> Please exercise some self-restraint. Otherwise I might have to pick up a
> whip & become a list disciplinarian.
The scourge of Wall Street wielding the whip? We'd never forgive you, unless you dressed up in really cool lizard leather beforehand. And, like, gave us some manacles or something (hey, we're not completely uncivilized out here on the West Coast).
Speaking of corporal punishment, I've been cyberspydering around some of the new 3D video game sites, Quake 2 and Unreal seem to be the hottest ones right now. They're violent, gory, mesmerizing affairs, a mutant splice of 1980s retro-imperial cultural DNA (essentially, cut-rate Rambo narratives, you have a stack of armaments and go up against take-no-prisoners aliens) raised in the petri dish of late 1990s stock options bubble-phoria, all tied together by what a previous Left analysis would regard as a virulent sexism, but which, I think, is more like a coherent professional-class ideologeme (the Quake community, for example, is increasingly cross-gendered, cross-generationed, multinational etc.; e.g. a German Quake site recently came on line). These are just the official, high-tech sites; I'm sure zillions of webpages across the Net practice a less professional sort of bricolage.
Fascinatingly, these new games have spawned not just their own fan clubs (to be expected), but also level designers, code-tweakers, various hackers and whatnot: the fans are integrated into game-production on a whole new level, and quickly evolve their own download sites, their own slang, netcodes, icons, images, etc. The thing just moves too damn quickly for a previous commodity fetishism -- Activision, which markets Quake 2, which is actually made by Id Software (appropriate name, actually), does have a web page with hats and goodies, but the real action lies with the virtual commodities, icons, programming tweaks, and what might be called the "art of the screenshot", i.e. representative shots of various set designs or levels. Remember, these new games aren't simply run-through-the-maze set-ups like PacMan, you're actually "walking" through a 3D kind of space, can move around, jump up and down, crawl, swim, look up and around, etc. You actually see the walls moving past you, etc. The first time I walked towards a steep drop and looked down, I got the same strange sense of dizziness you get when on top of a cliff or something, that "fear of falling" sensation, which says more about my nonexistent climbing skills, to be sure, than anything else.
Interestingly, videogames like Riven take a different tack on this, choosing a more video-cinematic approach to panoramas and scenes; you can manipulate various objects, but the fun lies in the gorgeous visuals and problem-solving puzzles (Riven has no true 3D space: you move from one shot to another static shot, and then fiddle with things within reach). I suspect that the shooter and adventure genres are going to merge in the near future, especially now that Intel and the big electronics firms are beginning to mass-produce 3D graphics cards of various kinds.
-- Dennis