Congratulations on Eating some Chicken Strips!

You did your best not to let the overwhelming success of Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game! go to your head. But after sleeping with Megan Fox and earning millions and millions of dollars just for being yourself it was hard not to lose your mind a little. So you purchased a small palace in the Andes, one that one of the less famous South American dictators used to live in, and you set up your board game making business.

But once you arrived in your mountain palace, filled with concubines and the occasional attendants of the lovely and poorly educated Miss Fox, you found that your creative process had left you almost completely. Lately this creative obstruction has manifested itself in other ways. You have trouble sleeping, you eat condor eggs compulsively and you can’t get an erection any more. The last one is weighing on you the heaviest.

You’ve been trying to kick start your creative process and by relation your ability to get boners for a while now, but it’s been rough going. Your poverty and your perceived struggle against the world was the source of a great deal of your creative energy. Now that you’ve made it there’s really no reason to try in your mind. The best you could do is lose face when your next creation fails to live up to the standard of Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game!, a game so well crafted and, dare we say, fun that it briefly united the Israeli government with Hamas for a rousing round before they started throwing trash at each other and calling each other names.

Today it’s going to come to a head when Megan stops by for an intercontinental booty call because “She kinda likes you and stuff” and you can’t get it up for her. While this has happened to you before it really has never ever ever happened to her and she’s going to flip shit and start tearing your place apart. You’ll feel like you’ve lost everything.

You’ll slip out of your room during her tantrum, dodging the various priceless artifacts that she’ll fling as she tries to come to terms with the idea that there might be a man on Earth who won’t immediately pop a boner at the sight of her. You’ll drag a blanket behind yourself like Charlie Brown and limp over to the couch, where you’ll drift off to sleep listening to the crash of your possessions being destroyed.

As you drift your mind will wander back to the days when you lived in a studio apartment alone and toiled in obscurity, making games like “So You Want to Briefly Hold the Office of Prime Minister in Italy” and “Coming Out: Time to Leave the Closet.” You’ll remember the joy you used to take in simple pleasures, in black coffee, cheap beer and fast food.

When you wake the next morning, following a series of deeply disturbing sex dreams about Megan Fox pegging you, you’ll fetch Manuel, your driver, from his chambers and have him take you in to the nearest town. You venture there so rarely yourself that it will seem like a different universe, a place filled with normal people leading their normal lives. It’ll be like you set foot on solid ground again.

You’ll instruct Manuel to drive you to the nearest establishment serving “chicken strips,” which will make him balk at first. But after you inform him that you are not shitting him or plannning to fire him several times he’ll acquiesce and the two of you will drive three towns over to the closest Jack-In-The-Box. There he’ll order two burgers for himself and a large order of chicken strips for you. You’ll split an order of fries.

You’ll drive back to your home and eat with Manuel on your patio built on a scenic overlook, talking about life with this man you see everyday. You’ll learn a lot about him and his wife and realize that the problems you face aren’t that different from his, aside from that whole tax evasion thing which has kept you out of the United States for a while now.

As you bite into your chicken strip and savor that delightful, universally loved flavor the concept for your next game will come to you: Getting It Up – The Boner Game.

It’ll be a huge hit.

Congratulations on Eating Some Chicken Strips!

Congratulations on Patching Things Up!

After alienating your girlfriend through a hilariously retarded series of missteps you’ve had a hard time with life in general. You can’t even do laundry yourself, you’re so inept. So you’ve decided to do everything in your power to get back to doing what you do well: being close to her and making her miserable.

Since she has, as we’ve said before, already blocked you on her cell you’ll have to get a little creative. Any sort of verbal communication is sure to spell disaster for your romantic overtures, so you’ll go old school and write a nice, elaborate letter apologizing for sleeping with her sister and not being as supportive as you could’ve following her miscarriage. After that you’ll hear word from her sister, who you’re continuing to sleep with, that she’s starting to second guess her decision to dump your ass. Even though you’re an idiot you really do care about her, and maybe you can change. After she tells you this you’ll punch her sister in the mouth accidentally, then apologize profusely and ask her if she needs a ride to the hospital as you throw her out of your apartment, barely waiting for her response.

