occupational hazard

Speaking of schoolboys:

These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.

Disarming the perfect detonator

There is a character in Joseph Conrad's "Secret Agent", that of anarchist-arsonist Karl Yundt who, in addition to giving out, by his own account, as much explosive as anyone wants to anyone who wants it (so long as he has just a bit for himself), goes around with a flask of explosive in a coat pocket, connected with a tube winding through shirtsleeves to a small rubber ball in his fist. Describing the arrangement to an associate in a seedy London pub, Yundt complains of the 20-second delay between closing his fist on the ball and triggering the explosive. He boasts about a work-in-progress perfect detonator that would reduce that lag to zero.

"... a detonator that would adjust itself to all conditions of actions, and even to unexpected changes of conditions. A variable and yet perfectly precise mechanism. A really intelligent detonator."

2010 In Passing

It was a good year to be a Muneeb Pasha. There have been and will be better years, and there are no altogether bad years, not yet, no - but 2010 was a good year nonetheless.

TL;DR

"What is this thing called love?

It is nothing reliable,

not like this silk cravat"

      - John Beer, the Waste Land
 
What made 2010 such a good year to follow after the jump:

Pillow Talk

I. Immaculate Misconception

Too many people were hitler this year

so it was unsurprising to hear

from someone, maybe Jon Stewart

(because Jon is one clever J-Streeter),

that Hitler also is hitler.

Civilitas Draconis

Perhaps it was rooted in my fondness for dinosaurs in the pre-Jurassic Park period when they were still underground, or perhaps it was the unpalatable rudeness of an armor-clad St George stabbing his lance through the heart of a scaled, winged Teuton engaged in pathetic imitation of flight, or perhaps it was just the broader human psychological imperative to root for the underdog at play, but irrespective of the underlying cause, the result has always been and still is an overweening adoration of Dragonkin that borders on the fanatical but is grounded securely in reason.

Of Daisy-Cutters & Olive Oil

While watching a fan-made video (Youtube, same window) of Foster the People's Pumped Up Kicks I noticed that one of the stills in the montage used by its creator seemed vaguely familiar. Curiosity piqued, I asked, and was promptly informed that it was a still from Věra Chytilová's surrealist Sedmikrasky (En.Wiki): Czechoslovak, surrealist, and grittily modern; predictably enough - considering how many of those things no longer exist today and the absolute sucker I am for things long extinct - I picked up the movie (no, I pirated it really) and sat down to watch. Note: There are some spoilers after the jump, mixed in with my own impressions of the movie, not that it counts for much in a movie such as this.

For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise

It is a moment of luxurious self-indulgence when one kicks off the covers early on a Saturday morning; to shrug off the temptation to sleep that is so alluring during weekdays and jump out of bed filled with anticipation for an entire day with no claims on one's time except what one may choose to grant. The phone is silent, the city is asleep for a few hours yet, and the very air one breathes is pregnant with the promise of realizable contentment.

Edgar Allan Poe Revisited

I chanced upon a collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe at a second-hand bookstore earlier this year, and was transported back to fifth grade when our English Literature teacher included To Helen and some few lines from Israfel in our syllabus. I cannot pretend to have been too impressed with poetry of any kind back then, so it was very surprising to find that I remembered Helen word-for-word, some fifteen years later. Since that day in February I have spent many Sunday afternoons enjoying Poe's poetry, and, intrigued by the fastidiousness of his craft, read through a few biographical sketches and articles of this great American poet.

Poe had the misfortune of being derided and dismissed by his contemporaries and critics in his day, and generally ignored by the public. His own proclivities and erratic behavior did nothing to help him here: from his stillborn career in the Army to his sacking from an editorial position at a literary periodical to his elopement with a 13-year-old cousin; Poe was alleged to have made a thorough hash of everything he did. Oh, and: Yes, thirteen. Yes, cousin. Classy, classy guy. 

TS Eliot called Poe "meretricious," implying perhaps the more tawdry of the word's meanings. Emerson, deriding Poe's obsession with the scale and meter of his poems, referred to him as a "rhymester." I do not quite understand - not unexpectedly, for I am no poet - why a poet would be attacked for being poetic. James Russell Lowell was somewhat more measured in his criticism of Poe when he described him thus:

"He has written some things quite the best of their kind,

"But the heart seems all squeezed out by the mind."

