Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Congratulations on Teaching Us All An Important Lesson About Chainsaw Safety!


A lot of people try to get the message out about saw safety. That sawstop dude tried to make an invention to keep people from chopping off their fingers, for fuck’s sake, and look what happened to him. It’s not an easy task, but it’s the one you’ve chosen.

It’s slow going. Most people don’t see why they should worry about saws in the age of i-Phones. Most people who work with saws are professional woodworkers or magicians, neither of whom seem terribly concerned with safety. The public just doesn’t recognize just how big a threat these saws are. You know that you have to do something extreme to prove that saws are a clear and present danger to every American citizen, but you’ve been at a loss for just what you need to do.

Today you’re going to break that dam. You’re going to finally know with clarity what you need to do. You’re going to kill a bunch of stranded teens with a chainsaw.

You’ll begin your day by, of course, sabotaging their car at a gas station where they stop for refreshments. This will be easy, since you’re literally the only gas station on the road from Montana to South Dakota, so you’ll just unscrew their oil cap while they’re not watching and let the whole engine drain out.

Their car will stop twenty minutes into Wyoming, chugging and sputtering to a halt near a cattle fence. You’ll have been following them in your truck, and when they pull off to the side of the road and exit the car you’ll see expressions of relief on their faces as you pull over to where they rest. They’ll be under the impression that you’re planning to help them.

But once you exit the car wearing a leather apron and a sack mask, their relief will falter. When you pull the chainsaw out of the back of your pickup, it’ll collapse completely. They’ll start screaming. One of the boys will charge at you, hoping to take you down in a heroic moment of glory. The saw will catch him in the upper right shoulder and cut across his torso, down into his flesh. He’ll fall in two halves without a chance to scream. One of the girls will take off running down the road but the others two teens, a girl and a boy, will simply stand by the car, unable to move.

You’ll charge up to the remaining boy and try to bury his chainsaw in his neck. It will come in high, however, and instead of neatly chopping off his head you’ll cut into it like a melon. The saw will grind against the solid bone of the cranium and the cut will not be easy or clean. He’ll scream murderously as he falls to the ground, and he won’t stop until the teeth of the saw work their way through his skull, into his brain and sever the nerves that allow him to speak.

The last woman will, by this point, have fallen to the ground, twitching catatonically. You’ll leave her there, insensate, and get into your truck to drive back to town. With those two teens alive there should be plenty of people to talk about important chainsaw control is in Wyoming, and you’ll be right there, perfectly positioned to intervene on behalf of the saw safety lobby.

Well played, you brilliant sociopath you.

Congratulations on Teaching Us All An Important Lesson About Chainsaw Safety!

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Congratulations on Gathering That Firewood!


When you return from the woods you’ll find a note, elegantly composed in her script.

Dear Jacob,

It’s not working. I know these woods seem like the perfect place to explore our co-dependent relationship away from people I can cheat on you with, but I slipped up and found another woods cabin a few miles away with another man in it named Chadwick. We had sex and now we’re in love and I’m leaving you.

Sorry, please get tested, I think I gave you herpes.

Sincerely,

Jane

You’ll throw down your wood in a rage and start weeping. You won’t stop for about an hour and a half, but when you do you’ll feel kind of better about the whole thing. You’ll realize that Jane was kind of a bitch, and that she really didn’t do anything for you. Without her intoxicating presence you’ll realize that this will free your time up so that you can work on your screenplay, about a man who moves to the woods to cope with his bitch of a girlfriend breaking up with him.

With this in mind you’ll start a fire for the night with the wood you gathered. You’ll feed each and every scrap of paper with Jane’s writing on it into the fire piece by piece until her presence is all but completely purged from the cabin. It’ll feel clean, fresh, the perfect place for a new beginning.

Congratulations on Gathering That Firewood!

Monday, February 27, 2012

Congratulations on Falling Through That Ice!


Remember that movie The Dead Zone, with Christopher Walken? Where he falls gets into a car accident and almost dies and can then see into the future for brief missives about what is to come, allowing him to predict the future and potentially save hockey teams? No? It’s on USA sometimes, you should watch it. It’s not bad.

Anyhow, that happened to you a while back, and today you’re going to get a chance to save a hockey team from falling through some ice, just like in the movie. Except instead of saving some people and then hearing about a bunch of others dying under the ice, you’re going to try to directly intervene, running on to the ice waving your hands, begging those kids to get off the god damn ice. The ice will give way while hockey players pile on top of you to try and get you to stop ruining their game, and you’ll drown under ice, hammering on the surface and begging for life as it leaves you in one of the most horrible fashions imaginable. Hockey players will be grabbing for your feet to try and haul themselves up, weighed down to the bottom of the frozen lake by their skates. As you lose consciousness you’ll be dimly aware of their movement beneath you.

The downside of all this is that, unlike in that movie, no one will be around to stop crazy president Martin Sheen from launching nukes at Russia (which could still start a nuclear apocalypse, thanks to the Doomsday Device from Doctor Stangelove that it turns out was real) and we’ll all die horribly in the aftermath.

On the upside, you won’t have to deal with it, and your ex-girlfriend’s dick husband will die in a hail of nuclear fire, so you’ll kind of win on that front. Pity about the rest, though.

Congratulations on Falling Through That Ice!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Narrative Discourse Continued!


With these definitions in mind, let’s think about what makes games’ post-structural take on narrative unique or special compared to other mediums. It’s important to generate these distinctions because, frankly, unconventional narratives aren’t at all uncommon, and determining what sets the narrative we’re focusing on aside from the others can help us hone in on just what video games do, why their portrayals of complex character, especially women, are so often problematic and what makes video games so potent as a means of telling stories.

After all, poems, comics and television shows all, in their own sense, take on aspects of post-structural narratives. Television shows will do so either through permitting thorough interaction of their audience (usually in non-explicitly narrative scenarios, such as reality or game-shows) or by utilizing external media to forward the story or provide it with context in some manner (in both explicitly and non-explicitly narrative scenarios, though the explicit scenarios are far more germane to our discussion). Comics utilize a similar set of principles, though their reliance on explicit narratives means that externalized narrative influence is far more prominent for them than any kind of reader influence (though some still exists in the form of polls that then determine narrative or, in some cases, comics that play on their reader’s ability to reinterpret or recodify texts through reappropriation or original approaches to reading text).

Poetry is more complicated, since we can divide poetry into two categories which have a great deal of overlap with video games: explicitly narrative and non-explicitly narrative poetry. Simply put, explicitly narrative poetry engages in a storytelling tradition whereby the poem attempts to convey a story of some sort with character who may or may not be directly named or even clearly identified. Non-explicitly narrative poetry eschews narrative to a different end, usually in order to generate an interpretive dialogue surrounding a set of themes, feelings or emotions that the author attempts to invoke or communicate. Both of these forms, however, require the influence and interpretation of a reader figure or group of reader figures in order to reach fruition and, as a result, have a great deal in common with our other mediums.

In non-explicitly narrative poetry the reader figure is especially important, as the reader figure is the crux upon which the poem rests: without a reader, the emotions cannot be transmitted by the author and the poem cannot operate. Even when the transmission does not occur exactly as intended, so long as some transmission occurs we can perceive the poem as some sort of success. Poetry which deliberately attempts to eschew narrative can, by merit of its unique aim, retain success regardless of whether or not the intended emotion is transmitted. Simply by evoking feeling in a reader or listener figure, the poem has succeeded. Non-explicitly narrative poetry can, of course, by merit of this flexibility and fluidity, have narrative elements imposed by readers. It could be argued, in fact, that this must occur to some extent, that the reading of the poem forms a sort of super-narrative structure which the poem then occupies even if an internal narrative of the poem itself is unavailable. But no narrative is explicitly intended in this sort of poetry, hence its name and its unique and intriguing status among literary mediums.

