Thursday, May 31, 2012

Congratulations on Finishing Off Your Cousin!


There’s a trick to it. You never make eye contact. That’s the trick.

With your wrist straining, your cousin’s face contorted into a rictus, it’ll be hard not to look him in the eye, as if to say “Really? That’s the face you want to make right now?” His breathless gasps will come in as clipped, fractured things. His pants around his ankles will twitch with each quaint spasm and when he finally convulses your hand will slow, then stop altogether, knuckles still tight around the shaft of his cock.

“Thanks,” he’ll breathe away from you, his hands darting downwards to shove yours away from his penis. Your fingers will be sopped through with a mix of lubricant and semen, which will seem odd. Semen, in the movies, always flies away. You won’t know how it got on your hand since, in addition to not looking at his face, you weren’t looking at his dick.

As he buttons up his pants you’ll look around for a paper towel or something, anything, to clean yourself up. Your best bet will be an old, stained white t-shirt on your cousin’s bedroom floor. You’ll pick it up and wipe your hand clean without him noticing. Then you’ll check your clothes to make sure you’re clean and walk out, suddenly incredibly happy that you decided not to go all the way with him.

Congratulations on Finishing Off Your Cousin!

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Congratulations on Capturing That Ancient Evil In Your Stepmom's Corpse!


Your stepmom is a total bitch. That’s why you killed her with a piano wire. But it turns out Johnny Law gets all up in arms when you murder someone, at least when they weren’t trying to murder you, so now you’ve got a whole new can-o-worms to deal with in the form of your stepmom’s dead body.

But, years ago, you made a pact with a demon whose name cannot be spoken with our mortal language, in exchange for some funyuns and a stylish hat that went out of style back in the mid-oughts. You told it you’d help it break into this world or, failing that, grant it your immortal soul to toy with for all eternity. So, with the vessel of your stepmom’s course inside of a protective salt circle and a bunch of cats to sacrifice, you’re going to bring your demon buddy into the world, feet first.

I RETURN,” the shapeless evil will screech.

“Awesome!” you’ll clap your hands and laugh in a moment of self-congratulation. “So far so good.”

WHY AM I SUMMONED?” The voice will skirt along the room, seeking purchase.

“My stepmom is dead and I want you to take her body. You just have to promise not to murder me and you have to pretend to be my stepmom, at least until I move out of my dad’s house.”

WHY HAVEN’T YOU MOVED OUT ALREADY? YOU’RE ALMOST FORTY,” the voice will have a mocking edge to it, like it’s judging you.

“Look, I’m still getting my shit together, okay? Do you want this corpse or not?”

The voice will turn silent for a few seconds, then erupt anew.

IT IS ACCEPTABLE.

A storm of light and fury will fill the room, penetrating your eyes, your ears, your very mind and, of course, your stepmom’s corpse. The corpse will lurch forward and backward, head shifting at odd angles as it finds new purchase upon your stepmom’s neck, still gashed open from the piano wire. Your stepmom’s body will shudder, her eyes will fly open and skin around her throat will close suddenly. Her fingers will snap into fists and then relax. Then the corpse will rise to its feet and grin.

It is accomplished,” she’ll murmur. Then your stepmom’s demon inhabited body will cross the salt circle and start doing your laundry, which is a relief because you’ll almost be out of clean clothes at this point and you’re totally incapable of fending for yourself for even a short period of time.

Congratulations on Capturing That Ancient Evil In Your Stepmom’s Corpse!

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Congratulations on Using Your Hand-Mirror to Save Everyone in the Mine Shaft!


You know how McGuyver sometimes used common household items to solve big problems? Today you’re going to do that. Sort of. When the mine shaft collapses, people are going to freak out. Hardcore. They’ll be running around, trying to figure out who’s going to be eaten first, determining whether or not there’s any air flowing into the tiny pocket of rock that has become your home.

Everyone but you. You’ll just be standing there, smirking at yourself, holding your hand mirror. Your mine-buddies will have made fun of you for carrying that around for years, almost a whole decade, but you never listened to them. You never listened to them because you knew the truth behind the mirror, that it was far, far more than a simple vanity. That it was, in fact, the prison for a powerful djinn.

So while your co-miners are screaming at one another, brandishing pickaxes and trying to figure out who’s gonna die first, you’ll open the mirror, shine your headlamp into it and calmly say “I’d like to make a wish please.”

A flash of light will ensue, a torrent of energy coursing forth from the mirror. The light and energy will coalesce, converge and form into a shape vaguely reminiscent of a man without legs, his torso fading into a vague drift of energy tapering towards the ground. The apparition’s skin will take on an almost un-nameable color, simultaneously orange and yellow and pure pale blue. Its eyes will be white, beaming out towards the universe, filling the cave with ethereal light.

“YOU HAVE SUMMONED THE DJINN OF MANNERS LITTLE FLESHLING. SPEAK YOUR WILL POLITELY.”

Your co-miners will stop running around and stare at the giant creature of light in front of them. Their chattering will fall to silence, and the only sound in the cave will be that of their pick-axes hitting the ground.

“I’d very much appreciate it if you saved me and my douchebag co-workers from this cave-in,” you’ll tell the djinn.

The djinn, ever thorough, will smile at you. “WOULD YOU ALSO LIKE VERY MUCH TO SAVE THE NON-DOUCHEBAG CO-WORKERS IN THIS CAVE-IN?”

You’ll smile and nod back at him. “I’d love it, old friend.”

He’ll laugh a belly laugh and teleport you and all of your co-miners out of the mine and into a giant field filled with Cadbury Cream Eggs.

“SEE YOU NEXT TIME,” the djinn will say as his body fades back towards the mirror. You’ll wave at him, smiling, as your co-workers stare at you.

“It’s been a pleasure as always,” you’ll whisper into the mirror as you snap it closed.

“Why did you wish for a job as something other than a miner?” your non-douchebag co-worker will ask. You’ll smile and shake your head at him, largely because your severe brain trauma, which you could also wish away, will prevent you from forming a coherent answer.

Congratulations on Using Your Hand-Mirror to Save Everyone in the Mine Shaft!

Monday, May 28, 2012

Congratulations on Growing Mold Where No Mold Has Grown Before!


There aren’t a lot of places where mold hasn’t grown on earth. Technically it’s growing all the time under the ocean, where we’re largely unsure of just what’s going on. It’s in caves, even caves we haven’t been in. It’s in our houses, our basements, our root cellars. The only place mold isn’t necessarily is at the top of really high mountains.

Mold’s been trying to grow up there for a long, long time, though. But since mold acts a lot of independent agency, it needs some help to get there. That’s where you come in.

You’re a notoriously dirty mountaineer, a champion of mold and a fan of mid-eighties hip hop music about hat stores. You’ve carried moss to the peaks of most mountains in continental America, and mold has celebrated you for it, withholding its consumption of your genitals until such a time as it believes it is necessary.

Today you’re going to fulfill your ultimate destiny. Today you’re going to climb to the top of Mount Everest, alone, and let mold lay its precious little spores up there at the top of the world.

It’ll be a long, arduous climb. Over the course of the climb you’ll break one arm, one leg and lose one lung. But the mold will fill in the gaps in bone and the failing flesh and flex itself, giving you the strength you need to reach the summit, the ultimate peak in the world. Once you get there your life will be ebbing, but you won’t care. You’ll plant your flag, grin at the sun, and then let the cold overtake you.

The mold, with its heart in the center of your crotch, will silently applaud you for your efforts. Then it’ll consume your entire body before the heat leaves it and let the cold come and freeze it inside your corpse, waiting for a day when global warming allows it to explode out of your corpse and propagate itself across the earth.

