I somehow managed to get through my entire essay on the Three Clue Rule without mentioning the adventure that first made me codify it: The Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Originally published in 1984, The Masks of Nyarlathotep is quite possibly the best-structured RPG campaign ever published. It chronicles the PCs’ attempts to crush the many cults of Nyarlathotep, beginning in 1920s New York and then carrying them through London, Cairo, Kenya, Australia, and Shanghai.

But not necessarily in that order. Or any order at all, for that matter.

What makes the campaign memorable is not just the epic globetrotting, but the fact that the PCs were left entirely in control of their own destiny: Every location had a plethora of clues which could lead the PCs to any of the other locations, giving them free reign to pursue their investigations in any way that they chose.

In 1984, this structure was completely revolutionary. It still remains virtually unduplicated in its scope and flexibility.

I’ve never gotten a chance to actually run The Masks of Nyarlathotep. (Some day!) But the nascent promise of its design made a deep impression on me and continues to fundamentally shape the way I plan my campaigns.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing through the God of War games for the first time. There’s a lengthier blog post rattling around in my brain about these games that I may get around to writing one of these days, but at the moment I’m playing through God of War II. I have just picked up the Spear of Destiny, which prompted me to say:

“What the fuck?”

For those of you unfamiliar with the games, God of War is set in a version of Ancient Greece where all the myths were real.

The Spear of Destiny, on the other hand, is the spear used by the Roman centurion Longinus to pierce the side of Jesus Christ as he hung in crucifixion.

I can accept that depiction of the Spear of Destiny as a purple, double-blade monstrosity with a telescoping shaft — I mean, the blood of Christ has been reputed to do all kinds of things. But what I can’t understand is how or why the Spear would have been transported back in time several centuries or millennia and ended up in Ancient Greece.

It would be one thing if this appeared to be some kind of deliberate choice on the part of the game designers, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: Everything else in the game is drawn directly from Greek mythology. As far as I can tell, they just didn’t know what the Spear of Destiny was.

(Pursuing this topic in Google, I discover that there have been some discussions suggesting that the end of the God of War trilogy will reach a conclusion as the Greek myths come to an end and the story of Christ begins. But even if that turns out to be true, the Spear of Destiny still doesn’t exist until after the death of Christ. So it still doesn’t make any sense.)

PROBLEMS WITH GOD OF WAR II

This is actually just the most glaring example of my problem with God of War II: While it’s visually more impressive than the original God of War, the game just isn’t as good. There are two reasons for this:

First, the game is simply not as polished. The game-controlled camera angles are frequently awkward. The pacing is more disjointed. The cut-scenes are cruder. The gameplay is less fluid and more dependent upon arbitrary QTEs. The plot is less focused. The list goes on. None of these are horrible problems, but they generally take the edge off the game.

Second, the underlying mythology of the game is not as well-executed. One of the things that made God of War particularly entertaining was that it truly felt like an “untold Greek myth”. It very cleverly incorporated very specific things from Greek mythology; expanded that mythology in a lot of creative ways; and then wove a completely original story of epic scope. Combined with addictively compelling gameplay, the result is easily one of the best video games I’ve ever played.

But in God of War II this starts to fall apart quite a bit. Instead of a careful and clever use of the Greek myths, you instead get the feeling that they just grabbed the closest copy of Edith Hamilton and picked pages at random whenever they needed to fill another 5 minutes of gameplay. The result is a kind of schizophrenic, dissociated grab bag.

The main plot of the game revolves around Kratos trying to reach the Three Sisters of Fate so that he can re-weave the threads of his fate. This is fairly clever. The problem is that everyone and everything from Greek mythology is apparently on the same quest… at the very same time.

For example, a youthful Perseus shows up. He’s seeking the Three Sisters so that he can save his love from the fires of Hades. This makes no sense: Andromeda survived the Perseus myths, fathered his children, and died of old age before being placed in the sky as a constellation by Athena. I can only assume that they were thinking of Orpheus.

A little while later an old, deranged man wearing wings shows up. He intends to fly to the island of the Three Sisters. And I’m immediately thinking, “Hey, that’s kinda cool. Daedalus, driven mad by the death of his son, is trying to rewrite history in order to save him. Clever.”

Only it’s not clever, because the guy self-identifies as Icarus after a couple of minutes. Since Icarus died as a young and foolish man (and that’s the entire point of his story), this makes no sense. It makes even less sense when you discover that the wings are literally growing out of his back.

And even if these individual uses of particular characters were not so jarringly wrong in so many ways, the collective effect of having the All-Star lineup of Greek mythology all showing up in the same place at the same time doesn’t work. Where God of War takes a few elements and uses them consistently in building a unique narrative, God of War II just takes a bunch of famous names and hopes for the best.

With all that being said, God of War II is still a great game. And there are many ways in which it marginally improves on the original.

But, ultimately, God of War is the better game.

To read a spoiler-free review of Rainbows End, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

It seemed to me that Rainbows End was the perfect storm:

For starters, Vernor Vinge was an author who could truly boast that every single novel he’d ever written was better than the one he’d written before: The Witling was better than Grimm’s World; The Peace War was better than The Witling; Marooned in Realtime was better than The Peace War; A Fire Upon the Deep was better than Marooned in Realtime; and A Deepness in the Sky was better than A Fire Upon the Deep. If Rainbows End followed that pattern, it was going to be a tremendous book.

