Finished Demos: The Ideal

I don't know how much else is left to say. I think this game (Six Days in Fallujah) is going to fail. I think it's too big for the development team. I hope it doesn't, but there's too much other shit going on around this game. Case in point: I doubt that the dev team and the bigwigs are on the same page when the bigwigs say that "We're not trying to make social commentary...We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable" and one of the stated goal of the game is to give players ethical dilemas in the shoes of real soldiers.

But, before the game finds a life in the hands of Papa Bear and his ilk (not that I'm singling out Bill O'Reilly here), I wanted to talk about it in tones that are respectful and distant, if not hopeful. I'm pessimistic. This needs to succeed in a way to shake up gamers, the press and eveyrone looking over the team's shoulder. There's an outside chance that the people making this have that kind of a game in them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not that my two cents carries much weight.

Anyway. The title is a song by the Explosion, off of their near-perfect Jade Tree full length called Flash Flash Flash. Go buy the CD right now and listen to one of the best punk rock records put to tape this decade. The Ideal starts with the lyric: "There are no good Samaritans. There are no proud Americans. This isn't my idea of success."

Perfect.



“Six Days In Fallujah” is a third-person shooter game set to be released sometime in 2010.

I usually don't get too concerned when I hear titles, but when I heard about the game I seized up. The president of Atomic Games, the company producing the game in conjunction with the Marine Corps and Activision, says they want “Six Days In Fallujah” to be the most realistic military shooter ever.

As a genre, shooters are not known for careful examination of their surroundings. Look at Gears of War 2. That game was as deep as a dog's water dish, but is a fantastic success, not just because it's executed nearly perfectly, but also because it didn't really challenge players. (Okay, Dom tried to find his wife and players complained that he was "too bitchy" during the game.) So a game based on a real-life six-day battle is going to be a tough sell—not to mention a difficult thing to write, script and program.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is based on a careful recreation of one of the longest instances of close-quarters combat the U.S. Marine Corps has been involved in since World War II. To get it right, the developers took the extra step of talking to some of the insurgents involved as well as Fallujah’s civilians.

Read that last sentence again. That's gonna be a sticking point.

Even ignoring the inevitable public outrage over the background work (which in any other medium would be reasonable), there is the larger issue of whose interests the developers are looking out for or sweeping under the rug.

The civilians are going to have a different perspective on the fighting and the tactics employed by both the insurgents who came to Iraq to fight the Jihad and the indiscriminate use of firepower by members of the United States Marine Corps. Oh, and both the irregulars fighting against the Americans and the Marines are going to have different (and truthful) perspectives that are going to skew how the game ought to be portrayed.

The Marines aren't going to be happy if the creators mention the pre-attack bombings Fallujah was subject to or the military’s offensive use of white phosphorous. The insurgents who risked their lives to talk to the game’s developers aren't going to be happy if the fact that members of their group used the civilian population as shields for their indiscriminate attacks is revealed. Oh, and let's not forget a coherent, well-designed game has to be made out of this, one that will make Activision and consumers happy.

“Six Days In Fallujah” has a lot of external hurdles ahead of it — a public suspicious of videogames and commentators looking for an easy topic to boost ratings.

But I think the biggest problem is internal. There's a lot of conflicting, accurate representations of those six days, so how do you pare down the experiences from all these different perspectives to something that resembles the truth? How do you put an ESRB rating on it?

“Six Days In Fallujah” frightens me because this game’s going to be in the spotlight and the creators have the time and money to dig themselves into a pretty big hole. To get the experience right, “Six Days in Fallujah” needs to set a milestone in storytelling. Frankly, I doubt the team is up to the challenge. I want them to succeed, but everyone looking over their shoulder has a different measure of success. And these are just the thematic concerns.

How, exactly, do you make a scripted third person shooter that acknowledges the claustrophobia of high density urban combat and still remains fun? Realism is hard to acknowledge when the actual soldiers can only clear buildings for an hour or two, tops and regularly pass out from heat exhaustion. If it's going to be realistic, then there is going to have to be an imposing penalty for using heavy automatic weapons on the map and huge bonuses for using less heavy weapons, which runs counter intuitive to the expectations the traditional player base.

The parallel that leaps to mind is Rainbow Six videogame series, which was realistic enough to dictate that when of the members of your unit got shot, they were pretty much down for the count if they were lucky. If they weren't, they're dead. Unfortunately, Fallujah isn't a series of three story office buildings or flat surfaces and building clearing is nerve wracking, when your enemies choose where, when and how the fight is happening is not what gamers are used to.

Gamers (I include myself in this) are used to having nigh-invincible, emotionally vacant, masculine demi-gods as their avatars, ones that have exquisite fire control and never empty a clip of ammunition to a room of people or prisoners because they've just been psychologically broken by seeing their friend's head explode in front of them. Are the developers of Six Days really going to digitally wrest control from the player at times and possibly alienate the players and force them to acknowledge how far removed our digital heroes are from flesh and blood?

Sherman said war is hell and I'd be willing to bet that with that description most gamers would expect "Doom". Let's hope I'm wrong.

Finished Demos: It's A Pretty Good Song, Babe, You Know the Rest

We're not dead. We just don't update regularly and my normal columns don't have an easy parallel here. So. I gave this to a college writing magazine at the end of January, and that issue still hasn't been published.

I eminently dislike sitting on writing when the only thing that's keeping from being seen is sorority obligations, which are things that do not hold a large amount of power in my life. Anyway. This piece (whenever it comes out) will be called Let Me Take You Out and it is about, well, girls and boys presuming there is a right time and place to go back to for authentic romantic expression.

Fuck that. (Oh, the title comes from a Gaslight Anthem song.)

What makes romantic expression authentic is the intent behind it, not when it was expressed and if that gets obscured, then I think we're in a world of trouble. Whenever this gets published on paper, I hope, I hope, I hope that the introduction below gets printed with it.

Romance, like love, might be beyond verbal expression. I don't even know if it's appropriate to say I'm grasping in the right direction, because that would suggest a Platonic form (look it up) of romance, which is not an idea I currently want to commit to. Remember: I don't know romance and I never will.

Hugs/Kisses,
Charles Victor Szasz


There's this little thing that's clawing away at the back of my mind: Romance isn't dead, but there are some people that are pretty determined to pronounce it dead on arrival despite its steady breathing and lively EKG.

Before I even begin, let's make it clear who I'm not speaking about. The kids (and adults) who go out to places where they can drink alcohol and orgasm mutually are not really a part of this discussion. if you want to complain that they're killing romance, this isn't the venue.

