Oh, Not Funny When It's You

So, some time ago, Star Wars Kinect was released for the XBox360, and it was met with what could charitably be described as mixed feelings, with most of the negative feelings strangely centered on a rhythm and dance portion of the game wherein much-beloved characters dance in well-known locales to popular songs made into parodies by a slight tweaking of key lyrics. "Princess in a battle" instead of "genie in a bottle" is one example.
As to why this has many fans outraged, there's no official answer, but if one were to be culled from the general consensus of the gaming community, it's that Star Wars Kinect is an officially licensed Lucasfilm product. In other words, Star Wars fans can make fun of their beloved franchise to their heart's content, but heaven forbid the people behind it have a sense of humor as well.
I could get into the psycho-socio-cultural underpinnings of this phenomenon, but The Escapist's MovieBob already did, and in reading his analysis, I remembered something from my own childhood that perfectly exemplifies the situation.

It was really hard for me to make friends after I moved to New Mexico in 1991. There's a lot of reasons for this I won't go into, but probably the most important one was that my sense of humor didn't gel with everyone else's. I understand that friends take digs at each other, call each other names, and even play mean little tricks on each other. Really, I get it; it's part of the trust, it's something you can do because of the comfort zone. The thing is, where I saw it as being "part" of the whole "friendship" paradigm, some people saw it as "the whole" and that struck me as just downright conceited. I kid you not when I say that I actually lost a really good friend because I told him to stop calling me a certain name because it genuinely bothered me. For years afterward, I thought there was something wrong with me because I just couldn't take a joke, I couldn't separate "laughing with" from "laughing at." Years later, I got a second opinion. The good news is that there wasn't really anything wrong with me, that sometimes people were just jerks. The bad news is that the number of jerks turned out to be higher than I'd thought.
My 7th grade history class had some class clowns in it. Trouble was, it was a de facto role as they weren't very good at it, as most of their jokes relied on me to be their punchline, whether I wanted to be or not. How exactly they made fun of me or laughed at me or generally had fun at my expense varied and changed almost daily. For about two or three days, though, the fixation was on the fact that I was the only boy in the class who wore glasses. Right away, I thought, "they're really desperate for a laugh." Seriously, the last months 7th grade, a year between us and high school, and I felt like I was living out an uninspired episode of Full House.
Anyway, we were all doing some sort of art project that I don't remember any details of, except that we'd have to stop about five minutes before the bell so we could all go wash up in the bathrooms. So, here's the scenario: everyone walks a little faster than me so they can get there first. When I step in, everyone turns away from the sinks and starts flicking their hands at me so water beads on my glasses, carrying on until I literally can't see and have to take them off to wipe them clean, and the process repeats when I put them back on until I get out of the bathroom, my hair wet enough that I can slick it back.

This goes on for two days. I don't get angry. I don't lash out. I don't confront anybody about it. I don't say a word.  I just stand there and seethe quietly to myself, because it's the seventh bloody grade, we're in our early teens, and flicking water at my glasses to where I can't see is the funniest damn thing in the world to these guys. On the third day, I figure that maybe I'm taking this too seriously, that I'm not having fun with the whole thing. So, I decide to give this "laughing with you" idea a shot. Again, everyone walks a little faster than me to get to the bathroom first. Before I step in, though, I take my glasses off and put them in my pocket. I make sure not to squint, because that would just give them something to laugh about. I walk in, knowing what's going to happen next, and I'm smiling. It's not a toothy, ear-to-ear grin, it's more like a Mona Lisa, at the risk of sounding pretentious. The funny thing is, I'd never felt more confident in my life at that moment. The sad thing is, no one else found it funny, made apparent when they turned away from the sinks with hands at the ready.

Awkward silence.

I'd see some turn away from the sink and watch a smile disappear almost like someone flipped a switch. Instead of knowing nods, playful shrugs, or even indifference, I saw, despite the blur, frowns and eye rolls. I hadn't gotten in on the joke, I'd ruined it. I'd ruined it by not ignoring them or getting angry or annoyed or anything like that. I'd ruined it by wanting in on it and playing along. They weren't making fun of me to be friendly or chummy, they were making fun of me because they were that desperate for a laugh. How dare I, apparently.

