https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro9K-QzL3g8

Your thirties are probably the beginning of a cultural sweetspot, where there things you watched/play/read has become something else. Fallon playing Goldeneye is kind of like Belushi as Godzilla interviewed by Gilda Radner as Barbara Walters. Or Berryman and Hass dropping Japanese film references into their poems. Aristotle using popular plays as examples in Poetics, plays that no longer exist only in Aristotle's mind and in his brief synopses. I figure this continues into your sixties. I figure this isn't a great revelation.

What might be more interesting is being part of the product; to be Pierce Brosnan, who is Bond but is no good at it. Or the playwright who no longer exists but wrote a comedy good enough for Aristotle to think of it. Good enough we can't even judge it anymore.

Entropy had a list of 5 films that influence your writing. There are a lot of cool ones. I got a list to:


1. In the Year of 13 Moons
2. Shadows in Paradise
3. Branded to Kill
4. Yojimbo
5. Major League


I got a bunch of others. They've also just put up a list of top 3 video game villains, but why not video games that have influenced your writing? I want to disregard Call of Duty, Halo, etc., games that are all about realism-"realism"games that celebrate the depiction of realistic violence without political repercussions, games that get a lot of "gorgeous" or "brilliant" or "beautiful" tagged to them. Their veneer of prestige is prestige in the classical sense, and their realism somehow makes them more "serious" than older/indie games.


But I've cornered myself. Old games, and current indie games (WiiWare, etc.), the ones with less-representational art and a lot of text were my first poems. They're kind of shambles, right?, with their broken-music box music. I wanted to make games as a kid, but I realized I am less interested in their constructions as games as I was, and am, attracted to their aesthetics, their music, their look. They're lack of narrative logic in particular. There is something about the language of these games: not just the break of language in translation, but its unusualness. Is this formalism? Technological restrictions prevent booming soundtracks, text, and representational art. One has to work within the form, etc.


 Games that have influenced me:


Earthbound
Earthbound Zero
Final Fantasy 3 (Famicom, fan translation)
The Legend of Zelda
Golgo 13
Cave Story
Dragon Warrior 4
Alex Kidd in High Tech World
Phantasy Star