It was not until long after his death that his work came into its own and Poe's reputation as a poet was not only rehabilitated but greatly embellished. Of course, Poe was not - not even in America nor indeed in his own time - the only literary figure to be attacked thus; just bait Hermann Melville with a giant white whale, although he might see that as vindication instead. In my reading of Poe's poetry, which is by no means either exhaustive or profound, I have failed to notice this lack of "heart" that Lowell deplores. Indeed, there is a certain nudity of emotion in some of his less macabre works that parallels that of the greatest Romantics.

The one poem of his that resonates most strongly with me in this context is Israfel. Grander and infinitely more coherent in whole than the few snippets we suffered through back in school. I view it as Poe's declaration of surrender, his admission of defeat, and his confession of a preposterous ambition and an apology for untamed arrogance. Poe views the Archangel Israfel as the true inspiration for his craft, wondering how monumental Israfel's song must be for it to bring an abrupt end to the Universe and revive all beings for the day of Judgment. Poe's hubris, typically, lies in seeking to identify with and be inspired by Israfel's perfection; more earthly standards of poetry having been judged and found wanting. The bitter taste of an over-reaching, impotent greed runs through the length of the poem, manifesting mid-way as a resigned acceptance of Poe's failure to do justice to his muse, whom he praises lavishly. Israfel ends on a conciliatory note, however, as Poe ascribes the Archangel's success and his own failure to the vast difference in their respective circumstances, realizing belatedly the sheer impossibility of his quest for Israfel's perfection. It is, in this view, a classic case of sour grapes and unrequited love, and Poe is quite the fox in salvaging some dignity. There is, however, a perplexing choice of a single word in the last line of verse. When Poe may reclaim his ambition by comparing his heavenly music to Israfel's favorably, he instead chooses to settle only for being better off than he is at present. In this Poe demonstrates a sensitivity and maturity one would never expect, and perhaps therein lies the root of his remonstrations.

I threw together the video below somewhat quickly as a tribute to Edgar A Poe. The Raven remains a very readable poem, even though one may hear Ramadan-fatigue dripping from my voice.

Enjoy, and you're welcome.

Repetition vs. Persistence in MMORPG Design: Why Arthas Won't Stay Dead

I was slow to jump on the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) bandwagon. I was content to play my single-player CRPG's and – occasionally – Action RPG's, devoting myself to faithfully enacting and reenacting the adventures of the Lone Wanderer, or Scion of Lionheart, or Bhaalspawn, or Darth Revan, or simply Hero. Going back to play the original Baldur's Gate in 2006 for no better reason than I'd run out of games to play was a pain, surely; but being able to immerse myself in the Forgotten Realms was worth the clunky animations and other limitations of the Infinity engine..

After eventually giving World of Warcraft a try and instantly getting hooked, I found that the game experience was lacking in something – not electronic ego boosts (epeen), nor the visually attractive wide-open worlds that the Elder Scrolls and Gothic series had lavished me with. There was an addictive crafting system, a popular PvP element, the PvE was rewarding and, and, and, the game was horribly repetitive and one was forced into doing the same things over and over.

Coming from a somewhat extensive and exclusive CRPG background, which extended to pen-and-paper fantasies, being out of the limelight and not being at the center of attention of the game world came as a pretty rude – even if perfectly reasonable – shock. My character in the world of Warcraft had no agency in the game world. I indulged in most of the things the game had to offer. The NPC's called my character “Hero,” I managed to get some text next to my character's name that proclaimed me a Champion of some sort, my character rode atop an enormous armored black bear, and was covered head-to-toe in fancy gear that bore testament to my character's numerous victories over heinous villains – hellish demons, corrupt wizards, megalomaniac warlords – and “enemy” players. But for all the alleged heroism of my character and the band of similarly acclaimed and accoutered adventurers that my character hung out with in Orgrimmar, we did not really have as much of an impact on the game's world and storyline. The *bling* gear, our majestic steeds and vainglorious titles were status symbols lacking in any inherent value, only appreciated within a narrow community of the game's players. Without much preamble regarding the indulgent escapism of players of video games and the dependency of video game media on the audience – the players – to immerse themselves in the content therein provided, I shall attempt to reconcile the idea of Agency, as that heroic footprint that allows players in single-player games to thoroughly affect the game world, with the “massively multiplayer” part of these games in the context of Bioware's upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: the Old Republic.