Congratulations on Growing Mold Where No Mold Has Grown Before!

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Star Wars Chores!


In the past, MMO lategames have always stood as anathema to me. Not because I don’t enjoy big time investments. I LOVE big time investments, that’s part of why I’m a gamer. If you don’t like spending a lot of time doing one thing reading books and playing video games aren’t really activities for you. No, I hate the lategame of MMOs because they usually, almost always, take the form of work. It’s essentially a set of time commitments or daily activities you need, absolutely need, to participate in. You’ll get a schedule from your manager (guildmaster) and pound away at your tasks until they’re done. Granted, your tasks might be things like “kill everything in this magical fantasy valley” instead of “alphabetize these files before 5 PM” but it’s still essentially a job. Best case scenario, it’s a set of chores that you’re asked to do and, should you choose to avoid them, do not experience any adverse consequences for choosing to do so. Though you will feel like you’ve achieved less and your character, which is an analogy for your apartment in this situation I guess, will be kind of a mess.

I’ve just started investing myself in Star Wars: The Old Republic’s lategame content, and they do this in spades. With Daily Quests that you’re asked to engage in time and time again, end-game instances that insist on being run multiple times so that each and every member of your party can get their absolute best gear, it can get out of hand quickly. I’ve spent three hours a day every day of my vacation doing my SWTOR chores over the last two weeks, and it’s been fucking killing me. I finish my daily quests feeling exhausted rather than refreshed. Instead of feeling ready to attack the day I think about what else I could play to recharge my batteries a little and get ready to plan that lesson or rework that poem. It’s kind of a nightmare. So why am I still doing it?

There are three answers to this. One is that Star Wars: The Old Republic is just fun to play. Add lightsabers to a game and holy shit, you got me. I will do whatever you ask me to do to get me a little bit of that glowing stick action. I will play fucking Cooking Mama if she has a lightsaber. As repetitive as this late game content is, it’s still SWTOR and I’m still a destructive whirlwind of dark side energy, ripping up everything around me as quick as I can. It’s tough to be annoyed during SWTOR’s admittedly rote combat gameplay, by sheer merit of its inherent specatacle.

The second, more honest answer is that SWTOR paces its late-game content quite well, rewarding players consistently and providing them with some pretty nice carrots for enduring effort. In just over a week of playing daily-quest content I’ve got from having 12,000 hit points (putting me at the low end of being able to engage with late-game content) to having 15,000 hit points. Instead of struggling through fights I tear them down. I’ve got from thinking my Powertech was like playing the game on easy-mode to relishing my time with my marauder, stacking up rage and unleashing it in torrents that drop enemy health like it’s hot. My character has improved dramatically in a very short period of time, arguably more than she did when she was leveling up normally, and she’s looking to get a lot stronger in the next few weeks. I’ve still got two major pieces of daily equipment to get my hands on, and then there are the crafting recipes that you can grab with daily commendations. I can see myself doing daily quests and getting a lot out of it for at least two more months, maybe more if Bioware continues expanding daily content the way they have been with the Legacy updates. And it’s tough to see any other future for SWTOR: their subscription fees seem to be paying into little mini-expansions that stick around and really do make the game…better!

Which leads into the last reason I’m still playing: all of the lategame content is gated behind this daily system of repetition, and all of this lategame content still has story material in it. And this story material is still driving me to play. I’ve finished up every ounce of class and companion story available to the Sith Warrior at this point. I’m still working on cracking the Bounty Hunter. I plan on playing through every class story in due time, though I’m not invested in it right now, given the combination of my SWTOR chores and work in general. But the story, even the promise of additional story, is still a big draw for me. I really, really want to see new parts of this world, even if they look a lot like parts I’ve already experienced. SWTOR tells a damn good story, and its Flashpoints are a stroke of genius. I’m already chomping at the bit to piss off my party mates by actually taking the time to listen to the story when I play end-game content (another problem with SWTOR being the disconnect between a largely more civil than usual MMO player base and an min-maxing end-game player base every bit as douchey as any other game’s).

I don’t expect it to be anywhere as involved as the wonderful storytelling that populates any of the class storylines. But I do think it’ll be enjoyable. I want more bite-sized SWTOR story chunks in my life, and thanks to the late-game repetition engine, I’m going to get them.

That said, it would be lovely if there was a way to avoid making the entire game feel like one big chore. I understand why the Daily Quests are Daily Quests, why mechanics are in place to prevent players from grinding the game until it eats itself or to keep them from ruining the economy of play. But it still feels odd to reluctantly play a game just to make sure I’ve done what I can with it for a given day. Today’s the first day I’ve taken off of my SWTOR chores in a week, and it feels liberating to do so. But I’m still lamenting the daily commendations I’m giving up by not playing right now. Maybe I can still get them tonight, after I’ve done everything else I want to do today. I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Congratulations Ejaculate Jackson Pollock!


This one’s pretty simple. You make paintings by jerking off on to campus. You then sometimes splatter paint on the canvas as well, but mostly you’re just jerking off while thinking about the concept you title the painting after.

You used to do landscapes, but then you tried this shit and it worked out really well for you financially so you just kept at it. We’d feel bad for you if you weren’t so hilariously successful.

Today you’re going to start your first major gallery show in Minneapolis. Your work will sell like hotcakes. We don’t necessarily dig it, even though we get the concept, but we’re not going to begrudge you your success. We will recommend that you branch out your interests, especially before fall of 2014, when ejaculation art won’t be nearly as gauche as it is today.

Do with this advice what you will, and try to be a little less pretentious in general. Also, stop wearing that hat.

Congratulations Ejaculate Jackson Pollock!

Friday, May 25, 2012

Congratulations on Telling Her How You Really Feel!


“Look, it’s just… It’s too big for me.”

By her facial expression it’ll be immediately apparent that she’ll think you’re talking about her vagina. You’ll scramble to recover.

“Not that! The books.”

You’ll let your hand rest on the pile of George R.R. Martin books that she’ll have stacked next to your bed. They’ll rise above the box frame and mattress that you sleep on. If you were standing you think they’d come over your knee, but you won’t want to stand. You’ll know that this is a tender moment, and that standing up would destroy any chance the two of you have at making it through together. So you’ll pat those books and look at her with your doe-iest of eyes.

“I don’t know if I can read all of these.”

She’ll shrug at you, unwashed hair shuffling over her eyes with the gesture. “I’m reading your dumb book.” She’ll punctuate her sentence by trying to blow some of her hair off her face futilely. A single strand will lift up and then fall back down across her nose. It’ll be adorable.

You’ll sigh. “Neuromancer is like half the length of one of these books. And you said you liked it.”

She’ll lean her shoulders forward and fold her arms so that her breasts press against them. It’ll look kind of uncomfortable, but it’ll also accentuate how big her breasts are and make you want to push her back on your bed and just make out with her until she forgets about books. But that would, at best, postpone this conversation and, far more likely, backfire disastrously, and you’ll know it. So you’ll take your hand off the book pile and spin around on your ass so you’re sitting down facing her criss-cross-applesauce. She’ll look up at you from her breasts through a tangled network of vines of hair.

“I don’t wanna dismiss your interests, and I really like you. And I’ll try to read one of them. But I started the first one and I’m not sure I like it. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, it just means I don’t like something as much as you do. But I don’t want you to think the way I feel about the books is the way I feel about you. Or us.” You’ll crane your head underneath her chin so you’re looking up at her. “Maybe we can compromise.”

She’ll mumble something in response. You’ll lean in close to hear her better, ear turned towards her, eyes fixed indistinctly on your own sheets, the unspoken question, when did I change these last?

