Monthly Archives: July 2012

On TNG 25th Anniversary

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There’s an event tonight that I’m looking forward to in the utmost: TNG 25th Anniversary in theaters.

It’s a couple of episodes, some behind the scenes footage, a sneak peak, and most importantly the chance to geek out to some classic TNG on the big screen in newly remastered high def.

The event, and the accompanying blu-ray releases over the next several years underline the desire that we trekkies have for a new series. After all, Enterprise has been off the air for 7 years now. The 2009 movie and its forthcoming sequels are enough to sate us, for now, but their glitz and sleek action don’t scratch the fundamental itch of a Star Trek at its best. I am not one that hates the new films, but I recognize that Trek movies in general have always been about trading some of the series’ best attributes (it’s willingness to approach philosophy with sci-fi, it’s vision of humanity and the Federation as benevolent keepers of a utopian society) for attributes that attract the laymen of Trek canon, the casual summer blockbuster ticket.

No, what Trekkies are thirsting for is another series. One with a set of characters we can grow to know well, like we feel we know Picard or Data or Riker or Geordie. One that takes us to new places with new challenges and, certainly, new foes. But what we have to remember is that 7 years of no series isn’t anything. There was a full decade between the end of TOS and the release of the first movie, almost another decade on top of that before TNG started. 20 years separates the series.

Now, 7 years from the truncated end of Enterprise, we hear rumors. We salivate over premises that, frankly, aren’t very strong. We are so desperate for a new series that we cling to these rumors and draw hope from them. Personally, though, I can wait. If we want to return to the halcyon days of Trek (like the 90s, which started and ended without ever knowing a day without a new Trek episode on the schedule) the first series to break the ice has to be phenomenal. It has to explode on the scene.

In this light, it’s easy to find a new respect for TNG. After a 20 year drought, 10 of which were filled with movies featuring the old cast, they had to come on, pay homage but, more importantly, find their own niche. They did this by advancing the timeline 100 years to a more mature, more organized Federation that focused more on a peaceful exploration with strict rules about non-interference. Simultaneously though, conflicts were bigger and badder, the stakes higher. TNG came in after 20 years of the same characters off and on and managed to up the ante on practically every front. Then, given 100 more episodes (more than twice as many) they managed to turn Trek from a series into a franchise that dominated TV sci-fi for another 15 years afterwards.

This is what I want. I don’t want another series. I want another era. If we have to wait for another 13 years to get the chance at having another 15 year age of Trek then I’ll wait. One good series is worth 10 ST: Cardinals or other proposed series.

Speculation

Taking the above to heart, what would a new series have to look like? First let’s try to distill what makes Trek Trek. Here’s my barest definition.

  1. The Future. This should be pretty obvious. I don’t think there’s much Trek in a modern day series.
  2. Human. Trek is inherently about humanity. Our journey through the stars and our trials and tribulations.
  3. Federation. Inasmuch as Trek is human, it’s also about a future in which we are banded together with many other species with similar ideals. Watching Trek without the Federation would be just watching sci-fi that happens to be in the Trek universe. Enterprise gets a pass because it was a prequel, but I think that ground has been trod.

Elaborating on the above, this is what I’d like to see in a new series.

Prime Universe. Abrams’ films are fine and exist handily in another universe which allows them to be considered wholly separate from every bit of Trek ’til now. Let’s take advantage of that fact and stick to the prime universe that’s already so well established.

Expand the Timeline… but not too far. Enterprise set a pretty firm range of dates for time travel becoming trivial enough that it’s regulated. Personally, I believe that once we get too much temporal flexibility, the premise will become too stretched. If time travel is an easy tool it means that you get infinite retries on the best outcome and nobody has to live with unintended consequences as long as they are in control of a time machine. Fortunately there’s about 600 years between the end of VOY (2378) and the temporal police of the 31st century in Enterprise, although I think time travel would’ve likely become a tool sometime before that.

