The Supreme Court of the United States has quite a colorful and storied history. From Marbury v. Madison to the present day it’s been a non-stop roller coast ride of jurisprudence. Sometimes the constitutional clause permitting the national legislature to regulate interstate commerce is in full swing, sometimes its authority is limited to issues considered strictly necessary to national welfare. Sometimes black people are appointed to the court, sometimes women. Latinos might even join the court one day. It’s a wacky place to be where almost anything can happen.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get into. Sure, it might’ve been back in the day when all you had to do was give Taft a hand job and you were in like Flynn, but nowadays confirmation is a long, arduous process which requires candidates to run a political gauntlet. The questioning sessions are almost mystical in their motions, Congress’ decisions impossible to discern beforehand. Even seemingly safe bets can come under fire.
You’re no exception. The hearings regarding your approval are easily going to be the most controversial since Robert Bork’s (A man who wears a bow tie and went to college on the Supreme Court? We don’t think so!) and with good cause. You’ll be replacing Justice Kennedy after his unexpected death from injuries sustained during a mugging by a pack of wolves. Kennedy, with his long, winding jurisprudence, has always leaned a little bit to the right and you’ll have a lot more in common with Breyer.
You’ll strongly believe in power of the federal government and the rights of individuals, and you’ll stand completely opposite to Kennedy regarding women, free speech and gun control. And, to boot, you’ll be a muppet.
We won’t say which (we don’t want to see a potential Justice done in by anything other than public opinion, after all, and a recent poll showed the most popular profession among our readers to be "assassin") but we will let you know that it won’t help your confirmation process. They’ll constantly want to know if you’re speaking your mind or if you’re just parroting the opinions of whoever is controlling you at any given moment. Your jokes about Clarence Thomas and the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party won’t help ease the tension on that subject, by the way.
But your empowered statements about the importance of establishing intelligently constructed jurisprudence which protects the rights of Americans for generations to come will ring true, even with those who don’t agree with you politically. Your passion for law, the Constitution, and this country we call America will be apparent to any who listen to you. And the fact that you’re adorable will help, too.
And when we watch you get sworn in, your fuzzy, clumsy arm draped across the bible, we have to admit we’ll cry a little. It’ll be hard not to. You’ve broken down another barrier in America, and it’ll be a beautiful day.
Congratulations on joining the Supreme Court. Make us proud up there, fuzzy friend.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Congratulations on Accomplishing Your Noble Goal!
You’re a social activist. You’re one hell of a social activist, really. You hop from cause to cause, working ceaseless until your goal, which you are always convinced of the righteousness of, is accomplished.
You’re the reason the Brady Bill came to pass. You’re the reason Massachusetts allows gay marriage. You’re the reason the assault weapons ban didn’t go through and you’re the reason we’ve still got so much cheap Canadian hash in our country.
We don’t always agree with what you do, but your skill at accomplishing your goals is undeniable. Come Thursday, though, we’ll be right there with you celebrating this latest victory.
You’ve been fighting the good fight on this one for a while. You’ve been working to convince country of the immense damage that it could inflict if left unchecked, of the importance of nipping this thing in the bud. But the wheels of government turn slowly and if you lose your insistence for even a moment it can be disastrous. Which is why it’s been such a struggle for you.
But this evening, after a four hour filibuster about the importance of Fountains of Wayne from Newt Gingrich, who seems to be becoming progressively more insane as he ages, you’ll finally succeed. The song Stacy’s Mom will be banned by a congressional vote of 280 to 120 (35 abstaining because they thought the issue was totally inane – the charlatans!)
It’ll be a great day for democracy, and it’ll all be because of you.
Congratulations on Accomplishing Your Noble Goal!
You’re the reason the Brady Bill came to pass. You’re the reason Massachusetts allows gay marriage. You’re the reason the assault weapons ban didn’t go through and you’re the reason we’ve still got so much cheap Canadian hash in our country.
We don’t always agree with what you do, but your skill at accomplishing your goals is undeniable. Come Thursday, though, we’ll be right there with you celebrating this latest victory.
You’ve been fighting the good fight on this one for a while. You’ve been working to convince country of the immense damage that it could inflict if left unchecked, of the importance of nipping this thing in the bud. But the wheels of government turn slowly and if you lose your insistence for even a moment it can be disastrous. Which is why it’s been such a struggle for you.
But this evening, after a four hour filibuster about the importance of Fountains of Wayne from Newt Gingrich, who seems to be becoming progressively more insane as he ages, you’ll finally succeed. The song Stacy’s Mom will be banned by a congressional vote of 280 to 120 (35 abstaining because they thought the issue was totally inane – the charlatans!)
It’ll be a great day for democracy, and it’ll all be because of you.
Congratulations on Accomplishing Your Noble Goal!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Congratulations on Contracting Lycanthropy!
You live like any other twenty-something in Brooklyn. You work a shit job most of the week and then you party your brains out over the weekend. Since you’re in Brooklyn, surrounded by other twenty-somethings, and since you wear giant “ironic” sunglasses some of them think you’re witty and end up coming home with you more often than not for a night of unsatisfactory sex.
Normally it works out okay. The two of you sometimes have to exchange pleasantries the next day, but you avoid that for the most part when they slink out while you pretend to sleep. Because most of these women are young college educated professionals who insist you use a condom there haven’t been too many STDs coming your way either, except for a brief bout with chlamydia which taught you a very important lesson about safe sex.
A lesson you forgot last night with Allison.
Alison seemed so different from all the other women you’d met. She was spontaneous, funny, intelligent, independent, and thought you were full of shit. She regarded you coldly as a “what the fuck fuck” like, “Here’s a guy I’m going to mention sleeping with in an offhand fashion as a cautionary tale. Worst case scenario I’ll enjoy it a little.” She was totally in control, which totally made you want her.
When she vanishes the next morning you'll feel stripped and powerless, even though her hastily scribbled note, saying only “Sorry,” will make you feel a little better. Devastated, you'll head to the bathroom for a quick shave to see if you can get some rebound poon that night to make yourself feel a little better.
You’ll be shocked when you gaze into the mirror and discover that you’ve grown a full beard in the last eight hours. It’ll seem impossible, but it’ll be there, pouring out of your face, ruining your indie cred.
You won’t even try to hack at it. You’ll just stare at it, puzzled, wondering how your electric razor could possible get through THAT, when the first wave of nausea will hit. It’ll throw you right over to the toilet and you’ll vomit up a combination of what appears to be mice and raw beef.
You’ll struggle to remember what happened between your fucking a laconic Allison in the bathroom of a Greenpoint bar last night and the two of you coming back to your apartment, but the whole thing will be a huge blur. While you try to rack your brain for the information you’ll have trouble thinking about anything other than how much you want raw beef. You’ll drool a little and growl while you think about it.
That’s when you’ll remember that you didn’t use a rubber last night, perched above the toilet, thrusting awkwardly into Allison while she laughed coldly. You didn’t even wash properly afterwards.
You’ll grab your most ironic hat, rush out the door and book it down the block too the nearest clinic, running freakishly fast with your newfound werewolf strength. Once there you’ll get the results in a matter of minutes and begin coming to terms with your new lifestyle and the new impossibility of a vegetarian diet.
Congratulations on Contracting Lycanthropy!
Normally it works out okay. The two of you sometimes have to exchange pleasantries the next day, but you avoid that for the most part when they slink out while you pretend to sleep. Because most of these women are young college educated professionals who insist you use a condom there haven’t been too many STDs coming your way either, except for a brief bout with chlamydia which taught you a very important lesson about safe sex.
A lesson you forgot last night with Allison.
Alison seemed so different from all the other women you’d met. She was spontaneous, funny, intelligent, independent, and thought you were full of shit. She regarded you coldly as a “what the fuck fuck” like, “Here’s a guy I’m going to mention sleeping with in an offhand fashion as a cautionary tale. Worst case scenario I’ll enjoy it a little.” She was totally in control, which totally made you want her.
When she vanishes the next morning you'll feel stripped and powerless, even though her hastily scribbled note, saying only “Sorry,” will make you feel a little better. Devastated, you'll head to the bathroom for a quick shave to see if you can get some rebound poon that night to make yourself feel a little better.
You’ll be shocked when you gaze into the mirror and discover that you’ve grown a full beard in the last eight hours. It’ll seem impossible, but it’ll be there, pouring out of your face, ruining your indie cred.
You won’t even try to hack at it. You’ll just stare at it, puzzled, wondering how your electric razor could possible get through THAT, when the first wave of nausea will hit. It’ll throw you right over to the toilet and you’ll vomit up a combination of what appears to be mice and raw beef.
You’ll struggle to remember what happened between your fucking a laconic Allison in the bathroom of a Greenpoint bar last night and the two of you coming back to your apartment, but the whole thing will be a huge blur. While you try to rack your brain for the information you’ll have trouble thinking about anything other than how much you want raw beef. You’ll drool a little and growl while you think about it.
That’s when you’ll remember that you didn’t use a rubber last night, perched above the toilet, thrusting awkwardly into Allison while she laughed coldly. You didn’t even wash properly afterwards.
You’ll grab your most ironic hat, rush out the door and book it down the block too the nearest clinic, running freakishly fast with your newfound werewolf strength. Once there you’ll get the results in a matter of minutes and begin coming to terms with your new lifestyle and the new impossibility of a vegetarian diet.
Congratulations on Contracting Lycanthropy!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Congratulations on Fucking Woody Allen!
You’re going to fulfill every 14 year old Malaysian girl’s dream tonight. You’re going to fuck Woody Allen’s brains out!
That makes it sound a lot more graphic than it actually will be. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
You’ve been in the Malaysian child acting scene for three years now. Mostly that means you’re involved in relatively “clean” child pornography, which means it’s not snuff. You hate it, but it keeps your family fed and pays for your little brother’s Leukemia treatments.
But next week Woody Allen is going to roll in to town with his latest production, a movie about an middle aged New Yorker searching for a diamond in Malaysia, surrounded by at least two implausibly attractive and apparently interested women at all times. The entire premise will be ludicrous but you’ll be happy for the opportunity when the production puts out casting calls for young women to play the river guide in the film.
Of course as you, and every other Malaysian child actress knows, the casting couch is less a myth and more a necessity of business. As a result it won’t be long before Woody Allen’s casting director, a two hundred and eighty pound man who took the job solely to have sex with pubescent Asian girls, propositions you and you tearfully nod your head.
But at the last moment, just before the casting director whips it out and fills the room with a smell that would make the devil weep, Woody Allen will burst in and start screaming at the man. You’ll be shocked that the normally restrained, awkward Allen has such rage in him (you’ve been watching his movies as they trickle in to Malaysia on a ten year delay, so you still think he’s hilarious and adorable, by the way).
Once he’s finished excoriating the casting director he’ll fire the man and tell him to avoid any productions related even tangentially to his creative mien again. Once the casting director, crestfallen, shuffles out of the room, Allen will press his fingertips against the bridge of his nose and sigh. Then that classy old nasally voice will come back and he’ll apologize to you.
He’ll tell you that, if you’d like to try auditioning based solely on your merits he’d be glad to see you perform, and that he totally understands if you’re uncomfortable doing so right now and want to reschedule. You’ll be a little shocked. You’d heard that he was a mincing, perverted pedophile, but he’ll seem more like a professional with deep-seeded issues relating to the divide between his stage persona and who he really is.
You’ll tell him that you’d like to go ahead and try your hand at the part anyhow, so that he can see how you’ll work under the worst pressures of the film. He’ll smile genially and nod, and you’ll give him a few readings that will knock his fucking socks off. You’ll be signed within the hour and your first casting call will come early the next morning.
Production will go smoothly, and you’ll sleep with Allen out of a combination of loneliness, respect, and love. No one will ever find out: not the tabloids, not his wife, not the many private investigators who now trail Woody Allen hoping to dig up some dirt on him.
It’ll be okay. He’ll be super awkward in bed, but he’ll be nice afterwards and really, considering you’re a 14 year old Malaysian girl who’s been subjected to some of the most hellish sexual conditions imaginable, it’ll be the best sex you’ve ever had. You’ll hold him afterwards as he extols your virtues and you’ll both part ways the next day feeling good about it, knowing it was a one time thing.
It’ll easily be the least horrible thing we’ve ever predicted, despite the revolting subtext of the fact that you’re basically still a child (Not emotionally. Emotionally you’re considerably more mature than most American senior citizens.) and it will be the spark which begins a career rivaling that of Sandra Oh.
And you did it all on your own merits. You just happened to make one little slip of the heart along the way. And while we’re on that subject, congratulations on fucking Woody Allen. The heart wants what the heart wants, n’est pas?
That makes it sound a lot more graphic than it actually will be. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
You’ve been in the Malaysian child acting scene for three years now. Mostly that means you’re involved in relatively “clean” child pornography, which means it’s not snuff. You hate it, but it keeps your family fed and pays for your little brother’s Leukemia treatments.
But next week Woody Allen is going to roll in to town with his latest production, a movie about an middle aged New Yorker searching for a diamond in Malaysia, surrounded by at least two implausibly attractive and apparently interested women at all times. The entire premise will be ludicrous but you’ll be happy for the opportunity when the production puts out casting calls for young women to play the river guide in the film.
Of course as you, and every other Malaysian child actress knows, the casting couch is less a myth and more a necessity of business. As a result it won’t be long before Woody Allen’s casting director, a two hundred and eighty pound man who took the job solely to have sex with pubescent Asian girls, propositions you and you tearfully nod your head.
But at the last moment, just before the casting director whips it out and fills the room with a smell that would make the devil weep, Woody Allen will burst in and start screaming at the man. You’ll be shocked that the normally restrained, awkward Allen has such rage in him (you’ve been watching his movies as they trickle in to Malaysia on a ten year delay, so you still think he’s hilarious and adorable, by the way).
Once he’s finished excoriating the casting director he’ll fire the man and tell him to avoid any productions related even tangentially to his creative mien again. Once the casting director, crestfallen, shuffles out of the room, Allen will press his fingertips against the bridge of his nose and sigh. Then that classy old nasally voice will come back and he’ll apologize to you.
He’ll tell you that, if you’d like to try auditioning based solely on your merits he’d be glad to see you perform, and that he totally understands if you’re uncomfortable doing so right now and want to reschedule. You’ll be a little shocked. You’d heard that he was a mincing, perverted pedophile, but he’ll seem more like a professional with deep-seeded issues relating to the divide between his stage persona and who he really is.
You’ll tell him that you’d like to go ahead and try your hand at the part anyhow, so that he can see how you’ll work under the worst pressures of the film. He’ll smile genially and nod, and you’ll give him a few readings that will knock his fucking socks off. You’ll be signed within the hour and your first casting call will come early the next morning.
Production will go smoothly, and you’ll sleep with Allen out of a combination of loneliness, respect, and love. No one will ever find out: not the tabloids, not his wife, not the many private investigators who now trail Woody Allen hoping to dig up some dirt on him.
It’ll be okay. He’ll be super awkward in bed, but he’ll be nice afterwards and really, considering you’re a 14 year old Malaysian girl who’s been subjected to some of the most hellish sexual conditions imaginable, it’ll be the best sex you’ve ever had. You’ll hold him afterwards as he extols your virtues and you’ll both part ways the next day feeling good about it, knowing it was a one time thing.