Her response will be unexpected. First the lips, then the tongue, then her teeth lapping upwards across your ear. Then her hands on your arms, spinning you into place, pushing you back with the strength and speed of shock until she’s sitting on top of you, jeans against your jeans, fabric already beginning to strain in wonderful agony. She’ll lean in close to your face so her hair hangs over you too, so you’re inside of the vines now, looking up at her eyes, nose, lips.

“I said I guess you only have to read the first one,” she’ll murmur down, no louder than before. You’ll hear her just fine this time.

“That sounds fair,” you’ll whisper back up. Her lips will split, expose teeth, and then you’ll lose sight of them as her mouth darts towards yours.

Congratulations on Telling Her How You Really Feel!

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Congratulations Joey Fatone!


N’Sync was a thing, way back in the ninties, when we were young and dead people like FDR were just old. Look it up kids.

But nowadays they’re all off and doing their own thing. Or own sing, in Justin Timberlake’s case. Lance Bass is happily married or making new parody boy bands or something, Chris Kirkpatrick is dealing coke out of his parent’s basement and JC Chasez is, we think, dead, maybe?

Which leaves you, Joey Fatone.

We always liked you. You were the member of N’Sync that we all identified with. You were down to earth, nice. You didn’t smoke or drink and we didn’t think you’d fuck our girlfriends given a chance even though you could.

Things haven’t been great for you of late, we’ll admit. You’ve been largely ignored for some pretty solid acting, excluding movies with the words “Big Fat Greek” in the title, and a normal life is out of the question since you were in N’Sync.

But today it’s all going to turn around. Today you’re going to find a penny, face up on the street. Enjoy!

Congratulations Joey Fatone!

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Congratulations on Teaching Those Aliens to Love One Another!


You thought your life was over when those aliens took you into their spaceship just outside of Tucson, and to some extent you were right. Existentially, your life was over the moment you were born, and realistically you were never going to be released by those aliens. You’re an insufferable prick, and you knew they’d suss it out sooner or later and figure out that the Earth as a planet was way better off without you.

But what you didn’t realize was that these aliens generated music almost exclusively by torturing captured humans. See, to them the screams of each human have a unique pitch and tenor that evoke emotions. Some people scream in a way that makes people want to jump around and slam into one another. Some people scream in a way that makes people want to chill out and discuss just how interesting the world is. And some people scream in a way that makes aliens want to fuck.

Turns out your screams are basically the alien equivalent to Al Greene. When you start to shriek as a barbed phallus is inserted into your rectum, aliens want to get biz-zay and freakay. In that order. When your voice is hoarse from having your nipples twisted and seared with isopropyl alcohol, they can’t help but unzip their flies. And when they hear it all live, it’s an amazing experience, a literal orgy of tentacles and alien genitals we really can’t accurately describe here.

Sure, you’re going to die in a month after you succumb to the tremendous physical trauma that aliens expose you to in order to get your sweet sweet screams out. But before that happens, long before that happens, you’re going to realize that this, this life of being constantly tortured by strange creatures from the stars so that you can bring their culture considerable joy, is the greatest thing you can achieve in life. And that realization, while really, really bittersweet, will kind of make the whole state of affairs more bearable.

Congratulations on Teaching Those Aliens to Love One Another!

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Congratulations on Leaving Your Apartment!


Blackout shades will have been drawn for almost three weeks at this point, possibly longer. You’ll only have been keeping track for three weeks, the period wherein time began again, following his departure, his last departure from this place, this space, this absolute lack of rhythm with full carpet and half a kitchen. By now you’ll be low on ramen, low on mac n cheese. The bag of rice will be holding up, but your soy sauce supply will verge on critical.

Cereal will be okay: a month ago you’ll have made the trip to Costco, where you can just buy garbage bags of the shit. But milk won’t be quite so forgiving. So today, when you get up and pour your start of the day bowl of Depressarios then wander to the fridge to get milk you won’t know what to do when the container sits there, totally empty.

You’ll consider cutting your cereal with water, but for some reason that won’t feel right. That’ll feel like letting him win, like if you do that he’ll really have been totally right about you. You’ll check your fridge a second time, then a third. No other milk in there, not even some questionable rice milk. Your cabinets will be bereft of powdered milk, possibly the only non-perishable food absent from your pantry. You’ll stand there in your kitchen, cabinets shut, fridge closed, holding your shoes, wondering if the potential exists for milk to simply spontaneously appear in your kitchen if you nap hard enough. It will seem implausible.

You’ll think about the walk down the hall, the looks you’ll be sure to encounter, the grimaces and groans of your neighbors, the potential for mumbles as you stride out of your building, down the street and into the corner store, where you’ll have to purchase milk with a debit card because you’ll have used up all your cash paying delivery people. You’ll think of the kids in do-rags, the old men in aviators, every possible reason to stay indoors.

Then you’ll think of his face, sneer upturned underneath glasses, shimmering in the light of the television. You’ll think of how he’d say you can’t even grab milk without me, jesus, the unspoken pathetic behind his eyes behind his glasses. You’ll chew your lip and slip your shoes on without socks. Open your door. Step out.

The light at the end of the hall will be dim, bright. It won’t be painful, not yet, but you’ll know in your heart that it’ll be painful once you get into the stairwell, where it’ll be brighter, more immediate. It’ll be painful, you’ll think, but worth it to keep eating cereal. Your Converse will squish with your first step down the hall, sweat already soaking into the insert.

Congratulations on Leaving Your Apartment!

Monday, May 21, 2012

Congratulations Backwards Betty!


You’re Betty, and you do everything backwards. Well, almost everything. This isn’t one of those Benjamin Button situations. You age normally. And you form and end relationships normally, loving people at first and then hating them by the time you’re finished with them.

But you do everything else backwards. Case in point:

Today you’re going to be giving a guy a blowjob while you’re on the bottom of a sixty-nine (which is just non-sense!) and then you’re going to ask him to fuck you in your favorite position: reverse cowgirl. He’ll be super excited.

“I love reverse cowgirl!” he’ll announce to his roommate, who will be videotaping the two of you. He’ll nod in response and then nod at you, as if to say “go for it.”

Then you’ll flip him on his back with your freakish strength, look him deep in the eyes and BOOP, inside you’ll go.

You’ll ride him while he stares up at you, mystified and uncomfortable, for a full minute and a half. Then the combination of your vagina and your eye contact will be too much for him to bear and he’ll come inside you without warning.

“Thanks a lot for that, buddy,” you’ll say without one whit of sarcasm. Then you’ll go to his bathroom and brush your teeth with his toothbrush while peeing and thinking about dropping out of school so that you can attend the University of Phoenix online.

Congratulations Backwards Betty!

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Scarcity and Tension!


There’s a rule in games, occasionally spoken but mostly tacit, that video games shouldn’t contain fail states. Period. End of discussion. If your video game has a fail state in it, you’re doing something wrong. If a player needs an item and they can’t get it because of some pre-existing condition within the game, you’ve made a bad game and you should feel bad.

This often manifests itself in the elimination of a sense of need in games. In Call of Duty, I never want for bullets, even though I’m shooting fucking hundreds of them. I also never want for health: I can just chill and regenerate my health behind some sort of incredible cover if I choose to. There are games that take this even further. Fear 3, much as I loved it, lacked even the most remote sense of want, especially while playing as Paxton Fettel, a crazy ghost who blasted enemies with psychic energy and took their bodies at will. So long as you were alive, you never wanted for a way to attack people.

Other games layer the scarcity of elements through supply mechanics. In the original Halo, if you want to use a particular gun you’re likely going to have to conserve ammo at one point or another in the game. But if you choose to just use whatever’s lying around, you’ll never really have a problem finding something to hit your enemy with. It allows players to establish some tension within the game, if they want to, by making each bullet count. This is a very inelegant solution, though: you can abandon it in a heartbeat, and enemies in Halo drop guns like its gun Christmas. You should never really have trouble with ammo in Halo.

