Congratulations on Discovering the Greatest Granola Bar Ever!

Today, during what you first thought would be just an ordinary museum heist, you’re going to discover – drum roll please – a special exhibit dedicated to granola bars.

Most of the exhibit will be given over to the history of the granola bar, resplendent with dioramas of how the ancient Sumerians crafted granola bars in their ziggurats and would give them to slaves so that they could have convenient high energy snacks with low to no fuss while they toiled themselves to death doing whatever it is that the Sumerians made their slaves do. Other dioramas will comment on the function of granola bars during the American revolution, during the Great Depression and during World War II. Another granola diorama will ask the question “DID THE DINOSAURS EAT GRANOLA BARS?!” inconclusively.

Most of these dioramas will be, as dioramas tend towards, extremely boring. But one of them will stand out. It’ll be at the back of the room, surrounded by red velvet ropes and a glass case. It’ll have a small, tasteful gold plaque below it, reading: “THE WORLD’S MOST DELICIOUS GRANOLA BAR.”

You’ll scoff at the exhibit and consider running off to find some paintings or something, but that plaque will bring you back. You’ll get out your museum-glass-case-opening-kit and crack the glass case containing the granola bar right out. Then you’ll taste it, just to see how it measures up to Nature Valley.

It’ll destroy your taste buds. In an instant you’ll learn what true deliciousness is. Your jaw will unhinge, and you’ll want more than anything else in the world to eat another bite of that sweet, sweet granola. Lucky for you the wrapper, upon examination, will be a map that details the location of an ancient ruin in the Yucatan Peninsula. This ruin will be labeled:

GRANOLA PARADISE

Pack your bags, son! You’re goin’ to the Yucatan tomorrow!

Congratulations on Discovering the Greatest Granola Bar Ever!

Congratulations on Ripping the Shit Out of That Bill!

Sometimes you just have to do something crazy, something that breaks all the rules. It can be something big or something small. Today you’re going to opt into the biggest of the big gestures: you’re going to sit down at your kitchen table, look deep into that Disney Club Membership Bill, and you’re going to tear it right in half. Then you’re going to take the scraps and tear them again, then again, then a fourth time until you have sixteen little bill bits in your hands.

Then you’ll grab the membership card itself and try to tear that in half. You’ll flex it and twist it, trying to shear it in half, grinning and sweating all the while. In the end you’ll less tear the card in half then crease and bend it beyond use, which won’t be quite as satisfying as ripping up the bill, but these things happen.

Some people would’ve just called to cancel their membership. Some people would’ve thrown the whole letter away. But you took a stand against the Disney Corporation. And thanks to the cameras that Walt Disney installed in every American home starting in the 30s, his frozen head will have seen all of it. And boy will he ever be pissed. You made a powerful gesture today.

Congratulations on Ripping the Shit Out of That Bill!

Congratulations on Finding the Best Tacos Ever!

Many people quest across New York City, looking for the best Mexican food. It can be elusive, not because it isn’t here, but because New York has so many terrible food places in it, places that surpass in number, cost, and often advertising the quality places to eat.

You began your quest at that ho-hum place in Soho across from REI about four months ago, and your journey since then has been anything but dull. You’ve been all the way from Spanish Harlem to Sunset Park, and while you’ve found some pretty good tacos (notably the cart on the corner of Church Avenue and Rugby Road in Flatbush) you haven’t found the best tacos ever. Nothing, in fact, to equal some of the stuff you’ve seen in Mexico City, where tacos are spiced with sadness, self hate, and gym mats are used as filler.

But today you’re going to finally stumble into the best tacos ever. Because after reading a book about the people who live under the subway you had a thought: what if the best tacos in New York City weren’t above ground, but rather concealed, where only the most deserving, those willing to wander into the dark depths of places similar to but distinct from Mexico City might find them?

With that in mind you bought a headlamp and some rope across the street from that taco place where your journey began and you descended into the darkness of the New York City subways.

