Trauma Center: Second Opinion

Played on Wii

There was an article over on GameSpy awhile back about how innovation in games is overrated And I agree with them - there’s nothing wrong with an incremental evolution of an old formula. But it is quite refreshing when something totally different comes along. Trauma Center: Second Opinion is one of those games (links: GameSpot, GameSpy, GameFly). In it you play the role of surgeon, using your wiimote to slice, dice, and stitch your patients into good health. It’s the sort of experience that couldn’t really happen on any other platform (save the DS).

I was surprised by how approachable they made a game about surgery. I’ve had people with almost no experience with the Wii jump in and start removing tumors in a matter of minutes. The controls are easy to pick up, but the game is crazy intense. You’ve got this clock ticking down, the heartbeat monitor beeping, and if you screw up this person is dead. Well, not quite; if you lose a senior doctor scolds you and takes over… even after you’ve become world renowned super surgeon. I guess they figured the whole “Game Over” screen meaning “You Lost a Patient” would be too much for people to bear. Instead they put in probably the most ego destroying Game Over message ever. But all of this together just builds together to make you feel like a total badass for every operation you complete successfully.

You may feel like a super surgeon while playing the game, but it’s a far cry from being medically accurate. I’m pretty sure that most illnesses are not caused by medical terrorism. And I’m positive I’ve never seen anyone on Scrubs fix anyone by removing biologically engineered creepy crawlies (and obviously Scrubs is the bastion of medical legitimacy). So if you’re looking to use this game as training for your future career in medicine… well, good luck with that. I just hope I don’t find myself on the other end in the O.R. with some Trauma Center grad smothering antibiotic gel on anything that moves.

Occupation viability aside, Trauma Center is an easy game to recommend. It’s fun, makes great use of the wiimote, scales to different skill levels, and is basically unlike anything else out there. Plus chicks dig surgeons.

Stopping to smell the roses

The Washington Post had a very interesting article (which I found via Raph Koster’s gaming blog, of all places) describing an experiment they did to essentially see if people would inconvenience themselves for something unexpected and beautiful. They took a world renowned violinist and plopped him down as a street musician in a commuter packed metro station. It’s a really interesting article, so you should just go read it.

There’s a lot to think about in that article. But I’m going to take a tangent off of one small comment from it on our willingness to experience new things:

“For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.”

It’s one of those odd human truths that at some point in everyone’s life they experience a cut off point past which they cease seeking out new things (in particular, music). It’s the scariest thing to me about aging. Having my body fall apart pales in comparison to losing my desire for new experiences. The unknown and unfamiliar are particularly uncomfortable things for me, but I consider it part of my human journey to push myself and try to grow as much as possible.

It’s ironic that our technological revolution has empowered individuals so much that we’re growing apart and losing our ability to do anything truly interesting with that technology. Technology has always been pioneered by the socially inept (i.e. nerds). But the time has come to blow past that and start making technology something social and collaborative. Most of the interesting individual software pieces have already be written - the true next frontier is technology working together, and technology working for real people. And this technology can’t just aim to satisfy our every selfish indulgence - we should have software that actually makes us better people.

There’s so much to be done here. In the realm of music, Pandora has made a great start. The whole concept of “play me something that I want to hear, but haven’t necessarily heard before” is brilliant. It needs to explode into other places. Movies, TV, news, food… really just about everything is in need of some quality individually-tailored recommendation system. All the content is there - the problem is that no human can parse all the information available today. People will stick with what they know because finding something else is too hard. We need to make it easy.

Why Superman sucks

I recently caught Unbreakable on TV. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy that movie. It’s so… understated. I guess you could say it’s about a superhero, in that you’ve got a person with a superhuman ability who does something heroic. But that sounds too grandiose. It’s more like the story a dude who learns something about himself and does some stuff. At no point would a moment where this guy gets into yellow spandex or form fitting leather seem normal. For a comic book themed movie it’s very down to earth.

Comic book movies got a resurgence after the releases of X-Men and Spider-man back in 2000 or so. Everyone on some level likes these kinds of stories, because the underlying message is plain and simple: “you’re special.” But if you just blindly go for the whole superhero theme, you’re missing the point. X-Men is great because each character has a ridiculously specific power that often alone would be useless (making much of it about character interactions), and it’s also got this interesting political story of the how the many treat the few. Spider-man is great because the character is a total geek (young, awkward, and flawed), but also because his heroics are on a small human scale. Both these franchises are relatable on some level. Especially in the beginning, where it’s basically just glorified adolescent awkwardness. The discovery portion is consistently entertaining, but afterwards… not so much. When it goes from personal to epic… ugh.

And of course we’ve got Batman. He doesn’t even have super powers… unless money counts as a super power. He’s rich and pissed off - what’s not to like? Well, when he gets too campy, that’s no fun. As long as its dark, gothic, morally ambiguous batman… that’s good stuff. Again, imperfection is relatable.

So far so good, but then there’s Superman. Superman can do everything. He can fly, melt stuff with his eyes, deflect bullets, lift just about anything, and of course rewind time by flying around the sun real fast. He’s so ridiculously overpowered that they had to write in some crazy green crystal to give him a weakness. And on top of this he has the most boringly good personality ever. Why should we care about this guy? Honestly, who gives a crap? I get that in the beginning he came in a time where we needed heroes, and that he wasn’t always so ridiculously super. But at this point I’d rather we just call it quits and never return to this franchise ever again.

These days we have Heroes. It’s part Unbreakable, part X-Men. And the TV format lets us spend more time getting to know the characters. The announcer for the commercials and spoilers drives me nuts, but the actual content of the show is quite good. They stuck us with a big break mid season, but thankfully there’s only a week left before I can get my fix again. I just hope they don’t all meet up to form a Justice League to discuss their new spandex uniforms.