This one is pretty self-explanatory. Today you’re going to succeed in milking the rats in your apartment. The milk will taste terrible, and will turn in a matter of days, but you’ll succeed in drawing it out of them. Overall the entire experience will still be more disturbing than anything else, but it will be something of a scientific landmark and for that you get a brief, pithy note on some douchebag’s blog.
Congratulations on Getting Milk From Rats!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Congratulations on Upsetting Everyone in the Room!
You’ll be at one of the many orgies you attend. They’re basically the only way to interact with people socially in L.A. and get any sort of genuine human contact out of it, which is kind of sad and kind of awesome considering how many attractive people come to L.A. to try and “make it.” You and an aspiring writer will both be balls deep in a waitress who shot a few commercials back in 2006 and hasn’t really had a lot of success getting supporting work since when the question will pop into your head and be out before you even had a chance to register what you were saying.
“So, Beatles or Stones?” you’ll say, wiping sweat from your brow.
The writer, whose name you never bothered to learn, will pull back a little.
“Beatles, of course, man,” he’ll say, giving the waitress a moment to breathe before he thrusts his penis back into her face. She’ll grab a hold of him before he does so and force him to hold for a second.
“Oh, yeah. Totally. The Stones had a lot going on, but you really can’t compare what they accomplished to what the Beatles managed to do with some of the worst luck of any band in history,” she’ll pontificate before accepting the writer’s penis back into her mouth.
Someone in a pile a short distance away will voice up.
“Fuck yeah, Beatles!” he’ll shout amidst the grunts and moans of your fellow orgy-goers. It’ll be hard to tell if the cries of assent are simply those of ecstasy or agreement, but most of the mutters of agreement will clearly be genuine acknowledgements that yes, the Beatles were indeed better than the Stones.
“I...kinda prefer the Stones,” you’ll say, taking a break from thrusting away at the waitress. She’ll pull her body forward, freeing herself from you and the writer. Everyone in the room will disengage for a moment, wrapped up in your seemingly innocuous entry into the discussion.
“I think it’s best if you leave,” the waitress will say, handing you your pants. Murmurs of agreement will dominate the room this time, the lack of moans and shrieks driving home just how badly you misstepped here.
As the waitress’ hands guide you out of the room, pressing articles of clothing into your arms along the way, you’ll think of all the mistakes you made in life that made you like the Stones more the Beatles, but in the end you’ll only be able to go back to an episode, long long ago, when your uncle made you touch your junk while he watched while Gimme Shelter was playing. That’s what you’ll blame for this whole horrible night as you drive home, teeth bared and rage brewing.
Congratulations on Upsetting Everyone in the Room!
“So, Beatles or Stones?” you’ll say, wiping sweat from your brow.
The writer, whose name you never bothered to learn, will pull back a little.
“Beatles, of course, man,” he’ll say, giving the waitress a moment to breathe before he thrusts his penis back into her face. She’ll grab a hold of him before he does so and force him to hold for a second.
“Oh, yeah. Totally. The Stones had a lot going on, but you really can’t compare what they accomplished to what the Beatles managed to do with some of the worst luck of any band in history,” she’ll pontificate before accepting the writer’s penis back into her mouth.
Someone in a pile a short distance away will voice up.
“Fuck yeah, Beatles!” he’ll shout amidst the grunts and moans of your fellow orgy-goers. It’ll be hard to tell if the cries of assent are simply those of ecstasy or agreement, but most of the mutters of agreement will clearly be genuine acknowledgements that yes, the Beatles were indeed better than the Stones.
“I...kinda prefer the Stones,” you’ll say, taking a break from thrusting away at the waitress. She’ll pull her body forward, freeing herself from you and the writer. Everyone in the room will disengage for a moment, wrapped up in your seemingly innocuous entry into the discussion.
“I think it’s best if you leave,” the waitress will say, handing you your pants. Murmurs of agreement will dominate the room this time, the lack of moans and shrieks driving home just how badly you misstepped here.
