Monday, May 31, 2010

Congratulations on Sharing that New York Hospitality

You’re going to move into a small town in Northern Minnesota this weekend, about twenty minutes outside of Bemidji. You’ll be moving there mostly to avoid charges for assault, battery, murder and tax evasion in New York and you thought that no one would ever think to look for a New Yorker in northern Minnesota.

You’ll be right, more or less. But it hasn’t been easy. To cover up your true identity you’ve had to avoid talking about New York for the entire trip, a Herculean feat for someone who is as big a douche bag as you. You’ve also had to avoid discussing musical, mentioning how much better New York’s version of the Lion king is and discussing that 30 Rock is shot and set in your town.

To reward yourself for doing such a good job you’re going to introduce yourself to the town in true New York style: you’re going to mug someone immediately upon entering the town. You’ll wait outside a bank until you see a Honda Civic with a single occupant in it. Then you’ll wait until the occupant, an ancient looking man, begins using the ATM to conduct a transaction.

You’ll rush up behind him quietly and slam his face into the ATM’s display, mashing the keys and fucking up his PIN entry.

“Give me all the money you can get in a single withdrawal,” you’ll whisper into his ear.

“Huh?” he’ll say, unable to hear you due to a German grenade which destroyed his hearing during World War 1.

“Give me all your fucking money!” you’ll scream, pressing your gun into the back of his head.

“No need for such language, son,” he’ll say, licking his lips as he tries to remember his PIN. “Let’s see. You don’t know what money number, now do ya?”

Your breath will whistle through your teeth in your rage and after the old man spends several minutes trying to recall his PIN without success you’ll just smash your gun into the back of his head and take the coupons and two dollar bills out of his wallet and leave.

When he comes to he’ll describe the situation to the sheriff who, because the town only has three hundred residents, will immediately know that you did it. He’ll arrive at your house, arrest you for armed robbery and, during the background check discover who you really are. Then you’ll be swiftly extradited to New York for trial and summary imprisonment.

You’ll die within a week of your arrival at Ryker’s, strangled in your cell by a rival Mafioso who was really tired of the way you would text his wife whenever you were drunk.

Congratulations on Sharing that New York Hospitality!

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Cold Worlds of Games!

The worlds in which most games exist are cold, inhospitable places, wastelands with only the most cursory trappings of humanity. Even when they’re teeming with virtual life games always have trouble grasping at just what makes a town a town, what makes a house more than four walls, a roof and a foundation. They are, by nature and by design, demonstrations of the fundamental elements of what something is, rather than representations of places, fictional or real.

There are exceptions. The most ironic, and indeed one of the best I’ve ever encountered, was Fallout 3, a world which felt vibrant, living and empty in a way which echoed the socially nihilistic world I live in as a nerd. Fallout 3 had people, many of them nominally friendly, only a handful of whom would actually accompany you through the Wasteland. It was a game about growing up, moving from place to place, and it grasped that to make a place real you must populate it with people who will deal with the main character without concern or knowledge of who or what that main character is.

Brutal Legend walked a similar line with its alien world of metal, in this case trading off immersion and interaction for fullness, richness and wondrous consistency. Brutal Legend should have felt odd and off-putting, but the manner in which a cycle of constant war shaped both the game and the game’s world made it come to life in a way that most single player experience cannot hope for. Sure, the multiplayer was dense and difficult to access, rooted on a set of systems where people are largely uninterested in playing new and original kinds of games on the internet, but the Brutal Land was without peer in how it delivered on its promise of a war-torn Metal landscape.

But compare this to a place like Liberty City. Liberty City is based off of New York’s layout, populace and landscape. It has no business being boring. To make New York boring is an impressive feat in its own right, but it sets Grand Theft Auto in the midst of a lifeless, sterile city consisting entirely of goodies to grab and occasional interstitials which register with the audible clunk of my disc shifting RPMs to draw new data from unused sectors. Occasionally the world comes to life within these interstitials, in rooftop chases and kidnappings, a few assassinations and one very notable heist, but none of this takes place within the much touted open world of Grand Theft Auto 4.

To the credit of Rockstar’s designers, they’ve spent most of their careers trying to mask the fact that their games are traditional video games shoehorned into open world environments, and they’ve been making improvements. But in the end their worlds are little better than those of a Final Fantasy game – filled with potential targets and threats, the occasional reward and little or no personality outside of bits of art and tidily scripted cutscenes which will, at best, unlock new areas of the game, but will most likely change absolutely nothing. They’ve popularized a form of world building without recognizing its potential for immersing players, and it’s a shame, because all it does is illustrate the problems that traditional game designs have had with making their worlds feel lifelike.

The issue mostly stems from the fact that games are intended to tell a story: singular. Games aren’t trying to present you with an interpretive narrative, again with few exceptions: they’re trying to lay out a series of events “as they occur” and let you engage them. Some games camouflage this fact better than others, games like Half-Life 2 and the first F.E.A.R. that constantly present you with interesting situations and asides and give you worlds that actually beg to be interpreted, worlds with muted and unclear laws and histories which demand that their players immerse themselves in order to comprehend events. Most games are more like Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto, forcing you to jump through hoops until you reach the end of the story they want to tell you, feeding you snippets of narrative until you reach the last snippet of narrative intended to close off all the other snippets with some measure of satisfaction.

In between the world consists of scripted challenges, usually challenges which consist mostly of harming other creatures or solving puzzles, and the story itself occurs outside of these challenges. Sometimes you’ll be given friends to accompany you through these challenges, and the game logic will insure that these friends arrive (or do not arrive) at your destination in one form or another. The two worlds are more or less closed off. Little has actually changed since Doom, with its occasional dying marine and text box informing you why you’re shooting weird brown men in the face through a series of gray hallways and stacks of boxes. All we’ve improved for the most part is the graphical quality of the boxes and the quality of the writing.

Few games illustrate this better than Torchlight, the utilitarian indie title which has been working its way through the Steam play lists of many of my friends. Torchlight is a neat little Diablo clone that takes the classic formula of Diablo – generate a dynamic map and populate it with random baddies then let players run through it - and adds a cutesie art style that recognizes the exceedingly low stakes that the genre brings with it and makes the game accessible to players from a variety of backgrounds. Even people who don’t like Diablo’s style of play have had their interested piqued a little by Torchlight’s endearing, cartoonish and incredibly generic art.

Torchlight is completely fine as a game, and if you play games as the sort of person who engages them so that they can essentially solve math problems with graphical representations and limited finesse, Torchlight is perfect. Its spreadsheets are engaging, its characters memorable and its world stripped down with just the right amount of self-aware humor and self-serious guidance to keep things moving painlessly. But Torchlight suffers from one serious defect in my mind: its maps lack a sense of place.

No one expects them to have a strong sense of place, and fair enough. They’re randomly generated dungeons that spit out items of various colors, and most of what you really care about while you’re inside those dungeons is stripping them of their brightly colored items so that you can progress to the next set of challenges and leave. There’s no sense that people live in these dungeons or that the creatures there have any existence outside of being destroyed by you. It’s like the polar opposite of the ambitious Badman games – the world you live in is completely artificial and totally unconscious of its own haphazardly constructed nature. The art is beautiful, but the places the art combines to build for game play are lifeless and dull. Only their procedural nature deflects any criticism.

There are many games which do their all to counter this. Massive effort goes into the Half-Life series in order to make its sets feel lived in, and a great deal of Left4Dead’s appeal comes in the fact that wherever you go you always feel as if you’re not the first to be there, and not just because of the hordes of zombies. Left4Dead’s world feels lived in. And while the logic doesn’t always hold up (Why does that jukebox still have power? Why are there so many infected who don’t seem to have any major physical trauma? Why don’t we occasionally see fallen survivors by the road?) the effort is there and the pieces are there so that we can see that we’re not alone in the cosmology of Left4Dead, an important message the game keeps repeating.

Even stealth games like the original Thief did their best to make you feel like you were part of a bigger world while pushing you to the outskirts of it. Guards have lives and conversations, crime bosses had business which needed taking care of, peasants had families and even the rat men had names. These touches define what turns a good game into a great game, what allows us to make our own stories and insert them into the larger narrative of our favorite pieces of electronic media. They separate games like the Call of Cthulhu shooter from Thief in the way they approach the world they build and the way they allow players to experience that world and generate stories from it.

Because even within these cold, inhospitable worlds there remains life. Like our own world it isn’t always life we get to know, and it isn’t always life we’d want to know, but the feel of it there makes these worlds seem real, complete and whole in ways that games with empty or soulless worlds do not. There are plenty of different ways to accomplish this goal and certainly, as Torchlight proves, it’s not always necessary for developers to do so. But if developers want to create serious games that tell serious stories they can’t set them in closed off worlds where nothing unexpected can happen and no consequence can emerge without the explicit dictum of the developer. As in fiction the world can be an impassive and cruel place and still feel right, so long as we can look at it and see some facsimile of ourselves reflected in our surroundings.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Congratulations on Tricking Your Husband!

