rant

A videogame movie.

Disclaimer I have not seen the movie, and probably never will, but I am into video games, and I thought this was interesting:

The new york times has two different reviews of this movie, and to my surprise they are complete opposites. The first one, by A. O. Scott, even designates this movie a “critic’s pick.” The second one, by Seth Schiesel, describes how he could barely get through this movie.

How can this be? Simple – the first person is a film critic, the second a video game reviewer. (I suspect age might have something to do with it as well.)

For the film critic, this movie does an excellent job of bringing to life the repetitive mindless button mashing point acquiring primal stupidity addictive feel of early video games. Back when there was no story, just the joy of being the best button masher. If you tried long and hard enough, (and had enough quarters) eventually you would win and get the girl. For him the movie does an excellent job of representing this feeling.

For the video game review writer, that sentiment is exactly what video games have been striving to get away from for years. Nowadays, video games are the ones that are very likely to be cinematic, and so story driven as to rival and greatly surpass many a cookie cutter movie offering. Today’s video games are often interactive, immersive, engaging stories that might pull you into their word more readily and more deeply than any movie ever has. With that in mind any movie that represents video games as the button mashing of yore is a slap in the face. It’s hard not to get a chip on your shoulder when you’re working in an industry that is trying to get recognition as a viable artistic medium and is constantly being compared to film.

Who to believe? Depends on which camp you’re in I guess. For me it was interesting to see opposite reviews in the New York Times, I had no idea this movie would be so divisive.

(Image: on Flickr – Photo Sharing!, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from antiparticle’s photostream)

I was just reading this, you should too:
New York Observer – The Bullshit Artists
http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/bullshit-artists

My thoughts on “BS Artists”:
Laurie Anderson once said “People say, ‘C’mon, just say what you mean,’ which to me seems like such a bizarre thing to say. I’ve always felt that if I could say it, I would just write it down on a piece of paper and stand on the street corner and hand it out.”

I don’t deny the fact that there is a lot of bullshitting going on in the art world, but I think the reasons for it are more complicated than just lazy, greedy or stupid artists. Sure, some of it, maybe even a lot, can be attributed to these factors. But, I think a lot of it is also due to the fact that in order to be competitive as an artist, you are often forced to create sound-bites for your art.

Often times if your art is any good, it will cause confusion, be hard to explain, perhaps hard to even put into words. After all, as Anderson’s quote states, if the best way to express your ideas had been words to begin with, than you probably would have just written them. You would have pursued being a novelist or a poet! Instead here you are expressing yourself in your chosen medium, you finally figured out a way to communicate something that is not necessarily easily expressed through words and the first thing that happens is that someone comes along and asks “Tell me, what does it mean? What is this about?”

And so you struggle, eventually you build up a repertoire of interesting sound-bites that either satisfy or serve to further obfuscate your meaning. But at least the person asking you has something they can use to tell their friends or to market you. I’m not saying there doesn’t have to be vigorous intellectual thought and practice behind a work of art, and a lot of art especially conceptual art, truly is about a specific highly intellectual pursuit that can only be explained using big words that to the untrained ear sound suspiciously like BS but a lot of art can also simply be about aesthetics and beauty.

A sculpture might be a highly intellectual exploration of nothing more than the shape and the space it occupies, or an exploration of orangeness. Point being, the aesthetic aspects of an artwork may sometimes be the very inexpressable thing the artist is exploring. Thus they may be at a disadvantage when their dealer or gallery needs a soundbite, especially if their work is not backed by a solid intellectual and historical foundation.

i.e. the 40-30-30 rule:

On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.

I’ve never heard of it before, but it makes sense, and can be applied anywhere. Read the full article, but the take away is to embrace risk and go for it, push yourself beyond your comfort zone.

(via thedonutproject)

SpongeBob SquarePants is celebrating 10 years of being on the air! Original pilot aired in the US on May 1, 1999 and the “official” series premiere followed on July 17, 1999. The show is translated into 25 languages and airs in 170 countries! Go SpongeBob!

The title of this one page website might be a little bit deceiving, for me the focus is not really typography, and the execution is so simple some may take it as nothing at all, but it really is an experiment (I love those), a test of an idea with a surprisingly engaging outcome.

“While this may not be the most practical layout on earth, it does illustrate some ideas worth mentioning. By keeping areas of content hidden until they are needed it can make a website look much cleaner. It also makes extensive use of navigation within a page (instead of between pages). I think both of these ideas should be used a lot more in web design.” – Matthew James Taylor

Try it here and read the rest of the author’s thoughts here.

Love it so much you need to follow every instance of the word being uttered on twitter?
Then Helveti-Tweet is for you!

I miss the animaniacs. I think I’ll go add them to my netflix list right now.

When will major businesses learn that design matters? Recently we saw how Tropicana lost 20% of it’s sales with a simple redesign of it’s packaging, well, here is an opposite story. With really good design Jacek Utko was able to increase circulation of his newspaper by as much as 100% in some places. This is a pretty inspiring TED talk.

Getting pretty excited about these new Simpsons stamps coming out in May! You can pre-order now, there is even a fancy “Framed Art” version (pictured above), and you can vote for your favorite Simpsons character too! I guess occasionally some (semi-private) government agencies can get it right!

Last night, I attended another NYPL Live event. The evening was, once again, stimulating and a good way to learn some new things about the world. Thomas Friedman was in conversation with Nandan Nilekani. Who is Nilekani? I didn’t know either, but after the evening was over I was surprised that I was so ignorant before.

For one, Nilekani is the one who gave Friedman the idea for the title of his book, The World is Flat. For another, he is someone who came from modest beginnings to being a founder of a huge multinational corporation, and a personal net worth of over 1.3 billion. A great American success story if I ever heard one, except all of this took place in India, and the company is headquartered there. I think Nandan may be something of national hero there because of this.

Maybe it’s just PR but I was surprised by how honest Nilekani was about what it takes to run a business in the 21st century, especially in light of the recent global economic and climatic changes. For example, he was very clear that companies can no longer afford to do business with the kind of disregard for the environment, that companies in the west, had up till now. He has many ideas on how to make India competitive in today’s world. He seems very pragmatic and he doesn’t overlook India’s many problems but is instead very aware of them, and seems to have solutions for them.

We should all pay attention because, as John Stewart said while interviewing Nilekani on the Daily Show, India will probably be our new overlord soon.

some interesting facts from the evening:

• india has one sixth of the worlds population, about 1.15 billion people
• infosys, nulakani’s company, gets 1.5 million job applications a year
• there are only about 25,000 positions
• India has more cellphones than the US has people
• India is very diverse religiously but these religions are able to generally coexist peacefully.
  Nilekani hopes India can become a role model for other countries in this regard.
• a demographic dividend is a good thing, India has one right now
• global climate summits are essentially unfair for developing countries like India, because developed countries got to reap the benefits of not worrying about polluting and now they want to share responsibilities in the repercussions