The Decline and Fall of Angry Birds

I came across a Business Insider article talking about the resignation of Rovio (Angry Birds) CEO Mikael Hed. Basically, the company is tanking because they bet it all on one franchise which they thought would spawn multimedia success with movie tie-ins, merchandise, etc. to rival Disney’s best mascot-promotion efforts. As it turns out, this particular bubble has burst magnificently. BI’s diagnosis of the situation is, in short, that

“The mobile games business is notoriously difficult: Games are essentially fads, and the Angry Birds fad is long over — eclipsed in part by Supercell’s Clash of Clans and King’s Candy Crush Saga.”

So the mobile games industry is singularly flighty. Nothing we don’t already know. What’s particularly troubling about the widespread penetration of this sector of the gaming industry is the values it represents: slavish imitation, pandering, and, most importantly, manipulation.

Visions of the Ineffable in Japanese Popular Media

“[Yugen or ‘ineffable grace] is like an autumn evening under a colorless expanse of silent sky. Somehow, as if for some reason that we should be able to recall, tears well uncontrollably….When looking at autumn mountains through mist, the view may be indistinct yet have great depth. Although few autumn leaves may be visible through the mist, the view is alluring. The limitless vista created in imagination far surpasses anything one can see more clearly”

Hume, Nancy G., ed. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader. pp 253-54.

Ancient Greek philosophy, figured as a tradition stemming from the person of Socrates, who was perhaps mostly an abstraction, undergirds the entirety of subsequent Western thought, to the extent that Bertrand Russell has referred to the latter as mere footnotes to Plato, Socrates’ successor and dutiful biographer. If Platonism is the wellspring of Occidental thought traditions, the same may be said of East Asian philosophy and Buddhism. Japan lived long in isolation from the world before conflict, commerce, and religion brought it into contact with the Asian continent. It absorbed traditions from mainland China, integrated them into its existing Shinto religious system, and transformed them into something uniquely Japanese, just as China had done with the Indian traditions that became Buddhism.

Game Review: Final Fantasy XIII

Partway through a replay of 2009’s Final Fantasy XIII, recently re-released for Windows PC, I’m starting to think that it’s the most misrepresented and unfairly maligned game of the previous console generation.