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I'm Lauren Rae Orsini, a graduate student and multimedia journalist. Welcome to my professional page.
How to plan for Katsucon 16
7 February 2010 | 7 Comments
You know you’re excited for this.
Between learning the ropes as an official maid and staying in touch with staff to get permission to film at the convention, I realized that I’ve become a bit of an insider to Katsucon this year. With the con at a new hotel this year, a lot of things have changed. Instead of just giving my friends the heads up, I thought I’d extend my knowledge to all my readers. Here’s a few tips from me to you:
1) Get somebody to drive you there. I found out the hard way that the Gaylord is neither cheap to park at, nor easily metro accessible. Parking in their garages is $19 a day. In order to get there the public transportation way, you have to take the green line all the way to Branch, and then take a metro bus. From there, you still have to walk a quarter of a mile to the hotel. The cheapest and easiest solution? Have a friend who isn’t attending drive you there. You could even take a taxi to cut costs!
2) Bring your own food. Much like a theme park, the Gaylord is surrounded by lots of conveniently placed but pricey dining options. If you’re planning to spend your money in the dealer’s room, you might want to bring a bunch of sandwiches with you to cut costs. My solution? I’m bringing my rice maker and my friends and I are making bento lunches in the room while we’re there.
3) Get there Thursday… Or be ready to wait. If you were at the con last year, you no doubt remember the three hour lines those of us who pre-registered waited in to get inside. If you’re not a volunteer like me, be prepared for that again. (Seriously guys, maybe we should all not pre-reg next year?) I haven’t heard an explanation for why this is the case, but Katsucon registration will be done completely on paper, without the aid of computers. This is going to considerably slow things down, so get there on Thursday before the rush if you can.
4) Reserve me! OK, it turns out I’m a more popular maid than I’d expected, but I’m not totally booked yet! You should go to the maid cafe page and reserve me so I can serve you some food and meet you. Now that I know there’s more of you than just people I know in real life, it’d be great to meet some of my readers. A tip though– if you get me I might ask you if you’re cool with an interview for my latest documentary. =D
If I missed something and you have another question about the con, leave a comment and I’ll answer it if I can.
Katawa Shoujo: empathy or exploitation?
4 February 2010 | 3 Comments
After reading Leigh Alexander’s article in Kotaku on Katawa Shoujo, a dating sim where the player tries to woo physically disabled and disfigured high school girls, I was too curious not to give the game a play-through*. The fact that another female gamer described this as a “polished, surprisingly compassionate and complex love letter to disabled girls,” inspired me to try to determine which politics were at work within the game.
Katawa Shoujo, Japanese for “disability girls,” is a game developed by Four-Leaf Studios, a group of anonymous members of 4chan. By now you’re probably expecting the worst from this game, as I was. However, “the internet hate-machine” is capable of producing empathy from time to time, as in this case. Far from the insulting parody you might expect, this game treats disabled individuals as human.
In the game, you play as Hisao, a high school student coming to terms with his status as a disabled person, having just discovered he suffers from Arrthymia, and sent to a school for students with special needs. While Hisao’s condition is invisible to others, the potential love interests in the game have disabilities that are anything but. You can choose to befriend disabled girls ranging from blind Lilly to burn-victim Hanako (and thankfully, Part One doesn’t allow any type of interaction beyond simply befriending the girls).
Game play is engaging. The dialogue and description is not only well written but belies a great deal of research into how each girl copes with her disability, details including how legless Emi uses different prosthetics depending on whether she is running track or walking to school, or how armless Rin eats lunch (with her feet). In other words, instead of putting the emphasis on the disabilities themselves, the main focus is on how each girl deals with her unique challenges.
The dialogue presents two views on disability. In some ways, disability is understated. “If I don’t mention [her disability], it’s like not discussing the elephant in the room,” Hisao says to the librarian. She replies, “It’s only the elephant in the room if you make it that way.” On the other hand, most plot points depend on assisting the girls in things they can’t do, like carrying things for armless Rin or informing blind Lilly of what the sunset looks like. This isn’t any different from other games in the dating sims, where you do favors for women to win their affection, but they still reveal the girls to be defined by their disabilities.
I talked to my friend John B. about the game, since his brother was born with Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that confined him to a wheelchair until the end of his life. He agreed that the game was surprisingly respectful and compassionate towards disabled people. However, his view was that this genre might not be the appropriate vehicle for spreading goodwill towards the disabled. So far, Four-Leaf has only released Part One of the game, and Part Two is likely to include nudity or worse (the studio has not said, but it’s logical to assume this since most games of this genre do). No matter how well done I’ve found the game to be, the ultimate goal still seems to be fetishizing disability.