Other games cap your ammo supply at a fairly low level. Far Cry 2, for example, never let you carry more than three clips for any given weapon. Even if you upgraded your kit completely, you’d never be more than a hundred rounds away from being totally bullet-dry. And while ammo stockpiles were interspersed through combat heavy areas, they were pretty finite. Along with a reward system which kept enemies from dropping substantial amounts of ammo, it made for some tense gameplay, where a gunfight could turn against a player quickly if they didn’t watch their ammo.

Tense is a good word to use here, because that’s what I’m interested in: tension, and how mechanics emerge to reinforce it. Because tension, contrary to contemporary development values, it often feels, is good. Tension feeds conflict, engages players and gives them challenges to overcome more often. Far Cry 2’s tension is a big part of its play: you’re always making choices about how best to address situations in Far Cry 2. Another game with some shallow clips for most of its guns, Just Cause 2, presented players with a bevy of choices and forced them to choose between none of them, effectively undercutting any sense of scarcity that might’ve existed within the game.

So tension isn’t simply a matter of supply: it’s a matter of tying supply to making important decisions. Think about Resident Evil. The original Resident Evil, not the new run and gun Resident Evils. Back in the day Resident Evil asked you to make tough choices about how and when to fight. If you tried to shoot zombies at the wrong moment, you’d lose all your ammo. If you refused to shoot zombies at the wrong moment, they’d murder you horribly. Managing your limited resources, in this case bullets, correctly was key to succeeding in the game. And there was no exact science to it. You made a choice and you dealt with the consequences. Simple as that.

Traditionally this mechanic appears in survival horror games, but it often raises the stakes in other genres in some inventive ways. Far Cry 2 and Bioshock, for example, only presents players with a finite amount of currency throughout the game. This means that you have to make choices constantly: do you want to upgrade the weapon you’re using or unlock a new toy? Do you get a support tonic or that plasmid that lets you shoot bees out of your hand? Your decision, once it’s been made, will have consequences, and cannot be undone. All sales are final.

Metro 2033 took this mechanic one step further, making ammunition and currency the same thing. You literally traded bullets to acquire equipment and weapons, bullets that were incredibly useful when you actually shot them at enemies. The end result was a decidedly non-horror game (that had some horror elements in it, I’ll admit) that infused itself with a constant sense of tension. Every shot became a choice. Do you use one of your precious military grade bullets to take out that bandit in one hit? Or risk missing him with a pneumatic weapon that does less damage, fires much more slowly and won’t impact your wallet?

It’s worth noting that the tension instilled by these games isn’t the tension that comes from generating a fail state if you make a wrong choice. It’s a tension that derives from having to deal with real consequences for the decisions you make in a game. If a resource needed to do something important is scarce, your decision on how to use it matters. A lot. And if there’s no right decision, dealing with consequences, oftentimes unexpected consequences, that stem from just playing the game, rather than interacting with a moment in the game that presents an explicit choice, is that much more engaging.

This revelation came to me when I was thinking about why Amnesia just didn’t really work as a horror game: there was no sense of tension or stakes within it. There were no resources to manage, and the consequences for failing to deal with a situation were always just a hard reset. There was never a moment that required me to make a choice that would have immediate and enduring consequences that changed the shape of the game. So developers, consider how tension works in your games and how scarcity works, not as a potential fail-safe generator, but as a means by which to force players to make tough decisions. Don’t fear frustrating your players so much that you fail to present them with meaningful challenges.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Congratulations Classy Dope Fiend!


Rising from the subway, you’ll straighten your tie as you move up the stairs two at a time. Your pants, somewhat wrinkled, will fall upon your body gloriously. Your suit jacket, despite its lack of buttons, will be breathtaking: each step you take will make it billow and fall like a cape.

When you reach the top of the stairs you’ll crack your neck and smile up at the sky. It’ll be one of those beautiful, beautiful days that emerge unexpectedly in Boston, days that make life worth living. You’ll smile at all the people around you, taking them in. Then, after spotting someone who looks like they could be intimidated into giving you money, you’ll charge towards them, chewing your bottom lip as you walk uncomfortably quickly towards them.

It’ll be a middle aged woman in a suit, clutching her purse, looking around like she’s lost.

“Got any change?” you’ll ask. She’ll shake her head and you’ll grab her arm. “You sure?” you’ll ask her again, looking deep into her eyes with your piercing baby blues. She’ll shake her head again, this time reaching into her purse. You’ll put your hand on hers and flash that surprisingly white smile of yours at her. Her unease will melt away in a heartbeat as she loses herself in your eyes.

Flash forward fifteen minutes, you’ll be having missionary position sex on top of her bedroom dresser while she silently gasps into your throat. When you’re finished she’ll be exhausted and you, once you’re sure she’s too zoned out to notice it, will steal everything in her apartment that you can carry, taking it to a pawn shop your “friend” Alfie owns, where you’ll pawn it in exchange for some heroin, which you absolutely love.

Congratulations Classy Dope Fiend!

Friday, May 18, 2012

Congratulations High Dive Drama Queen!


OH

MY

FUCKING

GOD.

Please please please shut the fuck up. We get it. You’re diving and it’s super high. You do not, absolutely do not, need to keep telling us just how high it is.

“It’s like thirty feet,” you’ll tell the bagger at the grocery store who, news flash, is thinking about when he’ll be able to convince his co-worker, Bernice, the one with the tits, to come with him in the stock room so that they can have unprotected sex behind a box of Kraft Mac n Cheese.

“Some people would be scared of the heights I jump from,” you’ll inform the waiter at the restaurant where you’re eating alone. “But I don’t have the natural instincts that keep people alive in society in general, like fear.” By the time you finish he’ll no longer be listening. He’ll be staring out the window at the intersection the restaurant sits near, licking his lips, praying for a van to swerve wildly and crash through the plate glass window that looks out at the intersection, changing the hideous course of his life and, good lord willing, maiming you.

“I guess I’m pretty brave,” you’ll tell your live-in boyfriend as he finishes packing his things into boxes. He won’t bother telling you he’s leaving. He’ll know you’re not listening. He’ll just turn the lights out while you keep talking, closing his eyes and drifting off to sleep on the couch.

You won’t speak to yourself as you lay in bed alone, thinking of the heights you jump from. At one point, for the briefest of moments at three in the morning, you’ll think that maybe there’s more to life than diving into water from tremendous heights. In a flash you’ll consider if you’re alone because you can’t step outside of your own high-belly-floppin’ drama for five god damn minutes, or if it’s because you can’t show interest in another human being for more than a few seconds. But that thought will vanish ere long, replaced with thoughts of how cool it is to jump high. Self-reflection will have been averted. Thank god.

Congratulations High Dive Drama Queen!

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Congratulations Neologism Nate!


You make up new words.

That’s all you do.

“Chumpsolth.”

That was you in 1991, during the first Gulf War, when you were just starting out and needed a word to describe the suffering of bored soldiers forced into a war they didn’t understand with adequate support and often inadequate mission descriptions. Also, exposure to some pretty awful chemicals.

“Grudcheque.”

That’s a word you invented in 2007 for the rising price of cheese on the national market. It came in handy for a small number of very strange economists who wanted to talk almost exclusively about why cheese imports from new and interesting places started to displace cheese imports from France.

“Awekrakular.”

That’s a word you made up to describe how great the idea of a kraken is in one movie (Lord of the Rings) and how awful it is in another movie (Rise of the Titans). It’s also a word you often lend out to people who want to have sex with giant squids. It’s been around for a while, but its meaning is being constantly refined.

