VR Craze

Excitement is building up again in the community, as Occulus Rift is appearing, project Morpheus was announced and somehow Microsoft will bud in. It is this new, hyper modern technology, called VR that seems to set the tone of our new expectations of this age. And why not? There has always been this dream of being part of the game instead of being just the external controller…

…or is it?

Many opinions have been circulating around these notions and some ha e been expectant, others quite skeptical. To be part of this discussion, I have listened to these opinions and tried to find some neutral ground on this. Thus I will first analyze the two main camps on this new technology, then move on to some more current perspectives, to then analyze: is this VR and this helmet really for the gaming of the future? So, let us break this down first:

1. The con: this has been tried!

We already had these tries before. The great fail was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, which not only tried to make VR a reality, but also portable. If you watch AVGN’s review of this though, the flaws were incredible. The pain-inducing red even made watching the review unbearable, and the sheer impractical design just made a generation wait one more day.

This was clearly due to poor technology. Back then VR was a dream of Tron and other Sci-Fi movies, and I feel Nintendo and other companies just rushed to look novel. Some people thus predict it will crash and burn again, not only because of the technology, but because of the practicality; now gaming will require you to wear a helmet for this deeper experience, making a fun afternoon in an adventure, instead of sitting down to relax. I can understand if some people will be against it.

Also, it is being called out as a gimmick, such as the 3D effect in current TVs and the 3DS. While it may be nice, many people end up turning off the effect, since the hassle or just the sickness makes the experience suffer. Development costs will try to create effective and enjoyable titles, but this effect may soon wear off, some reckon.

2. Tomorrow is today: the pros.

On the other hand many people could argue that these problems, especially the dizzy feeling, will subside with more use in time. And this could be true, since the jump to 3D gaming had a similar issue. Today only a few still suffer from ‘motion sickness’, and this is due to the people not getting used to it. A similar effect had happened with the first movie: people ran terrified when they first saw a grainy, black & white train charging towards them. Today, we are barely affected by the grandeur of the Hollywood blockbusters.

Also, the technology is definitely better. Although not totally ripened out, motion control has had a big impact on the market, and 20 years ago we could only dream of that. As an example we have the Power Glove, again from Nintendo, that was terribly inaccurate and difficult to use.

The people just get giddy with the idea of finally participating inside the game, which can revolutionize the way we play games. It has been already called the new way of carrying on the console war. And it definitely is an experiment worth trying.

3. I am too fat to play games.

A comedian (I can not remember who) already said that once when the Wii was released. The idea was to create a new way of approaching games, more proactive and participative instead of sitting passively in the couch. The thing is, it never caught on. Let us analyze it by the results. Even though the motion controls have been around us for years, the preferred method is still sitting down. I remember when Zelda’s Twilight Princess had the option to swing the sword or to just use the controller. My friends just sat down. Even I had to get a Game Cube controller to make my experience with said game more enjoyable. The fact is: most people that play games with a regularity different than for party purposes or the casual fun time usually prefer to sit down, taking the second set of controls.

Second is the space issue. Motion gaming failed also because you had to create a space to be able to play. Even I had trouble playing with a Wii when I had to move the sofa and the living room table to be able to play. Now, this may not seem to be an issue to play a game in VR, since for now it is only a visor, but I have already heard the discussion on how to make the game more real, many times portrayed with the treadmill base, as well as other extras that are not only space consuming, but also seemingly very expensive, no matter how much you mass produce it. Even this little joke by College Humor shows how problematic can an apparatus as complicated as the projected VR future be (not safe for work!).

Not only that, it will require much more movement than before. I can not imagine a person preparing himself half an hour to be connected to the apparatus to enjoy a game, especially after a hard day of work. This would be too complicated and not only obese people would suffer it, but also people on the wheelchair and with other kind of capacity problems. This makes gaming thus less playable, or at least less practical form even more public.

The we have to take into account the labels. Have you seen the labels on a 3DS box? Here, let me quote it:

WARNING Viewing of 3D images by children 6 and under may cause vision damage.

Now, I am trying to be an alarmist, but the fact that we have such a label already tells us that the perception of a developing mind is actually affected by the staring at the 3D screens. I can’t imagine what perception issues the VR visor could cause to children, something that remains to be seen. I really hope for it to be harmless, no more than the occasional epilepsy thing, but then again, this new, untested ground.

I see VR as a reality, but not as a game. If we ever get to that exciting technology, I see it most probably as an experience, much of the like of laser gun fights that existed before, or as Paintball nowadays. Another area it could be perfectly used is for training, a thing that happens today with all the flight simulators.

What do I make of this newest craze? I think it will be fun for a while, and sadly some of the production costs will be sunk in games based on the system. But at the end, when the phone rings or the cat topples over the decorations, you will have to learn to play without the new gimmick. The charm of games, especially console gaming, is in its capacity to immerse yourself in a world as quick as you can turn off the machine, to enjoy 10 minutes to hours of game play and being able to drop the game for a quick toilet break, going for popcorn or just a glass of water. The VR will stay a nice extra to gaming, but I don’t think it will replace the experience, since its impracticalities are just too many, and if you don’t see it now, wait until the experience happens. And much like motion control, it will fade for the more practical way, which seems old, but is even today functional.

