Cav's Place

This week marks one year since the start of last year’s protests, which brought down the Boc Government and eventually removed PDL from power several months before the elections. Unfortunately, the relatively few individuals who were actually thinking things through and seeing that USL, or even PP-DD, were nothing more than slightly different kinds of evil and therefore not worth supporting in the least were drowned out by the masses swayed by USL’s massive campaign, so the result was a very solid USL Government, backed by two thirds of the Parliament as of last month’s elections. In short, we as a nation jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Fortunately, at least some people didn’t forget that and now they plan to restart the protests, reminding the new government that not everyone can be fooled so easily and that repeating their predecessors’ mistakes will result in them sharing their fate. Just two of those I have seen announced so far do this, one in Bucharest and one in Cluj, while another one will unfortunately continue to be only against the president and openly in support of USL, but those two still count for something. Perhaps there will be more after them, or perhaps even at the same time, in other cities, but we have to start somewhere, right?
Now there are the usual problems about the very low turnout, the rather unclear demands, the conflicts between the various potential leaders and the various groups, but it’s a very good thing that something is at least supposed to happen. What the result will actually end up being, when you also include the likely interference of the police and, in case of this one from Bucharest, the fact that it’s right across the road from the one that supports USL and there have been plenty of conflicts between the two sides last year, we’ll see later.

For obvious reasons, this post will lack details, but yesterday I did something stupid and it prompted me to change my password on most sites. Now that was probably just a regular proxy server and the error meant that whatever I typed didn’t get anywhere anyway, plus that the fact that it wasn’t blocked by anything and the link was higher on the search result list than the actual site I was looking for, which is how I ended up there without realizing it, should quite clearly mean that it’s perfectly safe, but when I realized that I had submitted my password on an unknown site I just reacted.
Clearly, the accounts I use most frequently or see as particularly likely to cause significant problems if somehow taken over weren’t affected, as each of those have separate and more difficult passwords, and in some cases other security mechanisms as well, but many more might have been. Yes, that included some I hadn’t used in years, but I’m sure that there are plenty of others from that category that I couldn’t remember at all, so the total is certainly even higher.
It’s quite sad, and I certainly never thought I’d ever do something so stupid, but it was also probably about time to change passwords just about everywhere, especially since some sites were hacked relatively recently. That alone should have certainly prompted me to do this far more than an action that, as I said above, was probably completely harmless, but I guess the difference was that now I knew it was my mistake and there’d be nobody else to blame in case something happened, so I just reacted immediately.

Thinking of it, I guess I could have used this moment to perhaps also deactivate or delete some of those accounts I haven’t used in a very long time, if it is possible to do so, but I guess there will be another chance to do it. It could be my little project for this month, though the main one will be improving the security of the accounts I rarely use, so I won’t need to do something like this again in case one of them is or may end up being compromised, for whatever reason.
The problem with that, of course, is figuring out a way to come up with a system allowing me to create enough different passwords that’ll remain next to impossible for anyone else to guess, no matter how much said person will look up information about me, while still being extremely easy and intuitive for me to remember, even when I’ll need to quickly gain access to accounts not used in years. That’s not likely to prove easy and, as long as the passwords used are long enough and neither common nor particularly obvious, some may wonder what the point is, seeing as passwords can’t exactly guarantee security anymore, no matter how good they are… But if I can find some way to do something about it, it’d be about time.

A recent IGN article once again brought up the topic of games as an art form, but the author’s opinion differed greatly from what you’d expect to see on a gaming site, as he not only stated clearly and firmly that games are not art, but also that they shouldn’t be. His stance was that video games should be treated just like any other type of games, with their main purpose being to simply provide people with a medium and a set of rules that stimulate imaginative play and playful interaction. He even went as far as quoting a comparison between games and a ball and stated that the narrative, visual style or character motivations present in video games can and likely should be entirely optional, without having any effect on the actual gameplay.
Needless to say, I find such a view not only deeply flawed but also dangerous. Admittedly, AAA titles put far too much emphasis on the visual aspect and an increasingly worrying number of “games” are becoming increasingly “cinematic” by reducing player choice and even interactivity, but the need to hold back the rush to one extreme certainly doesn’t mean anyone should be praising the other. Or, of course, anyone should be free to express whatever views they hold, but those that’d have particularly damaging effects in the long run if they’d somehow end up being adopted need to be fought against and thoroughly defeated, so those expressing them won’t be given a chance to gather that critical mass of converts and allies necessary to create the change they’re advocating.

