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kaleidographia · 5 years

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[Review] Tales of Vesperia: The Brightest Star in the Night Sky Doesn't Shine as Strongly as I'd Hoped

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Warning: Contains allusive/thematic spoilers.

The day is finally here! Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition, containing content previously unseen outside of Japan, has finally been released, so that us English speakers and/or non-PS3 owners can experience the new storylines, characters and features for the first time! Alas, this isn’t a post about that, firstly because this post is going up day-of-release and I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, and secondly because I am writing this from outside of the country and won’t be united with my pre-ordered copy until I return next week, RIP.

Therefore, this post is written from the point of view of someone who has only played the Xbox 360 version. I will try to keep it brief for the sake of not spoiling newcomers to the game, and also hopefully not to complain about things that are fixed (or broken??) in the Definitive Edition.

Tales of Vesperia is a game in the long-running “Tales of” franchise from Bandai Namco, the first one in HD, originally released for the Xbox 360 in 2008, later receiving an updated PS3 version in 2009, exclusive to Japan. Like many older fans, my introduction to the Tales of series was with Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube, and I fell in love hard; I was therefore extremely excited to play the next games, but unfortunately, I never owned the platforms for them until very recently. Along with Tales of the Abyss, Vesperia and Symphonia form the “holy trinity” of games in the series almost everyone loves; find a Tales fan and ask them their favourite game, and the answer will likely be one of those three (note: I’ve heard very good things about Graces and the two Xillia games, but unfortunately haven’t had a chance to judge them firsthand myself). The three games, while not directly related in terms of plot or setting, share a lot of things in common, as they had mostly the same creative team, often referred to as “Team Symphonia” (as opposed to “Team Destiny” which made most other games since then). One notable difference is the scenario writer, Takashi Hasegawa, while Symphonia and Abyss were written by Takumi Miyajima.

The Tales series is known for its reliance on anime and JRPG tropes, often used in a way that plays off cliché expectations only to then layer plot twists and character development and produce a much deeper experience than what would be expected from the get-go. When used effectively, these methods produce a story that is both fun and emotionally challenging. Tales of Vesperia is no different, offering a cast of archetypes that should be highly recognizable to those familiar with the genre, and yet this may be best set of characters in a Tales game. The party has impressively good banter, chemistry and dynamics and several scenes had me laughing out loud or yelling, and I never had a bad time watching their relationships unfold.

Unfortunately, the game spares little time fleshing out backstories or learning more about each individual character outside of the main plot. By the end, I was left wanting, as the cast was so endearing and vibrant, yet I knew next to nothing about them aside from what had been relevant to show onscreen. I longed for more information about where they had come from and how they had gotten where they were, but it is a testament to the strength of the character writing that their storylines reached a satisfying conclusion despite this relative sparse amount of information about them. “Backstory is not story”, Craig McCracken and Frank Angones were fond of saying to fans of Wander Over Yonder, but for a game with the size and scope of a 60-hour JRPG, not providing that window of information feels like a hole in the worldbuilding.

Mechanically, Vesperia builds on the model established by Symphonia and refined in Abyss, where combat takes place in a 3D arena and the player can run around, hit enemies and rack up combos fighting game style (the franchise calls this “Linear Motion Battle System”). While Symphonia was in 3D, it restricted the player to a single side-to-side corridor of action. Abyss added the ability to run around in 3D space by holding down a button, a feature Vesperia also has. This makes combat easier and more fun, as nothing is quite as satisfying as avoiding an attack and then running around and hitting the enemy from behind. And, as the game allows up to four players controlling different party members, and I have a player 2 (shoutout to my roommate Opal), Vesperia’s system is the most well-suited to multiplayer. If nothing else, I never felt lost while on the battlefield yelling for backup. The one major flaw is that boss fights come with massive difficulty spikes and I often had to grind and formulate careful battle plans with Opal just to not get continuously massacred by bosses.

Storywise, Vesperia starts off very strongly, sort of peters out near the middle, and then the third act falls apart. At first the theme is anti-authority, with a protagonist who grew up in the slums, neglected by nobles, who became a knight and then quit out of disillusionment when it turned out all they did was squabble about politics, and the inciting incident and early driver of the plot is his quest to “fix the plumbing” as a popular Tumblr text post put it. It’s clear Yuri has all the reason in the world to not trust authority and he even goes full vigilante against unjust abuse of power, but while this thread seems like the most important theme in the story, after a while so many other elements come into play it ends up lost and doesn’t really make much of an appearance except to highlight the differences between Yuri and Flynn’s approaches to life and how they prefer to help people. On its own it’s a compelling idea, but it never gets the follow-through it deserves, and my expectations were certainly subverted—but in a bad way.

