You are not consuming this blog post. It is not being depleted by you so that it will never be available to anyone ever again. Instead, perhaps you are reading it on a large computer screen. Perhaps you’re reading it on a laptop, large or small, sitting on a desk or in your lap. Perhaps you’re reading it on the screen of a tablet computer, or on the small screen of a cellphone. Perhaps it’s been printed out onto paper, maybe a plain letter sheet, or onto the glossy pages of a magazine, and you’re reading it off that. Perhaps you’re reading it aloud to a group of people, or perhaps you’re in that group of people, having it read aloud to you. But whatever you’re doing as these words enter your brain, you’re most certainly not consuming any content.

There is no such thing as content. There is no content industry full of content creators who create consumable content for content consumers. Instead, there is a diverse field of people, young and old, amateur and professional, communicating and manifesting ideas and information using a wide variety of methods and techniques. The end products of these efforts may be in the form of text, imagery, sound, or interactive experience, but none can be categorized as a generic, consumable commodity known as “content.”

If you are an artist, you are not a content creator. Perhaps you’re a painter, a musician, a filmmaker, a novelist, a comedian, a dramatist, a playwright, a game designer, a sculptor, a photographer, an animator, a puppeteer, a poet, or perhaps you’re a combination of all these things and more, but you do not create content. You make art.

If you are a journalist, you are not a content creator. You may report your stories through written words, through spoken words, through pictures, through video footage, through motion graphics, or a fusion of all these media, but you do not create content. You do journalism.

If you are an entertainer, you are not a content creator. You may entertain by telling a story, by doing a dance, by making people laugh, or by recording your conversations with fascinating people, but whether you broadcast this entertaining act with pictures, sound, or anything else, you do not create content. You do entertainment.

If you are an educator, you are not a content creator. You may write informative articles for an encyclopedia, deliver an enlightening speech to an eager audience, or create a presentation with charts and graphics, but however it is that you communicate your knowledge, you do not create content. You teach lessons.

All of these things are expressions of human thought, and yet rather than respecting their nuances, their diversity, and their individual importance, we marginalize them with our language, relegating all of what makes us unique as human beings to the generic, soulless, meaningless, newspeak descriptor of “content,” and their authors to a status of “content creators”. Yet, we do not refer to architects, carpenters, industrial designers, and the forces of nature themselves as “object creators”, and rarely, if ever, do we collectively refer to the results of their efforts as “objects”.

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to This is Not Content; This is a Blog Post.
This work is published from: United States.

I decided to give it a try, and I’ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I’ll bet your life on the road today and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients. The experience is as exhilarating and possibly confusing as a first step in the right direction for them to become more involved in their children can vary greatly due to company policy and procedures for their use. Unfortunately, it’s all about themselves and their families in their homes and their lives are nothing.

The problem is that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them all. Google Scribe of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research: Online Press Releases and Newsletters fast and elegant 3D photo gallery on their website and buy this product again and again and I’ma let you finish. There are no comments for this user yet and can not believe that there is anything… I’ma get you something to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them.

To be fair, there are not any posts in the last few years and I have been able to find anything in these search results from RT on your Google searches by subscribing to the feed via email to state their case and their ownership of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books. I’m sure that some people might believe that they are not therefore to be understood that these embodiments are provided solely by this site are property of their respective owners, but with their own unique style of musical composition and performance of their duties and responsibilities of their jobs and their proportion against the total number of page views delivered based on the seller and the listing broker as an agent of the present invention is to provide and maintain their own calendars and schedules for their employees.

There is a certain element of surrealism to the results, and you can not print this page this way, they can become and to remain in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached. It’s almost as if Andre Breton had anything to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them. Google Scribe is a haunting look into the digital psyche of the American Chemical Society and American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Pain Society Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved • Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

As an actual writing aid, though, I don’t find it very useful.

It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.

Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.

Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.

So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).

It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.

So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?

Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.

So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.

You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.

I mean, like, duh.

Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.

My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:

It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.

Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.

Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.

WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Hit the jump for why:

Let’s look at what occurs up until that point. Jake has gained the trust of the Na’vi, he and Ney’tiri have fallen in love, and he’s beginning to feel “like out there [in the avatar] is the true world, and in here [in his human body] is the dream.” But there’s nothing he can do to stop the military from coming to blow up the Na’vi’s Hometree. The attack is devastating, and the Na’vi know that Jake was fully aware it was coming. Ney’tiri rejects him, says he will never be one of them. It’s heartbreaking. Tragic. The evil corporation with the big guns killed the innocent natives, destroyed the beautiful forest, and tore Jake away from the woman he loved, all so they could mine a stupid rock.

If the movie ended there, everyone in the audience would leave with one thing on their mind: blood for oil is a horrible thing. Look what it did to the Na’vi. Look what it did to our boy Jake.

But no, the story keeps going. Jake escapes and gets back in his avatar body to find that the Na’vi are still alive and well (albeit badly beaten and grieving for their lost people), and all he needs to do to become “one of them” again is to ride on the back of a really big dragon. He leads them into battle against the humans, and apparently their advanced technology is no match for flying lizards, rhinoceroses, and kitty people with bows and arrows (the same kitty people with the same bows and arrows that didn’t do squat just a few scenes before, but now they’re angry kitty people, so it totally works). In the end, the evil humans are defeated, and the kitty people live happily ever after with Jake among them.

So, what is the audience thinking now? Holy shit, we just saw dragons killing helicopters. That was cool. It was like Reign of Fire, but fucking awesome instead of fucking awful.

Yes, the battle scene was awesome, but what happened to the anti-war, anti-corporate, environmentalist message? Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I guess the whole Iraq thing really does suck. Anyway, remember when that angry cat guy just like jumped onto the ship and shot like seventeen soldiers with his bow? That was fucking sweet!!!!!!

If James Cameron had ended Avatar on a horribly tragic but realistic note, it would have been a bold, ballsy, daring move, and an extremely effective one at that. Most if not all arguments about the story being derivative and cliché would be rendered moot, and its message would pack more of a punch than any recent film of its type in recent memory. It would impress not only with its visual technology, but with its audacious injection of seriousness and maturity into a blockbuster. Here would be a big-budget, spectacular film telling us that a hero cannot save the day; only we, the people, can do so by preventing the horrors just witnessed in glorious 3D from ever occurring in reality. In terms of making pacifists out of us, “war is a drug” has nothing on that.

Alas, dragons killing helicopters is a much more impressive demonstration of glorious 3D technology. It’s not Best Picture material, though.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.

To clarify, the word I am referring to is not “kun-TENT,” which is an adjective (or less often, a verb) related to a state of peaceful satisfaction. I am referring to “KHAN-tent,” the noun, which is quite appropriately pronounced similarly to an evil dude that makes William Shatner scream loudly. This word, a bastardization of “contents,” is a generic term for some generic thing that you shove into a generic container, generally speaking. But lately, as part of media conglomerates’ transformation into Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, this generic product term has come to refer to cultural works: music, movies, news, games, photos, and anything else containing some form of digestible information and/or artistry.

It groups together everything creative in this world as some mundane product like a dishwasher or a lampshade. Casablanca is not a lampshade.

Well, of course it’s not. Isn’t that obvious? Nobody who watches movies thinks of them as generic objects, nor do they think that of news articles or Facebook photos. So why is anyone referring to them as if they are?

Perhaps from a business standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to consider something you’re trying to sell as a product or commodity. That jives with economic theories of supply and demand: you have a supply that you sell to meet the demand, at a price determined by whether demand is higher or lower than supply.

This makes sense.

Uhhhhhhh...

But again, this is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the business of “content creation”. That is the preeminent reason why this horrible word needs to stop being used: it doesn’t make sense in any context.

So what generic lump-together term should we use instead? How about we, uh, don’t? A video is a video, a song is a song, a film is a film, an article is an article, and a photo is a freaking photo, god dammit. And in the context of video games, it is not “downloadable content.” It is add-on levels or skins or models or whatever.

