Blogger Recognition Award

There was supposed to be another post here.  But I’m heading into one of those periods of life where time is at a premium.  So plans change.  But luckily, like a dreamy superhero, AK swooped in to save the day, nominating us for one of those social viral blog awards, providing a quick shot of easy content just when I needed it the most.  He may not be the hero we deserve, but he’s the hero we need.

And in an interesting twist, this is not an award I’d ever received before.  Which is strange.  I thought I’d gotten all of them already.  But no matter.  This blog’s path of award domination shall continue unabated.  Watch in awe, dear fellows, as I crush this award and all else in my path!

So, let us start by examining the rules that are foolish enough to challenge me.

1. Say thanks to who nominated you and leave a link back to that person’s blog.

So, thanks to AK, of the gaming and other stuff blog, Everything is Bad for You.  You should check his work out.  If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know I love writing long-form looks into the media I consume, and judging by the massive Disgaia post he’s sitting on top of at the time of this writing, he loves the same thing.  I find him to have some rather thoughtful takes on his chosen subjects, and he’s opened my eyes to some interesting things I wouldn’t have known otherwise.  He’s also been a common influence around these parts, both with his thoughtful comments and his other blog awards.  In recognition of his contributions, and in return for this award, I hereby bestow upon him the much coveted “Friend of Aether” award.  You may all commence your bowing now.

2. Give the story or history of your blog.

So, here’s the thing; I don’t have a real big reason or anything why I started this blog.  There were a bunch of influencing factors.  I was following and a regular commenter on a bunch of other blogs, and kind of wanted to do that myself.  I had done a bunch of dumb posts on Facebook basically hyping up my cooking in a really over-the-top way, and a lot of people who read those kept getting after me about starting a blog.  And, historically, I’d been involved in a lot of forums, but had kind of stopped getting much out of those.  And really, I was at a point where I really wanted to reach out of myself, and do something that connected with other people.  So it had been on my mind for quite a while.

I do remember deciding to take the plunge and actually start with it after one of the many, many games industry controversies happened, and there was nothing coming out about it that really reflected my thoughts on the issue.  I don’t even remember what it was, but I do remember that feeling.  Beforehand, I had been carrying the assumption that anything I had to say would have been said already by any of the millions of other journalists, bloggers, commenters, or video makers covering the industry, that there was no original thought under the sun.  And yet, there I was, with some particularly strong point of view that nobody else seemed to have.  So I thought there was room for me on the internet yet.  So I created this.

And this is a bit of an odd blog, isn’t it?  I mean yeah, there’s a lot of games content here, but really I just talk about whatever I want to.  And it’s kind of always been like that.  I used to think my niche was business analysis of the game industry, and sure, there’s still some of that.  But sometimes it’s amused me to muse about writing.  Sometimes I posted a small bit of that graphic novel I was practicing my art skills with.  Sometimes I write about wrestling.  Sometimes I do lets plays.  Sometimes I start up huge projects that I don’t see through.  Sometimes I get in deep with Godzilla.  This blog has no focus.  And that’s the way I like it.

3. Give two or more pieces of advice for new bloggers.

Write for yourself.  Write what you enjoy, write what gives you meaning, write what makes your life better.  If you’re writing to pursue views, you’re likely to end up unfulfilled.  If you’re writing to try and make a buck off of it, you’re likely going to end up hating what you’re creating and getting less income off of more work than if you took that effort and put it elsewhere.  This is a hobby that takes an extensive amount of time, and a lot of thought, and a lot of your personality, and if you’re putting all that into it and you’re writing for something other than yourself, it’s not going to be worth it to you.

And be social with it.  I didn’t expect it at first, I was one of those ‘If I build it they will come’ people, but honestly one of the best parts, and one of the things that really keep me going, is engaging with my fellow bloggers.  Again, time is at a premium for me, so I can’t spend as much time reading and commenting and discussing as I would really like, and I’m not necessarily the market for every other blogger that comes across here, but what I can do does honestly make this whole experiment more worthwhile.  Connecting with my fellow bloggers is meaningful, and I wouldn’t still be doing this if it didn’t happen.

4. Nominate 10 other bloggers and link their blogs.

Guess what?  I don’t play by your rules.  No, I think I’m so great, and I deserve this award so much, that I’m just going to nominate myself 10 times.  So take that, blogosphere.

But seriously, thanks to AK for opening up this content, thanks to all of you for being here, and I look forward to seeing y’all when our paths cross again.

