Videogame Music: The Ambience of Gaming

Because of various circumstances in my life right now, I'm in the midst of a break from playing videogames.  What with work and family and friends and personal projects, I just can't devote the time I feel is necessary to fully enjoy all aspects of the gaming experience. I was never the kind of person who played games casually or just to pass the time - I prefer to make my way through slowly, appreciate every detail, and give my respect to the time and energy it took to create the game.

I like to think of people's relationships with their interests as a pair of feet walking on a well-manicured lawn, and I think it applies directly to gaming as well.  Most people wear sneakers: they provide good support and leave a firm footprint.  These gamers will play through a game once, sticking with it until the end credits, and then put it on the shelf.  Others wear snowshoes, which cover a wider area with the pressure evenly distributed.  Snowshoeing gamers have interest in a wide variety of titles, playing many of them at the same time, until they get bored or something cooler comes out.  And still others walk while wearing lawn aerator shoes, which penetrate down past the surface to the cool, refreshing, nutrition-packed dirt underneath.  I consider myself one of these gamers.

One aspect of the games to which I pay specific deep attention is the music.  I think it's fascinating to see how the feel of a particular game is impacted by what you hear as well as how you control the action onscreen.  And since my current break only covers the playing of videogames - and not the reading about, writing about, or listening to the music from videogames - I'd like to say a few words about the music from the two games I'm currently playing/aerating: Mortal Kombat and L.A. Noire.

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The Art of Good Threadiquette

In today's technologically-advanced world, more and more communication takes place over email. And why not? Typing a few words on a keyboard and hitting send is easier, cheaper, and faster than composing a letter on paper, stuffing it into an envelope, putting a stamp on it, and dropping it in the mailbox. And I'm not just talking about business-related exchanges between two people sitting at their desks in their respective offices - with the advent of smartphones, more and more people have access to email at all times. And when sending an email has the same basic structure as sending a text message, you can bet there will be some residual decline in the class and reputation of the medium.

Seeing as how easy it is to compose a message, type in a recipient's email address, and hit "send," it's easy to overlook some of the more old-fashioned polite aspects of letter-writing. Remember when we spent hours learning in which situations to use "Dear Sir or Madam" or "To Whom It May Concern"? Or how to correctly format your return address in the letterhead? In emails, the only formality left is a pre-fabricated signature, if that. Yet emails are certainly less clear and direct than a conversation on the telephone or in person. They occupy an awkward middle ground.

So what is the proper way to comport ourselves in an email thread? Should we treat them like correspondence, with the proper salutations and formatting? Or should we approach them as we approach text messages, as an extension of a casual conversation? As always, it depends on the situation, but here are a few things I've learned about Proper Email Threadiquette.

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Consider The Onion: A Pulitzer Plea

Fake news isn’t new. Satirical jibes at journalism masquerading as journalism date back to at least 1835 when Richard A. Locke created the Great Moon Hoax in the New York Sun. Not only was Locke looking to increase sales of the upstart Sun, he was ridiculing contemporary theories in astronomy – including one Scottish reverend’s assertion that upwards of four billion people (or whatever they were) lived on the Moon.

The Onion isn’t that far removed from Locke and his hoax. Started in 1988 by two University of Wisconsin students, The Onion rose from its clever college rag roots to become an international brand of news-related comedy under the direction of founding Editor-in-Chief Scott Dikkers. Dikkers oversaw the launch of its website in 1996, which proliferated the publication’s classic style of deadpan satire.

Its imitation of actual print journalism – Associated Press formatting, a mix of editorial and on-the-street reporting – is The Onion’s greatest asset. They’ve so mastered the art of the headline that you rarely need read past “U.S. General Jealous That Syrian Army Allowed To Attack Citizens” to have a good ouch-too-true chuckle.

And now The Onion staff would like to be recognized for their efforts. Having just celebrated their 1000th issue yesterday, they’ve contracted serious Pulitzer hunger. They want the Prize, and they’re mobilizing the Internet on their behalf.

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LulzSec – The Lulz-Focused Hacktivist Successor to Anonymous

Shh. No, really. Quiet down. If anyone finds out I’m writing this, this website may cease to exist – for a few hours, anyway.

I want to talk to you about LulzSec. Yes, that LulzSec. Shhh! If they hear us, they’ll shut us down. They’ll use their network of botnets and whatever-the-hell-else-they-use to slam the site with traffic. They’ll find our phone numbers and unleash outdated auto-dialing machines to tie up our phones like that episode of The Simpsons.

Why? Why would they deliberately screw with strangers on the Internet, potentially damaging digital commerce and divulging private information?

For the lulz.