It's the kids who are trying to "go back" to an earlier era of courtesy and social cues that have been overly romanticized. (These people may be related to the people who think World War II was the Good War. I loathe the Holocaust, but there is no good war Ever. [More crimes were averted, I'll grant you that.] Over 40 million died in over World War II. To put that in perspective, go to a beach. Now imagine each grain of sand is a naked, ruined corpse, pale from malnourishment and smeared with the excrement of the lifeless vessels on top of them. That's war.) You know the type. Cynically, they're the douchebags who think that with a fedora and an antiquated dress code, they're somehow being gentlemen or ladies. They seem to have mistaken being romantic for being suave. I have no words for them, but then again, I've constructed them as an easy target.

Less cynically, but more pointedly, there's the people who genuinely believe that there is some golden age for romance to go back to and closely adhering to that standard will make them romantic. It's this group that's more worrisome to me, since they're more authentically disposed towards the idea, but are heading in a direction which avoids the problems that they claim to have a solution to.

Some say Victorian England, some say it's the period before the Second World War (1920-1940), some go to France, but all say that Romance is dead with a seriousness that makes me smirk. Romance, as I characterize it, the crossroads of concern, humility, sentiment and action, can't ever die because there's always going to be something genuine there. Modern Life is War got it right with "Fuck the Sex Pistols": The grass was never green. There was never purity. Some say it's all over. Stupid fucking jaded burnouts...You don't get to decide. It's ours. Go away. Shut up. Little else in my mind needs to be said. It is the genuine emotion that can never be a product of a particular time and place that makes love and the expression of it romantic.

It's the why and less the how, and that's where I take umbrage with this group of well-meaning kids who want to go back to something else. They want it to be codified, written down and definitive. There aren't many hard and fast rules to go by and for a lot of people, that's frightening. That's their prerogative, though, as is the focus of this submission, I believe they're barking up the wrong tree. I do not mourn the death of labyrinthine social codes around romancing the people of your desire. I don't think it's a good idea to go back to a time when the idea of romance was limited to straight white people. I am supposed to show you how much I care by giving you a rose or dancing slowly? How disappointingly limiting, not to mention exclusionary.

Going "back" to something lacks the ability to grow and blossom with the different intersections of gender, desire and sex, that are finally acceptable to express in public in the college's bounds and in some large cities. Our traditional dances are gendered for men who like women and women who like men. But you know that already. Remember, people are left out by these universal romancing ways. The reason why things like putting your jacket down over a puddle so the girl doesn't have to step in the water are supposedly romantic is because it comes out of a desire to make the person's life a little easier, cost be damned. Just to see you smile, as Tim McGraw sings, is the essence of the idea.

Romance is (Did I just type that? If you ever see the phrase "something is" without any kind of background, your bullshit detector should go off loud and clear.) an ideal that is meant to be reached for and never grasped, I believe (Phew.). You, I or anyone else can never ever think of ourselves as romantics, because at that point where I think I've got it, I've lost it. It's in the humility of knowing you would give up what you have for your lover but knowing that your lover would never ask it of you. It is crucial now to mention that I do not submit myself as any kind of answer to the questions I pose. I will feign suggestions but I am far too suspicious, neurotic and unreasonably paranoid to be a model for anyone, except in what not to do. (Did I mention the low self-esteem and depression?)

If you want to be romantic, I think you ought to first figure out what romantic means to you, and apply those ideas to a modern context. I initially compared this to Batman, but somehow, using a fictitious character who is almost completely incapable of sustaining a meaningful adult relationship (sexual or emotional) seems wrong here. You will make mistakes. I will make mistakes. It hurts. It breaks. But, in making the mistakes you are acknowledging the ever-expanding possibilities of modern interaction and expression that didn't exist during a fictitious Golden Era, whether it's comic books or Americana.

I don't feign to understand romance. I just see people looking in one direction and I think I see what they're describing in a different direction. I'm very, very distrustful of the desire to go back or say anything is dead. But then again, I'm a white heterosexual male, I've hardly ever needed help raising my voice.

Demos: In A Million Pieces

The title is a bit of a double entendre. In A Million Pieces is a record by the Draft, which I heartily endorse, but the name still might ring a different bell. A Million Little Pieces is a book that lots of people read, only to find out the author lied, fabricated or distorted much of his own life in the book. In a piece about reading and literacy, it's fun to echo a book that many people have read and been excited about only to be disappointed.

Plus, there's been a post...three out of the last five days. Can we keep it going?

In 2003 the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) put out a list of 100 of England's favorite books, based on a poll of their viewers. Now, in 2009, it is getting reborn as a Facebook meme.

The Facebook-spread meme heading states that the BBC believes people will read only six out of the 100 books. A quick Google search yields nothing from the BBC's perspective, so this heading sounds fictitious. (I think I saw this float around Livejournal once back in the earlier part of this decade. What's old is new again.) But that's not the real issue. The real issue in my mind is that this seems to be interpreted by otherwise intelligent people as a sign that we are living in illiterate times.

They might be right, but not for the reasons they think.

One, they're just going along with something they saw on the internet, but more importantly, that list isn't the arbiter of who or what is literate. (There are reading comprehension problems because until recently United States schools were not promised a lot of money—especially those that did not teach white kids.)
The list wasn't meant to be definitive, but even if it was trying to be, it never could be. There is always going to be something important left out. The list is written from one perspective, which privileges one form of expression over another.

White people writing in a traditional manner are overly represented and graphic novels are non-existent. But what's important to me is the reactions.
Many of the responses on Facebook I see appear to be a variation of the following: "I haven't read enough of these" or "based on the fact that more people haven't read these books, we live in illiterate times and that's depressing" and "I've read this many!"

That second response infuriates me. First, it's narcissistic and self-centered. It privileges the social class that has the time and energy to read these books by assuming that the list is definitive and applicable for everyone, everywhere else. They decide what is on that list. Mastery of it constitutes literacy. They ignore other forms of the written word, whether in newspapers, ads or printed on the internet.

What makes someone literate is how deeply they can read into the material, not how far they've gotten on some viral reading list, using the BBC’s coattails as a shield. Reading half or none of these books at age 22 (or 88) doesn't make you literate. It just shows you different ways to use language. Put me in a Staten Island high school and (if I’m lucky) I might recognize half of what's being said or expressed. The language of “Pride and Prejudice” isn't going to help me there. For that matter, neither will “Dune” by Frank Herbert.

Language is about expressing yourself with the written word regardless of what form you choose. All of the BBC’s books will help you, but what will help you more is knowing what to use and where and how to make connections between people and ideas that would otherwise remain distant from each other, lessons which doesn’t have to come from that list.

That experience and that knowledge doesn’t have to come from books. Illiteracy isn’t when people aren’t reading classics. Illiteracy is when people aren’t reading at all.

Demos: The Hand That Feeds

I know using a Nine Inch Nails song is passe on the internet, but I'm listening to a stripped down remix of the song, in which there is a light, ambient noise and piano as Mr. Reznor's only accompaniment. (Plus, With_Teeth wasn't good anyway.) There's also a bit of overlap. This one is about John McCain and who was feeding him when and with what.

