Bloodsucking Fiends - Vampires and Feminism what?

It could be said that I like vampires quite a bit.  It could also be said that the sky is a very nice shade of blue today, zebras generally have stripes, and for the most part fish like to be in water.  Are you picking up what I'm laying down, here?  Vampires are pretty much my favorite fictional creature after dragons.  I've tried to pin down why that is, and I've got two possible reasons.  The first is that I am attracted to things that frighten me - I was so afraid of the original Bela Lugosi Dracula when I was a kid that I would hang a glow-in-the-dark rosary over my bed while I was sleeping.  The second is that since I am a heathen and don't particularly believe in an afterlife I have a vested interest in living forever.  There could be a combination of both going on.

So one might imagine that I've read a ton of vampire books, which would be a correct thought so congratulations.  A lot of them I don't like, and many I actively hate for various reasons.  I don't like the Anne Rice vampire books - too languid and "oh pity me I'm an eternal hottie and I'm tortured".  I've never read Twilight, but I've seen some of the movies and known enough people who have read them to hate it simply because of the horrifying messaging.  Give up your ambitions to sublimate yourself to a (way older) dude right out of high school, girls!  Base your whole self image on another person!  Chimo is ok, because bonding!  I don't give a crap if the storytelling is good (which it probably isn't) I hate those books on sheer principal, leaving aside the sparkling.

Ok, I'm getting the Rage, its time for a Goon interlude.

Oh the endless ROFLs!  Spoiler alert, he beats them up.

There are several vampire books I very much enjoy however.  The Nightwatch series is excellent, and of course there's the original Dracula.  But today I would like to talk about a little book called Bloodsucking Fiends by Chrisopher Moore.  Its a comedy like his other books, but it also has one of the most accurate of the female perspective that I've ever seen from a male author.  So its funny and thought provoking!  Warning - I don't consider myself a militant feminist by any means, but I am a lady and I've had some experiences that are unique to those who are ladies.  I'll try to generalize as little as possible and keep this out of "RAAAGHRR all men are idjits!" territory.

Fiction has long been a great way to explore and illuminate social issues through the venue of story.  The main character of this particular story is Jodie, a normal lady with a normal job until she gets singled out and turned into a vampire for the sport of a really bored old-as-dirt vampire.  After that happens, she suddenly finds herself in the unique situation of being a woman who doesn't need to be afraid of anything.

As far as society has come in the last few decades, we ladies still struggle against labels, inconvenient socialization, and fear.  Dr. Nerdlove talks a bit about it in his blog, which is definitely worth a read.  I don't take quite the extreme view that he does - that being that most women instantly evaluate men they meet on a threat-assessment basis.  However I admit the way my brain works gives me a tendency not to care much about personal safety.  I've waited for buses at 2 am in parts of Seattle that really shouldn't be frequented by civilized folk at those times.  

However, there is one thing I've noticed in myself that's really irritating, the socialization to be nice.  I'm not talking about being kind, or noble, or anything like that.  Just being nice.   Not making waves, being accommodating, and polite even when the person on the other side of the conversation really doesn't deserve it.  How many of us have smiled and tried to keep reading on the bus while all you really want is to be left alone, only to have a conversation forced on us?  Giving someone a fake phone number instead of just saying "Sorry I just don't find you attractive" - an instance where the difference between nice and kind really stands out.  I'm not going to say that this experience is unique to women, but I will say that it is more culturally forced upon us than it is upon men.

When Jodie becomes a vampire, she slowly starts to forsake all the socialization she's been subjected to her entire life thanks to a conservative childhood in Carmel.  (Woo!  Monterey Bay FTW!)  It starts with makeup.  Somehow having to survive on blood makes stabbing yourself in the eye with a mascara wand completely irrelevant.  She starts saying exactly what's on her mind, to hilarious effect especially given the super hearing.  Walking around the city at night is exhilarating instead of terrifying.  Its an interesting statement, becoming something inhuman enables her to forget all the rules and fears that society forced upon her.