It’s hard to talk about the third act without spoilers so I will probably come back to it for a proper analysis at a later date, but its ultimate message was already kind of limp in 2008 and is even more laughable now. For a game whose initial premise was so strongly against authority, the ultimate resolution of the main conflict reads as incredibly daft in light of just about everything that is happening in politics at the moment. There’s a very strong environmental allegory and the comparisons to climate change are not subtle, but the writers probably bit off more than they could chew because realistically trying to solve this problem in the time the story allotted would have been next to impossible; I still would have hoped the implications of the given solution had been actually explored instead of settling for an “oh well, guess everything’s been fixed now”.

I’m being harsh about the plot because to me Vesperia has a lot of wasted potential. Don’t get me wrong: I do love this game. It is in fact up there with the holy trinity as far as my opinions of the series go, but it lands in third place out of the three because it just fails to live up to what its first half promises about the world it created. To put it bluntly, if the story had just ended at the conclusion of the second act, it would have been much stronger. That the game continues for another 20 hours on a completely different track with an unsatisfying, unrealistic conclusion is a huge shame because it brings down what could have been a real masterpiece of tropey anime JRPG narratives. I live for that stuff, there’s a reason I want to play every Tales game, but that’s what makes this letdown the most disappointing. At least the characters themselves get good conclusions; it is unfortunate I can’t say the same for the main plot.

Despite all this I think Vesperia is a worthwhile experience, and one of my favourite things about is its aesthetic sense. Every location is immersive, polished, and the pinnacle of what I want to see in a videogame, to the point I dream of Symphonia and Abyss remakes made in the same style (and every other game in the series, to be honest, but that seems unlikely with the direction it’s taken since then). I genuinely cared about the party and I wanted to see them succeed and I was ultimately happy that they did even if I did roll my eyes a lot. The combat was so satisfying and so fun to play with a player 2 it makes me twice as mad that Zestiria’s camera goes completely wild during multiplayer and prevents me from joining in. I should note that for someone who plays as many games as I do I am notoriously terrible at them so I heavily favour story over mechanics, but Vesperia is a game that reminds me that engaging gameplay can make a huge difference. Yeah, I suck, but at least I’m having fun while sucking. That’s more than I can say for a lot of games.

If you like JRPGs, games that let you run around and hit things, or fun and intriguing character dynamics, you’ll probably like Tales of Vesperia. If you’re looking for a coherent story from start to finish, you’ll probably disappointed, but there’s just enough there to keep you engrossed until the end. Overall, Vesperia is solid, and the parts it fumbles aren’t bad enough to ruin the whole thing, but hopefully the extra content in Definitive Edition helps to smooth it out; I’ll have to find that out for myself.

Aside from how it messes up the voice acting this time around. Oh, Bamco.

#Review #Tales of #Tales of Vesperia #videogames

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haunthearted · 6 years

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I wanted to recommend a very good website, especially to my trans, dysphoric or dissociative followers.

Gender Analysis is a very well researched, well-sourced website about the trans experience. I take whatever opportunities I can to write polite, good-faith, educational replies to people on Reddit who don't "get" trans things, and I always rely heavily on GA because whatever the topic, there will be an article filled with the original scientific papers rebutting transphobic viewpoints. It can also be useful for supporting conversations with parents/friends, because it has the primary research right there. For example, today I learnt that all the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria ("my kid got a tumblr and now she says shes transgender because of peer pressure!") originated on three anti-trans websites, and despite its official-sounding name, has no research behind it. I knew that intellectually, but it's powerful to have the evidence clearly there for you.

Zinna Jones is one of the key writers there, and you may know her other work as she's been a prominent internet trans human for many years (how she has the courage and spoons for that, I will never know). One of her key experiences of gender dysphoria was depersonalisation: a weird, fuzzy, not-quite-thereness. On beginning hormones, it cleared up immediately: she had an "I didn't know what wrong felt like until I started feeling right" experience, as well you might if feeling oddly absent is your normal day-to-day experience. Because it wasn't a focus of how dysphoria was written about while she was coming up, she's done a lot of writing and research on it at Gender Analysis: describing what it felt like, researching comparable experiences in other trans narratives, and most recently trialing an anti-dissociative drug to see how it affected her.