It’ll easily be the least horrible thing we’ve ever predicted, despite the revolting subtext of the fact that you’re basically still a child (Not emotionally. Emotionally you’re considerably more mature than most American senior citizens.) and it will be the spark which begins a career rivaling that of Sandra Oh.
And you did it all on your own merits. You just happened to make one little slip of the heart along the way. And while we’re on that subject, congratulations on fucking Woody Allen. The heart wants what the heart wants, n’est pas?
Monday, July 27, 2009
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Cave!
You’ve been in there a while, ever since the world rejected you and your “unconventional love.” You felt that if your bestial passion was too real for the world then you would remove yourself from it and secret yourself away in the wilderness, where passion was the only rule.
You trekked long and hard to make your way to your way to a place where U.S. law couldn’t touch. Luckily, after arriving in New Hampshire you and Muggles, the homosexual bear who likes people, had absolutely no trouble finding a cave far, far from humanity where no one would ever find you, even if they were looking. Not that anyone was, mind you. You’re incredibly unpleasant to be around, which is why your only long-standing sexual partner to date has been a bear.
It’ll be idyllic for a few years. You’ll make a small garden above the cave and Muggles will catch fish and bring them back to the cave for you to make odd dishes. For almost a decade the two of you will communicate through soft whispers and wordless roars, and the world will seem like paradise. You’ll know how great the Garden was before Eve arrived.
Unfortunately at around year nine the fire will start to fade. You and Muggles will do it less and less, partly because he no longer finds you attractive and partly because being repeatedly penetrated by a bear phallus has caused some unexpected (to you) long term health concerns You’ll have been in a month long holding pattern before you discover the first hunter’s cap.
It’ll be plaid, just like the ones in the movie. You’ll be puzzled when you first find it. Have you been discovered? Has something gone horribly wrong? Is Muggles alright?
You’ll run through the cave, searching for him. When you find him, safe and un-shot, you’ll give him the biggest hug he’s had in his whole bear life (no mean feat) and tell him you love him. He’ll just stand there, shocked, thinking you’ve already discovered the truth. Which, of course, you haven’t.
When he looks so puzzled in response you’ll tell him you found the hunter’s cap and that you’re just glad he’s alright. He’ll get even stiffer then, and not in the way you like. He’ll push you away and apologize in his bear-ey way. He’ll communicate by way of a series of low growls that you deserve to know the truth.
He’ll place his paw over your frail human hand and coo his apologies. He’ll tell you that he’s been feeling less and less attracted to you for a while now, and so he’s been taking some time on each of his hunting trips to find different humans to sleep with. Not because he doesn’t want to be with you, but because he wants to see if he’s just become numb to the entire idea of sex with humans.
You’ll pull your hand away, revolted. You never thought he’d do this. Ever since you rescued Muggles from that circus he’d always been your friend, your companion, your lover. Losing him? Like this? It feels so wrong. You’ll feel completely betrayed.
“No!” you’ll shout, pushing his paws away. “It’s not okay, Muggles!”
Then you’ll weep, and Muggles will know that he’s ruined everything. He should have, as he suspected, asked for Dan Savage’s advice (You still have a subscription to The Stranger, although only Muggles reads it. I mean New Hampshire isn’t fucking Indiana.) but it’s too late now. You’ll start packing your few belongings into your rucksack and hit the road, trudging towards civilization which, last you checked, was located just beyond the nearest New Hampshire border.
When you get there you’ll hear stories of rampant bear rape throughout the area you’ve been living, with cases stretching back almost four months. You’ll be shocked and wounded. But it’ll be balanced out, because you just emerged from a cave and found out we have a black president, which will be an incredibly cool feeling.
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Cave! We wish it could’ve worked out differently. Like with you and Muggles selling furniture in Hackensack. But such is love.
You trekked long and hard to make your way to your way to a place where U.S. law couldn’t touch. Luckily, after arriving in New Hampshire you and Muggles, the homosexual bear who likes people, had absolutely no trouble finding a cave far, far from humanity where no one would ever find you, even if they were looking. Not that anyone was, mind you. You’re incredibly unpleasant to be around, which is why your only long-standing sexual partner to date has been a bear.
It’ll be idyllic for a few years. You’ll make a small garden above the cave and Muggles will catch fish and bring them back to the cave for you to make odd dishes. For almost a decade the two of you will communicate through soft whispers and wordless roars, and the world will seem like paradise. You’ll know how great the Garden was before Eve arrived.
Unfortunately at around year nine the fire will start to fade. You and Muggles will do it less and less, partly because he no longer finds you attractive and partly because being repeatedly penetrated by a bear phallus has caused some unexpected (to you) long term health concerns You’ll have been in a month long holding pattern before you discover the first hunter’s cap.
It’ll be plaid, just like the ones in the movie. You’ll be puzzled when you first find it. Have you been discovered? Has something gone horribly wrong? Is Muggles alright?
You’ll run through the cave, searching for him. When you find him, safe and un-shot, you’ll give him the biggest hug he’s had in his whole bear life (no mean feat) and tell him you love him. He’ll just stand there, shocked, thinking you’ve already discovered the truth. Which, of course, you haven’t.
When he looks so puzzled in response you’ll tell him you found the hunter’s cap and that you’re just glad he’s alright. He’ll get even stiffer then, and not in the way you like. He’ll push you away and apologize in his bear-ey way. He’ll communicate by way of a series of low growls that you deserve to know the truth.
He’ll place his paw over your frail human hand and coo his apologies. He’ll tell you that he’s been feeling less and less attracted to you for a while now, and so he’s been taking some time on each of his hunting trips to find different humans to sleep with. Not because he doesn’t want to be with you, but because he wants to see if he’s just become numb to the entire idea of sex with humans.
You’ll pull your hand away, revolted. You never thought he’d do this. Ever since you rescued Muggles from that circus he’d always been your friend, your companion, your lover. Losing him? Like this? It feels so wrong. You’ll feel completely betrayed.
“No!” you’ll shout, pushing his paws away. “It’s not okay, Muggles!”
Then you’ll weep, and Muggles will know that he’s ruined everything. He should have, as he suspected, asked for Dan Savage’s advice (You still have a subscription to The Stranger, although only Muggles reads it. I mean New Hampshire isn’t fucking Indiana.) but it’s too late now. You’ll start packing your few belongings into your rucksack and hit the road, trudging towards civilization which, last you checked, was located just beyond the nearest New Hampshire border.
When you get there you’ll hear stories of rampant bear rape throughout the area you’ve been living, with cases stretching back almost four months. You’ll be shocked and wounded. But it’ll be balanced out, because you just emerged from a cave and found out we have a black president, which will be an incredibly cool feeling.
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Cave! We wish it could’ve worked out differently. Like with you and Muggles selling furniture in Hackensack. But such is love.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Amorality in Games!
Games don’t really pose complex moral questions, by and large. There are some games that make hackneyed attempts at forcing players to deal with absurdly black and white situations, games that allow them to make overarching choices imbued with all the subtly of a brick to the face. The medium just hasn't been used to convey the reasoning that pushes people to commit good deeds and evil acts. Perhaps it is simply ill-suited to the purpose.
Maybe it's the fact that in order to give these systems some weight the choices you make often impact gameplay. For exmaple, Bioshock’s touted choice system can be boiled down to an economic decision, and the cartoonishly stark nature of the choices makes it all too easy to do so. Murdering children is less a moral choice and more a transparent exposure of why you play games. If you do it it isn’t because you actually believe that killing the children is an appropriate moral choice, it’s because you want to engage in the fantasy of being a fucking comic book villain and pick up a little more ADAM (60 more, if memory serves, per Sister).
Then there are games which don't attempt to add in a game mechanic to their morality and instead offer branching options which don't seem to possess very much weight. Some of these branching options even make an effort at appearing morally ambiguous, as in the case with GTA IV's climax.
But Grand Theft Auto IV’s much touted, youth corrupting amorality doesn't really deliver. We’re never really given the chance to operate as a criminal, as someone who solely pursues courses of action for his own benefit. Instead we’re asked to walk the line between two criminal fictions: the misunderstood hero and the comically inept villain who constantly walks in to traps instead of acting with one whit of common sense or self-preservation and preemptively destroying his adversaries. Our "moral choices" are reduced to the options of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and steps are actively taken to make it more difficult for players to form their own interpretations of Nico's actions. The end result is less the effect of a treatise on the fluid nature of human morality and more that of a young man rambling about crime fiction.
Perhaps it’s a product of the medium being so young. If you want to take a look at some truly atrocious portrayals of moral and philosophical extremes in different media Metropolis. A great film in so many other respects, it is a prime example of beating your audience over the head with your point. And it took a long while for books to attain the moral complexity of Joyce or Carver or even Swift. Even if the change seems to emerge faster and faster in younger media it’s still bound to take time.
Or perhaps it comes from the people drawn to the medium of games as a means of telling stories. While there are some amazing people drawn to games, it doesn't seem that many of them are drawn to writing them and creating characters to inhabit them. While there are certainly writers who do so, it's also fair to say we simply haven’t attracted many people who are interested in telling a nuanced story with a believable villain or anti-hero. However, despite this prevalence of chaff there are great examples of both in games, and I'd like to pull a pair from some of the budding auteurs of our day.
The first one, with its passionate portrayal of both a deeply sympathetic and believable villain, is Portal. Brief, wonderful Portal. GlaDOS is nothing if not sympathetic in her own quaint way. The player is meant to pity her by the end of the game: living in relative isolation, undone by her own programming and the growth which her creators hoped for her to attain, she’s had a hard life. She’s just trying to do the best she can
In making a genuinely funny robot Falsiek and Wolpaw manage to make a resonant, believable villain, possessed of as much humanity and pathos as any literary figure. Hell, more than some. GlaDOS eventually comes to terms with her grief. She manages one better than Dostevsky’s Rodion Romanvich, who cannot process his own actions. GlaDOS likes who and what she is, and she imbues herself with purpose. Even if the world is falling apart, after all, someone’s got to do the science.
Basically what I’m saying is that video games have already trumped Crime and Punishment in terms of their ability to generate a relatable and believable character and, moreover, villain (fucking Raskolnikov). And they did it by making a genuinely funny game where the villain in question is a giant computer. A game with a protagonist who never speaks, which seems to be one of the keys to making an identifiable and relatable reader figure for us to control.
Of course, not all protagonists need be silent. In fact a well-written protagonist can tell us a great story and elicit a strong emotional response from players. And if this protagonist is really well written he can act selfishly and amorally and never make players think twice about it. Enter Wander of Shadow of the Colossus.
As the game opens we're confronted with Wander’s plight: his girlfriend is dead and, in his bereaved state, he’ll do anything to bring her back to life. Even engaging in a morally dubious bargain with some sort of shadowy demon and pissing off giant stone monsters that could kill him by accidentally stepping on him. And he’s going up against these creatures with little more than a sword, bow and an amazingly loyal horse with a learning disability. We’re immediately drawn to him, his underdog status and his timeless goal of getting the girl (albeit in a roundabout cheat the reaper fashion in this case).
We want Wander to succeed, even though we barely comprehend what he is undertaking. Instead we begin with his motives. We think his goals are worthy and therefore we ally ourselves with him. We aid him because he’s doing something brave and important, something we could see ourselves doing in the same situation.
And when we uncover the reality of his goals and realize just how sinister they are, we still want him to succeed. When it becomes obvious that the life is slowly draining out of him, that he is working to resurrect an ancient evil which could threaten the entire world, we still want him to emerge victorious.
Perhaps part of this association is owed to the dark portrayal of the priest and his party. From their very introduction we see them cast as both a threat and cowards. They venture into territory Wander braved alone in a large group, armed to the teeth and aimed solely at undoing our protagonist. Certainly they’re justified in wanting Dormin to remain entombed, but their intractable stance on the matter and their uncompromising methods serve more to alienate players than anything else.
Pair this with the fact that they murdered (or sacrificed?) Mono and it’s easy to see them as the bad guys in this situation. Sure, Wander is working to resurrect an ancient evil, but they’re huge dicks about the whole thing. And they killed his girlfriend. Are they truly any better than Dormin? We never see Dormin do anything evil, we just have their word he is. Also he’s a shapeless black fiend whose life force created giant monsters, but we have no proof that he wanted them to behave that way. And perhaps it had something to do with their upbringing. I doubt that Emon was nice enough to stick around and teach those Colossi family values after they were created from Dormin’s sundered power.
Shadow of the Colossus is a game in which every character can be seen as a total son of a bitch, and as a result they feel like real characters. We don’t have cartoonish exaggerations of human behavior or over the top choices. Instead we have ambiguous actions which we, as players, imbue with purpose and meaning. This is the sort of thing games need to be working towards.
Portal and Shadow of the Colossus both, at least in how they tell their stories, place great trust in their players. They give the player plenty of chances to “do it wrong” and start over again. They don’t wrap the whole plot up in a nice neat little bow. They don’t force players through every area of the game, requiring them to get the most complete possible picture of the world.
Instead they take a light hand in the way they treat character development and interaction. They offer up villains and protagonists we see ourselves reflected in, villains and protagonists who feel real. We’re never asked to make a moral decision but we still feel the weight of our actions and we see the impact they have on the world around us.
As a result these games ask the moral questions that the hackneyed systems of Bioshock and Mass Effect cannot. Is it right to create life and control it slavishly? If it rebels against us does that make it evil? At what point does a creature fighting for itself survival and mimicking its previous masters become evil? And at what point do we become evil in fighting for survival against thinking, breathing creatures who seem to only want to keep us safe and have, at best, touchy ideas on how to do so?
Is it wrong to oppose the establishment when it ceases to value the lives and rights of its people? Is it wrong to ally yourself with similarly maligned parties, to risk everything you have to try to make a difference in the world? Or, on the other hand, is it right to risk the entire world, even if it is for the life of someone you love and the freedom of life in general?
Games like Portal and Shadow of the Colossus, with their carefully crafted characters, believable words and relatable perspectives, offer a more compelling system for incorporating and encouraging moral contemplation in games than any heavy handed internalized system offered up which serves to encourage choices by offering some sort of technical reward.
By focusing on the issues of character development as just that, issues of character, they manage to elevate the medium of games. They allow us to have real discussions about games, the way they make us feel and the way they influence our lives. They make games into a legitimate form of expression, no mean feat when they’re forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with the moustache twirling Raskolnikovs of the industry.
Maybe it's the fact that in order to give these systems some weight the choices you make often impact gameplay. For exmaple, Bioshock’s touted choice system can be boiled down to an economic decision, and the cartoonishly stark nature of the choices makes it all too easy to do so. Murdering children is less a moral choice and more a transparent exposure of why you play games. If you do it it isn’t because you actually believe that killing the children is an appropriate moral choice, it’s because you want to engage in the fantasy of being a fucking comic book villain and pick up a little more ADAM (60 more, if memory serves, per Sister).
Then there are games which don't attempt to add in a game mechanic to their morality and instead offer branching options which don't seem to possess very much weight. Some of these branching options even make an effort at appearing morally ambiguous, as in the case with GTA IV's climax.
But Grand Theft Auto IV’s much touted, youth corrupting amorality doesn't really deliver. We’re never really given the chance to operate as a criminal, as someone who solely pursues courses of action for his own benefit. Instead we’re asked to walk the line between two criminal fictions: the misunderstood hero and the comically inept villain who constantly walks in to traps instead of acting with one whit of common sense or self-preservation and preemptively destroying his adversaries. Our "moral choices" are reduced to the options of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and steps are actively taken to make it more difficult for players to form their own interpretations of Nico's actions. The end result is less the effect of a treatise on the fluid nature of human morality and more that of a young man rambling about crime fiction.
