Developer Commentaries

A few years ago I discovered a developer commentary of my favourite videogame of all time, and found it absolutely fascinating (as well as decently entertaining). To see the design decisions behind elements of the game that I’d never even considered twice opened up a whole new perspective, and has only added to my enjoyment since.

Around a year or so ago I obtained the complete series boxset of Futurama, one of my favourite animated shows, and honestly have since regarded it as more of a collector’s item than a usable product, considering its easy availability on TV and other platforms. I was happy to know that I owned the series and had paid the creators back for all the years of laughter, but never saw much point in owning the content. I have, however, found real value in the developer commentary audio language selection, and am currently having a great time re-watching episodes and hearing more about the creative process as well as the original ideas for the episodes, some unexpected challenges in creating them and some snippets of what was going on behind the scenes.

And, well… it turns out that that’s about all I have to say on developer commentaries. Go listen to ’em, you might find them interesting. Other than that, I guess I leave you with that. Sorry for the 2 paragraph blog post. In all honesty, I’ve been sitting on this for a few days and nothing much has come out. I guess my brain wants to take a week off!

The Movie as a Limited Form of Narrative

Note: The second half of this blog post uses the new Netflix Original series ‘Stranger Things’ as a point of discussion, but reveals no spoilers or plot points.

I’m not a big movie guy. Name a classic movie that everybody’s seen, chances are, I haven’t seen it. And after we get done with the ten straight minutes of “So you’ve never seen [x]?!”, I’m just about ready to stop talking about movies altogether rather than justify my reasoning. But here it is: I think TV series do it better.

Well, ‘TV series’ is getting to be an outdated term, what with the increasing number of shows releasing directly to and exclusively on streaming services such as Netflix. And sure, there are some stories which suit a movie better than being stretched out over a series. But the downside of cinema is that you’re highly restricted by the length which your movie is allowed to air for, so as to get the optimum amount of showings in the theater per day. This often constricts narrative cohesion, with most movies having plenty of cut footage. There is no movie that I can think of where there hasn’t been at least one scene that should have been explored in greater depth, or one plot point that feels somewhat convoluted in order to get the rest of the movie rolling. Much of the time, it’ll feel like we’ve barely become acquainted with a set of characters before we’re meant to be fearing for their lives, or rooting for their romantic interests, or whatever the subject of the movie is about.

‘TV Series’, on the other hand, have more than enough room for character development and a fully fleshed out plot. Often, of course, this leads to the opposite problem, with many series having ‘filler’ episodes (see: Breaking Bad’s fly episode), some plot points being redundant (see: Orphan Black S2E8) and the pace of the overarching narrative feeling a little too slow (see: The Flash, Season 1). But nothing is perfect; these are all good shows (in my opinion) and I’d much rather have something with a few redundancies that still makes sense, than something which is cut together and barely retains its narrative thread.

Fun fact: It is for almost the exact same reasons as I mentioned above that I thought season 8 of Doctor Who was just pants. They decided to do a series of non-linked, standalone episodes and almost every single one of them felt rushed and constricted.

Stranger Things just released on Netflix, and is what finally prompted me to write this blog post which has been brewing in the back of my mind for the better part of a year. Stranger Things has eight episodes, all of which were released at the same time, as many Netflix Originals now do. However, I believe that there was more of a solid reason behind why the Duffer Brothers released them this way (if it was in fact their decision). At the end of my viewing I felt that I’d watched an eight hour movie as opposed to a TV series, and lo and behold, when I looked this up, many others felt the same way. The Duffer Brothers stated that they envisioned it as an eight hour movie themselves, so kudos to them for achieving their desired effect.