Many of us come to ghosthood due to experiencing similar things to Jones - a not-quite-thereness, an oddness, a sense of timelessness and dislocation. Some of us very clearly associate it with trauma, a mental illness, or gender dysphoria; for others, it's just part of the fabric of life. I would like to recommend reading her posts on this particular topic to anyone who experiences something similar.

Now, if you relate to what she writes it doesn't mean you're transgender - don't panic - as varieties of depersonalisation can be a symptom of all sorts of other things - especially trauma and trauma-related conditions like BPD/CPTSD. But you might still find her descriptions useful.

On the other hand, if you are identifying as transgender and wondering if hormones are for you, you might find it validating or helpful.

(and because the world is horrible, there's no small chance that trans people are also traumatised. There's a great pair of posts that I'm sure you've already read, "That was dysphoria?" - but also her follow up, in which she re-experiences some of those symptoms as a depression.)

Finally, a recent post series explored an anti-depersonalisation drug, which you might be interested in exploring as an option for yourself. I had no idea there was such a thing!

In short, I was re-reading the archives this morning, and it occurred to me that a great many followers here might appreciate or find these posts useful. Make of them what you will, and best wishes to you all x

A tonne more thoughts after the cut:

This isn't meant to be "a trans blog", so I'm not going to focus on this too often. But certainly for me, Jones' posts really spoke to me and my experiences. I think there's a real danger in underselling how weird gender dysphoria feels. One sort of expects or assumes gender dysphoria is "I hate my breasts because I am a man"; there isn't so much written about how it can be "I'm tired, I don't really care, everything seems hollow and false, but I can't imagine life being any different because it's what I've always known, and it's not clearly anything to do with gender". That's been my experience - and it's incredibly hard to spot. I've been through six diagnoses since I was a teen (OCD, depression, anxiety, BPD, ADHD, autism), because while I've always been clearly unwell, it's hard to pinpoint gender dysphoria when it just manifests as brainweird, especially when that brainweird is you normal, as it was for Jones. For example, I've never really recognised my own face in the mirror. Weird, but whatever. When I was considering hormones last year, I decided to take up weightlifting as part of my experimentation process. It would allow me to see how I felt about developing a more masculine body, in a controlled way, and as someone who *hates* exercise, it would also be a useful test of commitment: was I dysphoric enough to motivate me to go to the gym? Because if not, I probably was not dysphoric enough to transition either. Well, I went three times a week and followed the correct food recommendations for building muscle until I could no longer afford either; and then it happened. I looked in the mirror and it was like a visceral, immediate shock of recognition. And now I can't unsee it. Every time I look in the mirror, my brain immediately pings back "nice Robert Plant vibe you got there man", which is ridiculous; no one else on the planet would see me and think that. But that very small amount of muscle, and slightly-more-masculine-shoulder/arm-profile, was enough to make my brain recognise itself for the first time.

Sometimes you don't understand what "wrong" feels like until you have "right" to compare it to.

(I think those of us with early experience of abuse might also relate to that; the way that being loved and respected by a good person later in life can be both shocking, and bring on a period of processing and heavy reflection because it illustrates how very wrongly you were treated before. Even if you know it intellectually, just the experience can be profound. Certainly, I've got a few experiences of not-being-taken-advantage-of which were absolutely shattering, like I was being taught how to love myself for the first time.)

And as you might expect, I'm also feeling very reluctant to pursue transition. This sort of nebulous dysphoria is, well - . I envy very much the "I knew I was trans from the moment I hit puberty because I hated the gender I was living in" people, who clearly see gender as their problem. It's very hard to contemplate something as life-changing as transition when its motivated by an increasing certainty that the only cure for my incurable mental ill is a different hormone balance, and as many days I have where I ask myself why I didn't transition 5 years ago already, I have others where I know I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming through the process as my last resort.

Like, a few years ago I was at a "Even if I am transgender, I think I'd rather live as a woman [for reasons]" point; and now I'm at a "I would still rather live as a woman, but I am desperate to have enough disposable income to buy a really nice set of towels and maybe transition would make me well enough to not only work, but have a real career, and maybe I could buy a car, and go on holiday, and start buying tailored clothes instead of charity shop, and maybe redecorate my house in faux-Victorian style, and I really don't care if everybody hates me and I no longer have a coherently cisgender body, I would do anything to be able to afford unusual cheeses and teas rather than subsisting on stew" point. It sounds so shallow, but there it is; because so many of the problems I have don't feel dysphoria-related, because I'm only understanding them as dysphoria-related because nothing else has made an impact, my focus is increasingly on the little things in life I want to achieve, and maybe could achieve if my brainweird was fixed. I'm now fairly sure that if/when I do transition physically, I'll continue to recognise myself more, and realise how much of an impact physical dysphoria was having.