We’d detail your means of ingress, but that might be dangerous, since revealing the secret location of the best tacos in New York could trigger a series of disastrous subway adventures from untrained urban explorers who want delicious delicious tacos. Instead we’ll recount, by means of this sentence, the thousands of rats who will guide you to your destination as they scurry back and forth along the ratways of the sub-subway. They’ll use select routes, you assume, for the sake of safety, and following them will eventually lead you to a massive underground amphitheater lit by a sort of glowing blue fungus. A bunch of people in tattered suits will be standing in the middle of the amphitheater talking amongst themselves, while another, smaller group of people in suits will be standing around a small metal cart. The smell that greets you will be divine.

You’ll suck it deep into your nostrils and run up to the metal cart. The people in front of it will act like your presence is entirely normal, even though you’ll be the only person who isn’t wearing rags there aside from the man in the cart, who will be wearing a stained Ed Hardy t-shirt. He’ll nod at you and ask you something you don’t understand in Spanish, at which point you’ll realize what you’ve found.

The menu will list all of the items you’re accustomed to: chicken, beef, steak, spicy pork. But there will be another option, unfamiliar to you: human. You’re nothing if not culinarily adventurous, so you’ll step up, mumble the Spanish pronunciation of human listed next to the meat type and wait patiently with the men and women in their tattered suits until the man in the cart nods at you again, says something in Spanish and, for four dollars, hands you a pair of tacos heaping with mysterious meat.

You’ll take a bite and the experience will be absolutely divine. You’ll finish one taco, then wrap the other up for your trip back to the surface. As you leave the subway people will nod at you as you go. They’ll know that it’s just a matter of time before you come back down and decide to stay. The tacos get everyone eventually. But it’s not their place to enforce their siren call: the tacos will handle that on their own.

Congratulations on Finding the Best Tacos Ever!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Bringing The Path Into the Discussion!

There are many games which lack explicitly formed or illustrated narratives, and many of the games which utilize narrative elements often utilize them so loosely that they could barely be considered narrative exercises. You could argue, for example, that Donkey Kong has a narrative: your girlfriend has been captured by a giant ape, and you’ve got to rescue her from his clutches. But the story itself, the dramatic tension and the enjoyment of the game emerges not from this overarching narrative, but the free-form play, which exists outside of it and is imposed by the player. No one pays much attention to the end goal, compared to the second to second barrel dodging that occurs within the game.

This is both where the idea of non-explicit narratives becomes critical and becomes problematic. Games like Just Cause and Far Cry 2 have loose narrative frameworks with large interpretive segments of play inserted within them, and as a result they don’t necessarily fall into non-explicit narrative frameworks, but they utilize the strengths of non-explicit narratives to realize their play. Even though they’re possessed of a quality of writing and plot, the plot is ancillary to the play itself. This generates an odd dichotomy within these games: the central plot is often absent, and disconnected from the play and, as a result, strong characters usually don’t form. There are characters who dart in and out of the narrative, each of them surprisingly well developed for the time they spend in the game. Some of these characters are women, and they’re given a respectful and equal treatment by the writers of the game, but they’re not prominent enough to merit much discussion.

Since play in these loosely framed games is established in opposition to narrative, rather than in conjunction with developing it, it can be tricky to think of character as anything more than an afterthought. Even as narrative is developed, the play itself involves a sort of solo-improvisation in the world at larger and, as a result, prevents the engagement of or development of any sort of meaningful characters beyond the player (in both of these cases, a male agent represented by a gun, a conventional phallic symbol) and the world (represented by dehumanized enemies, almost all of them male, and resources, all of them objects in the world without easily recognizable human traits). But once a game goes “whole hog” with its loose narrative and is simply satisfied to bookend play with narrative, we can see some more interesting elements emerge.