“Media” is a word guilty of most of the same things, but it’s not nearly as awful. “Media,” after all, refers to something that’s in a medium (i.e. film or sound or pixels or words or the ashes of your dead grandmother), as opposed to the “content” of some shipping crate in a warehouse. It’s still not great, but at least it’s palatable.

Keep in mind there are appropriate uses of the word “content,” such as “explicit content,” “violent content,” etc. This use is permissible; it’s more dignified than the word “stuff,” and it’s used to describe something that is harmful to our children.

On Monday, I dismissed Microsoft’s Project Natal’s possibility to be the most revolutionary thing since sliced clichés, saying it was little more than both the good and bad qualities of the Wii taken to the extreme. On reflection, I’ve come to an interesting realization: my assumption that Natal was thought up by stupid marketers was a reaction to the fact that it was stupidly marketed.

The video which played the role of Project Natal’s big reveal featured many awful, awful uses of the technology, each doomed to failure without any haptic feedback: the discomfort caused by holding an imaginary steering wheel and hovering your foot over an imaginary gas pedal would be intense; throwing punches at an imaginary man (and getting occasionally punched back) would instantly de-immerse the player when a blow connects, changing the position of their avatar’s limbs but not theirs; jumping on an imaginary skateboard will do a better job of knocking fragile objects off shelves than conveying a crucial sense of balance. While not as important when using a gamepad, you need haptic feedback, not just visual, when the controls are haptic — no edges of mirrors or clashes of zenos can compensate anymore.

Where Natal will succeed is outside of classic “action” gameplay. That trivia game concept, for instance, could work quite nicely with Natal. And Milo (featured in this article’s video) is pretty self-explanatory. The technology to feel imaginary objects and experience imaginary changes in balance doesn’t exist yet (that I’ve heard of), but it’s not important in these types of games. Games in which a player is supposed to be moving fast, holding objects that weigh anything, getting jostled around, and similar physical things are not suitable for Natal. They will be fun until the novelty factor wears off, which won’t take long.

In a way, this is a good thing; while nothing is inherently wrong with video games focused on fast action and/or violence, the market is oversaturated with them. That’s not to say 99% of recent games are twitch-actiony (and sometimes violent, because that’s a compelling reason for fast action), just 99% of recent character-driven games. There are a lot of recent games which don’t focus on the player’s reflexes, but most don’t give the player very deep control of a character; they cast the player as an invisible “controller” or, rarely, simplify the player’s control of their single character. With Natal, though, game designers can allow the player to inhabit every aspect of a character’s body. The limitations come from physical space, as walking away from (or into) the screen is impossible and long periods of manipulating imaginary objects can be awkward and uncomfortable (in case I haven’t made the latter clear, pretend you’re riding a subway train and grab onto an imaginary bar overhead for ten minutes; stop beforehand when your arm gets tired). These limitations make these action games impossible to Natalize in an enjoyable way, so the only way to take advantage of its new capabilities is with new, fresh types of games. Milo is a very good example.

That’s not to say people won’t try to make Natal-based fighting games and racing games, and that’s not to say they won’t pass the farce that is Quality Assurance and make their way to store shelves. Those games will just quickly fall into the bargain bin and get terrible reviews. Meanwhile, people with actual talent will bring us games that don’t try to fight against Natal’s limitations, and turn out to be lots of fun.

The only thing that still concerns me is that there is still a distressingly low number of Wii games that use its motion sensors well, and a distressingly high number of games that still don’t get it. This is after three years, and those good Wii games still mix in some traditional control methods. Natal has zero traditional methods of control, so everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up. The potential for miserable failure by talentless hack developers forever set in the ways of their more skilled predecessors is even higher, and even veteran designers may have some trouble coming to terms with the fact that this thing is not good for first-person shooters.

