Congratulations on Assembling a Consortium of the Willing!

You’ve been working your ass off trying to get the right people together, and come Friday you’ll finally have most of them agreeing with you.

You’ll be seated around a conference table in the business center of your local Holiday Inn, because it’s cheaper than renting a real meeting space and because your home has too many distractions.

Around the table you’ll have collected a number of famed academics, thinkers, public servants, and the heads of a number of banks.

“Gentlemen,” you’ll begin, “we are here today to try and solve the encroaching economic crisis.” They’ll nod in affirmation. This will indeed be the stated purpose of the meeting. “I’d like to begin by opening the floor for ideas. Let’s get a nice brainstorm going, guys.”

The table’s occupants will shrug and just try to go with it. A professor of economics from the University of Minnesota and a bank president will raise their hands at the same time. You’ll ask them to rock-paper-scissors to determine who gets to speak first, and the professor will win.

He’ll thoughtfully outline an idea of widespread economic reform, where the ultimate goal of annual growth is replaced with one of sustainability and technological advancement. He suggests that the state take emergency control of financial institutions in order to ensure that they are properly regulated and the excesses of the past are not repeated.

The majority of the academics and leaders will consider the idea thoughtfully. They’ll sit down and stroke their chins, considering the options and the ramifications of creating such a state. The bankers, however, will all have a glazed look to their eyes and open, drooling mouths.

After a few seconds of what is pensive silence for some and awkward silence for others, the banker will raise his hand again. You’ll nod at him.

“What if we did what we always do during times of crisis?” The attendees will look at one another, then to the banker in curiosity. He’ll already have zoned out, however, staring at what could be a spider on the ceiling.

“And what would that be?” you’ll ask.

“Oh,” he’ll say, snapping back to attention. “Give ourselves raises and pretend this isn’t a real problem.” He’ll shrug. “Always worked before.”

You’ll shake your head, as will the majority of the conference goers. But the bankers will all be nodding in assent and saying “harumph” without knowing what that means.

When various academics and world leaders bring up that that idea is retarded all of the bankers will start screaming “You are!” in a horrifying unison. They won’t stop until everyone except you has left the room.

Then they’ll approve their plan, having a unanimous vote in favor of pay raises for themselves and “donkey punches” for all other meeting-goers, to be administered at a later date. This will be followed by a series of high fives and chest bumps, excessive use of the phrase “bro” and continued sustained economic decline.

Congratulations assembling a consortium of the willing, though! This is pretty much what all of us expected when you set out to do this.

Congratulations on Sleeping With Alison Goldfrapp!

It’ll be an exciting morning for you. Since you became unemployed three weeks ago most days have more or less blended together. You wake up at around noon and eat some frosted mini-wheats, then you take a nap until three or four in the afternoon. After the nap you wake up again and drink until you don’t know when you are, and the whole cycle repeats itself.

Today, however, you’ll be nearing the critical “prize” section of your cereal. Every three or four days you’ve looked forward to finding your prize with great trepidation. It takes a lot of effort as a 27 year-old man not to just reach in and grab the fucker, but it helps break up your days and add a little suspense to your otherwise suicide inducing existence.

So today, when the little cardboard sheet drops into your bowl you’ll all but clap your hands with joy. It’ll be unreadable at first, obscured by a mixture of wheat dust and powdered sugar, but after a thorough dusting off you’ll open the plastic and read just what crappy mail order gift you’ve won this morning.

Today’s card will be odd, however. It’ll fold out in a way which seems to defy the logic of time and space until it eventually becomes an envelope. Inside there will be a sheet of paper a single backstage pass. The paper will read “Spend a Night With Alison Goldfrapp!”

It’ll also contain directions on how to reach her concert from your home, which will be downright freaky-dekey. Still, you’ve spent far too long in the confines of your studio apartment so you’ll fire up your Honda Accord and drive down to the venue to watch her performance.

You’ll feel like you’re getting syphilis just watching her sing and dance, waving her lady-parts around like its the best way to make a difference in the world, but you’ll also be somewhat entranced. She’ll be like some kind of skanky, post-modern humanitarian..

After a surreal, arousing and unnerving performance you’ll be ushered back stage by a pair of burly men to Goldfrapp’s green room. There you’ll be confronted with a wide variety of luxuries, from exotic fruits and inventive sandwiches to rare liquors. You’ll spend most of your time on the liquors, of course.

After fifteen minutes and three 18 year old scotches she’ll arrive, dressed like a tarted up Cyndi Lauper. She’ll smile and speak to you in an adorable British accent.

“Hullo. I’m Alison,” she’ll drawl. Then she’ll sit on your lap and the two of you will start making out. It’ll be super hot, but the room will be filled with people with dog heads and a mummy shuffling and moaning, so the experience will be a little weird.

Still, you won’t fight her when she unzips your fly and mounts you properly. She’ll do all the work, which is what she expected of your loser ass, so don’t worry about that, and when you’ve come after ten minutes you’ll feel like a strange situation just got stranger. Allison will dismount you, saunter over to the bathroom, and close the door.

When she doesn’t come out after fifteen minutes you’ll take that as your cue to head home, taking your car keys from a valet dressed like an Egyptian boy.

The next day you’ll feel dirty, but sated, like your life just reached some sort of zenith of being fucked. You’ll start looking in the want-ads for various odd jobs, thinking all the while that last night you’d slept with Alison Goldfrapp, and that you’d even managed to fuck that up, thinking that it is time for a big change.

Congratulations on sleeping with Alison Goldfrapp, by the way. We suggest you get tested.

Congratulations Bumblefuck!

You’ve had a rough childhood. Your momma left when you were young and your daddy drank too much and didn’t have much learning to pass on to you, so most of his lessons came from the back of his hand and the thwak of a bottle against your skull.

But it made you realize how important it is to reach for your dreams and never give up, and that’s what you’ve done. You’ve been working six hour days at Wendy’s while trying your all at school and as a result you’ve got a cushy scholarship and enough pocket money to get you all set at NYU next year.

Which is why, in a few months, it’ll be such a tragedy when Jenny, your high school sweetheart, and you are riding on her pa’s ATV when it flips and hurls you both into a ditch filled with radioactive waste dumped there by Halliburton. Your girlfriend will, by all appearances, wither and die, along with the unborn child you had put in her womb a week and a half earlier (sorry you had to find out this way, but we thought you’d want to know!)

You, however, will be miraculously unharmed. You’ll spend the rest of your summer mourning and reading French books. Your father will be torn on how to respond to this, feeling sympathy for you and revulsion for your love of the French. After a week and a half of blessed silence he’ll settle of calling you a faggot and ending his campaign of physical violence against you.

After the summer ends and you’ve settled into New York, you’ll still be pretty down. Down enough, in fact, to make potentially the biggest mistake of your life and face up to a pair of muggers who were trying to take your iPod.

They’ll come at you with knives, but before you know it you’ll have used a combination of folksy skills and storytelling and American gumption to subdue one of them and crush the other’s skull with your bare hands.

You’ll realize, horrified and covered in a combination of brain matter, blood, and human excrement, that the toxic chemicals must’ve given you super powers. You’ll be torn, your deep need to use these powers for the greater good opposed by a desire to do well in the school and a fear that you’ll somehow be perceived as a racist if any of the criminals you happen to beat up are of a minority.

After a lengthy period of soul searching you’ll decide that you should stick close to the NYU campus, so that you know how the social strata works and so you can get home relatively quickly. You’ll pull out an old pair of overalls, fashion a crude mask out of a bandana and call yourself Bumblefuck.

Your name will be a beacon of hope for besieged co-eds throughout the five boroughs.

Godspeed, and congratulations Bumblefuck!

Congratulations on "Turning Japanese!"

The seminar will seem to have been dragging on for days, but it will have only been a few hours. A few tedious, nigh unbearable hours spent listening to people whose greatest aspiration in life is a six figure check blather on about productivity. The only thing you want to produce is a bullet between your eyes, from a gun.

You’ll try to distract yourself by looking around at the other attendees, but it’ll look like a slowly melting candle festival, filled with a variety of shapes and colors all gradually shifting towards the same sort of shapeless, functionless lumps of wax. Everyone except one.

Her name tag will ready Cheri, but you know it isn’t her real name. She’ll look just as bored as you are.

You won’t want to stare so you’ll just glance at her occasionally so that you can feel like there’s some light in this horrible situation, some potential for good to come of being in this unbearable place. On one of these furtive glances your eyes will meet. You’ll both smile, briefly, knowing what the other is thinking.

You’ll pantomime hanging yourself and she’ll pantomime beating off. To the best of your knowledge no one will notice.

During the intermission, after hearing a man with a moustache speak for an hour and a half about maximizing profit margins, you’ll approach her and offer your hand. She’ll pass an empty coffee cup into it and smile mischievously.

