Noise

Horizon Zero Chill

Chris 2 Comments

I’m going to preface this by saying I really enjoy playing this game. No matter what else I say, and I’ve got a lot to say, I really enjoy playing this game and can’t wait to keep playing it once I’ve finished creating my blog buffer.  The combat is rewarding, all of the action moves feel incredible, and the lore is just waiting for you to stumble over it. The skills you can unlock by leveling up feel diverse and any one of them can have an incredible (positive) impact on my play style.

I’ll admit my first impressions weren’t super positive. Having never owned a PlayStation anything, I consistently bear a minor grudge against all exclusive games on a platform I never intend to buy. A grudge that grows in size depending on how cool the game looks. Sure, I have access to one now since one of my roommates owns a PS4, but the game looked so cool when it came out that I made myself wait about four months before I bought it. Somehow, I managed to avoid all spoilers for the game, so I was essentially going in blind other than what turned out to be a few unfortunate comparisons to Breath of the Wild.

I say unfortunate because the comparison does Horizon Zero Dawn no favors. HZD is much more focused on lore and story-telling. Characters will constantly tell you all sorts of really interesting information about the world and what has happened in its recent history. Also, and this was the biggest problem for me, you can’t climb everything. There were so many times I had to settle for hopping up a pile of boulders or finding a way around the cliff rather than just being able to scale it. It isn’t really a problem given HZD’s preference to make you feel like there’s danger around every corner, so being forced to walk around more requires you to get really good at sneaking or decent enough at combat that you can eliminate several robo-beasts as you’re trying to find a path that leads up to the top of the cliff. Or ruined skyscrapers (which are so freaking cool).

Probably the best comparison between HZD and BotW is in their atmospheres. I absolutely love the atmosphere of HZD. Both maintain an air of neglect, decay, and loss but BotW veers toward melancholy and then focuses on what is now gone forever while HZD turns toward attempts to understand the mysterious and forgotten past. Around every corner is some relic of a past that is slowly revealed through text or audio dumps that hint at what was going on in the world before civilization collapsed. Everything from the various machines you encounter to the remnants of cities or bases you can explore works to paint a picture of a world that was headed toward the collapse you know happened.

One thing that I’m still on the fence about, which is the reason for the title, is how every robo-creature you kill lets out a keening scream as it dies. It is a really nice effect, making each of the kills feel rewarding and real, but stealth kills also result in loud noises and nothing seems to notice the death cries of anything. If you stand around and gawk once you’ve killed something, THEN something might notice you. There seems to be almost no concept of noise and some of the line-of-sight stuff can be confusing, too. You can walk within a dozen feet of something and it won’t notice you, but it’ll watch you from a mile away if it noticed you and ran away, no matter how much you attempt to sneak or hide.

I have a few other gripes, but it’s mostly stuff about what I prefer in video games. Stuff like particular movements the character models make, word choices and personality stuff, the way they wrote some of the lore. Nothing of importance. Any negativity is far-outweighed by how much fun it is to sneak around and look for new lore. I can’t marathon it the way I could marathon BotW, but HZD is definitely something I try to play for at least a little bit every day. If you haven’t played it yet and have the means to do so, I suggest picking up the complete edition and playing your heart out.

And Lo, the Silence is Broken

Chris 2 Comments

I’ve always been a fan of silence. There are many different types and I love most of them. The noisy silence one finds in the deep woods or the countryside, where all the noises of city live and humanity are gone, no longer hovering just below hearing like an invisible weight dragging us down but replaced with the cacophony that is nature. The soft silence of a quiet afternoon as the fans whir and the whisper of cars on the distant highway is only interrupted by the drone of an airplane heading to the airport. The heavy silence of a moment shared between two people as they recognize the depth of what lies between them and the strength they find in each other. The quiet silence of a good book as the rest of the world fades away and all you are is subsumed by the story unfolding between the quietly rustling silence.

There are a few I don’t like, some that I find every so often that seem to make me more miserable and depressed than I truly expected. The painful silence of two in the morning that weighs down the world and all of its problems, threatening solitude and loneliness without end. The mournful silence of hotel rooms in the quiet glow of a busy city that seeps through the curtains no matter how tightly they’re closed, weeping as it tells the tales of all the lonesome nights spent staring at the textured ceiling. The yawing silence that grows between people who have no more words for each other, who can only seem to hold up what once was and is now broken while bemoaning their inability to restore it.

