The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
It must be said, that just because an IP management company would like to sell the rights to make some movies does not mean any studio is interested in buying them or funding such a title.
Microsoft spent years "exploring" a Halo film.
(It must be said, I think a studio might bite on a Gandalf film, but I doubt there's enough in any of the others.)
When I was a kid I hated the Xbox, hated Halo, and hated how it seemed to create a new model for playing games. It was released when I was in middle school, and I remember there being a sudden and abrupt shift in what kind of gaming mentality there was.
Prior to the Xbox, console games were largely focused on lush, whimsical landscapes with mechanics that required some puzzling to figure out. At least, the games that kids played, anyway; I know Unreal Tournament and Doom and Quake were big, but looking back I think those games all had a whimsy to them as well. The arsenal in Unreal is way sillier than anything Halo's ever had to offer (even Halo's energy sword seems kind of rote). And the major titles on the N64 and Playstation and Dreamcast were titles like Mario and Sonic and Crash Bandicoot – colorful worlds, puzzles often based on platforming. Developers like Nintendo and Rare had a knack for creating controls and visuals that seem to reward you for getting into them, so that even Rare's Goldeneye 007 felt like an utterly silly game. (Proximity mine in the toilet!)
When Halo came out, it was immediately apparent that this was Microsoft's grand new vision of gaming – "realistic" graphics, self-seriousness, achievements, and an ugly competitive edge. My memories of Halo are almost all multiplayer, obviously: generally, six kids sitting by a machine, two of them unhappy because they sucked and consequently were cycled out every other game, meaning they didn't get practice time either. The local teen center turned into a place where a bunch of bro-types would hook up their Xboxes and play each other all night, screaming at one another between rooms. The TV that was used for movies got co-opted into another Xbox resource, so eventually the whole place became a Halo pit. And online Halo (which started with 2, if I recall correctly) changed the dynamic yet again, in a way that's familiar to all of us: kids cussing at one another, players generally acting like little shits.
Some of that all would have happened without Microsoft's "Xbox is a manly console for men" marketing push. But you can absolutely look back and say that Microsoft influenced developers in a bad way. Sony made a push to "cut Microsoft off" with titles like God of War, which are similarly quote-unquote epic. Halo opened the door for Tom Clancy games, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, on and on. A number of older game developers decided, when they made the change from 2D to 3D, to pursue a similarly "gritty" realism. Now there's a gaming culture wherein genres are solidly defined and there's excruciatingly little variation between game mechanics, visual style, or design mentality, at least in the AAAs. And it's because of how relentlessly Microsoft pushed to divide the market.
The old designers either shifted their styles along with this, or they ran out of steam. Sega hasn't made a good game in over a decade – I won't even blame that on their pursuing a "mature and edgy" vibe with the Sonic franchise, though they seem to think that's what gamers want. They just ran out of ideas for where to take Sonic. Rare had a couple of late-era successes, mostly Viva Pińata, but the only thing they've done in five years is Kinect Sports games. And Nintendo? They still stick to their old style, but this many years on Nintendo's flaws as a game developer are showing. Aspects of their games which were totally forgivable when they were building for N64 or even Gamecube are starting to feel like irritatingly deliberate decisions on their part now. And you know what? That would be okay if Nintendo didn't sometimes feel like the only company still pushing that particular aesthetic. If they were one company among many, it wouldn't matter so much, but they're singlehandedly trying to push against the currents of every other game developer on the planet, and it's increasingly becoming clear that they're just not good enough to carry that all by themselves.
Obviously, this is a view of just a limited slice of gamer culture. Indie games absolutely borrow from the old-school design mentality more than they do from the Halo mindset; I've seen more whimsy and fun in a single Humble Indie Bundle than I've seen appear on the Xbox 360 since its release. Even there, though, you can feel the influence somewhat, and it's spoiled some games that I really wish I could have enjoyed (namely Bastion). And you do have both occasional lighthearted breakouts (Katamari Damacy) and games that use the self-serious mentality to incredible effect (Demon's Souls). This is a fad which will pass with time, though I'm not so pleased at the thought that our next big wave of developers are the ones developing for mobile and Facebook. Angry Birds and Farmville are not a fun influence. But that's just the way it goes. There'll always be good stuff if you know how to hunt for it. I just miss the fact that for a decade or so, the best games were at the top of the heap or close to it. I don't know if I realized how lucky I was as a kid until that ended. The 90s were a great time to grow up a young gamer.
Because library shelves don't consist 90% of pop movies, video games, and music. Pirating the latest Halo game is not the same as borrowing a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us.
(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?)
Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!"
Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about.
I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.
Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).
Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and you have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.
Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-equivalent basket of books?
I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams).
For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap.
The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this isn't a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men).
There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor.
I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there.
A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.
EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment.
There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have lots of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time.
As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home).
The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics:
- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)
- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics)
The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today.
I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.
If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a markedly better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.
Hacker Cinema
6 comments on Hacker News
Few franchises that span generations?
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
It must be said, that just because an IP management company would like to sell the rights to make some movies does not mean any studio is interested in buying them or funding such a title.
Microsoft spent years "exploring" a Halo film.