I respect the man's service in uniform. I just hope he stops keeping the Republican party line, the one that ruined and tarred him with divisive and insulting race-baiting politics not to mention tying Sarah Palin to his ticket and political fortune. Like most other soldiers that Bush commanded, he also was used and led to ruin. It's just more clearly visible here.

If this inspires you to do anything, I hope it inspires you to look up more information on PTSD treatment for Iraq War veterans, because when they get home, they're going to find a host of problems (mental and emotional) waiting for them on this shore.

And that's assuming they can get a job.



There's something that rubbed me very wrong about Senator John McCain's comment about the $800 billion taxpayer bailout, which he called generational theft.

It's a poor choice of words. Admittedly, it's politics as usual—using overly emotional language to discuss something that is as serious as a heart attack and requires careful attention, which a shot to the gut (of which that imagery strikes) doesn't help.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Republican plan of 60% tax cuts versus 40% spending is the wrong way to go. Over the last eight years, we've had quite a few tax cuts and they haven't gotten us very far. I'm in favor of spending a lot of money, but it has to be directed not to one and done jobs (à la construction, see Japan in the 90s) but to industries that have a clear, long term sustainable trajectory.

What McCain means, I believe, is that the money was borrowed from future generations, for us and others to pay back. Which, while accurate, is incredibly callous. It's callous because the resources of my generation have already been plundered, and will never be repaid. That was when all those brave senators stood up and voted to authorize war in Iraq. McCain didn't seem to mind "generational theft" when it was his hand in the cookie jar of my youth.

McCain voted to send people my age out to fight a war when he didn't even bother to read the full 90 page NIE report about Iraq. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war over weapons of mass destruction, a particular point where the U.S.A. hadn't had human intelligence sources for five years. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war when the evidence presented to the Armed Services Committee were blurry pictures of trailers in the desert.

In 2007, when McCain was in Iraq, he said that (based on a visit to the Shorja Market in Baghdad) Baghdad was very safe. And he was right.

Shorja Market was safe because there were 100 troops on the ground and on rooftops in that market. Shorja Market was safe because three Blackhawk and two Apache attack helicopters were circling overhead. He was safe because he didn't remove his bulletproof vest. Traffic was redirected and restricted for that hour-long visit. He went out to visit the production he voted in favor of and found an orchestrated calm.

McCain may want to think more carefully about what he is implying.

When Bush and his water carriers in the Senate and House authorized a war on the other side of the world under false pretenses, it was vital to American national security that it shouldn't be questioned. McCain saw no generation theft there. But when it's an $800 billion spending bill proposed by a Democrat, that's when he draws the line.

We know where McCain stands now that he's away from President Bush. Even though Bush is out of office, it's still too close for my comfort ideologically. I've always felt Senator McCain's political career in this decade has had a tragic quality, and it's no more apparent than here. Quite a few people, myself included, respected him before 2004 because of his ability to speak to more than a traditional base. (Dare I say maverick?) But with the phrase generational theft, McCain continues his slide into a familiar, anonymous role: Republican senator keeping the party line.

And these statements sound as though he's listening to the same people who had a cruel hand in his losing presidential run. The great tragedies end when the protagonists are ruined. After the fiasco that was the post-Palin campaign, McCain isn't looking too good, but I don't want to see his curtain close yet.

Demos: The Impending Glory of American Adulthood

The title is another Crime In Stereo song, off of their now-venerated 2006 record, the Troubled Stateside. Buy it now. The song is track three. Both the song and this piece are about the same emotion: Shit, I'm growing up.

These columns are starting to turn into letters to the community. I don't know whether it's just my pronounced anti-social tendencies (Seasonal Affect Disorder, how are you?) or that I’m getting better at writing.
Grant me your attention, if for a moment. I do feel as if I'm clinging to my sanity or good humor.
The current generation of games does not interest me. This isn't for reasons of quality, since 2008 was one of the best years for games in recent memory. I simply can't afford the new games and systems. I'm feeling more and more distant from the current gaming generation and the reasons, aside from revenue, aren't really fashionable. I'm getting older and have other equally expensive interests to cultivate as well as a limited amount of time to indulge them all.

Investing in new systems is maddening. The Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure and has a tiered pricing structure, which means if I don't want to play inventory management on my console, I have to buy an external hard drive (or pay extra). Plus, its new games cost $60. The Wii has yet to find a library of third party games that take advantage of the Wii remote and are actually worth playing. The PS3 (and the games on it) is still too expensive for my tastes and does not retain the PS2 backwards compatibility, which is where most of my games are.
I've yet to exhaust that library. Sitting by my television is a stack of about five or six stellar PS2 games (a later Burnout and Splinter Cell iteration and God Of War 2, among others) released in the last four years, each of which needs finishing or starting. I'm also tempted by the promise of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections for a whopping $30 total.

Like books, movies, TV shows and other media, there’s always something new and shiny. But there are three or four less shiny things that get left along the way. The trick, if videogames are to be a hobby that does not cripple you financially, is to stay a couple years behind the cutting edge.

There are advantages to this for PC gaming—hopefully the bugs in the original games will have been fixed. The expansions on content will also usually come to you for free since the game is no longer current. It also means that on the console side the good games will have been removed from the chaff and will cost you half as much. It's because of these older games that I'm okay with becoming increasingly irrelevant in current videogame discourse. For reasons that make a sad logic to me, I am not much of a "gamer".

Gaming is an expensive hobby to stay up-to-date with. In some circles, it's only when I'm willing to pay a $350+ ante to play a $60 game that I am marked as a gamer. The disposable income exists to do that and buy one game, presuming I don't want to eat or enjoy anything else until the semester is over.
I'm keenly aware that I will not have as much time as I currently do later on, so five or six games will last me at least eighteen months. By then, the price will have gone down for the next generation systems and I'll have bought the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections.

As I get older, I'm beginning to wonder if the real question of videogames is not what you pick up and what you stay current with, but instead what you leave behind along the way. I view the trailing edge as the way to play videogames like one might pick flowers--slowly and with gusto. This only makes the scent sweeter in a world that moves quickly and without pity. Whether it's a chrysanthemum or a controller, I hope you'll pick one up.

Demos: I Smashed Their Theiving, Greedy Blackened Halos

The title, as should not surprise you, comes from a Crime In Stereo song called XXXX (The First Thousand Years of Solitude). A writer in an upstart campus magazine Overkill who had also written occasionally for the school newspaper called the Campus (unimaginative, I know) and called the Campus a bunch of names and suggesting that the newspaper wasn't doing its job.

I took umbrage and this was my response.

Hello, Penelope. About your Overkill piece. It brings up a couple points I think have been brought up by a lot of other people, so I'm responding to this publicly. A newspaper ought to speak to its audience directly in one place, the editorial, which I presume you understand, is written by the editorial board. I don't pretend to speak for them.