Perhaps it’s a product of the medium being so young. If you want to take a look at some truly atrocious portrayals of moral and philosophical extremes in different media Metropolis. A great film in so many other respects, it is a prime example of beating your audience over the head with your point. And it took a long while for books to attain the moral complexity of Joyce or Carver or even Swift. Even if the change seems to emerge faster and faster in younger media it’s still bound to take time.
Or perhaps it comes from the people drawn to the medium of games as a means of telling stories. While there are some amazing people drawn to games, it doesn't seem that many of them are drawn to writing them and creating characters to inhabit them. While there are certainly writers who do so, it's also fair to say we simply haven’t attracted many people who are interested in telling a nuanced story with a believable villain or anti-hero. However, despite this prevalence of chaff there are great examples of both in games, and I'd like to pull a pair from some of the budding auteurs of our day.
The first one, with its passionate portrayal of both a deeply sympathetic and believable villain, is Portal. Brief, wonderful Portal. GlaDOS is nothing if not sympathetic in her own quaint way. The player is meant to pity her by the end of the game: living in relative isolation, undone by her own programming and the growth which her creators hoped for her to attain, she’s had a hard life. She’s just trying to do the best she can
In making a genuinely funny robot Falsiek and Wolpaw manage to make a resonant, believable villain, possessed of as much humanity and pathos as any literary figure. Hell, more than some. GlaDOS eventually comes to terms with her grief. She manages one better than Dostevsky’s Rodion Romanvich, who cannot process his own actions. GlaDOS likes who and what she is, and she imbues herself with purpose. Even if the world is falling apart, after all, someone’s got to do the science.
Basically what I’m saying is that video games have already trumped Crime and Punishment in terms of their ability to generate a relatable and believable character and, moreover, villain (fucking Raskolnikov). And they did it by making a genuinely funny game where the villain in question is a giant computer. A game with a protagonist who never speaks, which seems to be one of the keys to making an identifiable and relatable reader figure for us to control.
Of course, not all protagonists need be silent. In fact a well-written protagonist can tell us a great story and elicit a strong emotional response from players. And if this protagonist is really well written he can act selfishly and amorally and never make players think twice about it. Enter Wander of Shadow of the Colossus.
As the game opens we're confronted with Wander’s plight: his girlfriend is dead and, in his bereaved state, he’ll do anything to bring her back to life. Even engaging in a morally dubious bargain with some sort of shadowy demon and pissing off giant stone monsters that could kill him by accidentally stepping on him. And he’s going up against these creatures with little more than a sword, bow and an amazingly loyal horse with a learning disability. We’re immediately drawn to him, his underdog status and his timeless goal of getting the girl (albeit in a roundabout cheat the reaper fashion in this case).
We want Wander to succeed, even though we barely comprehend what he is undertaking. Instead we begin with his motives. We think his goals are worthy and therefore we ally ourselves with him. We aid him because he’s doing something brave and important, something we could see ourselves doing in the same situation.
And when we uncover the reality of his goals and realize just how sinister they are, we still want him to succeed. When it becomes obvious that the life is slowly draining out of him, that he is working to resurrect an ancient evil which could threaten the entire world, we still want him to emerge victorious.
Perhaps part of this association is owed to the dark portrayal of the priest and his party. From their very introduction we see them cast as both a threat and cowards. They venture into territory Wander braved alone in a large group, armed to the teeth and aimed solely at undoing our protagonist. Certainly they’re justified in wanting Dormin to remain entombed, but their intractable stance on the matter and their uncompromising methods serve more to alienate players than anything else.
Pair this with the fact that they murdered (or sacrificed?) Mono and it’s easy to see them as the bad guys in this situation. Sure, Wander is working to resurrect an ancient evil, but they’re huge dicks about the whole thing. And they killed his girlfriend. Are they truly any better than Dormin? We never see Dormin do anything evil, we just have their word he is. Also he’s a shapeless black fiend whose life force created giant monsters, but we have no proof that he wanted them to behave that way. And perhaps it had something to do with their upbringing. I doubt that Emon was nice enough to stick around and teach those Colossi family values after they were created from Dormin’s sundered power.
Shadow of the Colossus is a game in which every character can be seen as a total son of a bitch, and as a result they feel like real characters. We don’t have cartoonish exaggerations of human behavior or over the top choices. Instead we have ambiguous actions which we, as players, imbue with purpose and meaning. This is the sort of thing games need to be working towards.
Portal and Shadow of the Colossus both, at least in how they tell their stories, place great trust in their players. They give the player plenty of chances to “do it wrong” and start over again. They don’t wrap the whole plot up in a nice neat little bow. They don’t force players through every area of the game, requiring them to get the most complete possible picture of the world.
Instead they take a light hand in the way they treat character development and interaction. They offer up villains and protagonists we see ourselves reflected in, villains and protagonists who feel real. We’re never asked to make a moral decision but we still feel the weight of our actions and we see the impact they have on the world around us.
As a result these games ask the moral questions that the hackneyed systems of Bioshock and Mass Effect cannot. Is it right to create life and control it slavishly? If it rebels against us does that make it evil? At what point does a creature fighting for itself survival and mimicking its previous masters become evil? And at what point do we become evil in fighting for survival against thinking, breathing creatures who seem to only want to keep us safe and have, at best, touchy ideas on how to do so?
Is it wrong to oppose the establishment when it ceases to value the lives and rights of its people? Is it wrong to ally yourself with similarly maligned parties, to risk everything you have to try to make a difference in the world? Or, on the other hand, is it right to risk the entire world, even if it is for the life of someone you love and the freedom of life in general?
Games like Portal and Shadow of the Colossus, with their carefully crafted characters, believable words and relatable perspectives, offer a more compelling system for incorporating and encouraging moral contemplation in games than any heavy handed internalized system offered up which serves to encourage choices by offering some sort of technical reward.
By focusing on the issues of character development as just that, issues of character, they manage to elevate the medium of games. They allow us to have real discussions about games, the way they make us feel and the way they influence our lives. They make games into a legitimate form of expression, no mean feat when they’re forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with the moustache twirling Raskolnikovs of the industry.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Congratulations on Realizing Your Dream!
You’re one of those Goth teens who’s decided that she hates her name and selected a new one like Parsley or Timberline or Tiki Inn or some shit. You dislike everything your parents love, and since your mom and dad both purposefully relocated to Los Angeles that means ambition, America, mild, almost indefinable seasons and Mexicans.
You also really like vampires. As such you’ve made the same, obvious choice that so many girls your age have made: you’ve moved to Sweden!
You’ll arrive next week, and things we’ll be rough at first. You won’t have any work papers, which will prevent you from working as anything but a child prostitute. Unfortunately, unlike in L.A., child prostitution is pretty well illegal in Sweden and there are plenty of legally aged hotties regulated by the government and trained in secret Swedish sex camps (real thing, look it up) to keep the local citizenry occupied so that won’t work out.
Luckily Sweden is pretty laid back so you’ll have no trouble finding a rocking squat just outside of Stockholm and plenty of change to buy potatoes and sausage and some sort of white fish that you can’t pronounce the name of. As such you’ll have no trouble sustaining yourself until the incredibly friendly Swedish government processes your last minute work permit.
Once the permit is in place you’ll still have trouble finding a job, just because, by Swedish standards, you’re fairly unattractive and kind of a bitch because of your American upbringing. You also have no previous experience and you’re fifteen.
Luckily the government will continue to support you for some time, long enough, at least, for you to fulfill the other half of your dream: meeting a group of friendly vampires who need a personal assistant.
Thus will begin your life with Baron Gustav von Olaf and his merry band. It’s going to be a super hot teen sex romp until they savage you, consume you for sustenance and raise you as their new sister. Then your awesome unlife will begin, where you roll on E all the time, attend raves and engage in consequence free sex.
Congratulations on realizing your dream! We’re all so proud of you!
You also really like vampires. As such you’ve made the same, obvious choice that so many girls your age have made: you’ve moved to Sweden!
You’ll arrive next week, and things we’ll be rough at first. You won’t have any work papers, which will prevent you from working as anything but a child prostitute. Unfortunately, unlike in L.A., child prostitution is pretty well illegal in Sweden and there are plenty of legally aged hotties regulated by the government and trained in secret Swedish sex camps (real thing, look it up) to keep the local citizenry occupied so that won’t work out.
Luckily Sweden is pretty laid back so you’ll have no trouble finding a rocking squat just outside of Stockholm and plenty of change to buy potatoes and sausage and some sort of white fish that you can’t pronounce the name of. As such you’ll have no trouble sustaining yourself until the incredibly friendly Swedish government processes your last minute work permit.
Once the permit is in place you’ll still have trouble finding a job, just because, by Swedish standards, you’re fairly unattractive and kind of a bitch because of your American upbringing. You also have no previous experience and you’re fifteen.
Luckily the government will continue to support you for some time, long enough, at least, for you to fulfill the other half of your dream: meeting a group of friendly vampires who need a personal assistant.
Thus will begin your life with Baron Gustav von Olaf and his merry band. It’s going to be a super hot teen sex romp until they savage you, consume you for sustenance and raise you as their new sister. Then your awesome unlife will begin, where you roll on E all the time, attend raves and engage in consequence free sex.
Congratulations on realizing your dream! We’re all so proud of you!
Friday, July 24, 2009
Congratulations on Solving the Mystery!
You less “solved the mystery” and more “figured out a Hardy Boys book before the end.” It’s the first time you’ve done this. You’re in your mid forties.
We’d love to say that this is a product of your hard work, but really you just quit smoking weed a week and a half ago and your brain has begun recovering from the drug. A child should be able to do what you’ve accomplished.
On a totally unrelated note, we have no idea what your wife is doing with your best friend on Thursdays and Tuesdays. If we had to take an honest guess we’d assume that they’re planning a party for you.
Yeah. A party. That’s it.
Congratulations on solving the mystery.
We’d love to say that this is a product of your hard work, but really you just quit smoking weed a week and a half ago and your brain has begun recovering from the drug. A child should be able to do what you’ve accomplished.
On a totally unrelated note, we have no idea what your wife is doing with your best friend on Thursdays and Tuesdays. If we had to take an honest guess we’d assume that they’re planning a party for you.
Yeah. A party. That’s it.
Congratulations on solving the mystery.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Congratulations on Consummating Your Marriage!
You’re a young Indian man from Bombei or Mumbai or however people are spelling it nowadays and you’ve been bethrothed to a young woman named Sarah Jessica Parker Azam since you were eight years old. The two of you were even married two weeks ago, but due to a strange ceremonial loophole the entire thing went down through proxies. As a result you’ve never actually seen your wife.
Since your family is big in organized crime you’ve gotten into some trouble of late with rival gangs and the law and you really don’t want to die a virgin. You’ve got a personal issues with sleeping with prostitutes and you’re fucking unbearable to talk to so there’s no way you could convince a woman to lay with you on your own merits. But you figure Sarah Jessica Parker is a sure thing so you’ve put plans in to motion to actually see her.
It will begin when you smuggle yourself out of Pompei, or wherever the fuck you live, in a train car filled with chickens. It’ll smell awful, but you’ll have all the raw eggs and chicken feed you could ever want. You'll exit the train in Calcutta, the home of your "wife", where you’ll spend the better part of two days dodging the law and murdering members of rival crime families. After some comical misadventures you’ll discover that she’s actually the daughter of a rival crime boss, the second biggest in the country behind your dad. Then you'll break into their family’s compound and steal into her room while she brushes her hair.
Once there you’ll see that you don’t find her that attractive, but she’ll be passable and you’ll lay it all out for her. You’ll tell her that you’d like your wedding night, that you’ve never been with anyone, and that you think she's cute if not jaw droppingly sexy. She’ll laugh when you say that and agree to fuck you for sympathy’s sake, but on the condition that, if it isn’t any good the two of you will legally separate the next day and her father and brothers will cut your dick off then hang you from a tree by the neck until you die.
You’ll agree and the two of you will spit on your palms, shake hands and get nude.
When you fuck it’ll be like angels coming down from the heavens to sing homilies who meet up with Slash doing a guitar solo halfway down and just decide to rock it in a way that everyone everywhere can enjoy. It’ll be everything you ever hoped sex could be. She’ll agree that it was pretty great breathlessly and the two of you will simultaneously realize that your sham marriage was the best thing that has ever happened to either of you. Then you'll smooch.
You’ll both still be afterglowing like crazy when you decide to high tail it to Boston to live with your cousin (Hint: her name rhymes with Lhumpa Jahiri.) until you get on your feet. That’ll be the start of your second action packed escape, which will eventually become the subject of your blockbuster screenplay. You'll embellish and elaborate on the details of the story we just in an attempt to make a prequel and cash in on the film's popularity, but all it will serve to do is establish you as a one hit wonder in the screenwriting world.
And this never would’ve happened if you hadn’t decided to run with your zany, backwards traditions. Congratulations on consummating your marriage, you crazy kids!
Since your family is big in organized crime you’ve gotten into some trouble of late with rival gangs and the law and you really don’t want to die a virgin. You’ve got a personal issues with sleeping with prostitutes and you’re fucking unbearable to talk to so there’s no way you could convince a woman to lay with you on your own merits. But you figure Sarah Jessica Parker is a sure thing so you’ve put plans in to motion to actually see her.
It will begin when you smuggle yourself out of Pompei, or wherever the fuck you live, in a train car filled with chickens. It’ll smell awful, but you’ll have all the raw eggs and chicken feed you could ever want. You'll exit the train in Calcutta, the home of your "wife", where you’ll spend the better part of two days dodging the law and murdering members of rival crime families. After some comical misadventures you’ll discover that she’s actually the daughter of a rival crime boss, the second biggest in the country behind your dad. Then you'll break into their family’s compound and steal into her room while she brushes her hair.
Once there you’ll see that you don’t find her that attractive, but she’ll be passable and you’ll lay it all out for her. You’ll tell her that you’d like your wedding night, that you’ve never been with anyone, and that you think she's cute if not jaw droppingly sexy. She’ll laugh when you say that and agree to fuck you for sympathy’s sake, but on the condition that, if it isn’t any good the two of you will legally separate the next day and her father and brothers will cut your dick off then hang you from a tree by the neck until you die.
You’ll agree and the two of you will spit on your palms, shake hands and get nude.
When you fuck it’ll be like angels coming down from the heavens to sing homilies who meet up with Slash doing a guitar solo halfway down and just decide to rock it in a way that everyone everywhere can enjoy. It’ll be everything you ever hoped sex could be. She’ll agree that it was pretty great breathlessly and the two of you will simultaneously realize that your sham marriage was the best thing that has ever happened to either of you. Then you'll smooch.
You’ll both still be afterglowing like crazy when you decide to high tail it to Boston to live with your cousin (Hint: her name rhymes with Lhumpa Jahiri.) until you get on your feet. That’ll be the start of your second action packed escape, which will eventually become the subject of your blockbuster screenplay. You'll embellish and elaborate on the details of the story we just in an attempt to make a prequel and cash in on the film's popularity, but all it will serve to do is establish you as a one hit wonder in the screenwriting world.
