He's here, the Phantom of the Opera

Finally, Part II of the Paris book is finished. Well, draft is finished. But I am a revise-as-you-go type and that puts me a lot closer to final draft than one might otherwise think.

A long tailing scene through the Palais Garnier, with musings on history, architecture, theater, and a whole bunch of stuff about Phantom.

Were I a better writer I might have been able to engage with the building more fully. Using the physical spaces and the various stories told in and of it as integral elements of the cat-and-mouse pursuit. I did sort of manage that when I did the big after-publication revision of the Japan book, making some semblance of one of those martial arts period piece chase scenes, jumping through windows and throwing straw baskets or whatever, out of what had been a stroll through the reproduction Edo-era town on the outskirts of Kyoto.

I didn't quite finish watching the 2011 Royal Albert Hall staged production of Phantom, or the 1925-1927 Lon Chany version, or for that matter reading the book. Much less Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of a hundred other adaptations of the story. Truth be told, I was doing long hours on another "unexpected emergency" project for the engineers at work. And what was playing through my earbuds to keep me awake was not Sir Andrew, but the MTV production of Legally Blonde.

***

Turns out I know someone who worked in that theater. At least he answered my ghost light question and whether the drops would be in or out. But still too many questions about the physical layout and none of the stuff I've found online is helping enough. Pretty much, every "behind the scenes at Palais Garnier" thing you find on a shallow search is either selling you, or telling you that someone sells, tickets for the guided tour.

Which I really should have taken while I was there. But no, I'm not going back to Paris to do research on a book only three people will ever read. So instead on to the Louvre, especially the Concourse mini-mall on the way to the lower entrance, parkour, La Defense, and the old belt railway (and some cataphiles...still on the fence about whether I will let Penny go into the catacombs on this trip.)

Tour de Paris

Had to work this weekend but actually felt pretty good Monday...over lunch at work, opened the file and wrote. A good hundred words. Whee! Do that for a year and I'd finish the novel.

I jest a little. The Palais Garnier chapter is at 1,700 words and no huge problems yet. Well, aside from the outline planning on this being an epic 4,000 word sequence. 

For no particular reason, though, I started thinking about what the book does as a tour of Paris. What hotspots does it hit and does it do anything interesting in them?

So here goes the current sequences (I use the term "sequences" as being a common idea or thread or location that may span several scenes or even chapters, or be concluded in just one or even part of one.)

A cafe at the place du tertre, and Penny meets a fellow tourist on her first day in Paris.

Penny looks for clues around Sacre-Coeur, atop the butte of Montmartre.

A stroll down Rue de Abesses, travel tips and beginning French, one of the Hector Guimard metro stations.

Back to place du tertre to meet a caricature artist, first of the "bohemians" who run a steampunk cabaret in modern Montmartre.

Musee d' Orsay, art and gossip about the Impressionists, and discussion of the Paris Exposition of 1900.

A (brief) stroll down the Champs Elysees and visit to the Arc de Triomphe, with Marianne (in the Phrygian cap), pointing the way to the next clue.

Morning workout running up the Rue Rivoli and past the old vineyards of Montmartre.

A visit to Shakespeare and Company, and the bouquinistes along the Seine.

A parkour chase across the Ile de le cite, followed by Parisian street food and a brief discussion of the Jewish community of Paris.

The Steampunk cabaret, with various popular songs being done in French...and German. Plus a "dual time" visit to the bateau-lavoir in the company of a young Picasso.

The Pompidou Center, Tintin (Herge was Belgian, though), and a long discussion on Rodin.

Another chase, starting in Gallery Vivienne.

A tailing scene through the projected landscapes of a Van Gogh multimedia show.

A talk with a "love picker" on Pont des Arts, about the love locks of Paris.

Another tailing scene through Palais Garnier, with a whole lot of stuff about the Phantom of the Opera.

***

And that's where I am. Projected, a steampunk photoshoot at the Arts et Metiers metro station, a parkour workout at La Defense, a description of the foyer at the ballet, a meeting with cataphiles along the route of the old Petite Ceinture and a run-in with some punks, details of what happened to Picasso's friend and why his Blue Period, a steampunk garden party and mock duel at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a midnight climb of Notre-Dame des Paris, a daytime visit to Notre-Dame du Travail, and a dinner at the Jules Verne cafe atop the Eiffel Tower.

So there's a few more hundred-word days left there.

Capital idea

I'm a good ways into the love locks scene, with one last big chapter to go to the end of Part II. Boy, has this one been a slog!