(It must be said, I think a studio might bite on a Gandalf film, but I doubt there's enough in any of the others.)
If they pick a game worthy of making it into a movie, that would be a good start.
Halo would have made a great movie but MS messed that one up and the guy they hired went on to make District 9.
There are plenty of games worthy of movie treatments. Dark Souls, SkyRim, Zelda, Mass Effect, Ico, Last Guardian, just to name a few.
If you start with Rampage or Mortal Kombat than you end up with equally shallow movies. There just isn't enough 'story' to make it worthwhile.
When I was a kid I hated the Xbox, hated Halo, and hated how it seemed to create a new model for playing games. It was released when I was in middle school, and I remember there being a sudden and abrupt shift in what kind of gaming mentality there was.
Prior to the Xbox, console games were largely focused on lush, whimsical landscapes with mechanics that required some puzzling to figure out. At least, the games that kids played, anyway; I know Unreal Tournament and Doom and Quake were big, but looking back I think those games all had a whimsy to them as well. The arsenal in Unreal is way sillier than anything Halo's ever had to offer (even Halo's energy sword seems kind of rote). And the major titles on the N64 and Playstation and Dreamcast were titles like Mario and Sonic and Crash Bandicoot – colorful worlds, puzzles often based on platforming. Developers like Nintendo and Rare had a knack for creating controls and visuals that seem to reward you for getting into them, so that even Rare's Goldeneye 007 felt like an utterly silly game. (Proximity mine in the toilet!)
When Halo came out, it was immediately apparent that this was Microsoft's grand new vision of gaming – "realistic" graphics, self-seriousness, achievements, and an ugly competitive edge. My memories of Halo are almost all multiplayer, obviously: generally, six kids sitting by a machine, two of them unhappy because they sucked and consequently were cycled out every other game, meaning they didn't get practice time either. The local teen center turned into a place where a bunch of bro-types would hook up their Xboxes and play each other all night, screaming at one another between rooms. The TV that was used for movies got co-opted into another Xbox resource, so eventually the whole place became a Halo pit. And online Halo (which started with 2, if I recall correctly) changed the dynamic yet again, in a way that's familiar to all of us: kids cussing at one another, players generally acting like little shits.
Some of that all would have happened without Microsoft's "Xbox is a manly console for men" marketing push. But you can absolutely look back and say that Microsoft influenced developers in a bad way. Sony made a push to "cut Microsoft off" with titles like God of War, which are similarly quote-unquote epic. Halo opened the door for Tom Clancy games, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, on and on. A number of older game developers decided, when they made the change from 2D to 3D, to pursue a similarly "gritty" realism. Now there's a gaming culture wherein genres are solidly defined and there's excruciatingly little variation between game mechanics, visual style, or design mentality, at least in the AAAs. And it's because of how relentlessly Microsoft pushed to divide the market.
The old designers either shifted their styles along with this, or they ran out of steam. Sega hasn't made a good game in over a decade – I won't even blame that on their pursuing a "mature and edgy" vibe with the Sonic franchise, though they seem to think that's what gamers want. They just ran out of ideas for where to take Sonic. Rare had a couple of late-era successes, mostly Viva Pińata, but the only thing they've done in five years is Kinect Sports games. And Nintendo? They still stick to their old style, but this many years on Nintendo's flaws as a game developer are showing. Aspects of their games which were totally forgivable when they were building for N64 or even Gamecube are starting to feel like irritatingly deliberate decisions on their part now. And you know what? That would be okay if Nintendo didn't sometimes feel like the only company still pushing that particular aesthetic. If they were one company among many, it wouldn't matter so much, but they're singlehandedly trying to push against the currents of every other game developer on the planet, and it's increasingly becoming clear that they're just not good enough to carry that all by themselves.
Obviously, this is a view of just a limited slice of gamer culture. Indie games absolutely borrow from the old-school design mentality more than they do from the Halo mindset; I've seen more whimsy and fun in a single Humble Indie Bundle than I've seen appear on the Xbox 360 since its release. Even there, though, you can feel the influence somewhat, and it's spoiled some games that I really wish I could have enjoyed (namely Bastion). And you do have both occasional lighthearted breakouts (Katamari Damacy) and games that use the self-serious mentality to incredible effect (Demon's Souls). This is a fad which will pass with time, though I'm not so pleased at the thought that our next big wave of developers are the ones developing for mobile and Facebook. Angry Birds and Farmville are not a fun influence. But that's just the way it goes. There'll always be good stuff if you know how to hunt for it. I just miss the fact that for a decade or so, the best games were at the top of the heap or close to it. I don't know if I realized how lucky I was as a kid until that ended. The 90s were a great time to grow up a young gamer.
Because library shelves don't consist 90% of pop movies, video games, and music. Pirating the latest Halo game is not the same as borrowing a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
That's a funny site:
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us.
(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?)
Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!"
Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about.
I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.
Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).
Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and you have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.
Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-equivalent basket of books?
I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams).
For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap.
The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this isn't a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men).
There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor.
I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there.
A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.
EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment.
There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have lots of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time.
As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home).
The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics:
- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)
- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics)
The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today.
I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.
If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a markedly better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.