But it's what I know. And like Hamlet says, easier to bear the struggles we know than fly to others that we know not of.

Sidenote:

Intermittently, you'll see approaches which try to set up trans or mentally ill people as enemies to otherkin people, like the two experiences cannot co-exist, or like otherkin people ought to take the fall for the way transphobic use them as an anti-trans "gotcha". I personally find this very frustrating: I prefer approaches which are open, rather than closed off. Many/most of my followers here are either trans, mentally ill, have trauma, experience dysphoria or some other unspecified bodyweird/brainweird. In real life, I have four otherkin/therian/furry friends - and they too all meet that description. {There are also many otherkin who see their history as spiritual or religious, who aren't trans/mentally ill/traumatised, or who don't really know the source of their experiences - all of which is also OK!}.

I would always prefer to take a holistic and compassionate approach to the way experiences can overlap, rather than a combatative/competitive/polarised one; any hostile or fightin' talk messages/replies will be ignored, blocked or deleted as appropriate, because that's not a value I have for my online space. Although I'm open to discussing or exploring it, so please don't hold back if you want to talk about your experiences in good faith.

In short, there is a fairly significant overlap between people who come to identify as transgender/dysphoric/mentally ill, and those who come to identify as otherkin, or who might temporarily identify with one of those experiences while figuring things out - and this post is for them. Politics makes things sound so simple and clean-cut, but people are messy and complex, and I'd much rather help individuals navigate and explore their experiences - even if they are contradictory, or don't support my political goals. Trying to figure out brainweird and bodyweird is challenging enough, without making people tread on eggshells during the process.

#ghostly self care #queer spectrality #ghostkin

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raymondchougaming · 7 years

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Thought Organization/Thought Hierarchies

It just hit me after watching that Bisu video, and I was thinking to myself - how should I organize all of my thoughts? How do I make myself aware enough to do everything, especially in the heat of the game when my thinking is limited?

This is a concept that comes from Jiu-Jitsu/piano, but I figure it can apply to Starcraft as well. I am hella good at piano - and I am hella good at multitasking on the piano. I first applied this concept from piano to Jiu-Jitsu, and now I will apply it to StarCraft. But first, a brief introduction on thought organization/hierarchy, a wonderful concept that can be stretched down to the tiniest actions, or even extended as far as teamwork stuff.

[A brief aside, I wish I had known about this during my Halo phase - when I applied it to Halo, things could have gone so much better]

So late 2014 I was seriously struggling to play polyphonic parts on the piano, and the way I had played piano was always to just play one hand from muscle memory, and really focus on the other one. The result was I’d have a beautiful sounding melody in one hand, and a barbaric, crude sound in the other. Which absolutely disgusted me.

I looked back on my Starcraft experience, to no avail, since I was never really that good at multitasking to begin with, so I decided to survey the problem with the skills I had at the time. I made a few declarations:

-No human being can successfully do 2 completely different things at the same time, without at least one of them being automated -The thought capacity of a human being is limited -Human thinking speed is limited

This is why people practice things - to hopefully automate one of the tasks, which will then reduce the amount of thoughts that need to occur in your head. Also, when tasks are practiced, it uses significantly less space in your brain, which is nice because then the brain needs to spend significantly less time, as the neural pathways are there.

But there is one other thought, and this was the absolute breakthrough for me, that really enabled me to go bananas on the piano - thought hierarchies.

So the solution I proposed to the limited-brain problem consists of a few steps:

1. Automate as many tasks as possible (practice), and by this, I mean use as little of a brain response as possible to get the task to occur 2. Use as little human thought as possible to get things done 3. Think about as few things as possible, while still getting everything done

Here’s something weird I discovered about brains (my brain, at least). I used to rave a lot about how I memorized music, in terms of structure and “macro structures.” I was all about the macro structure - using the words “C major, harmonic series voicing” pops six notes into my head, with both of my hands in the perfect spot. For someone unacquainted with the piano, for each note, you have the following thoughts:

Which note is it? Which finger goes on which note? And so, since there are 6 notes, that’s a total of 12 thoughts that occur. “C major, harmonic series voicing” is 2 thoughts.