Enterprise. DS9 is my favorite Trek even though it’s close with TNG and TOS, however I believe that DS9 was able to drastically change the core premise of Trek (by being on a space station rather than roving the galaxy) because TNG had given the series a good lead in. A new series should return to the Trek fundamental of exploration and diplomacy on the Enterprise to start on solid ground before considering a more studious (if rewarding) approach.

Another aspect of this point, and why it’s “Enterprise” and not “On a Ship” is that I want the core cast to be good at what they do, the best even. There’s a trend in TV and movies lately to have anti-hero or flawed characters. This was part of the ST: Cardinal premise that I thought was terrible. I want to see shining examples of logic, efficiency, and compassion. The traits that make us, as a species, great. I don’t want the same tired and conflicted main characters that you can find in every modern drama or sci-fi. I want to see my captain struggle to maintain or restore order in the galaxy, not struggle to get out of bed in the morning.

Crew Diversity. One of the great aspects of TNG was the ability to bring many viewpoints to bear. The TNG crew had plenty of humans, but also Troi, Worf, Data, and even Barclay to bring viewpoints other than human Elite Starfleet officers. TOS struggles with this in universe (Spock being the only non-human) but excelled in it out of universe (having a black woman, an asian man, and a Russian on the bridge in the late 60s). DS9 focuses on the Federation vs. Bajor contrast with Kira and various semi-regular Bajorans, but also includes Worf, Dax, Odo and Quark providing outside influences (coincidentally being on a space station instead of a ship is a definite plus in the diversity). VOY and ENT made attempts but were unsuccessful at accomplishing this, despite the seeds of possibility.

Screen Time. The final thing I’d like to see in a Trek series is a lot of screen time. These days, there’s been a definite trend toward short seasons. For the most part, this is good. If Game of Thrones has only 12 episodes to tell you a compelling arc, then you know each episode is going to be packed with content. Same thing with Breaking Bad, or Mad Men. The source of entertainment is the drama and the 12 episode season is very conducive to having drama dripping from every episode. But drama is not what Trek is about, at least not all the time.

Imagine cutting TNG down to twelve episodes a season. You have to ditch a full 92 episodes. Sure, you could start easily enough, forgetting bad episodes like Sub Rosa (my personal least favorite) but pretty soon you’re going to be cutting into episodes that are great, but not great enough. For example, The Measure of a Man. That episode would never get made if all 12 episodes had to be action packed drama fests. It’s too wordy and plodding. Yet it’s a great exploration into the topic of whether Data is human or deserves rights and, more generally, whether a human creation can ever have the same rights as humans themselves. Trek philosophy via sci-fi at its greatest would’ve never made it in a short season.

Now, I’m not saying that it has to be a full 26 episode season either, but whatever number, there needs to be plenty of time to ponder alongside the time for tension and drama. This is especially true if the new Trek follows the modern drama formula where each episode relies on the last. A Trek show has never been done like this (DS9 comes the closest toward the end), but this is not incompatible with having occasional one-offs and philosophical episodes that are woven into that framework.

This is roughly what I’d like to see, not only because it would please me, but also because I think it would provide a solid base for subsequent series and, therefore, another era of Trek on the airwaves. This is just a base however. I mentioned above that TNG upped the ante on virtually every aspect of TOS. While a modern series would obviously have the effects and make-up in the bag (even over 2005 Enterprise), it’d be tough to up the ante on TNG/DS9 era Trek. The story is going to be the deciding factor and that’s wide open for interpretation. This is why I can be patient. Anyone can make a show that fulfills the above criteria but it’s going to take a special someone to really make it awesome.

On Diablo

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I really didn’t intend for this to be a gaming blog, but it’s all I want to talk about at the moment. Life is rough recently, so escapism is always on my mind =P.

I played D2 when I was in high school. I played it to death. Single player and on realms. I played it vanilla, LoD, and then, over the subsequent decade, I played it a number of times on the higher (1.10 – 1.13) patches with my wife because it was an easy game to play on laptops on wireless and have a blast.