We may love and buy in into the new technology, but in the end of the day, when the helmet/visor rests heavy on our head, we will remove it and take the controller like always in our hands, enjoying what we have always done: relaxing on the sofa or on the floor and enjoying the virtual world on a screen.

Unless I am wrong.

Nai ainur raituvar tietyannë!

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Zelda and Meta-History

I love The Legend of Zelda. I may not have played each one of its iterations, I may not have completed them all 100%. But every time I have a second on my busy life, I just play them. I enjoy the mechanics, the bosses and sometimes even the silly stories. Heck, I even bought a 2DS just to play the most recent title, A Link Between Worlds.

How has it fared for me? In my opinion it was fantastic. In some friends’ opinion it was just a “meh”. But here I am a bit more biased, not because of my fandom, since my friends are fans too, but due to my attention to the story. Because the designers, inadvertently or not, have included an interesting facet into the game mechanics.

I once complained about the fact that in many sequels, the super powered player by some unexplained chance had become dwarfed, losing all the items he had at disposition, as well as power-ups and other neat stuff. In TLoZ this was often avoided by creating so called “sequels” where the hero was a reborn form of some ancestor. Thus a loophole was averted effectively. Not a big one, but a nitpick nonetheless.

When I heard that LBW was a sequel to probably the best Zelda ever, I was a bit dubious about how it would work out. But the world was familiar, but different, which I took much enjoyment in.

There was the issue of the items, which were technically all at disposition since the beginning of the game. Many found that a bit off putting, but for me it was a great stroke of genius. It was not the game mechanic that fascinated me here, but the “meta-history” behind this concept.

But what is meta history? Unlike meta story, which is technically a secondary story that runs in the background of a game to set the tone and the mood of the general game, meta-history refers to the history that runs from one sequel to another, as in how the change across the years/decades/centuries run by in the fictional game world or even the history that affects how we can relate to the game/work of fiction. There are many examples of this in fiction.

Let’s take, for example Tolkien’s books to explain the concept. The Hobbit as we know it today is not the original version. The 1937 edition told the chapter of “Riddles in the Dark” totally different: Gollum offered the Ring as a gift and, upon discovering that Bilbo already had it, offered him to guide him out of the mountain. When the author took the time to make the sequel, he had to create link to the Lord of the Rings. He decided to make the Ring that link and rewrote the story to match, more or less, the moods.

How did he excuse this change? He simply determined that the first version was old corrupted Bilbo’s point of view. Frodo wrote the second, more “correct”, version after the events of Lord of the Rings. That Red Book was taken to Gondor, while Bilbo’s Red Book stayed safely in Rivendell.  In other words, there were two versions in different libraries, and all Tolkien did was translate those books, discovering two points of view on the same story, as it happens with many historic events. Thus we have now two editions, the old one being Bilbo’s book and the new one being Frodo’s.

This is a prime example of meta-history. When there was something that contradicted in the editions of the books, instead of accepting it as a mistake, the author invented a historical reason within the framework of his fictitious world for the apparent mistake, integrating them thus in a much more creative evolution of the books and giving them a fake history.

How does the new Zelda accomplish this? The Hyrule we play at in LBW is the same as the one in Link to the Past. This means that the previous Link, who lived centuries ago, had already looted the dungeons, thus rendering them empty of legendary artifacts. The fact that Ravio has all the items in his possession could thus mean (this is purely conjectural) that he bought them all from collectors or found them in ancient graves and other places outside the dungeons. Granted, some objects, like the blue suit, are still in dungeons, but they are in another dimension, which does not contradict the idea of the emptied dungeons.

In other words, there is a historic reason for the new mechanic. I don’t know if the designers at Nintendo did it on purpose, but the mere idea that the treasure was now obtainable without the need to enter a dungeon was incredible. I liked the game because of this. Now all I had to do was to rent/buy the items from a greedy salesman and I felt there had been really a previous Link who had taken out all treasures and inherited (or maybe even sold) them to other people.

This is a minor detail in the grand total of a great game, but definitely one that gives more life to the fictional world provided. This again shifted the whole idea on how you approach dungeons, making thus Dark Hyrule even more open ended, since we did not need to scavenge for the treasure anymore.

Now that specific Hyrule had an history, and now the sequel felt even more like one. It is just that little detail, the meta-historic detail, that gives us a deeper world to explore and imagine – had this particular thing been on purpose or not.

May they smile upon your way!

Tolkien, the Movie Critic

Alassë aurë to all!

Today’s topic is about movies. To be exact, a question I asked myself after analyzing the ever so popular Lord of the Rings movies. Before entering this discussion let me just remind me the basic idea of this post.