“Jack,” you’ll say, pointing to your name tag, which reads Sam.

“Michelle,” she’ll respond, pointing to her own. You’ll smile.

“Would you like to get out of here, Michelle?” She’ll breath a sigh of relief and nod emphatically, and the two of you will be off to the hotel bar.

You’ll talk, but mostly about how boring that seminar is and how many other things there are that you’d both rather be doing. Forty five minutes will pass and you still won’t know her name, but you’ll be floored by her wit and confidence.

When you ask her to come up to your room where you can be more private your heart will skip a beat as you wait for her reply. When she smirks and says “Why not?” you’ll already be aroused, and she’ll know, amused.

The two of you will be making out hard from the start of the five story elevator ride all the way to your room. When you get inside she won’t take any of her clothes off, but she’ll tear your pants off and toss them to the floor.

She’ll remove a Disposable Funcam™ from her purse and, with the same mischievous grin, tell you to beat off.

“What?” you’ll say, a little bit stunned.

She’ll edge up next to you and whisper in your ear. “I want to see you jerk off. I want to see your face when you come.”

You’ll be nervous, of course, and trying to look cool while you do it, which will almost ruin the experience at first. But her interest in your masturbation will be so genuine that you’ll start to lose yourself in it.

Before long you’ll imagine that it’s her hand and she’ll be transfixed on your face, your hands, and your penis. You won’t even remember she’s there when you come and the whisper of her name passes through your lips.

The only thing that will break the spell will be the snap of the camera and the grind of the wheel as she rapidly takes shots of your afterglow. Then she’ll tell you to get into bed and... Well, it gets a little fuzzy from there on out to be honest. All bets are off.

Regardless, congratulations on “Turning Japanese,” stud. We’ll be checking Michelle’s Flickr for the results.

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Where the Innovation At?

Indie games have exploded over the last few years. Quirky small companies which would’ve fallen by the wayside half a decade ago are now commercial and artistic success who can distribute their games to the masses without fear.

Thanks to digital distribution and increased attention of late indie games are thriving, and while an unfortunate few titles had to be sacrificed for us to see this success (imagine Sword of the Stars with Stardock as a distributor instead of the ham handed mishmash of commercial and digital distribution they landed on) the variety of services which offer and specialize in indie games is growing daily. Off the top of my head Stardock, Steam and Greenhouse all come to mind as ways to buy small games without leaving your home. With companies like Tale of Tales also hosting their own content as well, there are a good many ways to get your soon-to-be critically acclaimed title out into the world.

The end result of these changes is that the market now has a lot of games rethinking what it means to be a game. Some of these are new takes on old systems, such as Peggle. Peggle, from veteran airquotes “indie” developer Popcap, which constitutes a fascinating new take on Pinball. Others, like World of Goo from 2D BOY, are completely original concepts which change the way we consider and approach gameplay. World of Goo is a puzzle game wherein developers expect and at times demand that players use what might normally be considered exploits or bugs in order to solve their puzzles.

And there are other games which attempt to subvert concepts ingrained in our intellect as gamers, such as The Path by the afforementioned Tale of Tales. In The Path we are stripped of goals and forced to murder our central character in order to “succeed” in a game which is as much an experience as it is anything else. It destroys the established ideas that normally govern the way we play and replaces them with a set of goals intended to change the very way we think of games as a means of entertainment.

Which brings me to my next point. A lot of indie games are different. Really really different. Some, like the Penny-Arcade game and Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden are gloriously samey, rooted in and celebrating traditional concepts. But most of them want not only to make a successful game, but to change the way we think of games today.

So the question then becomes what does this mean for mainstream video games? Some have begun to change genric convetions in order to compete. Resident Evil added co-op, Fallout 3 took refuge in the classic conventions on size and open world play and took them to a new level, maintaining the spirit of their series all the while.

And some mainstream games do their best to get bigger, games like Grand Theft Auto IV. They give you larger playgrounds and more toys to play with and hope that you’ll be distracted from the fact that their concepts hasn’t changed much. Some, like Far Cry 2, pull a similar trick by removing linearity from traditionally linear genres and giving you a massive space to goof off and move back and forth in.

But, when you come down to it, the “hardcore” games haven’t changed too much. Think of recent major releases in the first person shooter genre. Call of Duty 5 is largely a retread of ground covered in Call of Duties 1-4. And Killzone is an amalgam of concepts taken from other games (first person cover systems a la R6 Vegas, iron sights aiming a la CoD and regenerating health a la Halo 2 and every subsequent shooter ever made). F.E.A.R. II is little better, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is largely established in relation to games such as System Shock II. It’s fair to say that the shooter genre is beginning to repeat itself, if for no better reason than that the model is so well developed already.

The ground of first person shooters is exceedingly well tread, and while conceptually it can certainly grow, mechanically there is very little that we can do to push it forward. The same could be said, certainly, for real-time strategy games as we watch Blizzard essentially do a cosmetic update of Starcraft in Starcraft 2. While some people, such as Relic and Ironclad, are introducing new ideas about how the genre needs to be played for the most part real-time strategy is much the same as it’s always been. You acquire resources, translate them into army strength and try to remove your opponent from the map. Everything else is just semantics.

The only genre in which the mainstream “biz” seems to be keeping up with the little guys in terms of innovation is the nebulous, notoriously ill-defined action-adventure genre. Here we see unique titles rise and fall to greatly varying commercial success and critical reception. Assassin’s Creed, No More Heroes, God of War; these games all fell under the same banner and played very, very differently, offering greatly varied messages in terms of gameplay, story and storytelling technique.

It seems as if action-adventure, perhaps because of its roots as a nebulous genre based on executing on broad, original concepts, is the only place where large scale developers feel confident applying the absurd resources required to make a triple-A title in today’s games market. But it is also where we see most of the innovation taking place. Consider Prince of Persia.

Before Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia reboot, how many games had time-control mechanics? A handful, perhaps (Max Payne is the only one that comes to mind off hand), and not executed in quite such a stylish and creative fashion. But after PoP’s phenomenal success you couldn’t go five feet in a given direction without tripping over the god damn idea of time control, executed in a startlingly similar fashion.

Ubisoft’s moderate risk gambit paid off in spades. And we still see this trend continue today. Parkour has come into fashion like nothing else following, again, PoP and more recently Assassin’s Creed. Open world games are all the rage, and linearity is the enemy. The concepts of successful games repeated again and again in mainstream releases.

And while original properties do sometimes emerge from the bloated corporate clockwork of EA or whatever Vivendi-Universal is calling itself now, they are limited and, at times, graceless in their execution and imitation. But take heart. With indie games growing strong and publishers like Ubisoft doing their best to make original game concepts and IP the games industry isn’t in any danger. In fact, it’s easy to see why it is the one sector of the economy relatively untouched by recent events.

And as tools to make and release games become more and more accessible, perhaps we’ll see a revolution in stagnating genres. Only time will tell. All I can say for now is that as the indie revolution continues and publishers rally to keep up, it’s a very very good time to be a gamer.

Congratulations Shotgun Amy!

Sarah’s called you that ever since that night where her boss tried to touch her and you showed up and shot him in the knee with your daddy’s gun. He started screaming at you, cussing, calling you a cunt, a whore, a slut. You spit on him and told him to find a doctor, then you called him a pervert.

You knew what you were doing was right, but that the law wouldn’t agree so you started running that night. You took all the money he had on him (two hundred dollars in folded twenties and fifty dollars in ones, the piece of shit), borrowed your boyfriend’s car and left town to head west.

All you had on you was the money, the shotgun and your wits, but you kept moving and kept your head. Before long Missouri was long gone out of your rear view and you were well into lawless country, into the Southwest and the Four Corner’s states.

When you showed up in New Mexico you were almost out of money, doling out the folding ones so you could buy food and water at gas station rest stops. Before long you hit a small town, low on gas and low on options.

You didn’t even catch the name of the place, you just saw the bank sign and before you knew it you had your bandana off your head and over your face and you were in that bank telling people to grab their fucking ankles and not let go until it was all over.

You didn’t get away with much, just a few dozen grand. But it was enough. You sent it back to your family through a few obtuse channels – your grandmother to set up a nest egg for Sarah’s college, your aunt to make sure your daddy doesn’t drink himself to death and your best friend to make sure that the people you care about are always okay. You kept around a third for yourself so that you can stay on the road.

The next bank you hit will be in North Dakota. By this time you’ll have a different car, a new bandana and new clothes. You’ll have a new haircut and everything. The only thing that will be the same, the only thing that you’ll carry between robberies will be the shotgun.

This time you’ll walk away with over one hundred grand.

