I really enjoy the ideas in Little Brother (even if it’s for young adults) and Makers – the tech and lifestyles that seem only a few short years off, along with the ethics that go with them. Of course some people might say a story is just a story, but the “morals” in a story matter, especially in the case of a popular writer, because these stories help shape our morality.

Now, I’m not the pissed Harry-Potter-Hating Christian Mom who gets all up in arms about books, and for the most part I feel like Doctorow’s writing is a force for good, but there is one thing, just one thing, that I’m not sure I feel comfortable with. I’m not denouncing the guy – I really, really enjoy his writing, but I’m a little unsure of how I feel about this one thing, so I’m writing this post for two reasons: to sort out my thoughts in writing. But I also hope to get a little feedback from others who have read his books. I wanna know what YOU think.

Anyway, when I first read Little Brother, I noticed a section on page 62 (of the PDF version on craphound.com) where the main character and his friends go to a store to buy a bunch of merchandise printed with the new meme they’re supporting.

I thought it was weird – so much of the book was about information freed from corporations and government – that the main characters would embrace commercialism so openly. And in its most abhorrent form no less: capitalizing on a youth fad. Maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth ever since I was a teenager and happened to be working at Toys R Us during the Christmas season Pokémon was all the rage (oh, god, I still wake up screaming some nights, sweaty from nightmaring about all those fat, sticky little American kids groping with their jam hands for the latest Pikachu WhatHaveYou), but I can’t shake the feeling that this type of blatant commercialism is, if not flat-out evil, at least in poor taste.

I let it go at first – I really enjoy Little Brother and didn’t want a silly few sentences about the main character buying a T-shirt ruin a book for me, especially a book that preaches so many other “morals” I see as quality. Plus, I chalk it up to Doctorow just understanding that teenagers don’t care about commercialism and will buy t-shirts with their favorite memes on them (I did, when I was a teenager). In fact, teenagers are still young enough to think that t-shirts are social statements, so they might actually believe that by buying t-shirts with subversive slogans they are sticking it to whatever man they hate (when it’s more than likely they are supporting that man by buying the shirt).

But now, whilst reading The Makers (which is pretty awesome so far, by the way) – I’ve started to consider the question again, if only because the book is all about selling stuff. It’s about an indie inventor company that invents stuff and moves units. Sure, it’s about other stuff too, like an indie blogger, and the homeless, and corporations, and so on, but fueled by my earlier interest in Doctorow’s economic viewpoint (or, at the very least, his characters’ viewpoints), I see it as mostly an indie business manifesto. Keep in mind, I’m only 18.58% through the book, so take that with a grain of salt, especially if the book turns into an action/adventure spy thriller ala James Bond (of the Hollywood Bonds) at 21.45% or something. But I doubt that’ll happen.

Does anyone else think that the free information ideal must go hand in hand with physical minimalism? Because it seems like they do go together. You know – it’s like we’re digitally rich so it’s okay to be physically minimalist. But Doctorow, a guy who seems to support free information, doesn’t seem to support physical minimalism, so I’m at a loss as to how to jive these ideas together.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about physical minimalism because I have STUFF. I’ve made some recent purchases, such as a few graphic novels, video games, and a Playstation 3, and now I am feeling STUFF GUILT, even though life is pretty damn good and having STUFF is part of that.

But, now I have all this STUFF. And it seems like I shouldn’t want STUFF, since I believe information should be digital, or at the very least, cheap and easily digitized. But I have some STUFF, I like my STUFF, and I feel guilty for both of those things.

When I’m considering issues, I look for them in things I’m reading, watching, playing, etc, looking for the opinions about the issue I’m trying to figure out from people I respect. I respect Cory Doctorow, but although his characters and I believe many of the same things, we differ somehow, and it’s about STUFF.

So what the deal, people? Am I misinterpreting Doctorow’s viewpoints? Am I just too stuck up about STUFF and consumption? Am I wrong that the drive to make things digital (if they can be made digital – like movies, games, and books) conflicts with the desire to own physical property, especially media?

I live in Des Moines, Iowa, and the musical Rent was just here at the Civic Center. I’d seen it before, but it was some of the original cast this time, so I went again. The show was great.

But after the show, in the lobby, there was a table with a bunch of Rent STUFF, like t-shirts and lunch boxes. And all that seems like blatant commercialism, a bunch of crap people don’t need, but buy anyway. Because unless you’re in the market for a new lunch box, you’re only buying that lunch box because it says Rent on it. And then you’re going to get home and put it on your shelf, where it isn’t useful at all – it just collects dust until you finally throw it out to make space for the lunchbox you buy from the next fad.
Collections, especially physical media collections, piss me off, especially when the STUFF is available digitally, like DVDs and CDs. Even my books are starting to bother me, though the move from physical to digital isn’t quite there yet.

