Worldcon: Day 3, Saturday
Started off well, had sudden catastrophic spoon failure.
Videogames as Art with John Scalzi, K A Benford and Foz Meadows. This was quite a good panel, I thought I'd heard most of what there was to say on this topic but I hadn't.
An art form is respected when it has Serious Critics, and videogames don't yet but will eventually. I asked if part of the problem was that the critics there are (Yahtzee etc) aren't taken seriously, and the panel agreed.
Someone asked about the equivalent of dense paintings that only makes sense if you've been to art scool, he suggested that difficulty of play was equivalent, Foz suggested in-jokes and easter eggs. I thought of Sten saying "The cake is a lie" in Dragon Age and other such references between games.
There was much discussion of how to introduce video games to others, whether showing someone cutscenes really gets across the art of the game, and the rise of casual gaming. An idea I had that got to be the last question (and thus not discussed much) was the importance of walkthroughs and cheats in letting people (like me :)) get the full story of a game even if they suck at the gameplay.
Something that didn't really get addressed is the complicated way that the game creators and consumers are joint creators of the game experience, and the way this blur into transformative works eg with say Second Life or the Sims where much of the content is user generated, or with game mods and multiplayer roleplaying games (the ones where people actually roleplay and create stories).
The Plight of the female superhero with Karen Healey, Tansy Roberts and Peter V Brett.
This panel…did not go so well. The question asked by the blurb was "Why is there no Wonder Woman movie?". The women panelists answer was "Mysogyny, obviously. Now lets move on to discuss how it works and how we can fix it". Peter Bretts answer was "Well, it's hard to say exactly, there's some sexism, but also she's a hard character to relate to, and there's commercial pressures…".
They very quickly descended into telling each other the other answer was wrongwrongwrong. After some initial evident annoyance Karen Healey got over her disappointment at having her original panel expectations dashed and tried to find subtopics they could discuss without too much conflict and tried to get different ideas from the audience, but alas the other two panelists kept circling back to the same repetitive argument (I agreed with everything Tansy Roberts had to say, but she wasn't going to convince him, and watching her try just got dull and annoying)
While Peter V Brett did have some interesting things to say, but he was very defensive and played a lot of Anti-Comics-Feminist Bingo.
And as Cam pointed out after we left, none of the panellists discussed movies very much at all, despite that being the ostensible topic.
One thing I did get out of it: if you want to get decent portrayals of female superheroes, watch kids cartoons, especially Justice League Unlimited (I think that was the name?) They also recced "Secret Six" and "Marvel Adventures".
Fred Hoyle: Scientists and Science Fiction with Gregory Benford, Christina Lasaitis, Alistair Reynolds and Jeff Harris. This was all about Fred Hoyle rather than the general topic. I started feeling ill and so utterly bored I left, no easy task since I wanted to avoid using the very noisy reverse mid-panel. (It's hard to say how much was the panel actually being dull, and how much me feeling ill and grumpy)
I then went to Karen Healey's in-progress reading, which was VERY DUMB because the doors were closed and getting in was very noisy and I feel really bad for interrupting :( "Guardian of the Dead" does sound awesome, so my current plan for tomorrow is to buy a copy, get her to sign it, and fangirl at her for being so awesome in so many ways.
And then I went back to the room and rested for seven and a half hours and felt much better about the world (and up to making this post).
This entry was originally posted at http://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/354733.html. There are
comments.
Videogames as Art with John Scalzi, K A Benford and Foz Meadows. This was quite a good panel, I thought I'd heard most of what there was to say on this topic but I hadn't.
An art form is respected when it has Serious Critics, and videogames don't yet but will eventually. I asked if part of the problem was that the critics there are (Yahtzee etc) aren't taken seriously, and the panel agreed.
Someone asked about the equivalent of dense paintings that only makes sense if you've been to art scool, he suggested that difficulty of play was equivalent, Foz suggested in-jokes and easter eggs. I thought of Sten saying "The cake is a lie" in Dragon Age and other such references between games.
There was much discussion of how to introduce video games to others, whether showing someone cutscenes really gets across the art of the game, and the rise of casual gaming. An idea I had that got to be the last question (and thus not discussed much) was the importance of walkthroughs and cheats in letting people (like me :)) get the full story of a game even if they suck at the gameplay.
Something that didn't really get addressed is the complicated way that the game creators and consumers are joint creators of the game experience, and the way this blur into transformative works eg with say Second Life or the Sims where much of the content is user generated, or with game mods and multiplayer roleplaying games (the ones where people actually roleplay and create stories).
The Plight of the female superhero with Karen Healey, Tansy Roberts and Peter V Brett.
This panel…did not go so well. The question asked by the blurb was "Why is there no Wonder Woman movie?". The women panelists answer was "Mysogyny, obviously. Now lets move on to discuss how it works and how we can fix it". Peter Bretts answer was "Well, it's hard to say exactly, there's some sexism, but also she's a hard character to relate to, and there's commercial pressures…".
They very quickly descended into telling each other the other answer was wrongwrongwrong. After some initial evident annoyance Karen Healey got over her disappointment at having her original panel expectations dashed and tried to find subtopics they could discuss without too much conflict and tried to get different ideas from the audience, but alas the other two panelists kept circling back to the same repetitive argument (I agreed with everything Tansy Roberts had to say, but she wasn't going to convince him, and watching her try just got dull and annoying)
While Peter V Brett did have some interesting things to say, but he was very defensive and played a lot of Anti-Comics-Feminist Bingo.
And as Cam pointed out after we left, none of the panellists discussed movies very much at all, despite that being the ostensible topic.
One thing I did get out of it: if you want to get decent portrayals of female superheroes, watch kids cartoons, especially Justice League Unlimited (I think that was the name?) They also recced "Secret Six" and "Marvel Adventures".
Fred Hoyle: Scientists and Science Fiction with Gregory Benford, Christina Lasaitis, Alistair Reynolds and Jeff Harris. This was all about Fred Hoyle rather than the general topic. I started feeling ill and so utterly bored I left, no easy task since I wanted to avoid using the very noisy reverse mid-panel. (It's hard to say how much was the panel actually being dull, and how much me feeling ill and grumpy)
I then went to Karen Healey's in-progress reading, which was VERY DUMB because the doors were closed and getting in was very noisy and I feel really bad for interrupting :( "Guardian of the Dead" does sound awesome, so my current plan for tomorrow is to buy a copy, get her to sign it, and fangirl at her for being so awesome in so many ways.
And then I went back to the room and rested for seven and a half hours and felt much better about the world (and up to making this post).
This entry was originally posted at http://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/354733.html. There are
comments.