Girl Meets Geekdom

Movie title: Reality Bites Starring: Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn, Ben Stiller Directed by: Ben Stiller Written by: Helen Childress Genre: Drama, Romance, Comedy Year: 1994

Maybe it’s just that I’m approaching that post collegiate angst period of life, but there is something in Reality Bites that is very real and revealing about stepping into the world for the first time. In my depressive “what to do with the rest of my life” state, Reality Bites has been something to ponder, to relate to, and simply to enjoy.

Reality Bites is an angst-ridden glimpse of life after college for 4 Generation X-ers. Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder) is a woman with her own ideals and big dreams to become a documentary filmmaker. She gets her first taste of post-collegiate life when she takes a job at a TV station and moves into an apartment with her college roommate Vickie (Janeane Garofalo). Soon they are joined by another college friend, Troy (Ethan Hawke), a man who chose not to graduate college in favor of his philosophical views on society and has been in love with her for some time. Lelaina shows antagonism towards Troy from the start, and ultimately ends up in a relationship with Troy’s opposite–a yuppie TV exec, Michael played by Ben Stiller. Ultimately, this story deals with characters facing bleak realities that come with idealism, love, and career.

The interesting thing is that the characters are not necessarily likeable, but they grow on you as you watch them slowly let go of the adolescent ideals of their identity. Strangely enough, the film is uplifting despite a depressing subject nature. There’s no wrong or right, and the film is structured in such a way that you can still relate to the characters without necessarily agreeing with them, yet they belong to a unique generation. The film is accompanied by a great soundtrack that carries you through a glimpse of the 90’s.

In General:
B+ Movie
B+ Performance
B+ Script
A+ Music
A- Love Story

Sony has just released the Monster House Trailer, which has me bouncing off the walls with excitement. Why, you ask? Monster House happens to be the film that I got to work on as an intern at Sony Imageworks two summers ago.
The film is directed by Hollywood newcomer Gil Kenan, and produced by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. It utilizes the same “performance capture” technology as Polar Express, but the movement is a little more natural. For one thing, they did have kids act out the kids roles so there is none of that scaling down Tom Hanks business, plus I beleive the animations have more freedom
I saw the animatic for this film in the early stages of production, and the familiarity of the trailer amazes me. I guess that goes to show how much planning goes into a CG film. Anyway, I highly encourage everyone to see the movie when it comes out. If you subscribe to my blog, you can count on me to give you regular reminders!

While we are on the topic of emotion in video games, I figured I’d share my opinions on what makes Final Fantasy the #1 emotion evoker of all games. There are a lot of reason, but the biggest element, I would have to say, is linear story. A lot of game designers seem to frown upon linear storylines in general, arguing that it defeats the purpose of player control in gameplay. Of course one should focus on gameplay as the core of a video game, but let’s get over the no-duh statements and take it to the next level. Otherwise it would be like making movies with your entire focus on FOVs, f-stops, and film speeds.

Linear Story does NOT Mean Linear Gameplay
Critics tend to argue that linear stories limit gameplay, which maybe true to some extent, but less than you would imagine. For one thing, a linear story operates on a progression the way most games have levels. Even in a game like Tetris, you have to pass level 1 to get to level 2, which is really the basis of a linear progression. Generally, you can wrap non-linear gameplay around a linear story by allowing the player to customize characters, allowing the player to explore the world freely, filling the world with mini-games and sidequests, etc. Games like Bethesda’s new Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and consequently the entire Elder Scrolls series, champions the non-linear RPG, but at the core of their game is still a fundamentally linear story. It’s certainly different from games like Final Fantasy, but the principal of the linear story is still there.

