Congratulations on Renting Cop Out!

There are a lot of ways to tell your wife to go fuck herself. You can say it out loud, or with a card you can make out of a picture of you fucking her sister.

Or you can do what you’re going to do and rent Cop Out for your weekly “Date Night.”

“Are you sure about this?” the pimply faced young man at the video rental shoppe will ask.

You’ll nod grimly and he’ll put the DVD you requested into the case and place the case in a tiny plastic bag before handing it to you and nodding back.

“Okay,” he’ll say.

Your wife will see the case in front of the TV, look at the pint of vanilla ice cream you bought her, and shake her head.

“How did you know?” she’ll ask.

You won’t speak a word. You’ll just pull out the pictures of her next to your brother: exiting his car, holding hands as they walk towards a hotel room door at the edge of the frame, and finally kissing delicately before they enter the hotel room. You’ll hand them to her and watch her eyes plough down, down, down into tears. Then you’ll hug her, but you won’t hug her with your whole body.

“I don’t forgive you yet,” you’ll whisper in her ear.

Her tears will be flowing at this point, but you won’t keep holding her the way you usually do. You’ll just give her a tissue, put on Cop Out and sit down on the couch a little bit away from her.

She’ll glance at you every once in a while, as if she wishes she could turn to you and say “I’m sorry,” but Cop Out will be so awful, so very, very awful, that she won’t be able to. She’ll just sit and weep softly, eventually opening the vanilla ice cream (her least favorite flavor) and taking measly spoonfuls of it into her mouth.

It’ll be as close as you’ve ever come to spousal abuse, and it won’t let up until the end credits roll on Cop Out. When you reflect on events later you’ll know that if you hadn’t been involved in it, if you hadn’t been watching Cop Out too, you wouldn’t have been able to go through with it. But because you did, because you had the fortitude to sit and suffer with her, you know it made a difference: it made her understand how important she was to you.

It made her understand that even though you’re psychologically incapable of harming her you’re willing to fight for her and that she can hurt you with her actions. And that you can make her feel just as bad with your own, as long as you’re involved in them too.

Congratulations on Renting Cop Out!

Congratulations Freak Factory!

Today you’re about to become a factory that produces weird freaks of nature.

This means you’re becoming a large building occupied by a strange little man who cackles frequently and wears his hair so that it resembles a set of three massive spikes pointing upwards. This man, despite his odd mannerisms, is a kind soul who frequently gives to charity and loves the quaint creatures he creates, is a disgraced geneticist from MIT.

He purchased you under foreclosure from your previous owners, a “pharmaceutical investment company” that was, in fact, a Ponzi scheme designed to fleece hardworking people out of millions.

You will, starting today, be repurposed. The phones that were used to respond to calls for investment in a company called “Not Fradulent Pharmaceuticals Encorporated” (sic) will be cleared out, replaced with massive vats where freaks are grown.

These freaks will go on to lead long, productive lives (of up to six months) as living weapons, ordered by the United States military through a shell corporation and then licensed and deployed through private military contractors. They’ll be applied to make the world a more peaceful (less populated) place.

You, as a building used for this purpose, won’t really care, since you’re a building, and are primarily concerned with your property value which will not change significantly.

Congratulations Freak Factory!

Congratulations World Changing Cherry Blossom!

We all hear about the chaos effect and for the most part we all know it’s bullshit based on a facile understanding of a tremendously complicated mathematical theory centered around random chance having unknown effects on crucial world events. Butterflies flapping their wings and changing weather patterns isn’t a particularly elegant metaphor for the far-reaching implications of multivariable calculus.

But you know what is?

You.

You’re a cherry blossom and today is the day you’re gonna fall. You’re gonna fall from a tree in a suburb north of Osaka and a young man, a very sad and angry young man, is going to watch you descend gently on the wind.

It’ll be a simply moment, a brief one, but it’ll be infinite in its poetic capacity. That moment will be, in a sense, perfect. So perfect that it’ll help him contextual his abusive mother, his absent father and the jeers that his classmates greet him with each and every day at school.