For that reason, I see Sony’s motion control effort as being more successful, at least in the next several years. While it can only track two hands and doesn’t appear to recognize facial expressions, the player still has buttons to press, and still has something physical to hold. This is a much better way of adding motion-sensing to traditional action games; it could be used mostly for positioning, with much of the long-distance movement and object manipulation — which would be awkward for Natal — being controlled by buttons and analog sticks. This is nice because there will always be a place for video games about fighting, running, and/or jumping; they’re fun, they relieve stress (which, for violent games, is synonymous with the desire to partake in their real-world equivalents), and they speak to the primal instinct that all animals — a group which humans belong to, don’t forget — have. At the same time, it may serve as a stepping stone for designers who may not have a good idea about how to make use of Natal.

But based on the current push for games to be released on the 360 and PS3 and play the same way (which is good, because distinct platforms do nothing but limit the number of people who can play a game), we’ll likely see some Natal-optimized controllers on the market.

By the way, “Project Natal” is still a terrible name, but it sounds like it’s eventually going to be changed to something more generic.

With that said, I will now elaborate on all the things that infuriate me about the game, some new to The Sims 3, and some with roots that go all the way back to the very first game. There are plenty of reviews, like this one, this other one, and this third one from mainstream game journalists, which detail the wonderful experiences you can have with this game, so this is not going to be one of them. Instead, I am going to rant and rave about every tiny little problem the game has simply because someone has to.

My gripes come in three categories: problems with the structure of the new “living world” gameplay, small components that are (still) inexplicably missing or broken, and the fact that EA’s push for Sims 3 machinima has completely missed the point.


In order to understand some of the issues with The Sims 3, you need to know what’s new. Previously, the game was modeled on individual families: play as one household of sims in one location at a time. Every other location is frozen in time. Your sims can leave the house to visit restaurants, stores, and other such locations, but this freezes time back at the house. This created many peculiar situations, such as a father going out to the bar at noon, staying there until 3 AM, then returning home exhausted while it was still noon and the kids aren’t even home from school. The Sims 2 exacerbated this problem now that sims could grow old and die, creating strange situations in which a teenage boy and a girl could fall in love, but the girl would never grow older because she was a non-player character.

These issues are fixed in The Sims 3, as the entire neighborhood is being simulated all at once. A sim can go out shopping at 3 and come home at 8, and it’ll be 8 when they get home. In the meantime, anyone else still at home will have been continuing to live their lives. This comes with the added bonus of not having nearly as many loading screens to sit through. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood will develop relationships, grow older, get married, move in, move out, have children, and pretty much everything except get promoted at work. I have no idea what’s up with that last one, as my police lieutenant character still has a “Traffic Cop” as a boss. In any case, this changes the overall feel of the game for the better while creating a great deal of its own unique problems.

The time-freezing of The Sims and The Sims 2 was certainly strange, but at least it gave players enough time to do what they wanted. Because of the compressed representation of time in The Sims (one sim minute is roughly 2 seconds real-time), it was quite difficult to juggle a career, a social life, and three-hour periods of making a fucking sandwich. Therefore, the best way to meet new people and socialize with them was often to go downtown. A sim can spend eight hours downtown to get to know three new people (because with The Sims’ weird representation of time, that’s how long it takes), and upon returning home there’s still enough time to use the bathroom before work the next day.

In The Sims 3, this is no longer an option. You have 48 (real world-time) minutes in a day, and that’s it. Given that job performance in The Sims 3 relies more on building up skills (which can be accomplished by reading books, playing chess, or painting pictures — for seventeen hours), and becoming friends with others seems to take much longer, maintaining both a job and a social life is extremely difficult. It’s just like real life, except The Sims has always been at its best when it sacrifices gritty realism for fun.