You’ll send most of it back home, again, but you’ll have learned a lot after those two robberies. You’ll be pretty good at it after that. You’ll drive from place to place, using fake names, changing cars every once in a while and hitting banks.

Before long you’ll be in the papers. An anonymous note to the papers from your sister will have them using the right name and everything. Shotgun Amy.

No one will know where you came from, who you really are. They won’t know where your money goes or why you do it. They’ll just know that you don’t kill and that you’re fast and smart. They’ll know you can strike anywhere at any time, and that you’re so far off the grid that you might as well be living in the seventies.

You’ll be like a sexy, female Dillinger. Cafépress will sell t-shirts with your name, people will make bumper stickers about you. Coeds will buy frisbees with silhouettes of women with shotguns. You’ll work alone, you’ll work fast, and you’ll live like a legend.

Before long you’ll have enough stashed away to live comfortably for the rest of your life, enough to make sure that your sister and your dad never have to worry again. You’ll just need one last job to put yourself into retirement.

For the first time in your career you’ll choose your next hit well in advance. It will be a bank in downtown Tucson, a branch of one of the places that was propped up by the bailout, one of the places where the CEOs tried to keep the money for pay raises. It’ll be a quaint form of justice, a nice way for you to end your career.

Everything will go smoothly at first. You’ll have the money at your feet and you’ll be genially thanking the people in the bank for being so cooperative, but then everything will go wrong. One of the guards will get it into his head to be a hero. He’ll take a few shots at you and you’ll put a nice big cluster of buckshot into his chest, putting him to the ground with a heavy thud.

After that the only sound in the place will be his sick, wet breathing as he struggles against the blood filling up his lungs, but you’ll know right away that the alarm has been tripped. You’ll grab the duffle bag and run.

You’ll run out the door and into your car and you’ll be speeding towards a used car lot on the south side of town. When you get there you’ll ditch your ride and wire another one. You’ll slap on temporary plates but by the time you get out of town they’ll be looking for your new ride.

You’ll hop from car to car, making for Mexico. You’ve always hated Mexico – you wanted to retire in Toronto, but you’ll see this as, at best, a minor setback.

It’ll be rough going for you. Cops will be all over the place and by the time you get to the border they’ll have the crossing all locked down, just for you. You won’t be able to get the nerve up to try and cross. Instead you’ll look around town for another way.

You’ll find one in a pair of married pair of pet groomers/smugglers who take people across the border. They usually work the other way around, bringing people from Mexico to America, but they’ll have heard of you and for you, they’ll make an exception. You’ll give them one hundred grand, enough to make any future they’d like, and they’ll keep your trust for it.

Your story as Shotgun Amy will end happily with you in Tijuana looking for flights to get the fuck out of Mexico. Sorry if it seems like an anti-climax, but you’re just that good.

So congratulations Shotgun Amy. You’ll be lonely for a while, but you’ll get to Toronto eventually, and your sister will get in early decision at McGill two years from now and you guys can meet up there. It’s not that long a drive away by your standards, after all.

Congratulations on Surviving the Lion Cage!

You’ll be at the Bronx Zoo with your uncle Greg and your cousin Jack, walking through looking at various exhibits. You’ll be glad to be out. You don’t get out much anymore since your mom changed. She’s been up and down for a while now but she got much worse a few weeks back when your sister finally left for college.

You’ll have just passed the spider monkeys and you’ll be well on your way to the elephants when Jack will start going apeshit. He’ll be hunched over the hippo exhibit, failing to stifle laughter, smiling and pointing.

You’re a good deal younger, so your uncle will be walking with you a few feet behind him. He’ll be puzzled by Jack’s action; his son doesn’t usually get this worked up about animals, or life in general. When the two of you get closer he’ll see what your cousin is so excited about before you do.

His first reaction will be to pull him away then drag him a few feet back to scold him. He’ll be whispering harshly to him and you’ll only catch a few words. Something about life and babies. When you get on your toes to look over the railing, sure enough, the hippos will be fucking.

You didn’t know what fucking meant or was, really, aside from a bad thing, until your sister told you. You were watching dogs fighting in the street as the sun set on your neighborhood and it seemed like one of them was winning. The other had all but given in.

You’ll turn away from the hippos, a little bit embarrassed for your cousin and for the hippos too. It’ll be funny, sure, but in a sad sort of way because of the cage. You will walk away, not really knowing where you’re going until you arrive at the lions.

You’ve always liked the lions, the way they laze about and just stare at the world. They make you think of you and your mother sitting on the stoop watching people go by. And the railing is lower since the cage is so deep in the ground, which makes it easier for you to watch them laying in the sun.

You’ll be standing there watching them lick themselves clean when your cousin comes up behind you and shoves you with all his weight over the edge and into the lion’s cage.

At first he’ll be laughing. Not a funny laugh like the one he had for the hippos – this time it’ll be a child’s cruel laugh, the one they use to show you that they’re strong in all the way you’re not. But it’ll barely last a second, and his shit-eating grin will collapse.

You won’t be able to see his face from the ground, but it will be locked in a state of terror. He’ll slowly come to grasp what he did, and it will mark the beginning of an internal struggle which will dominate his adult life.

On the ground, however, you’ll have more immediate concerns. Your right arm and hip will hurt a lot and you won’t be able to move the arm on its own at all. After a few seconds of sitting still to see if anything else hurts you’ll turn yourself around with your legs to see what’s going on.

Your whole body will feel swollen and numb. If someone asked you to describe the sensation you’d say “wrong” and nothing else. You’ll be so distracted by the sensation that you’ll hardly notice that you’ve fallen in with the lions.

They won’t move towards you aggressively. In fact, they’ll barely acknowledge your presence. They’ll be quiet, calm, and well fed. Licking their lips, they’ll regard you with cold derision, like an unwanted guest or a distant relative arriving unannounced.

You won’t feel frightened at all, just embarrassed. Embarrassed for the hippos, for your cousin and your uncle. Embarrassed for your mom, raising you all alone, for your sister who had to leave home to be herself, for yourself, going to the zoo with your uncle just to leave the neighborhood. Most of all, you’ll be embarrassed for the lions for forgetting how to be lions.

Your uncle will get security into the cage right away, and they’ll have you out and into a first aid station in minutes. Your arm will have a minor fracture and serious bruising. They’ll give you a sling and set a doctor’s appointment for you for that day, but shock and the day’s overall surrealness will keep you from feeling too much pain.

You’ll get to sit up front on the ride to the hospital, your uncle having scolded your cousin and forced him to sit in the back. You’ll cry a little, not because of the pain or the lion’s cage, but because you didn’t get to see the elephants that day.

You’ll know in your heart that it’s a stupid reason to cry, but you’ll do it anyways.

Congratulations on surviving the lion cage.

Congratulations on Casting In With a Den of Thieves!

You’re an unsuccessful graduate student working towards your doctorate in theoretical chemistry. Your research primarily concerns manipulating enthalpy and entropy in order to generate favorable conditions for reactions regardless of environmental circumstances.

It’s pseudoscience at best, rooted entirely in equations, and you’ve had absolutely no luck moving forward at all. While you acquired a lot of funding based on your promising performance at various other academic institutions your lack of productivity has lead to the loss of most of your financing as well as all of your grant money.

You’re already falling on hard times and by the beginning of next week you’ll be hitting rock bottom. You’ll be considering a move back in with your parents and taking some researching positions when a knock sounds at your door.

An attractive young woman will be standing there, looking pissed off. She’ll be slight of build, pretty without being intimidating and she’ll have eyes that seem to see through you.

Still, she’ll seem completely natural there, like you were expecting her and she’s just showed up a little late. She’ll push past you, knock your books off the coffee table, scattering them on to the floor and say “What the fuck are you doing with your life?”

You’ll stammer. You’ll tell her you’re trying to do important work, maybe the most important work ever. You’ll tell her that you’re trying to uncover just what makes the universe tick and figure out how to best use it. You’ll tell her all that without knowing why you’re telling her.

She’ll look you up and down slyly, then lean close to your ear and say “Want to do something real important, right here, right now?”

Her body inches from you, she’ll outline her plan for the heist tomorrow, knowing exactly what parts you can and can’t handle. Before she leaves you’ll know for a fact that she’s the most entrancing woman you’ve ever met, but you won’t be able to recall her face for the life of you.

You’ll spend the rest of the night trying to figure out just what happened and why you felt such a connection to that woman. But you’ll never second guess your choice to help her. You’ll see the right in it, in her way of thinking, and you’ll want nothing more than to help her.

The next day you’ll show up at the appointed place at the appointed time outside the lab where you’ve been doing your research. Together you’ll grab what she needed, and by the day’s end your head will be crystal clear and you’ll know there’s no turning back.