I’m not a specialist in writing for screen. We had a few modules about it on my Creative Writing course (which I just found out I achieved a 2:1 in, go me!), but we didn’t delve too deeply into the overall craft of making a screenplay, and therefore I’m no expert on what the narrative difference between a movie and a TV series is besides quantity, and basing your structure around that. This eight-hour movie concept, then, is an abstract one to me, as there must have been a reason as to why I pegged it as more of a movie narrative myself. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that the series is more of a self-contained story (which may or may not have an ambiguous ending or some loose ends, I leave that for your viewing discovery), whereas most TV series are written with narrative threads for future series in place.

All I know is this: It proves my point about the limitations of standardised screen times for movies. In eight hours, there was enough time for character development, emotional exploration, side-characters that felt real, suspense that lasted long enough, and a plot that wasn’t in a rush to get to the end. And yet, when I review it in my head, it doesn’t feel like it stretched out at all; nor does it feel like a TV series. I remember it like it was an hour and a half movie… just a real, damn good one. Of course, you wouldn’t sit in a movie theater for eight hours straight watching ‘Stranger Things’, and I won’t deny that the movie-going experience is an enjoyable social occasion that I’d hate to lose. But maybe it’s time for us to stop restricting ourselves to the current forms of narrative we perceive as absolutes, and step into unknown territories such as eight hour movie-series hybrids.

Democracy in Action

By Wednesday evening, Theresa May will be sitting in Number 10 as Prime Minister, and that’s frankly mollifying to somebody who not only votes against Tories, but also is typically given the opportunity to vote in the first place. Given her previous voting history, it’s clear that she’s against pretty much every progressional movement of the last twenty years, and whilst we’ve yet to see what she’s like as PM, I think I speak for many more people than myself when I say that we don’t particularly want to find out.

The fact that Theresa May has been chosen, not elected to lead the country speaks volumes about our stance regarding democracy as a country, and to those who will immediately raise the issue of Gordon Brown being an unelected leader, I say that, well, I was freshly twelve at the time and understandably wasn’t taking much notice of politics. And besides, calling out one bad PM to justify another doesn’t really constitute a strong argument, in my books.

I like to believe that Larry speaks for us all.

As for David Cameron, I always believed that when he resigned, it would be a day of elation, but as a certain character who’s name I forget in the Matrix once said… not like this. David Cameron may be an utter pillock (my own views, of course), but he was an utter pillock who ushered in same-sex marriage, and whether that was a political stunt or a legitimate interest of his, it yielded a pleasant result. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t spend my entire life studying the achievements and disgraces of politicians like some over, more professionally political oriented blogs and people might do, but I get the general impression that Theresa May is far more of a bad cookie than David Cameron. And if there’s one thing I cannot forgive, it’s somebody spoiling a cookie to make a political point.

In all seriousness, though, the lack of say that the general public has had regarding the appointing of Theresa May as Prime Minister is simply appalling. Sure, it’s how it’s been done in the past, but the past falls further and further into obscurity and outdated values with each passing year, and we are encouraged to learn from our mistakes rather than repeat them. Some will say that Theresa’s appointment is still part of a democratic philosophy, because of the idea that you could ask your local Tory MP to vote for the leader that you want, as the vote was strictly among MP’s. But that is a wholly less official and reliable system than public polling, as these MP’s mostly have their own agendas and are most likely to ignore the concerns of the public, because they, of course, know better. And when all of this is brought up, they get around the matter by saying that MP’s always have the exclusive right to vote for their party leader.

Sure. So appoint her party leader, and then hold a general election. Theresa May herself has already stated that there will be ‘no general election’, likely due to the already unstable nature of the country (source), but for all I know that could be an easy excuse to secure her seat in power. Before we know it, Larry the Downing Street Cat might be strung up as an example for all male cats who chase other male cats.We might be going to war more easily, seeing more nationalisation, what have you. But maybe those are just the panicked ramblings of an uneasy left-winger.