Today you’re going to kill it yet again with a new word invented just for our cupcakes.

“Granutastacular.”

This word will indicate how awesome something that makes you feel gross can be if you eat it when you’re drunk or stoned. It’ll be a lesson in how we should eschew our perception on the importance of preconceptions in society and how we all need to become more open people in general. It’ll also make perfect sense to stoned people, who will be the primary audience/user base for this word moving ahead.

Great work all around!

Congratulations Neologism Nate!

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Congratulations Fuckface!


Normally the term you see above is reserved for people who are particularly shitty human beings. Congress people, used car salesmen, people who wear baseball caps high on their heads indoors. We’re not about that today.

Today we’re all about celebrating just how much we want to fuck that face.

You’ve got the total package going on there, and we’re not gonna lie: we’ve noticed. Those thick, juicy DSLs are just the most obvious quality. You also have a pert, healthy tongue that flicks out across your lips every few minutes when you’re not trying to keep yourself from lapping at your own chompers. It keeps those delightful slices of flesh suggestively moist, not too moist, just moist enough. It also draws attention away from your chin, which is somehow perfectly formed so that it could be missed if you weren’t paying attention to it. It’s not weak, and it’s not strong: it just is.

Paired with eyes that glisten up, just full of emotion and a nose bold enough to accent your face’s perfect symmetry but not so bold as to overwhelm your low cheekbones. And the expression you have, that half smile, those sad eyes… It’s almost too much to bear not to buy you a cake with an elaborate icing message telling you just how badly we want to be inside your mouth.

Anyhow, you’re going to win the no-bag raffle at Trader Joe’s today and we thought it made for a good excuse to tell you how much we wanted to fuck your face. We hope you don’t mind, and we hope you enjoy your free groceries. If we could make a recommendation: Charles Shaw wine is cheap and, for the price, good at what it does.

Also, we hope we didn’t weird you out with all the mouth sex stuff.

Congratulations Fuckface!

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Congratulations Spanx Marketeer!


You market Spanx, the underwear that women over 40 and men who care about how they look wear all the time and today you’re gonna fuggin’ kill it.

You’re going to buy ad time during This American Life through an unprecedented handshake agreement with the Public Broadcast Service (it’ll be considered a “donation” but it’ll come with five minutes of straight discussion about how great Spanx are). It’ll hit every single target demo you want and it’ll be a fucking steal, since PBS doesn’t actually know how much advertising costs.

After hearing all those insufferable douchebags liberals, fags, queens and dykes, along with conservatives who are ashamed of how liberal they feel deep down inside, will flock to stores and the internet in droves to try and get the fancy underwear your bosses want to sell so desperately.

It’ll be a huge success and Spanx sales will never be higher. Ever again. Which will fall upon your shoulders in a few months, when, under concerns of brand stagnation, the Spanx board of directors will fire you for failing to sustain the growth trend you were hired to generate.

You win some and you lose some, we guess.

Congratulations Spanx Marketeer!

Monday, May 14, 2012

Congratulations Adult Phantom Tollbooth Lover!


If you’re an adult and you love The Phantom Tollbooth, there’s nothing wrong with you. Far from it, you’re totally normal. But if you’re an adult and you talk about loving The Phantom Tollbooth all the time, you’re kinda weird.

It’s not that the book doesn’t warrant sustained thought, or that we’re not thinking about it right now. That shit is hot, and it stays with you for a lifetime.

It’s just that adults are supposed to suppress their feelings all the time, especially with regards to literature. If you like a work of literature you’re supposed to be either kind of catty and high handed about it, or to shut up and read it three or four times a year in accordance with the rules of hermitry outlined by J.D. Salinger in the mid-ninties.

It’s not the right way for the world to be, though, and you know it. Which is why today it’s going to be such a relief when your daughter turns seven, and is finally old enough to read and begin to discuss The Phantom Tollbooth.

You’ll give her a copy of the book, wrapped in a ribbon, for her birthday, today. Then you’ll wait for her to talk to you about it. You won’t want to chance ruining a single part of that incredible book for her.

When she comes out of her room, dazed a few days later, wiping tears and sleeplessness from her eyes, she’ll look up at you with wonderment.

“Was any of it real, daddy?” she’ll yawn.

You’ll smile back down at her.

“That’s a very good question.”

What follows will be one of the most enriching conversations of your life, adult or otherwise. It’ll be spectacular.

Congratulations Adult Phantom Tollbooth Lover!

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Legacy of The Old Republic!


It’s been a while since I’ve written about Star Wars: The Old Republic, but that’s not for lack of playing it. It has become for me a sort of “zone out” game, and during my vacation week it’s taken up a huge (kind of embarrassing) portion of my time. It has a familiar, almost too simple style of play, paired with a pleasant feedback loop and an endgame aimed at allowing players to continue to participate in the game is pretty much any way they like. It’s polished, polished, polished to a fine sheen, but I’ve said that before and other people who have invested more time in the end game of SWTOR are better equipped to discuss it (at present my /played time on my only maxed out character is a paltry 7 days, less than half of what my end-game invested friend has put into SWTOR at this point).

What I do want to write about, because it’s sort of singular and incredible, is the Legacy system.

The Legacy system was advertised as “a way to allow players to construct relationships between their characters and generate their own fiction within the Star Wars Universe.” It is, of course, not really this at all, but it’s been packaged as such so you could be excused for believing that it is some sort of spontaneous family tree generator.

There are definitely parts of family-tree generator stuck on there. You can drag around faces and tie together family members. You can marry two characters or establish an improbable mother figure for a character or father figure or just say that you adopted another character. And all of your characters, after you choose your Legacy, will have the same last name. So for the love of god, choose your Legacy name with care. I don’t need to see a bunch of the Colehausersucks family fighting for the freedom of Balmora or whatever. It’s just not something I want in my Star Wars experience.

But mostly this familial relationship thing is pretty de-coupled from gameplay. Marrying characters doesn’t disqualify you from romancing other characters, and the Legacy system even allows for same sex relationships (which are woefully absent from SWTOR’s story/crew segments – I still really want to see my Sith and Vette hook up). So in a sense we’re looking at a more progressive, totally ineffectual move towards making SWTOR a more grown up place for us all to play. Thanks Bioware!

I shouldn’t be facetious, because Bioware did do something incredible with the Legacy system: they added an imbedded series of end game money sink content for some players who spend lots of time grinding, and they added a wonderful way to make each new character generation easier than the last. Because the Legacy system doesn’t just let you drag things around and make a story no one else will hear (or understand if you try to tell them about it) that ties your characters together or spend scads of time and money to make some of your global cooldowns slightly quicker. The Legacy system also gives you some amazing shit.

First and foremost, there’s the buff sharing between Legacy characters. This means every character in your Legacy who has completed chapter 2 of their main story shares their buff with all other characters in your Legacy group. If you complete it with a Sith Warrior, any of your characters who use their normal buff will, in addition to their standard effect, get the Sith Warrior’s damage boost effect. This makes replaying the game considerably easier since, as every nerd knows, 5% is actually a pretty huge bonus when you come right down to it.

This also means there’s a good reason to max out each and every kind of character, beyond just seeing the story unfold. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the story. But the fact that there’s a real, positive feedback loop for exposing yourself to other parts of the story is a stroke of genius. The fact that each story play through gets easier, since you’ll now have access to a bevy of buffs and funds from other characters, is icing on the cake.

You’ll also acquire, along the way, “Legacy weapon components.” For a bundle of credits and some other stuff you can trade these pieces in for new, pretty nice gear at some vendors in Faction areas. This keeps you from having to rely on random drops for crucial pieces of gear at various times, and it gives you a nice incentive, as if the other Legacy bonuses didn’t, to play through different characters, since your acquisition of these Legacy components is tied to progress on your main class’ storyline.