It’ll help him channel his rage and sorrow into art instead of violence at the world around him. So instead of becoming a charismatic extrovert who desires acceptance and powers over others he’ll become a quiet, introverted artist who paints for the rest of his life, making a modest and joyful living alongside the woman he loves (who works as a marketing coordinator in a moderately sized company that manufactures plastic toys and relies on him to bring light and joy to her life). He’ll spend all of his days trying to capture the symbolic beauty of your descent and though he won’t succeed, he’ll feel he hasn’t wasted a single day of it.

So by falling today you’re going to alter the course of history, effectively preventing the rise of a vile dictator and insuring the growth of a quiet, humble artist.

Congratulations World Changing Cherry Blossom!

Congratulations Last Pelican!

Today you’re the last pelican on the planet. Well, sort of.

See, pelicans aren’t even endangered any more, if Wikipedia is to be believed. On earth. But you’re trapped in an alien zoo.

Oh snap!

What does this mean? It means that today your mate is going to die of something called “zarkon poisoning,” which involves her being poisoned when a tiny bit of alien atmosphere makes its way into your enclosure after it briefly de-materializes and permits some vile, vile gas into your home.

It also means that, in like a day and a half, you’ll be surrounded by tiny genetic clones of your mate, which will be incredibly freaky and emotionally distressing. The distress will be exacerbated by the fact that you, as a pelican, cannot express any of your feelings verbally and will instead simply have to display your emotional state by hopping around and scattering your pelican toys in a blind rage.

But before this period of vile chaos you’ll have a day and a half of peaceful mourning, starting this morning. We hope you make the most of it, because the next few days are going to be really, really rough.

You have our condolences. Try to make the most of your time in this alien zoo, which will last about three more months before they put your brain into a computer in what we understand will be the first time a bird will have had its intelligence implanted into a computer.

Congratulations Last Pelican!

Congratulations Angry Anger Management Instructor!

You’re an anger management instructor who is constantly upset about stuff.

“FUCKING BIRDS!” you’ll shout at some geese who are hanging out on the side of the road as you drive by them, slightly early for work.

“I fucking hate being early,” you’ll mumble to yourself as you drive.

After you pull into a parking space right next to the entrance to your anger management clinic you’ll almost lose your shit. “This is way too fucking close to the door,” you’ll say to no one in particular, shaking your head as you walk the ten feet from your car to the door.

After a brief series of tantrums about the office clock being too accurate, your receptionist being too relaxed and the weather being too nice for people to be inside working today you’ll step outside into the Zen garden constructed in a small patio space inside of your office and address the class that sits there, awaiting your instruction.

“LET IT OUT!” you’ll shout at them, hurling glass bottles at your “students” as you swear random, extremely offensive remarks at them. They’ll cower as best they can, trying not to get a face-full of glass as your seemingly endless supply of bottles streams towards them. A handful of them will catch on and charge towards you to start fighting you, but they’ll go down under a stream of bottles.

It’ll be, to hear you describe it later, an elaborate attempt to bring their attention to the futility of their own rage, but your supervisor won’t buy that one bit. He’ll just see it as you having a nervous breakdown after months of being way too tightly wound. He’ll insist that you take a month long paid vacation, which you’ll spend writing up what might best be described as a “crazed manifesto” on the subject of managing anger by releasing it constantly and violently.

Your book will become a best-seller in a few months time, flooding your coffers with cash, but in the interim shit’s gonna be kind hard for you, especially since you are, in a technical and legal sense, a fucking psychopath. Just hang in there, rage-filled kitty.

Congratulations Angry Anger Management Instructor!

Congratulations Lady Mafia!

You’re a group of super hot ladies. So what, says the world? No one’s gonna notice you for having the best gams for very long! Looks fade, but a history of criminal activities stretching across decades, that’ll last. Which is why today, at 4 PM, you and your incredibly fine friends are going to decide to form a Mafia composed entirely of sexy ladies.

“I think we should run protection or something,” Sharon will say, wearing a low cut blouse that shows off the dragon tattoo that winds around her tits while she cleans a nine millimeter handgun.