It’s no secret that I was excited for Diablo 3. I had it pre-ordered, I followed the news on /r/diablo for months before release. I tried every trick in the book to get into the beta, and participated gladly in the open beta weekend. I ate it up. I leveled every class, tried for every achievement.

Two months out I feel disappointed like so many gamers out there. Everyone from D2 wanted D3 to be a lifestyle rather than just a game (as one redditor put it). We wanted a game that we could dump hours into and be rewarded handsomely with that great feeling of finding a truly awesome item. We wanted that feeling of being decked out in the best gear and after such a struggle, cakewalking through the hardest difficulty or the toughest PvPers.

I was frothing at the mouth because I remember having so much fun with D2, but it was a different time for me and for gaming in general. AAA titles, indie games, mobile gaming, lo-fi hits mean that there is a steady stream of fun games out there that we don’t need to rely on mindless repetition to continue to have fun.

In 2000 there were a large number of really great games, AAA titles like Baldur’s Gate 2, Thief 2, and my absolute favorite game of all time Deus Ex. But these were finite affairs to me, you played them, you beat them (sometimes multiple times) and none of them were very multiplayer friendly (DX multiplayer added later notwithstanding). D2 was a strong game in its own right and its repetitive although rewarding formula with PvP and a real economy were perfect to fill the gaps. 5 character classes, 99 character levels, three difficulties and, to top it off a major expansion almost exactly a year later. This combined with the fact that I was 14, with a whole summer stretching out before me, no car and few friends meant that I could not only plow through the other titles, but also dump hours and hours in to D2 to fill the time. It was the perfect storm.

Fast forward 12 years. I’ve got a wife, a kid, a job, a mountain of bills and I still manage to put in more hours on gaming than the average 9-5er. But the difference isn’t just age, or means, the difference is that there are no longer any gaps. As gamers our attention is highly sought after. For reference, look at the wikipedia page for 2000 in videogaming versus the page for 2011. The criteria for inclusion on this list isn’t clear but if we condense the multi-platform titles and use them as a list of notable releases, it’s obvious that there are at least twice as many notable titles vying for our attention and that’s ignoring the vast amount of cheap but fun indie games that would further weight 2011 in comparison. The point is that now, in 2012, no gamer can honestly complain about having nothing to play. AAA titles abound. $2-$5 fun games show up on Steam every day and don’t even require decent PCs to play. Free to play MMORPGs are everywhere. That’s not even counting the huge backlog of video games from the past decade that you can pick up for a song (although in 2000 you had the entire 90s canon to fallback on too). Together with the fact we’re all older and have less time, there’s no need for a Diablo game to fill in your time between releases because there is no time between releases anymore

Without the need for an endless game to return to there is one thing that would hold a player’s attention in this cascade of games and that’s community. The reason that MMOs are so popular and have such a devoted player base is that you join and play with hundreds of other people, form guilds/factions/organizations as well as digital friendships. The same applies for FPS games with their clans. This social aspect is what makes players consider returning even after getting tempted away to another game for awhile. Ironically, social features – the very thing that might’ve redeemed D3 in face of a rocky start and its many other problems – are practically non-existent. The entire experience is isolating and many player actually complain that working with a group makes the game more of a boring grind rather than less because of the tendency for public players to be undergeared and uncoordinated. MMOs are now where people go to socialize, meet up, quest and battle. D3 offers none of those things compellingly. In fact, the lack of social features blows a hole in the end game that’s larger than just poor itemization. Without the ability to show off, get ranked, or PvP, what’s the point in continuing to optimize your gear? After all, you beat all of the story content before you even hit the half-way mark to level 60. Even if you want to beat it on the highest difficulty, that doesn’t take the best items with the best rolls in the game. Nobody grinds for hours and hours solely to beat end mobs just a little bit faster.

So, stripped of the role as a fallback game (because we don’t need them anymore), and stripped of the social features that entice players to return, what’s left? The answer is a pretty mediocre game. The gameplay and graphics are brilliant, but the story is a joke and the auction house has replaced the greatest feeling in Diablo (finding a great item) with the chore of gathering gold and going shopping.