That out of the way, let me take a critical eye to your piece. "In a nutshell, our college newspaper could be accomplished by high school students: current events, opinions, videogames, movies and sports. The thing with high school newspapers is that we expect that same repetitive quality."

My first question is a simple one: Do you know what a newspaper does? That the Campus responds to events and publishes the opinions of the media that surrounds the students is one of the definitions of a newspaper. So does every other paper, ever. Look at the New York Times, which is the standard for this medium. They report on current events and sports and they solicit informed opinions on things like videogames and movies.

There isn't anything left for the Campus (or any other newspaper) to write about if we didn't look at current events and opinions on media. What you want appears to be a magazine (like Harper's or Mother Jones, but let me know if I'm wrong or putting words in your mouth), which you published in (Might I suggest buying a subscription?) and currently needs money to continue publishing. If your question is why the Campus' writing isn't up to a standard you'd prefer, there's a lot to publish by a small amount of people.

"I have personally lowered myself to contributing to The Campus on a number of occasions. The last thing I expected to see was the editors had changed my title, edited my content and deleted my intent. How can taking someone else's words and tampering with their material and length be justified?"

How are an editing process and space constraints on a title draconian? I think It's perfectly reasonable for us to look over what we publish under their banner and look out for things that could get us or Allegheny sued. Speaking of which:

"The Campus is completely against vocalizing what students really want to say...They edit out the most opinionated, in some cases, the most important parts of articles, attributing their reasons to space. If space is the issue why don't they ask the writers what they want to edit?"

We have an open office during deadline night (5 p.m.-past 9 p.m. Wednesday) in which the authors are welcome to come in and look over their piece before it goes to the printer. If you want to be in the room when the editor goes over your piece, then show up in the room. As for the "most opinionated, most important" parts, since this is a hell of a charge to level against the paper (and I don't know which pieces you're referring to specifically), I am going to guess because we can't publish libel or slander. The libel of being "against vocalizing what the students want to say" that's intriguing, given that you cite absolutely nothing in defense of the defamation.

"But just think: a literary work where students could look to voice opinions and view aesthetically pleasing pictures - that would be OK."

There is a place where literary work and aesthetically pleasing pictures can be viewed and it's called Overkill (and hopefully Golem!) If I haven't mentioned this before, newswriting and literary writing are very, very different. Pictures too. The reason why there is a journalism track is an offshoot of the English track is because the two kinds of writing are incredibly different and require two different uses of the same tool, the written word to achieve different aims.

"A newspaper should be a loudspeaker to the student, a pulpit to the crowd."

We disagree. The purpose of a newspaper, in my estimation, is to be the voice of truthfulness, accuracy and avoid distortion. The Campus ought to be the person in the crowd telling you what you can reasonably believe from the person speaking at the pulpit. There's enough loudspeakers and pulpits that I particularly enjoy when an Allegheny outlet speaks softly.

I hope this answers the questions you have. If not, my email is at the bottom of this piece or find me in the office during deadline night.

Demos: Live Grenades

Obama's in office now. I am going to sleep tonight knowing that the eight years of our long national nightmare is now officially in epilogue mode, I hope. Tonight I had a drink and very nearly did "We Didn't Start the Fire" with five other friends of Eleven Names, but owing to time, we all headed back. When Friday comes, I'll be in full end of week (and end of Bush) mode and the drinks will be raised in celebration rather than commiseration.

CNN and 24 hour news networks have been trying for a long time to find a way to speak about the momentousness of Obama's inauguration. I've got little to bring to the table except a sincere feeling of joy and being estatic. I'm a white, heterosexual, vaguely Christian male. People who like me have been President for a long, long time. I can't tell you, vividly, if at all, what it means to the percentage of the population that isn't like me. I'm, therefore, cynical of the people who are cynical of the inauguration. I literally cannot begin to fathom what hope and possibilities it awakes in the minds of the non-white communities in the U.S. and so to say it doesn't mean that much appears to me, to miss the point, if, in fact, I can plot the point on the map.

Right. This is supposed to be about records. Forgive me. You know how much I like Obama. The Gentlebeast (introduced as much to Thomas and I as he was to you) says that he wants more of King and Obama to overlap and I agree, I just don't want Obama to get shot. So not too much overlap, okay?

I originally wrote this for another feature and only now is it getting published. Originally, this was supposed to be published around February or March of last year, but it got canned because the old features editor already had someone doing CDs that week. Oh well. You can find Polar Bear Club here and Life Long Tragedy here. Life Long Tragedy has already broke up, but Polar Bear Club, it appears, has another disc in them, to be released this year, which excites me almost unreasonably. The title is a fantastic track from Let Me Run's record, Meet Me at the Bottom, which you can stream in its entirety here. Try to give all these awesome music its own space. All of it will grow on you, I hope.

There are two discs that I believe have not been sufficiently highlighted over the last year. The first is by Polar Bear Club and is called "Sometimes Things Just Disappear", and the second is by a group called Life Long Tragedy and is titled "Runaways". The two currently carry with them the weight of some fairly heavy RIYLs, so let's investigate.

Polar Bear Club's disc has the unenviable task of following their blindingly good and stupefyingly emotional "the Redder, the Better" EP, which every track captured, to a great extent, the evolution of modern emo without the philosophically intriguing but socially maddening dress up. Here is where tour hungry, sore throated, now venerated heroes Hot Water Music and Small Brown Bike have their musical progeny, and "Sometimes Things Just Disappear" answers that call. It's old fashioned emo, in the sense that it, rocks, without applying any of the violent, macho overtones that seem to plague the rash of groups having their way with the genre.

Yes, for the most part, it is a disc written about girls and relationships. "What good am I to anyone like this? It's been a hard couple months, I'll admit" vocalist Jimmy Stadt sings, and by the time he drops that line, he's already pleaded "Dr. Howe, please call me back" three times. One suspects the *cough* ladies have not been kind to the poor narrator, and by and large, they haven't. "This boy is spent, but forever unlucky" is the sticking point in "Bug Parade", and that's a song spent watching the lips of the girlfriend and her mother move, trying to discern what they're talking about. The most wrenching song is Heart Attack at Thirty, with it's opening line "eight years from now, I will go into cardiac arrest". It's a disc for the cold times that autumn and winter bring, so I heartily suggest you get cozy with it.

Life Long Tragedy's "Runaways" (the band has now broken up), carries with it the heavy, heavy tag of "the next American Nightmare", which in the hardcore punk scene, may as well be saying "the next Metallica". American Nightmare was a band known, and perhaps defined by Wes Eisold's romantically anti-social, jaded lyrics on hope, lust and love. (His fingerpints are all over Fall Out Boy's last three discs, even when he doesn't get a writing credit.) And on a couple songs, Sweet Innocence in particular, "tomorrow isn't promised, but it's sure as f*ck coming" and "true love was just a marketing ploy, so guys can hit their lines and girls can grab their boys" Life Long Tragedy channel this near-mythic influence (American Nightmare) with startling potency, but also 90's straight edge heroes Unbroken in Runaways' less frantic and pus trickling moments.

