Games are starting to get interesting. Despite some recent criticism (the bad kind, not the argumentative kind) on behalf of writers such as Steven Johnson (whose book Everything Bad is Good for You gets games just completely wrong, despite arguing that they may not be, after all, completely bad for you), video games are beginning to find ways to tell singular narratives that only function effectively in a video game. Hideo Kojima wants his Metal Gear Solid series to be a cinematic experiences, but in trying to make his games filmic, he sacrifices some of their, to use a pretty clumsy noun, gameness.

I have an unabashed love for BioShock. Even though the final boss was completely lame, and even though I felt like the narrative peaked about three-quarters through the game, what that game did with narrative and player agency is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a video game. The story plays with the core concept of a video game–meaning, that the player, more or less, must do a series of tasks in a sequence to accomplish the ultimate goal of the game. Meaning that, to accomplish to goal, to progress in the game, the player really has no choice but to play the game. A man chooses, a slave obeys, as goes Andrew Ryan’s Randian dogma. But, in games, as much as current developers proselytize about the necessity of player choice, really, the player has already chosen to act through the events of the game. BioShock plays with that very foundational concept, and the narrative payoff is incredible.

Other games are finding different ways of telling stories. I’ve been playing this nifty little iPhone game called Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. In summary, you play as a spider who can construct webs across various domestic levels to trap insects of various kinds that have infested an abandoned house. And on that level, the game is perfectly serviceable and enjoyable. But the backgrounds themselves, the levels across which the player is guiding the spider, tell the macabre story of what happened to the Bryce family, and why this house now stands empty. For instance, the spider may crawl over a wicker basket, only to fall in and discover a bloody chisel resting hidden at the bottom. What happened with that chisel? Those questions and the environmental answers make up the passive narrative of the game. It’s really well done.

Consumable narratives have long been the purview of films and books; games are just now beginning to catch up, evolving past the kill-fest point-a-thons of early gaming, and evolving into a discreet vessel for the delivery of narrative, narratives that can affect players in ways that conventional narrative types cannot.

This post could go on for pages and pages, discussing the emotional investment in Ico, the character drama of Final Fantasy VII, the sprawling story-driven worlds of Oblivion and Fallout 3, the allegorical masterpiece of Braid. But, in the interest of space and the author’s wrists, I’ll stop here and proclaim, loudly across the internets, that it’s a good time to be a gamer. We’re seeing a renaissance of narrative execution. And it’s only going to get better from here.

Life is settling down into a rhythm. But it’s a strange rhythm of nothing, with each day bringing a whole lot of not much. No new news on the job hunting front. I have one job that I really want and think that I would be good at, and I’m into the second round interviews for it, so, I hope I hope.

I’ve had a lot of stuff that I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve ended up doing very little of it. My buddy J got back from school and plowed through two excellent full runs of television shows, several books, and totally annihilated Plants vs. Zombies, and I’ve done comparably nothing. Part of it, I think, is that I still feel in limbo. When I was at school, that was it, I knew what I was doing. Now, being out, I’m here, I’m home, but there’s nothing that I’m doing. My entire days are free time, and because of that, I don’t really want to do anything. It’s strange, doesn’t really make sense, and it irritates me because I have the Beacon story sitting there half-finished, waiting for some love, and another story that practically fell into my lap the other day when K and I were scouring the woods behind her house for a missing Beagle named Lucy. It’s just been hard to work up the desire to make that jump from zero to one.

I’m also writing a video game. I’m getting together with a college friend and his software developer buddies to work on a game, with the goal being to put in on the newly renamed Xbox Live Indie Games. It requires a drastically different narrative-building strategy than I’ve ever tried before, and I’m really excited about the potential of it. I’ve been drawing up story concepts and character ideas, along with brainstorming potential themes. It’s a fun process, but I’m worried that I may end up slowing the group down. But I also think that it has the potential to turn into something really cool. Yet another medium in which to write stories. I’ve written a couple novels, a couple short plays, one short screenplay. And now I’m writing a video game. I’m apparently just making my way to the various narrative buffets and finding what I want to put on my plate.

Writing is so weird because it’s what I love most, but most days I’d rather do something else. It’s sick, really.

