Audio Review: Welcome to Night Vale

It's fair to say that I've been neglecting my growing backlist of podcast listening in the last few weeks. Hours of content lie dusty and unheard, voices crying out into the digital wilderness, their stories left unheard. I have been distracted, absorbed, and entertained by something new and strange, something that has drawn me in obsessively, in a way that feels pretty rare, these days. In a lot of ways I should have been onto this months, if not years ago, only picking it up as it's popularity seemed to explode across the wider geek-scape through the summer. But I'm here now, and, after about 6 weeks of commutes, totally up to date. I am speaking, of course, of Welcome to Night Vale. 

2011 in Review

Well we're now six days into 2012, and who remembers 2011 eh? That's the fast moving world of the internet for you but I still wanted to put out some sort of thoughts on the years entertainments, and after a brief delay caused by the year starting with the house being broken into, here it is.

I've got to start with the podcast. Dissecting Worlds has now put out nearly 40 episodes and not only have I had a fantastic time making it (because arguing with one of my oldest friends is always fun!) but I've also met a lot of new people and been pointed at a lot of new media to try. I've still little to no idea how many people actually listen but meeting the few who approached us at Thought Bubble was a great (but slightly weird-feeling) experience. And this year we've had a load of guests on, and they've all been great, lovely people. Cliched but true!

Entertainment wise the best thing we did the whole year was quit World of Warcraft. Not out of any real antipathy for a game me and Z have played a lot, and will almost certainly go back to in the future, but simply because we ran out of things to do that seemed worthwhile, and just eased away from it. What it did do it turn me into a much wider consumer of media, and my reading, TV and gaming consumption shot up through the back half of the year, so we've caught up on a lot that I suspect we'd otherwise have missed out on.

That said, I'm not sure it's been a year that anything leaps out at me as particularly outstanding. I've become completely hooked on Fringe, for instance, but I've seen nearly it's full run in the last 12 months so it's hardly a 2011 revelation except for lazy catch-ups like me. Similarly I've discovered A Song of Ice and Fire and Atomic Robo and the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast this year after somewhat criminally letting them pass me by in earlier years. Stuff new to this year? Nothing quite so striking.

On the other hand, on the gaming front there is possibly more striking and interesting games than I can successfully differentiate, especially only the indie gaming front. Bastion was great, for instance, and the number of hours I've ploughed into small titles like Dungeon Defenders dwarfs my time on the big AAA games like Uncharted 3 or Arkham City, both of which were great in their own ways. That said, if I had to pick a Game of the Year it would have to be the moody, atmospheric, thoughtful, and ever-so-slightly flawed Deus-Ex: Human Revolution, just I just found deeply interesting and compelling just to be in that world, even if my view of it was largely from hiding behind a desk.

For the sake of completeness I think I'd better mention the disappointments - largely the personal one that I didn't produce enough material for either this blog or for the commitments I made over at Geek Syndicate, a problem caused mostly by going back to college in the last quarter of the year and finding myself generally a little over-extended. I fully expect to make the same sort of error this year!

So, that was 2011. Here's looking forward to 2012...

The Tyranny of Knowing (and not Knowing) the Numbers

One of my other hobbies, when I'm not podcasting, reviewing, writing or painting tiny plastic figures, is being neurotic and insecure. As many of the above involve putting my thoughts out onto the internet in one form or another, this can be best described as an "interesting" combination.

Now on sunday we are recording the "Conclusions" episode of Dissecting Worlds Series 4, which will be our 29th podcast, which is all kinds of cool. Like the rest it will go out into the world, get syndicated, copied, stuck on itunes, and generally passed around the internet, and like all the rest we'll have very little firm idea of how many people listen to it. Sure, we get some very welcome feedback, it's not that much. I've worked my time in Customer Support roles and I know the deep truth that no-one rings you or emails you to tell you you're doing a good job, so a lack of being called a proper idiot is as good a compliment as you can get in these circumstances, but at times you just want to know people are out there.

The complete opposite is true of this blog - and indeed the reviews I've done over at Geek Syndicate. I can see in wonderful, granular detail how many hits an article gets, and where it is referred from, and so on, which leads to complusive stat checking to see how many people are reading whatever whitterings it have put out at which particular time.

Now the wierd thing is, from talking to fellow podcasters and bloggers, is that I'm not alone. We're all - well certainly a lot of us - like this, driven by an urge to put out our opinions to the world and then caught between fear of being told we are doing it wrong, or just plain ignored and not sure which would be worse. It could drive you mad, but I'm not sure doing this sort of thing is a mark of sanity to start with.

The answer of course is simple, and the single best piece of advice I was given when we started out, and probably the only piece of advice I would pass on. Do it because it is fun to do, in of itself. Do it because you enjoy the process of recording, or writing. Do it for your own pleasure, with your voice, and that will come through in what you do. 

Let the numbers look after themselves. Anything else is a bonus.

Right, just got to go check how many hits this has got...

Podcasting Update

Things have been pretty busy on the podcast front in the last couple of weeks. Firstly we have the Dissecting Worlds: Drugs Special with our guest David Wynne from Particle Fiction.

Away from DW I also got to guest on the lastest on Scrolls Book Group: Jennifer Government which was blast, and notable as its the first podcast I've done without my DW co-host, so that was a bit wierd for me. But had a good time, and we found out this morning that Max Barry, the author of Jennifer Goverment, has actually listened to it! Which is kinda terrifying...

Thinking: Gaming Narratives and Narrative Gaming.