What’s strange enough is that thinking 2 thoughts, because I put in the practice, allows me to perform just as much as thinking 12 thoughts, but I now have the brain space to think about dynamics and other polishes as well. But even doing this, I still had to think 2 thoughts. There is a way to cut it down to 1 - seeing the “shape” of the keys on the piano. This, combined with theory, is what allows me to memorize so quickly - because the actual thoughts themselves don’t take up a lot of space.

The idea is to combine large umbrellas of thought into more macro groups, which eventually can all be encompassed into one single thought. There should be a theoretical approach, and then a visual approach; the theoretical approach aims to generalize based on definitions, and the visual approach aims to generalize through seeing things as “one,” instead of many. The final step is to combine these two ideas into a single one, some abstract entity which encompasses the entirety of your thoughts, but it is “one thought.”

Bruce Lee was a pioneer of this. “The two motions are part of one motion,” he said in Longstreet. Bruce Lee knew how precious brain space was, and advocated that the mind be kept blank so that it could function quickest. [I advocate the same approach for Starcraft...almost]

Unfortunately, to accomplish this requires a lot of planning, and absolute technical mastery. I can think the shape in my head, but unless I practice playing shapes that pop up in my head on the piano, I’ll have a hard time. If it’s a shape I know, however, my hands almost instantly jump.

Now, this is nothing new. Anyone who’s good at anything does this to some degree, but it is essential that they understand that this is what they are doing, so that they can do it effectively. For the longest time, I thought certain people were superhumans, but then people used to tell me that things I was doing seemed superhuman. I later realized it’s because they didn’t have the thought patterns that I did...and so I reasoned that perhaps people whom I thought were superhumans simply had brain processes I did not. (Problem solving is a good example) We will now explore this in detail, in application to Starcraft.

Perhaps this will create an solution to my awareness/multitasking/build order problems.

The first thing is to solve the awareness problem.

=====

Awareness - how do I ensure that I am aware of all of the pieces of the puzzle? While most people will say that a large amount of time invested into practice will do the trick (which is necessary), it does not guarantee it. That time must be invested wisely - so we must dispel the correlation of “time” with “awareness,” but rather investigate awareness itself.

People can keep track of things only when it’s a small number of things to keep track of. However, if each “thing” you’re keeping track of is actually multiple things, then it becomes very easy. Brains love associations.

The most applicable Starcraft theoretical example is the midgame plan. Why should we always declare a midgame plan (or even a late game plan, endgame plan, or even subplans during the late game)? Because it compacts information into something digestible, using “external thought” (which will be the topic of the next post - for now, external thought is thought done outside of the game, and internal thought is thought that occurs during the game). This is incredibly useful because we only have to think about one thing - am I satisfying my midgame plan?

For example, say I am doing some very, very high APM build (Corsair-Reaver comes to mind). Because my attention includes microing my corsairs, controlling my shuttle, and constantly watching that stupid zealot at the front of my base blocking the lings from getting in, I can invest as little thought as possible into my build order by means of a midgame plan. “2 bases, Double forge, 6 gateways, a stargate, a robo + robo bay, and later the templar archives as we take a 3rd” is the midgame plan for Corsair Reaver. If we see mutas, we may skip the reavers for the faster Templar Archives (to get the archon), but otherwise we get the reavers later.

This frees up so much brain space because I think “Corsair Reaver,” and then I can instantly check through my brain to see if any of those things are missing.

This may sound obvious, but that simple little organization of memory is incredibly helpful, as we shall see in subsequent applications.

Let’s look at the first “visual example” of compact memory in application to StarCraft, once again using Corsair Reaver; for convenience, let’s use Heartbreak Ridge as the map. The idea of the compacting memory visually is to, instead of seeing all of the separate parts (as humans love to do), see all of the pieces as one coherent unit and give it a name or associate it with something. In my piano example, I mentioned that I see shapes on the piano, and they are all associated with what they represent sonically, theoretically, and how they feel on my hands.

When going Corsair Reaver, I expect my minimap to look a certain way. If I even went as far as to plan out the exact layout of my base (which I encourage everyone to do with a well refined build), assuming I do this for every spawn position on HBR (there’s only 2), I know that my minimap and my base are supposed to look a certain way when I’m scrolling through it. Because I remember the complete picture as one single thought, I can devote very little brainpower to it, and work on everything else.

