Vision collision

You realize that each of these musings deserves more time and thought and references. So I apologize for throwing some of this stuff out there based almost solely on my own limited experience and observation, and largely without documentation. Whatever the case, in my line of work it is not uncommon (as I get older) to encounter a misunderstanding, or a full-on talking past one another situation, across the generations. Kids these days, eh. Sometimes it's hard to gap'em.

Anywhoo. Like I said, here goes, without enough documentation or enough experience ... today I was engaging some bright young folks on the finer points of game animation. (I am no gamer. I think games are a big deal. I don't have the time to play them. Though I think some day soon I'm going to give it a shot. (Not a FPS shot. By "shot" I mean "try".) I learned that there's significant difference between the animation quality of the opening sequences and the trailers new games, and the actual gameplay experience. Which, if you're a hardcore gamer (which I now take to mean that you pay attention to every detail of the game and may just play it because it looks good, even though the story's lame - that is, if you're hardcore you consider the whole game and will allow for a few weaknesses if at least one element of it is stellar) can be a bit off-putting. Well, this difference explains for me why games looks so damn much like movies in the ads, and then whenever I see someone playing one, I wonder what happened (and assume that something about the hardware is not quite measuring up).

I was, during my conversation with said gamers today, being a little narrowminded in my assessment of their choices (to play beautiful looking games despite poor story-writing), until I thought about it when I got home. I now have come to understand that perhaps the hardcore gamer, who will set aside a problematic element of a game simply because some other element makes it all worth it, is not so unlike me, who will read a novel that's thin on plot, simply because the prose style is so (to my taste) beautiful.

An example of such a novel would be J.M.G. Le Clezio's "the interrogation" which is, in fact, thin on plot, but big on style. As I consider why the novel works despite this seeming soft spot, I recognize immediately that there is no requirement for a novel, or any art form for that matter, to fully meet all of the so-called conventional characteristics of said genre. In fact the great pieces - the memorable ones - always "fall-short" significantly in one area, while they are simply overwhelmingly strong in another.

Isn't this because art reflects the artist, and his idiosyncracies, which are, in fact, her strengths? Of course. It's so obvious now. What more is there to say about this? Except perhaps to say that any critic worth paying attention to will absolutely not reduce a work of art to its weakest element, and will, absolutely, point out what's the strongest.

So here's come strong sentences from the above novel:

The sun went on blazing in the naked sky, and the countryside shrank back into itself, little by little, under the heat; the soil cracked in places, the grass turned a dirty yellow, sand heaped up in holes in the walls, and the trees were weighed down by dust.. It seemed as though the summer would never end. Now the fields and terraced hillsides were occupied by cruel hordes of grasshoppers and wasps. The rutted lanes ran through the tumult of their wings, cut like razor-blades through these excrescences of the air, these hot bubbles full of spicy scents, which jostled one another at stubble height. The atmosphere made unremitting efforts.
   Men cycled across the fields, emerged on to the main road and mingled with the flood of cars (55).   

Not too bad, I'd say. But the whole passage does nothing to advance the plot, which isn't really the point. The plot I mean. It isn't the point. Adam (the main character) doesn't do much of anything, except watch, and tell us why things aren't working for him. But his shabby, haphazard life is so beautifully rendered, so artfully detailed for me by the narrator, that I can't look away. I just have to keep reading. If the plot was good too, I might miss this point I think - that beauty comes at us in great variety and diversity.


Ride report
in:         10'C wind 25ks SE
out:      18'C wind 40-50ks SE