Explicitly narrative poetry can also possess this reader introduced narrative super-structure as well, but it contains within it the framework of some sort of conventional narrative, albeit one which may have unclear or fluid characters, plot and reasoning governing its narrative structure. This narrative structure usually (but not always) makes it easier to access a poem’s functionality, to comprehend the intended purpose of the author and form a connection with the author’s emotional work within the poem. By providing readers with a context through which their reading can be directed, poets can more readily shift attention to subjects they choose, more easily introduce and attach explicit meaning to internal symbols and ground readers in a context with which they feel more comfortable: that of a familiar narrative storytelling tradition. Of course, there’s a trade-off here: non-explicitly narrative poetry cannot be accused of bad storytelling, whereas narrative poetry can and, let’s be honest, often should.

If you attempt to tell a story, you risk doing it poorly, muddying the themes you are attempting to illustrate or bungling them somehow. It is an unfortunate risk that storytellers run that can sometimes be circumvented by refusing to include or involve a conventional narrative within a piece of work, favoring instead a focus on emotional transmission. A poorly told story can work against itself, while a poem which does not attempt to tell a story cannot fail in this respect: in fact, even if it fails in its intended or purported purpose, it may not fail at all in a greater sense if someone simply connects with it on some level, if someone finds or imposes value on the work.

Which brings us to games.

You wouldn’t be off base to observe that a great portion of storytelling in games is, for lack of a kinder word, poor. It is often clumsily executed. Characters are often broadly drawn and arbitrarily given to surreal action. Dialogue is often stilted and unbelievable or lacking in flow. Plotting will occasionally be sloppy, with a focus on guiding players through a series of interesting or attractive set pieces sometimes distracting from the actual telling of a conventional narrative story. This can certainly be perceived in all of the other aforementioned mediums, particularly television, but I believe the most significant parallel here lies between games and poetry. Because if a television program tells a story poorly it can rarely hope to succeed in spite of this fact: so much of television relies on explicit narrative and conventional storytelling that, without it, there really isn’t much to it. But a poem which tells a stilted or poor story can still succeed in evoking an emotional response, at informing and experientially enriching its reader. Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetic portrayal of a man leaping upon a grenade, for example, has all of the worst elements of a clichéd story within it: it utilizes an overused image to showcase an emotional payload which connects to said image. But in Komunyakaa’s case there is bitterness towards the man who has sacrificed himself, revulsion at what he has rendered and depression, not courage, stemming from this clichéd gesture. A clichéd, somewhat ineffective purpose is, by merit of clever framing, put to apt use.

In games, we can see this pattern repeated time and time again. Take, for instance, the Assassin’s Creed series of games. The story in these games is often poorly rendered, plot twists are telegraphed and many characters are nebulously developed, if they are developed at all. Historical figures are inserted into the plot, often to little effect, spare that of a celebrity cameo in television or film. And some characters are simply inserted so that set pieces can be included in the finished product. We need look no further than the final moments of Assassin’s Creed 2, which involve a romp into the Vatican where the protagonist, Ezio, is prompted to fist fight with the Pope in order to acquire his staff (in the story of the game, a powerful alien artifact which would allow Ezio entrance to a secret underground data storage facility) before descending into the basement of the Vatican for the games’ climactic cutscene.

This should sound pretty ridiculous and, in the game’s execution, it is. But the game does not fail because of these unfortunate patterns in its narrative structure. Rather, the play of the game, the means surrounding these at times unintentionally absurd structures, showcase an overarching method which saturates the game: a message that the refutation and refusal of authority and its structures without adherence to a newly constructed structure is a powerful and potent approach to life, one which gives its adherents great power and allows them a unique and rich experience within this context. Ignoring the plot is, in a sense, a part of maximizing this lesson as you are asked, again and again, to simultaneously construct and dismantle authority structures and figures as they inevitably turn on both you, as player and character, and themselves as both narrative figures and narrative devices.

As such we can see a method by which poor storytelling can be salvaged, and a link between the emerging medium of video games and the established medium of poetry. Which is kinda cool, right? But we haven’t gotten to the topic of gender yet, because my chosen starting example of the manner in which gender can be effective portrayed and utilized as a storytelling device in games is going to need its own five page article, and it’ll also explore the manner in which non-explicit narrative methods can be effectively utilized in games. That’ll come next week. Thanks for bearing with me!

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Congratulations on Symbolically Killing Your Father!


Today you’re going to symbolically kill your father by chopping down a tree, which is essentially a giant woods penis.

“TAKE THAT DAD!” you’ll shout with each swipe of your axe. Sap will ooze out of the tree’s wounds, which will look a little bit like semen, adding to the penis metaphor.

“YEAH!” you’ll scream at the tree as it begins to shift awkwardly and drift towards the ground. You’ll give the tree the middle finger and start to walk away, dreaming, as you often do, of fucking your sister. Then you’ll be crushed as the tree falls on you, symbolizing the enduring and suffocating nature of paternalism, violence’s impact on both the victim and the agent thereof and how important safety is when you’re working as a lumberjack.

Congratulations on Symbolically Killing Your Father!

Friday, February 24, 2012

Congratulations on Winning All the Events at Track and Field Day!


When you were a kid you weren’t very good at running. It’s always hounded you, and you’ve always hated yourself for not being able to win a single event at any kind of school spirit, team building or confidence renewing happening. When you were diagnosed with leukemia, your dreams of becoming a dad and running on the field during one of your child’s games to beat the everloving shit out of the rest of the kids on the field were crushed: even if you survived the cancer, chemo would likely leave you sterile, and your stretch marks from the explosive weight loss that treatment would cause would render you so unattractive a sex partner that there’s no way anyone would ever be willing to sleep with you.

Flash forward from your incredibly boring last few months of heartbreaking revelations to today, when the Make-A-Wish Foundation finally responds to your request. They’ll have thought you were a very young boy, thanks largely to your judicious use of crayon and some creative record keeping that you used when you submitted your application, so they won’t think your desire to “win a footrace” was at all unusual or any sadder than usual.

When they do meet you, they’ll feel entirely too awkward to say anything about it, so they’ll just send you, as planned, to the Special Olympics, where you’ll handily beat the shit out of all those lovable, big hearted kids. You’ll devastate them, and during the award ceremony, where everyone receives medals, you’ll go totally dickhole on all of them and start pushing them out of the way, throwing bows and punches and crotch chopping incessantly throughout the award ceremony.

You won’t be invited to the second day of the Special Olympics, but that’ll be okay. You’ll have had your moment in the sun, ruined the day for those kids the way your days were always ruined, and that’s what really matters. Have fun at chemo!

Congratulations on Winning All the Events at Track and Field Day!

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Congratulations on Realizing Your Own Potential!


A lot of people spend years upon years looking for the careers that are right for them. Take, for instance, a banker who might not realize he loves money until he’s in his middle age, the autumn of his life. How much is that going to suck for him, realizing that he could’ve pursued one of the easiest and most lucrative careers imaginable if only he’d given up when he was younger?

You’re going to be a lot luckier. You’ve always known you wanted to be a cat burglar, ever since you were a young man. That first B&E, the rush of your first sale at a pawn shop where you knew you’d never be back in there to fence another piece of merch, the lightness in your feet as you ran from a resident the first time. It was all just what you’d always wanted.

But lately you’ve realized that without a calling card, without some sort of focus to your actions, you’re just a face in a crowd. And that’s not how you’d like to go down, as some two bit father of four and cat burglar who was never caught and never did anything interesting with his life. Which is why today is so important.

Because today while you’re casing an apartment for stuff to steal you’re going to see an elaborately constructed cat toy sitting on a velvet fringed pillow. Its purpose will be clear: to satisfy the curiosity of a cat that eats better on a daily basis than you do, despite its lack of a GED and opposable thumbs. Rage will well in your heart at the sight of these excesses, and you’ll snatch them up.