Today you’re going to do something you’ve always wanted to do. You’re going to squeeze your lactating boob until milk comes out and then drop it into your coffee. You’ll serve it to him, waiting attentively by his side as he samples it.

He’ll sip, then look up, then sip a little more. When he opens his mouth to speak you’ll hold your breath.

“Why does my coffee taste like whore?” he’ll ask.

Congratulations on Tricking Your Husband!

Friday, May 28, 2010

Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball!


It isn’t actually that odd for people in Portland who are collecting unemployment to just drive around all day looking at thrift stores. It’s a good way to apply for jobs that will only make you work twelve hours a week and sometimes you find some really neat shit that you can bring back to your eccentric house filled with people who have exposed tattoos and little or no work ethic.


Which is why no will be surprised to see you digging around in the nexus of madness that is The Bins, a self-contained slice of Portland where junk is paid for by the pound and the sheer number of bargains contained within the walls of the building has begun to warp reality, slowly driving anyone inside who is not currently engaged in the pursuit of bargains towards madness. But when you pull your scabby arms from the midst of a pile of clothes and old hangers and find yourself clutching a massive, glittering ball of majesty you’ll be beyond shocked. Your loser friend who offers witticisms and tips about which business will give their food to you if you can prove unemployment will be speechless for the first time all day.

You’ll heft the ball in the air above your head and stage whisper: “I must have this.”

Your retarded hippy friend will nod and the two of you will shuffle to the front of the store where you’ll deposit the globe on a scale. It will come out to a dollar seventy five total for the orb, and you’ll shell it out so fast you’ll forget to ask for an application, which is good because The Bins would’ve taken what little sanity you had left and spit it out like chaw or something else which is gross after being spit out.

You’ll retreat back to your home, dropping your hippy friend off along the way at his co-op squat under the Hawthorne Bridge.

“Tell me when it’s set up,” he’ll say, eyes glistening with anticipation. You’ll drive off without responding, only taking your eyes off the road to look back at the globe covered in an old Ramones t-shirt. You’ll keep it under the t-shirt while you walk inside, ignoring your roommates as they sit around the floor and play a game of Sorry, reeking of pot.

When you get to your room you’ll unwrap the t-shirt from the globe and just stare at its surface. You’ll be sobering up from your morning bowl by this point and the combination of that rush of returning mental energy and the profundity of finding this worthless, cast off object in a place full of things like that and removing it to bring it back to your home will paralyze you. You’ll sit there for nearly forty five minutes, examining the imperfections of the ball before you even try hanging it on its suspension device.

You’ll watch it spin, slowly and elegantly, occasionally playing a flashlight over it in silence. It will, more or less, work, and you’ll feel good about that, like you have something to protect now. You’ll feel like you rescued something important from obscurity, like saving this meaningless little item will somehow have helped you get some part of your life back again.

Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Congratulations Skullfuck Joe!

Many gang members earn their nicknames because they have special skills or traits. Black Eye Mary, for example, is a retired middleweight boxer who can level a man twice her size with a well placed blow. Tom Gun Tommy is a sociopath with a reputation for firing automatic weapons into crowds during heists and then using the ensuing chaos to escape.

You, however, will not be so lucky. You will earn your nickname in the early hours of Thursday when you are set upon by a group of rival gang members in the pre-dawn gray. While you’ll put up a good fight they’ll eventually overpower you and do what gangs do when they overpower their foes: take turns raping your incapacitated body.

They’ll stick their be-warted penises in just about every hole you have without fail for almost forty five minutes before they feel even a little bored. And that’s when, understandably, one of the gang members will ram his penis into your eye socket, just to see what it’s like.

He’ll give it a few good thrusts before he decides that he doesn’t really like the feel of viscous fluid and tears all over his dick. Then he’ll hit you in the head with the butt of a gun hard and knock you unconscious. You’ll be found by a middle aged woman walking her dog the next day and rushed to the ICU, where doctors will, remarkably enough, find a way to save your eye. You will forever thereafter be known as Skullfuck Joe, and will be known for the furious vengeance you mete out upon skullfuckers the world over.

Congratulations Skullfuck Joe!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Congratulations on Being Blinded by Shampoo!

Tomorrow night when you try to burst in on your wife having sex with another man in the shower she’s going to respond the only way she knows how: by squeezing the shampoo bottle into your face. It’ll hurt a lot and you won’t be able to see anything, which will suck because you wanted to get a good look at the guy so you could potentially beat him up later.

After you’ve been blinded you’ll slip and fall in the shower, dragging down the curtain and royally freaking out your wife in the process. You’ll pass out in there, waking up hours later with cold water raining down on your head, shivering, the shampoo cleared from your eyes. It’ll be the closest you’ve come to sex in a shower since your wedding night, four years ago.

Congratulations on Being Blinded by Shampoo!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Congratulations on Reminding Us Why We Don't Speak to People Named Zed!

There is, of course, a disclaimer that comes with this post – we still think it’s okay to speak to people named Zed assuming they are British secret agents who just use Zed as their code name This rule really only applies to American citizens from “real America,” and it runs double if you’re a teen whose car just broke down in one of those horrifying sections of “real America.”

This will be proven again today when a group of sex crazed teens stop outside of your gas station. You, in this case, are Zed Steevenz, a semi-literate mechanic and Vietnam war vet who spent most of the war delivering mail and choking prostitutes.

When you see those kids, laughing and smiling outside your store despite their troubles, you’ll feel rage that America can contain such joy and not involve you. So you’ll pull out your shotgun and open fire into the car, killing the driver and the passenger immediately. Then you’ll pull one of the remaining teens out of the back seat and bludgeon him to death with your wrench while his girlfriend watches in horror. After a moment of disbelief she’ll start screaming for help, which will draw the townspeople to the scene.

They’ll arrive to see you pounding what’s left of that poor boy’s skill into the pavement while his girlfriend weeps in the backseat. Clucking their tongues and chuckling at your irascible nature they’ll drag the young woman outside and kill her with an axe before calming you down. Then the whole town will have a laugh at “old Zed and his murdering ways,” before leading the car with the corpses on to a wrecker and taking it out into the hills where it can be quietly torched away from prying eyes as God intended it.

Congratulations on Reminding Us Why We Don’t Speak to People Named Zed!

Monday, May 24, 2010

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife!

Tonight you’re going to do what we thought could never be done: you’re going to make someone associate something positive with the film The Bone Collector. It’ll be an amazing feat of mental dexterity which will begin when your wife suggests that you rent the Denzel Washington vehicle. Knowing of the film’s dismal reputation you’ll panic. Things will have been bad enough between the two of you lately that you won’t have the guts to tell her no, but you know that sitting through that shit will only make your marriage that much worse.

So you’ll move quickly inside your head, forming an elaborate scheme with which to deceive her. But you’ll abandon that scheme almost immediately and instead just decide to rent some interracial porn and tell her that you thought it was The Bone Collector, feigning ignorance if she accuses you of trying to just get her to have sex with you on a night other than Wednesday or Saturday.

When you show up with the DVD she’ll shrug and assume that you couldn’t find a copy of The Bone Collector and thought this would be a good replacement for it. So instead of watching that terrible movie, which your wife only wanted to see because she wanted to get turned on watching Denzel, the two of you will curl up and watch Black Cock Sluts 8, which will get the job done about as well.

The two of you will punctuate the film with no fewer than three sexual episodes, and by the time it’s all finished you’ll both fall asleep with warm feelings towards the film The Bone Collector which you’d never thought you’d experience, as well as a newfound appreciation for the engrossing storytelling of the Black Cock Sluts series of films.

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife!

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Way We Talk!

All narrative art forms are on some level participatory. A novel requires reading. It requires investment from the reader, an investment which shapes the reader’s interpretation of the work itself. I can read The Road and come away thinking it’s a trite, overwrought work filled with florid prose and poorly thought out plot points and you can come out thinking it’s a seminal work on the nature of fatherhood and inevitability of one’s own demise in a world where human life itself has become completely devalued, and we can both be totally right. We can each read Charles Simic and come away either thinking he’s mind numbingly pretentious or profound and both have valid opinions. We can all agree that Yoshimoto Banana needs to get laid something fierce.

Narrative art is constantly shaped by an invisible reader figure. It’s one of the big mysteries that structuralism and post-constructivism revealed about storytelling – there is no story without someone to hear it. It’s part of a tacit compact between reader and writer, a critical nexus of human intellect generating a collective experience in absentia of actual human interaction. Criticism of each narrative medium is aware of this to one extent or another. The more kinetic the medium, however, the less aware critics seem to be.

