Posts by Tag / GAME: Dragon's Crown (2)

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★★★☆☆

Capsule Review: Dragon's Crown

A 2.5D brawler with action RPG elements. You can play alone or via couch co-op, but the game is obviously tuned to favor online co-op - there are six different classes with varying specializations and it’s valuable to have multiple archetypes present, but there’s also a lot of very slow inventory and skill point management that only one local player can do at a time.

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Boobs are Not the Enemy: Video Games and the Male Gaze

Fancy Car
Suppose I’m making a film about street racers. The film’s characters have a great appreciation of cars, so when they first see the fancy new car that just might enable the hero to win the race, there’s an establishing shot with a long, slow pan across the car while dramatic music plays. Later, there’s a scene of the villain in his fancy car which the audience is seeing for the first time. There’s again a slow pan and dramatic music, even though there aren’t any other characters around. This time, the scene is establishing what a badass the villain is - not to any other characters, but to the audience itself. The way the camera lingers over the car’s lines isn’t showing a character’s appreciation. It’s to allow the audience to experience their own appreciation.

Probably the people watching my street racing movie like fancy cars, so they will appreciate the scene with the villain’s car. But now suppose I make another movie about a small-town high school teacher rallying the community for a local cause. When I first show the teacher driving to work, I use the same cinematic tricks I did in the other film - slowly panning along the car while playing dramatic music. Then the teacher gets to the school, and the story moves on.

Someone who really likes cars may still enjoy this scene, but to most people it’s going to be distracting at best. The car isn’t important to the story at all - why is it receiving so much attention? Why would I assume that the audience of this completely different film would be into cars? If I keep doing this, with more and more films on various subjects all treating cars in this same way, people who don’t care about cars may start to get annoyed with my work. They might feel that I’m being exclusionary in my film-making, privileging part of the audience over the rest for no clear reason. Plenty of people aren’t obsessed with cars - why can’t they enjoy my low-budget monster movie or my railroad magnate biopic too? Why do I insist on shoving in these totally distracting segments that damage the experience for them?

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