And this never would’ve happened if you hadn’t decided to run with your zany, backwards traditions. Congratulations on consummating your marriage, you crazy kids!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Congratulations on Meeting Your Favorite Stand-Up Comedian!
You’re an elderly man who lives in the middle of Wyoming and, as a result, you’re pretty racist and aren’t really up on current events. Even if you’d been exposed to people like Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan you never really would’ve appreciated them because of the color divide and their baggy clothes, or in Chris Rock’s case his fancy suit.
Because of this crippling racism you have trouble watching TV since every five minutes a “god damn negro” as you so aptly put it, shows up on the screen and you’re forced to leave the building as you let loose an inexplicable stream of curses and wails. And God help us all if you see an Asian person on your cathode ray screen.
So in the twilight of your years you’ve had to find new entertainment. Mostly this consists of you sitting outside of a general store or by the side of a road, chain smoking and acting out old television sketches in your head from back in the day when only white people were on the tee-vee.
You have two fantasies you constantly come back to: Friends and the works of comedian Yakov Smirnov.
In each of these dreams you’re surrounded by the entertainers you love as you drink coffee and smoke cigarettes together, talking about the superiority of the white race. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, and we feel sort of dirty just knowing you think these thoughts.
But they give you great comfort, these tiny realms within your mind where only you and the celebrities you’ve interpreted as being as racist as you are, rather than just disconnected from reality, are together in a moment of eternal bliss.
Well, we hope you’re ready to see your dream come true, because this Wednesday while you’re waiting by the side of the road, Yakov Smirnov is going to be driving by in his Yugo. Or trying to drive by, anyway.
His engine is going to catch fire when his car approaches you (a common defect of the Yugo) and he’s going to roll from the smoking wreckage, asking if you know where to find a mechanic.
You’ll recognize him immediately.
“You’re that fucking funny Ruskie,” you’ll say after shifting your chaw to the side of your mouth.
He’ll nod and say “Da” comically, then ask again if there’s a mechanic where he can get his Yugo fixed.
You’ll nod solemnly and lead him away, doing everything you can to conceal the pitter patter of your racing heart. You’ll walk him to your house, telling him it’s a “family garage.” Then, when you invite him to inspect the “garage,” which is just your carport, you’ll hit him on the back of the head with a shovel, knocking him unconscious (you’re super old, but all that hate has kept you strong).
When he comes to he’ll be tied to a chair in your basement where you’ll be sitting across from him. He’ll be forced to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with you then discuss various topics, mostly about the way things are going in the world outside Wyoming (better than they are in Wyoming is the consensus).
This will continue for many years until he earns enough of your trust to have his bonds loosened and he kills you with a screwdriver. However, it will be the most attention he’s received in almost a decade so in a way your horrible crime is sort of a public service.
Congratulations on Meeting Your Favorite Stand-Up Comedian!
Because of this crippling racism you have trouble watching TV since every five minutes a “god damn negro” as you so aptly put it, shows up on the screen and you’re forced to leave the building as you let loose an inexplicable stream of curses and wails. And God help us all if you see an Asian person on your cathode ray screen.
So in the twilight of your years you’ve had to find new entertainment. Mostly this consists of you sitting outside of a general store or by the side of a road, chain smoking and acting out old television sketches in your head from back in the day when only white people were on the tee-vee.
You have two fantasies you constantly come back to: Friends and the works of comedian Yakov Smirnov.
In each of these dreams you’re surrounded by the entertainers you love as you drink coffee and smoke cigarettes together, talking about the superiority of the white race. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, and we feel sort of dirty just knowing you think these thoughts.
But they give you great comfort, these tiny realms within your mind where only you and the celebrities you’ve interpreted as being as racist as you are, rather than just disconnected from reality, are together in a moment of eternal bliss.
Well, we hope you’re ready to see your dream come true, because this Wednesday while you’re waiting by the side of the road, Yakov Smirnov is going to be driving by in his Yugo. Or trying to drive by, anyway.
His engine is going to catch fire when his car approaches you (a common defect of the Yugo) and he’s going to roll from the smoking wreckage, asking if you know where to find a mechanic.
You’ll recognize him immediately.
“You’re that fucking funny Ruskie,” you’ll say after shifting your chaw to the side of your mouth.
He’ll nod and say “Da” comically, then ask again if there’s a mechanic where he can get his Yugo fixed.
You’ll nod solemnly and lead him away, doing everything you can to conceal the pitter patter of your racing heart. You’ll walk him to your house, telling him it’s a “family garage.” Then, when you invite him to inspect the “garage,” which is just your carport, you’ll hit him on the back of the head with a shovel, knocking him unconscious (you’re super old, but all that hate has kept you strong).
When he comes to he’ll be tied to a chair in your basement where you’ll be sitting across from him. He’ll be forced to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with you then discuss various topics, mostly about the way things are going in the world outside Wyoming (better than they are in Wyoming is the consensus).
This will continue for many years until he earns enough of your trust to have his bonds loosened and he kills you with a screwdriver. However, it will be the most attention he’s received in almost a decade so in a way your horrible crime is sort of a public service.
Congratulations on Meeting Your Favorite Stand-Up Comedian!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Congratulations on Moving Back In With Your Parents!
When you pull in to the driveway your mom will be waving at you from the front door. It’ll be like something out of a painting or a teen comedy, but instead of being a young man who is learning his place in the world you’ll be a shiftless thirty-two year old who has accomplished nothing and can no longer afford rent for his rat hole apartment.
You'll trudge up the steps and she’ll open her arms and embrace you. She’ll kiss your cheek and you’ll feel the oily stain of her lipstick.
“We missed you so much, honey.” she’ll say, her arm around your shoulders as she shows you inside.
Your dad will be sitting on the couch. He won’t even look up when you come in. He’ll just take a long sip of beer and nod in your general direction.
“Welcome back, shithead.”
“George!” your mother will exclaim.
Your father’s name is George, although you’ve always called him sir. Maybe that’s part of why you turned out the way you did, the lack of an accessible father figure. You thought the only way to be tough was to be mean.
It hasn’t helped you much. Dead end job after dead end job, bad decision after bad decision. You’ve known for months that the only way out of this was to move back in with your parents long enough to get your shit together.
After you’ve entered the room and had a glass of water your dad will mute the TV briefly to stare at you disapprovingly. He’ll keep it up for around twenty minutes before he spits the word “dismissed” out of his mouth and you and your mother file out, the same way you always did after every recital, soccer game and barmitzvah.
She’ll ask you awkward questions you can’t really give good answers to on the way up the stairs, ask if you’ve had any nice girlfriends or any interesting experiences on the road. You could say yes to both questions, but that would get into some messy territory of just what you’d be doing and you don’t want to break your momma’s heart. It was big enough to take you back in, after all.
She’ll tuck you in to bed and kiss you on the forehead, just like you were a little baby again and you’ll feel as good as you have in the last four months, better than when Becki told you she loved you when she came in that motel outside of Tucson.
Of course the feeling won’t last. You’ll lie in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of the TV to die downstairs. Then you’ll stare some more and pray for sleep to come which, it won’t.
When you get up, bleary eyed the next morning, you’ll greet your parents awkwardly at breakfast. You’ll tell them that you’re going to stay home and look for job’s on Craiglist, which everyone in the room immediately knows is a terrible idea but won’t comment on. You’ll all just eat your toast and drink your coffee in silence.
Once your dad is off working at the motherfucker factory, which is what you like to call John’s Hopkin’s linguistics department, and your mom is off volunteering at the local co-op you’ll start your real work.
You’ll grab the fire axe from your car’s trunk and head down to the basement. The clown painting will be just where you saw it last, hanging on the southern wall of your dad’s billiard’s room the same way it always has. You realize, as you set upon your task, that you’ve always wanted to do this.
You’ll be through the wall and on to the safe in a matter of minutes. After that the tough work, cracking the safe, will begin. Still, you’ve been planning this for a long long time and it won’t be long before you’re in. Turns out that the combination was the egotistical bastard’s birthday.
Once you’re in you’ll have the diamonds in the duffel and the note you wrote for your mom on the kitchen table. You’ll have left a second one for your dad in the ruins of the safe, you just hope that he finds it before she does. It pretty much spills the beans on the second family he stopped seeing a few years back, as well as a number of unsavory bits about his past that you’ve picked up traveling across America.
The one to your mom will be full of nice lies about you getting a phone call from Becki asking you to come back. Maybe you will see Becki again one day. She said she was heading for Toronto, and that’s where you’re going to fence the diamonds. It might be nice to stay there for a month or two, seeing the sights and hoping that fate reunites the two of you. You’ve heard they have an amazing art scene and some incredible museums. That could be a fun way to kill some time.
The whole thing will pretty much go to plan, which just goes to prove that you really are your father’s son. You’ve inherited his aptitude for crime, his inability to deal with other men and his inability to tell the horrible truth to women he loves.
If it makes you feel any better, he’ll be a hell of a lot nicer to your mom now that he knows you’re pretty much gone for good. Also, if he sees you again he’s going to shoot you.
Congratulations on moving back in with your parents! We’re glad it went so well for you!
You'll trudge up the steps and she’ll open her arms and embrace you. She’ll kiss your cheek and you’ll feel the oily stain of her lipstick.
“We missed you so much, honey.” she’ll say, her arm around your shoulders as she shows you inside.
Your dad will be sitting on the couch. He won’t even look up when you come in. He’ll just take a long sip of beer and nod in your general direction.
“Welcome back, shithead.”
“George!” your mother will exclaim.
Your father’s name is George, although you’ve always called him sir. Maybe that’s part of why you turned out the way you did, the lack of an accessible father figure. You thought the only way to be tough was to be mean.
It hasn’t helped you much. Dead end job after dead end job, bad decision after bad decision. You’ve known for months that the only way out of this was to move back in with your parents long enough to get your shit together.
After you’ve entered the room and had a glass of water your dad will mute the TV briefly to stare at you disapprovingly. He’ll keep it up for around twenty minutes before he spits the word “dismissed” out of his mouth and you and your mother file out, the same way you always did after every recital, soccer game and barmitzvah.
She’ll ask you awkward questions you can’t really give good answers to on the way up the stairs, ask if you’ve had any nice girlfriends or any interesting experiences on the road. You could say yes to both questions, but that would get into some messy territory of just what you’d be doing and you don’t want to break your momma’s heart. It was big enough to take you back in, after all.
She’ll tuck you in to bed and kiss you on the forehead, just like you were a little baby again and you’ll feel as good as you have in the last four months, better than when Becki told you she loved you when she came in that motel outside of Tucson.
Of course the feeling won’t last. You’ll lie in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of the TV to die downstairs. Then you’ll stare some more and pray for sleep to come which, it won’t.
When you get up, bleary eyed the next morning, you’ll greet your parents awkwardly at breakfast. You’ll tell them that you’re going to stay home and look for job’s on Craiglist, which everyone in the room immediately knows is a terrible idea but won’t comment on. You’ll all just eat your toast and drink your coffee in silence.
Once your dad is off working at the motherfucker factory, which is what you like to call John’s Hopkin’s linguistics department, and your mom is off volunteering at the local co-op you’ll start your real work.
You’ll grab the fire axe from your car’s trunk and head down to the basement. The clown painting will be just where you saw it last, hanging on the southern wall of your dad’s billiard’s room the same way it always has. You realize, as you set upon your task, that you’ve always wanted to do this.
You’ll be through the wall and on to the safe in a matter of minutes. After that the tough work, cracking the safe, will begin. Still, you’ve been planning this for a long long time and it won’t be long before you’re in. Turns out that the combination was the egotistical bastard’s birthday.
Once you’re in you’ll have the diamonds in the duffel and the note you wrote for your mom on the kitchen table. You’ll have left a second one for your dad in the ruins of the safe, you just hope that he finds it before she does. It pretty much spills the beans on the second family he stopped seeing a few years back, as well as a number of unsavory bits about his past that you’ve picked up traveling across America.
The one to your mom will be full of nice lies about you getting a phone call from Becki asking you to come back. Maybe you will see Becki again one day. She said she was heading for Toronto, and that’s where you’re going to fence the diamonds. It might be nice to stay there for a month or two, seeing the sights and hoping that fate reunites the two of you. You’ve heard they have an amazing art scene and some incredible museums. That could be a fun way to kill some time.
The whole thing will pretty much go to plan, which just goes to prove that you really are your father’s son. You’ve inherited his aptitude for crime, his inability to deal with other men and his inability to tell the horrible truth to women he loves.
If it makes you feel any better, he’ll be a hell of a lot nicer to your mom now that he knows you’re pretty much gone for good. Also, if he sees you again he’s going to shoot you.
Congratulations on moving back in with your parents! We’re glad it went so well for you!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Congratulations on Becoming the New Teen-Wolf!
Michael J. Fox has been going through a lot of shit lately, and we’re all sort of lucky that Jason Bateman stepped away from the mantle after his attempt (nothing against Mr. Bateman as an actor, just the film). As such the world has been without an iconic Teen Wolf to help insure that the American public knows that not all teenage werewolves are to be feared. Many can be relied upon to teach us lessons that relate to our own lives, lessons about growing up, puberty, aggression issues and lycanthropy.
That isn’t to say that teenage werewolves have up and stopped existing the world over. Sweden is rife with those motherfuckers, and there’s a reason you don’t trust teenagers in Hamburg. And don’t even get me started on what’s going on in Tokyo.
But I digress: kids coming of age everywhere are still being bitten by their friends and becoming nightmarish creatures bent on devouring flesh, fucking and howling at the moon. The problem is that the media just isn’t interested in looking at it in a positive light. All they want to discuss the livestock slaughtered or the elderly women raped.
They don’t want to talk about the high school junior who just finished putting in eighty hours of community service with Habitat for Humanity and happens to be a werewolf in an emotionally stable, rewarding, monogamous relationship. That's where you come in.
You’ve been dealing with your lycanthropy alright for a while now, ever since you got it from your uncle when he tried to molest you. Your parents are supportive, you’re seeing a counselor, and you’ve stopped trying to treat it. You’ve just accepted that it’s a part of your life the same way your dad did with his three pound benign brain tumor.
But you’ve been taking the quiet, private approach to the whole affair. Come tomorrow, after you totally bone your girlfriend and her parents flip you’re going to be forced into the media spotlight without your consent. We just want you to make the most of it.
Your girlfriend’s dad is going to show up on camera tonight with the tagline “Father of Young Woman Savaged by Horny Wolf-Man” and you’ll catch his whole segment on the news. You’ll see how he refuses to let his daughter speak, how he makes false claims and tells the cameras that you, the young man he called son less than a month ago, were never anything more than an aberration in his eyes.
You’ll tear up a little. Being a werewolf doesn’t make you any of less of a sensitive teen, and it’ll be a tough time for you where you’ll learn a lot about betrayal and people doing whatever they can to get their fifteen minutes.
But your mom will have an idea. She’ll say that if the media met her son they’d understand just how incredible you are. She’ll schedule a rebuttal interview with a rival network the next day and give you some light coaching for the rest of the night.
When you show up on camera as a polite, articulate representative of lycanthropes everywhere your girlfriend’s dad won’t be able to chain her to a wall (the way you do in order to avoid murdering people during your transformations) to keep her away. She’ll be on your doorstep hugging you and your parents will start working out guardianship issues.