As Alexander suggested, Katawa Shoujo takes the empathy we feel for disabled human beings and attempts to eroticize it. However, even this can be seen as a success. In this game, disabled people are seen as consenting and capable romantic partners, instead of the half-humans they are sometimes portrayed to be. I was impressed, but I won’t be playing part two anytime soon– disabled or not, pretend dating isn’t for me.
*Part One of the game, that is. The second part has yet to be released.
An interview with Danny Ledonne, part II
4 February 2010 | 1 Comment
This is the second installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, to be published in three parts. In this section, Ledonne shares his views on interactive narratives, and weighs in on how his own interactive narrative, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, fits into the canon.
Q: One thing we’ve touched on is how, in interactive narratives, you think you have a lot of control, but you don’t really have as much power as you think you do- it’s what the author of the narrative is influencing you. It’s linear at your own pace so it’s still going to go to the place that the creator deems. What do you think about that?
A: I know a number of game designers who have confided to me or they’ve said out loud in panel discussions, “You know, we’re actually not giving the player the opportunity to do whatever he or she wants, we’re giving them that feeling, we’re giving them perhaps that illusion. But ultimately all you’re doing is creating lines of codes, and on some level we’re still experiencing life in a linear way, we can’t travel through time, we exist in a three dimensional space and have gravity. So there’s all these restrictions in our real lives and in our virtual video game lives that are actually sources of constraint, so we don’t have no limitations, but I actually think that’s probably a good thing. If you were to exist, and there have been video games that have tried this, if you were to start a game with no explanation as to what it is, what you’re supposed to do, you don’t know what the controls are, and you just sort of go around and interact with objects but there’s really no clear reason as to why, you kind of have this existential moment in the game where you’re not sure what the purpose of the game is or what your purpose in the game is. So I think as much as we talk about interactivity, I think people still really secretly desire some elements of vary straightforward linear experiences in the game world because without that the experience just really falls apart. Some games do this in a more open ended way, “sand box games” like maybe The Sims or whatever where you can freely explore and experiences things. But even games like that have all kinds of assumptions built into them about how you’re supposed to interact with the game, and those are sort of, much like life, as with any game whether it be a video game, a board game, a sport, or an activity you play, there are rules to govern what the limits of the game are and how you play the game.
Q: I’ve heard that this is a negative, when interactive narratives are used in the news, that games do not give you that many choices and allow the creator’s bias to seep through. So you don’t think this is a negative? Read more
Infographic eye candy: rainbow
3 February 2010 | 1 Comment
It’s been a little more than a month (!) since my last infographic roundup, but gorgeous visualizations have not stopped showing up on the Internet, so I think we’re long overdue for another. This time: an infographic in every color of the rainbow!
Purple: Kung Fu Typing by Steven Von Worley
Blue: If You Printed Twitter by Creative Cloud
Green: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How it’s Spent by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox
Yellow: Haiti Earthquake: Who’s Given What? by David McCandless
Orange: Roomba Visualization by Paul Mathew
Red: What does China Censor Online? by David McCandless
Bonus (Rainbow): Crayola Color Chart by Velociraptor
Movie Night: Second Skin
1 February 2010 | 1 Comment
Another week, another documentary, and I am happy to say that this week’s pick was considerably better. This time I watched Second Skin (2008), directed by Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza. You can watch this film on Netflix Instant Queue.
I was immediately impressed with the cinematography of this film, but truth be told, anything would look good after last week’s doc. After a while of watching the same sort of quality shots (both interview and B-roll) that I learned to aspire to in my introduction to filmmaking class, I realized that while they were expertly maneuvered, they were really just average. An example of what I’m talking about: an interview with a video game addiction rehabilitator that positions her head between icons of Jesus and Mary, B roll of the shopping cart wheels while some gamers buy soda and snacks.
What really puts the visuals of the film above and beyond is the use of handy and gorgeously done infographics that explain to the viewer- in a crisp and straight-to-the-point style- the facts and figures of the film. Instead of trying to tell viewers how many WoW gamers consider themselves addicted, we are shown a jarring visual instead.
The story is powerful, but- as several reviewers put it- incredibly bleak. Let’s face it- Second Skin is downright depressing. As we watch the gamers World of Warcraft away their lives, we cringe for them. “Go outside!” we want to tell them. This film focuses entirely on gamers stuck more in their virtual worlds than the real one. Some have a legitimate reason; the depiction of severely handicapped people who find new purpose in life through their avatars was especially touching. But my complaint remains: there are no portrayals of people who identify themselves as “moderate” gamers.
While it’s not bad to make a depressing film, I think that the misery here is unnecessarily harped upon. Sure, video game addiction is a serious illness, and some people need to get help. But not all people who play video and computer games spend a whopping 8 hours a day in front of their console, like the people shown in this film. While I understand this isn’t as interesting a subject for a movie, the director needs to represent more types of gamers.
Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)
Cinematography: ★★★1/2
Content: ★★★
An interview with Danny Ledonne, part I
29 January 2010 | 1 Comment
I recently had the privilege to meet and befriend the illustrious Danny Ledonne. A filmmaker and MFA candidate at my school, Danny is best known for his controversial game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which is regarded as one of the first influential interactive narratives. (And as I’ve said before, I’m very interested in the emerging form of interactive narratives, probably because I’m a fan both of video games and good journalism.)
Danny was nice enough to agree to an interview with me in late December. From his ranch in Colorado, he offered me insight on the junction between video games, violence, and the media. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing the transcript in parts.
Q: Are video games still an emerging medium?
A: Yeah, I guess you could ask yourself what benchmark one would have to set to say that video games have come into their own and that they’re no longer emerging… Just last, no Friday night, Avatar screened in theaters and people were saying, “Oh this is this new direction that film is going in,” and you know the question is, “So is film still emerging?” and in some ways probably. So I think that the real definition that people talk about when they say that video games are an emerging medium is that they, unlike film, have a very restrictive understand based on what audiences expect them to do and what the general public thinks they are capable of. And so a game like ‘Columbine’ really revealed that games aren’t there yet because films and books and other contemporary forms of discourse were able to look at a subject like Columbine and video games just weren’t, at least in this case.
That doesn’t mean that ‘Columbine’ was the best game that could made about this subject, but given that so many people who never played it or really looked at it reacted negatively tells you something about where video games are at and that they haven’t emerged in the sense of being a socially relevant art form. No one would discount the- even Jack Thompson says that video games are art, that video games contain technical and artistic merit and that they can contain stories and ideas and depict the human condition. So video games are probably art. They’re not art like the Venus de Milo, but they’re art in a kind of contemporary digital form. But they haven’t yet emerged in the sense that video games still have a fairly narrow expectation of what we’re supposed to do with them. They’re generally toys that we use to spend a few hours entertaining ourselves. Video games are rarely seen as a way to engage in a socially relevant issue or look at a topic of contemporary importance.
Q: Do you think interactive narratives have become mainstream, or are they still an edgy or unusual way of telling a story? Read more
Life at the Newseum
27 January 2010 | 6 Comments
Photo by Flickr user Son of Groucho.
I’ve been meaning to write and tell you all about how my new internship is going. I’m happy to say it’s going pretty well.
My position title is Multimedia/Web intern, so everything I do involves the Newseum’s Web site or interactive kiosks. That includes blogging, site building, learning the CMS (content management system for the non-techies), and plenty of video game testing.
Have you heard about The Tester? It’s a reality show where people compete to become a video game tester for PlayStation. Now, this is just my opinion, but after spending a few mornings testing a video game for bugs at the Newseum, why would people risk their dignity for a job like that? Having “video game” in the title does not make it cool. I’m fine doing it as an intern since it’s helping me learn the basics of game building, but it’s not exactly something I’d compete on television for the privilege to do. Basically, I’ve spent at least ten hours so far playing a game over and over and over, searching for bugs, finding bugs, and writing up exactly what triggers them. Penny Arcade was right on the money.
The coolest part of my internship so far is the actual writing part. I’m writing posts for the Newseum’s Future of News blog, which was created to promote their new TV series, The Future of News. None of my posts are up yet, but you can bet I’ll post when they are. My next entry will be about the history of photo doctoring.
Photo by Flickr user Son of Groucho.
I really like my coworkers (do I call the employees that?), my internship supervisor, and my co-intern, Andrea. While in response to the Newseum’s recent troubles, you’d think it would be a gloomy place to intern, it’s the people that make the experience so rewarding. I love the staff meetings because people are always cracking jokes.
In sum, things are going great. I’m sure that plenty of my future posts here are about things I accomplish at the Newseum.
Movie Night: Manga Mad
27 January 2010 | 7 Comments
NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, I had to dip into an earlier backup and lost all comments on this post. Feel free to rewrite your comment… or write something entirely new!
Welcome to a new weekly feature on my blog. In preparation for my latest documentary on fandom, I am watching (at least) one documentary on the subject every week.
This past week I watched Manga Mad, a 2008 documentary by Ray Castle that you can watch on Hulu. I hate to start this column on a negtive note, but if you’ve watched at least five minutes into the film, you can see what I mean when I say that the film was an excellent example of what not to do.
Just one of the unsettling captions in Manga Mad.
The first thing that struck me about the film was the jarring cinematography. In what must have taken ages in a video editor, the screen seems to switch from one manga cover to the next every few seconds. The camera is shaky and pans in, out and side to side in a way that made me nauseous. The same footage was reused over and over- something I learned in my basic film making class never to do.
