Has the true meaning of the ending to The Thing been revealed?

A post went up on io9 today about a reddit user who may have revealed the meaning of the ending of John Carpenter's classic The Thing. If you haven't seen the movie then you should probably reevaluate your choices in life, or at least stop reading now because I'm going to be spoiling its awesome ending. Seriously though, you haven't seen The Thing? Come on, you can do better than that.

If you're still reading then I'm assuming you've seen The Thing and recall how at the end Kurt Russell and Keith David are left sipping whiskey and contemplating their assured demise, but it's unclear whether both of them are still human or not. The film ends on a totally awesome and characteristically ambiguous note with the audience left wondering, "Was one of them the thing at the end?" It's the perfect ending for a perfect movie (you can expect a post on this at some point), and one that has resonated with viewers since the film was released in 1982.

UNTIL NOW (maybe) [probably not]

reddit user kleinbl00 posted a comment on a discussion of The Thing describing a conversation with a friend of his about the movie. His friend claims to have worked for and talked to John Carpenter about The Thing, and well... Just check this out:

A friend of mine, back when he was an assistant, spent a great deal of time with John Carpenter doing interviews and the like for video games and comic projects. I was discussing my conversation with Larry Turman with this friend and he said 

"You know, I asked John Carpenter about The Thing." 

"Oh yeah? What did he say?" I asked. 

"He said he never understood where all the confusion came from. The last frame of The Thing is Kurt Russel and Keith David staring each other down, harshly backlit. It's completely, glaringly obvious that Kurt Russel is breathing and Keith David is not." 

I looked at my friend for a minute, soaking it in. Straight from the horse's mouth. 

"That's a pretty subtle cue to expect the audience to absorb having seen severed heads grow spider legs and run around," I said. 

"That's the genius of The Thing," my friend said, and we moved on to other subjects.

Holy. Freaking. Hannah.

Admittedly it's totally a "friend of a friend of mine"-type unsubstantiated anecdote that could be totally fabricated, but even then it'd still be a really cool take. It just makes me want to go back and watch The Thing again and do a frame-by-frame when I get to the final scene. It's also way too cool a story for me not to have shared here.

(reddit via io9)

Racing Game Players Drive Too Fast for "Gentlemen" Competition

In an interesting bit of gaming news, the British GT has banned graduates from Nissan's GT Academy from competing. For those of that aren't car racing/game enthusiasts, there's a lot in that sentence that probably doesn't make much sense, so let me break it down. The British GT Championship is a sports car racing series based (predictably) in the UK. The GT Academy, meanwhile, is an interesting little experiment where the best players of the Gran Turismo games are invited to train/compete in real cars in what essentially amounts to an annual reality television special. It's been going since 2008 and has probably been little more than a PR-stunt, only been notable to those involved/interested. Until now.

Last week the British GT Championship announced that it will not be allowing graduates of the GT Academy to apply for the series' "pro-am" format. By all accounts, this format uses teams that pair a professional driver with a "gentleman driver," AKA a talented amateur who's expected to be good-for-their-experience-level but below the professional level. This difference typically manifests itself in the speed at which both drivers race, with the "gentlemen" amateurs generally coming in at much lower speeds than their professional counterparts. Only last year, GT Academy winner Jann Mardenborough drove at speeds that were on par with his pro-driver partner, Alex Buncombe. The guy who got his start playing Gran Turismo on his Playstation was suddenly driving as fast as the pros.

In response, the British GT Championship has banned this year's GT Academy graduates from competing. British GT series manager Benjamin Franassovici has issued a statement saying,

[GT Academy] has shown itself to be a great way to source raw talent and turn that into real racing talent as we saw in British GT last year with Jann Mardenborough. However Nissan’s ability to find such amazing raw talent means that we cannot accept their full season entry for British GT in 2013. Their new recruits have very little racing experience so they have to be on the lowest performance grade. Their talent, going on Jann’s speed last year, doesn’t reflect this lack of experience so it is not fair to put them up against our Pro/Gentleman grid, the basis of British GT3.

I'm not a fan of racing games, and I don't even care about car racing, but I think this is pretty cool news. Essentially an entire (albeit small) class of video game players have been deemed too talented to compete as amateurs in a real driving competition. That's not only the best marketing that Gran Turismo (subtitled "The Real Racing Simulator") could ever have hoped for, it's an honestly good argument in favour of taking the medium seriously in terms of training potential.

Repost: Why games need colour blind modes

Tyler Wilde at PC Gamer has done a great piece on why games need to incorporate colour-blind modes for visually-impaired gamers. It's well-worth the read so head over there if you've got a moment to spare, and/or check out the video below. It shows the upcoming SimCity reboot (?) with a simulated deuteranopia setting on to demonstrate how colour-blind games see things. It's a very cool and revealing video, and it makes a good case for an argument that has been made many times before: games need to be more accommodating in terms of accessibility so that all gamers can enjoy them.