You’ll also steal any jewelry or laptops you see in the apartment, but you won’t think overmuch on those. They’ll go to your fence and you’ll eat for another month because of them. But the pillow you took, the cat toy, with its series of bells within bells within catnip shells, will make you feel some deep satisfaction.

Thus will begin your spree, your era of infamy, as a cat burglar who specializes in stealing cat toys and accessories, which you sometimes wittily refer to as “excessories.” The nightly news will have a field day with it, the police will spend years searching for you without success. You won’t tell a soul until your son comes of age, years from today, and you take him to a storage unit you rent in downtown Brooklyn. Once the two of you are inside you’ll begin telling him, in a hushed voice, that this is how you’ve made your mark on the world. You’ll describe that first day to him and his eyes will spark with recognition and respect for the first time.

It’ll be a good day to be a dad.

Congratulations on Realizing Your Own Potential!

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Congratulations on Reading War and Peace!


When you’re in prison, sometimes you choose to improve yourself in some way. Some people improve themselves by leading a horrifying band of white supremacists who rape and kill minorities and people who aren’t overly concerned with minorities. Other people sometimes take the time to learn a craft or a trade.

But you’re not much for any of that, what with your dainty hands and record of insurance fraud and murder (once they’d caught you those kids had to die) so you had to find another means by which to improve your life.

You decided you’d go through all of the books you’d lied about reading in your life one by one and try to make good on them over the course of your twenty to life. Thanks to dramatic improvements that have been made to the libraries of American prisons over the last half-decade and your own ruthless adherence to pacts you make with yourself, it’s actually been going quite well. You’ve found all the titles you’ve looked for and had plenty of time to sink into reading them.

Today you’ll have been going at it for almost a year and a half, and you’re going to finish your first book. It’ll be War and Peace, Tolstoy’s masterpiece. None of us here at Sexy Results have ever read Tolstoy, but one of our friends once did, and he told us it was outta sight, so we have a feeling that the appropriate response would be something like “Wow,” or “My eyes have been opened to the world.”

You’re going to put it down, slam it down really, and shout “WHAT” as loud as you can. Then you’ll decide to stop reading books altogether, and take up a new habit, maybe bitch raping, to pass the time.

Congratulations on Reading War and Peace!

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Congratulations on Winning the Oyster Shucking Competition!


The Maine Oyster Shucking Competition is conducted every year by a group of hard working, wader wearing youths with loose morals and big dreams. They come from all over the state to prove their prowess at removing the shells from mollusks with artistry and speed, and they do not all prove themselves worthy of the competition. The Maine Oyster Shucking Competition is known to many as “the finger destroyer,” in reference to unusually large number of finger injuries sustained by youth during the competition. It is not unusual for shuckers to lose one or more digits as they attempt to prove their skill.

And, of course, losers lose far more. Because in Maine, if you turn sixteen and you’re still a virgin you’re forcibly deflowered by the town De-Virginator, a man, usually obese, whose only purpose is to have unpleasant sex with you so that you’ll understand how abysmally sad your life in Maine is going to be over the years to come. The only way out is to win the Oyster Shucking Competition, through skill or guile.

You’ll be the daughter of a fisherman and you’ll go by the name of Sam. You’ll be one of those androgynous beauties, one of those rare human beings with a sexual fluidity that makes them appealing to nearly everyone who beholds them. You’ll be a spritely, brilliant young woman with dreams of leaving Maine and finding a real life somewhere else, somewhere slightly less horrible like Boston or maybe just one of the bigger towns in New Hampshire. But you know that you’ll be so traumatized if you give up your virginity to someone who doesn’t deserve it, especially a De-Virginator, you’ll probably fuck up college applications and, with them, the next eight years of your life.

So you’ll show up for the Oyster Shucking Competition with your trousers rolled up around your ankles, a man’s shirt hanging, too big, from your shoulders and a cockney cap hiding your gorgeous face from onlookers. You’ll have your own shucking knife, natch, and a sprig of wheat tucked in your mouth from an unknown source.

You’ll sign your name, take your place and, knife backed by your thumb, await the starting pistol with relaxed muscles and calm breath. When you hear the shot your hands will move the knife through and across, slicing the muscles at the back of each shell before you pry open the rest of the mass and scrape off the remainder with a deft pair of knife sweeps. You won’t bother putting the shells into their own bucket, you’ll just let them fall on the ground around your bare feet. Only the meat will have a new home.

You’ll repeat this motion again and again and again, your hands moving fluidly: one for the knife, one for the shells. Your fingers, calloused and thick pads on them gripping their precious cargo, will move like dancers: hardened and swift. Around you curses will echo from the mouths of other participants: blind rage as they cut their hands or lose some meat to the ground. Men and women alike will stare at you, at your hands and shoulders as they barely move with each new shucking. Your feet will remain still, the pile of shells growing around you.

You won’t think about time or effort as you move, just of the sun above you, how that same sun shines down in places that aren’t Bar Harbor or Bangor. You’ll be aware of where your hands are and where the shells are and where the knife is the same way you know where your heart and your eyes are, but you won’t give much thought to what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.

That’s why, when the sun sets and all the other shuckers are sitting on overturned buckets, cursing their luck and bandaging your hands you’ll just look up at the buckets you’ve filled, shift your feet to send the shells around you scattering to the ground and let yourself smile for the first time that day.

Your competition will be staring at you to a man, baffled by your success. They’ll all be shaking their heads in disbelief, watching you as you take off your hat and run your hand through your short, shaggy hair. You’ll laugh, sort of a guffaw, as you head up the beach to the card table where the registration desk will be ready to give you your prize.

You’ll only be there for a moment, and then you’ll be gone, your grace a sharp memory burned in the minds of each and every person on that beach. You’ll be on your way back home, where you’ll begin drafting one of your admissions essays centered around that day, around the rhythm and the sun and the hope that you found out there on that beach, the hope you gave each and every one of us when you reminded us that sometimes good things do happen. Sometimes the institutions that Maine has constructed to ruin the lives of its own inhabitants fail. On the days when that comes to pass, the weather, you’ll note in the essay, always seems exceptionally nice, even when it is not, necessarily.

Congratulations on Winning the Oyster Shucking Competition!

Monday, February 20, 2012

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife Into Having the Devil's Baby!


“Hey honey,” you’ll mumble into her ear, winding your arm around her stomach. She’ll let out a long breath, one you’ll feel rolling through her gut as she rests her head against yours. You’ll feel the smile roaring through her body rather than see it.

“Mmm,” she’ll purr. “Hi.”

You’ll turn her around gently. Both your eyes will already be closed as you inch her nearer and nearer to your face. You won’t speak another word, you’ll just move your lips to hers and up and over and under and within and words won’t matter by the end of it. You’ll drag step to the bedroom awkwardly in each other’s arms, but you won’t notice, you’ll be so focused on not touching, on not removing any clothing until you settle into the bed and begin your work, purposeful, methodical, reflexive and thoughtlessly infinitely engaging.

When you enter her you won’t be thinking of anything, anything in the world. That moment, that moment you’ll find yourself pinned within will be perfect, leaving you to echo inside your own mind until it builds to soundless cacophony in your ears, the driving force of your own blood pushing you over the edge gasping soundlessly as she smiles and sweats below you, her eyes again closed.

You won’t think about the deal you made with the devil until the next morning, when your Ski Doo materializes in your garage. Your wife will be puzzled, but you’ll tell her not to worry as you run your hands over her belly. You’ll wink and tell her that everything will be fine, wondering, as you do it, if the children of the anti-Christ might be spared the fires of his coming, on account of raising him and stuff.

