Friday, May 29, 2009

Chicago's Printers Row Lit Fest 2009

Live in Chicago? Love books? Great news! Next weekend, June 6-7, Chicago will be holding its 2009 Printers Row Lit Fest in the Printers Row neighborhood. This year's festival is particularly star-studded, featuring writers such as Neil Gaiman, Dave Eggers, Charles Baxter, Joe Meno, and Aleksandar Hemon. Unfortunately, and predictably, the tickets (which are free) for the events featuring both Neil Gaiman and Dave Eggers are all sold out as of the writing of this post. If I were a more studious person, I'd be able to tell you that I had had booked the tickets for both of those writers a long time ago, but that's sadly not the case. So while I will be attending the event, I unfortunately won't be seeing either of those authors. At any rate, if you live in Chicago or anywhere near Chicago, be sure to mark these dates in your calendar. It's in a beautiful part of downtown (although to be honest, all of downtown is beautiful), and the actual outdoor book fair portion of the festival -- wall to wall stands of every imaginable type of book and book-related product -- is simply stunning.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Storytelling and Video Games

Yes, the title of this post is correct. I am, for better or for worse, an avid video gamer. While I don't game as much as I used to in previous years (I wasted the better part of my youth on the computer) I do still enjoy a good gaming fix every now and then. Besides the obvious fix generated from blasting baddies and buddies alike, as a storyteller, one of my favorite parts of playing video games is the incredible opportunity to not only spectate and experience fantastic narratives, but to have the chance to participate in them too. One of the huge advantages computer games have over their other media counterparts is their interactivity. Now, instead of reading or watching Superman save Lois Lane for the umpteenth time, you can actually do it. Needless to say, the potential for immersive storytelling in video games is incredibly rich, and experiencing story and plot is nothing like it is in a book or a movie.

Despite all this, the standard for storytelling in video games is still horribly low. A common (and frequently accurate) stereotype is that video games pander to graphical ability, violence, and sex with little to no regard to story or narrative in order to sell copies. If there is a story, it is often a cliched one, the most common being the hero's journey, a tale usually involving a busty female in need of saving from the clutches of a villain by a protagonist of superhero (or superhero-like) ability. But the industry is still relatively immature, and at almost thirty years old, the medium of video games is extremely new and has a long way to go. With this, I present to you my own personal top seven list of outstanding examples of story and storytelling in video games. This is by no means a complete list -- there are many other worthy candidates that I have not played that should grace this list -- but I hope to outline what the video game industry has to offer in terms of not only creating and developing moving narratives, but also forging new ground in what the medium can offer in the realm of interactive storytelling.


7. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995)



Chrono Trigger is an old school Super Nintendo Japanese console RPG. In it you control Crono, a silent protagonist, and his band of adventurers whom you pick up along the way throughout the course of game, a cast which includes a princess tomboy, a robot, an evil wizard, and Glenn, the sword wielding frog, to save the world from a creature named Lavos (a gigantic lava-like oval monster?) by jumping through various periods in time. Hence the time-themed title of the game, Chrono Trigger. If you've never played a video game (especially a Japanese-made console RPG), this may seem all very strange, but for the initiated, it's very much par for the course. And yes, Glenn is the frog displayed on the cover of the game above.

Despite of, and perhaps because of the story's obvious wackiness, there's a certain zeal and charm to Chrono Trigger's world and its characters. For example, in the game's future time period, the land you explore is drab and gray, with little to no human or animal life, instead populated with rocks, steel, and worn down machines. Yet this same world, except in the prehistoric time period, is conversely dominated by jungles of overgrowth and green. Animals are everywhere -- including dinosaurs -- and humans are the minority, struggling to survive in a land where they are prey to nearly everything. Chrono Tigger's ability to immerse you in a half a dozen deep and interesting worlds through its art and design is remarkable.