And then there are the abilities. Through your Legacy tree you’ll unlock abilities, after clearing your entire class storyline, that other classes can use. Most of these aren’t so great: they can only be accessed when you’re using a Heroic Moment ability, which is a pretty slim window, and most of them, while useful, are abilities that are traditionally spammed for most classes. Still, it’s a nice touch, and these abilities are not parallel between Imperial and Republic characters, so there’s a real reason to go out of your way and max out characters from both sides, though it’s not much of one, I’ll admit.

I’ve just now realized I’ve essentially reconstituted copy for SWTOR’s website, and I don’t actually have a lot to say about the whole Legacy system, spare: wow. Not for the way it tries to get players to invent their own fiction, something players have never needed encouragement to do at any point ever in the past, ever. Not for the way it gives players access to a new kind of equipment which, I have to be honest, I’ve never seen used ever. But for the fact that it encourages players to explore every element of the game, and that it makes it easier and easier to do so and rewards those players for taking their exploration to its conclusion. There aren’t rewards for going halfway in the Legacy system (only two-thirds of the way), so in order to get anything out of playing a given class you really have to learn it, get to know its mechanics, strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been playing a Powertech for the last few weeks and loving it, and whenever I switch back to my Marauder to play endgame content with friends my brain shifts with an audible clunk.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because I’ve seen the end-game of a lot of MMOs, games like Ultima Online that abstractly capped players out and set them loose in the world to amazing effect, games like World of Warcraft that allowed their endgame to become essentially a second job and then refined their system, bit by bit, to give managers a little bit less to do. I’ve seen the end-game of Asheron’s Call, where tedious bullshit became even more tedious and the end-game was less a real end-game and more of a glacial pace switch paired with regularly administered server events that high-level players could try to ruin. But I’ve never seen an end-game that encouraged players to start at the beginning again and did it quite so well. And in a sense, that’s what Star Wars has always been about: building something, looking at it and then tearing it down to start over.

Kudos, Bioware, for hitting the nail on the head.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Congratulations on Having Your Hypochondria Justified!


We make fun of you. A lot. In our defense, you wash your hands after touching everything, and it makes your hands smell extremely weird. Also, you wear that funny white mask all the time, even during sex (by which we mean watching porn), and no one thinks it’s endearing anymore.

But today you’re going to be totally vindicated when everyone in New York City who has ever touched a subway pole with their bare hands or breathed in any air ever dies. They’re going to die horribly, too. Their skin will melt right off of their bones and their skulls will crack with the stress of their coughing fits so severely that their jaw bones will unhook and tumble to the ground. After that, their organs will liquefy.

Pretty gruesome, right? It was predicted by our youngest future-engineer, Sean, who is eight years young today.

You’ll be spared, thanks to your habit of constantly wearing gloves and the fact that you haven’t slept with anyone in like a decade. You’ll inherit a city filled with really wet, gross skeletons and a handful of other germaphobes, most of whom are Chinese, which is ironic because your racism against Chinese people was largely founded on them being, in your mind, “dirty.”

Live and learn, we guess! Try not to kill yourself in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be the Big Apple.

Congratulations on Having Your Hypochondria Justified!

Friday, May 11, 2012

Congratulations Girl with the Hebrew Tattoo!


Much has been made of late of ladies with various dangerous looking tattoos. But you know what? No one talks about the ladies, the Jews, with ink and knives and leather jackets and Mac Books running all kinds of Linuxes who discover secret Nazis and save intrepid, kinda creepy older reporters who are trying to do good in the world. Ladies like you.

You’re not that lady now, though. Right now you’re just a junior at Swarthmore College, studying English with a concentration in creative writing. You’re just another girl who gets super drunk and then talks about changing the world but hasn’t the foggiest idea just how to do so. Today you’re going to take your first step away from that world of college hedonism and into something bigger: a world of sexy hacking and crime fighting.

Because today, after a lengthy debate with your roommate/primary partner Julia, you’re going to decide to get your first tattoo. It’ll be a small, innocuous Hebrew phrase printed in flowing, beautiful script on the inside of your right arm. It will translate, approximately, to “above all else: seek truth.”

No one will understand it, not in your college and certainly not in the general population. Some rabbis will know what it means offhand, but they’ll be the exception to the rule by a mile. For the most part it’ll just confuse people, which won’t be that big a deal until the tattoo becomes your calling card during your reign as an internationally famous sexy crime fighter. Then a bunch of internet rumors will claim it means stuff like “slut” and “whore” and other unfortunate and unhelpful things. This will usher in a new era of crime fighting where you’ll battle one of the lamest and most pointless of crimes: cyberbullying.

Godspeed, Girl with the Hebrew Tattoo. We want you in our mouths!

Congratulations Girl with the Hebrew Tattoo!

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Congratulations Science Fiction Porter!


You know how awesome everything is in science fiction stories? How the world is new and interesting and fun and even being poor or hungry is kind of cool because of how great the future is? Well turns out it’s all bullshit. You’ll find this out today when you’re catapulted into the future, into a world where travel between worlds is not only a reality, but a mundane reality that people deal with grudgingly. Like train travel in the sixties.

In keeping with this tradition you, as a “Pastie,” an underclass consisting entirely of people from the past violently cast forward into the future without any means of returning to their original timeline, will have trouble finding a job. In fact the only job you’ll be capable of holding down will be as a porter, packing bags that robots are too weak to lift (we still haven’t got that shit down in this future) into baggage compartments on spaceships.

You’ll go through some minor bullshit at work which, in the future of your future, will be upheld as a momentous stand taken to insure the rights of all pasties, who will constantly be flooding the future with their filthy past values. But for the most part you’ll just lift bags, marry another woman from the past who was catapulted forward in time just a few years before you. You’ll live a simple space-life, and you’ll more or less enjoy your work. It’ll be way more enriching and helpful to others than working as an investment banker until your investment banking partner threw you into a time portal so that he could utilize a contractual loophole to steal all your shares of the stock the two of you bought together.

All things considered, it’ll be a pretty great space adventure, complete with romance, minor civil rights protests and a little bit of intrigue (when you beat your investment banking partner only remaining relative’s head in with a shovel).

Congratulations Science Fiction Porter!

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Congratulations on Filling Up Twenty Minutes of Her Life!


Tonight you’re going to be invited to a party at a family member’s apartment in Queens. You’ll arrive early, sit around a table of snacks with a glass of schnapps and soda (which you’ll call happyfizz, to the amusement of everyone there) and quietly make small-talk with whoever’s around for around seven hours. You won’t notice when the conversation gets awkward due to a rare social disorder, nor will you be able to perceive the relative interest or disinterest of your audience in things like Guild Wars and the show Fable.

This won’t really register much with the party-goers, since New York’s five boroughs are populated mostly by people who are either socially retarded or totally unconcerned with other human beings. But one young woman, who will be waiting for her boyfriend to get some cocaine from another party guest, will sit with you and listen to your prattle on uninterrupted for twenty whole minutes. She’ll actually be absorbed by you, and your total lack of interest in her despite how much hotter she’ll be than you (it’ll be the difference between a nine and a half and a four). As she listens to you and your genuine passion for things that other people don’t consider cool, she’ll start to see a world she’s never been exposed to before.

She’ll see a world where genuine interest isn’t just important: it’s the most important thing. A world where you don’t care what other people think about or judge you on. She’ll see a world where happiness is something you can attain simply by being yourself. She’ll wonder if she could find her way into that world if she spent a week away from the people she surrounded herself with now and just sat around on her own, thinking about what she really wants.