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife Into Having the Devil’s Baby!

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Another Portion of a Paper Draft!


In order to have an effective conversation about this subject, we’re going to have to define two nebulous, seemingly concrete, oft overused terms. First and foremost, what is a video game? And second, what is a post-structural narrative?

A video game is, for the purpose of our discussion, any game that utilizes multimedia components in order to convey a story or sense of action. These multimedia components are usually arbitrated through a single processing entity, a “computer” or “console.” This entity can be reserved for another purpose: it can be a phone or a home computer utilized for word processing and email. Or it can be a dedicated device, such as an X-Box or, as older individuals might recall, a Nintendo Entertainment System. The platform is simply a means to an end: whether it is built towards one purpose or towards multiple purposes the games themselves are usually best experienced when they’re engaged with without distractions.

Video games normally have narrative elements within them, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. These elements vary dramatically in prominence, however. Linerunner, for example, invents the simplest of narratives: there is a line, and a man rides it. However Bastion, an independently developed title with a relatively modest time commitment attached to it, invents a pair of warring societies with identity crises and immigration disputes between them, a cold war parable nested within a game. There is no actual ruleset, simply a concept of interactivity which demands the insertion of a player figure who can, in more conventional literary senses, be seen as a reader.

And that brings us to the concept of post-structural narrative. In literature, this term is used to define narrative modes that attempt to redefine or defy conventional ideas about narrative, effectively refuting conventional narrative structure in order to reinvent the means by which a story is told. Hence the term. In video games, this term can be applied in a considerably broader fashion. If we observe post-structural narrative as the norm, and not the exception, for video games, we see that games are not simply piddling attempts at storytelling, but rather a unique means of conveying a narrative experience which relies on the input from players.

This is indeed what sets them aside from other narrative forms: no other narrative form relies on user input in the fashion that video games do. Books require the participation of an active reader figure who, while somewhat active, remains less active than the player in video games, a truly active “reader figure” who re-defines narrative as it emerges. This is what distinguishes games from film, given film’s heavy reliance on passive reader figures (a factor which games embrace and utilize with unnerving regularity in cutscenes). In order to tell a story effectively in a game, you must involve your player, and failure to do so will make a game boring or tedious.

We need look no further than examples like Final Fantasy XIII and Clive Barker’s (bless his heart) Undying to witness this: these are games which decouple passive narrative from active involvement in order to couple a conventional narrative with a post-structural medium, and they suffer for the effort. Players lack influence over the events of the game, and the events which they have influence over (that is, overcoming the obstacles that face them) are so non-narrative and, all too often, monolithic in their established goals that players would find themselves hard pressed to find a place to insert themselves as readers or even active participants in the narrative, spare as the meagerest of facilitators for a writer’s vision.

It should be said, then, that video games do not represent a factotum which permits the effective facilitation of post-structural storytelling. Rather, they are a tool which enable this end. They do not necessarily fulfill this goal. Some games tell stories with such loose structures that they are totally invalid as narratives (man shoots gun, man dies, man reloads gun and walks on) but this is not the ultimate potential of the medium. Instead it rests within this medium to express narrative stories that permit the active insertion of reader figures as never before, as is the case in games such as Bastion.

Bastion, for the uninitiated, is on its surface an action game with a top down view and freeform story that showcases this dynamic wonderfully. Let me explain.

In Bastion players are given verbal and visual feedback based on their actions: that is, the story adjusts to their actions. They learn new things about the world around them as a result of their explorations. And while there is an existing story that the player must engage, a story with immutable elements as dramatic as the apocalypse of the player’s world, there are smaller events within that storyline that require the player’s action for actualization. These events vary in gravity from deciding the fate of a major character to simply uncovering details of characters lives through drug induced hallucinations.

Through Bastion we can see that there is more to games than simple a recounting of an existing narrative. Rather, narrative is collaboratively shaped between players (readers) and designers (authors). In this respect, games represent not only a medium of entertainment but also an extreme example of a certain vein of literary thought.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Congratulations on Capturing That Zeppelin!


We all love the spirited romp that is a zeppelin chase: the days and days of slow paced pursuit gliding through the skies. We all know the rush of hurling a grappling hook towards your foe, three spare fathoms distant, and the crushing sense of defeat which accompanies each missed throw. But eventually all good things must come to an end, and today your zeppelin chase, at this point four days in the running, will most certainly come to its end.

After weeks of remaining twenty feet apart, just outside of effective throwing range for your zeppelin’s grappling hook, you’ll suddenly recall that you purchased an air powered grappling hook launcher for just such occasions as this. You’ll cluck your tongue and smile to yourself as you search your zeppelin’s many opulent storage containers for said grappling hook launcher. When you find it you’ll raise it up and shout:

“EXCELSIOR!”

Your prey will take note of your new find and panic.

“GREAT SCOTT!” he’ll shout, just barely audible from your deck. He’ll start fiddling with levers like it’s going to make him go faster, but really it’ll just be him spinning his wheels to feel a little bit better about the whole affair. He won’t turn around when you start laughing maniacally as you meticulously load your grapping hook into the grappling hook launcher. When you fire it the first time it’ll miss your rival’s zeppelin pretty handsomely. The second and third hits will miss as well, but the fourth shot will find the lip of zeppelin control booth and take hold.

“BULLY!” you’ll shout into the wind as you take hold of the now taut grappling hook line and pull your own zeppelin closer and closer to the other zeppelin, occasionally pausing to catch your breath and check if your rival has successfully decoupled your grappling hook from his craft.

After around fifteen minutes of moderate hauling, you’ll have brought yourself alongside your rival, ready to deploy your boarding plank. It will rotate over your own zeppelin control booth and hook into your rival’s, forming a platform for safe crossing. You’ll chuckle to yourself as you draw your Boarding Saber and charge across to victory.

Your foe will be waiting there, his own Boarding Saber drawn.

“En garde!” he’ll shout at you, which will make both of you giggle. Then you’ll tap sabers.

“Tag!” you’ll girlishly shriek. Your opponent will chortle in response. Then he’ll begin counting, very slowly, down from one hundred.

You’ll hurry back across your boarding plank, pulling it up behind you. When you reach your control panel you’ll commence coming about, no mean feat in a zeppelin. Then you’ll maximize the acceleratrix and hope for the best. After all, Reginald counts quickly, and it’ll be a dull week to be super rich if you only get to spend a few hours as the pursued in Zeppelin Tag.

Congratulations on Capturing That Zeppelin!

Friday, February 17, 2012

Congratulations on Making Us All Nostalgic for World War II!


You make us wish for simpler times, specifically that period of nationalistic unity and selflessness that, at least in our collective consciousness, tied us together as a nation. Not because you’re an inspiring man born to the wrong time and place. No, no, no. Quite the opposite.

You’re just so fucking infuriating that you should be put into a camp and, if we were still vested in the political climate that surrounded World War II, we’d have absolutely no trouble sending you to northern California to live in a shack and grow yams behind a barbed wire fence.

Today, for example, you’re going to loudly exclaim that Hmung people are descended from dogs, then toss a bottle at a child who is whistling too loud as she walks home from school.

Fortunately, after that incident the police will stop by and promptly arrest you, relieving the rest of us of your misery for eight to fifteen years. Most likely fifteen, given how you’re going to act at the trial and how you’ll behave in prison.

Congratulations on Making Us All Nostalgic for World War II!

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Congratulations on Carving Up the Only Sentient Cooked Turkey in the World!


You know how sometimes you get so hungry that people just turn into the shape of a piece of food? Like when you’re on a desert island and someone changes shape into a steak or a chicken leg and you attack them and, moments before committing the permanent act, you snap out of it and realize that you’re actually about to stab a person? It happens to you a lot, so often your family has grown accustomed to screaming “I’m not a sentient piece of food” when you get a certain look in your eye in order to avoid embarrassing Greek Easters or Fourth of July Picnics.