But what's most unique about Chrono Trigger is that it was one of the first of its kind to feature multiple endings (thirteen). Depending on what you do in the game, and how you did it, what happens when the credits start rolling will be wildly different. While the way you can acquire these different endings are somewhat arbitrary, depending mostly on when you decide to engage the end boss and with which characters, the idea behind "customizing" the way you can experience the close of the story was a remarkable idea for its time. That you deeply care for the characters and their situations made the ending that you finished with all the more important and, interestingly, it encouraged the gamer to play and replay the game to see all the possible endings. This kind of experience is really only something that can be found in the medium of video games, and as we'll see in my later picks, the ability to "choose" and carve out your character's unique story and ending is something that the industry had barely begun to scratch with Chrono Trigger.


6. Grim Fandango (PC, 1998)


Grim Fandango is what you could call one of the last "old school" adventure games, which mushroomed in popularity during the eighties and nineties. A game under the Adventure genre is one typically defined by perspective and action, where the character controlled by the player is on-screen at all times, interacting with the environment and other characters through dialogue and manipulation. An adventure game is rarely violent (by today's standards), and is one part puzzle game, one part movie. Dialogue is perhaps one of the most important features of an adventure game, and one of the unique mechanics the adventure game pioneered for the industry was the invention of the "dialogue tree." When interacting with another character, players are given choices on how they might want to respond or say, and thus makes subsequent choices until the conversation ends. Back in the day, this essentially meant choosing option "A," "B," or "C" to get a slightly emotionally varied, but essentially same informational response from Random Character D, but at the time, this choice typified the kind of freedom a video game offered to players. Want to be serious? Choose the straight-forward dialogue option. Want to be snarky? Tell the character to go suck a lemon. Even though dialogue trees were (and to a certain degree, still are) a very stripped down version of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I really loved the unique opportunity to forward story, dialogue, and character development through non-violent means based on my own choices.

Out of all the adventure games I've played in my life, Grim Fandango is bar none, one of the finest games in terms of story, plot, and character that I've ever played. Grim Fandango takes place in The Land of the Dead, a world, heavily influenced by Mexico's "Day of the Dead" holiday, where recently deceased souls undergo a four year journey to their final resting place, the Ninth Underworld. It's all outlined in the game's starting intro below:



You play Manuel "Manny" Calavera (in the video above) who, through situations in the game, goes on his own four year journey to the Ninth Underworld while trying to save the soul of another character he falls in love with, Mercedes "Meche" Colomar (yes, it's the damsel in distress), and simultaneously foiling the plot of a crime syndicate. If it sounds like the game has heavy film noir influences, you'd be right. The art, the style, the story, and especially the music are all lifted from movies such as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Simply, the game oozes personality with its unique blend of film noir and Mexican-influenced style, from the high-ceilinged and beautiful architecture to the calaca-inspired characters.

What does this have to do with story? Everything. Atmosphere is the video game's long paragraphs of description, music and dialogue its sense of pace and rhythm. A game is nothing without place, art, and style, which Grim Fandango has in the spades, and simply, it's easy to get absorbed in a narrative that provides a ready-made world rich with history. But my hands down favorite aspect of Grim Fandango are the characters and their personalities. The voice acting is Pixar-quality, and every main character -- Manny, Meche, and Glottis (an huge orange demon) -- is a fully fleshed "person." I fell in love with these characters while playing, and when the game ended and the credits started to roll, I felt a kind of loss that's so familiar to me when finishing a great book. I didn't want it to end, having journeyed so long and experiencing so much with Manny and Meche; I wanted to follow with those characters forever, which is, really, all you could ever ask of a great story.