These thoughts will absorb her as much as your speech will right up until her boyfriend comes back with an eight ball.

“LET’S FUCKING MOOOOVE,” he’ll shout at her, already bleeding out of his nose. She’ll shake your hand briefly, awkwardly, and then look at you as she leaves. You’ll be the biggest thing on her mind right up until she does her first line of the night. And then all she’ll be able to think about is how great cocaine is.

Congratulations on Filling Up Twenty Minutes of Her Life!

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Congratulations on Adopting a Monkey!


After watching the film The Hangover 2 (the predecessor of which was mentioned yesterday in a completely unrelated context) you had a bunch of ideas about zany antics that you could have with your estranged college friends and that one guy at work who acts a lot like Zack Gallifiankis’ character in the films but looks a lot more like character actor Richard Jenkins. Then you thought a little bit harder about it and realized that all of your friends are accountants or insurance assessors or middle managers and that they probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in fun or antics unrelated to ice cream.

So you opted to take matters into your own hands. You adopted a monkey.

The paperwork for the process was obtuse, shipping fees were insanely expensive and it’s taken a lot of time for everything to resolve in a legal sense. But today you’re going to get a crate from Thailand. Inside that crate there’s going to be a monkey. A few sad monkey with a very unusual facial growth.

This monkey is going to have a tiny moustache. Just like Hitler.

Just so we’re being totally clear: he’s not going to have a discolored area of fur that looks like a moustache. He’s going to have a full on Hitler stash.

You’ll unpack him and fix him a big old bowl of monkey chow, which he’ll devour ravenously. Then you’ll stuff the box and its monkey restraints into a closet, forgetting about it immediately. You’ll be excited at how much happier your monkey/surrogate child looks outside of his tiny cardboard prison. Your head will be filled with joyous thoughts of opportunity and potential in your relationship for the first hour. After that first hour he’ll finish devouring the foul monkey food you bought him, and then the trouble will start.

First you’ll emerge from the bathroom and catch him writing, in grammatically incorrect German, racist screeds against Jews. You’ll use a spray bottle to discipline him but an hour later you’ll find him at it again, this time writing about Jews, gays, and people who fit your general description.

After you discipline him again you’ll go to bed. Tomorrow the trouble will really start, when he attempts to take over your apartment in a sudden and violent paramilitary campaign that primarily relies on his feces. We don’t want to spoil it too hard, but we do want to say that if you don’t kill that monkey the world is going to be in deep trouble.

Just sayin’.

Congratulations on Adopting a Monkey!

Monday, May 7, 2012

Congratulations on Over-Quoting the Hangover!


Everyone enjoys a good comedy movie, and particularly good ones tend to be particularly quotable. It’s only natural that Anchorman should have its lines repeated ad nausaeum throughout society: it’s a fucking work of genius constructed by a brilliant, troubled mad-man (Adam McKay).

Of course, there’s only so much time that can be spent quoting these master works of comedy before they decay. The best of them have all fallen with time. Even Wayne’s World 2 had to end its run as the most quotable of subject matter back in 2004.

More recent comedies, shoddier comedies, aren’t quite so great. Foremost among them: The Hangover.

In fact, the Hangover is so bad that it lost its quote cache within a month and a half of its release. People said “wolf pack of one” so many times, and then said something that Ken Jeong’s nude character said again and again and again until all of the film lost meaning.

But you live in a hole in the ground (Munsey, Indiana) and you had no idea this had passed. So today when you rent The Hangover from your local video store, you’re going to have no idea what you’re in for. But, having spent your whole life in Munsey, the big city antics of the characters in The Hangover will delight you. You’ll chortle and clap your hands in glee at each nut-shot and misstep. And when the movie is done you’ll turn to your wife and tell her:

“I’m glad I’m not part of a wolf pack of one!”

She’ll start laughing and laughing and laughing. She’ll keep right on laughing until the door explodes inwards off its hinges and a group of armed men storm into your living room. They’ll fire a net at you and shoot your wife in the neck with a dart and then drag you both away to a containment area where people who quote the Hangover go.

You’ll be locked in a cell with someone’s idiot roommate and a fat guy who wears nothing but heavy metal tees and constantly says racist shit. You’ll be forced to watch the Hangover four times a day with your cohorts. Your wife, though you won’t see her anymore, will be subjected to identical treatment.

It’ll be intended as punishment, but you’ll feel, for the very first time, like you’ve come home. Each viewing of the Hangover will uncover for your deep layers of meaning, and while in prison you’ll learn a lot about yourself, your feelings, and Ken Jeong’s penis. It’ll be a personal renaissance for you.

Congratulations on Over-Quoting the Hangover!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Waking the Walking Dead!

There’s a degree to which artifice saturates games: designers often make them “gamey” to such an extent that it calls attention to itself. Interactivity, instead of being a driving concept that guides development, becomes a sort of burden. If you don’t make a game clicky enough, if you don't insert little nicknacks for players to collect, even if those clicks and nicknacks are meaningless, it isn’t really a game.

Crysis 2, for example, has pointless collectibles and radios that tell bits of unconnected story in it. These elements have fuck all to do with the rest of the game, but they’re there, and if you miss them you’ll feel like you’re missing out. The collectibles are a big enough deal that the game deigns to inform you, whenever you check your objectives, just how many things you still have to find if you want to find everything. But in the end, all these collectibles do is give you access to a tiny, blurry screenshot of something you’ll see in the game anyway, stripped of context.

These elements don’t accomplish anything in terms of gameplay, nor do they alter the course of the game. They’re just there to remind us that we’re in a game. If anything they simply serve as a barrier to immersion, one shoehorned in ex-post facto by designers. Achievements are, in a sense, part of the same issue (though they speak to a much more fundamental psychological response that man sociological theorists frequently raise with regard to games). I’m bringing this up because I wanted to talk about the recent Walking Dead game, and this seemed like a good way to do it. Because The Walking Dead adventure game, designed by Telltale Games with the blessing of Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, doesn’t have any of this.

It’s a game entirely focused around clicking on things, but there isn’t a single click that feels forced or out of place. Even the red herrings feel like a necessity, a part of making the game world a living thing rather than an act of gaming artifice. I turned on a TV four times wondering if something would happen and, in the end, realized I was just discovering the mechanic of the remote control in the game, a relatively insignificant element in the game.

Maybe it’s because of my recent foray into discussing, at greater than necessary length, the operational concepts behind structuralism in games, but I was really taken by the raw efficiency and dedication to economizing clicks that Telltale brought to bear on The Walking Dead. Because while it doesn’t feel like any clicks are out of place, it also doesn’t feel like the clicks are shoehorning me into a particular course of action, even though they obviously are. Telltale has a gentle hand with their design and they utilize it spectacularly, balancing logical potential actions by providing players with plenty of insignificant drawers to look through and plenty of visual cues, if they want them, that they can use to this end.

The end result is a decidedly old school adventure game with lots of new school design savvy and awesome flavor. And it works, really, on two levels: a level of traditional engagement and a level of more unconventional player insertion in developing the content of the game. Because the choices you make in The Walking Dead matter.

I’m not saying they matter in the Mass Effect “you get a slightly different dialogue” way. I’m saying that, in the short, sweet vignettes that populate The Walking Dead’s gameplay, the choices you make range from the dire and dramatic to the stealthily impactful. Let me explain what I mean after breaking the two operational levels of The Walking Dead down explicitly.


I - The Conventional Point and Click Adventure Level

Point and click adventures, venerable genre that they are, have a certain glorious economy to them when they’re well executed. They should be possessed of innocuous, important items you use to solve puzzles in unexpected ways, conspicuous important items that you use to solve puzzles in expected ways and there should never, ever, ever be fail states, ever. You should never put your player in a situation they can’t get out of. This was something that older, bigger, rougher adventure games didn’t quite get and, until the genre hit this beat, I’d contend that it didn’t quite recognize its own potential.