We don’t want to spoil anything, but say hi to Solid Gold Gorilla when you see him and congratulations on casting in with a den of thieves.

Congratulations on Killing Again!

You’re an up and coming serial killer living and operating in the Bay Area. By day you work in document control for a prominent company which specializes in class action lawsuits. By night you seduce and strangle attractive young coeds wearing the color orange and then proceed to dismember them and make their corpses into compasses before wandering off into the night.

Sometimes you get kind of lonely, being with so many people and never letting them in, but you take comfort in your work. You’ve murdered nine young women and six young men so far, an impressive track record, and you have a little game you play with each murder. You try to leave little hints at each scene by pointing the compass towards your residence.

You know it’s a bit of a risk, but your murders occur over a pretty large area. It’d take a lot of brains and work to zero in on you, and sometimes you’re not even sure that you’ve set the compass up right. But it gives some extra direction to your slaughter and makes you feel a little bit like the Riddler.

Anyhow, despite the loneliness and the self-doubt you find a strong sense of self and purpose in your butchering. But lately you’ve been having some second thoughts. What if the people you carve up aren’t just mindless dolls like the voices in your head tell you and actually have thoughts and feelings of their own?

After a week of moping about the things you’ve done and whether or not you’re in the right a second voice will appear in your head, confirming the information your first voice has passed on. You’ll assume, naturally enough, that they are God and Jesus Christ respectively, and that logically you must be a grandson that the bible left out by accident.

This will fill your heart with joy again and you’ll set out to find a new co-ed.

It won’t take long before you have a sweet young thing and her girlfriend back at your place (you’re very charismatic, like most serial killers and let’s face it, college kids respond to aggressive sexual advances unsettlingly well) and you’ll be extra excited to be performing your first double homicide.

You’ll be a little worried that this will somehow damage God’s plan for you, but you’ll be more worried about letting him and your new friend Jesus down. You’ll also be worried about how to work the details, like killing them both and depositing the bodies.

You’ll take a long time in the bathroom just stressing about the deets, but you’ll play it off like a pro. When you emerge you’ll tell them was just to help you prepare for your first three way (also true!) and then you’ll ask the hotter one to grab some champagne from your fridge.

She’ll smile and saunter off and you’ll start making out with her friend. She’ll totally be into it until you start choking her with a roller up handkerchief. Then she’ll freak out and try to kick you in the balls.

But this isn’t your first time at the rodeo, and you’ll have her down for the count. You’ll watch the life slowly drain of her eyes and with it you’ll feel the rush of the kill. You’ll feel giddy. You’ll feel indestructible.

You’ll be wrong. The last thing that will go through your head will be thoughts of how you’re going to rape the other girl before you murder her. As you fantasize poised atop your latest victim the hot friend will return, champagne bottle in hand.

She’ll move fast thinking that her friend is still alive and cave in your skull with one smooth blow (she studied Eskrima). The concussive force will cause massive internal hemorrhaging and she’ll have plenty of time to cradle her dead friend, weeping, before she calls the police and they finally set the record straight on all those murders.

Anyhow, congratulations on killing again. We’re not really sorry it ended this way, but if you’d like to try and keep the mystery alive a little longer you should dump out the collection of your victim’s hands that you’ve been keeping for a while now. It’d make the whole thing harder to piece together.

Congratulations to the Sandwich Hero of Sandusky, Ohio!

Prior to tomorrow night the only thing people will know about Sandusky is that it is the city from the film Tommy Boy. But come the day after tomorrow the nearly 80,000 inhabitants of Sandusky will have something new to be proud of. They’ll have you.

Tomorrow you’ll wake up like every other day. You’ll put on a short sleeve collared shirt and a paisley tie and you’ll go to work in the office of a local paper warehouse where you’ll count boxes of paper before they’re put on trucks.

By lunch time you’ll be praying for a bullet in your brain, just like every other lunch time.

But tomorrow fate has something other than staring in gun shop windows, contemplating ending it all in mind for you. Tomorrow you’re going to exit the warehouse parking lot and immediately notice a woman in a bikini holding a sign. It will read “FACE DESTINY!” and point towards the local fairgrounds.

You will immediately find it compelling. You will follow it to four more signs, all of them held by scantily clad women. You will follow this succession of signs to the fairgrounds.

When you arrive there will be a crowd gathered around a man with a cowboy hat and a little cow skull necktie. He’ll be guffawing as the crowd boos him. Nearby there will be a pair of six-foot-party subs. He’ll gesture at them broadly.

“Well,” he’ll say. “I didn’t know Sandusky was full of pussies! But I guess it is!” The crowd’s boos will increase in volume, but no one will step forward since while all of Sandusky is not, in fact, populated by pussies many of the people who work in the industrial district are huge pussies which is why they’ve become stuck in dead end jobs in a shrinking economic region.

Not knowing what’s going on, but not wanting to seem like a pussy, you’ll step forward to confront the Texan about his rudeness in as passive-aggressive a fashion as possible. But after you move past the line of the crowd everyone around you will take a step back.

The Texan will smile.

“Well, I guess one of you has some balls after all.” He’ll push his hat up in an exceedingly folksy gesture. “Shoot.”

“Damn right,” you’ll say. Then you’ll wipe your hand across your mouth as if you were bleeding, even though you weren’t. This will puzzle the crowd, but they’ll cheer anyway and you’ll step forward, still not understanding what’s going on.

Eventually you catch on that it’s an eating contest, and that you’re in a race to finish that six-foot sub before the Texan who, as it turns out, is an oil baron (OF COURSE!). We’d give you the dramatic play by play, but the story rights are actually already in contention (Even though it’s happening in the future. You’ve got one hell of a legal team, buddy!)

Long story short, you’ll win and the Texan will leave town, shamed, after giving you a check for one billion dollars. You can do with it what you will. We suggest quitting your dead end job and leaving Sandusky, though, even though you’ll always be a folk hero in that crazy little podunk town.

Congratulations to the Sandwich Hero of Sandusky, Ohio!

Congratulations Florida!

You’re a 23 year-old woman named Florida who dresses exclusively in bikini tops and jean shorts (which we still like to call jorts). Your nickname comes from the fact that, given the way you dress and live, you could only survive in Florida, specifically in Miami in your parent’s guest house.

Anyhow you’ll be cruising the beaches with your just-too-chubby and just-too-skinny friends, looking your best after a three hour spa session paid for entirely by your parents and grand parents when the three of you get into a bit of a tizzy about which one is second prettiest.

You try to keep telling them it doesn’t matter, since they’re essentially visual noise next to you, but they won’t listen. They’ll just keep yammering on and on about how they have feelings too and bullshit like that. After about twenty seconds you’ll just walk away from them, patience exhausted.

As you walk away you’ll flip them the bird and shout as loud as you can “My life is hard too!” This will draw the attention of every single person on the beach and as you trounce back to your Pontiac Trans Am, a car synonymous with the sort of douchebag you are, a man in a suit will approach you.

He’ll introduce himself as Tyller, with two ls. He’ll be a producer for MTV who specializes in putting vapid, asinine princesses in front of cameras and video taping their temper tantrums. He’ll tell you you’d form a perfect postmodern counterpoint to the Hills. He’ll be surprisingly intelligent, given what he does for a living.

You’ll jump in the air and shout “ohmygod,” just like that, as one syllable, and he’ll pull the paperwork out of his briefcase like a fucking magician.

This will begin your brief and spectacular career as a reality-TV “star.” Congratulations Florida! We look forward to changing the channel every time we see your face or hear your voice.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Building a Mystery!

I’m a book nerd as well as a video game nerd, in case this website hasn’t given it away. I like stories, and I like mediums that allow for them to be told. I like to think about stories a lot. I like the way stories reflect their medium, the way they progress and flow, and the way they’re constructed. What I’m getting at is that I spend a lot of time reading and I spend a lot of time thinking about how the stories, in general, work.

Mysteries are specifically interesting in this context. During the 1920s, when the hard-boiled genre of mysteries began to emerge, they took on some pretty well known characteristics. Saturation with imminent sex and danger, compared to older books and stories, was certainly a part of that. But what’s always interested me more was the importance they placed, as a genre, on movement through various locales.

See, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two key figures in the burgeoning hard genre of hard boiled mysteries, also focused heavily on the way their characters could move between spaces, through both hostile and friendly environments, and interact with them in different ways. The way they could fluidly move through these various physical and social locations is what made them exceptional in the context of the story – they could survive anywhere.

Hammett’s Sam Spade and The Op could use their knowledge of and talent for violence to solve nearly any problem, regardless of their location. By being an unflappable paragon of manhood they could deal with whatever came their way.

