Congratulations on Capturing That Zeppelin!

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

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

“EXCELSIOR!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Capturing That Zeppelin!

Congratulations on Making Us All Nostalgic for World War II!

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Making Us All Nostalgic for World War II!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!

Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

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

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

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

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

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

So Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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