completely unavoidable.

I don’t want to talk about that now. It is still depressing to think about this whole mess and where it has left me. It’s just a shame there really isn’t anything else going on to distract me and make me think about something else. I guess there’s school, but it’s not like that’s ever been distracting or interesting enough to keep my attention for an entire day. There’s work… HA! So, yeah, not much else is going on at the moment. I’ve fallen behind on video editing for the youtube channel but that’s partly because of this and partly because of all the school stuff happening this week (two project-related things for film, a mid-term for Japanese History as well as a paper all in the same week). So in between bouts of homework when I’m not occupied with something else, I do a little writing here and that’s about it. Can’t wait for school to be done so I can free up more time to actually go out and DO stuff without worrying about deadlines or big projects I have little investment in.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the film class. But thus far, there hasn’t been a project I’ve had my heart set to yet. The first one, the one-shot, was fun, but I wished I could have soloed that because I had a heart attack about us having to do it all last minute because she got sick and I wasn’t informed about it. The second, the soundscape/interview, was probably the one I liked most because it was simple and allowed me to work with sound editing, which I enjoy doing. The third, the class project, I wish we could have gone more in line with the idea I had (about the hokey kung-fu parody with bad puns and goofy subtitles). Instead we did a parody of a murder story, which wasn’t bad in the end, but still not what I was all that interested in doing. Now we’re on the final project, and while I have some idea of things I’d like to do that falls in line with the parameters of the project, none of it is something I ultimately WANT to do. I’d love to do more sketch comedy based stuff, but it doesn’t seem like that falls into what we’re supposed to do, so I guess I’ll have to find something else more usable.

I’m planning on going to Shawn’s (name not changed for promotional reasons) comedy thing tomorrow night at the Yacht club. I usually don’t go because by that time, I’m already exhausted from work and I typically don’t have anyone to go with. But I want to get out and do something aside from being depressed at home. So I’ll just sit in a bar with strangers, not drinking, and just watch some people tell jokes for a little over an hour. Who knows? Maybe I’ll meet someone there where I can make things work out (relationship wise) or maybe I’ll just be ignored entirely and just sit around doing what I essentially intended to do. Or maybe I’ll get run over by a bus before I can make it into the building. A lot can happen. Hopefully the first two over the last one… buses are not fun to be run over by.

Let’s talk more game related stuff today because I like ending with that and it lightens the mood a bit. And I’ll just continue to tack it on at the end so those who aren’t interested can just read the personal bits without having to put up with my nerdy-nonsense. Though I never got feedback from anyone and now I’m wondering exactly who is reading this and why? What interest do you have in what I have to say and why are you being so quiet about it rather than responding and engaging in conversation? Especially since I’ve already said I’d love to get some advice or help figuring this shit out. Or maybe the lot of you are just creepy stalkers biding their time to secretly kill me. Either way, I’d say the lack of response or input from you people is kind of rude… anyway! Games!

April 1, 2013

So one thing I tend to do is start a journal entry and then forget to actually save it (or for you online folks, post it). I end up leaving it open, finding it the next day, and then continuing from where I left off making it a longer entry and possibly covering multiple topics or extending one longer than it should be. This started happening a lot when I started talking and hanging out with Rose and I’m not sure what necessarily started this trend. Either way, now you get a double dose of stuff for the same price. Yay.

For once, the place I hate the most, work, has become the one place I actually end up being in a good mood at, which is probably the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever said. I don’t like the job for a multitude of reasons (which I won’t get into here and now). But yesterday I got to work with Alan and Woody (these names are changed FYI) and not to sell the rest of the people I work with short, but these two just made my day with all the jokes, comic-book hero discussion, and just all-around having a good time with random and pointless conversations. It wasn’t enough to make me forget all the shit that’s been going down, but it certainly made me a smidge less depressed.

And you know what, I really miss that. I miss having a group of people I regularly hang out with to do that kind of stuff with. Back in Des Moines, we had a group of us that would meet, usually once a week, and we’d just spend a night playing games, watching TV/movies, and just messing around doing whatever. When I moved here, it took a while, but met some cool people and we started the same kind of thing again. It was different, but still good. Then that group fell apart for a multitude of reasons and here we are with me not really having that group of friends I can just do that with or talk to about shit I’m going through. I mean, I sort of have that with our podcast, but that’s not really the same now… is it?

So begins April… boy I was hoping this would be a much more uplifting day given that it’s April Fool’s Day and I’m only 370 days away from my 24^th birthday when I’ll proudly post up images from 24 and talk in a mock-Jack-Bauer voice all day. But I’ll just have to settle for 23 in just five days, which is good, I guess, though not nearly as funny. Two more years and I’m legally old enough to rent a car (is that still 25?). For the past month, I was looking forward to this being a fun week of me finishing projects and then headed out to Des Moines to see family, friends, girlfriend, dog, and just have a good time for a weekend. Now it’s become significantly less exciting. Not that getting to see family isn’t fun, but well, you know.

I had a subject I wanted to talk about for today, but on second thought, I’ll hold off on it. I’m not in the best of moods still and I don’t really want to open up that Pandora’s box of negativity at the moment, so I’ll save that for later this week if I remember. What is it? I won’t spoil it because that’s part of the fun.

I will say that future entries will be given fun titles from next entry onwards. Each one will be a reference to a movie, TV show, book, comic, game, joke, or webseries and if you choose to participate, all you have to do is guess what it is and you earn points. Simple as that. This is another one of my ways to encourage feedback and responses from people because, as I previously mentioned, I feel like I’m just writing to a bunch of people who are afraid to type on their keyboard or let their connection to me actually be known. It’s okay guys, it’s the internet. No one is going to judge you for responding the problems of a 23 year old guy who can’t seem to keep his life together for more than a month at a time.