My view is that computer games and, despite my hatred of consoles, video games in general, are the closest the regular person can currently get to immersing themselves in another world, to temporarily trading their life for another. As such, they can, and should, create an immersive experience, allowing the player to truly feel like they are part of the game world and that their choices have significant consequences. Yes, the rules and mechanics are also important, but good video games should start from creating believable worlds or alternate realities, featuring believable and solid narratives and characters, setting goals that the players will be able to relate to and offering a large amount of control and a vast array of choices that truly impact those worlds or alternate realities.
The outrageous costs mean that you can’t reasonably expect any games except those with the biggest budgets to offer you the feeling of being transported into a good movie and granted complete control of one or more of the characters, but there’s no reason to expect any less than the feeling of being granted complete control of one or more of the characters of a good book. The rules and mechanics should come after establishing the world, narrative, characters and motives, which will afterwards be fleshed out further by also developing the visual and aural aspects as much as possible, within the limits of the available time and budget, in order to get the immersion and sense of escapism to the greatest possible levels.

There will come a time when highly developed virtual reality systems will become readily available and affordable, at which point what we currently consider video games will have to step down from their current position, but at the moment they’re by far the best method we have of opening portals to other worlds, other lives or even simply other possibilities for ourselves. Movies grant the viewer nothing more than the entirely passive role of an observer of another’s vision, while books may allow the reader to imagine the events in ways that they can better relate to, but still grant no control whatsoever over the story or the characters. Video games, on the other hand, can take the best from other forms of art and add this layer of interactivity and freedom of choice on top of that, taking a good part of the control and decisions away from the author and placing them into the hands of the player. If that doesn’t mean that they can, and most definitely should, be art, then I don’t know what does.
Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of bad art out there, not to mention that, as I said above, some games are starting to try to mimic movies so much that they’re taking away the control and choices from the player and handing them back to the author. However, the way to fix that is definitely not to run away from the entire concept of games as art and strive for a return to the simplicity of games as toys, but quite the contrary. We need to encourage those aspects that can turn video games into art, but at the same time emphasize the fact that, unlike it happens with other art forms, the user should never be relegated to the role of a passive observer, but must always be active and entirely, or almost entirely, in control of at least the actions of the main character, group, faction or other clearly active element.

In the end, this, and not rules or mechanics, is what sets video games apart: Unlike movies and books, video games should allow the player to be in control of their destiny and, ultimately, of the conclusion of the story. And unlike toys or generic board games, video games should offer the player a good narrative, goals they can relate to, and perhaps most importantly, a feeling of immersion. They are, and will continue to be until those virtual reality machines will show up in everyone’s homes, the ultimate form of escapism… And escapism definitely is, and has always been, much needed, not only because this world we have created for ourselves is so terrible that anyone who’s not equally rotten to the core will be quickly driven to insanity if not allowed to take frequent breaks from actually living in it, but also because, even in a perfect world, humans would still need to explore, experiment and, to also tackle that idiotic debate about the influence violent games may have, to let off some steam in an entirely harmless manner, without putting themselves or others at risk.