Movies are a visual medium, in other words, the moving pictures have a different perspective compared to a novel. This means that the presenting of a story will always differ if you compare it to a book. First off we have the time limitations. In printing, you have the space you need to explain something. In film, the minutes have to be reduced, since we can hardly expect the public to remain entertained for over 24 hours for one movie. The eternal conflict (which is usually resolved with the comment “I like the books better”) is thus a needles one. When Peter Jackson started the project, I was very clear that the plot of both mediums would only be similar, thus not the same. In my personal opinion, the movies are extremely well done and maybe the only point I really criticise is the treatment of Faramir and his relationship with the Ring.

While reading the letters of Tolkien, though, I found a very interesting note on how the author corrected the screenplay of a previous, animated version that was planned during his lifetime. The criticism of the adaptation was quite fierce. Then I came to think: “What would Tolkien have thought of the newer adaptation?” I know the answer may be not a sure one, but from what I read in this letter, I found some interesting hints on the way he visualized his book being brought to film.

A clarification is needed though. Even as I read the letter, I was not sure if he really understood the medium. His comment “the cannons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different” (letter 210) does show to me that he was not able to see that seeing the story was totally different from reading it. I can not be totally sure about it, since such a view is debatable, but then again I have the feeling that he was not very sure, as a great literate person, on how he could make a movie attractive enough for a public.

On the question of his liking of the movie, I think he would have squirmed a bit when seeing Jackson’s screenplay. I will base this mainly on three facts that we can see on the movies:

1. Aragorn in Weathertop. During the rather long criticism of the screenplay, Tolkien focuses specially on the scene of Weathertop, initiating his first complaint with: “Strider does not ‘Whip out a sword’ in this book. Naturally not: his sword was broken.” This may seem like a minor complaint to many, but the idea of the re-forging the sword to start the Journey of Becoming a King was a quite clear way for the author to mark the first changes of the Third Age to the Fourth one.
   In the movie the sequence is changed. Here we find that Andruil is but reforged until the moment he is going to enter the Path of the Dead, in the place he stops doubting himself and starts finally his ascension to the throne of Gondor. Thus we have two different periods of rise for Aragorn.
   For Tolkien though, Weathertop was never a fight. This scene was meant to be brooding, with a terrible consequence to the group of hobbits. Simply said “The riders draw slowly in on foot in darkness […]. There is no fight.” This leads us to the next point;
2. “[…] showing a preference for fights”. Here Jackson would draw most of the fault in Tolkien’s eyes. How many battles do we have in the movies? There is one (necessary for me) representing the last alliance, albeit short, one against Wargs (which, in my eyes, seems a bit unnecessary, but tries to increase the drama of a ‘lost’ character), multiple warscenes in Osgiliath, plus two big battles that appear in the book. For the author, though, it was much more a matter of ambience. He even claims in the letter that, if a battle had to be eliminated, it would have to be the Hornburg, since “there would be this additional gain that we are going to have a big battle (of which as much should be made as possible), but battles tend to be too similar; the big one [Pelennor Fields] would gain by having no competitor.”
   Would the three movies have been more interesting by eliminating the fights? We have to consider that the movies were made in Hollywood-style, which means the spectacular had to prevail. Many changes were made to adapt the films into this format. As a counter example we have the first Hobbit movie, in which the character development has had a heavy influence. Although a nice touch, it seems like it made the movie even more boring to the general public, which poses a problem for me. How many fights more will the next Hobbit movies need to remain as interesting as The Lord of the Rings did? I am not sure if Tolkien’s idea would have worked, but his argument makes sense… if you think it as a book.
3. Finally we have Saruman’s death, which was not represented at all in the normal movies but had a strange turn in the extended ones. Here Tolkien states that “Z[immerman] has cut out the end of the book, including Saruman’s proper death. In that case I can see no good reason for making him die.” This one may be a little bit more difficult to work with, since the last scene, the rebellion in the Shire, seems like quite an extension for the movies and I can see why it was not included. Also, I have to point out that his death in the extended editions was not quite satisfactory and even too spectacular. First, Legolas got a new thing to brag about and second, the whole idea of the wheel seemed quite unnecessary. Who knows how Tolkien would have taken this business, but I suspect he would have had none of it.

All the points I mentioned do not make the movie bad. It is just a little thought experiment on what the original author might have disliked if he had ever been faced with this. In general the director made a very good interpretation, even though he never maintained the proper dialogues to the proper situations and characters (as he mentioned he wanted in the letter). Still, telling a story as huge as The Lord of the Rings in less than twelve hours was a challenge and, for the most part, well done.

Tolkien himself would have criticised it. But then again, he was a person who loved books, language and writing, making him not so prepared to understand movies as a whole and the way they should tell a story. Also, the new CGI and other effects we can now put into a movie has made the experience of seeing fantasy stories much easier than over 50 years ago. I thus would prefer people to separate the movie from the books. The story, although similar, is totally different. If one wants the complete experience, he would have to read the book, but who reads as much today as we did in the past?

Nai Ainur raituvar tiëtyanne!

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For further reading:

Carpenter, Humphrey [ed.], The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, New York, Houghton Mifflin