Maybe I should have grabbed a fire extinguisher before going in instead.

QuikTek

I mentioned Twitter last time, and writing about how I appreciated its versatility made me remember something. The first weblog I ever had was on Yahoo!360. I knew well of (and hated) MySpace, but hadn't heard of Facebook. I always preferred 360 to MySpace because it seemed that 360, by virtue of being a Yahoo! service, attracted a wider and more eclectic audience, whereas MySpace was almost exclusively a teen phenomenon. Call it ageism or technophobia, but it's probably safe to assume that more people have an e-mail address than a MySpace account, therefore that older and/or less tech-savvy generation still "ooh"-ing and "ah"-ing over Electronic Mail will be more likely to start up a weblog if that service is offered as part of the "packaged deal" that came with their e-mail account as opposed to seeking out an external, self-contained site that requires separate registration. In other words, on Y!360, you got more people who would probably not have otherwise started a weblog because they wouldn't want to leave their comfort zone.

Yahoo!360 is gone now, crushed underfoot by practically every other social networking site in existence, the key problem being a few unresolved technical issues (which led to my friend Vanessa tragically losing her entire account), the others being a deliberate dismantling by Yahoo! in light of a proposed buy-out of Facebook and an attempt by Yahoo! to make the networking tools of 360 a more integrated part of one's Yahoo! profile. I've archived those entries to a site called Multiply, a rather shameless MySpace knock-off. I won't link them here; they're not much to look at. Most of them recount my obsessions over my own personal pet peeve about 360 in light of other weblog sites like Multiply or Blogger, which was mobile-friendliness. I prided myself on "breaking the system" by using my PSP's built-in web-browser and wi-fi to write entries in clear defiance of desktops. It probably went a little too far; every time I got a new device, my readers would know it, evidenced by my "Hey, guess what I'm writing this on!" style of entry.

There was something I don't think I ever said on 360 and I think I never said it because I wasn't actually sure how well it would translate to text, so here goes:

The very best thing about 360 is that WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT, COMING FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, ALL OVER THE WORLD, and yet, at the end of the day, we're all just sitting at home in front of our computers, talking to one another.

the very worst thing about 360 is that we're all different, coming from all walks of life, all over the world, and yet, at the end of the day, WE'RE ALL JUST SITTING AT HOME IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

The point is, while I may have been seemingly singing the praises of Twitter last entry, my adoration is almost entirely conceptual; the first social networking site made with mobile networks distinctly in mind. By its very nature, it encourages people to go out into the world and not feel tethered to their undoubtedly uncomfortable desk chairs in front of their undoubtedly cluttered and cumbersome desks upon which rest their undoubtedly ghastly laptops and monolithic desktops.

To crib a saying by filmmaker Jean Cocteau: Weblogs will never truly achieve anything until they can be taken to all the same places ordinary notebooks and pens can go.

Twitter was a good start.

Tumblr appears to be the next step.

Evernote is the long stride between them.

Weblogs, V-logs, A-logs?

this is reposted from my Gamespot weblog. I decided to post it here as well for two reasons: 1)It involves a weblog I found here on Blogger and 2)The topic actually harkens back to an entry I wrote all the way back on Yahoo!360 (archived on Multiply), where the awesome phenomena of Cryptomnesia struck me and caused me to re-discover podcasts (which I called "A-Logs" in my ignorance of the obvious).

I have my PSP.

I still have my PS2.

There's also my roommate's Gamecube and the XBox a friend of mine gave me.

The only next-gen console I have is my roommate's Wii, to which I've contributed over half the games.

Suffice to say, I'm a little behind.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Wii, but I'm not totally in love with the motion control scheme (though I can't wait to play Dead Space: Extraction). At the end of the day, I'm all about kicking back on the couch with a controller in my lap, an experience the Wii makes me feel guilty for indulging in, especially considering most of the games I play the most on it are available for other consoles like the XBox360.

