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I’ve got to strongly recommend the movie City of God, although I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it. (Ebert.) But there’s this: I kept a stiff upper lip all throughout the film. Afterwards, as I’m wont to do, I visited its IMDB trivia page. Then came the tears. That’s never happened to me before. (Watch the movie before you read the trivia.)

The form feels a little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-ish (in a bad way) to me. The tiny bit of agency that allows me to choose one path over a second one doesn’t, like, mind-crushingly alter my entire relationship with the text or anything. So read Same Day Test because it’s a good story, any which way you slice it.

Just after Robin posted this Gamespot link on storytelling and video games, I left for a vacation in Orlando and my parents’ dial-up connection, so I could not contribute a proper reply. Here it is.

My favorite text addressing the place of video games within the spectrum of art/literature is Ernest Adams’ lecture at the 2004 Game Developers Conference, “The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design.”

You have to remember that Adams is talking to computer game developers, not academics, so he’s reductive at best and flat-out wrong at worst. (You may have to struggle to trust anything he says after he begins by boiling the last 200 years of Western philosophy down to English philosophy — logical and deductive — and French philosophy — touchy-feely. Germans, apparently, need not apply. And of course, you forgot Poland.) But once you get over his sketchy broad-brushing of history, he makes some wonderful points.

Adams maps video game storytelling onto the timeline of modern literary storytelling, and essentially decides that we’re just exiting the classical era. This feels spot-on to me. As much as I love Final Fantasy IV, it appeals to me emotionally in the same blunt, soaring, epic way Beowulf does.

Video game storytellers of today, Adams says, are still coming around to the Victorian age:

Read more…

There’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing since the start of the Age of Blogs about accuracy. How on earth do we trust anything we read on the Internet? Bloggers can say anything!

Just this year, there was a conference on blogging, journalism, and credibility.

Then there’s been some hand-wringing over the fact that you have to use phrases like “steady downward trend” to describe the recent credibility ratings of newspapers.

I’ve got a proposal.

Imagine: you come across an article on the Web purporting to be journalism or contain elements of journalism. So you cruise on over to StraightenTheRecord.org (or whatever) and you search for the name of the text’s author or publication. Up pops a screen listing all the corrections made on articles by that author or in that publication.

But you’re a tad underwhelmed. You had caught an error of fact in the document you were reading that isn’t listed on this page.

So you log in to the site and edit the record (it being some sort of a wiki), adding your correction to the stack.

Read more…

I’m not sure I understand what’s going on here, but I know it’s insane. (Via Steve Rubel by way of Dan Gillmor.)

Even though we’ve been on intermittent papal death watch for the past five years, and his death today has the dubious honor of being possibly the least surprising passing in the history of human mortality, the NYT managed to bollocks his obit. Classic. [ PDF evidence ]

Pastel Vespa covers Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” over at Copy, Right?

Remember Fahrenheit? Probably not, ’cause I think I was the only one with a mild fixation on it. Anyway, it’s now called “Indigo Prophecy” and it’s being published by Atari, not Vivendi Universal. Ostensibly coming out for the PC in June, for the PS2 and Xbox in September. [ Interviews 1 | 2 with game creator David Cage ]

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

J.D. Lasica, Marc Cantor, the Internet Archive, and the folks behind Drupal have launched OurMedia.org, which they hope will become the hub of the grassroots media revolution. Robin’s already posted EPIC up there, so we know that when 2014 actually rolls around, we can look back and laugh at how far our predictions diverged from reality, as we perform remote upgrades on our Digital Consciousness servers and sip calorie-free nanolattes in massively multiplayer gridcaf

All right, just like last year, here’s all the 2005 National Magazine Award finalists I could find online. Excerpts or articles behind subscription walls are in brackets (I’m not sure if all the Atlantic articles I bracketed are actually behind subscription walls; but I figured it was safer to assume, so try them even if you’re not a subscriber.)

Vanity Fair was a strong contender in the awards this year, but puts none of its content online. (At least NMA-nominated columnist James Woolcott has a blog now.) If not for The New Yorker winning 10 nods and putting most of its content online, this list would be pretty useless. In fact, I didn’t include the Photo Essay category, because The New Yorker‘s entry, “Democracy 2004” by Richard Avedon, is the only one available online.

If you come across anything I missed, add it in the comments!

LEISURE INTERESTS

Golf Digest:

– The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Buddies Trip

National Geographic Adventure:

– [ Grail Trails ]

O, The Oprah Magazine:

– Attention Shoppers!

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