There are three books in this series, and it also explores Jodie's life with her boyfriend Tommy after she turns him into a vampire.  He has the exact opposite reaction to the change that she did - where she felt powerful and unafraid he feels confused and frightened.  He doesn't like being a vampire, its too far out of his comfort zone.  But Jodie's "comfort zone" was so spectacularly uncomfortable that anything else is a relief.  I say "uncomfortable" because her life before being a vampire wasn't bad.  She had a job, a man, parents that irritated her, but she was always afraid of something.  But then, all of a sudden she wasn't.  And so when she's offered a cure she turns it down.

I find the contrast between Jodie and Tommy and their reactions to being vampires incredibly interesting.  Tommy, who already knew (at 19!) his place in the world, is thrown on tilt.  Looking at it from a feminist perspective, that makes a bit of sense.  Tommy, being a quintessential male, is comfortable with his place in the world.  Even though he becomes a more powerful entity, he isn't happy.  

All that aside, the book is hilarious, a highlight being the parts narrated by Abby Normal, the teenage PerkyGoth.  Hilarious, I tell you!

A Defense of Fan Fiction and a Condemnation of Geek Shame

I know what you’re thinking.  “Fan fiction?!  But that’s a cesspool of Mary Sues, horrifying slash, and rampant orgies thinly veiled as alien rituals!”  And you would be correct to some degree.  There is some really bad fanfic out there - I know because I’ve read quite a bit of it.  My favorite was a Star Trek TNG fic where the main character, the most Mary Sue-est of Mary Sues, commits suicide with an eyelash and a thumbnail clipping to force Capt. Picard to forget his love for her and be comforted in the pillowy bosoms of Dr. Beverly Crusher.  That is a thing that exists, and if I knew where to find it I would link to it because it is a treasure.

But I have also read some really good fan fiction in which the authors voiced the characters with more loyalty and believability than some published writers.  But still the practice is pretty overwhelmingly condemned as a waste of time, or the haven of uncreative minds - something I find I can’t agree with.  Fan fiction can be an excellent writing exercise - trying to slip into the mind of characters that aren’t your own is a great way to develop character writing skills.  If you have to constantly check yourself to make sure you are staying true to who the original creator made that character to be it tends to bleed into the rest of your writing.  The idea of a character starts to become more fleshed out than just a string of foibles constructed for the sake of the plot.  I say this because the way I define fan fiction in my head is exclusively tied to characters.  Most fan fiction I’ve come across happens because the author asked the question “What if Character X found themselves in Situation Y?” or “I wonder what happened between Character X and Character Z after Major Plot Climax Theta?”  These questions can make for some incredibly entertaining reads, but more than that they’re an expression of love.  Think about it - in order to write a good fanfic you have to love the characters you’re writing about enough to truly respect who they are, what they believe, and what they are capable of.  There’s nothing shameful about that.  However, if you treat those characters like your own personal love-muppets to be thrown into each others arms and beds without thought or reason - shame on you.  These are people.  At least make it plausible.

Also, writing fan fiction can be a good way to break yourself through a creative block.  Imagining your favorite characters in new and possibly funny scenarios is entertaining, and I know the more entertained I am by what I’m writing the more likely I am to keep going.  It doesn’t have to even be a whole fleshed-out story, either.  Sometimes when I’m stuck, and because I am possibly the biggest Dragon Age fangirl who ever lived, I’ll write little vignettes that take place in between the long marches between cities in Origins, or flesh out the consequences of something you did in DA:2.  Maybe Shale accidentally kicked over a poison Morrigan was brewing and wacky hijinks ensued.  And what if Hawke got knocked up from that one-night stand with Fenris and has been hiding a kid from him this whole time?  Emotional stuff there.  If you’re trying to get into the habit of writing every day, fanfic is a good way to get into that habit.  Its light, fun, and occasionally turns into something great.  I don’t know if Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy started out as fanfic, but that’s pretty much what it is and without it we wouldn’t have Mara Jade.  Life without Mara Jade is not a life worth thinking about if you ask me.  So when people ask what you write, own it.  Say “Oh, I mostly write urban fantasy, a lot of sci fi, and a fair amount of Halo fanfic!” and then skewer them fearlessly with your eyeballs and silently dare them to say anything about it.  Because those words of Halo fanfic are still words that you wrote when you found yourself in a creative way, and that makes them worth mentioning.