Sound was poorly executed in this documentary. The nature of the subject involved a lot of interviews with Japanese native speakers, but the voice over translation was barely understandable. The translator was himself a native speaker and his accent was difficult for Western ears to comprehend. The interviews needed subtitles. The music was no better. With the same repetitive clips used over and over during the jarring visual montages of one second shots, I felt dizzy.
What disappointed me most about this film was the content, which was not only difficult to follow but, to me, insulting. Castle’s assertions that manga is all about sexuality (more than half of the film consisted of unnecessary and unsavory stills of cartoon porn) and its readers are social outcasts were short sighted and poorly defended. Shame on Castle, who should know very well that manga genres and readers are far more varied than that.
I have taken out a still from the film that particularly bothered me (above.) Yes, it’s true that manga fans in Japan are still considered on the fringe. The Japanese media nervously reports on violent criminals who watch anime the same way the American media reports on violent criminals who play video games. However, by the time this film was made, it was long established that the otaku stereotype does not truly reflect today’s otaku, who are usually ordinary individuals who happen to enjoy anime and manga (and yes, I consider myself one). I think that Castle is mistaking his portrayal of otaku for hikikomori, or shut-ins (Link goes to a great story on the subject from The New York Times).
For a far more in depth analysis of the otaku stereotype problem, I highly reccomend otaku scholar Lawrence Eng’s academic paper, “The current status of “otaku” and Japan’s latest youth crisis.” But as for Manga Mad, don’t expect to get any insight into fandom here.
Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)
Cinematography: ★
Content: ★
Googlezon revisited: My response
19 January 2010 | 4 Comments
I’m glad my last post on Googlezon generated such fervor. Everyone had some very good points on the issue, some which I do agree with. Brendan’s point that the mainstream news has an editing problem is certainly true by my book. However, I think I should definitely follow up to crystallize my thoughts on the issue. Here’s why I still don’t think Googlezon is a good idea:
1) No one is held accountable in the Googlezon scenario. In the fictional world of Googlezon, the search engine would grab bits and pieces from all the blogs and information sources in the world in order to piece together news stories. It’s not entirely clear from whom each bit comes. As a result, if a fact were deemed to be faulty, it would be hard to trace back from whence it came. Meanwhile, right now in the highly flawed mainstream media, we at least know who to blame when something goes wrong.
2) Questions of accuracy are still a problem with Googlezon. How do we know what we read on the Internet is true? This is a question Adam Gurri tackled shortly after my post. In the end, we have come to the same conclusion- it’s a judgment call based on one’s own instincts and experience. Unfortunately, as Gurri points out, this is no different than how we receive mainstream news right now- we have to be conscientious news consumers and not trust that everything given to us is accurate. Once again, Googlezon would not solve this current media problem.
3) People will get a false sense of security about their news. I’ve written before about how people are more likely to listen to their friends as a news source than the mainstream news. So if people buy into Googlezon, where they (and people they know) are both producers and consumers of the news, they will naturally be more trusting of it. And given my second point, this trust is not earned- news consumers need to continue to be wary with this new medium.
This doesn’t mean I disagree with all new media concepts of news- I wouldn’t be blogging/publicly disagreeing with some media practices if I did! I just think that Googlezon would not be a successful or reliable method.
If you don’t agree, which is likely, definitely comment respectfully about why not. On the off chance that you do agree, I’d love to hear why, too. In this emerging new form of media, we’re all more or less beginners.
Back to work, and not just on the doc.
17 January 2010 | 3 Comments
Photo by John B.
Hello again! It’s been quite a week for me. Not only did I start a new semester of graduate school and a brand new internship at the Newseum, I also fell extremely ill with the flu. So there’s your explanation for a lack of posts. Need I say more?
Yesterday I began shooting for my documentary response to Washington Post reporter Dan Zak’s less than flattering maid cafe portrait last year. I don’t think I’ve quite explained this: My hypothesis here is that to understand the wonderful and wacky sub-subculture that is the Katsucon maid cafe, one would have to herself become a maid. So So that is exactly what I’m doing: the whole nine yards, costume and all! (See more on Flickr). I’m happy to say that the other maids are proving to be not only great coworkers but genuine interview subjects. Reporting while sick isn’t fun, but the atmosphere of maidly camaraderie did lots to help.
Photo by John B.
Filming while working has brought up a whole new set of challenges for me. When I applied for a maid position, I promised the staff that filming would not get in the way of my waitressing duties. So I have assistants, my colleague Alex Thompson and my friend John Bowers, helping me photograph and film. When editing, I’ll have to lengths to make sure my work isn’t biased- especially since I will be appearing in it as a narrator! I plan to simply do my best to observe and report exactly what I see.