From Taipei to Seoul

 Posted by (Visited 4662 times)  Misc
Nov 072005
 

I’m in the lounge at the Chiang Kai Shek airport in Taiwan, boarding a plane to Incheon Airport in about an hour. My bags are way heavy — probably heavier than they allow — because Taiwan is comparable to a sauna, whereas Korea is apparently near freezing at night. I’m struggling with this keyboard, which appears to handle every language known to man, but cannot supply a backspace key of a reasonable size, so I keep typing backslashes.

I am looking forward to exploring a little bit of Seoul, since I have never been. It will be interesting to contrast it to Taipei. The first time I was in Taiwan was in 1999, and I visited the capital, and the cities of Tainan and Kaohsiung. The country has changed tremendously already. Back then, as I noted in the poem “Driving to Tainan”, it reminded me of New Jersey. Today, it reminds me more of the other side of the river. A district that was mostly rice paddies now holds a six story mall. Wide boulevards and gardens, more cars and fewer motorcycles (though they still exist in profusion), and PC games for sale in the 7/11 stores. At Chili’s you can get the chicken crispers and they taste pretty much just like back home, and the menu is all in English.

There’s something of the vibe of say, Shanghai, where you still have that “expat” feeling. The Westerners cluster in certain bars and restaurants, and if you wander in the right direction, you’ll come across the parts of town that still exhibit life as it was. In Taipei, it feels a little bit harder to find that. Everyone speaks English — passably to excellently — and even the Snake Alleys are marked with posters in English saying “Please no photos of the snakes.”

In the toy stores, you find Japanese comics and Finnish Moomintrolls. On the radio, it’s an American interviewer joshing with a British comic about his character with an Australian accent. Last time I was here, I was taken to an expat bar. There was a jazz band from San Francisco fronted by an R&B singer who couldn’t make it in LA. The room was half local, I would guess, but the mixed drinks were mostly Western.

It isn’t that this bothers me; if anything, the Taiwanese have a remarkable accomodation with their tangled cultural heritage. Rather, the thing that strikes me, as I move from black Lincoln Town Car to Grand Hyatt to Chili’s to mall to shopping district with giant signs (Sony, Panasonic, an extra virgin olive oil ad depicting a naked woman swimming in olives) to luxe airport lounge with Internet terminals that support eight languages — the thing that strikes me is how there’s a whole world that exists that many never get to see: the world of the jetsetter, which is really a bubble-world. A world where the closest you come to beef noodle soup served by the side of the road is when you get taken out for lunch to sample the local cuisine, and get lucky enough to have a guide who prefers the real stuff. A world where you go out shopping for local souvenirs and end up in a mall that carries mostly foreign goods.

There’s a comfort in getting the International Herald Tribune delivered in English at your door each night, but I also miss that rare thrill, the moment back in 1999 when I was led between a gaggle of motorcyles, down a wet alley where laundry hung from windows, my host telling me that he was sure there was a good place to eat around there…

Down an alley we find a square,
An empty lot loomed by cosmetics ads.
Plastic sheeting circles plastic tables,
A sizzle of shells, sashimi and squid.
The fish eyes are everywhere, and
Taiwan beer tastes very familiar:
Perhaps there is only one beer, and many bottles.

In bubble-world, there is only one core experience, like the beer in those bottles; it’s like there is only one black and white coloring book, and we fill it all in with “local color.” It’s sitting down at a computer in an airport lounge to find it pre-equipped with Skype, since you just finished reading your V. I. Warshawski mystery.

And yet–I think this is the future. From it, Cleveland or Jacksonville look as provincial as Tainan, and like the classic New Yorker cartoon, your perspective inverts until you see the whole world as nothing more than the spaces around airports.

First Korean review of A Theory of Fun

 Posted by (Visited 6608 times)  Game talk, Writing
Nov 072005
 

Over at the Korea Times. More of a “books noticed” thing. They say:

Theory of Fun for Game Design (Chaemi Iron)
Raph Koster, translated by An So-hyon; Digital Media Research: 259pp., 15,000 won

Korea is now the undisputed hotspot of the world’s computer game industry. The blockbuster game Starcraft is known to boast more than 17 million fan base here. An e-sports-only stadium is reportedly to be built in Seoul to meet the explosive popularity of the online games. The author Koster, one of the most successful game developers in the world, who made “LegendMUD,” asks what fun is and, more, what makes people feel fun. According to him, the human mind tends to and likes to process information surrounding itself into certain patterns, procedures or schema. With the simplified versions, people can later apply with less thought in identical or similar situations. Games primarily feature core patterns and mechanics which players learn via playing them. And the mind feels a sense of fun while learning. If the games are either too difficult or too easy, the gamers would not find it fun, the US game developer wrote.