That’s not to say the increased realism in The Sims 3 is always a bad thing. The new mood system seems far more realistic than before; previously, a sim’s mood was calculated based solely on how full eight green bars were: Hunger, Energy, Comfort, Bladder, Hygiene, Social, Fun, and Room (how pretty the room they’re in is). Comfort and Room have been axed, and the green bars now just serve as a guideline for “power users.” The actual mood of a sim is now determined by “moodlets,” or little things with affect the mood one way or the other. Some of these are direct results of how full or empty these green bars are (i.e. “hungry” or “tired”); others are related to specific events (i.e. “stir crazy” from not having left the house, or “new car smell” from driving in a recently bought car, “dirty surroundings” from the sink being unclean, etc.). This is similar to the new personality system, built upon five “traits” as opposed to a bunch of overly restrictive statistics. It all makes a lot more sense, and it’s unfortunate that the rest of the long-broken systems in The Sims weren’t given such an overhaul.

Going back to the issue of time, specifically that it takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich, it still takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich. It also takes 30 minutes for a sim to get out of bed (which is kind of realistic, but not very convincing when the animation for putting one’s feet on the floor is playing for about 20 of them). It also takes about an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, 30 minutes to wash that one bowl of cereal, 20 minutes to close a laptop and get out of a chair, and 90 minutes to read a recipe for Philly Cheese Steak. This is probably familiar to long-time Sims players, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been fixed; doubly so because time is an even more scarce resource in The Sims 3.

Oh, might I add that time is also still taken up by completely stupid, useless things? Another familiar thing to veteran Sims players is the tendency of sims to waste 45 minutes waving their hands angrily to the almighty hand of the player because they’re so tired, which is 45 minutes they could have spent getting into bed like the player told them to 55 minutes ago. This still occurs. It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. I know it’s a trademark of The Sims, but it was infuriating in 2000 and is still infuriating in 2009.

In addition, it still takes about four hours for two sims going in opposite directions down a narrow hallway to figure out how to move past one another. This time, though, such attempts will not automatically be canceled if they can’t figure out how to do it. There were several instances in which after four in-game hours of watching two sims tap their feet waiting for the other to move, I had to cancel a long agenda of using the toilet, washing hands, then making some dinner in order to tell a couple of idiots which direction to walk in. Again, a familiar experience for a veteran Sims player, and it will continue to be.

Another long-lasting problem arises in the character creation tools. The Sims 3′s Create-A-Sim mode is much more powerful, allowing a much wider variety of faces, body types, skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, and clothing colors. It has a few minor quirks — it’s not very clear that clicking the big checkmark button will prevent you from making any changes to anything ever again, for example — but it’s wonderful overall. Except, of course, for the fact that the player still cannot change a sim’s height. Every adult sim is just as tall as every other adult sim, and every child is just as tall as every other child. This severely limits a player’s ability to create accurate representations of themselves or others; it’s unfortunate because A) everything else is so much more customizable and B) this feature is available for frickin’ Nintendo Miis.

Other small issues are abound, and boggle the mind just as much as to why they turned out the way they are. Of particular note is the lack of hot tubs or diving boards, two types of objects which were available in both The Sims and The Sims 2 without any of the overpriced expansions. It’s quite confusing, and I sincerely hope that EA adds these back in free of charge. All in all, The Sims 3 has bits of confusing omissions or shortcomings which add up quickly.

All of that said, The Sims 3 is, as I mentioned, lots and lots of fun. It’s an addictive game that will suck you in, and its shortcomings aren’t major enough to derail the whole experience. On the other hand, if EA’s machinima-related hype got you interested, prepare yourself for an appalling anticlimax.

The Sims 3 can capture video of your sims doing their thing. It also includes a fairly basic video editor capable of amateurish-looking titles and transitions. That’s it.

Normally, a filmmaker writes a script before shooting, not the other way around. If you’d like to work the other way around, then The Sims 3 might work for your machinima film. Otherwise, prepare for a lot more work and frustration than it’s worth. Because The Sims 3 is always behaving as if it’s a game, and not a filmmaking tool, you are completely at the mercy of the game state in terms of what animation you can produce. Would you like the image of a leaking sink faucet in the background? Use the sink over and over and hope it breaks. Do you need two characters to have a fistfight? Sorry, they like each other too much. How about making a sim look in a particular direction? Good luck waiting for that to happen. Even getting my doppelganger sim to slam his head against the desk for the screenshot at the beginning of this post required too much waiting around and too much difficulty in pausing the game at the right moment. And don’t get me started on maintaining continuity between shots of dialogue; the randomized animations and inability to shoot with two cameras at once complicates that far too much.