Track three Hey Death, though, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the disc. A slow, morose song, which builds and builds to a discharge of "Hey Death, can you stop this beating in my chest?", ending with Scott Phillips screaming for a minute of Death's time. Like the songs that spring from it, the production on "Runaways" feels weighty, oozing and festering. It's not a pretty disc, by any stretch of the lyrical or sonic imagination, the guitars are heavy and clear as mud, which describes the pacing and outlook of the disc fairly well. The bass is filthy. The vocals feel like Mr. Phillips slammed two shots of Liquid Plmbr before recording, and the end result sounds like the draining of an open wound. Not surprisingly, it only makes the songs more palatable to me. It's the grime that lends "Runaways" its remarkable authenticity, its character of being down but not quite out.

I hear all the time that certain artists lay it all out there, with nothing to hide. I recommend Polar Bear Club and Life Long Tragedy to you precisely because they actually lay themselves out there with uncommon effectiveness and poignancy. These discs won't be mentioned on Pitchfork any time soon, but that's fine, they're my secret from me to you. Start telling.

Demos: Painting By Numbers

This is a really early demo, the issues, I heard, was supposed to come out today but didn't because the editors wanted to have a week off when school started. Okay. So, here's something you'll see later on next week. The song is the first track off of Marathon's self-titled record. It would also, sadly, be their last. Listen to more Marathon here.


When ex-Governor Blagojevich was indicted, the response from my Illinois-native friends was swift, but this was telling: The one that seemed most prescient said "You know, I always thought the mayor would be indicted first." Knowledge is power, as we've learned in Saturday morning cartoons and any mafia movie ever, but that doesn't entirely describe Chicago. Yes, where's mine might be the mantra of City Hall, but the reason why the big politicians have stayed big in Chicago is not just because of the machine, but the most important detail is what they recuse themselves from.
It's incredibly bold for Burris to accept now-arrested governor's appointment, but to say that God spoke to the governor to appoint Burris goes beyond staggering self-importance and into messiah complex territory. Burris, as we all know, is a raging egomaniac, but he's also a pragmatic one, comparing Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats, whom he wishes to join, to famous Southern racists. Classy.
Not much remains to be said about the now-arrested governor (protesting too much, odd behavior patterns that make the viewer ask: cocaine?, bad haircut, etc), except that this, as everyone from Illinois knows, is the tip of the iceberg. A juicy little tidbit (I think I got this from the Daily Show) is that Representative Bobby Rush has backed Burris' appointment, saying that it was an imperative that a black man remain in the Senate. The statement was plenty distasteful and transparent, but made more so by the fact that Rush, when given the opportunity, backed the white incumbent that President-Elect Barack Obama unseated when he had the choice earlier this decade.
Speaking of which, the idea that Obama (or anyone from his campaign) is wrapped up with Blagojevich is laughable. Anyone politically cognizant in Illinois has known this guy was radioactive since 2006 and the idea that his phones were tapped should not surprise those same people.
The fact that he might actually be my state's next senator is concerning, but I have a lot of faith that the voters of Illinois, myself included, will kick his ass out the first chance we get. That is the genius and madness of the American political system. Problem is, Burris is more of the second and significantly less of the first.

Demos: Magic Fingers

Yes, it's about the Spore DRM. Enjoy. I guess Eleven Names is dead. I can't really do anything halfway, so I'll still be posting things here, even if I'm the only one. The song is by a metal/thrash band called Cursed. Listen with your headphones up and a maniacal grin on your face.




What do you do when you're a gigantic multinational corporation and you've got a hugely anticipated game you've sunk tens of millions into getting pirated weeks before the release date?

If you're Electronic Arts (EA) and that game is Spore, you throw a new kind of copy-protection on the retail release.

Perhaps by now, one of your computer savvy friends has told you the gripe: If you buy Spore, the copy-protection (known as SecureRom) the disc only allows three installations. Buy it from the online store, you still only have three installations. If you use an illegal file-sharing network to acquire that same game, you have as many installations as you want.

Seem silly to you? It seems silly to a lot of people as well, who are upset, and reasonably, given that they are paying for a product that is fundamentally crippled from what they can download for free. SecureRom is also a bit of a pejorative in the PC gaming community, since the Mass Effect controversy, where the game required you to be on the internet once every 10 days so it could phone home to make sure the game isn't pirated, and that's being polite and not mentioning that installing that game (or Bioshock) might give EA administrative access to your computer. EA, however, has said that they are going to use SecureRom in the forseeable future to protect their games, which suffice to say, concerns me.

Let me say this explicitly: If you choose to purchase Spore, you are getting a product that may endanger your computer, and from one perspective is a $50 rental. If you don't pay for Spore, and find it online, you get an un-crippled version of the game and it is less likely you'll get viruses from the game. Whether you'll get viruses from the programs you need to run the game without a disc is another matter entirely. Most of this, though, is obvious.

What's not obvious is that EA doesn't have anywhere else to go on the issue. What are you going to tell your investors who can grow reasonably nervous about their continued involvement with an industry that takes millions of dollars in loses from piracy? That the best way to protect your multi-million dollar baby is to put less strong anti-piracy measures on the disc? You think swallowing a negative profit margin is tough, try telling an executive that the best way to curb illegal acquisition of the game is to just to throw a CD-key (easily crackable) on the retail copy.

The official stance from EA is that if you want multiple accounts, you'll need to buy multiple copies of the game. If you've forgotten your email or lost access to the password, you are out of luck, and are now out another $50. This seems draconian. In fairness, it will probably take a couple weeks of customers calling EA's customer service saying that they need more installs, and the company heads will probably get the message and remove the three install limit.

Until then, though, is the issue. If I am going to be remotely honest, my advice is to buy a copy of Spore, then download it on your favorite filesharing service. Even typing that sentence seems absurd, but if you want the game you paid for, and you want it to work on terms that are reasonable, that's one of the only honest options I can come up with. To quote a good friend of mine, you can expect other commentators to be far less merciful.

Yes, SecreRom a) frightens me that much, but also b) restricts the content on the disc that you paid for. I'm sympathetic to the gigantic corporation trying to protect its investment, but at this point, rampant piracy has already succeeded, so restricting the enthusiastic customers helps no one.

EA, sadly, is in a bind. They don't have the quazi-moral authority that a Blizzard or Valve does, and they have significantly higher operating costs and a much larger group of developers to corral. They have to take a strong anti-piracy stance, and if that means using an overzealous alaskan wolf as a drug sniffing dog, so be it.

They, however, ought to prepare for when their wolf ruins their customers baggage.

Demos: Prick For President

Sadly, by now, the Republican National Convention has come and gone, proving my point about being cautiously optimistic about the vituperative nature of the campaign. The "liberals" being compared to the Viet Cong? Thanks, Mr. President. Oh well, at least someone in the RNC postponed the first day of the convention to keep the focus on Hurricane Gustav. Sarah's Palin's speech, though, had quite a bit of partisan rancor and even more lies. Way to go, Governor.