Three broad elements of gameplay are present in MMO games across the broad and are known as the Three Pillars: exploration, combat and character progression. It should be noted that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between these three pillars: the player engages in exploration and combat and is rewarded with progression; a broad term that means an increase in the strength and significance of the player character; this is accomplished by gaining a new ability, increasing the power of an ability, gaining score or – given the social nature of MMO games – prestige!

Somewhere along the road to having fun with the game, which is and should be the overriding reason people play games, the player community realized that it is possible, even encouraged by design, for all players to gain the same abilities, rack up the same scores and project the same in-game personality; bragging rights, then, become one of the key points of competition between players – how else does one define “winning” in what is an endless game experience? The objective is not just to complete a certain adventure, slay a particular monster or acquire a special treasure, but instead to be the first to complete the adventure, to slay the monster in the hardest way possible, to hoard a mountain of treasures from different sources and be able to show them off to people as trophies of one's unmatched success in the game. This is not an incidental development, either. The game is designed – by economic necessity – to reward the investment of time with character progression; in terms of items, abilities and prestige. The inclusion of achievement badges, trophies and honorific titles has absolutely no impact on the gameplay, but it does appease the burgeoning number of players who want to stand out from their colleagues, fueled by the remainder of the player-base playing catch-up to these competitive types.

Repetition is something we have come to associate with the very notion of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. After all, users expect to be provided hours of daily entertainment from these games, and because there is only so much content that developers can realistically create, they are forced to recycle. This repetitive nature of gameplay is indispensable and reasonable in its entirety from the perspective of the developers. There are three broad themes of repetition in MMO games:

Content Structure

Content structure and format are repeated frequently throughout the game, with cosmetic differences with varying player levels, game world areas, factions and allegiances and the like. Consequently, there are the ubiquitous “Kill X of Y” quests, the “Rescue/Escort the Prisoner to Safety” quests, the FedEx quests and several other recurring quest templates and formats.

Content

Another kind of repetition is that of content itself: enter repeatable quests, instances and material/currency farming. An artificial delay is introduced into the repetitive cycle by means of traveling time, respawn times on monsters, preventing you from doing a certain quest, instance or other activity more than once per day or week etc.

Rewarding Repetitive Gameplay

The game is structured by developers to reward repetition: gear, which is the main standard of progression in most end-games, is gained by repeatedly defeating an instanced encounter – perhaps on a resetting timer – until the desired items are randomly generated and received by everyone in the group who desires them, or raising a certain reputation score to the highest levels by means of repeatable quests and monster-killing, or entering a few instanced Player versus Player (PvP) areas again and again – win or lose – until the requisite tokens/currency/rank has been gained. This reward system leverages the repetition of content and content structures mentioned above to coherently bind the player to the game world and provide a broad set of “goals” for the players to work towards.

Whatever passes for epic adventures in such games are built by stringing together combinations of these content templates with a flimsy dressing of narrative, usually delivered by bland text boxes that most players skip reading. Some few adventures are actually well written, nicely choreographed narratives that have broad implications for developments in the story of the game world itself, but more often, story-telling takes a backseat in MMO games. Even when some major development takes place, such as the death of a major enemy from the game's overarching plot line at the hands of the player character, the killed character does not die in the game world itself, instead reappearing after a certain time and making no mention of his previous death. Indeed, even after the narrative of the game world acknowledges the death of such a character in the world's lore, the character is still very much alive and present in some dungeon. More than any death at the hands of the players, these all-powerful villains die of irrelevance; lurking ignominiously in their sprawling caverns that players no longer care to explore, sitting atop treasures that players no longer desire, lording over minions and underlings that can no longer earn their keep by attempting to keep Raiders at bay.

Of course it is not possible to remove content altogether once it is completed. As discussed already, repetition of content is an indispensable gameplay requirement. It is not possible for everyone to get everything the first time an encounter is defeated and it is not possible to remove content from everyone's game-world after one player or group of players has defeated it. To use an analogy from the Lord of the Rings:, it is not enough for one Frodo Baggins to defeat Sauron, it is not fair for the Nazgul to be destroyed by only one group of heroes; the Content is meant to be experienced by as many erstwhile adventurers as possible. Hence it is the “first” or “hardest” instance of an in-game achievement that confers bragging rights, and not the “only” instance of that achievement. These gameplay abstractions relating developments in the story to the game-world are left to the players to figure out and/or ignore altogether; story-telling is at once irrelevant to and unaffected by the gameplay. In these MMO games the player character's own story is (generally) shallow, and the broader world story arcs are not affected by any player actions, instead being tightly controlled by the Developer by means of playable content patches, revisions in canon, comic books, novelizations, game expansion packs etc.

