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Entries by Danny Webb (138)

Monday
May102010

Frank Frazetta Has Passed

Frank Frazetta has passed away, possibly from complications from a stroke.  He was 82 years old.  Frazetta is perhaps the most famous and successful fantasy artist of all time.  His work graced the covers of hundreds of books and magazines over the years.  He is also considered the most influential artist in the genre with dozens of name artists pointing to him as their early inspiration.  I'm sure we will begin to hear from them soon, and I'll post their comments as an expansion to this article when they start to come in.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to Frazetta's family.  Please leave comments below on your own experience with Frazetta's work.  We look forward to hearing from you.

 

While we are waiting, I missed this one when it came over the wire.  We had written a bit about the dispute over rights to Frazetta's paintings earlier this year.  Turns out the dispute has been amicably solved.  Here is the Associated Press story on the settlement:

 

Thursday
Apr222010

Are video games art? A response to Roger Ebert...

 

Though it seems that he realizes it is a can of worms best left sealed, Roger Ebert recently revisited the question "are video games art?" or, perhaps more accurately, "is video game creation an art form?"  Ebert, famously, has come down firmly on the "no" side of the fence.  In his new article (read it here), he elaborates some as a response to a speech at the recent TedxUSC event.  I'm not sure what prompted Ebert to take that speech so seriously, but it provides pretty easy fodder.  Other than Flower, which is ridiculously hard to describe in relation to its artistic impact on the player and observer, the examples given by the speaker are poor (and even downright weird).  Still, it gives Ebert, and now me, a jumping-off point.

I find it odd that the biggest detractors of video games as an art form come from a film background. Visual artists have embraced the medium, as have musicians and writers. Film critics, on the other hand, lead the charge in the "It is not art!" brigade. Stranger still to see that one of the prongs of Ebert's attack has to do with the fact that video games are a collaborative medium.

The fact is that as the industry has grown it has modeled itself after Hollywood. There are equivalencies for nearly every job done on a Hollywood set or in post-production. Directors, producers, writers, art designers, lighting experts, story board artists, sound men--these and more work on each project.

It is this community or artists and the lack of a singular controlling vision that Ebert sees as one of the reasons video games don't measure up to novels, painting, sculpture, and bridge-building.  He doesn't see the process as auteur-driven, and, truth be told, it usually isn't.  Of course, that fact models itself after Hollywood too.  The vast majority of film is made by committee and painted by numbers.  The best films are those that provide the support for the auteur theory.

Most video games a made for the lowest common denominator and have little redeeming value, but, consistently, the best games have a single person as the driving force, a designer who is the equivalent of the director of a film. He is the auteur of the medium and the best of them are famous within the gaming community--Miyamoto, Kojima, Schaeffer, Meier, Wright among them.  These auteurs rise above the pablum of a commercial, mainstream medium to create something that, at the very least, deserves consideration as "art."  At the worst, they are the industry's Spielbergs and Jacksons, auteurs blessed with a vision that appeals to the masses without pandering.

One of these auteurs is going to come up with a concept some day that will push the medium through the curtain of bias, and this argument will cease (or at least the "games are art" side will shift into the majority). When will that happen?  I'll avoid playing Nostradamus and say that I am not sure.

It occurs to me that one of the big problems facing a wider acceptance of video games as art is the lack of a truly critical journalistic voice.  There is nothing that serves as the video game version of Cahiers du Cinema.  There is no Truffaut, no Goddard, and likely there is not any such person in training anywhere at the moment.  Video game journalism remains little more than a marketing tool for the industry.  We write what is merely another version of the "thumbs up/thumbs down" dichotomy.  We are the literary equivalent of At the Movies and very few, if any, sites or magazines provide opportunity for a Goddard or Truffeau, or, hell, even a Ebert or Kael to arise.  Serious writers taking the medium seriously and writing powerfully--that will be the first hole in the dam.  

Will this happen in your lifetime or mine? Will we see a undeniable artist take the medium to a new level? Maybe not, but I would be very surprised if my young son and daughter didn't live to see that day.  

 

[Do you have an opinion on this issue?  We would love to hear it.  Please comment below]

Saturday
Apr102010

Finally, some casting news for AMC's The Walking Dead

I'm as excited as I can be for the adaptation of Kirkman's brilliant (at least for the first 60 issues) The Walking Dead.  It really is zombie literature at its best, and it reminds me much more of a Richard Laymon work where we get to see just how depraved (and heroic) normal people will behave when faced with horrible situations than it does the works of Romero or Keene.

The big announcement this week is that we have our protagonist:  Andrew Lincoln has been cast as ex-cop Rick, who is destined to become the most tragic character in the history of cable television.  Lincoln has been in lots and lots of television shows, mostly short-lived, and a handful of big screen motion pictures, but, unless I'm forgetting something, have never actually seen him act.  Here's hoping he is up to the challenge.  

In lieu of having anything constructive to say about this casting, here are some links you might find interesting.  

Reuters News Service announces the casting of lead for The Walking Dead

Andrew Lincoln's IMDB page

AMC's latest The Walking Dead news

Saturday
Apr102010

A tidbit of Game of Thrones info

While doing my normal surfing for news stories related to the HBO series Game of Thrones based on George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire, I came across this tidbit from the This Is Local London website:

"Aspiring young dancer Kelechi Nwanokwu has hit the big time after being picked for the latest big-budget drama to come out of the US.  The 26-year-old is set to appear with Sean Bean in fantasy epic A Game of Thrones"

No details about what role she was cast in, but I'll guess she is one of Daenerys's handmaidens (Irri, Jhiqui, or Doreah) that were Daenerys's gift from her brother at the wedding feast.  Or maybe she is just an unnamed in the employ of Illyrio.  A little searching reveals that, likely because she is a dancer and is pictured with other dancers at an GoT after party, that westeros.org is guessing she is a dancer at Daenerys's wedding feast.  I guess will see when the time comes.  I'm still going to guess she is Jhiqui just for the heck of it.  If she had already filmed the only scene she was ever going to be in before this article even ran, would she really be proclaiming she hit the big time?  (Well, probably, but I'll go with the long odds here).

 

http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/7989839.Talented_dancer_hits_the_big_time/

 

Saturday
Apr102010

British sci-fi author Richard Morgan to pen Crysis 2

EA announced this week that it had enlisted British Science Fiction writer Richard Morgan to pen the story for Crysis 2, the sequel to its "successful" and beautiful PC first-person shooter.  Successful is in quotation marks there because Crysis didn't actually sell that many copies and a lot of those sold were never played because of the extreme hardware requirements needed to get even decent frame rates on the game.  That won't be a problem with Crysis 2 as it will be released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 and be optimized to run on  less than stellar PCs.  Despite needing to run on consoles, the new engine is looking great (as these screenshots--courtesy of EA---show).

Click to view full-size image

 

 

The move to an urban setting really makes this look like a whole new property, and EA likely saw te need for stronger writing given the more recognizable setting.  Richard Morgan stormed onto the sci-fi scene in 2002 with the publication of his well-received Altered Carbon, a cyberpunkish thriller with a voice lifted from noir detective fiction.  He has continued to publish regularly and seems to have continued with the idea of blending different genres.  His latest, The Steel Remains is basically a sword-and-sorcery novel that feels like it takes place on a different planet and with sorcery that really seems more science-based than supernatural.

Crysis 2 is Morgan's first foray into the video game world, but his first novel has been optioned by Hollywood, so his work will soon be exposed to two, much larger than the sci-fi base, audiences.  

The history of genre authors teaming up with video game developers isn't exactly great, but Morgan can certainly do nothing to lessen the quality of first-person shooter writing.