Within twenty-four hours you’ll be catapulted into international fame. Things will get a little tense when fan letters start arriving and the relationship goes through ups and downs on that front, but we’d rather not discuss that right now. Right now we’d just like to say congratulations on becoming the new Teen-Wolf! Mr. Fox would be proud.
That isn’t to say that teenage werewolves have up and stopped existing the world over. Sweden is rife with those motherfuckers, and there’s a reason you don’t trust teenagers in Hamburg. And don’t even get me started on what’s going on in Tokyo.
But I digress: kids coming of age everywhere are still being bitten by their friends and becoming nightmarish creatures bent on devouring flesh, fucking and howling at the moon. The problem is that the media just isn’t interested in looking at it in a positive light. All they want to discuss the livestock slaughtered or the elderly women raped.
They don’t want to talk about the high school junior who just finished putting in eighty hours of community service with Habitat for Humanity and happens to be a werewolf in an emotionally stable, rewarding, monogamous relationship. That's where you come in.
You’ve been dealing with your lycanthropy alright for a while now, ever since you got it from your uncle when he tried to molest you. Your parents are supportive, you’re seeing a counselor, and you’ve stopped trying to treat it. You’ve just accepted that it’s a part of your life the same way your dad did with his three pound benign brain tumor.
But you’ve been taking the quiet, private approach to the whole affair. Come tomorrow, after you totally bone your girlfriend and her parents flip you’re going to be forced into the media spotlight without your consent. We just want you to make the most of it.
Your girlfriend’s dad is going to show up on camera tonight with the tagline “Father of Young Woman Savaged by Horny Wolf-Man” and you’ll catch his whole segment on the news. You’ll see how he refuses to let his daughter speak, how he makes false claims and tells the cameras that you, the young man he called son less than a month ago, were never anything more than an aberration in his eyes.
You’ll tear up a little. Being a werewolf doesn’t make you any of less of a sensitive teen, and it’ll be a tough time for you where you’ll learn a lot about betrayal and people doing whatever they can to get their fifteen minutes.
But your mom will have an idea. She’ll say that if the media met her son they’d understand just how incredible you are. She’ll schedule a rebuttal interview with a rival network the next day and give you some light coaching for the rest of the night.
When you show up on camera as a polite, articulate representative of lycanthropes everywhere your girlfriend’s dad won’t be able to chain her to a wall (the way you do in order to avoid murdering people during your transformations) to keep her away. She’ll be on your doorstep hugging you and your parents will start working out guardianship issues.
Within twenty-four hours you’ll be catapulted into international fame. Things will get a little tense when fan letters start arriving and the relationship goes through ups and downs on that front, but we’d rather not discuss that right now. Right now we’d just like to say congratulations on becoming the new Teen-Wolf! Mr. Fox would be proud.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Abstraction and Immersion!
Most games have pretty direct control schemes. In first person shooters they're almost always set up with a one-one ratio. You say turn right and you turn right without delay. You say shoot, you shoot. There's a lag time, but it's imperceptible, the lag of your brain telling your finger to pull the trigger. It's very straightforward and very effective. It does a good job of relating you to your character even if, as many have noted, your character is sometimes reduced to an ultra-masculine personification of violence who exists solely as a HUD weapon. But it also, to some extent, isolates you from your environment and the other characters. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. While it is a problem in games like the Call of Duty series where you are almost constantly functioning as part of a unit in this isolated state, games such as System Shock 2 and the original Thief series have used first-person perspective to great effect, putting it to work in crafting an atmosphere of suspense and horror.
Would that the same could be said of the modern RTS, with its direct command interface. The RTS makes players into god-figures, floating in the clouds far removed from the action, commanding toy soldiers to kill and die. The interface most RTSes use, another interface involving a one to one command-to-action ratio, actively fights immersion, removing players from both the units they command and they actions they are orchestrating. But some RTSes have worked to counter this.
The Mech Commander series, for example, did their best to both explain their UI and add unit persistence and progression to the mix to help commander associate with their troops. Myth and Warcraft 3 employed similar tactics to great effect. But the interface of most RTSes, where faceless troops accept orders from a stentorian voiced god in the clouds, fights any sort of relationship tooth and nail. Perhaps that’s why, as some game critics have pointed out, RTSes aren’t necessarily the best venue for telling a story or making players relate to characters.
Part of this might be the “camera in the sky” aspect of the genre, as much a product of necessity as an artistic choice, but for me a lot of it stems from the fact that my units feel more like tools than characters. They don’t respond to commands so much as they react to button pushes. But there are a few games that break these rules, and in doing so they manage to generate more significant connections with characters you otherwise wouldn’t care about in the least.
Overlord II does this exceptionally. It takes a game that would have been boring and makes it into something incredible. If you take away the indirect control scheme the game would be an incredibly poor brawler, but through a straightforward command system and by giving those little guys a hell of a lot of personality it actually makes for a really interesting experience.
If they were to blindly accept orders and carry them out with gleeful little sound bites it would be very hard to care about them. But because they don’t always react the way I expect, because they scream wordlessly and respond to every act of violence with spontaneous, wild abandon and joy I actually care when one of them dies. I feel compelled to run back to my tower and resurrect the little guy.
Part of that also might come from the minion-progression system and the adorable way they scavenge corpses for armor and arms, but a big part of it remains, for me, the way they respond to my commands. They feel, for all their buggy foibles, like a little army of Gremlins handed over to me to do my inane bidding. They transform a lackluster game into something I actually enjoy.
Republic Commando pulled off a similar gambit in a first person shooter. Technologically archaic by present standards and riddled with game play issues, storytelling issues and some of the worst examples of level design I’ve ever seen, Republic Commando should, by all means, be one of the worst first person shooters ever made. But anyone who’s ever played will tell you it’s an incredibly fun game.
The game only has a handful of weapons, several of which are just unpleasant to use (specifically the beam gun). The enemies are repetitive and many were poorly designed and implemented (is there anyone who doesn’t hate the salvage droids and actually feels frightened by them?). Even a few of the ones that are satisfying to fight don’t really fit into the Star Wars context (Fat Trandoshans? Fucking just use ugnauts. They’re already there). But Republic Commando is actually above Jedi Knight on my list of Star Wars games. How the fuck did this happen?
It’s because of my squad mates. Those loveable scamps, with their scripted dialogue, would normally annoy the living shit out of me. But they work on their own. They make choices, completely under the hood, that I don’t want them to make. 40 rushes in to combat and dies, 63 makes quips and occasionally does something useful and Sev and I usually kill most of the enemies.
I honestly don’t know if it’s coded or coincidence. I don’t know if its the memory loss onset by the heavy drinking that causes me to occasionally recognize their phrases as new or their behavior as spontaneous. I don’t care. It’s fun, and I like those three douchebags. I like them more than my own character, who I refer to as “the lame one” or “Lisa Kudrow” whenever possible.
Because they don’t always do what I tell them, and they goof off amongst themselves. Because 63 is my emotional barometer as a gamer and Raphael Sbarge does an excellent job voicing him. In fact, all of the voice overs (spare 38’s abysmal portrayal by Temeura Morrison who, for all the love George Lucas has languished on him, is still far worse an actor today than Jason Wingreen, the barely heard voice in Empire Strikes Back, was almost thirty years ago) manage to almost instantly make me relate to their characters. Sure, it made very little sense that a band of clones would all have different voices, but as I mentioned earlier alcoholism makes it very easy to gloss over these issues. If I didn’t drink heavily how would I be able to accept the inner workings of video games at all?
The personality that these little rascals possessed completely inverted the normal philosophy of self that first person shooter enforce, the idea that, as Half-Life so aptly displayed, you are just one man arrayed not just against the world but against all possible worlds, that your allies will, at best, be temporary, and will prove ineffective in any case. For once, in a first person shooter, I felt that I was part of a team, a fact owed entirely to a command system which, if I were a reviewer, I would call “touchy,” but as someone who genuinely loves games I can step back and call “accurate,” with teammates who obey my commands as often as they feel like it.
Quake Wars has a similar bot system, but a number of factors, ranging from the randomly generated nature of the bots to the relatively faceless nature of Battlefield games in general, makes Quake Wars ill suited to this discussion. However, another game rife with faceless units fits in perfectly: Dawn of War II.
In Dawn of War II you command legions of identically costumed minions and one more important minion who, try as he might, can never die. He’s a lot like Bruce Willis, but we’re largely unaware of how much hair he has. But your little minions do three things that most RTS units do not. They gain experience, they don’t squawk constantly at you and they respond through an almost inscrutable AI system. It isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t the most effective AI out there but it does help units move around the battlefield, adapt to new situations and utilize cover accordingly. It gives them a modicum of personality, but it doesn’t do nearly as well as the AI in games like Myth and the Total War games.
These are two games that took the abstraction of command to a wonderful place. Myth did it by using original systems of engagement and a projectile physics model which has yet to be matched by current generation RTSes (although Starcraft 2 seems to want to do so). And the Total War games use the command statistic of generals to take abstraction to a very interesting place. The morale system is also amazing, in its own right. That said, despite these features I never really felt a connection to the units that either of these games threw at me. Sure, I wanted my units to survive and gain in both titles. Experienced units in both games did more damage and survived longer. But I never felt the same connection to them that I do in Dawn of War 2, where I perceive each unit as an investment. Perhaps it’s the scarcity of resources or the strange mix of macro and micro management that the game demands, but I find the quirks of my DoW 2 units far more intriguing than the more game-impacting traits that Total War and Myth units display.
So perhaps there’s something to be said for scarcity. Perhaps the best games are the ones that offer the smallest number of units to command and have to develop an interesting mechanic for controlling these units as a result.
In Shadow of the Colossus you’re, for the most part, alone. You’ve got an opponent, occasionally, and you’ve got your horse. And your horse is, to put it lightly, kind of a dumbass. Whenever you truly need Agro to do his thing he’s never there to do it. It’s infuriating, and when you do have him acting exactly as you want him to you don’t really notice it. But I can honestly say that, in the last five years, there are only a handful of characters I love more than that horse. I actually cried when he fell off that cliff. I am a 25 year old man living on my own and I cried watching a virtual horse fall off a cliff. Because as infuriating as Agro was at times, I really liked him. He was my only companion in the landscape of the Colossi. He was my friend. He came to help me constantly. Again, I couldn’t discern the algorythms which seemed to dictate his patterns, but it didn’t matter. He was there, almost shapeless in the way of the Playstation II’s primitive graphics, and he was making me feel things I didn’t want to feel.
He made me feel sorrow when he fell from the cliff. And when he rejoined Mono he made me feel that I’d abandoned people simply by not being good enough, by not being as strong as he was. Watching that horse limp his way to my infant form (or to my magic baby, I’m still not clear on just what the fuck happened in that game) broke my heart. Every step was agony.
And I hated that horse. Fighting colossi he was all too often like another adversary, ignoring my directions and calls, fleeing at exactly the wrong moment and keeping his speed when it hurt my aim. Navigating with him was its own challenge, learning to pilot a purposefully unresponsive command system never being an easy task. But in the end I formed an emotional attachment to him. He was my friend.
He was my friend because he didn’t always do what I told him to. That’s an incredibly odd statement to make, especially in a gaming context, but when your underlings don’t obey you at all times it makes the occasions when they do all the more important. How is it notable that your flanking maneuver worked when there’s no chance for your own troops to break?
Does it matter that your orcs defeated their knights if it was simply a battle of numbers? Perhaps to some people, but those people are thought criminals, dead inside, and will never know true love. I just feel that abstracted control schemes, while certainly hit or miss, help generate a connection to a character and have a place in my heart. And they almost always help to make a game more memorable and enjoyable, even if they make it a hell of a lot harder.
Would that the same could be said of the modern RTS, with its direct command interface. The RTS makes players into god-figures, floating in the clouds far removed from the action, commanding toy soldiers to kill and die. The interface most RTSes use, another interface involving a one to one command-to-action ratio, actively fights immersion, removing players from both the units they command and they actions they are orchestrating. But some RTSes have worked to counter this.
The Mech Commander series, for example, did their best to both explain their UI and add unit persistence and progression to the mix to help commander associate with their troops. Myth and Warcraft 3 employed similar tactics to great effect. But the interface of most RTSes, where faceless troops accept orders from a stentorian voiced god in the clouds, fights any sort of relationship tooth and nail. Perhaps that’s why, as some game critics have pointed out, RTSes aren’t necessarily the best venue for telling a story or making players relate to characters.
Part of this might be the “camera in the sky” aspect of the genre, as much a product of necessity as an artistic choice, but for me a lot of it stems from the fact that my units feel more like tools than characters. They don’t respond to commands so much as they react to button pushes. But there are a few games that break these rules, and in doing so they manage to generate more significant connections with characters you otherwise wouldn’t care about in the least.
Overlord II does this exceptionally. It takes a game that would have been boring and makes it into something incredible. If you take away the indirect control scheme the game would be an incredibly poor brawler, but through a straightforward command system and by giving those little guys a hell of a lot of personality it actually makes for a really interesting experience.
If they were to blindly accept orders and carry them out with gleeful little sound bites it would be very hard to care about them. But because they don’t always react the way I expect, because they scream wordlessly and respond to every act of violence with spontaneous, wild abandon and joy I actually care when one of them dies. I feel compelled to run back to my tower and resurrect the little guy.
Part of that also might come from the minion-progression system and the adorable way they scavenge corpses for armor and arms, but a big part of it remains, for me, the way they respond to my commands. They feel, for all their buggy foibles, like a little army of Gremlins handed over to me to do my inane bidding. They transform a lackluster game into something I actually enjoy.
Republic Commando pulled off a similar gambit in a first person shooter. Technologically archaic by present standards and riddled with game play issues, storytelling issues and some of the worst examples of level design I’ve ever seen, Republic Commando should, by all means, be one of the worst first person shooters ever made. But anyone who’s ever played will tell you it’s an incredibly fun game.
The game only has a handful of weapons, several of which are just unpleasant to use (specifically the beam gun). The enemies are repetitive and many were poorly designed and implemented (is there anyone who doesn’t hate the salvage droids and actually feels frightened by them?). Even a few of the ones that are satisfying to fight don’t really fit into the Star Wars context (Fat Trandoshans? Fucking just use ugnauts. They’re already there). But Republic Commando is actually above Jedi Knight on my list of Star Wars games. How the fuck did this happen?
It’s because of my squad mates. Those loveable scamps, with their scripted dialogue, would normally annoy the living shit out of me. But they work on their own. They make choices, completely under the hood, that I don’t want them to make. 40 rushes in to combat and dies, 63 makes quips and occasionally does something useful and Sev and I usually kill most of the enemies.
I honestly don’t know if it’s coded or coincidence. I don’t know if its the memory loss onset by the heavy drinking that causes me to occasionally recognize their phrases as new or their behavior as spontaneous. I don’t care. It’s fun, and I like those three douchebags. I like them more than my own character, who I refer to as “the lame one” or “Lisa Kudrow” whenever possible.
Because they don’t always do what I tell them, and they goof off amongst themselves. Because 63 is my emotional barometer as a gamer and Raphael Sbarge does an excellent job voicing him. In fact, all of the voice overs (spare 38’s abysmal portrayal by Temeura Morrison who, for all the love George Lucas has languished on him, is still far worse an actor today than Jason Wingreen, the barely heard voice in Empire Strikes Back, was almost thirty years ago) manage to almost instantly make me relate to their characters. Sure, it made very little sense that a band of clones would all have different voices, but as I mentioned earlier alcoholism makes it very easy to gloss over these issues. If I didn’t drink heavily how would I be able to accept the inner workings of video games at all?