Poetry, for example, is painfully self-aware that their medium does not exist without participants. Anyone who has been to a poetry reading can vouch for that. Without readers or listeners, poetry doesn’t exist. The very manner in which one reads poetry line to line is critical to grasping the meaning of poems. Amateur poets frequently forget this fact, and many an undergraduate’s attempt at opus has been laid low by a failure to heed the importance of line, a failure to recognize that one day a reader will encounter this work whose experience cannot be personally guided by the writer. Critiquing poetry is inherently tied to the experience of the reader. The manner in which you read a particular phrase, the manner in which you interpret it, is something that criticism demands by brevity or nature. You cannot discuss a poem without discuss the experience of interacting with that poem, an experience inherently tied to every single experience leading up to it.

But compare this to the discourse surrounding film. Film critics will rarely discuss the experience of actually watching a film, spare in a negative fashion. Aside from Kelly Wand I’ve never heard a film critic talk about the way an audience improved a film, or the way that previous films influenced their opinion of craft. Some critics, like Roger Ebert, do this to an often comedic extent, approaching each film they watch with a seemingly psychotic lack of self-awareness. Others, like Dana Stevens, hint at the impact that previous films have had upon them, offering us insights into the basis of their criticism which then dovetail into their “objective” discussions of film.

Games as a medium exacerbate this problem in an unprecedented way, a way that most critics seem uncomfortable with. Many critics come from backgrounds wherein perceived neutrality is the gold standard for discourse, and games make such neutrality impossible by shifting and developing through interaction. Some writers, like the many of the Destructoid crew, want to pretend that the divide doesn’t exist. If a game isn’t great to Destructoid it’s because the game is, on some level, shitty or wrong. The player has no part in shaping the experience. Others reviewers, like Tom Chick or Leigh Alexander, can become overly invested in their personal analysis. In these cases intimate knowledge of the critic is required to interpret their reviews at times, limiting the effectiveness of such writing. When I think about the way people review games I am reminded of the way I heard people discuss poetry as a student.

The similarities between the critical communities surrounding video games and poetry are fascinating to me, and would no doubt make both parties deeply uncomfortable (though it would likely make the poetry community, still coming to terms with its own role despite a four hundred year grace period where they were not the dominant narrative art form, much more nervous, I’m sure, than the young video gamesmen). It’s all good and well to say that games criticism should be more like poetry criticism, that critiquing a game should be more like critiquing any sort of a book than a film, but such proclamations aren’t helpful. Games are their own beast, and they require their own sort of discussion, so instead of tossing out generalities I want to talk about a few occasions I’ve seen in the past few years of games criticism failing in discussing culturally, critically or commercially significant games.

The first example that comes to mind is the discussion surrounding Defense of the Ancients and its summary clones, Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. I started playing DotA during my first summer at home away from college. It was a way to keep in touch with people from college and to bring my two disparate social groups, my friends from high school and my friends from higher education, together. It was also a nuanced, deceptively complex game which demanded more attention from its player than most action oriented players were comfortable with and more nuanced tactical sense than most RTS players were comfortable with. It’s a game that should’ve fallen into nichedom, catering to a group of miscreants who want to remember games like Myth and X-Com, punishingly difficult affairs which rewarded intelligent, quick witted players with nerves of steel and plenty of determination, a rare group in today’s world of instantly rewarding games.

When I first became interested in games journalism I was a frequent reader of the Escapist. I consumed articles between asinine tasks at my first desk job out of college, licking my lips attentively each Wednesday to see if they’d gotten someone even moderately prominent to write an article this week. My hopes were dashed in a particularly noteworthy fashion when, one day, I checked the news feed on The Escapist and saw an article on DotA. When I clicked it open I expected a diatribe on punishing game play which rewarded endurance and passion. I expected an article about the merits of the game and the team play it encouraged.

Imagine my shock when I uncovered an article about how amateurish and unbalanced this fan-made mod for Warcraft 3 was. It was a discussion about long distance gaming using DotA as a hopping off point to kvetch about how bad games could draw people together. It was bereft of self-awareness. It was a New York Post review, something you’d expect to see in a small town paper that published op eds not to incite discussion but to up circulation. It was poorly written and didn’t seem to realize where it was or what it was discussing. It was about the author’s life without ever copping to it or even noticing it.

The article failed to discuss the context of the author’s experience, the author’s background as a gamer, the origin of his passion for gaming, where his desire to play this game with friends had come from. It was a discussion without any real information – a diatribe on how games bring people together without a shameful admission that it has as much to do with the game as the people playing it. The author’s knowledge of DotA’s antecedents, the pedigree and lineage of DotA’s creators, was all absent from the article. As far as the writer was concerned DotA should have had all the balance and grace of a Call of Duty 6.

Which brings me to the discussion surrounding Call of Duty 6, where reviews completely failed to acknowledge that the people making the game had done so with nearly unlimited resources using an engine built three years prior. When Modern Warfare 2 emerged it received glowing reviews, some would say ejaculatory. People praised the game as the greatest thing which could have ever happened to gaming rather than as a failed attempt at sequelage generated by people who had far too much time and money for the sloppy networking code and appallingly poor single player story they threw together.

This isn’t to say that Modern Warfare 2 is a bad game. It has serious issues, but the core game is an incredible experience. But the core game is 2007’s Modern Warfare. The things that make Modern Warfare 2 great, the interplay between shotguns, submachine guns, light machine guns, sniper rifles, and assault rifles, are all present in spades in the first Modern Warfare. The only arguable improvement over the first Modern Warfare comes in the form of the new leveling system and the distribution of Perks in Modern Warfare 2, something most reviewers failed to recognize altogether. Instead they approached it from the perspective of a dilettante, of someone who didn’t have to spend money on their own games.

They didn’t say things about the disruptive introduction of kill streak rewards which essentially broke the game, of the removal of lean-look control from the game or the way that rebalancing shotguns added a weapon which essentially ruined the previous balance between knives and close ranged weapons. Instead they focused on the way the new game was more marketable, the way it could sell more copies and commercially outperform its precursor, as well it did. To read all but a handful of reviews of Modern Warfare 2 is to read a celebration of a deeply flawed game which could’ve been far better if only the developers had listened to their audience.

In both of these cases of authorial experience, the essence of the author, were withdrawn for the sake of journalism, from a misapprehension that journalism means the denial rather than the admission of prior opinion. All of the critics who experienced Modern Warfare 2 had experienced the original Modern Warfare, but none of them wanted to admit that offending Activision would potentially remove their ability to receive future preview copies from the prominent publisher, a move which would fall well in line with Kotick’s aggressive, mercenary media personality and indeed in line with traditional publisher behavior with regards to what is derisively referred to as the “enthusiast press.”

So reviews of Modern Warfare 2 and DotA, big and small games alike, were released without concern for the experiences which informed those reviews or the effort which went into creating the games. Such a course of action would seem all but insensible if applied to any medium other than games, but it is accepted within the context of games despite the raw and indisputably experiential nature of games as an art form. A film critic who expected the same production values from an indie film and a Spielberg film would be laughed at, a literary critic who ignored the circumstances of author’s lives while comparing William Carlos Williams and T.S. Elliot an incompetent fool. But reviewers don’t like to talk about the resources that go into creating out fun, the raw effort which games like World of Goo require to create and the staggering resources poured into big budget sequels like Assassin’s Creed 2. Mass Effect 2 and The Path are compared without consideration for the effort which made them which, to any person with the slightest familiarity in either of the titles’ origin stories, would seem like nothing short of madness.

Exacerbating the problem is the manner in which game reviews all too often attempt to cling to ideas about objectivity. In reality criticism cannot exist within the realm of objectivity. Criticism is the description of an experience, wholly separate from journalism, the description of events. The two forms of writing are completely different, with different goals, techniques and rules governing them. But the majority of games writers don’t seem to recognize this. Their critiques are all too often lists of features followed up by de-contextualized value judgments. Terms like “epic” and “awesome” will be applied to the story of Mass Effect 2, but the same critics seem unwilling to discuss the way these events impact them. There are certainly people who work against this trend, perhaps the most prominent of them being the culturally indispensable Leigh Alexander who grasps both the difference between a journalist and a critic and the expertise to excel in both styles of writing with the skill and confidence of a much older author. But far more often games critics don’t treat their experiences with games as something to be discussed: they treat them as things to be quantified and commoditized: experiences which must be collected in under a thousand words and summed up in a single number or letter grade.

This falsehood of objectivity can kill the discussion of games. It lends itself to the creation of a consensus based on a sort of inscrutable hive mind which cannot deal with in depth discussion. A dissenting opinion is less likely to warrant careful consideration and more likely to elicit flames from whichever group of fan boys happens to be walking by. That most games journalists do not discuss games that have aged more than a few months further worsens circumstances. Open world darling and revolutionary Fallout 3 is absent from contemporary criticism of games like Red Dead Revolver, and most comparisons to older open world titles simply come in the form the acknowledgement that, why yes, Rockstar did make this game, thank you for remembering that they also made Grand Theft Auto. These twin factors of attempting to assess products in a cultural and intellectual vacuum and determine some sort of “objective” value for them leads to a frustrating body of reviews more suited to a consumer electronics buyer’s guide than the analysis of an art form.