The Walking Dead operates solidly within this tradition, dramatically oscillating pace and providing players with puzzles of varying degrees of obviousness. It uses time in an unconventional way: many of the puzzles you’ll be asked to solve will have a ticking clock as represented by a zombie, and if you fail to deal with this ticking clock you’ll be treated to a brief, satisfying aside where your character is eaten alive by said zed.

Most of these puzzles are fairly simple: kick the zombie in the face, find the ammo on the ground and load the shotgun. That sort of thing. But the centerpiece of the game’s first chapter, which I can only describe as a large scale MacGuyver-zombie-murder-puzzle, plays with the concept of time brilliantly. For the most part, it’s a non-issue. But should you linger too long while peeking over a wall or a car you’ll draw the ire of the Dead. And if you hesitate for even a moment when you’re engaged in resolving what I can only refer to as “murder puzzles,” turning points where you’re asked to provide some final resolution to the mini-story that is a zombie’s life, you’re going to find yourself with your guts for garters. But if you pay attention, stay calm and think your actions before you get into them, through, you’ll get through the murder puzzles okay. And there are few things more satisfying than clearing out a motel parking lot with the errata of garbage you can find within it.

Of course, these set pieces are all situated in a series of no-fail states, which can kind of make the zombocalypse lame. I mean, if failure has no real consequences, how do you introduce the concept of stakes in a zombie game? Don’t sweat it, The Walking Dead has it covered.

II - The Dialogue Based Adventure Game

Because if you read the ad-copy for The Walking Dead game (and you should, it’s more honest than most) you’ll see that it mentions that there are enduring consequences for your actions. How can this be in a game with no fail states? Well, here’s the thing. The Walking Dead isn’t just about the conventional object collection and utilization puzzles that make up traditional puzzle games. It also brings in a strange new construct: the conversation puzzle.

These aren’t puzzles in the conventional no-fail, single solution sense. Rather these “puzzles” are essentially moments for you to fuck up or win points with other characters, essentially a means by which you can construct a narrative. And this narrative then spills into the game play itself. Certain puzzles or events are impacted by the decisions you make in dialogue. Characters come to trust you or distrust you based on your choices. And if someone doesn’t trust you at a key moment, something can go wrong. Or, if someone does trust you, something can go right when it shouldn’t have.

This is pretty mild as far as consequences go, I’ll admit, but its subtle development and surprisingly far reaching impact is pretty interesting, and the way that minute decisions snowball into bigger and bigger events strikes me as something that The Walking Dead will play on more heavily in chapters to come. And the fact that these conversation choices bleed into the puzzles themselves, changing the play of the game and the way that characters interact is something special, something I want to explore with multiple playthroughs of the game that, frankly, I just haven’t had time for.

And there are more severe consequences at work in The Walking Dead, though they’re not nearly as subtly executed and in the moment that they occur, might actually seem kind of facile. Because The Walking Dead, with moderately paced regularity, will ask you to make a choice between two characters, both of whom are in immediate danger. Based on your choice, one will live and one will die.

It’s usually pretty cut and dry - one early event asks you to choose between saving a child and saving an adult who, to the best of my knowledge, dies in the canon of The Walking Dead anyway. But sometimes the decisions are tougher. Do you save the savvy, intelligent, tubby nerd? Or do you save the dangerous, depressed, svelte former newscaster turned marksman? Both of them have useful skill sets, both of them are, in their interactions with you, good people. But you only have time to save one of them.

Paired with the dialogue, this infuses the game with a sense of constant stakes. Your mislaid word might drive a wedge between you and a useful asset. Your choice to save a character might get you thrown out of the place you’re staying when another character dies. If you lie, even accidentally or innocuously, people will turn cold towards you. They’ll get angry, stop trusting you. If they stop trusting you, you won’t be able to count on them when the chips are down.

It’s tough to discuss the impact of these choices without getting into spoilers. The choices themselves are straightforward, and you’ll know what the immediate outcome will be, for the most part, when you run into a given choice. But the enduring impact of your decisions is more difficult to perceive, and I wouldn’t want to ruin the twists for anyone reading this who plans to play The Walking Dead. The unexpected twists here, by the way, are pretty hot. Sean Vanaman, the game’s writer, has been pretty loyal to Kirkman in that regard. The plot isn’t particularly convoluted, and many of the “twists” are telegraphed, but “holy shit” moments still abound, and certain actions carry with them a mounting dread that can pervade the events surrounding them, even though they’re not directly connected with the dialogue and plot.

If I keep talking about it I’m going to let a great example slip, and I’d rather not. Telltale has made something incredible here, something that deserves to be experienced. They’ve proven many a time that they’re masters of the tropes at work in the adventure genre, and here they’ve refined that mastery to a level of exactitude that is essentially invisible: they’ve made an object so polished that the elements drawn from genre are no longer visible. And while their insertion of consequence into this context does show some pretty clear seams, it feels pedantic to criticize them for it. Because what they’ve done is introduce consequence to a genre which often divested itself uncomfortably from the very concept of enduring impact by adding things like partial successes and acceptable failures to the bipolar, antiseptic gaming experience we’re more familiar with.

The end result is a vibrant artifact, both loyal to its source material and gaming precedents and revolutionary in the approaches that it takes. If you like The Walking Dead comics you’ll like this game. If you adventure games, especially Telltale’s adventure games, you’ll like this game. And if you’re anything like me you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see the intellectual contributions that Telltale has made to the story of The Walking Dead and the tradition of adventure games as a whole.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Congratulations Monster Civil Rights Activist!


When you reach the cache containing the remnants of your old life it’ll be the middle of the day. The potential for being spotted will be high: between hikers, perverts and park rangers (who actually just “engage in constitutionals” with their time more often than not) it’ll be almost a miracle that no one sees you digging up the old chest filled with books, photos and mix tapes from your past. And while much of the contents will not have held up well (including your original Wheatus cassettes) your constitutional law books will be in perfect condition.

After verifying their integrity you’ll throw them, along with the rest of the trunk’s contents, into the back of your geo and start driving back to your house. By this time a missing person’s report will be in effect for Alfred, the retarded man you murdered yesterday, but you won’t be running this time. Instead you’ll be reading through your old textbooks, looking for sections on the civil rights and liberties of occult or arcane entities under the conditions of the American Constitution. Turns out the founding fathers (particularly James Monroe) were really concerned with werewolves, mummies, vampires and whatnot and their place in American society, and they set up a series of special protections in the Hidden Passages of the Constitution (™) to make sure that these crucial constituents weren’t treated unfairly because of their state.

This includes a series of protections that permit werewolves to skip work for three days a month with impunity, to prevent co-worker murder, and an explicit writ that any employer who interferes with such a process is responsible for any injury or death that might occur therefore.

This is what you’ll need to defend yourself. You’ll turn yourself in at the PD later on in the day, checking your books in with your personal affects, and, while talking to the booking officer, you’ll lay out your whole five-year plan to her. You’ll tell her that you plan to represent yourself in court, pass the bar in Pennsylvania and then start a practice providing legal services to various “occult Americans.” She’ll shake her head and ignore you, but you won’t mind. You’ll know what you’re doing is right. And for the first time in your life since you left your wife, you’ll feel like your life has purpose again.

You’ll go to sleep with a smile on your face that night, muscles still sore from your transformation a few days earlier. You’ll already be playing out your defense in your head, dreaming of being back in front of a courtroom again, of how good it’ll feel to do something with your life again.

Congratulations Monster Civil Rights Activist!