I of course must point out that a) I didn’t make LegendMUD by myself, not by a long shot (and by the way, it’s an odd game to pick for the list in the book review!); b) I doubt that I am in the top 50 most successful game developers in the world.

I do find it interesting that the paraphrase that reviewers seem to repeatedly choose is also the most fatuous statement imaginable: “games shouldn’t be too easy or too hard.” Well, duh.

The Sunday Poem: Clouds From Above

 Posted by (Visited 4648 times)  The Sunday Poem
Nov 062005
 

Honoring all the clichés,
Evanescing like cottony candy,
Like cotton itself, soft twists torqued,
Tangled, aloft with imagined
Wild dragons–their qualia lie:

Our visions, our worships,
Are tepid, not rapid; have ice
In their bellies, not fire.

As we claw our way,
Damp and surrounded, through
Serpentine guts, grim gray tangles
Of mist, I see Tintagel’s battle
Is fought yet again:

We are lords of the sky;
We have burst from our stone;
This is dynasty.

Smartbomb

 Posted by (Visited 7283 times)  Game talk, Reading
Nov 052005
 

Here I am in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, waiting for my connection to Taipei, which has now been delayed by 2 hours. This means that I’ve already knocked off the first book I brought with me ont he trip, which is Aaron Ruby and Heather Chaplin’s Smartbomb.

I spent several hours with Heather in an amazing interview a couple of years ago, and another hour perhaps at GDC 2005. The book that she and Aaron have written is essentially a cultural history of videogames, a glimpse at the passions, politics, and personalities of the gaming world. I’m in it, and so are Rich Vogel, John Romero and John Carmack, CliffyB aka Cliff Bleszinzki, Seamus Blackley, Mike Zyda, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto. Rather than trying to capture everything about the gaming world, this book is written more as a series of looks into individual people and projects, and each is chosen as a frame for the issues that the writers want to talk about.

And what do they want to talk about? The ways in which art and commerce live in tension. The quasi-rock-star celebrity that games can attract, and then the ways in which that can damage people. The curious sort of intellect it often takes to succeed in working in games, and the outlandish characters who result. The authors play up the alienness of many of the developers, the perhaps Aspergian distance, the obsession with models and minutiae, as if to make the point that these are not the people you usually deal with. Heather told me when interviewing me that part of what she discovered during the writing of the book was that she wanted to know “why so many of the brightest people I’ve ever met are making games.”

From inside, of course, it doesn’t always feel that way (though I do know several people, people you wouldn’t expect, who say they simply cannot communicate with Will Wright because he’s too out there). This outside perspective is valuable, especially as the industry continues to evolve rapidly in a swirl of big cash and small ambitions.

Much of the story depicted here is of art and idealism and perhaps most importantly, love of play, finding itself caught up and co-opted in goals that wander a bit afield–training soldiers, fighting for corporate ownership of the boardroom. A bit of an agenda creeps in in the authors’ tone–there’s a clear sense that they too, are horrified along with the graphic artist who asks if the makers of America’s Army are insane, that they are more on Seamus Blackley’s side when he argues for creativity than J Allard’s when he gives away HD TVs and proclaims the day of the microtransaction in the struggle for the soul of the Xbox and the living room entertainment experience. And there’s something downright elegiac in their treatment of Nintendo.

The book has some minor inaccuracies — I’ve never lived in the Philippines, and I never got beat up in school, and I don’t think my smile is supercilious (you tell me!) — but as a look into the realities of why many of us in the industry do what we do, and as a primer on where the heart of he industry has been and where it is going, it’s invaluable. Definitely give it a look.

BTW, there’s something really eerie about reading about yourself as a character.

They’re doing reading events across the country; I was supposed to be at the San Diego one but cannot make it since I will be in Korea. John Donham is there instead. Let me know how it goes.

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