Hacker Cinema
Her Story
好东西
2024 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Shao Yihui
Wang Tiemei, a single mother, loses her job and moves, befriending neighbor Xiaoye who appears cheerful but is depressed. Their bond grows as Tiemei navigates relationships with her ex-husband causing trouble.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I think this is worth reading. It gives a lot of interesting points and cultural references to read further.
Is it relevant for this forum? I think so because engineers don't fully understand how technology shapes how people think. The recent thread about the ethics crisis in tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42540862 comes to my mind. We act as it doesn't touch us, but our very passivity is the same as Mrs Pelicot's: when the power we serve take away our own personal power (even the banal ones we can see, e.g. installing our own software on our own computers), we wine meekly when it is already too late.
Slavoj Žižek touches how the 92 episodes of rape of Mr Pelicot on the drugged out Mrs Pelicot, who was unaware until the police showed her photos, mirrors how "digital powers treat us today".
How Mr Pelicot is obviously the weaker one, slave to its own compulsions, who can only act on an unaware object, and cannot deal with a person with her own will. A tale we all live in how tech removed the Big Other from our lives (I have also been reading Byung-Chul Han's "Non-Things" book, which contains similar ideas).
"we must not ignore or avoid digital media: their manipulative use is not inherently inscribed into their technology. They can be repurposed for emancipatory purposes [...] The system desperately seeks to control digital media because it recognizes their potential as tools for massive awakenings – including among women"
Finally, he tells about the "Her Story (directed and written by Shao Yihui), exploded on Chinese screens in December 2024. [...] Her Story deserves to be celebrated as an exemplary case of feminine awakening that avoids the traps of politically correct moralizing stiffness. It hits both targets: the strong presence of male chauvinism in Chinese society and the ruling Communists’ solidarity with it (not to mention other critical stabs at state power). "
There was a Tex Murphy game (Tesla Effect) released in the last couple of years (and was Kickstarter backed), and Her Story made a big splash slightly more recently than that. Several Her Story inspired productions since have been in the works or released. They'll probably never be mainstream/"AAA" again, but there likely will continue to be some people building them so long as they can find their audience.
Plus, AAA game mo-capping has gotten to the point where some of them such as Uncharted and Quantum Break feel very close to classic FMV, with the benefits of a full 3D environment. Quantum Break even had entire "TV episodes" in the middle, making it perhaps the wildest "FMV" game of the last few years.