Not being able to choose has its advantages
Not being able to choose your character’s path is only a negative if the designer fails to use it to the game’s advantage. I remember one instance in beginning of Final Fantasy VIII, where the anti-hero, Seifer, disobeys orders and leaves his post and heads to a place of rumored danger, forcing you to follow. At that point, I was not too drawn to the game and found it annoying to have to follow even though I had selected not to when prompted. Sure, this is a frustration, and maybe viewed as the pitfall of linearity, but think of the set up. This follows a very cinematic model—one character has entered a place you know you shouldn’t be. You know something bad is going to happen. In film, you have no choice but to enter that space with the character and whatever happens to the character is out of your control. In video games, you are forced down that path, but cannot take the passive viewing approach. Think about the apprehension you feel when watching a horror movie, when you know that the main character is headed for danger, now put the control of that character in your hands—the stakes go up.

Linear Stories Allow for Better Characters
The best part of a linear story lies in the potential of creating dynamic characters. Linearity permits a character to change as a result to the games events. Moreover, linear structure raises the stakes for each character because the things you do can potentially change the character—you might not have control over the ultimate outcome, but it feels that you do. When Aeris died in FFVII, many people spent hours figuring out ways to bring her back, wondering if there was some way in which she could stay alive. Linear stories ultimately allow for characters to react to scripted events and to have that reaction carry through the rest of the game. When Aeris died, Cloud will never be the same again. By contrast, a character like James Bond–in either the games or movies, starts and ends practically the same, no matter what happens. Sure, they might be sad, confused, or profoundly affected by a lover’s death, but you know that when the sequel comes, it’ll be as if it never happened. Dynamic characters is a fundamental reason why games like Final Fantasy can evoke emotions—they are able to develop characters, then use the game events to change them fundamentally. These changes are what evoke emotions like love, sympathy, and pity.

Final Words
Despite my belief in the potential of linear stories in games, I do have one piece of warning: If you are going to force me down the dangerous path to rescue the princess, I better have a damn good reason why. Linear stories have the potential for what I described above, but they don’t inherently carry it. A good linear story is harder than it sounds, but that is a different discussion altogether…

Today I got all excited about Gravatars and downloaded a fancy plugin from the WP Plugins DB and proceeded to activate my plugin hoping to soon see pretty little pictures next to the comments in my posts. To my dismay, this did not happen. It was not some magical plug in as I had hoped. I had to go to the downloader’s site to insert a massive if statement in the foreach loop of my comment block.

So, I figured, fine, I’m not afraid of code. So I inserted it, edited my stylesheet and even created a little icon for those “gravatarless” individuals. To my dismay, this resulted in everyone being “gravatarless.” Needless to say, I was frustrated. In order to install this fancy plugin, I had to drop in a gravatar folder containing default images as well as a rather large .php file. I opened it up to find that there was actually a lot of code in there and automatically assumed that it’s probably not something I could dissect in a few hours. So I proceeded to the Gravatar website to figure out if they had any solutions.

What I found there was shocking. So this thing that apparently required a plug in consisting of a folder and a .php file with a LOT of functions is really something that can be done in as many lines of code as I had to add to my comments.php file. Even LESS if I wanted the gravatars to always link back to the gravatar website. No plugins required.

So for those of you who use WordPress and are too lazy to install the plugin here’s the simplest form of the code:


<img src=" http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=
  <?php echo md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default); ?>” alt=”" />


That code displays just the image. Of course I use a much more complicated code to generate the links and default image:


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) :
$default=””;
if (” != get_comment_author_url()) {
   echo “<a href=’$comment->comment_author_url’
title=’Visit $comment->comment_author’>”;
} else {
   echo “<a href=’http://www.gravatar.com’
title=’Create your own gravatar at gravatar.com!’>”;
}
echo “<img src=’”;
if (” == $comment->comment_type) {
  echo “http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”
  .md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default);
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) ||
  (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
  echo gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
}
echo “‘ alt=” class=’gravatar’ width=’80′ height=’80′ /></a>”; ?>


Just enter in the full path of your default image where it says $default = “” and replace the


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) ?>


Anyway…I figured if you can accomplish it in the same amount of code in your .php file, why the hell do you need a plugin with a lot of functions to do it for you?

Alias has a new Fake or Foto quiz out. For those of you not familiar, Alias provides 10 images of which half are photographs and the other half are CG and asks you to identify which one is which. Try it out. I got 5 out of 10.