Role-playing games have traditionally been about telling a story from the perspective of a key heroic role played by the player character. This detail has been lost and buried by successive generations of MMORPGs as something that could not be reasonably implemented within the constructs of contemporary MMO games. The traditional view has been challenged, however, by Bioware with their first foray into the MMO market with Star Wars: the Old Republic, it aims to leverage the studio's expertise in interactive narrative by making a bold attempt to innovate in a genre that has stagnated since its first iteration over a decade ago. This innovation comes in the form of adding a Fourth Pillar to the MMO design philosophy: Story.

Of course, considering the ease with which I give in to over-thinking and speculation, it did not come as a surprise when my enthusiasm for storytelling in a MMO context faded and I was left wondering if delivering to players millions of “Han/Fett/Vader/Luke/Emperor” fantasies was actually possible without instancing major portions of the game and hence killing off the “massively multiplayer” element. After all, having a million Luke Skywalkers slay a million Emperor Palpatines would – in my nit-picky eyes – detract from the idea of player agency. I am not convinced if Bioware will actually be able to pull off storytelling while allowing player characters to have an impact on the wider game world, I suspect it is not a priority and I will probably not know anything for certain until after I have played the game next year.

That said, it occurs to me that perhaps my expectations of player agency are over the top and unrealistic. It would certainly be that way insomuch as Galaxy-changing events such as the destruction of Alderaan are concerned (*hint* I would play the Grand Moff Tarkin class). By way of analogy, the problem appears to be one of having too many children playing in the same sandbox, one would only just start to build a sandcastle before another stomps on it, and no meaningful experience can be drawn from such chaos. One way, then, for players to have a heroic footprint without said footprints competing for severely limited “world space” is to reduce the radius of each to the point that they no longer overlap. The idea itself, like everything else in this post, is nothing unknown or surprising. Other MMORPG's, by reducing and limiting player agency to zero by means of widespread instancing and paying only lip service to story/narrative have accomplished exactly this. But is it impossible to allow the heroic footprint to retain some non-zero radius without destroying the structure on which the game's fun factor is based?

Our Galaxy is a big, fascinating place. The Star Wars galaxy is perhaps as big and certainly not as fascinating to a scientist – hokey religions and all that – but it is filled with tens of thousands of inhabited planets, populated by visually distinct but anthropomorphic alien species and improbable conspiracies, romance and drama. The Star Wars galaxy is not a zero-sum, closed-loop system. The Galactic Civil War that Luke helped to end in the movies did not have much of a bearing on events in the Unknown Regions or the Hapes Cluster. Life goes on, there are pirates, warlords, criminal syndicates and unpopular governments aplenty in this fantastic place, and you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting some plot point that could bring everything crashing down for everyone.

Luke, Leia, and Han – joined by an endless stream of poorly named characters from the Expanded Universe – are not only omnipotent and immortal as they need to be to resolve disparate crises one after another and escape unscathed; they are also omnipresent. To quote a certain irate Yuuzhan Vong Warmaster from another galaxy ever farther away: “Is every third person in this Galaxy named Solo?” One may excuse the Warmaster for thinking so, given how almost every major event in the YV invasion across the entire Galaxy was affected pervasively by the Wesley Crushers of the NJO. What does this mean for storytelling in SWtOR? Simply that heroic adventures are only a stone's throw away, your average Joe is neck-deep in some exhilarating quest, and the bad guys find redemption only too often in a self-sacrificing blaze of glory.

What this ubiquity of excitement and adventure confers on the designers of the Old Republic is the ability, the license, to craft – or allow a human-assisted computer system to cobble together – an enormous number of adventures using the templates provided by the novels and comic books of the Expanded Universe. If we are afraid of everyone being Luke Skywalker, the simple alternative is to tone it down a notch and allow everyone to be Kyp Durron or Nomi Sunrider instead: flying away to far flung parts of the galaxy, infiltrating criminal elements, raising squadrons of starfighters, waging anti-piracy campaigns, discovering some subtle hints of an overarching conspiracy – a resurgent Ssi Ruuvi, for instance – and following mostly solitary but convergent paths until they coalesce into an epic (shared: cooperative or competitive) climax for everyone involved, but it needs to be a climax that does not or cannot have rippling implications for the broader galaxy in the context of story. To illustrate: the final encounter in such an adventure can be with the leader of a band of Weequay pirates, not someone as irreplaceable as Admiral Ackbar.