But today, in what you all like to call “February Thanksgiving,” the holiday your family invented so you could be moderately less offensive to the American Indians who were murdered by your forefathers, you’re going to encounter a real live talking turkey.

“Hey!” the turkey will stand up and shout. “Hey! Hey!”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” your family will shout. They’ll all stand up from the table and back away until they’re ass to wall, staring at the turkey, waiting for something, anything, new to go wrong.

“I got this,” you’ll tell them, gesturing vaguely at the room surrounding you.

“Oh thank god,” the turkey will exclaim, standing up on its weird turkey legs and gesturing with its wings. “My name is Saul Kinsley and I’ve inhabited the body of this turk-“

You’ll cut off his life’s story with a serrated knife, digging it into his stomach and ripping it across, spilling his stuffing across the table.

“Oh god, oh god,” he’ll murmur, struggling to collect his stuffing in his tiny, worthless wings. “Please don-“

You’ll cut him again and again and again, taking limb from limb until he is totally dismembered. He’ll be screaming the entire time, despite his lack of a mouth. You won’t really know when he stops crying out. You won’t know if he just lost strength or if whatever eldritch power that drove that turkey to scream has been driven out by your reaving efforts.

All you’ll know is that when your family sits down and digs into the scattered corpse of the once-talking turkey it’ll be the best they’ve ever tasted. It’ll be so tasty that no one will argue. You’ll all just sit and eat. It’ll be one of the best February Thanksgivings ever.

Congratulations on Carving Up the Only Sentient Cooked Turkey in the World!

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!


Remember that scene in Slaughterhouse Five where the main character has sex with some actress while aliens watch and take notes and she ends up theoretically getting preggers? Aliens LOVE that part of the book, and for years now they’ve been trying to figure out how to make it, to loosely paraphrase Disney’s Ariel, a part of their world.

Three days ago they figured it out. If they capture a pair of desperate enough people with low enough self esteem they know that they’ll be able to get those folks to bump uglies out of desperation, and if those people are in a relationship already it’ll be that much more likely to happen. So tomorrow they’ll hover down over the trailer park where you and your girlfriend live together in a single-wide that you rent for around two hundred a month and they’ll snatch the two of you up as you head out into the yard to throw things at people’s dogs before their owners wake up.

Then they’ll freeze you, take you to a small research facility on the surface of Phobos, and lock the two of you in a small metal room while they wait for you to thaw.

The room will be wired with cameras, cameras that will catch everything that’s happening from every angle, allowing aliens to pipe the feed of you and your girlfriend adjusting to your new circumstances into conventional solo-masturbation rooms and larger, more culturally acceptable masturbation stadiums that aliens invented a while back. Then the aliens will sit back, occasionally feed you, and wait for you to fuck.

They’ll only have to wait two days before you get comfortable enough with your surroundings (an all white room that slowly drives you mad) to bone it up. You and your girl will, following a dramatic fight, fuck like rabbits while the aliens watch. You’ll use the lone condom you keep in your wallet to keep the deed clean (your girlfriend refuses to use birth control because she sees it as a form of abortion) and then fall asleep nude in each other’s arms.

The next day you’ll be in the habit and you’ll figure, whatever, fuck it. You’ll bump uglies in the morning and jizz all up inside her, immediately making your girlfriend pregnant. You’ll keep fucking for the next seven months, just in case she wasn’t pregnant enough, before the two of you, due to pregnancy and lack of exercise, are deemed “too gross to watch” by the aliens and sent back to earth without ceremony.

She’ll give birth two months later in an emergency room, where Medicaid will take care of your costs. You’ll later recount the story of how you got your girlfriend pregnant to your friends, but no one will ever believe you because, like most trailer park residents, you spent most of your time before your abduction talking about how aliens are watching us all the time, effectively ruining your credibility in case you ever had call to tell a story about aliens.

Your inability to stop talking about it will make everyone really uncomfortable around you, and render you even less attractive to local employers and potential friends. You will be unemployed and a terrible dad in the decades to come.

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!


American prisons are known for two things: non-consensual anal sex and providing prisoners with three warm meals a day and a cot to sleep in. Hence the well known idiom: “three hots, a cot, and a throbbing, engorged penis.”

Today you’re going to find out that this adage does not hold true for all prisons. Specifically Saudi Arabian prisons where they put men for wearing dreadlocks and Phish t-shirts in public. You’re going to get pulled off a street in Riyadh and shoved in a cell within minutes of getting off the plane, totally failing in your quest to “change the world from the ground up” by, in your mind, teaching Saudi women to appreciate their own independence (largely through a combination of basic literature and ESL skills and fucking you regularly).

Your cell will be roughly four feet long and wide, seven feet tall, so you’ll have to curl up when you want to sleep. There will be a single window, a slit really, that will issue only the tiniest hint of light into your new home. You’ll take to it almost immediately, since it will remind you a little bit of your parent’s basement, except it won’t have wi-fi or any wi-fi enabled devices in it.

But, even though you’ll feel more or less comfortable since you’re used to living like a shiftless hippy, you’ll be a little bit disappointed by the fact that you are, unlike when you’re in your parent’s basement, totally unable to leave. So by the end of the first day the lack of weed will infuriate you. By the end of the second day you’ll be frustrated by the fact that you’re fed only a heel of bread and a liter of water a day. By the end of the third day you’ll have become resigned to your fate, largely because the guards won’t speak English or loud, slowly shouted English, the language you normally use to communicate with brown people.

In around five months you’ll be set free, which will be great for you since you’ll be able to smoke weed again, as soon as you get out of Saudi Arabia, where that’s a felony. But what’ll be even better is that you’ll be svelte and slender for the first time in years. You’ll be attractive, were you to bathe, to members of the opposite sex and your performance while playing ultimate Frisbee will have never been better.

So Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

Monday, February 13, 2012

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!


We all watch the evening news, so we all know that between China, northeast China, Indochina, Iran, North Korea, Russia circa-1983 and the Philadelphia Flyer’s franchise the world is in constant danger. It’s a miracle we haven’t all been obliterated by a nuclear weapon or subjected to the most grotesque treatment imaginable by the Flyers. But we haven’t, so we all continue to live in fear.

And today, while you walk along the banks of the Charles River, you’re going to discover a whole new concept for us to irrationally fear. You’ll have your eight month old infant and you’ll be taking a brisk walk from your upscale apartment off of Memorial Drive to the lab where your husband works. You’ll be planning on confronting him for never being around you and your newborn in the least appropriate fashion possible: by bringing an infant into a basement filled with high pressure furnaces following a walk through extremely inclement weather in mid-February.

It’ll be a terrible idea, and your marriage would be ruined, condemned to a slow death over the course of a decade and a half, if you actually went through with it. But on your way something far more interesting and less disastrous will happen. A falcon will swoop down out of nowhere and try to snatch up your baby.

In a flash your momma instincts will kick in. You won’t even realize that the falcon is coming, just that you have a vague sense of ill-omen descending upon you and your child. You’ll clutch your purse a little tighter before a flash of tremendous movement collides with the back of your child’s stroller.

The falcon will impact the shield intended to keep rain off of your baby, and it will be disoriented for a few moments. You’ll flip shit on the falcon and start wailing on it with your purse, battering about the head until it flies off, crawing in an annoyed fashion. Then you’ll realize just how stupid your idea was and head back home to your one bedroom apartment, where you’ll continue to work on monetizing your Gilmore Girls fansite.

You won’t succeed at that, but at least you’ll have saved your baby and, without really realizing it, your marriage!

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Concept Forming Exercise on the Subject of Women in Games!