But Chandler’s protagonists, specifically Phillip Marlowe, were a little different. Chandler’s characters could act in a fashion appropriate to whatever situation they were in. They didn’t survive by relying on violence (although they certainly never shied away from it; Marlowe racks up an impressive body count, if nowhere near as impressive as The Op’s) but instead by being able to adapt to places, to move through them and take what they needed away in order to complete their mission.

This should sound pretty familiar to anyone who plays a lot of video games. Certain styles of play are largely defined by this sort of movement. Think about first person shooters, for example. In a first person shooter you, by nature, move from locale to locale, usually doling out violence with great efficiency and glee, until you move on to the next way station on your bloody road, confident that you’re heading towards the proper conclusion of the story.

I’d be interested to see what Hammett would think of first person shooters. I doubt he’d like them, but they’re illustrative of the same sort of theme and storytelling he brought to his stories. The acumen required of players is almost always the ability to kill and avoid being killed. Occasionally you’ll have to assess situations in order to best acquire supplies and, sometimes, you might have to figure out who doesn’t need to be killed.

This is, of course, only at the most basic level of the genre, but still, it does bear a striking resemblance to, oh say the way that The Op solves the troubles in Corkscrew. He fights effectively and determines who needs to be fought effectively. He also proves he’s manly and tough in there. My point is that most of what I’ve said above to could applied equally well to Painkiller and Hammett’s stories.

Of course, Hammett’s stories are kind of dull as far as mysteries go. Not in terms of action, they’re great there. But when they’re done the stories don’t tend to leave you with a whole lot. Sometimes there will be a vaguely racist message, or a statement about what it means to be a man, but it is rarely resonant. What’s more interesting is when a story break this mold and offers alternative solutions and ideas. Enter Chandler, Walter Mosley, James Crumley, and plenty of others since. And, in the video games corner enter the more complicated FPSes, the RPGs and the action/adventure games.

Most of these games, when reduced to their component parts, consist of moving from location to location solving small problems in order to solve a bigger problem. In Far Cry 2 these problems vary vastly, as do the solutions. There is a briefcase in a village. How do you get it? You can sneak up and grab it, then stealth off into the night. Or you can murder everyone in the village and walk right up, soaked in blood, and grab it. Hell, maybe you’ll pull of some sort of crazy driving stunt and grab it that way, then toss a Molotov to cover your tail and take off.

The point is that you are interacting, briefly, with this place in the context of this objective. And the way you do so reflects on your character, on the story that is being made with your character at its heart. Similar statements can be made about action/adventure games. Your approach to tasks in Assassin’s Creed reflects on you and the legend you’re carving out for Altair in the same way. And, just to hammer the parallels home, Assassin’s Creed is at times all about blending in to social situations and hiding in plain sight. The game won’t shut up about it until you’ve almost beaten the god damn thing.

Then there are puzzle games. World of Goo centers on moving from set to set, then understanding the rules and context of each puzzle in these sets. World of Goo demands that you adapt to your surroundings, understand them and the rules that operate them and then figure out how to use or exploit these rules to solve your problem. This is going to make me sound like a bit of a douchebag, but I think Raymond Chandler would really like World of Goo.

And of course, RPGs are detective stories taken to the highest possible level. In RPGs you have to move from place to place in order to progress as a character and progress the story, and you very rarely look back. You usually strip mine your environment for everything useful, in most cases anything that isn't nailed down, you learn how to deal with whatever problems are facing the place you’re in, and as a result you move closer to the end game.

There are certainly exceptions, but even in Fallout 3, what is debatably the broadest and most progressive treatment of the genre, you are moving from place to place, discovering what the problems that trouble these places are and how best to solve them so that you can grow, understand the world around you and better prepare yourself for the violence pervading the world you live in.

So it’s fair to say that games, in their present state, borrow heavily from the tropes of mystery novels, intentionally or unintentionally, and rightly so. They’re great templates for telling stories and they present a really engaging format for telling stories. They’re also incredibly versatile. Compare Farewell My Lovely and Mumbo Jumbo just to see how versatile mystery can be as a genre, then compare Final Fantasy VII and Fallout 3 for proof of the same in videogames.

But why does this relationship matter? Why should anyone care that video games use the same topos of story as mysteries? I mean most of them are already mysteries in one way or another. Why should people look at video games with an eye towards classic mysteries? Why should they think about what they have in common with a genre frequently referred to as a subset of “shit lit” until recently?

Well, perceptive readers, for one thing it matters because it allows us to reconsider how stories are told in these games and what progression in a story means. Think about Half-Life 2 for a moment. The game itself is pretty linear and easily falls into a Hammett archetype, at least on its surface. But dig a little and you’ll find layer upon layer.

As you move through the game your ability to explore and interact with environments does more than offer you supplies, which are usually readily available anyway. It also gives you a better understanding of the world around you. It makes you more away of the people you’re fighting with, against, and the rules that govern this world. And the Half-Life series is famous for including environmental puzzles, which often involve no violence at all. Portal is sort of the embodiment of this framing technique, where exploring the world, understanding your whereabouts and considering your interactions with them add depth to the experience. Well done, Half-Life 2 and all its whack-ass children, for moving the genre forward.

And that’s the second reason I’m writing this thing. By looking at games in this light and considering them in the same fashion we consider books and films we elevate games as medium. We treat them like grown-ups and, as a result, what they say becomes a lot more interesting, and they have more of it to say.

The quality of discourse improves and even something aggressively bad or childish can be interesting, edifying and/or engaging when we look at it with the same attentiveness we’d bring to other mediums. Painkiller goes from being an exercise in our kill muscles to being a commentary on how games function when they are distilled to their lowest common denominators when we hold it under a microscope. It might not be pretty, but it is interesting to consider.

And the final reason I’m writing this? Because story structure in inherently interesting to me, and doubly so in an interactive medium. So the next time you find yourself in the burned out streets of a new city fighting off a screaming horde of whatevers or solving a puzzle using a gun that makes pizza and cats just remember: the solutions you find to your problems are always products of the environments you move through. And the way these make you feel, the way you assess them, doesn't just reflect on the game. It reflects on you as a player.

Congratulations Anyways Mouseketeer!

When you were young, you were a star.

This is what you tell yourself. You were, in fact, one of a legion of smiling, interchangeable youths who could have had their personalities surgically removed without anyone ever noticing.

Lately, things have been worse for you. You’ve been bouncing from dead end job to dead end job, occasionally trying your hand at acting.

Results have been pretty abysmal. You’ve been a corpse a few times on various Law and Orders and CSIs. So far, the biggest adult role you landed was as “rape victim #3” in an episode of SVU.

Depression has hit you hard, of late. You’re pushing thirty and, as you know, thirty is when your dreams rot, fall off, and die if you haven’t accomplished them yet. So you’ve been trying that much harder to land a movie role.

Your most recent audition was for The Lost Boys 2, a sequel to the upcoming remake of the original Lost Boys film. You were auditioning for the part that Corey Haim almost didn’t receive in the first remake, and you were lucky enough to meet him briefly during the audition process.

Turns out he’s a really nice, down to earth guy underneath it all and the two of you have a lot of the same problems. You both feel that you peaked long before you could’ve appreciated it, you both had serious drug problems in your teens, and you were both molested and didn’t talk about it for way too long. Oh, and you’re both broke.

Anyhow, this meeting will give you the confidence you always needed and you’ll nail the audition and land the part. You’ll feel like this is finally your chance to get your life on track, like this could jump start your career at long last. It might not be glamorous at first but at the very least it could get you a few Sci-Fi channel roles, enough to pay the bills doing what you love.

Unfortunately, your rising star will be snuffed out when Corey Haim breaks into your apartment tomorrow night and murders you in your sleep. He’ll then remove your skin and wears it to the first day of shooting, trying to pretend that he’s you. He’ll be caught immediately.

Lucky you, however, you will be remembered forever as the man Corey Haim brutally murdered when he finally snapped. So that’s got to count for something. At the very least it will get you some air time on a very special The Two Coreys episode.

Congratulations Chinaman!

It’s 2009 and you run the last opium den in San Francisco. It’s a tough way to make a living. Your profits margins are razor thin, college campus dealers cutting in on your market. You used to supplement your primary income with a little money from the slave trade, but after the fall of the Iron Curtain the Russian mob made that all but impossible.

And lately there’s been a new DA in town who’s taken a very hard line against, as he puts it, “Orientals who own and operate businesses in the San Francisco metropolitan area.” He’s decided that the best way he can put the Asian community of the Bay Area into its “proper place” is by making an example of you.

He’s been doing all he can to remove you from the better business association, and he’d have succeeded by now but you’ve been paid up with the right people for decades, and recently the ACLU has become involved.

At first people believe he was just crusading against drug use, and treated his campaign with the same apathy that everyone has since Ronald Reagan’s wife first took the bold stance that marijuana directly correlates to rape. But as his comments garnered more and more media attention people realized that his motivations were rooted in racism, not some misguided desire to “clean up our streets.”