I also decided that I will send this to an editor after all. I'm not going to sell enough copies to pay for that, and I haven't the patience (see above!) to do developmental edits, but I want a line editor to go through the thing because I just can't deal with capitalization and, even more, italics.

Within the context of what I am doing some of these are arbitrary choices. As a for-instance, I am in this book italicizing sentences in French. As per the trend, if the entire sentence is in French the quotes are also italicized, otherwise, not.

But should I italicize names? Everyone knows the Louvre, so that probably shouldn't be. Something like the Ile de la Cité is actually a descriptive phrase as well as a name. As is anything that is a Rue or a Pont; should it be the Pont des Arts, because "pont" is the French word for bridge? It seems to make sense; that it would be the Eiffel Tower or le Tour Eiffel depending. But then is it properly Notre Dame, since that just means "Sacred Heart?" Or is it better that the familiar English Notre Dame isn't in italics, but Notre Dame de Paris when it is given in full form?

There's a bit early on when the character Bastien is speaking franglish; he is mixing actual French with English and English roots given French grammar (apparently that's a thing). So...which parts of that mess should be in italics?

Oh, and French capitalization rules are different, too. Of course.

I can at least get the French words correct by hiring a French reader. As painful an experience as that is likely to be. But the thought of trying to figure out consistency in such cases as whether I should italicize or quote or both something like, "You say 'bonjour' when you enter a place of business..."

In the Japan novel, my rather odd rule of thumb was that only proper Japanese got italics. If someone mentioned "sushi," that was just treated as an English word imported from Japanese. Even much of Aki's weaboo speak didn't get graced with italics, along with Penny's mixed attempts at it. Only a complete grammatical/idiomatic sentence from her got the full italics.

But all the little details of even if it should be the Eiffel Tower or the Eiffel tower are just too much for me to mess with. Sure I can look them up. But there's something on almost every page, and I'd just as soon to pay someone to worry about that. And fix the places where the italics or the intricacies of punctuation around quotations escape me.

I would very much love to somehow push through this one, and find some way to kick a few more out the door on a much shorter schedule.

(And, yes, the Love Locks scene is on the Pont des Arts. Largely because that's the bridge people think of if they've heard of love locks at all. And even though it is clear of them now, finding an excuse to stick some up anyhow is easier than going into the history of which bridges still have them...)

***

I've been reading a series about a very Mary-Sue character -- it is intentional on the writer's part, but only partially works -- and that's been giving me thoughts about larger-than-life characters. The Greeks didn't have the hangups we do, in that their heroes were larger, stronger, and probably related to a god, and that was just fine.

The first superheroes were also very much of a "faster better stronger" mold -- one of the innovations of Marvel was heroes that had problems and hang-ups and weaknesses, with perpetually broke hang-dog Peter Parker being the poster boy. And now we have come to where we often dislike the really skilled characters -- and when we get them, we demand that those skills have some logical reason for being.

One of the things critics express about the "Sue" characters is the opinion that they haven't earned their powers. But I can't help thinking that there is a hidden gender bias in there. The same swipe of a pen gives a character a black belt, a physics degree, six years in the Marines...but the readers question it more often when that character is female (doesn't help, of course, that the standard is usually hot, young female -- that is, not of the age and size and battered appearance that really should go with those years of getting those skills shown on the paperwork. Yet, this qualification is often waived for the men as well...)

A lot of what went into Penny was reaction on my part. I didn't want the standard female protagonist package, with or without the "strong" appended. So no handy martial arts background or surprisingly young doctorate degree, but she also isn't a shy loner, she gets along fine with cheerleaders, and her hair isn't perfect after a week in a cave.

Yet she is becoming a hero. Sure, an "ordinary man" hero, but in a semi-realistic universe (and trope-aware enough herself) to recognize that you stop being ordinary by the third Holy Grail you manage to dig up. So far, I've held back in that her superhuman ability is her almost autistic focus on whatever history the plot requires her to be knowledgable about.

(She's also able to pull of physical stunts that a self-described "ex dancer and climber of plastic rocks" shouldn't be able to pull off. And has stubborn endurance which is also way off the bell curve. But those are part of the standard "ordinary man" exception where one ticking atom bomb is enough to let thirty-something computer salesman who sometimes plays a bit of pick-up basketball somehow come up with the strength, determination, and sheer luck to beat up a renegade Green Beret.)

The main magic skill I've given her is language. She has an instinct that she isn't in control of. Which basically, at least up to this book, is given her the seasoned-world-traveller characteristic of being able to speak a little of whatever the local language is, without me having to defend her actually learning the damned thing. She's just a very finely tuned parrot; speaking the correct idiomatic phrase to get her through an interaction (with nearly flawless pronunciation), even as she has no idea what it is she said.