Then you’ll sit down and start drafting phase two of your plan. This will consist of you drawing several stick figures of yourself with chocolates and flowers ringing her doorbell and then crumpling them up and hurling them at your trashcan. Even you’ll be able to see how doomed to failure these plans are in their cliché.

As you look around your apartment, searching for inspiration and any weed that you’d just forgotten you had you’ll be struck with the single most brilliant plan you’ve ever had. You’ll see your copy of Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game! and you’ll know what you have to do.

Late that night, after she’s gone to bed, you’ll creep up next to her house and start blasting “I Can Hear You Calling In the Air Tonight” (her favorite song!) through a boombox until she wakes up. Then when she pokes her head out of her window to see what’s up you’ll spray lighter fluid all over the board game and light it on fire.

Unfortunately you’ll be a little clumsy with the lighter fluid and you’ll end up setting yourself on fire. Pretty seriously, actually. Stop drop and roll won’t work at first so your girlfriend will have to run out of her apartment with a fire extinguisher and put you out. Then she’ll drive you to the hospital to receive treatment for your third degree burns.

Late that night she’ll start weeping next to your hospital bed. She’ll feel like the entire thing could’ve been avoided if she just hadn’t dumped you. It’ll be a twisted sort of logic, but it’ll convince her to get back together with you just to keep you from doing something stupider and crazier. So in the end everything will work out, thanks to that wonderful board game.

Congratulations on Patching Things Up!

Congratulations on Pussying Out!

You and your wife have been honest with one another about the spark leaving your marriage for a while now. It happened years ago, but the two of you loved each other enough that you wanted to try and find a way to stick together. That’s why you started a board game night.

But board game night was incredibly dull. All it ever served to do was illustrate the banality of your pathetic sex life. Board games as a replacement for actual physical intimacy? How could you possible think that would work? After a month of trying to work it you tossed Russian Roulette into the mix and it solidified.

But lately you’ve been getting a little tired of Russian Roulette. No one’s died in some time and you’ve begun to assume that your wife isn’t really loading the gun. That assumption will be shattered when your swinging partner, James, blows the top of his head off before your Thursday evening sex.

After a nice bonding experience getting rid of his body and planting evidence that he vanished mysteriously during an arms smuggling operation you and your wife will return home and, in the heat of the moment, try to finish your pre-lovemaking ritual. You’ll sit down at a table with a revolver loaded with a single bullet, of which you are now painfully aware, and a copy of your favorite new board game, Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game!

You’ll look at the board, then at your wife, and realize that you like this game for what it is, that you love your wife for who she is. You don’t really need the risk, real or fictitious, that the gun represents. What you really need is to be honest with this woman with whom you’ve always wanted to spend your life.

You’ll pick up the gun and slip the chamber loose before upending the bullet on to the floor. It’ll fall with a lonesome little clatter and your wife will look at the bullet, then at you, confused.

“That could’ve gone off,” she’ll say, still puzzled.

You’ll hurl the gun across the room, then upend the table in a display of your intense manliness. Then you’ll grab your wife, overpower her and drag her to the bedroom where the two of you will have the best sex you’ve experience in years. You won’t use a condom, and as a result you’ll end up with an unwanted pregnancy, referred to ever after as a surprise pregnancy, which will hopefully stymie the self-destructive tendencies that dominate your lives.

Congratulations on Pussying Out!

Congratulations on Losing Your Girlfriend!

Your relationship will have been strained for a while, but that happens to plenty of people when they move to a new city together. The increased reliance on one another, the relative isolation and the constant struggle to fit in in a few place can tax a relationship to its breaking point. That’s why the two of you introduced game night.

Each Wednesday you try to play a board game which can accommodate two players. That means a lot of Stratego and Battleship for the most part. Since those games suck it’s not hard to see why this measure hasn’t improved your relationship. To you this is less a signal that your problems might be too complicated to be solved by playing board games together and more a sign that you need to kick it up a notch.