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'Reposts' are inspired by other articles or blog posts around the Internet. They are used here with accreditation as the basis for short bursts of Max's interests.

Repost: Dead Space 3 Microtransactions Break Internal Logic

Ben Kuchera of the (fantastic) PA Report wrote an interesting post about the recent news that Dead Space 3 will include microtransactions allowing players to purchase materials to craft weapons. The article touches on some of the qualities I most enjoy about the Dead Space series, and so I figured I'd chime in a bit here.

Kuchera notes how the Dead Space games have always been particularly effective at establishing and drawing players into a coherent and self-contained world: the menus appear in the game, all information typically conveyed via a HUD are contained within the game world, etc. The point of all this is to more effectively draw players into the world of the game and hold them there. The most superficial effect of this is to increase players' tension by refusing to allow them to put the action on hold while they access their inventory (as was the convention prior to Dead Space). However, Kuchera argues that this tension is but one symptom of the greater immersion that the game creates by forcing the player to participate in its world in the same way as the fictional characters within it. At no point in the game does the player engage in activity that their fictitious character does not also undertake; in effect the game world is constructed so as to force player immersion by limiting their interactions with the game world to those of their character.

The availability of microtransactions in the upcoming Dead Space 3 breaks this immersion via the deus ex machina availability of crafting materials. When players use a terminal they are told they can access "Downloadable Content" by which "A god-like hand is introduced and drops supplies in the lap of the character." This whole availability breaks the immersion spell that the Dead Space games have so effectively established, and moreover upsets the delicate sense of isolation and desperation that the survival-horror genre is premised upon.

The offending intrusion on Dead Space's fiction.

Kuchera's argument is compelling, and though even he acknowledges the nerdiness of getting hung-up on such a detail, I think it's a significant sacrifice on the part of the developers. A big part of what made Dead Space unique was its uncompromising immersion, forcing them to exist in the game world. It's unfortunate to have that quality diluted for the sake of some extra income and a further attempt at attracting a wider audience by dumbing-down the experience.

Tom Phillips at (the also fantastic) Eurogamer has also chimed in with a counterpoint, arguing that the kind of gamers who will be bothered by this feature are also not the types who are likely to use the it. Rather, Phillips argues, the microtransactions will only be taken advantage of by more casual gamers while more hardcore players will likely ignore them. While I think Phillips is right practically speaking, at the same time I'm more in line with Kuchera in feeling that there's a more significant cost to the sacrifice. I don't think "hardcore gamers" will take advantage of the microtransactions, and while I do feel there's a somewhat legitimate argument to be made against their existence at all I'm perfectly happy to simply ignore them. However the fact that they're implemented in such a way as to break the immersive fiction of the series will bother me if/when I play Dead Space 3. From all accounts the menus make their existence painfully clear so as to attract potential buyers, and that fourth-wall-breaking advertising is necessarily going to take away from the sense of isolation and immersion that the series' horror is based upon.

What do you guys think? Is it too early to tell, is Phillips right and are Kuchera and I just whining EA-haters, or is this a legitimately intrusive dilution of one of Dead Space's most unique qualities?

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'Reposts' are inspired by other articles or blog posts around the Internet. They are used here with accreditation as the basis for short bursts of Max's interests.

Repost: The Alien Beauty of Les Arènes de Picasso

An architecturally-inclined friend of mine pointed me towards Untapped Cities, a site that examines interesting and largely unknown qualities about major travel destinations. It seems sort of like a mix between a cultural blog and Lonely Planet, and that seems like a pretty awesome little niche. In particular I was directed towards a post from January 2012 about mass housing units in the suburbs of Paris, and despite how boring that description sounds it's actually a really cool piece.

The whole article is worth a read but I just want to focus on the bit about Les Arènes de Picasso. It's the building pictured at the top of this post, and as author Charles-Antoine Perrault explains,

In the post-Modernist tradition, Spanish architect Manolo Nuà ±ez Yanowsky intended to break with standardized, functional modern architecture. The overall setting is highly symbolic–the two circular modules are aligned on an axis parallel to the Equator and are meant to represent the wheels of an overturned chariot.

 The building is strikingly unique, especially when you consider that this is a mass housing unit that contains "540 dwellings, a kindergarten, a high school and a few convenience stores." I would love to see this place used as a set in a movie, either in a Bond flick like with Hashima Island in Skyfall (check that link out by the way, it's a really cool story itself) or as a deserted setting in a post-apocalyptic flick à la London at the beginning of 28 Days Later. Sadly, given the fact that Les Arènes de Picasso is a housing unit and at least one school, it's unlikely that it would be used as a film setting. Still though, the design of the place is just so out-there that it would be beautiful to see on film. I could imagine a really interesting tracking shot that takes advantage of the columns seen at the bottom of the image up top. They've got kind of a Sagrada Família vibe (see below), very cool stuff.

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'Reposts' are inspired by other articles or blog posts around the Internet. They are used here with accreditation as the basis for short bursts of Max's interests.