Take, for instance, the play of the original Mario series. Here we’ve got a largely non-narrative experience bookended by a highly gendered narrative with elements of masking and conventional gender binaries inserted within. There are some interesting elements to engage with: you’re constantly attempting to rescue a princess, you’re emasculating a giant lizard to do so, you’re foiled by a cross-dressing eunich with a mushroom, which could be considered a symbolic penis, on his head. We can investigate other elements of the play of the game from a feminist perspective, perceiving the sex of various enemies and the gendered nature of powers (mushrooms, flowers and stars representing male, female and neutral spaces along a gendered continuum with increasing effectiveness related to them) and we can find a gender-bending super-narrative structure threading through Mario’s play and its place within its larger narrative framework. Even though the explicit narrative involves rescuing a princess from a giant lizard, a seemingly male empowering storyline, the twists and turns contained within and the manner in which neutral and feminine sexuality are considered superior means by which to assault this task undermine the conventional ideas about masculine authority through play.

The Path takes this one step further, establishing an extremely loose narrative which establishes at best unclear conditions for success, inverts concepts of success and utilizes, to this end, an overarching structure with nearly no guidelines or limitations of play within the engine itself. The game focusing on retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of six young women, each of whom must be guided to Grandmother’s House. Even this objective is questionable, and the parallel between game and folk tale muddy and implicit rather than explicitly illustrated.

The game opens on a room with its six protagonists standing in it, playing with various toys, reading books and generally killing time. Once the player selects a character the character then gets up and removes themselves from the room, depositing themselves at the end of a long path. The game instructs players to proceed to their grandmother’s house and informs them not to stray from the path. This is a totally valid way to play the game: if you simply walk to the end of the path you’ll arrive at your grandmother’s house quickly, without incident. You’ll walk through the house to your grandmother’s room and climb into bed with her, ending prompting the introduction of a scoring screen which will tell you in no uncertain terms that by following the game’s directions you failed. And really, who could disagree? By obeying the game’s prompts you’ve effectively avoided any kind of interesting or engaging experience: you simply obeyed the rules that the system explicitly asked of you and arrived at the end of the level without injury or incident. You’ve avoided experiencing the content of the game itself, the unnamed content that exists off the titular path in the expansive woods that flank in.

Within these woods the game itself unfolds, not in a manner which relies on any kind of narrative form but rather a manner which requires that players plumb the depths of these woods in order to ferret out nuggets of narrative. The woods are composed largely of, appropriately enough, trees. Sometimes detritus also litters the woodland, detritus which some characters see value in but which is not explicitly given any value. Occasionally within the woods characters will encounter a set piece which is recognized as being of some significance, more than the detritus of the woods. Characters will spout a line or two of expository poetry or prose and the event will be marked in the “inventory” of experiences which players will seemingly randomly be reminded of as they continue to explore. Play continues in this fashion, where players explore their surroundings until they either choose to return to grandmother’s house or they encounter their “wolf.” This “wolf” is largely a metaphoric construct: while some characters do encounter literal wolves, their wolves are more often simply figures who seem to play some pivotal role in their lives, usually a paternal, sexual or spiritual role. When characters encounter their “wolf” they’re treated to a brief scene which usually touches on one of these themes before being deposited just in front of grandmother’s house in a world drained of color, beset by rain. Your character, who used to trot about in a sprightly manner, now limps awkwardly, and progress is nigh impossible in any direction that does not lead to grandmother’s house.

Once players enter grandmother’s house after meeting their wolf, they’re treated to a new experience. What was previously a quiet space filled with pastoral elements of memory and life is instead replaced by a collection of grim imagery, an apparent reflection of the conscious, subconscious or memory of their character. As they traverse this space, rendered hostile through their interaction with the wolf, experiences become increasingly intense until characters are killed as they approach their grandmother. Players are then given a grade, based on their exploration, and notified of their success. Then they are returned to the character selection, where the surviving young women still sit and await their journey through the woods. Symbols of the departed young women litter the floor. This process continues until players “succeed” with each young woman, effectively guiding each of them to a literal or metaphoric death.