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What If I Was A Twitter Celebrity? #whatifIwasaTwittercelebrity

I travel a lot for work. In fact, I was in the midst of a ludicrous string of flights last Tuesday, which is why I didn't get a chance to post anything - but enough with the lame excuses. Anyway, when you go through airport security nowadays, they generally direct you through some pretty intimidating imaging technology called Backscatter X-Rays. Use of this technology is optional, they always say, and if you don't want to be exposed to the little extra burst of potentially harmful radiation, you can "opt out" and select a full-body pat-down instead. I always opt out, despite the supposedly low dose, because when you average 4-6 trips to the airport a week, those mrems start to add up, you know what I'm sayin'?

The concept of "opting out" of a commonplace, accepted practice that people have long since taken for granted came up to me recently regarding Facebook. Sure there was a time when I made the conscious decision (much later than most) to sign up for the service, yet as the years went by and I became gradually more and more dissatisfied with the product, I simply put up with it. I was on Facebook, and that was that. Until recently, when I decided I didn't want to put up with the hassle of maintaining a digital profile, and I successfully "opted out" of Facebook.

Just to set the records straight, I don't have a problem with Social Media as such, or with anyone who uses Facebook. I just think it should be separate and distinct from our regular lives, in the way that mobile uploads and status updates can never allow Facebook to be again. I think Social Media should be something for which you have to consciously and actively "opt in", rather than the unspoken norm that acts as an alternative reality/massive time-suck. I think Social Media should have a purpose and be directly to the point. Which is why I've recently gotten involved with Twitter. And why I'm currently fantasizing about what it would be like to be a Twitter Celebrity. I even created a hashtag, which asks the musical question: #whatifIwasaTwittercelebrity?

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Funny Twitter Accounts Worth Preserving

Twitter is so strange. I think we can all agree on that.

It’s a bizarre hybrid of text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook status updates, and self/commercial advertising. Its character constraints encourage both tiresome Internet lingo (“c u l8r”, “lets go to 5 guys b4 the movie”, &c) and creative sentence structure (a good vocabulary helps you express complex ideas in 140 characters). Twitter’s infrastructure is so simple it’s wormed its way onto every web-connected device as well as “ordinary” SMS-enabled cell phones.

Perhaps it is deceptively simple – at least when it comes to entertainment. CBS’s recent cancellation of $#*! My Dad Says (discussed on this week’s podcast) is a reminder that Twitter functions best on its own terms.  It may be funny to read aloud Sarah Palin’s serpentine mangling of the English language to your friends, but her tweets would swiftly fall flat if propped up as anything other than one woman’s (or her publicist’s) inane chatter.

Hollywood and the various TV networks are blind to this. Chasing their audiences like deranged teenage exes, they bottle up any intellectual property the public might possibly like even a tiny bit in hopes of catching lightning.

Today, I’d like to speak up for the humorous Twitter accounts that should be left alone by TV.

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Sunday Reading: Cool Story, Bro

At the risk of eliciting a hearty “tl;dr” in the comments, I will be brief in relaying this Slate article to you.

If you’re up on your memes, you may be familiar with this picture:

“Cool story, bro” has breathed new life into this unnerving depiction of Hercules by Clayton Henry. Long article, completely straight-faced stories in desperate need of undercutting, statements so obvious as to warrant mockery: all are subject to the sarcastic dismissal that accompanies this cheery Herc.

Slate’s Michael Agger did some Internet digging to uncover this meme’s origin. He cites Know Your Meme, which credits “Cool story, bro” to either the “Youtube poop community” (!) or 4chan. I suppose you can this up yourself, but what’s worth reading is Agger’s analysis of the meme’s mutations.

Like most memes, it began life as an offshoot of something else – the aforementioned “tl;dr” – which is Internet slang for “Get to the point!”  It then morphed into a formidable weapon for troll-slaying. Nothing hurts an incendiary commenter more than being dismissed. What’s funniest to me, however, is how the meme has since folded back in on itself. Agger writes:

“Lately, yet another meaning has become attached to "Cool story, bro:" a nonironic acknowledgement that someone in fact has written a cool story.”

In our current age of planned, conformist irony, what’s more ironic than being sincere?

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Netflix To Offer Original Programming

Raise your hand if you have a Netflix subscription. Given this site's target audience, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of you are sitting at your desks or on your couches right now, hands upraised, suddenly aware that every eye in the room is on you.