You’ve been thinking about giving up the ghost and starting a pet shop with the last of your ill gotten gains, but Wednesday you’ll be getting a call for the ACLU. As you know, they’d defend a horse rapist if they thought it would make a point about the sacredness of human rights, so you’ll be small potatoes for them.

They’ll drum up media support for you, portray you as a man holding on to traditions in a modern world who is being targeted by a heartless institution solely because of his race. You’ll become a rallying point for the community.

Business will pick up dramatically. Aging hippies and insufferable college students will start frequenting your opium den, and before long you’ll be far enough back into the green that you’ll be able to hire prostitutes to attend to your client’s every need.

All because you stayed the course, and accepted the blind assistance of the ACLU. Congratulations chinaman! Does that term still fly in that part of the world?

Congratulations on Murdering Dave Grohl!

Hello madam. You’ve been institutionalized in various mental care facilities for the past decade thanks to a laundry list of chemical and behavioral problems largely caused by walking in on your parents doing it one time and being used for various drug tests by Merck as a baby, but there’s good news on the way!

You’re going to be released at long last come Thursday. They’ll give you a little bit of cash to get some new clothes, a room in a halfway house and enough drugs to keep you balanced for a good while.

However, since you’re a crazy bitch, you’ll see nothing wrong with trading these drugs almost immediately for tickets to a Foo Fighters concert. In your defense, you’ve never been to a concert before, and the idea excites you, while the thought of taking all those meds for the rest of your life makes you sad in a way that the Paxil doesn’t completely fix.

You’ve been a fan of Dave Grohl since he was in Nirvana, and more than anything else you’ve wanted to experience their music live. Last time you were on the outside they were your favorite band, and you can only assume that they’ve gotten better with time.

You’re going to be sorely disappointed.

After the show you’ll use your powers of crazy to sneak back stage and inform the band of your disappointment. However, the moment you lay eyes on Dave Grohl you’re just going to start fellating him. After about a minute and a half of that he’ll be done and you’ll be in food mood swing mode.

This will inevitably lead to you decapitating him with a razor blade you keep in your coat at all times. While it won’t take long, it will be incredibly painful, and he’ll be in agony for the duration.

His last words will be “But...I’m Dave Grohl...” although his speech will be occluded by all of the blood filling his throat.

Anyhow, you’ll be arrested in fifteen minutes, acquitted in a year and a half and celebrated as a hero. Then its time for you to tour the lecture circuit until it all collapses and you end up under a bridge, sucking dick for change so you can try to score speed.

For now, though, enjoy the ride and congratulations on murdering Dave Grohl!

Congratulations on Being Mauled by a Bear!

You and your step-dad have had a rocky relationship, to put it delicately. He has, on three separate occasions, tried to drown you and you once sat and stared as he was choking until he started to turn blue and hurled himself against a chair, narrowly avoiding death.

So this court mandated trust building camping trip is both much needed and unbelievably awkward. The two of you will barely speak to one another for the first five days. After that you’ll begin monosyllabic communications, with a smattering of nods and significant looks to indicate specific needs and desires.

The two of you will barely sleep the first week, each of you positive that the other will light him on fire the moment they attempt to sleep. The woods, after all, are a dangerous place and sometimes people go missing from them.

But around two and a half weeks in to the three month period of isolation the two of you will start to bond. You’ll learn that your step-dad is, as you already knew, one mean son-of-a-bitch, but that’s he’s your kind of mean son-of-a-bitch.

The two of you will share tender moments trapping and butchering small animals in various ways we’d rather not detail, then using the corpses to make food and nick-knacks. By the start of week three you’ll be cracking racist jokes to one another and espousing the reasons and details of your hatred of foreigners.

You’ll be espousing on the inferiority of Mexicans when the bear wanders into your camp site. It will have been drawn by the heady combination of ignorant prejudice, butchered animal, and uneducated redneck, and it’ll be vaguely puzzled when it finds the two of you instead of a KKK meeting (the two of you put out a lot of hate, is what we’re saying).

Once he steps in all that progress that the two of you have made will go flying out the window when your step-dad shoves you at the bear so that he can have an extra moment to grab the pistol he brought along.

The bear will immediately react with a nice one-two swipe and you’ll be on the ground bleeding in the fetal position, already weeping openly. You’ll be crying for your real daddy, who no longer returns your phone calls since he’s “tired of getting a white-pride rant every time he checks in on his first-born from his new home.”

Puzzled by your tears, the bear will decide that the best means of determining what’s up will be gnawing on your head voraciously, which he’ll proceed to do with gusto. By the time your step-dad comes back with his gun you’ll be bleeding quite profusely.

The first thing your step-dad will do, when he sees you return, is mentally pump his fist, thinking that you’re too far gone and that he won’t have to deal with you any more. The second thing he’ll do is raise his pistol and fire it at the bear, shouting “Fucking Mexicans!” at the top of his lungs.

The pistol, however, is an old .32, and the bear won’t be injured in the least. He will, however, be pissed off and charge your step-dad, pinning him to the ground and tearing him to pieces with his mighty jaws and claws.

You’ll take advantage of the opportunity to drag yourself away, already going in to shock. It’ll be a long ways to the highway and to safety, and a hard journey, but as you crawl, bleeding to death, through the woods you won’t be able to stop yourself from smiling. You'll finally have gotten rid of your step-dad.

Congratulations on being mauled by a bear, by the way.

Congratulations on the Success of Your Niche Porn Site!

You’ve been incredibly unsatisfied with the state of internet erotica over the last few years. Its all gangbangs and choking and face-fucking; sexual brutality at its worst. There’s no heart to it, no subtly or synapse.

Which is why you’ve decided to toss your hat into the ring. Over the last few months you’ve been laying the groundwork for a hot new site. It’s called Jizz in My Jeans (JIMJ for short) and you think it captures all that contemporary porn lacks.

It consists exclusively of men and women, still fully or partially clothed, engaging in foreplay. The theme, as the site’s name implies, is that the man comes before any explicit sex act is performed.

You’ve been recruiting talent, filming videos and writing ad copy and, come Thursday of this week, the site is going to go live. The first week will be, as you expected, slow. People will still be watching Interracial BBW Gangbangs™ instead of your cerebral, startlingly well shot porn.

But your marketing director will come up with a great tagline, “Want to Jizz in Your Jeans?” It’ll be plastered on banners all over the internet, and you’ll almost immediately see an upturn in traffic. It’ll be like the Penny-Arcade effect, except it won’t go through the slowdown cycle.

Traffic will just increase and increase. As you acquire more subscribers you’ll find yourselves forced to upgrade your servers to meet demand within a month. In two months you’ll be able to retire on the money you’ve made, but you’ll be so enthralled by your success that you won’t want to.

You’ll be high on the act of creation, and you’ll make groundbreaking film after groundbreaking film, and you won’t ever want to stop. This year you’ll sweep the AVNs, much to the chagrin of actor-producers like Brandon Irons and Ron Jeremy.

You’ll show up on stage in a t-shirt tux with beautiful women dressed in casual clothes on each arm. The first thing you’ll say into the microphone?

“I just jizzed in my jeans.”

You are a class act, my friend. Keep up the good work and congratulations on the success of your niche porn site.

Congratulations Tosser!

Hey. What’s up. Look, we’re super hungover, so we’d like to get this one out as fast as we can.

Your name is Franklin, you’re a gay American and you’re vacation in Britain. This is old news to you. After all, you’ve been there for around three weeks now on a “work visa.”

But the only real work you’ve been doing is between the thighs of various men, performing sex acts, free of charge. After all, you’re only here for a few months, so why not? Its not like you’ll ever see them again.

But tomorrow night you’re going to run into Kelly.

Kelly is the one girl you thought you’d switch for back in high school. She was smart, aggressive, balls out gorgeous, and very selective. And since you’ve always had a bit of a weight problem she was way the fuck out of your league back then.

You were tearing through women back in the day, thinking that if you found the right one it might make you feel right instead of giving you the fuck and run instinct you’ve always had. You had the charisma, you had the drive, and you had the ability to convince yourself you were right. But it never took, and you always felt drawn to Kelly.

When you see her in Trafalgar’s you’ll feel like you just got a new lease on life. The introduction will be brief, but it won’t feel awkward at all. She’ll remember you immediately and her smile will come natural and beautiful as the sun.

She’ll only be there for two weeks, and her hostel will be on the other side of Hyde Park from you, but you’ll still hike your pudgy ass over there every god damn morning to greet her and take her to tourist hubs.

You’ll drag her from bar to bar and pub to pub. Occasionally you’ll even visit a British club together. At one point you’ll smoke weed and almost kiss.