Over at the Dissecting Worlds Two Towers we are engaged in sporadic discussion over the contents of our next batch of episodes, which in part consists of mutual wish-lists of stuff we want to cover, alongside a desire to keep it varied and interesting to listen to. In nearly thirty episodes (gosh!) I think we’ve managed to cover a wide range of bases, but it all that time, we’ve only covered one Gaming universe. And given how big the gaming industry is these days, that feels a little odd. 

Now obviously there is a lot of factors at work here – Gaming is a hobby still in its awkward adolescence and maybe doesn’t have the long history that comics or TV or movies have. My partner in crime, the Witch-King of Angmar to my Saruman of Many Colours, isn’t much of a gamer, and I had to pretty much force him play Mass Effect for the podcast we did on it. But I am a gamer, one who probably spends more free time a week gaming than watching telly or reading books, and I can’t think of many that I’d like to cover, largely because so few have enough narrative depth to get any mileage out of. 

So why is that? Well some of it is the nature of the beast – a lot of games have next to no narrative at all outside of “get gun, shoot baddie, smash crate” or “kill pigs for exp, level up”, or even “jump on platforms to collect mushrooms that help you rescue the princess.” and don’t need to. That’s not what they are about. A lot of games are set in the real world, or approximations thereof. A lot of games are so abstract expecting any sort of fiction around them is silly. But more than a few games but a huge amount of effort into their surrounding fiction and make a big song and dance about it, with wildly varying levels of success. 

Anyone who’s played any Role-Playing Games out of Japan will be well aware of the labyrinthine plots and worlds that these games bring with them, padding out already long games with hours and hours of elaborate cut-scenes and exposition, so much so that they can be like watching a very long movie in which you need to do the action sequences yourself. Western RPGs tend to live in variations of the Western Fantasy tradition – very recognisable to anyone who ever play Dungeons and Dragons – and led by Bioware as far back as the Baldurs Gate series seem more interested in personal “choice” in how you move through the world. For me, the former has stagnated over recent years whilst the latter has become more and more interesting, but ultimately what has made is so isn’t the worlds themselves but the increasingly complex way with which you can interact with them. 

Almost the polar opposite is the First Person Shooter, a genre that feels like it hasn’t overly evolved, gameplay wise, in about 10 years, bar the odd innovation like recharging health or sticking, Velcro-like, to cover. What it has done however, is tried to compensate for that by varying the scenery you wobble around in shooting people quite a lot. Besides the seemingly endless parade of World-War 2 and modern-day shooters, we’ve also seen a large number of surprisingly complex backdrops, that are really tangential to the business at hand. Halo sets great store by its (quite generic actually) Space Opera background to the point of tie-in books and extra merchandise, but there really isn’t much mileage in it compared to any of the backgrounds that it is riffing off. More successfully, Bioshock’s Objectivist Paradise of Rapture, along with its clever meta-narrative and striking visuals makes it the sort of game I would love to cover, alongside places like Half-Life 2’s City 17. 

This isn’t meant to sound dismissive of any of these games. After all, they’re games – the best background and plot in the world isn’t going to keep my playing if the actual gameplay is dull or clunky or broken. Starcraft II was hugely successful and great fun to play but its story is un-engaging and it’s universe derivative. The Darkness had great atmosphere and story but iffy controls and level design. I know which one I preferred, as a gamer, to be playing. But if I had to chose one to talk about, I’d pick The Darkness. 

But The Darkness is based on a comic. The Dawn of War series is based on a wargame. Knights of the Old Republic is set in the Star Wars universe. LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption are both stylised period pieces where you can point directly to the source material and talk about that instead. The Witcher is an adaptation of a novel series. Most MMORPGs are based on established properties and I’m not mean enough to pass on my World of Warcraft addictions to anyone. All of these have big, immersive universes or strong narratives (or both) but talking about them is largely redundant because I feel we should be talking about the direct source material, and what has built that. 

And I think that’s the frustration when it comes right down to it. Games can clearly put you in fictional universes in a way that no other medium can, and can tell great stories in the process. Many do, but as yet there are very few that are wholly of the medium, not imported from outside and adapted. I think it’s changing – I think there is a breed of developer out there that strives for it to change, to make universes and tell stories organically in the way that only that immersive experience can – but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. 

So I guess there is nothing else for it. I need to buy the Witch-King a copy of Bioshock...

So I Guess Introductions Are In Order

Um. Hello.

I'm Matt, and I'm a Geek. (Hello, Matt). Actually I've been one for a while, and even kept a blog for a few years, but it's mostly personal, freinds locked and full of dull things like photos of the kids and what I did last weekend and so on. But it's a little unfocused, and so I've set up a new home as a space to let me post longer rambles about wider geeky issues that interest me. And it seems prudent - and polite - to explain a little.

For the last 18 months I've been the co-host of the Dissecting Worlds podcast, whose main focus is to take a sideways look at various Geek Fiction, from any genre and any source, and fit into the real world a little bit. We look at inspirations, real-world equivalents, and try and fill the gaps around the material where we find them. I'm very proud of it, not only because it is fun to record in itself, but because its put me in touch with a lot of new and interesting people in the Geek Community.

It's also shifted my perceptions a little bit; I find it hard to watch something now without analysing it, peering into the cracks a little bit, and that needs an outlet other then boring the wife and kids with it, which is were this blog comes in. There's already a handful of posts I've moved over from my old blog and hopefully more will come when the need to write long-winded commentaries overwhelms me, as well as any reviews and other comments I feel compelled to write up.

But thats all for now, back to tinkering with the design tools.