As the waitress’ hands guide you out of the room, pressing articles of clothing into your arms along the way, you’ll think of all the mistakes you made in life that made you like the Stones more the Beatles, but in the end you’ll only be able to go back to an episode, long long ago, when your uncle made you touch your junk while he watched while Gimme Shelter was playing. That’s what you’ll blame for this whole horrible night as you drive home, teeth bared and rage brewing.
Congratulations on Upsetting Everyone in the Room!
Monday, May 31, 2010
Congratulations on Sharing that New York Hospitality
You’re going to move into a small town in Northern Minnesota this weekend, about twenty minutes outside of Bemidji. You’ll be moving there mostly to avoid charges for assault, battery, murder and tax evasion in New York and you thought that no one would ever think to look for a New Yorker in northern Minnesota.
You’ll be right, more or less. But it hasn’t been easy. To cover up your true identity you’ve had to avoid talking about New York for the entire trip, a Herculean feat for someone who is as big a douche bag as you. You’ve also had to avoid discussing musical, mentioning how much better New York’s version of the Lion king is and discussing that 30 Rock is shot and set in your town.
To reward yourself for doing such a good job you’re going to introduce yourself to the town in true New York style: you’re going to mug someone immediately upon entering the town. You’ll wait outside a bank until you see a Honda Civic with a single occupant in it. Then you’ll wait until the occupant, an ancient looking man, begins using the ATM to conduct a transaction.
You’ll rush up behind him quietly and slam his face into the ATM’s display, mashing the keys and fucking up his PIN entry.
“Give me all the money you can get in a single withdrawal,” you’ll whisper into his ear.
“Huh?” he’ll say, unable to hear you due to a German grenade which destroyed his hearing during World War 1.
“Give me all your fucking money!” you’ll scream, pressing your gun into the back of his head.
“No need for such language, son,” he’ll say, licking his lips as he tries to remember his PIN. “Let’s see. You don’t know what money number, now do ya?”
Your breath will whistle through your teeth in your rage and after the old man spends several minutes trying to recall his PIN without success you’ll just smash your gun into the back of his head and take the coupons and two dollar bills out of his wallet and leave.
When he comes to he’ll describe the situation to the sheriff who, because the town only has three hundred residents, will immediately know that you did it. He’ll arrive at your house, arrest you for armed robbery and, during the background check discover who you really are. Then you’ll be swiftly extradited to New York for trial and summary imprisonment.
You’ll die within a week of your arrival at Ryker’s, strangled in your cell by a rival Mafioso who was really tired of the way you would text his wife whenever you were drunk.
Congratulations on Sharing that New York Hospitality!
You’ll be right, more or less. But it hasn’t been easy. To cover up your true identity you’ve had to avoid talking about New York for the entire trip, a Herculean feat for someone who is as big a douche bag as you. You’ve also had to avoid discussing musical, mentioning how much better New York’s version of the Lion king is and discussing that 30 Rock is shot and set in your town.
To reward yourself for doing such a good job you’re going to introduce yourself to the town in true New York style: you’re going to mug someone immediately upon entering the town. You’ll wait outside a bank until you see a Honda Civic with a single occupant in it. Then you’ll wait until the occupant, an ancient looking man, begins using the ATM to conduct a transaction.
You’ll rush up behind him quietly and slam his face into the ATM’s display, mashing the keys and fucking up his PIN entry.
“Give me all the money you can get in a single withdrawal,” you’ll whisper into his ear.
“Huh?” he’ll say, unable to hear you due to a German grenade which destroyed his hearing during World War 1.
“Give me all your fucking money!” you’ll scream, pressing your gun into the back of his head.
“No need for such language, son,” he’ll say, licking his lips as he tries to remember his PIN. “Let’s see. You don’t know what money number, now do ya?”
Your breath will whistle through your teeth in your rage and after the old man spends several minutes trying to recall his PIN without success you’ll just smash your gun into the back of his head and take the coupons and two dollar bills out of his wallet and leave.
When he comes to he’ll describe the situation to the sheriff who, because the town only has three hundred residents, will immediately know that you did it. He’ll arrive at your house, arrest you for armed robbery and, during the background check discover who you really are. Then you’ll be swiftly extradited to New York for trial and summary imprisonment.
You’ll die within a week of your arrival at Ryker’s, strangled in your cell by a rival Mafioso who was really tired of the way you would text his wife whenever you were drunk.