Now, what if I ended up in some crazy situation where I can no longer abide by my strict plan? Well, no worries. At some point between games, I can easy draw a picture of all of the key components of a winning strategy, represent them with pictures (for me, it’s a layout of buildings), and then I can just spam that picture in my head, and I’ll know exactly what I need to do. The visual memory does not need to be an in-game thing, but it certainly does help. Visual memory, I feel, is underused, as is most associative memory. While rote memory is the backbone of memory, but, in my eyes, it is insufficient to stand on its own. It needs support.

So that covers vertical compression of memory (if we consider memory and time to be y and x axes respectively), which leaves us with the question - how do we compress memory horizontally? The answer is through thought hierarchies. At the fundamental level, thought organization (compression) and hierarchies are actually the same thing, but I give them different names because the horizontal sense seems much more hierarchical. But all you’re really doing is taking big pieces of information, and squeezing them down using well-connected associations.

So the way I memorize a very long piece is I conduct analysis on it, identify all of the different sections, the different phrases, and the composer’s intent with each section. Harmonic motion, harmonic goals of phrases, etc. And by the time I’m done, I’ve usually memorized the piece, to which I can conveniently store in my head as “one piece.” In general I’ve found that vertical compression THEN horizontal compression is a lot easier to remember, but that is up to you honestly.

So one form of horizontal compression is “sectioning.” First, you divide up the entire time frame into many “sections,” and then you create larger sections using the smaller sections, until eventually you only have one.

I’ll keep using Corsair Reaver as the example, since we’ve been using it the entire time. The sections (which I have broken down more) are:

FORGE EXPAND (early) ---Scout timing (say on a map like fighting spirit, includes going to edge of your base to check for overlord) ---Am I getting cheesed? (extra pylon to block, and then cancel or something?) ---Forge first or nexus first? (based on what you see; fast third hatch = nexus first, if my Probe didn’t scout him first try then forge first, etc. Pre-made decisions)

QUICK TECH PHASE (early-mid) ---Stargate ASAP (Gate - Core - Stargate - +1 Flyer attack) ---Quick Robo + observatory (Robo + Obs + Robo Bay) ---Templar Archives (if corsair DT, then we skip the shuttle and reaver and go obs only) ---Epic corsair/shuttle+reaver control time, super harassment!

MASSIVE GATE + THIRD TIME (mid) ---Get 8-10 gates ---Double forge/upgrades in general ---Templar Archives (if we didn’t get it already) ---Gear to take a third, advance along necessary routes

FOURTH BASE/LATE GAME TRANSITION (mid-late) ---More gateways ---More dragoons, less zealots (depends on muta count) ---Space control for fourth

I remember these things as one, as Corsair Reaver. So I simply check - what phase am I on? And I know immediately what I need to do. Now, that execution...

Now, everyone does this already, to some degree. But by explicitly writing out, and doing it to the max, I have essentially made sure that I cannot forget a single thing, or even do it late if I sequence them properly, since it doesn’t make sense for me to go the next one without the previous one. In short, stories are a lot easier to remember, but too long of a story is hard. So what do we do? Tell a story consisting of many stories. That’s why books are divided into chapters, and in the chapters you have scenes, and in the scenes you have different sets of dialogues...etc.

Now I’m going to do potentially one of the most outrageous claims, but I believe every progamer does this to some extent - we just need to extend it.

I will bet you that at some fundamental level, Bisu considers all of his actions to be towards one singular action. Multitasking is impossible - it’s about reducing the multiple tasks to a single one. No one multitasks, they just create a more complicated task consisting of all of the other tasks. Now, one may ask, “well isn’t that exactly the same thing?” And the answer is yes, in terms of physical motions, but for the brain, it becomes a lot simpler to handle. I will use a computer analogy (though a computer is nothing similar to the brain, but this analogy will hold in this case). Imagine I had 20 notepad files, distributed across 5 folders. How long would it take you to retrieve all of the information? Now what if I put all of those notepad files in the same folder? Or better yet, just made one giant notepad file?

When you control Corsairs and the Shuttle with the two Reavers, while teching up, you must consider all of those actions one and the same thing. Think about it to yourself this way, it’s not thing A and thing B, it’s thing-A-and-thing-B. If that makes any sense. Not punch and kick, but punch-kick. I’m not controlling Corsairs outside his natural and dropping Reavers at his third, I’m “pressuring him,” and the visual memory of that is seeing two different groups of units attack him in two different places at the same time. But the two attacks must be one attack in your head, or you will never control either of them satisfactorily.