My present financial situation prevents me from buying an XBox360 (The only thing that makes me interested in the PS3 are Linger in Shadow, The Last Guardian, and Valkyria Chronicles... and that last one's getting a sequel for PSP anyway). There's a shortlist of games I'd want for 360, but the more I find out about them, the less inclined I am to make that wanting justify indulging myself. It's not that I find the games disappointing (not in each case, at least) but I definitely look upon this new generation of game consoles and think, "what am I really missing out on?"

The worst part of the answer I get, really, is that what I'm missing out on isn't even all that innovative. In fact, it's incredibly primitive to such a point that I've experienced them before in PC games, Myst and Marathon to be precise. To be more precise, the "missing element" I'm referring to are audiologs. In Myst, they took the form of little holograms or pieces of correspondence left on desks or bookshelves. In Marathon, they took the form of the on-screen text of the computer terminals scattered throughout each level. Similarly, Final Fantasy X-2 had you gathering spheres, which showed little video clips of bygone times and places. Metal Gear Solid had Snake's video briefings (which made me fall in video static and grainy video images in a way I didn't think was possible). Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has you cataloging various alien species you encounter and collecting logbooks and journals from past explorers long since passed on, survived only by their... er, echoes.

Some time ago, on The Escapist, I thought I'd started the perfect forum thread: "What was your first gadget?" I shared my first gadget to get the ball rolling, an RCA microcassette recorder. I did all the typical things that kids do with tape recorders: sing silly songs, do interviews or impressions, divulge thoughts and rants, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't start at least one recording with "Captain's log, stardate..." and so on. Anyway, time went on, my little handheld studio faded from memory, and I ended up giving it to my parents to help them get some recordings for a little legal trouble they were having. Suddenly, a few years ago, I was in a computer store when I suddenly started to miss my little RCA and found myself buying a Sony IC Recorder (ICD-P320). Now, I've got a small collection of digital voice recorders, at least five. I keep them scattered about and in different pockets of different jackets. I use them for everything and anything imaginable from grocery lists to driving directions to rough drafts of stories that float around in my head.

More recently, after the release of Bioshock, and all its subsequent discussions and reminisces of System Shock, made me aware of these funny little things called Audiologs. I'd never heard this term before, even though the items themselves have existed since the beginning of gaming, right down to the books on library shelves in any a number of RPGs. At first, I thought it was just referring to audio recordings. Under that narrow definition, the only past-gen experience I'd had with the things were the various audio cassettes scattered about the house in Fatal Frame. Of course, now I've learned that audiolog need not refer specifically to audio recordings, though those do seem the most interesting, the most recent to fully develop, and, in a way, the easiest to produce. Obviously, written text is the easiest in technical terms, but given that CD-ROM technology got its start back in the early 1990s, it's surprising that only a scant few games released in that era (namely System Shock) employed audio recordings as part of the game's atmosphere. Sure, Myst had sound-based puzzles, but they didn't aid the narrative backstory in any way.

Audiologs also seem like they'd just be flat out fun to make. They don't need to be long, they can be fragmented, and they needn't even be of the highest fidelity as, even in the far future, crackly static gives that extra added layer of authenticity to the game's atmosphere.

Although my forum thread didn't get many replies, The Escapist did lead me to an article written by Graeme Virtue, who I found out is the author (and principal actor) of a series of "sketches" for the One Life Left podcast, entitled "Science Officer Logs." Taking a cue from Dave Hollins, Space Cadet (the Son of Cliche radio sketches by Red Dwarf's Rob Grant and Doug Naylor), the Science Officer's Logs parody not only the concept of an audiolog, but also several gaming conventions, from ice and lava levels, to even damned escort missions. They can be found here.

In addition to that, I've just spent the past few minutes watching YouTube videos of people collecting the audiologs from Halo: ODST. I stopped out of guilt, thinking, "No, no, I should play the game, or at least own it before I go cheating like this."

So, here I am, an audiolog junky with no real way to satisfy my habit. I really hope I can afford an XBox 360 soon.