Rainbows End also saw Vinge returning to a fictional universe which had been the setting for two excellent short stories: “Fast Time at Fairmont High” and “Synthetic Serendipity”. An analogy could be drawn, I felt, between this relationship and the relationship between “The Blabber” and A Fire Upon the Deep. Both of these latter stories are set in in Vinge’s Zone of Thoughts universe, and “The Blabber” was the first peek we had into that universe. In that story, Vinge gave us a glimpse — from the edge of the Slow Zone — of what an amazing place the near-Singularity of the Beyond would be like. Frankly, when I first read “The Blabber” I didn’t think Vinge or anyone else could really deliver on that promise. But Vinge did. And A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the most amazing science fiction novels ever written.

“Fast Times at Fairmont High” excited me even more than “The Blabber”. Vinge was working his future history talents at their finest: He forwarded half a dozen different technical fields all at once and then started looking at how that would change us as a society and as individuals. His vision was compelling, startling, dynamic, and utterly believable. If those technologies become prevalent, society is going to look a lot like “Fast Times at Fairmont High” — you can already see the beginning of those trend lines forming in the high schools of today as the technology of today reshapes the contours of daily life. And those trend lines are even clearer today than they were in 2001 when he published the story.

So when I approached Rainbows End I was excited: Even if Vinge did nothing more than expand his previous treatment into a larger, more intricately woven plot it was going to be one of the most exciting science fiction novels I’ve read in the last decade. And if he followed his previous trends, I was fully prepared to be dazzled by his vision of the future

Finally, on a personal level, Rainbows End was being published just as I was tearing through Vinge’s entire corpus work of work: As you’ve seen in my recent reactions, I worked my way through his short stories and then tackled his novels one by one. It seemed as if I was working my way up a triumphant crescendo that would culminate in Vinge’s most recent and most brilliant work.

Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed in this.

To be clear, the book – considered in and of itself – is just fine. It’s a solid near-future techno-thriller. It’s very well executed, with some really interesting twists, and I give it a B+ with a solid recommendation to accompany it.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that, with Rainbows End, Vinge played chicken and he lost. He got into a staring contest… and he blinked. Rainbows End reads like a giant step backward from the vision he conjured forth in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”.

To take one example, in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, Vinge looked at the ways in which augmented reality would fundamentally change social interaction. In Rainbows End , by contrast, there was essentially nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a cellphone and text messaging. (The only exception I can think of is when a character virtually pops over to a beach in Indonesia … but once she’s there in virtual form, there’s nothing remarkable about the experience at all. It’s one step up from a webcam, but there’s nothing fundamentally transformative.)

There was, to put it more bluntly, more complexity of world-building in his short story than there was in his novel. And, ultimately, I consider that to be a colossal failure.

Vinge seems to have suffered a failure of imagination. And that’s not a flaw I ever thought I’d see in him.

GRADE: B+

For additional comments on Rainbows End, which include SPOILERS, click here.

Vernor Vinge
Published: 2006
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812536363
Buy Now!

I’m a bit bummed at the moment.

I recently discovered the BBC series Hustle. The show is about a group of professional con-men and every episode features a con in the style The Sting. As soon as I heard the concept, I knew this was a show I had to check out. And as soon as I saw the first episode I was completely hooked.

The show truly delivers on its promise: Every episode is a tightly-scripted and carefully-constructed piece that delivers the special magic of the long con. It really does feel as if you’re watching an episodic version of Ocean’s Eleven.

Adrian Lester, who plays the role of the mastermind and leader for the group, exudes the confidence, slickness, and sex appeal of a Brad Pitt or a Robert Redford. Robert Vaughn, who plays the wizened master, has the quiet mastery of a Paul Newman or George Clooney. The cons themselves are clever, elaborate, and masterfully executed. The entire show reeks of glamour and cleverness and sophistication.

But what really makes the show click is that the writers and directors clearly understand that, when you’re making a movie (or television series) about a long con, the first thing you must do is con the audience. The creators of Hustle are constantly trying to keep one step ahead of you, and it’s a real joy to try to keep one step ahead of them.

So why am I bummed?

I’ve just hit the fourth season of the series, and it all seems to be falling apart. Adrian Lester, for whatever reason, left the show. This has left the show without it’s strong center — it’s become Ocean’s Eleven without Danny Ocean. At the same time, the writing seems to have become sloppy, bloated, and ham-fisted. The cleverness and slickness is gone. Some of this may be intentional since, without Adrian Lester’s character, the team itself lacks that cleverness and slickness. But the result is simply not as satisfying.

And perhaps the creative team has simply used up its ideas. There are only so many ways in which the basic components of a con can be spun, after all, before you’re really just spinning your wheels. I was certainly seeing some weaknesses appearing even towards the end of the third season.

For example, one of the clever storytelling conceits the show employed in its very first episode was the freeze-frame: While the con is running, the action will suddenly enter a freeze frame — except for the grifters themselves, who will take the opportunity to turn to the camera and begin explaining the nature of the con. This was slick and clever and very well done. It has led to a general friendliness with the fourth wall in the series, in which the audience is drawn into the grifters’ inner circle through knowing looks, glances, double-takes, and the like.

But as the series has gone on, this use of the fourth wall has begun to be, in my opinion, abused. This unfortunate trend culminates late in the third season when the entire cast suddenly breaks into a full-fledged Bollywood musical number. They were, at the time, executing a con in which they attempted to convince a mark to invest in a Bollywood film (so there was some semblance of a connection). But, whatever the excuse may have been, the reality is that not only the con, but the characters and the dramatic reality of the sequence were all put on hold for a self-indulgent and utterly unnecessary extravagance.

So, in any case, I’m bummed because I have a strong feeling that this show has jumped the shark on me.

If it has, though, I’m going to keep my eye on the silver lining: I got eighteen really exceptional episodes of television in the show’s first three seasons (of six episodes each). And if that’s all I get, that’s more than most series can ever boast of.