17/03/2003 - Entry #75
Okay, so I just got back from seeing Equilibrium, and oh my hat, so much pants! The basic premise of the film is: In the future, we'll have a big war. We're realise that violence is just plain silly, and the only way to stop it is to eradicate all human emotion. On pain of death. We develop a drug to eliminate empathy which every civilian must take daily (we trust them to do this of their own volition). Anyone who shows any trace of feeling is brutally gunned down or incinerated alive. In the name of peace, you understand. The action of the film takes place over a period of about 5 days or so, and in that time I reckon at least 300 civilians are shot or burnt to death for collecting artwork. I just pray we achieve such an enlightened society one day.
Besides the ridiculous flaws of the film, it wasn't too bad, I suppose. Well, no, it was. It was fairly dreadful on many levels. The directing was clumsier than most hollywood outings, which is saying rather a lot. Every moment of Christian Bale's newfound emotion is met with violins and the gentle stroking of grainy photographs. Every action scene is positively drenched with kung fu and 'NNSH NNSH NNSH' techno music, making comparisons to the Matrix utterly inevitable. Indeed, the fact I've got this far without mentioning the Matrix is astounding in and of itself. It's a futuristic kung fu film with guns, a pumping soundtrack and a fairly haphazard stab at a meaningful message tacked on. If it had come out 3 years earlier both films would be 100% interchangeable. I feel it's slightly unfair to say it's a Matrix rip-off or anything, though, because even an unforgiving cynic like myself thinks that's harsh. It doesn't rip off the Matrix, it's just that both films rip off everything science fiction has ever produced since 1926. The fight scenes, I'll admit, are quite cool. I was unfortunate enough to sit next to Rich throughout the film, who kept twitching and ducking like a 7 year old watching a lightsaber fight. He also kept tipping the ice from his drink into his mouth and crunching it, which annoyed me greatly, but that's got nothing to do with the film, so never mind. But yeah, sufficient to say, the fight scenes are gratuitously 'cool', and will keep any young kid (or old kid with the mentality of a young kid) entertained for ages. Aside from that, there's nothing much to remember from the film, really. Except, perhaps, Sean Bean playing his usual role as a supporting character who gets killed off once they've served their purpose. How many times is he gonna do that, really? Lord of the Rings, Goldeneye, Equilibrium, Patriot Games...he didn't die in Ronin, but he was beaten up and kicked out of the group and never appeared again, which is virtually the same thing. I feel so sorry for him. Long gone are the classic days of When Saturday Comes. "Go on Jimmeh, you tekk it!" Unforgettable.
Aaanyway, in direct contrast to Equilibrium, I recently watched "All About Lily Chou-Chou", and it's shot to the pinnacle of my favourite films list. I'm not going to talk about it much, because I think knowing much about the film before you watch it might ruin it somewhat, but it really is a staggeringly good film, and I can't recommend it enough.
So as I mentioned, I've been playing Anarchy Online a lot lately. Man, I love that game. I mean, not so much because it's a good game in its own right, but just because I love online games. Well, Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games anyway. They're brilliant. This is the third time I've played one, and I've ended up being sucked into them all. They're just too engrossing. You stay up for hours and hours just trying to get "one more level." It's not just me, either. The first big MMORPG was Everquest, and was very quickly dubbed "EverCrack" by its fans. It's some kind of inexplicable phenomenon whereby every one of these online games becomes a giant contest to level up as fast as possible. Ahh. I love it, though.
One thing I've noticed, though, is the language of these games. I played the game when it first came out in July 2001, and quit in October or thereabouts the same year. So this is the first time I've played it since then, and the difference in language is noticeable. See, the language of any MMORPG is one of necessity. It's like harkening back to the stone age or something, when everything had to be monosyllabic grunts to express a concept as urgently as possible. When you're in the middle of a fight in one of these games, for example, the common terminology to say "there's another enemy entering the fight" is simply "add." The term for an incoming monster is "inc." But this stretches to non-combat chat too. People just sitting around talking over the public channel still abbreviate as much as possible, just through laziness. I know that that kind of thing is common to the whole internet, not just MMORPGs, but the games take it to a new level, mainly because everybody expects everyone else to know exactly what they mean. It's something that's been noticeable to me because in the year and a half since I last played the game, a lot of new things have been introduced. Just last night I was playing in a group, and it was my turn to loot the corpse of something we'd just killed. I picked up something I'd never seen before called a "Soul Fragment," and the most experienced player in our group immediately said: "lol roll on sf! j/p. np". I sat and stared at it for a while, not really understanding what the hell he was saying. "lol" I know, obviously. "sf" I figured had to be the Soul Fragment. "j/p" I figure is "just playing", or some other variation of "j/k", and "np" is "no problem." I later found out that the game has introduced a new 'roll' system which randomly picks one member of the group. The idea being that when one person picks up a valuable item like a Soul Fragment, the group rolls to decide fairly who gets it. So you can work out exactly what he was saying, but at first glance it was totally unintelligible. The same goes for the in-game shopping channel, too. It's a world of abbreviations which simply don't make sense to newcomers. The shopping channel is a specific chat channel where people can broadcast items for sale, or items they want to buy. A typical line would be something like "WTB ql90+ tsaka" or "WTS 40 cushion pst." The former means "Want To Buy a quality level 90 or higher Tsakamutchi sniper rifle", while the latter means "Want to sell quality level 40 concrete cushion, please send tell if you're interested." Even that last one requires a little explanation. A concrete cushion is a type of weapon in the game, literally a cushion made from concrete which you use to bludgeon opponents to death, and "tell" is the private message command in the game. This kind of insular language permeates the entire game, though. In this group I joined last night, before we started fighting, we "buffed" ourselves and each other. To "buff" is to cast a spell which improves your abilities. One such spell might, for example, improve your strength, while another makes you run faster. They literally buff you up. But they're almost always referred to by their abbreviated form, as everything else is in the game. While we were buffing one group member said "can I get ess plz". "Ess" refers to a specific buff called "Essence of the Brave Challenger", and "plz" is just pure bone idleness. You get the idea, though. It's a very cliquey group. The inhabitants of the game-world are exactly that. It's possibly worth noting that the help manual and promotional material invite you to "become a citizen of Rubi-Ka" (the planet the game is set upon). I doubt the makers of the game realised people would genuinely take on the characteristics of a race of people, complete with their own dialect and mannerisms. If I had the time and the inclination, I would genuinely be tempted to write some kind of anthropological study on the linguistic evolution of the game. It absolutely fascinates me how this dialect has sprung up for such specific purposes and has become absolutely second nature to the people close to it. I mean, anyone who knows me online will know that I never, ever say "lol." But yesterday Pete and I watched a film or two downstairs, and at one point he made a joke, and I actually said "lol", outloud, instead of laughing. I imagine it sounds utterly ridiculous to you all, and I can't really blame you. But seriously, I can't explain this whole thing. It's just plain odd how it takes a hold of you. It fascinates me.
Incidentally, if anyone is at all interested in seeing what I mean, you can download the game and try it for 7 days absolutely free, if you want to. If you have the time, I honestly do recommend it. If only to see first-hand what the hell I'm talking about. Heh.
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