I’m not done yet, though. On the topic of going to war more easily – remember the vote on Syrian airstrikes? I detest that big, country-affecting decisions like this are made exclusively by MP’s. This follows the aforementioned philosophy of the public going to their local MP and asking for them to vote in a particular direction, and I refer to my aforementioned argument against this. I’m aware that it would be impractical to hold a country-wide referendum for every decision made by Parliament, but I personally believe that many, many more of the important decisions should be put to the public, if not as a percentage of the overall vote, then as a mandatory point of discussion within Parliament before a decision is made. The current system is antiquated, and allows for the richer few to control the poorer many in manners sometimes reminiscent of dictatorship.

(Side-note: I’m trying to make my politically charged blog posts less angry and more pleasant to read. I hope this comes as a welcome change.)

Disconnected

Thanks to Chipzel, whenever I hear the word ‘disconnected’ I hear a pleasing arrangement of bleeps and bloops. Seemed appropriate to throw that song out there before we began.

So we wake up on Saturday morning to find that our BT Hub has decided to stop working. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that BT’s customer service is just so remarkably excellent that we’re not getting our internet back until an engineer comes out tomorrow, through no fault of our own. As somebody who lives much of their life through the net, this comes as a bit of a starvation period, though mobile data and the eventual discovery of a public BT hotspot I can (barely) connect to has softened the isolation somewhat. It’s also an interesting chance to cut out all of the noise of online life, though, and as such I present to you what I’ll hereby name:

Life Without WiFi

Now with 50% more fancy typesetting!

So it goes without saying that my 3DS immediately became much more relevant to my daily life. Since I bought it a couple of years ago, it has sat mostly neglected on my counter apart from when I’m travelling or have bought a new game on it. One of the first things I did when I realised what sort of purgatorial disconnected hell I was to be living in (okay, slight exaggeration) was to jump back in to my Animal Crossing town and poke the villagers and tell them I’m alive. My favourite thing about New Leaf is that by choosing the beautiful town ordinance, your town no longer becomes overgrown with weeds if you leave for a month; it instead blossoms with flowers. I’m so manly.

I’ve also decided to try and rebuild my Animal Crossing town in Minecraft, 1:1. It’s somewhat difficult to determine just what constitutes a tile, so it may not be perfect, and building entire house exteriors in 3×3 is going to be tough, but I’m having fun so far.

No to get too much into my gaming habits (for we have a separate blog for that), but I also booted Steam into offline mode and continued my once-abandoned playthrough of Oblivion. I graduated into Skyrim way before I’d given Oblivion the attention it deserved, and now that I’ve almost 100% completed Skyrim (one achievement left!) I’m able to go back and play Oblivion with a clear head. Plus, with the new mouse I’ve picked up since then, I can map my favourite spells to be equipped from a mere finger movement away, which far improves my enjoyment in Cyrodiil. But enough about gaming.

My two favourite times of the day are lunchtime, and going to sleep. I like going to sleep because I curl up with a book (or an issue of Spider-Man) and read to my heart’s content. For lunch, I always try to watch something while I eat, be it Youtube or Netflix, and hey, I just like food. With the internet out of the picture, though, I’ve had to resort to drastic measures to retain my food-and-watch paradise, and found myself in a great dilemma before I remembered I owned the Complete Series (old series, no rebooted stuff) of Futurama on DVD which I was given a birthday or two ago. I’m going through the entire series, now. I plan on watching the developer commentaries, too, if they’re any good; I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

I’ve been reading outside of my typical night-time niche, too. Having been after World of Warcraft books on the cheap since finishing the novel Illidan, I was lucky enough to find many on sale for Kindle, for £1 each, and had the foresight to download them all on the day of purchase in case something like my current situation happened. I finished Arthas the other day (which was £5, but hey, I wanted it) and absolutely loved it. I’m currently starting on Stormrage.

I have, of course, been doing things besides staying cooped up in my house and whinging about the lack of internet. Any whinging in this post has been exaggeration for (hopefully) comedic effect. I’d have written about something political and used big angry words to try and sound smart, but without internet I’ve not been keeping up with the news much… and besides, this country’s politics is beyond saving with simple complaint, it would seem.