I think I'll stop here. I still have another five games to go, but if I continued, this post would go on forever. Check in later, where I'll wax endlessly about more titles you've probably never heard of!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Goodreads

My previous post got me thinking: all my "What I'm Reading" list really is, is but a stripped down version of what Goodreads offers. What's Goodreads? I'm glad you asked. It's yet another social networking site, but with a literary twist. It focuses on books and the people who read books. Users maintain and update lists of books they've read, want to read ("to-read"), are currently reading, and any other kind of custom list. They can also rate books, write reviews, and comment on other people's book selections, reviews, comments, etc. Personally, I find it's an indispensable resource for keeping track of what I've read, when I've read it, and what I plan to read sometime down the line. On top of that, it's also a great way to generate book discussions with friends (the few that I have who read!).

Want to be my friend on Goodreads? Click here. Happy reading!

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Reading for Fun and Profit

I've ploughed through two books of my reading list for my craft class in the fall so far: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche. With this, I'd like to unveil a fancy right-hand sidebar addition to the blog, the "What I'm Reading" list. Yes, it's a very creative title. But for those of you who are interested, it's a simple listing of what I'm currently reading. Right now, it's Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction by David Jauss, a craft book on fiction.

As for the other two books I've finished, "Then We Came to the End" and "Shining at the Bottom of the Sea," I'm glad to say they were both great reads. The Stephen Marche book is less my kind of reading material, as I quickly came to realize it was more metafiction than anything else. "Shining at the Bottom of the Sea" is an anthology of works derived from a made up country (Sanjania) and its culture. Craft-wise, it's a pretty brilliant book. Marche creates a whole population with its own customs, practices, value systems, dialects, and histories from the bottom up. Reading through the anthology of short stories, I really came to appreciate the breadth of Marche's writing prowess; he manages to write over a dozen stories, "authored" by over a dozen different writers, all of which have their own unique voices and stylistic tics. It's both amazing and intimidating.

However, for all of Marche's technical virtuosity, I found myself fundamentally enjoying Ferris' "Then We Came to the End" on a much more viseral level. Everyone reads for different purposes. Myself, I read to be moved, to laugh, to cry. Metafiction, unfortunately, does not do this for me. Joshua Ferris' book does. Written entirely in first person plural, "Then We Came to the End" follows an advertising agency office struggling to stay afloat during a time of layoffs and economic troubles. At first, I was dubious about the subject matter of the book; I didn't think I would care very much about the travails of a group of affluent upper-middle class people, but I was pleasantly surprised that the book became much more than that. Suffice to say, it manages to be a very emotionally satisfying read. Also, what's extraordinary about Ferris' book is that it, too, is technically remarkable -- writing a story that is almost entirely in first person plural ("we" and "our") is amazing. The fact is, a story such as this could have never been written without the first person plural point of view. The narrator, the "we" and "our," is an additional character, representing the crowd, with the kind of group think that occurs in an office of people whose backgrounds are all socioeconomically and culturally very similar. This group think is an important character, as they act and think as one, often with the maturity level of children, which leads to some very ridiculous decisions and situations, some of them more serious than others.

I can't even begin to imagine how Ferris managed to develop this voice, though I suspect it came from years and years of writing and rewriting. But that's an obvious answer, right? At any rate, I'm very glad to have finished two books on my list already. I'll be sure to share the remaining book titles as I tackle them in the weeks ahead.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Work, etc.

How busy has your summer been so far? If it has been anything like mine, then the answer would probably be "very." Yet as early as a month ago, I was patting myself on the back for a job well done applying to all those schools last fall, thinking I'd take it easy over the summer, maybe read a few books, write a lot, and relax. Nope.

