Finally managed to go and see Inception at the cinema (or biograffen, if you prefer). It’s pretty alright, pretty much the “Matrix of dreams”, as a friend said. Blockbustery fun with a few smidgeons of interesting “philosophy stuff” or whatever. A little complex, perhaps, but Primer it was not. I enjoyed it, anyway.

But the wild blathering that the movie pushes me toward this evening concerns, wait for it, video games. In particular, I was thinking just now of the whole “game length” debate – basically the issue of studios feeling they can’t release shorter games because reviews (and many players) depend on the size and heft of a game. Bang for buck.

In Inception, as they drill down into different dream levels, time dilates and takes longer and longer. So if at one level a van is falling off a bridge, say, at a lower level they’ve got all kinds of time to do a bunch of stuff before the van hits the water in the higher level. It was one of the nicer devices in the movie, I thought.

Such a “drill down” effect might work well for at least part of the “length problem” with games. That is, you could make a game that was short, say two hours. The “short games!” people are happy, they play it through. But within the two hours you could embed a larger game which people might or might not choose to pursue, a dream within a dream, say, the gradual unfolding of a complex structure. And the same could be true of the lower level, such that you could choose to play this game in two hours or twenty, depending on how “deep” you went.

Couple of problems. One problem is that we might suggest games already do this. I’m playing Mass Effect by churning largely through the main story. Admittedly it’s taken me about 12 hours so far, but I’m getting through it far faster than if I pursued the side missions. On the other hand, that’s not the kind of thing I mean by the dream within a dream, that’s just chucking a whole lot of “you could do this extra thing!” into the world of the game. Whereas if we imagine a game with levels, it might mean something like the difference between whether you actually play through a particular chunk of the narrative or not, depending on how long you want the game to take.

Another problem is that it doesn’t solve anything whatsoever for the studios making the games. It probably makes things harder, and thus more expensive. After all, you still have to build the game that takes 30 hours, it’s just you then have to bite your lip and allow people to finish it in 2. I don’t have a sense for how unpalatable that would be for the various people who make of the world of game development. I suspect it wouldn’t necessarily appeal. Further, for those who just wanted the 2 hour version, they’d have to pay the price for the 30 hours they could have, unless we were to develop some amazing system in which you buy particular “possibility sets” for a game, more or less equivalent to buying more or less time (or dreams).

Anyway, I kind of like the idea in a vague, I’m-quite-tired-tonight way. Maybe you’re playing a game and the phone rings. You might just ignore it, or you could answer it and end up spending 8 extra hours on play that fills out the main narrative.

Something like that.

We watched Attack of the 50 Foot Woman yesterday, which was one of those instances in which you watch something purely for its pop-cultural value. As a movie it left a lot to be desired, let’s say. Rampant sexism, unbelievably horrible plotting, and some really quite shitty acting.

And yet, it was definitely a great experience. Partly this was for the pop-culture experience it provided – the act of “seeing Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” has its own special life-semiotic value which made it worthwhile. Having only really encountered the classic poster, seeing the movie that brought the poster into existence was great – now we know what it’s like.

But it also did certain things really quite surprisingly well. Although the leading lady was kind of pathetic, I thought her representation of the 50 Foot Woman was quite great, in terms of the booming voice constantly crying out for her husband. Sure it’s dumb, but there was just a hint of something soulful in the image – largely imagined – of this big creature filled with so much anxiety.

Additionally, while a lot of the effects were horrible (the semi-transparent people in the composite shots were so bad I was kind of amazed they bothered), some of them were remarkable. The image for this post is a good example. It’s just a woman and a model of a power pole, obviously, but somehow it managed to look really quite brilliant. They did some similar stuff with the outside of a bar, and of her looking through a window into a hotel. Those moments really did capture the notion of a giant woman rummaging around a town in a way I hadn’t expected in such an old (1958) movie.

It could be that it was just a relief to see a moderately plausible effect in the midst of all the horrible composites and atrocious “big rubbery hand models” and so on, but I think that there was more to it than that. Some of it was perhaps in the expression of leading lady Allison Hayes – she tended to wear a strangely disassociated look that really seemed to fit the scale, even as she also boomed her voice, calling, “Harry! Harry!”

I don’t think I’d recommend you see this movie, but in amongst the shittiness, it does have some brilliant. Maybe it’s got a… 50 foot heart? Right? Am I right? Or am I right?

Ha ha.

Fuck it, why not briefly take an early evening moment to think about the big stupid “are games art?” debate. You know, the whole “Roger Ebert says no – lots of people say yes” blah blah affair. Okay, maybe I’m not showing much commitment to the debate here. Oh, wait, maybe I’m really disinterested the debate. Okay, moving on.

Actually, what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days is the notion of an “artisanal video game”. A key distinction between video games and a lot of what tends to get called “fine art” is one of uniqueness. Video games are a mass media – lots and lots of people own Mass Effect, say, and every copy is the same thing (though every playing is not, of course). Whereas there’s only one Mona Lisa, one Les Amants, one shark in formaldehyde. This isn’t a hard rule, since you get editions, multiples and so on – but by and large there’s a scarcity of “fine art” that doesn’t exist with video games.

A lot of that is connected with their digital nature, of course – once you’ve made a video game, making a lot of copies and distributing them is a much more trivial task. Further, like other artistic media such as TV or music, getting the work out to lots of people is regarded as a good thing, the objective. But it does change our relationships with these objects – they’re not unique. If anything, video games have a leg up in uniqueness over TV and music thanks to the personal nature of an individual playing, but still, you’re playing with the “same thing” to a large extent.

While thinking about a stupid, jokey version of Tetris I’m planning on making this weekend (“Rustic Tetris” – hopefully it’s not going to be much harder than I think) I started wondering about the notion of an “artisanal game” instead of an “art game”. To some extent I suppose all games are made by (a massive team of) artisans, but I had a more specific idea. What if when you bought a game the people making it made it just for you, so that it was a unique item. Say the graphics person redrew all the graphics anew for your copy of the game. Or, more weirdly, the programmer reprogrammed the game engine to create a (less visibly) different game. Or they remake the sound effects, or the voice acting, or any other aspects. Now the game is a justifiably unique thing that only you would have.

Such a game would need to be of a small enough scale that it would be at all practical to remake these various assets, say in the vein of today’s indie games. Less ambitious in scale, but still excellent games. You could then buy a game that was uniquely your own – nobody else would have a game quite the same, though they might have another edition of the same game. You’d pay more for it, of course, because it’s artisanal in a way that that word normally denotes – hand crafted, not a straight up copy or a mass produced facsimile. You could show your edition of this game to friends, including those who had different editions, appreciating this individual video game on a different level to your personal approach to playing.

I can’t quite decide if this idea is weirdly brilliant, or just an amusing joke.