By now you've heard that Republican presidential candidate and long time U.S. Senator John McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his Vice President. It's not exactly an intellectual masterstroke to say the decision was made to appeal to many different segments of the US population. I'm starting to feel that McCain's choice of 44 year old mother of five Governor Palin represents a political Rorsarch test, with some liberal Democrats saying it's a desperation play for some of the bitter ex-Hillary people in the voting booths, some conservative outlets saying it's a maverick picking another maverick, traditional outlets saying it's a play for the disenfranchised Romney or Huckabee voters who are threatening to "sit out" the election.

Thus, the questions: Who, exactly, does this attract, and with who in mind, was it made?

From the traditional standards of electoral scorekeeping, the pick doesn't make sense. Alaska doesn't have enough electoral votes worth mentioning, and neither does the northwest. I was unaware that social conservatives were ever not going to vote for McCain, but at least according to Politico, the traditional Republican voters became tremendously more excited and more likely to play ball with the former reformer. We'll see if that holds.

I'll hazard a guess that Governor Palin was chosen based on being an obscure politician with fairly impeccable conservative credentials, in addition to having significant, if small scale organizational and legislative experience. All that, in addition to being a woman.

Also (but not paradoxically), you probably can take Senator McCain at his word here when he says that one of the reasons he chose her was to shake things up in Washington. Her experience as Governor of Alaska is, at best, two years total, having defeated the Republican incumbent. She's been a dynamic individual in Alaskan politics, pushing through the Alaskan Gasline Inducement Act after a couple years of inaction, tapping a Canadian corporation to do so. Before 2004, Senator McCain used to be a maverick, so perhaps he sees a little bit of himself in Governor Palin, a woman who is very comfortable with her views (pro-gun, against abortion except only in the case of the death of the mother) and isn't afraid to accept the consequences and drawbacks of her position.

According to members of my family in Alaska, Governor Palin is a tenacious, skilled politician who listens, connects well and radiates warmth, so it will be interesting to see when she gets dispatched here (and also in Michigan and Ohio) how she fares amongst the populous.

I'm not particularly concerned about her age, any more than I'm concerned about Senator Obama's, though that question appears to appeal to a lot more people. This general election has been significantly less dirty than the past two and I'd like to see that continue. I've heard significant policy disagreements and not personal attacks. Even the slimy ex-Swift Boat people have only written a book about Obama, and it's not even a part of McCain's campaign.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the next couple months that they won't be filled with the same vituperative sloganeering that characterized the 2004 or 2000 elections, and with the choices that both Senators running for President have made, it looks to be an interesting race. By the time this column goes to print, the Republican National Convention will have already happened, and I look forward to the goings on in and around it.

Demos: And I Begin the Longest Year Ever

A couple things: 

First: Yes, I'm still doing this in the new year.

Second: I was asked to submit a column of advice for freshmen. This is what I wrote.

Third: I don't know when Tom, Zach or Jack is going to update.

Fourth: I still have big plans regarding guest columnists.

Fifth: The title is a Distance song that has always intrigued me since I heard it. I like the way it rolls off the tongue, and the weight that goes with the phrase. You know what's coming, but you don't know how or from where.

My advice for freshmen is fairly simple: the best way to figure out what to do is to make mistakes. So, get them all out of the way quickly.

I suggest the following:
+Start drinking Tuesday night so that you go to your Wednesday 8 a.m. class with a brutal hangover as soon as possible, without even the glimmer of Friday to look forward to. Why? So you know how terrible it is and how little you want that feeling in the future.

+The very next night, buy three cans of Red Bull and mix it with Ritalin. If you don't die, you'll learn the important lessons of a) not taking everything you read in this paper seriously and b) doing your work ahead of schedule.

+Take the money you'd spend on a fake ID ($150 in my neck of the woods) and cover at any local bar and put the bills slowly in the toilet over the course of 10 minutes while weeping softly. Congratulations, you've just gotten the feeling of getting that fake ID confiscated by the police and kicked out of the bar without having anything on your record or spending a night in holding.

+Get drunk the night before a test and fail it. (In this case, the sooner, the better.) You've just learned not to do that again.

My real bitty-bites of advice are as follows. Most of these are details in a college life. The major ideas (go to class, don't accept drinks from strangers at parties, do work in advance, explore Meadville) the school, teachers and random upperclassmen will tell you. You don't need me to reinforce that. So, in an effort to be useful, I solicited advice from carefully chosen members of the community who had different experiences than I did. Their suggestions are marked with an asterisk, because it's easier than acquiring the ability to use their full names here.

1) Make silly mistakes. Often. (You won't be able to avoid the big mistakes.)

2) Don't take yourself too seriously.

3) Listen more often you speak.

*4) Get to know upperclassmen.

5) Participate in campus life.

6) Take chances.

7) The Pittsburgh Bagel Company is worth getting up before 9 a.m. and walking down the hill for.

8) Buy tooth whitening gum. Lots of it.

9) Get a flash drive.

*10) Talk to your friends when you're in an academic or emotional rut.

11) Your raid group will understand if you have a paper due the next day. Your professor will not understand the reverse.

*12) There is no shame in recognizing your limits, academic, alcoholic or otherwise.

13) Give the benefit of the doubt.

*14) It's not worth a piece of your soul. In other words, remember to have fun, too.

15) Overloading on coursework and activities does not make you special or awesome.

16) If it's not on campus, start it.

17) Go to at least one fraternity or sorority event and use that experience, along with conversations from people involved with those groups to make a decision on whether it's for you.

*18) Julian's is a fantastic restaurant for almost any occasion.

*19) College is a small place, so word gets around about Saturday night by Sunday morning.

*20) Have an idea of the person you want to be when you graduate, and try to act accordingly.

*21) Building secretaries can be more helpful than you realize. Get to know them.

Finally, hardest of all, and perhaps most important: Get uncomfortable. One learns nothing staying in their bubble. I certainly learned quite a bit by being dead wrong and on this crucial point, I am willing to universalize my experience. To steal a line from Fugazi: Do it. Now. Do it. You have four years, and it's already ticking away. Welcome to college. Start leaving your mark.

Demos: Disgrace Is the Color of Red

Behind the scenes, there's been some significant discussion about what we're doing with elevennames, if none of us post and are overworked. I gave up on posting, angrily, a while back, and return now, for no other reason than it settles my mind and gives my mind something else to focus on than my papers.

There's news in the world, but I presume that you might like to know Nine Inch Nails released their new (non-instrumental) disc, the Slip for free, and you can download it, with a registration, here. More whenever we get around to it.

Eleven Names is dead! Long live Eleven Names!