In an effort to spice things up you’re going to come home this Wednesday with a copy of Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game!, the hottest board game on the market. Fox News is campaigning to ban it, and a website is keeping a running tally of how many times it has made Glenn Beck cry. Right now it’s in the triple digits.

You’ll lay it out on the table with a bag of Goldfish and a pair of beers and walk your blindfolded girlfriend into the room, accidentally guiding her into the edge of the table at one point. When you remove her blindfold she’ll have a look of confusion on her face as she takes in the scene before her. Once she reads the title of the board game she’ll start bawling and run out to your bedroom and lock the door behind her while you sit there dumbfounded.

You’ll knock on the door and ask her what’s wrong but her only response will be forceful weeping. When she finally does emerge she’ll have a suitcase. She’ll tell you that there are better ways to break up with someone before shouting prick at you. You’ll move to follow her out the door but she’ll slam it as hard as she can on you, knocking you unconscious.

When you regain consciousness hours later you’ll just sit there Indian-style on the floor and wonder why she was so upset. After an hour and a half of pondering you’ll remember her miscarriage and have a total “doy” moment, but by then she’ll have already blocked you on her cell. Bitch.

Congratulations on Losing Your Girlfriend!

Congratulations on the Success of Your Board Game!

You’ve been designing games for decades, not that the general public would ever know it. You’re kind of big in Germany, where people still play board games, discuss literature and take care of their homeless, but here in the good old United States of “get off my fucking lawn” America people don’t like to play games about healthcare reform, touring foreign countries and acquiring experiences and discussing Proust. They like to play games about money, violence and, of course, sex.

So tomorrow night after your high concept re-imagining of the core mechanics of Settlers of Catan as applied to the French Revolution launches to a total lack of critical or commercial response you’re going to sit down in your game designing studio and create a game which will force America as a nation to recognize your brilliance.

After a week and a half eating food cold out of cans, chain smoking and drinking black coffee at three in the morning you’ll emerge from your studio with a design doc. You’ll then bring that to your artistic designer, Sven. Sven will take your design and make it into a prototype. That prototype will then go to marketing and marketing will give Sven and yourself some notes and those notes will be taken into account when you produce a second prototype.

That prototype will then enter testing and experience some early press work. This boring story will continue for several months until it leads up to your a huge critical buildup and the most elaborate release party you’ve ever experienced. It’ll be filled with B celebrities and even Megan Fox will make an appearance to get wasted and make out with you briefly, then dismiss you as a “perv.”

When you come to the next day you’ll be in Ms. Fox’s hotel room covered in vomit and some sort of sticky substance which, you assume, is some sort of sexual product celebrities produce which you have been mercifully unaware of thanks to your life in the board game industry. The television will be flickering across the room, muted. It will be tuned to the news, where the reporter appears to be discussing something with great gravity. A graphic displaying the box of your game will be in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

You’ll stumble across the room to the remote and unmute the TV so that you can hear him as he excoriates the amorality of your game. He’ll claim that it targets children and that it promotes inappropriate behavior among minors. He’ll say that you’ve singlehandedly contributed more to the destruction of the American family than any other board game maker since Sorry taught children that apologizing was appropriate behavior.

It’ll feel like the bottom has dropped out of your stomach, voiding your bowels. Only your sphincter, still taut from whatever Megan Fox did to it last night, will keep you from shitting your pants right there as you watch your most ambitious effort to date turn against you. You’ll re-mute the TV set and sit on the couch, head in your hands as you bemoan your existence.

After a few minutes of pondering various forms of suicide your press agent will call you and ask if you want to appear on the Daily Show. He’ll tell you that the initial run of your game has sold out and that nerds and hipsters alike have come together in their love of your unorthodox entertainment product.

You’ll be speechless for a few seconds before telling him that of course, it would be fantastic to appear on the Daily Show to promote Oops! We’re Pregnant: The Life Ruining Game! He’ll tell you to show up at their studios in a few hours and that they’ll pencil you in. You’ll numbly thank him and hang up, mind reeling with the pressure and impact that comes with real success.

Congratulations on the Success of Your Board Game!

Congratulations on Making the Single Most Profound Philisophical Discovery Of Your Life!

