I art when I video game all the time

A friend from college lured Girlfriend and me into Washington D.C. proper, where we ducked into the Smithsonian American Art Museum to look at the Art of Video Games exhibit. Why, yes, we are nerds.

Without being too harsh, it was not what we had hoped for. It partly came down to a grammatical quirk. I had wanted to see art from video games, perhaps concept art, stills, and things of that nature. What I got was more an exhibit explaining how video games could be art themselves. So, you see, it was something like picking up The Art of War expecting it to contain reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry and Guernica. Something like, but not exactly.

The problem really was that we were well ahead of the exhibit. We needed no convincing that video games were legitimately art, in the same sense that movies are. The question of whether video games deserve to be in a museum is like the question of whether a cheetah deserves to be in a zoo. It's not a matter of classification or merit. Onla a small subset of art is best experienced in a museum.

You'll hear no complaints from me if you assert that video games have narrative, evocative, salutary potential. The booklet accompanying the exhibit, according to Girlfriend (who read it), was a bit breathless about this, praising the medium's achievements with a convert's zeal.

Anyway, we weren't the intended audience, really. In this (and perhaps only this) we were more sophisticated than the mainstream museum crowd. I would have liked to see a room full of stills from Myst, instead of a large cabinet where it could be played, accompanied by a paragraph on how immersive it was.

It was a nice, nostalgic afternoon, though, of the sort I am likely to miss this year when other people go to PAX. And this is not to say that I didn't see or learn anything new. I had not known, for example, that Doom 2 was the first game to employ a "game engine." Girlfriend also pointed out the unusual number of major installments in video game history that are #2 in a series.

Speaking of the narrative potential of video games, though, I've been sucked back into Dwarf Fortress with the last few batches of updates, and more of a story has come of it than I had expected. Though it's not completed, I will share it with you.

My fortress had a vampire. Some dwarves were waking up mysteriously pale, and one was found dead in his room, completely drained of blood. So the search was on.

It was the mayor. I found out by accident that he had come to the fortress under a pseudonym. Examining his history revealed a suspiciously long list of previous residences. Most damning, he couldn't remember the last time he had drunk alcohol, which in a fortress that was practically afloat in booze, was almost proof positive that he had developed an unnatural thirst.

This was dismaying. Here was a mayor who had made himself more useful than mayors usually do. He had come to my attention by single-handedly striking down a rampaging minotaur. Nonetheless, he had to be removed. I convicted him of the murder of the dead dwarf. He was sentenced to 200 days in prison.

Here's where things get tricky. One, in Dwarf Fortress your control over the dwarves is tenuous. I could not, for example, set the mayor's sentence; that was up to the sheriff. Two, you can't just off a dwarf, generally. I couldn't sic the militia on him, but clearly the justice system wasn't going to handle him either.

I spent his jail term building a deathtrap: a mechanical series of glass spikes operated by a lever which I could order the mayor to pull. Unfortunately, when his sentence was up, the mayor didn't get straight to lever-pulling. In fact, his first act as a free dwarf was to chow down on the sheriff. Then, perhaps as an apértif, he helped himself to the fortress's most distinguished chef. This deed, at least, had witnesses. Then he proceeded to my deathtrap. Which, it became apparent, didn't work. It was a simple design error; he stood too close to the lever and the spikes didn't reach him.

At least he was occupied for the time being, diligently pulling the lever back and forth. It gave me the chance to lock him in the room, but I couldn't just keep him there. As the most charismatic dwarf in the fortress, he kept getting re-elected mayor, garnering support, I suppose, by whispering through the keyhole.

We were onto Plan C. I had the dwarves cut a hole in the ceiling directly above the vampire nee mayor, and then ordered them to fill the room with water.

I should have figured that dwarfpires don't drown. There was nothing for it; I had to let him out so the sheriff could arrest him again. The effect of opening a closet completely full of water was about what you would expect.

Justice, which had been Plan A, was now plan D as well. For the mayor's two additional murders, one of which had ten witnesses, he was sentenced to... 400 days in prison. Of course.

So I needed a Plan E. When he was tied securely in his jail cell, I removed the door and built a ballista in the jail cell opposite, so I could fire giant crossbow bolts directly at him. I had my siege engineer sharpen logs for the purpose, figuring that if a 300-pound wooden stake wouldn't fix my vampire problem, nothing would.

I hope that was wrong, because after five wooden ballista arrows, fired at a space of perhaps 15 feet, the vampire is thoroughly bruised and not much else. And that's where I stand now. I'm hoping that copper arrowheads will have more effect, because I'm running out of options.

The Middle.

Gripes and birdsong

The little finger of my right hand has been a study in scarlet, so to speak, this weekend. I'm learning about anatomy. Which is good because Thursday's judo class wasn't all that rewarding otherwise.

Apparently a finger can dislocate and relocate all at once, or at least so quickly that by the time you turn you head to see what the popping sound was, it's where it ought to be again, looking all innocent. (And by "relocated" I mean to its original position; my finger didn't migrate.)