Congratulations on Sharing that New York Hospitality!
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Cold Worlds of Games!
The worlds in which most games exist are cold, inhospitable places, wastelands with only the most cursory trappings of humanity. Even when they’re teeming with virtual life games always have trouble grasping at just what makes a town a town, what makes a house more than four walls, a roof and a foundation. They are, by nature and by design, demonstrations of the fundamental elements of what something is, rather than representations of places, fictional or real.
There are exceptions. The most ironic, and indeed one of the best I’ve ever encountered, was Fallout 3, a world which felt vibrant, living and empty in a way which echoed the socially nihilistic world I live in as a nerd. Fallout 3 had people, many of them nominally friendly, only a handful of whom would actually accompany you through the Wasteland. It was a game about growing up, moving from place to place, and it grasped that to make a place real you must populate it with people who will deal with the main character without concern or knowledge of who or what that main character is.
Brutal Legend walked a similar line with its alien world of metal, in this case trading off immersion and interaction for fullness, richness and wondrous consistency. Brutal Legend should have felt odd and off-putting, but the manner in which a cycle of constant war shaped both the game and the game’s world made it come to life in a way that most single player experience cannot hope for. Sure, the multiplayer was dense and difficult to access, rooted on a set of systems where people are largely uninterested in playing new and original kinds of games on the internet, but the Brutal Land was without peer in how it delivered on its promise of a war-torn Metal landscape.
But compare this to a place like Liberty City. Liberty City is based off of New York’s layout, populace and landscape. It has no business being boring. To make New York boring is an impressive feat in its own right, but it sets Grand Theft Auto in the midst of a lifeless, sterile city consisting entirely of goodies to grab and occasional interstitials which register with the audible clunk of my disc shifting RPMs to draw new data from unused sectors. Occasionally the world comes to life within these interstitials, in rooftop chases and kidnappings, a few assassinations and one very notable heist, but none of this takes place within the much touted open world of Grand Theft Auto 4.
To the credit of Rockstar’s designers, they’ve spent most of their careers trying to mask the fact that their games are traditional video games shoehorned into open world environments, and they’ve been making improvements. But in the end their worlds are little better than those of a Final Fantasy game – filled with potential targets and threats, the occasional reward and little or no personality outside of bits of art and tidily scripted cutscenes which will, at best, unlock new areas of the game, but will most likely change absolutely nothing. They’ve popularized a form of world building without recognizing its potential for immersing players, and it’s a shame, because all it does is illustrate the problems that traditional game designs have had with making their worlds feel lifelike.
The issue mostly stems from the fact that games are intended to tell a story: singular. Games aren’t trying to present you with an interpretive narrative, again with few exceptions: they’re trying to lay out a series of events “as they occur” and let you engage them. Some games camouflage this fact better than others, games like Half-Life 2 and the first F.E.A.R. that constantly present you with interesting situations and asides and give you worlds that actually beg to be interpreted, worlds with muted and unclear laws and histories which demand that their players immerse themselves in order to comprehend events. Most games are more like Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto, forcing you to jump through hoops until you reach the end of the story they want to tell you, feeding you snippets of narrative until you reach the last snippet of narrative intended to close off all the other snippets with some measure of satisfaction.
In between the world consists of scripted challenges, usually challenges which consist mostly of harming other creatures or solving puzzles, and the story itself occurs outside of these challenges. Sometimes you’ll be given friends to accompany you through these challenges, and the game logic will insure that these friends arrive (or do not arrive) at your destination in one form or another. The two worlds are more or less closed off. Little has actually changed since Doom, with its occasional dying marine and text box informing you why you’re shooting weird brown men in the face through a series of gray hallways and stacks of boxes. All we’ve improved for the most part is the graphical quality of the boxes and the quality of the writing.
Few games illustrate this better than Torchlight, the utilitarian indie title which has been working its way through the Steam play lists of many of my friends. Torchlight is a neat little Diablo clone that takes the classic formula of Diablo – generate a dynamic map and populate it with random baddies then let players run through it - and adds a cutesie art style that recognizes the exceedingly low stakes that the genre brings with it and makes the game accessible to players from a variety of backgrounds. Even people who don’t like Diablo’s style of play have had their interested piqued a little by Torchlight’s endearing, cartoonish and incredibly generic art.