I find it expedient to imagine this kind of encounter/content design as something akin to oversight by a 'Dungeon Master': throwing hordes of monsters and traps and riddles in the path of intrepid explorers on their way to rescuing the Princess. Not the same monsters nor the same obstacles, nor indeed the same treasures at the end of the adventure. The content structure, the content itself, must repeat, that much is a given, but the degree of variation, however superficial, must be heightened in order to offer a higher degree of immersion and a sense of Agency in the game world.

There is no reason this cannot be extended to other fictional universes. To cross over into Warhammer 40,000, consider that since “in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” allow players to fight said wars on obscure planets and actually conquer them. Offer a clear path starting with a “deep strike” to secure the Spaceport and leading up to the final defeat of a Demon Prince of Khorne.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are attractive and addictive; not least because persistence and social interaction bring them a lot closer to the “real world” than other games. Repetition detracts from the experience offered by the sense of finality that persistence can lend to these worlds. Developers have sidestepped this design conflict by widespread instancing of game content and trivialization of the player character narrative. However, I feel that the trade-off between accessibility and agency need not be dealt with in binary terms. It is possible, by limiting the player's expectations of agency and toning down the scope of the content and the player's role in it, to enhance the sense of player agency. This will create an experience containing a coherent, player-centric narrative and allow for the repetition of content to feel less like a meaningless grind.

In sum: some degree of repetition is required to appease the player-base within a reasonable amount of unique content; what this “degree” is and what constitutes a “reasonable amount,” of course, is open to debate. Agency demands, however, that things once done cannot be undone or done a different way, that the player character is a heroic influence on the game world, or a very small part of the game world, and as such holds sway over the pace and direction of the narrative of that part of the game. Their achievements are theirs alone and are visible for the rest of the server's population to see, even if most never happen across those hyperspace lanes anyway.

Blind Fake: Talmudic Correctional Paradigms

I happened to find myself at a celebration marking the holy day's of one of Pakistan's minute religious minorities last night. This afforded me, for the second successive night, the opportunity to drag out my soapbox and rant about the fallacy of mechanical religion devoid or distinct of religious faith.

Of course I could only do this circumspectly, because - arising perhaps as the consequence of a community-wide identity crisis - minority communities tend to take themselves and their religions a lot more seriously than those in the comfortable majority.

When surrounded suitably by a bunch of people, I proceeded to tell them of how I had discovered the work of (the Prophet) Tonclerf who, between 1792 and 1796 BCE, was inspired by divine guidance to write what we do today know as the Talmudic Correctional Paradigm / Instructional Protocols. I introduced him to my listeners as a great member of the Jewish Enlightenment of the second millenium BCE; who first introduced the Tribe of Israel to the concept of the Kteowrn (pronounced Kteowrn), which I explained was the belief that the Eternal Soul exists between the time of death and the day of judgement in a state of Disembodied Life, in which it continues the pattern by which it has existed in life. A scholar continues to read and write, to the mathematician all the secrets he has pondered in life are revealed, a sinner on the other hand continues to exist in a state of sin: it is the continuation of life absent physical restrictions, the Soul is freed from the need for sleep, from emotion, from deprivation, and may fully pursue that which it has sought in life - something that defines why the Afterlife is eternal when life itself is so short. I scanned the faces of the audience for signs of disbelief but was disappointed; apparently the Faithful respect others' convictions - if they are convincing enough.

I continued, telling them how life in this blissful disinterred state is determined by our actions in life - a concept I named Bycorz; how our comings-and-goings, our interactions with people and their opinions of us shape our existence as Bycerii. I elaborated at great length on the social structures of the world and our existence in it, and why the concept of a social Ketowrn was not so alien as we might think. I also set their hearts and minds at ease, clarifying that I was not a preacher, that the Talmudic Correctional Paradigms / Instructional Protocols were not so much Scripture as a philosophy of religion, morals and social life. I likened it to Zen and explained how it could be adhered to in conjunction with one's primary faith - that it served to complement religion, not replace it. Having thus garnered several converts to the cause of the Social Ketowrn, and placated their concerns by grandiloquent answers to their timid questions, I made up a name for myself, gave out a bunch of fake names of websites, books and other sources of information, and left.