So, sometimes I write cop-out essays for this and it’s quite apparent. Things like sandwich discussions and the like really don’t fit well into this blog’s focus, nor do they really explore the things I set out to focus when I started writing Sexy Results. And sometimes I write cop-out essays because I’m feeling sort of dry. That’s not the case right now at all. I’ve got a lot of games I’d love to write about, including Rage and Space Marine, to say nothing of ongoing essays about The Old Republic, Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim, all of which have kept me captivated for quite some time now.

But I’m working on a paper this semester, a paper where I’ll finally be able to discuss video games as a literary form at length. I’m going to be posting some of the preliminary work here as it develops, and what follows is going to more or less be a hybrid abstract and proposal: a tentative statement of scope as well as a sample of what the content of the paper will consist of. This will likely be more in line with the older posts that used to make up Super Nerd Sunday, and if you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, please let me know. It’s a lot more labor intensive, but I find it to be interesting most of the time, and if you agree then I’d love to hear it.

Gender has long been a problematic subject in video games. The manner in which archetypes of masculinity and feminity are portrayed, the roles that male and female characters play and the way they’re developed as protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters is in equal turn fascinating and problematic. Ever since the obscure Custer’s Revenge, an Atari based sex-game allowed a floating ghost general to literally drop cum-bombs on horrified Native American women below, began sexualizing and destroying the agency of women within games decades ago, an uphill battle has slowly been taking shape. Occasionally marketing forces have combated the slow progress of the industry, eviscerating strong portrayals of women and transforming them into ditzes, sex objects and pubescent fantasies made manifest. Lara Croft, who began her life as a proposed “female Indiana Jones,” famously became an implausibly physique, nude code adjacent target for criticism within and without the industry. And it becomes difficult not to see this sort of self-destructive path as a necessity of continuing to exist within the industry when games with strong female protagonists from the Playstation 2 generation, such as Beyond Good and Evil, bomb so thoroughly despite critical accolade.

But of late a renaissance has been underway in the games industry. Female protagonists and even female supporting characters have been emerging as complicated, interesting figures who outstrip their male counterparts in complexity and form the cornerstone of carefully constructed, socially aware stories in high-grossing, critically acclaimed games. Brutal Legend’s seemingly male-dominated story turns almost entirely upon feminine power, and female supporting characters are, in the end, both the enablers of the plot and the sole survivors of a harrowing military campaign. Half-Life 2 relies heavily on Alyx Vance, a strong, competent woman who both defies many social morays of feminine behavior and forms the cornerstone of a revolutionary movement, taking on qualities of both mother, sister and lover for the protagonist while embodying a sort of ultra-competent woman warrior, a valkyrie for a digital generation.

Perhaps no game series better illustrates the progress that has been made towards more complex and intellectually engaging portrayals of female characters in video games than Portal, wherein Chell, a voiceless protagonist whom we rarely see, comes to embody and invert many of the tropes that we, as gamers, have become comfortable with over the years. Chell simultaneously upholds and violates many of the rules of first person shooters, creating a revolutionary new kind of genre, a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of energy in gaming. Through the progress of Portal we can see both a complex concept of female sexuality and power emerging in contemporary games and a broader deconstruction of concepts of authority, invention and power in games. We can also look to Portal to find a new methodology and mentality for telling stories in games, representative of a movement towards more complicated, more interesting storytelling that seems to both accompany and rely on this feminine growth within games.

And alongside titles such as Portal indie titles have been expanding both what it means to be a game and what it means to portray women within them. Developers such as Tale of Tales, makers of such revolutionary titles as Fatale and The Endless Forest, have been exploring both our historical perception of women as well as the manner in which we perceive sexuality, gender and sexual development as a part of life and death. In The Path, they retell the story of Little Red Riding Hood as only a video game could, recasting it in a post-modern light to provide gamers with a new means by which to approach the topic of sexuality and explore their own relationship with just what it means to be a young woman growing into a teenager, coming to terms with desires both redemptive and self destructive. Through the revolutionary play of The Path, we’re forced to assess ideas of success and failure in games, ideas of life and death and the concept of achievement as an ethereal or unattainable subject, all the while interacting with a female cast of characters who express more without speaking a syllable than most can manage in an entire novel.

I’ll be bringing these titles into conversation with a number of articles about concepts of sex, sexuality, women in games and the nature of power in both narrative and games in order to explore just how it has both changed and is changing in the days to come. Bringing together figures such as Shodan and Victoria (from System Shock and Thief respectively) and looking at them along with the masculine and/or paternal counterparts (The Many, The Jackal/Father Karaas) illustrates more than just dynamics of feminine power in games. It also illustrates how the introduction of these complicated literary characters forms part of a larger tapestry wherein themes of resurrection, life, death and authority are both constructed and simultaneously undermined through the unique structure and storytelling requirements that games are uniquely possessed of as a medium.

From Custer to Chell, it’s been quite a long journey, and it is far from over. Masculinity continues to be a pervasive and often limiting trope in the construction of stories within games, and patterns of overt masculine exclusion, those evident in works such as Gears of War and Modern Warfare, operate to both undermine their own stories and convey simplified fictions of what it means to be a man in today’s society. By placing these examples next to more complicated stories and revealing the manner in which the perception of gaming as a “boy’s club” has undermined its growth, we can learn about the destructive power of exclusion. We can also witness the importance of inclusiveness within examples of potent female characters who propel complicated stories with key themes and literary methodology behind them. Stupid games will always exist, but it is difficult not to look to the growth of women within the games industry as well as in the stories told by that industry and see a correlation between the quality of stories told, the increasing maturity of the industry and the growth of games not just as a business but as a literary medium for telling singular and structurally unique stories.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!


You love love LOVE the movie Ghost. You’ve put a shitload of time into trying to re-enact parts of it: you’ve tried to foster a relationship with Whoopi Goldberg in the hope that she might one day sleep with you. You’ve done pottery with literally every person you’ve dated just in case you die while dating them so that you’ll have an excuse to share that experience with them posthumously. But it’s never worked out. Not until today. Today’s gonna be your lucky day.

Because today you’re going to be buying some heroin at a construction site filled with broken glass and discarded condoms and you’re going to pick a fight with your dealer.

“What the fuck, man?!” he’ll shout at you, pulling out his gun and turning it sideways as he prepares to shoot you.

“Wait wait wait!” you’ll scream at him, holding up your hands. He’ll look at you like you’re an idiot and cock the gun, then you’ll back up against the shell of a window, where some shards of glass will be hanging above you. You’ll point up, drawing the dealer’s attention to said bits of hanging glass.

“Shoot those out,” you’ll beg him. “It’ll look so much cooler.”

He’ll give you another look of disbelief before shrugging and pointing his gun upwards. He’ll loose two rounds into the top of the window. One of them will crack the glass and liberate a particularly nasty shard of glass, sending it cascading down into your body. It’ll strike you in the neck, which won’t be just like Ghost, but it’ll be close enough to make you happy, if only for a moment.

Unfortunately your happiness will rapidly subside as you lay there, impaled and bleeding out. You’ll begin to wonder how realistic the movie Ghost was when you don’t notice any tiny black specters coming out of the floor to collect your soul. As the world goes dark you’ll wonder if this was the best trajectory for you to follow with the last decade of your life, but the thought won’t last long. Blood loss will strip the thought from your mind, dwindling out all the others until your body even forgets to breathe.

Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!

Friday, February 10, 2012

Congratulations Ego Booster!


Today you’re going going to be jet skiing on Lake Michigan, an activity that only an idiot of the highest conceivable caliber would engage in in mid-February. You’re going to be wearing a beer hat and carrying an assault rifle on your back hooting and hollering at the top of your lungs.