And none of that makes my job of how to treat language any easier.

Do Gogh On

Various projects -- and some work politics -- all hit at the same time. Precisely as predicted, of course. Had to fly to Burbank to take some measurements and got a chance to step inside the gates at Sony, at least. But head colds and flying are not good companions.

In any case, I'm finishing of the scene at the Van Gogh Experience. This is the scene that gives the lie to the idea that I just cram everything I know into each chapter (although I will admit that this book is less filtered than the others). My choice for this one is that my protagonist doesn't know much about the painter and doesn't get a chance to learn, either.

So there are a lot of Van Gogh paintings being projected on to the walls, and I am spending time staring at haystacks and cafes and lots and lots of sunflowers. But the narrator is unable to name any of them, much less place them in proper historical context.

About the only one I think I can get away with is to have a cross-fade that suggests that the sunflower was Vincent himself. But the tidbit that he painted scads of these things to decorate the room that Gaugin was more-or-less blackmailed into taking in shared digs at Arles -- an odd couple that would soon enough erupt in violence and the loss of an ear -- well, I can't share any of that.

I have enough name-drops and references and weird jokes anyhow. At some point Penny is across the cornfield (with crows) from the people she is tailing, in a spy-movie version of that one segment from Kurosawa's Dreams, and she remarks there's too much light and they are going to see her "coming through the rye."

That's the problem with spending so long writing. Not that I add new stuff at every pass. The process is different. It is that I take so long between writing sessions, when I write a couple of new paragraphs I've had days to think about the scene and the random ideas and associations and jokes and turns of phrase are just waiting in the wings. All of my re-write passes are about taking as much of that stuff as I can...back out. 

Twenty Hours

There are some books in which the sample chapters are just so engaging you immediately buy the book...then find out the rest of the book does something different and not as interesting.

I've never encountered this in a game. Generally, you know in less than five minutes. (Of course, you rarely get a sample chapter, so you've bought the game already...)

Mostly. It can take a while to get into the core gameplay loop. In Horizon Zero Dawn you are introduced to most of the core concepts within twenty minutes of the (long!) opening cutscene. An important element is the "focus," however, and if you are really, enjoying exploration and listening to all the audio diaries it might take you forty minutes get to Aloy actually using the thing in-game.

Similarly, you don't get the bow and you certainly don't get the trick arrows until an hour into Tomb Raider 2013. But the thing is; whether it is the mostly-passive opening sequence of Bioshock or the extremely long cutscene that begins Horizon Zero Dawn or the big build-up -- you do character creation before you even start playing -- before you actually stride the corridors of the Normandy as Commander Shepard, you still know what kind of ride you are in for.

These games all have a style. There's a strong artistic vision that infuses all the design elements, from as big as skyboxes to as intimate as inventory screens. The music, the sound effects -- and when any element of play begins, the fluidity and intuitiveness of the controls.

I had trouble right out of the gate with Dragon Age, as I did not like the control system. It almost reminded me of the "tank" controls of original Tomb Raider.  Far Cry 3 also felt awkward. I just did not really feel in control of Jason Brody. But that's a me thing; that's a reaction some players will have, and some will not.

Just as the very strong design choices in some games just don't mesh with all players. When you give a whole game a distinct stamp, color, flavor, then some will like it and some will not.

What doesn't work is being bland. I can't think of any game I have really liked that had a bland approach. My favorite games have all had, over and above the game play, puzzles, dialogue, choices, voice acting, and of course graphics, an extremely distinctive style. You can't confuse Portal with anything else out there.

***

So every now and then a game comes along that the advise is not to judge it immediately but play for twenty hours. As I mentioned in my previous "review" (short take?) Starfield takes obscenely long to open up the rest of the game to you. 

Well, okay, the crafting, base building, and ship building are a bit of an appendage. They are to some one of the more attractive parts of the game, though, and they are behind a grindwall that's a good 10-20 hours thick.

Same goes for the main campaign. Considered skippable -- but one of the side quests that is well spoken of (Crucible) requires multiple hours of play just to clear the first barrier. You have to have a specific package of upgraded ship and upgraded skills (and some toughness, too) in order to even get the quest. 

It took me well over twenty hours to get to where I could start building my first outpost. I could have done ship building earlier, but really, not that much earlier. Plus, it took that long to get both the main campaign into an interesting place, and to be able to start pursuing the big side quests (like Mantis).