Anyway, ow. My finger is close to the size and color of its opposite again, but I wouldn't mind if it could hurry up again. It makes it hard to grab things or type. Also, the "p" on my keyboard is being troublesome, so that when I write "paper" it tends to come out "aer" and so on.

Oh, what a world, what a world.

Entirely unrelatedly, I have half a mind to try JulNoWriMo--that is, NaNoWriMo in July. It would be exciting and/or foolish because I have absolutely no idea what I would write. One advantage/disadvantage is that it would require me to finish off the story I'm writing now by the end of the month. That would be a good thing to do if I could anyway. So, as you can see, I really am ambivalent.

Yesterday morning I was in Philadelphia, awoken by an intriguing bird. It was cycling from song to song not unlike a car alarm, and it just kept going. I understand that some birds advertise for mates by showing off their extensive musical repertoire. If birds really go for that than this one must have been neck-deep in ladies. He went through what seemed like easily 100 songs.

I got to thinking about whether there were trends or memes in the world of birds. It reminded me of the internet, with people gathering and disgorging vast numbers of words and phrases stripped of context. I'm not sure it increases the odds of mating in humans, but we do it anyway.

This particular bird stuck to bird songs, but I do remember the mockingbird that picked up my mother's alarm clock and things of that nature. I was reminded of the impressive Superb Lyrebird, who adopts his songs indiscriminately. This one, for example, that picked up the sounds of construction at the zoo.

Birds don't understand us or what we do, as a general rule, but apparently they think some of our noises are cool enough to repeat. Is it all one to them, or do they know that human sounds are different from the other songs they pick up? Are these bird memes? Do birds repeat people noises because they're nonsensical to them? Do they think we're hilarious?

The metaconflict: Artist vs. plot

Back in college my friend tried to get me into Evil Dead. I wasn't impressed. Besides the fact that I didn't (and still don't) like horror movies, Evil Dead just didn't seem very good. My friend tried to impress on me that there was another story going on: that a bunch of film students without much in the way of equipment or experience went into the woods and made a whole movie, with plot and editing and makeup and a script and everything.

I didn't see that story, even though I see how he did. I didn't have the interest in the mechanics of film as such to analyze how or if they were done. Besides, I figured, the story of "someone made this thing" necessarily underpins basically everything.

Lately I've noticed myself paying attention to that "someone made this thing" narrative, though, and today I remembered Evil Dead.

If you watch my blog's sidebar (and I don't really know why you would) you've seen that I've been working my way through The X-Files. Girlfriend and I have been watching it in large gulps, almost always while one or both of us are working. As a long-running show, it had its good episodes and its bad episodes, but we noticed an odd and very unscientific correlation: the better written an episode was, the more likely that characters would survive and the problem would actually be resolved. Some weeks, it seemed, the writers stumped themselves completely with whatever terror they had thought up.

Of course, every writer faces this problem to some extent, but most of the time not coming up with a smart solution meant shoehorning in a dumb solution. The structure of The X-Files had the advantage (drawing, maybe, from the horror branch of its genealogy) that failure was an option. The entire supporting cast of an episode could die without upsetting the status quo. There was no guarantee that Mulder and Scully would solve the mystery, either. If the writers wrote themselves into a corner, they didn't necessarily have to write themselves out again.

Sometimes, when an episode didn't seem brilliantly written, Girlfriend and I would start watching the other story--the one about television writers on a deadline trying to think up a solution to their premise in time to save the supporting cast. They won some; they lost some.

I only recently realized how often I do this, though.

Yesterday Girlfriend and I got to see the Folger Shakespeare Theater's production of The Taming of the Shrew (on the very last day, no less). I didn't have any particular need to see The Taming of the Shrew as such, but well-produced Shakespeare is often worth the trouble. We were particularly interested in how they would "handle" it, because there's so much in the play that, taken at face value, is offensive or even disturbing to modern sensibilities. So we went out fully expecting a sort of gladiatorial theater: Folger Theater vs. The Taming of the Shrew; a fight to the finish, perhaps even to the death.

I'm glad to report that both combatants survived. However, there was no clear winner. The theater's strategy was bare-fisted; rather than cut the play deeply they tried to pin it down by laying interpretations on top of it. Two choices in particular were, in retrospect, like breaths of fresh air.

First, a lot hung Petruchio's sincerely exasperated and regretful delivery of "He that knows better how to tame a shrew, now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew."

Second, after the scene where Petruchio denies Kate a a hat and dress, they added a dialogue-less scene in which Kate, alone, discovers that Petruchio has given her an even better dress (well, really a nice duster and a pair of pants, since the whole thing was western-themed). As a rule, I dislike such brazen insertions, but in this case I'll concede that it was welcome.

I'm not sure there's any way around Kate's speech at the end, though. Ultimately we and Shakespeare's audience just have different ideas of what constitutes a happy ending; we have different conceptions of the natural state that needs to be restored. To the first audience, that Kate was unequivocally submissive was an unequivocal good. Petruchio's responsibility, they might have said, was to be a fair and loving master, not to share power. Try as we might to find an ambiguity to hang our own ideas on, Shakespeare didn't give us one. Because ambiguity is a flaw in a happy ending. So, because our ideas have changed, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew is unambiguously uncomfortable.