Eyes on Binary Domain

So the Yakuza guys made a cyberpunk game, huh?

Which immediately strikes me as kind of an unfair statement to lead in with.  Yes, this is made by the Ryu ga Gotoku team, the group behind one of my favorite video game series, Yakuza.  Yes, that fact is what made me pay attention to the game in the first place, and it one of the features that most makes it stand out in a market, but honestly, that doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on the end product.  Some teams, studios, designers, etc stick to a really distinctive design.  Hideo Kojima makes a game, you know it’s going to be full of giant cinematic cutscenes, swap between the bizarre and the realistic freely, and you will be lectured on Kojima’s moral stands through the characters.  If Bioware makes a game (well, pre-MMO Bioware, who knows where their design sense is now) it’s going to have expansive dialogue choices and convoluted plots.  Platinum Studios makes a game, its action will be extreme and fast and tense, and its plot and visual design will be waaaaaay over the top.  You know these things.

Some developers and studios, however, don’t stick to just one thing.  They’ve got some variety to them.  You wouldn’t think Ryu ga Gotoku studios would, given that they have one franchise that they keep churning out on a regular basis, but as Binary Domain shows, they really do.  This game has very little in common with the Yakuza series that the studio is based around.  It’s a completely different genre.  It’s distinctly made for an international audience whereas Yakuza is extremely Japanese.  It’s in an entirely different setting, requiring a very different visual design, and is structured completely differently.  Its takes a completely different path of play.  It does carry through the overall ethos of character design, with people that include just the right amount of visual flaws to look super realistic, and the very appropriately placed product placement, but that’s really all I can pick up on that’s carried over from the Yakuza series.

Good Sexy, Bad Sexy

Come to think of it, this post is going to cover the same ground as something I did years ago, when I was just a little baby blogger.  Just, saying it now in a different way.  So consider this the HD Remix of one of my most popular for probably the wrong reasons seminal posts of why and in what situations sexiness can be good.

Sexuality is awesome, isn’t it?  It grabs people at a very instinctual, emotional level, it brings people together, and makes us feel whole.  It makes us healthier physically and mentally, it gives us drive and energy, and it feels so innate to us that most consider it a significant part of our identity and our society has adopted a rather complex set of cultural practices surrounding sexuality.  It likely comes as no surprise, coming from the world’s sexiest man as determined by a survey of myself and my mirror, but to me, sexuality is a marvelous thing to be celebrating.

Media producers often work sexuality or titillation into the works they’re producing.  This is not a new phenomenon, it’s been going on for hundreds of years.  Just think back to all those classical paintings you spent way too long staring at back in middle school.  And it’s no wonder why.  We’ve got an instinctual draw for it, and it’ll capture or attention in a way that little else will.  And it works on an instinctual level, just like we react to the simulated intensity of danger or the fear of horror, so too do we get a thrill from sexiness when it’s coming through our screens, canvas, or pages.  And in contrast to what many may say, I’d posit that that’s a good thing that we can get that hook in us when we wish.

Which makes me wonder why so many creators get it so wrong.

Recently I was playing Oneechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers, which is part of a strange and eclectic collection I call “Games I own because of the women I’ve dated”.  Which also includes the first three games of the Hitman series, Onimusha, Final Fantasy VII Dirge of Cerberus, Dynasty Warriors III, the entire Fable series, Syberia II, the Wii version of Oregon Trail, and the absolute bane of my existence, Fur Fighters.  I’m coming to realize that my ladyfriends have some really mixed tastes.  Not sure what that says about me.  Anyways, in this case, as you can probably tell by the title, this is a total fanservice game.  It exists to put scantily clad women in front of you.  And yet I found the sexuality there really wasn’t working for me.  It’s kind of a middling game without it, yet the sexiness, I found, actually dragged the experience down.  I was wondering about that.  I’ve played a lot of other games where I enjoyed the sexuality there or felt it actually uplifted the experience.  And it got me thinking back to what made the difference there.

And that got me thinking back to that post I mentioned above.  And, you know, almost six years later, I still stand by that post.  I occasionally look back over my old writings and find something I may not agree perfectly with now, but that one, that still holds up completely.  But the thought still remains in my mind, of the differences between the works that do their sexuality right and those that don’t.  And I’d like to explore that here, today.  I’m not going to walk in my own footprints and re-make those same statements I did years ago, so check that post if you’d like some background on this whole deal.  But I would like to delve into that concept again.  This time, let’s take a look at how it works specifically, comparing and contrasting a few examples.