Not content to kill the dated Blockbuster Video model by sending DVDs straight to your house, Netflix is now hoping to succeed in creating original, Internet-only content that it can stream directly to subscribers. The company is perhaps the first with the infrastructure, business model, and subscriber base to make this feasible - in its most recent earnings call, Netflix claimed to have 22.8 million subscribers in the US and an additonal 800,000 in Canada, for a combined total of 23.6 million. As some sites have noted, this makes it larger than any US cable provider (Comcast, the largest of those, claims 22.8 million subscribers).

I can't really say anything about the show itself (a David Fincher-Kevin Spacey drama called House of Cards, based on a BBC miniseries and book of the same name), but I can talk a bit about the implications, both good and bad, of this move. Put your hand down, and I'll meet you after the jump.

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The Huffington Post Lawsuits: No Heroes Here, Only Villains

Earlier this year, AOL purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million dollars, virtually guaranteeing the site's place among the corporate news pantheon of the Internet, as well as unleashing a lot of hurt feelings and people looking to cash in on this deal. The latest exhibit in the latter category is Jonathan Tasini, an unpaid freelance blogger for the Huffington Post who filed a class action lawsuit against the publication on Tuesday, asking for a third of the money from the AOL deal to go to these bloggers who post to the site. 

Let's get this straight - no one aspires to become a writer, let alone a blogger, for the money. Tasini himself had been blogging for the Huffington Post since its infancy in 2001, and many others have voluntarily elected to do what he does. Unpaid blogging can be done for any number of reasons - padding for the resume, experience in the field, a way to increase one's readership, a forum to voice one's opinions, or (in my case) a hobby and creative outlet. Tasini knew from the start that he would not be getting paid for his work and, as his decade-long connection to the Huffington Post demonstrates, he must have been okay with this. 

It is unlikely that Tasini is going to walk away with any money, let alone a third of the profit from the Post's sale. And Tasini himself understands that; he acknowledges that he is not suing because of a breach of contract. In fact, it's sort of unclear what Tasini's actual argument is, besides the fact that its unfair that Arianna Huffington walks away with so much money on the backs of her unpaid writers. What is his game plan here? Does he have a strategy?

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We're as Sad as Hell and We're Not Gonna Take This Anymore! - R.I.P. Sidney Lumet

By now any of you out there with any sort of connection to the wider world will have heard the news that legendary director Sidney Lumet passed away this weekend at the age of 86. He leaves behind one of the most solid and astonishing filmographies of any Hollywood director in the past half decade. 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, the list goes on. Lumet established himself as one of the best directors for confronting capital i Issues through the use of cinema. And yet he never won an Oscar (except for a lifetime achievement award from the Academy a couple years ago, which is nice I suppose).

By far the most iconic and oft-referenced of Lumet's movies is 1976's television satire Network. Owing much to Peter Finch's famous-for-a-reason "Mad as hell" speech, you see this one get brought out every couple years or so at Oscar montages, and like I said, it's famous for a reason: it's so damn good.

Network is centered around the story of Howard Beale, the primetime news anchor at "UBS" the lowest-rated network in the country. When he receives the word that he's been fired, he suffers what seems to be a nervous breakdown; or is it a prophet's revelation?

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Artists and Critics - How Much Contact Do We Want?

There have always been publishing companies that charge a writer to publish their own work. The rise of the Kindle and other markets for ebooks have made this even easier to do. Most people refer to these companies as "vanity presses," though some of the more optimistic writers refer to themselves as "indie authors." This method is either a great way to build a fanbase, or a total scam, depending on whom you ask.

Few of these authors ever achieve anything close to mainstream success. But sometimes they stumble into fame in other ways. Most recently, self-described "author, poet and artist" Jacqueline Howett managed to create quite a bit of a stir online when she took to responding to reviews of her book, The Greek Seaman. 

A small, humble blog titled "Big Al's Books and Pals," which dedicates itself to reviewing independently published ebooks, published a review of The Greek Seaman on March 16th. Big Al gave the book two stars, but he was not necessarily mean-spirited. The review acknowledged that the book had an interesting plot that was marred by a large number of grammatical and spelling errors, rendering the story almost incomprehensible. 

You can read what happened yourself - Howett appeared in the comments section, apparently incensed that Big Al had dared to give her book two stars. She posted copies of other, more favorable reviews, and then started to attack Big Al personally, with a grasp of the English language that did nothing to combat Big Al's criticisms ("...if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected" reads one typical Howett response). By March 28th, Howett was calling Big Al "a big rat and a snake with poisenous venom [sic]", before leaving with the final, exquisitely professional, request to "Fuck off!"

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Zoinks! OED update includes OMG and LOL

Time to get annoyed when your spellcheck scribbles red underneath your 21st-century vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary now includes several words popular with millennials, surely to the ire of English professors everywhere.