The personality that these little rascals possessed completely inverted the normal philosophy of self that first person shooter enforce, the idea that, as Half-Life so aptly displayed, you are just one man arrayed not just against the world but against all possible worlds, that your allies will, at best, be temporary, and will prove ineffective in any case. For once, in a first person shooter, I felt that I was part of a team, a fact owed entirely to a command system which, if I were a reviewer, I would call “touchy,” but as someone who genuinely loves games I can step back and call “accurate,” with teammates who obey my commands as often as they feel like it.
Quake Wars has a similar bot system, but a number of factors, ranging from the randomly generated nature of the bots to the relatively faceless nature of Battlefield games in general, makes Quake Wars ill suited to this discussion. However, another game rife with faceless units fits in perfectly: Dawn of War II.
In Dawn of War II you command legions of identically costumed minions and one more important minion who, try as he might, can never die. He’s a lot like Bruce Willis, but we’re largely unaware of how much hair he has. But your little minions do three things that most RTS units do not. They gain experience, they don’t squawk constantly at you and they respond through an almost inscrutable AI system. It isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t the most effective AI out there but it does help units move around the battlefield, adapt to new situations and utilize cover accordingly. It gives them a modicum of personality, but it doesn’t do nearly as well as the AI in games like Myth and the Total War games.
These are two games that took the abstraction of command to a wonderful place. Myth did it by using original systems of engagement and a projectile physics model which has yet to be matched by current generation RTSes (although Starcraft 2 seems to want to do so). And the Total War games use the command statistic of generals to take abstraction to a very interesting place. The morale system is also amazing, in its own right. That said, despite these features I never really felt a connection to the units that either of these games threw at me. Sure, I wanted my units to survive and gain in both titles. Experienced units in both games did more damage and survived longer. But I never felt the same connection to them that I do in Dawn of War 2, where I perceive each unit as an investment. Perhaps it’s the scarcity of resources or the strange mix of macro and micro management that the game demands, but I find the quirks of my DoW 2 units far more intriguing than the more game-impacting traits that Total War and Myth units display.
So perhaps there’s something to be said for scarcity. Perhaps the best games are the ones that offer the smallest number of units to command and have to develop an interesting mechanic for controlling these units as a result.
In Shadow of the Colossus you’re, for the most part, alone. You’ve got an opponent, occasionally, and you’ve got your horse. And your horse is, to put it lightly, kind of a dumbass. Whenever you truly need Agro to do his thing he’s never there to do it. It’s infuriating, and when you do have him acting exactly as you want him to you don’t really notice it. But I can honestly say that, in the last five years, there are only a handful of characters I love more than that horse. I actually cried when he fell off that cliff. I am a 25 year old man living on my own and I cried watching a virtual horse fall off a cliff. Because as infuriating as Agro was at times, I really liked him. He was my only companion in the landscape of the Colossi. He was my friend. He came to help me constantly. Again, I couldn’t discern the algorythms which seemed to dictate his patterns, but it didn’t matter. He was there, almost shapeless in the way of the Playstation II’s primitive graphics, and he was making me feel things I didn’t want to feel.
He made me feel sorrow when he fell from the cliff. And when he rejoined Mono he made me feel that I’d abandoned people simply by not being good enough, by not being as strong as he was. Watching that horse limp his way to my infant form (or to my magic baby, I’m still not clear on just what the fuck happened in that game) broke my heart. Every step was agony.
And I hated that horse. Fighting colossi he was all too often like another adversary, ignoring my directions and calls, fleeing at exactly the wrong moment and keeping his speed when it hurt my aim. Navigating with him was its own challenge, learning to pilot a purposefully unresponsive command system never being an easy task. But in the end I formed an emotional attachment to him. He was my friend.
He was my friend because he didn’t always do what I told him to. That’s an incredibly odd statement to make, especially in a gaming context, but when your underlings don’t obey you at all times it makes the occasions when they do all the more important. How is it notable that your flanking maneuver worked when there’s no chance for your own troops to break?
Does it matter that your orcs defeated their knights if it was simply a battle of numbers? Perhaps to some people, but those people are thought criminals, dead inside, and will never know true love. I just feel that abstracted control schemes, while certainly hit or miss, help generate a connection to a character and have a place in my heart. And they almost always help to make a game more memorable and enjoyable, even if they make it a hell of a lot harder.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Congratulations on Your Triumphant Return to Dick Sucking!
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Friday, July 17, 2009
Congratulations on Your Brief Tenure as the World's Most Famous Africa American Washtub Bass Player!
If you blink you just might miss it.
You’ll be on the Today Show, Matt Lauer asking you some bullshit soft journalism questions about your music and you’ll be high as balls on it. You’ll keep talking about expanding what it means to be a jug band, about trying to allow pieces to develop organically and about how it isn’t important to know anything about music in order to make shitloads of money creating it.
He’ll be nodding and praying for a terrorist attack so that your interview could be interrupted and he could cover something engaging instead, even at the cost of countless American lives, but nothing will come. You’ll be there, throwing back your dreads occasionally and discussing just why it’s not only not important to not know how to read music, but how it helps “free you from preconceptions.”
In short, you’ll have totally forgotten all the lessons you learned over the last few days, about how the bands you liked and the music you thought you were making all proved to be inane upon even the most general of inspections, and Lauer won’t give half a shit.
He’ll be staring blankly at you, wishing that beetles would start pouring at of your mouth so that you could stop talking about the intricacies of playing washtub bass without any formalized lessons as if formal washtub bass lessons were a real thing instead of something you created to make yourself seem like more a rebel, when he’ll receive an index card from just off camera. Then he’ll make a cutting gesture across his neck to the camera man and the “taping” light will shut down and the crew will resume its standard business of hanging out around the craft services table trying to get into that one hot PA’s pants.
Lauer won’t even tell you what’s up, he’ll just get up and stagger to his dressing room, still mentally devastated from just how incredibly boring you were. You’ll just keep sitting until the other not-so-hot PA comes up to you and tells you you have to get up.
“Sorry man,” she’ll say. “You’re not number one any more.”
You’ll fix her with a baffled look, tossing your dreads back once again for good measure. Then she’ll point to a television monitor which will display an image of “famed” African American games journalist N’Gai Croal playing washtub bass in a press event for a new game called “Rock Jug Band.”
You’ll be crestfallen. Even his dreads will be better than yours. Heartbroken, you’ll leave the studio, dragging your feet as you go and deeply regretting your purchase of a solid gold motorcycle earlier that day. As the doors close and lock behind you you’ll absent-mindedly wonder if the novelty motorcycle store accepts returns. You certainly hope they do.
Congratulations on your brief tenure as the world’s most famous African American washtub bass player, though! You probably should’ve realized this couldn’t last.
You’ll be on the Today Show, Matt Lauer asking you some bullshit soft journalism questions about your music and you’ll be high as balls on it. You’ll keep talking about expanding what it means to be a jug band, about trying to allow pieces to develop organically and about how it isn’t important to know anything about music in order to make shitloads of money creating it.
He’ll be nodding and praying for a terrorist attack so that your interview could be interrupted and he could cover something engaging instead, even at the cost of countless American lives, but nothing will come. You’ll be there, throwing back your dreads occasionally and discussing just why it’s not only not important to not know how to read music, but how it helps “free you from preconceptions.”
In short, you’ll have totally forgotten all the lessons you learned over the last few days, about how the bands you liked and the music you thought you were making all proved to be inane upon even the most general of inspections, and Lauer won’t give half a shit.
He’ll be staring blankly at you, wishing that beetles would start pouring at of your mouth so that you could stop talking about the intricacies of playing washtub bass without any formalized lessons as if formal washtub bass lessons were a real thing instead of something you created to make yourself seem like more a rebel, when he’ll receive an index card from just off camera. Then he’ll make a cutting gesture across his neck to the camera man and the “taping” light will shut down and the crew will resume its standard business of hanging out around the craft services table trying to get into that one hot PA’s pants.
Lauer won’t even tell you what’s up, he’ll just get up and stagger to his dressing room, still mentally devastated from just how incredibly boring you were. You’ll just keep sitting until the other not-so-hot PA comes up to you and tells you you have to get up.
“Sorry man,” she’ll say. “You’re not number one any more.”
You’ll fix her with a baffled look, tossing your dreads back once again for good measure. Then she’ll point to a television monitor which will display an image of “famed” African American games journalist N’Gai Croal playing washtub bass in a press event for a new game called “Rock Jug Band.”
You’ll be crestfallen. Even his dreads will be better than yours. Heartbroken, you’ll leave the studio, dragging your feet as you go and deeply regretting your purchase of a solid gold motorcycle earlier that day. As the doors close and lock behind you you’ll absent-mindedly wonder if the novelty motorcycle store accepts returns. You certainly hope they do.
Congratulations on your brief tenure as the world’s most famous African American washtub bass player, though! You probably should’ve realized this couldn’t last.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Congratulations on Leaving Your Jug Band!
Tide’s been rising for some while now. Between Bruno’s constant cattiness, cutting your washtub bass solos every chance he gets, Craig’s prima donna bullshit, like his shit don’t stink just because he plays washboard and Jonah thinking he is the fucking band just because he blows on some jugs it's all getting a little much.
These bandmates, your former friends, collaborators and co-conspirators, have become something horrible to you. You remember watching Time Bandits with them and deciding to form this band a month and a half ago. You were so full of hope and dreams then. You had song titles coming out the wazoo and you only smoked a dime bag a night.
Now you’re up to a quarter and all the song titles have developed into lackluster pieces of improvised music which all seem to turn out the same way. It’s as if you created a jug band equivalent of Phish. We hate to put it that way, because you might interpret it as a good thing, but it’s accurate.
Luckily you’ve realized just how infuriating this form of music is. So today you’re going to show up to practice, your mind red with frustration and rage. Bruno will be on his cell phone, his banjo nowhere to be seen and Jonah will already be sparking something up already. Craig will come in behind you, wearing sunglasses. It will be seven-thirty at night.
You’ll run your hands through your dreadlocks and let loose a wordless scream to get their attention. It’ll work, mostly, although Bruno will still be talking on his cell phone. Jonah will freeze mid drag and Craig will take off his glasses to genuinely assess your emotional state. You’ll stand up straight, holding the broom handle of your washtub bass as if it was a staff to steady yourself. You’ll be modeling your speaking pose largely on Charleton Heston from The Ten Commandments.
But you won’t hold it long. Bruno’s continued insistence on ignoring you will push your rage to critical mass and you’ll grunt, straining against the screws you fixed to the base of the broom handle and snapping the whole thing off inside of the washtub. Then you’ll smack Bruno is his fat, stupid face, dislodging the cell phone from his hand and knocking his ass out.
Then you’ll turn around, breathing heavily and clutching the shattered remains of your instrument. Your shoulders will lurch with each breath and you’ll wonder if you should hit each of your band mates to make a point. You’ll think better of it fast, picking up your messenger bag with a sigh and doing a few breathing exercises to calm yourself down before you speak your peace.
You’ll close your eyes then re-open them, taking in your conscious bandmates and their current state (agitated). “I’m out,” you’ll say, dropping the broom handle to the ground. “Tell Bruno when he wakes up.”
Then you’ll walk out the front door, and just in the knick of time. A rival jug band will set fire to your practice space twenty minutes later and the rest of your band will die of smoke inhalation. On the upside, their deaths will make the value of your recordings skyrocket and your band will achieve popularity in death the like of which it never saw in life. And guess who’s going to be collecting all those royalties now?
That’s right, it’s you. So congratulations on leaving your jug band, and we hope you’ll enjoy your brief tenure as the world’s most famous African American washtub bass player.
These bandmates, your former friends, collaborators and co-conspirators, have become something horrible to you. You remember watching Time Bandits with them and deciding to form this band a month and a half ago. You were so full of hope and dreams then. You had song titles coming out the wazoo and you only smoked a dime bag a night.
Now you’re up to a quarter and all the song titles have developed into lackluster pieces of improvised music which all seem to turn out the same way. It’s as if you created a jug band equivalent of Phish. We hate to put it that way, because you might interpret it as a good thing, but it’s accurate.
Luckily you’ve realized just how infuriating this form of music is. So today you’re going to show up to practice, your mind red with frustration and rage. Bruno will be on his cell phone, his banjo nowhere to be seen and Jonah will already be sparking something up already. Craig will come in behind you, wearing sunglasses. It will be seven-thirty at night.
You’ll run your hands through your dreadlocks and let loose a wordless scream to get their attention. It’ll work, mostly, although Bruno will still be talking on his cell phone. Jonah will freeze mid drag and Craig will take off his glasses to genuinely assess your emotional state. You’ll stand up straight, holding the broom handle of your washtub bass as if it was a staff to steady yourself. You’ll be modeling your speaking pose largely on Charleton Heston from The Ten Commandments.
But you won’t hold it long. Bruno’s continued insistence on ignoring you will push your rage to critical mass and you’ll grunt, straining against the screws you fixed to the base of the broom handle and snapping the whole thing off inside of the washtub. Then you’ll smack Bruno is his fat, stupid face, dislodging the cell phone from his hand and knocking his ass out.
Then you’ll turn around, breathing heavily and clutching the shattered remains of your instrument. Your shoulders will lurch with each breath and you’ll wonder if you should hit each of your band mates to make a point. You’ll think better of it fast, picking up your messenger bag with a sigh and doing a few breathing exercises to calm yourself down before you speak your peace.
You’ll close your eyes then re-open them, taking in your conscious bandmates and their current state (agitated). “I’m out,” you’ll say, dropping the broom handle to the ground. “Tell Bruno when he wakes up.”
Then you’ll walk out the front door, and just in the knick of time. A rival jug band will set fire to your practice space twenty minutes later and the rest of your band will die of smoke inhalation. On the upside, their deaths will make the value of your recordings skyrocket and your band will achieve popularity in death the like of which it never saw in life. And guess who’s going to be collecting all those royalties now?
That’s right, it’s you. So congratulations on leaving your jug band, and we hope you’ll enjoy your brief tenure as the world’s most famous African American washtub bass player.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Congratulations on Being Assassinated!
Today you’re going to join the ranks of John F. Kennedy, James Garfield and Hitler (Oops! Did we let that slip?): you’re going to be assassinated!
Normally this is an honor reserved for presidents, company presidents and people who are generally important. But today it’s going to be extended to the regional manager of seven Arby’s located through the West-Virginia/Pennsylvania area. The whys are a little bit complicated, but it’s safe to say that downloading all those Napster tunes back in the early “Oughts” didn’t help. The hows are a little simpler.
You’ll be walking across the street with your daughter, moving from an ice-cream parlor to one of the many small bars where you collect protection money (You’ve translated your Arby’s franchise into some remarkable organized crime clout.) when a young man wearing a low baseball hat will shoot you twice in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol at point blank range. The bullets will enter and exit the right side of your chest, collapsing your lung and flooding it with fluid. The shooter will take off running to a nearby pay phone to tell your ex-wife that the deed is done, doing his best not to giggle with excitement as he does so.