I like silence, despite how deeply it can sometimes cut, because it gives me a chance to reflect and let my mind wander. I spend so much time just trying to get from one day to the next that I have an awful tendency to completely ignore what is going on in my head. Unraveling that mess can be a painful or exhausting experience. Work drains me more than anything else I’ve ever done and I don’t always have a lot of energy to spare outside of it. As a result, I tend to enforce an internal silence by removing all of my external ones, filling my life with noise and life so I don’t have the ability to look inside.

When I have a less stressful day or I get to the point where ignoring my internal self is no longer an option, I will take the time to create a comfortable silence for me to reflect in. Today, that silence is whistling wind, no music, and the quiet tap of my keys (plus the annoying screech of my sticky spacebar whenever I hit it off-center). It is my first silence in a couple of weeks, almost, and I’m taking the time to reflect a little bit on all the changes in my life. I’ve been in Madison, Wisconsin for almost 3 years now and I’ve been through a lot to get here. I’ve lost contact with people and let friendships diminish. I’ve renewed contact with other people and strengthened other relationships, not to mention started entirely new ones. I’ve learned a lot about myself even if there are a lot of things I learned before that I need to be constantly reminded of.

The origin of today’s blog also lies in a silence. I hadn’t talked to a very good friend of mine in years and he messaged me out of the blue today. We started catching up and when we talked about my writing, he had a lot of positive things to say in addition to having complete faith that I’d eventually finish and publish one of my novels. It was not only nice to be speaking to my friend again (you know who you are), but it was an excellent reminder that I’ve been working toward the next major step in my life for years. I’ve been writing since high school and I’ve constantly been improving. I can write faster now and at a much higher quality than I could have ever achieved with editing. I have written at least a million words just in terms of creative writing projects. My bigger book projects alone get me well over halfway there, not to mention the hundreds of short stories, unfinished novel ideas, and practice drafts of random situations.

Silence is good. In my life, at least, it helps more than it hurts. However, there is always a time to break a silence and I think today is as good a day as any. So thank you friend, who is hopefully reading this, because you gave me the push I needed today by breaking our silence. I am not ready to be specific (sorry, I know, vaguebooking sucks), but I can promise anyone who follows me will see the results in the coming months.

 

Silence, Agency, and Why You Just Need to Shout Sometimes

Chris Leave a comment

I’ve never been very good at maintaining a blog. I’m hoping this one will stick because I’ve come to realize some important things since the last time I tried to keep one up, but I suppose only time will tell.

The biggest problem I run into isn’t my own laziness despite the fact that I blame my own laziness literally every chance I can. I’ve got beard because shaving takes too much time. I had long hair because regular haircuts are a bother. I don’t get much done outside of work because I just want to sit around a bit. People expect less from you if you’re lazy and then you can out perform their wildest expectations with hardly any effort. The real problems behind the “laziness” are much harder to deal with. Not liking the way my neck looks. Being afraid of losing what hair I’ve got left. Trying to save what energy I’ve got left for the drudge that will be tomorrow.

The real problems are harder to face, but that’s how we’re supposed to grow, by working through things like this. The reason, the real reason, I’ve never been good at maintaining a blog is that I’ve always believed that silence is preferable to empty words. I’ve always hated people in classes and, now that I’m in the business world of being an adult, meetings who constantly drone on for little other reason than to enjoy the sound of their own voice. I would much rather maintain my silence and make the few words I used count. I firmly believed that I’d be heard better if I spoke less often.

As anyone with some real-world experience can tell you, that’s a somewhat naive and idealistic view. Usually the people who get heard the best are the ones making all the noise. It’s very easy to overlook a few confident, correct words spoken at just the right time. If you don’t exercise your voice and spend time fighting the windbags, you’re going to lose your agency. When you’re trying to affect some change or maybe just make the world a somewhat better playing, nothing quite defeats you like losing your agency.

Then it snowballs. People listen less and less and even you start to wonder if maybe they don’t have a point. You start to think that maybe no one cares or maybe you don’t matter. You struggle to carry onward, but that little bit of outside feedback is important. Sure, we’re supposed to do these things because they’re intrinsically rewarding or because it’s just the right thing to do, but it is so much easier to do that when we’ve got someone backing us up and giving us a nudge forward. We’re not really meant to go it entirely alone. We’re social creatures. We need a little participation from those around us. Some sort of emotional investment, even if it’s fleeting.

So this is me fighting back against the windbags of the world and of my life. Time to start reasserting myself and restoring the agency I’ve lost in my years of quiet contemplation and lackluster participation. Writing as best as I can with what words I’ve got. So please, pick up the pieces and let’s move on, shall we?