As for a new topic to talk about in the mean time? Again, let’s go back to games for a bit because what the fuck else would be more interesting?

I’ve been accused before of being out of touch when it comes to films, fashion, and music. For the latter two, yeah, I’ll admit to it. I’ve never really cared about clothes because I don’t find them all that interesting and only wear them to serve the purpose of not being nude and breaking certain laws society has constructed (or subjecting people to seeing me nude). As for music, well, I just have odd tastes. I like instrumental stuff over vocals. I like songs that make me laugh because they serve the purpose of being both entertaining and fun. And I like songs that just sound epic. Otherwise, to me, it’s all background sound to fill silence that I only kind of pay attention to.

As for films… please. I may not follow films to the same degree as I do videogames, but I do keep track of upcoming titles (beyond superhero ones) worth looking at (so hype for Pacific Rim). I am aware of who a variety of actors, directors, and even some writers are working behind the scenes. That said, I’m terrible with actresses, but I largely blame how most of the movies I see only cast the same few females or don’t have any major females for me to really pick out. Plus none get the same name repetition as big male names like Johnny Depp or Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr. Just saiyan. So this accusation didn’t sit well with me when it came up.

But what sort of bugged me in this accusation was the lack of the interactive entertainment (videogames), as if the pop-culture relevance of gaming is irrelevant in comparison to the rest of the spectrum of “trends.” Especially when I tend to view games more as interactive art than being simple toys. I follow gaming news on a daily basis. I keep track of some of the bigger names in gaming, know a lot of the developers and publishers (by name, not personally) working on given projects, and I know big issues facing the industry and what kind of things to expect in gaming-trends. There’s a lot more going on in this circle of entertainment in art than most people who don’t follow don’t really give it credit for.

So to prove my point, here’s some stuff about gaming I know that you may not have heard or known about. Just random small bits, nothing too major.

Within the past year, at least three major publishers have either closed down or lost their president/CEO for reasons related to their company not making enough money with their products. THQ was one of these, but that one became obvious when the losses of the uDraw device were made public. Apparently even the hot-commodity that is Saints Row couldn’t even make up for those losses. This resulted in a lot of different IPs being sold off to other publishers and developers, while some (like the Darksiders franchise) were left in the dust… for a while anyway.

EA’s big boss, John Ricetello also stepped down from running his asshole of a corporation. Apparently the studio wasn’t making the profits it wanted and it was considered a failure these past couple years. Ricetello accepted the blame for all of it, like a decent CEO would, and stepped down from running the company. While sales numbers haven’t come out yet for Dead Space 3, I know it has sold quite well, but EA’s board of directors essentially said that it needed to sell at least 5 million copies in order to keep the franchise going. This is ludicrous for series that was once part of a niche genre (horror).

Square Enix’s headhoncho (Yoichi Iwada) also stepped down from his role in the overbloated movies-as-games publisher (you know, Final Fantasy, and that business). What I wasn’t aware of is that they were responsible for publishing not only the recent Hitman Absolution, but also the new Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Human Revolution… and apparently all of these popular titles, despite making millions, failed to meet their “required” marks to satisfy a boardroom of old men who don’t know shit about videogames and market them in all the wrong ways. It’s not a surprise that this kind of stuff has been happening.

This is an issue a lot of publishers like EA and developers under them (like Visceral and Bioware) are facing in that the publishers are pushing for larger budgets to have larger teams of people working on games, enhancing the cutscenes and graphics to levels that are financially pointless, forcing multiplayer into experiences that don’t need multiplayer, shoveling in DRM and calling it a “feature,” and homogenizing games as a whole so they have broader appeal to a larger market than the niche markets they once had some dominance in. In short, these big publishers are trying to do everything, for FEAR that they will lose attention to their competition. We saw this with Capcom’s desperate attempt with Resident Evil 6, a series once known for being proud in silly stories, but a decent horror-vibe being reduced to a generic action game with all the same trappings as any other mainstream action game. And it’s not that these games are bad, but that they aren’t the same special titles they once were. And what’s worse is that for all the money being shoved into these games to get the most out of them, they are not making enough money for the company to make back what they cost.

In short, games are costing more to make because publishers are making costly mistakes. Technology has never made game development more easier, and as console generations last longer, the ease and efficiency of making a game improves, making the development much cheaper (theoretically). Yet when a game can sell 4 million copies and still be called a failure, we see signs of something much more problematic than a bad game piracy. We just have bad business ruining the industry and sending it into stagnation.

Jim Sterling (game journalist/reviewer/commentator) has already made the case that there will be a collapse in the games industry within the near future because companies like EA, Capcom, Activision, Square Enix, and other big names throwing around excessive amounts of money for garbage are making such bad decisions. He sees that this generation in gaming will see a big change and that many big names will fall, change, or be engulfed by something else and it’s up to the gamers to decide with their money how these changes occur. And I agree. Recent bad games getting bad press (or games getting bad press for stupid things attached to them) like SimCity, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Final Fantasy: All the Bravest, Dead Space 3, Resident Evil 6, and a few others have shown that the industry is having issues taking risks and would rather settle for general approval and mediocre appeal than to truly take risk and stand out to be something different.

Wow… that rant went on longer than expected. Um… yeah. Games are awesome. Being single sucks, but I think it’s something I need so I can focus on me for a little while. And I’m thirsty. See ya later.