Between Facebook’s new chat application (which you can’t opt out of) and the power outage on campus Thursday, a lightbulb turned on in my head. The big social question of our lives is how not how can we be more accessible, but how can we protect the few points in our lives where we are not accessible?

Consider, briefly, that airlines are thinking about allowing cell phone calls on flights. Can you imagine a multi-hour flight next to a businessperson or vapid human who needs to be speaking and in communication, and you can’t get away from it for another two hours? Or if it’s more than one person?

When the power went out during my Philosophy class (we were watching a movie), I exhaled. Suddenly, the reality of being in a basement in Montgomery, and having the comfort in seeing people’s faces in less detail, shrouded in shadows sunk in. There was a comfort in not having the lights on, and feeling just that much cooler, temperature wise.

For a couple moments, it felt like being in Plato’s cave. As the Germs might say, what we do is secret, and it was that remoteness and isolation, if only for 30 minutes, tops, made my day. (I suspect the classes in Alden were significantly less pleased.) Because the power was off, suddenly, the ability for people to contact me just got axed. I don’t think I brought my cell phone with me, so for those couple moments, I, truly, was unavailable. You couldn’t call, email, Facebook poke, IM (instant message), or text me and expect a response.

For that moment in our lives, nearly everything with a microchip was of no avail to me.

We (as a society) are quite attached to our electronics. This isn’t to say it’s bad, or wrong, but it’s happening. We vote with each new phone we purchase, with the video-feature, with every use of the mobile web feature, with every qwerty keyboard installed on that phone. With every new instant chat widget in an email client, social networking scheme and every single twitter update, we condone and support this hyper-connected behavior.

This is what we are becoming. At almost every point in my day, I am accessible. If I am not checking my multiple email accounts, updating blogs or chatting over IM I can also pick up my phone. I mention this to say I’m a part of it too. Do you want this lifestyle? Are we aware, that as a generation, we are making the decision to become connected and accessible at almost every point in our days and lives?

The answer is no. And, I presume, because I don’t see a discussion about it, that’s the problem. That’s what struck me and made me so angry about Facebook’s chat feature. There isn’t now, a way to simply update Facebook without being accessible.

I see a presumption that there that more accessibility is better and desired, and that’s what annoys me. It’s not true, and I think we’re losing something.

Quite what it is, I can’t put my finger on it, but I know, that as I have my IM client engaged, two email accounts open and my phone by my side, I won’t be anywhere close.

Demos: Mexico 4 Life

Again, a little something stop the bleeding of no posts here. We've got a good theme week coming up, Zach, Catherine and I are just real busy at the moment.

I have recently been reading the accusation that Senator Barack Obama has been throwing down the proverbial gauntlet in his stump speeches since Senator Hillary Clinton has put into circulation her 3 a.m. phone call ad, suggesting that Clinton has the experience on the first day she takes office to answer the dreaded early morning impending doom call that Obama doesn't.

Obama, then, has responded on his stump speeches by questioning Clinton's experience. This, I understand, is proof positive of his "taking the attack to Hillary", as the New York Times said on the sixth of March. For some readers, this counts as dirty politics.

I disagree.

I have seen dirty politics, and this is not it. Obama is asking for the evidence to Clinton's conclusion that she has the experience necessary to lead the country, which, when pushed, appears to be her eight years in the White House as her husband's de facto chief of staff, and her seven years on the Senate Armed Services Committee. That's a reasonable, if pointed question. By comparison, Obama has been on the same committee for two years, and the Republican nominee Senator John McCain has been on the committee since roughly the fall of man.

If you want real dirty politics, then I have a story to tell you. This story starts in South Carolina during the Republican primary in 2000 and stars Senator McCain and then Gov. George W. Bush during their campaign for the Republican nomination. Senator McCain has a lead and has won Iowa and New Hampshire. Anonymous polls begin in neighborhoods where McCain was strong, with a loaded question to the effect of "Would your opinion of Senator McCain change if you knew that he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (It's important to note at this point that the McCain family had adopted a girl from Bangledesh, which lent a bit of anecdotal evidence to the whisper campaign used to discredit him morally.) Not surprisingly, McCain's numbers dropped in the polls; Bush took South Carolina; leaving McCain shaking and unable to regain the advantage.

Reports from multiple sources including the National Review, the New York Times (years later, of course...) and other reputable outlets could only confirm innuendos, but prevailing wisdom awards the credit to Karl Rove, operating as Bush's chief political strategist.

That's dirty politics. Dirty politics is suggesting that your white opponent had a child with a black woman in a conservative state without putting your own name on the smear. Dirty politics is firing anyone in the Justice Department who isn't a "loyal Bushie". Dirty politics is outing a deep cover CIA agent to get back at her husband for criticizing your basis for starting a war.

Asking for evidence to a debatable conclusion doesn't even come close.

Demos: No, ALL!

This is in response to a column that gave me the impression that the author said that political engagement didn't matter. I disagreed. Some important changes were made, but not to the original thesis. Perhaps the new version is a smidge faster, and maybe hit the proverbial notes more accurately. I don't think anything is lost in the translation, though. In fact, I like the printed version a little better.

I am not too proud to admit that part of this was inspired by Beth, with whom I disagree on a couple issues relating to Obama. Since much of the internet is about pointless feuds, I'd like to note that this doesn't mean I hate her, but simply disagree with her on a fairly important social issue that (hopefully) affects both of us.

Oh, and if you understand why, specifically, the non sequitur title is there, (and not simply as a reference to a praticular band) you win three hundred internet points.

My peers ask why vote and why bother with civic engagement, and it's a good question. Why bother with civic engagement at all when for the last couple decades, youth turnout has been at all time low (recently that has been changing) and voter apathy (why bother with presidents when the differences between candidates are shallow and they're all sponsored by special interests that profit on the status quo…) is fairly high?

I wish I had something better, something that sounded more academic or something that sounded more debonair, but here it is. Why should you bother? Because you've seen what happens when people didn't care. W. If you're enrolled here and fairly liberal, then you know what it's like during your formative years to be shut out of the political process, attacked and called a traitor to your country, all for voicing your opinion. To stave off the inevitable: I make no statements for when Clinton was in office, since I wasn't old enough to render a complex enough judgment for this column.

As for the idea of "keeping your political ideas to yourself", I'd like to respond with "Well, that actually ties into why bother with civic engagement." Let me speak, as I often do, about videogames. As I have previously mentioned, the "debate" on videogames is couched in a framework of "They're the worst things to happen to kids since rap music, don't you agree? You don't? Well, you're wrong, and destroying the innocence of American youth." Why is this? Because this side is the only one speaking up and voting for "the issue". And yes, it also has something to do with the fact that they donate lavishly to the reelection campaigns of Congresspeople. For the most part, there has not been until incredibly recently a coordinated attempt to form another perspective on videogames in the media. Opponents of videogames speak up, so they have the floor, and set the tone of the discussion. To appropriate a Modern Life is War lyric, if no one is speaking to you, speak up.