Before moving on to blog-related matters, I have to say that I did somehow manage to go and see The Hobbit yesterday, making this the second movie I went to see in a theater on my own. It was the same theater as nearly three years ago, when I went to see Avatar, so could still reserve the seat on-line as long as I got there to actually make the purchase at least 30 minutes before the 12:45 start time, which made it far less difficult, but I still managed to make it “interesting” by going the wrong way after exiting the metro station.
The plan was to leave around 10:30, get there by 11:30 and then spend an hour wandering around that complex once I’ll have the ticket in my pocket. However, it was 10:45, if not 10:50, by the time I was walking out the door, so I was already feeling late and skipped something else I wanted to do on the way. Luckily, the trains came quickly enough, so I gained some time there too and was leaving the station at 11:27, quite on schedule despite the initial delay. The problem then was that the instructions I had fixed in my mind were limited to “you’ll be at the corner of a park, so cross the street and keep going”, not taking into account that there’s an intersection there, making for two streets that may be crossed, and of course I picked the wrong one.
Admittedly, I more or less realized what happened after a few minutes, but without a clear confirmation I couldn’t risk going back yet, and by the time I knew exactly where I was and could return it was already 11:44. At that point, I raced back to the station, even actually running at times, cutting the 17 minutes one way to 12 the other. Then, after crossing the street I should have crossed in the first place, I just about sprinted until I saw the dome and confirmed that I was almost there, rushed inside, immediately managed to find where I had to go to actually purchase my reserved ticket and tried not to give myself time to think about it, getting it within seconds, all red-faced and sweaty. Also noticed that the time printed on it was 11:58, so their clock was probably a bit behind and I had even more time left that I thought, because my cell showed past noon already.

About the movie itself… Well, it seemed to me that it didn’t quite know what it wanted to be and where it wanted to go. Also, too much crazy, impossible fighting. Honestly, felt like it made quite a mockery of the whole idea without being a proper parody, so there’s perhaps not much recommending it from that point of view, but what does still make it definitely worth watching for anyone who liked The Lord of the Rings is the amount of care put into certain things, the way it recreates the “feel” of those movies, how every place, every item feels like it belongs there, how every actor playing a part they had played before makes it seem like this was filmed at the same time as the series instead of a decade later. Also, the tune of the dwarves’ song is carried very well through many important scenes.

And now let me get to the changes I decided to make to this blog as of this year, starting with no longer sticking to one of the original three rules, which was to always have a number of posts in the “Society” category that was more than half of those in the “Personal” category, and creating the new “IT & Copyright” category to move the relevant posts from “Society” to it. I did this today, ending up with significantly more posts to move than I thought, but that was also due to the rather broad area covered by this new category, which includes all posts that have to do with computers and the Internet and can’t be filed under “Gaming“, but also all those related to copyright, “piracy” and new business models for the entertainment industry, even when not strictly related to file-sharing.
Admittedly, I’ll have to go through everything more carefully once again, if not twice more, because there are some posts I’m not sure about, so one or two may end up back under “Society” and one or two from there may end up going to the new category after all. I’m definitely still sticking to the idea that each post should be filed under a single category, with “Society” taking all those that deal with topics that are either unrelated or, while related in themselves, make it impossible to file the entire post under any of the other categories, and in some cases deciding where that line is drawn can be quite difficult, especially since I didn’t write those posts with such a category in mind, so I didn’t feel a need to be strict about the issues brought up in them. Still, as far as the numbers go, this should be more or less how it’ll end up either way.

Otherwise, though this is the first time I’m posting this, I’ve been thinking about writing news posts for the past few weeks. After all, I do keep posting links to news articles on my Facebook page, so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem to take those I have a little more to say about, perhaps even including some that catch my eye but, for one reason or another, I decide against sharing there, and post them here, with a paragraph as comment instead of just a few words, if even those.
Granted that the articles I share there come most often from the BBC site, because that’s where I usually look first when I just want to see the day’s major international stories, and that may need to change to some extent if I’m to do this, but I think it should work well enough. There have been many times when I just wanted to post something but only had a brief comment to make about it, which I felt was completely unsuitable for a non-personal blog post, but this way I could simply create a “News” category, gather several such articles that I found over no more than a few days and post them, with a brief comment about each. It’d allow me to even drop to a single “proper” post per week, which is something I’ve been fighting a losing battle against for years, while actually increasing the total frequency of posts.

Is it full of clichés? Of course. Does it, like the entire series, bear a striking resemblance to The Lord of the Rings? Again, of course. But the lack of originality doesn’t necessarily make for a bad read, unless of course you are already tired of the genre’s trappings and will accept nothing less than a fresh take on it, in which case you’d better steer clear.
Writing this over four years after reading it makes it difficult, but I still remember some “images” from it, scenes, moments, even a couple of characters, though the latter are perhaps one of the book’s weaknesses. So there are far better fantasy works out there, even in this very series, but it’s good enough to scratch that itch for some more epic fantasy and far from bad enough to be forgotten after being so used.

Rating: 3/5