Now, t-shirts aren’t something you can get digitally – clothes have to be physical (at least, until we’re digital, anyway), so we have to wear them. They might as well be Rent T-shirts as they are plain white ones. But why does it feel to me that Rent is cheapened because there are t-shirts of it? If merchandising supports things I like, why do I hate it so much? And why does Cory Doctorow, who seems to support many of the ideas I do, create characters that I disagree with about STUFF?

What do you think? Please leave a comment here, or @mispeled on Twitter, or send me an email and let me know. My email address is in the button on the right sidebar. I’m serious about talking about this, so if you have a lengthy response, email it to me and I’ll put it up as a post.

Thanks,

-m.

Two things have kept me from posting much during October: Playstation 3 and cigarette smoking cessation. I want to talk about them both, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about them lately.

1: I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, so I’ve been spending more time than I should be lately playing games and getting acclimated to the console scene. It’s been awhile (6 years) since I’ve been anything but a PC gamer. The two spheres are so dissimilar as to seem separate genera.

Console gaming is so easy. I don’t mean the content – the games are just as difficult (maybe more, since mouse based control schemes are easier to operate, in my opinion, than analogue stick based controls, at least for things like aiming), but the accessibility is so much higher on consoles than computers.

If I want to play a console game, I insert the disc and hit start in the PS3’s operating system. If there’s an update, it automatically downloads, patches itself, and starts. All I have to do is sit there and button mash the “X” button. I don’t have to know anything or learn anything. I’m sure there are bugs with this system from time to time, but I haven’t seen any yet, and I imagine any bugs get ironed out quick since the customers are unforgiving. There’s no DRM to worry about (there is, but it’s baked into the console, so it’s not invasive), no patch management, and no tweaking settings or drivers.

If I buy a game on the PC, it’s a whole different story – I have to make sure it works with my hardware, get driver updates, install the game, patch it, tweak settings to get the multiplayer to work, deal with bug fixes – it’s a long process. Recently I took a break from my PS3 to play Borderlands with some friends (I won’t play shooters on a console if I can get it on the PC) and getting the multiplayer to work is so convoluted (requiring port forwarding, TCP/IP tweaks, and spooky mumbo-jumbo chicanery) that we finally resorted to using Himachi to create a VPN and played using the LAN mode instead of the public game option. Even then, one of us could use the built in voice chat and two of us couldn’t, so we ended up using Ventrilo so we could use voice chat. What a goddamn headache. (I’d swear it off, but the game is crazy fun, so I return, night after night, to hosting a VPN and a Vent server just to play a friggin PC game.

I didn’t realize how used to that process I was until I started playing games on the console again. It’s so easy it’s almost criminal. I’m still not used to it. I’m used to having to fight to get things to work. Even though I still consider myself a PC gamer at heart, I understand why so many people are committed to consoles and consoles only. It’s truly plug and play.

Needless to say, I’ve spent most of the last month catching up on the titles that I’ve wanted to play since the PS3 game out. I tend to binge whatever I’m doing, so lately it’s been PS3 gaming.

2: Secondly, I haven’t been blogging as much because, after seven years, I’ve finally quit smoking. It’s been almost a month now. I’ve never made it beyond two or three days before, so I feel pretty comfortable announcing that I quit.

I quit because even though there were things I enjoyed about smoking, it was starting to get to my health. Going up stairs or any amorous activity wouldn’t leave me out of breath, but my breath was getting to feel less easy than it should be. I felt like I was always on the beach, buried under pounds and pound of wet sand.
I’ve always been a guy that has to experience things to understand them – I have a hard time just imagining things I have no basis for, though it’s pretty easy for me to take the basic seed of an idea and upscale it into something bigger. When my lungs started to feel heavy, like I was breathing with a sandbag on my chest all the time, it wasn’t hard to imagine how crushingly awful something like emphysema would be like. The idea of suffocation like that scared me down cold. It still does. I get friggin chills.

So, I quit smoking three weeks ago. Why should that affect my blog entries, you ask?

I’ve read a bunch about the effect of nicotine and creativity, and whether you believe that nicotine effects creativity or not, nicotine withdrawal certainly does. It severely lowers it, because nicotine withdrawal severely lowers brain function, at least for a while. I’ve seen a bunch of MRI’s (CAT scans? I dunno – the colored ones, which ever those are) on the net that show lowered brain activity during nicotine withdrawal. I can’t seem to find them right now to link them, but it doesn’t really matter.