Not if you want to hit the ground running in your first year of grad school. Relatively speaking, of course. All the preparation in the world can't replace actually going to grad school. But you can do is prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. And preparing for the worst, I've found, is a lot of work. This summer, I have to:
  • Move from one city to another.
  • Write -- New, sparkly stories that will validate my program's confidence in me!
  • Read -- Read what, you may ask? A ton of stuff:
    • My professors' works.
    • Works for my upcoming craft class.
    • Textbooks for my TAship.
    • Anything else that I would normally read for fun. A low priority, considering what's listed above.
  • Prepare for my TAship.
The above list may look small. Innocent, even. But it is by no means easy. For example, for the last bullet point, I emailed the TA Director a few days ago, asking for some guidance on teaching preparation for the fall, and happily, he provided me with a great deal of information, of which were: two textbooks (Did you know that you can get those suckers for free if you contact the publishers and let them know you're teaching that class? Free stuff rules.), a syllabus, and some journal readings on topics that I'll be expected to teach. The reading, while not exactly tiny stuff, isn't what scares me about teaching, though. I don't mind work. It's the act of teaching, the whole getting up in front of twenty or so students, and talking for fifty minutes, three times a week. How in the heck do you prepare for that? The syllabus provides some structure in this respect. As will the week-long orientation for all teaching assistants before school starts. In fact, I'm fairly confident in the University's ability to prepare their students to teach come fall, yet the simple fact is that all the preparation in the world cannot replace the knowledge gained from actually experiencing something. I'm not scared of the prospect of teaching (okay, maybe I am just a little; I despise public speaking), I'm really more looking forward to the day where I don't have to consciously worry about it.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Amazon's Kindle

Check it, the new Kindle DX. Discalimer: I do not represent or am affiliated with Amazon in any way. I am, however, a humongous technophile and a reading geek. So, you can imagine how great this new Kindle is to me. In addition to holding thousands of pounds of books in a light, easy to carry little tablet, the thing also supports magazines, textbooks, and newspapers, all downloadable at your fingertips. Hooray for an alternative financial model for the dying newspapers! It also supports PDF files, and has nifty graphics in black and white. No color, but I imagine that it'll be something that Amazon will be unveiling sometime down the road.

Now. Let's be honest. At $489, this item is not cheap. And if you want your New York Times or subscription to The Atlantic or any books at all, those are all additional fees on top of the extraordinarily expensive Kindle. Older versions will cost you about $350, which is (relatively) reasonable, but honestly, what writer (unless you're Stephen King) has that kind of change to spare? What's intriguing about the whole concept of downloadable content and media (in book and text form) is the way it could potentially change the way books are consumed and read. An electronic version of a book, one that can be bought and downloaded in the matter of minutes, anywhere, very much supports the kind of impulsive and "on-demand" buying pattern that the Internet currently feeds for things like video games and software. Want it? Have a credit card? It's yours, right now. A good thing for books, I think, if they are advertised and supported properly. At the same time, the electronic format (and the linked Wall Street Journal article above touches on this) also promotes a different type of reading pattern that a good old fashioned piece of paper does not. It makes reading more fractious, promotes skimming rather than an attention to detail. You can see it in the way media online is currently consumed. When was the last time you've read something you were only half interested in line by line in an online article? My reading habits and strategies massively shift depending on what medium it is in. Online, I tend to read more quickly, skimming articles, websites, and pages for key phrases and nuggets. When I find something that interests me, or that requires deeper attention, do I finally stop and give a deeper reading. Otherwise, if it doesn't attract me, I pass it over, and ignore it. This, I imagine, will be exacerbated with cheap, on-demand e-media. If a book -- bought relatively cheaply -- is easily gotten, easily downloaded, and easily loaded, how much attention will it be given if it doesn't grab a reader from the first page? The first paragraph? Easily gotten, also easily abandoned and forgotten. I've always considered buying books from the store as entering into a kind of agreement: no matter how long it takes me to get to the book or how long to read, I'll eventually finish it. More than it being 10-15 dollars in price, a physical book is a kind of reminder, sitting on your desk or bookshelf or whatever, until you go and read it, where it then transforms into a different kind of reminder, a reminder of how good (or bad) your memories of that book were everytime you see it. An e-book cannot do this. An e-book, if you don't like it, can be closed and filed away electronically. It disappears, and there is no physical reminder of your book, unless you actively go and look for it again in the file menu.

Some interesting things to think about -- both bad and good. Even though I believe the physical format will never go out of style, I do think the electronic format is the future. Just look at the music industry.