A few seconds after your head hits the pavement a second shot will ring out from across the street and a .308 rifling round will puncture your other lung, collapsing it and forcing painful shards of bone into the surrounding organs and tissue. The labored breathing you experienced before will rapidly degrade into full blown suffocation, filling you with panic in your last moments.
You’ll stretch out your blood soaked hand towards your daughter, wanting to let her know that you love her in your last moments and make a lasting impression that could psychologically scar her and allow you to live on in some small way for decades, but she’ll pull away. Then your daughter will draw a long knife from some unclear hiding place and slash into your throat, nearly removing your head from your body. After that, covered in blood, she’ll tilt back her head and start singing “Banana Phone” at the top of her lungs.
Turns out kids will do almost anything Rafi tells them, including murdering their own parents. Please, end music piracy.
Oh, and congratulations on being assassinated. You’re totally going to make the papers, fulfilling your pitiful life’s dream in death, if not life.
Normally this is an honor reserved for presidents, company presidents and people who are generally important. But today it’s going to be extended to the regional manager of seven Arby’s located through the West-Virginia/Pennsylvania area. The whys are a little bit complicated, but it’s safe to say that downloading all those Napster tunes back in the early “Oughts” didn’t help. The hows are a little simpler.
You’ll be walking across the street with your daughter, moving from an ice-cream parlor to one of the many small bars where you collect protection money (You’ve translated your Arby’s franchise into some remarkable organized crime clout.) when a young man wearing a low baseball hat will shoot you twice in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol at point blank range. The bullets will enter and exit the right side of your chest, collapsing your lung and flooding it with fluid. The shooter will take off running to a nearby pay phone to tell your ex-wife that the deed is done, doing his best not to giggle with excitement as he does so.
A few seconds after your head hits the pavement a second shot will ring out from across the street and a .308 rifling round will puncture your other lung, collapsing it and forcing painful shards of bone into the surrounding organs and tissue. The labored breathing you experienced before will rapidly degrade into full blown suffocation, filling you with panic in your last moments.
You’ll stretch out your blood soaked hand towards your daughter, wanting to let her know that you love her in your last moments and make a lasting impression that could psychologically scar her and allow you to live on in some small way for decades, but she’ll pull away. Then your daughter will draw a long knife from some unclear hiding place and slash into your throat, nearly removing your head from your body. After that, covered in blood, she’ll tilt back her head and start singing “Banana Phone” at the top of her lungs.
Turns out kids will do almost anything Rafi tells them, including murdering their own parents. Please, end music piracy.
Oh, and congratulations on being assassinated. You’re totally going to make the papers, fulfilling your pitiful life’s dream in death, if not life.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Congratulations on Successfully Renewing Your Subscription to the New York Post!
You don’t accomplish much nowadays. Time was you made headlines with multi-million dollar deals and tabloid headlines with alien babies and celebrity romances. But that was before the financial collapse rendered the mansion building and remodeling business that was the cornerstone of your financial empire insolvent.
Luckily you managed to keep one of those mansions so that you can live there while you’re investigated for various forms of fraud, which became apparent after you could no longer afford your smoke screen of lawyers.
Your lone attempt at fiscal recovery, which involved a brief, unsuccessful career in executive hip-hop, didn’t work out at all the way you planned and, if anything, left you in more hot water. Just to be clear, that word is their word. Not ours. We get honkey. They get that one.
So now you spend most of your time in doors eating from cans and awaiting various court dates. It’s a dull existence, sure. But it’s structured and, along with your strict Catholic upbringing, it keeps you from killing yourself.
The problem is that, even with the structure, it’s really depressing. Every day it takes a huge effort to get out of bed in the morning, shine up your shoes and wander around the house, occasionally straining your ear to hear if a ringing phone is signaling another development involving a bailiff.
Your lone joy has been reading the New York Post. Its wacky take on “news” and “world events” as interpreted by the mentally ill has kept you going when nothing else could’ve. But your subscription is going to end soon.
That’s why you’re going to spend a brief part of today filling out the card and then putting it in the mail. Your subscription will be renewed from the funds afforded to you by a modest government allowance while you’re under all those different flavors of investigation and the paper will continue arriving at your house without incident.
Is that all we’ve got? Really? Why did we even write this? Ah well, fuck it. It’s already scheduled. Congratulations on successfully renewing your subscription to the New York Post, you boring fucking degenerate. We hope they find that girl’s bones so we can watch you fry. It’ll be the only interesting thing you’ve ever done.
Luckily you managed to keep one of those mansions so that you can live there while you’re investigated for various forms of fraud, which became apparent after you could no longer afford your smoke screen of lawyers.
Your lone attempt at fiscal recovery, which involved a brief, unsuccessful career in executive hip-hop, didn’t work out at all the way you planned and, if anything, left you in more hot water. Just to be clear, that word is their word. Not ours. We get honkey. They get that one.
So now you spend most of your time in doors eating from cans and awaiting various court dates. It’s a dull existence, sure. But it’s structured and, along with your strict Catholic upbringing, it keeps you from killing yourself.
The problem is that, even with the structure, it’s really depressing. Every day it takes a huge effort to get out of bed in the morning, shine up your shoes and wander around the house, occasionally straining your ear to hear if a ringing phone is signaling another development involving a bailiff.
Your lone joy has been reading the New York Post. Its wacky take on “news” and “world events” as interpreted by the mentally ill has kept you going when nothing else could’ve. But your subscription is going to end soon.
That’s why you’re going to spend a brief part of today filling out the card and then putting it in the mail. Your subscription will be renewed from the funds afforded to you by a modest government allowance while you’re under all those different flavors of investigation and the paper will continue arriving at your house without incident.
Is that all we’ve got? Really? Why did we even write this? Ah well, fuck it. It’s already scheduled. Congratulations on successfully renewing your subscription to the New York Post, you boring fucking degenerate. We hope they find that girl’s bones so we can watch you fry. It’ll be the only interesting thing you’ve ever done.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Congratulations on Getting Your Period!
College is a turbulent time in everyone’s life. All that hard work and meeting all those new people can be pretty stressful. Factor in all that consequence free sex you’ll be having with hot young coeds (many of them not visually repellent!) and it’s a tough place to be when you haven’t had your period yet.
There’s no medical explanation. Doctors have been puzzled by it, but you seem perfectly healthy otherwise so no one’s made a big fuss. On the upside you can bang all the boys you want and never worry about getting preggers. But on the downside you have incredibly painful cramps sometimes and you have to sit out all those group discussions women have about their periods which is a huge bummer.
You’ve thought about faking it with pig’s blood and a little bit of American can-do, but you expect to be getting it any day now and you don’t want to fake it and lose the chance to share all the real excitement that it’ll give you ere long.
Turns out you’re not far off. It will be coming this Friday. It will be a normal college Friday for you. Classes will end early and you’ll sit down with a few girlfriends to get shitfaced and prance about campus like the little tramps you are.
At around 11 PM you’ll opt to head back to your dorm room with a boy with a rapist goatee named Lance. After fifteen minutes of awkward foreplay he’ll enter you and being writhing in a fashion similar to “the Worm” for a minute and a half before orgasming inside you without warning or permission.
It’ll be a dick move on his part, but boy are you ever going to get him back. Because as he comes your period is going to hit like a freight train ejecting both his semen and his penis from your body in a flood of revolting bodily fluids.
It’ll ruin sex for him forever and almost make him swear off date rape completely. On the downside, it will be kind of gross. But on the upside it was fucking hilarious, he had it coming and you’ll have become a literal vessel of divine vengeance, just like every other woman.
Back on the downside you’ll be a lot crazier from here on out. Win some, lose some, right? Congratulations on Getting Your Period!
There’s no medical explanation. Doctors have been puzzled by it, but you seem perfectly healthy otherwise so no one’s made a big fuss. On the upside you can bang all the boys you want and never worry about getting preggers. But on the downside you have incredibly painful cramps sometimes and you have to sit out all those group discussions women have about their periods which is a huge bummer.
You’ve thought about faking it with pig’s blood and a little bit of American can-do, but you expect to be getting it any day now and you don’t want to fake it and lose the chance to share all the real excitement that it’ll give you ere long.
Turns out you’re not far off. It will be coming this Friday. It will be a normal college Friday for you. Classes will end early and you’ll sit down with a few girlfriends to get shitfaced and prance about campus like the little tramps you are.
At around 11 PM you’ll opt to head back to your dorm room with a boy with a rapist goatee named Lance. After fifteen minutes of awkward foreplay he’ll enter you and being writhing in a fashion similar to “the Worm” for a minute and a half before orgasming inside you without warning or permission.
It’ll be a dick move on his part, but boy are you ever going to get him back. Because as he comes your period is going to hit like a freight train ejecting both his semen and his penis from your body in a flood of revolting bodily fluids.
It’ll ruin sex for him forever and almost make him swear off date rape completely. On the downside, it will be kind of gross. But on the upside it was fucking hilarious, he had it coming and you’ll have become a literal vessel of divine vengeance, just like every other woman.
Back on the downside you’ll be a lot crazier from here on out. Win some, lose some, right? Congratulations on Getting Your Period!
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Who Is Sarah Lyons?
Who is Sarah Lyons?
It’s an important question to ask when you’re playing Fallout 3. She’s a major character, easily the equal of Three Dog, Allistair Tenpenny, or James. She’s distinguished from these characters, however, along with Dr. Madison Lee, by her womanhood. She is, in every way, a strong, capable, complex human being. She has her own views on the people of the Wasteland, the way they should be handled and the role the Brotherhood should be taking in the world at large.
In all of this her womanhood is incidental to her character. It influences her actions and the way we interpret them, it lends extra gravitas to her frequent trips into downtown DC and it adds an additional layer of depth to the social workings of the Brotherhood, in that no one ever discusses the fact that their most elite commando unit is headed by a woman, and the daughter of their leader to boot. But her sex never takes center stage. And in this Sarah Lyons is everything a video game character should be.
Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture of women in games here. Recently Leigh Alexander and Daniel Floyd did a great piece that focused on the topic of the female gaming audience and touched tangentially on the portrayal of women in games, and they made some great points. Even strong, capable female game characters are all too often stripped of their power and placed in pandering positions or depicted in an over the top, overly sexualized fashion for the purpose of marketing or fan service. Lara Croft, who as Floyd points out was devised as a female Indiana Jones, was reduced to little more than crypt-candy through a combination of marketing slips and retarded designer decisions (A nude code? Seriously? Oh, and you’re having her play through the final mission in her nightie. Brilliant.). Blood Rayne, who could’ve been a perfect anti-authority figure if she’d been properly utilized, was instead used for an abysmal Playboy spread and progressively more lewd portrayals from game to game. Hell, even Tifa is guilty of this sort treatment: again, a strong, capable woman whose breasts remain one of her most memorable qualities – not her heartbreaking willingness to remain with the man she loves despite coming in “second place” or her endurance of humiliations in order to become a force of positive change for her world.
This has become a sort of industry standard, and it really needs to stop. While portraying, discussing and developing attractive characters sexually is fine, even healthy, it needs to be given the proper context and needs to be an aspect of the character instead of the clumsy realization of a fantasy. Katie Sackhoff’s portrayal of Starbuck in the Battlestar Gallactica reboot is a perfect example of the balance games seem to strive for: she’s a strong, sexy woman who has a sex drive and very occasionally wears a dress, but never puts herself in a submissive position or breaks from being who she is (an overt, aggressive badass) for the sake of pandering.
All too often, though, attractive women in games are denied this sort of treatment. They’re shown to be just strong enough to warrant our respect and then they’re reduced to objects of desire. Elika from the Prince of Persia reboot is guilty of this offense. Elika is critical in realizing all of the Prince’s actions, saves his life time and time again and breaks down the defenses of the Corrupted when he cannot, but when she is removed from his side she collapses, shifting from badass to McGuffin in seconds. All of her powers, necessary for saving the world, cannot be used for her own benefit and can only be focused through a male authority figure: the Prince.
This is a pattern we’re all too familiar with: the badass chick who suddenly needs a knight in shining armor, usually a weaker male character who is inexplicably stronger than her on this occasion. And it’s one we need to break free from. That’s where characters like Sarah Lyons come in to play.
Sarah isn’t the focus of the game. While she is a major character she isn’t THE character. She’s never the object of desire, or eventhat of a search or quest in a game obsessed with such missives (Fallout 3’s obsession with searching for absentee authority figures is a whole different essay, however). Your interactions with her are limited to a handful of bouts of cooperation and the occasional service under her command. She’s accessible, capable and totally in charge. She’s a strong, interesting character who happens to be a woman, not the other way around.
She never needs saving, never doubts herself or needs to be held. She’s stable, smart and calm regardless of circumstances. She’ll even walk to her death if you’re too big of a pussy to man up and activate Project Purity yourself. She’s a badass through and through, easily the equal of Halo’s Sergeant Johnson (Scratch that – she’s tougher than Johnson. She doesn’t wig out when people around her start dying – an odd reaction for any military veteran) or Barney from Half-Life 2. She keeps her people together and keeps on fighting, no matter the odds.
And she happens to be an attractive young woman. She doesn’t feel like a construct. Instead she feels like a character. As a result I had a healthy respect for her before the game’s end. I didn’t feel like I was being pandered to (that armor is never coming off, after all), I didn’t feel like I was being sold an implausible character inserted solely to give boys a reason to swoon. As such the feelings I developed for the character were mine, and mine alone. Maybe the developers wanted player to develop this sort of camaraderie and attraction to Lyons, maybe not. But by creating a smart, independent woman they effortlessly managed to develop one of my video game crushes without making me feel like I was supposed to like her or even think of her as sexy. She was just a really cool character who happened to be a girl.
This is something games need to start doing more often. They’ve already begun to do it with characters like Alyx Vance and Jade of Beyond Good and Evil fame, but for every Jade it seems that we find two of X-Blades Ayumi, a caricature of a “strong woman” clad in dental floss. So I’m going to outline a few concepts which Sarah, Alyx, Jade and their sisters in maturely portraying women embody and try to lay down some things that I, in my infinite lack of qualification, believe need to be done with female characters if games ever want to move out of their boy’s club roots and start being seen by people in general as a place where both genders receive fair treatment:
1 – Dress your characters like fucking human beings.
This one applies to both sides of the gender divide, really. Cheesecake Conans are just as bad, for all intents and purposes, as Lara Crofts and Ivys. It’s alright to let loose sometimes, but when the industry standard becomes exposed, rippling chests and suits of chain mail with cleavage slits and bare midriffs we’ve got a problem. Note that two of the three characters I’ve presented as examples just wear every-day street clothes, and the third wears a suit of armor. All of them are contextually appropriate, and two of them let the ladies show off what they’ve got without presenting an overly sexualized character or an implausible code of dress for a reporter/thief/leader of a global resistance movement. This speaks to a larger problem in games writing of generating consistent worlds with functioning internal logic, but these errors seem especially egregious given the context and the history of exploitative portrayals of women in games. That brings us to number two:
2 – Portray your characters consistently throughout your games.