In a very real way games are trying to shy away from their place in the world of narrative art. The criticism surrounding them is seemingly uninterested in literary theory or discussion, something which does not necessarily indict the intellect of the discussion participants but rather their background. For example an intellectual discussion I was once involved in on and industry blog regarding the nature of storytelling in games boiled down to a talk about sources of conflict utilizing generalizations most frequently taught in junior high schools to assist students in categorizing and comprehending conflict, categorical classifications such as man vs. man, man vs. nature and man vs. god. The participants in this discussion were all very intelligent individuals who either wrote about or worked on games as a medium. But if I were to discuss a work of literature in such terms I’d be laughed back to the sixties. I might as well bring up Foucault every five minutes in conversation. This issue seems to be partially rooted in the fact that many writers are uninterested in studying and analyzing games, and that many of the people who are interested in doing so and have had success doing so have no background in narrative theory or analysis.

There are exceptions, certainly, but the frequency which developers, journalists and visual artists step into the arena of writing about games should give anyone familiar with criticism pause. While there are certainly people who mix critical and creative careers in other industries they’re rarely the norm. Carrie Brownstein’s articles are a case in point: she has become an oddity, a journalist who emerged from a band with an educational background in sociolinguistics. Brownstein came to music journalism through a lifetime of studying and participating in cultural discourse. Compare this to someone like Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, an industry insider who acts as a cultural figurehead and the focal point for discussions. Hyrb’s undergraduate degree was in communications, and his discussions are less about forming coherent opinions and more about attempting to shape or quantify public opinion. He is a mouthpiece for an organization who masquerades as the focal point for discussions, a Fox News reporter claiming to be a part of New York Magazine.

The strange educational backgrounds of games writer’s as well as the industry’s predilection to filter out those without a high tolerance for and ability to readily sort through marketing bullshit has generated a forum for discussion which is largely intellectually destitute. And while there are certainly people who promote real, intelligent, experiential discussions about how games make them feel, why they feel that way and the questions that these games raise for them, there are far, far more people who see games as a cool thing with the potential to make a lot of money. And we need those people, we need them to make sure that publishers and developers can work their craft and still be able to eat and pay rent. But we need nowhere near as great a number as we have today, standing in a throng crying the praises of AAA titles and ignoring or denigrating new and interesting releases as being, at best, “good enough.” Games criticism is, in its current incarnation, far from living up to its name.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Congratulations on Your Inappropriate Use of Office Space!

Tomorrow you’re going to prove to the world that VPs of Sales can party too. You’re going to show up early in your corner office, spark up and set about hotboxing the entire thing. It’ll take four hours but eventually you’ll fill the entire thing with smoke. Co-workers will walk by and mutter about how rocking it must be in there.

But as it turns out hotboxing your office will just give you panic attacks and make you really, really paranoid. Turns out you don’t really have a good “weed high,” and you tend to become kind of a nervous dick when you get enough pot in you. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, it’s just the way some people are, but it will forever be your burden to bear.

When the smoke finally clears, around 2:30, you’ll cut out to return home to your shrewish wife and disappointing children where you’ll sit in your overstuffed chair watching old Seinfeld episodes of DVD and thinking about the things you did instead of partying when you were younger.

Congratulations on Your Inappropriate Use of Office Space!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Congratulations on Your Amazing Corporate Heist!

Most people don’t know where the money really is in America. Turns out it’s not in the banks or the hands of the government. It’s in the offices of a handful of corporate big wigs, fat catting it up in their posh suites. That’s how they weathered the economic devastation their decision to change from clown birthday cards to balloon birthday cards wrought: by hiding their money in various surreptitious locations throughout their offices and waiting for it all to blow over.

You lost everything in that recession: your RV, the things inside your RV, your decently paying job as an RV salesman, complete with commission. But your daddy didn’t raise you to take things like that in stride, to lay down and let them walk all over you. He raised you to stand up and fight, and that’s just what you’re going to do.

At 7:30 AM this Friday morning you’re going to walk into Goldman Sachs offices in New York City. You’ll have gotten the idea from Michael Moore, but unlike his dumb ass you won’t be doing it in stretch pants and a windbreaker. You’ll be in a real fancy suit, like the one your daddy was buried in.

The security guards will see that you are impeccably dressed and holding a sack with a dollar sign on it and wave you through, assuming you’re an investment banker who is “in the know” and wants some walking around money. You’ll board an elevator with several similarly dressed men and a few secretaries with the top two buttons of their blouses undone. It will be both swank and posh, everything you ever imagined the inside of an elevator in a New York office building to be.

When you reach the top floor you’ll disembark and make your way to the CEO’s office. The real CEO’s office, not the one that Lloyd Blankfein sits his bald, fat, impotent ass in while he issues retarded proclamations to people who hate his stupid guts. This one will have a dude who looks a lot like Sam Elliot and a bunch of hookers inside. When you step in you’ll lock the door behind you and pull out your gun. The CEO will look you up and down and nod to himself.

“Looks like you bested me, boy,” he’ll say in a Southern twang you didn’t expect stepping into this big city office.

“Reckon I did,” you’ll say, spitting in a corner and nodding at one of his more attractive whores, who will smile and wink back.

“Long time coming,” he’ll say, leaning back in his chair. He’ll motion towards one of the hookers and she’ll bring out two big white bags with dollar signs on the front of them. Then he’ll nod for you to take them.

You’ll peer inside and there will be more money than you’ve ever seen before, which wasn’t a lot to start with. You’ll nod affably to him, put your gun back in your trousers and walk out, motioning for the prettiest hooker to follow you.

As you leave the CEO of Goldman Sachs will laugh affably. He’ll call in his secretary so that she can tell the Illuminati to contact the Knights Templar so that they can ask the Shadow Government what your name is. He’ll have been wowed by your go-getting attitude and want to offer you a job. But you won’t know any of this as you head out. You’ll just feel joy in your heart as your prostitute helps you carry fifty million dollars in other people’s money to the elevator so that the two of you can ride down to the ground floor and head off to the nearest corner store for some celebratory wine spritzers.

Congratulations on Your Amazing Corporate Heist!

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Congratulations on Discovering Your Prowess as a Baker!

Most people who are captured by terrorists rapidly lose hope. They get to thinking about how they’ll be murdered or raped or both on camera and get all “Oh, woe is me! My life is over!” But not you. You raised three kids and turned them a gaggle of ungrateful shitfuckers into contributing members of society, you took a happy, fulfilled man and turned him into the broken down suicidal wretch that is your husband and you took a perfectly good human brain and turned it into a vault filled with useless quasi-Christian knowledge, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to let those terrorists determine the quality of life for you and your fellow missionaries over the next one to fifteen months.

That’s why after a week passes and the beatings quiet down you’ll start baking. It’ll be slow going at first since you’ll be a tiny mountain town in Afghanistan and most of what they’ll have is goats but through sheer will and a lot of dick sucking you’ll manage to get your hands on some flour. After that and a thorough goat-milking session you’ll set to making the most delicious sugar cookies that these freedom-haters will have ever tasted.

Fortunately for you the bar will pretty low. None of these people will have ever had cookies before, so the combination of goat milk, mealy flour and sugar normally used for making beet vodka even more alcoholic will floor everyone in the village. You’ll be hailed as some sort of brilliant Western prophet and be awarded several supple wives of questionable upbringing and crazy sexual talent. You’ll also get a crate of AK-47s and the potential to earn freedom for yourself and your friends from captivity in The Thunderdome.

What follows will be a rousing tale, the journey of the first white female warlord to rise to power in Afghanistan. It will have ups and downs and some people (morons) will call you the white Jackie Robinson of war crimes. But tonight, laying in bed feeling disgusted with yourself for indulging in sinful, incredibly hot lesbian intercourse, you’ll just reflect on how you wish you’d discovered your skill as a baker earlier in life, and that maybe two of your kids wouldn’t be in jail if you’d just made them cookies once or twice.

Congratulations on Discovering Your Prowess as a Baker!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Congratulations on Getting Your Just Deserts!

After you got off Scott free with betraying your bank robbing friends to the cops in exchange for a Costco membership and twenty minutes with a young, moderately attractive staff writer for the New York Times you felt like you were cock of the god damn walk. You’ve been strutting around like you own the shit the rest of us eat and it’s only your gift that keeps us from starving in the street and the whole world is howling in rage that you’ve gotten away with it all. That’s why we’ll all cheer when we hear what transpired today on the evening news.

It will begin this morning when the moderately attractive staff writer for the New York Times gets up to leave your apartment.

“Already?” you’ll mumble at her, your pillow stuck to the side of your face.

“Yeah,” she’ll say as she hops from foot to foot in your doorway, “This has been really awkward.” She’ll slip out and close the door without a sound as she leaves, abandoning you to lay and sigh in your bed alone.