After around an hour and a half of doing that you’ll notice a ferry puttering its away across this, your Great Lake du Jour. You’ll also notice a patch of ice that, in your head, will look like a totally sweet ramp. Revving your engine, you’ll drag your jet ski in a languid loop around the side of the lake until you turn in and angle towards the ferry, manipulating your jet ski so that your path will cross the ice along the way.

“WOOOOO!” you’ll scream at the top of your lungs as you gun the engine and floor it, speeding towards the ferry as fast as your little engine can carry you.

You’ll holler like a madman as you speed along, hair slicked back. In your mind you’ll see yourself hitting the ice and turning it into a ramp with the weight of your jet ski, propelling yourself into the air and over the ferry.

In reality you’ll hit the ice and lose control of your jet ski, flipping it end over end and casting you into the water. The force of your impact on to the surface of the water will knock you unconscious, and the cold will start to kill you almost instantly. The crew of the ferry will scramble to rescue you from the freezing water, pulling you out as the passengers chortle at your plight.

Their otherwise miserable commute across the lake will have been lightened by your ridiculous misfortune. Your retardation will have lifted their spirits. And in the end, your brain damage from the cold and lack of oxygen will be minor, so no one will have to feel too bad about it.

Congratulations Ego Booster!

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!


It’ll begin, as all things pertaining to Leslie Feist do, with an incantation.

We’d print the incantation here, but we’d prefer it doesn’t get out, because it not only contains within it the framework by which any creature can be contained, bound into service most foul and infinitely fair, but also references Leslie Feist’s true name, necessary to bind her into service. We would be remiss to reproduce such information, as it would make grievous oversteps of mortal authority such as yours commonplace. Even though we could certainly use the hits, we’re not going to subject a being as magnificent as Leslie Feist to that ilk of bullshit.

Once the incantation is completed Leslie Feist will be standing before you within the circle of sealing. Stripped of her glamour she will stand before you as she truly is: twelve feet tall, skin glowing magnificently. Her wings will long to stretch outside the circle, but its limits will force them into a sphere’s containment until she manages to furl them and wrap them around herself. She’ll shiver, naked, the heat of her own inner fire rendered distant by your efforts.

“What do you wish?” she’ll rasp, voice also severed by the circle.

“Get in this crystal for my girlfriend!” you’ll shout at her. She’ll wince, leaning her body away as if she would do anything she could to escape her fate. But she won’t be able to, and like sand in the breeze she’ll shift rapidly, molecule by molecule, towards the crystal, tapering down and filtering into it. When the process is done the circle will be obliterated, the salt woven into her being, into the crystal. Her face will not appear within its facets, her voice will not echo from its depths. The only hint at what it contains will be an unearthly glow, the glow that is all that this world will be able to see of Leslie Feist so long as she remains contained within that crystal.

You’ll pick up the stone, which will be warm to the touch, and pocket it. You’ll leave the windowless study room on the fourth floor of Macalester College’s library whistling to yourself, imagining how psyched your girlfriend will be to have a stone containing the essence of Leslie Feist. You won’t be able to imagine her staying angry at you for cheating on her with her roommate.

Turns out you’ll be totally wrong about the anger allaying effects of a crystal containing Leslie Feist, and your girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, really) will freak out and throw the stone to the ground, cracking it and allowing Leslie Feist to escape from it in a glittering cavalcade of light. She’ll emerge full of rage, not only for what you’ve done to her but what you’ve done to your girlfriend.

By the end, you will beg for death, but your ex-girlfriend will have Leslie Feist’s autograph and an awesome story of bonding with her over your slow, painful end, so that’ll be pretty boss for her.

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!


After the robbery, after the guns go quiet and you’re sitting back in your hideout you’ll be sitting perfectly still on your stool, looking at the chaos arrayed on the table in front of you: bills, thrown about on the table, pistol with its barrel still cooling, dye bomb stained bags. You’ll look at your team: the driver, the heavy, the nerd, the chick. All of them will be fine because, TWIST, your entire plan went off without a hitch!

You robbed a Wells Fargo branch in central Indiana in a green Subaru outback you stole from a stranger two towns over without a word or a shot. You did it quick and clean, like you’d all done it before, but you hadn’t. Really, you just watched the movie Heat a bunch and sorted out what they did wrong. They:

A) Didn’t have any ladies along for good luck.

B) Robbed a bank in the middle of a major city.

C) Brought a bunch of assault rifles along for some reason.

D) Used highly recognizable actors to rob a bank.

Based on all these mistakes you robbed a bank with a small, charismatic but unrecognizable group of community theater actors from Northern Wisconsin and, sure enough, it worked out. It helped that they all shared the practical skills that were normally associated with their heist-role archetype. The nerd knew a lot of stuff and had some practical skills as a result of growing up in the Midwest. The chick had boobs, which distracted and comforted a number of bank patrons during the entire affair. The heavy was a pretty big guy who looked scary but was actually quite nice and the driver could drive stick.

You also Googled “how to rob a bank” before doing the whole thing, so you knew to watch for dye bombs, to pack money yourselves and to avoid killing anyone if it was at all possible. You came through on all of those, though it was impossible to resist firing your guns in the air in celebration after you finished packing the money, which did damage the bank’s ceiling and made dust fall all over the bank patrons.

All that’s left is for you to burn the original bank plans and go your separate ways. You won’t ask anyone where they’re headed. That’d break the rules. But you will wish them all good luck and share a beer with them, stepping out of your shed to sit in deck chairs in the backyard and watch your plans literally go up in smoke as they burn in the barbecue pit you dug yourself, ages ago, back before you knew you’d never have to work again.

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!


Remember when you fucked with the eye wash stations in your lab so that they’d fire gouts of sulfuric acid instead of water into whoever used them? Yeah, we didn’t think you did. Well, today you’re going to wish you had, because following a particularly nasty incident where another prank you were working on (monkey urine in a spray bottle) backfires and ends up spraying gross monkey pee all over your face you’re going to head to one of the aforementioned eye wash stations and try to get the crud out of your face.

You’ll bend down, pull the lever and gouts of acid will spray right into your peepers.

“Agggh!” you’ll scream. “This prank is a lot less funny than I thought it would be!”

You’ll thrash around on the ground for a while as your eyes burn out of your skull, wishing you could cry. But you won’t be able to: your tear ducts will be totally annihilated within seconds. After what seems like an eternity of pain the reaction will stop: the acid will have run its course, and you’ll be left on the ground with a ruined face and a newfound respect for the limitations that need to be in place for workplace pranks to be both funny and appropriate.

This will result in an entire week without any of your retarded pranks ruining shit for your co-workers until you forget all the lessons that your scarred face has taught you and decide to train your seeing-eye dog to attack white people, forgetting (since you’re blind) that you’re white and getting yourself pretty badly mauled along the way.

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!

Monday, February 6, 2012

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!


We rarely hear about it, but every year after the regular, above ground Super Bowl a second, far more interesting Super Bowl is played beneath the streets of America’s filthiest metropolises. Everything from were-bats to people who have been turned into bats after being exposed to radioactive materials gather in a series of subterranean arenas to determine who is truly the best football player in the seedy underworld of America.

We should mention, underground football has far fewer rules than regular American football. It’s like Aussie rules football, but slightly less brutal: players can carry blunt and edged weapons on to the field and use them to hack and slash at one another until a player is incapacitated, at which point all other players on the field are encouraged to fall upon the downed player and devour them.

This year your team, the Cleveland Mutants, will be up against the Brooklyn CHUDs. It’ll be a grudge match, since the Mutants used to be in Brooklyn back in the day, but as we all know moved to Cleveland when Brooklyn got kinda racist and Ohio threw enough money in the right direction. Both teams will have been hard pressed to get as far as they have so far, but the CHUDs will have put quite a bit of money into getting to the title match: they’ll have attracted more impressive freaks of nature and they’ll have bribed a lot of refs, which is slightly more legal in underground football than it is in regular football.