To generalize this notion even more, the control and the macro must be one in your head. You are NOT microing while macroing - you’re doing Corsair Reaver! Corsair Reaver isn’t just harassing them, that’s a stupid strategy if you didn’t build the 10 gateways. You must build the 10 gateways and add the Templar Archives. The control and the stuff going on at home must be linked very closely. Yes, I understand that there is a physical limitation - sometimes you cannot achieve both tasks at the same time, it’s literally impossible. No matter, the idea is that the thought needs to constantly be in your head, and if your strategy is so, you will not struggle. I do not attack and macro, I attack-and-macro.

This was how I solved the multitasking problem on the piano - instead of two separate voices, I thought of them as one voice doing two separate things, that were part of one whole complete thing (which has two different parts - yet we experience them as one). Every single bit of personality I tried to impregnate into each part to give it character - all I had to do was add that to my full picture, my full choreographed action, and I was able to do it. Easy.

The next and final topic will be a subject I’ll discuss more in later posts, but that involves the late game, as well as late game strategy, and “goals.” Traditionally it’s a little hard to end in late game, unless the other player seriously screws up or can’t keep up, but if both players are even in skill, it will most likely progress to endgame before anything happens. Let’s look at the thought hierarchy:

LATEGAME ---Infrastructure ------Suffcient Production (have specific in mind depending on matchup) ------Sufficient upgrades (3/3 everything and necessary tech upgrades) ------Sufficient tech towards endgame army, if any tech switches are necessary ---Expansions ------Control expansions ------Deny enemy expansions ------Have a goal/Determine their goal ------Get workers there and build refineries/extractors/assimilators ------Static defense ------Vision of safe paths ---Army movement ------Move relative to their army ------Protect key paths to your expansions ------Attempt to split his army off from one of his expansions to kill it ------Vision vision vision vision vision vision vision ---Endgame setup ------Will elaborate later

Now, people do this to some extent, but stating it deliberately makes it impossible to forget. The simplest (oversimplified) model of the late game is as follows: Claw for expansions, and try to have more expansions than your opponent. If you don’t feel safe expanding, then fight for an expansion, and then defend your own expansions while harassing theirs. If you can destroy one, go for it. In other words, the goal is to get expansions.

So let’s say I have a plan created for every single expansion my enemy tries to take, and I figure out which expansions I can take, and how to defend them based on the position of my army for the attack I want to do. Then, I compile them into a plan, I associate it with desired goal, and then BAM. I took a lot of the thinking in-game out of the equation, freeing up more brain space.

Example: Shattered Temple, I’m in the 1 o’clock position and my opponent is at the 3 o’clock (close by air). I decide to attack the expansion in the 7 o’clock position, having seen that my opponent took it. The wise move for me is to take either the 10 o’clock natural, or the 11 o’clock “island” expansion, while pushing to the center watch tower, pushing to their gold base, and then leaving the majority of my army at the gold and sending some units to the 7 o’clock base. Easy, easy, easy...also, I know exactly what this should look like on the minimap, so it’s really easy to remember.

That was another obvious example, but try this - every time you feel like your brain is being overworked by too many thoughts (in a performance setting), try combining the thoughts into one.

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s0020255a2film-blog · 7 years

Text

Post T-Evaluation

I aim to assess my creative realization and how my research aided me to the construction of my film, as well as the way in which I linked this to my textual analysis. My main focus is Tim Burton’s style, and how I portrayed this in my film. This is evident through aspects of my film, including narrative, cinematography, casting and editing. I deliberately created a script that reflected Tim Burton, because he not only uses personal themes and issues within his films, he makes them relatable and fun to watch. This is something that I tried to portray in my film. In relation to my research, I feel that my script was linked coherently to Tim Burton’s style, but also reflects my own personal ideologies and my own style.

The first two scenes of my film effectively introduce my protagonist and antagonist, due to my use of dialogue. I chose to deliberately have the first line that the antagonist says, be off screen, as I felt that it would introduce him in a way that the audience can only analyse him with one aspect-his choice of words. I also, in the first shot, to have an over the shoulder shot of my protagonist through the mirror, because I felt that it would be an effective way to introduce her-by letting the audience see not only her face, but also the back of her head. This juxtaposes the way that the antagonist was introduced. Additionally, this shot allows us to see Billie the same way in which she sees herself, which is effective in introducing the character. The second scene demonstrates that the antagonist is clearly insecure about their relationship, and it also shows that he is very controlling over her. I feel that this is a scene that is effective in terms of showing their relationship with each other and also both of their weaknesses. His insecurities are demonstrated with his constant questions about her appearance and why she is wearing what she is wearing. Tim Burton believes that the ‘monsters’ in a film are the characters that are the most sensitive, which is something that I tried to reflect in my short film, particularly in this scene.