So, if you want to change the discussion (whether it's videogames or something else entirely), you're going to have to get your metaphorical hands dirty. You're going to have to speak in public about how you feel and you're going to have to take the plunge of expressing yourself about something publicly, or you can keep silently writhing and hope that magically, things will change.

I'm trying to say this without a bunch of rah-rah-rah garbage but, if you want change, you're going to have to raise your voice. I don't want this to end like a Disney teen drama, so I'll leave it like this: We have a mounting national debt (both foreign and domestic), a housing crisis that is squeezing people out of their homes, a war that will cost us over $2 trillion all told, and an international image in tatters.

You're still asking why you should care?

Demos: Don't Push Us When We're Hot

Discussions of breaking the theme aside, here's the draft I sent over to the newspaper to be published. Sometimes, the demos deserve to be outshown by their full studio release sibling, and I think this column is a great example of that. Fear not, I've got something for the theme week, but this will tide you over until I'm happy with the quality and quantity of my output.

There is a discussion among music industry pundits as to what, exactly, to do with the games "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero". After you get through the usual "Why don't they just play real guitars?" question (Answer: It differs from person to person, but in a lot of cases because it's fun faster.) and the suits thumbing their noses (Hello Velvet Rope!), what emerges most often is the word "market".

Market is an important choice of word. It shows what gamers are thought of. It dehumanizes the subjects and dismisses the idea of a shared community, experience or anything else except for age or geographical location. I'll return to this later. But, they see an "emerging market" for music in gamers. This "emerging market" is the enthusiastic "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" players who will buy new songs, sold as downloadable content. Why are we an emerging market? Because the record industry didn't pay attention to gamers before (even with the huge success of SingStar abroad), and now that downloadable content and "Guitar Hero" took off in numbers that raised some eyebrows, suddenly, gamers (and I include myself) courted.

This means, first and foremost, there's going to be a lot more garbage released on "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band", as any band who is smart enough will insist that part of their contract mandate that the label work with MTV or Harmonix to get their material on the games will, with the right push from the label (read: burlap sacks filled with money), get their focus tested single in. (See also: The upcoming Aerosmith edition of "Guitar Hero".) But, it also means that Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Beatles songs (what the industry might reasonable call high profile content) will become available to play.

The music industry sees the energy and willingness to spend money in the gaming world as something worth tapping into, and worth trying to profit off of. (They are not wrong, gamers are an reliable market which generates revenue consistently and in a physical retail environment. For an industry losing its core demographics left and right, this is an especially tempting pie.)

The interaction between the players in "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" and the feeling of "yes, I'm nailing this song" are what sells copies, and makes believers out of gamers. This is at odds with the current state of the music industry. There's enough economics people in the music industry, which is common knowledge, but not enough believers.

What remains to be seen is how the people making "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" will respond to the tempting offers of money to stuff their high profile game with sub-par material. "Guitar Hero 3" (the latest iteration) had small, but unforgivable problems with button response time, which is crucial in a timed response game. On the other hand, it had a more varied and deeper track list, which made "Guitar Hero 3" unbearable to play, knowing that when I hit the notes correctly, and on time, the game would not register it, making a "plunk" noise and taking me out of the experience.

That edition of "Guitar Hero" has since sold over a couple million copies, which is a success for any game. The problem is, players who bought the game got frustrated with the controls, and have since stopped playing that edition. As the music industry loses goodwill left and right, it's important to note that the "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" franchises have had some crossover success. Let us hope the success is not Pyrrhic.

Introducing: Demos

Eleven Names and my campus' newspaper occupy a strange place in my head. Both are repositories for my coalesced thoughts on a given issue, and frequently, they overlap. I could publish something on Eleven Names before it goes to the newspaper, but when it was originally written for the newspaper, it feels a little bit like cheating.

In fact, I wrote something that was originally written for the school paper, but I published it here when I realized that it would be a month or so before it was published in the school. That gave me an idea that I sat on for a couple issues. The editors tend to screw up the column when they don't check what they're putting on the page, which made me think, I'll take my own mistakes so long as I can do the final spell check. My columns will be be great!

So, I'll publish my first drafts here, a couple hours after they appear in the campus' paper to be digested. I hope this is a fairly stable new feature, where you all will get the demo version, what I sent to the paper for them to supposedly improve, and in fact, foul up with not catching the notes on the edits they were making.

Enjoy!

I wrote in recently about videogames and about the ease that journalists can dismiss them. But now I’d like to focus on why, with a couple reasons stolen outright from Wired’s Clive Thompson.

Why don’t videogames have the same kind of in depth discussion associated with them that recordings or movies do? First and foremost, I would imagine is because they simply aren’t good material for a daily feature or column. Just speaking about the time invested in (or expected from) a video game, the sweet spot being anywhere between 20 and 40 hours, depending on the kind of game, there’s no way that columnists could play a third as many videogames a year as they write columns or articles and expect to maintain a readership. They wouldn’t be saying anything useful. To make a quick comparison: If my college’s DJs had to sit through 3 10 hour CDs a week, they’d give up.

That is one of the primary reasons why videogames as a medium and form of communication do not get attention or care from newspaper media, the investment of time is too great as compared to other forms of communication and entertainment. In other words: Videogames take too long to digest for effective daily or weekly publishing material.

There’s also the monetary cost. Keeping up with the latest videogames is expensive, since the technology shifts every so often (PCs and consoles), in addition, the games themselves usually cost between $50 and $60 before tax. Unless, of course, you’re still playing last generation systems, in which case, it just isn’t newsworthy enough for further explanation in a paper or professional magazine.

Right now, video games occupy the same position that the “God-forsaken rock and roll noise” and “that awful rap garbage” did years ago, as the corrupter of children. How were those art forms absolved of their blame for being the worst thing to happen to morality since Original Sin? It was only through exposure to the music and an in depth discussion of the themes contained in the words that the form was acknowledged as legitimate and not as some kind of artless, puerile endeavor.

Pioneering political and social artists Public Enemy and NWA were bitter pills to swallow for Tipper Gore and Co., this is true, but almost two decades worth of distance from the outbreak of hip-hop music from racial boundaries, most serious critics acknowledge, at the very least, that those artists were writing about what they knew. (For that matter, “Fear of a Black Planet” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2004 alongside the Beach Boys and Dizzie Gillespie.)

The easy comparisons end there. Because video games today combine text, audio and an interactive portion with a controller or mouse and keyboard, games are judged in terms of a seamless interactive experience, which must be intimidating to players who don’t understand the vernacular.

With Grand Theft Auto IV coming out this year, gamers of all stripes can expect a storm of faux-controversy and hours of babbling from ignorant commentators who don’t know the vocabulary, but have no trouble proclaiming it as another murder simulator, peddled underhandedly to mentally unstable, titillated, teenage boys with predilections for school shootings.

Hopefully, you’ll know better.