So, yes. As far as the play opportunities, as far as exploring that "core gameplay loop," I really did need to put twenty hours in.

Which pains me. It means there are some upper-level managers who are congratulating themselves on making a game good enough that most players do a good twenty hours, and none of them quality for a refund. The reality is that they've done such a bad job of staging this game, it really does require that kind of time.

The crafting system is ridiculously grindy, and it is linked in various ways to outpost building (and less so to ship construction but there are similar things going on there). The player just can't experience the game as written without exceeding the refund time.

But...and here's the big but...the five minute rule was still true.

It looks awful. It looks like shit and it runs like shit. The two are connected only in the dreams of the marketers; turn down the graphics and it still bugs out all over the place. Turn up the graphics to full settings -- and it still looks like a game from fifteen years ago.

Almost every part of this game is a regression. The NPCs are less alive, less animated, less realistic. The scenery is less interesting. There's less interactivity overall, really. This still has the Creation Engine stupid of playing long, long animations of your character sitting down, then awkwardly cutting to a different POV of them seated. Same for crafting. This still has the stuck-in-place, dead-eyed NPCs chanting the same stock lines at you without any sense that your input even matters. It is like being trapped in the animatronic Hall of Presidents for twenty hours.

And all the usual stuck on scenery, vanishing heads, and people mysteriously floating into the sky...that's all still there.

But even that doesn't matter. Because when all is said and done, it doesn't have the "it." The design is merely adequate. There's no strong flavor to it. No strong choices. Just...stuff. Generic music, generic assets, generic UI..

I take that back. The UI is regrettably ugly and dysfunctional. It looks and feels and works like the low bid for a mega-chain POS register. Endless unfriendly menus with poor text, poor tactile response, no clear and consistent UI system...

It feels absolutely random, for instance, whether you can click on a quest location and make the jump from there, or if you have to go to your ship, or if your ship pops into space over the planet and you have to navigate down to the surface with another click-and-loading screen. After dodging bigger enemies for hours by having one finger on the hyperdrive controls -- as the game itself, and the NPCs in the cockpit with me, all recommend -- I got killed while staring at a screen labeled "You can not fast travel in combat!"

There's no strong spirit to it. People don't love Portal because of the cutting-edge ambient lighting engine (although Portal 2 does look very, very nice). Or Bioshock because the environments are filled with intricately modeled clutter. They love that these games have a distinctive look and feel that draws you emotionally and aesthetically into their world.

And you can figure this out in five minutes. Seriously -- don't do the twenty hours. It doesn't really get any better. The same poor gameplay loop, the same broken balance, the same crashes, the same ugly graphics and lack of a great style; what you see in a tutorial in a mineshaft really is the game you are going to get.

Monkey!

I decided my Starfield  character would be an incarnation of Sun Wukong. I'd already decided this during character creation -- and it turned out to work quite well.

Bethesda games. You go around solving problems that have been there for decades. Going one-man army on the enemy that somehow has experienced Marine units pinned down. Doing errands and helping people and everyone is amazed at your exploits.

In Fallout 4 you get the reputation as the Vault Survivor (or you can even go around in costume as the Silver Shroud, but only a few people recognize it). In Skyrim you are the literal Dragonborn. So at least there's an in-game reason for you to be so heroically capable in that game. I was starting to have a sort of standard backstory for my Fallout 4 characters that basically the world had gone to shit and one competent person from the past could kick ass. Helped that I tended towards engineers; people who could make their own advanced weapons and elaborate settlements, which I hand-waved as me having had a pre-war education.

And in Starfield you pretty soon get alien powers. But it doesn't matter. You are already both scary competent and also the savior to pretty much every obsequiously thankful colonist out there.

So it worked being the Monkey King. Being a demi-god already, a legendary trickster and warrior, even if I did have to work my way to my first ship as a street rat in the cyberpunk city of Neon.

Incidentally, that's the most fun I've had in the game so far; going around playing with the gangs and corruption in Neon as an ex street rat. So basically a cut-rate Cyberpunk 77. Only with worse graphics, worse stories, worse missions, and much, much, much worse NPCs.

It helped a lot with suspension of disbelief. Why this penniless street kid and one-time Argos Consortium miner is suddenly beating up twenty-year veteran pirate captains. And why all those worshipful colonists are getting stars in their eyes whenever I offer to help out. Because I'm already a legendary hero. Reincarnated, maybe, but after the Journey to the West this shit is easy.

Did make for some weird moments around the alien artifact, though. The Constellation Group kept asking how I suddenly felt so different now that I had alien powers, and I'd shrug because, hey, I was already a supernatural being. Bethesda had not planned for those dialog options.