It’s one thing if our guileless female McGuffin is just that throughout. We can apply the same standard to men and it’s just dandy. Princess Peach, after all, isn’t an overtly sexualized or offensive portrayal of a female video game character, though she’s plainly an object of desire throughout the entire game. She’s never built up then undermined or dangled in front of you like a carrot. She’s just the reason you’re hunting down Bowser in the first place. But when you strip your strong, independent characters of power and make them into objectives you’re entering troubled waters. Again, you can apply this to both ends of the gender spectrum, but it seems to present itself far more often with regards to women. Gamers are all too accustomed to seeing their previously powerful female allies stripped of power (and on occasion clothing) and placed upon a pedestal with a glowing arrow above their head. This isn’t a diatribe against change and development, it’s a cry for consistency and a shift away from the boyhood fantasies of swooping in to save the badass woman of your dreams so that she’ll be eternally grateful. If we want to be seen as grownups we’re going to have to start acting like it.
3 – Try to develop your characters without an eye to their sex.
Obviously this one is kind of impossible to manage. Metroid came as close as any game ever has, though, and we can take a few lessons from the nearly story-less NES and SNES entries into the series. Samus Aran is totally gender neutral until that helmet comes off (for the purpose of discussion I’m ignoring the lengthy period of time when developers decided it would be a good idea to put her in a skin tight body suit) and she’s a pretty big badass regardless of what kind of plumbing you think she has. Sure, once the helmet comes off we see her as a woman and that influences both our feelings for the character and the way we relate to her. But her being a woman never seems to generate information about her character. Instead it’s simply an aspect of who she is. She is a tough, capable bounty hunter who happens to have a vagina. This is something we need more of in games in general as well – developing characters with an eye towards identity rather than archetype. This is just another specific area where there’s been particularly slow progress. There’s nothing wrong with considering sex and sexuality as a part of who your character is, but when you’re utilizing that as the generative trait for your character that’s when we tend to run into Tomb Raider situations where otherwise tough, intelligent female characters shift from being capable human beings to being damsels in distress with barely a gun holster to cover themselves with.
4 – Stop forcing us into relationships.
This is one of my favorite parts of how Fallout 3 portrays Sarah Lyons. She’s never a “relationship option.” And why would she be? You see her a handful of times over the course of a few weeks. You barely know her. She’s way out of your league, and she’s part of one of the most selective, isolationist organizations in the game. Even more impressive is that she’s never written into a forced relationship – she’s a young, focused adventurer who doesn’t need a partner – same as the Kid from Vault 101. We don’t always need to be shoehorned into a relationship in video games. In fact, it’s often healthier to leave relationships out of the equation entirely. This is something Bioware desperately needs to learn to do. The relationships in Baldur’s Gate II (mostly) stemmed from long standing interpersonal relationships and developed in a believable, if not realistic, fashion. The relationships in every subsequent game they’ve made have been shoehorned clichés of romance crammed down player’s throats. Sure, we can ignore them, but it actually takes an effort to do so. And you have to be a bit of a dick to boot. Can you tell Ashley off while remaining the high minded, regulation focused Shepard with maxed out paragon points? Or is the only means by which you can avoid boffing your co-worker being a bit of a dick? These aren’t usually problems for developed media with a message, and games have got to learn to stop doing this to us. It’s fine to put us in a game where we can pursue a relationship, but as long as we keep getting forced into them we’re always going to be portraying one of the parties in an exploitative light. And, sadly, it’s normally going to be the female party.
5 – Hire better writers.
This is my last point, and, again, it’s one of the ones that needs to be taken to heart by gaming at large with regards not just to women but characters in general. A lot of these problems emerge from putting people in the writer’s room who have absolutely no business being there. Characters like Jade, Lyons, Chell, Alyx, Tennenbaum and a milieu of others emerge because actual honest to god writers sat down and made them. Characters like Zelda, Liara, Elika and every other hackneyed female love interest come into being because people who have no business putting pen to page are forced to make stories to fit their game play models. This is starting to turn around, but it’s slow going and it’s incredibly frustrating. In a world where plenty of capable writers are chomping at the bit with new and interesting game ideas the high cost and closed-door nature of the industry seems to be keeping them out and ensuring that the people writing the games are not people who could work as professional authors in their own right but instead people who already work in “the biz” who happen to be able to write in complete sentences. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but this is how it all appears to an outsider and, frankly, it’s obvious when real talent emerges to write games. Portal proved that employing capable writers, people who would be crafting stories even if video games had never come to be, can generate some amazing writing in games. And once we have more people following Valve’s example and getting some real writers to sit down and breathe life into their properties we’ll stop seeing the same tired damsel in distress archetypes and start seeing some original, thought provoking stories emerge in games.
Just follow these five, not so simple points and I’m sure your industry will start to be perceived as mature in two to three years instead of two to three decades. If those five points are too complicated, however (we all know how short executive attention spans are, after all), I’ve come up with a one sentence summary to help you decide if you’re making your female character properly: More like Sarah Lyons.
It’s an important question to ask when you’re playing Fallout 3. She’s a major character, easily the equal of Three Dog, Allistair Tenpenny, or James. She’s distinguished from these characters, however, along with Dr. Madison Lee, by her womanhood. She is, in every way, a strong, capable, complex human being. She has her own views on the people of the Wasteland, the way they should be handled and the role the Brotherhood should be taking in the world at large.
In all of this her womanhood is incidental to her character. It influences her actions and the way we interpret them, it lends extra gravitas to her frequent trips into downtown DC and it adds an additional layer of depth to the social workings of the Brotherhood, in that no one ever discusses the fact that their most elite commando unit is headed by a woman, and the daughter of their leader to boot. But her sex never takes center stage. And in this Sarah Lyons is everything a video game character should be.
Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture of women in games here. Recently Leigh Alexander and Daniel Floyd did a great piece that focused on the topic of the female gaming audience and touched tangentially on the portrayal of women in games, and they made some great points. Even strong, capable female game characters are all too often stripped of their power and placed in pandering positions or depicted in an over the top, overly sexualized fashion for the purpose of marketing or fan service. Lara Croft, who as Floyd points out was devised as a female Indiana Jones, was reduced to little more than crypt-candy through a combination of marketing slips and retarded designer decisions (A nude code? Seriously? Oh, and you’re having her play through the final mission in her nightie. Brilliant.). Blood Rayne, who could’ve been a perfect anti-authority figure if she’d been properly utilized, was instead used for an abysmal Playboy spread and progressively more lewd portrayals from game to game. Hell, even Tifa is guilty of this sort treatment: again, a strong, capable woman whose breasts remain one of her most memorable qualities – not her heartbreaking willingness to remain with the man she loves despite coming in “second place” or her endurance of humiliations in order to become a force of positive change for her world.
This has become a sort of industry standard, and it really needs to stop. While portraying, discussing and developing attractive characters sexually is fine, even healthy, it needs to be given the proper context and needs to be an aspect of the character instead of the clumsy realization of a fantasy. Katie Sackhoff’s portrayal of Starbuck in the Battlestar Gallactica reboot is a perfect example of the balance games seem to strive for: she’s a strong, sexy woman who has a sex drive and very occasionally wears a dress, but never puts herself in a submissive position or breaks from being who she is (an overt, aggressive badass) for the sake of pandering.
All too often, though, attractive women in games are denied this sort of treatment. They’re shown to be just strong enough to warrant our respect and then they’re reduced to objects of desire. Elika from the Prince of Persia reboot is guilty of this offense. Elika is critical in realizing all of the Prince’s actions, saves his life time and time again and breaks down the defenses of the Corrupted when he cannot, but when she is removed from his side she collapses, shifting from badass to McGuffin in seconds. All of her powers, necessary for saving the world, cannot be used for her own benefit and can only be focused through a male authority figure: the Prince.
This is a pattern we’re all too familiar with: the badass chick who suddenly needs a knight in shining armor, usually a weaker male character who is inexplicably stronger than her on this occasion. And it’s one we need to break free from. That’s where characters like Sarah Lyons come in to play.
Sarah isn’t the focus of the game. While she is a major character she isn’t THE character. She’s never the object of desire, or eventhat of a search or quest in a game obsessed with such missives (Fallout 3’s obsession with searching for absentee authority figures is a whole different essay, however). Your interactions with her are limited to a handful of bouts of cooperation and the occasional service under her command. She’s accessible, capable and totally in charge. She’s a strong, interesting character who happens to be a woman, not the other way around.
She never needs saving, never doubts herself or needs to be held. She’s stable, smart and calm regardless of circumstances. She’ll even walk to her death if you’re too big of a pussy to man up and activate Project Purity yourself. She’s a badass through and through, easily the equal of Halo’s Sergeant Johnson (Scratch that – she’s tougher than Johnson. She doesn’t wig out when people around her start dying – an odd reaction for any military veteran) or Barney from Half-Life 2. She keeps her people together and keeps on fighting, no matter the odds.
And she happens to be an attractive young woman. She doesn’t feel like a construct. Instead she feels like a character. As a result I had a healthy respect for her before the game’s end. I didn’t feel like I was being pandered to (that armor is never coming off, after all), I didn’t feel like I was being sold an implausible character inserted solely to give boys a reason to swoon. As such the feelings I developed for the character were mine, and mine alone. Maybe the developers wanted player to develop this sort of camaraderie and attraction to Lyons, maybe not. But by creating a smart, independent woman they effortlessly managed to develop one of my video game crushes without making me feel like I was supposed to like her or even think of her as sexy. She was just a really cool character who happened to be a girl.
This is something games need to start doing more often. They’ve already begun to do it with characters like Alyx Vance and Jade of Beyond Good and Evil fame, but for every Jade it seems that we find two of X-Blades Ayumi, a caricature of a “strong woman” clad in dental floss. So I’m going to outline a few concepts which Sarah, Alyx, Jade and their sisters in maturely portraying women embody and try to lay down some things that I, in my infinite lack of qualification, believe need to be done with female characters if games ever want to move out of their boy’s club roots and start being seen by people in general as a place where both genders receive fair treatment:
1 – Dress your characters like fucking human beings.
This one applies to both sides of the gender divide, really. Cheesecake Conans are just as bad, for all intents and purposes, as Lara Crofts and Ivys. It’s alright to let loose sometimes, but when the industry standard becomes exposed, rippling chests and suits of chain mail with cleavage slits and bare midriffs we’ve got a problem. Note that two of the three characters I’ve presented as examples just wear every-day street clothes, and the third wears a suit of armor. All of them are contextually appropriate, and two of them let the ladies show off what they’ve got without presenting an overly sexualized character or an implausible code of dress for a reporter/thief/leader of a global resistance movement. This speaks to a larger problem in games writing of generating consistent worlds with functioning internal logic, but these errors seem especially egregious given the context and the history of exploitative portrayals of women in games. That brings us to number two:
2 – Portray your characters consistently throughout your games.
It’s one thing if our guileless female McGuffin is just that throughout. We can apply the same standard to men and it’s just dandy. Princess Peach, after all, isn’t an overtly sexualized or offensive portrayal of a female video game character, though she’s plainly an object of desire throughout the entire game. She’s never built up then undermined or dangled in front of you like a carrot. She’s just the reason you’re hunting down Bowser in the first place. But when you strip your strong, independent characters of power and make them into objectives you’re entering troubled waters. Again, you can apply this to both ends of the gender spectrum, but it seems to present itself far more often with regards to women. Gamers are all too accustomed to seeing their previously powerful female allies stripped of power (and on occasion clothing) and placed upon a pedestal with a glowing arrow above their head. This isn’t a diatribe against change and development, it’s a cry for consistency and a shift away from the boyhood fantasies of swooping in to save the badass woman of your dreams so that she’ll be eternally grateful. If we want to be seen as grownups we’re going to have to start acting like it.
3 – Try to develop your characters without an eye to their sex.
Obviously this one is kind of impossible to manage. Metroid came as close as any game ever has, though, and we can take a few lessons from the nearly story-less NES and SNES entries into the series. Samus Aran is totally gender neutral until that helmet comes off (for the purpose of discussion I’m ignoring the lengthy period of time when developers decided it would be a good idea to put her in a skin tight body suit) and she’s a pretty big badass regardless of what kind of plumbing you think she has. Sure, once the helmet comes off we see her as a woman and that influences both our feelings for the character and the way we relate to her. But her being a woman never seems to generate information about her character. Instead it’s simply an aspect of who she is. She is a tough, capable bounty hunter who happens to have a vagina. This is something we need more of in games in general as well – developing characters with an eye towards identity rather than archetype. This is just another specific area where there’s been particularly slow progress. There’s nothing wrong with considering sex and sexuality as a part of who your character is, but when you’re utilizing that as the generative trait for your character that’s when we tend to run into Tomb Raider situations where otherwise tough, intelligent female characters shift from being capable human beings to being damsels in distress with barely a gun holster to cover themselves with.
4 – Stop forcing us into relationships.
This is one of my favorite parts of how Fallout 3 portrays Sarah Lyons. She’s never a “relationship option.” And why would she be? You see her a handful of times over the course of a few weeks. You barely know her. She’s way out of your league, and she’s part of one of the most selective, isolationist organizations in the game. Even more impressive is that she’s never written into a forced relationship – she’s a young, focused adventurer who doesn’t need a partner – same as the Kid from Vault 101. We don’t always need to be shoehorned into a relationship in video games. In fact, it’s often healthier to leave relationships out of the equation entirely. This is something Bioware desperately needs to learn to do. The relationships in Baldur’s Gate II (mostly) stemmed from long standing interpersonal relationships and developed in a believable, if not realistic, fashion. The relationships in every subsequent game they’ve made have been shoehorned clichés of romance crammed down player’s throats. Sure, we can ignore them, but it actually takes an effort to do so. And you have to be a bit of a dick to boot. Can you tell Ashley off while remaining the high minded, regulation focused Shepard with maxed out paragon points? Or is the only means by which you can avoid boffing your co-worker being a bit of a dick? These aren’t usually problems for developed media with a message, and games have got to learn to stop doing this to us. It’s fine to put us in a game where we can pursue a relationship, but as long as we keep getting forced into them we’re always going to be portraying one of the parties in an exploitative light. And, sadly, it’s normally going to be the female party.
5 – Hire better writers.
This is my last point, and, again, it’s one of the ones that needs to be taken to heart by gaming at large with regards not just to women but characters in general. A lot of these problems emerge from putting people in the writer’s room who have absolutely no business being there. Characters like Jade, Lyons, Chell, Alyx, Tennenbaum and a milieu of others emerge because actual honest to god writers sat down and made them. Characters like Zelda, Liara, Elika and every other hackneyed female love interest come into being because people who have no business putting pen to page are forced to make stories to fit their game play models. This is starting to turn around, but it’s slow going and it’s incredibly frustrating. In a world where plenty of capable writers are chomping at the bit with new and interesting game ideas the high cost and closed-door nature of the industry seems to be keeping them out and ensuring that the people writing the games are not people who could work as professional authors in their own right but instead people who already work in “the biz” who happen to be able to write in complete sentences. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but this is how it all appears to an outsider and, frankly, it’s obvious when real talent emerges to write games. Portal proved that employing capable writers, people who would be crafting stories even if video games had never come to be, can generate some amazing writing in games. And once we have more people following Valve’s example and getting some real writers to sit down and breathe life into their properties we’ll stop seeing the same tired damsel in distress archetypes and start seeing some original, thought provoking stories emerge in games.
Just follow these five, not so simple points and I’m sure your industry will start to be perceived as mature in two to three years instead of two to three decades. If those five points are too complicated, however (we all know how short executive attention spans are, after all), I’ve come up with a one sentence summary to help you decide if you’re making your female character properly: More like Sarah Lyons.
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