Over the past couple months I’ve looked at both of Satoshi Mizukami’s works that are available in English, Spirit Circle and Hoshi no Samidare: The Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, and my feelings on Biscuit Hammer were rather lukewarm. I felt like Spirit Circle improved on all of the problems I had with the story but that was expected, ... Read more
By: jeff,
on 3/20/2010
The world is facing some pretty big problems: climate change, famine, war, terrorism, poverty… and little old you are just one person. For many people, the immensity of these problems only highlights for them a single person’s impotence against global scale issues.
Video games, however, are different. If you try hard enough, you WILL prevail. You can save the world/princess/lemmings through a series of levels of gradually increasing difficulty. In video games, you can be a winner, with wealth, power, prestige and (virtual) babes, even if, in life, you work at Blockbuster part time and crash on your buddy Steve’s futon. No wonder you would prefer to spend more time online than stocking copies of Twilight.
Extreme cases of this escapism has been in the news, with (usually Asian) gamers dying of dehydration/exhaustion after too much time online. One Korean couple recently let their real life baby starve while they cared for a virtual child online!
These stories are alarming, but it doesn’t end there. It may amaze you to know that we invest 3 billion hours a week playing games! It may alarm you even more to hear a video game expert assert that we need to spend MORE time gaming: she estimates that we should shoot for 21 billion hours a week.
This talk raises some very interesting points regarding the “virtuosity” that is attained by serious gamers. The skills they become virtuosic at are: Urgent Optimism (desire to act immediately combined with reasonable expectation of success), Weaving Social Fabric, Blissful Productivity (recognizing that we are happiest when engaged rather than “relaxing”), and Epic Meaning (attaching themselves to large scale causes and goals).
Great, those sound like fine qualities to have, but they only apply to World of Warcraft, right? You’d be surprised. Jane demos some games that she has deve
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It has been a long time since I last read Biscut Hammer, but I remember the animal spirit things being very funny and yes I can agree the jokes do come off as LOOK WE MADE A JOKE which is true! That and the other supporting characters are quite interesting and some of the deaths were shocking at least to me…
I still have my fingers crossed for an anime adaptation of this series, I just hope it goes to a talented studio that can handle the source material without messing things up, but if I had to choose I might go with JC Staff, Shaft, TRIGGER or MAPPA.
I didn’t find a way to work in a mention of the familiars but I liked how they weren’t all reflections of the characters or something simple like that, Loki’s words that no matter what his knight does he’ll follow him because it’s been too painful to watch them die over and over really summed it up nicely.