***

It is a basic problem with games. Somehow the entire Third Army can't move unless Private Jones can chuck a grenade through a window successfully. Sometimes it is acceptable in context. Commander Shepard is a highly. highly, highly trained soldier, top of her class, survivor of legendary battles. And hasn't figured out how to use a rifle, but never you mind. The Doom Marine, on the other hand, just is. It's his thing.

Aloy has her Focus and spent a lot of time learning its tricks -- so even when she runs into other Focus users, she is able to do things they can't. 2013's Lara Croft, on the other hand, is just a student. Even the movie gave her an athletic background. The game does handwave that Roth taught you how to shoot, but still, you should not be doing so well against experienced survivors. "She's just one girl!" ("This one girl is kicking our ass!")

The bigger problem is RPGs. And this is a game design problem. You need situations for the protagonist to solve. In the real world, there would still be problems occurring. There's always business for the long-runner detective show or whatever. But games are cast in bronze before you start playing. When you fix the current issues...there are no more.

And they have to be fixed, too. There has to be that moment when the thing is concluded and you collect XP. So that leaves late-game in a weird place where none of the NPCs have much to say to you (because you already did their quest), but the world hasn't really changed despite all of that (because quests can happen out of order and they can't design for every single option. In Just Cause 3, you can liberate the entire nation but the dictatorship still has cars full of soldiers patrolling around.)

Character AI, as exciting as it is, won't solve all of this. As already implemented (and only in third-party mods, oddly enough, not in any current release) it allows conversations to continue and the NPC to remember and refer back. And, eventually, to have their personality shaped (because that's already happening, but the trigger is actions, not unscripted dialogue). But this stays at a Sims sort of level, as AI is not the tool to create new scenarios, new quests.

Oh, sure, they've been trying. Bethesda has had ongoing open quests using their Radiant system for a while now...and it sucks. A good quest is sculpted, with unique options, locations, dialogue. Not "Another settlement needs your help."

At some point activity ceases. The world becomes static. Might as well go invest in the base building at that point...

Dragon or Draggin'

Bethesda is still searching for the right balance.

Skyrim starts with a slow five minutes, but there is this thing in Elder Scrolls games; you need to spend to first five minutes in a dungeon. Or in Skyrim's case, in a cart to your execution. The thing is, it doesn't put half the game behind a grind wall. You can go anywhere, and you can dip your toes in anything. At level one, you can use a sword or a bow or even magic, you can craft a potion or some new boots or even cook some stew.

Fallout 4 was, I believe, intended to give you a taste of future glory. Unlike Fallout 3 where there is a complete faction quest before you can get to powered armor, you can get your first suit at level 1. And a mini-gun. Which is in a place with several triggers to tempt you into wasting all of your ammunition on raiders so the spring-loaded deathclaw can twist your brand-new armor into wreckage in one epic hand-to-hand.

Starfield is generous in giving you your own ship barely ten minutes in. But, really, the game doesn't start getting fun until about twenty hours of play. It takes that much, well, grinding -- boring stupid grinding -- before you have any skills that make a difference. You aren't really doing an RPG, and you don't have a lot of options. The interesting quests are meat-gated away (you need to level up in order to tackle them), the random planet hopping turns up nothing of particular value or interest...plus of course this is late Bethesda RPG in which your responses to a quest-giver are either agree to do it, or agree but be sarcastic about it.

It simply isn't worth crafting, or collecting most of the materials you can collect, or exploring, because you don't have the skills to do anything with any of that. And those skills only come with a whole bunch of exceptionally grindy combat.

And you can't personalize your experience, because it doesn't matter if you want to be an assassin or a diplomat or a gadgeteer, you don't have any skills and won't be getting any for hours and every single enemy is dropping a leveled spray-and-pray gun for you to use instead.

About twenty hours of play. Less if you don't struggle against the railroading (always a decent recommendation for recent Bethesda games) and just follow the quest markers they throw in front of you. At that point you can start making some choices that feel worth making, and start having some skills other than "picking up gun off ground and holding down the trigger."

It isn't...good...yet. The quests are often frustratingly unfinished, stopping just when you've actually started to get involved. But you can finally survive getting out of the easy plains and into the wild where half-way interesting things to do are. It is still shallow, but I liked the Cydonia mining colony and sort-of-liked Neon and the Mantis quest is actually sort of fun.

Plus, at the end of it I expect to get a ship that might -- like the finally unlocked basic crafting skills -- make it worth doing some of the other activities the universe offers.