Over at IO9.com, they’ve linked to some game footage of Bioshock 2, which of course has me very excited, as I lost several weeks playing the first one. Although ultimately I found the game to be a little unsatisfying – a little too repetitious, and a lot of the things that were supposed to make the game feel huge and nonlinear, like the plasmid system, ended up being unnecessarily complex and confusing without really adding any depth to the game – it was still a four star game, with a great storyline.

IO9 also mentions a Bioshock movie in the works, which dismays me, because, as we all know, movies made from video games have been discovering heretofore unknown depths of suckage for decades now. I mean, has there ever been a movie adapted from a game that wasn’t the worst movie of the year? I submit that there has not. And I am never wrong. Or at least I don’t remember being wrong. The fact that I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday doesn’t change the fact that I am always right.

The reason video game movies always suck is simple: Video games can and have, at times, developed storylines over the course of hours and hours of gameplay, involving multiple settings, dozens of characters, reams of dialogue, and copious visual detail. A movie is meant to convey all of that in about 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours tops. It’s an impossible task. Look at Half life, my other favorite first-person shooter. You could make five or six movies out of the first game alone, and even if you boiled it down to major set pieces and cut out a lot of the crawling through ducts and puzzling over physics puzzles designed simply to show off the game engine, you’d still probably have a four hour movie on your hands. So the movie version tend to either abandon the game’s actual characters and storyline completely, or strip it down to monsters and special effects, hoping someone like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson can keep you entertained with just his pecs and eyebrows.

Video games are also getting increasingly cinematic, with graphics getting nearer and nearer photorealism and game engines getting better and better physics models. You see where this is going: As our computer monitors get bigger and bigger, eventually melding with our televisions and the Internet so that there’s very little distinction between them, movies are going to become video games, and vice-versa. Eventually you won’t drive to a theater, buy a ticket, and passively watch a movie for 2 hours. You’ll pay $50, install a game, and spend the next few weeks experiencing the story.

I’m actually looking forward to that – I’d love to write a video game, figuring out all the fun ways the player can interact and possibly even affect the story. Bioshock had a very tentative and small way for the player to alter the ultimate ending, depending on how the player treated certain Non-Player Characters during gameplay, but this really only affected the final cutscene and the mood of the ending, nothing else. While the programming challenge is huge, it would be fun to write a sort of “pick-a-path” kind of game where your decisions actually alter the game’s behavior as you play, in a significant way.

Until Bioshock 2 comes out, I guess I’ll just play Portal again.

The other day, my publisher called:

ME: Hello, this is Jeff–you may already owe me money*.

PUB: Actually, after reviewing the accounting, you actually owe us sixty-four thousand dollars after triggering the morality clause in your contract, but that’s not why we’re calling.

ME: If it’s about those office supplies, I can explain. I was drunk.

PUB: What office supplies?

ME: Sorry – I am drunk. What did you want?

PUB: We’re putting out a new edition of The Electric Church, anything you want to change?

ME: I’d like to change the title to JEFF SOMERS BADASS KILLING MACHINE. Also, I’d like to change the main character’s name to Jeff Somers.

PUB: <dial tone>

We’re entering into a weird era for writers, I think. Technology is going to offer us the opportunity at some point to continuously edit and revise our work. Once our books and stories are out on Kindles and yet-to-be-invented devices, we’ll be able to suddenly decide to clarify a character’s motivations in chapter 25 and beam it out to everyone overnight. Readers wake up the next day, switch on their readers, and boom! A new changed version of the book.

Some authors never stop revising, and for them this is probably a wonderful thing. Heck, some authors would love to completely re-write their books thirty years after publication, whether because they suffer from Authorial I Suck Syndrome or because changing technology/history makes their story inaccurate or laughably dated. Me, personally I tend to regard things as finished and if I decide years later that I didn’t do a very good job, or that I could do better, I’d rather just write a new version of the story from scratch. Whether or not authors will like the ability to do this, I think the better question is whether we should be allowed to, and what it would mean for readers.

I’m not sure it would be so great for readers, actually. The idea that my copy of a book can shift without my knowledge – or, hell, with my knowledge – is horrifying. Bad enough for fictions, where the very scene or dialog that grabbed you and made you fall in love with the story could be completely rewritten or deleted years after you read it, but imagine history books being edited remotely, biographies, anything. You can go totally paranoid and imagine every reference to some political event erased from every book, ever, or you can stick with the depressing thought that should I someday have a Philip K. Dick stroke-moment, I might be able to go back to The Electric Church and insert lots of giant bunny rabbits speaking Latin.

Of course, death silences all of us, so eventually a book will have to settle down into a canon version. . .unless of course the estate, which will hold the copyright for a while (possibly forever and ever if things keep sliding towards hell the way they have been). It’ll be great when the grandson of a writer can go into their ancestor’s files and start editing their books, won’t it? Watch and see. I think Douglas Adams once speculated on how horribly chaotic history would become once we developed time travel, well, this is it: A world where nothing will ever be set in stone ever again. Unless you actually carve your book into tablets as some sort of marketing gimmick. Which is genius.