Been reading some really good stuff, too. The last week or so was spent with Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which I came to by way of a link from House of Leaves‘ Amazon page. I’ll try to get a microreview up later this week, but I’ll say that I had much more fun with it than I did with House of Leaves. The Raw Shark Texts was a novel that remembered that it was, in fact, a novel and not some obtuse piece of film criticism. Great fun, with shades of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville sprinkled in there. Is it just me, or do the British seem to do fantastic literature better than Americans?

Next on the list are Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You and Stephen King’s The Green Mile (I know, a little late to the party on both).

Currently watching HBO’s 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and it reminds me once again how much I love the story of the Apollo program. Apollo 13 was my favorite movie as a kid, and this is like a 12 hour version that covers everything from the early Mercury missions all the way to Apollo 17. Very cool, very well done, with an obscene amount of noteworthy actors.

What else?

Played through inFAMOUS on the Playstation 3 and thought that, while it was fun, the narrative was pretty weak and poorly executed. I also realized that I’m totally done with dichtomous notions of good and evil in video games.

Needed to take a blog breather after the Twilight project, but I plan to update more regularly from now on.

Something that I often find myself thinking about is latency in entertainment. There have been several times that I’ve been reading a book/playing a game/watching a movie/listening to an album, and I have thought that, even though to me this is cutting edge, state of the art stuff, this book/movie/game existed in the minds of its creators perhaps years before I’d even heard of it.  It’s like an old factoid I heard awhile back that the aviation technology of the military is always something like ten years ahead of what is public knowledge. We only get to experience it when it’s done, but it’s been created over the span of years.

It’s because of this idea of latency that I like to follow creator blogs. David Jaffe is doing this now. He has periodic updates on his blog about an as of yet unannounced game his company is working on for Sony, and it’s fostered some interesting posts about his game design philosophy and the things he’s doing with this title. Of course he never references the game directly, but having that unique window into the creative process is something I really enjoy. I can almost see the wheels turning in his head.

Neil Gaiman has done this several times on his blog (which was actually started to track his writing of American Gods). When The Graveyard Book, hit earlier this year, I actually felt more attached to it as a text because I had been following Neil’s progress, all the way from handwritting the first draft to selecting Dave McKean’s amazing cover art.

Watching the process, even when the product is only referenced obliquely, is something I enjoy as someone who makes things. It makes me wonder what others things are out there right now being created that we have no idea even exist yet.

(This article originally appeared here.)

I admit, in the last two years I’ve cracked more than my share of Playstation 3 jokes. For the first year of its life, it seemed to me to be a more expensive system that played mostly games that appeared on the 360; more of a status symbol than an actual game console. Which was probably a result of the fact that it seemed targeted at a very specific entertainment demographic—people with expensive home theaters and HD televisions—a group that I decidedly did not belong to.

So, I played Bioshock on the 360. I played Call of Duty 4 on the 360. I played Grand Theft Auto IV on the 360. I could have played Fallout 3 on the 360. So, why did I choose to get a PS3? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First is that my girlfriend and I are avid gamers, and there is something to be said about having all available major platforms. That said, many of the great games on the PS3 can be found on the 360. There are a few games—like LittleBigPlanet and Resistance: Fall of Man—that I really wanted to play, but with the economy the way it is right now, a handful of great exclusives isn’t really enough to make me want a new system.

So, why the Playstation 3?

Without getting into a fanboy pissing contest over whose system is the next-geniest, the PS3 seems to me to be a better piece of hardware. It’s pretty clear to me that Blu-ray won the HD format war in large part because every person who purchased a Playstation 3 also got a Blu-ray player. It’s my understanding that this was not an accident. And in a time when HD televisions are becoming more and more common, I think many of those console owners turn to the new media format simply because they now had the ability to play it. Now, I love pretty tech. Always have. But I do not see myself purchasing a stand alone Blu-ray player, even at the lower price points we’re seeing. But my Playstation 3 came with one. And given the choice between the getting some of my favorite movies of the year—The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Wall-E—on standard DVD or the new High-Def format that I found myself with, it wasn’t a hard decision. Now, I haven’t had a chance to play with the DVD-upscaling feature of the PS3 (still waiting for my HDMI cable in the mail at the time of this writing) but Blu-ray is noticeably sharper than DVD. Even on my 720p television, I can see a drastic difference. It’s pretty.

