felis_ultharus

I'm bored and unable to focus on editing, which means being unable to focus on anything else since my attention span collapses on any day I haven't worked on my writing.

So instead, I'll post about something small I didn't have a chance to while I was in BC, which was a game and sequel I watched Sean play while I was out there. We have very different tastes in video games, and this one was one of those war games where the object is largely to kill anything that moves, a "third-person shooter" called Gears of War (I and II).

This particular game was astonishing for the genre. Every detail was precise. Every speck of dust expertly rendered. Buildings collapse the way they're supposed to, each brick tumbling naturally. Objects fall and bodies come apart the way they really would. The dialogue seems cribbed from actual soldier dialogue you hear in documentaries following soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, transposed into a sci-fi setting.

And it's an intelligent game. Every second sentence contains a mythological, hagiographical, historical, or Shakespearian allusion. Every name is a kind of in-joke for anyone who bothers to look up its origins or meaning.

But it's still a very disturbing game, just because it's such a perfectly-polished mirror. The soldiers moving over the landscape of Palladian and Gothic buildings in ruins don't care anything about the civilization that was there, or the motivations of the faceless enemy they're fighting. There's no diplomacy between the two sides, just a battle that both sides are clear will end in total genocide of the other.

Because the mirror is so perfect, there's no escaping the reality of the post-Iraq America it's throwing back. But I guess that's what we mean when we say video games can be art.

For video-games-as-art of a very different kind, I've sent away for Okami, a game where you play the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu as a wolf looking for her lost light. The game is done in the style of a Japanese wall scroll, and you paint your alterations to reality onto the screen with a brush.

Meanwhile, for the anime group --