Don’t fret, though. Less than a minute after she’s slipped out two cops will stumble in, reeking of their morning whiskey-lattes. They’ll enter with guns drawn and advance on you, the fatter one producing his handcuffs from some previously unseen place.

“We’ve got some questions for you, son,” they’ll say, smiling broken toothed grins as they pull you out of your sheets to reveal that you do indeed, thank christ, sleep with pajamas on.

“I thought this was settled,” you’ll say, not struggling at all as they cuff you and lead you out of your apartment.

“Almost,” the skinnier one will mumble into your ear as he pushes your head into the car and slams the door, offering you the closure your young writer refused you.

Inside the car the city will race by. The police will never use their siren, but their knowledge of the flow of traffic, the life of the city and the thousand little side streets no one ever uses will all make a journey of hours into one of minutes. They’ll be so adept at folding the city around their vehicle that you’ll only have the barest inkling that you’re not heading to the station during the trip. But when they begin to slow down near a dockyard you’ll realize something is wrong. This realization will bloom into belief when they forcibly remove you from their vehicle and start walking you towards a cargo container with Yuri, the middle aged Russian man who organized the failed heist, standing outside it.

When you’re just outside the cargo container Yuri will smile and clap his hands. The front of the container will open a crack and the cops will force you through the opening, banging your elbow on the steel door in the process. They won’t follow you in, their work taken over by grasping hands from within the container. You won’t be able to make out who the hands belong to, but they’ll guide you to a small wooden chair with only the light from the crack in the door to work by. They’ll bind you quickly and handily, leading you to the conclusion that at least one of your captors is either an old Boy Scout or a professional/semi-professional BDSM Dominant. You’ll start to guess at just who would have such a skillset who you’d have wronged recently, but the list will be too long to process before a tiny, bright orange bulb lights up in the middle of the room and reveals your captors.

Standing there before you in a semicircle will be all your heist friends who you recently betrayed. Jimmy, the loner with a heart of gold, will step forward and slap you in the face.

“It’s just been revoked,” he’ll say before returning to his compatriots.

Then Marianne, the super hot single mom who fucked every other person on the heist, including you, because that’s just how she rolls, will step up and slap you her hardest, knocking a filling loose.

“Turns out cops are easy to bribe,” she’ll say, smacking her ass as she walks back to the group.

Your friends will each slap you and issue a brief catch phrase in turn until everyone’s gone at least once. Jimmy will pitch two or three, but he’ll be more upset than most of the others so it’ll be understandable. Then when they’re all done they’ll sit down on the floor of the container and discuss the way your betrayal made them feel in a candid and open way. After that, but before you have a chance to address their feelings, they’ll wet down every surface in the container with gasoline and then leave before lighting the whole thing up with you inside. Your last moments will consist of you thinking that you should’ve been a better friend before the agony takes your capacity for rational thought and you die screaming.

Congratulations on Getting Your Just Deserts!

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Congratulations You Rat Fuck Son of a Bitch!

You turned your back on all of them, every single one, and why? For money? Power? A taste of pussy you could’ve gotten for a few grand or a little smooth talk?

Whatever your reasons you did it and we hope you’re happy with yourself. We’re pretty sure you’ll get what’s coming to you sooner or later but today you got away with it, so have fun being smug and laughing as all the people you’d said you’d loved fall apart around you, you fucking cuntrag.

Congratulations You Rat Fuck Son of a Bitch!

Monday, May 17, 2010

Congratulations on Coming Up With a Great Pornstar Name!

It’s going to be Max Sinnzz, spelled just like that with two ns and two zs. Now the only things standing in the way of your successful career in adult films are the facts that you’re overweight, out of shape, have a tiny penis, performance issues, a horrible grating voice and hideous acne. If you can work all those out you’ll be all set to take on what you think of as a “dream job,” but would most likely be a harrowing and mentally scarring experience for you.

Congratulations on Coming Up With a Great Pornstar Name!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Maps!

It’s getting dark fast. I’ve only been there once, an hour earlier. I’d been in a panic, not bothering to read street signs, dodging between cars. I’d only had my pack then, a handful of books, pens, IDs and letters stating that I belong in the country. My belongings were miles away then, on the other side of the city. Now I had eighty pounds of gear, no map, vanishing light and a public largely unaware of the area they lived in. I hadn’t eaten in almost twenty hours, slept in closer to thirty. I was held together by caffeine and anxiety, my knees rolling with each stride to accommodate the weight and the speed I leant my strides.

I’d arrived in Cork only a day earlier, landing in Shannon and spending an restless eight hours on a bus to reach the city itself before navigating a foreign public transit system in order to reach a hostel, where I was entreated to a lukewarm greeting. I then learned that wireless access in the hostel was non-existent, and that to contact the person I’d be staying with I’d have to wander around the city of Cork until I found a wireless signal.

It gave me a chance to learn my surroundings, to get a sense for the place, the university campus. It was gorgeous, expansive and artfully built into the hill over the Lee. The buildings ranged from venerable aging classics to hideous modernist stucco upstarts to towering post-modern oddities of steel and glass, the campus itself lifeless for Christmas break. It seemed strangely tropical to me, having come from Minnesota days earlier. I only needed a single wool sweater to sit outside and type furiously, trying to find a single unsecured wireless network. The networks themselves were scarce in this foreign land and when I’d finally gotten in touch with my hostess-for-an-evening-to-be I’d lost the signal soon thereafter. I had no Google map to guide me back to my hostel, only my wits.

This would be nothing compared to the three mile foot trek in the dark back from her apartment. Sleepless and exhausted, carrying books, clothes, my laptop and my sleeping bag, slung across my body like some sort of apocalyptic wanderer, I shook Sarah’s hand two days later and began walking. My walkman was tucked in my bag – I didn’t want the added encumbrance of wires on my journey. All I had was the sound of cars and the occasional burst of obscenity from the locals.

I made my way to the campus with relative ease. The main thoroughfare guided my way, an easy road of concrete and stucco houses. When I reached campus the road grew more complicated. To reach my new apartment I’d have to delve into the sloping side streets of Cork, the warren of side streets and cobbled roads that make up the downtown section of the aging port. So, with my pack on my back and the river as my only guide I pressed onward.

Cork really isn’t that complicated. It isn’t laid out in a grid, so it’s not that easy to navigate, but it isn’t overly complex. All roads eventually lead to the harbor. The harbor. The markets, the museums, everything is centered around the harbor. It’s a point of natural progression in the city. If you walk and treat the city as a maze you’ll eventually reach the waterfront, which is convenient because the bus lines converge there. It’s similar to the way flags are laid out in older first person shooters, large scale games like Tribes.

So suddenly I’m back inside of the floating fortresses of Broadside, feeling my way down through the various tunnels to the flag room. The walls lack feature, the environment feels hostile even when it’s empty and I’m not even sure heading towards my destination is the best idea. What will I do when I get there? Awkwardly work towards some nebulous, pre-determined goal? What do I gain in the end? Hardship? A single flag cap, best circumstances. A motion towards a goal, nothing more.

Watching the curve of the river, I thought of the hours I spent running through tunnels, flying and sighting the curve of a hill or the dip of a river, the joy of motion in Tribes. I thought of the way that I would check my command overlay in mid air, sighting my location and heading on the map and then flip back to the game to break, desperately trying to avoid slamming into an outpost. I thought of the times I’d darted towards sounds I could hear echoing off of valleys, gently advanced on fortified positions looking for turrets whose footing I’d memorized.

I thought of the days I’d spent in the tunnels of F.E.A.R., moving towards a known destination, backtracking along indistinct passages. I thought of weeks wasted in the caverns of Halo, patches of French landscape just east of Normandy beach. I thought of all the time I’d spent as a gamer and how my sense of direction was, if not refined per sec, developed by the experiences I’d had.

When we discuss maps it is all too easy to limit our discussion to the matter of strategy games, where maps are abstractions of terrain that we as players are fortunate enough to have filtered through to us through some sort of mystical god lens. And while these maps are certainly important they are not the only maps that we have to deal with as gamers. All games are inevitably played on some sort of map, even if that map is little more than a corridor drawn on graph paper, and to toss aside the sort of maps which necessitate the immersion of the player is not only a mistake but a disservice to the discussion of the subject.

Maps in games inform us. They give us concept of space, ideas about purpose and structure and they push us towards certain types of play. In a way they’re the fundamental unit upon which all games are based. They establish the place we play the game and the rules which govern it. Sometimes the manner in which a map can be manipulated sometimes even determines the manner in which a game can be played. Look at the ill fated Fracture or the incredible Red Faction: Guerilla, both incredible games that trade heavily on being able to restructure your world.

And in the end the best way to really comprehend the importance of maps and the real impact they have on us as players is to think of them in terms of what they represent: physical places. GPS coordinates allow us to navigate the world, but without the physicality of the street, the woodland, the country road, those numbers are meaningless. They’re ones and zeroes telling us where we should be instead of informing where we are. The games most effective at establishing a sense of place and leading players through them know this.