Torchlight is completely fine as a game, and if you play games as the sort of person who engages them so that they can essentially solve math problems with graphical representations and limited finesse, Torchlight is perfect. Its spreadsheets are engaging, its characters memorable and its world stripped down with just the right amount of self-aware humor and self-serious guidance to keep things moving painlessly. But Torchlight suffers from one serious defect in my mind: its maps lack a sense of place.
No one expects them to have a strong sense of place, and fair enough. They’re randomly generated dungeons that spit out items of various colors, and most of what you really care about while you’re inside those dungeons is stripping them of their brightly colored items so that you can progress to the next set of challenges and leave. There’s no sense that people live in these dungeons or that the creatures there have any existence outside of being destroyed by you. It’s like the polar opposite of the ambitious Badman games – the world you live in is completely artificial and totally unconscious of its own haphazardly constructed nature. The art is beautiful, but the places the art combines to build for game play are lifeless and dull. Only their procedural nature deflects any criticism.
There are many games which do their all to counter this. Massive effort goes into the Half-Life series in order to make its sets feel lived in, and a great deal of Left4Dead’s appeal comes in the fact that wherever you go you always feel as if you’re not the first to be there, and not just because of the hordes of zombies. Left4Dead’s world feels lived in. And while the logic doesn’t always hold up (Why does that jukebox still have power? Why are there so many infected who don’t seem to have any major physical trauma? Why don’t we occasionally see fallen survivors by the road?) the effort is there and the pieces are there so that we can see that we’re not alone in the cosmology of Left4Dead, an important message the game keeps repeating.
Even stealth games like the original Thief did their best to make you feel like you were part of a bigger world while pushing you to the outskirts of it. Guards have lives and conversations, crime bosses had business which needed taking care of, peasants had families and even the rat men had names. These touches define what turns a good game into a great game, what allows us to make our own stories and insert them into the larger narrative of our favorite pieces of electronic media. They separate games like the Call of Cthulhu shooter from Thief in the way they approach the world they build and the way they allow players to experience that world and generate stories from it.
Because even within these cold, inhospitable worlds there remains life. Like our own world it isn’t always life we get to know, and it isn’t always life we’d want to know, but the feel of it there makes these worlds seem real, complete and whole in ways that games with empty or soulless worlds do not. There are plenty of different ways to accomplish this goal and certainly, as Torchlight proves, it’s not always necessary for developers to do so. But if developers want to create serious games that tell serious stories they can’t set them in closed off worlds where nothing unexpected can happen and no consequence can emerge without the explicit dictum of the developer. As in fiction the world can be an impassive and cruel place and still feel right, so long as we can look at it and see some facsimile of ourselves reflected in our surroundings.
There are exceptions. The most ironic, and indeed one of the best I’ve ever encountered, was Fallout 3, a world which felt vibrant, living and empty in a way which echoed the socially nihilistic world I live in as a nerd. Fallout 3 had people, many of them nominally friendly, only a handful of whom would actually accompany you through the Wasteland. It was a game about growing up, moving from place to place, and it grasped that to make a place real you must populate it with people who will deal with the main character without concern or knowledge of who or what that main character is.
Brutal Legend walked a similar line with its alien world of metal, in this case trading off immersion and interaction for fullness, richness and wondrous consistency. Brutal Legend should have felt odd and off-putting, but the manner in which a cycle of constant war shaped both the game and the game’s world made it come to life in a way that most single player experience cannot hope for. Sure, the multiplayer was dense and difficult to access, rooted on a set of systems where people are largely uninterested in playing new and original kinds of games on the internet, but the Brutal Land was without peer in how it delivered on its promise of a war-torn Metal landscape.
But compare this to a place like Liberty City. Liberty City is based off of New York’s layout, populace and landscape. It has no business being boring. To make New York boring is an impressive feat in its own right, but it sets Grand Theft Auto in the midst of a lifeless, sterile city consisting entirely of goodies to grab and occasional interstitials which register with the audible clunk of my disc shifting RPMs to draw new data from unused sectors. Occasionally the world comes to life within these interstitials, in rooftop chases and kidnappings, a few assassinations and one very notable heist, but none of this takes place within the much touted open world of Grand Theft Auto 4.