You’ll be watching Sponge Bob Square Pants high, the way you always do, when it comes to you. It’ll be a slow trickle at first, the sort of feeling you get from trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem or remember the name of an old classmate you used to masturbate to more as an idea of a person than an actual person.

The weed will fight it, though, demanding that you simply appreciate the wonder that is a children’s show about an anthropomorphic sponge learning about life and friendship, but you’ll be too much of a pretentious dipshit to just let it go. No, you’ll grit your teeth and pull it out like fucking Dumbledore ripping memories out of his mind.

After a five minute existential struggle you’ll let out the thought with a deep breath and settle with your revelation: that organized religion isn’t conceptually flawed as a rule, but that it’s often applied in a counterproductive fashion.

After letting that gem fly through your mind you’ll collapse in a mental heap and just sit there as Sponge Bob turns to Jimmy Neutron and your thoughts dwindle to their normal pinprick, having reached their incredibly disappointing zenith for the rest of your life.

Congratulations on Making the Single Most Profound Philosophical Discovery Of Your Life!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Playing to Die!

This is a bit dated, but I feel that Killing Floor’s recent free-trial on Steam has exposed a lot of people to a game they would’ve otherwise ignored. Paired with the recent addition of The Last Stand to Dawn of War II’s already overwhelming and constantly shifting multiplayer and Left 4 Dead 2’s upcoming release it seems that there’s a trend of games which aren’t really designed to be won.

Sure, you can survive Left 4 Dead 2 and Killing Floor if you play a certain way, but both these games have modes designed to annihilate players (Left 4 Dead 2’s Survival mode or a custom version of Killing Floor with settings tweaked so that the game never ends). And even some mainstream games like Halo: ODST and Gears of War 2 have taped on modes which have to end in player death recently, to great acclaim. It’s fair to say that of late there have been a proportionally larger number of games where players play to fail. Here’s the thing: they’re really fun.

You Already Know How This Will End

It’s a strange thing to enter into a game with the knowledge that you’re basically playing to lose. Most of these games alleviate this to one extent or another by giving players a set of goals to surpass over the course of play, but meeting these goals again and again won’t get you anywhere new, and it won’t help you survive. Eventually time and resources will run too thin and you’ll be dead.

But despite this it’s hard to play in any fashion other than a survival centered manner. Instead of thinking of adapting the game to my desires I’m playing to “beat” it, calculating waves and scripted events to see if I can pull off something that even vaguely resembles a “win.” On occasion I’ll do dangerous things to increase my “score” in a score based game, like grabbing points at awkward times in The Last Stand or trying to rack up a combo at the cost of health in ODST’s survival mode, but for the most part I just play to live. I’ll leap around orcs until my score multiplier hits 0 if it means I don’t lose. When it comes down to boosting my score by a few dozen points or making it a little bit further I’ll always choose to struggle on for those last few inches instead of caving to inevitably fate.

Rather than changing the way I play it seems like these survival games alter my expectations. After a round or two I stop seeing my deaths as failures and instead see them as learning experiences. I do that in every game to some extent, but in games which must inevitably end in failure I find myself relaxing about dying. I know it’s coming and, as such, I care a good amount less. Instead of worrying about the death which must come I look forward to dying in an interesting or creative way. If I drop out of a building in Killing Floor or get shot out of the sky by Marine plasma in The Last Stand I don’t want to bang my head against my keyboard. I want to laugh.

What’s the Point?

And that’s sort of the appeal of these games. They’re less about fulfilling the expectations of the developers, as most games are, and more about subverting them. I’m not trying to beat the challenges the design team inserted into the game for me, I’m trying to subvert their expectations and find new and creative ways to compete against their system. I stop playing with the designers and begin playing against them.

It’s something that many gamers do on a much higher level in general. Power games and speed gamers who run through games like Half-Life 2 in twenty minutes have been getting their rocks off by destroying the expectations of developers for some time. And some developers have even taken a tongue in cheek approach to the subject, with games like World of Goo teaching players how to subvert the normal function of their system in order to solve puzzles. At its highest level World of Goo is entirely obsessed with this subversion of the mechanics of their system.