Episode 2 of Half-Life 2 knew this all too well. Listening to the commentary you can see how the level designers at Valve took pains to make sure that each area was constructed in a fashion that would usher characters towards their ultimate goal. And when they finally chose to make their game into an open world adventure the landscape of that world was not only laid bare, it was presented prior to any sort of action so that players could become comfortable with it. It was made into a character of its own, like the streets of Cork. Faceless, cultureless, but possessed none the less of a soul that cannot be died when you walk along its roads. I still remember rushing to defeat striders as they hurried towards those buildings, scrabbling to protect my precious resources, my beautiful rocket, my gorgeous quasi-Russian woods. I remember the way it felt beneath my feet, under the wheels of my car. I remember seeking out the hidden caches, seeing where rebels would’ve considered their supplies safe.

I remember these things because the maps they made had a topography which impacted me as much as every real place I’ve ever been. I speak not as an architect or an engineer but as a hiker and a traveler, someone who has seen more of the world in his brief life than most people will have the opportunity to over the course of a life time. I speak as someone who has wandered from Victoria Station to The Globe on foot, then crossed London at night to reach the north side of Hyde Park. I speak as someone who loves the simple action of moving from place to place, who takes joy in observing my surroundings. I’ll often walk two or three miles to see something if I think the journey will be interesting enough, and in a great way my preponderance towards and ability to do so is owed to games. Games reinforced the love of hiking I found myself with as a child and made it into something greater: a love of topography.

It added joy to what I’d already found to be a practical and satisfying experience, made me better at something I was already pretty good at. Games didn’t teach me how to read or follow maps better, nor do I think they imparted a sense of direction to me. But they took the skills I already had and refined and reinforced them, made them into something greater, something infinitely less practical and, in a way, much more interesting. They helped me develop confidence in skills I had, a necessary component of being a skilled navigator. They made me consider spaces and the purpose behind their construction. They educated me in the manner traditionally reserved for students of architecture and urban planning, encouraging me to see the pencil lines defining and enclosing the places I lived in.

But I didn’t think of any of this in Cork. Instead I glanced around, searching for markers, following the river. It was pitch black by then. Night fell swiftly in Cork, and the unfamiliar streets had begun to feel hostile despite generally genial or harmless looking citizens. As I spotted bits of graffiti and gentle curves of streets recognition sparked in me. I made the last turn and saw the glass walled lobby in the distance down the street. A single light was on, illuminating the tiny elevator which formed the spine of the building. I moved forward slowly, confidently striding with my possessions still slung across my body, the surety exhaustion brings powering my even strides. When I reach the doors I stumble, searching for my keys. For the first time in almost an hour I put down my bags and search my pockets, grimacing at this irritating new challenge. I know that I will find my keys soon, that I will be up the stairs in a few minutes and sitting on my sheetless bed in a sleeping bag, feverishly sleeping off the last two days before long. But for the time I am helpless, looking through a non-space for an insignificant item without any sort of map, even one within my own mind.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Congratulations on Proving You Don't Have a Problem!

Traditionally when a person is told they have a drinking problem and they say they’re going to prove they really don’t the person in question takes a break from drinking to prove that their habit doesn’t have any hold over them. You’ll choose a slightly different route.

You’ll purchase six bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, crack one open and set to work constructing an elaborate obstacle course. By the time you’ve finished constructing the course the bottle will be drained, but a functional and sturdy set of wooden structures implying various physical challenges will be standing, tall and proud like your manhood. You’ll insist that your wife stand where the apparent exit of the course is, handing her a bottle of fortified wine. Then you’ll place three other bottles throughout the course, keeping one in hand as you walk to the entrance.

“I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM!” you’ll shout at your wife, who will be looking worried.

You’ll then chug the entire bottle of Mad Dog 20-20 and mount the Monkey Bars you erected, sanded and secured in less than three hours while inebriated. You’ll cross them with the grace and ease of a young man and hurl yourself off them on to an elevated platform attached to a balance beam.

You’ll pick up a second bottle of Mad Dog from the platform and down it in one go as well.

“WHY CAN’T YOU SEE THIS?!” you’ll shout at your wife, hurling the bottle to the ground, where it will shatter. She’ll start shaking a little.

You’ll then hurry across the balance beam, swaying slightly at one point during your journey but mostly doing alright. Then you’ll do a forward flip to the ground and give your wife the double thumbs up. She’ll move to clap then stop herself halfway when she realizes she doesn’t want to encourage you.

At the bottom of the balance beam will be the final bottle of Mad Dog. You’ll down it as well, then set off across the field of flaming rings, tires and land mines.

You’ll move through them with startling agility, well beyond the capacity of most human beings. Indeed, it will seem as if you’re some sort of Olympiad athlete instead of a system’s analyst who has trouble getting action from his wife most nights. Your wife will be more than a little impressed by the whole show.

By the time you reach the kiddie pool filled with KY Jelly she’ll be smiling, the top of her bottle of Mad Dog unscrewed. You’ll feel a little upset that she started drinking before you got to her but then you’ll realize that this means that she’s probably cool with your drinking. Smiling and covered in burns, with only a handful of shrapnel wounds to show for your tribulations, you’ll step out of the pool and walk carefully towards your wife.

“I’m sorry,” she’ll slur at you. “I was wrong to ever dout you.”

You’ll smile at her typo and embrace her. “Oh honey,” you’ll say, grabbing her shoulders and looking her in the eye with all the love and affection you felt for her when the two of you were first wed. “You’re so fucking drunk.”

She’ll laugh, handing you the bottle as the two of you break your embrace. Then the two of you will walk back into your house holding hands to get wasted and watch Everybody Loves Raymond together.

Congratulations on Proving You Don’t Have a Problem!

Friday, May 14, 2010

Congratulations on Perfecting Your Backhand!

Until Jerry started spouting today’s prediction we weren’t even aware that there were competitive wife beating contests. Even after we heard him talking about it with his eyes rolled into the back of his head and his voice a hellish snarling demonization of language we had to hop on Wikipedia and look it up before we really believed it. But it turns out that it’s a real thing, hosted each year in St. Petersburg, and this year you’re going to win.

It will be the first time America has won this storied contest since 1954, when non-white Africans were first permitted to participate. Turns out some of those guys out there can really beat.

The rules are simple: beat your wife nearly to death without killing her, leaving relatively few bruises. Bonus points will be awarded for particularly embarrassing bruises, such as finger marks around the throat. Black eyes disqualify wife beaters immediately, without exception.

You’ll use a technique consisting mostly of a strong backhand and WASPy psychological abuse. It’ll be called “The Tennis Techique,” or some Russian variation thereof, by the commentators and will earn you a place on that blood stained linoleum, your battered, fearful wife still clutching your arm, unsure of just what she did to deserve this.

Congratulations on Perfecting Your Backhand!

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Congratulations on Talking About the Film 30 At Length!

We get that you don’t meet a lot of women. And it’s cool that you’re going to be so psyched about meeting a girl who likes classical culture as much as you do. But you might want to ask questions about what she finds interesting about it and then work off of that to chat her up instead of just rattling off your favorite scenes from 300 in rapid succession, complete with voices and spittle and, at one point, no shirt.

We understand that being alone is no picnic, but there are better ways to find someone than screaming at them about overproduced B movies for fifteen minutes until they walk out of your cubicle and into HR to request a transfer.

Congratulations on Talking About the Film 300 At Length!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Congratulations on Getting an Entire Bar to Sing Black Betty!

Most trained hypnotists choose one of two careers. They either become licensed therapists who sexually abuse their clients without any repercussions or they become trade magicians who amuse large audiences with their hilarious antics. You’re the latter kind and your conscience is clean because of it.

But your entire life is spent amusing others. Sure, you get a kick out of bending the occasion drunk to your will or planting suggestions in the heads of impressionable co-eds so that they later murder the man they’ve taken home that night for anonymous sex, but rarely do you just get to have a laugh all to yourself.

That’s why tonight you’re going to go into a crowded bar with karaoke and step up on stage. You’ll select “Died In Your Arms Tonight” as your song, but after the opening bars you’ll begin the super secret process (pocket watch) of placing the entire audience, including the MC, into a deep hypnotic trance. Once they’ve been settled you’ll run them through the basics just to be sure they have it down.

They’ll cluck like chickens for you, strip naked, and a few of them will fellate one another while you laugh. But after the test run the main event will begin. You’ll commandeer the karaoke machine and get it to start playing the Ram Jam classic Black Betty, imprinting them all with the compulsion to sing the song in its entirety, slowly coming out of the trance as they do so.

As the music comes up the entire group will monotone “Whoa, Black Betty, Bam Balam,” a group of hard rocking zombies. They’ll stare straight ahead as they churn out the lyrics mechanically. It’ll be as if an entire crowd was spontaneously transformed into robots, and it’ll all be the fruit of your efforts.