So tomorrow all bets will be off. It’ll be you: a scrappy group of mutants with no families to speak of, morals to claim or scruples about committing acts of terrible violence against an endless, sniggering horde of cannibalistic humanoids, most of them pretty tiny, a handful of them incredibly large.

Your team will wade into the game wielding bats with nails hammered into them, machetes attached to the end of brooms and fire axes that weren’t carefully secured in the city. A few of your more interesting teammates will also have blades where arms should be on their bodies. The CHUDs will have nothing but teeth, claws, and a lot of money to get their way out of various fouls.

But that money will run out quick, and before you know it the head basket that hangs in your end zone will be full and their head basket will contain only the head of Gary, the insufferable team captain who sought to inspire all of you to succeed. Everyone will be happy, everything will be great and you’ll have won the Underground Super Bowl! Enjoy the brief period of increased adulation and pay before people go back to shitting all over you for being from Cleveland again!

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Me and My M-4!


This is my M-4. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

And I don’t just mean there are a lot of M-4s out there. There most certainly are. But there are also guns that are an awful lot like the M-4 in how they play: the G-36c, the CM901, and the ACR all play an awful lot like the M-4, with nice, quiet, controlled fire and middling power and range backing them up. But I’ve got a soft spot for the M-4, for both its cultural cache, its contemporary significance and its general well roundedness, so when it unlocks it becomes my gun. I’m here to plumb its depths.

Modern Warfare 3 really wants you to do this. It has its unlockable system set up so that you acquire attachments, exchangeable upgrades, weapon skins and even cosmetic changes for your gunsights based on using weapons so that you can unlock these fancy little features. It really makes you want to sit down with a gun, get to know it and carry it around with you for a few hundred hours. Unfortunately the ability to actually create a class with your weapon of choice, along with the ability to invest time and effort in that weapon, is cordoned off until level 4, which takes around an hour and a half of playing to reach.

Immediately after paying my dues this way I hastily created a class while under severe duress from the constantly ticking clock that counts down the time until the next round. I picked my perks all but at random – something called Stalker, which apparently lets me actually move around while looking down my sights (a savvy balancing move considering the heavy favoritism that Modern Warfare usually gives to perks that eliminate the need for silly things like the ironsights they put the time into balancing in the game), something called Recon, which encourages me to throw grenades at random, and something called Quickdraw, which I think I recall from another Modern Warfare game. This is supposed to help me switch between weapons a little faster, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do that. The clock hits zero before I have a chance to pick anything else, like killstreak or deathstreak items, but since I’m just starting out I don’t really have any options to play with in those arenas just yet, so there’s no biggy.

And I am suddenly and violently transported into a dusty, grey-brown realm, surrounded by gunfire and some kid who won’t stop chanting “gay” into his headset mic. A grenade goes off a short distance away, hurled by some invisible foe, and I’m prompted to sprint forward – it’s an old dance, a familiar dance.

I twirl around aimlessly, painfully aware of how out of practice I am. Dual wielded sub-machine guns have apparently come into fashion, and I’m repeatedly cut down by sustained fire from not one but two barrels as I round corners time and time again. Eventually I see someone just before they see me and open fire, barely (just barely) cutting them down. Red tinges my vision, but I’m back in the swing of things. I’m okay running around, aiming down ironsights and pulling my trigger without flinching. The number to the far right is a lot bigger than the number to its left, but I do my best not to get discouraged – I used to be good at this, and becoming decent at it again can be a meta-game all its own for me.

But after the third or fourth kill something unexpected happens – I’ve been told not only that I leveled up (I’m used to seeing that, thanks) but that my weapon has leveled up. My M-4 is apparently now level 2.

After I endure the rest of the match, which I finish with a kills to deaths ratio that would embarrass any sensible person, I decide to step out of the game for a minute to customize my classes. I see that, to my surprise, something new has been unlocked under my assault rifle tree. Usually I only get a notice about this sort of thing when I’ve got a new weapon to play with or when, in Modern Warfares of old, I racked up enough kills to unlock the latest attachment. But now I learn that I’ve acquired a red dot sight for my M-4, and with it a new “Challenge,” which is what Modern Warfare games like to call their quests in the MMO sense.

Apparently if I shoot sixty people while I’m looking through my fancy new red dot sight, I’ll get additional experience. And, judging by the locks next to all the other rows in this “weapon challenges” display, this experience will go towards leveling up my gun so I can get more stuff to slap on to it to fulfill these other challenges.

With this in mind, I go back to the Create Class menu, make four more classes, and then decide that I’m going to ignore them and pursue unlocking every last element of my M-4 with dogged determination into the night. I last another forty minutes before I log off for the night, a paltry dozen or so kills into my gun-quest’s progress.

The next day I blow through it. I also acquire a silencer, a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, some holographic sights and a few weird little symbols that modify my gun’s performance slightly, but don’t have any quests associated with them. Although one of them does let me attach two upgrades to one gun, effectively doubly the rate at which I can complete my gun quests, which is pretty nice. And I’ve got to say, I do enjoy using most of the attachments. Even the ACOG sight, worst of the worst in previous Modern Warfare games, is fun and well suited to its purpose in this iteration. And it’s really hard to feel anything but joy with a silencer strapped to the front of your gun.

But of course, it all can’t be joy. The next day, after I blow through a few more gun quests pleasantly enough and unlock a few new toys I end up with something called a “shotgun attachment.” Apparently my gun isn’t gunny enough, so I’ve duct taped a shotgun barrel to it and I am now being encouraged to shoot forty people with it. Forty!

I set to work immediately.

Two days later I hate the M-4. The shotgun attachment is terrible, and having to struggle through it is like pulling teeth. I put round after round into assholes, and it just won’t kill them – a point blank blast won’t a kill make, and I rarely have time for more. I want the M-4 to fucking die. My psyche is so shattered by the experience that I’m tempted to step away from the M-4 altogether and start seeing other guns, but I persevere. I move on to my quest to murder people while using hybrid sights, my modest K-D in tatters, my love of the M-4 eroded.

By the time I finish with hybrid sights and extended mags to wrap up the gun-quest cycle by using the thermal scope, my love of the M-4 is restored. I think the thermal scope is a little ridiculous, sure, but I go through it all the same. People make fun of me for doing it, but in the end I’ve got all of my little M-4 achievements achieved, and I’m happier for it. And a bunch of other guns unlocked in the mean time, guns I can put myself to work unlocking gun quests for. I shelve my completed M-4 for a CM901, which looks enough like an M-4 to keep me from feeling uncomfortable when I use it. I give my monitor a little kiss as I finish the process – it’s been a wild ride.

There’s a downside to this, of course. Now that I’m done with my M-4, it’s unlikely that I’ll come back to it. As enjoyable as Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer is, some of its problems (the aforementioned clutter I brought up in the last essay which, while somewhat reduced, remains an issue, for example) will keep me from ever playing it in the ravenous, compulsive way I played the original Modern Warfare. I reserve that kind of play for games that traditionally fall into an e-sports model, and I think there has to be a sort of essentialism for an e-sports game to work – an essentialism that Modern Warfare 2 and 3 lacked.

But this feedback loop remains compelling – I spent a month of my life letting it distract me from the also very compelling Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the end it leaves you with a list of things you’ve earned and a nice, pretty, full progress bar in the Barracks sub-menu. And it really does make you feel attached to a weapon and make you feel like you know it. For instance, even though they feel very similar I know my CM901 shoots a little harder and a little slower than my M-4 now, which is a really fine distinction considering how fast guns seem to shoot in Modern Warfare 3 as a rule. Still, the M-4 will always have a special place in my heart as my first fully unlocked weapon in Modern Warfare 3.