Is there a price difference between the 360 and the PS3? Yes, of course there is, though I think that gap will begin to close. It’s interesting to me that, at the previous price point of $399, the Xbox 360 was still flying off the shelves. Now that the PS3 has come down to that same price—a drastic improvement over its ludicrous launch price—some say it’s still too expensive. And don’t get me wrong, $399 is a ton of money, and a week before I got the system I was already feeling a sense of pre-emptive buyer’s remorse. After a week of tinkering with it, playing a lot of Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet, messing around with Skate, and watching a few Blu-rays, that feeling is mostly gone. I feel like, for what I got, the price is justified.

If that’s the case, why isn’t the PS3 doing all that great?

I think the problem with the PS3 might be that it’s catering to a market that doesn’t have a very large slice of the overall market share. Blu-ray is doing alright, but is still fairly niche. I think recent blockbuster releases on the format have done much to at least narrow that gap, but DVD is still the juggernaut. I think in the next 2-3 years we’ll see that gap begin to close. But in a technological landscape in which the government has to send out vouchers for special boxes to consumers to make sure their TV able to accept digital signal—in 2009!— it’s apparent that this transition from standard def to high def is likely going to take much longer than the switch from VHS to DVD. In that sense, the PS3 seems future-proof. The trade off is that it’s not at all present-proof. Even though the system launched over two years ago, it still seems ahead of it’s time, and I have to wonder, as sweet at the Blu-ray technology is, if Sony jumped the gun. Just because something is state-of-the-art does not mean that it’s state-of-the-market.

However, I don’t think that including Blu-ray in the PS3 was a mistake. In fact, I think the opposite. There are games on the PS3—like Metal Gear Solid 4—that were designed from the ground up to take advantage of the extra storage place, and it shows (whether you appreciate hour-long rendered cut scenes is another argument). The problem, is that by using such a format, Sony alienated a number of customers. Of course I don’t have statistics, but I wonder about the number of people who purchased the 360 over the PS3 because they didn’t have a high-def set and thus saw Blu-ray as an unnecessary expense? Why pay $400 for a PS3 when you can spend $300 on a 360? Or what about the Wii? The Wii has shown that gaming systems can be marketed very successfully to people who would not normally own such an expensive piece of consumer electronics, and it this unexpectedly growing group of gamers that the PS3 is simply not built for.

So, what are we left with here? Is the Playstation 3 good? I would say definitely yes, but not for everyone. For people who don’t care about Blu-ray, who don’t care about managing media, or who don’t care about LittleBigPlanet (read: people who hate fun) then, no, I would not recommend the system. The 360 has everything you want at a lower price point with better exclusive games. Right now, the best pure gaming platform is the Xbox 360, and this console generation I don’t think that is likely to change.

But, for what you get for the money, the Playstation 3 really is a steal.

Okay, so one of the things I always look forward to on school breaks is reading–reading where my incination takes me.  Reading for myself.  I’m the kind of person who, if I know that I’m taking a long trip sometime in the near future, will obsessively think about the books that I want to take with me.  Clothes get thrown in at the last minutes, but when deciding what books to pack, oh, that takes time.

I’ve been making mental lists of the stuff I would like to read over break–

• Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors
• Michael Perry, Population: 485
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Stephen King, Just After Sunset

Definitely a slant toward creative nonfiction and memoir–Burroughs and Eggers are two I’ve been wanting to read for awhile, and Perry was something I picked up recently–read all about that here.  Kundera because a reading group I’m in is going to be looking at that novel, and King because, well, I loves him.  Apparently after he edited Best American Short Stories last year, he got more interested in going back to his own short fiction, so I’m stoked to see what he’s come up with.  Early reviews I’ve glanced at seem to be generally positive.

Also fiending for some video games.  I can’t wait to check out Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet.  My friend PK told me that Fallout 3 is likely his game of the year, and I generally trust his judgement.  And LittleBigPlanet because, even after only playing an hour of it at NG’s house, I fell madly in love.  That little SackBoy stole my heart.

As far as TV and movies go, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dexter are all on the list.  Also, the return of Battlestar Galactica on January 16 cannot come soon enough.  After that midseason cliffhanger, man, I just want to eat it with a spoon.

I am charged with geek.