The latest update legitimizes initialisms (abbreviations consisting of sequential first letters from a name or expression) borne out of online interaction. That’s right, OMG and LOL are now totally viable words according to the OED. But it’s not just their useful on Twitter that earned them passage into everyone’s favorite English lexicon.

Such abbreviations are cropping up in print and everyday speech, and convenience isn’t the reason, say the OED folks:

“The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.”

For a generation that grew up in AOL chat rooms and now groans every time their parents text them “LOL u r so funny,” this is exactly the usage of Internet initialisms. Writing for Thought Catalog last November, Leigh Alexander called for an end to online use of LOL, citing ironic use and the fact that it’s rarely ever true. Think about it. I’m more likely to type “hahaha” to friends online than LOL, unless I’m being cute or snarky.

There’s a hope (or perhaps fear) that the inclusion of OMG and LOL will open the OED floodgates for more Internet speak. Ben Hardwidge over at Bit-Tech asked OED principal editor Graeme Diamond if we’d ever see l337 in the dictionary. “It’s got a good chance, but it may not quite cross the line yet,” says Diamond. The inclusion of numbers won’t prevent it (check out 1471), but its niche usage might.

What other Internet words should we see in the OED? ROFL? idk? Butthurt?

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Revisiting the Simplicity of Baseball Cards

This Saturday, a very important announcement about the baseball season was made: The Chicago Cubs announced that youngster Andrew Cashner would be their 5th starter for the 2011 season, pushing veteran Carlos Silva off the 25-man roster. This is just one of the tidbits of information that flashes across the bottom of your screen while you watch Spring Training games on MLB Network. Why was I fixated on this one, then? It was because I recognized the name "Carlos Silva" from a 2011 Topps baseball card I had just opened.

That's right, at Spring Training this past weekend, I picked up a couple of packs of baseball cards, and I've been hooked ever since. Organizing them by collector's number, constructing fantasy depth charts on my table top, you name it, the whole nine yards. In fact, right before I heard the news, I had shifted Silva's card from my "good starters" pile to my "garbage starters" pile. And it looks like Cubs GM Jim Hendry's decision justified my classification.

Opening these few spring packs made me realize how much I missed baseball cards. I have binders full of the stuff at home, compiled between the years of 1989 and 2003, but once they're in the sleeves, you very rarely take them out and play with them like you do when you open a new pack. Part of the reason that baseball cards are so much fun is their permanence: they actually exist, cardboard and ink. Sure you can get stats and pictures of baseball players online, but it's very different from opening up a new pack of baseball cards. It's kind of like the difference between settling down with a cup of coffee and the print version of the New York Times, and paying a reasonable price for the New York Times' digital subscription.

So, has the death of print journalism coincided with the decline in popularity of baseball cards? I don't see how there possibly couldn't be a connection.

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Sunday Reading: Poking the Trolls

Have you heard of The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory? It’s a real thing. Jerks, halfwits, and annoying adolescents prove it everyday. And thanks to the erosion of Internet anonymity, sites finally have the means to combat the trolls.

On this week’s podcast, we briefly discuss the ramifications of TechCrunch’s decision to switch to a Facebook-based comment system. Readers must now log into Facebook to post comments. TechCrunch claims that, despite early negative reactions, the switch has been well-received. The overall number of posts is down, but they’re generally more thoughtful than the trash that used to litter the boards.

TechCrunch did note an odd side effect: “whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way.” It’s almost as if, now that their posts are public, people don’t want to look like dicks.

In response to TechCrunch’s switch, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo argued in favor of Facebook comments, invoking the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory by name. While Manjoo recognizes that not every Internet act should be made public – you should be able to keep the more embarrassing items in your Netflix queue private – he believes that comments aren’t public enough:

“But posting a comment is a public act. You're responding to an author who made his identity known, and your purpose, in posting the comment, is to inform the world of your point of view. If you want to do something so public, you are naturally ceding some measure of your privacy. If you're not happy with that trade, don't take part—keep your views to yourself.”

Manjoo’s writing as, well, a writer on the Internet. People from other corners of the Internet are less willing to intertwine their physical and digital lives. Leading up to last year’s release of Starcraft II, Blizzard Entertainment added a Facebook-enabled Real ID system to its Battle.net forums. A portion of the community went ballistic. Three days later, Blizzard canceled their Real ID plans.

Some gamers simply wanted their privacy. Others – members of gaming minorities (defined by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation) – preferred the anonymity because misogyny, racism, and homophobia remain disgusting trademarks of the online gaming community. These problems will not go away easily (as unfortunate as that is), and many felt that the Real ID authentication would make it worse in the short run.

