With each post in this mini-feature, I highlight a game from a different country around the world. Keep in mind these aren't necessarily the best or most popular games from each nation, but simply a fitting representative.
After traversing the familiar gaming grounds of the United States, Japan, and Europe, the Global Gaming Spotlight moves south of the Equator. This is really the purpose of my feature--highlighting games made in countries you wouldn't expect so we can expand the horizons of our medium.
Calabouço Tétrico (Portuguese for Tetric Dungeon) is an adaptation of Raph Koster's commentary on the "skin" of games, made by Brazilian designer Raphael Aleixo. Koster wrote about the disconnect between a game's skin and its mechanics, because often hardcore gamers see past the skin. When players see a hooker in Grand Theft Auto, they don't see a blow job; they see a power-up. Mechanics-wise, they're right, but the skin can have a deeper effect.
Aleixo illustrates this with Calabouço Tétrico. When it comes to gameplay, it's simply Tetris with no bells or whistles. But Aleixo changes the skin. Instead of abstract blocks, the player is dropping prisoners into a giant pit. The player-character is the executioner. The prisoners let out a ghastly scream as they're crunched lower into the pit whenever the player clears a line of "blocks." It's jarringly violent.
Is this really so different from Tetris? Aleixo's game tells us that despite the superficiality of a game's skin, it can change the entire tone and meaning. It's also an interesting role reversal where the gameplay stays the same, but the player moves from being the arbitrary protagonist of Tetris to the murderous antagonist of Calabouço Tétrico. When the player loses, the prisoners climb out of the pit and finally attack the executioner. Do we really want to "win" this game?
It's important to highlight video games being made outside the global hubs of North America, East Asia, and Western Europe. South America is only going to get bigger in the gaming landscape over the next decade.
If you watched Brazil's mostly-rookie squad spank the mostly-intact-from-the-World-Cup U.S. soccer team 2-0 last night, you may have seen Bob Bradley's last match as head coach. Since our Round of Sixteen loss to Ghana a month ago, his days have been numbered. Last week I wrote about Soccernomics' analysis of managers, so let's take a gander at Bob "Professor X" Bradley's potential replacement.
The name popping up most is JürgenKlinsmann. As a player, the German helped die Mannschaft conquer the 1990 World Cup and the '96 European Championship (and he played 46 games with Tottenham!). As manager, he coached Germany to third place in the 2006 World Cup, and went on to coach Bayern Munich until '09. He's currently unemployed, but Americans may know him as one of ESPN's analysts during the World Cup this summer (as a side note, say what you will about ESPN, but they handled this World Cup masterfully).
He'd make a great choice. As Soccernomics describes, no matter how much demographics change, continental Western Europe is still the heart of soccer. On average, German and Dutch managers are some of the most successful in the world. Many opponents to Klinsmann taking the job would say they want an American to coach America's team, but nationalism is a crutch. It's sort of an "affirmative action for coaches," where someone will get picked because they're the right nationality instead of because they're right for the job. On a club level, Inter Milan won Champions League this year with a non-Italian manager and a bunch of non-Italian players. Obviously with national teams the players must be from the country, but not the coach.
Klinsmann explained after the U.S. loss to Ghana that one of the biggest issues with U.S. soccer is the whole way our soccer system is structured. Kids are playing in full 11-on-11 games at a very young age and are great team players, but they lack any of the individual skill of greater soccer nations. In countries like Brazil, children simply play on courts and fields alone or with a couple friends, and they don't play full 11-on-11 matches until they're around 12 years old. This gives them not only more individual skill, but better soccer instincts. The fact that Klinsmann could point this all out hugely impressed me. I'm sold on the German for USA.
A more positive note from the hubbub around the U.S.-Brazil match--Nike released a new U.S. Soccer viral video. Watch for yourself:
This is exactly what they should be doing. I feel like this is "Compliment Major Corporations Day" for me, but the commercial represents a ton of money and effort poured into U.S. soccer. I wrote last week about their fantastic work promoting the underdog ideals of "Don't Tread on Me," and it continues with this video. As a film major, I love that Nike consistently creates intricate cinematographic experiences. But why target so much of it specifically at the non-traditional American soccer fan? It's investment toward the future: soccer is on the rise in the United States. The country is becoming more multicultural and soccer-friendly, which rubs off on the rising quality of the U.S. national team, which rubs off on Nike's sales.