Meta-textual elements of the young women exist outside of the game’s structure itself: a series of blogs maintained by the young women, their grandmother, mother and a set of mysterious parties were hosted by developer Tale of Tales. These bits of metatext provide backstory for the young women of The Path, but do nothing to explicitly inform the narrative, or lack thereof, in the game. Instead they form a sort of external narrative framework which informs the play, but does not impact or affect it. The Path forms, with this framework, a remarkable platform for the introduction and formation of unique narratives imposed by the player. Sure, they’re all taking place within the spectrum of a set of acceptable outcomes that designers established for the game long before its formation took hold, but the spectrum of these experiences, their disjointed nature and the fluid concepts of success and failure that the game relies upon all combine to make a game where the player’s experience is wholly unique and open to multiple layers of interpretation.

It’s no mistake that this framework is applied to women. Young women who are entering a new stage of their lives who are, through the events in The Path, empowered and destroyed.

Congratulations on Planting All Those Flowers!

Rows upon rows, they’ll stretch from the car to your front steps. They’ll turn with the wind, as if they were trying to smile, and even when it rains, which it how it seems on most days of late, they’ll glimmer with sunlight.

You’ll have planted them all at night, blindly fumbling for colors so that they mesh awkwardly, as if they’d been choreographed by a child. The ordered rows, intended to form a sort of living flag, will not have emerged at all, replaced by a chaotic morass of petals that spell out not the birth of a nation, but the song of love for the woman you loved.

So when she gets out of bed the next morning and sees that you spent the night sleeping in your car, sees you, hair disheveled, hands covered in dirt, she won’t flip out that you dug up your entire yard and replaced it with flowers in a grand romantic gesture. She also won’t forget you fucked her sister in the bathroom that one night, so many months ago.

But she will see something in you, something of the man she once knew and loved. It won’t be as bright as it was, it won’t be the shimmering human being who once convinced her to marry him and move to Seattle. But it’ll be enough to make her hold the door open for you as you shuffle inside, to make you coffee and to sit and talk, for the first time in what seems like months, about who you are, what you are, and what you’re going to become over coffee. It’ll be enough for her to give you a chance, if not a second chance.

One word of advice: do not, under any circumstances, mention her sister.

Good luck.

Congratulations on Planting All Those Flowers!

Congratulations on Teaching Yourself to Fly!

While you’re enduring month four of your ongoing coma (which, spoiler alert, will end around month ten) you’re going to hit a key moment in the insanely interesting journey through your own mind that you’ve been having while you list horribly in that bed that has become your home: you’re going to drop acid within the fantasy world that you’ve created and, in that instant, learn to fly.

While soaring through the air in your coma-drug-trip you’ll see a fantastic world of your own creation rushing by beneath you, a world filled with wonder and grace and more than a little bit of magic. You’ll also, briefly, have a heart attack, which will freak out your attending physician and, if you were a more articulate person, would probably be the subject of study after you woke up in a few months.

But as it stands it’ll just be an ordinary day with a minor hiccough in the hospital where you rest, and your amazing mind adventure will continue for another six months. Over the course of these months way more interesting stuff will happen, stuff that will totally change the way you see the world. But the only thing you’ll really be able to describe when you get out will be “that time I went flying.”

We hope you take this into consideration and stop smoking quite so much weed. It put you in a coma, and it makes you insufferable.

Congratulations on Teaching Yourself to Fly!

Congratulations on Crashing Your Van Into That School!

There are lots of ways to clean up your community. You can plant a garden, volunteer at your local rec center, or you can do what you’re going to do: crash your van into the wall of a school so that you explode it inwards, sending bricks flying into the bodies and faces of drug dealers as they try to orchestrate an unmitigated flow of crack into your local school system.

“NOT IN MY POSTAL CODE!” you’ll shout as you crash through the wall, suddenly filled with regret at your decision to fire your one-liner writer last week. Then you’ll shakily exit the van and shoot each of the surviving gang members in the head with a revolver, along with the gym teacher, who was heading up the drug ring inside of the school.

Then you’ll leave a post-it note attached to the front of your van and flee the scene, already dreaming of the headline that the Post will produce tomorrow:

MYSTERIOUS VIGI-VAN-TE CLEANS UP QUEENS PUBLIC SCHOOLS!

Your name will never be known, and your methods are surprisingly expensive, but they get results and that’s what counts in this crazy city.

Congratulations on Crashing Your Van Into That School!