The third scene, the one in which Billie is speaking to her mother, juxtaposes the first two sequences because of the caring dialogue. I chose to include this because I felt that it would make the film more realistic, and I also wanted to include more of the people in her life rather than just her boyfriend in order to see more than one perspective of the situation. I chose to keep the cinematography relatively basic throughout this sequence because I wanted to keep it naturalistic. I admit that I could have been a little bit more ambitious when it came to shots, however, I felt that it was effective. Additionally, when it came to editing, I deliberately made the shots jumpy and fast at times, so that it mirrored Billie’s mind, which I felt worked well in terms of the contents of the scene.

My fourth scene is the scene in which Billie decides to stand up for herself against Aaron. I feel that this scene is well-placed within my film, as it is the medial scene, and also the scene where Billie realises that she deserves more from a relationship than what she is currently getting. Billie is evidently nervous in this sequence, which is shown by her trouble when it comes to finding the right words to say, and her constant apologising. I was originally planning on having Aaron “punch” Billie in this sequence, with a point of view shot from Billie’s perspective, however, after I had filmed this and was looking back over the footage, I felt that it did not look particularly effective, and so I removed it from the sequence. The fifth scene is set in the hallway of Billie’s house, and although it is incredibly short in length, it is very significant in terms of the narrative of the film. For instance, I have edited the line in which Aaron says “I will make your life a living hell” and placed it into the next sequence, where Billie is alone in her room and has the voices of people that are close to her in her head. Additionally, this sequence emphasises that Aaron has the control in the relationship, because of the physicalization of him leaving Billie and going outside, whereas Billie is still ‘trapped’ inside the house.

The sixth scene in my film is the sequence in which Billie can hear the voices of her head. This scene is the most significant one in my opinion, because it physicalizes the idea that she is thinking of multiple things at a time, and it also is significant in the making of Billie’s final decision in terms of their relationship. This is the scene that I am technically the most proud of, because even though the physical shot is relatively basic, it took a lot of editing in terms of sound and clipping it so that I was completely happy with it, and so that it fit perfectly in with Billie saying her line “shut up”. I chose to have Billie sat in front of wallpaper that was very ‘busy’ so that it would reflect her mind, and I also chose to have Billie in the middle of the shot, with a lot of space behind her to emphasise that she is isolated from things such as friends and freedom.

The final sequence in my short film is the monologue, and I chose to have a montage of footage of happy moments between Billie and Aaron in order to juxtapose the contents of the monologue. I chose to have a well-known quote about abuse in my script, because it is something that I feel will resonate with people that have been through a similar situation, and I also feel that it is a quote that most people will remember because it is so unique. I also chose for the footage to end just before the monologue ended, and so the last line was said in darkness. The final line of the film is “I’m not finished”, which is the title of the film, and is also the second line said at the beginning of the film. This is a line that I have taken from one of my chosen focal films, Edward Scissorhands (1990), and I felt that it would be appropriate to have it in my film, and for it to be my main line. I chose to use many different techniques in terms of cinematography in order to show the different aspects of their relationship.

In terms of genre, I feel that my film would fit into the Drama genre, because of the mature themes and strong language. In terms of representation, I feel that I used stereotypes in my casting. For example, I casted a male as the aggressor in my film, and a female as the victim, which is stereotypical of abusive relationships, however, I feel that this was the most effective use of casting, because if I had have used a female as the aggressor I do not feel that this would have had as much of a hard-hitting message. Additionally, I used a heterosexual relationship in my film, which I feel I could have changed, however, again, I feel that it was the most effective type of relationship to use in order for my messages and values to truly resonate with my audience. In terms of narrative, I chose to use some of Todorov’s equilibrium theory, however, I skipped the first two ‘steps’ because I wanted to make it so that the film began negatively, because I feel that this would make the audience immediately aware of what the film would be about. The film’s narrative is about a girl in an abusive relationship. She slowly discovers throughout the film that the relationship is toxic, and at the end she resolves it by leaving him. I feel that the film conveys all the ideas that I set out to convey in many different ways, particularly in terms of the micro and macro elements.

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