It doesn’t have to be that way at all. It would be fairly trivial to give filmmakers a tool to trigger whatever situation they like; the developers likely use such a thing themselves for testing purposes anyway. Make it only available in a mode where the overall game isn’t affected, and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, because of this limitation, The Sims 3 is not likely to be used for a lot of good machinima. Anything that doesn’t look crude or uninspired takes a lot of unnecessary effort, often more effort than directing real actors.

The state of The Sims 3′s machinima tools is very sad. There are thousands of creative people without the ability to get actors or sets or cameras, and could effectively tell their story if only The Sims 3 had a better tool set. Without it, The Sims 3 machinima can only tell a very limited number of stories without looking laughably artificial. Perhaps it’s all right to some people, because nobody expects video game animation to hold a candle to carefully crafted animation or acting. The Sims 3, with such high quality character animation in-game, had an opportunity to change those expectations, and it missed it completely.

On a similar note, apparently absent, again, is access to the game’s scripting language for creating new types of things to buy or new gameplay. The rationale for this in The Sims 1-era was that some people might abuse the system and cause everyone in a player’s game to die horribly, and besides, the average player, no matter how dedicated and creative, wouldn’t comprehend programming. The arguments against this still apply today, the former refuted by the fact that reloading saved games and word spreading fast on the Internet prevents such damage, and the latter is complete and utter bullshit.

As a game, in and of itself, The Sims 3 has flaws, like any other game, while still being an enormously fun experience. Any more balanced review than mine will be happy to tell you why, and if you’ve ever enjoyed a Sims game before, you already have a pretty good idea. As a creative tool, The Sims 3 serves as a gateway drug for people to become artists, quickly catapulting them into the camp of people frustrated with how limited ones options are. In other words, it’s the first Sims for a new generation, and it’s likely to get even more millions of people hooked. But there are so many things which could have been better, both new problems and things that really should have been addressed after nine years.

Oh, and what the hell is with the musical score in The Sims 3? What was wrong with the excellent Mark Mothersbaugh soundtrack in the second one? The best song in the entirety of The Sims 3 is the one remix of a Sims 2 song, and the rest are like annoyingly cliché Broadway showtunes. Sorry, I’ll stop.

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage.
[...]
I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Oh, poor pitiful you, Mr. Richtel. Your entire toolbox of tired plot devices that have been done to death is ruined, forcing you to come up with new and interesting ideas. How awful. At this rate, TV producers won’t be able to have computers make sci-fi beeping noises when someone uses Photoshop. Soon you’ll have to write thrillers where characters die because their partner’s iPhone “fixed” an important “typo.” Or romantic comedies where a woman gets angry at her husband because he can’t explain what he was really doing last night with her best friend in 140 characters, minus her Twitter name. It would be terrible!

For the record, on the off chance that Mr. Richtel’s cubicle is five feet away from my mother’s, I don’t actually think he’s a lazy, whiny hack, and I’m just coming off that way to appeal to the Gawker readers. The column makes some interesting points and brings up some valid issues, though it doesn’t seem to discuss many solutions to them other than “blow up the cellphone tower.” In this day and age, where everyone is always connected, that’s the kind of plot device that people can’t relate to.

So what exactly cost so much money? Without access to Pixar’s financial records, I’ll take a few guesses. But the short answer is that they’re spending way more money than they need to.

UPDATE: I guess this piece got high up in some common Google query, because I’ve had a lot of vicious comments on it over the years. So let me explain: This article is from 2009. I was nineteen when I wrote it. I also wrote this follow-up piece clarifying what I meant to say, which apparently isn’t as popular on the Googletubes. Anyway, this is a terrible post. I was trying to encourage people to innovate with low-cost animation, but the following is a completely ridiculous way of saying that. Please stop getting angry at me.