Whether we like it or not, we’re moving out of the Era of Anonymity. Thanks to social media services like Facebook and LinkedIn, people are taking more responsibility for their digital actions. Hopefully the fuckwads will, too.

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Firefox 4 Is Taking Forever and I'm SO MAD

To answer your first question, no, I don't think I could find a nerdier thing to be mad about.

Being the tech dude that I am, I like to use beta and unreleased software, both because I like to live life on the edge and because I like to keep abreast of what's coming down the pike. As such, I've been using Firefox 4 since pretty early in the beta process.

Mostly, I've liked what I've seen, but what I haven't liked so much is that fact that Firefox 4 has been in beta for so damn long. The first beta was release in July - we're now on beta twelve and there's still no solid release date. Firefox 4 is four months late. What the hell is taking so long, and why the hell am I so upset about it?

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Saturday Morning TV: What is the Internet?

A few years ago (17, in fact), Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel didn’t quite understand what the Internet was. A week or two ago, an NBC employee disseminated footage of this humorous misunderstanding on said Internet. A day or two ago, that same employee claims NBC fired him for doing so. Awesome.

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Where Digital Downloads, Automatic Updates, and Artistic Vision Collide

I got a note in my inbox from Amazon the other day - apparently, a song I'd downloaded recently (one of the ones from the Decemberists' so-so The King is Dead) had a new version available that "more accurately represent[ed] the artist's vision" and gave me a code I could use to re-download the song for free.

I'd never gotten one of these emails before, but it got me thinking about some of the fundamental differences between purchasing a physical product and buying a digital version of the same thing. It's sort of interesting that an artist can make a change to a song and offer it to their fans free of charge - in a best-case scenario, it can make a normally static piece of art a more organic, living thing.

The thing of it is, the best-case scenario is rarely the most realistic scenario. It's fine to be given the opportunity to download a different version of a song for free, but what happens if this sort of thing becomes compulsory?

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Sunday Reading: Five Emotions Invented by the Internet

We do our best to eschew numbered lists here at Charge Shot!!!, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading them elsewhere – especially when they’re insightful examinations of digital culture.

Leigh Alexander’s “Five Emotions Invented by the Internet” has been circulating around the, well, Internet for a week or two now. I’ve actually stumbled across it by accident a few times, which speaks to its resonance with a substantial chunk of the online population.

I’ve listed them below. Be sure to head on over to Thought Catalog to read her explanations of each.

“A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.

A sudden and irrational rage in response to reading an ‘@-reply’ on Twitter.

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation.

The car collision of appetite and discomfort one feels simultaneously when using the internet to seek and consume images or information that may be considered unseemly or inappropriate.

The sense of fatigue and disconnect one experiences after emitting a massive stream of content only to hit some kind of ‘wall’ and forget and/or abandon the entire thing.”

Without a doubt, I have experienced each and every one of these. What about you? Are there any she missed?

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Oh boy! Comcast-NBC Merger Approved By the FCC

On Tuesday, the FCC approved Comcast's much-ballyhooed acquisition of NBC.

This deal has been a long time coming: General Electric agreed to sell NBC, then worth $30 billion, to Comcast in December of 2009, and this agreement followed some nine months of negotiations. Then, the deal passed to the Federal Communications Commission, who decided in a four-to-one vote that it was okay for a production company to be controlled by a company that distributes those productions.

As with the Net Neutrality restrictions that the FCC issued last month, there's a lot going on in this deal, and a lot of different people have a lot of very different things to say about it. In this week's episode, I'll try to parse the news and, as always, explain what the big deal is.

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The Myspace Layoffs: Have We Seen This Before? Will We See It Again?

2010 was the year that pretty much cemented Facebook's ascension as the dominant player in the social networking world. It managed to fight off the rising tide of Twitter, earn an estimated worth of $50 billion, and be the subject of a fairly well-acclaimed movie that cements the website's status as some sort of generational milestone. In The Social Network, David Fincher uses Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as a way to examine how we communicate in the 21st-century and, in the process, portrays Facebook not as an Internet flash-in-the-pan, but as a full-blown paradigm shift. 

News came out this week that Myspace (remember them?) is cutting half of its remaining staff.  The Other Social Network has declined in inverse proportion to Facebook's meteoric rise, and these layoffs, combined with the recent Myspace make-over that allows the user to integrate the site with Facebook, pretty much confirm that the Social Networking wars are over. 

A quick search on Google Trends reveals April 2008 as the date in which Facebook surpassed Myspace (at least as a search term). At that time, Facebook did not even have 100 million users; presently, it has more than 500 million. As of this summer, Myspace had a mere 66 million users. 

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