At least you can count on my disastrous disorganization and laziness to protect you from this fresh hell in my books at least. Though be careful when my liver finally pops: The wife is very eager to get in there and “correct” my books. Read ’em while you can.

*My standard greeting

Y’know, you just don’t have to read, watch, or listen to anything any more. Welcome to the future, and the future is spoilers.

This is not an anti-spoiler rant. I have no worries over spoilers. Demanding that every piece of entertainment be delivered to you pristine and unexplained in any way is ludicrous; half of the power of good fiction is poring over it and gleaning the details, the references, the tiny points that reward careful attention. If knowing the ending to a story ruins that story for you, then 99% of the literature and filmed entertainment ever produced is already ruined for you, and that’s just sad for you, to be that limited.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go into new things fresh – for example, you don’t mind that you know how The Lord of the Rings ends, you still re-read it occasionally, but when Watchmen comes out, you want to remain ignorant of it until you watch the movie so you can experience it as pure new story, well, that’s fine. But if someone does spoil the story for you, the only reasonable reaction is to shrug and go see the movie anyway, because if the story’s any good, it won’t matter.

Anyway: This is not an anti-spoiler rant; I sleep on a mattress made of spoilers and I sleep well. No, this is about the Cloud.

The Cloud is the web, mainly, although it’s also people around you. The Cloud is the repository of spoilers out there, the ongoing discussions about TYV shows, books, and movies. The Cloud basically contains the entire plot of every new book, movie, or TV show, plus the detail analysis and exhaustive revelation of Easter Eggs. The Cloud means that you no longer have to watch or read anything in order to be perfectly familiar with it.

I have never watched an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica. Yet, I can give you a decent plot summary and even discuss the basic themes of the show, and a smattering of the complaints people have had. It’s like I’ve actually watched it. All because of web sites like I09 and the like – hell, I’ve seen clips, read detailed reviews and analysis. Having never actually watched the show, I could convince you otherwise at a party.

Part of this is because I am a Catholic-church-trained liar, and we Catholics learn to lie with the best. I could also convince you I am wearing pants, when I clearly am not. But I digress.

I have also never seen the movie Watchmen or read the graphic novel, but I know the plots of both, plus a boatload of background details. Am I a mindreading genius? No, I’ve simply read so much about it, I’m like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: I’ve been around for so long I know everything. IO9 even provided a handy analysis of the opening credits sequence for me, which gave me an abundance of tiny detail to work with.

We are entering a period of time when you don’t actually have to read or watch something to know all about it. Yes, you’re missing the wonderful details, the craft, and the joy of good writing. But on the other hand, you can now, in a way that was impossible not so long ago, determine pretty exactly whether you’re truly interested in a book, movie, or TV show before you actually put much time and effort into it. Just by dipping into the Cloud, you can get very good idea if you’re going to like something before you invest in it. And that’s a good thing, I think. But then, I don’t fear spoilers. I only fear children. And adults. Stop judging me.

I see my brother regularly; let’s call him Yan. Yan is a famous curmudgeon, dissatisfied with just about every movies, TV show, or book he’s ever digested, and we often have long talks about what he doesn’t like about The Entertainments the universe offers him. He’s usually pretty savvy in his criticisms, though I’m more forgiving and can accept imperfection as long as there are compensating pleasures offered and so we don’t usually agree on what qualifies as ‘good’ in TV or movies.

One of the things we often discuss is a tendency by bad writers to view any Science Fiction or Fantasy story as a license to do anything, to toss out the very laws of physics. I’m not talking about magic here, you see – I’m talking about the assumption by hack writers that just because a story is SFnal, anything can happen. It’s one thing to have magic in your story. The Jedi can do just about anything, okay, fine – that gets established early on in the Star Wars world and so when Yoda lifts the X-Wing out of the swamp, or when Vader chokes the life out of someone who’s on a completely different ship, well, you just shrug and accept it. The rules of The Force are established and that’s fine.

Sometimes, though, you have writers who decide that just because you have, say, a psychic or a spaceship in the story, well, anything is possible. That if a character has one special power or ability, he or she should be able to sprout new ones whenever the plot requires a solution. Of course, sometimes a character with unspecified abilities can believably display a heretofore unknown aspect of them – take Spock stuffing his soul into Bones McCoy in Star Trek 2 – so to a certain extent it depends on how it’s handled.

For the clearest example of the acidic effect this attitude has on SF writing, I direct your suffering eyes to Highlander 2: The Quickening. The special sauce of this movie is the idea that since it’s a SF story, anything goes! And I do mean anything. Though to be fair this movie apparently suffered from meddlesome investors who took a bad movie and made it indescribably terrible, the fact remains that the writers of this movie heard ‘immortals’ and ‘science fiction’ and decided that whatever batshit crazy stuff they came up with would work.

You can, of course, let your imagination run when writing SF/F work, but there have to be rules of some sort. Especially in serial works when a character has, say, dozens of episodes or novels to develop and display their abilities. Suddenly granting them the one power which would solve your plotting problems will not fly, my friend. But then, my brother and I are bitter, bitter people. For example: I still intend to get my $7 back from the producers of Highlander 2. Oh, some day, they will pay me back. I swears it.