And then she’ll be gone. For two whole weeks your mom would’ve been proud. She could’ve said you had a girlfriend, and it would’ve been true in its own way.

If you were a better man you’d hike out to her hostel and beg her to stay. You’d tell her you love her. You’d tell her you’re bisexual and that you’ve largely approached men as sexual partners because you’ve never met a woman who could live up to the standard she’d set in your mind.

But you aren’t. So instead you’ll sit on the Millenium Bridge. You’ll consider leaping over the suicide guards and crashing into the Thames. In your head it’ll be the most important thing you could do, a perfect coda to your cowardly life.

But you won’t be able to do it. Instead you’ll fly home, a week and a half and three sexual partners later, and start looking for temp work.

Eventually you’ll acquire enough capital, with the aid of your parents and your job, to start a small pet groom service. With time you’ll come to acquire a partner named Dan.

Dan will accept you for who you are and what you want to be. He’ll never look down on you and he will make you feel good whenever he can. Dan has had his heart broken many times, and he sees that you are good at heart but that you are ultimately afraid.

You will never come to love Dan as he loves you, but you will appreciate him and make him feel appreciated and that will be enough. The two of you will live to a ripe old age, grooming dogs until around sixty five when you start to shut down shop and just live for a change, the way you did when you were twenty-three.

You will think about Kelly every day, and Dan will know. He won’t mind. He knows that he’s your rock, and that whatever happens what the two of you have will remain intact.

When you die, you’ll kiss him on the mouth without having uttered a single syllable of Kelly Trelawney’s name before you breath your last into him and he grabs you, shivering with tears.

He always was too good for you.

But you’ll never see her after she left you in Stansted, smiling and waving, heading to meet her boyfriend in Amsterdam. You wish you knew what had happened, but time makes fools of us all.

Dan will smile, though, knowing that in the end he had you last and that your last thoughts truly were of him. And he’ll be right. In the end, Dan beat you.

Congratulations tosser.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Genodical Maniacs!

A lot of first person shooters involve battles of genocidal proportions. I never really thought about it until I listened to Penny-Arcade’s Tycho and Gabe discussing Army of Two, but it could be said of almost any shooter. Over the course of the game you’re going to end up killing a lot of people. An incredibly large number, really.

There are exceptions, certainly. The early Rainbow Six games, for example, were harshly realistic. If you tried to act like a walking murder factory in those games you’d end up riddled with holes. Instead they demanded careful tactics and the judicious use of your a small force to wipe out a group of enemies who were rarely overwhelming in number.

But nowadays you can’t play a first person shooter without having to mow your way through legions of baddies. Think of every arbitrary machine gun segment in every military FPS you’ve played in the last two years. Think of all the rooms filled with three to four guards you have to pass through in “stealth” missions. Think of all those poor Combine soldiers killed in the line of duty in Half-Life 2. Where do they keep finding these guys, anyway? There don’t seem to be that many people left, but they’ve got an army of those fuckers coming at you out of the woodwork.

Even in multiplayer matches, our genocidal progress is how we measure our FPS prowess. Eventually it comes down to the all important kill-death ratio. How many can you take down before they catch up (and they will catch up, just you wait). Even relatively conservative games, such as Counterstrike, hold up a two to one ratio or better as a golden standard. If you pull a 17 to 1 or a 35 to 2 you should probably be playing for a living.

And this mentality persists in other genres. Real-time strategy games are almost all based around tossing man after man into a meat grinder in order to kill more of the enemy’s tiny soldiers than you’re losing. Again, there are exceptions, Myth and Dawn of War 2, to be specific, but most RTSes are based around killing as many little dudes as you can so that you can have free reign to destroy buildings with your remaining dudes.

And stealth games, even games which encourage players to expressly avoid killing such as the Thief series, involve leaving a trail of bodies a mile wide. Especially if you perceive the blackjack of Thief outside of the game’s explanation and in the context of its performance, where it stops being a non-violent implement and simply becomes a silent one hit kill weapon with some stringent use requirements.

So games encourage people to kill, to eliminate opponents. It’s almost everywhere, and its not that odd when you really think about it. After all, games are all about challenges. And what better way to offer up a challenge with both mental and emotional heft than to put players in mortal engagement after mortal engagement. But it is odd that we don’t think about it or discuss it more often.

Consider the Master Chief. He’s a heroic figure, fighting to keep Earth safe from alien zealots. But he accomplishes his goal not through savvy or subterfuge, but brute force. He’s a blunt implement, and a huge one at that. Think of all those poor Grunts, scrabbling to escape your grenades. You kill thousands of those little fuckers one after another without batting an eyelash. And then there are the Jackals, those poor, servile Jackals, and those noble Elites, simply fighting for what they believe in. The Brutes even have their good points, but you kill them by the truckload.

It doesn’t take much work to shift the Master Chief from noble defender to genocidal maniac with a little slice of racist in there. Yes, I know he has a black friend, but come on. That’s such a cop out. And its not an unreasonable subject to think about in the game’s context and think about how people who don’t constantly murder for a living survive in this world, the way that I Love Bees did.

This logic can be extended to almost any setting. Thief: Deadly Shadows has you literally annihilating the last remnant of an ancient culture in order to steal a sentient crown (on a side note, I love being able to say sentient crown, and would like to genuinely thank Thief: DS and its development team from allowing me that luxury). Resident Evil 4 involves methodically wiping out the entire population of a Spanish fishing village, with a careful eye towards resource management, then moving on to other exotic locations where you methodically remove more local inhabitants. Add in to that that you’re doing so to save a spoiled, rich white girl with connections and the game suddenly takes on a sinister air (assuming you ignore the part about mind-controlling centipede things).

Call of Duty 4 involves killing enough people in various locales to beg the question, where do they keep finding recruits for these suck-ass armies? Do they just have incredible health benefits or something? The earlier Call of Duty games involve killing enough Nazis by yourself to turn the tide of the war right there. Far Cry 2’s supply of mercenaries is literally endless, and you’re almost always going to have to kill every last one of them in a variety of fun, inventive ways. Play Time Splitters and you’ll be wiping out populations in various exotic locales and epochs to “save the world.” You’ll also be doing your damnedest to eradicate a totally inexplicable race of hilarious aliens, but whatever. And don’t even get me started on World of Goo, forcing us to kill all those poor, flammable goo balls. It makes my heart heavy just to think of it.

Innumerable foes of all shapes and sizes populate so many games, and so many times it makes no sense outside of the game’s internal logic. It’s simply the way things must be in order for the game to be as fun as possible. But it’s worth noting and thinking about, and when games do so they improve vastly.

Enter Left4Dead.

There’s been some criticism levied at Left4Dead, and rightly so. The game play is crazy repetitive and there are only four campaigns at around one to two hours each which, after you’ve beaten them, probably won’t be revisited by casual players. There are only seven different guns, three of which are just “upgrades” of other arms. There’s very little differentiation, in general, in the game play, and this is a problem for a lot of people.

This is coming from someone who, to this day, still plays Left4Dead on Expert and in Versus when he has the time, by the way. And in Left4Dead’s defense, I would like to mention that the dynamism offered by the Director, which makes replaying the game a lot of fun and is just incredibly cool from a technological perspective. But I digress.

Left4Dead is sort of unique in another way, as well: it actually offers a reasonable context for its traditional video game violence. In Left4Dead, life is quaintly precious. You are, after all, simply fighting to survive, and the people around you are soulless zombies. Even the Resident Evil games didn’t capture the oppressive and fearsome soullessness of zombie apocalypse as well as Left4Dead did.

Unlike in say, Call of Duty, the people you’re killing in Left4Dead really don’t have families anymore. They don’t have a culture of their own, and they’re actively destroying any surviving culture or intelligence simply by existing. Sure, they might’ve had parents at one point, but they’re so inhuman and you can inhabit Romero’s film and thinking of them, not as individuals with motivations, hopes and dreams and instead walking obstacles, hell bent on removing as much flesh from your bones as possible.

This is the only context where video game violence really holds up with external logic: you’re not fighting for a cause against people of other ideologies, and you’re not engaging thinking opponents. You’re just scrabbling as hard as you can to survive, to reach safety. And for this, I think Left4Dead deserves some praise, because in presenting us with a reasonable context for video game violence, it also casts a light on the absurdity of other contexts.

Is it really effective to mow down insurgents in order to accomplish your goal of moving across a city? Is putting the last shovel full of dirt over the bones of fish-person society really the thing to be doing, from both a moral and financial perspective? Wouldn’t the Combine consider listening to their supplicants’ complaints after losing the first thousand or so troops to one PHD who never even finished his post-doc? Left4Dead doesn’t raise any of these questions. You’re moving towards safety the only way you know how, and zombies are in your way. You’re not part of anything bigger than that.