These games, where fail states are necessities rather than punishments, encourage this sort of “man against the world” approach to the game world, and it’s telling just how fun it is. People no longer want to complete objectives in Left 4 Dead’s survival mode. They want to see how far they can push the system, to see what sort of absurd spawns Valve’s algorithms concoct when pushed too far. People playing The Last Stand don’t think they’ll make it through wave 20 (something a handful of players have now done, kudos to them). They’re playing to see how high they can jack their score up, how hard they can push themselves and the game and just what’s going to come next, either in their equipment load-out options or in the waves of enemies sure to eviscerate them. In fact, at the highest level they’re actually playing to see what comes next in Dawn of War as a series.

How Long Can We Hold Out?

But this sort of game isn’t without its problems. Repetitive gameplay can cripple these games if the system isn’t complex enough. Killing Floor, for example, barely held my attention for twenty four hours of its weekend-long free trial. It was an interestiing idea, certainly, but the game repeated its set pieces so often and made all of the game’s elements feel so similar that it lost its flair almost immediately. Even when I was fighting new monsters I didn’t feel like I was dealing with a new challenge. I felt like I was dealing with an upgraded version of existing challenges, and in the end it left me feeling frustrated instead of engaged. I was totally aware of the game and its attempts to keep me from winning, and it infuriated me.

Left 4 Dead’s survival mode is especially bad in this respect. Although it does, to its credit, do an excellent job of randomizing both the threats you encounter and the resources you receive to combat them, you are dealing with the same seven or eight set pieces being reconstituted in a new way on each playthrough. If not for the Director entity and the fluidity of the systems the game wouldn’t have any appeal at all, which just goes to show that a good game will always win out over a decent meta-game. Killing Floor was, on paper at least, a much deeper experience than Left 4 Dead, but it was less engaging in every way and considerably less entertaining. I have no qualms about purchasing Left 4 Dead for $50. I wouldn’t play Killing Floor for more than a day, even if it was free.

The Last Stand illustrates the best counter to this sort of dangerous repetition. Its units are imbued with all the personality of Left 4 Dead’s characters and enemies, and even though they roll out in the same order each time you’re never quite sure how they’ll react to a given situation. Their behavior is always a little bit unexpected, just enough to make you feel like the system you’re operating within is intelligent without making it seem cheap or random. This personality, paired with the slow, enduring character progression The Last Stand handles so deftly, is a big part of what keeps me coming back to the game, even as Brutal Legend, STALKER, Borderlands and graduate admissions jockey for my attention.

It’s worth noting that the variety offered by the progression system in The Last Stand helps keep the game fresh. Even when I don’t see the use of a particular item I still want to try it out and see how it will fit into my strategies. Compare this to Killing Floor’s progression system, which never really makes your character feel any different. Sure, it has some serious mechanical impact, but the impact is obscured by the generic nature of the game.

Everything Old Is New Again

These games, with their built in fail states, are fated to run afoul of repetition early on. But with a focus on personality and careful attention to the construction of a system which rewards repeat play and offers new experiences over periods of extended play they are some of the most interesting and engaging games on the market right now. Even knowing that they can’t win people still flock to these games and game modes, because there’s some nobility in fighting that unwinnable fight, something great about inhabiting a world where you can construct your own private Thermopolis. But the world has to have some sort of personality, the game some variety in order to keep players engaged. Plants vs. Zombies’ endless mode is the main way I play that game, and still play it months after release. Even knowing that I can’t win I still love interacting with that world and seeing just how hard I can push against the system that Popcap created.

As gamers we like to overcome systems, and offering us a system which by nature cannot be overcome is inviting us to revisit this system again and again in order to prove whoever’s said this wrong. Even if, in the end, they are quite correct we’re still inclined to hurl ourselves against these challenges again and again, drawn back by the strength of their imagery and the uniqueness of the experience they offer. Their appeal is as old as the arcade era, and it will always be there. So long as there are gamers there will be unwinnable games. And these games will retain their appeal until, as in King of Kong, someone proves that they can finally be beaten.