Those punks felt lucky

I can't imagine how anyone can vote for Rand Paul. I'm not even talking about his moronic take on the Civil Rights Act. I mean, that's pitiably foolish, and his whole "I"m not a racist, but..." act doesn't excuse his adopting the position that government must never interfere with private business even in the face of egregious social injustice. But at least if the people of Kentucky are fools enough to elect the man, the CRA is in no danger of being undone by Paul's idiocy. We might not be so lucky when it comes to his potential choices for dealing with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which he recently had the goddamn gall to characterize as an "accident". Paul even criticized the anger towards BP as un-American. To which I say: Fuck you, sir, and the political philosophy you rode in on.

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What's wrong with Leanne

In my last post I mentioned the difficulty I sometimes have in connecting with characters that express values opposed to my own. Because a game is an interactive entertainment that requires the player to exert considerable effort in order to progress, it's important to make sure that the player identifies or sympathizes with the characters he's controlling. This is especially true of 40+ hour games like RPGs. You're spending a lot of time with these people, so they'd better be worthwhile company. Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate had a small cast I didn't enjoy spending time with at all. I found the personalities of the male characters, Vashyron and Zephyr, to be completely repulsive and tiresome. But the female character, Leanne, was problematic in a different way. It wasn't just her personality, although she's not the sort of person I'd generally care to hang around with. Leanne just made me sad, because she was so obviously a patriarchal caricature.

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Who wants to be Lloyd Irving?

Having explained what I thought was wrong with Infinite Space, I feel obliged to talk about what it did right. In this context I'm going to discuss something lots of other games get wrong, from my point of view. Let me start with the proposition that games express values. That may seem trivial to anyone who has played through twenty or so JRPGs with the same neo-luddite earth-friendly themes, but I'm actually not talking about that kind of expression. Games also have intrinsic values that are communicated by the kinds of characters that are chosen as protagonists, the way that the plot evolves around them, and the systems with which the player affects that plot. In marked contrast to many notable JRPGs of the last decade, Infinite Space values intelligence and pragmatism. Because I share those values, I appreciated the game more, perhaps, than its gameplay and plot strictly deserved.

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