I suspect that if any amongst my listeners had recalled how Vinton Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP suite between 1972 and 1976 CE, how first the Internet and then Social Networking had evolved - I would have been torn limb to limb by a mob of frothy-mouthed zealots. What I managed to prove to myself - for no reason, and for the umpteenth time, was that humans have a strong ability to rationalize and give in to well-constructed lies, especially when the farce does not affect their lives in any meaningful manner. For some odd reason I'm reminded of a quote from the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, when Ming the Merciless Emperor of Mingo (yeah, I know) says:

"Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror."

What a horrible movie that was.

An Insecurious Man

The latest film by Hollywood's best known two-headed dragon may best be described as a fable about fables. The problems that seem to befall the protagonist, Larry Gopnik, one after another are set in bas relief against the backdrop of the greater question that Jewish moralists have been attempting to answer for the better part of the last two thousand years: "Is it possible to have faith in Hashem (a word they use for God so they may not take the Lord's name in vain) in the face of all their people have endured?" As is the case with the entire movie, this question is left unanswered. 

The Coens seem content to raise such serious questions side-by-side with black humor that always seems to find Larry Gopnik at the receiving end without offering any conclusive answers. His problems are allowed to compound until well past halfway through the movie, forcing the unassertive physics professor to reticently turn to three rabbis for help and guidance. The first talks to him in platitudes, the second tells him a story even he doesn't know the meaning or significance of, and the third turns him away without seeing him. 

Towards the end, with Larry Gopnik at the end of his wits, delusional and wanting in faith finds his troubles resolved sequentially by unlikely remedies: his marital life appears to be turning a new leaf, his son manages to get through the Bar Mitzvah despite being high as a kite, he gets tenure at the university; but no sooner has he pocketed a bribe from a student that he has tried to refuse but cannot (for reasons best left for the audience to discover), a freak tornado heads for his hometown, and he receives a call from his physician asking him to drop by immediately to discuss his latest X-rays.

The Moral, or at least what I took home from it, was the Coens' reassertion that Hashem tries his favored children more than most, that He demands from them unswerving faith in the face of challenges no-one can be expected to endure,  with the only reward being a gradual lessening of these trials' severity - and the admonition that everything may yet come wantonly undone by a single, seemingly trivial, misdeed. This view is reinforced at several points in the movie: the funeral of one of Larry's tormentors, the following dialog with a rabbi.

Rabbi: Hashem doesn't owe us any answers, Larry.

Larry: Why does he make us feel all these questions if he's not going to give us any answers?

In the wake of the Holocaust and everything else the Tribe of Israel has suffered since the Diaspora in the first and second centuries CE, it's not surprising if their foremost grievance is "Why me?" The entire movie is built around that premise, and while it has been executed with pervasive dark humor, the final reaction it evokes is pity and not ridicule.

Meliorism vs Apologism

January 10, 2010

Composed on a sleepless night torn between thoughts of the American Surge in Afghanistan, Eigendecomposition, the new Indian missile submarine, and recurrent themes for introspection.

Were it naught but hate I had sown
alas there is nothing left to do
but to replant the harvest
and pray it never rains

Reflections on Avatar

Been to see that movie three times now, and each time I've left the theater there's the regret that I cannot realistically watch it in IMAX 3D.

Why three times? Because the movie is a non-stop climactic rollercoaster, each scene and each action sequence is loaded with breathtaking landscapes, incredible creatures and the kind of choreography that could make three separate movies a success.(Granted, of course, that none of these make a lot of sense scientifically; I keep stifling the engineer inside me to keep from ruining the fun).

More and more movies of late have of course been moving towards this non-stop-climactic-rollercoaster pattern. The kind of flicks that build up a nuanced narrative while continually pacing the story-telling against the attention-grabbing are on the wane (2009's notable exception was Das Weisse Band, great movie if you're cool with subtitles and black & white); but while I do decry the slow, sorry demise of story-telling, there's certainly a lot to be said for the kind of action Avatar presents so well.

Next movie I'm watching multiple times at the theater: Legendary Pictures' remake of Clash of the Titans.