I’d imagine, from my experience, that some of the the biggest expenses in filmmaking are film stock, set construction, stunt coordination, and other tangible materials. Pixar requires none of that. The only materials they really need to buy are computer parts, which are relatively cheap on their own and downright bargains when bought in bulk. Yes, their concept artists need clay and paint and such, but that hardly seems like it would cost more than a couple thousand, even for a gigantic team of the kind of overzealous madmen who spend more than a week in an art school (i.e. me).

So that brings us to visual effects, which is essentially 100% of what you see on the screen. Yes, WALL-E and Happy Feet had live action bits superimposed, but anyone with access to a green screen and a DVX can imitate those. The actual CGI, though, is achieved by making a bunch of 3D models, texturing them, arranging them in a world, moving them around, and then pointing a virtual “camera” at various parts of the world to get the images you need.

It may sound simple (save for the whole “talent” part in terms of modeling, texturing, and animating), but to create the impressive visuals, Pixar needed a very large amount of polygons. Add to that the calculations necessary for lighting, post-processing (focus, motion blur, etc.), and spitting that out into 24 images per second at 4000 pixels wide, and you have something that requires a lot of very expensive computers to eat a lot of expensive electricity for a very long time.

Except it actually is as simple as I made it sound in the paragraph before that. Take a look at this video:

Impressive visuals. If you had never heard of Team Fortress 2, and that video cut off after the first 30 seconds, wouldn’t you imagine that perhaps this was an upcoming Pixar film (albeit more violent than their previous efforts)?

Now, obviously, this is actually a promotional video for a game. Let’s take a look at the game’s graphics…

Obviously not quite as impressive, but you’d be hard pressed to say that the Scout model in the game isn’t the same one in the Pixar-quality promo video. In fact, the line between the two is very blurry — specifically the fact that the promo video has more blur effects based on motion and focus. Well, that’s because it’s absolutely true.

Meet the Scout, rendered in Team Fortress 2, contains a significantly smaller amount of polygons on screen at a time than a Pixar movie like, say, The Incredibles. Can you tell?

On close inspection, you can see that the Team Fortress 2 models are slightly more jagged than Mr. Incredible. However, it’s unlikely that you’d notice this unless you were looking for it in a freeze frame. In addition, Team Fortress 2′s models are actually far less complicated than those from many other video games. Take, for example, BioWare’s Mass Effect:

(Image from Gamespot)

There, slightly more complex models and the jaggedness is solved, but still significantly less intense than what Pixar does. And most blockbuster video games cost things that are considered “indie budgets” to Hollywood: Gears of War cost $10 million, $5 million less than the pretty much indie-produced film Slumdog Millionaire. And as you can see in that article, many games cost “crazy figures” like $30 million, which is still pocket change to Hollywood. Off-season movies like Taken cost somewhere around $25 million, for god’s sake. Now, if you were to take all the work on Gears of War related to getting the thing to run smoothly on an Xbox 360, and channel all that into putting the camera in the right places, pressing “render,” and letting three laptops run for 10 hours to give you a 2 hour movie, I’d imagine it would cost even less.

So now we’ve thoroughly debunked the myth that CGI is inherently expensive. What’s left? A-list voice talent? Yeah, I can see that being up there. And marketing costs a lot. Indie filmmakers would probably replace those two strategies “five of my friends” and “Twitter,” respectively, but I understand Hollywood’s obsession with such luxuries. That can’t account for all $180 million, though, can it?

Well, in addition to Pixar’s overkill in terms of hardware and technical complexity, they employ a gigantic amount of people, paying them salaries and such. That’s probably necessary because of the technical complexity of their animation.

In theory, a team of four passionate geeks who already have MacBook Pros and copies of Maya, Photoshop, and Final Cut could probably make a Pixar-quality film in their spare time. Perhaps it’s the massive, daunting complexity of Pixar films that discourage budding independent filmmakers from trying to compete using more efficient methods.

Or maybe they’re all developing video games instead.