I love all the games I’ve used as examples, and I don’t think that video game violence is bad, or stupid, or that it takes away from the experience of playing games. But I do think it warrants discussion and consideration. Video game violence is so often on an epic scale, and with good reason. We play games to experience stories, and bigger stories are usually more interesting. But the violence in these games, and our response to it, is something we need to consider if we ever want to sit at the big-boy’s table, art-wise. It’s no different than discussing Hemmingway’s misogyny or Stein’s pretension. It’s a part of the works we love.

Congratulations on Writing the Greatest Novel Ever Written!

You’re a young mob doctor and you live a pretty interesting life. Your work, in and of itself, is incredibly engaging and the people you find yourself interacting with both inside and outside of the mafia are fascinating individuals who could each have an entire book written about them.

Which is why your wife won’t be surprised in the least when you start writing a novel based loosely around your life. You’ll write it from the perspective of several characters: a defense attorney you oversaw the torture of, a reticent soldier you once removed three bullets from and an aging Don who feared that he would leave nothing but a legacy of violence and greed who you mercy killed some time ago.

They will form the center of a rich, ficticious web which you will weave. It will be given authenticity by your experiences, and eventually you’ll find yourself inserted into it in odd places. Your fear for your family’s safety will be reflected in the attorney, your grim resignation to a life beyond your control in the soldier. As was the case when you helped him find some peace, you’ll find more and more that you have quite a lot in common with the Don.

Eventually this encroaching age will become an overarching theme, and you’ll have made a book about what it means not just to live in the world of organized crime, but to live in a senseless world where men only grow older, not wiser. You’ll have written about a world where human life is slowly but surely becoming more commodified and disconnected, a world where people with incredible power are powerless.

Eventually you’ll insert a few section breaks from the perspective of the wife of the attorney, and the whole thing will fall together. You’ll have written a novel which flawlessly and unpretentiously captures both the wonder and horror of living in the present day, of straddling worlds as we all do and feeling out of place in all of them.

Your wife will read it and begin weeping before she embraces you. Your children will struggle through it, coming to see you in a new light. The soldier will read it and see himself reflected in your words, and become inspired to write his own novel, which will become the second greatest novel ever written, in the natural course of things. And your publisher will read it and call the Don’s son, who is a sociopath.

Once he catches wind that you were planning on putting him and his old man in some fruity, fancy pants book, he’ll have you executed in your sleep. If not for your lengthy service he would’ve also killed your wife and children, but instead he’ll just have them beaten by professional thugs.

The only suggestions we have for you here are to either find a new publisher who isn’t connected to Penguin and therefore the mob, or to put another copy of the manuscript in a safe so that it will go to the police, who can see to it that it will get the attention and publication it deserves after your death.

Whatever happens, congratulations on completing the greatest novel ever written. It taught us a lot about ourselves.

Congratulations Feminism!

You’re a Born Again Pastor with a mean streak a mile wide, a strong misogynistic opinions and a taste for whores. Cheryl is a woman’s rights activist from San Diego with a chip on her shoulder, a pretty face, and a steel-trap mind.

The two of you will meet in a hotel bar just a few miles from the Tucson airport. You’ll be on a lecture tour throughout what you call the “Real United States™” and she’ll have known you were coming.

She’ll have been waiting for a full day after she bribed your personal assistant to find out where you were staying, establishing herself as a lady of the evening in transit to parts unknown, just trying to scare up a little cash. She’ll have staged a man-friend of hers coming to visit and soliciting her for sex to make them think she was taking Johns (he’s actually just a fuck buddy) so that when you take her up to your room none of your entourage will think anything of it.

And you will take her up to your room. She’ll be the single most entrancing woman you’ve ever met, far more interesting than the sullen, slow-witted whore that you married. And what’s more she’ll be elusive, despite her price tag. Her mind, her identity, will evade you at every turn. She’ll talk like a prostitute and pontificate like a Berkley scholar in equal measure.

Perhaps part of her charm will come from your relative exhaustion. You’ll have just finished up a long, ranting tirade on why women, blacks, Jews, and gays are destroying the economy through the displeasure they visit upon Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, praise him, Amen, and it will have taken a lot out of you. It’ll be the speech’s premiere, and you give your all when you roll out a new speech.

And you knocked this one out of the park. There wasn’t a person within a mile of you who didn’t feel a mind searing rage before you were done, either against you or the fictional people you screamed about, and that’s what you love.

Cheryl won’t have known it was your first night giving a new, more hateful speech a try, but it’ll make the whole thing that much more worthwhile. Cheryl will begin her night by videotaping the two of you having brief, awkward sex (the best kind, am I right?! Seriously, though, take a class). Then she’ll give you some drugged whiskey which, as a misogynist, you’ll have requested and you’ll be out like a light.

This will give her the time and access she needs to arrange for your suicide. She’ll forge a scribbled note in a perfect re-creation of your writing and then insert a lethal dose of heroin into your body. It won’t be pretty.

When the sun rises you’ll be dead in a hotel bed, the shades still drawn, housekeeping waiting patiently to enter the room and remove the sheets to wash the mottled sex off of them. They’ll be waiting there until two in the afternoon and Cheryl, whose name is actually Sarah, will be long gone. Before the day’s end, so will your reputation and all the work you’ve done in the name of intolerance. Your followers will attribute your death to the devil’s presence in your new hate speech. Your opponents will see it as just deserts and the product of repressed desires under a thin veneer of morality. But they’ll both be a little sad.

They’ve both lost a man who made their lives simpler and gave them a symbol to rally around. Now if they want to engage in water-cooler conversation they’ll have to try their hand at rational discussion, something most people who watch you are incapable of.

So there’s only one true winner here: the rights of women everywhere. Congratulations feminism!

Congratulations Zombie!

You and your friend Sam will be at the Lyn-Lake Rainbow Foods at three in the morning. You often find yourselves there, stoned off your asses and buying Ben and Jerry’s so you can eat it while you watch Jay and Silent Bob and giggle to one another about how much cooler people who smoke pot too often are than everyone else.

You’ll be shuffling down the isles, considering some Shark Bites fruit snacks to go with those Cooler Ranch Doritos you’ve selected when you’ll notice a young man running through the store.

It will be Reggie, the manager, who normally just looks at you like you’re human waste. But tonight his eyes will be wide with panic as he races past, gasping. He’ll be muttering “What the fuck” over and over to himself. You’re really high, so you’ll giggle at first thinking that Reggie is totally wigging out.

But after a few moments standing there, thinking about your snack food choices it’ll dawn on you. Reggie couldn’t have been wigging out. He’s a square, doesn’t smoke pot, and therefore simply could not wig.

You’ll explain this to Sam in a series of monosyllabic grunts that the two of you have fine tuned into some retarded working system of communication and he’ll nod in response and suggest that the two of you investigate the cause of his distress.

When you come to the front of the store you’ll see that it has been overrun by shambling corpses in various states of decay. “Bro,” you’ll say to Sam, indicating that this is an unthinkable scenario, one which rattles your perception of reality to its core.

Sam will nod, indicating that he is also shaken, but remains comforted by your friendship and the support you offer. The two of you will hold hands for a moment and squeeze, briefly becoming lost in each others eyes.

Unfortunately this momentary distraction, lasting around two minutes in length, will be long enough for those zombies to get their teeth and claws into Sam, drawing him into their mass and devouring him as he screams horribly. You’ll try to pull him out, but all that you’ll get for your trouble is a nasty bite on the arm.

You’ll shout his name, then flee down the isles to the back of the store, where you take shelter within the walk-in freezer. Your entire body will be numb in there before long, with the exception of your arm.

The bite there will be throbbing and giving off the most intense heat you’ve ever experienced. It won’t hurt, per sec, but it’ll feel as if your life is leaking out through the wound. It will also have a strange warming effect on you.

Fearful that you will have become infected you’ll engage in your standard emergency medical procedure, smoking the last of your stash. Good and proper stoned, you’ll reflect on Sam and how good a friend he was, the way he always giggled absently when you spoke, the way he appreciated all the same movies you did and junk.

It is with these thoughts that sleep will finally find you, dragging you into a deep, comfortable slumber.

You will awaken, a mindless undead creature, in a few hours, immobilized by the combination of the THC and the cold. Your pathetic brain will be wracked by confusion and frustration, and all you’ll be able to think of now is your hunger, insatiable and unquantifiable, consuming all you’ve ever known.

It’ll be like the worst munchies you’ve ever had. Just hold out, though. In a few hours an Army zombie-eradication squad will find you and destroy your tortured shell with a flamethrower, although they will notget a sweet high from the smoke and ash as you had always hoped.

Congratulations Zombie!