"Auteurs" and Collaboration

Name-checking one of my all-time favorite movies is a sure way to get me to read your article. Teaching me something new about it and using to brilliantly distill a very important argument is icing on a particularly contentious cake.

For instance, on North by Northwest, a classic Cary Grant thriller, Hitchcock insisted on working with Ernest Lehman, a screenwriter best known for Sabrina. It was, at first glance, a peculiar choice: Sabrina was a romantic comedy, and Hitchcock had been hired to create a dark suspense movie. But Hitchcock knew what he was doing. In fact, he gave Lehman a tremendous amount of creative freedom. (Hitchcock’s only requirement was that the plot contain three elements: a case of mistaken identity, the United Nations building and a chase scene across the face of Mt. Rushmore.)

Turns out, everything truly brilliant about North by Northwest's script--the banter, the plot twists, the bottomlessly complex characters--grew not from Hitch the auteur, but from his unconventional choice of collaborators and the fertile negative spaces between the bones of his almost imperceptible outline.

(via ClickNothing)

F&#k the Average [Player]

From a 2007 interview by one of my favorite storytellers, Nick Hornby, with David Simon (creator of The Wire):

David Simon: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

This is henceforth the epigram to chapter one of my internal how-to-write-for-games manifesto. It's all about the exposition, baby! Or, more to the point, slaughtering all of it in the crib and cleverly squirreling off the rest in the environment.

For the record, chapter 2 of my game writing guide is (courtesy @DoctorSpooky) this awe-inspiring counter-example:

Gearbox? Dead to Me.

I'm not one to get worked up about this stuff (the Duke Nukem 3D shooting strippers to turn them into cash dustup was absurd) and I genuinely enjoyed DN3D back in the day. But, this, from Ars Technica's review of Duke Nukem Forever made me furious.

And that's before you come to the really offensive bits. Just in case you didn't feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)

The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.

Update: I apologize for the confusion, as was pointed out in the comments if you wait long enough they explode due to the aliens growing inside them. You may now mock me for getting out my gun to try to escape the game just a little bit quicker.

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

Shame on you, Gearbox.

How is it that not one single, solitary Gearbox employee stood up to say "No, I won't have my name on this and I won't work for a company that does" and walk out? If there are any, there's been no public report of it.

Gearbox, I hope this funds years of development of your original IP and dozens of luminous, great games...that I will never...fucking...buy.

Shame on you.

Update on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 7:52AM by Greg

Post corrected to fix mis-attribution to Wired rather than Ars Technica. Apologies to Ars and the author, Ben Kuchera.

Motal Kombat, Why Do You Taunt Me?

For the record, I may be the world's worst Mortal Kombat player. And yet...and YET...I'm having to fend off the urge to buy the upcoming back-to-its-roots version.

And these kinda cool live action, independently produced shorts aren't helping my self control any.

Also...Tahmoh!

Sony's designing actual curricula around Little Big Planet 2

Yes, yes, yes!!!