I believe it.

As a result, though I am happy to no longer smoke cigarettes, I’ve felt slow and stupid for weeks. Combine that feeling with a new video game system that makes vedging out on the couch pretty easy and there isn’t much writing getting done. It’s starting to turn around, I’ve felt like writing again, but I couldn’t for a little while. Even sitting there for hours, no sparks came. It wasn’t that I couldn’t type – it was that nothing interested me enough to type about it.

Hopefully, that’s over now.

As a side note – those of you participating in NaNoWriMo – good for you. Good luck.

-m.

After surfing the categories on the Steam store for awhile, I happened across the demo for Trine. It looked pretty and I couldn’t argue with the price: free.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXILzS03HCo&hl=en&fs=1&]

Trine is a side-scrolling physics puzzle game that incorporates combat and item collection. The player solves physics puzzles to advance through the level, collecting items, experience, and equipables along the way. The puzzles (at least in the demo) involved stacking blocks, seesaw manipulation, and grappling hook movement. The combat is hack and slash ala the original Prince of Persia.

The story of Trine is pretty simple – three fantasy different characters, a wizard, a rogue, and a knight, all place their hands on the same magical artifact (the Trine) at once. The artifact melds all three together into the same body and they take off on an adventure to figure out how to undo the meld. Of course, all three have separate motivations and its fun to hear them argue from inside the same body. The story is told through voiced dialogue and a voiced narrator. It all feels being like told a fairytale, which is charmingly effective.

The player is able to switch between the three characters at will, using their individual strengths to navigate the puzzles. The wizard is able to summon crates and levitate objects. The rogue is able to attack with her bow and use her grappling hook to swing from most overhead surfaces. The knight is able to attack with his sword and defend himself with his shield. Because some of the functionality seems to overlap, the puzzles can often be navigated in multiple ways, with multiple solutions. The player can choose to weight down one end of a seesaw with a crate summoned by the wizard, or pull one end down with the rogue’s grappling hook, or bash it with the knight sword to set it spinning. And so on.

Trine is lushly detailed, with beautiful graphics. Although the levels are 2D sidescrollers, the illusion of 3D is provided by 3D background graphics. Ruins, forests, and other environments look wonderful, and encourage the fairytale concept. The animations for the characters are solid and characters react well to their environment. I only saw skeleton enemies in the demo, but I hope to see more enemies in the full version.

Sound is decent and all the expected sound effects are there. But the best part of the sound, by far, is the voice acting, particularly the voice of the narrator. It gives the feeling of playing through a fairytale, which seems the exact thing the creators were trying to achieve. Of course, the pacing of the sound is broken if the player takes awhile to transverse some of the more difficult puzzles, leaving a player a bit surprised when the narration kicks back on after reaching a checkpoint.

The difficulty of the demo wasn’t that high, even on its highest setting, though I expect this to ramp up as the game goes on – that’s what good platformers do.
The difficulty, if any, was related to the controls, which took a little playing to get used to. Trine is going to be offered on both the PC and the PS3, and it’s obvious that Trine was built more for the console crowd than the PC gamer in mind. The game does offer gamepad mapping, but I didn’t try it – my gamepad is buried in the closet somewhere. As a PC gamer I expect to be able to play with my keyboard and mouse. The player uses WASD to move, the mouse buttons to trigger the two functions of each character, and the mouse pointer to aim things like the grappling hook. 1,2, and 3 switch between the three characters. Sometimes the controls are a little clunky, especially for the rogue’s grappling hook.

The best thing about Trine is figuring out interesting ways to play with the physics and navigate the puzzles in multiple ways. Trying each puzzle in a variety of ways awards the player with access to hidden areas – the knight might be able to get past one puzzle with some difficulty, but the rogue might be better suited, using the physics momentum gained to rocket up to a hidden area. Or the wizard could place a crate to brace a seesaw and the knight could run up it, ready to attack the skeletons waiting up top. Overall, the game rewards rapid character changes and playing to each characters strengths.

The joys of Trine are threefold: the graphics, the physics, and the delightful manner the story is told. The drawbacks stem from the awkward controls, at least with a standard keyboard and mouse setup, and a worry that the puzzles won’t be as interesting as they could be. Because many of the puzzles are created to be circumvented by more than one character, I’m afraid some of them might end up repetitive and watered down. Only the full version will tell.

Trine is set to launch in July on Steam, priced at $30, which could be steep or cheap depending on how long the full game is. The gameplay is fun, and as long as there is enough content to justify a full 30 bucks, I’ll be buying it on the day it’s released.