To the credit of Rockstar’s designers, they’ve spent most of their careers trying to mask the fact that their games are traditional video games shoehorned into open world environments, and they’ve been making improvements. But in the end their worlds are little better than those of a Final Fantasy game – filled with potential targets and threats, the occasional reward and little or no personality outside of bits of art and tidily scripted cutscenes which will, at best, unlock new areas of the game, but will most likely change absolutely nothing. They’ve popularized a form of world building without recognizing its potential for immersing players, and it’s a shame, because all it does is illustrate the problems that traditional game designs have had with making their worlds feel lifelike.
The issue mostly stems from the fact that games are intended to tell a story: singular. Games aren’t trying to present you with an interpretive narrative, again with few exceptions: they’re trying to lay out a series of events “as they occur” and let you engage them. Some games camouflage this fact better than others, games like Half-Life 2 and the first F.E.A.R. that constantly present you with interesting situations and asides and give you worlds that actually beg to be interpreted, worlds with muted and unclear laws and histories which demand that their players immerse themselves in order to comprehend events. Most games are more like Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto, forcing you to jump through hoops until you reach the end of the story they want to tell you, feeding you snippets of narrative until you reach the last snippet of narrative intended to close off all the other snippets with some measure of satisfaction.
In between the world consists of scripted challenges, usually challenges which consist mostly of harming other creatures or solving puzzles, and the story itself occurs outside of these challenges. Sometimes you’ll be given friends to accompany you through these challenges, and the game logic will insure that these friends arrive (or do not arrive) at your destination in one form or another. The two worlds are more or less closed off. Little has actually changed since Doom, with its occasional dying marine and text box informing you why you’re shooting weird brown men in the face through a series of gray hallways and stacks of boxes. All we’ve improved for the most part is the graphical quality of the boxes and the quality of the writing.
Few games illustrate this better than Torchlight, the utilitarian indie title which has been working its way through the Steam play lists of many of my friends. Torchlight is a neat little Diablo clone that takes the classic formula of Diablo – generate a dynamic map and populate it with random baddies then let players run through it - and adds a cutesie art style that recognizes the exceedingly low stakes that the genre brings with it and makes the game accessible to players from a variety of backgrounds. Even people who don’t like Diablo’s style of play have had their interested piqued a little by Torchlight’s endearing, cartoonish and incredibly generic art.
Torchlight is completely fine as a game, and if you play games as the sort of person who engages them so that they can essentially solve math problems with graphical representations and limited finesse, Torchlight is perfect. Its spreadsheets are engaging, its characters memorable and its world stripped down with just the right amount of self-aware humor and self-serious guidance to keep things moving painlessly. But Torchlight suffers from one serious defect in my mind: its maps lack a sense of place.
No one expects them to have a strong sense of place, and fair enough. They’re randomly generated dungeons that spit out items of various colors, and most of what you really care about while you’re inside those dungeons is stripping them of their brightly colored items so that you can progress to the next set of challenges and leave. There’s no sense that people live in these dungeons or that the creatures there have any existence outside of being destroyed by you. It’s like the polar opposite of the ambitious Badman games – the world you live in is completely artificial and totally unconscious of its own haphazardly constructed nature. The art is beautiful, but the places the art combines to build for game play are lifeless and dull. Only their procedural nature deflects any criticism.
There are many games which do their all to counter this. Massive effort goes into the Half-Life series in order to make its sets feel lived in, and a great deal of Left4Dead’s appeal comes in the fact that wherever you go you always feel as if you’re not the first to be there, and not just because of the hordes of zombies. Left4Dead’s world feels lived in. And while the logic doesn’t always hold up (Why does that jukebox still have power? Why are there so many infected who don’t seem to have any major physical trauma? Why don’t we occasionally see fallen survivors by the road?) the effort is there and the pieces are there so that we can see that we’re not alone in the cosmology of Left4Dead, an important message the game keeps repeating.
