Planet Sillicon

No more Malazan

By blog on Jun. 3, 2010.

No more Malazan for me!

I’ve been toying with putting down Dust of Dreams and taking up another series for a while. Another book might make me appreciate the characters of Malazan again, or something like that. However some aspects of the story were picking up and I was looking forward to seeing where it ended up, so I kept reading.

I’ve put up with a lot from this series and this author. Of the top ten most horrific things I’ve ever read in fantasy, this series would have to have eight places on that list, and the other two actually had merit in the series in which they appear. Erikson has a talent for being a sadistic ass that is often seen in overdrive in these books. But I stuck with it for eight and a half books, and at about half way through book nine, and the ‘Hobbling’ of Hetan, I’ve quit the damn series.

That’s right, Erikson, I was really enjoying the books. That’s right, I did feel that the story was worth the horrible crap you seemed to take pleasure at putting in there. The gratuitous and vile acts, especially towards women and children, that have gone on through this series have been beyond what I’d put up with in a film or television series, but I kept reading because I liked a lot of what was going on. I really enjoyed the immense scale, the inclusion of so many Gods, and the army themselves, the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters were awesome, well, save the psychos included for no apparent reason.

But yeah, at that one scene, I hated Erikson with a vast and deep passion. I felt violated by the horror of what I read, and thanks to Erikson I’ve read some horrific stuff. So, that’s it. I’ve tried to find a good synopsis of what happens through the book, and I’ve figured out much of what happens, though many of the story lines could use further filling out. I’m not going to buy or read the final book, either, though I will again read a synopsis of it online.

However…

By blog on May. 9, 2010.

There’s always a however when it comes to Malazan, isn’t there?

So, I’m still enjoying the book, and I’m still finding motivation to stick with it, but there’s one little group of characters which is extremely depressing, and one character specifically that’s rather irritating.

Remember when I was talking about Alan Wake, and how I didn’t like that a fair portion of the storyline was told through Wake’s internal monologuing? Well, there’s a character who does that a lot in Dust of Dreams, too, Badalle. If her internal dialogue wasn’t the mean depressing diatribe that it is, this probably wouldn’t bother me so much, but really, she’s just such a depressing point of view to read.

The Snake, which she’s a part of, is a very interesting and odd little group, and where I’m up to I’ve no idea where it’s going. We know they’re all children, and what Erikson’s putting them through is absolutely horrid, but that’s really about all we know. They’re on some mass exodus from a city, and they’re headed ’somewhere’ and were being pursued at some some point but probably not any longer.

Badalle seems to be the religious leader of the group in a way, delivering poems to the children as if they were services. It’s all very sad and surreal to read, and that can become quite grating. I really do enjoy a bit of surreality in a book, but more like a scene of it, not an entire recurring point of view of it, and this group/PoV isn’t the only one that’s pretty much entirely surreal and… odd.

The group currently running around in the abandoned K’Chain Che’Malle city fortress thing is also a very surreal group to read about. There’s a ghost running around with them, but I honestly have to wonder if it’s just one of the group who thinks he’s a ghost. They’ve all seemed to lose themselves, to be taken over by some sort of force. They absolutely don’t seem the same as they were in previous books, so I really don’t know what’s going on there.

That’s the thing about these books. A lot of it you read on faith that all will be made clear at some later point, and that is exactly what happens, but occasionally you have to slog through it to get to that point. Still, I am enjoying the read overall and do look forward to the next, and final, book in the series.

Taking the next step in gaming

By blog on Apr. 18, 2009.

As a follow on from my previous article, where I state that games are now a medium of entertainment for adults as well as children, I would like to look into the evolutionary steps gaming can take in the future.

Gaming has grown up. No longer are we faced with the same Good versus Evil dichotomy that Super Mario Bros brought us in the ’80s, no, games have grown from there. Today’s games give us gritty characters with morally ambiguous choices. We can play as the paladin like bastion of goodness, the everyday person who is by and large neutral, or the dark self-serving villain, we now have the choice. Games are accommodating more and more complex characters and narratives, and gamers are thrilled with this new era of realism.

There are those, such as Roger Ebert, who believe gaming will never be an art form, that it’s very nature precludes it from gaining the title of art, but many other respected authors, artists, game developers, and game players, disagree with great vehemence. Gaming is becoming widely accepted as an art form, with exhibitions of concept art now taking place, and serious academic work being put into defining why some video games should be considered art.

Whilst the stigma of games being for children lives on, gaming as an art form can’t really get into the air and soar. If game developers are held back from certain content, that is already acceptable in literature and film, then how can this medium compete on a level playing ground? We have read about the darker side of the human nature for the past few centuries, look at Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk as but one such example. And yet, could you imagine the outcry should anyone try to include Lewis’s often grotesque actions of Ambrosio in a game? Well a game in this day and age, Custer’s Revenge will always baffle me as to how that got through.

I find the denouncement of adult content in games often reminds me of that Simpsons episode where the statue of David comes to Springfield museum and the censor group that Marge started because of cartoon violence goes mad with trying to ban the statue for being ‘indecent’.

Film, comics, and animation are among the most recent additions to the world of fine art, and it occurs to me that all of these mediums had to fight for their place in the fine art pantheon, gaming is the newest, but we can be sure it won’t be the last.