For the record, I don’t write Halo fanfic.  If I played Halo I probably would, however, and shame on you for judging parallel-universe me for that.

Judgement is the other thing I’ve been thinking about lately, and the related ugly habit we in the geek culture are sometimes prone to fall into.  Being a geek is all about loving something to a degree that might be considered abnormal to those on the outside, but its also about sharing that love with others and accepting those who also love that thing.  In that last bit we sometimes fall a little short - or at least I know I do.  When someone tells me they’re watching Death Note or FMA on Netflix, there’s always a little tiny part of my brain that feels superior because I saw them back when you had to download fansubs directly from Japan.  Its completely irrational when you think about it.  The reason I’d already seen those and other series’ before they popped up in the mainstream was because of an intersection of friends and interest that was specific only to me.  I can’t be superior to someone basically for being in the right place at the right time, and judging someone for not knowing something earlier is just silly-pants.

We joke and poke fun at people sometimes with phrases like “Have you been living under a rock?” when we find out they haven’t experienced some game or movie or whatever that we literally can’t imagine our life without.  Sometimes its good-natured and we offer to come over post-haste with a couple DVDs and some camaraderie.  But other times (and I unfortunately have experienced this) it is completely the opposite, as though lacking a particular set of experiences suddenly makes a person’s opinions invalid.  For example - it’s one thing to ignore someone breaking into a conversation about comic book movies who either hasn’t seen the movies, or took their kids to see one and didn’t pay attention and is suddenly handing out opinions like they’re condoms.  But what about someone who did see the movies, loves them, but hasn’t read any of the comics?  Is their input worth less because they didn’t have a group of friends to go down to the comic book store with every week?  It shouldn’t be, but sometimes people are treated that way.  A person is still allowed to think The Last Stand is a rubbish movie even if they’ve never heard of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Even when we talk to each other, we talk about our Geek Shame - some thing that for one reason or another has passed us by.  Its not shameful to have not experienced something.  Here’s one for you - I have never played a Zelda game.  Not one.  Through a series of circumstances mostly beyond my control, I’ve never owned a Nintendo system.  Should I have to hand in my access to the nerd treehouse over that?  No.  And it shouldn’t matter what your time frame for experiencing something is.  A person is not less of a fan because they read Lord of the Rings after they saw the movies.  Being a geek isn’t about shame, that word shouldn’t be in our vocabularies for any reason.  We should be about acceptance no matter what someone’s road to nerddom was.  Its tough sometimes because a lot of us geeks have dealt with social exclusion, and the desire to feel superior to others is a natural one.  But I think this experiential superiority is something we should try to get rid of in ourselves, and gently refuse to tolerate in others.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna try and kickstart my creativity with some Hawke/Fenris preggers drama.

Assorted Musings

The last few days have been sadly void of many solid ideas I feel like I can articulate yet, probably because its been a bit of a crap week.  Some people become more prolific when they’re having a hard time of it, but I find my creativity takes a nose-dive when the depression kicks into high gear and I can’t really organize my thoughts.  So I’ve decided to switch gears a little for this post and instead of talking about one thing in detail I’m just going to throw some stuff out there that’s been careening around in my brain.