Even stealth games like the original Thief did their best to make you feel like you were part of a bigger world while pushing you to the outskirts of it. Guards have lives and conversations, crime bosses had business which needed taking care of, peasants had families and even the rat men had names. These touches define what turns a good game into a great game, what allows us to make our own stories and insert them into the larger narrative of our favorite pieces of electronic media. They separate games like the Call of Cthulhu shooter from Thief in the way they approach the world they build and the way they allow players to experience that world and generate stories from it.
Because even within these cold, inhospitable worlds there remains life. Like our own world it isn’t always life we get to know, and it isn’t always life we’d want to know, but the feel of it there makes these worlds seem real, complete and whole in ways that games with empty or soulless worlds do not. There are plenty of different ways to accomplish this goal and certainly, as Torchlight proves, it’s not always necessary for developers to do so. But if developers want to create serious games that tell serious stories they can’t set them in closed off worlds where nothing unexpected can happen and no consequence can emerge without the explicit dictum of the developer. As in fiction the world can be an impassive and cruel place and still feel right, so long as we can look at it and see some facsimile of ourselves reflected in our surroundings.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Congratulations on Tricking Your Husband!
Today you’re going to do something you’ve always wanted to do. You’re going to squeeze your lactating boob until milk comes out and then drop it into your coffee. You’ll serve it to him, waiting attentively by his side as he samples it.
He’ll sip, then look up, then sip a little more. When he opens his mouth to speak you’ll hold your breath.
“Why does my coffee taste like whore?” he’ll ask.
Congratulations on Tricking Your Husband!
He’ll sip, then look up, then sip a little more. When he opens his mouth to speak you’ll hold your breath.
“Why does my coffee taste like whore?” he’ll ask.
Congratulations on Tricking Your Husband!
Friday, May 28, 2010
Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball!
It isn’t actually that odd for people in Portland who are collecting unemployment to just drive around all day looking at thrift stores. It’s a good way to apply for jobs that will only make you work twelve hours a week and sometimes you find some really neat shit that you can bring back to your eccentric house filled with people who have exposed tattoos and little or no work ethic.
Which is why no will be surprised to see you digging around in the nexus of madness that is The Bins, a self-contained slice of Portland where junk is paid for by the pound and the sheer number of bargains contained within the walls of the building has begun to warp reality, slowly driving anyone inside who is not currently engaged in the pursuit of bargains towards madness. But when you pull your scabby arms from the midst of a pile of clothes and old hangers and find yourself clutching a massive, glittering ball of majesty you’ll be beyond shocked. Your loser friend who offers witticisms and tips about which business will give their food to you if you can prove unemployment will be speechless for the first time all day.
You’ll heft the ball in the air above your head and stage whisper: “I must have this.”
Your retarded hippy friend will nod and the two of you will shuffle to the front of the store where you’ll deposit the globe on a scale. It will come out to a dollar seventy five total for the orb, and you’ll shell it out so fast you’ll forget to ask for an application, which is good because The Bins would’ve taken what little sanity you had left and spit it out like chaw or something else which is gross after being spit out.
You’ll retreat back to your home, dropping your hippy friend off along the way at his co-op squat under the Hawthorne Bridge.
“Tell me when it’s set up,” he’ll say, eyes glistening with anticipation. You’ll drive off without responding, only taking your eyes off the road to look back at the globe covered in an old Ramones t-shirt. You’ll keep it under the t-shirt while you walk inside, ignoring your roommates as they sit around the floor and play a game of Sorry, reeking of pot.
When you get to your room you’ll unwrap the t-shirt from the globe and just stare at its surface. You’ll be sobering up from your morning bowl by this point and the combination of that rush of returning mental energy and the profundity of finding this worthless, cast off object in a place full of things like that and removing it to bring it back to your home will paralyze you. You’ll sit there for nearly forty five minutes, examining the imperfections of the ball before you even try hanging it on its suspension device.
You’ll watch it spin, slowly and elegantly, occasionally playing a flashlight over it in silence. It will, more or less, work, and you’ll feel good about that, like you have something to protect now. You’ll feel like you rescued something important from obscurity, like saving this meaningless little item will somehow have helped you get some part of your life back again.
Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball
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