Watching them chant will give you a nice chuckle, and you’ll be impressed at your own grasp of the human mind. But a part of you, however small, will feel a little sad that the whole thing isn’t funnier and that there’s no one there to share it with you. As the patrons of the bar come out of the trance one by one you’ll quietly finish your whiskey, wondering if you want to do something else before you leave.

Congratulations on Getting an Entire Bar to Sing Black Betty!

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Congratulations on Putting Salt in the Wound!

She’s probably right about it killing any infections that might’ve been present, sure. It’s a sound argument and no one here in the office is a doctor so we’ll buy it.

But we’re almost positive that it isn’t, as she so aptly put it “the best way to do it.” There are disinfectants, many of which have mild anesthetics intended to dull the pain of the annihilation of all healthy cells in the wound’s immediate vicinity.

So while she her thoughts might truly have been of your safety and well being when she told you she knew just how to fix up your stab wound it might just be one of her many ways of saying that she isn’t really that interested in dating an unsuccessful bank robber anymore.

Congratulations on Putting Salt in the Wound!

Monday, May 10, 2010

Congratulations on Proving to the World That No One Should Ever Be a Macrobiotic!

Following the trend of movies like Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation it seemed like the right time to make a hard hitting documentary showing just how much better macrobiotics were than regular people. Unfortunately most Hollywood producers won’t have the slightest clue what that even means, nor will they be in any way willing to extend funding towards your dubious and poorly defined project about “eating better and stuff, bro.”

But this won’t have dissuaded you. Oh no, your determination knows no bounds. You’ll flip those Hollywood fat cats the bird and just start filming yourself with a two hundred dollar camera from Best Buy. You’ll document all your meals and your daily exercise sessions and, occasionally, videotape you and your girlfriend having sex just for the hell of it.

In the end you’ll be left with months of footage, severe health problems and absolutely no technical knowledge of how to edit and master video. So today you’ll wander out into the streets of Large American City and find yourself a cheap-ish video editor. His name will be Franklin and he’ll smoke a lot and avoid eye contact with you while you talk to him, which marks him as a clear carnivore in your mind.

When he opens your video files and finds what’s inside he’ll know that there’s a gold mine in there. Within moments a few of the clips, masterfully edited, will be posted to Youtube. It will depict you discussing how much better your diet makes you than other people while you wheeze, trotting on a treadmill. Then it will cut to a confessional video you made the next day about how watching someone drink a glass of milk is what prevented you from performing sexually the night before. Then it’ll cut to a few seconds of the editor nodding and pointing to an off-You-Tube link of said sex tape at the bottom of the feed which promises to show the embarrassingly bad sex.

You’ll write the editor an enraged email a few seconds later, threatening legal action for his irresponsible behavior. He’ll respond within fifteen minutes, assuring you that hemp is not legal tender and that his movie is way better than the one you tried to make, which actually mostly just shows how big of an asshole you are to your girlfriend.

Who deserves way better, by the way.

Congratulations on Proving to the World That No One Should Be A Macrobiotic!

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Sandwiches I Have Loved!

I'd like to preface today's SNS with an apology both for the quality of the writing and the lateness of the post. I had much grander plans for this essay and they simply didn't come together due to the simultaneous trials of moving, computer repair and being really, really sleepy. Still, I hope there's something to enjoy here.

Long standing readers will recall that when I first started this site I began with the caveat that I would write about more than just games. And while the focus over the year and a half has mostly fallen upon electronic entertainment I have occasionally taken the opportunity to write about random shit and run with it, investigating a wide range of topics no one cares about and which most people are somewhat embarrassed to discuss and tying it into video games in some obtuse way.

Today’s essay won’t be anything like that. I won’t be mapping the cosmology of food in games or the way portrayals of food in most popular entertainment media actually inform the function of food in games (although now that I say those topics out loud they sound pretty good). I won’t be talking about the way food factors in to “game nights” and other social gatherings centered around sitting and playing games for hours on end. Today I’ll just be talking about some sandwiches that changed my life forever.

1 ) The NoMacPoBoy from the Vegan Barbecue truck across the street from Portland State’s engineering campus (with Shut the Fuck Up Puppies).

I’m still not really sure if this even qualifies as a sandwich, to be totally honest. The way it is presented is similar to a burrito, but unlike a burrito there is no rice, no cheese and no meat. Beans, perhaps, live within its hallowed folds, but for the most part it is an indescribable conglomerate of various protein products assembled for the express purpose of blowing the minds of sucker MCs the world over. Ergo I will refer to it under the more generalized sandwich blanket of “wraps.”

As a wrap the NoMacPoBoy has absolutely nothing in common with more traditional light sandwiches. There is no drizzled salad dressing teasing out the flavor of meat hidden amongst vegetables. Instead the inside of the sandwich is a tempest of macaroni and nocheese, beans, peppers and soy curls, a struggle for dominance against a collection of worthy sandwich foes. What remained more impressive was the way the flavors remained both complimentary and distinct under the most unfavorable eating conditions.

Even as I gulped down a sandwich during the remaining ten minutes of my lunch as my co-worker showed me unsolicited pictures of her child, complete with a lengthy recounting of both her child’s thoughts, her own thoughts and the thoughts of her high school friend who she saw at Wal-Mart that weekend but didn’t talk to because she was kind of a bitch but she wanted to talk to her so she kind of regrets not talking to her but hey maybe next time, my joy at my sandwich remained unabated. What was even more impressive was the way it settled after eating. I felt weightless after my poboy’s duty was fulfilled, as if I’d been struck by a friendly bolt of lightning who just wanted to hang out.

The NoMacPoBoy remains, in my mind, a lunchtime bastion, and a perfect example of a how vegan food can not only be delicious but how it can present brand new dining experiences, not just alterations of existing ones. A fine sandwich in its own right, the NoMacPoBoy also serves as a sort of mission statement for the sandwich startup that sells it: this is a place of original, cheap, delicious cuisine. Eat it or don’t, it does not require your validation. I find that sort of bold antipathy sexy in a sandwich, and the NoMacPoBoy made me a better person by almost-raping my taste buds and leaving me panting, breathless in an alley with no pants.

2 ) The Sweet Onion Teriyaki Sub with swiss, peppers and onions from the Frackville, Pennsylvania Subway

Frackville is not a large place. The main drag, sprung up to service travelers moving south along I-85, is less than three miles long and consists primarily of eateries and quick-stores like Walgreens and Buy Rite. But each year for some time my family would visit Frackville, stopping for lunch at Frackville’s marvelous Subway restaurant.

It was a ritual of sorts, a small comfort in a trip riddled with unpleasant regularities. My brother and I were each permitted a footlong sandwich of our own (lap of luxury!) with a choice of large chip bags, to be shared throughout the car at the Rite Aid next door. For years I took solace in the same sandwich, time and time again: the BLT without the T. I was young and foolish, a poor excuse for my transgression at best, but still there I was, eating my simple sandwich when the wonders of Subway stood ready for the taking. Was the taste of the crisp bacon a comfort as I faced the terror of the holidays with my family? Certainly, but it robbed me of all other potential sandwiches.

As I grew older, luckily, I began to experiment. At first it was furtive – perhaps I’d have tomato or green peppers placed ‘pon my sandwich, along with the requisite bacon. But after lengthy consideration I decided to try different sandwich types. The first, and I dare say the best, was the infinitely egalitarian Sweet Onion Teriyaki Sub with swiss, peppers and onions (hereafter referred to as SOTSSPO).

“Double onions?” you no doubt cry, dear reader. Indeed, it is true. Even in my youth I was given to the most callous of excess, demanding onions left and right, manners be damned. The SOTSSPO catered to all comers: those who enjoyed the illusion of health with their meals, those who liked their chicken doused in sauce of dubious origin and those who liked cheese in inappropriate places, all the important categories of Subway customer populating the Frackville store.

And what’s more, the SOTSSPO was delicious. While, like all Subway sandwiches, it took more than its due in pride, it delivered plenty to make up for it in taste and fulfillment. It helped me sleep on that long car ride to Maryland and when I arrived with a full stomach I didn’t care how flavorless my grandmother’s boiled green beans were. I’d climbed to the top of the mountain and it was good. If the world insisted that I dither in the hinterlands for a while as retribution, so be it.

Eventually, however, health code violations and alterations to our travel route destroyed my relationship with the SOTSSPO of Frackville origin. While other SOTSSPOs exist out there somewhere I’m sure, they are not my SOTSSPO, and as such I feel only sadness when I consider them.

3 ) Homemade Hummus and Pepper Pita

This sandwich is here mostly for honorable mention. I ate almost nothing but humus and pepper on pita for roughly two months in 2009. The handcrafted hummus made it better than other people’s sandwiches, not because it was actually tastier or even better for me, but because I could act like a douche and brag about having made it. Total hipsters seduced thusly: zero.