Its been pointed out to me by someone with more experience that I might be off the mark a bit envisioning this game as an MMO.  Those things are huge and involve a metric ton of maintenance and support.  Trying to build one that’s not only functional, but also fresh and new might be out of this project’s wheelhouse.  I’ve been pondering something closer to a cooperative stage/hub based RPG.  Before I go on, let me mention that I have not played very many MMOs.  I downloaded the free trial of WoW and was so bored after a couple days that I seriously couldn’t understand the amount of time and money people put into it.  The only MMO I really got into was Guild Wars 2.  Mechanically that game is tons of fun and I’ve done a lot of the story missions to get the shiny toys that come as rewards, but I have to say my immersion was completely shattered by the story bits.  The focus of your personal story is that you become the military leader that saves the land from unspeakable evil, but there’s always the glaring fact that everyone else in the game is that same military leader.  I would rather have a story that makes the entire community of players a collective force that beats back the unspeakable evil, and hub-based missions might be better suited for that.  And easier.  Some of the missions/stages/whatever could be for solo players and some could be for a medium-to-large party.  Anyway, that’s where my mind's been going.

Speaking of unspeakable evil, I’m getting a better idea of where I want to go with the world-building.  A few years ago I wrote a thing for NaNoWriMo, which started out as a vampire story (I know I know).  After November was over I decided that it was a crap story but had some potential if I expanded the world beyond what I’d originally written.  I’ve been working on it for way too long for it to be as rough as it is, but I think there’s potential there.  I had a revelation when I started re-writing it that if there was something I wanted to put in there, I could find a way to put that thing in there.  Seems obvious, but there you have it.  In any case, the world in the story draws heavily from the Japanese onryo or vengeful ghost, a concept with frightens me more than practically any other thing that exists, and as much as I am fond of hyperbole I am not exaggerating here.  I’ve gone into the philosophy of the myth and why it scares me so much - if I can find that particular blog from years ago I’ll post it.  But anyway, after I started expanding my world into other areas of horror and fantasy besides vampires magical things started to happen.  I toyed with the idea of every pantheon of gods being lesser aspects of one nameless archetype.  I added dragons for no other reason than I frikkin’ love dragons, but I think I found a way for it to work.  Ever have one of those moments where something is so completely clear and obvious you can’t imagine why you didn’t think of it in the first place?  That’s what happened here.

I thought about it and decided to post a link to part of the fragmented mess that is this story if some folks wanted to get an idea of the setting, which is quite urban fantasy/horror.  If you do decide to read it keep in mind that it is SUPER rough around the edges, but I’m putting it up here anyway.  With the stuff that’s been going on recently, “having something I wrote eviscerated on the internet as crap” isn’t really that scary.

That being said, don't eviscerate it.  Or at least, eviscerate constructively.

On the subject of scope, I’ve had a few more thoughts about the target audience for this tool/game.  I said before I that I would like to have it be available for anyone with a mental illness, and I’m sticking with that eventual goal.  But I think I’m going to have to focus on one or two in the beginning and try to branch out from there because the spectrum of mental health issues is so broad and dealt with in so many different ways.  This came up because of a close friend of mine who has bipolar disorder and is in the middle of a manic episode.  Bipolar is a completely different beast from what I deal with - when I get depressed being inactive is the worst possible thing I can do.  I have to make myself get out of the house, play a game, ride my bike, or something that forces my mind to break out of the pattern its fallen into.  Not so with someone on the edge of mania.  The more stimulation they get, the worse their mental state becomes in my experience.  Which is a problem from a game design standpoint because games are by definition meant to stimulate.  So perhaps for the time being it would be best for me to focus on the problems that are more in my wheelhouse and expand later if possible, and after a lot of consulting with professionals and folks who suffer from more diverse issues.

On the technology side of things, HTML5 is exciting because its a coding language born in the mobile age and there is just a ridiculous amount of potential applications for it.  If you follow Day9tv at all (and I do, rather obsessively I admit), you’ll have seen some exciting new tech approaching on the horizon in the form of Artillery, a gaming platform built in HTML5 and Javascript.   I’ve also learned a bit about Sencha, an HTML5/Javascript framework geared towards mobile apps.  My imagination may be going a little nuts here, and like I said I’ve only ever dabbled in programming, but between these two things I’m thinking that this project can be created entirely without the need for a software download.  And since they're both supported by people I consider to be intelligent and insightful - my brother does a lot of Sencha development in and lets just say I have a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to him - I think they're pretty darn promising.