“I think we should try to move drugs around and stuff, you know?” Karen will say, punctuating the sentence with a snap of her gum. She’ll be on her laptop, writing up a business proposal on how to sell crack most effectively given the current level of police and criminal activity in your neighborhood. She’ll decide a mail order system which utilizes credit cards and is, ostensibly, used to sell pornography is the best way to go about it.

“I think we should murder people,” Melissa will mumble in a way that saturates the entire room. She’ll be swinging a baseball bat while she murmurs, and she’ll look like she’s ready to use it at a moment’s notice. She’ll snort and wiggle her septum piercing like it itches, but it’ll just be what she does when she’s in a killing mood.

“I think we can do it all,” you’ll say as you try to pull your skirt down a little to cover more of your thighs. You’ll give up on that almost immediately, letting your hands wander from your clothes to a pair of brass knuckles on a table in front of you. You’ll put them on your fingers and examine them as if they were fine jewelry, a set of ornate rings. You’ll crunch your fingers around them once, twice, and then smile at the balance.

Two weeks later you’ll have murdered your first rival drug dealer who refused to pay protection. Three weeks later you’ll own the streets of Groveland, Saint Paul with an iron fist. Four weeks later you’ll have moved operations out of your apartment into a small shell house in downtown Minneapolis, purchased in a fake name, paid for entirely in cash. In two months you’ll have your fingers in almost everything that happens south of Northern Minne. Within a year, you’ll control that too.

But today you’re just a bunch of fine ass ladies hanging out, enjoying your sexiness and dreaming up plans, plans that, once they come to fruition, will lead to the formation of one of the sexiest crime families we know of in American history. Enjoy the day together, because ere long you’ll all be justifiably paranoid, and that’ll really impact your friendship, even though it’ll come with a tremendous influx of cash that will, admittedly, dull the pain of intimacy lost.

Congratulations Lady Mafia!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Coda of Sorts!

I feel like I’m kind of illustrating a facile point here, but I still feel like I have to do so. Games have been in a cultural ghetto for a long time, mostly undeservedly so. Considered as a whole, games are no more childish or ridiculous than any other medium, no less problematic than novels or films. All of these mediums have issues in breaking out of pre-conceived molds, exploring new forms and, all too often, breaking out of stereotypical cultural portrayals of women. If we read shitty romance novels and compared them to shitty video games, we’d likely see a lot of parallelism in their storytelling: lots of Mary Sue insertion, unfortunate and oversimplified characterizations prone to outlandish acts for the sake of plot and possessed of non-sense motivation.

But it seems like only games are judged by the worst examples of the medium. Only games have their potential assessed by the worst of the worst of their field, and only games lack the sort of lionistic protectors and celebrated critiquing, enshrined in academic pursuit, that other literary mediums, even the humble graphic novel/comic book, are now receiving. It’s bullshit, and if I’ve sought to illustrate one point here, that’s it.

Games are, in a literary sense, a new medium, something fresh and native to the post-structural contexts that we often seek to generate in more conventional literary contexts. We’re often prone to approach games from the perspective of familiar, narrative oriented mediums. Who can say why; that’s unimportant. What is readily apparent is that these means of assessing games and their narratives are inadequate. The experience of playing a game is just that: an experience, informed largely by the player. We need to develop a critical apparatus that accounts for this empowerment of the player/reader figure in order to effectively discuss games as a narrative medium, and I genuinely believe poetry offers us the best possible inroad to do so.

Poems, after all, rely on their reader more than any other literary medium to establish things like context, narrative and coherence. Poetry cannot function without a reader, and it doesn’t just provide a reader with a set of images the way that films or novels might. Instead it presents readers with an experience and leaves them to interpret it, much in the way that games, good games do. Good is the key word here, though perhaps effective is a more apt term. Games that work, games that function as games not as novels and films outside of their native format, trade heavily on the experience they generate. They don’t provide an explicit context for players to engage in so much as they provide a context for the players to emerge within: the way that a good poem allows a reader to form their own ideas and will, if we’re lucky, elicit their own poems from them.

