I don’t normally post about society’s dirty underbelly, but it’s time for the world to know:
I am forming a new political party. The Party of One’s membership is extremely exclusive, and our goals are not to be shared with the uninitiated.
Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category
We’ve come to a point where the things people say carry more weight than the things they do. Yesterday evening Chris Matthews, host of Hardball, said he was glad the East Coast “had that storm last week.” Today he’s apologizing and it makes me sick. He shouldn’t owe anyone heart-rending self-abasement over this, a polite explanation of what he actually meant should be enough. It makes me sick that a verbal slip on the air garners more outrage than if the man had punched a nun.
I’m addicted. The ending they put on this game really put a damper on replay value but I keep going back to the multiplayer. The problem is server uptime. Often (2 or 3 times a week?) I am disconnected because the EA Servers are down. This afternoon it’s happened twice. What kind of IT department are you clowns running? Is this really just an extended beta? Get your poop in a pile, guys.
The game’s been out for months. I’ve completed it three times and spent a number of hours in multiplayer. Why wait so long to review it? Because I have been searching for something original to say while I give myself time to digest the experience.
Gameplay: 8/10 — I play on an Xbox 360 and Bioware put too many functions on the A button. Shepard takes cover when I try to evade, evades when I want to sprint, and goes into cover when I want to interact. Also, I never get to combine the powers I most wanted to use. Bioware needs to rethink their approach to class creation. Also: I am generally unhappy with the tweaks to weapons between ME2 and ME3. And putting the player in darkness–with a flashlight–with NO ambushes = lame. (Is Shepard too poor to buy night vision?)
Story: 8/10 — This should really be 6/10 but Bioware included so many wonderful things here, they deserve bonus points. I particularly enjoyed the missions on and around Rannoch as I figured out how best to resolve the differences between the Geth and Quarians. Points deducted for dropping the dark matter plot line from ME2 and nearly dropping the Keepers plot line from ME1. I should ding them additional points for failing to foreshadow the Crucible in the first two games, but what’s there is fantastic.
The End: 0/10 — I could go on for pages, but I won’t. It’s been covered brilliantly here: Mass Effect 3 Ending: Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage. What hasn’t been said, or at least hasn’t been said very much, is the most obvious: ME3 is a game. I play games to win. In Mass Effect 3, I didn’t lose but it sure doesn’t feel like victory either. By offering a conclusion with so many parallels to a draw, Bioware has reduced their beautiful franchise to the world’s most complex form of tic-tac-toe.
Marketing: 0/10 –Bioware promised me a game where my choices matter and where there would be wild divergence in the available endings. They did not deliver. Classic false advertising.
Final Tally: A bungled ending can ruin an otherwise stellar piece, while a brilliant conclusion can make a very average story come alive. ME3 is not merely a game, it is the conclusion of a series. The end of the end, as it were. Thus, the final scenes carry more importance than anything that came before. In these final, critical moments, Bioware stole from me the gaming aspect of my game. My arbitrary final grade: 3/10.
I try to make a habit of not forwarding all of the cute stories and funny posters people send around in endless loops. Every once in a while, though, I find one that describes me too well to pass up:
“Ever have one of those days where you look at your watch three times and still don’t know what time it is?”
Yup.
This is a speech I delivered in Grammar for Teachers. The subject is an anonymous high-school student who submitted 68 rather generic words after a full class period of free writing. After showing us the writing sample my professor asked, “How do I motivate this student?” The following is my attempt to answer.
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This award is for the anonymous young man with the shortest writing response. The academic world will often grade you on the length of your writing and in the process make it appear that your path to success is fluff, not substance. Do not despair. Take the long view. Eventually people will value your words for their quality, not their quantity.
Professional writers often say that if you can form a complete sentence, you can write. It is clear that you pass this standard. Word count is all but meaningless. In the long run, ideas are king and this is where you have the most room to improve.
You do not like Vancouver but do not say why, beyond a vague claim that our city is boring. Vancouver started with an idea that became goals, then a fur trading post, then a city. This progression appears in everything else. What do an xBox, your favorite music, or that pretty girl have in common? Each started with an idea.
It’s not the size of a word, it’s how you use it. And the same is true for sentences, paragraphs, and whole papers. Professional writing guides repeatedly make the point that people are busy and often will not read more than the first page of anything you give them. So be concise, be clear, but above all, be relevant.
Brevity is not just the soul of wit, it is also the path to remembrance. Abraham Lincoln used 278 words to deliver the Gettysburg Address. We still remember these few great words because they were concise, emotional, and oh so relevant. Lincoln was not the only speaker that day but you’ll need a history book to find out who else was there.
In order to duplicate this, you must master your own voice. Every writer has a million bad words in them and in order to reach the good words underneath, you must shovel the bad ones out of the way. If a little voice in the back of your mind just groaned, you’re catching on. The only way to trim the verbal fat is practice. Spew your thoughts onto the page, then cut the ones that don’t matter.
Left in the mind, an idea is useless. It sits, at best a private amusement, but its destiny is to be forgotten. An idea on the page is the beginning of power, where it can enlighten, inspire, and incite. You may have the most brilliant notion in all of earth’s history, but until you share it, it has no value.
While you are to be commended in your quest for brevity, you are not yet an expert. The true masters of this art spent time honing it. They sat around tables together, somewhat like your lunch room, drinking black broth and competing for the pithiest phrase. We remember them like this.
After conquering most of Greece, Philip II of Macedon sent a message to Sparta, saying, “If I win this war, you will be slaves forever.” The Spartan reply: “If.” This single word, remembered long after its time, encapsulates emotion, relevance, and some very tight editing.
Word count is meaningless. Ideas are king. Let them control the pen, and word count fall where it may. You can write, I can can see it. Now show us some ideas. Make your words count.
The Concision Award by Mark VanTassel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.markvantassel.com.
In class we’re discussing Electronic Literature and I find myself experiencing an old frustration. I view expression–we often boil the various methods down to art, language, and music–as methods of communication. Academic writing tends to obscure ideas behind cumbersome language. eLit suffers from a related ailment: namely, as artists experiment with various techniques, they obscure the message. I think about this subject through a window metaphor.
You live in one room (your experiences) and I live in the next. We are separated by a wall (our inability to understand each other) and communicate through a window (expression.) The window’s purpose is to share something of our lives with each other.
Artists, almost inevitably, monkey with the window. We shade the glass, decorate it with curtains, and all manner of other things. Done well, this can be pleasant and sometimes, our goal is not to communicate flawlessly, but to add value to the message by forcing our audience to work for it.
I have one request for the world at large: Be creative and spontaneous. Try new things. But while you’re doing that, please make a good-faith effort not to smear poop on the window.