Speaking of major corporations' investment toward the future of U.S. soccer, EA Sports revealed today Landon Donovan will be on the cover of FIFA 11 in North America, along with Kaka and... Carlos Vela? Why Carlos Vela of all people? Anyway, this box art is reminiscent of the FIFA 07 cover. Both the first FIFAtitles immediately following a World Cup, they share strikingly similar covers:
-A Brazilian star who plays for a Spanish powerhouse in the middle
-a Mexican player on the left
-Landon Donovan on the right, and
-One of the two players flanking the Brazilian is wearing their national team kit.
It's great to see Donovan in his U.S. shirt on the cover. It's no coincidence, as EA believes the United States will be the biggest market for soccer video games in the future. Englishman Matt Bilbey, VP of EA Sports Football, says: "The U.S. market was our No. 4 in the world four years ago. This year it will be our No. 1 market." I don't know if I believe we'll surpass the U.K. this year, but definitely in the near future. Clearly, EA believes in U.S. soccer.
One issue I have with the cover, though, is their choice of Donovan USA jersey: the blue away kit. It's the one mistake Nike made this year. There's nothing wrong with the shirt itself, but the way it was marketed. The away kit was released months before the equally smart white home kit, and because of this, looking at fans at a game or on the streets, you see far more people wearing blue jerseys than white jerseys. Why would you make the away kit more famous than the home kit? If Nike preferred the blue shirt so much, why didn't they just make it the home shirt? Alas, that's life. And that's why Landon Donovan shows up in blue, not in white, on the cover of FIFA 11.
About a week ago, I reviewed City of God. It was a sprawling 2002 epic about the slums of Rio, and one of the most renowned Brazilian films of all time. Its success led to a TV show called City of Men which ran for four seasons, and in 2007 was adapted into this film of the same name. Fernando Mereilles has moved from director to producer, and the two lead actors carry over from the first film.
City of Men is very well-made. The cinematography in particular is stunning--there are some beautiful shots of the shanty towns lit up at night that were not present in its predecessor.
But unfortunately, it lives in its predecessor's insurmountable shadow. City of God's scope was wider, its message was stronger, its characters more memorable and its child violence more disturbing. City of Men is a great movie, but it would be like making a "pretty good fantasy film" as a spiritual successor to The Lord of the Rings.
City of Men is a solid film on its own and out of filmic context, but in relation to what came before, it's merely a supplement. I started the movie expecting "not nearly as good as the first film, but still good," and that's exactly what I got. The problem with masterpiece cinema is figuring out what comes afterward.
City of God is one of my favorite films because it features children getting shot.
Not that I enjoy watching kids get hurt. It's pretty traumatizing, in fact. But I love what onscreen killing of minors represents.
It shows director Fernando Meirelles doesn't pull punches. This 2002 drama about the slums of Rio de Janeiro is gritty, dark, and depressing, everything a slum movie should be, to the point of making the viewer feel uncomfortable. And it's beautiful.
The film (Cidade de Deus in Portuguese) is rated R, but even still, if I were a distributing company or a movie theater, I think "murdering small children" would be pretty high up there on my Top Ten Things Not to Show Audiences list. Meirelles could've easily taken this scene out of the movie and still had a great piece of filmmaking, but he foregoes potential profits for realism and artistry, and I respect that enormously.
The story follows a kid named Rocket growing up in the "City of God," as the slum is named, in the '60s and '70s. Rocket just wants to leave and become a photographer. But he's surrounded by crime. Although he's the main character and narrator of the film, he really isn't the focus of the movie. He's a vessel for the audience to see what goes on in the Cidade de Deus, children learning to fire a gun almost as soon as they learn to walk. Some kids want to get out, others embrace it; all of them are swallowed up in the violence. The rich people want nothing to do with them, the cops are corrupt, and the children are left to fend for themselves.
There really are no significant adult characters in City of God. Cars are held up by young children with pistols, and the drug cartels and gangs are all created by teenagers. A 12-year-old kid asserts,
"A kid? I smoke, I snort. I've killed and robbed. I'm a man."
The film asks the question, does this make you a man? I couldn't help but think of the endless connections to William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Kids are thrown into the wild and left to their own devices. Trying to create some sort of organized society, they end up killing each other. It's a very Thomas Hobbes way of looking at the world. And as City of God illustrates, it's incredibly circular. If one drug lord is killed, another will take his place. It never ends. Warriors forget why they're fighting, only remember that they have to fight. And it continues to this day.
Calabouço Tétrico - Loodo, 2008 (play it here)