The key factor here is the role of the reader figure. Poems and games that trade on the power that reader figures can exert over them tend to be more effective at telling stories and conveying ideas and themes than poems and games that ignore the power of the reader, instead relying on standards of other mediums, attempting to establish meaning and impress it upon reader figures in a clumsy attempt to convey ideas. If you write a poem that might as well be a novel, then it might as well have been a novel. If you make a game that might as well have been a film, why not simply generate a film? The apparent lower bar for games is only apparent if we ignore the bulk of cinema, the dross that we often don’t even see in theaters which is frequently (and fairly) reviled.

It should come as no surprise then that writers who understand the potential of the medium understand the maturity of their audience, and, therefore, tend to utilize it to better effect. Games that recognize their own structures, games that know they’re supposed to be games and not any other kind of medium, display complex ideas every bit as worthy of our attention as a good movie, a good poem, a good novel or short story. I hope my depictions of The Path, Portal and the Half-Life series have illustrated the complex female characters you can find in games if you, you know, look at them, and the complex weaving of theme, story and play that players (readers) experience when they play games.

There’s a reason people like them.

I feel like a bit of an ass writing this coda, because what I’m really doing is asking a group of people uninterested in a medium to grow up. Critics of the facility of games, individuals who are unfamiliar with concepts as simple as authorship and collaboration in game design environments, will bash or dismiss the medium as insignificant. People scoff at the idea of having a profound or well constructed experience in a game, and all too often, as a pass-time, it feels like games are something we can’t shamelessly show our love of. If I tell you I love games, you’ll think I’m childish, a boob, underdeveloped and emotionally stunted. And while I’m all of those things, the fact that I love games and find them to be profound experiences has nothing to do with it.

Games tell stories. They’re good at it. And they’re good at doing it in a post-structural context, where the story unfolds as the reader inserts themselves into it. It isn’t simply a matter of constructing an experience from pieces provided, however. It’s more of a collaborative effort wherein reader figures and author figures engage in a tacit exchange of creation and play: through play, the creation is realized, the story is generated on a moment to moment basis and a narrative begins to emerge.

The narrative can be as simple as a red wheelbarrow, covered with rain (or a yellow disk eating dots to escape its stark prison) or it can be something deeper, more profound, more complex. It can be a multi-volume treatise on what it means to grow up, a story about revolution and rejection of authority or a story about what it means to be a woman in a man’s world. It’s easy to snicker when we see something unexpected or seemingly out of place, and far far harder to look at this new object, consider it and try to find meaning within it, as well as meaning that it reflects in us as we engage with it.

I feel silly to be writing about games in this way, to be writing about them like I have to defend them after spending the last few weeks illustrating just how they form complex narratives with compelling female characters and a surrounding cultural discourse every bit as rich (and a great deal more accessible) than the discourse that surrounds other literary mediums. But I feel like I have to.

No medium should ever be in a cultural ghetto. No medium should be assessed by its worst case scenarios. We shouldn’t be talking about Real Housewives or Jersey Shore when we discuss the potential of reality television. We should be talking about The Deadliest Catch or…some…whatever thing. I don’t know anything about reality television, so I can’t really do a lot with that analogy. And by looking at games, actually looking at games that matter, we can see this particularly clearly. Because no one would ever call novels a universally infantile medium based on having read two or three romance novels and be considered anything but a buffoon. But prominent cultural critics have done just this to games in the past and been criticized minimally, by cultural outliers.

Now I’m starting to whine, and that doesn’t help anything. So I’m gonna close this up and start working on it as a paper, not a series of posts. Thanks to all my reader(s) for bearing with me while I experimented with this idea of forming content and developing a bigger idea. I think it lead to some interesting and dramatically varying outcomes here, but overall I feel like I made something that illustrates in some manner in the importance and care that goes into developing games, the complexity of the themes that games convey and the driving impetus that makes me a gamer. This is an incredible medium which has long been denied its due consideration in my estimation, and if I’ve elevated the conversation on games to equal footing with other literary mediums, if I’ve appropriated a means by which to comprehend, interpret and discuss them, even a little, then I’m happy.

Thanks for reading. Super Nerd Sundays will return to their normal rambling randomness soon, I promise.