4 ) New England’s Chicken Parmesan Sub

Much like the SOTSSPO, the Chicken Parm is an everyman’s sandwich. It’s a sandwich that sub and pizza shop workers throughout the Northeast hear with deep regret. If they were a more enthusiastic bunch they might even deign to shake their heads in sadness, but food service in New England takes something out of a man and leaves him hollow.

But the Chicken Parm is noteworthy because, unlike the SOTSSPO, its consumption is not shameful. Right now writing this my mouth is watering at the prospect of the marinara and breaded chicken making sweet sweet love to my tongue’s face over its mumbled, unclear protests. The Chicken Parm is delicious, and none would ever disagree.

Sure, there are reasons you wouldn’t order one. Variety, health, a desire to mix up the hellscape the food service worker you’re purchasing your sandwich from’s day by having him make something other than Chicken Parm for once. Maybe you just felt like a steak bomb. It’s not important, because sooner or later you’ll be back to the Chicken Parm. And that’s partially because unlike the SOTSSPO, which I enjoy partially because it renders me unconscious, the Chicken Parm is an invigorating experience.

Despite the use of the word Parmesan in the sandwich’s name don’t be fooled. While cheese is involved in any true Chicken Parm the true beauty of the sandwich comes from the mixture of the chicken and the marinara sauce. The combination of texture and flavor is something no other sandwich can offer. While others may try we need look no further than the heap o’ fail that is the eggplant Parmesan to see just how foolhardy these efforts are.

And so the Chicken Parm is less an everyman’s sub and more a sub for every man – regardless of race, class or creed. Everyone loves Chicken Parm. Except vegans, and they’re douchebags.

And so I close this discussion of sandwiches, leaving you with the chilling realization that I didn’t mention video games once Monkey Island.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Congratulations on Moving the Mountain!

Most Christians would cry to the heavens, “Lord,” followed by a series of hymnal cries, followed by the statement “Don’t move that mountain.”

But not you. You believe that, as a Christ-tian, you have certain rights and privileges awarded to you by your faith. So you’re going to kneel down this morning and start praying your little cursed tits off.

You won’t be wishing for a better rack or a vagina unmarred by syphilis or better self-esteem. Instead you’ll simply ask God to bring a mountain to you.

You’ll ask persistently in a high pitched, whining voice, never changing your request: Lord, please move that mountain so that I have a better view of the Six Flags amusement park behind it.

God won’t want to acquiesce. He’s a busy man with lots of plans and he’ll be trying to work on solving that whole Darfur thing really hard for most of the day. But your incessant whining will eventually get his attention and he’ll bring his power to bear to move that mountain around six miles to the left, clearing up your view of the top of that one Six Flags flag in the water park. The really tall one. He’ll have done it not because he loves you, but because he felt like he wouldn’t be able to get any fucking work done unless he did.

“Thanks!” you’ll cry up at him, as his hand falls back into the clouds, flipping you the bird.

With the mountain moved you’ll unpack your high powered telescope and start gazing at the men who climb to the top of the slide, masturbating furiously whenever one of them that strikes your fancy comes along.

Congratulations on Moving the Mountain!

Friday, May 7, 2010

Congratulations on Screaming Fuck You in a Mostly Empty Theater!

We understand that you dislike it when movies have bullshitty romantic subplots. And we understand that you firmly believe in your right to speak freely regardless of where you are and who is around you.

But even if screaming “fuck you” for five solid minutes at the screen during a dollar screening of the Goofy Movie does qualify as protected speech it still seems like an unnecessarily dickish thing to do. Even if you did have a somewhat valid point to make (and we’re not conceding that yet) you probably could’ve done it in a way that didn’t make so many kids cry.

Regardless of whether or not it was the right thing to do we look forward to the outcome of the court decision regarding your controversial and spirited choice of words to use to describe your feelings towards a children’s film. We’d love to look into the future and just tell you, but that would ruin the surprise for everyone.

Congratulations on Screaming Fuck You in a Mostly Empty Theater!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Congratulations on Bucking the System!

Highschool sucks. No one can ever overemphasize this fact. It sucks if you think it’s good and it sucks even worse if you think it sucks. But that will never keep people like you from trying to make it a little less horrific. That’s what makes you so brave and special.

Your feelings towards Kim Kashewitz (Cashew Kim, as the more vulgar class members call her, because she “loves nuts”) are case in point. Kim is your better socially, physically and financially. But you see through her apparent vanity and classism to the vulnerable, loveless girl underneath it all. A girl who needs someone genuine and caring to offer her succor. Someone like you.

So today you’ll approach her in the hallway and try to reach out to her.

“Hey, Kim,” you’ll say, your books clutched in your hands as if it was Sadie Hawkins all over again and you were waiting to be pranked by some girl you harbor a secret crush for.

“Huh?” she’ll respond, snapping her gum. You’ll take this as a good sign and keep going in headlong.

“So I’ve noticed you’re kind of mean and-” you’ll start, but she’ll cut you off.

“What are you talking about?” she’ll say, making a cutting gesture as she does so to indicate that you should stop speaking.

“Just...I like-“

“Cha! I bet you do, perv!” she’ll say, dropping her books to the floor. You’ll drop down to your knees and pick them up for her while she stands above you and looks bored. It’ll be as close as you’ve ever been to sex with a woman, and you’ll understand, somewhere in your adolescent brain, that this is basically what sex will be like for you the first dozen or so times.

When you stand up to hand her the books she’ll have the same contempt on her face that she had before. She’ll seem reluctant to accept them at first, but after you hold them in front of her for a full minute and a half she’ll finally acquiesce and take them. Once they’re in her arms she’ll give you a quick one armed shove backwards, tucking something into your pocket with the gesture.

“Fuck off,” she’ll say, turning around and walking down the hall, away from you.

You’ll unfold the piece of paper and read it. The script will be hastily scrawled, as if she’d written it standing up in the endless seconds while you were on the ground. It will read:

Leave your bedroom light on and a ladder in the bushes nearby. I’ll stop by.

You’ll scratch your head as she walks away, things to shout after her racing through your head, but none of them will really seem appropriate. In the end you’ll resolve to head home and turn your light on that night, firm in your knowledge that Kim is a crazy bitch with some serious problems who needs help.

When you have your hand firmly wedged up Kim’s shirt while she smiles and listens to you talk about the original Star Trek series you’ll reconsider your opinion. You’ll realize that maybe Kim isn’t that crazy. She’s just trying to survive and, in her own way, to have it all. Which will work out pretty well for you since you don’t really care about being publicly abused while you’re in high school by a super hot girl. It won’t seem like much of a price to pay with your hand wrapped around her B-cup, watching her smile.

Congratulations on Bucking the System!

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!

The Store 24 will be abandoned when you stumble in, drunk, at 3:00 AM, but then it always seems abandoned. The Store 24 kind of exists outside of time and space that way, a swirling nebula of twenty-four hour convenience, forever bereft of customers with the same microwave burritos and potato chip bags existing in quantum synchronicity throughout the Store 24 multiverse.

Normally this unique physical state of existence causes customers to instinctively shy away from eating Store 24’s dangerously ill-kept foods. But you’ll be drunk and hungry and warm food will sound too good to pass up so you’ll order, through a series of gestures, a heat lamp hot dog from Store 24 and eat it in four large bites.

You’ll walk out feeling alright, the time from within the store temporarily clinging to you as you re-enter the real world. But it won’t last long. Time, as these things go, never lasts long and you won’t be more than a block or two before the hot dog hits you in full force.

First the nausea will come. It will not come in waves, it will not come slowly. It will strike like a wave, turning your bowels to jelly and leaving you mired in an empty, ready to pop feeling. You’ll all but have to turtle walk back home to keep from shitting yourself, limping and dragging one foot behind you from a feeling that, if you were to make a full stride you might suddenly give in and shit yourself.

When you reach your apartment your roommate will already be asleep, but the sounds you make in the bathroom will wake him up ere long. Moaning, vomiting and the explosive sounds of liquefied feces being propelled from your asshole will all mix together and bring his light tapping to the door, his voice full of concern.

When you finally tell him what you’ve done he’ll nod and calmly drive you to the hospital. He’ll have to pull over every few miles to let you throw up again but the roads will be quiet and you’ll get there in one piece, more or less. The E.R. will have a short waiting list but you’ll be in a bed within an hour and a young nurse will be negotiating an I.V. into the back of your hand to feed fluids that your body would otherwise reject.

“Time gets us all,” she’ll say, drawing your eyes to her face. She’ll be the single prettiest girl you’ll have ever seen. We’d go into greater detail but we don’t want to ruin the surprise. Suffice it to say you wouldn’t believe us if we told you. And as she holds you while you violently heave your dry stomach into a bedpan you’ll feel as if you’ve finally found your true home, voiding your bowels wrapped in her arms

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!