I'm hoping my thought processes will be more clear in the next couple days and I can start mapping out more details on the self-tracking tool I want to include and the social platform.  In the meantime, thanks again to everyone who's still reading and giving feedback.

Storytelling in Games (there may be spoilers)

I've been thinking a lot about stories in videogames for a couple reasons, partially because I still haven't been able to force myself away from Starcraft and Guild Wars 2 and pick up Assassin's Creed 3 finally.  Its the first time in my life that games with a lesser emphasis on story have held me away from other games.  That's not to say those two games don't have a story, but its not the biggest focus.  The single player campaign for Starcraft was really well done and by the end if Jim Raynor hadn't rescued the Queen of Blades I would have raged at the screen like Rush Limbaugh.  But as cool as the story was, its taken a bottom shelf to the multiplayer aspect for me - the story is over and yet I still play.  That hasn't happened before.

Guild Wars 2's story is alright as far as it goes - I can tell its painted in very broad terms to accommodate thousands of players playing several races.  They did a good job with it - giving your character a few options at the beginning to introduce a little variety.  But it didn't really grab me, and honestly I kind of phase out during the dialog parts so I can get to the fighting and figure out what new fancy toy I'm going to get later.  Another first.  For most of my life, once the story was finished in a game (or I was no longer invested) I stopped playing.  There are so many sandbox games that encourage you to play past the endgame but I never did no matter how much I loved the game.  That probably has to do with the addition of other humans in play - playing Guild Wars with someone else is so much more fun than playing by yourself.

But it got me thinking - are mechanics alone enough to carry a game?  For my part, I don't think so.  Here's an example - Jak 2 & 3.  I loved those games.  I loved the mechanics, I loved the art, the character design, and I loved the hoverboard business.  But once the story (which is awesome) was done, the mechanics that I had loved so much no longer held any appeal for me.  It was time to move on.  Without a reason to play such as beating other people or furthering the story, I ceased to be interested.

So what makes a game story good?  This has to do with my complete inability to pick up Assassin's Creed 3 again.  I'm tired of that story.  It feels like Lost to me now, just and endless string of mysteries for the sake of extending its appeal.  I stopped watching Lost in the second season and I don't care how many people tell me it "gets awesome later".  I'm not going to watch it - its too long and hard and I honestly don't care about any of the characters anymore.  Some of them I actively hate.  And that's what happened with Assassin's Creed for me.  I love Ezio, but he's not enough to hold up a whole game for me, and this one doesn't even have Ezio in it.  It has all the future people who are, lets face it, boring and annoying all to hell.  So that's one point; if your series doesn't have good characters to hold the story up, even the most gilded wordsmithing isn't going to save you.

And another thing - I came to this conclusion trying to explain the Mass Effect series to a friend of mine - good stories don't have to be complicated.  I once went to a discussion panel with Jim Butcher and one thing he said that stuck with me is that you can make a good story about anything.  He made a bet with some people on a message board that he could base a story on Pokemon and Ancient Rome and have it be good, and he came out of that bet with the Codex Alera series.  When I was explaining Mass Effect to my friend I put it into these exact words - "There are giant monsters coming to kill everything alive and you have to stop it".  That's been done so many times, but as long as you do it right that formula will keep working until the goddamn end of time.  Same thing with one of my favorite games of all time - Dragon Age: Origins.  Giant monster coming to kill everything, you must stop it.  And yet that shit resonated with me so much that I started writing fan fiction again.  No you can't read it.

So, yeah.  Games don't need a complicated story to be good.  Don't dress up your series in a bunch of mysteries for the sake of being mysterious.  Write compelling characters, flesh out the lore, work on the mechanics.  Make the mechanics part of the story, I don't know.

I guess what I'm saying is don't make me compare your series to Lost.